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AMONG FAMOUS BOOKS

BY

JOHN KELMAN, D.D.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON; NEW YORK; TORONTO

_Printed in 1912_




PREFACE


The object of the following lectures is twofold. They were delivered in
the first place for the purpose of directing the attention of readers to
books whose literary charm and spiritual value have made them
conspicuous in the vast literature of England. Such a task, however,
tends to be so discursive as to lose all unity, depending absolutely
upon the taste of the individual, and the chances of his experience in
reading.

I have accordingly taken for the general theme of the book that constant
struggle between paganism and idealism which is the deepest fact in the
life of man, and whose story, told in one form or another, provides the
matter of all vital literature. This will serve as a thread to give
continuity of thought to the lectures, and it will keep them near to
central issues.

Having said so much, it is only necessary to add one word more by way of
explanation. In quest of the relations between the spiritual and the
material, or (to put it otherwise) of the battle between the flesh and
the spirit, we shall dip into three different periods of time: (1)
Classical, (2) Sixteenth Century, (3) Modern. Each of these has a
character of its own, and the glimpses which we shall have of them ought
to be interesting in their own right. But the similarity between the
three is more striking than the contrast, for human nature does not
greatly change, and its deepest struggles are the same in all
generations.




CONTENTS


LECTURE I
The Gods of Greece

LECTURE II
Marius the Epicurean

LECTURE III
The Two Fausts

LECTURE IV
Celtic Revivals of Paganism

LECTURE V
John Bunyan

LECTURE VI
Pepys' Diary

LECTURE VII
Sartor Resartus

LECTURE VIII
Pagan Reactions

LECTURE IX
Mr. G.K. Chesterton's Point of View

LECTURE X
The Hound of Heaven




LECTURE I

THE GODS OF GREECE


It has become fashionable to divide the rival tendencies of modern
thought into the two classes of Hellenistic and Hebraistic. The division
is an arbitrary and somewhat misleading one, which has done less than
justice both to the Greek and to the Hebrew genius. It has associated
Greece with the idea of lawless and licentious paganism, and Israel with
that of a forbidding and joyless austerity. Paganism is an interesting
word, whose etymology reminds us of a time when Christianity had won the
towns, while the villages still worshipped heathen gods. It is difficult
to define the word without imparting into our thought of it the idea of
the contrast between Christian dogma and all other religious thought and
life. This, however, would be an extremely unfair account of the matter,
and, in the present volume, the word will be used without reference
either to nationality or to creed, and it will stand for the
materialistic and earthly tendency as against spiritual idealism of any
kind. Obviously such paganism as this, is not a thing which has died out
with the passing of heathen systems of religion. It is terribly alive in
the heart of modern England, whether formally believing or unbelieving.
Indeed there is the twofold life of puritan and pagan within us all. A
recent well-known theologian wrote to his sister: "I am naturally a
cannibal, and I find now my true vocation to be in the South Sea
Islands, not after your plan, to be Arnold to a troop of savages, but to
be one of them, where they are all selfish, lazy, and brutal." It is
this universality of paganism which gives its main interest to such a
study as the present. Paganism is a constant and not a temporary or
local phase of human life and thought, and it has very little to do with
the question of what particular dogmas a man may believe or reject.

Thus, for example, although the Greek is popularly accepted as the type
of paganism and the Christian of idealism, yet the lines of that
distinction have often been reversed. Christianity has at times become
hard and cold and lifeless, and has swept away primitive national
idealisms without supplying any new ones. The Roman ploughman must have
missed the fauns whom he had been accustomed to expect in the thicket at
the end of his furrow, when the new faith told him that these were
nothing but rustling leaves. When the swish of unseen garments beside
the old nymph-haunted fountain was silenced, his heart was left lonely
and his imagination impoverished. Much charm and romance vanished from
his early world with the passing of its pagan creatures, and indeed it
is to this cause that we must trace the extraordinarily far-reaching and
varied crop of miraculous legends of all sorts which sprang up in early
Catholic times. These were the protest of unconscious idealism against
the bare world from which its sweet presences had vanished.

"In th' olde dayes of the King Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
But now can no man see none elves mo.
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitours and othere holy freres,

* * * * *

This maketh that there been no fayeryes.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself."

Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it
explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe. Children of
nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth,
their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than
speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven. Wordsworth, in his
famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:--

"Great God, I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the
mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan. It was
humanistic, and represented the response of man's spirit to that free
and beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him. All such
symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and
Ceres, shows this. In these cults the commonest things of life, the wine
and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and richer
meaning. Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine
gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material
world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings.
Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man's common life into a
wonderful world of mystic spirituality. Thus there was a great fund of
spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very
heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of
paganism.

