Chapter XIX: Amiel 432 (7)

This is why the man of imagination—nay, and the philosopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him—will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church; because of the rich treasures of human life which have been stored within her pale. The mention of other religious bodies, or of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the thought of men of a definite type as their adherents; the mention of Catholicism suggests no such special following. Anglicanism suggests the English episcopate; Calvin’s name suggests Dr. Candlish; Chalmers’s, the Duke of Argyll; Channing’s, Boston society; but Catholicism suggests,—what shall I say?—all the pell-mell of the men and women of Shakspeare’s plays. This abundance the Abbé Migne’s collection faithfully reflects. People talk of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their life with only one; for my part I think I would choose the Abbé Migne’s collection. _Quicquid agunt homines_,—everything, as I have said, is there. Do not seek in it splendor of form, perfection of editing; its paper is common, its type ugly, its editing indifferent, its printing careless. The greatest and most baffling crowd of misprints I ever met in my life occurs in a very important page of the introduction to the _Dictionnaire des Apocryphes_. But this is just what you have in the world,—quantity rather than quality. Do not seek in it impartiality, the critical spirit; in reading it you must do the criticism for yourself; it loves criticism as little as the world loves it. Like the world, it chooses to have things all its own way, to abuse its adversary, to back its own notion through thick and thin, to put forward all the _pros_ for its own notion, to suppress all the _contras_; it does just all that the world does, and all that the critical shrinks from. Open the _Dictionnaire des Erreurs Sociales_: “The religious persecutions of Henry the Eighth’s and Edward the Sixth’s time abated a little in the reign of Mary, to break out again with new fury in the reign of Elizabeth.” There is a summary of the history of religious persecution under the Tudors! But how unreasonable to reproach the Abbé Migne’s work with wanting a criticism, which, by the very nature of things, it cannot have, and not rather to be grateful to it for its abundance, its variety, its infinite suggestiveness, its happy adoption, in many a delicate circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man of the world, instead of the acrid tone and temper of the fanatic!

Still, in spite of their fascinations, the contents of this collection sometimes rouse the critical spirit within one. It happened that lately, after I had been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times, I took down the _Dictionnaire des Origines du Christianisme_, to see what it had to say about paganism and pagans. I found much what I expected. I read the article, _Révélation Évangélique, sa Nécessité_. There I found what a sink of iniquity was the whole pagan world; how one Roman fed his oysters on his slaves, how another put a slave to death that a curious friend might see what dying was like; how Galen’s mother tore and bit her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. I found this account of the religion of paganism: “Paganism invented a mob of divinities with the most hateful character, and attributed to them the most monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, sensuality, knavery, cruelty, and rage.” And I found that from this religion there followed such practice as was to be expected: “What must naturally have been the state of morals under the influence of such a religion, which penetrated with its own spirit the public life, the family life, and the individual life of antiquity?”

The colors in this picture are laid on very thick, and I for my part cannot believe that any human societies, with a religion and practice such as those just described, could ever have endured as the societies of Greece and Rome endured, still less have done what the societies of Greece and Rome did. We are not brought far by descriptions of the vices of great cities, or even of individuals driven mad by unbounded means of self-indulgence. Feudal and aristocratic life in Christendom has produced horrors of selfishness and cruelty not surpassed by the grandee of pagan Rome; and then, again, in antiquity there is Marcus Aurelius’s mother to set against Galen’s. Eminent examples of vice and virtue in individuals prove little as to the state of societies. What, under the first emperors, was the condition of the Roman poor upon the Aventine compared with that of our poor in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green? What, in comfort, morals, and happiness, were the rural population of the Sabine country under Augustus’s rule, compared with the rural population of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire under the rule of Queen Victoria?

But these great questions are not now for me. Without trying to answer them, I ask myself, when I read such declamation as the foregoing, if I can find anything that will give me a near, distinct sense of the real difference in spirit and sentiment between paganism and Christianity, and of the natural effect of this difference upon people in general. I take a representative religious poem of paganism,—of the paganism which all the world has in its mind when it speaks of paganism. To be a representative poem, it must be one for popular use, one that the multitude listens to. Such a religious poem may be at the end of one of the best and happiest of Theocritus’s idylls, the fifteenth. In order that the reader may the better go along with me in the line of thought I am following, I will translate it; and, that he may see the medium in which religious poetry of this sort is found existing, the society out of which it grows, the people who form it and are formed by it, I will translate the whole, or nearly the whole, of the idyll (it is not long) in which the poem occurs.

