Greek Studies A Series of Essays 6

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 6

"And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth a year of grievous

famine. The dry seed remained hidden in the soil; in vain the oxen

drew the ploughshare through the furrows; much white seed-corn fell

fruitless on the earth, and the whole human race had like to have

perished, and the gods had no more service of men, unless Zeus had

interfered. First he sent Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one,

to turn Demeter from her anger; but none was able to persuade her;

she heard their words with a hard countenance, and vowed by no means

to return to Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth, until her

eyes had seen her lost daughter again. Then, last of all, Zeus sent

Hermes into the kingdom of the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to suffer

his bride to return to the light of day. And Hermes found the king

at home in his palace, sitting on a couch, beside the shrinking

Persephone, consumed within herself by desire for her mother. A

doubtful smile passed over [90] the face of Aidoneus; yet he obeyed

the message, and bade Persephone return; yet praying her a little to

have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge him too hardly, who was also

an immortal god. And Persephone arose up quickly in great joy; only,

ere she departed, he caused her to eat a morsel of sweet pomegranate,

designing secretly thereby, that she should not remain always upon

earth, but might some time return to him. And Aidoneus yoked the

horses to his chariot; and Persephone ascended into it; and Hermes

took the reins in his hands and drove out through the infernal halls;

and the horses ran willingly; and they two quickly passed over the

ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor of the

rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the

shore, resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before

the door of the temple where her mother was; who, seeing her, ran out

quickly to meet her, like a Maenad coming down a mountain-side, dusky

with woods.

 

"So they spent all that day together in intimate communion, having

many things to hear and tell. Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his

venerable mother, the oldest of divine persons, to bring them back

reconciled, to the company of the gods; and he ordained that

Persephone should remain two parts of the year with her mother, and

one third part only with her husband, in the kingdom of the dead. So

Demeter suffered [91] the earth to yield its fruits once more, and

the land was suddenly laden with leaves and flowers and waving corn.

Also she visited Triptolemus and the other princes of Eleusis, and

instructed them in the performance of her sacred rites,--those

mysteries of which no tongue may speak. Only, blessed is he whose

eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other

men!"

 

In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek myths, we may trace the

action of three different influences, which have moulded it with

varying effects, in three successive phases of its development.

There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase,

in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to

mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place,

there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the

natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or

literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of the

vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it

with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying

or developing its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the

ethical phase, in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical

narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because intensely

characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions. [92]

Behind the adventures of the stealing of Persephone and the

wanderings of Demeter in search of her, as we find them in the

Homeric hymn, we may discern the confused conception, under which

that early age, in which the myths were first created, represented to

itself those changes in physical things, that order of summer and

winter, of which it had no scientific, or systematic explanation, but

in which, nevertheless, it divined a multitude of living agencies,

corresponding to those ascertained forces, of which our colder modern

science tells the number and the names. Demeter--Demeter and

Persephone, at first, in a sort of confused union--is the earth, in

the fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the accident

and detail of the growth and decay of its children. Of this

conception, floating loosely in the air, the poets of a later age

take possession; they create Demeter and Persephone as we know them

in art and poetry. From the vague and fluctuating union, in which

together they had represented the earth and its changes, the mother

and the daughter define themselves with special functions, and with

fixed, well-understood relationships, the incidents and emotions of

which soon weave themselves into a pathetic story. Lastly, in

proportion as the literary or aesthetic activity completes the

picture or the poem, the ethical interest makes itself felt. These

strange persons--Demeter and Persephone--these marvellous incidents--

the translation into Hades, the seeking [93] of Demeter, the return

of Persephone to her,--lend themselves to the elevation and

correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the presentment to

the senses and the imagination of an ideal __EXPRESSION__ of them.

Demeter cannot but seem the type of divine grief. Persephone is the

goddess of death, yet with a promise of life to come. Those three

phases, then, which are more or less discernible in all mythical

development, and constitute a natural order in it, based on the

necessary conditions of human apprehension, are fixed more plainly,

perhaps, than in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story of

Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the central __EXPRESSION__ of its

literary or poetical phase, so the marble remains, of which I shall

have to speak by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what

I have called its ethical phase.

 

Homer, in the Iliad, knows Demeter, but only as the goddess of the

fields, the originator and patroness of the labours of the

countryman, in their yearly order. She stands, with her hair yellow

like the ripe corn, at the threshing-floor, and takes her share in

the toil, the heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the

wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she yields to the

embraces of Iasion, to the extreme jealousy of Zeus, who slays her

mortal lover with lightning. The flowery town of Pyrasus--the wheat-

town,--an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. But

when [94] Homer gives a list of the orthodox gods, her name is not

mentioned.

