Volume Ii Part 45 (1/2)

THE WOMAN HATER.

Act. I. sc. 2. This scene from the beginning is prose printed as blank verse, down to the line--

E'en all the valiant stomachs in the court--

where the verse recommences. This transition from the prose to the verse enhances, and indeed forms, the comic effect. Lazarillo concludes his soliloquy with a hymn to the G.o.ddess of plenty.

ON THE PROMETHEUS OF aeSCHYLUS:

An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature, May 18, 1825.

The French 'savans' who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been a.s.serted), triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of doc.u.ments that cannot lie;--namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous ma.s.ses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which cannot lie' the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years standing.

Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves,--the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated.

But more than all the preceding,--I cannot but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense--a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalized from the great ma.s.s of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached doc.u.ments or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the doc.u.ments--I cannot but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch,--and which, in perfect accordance with all a.n.a.logous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to antic.i.p.ate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,--will be worth a whole library of such inferences.

I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this a.s.sumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superst.i.tions,--of certain talismans connected with star-magic,--plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies,--there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful a.s.sertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favour of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions;--namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or wors.h.i.+p of the world as G.o.d.

The reason, or pretext, a.s.signed by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the wors.h.i.+p of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second;--for it is most certain that the ten tribes wors.h.i.+pped the Jehovah, the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:--secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the wors.h.i.+p of nature, or the [Greek (transliterated): to pan], as G.o.d. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world,--the positive and negative forces in the science of superst.i.tion;--for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be a.s.signed for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return, (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies); [1]--how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings--(for the priestly is ever the first form of government)--devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?--For this rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,--for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]--became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their G.o.ds.

The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G.

W-G=O;

or the World without G.o.d is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse--

G-W=O;

for which the theist subst.i.tutes--

G-W=G;

or that--

G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G+W. [2]

'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'--I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of pa.s.sing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.

The objects which, on my appointment as Royal a.s.sociate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were,

1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:--

2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius:--