Part 17

Wagner showed his wisdom when he left her alone in her glory, and made no attempt to introduce that other Iseult of Brittany, who certainly interferes with any conception of Tristram as the most faithful of lovers. “And for because that Sir Tristram had such cheer and riches, and all other pleasures that he had, almost he had forsaken La Beale Isoud. And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud les Blanches Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage,” But this is far too natural and unheroic for the nineteenth century; and poor Iseult the Second fares ill at the hands of our poets—excepting Matthew Arnold who, with unwonted chivalry, has taken up the cause of this distressed damsel (this “snowdrop by the sea,” whose own brother forsook her for her namesake), and made of her one of those meek, motherly, sweet little women, who are ready to forgive any one they love anything; and who, too weak either to make or mar the lives with which they come in contact, yet hold their own by the power of that clinging, lasting devotedness, which is all their innocent natures let them know of passion. Very sweet is his picture of her, standing in her gorgeous robes by the chimney-piece with the firelight flickering on her white face and her white hands, and her jewelled clasp, ready to vanish gracefully the moment her rival enters; and it is with a gentle feeling of regret that we lose sight of her at last, wandering on the seashore with her children, while she tells them the old story of Merlin and Vivien to beguile the weary hours of her widowhood. Here and here only the pure, white-handed maiden-wife bears away the palm from the old Iseult of Tristram’s dreams, with

Her proud, dark eyes, And her petulant, quick replies;

and we rather resent her intrusion than welcome her, when she comes back to nurse him, very repentant indeed, like a sort of queenly Sister of Mercy. His dying request is also a great innovation:

Close mine eyes, then seek the princess Iseult; Speak her fair, she is of royal blood! Say, I charged her, that thou stay beside me— She will grant it; she is kind and good.

The hero of “the last tournament” is a very different being. Of all those who have told the story, Tennyson alone seems to have looked upon Tristram as thoroughly base and unworthy. Such a knight as this, so rough, licentious, and wanting in courtesy, could never have been Launcelot’s second; and indeed Tennyson lays no stress whatever on the strong friendship which existed between them—so strong that neither would ever wittingly harm any relation or friend of the other. As Wagner has made the legend a symbol of that strife between man, his passions, and his circumstances, which is the complex motive of our latest tragedy,—as Matthew Arnold has drawn from it the lesson, that quiet and neglected lives often do more to make the world lovely than great and brilliant ones (a lesson which chivalry would never have found there),—so Tennyson has made it a symbol of that degradation of the whole nature, which follows the conscious surrender of the spirit to the flesh, and has drawn from it the lesson that the very happiness of partners in guilt is tainted with bitterness and turns to ashes in their mouths. Nowhere else is there such a sharp contrast implied between Launcelot, the sinner who repented and was given time for repentance, and Tristram, the sinner who repented not and was cut off in the midst of his sin. There is a great gulf between them, across which they do not even join their hands.

Iseult stands in much the same relation to Guinevere; she is coarser, more ironical, free from any feeling of remorse; but she surpasses Tristram as Launcelot surpasses Guinevere, in “faith unfaithful,” and one has a strong compassion for her in her lonely home, looking out over the wild sea, with that stealthy spy of a husband, dogging her every footstep. How full of compressed, dramatic force the last lines are!

He rose, he turn’d, then, flinging round her neck, Claspt it; and cried “Thine Order, O my Queen!” But while he bow’d to kiss the jewel’d throat, Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch’d, Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek— “Mark’s way,” said Mark, and clove him through the brain.

Not so has Swinburne read the character. His Tristram of Lyonesse is once more the free, open-handed, light-hearted hero, or rather he would be if he had not inevitably contracted some of the _Zeit-Geist_, its weariness, its languor, its power of analysis. His gaiety is not spontaneous—his song is as labored as if he had had to send it up for an examination; his love is over-heavy with its own sweetness. The long-drawn, honied lines drag on and on through pages of description, till we almost long for a rough, dissonant note to break the eternal, soft, alliterative hissing and kissing. But Iseult bears the wealth of jewelled epithets lavished upon her, and it is easy enough to understand them when we are under the spell of her fascination, or when she is finely contrasted with the cruel, cold-blooded Iseult of Brittany, who in her jealous anger kills her husband, by telling him that the sails of the ship which is bringing his love to him are black instead of white, so that he thinks she has refused to come:

And fain he would have raised himself and seen And spoken, but strong death struck sheer between, And darkness closed as iron round his head, And smitten through the heart lay Tristan dead.

