Homer's Odyssey Part 4

A mythical figure appears, Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who is to foretell to the inquiring mortal what may be needful for his safety.

Not an Olympian G.o.d is Proteus, yet a supernatural shape standing between man and deity and mediating the two, the human and the divine.

For it is Proteus who sends Menelaus back to the G.o.ds whom he has neglected and offended.

The Fairy Tale which we are now to consider, is not to be looked upon as an allegory; it is a story with incident, movement, character, all in their own right, and not for the sake of something else. But we must not, on this account, imagine that it has no thought; in fact, the Fairy Tale is just the way in which primitive peoples think. It has thought, often the profoundest thought, which darts through it, not steadily, but fitfully in flashes at the important links, like electric sparks. This thought we are to catch and hold, and not rest satisfied with the mere outer form of the story.

Persons we can always find who are strongly prepossessed against seeing any meaning in the Fairy Tale, or in the Mythus. Modern usage of these literary forms, doubtless, justifies such an opinion. Still we must remember that Homer was not playing, but thinking with his Fairy Tale; he had no technical terms, and almost no abstract language for expressing thought; the day of philosophic reflection had not yet dawned upon Greece. Homer has a great and deep thought to utter, but his utterance is and must be mythical. His problem, too, he has, and it is spiritual; the Mythus is his statement, honest, earnest, final. No, he was not playing at story-telling, though it must have given him pleasure; nor was his object merely to delight somebody, though he certainly has delighted many by his song. He was the true Poet, upholding his own worth and that of his vocation; he was loyal to the Muse whose word he must sing whether it find listeners or not. Homer built his legendary structure to live in, not to play in; with all his sportiveness, he is a deeply earnest man; if his Zeus sometimes takes on a comic mask, it is because Providence is a humorist. Homer, when he mythologizes, is thinking, thinking as profoundly as the philosopher, and both are seeking to utter to men the same fundamental thought. The reader is to think after the poet, if not in the immediate mythical form, then in the mediate, reflective way.

The present Tale seeks to give an answer to the two main questions of Telemachus: Where is my father now? And, Will he return home? To answer the one question requires a knowledge of what is distant in s.p.a.ce; to answer the other question requires a knowledge of what is distant in Time. Can we not see that herein is an attempt to rise out of that twofold prison of the spirit, s.p.a.ce and Time, into what is true in all places and times? In other words, Menelaus unfolds in a mythical form, the Universal to his young pupil, and we may now see in what manner he gives the lesson.

He leaps at once into the middle of his theme; he was in Egypt and detained there by the G.o.ds, "though longing to return home." Such is the great initial fact, he did not do his duty to the G.o.ds. Without their aid or without their adequate recognition, he seeks to come home.

This indicates the spiritual difficulty; he is indifferent to or a disbeliever in the Divine. The G.o.ds are the upholders of the world-order, they are the law and the spirit of the reality. Clearly Menelaus could not or did not fit himself into the providential system.

Neglect of the G.o.ds--that detains him, must detain him. The result is, he and his companions are wasting away on an island, without any chance of return.

The question of the hour is, How shall I get out of the difficulty?

Only in one way: Acknowledge the G.o.ds, put yourself into harmony with their order, then the outer world and the inner man will be one, and must bring about the deed, which is the return. We are now to witness the process whereby this reconciliation between man and the G.o.ds takes place--surely the supreme matter in life. It is told in the form of the Fairy Tale or Marvelous Legend, which shifts and changes; we, however, must cling to the essence else it will escape us, Proteus himself we must hold fast, and not be misled by his many appearances.

Menelaus begins to feel sorrow, which is a penitent condition antecedent to all help. Moreover he wanders alone, he has gone apart from his companions; behold, the G.o.ddess steps out of the air and speaks. She reproaches him with folly, and turns him to the deity who can a.s.sist him. Who is this G.o.ddess?

It is Eidothea, the G.o.ddess of Appearance, yet the daughter of Proteus, the old First One, to whom she directs Menelaus, as the only means of salvation. Mark how she designates Proteus: "he is the true, the immortal; without error, without death; he knows the depths of all the sea"--the great sea of Time and s.p.a.ce, which envelops the poor mortal.

