cruelty in the eyes of Pan, but his words were still the words of
passionate tenderness. Like a bird that trembles, helpless, before the
serpent that would slay it, so did Syrinx the huntress stand, and her
face in the shade of the forest was like a white lily in the night.
But when the god would have drawn her close to him and kissed her red
lips, Fear leapt to Terror, and Terror winged her feet. Never in the
chase with Diana had she run as now she ran. But like a rushing storm
did Pan pursue her, and when he laughed she knew that what the nymphs
had said was true--he was Power--he was Fear--he was Beast--he was
Life itself. The darkness of the forest swiftly grew more dark. The
climbing trails of ivy and the fragrant creeping plants caught her
flying feet and made her stumble. Branches and twigs grew alive and
snatched at her and baulked her as she passed. Trees blocked her path.
All Nature had grown cruel, and everywhere there seemed to her to be a
murmur of mocking laughter, laughter from the creatures of Pan,
echoing the merciless merriment of their lord and master. Nearer he
came, ever nearer. Almost she could feel his breath on her neck; but
even as he stretched out his arms to seize the nymph whose breath came
with sobs like that of a young doe spent by the chase, they reached
the brink of the river Ladon. And to her "watery sisters" the nymphs
of the river, Syrinx breathed a desperate prayer for pity and for
help, then stumbled forward, a quarry run to the death.
With an exultant shout, Pan grasped her as she fell. And lo, in his
arms he held no exquisite body with fiercely beating heart, but a
clump of slender reeds. Baffled he stood for a little space, and, as
he stood, the savagery of the beast faded from his eyes that were
fathomless as dark mountain tarns where the sun-rays seldom come, and
there came into them a man's unutterable woe. At the reeds by the
river he gazed, and sighed a great sigh, the sigh that comes from the
heart of a god who thinks of the pain of the world. Like a gentle
zephyr the sigh breathed through the reeds, and from the reeds there
came a sound as of the sobbing sorrow of the world's desire. Then Pan
drew his sharp knife, and with it he cut seven of the reeds that grew
by the murmuring river.
"Thus shalt thou still be mine, my Syrinx," he said.
Deftly he bound them together, cut them into unequal lengths, and
fashioned for himself an instrument, that to this day is called the
Syrinx, or Pan's Pipes.
So did the god make music.
And all that night he sat by the swift-flowing river, and the music
from his pipe of reeds was so sweet and yet so passing sad, that it
seemed as though the very heart of the earth itself were telling of
its sadness. Thus Syrinx still lives--still dies:
"A note of music by its own breath slain,
Blown tenderly from the frail heart of a reed,"
and as the evening light comes down on silent places and the trembling
shadows fall on the water, we can hear her mournful whisper through
the swaying reeds, brown and silvery-golden, that grow by lonely
lochan and lake and river.
THE DEATH OF ADONIS
"The fairest youth that ever maiden's dream conceived."
Lewis Morris.
The ideally beautiful woman, a subject throughout the centuries for
all the greatest powers of sculptor's and painter's art, is Venus, or
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and of love. And he who shares with her
an unending supremacy of perfection of form is not one of the gods,
her equals, but a mortal lad, who was the son of a king.
As Aphrodite sported one day with Eros, the little god of love, by
accident she wounded herself with one of his arrows. And straightway
there came into her heart a strange longing and an ache such as the
mortal victims of the bow of Eros knew well. While still the ache
remained, she heard, in a forest of Cyprus, the baying of hounds and
the shouts of those who urged them on in the chase. For her the chase
possessed no charms, and she stood aside while the quarry burst
through the branches and thick undergrowth of the wood, and the hounds
followed in hot pursuit. But she drew her breath sharply, and her eyes
opened wide in amazed gladness, when she looked on the perfect beauty
of the fleet-footed hunter, who was only a little less swift than the
shining spear that sped from his hand with the sureness of a bolt from
the hand of Zeus. And she knew that this must be none other than
Adonis, son of the king of Paphos, of whose matchless beauty she had
heard not only the dwellers on earth, but the Olympians themselves
speak in wonder. While gods and men were ready to pay homage to his
marvellous loveliness, to Adonis himself it counted for nothing. But
in the vigour of his perfect frame he rejoiced; in his fleetness of
foot, in the power of that arm that Michael Angelo has modelled, in
the quickness and sureness of his aim, for the boy was a mighty hunter
with a passion for the chase.
