A Book of Myths
came to him, like a draught of wine to a warrior spent in battle, an
imperial vision of the sons of men through all the aeons to come,
combatting all evils of body and of soul, going on conquering and to
conquer. Thus, saved by Hope, the Titan and the woman faced the
future, and for them the vengeance of the gods was stayed.
"Yet I argue not
Against Heav'n's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward."
So spoke Milton, the blind Titan of the seventeenth century; and
Shakespeare says:
"True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings."
Upon the earth, and on the children of men who were as gods in their
knowledge and mastery of the force of fire, Jupiter had had his
revenge. For Prometheus he reserved another punishment. He, the
greatly-daring, once the dear friend and companion of Zeus himself,
was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus by the vindictive deity.
There, on a dizzy height, his body thrust against the sun-baked rock,
Prometheus had to endure the torment of having a foul-beaked vulture
tear out his liver, as though he were a piece of carrion lying on the
mountain side. All day, while the sun mercilessly smote him and the
blue sky turned from red to black before his pain-racked eyes, the
torture went on. Each night, when the filthy bird of prey that worked
the will of the gods spread its dark wings and flew back to its eyrie,
the Titan endured the cruel mercy of having his body grow whole once
more. But with daybreak there came again the silent shadow, the smell
of the unclean thing, and again with fierce beak and talons the
vulture greedily began its work.
Thirty thousand years was the time of his sentence, and yet Prometheus
knew that at any moment he could have brought his torment to an end. A
secret was his--a mighty secret, the revelation of which would have
brought him the mercy of Zeus and have reinstated him in the favour of
the all-powerful god. Yet did he prefer to endure his agonies rather
than to free himself by bowing to the desires of a tyrant who had
caused Man to be made, yet denied to Man those gifts that made him
nobler than the beasts and raised him almost to the heights of the
Olympians. Thus for him the weary centuries dragged by--in suffering
that knew no respite--in endurance that the gods might have ended.
Prometheus had brought an imperial gift to the men that he had made,
and imperially he paid the penalty.
"Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire.
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!"
Shelley.
"Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless."
Byron.
"Yet, I am still Prometheus, wiser grown
By years of solitude,--that holds apart
The past and future, giving the soul room
To search into itself,--and long commune
With this eternal silence;--more a god,
In my long-suffering and strength to meet
With equal front the direst shafts of fate,
Than thou in thy faint-hearted despotism ...
Therefore, great heart, bear up! thou art but type
Of what all lofty spirits endure that fain
Would win men back to strength and peace through love:
Each hath his lonely peak, and on each heart
Envy, or scorn or hatred tears lifelong
With vulture beak; yet the high soul is left;
And faith, which is but hope grown wise, and love
And patience, which at last shall overcome."
Lowell.
PYGMALION
In days when the world was young and when the gods walked on the
earth, there reigned over the island of Cyprus a sculptor-king, and
king of sculptors, named Pygmalion. In the language of our own day, we
should call him "wedded to his art." In woman he only saw the bane of
man. Women, he believed, lured men from the paths to which their
destiny called them. While man walked alone, he walked free--he had
given no "hostages to fortune." Alone, man could live for his art,
could combat every danger that beset him, could escape, unhampered,
from every pitfall in life. But woman was the ivy that clings to the
oak, and throttles the oak in the end. No woman, vowed Pygmalion,
should ever hamper him. And so at length he came to hate women, and,
free of heart and mind, his genius wrought such great things that he
became a very perfect sculptor. He had one passion, a passion for his
art, and that sufficed him. Out of great rough blocks of marble he
would hew the most perfect semblance of men and of women, and of
everything that seemed to him most beautiful and the most worth
preserving.
When we look now at the Venus of Milo, at the Diana of Versailles, and
at the Apollo Belvidere in the Vatican, we can imagine what were the
greater things that the sculptor of Cyprus freed from the dead blocks
of marble. One day as he chipped and chiselled there came to him,
like the rough sketch of a great picture, the semblance of a woman.
How it came he knew not. Only he knew that in that great mass of pure
white stone there seemed to be imprisoned the exquisite image of a
woman, a woman that he must set free. Slowly, gradually, the woman
came. Soon he knew that she was the most beautiful thing that his art
had ever wrought. All that he had ever thought that a woman _should_
be, this woman was. Her form and features were all most perfect, and
so perfect were they, that he felt very sure that, had she been a
woman indeed, most perfect would have been the soul within. For her he
worked as he had never worked before. There came, at last, a day when
he felt that another touch would be insult to the exquisite thing he
had created. He laid his chisel aside and sat down to gaze at the
Perfect Woman. She seemed to gaze back at him. Her parted lips were
ready to speak--to smile. Her hands were held out to hold his hands.
