Historia Amoris: A History of Love, Ancient and Modern Part 4

(_thinking of a younger sister whom he would sell when she is older._)

We have a little sister, still immature. What shall we do with her when she is spoken for?

SECOND BROTHER

If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards.

THE SHULAMITE

(_ironically intervening._)

I am comely, yet I made them let me be.

FIRST BROTHER

(_significantly._)

Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver.

THE SHULAMITE

But my vineyard which is mine I still have.

(_Laughing._)

A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others.

(_At the door the_ SHEPHERD _appears. Behind him are comrades._)

THE SHEPHERD

Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause me to hear it.

THE SHULAMITE

Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the mountains of spices.

III

APHRODITE URANIA

Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judaea the days of the righteous were long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the G.o.ds loved died young. The G.o.ds themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the h.e.l.lenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephaestos limped, but among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that counted their years by their games.

As the tribes dispersed the G.o.ds advanced. Their pa.s.sage, marked here by a temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by the ideal. Divinities, whom the a.s.syrian priests barely dared to invoke by name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art, belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than austere, more aesthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceeds.

Greece to-day lies buried with her G.o.ds. She has been dead for twenty centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed before death did and survived her.

To Homer beauty was an article of faith. But not the divinities that radiated it. He laughed at them. Pythagoras found him expiating his mirth in h.e.l.l. A later echo of it bubbled in the farce of Aristophanes. It reverberated in the verses of Euripides. It rippled through the gardens of Epicurus. It amused sceptics to whom the story of the G.o.ds and their amours was but gossip concerning the elements. They believed in them no more than we do. But they lived among a people that did. To the Greeks the G.o.ds were real, they were neighborly, they were careless and caressing, subject like mortals to fate. From them gifts came, desires as well. The latter idea, precocious in its nave psychology, eliminated human responsibility and made sin descend from above.

Olympus was not severe. Greece was not, either. The solemnity of other faiths had no place in her creed, which was free, too, of their baseness.

It was not Homer only, but the inherent h.e.l.lenic love of the beautiful that, in emanc.i.p.ating her from Orientalisms, maintained her in an att.i.tude which, while never ascetic, occasionally was sublime. The tradition of Orpheus and Eurydice, the fable of Psyche and her G.o.d, had in them love, which nowhere else was known. They had, too, something of the high morality which the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ depict.

In the _Iliad_ a thousand s.h.i.+ps are launched for the recovery of an abducted wife. The subject is equivocal, but concerning it there is not a dubious remark. In the _Iliad_ as in the _Odyssey_ love rested on two distinct principles: First, the respect of natural law; second, the respect of lawful marriage. These principles, the G.o.ds, if they willed, could abolish. When they did, their victims were not blamed, they were pitied. Christianity could not do better. Frequently it failed to do as well. But the patricists were not psychologists and the theory of determinism had not come.

Aphrodite had. With love for herald, with pleasure for page, with the Graces and the Hours for handmaids, she had come among the dazzled immortals. Hesiod told about it. So did de Musset.

Regrettez-vous le temps ou le Ciel, sur la terre, Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?

Ou Venus Astarte, fille de l'onde amere, Secouait, vierge encor, les larmes de sa mere, Et fecondait le monde en tordant ses cheveux!

But Astarte was a stone which Aphrodite's eyes would have melted. It may be that they did. The wors.h.i.+p of the Dea Meretrix was replaced by the purer rites of this purer divinity, unconscious as yet of the names and shames of Ishtar.

The Aphrodite whom Homer revealed differed from that of Hesiod. In Hesiod she was still a novice, but less austere than she afterward appeared in the conceptions of Pheidias. The latter succeeded in detaining the fluidity of the G.o.ds. He reproduced them in stone, sometimes in gold, always in beauty. He created a palpable Olympus. To die without seeing it was thought a great calamity. The universal judgment of antiquity was that art could go no higher. At the sight of the Pheidian Zeus, a barbarian brute, aemilius Paulus, the Roman invader and victor, shrank back, awe struck, smitten with sacred terror. The image was regarded less as a statue than as an actual revelation of the divine. To have been able to display it, the general a.s.sumption was that either Pheidias had ascended above, or else that Zeus had descended to him. The revelation of Aphrodite Urania which he effected for her temple near the Cerameicus must have been equally august, the celestial in its supremest expression.

Thereafter the decadence of the G.o.ddess began. Previously she had ruled through her perfection. Subsequently, though the perfection persisted, the stamp of divinity ceased. In lieu of the G.o.ddess was a very pretty woman.

If that woman did not, as Hesiod claimed, issue from the sea, she at least emerged from marble. The statues differed. Sometimes there were doves on them, sometimes there was a girdle embroidered with caresses and kisses, at times in the hand was an arrow, at others a lance, again Aphrodite was twisting her hair. But chiefly she was a.s.sa.s.sinated, not like Lais by jealous wives, but by sheer freedom of the chisel. It was these profaner images that inflamed Phaedra and Pasiphae. Among them was Praxiteles'

Cnidian Aphrodite, a statue which a king tried vainly to buy and a madman offered to marry. The Pheidian Aphrodite belonged to an epoch in which art expressed the eternal; the Praxitelean, to a period in which it suggested the fugitive. One was beauty and also love, the other was beauty and pa.s.sion.

Originally both were one. It was only the idea of her that varied. Each h.e.l.lenic town, each upland and valley had its own faiths, its own myths.

