a huge racial inspiration.  But Dante had something more:  a purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.  Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as “the most important poetical monument existing.”  Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.  But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe—­to name only poets of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul-symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.

Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism.  If there is paucity of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his surgery.  I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way.  Now Poetry essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations are with the Soul.

“From Homer and Polygnotus,” says Goethe, “I daily learn more and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell.”  A truth, so far as it goes:  this Earth is hell; there is no hell, says H.P.  Blavatsky, but a man-bearing planet.  But we demand of the greatest, that they shall see beyond hell into Heaven.  Homer achieves his grandeur oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the bright Reality.  Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy, Helen says: 

“Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders,
Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus—­
Own dear brethren of mine,—­one parent loved us as infants. 
Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved
Lacedaimon? 
Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound
through the waters,
Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes,
All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?”

And then: 

Hos phato.  Tous d’ede kalechen phusizoos aia,
En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie.

“—­So spake she; but they long since under Earth were
reposing
There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon.”

[From Dr. Hawtrey’s translation, quoted by Matthew Arnold in On Translating Homer.]

There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner.  Then there is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos: 

“Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness known to mortals was granted them:  the one on the mountain, the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded Muses sing.”