Part 2

MARGARET agreed, and said that the pride of knowledge which he would find in the world should he appear, would be a greater obstacle than superstition once was.

Did somebody say a little while ago that Will indomitable was born of obstacle?

MARGARET told William White that Coleridge had once said that he could neither measure nor understand Plato’s ignorance! His mind had not reached that altitude!

HENRY HEDGE, not willing to forego the possible birth of Genius, asked if all the experience and discovery with which the world had been enriched since Plato’s time would not furnish enough for the new-comer to act upon?

MARGARET replied that the mind could not receive unless excited. She must go through all the intellectual experience of a Plato, to be as great as he; but she might stand upon the general or even her own intuitive recognition of the truths he had advanced, and go forward to greater results,—but still that would not be to make herself greater.

But, said MRS. RIPLEY, in the first case you would be nothing _but_ Plato.

MARGARET acceded, but begged not to be understood as doubting that the future would be capable of finer things than the past.

The ideal significance of the Mythology was further dwelt upon, and much was said of the contrast between the thought of the priest and the worship of the people. It was acknowledged as a matter of course, that only a few preserved any consciousness of the original significance of the Mythology.

HENRY HEDGE thought that this was the true key to the purpose of the Eleusinian mysteries, whether in Egypt where they originated, or in Greece where they were introduced. Through them, all who chose became initiated into the interior meaning of the Mythology.

CHARLES WHEELER added, that in the flourishing times of the Athenian Republic every citizen was compelled to initiate himself.

MARGARET closed our talk with a gentle reproof to our wandering wits. To prevent such desultory prattling, she desired that a subject should be proposed for the next evening. The story of Ceres or Rhea, in fact the Productive Energy however manifested, carried general favor, and Margaret said archly that she had thought the presence of gentlemen (who had never until now attended one of her talks) would prevent the wandering and keep us free from prejudice!

I thought she was rightly disappointed.

I cannot recall the words, but at some time this evening Margaret distinguished three mythological dynasties. The first was the reign of the Natural Powers. The second, represented by Jupiter, Pluto, and Neptune, stood for the height, the depth, and the surface or flow of things, the first manifestations of human consciousness. The third was the Bacchic, Bacchus not being yet, in her estimation, the vulgar God of the wine-vat and the festival, but the inspired Genius,—being to Apollo, as she said, what the nectar is to the grape.

CAROLINE W. HEALEY.

March 2, 1841.

II.

_March 8, 1841._

Margaret recapitulated the statements she made last week. By thus giving to each fabled Deity its place in the scheme of Mythology, she did not mean to ignore the enfolding ideas, the one thought developed in all—as in Rhea, Bacchus, Pan. She would only imply that each personification was individual, served a particular purpose, and was worshipped in a particular way.

Before proceeding to talk about Ceres, she wished to remind us of the mischief of wandering from our subject. She hoped the ground she offered would be accepted _at least to talk about_! Certainly no one could deny that a mythos was the last and best growth of a national mind, and that in this case the characteristics of the Greek mind were best gathered from this creation.

Ceres, Persephone, and Isis, as well as Rhea, Diana, and so on, seem to be only modifications of one enfolding idea,—a goddess accepted by all nations, and not peculiar to Greece. The pilgrimages of the more prominent of these goddesses, Ceres and Isis, seem to indicate the life which loses what is dear in childhood, to seek in weary pain for what after all can be but half regained. Ceres regained her daughter, but only for half the year. Isis found her husband, but dismembered. This era in Mythology seems to mark the progress of a people from an unconscious to a conscious state. Persephone’s periodical exile shows the impossibility of resuming an unconsciousness from which we have been once aroused, the need thought has, having once felt the influence of the Seasons, to retire into itself.

CHARLES WHEELER reminded Margaret that she had said that the predominant goddesses, without reference to Greece, enfolded only one idea, that of the female _Will_ or _Genius_,—_the bounteous giver_. He had asked her if she could sustain herself by etymological facts, and she replied that her knowledge of the Greek was not critical enough. Since then he had inquired into the origin of the proper names of the Greek deities, and found that it confirmed her impression. The names of Rhea, Tellus, Isis, and Diana were resolvable into one, and the difference in their etymology was only a common and permissible change in the position of the letters of which they are composed, or a mere provincial dialectic change. Diana is the same as Dione, also one of the names of Juno.

