The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
     Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace’s advice to the writer of Epic to plunge in medias res, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and intervals.  I believe that it lay—­though whether consciously or not he scarcely tells us—­at the bottom of Matthew Arnold’s mind when, selecting certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very first, Homer’s rapidity.  ‘First,’ he says, ’Homer is eminently rapid; and,’ he adds justly, ’to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien.’

Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why verse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold’s choice of rapidity to put in the forefront of Homer’s merits may seem merely capricious.  ’Homer (we say) has other great qualities.  Arnold himself indicates Homer’s simplicity, directness, nobility.  Surely either one of these should be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue with either?’

But when we see that the difficulty of verse-narrative lies just here; that the epic poet who is rapid has met, and has overcome, the capital difficulty of his form, then we begin to do justice not only to Arnold as a critic but (which is of far higher moment) to Homer as a craftsman.

The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact something daemonic.  He seems to shirk nothing:  and the effect of this upon critics is bewildering.  The acutest of them are left wondering how on earth an ordinary tale—­say of how some mariners beached ship, stowed sail, walked ashore and cooked their dinner—­can be made so poetical.  They are inclined to divide the credit between the poet and his fortunate age—­’a time’ suggests Pater ’in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture “in the great style” against a sky charged with marvels.’

Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius.  Just here it is rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, genius overcame it; yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical achievement is such a success.  Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in this technical triumph over the capital disability of annihilating flat passages.  I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists; because they have only to give a stage direction ’Enter Cassius, looking lean,’ and Cassius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer has in his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe