Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/897

Rh say the Phoibos of the poet is the Sun; but we are landed at once in the absurd consequence that we have got a Sun already, and that the two are joint actors in a scene of the eighth Odyessy. Strange, indeed, will be the effect of such a system if applied to our own case at some dale in the far-off future; for it will be shown, inter alia, that there were no priests, but only presbyters, in any portion of Western Christendom; that our dukes were simply generals leading us in war; that we broke our fast at eight in the evening (for dîner is but a compression of déjeuner); and even, possibly, that one of the noblest and most famous of English houses pursued habitually the humble occupation of a pig-driver.

The character of Hera, or Heré, has received from Homer a full and elaborate development. There is in it absolutely no trace whatever of "the queen of the shining heaven." In the action of the "Odyssey" she has no share at all—a fact absolutely unaccountable if her function was one for which the voyages of that poem give much more scope than is supplied by the "Iliad." The fact is, that there is no queen of heaven in the Achaian system; nor could there be without altering its whole genius. It is a curious incidental fact that, although Homer recognizes to some extent humanity in the stars (I refer to Orion and Leucotheë, both of them foreign personages of the Outer Geography), he never even approximates to a personification of the real queen of heaven, namely, the moon. There happens to be one marked incident of the action of Hera, which stands in rather ludicrous contrast with this lucent queenship. On one of the occasions when, in virtue of her birth and station, she exercises some supreme prerogative, she directs the sun (surely not so to her lord and master) to set, and he reluctantly obeys. Her character has not any pronounced moral elements; it exhibits pride and passion; it is pervaded intensely with policy and nationalism; she is beyond all others the Achaian goddess, and it is sarcastically imputed to her by Zeus that she would cut the Trojans if she could, and eat them without requiring in the first instance any culinary process. I humbly protest against mauling and disfiguring this work; against what great Walter Scott would, I think, have called "mashackering and misguggling" it, after the manner of Nichol Muschat, when he put an end to his wife Ailie at the spot afterward marked by his name. Why blur the picture so charged alike with imaginative power and historic meaning, by the violent obtrusion of ideas, which, whatever force they may have had among other peoples or in other systems, it was one of the main purposes of Homer, in his marvelous theurgic work, to expel from all high place in the order of ideas, and from every corner, every loft and every cellar, so to speak, of his Olympian palaces?

If the Hera of Homer is to own a relationship outside the Achaian system, like that of Apollo to the sun, it is undoubtedly with Gaia, the earth, that "it can be most easily established. The all-producing function of Gaia in the Theogony of Hesiod and her marriage with Ouranos, the heaven, who has a partial relation to Zeus, points to Hera as the majestic successor who in the Olympian scheme, as the great mother and guardian of maternity, bore an analogical resemblance to the female head of one or more of the Pelasgian or archaic theogonies that it had deposed.

I have now done with the treatment of details, and I must not quit them without saying that there are some of the chapters, and many of the sentences, of Dr. Réville which appear to me to deserve our thanks. And, much as I differ from him concerning an essential part of the historic basis of religion, I trust that nothing which I have said can appear to impute to him any hostility or indifference to the substance of religion itself.

I make, indeed, no question that the solar theory has a most important place in solving the problems presented by many or some of the Aryan religions; but whether it explains their first inception is a totally different matter. When it is ruthlessly applied, in the teeth of evidence, to them all, in the last resort it stifles facts, and reduces observation and reasoning to a