prove too much on her behalf; namely, that both the abduction and the subsequent life were against her will. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the testimony of the poems, to suppose that her whole offence lay in having permitted at the first, perhaps half unconsciously, the attentions of a flatterer, who became at once a paramour and a tyrant to his viction. In order to comprehend the heroic age, it is indispensable that we should recollect that the responsibilities of woman were contracted in proportion to her strength; and that the heroism of endurance, in which she has since excelled, is a Christian product. That element of weakness and lightness in a character otherwise beautiful, which the incident of the Horse betrays, was probably at once the source and the measure of her offending in reference to the cause of war. It was a mind of relaxed fibre, and vacillated under pressure. suppose, and there is no occasion to suppose more. The respect felt, within certain limits, for women in the heroic age, and so powerfully proved by the Odyssey, may perhaps be adverse to the supposition that Paris carried her away without some degree of previous encouragement. I confine myself to 'perhaps,' because it is nowhere indicated in the poems, and we can at most have only a presumption to this effect. On the other hand, it seems certain that what she expiated in life-long sadness was, at any rate, no more than the first step in the ways of folly, the thoughtless error of short-sighted vanity, which the state of manners did not permit her subsequently to redeem. Repent she might: but to return was beyond her power. On the whole, it may be said with confidence that the Helen of the Homeric poems has been conceived, by an author himself of peculiar delicacy, with great truth of nature, and with no intention to deprive her of a share in the sympathies of his hearers; that he has made her a woman, not cast in the mould of martyrs, nor elevated in moral ideas to a capacity of comprehension and of endurance above her age, but yet endowed with much tenderness of feeling, with the highest grace and refineo Od. iv. 274. General estimate of the Homeric Helen. 585 ment, and with a deep and peculiar sense of shame for having done wrong. Probably her appreciation of virtue and of honour, though beneath that of the highest matronly characters, may have been in no way inferior to that of society at large in her own time, and superior to the standard of many following epochs; nay superior also to that which has prevailed, at least locally, even at some periods of the Christian era: as, for example, when Ariosto wrote the remarkable passage-- Perche si de' punir donna o biasmare Che con uno, o più d' uno, abbia commesso The degradation of Helen by the later tradition will be treated of hereafter. Meantime it will be seen how much on this subject I have the misfortune to differ from Mure, who has been usually so great a benefactor to the students of Homer. With him Helen is the female counterpart of Paris9.' Paris and Helen are respectively the man of fashion and the woman of pleasure of the heroic age.' Both are unprincipled votaries of sensual enjoyment; both self-willed and petulant, but not devoid of amiable and generous feeling.' He finds indeed in her a tenderness of heart and kindly disposition;' and says that traces of better principle seem also to lurk under the general levity of her habits.' This petulance, this general levity, I do not find; but rather the notes of a fatal fall, continually and deeply felt under the general grace and beauty of her character. What Mure calls her 'petulant argument with her patron goddess,' we take to be the noble and indignant reaction of a soul under the yoke of conscious slavery, and still quick to the throb of virtue. Indeed I derive some comfort from the closing words of his criticism, in which, after expressing his pity and condemnation, he says that still we are constrained to love and admire.' In the whole circle of the classical literature, as far as it is known to us, there is, I repeat, nothing that approaches so nearly to what Christian theology would term a sense of sin, as the humble demeanour, and the self-denouncing, self-stabbing language of the Argeian Helen. p Orl. Fur. iv. 66. q Book ii. ch. viii. sect. 20. III. The character of Paris is as worthy, as any other in the poems, of the powerful hand and just judgment of Homer. It is neither on the one hand slightly, nor on the other too elaborately, drawn; the touches are just such and so many, as his poetic purpose seemed on the one hand to demand, and on the other to admit. Paris is not indeed the gentleman, but he is the fine gentleman, and the pattern voluptuary, of the heroic ages; and all his successors in these capacities may well be wished joy of their illustrious prototype. The redeeming, or at least relieving point in his character, is one which would condemn any personage of higher intellectual or moral pretensions; it is a total want of earnestness, the unbroken sway of levity and of indifference to all serious and manly considerations. He completely fulfils the idea of the poco-curante, except as to the display of his personal beauty, the enjoyment of luxury, and the resort to sensuality as the best refuge from pain and care. He is not a monster, for he is neither savage nor revengeful; but still further is he from being one of Homer's heroes, for he has neither