The idyll is dramatic. Somewhere about two hundred and eighty years before the Christian era, a couple of Syracusan women, staying at Alexandria, agreed on the occasion of a great religious solemnity,—the feast of Adonis,—to go together to the palace of King Ptolemy Philadelphus, to see the image of Adonis, which the queen Arsinoe, Ptolemy’s wife, had had decorated with peculiar magnificence. A hymn, by a celebrated performer, was to be recited over the image. The names of the two women are Gorgo and Praxinoe; their maids, who are mentioned in the poem, are called Eunoe and Eutychis. Gorgo comes by appointment to Praxinoe’s house to fetch her, and there the dialogue begins:—

_Gorgo._—Is Praxinoe at home?

_Praxinoe._—My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Eunoe, find a chair,—get a cushion for it.

_Gorgo._—It will do beautifully as it is.

_Praxinoe._—Do sit down.

_Gorgo._—Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoe, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you really live _too_ far off.

_Praxinoe._—It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place,—for a house it is not,—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbors. He is always just the same; anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!

_Gorgo._—My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. Never mind, Zopyrio, my pet, she is not talking about papa.

_Praxinoe._—Good heavens! the child does really understand.

_Gorgo._—Pretty papa!

_Praxinoe._—That pretty papa of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead;—stupid, great, big, interminable animal!

_Gorgo._—Mine is just the fellow to him.... But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.

_Praxinoe._—In grand people’s houses everything is grand. What things you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to anybody who has never been here!

_Gorgo._—Come, we ought to be going.

_Praxinoe._—Every day is holiday to people who have nothing to do. Eunoe, pick up your work; and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that, extravagant! Now pour out the water;—stupid! why don’t you take care of my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here;—quick!

_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost?—the dress by itself, I mean.

_Praxinoe._—Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it I have almost worn my life out.

_Gorgo._—Well, you couldn’t have done better.

_Praxinoe._—Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head;—properly. No, child (_to her little boy_), I am not going to take you; there’s a bogy on horseback, who bites. Cry as much as you like; I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse, take the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street-door. (_They go out._) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? here are the royal Horse Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoe, you mad girl, do take care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home!

_Gorgo._—All right, Praxinoe, we are safe behind them; and they have gone on to where they are stationed.

_Praxinoe._—Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon us.

_Gorgo_ (_to an old woman_).—Mother, are you from the palace?

_Old Woman._—Yes, my dears.

_Gorgo._—Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?

_Old Woman._—My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.

_Gorgo._—The old creature has delivered herself of an oracle and departed.

_Praxinoe._—Women can tell you everything about everything, Jupiter’s marriage with Juno not excepted.

_Gorgo._—Look, Praxinoe, what a squeeze at the palace gates!

_Praxinoe._—Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoe, take hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoe! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress!

_Stranger._—I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.

_Praxinoe._—What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.

_Stranger._—Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.

_Praxinoe._—May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There is Eunoe jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride.

_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is!—how exquisite! Why, they might wear it in heaven.

_Praxinoe._—Heavenly patroness of needlewomen, what hands were hired to do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real;—as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis,—Adonis, whom one loves even though he is dead!

_Another Stranger._—You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter! Like turtles, you go on forever. They are enough to kill one with their broad lingo—nothing but _a, a, a_.

_Gorgo._—Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we _are_ chatterboxes? Order about your own servants! Do you give orders to Syracusan women? If you want to know, we came originally from Corinth, as Bellerophon did; we speak Peloponnesian. I suppose Dorian women may be allowed to have a Dorian accent.

_Praxinoe._—Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no more masters than the one we’ve got! We don’t the least care for _you_; pray don’t trouble yourself for nothing.

_Gorgo._—Be quiet, Praxinoe! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman’s daughter, is going to sing the _Adonis_ hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from _her_. She is going through her airs and graces ready to begin.—

So far the dialogue; and, as it stands in the original, it can hardly be praised too highly. It is a page torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom! What animation! What gaiety! What naturalness! It is said that Theocritus, in composing this poem, borrowed from a work of Sophron, a poet of an earlier and better time; but, even if this is so, the form is still Theocritus’s own, and how excellent is that form, how masterly! And this in a Greek poem of the decadence!—for Theocritus’s poetry, after all, is poetry of the decadence. When such is Greek poetry of the decadence, what must be Greek poetry of the prime?

