Hypolympia; Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy

[The veiled figure flits across again, and Pan once more crosses in close pursuit.]

Phœbus [as they vanish].

What an amiable vivacity! Yes; the lower order of divinities will be happy, for they will forget. We, on the contrary, have the privilege of remembering. It is only the mediocre spirits, that cannot quite forget nor clearly remember, which will have neither the support of instinct nor the solace of a vivid recollection.

[He seats himself. A noise of laughter rises from he marsh, and dies away. In the silence a bird sings.]

Phœbus.

Not the Daulian nightingale, of course, but quite a personable substitute: less prolongation of the triumph, less insistence upon the agony. How curiously the note breaks off! Some pleasant little northern bird, no doubt. I experience a strange and quite unprecedented appetite for moderation. The absence of the thrill, the shaft, the torrent is not disagreeable. The actual Phocian frenzy would be disturbing here, out of place, out of time. I must congratulate this little, doubtless brown, bird on a very considerable skill in warbling. But the moon – what is happening to it? It is not merely climbing higher, but it is manifestly clarifying its light. When I came, it was copper-coloured, now it is honey-coloured, the horn of it is almost white like milk. This little bird's incantation has, without question, produced this fortunate effect. This little bird, halfway on the road between the nightingale and the cicada, is doubtless an enchanter, and one whose art possesses a more than respectable property. My sister's attention should be drawn to this highly interesting circumstance. Selene! Selene!

[He calls and waits. From the upper woods Selene slowly descends, wrapped in long white garments.]

Phœbus.

Sister, behold the throne that once was thine.

Selene.

And now, a rocking cinder, fouls the skies.

Phœbus.

A magian sweeps its filthy ash away.

Selene.

There is no magic in the bankrupt world.

Phœbus.

Nay, did'st thou hear this twittering peal of song?

Selene.

Some noise I heard; this glen is full of sounds.

Phœbus.

Fling back thy veil, and staunch thy tears, and gaze.

Selene.

At thee, my brother, not at my darkened orb.

Phœbus.

Gaze then at me. What seest thou in mine eyes?

Selene.

Foul ruddy gleams from what was lately pure.

Phœbus.

Nay, but thou gazest not. Look up, look at me!

Selene.

But on thy sacred eyeballs fume turns fire.

Phœbus.

Nay, then, turn once and see thy very moon.

Selene [turning round].

Ah! wonder! the volcanic glare is gone.

Phœbus.

The wizard bird has sung the fumes away.

Selene.

Empty it seems, and vain; but foul no more.

Phœbus [approaching her, and in a confidential tone].

I will not disguise from you, Selene, my apprehension that the hideous colour may return. Your moon is divorced from yourself, and can but be desecrated and forlorn. But at least it should be a matter of interest to you – yes, even of gratification, my sister – that this little bird, if it be a bird, has an enchanting power of temporarily relieving it and raising it.

[Selene, manifestly more cheerful, ascends to the wood on the left. Phœbus, turning again to the moon,]

I have observed that this species of mysterious agency has a very salutary effect upon the more melancholy of our female divinities. They are satisfied if they have the felicity of waiting for something which they cannot be certain of realising, and which they attribute to a cause impossible to investigate. [To Selene, raising his voice.] Whither do you go, my sister?

Selene.

I am searching for this little bird. I propose to discuss with it the nature of its extraordinary, and I am ready to admit its gratifying, control over the moon. I think it possible that I may concoct with it some scheme for our return. You shall, in that case, Phœbus, be no longer excluded from my domain.

Phœbus.

Let me urge you to do no such thing. The action of this little bird upon your unfortunate luminary is sympathetic, but surely very obscure. It would be a pity to inquire into it so closely as to comprehend it.

[Selene, without listening to him, passes up into the woods, and exit.]

Phœbus [alone].

To comprehend it might even be to discover that it does not exist. Whereas to come here night after night, in the fragrant darkness, to see the unhallowed lump of fire creep out of the lake, to listen for the first clucks and shakes of the sweet little purifying song, and to watch the orb growing steadily more hyaline and lucent under its sway, how delicious! The absolute harmony and concord of nature would be then patent and recurrent before us. My poor sister! However, it is consoling to reflect that she is almost certain not to be able to find that bird.

