The Authoress of the Odyssey. Butler Samuel

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СКАЧАТЬ though Thucydides had said "Phocians" without qualifying his words by adding "of those from Troy," or "of the Trojan branch," he still places Greek-speaking people within five miles of Trapani.

      As for the points of correspondence between both Ithaca and Scheria, and Trapani, they will remind me that Captain Fluelen found resemblances between Monmouth and Macedon, as also Bernardino Caimi did between Jerusalem and Varallo-Sesia; they will say that if mere topographical resemblances are to be considered, the Channel Islands are far more like the Ionian group as described in the Odyssey than those off Trapani are, while Balaclava presents us with the whole Scherian combination so far more plausibly than Trapani as to leave no doubt which site should be preferred. I have not looked at the map of Balaclava to see whether this is so or no, nor yet at other equally promising sites which have been offered me, but am limiting myself to giving examples of criticisms which have been repeatedly passed upon my theory during the last six years, and which I do not doubt will be repeatedly passed upon it in the future.

      On the other hand I may comfort myself by reflecting that however much I may deserve stoning there is no one who can stone me with a clear conscience. Those who hold, as most people now do, that the Iliad and Odyssey belong to ages separated from one another by some generations, must be haunted by the reflection that though the diversity of authorship was prominently insisted on by many people more than two thousand years ago, not a single Homeric student from those days to the end of the last century could be brought to acknowledge what we now deem self-evident. Professor Jebb, writing of Bentley,2 says

      He had not felt what is now so generally admitted, that the Odyssey bears the marks of a later time than the Iliad.

      How came so great a man as Bentley not to see what is so obvious? Truly, as has been said by Mr. Gladstone, if Homer is old, the systematic and comprehensive study of him is still young.3

      I shall not argue the question whether the Iliad and Odyssey are by the same person, inasmuch as if I convince the reader that the Odyssey was written by a woman and in Sicily, it will go without saying that it was not written by Homer; for there can be no doubt about the sex of the writer of the Iliad. The same canons which will compel us to ascribe the Odyssey to a woman forbid any other conclusion than that the Iliad was written by a man. I shall therefore proceed at once to the question whether the Odyssey was written by a man or by a woman.

      It is an old saying that no man can do better for another than he can for himself, I may perhaps therefore best succeed in convincing the reader if I retrace the steps by which I arrived at the conclusions I ask him to adopt.

      I was led to take up the Odyssey by having written the libretto and much of the music for a secular oratorio, Ulysses, on which my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I had been for some time engaged. Having reached this point it occurred to me that I had better after all see what the Odyssey said, and finding no readable prose translation, was driven to the original, to which I had not given so much as a thought for some five and thirty years.

      The Greek being easy, I had little difficulty in understanding what I read, and I had the great advantage of coming to the poem with fresh eyes. Also, I read it all through from end to end, as I have since many times done.

      Fascinated, however, as I at once was by its amazing interest and beauty, I had an ever-present sense of a something wrong, of a something that was eluding me, and of a riddle which I could not read. The more I reflected upon the words, so luminous and so transparent, the more I felt a darkness behind them, that I must pierce before I could see the heart of the writer – and this was what I wanted; for art is only interesting in so far as it reveals an artist.

      In the hope of getting to understand the poem better I set about translating it into plain prose, with the same benevolent leaning, say, towards Tottenham Court Road, that Messrs. Butcher and Lang have shewn towards Wardour Street. I admit, however, that Wardour Street English has something to say for itself. The "Ancient Mariner," for example, would have lost a good deal if it had been called "The Old Sailor," but on the whole I take it that a tale so absolutely without any taint of affectation as the Odyssey will speed best being unaffectedly told.

      When I came to the Phæacian episode I felt sure that here at any rate the writer was drawing from life, and that Nausicaa, Queen Arete, and Alcinous were real people more or less travestied, and on turning to Colonel Mure's work4 I saw that he was of the same opinion. Nevertheless I found myself continually aghast at the manner in which men were made to speak and act – especially, for example, during the games in honour of Ulysses described in Book viii. Colonel Mure says (p. 407) that "the women engross the chief part of the small stock of common sense allotted to the community." So they do, but it never occurred to me to ask myself whether men commonly write brilliant books in which the women are made more sensible than the men. Still dominated by the idea that the writer was a man, I conjectured that he might be some bard, perhaps blind, who lived among the servants much as the chaplain in a great house a couple of hundred years ago among ourselves. Such a bard, even though not blind, would only see great people from a distance, and would not mix with them intimately enough to know how they would speak and act among themselves. It never even crossed my mind that it might have been the commentators who were blind, and that they might have thus come to think that the poet must have been blind too.

      The view that the writer might have lived more in the steward's room than with the great people of the house served (I say it with shame) to quiet me for a time, but by and by it struck me that though the men often both said and did things that no man would say or do, the women were always ladies when the writer chose to make them so. How could it be that a servant's hall bard should so often go hopelessly wrong with his men, and yet be so exquisitively right with every single one of his women? But still I did not catch it. It was not till I got to Circe that it flashed upon me that I was reading the work, not of an old man, but of a young woman – and of one who knew not much more about what men can and cannot do than I had found her know about the milking of ewes in the cave of Polyphemus.

      The more I think of it the more I wonder at my own stupidity, for I remember that when I was a boy at school I used to say the Odyssey was the Iliad's wife, and that it was written by a clergyman. But however this may be, as soon as the idea that the writer was a woman – and a young one – presented itself to me, I felt that here was the reading of the riddle that had so long baffled me. I tried to divest myself of it, but it would not go; as long as I kept to it, everything cohered and was in its right place, and when I set it aside all was wrong again; I did not seek my conclusion; I did not even know it by sight so as to look for it; it accosted me, introduced itself as my conclusion, and vowed that it would never leave me; whereon, being struck with its appearance, I let it stay with me on probation for a week or two during which I was charmed with the propriety of all it said or did, and then bade it take rank with the convictions to which I was most firmly wedded; but I need hardly say that it was a long time before I came to see that the poem was all of it written at Trapani, and that the writer had introduced herself into her work under the name of Nausicaa.

      I will deal with these points later, but would point out that the moment we refuse to attribute the Odyssey to the writer of the Iliad (whom we should alone call Homer) it becomes an anonymous work; and the first thing that a critic will set himself to do when he considers an anonymous work is to determine the sex of the writer. This, even when women are posing as men, is seldom difficult – indeed it is done almost invariably with success as often as an anonymous work is published – and when any one writes with the frankness and spontaneity which are such an irresistible charm in the Odyssey, it is not only not difficult but exceedingly easy; difficulty will only arise, if the critic is, as we have all been in this case, dominated by a deeply-rooted preconceived opinion, and if also there is some strong à priori improbability in the supposition that the writer СКАЧАТЬ