“Praxinoe, certainly women are wonderful things. That lucky woman to
know all that! and luckier still to have such a splendid voice! And now
we must see about getting home. My husband has not had his dinner. That
man is all vinegar, and nothing else; and if you keep him waiting for
his dinner, he’s dangerous to go near. Adieu, precious Adonis, and may
you find us all well when you come next year!”
So, with the hymn still in her ears, says the incorrigible Gorgo.
But what a hymn that is! Of religious emotion, in our acceptation of the
words, and of the comfort springing from religious emotion, not a
particle. And yet many elements of religious emotion are contained in
the beautiful story of Adonis. Symbolically treated, as the thoughtful
man might treat it, as the Greek mysteries undoubtedly treated it, this
story was capable of a noble and touching application, and could lead
the soul to elevating and consoling thoughts. Adonis was the sun in his
summer and in his winter course, in his time of triumph and his time of
defeat; but in his time of triumph still moving towards his defeat, in
his time of defeat still returning towards his triumph. Thus he became
an emblem of the power of life and the bloom of beauty, the power of
human life and the bloom of human beauty, hastening inevitably to
diminution and decay, yet in that very decay finding
“Hope, and a renovation without end.”
But nothing of this appears in the story as prepared for popular
religious use, as presented to the multitude in a popular religious
ceremony. Its treatment is not devoid of a certain grace and beauty, but
it has nothing whatever that is elevating, nothing that is consoling,
nothing that is in our sense of the word religious. The religious
ceremonies of Christendom, even on occasion of the most joyful and
mundane matters, present the multitude with strains of profoundly
religious character, such as the _Kyrie eleison_ and the _Te Deum_. But
this Greek hymn to Adonis adapts itself exactly to the tone and temper
of a gay and pleasure-loving multitude,—of light-hearted people, like
Gorgo and Praxinoe, whose moral nature is much of the same caliber as
that of Phillina in Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_, people who seem never
made to be serious, never made to be sick or sorry. And, if they happen
to be sick or sorry, what will they do then? But that we have no right
to ask. Phillina, within the enchanted bounds of Goethe’s novel, Gorgo
and Praxinoe, within the enchanted bounds of Theocritus’s poem, never
will be sick and sorry, never can be sick and sorry. The ideal,
cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry. No; yet its natural
end is in the sort of life which Pompeii and Herculaneum bring so
vividly before us,—a life which by no means in itself suggests the
thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the
senses and the understanding; but by the very intensity and
unremittingness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by
its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing
and revolting us; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of
oppression,—with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms,
effusion, and relief.
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the clouds and storms
had come, when the gay sensuous pagan life was gone, when men were not
living by the senses and understanding, when they were looking for the
speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in Italy, to the north of
Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at the foot of the Apennines, a
figure of the most magical power and charm, St. Francis. His century is,
I think, the most interesting in the history of Christianity after its
primitive age, more interesting than even the century of the
Reformation; and one of the chief figures, perhaps the very chief, to
which this interest attaches itself, is St. Francis. And why? Because of
the profound popular instinct which enabled him, more than any man since
the primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought religion
to the people. He founded the most popular body of ministers of religion
that has ever existed in the Church. He transformed monachism by
uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the bondage of
property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and
sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded haunts of men,
to console them and to do them good. This popular instinct of his is at
the bottom of his famous marriage with poverty. Poverty and suffering
are the condition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority of
mankind; and it was towards this _people_ that his soul yearned. “He
listens,” it was said of him, “to those to whom God himself will not
listen.”
So in return, as no other man he was listened to. When an Umbrian town
or village heard of his approach, the whole population went out in
joyful procession to meet him, with green boughs, flags, music, and
songs of gladness. The master, who began with two disciples, could in
his own lifetime (and he died at forty-four) collect to keep Whitsuntide
with him, in presence of an immense multitude, five thousand of his
Minorites. And thus he found fulfilment to his prophetic cry: “I hear in
my ears the sound of the tongues of all the nations who shall come unto
us; Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen. The Lord will make of us
a great people, even unto the ends of the earth.”
Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made poetry. Latin was
too learned for this simple, popular nature, and he composed in his
mother tongue, in Italian. The beginnings of the mundane poetry of the
Italians are in Sicily, at the court of kings; the beginnings of their
religious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are the humble
upper waters of a mighty stream; at the beginning of the thirteenth
century it is St. Francis, at the end, Dante. Now it happens that St.
Francis, too, like the Alexandrian songstress, has his hymn for the sun,
for Adonis. _Canticle of the Sun_, _Canticle of the Creatures_,—the poem
goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian hymn, it is designed for
popular use, but not for use by King Ptolemy’s people; artless in
language, irregular in rhythm, it matches with the childlike genius that
produced it, and the simple natures that loved and repeated it:—
“O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory,
honor, and all blessing!
“Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and specially our
brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light;
fair is he, and shining with a very great splendor: O Lord, he signifies
to us thee!
“Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the
which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.
“Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud,
calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all
creatures.
“Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto
us, and humble, and precious, and clean.
“Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us
light in the darkness; and he is bright, and pleasant, and very mighty,
and strong.
“Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us
and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, and flowers of many
colors, and grass.
“Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for his love’s
sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who
peaceably shall endure, for thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a
crown!
“Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from whom no
man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin! Blessed are they who
are found walking by thy most holy will, for the second death shall have
no power to do them harm.
“Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto him, and serve
him with great humility.”
It is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. But it is
natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination
from his misery. And when one thinks what human life is for the vast
majority of mankind, how little of a feast for their senses it can
possibly be, one understands the charm for them of a refuge offered in
the heart and imagination. Above all, when one thinks what human life
was in the Middle Ages, one understands the charm of such a refuge.
Now, the poetry of Theocritus’s hymn is poetry treating the world
according to the demand of the senses; the poetry of St. Francis’s hymn
is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the heart and
imagination. The first takes the world by its outward, sensible side;
the second by its inward, symbolical side. The first admits as much of
the world as is pleasure-giving; the second admits the whole world,
rough and smooth, painful and pleasure-giving, all alike, but all
transfigured by the power of a spiritual emotion, all brought under a
law of super-sensual love, having its seat in the soul. It can thus even
say: “Praised be my Lord for _our sister, the death of the body_.”
But these very words are, perhaps, an indication that we are touching
upon an extreme. When we see Pompeii, we can put our finger upon the
pagan sentiment in its extreme. And when we read of Monte Alverno and
the _stigmata_; when we read of the repulsive, because self-caused,
sufferings of the end of St. Francis’s life; when we find him even
saying, “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” meaning by these
words that he had been too hard upon his own body; when we find him
assailed, even himself, by the doubt “whether he who had destroyed
himself by the severity of his penances could find mercy in eternity,”
we can put our finger on the mediæval Christian sentiment in its
extreme. Human nature is neither all senses and understanding, nor all
heart and imagination. Pompeii was a sign that for humanity at large the
measure of sensualism had been overpassed; St. Francis’s doubt was a
sign that for humanity at large the measure of spiritualism had been
overpassed. Humanity, in its violent rebound from one extreme, had swung
from Pompeii to Monte Alverno; but it was sure not to stay there.
The Renascence is, in part, a return towards the pagan spirit, in the
special sense in which I have been using the word pagan; a return
towards the life of the senses and the understanding. The Reformation,
on the other hand, is the very opposite to this; in Luther there is
nothing Greek or pagan; vehemently as he attacked the adoration of St.
Francis, Luther had himself something of St. Francis in him; he was a
thousand times more akin to St. Francis than to Theocritus or to
Voltaire. The Reformation—I do not mean the inferior piece given under
that name, by Henry the Eighth and a second-rate company, in this
island, but the real Reformation, the German Reformation, Luther’s
Reformation—was a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense against the
carnal and pagan sense; it was a religious revival like St. Francis’s,
but this time against the Church of Rome, not within her; for the carnal
and pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church of Rome
herself, its prime representative. But the grand reaction against the
rule of the heart and imagination, the strong return towards the rule of
the senses and understanding, is in the eighteenth century. And this
reaction has had no more brilliant champion than a man of the
nineteenth, of whom I have already spoken; a man who could feel not only
the pleasurableness but the poetry of the life of the senses (and the
life of the senses has its deep poetry); a man who, in his very last
poem, divided the whole world into “barbarians and Greeks,”—Heinrich
Heine. No man has reproached the Monte Alverno extreme in sentiment, the
Christian extreme, the heart and imagination subjugating the senses and
understanding, more bitterly than Heine; no man has extolled the Pompeii
extreme, the pagan extreme, more rapturously.
