The gods, they say, are ever young, and a certain sensuous and fleshly note is essential to those of Italy if they are to retain the love of their worshippers. Granted. We do not need a scarred and hirsute veteran; but we need, at least, a personage capable of wielding the sword, a figure something like this:—
His starry helm unbuckled show’d his prime In manhood where youth ended; by his side As in a glist’ring zodiac hung the sword, Satan’s dire dread, and in his hand the spear. . . .
There! That is an archangel of the right kind.
And the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, has suffered a similar transformation. He is shrunk into a poor little reptile, the merest worm, hardly worth crushing.
But how should a sublime conception like the apocalyptic hero appeal to the common herd? These formidable shapes emerge from the dusk, offspring of momentous epochs; they stand aloof at first, but presently their luminous grandeur is dulled, their haughty contour sullied and obliterated by attrition. They are dragged down to the level of their lowest adorers, for the whole flock adapts its pace to that of the weakest lamb. No self-respecting deity will endure this treatment—to be popularized and made intelligible to a crowd. Divinity comprehended of the masses ceases to be efficacious; the Egyptians and Brahmans understood that. It is not giving gods a chance to interpret them in an incongruous and unsportsmanlike fashion. But the vulgar have no idea of propriety or fair play; they cannot keep at the proper distance; they are for ever taking liberties. And, in the end, the proudest god is forced to yield.
We see this same fatality in the very word Cherub. How different an image does this plump and futile infant evoke to the stately Minister of the Lord, girt with a sword of flame! We see it in the Italian Madonna of whom, whatever her mental acquirements may have been, a certain gravity of demeanour is to be presupposed, and who, none the less, grows more childishly smirking every day; in her Son who—hereabouts at least—has doffed all the serious attributes of manhood and dwindled into something not much better than a doll. It was the same in days of old. Apollo (whom Saint Michael has supplanted), and Eros, and Aphrodite—they all go through a process of saccharine deterioration. Our fairest creatures, once they have passed their meridian vigour, are liable to be assailed and undermined by an insidious diabetic tendency.