Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 - Various
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
CONTENTS
Agrarianism
Bulls and Bears
Bundle of Old Letters, A
Calculus, The Differential and Integral
Charge with Prince Rupert
Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith
Coffee and Tea
Did I?
El Llanero
Gymnasium, The
Holbein and the Dance of Death
Illustrious Obscure, The
In a Cellar
In the Pines
Juanita
Letter to a Dyspeptic, A
Lizzy Griswold's Thanksgiving
Men of the Sea
Mien-yaun
Minister's Wooing, The
New Life of Dante, The
Odds and Ends from the Old World
Olympus and Asgard
Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?
Palfrey's and Arnold's Histories
Plea for the Fijians, A
Professor at the Breakfast-Table, The
Roba di Roma
Shakespeare's Art
Smollett, Some Unedited Memorials of
Stereoscope and Stereograph, The
Trip to Cuba, A
Two Sniffs
Utah Expedition, The
White's Shakspeare
Why did the Governess Faint?
Winter Birds, The
POETRY.
Achmed and his Mare
At Sea
Bloodroot
Chicadee
Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The
Drifting
Hamlet at the Boston
Inscription for an Alms-Chest
Joy-Month
Last Bird, The
Left Behind
Morning Street, The
Our Skater Belle
Palm and the Pine, The
Philter, The
Prayer for Life
Sphinx, The
Spring
Two Years After
Walker of the Snow, The
Waterfall, The
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Allibone's Dictionary of Authors
Arabian Days' Entertainments
Avenger, The
Bacon, The Works of
Bitter-Sweet
Bryant, Durand's Portrait of
Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte
Cotton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas
Courtship of Miles Standish
Dexter's Street Thoughts
Duyckinck's Life of George Herbert
Emerson, Rowse's Portrait of
Ernest Carroll
Furness's Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus
Hamilton's Lecture on Metaphysics
Hymns of the Ages
Index to Catalogue of Boston City Library
Lytton, R.B., (Owen Meredith,) Poems by
Mathematical Monthly, The
Morgan's, Lady, Autobiography
Mothers and Infants, Nurses and Nursing
Mustee, The
Prescott's Philip II
Sawyer's New Testament
Seddon, Thomas, Memoir and Letters of
Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest
Stratford Gallery, The
Symbols of the Capital
Truebner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature
Vernon Grove
Whittier, Barry's Portrait of
Wilson's Conquest of Mexico
LIST OF BOOKS
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. III.--JANUARY, 1859.--NO. XV.
OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.
How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the
old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that
world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of
twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses
of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A
thousand objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled,
opaque, and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of
the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the
age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might
have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or
Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and
societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and
philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and
gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics,
geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too
numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of
glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of
outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature
moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a
morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the
strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful,
sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine
powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their
worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far
summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their
celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the
Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds
from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae,
Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped
headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief deities were all
visible from the far streets and dwellings of their earthly
worshippers, in that clear, shining, Grecian atmosphere. Uranography
was then far better understood than geography, and the personages
composing the heavenly synod were almost as definitely known to the
Homeric men as their mortal acquaintances. The architect of the
Olympian palaces was surnamed Amphigueeis, or the Halt. The Homeric
gods were men divinized with imperishable frames, glorious and immortal
sensualists, never visited by qualms of conscience, by headache, or
remorse, or debility, or wrinkles, or dyspepsia, however deep their
potations, however fiercely they indulged their appetites. Zeus, the
Grand Seignior or Sultan of Olympus and father of gods and men,
surpassed Turk and Mormon Elder in his uxoriousness and indiscriminate
concubinage. With Olympian goddess and lone terrestrial nymph and
deep-bosomed mortal lass of Hellas, the land of lovely women, as Homer
calls it, did he pursue his countless intrigues, which he sometimes had
the unblushing coolness and impudence to rehearse to his wedded wife,
Here. His _list_ would have thrown Don Giovanni's entirely into the
shade. Here, the queen of Olympus, called the Golden-Throned, the
Venerable, the Ox-Eyed, was a sort of celestial Queen Bess, the
undaunted she-Tudor, whose father, bluff Harry, was not a bad human
copy of Zeus himself, the Rejoicer in Thunder.