“All through the Middle Age these sufferings, this fever, this
over-tension lasted; and we moderns still feel in all our limbs the pain
and weakness from them. Even those of us who are cured have still to
live with a hospital atmosphere all around us, and find ourselves as
wretched in it as a strong man among the sick. Some day or other, when
humanity shall have got quite well again, when the body and soul shall
have made their peace together, the fictitious quarrel which
Christianity has cooked up between them will appear something hardly
comprehensible. The fairer and happier generations, offspring of
unfettered unions, that will rise up and bloom in the atmosphere of a
religion of pleasure, will smile sadly when they think of their poor
ancestors, whose life was passed in melancholy abstinence from the joys
of this beautiful earth, and who faded away into specters, from the
mortal compression which they put upon the warm and glowing emotions of
sense. Yes, with assurance, I say it, our descendants will be fairer and
happier than we are; for I am a believer in progress, and I hold God to
be a kind being who has intended man to be happy.”
That is Heine’s sentiment, in the prime of life, in the glow of
activity, amid the brilliant whirl of Paris. I will no more blame it
than I blamed the sentiment of the Greek hymn to Adonis. I wish to
decide nothing as of my own authority; the great art of criticism is to
get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide. Well, the
sentiment of the “religion of pleasure” has much that is natural in it;
humanity will gladly accept it if it can live by it; to live by it one
must never be sick or sorry, and the old, ideal, limited, pagan world
never, I have said, _was_ sick or sorry, never at least shows itself to
us sick or sorry:—
“What pipes and timbrels! What wild ecstasy!”
For our imagination, Gorgo and Praxinoe cross the human stage chattering
in their blithe Doric,—_like turtles_, as the cross stranger said,—and
keep gaily chattering on till they disappear. But in the new, real,
immense, post-pagan world,—in the barbarian world,—the shock of accident
is unceasing, the serenity of existence is perpetually troubled, not
even a Greek like Heine can get across the mortal stage without bitter
calamity. How does the sentiment of the “religion of pleasure” serve
then? does it help, does it console? Can a man live by it? Heine again
shall answer; Heine just twenty years older, stricken with incurable
disease, waiting for death:—
“The great pot stands smoking before me, but I have no spoon to help
myself. What does it profit me that my health is drunk at banquets out
of gold cups and in most exquisite wines, if I myself, while these
ovations are going on, lonely and cut off from the pleasures of the
world, can only just wet my lips with barley-water? What good does it do
me that all the roses of Shiraz open their leaves and burn for me with
passionate tenderness? Alas! Shiraz is some two thousand leagues from
the Rue d’Amsterdam, where in the solitude of my sick chamber all the
perfume I smell is that of hot towels. Alas! the mockery of God is heavy
upon me! The great author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven,
has determined to make the petty earthly author, the so-called
Aristophanes of Germany, feel to his heart’s core what pitiful
needle-pricks his cleverest sarcasms have been, compared with the
thunderbolts which his divine humor can launch against feeble
mortals!...
“In the year 1340, says the Chronicle of Limburg, all over Germany
everybody was strumming and humming certain songs more lovely and
delightful than any which had ever yet been known in German countries;
and all people, old and young, the women particularly, were perfectly
mad about them, so that from morning till night you heard nothing else.
