Chapter I: Introduces a Latter-Day Heroine

I was twenty-two, and without employment.

I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy me. A swallow’s back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even here in London, where life is rarer, how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange barks—mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living stream is so marvellous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do they go?—innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars, phantoms that flash athwart the orbit of my life one second, and then vanish. But to themselves they are the centre of a world—of _the_ world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon.

I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown, by the early trains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin soot of the chimney-back—men with small black bags, bound for mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they may lend money, or buy shares, or promote Christian knowledge. I only know I see them come in the morning and flit again at night, sometimes the same figures, recognisably identical. They rush back, absorbed, to catch the train to the Unknown, as they rushed up from it earlier. So, day after day, the tide sets and ebbs; while I stand on the shore of the vast sea of London like a child that watches. And Commissioner Lin guards me.

I have always been grateful to Mr. Samuel Butler for his eccentric theory that a woman wrote the Odyssey. I do not say that I agree with him; if I did, I am not aware that any critic would attach the least importance to my opinion. But it is a soothing theory for us latter-day women. Without thinking it true, I love to believe it. The Odyssey, you will grant, is the epic of the imagination. It is the epic of mystery. In the Iliad, which is the epic of fact, everything is clear-cut, distinct, commonplace. I do not conceive that a woman could have written the Iliad. Its theme would fail to interest her. That hard handplay of battle counts for nought to our sex. Clang of bronze sword on ringing shield rouses no echo in our heart or brain. It is a masculine poem. How practical it is, how cold, how everyday, how mannish! Considering its august age, how little it gleams with the glamour of antiquity! Ulysses in the Iliad is just a shifty politician, an adroit public speaker. Achilles is just a petulant, ill-disciplined young warrior—I have met him in London, fresh home from the Transvaal. The whole mighty saga is a saga of men’s ideas, so sharp is it in its outlines, so historical, so definite. But the Odyssey!

Yes, I read in it clearly the fine hand of a woman. It has the vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft. It thrills with mystery; and woman is the mystic. Look at its glorious dimness. You descry its geography in veiled outline only, as one beholds the Paps of Jura on a day of sea-fog through swaying sheets of white cloud from a fisherman’s boat on the Bay of Oban. It is a Celtic dreamland. From morning to night, in that enchanted poem, on and on we sail, past uncertain isles or dubious blue headlands, begirt with fantastic forms, and in perils of the sea more awesome than the real. Architects have reconstructed Priam’s palace, I believe, from the description in the Iliad. That is man’s way of describing. But who could reconstruct, from the rapt words of the Odyssey, Circe’s island or the gardens of Alcinous? Peering and prying Schliemann found in the battle-epic a whole plan of the Troad; or, at least, read one into it: fancy even imagining you could construct a chart of the Mediterranean to show the homeward maze of the much-travelled wanderer from Ilion to Ithaca! The bare idea would indicate a misconception of the Odyssey. For those are the seas and islands that never were; they live but in the ghost-geography of poets and women.

As arguments, indeed, the proofs adduced seem to me preposterous. It is nonsense to say that in the Odyssey the chief _rôle_ is played by women. Do women’s books deal exclusively, or even mainly, with their own sex? Is not the Titan man, the strong, sardonic, woman-quelling hero, a recognised commonplace of women’s fancy? I do not believe an Ithacan lady wrote the Odyssey _because_ of the relative importance of Penelope and Nausicaa. Surely even a man might have set Penelope at her web, or Nausicaa at her tennis. In that I see nothing occult or esoterically feminine. Men must be aware that every Circe has the power of turning men into swine. They ought to know; they have seen it done daily. No, those are not the reasons that weigh with me. It is the wonder, the magic, the purple mystery, of the Odyssey that tells to my mind in favour of its female authorship. And though I know Mr. Samuel Butler’s theory is not true, I thank God I am woman enough none the less to embrace it.

But what has all this to do with my story—the story I am setting out in my own fashion to tell you? A great deal; and besides, unless you let me tell it in my own wayward way, I can never get through with it. In that respect also I hold myself true woman. And this is the connection. “If only we could have lived in those days!” people say. I answer, “You _are_ living in them.” It is not the days, not the places, not the things that change, but we who see them otherwise. Consider, the Mediterranean is the same sea to-day as when the Ithacan lady who wrote the Odyssey looked out upon its blue zones to behold it peopled with strange forms and wizard shadows. For that nameless Sappho, that prehistoric Charlotte Brontë, that inchoate Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Ionian main swarmed alive with Gorgons and Harpies as Loch Fyne with herrings. Sirens sang on every rock to lure the seaman; promontories glowed red at set of sun with the forges of the Cyclops. You may steam down the prosaic Adriatic to-day in an Austrian Lloyd steamer—a fearsome Behemoth, bellowing, snorting, flame-breathing—and identify those charmed shores of Hellenic fancy, as laid down, with soundings, in the Admiralty surveys. But that is your blindness. Scylla and Charybdis are there as of old: ’tis you who turn them into the Straits of Messina. Polyphemus still haunts his seaward cave: ’tis you who transform him into a custom-house officer. Adventures are to the adventurous. Go through the world in search of Calypso, and you will surely find her. Be modern, and you will find only Willesden Junction. That may suffice for you. I live in “those days,” as all lovers of the mystical have always lived in them.

And I will go forth into the world in search of adventures. They are sure to come to me; for faith moves mountains. In every age, when the Princess Cleodolind is sent out from the city as a prey for the dragon, some youthful St. George, in celestial armour, rides by in the nick of time, on his snow-white steed, and draws his trusty blade, and fights for her, and rescues her from the loathly thing. Else what were the use of faith and of poetry? In every age we fashion the story anew in our passing manner, dressing it up in our own clothes, and fitting it to our particular modes and morals. But ’tis the same to the end through all disguises. The Greeks told it as the tale of Perseus and Andromeda; they made their hero purely Greek, a triumphant young son of immortal Zeus, who rescues a beautiful princess, with fair nude limbs like Parian marble, from the devouring sea-monster. Mediæval Italy made the sign of the cross, turned the son of Danaë into a Christian martyr, and clad the beautiful nude maiden in clinging silk robes, as it would fain have clad Melian Aphrodite herself when it converted her image into a crowned Madonna. The Renaissance came, and Cellini unclothed her again, in his revived paganism, to set her polished bronze limbs, where every eye might see and stare, in the Piazza at Florence. Our modern novelists dress her up afresh in the princess robe of the day (sage green or crushed strawberry), and turn her loose on that slimy old dragon the world, till Prince Charming comes by, as a baronet in a tennis suit, to lay at her feet ten thousand a year and the title of My Lady. But ’tis the old tale still, and who lists to tell it may trick it out once more in his own heart’s fashion. For though there be nothing new under the sun, the old wonder is there, as marvellous as ever, if you choose to marvel at it. Each spring brings it back, a perpetual miracle.

So I set forth into the world, a Princess Cleodolind of the nineteenth century, ready to face the dragons that, as I well know, abound in it, and full of faith in the St. George who will come to rescue me. I mean to sail away on my Odyssey, unabashed, touching at such shores as may chance to beckon, yet hopeful of reaching at last the realms of Alcinous.

From all which you may guess that I am a Girton girl.