Juno is only the feminine form of this Indomitable Will. By herself she is inferior to it, and whenever she opposes it, loses the game. Vulcan, her child, is Mechanic Art, great in itself to be sure, but not comparable to the Perfect Wisdom, or Minerva, which sprang ready armed from the masculine Will. She was greater than her Father, but still his child.
Neptune, who raises always a “placid head above the waves,” represents the flow of thought,—all-embracing, girdling in the world, Diana and Apollo, or Purity and Genius.
Mercury is Genius in the extrinsic, of eloquence, human understanding, and expression. All were the embodiments of Absolute Ideas, of ideas that had no origin,—that were eternal. Love brooded over Chaos; and the perfect Beauty and Love, represented among the Greeks by Venus and her son, rose from the turbid elements. It is singular that even the ancients should have maintained the pre-existence of Love. It was before Order, Men, or the Gods men worshipped. The fable suggests the truth,—Infinite Love and Beauty always was. It is only with their development in finite beings that History has to do.
Here Margaret recapitulated. The Indomitable Will had dethroned Time, and, acting with Productive Energy,—variously represented at different times by Isis, Rhea, Ceres, Persephone, and so on,—had driven back the sensual passions to the bowels of the earth, while it produced Perfect Wisdom, Genius, Beauty, and Love, results which were more excellent if not more powerful than their Cause.
To understand this Mythology, we must denationalize ourselves, and throw the mind back to the consideration of Greek Art, Literature, and Poesy. It is only scanty justice that my pen can render to Margaret’s eloquent talk.
Frank Shaw asked her how she imagined these personifications to have suggested themselves in that barbarous age.
Margaret objected to the word barbarous. She believed that in the age of Plato the human intellect reached a point as elevated in some respects as any it had ever touched.
But the Gods were not the product of that age, but of another far more remote, Frank objected. Was not the infinity of Hindu conception impaired, when the Greeks attributed to the Gods the duties, passions, and criminal indulgences of men?
Mrs. Ripley said that the virtue of the Hindu lay in contemplation. If a man had seen God, he was exempt from the ordinary obligations of life, and allowed to pass his life in quiet adoration.