Then the singer begins her hymn:—

“Mistress, who loveth the haunts of Golgi, and Idalium, and high-peaked Eryx, Aphrodite that playest with gold! how have the delicate-footed Hours, after twelve months, brought thy Adonis back to thee from the ever-flowing Acheron! Tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours, but all mankind wait their approach with longing, for they ever bring something with them. O Cypris, Dione’s child! thou didst change—so is the story among men—Berenice from mortal to immortal, by dropping ambrosia into her fair bosom; and in gratitude to thee for this, O thou of many names and many temples! Berenice’s daughter, Arsinoe, lovely Helen’s living counterpart, makes much of Adonis with all manner of braveries.

“All fruits that the tree bears are laid before him, all treasures of the garden in silver baskets, and alabaster boxes, gold-inlaid, of Syrian ointment; and all confectionery that cunning women make on their kneading-tray, kneading up every sort of flowers with white meal, and all that they make of sweet honey and delicate oil, and all winged and creeping things are here set before him. And there are built for him green bowers with wealth of tender anise, and little boy-loves flutter about over them, like young nightingales trying their new wings on the tree, from bough to bough. Oh, the ebony, the gold, the eagle of white ivory that bears aloft his cup-bearer to Cronos-born Zeus! And up there, see! a second couch strewn for lovely Adonis, scarlet coverlets softer than sleep itself (so Miletus and the Samian wool-grower will say); Cypris has hers, and the rosy-armed Adonis has his, that eighteen or nineteen-year-old bridegroom. His kisses will not wound, the hair on his lip is yet light.

“Now, Cypris, good-night, we leave thee with thy bridegroom; but to-morrow morning, with the earliest dew, we will one and all bear him forth to where the waves splash upon the sea-strand, and letting loose our locks, and letting fall our robes, with bosoms bare, we will set up this, our melodious strain:

“‘Beloved Adonis, alone of the demigods (so men say) thou art permitted to visit both us and Acheron! This lot had neither Agamemnon, nor the mighty moon-struck hero Ajax, nor Hector the first-born of Hecuba’s twenty children, nor Patroclus, nor Pyrrhus who came home from Troy, nor those yet earlier Lapithæ and the sons of Deucalion, nor the Pelasgians, the root of Argos and of Pelop’s isle. Be gracious to us now, loved Adonis, and be favorable to us for the year to come! Dear to us hast thou been at this coming, dear to us shalt thou be when thou comest again.’”

The poem concludes with a characteristic speech from Gorgo:—

“Praxinoe, certainly women are wonderful things. That lucky woman to know all that! and luckier still to have such a splendid voice! And now we must see about getting home. My husband has not had his dinner. That man is all vinegar, and nothing else; and if you keep him waiting for his dinner, he’s dangerous to go near. Adieu, precious Adonis, and may you find us all well when you come next year!”

So, with the hymn still in her ears, says the incorrigible Gorgo.

But what a hymn that is! Of religious emotion, in our acceptation of the words, and of the comfort springing from religious emotion, not a particle. And yet many elements of religious emotion are contained in the beautiful story of Adonis. Symbolically treated, as the thoughtful man might treat it, as the Greek mysteries undoubtedly treated it, this story was capable of a noble and touching application, and could lead the soul to elevating and consoling thoughts. Adonis was the sun in his summer and in his winter course, in his time of triumph and his time of defeat; but in his time of triumph still moving towards his defeat, in his time of defeat still returning towards his triumph. Thus he became an emblem of the power of life and the bloom of beauty, the power of human life and the bloom of human beauty, hastening inevitably to diminution and decay, yet in that very decay finding

“Hope, and a renovation without end.”

But nothing of this appears in the story as prepared for popular religious use, as presented to the multitude in a popular religious ceremony. Its treatment is not devoid of a certain grace and beauty, but it has nothing whatever that is elevating, nothing that is consoling, nothing that is in our sense of the word religious. The religious ceremonies of Christendom, even on occasion of the most joyful and mundane matters, present the multitude with strains of profoundly religious character, such as the _Kyrie eleison_ and the _Te Deum_. But this Greek hymn to Adonis adapts itself exactly to the tone and temper of a gay and pleasure-loving multitude,—of light-hearted people, like Gorgo and Praxinoe, whose moral nature is much of the same caliber as that of Phillina in Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_, people who seem never made to be serious, never made to be sick or sorry. And, if they happen to be sick or sorry, what will they do then? But that we have no right to ask. Phillina, within the enchanted bounds of Goethe’s novel, Gorgo and Praxinoe, within the enchanted bounds of Theocritus’s poem, never will be sick and sorry, never can be sick and sorry. The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry. No; yet its natural end is in the sort of life which Pompeii and Herculaneum bring so vividly before us,—a life which by no means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the understanding; but by the very intensity and unremittingness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing and revolting us; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of oppression,—with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion, and relief.

