Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the heave of the deep,
’Twixt hooves of seahorses a-scatter, stampeding the dolphins as sheep.
Lo! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow’d and besprent of its dew!
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye who have loved, love anew!
Her favour it was fill’d the sails of the Trojan for Latium bound,
Her favour that won her Aeneas a bride on Laurentian ground,
And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars;
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew
From Romulus down to our Caesar—last, best of that blood, of that thew.
Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye who have loved, love anew!
“Last, best of that blood”—her blood, fusa Paphies de cruore, and the blood of Teucer, revocato a sanguine Teucri, “of that thew”—the thew of Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these our Roman believed himself the son and inheritor.
If we grasp this, that the old literature was packed with the old religion, and not only packed with it but permeated by it, we have within our ten fingers the secret of the Dark Ages, the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought down literature and almost prevailed to the point of stamping it out. They hated it, not as literature; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous and they austere: but they hated it because it held in its very texture, not to be separated, a religion over which they had hardly triumphed, a religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical to truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the name of Christ they had to fight it, accepting no compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no issue save that one of the twain—Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus or the carpenter’s son of Nazareth—must go under.
It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between adversaries so tremendous. Today, in Dr. Smith’s Classical Dictionary, Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by jowl with Terpsichore. But we are not concerned, here, with what happened in the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christian fighters had in their minds—to trample out the old literature because of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of it when he wrote of the effect of Christ’s Nativity—
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No mighty trance, or breathèd spell
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
—as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his “Hymn to Proserpine,” supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the “old profession” on the morrow of Constantine’s proclaiming the Christian faith—
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeem’d from your chains, men say.
New Gods are crown’d in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were …
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
“Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean!” However the struggle might sway in this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to her knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her body. You will not be surprised that the heavy hand of these Christian fathers fell first upon the Theatre: for the actor in Rome was by legal definition an “infamous” man, even as in England until the other day he was by legal definition a vagabond and liable to whipping. The policy of religious reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our Puritans did in 1642; and a recent pronouncement by the Bishop of Kensington would seem to show that the instinct survives to this day. Queen Elizabeth—like her brother, King Edward VI—signalized the opening of a new reign by inhibiting stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me the pensive speculation, “How much of English Literature, had she not relented, would exist today for a King Edward VII Professor to talk about?” Certainly the works of Shakespeare would not; and that seems to me a thought so impressive as to deserve the attention of Bishops as well as of Kings.
Apart from this instinct the Christian Fathers, it would appear, had plenty of provocation. For the actors, who had jested with the Old Religion on a ground of accepted understanding—much as a good husband (if you will permit the simile) may gently tease his wife, not loving her one whit the less, taught by affection to play without offending—had mocked at the New Religion in a very different way: savagely, as enemies, holding up to ridicule the Church’s most sacred mysteries. Tertullian, in an uncompromising treatise “