Aphrodite felt that her heart was no longer her own, and knew that the
wound that the arrow of Eros had dealt would never heal until she knew
that Adonis loved her. No longer was she to be found by the Cytherian
shores or in those places once held by her most dear, and the other
gods smiled when they beheld her vying with Diana in the chase and
following Adonis as he pursued the roe, the wolf, and the wild boar
through the dark forest and up the mountain side. The pride of the
goddess of love must often have hung its head. For her love was a
thing that Adonis could not understand. He held her "Something better
than his dog, a little dearer than his horse," and wondered at her
whim to follow his hounds through brake and marsh and lonely forest.
His reckless courage was her pride and her torture. Because he was to
her so infinitely dear, his path seemed ever bestrewn with dangers.
But when she spoke to him with anxious warning and begged him to
beware of the fierce beasts that might one day turn on him and bring
him death, the boy laughed mockingly and with scorn.
There came at last a day when she asked him what he did on the morrow,
and Adonis told her with sparkling eyes that had no heed for her
beauty, that he had word of a wild boar, larger, older, more fierce
than any he had ever slain, and which, before the chariot of Diana
next passed over the land of Cyprus, would be lying dead with a
spear-wound through it.
With terrible foreboding, Aphrodite tried to dissuade him from his
venture.
"O, be advised: thou know'st not what it is
With javelin's point a churlish swine to gore,
Whose tushes never sheathed he whetteth still,
Like to a mortal butcher, bent to kill.
* * * * *
Alas, he naught esteems that face of thine,
To which love's eyes pay tributary gazes;
Nor thy soft hands, sweet lips, and crystal eyne,
Whose full perfection all the world amazes;
But having thee at vantage--wondrous dread!--
Would root these beauties as he roots the mead."
Shakespeare.
To all her warnings, Adonis would but give smiles. Ill would it become
him to slink abashed away before the fierceness of an old monster of
the woods, and, laughing in the pride of a whole-hearted boy at a
woman's idle fears, he sped homewards with his hounds.
With the gnawing dread of a mortal woman in her soul, Aphrodite spent
the next hours. Early she sought the forest that she might again plead
with Adonis, and maybe persuade him, for love of her, to give up the
perilous chase because she loved him so.
But even as the rosy gates of the Dawn were opening, Adonis had begun
his hunt, and from afar off the goddess could hear the baying of his
hounds. Yet surely their clamour was not that of hounds in full cry,
nor was it the triumphant noise that they so fiercely make as they
pull down their vanquished quarry, but rather was it baying, mournful
as that of the hounds of Hecate. Swift as a great bird, Aphrodite
reached the spot from whence came the sound that made her tremble.
Amidst the trampled brake, where many a hound lay stiff and dead,
while others, disembowelled by the tusks of the boar, howled aloud in
mortal agony, lay Adonis. As he lay, he "knew the strange, slow chill
which, stealing, tells the young that it is death."
And as, _in extremis_, he thought of past things, manhood came to
Adonis and he knew something of the meaning of the love of
Aphrodite--a love stronger than life, than time, than death itself.
His hounds and his spear seemed but playthings now. Only the
eternities remained--bright Life, and black-robed Death.
Very still he lay, as though he slept; marble-white, and beautiful as
a statue wrought by the hand of a god. But from the cruel wound in the
white thigh, ripped open by the boar's profaning tusk, the red blood
dripped, in rhythmic flow, crimsoning the green moss under him. With a
moan of unutterable anguish, Aphrodite threw herself beside him, and
pillowed his dear head in her tender arms. Then, for a little while,
life's embers flickered up, his cold lips tried to form themselves
into a smile of understanding and held themselves up to hers. And,
while they kissed, the soul of Adonis passed away.
