did not do full justice to Lang, some Frenchmen would be ready to claim as their own the successor of Fontenelle, the admirer of French ballads and contes, and the worshipper of Joan of Arc.

SALOMON REINACH.

III.

ANDREW LANG as a scholar belonged to a type which is almost peculiar to this country and even here is becoming rare. He was a great man of letters who naturally included the classical literatures in his sweep and wrote about them with understanding and mastery. You could say he was an amateur among professionals; you could equally well say he was a man of living culture among a number of highly-trained technical craftsmen. Yet it would be a complete mistake to suppose that Lang was slipshod in his method or weak in his linguistic knowledge. He really did know Greek, and he was very accurate in his statements. Where he was sometimes left behind was in the large field of constructive or critical work wrought over by specialists since his university days.

His first work on Homer was the famous translation of the Odyssey (1879), known by the name of 'Butcher and Lang' to many generations of students. It is a beautiful book. Its authors claimed for it the merits of plain prose; they expressly repudiated the whole idea of a poetical translation, which must always falsify its original. Yet I venture to think that the book really owed its triumph to the qualities it professed to despise. It is not a better crib than many others; it is a much better poem; and being a poem, with a style of its own, it inevitably gives us its own style in place of Homer's. The style was better suited to the Odyssey than to the Iliad, and to Theocritus perhaps better than either. Lang's Theocritus is a thing to read with delight.

In 1893 Lang made his first large contribution to the Homeric Question in 'Homer and the Epic.' He took up what used to be called the Unitarian' position-the word is no longer suitable, since the controversy is arranging itself on different lines. For Lang there was only one Homer; his work was enormously earlier, as

well as nobler, than the rest of Greek literature; but nevertheless his text has been preserved to us almost without a flaw. The book, however, was in form not a defence, but an attack, an attack on all modern critics since Wolff. Lang showed easily enough that you cannot argue diversity of authorship from mere inconsistencies; there are more definite self-contradictions in 'Pendennis' than in the Iliad. More important, he showed the inadequacy of the current hypotheses of critics who, following Grote, tried to reconstitute an ' original Iliad' by simply cutting out verses or books as late or spurious. He made great play with the divergent views of the advanced critics among themselves-an easy task, since they were naturally throwing out different hypotheses, else they would not have written books. With a flash of strategical insight he saw that the central point to attack was not any contemporary theory, but the little 18th century treatise which started modern criticism on its quest. Lang points out that Wolff's 'Prolegomena' is a very small book; that it was written hurriedly; that it sometimes modestly shrinks from its own results. He ingeniously belittles the stupendous learning and vigour of mind which make the book what it is, and he points out the various discoveries which have been made since Wolff's time. He suggests that the whole raising of the Homeric Question' has been due to the passing fancy of a brilliant scholar in a hurry. In any case the advanced critics who have based themselves on Wolff have made a fine mess of things, and the less we listen to them the better. 'If we err, at least we err with the poets.'

This view is not in my judgment sound. It is easy to show that various men of science contradict themselves and one another about the probable origin and age of the world; but one cannot deduce therefrom that the account in Genesis must be true. Yet Lang's book was a contribution of real value. He shook a current orthodoxy of criticism, and compelled it to reconsider its methods and to restate its problems. And he brought fresh air into the discussion by his handling of the French and Teutonic epics and his occasional use of anthropological parallels.

and his Age,' which contained a specially valuable discussion of Homeric armour; and again in 1910 by 'The World of Homer,' part of which was devoted to the criticism of my 'Rise of the Greek Epic.' These books were specially concerned in showing that the life described in the Homeric poems formed an intelligible unit, and further that such a life probably did once, for a brief moment, exist on earth. It was not, as some of us thought, the life of an idealised and half-imaginary past. Lang fought as uncompromisingly as ever. The madness of criticism would pass away, if only we would wait and be sober. The critics could prove nothing. As to the supposed cumulative force of many small indications pointing the same way, he answered that there were no small indications. They were all nothing. And nothing added to nothing produced nothing. Yet the last book, in my judgment, marks a considerable advance on Lang's earlier criticism. His archæological knowledge has deepened, and he uses it with more serious effect. He is courteous and scrupulous in argument. He tries less to score and more to convince. He is more ready to admit as probable various 'critical' suggestions which he formerly did not consider at all. He admits the likelihood of changes occurring while the poem is handed on from minstrel to minstrel; of some expurgations,' of some remaniements. But he evidently felt deeply, almost religiously, on the whole question of the Unity of Homer, and on the need of vindicating the work of a supreme poet against a herd of impious little cavillers who could not understand it. It might fairly be urged on his side that the Homeric Question has probably produced a far greater bulk of tedious and worthless literature than its positive results justify. It might be answered that the Question is still there; that, if we cannot answer it, we should at least try to state it, and understand what it is that puzzles us. And Lang, with his great knowledge of literature and anthropology and history, to say nothing of his powers of poetry and imagination, might perhaps, had he wished, have stated it better than anyone.

