PAGANISM OLD AND NEW
PAGANISM, a natural religion obviously capable of accommodating itself to widely different natures by reason of its flexibility, can also surround itself with the prestige of a great past — though a dead past; of a poetry — though a dead poetry; of a sculpture — though a dead sculpture; of an idealizing retrospection which is not dead. And it can proclaim that, with the revival of dead Paganism, these other dead things too shall live. The old gods, say its advocates, were w^arm with human life, and akin to human sympathy: beautiful gods whose names were poetry. Then the daily gracefulness of Pagan life and religion! The ceremonial pageants, with the fluent grace of their processional maidens, as they
shook a most divine dance from their feet
or the solemn chastity of their vestal virgins; the symmetry of their temples with their efhgies of benignant powers; the street, adorned with noble statuary, invested with a crystal air, and bright with its moving throng in garments of unlaboured elegance; and the theatre unroofed to the smokeless sky, where an audience, in which the merest cobbler had some vision beyond his last, heard in the language of ^schylus or Sophocles the ancestral legends of its native land.
With all this, these advocates contrast the condition of to-day: the cold formalities of an outworn worship; our nc plus ultra of pageantry, a Lord Mayor's Show; the dryadlcss woods regarded chiefly as potential timber; the grimy street, the grimy air, the disfiguring statues, the Stygian crowd; the temple to the reigning goddess Gelasma, which mocks the name of theatre; last and worst, the fatal degradation of popular perception, which has gazed so long on ugliness that it takes her to its bosom. In our capitals the very heavens have lost their innocence. Aurora may rise over our cities, but she has forgotten how to blush.
And those who, hke the present writer, tread as on thorns amidst the sordidness and ugliness, the ugly sordidness and the sordid ugliness, the dull materiality and weariness of this unhonoured old age of the world, — cannot but sympathize with these feelings; nay, even look back with a certain passionate regret to the beauty which invested at least the outward life of those days. But, in truth, with this outward life the vesture of beauty ceases: the rest is a day-dream, lovely it is true, but none the less a dream. Heathenism is lovely because it is dead. To read Keats is to grow in love with Paganism; but it is the Paganism of Keats. Pagan Paganism was not poetical.
Literally, this assertion is untenable. Almost every rehgion becomes a centre of poetry. But, if not absolutely true, it is at least true with relation to Christianity. The poetry of Paganism is chiefly a modern creation; in the hands of the Pagans themselves it was not even developed to its full capabilities. The gods of Homer are braggarts and gluttons; and the gods of Virgil are cold and unreal. The kiss of Dian was a frigid kiss till it glowed in the fancy of the barbarian Fletcher: there was little halo around Latmos' top, till it was thrown around it by the modern Keats. No pagan eye ever visioned the nymphs of Shelley. In truth there was around the Olympian heaven no such halo and native air of poetry as, for Christian singers, clothed the Christian heaven. To the heathen mind its divinities were graceful, handsome, noble gods; powerful, and therefore to be propitiated with worship; cold in their sublime selfishness, and therefore unlovable. No Pagan ever loved his god. Love he might, perhaps, some humble rustic or domestic deity, — but no Olympian. Whereas,in the Christian religion,the Madonna, and a greater than the Madonna, were at once high enough for worship and low enough for love. Now, without love no poetry can be beautiful; for all beautiful poetry comes from the heart. With love it was that Wordsworth and Shelley purchased the right to sing sweetly of Nature. Keats wrote lovingly of his Pagan hierarchy, because what he wrote about he loved. Hence for no antique poet was it possible to make, or even conceive, a Pagan Paradise. We, who love the gods, do not worship them.
The ancients, who worshipped the gods, did not love them. Whence is this?
