The 19th book contains the formal renuncia tion of Achilles' wrath, his somewhat indifferent reconciliation with Agamemnon, the return of Briseis, the preparations for another battle, and the final picture of Achilles driving forth in his car in all the terrors of the divine armor. The fighting of the 20th and 21st books, though re lieved by some magnificent passages, does not quite meet the expectations of modern readers. The battle between the gods who descend to the Trojan plain was perhaps not taken altogether seriously by Homer. And Achilles' contest with the river god Scamander and his rescue from the pursuing waters by the fire god Hephmstus are fantasies in which the proportion of allegory is not easy to determine. The climax of the 22d book, however, in which Hector is slain, leaves nothing to be desired in natural pathos of human feeling, dramatic in tensity and firmness of artistic composition. This is the book selected in Jebb's 'Homer' for analysis as an illustration of Homer's style. When the Trojans are driven within their walls, Hector, whose overconfidence has been the chief cause of the disastrous rout, feels in honor bound to redeem his previous boast that he would not flinch from confronting Achilles' self. In spite of the piteous appeals of father and mother he remains without the gates, and though in a moment of uncontrollable panic he flees thrice around the sacred walls he had kept so well, he at last makes a brave stand and accepts the doom which he half foresaw when he parted from Andromache. Some modern critics have held that the poem should properly end with this climax. That was not the feeling of the Greeks nor apparently of Homer. An dromache's lament for Hector concludes the 22d book on a note of pathos which it would be impossible to sustain. The art of the poet, therefore, interposes in the 23d book the relief of the long and interesting and sometimes slightly humorous description of the funeral games which Achilles held in honor of Patro clus. In the 24th and last book we return to Hector, whose dead body Achilles maltreats, to the indignation of the gods, who arrange for its ransom. Priam, guided through the night by Hermes, finds his way to the hut of Achilles and endures what no mortal man hath ever borne, to put to his lips the hands that slew his son. In a scene of unequalledpathos the two, bethinking them of their dead, mingle their tears. Priam returns to Troy with the body of his son; and the beautiful threnodies of An dromache the wife, of Hecuba the mother, and of the guilty Helen, who now has no one left to say a kind word to her in all broad Troy, con clude the poem. As a late Greek epigrammatist writes: Hector whom Homer sings to every The sole support of Ilium's god-built walls, Thy funeral sealeth that immortal page; The rest is silence when great Hector falls.
The appetite of unspoiled childhood will always relish Homer whether as the older gen erations did in the rhetorical rhyme of Pope or as is the present fashion in the Biblical prose of Lang, Leaf and Myers. But the sophisticated taste and the distracted attention of the adult reader can recover this freshness of apprecia tion only by an effort. The effort is well worth making.
Of course regarded merely as documents the Homeric poems repay study. The multitude of
things in Homer is wonderful,'" says an older English critic. There are few books in the world that depict a life, a stage of civilization, so completely and so vividly as do the Homeric poems. And this interest is now doubled by the possibility of comparison with the immense array of facts brought to light by the excava tions of Troy, Mycenx, Tiryns, Orchomenus and in Crete, and the enormous literature of speculation that has grown up about them.
There are greater obstacles to the unfeigned enjoyment of the 'Iliad' as poetry. Some con ception of the beauty that unavoidably escapes in translation can be gained only by the com parison of several translations, by the use of such imitations as Matthew Arnold's and Rustum> and by the study of such appre ciations as Arnold's essay on translating Homer, the introduction to Pope's translation. Mackail's lectures on Greek poetry, Jebb's 'Homer' and his 'Lectures on Greek Poetry,' and the too few pages of literary criticism in Professor Murray's fascinating but fantastic 'Rise of the Greek Epic.' Any one of these taken by itself and too absolutely may mislead. Arnold's 'Sohrab and Rustum,' for example, will give nothing of the divine energy of Homer or of that rapidity of movement which Arnold him self says is the chief note of the Homeric style. It will merely help us to appreciate certain qualities of Homeric imagery, the elaborate Homeric simile turning on one slight, but sharply defined, point of resemblance. Chap man's 'Homer,' to which Keats' sonnet has sent many readers destined to disappointment, in its most inspired passages reproduces as no other version can the fiery passion, the intensity, the impetus of Homer's battle fury. But the harmony, the grace, the reasonableness of Homer's sustained art are lacking, and for con tinuous perusal even the polished declamatory rhetoric of Pope will serve many readers better than the intolerable ruggedness and the un Homeric conceits of the Elizabethan. Readers who cannot be at the pains thus to employ many aids in recovering something of the spell of the original may at least clear their minds of the conventional cavils of modernistic cant. If the excess of fighting wearies them, they are no more required to read the 'Iliad' through con tinuously than so to read the 'Faerie Queen' or 'Paradise Lost.' Having the main story in mind they may read in various versions the speeches of Achilles, the parting of Hector and Andromache, the description of the shield, the 22d book, the games, the ransom of Hector, or whatever attracts them most. And if modernis tic or pseudo-scientific critics seek to mar our enjoyment by laying it down that the Homeric simile, the standing Homeric epithets, the repe tition of certain formulas or motives are in themselves notes of a childish, a primitive, an inferior art, we have only to ask ourselves how do they know it? Is it true? Or may not these traits of Homeric style together with the roll of the Homeric hexameter be rather, as the over whelming majority of the best informed modern critics from Sainte-Beuve to Quiller-Couch be lieve, the effectively and consciously employed conventions of the noblest art of poetry that has yet been given to man ?