Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/498

488 securely on his way, and is led by signs from the goddess herself, when he travels far to see her at Hermione or Eleusis.

So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are similar. In the mythical conception, as in the religious acts connected with it, the mother and the daughter are almost interchangeable: they are the two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually Persephone defines herself; functions distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detatched from her, coming and going on her mysterious business. A third part of the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone then, is the summer-time, and a daughter of the earth in this sense; but the summer as bringing winter; the flowery splendour and consummated glory of the year, as thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its end, as the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in the threefold division of the Greek year. Her story is but the story, in an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus, the king's blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear, of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds every springtime, of the Sleeping Beauty. From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the goddess of night and sleep and death, confusable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight terrors: Κόρη άρρητος, the mother of the Erinnyes, who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approaching end, upbraiding him because he had made no hymn in her praise, which swan's song he thereupon began, but finished with her. She is a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized respectively. A duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone, runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity; hence the many euphemisms of later language concerning her.

The student of origins, of the earlier stages of art and poetry, must be content to follow faint traces; and in what has been here said, much may seem to have been made of little, with too much completion, by a general framework or setting, of what after all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications. Yet there is a certain cynicism too, in that over-positive temper, which is so jealous of our catching any resemblance in the earlier world to the thoughts that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is content to find no seal of human intelligence upon them. Slight indeed in themselves, these fragmentary indications become suggestive of much, when viewed in the light of such general evidence about the human imagination as is afforded by the theory of "comparative mythology," or what is called the theory of "animism." Only, in the application of these theories, the critic must never forget that after all it is with poetry that he has to do. As regards this story of Demeter and Persephone, what we actually possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture; and with a curiosity, justified by the direct esthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-people, with which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our knowledge. The abstract poet of that first period of mythology, creating in this wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way — the abstract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; and, in speaking of this poetical age, the critic must take heed, before all things, not to offend the poets.

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

  ended, Rebecca presently retired, first giving her dearest Arthur a languishing embrace; and Mrs. Yorke and her son left soon after, the lady bidding her son-in-law, on parting, to be sure to send for her the moment she was wanted — an injunction which, however, while repeatedly thanking her for, he did not promise to obey. He also declined her invitation for the small party which Mrs. Yorke was going to give on the following evening, in honour of her son's arrival, waving it away with his hand as if the idea of his joining in such an amusement was too absurd to be seriously considered, and saying he must leave such things to the gentlemen 