honour, courage, eloquence, thought, nor prudence. That he bears the reproaches of Hector without irritation, is due to that same moral apathy, and that narrowness of intelligence, which makes him insensible to those of his wife. No man can seriously resent what he does not really feel. He is wholly destitute even of the delicacy and refinement which soften many of the features of vice; and the sensuality he shows in the Third Book' partakes largely of the brutal character which marks the lusts of Jupiter. No wise, no generous word, ever passes from his lips. On one subject only he is determined enough; it is, that he will not give up the woman whom he well knows to be without attachment to hims, and whom he keeps not as the object of his affections, but merely as the instrument of his pleasures. One solicitude only he cherishes; it is to decorate his person, to exhibit his beauty, to brighten with care the arms that he would fain parade, but has not the courage to employ against the warriors of Greece. There are other greater achievements in the Iliad, but none finer, or more deserving our commendation, than the manner The character of Paris. 587 in which Homer has handled the difficult character of Paris. It was quite necessary to raise him to a certain point of importance; had he been simply contemptible, his place in the early stages of the Trojan tale, and the prolongation of the War on his account, would have involved a too violent departure from the laws of poetical credibility. This importance Homer, whether from imagination or from history, has supplied; in part by his very high position. Even if I were wrong in the opinion that the Poet meant to represent him as the eldest son, or the eldest living son, of Priam, it would still at least be plain that he is more eminent and conspicuous than any other member of the royal house after Hector; while he is so much less worthy than Deiphobus, for example, that no one, I think, could doubt that his distinction is due to his being senior to that respectable prince and warrior, and to the rest of his brothers. Further, the Poet has raised him to the very highest elevation in two particulars; one the gift of archery, the other the endowment of corporeal grace and beauty. But neither of these involves one particle of courage, or of any other virtue; for the archer of Homer's time was not like the British bowman, who stood with his comrades in the line, and discharged the function in war which has since fallen to musketry; he was a mere sharpshooter, always having the most deliberate opportunity of aim at the enemy, and always himself out of danger. No archer is ever hit in the Iliad; but Pandarus, so skilled in the bow, is slain, and Paris is disgraced, when they respectively venture to assume the spear. Again, the Poet has contrived that the accomplishments of Paris, though in themselves unsurpassed, shall attract towards him no share, great or small, of our regard. This prince really does more, than even Hector does, to stay the torrent of the Grecian war; for in the Eleventh Book, from behind a pillar, he wounds Diomed, who had fought with the Immortals, Eurypylus, who had also been one of the nine accepters of Hector's challenge, and Machaon, one of the two surgeons. Thus Homer has been able to make him most useful in battle, most lovely to the eye, and yet alike detestable and detested. t Il. xi. 368-79, 581-4, 505-7. This aim he attains, not by that tame method of description which he so much eschews, but by the turn he gives to narrative, and by the colour he imparts to it in one or a few words. Paris, though effeminate and apathetic, is not gentle, either to his wife or his enemies; and, when he has wounded Diomed, he wishes the shot had been a fatal one. The reply of Diomed cuts deeper than any arrow when he addresses him as, Bowman! ribald! well-frizzled girl-hunter" ! Again, the Poet tells us, as if by accident, that when, after the battle with Menelaus, he could not be found, it was not because the Trojans were unwilling to give him up, for they hated him with the hatred, which they felt to dark Death. And again we learn, how he uses bribery to keep his ground in the Assembly; how he refuses to recognise even his own military inferiority, but lamely accounts for the success of Menelaus by saying that all men have their turny; and how he causes shame to his own countrymen and exultation to the Greeks, when they contrast the pretensions of his splendid appearance with his miserable performances in the field. Homer, full as he is of the harmonies of nature, differs in this as in so many points from most among later writers, that he does not set at nought the due proportion between the moral and the intellectual man, nor combine high gifts of mind with a mean and bad heart. He never varies from this rule ; and he has been careful to pay it a marked observance in the case of Paris. No set of speeches in the Iliad are marked by greater poverty of ideas. If he cleans his arms and builds his house, which are honourable employments, they are employments immediately connected with the ostentation to which he was so much given. More than this, the Poet informs us, through the medium of Helen, that he was but ill supplied with sense, and that he was too old to mend: τούτῳ δ ̓ οὔτ ̓ ἂρ νῦν φρένες ἔμπεδοι, οὔτ ̓ ἄρ ̓ ὀπίσσω The immediate transition, in the Third Book, from the field x Il. iii. 454. u Il. xi. 385. y Il. vi. 339. a Il. vi. 372. z Il. iii. 43, 51. |