So there he lies. But he may yet be born again, and fight, and love, and die, for who knows what shall be in the days to come, or to what ancient songs the houses of our children’s children may echo? It may be there is yet a further interpretation of the riddle, the outlines of which we cannot even guess; and that the two Iseults may come to like each other. Things even more strange than this have happened. It was said that out of Tristram’s grave there grew an eglantine, which turned itself around Iseult’s; and although it was cut three times by order of the king, the eglantine was ever fair and fresh. By this time it has grown into a mighty tree, and, for all we know, it has not done growing yet.—_Merry England._

OLD MYTHOLOGY IN NEW APPAREL.

BY J. THEODORE BENT.

We are generally accustomed to consider mythology as a bygone episode of _juventus mundi_; it may seem at first sight strange to realize that what we have read of in Homer exists to-day. But so it is, and the following facts collected during lengthened tours in remote corners of Greece will prove, I hope, that the mystic beings of classical Greece are present now, when the world is supposed to be growing old. All my instances are from the islands of the Ægean Sea, the Cyclades and the Sporades, where communication with the outer world has never been great, and over which the various waves of Goths, Italians, Turks, which in a measure destroyed the identity of continental Greece, had, comparatively speaking, slight influence, and that only in the towns near the coast, whereas up in the mountains of Naxos, Amorgos, &c., pure Greek blood still flows.

Here the mythology of their ancestors is deeply ingrained in the inhabitants, both in the ritual of their Church, and in their manners and customs; the ritual, indeed, of the Eastern Church is but an intellectual adaptation under Christian guidance of the problems propounded by the later philosophers to the popular doctrines of polytheism.

I was in the island of Keos, or Zia, one of the Cyclades, when the idea of forming this collection struck me, and it was on the occasion of being told that here St. Artemidos is considered as the patron saint of weakly children. The church dedicated to this saint is some little way from the town on the hill slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say; she then strips off its clothes, and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite for the church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unconscious that she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis. The Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake.

About these Nereids, too, we hear much in modern Greece, and they have the properties of many of our mythological friends, those of Keos, for example, are supposed to live on cliffs and in trees; if a man sleeps under the shadow of a cliff or tree, and is taken with a cold sweat, they say “the goddess of the tree has injured him,” and accordingly to appease her they spread on the place a clean white cloth, and put on it new-made bread, a plate with honey, another with sweetmeats, a bottle of good wine, a knife and fork and an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and an incense pot; an old woman utters some mystic words, and then all go away, “that the Nereids may eat and the sufferer regain his health.” We have here a ceremony very like that anciently performed at Athens to appease the Eumenides when a banquet was laid near the caves they were supposed to haunt, of which honey and milk were the necessary ingredients.

The Nereids in many cases correspond to the nymphs of antiquity; they preside over healing streams, and they wash in them at night when the waters sleep, and no one at that time dares to approach for fear of becoming frenzied (νυμφόληπτος).

The cloak of Phœbus Apollo has fallen on the prophet Elias. As of old temples on all the highest hills of the islands are dedicated to the sun-god; the reason is obvious. Ἡλιος, the sun deity (the _h_ not being aspirated), at once suggested Elias to the easily accommodating divines, and to all intents and purposes the prophet supplies the place of the sun-god of antiquity. Prophet Elias has power over rain; in times of drought people assemble in crowds in his church to pray for rain, and in this he has the attribute of ὄμβριος or ὑέτιος Ζεῦς. When it thunders they say the prophet is driving in his chariot in pursuit of demons.

To pass on to another analogy. There is a curious parallel between St. Anarguris, the patron saint in some parts of flocks and herds, and the god Pan of ancient days. On the island of Thermià (Κύθνος) I saw a church dedicated to St. Anarguris built over the mouth of a cavern, as the protecting saint of the place, instead of Pan, the ancient god of grottos. But a still more marked instance of the continuation of Pan worship occurs to-day on Keos at the little church of St. Anarguris, at a remote hamlet called 'στὸ μακρινὸ. Whenever an ox is ailing they take it to this church and pray for its recovery; if the cock crows when they start, or they hear the voice of a man or the grunt of a pig, there is every hope that the animal will be cured; but on the contrary, if they hear a cat, a dog, or a woman, it is looked upon as an evil omen. When at the church of St. Anarguris they solemnly register a vow that if the ox recovers they will present it to the saint when its days of work are over; accordingly, every year on the 1st of July, the day on which they celebrate the feast of St. Anarguris, numbers of aged oxen may be seen on the road to this church, where they are slaughtered on the threshold and the flesh distributed amongst the poor.

St. Nicholas, again, is the lineal descendant of Poseidon; he is the sailor’s god. Wherever in ancient times there existed a temple to the honor of Poseidon we now find an insignificant white-washed edifice dedicated to St. Nicholas. This is especially noticeable at Tenos, where was in antiquity the famous shrine and feast of Poseidon. On this island the chief town is now called St. Nicholas, and hither yearly assemble to worship thousands of Greeks from all parts of the world before a miracle-working shrine. Modern priestcraft, in short, has cleverly arranged that Tenos should be the modern Delos where the topic of independent panhellenism can be freely discussed.

