BOOKS.

HOMER.*

IT is difficult, as we are told by the wisest and most persuasive of all masters in literature, to annex triumphantly from the common stock ; to make a well-worn theme or character one's own, without either innovation or eccentricity. The treat- ment of Homer's characters is given as an illustration of this precept ; but in our days the treatment of Homer's works might seem to require Horace's warning. Is it possible, we may ask, to say anything new about them without being absurd or dull P Can modern scholarship explain them without explaining them away P Now English scholarship, at any rate, has given us quite recently two books about Homer which certainly make him more living and real than he was thought to be a century ago. The first of them, in time, is Professor Gilbert Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic, which carries us away, as by magic, into the early world. It reconstructs for us with an equal charm, sympathy, and penetration the social conditions and the mental atmosphere of those vanished ages ; and, above all, it shows us how books grew when authorship was not only an art but a mystery ; when a poet was not merely a writer but a singer, and a prophet or revealer of the unseen powers. Without committing ourselves to everything in • Horner Mid the Iliad. By Y. Xenon Stowell. London s J. N. Dent and Sons. [104.6d. net.]

Professor Murray's book, we Must express our gratitude and admiration for this part of it ; and it is valuable because it is so illuminative about the origins, not only of Greek literature, but of the few comparatively ancient Hebrew records, as of everything which has come down to us from those twilight frontiers between the ages of history and the prehistoric aeons.

Miss Stawell's book is the second fine contribution of English scholarship to the Homeric problem. She. has entitled it Homer and the Iliad : an Essay to Determine the Scope and Character of the Original Poem. The title describes only one part of Miss Stawell's work, for she gives her readers ranch more than she has promised. What she promises, first, is a sketch or notion of the original Iliad,—the nucleus of the various books as we now have them ; the heart of the different poems, by various authors as most scholars hold, which have been collected or welded into "the tale of Troy divine."

As to this matter learned opinion has been; and is, very much divided, too often in a way that stultifies the Latin text about the humanising effect of good litera-

ture ; though we should remember that those words were written in a happy ignorance of German professors and Christian theologians. Miss Stawell thinks that modern scholarship, if it should be so called, has gone much too far in a sceptical and iconoclastic direction. She herself is amply competent in the details of scholarship, in language and in grammar ; but she says, very truly, with regard both

to this question and to several others of a similar kind:— "Scholarship has been the bane of scholars. The Iliad is too

familiar to them ; they cannot think away what they cut away." She means that they have dwelt too exclusively on language and grammar, in which they are not infallible, and in which she proceeds to show that they are not invulnerable, and, while handling the poems drastically according to their

supposed grammatical tests, they have overlooked the effect of their amputations on the poetry, both in its structure and in the development and revelation of the characters. It has been maintained that the original poem was not an Iliad, a tale of Troy, but an Achilliad, or a lay about the menis or wrath of Achilles and its effects. Various scholars have professed to reconstruct the original poem, the core of the Iliad, from this point of view. To do so they have cut out an immense quantity of matter from all parts of the poem, and, worst of all, they have cut of the end. The technical arguments on both sides, both those which deal with grammar and those which deal with the construction of the poem, may be left to experts ; but the best and strongest part of Miss Stawell's ease may be understood by any one who has literary taste, a knowledge of human nature, and a little common-

sense. She meets the destructive critics on their own ground, and in technical details she is quite able to hold her own, and in some cases to expel the enemy. To sum up briefly, she says that not only do these excisions destroy the story and stultify the poetry, but they mutilate in all cases the characters which are presented to us, and to a large extent render what remains of them incomprehensible.

It is only possible to give an outline, not so much of her arguments as of her method in handling the problem. It is a method which has been almoSt entirely overlooked.

"Criticism of the letter," as she says, "may stifle the spirit."

Collection, collation, and editing, Miss Stamen admits. The tradition of Peisistratus and his work seems to her true ; but, as she remarks shrewdly, " the whole body of the poems had come to be regarded with love and reverence as the work of a mighty past. Hebrew literature might furnish many

parallels." "It is pious conservatism and not ',subtle Skill that has given the Iliad its Anil shape." Aga' "Much of the traditional poem has scarcely had a fair chance at the hands of modern' critics. ScAkes whq$'1iie: &tiff "arid bearing are not obviona .at once, haie 'been at Maar/ Vitherit further. thought. But a great dramatic [sic] poem. dries not gite up all its secrets at once. There are subtle 74,rmpilie ;that can only be realised dearly after long and sympathetic study : the work on Shakespeare might suffice- to /word thin And' Homer, like Shakespeare, can put in very important points -Very quietly. We may miss them, and that iii,our loss.. Tha poet. Nal, ilotAmds, emphasise them for our sakes. Therefore it is not eangh to ask ourselves whether such .and such'a-psssage _could 'be cut 'out and -the story hang together; We mast aifIr further Ithethei -'the omission really leaves the figures as solid, the itory-as the background as grand,- as before; I-feel sure that the full consequencarof their own•exeisiens fists notaisiari; heervinitieed by the critics who have made them. They dinfftit' anti q' strip away the memory of the `later accretions'; there are

