book. In
those simple stories of the people we observe the good and the bad
marked off distinctly and engaged in some kind of a wrestle, which
shows at last the supremacy of the good. Not in every case perhaps, but
such is the tendency. But these Tales of Grimm, though collected, are
in no sense united; the architect never appeared, though they are the
material of a great Teutonic epos; they are the stones of the edifice,
not the edifice itself by any means. (3) Out of this second stage
easily rises the third, the poet being given; whereof the best example
is just those four Books of the Odyssey. Now the folk-tale stands not
alone, in widowed solitariness, but is made to take its place in the
great national, or perchance universal temple of song.

We may say, therefore, that Homer not only gathered these Tales but
organized them into a Whole, so that they no longer fall asunder into
separate narratives, but they are deftly interwoven and form a great
cycle of experience. No segment of this cycle can be taken away without
breaking the totality. Moreover the entire series is but an organic
part of the Odyssey.

It is now manifest that those who resolve these Tales into a
disconnected bead-roll have really fallen back into the second stage
before mentioned; they have undone the work of Homer. If these four
Books be simply a string of stories without an inner movement from one
to the other, or without any organic connection with the rest of the
poem, the entire poetic temple is but a pile of stones and no edifice.
And this is what Wolf and his disciples make out of Homer. In one way
or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in
a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the
Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. A school more recent than that of Wolf,
the Comparative Philologists, have gone still further backwards, and
have reduced Homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. The merit of
both schools is that they have called attention to Homer's primitive
materials; they have rendered impossible the idea that Homer created
the Greek Gods or his mythology, or even his little stories. The defect
of these schools is that they fail to see the architectonic Homer, the
poet who builds the crude materials furnished by his people into an
enduring structure of the noblest art. They recognize in the edifice
the stone and also the stone-cutter, but no master-builder.

Homer, therefore, is not