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the clouds and storms had come, when the gay sensuous pagan life was gone, when men were not living by the senses and understanding, when they were looking for the speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in Italy, to the north of Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at the foot of the Apennines, a figure of the most magical power and charm, St. Francis. His century is, I think, the most interesting in the history of Christianity after its primitive age, more interesting than even the century of the Reformation; and one of the chief figures, perhaps the very chief, to which this interest attaches itself, is St. Francis. And why? Because of the profound popular instinct which enabled him, more than any man since the primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought religion to the people. He founded the most popular body of ministers of religion that has ever existed in the Church. He transformed monachism by uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the bondage of property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded haunts of men, to console them and to do them good. This popular instinct of his is at the bottom of his famous marriage with poverty. Poverty and suffering are the condition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority of mankind; and it was towards this _people_ that his soul yearned. “He listens,” it was said of him, “to those to whom God himself will not listen.”

So in return, as no other man he was listened to. When an Umbrian town or village heard of his approach, the whole population went out in joyful procession to meet him, with green boughs, flags, music, and songs of gladness. The master, who began with two disciples, could in his own lifetime (and he died at forty-four) collect to keep Whitsuntide with him, in presence of an immense multitude, five thousand of his Minorites. And thus he found fulfilment to his prophetic cry: “I hear in my ears the sound of the tongues of all the nations who shall come unto us; Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen. The Lord will make of us a great people, even unto the ends of the earth.”

Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made poetry. Latin was too learned for this simple, popular nature, and he composed in his mother tongue, in Italian. The beginnings of the mundane poetry of the Italians are in Sicily, at the court of kings; the beginnings of their religious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are the humble upper waters of a mighty stream; at the beginning of the thirteenth century it is St. Francis, at the end, Dante. Now it happens that St. Francis, too, like the Alexandrian songstress, has his hymn for the sun, for Adonis. _Canticle of the Sun_, _Canticle of the Creatures_,—the poem goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian hymn, it is designed for popular use, but not for use by King Ptolemy’s people; artless in language, irregular in rhythm, it matches with the childlike genius that produced it, and the simple natures that loved and repeated it:—

“O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honor, and all blessing!

“Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light; fair is he, and shining with a very great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us thee!

“Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven.

“Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all creatures.

“Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and clean.

“Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright, and pleasant, and very mighty, and strong.

“Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, and flowers of many colors, and grass.

“Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for his love’s sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for thou, O most Highest, shalt give them a crown!

“Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm.

“Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto him, and serve him with great humility.”

It is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. But it is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery. And when one thinks what human life is for the vast majority of mankind, how little of a feast for their senses it can possibly be, one understands the charm for them of a refuge offered in the heart and imagination. Above all, when one thinks what human life was in the Middle Ages, one understands the charm of such a refuge.

Now, the poetry of Theocritus’s hymn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the senses; the poetry of St. Francis’s hymn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the heart and imagination. The first takes the world by its outward, sensible side; the second by its inward, symbolical side. The first admits as much of the world as is pleasure-giving; the second admits the whole world, rough and smooth, painful and pleasure-giving, all alike, but all transfigured by the power of a spiritual emotion, all brought under a law of super-sensual love, having its seat in the soul. It can thus even say: “Praised be my Lord for _our sister, the death of the body_.”

But these very words are, perhaps, an indication that we are touching upon an extreme. When we see Pompeii, we can put our finger upon the pagan sentiment in its extreme. And when we read of Monte Alverno and the _stigmata_; when we read of the repulsive, because self-caused, sufferings of the end of St. Francis’s life; when we find him even saying, “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” meaning by these words that he had been too hard upon his own body; when we find him assailed, even himself, by the doubt “whether he who had destroyed himself by the severity of his penances could find mercy in eternity,” we can put our finger on the mediæval Christian sentiment in its extreme. Human nature is neither all senses and understanding, nor all heart and imagination. Pompeii was a sign that for humanity at large the measure of sensualism had been overpassed; St. Francis’s doubt was a sign that for humanity at large the measure of spiritualism had been overpassed. Humanity, in its violent rebound from one extreme, had swung from Pompeii to Monte Alverno; but it was sure not to stay there.

