The reevaluation of Homer and the Homeric poems, which culminated in F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer in 1795, was arguably the most important scholarly development of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century Homeric scholars were primarily responsible for introducing historical criticism to the study of secular literature, and, by so doing, ended the dominance of French neo-Aristotelian formalism. By the century’s end, Homer himself had even disappeared: the Homeric epics, scholars argued, were not created by a single blind bard, but instead were collections of set-pieces, composed orally by many different writers and preserved centuries after their composition by editors who were responsible for transcribing and arranging the epics in a readable, coherent form. Besides reshaping the contemporary understanding of the Homeric epics, this line of criticism had profound cultural effects. Antiquarians throughout Europe began to investigate and preserve the last remnants of the oral poetry of their own countries, in hope of discovering epics equal to Homer’s. As a result of their efforts, thousands of works that survived only in rare manuscripts or in oral tradition were published for the first time, including the poems of Ossian, the first scholarly collections of medieval ballads, and medieval epics and romances, such as The Poem of the Cid. Critics such as Herder argued that these newly discovered works should serve as models for contemporary writers, and, almost immediately, serious young poets began experimenting with ballads, romances, and folksongs as their preferred genres. Their aim was to recover the immediacy and power of primitive verse; by so doing, they permanently transformed the character of European literature.
We can trace this transformation by considering the arguments of three Homeric scholars: Thomas Blackwell, Robert Wood, and F. A. Wolf. In An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), Blackwell called Homer a ‘‘stroling indigent Bard,’’ his translation of the Greek aoidos, a word used in the Homeric poems to describe ‘‘a Set of Men, who distinguished themselves by Harmony and Verse. The wonderful Tales which they told, and the Melody with which they accompanied them, made the Delight of these simple Ages...’’ (Blackwell 1735: 104). These bards traveled throughout Greece, from household to household and from city to city, singing or chanting their poems to the accompaniment of the lyre, as a form of after-dinner entertainment. Thus they were able to observe a wide variety of places and scenes, as well as customs and manners, all of which they would reproduce in their poems. What distinguished Homer from the others, thought Blackwell, was his skill in reproducing what he had seen: he ‘‘took his plain natural images from Life'' (34). That he performed his poems in public was also important: he was compelled to use ‘‘a simple, intelligible Stile,'' so as to communicate with his audience effectively, and at the same time would employ ‘‘the boldest Metaphors and glowing Figures,’’ to capture and hold their attention (116-17). In fact, Blackwell came very close to articulating an oral theory of composition: the Homeric poems, he wrote,
Were made to be recited, or sung to a Company; and not read in private, or perused in a Book, which few were then capable of doing.... His Stile... cannot be understood in any other Light; nor can the Strain and Manner of his work be felt and relished unless we put ourselves in the place of his Audience, and imagine it coming from the Mouth of a Rhapsodist. (Blackwell 1735: 118)
To understand the Homeric poems, then, we must investigate both the historical circumstances that his poems represent and the customs of the society in which they were produced. This is the core of the argument of Blackwell’s Enquiry. With it, this obscure Scottish scholar, the future Principal of Marischal College, Aberdeen, overturned two centuries of literary formalism.
