However, we must not lose ourselves in further digression through particular examples, and I will merely, by way of passage, and the one further reference to the change of the Pierides, who, according to Ovid[147], were the daughters of Pieros and challenged the Muses to a match of rivalry. For ourselves the distinction of importance is the nature of the songs which the combatants sang respectively. The Pierides celebrate the battles of the gods[148] and honour the giants unduly while they depreciate the deeds of the great gods. Rising up from the depths of Earth, Typhoeus filled heaven with fear; in a body the gods take flight from thence until, wearied out, they rest on Egyptian soil. But here, too, so sang the Pierides, Typhoeus arrives, and the high gods are fain to hide themselves in illusive shapes. Jupiter was leader of the army, and for this reason, so ran their refrain, the Lybian Ammon to this day is figured with crooked horns; and in like manner the scion of Semele is changed into a ram, the sister of Phoebus into a cat, Juno into a snow-white cow, Venus is concealed in a fish, Mercury in the feathers of Ibis.
Here we find therefore the gods suffer reproach in their change to animal form. Although their translation is not presented as a punishment for a wrong or a crime, it is their cowardice which is held forth to us as the reason of this self-imposed metamorphosis. Calliope, on the other hand, exalts in song the good deeds and history of Ceres. Ceres was the first, so ran the strain, to scour through the fields with the crook-backed ploughshare; first was she to give fruits and fruitful means of nourishment to the ploughed fields. First was she to lay down laws for our guidance; we are collectively but a gift of her wisdom. "Ah," she exclaims, "my task is to celebrate her, and yet how shall I tune my strain worthy of such a goddess! Assuredly the goddess is worthy of the singer's best." When she has finished, the Pierides adjudge themselves victors in the contest: but even as they endeavour to speak, and with loud cries, so Ovid informs us (v. 670), are flourishing about with their hands, they perceive their nails passing away into feathers, their arms become covered with down, while each is aware that the mouth of the other is closing up into the stiff bill of a bird: and while they are all for deploring their lot, they are carried up on the waves of their wings, they float away, the screamers of the woods, and as waifs of the air. And even unto this day, adds our poet, they still retain their own glibness of tongue and excited chatter, and infinite desire to gossip. In this way we find again also here that metamorphosis is presented us as punishment, and, what is more, is presented, as is so frequently the case with such stories, as punishment due to religious impiety.
(β) If we consider further examples of still well recognized metamorphoses of men and gods into animals, we shall find that, although they do not directly imply any transgression as the cause of such a change, as, for example, in the case where Circe possessed the power to change men into animals, yet, for all that, the animal condition is at least indicative of a misfortune and a humiliation, such as brings no honour even to the person who makes such a change subservient to private ends. Circe was quite a subordinate, obscure type of goddess, and her power appears as mere witchery, and Mercury assists Odysseus, when the latter contrives to free his comrades from the spell. Of much the same kind are the many shapes which Zeus takes upon himself, as, for example, when he is changed into a bull in his quest of Europa, or when he approaches Leda in the form of a swan, or fructifies the Danae in a shower of gold. In all these cases the object is one of deception, directed by purposes of an inferior, that is to say, not spiritual, but purely natural quality, purposes which the ever constant jealousy of Juno render unavoidable. The conception of a universal procreative life of Nature, which in many of the more ancient mythologies constituted the leading motive, is imaginatively reproduced in separate poetical tales about the easily enamoured disposition of the father of gods and men, exploits, however, which he does not carry through in his own or, for the most part, in human shape, but expressly either in the shape of animals, or some other embodiment of Nature.
(γ) And, lastly, we may add to our list those hybrid forms, combining both humanity and animalism, which are also not excluded from Greek art, though the animality is here accepted as something that degrades, is unspiritual. Among the Egyptians, for example, the he-goat, Mendes, was revered[149], and, according to the opinion of Jablouski[150], in the sense of the procreative power of Nature, generally speaking, as that of the sun, and to such an outrageous excess that, according to Pindar, even women sacrificed themselves to these creatures. Among the Greeks, Pan, on the contrary, personifies the mysterious sense of the divine presence, and later in the shape of fauns, satyrs, and Pan-like figures, the goat shape only appeared in a subordinate way, such as in the feet, and in the most beautiful representations was perhaps limited to the pointed ears and little horns. The rest of the figure is shaped in human guise, and the animal suggestion thrust back upon the barest detail. Yet, for all that, fauns were not recognized among the Greeks as gods of any important rank or spiritual forces; their fundamental characteristic remained that of a sensuous, uncontrolled joviality. It is true that they are also artistically represented with an expression of profounder significance, as, for instance, that fine example of one in Munich, which holds the youthful Bacchus in his arms, and gazes down on him with a smile which is brimming over with love and tenderness. He is not to be taken as the father of Bacchus, but merely the foster-parent, and we find given him here the beautiful feeling of joy in the innocence of the child, such as that which, in the maternal devotion of Mary for the Christ babe, is exalted in romantic art to so lofty a level of contemplation. Among the Greeks, however, this most charming love still belongs to the subordinate sphere of fauns in order to indicate that its origin is traceable from animal, that is natural, life, and consequently is entitled to rank with such a sphere[151].
