ryland, toward Egypt
and the East, leaving Hellas and Troy behind, quite as Ulysses here
does. It was the story of Menelaus in the Fourth Book, who also found
Proteus and Eidothea, a new order of deities, though Olympus and Zeus
lay in the distant background. Moreover, Proteus and Eidothea represent
the two sides, the supersensible and the sensible, the latter of which
must be transcended and the former grasped, ere return be possible.
Nestor also tells his own experience in the Third Book, but he keeps
inside of Hellas and under the direct control of the Greek Gods. Hence
no Faery Realm rises in his narrative, he needs none for
self-expression. But Menelaus and Ulysses, wandering far over the Greek
border, reach a new world, and require a new art-form for their
adequate utterance. Especially is this the case with Ulysses, who has
had a much larger and deeper experience than Menelaus, and who thus
stands in strong contrast with Nestor, the old man of faith with his
devotion to the old order, who has no devious return from Troy, and
continues to live in immediate unquestioning harmony with the
Olympians. There is no room in Pylos for a Circe or a Polyphemus.
Ulysses, therefore, having reached the court of Phaeacia, takes a calm
retrospect of the past, and recounts the same to the people there; he
comes to know himself, and he uses art for self-expression, not for the
praise of the external deed of war; his inner life is the theme. In
other words, he has become self-conscious in Phaeacia, he knows his own
processes, and shows that he knows them. As already pointed out, this
internal movement of his spirit is the process of the negative, he has
turned denier of the old institutional order of Greece, and he has to
work through into a positive world again, which he now sees before
himself in Phaeacia.
To be sure, the self-consciousness to which he has attained is not
expressed in the language of philosophy, but in poetry, in a
transcendental Fairyland. There is as yet no Greek language of
philosophy; a long development will bring it forth however; Aristotle
will deracinate the last image of Homer, and leave the Greek tongue
supersensible.
7. The fact that Ulysses must tell his own story is deeply coupled with
the following characteristic: these four Books of Fableland are
essentially a confession. From beginning to end we observe it to be an
account of shortcomings and their results; we find the acknowledgment
of er
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