Yet the history of Greece affords the explanation and even the
justification of the popular idea. The pagan who is in us all, tends
ever to draw us downwards from sacramental and symbolic ways of thinking
to the easier life of the body and the earth. On the one hand, for blood
that is young and hot, the life of sense is overwhelming. On the other
hand, for the weary toiler whose mind is untrained, the impression of
the world is that of heavy clay. Each in his own way finds idealism
difficult to retain. The spirituality of nature floats like a dream
before the mind of poets, and is seen now and then in wistful glimpses
by every one; but it needs some clearer and less elusive form, as well
as some definite association with conscience, if it is to be defended
against the pull of the green earth. It has been well said that, for the
Greek, God was the view; but when the traveller goes forward into the
view, he meets with many things which it is dangerous to identify with
God. For the young spirit of the early times the temptation to
earthliness was overwhelming. The world was fair, its gates were open,
and its barriers all down. Men took from literature and from religion
just as much of spirituality as they understood and as little as they
desired, and the effect was swift and inevitable in that degeneration
which reached its final form in the degraded sensuality of the later
Roman Empire.

The confusing element in all such inquiry lies in the fact that one can
never get an unmixed paganism nor a perfect idealism. Just as the claims
of body and spirit are in our daily life inextricably interwoven, so the
Greek thought hung precariously between the two, and was always more or
less at the mercy of the individual interpreter and of the relative
strength of his tastes and passions. So we shall find it all through the
course of these studies. It would be preposterous to deny some sort of
idealism to almost any pagan who has ever lived. The contrast between
pagan and idealist is largely a matter of proportion and preponderating
tendency: yet the lines are clear enough to enable us to work with this
distinction and to find it valuable and illuminating.

The fundamental fact to remember in studying any of the myths of Greece
is, that we have here a composite and not a simple system of thought and
imagination. There are always at least two layers: the primitive, and
the Olympian which came later. The primitive conceptions were those
afforded by the worship of ghosts, of dead persons, and of animals. Miss
Jane Harrison has pointed out in great detail the primitive elements
which lingered on through the Olympian worship. Perhaps the most
striking instance which she quotes is the Anthesteria, or festival of
flowers, at the close of which the spirits were dismissed with the
formula, "Depart, ye ghosts, the revels now are ended." Mr. Andrew Lang
has suggested that the animals associated with gods and goddesses (such
as the mouse which is found in the hand, or the hair, or beside the feet
of the statues of Apollo, the owl of Minerva, etc.) are relics of the
earlier worship. This would satisfactorily explain much of the
disreputable element which lingered on side by side with the noble
thoughts of Greek religion. The Olympians, a splendid race of gods,
representing the highest human ideals, arrived with the Greeks; but for
the sake of safety, or of old association, the primitive worship was
retained and blended with the new. In the extreme case of human
sacrifice, it was retained in the form of surrogates--little wooden
images, or even actual animals, being sacrificed in lieu of the older
victims. But all along the line, while the new gods brought their
spiritual conceptions, the older ones held men to a cruder and more
fleshly way of thinking. There is a similar blend of new and old in all
such movements as that of the Holy Grail and the Arthurian legends,
where we can see the combination of Christian and pagan elements so
clearly as to be able to calculate the moral and spiritual effect of
each. Thus we have in the early Greek mythology much of real paganism
involved in the retention of the old and earth-bound gods which attached
themselves to the nobler Olympians as they came, and dragged them down
to the ancient level.

This blending may be seen very clearly in the mythology of Homer and
Hesiod. There it has been so thorough that the only trace of
superposition which we can find is the succession of the dynasties of
Chronos and Jupiter. The result is the most appalling conception of the
morality of celestial society. No earthly state could hope to continue
for a decade upon the principles which governed the life of heaven; and
man, if he were to escape the sudden retributions which must inevitably
follow anything like an imitation of his gods, must live more decently
than they.

Now Homer was, in a sense, the Bible of the Greeks, and as society
improved in morals, and thought was directed more and more fearlessly
towards religious questions, the puzzle as to the immoralities of the
gods became acute. The religious and intellectual developments of the
sixth century B.C. led to various ways of explaining the old stories.
Sophocles is conciliatory, conceiving religion in a sunny good temper
which will make the best of the situation whatever it is. AEschylus is
sombre and deeply tragic, while yet he remains orthodox on the side of
the gods. But Euripides is angry at the old scandals, and in the name of
humanity his scepticism rises in protest.

