Chapter 14

I am following Mr. Murray's examples of expurgation. The spirit of the battles in theIliad"is chivalrous," he says. "No enemy is ever tortured" (as Sinon is in Quintus Smyrnaeus). Yet mediæval professors of chivalry never mutilated, I think, foes (not beingrebels) slain in fair field. Homer's men did, I have shown; and nobody expurgated the melancholy facts. As to cruelty to living foes, Euripides and Sophocles make Achilles drag the living Hector behind his chariot, while Homer makes it plain that Hector is stone dead.[18]

One can only say that Homer shows better taste than the tragedians. If this good taste is due to late expurgators, if, in a Homeric lay, Achilles did drag the living Hector, one can only wish that Sophocles and Euripides had been on the moral level of the expurgators. Whoevertheywere, their taste was vastly superior to that of the tragedians. I would attribute the better taste to Homer. The odious tale may be of Ionian invention: the Ionian poet makes Odysseus a child murderer. In theTain Bo Cualgne, Ferdiad drags a very odious dead man at his chariot wheels, not a living man. Homer was probably, indeed certainly, on a higher level of taste than the ancient Irish epic-makers: on this point they are at one with him. The great tragedians preferred a more horrible story—not, of course, because they approved of such proceedings. In King Lear, Shakespeare has horrors undreamed of in his sources, inMärchenand chronicles. He followed a French story in Sidney'sArcadia, and pleased "the groundlings." To "groundlings" Homer did not sing: Sophocles and Euripides wrote for the cultured Pit of Athens. For that reason, or because they found their story in some unknown source, and liked the horrible, they made Achilles torture a living enemy.

There is a passage in theIliad(xiii. 573) in which a man, speared from behind through the bowels, "where a wound is most baneful to wretched mortals, writhes about the spear ... for a moment, not for long"; his life follows the spear withdrawn. This is not a pleasant picture; but war, in fact, is not pleasant. Mr. Murray conceives the line which he renders "he struggled quite a little while, not at all long," to be a later palliative or expurgative addition; like the same formula in Odyssey, xxii. 473, where it is applied to the dying struggles of the hanged women-servants of Odysseus. This may be so, or may not; the fact that the lineisa formula, like those of our ballads, makes me incline to think itancient. The point is not of much importance, and cannot be decided. The horrible death inflicted on the treacherous thrall, Melanthius, in theOdyssey, is a proof that Homer's men could be very cruel to a treacherous thrall; but so could the Norsemen be, as in the scarcely quotable parallel case of Wolf the Unwashed. In the sagas generally we hear of few such cases, though many must have occurred, abroad, in Viking raids. In theIliadthere is no treacherous thrall; if such an one there were, he would have been treated like Melanthius.

I understand Mr. Murray to argue that theIliadhas been expurgated, but not quite successfully, of traces of poisoned arrows; while theOdyssey(l. 257-264) has the story of Odysseus seeking for arrow-poison at Ephyre, where poison was, we elsewhere learn, a marketable commodity. Ilus would not give it, for he feared the gods; another man gave it, as he dearly loved Odysseus. The story is not a true story, but a fable told by Athene. All it proves is that arrow-poison was known, but was hateful to the gods. As to Mr. Murray's arguments that such words asἄφυκτος, not "to be escaped," applied to arrows in theIliad, and "bitter" (πικρός) and "groanful" and "not long to be supported" as proofs of the practice of poisoning arrows, I can only say that I do not think the inference necessary.Πικρόςmeans "sharp," according to Liddell and Scott; unpoisoned arrows cause groans enough; the heroes "do not long support" flesh-wounds fromspears, but "retire hurt." That Agamemnon expects Menelaus to die (iv. 134) when arrow—smitten in the belly, is very natural. Menelaus would have died had the arrow bitten deep, but it merely grazed him through several interstices of his armour. Pandarus shot with a fresh arrow, "unused before," "whose poison has not been rubbed off." I reply that in meditating an important shot, any archer would use a fresh arrow if he could, because the feathers would have been in better trim and the shaft unstrained, the point unblunted, exactly as a man would use a new spear in a tournament.

