Not to accept that spirit is not to
accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of
the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its
climax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, as
he must believe in Hektor and Achilles. (Puritans like Xenophanes were
annoyed not with the gods for being as Homer described them, but with
Homer for describing them as he did.) Virgil is more decorous; but can
we imagine Virgil praying, or anybody praying, to the gods of the
_Aeneid_? The supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is frankly
absurd; they are not only careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucan
tried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even more
faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and
merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the
value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is
it, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery is
valuable? Or only as a superlative kind of ornament? It is surely more
than that. In spite of the fact that we are not seriously asked to
believe in it, it does beautifully and strikingly crystallize the poet's
determination to show us things that go past the reach of common
knowledge. But by putting it, whether instinctively or deliberately, on
a lower plane of credibility than the main action, the poet obeys his
deepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poem
emphatically an affair of recognizable _human_ events.
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