E. P. P. asked if Homer ever confounded the last two? MARGARET thought not. Homer was purely objective. He knew little and cared less about the primitive creation of the myths.

R. W. EMERSON thought it would be very difficult to detect this secret. Jupiter, for instance, might have been a man who was the exponent of Will to his race.

MARGARET said, “No; they could have deduced him just as easily from Nature herself, or from a single exhibition of will power.”

R. W. EMERSON said that a man like Napoleon would easily have suggested it.

“What a God-send is a Napoleon!” exclaimed CHARLES WHEELER; “let us pray for scores of such, that a new and superior mythos may arise for us!” Is it malicious to suspect a subtle irony turned against the sacred person of R. W. E. in this speech?

MARGARET retorted indignantly that if they came, _we_ should do nothing better than write memoirs of their hats, coats, and swords, as we had done already, without thinking of any lesson they might teach. She could not see why we were not content to take the beautiful Greek mythi as they were, without troubling ourselves about those which might arise for us!

R. W. E. acknowledged that the Greeks had a quicker perception of the beautiful than we. Their genius lay in the material expression of it. If we knew the real meaning of the names of their Deities, the story would take to flight. We should have only the working of abstract ideas as we might adjust them for ourselves.

MARGARET said that a fable was more than a mere word. It was a word of the purest kind rather, the passing of thought into form. R. W. E. had made no allowance for time or space or climate, and there was a want of truth in that. The age of the Greeks was the age of Poetry; ours was the age of Analysis. _We_ could not create a Mythology.

EMERSON asked, “Why not? We had still better material.”

MARGARET said, irrelevantly as it seemed to me, that Carlyle had attempted to deduce new principles from present history, and that was the reason he did not _respect_ the _respectable_.

EMERSON said Carlyle was unfortunate in his figures, but we might have mythology as beautiful as the Greek.

MARGARET thought each age of the world had its own work to do. The transition of thought into form marked the Greek period. It was most easily done through fable, on account of their intense perception of beauty.

EMERSON pursued his own train of thought. He seemed to forget that we had come together to pursue Margaret’s. He said it was impossible that men or events should _stand out_ in a population of twenty millions as they could from a population of a single million, to which the whole population of the ancient world could hardly have amounted. As Hercules stood to Greece, no modern man could ever stand in relation to his own world.

MARGARET thought Hercules and Jupiter quite different creations. The first _might_ have been a deified life. The second could not.

CHARLES WHEELER said that R. W. E.’s view carried no historical obligation of belief with it. We could not deny the heroic origin of the Greek demigods, but the highest dynasty was the exponent of translated thought.

SOPHIA RIPLEY asked if the life of an individual fitly interwoven with her experience was not as fine a Poem as the story of Ceres, her wanderings and her tears? Did not Margaret know such lives?

R. W. E. thought every man had probably met his Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Venus, or Ceres in society!

MARGARET was sure she never had!

R. W. E. explained: “Not in the world, but each on his own platform.”

WILLIAM STORY objected. The life of an individual was not universal. (!)

SOPHIA RIPLEY repeated, “The inner life.”

WILLIAM STORY claimed to be an individual, and did not think individual experience could ever meet all minds,—like the story of Ceres, for example.

SOPHIA said all experience was universal.

I said nothing, but held this colloquy with myself. Thought is the best of human nature; its fulness urges expression: its need of being met, not only by _one_ other but by every other, _craves_ it. This craving is the acknowledgment of the universal experience. What is _purely_ individual is perishable. _Identity_ is to be separated from individuality for this cause.

MARGARET said the element of beauty would be wanting to our creations. A fine emotion glowed through features which seem to fall like a soft veil over the soul, while it could scarce do more than animate those that were obtuse and coarse in every outline. (!)

