It was well that the handling of Homer should cease altogether for a time, when the characters and scenes belonging to his subject had become so thoroughly anti-Homeric, that they only falsified what they ought to have assisted to perpetuate. An interval has followed, during which they have been allowed to repose. It would be hazardous to conjecture, after the failures of so many ages, how far they can hereafter be satisfactorily reproduced. It has been reserved for Goethe, with his vigorous grasp of classical antiquity, to tread regions bordering upon that of the Iliad and Odyssey with the consciousness of a master’s power. In his ‘Iphigenie,’ for example, he has given to his scenes, events, and characters the tone and colouring, with which alone they ought to be invested. And, if the study and investigation of Homer shall henceforward be carried on with a zeal at all proportioned to the advantages of the present age, they cannot fail to accumulate materials, which it may be permitted us to hope that future genius will mould into such forms as, if only they are faithful to the spirit of their original, must alike abound in beauty, truth, and grandeur, and alike avail for the delight and the instruction of mankind.
Conclusion.
We have now walked, in the train and in the light of the great Poet of antiquity, through a long, yet, so far at least as he is a party, not a barren circuit. We have begun with his earliest legends, faintly glimmering upon us from the distance of an hundred generations. We have seen the creations of his mind live and move, breathe and almost burn before us, under the power and magic of his art. We have found him to have shaped a great and noble mould of humanity, separate indeed from our experience, but allied through a thousand channels with our sympathies. We have seen the greatness of our race at one and the same time adorned with the simplicity of its childhood, and built up in the strength of its maturity. We have seen it unfold itself in the relations of society and sex, in peace and in war, in things human and things divine; and have examined it under the varied lights of comparison and contrast. We have seen how the memory of that great age, and of its yet greater Poet, has been cherished: how the trust which he bequeathed to mankind has been acknowledged, and yet how imperfectly it has been discharged. We have striven to trace the fate of some among his greatest creations; and having accompanied them down the stream of years even to our own day, it is full time to part. Nemesis must not find me[1097],
ἢ νῦν δηθύνοντ’, ἢ ὕστερον αὖθις ἰόντα.
To pass from the study of Homer to the ordinary business of the world is to step out of a palace of enchantments into the cold grey light of a polar day. But the spells, in which this sorcerer deals, have no affinity with that drug from Egypt[1098], which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference: rather they are like the φάρμακον ἐσθλὸν, the remedial specific[1099], which, freshening the understanding by contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of duty.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Page xvii.
[2] Merope; by Matthew Arnold, pp. 94, 135.