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By Alfred Emerson

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UST where illustration should be pigeonholed in a system of esthetics is still a problem. Some able artists and teachers of painting condemn all story-telling in pictures as a betrayal of the artist's proper function and mission to the crude spirit of gain. Others, again, and some of our best, the Elihu Vedders and Howard Pyles, have won renown as illustrators. Few painters ever cultivated this field more earnestly than the masters of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, whose aims fell short of nobody's for loftiness and purity. Lessing, to be sure, laid down, in his famous "Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting," that descriptive poetry and narrative painting are artistic taboo. But Lessing's doctrine is too austerely logical for human nature's daily food. What would be left of Italian painting, if we cancelled all the pictures that illustrate the characters and events of the Old and New Testaments, of the Apocrypha, the lives of the Saints, and the world of fable?

The necessity of projecting the mode of expression out of time into space certainly hampers the sculptor and the painter. But it does not follow that chisel and brush can tell no stories. The significant pose, the animated group, do look before and after. The idea of action, of motion, of change is inseparable from the lifted sword, the rearing steed, the crested wave and the bellied sail. The sunset red foretells the "dear thrice-prayed-for night." October's motley is keen with a foretaste of December frost. If Euphranor's lost statue of the Trojan Paris did equal justice to the judge of the goddesses, to Helen's lover, and to the slayer of Achilles, as Pliny declares, the instance shows how well a detached figure can tell a complex story. How many of our own artists can give us the Washington of Valley Forge and Yorktown and the first President of the United States in one? If it was wrong to enlist the co

The Blinding of Polyphemos. From an early black-figured vase by Aristophonos, whose Signature is misspelled Aristonophos. From Collignon's Greek archaeology.

operation of a well-informed Greek and German public, then and then only Euphranor and Richard Wagner were bad artists. If Tannhauser and Lohengrin, Hans Sachs and Siegfried are empty names to you, you are ill qualified to receive the poet-composer's dramatic and musical message. An' there's an end on it.

Now the Greek knew his Homer as a Scotchman knows his Bible. Nor was his Homer limited to the Iliad and Odyssey as ours is. Some of the favorite stories of the Themis, the apple of Discord, the wooing and wedding of Trojan cycle are not related in those epics. The counsel of Peleus and Thetis, the youth of Achilles, the judgment of Paris, the rape of Helen, the rally of the Greek princes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the adventure of Telephos, the Grecian landfall on the Trojan shore, and the earlier events of the Achaean campaigns, yea, these stories and many more, were they not related in a preceding poem of the Epic Cycle? Andrew Lang's "Helen of Troy" is a charming literary restoration of "The Cypria" in masterly English. The Greek hero's favorite horse Xanthos foretells the early death of Achilles by the Trojan seductor's arrow in the Nineteenth Iliad. But the full story of it appeared in another ancient epic. "The Ethiopians" has gone the way of "The Cypria," all but the bare chapter-indexes of both. Yet those poems are not utterly lost, for the tragic poets and the form

ative artists of later ages drew freely upon the old romances of the falls of Thebes and Troy. Statius, Quintus of Smyrna, Colluthus and sundry other

minor poets, whose books are extant, rewrote some of them again centuries after Christ. I read Colluthus's "Fall of Troy,' by the way, in a queer old edition, at the San Francisco Public Library, that went up in flames soon afterwards. And so these old tales passed

on, by strange ways of medieval literature and Renaissance tapestries, to our own Shakespeare and Tennyson.

Plato and other early writers credited the whole Epic Cycle to Homer himself. There is an echo of this earlier faith in a passage of Lucian's whimsical "True Narrative." The hero interviews Homer's shade in the Elysian Fields as to which of all the poems attributed to him he had really written, and records the blind bard's answer that he wrote them all. Our higher criticism claims to distinguish many strata of accretions from a thin bed of authentic matter, even in Iliad and Odyssey. A glance

at the art monuments in Overbeck's Gallerie heroischer Bildwerke persuades one

Upper Face of a Clazomenian Sarcophagus. From Collignon's "Greek Archaeology."

that the Greek artists who quarried picture and sculpture stuff from the national epics cared little who wrote them, or

The single Combat between Achilles and Memnon, witnessed by Thetis and Eos. From a Melian Amphora. Taken from Rayet et Collignon, "Histoire de la Céramique Grecque."

what parts of them were the earliest stock in trade of the Homeric bards. A study of their illustrations must start from the same free and easy premises. Clever artisans carved the ancient tale of Troy in stone, beat it in metal, painted it in black silhouettes and outlines on earthenware,

emblazoned it in color on
Roman walls and early
parchments. Greek children

probably learned to spell it
out in the picture form be-

Hermes Leads the Goddesses ro Paris. On a Tyrrhenian Amphora at Berlin, From Furtwangler's "Griechische Vasenmalerei."

fore they learned to read
and recite the real Homer
at school. Just so the un-
lettered masses of the mid-
dle ages had their Bible of
the Poor in stained glass.
The pictures compose a
book well worth anyone's
reading in both cases.

According to Homer,
the first illustrator of the
Trojan war was Helen of
Troy herself. Iris assumes
the semblance of her Tro-
jan sister-in-law, Laodike,
and finds Helen in her hall.
"For there," says the poet,
"she was weaving a great

adven

two-faced purple dress-pattern. And many tures of the steed-taming Trojans and of the mail-clad Achaeans she wrought therein, which they endured at the war-god's hands on her account." (Iliad III, 125ff.). William's Queen Matilda has been credited with the embroidered chronicle of the Norman conquest of England which is preserved in the Cathedral of Bayeux. The great Alexandrian critic, Aristarchus, allowed the Schliemannesque opinion to escape him that Homer obtained his knowledge of the Trojan campaign from Helen's figured damask! It is certainly curious to find that the illustrated blanket newspaper, which we have fondly supposed to be an American novelty, dates

Paris Receives Hermes and the Goddesses.

From a Tyrrhenian Amphora at Berlin. Furtwangler's "Grieschische Vasenmalerei." from the Trojan War. Certain painted clay coffins have been excavated at Clazomenae, one of Homer's seven traditional birthplaces, the decorations of which are not far from showing what Helen's tapestries were like. These silhouettes are a painted form, so to speak, of the Ionian dialect.

On other old Ionian vases, found at Rhodes and Melos, we seem to catch the ceramic painter developing an inherited pattern of confronted birds, lions, or men into the pictured story of a heroic conflict. A Rhodian plate with a single combat between Menelaos and Hektor, so inscribed, over the body of the Trojan Euphorbos has been adopted as the label of a brand of American cigars. Here the two armed champions face one another with round shields and