But he must be snared and held--surely not an easy task it is to catch him.

The etymology of the names of these two deities indicates their meaning and relation. The grand dualism of the world is clearly suggested: Appearance and Substance, the Transitory and the Eternal, that which seems and that which is. Menelaus had gone astray, he had neglected the G.o.ds, he had followed Appearance, Delusion, Negation; the result could only be death. But even Appearance points to something beyond itself, something true and eternal. So Eidothea suggests Proteus, who is her parent; that is, she is the manifestation of his being. She is the many, he is the one underneath and in the many; she is change, he is the permanent in all change. He may well be designated as her father, whose transformations she knows and declares. These transformations are called his tricks or stratagems, the shapes he puts on in the world of Appearance; they are indeed Eidothea herself along with her voice telling what is higher than herself.

When this one first principle is clearly revealed, then all is revealed; the future becomes transparent, and the distant becomes near.

But you must hold fast to the one true Proteus; he will turn to fire--hold fast; he will become running water--hold fast; he will change to tree, beast, reptile--hold fast. Then he will show himself in his right shape, and will speak the fact. Hold fast; the One is under all, and is a G.o.d, who will lift the veil of s.p.a.ce and Time from the visage of Truth. But unquestionably the man in his desperate struggle must never forget the injunction. Hold fast to old Proteus.

We must note, too, that the poet has shown Menelaus as prepared to receive this divine revelation; the Greek wanderer has been brought to contrition by manifold sufferings. "I surely must have sinned against the Immortals," is his penitent outcry. Thus he is ready for the new truth, and the voice of the G.o.ddess speaks, when he is internally in condition to hear it. The divine word is not forced upon him; he must do his share even toward creating the same within himself. Now, along the sh.o.r.e of the sea, "he prays the G.o.ds fervently," ere he goes to his task. Egyptian Proteus he seeks to catch and to hold, for it is Proteus who is to point out to him the way of reconciliation with Zeus and the Olympian G.o.ds.

Stress is strongly laid by the poet upon the fact that Proteus is of Egypt. Evidently, in the mind of Homer, the thought of this Fourth Book connects with the land of the Nile. What hint lies in that? The highest wisdom of Egypt, indeed, of the Orient, is just this grand distinction between Appearance and Substance, the Transitory and the Eternal, the Many and the One. What Egypt gave to h.e.l.las is here suggested, nay, said directly. In fact, the first great step in wisdom, is still to make the above distinction, which in many ways has been handed down to us from the East.

But the Greeks united the two sides--that which appears and that which is, or the world of sense, and the world of spirit--and thereby produced art, the plastic forms of G.o.ds and Men. h.e.l.las brought forth to the sunlight Beauty, which Egypt never could. Even here Egyptian Proteus leads Menelaus to the Greek G.o.ds, and becomes himself a kind of antecedent h.e.l.lenic deity. Egypt means to Greek Menelaus two things: first, it is a land of error, of alienation, of darkness; secondly, it has its light, its wisdom, which, when he finds, points him homeward to h.e.l.las, to his own G.o.ds.

Deeply suggestive become all these mythical hints, when we once are in touch with their spirit. We naturally pa.s.s to the Hebrew parallel, since that other great world-historical people of antiquity, the Israelites, had their experience also with Egypt. For them, too, it was a land of darkness, slavery, divine estrangement. They also sought a Return, not dissimilar to the Greek Return, to their true home. It was a long, terrible time, a wandering not on the water, like the sea-faring h.e.l.lene, but in the wilderness and desert, like the sand-faring Semite. All the companions (but two) were lost, and the leader also; moreover that leader was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, but had to get out of it and away from it, and lead his people into their own possessions. Much light Egypt with all its darkness furnished to Moses and Judea; much to Menelaus and to h.e.l.las.

So the two chief streams of human culture, the Greek and the Hebrew, are traced back to the Egyptian source in the earliest books, or Bibles of the two peoples themselves.

