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 " internal evidence " that there was nothing 

 like " unity of design " 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 

 " uncritical " and " unscholarly." 



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 " On Translating Homer." 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- 