In theIliad, men have strong bows, with iron or bronze points. People with these advantages do not use arrow-poison, the resort of races with blow-pipes, or with weak bows and arrow-points of bone, corrupt human bones by preference.

As to human sacrifice, a frequent topic in the Cyclic poems and the Greek dramatists, I have treated the subject elsewhere. I do not think that it was expurgated from theIliadby men who let it stand in the Cyclic poems and the drama, but that it was not in Achaean manners. In the legends told of human sacrifice by Pausanias, the peoples concerned are usually Ionian or Athenian. The timid Calchas ofIliad, i. 74-83, who dare not name the cause of Apollo's wrath unless Achilles will guarantee his safety, could never have bidden Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia, who is not one of the Over Lord's three daughters, in the Iliad.

Mr. Murray suspects that stories of sacrifices of maidens "would have been rejected from theIliad, not only because human sacrifice was a barbarity, but also because the stories involved too intense an interest in women."[19]As I am intensely interested in Helen, Hecuba and Andromache, in the Iliad, the argument seems to me strange. As to Mr. Murray's theory that the Cretan king was done to death at stated intervals,[20]the topic cannot be treated satisfactorily here. I do not believe that anything of the sort described occurred anywhere, and I am surprised at the remark, "We have no tradition of Minos's death."[21]

The Minyan story of the intended sacrifice of Phryxus and Helle is a world-wideMärchen, with sacrifice substituted for endophagous cannibalism.

Finally, I do not suppose that the ferocities of Achilles towards Hector, and at the funeral of Patroclus, are an expurgated version of a lay in which they were narrated with pride and pleasure.[22]It was customary, in Homeric warfare, to maltreat the dead; but Achilles went too far, and persevered too long. He is, as Mr. Murray says, "a man mad with grief, a man starving and sleepless," a man who knows that Hector intended to mutilate his friend and give his body to the dogs. But these excuses do not palliate the perseverance of Achilles in outrage, or his slaying of the twelve Trojan captives. Sacrificed they were not. There was no ritual for such a slaughter, 'and, as a matter of fact, it is crowded into a shamefacedline and a half.' You would expect this sacrifice to have at the very least twenty."[23]

You might expect that, if you believed that the Achaeans had a ritual for human sacrifice! If they had, which I deem inconceivable, we may readily believe that the spirit of historic Hellas would have expurgated eighteen and a half of the twenty lines.

Much of this theory of expurgation of theIliadandOdysseyseems to me to rest on the assumption of εὐφημία. This means abstention from ill-omened words in poems recited at a great public festival. It is impossible for me to understand why words referring, for example, to the habitual and legal purification of homicides, or to the established cult of heroes, should be deemed "ill-omened" at the recitations, in no way religious, at a public holiday, and yet be deemed "well-omened" in the performances of Athenian tragedy.

If the superstitions of the conquered races were not those of the conquerors, they could not be in the epics of the conquerors. If they were not there,les intellectuelsof Athens could not expurgate them.

[1]R. G. E.p. 134.

[2]Iliad, xi. 145-147.

[3]xiii. 202-204.

[4]xviii. 176-177.

[5]xiv. 496-505.

[6]xvii. 39.

[7]xviii. 175-177, xvii. 126.

[8]R. G. E.p. 131.

[9]Iliad, vi. 416-419.

[10]R. G. E.p. 134.

[11]R. G. E.pp. 245-246.

[12]R. G. E.p. 173.

[13]This archetype, Mr. Murray has just said, is "unknown."

[14]Prolegg. to Study of Greek Religion, 1903, p. 329.

[15]Ibid. pp. 327, 328.

[16]Ibid. p. 329.

