Though comparison is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and saga, decided that “in our country, as in others, we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems. These poems must be studied in themselves, without looking for aid, in this sense, to the comparative method.” 356 Part of this conclusion seems to us rather hasty. In a brief manual Sir Richard had not space for a thorough comparative study of old heroic poetry at large. His quoted sources are: for India, Lassen; for France, Mr. Saintsbury’s Short History of French Literature (sixteen pages on this topic), and a work unknown to me, by “M. Paul”; for Iceland he only quoted The Encyclopedia Britannica (Mr. Edmund Gosse); for Germany, Lachmann and Bartsch; for the Finnish Kalewala, the Encyclopedia Britannica (Mr. Sime and Mr. Keltie); and for England, a Primer of English Literature by Mr. Stopford Brooke.

These sources appear less than adequate, and Celtic heroic romance is entirely omitted. A much deeper and wider comparative criticism of early heroic national poetry is needed, before any one has a right to say that the study cannot aid our critical examination of the Homeric problem. Many peoples have passed through a stage of culture closely analogous to that of Achaean society as described in the Iliad and Odyssey. Every society of this kind has had its ruling military class, its ancient legends, and its minstrels who on these legends have based their songs. The similarity of human nature under similar conditions makes it certain that comparison will discover useful parallels between the poetry of societies separated in time and space but practically identical in culture. It is not much to the credit of modern criticism that a topic so rich and interesting has been, at least in England, almost entirely neglected by Homeric scholars.

Meanwhile, it is perfectly correct to say, as Sir Richard observes, that “we fail to find any true parallel to the case of the Homeric poems,” for we nowhere find the legends of an heroic age handled by a very great poet — the greatest of all poets — except in the Iliad and Odyssey. But, on the other hand, the critics refuse to believe that, in the Iliad and Odyssey, we possess the heroic Achaean legends handled by one great poet. They find a composite by many hands, good and bad, and of many ages, they say; sometimes the whole composition and part of the poems are ascribed to a late littérateur. Now to that supposed state of things we do find several “true parallels,” in Germany, in Finland, in Ireland. But the results of work by these many hands in many ages are anything but “a true parallel” to the results which lie before us in the Iliad and Odyssey. Where the processes of composite authorship throughout many Ages certainly occur, as in Germany and Ireland, there we find no true parallel to the Homeric poems. It follows that, in all probability, no such processes as the critics postulate produced the Iliad and Odyssey, for where the processes existed, beyond doubt they failed egregiously to produce the results.

Sir Richard’s argument would have been logical if many efforts by many hands, in many ages, in England, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, and Germany did actually produce true parallels to the Achaean epics. They did not, and why not? Simply because these other races had no Homer. All the other necessary conditions were present, the legendary material, the heroic society, the Court minstrels, all — except the great poet. In all the countries mentioned, except Finland, there existed military aristocracies with their courts, castles, and minstrels, while the minstrels had rich material in legendary history and in myth, and M?rchen, and old songs. But none of the minstrels was adequate to the production of an English, German, or Irish Iliad or Odyssey, or even of a true artistic equivalent in France.

We have tried to show that the critics, rejecting a Homer, have been unable to advance any adequate hypothesis to account for the existence of the Iliad and Odyssey. Now we see that, where such conditions of production as they postulate existed but where there was no great epic genius, they can find no true parallels to the Epics. Their logic thus breaks down at both ends.

It may be replied that in non-Greek lands one condition found in Greek society failed: the succession of a reading age to an age of heroic listeners. But this is not so. In France and Germany an age of readers duly began, but they did not mainly read copies of the old heroic poems. They turned to lyric poetry, as in Greece, and they recast the heroic songs into modern and popular forms in verse and prose, when they took any notice of the old heroic poems at all.

One merit of the Greek epics is a picture of “a certain phase of early civilisation,” and that picture is “a naturally harmonious whole,” with “unity of impression,” says Sir Richard Jebb. 357 Certainly we can find no true parallel, on an Homeric scale, to this “harmonious picture” in the epics of Germany and England or in the early literature of Ireland. Sir Richard, for England, omits notice of Beowulf; but we know that Beowulf, a long heroic poem, is a mass of anachronisms — a heathen legend in a Christian setting. The hero, that great heathen champion, has his epic filled full of Christian allusions and Christian morals, because the clerical redactor, in Christian England, could not but intrude these things into old pagan legends evolved by the continental ancestors of our race. He had no “painful anxiety,” like the supposed Ionic continuators of the Achaean poems (when they are not said to have done precisely the reverse), to preserve harmony of ancient ideas. Such archaeological anxieties are purely modern.

If we take the Nibelungenlied, 358 we fi............