March 8, 1841.

Margaret recapitulated the statements she made last week. By thus giving to each fabled Deity its place in the scheme of Mythology, she did not mean to ignore the enfolding ideas, the one thought developed in all—as in Rhea, Bacchus, Pan. She would only imply that each personification was individual, served a particular purpose, and was worshipped in a particular way.

Before proceeding to talk about Ceres, she wished to remind us of the mischief of wandering from our subject. She hoped the ground she offered would be accepted at least to talk about! Certainly no one could deny that a mythos was the last and best growth of a national mind, and that in this case the characteristics of the Greek mind were best gathered from this creation.

Ceres, Persephone, and Isis, as well as Rhea, Diana, and so on, seem to be only modifications of one enfolding idea,—a goddess accepted by all nations, and not peculiar to Greece. The pilgrimages of the more prominent of these goddesses, Ceres and Isis, seem to indicate the life which loses what is dear in childhood, to seek in weary pain for what after all can be but half regained. Ceres regained her daughter, but only for half the year. Isis found her husband, but dismembered. This era in Mythology seems to mark the progress of a people from an unconscious to a conscious state. Persephone’s periodical exile shows the impossibility of resuming an unconsciousness from which we have been once aroused, the need thought has, having once felt the influence of the Seasons, to retire into itself.

Charles Wheeler reminded Margaret that she had said that the predominant goddesses, without reference to Greece, enfolded only one idea, that of the female Will or Genius,—the bounteous giver. He had asked her if she could sustain herself by etymological facts, and she replied that her knowledge of the Greek was not critical enough. Since then he had inquired into the origin of the proper names of the Greek deities, and found that it confirmed her impression. The names of Rhea, Tellus, Isis, and Diana were resolvable into one, and the difference in their etymology was only a common and permissible change in the position of the letters of which they are composed, or a mere provincial dialectic change. Diana is the same as Dione, also one of the names of Juno.

E. P. P. asked if Homer ever confounded the last two? Margaret thought not. Homer was purely objective. He knew little and cared less about the primitive creation of the myths.

R. W. Emerson thought it would be very difficult to detect this secret. Jupiter, for instance, might have been a man who was the exponent of Will to his race.

Margaret said, “No; they could have deduced him just as easily from Nature herself, or from a single exhibition of will power.”

R. W. Emerson said that a man like Napoleon would easily have suggested it.

“What a God-send is a Napoleon!” exclaimed Charles Wheeler; “let us pray for scores of such, that a new and superior mythos may arise for us!” Is it malicious to suspect a subtle irony turned against the sacred person of R. W. E. in this speech?

Margaret retorted indignantly that if they came, we should do nothing better than write memoirs of their hats, coats, and swords, as we had done already, without thinking of any lesson they might teach. She could not see why we were not content to take the beautiful Greek mythi as they were, without troubling ourselves about those which might arise for us!

R. W. E. acknowledged that the Greeks had a quicker perception of the beautiful than we. Their genius lay in the material expression of it. If we knew the real meaning of the names of their Deities, the story would take to flight. We should have only the working of abstract ideas as we might adjust them for ourselves.

Margaret said that a fable was more than a mere word. It was a word of the purest kind rather, the passing of thought into form. R. W. E. had made no allowance for time or space or climate, and there was a want of truth in that. The age of the Greeks was the age of Poetry; ours was the age of Analysis. We could not create a Mythology.

Emerson asked, “Why not? We had still better material.”

Margaret said, irrelevantly as it seemed to me, that Carlyle had attempted to deduce new principles from present history, and that was the reason he did not respect the respectable.

Emerson said Carlyle was unfortunate in his figures, but we might have mythology as beautiful as the Greek.

Margaret thought each age of the world had its own work to do. The transition of thought into form marked the Greek period. It was most easily done through fable, on account of their intense perception of beauty.

Emerson pursued his own train of thought. He seemed to forget that we had come together to pursue Margaret’s. He said it was impossible that men or events should stand out in a population of twenty millions as they could from a population of a single million, to which the whole population of the ancient world could hardly have amounted. As Hercules stood to Greece, no modern man could ever stand in relation to his own world.