Moreover we find the form of the two grand experiences quite the same; there is a going into Egypt, the land of dazzling riches and power and civilization; there is the misfortune and trial in that land after a time of prosperity, finally, there is the Return home, with many wanderings and sufferings. Both peoples bring with them what may be called the Egyptian idea, yet each transforms it into its own spirit after its own fashion.

Still further we may follow this thought and behold it as universal.

The form of separation and return is fundamental in human spirit; this is its inherent movement, and the shape which it imparts to the great works of literature. The very destiny of man is cast into this mould; there is, first, his estrangement, the fall from his high estate; then is his return to harmony with the divine order. The Hebrew Bible begins with the Fall of Man; that is the first chapter; the rest of the book is his rise, and marks out the path of his Return which, of course, shows many sinuosities. Such is the deepest fact of the human soul, and to image it, there springs into existence the corresponding literary form. Not that it was taken consciously by the poet or maker after much ratiocination; he has to take it, if he sees the universe as it is.

This form is the form of the everlasting reality, of which he has the immediate vision, it is also the form of very selfhood, of the Ego.

Though different in many things, the Odyssey and the Bible are both, at bottom, Returns. They restore the man after alienation. Indeed we may behold the same form as fundamental in all Great Literary Books--in Homer, in Dante, in Shakespeare, in Goethe.

Many things connected with this catching and holding of Proteus are suggestive, but they are the flash of the poet into the depths, and must be seen with the poetic glance, for they bear with much loss the heavy translation into thought. How this Eidothea, the G.o.ddess of Appearance, turns against her own father, and helps to make him reveal himself in his true shape; how Menelaus and his three comrades put on the skins of the sea-calves, and deceive the deceiver, applying the latter's art of transformation to himself, and destroying appearance with appearance; how the poor mortals almost perish through the odor of the skins of the sea-calves, thus showing their human weakness and limitation, till ambrosia, the food of the Immortals, is brought by the G.o.ddess, which at once relieves them of their mortal ailment--these and other incidents have their subtle, far-reaching hint of the supersensible world. The whole story is illumined with one thought, how to master the material show of things and reach their spiritual inwardness.

But the chief duty of these people, now disguised to destroy disguise, is to hold the Old Man fast when they have once caught him, that shifty, ever-changing Old Man of the Sea. Let him turn to water, to a snake, to a lion, to a tree--hold him fast; he is the One under them all and will at last reveal himself. Very necessary, indeed, is it to hold fast, and never let go in the grand play of Appearances; the strength of the man is shown by his ability to hold fast, amid the fleeting shadows of Time.

Menelaus holds the Old Man fast, and asks: What G.o.d detains me from my return? The answer comes home strong: Thou hast neglected the sacrifice due to Zeus and the other deities; thou hast not recognized the G.o.ds.

Verily the heart of the difficulty; Menelaus has not placed himself in harmony with the divine order, in which he must act. What then? Go back to the beginning, back to Egypt, and start aright; commence thy return again with the new light, recognize Zeus and the G.o.ds by sacrifice there, and thou shalt see home. Thus the Egyptian estrangement is removed, the Greek hero of wisdom must reach beyond the experience of Egypt and be restored to the Greek G.o.ds.

At once Menelaus was ready to obey, though "his heart was broken" at the thought of recrossing the sea to Egypt, for the "way was long and difficult." Still he will do it; and next he is given a look into the Distant and Future, a glance into the soul of things separated from him by s.p.a.ce and Time. He will know concerning the Returners, in deep accord with the spirit of the poem. He hears of the awful death of Ajax, son of Oileus, he hears of the sad fate of his brother Agamemnon; also the Old Man of the Sea tells him a few words concerning Ulysses, who is still alive but cannot get away from the isle of Calypso. News just good enough to give hope to the son who is eagerly listening, and hears that his father still lives.

