A Complete Life of Homer. By F. A. White, B.A.
(Bell and Sons.)—Is this book seriously meant or not ? Is it an elaborate effort to pay the destructive critics in their own coin ? The "higher criticism," for instance, is applied to some of the incidents of the Odyssey. We are told that the story of the daily weaving and nightly unweaving of Penelope's web is incredible. Could all the suitors have been so thick-headed as not to find out the trick for four years ? The real explanation is that the poet is autobiographical. The web represents the devices by which the poet's mother kept her suitors at bay "till she was rescued from them by the honour- able proposals of Phemius." But, on the whole, the book does not bear the theory of its being a jeu d'esprit. The author seems to be quite in earnest. He has collected together a variety of the statements which later Greek writers, at a time when the true literary impulse had ceased, amused themselves by inventing and embellishing. These he has woven into a continuous narrative and criticism. He is not without ingenuity and a certain amount of learning. And it is only justice to say that he seems to have read the Homeric and quasi-Homeric poems with attention, if not with judgment. But the elaborate biography ; the statement of dates that can scarcely be called even conjectural, as if they were as well established as the dates of English history; the mythical genealogies, stated with a gravity which even a peerage-compiler could not match,—these things are really outside the range of criticism. If some second Bentley were to arise and deal with A Complete Life of Homer as the first did with Boyle's "Letters of Phalaris," the world would get entertainment, if not profit.
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