IN LITERATURE
this life was once a matter of chance or luck, and experience was unforeseeable; that the race-mind cleared very slowly; and that we are the first to imagine a universe of complete and unalterable law.
Our complacent attitude toward primitive man has of late been fostered by certain gifted classical scholars, chief among them Professor Gilbert Murray and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the help of anthropology have recreated that dim world which lay behind Greek letters. The beautiful logic by which these scholars reach their results increases our conceit that reason is a modern instrument, while the world they picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and superstition, of necromancy and the arts, reassures us as to what we have risen from. Against that sombre background Homer, once thought primitive, seems
[123]
