That perhaps was why Pan had become for romanticists the Master. That might be why, when Olympos crumbled, romanticists had set between those ungainly horns the pentagram; had caused this hairy brown body to burgeon with scales and feathers; had given to the most virile of the gods the breasts of a woman; and had kindled in his honor the moons of Chesed and Geburah. The goat god had thus, alone of the Olympians, endured. He endured as Baphomet, as Azazel, as Janicot, as Eblis; as the Master of the Gnostics, the Master of the Sabbath, the Master of the Two Moons, moons which had, here again, their minions....

I shall not, in this place, speak at any length of what the prosaic perhaps do well to regard as bedlamite nonsense: here I shall only indicate from afar the mystery I could not ignore. For I knew that the romantic had whispered of two scapegoats, of Christ and Pan, the saviors severally of religion and of art: the one dying in atonement for human sin, in the manner of the stainless beast which was sacrificed in the Temple; the other serving men in the manner of that other beast, not necessarily immaculate, which was loaded with the sins of the twelve tribes, and driven out of the Temple forever, as one consecrated not to death but to life, and condemned not to rest but to the exile's freedom, in those desert places which belonged to Pan-Azazel. For it is recorded—where we would least look for it, even in our English Bible,[4]—that the Lord of Sabaoth commanded such sacrifice and such honor be divided between Himself and the goat god, as equals share. And it is recorded too, in the sacred lore of the Moslems, that to the Master of the Two Moons, and to that especial manifesting of Pan which the East called Eblis, was relinquished by Heaven—through a compact such as, once again, is made by equals,—the overlordship of all loneliness, of wine, of verse and song and rhetoric, and of all the arts. You will perceive this is, very exactly, the heritage of the creating romantic....

Well! thus Christ had His servitors, whose reward was to be, by and by, in a land fulfilled with the glory of the Sun, eternal rest: and Pan, the Master of the Two Moons, had mustered likewise his minions, whose reward was their work. By these exceedingly diverse saviors, I knew, had been evolved the magic of the sanctuary and of the wilderness, the white magic and another magic rather less candid. So had arisen the messiahs who led men severally to hope for contentment to come, or to create contentment, somehow, even in this unsatisfying life and moment.... Pan was, in fine, the god who had looked upon the divine handiwork, and seen that it was not good; or, at any rate, not good enough. The creating romanticist had always hoped that somewhere must at least one such clear-sighted god exist; and, finding him, had worshipped appropriately....

And so I got my clue, and esteemed it, upon the whole, unwelcome.

For I saw that the one feature common to all the great mythic figures over whose deathlessness I had been puzzling, was that each was a divine and unrepentant outcast, that each one of them was a rebel who had gained famousness by warring in one way or another against Heaven. And that might be, I felt uncomfortably, just what had made them to all creative artists irresistible. Here well might lurk, for so long unapprehended by me, another and more lurid instance of art's need to make sport with piety; here revealed in art's unfaltering endeavor to glorify not merely the rogue but the rebel. Once the discovery might have pleased me. But nowadays, rebellion in any form really does seem rather unurbane and almost certainly futile: and very much as penitent Villon turned monk, or as the wild Highlanders ceased to rebel after the Stuarts lost in 'Forty-five, so have I found the same numeral to be remarkably sedative.

Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, the romantic artist, I knew, has not ever been in harmony with Providence and this world's Demiurge. He has not ever honestly believed, as I recall the dicta of John Charteris, that this world reflected credit upon its Maker. And so, toward offenders against this divine ordering the artist might well incline with unavoidable, unreasoning and, I preferred to think, unconscious sympathy.

§ 35

Certainly, of the myths I have named, all save two deal with protagonists who are condemned perforce to struggle against, and who contrive to thwart, inimical gods, as did Andromeda and Odysseus; or who rebel with the volition and candor of Satan and Tannhäuser and Prometheus. But the myths of the Sphinx and of Queen Helen rest upon other bases of impiety.... Helen, indeed, stands pedestalled above the bickerings of mere gods.... And to the romantic the Sphinx has never really been that offensively feeble-minded monster who molested Œdipus with a conundrum so inane as to result, quite properly, in the death of its perpetrator. Instead, the Sphinx has become, for the romantic, the one being who foreknows the answer to all riddles and the outcome of all experience. And because of this foreknowledge, obviously denied to demiurgically experimenting gods, the Sphinx does nothing.... This dreadful certitude, equally male and female, as was Baphomet and as was the veiled Lord of Mommur, this quietness that is equally a beast of the field and an unslayable immortal, this very large and pitiless felinity, lies waiting; and waits in blasphemous and perturbingly untroubled ease. The years pass; pious nations come into being and high power and pass; heaven is no longer great enough to contain a catalogue of the gods that have reigned in heaven: the Sphinx, men say, has never stirred. For the Sphinx waits. All the august doings of Olympos and Sinai and Valhalla have been witnessed by the Sphinx: and the most favorable interpreting of that changeless face is, upon the whole, to hope it wears the provisional smile we bend toward the playing of not yet unbearable children. And therein lies the impiety of the waiting Sphinx, in this amused deep comprehension that there is no need to rebel against our gods.... For the Sphinx is immortal: and the secret of the Sphinx, men say, is that secret which the harried gods strive desperately to surmise: the Sphinx knows why no god may ever hope to be immortal.

§ 36

Yes: all these so inexplicably popular myths commemorate a rebel against Heaven's orderings. Each myth, in one fashion or another, adopts the true Byronic posture of looking the Omnipotent in the face and imparting to Him the, upon the whole unstartling, information that His evil is not good. And that—where every dictum is perforce an hypothesis,—that well may be why these especial myths, rather than others, overruled the art of yesterday; and why upon us is yet laid their mastery, from which the spiritual descendants of us who are minions of the moon shall not escape.