Some 30 years after the publication of An Enquiry into... Homer, Robert Wood refined and extended Blackwell’s argument in his Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1775). No professional scholar, Wood was an educated amateur traveling throughout the Eastern Mediterranean on diplomatic missions who spent his spare time checking out the actual geography of the Homeric poems, measuring the distance of sea voyages, and drawing the first modern topographical survey and map of the plain of Troy. Like Blackwell, Wood historicized the Homeric epics:
Homer’s great merit seems to be that of having transmitted to us a faithful transcript, or (what is, perhaps, more useful) a correct abstract of human nature, impartially exhibited under the circumstances, which belonged to his period of society, as far as his experience and observation went. (Wood 1775: xiii)
To understand this ‘‘transcript,’’ we must understand ‘‘his period of society,’’ and from his poems attempt to judge the extent of ‘‘his experience and observation.’’ In this respect, Wood followed Blackwell very closely. But, in his chapter entitled ‘‘Homer’s Language and Learning,’’ he struck out in a new direction. Assuming that Homer was an aoidos, Wood argued, first, that if writing was known in Homeric Greece, it was pictographical, not alphabetical, and thus unsuited for lengthy compositions like an epic poem. He then maintains that Homer himself was probably illiterate and must have composed his poems orally. We owe their survival not to their author but to the memory of Ionian rhapsodes, who preserved the poems for centuries as scattered fragments, something like ballads. After the invention of alphabetical writing, an effort was made to collect and assemble these fragments, probably late in the sixth century bc, and only at that time did the poems take something like their current form. What we call the ‘‘Homeric’’ poems, then, may owe as much to the efforts of later editors as to the ‘‘original genius’’ of a bard named Homer (Wood 1775: 248-78).
Having shown that Homer composed his poems orally, Wood considered ‘‘whether [the poet] might not derive some advantages from this illiterate state of things’’ (Wood 1775: 279). He then developed a primitivist argument that focuses on Homer’s style:
When the sense was catched from the sound, and not deliberately collected from paper, simplicity and clearness were more necessary. Involved periods and an embarrassed style were not introduced, till writing became more an art, and labour supplied the place of genius. (Wood 1775: 281)
For Wood, Homer’s is ‘‘the language of Nature,’’ a language which
Still retains its powers in the province of Poetry, where the most finished efforts of artificial language are but cold and languid circumlocution, compared with that passionate expression of Nature, which incapable of misrepresentation, appeals directly to our feelings, and finds the shortest way to the heart. . . . It was therefore an advantage to the
Father of Poetry, that he lived before the language of Compact and Art had so much prevailed over that of Nature and Truth.... Thus the simplicity, without meanness or indelicacy, of the Poet’s language rises out of the state of his manners. (Wood 1775: 283-4)
There are a number of things to note here: first, his assertion that writing tends to corrupt language, inducing poets to depart from simple clarity and indulge in ‘‘cold and languid circumlocution’’; second, his articulation of an expressivist poetics, closely allied to his primitivism, which M. H. Abrams considers to be one of the central features of the Romantic enterprise (Abrams 1953: 80-1); and third, his insistence on Homer’s indebtedness to ‘‘the state of his manners’’ for his poetic achievement. As Wood stated near the end of his Essay, ‘‘It has been the great object of this Essay to carry the Reader to the Poet’s Age, and Country,’’ to read Homer historically and investigate his culture anthropologically (Wood 1775: 300). Expres-sivism and historicism are thus inextricably bound together.
Wood’s Essay was published in 1769, in a private edition of about a half dozen copies, and its author died shortly afterwards. Luckily, one of these copies was sent to Johann Michaelis at the University of Gottingen. Michaelis, the greatest living biblical scholar, recognized the significance of Wood’s arguments and asked his son to prepare a German translation of the Essay, to rescue it from obscurity. The translation was published in 1773, to great acclaim. C. G. Heyne and the young Goethe reviewed it enthusiastically. Herder put its arguments about the power of primitive poetry at the heart of his famous essays on Ossian (Foerster 1947: 96-112). At Gottingen itself, Heyne introduced a generation of students to Wood’s arguments, and in the late 1770s, one of them, F. A. Wolf, began to seek concrete scholarly evidence to prove the ‘‘many shrewd and fine observations’’ of the English amateur (Wolf 1985: 71). Wolf first formulated his ‘‘unorthodox thoughts on Homer’’ in an essay presented to Heyne in 1779 (Wolf 1985: 232). But it was Villoison’s publication of Homeric scholia (1788) that finally gave Wolf the evidence he was lacking and led him to write what has been called the greatest philological work of the eighteenth century, his Prolegomena to Homer (1795). In that work, as Anthony Grafton has noted, Wolf wrote the first ‘‘history of the Homeric text’’ (Wolf 1985: 7-15): he showed how the practices of rhapsodes and scholiasts would have affected our received texts of the Homeric poems, he outlined the difficulties inherent in purifying the poems of their many accretions, and he concluded that, very probably, ‘‘the very songs from which the Iliad and Odyssey were assembled do not all have one common author’’ (Wolf 1985: 70). After Wolf’s Prolegomena, our idea of Homer could never be the same.