 

Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone also, but not as Kore; only

as the queen of the dead--epainê Persephonê+--dreadful Persephone, the

goddess of destruction and death, according to the apparent import of

her name.+ She accomplishes men's evil prayers; she is the mistress

and manager of men's shades, to which she can dispense a little more

or less of life, dwelling in her mouldering palace on the steep shore

of the Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows and tall poplars.

But that Homer knew her as the daughter of Demeter there are no

signs; and of his knowledge of the rape of Persephone there is only

the faintest sign,--he names Hades by the golden reins of his

chariot, and his beautiful horses.

 

The main theme, then, the most characteristic peculiarities, of the

story, as subsequently developed, are not to be found, expressly, in

the true Homer. We have in him, on the one hand, Demeter, as the

perfectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose children, if

she has them, must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful,

unravished Kore; on the other hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly

terrible goddess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous

shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon Medusa in her

keeping. And it is only when these two contrasted images have been

[95] brought into intimate relationship, only when Kore and

Persephone have been identified, that the deeper mythology of Demeter

begins.

 

This combination has taken place in Hesiod; and in three lines of the

Theogony we find the stealing of Persephone by Aidoneus,*--one of

those things in Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older than Homer.

Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is thought to have

preserved some of the traditions of those earlier inhabitants of

Greece who had become a kind of serfs; and in a certain shadowiness

in his conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete and

heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may perhaps trace something of

the quiet unspoken brooding of a subdued people--of that silently

dreaming temper to which the story of Persephone properly belongs.

However this may be, it is in Hesiod that the two images,

unassociated in Homer--the goddess of summer and the goddess of

death, Kore and Persephone--are identified with much significance;

and that strange, dual being makes her first appearance, whose latent

capabilities the poets afterwards developed; among the rest, a

peculiar blending of those two contrasted aspects, full of purpose

for the duly chastened intelligence; death, resurrection,

rejuvenescence.--Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust!

 

[96] Modern science explains the changes of the natural world by the

hypothesis of certain unconscious forces; and the sum of these

forces, in their combined action, constitutes the scientific

conception of nature. But, side by side with the growth of this more

mechanical conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic,

philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy more of

instinct than of the understanding, the mental starting-point of

which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such

feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when

we seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at work; as

if just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there

were really circulating some spirit of life, akin to that which makes

its energies felt within ourselves. Starting with a hundred

instincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual, or

Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the unity of a living

spirit or person, revealing itself in various degrees to the kindred

spirit of the observer, than as a system of mechanical forces. Such

a philosophy is a systematised form of that sort of poetry (we may

study it, for instance, either in Shelley or in Wordsworth), which

also has its fancies of a spirit of the earth, or of the sky,--a

personal intelligence abiding in them, the existence of which is

assumed in every suggestion such poetry makes to us of a sympathy

between the ways [97] and aspects of outward nature and the moods of

men. And what stood to the primitive intelligence in place of such

metaphysical conceptions were those cosmical stories or myths, such

as this of Demeter and Persephone, which springing up spontaneously

in many minds, came at last to represent to them, in a certain number

of sensibly realised images, all they knew, felt, or fancied, of the

natural world about them. The sky in its unity and its variety,--the

sea in its unity and its variety,--mirrored themselves respectively

in these simple, but profoundly impressible spirits, as Zeus, as

Glaucus or Poseidon. And a large part of their experience--all, that

is, that related to the earth in its changes, the growth and decay of

all things born of it--was covered by the story of Demeter, the myth

of the earth as a mother. They thought of Demeter as the old Germans

thought of Hertha, or the later Greeks of Pan, as the Egyptians

thought of Isis, the land of the Nile, made green by the streams of

Osiris, for whose coming Isis longs, as Demeter for Persephone; thus

naming together in her all their fluctuating thoughts, impressions,

suspicions, of the earth and its appearances, their whole complex

divination of a mysterious life, a perpetual working, a continuous

act of conception there. Or they thought of the many-coloured earth

as the garment of Demeter, as the great modern pantheist poet speaks

of it as the "garment of God." Its [98] brooding fertility; the

spring flowers breaking from its surface, the thinly disguised

unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and of their chosen places of

growth; the delicate, feminine, Prosperina-like motion of all growing

things; its fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving

juices; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and sudden volcanic

heats; the long delays of spring; its dumb sleep, so suddenly flung

away; the sadness which insinuates itself into its languid

luxuriance; all this grouped itself round the persons of Demeter and

her circle. They could turn always to her, from the actual earth

itself, in aweful yet hopeful prayer, and a devout personal

gratitude, and explain it through her, in its sorrow and its promise,

its darkness and its helpfulness to man.