The Renascence is, in part, a return towards the pagan spirit, in the special sense in which I have been using the word pagan; a return towards the life of the senses and the understanding. The Reformation, on the other hand, is the very opposite to this; in Luther there is nothing Greek or pagan; vehemently as he attacked the adoration of St. Francis, Luther had himself something of St. Francis in him; he was a thousand times more akin to St. Francis than to Theocritus or to Voltaire. The Reformation—I do not mean the inferior piece given under that name, by Henry the Eighth and a second-rate company, in this island, but the real Reformation, the German Reformation, Luther’s Reformation—was a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense against the carnal and pagan sense; it was a religious revival like St. Francis’s, but this time against the Church of Rome, not within her; for the carnal and pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church of Rome herself, its prime representative. But the grand reaction against the rule of the heart and imagination, the strong return towards the rule of the senses and understanding, is in the eighteenth century. And this reaction has had no more brilliant champion than a man of the nineteenth, of whom I have already spoken; a man who could feel not only the pleasurableness but the poetry of the life of the senses (and the life of the senses has its deep poetry); a man who, in his very last poem, divided the whole world into “barbarians and Greeks,”—Heinrich Heine. No man has reproached the Monte Alverno extreme in sentiment, the Christian extreme, the heart and imagination subjugating the senses and understanding, more bitterly than Heine; no man has extolled the Pompeii extreme, the pagan extreme, more rapturously.

“All through the Middle Age these sufferings, this fever, this over-tension lasted; and we moderns still feel in all our limbs the pain and weakness from them. Even those of us who are cured have still to live with a hospital atmosphere all around us, and find ourselves as wretched in it as a strong man among the sick. Some day or other, when humanity shall have got quite well again, when the body and soul shall have made their peace together, the fictitious quarrel which Christianity has cooked up between them will appear something hardly comprehensible. The fairer and happier generations, offspring of unfettered unions, that will rise up and bloom in the atmosphere of a religion of pleasure, will smile sadly when they think of their poor ancestors, whose life was passed in melancholy abstinence from the joys of this beautiful earth, and who faded away into specters, from the mortal compression which they put upon the warm and glowing emotions of sense. Yes, with assurance, I say it, our descendants will be fairer and happier than we are; for I am a believer in progress, and I hold God to be a kind being who has intended man to be happy.”

That is Heine’s sentiment, in the prime of life, in the glow of activity, amid the brilliant whirl of Paris. I will no more blame it than I blamed the sentiment of the Greek hymn to Adonis. I wish to decide nothing as of my own authority; the great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide. Well, the sentiment of the “religion of pleasure” has much that is natural in it; humanity will gladly accept it if it can live by it; to live by it one must never be sick or sorry, and the old, ideal, limited, pagan world never, I have said, _was_ sick or sorry, never at least shows itself to us sick or sorry:—

“What pipes and timbrels! What wild ecstasy!”

For our imagination, Gorgo and Praxinoe cross the human stage chattering in their blithe Doric,—_like turtles_, as the cross stranger said,—and keep gaily chattering on till they disappear. But in the new, real, immense, post-pagan world,—in the barbarian world,—the shock of accident is unceasing, the serenity of existence is perpetually troubled, not even a Greek like Heine can get across the mortal stage without bitter calamity. How does the sentiment of the “religion of pleasure” serve then? does it help, does it console? Can a man live by it? Heine again shall answer; Heine just twenty years older, stricken with incurable disease, waiting for death:—

“The great pot stands smoking before me, but I have no spoon to help myself. What does it profit me that my health is drunk at banquets out of gold cups and in most exquisite wines, if I myself, while these ovations are going on, lonely and cut off from the pleasures of the world, can only just wet my lips with barley-water? What good does it do me that all the roses of Shiraz open their leaves and burn for me with passionate tenderness? Alas! Shiraz is some two thousand leagues from the Rue d’Amsterdam, where in the solitude of my sick chamber all the perfume I smell is that of hot towels. Alas! the mockery of God is heavy upon me! The great author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, has determined to make the petty earthly author, the so-called Aristophanes of Germany, feel to his heart’s core what pitiful needle-pricks his cleverest sarcasms have been, compared with the thunderbolts which his divine humor can launch against feeble mortals!...

“In the year 1340, says the Chronicle of Limburg, all over Germany everybody was strumming and humming certain songs more lovely and delightful than any which had ever yet been known in German countries; and all people, old and young, the women particularly, were perfectly mad about them, so that from morning till night you heard nothing else. Only the Chronicle adds, the author of these songs happened to be a young clerk, afflicted with leprosy, and living apart from all the world in a desolate place. The excellent reader does not require to be told how horrible a complaint was leprosy in the Middle Ages, and how the poor wretches who had this incurable plague were banished from society, and had to keep at a distance from every human being. Like living corpses, in a gray gown reaching down to the feet, and with the hood brought over their face, they went about, carrying in their hands an enormous rattle, called Saint Lazarus’s rattle. With this rattle they gave notice of their approach, that every one might have time to get out of their way. This poor clerk, then, whose poetical gift the Limburg Chronicle extols, was a leper, and he sate moping in the dismal deserts of his misery, whilst all Germany, gay and tuneful, was praising his songs.