The historical criticism of the Homeric poems made possible a broad critical reexamination of the European poetic tradition. If the Iliad and Odyssey had been produced by a preliterate oral culture, then there might be similar cultural monuments preserved in obscure manuscript collections or still alive in oral traditions in remote parts of Europe. In Scotland, James Macpherson, who studied at Marischal College while Blackwell was its Principal, collected fragments of ancient Gaelic poetry, knit them together into two epic poems (Fingal and Femora, published in 1762 and 1764), and ascribed them to a legendary Gaelic bard named Ossian. For the next century, Ossian became a household name across the European continent. Thomas Percy, skeptical of Macpherson’s procedures, compiled manuscripts of older English and Scottish poems, most of them ballads. These were, he argued, composed by ancient British minstrels, itinerant bards who performed their works at the households of noble patrons during the later Middle Ages. He published his three-volume collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, introduced with lengthy scholarly dissertations and supplemented with a full critical apparatus. Percy’s Reliques were read and admired widely, both in Great Britain and on the continent (Groom 1999: 61-105). They were translated into German by Herder, for whom ‘‘Ossian,’’ ‘‘Homer,’’ and ‘‘minstrel’’ became almost interchangeable terms. They were imitated by a generation of young German poets, among them Goethe and Burger, whose imitations of folk ballads achieved extraordinary popularity. In the 1790s many of these modern German imitations of ancient English ballads were translated back into English and published in prominent literary journals. Walter Scott, later the editor of an important ballad collection of his own (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border), first made his literary reputation as a translator of German ballads. And in 1798, spurred in part by their reading of German literature, two young Englishmen decided to publish their own collection of ballads, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, one of the foundational works of British Romanticism (Graver 2005: 39-41).
In The Hidden Wordsworth, Kenneth Johnston raises once again an old scholarly question: ‘‘Why the Lyrical Ballads)" ‘‘Wordsworth,’’ Johnston notes,
Had, as of March 1798, written only one and a half ballads in his entire life.... His interest for several years had not been in short poems at all, let alone ballads. He was determined to write long poems, narrative poems in blank verse... taking his inspiration not from the ballad revivals of Bishop Percy. . . but from the epic examples of Milton and Spenser. (Johnston 1998: 568-9)
Much the same may be said of Coleridge: he had written sonnets, odes, effusions, philosophical or meditative blank verse, and verse drama, but very little in the way of ballads before ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’’ Johnston here assumes a sharp generic division between the ballad and the epic: the former is a product of folk culture and a low poetic kind; the latter is both highly sophisticated and fiercely literate, the most ambitious of poetic genres. But in light of eighteenth century Homeric scholarship, Johnston’s generic division does not seem as sharp as he implies. By 1798, scholars across Europe had come to consider the Iliad and Odyssey not as sophisticated literary epics but as repositories of traditional material, composed orally by an anonymous bard or bards, preserved in the memories of rhapsodes, and assembled at a much later date by scholarly editors. The closest English equivalent to Homeric epic is not Paradise Lost, but a late medieval ballad like ‘‘Chevy Chase.’’ It follows, then, that to write a collection of ballads (and to publish them anonymously) is to approximate the writing of epic, albeit epic of a very different kind from those conceived of by Milton, Spenser, or Vergil. In this light, the experiments of the Lyrical Ballads take on a new appearance. It has often been said that Wordsworth, in his ‘‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and especially in his 1802 ‘‘Appendix on Poetic Diction,” articulates a primitivist view of poetic style. It is less often noted that when he refers to ‘‘the earliest Poets of all nations” (Wordsworth 1992: 761-2), he includes Homer in the mix and thus allies his poetical experiments with the earliest literary art of ancient Greece.