[17]R. G. E.pp. 116, 117.

[18]Ajax, 1031. Andromache, 399.

[19]R. G. E.p. 123.

[20]Ibid. p. 127.

[21]See Roscher'sLexikon, s.v. Minos.

[22]R. G. E.pp. 130, 131.

[23]R. G. E.p. 131.

Wolf could not but confess that theIliad, as we possess it, is an unity, better or worse; is a literary structure. How, then, did it come to be what it is, if it were the work of several authors in several ages? Wolf replies, "History speaks! The voice of all antiquity, and, on the whole, the consent of all report bears witness that Pisistratus was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing, and brought into that order in which we now possess them."[1]

This amazing statement shows that there are classical scholars who mean, when they speak of "History," something that no historical student means when he uses the same term. About any dealings by Pisistratus with Homer, history is mute as the grave. Not only is there no record—that is, no contemporary public inscription—testifying that Pisistratus or any other person "first had the Homeric poems arranged and committed to writing," there is not even a hint of a reference to any tradition of this event, in the great Historians of the following century, Herodotus and Thucydides, none in Aristotle, none in Ephorus (in the fourth century B.C.), none in the remains of Aristarchus and other famous Alexandrian grammarians. History is silent even as to a rumour. We know that Dieuchidas, a Megarian historian of the fourth century, said something about its being Solon rather than Pisistratus who did something in connection with Homer. We know this from a mutilated passage in an author of the thirdcentury, Diogenes Laertius. That is all.[2]Tradition from the time of Pisistratus himself to that of Cicero speaks no articulate and intelligible word as to what, according to Wolf, the voice of all antiquity declares. When we come after five centuries of historic silence to Cicero, we do not find him agreeing with Wolf that Pisistratus first had the poems of Homer committed to writing, but saying that "he is said" (by whom?) "to have been the first to have arranged, in their present order, the books of Homer, previously in disarray?"[3]

Cicero speaks only of what "is said." The unvouched for report mentioned by Cicero half a milennium after the date of Pisistratus is not history, of course; is not evidence. Long before Cicero, in the fourth century, Ephorus and Heraclides Ponticus told other stories about the coming of Homer to Sparta, stories equally unhistorical. The author of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue,Hipparchus, represented the second son of Pisistratus as the first to bring Homer to Attica, and to regulate Homeric recitations. None of these writers stands for History, none of them agrees with another; they had no historical knowledge of whatever facts there may have been.

We are in presence (1) of variants of a tradition doubtless founded on fact, namely, that at an unknown date an Act was passed in Athens regulating the recitations of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaic festival; by some accounts an Act limiting the recitations to "Homeric" poetry alone; and (2) of a legend that Pisistratus, or his second son, collected and arranged in a certain order the Homeric poems. The earliest and only good evidence, says Mr. Monro, with regard to the recitation of Homer at Athens, is that of two orators two centuries later than Pisistratus, Lycurgus and Isocrates. The former said in a speech "Our fathers thought Homer such a good poet that they made a law for him alone among poets that his poems should be recited by rhapsodists at every quinquennial holding of the Panathenaea."[4]No date is given, but Lycurgus must apparently be thinking of a date prior to Tyrtaeus, as we shall see later. When Lycurgus says that the poems of Homer alone were to be recited at the festival,he is of so late a date that he probably means the Iliad and Odyssey. If the Act were made in Solon's time, "Homer" may conceivably include all heroic epic poetry. We know nothing about it.

