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re not Gods. But they are in a far-off background, namely, in civilized Hellas, beyond whose border Ulysses passes in these Books. Still Zeus, the supreme Greek God, sends his decree to Calypso, when Ulysses is ready to leave the Dark Island. Thus the Olympians exercise a final jurisdiction even here. It is to be noticed, however, that Pallas has little to do with Ulysses in Fableland; for is she not substantially negated? But when he touches Greece again, and even in Phaeacia, she will not fail to be at his side. She belongs not to Wonderland, but to the clear rational realm of light and order; she cannot follow even her darling mortal through these dark mazy wanderings. It is manifest that the epical Upper World of the Gods has receded from the place it occupies in the Iliad and in the other portions of the Odyssey; in fact, it has been largely but not wholly supplanted. A new order of deities is portrayed, subordinate, yet authoritative in their limited domain, which is cut off by the vast sea from united Hellas, and is thus made merely individual and anti-social by its situation. What are these shapes and why? Man has created them that he may indicate his own spiritual state when he has fallen out with the established order. Really they are phases of the development of the hero, who is reaching out through disbelief, denial, defiance, toward a restoration. He is negative to the Greek consciousness, and this negation takes shape by mind, yet has to be put down by mind. The whole process he projects out of himself into two lines of movement: the first is the row of preternatural forms arranged as if in a gallery of antique sculpture, the second is himself passing through these forms, grappling with them, mastering them, or fleeing from them. Such is this Fairy World which has crept in under the grand Olympian order in response to a true necessity. Its beings are not natural, its events are not probable; thus the poet forces us to look inward if we would see his meaning. Spirit is portraying spirit, and not externality, which is here made absurd; in this manner we are driven out of the real into ideal, or we drop by the way in reading those four Books. 4. But it must not for a moment be thought that Homer created this Fairy World or made, single-handed, these Fairy Tales. The latter are the work of the people, possibly of the race. Comparative folk-lore has traced them around the globe in one form or other. The
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