Before any process of disintegration is begun, this claim should be taken into account; the poem deserves to be appreciated as it stands. Whatever may be the secrets of its authorship, it exists as a single continuous narrative poem; and whatever its faults may be, it holds a position by itself, and a place of some honour, as the one extant poem of considerable length in the group to which it belongs. It has a meaning and value apart from the questions of its origin and its mode of production. Its present value as a poem is not affected by proofs or arguments regarding the way in which it may have been patched or edited. The patchwork theory has no power to make new faults in the poem; it can only point out what faults exist, and draw inferences from them. It does not take away from any dignity the book may possess in its present form, that it has been subjected to the same kind of examination as the _Iliad_. The poem may be reviewed as it stands, in order to find out what sort of thing passed for heroic poetry with the English at the time the present copy of the poem was written. However the result was obtained, _Beowulf_ is, at any rate, the specimen by which the Teutonic epic poetry must be judged. It is the largest monument extant. There is nothing beyond it, in that kind, in respect of size and completeness. If the old Teutonic epic is judged to have failed, it must be because _Beowulf_ is a failure. Taking the most cursory view of the story of _Beowulf_, it is easy to recognise that the unity of the plot is not like the unity of the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. One is inclined at first to reckon _Beowulf_ along with those epics of which Aristotle speaks, the _Heracleids_ and _Theseids_, the authors of which "imagined that because Heracles was one person the story of his life could not fail to have unity."[40] [Footnote 40: _Poet._ 1451 a.] It is impossible to reduce the poem of _Beowulf_ to the scale of Aristotle's _Odyssey_ without revealing the faults of structure in the English poem:-- A man in want of work goes abroad to the house of a certain king troubled by Harpies, and having accomplished the purification of the house returns home with honour. Long afterwards, having become king in his own country, he kills a dragon, but is at the same time choked by the venom of it. His people lament for him and build his tomb.