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For my own part, I was possessed with an intemperate haste to read Homer straight through as fast as I could; for I felt, without exactly knowing, that there was something in the epic I wanted, yes, I needed and must have.
We can conceive nothing, not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugène Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon us.
The very learned men are angularly unenlightened on this as on many other subjects; and the position they take up is really quite unreasonable. If any ordinary journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer, they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, "You cannot read mediæval French," or "You cannot read Homeric Greek."
The London Gazette does not tell us things more like facts than the narratives of Homer, and it often states facts that are much more like fictions than his most poetical inventions. So much is this the case with the works of all the higher poets, that as they recede from that worldly standard which is found in the Epics of Homer, they sink in the scale of poets.
"You treat your own flesh and blood as though blood was nothing but water with you." "I stand by the Union, and those on the other side must keep out from under. When I was in a Confederate prison, my uncle Homer, your father, did not do a single thing for me. Lead on, Ralph." Dr.
Again, Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or 'ethical, or 'pathetic. The parts also, with the exception of song and spectacle, are the same; for it requires Reversals of the Situation, Recognitions, and Scenes of Suffering. Moreover, the thoughts and the diction must be artistic. In all these respects Homer is our earliest and sufficient model.
It is a pity that we have no poets now in France, for the deeds of the last few years would have given a subject for a Homer or a Virgil. It seems that I can create kingdoms but not poets. Whom do you consider to be the greatest French writer? 'Racine, sire. 'Then you are a blockhead, for Corneille was infinitely greater.
We know, and have always known, who built the Parthenon and crowned the Acropolis; but not until Schliemann had by faith and good works removed the mountain of Hissarlik, did we know that the Troy, of which blind Homer sang, was not a figment of the poet's brain. Schliemann showed us that a thousand years before the age of Pericles there was a civilization almost as great.
"Ye put the oil in there just crude, as it comes out of the wells, Homer; it don't need refinin' and it runs through this and down here to this, where it's vaporised much the same's they vaporise gasoline for autymobile engines, ye know and then it just naturally flows up to the bracket and there ye are." "It's wonderful, Sam," said I, wondering if it really were.
The Homer of the Iliad has little liking for a talker. Thersites is his pattern specimen of such; and it is the current scoff at unready warriors to praise their father's courage, and then to add But the Phoeacian Lord who ventured to reflect, in the Iliad style, on the supposed unreadiness of Ulysses, is taught a different notion of human excellence. Ulysses tells him that he is a fool.
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