MR. GLADSTONE'S YOUTH OF THE WORLD,

 OR THE GODS AND MEN OF THE HEROIC AGE. Macmillan and Co.

. . . . .
Having thus given our tribute of admiration to the eminent statesman and scholar we will place before the readers of the Town and Country Journal a few synoptical extracts from the "Juventus Mundi." And here, in common with several others, we may be allowed to defend the title of the work from the charge of inappropriateness preferred against it by some critics. The term "youth of the world," as applied to the period of Grecian history on which Mr. Gladstone treats is, we think, sufficiently precise to satisfy all reasonable demands. Civilization cannot be said to have reached such a stage of advancement, at the period referred to, as to characterize the Greek people as having attained the full development of intellectual manhood in comparison with the intellectual condition of man kind at the present day. Assuming ourselves to have reached the period of the greatest development of man's intellectual powers, it is but a reasonable view of the subject to consider the period of early Grecian civilization as being that of the " youth of the world," and as being a rather early youth at that; Behind that period stand two cycles, comprising the birth and infancy of the world ; before it stands the civilization resulting from nearly twenty centuries of Christianity. The analogy instituted between the condition of the world, or of the civilized portion of its inhabitants, from its birth to the present moment, and that of individual progression, from the cradle to the full maturity of manhood, is then by no means fanciful or inappropriate. In saying this we offer no opinion upon the conjectures of science upon pre-historic eras of man's existence upon the earth, nor upon the comparative degrees of civilization prevailing anterior to the Grecian or Homeric age. Assyrian and Egyptian civilization may, for aught we at present know to the contrary, have been preceded by ages of human culture ; but judging of such civilization by comparison with ancient Grecian and modern culture, we are justified in considering it as the result of one of the first in the series of spasmodic movements, by which portions of mankind had emerged from utter ignorance and barbarism, up to the period of the almost universal diffusion of advanced civilization by the Roman people. Nor in the consideration of this question have we anything to do with the contemporaneous civilization of the East, as that of China, Hindostan, and Persia, for modern progress has this distinctive characteristic, that it is the natural outcome of ancient Grecian and Roman culture, which again were advancements on Egpytian and Assyrian civilization; while the civilization of the three great nations we have named, taking its rise from the same source as the Egyptian, has never advanced a step in the march of progress beyond that taken by it at the first, almost general movement of mankind which culminated in the singular culture of the priests and people of Isis. So that Eastern civilization at the present day, being as it was in the Homeric period, may be said to represent the early youth of mankind's intellectual growth, as did that of ancient Greece. So much for the title of Mr.Gladstone's work, against which the charge of inappropriateness has been levelled. Many of our readers, especially those who are fresh from the perusal of the Iliad and Odyssey, and who have not had their faith in the individuality of Homer rudely shaken by the daring theories of Wolf and others, as to the authorship of sublime poems passing under the name of Homer, will hail with pleasure the accession of so profound a Greek scholar as Mr. Gladstone to the ranks of the faithful believers in the individuality of the Bard of Chios.

. . . . .