IV

[The same glen. Æsculapius alone, busily arranging a great cluster of herbs which he has collected. He sits on a large stone, with his treasures around him.]

Æsculapius.

Yew – an excellent styptic. Tansy, rosemary. Spurge and marsh mallow. The best pellitory I ever plucked out of a wall. The herbs of this glen are admirable. They surpass those of the gorges of Cyllene. Is this lavender? The scent seems more acrid.

[Enter Pallas and Euterpe.]

Pallas.

You look enviably animated, Æsculapius. Your countenance is so fresh beneath that long white beard of yours, that the barbarians will suppose you to be some mad boy, masquerading.

Euterpe.

What will you do with these plants?

Æsculapius.

These are my simples. As we shot through the Iberian narrows on our frantic voyage hither, my entire store was blown out of my hands and away to sea. The rarest sorts were flung about on rocks where nothing more valetudinarian than a baboon could possibly taste them. My earliest care on arriving here was to search these woods for fresh specimens, and my success has been beyond all hope. See, this comes from the wet lands on the hither side of the tarn —

Euterpe.

Where Selene is now searching for the wizard who draws the smoke away from the moon's face at night.

Æsculapius.

This from the beck where it rushes down between the stems of mountain-ash, this from beneath the vast ancestral elm below the palace, this from the sea-shore. Marvellous! And I am eager to descend again; I have not explored the cliff which breaks the descent of the torrent, nor the thicket in the gully. There must be marchantia under the spray of the one, and possibly dittany in the peat of the other.

Pallas.

We must not detain you, Æsculapius. But tell us how you propose to adapt yourself to our new life. It seems to me that you are determined not to find it irksome.

Æsculapius.

Does it not occur to you, Pallas, that – although I should never have had the courage to adopt it – thus forced upon us it offers me the most dazzling anticipations? Hitherto my existence has been all theory. What there is to know about the principles of health as applied to the fluctuations of mortality, I may suppose is known to me. You might be troubled, Pallas, with every conceivable malady, from elephantiasis to earache, and I should be in a position to analyse and to deal with each in turn. You might be obscured by ophthalmia, crippled by gout or consumed to a spectre by phthisis, and I should be able, without haste, without anxiety, to unravel the coil, to reduce the nodosities, to make the fleshy instrument respond in melody to all your needs.

Pallas.

But you have never done this. We knew that you could do it, and that has been enough for us.

Æsculapius.

It has never been enough for me. The impenetrable immortality of all our bodies has been a constant source of exasperation to me.

Pallas.

Is it not much to know?

Æsculapius.

Yes; but it is more to do. The most perfect theory carries a monotony and an emptiness about with it, if it is never renovated by practice. In Olympus the unbroken health of all the inmates, which we have accepted as a matter of course, has been more advantageous to them than it has been to me.

Pallas.

I quite see that it has made your position a more academic one than you could wish.

Æsculapius.

It has made it purely academic, and indeed, Pallas, if you will reflect upon it, the very existence of a physician in a social system which is eternally protected against every species of bodily disturbance borders upon the ridiculous.

Pallas.

It would interest me to know whether in our old home you were conscious of this incongruity, of this lack of harmony between your science and your occasions of using it.

Æsculapius.

No; I think not. I was satisfied in the possession of exact knowledge, and not directly aware of the charm of application. It is the result, no doubt, of this resignation of immortality which has startled and alarmed us all so much —

Pallas.

Me, Æsculapius, it has neither alarmed nor startled.

Æsculapius.

