Though men doubt if Homer’s Odyssean characters ever lived, I for one have no doubt whatever that such redoubtable characters once walked the earth. For I met such men when the world was young.
That uninvited guest came into our presence, massive and wonderful, some strange embodiment of heroic romance and lore; then departed like unto a dream. He was the nearest approach to my idea of Odysseus that I ever came across. I can still imagine I hear the vibrant, melodious timbre of his utterance as he curses and swaggers up the little rope gangway that hung from the deck of the strange fore-and-aft schooner that had suddenly appeared in the enchanted bay off Tai-o-hae. The very deck seemed to tremble as his big sea-boots crashed on board. Even the skipper gave one awesome glance at that giant figure of his as he rattled his antique accoutrements; then with his huge, hairy, sun-tanned hand arched to his fine brow he stared seaward at the sunset. The dark saffron-hued canvas sails bellied to the soft warm winds as the outward-bound schooner went out on the tide, as he stood on deck and faded away on the wine-dark seas.
I could write many chapters on such men, their ways, virtues and sins. They were strange, unfathomable beings of Time and Space: men who followed their own wishes, who reigned as king over their own life: men who were disciples of the great transcendental school of the genuine old idealists—those spiritualists of the Truth, the wise and the beautiful, happy in the glad excitement of the wide and wonderful. They were men who in the great desert of life had found a wonderful oasis—in themselves! Men who were born to command _themselves_, standing on their own feet, standing apart from the supreme stagnation of conventional civilisation.
Heaven knows how it was, but I always liked that class. They were, to me, the posthumous books, works of long-forgotten heroes, the only works that I ever read with deep educational interest: they are still books to me, shelved tenderly in the library of my memory; books that I so well know are born to be sneered at, buffeted about and criticised, ye gods, by weak-kneed chapel disciples and all the sensual, godless, hypocritical survivals that pose as the personification of the beautiful.