Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/27

 1893.] Bertillonage, and the combined data would make identification absolutely sure. Mr. Galton, after considering the identification value of finger-prints, makes some study of the heredity of patterns, which he believes to exist; he finds considerable resemblances also between twins. His study of finger-prints of different races is not very extensive; but he has studied some material from Welsh, Hebrew, Negro, and Basque sources. From this he concludes that there are no ethnic peculiarities. It seems to us, however, that such a conclusion is premature.

Such, in brief, is Mr. Galton's work, remarkable alike for its originality, its practical importance, and its scientific value. author:Frederick Starr

 

Did Homer write the "Iliad," or was it another man of the same name? This question,—as Matthew Arnold tells us, with his characteristic impatience of laborious futility,—has been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, with genius even; but it has the inconvenience that there really exist no data for determining it. And yet. unmindful of Seneca's warning that life is too short to debate the authorship of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," Mr. Andrew Lang, master in the art of evading vain logomachy with an epigram, now inflicts upon a book-ridden world four hundred pages of supererogatory demonstration that the German higher criticism of Homer is naught. Is he preparing a volume to disprove the Baconian authorship of the plays of Shakespeare?

As a student, I perused two or three thousand pages of erudite German and Latin treatises in order to earn the right to enjoy my Homer in peace. But I date from two memorable conversations the final illuminating and restful conviction that the Homeric question should be relegated to the large leisure of Milton's fallen angels, along with the free-will controversy, the problem of the nature and origin of the Roman gens, and the determination of the dates of the Platonic dialogues. I was once talking with a well-known German Homerid about certain favorite passages in the closing books of the "Iliad,"—the lament of Briseis over the body of Patroclus, and the threnodies of Andromache and Helen for Hector. These passages my interlocutor had pronounced late interpolations; and, half in jest, I expressed my regret at the sacrifice of this exquisite poetry on the altar of science. "Yes," he gravely replied, "they are not by Homer, but were all composed by one interpolator who had a special talent for dirges." The other conversation was an argument with an American colleague, a distinguished professor of comparative philology. Our debate terminated in the "mere oppugnancy" of assertion and counter-assertion. It was to him axiomatic that no early Greek poet could have employed for variety or metri causa any dialectic form not familiar to his infancy in his native isle or canton. And he also stoutly maintained that there was an irreconcilable contradiction between the last line of the first Iliad, in which Zeus and all the Gods go to bed (or to sleep), and the first lines of the second book, in which "the other gods slumbered all night, but sweet sleep did not hold Zeus." Neither of these affirmations would "shine in on me," as the Germans say, and the debate ceased from want of common standing-ground of principles.

Now Mr. Lang's book is a prolonged printed conversation of this type with the German Homerids, and with his friend Mr. Walter Leaf, who has wasted much good paper on these themes in his otherwise excellent edition of the "Iliad," and in his recently-published "Companion to the Iliad," which would be much more companionable if it were not stuffed with this unsatisfying sawdust. In his introductory chapters, Mr. Lang retells the thrice-told tale of the Homeric controversy from the days of Wolf, summarizing and refuting point by point Wolf's famous but much overrated "Prolegomena." He then analyzes in detail the story of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," smoothing over the hitches in the plot detected by exigent German exegesis, and defending the more important of the passages that have been stigmatized as interpolations. It is a wearisome business, as Mr. Lang says, to undo the "knots in the bulrush" which this pettifogging criticism is perpetually discovering. A few specimens must suffice. Herr Fick, for example, rejects the fight over the body of Patroclus because the prologue explicitly declares that the wrath of Achilles gave the bodies of heroes to the dogs and the birds. As if there were nothing in "Paradise Lost" that the heavenly muse is not bidden to sing in the prologue! Diomede, when confronted with the unknown Glaucus in the sixth book of the