n is the
image of the complete self-conscious being, who has taken the negative
period into himself and digested it. Fortunate person! he cannot now be
made the subject of a poem, for he has no conflict.

But the young man beginning life, the son Telemachus, is to obtain the
same kind of knowledge, not through experience but through inquiry.
Oral tradition is to give him the treasures of wisdom without the
bitter personal trial. It is for this reason that Pallas sends him to
find out what his father did, and to make the experience of the parent
his own by education; it is, indeed, the true education--to master the
accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the race up to date. So we are now
to have the school period of the son, who is thereby not merely the
physical son (which, he remarks, is always a matter of doubt), but the
spiritual son of his father, whereof there can be no doubt.

The Odyssey proper, toward which we may now cast a glance, contains the
wanderings of Ulysses, and is the work of the grown man who has to meet
the world face to face and conquer it; thus he obtains the experience
of life. The two parts are always to be placed together--the education
of the young man and the experience of the mature man; they constitute
a complete history of a human soul. Both are, indeed one--bud and
flower; at bottom, too, both mean the same thing--the elevation of the
individual into an ethical life in which he is in harmony with himself
and with the divine order. True learning and true experience reach this
end, which may be rightfully called wisdom.

So Telemachus the youth is to listen to the great and impressive fact
of his time, containing the deep spiritual problem which is designated
as the Return. Nestor is the first and simplest of these Returners; he
is an old man, he has prudence, he is without passion; moreover he has
not the spirit of inquiry or the searching into the Beyond; he accepts
the transmitted religion and opinions without question, through the
conservatism of age as well as of character. It is clear that the
spiritual scission of the time could not enter deep into his nature;
his long absence from home and country produced no alienation; he went
home direct after the fall of Troy, the winds and the waters were
favorable, no tempest, no upheaval, no signs of divine anger. But he
foresaw the wrath of the Gods and fled across the wave in all speed,
the wrestle with the deity lay not in him.

It is wor