The Plot of the Odyssey

THE kinship of Iliad and Odyssey can never be denied. Despite microscopic dissimilarities which have been noted, the dialect, the metre, and, we may add, with reasonable allowance for the difference in subject, even the vocabulary, remain essentially unchanged as we pass from the earlier to the younger epic. Where the same characters appear in both poems — for example, Odysseus, Nestor, Menelaos — there is a careful consistency in the traits assigned to them. This statement may be extended even to Achilles, though he appears in the Odyssey only as a ghost in the underworld. The sole important exception, if she be one, is Helen. Even in this case the difference is of course partly one of circumstances ; and the restoration of Menelaos’ wife to her former position may have been firmly fixed in the legend before Homer. So Tennyson, with all the changes he permits himself, could perhaps hardly have brought back Guinevere to Arthur’s throne, or even hidden Elaine live, to wed happily with Launcelot. We may even please ourselves with the belief that our sterner Teutonic or Keltic morality made the queen’s fall from virtue an irreparable one, just as the Greek worship of beauty could hardly be satisfied unless Helen rode, unconquerable still, in all her radiant charms, over the black billows of a war which was aroused by her sin, and had engulfed the chosen youth of her generation !

In what we may call the accidents of structure, also, there are striking analogies between the two Homeric poems. Each deals with the long-delayed but sure and complete fulfillment of a decree uttered by Zeus. In the first book of the Iliad, Thetis prays that the Greeks may suffer in atonement for Achilles’ wrongs (508-10), and Zeus impressively nods his assent (524—27). In the assembly of the gods at the opening of the Odyssey, Zeus himself proposes Odysseus’ home-return (Book 1. 76, 77), and in the similar divine council which opens Book v. declares it as the settled decree of fate (41, 42): —

This divine machinery seems to us, perhaps, a rather foreign and artificial addition to the ancient epic; and in Virgil’s age of skepticism it evidently is so, to some extent. But much the same effect is produced, also, upon our minds, at the present day, by the witch scenes in Macbeth. Yet Hecate and her beldames were, probably, three centuries ago, quite as real to many Englishmen as the gods of the Odyssey were to the poet’s first auditors. Indeed, we ourselves are hardly yet far enough removed from Cotton Mather’s demonology and the Salem witchcraft to stigmatize either the Homeric theology or Shakespeare’s witches as merely a degrading superstition.

As the Iliad opens in the tenth and last year of Troy’s beleaguerment, so the companion poem begins with the tenth and final year of Odysseus’ long wanderings on his homeward way. Each epic crowds its action into a comparatively small number of days, — fifty-one in the Iliad, forty-one in the Odyssey, while even of these a few only are eventful, — but both poems give us also, incidentally, vivid pictures of previous events, and significant glimpses as well into the future. As Achilles’ doom was thrice foretold with increasing definiteness, so now we hear of Menelaos’ destiny (Odyssey IV. 561-69), to be transferred, without dying, to the Elysian plain, because he is wedded to Zeus’ daughter Helen ; and we listen also to an equally mystical hint as to the hero Odysseus’ own last adventure (XI. 13436): —

In the Iliad, we hear only briefly, and as it were accidentally, concerning the origin of the war and its progress hitherto ; while four entire books of the younger epic are taken up with the hero’s own account of previous adventures. But it must be remembered that the Iliad professes to deal only with an episode, —

while the Odyssey is a story with a hero :

So that these four books of narrative (IX.-XTI.) are after all no digression, and require no apology.

The device of plunging into the midst of the action, and permitting a leading character to relate his own exploits, has been imitated frequently ; for example, closely by Virgil, less so by Milton. Lovers of the Autocrat will remember how the Breakfast Table was once shocked by the remark, “ A woman would rather hear a man talk than an angel, any time ! ” and how it is justified by the citation of a passage in Paradise Lost, where Adam asks from the archangel concerning the deeper mysteries of creation, but Eve withdraws into the garden : —

The magician who told the loves of Othello and Desdemona also realized how effective it is to hear from the hero’s own lips the tale

Even the Shakespearean motif of woman’s love won through sympathy is original with Nausicaa’s poet, though Virgil’s Dido and her passion make a larger element in the epic plot.

