lves. Now Homer was a deal more
like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:
he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his
contemporaries. Men in those days, he says, were of huger
stature than they are now. And yet, when his imagination is not
actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero,
real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to
obtrude on him. So he lets in bits now and again that belong to
the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of
Hesiod's dismal picture.

Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his
songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just
now, "in the ancient sacred hymns." As Shakespeare was first an
actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on
his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old
hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker
of new ones. He saw the wretched condition of his people,
contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and
was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as
yoke-fellow with race-pride. You shall see presently how the
intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been
something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression: he had
seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to
fate no quality but cruelty. Impassioned by what we may call
patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for
Greek epic: the story of a Greek contest with and victory over
West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West
Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and
Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth
the hand of the great enemy, fate. In different moods and at
different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a
large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.

And the Odyssey? Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his
old age. Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and
many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and
there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all. Someone
says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than
from that of Homer. I do not know. It is a better story than
the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind. Yet
it, too, must be said no