Concerning the visions which men have of the gods there is much
uncertainty. It is written that no man can see God and live; but I
think some evil god or evil man must be spoken of, and that they come
nearer to the truth who say that the vision of God brings perfect
happiness. I suspect this is true in a humbler and more familiar sense
than is intended in discourses about the state of the soul in heaven;
for there is a heaven above every place, and the soul mounts to it in
all its thoughts and actions, when these are perfect. I incline also
to another opinion, which would surprise those religious friends of
mine who call me an atheist; namely, that Whenever we see anything,
we have, or might have if we chose, a partial vision of God, and a
moment of happiness. For all experience comes to us fatally, from an
alien source which in physics is called matter, in morals power or
will, and in religion God; so that by his power (as I learned when a
child in my Spanish catechism) God is present in everything. The same
authority added (and how full of meaning that word is to me now!)
that he was also present in everything by his essence; since what is
brought unimpeachably before us in any vision is some essence which,
being absolutely indestructible, is in that respect divine. It is
indestructible because, if all trace and memory of it were destroyed,
it would in that very obscuration vindicate its essential identity,
since not _it_, but only things different from _it_, would now exist.
Every essence, therefore, lies eternally at the very foundations of
being, and is a part of the divine immutability and necessity; an
intrinsic feature in that Nous or Logos which theologians tell us is
the second hypostasis of the divine nature. Yet to say that we see
God when we see him only in part is perhaps hazardous and open to
objection, because a part of anything, separated from the rest, becomes
a different being, qualitatively and numerically; and it will be better
to speak of our visions as visions of angels or messengers or demigods,
having one divine parent and one human. In everything, if we regard it
as it is in itself, and not selfishly, we may find an incarnation or
manifestation of deity.
How the divinity of our daily visitants shines out at certain moments
and then again is obscured by our practical haste and inattention, is
admirably expressed in the history of Helen. Her birth was miraculous,
and yet quaintly natural, for her father Zeus, having taken the form
of a swan when he wooed her mother Leda, she was hatched from a great
white egg; and there was always something swanlike in the movements
of her neck, in the composure of her carriage, as if borne on still
waters, in the scarcely flushed marble of her skin, and in the
lightness and amplitude of her floating garments. She was hardly of
this world, and it seemed almost a desecration to have wedded her to
any mortal. Yet she offered no resistance to love; it was indifferent
to her whom she might enamour, or into what nest of robbers she might
be carried by force. Was it not violence, she said to herself, to exist
on earth at all? What mattered a shade more or less of violence? If she
remained in a manner chaste and inviolate, it was only because she was
too beautiful to tempt the lusts of men. Neither of her two husbands
loved or understood her. Menelaus because he was a dullard, and Paris
because he was a rake, approached her as they would have approached
any other woman, and they found no great pleasure in her society. Yet
wherever she appeared, every one stopped talking and was motionless;
and she was worshipped by all who saw her pass at a distance. Supreme
beauty is foreign everywhere, yet everywhere has a right of domicile;
it opens a window to heaven, and is a cause of suspended animation and,
as it were, ecstatic suicide in the heart of mortals.
Helen passed her childhood dazed, but with a pleasing wonder, because
she loved her brothers, and they, absorbed though they were habitually
in their violent sports, were tender to her. When they died, how gladly
would she have followed them and become the third star with them in
heaven! But she found herself married to Menelaus the king; and this
her first mansion at Sparta, the narrowest of citadels, was far from
happy. The palace was a great farm-house, and the talk in it was all
of harvests and cattle and horses and wars. The men were boors, and
their scruples about sacrifices and auguries annoyed her; being half
divine, she felt no need for religion. "What advantage is it," she said
in her thoughts, "to be a queen when I am a prisoner, or to be called
beautiful where nobody looks at me."
Accordingly it was with a vague hope and a secret desire for vengeance
that she heard of the approach of a brilliant stranger, from a far more
populous and flourishing city than Sparta, who came with gifts and a
glib tongue to view the wonders of the island world. When his eyes fell
on her, his unfeigned surprise filled her with exultation. To be so
discerned, for her, was to be won. Those eyes could recognize divinity.
No doubt he was preparing new fetters for her and new sorrows, but for
a moment she would be free, and in following him she would feel herself
once more the goddess.
In fact, so long as they sailed the dark-purple sea, or rested in
caves or in island bowers, all was pleasantness between them. Their
very galley, with its white sails spread, took on something of Helen's
beauty, and seemed a cloud wafted across the Aegean, or the swan, her
father, riding on the rippled reaches of the Meander. Paris proved
a candid and light-hearted lover; never vexed, he was all grace and
mastery in small matters: one of those lordly travellers who can feel
the charm of nature and of woman in every dime, however exotic, however
pure, or however impure; and the incomparable Helen seemed indeed
incomparable to his practised mind. He adored her, but he preferred
other women. Moreover, she found that at Troy he counted for nothing.
