The World of Homer
inconsistencies which shocked him in the poems. The poems, he said,
had _unus color_, "one harmonious colouring." But if that be true, and
it is true, how was this harmony preserved in a poem which, as Wolf
decided from _a priori_ considerations, cannot be the work of one man
or one age? Now the work of many men in many ages inevitably _must_
be a chaos, not a harmony, and so Wolf's followers have devoted their
lives to the hunt for discrepancies and inaccuracies fit to support
their preconceived opinion.
Meanwhile Wolf started, not from discrepancies which could only exist
in a mosaic of the lays of several distinct ages, but from _a priori_
reflections on the nature of the age and civilisation in which the
epics began. Of that age and civilisation we have now some knowledge.
Wolf had none. He reckoned that, granting the barbarism of the unknown
age as he conceived it, and the abysm of time through which the poems
passed before they reached the hands of competent grammarians,--the
Alexandrians,--the texts of epics must necessarily have suffered
terribly. If so, there necessarily must be many fatal discrepancies,
--unless, indeed, the supposed Editorial Committee at Athens (600-530
B.C.) and the Alexandrian editors later harmonised the whole into the
actual _unus color_. For the whole _did_ seem harmonious to Wolf,
with merely a few roughnesses, and passages suspected even by the
ancient grammarians. But Wolf's successors, hypnotised by his original
_suggestion_ that, in the circumstances of the case, the poems _must_
be by many hands, have felt that, if so, they _must_ contain many fatal
discrepancies, have hunted for, and have, of course, found them. Thus
an unscientific and illogical method has long prevailed.
Indeed, a method less scientific and less logical cannot be imagined.
Critics already prepossessed by the suggestion of Wolf in favour of
multiplex authorship, sedulously hunt, we repeat, through the poems for
discrepancies in support of their case. They do what men have never
done to any other long poetic work of imagination, they seek, with
microscopic minuteness of inquiry, for inconsistencies in a fictitious
narrative, composed not for analytic readers, but for a circle of
listeners. When they find--or much more frequently imagine that they
have found--such discrepancies, they proclaim them as proofs of
multiplex authorship. Never have they as eagerly and carefully sought
for such errors in long imaginative tales that are certainly known
to be the work of one hand. Scientific method imperatively demands
this investigation; but the critics do not listen. They have studied
a work of pure literature with the desire to prove their own foregone
conclusion, that the authorship of the _Iliad_ is multiplex, and that
it is the growth of several disparate ages.
When archaeological discoveries during the last forty years had thrown
some light on the pre-Homeric age, then the material objects found
were raked and sifted for proof of the foregone conclusion--the Epic
is a mosaic of four or five centuries. We have examined the results
of the archaeological inquisition into discrepancies in religion,
custom, armour, tactics, and so forth. We try to prove that, in all
such details, the epics are the work of a single moment of culture; and
again, that no other work of the Greek genius, and no material relics
of other moments of Greek culture, represent the religion, polity,
armour, costume, morality, and taste of Homer. Not in these fields of
ascertainable facts can the proof that the Epics are by many men in
many ages be discovered.
Except in the general conclusion that the _Iliad_ is a mosaic, produced
(most of them think) by a long series of Ionian additions to an Achaean
"kernel," there is no harmony among critics. For example, English
savants usually, like Mr. Leaf, make no objections to the unity of
the _Odyssey_. They do not read it in the same spirit, or torment it
in the same style, as they rack and lacerate the _Iliad_. With Wolf,
they recognise its unity, though it arose in the same dark age, and
passed through the same adventures as the _Iliad_. Yet in Germany the
_Odyssey_ is even more and more variously lacerated than the _Iliad_.
Turning to the most recent English book on the subject, _Homer and
the Iliad_, by Miss Stawell (1909), we find that while she rejects
6,000 out of 15,000 lines as non-original, she cannot believe in the
critics' "original _Menis_" of only some 2500 lines. She, like the
rest, believes (what Wolf did not believe) "that it is quite possible
to disentangle the original core of the _Iliad_ from the present mass."
But of her _Iliad_, her "core" is by far the greater part, not a poor
sixth. I am tempted to quote a long passage from Miss Stawell, because
it seems to contain sound sense, and to be guided by fine literary
appreciation.
"The reconstructions actually proposed seem open to serious
criticisms. It appears to me that certain important
considerations have been overlooked, and that in their
light we should discover the original to be far more
like the _Iliad_ as we have it now than has usually been
supposed.
In the first place, much of the traditional poem has
scarcely had a fair chance at the hands of modern critics.
Scenes where the drift and bearing are not obvious at
once have been cut away without further thought. But a
great dramatic poem does not give up all its secrets at
once. There are subtle harmonies that can only be realised
clearly after long and sympathetic study: the work on
Shakespeare might suffice to prove this. And Homer, like
Shakespeare, can put in very important points very quietly.
