The Crown of Wild Olive
them, so far as they _are_ clear; and you should always accurately
ascertain the state of your mind about them. I want you never to read
merely for the pleasure of fancy; still less as a formal religious duty
(else you might as well take to repeating Paters at once; for it is
surely wiser to repeat one thing we understand, than read a thousand
which we cannot). Either, therefore, acknowledge the passages to be, for
the present, unintelligible to you; or else determine the sense in which
you at present receive them; or, at all events, the different senses
between which you clearly see that you must choose. Make either your
belief, or your difficulty, definite; but do not go on, all through your
life, believing nothing intelligently, and yet supposing that your
having read the words of a divine book must give you the right to
despise every religion but your own. I assure you, strange as it may
seem, our scorn of Greek tradition depends, not on our belief, but our
disbelief, of our own traditions. We have, as yet, no sufficient clue to
the meaning of either; but you will always find that, in proportion to
the earnestness of our own faith, its tendency to accept a spiritual
personality increases: and that the most vital and beautiful Christian
temper rests joyfully in its conviction of the multitudinous ministry of
living angels, infinitely varied in rank and power. You all know one
expression of the purest and happiest form of such faith, as it exists
in modern times, in Richter's lovely illustrations of the Lord's Prayer.
The real and living death-angel, girt as a pilgrim for journey, and
softly crowned with flowers, beckons at the dying mother's door;
child-angels sit talking face to face with mortal children, among the
flowers;--hold them by their little coats, lest they fall on the
stairs;--whisper dreams of heaven to them, leaning over their pillows;
carry the sound of the church bells for them far through the air; and
even descending lower in service, fill little cups with honey, to hold
out to the weary bee. By the way, Lily, did you tell the other children
that story about your little sister, and Alice, and the sea?
LILY. I told it to Alice, and to Miss Dora. I don't think I did to
anybody else. I thought it wasn't worth.
L. We shall think it worth a great deal now, Lily, if you will tell it
us. How old is Dotty, again? I forget.
LILY. She is not quite three; but she has such odd little old ways,
sometimes.
L. And she was very fond of Alice?
LILY. Yes; Alice was so good to her always!
L. And so when Alice went away?
LILY. Oh, it was nothing, you know, to tell about; only it was strange
at the time.
L. Well; but I want you to tell it.
LILY. The morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless
when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she
could find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie
gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great,
deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked
round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and
Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hands through the
water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! send little Alie
back to me.'
L. Isn't that pretty, children? There's a dear little heathen for you!
The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal
being in the elemental power;--of its being moved by prayer;--and of its
presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred.
Now, remember, the measure in which we may permit ourselves to think of
this trusted and adored personality, in Greek, or in any other,
mythology, as conceivably a shadow of truth, will depend on the degree
in which we hold the Greeks, or other great nations, equal, or inferior,
in privilege and character, to the Jews, or to ourselves. If we believe
that the great Father would use the imagination of the Jew as an
instrument by which to exalt and lead him; but the imagination of the
Greek only to degrade and mislead him: if we can suppose that real
angels were sent to minister to the Jews and to punish them; but no
angels, or only mocking spectra of angels, or even devils in the shapes
of angels, to lead Lycurgus and Leonidas from desolate cradle to
hopeless grave:--and if we can think that it was only the influence of
spectres, or the teaching of demons, which issued in the making of
mothers like Cornelia, and of sons like Cleobis and Bito, we may, of
course, reject the heathen Mythology in our privileged scorn: but, at
least, we are bound to examine strictly by what faults of our own it has
come to pass, that the ministry of real angels among ourselves is
occasionally so ineffectual, as to end in the production of Cornelias
who entrust their child-jewels to Charlotte Winsors for the better
keeping of them; and of sons like that one who, the other day, in
France, beat his mother to death with a stick; and was brought in by the
jury, 'guilty, with extenuating circumstances.'
MAY. Was that really possible?
L. Yes, my dear. I am not sure that I can lay my hand on the reference
to it (and I should not have said 'the other day'--it was a year or two
ago), but you may depend on the fact; and I could give you many like it,
if I chose. There was a murder done in Russia, very lately, on a
traveller. The murderess's little daughter was in the way, and found it
out, somehow. Her mother killed her, too, and put her into the oven.
There is a peculiar horror about the relations between parent and child,
which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of
European white slavery. Here _is_ one reference, I see, in my notes on
that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly
for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but
it is a good instance of the power of the King of the Valley of
Diamonds[153] among us.
