HOMERIC DISSERTATIONS.

THE intelligent contemplation of any great work of poetic art implies a knowledge of two things: the materials from which the work was composed, and the form into which these were moulded by the shaping genius of the poet. What the student of Homer, therefore, has to expect from a series of preliminary discourses on his great poem, the Iliad, consists mainly in an answer to these two questions,

From what sort of materials was that poem put together? and, What was the distinctive character of the presiding genius under the action of which these materials took shape? What was the war of Troy?-a plain affair of blood and battery like the siege of Sebastopol, or a brilliant figment of the imagination, like so many terrible encounters of slashing swordsmen and dashing cavaliers in Ariosto and the Mort d'Arthur? What was Spartan Helen?-a beautiful woman, like other women not a few, whose fair features have been the innocent cause of the shedding of much human tears, and gall, and blood; or only the artistic embodiment of a beautiful star, the Hellenic transmutation of a Sanscrit Aurora, the shining shepherdess of celestial kine in the pastures of the Vedic Olympus? What was Homer?-a man, or many men--a person or a symbol--the symbol of a minstrel brotherhood and the type of a national tendency? 1 Max Muller, Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 471.

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But besides the discussion of these questions, the reflective reader of such a poem as the Iliad--a work now nearly three thousand years old-will desire to know under what guarantee of authenticity he possesses the text as he now uses it; how far it may, in the course of time, have been exposed to accidental or intentional interpolations; and whether there are any tests of a really scientific character by which what is late and adventitious in our present manuscripts may be separated from what is ancient and original. An important question also will arise to the student of the Iliad, who, from ignorance of the Greek language, is forced to receive his impression of that time-hallowed work through the medium of a translation: What are the principles on which the translation of a poem should be made, so as to convey to the mind of a modern reader, as far as may be, a true image, not only of the matter and the substance--a comparatively easy task,-but of the living movement, character, colour, and atmosphere of the ancient work? Such, stated. in the most general way, are the questions which an expositor of Homer, at the present day, must expect to have proposed to him by those of his readers for whom he has the greatest respect; and I accordingly set myself to answer them in the best manner I can, after no light and trivial consideration, but with such seriousness as is due to a work of high art, which, next to the sacred Scriptures, has been, in the closest possible manner, compacted into the framework of literary tradition, and the most intimately interwoven with the whole texture of cultivated thought in modern Europe.

DISSERTATION I.

ON THE MATERIALS OF NATIONAL AND POPULAR POETRY

TRADITION: ITS CHARACTER AND CONTENTS.

OF Poetry, the most graceful at once, and the most truthful definition that I know, is that given by the late Leigh Hunt. "Poetry," said that ingenious and sunny-souled writer, "is the flower of any sort of experience rooted in truth and growing up into beauty." Here we have, in my opinion, a definition which at once enables us to distinguish between what is spurious in poetical composition, and what is genuine; between what is showy, and what is substantial; between what is ephemeral, and what is enduring. There are poems which may most fitly be compared to soap-bubbles -floating in the air for a short space with the most lovely forms and hues of landscape and architecture pictured in their light and lucid globes; but they have no root, no permanency; they are blown into existence; they do not grow. A great poem, on the other hand, is a reality; every true poem, indeed, that is an organic utterance of the whole man, and not a mere pretty play of fancy or cunning juggle of words, is a reality; and it is in this reality that its power over real men in this real world consists. No form of literary composition in the present day calls into play so much of the most high and varied talent as novels and

other works of fiction; but these works are read and enjoyed by the better class of readers, not so much from interest in the fiction, however skilfully contrived, as from the deeply felt reality of the life which they portray. A really good novel does, in fact, give the reader the very cream of present reality. The novel is the epic of common life, and as such has a right to claim somewhat of the more philosophical character which Aristotle assigns to all poetry, as distinguished from history. It is with the permanent types of society that the novel has to do; the greatest and most important reality of the life of man with man. It is with these types that all poetry has to do; and herein precisely lies its common truth and universal validity. But more than this. Invented types of humanity, however truthful, will never have the same speaking power to the great mass of the people as actual, living, and breathing types. Every prominent man in any human society is a type or model of some grand human excellence; and, when the original appears, he must be a poor pedant who shall still prefer gazing at a picture. Nelson and Wellington were two living types, the one of fervid, the other of cool, heroic energy; and as such will always keep a firmer hold of the British imagination than any the most perfect soldier or seacaptain that the pencil of the most cunning writer of fiction could paint. What hero of romance ever exercised such a sway over the minds of men as Napoleon Buonaparte, when

• Aristot. Poet. 9. Φανερὸν δὲ ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων καὶ ὅτι οὐ τὸ τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τοῦτο ποιητοῦ ἔργον ἐστίν, ἀλλ' εἷα ἂν γένοιτο, καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον. ὁ γὰρ ἱστορικὸς καὶ ὁ ποιητὴς οὐ τῷ ἢ ἔμμετρα λέγειν ἢ ἄμετρα διαφέρουσιν· εἴη γὰρ ἂν τὰ Ηροδότου εἰς μέτρα τεθῆναι, καὶ οὐδὲν ἧττον ἂν εἴη

ἱστορία τις μετὰ μέτρου ἢ ἄνευ μέτρων ἀλλὰ τούτῳ διαφέρει, τῷ τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο. διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν· ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ' ἱστορία τα καθ' ἕκαστον λέγει.

he thundered and lightened over Europe, Africa, and Asia, and portioned out kingdoms like a god? And if such is the fascinating force of a powerful and vivid personality now, in the early ages of the world we may rest assured its efficacy was much greater. For we have in these days a literary class, and a class of persons with strong literary sympathies, for whom mere art, the rich play of fancy, the subtle inventiveness of imagination, and the cunningly carved phrase, have a peculiar interest, altogether apart from the actuality of the materials on which these plastic faculties are exercised. But in the early times it was otherwise. In the days when Homer sang and Moses wrote, men would not accept a purely fictitious narrative. There might be many fictions in what they believed, but these fictions were either the graceful festoons with which facts were decorated, or the beautiful flowers into which facts had blossomed. The craving for reality is too strong in the early stages of human society to tolerate an entertainment artificially tricked out from mere invention. Dr. Arnold, the great English teacher, remarked that boys before the age of puberty had no taste for poetry; and it is quite certain that vigorous nations in the first stages of intellectual culture will not be content to be fed on the spoon-meat of pretty fancies; nor happily do they require the unhealthy stimulant of strange attitudes and startling imaginations. All early popular literature grows out of the popular life, and that life has two great parts,--the life of inward passion and sentiment, which gives birth to war-songs, love-songs, and religious hymns; and the life of outward action and adventure, which gives birth to epic poetry. No poem, even in the later ages of cultivated literature, has ever made a great popular impression, unless when it contained what was true, or what was generally