The Bacon- Shakespeare Folly 353 



alleged absence of the art of writing. Having 

 thus made a plausible start, the Wolfians pro 

 ceeded to pick the poems to pieces, and to prove 

 by &quot; internal evidence &quot; that there was nothing 

 like &quot; unity of design &quot; in them, etc. ; and so it 

 went on, till poor old Homer was relegated to the 

 world of myth. As a schoolboy I used to hear the 

 belief in the existence of such a poet derided as 

 &quot; uncritical &quot; and &quot; unscholarly.&quot; 



In spite of these terrifying epithets, the ballad 

 theory never made any impression upon me ; for it 

 seemed to ignore the most conspicuous and vital 

 fact about the poems, namely, the style, the noble, 

 rapid, simple, vivid, supremely poetical style, 

 a style as individual and unapproachable as that 

 of Dante or Keats. For an excellent character 

 ization of it, read Matthew Arnold s charming 

 essays &quot; On Translating Homer.&quot; The style is the 

 man, and to suppose that this Homeric style ever 

 came from a democratic multitude of minds, or 

 from anything save one of those supremely en 

 dowed individual natures such as get born once or 

 twice in a millennium, is simply to suppose a psy 

 chological impossibility. I remember once talking 

 about this with George Eliot, who had lately been 

 reading Frederick Paley s ingenious restatement of 

 the ballad theory, and was captivated by its inge- 



