As Mr. Gollancz has given no reference, so neither can I. Mr. Gollancz continues that if Coleridge had read Act II. Scene i. of Dido and Æneas—a play left unfinished by Marlowe—he would have changed his mind, but I do not believe he would.
At the same time I take it that the writer was one half laughing and the other half serious, and would sometimes have been hard put to it to know whether she was more in the one vein than in the other. So those who know the cantata Narcissus, advertised at the end of this volume, will admit that there are people who are fully aware that there is no music in this world so great as Handel's, but who will still try to write music in the style of Handel, and when they have done it, hardly know whether they have been more in jest or earnest, though while doing it they fully believed that they were only writing, so far as in them lay, the kind of music which Handel would have written for such words had he lived a hundred years or so later than he did.
We may note, without, however, being able to deduce anything from it as regards the dates at which the various parts of the poem were composed, that in the first four Books of the Odyssey the season appears to be summer rather than winter. In all the other Books (of course excluding those in which Ulysses tells his story) the season is unquestionably winter, or very early spring. It is noticeable also that snow, which appears so repeatedly in the Iliad, and of which Homer evidently felt the beauty very strongly, does not appear, and is hardly even mentioned, in the Odyssey. I should perhaps tell some readers that winter is long and severe in the Troad, while on the West coast of Sicily snow is almost unknown, and the winter is even milder than that of Algiers.
I ought also perhaps hardly to pass over the fact that amber, which is never mentioned in the Iliad, appears three times in the Odyssey.[4] This may be mere accident, nevertheless Sicily was an amber-producing country, and indeed still is so; a large collection of Sicilian amber exists in the museum of Castrogiovanni, the ancient Enna, and I have been assured on good authority, but have not verified my informant's statement, that some fine specimens may be seen in the South Kensington Museum. Speaking of Sicilian amber the Encyclopedia Britannica says:—
The most beautiful specimens are, perhaps, those which are found at Catania. They often possess a beautiful play of purple not to be observed in the product of other places.
I cannot make out whether the first four Books were written before the last twelve or after; probably they were written first, but there is something to be said also on the other side. I will not attempt to settle this point, and will only add that when we hear in mind how both the two main divisions of the Odyssey—the Phæacian episode with the Return of Ulysses, and the story of Penelope and the suitors, show unmistakeable signs of having been written at one place, by woman, by woman who is evidently still very young, and that not a trace of difference in versification, style, or idiom can be found between the two divisions, the only conclusion we should come to is that the poem was written by one and the same woman from the first page to the last. I think we may also conclude in the absence of all evidence to the contrary—for assuredly none exists that deserves the name of evidence—that we have the poem to all intents and purposes in the shape which it had assumed in the hands of the authoress.
[1] Introduction to Homer, Macmillan, 1888, p. 172.
[2] None of these three passages will be found in my abridgement.
[3] Cf. Od. ix. 391-393.