 

The personification of abstract ideas by modern painters or

sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks,

in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or

rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech,

which could please almost no one. On the other hand, such symbolical

representations, under the form of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues

and Vices at Padua, or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series of

the planets in certain early Italian engravings, are profoundly

poetical and impressive. They seem to be something more than mere

symbolism, [99] and to be connected with some peculiarly sympathetic

penetration, on the part of the artist, into the subjects he intended

to depict. Symbolism intense as this, is the creation of a special

temper, in which a certain simplicity, taking all things literally,

au pied de la lettre, is united to a vivid pre-occupation with the

aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figured side of figurative

__EXPRESSION__, the form of the metaphor. When it is said, "Out of his

mouth goeth a sharp sword," that temper is ready to deal directly and

boldly with that difficult image, like that old designer of the

fourteenth century, who has depicted this, and other images of the

Apocalypse, in a coloured window at Bourges. Such symbolism cares a

great deal for the hair of Temperance, discreetly bound, for some

subtler likeness to the colour of the sky in the girdle of Hope, for

the inwoven flames in the red garment of Charity. And what was

specially peculiar to the temper of the old Florentine painter,

Giotto, to the temper of his age in general, doubtless, more than to

that of ours, was the persistent and universal mood of the age in

which the story of Demeter and Persephone was first created. If some

painter of our own time has conceived the image of The Day so

intensely, that we hardly think of distinguishing between the image,

with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and the meaning of the

image; if William Blake, to our so great delight, makes the morning

stars [100] literally "sing together,"--these fruits of individual

genius are in part also a "survival" from a different age, with the

whole mood of which this mode of __EXPRESSION__ was more congruous than

it is with ours. But there are traces of the old temper in the man

of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier

time--a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples--in

which every impression men received of the action of powers without

or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like

their own--a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and

feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the

marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but

yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man "was really a

stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist."

 

The gods of Greek mythology overlap each other; they are confused or

connected with each other, lightly or deeply, as the case may be, and

sometimes have their doubles, at first sight as in a troubled dream,

yet never, when we examine each detail more closely, without a

certain truth to human reason. It is only in a limited sense that it

is possible to lift, and examine by itself, one thread of the network

of story and imagery, which, in a certain age of civilisation, wove

itself over every detail of life and thought, over every name in the

past, and almost every place in [101] Greece. The story of Demeter,

then, was the work of no single author or place or time; the poet of

its first phase was no single person, but the whole consciousness of

an age, though an age doubtless with its differences of more or less

imaginative individual minds--with one, here or there, eminent,

though but by a little, above a merely receptive majority, the

spokesman of a universal, though faintly-felt prepossession,

attaching the errant fancies of the people around him to definite

names and images. The myth grew up gradually, and at many distant

places, in many minds, independent of each other, but dealing in a

common temper with certain elements and aspects of the natural world,

as one here, and another there, seemed to catch in that incident or

detail which flashed more incisively than others on the inward eye,

some influence, or feature, or characteristic of the great mother.

The various epithets of Demeter, the local variations of her story,

its incompatible incidents, bear witness to the manner of its

generation. They illustrate that indefiniteness which is

characteristic of Greek mythology, a theology with no central

authority, no link on historic time, liable from the first to an

unobserved transformation. They indicate the various, far-distant

spots from which the visible body of the goddess slowly collected its

constituents, and came at last to have a well-defined existence in

the popular mind. In this sense, Demeter appears to one in [102] her

anger, sullenly withholding the fruits of the earth, to another in

her pride of Persephone, to another in her grateful gift of the arts

of agriculture to man; at last only, is there a general recognition

of a clearly-arrested outline, a tangible embodiment, which has

solidified itself in the imagination of the people, they know not

how.

