Chapter V: Appendix: Greek Speaks for Itself (3)

Life is full to the brim with emotions. Not war only nor political rallies nor the excited throngs at sports are vibrant with emotion, but there is not a single act of life which has not some emotion, quiet or intense, as its source, its companion and its effect. Man ought to be ruled by cold reason, but he responds to feelings and succumbs to feelings.

Today more than ever in the history of the world is emotionalism rampant. Civilization has made mankind a crowd. We touch elbows with the world. The Egyptian hermit has now “the privacy of a goldfish in a glass bowl.” An individual by himself may indeed deliberate and philosophize, but a crowd feels and acts. As soon as it stops cheering, it begins to disintegrate into thinking individuals, who creep silently back to the hermitage of home. The war, with its drives of all kinds, the elections, the athletic contests, have made us familiar with the nature of a crowd. The mob is a high-pressure crowd, and the feelings which burn in the crowd explode violently in a mob. Civilization has brought mankind into the closeness of a crowd, but not yet to the explosive confusion of a mob.

War taught us too the great value of morale. What is morale? What is that light in the sky, that solid ground under foot, that winged buoyancy of the heart? Morale might be described as organized emotion. A crowd is fickle because it feels instead of reasons. Morale is the counter-force to fickleness. Emotions are awakened, are focused on a given point, are stabilized, and the result is morale. Courage hardens to pluck, duty flames into devotion and bravery is transfigured into heroism.

Life therefore is flooded with emotion, all the way from every action of the individual up to the responsive crowd, yielding to panic, exploding into violence or steadied by morale. What then is education doing for the emotions? Whether education be considered a development of the individual capacities, or an adjustment of man to the community, education should not neglect the emotions. The controlling tendencies, however, of the modern school would seem to ignore or belittle emotions. Modern schools pride themselves on being practical and scientific. They have become more immersed in matter than in man. They are materialistic in the wide sense, or naturalistic, but they are less and less humanistic. Three great fields lie before the spirit of man, the field of truth, the field of beauty and the field of good. No traveler can reach beauty and good except through truth, but education seems to think its work is done if it travels the regions of truth and ignores the regions of beauty and good.

All education formerly could be divided into two stages, the earlier of preparation, the later of application. The individual was taught to speak and write and was equipped with the general information necessary to all. He who was able to speak and write was able to express himself, and self-expression, which argued that man’s powers were working normally, was the satisfactory goal in the first stage of education. After the development of the individual came his application to the study of his life-work in professional schools and universities.

In the former of these two stages, as self-expression was the end, language was the chief and almost exclusive means. Sciences were relegated to the university and informational subjects were left strictly subordinated, and the whole course was predominately humanistic. Modern education has profoundly changed this simple arrangement. The university method of education and electivism and specialization have been advanced to college, to high school and to grade school. Many natural sciences have been systematized and brought into early classes. The university chemistry and physics of fifty years ago are now in the grades. Besides professional courses, pre-medical, pre-law, pre-divinity, pre-engineering, pre-journalism, and in general pre-professional studies are in our schools or at the doors. The trades are not behind the professions. The million trades which concern themselves with the production of raw material or with the manufacture of raw material into finished products or with the distribution of finished products, all these are knocking at the door or looking in the window of our school. Nor is that all. As the professions want pre-professional and the trades pre-trade courses, so the state demands pre-citizen courses in civic and hygienics and military tactics, and the home exacts pre-family courses in eugenics and many domestic sciences. Do not close your curriculum list yet. The profession, the trade, the home, the state are not all, and to leave out religion, which calls for pre-religious courses in private schools, we have the whole field of sport and play in pre-dancing, pre-ball-playing, and at last pre-movies. To make the conquest of the practical complete, it is seriously advocated by a special committee of the N. E. A. that this bewildering multiplicity of sciences, professions, trades, civic, domestic and amusement courses should be begun at the junior high school or seventh grade.

There is the contrast. Life is emotional. The early schools that used to be devoted chiefly to writing and speaking, are now crowded with a multiplicity of fact subjects, and even language and literature, the most humanistic and emotional subjects of our courses, are taught theoretically by university and scientific methods. In the Jesuit _Ratio Studiorum_, which did not differ essentially from other systems, four years of the lower schools were given to correct expression of the truth, one year to the element of interest, or beauty, in expression, and one whole year to the element of force, or good, in expression. These two latter classes were called humanities and rhetoric and correspond to the present freshman and sophomore classes in Jesuit colleges.

