that he made himself master of the entire subject by a single powerful
glance.

The _Iliad_ is not a garland, but a bunch of flowers. As many pictures
as possible are crowded on one canvas; but the man who placed them there
was indifferent as to whether the grouping of the collected pictures was
invariably suitable and rhythmically beautiful. He well knew that no one
would ever consider the collection as a whole; but would merely look at
the individual parts. But that stringing together of some pieces as the
manifestations of a grasp of art which was not yet highly developed,
still less thoroughly comprehended and generally esteemed, cannot have
been the real Homeric deed, the real Homeric epoch-making event. On the
contrary, this design is a later product, far later than Homer's
celebrity. Those, therefore, who look for the "original and perfect
design" are looking for a mere phantom; for the dangerous path of oral
tradition had reached its end just as the systematic arrangement
appeared on the scene; the disfigurements which were caused on the way
could not have affected the design, for this did not form part of the
material handed down from generation to generation.

The relative imperfection of the design must not, however, prevent us
from seeing in the designer a different personality from the real poet.
It is not only probable that everything which was created in those times
with conscious æsthetic insight, was infinitely inferior to the songs
that sprang up naturally in the poet's mind and were written down with
instinctive power: we can even take a step further. If we include the
so-called cyclic poems in this comparison, there remains for the
designer of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ the indisputable merit of
having done something relatively great in this conscious technical
composing: a merit which we might have been prepared to recognise from