Part 21

Hear then the curse of the Cyclops, which hints the great obstructing motive to the return of Ulysses, and marks out the action of the poem; "Give Ulysses no return to his home; but if he returns, may he arrive late and in evil plight, upon a foreign ship with loss of all his companions, and may he find troubles in his house." Of course Neptune heard the prayer, had to hear it, in the divine order of things. The curse lay inside of Ulysses, else it could not have been fulfilled; he himself could drop from his humane and religious mood in adversity and become a savage in prosperity. His chief misfortunes follow after this curse. But for the present he escapes to Goat Island, though another portentous rock is hurled at him by the Cyclops. There he sacrifices to the Highest God, Zeus, who, however, pays no heed--how is it possible?

Such is this far-reaching Fairy Tale, certainly one of the greatest and most comprehensive ever written. It shows a movement, an evolution both of Polyphemus and Ulysses; this inner unfolding indeed is the main thing to be grasped. It is worth the while to take a short retrospect of the five leading points. (1) The completely negative character of the Cyclops as to institutions, religion, and even the physical man. (2) This negative being is negated by the man of intelligence, who puts out his eye, nullifies his strength by drink, and thwarts all help for him by a punning stratagem. (3) He is made to help his enemies escape from his cave by the skill of Ulysses who turns the force of nature against nature. (4) The Cyclops reaches self-knowledge through Ulysses, who tells his wrong and its punishment, who also tells his own name: whereat the Cyclops suddenly changes and makes a humane offer. (5) Ulysses changes the other way, becomes himself a kind of Cyclops and receives the curse.

This curse will now follow Ulysses and drive him from island to island through Fableland, till he gets back to Ithaca with much suffering and with all companions lost, where he will find many troubles. In this manner the return of Ulysses becomes intertwined with Polyphemus and this Fableland, which furnish an underlying motive for the third Part of the Odyssey (the last 12 Books). The curse here spoken is still working when Ulysses reaches home and finds the suitors in possession. Verily his negative spirit lies deep; in cursing Polyphemus, he has cursed himself.

Thus the impartial poet shows both sides--the guilt as well as the good in Polyphemus and in Ulysses. The man of nature has his right when he offers to transform his conduct, and it shows that Ulysses still needs discipline when he scorns such an offer. Polyphemus too is to have his chance of rising, for he certainly has within himself the possibility. Has not the poet derived the noble Arete and Alcinous and institutional Phæacia from the savage Cyclops? But Ulysses negatives Polyphemus just at the start upward. The character which he showed in sacking the city of the Ciconians is in him still, he is not yet ready to return.

The Ninth Book has thus run through its three stages and has landed us in pure Fableland. These three stages--the attack on the Ciconians, the Lotus-eaters, the adventure with the Cyclops--may now be seen to be parts of one entire process, which we may call the purification of the spirit from its own negative condition. The man, having become destructive-minded (oloophrn) must be put under training by the Gods, and sent to battle with the monsters of Fableland.

So we advance to the next Book with the certainty that there is still some stern discipline in store for the wandering Ulysses.

BOOK TENTH.

At the first glance we can observe a certain similarity between this Book and the last one. There are in each three distinct portions or adventures, two very short and simple, and one very long and intricate. Each Book culminates in a fabulous being with whom the Hero has a wrestle for supremacy, and in both cases he comes out victorious. We are still in Wonderland, we have to reach into the ideal realm in order to find out what these strange incidents mean. The two central figures are Polyphemus and Circe, respectively, each of whom imparts the dominating thought to the Book in which he or she appears.

The first thing we ask for is the connection, the inner thread which joins these Books together. It was stated that Polyphemus was the negation of the institutional world, he was individualistic, he belonged to neither Family nor State. No laws, no councils, no civil polity; he is a huge man of violence, hostile specially to man's social life. Circe on the contrary, is the woman hostile to woman's domestic world, the Family, first of all; she is the grand enchantress, representing the power and seductiveness of the senses; she is the enemy of what we call morals. To be sure, we shall find in her something more, whereof the full unfolding will be given hereafter.