Margaret thought Hercules and Jupiter quite different creations. The first might have been a deified life. The second could not.

Charles Wheeler said that R. W. E.’s view carried no historical obligation of belief with it. We could not deny the heroic origin of the Greek demigods, but the highest dynasty was the exponent of translated thought.

Sophia Ripley asked if the life of an individual fitly interwoven with her experience was not as fine a Poem as the story of Ceres, her wanderings and her tears? Did not Margaret know such lives?

R. W. E. thought every man had probably met his Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Venus, or Ceres in society!

Margaret was sure she never had!

R. W. E. explained: “Not in the world, but each on his own platform.”

William Story objected. The life of an individual was not universal. (!)

Sophia Ripley repeated, “The inner life.”

William Story claimed to be an individual, and did not think individual experience could ever meet all minds,—like the story of Ceres, for example.

Sophia said all experience was universal.

I said nothing, but held this colloquy with myself. Thought is the best of human nature; its fulness urges expression: its need of being met, not only by one other but by every other, craves it. This craving is the acknowledgment of the universal experience. What is purely individual is perishable. Identity is to be separated from individuality for this cause.

Margaret said the element of beauty would be wanting to our creations. A fine emotion glowed through features which seem to fall like a soft veil over the soul, while it could scarce do more than animate those that were obtuse and coarse in every outline. (!)

“Then,” said William Story, and my heart thanked the preux chevalier,—“then something is wanting in the emotion itself.”

William White said, stupidly, that sunlight could not fall with equal charm on rocks and the green grass. (!)

I asked if the rock could not give what it did not receive? Flung back by rugged points and relieved by dark shadows, was not the sunlight itself transfigured?

Story said every face had its own beauty. No act that was natural could be ungraceful.

Emerson said that we all did sundry graceful acts, in our caps and tunics, which we never could do again, which we never wanted to do again.

Margaret said, at last we had touched the point. We could not restore the childhood of the world, but could we not admire this simple plastic period, and gather from it some notion of the Greek genius?

R. W. E. thought this legitimate. He would have it that we could not determine the origin of a mythos, but we might fulfil Miss Fuller’s intention.

Margaret said history reconciled us to life, by showing that man had redeemed himself. Genius needed that encouragement.

Not Genius, Sophia Ripley thought; common natures needed it, but Genius was self-supported.

Margaret said it might be the consolation of Genius.

Mrs. Russell asked why Miss Fuller found so much fault with the present.

Margaret had no fault to find with it. She took facts as they were. Every age did something toward fulfilling the cycle of mind. The work of the Greeks was not ours.

Sophia Ripley asked if the mythology had been a prophecy of the Greek mind to itself, or if the nation had experienced life in any wide or deep sense.

Margaret seemed a little out of patience, and no wonder! She said it did not matter which. The question was, what could we find in the mythi, and what did the Greeks mean that we should find there. Coleridge once said that certain people were continually saying of Shakespeare, that he did not mean to impart certain spiritual meanings to some of his sketches of life and character; but if Shakespeare did not mean it his Genius did: so if the Greeks meant not this or that, the Greek genius meant it.

In relation to the progress of the ages, James F. Clarke said that the story of Persephone concealed in the bowels of the earth for half the year seemed to him to indicate something of their comparative states. Persephone was the seed which must return to earth before it could fructify. Thought must retire into itself before it can be regenerate.

Margaret was pleased with this, more especially as in the story of the Goddess it is eating the pomegranate, whose seed is longest in germinating, which dooms her to the realm of Pluto.

George Ripley remarked that we saw this need of withdrawal in the slothful ages when mind seemed to be imbibing energy for future action. The world sometimes forsook a quest and returned to it. We had forsaken Beauty, but we might return to it.

Certainly, Margaret assented. A perfect mind would detect all beauty in the hearth-rug at her feet: the meanest part of creation contained the whole; but the labor we were now at to appreciate the Greek proved conclusively that we were not Greek. A simple plastic nature would take it all in with delight, without doubt or question.

Or rather, amended Emerson, would take it up and go forward with it.

It makes no difference, said Margaret, for we live in a circle.