Perhaps it may be added, as another feature of both poems, that the catastrophe is skillfully retarded, and the exact manner in which it will be brought about is long hidden from the listener. As the intervention and death of Patroclos, extinguishing Achilles’ wrath in the mightier flame of his grief, could not easily be foreseen, so the trial of strength with the bow, proposed in good faith by Penelope to decide her choice among the suitors, puts a great advantage into her unrecognized husband’s hands. Several passages early in the Odyssey, suggesting that young Telemachos may himself destroy the suitors, especially Pallas Athene’s own words reminding the prince of Orestes’ brave deed (I. 298-302), leave us in some doubt, until his father and he unite their counsels and their valor in the great closing scenes.

Here, however, we perhaps touch upon the chief defect of the Iliad. Its action is retarded by interruptions, not merely by digressions. The Odyssey is the shorter poem by several thousand lines, but yet has both a much greater variety of interest and a completer unity. We do not, I think, feel at any time that the action of the Odyssey is deliberately and unduly delayed. While Achilles is unseen and almost forgotten through many books of the Iliad, we almost never lose sight of Odysseus, and his fortunes are always of supreme importance. This single and unbroken thread of human interest aids essentially in making the Odyssey what we believe it is, — the best of all the good stories that ever were told !

The most striking difference between the two poems may be found in the unvaried setting of the elder epic, the shifting scene of the younger. In the Iliad, our gaze ranges onlyfrom the ships and cabins of the Greeks on the Hellespontine shore to the homes and streets of the beleaguered town, or at farthest to Zeus’ seat on Ida whence he overlooks both hosts. Even the divine abodes seem close at hand : the gods, debating only upon the issue of the war, keep their eyes fixed, as it were, upon the Trojan plain, and nearly all of them actually enter the field of battle on some occasion. In the Odyssey, the heavens are grown larger as well as more serene, while of the earth we have an infinitely wider and more varied view. First of all, we glance, with the gods, at Calypso’s remote isle, where Odysseus pines in exile. Then, after a vivid glimpse at Ithaca and the suitors’ misdeeds, we see Telemachos set off for the kingdoms of the mainland. As Nestor and Menelaos relate to him the story of their homeward voyages from Troyland, they seem to put us for the moment in direct connection with the familiar scene of the Iliad. Again, we follow Odysseus as he starts from Calypso’s abode, and, sailing, drifting, swimming, reaches at last the Phæacians’ shore. At the banquet, we retrace with him the world-wide wanderings, during which each of his comrades has found a miserable end. Presently, we sway over the long surges with him once more, as he passes homeward, sleeping soundly through the all-night voyage, upon the magic bark that flies “ swifter than the thought of man.” Meantime, the wanderings of Telemachos and the perplexities of Penelope have occasionally divided our attention. Two thirds of the poem are completed when father and son are united in the faithful swineherd’s cabin. From this point the swiftly moving action is centred in the little island kingdom of Ithaca.

Some great advantages the Odyssey certainly gains through this widening of its scene. The Iliad offers us, as has been said, a single magnificent picture, that of Troy Besieged. Even the Olympian gods seem merely to occupy a coincident upper stage, as in the mediæval miracle-plays heaven and earth, indeed hell also, are represented simultaneously open before the eyes of the audience. Conditions are, so to speak, abnormal, certainly exceptional, everywhere in the Iliad. The Greeks are homeless and demoralized. The camp is full of captive widows and orphaned maids condemned to a state worse than mere slavery. The town is crowded with the armies of its allies, and reduced almost to desperation. The very gods in heaven imitate mankind with unseemly quarrels and threats, or even with actual violence, culminating in the opera-bouffe scene where Hera castigates Artemis. There is no other picture of war so brilliant, so vivid, so indelibly stamped upon the imagination of mankind.

Now, if the younger poem had confined itself to Odysseus’ home-coming and grim vengeance on the jackals that troubled the lion’s lair, this picture of the impoverished royal family, the disordered palace, and the riotous suitors would have been hopelessly inferior in tragic dignity and in artistic scope to that contest which so long shook the Scamandrian plain, and made Pluto leap from his throne in terror lest his ghastly realm be revealed to the light of the sun. But in the Odyssey, as an adequate compensation, is unrolled the magnificent background, the entire Homeric world.