The reason why a whole year was given to the elements of interest and force in self-expression is found in the twofold nature of emotions. One set of emotions arises from the apprehension of good or avoidance of evil. Another set arises from the perception of the novel, humorous and beautiful. These latter comprehend the emotions of surprise, wonder, delight, awe, in general, the esthetic emotions. The other emotions, called appetitive, include love and hate, with desire and fear, joy and sadness, pity and anger and many others.

Fortunately for the teacher the teaching of emotions is somewhat simplified by the fact that both kinds of emotions respond, not to abstract truth but to truth in the concrete and concrete truth takes on beauty or good and awakens emotions through the imaginations of teacher and student. Teachers who themselves imagine will awaken emotions and educate emotions by exercising them. Teachers who imagine will make pupils imagine by making them translate all truth from the abstract to the concrete. The perpetual question on the lips of the teacher, “For instance?” will embody truth in the concrete, exercise students in imagination and make truth emotional and abiding.

Interesting and enthusiastic teachers are always training emotions. Emotion is not imparted by instruction; it is kindled by contact. Teachers who have their subjects transferred from dead books to their warm, living imaginations, will be interesting, will be moving. They will excite surprise and wonder by novelty and beauty of presentation. They will make their classes expand with love or shrink in horror at the pictures of good or evil.

After imagination and actual feeling on the part of both student and teacher, the next best means of educating emotions is the stimulating of action, especially in the way of original self-expression through the written and spoken word. One of the happy tendencies of our modern education is the restoring of oral expression to its former high place.

These means just mentioned will be helpful in any subject of the curriculum, but the principal instrument in the schools for training the emotions will be literature. Literature is the embodiment of human emotions, in story, in essay, poem, and speech. The schools must hold on to the teaching of literature. They must make a stand against the imperialism of facts and so-called practical subjects. The schools must never forget that it is at least just as practical to have a heart in life as to have a head. A modern French scholar has said: “Humanities and letters are man himself, to remove them from education, it would be necessary to commence by taking man from man.”

Instruction in trades is a knack, not an education of man. A savage can learn to run an automobile, and there are many today running automobiles, but a savage does not enjoy literature or produce literature. Science has its center outside of man, it is impersonal and unemotional. Literature is human, is personal, it appeals to the heart which must not be starved while the head is stuffed.

But even when the teachers of literature have the works of man in their hands, they must not rob them of all emotions by making their teaching of them historical only, or analytical only or theoretical only, lowering Macbeth to a footnote in Scottish history or to an argument for the theory of the romantic movement or to a dissertation on the psychology of temptation. Literature must be taught as literature, not as history, not as ethics. Literature should be taught as an art, not as a science. The teacher should keep self-expression in view. The teacher will consider the work of literature as the expression of a man. Before the class the masterpiece of literature will grow and crystallize into unity. The students will watch its creation; they will reflect the light from the eyes of an enthusiastic teacher; they will grasp the truth vividly and emotionally; they will be thrilled with the truth that has taken shape in their teacher’s imagination, that has been dramatized before them in suggestive detail, that will teach the students themselves how to think, how to imagine, how to find for the embodied truth a local habitation and a name, how to express themselves in words which fascinate and inflame.

So will the emotions by their exercise be developed and by their expression be controlled. The world of the classroom is a little world and its tiny emotions are as dew-drops to a deluge, but for the young hearts in school the world of the classroom is a gigantic world and its slight emotions are adequate to teach beginners. For a dew drop may be a deluge for a violet and its very food and life.

XIII

KEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM

This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded. Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression, as a practical and permanent possession of the student through appreciation and through composition in his own language.

Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a translation which might be dictated to the class. This was done because in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature, and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and writing is of lifelong utility.

The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all arts except literature the contact with the artist’s work is almost immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed 27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art of literature.

Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university, where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators. The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying a generalization.

France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature. England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic appreciation and of composition.

What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to composition.

It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, _Manuels des Etudes Grecques et Latines_ (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination. The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution, origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal of literature.

Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow. Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.

Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics. “Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.

The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature.

Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.

The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college.

XIV

THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD

This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?

The civilization of Rome in every part felt the influence of Greece. Rome conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then humanized the world through Greece. Every modern language today feels the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2] It was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova, and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not spend itself before the decline of scholasticism. John Scotus, John the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece, gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.

Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against the realism of that day, and “his conflict with the school of useful knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on Greek traditions.”[3] Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek, and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism and Winckelmann in art.

England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation, they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life. Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. In poetry recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer; recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece, and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie, Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the first sod.

Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government, and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos, the world, and of the microcosm, man.

XV

TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM

The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests of the higher critics to Homer.

