The stories of
the flight of Helen, of the siege of Troy, the anger of Achilles,
the valour of Hector, and the love of Andromache, of the wanderings
of much-enduring Odysseus, and the trials of his faithful wife,
Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, more probably
perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction;
but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories
are set, the background of human life and society upon which they
are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance,
and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what
the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest
phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the
picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of
things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it,
extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the
product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders,
but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to
start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out
of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty
and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any
verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy,
or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have
no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life.
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