I mean that while we were beyond the dread of any attack, the pleasure of rebutting such attack was unknown to us. I have divined, since our misfortunes, that disease itself may bring an excitement with it not all unallied to pleasure… You smile, Euterpe, but I mean even for the sufferer. There is more in disease than the mere pang and languishment. There is the sense of alleviation, the cessation of the throb, the resuming glitter in the eye, the restoration of cheerfulness and appetite. These, Pallas, are qualities which are indissolubly identified with pain and decay, and which therefore – if we rightly consider – were wholly excluded from our experience. In Olympus we never brightened, for we never flagged; we never waited for a pang to subside, nor felt it throbbing less and less poignantly, nor, as if we were watching an enemy from a distance, hugged ourselves in a breathless ecstasy as it faded altogether; this exquisite experience was unknown to us, for we never endured the pang.

Euterpe.

You make me eager for an illness. What shall it be? Prescribe one for me. I am ignorant even of the names of the principal maladies. Let it be a not unbecoming one.

Æsculapius.

Ah! no, Euterpe. Your mind still runs in the channel of your lost impermeability. Till now, you might fling yourself from the crags of Tartarus, or float, like a trail of water-plants, on the long, blown flood of the altar-flame, and yet take no hurt, being imperishable. But now, part of your hourly occupation, part of your faith, your hope, your duty, must be to preserve your body against the inroads of decay.

Euterpe.

You present us with a tedious conception of our new existence, surely.

Æsculapius.

Why should it be tedious? There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of the unreal. What is pleasure, if the strain of it is followed by no fatigue; what the delicacy of taste, if we can eat like caverns and drink like conduits without being vexed by the slightest inconvenience? You will discover that one of the acutest enjoyments of the mortal state will be found to consist in guarding against suffering. If you are provided with balloons attached to all your members, you float upon the sea with indifference. It is the certainty that you will drown if you do not swim which gives zest to the exercise. I climb along yonder jutting cornice of the cliff with eagerness, and pluck my simples with a hand that trembles more from joy than fear, precisely because the strain of balancing the nerves, and the certainty of suffering as the result of carelessness, knit my sensations together into an exaltation which is not exactly pleasure, perhaps, but which is not to be distinguished from it in its exciting properties.

Pallas.

Is life, then, to resolve itself for us into a chain of exhilarating pangs?

Æsculapius.

Life will now be for you, for all of us, a perpetual combat with a brine that half supports, half drags us under; a continual creeping and balancing on a chamois path around the forehead of a precipice. A headache will be the breaking of a twig, a fever a stone that gives way beneath your foot, to lose the use of an organ will be to let the alpenstock slip out of your starting fingers. And the excitement, and be sure the happiness, of existence will be to protract the struggle as long as possible, to push as far as you can along the dwindling path, to keep the supports and the alleviations of your labour about you as skilfully as you can, and in the fuss and business of the little momentary episodes of climbing to forget as long and as fully as may be the final and absolutely unavoidable plunge. [A pause, during which Euterpe sinks upon the green sward.]

Æsculapius.

I have unfolded before you a scheme of philosophical activity. Are you not gratified?

Pallas.

Euterpe will learn to be gratified, Æsculapius, but she had not reflected upon the plunge. If she will take my counsel, she will continue to avoid doing so. [Euterpe rises, and approaches Pallas, who continues, to Æsculapius.] I am with you in recommending to her a constant consideration of the momentary episodes of health. And now let us detain you no longer from the marchanteas.

Euterpe.

But pray recollect that they grow where the rocks are both slippery and shelving.

[Exit Æsculapius. Euterpe sinks again upon the grass, with her face in her hands, and lies there motionless. Pallas walks up and down, in growing emotion, and at length breaks forth in soliloquy.]

Pallas.

