As for the chansons de geste, we know, or at least the most eminent French scholars believe, that these, or the earliest of them, are the final poetic results of actual reminiscences, recorded in lays or ballads, popular or military, of the reign of Charlemagne. But Homer is far in advance of the age of ballads on actual events in the remote past.
M. Gaston Paris says: "The Chanson de Roland is not a work composed d'un seul jet à un moment donné, it contains elements of very different dates and different sources"—there is a basis of popular or military ballads; there are additions invented by professional poets to increase the interest. "The author of the Chanson is Legion."[2] I entirely agree, and Legion is the author of Paradise Lost, and the author of King Lear, or Hamlet, or Macbeth. Legion is the name of the myth-makers from an age of savagery onwards; of the Greek and Roman and Celtic poets and historians, of the Christian theologians, and Anglo-Saxon minstrels and low Latin versifiers, and heavy Dutch poets, and gay Italian poets, who have contributed the ideas and material to Paradise Lost. But the Epic is Milton's though Homer and Virgil are among the authors: without their lives it had not been what it is. The form is Milton's, and the form of the Iliad is Homer's.
These things are manifest. All poetry, down to a lyric like "Bonnie Dundee," has, in one sense, a multiplicity of authors. The poet selects, combines, and gives form to a mass of pre-existing materials.
In Lear, Shakespeare works on a Märchen still current in rural England. That Märchen he takes in the pseudo-historic form given to it by the chroniclers. Shakespeare combines with it—for Gloucester and Edmund—a French story which he finds in Sidney's Arcadia. He has before him an earlier drama on King Lear; he selects, arranges, composes, he adds what is his own, the poetry, and the fatal conclusion; and even so the author of our Iliad treated his materials. Of all poetry, and especially of all epic poetry, the author's name is Legion. Legion supplies the materials, and examples of different methods of dealing with them, and the stock of ballad or epic formulae. The final poet makes his selections, his combinations, and fuses all into a new form.
It may be said that I mean by "Legion" something which M. Gaston Paris did not mean. But what did he mean? Did he mean that a different laisses, or strings of verses on one assonance in the Chanson de Roland, were by different poets, and were tacked together by one man, who, perhaps, made omissions and additions? If this was what M. Gaston Paris meant, I do not agree with him, nor with any one who may hold the same opinion about the evolution of our Iliad. I know perfectly well what I mean, when I say that Legion provided Homer's materials, and showed various methods of treating them.
What these materials were we cannot exactly know. There must have been much heroic poetry in hexameter verse; in Homer the form has reached perfection. The style retains some peculiarities of popular poetry, of ballads, as in stereotyped formulae descriptive of habitual actions of every kind. Like our ballads, the poet never avoids a formula, if he can find one current; if he invents a new one, he clings to it. This recurrence of formulae is no less marked in Iliad viii. than in Child's four hundred English and Scottish Popular Ballads, or in La Chancun de Willame, one of the oldest chansons de geste.
Homer's chief heroes need no introduction to his audience, as Roland and Oliver, Ganelon and Naismes needed none. All his characters were familiar figures in an ancient legend of an expedition against the Northern shore of Asia. About that we have no historic knowledge, and it is rare indeed that chronicles record any "facts" given in early chansons de geste. The rear-guard action at Roncevaux is an exception; it is a historical fact.
Homer surveyed the whole, selected some situations, invented others, combined and fused all in the furnace of his genius, just as did Milton and Shakespeare. But how Legion made the Iliad, with no Homer, no one great genius, but in some incomprehensible manner of combination, I have never understood. I have never seen any description of the processes which was clear, coherent, intelligible, and corroborated by an example historically known. Theories of "redactors," "editors," literary committees, are all in the air; we cannot say, with Mrs. Quickly, "You, or any man, knows where to have them." No theory shows us "where to have" the Dichter, where, or when, or in what circumstances he did whatever he is supposed to have done.