It is manifest that the epical Upper World of the Gods has receded from the place it occupies in the Iliad and in the other portions of the Odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. A new order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united Hellas, and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation.
What are these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. Really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms, grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them.
Such is this Fairy World which has crept in under the grand Olympian order in response to a true necessity. Its beings are not natural, its events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we would see his meaning. Spirit is portraying spirit, and not externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four Books.
4. But it must not for a moment be thought that Homer created this Fairy World or made, single-handed, these Fairy Tales. The latter are the work of the people, possibly of the race. Comparative folk-lore has traced them around the globe in one form or other. The story of Polyphemus is really a collection of stories gathered about one central person; some portions of it have been found in the East as well as the West, in Arabian and Tartar legend as well as in Celtic and Esthonian. The subtle play upon the word "nobody" as a name is known far and wide by many people who never heard of Homer. Wilhelm Grimm took the trouble to collect a lot of examples from a great variety of sources, ancient, medieval and modern, European and Asiatic, in a special treatise called the Legend of Polyphemus. Circe, the enchantress, has been discovered in a Hindoo collection of Tales belonging in the main to the thirteenth century of our era; but the witch who has the power of turning men into animals is as universal as folk-lore itself. The werewolf superstition will furnish instances without number. The descent into Hades has its parallel in the Finnish epic Kalevala, which reaches far back into Turanian legend; even the North American and Australian savages have their heroes enter the world beyond, and bring back an account of what is there. Truly one of the earliest needs of the human soul is this striving to find and to shadow forth in mythical outlines the realm of the supersensible. Dante's Journey through Inferno goes back to Virgil, Virgil goes back to Homer, and Homer to the folk-tales of his people, and these folk-tales of Greece reach out to still more remote ages and peoples. Thus into Christian legend the old heathen stories are transformed; many descents to Hell and Purgatory, as well as visions of Heaven are recorded in the Middle Ages. It may be said that folk-tales have an ancestry as old as man himself, and have followed him everywhere as his spirit's own shadow, which he casts as his body casts its visible shadow.
A collection of Fairy Tales we may, then, consider these four Books, with its giants, cannibals, enchantresses, with its bag of winds, which is still furnished by the town-witch to the outgoing sailor in some countries, if report be true. In fact, a little delving among the people, who are the great depositories of folk-lore, would probably find some of the stories of the Odyssey still alive, if not in their completeness, at least some shreds or floating gossamers thereof. Indestructible is the genuine tale when once made and accepted by the people, being of their very essence; it is also the primordial material of which all true poetry is produced, it is nature's Parian marble of which the poetic temple of Greece is built, specially this Homeric temple.
5. At this point we begin to see just what is the function of Homer who has inherited a vast mass of poetic material. He is its shaper, organizer, transformer; chiefly, however, he is the architect of the beautiful structure of song. He does not and cannot make the stone which goes into his edifice, but he makes the edifice. His genius is architectonic; he has an idea which he builds into harmonious measures. What the ages have furnished, he converts to his own use, and orders into a poetic Whole.
The store of Fairy Tales in those four Books was unquestionably transmitted to him, but he has jointed them into the Ulyssiad, and into the total Odyssey, of whose structure they form the very heart. The question arises: Did Homer find those Tales already collected? Possibly he did, to a certain extent; they seem to come together of themselves, making a marvelous romance of the sea. Some story-telling Greek sailor may well have given him the thread of connection; certainly they are sprung of nautical experience. But in whatever shape they may come to the poet, we may be certain of one thing: his constructive spirit transformed them and put them into their present place, where they fit to perfection, forming a most important stage in the grand Return.
In the development of the folk-tale, we can in a general way mark three grades. (1) There is first the story which sets forth the processes in nature, the clouds, the winds, the storms, the sun and moon, the conflict of the elements. Such is mainly the mythical character of the old Vedas. Many a trace of this ancient conception we can find in Homeric Fableland, which has a strong elemental substrate in the wrath of Neptune, in the tempests, in the winds of Æolus, in the Oxen of the Sun. Still the Odyssey has passed far beyond this phase of mythical consciousness; it cannot be explained by resolving it back into mere nature-myths, which method simply leaves out the vital fact, namely, that of development. (2) In the second stage of the Fairy Tale the physical meaning begins to withdraw into the background, and an ethical element becomes dominant; the outer conflicts of nature, if they be present, are taken to portray the spirit's struggle, in which a supreme moral order of some kind is brought to light. Here we may well place Grimm's collection of folk-tales in many ways an epoch-making book. In those simple stories of the people we observe the good and the bad marked off distinctly and engaged in some kind of a wrestle, which shows at last the supremacy of the good. Not in every case perhaps, but such is the tendency. But these Tales of Grimm, though collected, are in no sense united; the architect never appeared, though they are the material of a great Teutonic epos; they are the stones of the edifice, not the edifice itself by any means. (3) Out of this second stage easily rises the third, the poet being given; whereof the best example is just those four Books of the Odyssey. Now the folk-tale stands not alone, in widowed solitariness, but is made to take its place in the great national, or perchance universal temple of song.
We may say, therefore, that Homer not only gathered these Tales but organized them into a Whole, so that they no longer fall asunder into separate narratives, but they are deftly interwoven and form a great cycle of experience. No segment of this cycle can be taken away without breaking the totality. Moreover the entire series is but an organic part of the Odyssey.
It is now manifest that those who resolve these Tales into a disconnected bead-roll have really fallen back into the second stage before mentioned; they have undone the work of Homer. If these four Books be simply a string of stories without an inner movement from one to the other, or without any organic connection with the rest of the poem, the entire poetic temple is but a pile of stones and no edifice. And this is what Wolf and his disciples make out of Homer. In one way or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. A school more recent than that of Wolf, the Comparative Philologists, have gone still further backwards, and have reduced Homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. The merit of both schools is that they have called attention to Homer's primitive materials; they have rendered impossible the idea that Homer created the Greek Gods or his mythology, or even his little stories. The defect of these schools is that they fail to see the architectonic Homer, the poet who builds the crude materials furnished by his people into an enduring structure of the noblest art. They recognize in the edifice the stone and also the stone-cutter, but no master-builder.