impossible.
Nobody, I suppose, not even if he be Provost of Oriel, can tell us much
of the personal characteristics of the author--if there was an
author--of the _Iliad_. He must remain for us a typical Greek of the
heroic age; though even so, the attempt to realise the corresponding
state of society may be of high value to an appreciation of the poetry.
In later times we suffer from the opposite difficulty. Our descendants
will be able to see the general characteristics of the Victorian age
better than we, who unconsciously accept our own peculiarities, like the
air we breathe, as mere matters of course. Meanwhile a Tennyson and a
Browning strike us less as the organs of a society than by the
idiosyncrasies which belong to them as individuals. But in the normal
case, the relation of the two studies is obvious. Dante, for example, is
profoundly interesting to the psychologist, considered simply as a human
being. We are then interested by the astonishing imaginative intensity
and intellectual power and the vivid personality of the man who still
lives for us as he lived in the Italy of six centuries ago. But as all
competent critics tell us, the _Divina Commedia_ also reveals in the
completest way the essential spirit of the Middle Ages. The two studies
reciprocally enlighten each other. We know Dante and understand his
position the more thoroughly as we know better the history of the
political and ecclesiastical struggles in which he took part, and the
philosophical doctrines which he accepted and interpreted; and
conversely, we understand the period the better when we see how its
beliefs and passions affected a man of abnormal genius and marked
idiosyncrasy of character. The historical revelation is the more
complete, precisely because Dante was not a commonplace or average
person but a man of unique force, mental and moral. The remark may
suggest what is the special value of the literary criticism or its
bearing upon history. We may learn from many sources what was the
current mythology of the day; and how ordinary people believed in devils
and in a material hell lying just beneath our feet. The vision probably
strikes us as repulsive and simply preposterous. If we proceed to ask
what it meant and why it had so powerful a hold upon the men of the
day, we may perhaps be innocent enough to apply to the accepted
philosophers, especially to Aquinas, whose thoughts had been so
thoroughly assimilated by the poet. No doubt tha