“Sometimes, in my somber visions of the night, I imagine that I see before me the poor leprosy-stricken clerk of the Limburg Chronicle, and then from under his gray hood his distressed eyes look out upon me in a fixed and strange fashion; but the next instant he disappears, and I hear dying away in the distance, like the echo of a dream, the dull creak of Saint Lazarus’s rattle.”

We have come a long way from Theocritus there? the expression of that has nothing of the clear, positive, happy, pagan character; it has much more the character of one of the indeterminate grotesques of the suffering Middle Age. Profoundness and power it has, though at the same time it is not truly poetical; it is not natural enough for that, there is too much waywardness in it, too much bravado. But as a condition of sentiment to be popular,—to be a comfort for the mass of mankind, under the pressure of calamity, to live by,—what a manifest failure is this last word of the religion of pleasure! One man in many millions, a Heine, may console himself, and keep himself erect in suffering, by a colossal irony of this sort, by covering himself and the universe with the red fire of this sinister mockery; but the many millions cannot,—cannot if they would. That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a religion of pleasure; in its power to be a general, popular, religious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship. It really succeeds in conveying far more joy, far more of what the mass of mankind are so much without, than its rival. I do not mean joy in prospect only, but joy in possession, actual enjoyment of the world. Mediæval Christianity is reproached with its gloom and austerities; it assigns the material world, says Heine, to the devil. But yet what a fulness of delight does St. Francis manage to draw from this material world itself, and from its commonest and most universally enjoyed elements,—sun, air, earth, water, plants! His hymn expresses a far more cordial sense of happiness, even in the material world, than the hymn of Theocritus. It is this which made the fortune of Christianity,—its gladness, not its sorrow; not its assigning the spiritual world to Christ, and the material world to the devil, but its drawing from the spiritual world a source of joy so abundant that it ran over upon the material world and transfigured it.

I have said a great deal of harm of paganism; and, taking paganism to mean a state of things which it is commonly taken to mean, and which did really exist, no more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end without reminding the reader, that before this state of things appeared, there was an epoch in Greek life,—in pagan life,—of the highest possible beauty and value. That epoch by itself goes far towards making Greece the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece,—a country hardly less important to mankind than Judæa. The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of mediæval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit’s life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason. And there is a century in Greek life,—the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 to the year 430 B. C.,—in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live. Of this effort, of which the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Æschylus, Sophocles, I must not now attempt more than the bare mention; but it is right, it is necessary, after all I have said, to indicate it. No doubt that effort was imperfect. Perhaps everything, take it at what point in its existence you will, carries within itself the fatal law of its own ulterior development. Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar’s time, Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. Perhaps the life of their beautiful Greece could not afford to its poets all that fulness of varied experience, all that power of emotion, which

‘... the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world

affords the poet of after-times. Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking-power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and Shakspeare, are enough for it. That I will not dispute; nor will I set up the Greek poets, from Pindar to Sophocles, as objects of blind worship. But no other poets so well show to the poetry of the present the way it must take; no other poets have lived so much by the imaginative reason; no other poets have made their work so well balanced; no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power, have so well satisfied, the religious sense:—

“Oh! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.”

Let St. Francis,—nay, or Luther either,—beat that!

VII.

A PERSIAN PASSION PLAY.