In that old Homeric heaven,--in those quiet seats of the gods of the
heroic world, which were never shaken by storm-wind, nor lashed by the
tempest that raved far below round the dwellings of wretched
mortals,--in those quiet abodes above the thunder, there was for the
most part nought but festal joy, music, choral dances, and emptying of
nectar-cups, interrupted now and then by descents into the low-lying
region of human life in quest of adventure, or on errands of divine
intervention in the affairs of men, for whom, on the whole, Zeus and
his court entertained sentiments of profound contempt. Once in a while
Zeus and all his courtiers went on a festal excursion to the land of
the blameless Ethiops, which lay somewhere over the ocean, where they
banqueted twelve days. Why such a special honor as this was shown to
these Ethiops is not explained. Within their borders were evidently the
summer resorts, Newport and Baden-Baden, frequented by the Olympians.
Only in great crises was the whole mythic host of the Grecian religion
summoned to meet in full forum on the heights of the immemorial
mountain. At such times, all the fountains, rivers, and groves of
Hellas were emptied of their guardian daemons, male and female, who
hastened to pay their homage to and receive their orders from the
Cloud-Gatherer, sitting on his throne, in his great skyey Capitolium,
and invested with all the pomp of mythic majesty, his ambrosial locks
smoothly combed and brushed by some Olympian _friseur_, his eagle
perched with ruffled plumes upon his fist, and everything else so
arranged as most forcibly to impress the country visitors and rural
incumbents with salutary awe for the occupant of their sky-Vatican.
Whether these last were compelled to salute the Jovine great toe with a
kiss is not recorded, there being no account extant of the ceremonial
and etiquette of Olympus. Whatever it was, doubtless it was rigidly
enforced; for the Thunderer, it would seem, had a Bastile, or lock-up,
with iron doors and a brazen threshold specially provided for
contumacious and disobedient gods.
Zeus, although he could claim supreme dominion under the law of
primogeniture, was originally only a coequal ruler with his two
brothers, Hades, king of the underworld, and Ennosigaeus, monarch of
the salt sea-foam. They were alike the sons and coequal heirs of
Kronos, or Time, and the Moerae, or Destinies, had parcelled out the
universe in three equal parts between them. But the position of Zeus in
his serene air-realm gave him the advantage over his two brothers,--as
the metropolitan situation of the Roman see in the capital of the world
gave its diocesan, who was originally nothing more than the peer of the
Bishops of Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Constantinople, an
opportunity finally to assert and maintain a spiritual lordship. This
is a case exactly in point. It is certainly proper to illustrate a
theocratic usurpation by an hierarchic one. Zeus, with his eagle and
thunder and that earthquaking nod, was too strong for him of the
trident and him of the three-headed hound. The whole mythic host
regarded Jove's court as a place of final resort, of ultimate appeal.
He was recognized as the Supreme Father, Papa, or Pope, of the Greek
mythic realm. The nod of his immortal head was decisive. His azure
eyebrows and ambrosial hair were full of fate.
