1. The Iliad' represents not the beginning but the culmination of a great school of poetry. There is a period in the history of every art when the artist ceases to copy nature, and begins to copy his master or himself, when the art consequently begins to run in certain fixed grooves and to be stamped with a conventional mannerism. Early art is peculiarly liable to fall under the dominion of tradition; and the tendency is soon perceptible in the Greek epic. Even the 'Odyssey,' with its superiority in symmetry and finish, is inferior in the force and freshness of the several parts. The 'Iliad' has all the excellences of a golden age of literature.

2. As the cycle' grew out of the two Homeric poems by an extension of plan, and as the 'Odyssey' improved upon the 'Iliad' by a more perfect adjustment of parts, so the 'Iliad' may have been formed by a process in which both these principles were at work. Successive poets may have added to an existing stock, or may have remodelled the cycle of lays which they found. Either process would be animated and controlled on the one hand by the tendency to make the poems an adequate representation of the national legends, and on the other by the artistic impressiveness of such a conception as the wrath of Achilles, and the powerful attraction which it must have exercised on the floating tales of the war.

3. It is difficult to imagine a single man, however gifted, making the prodigious advance involved in passing from short lays to a complete epic. The assumption of a Homeros, as the word has sometimes been explained, namely a compiler or arranger, is only less improbable than the theory which ascribed the same function to Pisistratus.

4. The difference between a mass of ballad literature and a poem like the Iliad' is one of style no less than of form and dimensions. Homer belongs to an entirely different world from the common tribe of Teutonic and Romantic minstrels, and their manner, as Mr. Arnold has so happily shown, is a snare rather than a help to his translators. Along with all that is good in the ballad manner-its simplicity, its animation, its plaintive grace-Homer has much that ballads do not attempt. An even and stately harmony in every line and word; a rhythm neither rough nor jingling, neither tame nor boisterous; a style as remote from affectation as from commonplace-these qualities place a gulf between the two forms of poetry which could hardly be bridged over by a single poet. It must have been the work of a period or a school of poetic art.

5. The poetical relations of the Homerida to the poems which they

they watched over and recited cannot be accurately determined. In later times it is unlikely that they allowed themselves much licence in tampering with what had become the common property of the Hellenic race, but they were themselves for the most part the sole judges of the treatment due to their poetic heirloom; there was no sense of literary faith to restrain individuals from adding or recasting, as they were prompted by their own poetic feeling. The earliest Homerids were in a very different position, and may have been the creators of the unity of Homer. Their peculiar Ionian genius may have impelled them to combine and systematise into a new and perfect whole the short and isolated lays which they learned from Æolic bards. If other considerations lead us to assign the chief share in this process to schools of poetry and common epic type rather than to individually illustrious composers, a gens or clan, such as that of the Homerids, supplies precisely the form under which schools or traditional types of art most frequently appear in the earliest periods of Greek history.

6. Whether the Iliad' may be properly called the work of one poet or not, the Greek epic must be the work of many poets, stretching over a considerable period. Essentially indigenous and self-developed, it must have grown from its primeval elements, whatever these were, to its culmination in the Iliad ' by a gradual evolution of the same kind as that which has formed the history of all the capital products of human genius. Every great style of architecture, every original school of painting or music, every great mechanical invention even, has been produced by an almost infinitesimal series of improvements. It is only because the links in the series remain in some cases, as in that of architecture, whereas they are lost in others, that the process seems to be sometimes continuous, and sometimes not. If this is so in a manner for every creative period, it is especially characteristic of remote antiquity. The personality of early bards and minstrels, in spite of the popular tendency to attribute everything to one great name, is always obscure and indeterminate. On this point we cannot do better than translate some words from Welcker,* with the suggestive illustration which he quotes:

There are times in which the love of art is so true-hearted, and the spirit of union so penetrating that the individual forgets himself, and not only represents the society as morally a person, but even feels it to be so. Our old builders' brotherhoods are well known, of which

*

Ep. Cycl.,' vol. i. p. 159.

a thoughtful

Mr. Matthew Arnold's Report on French Education.

473

a thoughtful architect very rightly says: In the Middle Ages there was a strange inspiration, a tendency now almost unknown, to transfer all feeling of self to a corporation, which gathered into a narrow union the artistic growth of whole districts and neighbourhoods, in which all, with a complete renunciation of individual renown, offered their powers of mind and body to a single creation of art. It is thus that things otherwise inconceivable in greatness and completeness were attained, and the heart of the guild-brother was better withal than where they spent themselves in the contest of ambition and jealousy.'

ART. VII.-1. Report on the System of Education for the Middle and Upper Classes in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. By M. Arnold, Esq., M.A., one of H.M. Inspectors of Schools. Schools Inquiry Commission Reports, Vol. VI. 2. Schools and Universities on the Continent. By Matthew Arnold, M.A. London, 1868.

3. Rapport sur l'Enseignement secondaire en Angleterre et en Ecosse. Adressé à S. E. le Ministre de l'Instruction Publique. Par MM. Demogeot et Montucci. Paris, 1867.