His conclusions respecting the tribal and national names by which the Greeks of the heroic were distinguished, will be accepted, we doubt not, by many colonial scholars. We have ourselves often been
puzzled by the appellative Argeioi, Achavi, and Danoi, which are used indiscriminately by Homer, in speaking of the Greeks, and we have thought that they must be specific names. Mr. Gladstone, however, after an elaborate discussion of the text of Homer bearing on this point, satisfies himself that the Achavi was the national name of the Greeks, while Danoi was the appellative of the Greek soldiery, and the term Argeioi indicated the husbandmen or agricultural class. He also fancies that the term Achaioi, which he has given as the national name, has also a narrower signification, and was a distinctive appellative of the chiefs or aristocracy. He says, in conclusion, on this point :— " The Greek of Homer is neither the man of Athens, nor the man of Sparta ; he is neither cast in the Dorian nor the Ionian pattern ; he is the Achaian Greek. Simple, yet shrewd ; brave in battle and gentle in converse ; keenly living in the present, yet with a large discourse over the past and future ; passionate, yet self-contained ; as he is in body, full limbed and tall, so he is in mind, towering and full formed. The portrait of the Greek of the heroic period, which Homer has given us, could never have been drawn but from the life ; and, disregarding what I conceive to have been the figments of the first renaissance, after the wild, rude, Dorian revolution, I set down Homer himself as the Achaian painter of his own kith and kin." Mr. Gladstone also makes some attempt to trace the origin of the pre-historic Greeks through philological evidence, but he does not venture beyond conjecture, in a matter necessarily so obscure, and, sooth to say, so unimportant. It has already been shown that the early Greeks were a race compounded of the aboriginal inhabitants and Egyptian and Phoenecian immigrants or invaders ; nor is conjecture ever likely to disturb this generally accepted solution of the problem. The most daring speculation in the work before us is that on the mythological system of ancient Greece. Mr. Gladstone commits himself to the dogma that before Homer's time there were the elements of a system indeed, but they existed in such a rude and unorganised form, that they had nothing national about them ; and were merely in the chaotic state in which they might be expected to be found among a people which had yet scarcely amalgamated sufficiently to mark its composite origin. To Homer he awards the merit of having brought together into a coherent whole, the loose and heterogeneous religious beliefs of the different sections of the people. This would be a work gigantic enough for the most powerful capacity and will of any pre-historic Greek; but Mr. Gladstone goes further, and asserts that Homer formed the Greek language in great part, and imparted a national sentiment to the people : and that to his influence as a religious teacher, as a poet, and as a patriot we must attribute the immense superiority which the Greeks maintained over surrounding nations for fifteen centuries of what may be termed a struggle for national existence. Now we are prepared to admit that the influence of the Iliad and Odyssey over the Greek mind was very great. But when we hear in mind that at the period when these poems were recited with the greatest fervour before the assembled tribes, they were unwritten, one feels disinclined to accept the sweeping conclusion of Mr.Gladstone, that the author of those poems must be credited with being the founder of the religion, language, and manners of the Greeks. To no one person in any age can so great an honour belong. National development is not to be achieved in the lifetime of one man ; and believing this, we are reluctantly compelled to differ from Mr. Gladstone, on the important point as to Homer's supreme influence in the formation of the typical Greek character. We will conclude this brief notice with lengthy extracts from the really great work of Mr. Gladstone. It must be consoling to the Christian, in this age of almost universal scepticism, to find one of the most highly-endowed and most exquisitely-cultured minds of Christendom speaking thus reverently and hopefully of the providential scheme in which Grecian civilization played so important a part.

" The history of the race of Adam before the Advent is the history of a long and varied, but incessant preparation for the Advent. It is commonly perceived that Greece contributed a language and an intellectual discipline, Rome a political organization, to the apparatus which was put in readiness to assist the propagation of the Gospel ; and that each of these, in its kind, was the most perfect that the world had produced. I have endeavoured elsewhere to show with some fullness what was the place of Greece in the Providential order of the world ; and likewise what was the relation of Homer to the Greeks, and to their part of the Divine plan, as compared with the relation of the Sacred Scriptures to the chosen people of God. I cannot now enter on that field at large ; yet neither can I part without a word from the subject of the Olympian religion.

"In the works of Homer, this design is projected with such extraordinary grandeur, that the representation of it, altogether apart from the general merits of the Poems, do serves to be considered as one of the topmost achievements of the human mind. Yet its character, as it was first and best set for in its entirety from the brain of the finisher and the maker, is not more wonderful than its subsequent influence and duration in actual life. For, during twelve or fourteen hundred years, it was the religion of the most thoughtful, the most fruitful, the most energetic portions of the human family. It yielded to Christianity alone ; and to the Church it yielded with reluctance, summoning up strength in its extreme old age, and only giving way after an intellectual as well as a civil battle, obstinately fought, and lasting for generations. For the greater part of a century after the fall of Constantinople, in the chief centres of a Christian civilization in many respects degenerated, and an ecclesiastical power too little faithful to its trust, Greek letters and Greek thought once again asserted their strength over the most cultivated minds of Italy,in a manner which testified to the force, and to the magic charm, with which they were imperishably endowed. Even within what may be called our own time, the Olympian religion has exercised a fascination altogether extraordinary over the mind of Goethe, who must be regarded as standing in the very first rank of the great minds of the latest centuries.

"The Olympian Religion, however, owes perhaps as large a share of its triumphs to its depraved accommodation as to its excellences. Yet, an instrument so durable, potent, and elastic, must certainly have had a purpose to serve. Let us consider a moment what it may have been.

"We have seen how closely, and in how many ways it bound humanity and deity together. As regarded matter of duty and virtue, not to speak of that highest form of virtue which is called holiness, this union was effected mainly by lowering the divine element. But as regarded all other foundations of our nature, outside the domain of the life to god-ward all those functions which are summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind, the psychic and the body life, the tendency of the system was to exalt the human element, by proposing a model of beauty, strength, and wisdom, in all their combinations, so elevated, that the effect to attain them required a continual upward strain. It made divinity attainable ; and thus it effectually directed the thought and aim of man.          

' Along the line of limitless desires.'

"Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the  government of the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral duties, tended powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a large, free, and varied conception of humanity. It incorporated itself in schemes of notable discipline of mind and body indeed of a life-long education ; and these habits of mind and action had their marked results (to omit many other greatnesses) in a philosophy, literature, and art, which remain in this day unrivalled or unsurpassed.

 

 Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW : 1870 - 1919), Saturday 19 March 1870, page 18