Through Telemachos’ eyes we see Nestor and Menelaos ruling in peace and in luxury over prosperous, contented Greek peoples ; and thus we acquire, through contrast, a juster conception of distracted Ithaca, as well as a delightful picture of patriarchal Hellas in times of peace.

In Scheria we have a happy ideal sketch, not without mildly satirical strokes, of a still gentler race. As sailors and voyagers the Phæacians are beyond rivalry, but otherwise their life is an idle one. As their merry ruler says,

Evidently a people to be looked upon by Greek eyes with an indulgent smile.

In Odysseus’ narrative we have, again, added like a darker fringe to these bright pictures, the wild scenes on the edge of the habitable world. We shudder in the Cyclops’ cave, flee from Scylla’s writhing heads, hear the Sirens’ song as the waves dash over their victims’ whitening bones, and even gain more than a glimpse at the mist-wrapped abode of the dead.

These adventures, also, glorify Odysseus, the chief figure in them all, and accompany him, as it were, toward his desecrated home. As the unknown and oft-insulted beggar rolls grim, silent eyes about the tumultuous hall of his heritage, marking for death the unbidden banqueters, we remember that this is the same dauntless hero who quelled Circe, blinded Polyphemus, and called up Teiresias from Hades. We realize that Pallas and Hermes, who saved him then, will surely make him resistless now.

The poem, then, is an artistic whole ; and the key to its unity is truly given in the opening note. It is the personality of Odysseus, the story of his return to Ithaca. And yet we may find that the temptation will at times beset us, even more than with the Iliad, to forget that whole in the dreamy enjoyment of its parts. We may even excuse ourselves with the thought that the poet himself has not wholly resisted the corresponding temptation. The singer of the Odyssey seems to have much more of the romantic spirit than he — or they — of the Iliad. There is an occasional appeal to sentiment for its own sake. There is a tender and lingering touch in certain episodes, which indicates that they are elaborated for their own idyllic beauty as much as for the benefit of the plot.

In the Iliad, the rare appeals to softer emotions are more evidently for the sake of contrast. Hector’s parting, to take a shining example, avowedly foreshadows his death, deepening its pathos and impressiveness. Mighty indeed — so runs the undercurrent of our thought — is Achilles ; mightier yet the justice that dooms guilty Ilios, since it could compel the fall even of such a worthy favorite among gods and men as Hector. If we linger a moment over the guilty love of Paris and Helen, we see in the same instant — never in truth more clearly — the wronged and baffled Menelaos, and almost hear the swift wings of his coming revenge. But with Nausicaa we linger not only long, but lovingly. We are forgetting Penelope; and I fear we might almost find it in our hearts to forgive the sea-worn and war-worn hero if he too had forgotten her !

Still more difficult to fit into the ethical frame of the picture is the Helen of the Odyssey. As she, or her poet, unfolds each womanly and queenly accomplishment, and, touching even upon the dreadful past, manages to recall scenes and motives which soften our feelings as to her abiding in Troy, we realize that upon us, also, the starry eyes of Argive Helen glow resistless. We take our places among her fascinated guests, and no longer wonder that she outlived that terrible night when Priam’s gray hairs won no mercy, and Pallas’ shrine could not save Cassandra’s honor, (There are works of art in which the dagger is seen dropping from Menelaos’ hand as Helen unveils before him: for example, Baumeister, pp. 745, 746.) To us, even as to the brother of Antilochos slain and to Odysseus’ fatherless son, Helen proffers the nepenthe which drowns just grief and resentment for the evils of former days. Yet all this is at least aside from, if not antagonistic to, the avowed theme and purpose of the poet.

If Nausicaa is lovable as well as loving, it may perhaps be pleaded that she is so much the fitter to be the last temptation of the patient hero, as he passes on, lonely and saddened, yet steadfast, homeward. Calypso, he knows, was fairer and statelier than his mortal wife had ever been. Nausicaa, too, he will gladly honor as a divinity. Yet,

But why should Helen be ever beautiful, and honored, and even happy, while faultless Penelope grows old in sorrow and persecution ? One is tempted to think that our poet has himself failed to see any adequate retribution overtaking his men and women; that he even, like an earlier Euripides, emphasizes in his art the failure of the divinity to visit vengeance upon sin, and to bestow happiness upon the righteous.