Everything nautical has to do with St. Nicholas; in Mykenos a little church built on a rock out in the harbor is dedicated to him; another on the sea shore at Paros is dedicated to Ἅγιος Νικόλαος Θαλασσίτης; his picture, or εἰκὼν is painted on the inside of crabs’ backs, which are gilded outside and worshipped. In nautical songs St. Nicholas is always alluded to as the inventor of the rudder, and is represented as seated at the helm, whilst Christ sits at the prow and the Virgin in the middle. In a storm sailors call on him for assistance, as the ancients did on the Dioscouri, whom they thought to have power to allay storms direct from Poseidon himself.

We always find St. Dionysius as the successor of Dionysos in the Christian ritual. The island of Naxos was a chief centre of the worship of the wine-loving god in antiquity; and a fable about St. Dionysius, still told in the islands and on the mainland, clearly points to the continuity of the myth. It is as follows:—

St. Dionysius was on his way one day from his monastery on Mount Olympus to Naxos, and he sat down to rest during the heat of the day. Close to him he saw a pretty plant which he wished to take with him, and, lest it should wither by the way, he put it into the leg bone of a bird, and to his surprise at his next halting-place he found it had sprouted; so, accordingly, he put it into the leg bone of a lion, and the same thing occurred; finally, he put it into the leg of an ass, and in reaching Naxos he found the plant so rooted in the bones that he planted them altogether. And up came a vine, from the fruit of which he made the first wine, a little of which made the saint sing like a bird, a little more made him strong as a lion, and yet a little more made him as foolish as an ass.

At Melos they have a curious feast which recalls a Bacchic revelry. Every landowner who wishes to plant a vineyard calls together, on a certain day, fifty or more men, when church is over; to these he gives a spade apiece, and slaughters some goats and fills skins with wine. Then they all start off together to their work, preceded by a standard-bearer holding a white banner. In the field they eat the food, drink the wine, and plant the vineyard, all in the space of one day, and return home again, most of them in a decided state of intoxication. This is followed by a dance and further revelry in front of the church, which doubtless the village priest will hallow with his presence. The Greeks, taken as a whole, are a sober race, but on certain occasions and festivals it is almost a religious duty to drink heavily. In the island of Paros there actually exists a church dedicated to the drunken St. George, whose feast-day is on the 3rd of November. The priest thereof, in answer to my inquiries about this strange name, remarked that the 3rd of November is the anniversary of St. George’s burial, and then the inhabitants usually tap their new-made wine and get drunk; but why they should on such a solemn occasion speak of Ἅγιος ΓἍοργιος μεθύστης I could not divine, unless we take into account the hereditary tendency of the Greeks to deify passions.

A curious instance of the survival of the mythical Titans I met at Chios, at the southern point of which island exists a colossal white rock; this the natives told me was a stone which Samson had once hurled against God, and it had fallen here. But of all the myths of antiquity which exist to-day none is more marked than the belief in Charon, the Styx, and Hades. In Thermià they believe that in Charon’s infernal kingdom are lamps which represent the life of men, and when each man’s lamp is extinguished for want of oil he will die.

A Greek peasant looks upon death quite differently from what a peasant of the western world is taught to believe. To him it is the end of all joy and gladness; the songs over his body (myriologues) speak of the black earth, the end of light and brilliancy. A popular Klephtic song on the death of Zedros, when read by the side of Sophocles’ description of the death of Ajax, shows how curiously alike are the ideas of death as painted in the two poems. Charon is still believed to be a white-haired old man with long and fearful nails, and in myriologues or lamentations, which are still of every-day occurrence in the islands, you actually hear of Charon’s caïque. He is now spoken of as Charos. I had been told that, in some parts of Greece they still put money on the mouth of a deceased person to pay the passage (ναὗλον). I sought in vain for instances of it in the islands; but one day, whilst attending a child’s funeral in a mountain village of Naxos, I saw a wax cross put on the childs’ mouth by the priest, and on inquiry I was told it was the ναὗλον, _i.e._, freight money—so completely has the Eastern Church incorporated into itself the ancient ideas.

In a popular song I have heard Charon spoken of as a “bird like unto a black swallow,” which compares curiously with the passage in the twenty-second _Odyssey_, where Athena is represented as sitting on the roof of the palace at Ithaca like a swallow, on the day of vengeance for Penelope’s suitors.

