Think for an instant of another place:—“Sharp stones are under him, he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.” We must yet keep to Dante, however. Echidna, remember, is half-maiden, half-serpent;—hear what Dante’s Fraud is like:—
| “Forthwith that image vile of Fraud appear’d, His head and upper part exposed on land, But laid not on the shore his bestial train. His face the semblance of a just man’s wore, So kind and gracious was its outward cheer; The rest was serpent all: two shaggy claws Reach’d to the armpits; and the back and breast, And either side, were painted o’er with nodes And orbits. Colors variegated more Nor Turks nor Tartars e’er on cloth of state With interchangeable embroidery wove, Nor spread Arachne o’er her curious loom. As oft-times a light skiff moor’d to the shore, Stands part in water, part upon the land; Or, as where dwells the greedy German boor, The beaver settles, watching for his prey; So on the rim, that fenced the sand with rock, Sat perch’d the fiend of evil. In the void Glancing, his tail upturn’d, its venomous fork With sting like scorpion’s arm’d.” |
§ 14. You observe throughout this description the leaning on the character of the Sea Dragon; a little farther on, his way of flying is told us:—
| “As a small vessel backing out from land, Her station quits; so thence the monster loos’d, And, when he felt himself at large, turn’d round There, where the breast had been, his fork’d tail. Thus, like an eel, outstretch’d at length he steer’d, Gathering the air up with retractile claws.” |
And lastly, his name is told us: Geryon. Whereupon, looking back at Hesiod, we find that Geryon is Echidna’s brother. Man-serpent, therefore, in Dante, as Echidna is woman-serpent.
We find next that Geryon lived in the island of Erytheia, (blushing), only another kind of blushing than that of the Hesperid Erytheia. But it is on, also, a western island, and Geryon kept red oxen on it (said to be near the red setting sun); and Hercules kills him, as he does the Hesperian dragon: but in order to be able to reach him, a golden boat is given to Hercules by the Sun, to cross the sea in.
§ 15. We will return to this part of the legend presently, having enough of it now collected to get at the complete idea of the Hesperian dragon, who is, in fine, the “Pluto il gran nemico” of Dante; the demon of all evil passions connected with covetousness; that is to say, essentially of fraud, rage, and gloom. Regarded as the demon of Fraud, he is said to be descended from the viper Echidna, full of deadly cunning, in whirl on whirl; as the demon of consuming Rage, from Phorcys; as the demon of Gloom, from Ceto;—in his watching and melancholy, he is sleepless (compare the Micyllus dialogue of Lucian); breathing whirlwind and fire, he is the destroyer, descended from Typhon as well as Phorcys; having, moreover, with all these, the irresistible strength of his ancestral sea.
§ 16. Now, look at him, as Turner has drawn him (p. 298). I cannot reduce the creature to this scale without losing half his power; his length, especially, seems to diminish more than it should in proportion to his bulk. In the picture he is far in the distance, cresting the mountain; and may be, perhaps, three-quarters of a mile long. The actual length on the canvas is a foot and eight inches; so that it may be judged how much he loses by the reduction, not to speak of my imperfect etching,[6] and of the loss which, however well he might have been engraved, he would still have sustained, in the impossibility of expressing the lurid color of his armor, alternate bronze and blue.
§ 17. Still, the main points of him are discernible enough; and among all the wonderful things that Turner did in his day, I think this nearly the most wonderful. How far he had really found out for himself the collateral bearings of the Hesperid tradition I know not; but that he had got the main clue of it, and knew who the Dragon was, there can be no doubt; the strange thing is, that his conception of it throughout, down to the minutest detail, fits every one of the circumstances of the Greek traditions. There is, first, the Dragon’s descent from Medusa and Typhon, indicated in the serpent-clouds floating from his head (compare my sketch of the Medusa-cloud, Plate 71); then note the grovelling and ponderous body, ending in a serpent, of which we do not see the end. He drags the weight of it forward by his claws, not being able to lift himself from the ground (“Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell”); then the grip of the claws themselves as if they would clutch (rather than tear) the rock itself into pieces; but chiefly, the designing of the body. Remember, one of the essential characters of the creature, as descended from Medusa, is its coldness and petrifying power; this, in the demon of covetousness, must exist to the utmost; breathing fire, he is yet himself of ice. Now, if I were merely to draw this dragon as white, instead of dark, and take his claws away, his body would become a representation of a greater glacier, so nearly perfect, that I know no published engraving of glacier breaking over a rocky brow so like the truth as this dragon’s shoulders would be, if they were thrown out in light; there being only this difference, that they have the form, but not the fragility of the ice; they are at once ice and iron. “His bones are like solid pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron; by his neesings a light doth shine.”