ore probably
perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction;
but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories
are set, the background of human life and society upon which they
are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance,
and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what
the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest
phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the
picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of
things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it,
extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the
product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders,
but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to
start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out
of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty
and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any
verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy,
or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have
no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life. But it is
exactly here that the realism of the Homeric world strikes the
student. It is not vague--on the contrary, the preciseness of its
detail is almost as striking, sometimes almost as prosaic, as the
detail which makes Robinson Crusoe the most realistic of all works
of fiction; and while its splendours are such as we look for in
vain in early historic Greece, and are certainly not borrowed from
the great civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, they are
such as we can perfectly well believe to have existed, and such
as can be perfectly well paralleled, though in widely different
styles, by Babylonia or by Thebes.

Was it not more likely that a picture so precise in its outlines,
and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous
details, should have had behind it something, probably a great
deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have
been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented
to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father
Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though
with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination
which we find in the subject of the poems as distinct from the
poems themselves. It may be that this effect is due to the art
o