even instances of their praising the recovered ' for effects, which could not have been obtained without the ' later interpolations.' " In fact, Miss Stawell, with her woman's tact and wit, her exceedingly fine taste. in literature, and her superb common- sense, has exploded a great deal of pedantry, and has made a great many pedants look extremely foolish. "A load of learned lumber" is not a sufficient outfit for interpreting the

finest poetry in the world. Much has been said of the " delays " in Homer, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey; but neither a tragedy nor an epic poem can be reduced to its bare

skeleton without destroying the poetry. If a story must be told in a flash, in a moment of time, there could be no art of story-telling. The crime of Macbeth or the madness of Lear might be told in fifty words, but we should not have Shake-

speare's poetry. So it is with Homer. He " was not super- human. It takes him some time to gather his threads together, but the threads are essential to his pattern. To cut them would not mend matters." It would merely spoil the

pattern, and that is precisely what many scholars, especially Germans, have done with Homer's poetry.

Miss Stawell not only has revived the courage of Homer's true lovers and maintainers, but has made his characters seem more living and wonderful than they were before. The

excellence of her work can only be realised by a study of her book, but we may assert here that the subtlety and Strength

with which she has analysed HoMer's characters make her argumenta quite invulnerable to mere pedantic objections. As a convincing argument to many such objections, we would

point to her dissertation on the Homeric armour. Horace

has committed himself to the judgment that Homer some- times dozes. If by " Homer " he meant the books as we have them, we must agree ; but Miss Stawell says "give the poems a shake," not the poet, " and the loose additions drop away," What these " additions " may be is, of course, the disputed question. Some extreme critics would say they are the greater part of the existing poems. The original poem is reduced to the opening and a part of Book I., the rout of the Greeks in Book XI., the sending of Patroclus, his death, the return of Achilles, and the killing of Hector, parts, that is, of Books XV.-XXIL This is what the labouring mountains have brought forth, and Miss Stawell proves conclusively that

it is both ridiculous and incomprehensible. From the use of Homer this pedantry has produced nothing but fog and mist. Miss Stawell's achievement is precisely opposite :- "Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem Cogitat, ut speciosa dehine miracule, promat."

Certainly a miracle that at "the sunrise of our western day" these poems shoUld appear in all the richneie of their

perfection, with their delicate appreciations of character, and their Sense both of the largenesa ,and complexity of human life and of the mystery which surrounds it.

MuCh has been discovered in the last twenty years to alter our conceptions of the Homeric problem. The poems no longer come to ns, ostensibly, out of the dawn of civilisation, buoyant

with the youth of our race, or at least of the Hellenic world, the product of a time before writing; The hexameter' itself should have prevented the latter hypothesis ; but we know now that behind Homer was an old and a decaying, perhaps even a vanished, civilisation. Writing and all the arts go much

farther back than was supposed. • And all this knowledge reacts, not Only upon Homer, but upon Virgil. The two cannot be contrasted in the absurd manner which prevailed for so long, and which vitiated so many literary judgments : one being thOuglit " natural " and the othbr imitative or " artificial," Whate'Ver thode terms may mean. Aa Miss•Stawell points out

so truly, "we kilo* of no other style in literature at once so IttAfteicir and so 'free as the epic dialett."'".'We knoiifoo what Yirgiliiddlielaind* amt it included Homer --We de know exactly what Homer. had behind' hini; lint* *e'Can he .6eitain that 'he -must innst hafe had • Many 1.trrgik& 'models; and eitiler'the reality or-the tradition'of a complex society.' If the tale-of TreY in Honier tia'"'divine," as Milton says, the taking of ti-Cy as told in the second AerOd is perhaps'Moi'e'eh'arget with divine presenees and visions. het- ns enjoyi What both pOeta haiie- to gtii6'wititbiff being so- 4' to' Mae uro - ottb at the expense brthe other. The mySter§..kflif l'erit—dins that . Virgil;"the supposed Court poet' of an artiffeliPage; has given tta ont.Y. one-living:01'd CoiniAi*ditiaii; iris /Md.; .whilst rfothdi, 1116 shtfde and ViiioptiLitkitried\Aaiger:ith has given a whole gallery, more than Meredithian in variety, subtlety, and truth: Helen and Hecuba, Andromache and Nausicaa, Penelope, Calypso and Circe. We may be allowed to attribute them all to Homer, because Miss Stawell asserts valiantly that "it is not even probable" that the original Iliad and the Odyssey were by different authors. At any rate, this simplifies the Homeric problem, and reduces our search to the "original Iliad." An audacious writer, not many years ago, suggested that the Odyssey was by a woman, and he described her as the authoress. However that may be, the composer of the Homeric poems understood women perfectly ; and two women, Miss Jane Harrison and Miss Stawell, are pre-eminent in modern Hellenic scholarship. Let us hope that they both agree about Homer. If so, they may prove irresistible.