Mediate shapes of a similar kind are the centaurs, in which we may also observe that the Nature-aspect of sensuality and desire is also supremely prominent to the suppression of the spiritual side. Cheiron, no doubt, is of a more noble type, a clever physician, and the tutor of Achilles; but this instructive rôle, as the teacher of a child, is not appropriate to godhead strictly, but is to be related with human ability and cleverness.
In this manner the relation of the animal shape receives a modification in classical art from whatever point of view we regard it. Its prevailing employment is to indicate that which is evil, bad, inferior, merely natural and unspiritual, whereas, outside Greece it was the expression of the positive and absolute.
2. THE CONTEST BETWEEN THE ANCIENT AND MODERN DIVINITIES
The second grade of more elevated rank we may contrast with the degradation of the animal condition consists in this, that the genuine gods of classical art, inasmuch as they possess for their content a free self-consciousness, which we may define as the power of spiritual individuality reposing on its own resources, are also able to be represented as subjects of knowledge and volition, that is as spiritual potences. For this reason the humanity, in the bodily form of which they are presented us, is not, as one may say, a mere form, which is girt about this content by virtue of the imagination under a mode of purely external validity, but is rooted in the significance, content, and ideal substance itself. The divine, however, generally speaking, is essentially to be apprehended us unity of the natural and spiritual; both sides are involved in the conception of the Absolute; and it is merely the different mode, under which this harmony is conceived, which constitutes from our present point of view the respective grades of the various forms of art and historic religions. According to our own Christian way of looking at it, God is the creator and lord of Nature and the spiritual world, and therewith, no doubt, exempted from the immediate and determinate existence of Nature, for the reason that, before all else, he is very God as the taking back into Himself of his own fulness, that is as absolute and self-dependent Spirit; it is only the finite and human spirit which stands in opposition to Nature as a limit and a bound, a limitation which such only thereby overcomes in his determinate existence, and exalts himself intrinsically to the grade of infinity in so far as he grasps Nature contemplatively in thought, and in the actual world[152] consummates the harmony between spiritual idea, reason, the Good and Nature. This infinite actualization is, however, God, in so far as the lordship over Nature is strictly due to Him, and He Himself is conceived as explicit in this infinite activity, and the knowledge and volition of such realization.
In the religions of strictly symbolic art, on the contrary, as we have traced already, the union of the Inward and Ideal with Nature was an immediate association, which consequently made use of Nature both as regards its substance and form as its fundamental mode of determination. In this sense the sun, the Nile, the sea, the Earth, the natural processes of birth, death, procreation, and reproduction, in short, all the varied changes of the universal life of Nature were revered as divine existence and life. These Nature-forces, however, were even in symbolic art personified, and consequently set up in contrast to the spiritual. If, however, and nothing less than this is the requirement of classical art, the gods are to be spiritual individualities in harmony with Nature, mere personification is a conception insufficient for this result. For personification, in the case that its content is a purely universal force and activity of Nature, persists as a mere form, unable to penetrate to the constituting substance, and can neither give existence to the spiritual content in the same, nor its individuality. We find therefore necessarily in classical art a change of front[153], to the effect that, in conformity with the degradation of the animal aspect we have just been considering, the universal power of Nature also in one aspect of it suffers humiliation, and the spiritual is proportionally exalted in contrast to it. And by this means we find that it is the principle of subjectivity, rather than mere personification, which becomes the main mode of definition. From another point of view, however, the gods of classical art do not cease to be potences of Nature, because God here has not yet come to be represented as essentially absolute and free spirituality. In the relation of a merely created and ministrant creature to a lord and creator separated from it, Nature stands, however, albeit deified, either as we have it in the art of the Sublime—conceived as an essentially abstract, that is purely ideal masterdom of one supreme substance, or—as in the case of Christianity—exalted as concrete Spirit to absolute freedom within the pure element of spiritual existence and personal actuality. Neither of these examples falls in with the point of view of classical art. God here is not as yet lord of Nature, for the reason that he does not as yet possess absolute spirituality either if regarded relatively to what is contained in Him, or to the mode under which He is apprehended. He is no longer lord of Nature, because the sublime relation of the deified natural thing and human individuality has ceased, and taken upon itself the limitations of beauty, in which their just due must be rendered for art's representation without any tittle of loss to both aspects, the universal and the individual, the spiritual and the natural. Consequently in the god of classical art the nature-potency is preserved, but is conceived as such not in the sense of the universal and all-embracing Nature, but as the definable, and consequently limited activity of the sun, sea, and so on, generally speaking, as a particular natural potency, which is made visible as spiritual individuality, and possesses this spiritual individuality as its essential being.
For the reason, then, as we have already made clear, that the classical Ideal is not immediately present, but first makes its appearance through the process in which that which is negative to the formative content of spirit is resolved, this transformation and building up into new forms of that which is raw, unbeautiful, wild, grotesque, purely natural, or fantastic, which originated in earlier religious conceptions and views of art, will be a leading interest in Greek mythology, and consequently will necessarily reproduce a readily defined sphere[154] of particular significances.