purification of
the spirit from its own negative condition. The man, having become
destructive-minded (_oloophrn_) must be put under training by the Gods,
and sent to battle with the monsters of Fableland.

So we advance to the next Book with the certainty that there is still
some stern discipline in store for the wandering Ulysses.

_BOOK TENTH._

At the first glance we can observe a certain similarity between this
Book and the last one. There are in each three distinct portions or
adventures, two very short and simple, and one very long and intricate.
Each Book culminates in a fabulous being with whom the Hero has a
wrestle for supremacy, and in both cases he comes out victorious. We
are still in Wonderland, we have to reach into the ideal realm in order
to find out what these strange incidents mean. The two central figures
are Polyphemus and Circe, respectively, each of whom imparts the
dominating thought to the Book in which he or she appears.

The first thing we ask for is the connection, the inner thread which
joins these Books together. It was stated that Polyphemus was the
negation of the institutional world, he was individualistic, he
belonged to neither Family nor State. No laws, no councils, no civil
polity; he is a huge man of violence, hostile specially to man's social
life. Circe on the contrary, is the woman hostile to woman's domestic
world, the Family, first of all; she is the grand enchantress,
representing the power and seductiveness of the senses; she is the
enemy of what we call morals. To be sure, we shall find in her
something more, whereof the full unfolding will be given hereafter.

Ulysses is the one who is to meet those negative forces and put them
down. His companions give him special trouble in the present Book, they
seem to represent the weaker phases of man, possibly of Ulysses
himself. Already he has suppressed Polyphemus, or the institutional
negation; now he is to subordinate Circe or the moral negation. The
latter is a woman because she must have sensuous beauty and all the
charm of passionate enticement; the former is a man because he must
show strength and violence rather than the allurement of pleasure.

Nor should we forget that these forms are in Ulysses himself, and were
really generated out of his Trojan life; that spirit of his, shown at
the start by the attack on the Ciconians, has all these phases in its
process. He is traveling through an Inferno, seeing its en