The Poems of Felicia Hemans
never existed except in the imagination of modern poets. The beings
intended were the ‘fair humanities’ of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, whose
attributes, derived from the baser parts of our nature, were human
passions lawlessly indulged, accompanied with more than mortal
power. Gibbon, who was any thing rather than what he affected to
be--a philosopher--speaks of ‘the elegant mythology of the Greeks.’
The great fountains of their popular and poetical mythology were
Homer and Hesiod. Hesiod does not surpass Homer in the agreeable or
moral character of his fictions; and, as regards the elegance of the
mythology found in the great epic poet, a single passage, if we had
no other means of judging, might settle the question, the address
of Jupiter to Juno at the commencement of the Fifteenth Book of the
_Iliad_:--
‘Oh, versed in wiles,
Juno! thy mischief-teeming mind perverse
Hath plotted this; thou hast contrived the hurt
Of Hector, and hast driven his host to flight.
I know not but thyself mayst chance to reap
The first fruits of thy cunning, scourged by me.
Hast thou forgotten how I hung thee once
On high, with two huge anvils at thy feet,
And bound with force-defying cord of gold
Thy wrists together? In the heights of heaven
Did I suspend thee. With compassion moved,
The assembled gods thy painful sufferings saw,
But help could yield thee none; for whom I seized,
Hurl’d through the portal of the skies, he reach’d
The distant earth, and scarce survived the fall.’
* * * * *
I thus remind thee now, that thou may’st cease
Henceforth from artifice, and mayst be taught
How little all the dalliance and the love,
Which, stealing down from heaven, thou hast by fraud
Obtain’d from me shall favour thy designs.’
“It may be incidentally remarked, that these lines illustrate not
merely the features of the ancient mythology, but also the condition
of woman as treated by the heroes of Homer and by his contemporaries.
We happen just to have opened upon another striking example of the
_elegance_ of the ancient mythology during the Augustan age. It is a
passage of Ovid, almost too indecent and silly to be alluded to, though
Addison was not ashamed to translate it, beginning--
‘Forte Jovem memorant, diffusum nectare, curas
Seposuisse graves, vacuaque agitasse remissos
Cum Junone jocos.’[446]
“From the passage referred to, we may judge something of the convivial
manners of the Romans, and of the habits of intercourse between the
sexes.
“It is remarkable that, in all religious and moral conceptions, the
noblest materials of poetry, the philosophers were very far in advance
of the poets. ‘The Fables of Hesiod and Homer,’ says Plato, ‘are
especially to be censured. They have uttered the greatest falsehoods
concerning the greatest beings.’ Referring to the loathsome and
abominable fables about Cœlus, Saturn, and Jupiter, he says--‘We must
not tell our youth that he who commits the greatest iniquity does
nothing strange, nor he who inflicts the most cruel punishment upon his
father when injured by him; but that he is only doing what was done by
the first and greatest of the gods.’ A little after he subjoins:--‘The
chaining of Juno by her son, the throwing of Vulcan from heaven by his
father, because he attempted to defend his mother from being beaten,
and the battles of the gods described by Homer, are not fictions to be
allowed in our city, whether explained allegorically or not.’ ‘Though
we praise many things in Homer,’ he says, ‘we shall not praise him
when he represents Jupiter as sending a lying dream to Agamemnon, nor
Æschylus when he makes Thetis complain of having been deceived by
Apollo.’ ‘When any one thus speaks of the gods, we are indignant; we
grant no permission for such writings, nor shall we suffer teachers to
use them in the instruction of youth.’[447]
“The poets of this nation did not, in Plato’s opinion, represent their
heroes as more amiable or respectable than their gods. ‘We shall not,’
he says, ‘suffer those of whom we have the charge to believe that
Achilles, the son of a goddess, was so full of evil passions as to
unite in himself two opposite vices--avaricious meanness, and insolence
towards gods and men. Nor shall we allow it to be said that Theseus,
the son of Neptune, and Perithöus, the son of Jove, rushed forth to
the commission of such abominable robberies, or that any son of a god
or any hero committed those abominable and impious acts which are now
imputed to them in the fictions of the poets.’ ‘Such fictions are
pernicious to those who hear them; for every bad man finds a license
for himself, in the belief that those nearly related to the gods do
and have done such deeds. They are, then, to be suppressed, lest they
produce a strong tendency to wickedness in our youth.’[448]
“Such were the sentiments of the most poetical of Grecian philosophers
concerning the religious and moral character of the poets of his
nation; and he remarks in addition upon the gloomy fancies of Homer
concerning the state of departed souls, as neither true nor useful, but
adapted to produce unmanly fears, and therefore not to be listened to
by those who, as freemen, should dread slavery more than death. During
the period between Homer and Virgil, a misty brightness had spread over
the poetic ideas of the future abodes of the blessed; but the Elysium
and Tartarus of poetry were but fictions, awakening no serious hopes
nor fears, and having no power over the heart. These imaginations of
a future life were connected with no just and ennobling conceptions
of the purposes of our existence, of the spiritual nature of man, or
of that endless progress to which we may look forward. The heroes of
Elysium found their delight in the meaner pleasures of this life,--
‘Quæ gratia currum
Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes
Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos.
