Part 3

Still there is a difference. Telemachus is despondent; we might almost say, he is getting to disbelieve in any divine order of the world. "The Gods plot evil things" against the House of Ulysses, whose fate "they make unknown above that of all men." Then they have sent upon me these suitors who consume my heritage. The poor boy has had a hard time; he has come to question providence in his misery, and discredits the goodness of the Gods.

Here, now, is the special function of Pallas. She instills courage into his heart. She gives strong hope of the return of his father, who "will not long be absent from Ithaca;" she also hints the purpose of the Gods, which is on the point of fulfillment. Be no longer a child; follow the example of thy father; go and learn about him and emulate his deeds. Therewith the Goddess furnishes to the doubting youth a plan of immediate action--altogether the best thing for throwing off his mental paralysis. He is to proceed at once to Pylos and to Sparta "to learn of his father" with the final outlook toward the destruction of the suitors. She is a veritable Goddess to the young striver, speaking the word of hope and wisdom, and then turning him back upon himself.

Here again we must say that the Goddess was in the heart of Telemachus uttering her spirit, yet she was external to him also. Her voice is the voice of the time, of the reality; all things are fluid to the hand of Telemachus, and ready to be moulded to his scheme. Still the Goddess is in him just as well, is his thought, his wisdom, which has now become one with the reason of the world. Both sides are brought together by the Poet in the most emphatic manner; this is the supreme fact in his procedure. The subjective and objective elements are one; the divine order puts its seal on the thought of the man, unites with him, makes his plan its plan. Thus the God and the Individual are in harmony, and the great fulfillment becomes possible. But if the thought of Telemachus were a mere scheme of his own, if it had not received the stamp of divinity, then it could never become the deed, the heroic deed, which stands forth in the world existent in its own right and eternal.

The Goddess flits away, "like a bird," in speed and silence. Telemachus now recognizes that the stranger was a divinity. For has he not the proof in his own heart? He is indeed a new person or the beginning thereof. But hark to this song! It is the bard singing "the sad return of the Greeks"--the very song which the poet himself is now singing in this Odyssey. For it is also a sad return, indeed many sad returns, as we shall see hereafter. Homer has thus put himself into his poem singing his poem. Who cannot feel that this touch is taken from life, is an echo of his own experience in some princely hall?

But here she comes, the grand lady of the story, Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, as it were in response to the music. A glorious appearance at a happy moment; yet she is not happy: "Holding a veil before her face, and shedding tears, she bespoke the bard: Phemius cease from this sad song, it cuts me to the heart." It reminds her of her husband and his sorrowful return, not yet accomplished; she cannot endure the anguish and she begs the bard to sing another strain which may delight his hearers.

This, then, is the sage Penelope whose character will be tested in many ways, and move through many subtle turns to the end of the poem. In this her first appearance we note that she proclaims in the presence of the suitors her undying love for her husband. This trait we may fairly consider to be the deepest of her nature. She thinks of him continually and weeps at his absence. Still she has her problem which requires at times all her female tact, yes, even dissimulation. Reckless suitors are pressing for her hand, she has to employ all her arts to defer the hateful marriage; otherwise she is helpless. She is the counterpart of her husband, a female Ulysses, who has waited twenty years for his return. She also has had a stormy time, with the full experience of life; her adventures in her world rival his in his world. But underneath all her cunning is the rock of eternal fidelity. She went back to her room, and wept for her husband "till Pallas closed her eye-lids in sweet sleep."

Nor can we pass over the answer of Telemachus, which he makes at this point to his mother. It may be called a little Homeric treatise on poetry. "Mother, let the poet sing as his spirit moves him;" he is not to be constrained, but must give the great fact; "poets are not to blame but Zeus," for the sad return of the Greeks; "men applaud the song which is newest," novelty being already sought for in the literature of Homer's time. But the son's harsh reproof of the mother, with which his speech closes, bidding her look after her own affairs, the loom and distaff and servants, is probably an interpolation. Such is the judgment of Aristarchus, the greatest ancient commentator on Homer; such is also the judgment of Professor Nitzsch, the greatest modern commentator on the Odyssey.

