After all those brave victories of man over the first chaos, organic
and inorganic, whose effect upon his phantasms has been indicated;
after fire had slain its thousands, and iron its tens of thousands of
his demons, and the rough artisan become a Nemesis with his rudder and
wheel pursuing the hosts of darkness back into Night and Invisibility;
still stood the grim fact of manyformed pain and evil in the world,
still defying the ascending purposes of mankind. Moreover, confronting
these, he is by no means so different mentally from that man he was
before conquering many foes in detail, and laying their phantoms, as
he was morally. More courage man had gained, and more defiance; and,
intellectually, a step had been taken, if only one: he had learned
that his evils are related to each other. Hunger is of many heads
and forms. Its yawning throat may be seen in the brilliant sky that
lasts till it is as brass, in the deluge, the earthquake, in claw
and fang; and then these together do but relate the hunger-brood to
Fire and Ferocity; the summer sunbeam may be venomous as a serpent,
and the end of them all is Death. Some tendency to these more general
conceptions of an opposing principle and power in the world seems
to be represented in that phase of development at which nondescript
forms arise. These were the conquered demons' bequest.
It is, of course, impossible to measure the various forces which
combined to produce the complex symbolical forms of physical
evil. Tradition is not always a good draughtsman, and in portraying
for a distant generation in Germany a big snake killed in India might
not be exact as to the number of its heads or other details. Heroes
before Falstaff were liable to overstate their foes in buckram. The
less measurable a thing by fact, the more immense in fancy: werewolves
of especial magnitude haunted regions where there had not been actual
wolves for centuries; huge serpents play a large part in the annals
of Ireland, where not even the smallest have been found. But after all
natural influences have been considered, one can hardly look upon the
sphynx, the chimæra, or on a conventional dragon, without perceiving
that he is in presence of a higher creation than a demonic bear or a
giant ruffian. The fundamental difference between the two classes is
that one is natural, the other præternatural. Of course a werewolf is
as præternatural as a gryphon to the eye of science, but as original
expressions of human imagination the former could hardly have been a
more miraculous monster than the Siamese twins to intelligent people
to-day. The demonic forms are generally natural, albeit caricatured
or exaggerated. And this effort at a præternatural conception is,
in this early form, by no means mere superstition; rather is it
poetic and artistic,--a kind of crude effort at allgemeinheit, at
realisation of the types of evil--the claw-principle, fang-principle
in the universe, the physiognomies of venom and pain detached from
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