s been
told--the learner Telemachus. He hears of the Orient and its principle;
the antecedents of his people, their origins, separations, their
advance upon the older nations are significantly hinted. All this is an
education. For its function is to bring together the scattered wisdom
of the Past and to give it to the youth who is coming upon the stage of
life; thus he is made the spiritual heir of all that his race has
achieved in word and deed. Telemachus has learned about the history of
Troy, the great event of the early Greek world; he has heard the
Returns of the Heroes, and he has seen Helen. But, chiefly, he has been
taught the grand distinction between Appearance and Substance; he has
come to know, if he has learned his lesson, the One in the Many; he has
been shown how to reach beyond the sensuous appearances of things and
enter the realm of spirit. Such is still the best education to-day,
though the manner of it be so different. There were no books in those
days, no schools but the lips of the aged; every Greek youth, to a
degree, was a Telemachus, and had a similar discipline. Tradition,
song, folk-lore are also means of education; we cannot do without the
mythus even now, and we are in many ways seeking to restore it to its
place in the training of the child, and of the grown man too.
Telemachus has graduated, he can now go home; so he asks to be
permitted to depart for Ithaca, where the hardest practical problem of
life is awaiting him. But mark, he carries with him the grandest of all
hospitable presents: the knowledge of the true and eternal in contrast
to the unreal and transitory.

In these four Books of the Odyssey the education of the Homeric youth
has been given. Next we are to have the experiences of the man--those
of the typical man Ulysses, as he works out his own problem. Menelaus
could not tell that tale; the man himself must be seen doing,
overcoming his obstacles by the deed. He will present a phase of life
not known to the East, not known to Egyptian Proteus. Thus the Odyssey
will be an entire book, a veritable Bible for young and old, with its
complete cycle of human discipline.

The story of Proteus itself is Protean, and must be grasped in its
essence through all its appearances. The whole Odyssey is veritably a
Protean poem as already said, whose study is to seize the one truth
which is underneath all these shifting shapes and manifold events. What
are we doing now but trying to grasp P