"A cruel, cruel wound on his thigh hath Adonis, but a
deeper wound in her heart doth Cytherea[6] bear. About
him his dear hounds are loudly baying, and the nymphs of
the wild woods wail him; but Aphrodite with unbound
locks through the glades goes wandering--wretched, with
hair unbraided, with feet unsandalled, and the thorns as
she passes wound her and pluck the blossom of her sacred
blood. Shrill she wails as down the woodland she is
borne.... And the rivers bewail the sorrows of
Aphrodite, and the wells are weeping Adonis on the
mountains. The flowers flush red for anguish, and
Cytherea through all the mountain-knees, through every
dell doth utter piteous dirge:
"'_Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely
Adonis!_'"
Bion.
Passionately the god besought Zeus to give her back her lost love, and
when there was no answer to her prayers, she cried in bitterness: "Yet
shall I keep a memorial of Adonis that shall be to all everlasting!"
And, as she spoke, her tears and his blood, mingling together, were
turned into flowers.
"A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and
blood on the earth are turned to flowers. The blood brings forth the
roses, the tears, the wind-flower."
Yet, even then, the grief of Aphrodite knew no abatement. And when
Zeus, wearied with her crying, heard her, to his amazement, beg to be
allowed to go down to the Shades that she might there endure eternal
twilight with the one of her heart, his soul was softened.
"Never can it be that the Queen of Love and of Beauty leaves Olympus
and the pleasant earth to tread for evermore the dark Cocytus valley,"
he said. "Nay, rather shall I permit the beauteous youth of thy love
to return for half of each year from the Underworld that thou and he
may together know the joy of a love that hath reached fruition."
Thus did it come to pass that when dark winter's gloom was past,
Adonis returned to the earth and to the arms of her who loved him.
"But even in death, so strong is love,
I could not wholly die; and year by year,
When the bright springtime comes, and the earth lives,
Love opens these dread gates, and calls me forth
Across the gulf. Not here, indeed, she comes,
Being a goddess and in heaven, but smooths
My path to the old earth, where still I know
Once more the sweet lost days, and once again
Blossom on that soft breast, and am again
A youth, and rapt in love; and yet not all
As careless as of yore; but seem to know
The early spring of passion, tamed by time
And suffering, to a calmer, fuller flow,
Less fitful, but more strong."
Lewis Morris.
And when the time of the singing of birds has come, and the flowers
have thrown off their white snow pall, and the brown earth grows
radiant in its adornments of green blade and of fragrant blossom, we
know that Adonis has returned from his exile, and trace his footprints
by the fragile flower that is his very own, the white flower with the
golden heart, that trembles in the wind as once the white hands of a
grief-stricken goddess shook for sorrow.
"The flower of Death" is the name that the Chinese give to the
wind-flower--the wood-anemone. Yet surely the flower that was born of
tears and of blood tells us of a life that is beyond the grave--of a
love which is unending.
The cruel tusk of a rough, remorseless winter still yearly slays the
"lovely Adonis" and drives him down to the Shades. Yet we know that
Spring, with its _Sursum Corda_, will return as long as the earth
shall endure; even as the sun must rise each day so long as time shall
last, to make
"Le ciel tout en fleur semble une immense rose
Qu'un Adonis celeste a teinte de son sang."
De Heredia.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Aphrodite.
PAN
"What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
* * * * *
'This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
'The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.'
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river."
E. B. Browning.
Were we to take the whole of that immense construction of fable that
was once the religion of Greece, and treat it as a vast play in which
there were many thousands of actors, we should find that one of these
actors appeared again and again. In one scene, then in another, in
connection with one character, then with another, unexpectedly
slipping out from the shadows of the trees from the first act even to
the last, we should see Pan--so young and yet so old, so heedlessly
gay, yet so infinitely sad.
If, rather, we were to regard the mythology of Greece as a colossal
and wonderful piece of music, where the thunders of Jupiter and the
harsh hoof-beats of the fierce black steeds of Pluto, the king whose
coming none can stay, made way for the limpid melodies of Orpheus and
the rustling whisper of the footfall of nymphs and of fauns on the
leaves, through it all we should have an ever-recurring _motif_--the
clear, magical fluting of the pipes of Pan.
