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The Humour of Homer and Other Essays
Introduction
By R. A. Streatfeild
The nucleus of this book is the collection of essays by Samuel Butler,which was originally published by Mr. Grant Richards in 1904 under thetitle Essays on Life, Art and Science, and reissued by Mr. Fifield in1908. To these are now added another essay, entitled “TheHumour of Homer,” a biographical sketch of the author kindly contributedby Mr. Henry Festing Jones, which will add materially to the value ofthe edition, and a portrait in photogravure from a photograph takenin 1889—the period of the essays.
From a photographmade by Pizzetta in Varallo in 1889. Emery Walker Ltd., ph. sc.
“The Humour of Homer” was originally delivered as a lectureat the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street on the 30thJanuary, 1892, the day on which Butler first promulgated his theoryof the Trapanese origin of the Odyssey in a letter to the Athenæum. Later in the same year it was published with some additional matterby Messrs. Metcalfe and Co. of Cambridge. For the next five yearsButler was engaged upon researches into the origin and authorship ofthe Odyssey, the results of which are embodied in his book TheAuthoress of the “Odyssey,” originally publishedby Messrs. Longman in 1897. Butler incorporated a good deal of“The Humour of Homer” into The Authoress of the “Odyssey,”but the section relating to the Iliad naturally found no placein the later work. For the sake of this alone “The Humourof Homer” deserves to be better known. Written as it wasfor an artisan audience and professing to deal only with one side ofHomer’s genius, “The Humour of Homer” must not, ofcourse, be taken as an exhaustive statement of Butler’s viewsupon Homeric questions. It touches but lightly on important points,particularly regarding the origin and authorship of the Odyssey,which are treated at much greater length in The Authoress of the“Odyssey.”
Nevertheless, “The Humour of Homer” appears to me tohave a special value as a kind of general introduction to Butler’smore detailed study of the Odyssey. His attitude towardsthe Homeric poems is here expressed with extraordinary freshness andforce. What that attitude was is best explained by his own words:“If a person would understand either the Odyssey or anyother ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing theliving in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the modernsas another.” Butler did not undervalue the philologicaland archæological importance of the Iliad and the Odyssey,but it was mainly as human documents that they appealed to him. This, I am inclined to suspect, was the root of the objection of academiccritics to him and his theories. They did not so much resent thesuggestion that the author of the Odyssey was a woman; they couldnot endure that he should be treated as a human being.
Of the remaining essays two were originally delivered as lectures;the others appeared first in The Universal Review in 1888, 1889and 1890. I should perhaps explain why two other essays whichalso appeared in The Universal Review are not included in thiscollection. The first of these, entitled “L’AffaireHolbein-Rippel,” relates to a drawing of Holbein’s “Dansedes Paysans”