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merely the editor, collector, redactor; he is not a Grimm, gathering his tales from the mouths of the people with a scientific accuracy. He gathered them, doubtless, but he transfigured them into an image reflecting the experience of a human soul. Our age is indeed scientific, it is collecting the folk-songs and the folk-tales from every quarter of the globe, and stringing them on a thread, like so many beads, not being able to transmute them into poetry. Wolf heralded the coming time by starting to reconvert Homer into his primitive materials, by making him scientific and not poetic, at least not architectonic. Still we may be permitted to hope that these vast collections of the world's folk-lore will yet be transmuted by some new Homer into a world-poem. 6. The careful reader will also weigh the fact that Ulysses is now the story-teller himself. The entire series of adventures in Fableland is put into his mouth by the poet. Herein, we note a striking difference from the previous Book, the ninth, in which Demodocus is the singer. What is the ground of such a marked transition? Demodocus has as his theme the war at Troy with its lays of heroes, and its famous deeds; he celebrates the period portrayed in the Iliad; his field is the Heroic Epos, or the songs of which it is composed. But he cannot sing of the world outside of the Greco-Trojan consciousness, he cannot reach beyond the Olympian order into the new set of deities of Fableland. Ulysses, however, has transcended the Trojan epoch, has, in fact, reacted against Hellenic life and institutions, though he longs to get back to them, out of his alienated condition. This internal phase Demodocus does not know, it manifestly lies beyond his art. He does not sing of the Return at all, though Phemius, the Ithacan bard, did in the First Book. A new strain is this, requiring a new singer, namely the man who has had the wonderful experience himself. The result is, another art-form has to be employed, the Fairy Tale, of which we have already spoken. The individual now turns inward and narrates his marvelous adventures in the region of spirit, his wrestlings there, his doubts, his defeats and escapes. For Fableland is not actual like Hellas, not even like Phaeacia; it is a creation of the mind in order to express mind, and its shapes have to be removed from sensuous reality to fulfill the law of their being. Such is plainly Homer's procedure. Once before he sped off into Fai
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