Everybody has this last autumn[22] been either seeing the Ammergau Passion Play or hearing about it; and to find any one who has seen it and not been deeply interested and moved by it, is very rare. The peasants of the neighboring country, the great and fashionable world, the ordinary tourist, were all at Ammergau, and were all delighted; but what is said to have been especially remarkable was the affluence there of ministers of religion of all kinds. That Catholic peasants, whose religion has accustomed them to show and spectacle, should be attracted by an admirable scenic representation of the great moments in the history of their religion, was natural; that tourists and the fashionable world should be attracted by what was at once the fashion and a new sensation of a powerful sort, was natural; that many of the ecclesiastics present should be attracted there, was natural too. Roman Catholic priests mustered strong, of course. The Protestantism of a great number of the Anglican clergy is supposed to be but languid, and Anglican ministers at Ammergau were sympathizers to be expected. But Protestant ministers of the most unimpeachable sort, Protestant Dissenting ministers, were there, too, and showing favor and sympathy; and this, to any one who remembers the almost universal feeling of Protestant Dissenters in this country, not many years ago, towards Rome and her religion,—the sheer abhorrence of Papists and all their practices,—could not but be striking. It agrees with what is seen also in literature, in the writings of Dissenters of the younger and more progressive sort, who show a disposition for regarding the Church of Rome historically rather than polemically, a wish to do justice to the undoubted grandeur of certain institutions and men produced by that Church, quite novel, and quite alien to the simple belief of earlier times, that between Protestants and Rome there was a measureless gulf fixed. Something of this may, no doubt, be due to that keen eye for Nonconformist business in which our great bodies of Protestant Dissenters, to do them justice, are never wanting; to a perception that the case against the Church of England may be yet further improved by contrasting her with the genuine article in her own ecclesiastical line, by pointing out that she is neither one thing nor the other to much purpose, by dilating on the magnitude, reach, and impressiveness, on the great place in history, of her rival, as compared with anything she can herself pretend to. Something of this there is, no doubt, in some of the modern Protestant sympathy for things Catholic. But in general that sympathy springs, in Churchmen and Dissenters alike, from another and a better cause,—from the spread of larger conceptions of religion, of man, and of history, than were current formerly. We have seen lately in the newspapers, that a clergyman, who in a popular lecture gave an account of the Passion Play at Ammergau, and enlarged on its impressiveness, was admonished by certain remonstrants, who told him it was his business, instead of occupying himself with these sensuous shows, to learn to walk by faith, not by sight, and to teach his fellow-men to do the same. But this severity seems to have excited wonder rather than praise; so far had those wider notions about religion and about the range of our interest in religion, of which I have just spoken, conducted us. To this interest I propose to appeal in what I am going to relate. The Passion Play at Ammergau, with its immense audiences, the seriousness of its actors, the passionate emotion of its spectators, brought to my mind something of which I had read an account lately; something produced, not in Bavaria nor in Christendom at all, but far away in that wonderful East, from which, whatever airs of superiority Europe may justly give itself, all our religion has come and where religion, of some sort or other, has still an empire over men’s feelings such as it has nowhere else. This product of the remote East I wish to exhibit while the remembrance of what has been seen at Ammergau is still fresh; and we will see whether that bringing together of strangers and enemies who once seemed to be as far as the poles asunder, which Ammergau in such a remarkable way effected, does not hold good and find a parallel even in Persia.

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Footnote 22:

1871.

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Count Gobineau, formerly Minister of France at Teheran and at Athens, published, a few years ago, an interesting book on the present state of religion and philosophy in Central Asia. He is favorably known also by his studies in ethnology. His accomplishments and intelligence deserve all respect, and in his book on religion and philosophy in Central Asia he has the great advantage of writing about things which he has followed with his own observation and inquiry in the countries where they happened. The chief purpose of his book is to give a history of the career of Mirza Ali Mahommed, a Persian religious reformer, the original _Bâb_, and the founder of _Bâbism_, of which most people in England have at least heard the name. Bab means _gate_, the door or gate of life; and in the ferment which now works in the Mahometan East, Mirza Ali Mahommed,—who seems to have been made acquainted by Protestant missionaries with our Scriptures and by the Jews of Shiraz with Jewish traditions, to have studied, besides, the religion of the Ghebers, the old national religion of Persia, and to have made a sort of amalgam of the whole with Mahometanism,—presented himself, about five-and-twenty twenty years ago, as _the door_, _the gate_ of life; found disciples, sent forth writings, and finally became the cause of disturbances which led to his being executed on the 19th of July, 1849, in the citadel of Tabriz. The Bâb and his doctrines are a theme on which much might be said; but I pass them by, except for one incident in the Bâb’s life, which I will notice. Like all religious Mahometans, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca; and his meditations at that center of his religion first suggested his mission to him. But soon after his return to Bagdad he made another pilgrimage; and it was in this pilgrimage that his mission became clear to him, and that his life was fixed. “He desired”—I will give an abridgment of Count Gobineau’s own words—“to complete his impressions by going to Kufa, that he might visit the ruined mosque where Ali was assassinated, and where the place of his murder is still shown. He passed several days there in meditation. The place appears to have made a great impression on him; he was entering on a course which might and must lead to some such catastrophe as had happened on the very spot where he stood, and where his mind’s eye showed him the Imam Ali lying at his feet, with his body pierced and bleeding. His followers say that he then passed through a sort of moral agony which put an end to all the hesitations of the natural man within him. It is certain that when he arrived at Shiraz, on his return, he was a changed man. No doubts troubled him any more: he was penetrated and persuaded; his part was taken.”