Ulysses is the one who is to meet those negative forces and put them down. His companions give him special trouble in the present Book, they seem to represent the weaker phases of man, possibly of Ulysses himself. Already he has suppressed Polyphemus, or the institutional negation; now he is to subordinate Circe or the moral negation. The latter is a woman because she must have sensuous beauty and all the charm of passionate enticement; the former is a man because he must show strength and violence rather than the allurement of pleasure.

Nor should we forget that these forms are in Ulysses himself, and were really generated out of his Trojan life; that spirit of his, shown at the start by the attack on the Ciconians, has all these phases in its process. He is traveling through an Inferno, seeing its entire demonic brood, which he has begotten, and which he has to fight and subject. At the same time these fantastic shapes are typical, and shadow forth the universal experience of man, belonging to all countries and all ages.

As already stated, there are three different localities to which Ulysses is brought. Three islands, bounded, yet in a boundless sea, through which he moves on his ships; such is the outermost setting of nature, suggestive of much. No tempest occurs in this Book; the stress is upon the three fixed places in the unfixed aqueous element.

I. First is the island where dwells Æolus with his Family; hither Ulysses comes after putting down Polyphemus who was hostile to domestic life. In this spot the bag of winds is given into the possession of the navigator, whose companions, however, release them, and he is driven to the starting-point, with the winds at large. Æolus refuses to receive him the second time.

II. Next is the city of the Læstrigonians, where is a civil life, a State, to which Ulysses can come after subjecting the Cyclops, who had no polity of the sort. But the State is verily a giant, a cannibal to him now, with all the winds loose. Hence he has to flee for his life. Whither now does he go?

III. Not to Penelope and Ithaca, but to Circe, and her isle. She is the form which next rises before Ulysses, banished from the domestic world of Æolus, and fleeing from the civil life of the Læstrigonians.

We shall try to bring the threads of connection to light, for it is our emphatic opinion that these three islands with their shapes are spiritually bound and wound together. Still further, they reach back and interlink with the forms of the previous Book, which furnish antecedent stages of the grand total movement of Fairyland. Separated in image are these islands and their inhabitants, but they have to be united in thought. Not a mere accident is the sequence, but a necessity, a strict evolution. The work here, according our best belief, is organic, and the reader must not rest contented with his understanding of it, till he moves with the poet from place to place by the interior path of the spirit.

The first fact about the Æolian Isle is that it was afloat in the waters of the sea, as Delos and other islands of antiquity were reported to be. Not stationary then; the king of it, Æolus, has a name which indicates a changeable nature, veering about like the winds, of which he is king. The second fact pertaining to this Isle is that a wall of brass encircles it not to be broken through; "and the cliff runs up sheer from the sea." Manifestly two opposite ideas are suggested in this description: the fixed and the movable; the island within itself is bound fast, and cannot be driven asunder; yet it floats in the most unstable of elements, in the sea and winds. Such is the physical environment, clearly mirroring the meaning. Something permanent in the midst of all that is mutable we may expect to find here.

On the island dwell the King of the Winds and his wife, along with six blooming sons and daughters. He gave his daughters to his sons for wives; a custom not elsewhere found in Homer outside of the realm of the Gods; yet is claimed to have been a very ancient custom, which the Ptolomies revived in Egypt. At any rate here is the picture of the Family in its patriarchal form, wholly separated from other connections and set apart by itself, on the brass-bound precipitous island. The Family is abstracted from the rest of the world and given a dwelling-place.

At this point we begin to catch a glimpse of the significance of the story. The Family is the first power which seizes the emotions and passions and caprices of men (the winds of his soul) and starts the taming of them; the marriage tie is fixed, is not for a day; thus the Family makes itself permanent, and makes the human being stable through feeling and duty. None but married people are here; very different will it be hereafter in the island of Circe. The king of the winds is not only Æolus, but also his institution, the Family, rules here, for there is no State to be governed. Not polygamy, but monogamy, as the great Homeric principle of domestic life, do we witness--the mutual devotion of one man and one woman. Externally we found the fixed and the floating; internally also we discover the fixed and the floating, or rather, that principle which fixes the floating, and makes the world stable. Thus we see the reason why Homer puts the Family upon the Isle of the Winds.