Higher than this dull circle of the sense —Shrewd though its pulsing sharp reminders be,With ceaseless fairy blows that ring and wakeThe anvil of the brain – I rather chooseTo lift mine eyes and pierceThe long transparent bar that floats above,And hides, or feigns to hide, the choiring stars,And dulls, or faintly dulls, the fiery sun,And lacquers all the glassy sky with gold.For so the strain that makes this mortal lifeIrksome or squalid, chains that bind us down,Rust on those chains which soils the reddening skin,Passes; and in that concentrated calm,And in that pure concinnity of soul,And in that heart that almost fails to beat,I read a faint beatitude, and dreamI walk once more upon the roof of Heaven,And feel all knowledge, all capacityFor sovereign thought, all intellectual joy,Blow on me, like fluttering and like dancing winds.We are fallen, fallen!..And yet a nameless mirth, flooding my veins,And yet a sense of limpid happinessAnd buoyancy and anxious fond desireQuicken my being. It is much to seeThe perfected geography of thoughtSpread out before the gorged intelligence,A map from further detail long absolved.But ah! when we have tasted the delightOf toilsome apprehension, how returnTo that satiety of mental easeWhere all is known because it merely is?Nay, here the joy will be to learn and learn,To learn in error and correct in pain,To learn through effort and with ease forget,Building of rough and slippery stones a House,Long schemed, and falling from us, and at the lastImperfect. Knowledge not the aim, so muchAs pleasure in the toil that leads to knowledge,We shall build, although the house before our eyesCrumble, and we shall gladden in the toilAlthough it never leads to habitation —Building our goal, though never a fabric rise.

V

[The glen, down which a limpid and murmuring brook descends, with numerous tiny cascades and pools. Beside one of the latter, underneath a great beech-tree, and sitting on the root of it, Aphrodite, alone. Enter from below, concealed at first by the undergrowth, Ares. It is mid-day.]

Aphrodite [to herself].

Here he comes at last, and from the opposite direction… No! that cannot be Phœbus… Ah! it is you, then!

Ares.

Is it possible? Your Majesty – and alone!

Aphrodite.

Phœbus offered me the rustic entertainment of gathering wild raspberries. We found some at length, and regaled ourselves. I wished for more, and Phœbus, with his usual gallantry, wandered dreamily away into the forest on the quest. He has evidently lost his way. I sat me down on this tree and waited.

Ares.

Surely it is the first time that you were ever abroad unattended. I am amazed at the carelessness of Phœbus. Aphrodite – without an attendant!

Aphrodite.

That is rather a fatuous remark, and from you of all people in the world. My most agreeable reminiscences are, without exception, connected with occasions on which I had escaped from my body-guard of nymphs. At the present moment you would do well to face the fact, Ares, that I have but a single maid, and that she has collapsed under the burdens of novelty and exile.

Ares.

Is that my poor friend Cydippe?

Aphrodite.

You have so many friends, Ares. Poor Cydippe, then, broke down this morning in moaning hysterics after having borne up just long enough to do my hair. I really came out on this rather mad adventure after the raspberries to escape the dolours of her countenance, and the last thing I saw was her chlamys flung wildly over her head as she dived down upon the floor in misery. Such consolations as this island has to give me will not proceed from what you call my attendant. You do not look well, Ares.

Ares.

I am always well. I am still incensed.

Aphrodite.

Ah, you are oppressed by our misfortunes?

Ares.

I can think of nothing else.

Aphrodite.

You do not, I hope, give way to the most foolish of the emotions, and endure the silly torture of self-reproach?

Ares.

I have nothing to reproach myself with. Our forces had never been in smarter trim, public spirit in Olympus never more patriotic and national; and as to the personal bravery of our forces, it was simply a portent of moral splendour.

Aphrodite.

And your discipline?

Ares.

It was perfect. I had led the troops up to the point of cheerfully marching and counter-marching until they were ready to drop with exhaustion, on the eve of each engagement; and at the ends of all our practising-grounds brick walls had been set up, at which every officer made it a point of honour to tilt head-foremost once a day. There was no refinement preserved from the good old wars of chivalry which was not familiar to our gallant fellows, and I had expressly forbidden every species of cerebral exercise. Nothing, I have always said, is so hurtful to the temper of an army as for the rank and file to suspect that they are led by men of brains.

Aphrodite.

There every one must do you justice, Ares. I never heard even the voice of prejudice raised to accuse you.

Ares.

No; I do not think any one could have the effrontery to charge me with encouraging that mental effort which is so disastrous to the work of a soldier. The same old practices which led our forefathers to glory – the courage of tigers; the firm belief that if any one tried to be crafty it must be because he is a coward; a bull-front set straight at every obstacle, whatever its nature; a proper contempt for any plan or discovery made since the days of Father Uranus – these are the principles in which I disciplined our troops, and I will not admit that I can have anything to reproach myself with. The circumstances which we were unexpectedly called upon to face were such as could never have been anticipated.

