ART. IV.-HOMER TO-DAY.

THE literature of Greece, like its art, is a treasure forever. Its wisdom can never fail to instruct, or its beauty to delight, mankind. Even if research and criticism had completed their task, yet, as in changeful light on familiar landscapes, new aspects would constantly appear in Grecian letters, and nothing could stale the freshness of its ever-shifting variety.

In the beginning, speaking as human vision dimly sees, Homer created Greek literature. His poems, coming out of the far-away, have, like the Nile, for ages "concealed the origins of their fountains." Many an investigator, like Bruce, a hundred years ago, dancing with delight at his discovery of the Nile spring, has declared with exultation his settlement of the Homeric time, place, and personality. But, as the Nile has been shown to rise far beyond the scene of Bruce's triumphbeyond the great midland lakes, in watersheds still more remote-so the conclusions of more than one literary explorer have been displaced by some new theory of the Homeric origin. Modern discovery has wrought no change in the beneficent river that, still broods over Egypt with its watery wings, nor has modern critical debate affected the Homeric stream. It is always the Nile on which we gaze or sail, and it is always Homer with whom we are entranced. He has today far more readers and expounders than when, twenty-two centuries ago, Ptolemy Philadelphus founded an Homeric chair at Alexandria and Aristarchus centered upon Homer the labor of the first great school of criticism.

Of the Homeric poems, as of the Book of Job, it must be a matter of universal concession that they are prehistoric. They are unattended by contemporary records. They must be treated by the higher criticism. If the light that is in them. be darkness, dark they must remain. It is only a hundred years since vigorous inquiry as to Homer and his poems actually began, and the task seems now nearly finished. The early literary world was trustful, if not credulous. Finding the treasure in its actual possession, it was inclined to the simplest view of its origin. At the first literary epoch in Greece the Homeric poems are already existing, and, in fact, form nearly

It is the era of Solon,
The Greek is already

the whole of the nation's literary store. when Athens is beginning to be great. a written language, as an inscription found in Upper Egypt, carved a hundred years earlier, fully proves. Pisistratus finds these epics, which are probably unwritten, familiar and delightful to the ear and tongue of himself and his people. Besides these, there is a mass of inferior epic matter taking from them its theme, tone, and movement. Nor need we wonder that a people so intellectual as the Greeks held all in recollection and passed it down orally from one generation to another. Such feats of memory have been frequent, as when, at the beginning of our own century, Duncan McIntyre, a Highland gamekeeper, though unable to read or write, could recite six thousand verses in Gaelic, besides copious poems of his own. Pisistratus wisely urged attention to these ancient treasures and encouraged their recitation, while a commission of his appointing rejected the unimportant mass and edited the Homeric poems. Rhapsodies, epic snatches, and ballads "stitched" to these were generally thrown to the winds. Onomacritus, the chief editor, is believed to have done his work well; and it was surely no easy task. He left the antique clear of the ideas of his own time; and, if he welded many poems to produce the Iliad and the Odyssey, he did it so skillfully that men of keen eyesight have never agreed as to where his seams and sutures run. This edition was the one used by Greeks in the great days of Pericles and Plato, the one carried in a rich casket by Alexander and read at the tomb of Achilles-that young man of Hellas's fair morning, as Alexander was the youth of its evening. It is, in substance, ours to-day.

During these centuries, the fifth and the fourth before our era, the influence of the poems on Greek thought is immeasurable. Hardly any intellectual product fails to get from Homer something of ornament or illustration. Named or unnamed, he is "the poet." Hesiod, eldest of the poets next to Homer, Pindar, in his triumphal odes, and Sophocles, in his dramas, praise and copy him. His verses brighten the last dream of Socrates and enrich the last eloquence of Eschines. The philosophers trace to him the prevailing ideas, in not only morals and religion, but even in physics; and Plato, though denouncing him as immoral for giving gods mortal passions and

excluding him from his republic for "estranging minds from things real," yet falls into his style and continually quotes from him, in a way showing a reverence involuntary and a fascination irresistible. Homer's poems stood with the Greeks of those days even as the Bible stands with us. Each sect of philosophers found its origin in the poet and claimed his indorsement; however they might differ in interpretation, they at least agreed that in his subject-matter and its treatment one found all religion and morality. Nor was he known in Greece only. Livius Andronicus, the earliest Roman writer, put the Odyssey into Latin as the first book from which Roman boys should learn their own language; and thus "rude Rome" was, after a fashion, early familiar with the Homeric strains, the music of Ionic thought.

