Homer is the most objective of poets. In him mind has not yet been turned back upon itself. It is a mirror of the world. If the heroes dine. the ox is consecrated to the gods, slain, cut up, roasted, carved, and served up in our presence.
Wo assist at all the detail: of the hero's toilet, or of his arming for battle. Homer does not enumerate the parts of a ship or a bed; but he shows us Odysseus building the craft that is to bear him away from the isle of Calypso, or the bed whose secret reveals his identity to Penelope. We watch every step in the launching of the ves sel that bears Chryseis back to her father. We are not merely told that the ox sacrificed by Nestor has gold-tipped horns; we see the gold smith come with the tools of his craft to lay on the gold. In consequence, we know the life of the Homeric man more intimately than that of any other primitive peopie—than that of the Hebrews or of our own Teutonic ancestors. This lore has been collected in three huge double vol umes of Homeric 'Realien,' or real things, by the German Buchholz, and every history of Greece contains its chapter on early Greek life, religion, government, and manners. drawn from the Maine source. And this wealth of concrete detail is a striking, if not the chief, literary quality of Homeric poetry. Homer does not "beat in the void his luminous wings in vain." Ile does not analyze and refine. He is not dominated by any one great unifying religious or patriotic idea, like •ergil or Dante or Milton. He does not delay to moralize or reflect except in brief pregnant sentences. He flows on and on in a broad, pellu cid stream of narrative, description, and, above all, action. "The multitude of things in Homer is wonderful" (says Hazlitt)—"the splendor, the truth, the power, the variety." The great gods of Homer—Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Hera ,Poseidon— have remained for 3000 years as ideal types for all subsequent poetry and sculpture. Ilis per sonages—Achilles, Hector, Nestor, Odysseus. Helen, Andromache, Penelope, Nausieaa—live for the imagination to-day as no others save those of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. The berserker battle rage and impassioned eloquence of Achilles still stir the sluggish blood like wine. The great pathetic or dramatic episodes—the parting of Hector and Andromache, the death of Sarpedon, the horses of Achilles mourning for Patroclus, Hecuba baring her bosom to her son from the walls of Troy, the dirges for Hecto•—are still the despair of imitators. The Odyssey is yet the most interesting story-book in the world. In short, the Homeric poems are still, as Matthew Arnold said, "the most important poetical monu ment existing." The most distinctive quality of that poetry is due to its intermediate position between the literary epic. as Paradise
Lost, and the supposedly spontaneous popular epic, as the Edda. the Kaletrala, or the Chanson de Roland. It has all the simple, childlike charm of the one. all the lucidity, architectonic order, and noble diction of the other. The primi tive feelings still preserve their freshness and force, but they appeal to us through the medium of a noble and dignified art. But though an artist, and perhaps a conscious artist. the Homeric poet is not like his successors, Apol ionins of Rhodes, Vergii, Tasso, Milton. conscious of an inimitable model. of a long line of pred ecessors, and of a code of critic-formed rules. Matthew Arnold's four canons of Homeric style are well known: Homer, he says, is rapid. plain. and direct in syntax and words, plain and direct in matter and ideas, and yet withal eminently noble—a master of the grand style in simplicity. There is space only to mention some minor traits: (1) The stereotyped epithets, 'cloud compelling Zeus,' the 'wine-dark' or 'unharvested' sea, the 'rosy-fingered dawn.' the swift-footed Achilles,' the 'red-cheeked ships:* (2) the peculiar Homeric simile which, suggested by one pidlit of resem blance, is continued for the sake of the picture into details where the likeness ceases. It is cleverly imitated by Matthew Arnold in Soh rub and Bustum. There are nearly 200 such similes in the /hod, many of them containing precious detail about Hinneric life. Those drawn lions and the chnse are particularly vigorous. To the Greek, Homer was Bible, Shakespeare, 31ilton. and Domesday Book in one. Later forms of poetry were looked upon as evolutions or bor• iowings from Homer. He was the foundation of education, and many cultivated Greeks knew the Iliad by heart. Even in the prime of the Attic drama professional rhapsodists recited the Iliad and Odyssey to enthusiastic audiences of thou sands. Ethical reflection tool: its first ItAts from Homer, and was largely occupied in the criticism of the conduct and character of his pci sonages. Puttr religious ideas presented them selves in the form of a censure by Plato and Nenophanes of lIomeric anthropomorphism, and the allegorical interpretation of literature ma, invented as a reconeiliation. The first beginnings of literary and linguistic criticism among the Greek sophists attached themselves to Homeric problems. Lexicography probably originated in books of Homeric glosses. The conception of text criticism arose in the effort to establish a sound lionulie text. And the critical science of the great Alexandrian scholars. Zenodotus, of Byzantium, and Aristarehus, bad its origin and achieved its greatest triumphs in study of Homer.