Perhaps it will be wiser, nevertheless, to recur to our former phrase, and to recognize in the Odyssey merely an increasing romantic element, a bolder appeal to sentiment, a fuller elaboration of the parts for the sake of their own beauty. It is a familiar tendency, which the late John Addington Symonds was never tired of pointing out. There will always be more of us to enjoy Praxiteles’ softened outlines than Phidias’ rugged strength. “ Euripides the human ” draws tears more easily than Æschylos, — or, in more modern terms, Little Em’ly more easily than Macbeth, — though not from such deep sources, mysterious even to ourselves. A more fruitful comparison, however, may be made with the austere art of Milton and the linkèd sweetness of Tennyson.

Three thousand years hence, if all other literature and tradition of England shall have perished, men may seriously discuss whether one poet could have composed Paradise Lost and the Idylls of the King. The theology of the two is not irreconcilable. The language, the metre, the poetic tradition, may then appear essentially identical. Certainly, the later poem should reveal a perfect familiarity with the earlier one, since the laureate counted as chief among his masters the “ God-gifted organ voice of England.”

So much, at least, is true of Iliad and Odyssey. It is not strange that the claim of Homer as the author of both was maintained among the ancients, even after the Cyclic epics and the Homeric hymns had been rightly assigned to a later age and to feebler hands. There are still many who find it easier to abide by the tradition of one great epic poet than to accept the possibility of two so alike and so equal in power. And surely it is conceivable that a single genius should have shaped the two great poems. Tennyson’s poetical career lasted just about as long as the period from the composition of the earliest extant drama of Æschylos which can be accurately dated, The Persians, to the death of Euripides and Sophocles. A briefer epoch might include both Homeric epics. The Iliad and the Odyssey may to many seem more closely akin than In Memoriam and Harold. I find it, for myself, however, in high degree improbable that one man lived to see, and even led, so great a transition from classic toward romantic taste ; from an age which was content to devote an Iliad to the glorification of war to the generation which felt the full pathos of Odysseus’ longing for home and rest, overpowering even the charm of worldwide adventure and marvelous experience. Such a transition is implied in the ancient belief that the Iliad was the work of Homer’s prime, the Odyssey the child of his age. Though perhaps not literally, it is figuratively true, — true of a race, of a civilization, if not of an individual.

The argument that it is easier to believe in the existence of one great epic poet than of two, or of a school, seems to us distinctly against the weight of evidence. It is not a mere popular fancy that arranges the greatest authors in contemporary groups. Schiller and Lessing help to render Goethe’s career intelligible, Horace is the natural pendant of Virgil, Lowell was produced by the conditions which made Emerson possible. The best illustration is, however, the age of Greek drama. Even the three tragedians just mentioned did not hold the field alone. If Phrynichos, Ion, Agathon, and the rest had survived, we might perhaps have accepted the Athenian people’s judgment, which repeatedly preferred them to the surviving masters, granting to Œdipus the king only a second prize, and to Medea the third ! Even so, there are yet remaining beautiful though scanty epic fragments, indicating that there may have been not merely two, but twenty great masters of the hexameter.

Before we turn to the somewhat detailed discussion of the structure of the Odyssey, I should like to dwell for an instant on the contrast in the spirit of the two glorious epics. The prevailing note of the Iliad seems to be the fierce delight in strife and bloodshed. The war-worn and wave-worn hero of the Odyssey realizes that lie has gained rich experience and wisdom by wandering, and his eagerness to see and know is not easily sated ; yet the chord which vibrates most strongly throughout the younger poem is the longing for the peace of home-life.

There is a passage near the close of the Odyssey in which the night following the slaying of the suitors is divinely prolonged, that Odysseus may enjoy with Penelope comfort and repose after twenty years’ separation. The poet has taken this opportunity to recall rapidly, through Odysseus’ lips, in their proper sequence, the adventures of his hero since the fall of Troy. We may seize the same occasion to pass in review some of the familiar tales of folk-lore which have crystallized about the central story of the returning husband.