The wars of mortals in Hellas and Dardanland were matters of more
interest to the Olympian celestials than any other mere human
transactions. These occasioned partisanships, heartburnings, and
factions in the otherwise serene Olympian palaces. Even Father Zeus
himself acknowledged a bias for sacred Ilium and its king and people
over all the cities of terrestrial men beneath the sun and starry
heaven. In the ten-years' war at Troy, the Olympians were active
partisans upon both sides at times, now screening their favorites from
danger, and now even pitting themselves against combatants of more
vulnerable flesh and blood. But in the matter of vulnerability they
seem not to have enjoyed complete exemption, any more than did Milton's
angels. Although they ate not bread nor drank wine, still there was in
their veins a kind of ambrosial blood called _ichor_, which the prick
of a javelin or spear would cause to flow freely. Even Ares, the genius
of homicide and slaughter, was on one occasion at least wounded by a
mortal antagonist, and sent out of the melee badly punished, so that he
bellowed like a bull-calf, as he mounted on a dusty whirlwind to
Olympus. Over his misadventures while playing his own favorite game
certainly there were no tears to be shed; but when, prompted by
motherly tenderness, Aphrodite, the soft power of love,--she of the
Paphian boudoir, whose recesses were glowing with the breath of Sabaean
frankincense fumed by a hundred altars,--she at whose approach the
winds became hushed, and the clouds fled, and the daedal earth poured
forth sweet flowers,--when such a presence manifested herself on the
field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection, and attempted
to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes with a fold of
her shining _peplum_, surely the audacious Grecian king should have
forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his wrath
elsewhere. But no,--he pierced her skin with his spear, so that,
shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her
immortal homestead. The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who
put his lance in rest against the immortals had but a short lease of
life to live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire's
return, nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Homer, in the first books of his "Ilias," permits us to glance into the
banqueting-hall of Olympus. The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit,
Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty. Hephaestus the Cripple has taken their
place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable
laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of "passing the
rosy." His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos
from the threshold of heaven. So, all day long, says the poet, they
revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop.
It is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours,
conforming, in this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard. Duly at set
of sun they betook themselves to their couches. Zeus himself slept, and
by his side Here of the Golden Throne.
Who would wish to have lived a pagan under that old Olympian
dispensation, even though, like the dark-eyed Greek of the Atreidean
age, his fancy could have "fetched from the blazing chariot of the Sun
a beardless youth who touched a golden lyre and filled the illumined
groves with ravishment"?--even though, like him, he might in
myrtle-grove and lonely mountain-glen have had favors granted him even
by Idalian Aphrodite the Beautiful, and felt her warm breath glowing
upon his forehead, or been counselled by the blue-eyed Athene, or been
elevated to ample rule by Here herself, Heaven's queen? That Greek
heaven was heartless, libidinous, and cold. It had no mild divinities
appointed to bind up the broken heart and assuage the grief of the
mourner. The weary and the heavy-laden had no celestial resource
amongst its immortal revellers and libertines, male and female. There
was no sympathy for mortal suffering amongst those divine sensualists.
They talked with contempt and unsympathizing ridicule of the woes of
the earthborn, of the brevity of mortal life, and of its miseries. A
boon, indeed, and a grateful exchange, was the Mother Mild of the Roman
Catholic Pantheon, the patroness of the broken-hearted, who inclines
her countenance graciously to the petitions of womanly anguish, for the
voluptuous Aphrodite, the haughty Juno, the Di-Vernonish Artemis, and
the lewd and wanton nymphs of forest, mountain, ocean, lake, and river.
Ceres alone, of the old female classic daemons, seemed to be endowed
with a truly womanly tenderness and regard for humankind. She, like the
Mater Dolorosa, is represented in the myths to have known bereavement
and sorrow, and she, therefore, could sympathize with the grief of
mothers sprung from Pyrrha's stem. Nay, she had envied them their
mortality, which enabled them to join their lost ones, who could not
come back to them, in the grave. Vainly she sought to descend into the
dark underworld to see her "young Persephone, transcendent queen of
shades." Not for her weary, wandering feet was a single one of the
thousand paths that lead downward to death. Her only consolation was in
the vernal flowers, which, springing from the dark earthly mould,
seemed to her to be
"heralds from the dreary deep,
Soft voices from the solemn streams,"
by whose shores, veiled in eternal twilight, wandered her sad child,
the queen of the realm of Dis, with its nine-fold river, gates of
adamant, and minarets of fire. The heartlessness of all the ethnic
deities, of whatever age or nation, is a noticeable feature, especially
when contrasted with the unfathomable pity of their Exterminator, who
wept over the chief city of his fatherland, and would have gathered it,
as a hen gathereth her chickens, under the wings of his love, though
its sons were seeking to compass his destruction. Those old ethnic
deities were cruel, inexorable, and relentless. They knew nothing of
mercy and forgiveness. They ministered no balm to human sorrow. The
daemons who wandered in human shape over the classic lands of old were
all fickle and malevolent. They oftentimes impelled their victims to
suicide. The ghouls that haunt the tombs and waste places of the
regions where they were once worshipped are their lineal descendants
and modern representatives. The vampires and pest-hags of the Levant
are their successors in malignity. The fair humanities of the old
religion were fair only in shape and exterior. The old pagan gods were
friendly only to kings, heroes, and grandees; they had no beatitude for
the poor and lowly. Human despair, under their dispensation, knew no
alleviation but a plunge from light and life into the underworld,
--rather than be monarch of which, the shade of Achilles avers,
in the "Odusseia," that it would prefer to be the hireling and
drudge of some poor earthly peasant. Elysium was only for a privileged
few.