Apply the tests of art to Homer and judge him by those. Take the matter of the contradictions which critics have talked so much about. In many cases, especially where mythology was concerned, the material the poet had to handle bristled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Long ago Aristotle laid down the sensible rule for drama, and it is equally true for epic poetry, that the poet is not responsible for the improbabilities in his materials. The sculptor may have flaws in his block of marble; the painter may have defects in his lead or oil, or pigments; and the epic poet found contradictions in the fairy stories of mankind which he wove into the story he sang. That one consideration will sweep away instantly heaps of higher criticism.

Again, the artist is more taken up with the end than he is with the means. In the fervor of his composition he wreaks himself upon expression, he burns to embody his ideal and, engrossed in that, he is likely to be less observant of the material of his art. The achieving of the effect is more to him than mathematical accuracy in the use of the instruments by which he achieves the effect. He makes his hero win his battle; he may unhappily forget some of the tactics or even the geography of the battlefield. His object is not to teach the art of warfare or furnish the topography of the country, but to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. The _Iliad_ has a wall that vexes many critics. It was built in the tenth year of the war, which was no time to build a wall, and was put up simply because Achilles left the field. Besides, according to these critics the wall appears and disappears strangely. So the conclusion is: Homer did not build the wall, but some other poet came along and projected his masonry into the epic. In answer it has been shown that the wall behaves very well, but, whether it does or not, it matters little. The poet is not a surveyor or a street commissioner. He wished to make his story interesting, to make the character of Achilles prominent, to bring some agreeable variety into what might prove a monotonous catalog of similar battles. Those are reasons enough for a poet to build a Chinese wall or reduce it to dust when he does not want it, or conveniently overlook it in the heat of an imaginary charge.

A story-teller is more concerned to please his hearers than to guard against inconsistencies which they would never detect as listeners, and which even close readers did not detect for about thirty centuries. A work of art is not to be judged as a mass of machinery is, nor is a poem to be scrutinized with dictionary and grammar as you would a schoolboy’s exercise. This is the statue of Phidias over again. A stage scene will differ somewhat from a miniature, and an epic takes liberties with walls and rivers and even mountains and oceans, liberties which would not be tolerated in a quatrain. These principles are as obvious as daylight, but apostles of the obvious are needed in abundance in the harvest fields of higher criticism.

What is needed for Homer is a study of his art in a broad but not shallow way, comprehensive and fundamental like Aristotle’s brief discussion. For the wonderfully analytical mind of Aristotle Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were models of unity, because he looked upon them as works of art, not scrap-heaps of philology and archeology. Put the poems of Homer on the pedestals for which he made them, for listeners who had to be entertained and clamored for variety. “It is a trait of Homer,” says a writer, “constantly to shift the scene. The motive may be weak, but the eye of the poet was not on the motive, but on the scene; so he not only shifts the scene but varies the description of the events.” The poet’s eye, it might be added, is also like the orator’s, fixed steadily on his audience, and the audience must be relieved even if masonry or geography suffer.

The paramount principles of variety and growth of interest which govern every good story hold sway in Homer. Take a staple action of the _Iliad_, the battles. Homer’s audience wanted fighting, yet jaded listeners and the artistic poet knew there must be in the fighting variety and growth of interest. Even in the matter of killing men, which seems to us unimportant but which would not be to an audience of fighters, Homer has shown a wonderful variety. A German professor has diagnosed the Homeric surgery with all the thoroughness of his class. The conclusions may be found in Seymour’s _Life in the Homeric Age_. The number and variety of the wounds, the weapons used, the percentages of fatalities, are all given in full detail. “Hardly could the poet have covered more completely the possibilities of wounds for the human body if he had proceeded systematically and mechanically.” Some will have it that Homer was a surgeon and an army doctor. Certainly the history of anatomy has its first chapter in the _Iliad_.

But to pass over the variety displayed in the wounds and other smaller points, consider the actual fighting. For the maneuvers we may refer to two interesting chapters in Lang’s _World of Homer_, where the variety and consistency of Homeric warfare are well described and defended against the dissectionists. The point, however, we are working toward is the variety shown in even the external circumstances of the warfare. A closer study than we can afford to give would reveal more variety, but we may mention the plain, the wall, the river, the night as in the tenth book, the mist. These are the various circumstances which the poet introduces into his battles, relieving the monotony and sustaining the interest. There is no falling off. The different heroes, too, succeed one another; the victory alternates from one side to the other; the battle on earth has its echo among the gods. The interest rises. Patroclos enters the fight, and then his fallen body becomes the center of the struggle, as the wall and the ships had been before. Something, too, is left for Achilles. Ferocious as may have been the fighting before, it becomes a veritable shambles when Achilles enters the fray. Never were such frightful wounds, never such rivers of blood as may be witnessed in