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“If it please your Majesty,” said he, in answer to King Alcinous, “I should be delighted to stay here for another twelve months, and to accept from your hands the vast treasures and the escort which you are go generous as to promise me. I should obviously gain by doing so, for I should return fuller-handed to my own people and should thus be both more respected and more loved by my acquaintance. Still to receive such presents–“

The king perceived his embarrassment, and at once relieved him. “No one,” he exclaimed, “who looks at you can for one moment take you for a charlatan or a swindler. I know there are many of these unscrupulous persons going about just now with such plausible stories that it is very hard to disbelieve them; there is, however, a finish about your style which convinces me of your good disposition,” and so on for more than I have space to quote; after which Ulysses again proceeds with his adventures.

When he had finished them Alcinous insists that the leading Phaeacians should each one of them give Ulysses a still further present of a large kitchen copper and a three-legged stand to set it on, “but,” he continues, “as the expense of all these presents is really too heavy for the purse of any private individual, I shall charge the whole of them on the rates”: literally, “We will repay ourselves by getting it in from among the people, for this is too heavy a present for the purse of a private individual.” And what this can mean except charging it on the rates I do not know.

Of course everyone else sends up his tripod and his cauldron, but we hear nothing about any, either tripod or cauldron, from King Alcinous. He is very fussy next morning stowing them under the ship’s benches, but his time and trouble seem to be the extent of his contribution. It is hardly necessary to say that Ulysses had to go away without the 250 pounds, and that we never hear of the promised goblet being presented. Still he had done pretty well.

I have not quoted anything like all the absurd remarks made by Alcinous, nor shown you nearly as completely as I could do if I had more time how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at him in her sleeve. She understands his little ways as she understands those of Menelaus, who tells Telemachus and Pisistratus that if they like he will take them a personally conducted tour round the Peloponnese, and that they can make a good thing out of it, for everyone will give them something–fancy Helen or Queen Arete making such a proposal as this. They are never laughed at, but then they are women, whereas Alcinous and Menelaus are men, and this makes all the difference.

And now in conclusion let me point out the irony of literature in connection with this astonishing work. Here is a poem in which the hero and heroine have already been married many years before it begins: it is marked by a total absence of love-business in such sense as we understand it: its interest centres mainly in the fact of a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, being eaten out of house and home during his absence by a number of young men who are courting the supposed widow–a widow who, if she be fair and fat, can hardly also be less than forty. Can any subject seem more hopeless? Moreover, this subject so initially faulty is treated with a carelessness in respect of consistency, ignorance of commonly known details, and disregard of ordinary canons, that can hardly be surpassed, and yet I cannot think that in the whole range of literature there is a work which can be decisively placed above it. I am afraid you will hardly accept this; I do not see how you can be expected to do so, for in the first place there is no even tolerable prose translation, and in the second, the Odyssey, like the Iliad, has been a school book for over two thousand five hundred years, and what more cruel revenge than this can dullness take on genius? The Iliad and Odyssey have been used as text-books for education during at least two thousand five hundred years, and yet it is only during the last forty or fifty that people have begun to see that they are by different authors. There was, indeed, so I learn from Colonel Mure’s valuable work, a band of scholars some few hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, who refused to see the Iliad and Odyssey as by the same author, but they were snubbed and snuffed out, and for more than two thousand years were considered to have been finally refuted. Can there be any more scathing satire upon the value of literary criticism? It would seem as though Minerva had shed the same thick darkness over both the poems as she shed over Ulysses, so that they might go in and out among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge from generation to generation, and none should see them. If I am right, as I believe I am, in holding the Odyssey to have been written by a young woman, was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed behind a more impenetrable hedge of dulness?–and she will have to sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually. But what else can one expect from people, not one of whom has been at the very slight exertion of noting a few of the writer’s main topographical indications, and then looking for them in an Admiralty chart or two? Can any step be more obvious and easy–indeed, it is so simple that I am ashamed of myself for not having taken it forty years ago. Students of the Odyssey for the most part are so engrossed with the force of the zeugma, and of the enclitic particle [Greek]; they take so much more interest in the digamma and in the AEolic dialect, than they do in the living spirit that sits behind all these things and alone gives them their importance, that, naturally enough, not caring about the personality, it remains and always must remain invisible to them.

If I have helped to make it any less invisible to yourselves, let me ask you to pardon the somewhat querulous tone of my concluding remarks.