the same final victory, the peace of
Olympus. Who cannot attain the latter is a Tantalus, seeking but never
reaching the fruit. Such is the outcome and culmination of Hades; after
Hercules has spoken, no further word is heard by Ulysses.

Dante, whose poem on so many lines grows out of this Eleventh Book, has
also the same duplication of the person in his Paradise. The soul is in
its special planet, Venus, Mars, etc., and also it is in the highest
Heaven, enjoying the Vision of God. But Dante universalizes the Greek
view, making it truly Christian; all men are children of God and can
attain the seats of the Blessed, not merely the one man, the Hero
Hercules. Still even here the inference is that Ulysses must also be
transferred to Olympus, though no such declaration is made.

We hope the reader feels how inadequate Hades would be, and how
incomplete the experience of Ulysses would be, if this last division of
the Book were cut out. The wanderer has now gone through the total
cycle of the Underworld, not only outwardly, but inwardly; he is just
ready to step out of it, because he is beyond it in spirit. This last
step is now to be given in Homeric fashion.

There is a danger at present rising strongly into consciousness, a
danger inherent in this too-long contemplation of Hades; it is the
danger of the Gorgon, the monster whose view turns the spectator into
stone, taking away all sensation, emotion, life. The Greek sooner or
later must quit Hades, and flee from its shapes; the supersensible
world he must transfuse into the sensible, else the former will rush
over into the fantastic, the horrible, the ugly. The Gorgon is down in
Hades too, having been slain in the terrestrial Upperworld by a Greek
Hero, Perseus, who slew the monster of the Orient which once guarded
the fair Andromeda, a kind of Pre-Trojan Helen, chained in captivity,
whom the heroic Hellenic soul came to release. Ulysses has now reached
the Greek limit, Oriental phantasms will rise unless there be a speedy
return to the reality, to the realm of sense. Hades has furnished its
highest image in Hercules, beware of its worst. Already the Underworld
has been in danger of running into the fantastic; then Beauty, the
Hellenic ideal, would be lost. The figures of Homeric Hades hitherto
have all been men and women, but the monsters are ready to come forth.
So they did come forth in the later Greek world under the spur of
Oriental influence; witness the Revelatio