In Goethe’s ‘Faust’ we read, Doch das Antike find’ ich zu lebendig. It is a criticism on the nudity of the Greek forms that appear in the classical Walpurgis Night. But the authority is not good: it is Mephistopheles who is disgusted with sight of the human form, and he says they ought in modern fashion to be plastered over. His sentiments have prevailed at the Vatican, where the antique statues and the great pictures of Michael Angelo bear witness to the prurient prudery of the papal mind. ‘Devils are our sins in perspective,’ says George Herbert.
Herodotus (ii. 47) says, ‘The Egyptians consider the pig to be an impure beast, and therefore if a man, in passing by a pig, should touch him only with his garments, he forthwith goes to the river and plunges in; and, in the next place, swineherds, although native Egyptians, are the only men who are not allowed to enter any of their temples.’ The Egyptians, he says, do not sacrifice the goat; ‘and, indeed, their painters and sculptors represent Pan with the face and legs of a goat, as the Grecians do; not that they imagine this to be his real form, for they think him like other gods; but why they represent him in this way I had rather not mention.’ We need not feel the same prudery. The Egyptians rightly regarded the symbol of sexual desire, on whose healthy exercise the perpetuation of life depended, as a very different kind of animalism from that symbolised in the pig’s love of refuse and garbage. Their association of the goat with Pan—the lusty vigour of nature—was the natural preface to the arts of Greece in which the wild forces were taught their first lesson—Temperance. Pan becomes musical. The vigour and vitality of human nature find in the full but not excessive proportions of Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis, and others of the bright array, the harmony which Pan with his pipe preludes. The Greek statue is soul embodied and body ensouled.
Two men had I the happiness to know in my youth, into whose faces I looked up and saw the throne of Genius illumined by Purity. One of them, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, ‘If beauty, softness, and faith in female forms have their own influence, vices even, in a slight degree, are thought to improve the expression.’ The other, Arthur Hugh Clough, wrote, ‘What we all love is good touched up with evil.’ Here are two brave flowers, of which one grew out of the thorny stem of Puritanism, the other from the monastic root of Oxford. The ‘vices’ which could improve the expression, even for the pure eyes of Emerson, are those which represent the struggle of human nature to exist in truth, albeit in misdirection and reaction, amid pious hypocrisies. The Oxonian scholar had seen enough of the conventionalised characterless ‘good’ to long for some sign of life and freedom, even though it must come as a touch of ‘evil.’ To the artist, nature is never seen in petrifaction; it is really as well as literally a becoming. The evil he sees is ‘good in the making:’ what others call vices are voices in the wilderness preparing the way of the highest.
‘God and the Devil make the whole of Religion,’ said Nicoli—speaking, perhaps, better than he knew. The culture of the world has shown that the sometime opposed realms of human interest, so personified, are equally essential. It is through this experience that the Devil has gained such ample vindication from the poets—as in Rapisardi’s ‘Lucifero,’ a veritable ‘bringer of Light,’ and Cranch’s ‘Satan.’ From the latter work (‘Satan: A Libretto.’ Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874), which should be more widely known, I quote some lines. Satan says—
I symbolise the wild and deep
And unregenerated wastes of life,