Odyssey

“ The Odyssey is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty, subtle, and passionate. ”

“ And when Ulysses attempts to comfort him with the thought of the deathless glory which surrounds his name, the hopelessness of his answer sets forth, in the darkest colours, that gloomy view of human destiny which breaks out from time to time in the creed of the poet, and which belongs to the character of his favourite hero. Whether the Odyssey did or did not come from the same hand as the Iliad, at least Achilles is the same in both. ”

“ The Odyssey proper, toward which we may now cast a glance, contains the wanderings of Ulysses, and is the work of the grown man who has to meet the world face to face and conquer it; thus he obtains the experience of life. The two parts are always to be placed together—the education of the young man and the experience of the mature man; they constitute a complete history of a human soul. ”

“ The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story. ”

“ If the Odyssey was not written without laughter, so neither was it without tears. 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 poem is so august: it is hallowed by the veneration of so many ages; it is like my frontispiece, so mysterious, so imperfect, and yet so divinely beyond all perfection; it has been so long associated with the epic poem which stands supreme—for if the Odyssey be the Monte Rosa of literature, the Iliad must, I suppose, for ever remain as the Mont Blanc; who can lightly vivisect a work of such ineffable prestige as though it were an overlooked parvenu book picked up for a few pence at a second hand book stall? ”

“ It were absurd to quote the fable of the Iliad or the Odyssey, the legend of Hercules, Theseus, and Œdipus, as authorities in matters of fact relating to the history of mankind; but they may, with great justice, be cited to ascertain what were the conceptions and sentiments of the age in which they were composed, or to characterize the genius of that people with whose imaginations they were blended, and by whom they were fondly rehearsed and admired. ”

“ Some man hath moved it, and smitten the olive-bole from its base.’
These last twelve books of the Odyssey have not the same marvel of romance, adventure and colour that we find in the earlier part of the epic. There is nothing in them that we can compare to the exquisite idyll of Nausicaa or to the Titanic humour of the episode in the Cyclops’ cave. Penelope has not the glamour of Circe, and the song of the Sirens may sound sweeter than the whizz of the arrows of Odysseus as he stands on the threshold of his hall. ”

“ We go back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the creative romance and poesy of all literatures, as strong men wearied seek again the woods and waters of their youth, for a time renewing the dream which, in sooth, is harder to summon than to dispel. ”

“ In the Iliad, in spite of the gloom of Achilles, and his complaint of the double urn, the sense of life, on the whole, is sunny and cheerful. There is no yearning for anything beyond—nothing vague, nothing mystical. The earth, the men, the gods, have all a palpable reality about them. From first to last, we know where we are, and what we are about. In the Odyssey we are breathing another atmosphere. ”

“ And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of as the Iliad’s better half or wife. Here we have a poem of more varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater fascination—one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed neither at gods nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated exception, at man. Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things, but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just referred to, they are never laughed at. ”

“ There is one play especially, The Return of Ulysses, which we will praise for perfect after its kind, the kind of our new drama of wisdom, for it moulds into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible of literal translation, those closing books of the Odyssey which are perhaps the most perfect poetry of the world, and compels that great tide of song to flow through delicate dramatic verse, with little abatement of its own leaping and clamorous speed. ”

“ For ourselves we do not need to prove its transcendence of life by this or that extraordinary incident; it is the whole spirit and essence and sound and colour of the song that affect us; and we know that the Odyssey surpassed the bounds of its own age and its own land just as much as it surpasses those of our time and our country. ”

“ In the Odyssey, on the other hand, religion has become more spiritual. Olympus is no longer the mountain of that name, but a vague term, like our "heaven," denoting a place remote from all earthly cares and passions, a far-off abode in the stainless ether, where the gods dwell in everlasting peace, and from which they occasionally descend, to give an eye to the righteous and unrighteous deeds of men. ”

“ The native land of its hero is not very unlike our own, "full of mist and rain", yet able to make us love it far more than a Calypso's isle with an offer of immortality to any who will exchange his real love of home for an unnatural haven of peace. A splendid hero, a good love-story, admirable narrative, romance and excitement, together with a breath of the sea which gives plenty of space and pure air have made the Odyssey the companion of many a veteran reader in whom the Greek spirit cannot die. ”

“ The true type of the allegory is the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. ”

“ The writer of the Odyssey is fierce as a tigress at times, but the feeling of the poem is on the whole exactly what Shelley says it is. Strength is felt everywhere even in the tenderest passages of the Iliad, but it is sweetness rather than strength that fascinates us throughout the Odyssey. It is the charm of a woman not of a man. ”