“Then,” said WILLIAM STORY, and my heart thanked the _preux chevalier_,—“then something is wanting in the emotion itself.”

WILLIAM WHITE said, stupidly, that sunlight could not fall with equal charm on rocks and the green grass. (!)

I asked if the rock could not give what it did not receive? Flung back by rugged points and relieved by dark shadows, was not the sunlight itself transfigured?

STORY said every face had its own beauty. No act that was natural could be ungraceful.

EMERSON said that we all did sundry graceful acts, in our caps and tunics, which we never could do again, which we never wanted to do again.

MARGARET said, at last we had touched the point. We could not restore the childhood of the world, but could we not admire this simple plastic period, and gather from it some notion of the Greek genius?

R. W. E. thought this legitimate. He would have it that we could not determine the origin of a mythos, but we might fulfil Miss Fuller’s intention.

MARGARET said history reconciled us to life, by showing that man had redeemed himself. Genius needed that encouragement.

Not _Genius_, SOPHIA RIPLEY thought; common natures needed it, but Genius was self-supported.

MARGARET said it might be the consolation of Genius.

MRS. RUSSELL asked why Miss Fuller found so much fault with the present.

MARGARET _had_ no fault to find with it. She took facts as they were. Every age did something toward fulfilling the cycle of mind. The work of the Greeks was not ours.

SOPHIA RIPLEY asked if the mythology had been a prophecy of the Greek mind to itself, or if the nation had experienced life in any wide or deep sense.

MARGARET seemed a little out of patience, and no wonder! She said it did not matter which. The question was, what could _we find_ in the mythi, and what did the Greeks mean that we should find there. Coleridge once said that certain people were continually saying of Shakespeare, that he did not mean to impart certain spiritual meanings to some of his sketches of life and character; but if Shakespeare did not mean it his Genius did: so if the Greeks meant not this or that, the Greek genius meant it.

In relation to the progress of the ages, JAMES F. CLARKE said that the story of Persephone concealed in the bowels of the earth for half the year seemed to him to indicate something of their comparative states. Persephone was the seed which must return to earth before it could fructify. Thought must retire into itself before it can be regenerate.

MARGARET was pleased with this, more especially as in the story of the Goddess it is eating the pomegranate, whose seed is longest in germinating, which dooms her to the realm of Pluto.

GEORGE RIPLEY remarked that we saw this need of withdrawal in the slothful ages when mind seemed to be imbibing energy for future action. The world sometimes forsook a quest and returned to it. We had forsaken Beauty, but we might return to it.

Certainly, MARGARET assented. A perfect mind would detect all beauty in the hearth-rug at her feet: the meanest part of creation contained the whole; but the labor we were now at to appreciate the Greek proved conclusively that _we_ were not Greek. A simple plastic nature would take it all in with delight, without doubt or question.

Or rather, amended EMERSON, would take it up and go forward with it.

It makes no difference, said MARGARET, for we live in a circle.

I did not think it pleasant to track and retrack the same arc, and preferred to go forward with R. W. E., so I asked if there was to be no _higher_ poetry.

MARGARET acknowledged that there was something beyond the aspiration of the Egyptian or the poetry of the Greek.

GEORGE RIPLEY thought we had not lost all reverence for these abstract forces. The Eleusinian mysteries might be forgotten, but not Ceres. We did not worship in ignorance. The mysteries led back to the Infinite. The processes of vegetation were actually heart-rending! Here, _I_ thought, was a basis for my higher poetry.

GEORGE RIPLEY acknowledged that it was so. He seemed to be more conscious of the movement of the world than any of our party. He said we must not measure creation by Boston and Washington, as we were too apt to do. There was still France, Germany, and Prussia,—perhaps Russia! The work of this generation was not religious nor poetic; still, there was a tendency to go back to both. There were to be ultraisms, but also, he hoped, consistent development.

CHARLES WHEELER then related the story of Isis, of her hovering in the form of a swallow round the tree in which the sarcophagus of Osiris had been enclosed by Typhon; of her being allowed to fell the tree; of the odor emitted by the royal maidens whom she touched, which revealed her Divinity to the Queen; of the second loss of the body, as she returned home, and its final dismemberment.

