NORM AND INNOVATION

I HAVE been supposing that Homer, who wrote the Iliad and thereby founded European literature, was one definite individual. Whilst examining the circumstances in which he worked and the habits which he bequeathed, I have dealt mainly with externals and said little of his ‘genius’ or ‘inspiration’. I will continue to avoid these words, not that they are meaningless but because their suggestiveness is not easy to control. The hypothesis I wish to explore is rather that he was a considerable innovator. Homeric scholars have recently paid a good deal of attention to the narrative minstrels of other peoples, especially among the Slavs of our own day, and they have pointed out that it is not in the nature of such minstrels to be innovators, to be creative poets in the ways I shall suggest. It is, I am sure, exceedingly rare for such a minstrel to be such an innovator: as indeed creativeness on Homer's scale is not in the nature of normal humanity.

Few people are outstandingly creative in (for example) language or morals: most people appear to follow, with varying fidelity and skill, some kind of norm. Protagoras maintained that we learn our notions of right and wrong in the same way as we learn the language we speak, from the usage of our fellow men. Societies need both these things, a conventional morality and a language: both are compounded of tradition and a constant creative element; the vitality of both lies in that tension. But the creative element is normally small, and societies are preserved by the not-too-creative norm: few moralists are creative on Sokrates' scale, and societies sometimes founder beneath them. The minstrels' tradition, centuries old in Greece, foundered beneath the Iliad.

What are the pressures which compel a man to be an innovator? When the desire is intense to create something to which existing conditions are unequal: when this intense desire fills and integrates the whole man. It is evident that such intense desires were characteristic of the creative centuries of Greece: we must expect to find this so in Homer.