The poet of the _Iliad_ is a great and sober artist. He does not make Agamemnon endure the lowest disgraces which the latest French epic poets heap on Charles. But we see how close is the parallel between Agamemnon and the Charles of the decadent type. Both characters are reflections of feudal jealousy of the Over-Lord; both reflect real antique historical conditions, and these were the conditions of the Achaeans in Europe, not of the Ionians in Asia.
The treatment of Agamemnon's character is harmonious throughout. It is not as if in "the original poem" Agamemnon were revered like St. Charlemagne in the _Chanson de Roland_, and in the "later" parts of the _Iliad_ were reduced to the contemptible estate of the Charles of the decadent _Chanson de Geste_. In the _Iliad_ Agamemnon's character is consistently presented from beginning to end, presented, I think, as it could only be by a great poet of the feudal Achaean society in Europe. The Ionians--"democratic to the core," says Mr. Leaf--would either have taken no interest in the figure of the Over-Lord, or would have utterly degraded him below the level of the Charles of the latest _Chansons_. Or the late rhapsodists, in their irresponsible lays, would have presented a wavering and worthless portrait.
The conditions under which the _Chansons_ arose were truly parallel to the conditions under which the Homeric poems arose, and the poems, French and Achaean, are also true parallels, except in genius. The French have no Homer: _cared vate sacro_. It follows that a Homer was necessary to the evolution of the Greek epics.
It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our _Iliad_ is only a very late _remaniement_, like the fourteenth century _Chansons de Geste_, of something much earlier and nobler. But in France, in the age of _remaniement_, even the versification had changed from assonance to rhyme, from the decasyllabic line to the Alexandrine in the decadence, while a plentiful lack of seriousness and a love of purely fanciful adventures in fairyland take the place of the austere spirit of war. Ladies "in a coming on humour" abound, and Charles is involved with his Paladins in _gauloiseries_ of a Rabelaisian cast. The French language has become a new thing through and through, and manners and weapons are of a new sort; but the high seriousness of the _Iliad_ is maintained throughout, except in the burlesque battle of the gods: the versification is the stately hexameter, linguistic alterations are present, extant, but inconspicuous. That the armour and weapons are uniform in character throughout we have tried to prove, while the state of society and of religion is certainly throughout harmonious. Our parallel, then, between the French and the Greek national epics appears as perfect as such a thing can be, surprisingly perfect, while the great point of difference in degree of art is accounted for by the existence of an Achaean poet of supreme genius. Not such, certainly, were the composers of the Cyclic poems, men contemporary with the supposed later poets of the _Iliad_.