It may be interesting, at this point, to glance for a little at the
various theories which have been brought forward to explain the myths.
The commonest of all such theories is that the divine personalities
stand for the individual powers of nature. Most especially, the gods and
goddesses symbolise the sun, moon, and stars, night and morning, summer
and winter, and the general story of the year. No one will deny that the
personification of Nature had a large share in all mythology. The
Oriental mythologies rose to a large extent in this fashion. The Baals
of Semitic worship all stood for one or other of the manifestations of
the fructifying powers of nature, and the Chinese dragon is the symbol
of the spiritual mystery of life suggested by the mysterious and protean
characteristics of water. It is very natural that this should be so, and
every one who has ever felt the power of the sun in the East will
sympathise with Turner's dying words, "The sun, he is God."

As a key to mythology this theory was especially associated with the
name of Plutarch among ancient writers, and it has been accepted more or
less completely by a vast number of moderns. In the late Sir George
Cox's fascinating stories it was run to utter absurdity. The story is
beautifully told in every case, and when we have enjoyed it and felt
something of the exquisiteness of the conception and of the variety and
range of thought exhibited in the fertile minds of those who had first
told it, Sir George Cox draws us back sharply to the assertion that all
we have been hearing really meant another phase of sunset or sunrise,
until we absolutely rebel and protest that the effect is unaccountable
upon so meagre a cause. It is an easy method of dealing with folk-lore.
If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun
and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in
religion and astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary to
school one day. This nature element, however, had undoubtedly a very
considerable part in the origin of myths, and when Max Mueller combines
it with philology it opens a vast field of extraordinarily interesting
interpretations resting upon words and their changes.

A further theory of myths is that which regards them as the stories of
races told as if they had been the lives of individuals. This, as is
well known, has had permanent effects upon the interpretation not only
of Greek but of Hebrew ancient writings, and it throws light upon some
of those chapters of Genesis which, without it, are but strings of
forgotten and unpronounceable names.

But beyond all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in
every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these
fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual
fact. Individual historic figures, seen through the mists of time, walk
before our eyes in the dawn. Long before history was written men lived
and did striking deeds. Heroic memories and traditions of such
distinguished men passed in the form of fireside tales from one
generation to another through many centuries. Now they come to us,
doubtless hugely exaggerated and so far away from their originals as to
be unrecognisable, and yet, after all, based upon things that happened.
For the stories have living touches in them which put blood into the
glorious and ghostly figures, and when we come upon a piece of genuine
human nature there is no possibility of mistaking it. This thing has
been born, not manufactured: nor has any portrait that is lifelike been
drawn without some model. Thus, through all the mist and haze of the
past, we see men and women walking in the twilight--dim and uncertain
forms indeed, yet stately and heroic.

Now all this has a bearing upon the main subject of our present study.
Meteorology and astronomy are indeed noble sciences, but the proper
study of mankind is man. While, no doubt, the sources of all early
folk-lore are composite, yet it matters greatly for the student of these
things whether the beginnings of religious thought were merely in the
clouds, or whether they had their roots in the same earth whereon we
live and labour. The heroes and great people of the early days are
eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection
in its own life and experience. They have eternal human meanings,
beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed
from birth to death. Soon everything of them is forgotten except the
ideas about human life for which they stand. Then each of them becomes
the expression of a thought common to humanity, and therefore secure of
its immortality to the end of time; for the undying interest is the
human interest, and all ideas which concern the life of man are immortal
while man's race lasts. In the case of such legends as those we are
discussing, it is probable that beyond the mere story some such ideal of
human life was suggested from the very first. Certainly, as time went
on, the ideal became so identified with the hero, that to thoughtful men
he came to stand for a particular idealism of human experience. Thus
Pater speaks of Dionysus as from first to last a type of second birth,
opening up the hope of a possible analogy between the resurrections of
nature and something else, reserved for human souls. "The beautiful,
weeping creatures, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and
rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of
the hardness and stony darkness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal
of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering."
This theory would also explain the fact that one nation's myths are not
only similar to, but to a large extent practically identical with, those
of other nations. There is a common stock of ideas supplied by the
common elements of human nature in all lands and times; and these, when
finely expressed, produce a common fund of ideals which will appeal to
the majority of the human race.

Thus mythology was originally simple storytelling. But men, even in the
telling of the story, began to find meanings for it beyond the mere
narration of events; and thus there arose in connection with all stories
that were early told, a certain number of judgments of what was high and
admirable in human nature. These were not grounded upon philosophical or
scientific bases, but upon the bed-rock of man's experience. Out of
these judgments there grew the great ideals which from first to last
have commanded the spirit of man.

