entre;
ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he contemplated--the
victor and the vanquished, the hunter and the hunted, the house and its
builder, Thersites and Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and the
stars, the gods and the laughter of the gods. He took no sides,
pronounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became pure vision; but
not passive vision. To see, he had to re-create; and the material his
observation had amassed he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of his
imagination. Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts ran
together and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a moment the
image arose of "a stately poplar falling by the axe in a meadow by the
riverside." Did a host move out to meet the foe? It recalled the ocean
shore where "wave follows wave far out at sea until they break in
thunder on the beach." Was battle engaged? "The clash of the weapons
rang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain-glades." Did a wounded
hero fall? The combatants gathered about him "like flies buzzing round
the brimming milk-pails in the spring." All commonest things, redeemed
from isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance with which
they were charged. The result was the actual made real, a reflexion
which was a disclosure, a reproduction which was a recreation. And if
experience, as we know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothing
beyond and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, no
purpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest reach of human
achievement.

For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision transmutes life, but
does not transcend it. Experience is ultimate; all the poet does is to
experience fully. Common men live, but do not realise life; he realises
it. But he does not question it; it is there and it is final; glorious,
lovely, august, terrible, sordid, cruel, unjust. And the partial,
smiling, unmoved, unaccountable Olympians are the symbol of its brute
actuality. Not only is there no explanation, there is not even a
question to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer's
outlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they
novels, is an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writing
1000 years before Christ would have been Homer; and Homer, writing now,
would have been Turgeneff or Balzac.

But Shelley could never have been Homer; for he was born a critic and a
rebel. From the