The three creatures differed in character. The panther was beautiful; the lion was terrible; the wolf was horrible. Although the poet knew full well the cruelty and deadliness of the crouching panther’s spring, he was compelled to admire the creature’s exquisite beauty. ‘The hour,’ he says,
The hour was morning’s prime, and on his way.
Aloft the sun ascended with those stars
That with him rose, when Love divine first moved
Those its fair works; so that with joyous hope
All things conspire to fill me, the gay skin
Of that swift animal, the matin dawn.
And the sweet season.
The lion, on the other hand, is the symbol of majesty and terror. But the lean she-wolf was positively [193] horrible. Her hungry eyes, her gleaming fangs, her panting sides, filled the beholder with loathing. ‘Her leanness seemed full of all wants.’ The poet says that the very sight of her o’erwhelmed and appalled him. Dante himself confessed that, of the three, he regarded the last as by far the worst of these three brutal foes. Now I fancy that, in the temptations that respectively assail youth, maturity, and decline, I have noticed these same characteristics. As a rule, the sins of youth are beautiful sins. The appeals to youthful vice are invariably defended on aesthetic grounds. The boundary-line that divides high art from indecency is a very difficult one to define. And it is so difficult to define because the blandishments to which youth succumbs are for the most part the blandishments of beauty. Like the panther, vice is cruel and pitiless; yet the glamour of it is so fair that it ‘blends with the matin dawn and the sweet season.’ The sins that bring down the strong man, on the other hand, are not so much beautiful as terrible. The man in his prime goes down before those terrific onslaughts that the forces of evil know so well how to organize and muster. They are not lovely; they are leonine. And is it not true that the temptations that work havoc in later life are as a rule unalluring, hideous, and difficult to understand? The world is thunderstruck. It seems so incomprehensible that, after having [194] survived his struggle with the beauteous panther and the terrible lion, a man of such mettle should yield to a lean and ugly wolf!