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 another incident; and again, after an interval, another?  Each time with the intention to make a complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or god, now with another.  The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote the fairylike Lady of Shalott, was a very different man in mood and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the execrable Merlin and Vivien; but both were possessed with the Arthurian legend.  At thirty and at fifty you may easily take different views of the same men and incidents.  The Iliad, I suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems and many moods and periods of life of a single poet.  It was not until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into a single epic.

Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering minstrels—­Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they were called—­who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and unculture.  The first three orders were doubtless in existence long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of culture in any race during its pralayas.  So you find the professional story-tellers in the East today.  But the Homeridae