the Unfathomable that flowed through him. He had the high
serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them
highly, deeply and seriously. We may compare him to Dante: who
also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with
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