Then Pygmalion covered his eyes. He, the hater of women, loved a
woman--a woman of chilly marble. The women he had scorned were
avenged.
Day by day his passion for the woman of his own creation grew and
grew. His hands no longer wielded the chisel. They grew idle. He would
stand under the great pines and gaze across the sapphire-blue sea, and
dream strange dreams of a marble woman who walked across the waves
with arms outstretched, with smiling lips, and who became a woman of
warm flesh and blood when her bare feet touched the yellow sand, and
the bright sun of Cyprus touched her marble hair and turned it into
hair of living gold. Then he would hasten back to his studio to find
the miracle still unaccomplished, and would passionately kiss the
little cold hands, and lay beside the little cold feet the presents he
knew that young girls loved--bright shells and exquisite precious
stones, gorgeous-hued birds and fragrant flowers, shining amber, and
beads that sparkled and flashed with all the most lovely combinations
of colour that the mind of artist could devise. Yet more he did, for
he spent vast sums on priceless pearls and hung them in her ears and
upon her cold white breast; and the merchants wondered who could be
the one upon whom Pygmalion lavished the money from his treasury.
To his divinity he gave a name--"Galatea"; and always on still nights
the myriad silver stars would seem to breathe to him "Galatea" ... and
on those days when the tempests blew across the sandy wastes of Arabia
and churned up the fierce white surf on the rocks of Cyprus, the very
spirit of the storm seemed to moan through the crash of waves in
longing, hopeless and unutterable--"Galatea!... Galatea!..." For her
he decked a couch with Tyrian purple, and on the softest of pillows he
laid the beautiful head of the marble woman that he loved.
So the time wore on until the festival of Aphrodite drew near. Smoke
from many altars curled out to sea, the odour of incense mingled with
the fragrance of the great pine trees, and garlanded victims lowed and
bleated as they were led to the sacrifice. As the leader of his
people, Pygmalion faithfully and perfectly performed all his part in
the solemnities and at last he was left beside the altar to pray
alone. Never before had his words faltered as he laid his petitions
before the gods, but on this day he spoke not as a sculptor-king, but
as a child who was half afraid of what he asked.
"O Aphrodite!" he said, "who can do all things, give me, I pray you,
one like my Galatea for my wife!"
"Give me my Galatea," he dared not say; but Aphrodite knew well the
words he would fain have uttered, and smiled to think how Pygmalion at
last was on his knees. In token that his prayer was answered, three
times she made the flames on the altar shoot up in a fiery point, and
Pygmalion went home, scarcely daring to hope, not allowing his
gladness to conquer his fear.
The shadows of evening were falling as he went into the room that he
had made sacred to Galatea. On the purple-covered couch she lay, and
as he entered it seemed as though she met his eyes with her own;
almost it seemed that she smiled at him in welcome. He quickly went up
to her and, kneeling by her side, he pressed his lips on those lips of
chilly marble. So many times he had done it before, and always it was
as though the icy lips that could never live sent their chill right
through his heart, but now it surely seemed to him that the lips were
cold no longer. He felt one of the little hands, and no more did it
remain heavy and cold and stiff in his touch, but lay in his own hand,
soft and living and warm. He softly laid his fingers on the marble
hair, and lo, it was the soft and wavy burnished golden hair of his
desire. Again, reverently as he had laid his offerings that day on
the altar of Venus, Pygmalion kissed her lips. And then did Galatea,
with warm and rosy cheeks, widely open her eyes, like pools in a dark
mountain stream on which the sun is shining, and gaze with timid
gladness into his own.
There are no after tales of Pygmalion and Galatea. We only know that
their lives were happy and that to them was born a son, Paphos, from
whom the city sacred to Aphrodite received its name. Perhaps Aphrodite
may have smiled sometimes to watch Pygmalion, once the scorner of
women, the adoring servant of the woman that his own hands had first
designed.
PHAETON
"The road, to drive on which unskilled were Phaeton's hands."
Dante--_Purgatorio_.
To Apollo, the sun-god, and Clymene, a beautiful ocean-nymph, there
was born in the pleasant land of Greece a child to whom was given the
name of Phaeton, the Bright and Shining One. The rays of the sun
seemed to live in the curls of the fearless little lad, and when at
noon other children would seek the cool shade of the cypress groves,
Phaeton would hold his head aloft and gaze fearlessly up at the brazen