In many of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge explore the relationship of preliterate folk culture to the modern world of literacy and published books. Maureen McLane argues that the Lyrical Ballads mark ‘‘the emergence of a new literary orality.... [The poems] offer a way to rethink the relation of orality to literacy and specifically the relation of the oral to the literate within literature'' (McLane 2001: 425-8). Coleridge's ‘‘Rime of the Ancient Marinere'' is a good case in point. His mariner is an illiterate itinerant, invested, like a Celtic bard, with preternatural powers. The wedding guest is a representative of the noble class that would employ itinerant minstrels, and the narrator of the poem is intended to be a minstrel of a somewhat later period who presents the telling of the tale in dramatic form. We owe the preservation of the ballad to an editor of an even later date, who is the fictive author of the introductory ‘‘Argument'' and the notorious marginal gloss that Coleridge first published in 1817. The whole poem thus seems a complex scholarly hoax on the antiquarian fascination with the minstrelsy and preliterate folk culture. Wordsworth, too, explores over and over again the relationship between the oral traditions of folk culture and the literate poet who turns these traditions into published verse. In ‘‘The Brothers,'' for instance, the parish priest of Ennerdale is a repository of oral history, which the narrator of the poem has taken upon himself to preserve. In ‘‘Michael,'' Wordsworth uses Miltonic blank verse to relate a plain tale about a remarkable Grasmere shepherd. This tale is also a product of oral tradition: he was told it ‘‘while I was yet a Boy, / Careless of books,'' and he retells it in this highly literate form specifically for ‘‘youthful Poets, who among these Hills / Will be my second Self when I am gone'' (‘‘Michael,'' lines 27-8, 389, in Wordsworth 1992: 253). Oral culture is translated to literary form for the sake of writers of literature, and they in turn will inherit Wordsworth's role as a preserver of oral tradition. But of all the Lyrical Ballads, ‘‘Hart-leap Well'' problematizes the relationship of oral and literate culture most fully: not only does it dramatize the relationship of the modern poet to oral tradition, but it raises questions about the contemporary concepts of minstrelsy and primitive poetry, derived from Blackwell, Percy, and others.
‘‘Hart-leap Well'' is divided into two nearly equal parts. Part 1 recounts in heroic terms a tale of a medieval stag hunt, beginning abruptly, in medias res, with the leader of the hunt, ‘‘Sir Walter,'' calling for his third horse of the day.
Mounted on a new ‘‘Courser,’’ Sir Walter ‘‘like a falcon flies,’’ to pursue a ‘‘poor Hart’’ (lines 9, 11, 29), leaving the rest of his party far behind. Just before expiring, the hart leaps ‘‘Nine roods’’ in three bounds, to die beside the spring that gives the poem its name, and in honor of ‘‘the gallant brute,’’ Sir Walter has a basin constructed around the spring, erects three stone pillars to mark the hart’s leaps, and orders a ‘‘Pleasure-house’’ to be built, for summertime merrymaking (lines 50, 65, 57). Here, he vows,
Thus ends the story of Sir Walter and the hart. But not the poem. In the last stanza of Part 1, the narrator makes a promise to ‘‘add another tale’’ in ‘‘a second rhyme’’ (lines 95-6). And in that ‘‘second rhyme,’’ Part 2 of the poem, he proceeds very differently. First of all, it takes place, not in the past, but in contemporary England, and depicts the chance encounter, at the site of the original hunt, between the narrator of the poem and a Yorkshire shepherd. The shepherd retells the tale of the hart’s death, and both he and the poet moralize about it from a modern perspective. For the shepherd, ‘‘the spot is cursed’’ (line 126), made forever barren because of Sir Walter’s brutality. For the poet-narrator, Sir Walter has violated the ‘‘sympathy divine’’ of ‘‘Nature’’ (lines 163-4), and the bleakness of the landscape is not so much a curse as a sign of what happens when we disrupt the balance of natural environments. Yet ‘‘Nature,’’ he continues, ‘‘once more / Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom,’’ once the ‘‘monuments’’ Sir Walter erected have decayed (lines 171-2, 176). He concludes with a moral:
In other words, if we don’t hunt down harts (or, for that matter, albatrosses), don’t build pleasure houses (or pleasure-domes) to celebrate our power, and don’t enclose springs that naturally irrigate meadows, the world may be a better place.
