save perhaps in a few interpolated passages--touched by the
influences of that late age. It is not a complex of the work of
four incompatible centuries, as far as this point is concerned--
the point of legend, religion, ritual, and conception of heroic
character.




CHAPTER III


HYPOTHESES OF EPIC COMPOSITION

Whosoever holds that the Homeric poems were evolved out of the
lays of many men, in many places, during many periods of culture,
must present a consistent and logical hypothesis as to how they
attained their present plots and forms. These could not come by
accident, even if the plots are not good--as all the world held
that they were, till after Wolf's day--but very bad, as some
critics now assert. Still plot and form, beyond the power of
chance to produce, the poems do possess. Nobody goes so far as to
deny that; and critics make hypotheses explanatory of the fact
that a single ancient "kernel" of some 2500 lines, a "kernel"
altered at will by any one who pleased during four centuries,
became a constructive whole. If the hypotheses fail to account for
the fact, we have the more reason to believe that the poems are
the work of one age, and, mainly, of one man.

In criticising Homeric criticism as it is to-day, we cannot do