Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/83

Rh his inevitable arrow destroys deformity. Excellence is his prerogative: whoever contends with him is worsted and dies. His first great oracle commands to man self-consciousness. It is man's prerogative and duty to act, not blindly, but in the light of the past and the future.

There is trace in Greece, as everywhere else in the ancient world, of a worship of nature, which grovelled in the material slime. This appears in the mythology as monsters, especially as serpents which some hero, personifying or concentrating in himself the genius of some Grecian tribe, destroys. Perhaps one hideous form of earth-worship had its seat, in very early times, at Delphusa and Delphi, and was expelled thence by a Dorian colony, who settled there, and built the temple of Apollo. But the most important part of the worship was not a commemoration of historical facts, but the expression of an idea; which, though it has not, in the Apollonic religion, the complete expression that it after wards found in the facts of the Christian history, was no less deep than the central idea of Christianity.

Apollo kills the Pythoness by the necessity of his nature. It is his virtue. But his virtue is a crime that must be expiated. No sooner is the deed done, than, by a necessity as irresistible as that by which he did it, he flies from the scene of the slaughter toward the old Vale of Tempe for purification. On the way occurs the expiation. For eight years, he serves Admetus; and Müller has demonstrated, that Admetus is but a title of Pluto, and that Pheræ was from the earliest times a spot where the infernal deities were worshipped. Having expiated, he goes on to Tempe, and breaks the bough of peace from the laurel groves that encompass the temple, and, returning to Delphi, lays it on the altar.

The interpretation of this fable is awful. Life, then, is sacred: even the all-divine Son of God, if he violate it in its lowest, most degraded manifestation, must expiate the deed afterwards by years of activity in the service of Death. The