There was little success in spiritualizing more of this story than the pilgrimage, and R. W. E. seemed to feel this; for when MARGARET had remarked that even a divine force must become as the birds of the air to compass its ends, and that it was in the carelessness of conscious success that the second loss occurred, he said that it was impossible to detect an inner sense in all these stories.

MARGARET replied, that she had not attempted that, but she could see it in all the prominent points.

CHARLES WHEELER said that the varieties of anecdote proved that the stories were not all authentic. It was an ancient custom to strike off medals in honor of certain acts of the Gods. To these graven pictures the common people gave their own vulgar interpretations, as they did also to the bas-reliefs on their temples and monuments.

E. P. P. said this accounted for many of the stories transmitted by Homer. When sculpture and architecture had lost their meaning, his inventive genius was only the more stimulated to find one.

CHARLES WHEELER asked what Margaret would make of the story that the tears of Isis frightened children to death?

There was a general laugh, but MARGARET said coolly, that children always shrank from a baffled hope.

Some one contrasted Persephone with her mother.

MARGARET assented to whatever was said, and added that she had been particularly struck with it in an engraving she had recently seen, in which Ceres stood with lifted eyes, full-eyed, matronly, bounteous, ready to give all to all, while Persephone, dejected and thoughtful, sat meditating; and the idea was strengthened by her discovering that Persephone was the same as Ariadne the deserted. I could only guess at the remark by Margaret’s comment. It seemed to imply baffled hope for Persephone.

The Eleusinian mysteries were now alluded to. Although it has been said that only moral precepts were inculcated through these, WHEELER urged that a whole school of Continental authors now acknowledged that the higher doctrines of philosophy were taught.

R. W. E. added, that as initiation became more easy such instruction must have degenerated into a mere matter of form, and many of the _un_initiated surpass the initiated in wisdom.

MARGARET admitted this. Socrates was one of the uninitiated. The crowd seldom felt the full force of beauty in Art or Literature. To prove it, it was only necessary to walk once through the Hall of Sculpture at the Athenæum, and catch the remarks of any half-dozen on Michael Angelo’s “Day and Night.” He would be fortunate who heard a single observer comment on its power.

MRS. RUSSELL asked why the images of the sun and moon were introduced into these mysterious celebrations.

MARGARET asked impatiently why they had always been invoked by every child who could string two rhymes together.

I said that if Ceres was the simple _agricultural_ productive energy, of course the sun was her first minister, its genial influence being as manifest as the energy itself.

In regard to the etymology of the proper names, it seemed reasonable to me that this energy should have gained attributes as it did names. Any nation devoted to the chase would learn to call the lunar deity Diana; any devoted to the cultivation of grain would project her as Ceres. The reproductive powers of flocks and herds would suggest Rhea or Juno, and philosophy or art would invoke Persephone.

When we were talking about beauty, J. F. C. quoted Goethe, and said that the spirit sometimes made a mistake and clothed itself in the wrong garment.

C. W. HEALEY.

March 9, 1841.

III.

The third conversation was delayed by Margaret’s illness, and finally took place—

_March 19, 1841._

MARGARET again complained that we wandered from the subject, and told the following story from Novalis.

Imagine a room, on one side of it Eros and Fable at play. On the other, before a marble slab on which rests a vase of pure water, sits a fair woman named Sophia. Her head rests upon her hand. Between her and the children sits a man of reverend age, before a table at which he writes whatever has been or is. This is History; and as he finishes each sheet he hands it to Sophia, who dips it in the vase of pure water, from which it often emerges a perfect blank. Sometimes a few lines, at others a few words, sometimes only a punctuation mark, survive the test. This troubles the old man. At last he rises and leaves the room. Fable springs to his vacant seat, and scribbles as if in play till his return, when History reproves her for wasting the paper, and passes the sheet to Sophia, when, lo! it comes out from her vase unchanged. Fable has borne the test of Truth. History is enraged at this, and succeeds in driving both Sophia and Fable from their home, unfairly. Sophia is driven away, but the child escapes by a back door, and, becoming bewildered in the central caverns of the Earth, falls into the power of the Fates.

