CHAPTER VIII.

THE DRAGON'S EYE.

The Eye of Evil--Turner's Dragons--Cloud-phantoms--Paradise and
the Snake--Prometheus and Jove--Art and Nature--Dragon forms:
Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Egyptian, Greek, German--The modern
conventional Dragon.


The etymologies of the words Dragon and Ophis given in the preceding
chapter, ideally the same, both refer to powers of the serpent which
it does not possess in nature,--the præternatural vision and the
glance that kills. The real nature of the snake is thus overlaid;
we have now to deal with the creation of another world.

There are various conventionalised types of the Dragon, but through
them all one feature is constant,--the idealised serpent. Its presence
is the demonic or supernatural sign. The heroic dragon-slayer must not
be supposed to have wrestled with mere flesh and blood, in whatever
powerful form. The combat which immortalises him is waged with all
the pains and terrors of earth and heaven concentrated and combined
in one fearful form.

Impossible and phantasmal as was this form in nature, its mystical
meaning in the human mind was terribly real. It was this Eye of
anti-human nature which filled man with dismay, and conjured up
the typical phantom. It was this Pain, purposed and purposing, the
Agony of far-searching vision, subtlest skill, silently creeping,
winged, adapted to meet his every device with a cleverer device,
which gradually impressed mankind with belief in a general principle
of antagonism to human happiness.

It is only as a combination that any dragon form is miraculous. Every
constituent feature and factor of it is in nature, but here they are
rolled together in one pandemonic expression and terror. Yet no such
form loses its relations with nature: it is lightning and tempest,
fever-bearing malaria and fire, venom and fang, slime and jungle,
all the ferocities of the earth, air, and heavens, gathering to
their fatal artistic force, and waylaying man at every step in his
advance. In Turner's picture of Apollo slaying the Python there is
a marvellous suggestion of the natural conceptions from which the
dragon was evolved. The fearful folds of the monster, undulating
with mound and rock on which he lies, at points almost blend with
tangle of bushes and the jagged chaos amid which he stretches. The
hard, wild, cruel aspects of inanimate nature seem here and there
rankly swelling to horrible life, as yet but half-distinguishable
from the stony-hearted matrix; the crag begins to coil and quiver,
the jungle puts forth in claws; but above all appear the monstrous
EYES, in which the forces of pain, hardship, obstacle have at last
acquired purpose and direction. The god confronts them with eyes yet
keener; his arrow, feathered with eyebeams, has reached its mark,
straight between the monster's eyes; but there is no more anger in
his face than might mar the calm strength of a gardener clearing away
the stone and thicket that make the constituent parts of Python.

If we turn now to the neighbouring picture in the National Gallery
by the same artist, the Hesperian Gardens and their Guard, we behold
the Dragon on his high crag outlining and vitalising not only the
edge of rock but also the sky it meets. His breath steams up into
cloud. The heavens also have their terrors, which take on eyes and
coils. On the line of the horizon were hung the pictures of the
primitive art-gallery. Imagination painted them with brush dipped
now in blackness of the storm, now in fires of the lightning or the
sunset, but the forms were born of experience, of earthly struggle,
defeat, and victory.

As I write these words, I lay aside my pen to look across a little
lake amid the lonely hills of Wales to a sunset which is flooding the
sky with glory. Through the almost greenish sky the wind is bearing
fantastic clouds, that sometimes take the shape of chariots, in which
cloud-veiled forms are seated, and now great birds with variegated
plumage, all hastening as it were to some gathering-place of aerial
gods. Beneath a long bar of maroon-tint stretches a sea of yellow
light, on the hither side of which is set a garden of fleecy trees
touched with golden fruit. Amid them plays a fountain of changing
colours. On the left has stood, fast as a mountain range, a mass
of dark-blue cloud with uneven peaks; suddenly a pink faint glow
shines from behind that leaden mass, and next appears, sinuous with
its long indented top, the mighty folds of a fiery serpent. Nay,
its head is seen, its yawning lacertine jaws, its tinted crest. It
is sleepless Ladon on his high barrier keeping watch and ward over
the Hesperian garden.

Juno set him there, but he is the son of Ge,--the earth. The tints of
heaven invest and transform, and in a sense create him; but he would
never have been born mythologically had it not been that in this world
stings hover near all sweetness, danger environs beauty, and, as Plato
said, 'Good things come hard.' The grace and lustre of the serpent
with his fatal fang preceded him, and all the perils that lurk beneath
things fair and fascinating. So far there is nothing essentially moral
or unmoral about him. This dragon is a shape designed by primitive
meteorology and metaphysics together. Man has asked what is so, and
this is the answer: he has not yet asked why it is so, whether it ought
to be so, and whether it may not be otherwise. The challenge has not
yet been given, the era of combat not yet arrived. The panoplied guard
and ally of gods as unmoral as himself has yet to be transformed under
the touch of the religious sentiment, and expelled from the heaven of
nobler deities as a dragon cast down, deformed, and degraded for ever.