“ After the total Odyssey has been organized on Olympus, it begins at once to descend to earth and to realize itself there. For the great poem springs from the Divine Idea, and must show its origin in the course of its own unfolding. Hence the Gods are the starting-point of the Odyssey, and their will goes before the terrestrial deed; moreover, the one decree of theirs overarches the poem from beginning to end, as the heavens bend over man wherever he may take his stand. ”

“ If we glance through the references to pleasant landscape which occur in other parts of the Odyssey, we shall always be struck by this quiet subjection of their every feature to human service, and by the excessive similarity in the scenes. ”

“ When we are told, in passages to be quoted, that there was in the formation of the Iliad, and to a less extent in that of the Odyssey, a strong element of reform and expurgation, we ask ourselves—who, in what age, and from what motives, were the reformers and purgers of what pre-existing poetic and legendary materials? ”

“ The circumstances are just as active as themselves, frequently more active. The return to Ithaca, for example, is the actual project of Odysseus. The Odyssey, however, does not merely display this character in the active execution of his predetermined end, but expands its account into all the variety of occurrence which he happens to experience in his wanderings, what he suffers, what obstructions meet him in the way, what dangers he has to overcome, and all, in fact, that moves him. ”

“ In the Odyssey the gods no longer live in houses and sleep in four-post bedsteads, but the conception of their abode, like that of their existence altogether, is far more spiritual. Nobody knows exactly where they live, but they say it is in Olympus, where there is neither rain nor hail nor snow, and the wind never beats roughly; but it abides in everlasting sunshine, and in great peacefulness of light wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever. It is hardly possible to conceive anything more different from the Olympus of the Iliad. ”

“ Although both in the Iliad and Odyssey we can clearly discern traces of the infancy of the nation to which they belong, and although a spirit of simplicity pervades them, peculiar to the childhood of the human race, yet the class of poetry under which they fall, appears in them at its full maturity; all the laws which reflection and experience can suggest for the epic form are observed with the most refined taste ”

“ Iliad ii. 298.
1103 We should probably here read Menestheus.
1104 But the immortals will send you to the Elysian plain, and the boundaries of the earth, where is auburn-haired Rhadamanthus; there of a truth is the most easy life for men. There is nor snow nor long winter, nor ever a shower, but ever does the ocean send forth the gently blowing breezes of the west wind to refresh men. Odyssey iv. ”

“ The romantic elements which are so necessary a part of all Epic are much more convincing in the Odyssey; the actions and adventures are indeed beyond experience, but they are treated in such a masterly style that they are made inevitable ”

“ Why wilt thou take this dreadful journey, thou, an only child, so loved, and so dear? Odysseus is lost for ever, and if thou go we shall lose thee too, for the suitors will plot thy ruin while thou art far away. ”

“ They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naïve and so lovely. ”

“ Odyssey, i. 338.
It was accordingly looked at and portrayed as a whole; and it is this very wholeness which is one of the principal charms of primitive poetry—an irrecoverable charm; for civilisation renders existence a labyrinth of which it too often rejects the clue. In olden times, however, its ways were comparatively straight, and its range limited. It was accordingly capable of being embraced with approximate entirety. 32Hence the encyclopædic character of the early epics. Humani nihil alienum. ”

“ The two great originals of a serious air, which we have derived from that mighty genius, differ principally in the action, which in the Iliad is entire and uniform; in the Odyssey, is rather a series of actions, all tending to produce one great end. ”

“ The “Odyssey,” which describes the travels and sufferings of an individual, has, of course, more numerous sketches of private life than the “Iliad,” the actors in which seem, as it were, to be upon a public stage, and to stalk in the tragic buskin from one end of the poem to the other. But we cannot help wondering at the manner in which the poet has so frequently interwoven in his most gorgeous descriptions some allusion to the commerce or the arts of his countrymen; his similes, in particular, are perpetually borrowed from the works of the farmer or the mechanic. ”

“ Fate, in the sense of the non-human determinants of man's career, can show its hand. In the Odyssey, for example, shipwreck and the interference of the gods are factors as decisive as Odysseus' courage and cunning. By contrast, in lyric poetry, nature is merely a reflection of moods; in dramatic poetry, it is simply the passive, causally ineffective stage for a social experience wholly determined by human agents. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the Iliad the poet never missed an opportunity of letting us know that—whoever he was and wherever he was born—he knew the sea well, and had a seaman's tastes. But there his tale confined him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and such opportunities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey we roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and the restless hero seems never so much at home as when he is on shipboard. ”

“ Tell the bare "plot" of the Odyssey to one of these writers, and hint that it might be made into a "successful Christmas book for boys," and he will produce you a book which will contain the Lotus-Eaters, and Calypso and the Cyclops, but which will have just the same relation to literature as blasphemy bears to the Liturgy. That seems to me the explanation; one must say again that mere incident is nothing, that it only becomes something when it is a symbol of an interior meaning. ”