Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/178

 162 HISTORY OF GREECE. Since that time, an elaborate study has been bestowed upon tin early manifestations of poetry (Sagen-poesie) among other na- tions; and the German critics especially, among whom this description of literature has been most cultivated, have selected it as the only appropriate analogy for the Homeric poems. Such poetry, consisting for the most part of short, artless effusions, with little of deliberate or far-sighted combination, has been assumed by many critics as a fit standard to apply for measuring i he capacities of the Homeric age; an age exclusively of speak- ers, singers, and hearers, not of readers or writers. In place of the unbounded admiration which was felt for Homer, not merely as a poet of detail, but as constructor of a long epic, at the time when Wolf wrote his Prolegomena, the tone of criticism passed to the opposite extreme, and attention was fixed entirely upon the defects in the arrangement of the Iliad and Odyssey. What- ever was to be found in them of symmetry or pervading system, was pronounced to be decidedly post-Homeric. Under such pre- conceived anticipations, Homer seems to have been generally studied in Germany, during the generation succeeding Wolf, the negative portion of whose theory was usually admitted, though as to the positive substitute, what explanation was to be given of the history and present constitution of the Homeric poems, there was by no means the like agreement. During* the last ten years, however, a contrary tendency has manifested itself; the Wolfian theory has been reexamined and shaken by Nitzsch, who, as well as 0. Miiller, Welcker, and other scholars, have revived the idea of original Homeric unity, under certain modifi- cations. The change in Gothe's opinion, coincident with this new direction, is recorded in one of his latest works. 1 On the cxplosa est eorum ratio, qui Homerum et Callimachum et Virgilium ct Nonnura ct Miltonum eodem animo legunt, nee quid uniuscujusque aetas fcrat, expendcre legendo ct computare laborant," etc. A similar and earlier attempt to construe the Homeric poems with refer- ence to their age, is to be seen in the treatise called 11 Vero Omero of Vico, marked with a good deal' of original thought, but not strong in erudition (Opere di Vico, ed. Milan, vol. v. pp. 437-497). ' In the forty-sixth volume of his collected works, in the little treatist " Homer, noch cinmal:" compare G. Lange, Ueber die Kvklischen Dichter (Mainz 1837), Preface, p. vi.