376

PARADISE AND THE SNAKE.

Serpent, heroes had given battle to the whole fraternity. Nay, in their place had arisen a new race of gods, whose theoretical omnipotence was gladly surrendered in the interest of their righteousness; and there was now war in heaven; the dragon and his allies were cast down, and man was now free to fight them as enemies of the gods as well as himself. Woe henceforth to any gods suspected of taking sides with the dragon in this man's life-and-death struggle with the ferocities of nature, and with his own terrors reflected from them! The legend of Prometheus was their unconsciously-given notice to quit,' though it waited many centuries for its great interpreter. It is Goethe who alone has seen how pale and weak grow Jove's fireworks before the thought-thunderbolts of the artist, launched far beyond the limitations that chain him in nature. Gods are even yet going down in many lands before the sublime sentence of Prometheus:—

Curtain thy heavens, thou Jove, with clouds and mist,
And, like a boy that moweth thistles down,

Unloose thy spleen on oaks and mountain-tops;
Yet canst thou not deprive me of my earth,
Nor of my hut, the which thou didst not build,
Nor of my hearth, whose little cheerful flame
Thou enviest me!

I know not aught within the universe

More slight, more pitiful than you, ye gods!

Who nurse your majesty with scant supplies

Of offerings wrung from fear, and muttered prayers,

And needs must starve, were't not that babes and beggars
Are hope-besotted fools!

When I was yet a child, and knew not whence
My being came, nor where to turn its powers,
Up to the sun I bent my wildered eye,
As though above, within its glorious orb,
There dwelt an ear to listen to my plaint,
A heart, like mine, to pity the oppressed.

PROMETHEUS AND JOVE.

Who gave me succour

Against the Titans in their tyrannous might?
Who rescued me from death-from slavery?
Thou !—thou, my soul, burning with hallowed fire,
Thou hast thyself alone achieved it all!
Yet didst thou, in thy young simplicity,
Glow with misguided thankfulness to him
That slumbers on in idlesse there above!

I reverence thee?

Wherefore? Hast thou ever

Lightened the sorrows of the heavy laden?
Thou ever stretch thy hand to still the tears
Of the perplexed in spirit?

Was it not

Almighty Time, and ever-during Fate

My lords and thine-that shaped and fashioned me
Into the MAN I am?

Belike it was thy dream

That I should hate life-fly to wastes and wilds,

For that the buds of visionary thought

Did not all ripen into goodly flowers?

Here do I sit and mould

Men after mine own image

A race that may be like unto myself,

To suffer, weep; to enjoy, and to rejoice;
And, like myself, unheeding all of thee!

377

The myth of Prometheus reveals the very dam of all dragons, the mere terrorism of nature which paralysed Man's first combat was to be with

the energies of man.

his own quailing heart. to their ships with the

Apollo driving back the Argives image of the Gorgon's head on

Jove's shield is Homer's picture of the fears that unnerved heroes:

Phœbus himself the rushing battle led;

A veil of clouds involved his radiant head:
High held before him, Jove's enormous shield
Portentous shone, and shaded all the field:
Vulcan to Jove th' immortal gift consigned,
To scatter hosts, and terrify mankind. . . .

378

ART AND NATURE.

Deep horror seizes ev'ry Grecian breast,
Their force is humbled, and their fear confest.
So flies a herd of oxen, scattered wide,
No swain to guard them, and no day to guide,
When two fell lions from the mountain come,
And spread the carnage thro' the shady gloom..
The Grecians gaze around with wild despair,

Confused, and weary all their pow'rs with prayer.'

A generation whose fathers remembered the time when men educated in universities regarded Franklin with his lightning-rod as 'heaven-defying,' can readily understand the legend of Vulcan-type of the untamed force of firebeing sent to bind Prometheus, master of fire.2 How much fear of the forces of nature, as personified by superstition, levelled against the first creative minds and hands the epithets which Franklin heard, and which still fall upon the heads of some scientific investigators! Storm, lightning, rock, ocean, vulture,—these blend together with the intelligent cruelty of Jove in the end; and behold, the Dragon! The terrors of nature, which drive cowards to their knees, raise heroes to their height. Then it is a flame of genius matched against mad thunderbolts. Whether the jealous nature-god be Jehovah forbidding sculpture, demanding an altar of unhewn stone, and refusing the fruits of Cain's garden, or Zeus jealous of the artificer's flame, they are thrown into the Opposition by the artist; and when the two next meet, he of the thunderbolt with all his mob will be the Dragon, and Prometheus will be the god, sending to its heart his arrow of light.

The dragon forms which have become familiar to us through mediæval and modern iconography are of comparatively little importance as illustrating the social or spiritual conditions out of which they grew, and of which they became emblems. They long ago ceased to be descriptive, and in the rude periods or places a very few

1 1 Pope's Homer,' Book xv.

2 See p. 59.

DRAGON FORMS.

379

scratches were sometimes enough to indicate the dragon; such mere suggestions in the end allowing large freedom to subsequent designers in varying original types.

As to external form, the various shapes of the more primitive dragons have been largely determined by the mythologic currents amid which they have fallen, though their original basis in nature may generally be traced. In the far North, where the legends of swan-maidens, pigeonmaidens, and vampyres were paramount in the Middle Ages, we find the bird-shaped dragon very common. Sometimes the serpent-characteristics are pronounced, as in this ancient French SwanDragon (Fig. 26); but, again, and especially in

regions where serpents

Fig. 27.-ANGLO-SAXON DRAGONS (Cædmon
MS., tenth century).

are rare and comparatively innocuous, the serpent tail is often conventionalised away, as in this initial V from the

380 ANGLO-SAXON AND SOUTHERN DRAGONS

Cædmon Manuscript, tenth century (Fig. 27), a fair example of the ornamental Anglo-Saxon dragon. The cuttlefish seems to have suggested the animalised form of the Hydra, which in turn helped to shape the Dragon of the Apocalypse. Yet the Hydra in pictorial representation appears to have been influenced by Assyrian ideas; for although the monster had nine heads, it is often given seven (number of the Hathors, or Fates) by the engravers, as in Fig. 6. The conflicts of Hercules with the Hydra repeated that of Bel with Tiamat ('the Deep'), and had no doubt its

counterpart in that of Michael with the Dragon,-the finest representation of which, perhaps, is the great fresco by Spinello (fourteenth century) at Arezzo, a group from which is presented in Fig. 28. In this case the wings represent those always attributed in Semitic mythology to the Destroying Angel. The Egyptian Dragon, of which the crocodile is the basis, at an early period entered into christian symbolism, and gradually effaced most of the pagan monsters. The crocodile and the alligator, besides being susceptible of many horrible varia