Part 6

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. 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 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 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 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!

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 delicate, fresh, farm-lad we may still actually see sometimes, like a graceful field-flower among the corn, becomes, in the sacred legend of agriculture, a king's son; and then, the fire having searched out from him the grosser elements on that famous night, all compact now of spirit, a priest also, administering the gifts of Demeter to all the earth. Certainly, the extant works of art which represent him, gems or vase-paintings, conform truly enough to this ideal of a "nimble spirit," though he wears the broad country hat, which Hermes also wears, going swiftly, half on the airy, mercurial wheels of his farm instrument, harrow or plough--half on wings of serpents--the worm, symbolical of the soil, but winged, as sending up the dust committed to it, after subtle firing, in colours and odours of fruit and flowers. It is an altogether sacred character, again, that he assumes in another precious work, of the severer period of Greek art, lately discovered at Eleusis, and now preserved in the museum of Athens, a singularly refined bas-relief, in which he stands, a firm and serious youth, between Demeter and Persephone, who places her hand as with some sacred influence, and consecrating gesture, upon him.

But the house of the prudent countryman will be, of course, a place of honest manners; and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of married life, the deity of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the founder of civilised order. The peaceful homes of men, scattered about the land, in their security--Demeter represents these fruits of the earth also, not without a suggestion of the white cities, which shine upon the hills above the waving fields of corn, seats of justice and of true kingship. She is also in a certain sense the patron of travellers, having, in her long wanderings after Persephone, recorded and handed down those omens, caught from little things--the birds which crossed her path, the persons who met her on the way, the words they said, the things they carried in their hands, einodia symbola+--by noting which, men bring their journeys to a successful end; so that the simple countryman may pass securely on his way; and is led by signs from the goddess herself, when he travels far to visit her, at Hermione or Eleusis.

So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are similar. In the mythical conception, as in the religious acts connected with it, the mother and the daughter are almost interchangeable; they are the two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office of Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detached from her, going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third part of the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is the summer- time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the earth; but the summer as bringing winter; the flowery splendour and consummated glory of the year, as thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its end, as the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in the threefold division of the Greek year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus--the king's blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear--of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds every spring-time--of the English Sleeping Beauty. From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the goddess of night and sleep and death, confuseable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight terrors--Korê arrêtos,+ the mother of the Erinnyes, who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approaching death, upbraiding him because he had made no hymn in her praise, which swan's song he thereupon began, but finished with her. She is a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, respectively. A duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone, runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity: hence the many euphemisms of later language concerning her.

The "worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were never "sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty, permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities; and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the "worship of sorrow" was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a matter, at first sight painful and strange.

The student of origins, as French critics say, of the earliest stages of art and poetry, must be content to follow faint traces; and in what has been here said, much may seem to have been made of little, with too much completion, by a general framework or setting, of what after all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications. Yet there is a certain cynicism too, in that over-positive temper, which is so jealous of our catching any resemblance in the earlier world to the thoughts that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is content to find no seal of human intelligence upon them. Slight indeed in themselves, these fragmentary indications become suggestive of much, when viewed in the light of such general evidence about the human imagination as is afforded by the theory of "comparative mythology," or what is called the theory of "animism." Only, in the application of these theories, the student of Greek religion must never forget that, after all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theological belief or dogma, that he has to do. As regards this story of Demeter and Persephone, what we actually possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture; and with a curiosity, justified by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-people, with which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our knowledge. The abstract poet of that first period of mythology, creating in this wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way,--the abstract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; and, in speaking of this poetical age, we must take heed, before all things, in no sense to misconstrue the poets.

NOTES

94. +Transliteration: epainê Persephonê. Translation: "dread Persephone." See, for example, Odyssey, Book 10.490 and 563.

94. +"According to the apparent import of her name"; Pater likely refers to the etymology of "Persophone"--"bringer of destruction."

95. *Theogony, 912-14:

+Transliteration:

Autar ho Dêmêtros polyphorbês es lechos êlthen ê teke Persephonên leukôlenon, hên Aidôneus hêrpasen hês para mêtros, edôke de mêtieta Zeus.

+Translation: "And he came to bountiful Demeter’s bed, / and she gave birth to white-armed Persephone, whom Aidoneus / took from her mother’s side; but Zeus, wise counsellor, gave her to him." Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Theogony. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press. London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.

103. *In the Homeric hymn, pre-eminently, of the flower which grew up for the first time, to snare the footsteps of Kore, the fair but deadly Narcissus, the flower of narkê, the numbness of death.

108. +Transliteration: einodia symbola. Translation: "signs along the roadside."

110. +Transliteration: Korê arrêtos. Translation: "Korê the mysterious, the horrible ."

THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: II

THE stories of the Greek mythology, like other things which belong to no man, and for which no one in particular is responsible, had their fortunes. In that world of floating fancies there was a struggle for life; there were myths which never emerged from that first stage of popular conception, or were absorbed by stronger competitors, because, as some true heroes have done, they lacked the sacred poet or prophet, and were never remodelled by literature; while, out of the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct of poetry and art, came the little pictures, the idylls, of the Homeric hymn, and the gracious imagery of Praxiteles. The myth has now entered its second or poetical phase, then, in which more definite fancies are grouped about the primitive stock, in a conscious literary temper, and the whole interest settles round the images of the beautiful girl going down into the darkness, and the weary woman who seeks her lost daughter--divine persons, then sincerely believed in by the majority of the Greeks. The Homeric hymn is the central monument of this second phase. In it, the changes of the natural year have become a personal history, a story of human affection and sorrow, yet with a far-reaching religious significance also, of which the mere earthly spring and autumn are but an analogy; and in the development of this human element, the writer of the hymn sometimes displays a genuine power of pathetic expression. The whole episode of the fostering of Demophoon, in which over the body of the dying child human longing and regret are blent so subtly with the mysterious design of the goddess to make the child immortal, is an excellent example of the sentiment of pity in literature. Yet though it has reached the stage of conscious literary interpretation, much of its early mystical or cosmical character still lingers about the story, as it is here told. Later mythologists simply define the personal history; but in this hymn we may, again and again, trace curious links of connexion with the original purpose of the myth. Its subject is the weary woman, indeed, our Lady of Sorrows, the mater dolorosa of the ancient world, but with a certain latent reference, all through, to the mystical person of the earth. Her robe of dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also the blue robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it in Titian's landscapes; her great age is the age of the immemorial earth; she becomes a nurse, therefore, holding Demophoon in her bosom; the folds of her garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense of Eleusis, but with the natural perfume of flowers and fruit. The sweet breath with which she nourishes the child Demophoon, is the warm west wind, feeding all germs of vegetable life; her bosom, where he lies, is the bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat, reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinise too closely its secret chemistry; it is with the earth's natural surface of varied colour that she has, "in time past, given pleasure to the sun"; the yellow hair which falls suddenly over her shoulders, at her transformation in the house of Celeus, is still partly the golden corn;--in art and poetry she is ever the blond goddess; tarrying in her temple, of which an actual hollow in the earth is the prototype, among the spicy odours of the Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit of the earth, lying hidden in its dark folds until the return of spring, among the flower-seeds and fragrant roots, like the seeds and aromatic woods hidden in the wrappings of the dead. Throughout the poem, we have a sense of a certain nearness to nature, surviving from an earlier world; the sea is understood as a person, yet is still the real sea, with the waves moving. When it is said that no bird gave Demeter tidings of Persephone, we feel that to that earlier world, ways of communication between all creatures may have seemed open, which are closed to us. It is Iris who brings to Demeter the message of Zeus; that is, the rainbow signifies to the earth the good-will of the rainy sky towards it. Persephone springing up with great joy from the couch of Aidoneus, to return to her mother, is the sudden outburst of the year. The heavy and narcotic aroma of spring flowers hangs about her, as about the actual spring. And this mingling of the primitive cosmical import of the myth with the later, personal interests of the story, is curiously illustrated by the place which the poem assigns to Hecate. This strange Titaness is, first, a nymph only; afterwards, as if changed incurably by the passionate cry of Persephone, she becomes her constant attendant, and is even identified with her. But in the Homeric hymn her lunar character is clear; she is really the moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone, as the sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her away. One morning, as the mother wandered, the moon appeared, as it does in its last quarter, rising very bright, just before dawn; that is, in the words of the Homeric hymn--"on the tenth morning Hecate met her, having a light in her hands." The fascinating, but enigmatical figure, "sitting ever in her cave, half-veiled with a shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts," in which we seem to see the subject of some picture of the Italian Renaissance, is but the lover of Endymion-- like Persephone, withdrawn, in her season, from the eyes of men. The sun saw her; the moon saw her not, but heard her cry, and is ever after the half-veiled attendant of the queen of dreams and of the dead.

But the story of Demeter and Persephone lends itself naturally to description, and it is in descriptive beauties that the Homeric hymn excels; its episodes are finished designs, and directly stimulate the painter and the sculptor to a rivalry with them. Weaving the names of the flowers into his verse, names familiar to us in English, though their Greek originals are uncertain, the writer sets Persephone before us, herself like one of them--kalykôpis+--like the budding calyx of a flower,--in a picture, which, in its mingling of a quaint freshness and simplicity with a certain earnestness, reads like a description of some early Florentine design, such as Sandro Botticelli's Allegory of the Seasons. By an exquisite chance also, a common metrical expression connects the perfume of the newly-created narcissus with the salt odour of the sea. Like one of those early designs also, but with a deeper infusion of religious earnestness, is the picture of Demeter sitting at the wayside, in shadow as always, with the well of water and the olive-tree. She has been journeying all night, and now it is morning, and the daughters of Celeus bring their vessels to draw water. That image of the seated Demeter, resting after her long flight "through the dark continent," or in the house of Celeus, when she refuses the red wine, or again, solitary, in her newly-finished temple of Eleusis, enthroned in her grief, fixed itself deeply on the Greek imagination, and became a favourite subject of Greek artists. When the daughters of Celeus come to conduct her to Eleusis, they come as in a Greek frieze, full of energy and motion and waving lines, but with gold and colours upon it. Eleusis--coming--the coming of Demeter thither, as thus told in the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in Greek mythology of such divine appearances. "She leaves for a season the company of the gods and abides among men;" and men's merit is to receive her in spite of appearances. Metaneira and others, in the Homeric hymn, partly detect her divine character; they find charis+;--a certain gracious air--about her, which makes them think her, perhaps, a royal person in disguise. She becomes in her long wanderings almost wholly humanised, and in return, she and Persephone, alone of the Greek gods, seem to have been the objects of a sort of personal love and loyalty. Yet they are ever the solemn goddesses,--theai semnai,+ the word expressing religious awe, the Greek sense of the divine presence.