Paul Shorey

“ And yet he still persists in arguing, and grows too angry to be always amusing: "A critic who can seriously advance such a theory simply proves that he is incapable of understanding what poetry is." "It is possible to give people poetry, but impossible to give them the brains to understand and the hearts to feel it." ”

“ Lang also points out that Thackeray and Scott, in the days of proof-readers, could not attain to anything approaching the unfailing accuracy demanded by Homeric critics; he affirms that the lapses and nods of Homer are not discernible to the unmicroscopic eye, and that they never disturb any readers except "spectacled young Germans on their promotion"; he shows that philosophic consistency is not to be looked for in scenes where the gods play a part, "mythology being consistent only in inconsistency" ”

“ Lang retells the thrice-told tale of the Homeric controversy from the days of Wolf, summarizing and refuting point by point Wolf's famous but much overrated "Prolegomena." He then analyzes in detail the story of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," smoothing over the hitches in the plot detected by exigent German exegesis, and defending the more important of the passages that have been stigmatized as interpolations. It is a wearisome business, as Mr. Lang says, to undo the "knots in the bulrush" which this pettifogging criticism is perpetually discovering. ”

“ And, indeed, it does not require much insight into the logic of passion to see that an angry man may well spurn profferred atonement to-day, and yet cry out exultingly when he sees his enemy reduced to still more grievous straits on the morrow. ”

“ We cannot tell how far the roots of personality penetrate into the real nature of things; and since we have no right to dogmatize on either side, we may properly throw the weight of our moral and religious feelings into the scale of hope. ”

“ The critic can try the experiment with his night-shirt: he will be far from ingenious if he does not solve the problem."
More attractive than these polemics are the archæological and literary chapters at the end of Mr. Lang's volume. What is the relation of the Mycenæ finds to the art described in Homer? Closer study reveals that the two arts are not identical, as was incautiously assumed at first. How shall we date the art of Mycenæ by Egyptian or by Assyrian analogies? ”

“ To explain it we must assume a higher form of intelligence independent of the organism, and yet radically distinct from the active power of inventing signs for his own rational or moral ends, which is the peculiar prerogative of man. ”

“ At each of these points he erects a barrier and assumes a direct intervention of the living source of all existence. In defense of the first barrier, he offers no argument beyond the generally acknowledged fact that spontaneous generation cannot now be experimentally verified. ”