Note 496 — Chapter XIII

Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed situation with more than demi-goddesslike dexterity and good humour. It may perhaps be not irrelevant, to discussion of novels in general, to mention something which I have never yet seen put in Homeric discussion, though the bare idea of anything new there being possible may seem preposterous. The arguments of the splitters-up are, naturally enough, seldom if ever literary, belonging as they do to the class of Biblical, that is to say, unliterary, criticism. But strictly literary considerations, furnishing argument of the strongest kind for unity, might be brought by comparing the behaviour of Circe, at the moment referred to, and that of Helen when Paris returned from his defeat. These situations are, of course, in initial circumstance as opposite as possible, though they arrivent à pareille fin. But behind their very opposition there is a conception of the eternal feminine—partly human, partly divine—which it would be very surprising to find in two different persons, and which might, if any one cared to do it, be interestingly worked out from divers other Homeric characters of women or goddesses, from Hera and Aphrodite in the one poem to Nausicaa and Calypso in the other. "How great a novelist was in Homer lost" is a theme too much neglected.