The world does indeed know little of its greatest men and women, and bitterly has it been reproached for its want of penetration, but there are always two sides, and it should be remembered that its greatest men and women commonly know very little of the world in its more conventional aspects. They are continually flying in the face of all that we expect of greatness, and they never tell us what they are; they do not even think that they are great; if they do we may be sure that they are mistaken; how then can we be expected to appreciate people correctly till we have had plenty of time to think them over?
And when we have thought them over, how little have our canons of criticism to do with the verdict which we in the end arrive at. Look at the Odyssey. Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have been already married many years before it opens; from the first page to the last there is no young couple in love with one another, there is in fact nothing amatory in the poem, for though the suitors are supposed to be madly in love with Penelope, they never say or do anything that carries conviction as to their being so. We accept the fact, as we do the sagacity of Ulysses, because we are told it, not because we see it. The interest of the poem ostensibly turns mainly on the revenge taken by a bald middle-aged gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, on a number of young men who have been eating him out of house and home, while courting his supposed widow.
Moreover, this subject, so initially faulty, is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency and plausibility, an ignorance of commonly known details, and a disregard of ordinary canons which it would not be easy to surpass, and yet, such is the irony of art that it is not too much to say that there is only one poem which can be decisively placed above it. If the Odyssey enforces one artistic truth more than another, it is that living permanent work in literature (and the same holds good for art and music) can only be done by those who are either above, or below, conscious reference to any rules or canons whatsoever—and in spite of Shakespeare, Handel, and Rembrandt, I should say that on the whole it is more blessed to be below than above. 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. I do not mean that the writer was always, or indeed generally, unhappy; she was often, at any rate let us hope so, supremely happy; nevertheless there is throughout her work a sense as though the world for all its joyousness was nevertheless out of joint—an inarticulate indefinable half pathos, half baffled fury, which even when lost sight of for a time soon re-asserts itself. 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 only approach to argument which I have seen brought forward to show that the Odyssey must have been written by a man, consists in maintaining that no woman could have written the scene in which Ulysses kills the suitors. I cannot see this; to me it seems rather that no man could have brought himself to disregard probability with so little compunction; moreover a woman can kill a man on paper as well as a man can, and with the exception of the delightful episode in which Ulysses spares the lives of Phemius and Medon, the scene, I confess, appears to me to be the most mechanical and least satisfactory in the whole poem. The real obstacle to a general belief that the Odyssey was written by a woman is not anything that can be found in the poem, but lies, as I have already said, in the long prevalence of an opinion that it was written by the same person as the Iliad was. The age and respectability of this opinion, even though we have at length discarded it, will not allow us to go beyond ascribing the Odyssey to another man—we cannot jump all at once to the view that it was not by a man at all. A certain invincible scholasticism prevents us from being able to see what we should see at once if we would only read the poem slowly and without considering anything that critics have said concerning it.
This, however, is not an easy thing to do. I know very well that I should never have succeeded in doing it if I had not passed some five-and-thirty rebellious years during which I never gave the Odyssey so much as a thought. 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? Lightly, no, but inexorably, yes, if its natural health and beauty are to be restored by doing so.
One of our most accomplished living scholars chided with me in this sense a year or two ago. He said I was ruthless. "I confess," he said, "I do not give much heed to the details on which you lay so much stress: I read the poem not to theorise about it, but to revel in its amazing beauty."
It would shock me to think that I had done anything to impair the sense of that beauty which I trust I share in even measure with himself, but surely if the Odyssey has charmed us as a man's work, its charm and wonder are infinitely increased when we see it as a woman's. Still more must it charm us when we find the writer to be an old friend, and see no inconsiderable part of her work as a reflection of her own surroundings.
Have we, then, a right in sober seriousness so to find her? I have shown that in the earliest known ages of Greek literature poetesses abounded, and gained a high reputation. I have shown that by universal consent the domestic and female interest in the Odyssey predominates greatly over the male. I have shown that it was all written in one place, and if so—even were there no further reasons for thinking so—presumably by one hand: I have shown that the writer was extremely jealous for the honour of woman, so much so as to be daunted by no impossibilities when trying to get rid of a story that she held to be an insult to her sex. These things being so, is it too much to ask the reader to believe that the poem was not written, as Bentley held, by a man for women, but for both men and women, by one who was herself a woman?
And now as I take leave of the reader, I would say that if when I began this work I was oppressed with a sense of the hopelessness of getting Homeric scholars to take it seriously and consider it, I am even more oppressed and dismayed when I turn over its pages and see how certain they are to displease many whom I would far rather conciliate than offend. What can it matter to me where the Odyssey was written, or whether it was written by a man or a woman? From the bottom of my heart I can say truly that I do not care about the way in which these points are decided, but I do care, and very greatly, about knowing which way they are decided by sensible people who have considered what I have urged in this book. I believe I have settled both points sufficiently, but come what may I know that my case in respect of them is amply strong enough to justify me in having stated it. And so I leave it.