the beginning, and which is in my opinion of the very first order in the
domain of instinctive creation. We may even be ready to pronounce this
synthetisation of great importance. All those dull passages and
discrepancies--deemed of such importance, but really only subjective,
which we usually look upon as the petrified remains of the period of
tradition--are not these perhaps merely the almost necessary evils which
must fall to the lot of the poet of genius who undertakes a composition
virtually without a parallel, and, further, one which proves to be of
incalculable difficulty?

Let it be noted that the insight into the most diverse operations of the
instinctive and the conscious changes the position of the Homeric
problem; and in my opinion throws light upon it.

We believe in a great poet as the author of the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey--but not that Homer was this poet_.

The decision on this point has already been given. The generation that
invented those numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth of the
contest between Homer and Hesiod, and looked upon all the poems of the
epic cycle as Homeric, did not feel an æsthetic but a material
singularity when it pronounced the name "Homer." This period regards
Homer as belonging to the ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus,
Dædalus, and Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new branch of art,
to whom, therefore, all the later fruits which grew from the new branch
were thankfully dedicated.

And that wonderful genius to whom we owe the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
belongs to this thankful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the
altar of the primeval father of the Homeric epic, Homeros.