Isocrates[5]says that the ancestors of the Athenians "desired to make Homer's art honoured, both in contests of music (i.e. of the reciters) and in the education of the young" (Monro,Iliad, vol. i. p. 15). Still later, in a passage with an important lacuna, Diogenes Laertius says that Solon passed a law regulating the recitations,[6]the very law which is attributed to Hipparchus by the author of the Dialogue of that name.[7]In Sicyon also, in the sixth century, there were recitations of Homer by competing rhapsodists; they were put down by the tyrant Cleisthenes.[8]

Mr. Monro says that for the existence of an Athenian law about Homeric recitations, whatever the date of that law may have been, we have historical testimony. Indeed, if there were no such law, even rhetoricans of the fourth century could scarcely tell the Athenians that such a law existed. But as to its date and scope, and the name of the statesman who passed it, if any exact information had existed, perhaps there might have been some agreement among the persons who speak of it. If nothing like a History of Literature existed before the fourth century, we can expect no information. If it did exist, it was of no value to Ephorus, Heracleides, and the author of theHipparchus. They are all at odds.

Mr. Monro says, as every man trained in historical criticism must say, "modern scholars have tried to harmonise these notices, and to assign to (the Spartan) Lycurgus (named by Ephorus), Solon (named by Diogenes Laertius)," Pisistratus, and Hipparchus their several shares in the service done to Homer. "This would be legitimate if there were reason to regard any of the notices as historical. But, in fact, they are merely mythical anecdotes, supplemented by the guesses of scholars."[9]Whatever Homeric critics may think, they will find no trained historian to dissent from Mr. Munro on those points.

Historia silet! History is mute. We only know that from an uncertain period there were quinquennial recitations of "Homer," and Homer alone, at Athens, and that "Homer" was used in education. Beyond that all is "guesses of scholars." These guesses vary according to the taste and fancy of the learned.

In this conclusion every one who is accustomed to historical criticism will agree with Mr. Monro. Nothing can be made out of late and contradictory statements; nothing beyond the fact that "Homer" (whatever may be meant by "Homer") was quinquennially recited, under regulations, at Athens, and entered into public education.

Mr. A. W. Verrall, however, says: "In general, the very last thing that we get from disputants on either side is an exact construction and estimation of what, truly or falsely, is recorded about the history of Homer." Mr. Verrall writes thus in aQuarterlyreview of Mr. Murray'sRise of the Greek Epic, and of myHomer and his Age.

The questions as to what is "recorded" about "the history of Homer," I had treated in myHomer and the Epic(pp. 35, 38, 67-70), examining the evidence, such as it is, and the opinions of Wolf, Ritschl, and others; and siding with Mr. Monro (I may add, with Blass, Meyer, Nutzhorn, Mr. T. W. Allen, and many others). InHomer and his Age(pp. 46-50), I again went over the old ground, in reference to Mr. Leaf's changes of opinion.

Mr. Verrall writes:[10]"The texts, as we have said, are not treated fairly." Now really the texts are treated as the historian treats all texts that come into his province. The dates of the alleged events are set beside the dates of the texts concerning them; the texts are remote, contradictory, and unevidential; the best historians, and the historian who most carefully examined the popular traditions concerning Pisistratus and his sons, namely, Thucydides, say nothing about the alleged events.

Mr. Verrall also writes: "The record, such as it is, is hardly ever correctly represented. The most punctilious of scholars (Grote, for example) are in this matter not to be trusted."[11]

These are severe reproaches! Mr. Monro is notmentioned: are any of his remarks unfair and untrust-worthy?

Mr. Verrall says: "We cannot but think that the ancient record about the origin of Homer suffers unfairly from certain prepossessions which all would disclaim, but which are more easily disclaimed than abandoned."

For me, I frankly confess my own prepossessions, but consciousness of his bias is the safeguard of the historian; it compels him to make certain that he adds nothing to and takes nothing from what Mr. Verrall calls "the ancient record," andIcall "the various ancient legends." Mr. Verrall insists that "internal evidence about the history of a book, if not controlled by record, is liable to infinitely elastic interpretation." Certainly, but there is no possibility of "control by record" in the case of the history of the Homeric poems.