II.

The other side of the collision is the party of suitors, who assail the House of Ulysses in property, in the son, in the wife, and finally in Ulysses himself. They are the wrong-doers whose deeds are to be avenged by the returning hero; their punishment will exemplify the faith in an ethical order of the world, upon which the poem reposes as its very foundation. They are insolent, debauched, unjust; they defy the established right. Zeus has them in mind when he speaks of Ægisthus, who is an example of the same sort of characters, and his fate is their fate according to the Olympian lawgiver. They too are going to destruction through their own folly, yet after many an admonition. Just now Telemachus has spoken an impressive warning: "I shall invoke the ever-living Gods, that Zeus may grant deeds requiting yours."

Still their insolence goes on; the ethical world of justice and institutions has to be cleared of such men, if it continue to exist. Who does not love this fealty of the old bard to the highest order of things? The suitors are indeed blind; they have not recognized the presence of the Goddess, yet there is a slight suspicion after she is gone; one of the suitors asks who that stranger was. Telemachus, to lull inquiry, gives the outer assumed form of the divine visitor, "an ancestral guest, Mentes of Taphos;" the poet however, is careful to add: "But he (Telemachus) knew the immortal Goddess in his mind."

The conflict with the suitors is the framework of the entire poem. The education of Telemachus as well as the discipline of Ulysses reach forward to this practical end--the destruction of the wrong-doers, which is the purification of the country, and the re-establishment of the ethical order. All training is to bring forth the heroic act. The next Book will unfold the conflict in greater detail.

Appendix. The reader will have observed that, in the preceding account of Book First, it is regarded as setting forth three unities, that of the total Odyssey, that of the Telemachiad, and that of the Book itself. We see them all gradually unfolding in due order under the hand of the poet, from the largest to the least. Now the reader should be informed that every one of these unities has been violently attacked and proclaimed to be a sheer phantasm. Chiefly in Germany has the assault taken place. What we have above considered as the joints in the organism of the poem, have been cut into, pried apart, and declared to make so many separate poems or passages, which different authors have written. Thus the one great Homer vanishes into many little Homers, and this is claimed to be the only true way of appreciating Homer.

The most celebrated of these dissectors is probably the German Professor, Kirchhoff, some of whose opinions we shall cite in this appendix. His psychological tendency is that of analysis, separation, division; the very idea of unity seems a bugbear to him, a mighty delusion which he must demolish or die. Specially is his wrath directed against Book First, probably because it contains the three unities above mentioned, all of which he assails and rends to shreds in his own opinion.

The entire Introduction (lines 1-88) he tears from its present place and puts it before the Fifth Book, where it serves as the prelude to the Calypso tale. The rest of the Telemachiad is the work of another poet. Indeed the rest of the First Book (after the Introduction) is not by the same man who produced the Second Book. Then the Second Book is certainly older than the First, and ought somehow to be placed before it. The real truth is, however, that the First Book is only a hodge-podge made out of the Second Book by an inferior poet, who took thence fragments of sentences and of ideas and stitched them together. In the Invocation Kirchhoff cuts out the allusion to the oxen of the Sun (lines 6-9) as being inconsistent with his theory.

After disposing of the Introduction in this way, Kirchhoff takes up the remaining portion of the First Book, which he tears to pieces almost line by line. In about forty separate notes on different passages he marks points for skepticism, having in the main one procedure: he hunts both the Iliad and the Odyssey through, and if he finds a line or phrase, and even a word used elsewhere, which he has observed here, he at once is inclined to conclude that the same must have been taken thence and put here by a foreign hand. Every reader of Homer is familiar with his habit of repeating lines and even entire passages, when necessary. All such repetitions Kirchhoff seizes upon as signs of different authorship; the poet must have used the one, some redactor or imitator the other. To be sure we ought to have a criterion by which we can tell which is the original and which is the derived; but such a criterion Kirchhoff fails to furnish, we must accept his judgment as imperial and final. Once or twice, indeed, he seems to feel the faultiness of his procedure, and tries to bolster it, but as a rule he speaks thus: "The following verse is a formula (repetition), and hence not the property of the author." (Die Homerische Odyssee, p. 174.)

