Samuel Butler

“ For after all it is not the outward and visible signs of what we read, see, or hear, in any work, that bring us to its feet in prostration of gratitude and affection; what really stirs us is the communion with the still living mind of the man or woman to whom we owe it, and the conviction that that mind is as we would have our own to be. All else is mere clothes and grammar.
As regards the mind of the writer of the "Odyssey" there is nothing in her work which impresses me more profoundly than the undercurrent of melancholy which I feel throughout it. ”

“ Half a dozen first-class poets in prose or verse are as many as the world can carry in any comfort; twenty Shakespeares, twenty Homers, twenty Nausicaas would make literature impossible, yet we may be sure that every country in every century could yield two or three first-class writers, if genius were to be known at once, and fostered by those who alone know how to foster it. Genius is an offence ”

“ Now that I know the writer to have been a woman, I am ashamed of myself for not having been guided to my conclusion by the exquisitely subtle sense of weakness as well as of strength that pervades the poem, rather than by the considerations that actually guided me.
The only approach to argument which I have seen brought forward to show that the "Odyssey" must have been written by a man, consists in maintaining that no woman could have written the scene in which Ulysses kills the suitors. ”

“ Since, therefore, there are such insuperable difficulties in the way of eliminating geniuses when we have once absorbed them, and since also, do what we may, we can no more detect the one genius who may be born among a multitude of good average children, than Herod could detect the King of the Jews among the babes of Bethlehem, we have no course but to do much as Herod did, and lay violent hands upon all young people till we have reduced every single one of them to such mediocrity as may be trusted to take itself off sooner or later. ”

“ Horace tells us that mediocrity in a poet is forbidden alike by gods, men, and publishers, but, whether forbidden or no, there are a good many mediocre poets who are doing fairly well. So far as I can see, indeed, gods, men, and more particularly publishers, will tolerate nothing in a poet except mediocrity, and if a true poet by some rare accident slips in among the others, it is because gods and publishers’ readers did not find him out until it was too late to stop him. ”

“ It seems as though Minerva had shed the same darkness over both the poems that she shed over Ulysses, that they might go in and out among eminent Homeric scholars from generation to generation, and none should see them.
The world does indeed know little of its greatest men and women, and bitterly has it been reproached for its want of penetration, but there are always two sides, and it should be remembered that its greatest men and women commonly know very little of the world in its more conventional aspects. ”

“ Look at the "Odyssey." Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have been already married many years before it opens; from the first page to the last there is no young couple in love with one another, there is in fact nothing amatory in the poem, for though the suitors are supposed to be madly in love with Penelope, they never say or do anything that carries conviction as to their being so. We accept the fact, as we do the sagacity of Ulysses, because we are told it, not because we see it. ”

“ If, however, any man resents the common course of nature and sets himself to looking upon himself and cursing his fate that he was not born to be of the number of them that enter into life eternal even in this world, let him console himself by reflecting that until he is long dead, there is no certain knowing whether he is in life or no, and also that though he prove to be an immortal after all, he cannot escape the treatment which he is the more sure to meet with according as he is the more immortal—let alone the untold misery which his works will inflict upon young people. ”

“ To this end we have established schools and schoolmen; nor is it easy to see how we could more effectually foster that self-sufficiency which does so much towards helping us through the world, and yet repress any exuberance of originality or independence of thought which may be prejudicial to its possessor during his own life, and burdensome to posterity when he is dead and gone. ”

“ And after all it is well that things are as they are; for the mediocre poet, though he may hang about for many years, does in the end die, or at any rate become such a mere literary Struldbrug as to give plain people no trouble, whereas the true poet will possess himself of us, and live on in us whether we will or no, and unless the numbers of such people were severely kept in check they would clog the wheels of the world. ”

“ Turning from her commentators to the authoress herself, I am tempted to wonder whether she would be more pleased or angry could she know that she had been so long mistaken for a man—and that man Homer. It would afford her an excellent opportunity for laughing at the dullness of man. ”

“ They are continually flying in the face of all that we expect of greatness, and they never tell us what they are; they do not even think that they are great; if they do we may be sure that they are mistaken ”

“ Angry, however, as she would no doubt be, she could hardly at the same time help being flattered, and would perhaps console herself by reflecting that poets as great as she was are bound to pay the penalty of greatness in being misunderstood. ”

“ The age and respectability of this opinion, even though we have at length discarded it, will not allow us to go beyond ascribing the "Odyssey" to another man—we cannot jump all at once to the view that it was not by a man at all. A certain invincible scholasticism prevents us from being able to see what we should see at once if we would only read the poem slowly and without considering anything that critics have said concerning it. ”

“ Dead mind like dead body must, after a decent interval, be buried out of our sight if living mind is to have fair play, and it might perhaps not be a bad thing if our great educational establishments had more of the crematorium and less of the catacomb about them than they have at present. ”

“ I have shown that in the earliest known ages of Greek literature poetesses abounded, and gained a high reputation. I have shown that by universal consent the domestic and female interest in the "Odyssey" predominates greatly over the male. ”

“ Our notions of intellectual sanitation are deplorably imperfect, and unless the living become more jealous of letting dead mind remain unconsumed in their system, a fit of intellectual gout must ere long supervene, which, if not fatal, will still be excruciatingly painful. ”

“ For they lie all of them upon the surface; they are a mere washing in the Jordan and being clean; they require nothing but that a person should read the "Odyssey" as he would any other book, noting the physical characters described in the Scherian and Ithacan scenes, and looking for them on some West coast of the Mediterranean to the West of Greece. ”

“ I cannot see this; to me it seems rather that no man could have brought himself to disregard probability with so little compunction; moreover a woman can kill a man on paper as well as a man can, and with the exception of the delightful episode in which Ulysses spares the lives of Phemius and Medon, the scene, I confess, appears to me to be the most mechanical and least satisfactory in the whole poem. ”

“ The interest of the poem ostensibly turns mainly on the revenge taken by a bald middle-aged gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, on a number of young men who have been eating him out of house and home, while courting his supposed widow. ”