After having myself tested the text as to its self-consistency and otherwise, in several thousand places, I find scarcely one or two places in each thousand, where it seems to invite expurgation in order to establish the consistency of its contents. The evidence on which I really place reliance is experimental evidence: and that I find in the poems, accumulated to a degree which no other human work within my knowledge approaches. I do not presume to hope more than that the more remote and general arguments, which have now been used, may assist in removing preliminary barriers to the consideration of the one cardinal and paramount argument, the text itself and its contents.
And here a brief reference must be made to the scepticism in miniature which has replaced the more sweeping incredulity of Wolf and his school. Editors of great weight, refusing to accompany even the Chorizontes in separating the authorship of the poems, nevertheless freely condemn particular passages. I do not deny that there are various passages, of which the genuineness is fair matter for discussion. But I confess that I find such grounds of excision, as those commonly alleged by critics recommending it, very indeterminate, and of a nature to leave it doubtful where their operation is to stop. They generally involve arbitrary assumptions either of construction or of history, or the application of a more rigid and literal rule of consistency than poetry either requires or can endure, or else the capital error, as I cannot but consider it, of bringing Homer to be tried at the bar of later and inferior traditions. And there is a want of common principles, a general insecurity of standing ground, and an appearance of reforming Homer not according to any acknowledged laws of criticism, but according to the humour of each accomplished and ingenious man: which, in a matter of this weight, is no sufficient guarantee. I therefore follow in the line of those, whose recommendation is to draw every thing we can out of the present text; and to see how far its contents may constitute a substantive and consistent whole, in the various branches of information to which they refer. When we have carried this process as far as it will bear, we may find, first that many or some of the seeming discordancies are really embraced within a comprehensive general harmony, and secondly that with a fuller knowledge of the laws of that harmony we may ourselves be in a condition at least of less incapacity to pronounce what is Homeric and what is not. I will only say that were I to venture into this field of criticism, I should be governed less than is usual by discrepancies of fact often very hastily assumed; and much more than is usual by any violence done to the finer analogies of which Homer is so full, and by departures from his regular modes of thought, feeling, and representation.
Sect. 6.—The Place and Authority of Homer in Historical Inquiry.
The principal and final purpose, which I wish to present in the most distinct manner to the mind of the reader, is that of securing for the Homeric traditions, estimated according to the effect of the foregoing considerations, a just measure of relative as well as absolute appreciation.
It appears to me that there has prevailed in this respect a wide-spread and long-continued error, assuming various forms, and affecting in very different degrees, without doubt, the practice of different writers, but so extended and so rooted, as at this stage in the progress of criticism to require formal challenge. I mean, that it is an error to regard and accept all ancient traditions, relating to the periods that precede regular historic annals, as of equal value, or not to discriminate their several values with adequate care. Above all, I strongly contend that we should assign to the Homeric evidence a primary rank upon all the subjects which it touches, and that we should make it a rule to reduce all other literary testimony, because of later origin, to a subordinate and subsidiary position.
Mere rumours or stories of the pre-historic times are not, as such, entitled to be called traditions. A story of this kind, say in Apollodorus, may indeed by bare possibility be older than any thing in Homer; but if it comes to us without the proper and visible criteria of age, it has no claim upon our assent as a truthful record of the time to which it purports to refer. Traditions of this class only grow to be such, as a general rule, for us, at the time when they take a positive form in the work of some author, who thus becomes, as far as his time and circumstances permit, a witness to them. It is only from thenceforward, that their faithful derivation and transmission can be relied on as in any degree probable.
Again, I cast aside statements with respect to which the poet, being carried beyond the sphere of his ordinary experience, must, on that account, not be presumed to speak historically; yet even here, if he is speaking of matters which were in general belief, he is a witness of the first class with respect to that belief, which is itself in another sense a matter of history; and here also those, who have followed him at a remote date, are witnesses of a lower order.
Or there may be cases, as, for instance, in the stubborn facts of geography, where the laws of evidence compel us rudely to thrust aside the declaration of the bard; or cases where his mode of handling his materials affords in itself a proof that he did not mean to speak historically, but, in the phrase of Aristotle, ἐκπληκτικῶς, or for poetic effect.
Or again, it is conceivable, though I do not know whether it has happened, that Homeric testimony might come into conflict, not with mere counter-assertion, but with those forms of circumstantial evidence which are sometimes conclusively elicited by reasoning from positive data of architecture, language, and ethnology. I claim for Homer no exemption from the more cogent authority which may attach to reasoning of this kind.