In this connection it is interesting to remember that in Homer the men
were regarded as the means of revealing ideas and characters, and not as
mere natural objects in themselves. The things among which they lived
are described and known by their appearances; the men are known by their
words and deeds. "There is no inventory of the features of men, or of
fair women, as there is in the Greek poets of the decline or in modern
novels. Man is something different from a curious bit of workmanship
that delights the eye. He is a 'speaker of words and a doer of deeds,'
and his true delineation is in speech and action, in thought and
emotion." Thus, from the first, ideas are the central and important
element. They spring from and cling to stories of individual human
lives, and the finest of them become ideals handed down for the guidance
of the future race. The myths, with their stories of gods and men, and
their implied or declared religious doctrines, are but the forms in
which these ideals find expression. The ideals remain, but the forms of
their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more
fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture.
Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,--dwelling, like Plato's, in
heaven,--and there are always two alternatives for every man. He may go
back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in
sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in
their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human
experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly
stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the
former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In
what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous
Greek legends--those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo--in the
light of what has just been stated.

Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had
fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the
later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the
thought of men. In this form of the legend he appears constantly living
and striving for man's sake as the foe of God. We hear of him making men
and women of clay and animating them with celestial fire, teaching them
the arts of agriculture, the taming of horses, and the uses of plants.
Again we hear of Zeus, wearied with the race of men--the new divinity
making a clean sweep, and wishing to begin with better material. Zeus is
the lover of strength and the despiser of weakness, and from the earth
with its weak and pitiful mortals he takes away the gift of fire,
leaving them to perish of cold and helplessness. Then it is that
Prometheus climbs to heaven, steals back the fire in his hollow cane,
and brings it down to earth again. For this benefaction to the despised
race Zeus has him crucified, fixed for thirty thousand years on a rock
in the Asian Caucasus, where, until Herakles comes to deliver him, the
vulture preys upon his liver.

Such a story tempts the allegorist, and indeed the main drift of its
meaning is unmistakable. Cornutus, a contemporary of Christ, explained
it "of forethought, the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to
the painful necessities of human life, its liver gnawed unceasingly by
cares." In the main, and as a general description, this is quite
unquestionable. Prometheus is the prototype of a thousand other figures
of the same kind, not in mythology only, but in history, which tell the
story of the spiritual effort of man frustrated and brought to earth. It
is the story of Tennyson's youth who

"Rode a horse with wings that would have flown
But that his heavy rider bore him down."

Only, in the Prometheus idea, it is not a man's senses, as in Tennyson's
poem, but the outward necessity of things, the heavy and cruel powers of
nature around him, that prove too much for his aspirations. In this
respect the story is singularly characteristic of the Greek spirit. That
spirit was always daring with truth, feeling the risks of knowledge and
gladly taking them, passionately devoted to the love of knowledge for
its own sake.

The legend has, however, a deeper significance than this. One of the
most elemental questions that man can ask is, What is the relation of
the gods to human inquiry and freedom of thought? There always has been
a school of thinkers who have regarded knowledge as a thing essentially
against the gods. The search for knowledge thus becomes a phase of
Titanism; and wherever it is found, it must always be regarded in the
light of a secret treasure stolen from heaven against the will of
contemptuous or jealous divinities. On the other hand, knowledge is
obviously the friend of man. Prometheus is man's champion, and no figure
could make a stronger appeal than his. Indeed, in not a few respects he
approaches the Christian ideal, and must have brought in some measure
the same solution to those who were able to receive it. Few touches in
literature, for instance, are finer than that in which he comforts the
daughters of Ocean, speaking to them from his cross.

The idea of Titanism has become the commonplace of poets. It is familiar
in Milton, Byron, Shelley, and countless others, and Goethe tells us
that the fable of Prometheus lived within him. Many of the Titanic
figures, while they appeared to be blaspheming, were really fighting for
truth and justice. The conception of the gods as jealous and
contemptuous was not confined to the Greek mythology, but has appeared
within the pale of Christian faith as well as in all heathen cults.
Nature, in some of its aspects, seems to justify it. The great powers
appear to be arrayed against man's efforts, and present the appearance
of cruel and bullying strength. Evidently upon such a theory something
must go, either our faith in God or our faith in humanity; and when
faith has gone we shall be left in the position either of atheists or of
slaves. There have been those who accepted the alternative and went into
the one camp or the other according to their natures; but the Greek
legend did not necessitate this. There was found, as in AEschylus, a hint
of reconciliation, which may be taken to represent that conviction so
deep in the heart of humanity, that there is "ultimate decency in
things," if one could only find it out; although knowledge must always
remain dangerous, and may at times cost a man dear.

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