would be dark indeed, if its champions were to continue wasting their energies on an object before having brought it within their constitutional grasp. The obvious duty of the Prussian Liberals is to begin by extending their parliamentary competence. There is, as yet, no monarchy, however limited, where the king does not enjoy the exclusive right of making war and peace. The people are supposed to hold the purse-strings, but the initiative belongs to the king. Royalty naturally clings to this prerogative, which is, in fact, the last shred of reality left to it. But the sooner this, too, is wrested from it, the better it will be for mankind. The Prussian Liberals will do well to make this a plank of their future platform. Their strenuous opposition to the war budget never implied any Quakerish unwillingness to fight for their country, but only a disapprobation of secret diplomacy. In the present case, the political horizon seemed cloudless. If a storm was brewing, why did not our Fitzroys hoist their drums and cones in time? When the storm has begun, it is the fashion to call upon the people to "do their duty." Even Napoleon had learned this Nelsonian phrase. But what duty? the people may ask. And who is the "God of battles" whom both king and emperor invoke as if he were a special court deity of their own?

It is difficult to judge of the righteousness of a war. Popularity proves nothing, the emotional surface being generally the same in both hostile camps. Both Greeks and Trojans shout and boast, and think but little about the royal "deliria" which they are called upon to atone for. But if the goodness of a cause is rarely absolute, and if the popularity of the war, the pugnacity of the soldier, is the result, rather than the cause, of its outbreak, the real test of its legitimacy must be sought in popular initiative. The readiness of assent to a war declared by a king shows nothing beyond the degree of culture reached by the people. But the spontaneity of popular demand, the initiative taken by the representatives of the people, would make any war, if not righteous, at least technically legitimate, inasmuch as the responsibility for international butchery would rest on those on whom it ought to rest; neither on an individual nor on ignorant masses, but on the lawgivers of the nation.

ERNST GRYZANOVSKI.

ART. III. MR. BRYANT'S TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD.

ΑΝ age that has so many things to study and admire as ours cannot understand the large space Homer filled in the Greek mind. His poems were to the Greeks, in their best days, at once the standard of perfection in literature, the proud record of their early history, the chief text-book of education, and the Bible of their religion. If our civilization were as independent of Greece as of India or China, they would still be a fascinating and instructive study. But who can say how much we owe to them? A critic of authority asserts that "the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods." * With at least as much truth it may be said that Homer is a more important name in English literature than Shakespeare. The activity of modern mind is traced to what we call the revival of letters, that is, of Greek thought and taste; and all that Greece left to the world was but the harvest of which Homer was the seed. It is easy, therefore, to justify the persistent efforts of recent scholarship and genius to bring these poems into our mother tongue; and only a rash and narrow judgment will conclude in haste that the forty metrical translations of the Iliad already published, and the new one that appears every year, are wasted labor. The author of each of them has seen before him a staring gap in our literature, and has tried to fill it, and such attempts are sure to be continued until the work is pronounced, by common consent, either achieved or impossible.

Mr. Bryant's translation of the Iliad has peculiar claims upon critical attention, both because it is the work of a poet eminent for his original writings, and because it has already won much favor with the people. Most of Mr. Bryant's predecessors in this field are known only to a few students, and by the association of their names with Homer. But three of them can be called English poets; of these, Chapman published the Iliad in 1611, Pope in 1720, and Cowper in 1791.

* Edinburgh Review, No. LXXXV. p. 343.

Only one more, the Earl of Derby, whose work appeared in 1864, has found a very wide circle of readers. Mr. Bryant's Iliad comes to us, too, at a time when Homeric translation has been actively discussed by scholars, poets, and critics. Some of the questions this subject suggests have drawn opposite opinions from writers of great intelligence, and remain unsettled in the general mind; yet the discussion seems to have reached some definite and valuable results, worthy to be gathered with care. And all that is new and important in these results depends so closely upon the wonderful progress which criticism has made, during the last eighty years, in the understanding of the Homeric poems themselves, that it can be properly approached only through what is called "the Homeric controversy," the most fiercely contested battle-field in the history of literature and perhaps the most important. For the issue is not upon a mere question of classical learning; it is not, which of two opinions we shall hold concerning Homer. The fury of the hosts that gathered around Attila in the plain of Chalons, and struggled from dawn to thick night for a little hill beside the Marne, was not kindled by the desire to possess that hill. And the spirits of the dead, who rose from the field and clouded the sky over it with conflict, were destinies contending for Europe and mankind. So the controversy about these poems is between two schools of thought, two methods of inquiry, and a whole intellectual empire is at stake. All traditional and conservative forces are gathered and intrenched on one side; all the sceptical and progressive forces, to which the fresh activities and splendid victories of modern thought are due, advance against them on the other. The struggle links itself on every side with the competing methods of inquiry in other provinces, and a complete history of it would be an epitome of the history of criticism in its best age, and its most characteristic features.