FRA

RANCE and England have during the last few years taken a great interest in each other's systems of education. Besides the notices of French education which we continually see in the English papers, and the somewhat interested exaltation of our English school liberty in the discussions of the French Chambers, a Commission for the purpose of inquiry has been issued by either Government. It is curious to compare the two results. M. Demogeot's Report on our Secondary Education is contained in a large volume printed at the Imprimerie Impériale; Mr. Arnold's occupies half the sixth volume of the Appendix to the Schools Inquiry Commission Report, and is also issued in a handsomer and more expensive form. We strongly recommend everybody to buy the Blue-book in preference. It costs only a trifle, and it contains, besides many pièces justificatives on which Mr. Arnold's Report is based, Mr. Fearon's Report on Scotch Schools, which will in some measure correct the gloom and despair which must follow on reading Mr. Arnold's volume. The French and English Commissioners had very different qualifications for their task. M. Demogeot, well known in France as a man of letters, has gone through the whole curriculum of the instruction publique, he has reached the rank of inspector through that of professor, he is acquainted with all the details of school teaching, and well knows the difficulties which stand in the way of any reform. His stay in England was short, but he

had

had spent months before his visit in studying the Report of the Royal Commission on our Public Schools and in making himself otherwise acquainted with what he was likely to see. Those who met him in England were astonished at the intelligence of his questions, and at the amount of knowledge which he already possessed on the subject of his inquiry. Mr. Arnold is also a man of letters, perhaps better known than M. Demogeot as such; he is also an Inspector of Primary Schools; but, to judge from his Report, he knows little or nothing of secondary education in England, and, indeed, has a contempt for the business which he takes no pains to conceal. He considers the profession of schoolmaster unattractive (p. 482); he would rather be even a professor in a French Lycée than a master in an English public school (p. 476), where he would form part of no 'hierarchy, have no position, have little or no time for study, and have no career before him' (p. 474). He evidently is entirely ignorant of the changes which have been made in English education during the last twenty years. Whenever he compares French with English teaching he can only draw on his schoolboy recollections of Winchester and Rugby, and has never regarded the matter from the master's point of view. He does not know where to look for flaws, or where to discover the deficiencies of the system he is examining. He is in consequence frequently deceived. He takes the promises of the official programme as if they were always performed. He is dazzled by the neatness and order of the household arrangements of a large Lycée, charmed, perhaps a little reproved, by the activity of its proviseur, and he comes to the conclusion that even a pion is not so bad as he is painted. His ignorance of English schools is paralleled by the apparently scanty preparation he made for visiting foreign schools. He is in a constant state of surprise, and his Report is like a traveller's tale of a newly-explored country. Englishmen, you won't believe it, but I have seen,' is the burden of his message. Mr. Arnold spent seven months abroad at the Government expense. We wish he had given us a diary of his operations, as Mr. Fearon has done of the six weeks he spent in Scotland. We find very few traces in his Report of personal experiences. By accident or design his visit was arranged during that time of the year when many of the schools he wished to visit were taking their holiday. When he got to Berlin it wanted only a fortnight of the summer vacation. In Switzerland, during the time he was there, the schools were altogether closed. He appears to have visited Rome, but he gives us no account of what he saw there, except that it reminded him of England. The instructions given him by the Commissioners

were

were most ample, too large perhaps for any single person to have executed. They sketched out the plan of an exhaustive work on foreign education, on which any labour would have been well bestowed. But the meagre Report which Mr. Arnold gives us might have been composed without any personal visit at all. Copies of all the French official programmes, and a selection from their large library of works on public instruction, a few books, such as those which Mr. Arnold quotes, the Italian Report, Sulle condizioni della Pubblica Instruzione nel regno d' Italia,' and Dr. Wiese's' Das höhere Schulwesen in Preussen,' in the hands of an able literary man, would have produced a result as satisfactory as Mr. Arnold's without paying a sixpence for travelling expenses.

There is another characteristic difference between the two works. The French enquirer is, of course, strenuous for the honour of France. He admits that there is something to be learned from England, but he never forgets that he is the emissary of the great nation. Our education is treated by M. Demogeot with the highest respect, but his extreme politeness is based on a sense of superiority. We believe that M. Demogeot has the strongest wish to engraft English liberty on French method, and that to prepare the French people for such a change is an object very dear to him; but his sense of courtesy as well as of justice prevents him from giving force to his arguments by abuse of institutions of which he does not wholly approve. Mr. Arnold has no such scruples. For once he appears in the character of the true British Philistine. His Report is a good honest grumble throughout; everything foreign is good, everything English bad. One foreign school he thinks is just like another; if he has not seen the Polytechnicum at Zürich he has seen the Polytechnicum at Stuttgard, and they are all very good whereas in England the masters are bad, and the schools are bad, and the boys are badly prepared, and they are too much crammed, they are examined at the wrong age, they have no love of literature, and even their games are not so good as the foreign gymnastics; and the whole nation is past redemption because not two hundred of us (we confess the impeachment) have read Mr. Arnold's 'Report on Primary Education," although it has been published seven years.

We do not propose to accompany Mr. Arnold through thewhole of his Report. The greater part of it is occupied with a statement of facts from official sources, very neatly and clearly put, about which no difference of opinion can exist. Twentyseven pages are devoted to Italy, only fifteen to Switzerland. For this we are very sorry; we believe that there is no country.

where