merely the editor, collector, redactor; he is
not a Grimm, gathering his tales from the mouths of the people with a
scientific accuracy. He gathered them, doubtless, but he transfigured
them into an image reflecting the experience of a human soul. Our age
is indeed scientific, it is collecting the folk-songs and the
folk-tales from every quarter of the globe, and stringing them on a
thread, like so many beads, not being able to transmute them into
poetry. Wolf heralded the coming time by starting to reconvert Homer
into his primitive materials, by making him scientific and not poetic,
at least not architectonic. Still we may be permitted to hope that
these vast collections of the world's folk-lore will yet be transmuted
by some new Homer into a world-poem.

6. The careful reader will also weigh the fact that Ulysses is now the
story-teller himself. The entire series of adventures in Fableland is
put into his mouth by the poet. Herein, we note a striking difference
from the previous Book, the ninth, in which Demodocus is the singer.
What is the ground of such a marked transition? Demodocus has as his
theme the war at Troy with its lays of heroes, and its famous deeds; he
celebrates the period portrayed in the Iliad; his field is the Heroic
Epos, or the songs of which it is composed. But he cannot sing of the
world outside of the Greco-Trojan consciousness, he cannot reach beyond
the Olympian order into the new set of deities of Fableland. Ulysses,
however, has transcended the Trojan epoch, has, in fact, reacted
against Hellenic life and institutions, though he longs to get back to
them, out of his alienated condition. This internal phase Demodocus
does not know, it manifestly lies beyond his art. He does not sing of
the Return at all, though Phemius, the Ithacan bard, did in the First
Book. A new strain is this, requiring a new singer, namely the man who
has had the wonderful experience himself.

The result is, another art-form has to be employed, the Fairy Tale, of
which we have already spoken. The individual now turns inward and
narrates his marvelous adventures in the region of spirit, his
wrestlings there, his doubts, his defeats and escapes. For Fableland is
not actual like Hellas, not even like Phaeacia; it is a creation of the
mind in order to express mind, and its shapes have to be removed from
sensuous reality to fulfill the law of their being. Such is plainly
Homer's procedure. Once before he sped off into Fai