ent manvantara, why not
Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one? At
such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a
little after; because they have a work of preparation to do;
and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and
aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other
sought to do for Greece. But this is to treat Homer as if he had
been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved'
(a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of
him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a
fiction. Admitted. A school of critics has cleaned poor old
blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on
God's earth--just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up
the Human Soul. But there is another school, who have preserved
for him some shreds at least of identity. Briefly put, you can
'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence--grammar,
microscopic examination of text and forms and so on--that Homer
is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious
of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into
account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave
and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad
does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities
between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally
speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master
made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as we know it, may contain
passages not his; but--_he wrote the Iliad._

What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said: "Now
let us write an epic." Conditions would be against it. A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies: that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting. The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.

Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later