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We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the ILIADand ODYSSEY. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends.
It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all.
One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of "a certain phase of early civilisation," and that picture is "a naturally harmonious whole," with "unity of impression," says Sir Richard Jebb. {Footnote: Homer, p. 37.} Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this "harmonious picture" in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of Beowulf; but we know that Beowulf, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms—a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no "painful anxiety," like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.
If we take the Nibelungenlied, {Footnote: See chapter on the Nibelungenliedin Homer AND the Epic, pp. 382-404.} we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the Nibelungenliedis of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian prose author of the Volsungabeen a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the Iliad. But, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the savage begi
"If any inference could properly be drawn from the Edda" (the Icelandic collection of heroic lays), says Sir Richard Jebb, "it would be that short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection withoutcoalescing into such an artistic whole as the Iliad or the Odyssey." {Footnote: Homer, p. 33.}
It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they ca
Where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence, as Dr. Lц
This is perfectly true; much as Lц
Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. The Odyssey is an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse. Blass, Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare that the composition is excellent. A crowd of German critics and Father Browne, S.J., hold that the composition is feeble. The criterion is the literary taste of each party to the dispute. Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Mцllendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the Odysseyis a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. Yet Sir Richard Jebb, while recognising the Odysseyas "an artistic whole" and an harmonious picture, and recognising Lц
It is, of course, possible that Mr. Leaf, who has not edited the Odyssey,may now, in deference to his belief in the Pisistratean editor, have changed his opinion of the merits of the poem. If the Odyssey,like the Iliad, was, till about 540 B.C., a chaos of lays of all ages, variously known in various rйpertoiresof the rhapsodists, and patched up by the Pisistratean editor, then of two things one—either Mr. Leaf abides by his enthusiastic belief in the excellency of the composition, or he does not. If he does still believe that the composition of the Odysseyis a masterpiece, then the Pisistratean editor was a great master of construction. If he now, on the other hand, agrees with Wilamowitz Mцllendorff that the Odysseyis cobbler's work, then his literary opinions are unstable.