It has been said that the old ethnic creeds were the true religion
"growing wild,"--that the human soil was prepared by such kind of
spiritual crops and outgrowths, with their tares and weeds intermingled
with wheat, for the seed that was finally to be sown by the Divine
Sower,--that, erroneous as they were in a thousand respects, they were
genuine emanations of the religious nature in man, and as such not to
be stigmatized or harshly characterized,--that without them the human
soil could not have been made ready for the crop of unmixed truth. This
may be true of some of them, though surely not of the popular form of
the old Greek ethnic faith. Its deities were nothing better than the
passions of human nature projected upon ethereal heights, and
incarnated and made personal in undecaying demonic shapes,--not
conditioned and straitened like the bodies of man, but enjoying
perpetual youth and immunity from death in most cases, with permission
to take liberties with Space and Time greater even than are granted to
us by steam and telegraph-wires.
The vulgar Grecian polytheism was all material. It had no martyrs and
confessors. It was not worth dying for, as it was good for nothing to
live by. The religion of Hellas was the religion of sensualistic beauty
simply. It was just the worship for Pheidias and Praxiteles, for the
bard of Teos and the soft Catullus, for sensual poet, painter, and
sculptor. But "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," although we
gather most of our knowledge of Olympus and the Olympians from his
verse, was worthy of a loftier and purer heaven than the low one under
which he wandered from city to city, singing the tale of Troy divine,
and hymns and paeans to the gods. The good and the true were mere
metaphysical abstractions to the old Greek. What must he have been when
it would not have been safe for him to leave his wife alone with the
best and highest of his gods? The ancient Hellenes were morally most
vicious and depraved, even when compared with contemporary heathen
nations. The old Greek was large in brain, but not in heart. He had
created his gods in his own image, and they were--what they were. There
was no goodness in his religion, and we can tolerate it only as it is
developed in the Homeric rhapsodies, in the far-off fable-time of the
old world, and amongst men who were but partially self-conscious. In
that remote Homeric epoch it is tolerable, when cattle-stealing and war
were the chief employments of the ruling caste,--and we may add,
woman-stealing, into the bargain. "I did not come to fight against the
Trojans," says Achilles, "because I had suffered any grievance at their
hands. They never drove off my oxen and horses or stole my harvests in
rich-soiled Phthia, the nurse of heroes; for vale-darkening mountains
and a tumultuous sea separate us."
Into that old Homeric world we enter through the portals of the "Ilias"
and "Odusseia," and see the peaks of Olympus shining afar off in white
splendor like silvery clouds, not looking for or expecting either a
loftier or a purer heaven. Somewhere on the bounds of the dim
ocean-world we know that there is an exiled court, a faded sort of St.
Germain celestial dynasty, geologic gods, coevals of the old Silurian
strata,--to wit, Kronos, Rhea, Nox, _et al._ Here these old,
unsceptred, discrowned, and sky-fallen potentates "cogitate in their
watery ooze," and in "the shady sadness of vales,"--sometimes visited
by their successors for counsel or concealment, or for the purpose of
establishing harmony amongst them. The Sleep and Death of the Homeric
mythology were naturally gentle divinities,--sometimes lifting the
slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly
through the air to his home and weeping kindred. This was a gracious
office. The saintly legends of the Roman Church have borrowed a hint
from this old Homeric fancy. One pleasant feature of the Homeric
battles is, that, when some blameless, great-souled champion falls, the
blind old bard interrupts the performances for a moment and takes his
reader with him away from the din and shouting of the battle,
following, as it were, the spirit of the fallen hero to his distant
abode, where sit his old father, his spouse, and children,--thus
throwing across the cloud of battle a sweet gleam of domestic, pastoral
life, to relieve its gloom. Homer, both in the "Ilias" and "Odusseia,"
gives his readers frequent glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for
messengers are continually flashing to and fro, like meteors, between
the throne of Zeus and the earth. Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with
down; sometimes it is wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald
plumes of the rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that
glides down to earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night,
bearing the behests of Jove. But however often we are permitted to
return to the ambrosial homestead of the ever-living gods in the wake
of returning messengers, we always find it the same calm region, lifted
far up above the turbulence, the perturbations, the clouds and storms
of
"That low spot which men call earth,"
--a glorious aerial Sans-Souci and house of pleasaunce.