In 'Galignani' of July 21-22, 1862, is reported a trial of a farmer's
son in the department of the Yonne. The father, two years ago, at Malay
le Grand, gave up his property to his two sons, on condition of being
maintained by them. Simon fulfilled his agreement, but Pierre would not.
The tribunal of Sens condemns Pierre to pay eighty-four francs a year to
his father. Pierre replies, 'he would rather die than pay it.' Actually,
returning home, he throws himself into the river, and the body is not
found till next day.
MARY. But--but--I can't tell what you would have us think. Do you
seriously mean that the Greeks were better than we are; and that their
gods were real angels?
L. No, my dear. I mean only that we know, in reality, less than nothing
of the dealings of our Maker with our fellow-men; and can only reason or
conjecture safely about them, when we have sincerely humble thoughts of
ourselves and our creeds.
We owe to the Greeks every noble discipline in literature; every radical
principle of art; and every form of convenient beauty in our household
furniture and daily occupations of life. We are unable, ourselves, to
make rational use of half that we have received from them: and, of our
own, we have nothing but discoveries in science, and fine mechanical
adaptations of the discovered physical powers. On the other hand, the
vice existing among certain classes, both of the rich and poor, in
London, Paris, and Vienna, could have been conceived by a Spartan or
Roman of the heroic ages only as possible in a Tartarus, where fiends
were employed to teach, but not to punish, crime. It little becomes us
to speak contemptuously of the religion of races to whom we stand in
such relations; nor do I think any man of modesty or thoughtfulness will
ever speak so of any religion, in which God has allowed one good man to
die, trusting.
The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished
convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever
is right in them will become: and no error is so conclusively fatal as
the idea that God will not allow _us_ to err, though He has allowed all
other men to do so. There may be doubt of the meaning of other visions,
but there is none respecting that of the dream of St. Peter; and you may
trust the Rock of the Church's Foundation for true interpreting, when he
learned from it that, 'in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh
righteousness, is accepted with Him.' See that you understand what that
righteousness means; and set hand to it stoutly: you will always measure
your neighbors' creed kindly, in proportion to the substantial fruits of
your own. Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into
the faith of others, and to sympathise, in imagination, with the guiding
principles of their lives. So only can you justly love them, or pity
them, or praise. By the gracious effort you will double, treble--nay,
indefinitely multiply, at once the pleasure, the reverence, and the
intelligence with which you read: and, believe me, it is wiser and
holier, by the fire of your own faith to kindle the ashes of expired
religions, than to let your soul shiver and stumble among their graves,
through the gathering darkness, and communicable cold.
MARY (_after some pause_). We shall all like reading Greek history so
much better after this! but it has put everything else out of our heads
that we wanted to ask.
L. I can tell you one of the things; and I might take credit for
generosity in telling you; but I have a personal reason--Lucilla's verse
about the creation.
DORA. Oh, yes--yes; and its 'pain together, until now.'
L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old error
of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of 'Modern Painters,' I said
that the earth seemed to have passed through its highest state: and
that, after ascending by a series of phases, culminating in its
habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually becoming less fit for
that habitation.
MARY. Yes, I remember.
L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the gradual
perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew in the
physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might have
attributed to loss of sensation in myself--but by violent and definite
physical action; such as the filling up of the Lac de Chede by landslips
from the Rochers des Fiz;--the narrowing of the Lake Lucerne by the
gaining delta of the stream of the Muotta-Thal, which, in the course of
years, will cut the lake into two, as that of Brientz has been divided
from that of Thun;--the steady diminishing of the glaciers north of the
Alps, and still more, of the sheets of snow on their southern slopes,
which supply the refreshing streams of Lombardy:--the equally steady
increase of deadly maremma round Pisa and Venice; and other such
phenomena, quite measurably traceable within the limits even of short
life, and unaccompanied, as it seemed, by redeeming or compensatory
agencies. I am still under the same impression respecting the existing
phenomena; but I feel more strongly, every day, that no evidence to be
collected within historical periods can be accepted as any clue to the
great tendencies of geological change; but that the great laws which
never fail, and to which all change is subordinate, appear such as to
accomplish a gradual advance to lovelier order, and more calmly, yet
more deeply, animated Rest. Nor has this conviction ever fastened itself
upon me more distinctly, than during my endeavour to trace the laws
which govern the lowly framework of the dust. For, through all the
phases of its transition and dissolution, there seems to be a continual
effort to raise itself into a higher state; and a measured gain, through