This Ali also, at whose tomb the Bâb went through the spiritual crisis here recorded, is a familiar name to most of us. In general our knowledge of the East goes but a very little way; yet almost every one has at least heard the name of Ali, the Lion of God, Mahomet’s young cousin, the first person, after his wife, who believed in him, and who was declared by Mahomet in his gratitude his brother, delegate, and vicar. Ali was one of Mahomet’s best and most successful captains. He married Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet; his sons, Hassan and Hussein, were, as children, favorites with Mahomet, who had no son of his own to succeed him, and was expected to name Ali as his successor. He named no successor. At his death (the year 632 of our era) Ali was passed over, and the first caliph, or _vicar_ and _lieutenant_ of Mahomet in the government of the state, was Abu-Bekr; only the spiritual inheritance of Mahomet, the dignity of Imam, or _Primate_, devolved by right on Ali and his children. Ali, lion of God as in war he was, held aloof from politics and political intrigue, loved retirement and prayer, was the most pious and disinterested of men. At Abu-Bekr’s death he was again passed over in favor of Omar. Omar was succeeded by Othman, and still Ali remained tranquil. Othman was assassinated, and then Ali, chiefly to prevent disturbance and bloodshed, accepted (A. D. 655) the caliphate. Meanwhile, the Mahometan armies had conquered Persia, Syria, and Egypt; the Governor of Syria, Moawiyah, an able and ambitious man, set himself up as caliph, his title was recognized by Amrou, the Governor of Egypt, and a bloody and indecisive battle was fought in Mesopotamia between Ali’s army and Moawiyah’s. Gibbon shall tell the rest:—“In the temple of Mecca three Charegites or enthusiasts discoursed of the disorders of the church and state; they soon agreed that the deaths of Ali, of Moawiyah, and of his friend Amrou, the Viceroy of Egypt, would restore the peace and unity of religion. Each of the assassins chose his victim, poisoned his dagger, devoted his life, and secretly repaired to the scene of action. Their resolution was equally desperate; but the first mistook the person of Amrou, and stabbed the deputy who occupied his seat; the prince of Damascus was dangerously hurt by the second; Ali, the lawful caliph, in the mosque of Kufa, received a mortal wound from the hand of the third.”

The events through which we have thus rapidly run ought to be kept in mind, for they are the elements of Mahometan history: any right understanding of the state of the Mahometan world is impossible without them. For that world is divided into the two great sects of Shiahs and Sunis. The Shiahs are those who reject the first three caliphs as usurpers, and begin with Ali as the first lawful successor of Mahomet; the Sunis recognize Abu-Bekr, Omar, and Othman, as well as Ali, and regard the Shiahs as impious heretics. The Persians are Shiahs, and the Arabs and Turks are Sunis. Hussein, one of Ali’s two sons, married a Persian princess, the daughter of Yezdejerd the last of the Sassanian kings, the king whom the Mahometan conquest of Persia expelled; and Persia, through this marriage, became specially connected with the house of Ali. “In the fourth age of the Hegira,” says Gibbon, “a tomb, a temple, a city, arose near the ruins of Kufa. Many thousands of the Shiahs repose in holy ground at the feet of the vicar of God; and the desert is vivified by the numerous and annual visits of the Persians, who esteem their devotion not less meritorious than the pilgrimage of Mecca.”

But to comprehend what I am going to relate from Count Gobineau, we must push our researches into Mahometan history a little further than the assassination of Ali. Moawiyah died in the year 680 of our era, nearly fifty years after the death of Mahomet. His son Yezid succeeded him on the throne of the caliphs at Damascus. During the reign of Moawiyah Ali’s two sons, the Imams, Hassan and Hussein, lived with their families in religious retirement at Medina, where their grandfather Mahomet was buried. In them the character of abstention and renouncement, which we have noticed in Ali himself, was marked yet more strongly; but, when Moawiyah died, the people of Kufa, the city on the lower Euphrates where Ali had been assassinated, sent offers to make Hussein caliph if he would come among them, and to support him against the Syrian troops of Yezid. Hussein seems to have thought himself bound to accept the proposal. He left Medina, and, with his family and relations, to the number of about eighty persons, set out on his way to Kufa. Then ensued the tragedy so familiar to every Mahometan, and to us so little known, the tragedy of Kerbela. “O death,” cries the bandit-minstrel of Persia, Kurroglou, in his last song before his execution, “O death, whom didst thou spare? Were even Hassan and Hussein, those footstools of the throne of God on the seventh heaven, spared by thee. _No! thou madest them martyrs at Kerbela._”