“Thou art like the harpy,
Which, to betray, dost with thine angel’s face
Seize with thine eagle’s talons.”
In the “Monstrorum Historia” of Aldrovandus[18] we find figured a mediæval rendering of the creature, and Guillim in his “Heraldry” seems to frankly accept the harpy as a real thing, while the lines he quotes in support from Virgil are powerfully descriptive:—
“Of Monsters all, most Monstrous this: no greater Wrath
God sends ’mongst Men: it comes from depth of pitchy Hell:
With Virgin’s Face, but Womb like Gulf unsatiate hath,
Her Hands are Griping claws, her Colour pale and fell.”
Virgil, it will be noticed, makes the creature wholly fearful, while Shakespeare makes the horror yet more weird by giving the implacable and destroying monster a face of angelic sweetness.
Upton, another old writer on heraldry, says that in blazoning arms “the Harpy should be given to such persons as have committed Manslaughter, to the End that by the often view of their Ensigns they might be moved to bewail the Foulness of their Offence.” This we should imagine, is more simple in theory than in practice, and Upton must have been very simple himself to fancy that any one could thus be induced to blazon their misdoings abroad like that. In the earlier days of heraldry the monarch had two powerful means of rewarding or punishing his nobles in what were termed respectively marks of augmentation and of abatement in their armorial bearings, but in the later times in which Upton lived no such compulsory stigma was possible. We fancy, too, that in the earlier days a good deal of what a modern judge and jury would call manslaughter went on, and was not by any means considered a foul offence to be bewailed over.
The terrible Echidna, half-woman, half-serpent, the mother of the dread chimæra, the fierce dragon of the Hesperides, the gorgons that turned to stone all who gazed on them, the hydra of the Lernean marsh, the vulture that made itself so decidedly unpleasant to Prometheus, and several other children of an equally objectionable type, was another of the monsters once believed in, while the better known Sirens and Mermaids, half-woman, half-fish, will naturally occur to the minds of our readers.
The Sirens were originally nymphs, but Demeter transformed them into beings half-women, half-birds, for reasons that may be found duly set forth in any work on mythology. Ultimately they were again transformed into creatures of which the upper portion was that of a beautiful woman, while the lower was fish-like. These sirens dwelt in the cliffs on the Sicilian shore, and by the sweetness of their voices bewitched passing travellers, who, allured by the charms of their song, were drawn to them, when they were lulled into insensibility and perished. Skeletons lay thickly round their dwelling, but the warning was useless and hopeless, as the sirens were allowed by the gods to retain this cruel power over the hearts of men until one arose who could defy their sweet allurements. Orpheus and Odysseus each fulfilled the conditions, and thus the evil power of the sirens came to an end. Orpheus, by the unsurpassable sweetness of his own music and his hymns of praise to the gods, carried himself and his crew safely past the spot so fatal to others; while Odysseus stopped the ears of his crew with wax, that they might be deaf to the bewitching music, while he himself was bound to the mast, and incapable, therefore, of yielding to the soft fascination. It has been surmised that the whole story can be explained by the soft beating and melodious murmur of the waves over the hidden shoals and sands that would engulf those who would attempt to land. However this may be, the sirens were at one time a firm article of belief, and are often represented in ancient art or referred to in ancient poetry, while later moralists find the simile an apt one between the siren-song and its tragic effects and all earthly pleasures that carry within them the seeds of death.[19] A later legend of the same type may be seen in the myth of the Lurlei, a water-spirit whose home was in the steep cliff that overshadows the Rhine near St. Goar, the fairness of whose person was as great as the unfairness of her conduct in luring to their destruction the passing travellers. Here again, of course, matter-of-fact people have stepped in and explained all away, a striking echo and a rock on which to strike being all that is left to us, the moral being, that if people will be so foolish as to awaken by bugle or song the slumbering voices of the rocks when they ought to be giving their whole attention to their steering, what wonder if they come to grief? A very good reference to the siren’s lulling song will be found in the second scene in the third act of the “Comedy of Errors.”
Mermaids and Tritons were once fully accepted facts, and illustrations of them, literary or artistic, abound, Ariel in the “Tempest” sings of the sea-nymphs, and Oberon in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” speaks of