As thought goes on, such allies compromise their employers; the
creator's work reflects the creator's character; and after many
timorous ages we find the dragon-guarded deities going down with
their cruel defenders. It is not without significance that in the
Sanskrit dictionary the most ancient of all words for god, Asura,
has for its primary meaning 'demon' or 'devil:' the gods and dragons
united to churn the ocean for their own wealth, and in the end they
were tarred with one brush. I have already described in the beginning
of this work the degradation of deities, and need here barely recall
to the reader's memory the forces which operated to that result. The
bearing of that force upon the celestial or paradise-guarding Serpent
is summed up in one quatrain of Omar Khayyám:--


O Thou who man of baser earth didst make,
And e'en in Paradise devised the Snake;
For all the sin wherewith the face of man
Is blackened, man's forgiveness give--and take!


The heart of humanity anticipated its logic by many ages, and, long
before the daring genius of the Persian poet wrote this immortal
epitaph on the divine allies of the 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.

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 idlenesse 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!


The myth of Prometheus reveals the very dam of all dragons,--the mere
terrorism of nature which paralysed the energies of man. Man's first
combat was to be with his own quailing heart. Apollo driving back the
Argives to their ships with the image of the Gorgon's head on Jove's
shield is Homer's picture of the fears that unnerved heroes:--


Phoebus 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....
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. [241]


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 fire--being sent to bind Prometheus, master of
fire. [242] 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 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, pigeon-maidens, 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
Swan-Dragon (Fig. 26); but, again, and especially in regions where
serpents are rare and comparatively innocuous, the serpent tail is
often conventionalised away, as in this initial V from the 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 variations in pictorial treatment, were particularly
acceptable to the Christian propaganda, because of the sanctity
attached to them by African tribes,--a sanctity which continues to
this day in many parts of that country, where to kill one of these
reptiles is believed to superinduce dangerous inundations. In Semitic
traditions, also, Leviathan was generally identified as a demonic
crocodile, and the feat of destroying him was calculated to impress the
imaginations of all varieties of people in the Southern countries for
which Christianity struggled so long. This form contributed some of its
characters to the lacertine dragons which were so often painted in the
Middle Ages, with what effect may be gathered from the accompanying
design by Albert Durer (Fig. 29). In this loathsome creature, which
seeks to prevent deliverance of 'the spirits in prison,' we may remark
the sly and cruel eye: the præternatural vision of such monsters was
still strong in the traditions of the sixteenth century. In looking
at this lizard-guard at the mouth of hell we may realise that it
has been by some principle of psychological selection that the
reptilian kingdom gradually gained supremacy in these portrayals of
the repulsive. If we compare with Fig. 29 the well-known form of the
Chimæra (Fig. 30), most of us will be conscious of a sense of relief;
for though the reptilian form is present in the latter, it is but an
appendage--almost an ornament--to the lion. It is impossible to feel
any loathing towards this spirited Trisomatos, and one may recognise
in it a different animus from that which depicted the christian
dragon. One was meant to attest the boldness of the hero who dared
to assail it; the other was meant, in addition to that, to excite
hatred and horror of the monster assailed. We may, therefore, find a
very distinct line drawn between such forms as the Chimæra and such as
the Hydra, or our conventional Dragon. The hairy inhabitants of Lycia,
human or bestial, whom Bellerophon conquered, [243] were not meant to
be such an abstract expression of the evil principle in nature as the
Dragon, and while they are generalised, the elements included are also
limited. But the Dragon, with its claws, wings, scales, barbed and
coiling tail, its fiery breath, forked tongue, and frequent horns,
includes the organic, inorganic, the terrestrial and atmospheric,
and is the combination of harmful contrivances in nature.

Nearly all of the Dragon forms, whatever their original types and their
region, are represented in the conventional monster of the European
stage, which meets the popular conception. This Dragon is a masterpiece
of the popular imagination, and it required many generations to give it
artistic shape. Every Christmas he appears in some London pantomime,
with aspect similar to that which he has worn for many ages. His body
is partly green, with memories of the sea and of slime, and partly
brown or dark, with lingering shadow of storm-clouds. The lightning
flames still in his red eyes, and flashes from his fire-breathing
mouth. The thunderbolt of Jove, the spear of Wodan, are in the barbed
point of his tail. His huge wings--batlike, spiked--sum up all the
mythical life of extinct Harpies and Vampyres. Spine of crocodile
is on his neck, tail of the serpent, and all the jagged ridges of
rocks and sharp thorns of jungles bristle around him, while the ice
of glaciers and brassy glitter of sunstrokes are in his scales. He is
ideal of all that is hard, obstructive, perilous, loathsome, horrible
in nature: every detail of him has been seen through and vanquished
by man, here or there, but in selection and combination they rise
again as principles, and conspire to form one great generalisation
of the forms of Pain--the sum of every creature's worst.