Finally, Menelaus learns of his own future existence from the Old Man, who is in person the very embodiment of what lies beyond the senses, of immortality. "The G.o.ds have decreed thou shalt not die, O Menelaus, but shalt dwell in the Elysian Plain, at the ends of the earth." He is the husband of Helen, and coupled forever with her destiny; he is, through her, of the divine family of Zeus. Such is the promise, has it not been fulfilled?

The poet thus brings to an end his Fairy Tale, with its deep-reaching glances into Egypt as one of the antecedent sources of h.e.l.lenic civilization. We find therein hinted a double relation: first, Egypt was the giver of much wisdom to Greece especially the distinction into Appearance and the one First Principle; secondly, it was hostile to Greek spirit, which had to pa.s.s through the Egyptian stage to reach its own destiny. Homer spins, in this Book, a thread which connects the culture of h.e.l.las with that of Egypt, So much we dare find in the present legend without much straining. The distant background of this entire visit of Telemachus to Sparta is Egyptian and Oriental, as we see from the talk of both Helen and Menelaus.

We may now be certain that Homer, the poet, had before him a thought of this kind: the inner soul of things and the outward manifestation. The story of Proteus we may call not merely a Fairy Tale, but the Fairy Tale, which images its universal self in setting forth its special theme; it has the one meaning, which, however, takes on many varieties of external shape; it is the essence of all Fairy Tales. Still you have to catch the Proteus and make him tell his secret; I can only advise you to hold fast, and finally the true form of the Old Man will reveal itself, and speak the truth of many appearances, nay, of all. In reading this poem of Homer we are only following the poet, if we seek to lay hold of its essence under its varied manifestations. The whole Odyssey is a Proteus, ever changing, a.s.suming new forms, which will utterly bewilder the reader until he reaches its first principle. Homer probably suggests that his own Fairy Tale, nay, his own poem, is a Proteus, which must be grasped and held by the one central thought. In fact, does not the modern reader, like ancient Menelaus, in his wanderings need an Eidothea, an interpreter, to point out the Old Man of the Sea, the First One, and to tell how to catch him? In the very names of Proteus and Eidothea we feel the intention, the conscious etymology which borders on personification. Yet around this simple substrate of thought are woven so many wonders, so many suggestions, far-hinting and deep-glancing, that it becomes truly the Tale of Tales (_Marchen aller Marchen_).

The Fairy Tale will appear again in the Odyssey, and take possession of the whole poem for a time when we come to the wanderings of Ulysses.

Now it is but a slight bubbling-up of what will be a great stream. At present it turns to the East and unfolds the Greek relation thereto; hereafter it will turn to the West, and unfold the Greek relation thereto. Both have their wise men, and the Return is from each direction to Greece. The distinction between them we may suggest in advance: the one has more of the speculative, of the spirit; the other has more of the active, of the will, though neither side excludes the other. Both men return to h.e.l.las as the common destination; hence, we find in this Book everywhere expressed the intimate brotherhood between Menelaus and Ulysses.

It is of great interest to see the poet build his Fairy Tale, which is but one form of his mythical procedure. Instinctively he builds it, as the bee does the honey-cell. He places the G.o.d or G.o.ddess at the center of every movement or event; by divine will it is all brought about. The sea which stands in the way of the return of Ulysses is a deity, Poseidon; Eidothea is a person, the voice of the world of Appearance, and she leads to Proteus, the Primal One. To Homer personality is at the heart of this universe. Such is truly the mythical mind; all phenomena are the product of an intelligent will, not of blind law. Not a long chain of cause and effect hovers before Homer's soul, thus his work would be prose; but he sees self-cause at once, and so cannot help being poetical, as well as religious. The culture of to-day tends too much to divest us of the mythical spirit--which is not altogether a gain. Homer, if rightly studied, will help restore that lost gift of the early ages.

