II.

We now come to the great physical obstacle standing in the way of the

Return of Ulysses, the sea, which, however, has always its divine side

to the Greek mind. A series of water-deities will rise before us out of

this mighty element, assuming various attitudes toward the solitary

voyager. Three of them, showing themselves as hostile (Neptune), as

helpful (Ino Leucothea), as saving (the River-God); all three too seem

in a kind of gradation, from the vast total sea, through one of its

phases, to the small stream pouring into the sea from the land. Thus

the Greek imagination, playing with water, deified the various

appearances thereof, specially in their relation to man. The

introduction of these three marine divinities naturally organizes this

second part of the Fifth Book into three phases or stages. Such is the

divine side now to be witnessed.

Parallel to this runs the human side, represented by the lone hero

Ulysses, who is passing through a fearful ordeal of danger with its

attendant emotions of anxiety, terror, hope, despair. A very hard test

is surely here applied to weak mortal flesh. We shall observe that he

passes through a series of mental perturbations at each divine

appearance; he runs up and down a scale of doubt, complaint,

resolution. His weakness he will show, yet also his strength;

dubitation yet faith; he will hesitate, yet finally act. Thus he saves

himself at last through his own will, yet certainly with the help of

the Gods; for both sides have to co-operate to bring about the heroic

act of his deliverance.

Pallas also comes to the aid of her favorite, but in an indirect

manner. The sea does not seem to be her element. She stops the winds

and "informs his mind with forecast," but she does not personally

appear and speak, nor is she addressed, as is the case with the

water-gods. She plays in by the way in this marine emergency; her

appearances now do not organize the action. But the three appearances

of the water-gods are the organic principle, their element being at

present the scene of the adventure. On these lines we shall note the

course of the poem in some detail.

1. Neptune returning from the Ethiopians to Hellas, sees the lone

sailor with his little craft from the heights of the mountain called

Solyma; at once the God's wrath is roused and he talks to himself,

"shaking his head." The clouds, the winds, the ocean obeyed his behest,

and fell upon the voyager in a furious tempest. A huge billow whirled

the raft around and threw Ulysses off into the deep; with difficulty be

regained his place, and escaped death.

A vivid picture of the grand obstacle to early navigation, of which

Neptune is the embodiment. Why should he not be angry at the man who

seeks to tame him? The raft means his ultimate subjection. Nature

resists the hand which subdues her at first, and then gracefully

yields. To be sure there had to be a mythical ground for Neptune's

anger at Ulysses: the latter had put out the eye of his son, the

Cyclops Polyphemus, which was another phase of the subjection of wild

nature to intelligence. For seventeen days Ulysses had easy sailing,

guided by the stars; but the sea has its destructive side which must

also be experienced by the much-enduring man.

Corresponding to this outer tempest, we observe an inner tempest in the

soul of Ulysses. "O me wretched! what is now to happen to me!" Terror

unmans him for the time being; regret weakens him: "Thrice happy, four

times happy the Greeks who fell on Troy's broad plain!" Thus he goes

back in memory to his heroic epoch and wishes for death then. Too late

it is, for while he is lamenting, a wave strikes him and tosses him out

into the deep; now he has to act, and this need of action saves him

from his internal trituration, as well as from external death.

With this renewed energy of the will, a new help appears, a divine aid

from the sea. For without his own strong effort, no God can rescue him,

however powerful. That toss out into the waves was not without its

blessing.

2. Ino Leucothea, Ino the white Goddess, beholds him with pity in his

extremity--she was once mortal herself but now is divine. Her function

seems to be to help the shipwrecked mariner; her name reminds the

reader of the white calm of the sea, elsewhere celebrated by Homer

(Book X, 94; Nitzsch's observation). Thus she appears to represent the

peaceful placid mood of the marine element, which rises in the midst of

the storm and imparts hope and courage, nay predicts safety. She gives

her veil to Ulysses, in which commentators trace a suggestion of the

fillet or sacred cloth which was given out from a temple in Samothrace,

and had the power of saving the endangered mariner, if he had tied it

round his body. As it is here employed, it strangely suggests a

life-preserver. At any rate Ino is the calming power opposed to angry

Neptune, and she works upon both the waters and the man.

"Ill-fated man," she cries, "why hast thou so angered Neptune?" Then

she changes her note: "Still he shall not destroy thee, however much he

desires." She bids him give up his raft to the anger of Neptune, throw

away his clinging wet garments of Calypso, and swim to the land of the

Phaeacians. Then she hands him the veil which he is to "bind beneath his

breast," and, when he has reached land, he is to throw it back into the

sea. A ritual of some kind, symbolic acts we feel these to be, though

their exact meaning may be doubtful. Ino, "the daughter of Cadmus," is

supposed to have been a Phoenician Goddess originally, and to have

been transferred to the Greek sailor, just as his navigation came to

him, partly at least, from the Phoenicians. If he girded himself with

the consecrated veil of Leucothea, the Goddess of the calm, Neptune

himself in wrath could not sink him.

Such was the faith required of Ulysses, but now comes the internal

counterstroke: his skepticism. "Ah me! what if some God is planning

another fraud against me, bidding me quit my raft!" The doubter refuses

to obey and clings to his raft. But the waves make short work of it

now, and Ulysses by sheer necessity has to do as the Goddess bade him;

"with hands outspread he plunged into the sea," the veil being

underneath him. When he quits his raft, and is seen in the water,

Neptune dismisses him from view with a parting execration, and Pallas

begins to help him, not openly, but indirectly.

In such manner the great doubter is getting toward shore, but even here

his doubts cease not. Steep jutting cliffs may not permit him to land,

the billows may dash him to death on the sharp shoaly rocks, or carry

him out again to sea, or some huge monster of the deep may snap him up

in its jaws; thus he is dashed about internally, on the billows of

doubt. But this grinding within is stopped by the grinding he gets

without; a mighty surge overwhelms him, he clutches a rock and saves

himself, but leaves flakes of flesh from his hands behind on the rock.

"He swam along the coast and eyed it well," he even reaches the mouth

of a soft-flowing river, where was a smooth beach and a shelter from

the wind. Here is the spot so long desired, here then he passes to an

act of faith, he prays to the river which becomes at once to the Greek

imagination a God.

3. This brings us to the third water deity, and we observe a kind of

scale from the universal one, Neptune, down to a local one, that of the

river. The middle one, Ino, is the humane kindly phase of the great

deep, showing her kinship with man; Neptune was the ruder god of the

physical sea, and, to the Homeric Greek, the most powerful and natural.

No wonder that he was angry at that little raft and its builder; it

meant his ultimate subjection.

The prayer of Ulysses to the River-God is, on the whole, the finest

passage in the present Book. It shows him now a man of faith, humbled

though he be to the last degree of misery: "Hear me, ruler, whoever

thou art, I approach thee much-besought. The deathless Gods revere the

prayer of him who comes to them and asks for mercy, as I now come to

thy stream. Pity, ruler, me thy suppliant." Certainly a lofty

recognition of the true nature of deity; no wonder that the River

stayed his current, smoothed the waves and made a calm before him. Such

a view of the Gods reveals to us the inner depths of the Hero's

character; it calls to mind that speech of Phoenix in the Iliad (Book

Ninth) where he says that the Gods are placable. As soon as Ulysses

makes this utterance from his heart, he is saved, the Divine Order is

adjusted to his prayer, he having of course put himself into harmony

with the same. He has no longer any need of the protecting veil of the

sea-goddess Ino, having escaped from the angry element, and obtained

the help of the new deity belonging to the place. He restores the veil

to the Goddess according to her request, in which symbolic act we may

possibly read a consecration of the object which had saved him, as well

as a recognition of the deity: "This veil of salvation belongs not to

me, but to the Goddess." Not of his strength alone was he saved from

the waves.

Such is one side of Ulysses, that of faith, of the manifestation of the

godlike in man, especially when he is in the very pinch of destruction.

But Ulysses would not be Ulysses, unless he showed the other side too,

that of unfaith, weak complaint, and temporary irresolution. So, when

he is safe on the bank of the stream, he begins to cry out: "What now

am I to suffer more! If I try to sleep on this river's brink for the

night, the frost and dew and wind will kill me; and if I climb this

hill to yonder thicket, I fear a savage beast will eat me while I

slumber." It is well to be careful, O Ulysses, in these wild solitudes;

now let the petulant outburst just given, be preparatory to an act of

will which will settle the problem. "He rose and went to the wood near

by; he crept under two bushes that grew from the same place, one the

wild and the other the tame olive." There in a heap of leaves--man's

first bed--he slept under the intertwined branches of the two

olives--nature's shelter against wind, rain, sun. He, with all his

cultivation is quite reduced to the condition of the primitive man.

One cannot help feeling a symbolic intention in these two olive trees,

one wild and one cultivated. They represent in a degree the two phases

of the man sleeping under them; they hint also the transition which he

is making from the untamed nature of Calypso's island to the more

civilized land of Phaeacia. The whole Book is indeed the movement to a

new life and a new country. We might carry out the symbolic hint much

further on these lines, and see a meaning in their interwoven branches

and the protection they are giving at present; but the poetic

suggestion flashing afar over poem backwards and forwards is the true

effect, and may be dimmed by too much explanation.

Such is this marvelous storm with its ship-wreck, probably the first in

literature, but often made use of since. The outer surges of the

tempest are indeed terrific; but the main interest is, that along with

this external description of the storm, we witness the corresponding

internal heaving and tossing of a human soul. Everywhere we notice that

Ulysses doubts at first, doubts Calypso, doubts Ino, doubts even his

final safety when on land. He is the skeptical man, he never fails to

call up the possibilities on the other side. Though a God give the

promise, he knows that there are other Gods who do not promise, or may

give a different promise to somebody else. It is the experience of

life, this touch of doubt at first; it always accompanies the thinking

man, who, like Ulysses, must be aware of a negative counterpart even to

truth. Not pleasant, but painful is this doubt shooting through the

soul, and keeping it in distress and often in lamentation. So even the

Hero breaks out into unmanly complaint, and reveals to the full his

finite nature.

Yet if Ulysses doubts, he always overcomes his doubt in the end; he

sees the positive element in the world to be deeper than the negative

one, after a little access of weakness. Under his doubt is the deeper

layer of faith, so he never gives up, but valiantly holds on and

conquers. The Gods come to his aid when he believes and acts. His

intellect is doubt, his will is faith: wherein we may trace important

lines which unite him with Faust, the chief character in our last

world-poem. Ulysses will complain, and having freed his mind, will go

to work and conquer the obstacle. He struggles with the billow,

clinging to the mast, though he had just said: "Now I shall die a

miserable death."

Parallel to this human side runs the divine side, which we need not

further describe here, with its three water-deities. A little attention

we may give to the part of Pallas. At one time she seems to control the

outer world for her favorite, sending the wind or stopping it; then she

is said to inform his mind with forecast, that he may do the thing in

spite of wind or other obstacle; finally he often does the deed without

any divine suggestion, acting through himself. In these stages we can

see a transition of the Mythus. The first stage is truly mythical, in

which the deity is the mover, the second is less so, the Goddess having

become almost wholly internal; in the third stage the mythical is lost.

All these stages are in Homer and in this Book, though the first is

still paramount.

Taking into view the general character of the mythical movement of this

Fifth Book, we observe that there is a rise in it from a lower to a

higher form; Calypso and Neptune are intimately blended with their

physical environments, the island and the sea. Though elevated into

persons, they are still sunk in Nature; it is the function of the Hero,

especially the wise man, to subordinate both or to transcend both:

which is just what Ulysses has done. His Mythus is, therefore, a higher

one, telling the story of the subjection of nature and of her Gods.

This story marks one phase of his career.

The reader will probably be impressed with the fact that in the present

Book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions

of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses

has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso

is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses

has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation

of all intelligence. It is not simply sensuous gratification with the

mind still whole and capable of resolution, as was the case with

Ulysses in the realm of Circe, in which he shows his will-power, though

coupled with indulgence. Such is the difference between Calypso and

Circe, which is always a problem with the reader. In this way, too, we

see how the Fifth Book before us is a direct continuation and unfolding

out of the Twelfth Book. Indeed the very movement of the poem is

significant, which is a going backwards; so Ulysses drops far to the

rear out of that light-loving Island of the Sun, against which is his

violation, when he comes to Ogygia.

But Ulysses has now, after long discipline, transcended this sphere,

and has reached a new land, of which the account is to follow next.

_BOOK SIXTH._

We are now to make one of the chief transitions of the poem, we are

going to pass from the Dark Island and the stormy sea to Phaeacia, a

bright, sunlit land, where reign peace and harmony. Moreover, we move

out of the realm of nature to that of institutions. Still more

significant are the central figures of the two localities, both women;

one of these we have seen, Calypso, who is now to give way to Nausicaa.

This Book may, therefore, be called Nausicaa's Book, as she is the

leading character in it, imparting to it a marvelous mood of idyllic

beauty and womanly purity. She is the person chosen by the poet to

introduce the Hero into the new realm, Phaeacia, being in sharp contrast

to Calypso, who detained Ulysses in dark Ogygia away from his family,

and whose character was adverse to the domestic relation. But Nausicaa

shows from the start the primal instinct of the true woman for the

home. She is still young, but she has arrived at that age in which she

longs with every throb of her heart to surrender her own separate

existence, and to unite it with another. She manifests in all its

attractiveness the primordial love of the woman for the Family, basis

of all institutional life, as well as fountain of the deepest joys of

our terrestrial sojourn.

On this account she represents the place of Phaeacia in the Greek world

as well as in the present poem; perhaps we ought to add, in the whole

movement of civilization. That land may be called the idyllic one, a

land of peace and of freedom from all struggle; the borderland between

the natural and the civilized spheres. Man has risen out of the

grossness of mere sensuous individualism, such as we see in Polyphemus

and in other shapes of Fairyland; but he has not yet reached the

conflicts of higher forms of society resulting from a pursuit of

wealth, from ambition, from war. Here is a quiet half-way house on the

road from nature to civilization; a sweet reposeful realm, almost

without any development of the negative forces of society; a temporary

stopping-place for Ulysses in his all-embracing career, also for

individuals and nations in their rush forward to reach the great end.

