Homer's Odyssey Part 11

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 a.s.signs 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s of a peculiar sort, which cla.s.s, 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 inst.i.tutional and anti-inst.i.tutional. 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 h.e.l.las, he throws it outside of h.e.l.lenic boundaries.

Over the Greek border somewhere it has to be placed; thus it pa.s.ses 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 h.e.l.las, 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 h.e.l.las and her life, and have inhabitants of their own, strangers to h.e.l.lenic influence. Ulysses and his crew will pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.las below, throws it out of Olympus above. Indeed what else could he do? The G.o.ds of Greece are the protectors of its inst.i.tutions, 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 G.o.ds rule over the realm which is negative to them, must do so, else they were not G.o.ds. But they are in a far-off background, namely, in civilized h.e.l.las, beyond whose border Ulysses pa.s.ses in these Books. Still Zeus, the supreme Greek G.o.d, 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 G.o.ds 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 h.e.l.las, 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 pa.s.sing 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 "n.o.body" 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 superst.i.tion 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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 n.o.blest 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 trans.m.u.te 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 trans.m.u.ted 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 h.e.l.lenic life and inst.i.tutions, 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 h.e.l.las, 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 h.e.l.las 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 h.e.l.las and under the direct control of the Greek G.o.ds. 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 inst.i.tutional 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 att.i.tude to the State and the consequences thereof; he confesses to Arete in what way he has violated her inst.i.tution. 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 a.s.serts 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds. 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,"