Conspicit, ecce, alios dextra lævaque per herbam
Vescentes, lætumque chora pæana canentes.’[449]
“Thus the ancient poets were shut out from the whole sphere of
religious sentiment; and all those numberless conceptions and
feelings that spring from our knowledge of God and the sense of our
own immortality, are absent from their writings, while this whole
exhaustless domain has been laid open to the poets of later times.
A single example may illustrate what has been said. Let us take the
concluding verses of Mrs Hemans’s ‘Fountain of Oblivion:’--
‘Fill with forgetfulness!--there are, there are
Voices whose music I have loved too well;
Eyes of deep gentleness--but they are far--
Never! oh! never, in my home to dwell!
Take their soft looks from off my yearning soul--
Fill high th’ oblivious bowl!
‘Yet pause again!--with memory wilt thou cast
The undying hope away, of memory born?
Hope of reunion, heart to heart at last;
No restless doubt between, no rankling thorn?
Wouldst thou erase all records of delight
That make such visions bright?
Fill with forgetfulness, fill high!----yet stay--
’Tis from the past we shadow forth the land
Where smiles, long lost, again shall light our way,
And the soul’s friends be wreathed in one bright band.
Pour the sweet waters back on their own rill:
I must remember still.
‘For their sake, for the dead--whose image naught
May dim within the temple of my breast--
For their love’s sake, which now no earthly thought
May shake or trouble with its own unrest,
Though the past haunt me as a spirit--yet
I ask not to forget.’
“The whole train of emotion and thought in these verses is of a
character wholly unknown to the classic days of Greece and Rome. To
imagine any thing corresponding to it in the work of an ancient poet,
is to bring together conceptions the most incongruous.
“Here it may be worth while, in order to prevent ourselves from being
misunderstood, to observe, that we do not mean to depreciate the value
of the study of the ancient poets. After those inquiries by which the
truths of religion are established, there are none of more interest
or importance than such as relate to the mind and heart of man, and
open to us a knowledge of what he has been, and what he may be on
earth. But, to attain this knowledge, we must acquaint ourselves with
the moral and intellectual character of our race, as it has existed,
and exists, under influences and forms of society very unlike each
other. In this research, no period can be compared in interest with
a few centuries in the history of Athens and Rome, which have left
traces still so deeply impressed upon the civilised world. Thus, in
studying the history of human nature, the Grecian and Roman poets
furnish some of our most important materials. We may discover in them
a source of sentiments and opinions that still affect men’s minds.
Homer carries us back to remote Pagan antiquity, on which his writings
shed a light afforded by no other; and, at the same time, having been
regarded as the undisputed master-poet by his countrymen, (for this
Plato himself does not question,) he shows us what were the topics
by which their imaginations were most affected during the period of
their greatest civilisation. The dramatic poets of Athens reflect
the Athenian character; and in Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, we find the
lineaments of the Augustan age. But the value which thus attaches to
their works is not to be confounded with the absolute value of those
works as poems adapted through their intrinsic beauties to give delight
at the present day. In estimating their naked worth, we must likewise
separate from them the interest connected with their antiquity, and
all those accidental associations that have been gathering round them
for many centuries. We must even put out of view the native genius
of the writer, if this genius have been exerted under circumstances
so unfavourable as to render it ineffectual to produce what may give
pleasure to a pure and highly-cultivated mind. Not-withstanding the
traditionary enthusiasm that has existed on the subject, it may well
be doubted whether their power of giving vivid pleasure merely as
poetical compositions, forms a principal recommendation of the study of
the ancient poets. They were not acquainted with the richest realms of
mind. It is a mistake to address them as ‘bards illustrious, _born in
happier days_.’ But, to return to our immediate subject.
“After the revival of letters, the forms of what was called
Christianity, both among Catholics and Protestants, were in many
respects so abhorrent to reason, or feeling, or both, that they could
combine in no intimate union with our higher nature, however they might
operate on men’s passions or fears. Religious truth was, however,
sometimes contemplated in greater purity by minds of the better
class; and we early begin to find in poetry some expressions of true
religious sentiment. But what advance had been actually made even in
the seventeenth century, we may learn from the great work of Milton.
It is based on a system of mythology more sublime than the Pagan, and
less adapted to degrade the moral feelings, but scarcely less offensive
to reason, and spreading all but a Manichæan gloom and blight over
the creation of God. Putting forth his vast genius, he struggles with
it as he can, moulding it into colossal forms that repel our human
sympathies, and lavishing upon it gorgeous treasures of imagination;
but even his powers yield and sink at times before its intrinsic
incongruity and essential falsehood. Whoever rightly apprehends the