“Who prized good living more than ladies’ love;”
and he even hints that Penelope’s knowledge of their real sentiments helped to account for her obduracy. But Horace, we must remember, was a satirist by trade. A mere prosaic reader might be tempted to raise the question whether the personal charms of Penelope, irresistible as they might have been when Ulysses first left her for the war, must not have been somewhat impaired during the twenty years of his absence; and whether it was possible for a widow of that date (especially with a grown-up son continually present as a memento) to inspire such very ardent admiration. These arithmetical critics have always been the pests of poetry. One very painstaking antiquarian—Jacob Bryant—in the course of his studies on the Iliad, made the discovery, by a comparison of mythological dates, that Helen herself must have been nearly a hundred years old at the taking of Troy. But the question of age has been unanimously voted impertinent by all her modern admirers: she still shines in our fancy with
“The starlike beauty of immortal eyes”
which the Laureate saw in his ‘Dream of Fair Women.’ The heroic legends take no count of years. Woman is there beautiful by divine right of sex, unless in those few special instances in which, for the purposes of the story, particular persons are necessarily represented as old and decrepit. Nor is there any ground for supposing that the suitors of Penelope, like the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, persisted in attributing to her fictitious charms. She is evidently not less beautiful in the poet’s eyes than in theirs. As beauty has been happily said to be, after all, “the lover’s gift,” so also the bestowal of it upon whom he will must be allowed to be the privilege of the poet. The island-queen herself says, indeed, that her beauty had fled when Ulysses left her, and could only be restored by his return; but this disclaimer from the lips of a loving and mourning wife only makes her more charming, and she is not the only woman, ancient or modern, who has borrowed an additional fascination from her tears.
The suitors of Penelope, strange to say, are living at free quarters in the palace of the absent Ulysses. Telemachus is too young, apparently, to assert his rights as master of the house on his own or his mother’s behalf. If the picture be true to the life—and there is no good reason to suppose it otherwise—we must assume an age of rude licence even in the midst of considerable civilisation, when, unless a king or chief could hold his own by the strong hand, there was small chance of his rights being respected. A partial explanation may also lie in the fact that the wealth of the king was regarded as in some sort public property, and that to keep open house for all whose rank entitled them to sit at his table was probably a popular branch of the royal prerogative. Telemachus is an only son, and he and his mother have apparently no near kinsmen to avenge any wrong or insult that may be offered. There is, besides, somewhat of weakness and tameness in his character, more than befits the son of such a father. He is a home-nurtured youth, of a gentle and kindly nature, a dutiful and affectionate son; but his temperament is far too easy for the rude and troublous times in which his lot is cast, and the roystering crew who profess at least to be the wooers of Penelope have not been slow to find it out. Some kindly critics (“Christopher North” among the number) have refused to see any of these shortcomings in the young prince’s character; but his father Ulysses saw them plainly. For thus it is he speaks, at a later period of the tale, under his disguise of a mendicant:—
“Had I but youth as I have heart, or were
The blameless brave Ulysses, or his son,
Then let a stranger strike me headless there,
If against any I leave revenge undone!”
But this is anticipating somewhat too much. We must return to the opening of the poem.
The fate of Ulysses, so far as any knowledge of it has reached his wife and son, lies yet in mystery. Only the gods know—and perhaps it were as well for Penelope not to know—in what unworthy thraldom he is held. He has incurred the anger of the great Sea-god, and therefore he is still forbidden to reach his home. He has lain captive now for seven long years in Ogygia, the enchanted realm of Calypso—
“Girded of ocean in an island-keep,
An island clothed with trees, the navel of the deep.
“There dwells the child of Atlas, who can sound
All seas, and eke doth hold the pillars tall
Which keep the skies asunder from the ground.
There him, still sorrowing, she doth aye enthral,
Weaving serene enticements to forestal
The memory of his island-realm.”