Yet of all their fine arts, it was music of which the Greeks were
themselves most proud. Its traditionary effects were far more powerful
than any which we experience from the compositions of our times. And
now for their poetry, Cadurcis. It is in poetry, and poetry alone,
that modern nations have maintained the majesty of genius. Do we equal
the Greeks? Do we even excel them?'
'Let us prove the equality first,' said Cadurcis. 'The Greeks excelled
in every species of poetry. In some we do not even attempt to rival
them. We have not a single modern ode, or a single modern pastoral. We
have no one to place by Pindar, or the exquisite Theocritus. As for
the epic, I confess myself a heretic as to Homer; I look upon the
Iliad as a remnant of national songs; the wise ones agree that the
Odyssey is the work of a later age. My instinct agrees with the result
of their researches. I credit their conclusion. The Paradise Lost is,
doubtless, a great production, but the subject is monkish. Dante is
national, but he has all the faults of a barbarous age. In general the
modern epic is framed upon the assumption that the Iliad is an orderly
composition. They are indebted for this fallacy to Virgil, who called
order out of chaos; but the Aeneid, all the same, appears to me an
insipid creation.
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