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