Chapter 14
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.
I.