But this moral is rather beside Wordsworth’s point, a point that, like Coleridge’s in the ‘‘Rime,’’ has much more to do with the debates about minstrelsy and cultural primitivism than with animal rights or ecology. In ‘‘Hart-Leap Well’’ Wordsworth juxtaposes competing versions of the minstrel, Percy’s ancient minstrel and Wordsworth’s modern one, and does so to explore the relation of each to oral tradition. Part 1 of the poem is a modern imitation of Percy’s Reliques, and its placement in Lyrical Ballads (‘‘Hart-Leap Well’’ is the opening poem of vol. 2 of the collection) as well as its subject matter are meant to recall ‘‘Chevy Chase,’’ the first poem in Percy’s collection. Until the final stanza of Part 1, Wordsworth’s narrator seems an impersonation of Percy’s ancient minstrel, celebrating the deeds of a noble patron from the patron’s point of view, with a tale that the patron himself must have been the source for. We can even imagine this part of the ballad being sung as a kind of after-dinner entertainment in the ancestral seat of Sir Walter and his descendants, or perhaps in the very pleasure-house he built to commemorate the hunt. Part 2 of the poem, however, retells the story from the perspective of an illiterate rustic, who sees things, not like Sir Walter, but through the eyes of the ‘‘unhappy hart.’’ For the shepherd, the hunt was just another sign of how the ruling class exercises arbitrary power, exploiting wildlife, the land, and, by implication, those who work the land, in pursuit of idle and destructive pleasures. Wordsworth’s narrator is literally a ‘‘stroling indigent bard,’’ a modern incarnation of Blackwell’s Homer en route between Richmond and Askrigg, who records both versions of a local legend: the shepherd’s version, given in the shepherd’s own voice, and Sir Walter’s version, which he recreates from what the shepherd told him. This is creative editing indeed! And it is also partisan editing. The poet concludes the poem by taking the shepherd’s side, effectively undercutting the ruling-class point of view expressed in Part 1 of the poem. By undercutting it, Wordsworth rejects Percy’s model of the minstrel.
But what, then, are we left with? What kind of minstrel, if minstrel he is, does Wordsworth represent himself as being? Surely not one who sings of ‘‘low and rustic life’’ to ‘‘low and rustic’’ people (‘‘Preface’’ to Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth 1992: 743) - people who never had the five shillings for the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, let along the higher price for the two-volume editions of 1800, 1802, and 1805. Rather, I suggest that Wordsworth is attempting to recover a more genuinely Blackwellian concept of the poet - an itinerant, to be sure, but one without any particular ties to a noble household, one who, like Blackwell’s Homer, ‘‘is a keen observer ofhis world,’’ taking his ‘‘plain, natural images from life’’ as he sees it, not as it is seen by those who read his books - a poet, that is, of the sort who might write to the leader of the Whigs, Charles James Fox, and enjoin him with a straight face to read his poems and learn of the ‘‘domestic affections’’ of rural laborers, so that even the powerful can come to recognize ‘‘that men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’’ (quoted in Wordsworth 1992: 401).
World History