Only the Chronicle adds, the author of these songs happened to be a
young clerk, afflicted with leprosy, and living apart from all the world
in a desolate place. The excellent reader does not require to be told
how horrible a complaint was leprosy in the Middle Ages, and how the
poor wretches who had this incurable plague were banished from society,
and had to keep at a distance from every human being. Like living
corpses, in a gray gown reaching down to the feet, and with the hood
brought over their face, they went about, carrying in their hands an
enormous rattle, called Saint Lazarus’s rattle. With this rattle they
gave notice of their approach, that every one might have time to get out
of their way. This poor clerk, then, whose poetical gift the Limburg
Chronicle extols, was a leper, and he sate moping in the dismal deserts
of his misery, whilst all Germany, gay and tuneful, was praising his
songs.
“Sometimes, in my somber visions of the night, I imagine that I see
before me the poor leprosy-stricken clerk of the Limburg Chronicle, and
then from under his gray hood his distressed eyes look out upon me in a
fixed and strange fashion; but the next instant he disappears, and I
hear dying away in the distance, like the echo of a dream, the dull
creak of Saint Lazarus’s rattle.”
We have come a long way from Theocritus there? the expression of that
has nothing of the clear, positive, happy, pagan character; it has much
more the character of one of the indeterminate grotesques of the
suffering Middle Age. Profoundness and power it has, though at the same
time it is not truly poetical; it is not natural enough for that, there
is too much waywardness in it, too much bravado. But as a condition of
sentiment to be popular,—to be a comfort for the mass of mankind, under
the pressure of calamity, to live by,—what a manifest failure is this
last word of the religion of pleasure! One man in many millions, a
Heine, may console himself, and keep himself erect in suffering, by a
colossal irony of this sort, by covering himself and the universe with
the red fire of this sinister mockery; but the many millions
cannot,—cannot if they would. That is where the sentiment of a religion
of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion of
pleasure; in its power to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a
stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship. It
really succeeds in conveying far more joy, far more of what the mass of
mankind are so much without, than its rival. I do not mean joy in
prospect only, but joy in possession, actual enjoyment of the world.
Mediæval Christianity is reproached with its gloom and austerities; it
assigns the material world, says Heine, to the devil. But yet what a
fulness of delight does St. Francis manage to draw from this material
world itself, and from its commonest and most universally enjoyed
elements,—sun, air, earth, water, plants! His hymn expresses a far more
cordial sense of happiness, even in the material world, than the hymn of
Theocritus. It is this which made the fortune of Christianity,—its
gladness, not its sorrow; not its assigning the spiritual world to
Christ, and the material world to the devil, but its drawing from the
spiritual world a source of joy so abundant that it ran over upon the
material world and transfigured it.
I have said a great deal of harm of paganism; and, taking paganism to
mean a state of things which it is commonly taken to mean, and which did
really exist, no more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end
without reminding the reader, that before this state of things appeared,
there was an epoch in Greek life,—in pagan life,—of the highest possible
beauty and value. That epoch by itself goes far towards making Greece
the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece,—a country hardly less
important to mankind than Judæa. The poetry of later paganism lived by
the senses and understanding; the poetry of mediæval Christianity lived
by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern
spirit’s life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and
imagination; it is the imaginative reason. And there is a century in
Greek life,—the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the
year 530 to the year 430 B. C.,—in which poetry made, it seems to me,
the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the
priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modern
spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live. Of this effort, of
which the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, I
must not now attempt more than the bare mention; but it is right, it is
necessary, after all I have said, to indicate it. No doubt that effort
was imperfect. Perhaps everything, take it at what point in its
existence you will, carries within itself the fatal law of its own
ulterior development. Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar’s time,
Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. Perhaps the life of their beautiful
Greece could not afford to its poets all that fulness of varied
experience, all that power of emotion, which
‘... the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
affords the poet of after-times. Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power
a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious
sense overbalances the thinking-power. The present has to make its own
poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and
Shakspeare, are enough for it. That I will not dispute; nor will I set
up the Greek poets, from Pindar to Sophocles, as objects of blind
worship. But no other poets so well show to the poetry of the present
the way it must take; no other poets have lived so much by the
imaginative reason; no other poets have made their work so well
balanced; no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power,
have so well satisfied, the religious sense:—
“Oh! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of word and
deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in the highest
empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the father alone, neither
did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them
to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.”
Let St. Francis,—nay, or Luther either,—beat that!