[CHAPTER XIX]
THE GREAT DISCREPANCIES
The standing argument against the old belief in the unity of authorship of the Epics, has for several generations been based on the discrepancies and inconsistencies which are said to abound in these poems. "The only begetter" of the critical school which lacerates Homer was Wolf; but Wolf's suspicions were not originally roused by inconsistencies which shocked him in the poems. The poems, he said, had unus color, "one harmonious colouring." But if that be true, and it is true, how was this harmony preserved in a poem which, as Wolf decided from a priori considerations, cannot be the work of one man or one age? Now the work of many men in many ages inevitably must be a chaos, not a harmony, and so Wolf's followers have devoted their lives to the hunt for discrepancies and inaccuracies fit to support their preconceived opinion.
Meanwhile Wolf started, not from discrepancies which could only exist in a mosaic of the lays of several distinct ages, but from a priori reflections on the nature of the age and civilisation in which the epics began. Of that age and civilisation we have now some knowledge. Wolf had none. He reckoned that, granting the barbarism of the unknown age as he conceived it, and the abysm of time through which the poems passed before they reached the hands of competent grammarians,—the Alexandrians,—the texts of epics must necessarily have suffered terribly. If so, there necessarily must be many fatal discrepancies, —unless, indeed, the supposed Editorial Committee at Athens (600-530 B.C.) and the Alexandrian editors later harmonised the whole into the actual unus color. For the whole did seem harmonious to Wolf, with merely a few roughnesses, and passages suspected even by the ancient grammarians. But Wolf's successors, hypnotised by his original suggestion that, in the circumstances of the case, the poems must be by many hands, have felt that, if so, they must contain many fatal discrepancies, have hunted for, and have, of course, found them. Thus an unscientific and illogical method has long prevailed.
Indeed, a method less scientific and less logical cannot be imagined. Critics already prepossessed by the suggestion of Wolf in favour of multiplex authorship, sedulously hunt, we repeat, through the poems for discrepancies in support of their case. They do what men have never done to any other long poetic work of imagination, they seek, with microscopic minuteness of inquiry, for inconsistencies in a fictitious narrative, composed not for analytic readers, but for a circle of listeners. When they find—or much more frequently imagine that they have found—such discrepancies, they proclaim them as proofs of multiplex authorship. Never have they as eagerly and carefully sought for such errors in long imaginative tales that are certainly known to be the work of one hand. Scientific method imperatively demands this investigation; but the critics do not listen. They have studied a work of pure literature with the desire to prove their own foregone conclusion, that the authorship of the Iliad is multiplex, and that it is the growth of several disparate ages.
When archaeological discoveries during the last forty years had thrown some light on the pre-Homeric age, then the material objects found were raked and sifted for proof of the foregone conclusion—the Epic is a mosaic of four or five centuries. We have examined the results of the archaeological inquisition into discrepancies in religion, custom, armour, tactics, and so forth. We try to prove that, in all such details, the epics are the work of a single moment of culture; and again, that no other work of the Greek genius, and no material relics of other moments of Greek culture, represent the religion, polity, armour, costume, morality, and taste of Homer. Not in these fields of ascertainable facts can the proof that the Epics are by many men in many ages be discovered.
Except in the general conclusion that the Iliad is a mosaic, produced (most of them think) by a long series of Ionian additions to an Achaean "kernel," there is no harmony among critics. For example, English savants usually, like Mr. Leaf, make no objections to the unity of the Odyssey. They do not read it in the same spirit, or torment it in the same style, as they rack and lacerate the Iliad. With Wolf, they recognise its unity, though it arose in the same dark age, and passed through the same adventures as the Iliad. Yet in Germany the Odyssey is even more and more variously lacerated than the Iliad.
Turning to the most recent English book on the subject, Homer and the Iliad, by Miss Stawell (1909), we find that while she rejects 6,000 out of 15,000 lines as non-original, she cannot believe in the critics' "original Menis" of only some 2500 lines. She, like the rest, believes (what Wolf did not believe) "that it is quite possible to disentangle the original core of the Iliad from the present mass." But of her Iliad, her "core" is by far the greater part, not a poor sixth. I am tempted to quote a long passage from Miss Stawell, because it seems to contain sound sense, and to be guided by fine literary appreciation.
"The reconstructions actually proposed seem open to serious criticisms. It appears to me that certain important considerations have been overlooked, and that in their light we should discover the original to be far more like the Iliad as we have it now than has usually been supposed.
In the first place, much of the traditional poem has scarcely had a fair chance at the hands of modern critics. Scenes where the drift and bearing are not obvious at once have been cut away without further thought. But a great dramatic poem does not give up all its secrets at once. There are subtle harmonies that can only be realised clearly after long and sympathetic study: the work on Shakespeare might suffice to prove this. And Homer, like Shakespeare, can put in very important points very quietly. We may miss them, and that is our loss. The poet will not over-emphasise them for our sakes. Therefore it is not enough to ask ourselves whether such and such a passage could be cut out and the story still hang together; we must ask, further, whether the omission really leaves the figures as solid, the story as enthralling, the background as grand, as before. I feel sure that the full consequences of their own excisions have not always been noticed by the critics who have made them. They cannot entirely strip away the memory of the "later accretions"; there are even instances of their praising the recovered "original" for effects which could not have been obtained without the "later interpolations."
Secondly, a theory of "accretions" that is formed to account for glaring discrepancies brings, or should bring, with it a clear presumption against a certain type of excision. To cut away not only individual scenes, but all allusions to such, however numerous, however far apart, however skilfully inwoven with their context, on the plea that they were added in order to harmonise old and new, is surely to prove too much. If the need for adjustment was felt to this extent, if the adjustment was done with this delicate care, how did it ever happen that the gross blots were allowed to enter or remain? That many scholars do overlook this difficulty will be shown in detail later—for instance, in the matter of Achilles' armour. The fact is that, on any theory, it must be admitted that the Iliad, as we have it, shows, again and again, the marks of carelessness at the joints. Whole scenes and passages which do not cohere with the rest have got into the poem somehow, and have been left there. This is perfectly intelligible on a theory of loose additions, afterwards piously preserved in one block without any attempt at elaborate harmonising between old and new; but a critical theory that assumes throughout the growth and the editing, a constant union of gross carelessness and minute care, is liable to just the same objection as the old theory of a great but negligent poet. It will not stand the test of thinking out in detail.