Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/210

 ;94 HISTORY OF GREECE. Achill&is would have been a long poem, half the length of the present Iliad, and probably not less compact in its structure than the Odyssey. Moreover, being parted off only by an imaginary line from the boundless range of the Trojan Avar, it would admit of enlargement more easily, and with greater relish to hearers, than the adventures of one single hero ; while the expansion would naturally take place by adding new Grecian victory, since the original poem arrived at the exaltation of Achilles only through a painful series of Grecian disasters. That the poem under these circumstances should have received additions, is no very violent hypothesis : in fact, when we recollect that the integrity both of the Achilleis and of the Odyssey was neither guarded by printing nor writing, we shall perhaps think it less wonderful that the former was enlarged, 1 than that the latter was not. Any relaxation of the laws of epical unity is a small price to pay for that splendid poetry, of which we find so much between the first and the eighth books of our Iliad. The question respecting unity of authorship is different, and more difficult to determine, than that respecting consistency of parts, and sequence in the narrative. A poem conceived on a comparatively narrow scale may be enlarged afterwards by its original author, with greater or less coherence and success : the 1 Tliis tendency to insert new homogeneous matter by new poets into poems already existing, is noticed by M. Fauriel, in reference to the Romans of the Middle Ages : " C'est tm phenomene remarquable dans Thistoire de la poe'sie epique, que cettc disposition, cette tendance constante du gout populaire a amalgamer, a Her en une seule et meme composition le plus possible des compositions diverses, cette disposition persiste chez un peuple, tant que la poe'sie con- serve un reste de vie ; tant qu'elle s'y transmct par la tradition et qu'elle y circule a 1'aide du chant ou des recitations publiques. Elle cesse partout ou la poe'sie est nne fois fixe'e dans les livrcs, et n'agit plus que par la lecture, cette dcrniere e'poque est pour ainsi dire, celle de la propriete poetique celle ou chaque podte pretend a une existence, a une gloire, personnelles ; et oti la pc&ie ccsse d'etre une espece de tre'sor commun dont le peuple jouit et dispose a sa maniere, sans s'inqnie'ter des individus qui le lui ont fait." (Fauriel, Sur les Romans Chevaleresques, leqon Dmo, Rcvuc des Deux Mondes, vol. xiii. p. 707.) M. Fauriel thinks that the Shah Kameh of Ferdusi was an amalgamation of epic poems originally separate, and that probably tho Mahabharat was w LiO (ib. 708).