April 15, 1841.

Margaret said very little about Pluto. On the first evening she had called him the depth of things, and James Clarke now had a good deal to say upon the three ideas which she thought pervaded the Greek mythology,—the source, the depth, and the extent or flow of thought. He said that this distinction had struck him very forcibly when Margaret first mentioned it. We speak of widely diffused thought, of aspiring and profound thought; of sympathetic, exalted, or deep feeling,—and this seemed to exhaust language. It was through the depths of feeling and experience that we came to the profound of thought.

E. P. P. said, “There is no genius in happiness.” Not a very intelligible statement.

Margaret said, “There is nothing worth knowing that has not some penalty attached to it. We pay it the more willingly in proportion as we grow wise. Depth, altitude, diffusion, are the three births of Time. It is this which makes the German cover the operations of the miner with a mystic veil. Bostonians laugh at the Germans because they think.”

Wheeler liked what Mr. Clarke said, and added that there was meaning in the Irish phrase, “Lower me up.”

Margaret said that all the punishments of Tartarus expressed baffled effort, the penalty least endurable to the active Greek.

Mr. Mack thought it singular that in every nation where the belief in Tartarus had prevailed, an exact locality had always been assigned to it.

William White said that, so long as anybody could point out the locality of the garden of Eden, we had no need to smile at the locality of a Tartarus or an Elysium.

I do not think these “myths” belong to the same class.

Charles Wheeler quoted Champollion to the effect that the Styx was only a small river flowing between the Temple at Thebes and a neighboring “place of tombs.” The ferryman was named Charon, and the Egyptian habit of judging the dead probably gave rise to the rest of the fable.

Margaret said, “This was very natural.” She asked Mr. Wheeler the meaning of certain names.

Phlegethon, he answered, meant burning fire; Acheron, anguish.

Why did not somebody say that the lifeless current of the Styx first tempted Homer to give it to the Infernals? It is in reality a river of Epeiros.

The Styx, Wheeler said, was a cold unhealthy stream, like that which caused the death of Alexander. It flowed slowly through Acadia, but was supposed to take its rise in Hades. Lethe is a river near the Syrtus in Africa. It disappears in the sand, but rises again. Hence its name.

Mr. Wheeler had some difficulty in explaining certain inconsistencies in the poets.

Mr. Clarke quoted the remark of Achilles (?) concerning Elysium,—that a day of hard labor on earth was preferable to an eternity of pleasure in Elysian fields!

Margaret said that in Elysium, as in Tartarus, souls waited. These restless Greeks could do nothing. They were cut off from action, which was their delight. All their punishments seem to consist of frustrated effort,—the consequence of some presumption. Tantalus was ever thirsty and ever famished because he had aspired to nectar and ambrosia. Ixion, who would have scaled the heavens, was condemned to incessant revolution upon a wheel, which never paused yet never accomplished anything. The Danaides, who murdered the love which wooed them, were doomed to fill a broken vessel with water which as constantly escaped. Sisyphus, who had never labored except for a selfish end, was to roll a stone up hill, which as constantly rolled down,—fit emblem of all selfish labor. As for Tityrus, who sought to violate the secrets of Nature, the vulture fed always upon his entrails.

Wheeler said this did not represent frustrated effort.

Margaret said, No: this was remorse; but there was an admirable instance of the former given by Goethe, of a man who wove rope from the sedges which grew upon the banks of Lethe, for an ass who continually devoured it. The moral seemed to be that the ass could just as well have eaten them unwoven. Goethe goes on to say that the Greeks only thought that the poor man had a prodigal wife, but that the moderns would look deeper and see more in the fable.

We all weave sedges for asses to eat, thought I.

Margaret seemed to think that every heart might have an experience which would correspond to Tartarus. Every hero must visit it at least once.

I suggested Pluto, Persephone, the Fates, the Gorgons, the Furies, and Cerberus. Pluto was equal to Neptune and Jupiter.

Margaret continued: Hades was not given to Pluto to mark defective character, but simply as his kingdom. His wants were all supplied. The bride Olympus refused him he was permitted to steal from earth while she gathered flowers. Persephone, seed of all things, must dwell in the dark; but another legend tells us that if she had been willing to leave her veil, she might have stolen away. There was a meaning in her being forbidden to eat in the infernal regions. Fate said, “Do not touch what you don’t want.” Psyche was forbidden to partake of the regal banquet Persephone spread. Seeking for Immortality, this soul, like every other, must be content to eat bitter bread.

There was then a talk about Cerberus and the Gorgons.

Mr. Clarke said that in the New Testament the dog seemed to stand for popular prejudice. The swine stood for what could not, the dog for what would not, be convinced.

Yes, Margaret said, the wolf is a misanthropic dog. He has little dignity.

Ida Russell said Cerberus stood for the temperaments.

Well, Margaret said, that being so, she liked the Greeks for making no allowance for the lymphatic. To what, she continued, do we offer the first sop, as we pass through life? As for the Gorgons, every one, she thought, would find his own interpretation of them. To her there was no Gorgon but apathy; there is nothing in creation that will so soon turn a live man into stone. These Gorgons were three women, who used one eye and one tooth between them,—except Medusa, who was beautiful and perfect. Her hair had provoked the envy of Minerva, and was changed into serpents. Margaret had a copy of a gem, which Marion Dwight had made for her, which showed this.

E. P. P. asked if Perseus did not endeavor to show Medusa her own head.

Margaret said that might well rouse her!

Charles Wheeler explained. Perseus only used a mirror given him by Minerva to avoid looking at the Gorgon.

Caroline Sturgis said that the old woman who keeps house for Helen in the second part of “Faust” was a Gorgon to her.

This dragged a critical analysis of the “Faust” forward.

Margaret said the Seeker represents the Spirit of the Age. He never sinned save by yielding, and yet he was emphatically saved by grace. It was difficult to see what Goethe meant until he got to the Tower of the Middle Ages. That made all clear.

Charles Wheeler said, the reader would a great deal rather that Faust went to the Devil than not!

Margaret defended Goethe’s way of exhibiting character, of which Wilhelm Meister was an instance. Goethe said to himself, What should I do with a hero in such rascally society? Meister preferred the Brahmal experience.

E. P. P. asked if this moral indifference was well?

Margaret replied, that it was just as frightful as any other Gorgon. If we are to have a purely intellectual development, it was well for a man like Goethe to represent it. To choose fairly between evil and good, the intellect must regard both with indifference.

Somebody asked how the Gorgon’s head came to be on the Ægis of Minerva?

If Apathy is the Gorgon, surely Wisdom needs it!

Then we began to talk about Theseus in connection with Tartarus. Why should he sit forever on a stone?

Margaret thought he represented reform!

Mr. Mack said reform checked itself by its own fanaticism.

Wheeler, in this connection, asked after the Greek notion of accountability.

Margaret did not think the Greeks had any.

Wheeler assured her to the contrary, and told anecdotes to prove it. He spoke of the fatal transmission of guilt in one family, generation after generation.

Margaret said the Greeks never rejected facts.

Ida Russell spoke of the last King of Athens, Codrus, supposed to have been punished for the crimes of his ancestors.

Wheeler said that when the Greeks killed some ambassadors, they felt so sure that Heaven would avenge the sin that they sent two citizens to expiate it; but Darius, to whom they were sent, refused to release the Greeks from their impending doom.

Margaret said the moment such a supposition was started, there were plenty of facts to sustain it. Orestes is the purified victim of his family. The old Greeks had made no complete statement of their destiny or their accountability.

E. P. P. said they had made it in art.

C. W. HEALEY.

April 16, 1841.