ger (Odysseus), has recourse to a simile: "Even as when a man gazes on a minstrel, whom the gods have taught to sing words of yearning joy to mortals, and they have a ceaseless desire to hear him, so long as he will sing, even so he charmed me, sitting by me in the halls.”

The Greek

power.

Thus the minstrel appears in the Odyssey as a singer whom men believe to be directly moved by the gods or by the Muse; he sings in the halls of chieftains, accompanying his song with the lyre; and his song is ordinarily a lay of moderate compass, dealing with some episode complete in itself, such as the making of the wooden horse, taken from a larger story, such as the tale of Troy. But there are two points above all others that deserve notice. The first is the minstrel's rapt attention with which the audience listens, the strong power of the minstrel over their emotions. This entirely agrees with the vivid picture of the effects produced, in a later age (circ. 400-350 B. C.), by the Homeric rhapsode, as described in Plato's Ion. The other point is the phrase used to denote the general class of themes handled by the minstrels, the deeds of heroes, κλéα åvdpŵv. It is the same used in the Iliad to describe the subjects which Achilles sang to the lyre, for his own pleasure and that of Patroclus, in his hut at Troy.

His themes.

In this phrase itself, however, there is nothing distinctive. The early age of almost every people

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER 39

can show forms of folk-lore and folk-song which could be described as the deeds of famous men, the legendary heroes of the race. The question is, What was distinctive in the Greek conception here, separating it from the conceptions formed by other races ?

The Nibelun

The early legends of a people commonly blend mythology with reminiscences more or less historical; but the proportions which the two elements bear to each other vary indefinitely in different cases. Sometimes mythology is paramount; the national saga serves mainly to preserve weird images of the supernatural, fantastic creations of a primitive fancy, which have fascinated the childhood of the race, and have continued to haunt its mind. As an instance, one might take the earlier shape of the story on which the German Nibelungenlied was founded, a story a story genlied. once common to the whole Teutonic stock. In the Nibelungenlied itself, no doubt, the mythological element has dwindled before the ethical, and history, though in a fantastic disguise, has contributed the persons of Attila and Theodoric. But the older Norse version of the story still moves in a world where dæmonic and magical agencies reign supreme; Brunhild is a valkyria, and Sigurd can metamorphose himself; the nominally human persons scarcely pertain to real humanity. Or such early folk-song may be directly Early English based on definite historical events, and war-poems. adhere pretty closely to facts; thus the early

French

chivalry:

war-poems of England in the tenth century, such as the "Battle Song of Brunan buhr" and the " Song of the Fight at Maldon," concern the real struggles against the Danes. And between these two poles there is an intermediate region, a class of legends in which the basis is historical, but in which a free fancy has given a new complexion to the facts, altering, shifting, combining them, mingling them with alloy, old or new, at its pleasure. This is what has happened, romances of for example, in some of the early French romances of chivalry, the so-called "Chansons de Geste." The great German Karl has become the French Charlemagne, with his capital at Paris instead of Aachen; he goes on crusades, and leads his armies against Jerusalem or Constantinople. But, amidst all these fantasies and impossibilities, the romances preserve the fundamental fact that there was a time when a single emperor ruled over western Europe from the Eider to the Ebro. And the same thing holds good of minor persons; thus the Roland of the romance is killed fighting against Saracens in the Pyrenees; and there was a real knight named Roland, who was indeed killed in Pyrenaean warfare, though his foes were the Gascons. Now the Iliad and the Odyssey are evidently more nearly analogous to the French romances of chivalry than to the primitive form of the Nibelungen lay, or to the early war-poetry of England. What exact

compared

with the HOmeric epics.

DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER

4I

measure of historical fact the Iliad contains, we cannot say: the analogy of the Carolingian romance would suggest that some Achaean king may once have held a dominion as extensive as that of Agamemnon, and that there were struggles in the Troad of the kind which the Iliad describes; inferences which are probable on grounds independent of such analogy. On the other hand, the supernatural agency is an organic part of the Iliad; the Homeric Achilles slays Hector with the aid of Athena; we are not logically justified in eliminating Athena, and still affirming as a fact that a Greek hero named Achilles slew a Trojan hero named Hector.

The essential difference between the French romances, considered as legends typical of a class, and the Homeric epics is this. In the French romances, widely as they depart from historical truth, the main interest is afforded by imagination. playing around history. The series of exploits constitutes the principal charm. These achievements, which the French poets and hearers ascribed to ancestors of their own, form the pith of the romances; the characters of the great men who do them, as, for instance, that of the poetical Charlemagne, however interesting, are of subordinate interest. Now, in the Homeric epics, the deeds of prowess ascribed to the legendary ancestors of noble Greek houses or clans were indeed sources of deep interest and pride to their descendants; so, too, were the achievements of

The human

meric poetry.

the Greek army, as a whole, against the Trojans. But the inmost secret of the spell exerted by Homeric epos does not reside in such sentiments. The supreme and distinctive work of the Homeric poet was to body forth those types in Ho- human types in which the Hellenic race recognized its own ideals, and in contemplating which it became conscious of itself. Not the successes won by Achilles, but Achilles himself, - not the adventures of Odysseus, but Odysseus himself, — made the Iliad and the Odyssey all that they were to the Greeks. The same remark applies to the minor human types in each epic, and, in the Olympian sphere, to the divine types; but it is in the central person of either poem that it is most significant.

Achilles.

Achilles is a young warrior of transcendent physical beauty and unequaled prowess; he is further characterized by the most vehement emotions, curbed with difficulty by strong self-command; he is a masterly orator, in whose speaking the most fiery passion is combined with the keenest power of sarcasm and the utmost force of argument; he is also in sympathy with the gentler graces of human life; the delight of his leisure in the camp is to sing the glories of heroes to the lyre; his tact and his courtesy are preeminent; he is chivalrous and tender towards the afflicted and the helpless. And he has also a peculiar pathos. Two fates, as his divine mother told him, were open to his choice; he might