Little success in winning popular approval has attended the efforts spent in attacking the essential unity of plot and of probable authorship in our Odyssey. Yet for every comedy of Shakespeare, save The Tempest, suggestions have been found in earlier works, usually in tales of other races. Even so, it is no detraction from Homer’s originality if many incidents woven into the Odyssey are traced to myths unconnected with Penelope’s husband, some of them probably not even Greek in their origin.

The verses of Homer outlining the narrative as it was thus told to Penelope will serve, at least in part, as texts for us to gloss.

These allies of Priam furnish the only victory and booty of the Ithacans in the long tale of woe and death. Even here defeat quickly followed, and loss of many lives.

Then in the fertile land of the lotus-eaters he
tarried.

We are perhaps not yet beyond the pale of realities, and the lotus has been identified sometimes with the “jujuba”of northern Africa ; sometimes, also, with the “ mandrakes ” which Reuben brought to his mother Leah (Genesis xxx. 14). Some narcotic is doubtless indicated by the poetic account, though Homer does not distinctly assert anything more than that Odysseus’ comrades liked it: —

The incident is a brief and unimportant one in Homer, and Tennyson’s genius may fairly be said to have wrested the subject from the master’s hand.

In this case, Odysseus confesses, his companions were more wisely cautious than he. His foolhardy lingering in the cavern till the giant should return is hardly offset by the final escape with a remnant of his crew. Perhaps these features mark the story as an imperfect adaptation from a foreign source. The legend of the oneeyed man-eating ogre is curiously widespread, from Tartary to Ireland. It is, at any rate, fitted skillfully into the Homeric plot; for Poseidon, we are told, is the Cyclops’ father, and the sea-god’s wrath follows relentlessly the men who had blinded his son. Yet, as in Coleridge’s tale of the albatross, the chief guilty one — if guilt there was in such self-defense — is the sole survivor at last!

Æolus, who is next visited, and who gives the winds to Odysseus in a bag, is, according to Andrew Lang, “ an heroic ancestor of the witches who down to the present century sold winds in the same fashion to Scottish mariners.” These Homeric blasts were, however, the winds that were not to blow. Only the west wind was left free, and would have wafted the exiles speedily home. The untying of the sack while Odysseus sleeps recalls the motif of the Pandora myth, and of countless others in all lands.

The cannibal Læstrygonians, whom the Ithacans next visit, destroy all the ships save one, with their crews. These savages live by a narrow fiord between high rock walls, where “ the paths of day and night are nigh together,” and “ a sleepless man might earn a double wage ” as herdsman. This is surely a reminiscence of the long arctic day. If it is too early a date for Mediterranean sailors to have fared so far as Norway, the vague legend may have reached Greek lands by the overland trade route along which amber came to the southern peoples.

The lonely floating island of Æolus, it has been suggested, may have originated in some sailor’s tale of an iceberg. It seems to be near the Læstrygonians’ coast, since no night is mentioned as intervening on the voyage from their land to Æolia, and an old tradition made Æolus’ wife one of their people.

The ethical interpretation of the Circean myth — that sensuality makes men truly bestial — is at least as old as Socrates. But the marvel is doubtless more ancient than the moral. The legend has plenty of parallels elsewhere, the most familiar being Queen Labè in the Arabian Nights, who also transforms her discarded lovers into various beasts. Indeed, the change to animal forms is one of the most familiar elements of enchantment everywhere. The terrible were-wolf superstition died late and hard, if it is even now extinct.

From Circe’s island Odysseus made his excursion to Hades, and returned thence to the enchantress. The Kimmerian land of ghosts, ever wrapped in fog, may be a sort of pendant to the Læstrygonian legend, suggested by the long night of the far north or of the far south.

