problem which, like a coin long passed from hand to hand, has lost its original and highly conspicuous stamp.  Poetical works, which cause the hearts of even the greatest geniuses to fail when they endeavour to vie with them, and in which unsurpassable images are held up for the admiration of posterity—­and yet the poet who wrote them with only a hollow, shaky name, whenever we do lay hold on him; nowhere the solid kernel of a powerful personality.  “For who would wage war with the gods:  who, even with the one god?” asks Goethe even, who, though a genius, strove in vain to solve that mysterious problem of the Homeric inaccessibility.

The conception of popular poetry seemed to lead like a bridge over this problem—­a deeper and more original power than that of every single creative individual was said to have become active; the happiest people, in the happiest period of its existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and formative power, was said to have created those immeasurable poems.  In this universality there is something almost intoxicating in the thought of a popular poem:  we feel, with artistic pleasure, the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon as we do in an uncontrollable cataract.  But as soon as we examine this thought at close quarters, we involuntarily put a poetic mass of people in the place of the poetising soul of the people:  a long row of popular poets in whom individuality has no meaning, and in whom the tumultuous movement of a people’s soul, the intuitive strength of a people’s eye, and the unabated profusion of a people’s fantasy, were once powerful:  a row of original geniuses, attached to a time, to a poetic genus, to a subject-matter.

Such a conception justly made people suspicious.  Could it be possible that that same Nature who so sparingly distributed her rarest and most precious production—­genius—­should suddenly take the notion of lavishing her gifts in one sole direction?  And here the thorny question again made its appearance:  Could we not get along with one genius only, and explain the present existence of that unattainable excellence?  And now eyes were keenly on the lookout for whatever that excellence and singularity might consist of.  Impossible for it to be in the construction of the complete works, said one party, for this is far from faultless; but doubtless to be found in single songs:  in the single pieces above all; not in the whole.  A second party, on the other hand, sheltered themselves beneath the authority of Aristotle, who especially admired Homer’s “divine” nature in the choice of his entire subject, and the manner in which he planned and carried it out.  If, however, this construction was not clearly seen, this fault was due to the way the poems were handed down to posterity and not to the poet himself—­it was the result of retouchings and interpolations, owing to which the original setting of the work gradually became