He moved amid battles and councils, quite at home in the scene, but
never consulted; a prince turned shepherd, a familiar but superfluous
ornament, like a fop or a ballet-dancer that everybody smiled upon and
nobody respected. It was given him in the end to slay the redoubtable
Achilles with a chance arrow, Apollo secretly directing the shaft,
but he was no warrior. It was a useless triumph, as his abduction of
Helen had been an innocent crime: both were the work of gods laughing
at human arrogance. There were doubtless street rhetoricians in Ilium
who upbraided Paris and Helen, as there are reasoning philosophers
and politicians to-day who attribute the ascendancy or decay of
nations to the ideas that prevail there, forgetting to ask why those
particular ideas have been embraced by those peoples, when all ideas,
in the universal market, are to be had gratis. The wise old Priam
and his counsellors knew better. They did not disown Paris for his
escapade, as they might so easily have done, nor did they return
Helen to her wronged husband, useless as she was at Troy. They knew
that the confused battles of earth must be fought over some nominal
prize; men and animals will always be fighting for something, not
because the thing is necessarily of any value to them, but because
they wish to snatch it from one another. Helen had lent her name and
image to colour an ancient feud, and make articulate the dull eternal
contention between Asia and Europe. It was for existence that each
party was fighting; but it added to their courage and self-esteem to
say they were fighting for beauty, and that the victory of their side
would be a victory for the gods. But the gods were in both camps, and
in neither, as in her heart was Helen herself. In her isolation, her
conscience sometimes reproached her, and she wondered that she never
heard these reproaches from the lips of others. Hector and Priam and
the other old men, even the queen and the gossiping women, treated her
with deference; but they cared only for Troy and for their own affairs.
If less beset than in her strict old home, she was more neglected
in these spacious palaces, and no less melancholy. Was it a miracle
of generosity that nobody blamed her, or was it a supreme proof of
indifference, that standing in the centre of the stage she remained
unheeded? Was she so much a goddess that they thought her a statue?
Would she be borne away by the victors like an inert Palladium, to be
set up elsewhere on a new pedestal? She did not understand that it is
not the vision that men have of the gods that works their safety or
ruin, but that fatal maladjustments, or natural vigour in them, in
shaping their destiny, call that vision down. Nor is it an idle vision;
for the sight turns the dreary length of their misery into a tragedy
flashing with light and tears; and the presence of Helen on those
beleaguered walls, which might have irritated the foolish, consoled
the wise. She was not the cause of their danger nor of their coming
disaster, as she had not been the cause of the harsh virtues of her
Spartan clan; but as those harsh virtues had created her beauty, so the
wealth and exuberant civilization of Ilium had recognized it, and made
it their own; and she was a glory to both nations, for not every city,
of all the cities that perish, has had a queen like her.
When Troy fell at last, when Hector and Paris and Priam were dead, and
Aeneas had escaped just in time, she waited, impassible, at the gate
of the smoking acropolis, neither glad nor sorry, not ashamed to see
her first husband again and his shouting friends--for she despised
them--nor unwilling to be removed, as it were, into the evening shadow
of her old queenliness. Something told her that in her second life at
Sparta she would be more feared and more respected; in her advancing
age and intangible isolation she would be as a priestess whom no
one--not even Menelaus--would dare to approach. Her crime would be her
protection; her rebellion, proudly acknowledged and never retracted
in spirit, would lift her above all mankind. Even while still in this
world, she would belong to the other.
There is an obscure rumour that after the fall of Troy Helen never
returned to Sparta but was spirited away to Egypt, whilst a mere
phantasm resembling her accompanied her dull husband back to his
dull fastness by the pebbly Eurotas. This turn given to the fable
hints darkly at the unearthly truth. Helen was a phantom always and
everywhere; so long as men fought for her, taking her image, as it
were, for their banner, she presided over a most veritable and bloody
battle; but when the battle ceased of itself, and all those heroes
that had seen and idolized her were dead, the cerulean colours of that
banner faded from it; the shreds of it rotted indistinguishably in the
mire, and the hues that had lent it for a moment its terrible magic
fled back into the ether, where wind and mist, meteors and sunbeams,
never cease to weave them. The passing of Helen was the death of
Greece, but Helen herself is its immortality. Yet why seek to interpret
the parable? There is more depth of suggestion in these ancient myths
than in any abstract doctrine which we may substitute for them. Homer
and his companions certainly were not writing intentional allegories;
but they had a sense for beauty and a sense for the flux of things,
and in those two perceptions the whole philosophy of Ideas is latent.
Sight, thought, love arrest essences; and time, perpetually undermining
the existence that brings those essences before us, drives them, as
fast as we can arrest them, like a sort of upward flaw, back into
heaven.
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