CHAPTER II.
The Sphinx—The Chimæra—The Centaurs—The Origin of the Myth—The Onocentaur—Sagittarius—Satyrs and Fauns—The Harpys, described by Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and others—The Echidna—The Gorgon—The Hydra—The Sirens—The Lurlei—Mermaids—The Manatee—Dog-Headed Men of Brazil—The One-Eyed Cyclops and Briaræus of the Hundred Arms—The Headless Men or Anthropophagi—Sir Walter Raleigh’s El Dorado—Claw-Footed Men—The Marvels of Hackluyt and Mandeville—The Long-Eared Fanesii—The Fairies—The “Discoverie of Witchcraft”—The Little Good People—Fairy-Rings—Elf-Music—Changelings—Elf-Possession—Spirits of the Mine, or Knockers—Robin Goodfellow—Queen Mab—The Phoca or Storm-Spirit—The Kelpie—Jack-o’-Lantern—The Pigmies—Giants—Early Sculptures—Gigantic Men of Antiquity.
THE creatures we have hitherto been considering—the griffin, the phœnix, the manticora or the sea-horse—have either been unmitigated monsters of the fancy, or else, like the salamander or the chameleon, so transformed by legend as to be scarcely less monstrous and unreal. Having the fear of Pope’s oft-quoted line upon us, “The proper study of mankind is man,” we leave for a while these fantastic imaginings, and turn to another class of forms scarcely less grotesque, but all agreeing in this, the presence in them of more or less of the human form and nature. This class of forms readily subdivides itself into three sections, which we propose to deal with in the order in which we enumerate them. The first of these are forms compounded of the human and the animal, as, for example, the sphinx or the centaur; the second may be considered as human, though distorted, as the one-eyed cyclops, or, “the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders;” while the third class may be held to embrace the fairies, pigmies, and giants, forms that are human, yet in bulk or minuteness bear no semblance to ordinary humanity.
The Sphinx may be considered as more especially an artistic and symbolic creation, though the old Greek myth of Œdipos would seem to show that in very early times there was a real belief in a real monster. The sphinx is composite in nature, being in Greek art and legend ordinarily the combination of the head and bust of a woman with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle; while in Egyptian art the creature is always wingless, and its recumbent leonine body is surmounted by the head of a man, hawk, or other creature. Egyptian art is full of such composite monsters, and in cases where such attributes as the courage of the lion or the wisdom of the serpent were to be expressed, it was held that the actual leonine body or the head of the serpent itself would best convey the required characteristics to the eye and mind of the beholder. A reference to Wilkinson, Rosellini, or any other good standard work on Egypt, will reveal an immense variety of these curious composite figures, though, as they are evidently in most cases symbolic merely, they scarcely fall within the limits of our present study. According to some authorities, the well-known type of Egyptian sphinx represented the royal power by its junction in one creation of the highest physical and mental strength. Pliny, however, states that it is to be taken as the representation of the beneficent Nile, as the annual rising took place while the sun was in Leo and Virgo. As the head is masculine in type, and not that of maiden fair, this theory will scarcely meet the case.
The sphinx of classic story, a monster half-woman, half-lion, was sent by Hera to devastate the land of Thebes in revenge for an insult that had been offered to her. Sitting by the roadside, the sphinx put to every passer-by the celebrated riddle, “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three in the evening?” As one after another of these luckless travellers was obliged to “give it up” he was cast from the rock on which the monster sat into a deep abyss at its foot. The understanding was, that if any one could solve this conundrum the sphinx should herself perish, a consummation devoutly to be wished. One Œdipos hit upon the happy idea that perhaps it was a man that was meant, his career being traced through crawling infancy to stalwart manhood, and thence to tottering old age. Probably the sphinx had presumed too thoroughly on the badness of the riddle, and thought that its inane character would be her safeguard in this perilous game for forfeits. Lord Bacon[14] supplies a curious theory in explanation of the Greek legend; he tells us that the creature represented science, her composite nature being the various and different branches of which it is composed; that the female face denoted volubility of speech, while the wings showed the rapidity with which knowledge could be diffused. Her hooked talons are supposed to remind us of the arguments of science laying hold of the mind. Her position on the crag is a hint that the road to knowledge is steep and difficult, while the riddles of science “perplex and harass the mind.” Probably our readers have already made up their minds as to the value of this theory of Bacon’s; it appears to us that fifty other equally good explanations might be devised, and all equally wide of the mark. Of course after so sweeping a statement we can scarcely be expected to supply one ourselves for the other forty-nine critics to mercilessly dissect.
The Chimæra was, according to Hesiod, a fire-breathing monster compounded of lion, goat, and serpent, having three heads, one of each of these creatures. It is in this form often represented in classic art; but Coats, a great authority in blazonry in the last century, in describing the monster departs somewhat from the ancient type, and in so doing brings the creature within the scope of our present chapter. He speaks of it as “an imaginary creature invented by the Poets, and represented by them as having the Face of a beautiful Maiden, the two Fore-legs and the Main of a Lyon, the Body like a Goat, the hinder-legs like a Griffin, and the Tayl like a Serpent or Dragon turned in a Ring.” He does not, however, give his authorities. Though Milton in his “Paradise Lost” gives us the line, “Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimæras dire,” the myth has been received amongst ourselves with so little faith that anything wildly improbable is branded as chimerical, and scouted accordingly.
The Centaurs are said by Virgil and Horace to have dwelt in Thessaly, a land then greatly famed for its breed of horses. Instances, as in the landing of the Spaniards in America, have not been unknown where those to whom the horse was unknown have imagined that the horse and his rider were but one creature. The belief in centaurs is not, therefore, so difficult a myth to trace to its origin as many others. The usual form of representation is the conjoining of the body and legs of a horse and the head, arms, and body of a man so far as the waist, though in some early works, as, for example, in archaic pottery in the British Museum, the legs of the man take the place of the fore-legs of the horse. The celebrated statue in the Louvre known as the Borghese Centaur, a sculpture of the most refined period of Greek art, gives the best idea, perhaps, of the highest treatment the form permits. Other fine examples, fragments of the sculpture of the Parthenon, may be seen in our own national collection in London.[15] In the works of the earlier writers, as Homer, the centaurs have nothing unnatural in their composition; we read nothing of their being half-horse, half-man, but they are introduced to us as a tribe of men whose home was in the mountains and whose nature was altogether barbarous and ferocious. The contests with centaurs, so favourite a subject in Greek art, have been generally conceived to be the struggle of Greek civilisation with the barbarism of the tribes with which it came in contact in the early Pelasgian period, a struggle that strangely enough finds its memorial not only in the grand sculptures of the matchless Parthenon, but in the delicate beauty of a little English wild flower, the pink centaury.[16]