This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse, has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr Noyes’ poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:—­

     Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake
     Put down the helm and drove against the seas—­
     Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman,
     Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again
     Put down the helm and so drove on—­et cetera.

Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next to impossible.  He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a ten years’ voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us in plain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made a superb epic of it.  Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, what amazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforward tale!—­eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, and magnificently presented to Circe

     Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main

—­and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficulties connected therewith.

Note the space given to Telemachus and his active search for the lost hero:  note too how the mass of Odysseus’ seafaring adventures is condensed into a reported speech—­a traveller’s tale at the court of Alcinoues.  Virgil borrowed this trick, you remember; and I dare to swear that had it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga of Nelson’s pursuit after Villeneuve he would have achieved it triumphantly—­by means of a tale told in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton.  Note, again, how boldly (being free to deal with an itinerary of which his audience knew nothing but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal of the marvellous, spaced at irregular distances) Homer works in a shipwreck or a miracle wherever the action threatens to flag.  Lessing, as you know, devoted several pages of the “Laokoeon” to the shield of Achilles; to Homer’s craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus’ hammer:  so that we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being wearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one may presume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in a sense that the shield is being made for us. Well, that is one artifice out of many:  but if you would gauge at all Homer’s resource and subtlety in technique I recommend you to analyse the first twelve books of the “Odyssey” and count for yourselves the device by which the poet—­[Greek:  polutropos] as was never his hero—­evades or hurries over each flat interval as he happens upon it.

     These things, Ulysses,
     The wise bards also
     Behold and sing. 
     But O, what labour! 
     O Prince, what pain!