§ 18. The strange unity of vertebrated action, and of a true bony contour, infinitely varied in every vertebra, with this glacial outline;—together with the adoption of the head of the Ganges crocodile, the fish-eater, to show his sea descent (and this in the year 1806, when hardly a single fossil saurian skeleton existed within Turner’s reach), renders the whole conception one of the most curious exertions of the imaginative intellect with which I am acquainted in the arts.
§ 19. Thus far, then, of the dragon; next, we have to examine the conception of the Goddess of Discord. We must return for a moment to the tradition about Geryon. I cannot yet decipher the meaning of his oxen, said to be fed together with those of Hades; nor of the journey of Hercules, in which, after slaying Geryon, he returns through Europe like a border forager, driving these herds, and led into farther battle in protection or recovery of them. But it seems to me the main drift of the legend cannot be mistaken; viz., that Geryon is the evil spirit of wealth, as arising from commerce; hence, placed as a guardian of isles in the most distant sea, and reached in a golden boat; while the Hesperian dragon is the evil spirit of wealth, as possessed in households; and associated, therefore, with the true household guardians, or singing nymphs. Hercules (manly labor), slaying both Geryon and Ladon, presents oxen and apples to Juno, who is their proper mistress; but the Goddess of Discord, contriving that one portion of this household wealth shall be ill bestowed by Paris, he, according to Coleridge’s interpretation, choosing pleasure instead of wisdom or power;—there issue from this evil choice the catastrophe of the Trojan war, and the wanderings of Ulysses, which are essentially, both in the Iliad and Odyssey, the troubling of household peace; terminating with the restoration of this peace by repentance and patience; Helen and Penelope seen at last sitting upon their household thrones, in the Hesperian light of age.
§ 20. We have, therefore, to regard Discord, in the Hesperides garden, eminently as the disturber of households, assuming a different aspect from Homer’s wild and fierce discord of war. They are, nevertheless, one and the same power; for she changes her aspect at will. I cannot get at the root of her name, Eris. It seems to me as if it ought to have one in common with Erinnys (Fury); but it means always contention, emulation, or competition, either in mind or in words;—the final work of Eris is essentially “division,” and she is herself always double-minded; shouts two ways at once (in Iliad, xi. 6), and wears a mantle rent in half (Æneid, viii. 702). Homer makes her loud-voiced, and insatiably covetous. This last attribute is, with him, the source of her usual title. She is little when she first is seen, then rises till her head touches heaven. By Virgil she is called mad; and her hair is of serpents, bound with bloody garlands.
§ 21. This is the conception first adopted by Turner, but combined with another which he found in Spenser; only note that there is some confusion in the minds of English poets between Eris (Discord) and Até (Error), who is a daughter of Discord, according to Hesiod. She is properly—mischievous error, tender-footed; for she does not walk on the earth, but on heads of men (Iliad, xix. 92); i.e. not on the solid ground, but on human vain thoughts; therefore, her hair is glittering (Iliad, xix. 126). I think she is mainly the confusion of mind coming of pride, as Eris comes of covetousness; therefore, Homer makes her a daughter of Jove. Spenser, under the name of Até, describes Eris. I have referred to his account of her in my notice of the Discord on the Ducal palace of Venice (remember the inscription there, Discordia sum, discordans). But the stanzas from which Turner derived his conception of her are these—
| “Als, as she double spake, so heard she double, With matchlesse eares deformed and distort, Fild with false rumors and seditious trouble, Bred in assemblies of the vulgar sort, That still are led with every light report: And as her eares, so eke her feet were odde, And much unlike; th’ one long, the other short, And both misplast; that, when th’ one forward yode, The other backe retired and contrárie trode. “Likewise unequall were her handës twaine; That one did reach, the other pusht away; That one did make the other mard againe, And sought to bring all things unto decay; Whereby great riches, gathered manie a day, She in short space did often bring to nought, An their possessours often did dismay: For all her studie was, and all her thought How she might overthrow the thing that Concord wrought. “So much her malice did her might surpas, That even th’ Almightie selfe she did maligne, Because to man so mercifull He was, And unto all His creatures so benigne, Sith she herself was of his grace indigne: For all this worlds faire workmanship she tride Unto his last confusion to bring, And that great golden chaine quite to divide, With which it blessed Concord hath together tide.” |
All these circumstances of decrepitude and distortion Turner has followed, through hand and limb, with patient care: he has added one final touch of his own. The nymph who brings the apples to the goddess, offers her one in each hand; and Eris, of the divided mind, cannot choose.
§ 22. One farther circumstance must be noted, in order to complete our understanding of the picture,—the gloom extending, not to the dragon only, but also to the fountain and the tree of golden fruit. The reason of this gloom may be found in two other passages of the authors from which Turner had taken his conception of Eris—Virgil and Spenser. For though the Hesperides in their own character, as the nymphs of domestic joy, are entirely bright (and the garden always bright around them), yet seen or remembered in sorrow, or in the presence of discord, they deepen distress. Their entirely happy character is given by Euripides:—“The fruit-planted shore of the Hesperides,—songstresses,—where the ruler of the purple lake allows not any more to the sailor his way, assigning the boundary of Heaven, which Atlas holds; where the ambrosial fountains flow, and the fruitful and divine land increases the happiness of the gods.”
But to the thoughts of Dido, in her despair, they recur under another aspect; she remembers their priestess as a great enchantress; who feeds the dragon and preserves the boughs of the tree; sprinkling moist honey and drowsy poppy; who also has power over ghosts; “and the earth shakes and the forests stoop from the hills at her bidding.”
§ 23. This passage Turner must have known well, from his continual interest in Carthage: but his diminution of the splendor of the old Greek garden was certainly caused chiefly by Spenser’s describing the Hesperides fruit as growing first in the garden of Mammon:—