Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/240

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS of Homer himself. The best scholars have become reluctant to give any credence to the historical import of the Iliad and Odyssey, and indeed of the glorious procession of the Athenian masterpieces, whose themes were largely taken from the episodes and traditions gathered in the measures of the blind Ionian bard. The geography and narrative of Herodotos were long under a similar cloud. The known absurdities gravely interspersed throughout his history stamped him as a marvel-monger, and served to vitiate the entire record of the Pierian books.

But in our own time a change has marked the opinion of the critical world. The exact research of modern travellers and geographers has proved that Herodotos, while overcredulous in minor and hearsay matters, was correct in essentials, even to the general topography and ethnology of the remote portions of Central Africa. And as for Homer, we begin to see in his poems a single creation, rather than a growth, and again to conceive of his simple and poetic individuality,—a blind, gray-bearded, heaven-endowed minstrel, wandering from Smyrna to Greece, and there from province to province, idealizing the history of his heroic period and race, and, either by oral or scriptural methods, fastening his ballad-epics upon time itself, so that, handed down from sire to son, they became the enduring treasure of all generations of mankind. We begin to feel—making allowance for the supernaturalism of an age when nothing was known of the earth itself, beyond the pillars of Herakles on the West and the Ganges on the East—when the gods were [226]