No historian can agree with Mr. Verrall that "as a matter of record and apart from inference or hypothesis, this Homer of ours ... appears as an artificial product of scholarship, the result of a critical process."[12]It is he who insists on the technical term "record"; it is not pedantic, therefore, to reply that "record" there is none. By "record" Mr. Verrall seems to mean, as regards the "artificial product of scholarship," a statement of opinion made five centuries after the alleged events.

The first testimony, or "record," cited by Mr. Verrall has nothing to say about our Homer as "an artificial product of scholarship." It deals merely with the legalised recitation of Homeric poetry, and of that poetry alone, at the Panathenaea. The text is that which Mr. Monro calls "the earliest evidence," "that of the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates," in the fourth century.

That is good evidence. Lycurgus could not speak to the Athenians of a law which, to their knowledge, did not exist. Lycurgus, in fact, had been cajoling his Athenian audience with a set of fables about their ancestors, whose patriotism and valour inpre-Homeric timeshe applauds. Did not Erechtheus in a war with Thrace sacrifice his own daughter in obedience to an oracle, and then defeat the invaders! For this nobleaction Lycurgus cites a play by Euripides,The Erechtheus!

Lycurgus next says that Athens made a law that the poems of Homer alone should be recited at the Panathenaea; and that, encouraged by the patriotism ascribed by the poet to Hector, the Athenians, in the Persian affair, were ready to die, not for their city only, but for all Hellas. Such men were the Athenians, in public and private life: then comes the story of the Spartans borrowing Tyrtaeus from Athens, and their approval of a Tyrtaean poem adapted in part fromIliad, xxii. 71 ff.

That is all. Mr. Verrall writes: "By Lycurgus this whole educational movement, and the adoption of Homer as the basis of it, is attributed to the Athenians as a people...." What Mr. Verrall says about "a revolution in the method of education not less momentous than any movement in history,"[13]has, I think, but scanty warrant in the actual words of Lycurgus. It is Mr. Verrall, not Lycurgus, who compares the effect of Homer on Athens with the effect ("notorious," as he too truly says) of the Bible upon Scotland. All this about an educational movement, however true it may be, is, I fear, "inference and hypothesis" of Mr. Verrall's own. Lycurgus speaks of learning courageous patriotism from Homer, all the rest we have to assume; at least I cannot find it in Lycurgus.

Mr. Verrall has next to meet the charge of contradictions among the late writers who attribute to Solon, Pisistratus, andHipparchusthe law about recitations at the Panathenaea. But these texts, except the pseudo-PlatonicHipparchus, say nothing about Homer as "an artificial product of scholarship." Mr. Verrall declares that Lycurgus and theHipparchussay nothing about the "arrangement" of the poems, "they speak merely of adoption and compilation."[14]But Lycurgus says nothing about compilation, the Hipparchus says nothing about compilation.

TheHipparchussays, what Lycurgus does not say, "thatHipparchus, son of Pisistratus, first brought the poems of Homer to Attica, and that he obliged the rhapsodists at the Panathenaic festival to recite consecutively, so that the people might hear entire poems,and not merely passages chosen at the will of the reciter."[15]

Not a word about "compilation." The Hipparchus falls into all the errors regarding the history of the Pisistradae that are pointed out by Thucydides.[16]Mr. Verrall is not lucky, he chooses a very erroneous anonymous author, and makes him speak of "compilation," which I do not see that he mentions, and calls his "no late or dubious authority."[17]

Next, theHipparchusattributes to a man who might have been Solon's great-grandson the law which Diogenes Laertius attributes to Solon. Mr. Verrall palliates the contradictions in a curious way. "These ascriptions have presumably the same measure of truth as the connecting of the Reformation now with one and now writh another of the princes or statesmen of the sixteenth century."[18]

I do not know what historian connects the Reformation with one statesman or prince and with one only. But the texts of Mr. Verrall attribute not a religious and political movement dating, in England, from about 1370 to—?, but a single legislative Act, to several statesmen of about four generations. They are not speaking of a prolonged "educational movement," but of one legislative Act,—about which they really know no particulars.

