Among them all, the Cyclopes, children of Neptune, offer, as a work of art, by far the most successful and satisfactory result. In every point they are placed at the greatest possible distance from human society and its conventions. Man is small, the Cyclops huge. Man is weak, the Cyclops powerful. Man is gregarious, the Cyclops is isolated. Man, for Homer, is refined; the Cyclops is a cannibal. Man inquires, searches, designs, constructs, advances, in a word, is progressive: the Cyclops simply uses the shelter and the food that nature finds for him, and is thoroughly stationary. Yet, while man is subject to death, the Cyclops lives on, or vegetates at least, and transmits the privileges of his race by virtue of its high original. The relaxed morality of the divine seed, as compared with man, is traceable even in their slight customs. They are polygamous:
θεμιστεύει δὲ ἕκαστος
παίδων ἠδ’ ἀλόχων[593].
From their personal characters the moral element has been entirely dismissed. Polyphemus is a huge mass of force, seasoned perhaps with cunning, certainly with falseness. This union of a superhuman life with the brutal, that dwells in solitude, and has none of its angles rubbed down by the mutual contact between members of a race, produces a mixed result of extreme ferocity, childishness, and a kind of horrible glee, which as a work of art is most striking and successful. We may justly think much of Caliban: but Caliban cannot for a moment be compared to Polyphemus. It is equitable, however, to remember that contrast with Ariel, which must have been a governing condition in the creation of Shakespeare, required a nature which should be fatuous and grovelling, as well as coarse.
To feed Polyphemus, what lies nearest him, namely, the Læstrygonian adventure, has, perhaps, been starved. Again we are introduced to cruel Giants and to cannibalism, but with a great scantiness of detail. Their individuality is scarcely established. Their only marked qualities they hold in common with the Cyclopes, except as to a single point, namely, that they live gregariously. We see their city, and are introduced to their king, their queen, and their princess[594]. But a too great likeness to the Cyclops still suggests itself; and it is probable that in both the one and the other Homer set before him, among the materials of his work, that old tradition of powerful beings, allied to the deity, and yet rebellious against him, which meets us in so many forms, dispersed about the Homeric poems, and which the later tradition, by further multiplication and variety, resolved into a living chaos.
The Phæacians appear to stand quite in another category. While the Cyclops has no trace of deity but in superhuman force, the Phæacians have no pretensions of this kind. They are not even immortal, nor are they wholly removed from man, for they are accustomed to carry passengers by sea; they seem really to be meant in a measure to represent the θεοὶ ῥεῖα ζώοντες. We must not look too rigidly in them for notes of the divine character, but rather for the abundance, opulence, ease, and refinement of the divine condition. Hence Homer lavishes all the simple wealth of his imagination upon the palace and garden of Alcinous, which far exceeds any possessions he has assigned to ordinary men. This additional splendour of itself proves, if proof were wanted, that the picture is ideal. The same amount of ornament assigned to the palace of Menelaus would, from the contrast with fact, probably have been frigid to his hearers.
From the games and athletic exercises of this people all the ruder and more violent sports are excluded. Navigation, to others so formidable, for them is conducted by a spontaneous force and intelligence residing in their ships; which annihilates distance, and at last excites even the jealousy of Neptune (Od. viii. 555–69). We find in the island and in its history no poverty, no grief, no care, no want; all is fair to see and to enjoy. But we feel thankful to Homer that he has not here, as in the case of the Cyclops, made kin with the gods entail a marked moral or intellectual inferiority upon the sons of men; no purer or more graceful piece of humanity is to be found among the creations of the human brain, than his picture of Nausicaa. She combines in herself all that earth could suggest of bright, and pure, and fair. Still it cannot be denied that levity and vanity are rather conspicuous in the Phæacian men. They shew off, among other sports, their boxing and wrestling, before they know what Ulysses is made of. When they know it, Alcinous informs him in an off-hand way that they do not pretend to excellence in that class of sports[595]. After the dancers have performed, Ulysses with great tact at once passes a high compliment upon them. Alcinous, delighted with the praise, cries aloud, ‘Phæacian chiefs! this stranger appears to me to be an extremely sensible man[596].’
It appears, however, most likely that, besides the mythical element in two of them, Homer may have had some basis of maritime report, and thus of presumed fact, for his delineations of all these three races; that, with an unlimited license of embellishment, he, nevertheless, may have intended in each case to keep unbroken the tie between his own tale, and the voyages of Ulysses, founded upon Phœnician geography, as reported in his time. I form this opinion partly from some singularities in the Phæacian character, which, as they are not in keeping with any poetic idea, may probably have had an historic aim, though I cannot be persuaded that they afford a foundation broad enough for the full theory of Mure[597], if he conceives the Phæacians of the Odyssey to be strictly a portrait of the Phœnicians. Partly I draw the inference from the want of clear severance in the ideals, on which the characters of the Cyclops and the Læstrygones are severally founded. The remarkable natural characteristic of Læstrygonia which he has given us, its perpetual day, supports the same hypothesis. What would otherwise amount to poverty in the imagery is sufficiently accounted for, if we assume that he meant to describe two savage tribes, that inhabited the latitudes with which he was dealing; and that, feeling himself bound to brutality in each case, he has, under these unfavourable circumstances, varied it as much as he could. Unless it had been to preserve an historical or mythological tradition, the Læstrygonian adventure might hardly have deserved introduction into the Odyssey. Plainly, on the other hand, he is not to be held responsible for all that he has put down while he believed himself to be conforming to narratives of fact, in the same manner and degree as if he had been presenting us with a picture in which his fancy had only to work at will.
The remaining case is slight, and may speedily be dismissed. Æolus is φίλος ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι, and is intrusted with the charge of the winds; and his six sons are married to his six daughters, as αἰδοίαι ἄλοχοι[598]. The word φίλος may bear the sense of relationship: immortality seems to be of necessity involved in the charge over the winds, who are themselves in the Iliad (in this point varying poetically from the Odyssey) invested with deity[599]: and the marriage of the sons to the daughters affords another absolute proof: for this, which would have been incest, μέγα ἔργον, among men, is evidently set down as in their case a legitimate connection. The great example in the Kronid family would give it full sanction for the Immortals.