'Christ hath sent us down the angels;
And the whole earth and the skies
Are illumed by altar candles
Lit for blessed mysteries;
And a Priest's hand through creation
Waveth calm and consecration—
And Pan is dead.
'O brave Poets, keep back nothing;
Mix not falsehood with the whole!
Look up Godward! speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest truth, the fairest Beauty!
Pan, Pan is dead.'
As we have already intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, resulting in varied gods and goddesses; but the soul could find no satisfaction for its deeper needs in such conceptions; urged on by its secret instincts, it sought to recompose the broken unity of the divine nature.
All government requires a Head; and when an attempt was made to apply the heterogeneous qualities and contradictory powers of the gods to the regulation of society—when it was necessary to find in an Olympus filled with quarrels and scandals, a steady Power capable of directing the destinies of a great people toward a single aim—men were again forced to recompose the fractioned Unity, to form an idea of one God superior to those with whom they had peopled earth and heaven. They were thus forced upon the conception of a Being superior to Jupiter, who subjected all the gods to his inflexible laws; and giving wings to those instincts of dread always present in the soul of a fallen race, they invented an invisible Divinity who never manifested himself to men; who dwelt in inaccessible and dreadful regions, in which an inscrutable Horror forever reigned; and through this new Terror, Unity was again brought into the design of creation, for all beings were, in despite of themselves, forced to fulfil the decrees of its pitiless will. All struggle was vain, all effort useless, prayer was without avail, and human anguish utterly unheeded by this terrific phantom of irresistible and crushing Power without a heart!
It is this dread idea which, pervading the pages of Eschylus, gives them that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could conciliate—this dark Fate, the creation of his own misled and perverted intuitions—and vainly seeking to escape from the inflexible circle which he had traced around himself, is an object which cannot fail to awaken the deepest pity. He asks from his fellow men, from nature, from the gods, the meaning of the dire enigma of life. Alas! they leave him to struggle in the stony hands of an unbending Fate! no reply is ever given to his wild demand, and the 'veil of Isis is never raised!' The world quivered under some strange anathema; a mystic malediction wreathed its thorns round the anguished heads of men; even in the midst of their festivals, when seeming to drink deep of joy from the brimming cup of life, the invisible hand of a Gorgon Fate was forever felt tracing upon their walls the decrees of a dark, inscrutable, inflexible, and terrible destiny!
Yet there are poets among us, who would willingly return to the days of Paganism, and resuscitate the gods of Greece!
'Get to dust as common mortals,
By a common doom and track!
Let no Schiller from the portals
Of that Hades call you back,
Or instruct us all to weep:
Everlasting be your sleep!
Pan, Pan is dead!'
''Twas the hour when one in Zion
Hung for Love's sake on a cross—
When His brow was chill with dying,
And His soul was faint with loss;
When His priestly blood dropped downward;
And His kingly eyes looked homeward—
Then Pan was dead!'
The Prometheus of the rock, the Tantalus of the fable, man, plunged in this world of woe with his lips thirsty for happiness, stretches out his hand to pluck the bitter Dead-Sea fruits of this earth. With his profound instincts of the Infinite, his craving for the Absolute, he seizes madly upon every object which suggests their image to him; the foul fiend, adapting his temptations to the nature of the tempted, still whispers, as into the ear of the mother of mankind: 'Ye shall be as gods;'—but the phenomenal flies before him, and he everywhere falls upon the thorns closely hedging in the narrow circle of the actual. Without Faith, the artist is among the most miserable of men, for through the illimitable horizons of the Infinite, genius catches secrets which it can never fully utter; symbolic signs, whose sense it cannot articulate; while the voice of the invisible Love loads every breeze. What profound and mournful aspirations for that Unknown which the mortal may not see, surge through the soul of the imaginative!
'E'en the flowing azure air
Thou hast charmed for his despair.'