It is curious that the atheistic Lucretius has given us a most glowing
description of the Olympian mansions; but perhaps the Olympus of the
Epicurean poet and philosopher is somewhat higher up and more
sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the
popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls of
the universe are cloven. I see through the void inane. The splendor
(_numen_) of the gods appears, and the quiet seats which are not shaken
by storm-winds nor aspersed by rain-clouds; nor does the whitely
falling snow-flake, with its hoar rime, violate _their summery warmth_,
but an ever-cloudless ether laughs above them with widespread
radiance." Lucretius had all these lineaments of his Epicurean heaven
from old Homer. They are scattered up and down the "Ilias" and
"Odusseia" in the shape of _disjecta membra_. For instance, the Olympus
which he beholds through a chasm in the walls of the universe, towering
into the pure empyrean, has some of the features of Homer's island
Elysiums, the blissful abodes of mortal heroes who have been divinized
or translated. The Celtic island-valley of Avalon, the abode of King
Arthur, "with its orchard-lawns and bowery hollows," so exquisitely
alluded to by Tennyson, is a kindred spot with the Homeric Elysian
plain. Emerson says, "The race of gods, or those we erring own, are
shadows floating up and down in the still abodes." This is exactly the
meaning of Lucretius also. They are all air-cities, these seats of the
celestials, whatever be the creed,--summery, ethereal climes, fanned
with spice-winds and zephyrs. Meru, Kaf, Olympus, Elboorz,--they are
all alike. The ethnic superior daemons were well termed the powers of
the air. Upward into the far blue gazes the weary and longing saint and
devotee of every faith. Beyond the azure curtains of the sky, upward
into the pure realm, over the rain-cloud and the thunder and the silver
bars of the scirrhus, he places his quiet seats, his mansions of rest.
The German poet, Schiller, who was a worshipper of Art and sensualistic
beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere handmaids of Art,
exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man, quite naturally
regretted that he had not lived in the palmy days of the
anthropomorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in
the Isle of Naxos. His "Gods of Greek Land" is as fine a piece of
heathenish longing as could well be written at so late a day. His heart
was evidently far away from the century in which he lived, and pulsated
under that distant Grecian sky of which he somewhere speaks. For
artistic purposes the myths of Greece formed a glorious faith. Grace
and symmetry of form were theirs, and they satiated the eye with
outward loveliness; but to the deep fountains of feeling and sentiment,
such as a higher faith has unsealed in the heart, they never
penetrated. What a poor, narrow little world was that myth-haunted one
of the Grecian poet and sculptor, and even philosopher, compared with
the actual world which modern science is revealing from year to year!
What a puny affair was that Grecian sun, with its coachman's apparatus
of reins, fire-breathing nags, and golden car, which Schiller looks
back to, in the spirit of Mr. Weller, Senior, when compared with the
vast empyreal sphere and light-fountain of modern science, with its
retinue of planets, ships of space, freighted with souls! Science the
handmaid of Art! Well might the mere artist and worshipper of
anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some
low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as
he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which
has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous
abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its
finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic
Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which the
puny human image was easily reflected in beautiful and picturesque and
grotesque shadows, which were mistaken for gods. But the Nature and
Universe revealed by modern Christian science are too vast and profound
to mirror anything short of the image of the Omnipotent himself.