 

The worship of Demeter belongs to that older religion, nearer to the

earth, which some have thought they could discern, behind the more

definitely national mythology of Homer. She is the goddess of dark

caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form. She gave men the

first fig in one place, the first poppy in another; in another, she

first taught the old Titans to mow. She is the mother of the vine

also; and the assumed name by which she called herself in her

wanderings, is Dôs--a gift; the crane, as the harbinger of rain, is

her messenger among the birds. She knows the magic powers of certain

plants, cut from her bosom, to bane or bless; and, under one of her

epithets, herself presides over the springs, as also coming from the

secret places of the earth. She is the goddess, then, at first, of

the fertility of the earth in its wildness; and so far, her

attributes are to some degree confused with those of the Thessalian

Gaia and the Phrygian Cybele. Afterwards, and it is now that her

most characteristic attributes begin to concentrate themselves, [103]

she separates herself from these confused relationships, as specially

the goddess of agriculture, of the fertility of the earth when

furthered by human skill. She is the preserver of the seed sown in

hope, under many epithets derived from the incidents of vegetation,

as the simple countryman names her, out of a mind full of the various

experiences of his little garden or farm. She is the most definite

embodiment of all those fluctuating mystical instincts, of which

Gaia,* the mother of the earth's gloomier offspring, is a vaguer and

mistier one. There is nothing of the confused outline, the mere

shadowiness of mystical dreaming, in this most concrete human figure.

No nation, less aesthetically gifted than the Greeks, could have thus

lightly thrown its mystical surmise and divination into images so

clear and idyllic as those of the solemn goddess of the country, in

whom the characteristics of the mother are expressed with so much

tenderness, and the "beauteous head" of Kore, then so fresh and

peaceful.

 

In this phase, then, the story of Demeter appears as the peculiar

creation of country-people of a high impressibility, dreaming over

their work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense

of its sacredness, and a sort of [104] mystery about it. For there

is much in the life of the farm everywhere which gives to persons of

any seriousness of disposition, special opportunity for grave and

gentle thoughts. The temper of people engaged in the occupations of

country life, so permanent, so "near to nature," is at all times

alike; and the habitual solemnity of thought and __EXPRESSION__ which

Wordsworth found in the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter

François Millet in the peasants of Brittany, may well have had its

prototype in early Greece. And so, even before the development, by

the poets, of their aweful and passionate story, Demeter and

Persephone seem to have been pre-eminently the venerable, or aweful,

goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs

are dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing

and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She presides

over all the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the

threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands beside the woman

baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected certain

simple rites; the half-understood local observance, and the half-

believed local legend, reacting capriciously on each other. They

leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat, at the cross-

roads, to take on her journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries

them away, as she wanders through the country. The incidents of

their yearly labour become to [105] them acts of worship; they seek

her blessing through many expressive names, and almost catch sight of

her, at dawn or evening, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. She

lays a finger on the grass at the road-side, and some new flower

comes up. All the picturesque implements of country life are hers;

the poppy also, emblem of an inexhaustible fertility, and full of

mysterious juices for the alleviation of pain. The countrywoman who

puts her child to sleep in the great, cradle-like, basket, for

winnowing the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos, the mother of

corn and children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress

worn by its father at his initiation into her mysteries. Yet she is

an angry goddess too, sometimes--Demeter Erinnys, the goblin of the

neighbourhood, haunting its shadowy places. She lies on the ground

out of doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with the dew. She

grows young again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled

woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of Demophoon. Other

lighter, errant stories nest themselves, as time goes on, within the

greater. The water-newt, which repels the lips of the traveller who

stoops to drink, is a certain urchin, Abas, who spoiled by his

mockery the pleasure of the thirsting goddess, as she drank once of a

wayside spring in her wanderings. The night-owl is the transformed

Ascalabus, who alone had seen Persephone eat that morsel [106] of

pomegranate, in the garden of Aidoneus. The bitter wild mint was

once a girl, who for a moment had made her jealous, in Hades.

 

The episode of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter imparts the mysteries of

the plough, like the details of some sacred rite, that he may bear

them abroad to all people, embodies, in connexion with her, another

group of the circumstances of country life. As with all the other

episodes of the story, there are here also local variations,

traditions of various favourites of the goddess at different places,

of whom grammarians can tell us, finally obscured behind the greater

fame of Triptolemus of Eleusis. One might fancy, at first, that

Triptolemus was a quite Boeotian divinity, of the ploughshare. Yet

we know that the thoughts of the Greeks concerning the culture of the

earth from which they came, were most often noble ones; and if we

examine carefully the works of ancient art which represent him, the

second thought will suggest itself, that there was nothing clumsy or

coarse about this patron of the plough--something, rather, of the

movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and his chariot. And

this finer character is explained, if, as we are justified in doing,

we bring him into closest connexion with that episode, so full of a

strange mysticism, of the Nursing of Demophoon, in the Homeric hymn.

For, according to some traditions, none other [107] than Triptolemus

himself was the subject of that mysterious experiment, in which

Demeter laid the child nightly, in the red heat of the fire; and he

lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, not wholly divine, yet, as

Shakspere says, a "nimble spirit," feeling little of the weight of

the material world about him--the element of winged fire in the clay.

The delic