My days and strength have lately been much broken; and I never more felt
the insufficiency of both than in preparing for the press the following
desultory memoranda on a most noble subject. But I leave them now as
they stand, for no time nor labor would be enough to complete them to my
contentment; and I believe that they contain suggestions which may be
followed with safety, by persons who are beginning to take interest in
the aspects of mythology, which only recent investigation has removed
from the region of conjecture into that of rational inquiry. I have
some advantage, also, from my field work, in the interpretation of myths
relating to natural phenomena; and I have had always near me, since we
were at college together, a sure, and unweariedly kind, guide, in my
friend Charles Newton, to whom we owe the finding of more treasure in
mines of marble than, were it rightly estimated, all California could
buy. I must not, however, permit the chance of his name being in any
wise associated with my errors. Much of my work as been done obstinately
in my own way; and he is never responsible for me, though he has often
kept me right, or at least enabled me to advance in a new direction.
Absolutely right no one can be in such matters; nor does a day pass
without convincing every honest student of antiquity of some partial
error, and showing him better how to think, and where to look. But I
knew that there was no hope of my being able to enter with advantage on
the fields of history opened by the splendid investigation of recent
philologists, though I could qualify myself, by attention and sympathy,
to understand, here and there, a verse of Homer's or Hesiod's, as the
simple people did for whom they sang.
Even while I correct these sheets for press, a lecture by Professor
Tyndall has been put into my hands, which I ought to have heard last 16th
January, but was hindered by mischance; and which, I now find, completes,
in two important particulars, the evidence of an instinctive truth in
ancient symbolism; showing, first, that the Greek conception of an
ætherial element pervading space is justified by the closest reasoning of
modern physicists; and, secondly, that the blue of the sky, hitherto
thought to be caused by watery vapour, is, indeed, reflected from the
divided air itself; so that the bright blue of the eyes of Athena, and
the deep blue of her ægis, prove to be accurate mythic expressions of
natural phenomena which it is an uttermost triumph of recent science to
have revealed.
Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine triumph more complete. To form,
"within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky
itself!" here is magic of the finest sort! singularly reversed from that
of old time, which only asserted its competency to enclose in bottles
elemental forces that were--not of the sky.
Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for the true wonder of this piece
of work, ask his pardon, and that of all masters in physical science, for
any words of mine, either in the following pages or elsewhere, that may
ever seem to fail in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or
in the admiration due to the far scope of their discovery. But I will be
judged by themselves, if I have not bitter reason to ask them to teach us
more than yet they have taught.
This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun
thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In
that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought
upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.
The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn,
and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid
the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with
languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their
very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if hell had
breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into
crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to
shore. These are no careless words--they are accurately, horribly, true.
I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountain at its
source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile
from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep.
The light, the air, the waters, all defiled! How of the earth itself?
Take this one fact for type of honour done by the modern Swiss to the
earth of his native land. There used to be a little rock at the end of
the avenue by the port of Neuchâtel; there, the last marble of the foot
of Jura, sloping to the blue water, and (at this time of year) covered
with bright pink tufts of Saponaria. I went, three days since, to gather
a blossom at the place. The goodly native rock and its flowers were
covered with the dust and refuse of the town; but, in the middle of the
avenue, was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with a fountain
twisted through a spinning spout, and an inscription on one of its
loose-tumbled stones,--
"Aux Botanistes,
Le club Jurassique,"
Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my Athena out of your vials,
and seal, if it may be, once more, Asmodeus therein. You have divided
the elements, and united them; enslaved them upon the earth, and
discerned them in the stars. Teach us now, but this of them, which is
all that man need know,--that the Air is given to him for his life; and
the Rain to his thirst, and for his baptism; and the Fire for warmth; and
the Sun for sight; and the Earth for his Meat--and his Rest.
VEVAY, May 1, 1869.