THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA.

ARTICLE I.

PREHISTORIC LITERATURE.

BY PROF. W. A. STEVENS, M.A., DENISON UNIVERSITY, GRANVILLE, OHIO.

LATE years have done much in the way of research and criticism to throw light on the literary beginnings of nations. Despite the demands of modern literature and science our age is busy as never before with the products of primitive thought. There is a vast reading public with the Iliad in its hands in the noble English of Bryant and of Derby; there are repeated versions of the Scandinavian Sagas, of the German Lay of the Nibelungs; Müller is toiling to render accessible to us the songs of the remote Hindu Rig-vêda; Tennyson interprets anew the Celtic legends of Arthur; the Occident and Orient, the steppes of Russia and the wilds of Tartary are explored for such poetic relics as they may have preserved. We design in the following pages to bring together, and appropriate to use, some results of comparatively recent criticism in the field of prehistoric literature. The discussion may prove of incidental value to the student of early English poetry; it will deal directly and especially with the question concerning the literary character of the Homeric poems; it will assist to apprehend more clearly the real nature of a favorite rationalistic theory of biblical interpretation.

Such a discussion can hardly avoid reference to the poems of Homer at the outset. For it is to Homeric studies that we are chiefly indebted for the most influential movement in literary and historical criticism of the present century. That the result and positive value of this movement are still sufficiently far from being recognized, we need not look far for proof. Mr. Gladstone's Juventus Mundi is a confirmatory instance. Commend itself as it may to our acceptance as Homeric fruit from modern soil with modern methods, it is yet in its spirit an exponent of an old school of thought, and in so far, is a century behind its time. It shows in this respect little improvement on the earlier and larger work of which it is an abridged revision. There are some considerations on the date and origin of the Homeric poems, which, although not demonstrated facts, have a generally admitted value, that Mr. Gladstone has omitted to recognize. Several of the more important conclusions at which he arrives are seriously vitiated by this defect of view. It must be admitted, however, he has re-wrought old mines to good purpose, striking new veins, and smelting over ancient slag-heaps, with a considerable product of solid ingots. The Juventus Mundi rightly treats of Homer as "historic song." Homer "has probably told us more about the world and its inhabitants at his own epoch than any historian that ever lived." Gladstone's work accordingly becomes a valuable common-place book of fact and inference bearing on the worship, social life, and culture of the heroic age of Hellas. Such materials are invested with additional value in a time like the present, when history with new constructive facilities is flinging its pontoons far towards the other margin of a prehistoric past.

But the history of the poems themselves has an interest, even deeper and requires profounder research. The genesis of such extraordinary phenomena of human thought would seem to have a deeper significance to the philosophic inquirer than could any collection of the external incidents of history. That epic impulse, which, striking on the Grecian mind, has passed down through all the western world with

ceaseless energy and widening influence, where did it originate, and what forces dominated at its birth? Critical research in this direction started the intellectual agitation which dates from the issue of Wolf's "Prolegomena ad Homerum" in 1795. By virtue of this movement the Homeric poems hold a relation to the thinking of the nineteenth century different from any preceding one; they have indirectly rendered effective assistance in the "intellectual deliverance," if we may use Matthew Arnold's phrase, of this century, and inaugurated a permanent advance along the whole line of critical science.

Professor Blackie several years ago wrote: "The name of Wolf in connection with Greek literature, and of Niebuhr in reference to Roman history, wear a significance that extends far beyond the particular spheres where their gigantic critical excavations were conducted. If the Wolfian theory with regard to the origin and composition of the Homeric poems be looked at beyond the surface, it will be found to underlie a great number of the most important literary, historical, and theological questions that stir the mind of England at the present hour." These remarks are suggestive as coming from one who does not accept the theory. The year 1795 is as much an epoch in the history of critical thought, as is 1789 in political history. The revolution then begun is beyond doubt the most suggestive phenomenon connected with the development of classical studies since their revival in the Middle Ages.

1

Of Wolf himself, and his one book, both possessing a career of singular interest, we should be glad to speak further. But we hasten from this historic reference to consider the subject of early popular literature, particularly epic poetry, as illustrated and brought into prominence by the advancing investigations of comparative criticism.

It has puzzled many a critic and many a thoughtful reader to analyze the felt difference between such poems as, for instance, the Iliad and the Aeneid, a difference similar to

1 Homer and the Iliad (Edinburgh, 1866), Dissertation vi.

that recognized between the earliest ballads of Chevy-Chace, and one of Walter Scott's border lays. Without attempting to enumerate specific diversities, one production is like a wild forest, the other like a planted grove. In one an artificial, reflective element is far more conspicuous than in the other. One is nature and one art to a degree which an intervening distance of time or of progressive culture does not wholly account for. In reality they belong to two distinct classes of poetry, generically alike, but with marked specific differences. One of these classes criticism recognizes as an individual or personal product, the other as peculiarly collective or, so to speak, impersonal in its origin. In epic poetry, to which we wish to devote special attention, we have what the Germans call the Kunstepos and the Volksepos, the epic poem of art, and the popular epos. What an epic poem in the ordinary sense is, let Blair and the books of rhetoric define according to the recognized canons. Such are the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, the Jerusalem Delivered, the Henriad, the Messiah, the Paradise Lost. The popular epic, the character of which we are to consider, differs from these. The national epos of Germany is transmitted to us, imperfectly and in part, in the Nibelungenlied, that of France in the Chansons de Geste of Charlemagne.

A Celtic epos once celebrated in its heroic verse the achievements of its renowned King Arthur, his race, and his chiefs. Long before the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, before English was a language, before the Briton and the Saxon had coalesced into a nation, the Morte d'Arthur and the legends of the Holy Vessel were sung in rude, wild, epic strains by pagan bards in the wilds of Wales and Britain. As Christianity prevailed, the pagan conceptions of this literature were gradually in part eliminated. By the time of the Middle Ages these had become a body of written poetry in most of the languages of Europe, and had been recast in the moulds of ecclesiastical thought and tradition. In the Tennysonian Idylls it has emerged again into the common literature of Christendom, dowered with gifts alike