But now we must turn our look to the youth for whom the tale has been told--the learner Telemachus. He hears of the Orient and its principle; the antecedents of his people, their origins, separations, their advance upon the older nations are significantly hinted. All this is an education. For its function is to bring together the scattered wisdom of the Past and to give it to the youth who is coming upon the stage of life; thus he is made the spiritual heir of all that his race has achieved in word and deed. Telemachus has learned about the history of Troy, the great event of the early Greek world; he has heard the Returns of the Heroes, and he has seen Helen. But, chiefly, he has been taught the grand distinction between Appearance and Substance; he has come to know, if he has learned his lesson, the One in the Many; he has been shown how to reach beyond the sensuous appearances of things and enter the realm of spirit. Such is still the best education to-day, though the manner of it be so different. There were no books in those days, no schools but the lips of the aged; every Greek youth, to a degree, was a Telemachus, and had a similar discipline. Tradition, song, folk-lore are also means of education; we cannot do without the mythus even now, and we are in many ways seeking to restore it to its place in the training of the child, and of the grown man too.

Telemachus has graduated, he can now go home; so he asks to be permitted to depart for Ithaca, where the hardest practical problem of life is awaiting him. But mark, he carries with him the grandest of all hospitable presents: the knowledge of the true and eternal in contrast to the unreal and transitory.

In these four Books of the Odyssey the education of the Homeric youth has been given. Next we are to have the experiences of the man--those of the typical man Ulysses, as he works out his own problem. Menelaus could not tell that tale; the man himself must be seen doing, overcoming his obstacles by the deed. He will present a phase of life not known to the East, not known to Egyptian Proteus. Thus the Odyssey will be an entire book, a veritable Bible for young and old, with its complete cycle of human discipline.

The story of Proteus itself is Protean, and must be grasped in its essence through all its appearances. The whole Odyssey is veritably a Protean poem as already said, whose study is to seize the one truth which is underneath all these shifting shapes and manifold events. What are we doing now but trying to grasp Proteus in this exposition? There is no mythus in Homer which has wound itself so deeply and so variously into the literature of the world. It would be an interesting history to trace its employment by later poets, and see how it has mirrored itself in the consciousness of the ages. The last world-poet, Goethe, takes the figure of Proteus from his eldest brother, the first world-poet, and transplants it into the Second Part of Faust, where it has its place in the development of the modern man. The Mythus of Evolution the tale of Proteus becomes in Goethe's hands, and hints of Darwinism long before Darwin.

Still the most significant historical fact of this Fourth Book is the connection which it makes between Egypt and Greece. In another Greek legend, that of OEdipus, the same connection is made through the Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat the Egyptian monster destroys itself.

The Sphinx, the grand symbol of Egypt and chief product of its Art, may be taken as the Egyptian starting-point for both Greece and Judea. The Sphinx is half human, half animal; the two are put together in stone and thus stand a fixed, unreconciled contradiction. Such was just the Sphinx-riddle of humanity to the old Egyptian: man is a beast and a spirit, linked together without any true mediation. Both the Hebrew and the Greek sought to solve this grand riddle, each in his own way. The Hebrew attempted to extirpate the sensuous element; he would have no graven image, no idolatry, he would worship only the pure spirit, and obey only the divine law. The Greek reconciled the two sides, by making the sensuous element the bearer and the revealer of the spiritual. The animal must be subordinated to the spirit, then it can live, nay can have a new and higher existence. Thus Art arose in Greece, and not in Judea.

The interpretations which the story of Proteus has received are simply infinite. Probably it appeals to every reader in a somewhat different fashion; he pours into this marvelous form certain phases of his own experience and is satisfied. Indeed Proteus is not only a Form, but a Form of Forms for the human mind, hinting both the oneness and the multiplicity of the Ego itself. We may go back to the Vedas and find traces of it there in some sun-myth; we may go to the sea and find it a miraculous legend in which the Greek sailor set forth his perils and his escapes. It certainly connects h.e.l.las with Egypt, and suggests the movement of ancient civilization. Menelaus in his voyage transcends the Greek world of the Trojan epoch, and brings back the story thereof to his country. The tale of Proteus is said to have been carried back to Egypt, where Herodotus, several hundred years after Homer, found it in a new transformation, Proteus being a king of Egypt, who took Helen from Paris and kept her till Menelaus arrived and received her from the Egyptian ruler. Thus the Fairy Tale raised the Old Man of the Sea to the royal dignity, changing sovereignty from water to land. (_Herodotus_, II. 112-20.) Plato makes him typical of a sophist, Schlegel of a poet, Lucian of a dancer.