Now such repetitions are common in all old poetry, in the ballad, in the folk-song, in the Kalevala as well as in the Homeric poems. Messages sent are repeated naturally when delivered; the same event recurring, as when the boat is rowed, the banquet prepared, or the armor put on, is described in the same language. Such is usually felt to be a mark of epic simplicity, of the naive use of language, which will not vary a phrase merely for the sake of variety. But Kirchhoff and his followers will have it just the other way; the early poet never varies or repeats, only the later poet does that. So he seeks out a large number of passages in the rest of the Odyssey, and in the Iliad also, which have something in common with passages of this First Book, especially in the matter of words, and easily finds it to be a "cento," a mixed mass of borrowed phrases.

But who was the author of such work? Not the original Homer, but some later matcher and patcher, imitator or redactor. It is not easy to tell from Kirchhoff just how many persons may have had a hand in this making of the Odyssey, as it lies before us. In his dissertations we read of a motley multitude: original poet, continuator, interpolator, redactor, reconstructor, imitator, author of the older part, author of the newer part--not merely individuals, but apparently classes of men. Thus he anatomizes old Homer with a vengeance.

BOOK SECOND.

The general relation between the First and Second Books is to be grasped at once. In the First Book the main fact is the Assembly in the Upper World, together with the descent of the divine influence which through Pallas comes to Telemachus in person, gives him courage and stirs him to action. This action is to bring harmony into the discordant land. In the Second Book the main fact is the Assembly in the Lower World, together with the rise of Telemachus into a new participation with divine influence in the form of Pallas, who sends him forth on his journey of education. We behold, therefore, in the two Books a sweep from above to below, then from below back to the divine influence. Earth and Olympus are the halves of the cycle, but the Earth is in discord and must be transformed to the harmony of Olympus.

Looking now at the Second Book by itself, we note that it falls into two portions: the Assembly of the People, which has been called together by Telemachus, and the communion of the youth with Pallas, who again appears to him at his call. The first is a mundane matter, and shows the Lower World in conflict with the divine order--the sides being the Suitors on the one hand and the House of Ulysses on the other. The second portion lifts the young hero into a vision of divinity, and should lift the reader along with him. Previously Pallas had, as it were, descended into Telemachus, but now he rises of himself into the Goddess. Clearly he possesses a new power, that of communion with the Gods. These two leading thoughts divide the Book into two well-marked parts--the first including lines 1-259, the second including the rest.

The Assembly of the Ithacans presupposes a political habit of gathering into the town-meeting and consulting upon common interests. This usage is common to the Aryan race, and from it spring parliaments, congresses, and other cognate institutions, together with oratory before the People. A wonderful development has come of this little germ, which we see here still alive in Ithaca, though it has been almost choked by the unhappy condition of things. Not since Ulysses left has there been any such Assembly, says the first speaker, an old man drawing upon his memory, not for twenty years; surely a sign of smothered institutional life. The first thing which Telemachus in his new career does is to call the Assembly, and start this institutional life into activity again. Whereof we feel the fresh throb in the words of the aged speaker, who calls him "Blessed."

Now the oratory begins, as it must begin in such a place. The golden gift of eloquence is highly prized by Homer, and by the Homeric People; prophetic it is, one always thinks of the great Attic orators. The speakers are distinctly marked in character by their speeches; but the Assembly itself seems to remain dumb; it was evidently divided into two parties; one well-disposed to the House of Ulysses, the other to the Suitors. The corruption of the time has plainly entered the soul of the People, and thorough must be the cleansing by the Gods. Two kinds of speakers we notice also, on the same lines, supporting each side; thus the discord of Ithaca is now to be reflected in its oratory. Three sets of orators speak on each side, placing before us the different phases of the case; these we shall mark off for the thought and for the eye of the reader.