The correct analogy to this Act is the authorisation of a translation of the Bible in England. No historian attributes that feat to any prince but gentle King Jamie: none says that it was due to Henry VIII., Edward VI., or Elizabeth. The historian cannot assume that when Diogenes Laertius attributes the law on recitations to Solon, and theHipparchusattributes it to the son of Pisistratus, both authorities mean only that a whole educational movement occurred in the sixth century. The existence of primary education in the Athens of the seventh and sixth centuries is proved by the multitude ofinscribedvases with paintings of Homeric, Cyclic, and Attic legends; but Diogenes and theHipparchusare speaking variously about a single legislative enactment.

Mr. Verrall next supposes that the "Homer" then recited and taught at Athens was probably the whole "Cycle" of Cyclic poems.[19]This question he must settle with Mr. Murray, who, we have seen, says that the poetry selected for recitation at the Panathenaea was none but the still fluid lays of which, as I understand, our two epics are the final result; while the Cyclic poems were rejected.

[1]Prolegomena, 2nd edition, 1859, p. 85.

[2]SeeHomer and his Age, pp. 44-50.

[3]De Oratore, iii. 34.

[4]Leocr. p. 209.

[5]Panegyr. c. 42.

[6]Diog. Laert.Solon, i. 57.

[7]See Monro,Odyssey, vol. ii. pp. 393. 397.

[8]Herodotus, v. 67.

[9]Iliad, vol. i. p. 27

[10]Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 76.

[11]Ibid.p. 53.

[12]Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 54.

[13]Quarterly Review, July 1908, p. 55.

[14]Ibid. p. 60.

[15]Hipparch, p. 228 B.

[16]Thucydides, vi. 57-59; Monro,Odyssey, vol. ii. p. 393.

[17]Quarterly Review, p. 58.

[18]Ibid. p. 58.

[19]Quarterly Review, p. 60.

In Chapter XVIII., on Homer and the "Cyclic" Poems, I fear that I have not succeeded in understanding Mr. Murray's view of the subject. The fault of misapprehension is not perhaps entirely without excuse. Generally speaking, I give the erroneous impression that Mr. Murray thinks theIliad laterthan what are usually called the "Cyclic" poems on the themes connected with Troy. He certainly says that passages in the Iliad "seem to be derived from the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis...."[1]

He also says: "In its actual working up, however, ourIliadhas reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles, if I may use the term." Moreover, "we happen to know that there was an old chronicle poem which both contained a catalogue of the ships[2]and also narrated at length the assembling of the fleet at Aulis—the so-calledCypriaor Cyprian verses. Our Catalogue has in all probability been taken from there."[3]Here we are told that our Iliad derives some passages and the Catalogue from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, and from several other named epics, "the Little Iliad, and the Sack of Ilion, the so-called Aethiopis," while, "in actual working up, our Iliad has reached a further stage of development than the ordinary run of poetic chronicles...." It was natural that, on hearing how the Iliad borrowed from an old chronicle poem, the Cypria, I should think that theCypriawas regarded as an old chronicle poemcomplete in itselfbefore it was borrowed from by theIliad. The chronicle poem of events so mythical and remote could not resemble a monastic chronicle in receiving additions from contemporary history. This remark also applies to the other poems with names,Sack of Ilion,and so on, and with contents which must be definitely known, if it be known that theIliadborrowed from them, or seems to have borrowed from them. One could not but be convinced, then, that these oldbookswhich lent, were supposed to be earlier finished than the book, theIliad,which borrowed from them. But Mr. Murray also said, and here the prospect wavers: "The truth is that these various books or masses of tradition were growing up side by side for centuries. All the great books were growing up together, and passages could be repeated from any one to any other."[4]