We have the stories of Pan and of Echo, of Pan and of Midas, of Pan
and Syrinx, of Pan and Selene, of Pan and Pitys, of Pan and Pomona.
Pan it was who taught Apollo how to make music. It was Pan who spoke
what he deemed to be comfort to the distraught Psyche; Pan who gave
Diana her hounds. The other gods had their own special parts in the
great play that at one time would have Olympus for stage, at another
the earth. Pan was Nature incarnate. He was the Earth itself.
Many are the stories of his genealogy, but the one that is given in
one of the Homeric hymns is that Hermes, the swift-footed young god,
wedded Dryope, the beautiful daughter of a shepherd in Arcadia, and
to them was born, under the greenwood tree, the infant, Pan. When
Dryope first looked on her child, she was smitten with horror, and
fled away from him. The deserted baby roared lustily, and when his
father, Hermes, examined him he found a rosy-cheeked thing with prick
ears and tiny horns that grew amongst his thick curls, and with the
dappled furry chest of a faun, while instead of dimpled baby legs he
had the strong, hairy hind legs of a goat. He was a fearless creature,
and merry withal, and when Hermes had wrapped him up in a hare skin,
he sped to Olympus and showed his fellow-gods the son that had been
born to him and the beautiful nymph of the forest. Baby though he was,
Pan made the Olympians laugh. He had only made a woman, his own
mother, cry; all others rejoiced at the new creature that had come to
increase their merriment. And Bacchus, who loved him most of all, and
felt that here was a babe after his own heart, bestowed on him the
name by which he was forever known--Pan, meaning _All_.
Thus Pan grew up, the earthly equal of the Olympians, and, as he grew,
he took to himself the lordship of woods and of solitary places. He
was king of huntsmen and of fishermen, lord of flocks and herds and of
all the wild creatures of the forest. All living, soulless things
owned him their master; even the wild bees claimed him as their
overlord. He was ever merry, and when a riot of music and of laughter
slew the stillness of the shadowy woods, it was Pan who led the
dancing throng of white-limbed nymphs and gambolling satyrs, for whom
he made melody from the pipes for whose creation a maid had perished.
Round his horns and thick curls he presently came to wear a crown of
sharp pine-leaves, remembrance of another fair nymph whose destruction
he had brought about.
Pitys listened to the music of Pan, and followed him even as the
children followed the Pied Piper of later story. And ever his playing
lured her further on and into more dangerous and desolate places,
until at length she stood on the edge of a high cliff whose pitiless
front rushed sheer down to cruel rocks far below. There Pan's music
ceased, and Pitys knew all the joy and the sorrow of the world as the
god held out his arms to embrace her. But neither Pan nor Pitys had
remembrance of Boreas, the merciless north wind, whose love the nymph
had flouted.
Ere Pan could touch her, a blast, fierce and strong as death, had
seized the nymph's fragile body, and as a wind of March tears from the
tree the first white blossom that has dared to brave the ruthless
gales, and casts it, torn and dying, to the earth, so did Boreas grip
the slender Pitys and dash her life out on the rocks far down below.
From her body sprang the pine tree, slender, erect, clinging for dear
life to the sides of precipices, and by the prickly wreath he always
wore, Pan showed that he held her in fond remembrance.
Joy, and youth, and force, and spring, was Pan to all the creatures
whose overlord he was. Pan meant the richness of the sap in the trees,
the lushness of grass and of the green stems of the blue hyacinths and
the golden daffodils; the throbbing of growth in the woodland and in
the meadows; the trilling of birds that seek for their mates and find
them; the coo of the doves on their nests of young; the arrogant
virility of bulls and of stags whose lowing and belling wake the
silence of the hills; the lightness of heart that made the nymphs
dance and sing, the fauns leap high, and shout aloud for very joy of
living. All of these things was Pan to those of his own kingdom.
