Homer and Classical Philology | Page 6

The masses have
never experienced more flattering treatment than in thus having the laurel of genius set
upon their empty heads. It was imagined that new shells were forming round a small
kernel, so to speak, and that those pieces of popular poetry originated like avalanches, in
the drift and flow of tradition. They were, however, ready to consider that kernel as being
of the smallest possible dimensions, so that they might occasionally get rid of it
altogether without losing anything of the mass of the avalanche. According to this view,
the text itself and the stories built round it are one and the same thing.
[1] Of course Nietzsche saw afterwards that this was not so.--TR.
Now, however, such a contrast between popular poetry and individual poetry does not
exist at all; on the contrary, all poetry, and of course popular poetry also, requires an
intermediary individuality. This much-abused contrast, therefore, is necessary only when
the term individual poem is understood to mean a poem which has not grown out of the
soil of popular feeling, but which has been composed by a non-popular poet in a
non-popular atmosphere--something which has come to maturity in the study of a learned
man, for example.
With the superstition which presupposes poetising masses is connected another: that
popular poetry is limited to one particular period of a people's history and afterwards dies
out--which indeed follows as a consequence of the first superstition I have mentioned.
According to this school, in the place of the gradually decaying popular poetry we have
artistic poetry, the work of individual minds, not of masses of people. But the same
powers which were once active are still so; and the form in which they act has remained
exactly the same. The great poet of a literary period is still a popular poet in no narrower
sense than the popular poet of an illiterate age. The difference between them is not in the
way they originate, but it is their diffusion and propagation, in short, tradition. This
tradition is exposed to eternal danger without the help of handwriting, and runs the risk of
including in the poems the remains of those individualities through whose oral tradition
they were handed down.
If we apply all these principles to the Homeric poems, it follows that we gain nothing
with our theory of the poetising soul of the people, and that we are always referred back
to the poetical individual. We are thus confronted with the task of distinguishing that
which can have originated only in a single poetical mind from that which is, so to speak,
swept up by the tide of oral tradition, and which is a highly important constituent part of
the Homeric poems.
Since literary history first ceased to be a mere collection of names, people have attempted
to grasp and formulate the individualities of the poets. A certain mechanism forms part of
the method: it must be explained--i.e., it must be deduced from principles--why this or
that individuality appears in this way and not in that. People now study biographical
details, environment, acquaintances, contemporary events, and believe that by mixing all
these ingredients together they will be able to manufacture the wished-for individuality.

But they forget that the punctum saliens, the indefinable individual characteristics, can
never be obtained from a compound of this nature. The less there is known about the life
and times of the poet, the less applicable is this mechanism. When, however, we have
merely the works and the name of the writer, it is almost impossible to detect the
individuality, at all events, for those who put their faith in the mechanism in question;
and particularly when the works are perfect, when they are pieces of popular poetry. For
the best way for these mechanicians to grasp individual characteristics is by perceiving
deviations from the genius of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions: and the
fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem the fainter will be the traces of the individual
poet who composed it.
All those deviations, everything dull and below the ordinary standard which scholars
think they perceive in the Homeric poems, were attributed to tradition, which thus
became the scapegoat. What was left of Homer's own individual work? Nothing but a
series of beautiful and prominent passages chosen in accordance with subjective taste.
The sum total of æsthetic singularity which every individual scholar perceived with his
own artistic gifts, he now called Homer.
This is the central point of the Homeric errors. The name of Homer, from the very
beginning, has no connection either with the conception of æsthetic perfection or yet with
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a
historical tradition, but an æsthetic judgment.
The