We cannot refrain from contemplating such possibilities.  If we are to be at home with Homer there must be no sitting on the edge of one’s chair dazzled by the splendour of his reputation.  He was after all only a literary man, and those who occupy themselves with letters must approach him as a very honoured member of their own fraternity, but still as one who must have felt, thought, and acted much as themselves.  He struck oil, while we for the most part succeed in boring only; still we are his literary brethren, and if we would read his lines intelligently we must also read between them.  That one so shrewd, and yet a dreamer of such dreams as have been vouchsafed to few indeed besides himself—­that one so genially sceptical, and so given to looking into the heart of a matter, should have been in such perfect harmony with his surroundings as to think himself in the best of all possible worlds—­this is not believable.  The world is always more or less out of joint to the poet—­generally more so; and unfortunately he always thinks it more or less his business to set it right—­generally more so.  We are all of us more or less poets—­generally, indeed, less so; still we feel and think, and to think at all is to be out of harmony with much that we think about.  We may be sure, then, that Homer had his full share of troubles, and also that traces of these abound up and down his work if we could only identify them, for everything that everyone does is in some measure a portrait of himself; but here comes the difficulty—­not to read between the lines, not to try and detect the hidden features of the writer—­this is to be a dull, unsympathetic, incurious reader; and on the other hand to try and read between them is to be in danger of running after every Will o’ the Wisp that conceit may raise for our delusion.

I believe it will help you better to understand the broad humour of the Iliad, which we shall presently reach, if you will allow me to say a little more about the general characteristics of the poem.  Over and above the love and war that are his main themes, there is another which the author never loses sight of—­I mean distrust and dislike of the ideas of his time as regards the gods and omens.  No poet ever made gods in his own image more defiantly than the author of the Iliad.  In the likeness of man created he them, and the only excuse for him is that he obviously desired his readers not to take them seriously.  This at least is the impression he leaves upon his reader, and when so great a man as Homer leaves an impression it must be presumed that he does so intentionally.  It may be almost said that he has made the gods take the worse, not the better, side of man’s nature upon them, and to be in all respects as we ourselves—­yet without virtue.  It should be noted, however, that the gods on the Trojan side are treated far more leniently than those who help the Greeks.