Yet to the human men and women who had also listened to his playing,
Pan did not mean only joyousness. He was to them a force that many
times became a terror because of its sheer irresistibleness.
While the sun shone and the herdsmen could see the nodding white
cotton-grass, the asphodel, and the golden kingcups that hid the black
death-traps of the pitiless marshes, they had no fear of Pan. Nor in
the daytime, when in the woods the sunbeams played amongst the trees
and the birds sang of Spring and of love, and the syrinx sent an echo
from far away that made the little silver birches give a whispering
laugh of gladness and the pines cease to sigh, did man or maid have
any fear. Yet when darkness fell on the land, terror would come with
it, and, deep in their hearts, they would know that the terror was
Pan. Blindly, madly, they would flee from something that they could
not see, something they could barely hear, and many times rush to
their own destruction. And there would be no sweet sound of music
then, only mocking laughter. _Panic_ was the name given to this
fear--the name by which it still is known. And, to this day, panic
yet comes, and not only by night, but only in very lonely places.
There are those who have known it, and for shame have scarce dared to
own it, in highland glens, in the loneliness of an island in the
western sea, in a green valley amongst the "solemn, kindly,
round-backed hills" of the Scottish Border, in the remoteness of the
Australian bush. They have no reasons to give--or their reasons are
far-fetched. Only, to them as to Mowgli, _Fear_ came, and the fear
seemed to them to come from a malignant something from which they must
make all haste to flee, did they value safety of mind and of body. Was
it for this reason that the Roman legionaries on the Great Wall so
often reared altars in that lonely land of moor and mountain where so
many of them fought and died--
"_To Pan, and to the Sylvan deities_"?
For surely Pan was there, where the curlew cried and the pewit
mourned, and sometimes the waiting soldiers must almost have imagined
his mocking laughter borne in the winds that swept across the bleak
hills of their exiled solitude.
He who was surely one of the bravest of mankind, one who always, in
his own words, "clung to his paddle," writes of such a fear when he
escaped death by drowning from the Oise in flood.
"The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in
this green valley quickened by a running stream. The bells were all
very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of
Pan's music. Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels,
indeed? and look so beautiful all the time? Nature's good humour was
only skin-deep, after all."
And of the reeds he writes: "Pan once played upon their forefathers;
and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays upon these later
generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays the same air,
both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror of the
world."
"_The Beauty and the terror of the world_"--was not this what Pan
stood for to the Greeks of long ago?
The gladness of living, the terror of living--the exquisite joy and
the infinite pain--that has been the possession of Pan--for we have
not yet found a more fitting title--since ever time began. And because
Pan is as he is, from him has evolved a higher Pantheism. We have done
away with his goat's feet and his horns, although these were handed on
from him to Satan when Christianity broke down the altars of Paganism.
"Nature, which is the Time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise,
hides Him from the foolish," writes Carlyle. Pan is Nature, and Nature
is not the ugly thing that the Calvinists would once have had us
believe it to be. Nature is capable of being made the garment of God.
"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living;
'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."
So speaks the _Erdgeist_ in Goethe's _Faust_, and yet another of the
greatest of the poets writes:
"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains--
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
* * * * *
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?"
Tennyson.
Carlyle says that "The whole universe is the Garment of God," and he
who lives very close to Nature must, at least once in a lifetime,
come, in the solitude of the lonely mountain tops, upon that bush that
burns and is not yet consumed, and out of the midst of which speaks
the voice of the Eternal.
The immortal soul--the human body--united, yet ever in conflict--that
is Pan. The sighing and longing for things that must endure
everlastingly--the riotous enjoyment of the beauty of life--the
perfect appreciation of the things that are. Life is so real, so
strong, so full of joyousness and of beauty,--and on the other side of
a dark stream, cold, menacing, cruel, stands Death. Yet Life and Death
make up the sum of existence, and until we, who live our paltry little
lives here on earth in the hope of a Beyond, can realise what is the
true air that is played on those pipes of Pan, there is no hope for us
of even a vague comprehension of the illimitable Immortality.