Coleridge, in those beautiful lines from W allenstein^ has given us his explanation. It is true, yet only half the truth. For in very deed that beautiful mythology has a beauty beyond anvthing it ever possessed in its worshipped days; and that beauty came to it in dower when it gave its hand to Christianity. Christianity it was that stripped the weeds from that garden of Paganism, broke its statue of Priapus, and delivered it smiling and fair to the nations for their pleasure-ground. She found Mars the tvpe of brute violence, and made of him the god of valour. She took Venus, and made of her the type of Beauty, — Beauty, which the average heathen hardly knew. There is no more striking instance of the poetizing influence exerted on the ancient mythology by Christianity than the contrast between the ancient and modern views of this goddess. Any school-boy will tell you that she was the Goddess of Love and Beauty. * Goddess of Love ' is true only in the lowest sense — but * Goddess of Beauty '? It exhibits an essentially modern attitude towards Venus, and would be hard to support from the ancient poets. No doubt there are passages in which she is styled the beautiful goddess; but the phrases are scarcely to my point. If, in the early days of the Second Empire, you came across a writer who described the Empress Eugenie as ' the beautiful Empress/ you would hardly be fair in deducing from that his devotion to her as the Empress of Beauty. No; when Heine, addressing the Venus of Tslelos, called her ' Our Lady of Beauty,' the idea, no less than the expression, was centrally modern. I will go further. It was centrally Christian.
To the average Pagan, Venus was simply the personification of the generative principle in nature; and her offspring was Cupid, — Desire, Eros — sexual passion. Far other is she to the modern. To him she is the Principle of Earthly Beauty, who, being of necessity entirely pure, walks naked and is not ashamed, garmented in the light of her unchanging whiteness. This worship of Beauty in the abstra6l, this conception of the Lady Beauty as an all-amiable power, to register the least glance of whose eye, to catch the least trail of whose locks, were worth the devotion of a life, — all this is charaderistic of the Christian and Gothic poet, unknown to the Pagan poet. No antique singer ever saw Sibylla Palmifera; no antique artist's hand ever shook in her pursuit.* The sculptors, I suspect, had known something of Sibylla, in the elder days, before Praxiteles made of the Queen of Beauty merely the Queen of Fair Women. The
• Philosophers and ' dreaming Platonists,' perhaps, had scaled her craggy heights after their own manner, but none will pretend that Platonic dreams of the ' First and Only Fair ' were the offspring of Paganism. Rather were they a contravention of it.
Venus of IVlelos remains to hint so much. But, besides that Greek sculpture is virtually dead and unrevivable in civilized lands, I do not purpose in this narrow space to deal with subjects so wide as Sculpture or Art. Suffice it if I can suggest a few of the irreparable losses to Poetry which would result from the supersession of the Christian by the Pagan spirit.
If there are two things on which the larger portion of our finest modern verse may be said to hinge, they are surely Nature and Love. Yet it would be the merest platitude to say that neither the one nor the other, as glorified by our great modern poets, was known to the singers of old. Their insensibility to landscape was accompanied and perhaps conditioned by an insensibility to all the subtler and more spiritual qualities of beauty; so that it would hardly be more than a pardonable exaggeration to call Christianity (in so far as it has influenced the arts) the religion of beauty, and Paganism the religion of form and sense. Perhaps it is incorre6l to say that the ancients were indifferent to landscape: rather they were indifferent to Nature. Cicero luxuriates in his * country,' Horace in his Soracte and fitful glimpses of scenery; but both merely as faftors in the composition of enjoyment: the bees, the doves, of Virgil are mere ministers to luxury and sleep. ' The fool,' says Blake in a most pregnant aphorism, ' The fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees.' And assuredly no heathen ever saw the same tree as Wordsworth. For it is a noteworthy faft that the intellect of man seems unable to seize the divine beauty of Nature, until moving beyond that outward beauty it gazes on the spirit of Nature: even as the mind seems unable to appreciate the beautiful face of woman until it has learned to appreciate the more beautiful beauty of her soul.