It will be apparent from the above remarks that at the time of the change of religion from paganism to Christianity, names were given to saints to supply wants felt by the abandonment of polytheism. There are many instances of this. For example, St. Eleutherius is the saint called upon by women in childbirth to deliver them; deaf people are recommended to consult St. Jacob (Ἄκουφος as he is called, κουφος—deaf), and in Lesbos I was told that St. Therapon could heal all manner of diseases. In the same way young married people who wish for a numerous progeny chose St. Polycarp as their patron saint, so that they may have many teeth in their house, as the saying goes (πολὺ 'δοντια 'στὸ σπίτι).

St. Charalambos is, however, the Æsculapius of modern days. He used to hold jurisdiction over the plague, and is represented as a hideous wizard, trampling under foot a serpent with smoke issuing out of its mouth; and in fever-stricken, marshy districts St. Charalambos still reigns supreme. In many places it is the custom on the outbreak of a pestilence for forty women to make a garment in one day, which is hung up in the saint’s church. For instance, at Zephyria, the mediæval capital of the island of Melos, which was abandoned altogether about twenty years ago as unfit to live in, I visited the ruins, and in the centre of them saw still standing the church of St. Charalambos, and an old man, who happened to be picking his olives there at the time, told me the history of the desolation, and the methods they used to resort to when he was young to rid the place of disease; how they used to bury heifers whole; and how they used to fasten up illnesses in a cauldron—that is to say, they wrote down the names of the various maladies on paper, and boiled them in a cauldron with some money and a cock in front of the shrine of the modern Æsculapius. But in vain; the town had to be abandoned, for it had been cursed by a priest, and never could hope to recover salubrity.

It is a very common custom for Greek peasants to pass the night in a church of St. Charalambos with a view to cure an ailment; at festivals too, near miraculous _eikons_, such as the one at Tenos, the invalids pass whole nights in the church, reminding one forcibly of that ridiculous scene in Aristophanes (Plut. vv. 655) when the priests stole the food from the invalids who were asleep in the temple of Æsculapius, and we can easily see in this custom a mild form of the ancient ἐγκοίμησις when the sick folks lay down in the skin of a newly killed ram in the churches, and in this luxurious couch awaited the inspiration of the divinity.

The quackeries and incantations common in Greece to-day as specifics for certain diseases are many of them very quaint, being long rhymes and formulas mixing up Christ, the Virgin, and saints with magic words and signs which savour of heathendom. It is the old women only who are supposed to know them, and they are very shy of producing them before a foreign unbeliever. They are just like those women who in ancient Athens practised quackery and secret cures, which were zealously guarded and kept up as specialities in families. Curiously enough these old women in Greece who profess to cure diseases will tell you, arguing from the analogy of plants, that all diseases are worms, which consume the body, and that they are generated by the wrath of the gods. They have arrived at the bacillus theory by much straighter reckoning than our physicians.

On the day of the commemoration of the dead I was in a small village in Amorgos, and there witnessed the quaint ceremony of κόλλυβα. Every house on this occasion sends to the church a plate of boiled corn; tottering old women with one foot in the grave generally bring it, and pour the contents into a large basket placed before the high altar whilst the service is going on, and then into the mass of corn they stick a candle, and if the family is especially grand they have separate plates with sesame seeds, or adorned with patterns of raisins and almonds. After the service is over the boiled corn and other delicacies are distributed amongst the poor outside the church. These offerings are very suggestive of the ancient idea of Demeter and her daughter.

We will now consider another branch of mythology—the fickle goddesses, the Fates (Μοῖρα), whose workings in modern Greece are looked upon with as much superstition as of old. On the island of Sikinos I attended an interesting ceremony called the μοίρισμα of a child, which happens a year after its birth. All the friends and relatives are gathered together to a feast. A tray is brought out, and on it are put various objects—a pen, money, tools, an egg, &c., and whichever the infant first touches with its hands is held to be the indication of the μοῖρα as to the most suitable career to be chosen for it. The meaning of the first-mentioned articles is obvious. The demarch of Sikinos told me that his son had touched a pen, consequently he had been sent to the university at Athens, and had there distinguished himself, but the meaning of the egg is not quite so clear, and the egg is the horror of all parents, for if the child touches it he will be fitted for no calling in life—he will be a good-for-nothing, a mere duck’s egg, so to speak, in society.

Some ceremony such as this must have been the one alluded to by Apollodorus when he tells us that seven days after the birth of Meleager the Fates told the horologue of the child, and the torch was lighted on the hearth. In some places still the seventh day is chosen as the one for this important ceremony, and it is called ἑφτὰ. When it is dark and the lamps lighted a table is put in the middle of the house, a basin full of honey in the centre of the table, and all round quantities of food. Numerous oil lamps are then lighted; one dedicated to Christ, another to the Virgin, another to the Baptist, and so forth. A symbol of faith is then read and deep silence prevails, and the saint whose lamp is first extinguished is chosen as the protector of the infant. At this moment they say the Fates come in and “κάλομοιραζουσι” the child, and take some of the food from the table.