Some of his very best work on Homer is contained in the small volume on the Homeric Hymns. The translation is perhaps a trifle mannered, but the essays are illuminating. He writes at his ease, free from the

atmosphere of controversy. He is not constantly turning aside from his exposition to confute an opponent. And he has, far more than in Homer proper, a fair field for his anthropology. It is surprising, as one turns over the leaves of that little book, to see how many ideas it contains which have since proved fruitful and significant. But that was one of the marks of Lang's vivid intellectual power. Even when he was-in my judgment-defending an obsolete and impossible position, he would flash out a sentence which contained the seed of new and fruitful study. I can suggest no better motto for the next writer who plunges into Homeric research than a sentence in the preface to Homer and his Age': 'The fallacy is that of disregarding the Homeric poet's audience.'

The value of this hint of Lang's will perhaps only be visible to one who is already steeped in Homeric study. In any case I personally owe him a large debt for what he has taught me about Homer, as well as for much personal kindness ever since the time when my first book-a novel, as it happens-was wandering forlorn, and Lang found it a publisher.

IV.

GILBERT MURRAY.

It is no easy task to discuss Lang's position in the world of poetry and belles lettres. These are matters much less tangible than anthropology or history, for one thing; and the texture of his work is so delicate that criticism less sensitive and refined than his own is apt to appear rude and clumsy. For another thing, he would no more have condescended than Matthew Arnold to repudiate the imputation of being a mere 'belletristic trifler.' He had a horror of the persons who persist in taking themselves seriously both in and out of season.

It is ourselves we must try to improve' (he declares in that agreeable essay in irony, 'How to Fail in Literature'), 'our

These lines were in print before the writer had seen the posthumous 'Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown,' in which Lang expressly takes the description to himself (p. xvii). It may be added that the book is an admirable specimen of the author's controversial powers. If the outward eye had become dim, his natural force was in no wise abated. The argument is an expansion of that put forward by him a few years ago in these pages ('Quarterly Review,' July 1898, clxxxviii, 31).

attentiveness, our interest in life, our seriousness of purpose; and then the style will improve with the sense.' But he hastens to add: 'Or perhaps, to be perfectly frank, we shall thus convert ourselves into prigs, throw ourselves out of our stride, lapse into self-consciousness, lose all that is natural, naïf, and instinctive within us. Verily there are many dangers, and the paths to failure are infinite.'

As the world grows older it seems to grow denser and more credulous. In an age of blatant advertisement, men come to be taken at their own valuation. And Lang paid the penalty of his characteristic attitude. Experts,' instead of answering his arguments, persisted in dealing with him as a 'light horseman,' a mode of treatment at which he sometimes fretted, not without just cause. In the same way he excelled so remarkably in raillery, whether in verse or prose, that many failed to detect the accomplished poet and the penetrating critic. For such blindness there is no excuse, now that he is gone; and we shall assume that we speak to the hearing ear and the understanding heart.

First, then, of his poetry. He was in the habit of deploring, and with good reason, the want of interest in that branch of letters which is so significant a mark of modern culture. Nothing, he thought, could speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the birth of so many literary societies.

'They all demonstrate' (he said) that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women need confederates in this adventure. There is safety in numbers, and by dint of teaparties, recitations, discussions, quarrels, and the like, Dr Furnival and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!' ('Letters on Literature.')

The societies are not with us perhaps so much as they used to be; but the frame of mind of which they were symptomatic abides. Lang himself was entered' at the poets young, to borrow an expression from the goodman of Charlies-hope. Beginning with Shakespeare and Scott, he went on, while still a boy, to Tennyson, to whom his allegiance never faltered. He has himself recorded how, at the Edinburgh Academy, he detested the Eclogues