Volume I Part 2 (1/2)

”Ah, Psyche, froions which Are Holy Land!”

The early Church did not teach that the Gods of the heathen were merely brass and stone On the contrary she accepted them as real and formidable personalities--demons who had assumed divinity to lure their worshi+ppers to destruction It was in reading the legends of that Church, and the lives of her saints, that I obtained ined those Gods to reseoblins of my nursery-tales, or the fairies in the ballads of Sir Walter Scott Goblins and their kindred interested ly Saints of the Pictorial Church History,--ious prints, who unpleasantly re all the friends of Cousin Jane's God, and feeling a natural syoblins, fairies, witches, or heathen deities

To the devils indeed--because I supposed theer than the rest--I had often prayed for help and friendshi+p; very hurimly answered,--but afterwards ords of reproach on finding that nored

But in spite of their indifference, my sythened; and my interest in all the spirits that the Church History called evil, especially the heathen Gods, continued to grow And at last one day I discovered, in one unexplored corner of our library, several beautiful books about art,--great folio books containing figures of Gods and of demi-Gods, athletes and heroes, ny y

How my heart leaped and fluttered on that happy day! Breathless I gazed; and the longer that I gazed the ure after figure dazzled, astounded, bewitched ht was in itself a wonder,--also a fear Soes,--so invisible that ic that inforan statuaries But this superstitious fear presently yielded to a conviction, or rather intuition--which I could not possibly have explained--that the Gods had been belied _because_ they were beautiful

(Blindly and gropingly I had touched a truth,--the ugly truth that beauty of the highest order, whether mental, or moral, or physical, must ever be hated by the many and loved only by the few!) And these had been called devils! I adored them!--I loved them!--I promised to detest forever all who refused them reverence! Oh! the contrast between that immortal loveliness and the squalor of the saints and the patriarchs and the prophets of ious pictures!--a contrast indeed as of heaven and hell In that hour the liness and of hate And as it had been taught to me, in the weakness of my sickly childhood, it certainly was And even to-day, in spite of larger knowledge, the words ”heathen” and ”pagan”--however ignorantly used in scorn--revive within ht and beauty, of freedom and joy

Only with much effort can I recall these scatteredthem I am well aware that a later andto speak in the place of the Self that was,--thus producing obvious incongruities Before trying to relate anythingthe experiences of the earlier Self, I may as well here allow the Interrupter an opportunity to talk

The first perception of beauty ideal is never a cognition, but a _recognition_ No eometrical theory of aesthetics will ever interpret the delicious shock that follows upon the boy's first vision of beauty supreme He himself could not even try to explain why the newly-seen forht upon earth He only feels the sudden power that the vision exerts upon theis but dim deep memory,--a blood-remembrance

Many do not remember, and therefore cannot see--at any period of life

There are her beauty than the blind wan fish of caves--offspring of generations that swaht Probably the race producing s,--never beheld the happier vanished world of iher knowledge has been effaced or blurred by long dull superimposition of barbarian inheritance

But he who receives in one sudden vision the revelation of the antique beauty,--he who knows the thrill divine that follows after,--the unutterable ht and sadness,--he _rees of a finer humanity, he must have lived with beauty Three thousand--four thousand years ago: itof what has been, the phanto of beauty as power, of the worth of it to life and love, never could the ghost in him perceive, however dimly, the presence of the Gods

Now I think that sohostliness in this present shell of ed to the vanished world of beauty,--race and force,--ht lilory, and the pride of the winner in contests, and the praise ofof a pal by the altar in Delos All this I am able to believe, because I could feel, while yet a boy, the divine humanity of the ancient Gods

But this new-found delight soon became for me the source of new sorrows

I was placed with all e; and then, of course,was subjected to severe examination One day the beautiful books disappeared; and I was afraid to ask what had become of them After many weeks they were returned to their forain was of brief duration All of them had been unmercifully revised My censors had been offended by the nakedness of the Gods, and had undertaken to correct that iraces,and erased with a pen-knife;--I can still recall one beautiful seated figure, whose breasts had been thus excised Evidently ”the breasts of the ny: dryads, naiads, graces and muses--all had been rendered breastless And, in most cases, _drawers_ had been put upon the Gods--even upon the tiny Loves--large baggy bathing-drawers, woven with cross-strokes of a quill-pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of beauty,--especially the lines of the long fine thighs However, in my case, this barbarism proved of some educational value It furnished me with many problems of restoration; and I often tried very hard to reproduce in pencil-drawing the obliterated or the hidden line In this I was not successful; but, in spite of the ahness hich every mutilation or effacement had been accomplished,before I knew Winckelmann--to understand how Greek artists had idealized the huure Perhaps that is why, in after years, few modern representations of the nude could interest ht the iin to reveal itself in the lines of those very fored such implacable war

Is it not alure, as chiselled or painted, shadows so, therefore, of individual irand era is superindividual,--reflecting the ideal-supreme in the soul of a race Many, I know, deny this;--but do we not rereat Ruskin, on the topic of Greek art, spake often like a Goth Did he not call the Medicean Venus ”an uninteresting little person”?

Now after I had learned to know and to love the elder Gods, the world again began to glow about me Glooms that had brooded over it slowly thinned away The terror was not yet gone; but I noanted only reasons to disbelieve all that I feared and hated In the sunshi+ne, in the green of the fields, in the blue of the sky, I found a gladness before unknown Within s for I knew not ere quickening and thrilling I looked for beauty, and everywhere found it: in passing faces--in attitudes andwhite clouds,--in faint-blue lines of far-off hills At moments the sie, so deep, that it frightened e sadness,--a shadowy and inexplicable pain

I had entered into un the inevitable fissure between hiine the emotions of his spiritual pastors and masters aroused by such an incident as this--related in one of his letters of later years:--

”This again reo to confession, and hostly father that I had been guilty of desiring that the devil would come to me in the shape of the beautiful women in which he caht I should yield to such terim man who rarely showed emotion, my confessor, but on that occasion he actually rose to his feet in anger

”'Let s never wish that! You ht be more sorry for it than you can possibly believe!'

”His earnestness filled ht actually be realized--so serious he lookedbut the pretty _succubi_ all continued to remain in hell”

From these indications the belief is unavoidable that there was never the slightest foundation for the assertion that an endeavour was made to train him for the priesthood In a letter to his brother he distinctly denies it He says:--