Part 4 (1/2)

(_thinking of a younger sister whom he would sell when she is older._)

We have a little sister, still immature. What shall we do with her when she is spoken for?

SECOND BROTHER

If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards.

THE SHULAMITE

(_ironically intervening._)

I am comely, yet I made them let me be.

FIRST BROTHER

(_significantly._)

Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver.

THE SHULAMITE

But my vineyard which is mine I still have.

(_Laughing._)

A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others.

(_At the door the_ SHEPHERD _appears. Behind him are comrades._)

THE SHEPHERD

Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause me to hear it.

THE SHULAMITE

Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the mountains of spices.

III

APHRODITE URANIA

Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judaea the days of the righteous were long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the G.o.ds loved died young. The G.o.ds themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the h.e.l.lenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephaestos limped, but among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that counted their years by their games.

As the tribes dispersed the G.o.ds advanced. Their pa.s.sage, marked here by a temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by the ideal. Divinities, whom the a.s.syrian priests barely dared to invoke by name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art, belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than austere, more aesthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceeds.

Greece to-day lies buried with her G.o.ds. She has been dead for twenty centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed before death did and survived her.

To Homer beauty was an article of faith. But not the divinities that radiated it. He laughed at them. Pythagoras found him expiating his mirth in h.e.l.l. A later echo of it bubbled in the farce of Aristophanes. It reverberated in the verses of Euripides. It rippled through the gardens of Epicurus. It amused sceptics to whom the story of the G.o.ds and their amours was but gossip concerning the elements. They believed in them no more than we do. But they lived among a people that did. To the Greeks the G.o.ds were real, they were neighborly, they were careless and caressing, subject like mortals to fate. From them gifts came, desires as well. The latter idea, precocious in its nave psychology, eliminated human responsibility and made sin descend from above.

Olympus was not severe. Greece was not, either. The solemnity of other faiths had no place in her creed, which was free, too, of their baseness.

It was not Homer only, but the inherent h.e.l.lenic love of the beautiful that, in emanc.i.p.ating her from Orientalisms, maintained her in an att.i.tude which, while never ascetic, occasionally was sublime. The tradition of Orpheus and Eurydice, the fable of Psyche and her G.o.d, had in them love, which nowhere else was known. They had, too, something of the high morality which the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ depict.

In the _Iliad_ a thousand s.h.i.+ps are launched for the recovery of an abducted wife. The subject is equivocal, but concerning it there is not a dubious remark. In the _Iliad_ as in the _Odyssey_ love rested on two distinct principles: First, the respect of natural law; second, the respect of lawful marriage. These principles, the G.o.ds, if they willed, could abolish. When they did, their victims were not blamed, they were pitied. Christianity could not do better. Frequently it failed to do as well. But the patricists were not psychologists and the theory of determinism had not come.