Here, before critical debate begins, one may ask what is the content and quality of these poems that, from antiquity, have so fascinated mankind. One of their charms is found in the glimpses they give of a rich and suggestive background. Whatever the date of the poems, behind them lies a "pre-Hellenic" stretch of human doings and development. This Homer reveals by allusions and assumptions, as through rifts in clouds or breaks in mountain chains; and it is all the more effective because seen in glimpses only. This background is also evidenced by proof of another, and of a material, kind. At Mycena we pass through the gate whose lintel supports those marble lions which are the oldest piece of sculpture in Europe, and we are in the heart of an ancient citadel. On our right is the open-air council room, a hundred feet in diameter, where sat the wise men of the State. On the left are those tombs, inviolable and mysterious for three thousand years, from which have of late been taken the ashes of a royal house, with a hundred pounds' weight of golden ornaments. In the Troad, where the site of Ilium has borne in turn seven towns, the city of Priam and his palace have been brought to the light. Even the contingent of his ally, "the son of the dawn," has been traced to that Hittite empire, so long forgotten, in the east of Asia Minor. All these discoveries, achieved by recent toil and now filling many books and enriching many museums, are but suggestions of the Homeric background. They awaken more curiosity than they appease, and for that reason are of undying

interest. From the dim unknown into which we peer Homer brings royal personages, kings wide of sway, warriors of prowess, sages of wisdom, women beautiful, delicate, and accomplished. These come not of barbarism; men do not gather figs of thistles. The Peloponnesus must have been a mart of many nations, a realm of art and culture, from which Homer gathered, with an artist's privilege, as Walter Scott gathered from the feudal ages, such things as best suited the picture upon his easel. But who were these kings before Agamemnon? Farther back, what manner of men were they who furnished heroes and demigods to mythology and tragedy? Each student in each generation puts the question, but the darkness gives no answer. Conjecture will be, as it has been, rife as to those rich realms of which Homer veils so much more than he reveals; and the shadowy forms of Edipus and Antigone, of statesmen, warriors, and fair women, will hereafter, as heretofore, be suininoned to fill the pre-Homeric, prehistoric void.

Another of Homer's enduring charms is his perfect presenta tion of human nature. As long as man's behavior is man's chief entertainment and we reckon nothing human to be alien from us, Homer's men and women will never be dull company. Helen, more sinned against than sinning, her grief and shame softening her celestial charms; Andromache, smiling tearfully as a beam from her infant's face gilds her sad farewell to her husband; Hector, brave and gentle, the Bayard of that far-off chivalry; Achilles, impulsive and passionate more than boy and forceful more than man-these, and others whom time would fail to name, are not artificial people. They are as real as those on our streets to-day. As distance counts for nothing in Colorado air, so, in looking back to Homer's people, we sce their smiles and tears, we hear their words of love, of passion, or command, and we are at ease in their company. The height of art is attained in concealing art; the poet makes no visible effort to parade them or to display their qualities. Neither Hector nor Helen is aware that anyone is looking or listening. "Hinter dem Gebirge sind unseres Gleichen" says the German peasant, and Homer shows that behind the ages are people like ourselves. We are their kindred. Their mortal joys and griefs touch us. We reach our hands to them; and all after us will equally realize this kinship.

59-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI.

Homer's presentation of nature also gives his poems imperishable interest. He was fortunate in his locality. In the whole world there are no other such seas and islands, such streams and groves, such fertile vales and towering hills as were his. In this profusion of environment the poet reveled, but squandered nothing. Already the rule of Greek rhetoric was, "Nothing in excess. He had but to open his eyes, and something of nature illustrating something of man was visible. The bee, the cicada, and the swan; the dog, so vile in the Iliad, so true and loving in the Odyssey; the horse and the lion; the flock on the hillside; the ship running athwart the gray-haired waves-these and other objects make a picture that is worthy in itself, is restful to the reader's thought, and enlivens the transactions of the story. Every one of Homer's sketches of nature, still or stirring, has a purpose, in which it never fails, of illuminating or emphasizing some aspect of human condition or behavior. The illustrations that sparkle through these poems are as profuse as the dewdrops. As the tourist of to-day wanders along the Homeric lands, much of their beauty has vanished, many a charm has withered, man has broken and wasted much; but Homer is verified in this half decay, and one is grateful that in their early freshness there was an eye to see and a hand to preserve to all ages those charms which are like a framing of silver to golden pictures of human deeds.

Thus far in history most great enterprises have involved the struggles and carnage of war. The Iliad shows us the marshaling of hosts, the shock of battle, all the pomp, parade, and circumstance of war. Paris, alluring Helen, the most beautiful woman of her time, to Troy, finds all Greece rising to obtain. for Menelaus restitution and revenge. Asia comes to Troy's relief. Ten years of struggle follow, intensifying in the tenth; and from Troy's blood and ashes Helen returns, to be again the wife of Menelaus and the queen of Sparta. Such a drama calls out every human ability and rouses every passion in our frames of clay. But the Odyssey is a poem of peace; it describes simpler tempers, conditions, and experiences. The poet fearlessly adapts his geography to his story, and in seas, islands, rivers, and continents man is to him the measure of all things. Ithaca to-day is not his Ithaca, nor Corfu his Phæacia, nor is Sparta an easy chariot ride of a day from Pylos.