Aphrodite.

I do not see that you could have done otherwise than, as you did, to refuse with dignity to anticipate anything so revolutionary.

Ares.

There are certain things which one seems to condone by merely acknowledging their existence. That employment of mobile mechanisms, for instance —

Aphrodite.

Do not speak of it! I could never have believed that the semblance of the military could be made so excessively distasteful to me.

Ares.

Can I imagine myself admitting the necessity of guarding against such an ungentlemanlike form of attack?

Aphrodite.

Your friends are all aware, Ares, that if the conditions were to return, you would never demean yourself and them by guarding against anything of the kind. But I advise you not to brood upon the past. Your figure will suffer. You must keep up your character for solid and agile exercises.

Ares.

It will not be easy for me to occupy myself here. I am accustomed, as you know, to hunting and slaying. I thought I might have enjoyed some sport with the barbarian islanders, and I selected one for the purpose. But Zeus intervened, with that authority which even here, in our shattered estate, we know not how to resist.

Aphrodite.

Did he give any reason for preventing the combat?

Ares.

Yes; and his reasons (I was bound to admit) carried some weight with them. He said, first, that it was wrong to kill those who had received us with so generous a hospitality; and secondly, that, as I am no longer immortal, this brawny savage, with hair so curiously coiled and matted over his brain-pan, might kill me; and thirdly, that the whole affair might indirectly lead to his, Zeus', personal inconvenience. Here then is enjoyment by one door quite shut out from me.

Aphrodite.

Are there not deer in these woods, and perhaps wolves and boars? There must be wild duck on the firth, and buzzards in the rocks. Instead of challenging the barbarians to a foolish trial of strength, why not make them your companions, and learn their accomplishments?

Ares.

It is possible that I shall do so. But for the present, anger gushes like an intermittent spring of bitter water in my bosom. I forget for a moment, and the fountain falls; and then, with a rush, memory leaps up in me, a column of poison. I say to myself, It cannot be, it shall not be; but I grow calm again and find that it is.

Aphrodite.

The worst of the old immortality was the carelessness of it. We were utterly unprepared for anything bordering on catastrophe, and behold, without warning, we are swept away in a complete cataclysm of our fortunes. I see, Ares, that it will be long before you can recover serenity, or take advantage of the capabilities of our new existence. They will appeal to you more slowly than to the rest of us, and you will respond more unwillingly, because of your lack – your voluntary and boasted lack – of all intellectual suppleness.

Ares.

It is not the business of a soldier to be supple.

Aphrodite.

So it appears. And you will suffer for it. For, stiff and blank as you may determine to be, circumstances will overpower you. Under their influences you will not be able to avoid becoming softer and more redundant. But you will resist the process, I see, and you will make it as painful as you can.

Ares.

You discuss my case with a cheerful candour, Aphrodite. Are you sure of being happier yourself?

Aphrodite.

Not sure; but I have a reasonable confidence that I shall be fairly contented. For I, at least, am supple, and I court the influences which you think it a point of gallantry to resist.

Ares.

You will continue, I suppose, to make your main business the stimulating and the guiding of the affections? Here I admit that suppleness, as you call it, is in place.

Aphrodite.

Unfortunately, even here, immortality was no convenient prelude to our present state. We did not, indeed, neglect the heart —

Ares.

If I forget all else, there must be events —

Aphrodite.

Alas! we loved so briefly and with so facile a susceptibility, that I am tempted to ask myself whether in Olympus we really loved at all.

Ares [with ardour].

There, at least, memory supplies me with no sort of doubt —

Aphrodite [coldly].

Let us keep to generalities. Looking broadly at our experience, I should say that the misfortune of the gods, as a preparation for their mortality, was that in their deathless state the affections fell at the foot of the tree, like these withered leaves. We should have fastened the branches of life together in long elastic wires of the thin-drawn gold of perdurable sentiment.