The Eye of Evil—Turner’s Dragons—Cloud-phantoms—Paradise and the Snake—Prometheus and Jove—Art and Nature—Dragon forms: Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Egyptian, Greek, German—The modern conventional Dragon. The etymologies of the words Dragon and Ophis given in the preceding chapter, ideally the same, both refer to powers of the serpent which it does not possess in nature,—the prÆternatural vision and the glance that kills. The real nature of the snake is thus overlaid; we have now to deal with the creation of another world. There are various conventionalised types of the Dragon, but through them all one feature is constant,—the idealised serpent. Its presence is the demonic or supernatural sign. The heroic dragon-slayer must not be supposed to have wrestled with mere flesh and blood, in whatever powerful form. The combat which immortalises him is waged with all the pains and terrors of earth and heaven concentrated and combined in one fearful form. Impossible and phantasmal as was this form in nature, its mystical meaning in the human mind was terribly real. It was this Eye of anti-human nature which filled man with dismay, and conjured up the typical phantom. It was this Pain, purposed and purposing, the Agony of far-searching vision, subtlest skill, silently creeping, winged, adapted to It is only as a combination that any dragon form is miraculous. Every constituent feature and factor of it is in nature, but here they are rolled together in one pandemonic expression and terror. Yet no such form loses its relations with nature: it is lightning and tempest, fever-bearing malaria and fire, venom and fang, slime and jungle, all the ferocities of the earth, air, and heavens, gathering to their fatal artistic force, and waylaying man at every step in his advance. In Turner’s picture of Apollo slaying the Python there is a marvellous suggestion of the natural conceptions from which the dragon was evolved. The fearful folds of the monster, undulating with mound and rock on which he lies, at points almost blend with tangle of bushes and the jagged chaos amid which he stretches. The hard, wild, cruel aspects of inanimate nature seem here and there rankly swelling to horrible life, as yet but half-distinguishable from the stony-hearted matrix; the crag begins to coil and quiver, the jungle puts forth in claws; but above all appear the monstrous EYES, in which the forces of pain, hardship, obstacle have at last acquired purpose and direction. The god confronts them with eyes yet keener; his arrow, feathered with eyebeams, has reached its mark, straight between the monster’s eyes; but there is no more anger in his face than might mar the calm strength of a gardener clearing away the stone and thicket that make the constituent parts of Python. If we turn now to the neighbouring picture in the National Gallery by the same artist, the Hesperian Gardens and their Guard, we behold the Dragon on his high crag outlining and vitalising not only the edge of As I write these words, I lay aside my pen to look across a little lake amid the lonely hills of Wales to a sunset which is flooding the sky with glory. Through the almost greenish sky the wind is bearing fantastic clouds, that sometimes take the shape of chariots, in which cloud-veiled forms are seated, and now great birds with variegated plumage, all hastening as it were to some gathering-place of aerial gods. Beneath a long bar of maroon-tint stretches a sea of yellow light, on the hither side of which is set a garden of fleecy trees touched with golden fruit. Amid them plays a fountain of changing colours. On the left has stood, fast as a mountain range, a mass of dark-blue cloud with uneven peaks; suddenly a pink faint glow shines from behind that leaden mass, and next appears, sinuous with its long indented top, the mighty folds of a fiery serpent. Nay, its head is seen, its yawning lacertine jaws, its tinted crest. It is sleepless Ladon on his high barrier keeping watch and ward over the Hesperian garden. Juno set him there, but he is the son of Ge,—the earth. The tints of heaven invest and transform, and in a sense create him; but he would never have been born mythologically had it not been that in this world stings hover near all sweetness, danger environs beauty, and, as Plato said, ‘Good things come hard.’ The grace and lustre of the serpent with his fatal fang preceded him, and all the perils As thought goes on, such allies compromise their employers; the creator’s work reflects the creator’s character; and after many timorous ages we find the dragon-guarded deities going down with their cruel defenders. It is not without significance that in the Sanskrit dictionary the most ancient of all words for god, Asura, has for its primary meaning ‘demon’ or ‘devil:’ the gods and dragons united to churn the ocean for their own wealth, and in the end they were tarred with one brush. I have already described in the beginning of this work the degradation of deities, and need here barely recall to the reader’s memory the forces which operated to that result. The bearing of that force upon the celestial or paradise-guarding Serpent is summed up in one quatrain of Omar KhayyÁm:— O Thou who man of baser earth didst make, And e’en in Paradise devised the Snake; For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened, man’s forgiveness give—and take! The heart of humanity anticipated its logic by many ages, and, long before the daring genius of the Persian poet wrote this immortal epitaph on the divine allies of the Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist, And, like a boy that moweth thistles down, Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-tops; Yet canst thou not deprive me of my earth, Nor of my hut, the which thou didst not build, Nor of my hearth, whose little cheerful flame Thou enviest me! I know not aught within the universe More slight, more pitiful than you, ye gods! Who nurse your majesty with scant supplies Of offerings wrung from fear, and muttered prayers, And needs must starve, were’t not that babes and beggars Are hope-besotted fools! When I was yet a child, and knew not whence My being came, nor where to turn its powers, Up to the sun I bent my wildered eye, As though above, within its glorious orb, There dwelt an ear to listen to my plaint, A heart, like mine, to pity the oppressed. Who gave me succour Against the Titans in their tyrannous might? Who rescued me from death—from slavery? Thou!—thou, my soul, burning with hallowed fire, Thou hast thyself alone achieved it all! Yet didst thou, in thy young simplicity, Glow with misguided thankfulness to him That slumbers on in idlenesse there above! I reverence thee? Wherefore? Hast thou ever Lightened the sorrows of the heavy laden? Thou ever stretch thy hand to still the tears Of the perplexed in spirit? Was it not Almighty Time, and ever-during Fate— My lords and thine—that shaped and fashioned me Into the MAN I am? Belike it was thy dream That I should hate life—fly to wastes and wilds, For that the buds of visionary thought Did not all ripen into goodly flowers? Here do I sit and mould Men after mine own image— A race that may be like unto myself, To suffer, weep; to enjoy, and to rejoice; And, like myself, unheeding all of thee! The myth of Prometheus reveals the very dam of all dragons,—the mere terrorism of nature which paralysed the energies of man. Man’s first combat was to be with his own quailing heart. Apollo driving back the Argives to their ships with the image of the Gorgon’s head on Jove’s shield is Homer’s picture of the fears that unnerved heroes:— Phoebus himself the rushing battle led; A veil of clouds involved his radiant head: High held before him, Jove’s enormous shield Portentous shone, and shaded all the field: Vulcan to Jove th’ immortal gift consigned, To scatter hosts, and terrify mankind.... Their force is humbled, and their fear confest. So flies a herd of oxen, scattered wide, No swain to guard them, and no day to guide, When two fell lions from the mountain come, And spread the carnage thro’ the shady gloom.... The Grecians gaze around with wild despair, Confused, and weary all their pow’rs with prayer. A generation whose fathers remembered the time when men educated in universities regarded Franklin with his lightning-rod as ‘heaven-defying,’ can readily understand the legend of Vulcan—type of the untamed force of fire—being sent to bind Prometheus, master of fire. Fig. 26.—Swan-Dragon (French). Fig. 26.—Swan-Dragon (French). The dragon forms which have become familiar to us through mediÆval and modern iconography are of comparatively little importance as illustrating the social or spiritual conditions out of which they grew, and of which they became emblems. They long ago ceased to be descriptive, and in the rude periods or places a very few Fig. 27—Anglo-Saxon Dragons (CÆdmon M.S., tenth century). Fig. 27—Anglo-Saxon Dragons (CÆdmon M.S., tenth century). Fig. 28.—From the Fresco at Arezzo. Fig. 28.—From the Fresco at Arezzo. As to external form, the various shapes of the more primitive dragons have been largely determined by the mythologic currents amid which they have fallen, though their original basis in nature may generally be traced. In the far North, where the legends of swan-maidens, pigeon-maidens, and vampyres were paramount in the Middle Ages, we find the bird-shaped dragon very common. Sometimes the serpent-characteristics are pronounced, as in this ancient French Swan-Dragon (Fig. 26); but, again, and especially in regions where serpents are rare and comparatively innocuous, the serpent tail is often conventionalised away, as in this initial V from the Fig. 29.—From Albert Durer’s ‘Passion.’ Fig. 29.—From Albert Durer’s ‘Passion.’ Nearly all of the Dragon forms, whatever their original types and their region, are represented in the conventional monster of the European stage, which meets the popular conception. This Dragon is a masterpiece of the popular imagination, and it required many generations to give it artistic shape. Every Christmas he appears in some London pantomime, with aspect similar to that which he has worn for many ages. His body is partly green, with memories of the sea and of slime, and partly brown or dark, with lingering shadow of storm-clouds. The lightning flames still in his red eyes, and flashes from his fire-breathing mouth. The thunderbolt of Jove, the spear of Wodan, are in the barbed point of his tail. His huge wings—batlike, spiked—sum up all the mythical life of extinct Harpies and Vampyres. Spine of crocodile is on his neck, tail of the serpent, and all the jagged ridges of rocks and sharp thorns of jungles bristle around him, while the ice of glaciers and brassy glitter of sunstrokes are in his scales. He is ideal of all that is hard, obstructive, perilous, loathsome, horrible in nature: every detail of him has been seen through and vanquished by man, here or there, but in selection and combination they rise again as principles, and conspire to form one great generalisation of the forms of Pain—the sum of every creature’s worst. Fig. 30.—ChimÆra. Fig. 30.—ChimÆra. |