1. After the short opening speech of the old man, Ægyptius, the heart of the whole movement utters itself in Telemachus, who remains the chief speaker throughout. His speech is strong and bold; from it two main points peer forth. The first is the wrong of the Suitors, who will not take the right way of wooing Penelope by going to her father and giving the bridal gift according to custom, but consume the son's property under pretense of their suit for the mother. The second point is the strong appeal to the Ithacans--to their sense of right, to their sense of shame, and to their fear of the Gods, who "in their divine wrath shall turn back ill deeds upon the doer." But in vain; that Ithacan Assembly contains friends and relatives of the Suitors, and possibly purchased adherents; nay, it contains some of the Suitors themselves, and here rises one of them to make a speech in reply.

This is Antinous, who now makes the most elaborate defense of the case of the Suitors that is to be found in the poem. The speech is remarkable for throwing the whole blame upon Penelope--not a gallant proceeding in a lover; still it betrays great admiration for the woman on account of her devices and her cunning. She has thwarted and fooled the whole band of unwelcome wooers for three years and more by her wonderful web, which she wove by day and unraveled by night. And even now when she has been found out, she holds them aloof but keeps them in good humor, though clearly at a great expense of the family's property, which fact has roused Telemachus to his protest. Antinous, though feeling that he and the rest have been outwitted by the woman, does not stint his praise on that account, he even heightens it.

But we hear also his ultimatum: "Send thy mother away and bid her be married to whomsoever her father commands, and whoso is pleasing to her." So the will of the parent and the choice of the daughter had to go together even in Homer's days. Of course Antinous has no ground of right for giving this order; he is not the master of the house, though he hopes to be; his assumed authority is pure insolence. Then why should the Suitors injure the son because they have been wheedled by the mother? Still they will continue to consume "his living and his wealth as long as she keeps her present mind."

But the most interesting thing in his speech is to discover the attitude and motives of Penelope. We see her fidelity, but something more than fidelity is now needed, namely the greatest skill, dissimulation, or female tact, to use the more genteel word. She has a hard problem on her hands; she has to save her son, herself, and as much of the estate as she can, from a set of bandits who have all in their might. Were she to undertake to drive them away, they would pillage the house, kill her boy, and certainly carry her off. They have the power, they have the inclination; they are held by one small thread in the weak hands of a woman, but with that thread she snares them all, to the last man. Love it may be called, of a certain sort; we see how Antinous admires her, though conscious that she has made a fool of him and his fellows. Each hopes to win the prize yet, and she feeds them with hope, "sending private messages to each man;" thus she turns every one of them against the other, and prevents concerted action which looks to violence. That wonderful female gift is hers, the gift of making each of her hundred Suitors think that just he is the favored one, only let it be kept secret now till the right time comes!

But Penelope uses this gift as a weapon, it is her means of saving the House of Ulysses, while many another fair lady uses it for the fun of the thing. Is she right? Does her end justify her means? True she is in the highest degree to Family and State, is saving both; but she does dissemble, does cajole the suitors. One boy, one woman, one old man in the country constitute the present strength of the House of Ulysses; but craft meets violence and undoes it, as always.

And yet we may grant something to the other side of her character. She takes pleasure in the exercise of her gift, who does not? Inasmuch as the Suitors are here, and not to be dismissed, she will get a certain gratification out of their suit. A little dash of coquetry, a little love of admiration we may discern peeping through her adamantine fidelity to her husband, recollect after an absence of twenty years. As all this homage was thrust upon her, she seeks to win from it a kind of satisfaction; the admiration of a hundred men she tries to receive without making a sour face. Still further she takes pleasure in the exercise of that feminine subtlety which holds them fast in the web, yet keeps them off; giving them always hope, but indefinitely extending it. Verily that web which she wove is the web of Fate for the Suitors. So much for Penelope at present, whom we shall meet again.