Uniformity concerning them was not doctrinal, it was ritualistic. Then, too, Aphrodite, Apollo, Zeus himself, the whole brilliant host of Olympus were once monsters of Asia. However august they had since become, memories and savors of anterior rites followed in their ascensions. These things incited them to resume their primal forms. It was pleasurably that they acceded. Therein is the simple mystery of their double lives, the reason why Aphrodite could be degrading and ideal, celestial and vulgar, yet always Philommeis, Queen of Smiles. In Cythera and Paphos she was but a fresh avatar of Ishtar. In other sites she resembled the picture that Dante made of Fortune and which an artist detached.

"Dante," said Saint-Victor, "displays Fortune turning her wheel, distributing good and evil, success and failure, prosperity and want.

Mortals upbraid and accuse her. 'But these she does not hear. Tranquil among primordial things, she turns her sphere and ineffably rejoices.' So does Venus indifferently dispense high aims and viciousness. Curses do not reach her, insults do not touch her, the pa.s.sions she has unchained cannot rise to where she is. In her high place tranquilly she turns her sphere of stars.

'Volge sua sfera e beata si G.o.de.'"

It was not that serene divinity, it was the more human Aphrodite of Hesiod, that disturbed the Argive Helen. The story of her, the story of the golden fruit tossed into Olympus with its tag, To the Fairest, the rivalries that resulted, the decision of Paris, corrupt yet just, his elopement with Helen, and the war of the world which ensued, these episodes the hexameters of the _Iliad_ unfold.

There, drenched with blood and bathed in poetry, is Helen. There, too, is Paris on his scarlet prow. With them you go from Lacedaemon, past the faint, fair rose of Ida's snow, over the green plain of waters, right to the gates of Ilium and within, and see how each man stopped and stood and mused at Helen's face and her undreamed-of beauty.

Her beauty was no doubt surprising. She trailed admiration but also respect. Homer relates that the seated sages rose at her approach. They did not blame her for the conflagration that her face had caused. They knew, as Priam knew, that responsibility rested not with the woman but with the G.o.ds. Perhaps she was not responsible. As in an allegory of beauty which itself is for all and yet for none, already she had pa.s.sed from hand to hand. When she was but a child she had been abducted.

Theseus took her from a temple in which she was dancing. Recovered by her brothers, Achilles got her from them but only to cede her to Patroclus.

Later she became the wife of Menelaus. Subsequently Aphrodite gave her to Paris. At that she rebelled. But no mortal may resist the divine. Helen accompanied Paris to Troy, where, during the war that was waged for her, he was killed and she remained in his brother's arms until recovered by Menelaus.

Quintus Smyrnaeus[4] represented Menelaus, sword in hand, rus.h.i.+ng violently at her. A glance of her eyes disarmed him. In the clatter of the falling sword was love's reawakening. Then presently, as an honored wife, she returned to Lacedaemon. Even there her adventures continued. Achilles, haunted in Hades by the memory of her beauty, escaped, and in mystic nuptials conceived with her a winged child, Euphorion. Clearly, as the sages thought and Priam believed, she could not have been responsible. Nor was she so regarded. The various episodes of her career formed a sort of sacred legend for the polluting of which a poet, Stesichorus, was blinded.

The blindness of Homer, Plato attributed to the same cause. To degrade beauty is a perilous thing. To preserve it, to make the legend more sacred still, it was imagined that not Helen, but a phantom of her, accompanied Paris to Troy, and that it was for a phantom that men fought and died.

A thousand years later Apollonius of Tyana happened on that romance.

Apollonius knew all languages, including that of silence, and all things, save the caresses of women. He knew, too, how to summon the dead. To verify the story, he evoked the shade that once before for Helen had emerged from h.e.l.l. Apollonius asked: "Is it true that Helen went to Troy?"

"We thought so," Achilles answered, "and we fought to get her back. But she was actually in Egypt. When we discovered that we fought for Troy itself."[5]

Achilles may have been right. In the _Odyssey_, in connection with Helen, mention is made of nepenthe. Nepenthe was an Egyptian drug that dispelled the memory of whatever is sad. Helen had much to forget and probably did, even without a.s.sistance. She was the personification of pa.s.sivity. Her little rebellion at Aphrodite was very brief. But, a.s.suming the nepenthe, it has been a.s.sumed also that in it was the secret of the spell with which she so promptly disarmed Menelaus. To modern eyes his att.i.tude is ambiguous. His complaisance has an air of complicity. But Menelaus lived in an heroic age. Moreover, when Sarah vacated the palace of the Pharaohs, the complaisance of Abraham was the same.

In both instances the principle involved was one of owners.h.i.+p. In patriarchal and heroic days woman was an a.s.set. She was the living money of the period. Agamemnon, in devising how he might calm the anger of Achilles, offered him a quant.i.ty of girls. They were so much current coin.

When stolen, recovery was the owner's chief aim. What may have happened in the interim was a detail, better appreciable when it is remembered that booty was treated, as Helen at Ilium was treated, in the light of Paris'

lawful wife; for robbery at that time was a highly legitimate mode of acquiring property, provided and on condition that the robber and the robbed were foes. The idea of enticing the property was too complicated for the simplicity of those days. It was in that simplicity, together with the belief that whatever occurred was attributable to the G.o.ds, that the morality of the epoch resided.