It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a very inharmonious whole, as in the _Nibelungenlied_, but a controlling poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that feat.
Where a man who is not a poet undertakes to produce the coalescence, as Dr. Lönnrot (1835-1849) did in the case of the peasant, not courtly, lays of Finland, he "fails to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," says Sir Richard Jebb. [Footnote: Homer, p. 134-135.]
This is perfectly true; much as Lönnrot botched and vamped the Finnish lays he made no epic out of them. But, as it is true, how did the late Athenian drudge of Pisistratus succeed where Lönnrot failed? "In the dovetailing of the _ODYSSEY_ we see the work of one mind," says Sir Richard. [Footnote: Homer, p. 129.] This mind cannot have been the property of any one but a great poet, obviously, as the _Odyssey_ is confessedly "an artistic whole." Consequently the disintegrators of the Odyssey, when they are logical, are reduced to averring that the poem is an exceedingly inartistic whole, a whole not artistic at all. While Mr. Leaf calls it "a model of skilful construction," Wilamowitz Mollendorff denounces it as the work of "a slenderly-gifted botcher," of about 650 B.C., a century previous to Mr. Leaf's Athenian editor.
Thus we come, after all, to a crisis in which mere literary appreciation is the only test of the truth about a work of literature. The Odyssey is an admirable piece of artistic composition, or it is the very reverse. Blass, Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, and the opinion of the ages declare that the composition is excellent. A crowd of German critics and Father Browne, S.J., hold that the composition is feeble. The criterion is the literary taste of each party to the dispute. Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz Möllendorff see a late bad patchwork, where Mr. Leaf, Sir Richard Jebb, Blass, Wolf, and the verdict of all mankind see a masterpiece of excellent construction. The world has judged: the _Odyssey_ is a marvel of construction: therefore is not the work of a late botcher of disparate materials, but of a great early poet. Yet Sir Richard Jebb, while recognising the _Odyssey_ as "an artistic whole" and an harmonious picture, and recognising Lönnrot's failure "to prove that mere combining and editing can form an artistic whole out of originally distinct songs, even though concerned with closely related themes," thinks that Kirchhoff has made the essence of his theory of late combination of distinct strata of poetical material from different sources and periods, in the _Odyssey_, "in the highest degree probable." [Footnote: Homer, p. 131.]