In the ancient myth and romaunt of ‘Merlin’ may be found the mediæval witness to the diabolised religion of Britain. The emasculated saints of the South-east could not satisfy the vigorous race in the North-west, and when its gods were outlawed as devils they brought the chief of them back, as it were, had him duly baptized and set about his old work in the form of Merlin! Here, side by side with the ascetic Jesus, brought by Gatien and Augustin, was a Northern Christ, son of an Arch-incubus, born of a Virgin, baptized in the shrunken Jordan of a font, performing miracles, summoning dragons to his aid, overcoming Death and Hell in his way, brought before his Pilate but confounding him, throning and dethroning kings, and leading forth, on the Day of Pentecost, an army whose knights are inspired by Guenever’s kisses in place of flaming tongues. How Merlin ‘went about doing good,’ after the Northman’s ideal of such work; how he saved the life of his unwedded mother by proving that her child (himself) was begotten by a devil without her knowledge; how, as a child, he exposed at once the pretension of the magistrate to high birth and the laxity of his lady and his parson; how he humiliated the priestly astrologers of Vortigern, and prophesied the destruction of that usurper just as it came to pass; how he served Uther during his seven years’ reign, and by enabling him to assume the shape of the Duke of Cornwall and so enjoy the embraces of the Duchess Igerna, secured the birth of Arthur and hope of the Sangréal;[4] how he defended Arthur’s legitimacy of birth and assisted him in causing illegitimate births; and how at last he was bound by his own spells, wielded by Vivien, in a prison of air where he now remains;—this was the great mediæval gospel of a baptized christian Antichrist which superseded the imported kingdom not of this world.
Fig. 25.—From the ‘Raree Show.’
Merlin was the Good Devil, but baptism was a fatal Vivien-spell to him. He still dwells in all the air which is breathed by Anglo-Saxon men,—an ever-expanding prison! Whether the Briton is transplanted in America, India, or Africa, he still carries with him the Sermon on the Mount as inspired by his baptized Prince of the Air, and his gospel of the day is, ‘If thine enemy hunger, starve him; if he thirst, give him fire; if he hate you, heap melted lead on his head!’ Such remains the soul of the greatest race, under the fatal spell of a creed that its barbarism needs only baptism to be made holiness and virtue.
In the reign of George II., when Lord Bute and a Princess of easy virtue were preying on England, and fanatical preachers were directing their donkeys to heaven beside the conflagration of John Bull’s house, the eye of Hogarth at least (as is shown in our Figure 25, from his ‘Raree Show’) was able to see what the baptized Merlin had become in his realm of Air. The other worldly-Devil is serpent-legged Hypocrisy. The Nineteenth Century has replaced Merlin by Mephistopheles, the Devil who, despite a cloven foot, steps firmly on earth, and means the power that wit and culture can bring against the baptized giant Force. Him the gods fear not, even look upon with satisfaction. In the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ the Lord is even more gracious to Mephistopheles than the Jehovah of Job was to Satan. ‘The like of thee have never moved my hate,’ he says—
Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.
This is but a more modern expression of the rabbinical fable, already noted, that when the first man was formed there were beside him two Spirits,—one on the right that remained quiescent, another on the left who ever moved restlessly up and down. When the first sin was committed, he of the left was changed to a devil. But he still meant the progressive, inquiring nature of man. ‘The Spirit I, that evermore denies,’ says the Mephistopheles of Goethe. How shall man learn truth if he know not the Spirit that denies? How shall he advance if he know not the Spirit of discontent? This restless spirit gains through his ignorance a cloven hoof,—a divided movement, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. From his selfishness it acquires a double tongue. But both hoof and serpent-tongue are beneath the evolutional power of experience; they shall be humanised to the foot that marches firmly on earth, and the tongue that speaks truth; and, the baptismal spell broken, Merlin shall descend, bringing to man’s aid all his sharp-eyed dragons transformed to beautiful Arts.