These respectable old ladies find the little Fable very troublesome, and, after some scolding, send her away to spin, when, lo! from the recesses of the cavern all sorts of wonders and strange shapes are spun out. The Fates are frightened, and they seek History to learn in what manner they may best rid themselves of the intruder. However much they may dislike her, she is under their protection, and History can do no more than advise them to send her out to catch Tarantulas! Fable departs and meets Eros, who gives her a lyre, upon which she plays, and the venomous insects swarm about her. The Fates behold her return unharmed! They had hoped she would be stung to death, and in despair Ate throws her scissors at the child, who gracefully avoids them. Hereupon the Tarantulas sting the Fates in the feet, at which they begin to dance. As their clothes are thick and heavy, this is rather inconvenient exercise, and when Fable laughs at their distress they send her away to spin them some thin dresses. Fable is tired of wandering. She plays upon her lyre to the Tarantulas, bidding them spin, and she will give them three large flies. When the dresses are done, she carries them immediately to the Fates, who begin again to dance. The ends of the threads are still in the bodies of the Tarantulas, who do not like to be jerked about. “Behold the flies which I promised you,” said Fable.

Thereupon the Tarantulas fall upon the dancing Fates, and a new dynasty commences, in which Eros reigns, with Fable for prime minister.

MARGARET said that in the story she had told she had set us the example of wandering from the subject, but she hoped to some purpose. She hoped no one would have need to call upon little Fable’s body-guard of Tarantulas.

The subject of the evening was Apollo in contrast with Ceres, or Genius opposed to Productive Energy. The history of Apollo stood for the history of thought, its progressive development and its unhappiness. All the loves of Apollo are miserable. He never labors for himself. He uses the instruments which others have shaped. He is so delighted with the lyre, which Mercury, that is Sagacity, has made, that he gives him the divining-rod, and would give him more, but he cannot. The earnest simplicity with which Apollo begs Mercury to swear by the sacred Styx not to steal his quiver or his darts is beautiful! The common understanding, mere human sagacity, may indeed lay hands on the weapons of the Inspired One, but it cannot possess them. The ray, the dart, the quiver, of Apollo all stand for the instantaneous power of thought.

Delphi did not originally belong to Apollo. With the aid of Bacchus, he wrested it from Terra, Neptune, and Themis; hence the name “Delphi,” or “The brothers.” This is only another instance of his independence. All things are made to his hand. The great contrast between Ceres and Apollo lies in the success of each. Ceres is always full, always prepared to meet the call of humanity. Apollo is always unsatisfied. He transmutes whatever he touches, as he did one of his many loves, changed to a bay-tree. His changes are always beautiful.

JAMES F. CLARKE asked how Margaret would explain the fraternal relation between Bacchus and Apollo.

“Don’t you remember?” she retorted. “I don’t like to repeat it, it is so smart and ingenious!” Apollo and Bacchus seemed to her the question and the response. Bacchus was what the earth yielded to the touch of Genius. The grape was genial. It typified the excess of the earth’s fruitfulness. Bacchus avenges the wrongs of Apollo, who is said never to have seen a shadow! He never perceives an obstacle, but instantly destroys an alien nature. Whatever opposed Apollo met with terrible retribution,—if not from himself, then from others. Genius cannot endure the presence of anything that mocks at it.

CHARLES WHEELER said something about the flaying of Marsyas.

MARGARET said that this once seemed to her the most shocking of cruelties, but she had lately seen a picture which reconciled her to the deed! After looking at the self-complacent face of Marsyas, she did not wonder that Apollo destroyed him. She longed to _see him do it_! Apollo was never indignant at any sublime treachery. He forgave Mercury his theft because it was god-like, because he did it so well.

MRS. RUSSELL said ironically that the destruction of the children of Niobe must have been a gratifying sight.