That Paganism had no real sense of the exquisite in female features is evident from its statues and few extant paintings: mere regularity of form is all it sees. Or again, compare the ancient erotic poets, delighting in the figure and bodily charms of their mistresses, with the modern love-poets, whose first care is to dwell on the heavenly breathings of their ladies' faces. Significant is it, from this point of view, that the very word in favourite use among the Latin poets to express beauty should be forma.) form, grace of body and line. When Catullus pronounces on the charms of a rival to his mistress, he never even mentions her face. * Candida, longa, refta; ' that is all: ' She is fair, tall, straight.'
But the most surprising indication of this blindness to the subtler qualities of beauty is the indifference of the ancient singers to what in our estimation is the most lovely and important feature in woman — the eye. This may have some connexion with their apparent deadness to colour. But so it is. In all Catullus there is only a single indirect allusion to the colour of Lesbia's eyes. There is, to the best of my recolledion, no such allusion at all throughout TibuUus, Propertius, or Ovid. This one fa6t reveals a desert of arid feeling in the old erotic poets which a modern imagination refuses to traverse. In the name of all the Muses, what treason against Love and Beauty! Why, from the poetical Spring of Chaucer to the Indian- Summer of William Morris, their ladies' eyes have been the cynosure of modern love-poets!
are the admirably chosen words in which Chaucer describes his Duchess' eyes; and this is the beautiful passage in which Morris sets his lady's eyes before us:
Her great eyes, standing far apart, Drazv up some memory from her heart. And gaze out very mournfully;
Beata mea Domina! — So beautiful and kind they arc, But most times looking out afar, Waiting for something, not for me.
Beata mea Domina!
The value which Morris' master, RossettI, had for this feature in feminine attraction is conspicuous. Witness his Blessed Damozel, whose
— Eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even.
In his mistress' portrait he notes that
The shadowed eyes remember and forget.
Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed With the clear-pointed flame of chastity.
And almost all his heroines have their chara61:eristic eyes: the Gardener's Daughter, violet, Amy of Locksley Hall, hazel,
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes;
Enid, meek blue eyes; and so on. Wordsworth, again, notes his wife's
Eyes like stars of twilight fair; and has many a beautiful passage on female eyes. Shelley overflows with such passages, showing splendid power in conveying the idea of depth: the following is a random example;
deep her eyes as are
Two openings of unfathomable night Seen through a tempest's cloven roof.
Will any one forget the eyes of the dreaming Christabel?
Both blue eyes, more bright than clear. Each about to have a tear.
One could multiply instances; but take as a last one those magnificent eyes of De Quincey's Mater Suspiriarum: ' Her eyes were filled with perishing dreams, and wrecks of forgotten delirium.'
Again, what a magnificent means of charaderization — especially in personification — da our poets make of the eye. Could anything be more feHcitous than ColHns' Pity
With eyes of dewy light?
And equally marvellous is Shelley's epithet for sleep:
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed.
Yet all this superfluity of poetic beauty remained a sealed fountain for the Pagan poets! After such a revelation it can excite little surprise thatjCompared with Christian writers, they lay little stress on the grace of female hair.
But, after all, the most beautiful thing in love-poetry is Love. Now Love is the last thing any scholar will look for in ancient erotic poetry.* Body differs not more from soul than the Amor of Catullus or Ovid differs from the Love of Dante or Shelley;| and the root of this difference is the root of the whole difference between this class of poetry in antique and contemporary periods. The rite of marriage was to the Pagan the goal and attainment of Love — Love, which he regarded as a transitory and
• It will not do to say that this was solely owing to the impossibility of what we call courtship in heathen society; and that heathen love was postnuptial. It is sufficiently apparent from Martial's allusions that the married poems of Sulpicia, styled and considered ' chaste ' because addressed to her husband, would have justly incurred among us the reproach of hcentiousness in treatment.
t An Anti-Christian in ethics. But the blood in the veins of his Muse was Christian. The spirit cf his treatment of Love is — with few, if any, exceptions — entirely Christian.
perishable passion, born of the body and decaying with the body. On the wings of Christianity came the great truth that Love is of the soul, and with the soul coeval.