We shall now take a glance backwards and give a short summary of the story, that its inner development in the hands of the poet may be more fully seen.

1. The desolation of Menelaus and his companions on the island of Pharos; no Return possible, death from hunger imminent. Moreover, disregard of the G.o.ds, internal estrangement, a condition of separation from the Divine, truly an Egyptian condition.

2. Eidothea appears to him, just the G.o.ddess of Appearance, and points him to a power beyond herself. Hitherto he was lost in the world of Appearance; but when he thinks of it, he separates himself from it, and sees its nullity. So the Finite points to the Infinite, the Fleeting to the Permanent, the Sensible to the Supersensible, Eidothea to Proteus, who is the First One, or the First Principle underlying all Appearance, hence her father.

3. She tells also how to catch him. When he emerges from the water, source of all Forms, indeed just the Formable (see Goethe's Faust, Part II. in the _Cla.s.sical Walpurgisnight_), he will count by fives all his sea-calves, or sea-forms, offspring of the sea (Halosydna). This counting by fives, is significant, hinting the earliest abstraction from the sensuous through number, specially by means of the five-system, though Homer knew well the decimal system (see _Od._ XVI, 245. _Iliad_ II. 126). Menelaus with his companions is to take on this sea-form, and be counted with the rest, though in disguise; then when Proteus lies down to sleep with his herds or Forms, he is to be seized; that is, seized in repose, as he is himself, not in relation to his shapes. They must continue to hold fast to this primal Form of Proteus, or the archetype, through all his changes, till he resumes his first shape, "the one in which thou sawest him in repose." Then they possess the Essence as distinct from the Phenomenon; they know that their disguise has torn off all disguise, and attained the real.

4. Proteus will now tell Menelaus the truth devoid of all delusive shows; ere the latter can leave Egypt and return to Greece he must put himself into harmony with the Greek G.o.ds, Zeus and the rest. So he has to go back to Egypt's river and start over again in the right way. Then he will make the Return to h.e.l.las.

5. Proteus also gives the fate of a number of Returners. Ajax he specially speaks about--Ajax, son of Oileus (not the greater Ajax), the blasphemer, who said he would return in spite of the G.o.ds, and at once perished. The account of the death of Ajax has its meaning for Menelaus, who thought of getting home with paying due regard to the G.o.ds. Once more Agamemnon's dire lot is told with some new incidents added. Thirdly Proteus has seen Ulysses in an ocean isle with the nymph Calypso who detains him though eager to get away. Thus the son hears the fact about his father. Finally Proteus prophesies the immortality of Menelaus, for has not the latter reached beyond Appearance into the Eternal already, just by catching and holding Proteus? So the Old Man of the Sea cannot help giving this prophecy, which lives directly in his own experience.

Though Telemachus is not told that his father is returning, still he may draw such an inference from the story of Menelaus, who was also detained on an island longing to get home. If the G.o.ds, being duly recognized, will give their help in the one case, they will in the other; they too, will come to the aid of Ulysses, when he has placed himself in harmony with them. This is what is about to happen.

As already set forth, there are three divisions of this first part of the Fourth Book: the simple idyllic Present at Sparta, the disrupted strifeful Past at Troy, the movement out of the latter by way of Egypt.

Taking the three divisions together, we note that they form the total sweep of one great Return, that of Menelaus, from unity through separation back to harmony. Thus Menelaus and also Helen are shown to have solved their problem.

But there remains the harder and deeper problem of Ithaca, which is that of Ulysses. Here enemies have possession of the man's home, and he brings back no help, only himself. It is therefore, a natural transition to introduce at this point the Ithacan condition which is seen to be more difficult than the Spartan one, for Menelaus seems to have had no enemies in his house to dispute his Return, as Agamemnon had and also Ulysses has. But Agamemnon perished, Ulysses will not.

II.