When we ask, What was the origin of the Greek epic poems ? ancient records give no answer. In all the monuments of Greek history there is not a word of evidence upon the subject. Homer is but a name for the old collections of poetry; and nothing tells us when or how it became connected with them. There are many volumes of learned researches into

what is called the testimony of antiquity concerning them; but they might almost as well be filled with inquiries into ancient records of the origin of the sun. Both Wolf and his opponents gather from Ælian, Josephus, Lucian, Pausanias, and Cicero assertions or so-called traditions about Homer; much as an industrious compiler might be supposed to "collate" all that Shakespeare, William Harrison Ainsworth, and the Windsor Castle guide-books say about Herne the Hunter, and call the result "the historical testimony" concerning him. The Greek race enters history with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric hymns, substantially as we have them, in its hands; all that the Greeks believed concerning them they inferred from the text of the poems, and we have but the same source of information. Yet their unquestioning belief that all these works were the productions of one great mind is not entertained by any scholar of the nineteenth century. There are still men of intelligence who defend what they call "Homeric unity" against sceptical criticism, and who appeal to the belief of the ancients in it as an authority for us; but not one of them will deny that the so-called Homeric hymns are demonstrably fragments from different minds and different ages; or that Thucydides himself, the most critical intellect of Greece before Aristotle, was mistaken in confidently ascribing to Homer even the best of them, the composite hymn to Apollo. The appeal, so often heard, to "the united testimony of antiquity, that one Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey," is utterly misleading. There is no such testimony; and the ancient belief in Homer has precisely the same weight in favor of the hymns that it has in favor of the epic narratives; if it proves what those who plead it claim, it proves also what they deny. To him who knows anything of the nature of traditional belief or of the history of apocryphal books, the ancient Greek assumption of one author for the poetry they loved and admired, is the easiest fact to account for. That it was general does not, in the absence of all evidence, raise any presumption as to their origin. It would have been as general, had the poems been found in an old chest. The undisciplined mind has an infantile intolerance of doubt; the unclaimed goods of tradition are quick to find an owner; and just as all the myths

and stories of superhuman strength clustered closely around the one heroic name of Heracles, so it was enough to give a name to the demigod of poetry, and all the noble song of the nation was ascribed to it.

The student must therefore turn to the poems, without prepossessions, and ask of them what they are. The Iliad and the Odyssey differ widely from any literature of our own day. They come to us as "books," but the first step towards understanding them is to free the mind from all its associations with a book, and to conceive how little they have in common with the writings even of poets. Modern poetry has its own dialect, and is addressed to people of culture; they speak to the rude throng of men, in their own homely words. The favorite verse of these times seeks effect in pregnant allusions, in fanciful metaphors, in nicety and refinement of thought and language; but none of these exist in Homer. Authors write carefully at their desks, for the reading eye, which can linger upon words and lines; but the epic stories are addressed directly to the ear, which hears once and continuously; and their power lies wholly in the persons, things, and incidents which they bring broadly and clearly before the mind, and in the melody with which they charm the ear. They are the popular ballads of a society as strange to the Greeks whom we know in history as to ourselves; one in which passions are fierce and outspoken, the arts of peace are rudimentary, war is the only work for greatness, and strength and cunning are the measures of a man. They were certainly composed among a people to whom written poems were unknown; and they were designed for recitation to throngs of warriors, to whose martial spirit their appeal is the most effective ever made in words. They set us in a world of men without an alphabet, with keener eyes and ears, simpler lives and directer passions, than ours; and no world of men has ever found nobler or more adequate expression than this has in them. Their greatness is wonderful and valuable to us, precisely because it is the most different conceivable from all other literary greatness. Every nation has its popular ballads, but the best are to them as turbid pools to the ocean. Other races have their ancient epics. Northmen, Poles, Gaels, Germans, have immemorial songs of war which fond students