o us faithfully the men and women
among whom he lived. He sang the tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
purposes of history, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the most effective
books which ever were written. We see the hall of Menelaus, we see the
garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the market-place
dealing out genial justice. Or, again, when the wild mood is on, we can
hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armor as the heroes
fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.

I am not going into the vexed question whether history or poetry is the
more true. It has been sometimes said that poetry is the more true,
because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
fact were not just enough.

I entirely dissent from that view. So far as poetry attempts to improve
on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
called the accidents of