Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/122

98 invents a plot ; he merely works up old materials, as Shakespeare did when he combined old folktales and scraps of some ancient chronicle into a Hamlet, or a Lear. To assert this is not to detract in any way from the genius of the poet. In nothing is the supreme skill of Homer more apparent than in the deftness with which he has woven one tale into the structure of another ; he has thus given us not a crude mosaic, but a well-connected product of sheer poetic art. Equally noteworthy is his eclecticism, by which he drops what is coarse or ridiculous in the tradition with which he deals, and concentrates attention on all that is pure and artistic. The Homeric poems, like the Vedas and the Indian Epics, are in no sense primitive. The state of society which they depict is far removed from that crude savagery of which the natives of Tasmania and Australia are familiar types. There are even indications, such as the frank detestation of war, the naïve unconsciousness of disgrace in retreating before the foe in battle, the exaltation of cunning and wordly wisdom in the case of Odysseus, which point to the probability that the lays were sung to a people in a state of decadence from the heroic ideal. But with all this we have many survivals of early custom scattered through the poems. These we may regard either as cases of pseudo-archaism, where the poet of a polished age strives to reproduce the colour of an earlier time ; or with more probability we may consider them fragments of the more ancient folk tradition which the poet used ; sometimes, perhaps, without striving to realise their real meaning, or with that contempt for detail which is characteristic of the higher art. Some of these survivals, like the fossils and scraps of older rock which the geologist digs out of the newer conglomerate, we may find, I venture to think, in the poems, particularly in connection with the law of land and marriage, without some examination of which it seems to me impossible to understand the Saga of the Wooing ; and