It was most just and natural, therefore, that from the Christian poets should come the full development of this truth. To Dante and the followers of Dante we must go for its ripe announcement. Not in marriage, they proclaim, is the fulfilment of Love, though its earthly and temporal fulfilment may be therein; for how can Love, which is the desire of soul for soul, attain satisfaction in the conjunftion of body with body? Poor, indeed, if this were all the promise which Love unfolded to us — the encountering light of two flames from within their close-shut lanterns. Therefore sings Dante, and sing all noble poets after him, that Love in this world is a pilgrim and a wanderer, journeying to the New Jerusalem: not here is the consummation of his yearnings, in that mere knocking at the gates of union which we christen marriage, but beyond the pillars of death and the corridors of the grave, in the union of spirit to spirit within the containing Spirit of God.
The distance between Catullus and the Vita Nuova, between Ovid and the House of Life, can be measured only by Christianity. And the lover of poetry owes a double gratitude to his Creator, Who, not content with giving us salvation on the cross, gave us also, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, Love. For there
Love was consecrated, and declared the child of Jehovah, not of Jove; there virtually was inaugurated the whole successive order of those love-poets who have shown the world that passion, in putting on chastity, put on also tenfold bcautv. For purity is the sum of all lovehness, as whiteness is the sum of all colours.
A detailed comparison would be possible between the treatment of the Pagan Olympus by the ancients and by the moderns, with Keats at their head, in order to demonstrate what I have in these pages merely advanced. One point, however, I must briefly notice. This is the false idea that a modern Paganism could perpetuate, from a purely artistic sense, the beauty proper to Christian literature: that it is possible for the imaginative worker, like the conspirator in Massinger, to paint and perfume with the illusion of life a corpse. For refutation, witness the failure of our English painters, with all their art, to paint a Madonna which can hang beside the simplest old Florentine Virgin without exhibiting the absence of the ancient rehgious feeling.* And what has befallen the loveliness of CathoHcity would — in a few generations, when Christianity had faded out of the blood of men — befall the loveliness of Christianity.
Bring back, then, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on the cheek.
•Rossetti is perhaps an exception. But he had Catholic blood in his veins, and could not escape from it. His heart worshipped.
But you cannot bring back the best age of Paganism, the age when Paganism was a faith. None will again behold Apollo in the forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the long lustre of her golden locks. But you may bring back — dii avertant omen — the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and Statius, and Juvenal; of much philosophy and little belief; of superb villas and superb taste; of banquets for the palate in the shape of cookery, and banquets for the eye in the shape of art; of poetry singing dead songs on dead themes with the most polished and artistic vocalization; of everything most polished, from the manners to the marble floors; of Vice carefully drained out of sight, and large fountains of Virtue springing in the open air; — in one word, a most shining Paganism indeed — as putrescence also shines.
This Paganism it is which already stoops on Paris,* and wheels in shadowy menace over England. Bring back this — and make of poetry a dancing-girl, and of art a pandar. This is the Paganism which is formidable, and not the
* Paris, it may be said, is not scrupulous as to draining her vice underground. But it is kept underground exactly to the same extent as vice was in the Plinian days. Private rice is winked at with a decorous platitude about ' the sanctity of private life.' If evil literature is openly written, what Roman or Italian of the younger PUny's day thought anything of writing ^facetiae'? If indecent pictures are displayed in the vdndows, what, I should Hke to know, if photography had flourished under Rome, would have beeu the state of the shop-windows of Pompeii?
antique lamp whose feeding oil is spent, whose light has not outlasted the damps of its long sepulture. She who created Zeus and Here, Phccbus and Artemis, Pallas Athene and the fairhaired Aphrodite, is dead, and lives only in her corruption; nor have we lost by her death one scintillation of beauty. For the poetry of Paganism (with reference to England) was born in the davs of Elizabeth, and entered on its inheritance in the days of Keats. But could Paganism indeed grow supple in her cere-cloths, and open her tarnished eyes to the light of our modern sun — in that same hour the poetry of Paganism would sicken and fall to decay. For Pagan Paganism was not poetical.