We have kept the most beautiful of the Sicilian mythic stories to conclude with: for such, doubtless, is the Rape of Proserpine. It is full of the most striking contrasts of grandeur and beauty. Both heaven and hell are in it—the freshest vernal airs, with the depths of Tartarus; and the hearts of a mother and daughter beat through all. It is a tale at once of the wildest preternaturalism and the most familiar domestic tenderness. The daughter of Ceres is gathering flowers, with other damsels of her own age, in the Vale of Enna, intent upon nothing but seeing who shall get the finest. Suddenly, in the midst of the violets and jonquils, there is an earthquake: a noise is heard like the coming of a thousand chariots; the earth bursts open; and a rapid, majestic figure appears, like a swarthy Jupiter, who, sweeping by Proserpine, whirls her away with him into his car, and prepares to rush down through another opening. Of all her attendants, the nymph Cyane alone has the courage to bid him stop, and ask him why he dares take away the daughter of Ceres. He makes no answer, but, knitting his brows like thunderbolts, smites the fountain over which she presided with his iron mace, and dashes down through it with his prey. It is the King of Hell himself, tired of celibacy, and resolved to have the fairest creature on earth for his wife.
The cries of Proserpine become fainter as the earth closes over them; but they have been heard by Ceres herself, who comes, with all the speed of a divine being, to see what is the matter. She can discern nothing; the tranquillity of the scene is restored; Cyane has melted away in tears. The goddess seeks everywhere in vain. She travels by day and by night, lit by two flaming pines from Mount Ætna. At length she learns who has got her child; and, by the intervention of Jupiter, Proserpine is allowed to come to earth and see her. The mother and daughter are half drowned in tears, half absorbed in delight, and Jupiter would prevent their separation, but is not able; for Proserpine has eaten of a fatal fruit, compulsory of her continuance with Pluto; and all that can be done, is to stipulate for her being half a year with her mother, on condition of her being a good wife during the other half. Ceres makes a virtue of the necessity, seeing that her daughter is married to the brother of Jove; and Proserpine is content to divide the throne of Tartarus, and walk in gardens of her own, splendid, though subterraneous.
The ancient poets made these gardens consist of all the flowers which she had been accustomed to gather in Sicily; but modern imagination, which (with leave be it said) is still finer than theirs, and sees beauty beyond its ordinary manifestation in the fitness of things, and in the balance of good and evil, has told us, through the inspired medium of Spenser, that the garden was such a garden as might have been expected from “the grandeur of the glooms” in those lower regions:—
There mournful cypress grew in greatest store,
And trees of bitter gall, and ebon sad,
Deep-sleeping poppy, and black hellebore,
Cold coloquintida, and tetra mad,
Mortal samnitis, and cicuta bad,
With which the unjust Athenians made to die
Wise Socrates, who thereof quaffing glad
Pour’d out his life and last philosophy
To the fair Critias, his dearest belamy.
The Garden of Prosèrpina this hight;
And in the midst thereof a silver seat,
With a thick arbour goodly overdight,
In which she often used from open heat
Herself to shroud, and pleasures to entreat;
Next thereunto did grow a goodly tree,
With branches broad dispread, and body great,
Clothed with leaves, that none the fruit might see,
And loaden all with fruit as thick as it might be.
Their fruit were golden apples, glistering bright.
—Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 7.
Here we see, that Proserpine enjoyed herself in the lower regions, though among flowers of a different kind from those to which she had been accustomed. She became used to the place, and found pleasures even in Tartarus. And reasonably. First, because she needed them; and in the second place, because she knew there was good as well as evil there, and that the evil itself contained good. The hemlock was “bad,” inasmuch as it killed Socrates, but it was good, also, for many a medicinal cup. “Deep-sleeping poppy” was a very kindly fellow, if properly treated; and all the flowers, after their kind, were full of beauty. Flowers cannot help being beautiful. Then there was the Silver Seat and the Golden Tree; and it is manifest, that the summer sun used to come there through some unknown ravine, to say nothing of Wordsworth’s
Calm pleasures and majestic pains.
We do not, to be sure, see what good Tantalus’s eternal thirst could have been to him, or the everlasting wheel to Ixion; but, probably, on coming up to those gentlemen, we should have found they were visions, put there to make us “snatch a fearful joy” at thinking we were not among them in propriâ personâ.
And so we take leave of the beautiful ancient fables of Sicily, having found honey for our Jar even in the fields of Pluto.