I did not think it pleasant to track and retrack the same arc, and preferred to go forward with R. W. E., so I asked if there was to be no higher poetry.

Margaret acknowledged that there was something beyond the aspiration of the Egyptian or the poetry of the Greek.

George Ripley thought we had not lost all reverence for these abstract forces. The Eleusinian mysteries might be forgotten, but not Ceres. We did not worship in ignorance. The mysteries led back to the Infinite. The processes of vegetation were actually heart-rending! Here, I thought, was a basis for my higher poetry.

George Ripley acknowledged that it was so. He seemed to be more conscious of the movement of the world than any of our party. He said we must not measure creation by Boston and Washington, as we were too apt to do. There was still France, Germany, and Prussia,—perhaps Russia! The work of this generation was not religious nor poetic; still, there was a tendency to go back to both. There were to be ultraisms, but also, he hoped, consistent development.

Charles Wheeler then related the story of Isis, of her hovering in the form of a swallow round the tree in which the sarcophagus of Osiris had been enclosed by Typhon; of her being allowed to fell the tree; of the odor emitted by the royal maidens whom she touched, which revealed her Divinity to the Queen; of the second loss of the body, as she returned home, and its final dismemberment.

There was little success in spiritualizing more of this story than the pilgrimage, and R. W. E. seemed to feel this; for when Margaret had remarked that even a divine force must become as the birds of the air to compass its ends, and that it was in the carelessness of conscious success that the second loss occurred, he said that it was impossible to detect an inner sense in all these stories.

Margaret replied, that she had not attempted that, but she could see it in all the prominent points.

Charles Wheeler said that the varieties of anecdote proved that the stories were not all authentic. It was an ancient custom to strike off medals in honor of certain acts of the Gods. To these graven pictures the common people gave their own vulgar interpretations, as they did also to the bas-reliefs on their temples and monuments.

E. P. P. said this accounted for many of the stories transmitted by Homer. When sculpture and architecture had lost their meaning, his inventive genius was only the more stimulated to find one.

Charles Wheeler asked what Margaret would make of the story that the tears of Isis frightened children to death?

There was a general laugh, but Margaret said coolly, that children always shrank from a baffled hope.

Some one contrasted Persephone with her mother.

Margaret assented to whatever was said, and added that she had been particularly struck with it in an engraving she had recently seen, in which Ceres stood with lifted eyes, full-eyed, matronly, bounteous, ready to give all to all, while Persephone, dejected and thoughtful, sat meditating; and the idea was strengthened by her discovering that Persephone was the same as Ariadne the deserted. I could only guess at the remark by Margaret’s comment. It seemed to imply baffled hope for Persephone.

The Eleusinian mysteries were now alluded to. Although it has been said that only moral precepts were inculcated through these, Wheeler urged that a whole school of Continental authors now acknowledged that the higher doctrines of philosophy were taught.

R. W. E. added, that as initiation became more easy such instruction must have degenerated into a mere matter of form, and many of the uninitiated surpass the initiated in wisdom.

Margaret admitted this. Socrates was one of the uninitiated. The crowd seldom felt the full force of beauty in Art or Literature. To prove it, it was only necessary to walk once through the Hall of Sculpture at the AthenÆum, and catch the remarks of any half-dozen on Michael Angelo’s “Day and Night.” He would be fortunate who heard a single observer comment on its power.

Mrs. Russell asked why the images of the sun and moon were introduced into these mysterious celebrations.

Margaret asked impatiently why they had always been invoked by every child who could string two rhymes together.

I said that if Ceres was the simple agricultural productive energy, of course the sun was her first minister, its genial influence being as manifest as the energy itself.

In regard to the etymology of the proper names, it seemed reasonable to me that this energy should have gained attributes as it did names. Any nation devoted to the chase would learn to call the lunar deity Diana; any devoted to the cultivation of grain would project her as Ceres. The reproductive powers of flocks and herds would suggest Rhea or Juno, and philosophy or art would invoke Persephone.

When we were talking about beauty, J. F. C. quoted Goethe, and said that the spirit sometimes made a mistake and clothed itself in the wrong garment.

C. W. HEALEY.

March 9, 1841.