Homer and His Age | Page 5

reverse of what has long been, and still is,
the current theory of Homeric criticism, according to which the
Homeric poems are, and bear manifest marks of being, a mosaic of the
poetry of several ages of change.
Till Wolf published his Prolegomena to [blank space] (1795) there was
little opposition to the old belief that the ILIAD and Odyssey were,
allowing for interpolations, the work of one, or at most of two, poets.
After the appearance of Wolfs celebrated book, Homeric critics have
maintained, generally speaking, that the ILIAD is either a collection of
short lays disposed in sequence in a late age, or that it contains an
ancient original "kernel" round which "expansions," made throughout
some centuries of changeful life, have accrued, and have been at last
arranged by a literary redactor or editor.
The latter theory is now dominant. It is maintained that the Iliad is a
work of at least four centuries. Some of the objections to this theory
were obvious to Wolf himself--more obvious to him than to his
followers. He was aware, and some of them are not, of the distinction
between reading the ILIAD as all poetic literature is naturally read, and
by all authors is meant to be read, for human pleasure, and studying it
in the spirit of "the analytical reader." As often as he read for pleasure,

he says, disregarding the purely fanciful "historical conditions" which
he invented for Homer; as often as he yielded himself to that running
stream of action and narration; as often as he considered the harmony
of colour and of characters in the Epic, no man could be more angry
with his own destructive criticism than himself. Wolf ceased to be a
Wolfian whenever he placed himself at the point of view of the reader
or the listener, to whom alone every poet makes his appeal.
But he deemed it his duty to place himself at another point of view, that
of the scientific literary historian, the historian of a period concerning
whose history he could know nothing. "How could the thing be
possible?" he asked himself. "How could a long poem like the Iliad
come into existence in the historical circumstances?" [Footnote, exact
place in paragraph unknown: Preface to Homer, p, xxii., 1794.]. Wolf
was unaware that he did not know what the historical circumstances
were. We know how little we know, but we do know more than Wolf.
He invented the historical circumstances of the supposed poet. They
were, he said, like those of a man who should build a large ship in an
inland place, with no sea to launch it upon. The Iliad was the large ship;
the sea was the public. Homer could have no readers, Wolf said, in an
age that, like the old hermit of Prague, "never saw pen and ink," had no
knowledge of letters; or, if letters were dimly known, had never applied
them to literature. In such circumstances no man could have a motive
for composing a long poem. [Footnote: Prolegomena to the Iliad, p.
xxvi.]
Yet if the original poet, "Homer," could make "the greater part of the
songs," as Wolf admitted, what physical impossibility stood in the way
of his making the whole? Meanwhile, the historical circumstances, as
conceived of by Wolf, were imaginary. He did not take the
circumstances of the poet as described in the Odyssey. Here a king or
prince has a minstrel, honoured as were the minstrels described in the
ancient Irish books of law. His duty is to entertain the prince and his
family and guests by singing epic chants after supper, and there is no
reason why his poetic narratives should be brief, but rather he has an
opportunity that never occurred again till the literary age of Greece for
producing a long poem, continued from night to night. In the later age,

in the Asiatic colonies and in Greece, the rhapsodists, competing for
prizes at feasts, or reciting to a civic crowd, were limited in time and
gave but snatches of poetry. It is in this later civic age that a poet
without readers would have little motive for building Wolfs great ship
of song, and scant chance of launching it to any profitable purpose. To
this point we return; but when once critics, following Wolf, had
convinced themselves that a long early poem was impossible, they soon
found abundant evidence that it had never existed.
They have discovered discrepancies of which, they say, no one sane
poet could have been guilty. They have also discovered that the poems
had not, as Wolf declared, "one 'harmony of colour" (_unus color_).
Each age, they say, during which the poems were continued, lent its
own colour. The poets, by their theory, now preserved the genuine
tradition of things old; cremation,