Now abookis one thing—a book with a name, such asCypria, is not equivalent to "a mass of tradition," which is another thing. To take an example, we haveThe Wallaceof Blind Harry (circ. 1460), a book about as long as theOdyssey. Harry's materials were "a mass of tradition," including, it is believed, popular ballads, concerning events then remote by a century and a half. We cannot call the mass of tradition "abookwhich was growing up"; nor can we call the mass of tradition about the Graeco-Trojan affairs before the tenth year of the siege,a book. There is nobooktill theCypriais made, and theCypriacannot be borrowed from before it is made. A poet who relies on themass of traditionis not borrowing from abook,any more than Harry was borrowing from a book (his use of an alleged book by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, is another question). Manifestly incidents from a mass of tradition about Thebes, about the Greek and Trojan affairs before the war, and so on, may be introduced into an epic about the actual siege of Troy. That is all very natural and probable. But if a poem, with a definite name and a definite scope, theIliad, borrow passages from another poem with a definite scope and name, theCypriaor others, then the poem that lends is the earlier, and the poem that borrows is the later. It was the use by Mr. Murray of these definite names of poems,Cypria, Little Iliad, Aethiopis, and so on, withhis assertion that another book, theIliad, borrows passages from them, which led me to suppose that the lending poems were, in his opinion,complete(in one form or another) when theIliadborrowed from them. Here I misinterpreted him.

Had Mr. Murray written: "Other passages," in theIliad, "seem to be derived from the masses of tradition about matters previous to and later than the opening and end of theIliad—masses of tradition which in time became the topics of theCypria, theLittle Iliad, theAethiopis," then I should have understood and agreed with him. The true view of the case, Mr. Murray's own view, seems to be this: there might be actual Greek books (probably not definitelynamedtill a later age), and these books might, like theChanson de Roland, beremaniés; might be modernised, and might receive additions; and another book, that which we call theIliad, might exist, and, like theChanson de Roland(in theRoncevauxpoem) might receive additions, the facts, in some cases, being taken from the other books, which were undergoing similar vicissitudes.

This is not my own view of what occurred, but it is a thinkable state of things, and I regret that I did not understand Mr. Murray's position.

At the same time, if one found in achansonof the thirteenth century matter borrowed from the conclusion ofRoncevaux(theremaniementof theChanson de Roland), one could not say that it was borrowed fromRoland, a substantive earlier poem, in a metre not that ofRoncevaux.

There is a sense in which all early Greek epics might be said to borrow passages from each other. The statement would, however, I think, be misleading. The fact would be more correctly expressed by saying that the epics probably (like our own traditional ballads certainly) employ a common set of formulae to express habitual and often repeated actions and events—dawn, night-fall, feasts, preparations of food, arming, arraying a host, greeting a guest, falling in battle, and other constantly recurring circumstances.

"They hadna sailed a league, a league,A league but barely three.""They hadna walked in the bonny greenwood,Na an hour but barely are."

The formula for the death of lovers—

"The one was buried in Mary kirk,The other in Mary quire," etc.,

is of constant recurrence.

The murderer always

"takes out a little penknifeThat hung low by his gare,"

or—

"Lifts up a gilt daggerHung low down by his knee."

The mother or lady, awaiting her son or lover, always

"Looks over tower and town,"

or—

"Looks over Castle Doune."

After a death it is always

"Bells were rung and mass was sung.""'A grave, a grave,' Lord Bernard cryd,'To put these lovers in.'""'A bed, a bed,' Clark Saunders cried,'A bed for you and me.'"

Motherwell, who wrote without Homer in his mind, seems to state the case of the ballads very clearly. "There is not an action, not an occurrence of any sort, but what has its appropriate phraseology; and to enumerate all these would, in effect, be to give the principal portion of all our ancient ballads. For in all cases where there is an identity of interest, of circumstance, of action, each ballad varies not from the established mode of clothing these in language.... They were the general outlines of every class of human incidents...."