We may miss them, and that is our loss. The poet will not
over-emphasise them for our sakes. Therefore it is not
enough to ask ourselves whether such and such a passage
could be cut out and the story still hang together; we
must ask, further, whether the omission really leaves the
figures as solid, the story as enthralling, the background
as grand, as before. I feel sure that the full consequences
of their own excisions have not always been noticed by the
critics who have made them. They cannot entirely strip
away the memory of the "later accretions"; there are even
instances of their praising the recovered "original" for
effects which could not have been obtained without the
"later interpolations."
Secondly, a theory of "accretions" that is formed to
account for glaring discrepancies brings, or should bring,
with it a clear presumption against a certain type of
excision. _To cut away not only individual scenes, but all
allusions to such, however numerous, however far apart,
however skilfully inwoven with their context, on the plea
that they were added in order to harmonise old and new, is
surely to prove too much. If the need for adjustment was
felt to this extent, if the adjustment was done with this
delicate care, how did it ever happen that the gross blots
were allowed to enter or remain?_ That many scholars do
overlook this difficulty will be shown in detail later--for
instance, in the matter of Achilles' armour. The fact is
that, on any theory, it must be admitted that the _Iliad_,
as we have it, shows, again and again, the marks of
carelessness at the joints. Whole scenes and passages which
do not cohere with the rest have got into the poem somehow,
and have been left there. This is perfectly intelligible on
a theory of loose additions, afterwards piously preserved
in one block without any attempt at elaborate harmonising
between old and new; but a critical theory that assumes
throughout the growth and the editing, _a constant union of
gross carelessness and minute care, is liable to just the
same objection as the old theory of a great but negligent
poet. It will not stand the test of thinking out in detail_.
I have frequently insisted (in _Homer and the Epic,_ 1893) on the
points in the italicised passages. In the present book, which merely
tries to prove that the poems are the work of a single pre-ionic age, I
cannot again examine the numerous allegations of glaring discrepancies
in the _Iliad_, such as no one sane poet could commit. As has been
often proved, notably by Colonel Mure, the greatest fictitious
narratives, known to be by a single hand in each case, contain
discrepancies at least as remarkable as any that can be proved to occur
in Homer. I have also argued that many of Homer's supposed faults
exist only in the imagination of the learned. I cannot then, again,
examine all, or even many of the imaginary inconsistencies: three of
the most glaring must suffice. But I take advantage of a critique by
a distinguished scholar, Mr. Verrall, to meet certain preliminary
objections which he states. In _The Quarterly Review_,[1] Mr. Verrall
writes concerning me:
"But when we turn to other parts, equally essential, of his
argument for single authorship, our feeling always is that,
in reality, he begs the question. He maintains, if we do
not mistake, that there is no difficulty in supposing the
_Iliad_, as we have it, to be the work of one poet; that
the alleged dislocations, wanderings, inconsistencies of
the story, so far as they exist at all, are nothing more
than, from common experience, we might naturally expect in
a single author. When he comes to establish this in detail,
his procedure is to take the allegations separately, and
to ask, in each case, whether it is inconceivable that the
discrepancy (if allowed) is due to oversight on the part of
the single composer. On these lines we may make short work.
Hardly any error whatever of this sort is inconceivable,
and hardly any, by itself, can be improbable. It would be
nothing at all that, once in a way, Homer should forget
that his Greek camp had a wall. We could scarcely call it
inconceivable that, having himself described the 'Sending
of Patroclus' with one set of circumstances, he should
make his Thetis relate it with a totally different set.
If such flaws were few and miscellaneous, and if there
were external testimony to the single authorship, we would
pass them without a murmur. Mr. Lang always does argue on
this head as if they were few, as if they had no apparent
relation to one another, and, above all, as if single
authorship were a _datum_. Any explanation will serve where
none is necessary; and consequently Mr. Lang's explanations
often seem to us hardly serious.
"We will give one specimen. In Book ix. the Greek camp has
a wall (vv. 69-87). At the beginning of Book x., Agamemnon
at night, looking from his tent on the plain, sees the
'many watch-fires' of the Trojans, who, on this particular
night, are camping out before the city on the same plain.
The wall is gone, as it does go and come throughout the
fighting scenes of the _Iliad_. Nor is this a momentary
inadvertence; for through the whole of Book x., though its
story is such that the wall, if there, must be visible
to the narrator (so to say) constantly, though the camp
boundary is passed several times, never is there trace of
anything but a ditch. We say that, for a composition meant
to be continuous as it now stands, this is a most uncommon
and surprising phenomenon; nor is it intelligible to us
that any one so far should disagree. Mr. Lang, in a special
chapter on Book x., disposes of the matter thus: