III.

The praise of the bard naturally leads to the third portion of the

Book, introduced by another song, which has its intimate connection

with the preceding ones. Then its effect is noted upon Ulysses, who

weeps as before, being stirred by many memories of companions lost.

Verily Troy is a tearful subject. What motive for weeping? Who is this

stranger anyhow? Alcinous now starts his interrogations which Ulysses

answers in the following Book. Still, though nameless, he has unfolded

himself quite fully through his actions in this Book. Again we hear the

deeds of the aforetime sung by the poet, and see their influence in the

present.

1. Ulysses himself now asks the poet to sing of the Wooden Horse which

"was made by Epeius with the aid of Pallas," the Goddess here standing

for skill, as it is now skill which takes Troy, not mere courage. Then

mark further: Ulysses was the man who introduced it within the Trojan

walls by stratagem--clearly another case of brain-work rather than

brawn-work. This famous Wooden Horse was "filled with men who took

Troy." Such is the song which Ulysses now calls for, mentioning himself

by name--a fact which makes the announcement of his name soon after

more impressive and dramatic. The Phaeacians had just heard the

culminating act in the taking of Troy, whereof Ulysses was the hero;

behold! he stands before them, in all the prestige of song. Some

critics have wondered why the name of Ulysses was withheld so long, and

have imagined all sorts of interpolations; surely they have not seen

the plan of the poet.

The Wooden Horse is not employed in the Iliad, but is one of the

striking details of the later epics, which recounted the destruction of

Troy. The song of Demodocus carries the incident back to the time of

Homer, and before Homer, for it suggests antecedent ballads or

rhapsodies which Homer knew, but did not use, and which poets after him

developed. The Odyssey takes for granted that its hearers knew the Lay

of the Wooden Horse, and also the Lay of the Strife between Ulysses and

Achilles, "the fame of which had reached the broad Heavens." Thus we

get a peep into the workshop of Homer and catch a glimpse of his

materials, which he did not invent, but found at hand. Homer is the

builder, the architectonic genius; he organizes the floating, disparate

songs of his age into a great totality, into a Greek Temple of which

they are the stones. Note what he does with this lay of Demodocus; he

puts it into its place in the total structure of the Odyssey, and thus

preserves it forever. So he has done with all his materials doubtless.

We may now see that those who cut up the Homeric poems into so many

different songs or ballads simply destroy the distinctive work of

Homer. They pry asunder the beautiful Greek Temple, lay its stones

alongside of one another, and say: behold the poet. But this is just

what he is not, and in the present Book we may see him unfolding his

own process. Homer is not Demodocus, but the latter's lay he takes up

and then weaves what he wants of it into the texture of the total poem.

He is thus a contrast to the bard, whom, however, he fully recognizes

and makes a part of his own work. Thus Homer himself really answers the

Wolfian theory, which seeks to reduce him to a Demodocus, singing

fragmentary lays about the Trojan War.

From the Greek poets the Wooden Horse passed to Virgil, who has made it

the best-known incident of the Trojan War. It is probably the most

famous stratagem of all time, due to the skill of Ulysses. Herein lies

the answer to the first lay of Demodocus; in the dispute Ulysses is

right, indeed he is a greater hero than Achilles, who could never have

captured the hostile city. The incident took place after the action of

the Iliad, and after the death of Achilles, who, heroic in courage,

stood in the way of intelligence. When he is gone, the city falls,

overthrown by the brain of Ulysses.

Homer does not pretend to give the song of Demodocus in full, but a

brief summary of what he sang before the Phaeacians. A later poet,

Arctinus, took up the legend here alluded to, and developed it in a

separate epic, called the Iliou-persis or Sack of Troy. Indeed a vast

number of legends and lays about the Trojan War bloomed into epics,

which were in later times joined together and called the Epic Cycle.

Thus we distinguish two very different stages of consciousness in early

Greek poetry: the ballad-making and the epical, Homer being the supreme

example of the latter, and Demodocus an instance of the former.

Looking back at the three lays of the bard in the present Book we find

that they all are connected together in a common theme of which they

show different phases, beginning, middle and end--the conflict before

the Iliad, the conflict of the Iliad, and the conflict after the Iliad,

all hovering around the great national enterprise of the Greeks, namely

the Trojan War, in which the deepest principle of the Hellenic world,

indeed of the entire Occident, was at stake.

But Homer, in distinction from Demodocus, weaves into his poem not only

the past but the present, not only Troy but Phaeacia, not only the

movement against the East but also the movement toward the West, of

which Phaeacia is simply one stage. The Hero who unites these two great

movements of Greek spirit is now brought before us again.

2. Ulysses weeps at the song of the bard which recalls so many memories

of friends departed and of dire calamities. These tears connect him

deeply with Troy and its conflict; the Phaeacians listen intently, but

are outside of the great struggle, they shed no tears. Thus does

Ulysses in his strongest emotions unite himself with the Trojan

enterprise of aforetime. He is not simply a wanderer over the sea

seeking to get home, but a returner from Troy; he has revealed himself

through his feelings. He personally shares in the woes sung by the

bard, because he has experienced them. Indeed the very image which the

poet here employs to express sorrow, taken from the woman whose husband

has been slain fighting for his city, and for his wife and his

children, recalls Hector, Andromache and Astyanax as they appear in the

Sixth Book of the Iliad. Ulysses is like such a woman, without home or

family, alone among strangers, shedding tears. Thus he connects himself

with the fateful story of Ilium.

Previously Ulysses wept at the first lay of Demodocus, now he

emphasizes his sorrow by repetition. Whenever the theme of Troy is

touched, he has to respond with tears; the second time of weeping at

the Trojan tale is necessary in order to fix his character and identify

him as a returner. Yet this repetition so vitally organic is questioned

by many critics, some of whom resort to excision. It is hardly worth

the while to notice them in their various attempts at destruction and

construction; when we once catch the underlying motive all becomes

plain. The first and last scenes of weeping unifies the Book, the bond

of tears holds its parts indissolubly together in the emotions.

Alcinous has observed the stranger both times, sitting near him, while

we may suppose that the other Phaeacians, not noticing him, to be

further off. The king sees his distress and even hears his sobs; in the

first case the royal host refrained from inquiry, that being the duty

of hospitality; but now the time for interrogation has arrived. The

speech of Alcinous is characteristic; full of humanity, full of

sympathy is the tone: "a guest, a suppliant stands for a brother even

to the man of little feeling." A touch of prophetic boastfulness he

shows here and elsewhere; the ships of the Phaeacians he endows with

supernatural powers, which fact, however, is not without meaning: "We

have no pilots, no rudders even, our boats obey our thoughts, and know

the cities and lands to which they come; very quickly do they shoot

across the wave, hid in fog and cloud." Truly an ideal ship, which time

has not yet realized, though recent navigation, with its present steam

and its future electricity, is on the way thereto. Still angry Neptune

threatens danger and may work damage, "smiting the ship on the dark

deep." This speech of Alcinous with its miraculous, prophetic tinge,

with its far-seeing hints of coming realities, almost foretelling our

modern humanity and our modern mastery of the sea through science, and

putting the two side by side, has given much trouble to the critics,

whom we again shall have to pass by, as they simply darken the poet.

Finally comes the demand: who art thou and why didst thou weep? What is

thy relation to Troy? Such is the culminating question; Ulysses has

been unfolding himself more and more throughout the present Book before

the king and people. The games showed his heroic strength; the dances

brought out his recognizing and harmonious spirit; the lays of

Demodocus have developed his connection with Troy. He clearly belongs

to the past and to the present, possibly he is a bridge spanning them,

which bridge he may be induced to build in wondrous rainbow colors

before the eyes of the Phaeacians.

_Appendix._ It seems never to have been noticed what an important

relation the present Book sustains toward the Wolfian theory concerning

the Homeric poems. The picture of Demodocus here given doubtless

suggested to Wolf the first outline of his view, and has influenced

other commentators who lean toward similar opinions. It is well known

that Wolf in his famous _Prolegomena_ maintains that the Iliad and

Odyssey were originally a string of ballads more or less disconnected,

and that Homer was only one of the many balladists, probably the best;

furthermore he holds that these ballads were brought together, edited

and put into their present shape by certain literary men called

_diaskeuastoe_--revisers, redactors, professors of poetry and philology

at the court of Peisistratus, about 500 B.C.

That is, Wolf regards Homer as a Demodocus, a singer and also a maker

of disjointed ballads and war-songs, the latter pertaining mostly to

the heroes of the Trojan War. These were sung at the festivals of the

people, at the houses of the nobility, and at the courts of kings,

quite as we see the bard singing here in Phaeacia. This fact we may

accept; but the question comes up: Is Homer such a balladist and

nothing more?

Now it is clear that Homer is not a Demodocus, since the latter is not

an epical builder, but a simple singer of separate lays for the

occasion. Mark well that Homer in this book does not unfold the themes,

"Strife between Ulysses and Achilles," and "The Wooden Horse," but

simply alludes to them as well-known; he barely gives the title and a

little of the argument, then drops the matter, leaving us to suppose

that the Bard sang a somewhat lengthy lay, of which the effect upon the

hearers and specially upon Ulysses is duly noted.

Homer, therefore, in this Book as well as in the First Book where

Phemius is introduced, makes the Bard or Balladist merely one of his

figures, and the song one of his incidents, while he, the veritable

Homer, portrays the total environment, showing the court, the games,

the household, the complete Phaeacian world. Here we come upon the main

distinction: Homer's eye is upon the totality of which the

ballad-singer is but a small fragment; Demodocus appears in but one

Phaeacian Book, and is by no means all of that, though for once the

leading figure.

A step further we may carry the thought. Homer is not only not a

Demodocus, but he very distinctly contrasts himself with Demodocus by

his poetic procedure. If he is at such pains to show himself a

world-builder, and then puts into his world a ballad-singer as a

passing character, he certainly emphasizes the difference between

himself and the latter. It is also to be noticed that Demodocus does

not sing an Iliad, though he chants lays of Troy; the Iliad is an

organized work, not a collection of ballads strung together. Everything

about Demodocus indicates separate songs; everything about Homer (the

Iliad and the Odyssey) indicates unity of song. Hence with the

separatists, dissectors, anatomizers, Demodocus is a greater favorite

than Homer, indeed he has taken the place of Homer.

Moreover the poet has plainly marked another stage, a stage between

himself and Demodocus. In the next Book Ulysses will begin singing and

continue through four Books, giving his adventures in Fableland, which

by itself possesses a certain completeness. Still it is but an organic

part of the total Odyssey, whose poetical architect is Homer. Ulysses

as singer is clearly higher than Demodocus; but Homer is above both,

for he takes both of them up into his unity, which is the all-embracing

poem.

Most emphatically, therefore, Homer shows himself not to be a

Demodocus, not to be a ballad-singer, which is an essential point in

the Wolfian argument. Homer himself refutes Wolf some 2,500 years

beforehand, and his is still the best refutation. A careful study of

this Eighth Book settles the relation between balladist and poet by a

simple presentation of the facts in their proper co-ordination, and

also puts the alert reader on the track of the genesis of the Wolfian

_Prolegomena_. For there can hardly be a doubt that Wolf, consciously

or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, derived his main conception

of Homer from the present Book and from the part that Demodocus, the

bard, plays in it. To be sure, the idea that Demodocus, in a general

way, is Homer, is old, coming down from antiquity and suggesting itself

to the modern reader, who very naturally thinks that Homer is giving

some traits of himself in his picture of the blind singer. So much we

may grant: some traits of himself, but not all by any means; Homer

doubtless upon occasion could sing a short lay of Troy for the

amusement of his audience, like Demodocus; but in such a part he is

only a wee fragment of the author of those magnificent works, the Iliad

and the Odyssey. The total Homer builds totalities, by the very

necessity of his genius.

Who, then, according to the theory, put these ballads together? Wolf,

fully possessed of the notion that Demodocus is Homer, starts to

account for the present form of the poems, which he assigns to the

shaping hand of Peisistratus and his college of editors, critics, and

poetasters. That is, the grand marvel of Homeric poetry, the mighty

constructive act thereof, he ascribes to a set of men essentially

barren and uncreative, for all of which he cites some very dubious and

inadequate ancient authority.

Here again we may be permitted to trace the Wolfian consciousness to

its origin, for origin it has in time and circumstance. Wolf was a

professor in a University, and his department was philology; his ideas

on Homer are really drawn from his vocation and his surroundings. Why

should he not make a philologer and a professor the author of the

Homeric poems? So he came to imagine that the tyrant Peisistratus 500

B.C. had under his patronage a kind of German University, or at least

a philological seminary, whose professors really constructed Homer as

we now have him, having put him together out of antecedent ballads

which the actual Homer and many others may have made ages before. Wolf,

therefore, is the founder of two philological seminaries; one at the

University of Berlin, and the other at the court of Peisistratus. Great

is the professor in smelling out the professor anywhere; still we

cannot help thinking that what Wolf ascribed to the old Greek seminary,

was done only at his German seminary, namely, the patching together of

Homer out of ballads.

_FABLELAND._

The movement of the second grand division of the poem, the Ulyssiad,

has passed through two of its stages, which have been already

considered; the third is now reached which we have called Fableland,

though it may be said that the two previous lands are also fabulous.

Let it then be named the Fairy World, though this term also does not

state or suggest the fact with precision. Without troubling ourselves

further about names, we shall proceed to seize the meaning by an

exposition given in some detail.

No careful reader can doubt that the poem changes decidedly at the

present juncture in color, style, environment and purpose. What reason

for it? And what is the connection with the preceding portion of the

poem? Four Books (IX-XII) of the same character essentially, unfold

themselves before us and demand a new kind of appreciation; they are

not idyllic, not epical; they form a class of a peculiar sort, which

class, however, we have before noticed in the Odyssey, showing itself

in short but suggestive interludes.

We shall, accordingly, first grapple with the leading facts of this new

poetic order and seek to interpret them, or rather let them interpret

themselves. Phaeacia, which we have just seen, lies before Fableland,

though the story of the latter is now told in Phaeacia.

1. The first fact which strikes us is the decided contrast between the

two realms. Phaeacia is the land of pure idyllic delight, its supreme

characteristic is peace, its happy people seem to have no conflict;

Fableland, on the contrary, is one incessant course of strife, struggle

and calamity, beginning with the unprovoked attack on the Ciconians.

Polyphemus the savage Cyclops is the opposite of the civil ruler

Alcinous; Circe, the enchantress, is the insidious foe to domestic life

represented by Arete; State and Family in Phaeacia are counterbalanced

by an anti-State and an anti-Family in Fableland. Thus man and woman

are shown in the two different places as institutional and

anti-institutional. Still deeper does the opposition reach; Phaeacia

lies wholly in the Upperworld, with its sweet sunlight, while Fableland

has a dim Underworld, beyond the sunlight, the realm of the

Supersensible; finally Fableland witnesses the supreme negative act of

man, typified in the slaying of the Oxen of the Sun. We may, therefore,

affirm that Fableland, as compared with Phaeacia, shadows forth the

realm of negation; the one stands for the ideal Greek world of ethical

order and harmony; the other is the denial and destruction of the same.

But we must not omit the reverse side of the contrast. In Fableland

there is one continued striving of the human soul, a chafing against

all limits, a moving forward from one stage to another; the spirit of

man is shown transcending its bounds everywhere. In Phaeacia, however,

there is no striving apparently, it is contented with itself and stays

with itself, seeking no neighbors; it is the land of rest, of cessation

from conflict, possibly of stagnation, unless it is stirred by inner

scission.

The transition from Phaeacia to Fableland is, therefore, full of

meaning. It is possible that Ulysses or the poet wished to show these

people the struggles which were slumbering in their society, for all

civilized order has the possibility of them. The negative spirit will

rise hereafter in their midst; so it rose in legendary Greece after the

Trojan War, so it rose in historical Greece after the Persian War. Thus

we may catch a prophetic tinge in this web of marvelous tales. On the

other hand, we should note also that Ulysses has reached the land of

peace just through the realm of strife and negation.

2. The next important thing is to observe how the poet is going to

locate, and environ this negative world. As it is the opposite of the

civilized order of Hellas, he throws it outside of Hellenic boundaries.

Over the Greek border somewhere it has to be placed; thus it passes

easily from the known to the unknown, out of the civilized to the

barbarous, out of the natural, to the supernatural.

All this we feel at once in the narrative. It is true that the first

destructive deed, the attack upon the Ciconians, occurs within the

limits of historical Hellas, in a region well known; but this act is

the prelude and the example, the offenders are at once borne to the

Lotus-eaters, who have the faintest touch of historical reality, and

thence to Polyphemus who is wholly fabulous. In this realm of pure

fable they stay till the end, having been cast out of Greece by the

poet on account of their hostile spirit.

Moreover we should note that they move about on the sea, that most

unstable element, in contrast to the fixed land; on the one there is

order and law, on the other caprice and violence. Yet certain fixed

points are set in this uncertain domain, namely the islands, which

however, are wholly separated from Hellas and her life, and have

inhabitants of their own, strangers to Hellenic influence. Ulysses and

his crew will pass from island to island, each of which will show its

meaning in some way antagonistic to Greek spirit. Out of the pale they

all lie in the boundless billowy waters; thus the Odyssey in this part

becomes a sea poem, while in the other two parts it is essentially a

land poem. The Greek was and still is a native of both sea and land

which are physically interwined and bound together in Greece as in no

other portion of the globe. His great poetical book envisages his

country as well as himself.

The main point, however, is that Fableland being negative to the Greek

world is put outside of all of its known geographical limits, and thus

becomes the setting for the marvelous story. It may here be added that

Grimm's Tales have a similar border which lies between civilized life

and the forest, since the forest was, for our Teutonic ancestors, the

fairy realm, in which their supernatural beings dwelt for the most

part. Out of culture back to nature the human being sometimes has to go

and have strange communings with the spirits there; such is often the

movement of the Fairy Tale. But who are these spirits or weird powers

dwelling in the lone island or in the solitary wood?

3. This question brings us to the pivotal fact of all Fableland: it is

ruled over by a new order of deities, not Olympians; the poet, throwing

it out of Hellas below, throws it out of Olympus above. Indeed what

else could he do? The Gods of Greece are the protectors of its

institutions, State and Family; they are the embodiment of its spirit,

of its civilization. But a spirit is now portrayed which is negative to

Greek spirit, which denies and defies it in its very essence; the

result is a new set of supernatural shapes which dominate the separated

world. The negation also must be seen taking on a plastic form, and

appearing before the Greek imagination.

The deities of Fableland, or its supernatural powers, are therefore

opposite to the deities of Olympus. Hence their shape is changed, they

can be even monstrosities, such as Polyphemus, the Laestrigonians,

Scylla and Charybdis. Circe and Calypso are beautiful women, yet not

natural women, in spite of their beauty; there is something superhuman

about them, divine, though they be not Olympians. Shapes of wonder they

all seem, unreal, yet in intimate connection with mankind. Moreover

they are local, attached to a given spot, or island; they are not

universal, they have no general sway like the Olympians; limited,

confined, particular is their authority, which the human being can and

must transcend.

At this point Olympus can descend into their world and give command.

So, after all, the Greek Gods rule over the realm which is negative to

them, must do so, else they were not Gods. But they are in a far-off

background, namely, in civilized Hellas, beyond whose border Ulysses

passes in these Books. Still Zeus, the supreme Greek God, sends his

decree to Calypso, when Ulysses is ready to leave the Dark Island. Thus

the Olympians exercise a final jurisdiction even here. It is to be

noticed, however, that Pallas has little to do with Ulysses in

Fableland; for is she not substantially negated? But when he touches

Greece again, and even in Phaeacia, she will not fail to be at his side.

She belongs not to Wonderland, but to the clear rational realm of light

and order; she cannot follow even her darling mortal through these dark

mazy wanderings.

It is manifest that the epical Upper World of the Gods has receded from

the place it occupies in the Iliad and in the other portions of the

Odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. A new

order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their

limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united Hellas,

and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation.

What are these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may

indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the

established order. Really they are phases of the development of the

hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a

restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this

negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole

process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the

first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of

antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms,

grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them.

Such is this Fairy World which has crept in under the grand Olympian

order in response to a true necessity. Its beings are not natural, its

events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we

would see his meaning. Spirit is portraying spirit, and not

externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven

out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four

Books.

4. But it must not for a moment be thought that Homer created this

Fairy World or made, single-handed, these Fairy Tales. The latter are

the work of the people, possibly of the race. Comparative folk-lore has

traced them around the globe in one form or other. The story of

Polyphemus is really a collection of stories gathered about one central

person; some portions of it have been found in the East as well as the

West, in Arabian and Tartar legend as well as in Celtic and Esthonian.

The subtle play upon the word "nobody" as a name is known far and wide

by many people who never heard of Homer. Wilhelm Grimm took the trouble

to collect a lot of examples from a great variety of sources, ancient,

medieval and modern, European and Asiatic, in a special treatise called

the Legend of Polyphemus. Circe, the enchantress, has been discovered

in a Hindoo collection of Tales belonging in the main to the thirteenth

century of our era; but the witch who has the power of turning men into

animals is as universal as folk-lore itself. The werewolf superstition

will furnish instances without number. The descent into Hades has its

parallel in the Finnish epic _Kalevala_, which reaches far back into

Turanian legend; even the North American and Australian savages have

their heroes enter the world beyond, and bring back an account of what

is there. Truly one of the earliest needs of the human soul is this

striving to find and to shadow forth in mythical outlines the realm of

the supersensible. Dante's Journey through Inferno goes back to Virgil,

Virgil goes back to Homer, and Homer to the folk-tales of his people,

and these folk-tales of Greece reach out to still more remote ages and

peoples. Thus into Christian legend the old heathen stories are

transformed; many descents to Hell and Purgatory, as well as visions of

Heaven are recorded in the Middle Ages. It may be said that folk-tales

have an ancestry as old as man himself, and have followed him

everywhere as his spirit's own shadow, which he casts as his body casts

its visible shadow.

A collection of Fairy Tales we may, then, consider these four Books,

with its giants, cannibals, enchantresses, with its bag of winds, which

is still furnished by the town-witch to the outgoing sailor in some

countries, if report be true. In fact, a little delving among the

people, who are the great depositories of folk-lore, would probably

find some of the stories of the Odyssey still alive, if not in their

completeness, at least some shreds or floating gossamers thereof.

Indestructible is the genuine tale when once made and accepted by the

people, being of their very essence; it is also the primordial material

of which all true poetry is produced, it is nature's Parian marble of

which the poetic temple of Greece is built, specially this Homeric

temple.

5. At this point we begin to see just what is the function of Homer who

has inherited a vast mass of poetic material. He is its shaper,

organizer, transformer; chiefly, however, he is the architect of the

beautiful structure of song. He does not and cannot make the stone

which goes into his edifice, but he makes the edifice. His genius is

architectonic; he has an idea which he builds into harmonious measures.

What the ages have furnished, he converts to his own use, and orders

into a poetic Whole.

The store of Fairy Tales in those four Books was unquestionably

transmitted to him, but he has jointed them into the Ulyssiad, and into

the total Odyssey, of whose structure they form the very heart. The

question arises: Did Homer find those Tales already collected? Possibly

he did, to a certain extent; they seem to come together of themselves,

making a marvelous romance of the sea. Some story-telling Greek sailor

may well have given him the thread of connection; certainly they are

sprung of nautical experience. But in whatever shape they may come to

the poet, we may be certain of one thing: his constructive spirit

transformed them and put them into their present place, where they fit

to perfection, forming a most important stage in the grand Return.

In the development of the folk-tale, we can in a general way mark three

grades. (1) There is first the story which sets forth the processes in

nature, the clouds, the winds, the storms, the sun and moon, the

conflict of the elements. Such is mainly the mythical character of the

old Vedas. Many a trace of this ancient conception we can find in

Homeric Fableland, which has a strong elemental substrate in the wrath

of Neptune, in the tempests, in the winds of AEolus, in the Oxen of the

Sun. Still the Odyssey has passed far beyond this phase of mythical

consciousness; it cannot be explained by resolving it back into mere

nature-myths, which method simply leaves out the vital fact, namely,

that of development. (2) In the second stage of the Fairy Tale the

physical meaning begins to withdraw into the background, and an ethical

element becomes dominant; the outer conflicts of nature, if they be

present, are taken to portray the spirit's struggle, in which a supreme

moral order of some kind is brought to light. Here we may well place

Grimm's collection of folk-tales in many ways an epoch-making book. In

those simple stories of the people we observe the good and the bad

marked off distinctly and engaged in some kind of a wrestle, which

shows at last the supremacy of the good. Not in every case perhaps, but

such is the tendency. But these Tales of Grimm, though collected, are

in no sense united; the architect never appeared, though they are the

material of a great Teutonic epos; they are the stones of the edifice,

not the edifice itself by any means. (3) Out of this second stage

easily rises the third, the poet being given; whereof the best example

is just those four Books of the Odyssey. Now the folk-tale stands not

alone, in widowed solitariness, but is made to take its place in the

great national, or perchance universal temple of song.

We may say, therefore, that Homer not only gathered these Tales but

organized them into a Whole, so that they no longer fall asunder into

separate narratives, but they are deftly interwoven and form a great

cycle of experience. No segment of this cycle can be taken away without

breaking the totality. Moreover the entire series is but an organic

part of the Odyssey.

It is now manifest that those who resolve these Tales into a

disconnected bead-roll have really fallen back into the second stage

before mentioned; they have undone the work of Homer. If these four

Books be simply a string of stories without an inner movement from one

to the other, or without any organic connection with the rest of the

poem, the entire poetic temple is but a pile of stones and no edifice.

And this is what Wolf and his disciples make out of Homer. In one way

or other they tear asunder the structure and transform it backwards in

a collection, allowing it hardly as much unity as may be found in the

Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. A school more recent than that of Wolf,

the Comparative Philologists, have gone still further backwards, and

have reduced Homer to the first stage, to a nature-myth. The merit of

both schools is that they have called attention to Homer's primitive

materials; they have rendered impossible the idea that Homer created

the Greek Gods or his mythology, or even his little stories. The defect

of these schools is that they fail to see the architectonic Homer, the

poet who builds the crude materials furnished by his people into an

enduring structure of the noblest art. They recognize in the edifice

the stone and also the stone-cutter, but no master-builder.

Homer, therefore, is not merely the editor, collector, redactor; he is

not a Grimm, gathering his tales from the mouths of the people with a

scientific accuracy. He gathered them, doubtless, but he transfigured

them into an image reflecting the experience of a human soul. Our age

is indeed scientific, it is collecting the folk-songs and the

folk-tales from every quarter of the globe, and stringing them on a

thread, like so many beads, not being able to transmute them into

poetry. Wolf heralded the coming time by starting to reconvert Homer

into his primitive materials, by making him scientific and not poetic,

at least not architectonic. Still we may be permitted to hope that

these vast collections of the world's folk-lore will yet be transmuted

by some new Homer into a world-poem.

6. The careful reader will also weigh the fact that Ulysses is now the

story-teller himself. The entire series of adventures in Fableland is

put into his mouth by the poet. Herein, we note a striking difference

from the previous Book, the ninth, in which Demodocus is the singer.

What is the ground of such a marked transition? Demodocus has as his

theme the war at Troy with its lays of heroes, and its famous deeds; he

celebrates the period portrayed in the Iliad; his field is the Heroic

Epos, or the songs of which it is composed. But he cannot sing of the

world outside of the Greco-Trojan consciousness, he cannot reach beyond

the Olympian order into the new set of deities of Fableland. Ulysses,

however, has transcended the Trojan epoch, has, in fact, reacted

against Hellenic life and institutions, though he longs to get back to

them, out of his alienated condition. This internal phase Demodocus

does not know, it manifestly lies beyond his art. He does not sing of

the Return at all, though Phemius, the Ithacan bard, did in the First

Book. A new strain is this, requiring a new singer, namely the man who

has had the wonderful experience himself.

The result is, another art-form has to be employed, the Fairy Tale, of

which we have already spoken. The individual now turns inward and

narrates his marvelous adventures in the region of spirit, his

wrestlings there, his doubts, his defeats and escapes. For Fableland is

not actual like Hellas, not even like Phaeacia; it is a creation of the

mind in order to express mind, and its shapes have to be removed from

sensuous reality to fulfill the law of their being. Such is plainly

Homer's procedure. Once before he sped off into Fairyland, toward Egypt

and the East, leaving Hellas and Troy behind, quite as Ulysses here

does. It was the story of Menelaus in the Fourth Book, who also found

Proteus and Eidothea, a new order of deities, though Olympus and Zeus

lay in the distant background. Moreover, Proteus and Eidothea represent

the two sides, the supersensible and the sensible, the latter of which

must be transcended and the former grasped, ere return be possible.

Nestor also tells his own experience in the Third Book, but he keeps

inside of Hellas and under the direct control of the Greek Gods. Hence

no Faery Realm rises in his narrative, he needs none for

self-expression. But Menelaus and Ulysses, wandering far over the Greek

border, reach a new world, and require a new art-form for their

adequate utterance. Especially is this the case with Ulysses, who has

had a much larger and deeper experience than Menelaus, and who thus

stands in strong contrast with Nestor, the old man of faith with his

devotion to the old order, who has no devious return from Troy, and

continues to live in immediate unquestioning harmony with the

Olympians. There is no room in Pylos for a Circe or a Polyphemus.

Ulysses, therefore, having reached the court of Phaeacia, takes a calm

retrospect of the past, and recounts the same to the people there; he

comes to know himself, and he uses art for self-expression, not for the

praise of the external deed of war; his inner life is the theme. In

other words, he has become self-conscious in Phaeacia, he knows his own

processes, and shows that he knows them. As already pointed out, this

internal movement of his spirit is the process of the negative, he has

turned denier of the old institutional order of Greece, and he has to

work through into a positive world again, which he now sees before

himself in Phaeacia.

To be sure, the self-consciousness to which he has attained is not

expressed in the language of philosophy, but in poetry, in a

transcendental Fairyland. There is as yet no Greek language of

philosophy; a long development will bring it forth however; Aristotle

will deracinate the last image of Homer, and leave the Greek tongue

supersensible.

7. The fact that Ulysses must tell his own story is deeply coupled with

the following characteristic: these four Books of Fableland are

essentially a confession. From beginning to end we observe it to be an

account of shortcomings and their results; we find the acknowledgment

of error in the very statement of the transaction. He confesses to

Alcinous and the Phaeacians his negative attitude to the State and the

consequences thereof; he confesses to Arete in what way he has violated

her institution. Here lies the necessity: this confession is absolutely

needful to his soul to free it of its negative past. He has become

conscious of his condition, and utters his confession to these people

who are the opposite of it, and thus gets rid of his limitation. The

psychologic ground of his telling his own story is that he must.

To be sure, this is all done in a mythical form, which is somewhat

alien to our method of making a confession. Then Homer does not

moralize by the way, he does not usually approve or condemn; he simply

states the deed and its consequences. His procedure is objective, truly

artistic, letting the thing speak for itself. The modern reader,

however, likes to have moral observations interspersed, which will stir

up his sentiments, and save him the trouble of thinking the matter out

for himself.

Yet Ulysses, on the other hand, is always striving to reach out of his

error, to transcend his limitation. His mistake flings him to the

earth, but he gets up again and marches forward. Thus he asserts his

own infinite worth; he is certain to reach home at last and accomplish

the grand Return.

But he does not bring back his companions. These often seem to be lower

unheroic phases of human nature, which the hero must throw off in the

course of his development. In general, they may be considered to be in

him, a part of himself, yet they are real persons too. This rule,

however, will not always apply. Still his companions are lost, having

"perished by their own folly," while he is saved; the wise man is to

live, the unwise to pass away.

The pivotal sin committed by Ulysses in Fableland is against Neptune,

who is angry because Ulysses put out the eye of his son Polyphemus. So

the God, after the affair of the Oxen of the Sun, becomes the grand

obstacle to the Return, and helps to keep the hero with Calypso. Such

is the mythical statement in which three conceptions seem to blend. (1)

Neptune is the purely physical obstacle of the sea, very great in those

early days. (2) Nature has her law, and if it be not observed, the

penalty follows, when she may be said to be mythically angry. If a man

jump down from a high precipice, he violates a law of nature,

gravitation, and she executes him on the spot, it may be; she is always

angry and quick to punish in such cases; but he may climb down the

height and escape. In like manner a man, undertaking to swim across the

sea, encounters the wrath of Neptune; but he may construct a ship, and

make the voyage. (3) Finally there is the ethical violation: we shall

see in the narrative, how Ulysses, after appealing to humanity, becomes

himself inhuman and a savage toward Polyphemus, who then curses him and

invokes father Neptune with effect. So the God visits upon Ulysses the

punishment for his ethical offense, which is the main one after all. In

this way Fableland through the story of Polyphemus contains a leading

motive of the Ulyssiad, and thereby of the whole Odyssey, and Ulysses

is seen to be detained really by his own deed.

8. The general structure of these four Books is simple enough. They

form a series of adventures, with three to a Book. Though the

connection seems slight on the surface, there are inner threads which

bind intimately together the separate adventures; one of the points in

any true interpretation is to raise these threads to light. The general

movement of the whole may be regarded as threefold: the sensible world

(two Books), the supersensible Hades (one Book), the sensible world a

second time (one Book). Very significant are these changes, but it is

hardly worth while to forecast them here; they must be studied in

detail first, then a retrospect can be given, as the contents of the

four Books will be present in the reader's mind. We may now say,

however, that this sweep from the sensible into the supersensible, and

back again to the sensible, has in it the meaning of a soul's

experience, and that the second sensible realm here mentioned is very

different from the first.

The central fact of Fableland is, accordingly, that the man must get

beyond the realm of the senses, and hold communion with pure spirit,

with the prophet Tiresias, and then come back to the real world,

bringing the wisdom gained beyond, ere he can complete the cycle of the

grand Return.

_BOOK NINTH._

Ulysses is now called for by Alcinous, and he is to be the singer. At

first he naturally pays a compliment to his predecessor Demodocus: "A

pleasant thing to hear a bard such as this," with a voice like unto

that of the Gods. Then he gives a delicate touch of commendation to the

whole people "sitting in a row and listening to the singer" who is

chanting the famous deeds of the aforetime. But when Ulysses praises

the tables laden with bread and meat, and the cupbearer filling the

wine-cups of the guests, saying, "This seems to me the best thing,"

strong opposition has been aroused, shown even in antiquity by the

sharp protest of Plato and Lucian. Still this Phaeacian enjoyment is

innocent enough; not ascetic is the trait, yet not sensual; to-day good

people usually eat and drink without the song of bard or other

spiritual entertainment accompanying the material one of gustation.

Now comes the change, Ulysses is to give a song, he is to sing his own

deeds, the story of his trials, "which will wake fresh sorrow in me."

Clearly this will be a different song from the preceding one of

Demodocus; not now an heroic tale of Troy, but an account of the Return

therefrom; a tale in which endurance is the theme rather than action.

The hero is more the sufferer than the doer; he is to meet the hostile

blows of Fate and to master it by his ability to bear as well as by his

ability to act. A new poetic form will gradually rise out of the theme

and in harmony with the same; the present movement runs counter to the

Trojan story both in space and in spirit.

The first act of Ulysses in this novel procedure is to be duly noted:

he declares who he is, gives his father's name and utters a hint of his

own character. Very great surprise must the announcement have created

among those Phaeacians--a veritable sensation, as we say in these times;

for Ulysses had been the real hero of the songs of Demodocus just sung;

behold, that hero himself is present and has been listening all the

while. The dramatic disguise, in which the interest of the hearer has

centered hitherto, is thrown off, the concealed man shows himself.

Still deeper must we look into this act of self-revelation. "I am

Ulysses," says the bard now, proposing to sing of Ulysses. I am myself,

I know what I have done and I am the man to tell it. Really here is a

statement of self-consciousness; the singer is no longer a Demodocus

singing of another man, of Ulysses, at Troy, but it is Ulysses himself,

now singing of himself, of his profoundest experiences, which none

other but he can tell. His internal life opens, not that active heroic

one; the trials of his spirit are the theme, therewith must follow a

new manner of utterance, a poetic form which can express what is within

and still remain in the domain of the imagination. A self-conscious art

we must now be prepared for, which seeks to express just the

self-consciousness of the poet going through his inner experiences,

with the counterstroke from the outer world.

What new art-form, then, will Homer, the grand constructive poet, who

seizes every object necessary for his temple of song, assign to Ulysses

singing of himself? The Fairy Tale is taken with its strange

supernatural shapes, which have no reality, and hence can only have an

ideal meaning; we are ushered into the realm of the physically

impossible, where we have to see the spiritually actual, if we see

anything. Polyphemus is not a man, not an animal, not a direct product

of nature; he is a creature of the mind made by the mind in order to

express mind. Undoubtedly he has external shape, but that shape is

meaningless till we catch the spirit creating him. The Fairy Tale

removes the vision from an outer sensuous world, and compels an

internal vision, which looks into the soul of things and there beholds

the soul.

The Fairy Tale existed long before Homer, it is a genuine product of

the people. The stories which here follow have been traced among the

remotest races; they spring up of themselves out of the popular heart

and imagination. Homer picks them up and puts them into their true

place in his grand edifice, polishing, transforming them, by no means

creating them; certainly he never created this art-form. His merit is

that he saw where they belong and what phase of human experience they

express; to this merit must be added his special power, that of poetic

transfiguration. Not simply a redactor or putter together externally of

odd scraps, but the true architect of the totality; thus he comes

before us on the present and on all other occasions.

Ulysses, having told us who he is, proceeds to inform us of a second

important fact: his soul's strongest aspiration. He longs to return to

home and country. Ithaca, a small, rocky island, is the sweetest spot

on earth to him; Circe and then Calypso tried to detain him, each

wishing to keep him as husband; "but they could not shake the purpose

of my heart." One thinks that he must, while saying this, have cast a

sly glance at Arete, for whose approval it must have been intended, for

she was no friend of Circe and Calypso.

It is a curious fact that Homer, in this short description, makes two

mistakes in reference to the topography of Ithaca. The island can

hardly be called low as here stated, nor does it lie westward of

Cephallenia, but northeastward. A reasonable inference is that Homer

was not an Ithacan, and did not know the island very well, though he

may have seen it in a passing visit. Anaximander with his first map

comes after Homer several hundred years.

The present Book has three plainly marked portions. First comes the

wanton attack on the Ciconians, which connects immediately with the

Trojan experience of Ulysses. Second is the country of the

Lotus-eaters, to which he and his companions are driven by wind and

storm. Third is the Land of the Cyclops, especially of Polyphemus, with

whom he has his chief adventures. The first two portions are quite

brief, are in fact introductory to the third, which takes up more than

four-fifths of the Book, and is the Fairy Tale proper. We may observe

the gradual transition: the Ciconians are a real people in geography

and history; the Lotus-eaters are getting mythical, are but half-way

historical; the Cyclops belong wholly to Fableland. Thus there is a

movement out of the Trojan background of reality into the Fairy World.

Having marked the dividing lines, the next thing will be to find the

connecting links between these three portions. They are not thrown

together haphazard or externally joined into one Book; they have an

internal thought which unifies them and which must be brought to light.

The poet sees in images which are separate, but the thinker must unite

these images by their inner necessity, and thus justify anew the poet.