THE perennial youth of the Homeric poems is without a parallel in the history of art. No other imaginative works have so nearly succeeded in bidding defiance to the ‘tooth of time.’ Like the golden watch-dogs of Alcinous, they seem destined to be ‘deathless and ageless all their days.’ Nor is theirs the faded immortality of Tithonus—the bare preservation of a material form emptied of the glow of vitality, and grown out of harmony with its environment. Their survival is not even that of an ‘Attic shape’ whose undeniable beauty has, in our eyes, assumed somewhat of a recondite coldness, very different from the loveliness of old, when connoisseurship was not needed for appreciation. The Iliad a…
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