Motherwell adds that "something of the same sort, though in a less marked degree, may be discovered in the construction of the longer metrical romances."[5]When we look at Book viii. of theIliad, we see that, in Mr. Leaf's words, "it has undoubtedly great spiritand movement," though "nearly one-third" of the lines "are found again in theIliadandOdyssey—sometimes with a slight difference."

For reasons connected with the study of ballad poetry I have made some imitations of the traditional ballads, and find that, though the stories I tell are new, yet they abound in ballad formulae: indeed, a ballad, if it is to resemble the traditional sort, cannot be made on other principles. Ancient Greek epic poetry, intended, like the ballads, to be recited, not to be read, preserved the old popular and traditional convention. Critics quarrel as to the parts of the epic in which the lines are "original" and the parts in which they are "borrowed." Of many of them we may say that they are neither borrowed nor original, but are parcels of the common epic stock.

I lately met with a curious example of the critical method of treating Homer applied in certain criticisms of Scottish ballads. One ballad, "Auld Maitland," was distributed, by the critic, between Hogg and Scott. In certain stanzas he foundWiederholungenof lines in the English ballad of "Chevy Chase," and of others in Herd's version of "Otterburne" (1776). The verses in "Auld Maitland" which presentedthese Wiederholungenwere speculatively assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd; because, in a confessed interpolation by him of two lines, where only half a stanza was received from the recitation of "Auld Maitland," the words "Remember Percy" occur. In "Chevy Chase" we have "But trust me, Percy." Hogg was following "Chevy Chase." But in "Auld Maitland" we read, "King Edward rode, King Edward ran"; while in "Jamie Telfer" we have "The Scotts they rode, the Scotts they ran." Nowthatline occurs in Scott's, and did not occur in Hogg's version of "Jamie Telfer." Moreover, Scott himself, the critic believes, wrote the part of "Jamie Telfer" where the Scotts ride and run. "If Hogg is responsible for the insertion of this line" ("King Edward rode, King Edward ran"), "he must have borrowed it from "Edom of Gordon," where we have "Sum they rode, and sum they ran."

He must have borrowed it! How like is all this to the higher criticism of HomericWiederholungen! In fact, ballad poetry and Homeric poetry have stocks of formulaeopen to every maker. Not to use them would be not to play the game.

Thus the criticism went on, and Scott's hand was detected exactly as Hogg's had been, by the occurrence, in "Auld Maitland," of ballad-formulae which also appear in ballads edited by Scott.

Enfin, "Auld Maitland" was declared to be, in the critic's opinion, in origin a composition of Hogg's, which he tried to palm off on Scott as traditional. Scott detected Hogg, entered into the plot, wrote stanzas and lines into the ballad, and palmed it off on the public.[6]

The critic happened not to know (or did not mention) the history of how the ballad was first heard by Laidlaw in the mouth of a servant girl; and how Laidlaw got a version in manuscript from Hogg, who heard a recitation by his uncle, Will o' Phawhope. The critic had never seen the extant original MS. sent by Hogg to Laidlaw, and given by Laidlaw to Scott. He had never, of course, collated that manuscript with the copy published by Scott. When we make the collation, we find that Scott neither rejected nor added a single stanza; that he made a necessary and successful emendation in one line; and that the few small verbal differences between Hogg's MS. and Scott's printed ballad may be accounted for by the fact that the copy printed from was that received from a recitation by Hogg's mother.

Thus the higher criticism, working on lines recognised as orthodox in Homeric circles, was absolutely erroneous from beginning to end. The critic was acute, ingenious, even brilliant, but he had scanty knowledge of the facts in the case. He had not consulted certain printed books germane to the matter; he had not consulted the ballad-manuscripts at Abbotsford, and the manuscript letters.

In Homeric criticism, alas! we have not the letters and manuscripts of the poet. But it is clear from the case of "Auld Maitland" that, in the absence of facts, our motto, in conjecture, should be—Gang warily!

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