A curious geographical question arises at this point. At Æolus’ isle Odysseus was west of his Grecian home, since Zephyrus was to carry him thither. Circe’s island, like Læstrygonia, seems to be within a day’s sail of Æolus. Yet the hero is said to return from the realm of the dead (XII. 3, 4) to Circe, coming

Commentators, old and new, have struggled with the problem how Circe’s island home can be both in the remote west and in the far east. President Warren utilizes this passage as the corner-stone of his theory that Homer was aware of the shape of our globe, and makes his hero circumnavigate it. This is but a part of the learned and elaborately woven argument by which Dr. Warren locates the lost earthly Paradise at the north pole. It does not seem quite impossible that a truer cosmology than the later classic beliefs may have been included among those Lost Arts with which Wendell Phillips’s silvery tongue delighted our boyhood.

Their voices are still heard across every “ perilous sea of fairyland forlorn.” The Wandering Rocks, between which no ship save Argo had ever passed uncrushed, are said to be described in old sailors’ tales even among the Aztecs of our own continent. Scylla’s writhing heads, each of which drags a man from the vessel’s deck, seems to be a polypus or devil-fish. The belief that these creatures are occasionally so enormous as to attack even a ship successfully is by no means only an ancient one.

Lastly, for devouring the sacred kine of Helios, the sun-god, in Thrinakia, the crew of Odysseus’ ship are destroyed in a deep-sea shipwreck by Zeus’ thunderbolt. The hero, alone, drifts, after many days, to the isle of Calypso, in the centre of the sea. In this lovely earthly Paradise (as Dr. Warren declares it to be, though but a dim and distorted wraith of the true tradition remains, according to him, in Homer) Odysseus spends seven years with the gentle and loving nymph. Of the hero’s last voyage, to Phæacia, we have spoken, and shall speak again.

The night-long slumber on the Phæacian ship, already mentioned, seems a clear reminder that the curtain of fairyland is here pushed aside, while the Ithacan wanderer emerges again into the real world. From the Cyclops to the Phæacians, everything lies at an unknown distance from Greece, in a trackless sea, quite beyond the pale of merely human experience. Several passages remind us to include the gentle Phæacians, also, in this part of the tale. We are informed that they were formerly neighbors of the Cyclops, and are “ very near to the Immortals.”After they have conducted the crafty Ithacan homeward, Poseidon resolves to turn the offending vessel to stone, and wall up their city behind a mountain. The Phæacian king sees the significance of all this, the more as it fulfills an ancient oracle, and bids his people

The poetic significance of this passage is surely no less clear. Never shall mariner or adventurer bring further tidings home from the happy Phæacian land. Like the German maiden in the cursed village of Germelshausen, the loving Nausicaa is seen but for a day ; nor may any weaker hand “ the lost clue regain.”

The latter half of the poem has a comparatively realistic character. The scene is either in the great house of Odysseus, or in the swineherd’s cabin on the further side of rocky Ithaca. In the accounts of Penelope’s and Telemachos’ movements, of the suitors’ banquets, and finally of the great massacre, many architectural details are incidentally given. So judicious a scholar as Professor Jebb joins in the attempt to piece these together into a scientific restoration of the prehistoric Greek country - house. The results do not seem very fruitful or well assured. But such studies are stimulated and aided by the brilliant discoveries of early architecture in Tiryns, Mycenæ, Troy, and elsewhere. They are certainly wiser and safer than any attempt to illustrate prehistoric customs or manners from the scenes of these books. Thus, on three different occasions a handy missile is thrown at the supposed beggar, Odysseus : Book XVII. 462, a stool, which hits his shoulder; XVIII. 394, another footstool, which misses him, but hits the cupbearer ; xx. 299, an ox-foot, which is dodged, and strikes the wall. This is an illustration — of what ? Surely, only of drunken and lawless manners everywhere ; though it also serves to harden Odysseus’ heart against all thought of mercy, and perhaps has a grim irony as we think of the deadlier missiles which will so soon hurtle through the shadowy hall in return.

But a loftier tragic tone is felt through the twenty-second book in particular, wherein the slaughter of the suitors is accomplished. Only the minstrel and the herald, who had served in the hall under compulsion, are spared. The unfaithful maid servants, whom the suitors had beguiled, are made to clear the hall of their lovers’ bodies, and then are hung, all a-row, in the courtyard ! Such are the tidings that are brought by the old nurse, Enrykleia, to Penelope upon her waking. That she is long incredulous, and also proves the stranger, craftily, before she believes him to be her longabsent lord, troubles Telemachos, and has offended some commentators ; but it only wins a smile from the man of many wiles himself, who had evidently chosen wisely a wife after his own heart.

