Through all the Odyssey the winds are blowing, the seas moaning, and the estranged sad spectres of the night flit noiselessly across the printed page.
Through new lands, among new peoples—friends and foes—touching at green islands set like emeralds in wine-coloured seas, the immortal mariner moves to the music of his creator’s verse. The Sirens’ voices, the Fairy’s enchanted wine, the Twin Monsters of the Strait pass and are forgotten.
His wife’s tears bid him ever towards home.
I sometimes have wondered if Vergil thought of Ulysses when he made his own lesser wanderer say:—
“Per varios casus per tot discrimina rerum,
Tendimus in Latium, sedes ubi fata quietas
Ostendunt.”
And now, since we are to have, on that so magical a stage, a concrete picture: since we are to take away another storied memory from beneath the copper dome, I feel that the story of Ulysses may once more be told in English.
A fine poet, a great player, are to give us an Ulysses who must perforce be not only full of the spirit of his own age of myth, but instinct with the spirit of this.
That is as inevitable as it is interesting.
The “Gentle Elia” (how one wishes one could find a better name for him—but custom makes cowards of us all) has written his own version of the Odyssey. I cannot emulate that. But I think I can at least be useful.
There are three stages of knowing Homer: the time when one dog’s ears and dogrells him at school, the time when one loves him, a literary love! at Oxford, and the time when the va et vient of life in great capitals wakes the dormant Ulysses in the heart of every artist, and he begins to understand.