The deep collisions of social life belong not to Phaeacia, nor to

Nausicaa, its ideal image.

It is the virgin land, the virgin world, which now has a young virgin

as its central character and representative, to mediate Ulysses with

itself, the universal man who must also have the new experience. Still

she is not all of Phaeacia, but its prelude, its introductory form;

moreover, she is just the person to conduct Ulysses out of his present

forlorn condition of mind and body into a young fresh hope, into a new

world. The Calypso life is to be obliterated by the vision of the true

woman and her instinctive devotion to the Family. We are aware that

Ulysses has not been contented with the Dark Island and its nymph, he

has had the longing to get away and has at last gotten away; but to

what has he come? Lost the one and not attained the other, till he

beholds Nausicaa, who grasps him by the hand, as it were, and delivers

him wholly from Calypso, leading him forth to her home, where he is to

witness the central phase of domestic life, the mother.

The organism of the Book easily falls into two parts, one of which

portrays Nausicaa at home, the other gives the meeting between her and

Ulysses. Yet over this human movement hovers always the divine, Pallas

is the active supernal power which brings these events to pass,

introducing both the parts mentioned. She is the providence which the

poet never permits to drop out. Most deeply does the old singer's

sincerity herein move the reader, who must rise to the same elevation;

Homer's loyalty is to faith, faith in the Divine Order of the World,

for this is not suffered to go its way without a master spirit; the

individual, especially in his pivotal action, is never left alone, but

he fits in somewhere; the Whole takes him up and directs him, and

adjusts him into the providential plan; not simply from without but

through himself. Such is this poet's loyalty to his Idea; he has faith,

deep, genuine faith, yet unostentatious, quite unconventional at times;

a most refreshing, yes, edifying appearance to-day, even for religious

people, though he be "an old heathen."

Such continual recurrence of the God's interference with the course of

events--what does it mean? This is unquestionably the fundamental

problem with the earnest student of Homer. Let us observe, then, first,

that the poet's principle is not to allow a divine intervention to

degenerate into a merely external mechanical act; himself full of the

spirit of the God, he puts the divine influence inside the individual

as well as outside, and thus preserves the latter's freedom in the

providential order. The faithful reader will never let these movements

of the deity drop into mere machinery; when he does, he has lost the

essence of Homer. Doubtless it requires an alert activity of mind to

hold the Gods always before the vision in their truth; they must be

re-thought, or indeed re-created every time they appear. The

somnolescent reader is only too ready to spare himself the poetic

exaltation in which the old bard must be read, if we would really see

the divinities, and grasp the spirit of their dealings with man. Speak

not, then, of epical machinery in Homer, the word is misleading to the

last degree, is indeed libellous, belieing the poet in the very soul of

his art.

In the present Book there is not by any means as much divine

intervention as in the preceding one; we pass from the lower realm of

the water-gods to that of Pallas, the goddess of intelligence, who is

the sole active divinity in this Book. She appears to Nausicaa at the

beginning in the form of a dream, and bids the maiden look after some

washing. Our first question is, why call in a goddess for such a

purpose? The procedure seems trivial and unnecessary, and so it would

be under ordinary circumstances. But through this humble and

common-place duty Nausicaa is made a link in the grand chain of the

Return of Ulysses, which is the divine plan underlying the whole poem,

and is specially the work of Pallas. To be sure this had no place in

Nausicaa's intention, but it does have a place in the providential

scheme, which has, therefore, to be voiced by the Goddess. Yet that

scheme does not conflict with the free-will of the maiden, which finds

its fullest scope just in this household duty, and brings out her

character. She reveals to Ulysses her nature, this is the occasion; she

had to be free to represent what she truly was to the much-experienced

man. An ordinary wash-day has little divinity in it, but this one is

filled with the divine plan. Thus small events, otherwise immediately

forgotten, may by a mighty co-incidence he elevated into the sphere of

the World's History, and become ever memorable. That French soldier who

threw a camp-kettle over the head of Mirabeau's ancestor and thus saved

him from being trampled to death by a passing troop of cavalry, made

himself a factor in the French Revolution, and was inspired by whom,

demon or angel?

As already hinted, the structure of the Book is determined by the two

interventions of Pallas, which divide it into two portions; these are

shown in the following outline:--

I. (1.) Pallas appears to Nausicaa in a dream, and gives the

suggestion.

(2.) Nausicaa, when she awakes, obeys the suggestion and

proceeds to the place of the washing.

II. (1.) Ulysses also asleep, lies in his cover not far from the

same spot, when Pallas starts the plan for his waking.

(2.) Meeting of Ulysses and Nausicaa, and the going to the city.

In both parts we observe the same general method; the divine influence,

beginning above, moves below and weaves the mortal into its scheme

through his own action.