It is in this palace, where the groans of the dying suitors have hardly died away, that Odysseus receives again into his arms, after twenty years’ separation, the wife of his youth. A pathetic touch is the mention of Teiresias’ prophecy, indicating that long wanderings still remain before the brief space of peaceful old age which is to close the storm-tossed heroic life. Even now his rest is troubled by a weighty care : the death-feud with the kin of the slain suitors. Odysseus cannot refrain from mentioning this, also, in Penelope’s hearing, to the boyish son whom this day’s work has made a man and a warrior.

Odysseus evidently realizes that he has a worse than Corsican vendetta to face. Telemachos’ reply naturally expresses the fullest confidence in his father’s resources. We would gladly have heard an added word of confidence in the divine aid, which Pallas should have taught him ere now.

With the close of this day the ancient Alexandrian critics believed that the genuine Odyssey ended. But Mr. Lang is no doubt right in reminding us emphatically that no hearer in the heroic age could have been content unless a solution for the feud of blood was added. This is more convincing than his similar assertion that the poet of the Iliad could not have left Hector unburied. Artistically, however, anything that follows the death of the wooers and the happy reunion of the royal pair must seem to us an anti-climax. Furthermore, our attention is unexpectedly distracted by the form which this continuation, the present twenty-fourth book, actually takes. There are, in fact, three nearly distinct pictures making up this closing canto.

First, the scene is transferred, without warning, to the underworld once more, and we overhear a conversation between the ghosts of Agamemnon and Achilles. The latter, for some reason not indicated, now hears for the first time the story of his own funeral in the Troad. It is a stately pageant that is here described, and the glimpse accorded us of the lovely Thetis and her great grief alone rewards us for its perusal. But this is a strange place in which to find it. It could certainly have been made more effective in the eleventh book.

Then follows Odysseus’ visit with Telemachos to the upland farm, and the loving recognition of him by his old father and the thralls. Part of this, again, is noble poetry, and we cannot feel that it is precisely out of place, though we certainly do not feel that it is essential to the epic plot. It is, rather, like a sentimental one-act drama or idyl by itself.

Lastly, the kin of the slain take to arms, and are seen approaching the farm. Old Laertes determines to “tilt it out among the lads.” and is not, like the father of Tennyson’s prince, dissuaded therefrom. A remark of his is really the one stirring word in the scene :

The passage reminds us vaguely of the pictures, popular a few years ago, representing four generations of German imperial stock. Laertes is the only one who kills his man. The victim is the leader of the avengers, and father of the most insolent among the suitors. Then Zeus Stays the skirmish with a thunderbolt, and we are told in curt words that Pallas Athene reconciled the feud, at her father’s bidding, taking on therefor the guise of mortal Mentor. But not one word of hers is actually reported, and the book ends tamely ; even, as it seems, hastily and lamely.

Perhaps, as Mr. Lang says, such a divine intervention was about the only solution possible, at least without further waste of life. But if the master poet of the Odyssey composed the last two hundred lines in their present form, he was very weary either of his art altogether or else of this theme. There are few even of the greatest artists who understand the divine art of leaving off betimes. Perhaps the most effective verse in all Dante is that quiet word of Francesca: —

Something may always be left to the imagination of the sympathetic reader.

But as we look back upon the whole mass of Greek epic, upon the Iliad arid the Odyssey together, how complete and how magnificent is the picture which they create ! We must, I think, concede the truth of one of the boldest assertions made by the brilliant and canny Scot who is so often quoted, and still oftener drawn upon, in this essay : if we were forced to lose either Homer or all Greek literature beside, we should hesitate as long as possible ; but at last, we should cling to Homer, who anticipates so much that is best in all the other Hellenic poets, and whose world seems to have a completeness and a perfect beauty of its own to which its very remoteness adds a final charm.

The truest answer to his own question Dr. Holmes himself gives in another connection : —

And these tragic yet sweetest memories of the world’s lost youth are bound up forever under the rubric that bears the doubted and denied, yet ever glorious name of Homer.

William Cranston Lawton.