It is no wonder, therefore, that in such a place is held up before us a picture of happiness and plenty. "All feast from day to day with endless change of meats;" why ask whence the viands come? The inner peace provides them. Even the sound of flutes is heard round about, according to one way of translating the passage; music attunes the everlasting festival. Not mere gratification is this, but happiness, the outer again mirroring the inner; domestic harmony is the matter set forth.

Hither Ulysses comes with his companions, "to the city and beautiful houses" of Æolus. A city is here, but no civil life is introduced into the story. "A whole month the monarch entertained me;" what was again the interest? "He asked me about Ilium," the eternal theme, which lies always in the background of Fairyland as well as of Historic Hellas. The Trojan war and also "the Return of the Greeks" were recounted, we may say, sung by Ulysses; the Iliad and the Odyssey, delighted also those domestic Æolians. Was not Troy destroyed because of a wrong done to the Greek Family? Finally Ulysses was gotten ready to be sent home by his host.

Æolus, the ruler of the winds, gives them into the might of Ulysses; he confines them in "a bullock's bladder," which, tied by a silver chain, he places in the ship. It is manifest that the sea, deprived of these windy powers, cannot hinder the passage. Again we behold the main fact of the island: the unstable, uncertain, capricious, is held by the fixed, the permanent; during his sojourn with Æolus, Ulysses has obtained an inner hold, an anchorage of the moral kind, which he sorely needed. This was given him by his view of the Family, which was the real security of the island. All the conditions of his return (but one) are placed in his hand, tied up in a bag. "Only the west-wind was allowed to blow," which sent him homewards.

Still the supreme condition was not, could not be given by Æolus or by anybody else, could not be tied up in a bag. The free man must be alert, he must watch, and win his own salvation; his prime duty is to keep the bag tied, and therein to exercise his will. This is just what he failed to do at the last moment. He went to sleep when in sight of Ithaca; his companions, led by curiosity and avarice (two blasts of the soul) open the bag, expecting to find gold and silver, and find the rushing winds. Of course all are driven back to the starting-point, to the island, on which they soon land.

What will Ulysses do in such extremity? "Shall I drop into the sea and perish, or shall I still endure and stay among the living?" Suicide will not solve his problem: "I remained and suffered." Herein also we trace the stamp of the hero, whose special call it is to master fate.

So Ulysses tries again to get the bladder of winds from Æolus, confessing that it was equally the fault of himself and his companions. But the opportunity is gone; the sum total of conditions, all bagged and tied up, and put into his hands, presents itself only once. Moreover the sleep of Ulysses, just at the nick of destiny, showed an internal weakness; he became careless, almost insolent under such circumstances; he manifested a similar trait to that which led to the curse of the Cyclops. Again he hears a malediction, now uttered by his former host: "Get thee out of my island quickly, most guilty of men, hated by the Gods!" Thus Æolus regards the man before him, and reinforces the curse of Polyphemus. But if Ulysses had to fall asleep by sheer fatigue (which construction the passage hardly demands), then he did not look properly after his companions, making them the sharers of his knowledge. A foolish question has been asked here and much discussed: How did Ulysses know what his companions said during his sleep? Easily enough; but the answer is not worth the candle.

Æolus, therefore, refuses to receive Ulysses and his companions a second time; they have fallen, they must experience the full meaning of their conduct; they must go to Circe, and some of them, at least, be changed into swine, till they know the nature of their deed. Æolus cannot receive them, they have destroyed his gift; they would repeat their act, if he gave all into their hands again, without the deeper penalty. The law thus is clear; they, having disregarded the fixed control of appetite and passion, which the King of the Island imparts, are swept back into brutishness.

Many have been the interpretations of this marvelous King and his children and his island. The supporters of the physical theory of mythology have maintained that the twelve sons and daughters are the twelve months of the year, six of summer and six of winter, while Æolus, the father, is the Sun who produces them. Others regard Æolus as a mortal king, who, on account of certain traits or certain deeds, was transformed into the fabled monarch of the winds. There has been much dispute over the location of Æolia; the most of those who have searched for its geographical site are in favor of one of the Lipari Islands, on the northern coast of Sicily. Finally Virgil has somewhat transformed the legend and put it into his Æneid.

II.