Traditional Christians of both East and West are observing Great and Holy Friday today in remembrance of the sacrificial death of Jesus of Nazareth whom they revere as ‘Christ’ or Messiah. As one of those believers, I offer some thoughts I have had before and after, and, alas, even during the services of this past week along these lines. I have been startled by how much of the imagery of the books we discuss here resonate with the historical events and eternal verities we commemorate this weekend. If you are not a Christian, I doubt these musings below the jump will have any value to you; I will return to my more profane posts for all readers on Monday.

My thinking started with a search for a recording of Dorothy Sayers’ The Man Born to be King, her dramatization of Holy Week and the human choices and qualities mixed up in the transcendent and world-altering death and resurrection of the Christ. It turns out there isn’t a recording, at least not one available for retail purchase, My researches, though, turned up that one could be had through a bit of pirating (?) technology called ‘torrent.’ Having no experience with this sort of thing, I wrote a good friend, the man in fact with whom I first experienced Man Born to be King in a C. S. Lewis Society on the Left Coast, to ask for his advice about the ‘whether’ and ‘how to’s of downloading this sort of thing.

He emailed me the necessary advice (I have decided against Torrent) and with it he added this jarring aside:

Getting off the tech talk… yes, “That Man Born to Be King” is terrific!  Though years later, I no longer find myself interested so much in the naturalistic psychology of Judas that Sayers did a good job expanding upon.  Fr, Alexander Schmemann’s exegesis below now seems more apt and to the point:

=== Fr. Alexander Schmemann on distorted love ===

But this hour of ultimate love is also that of the ultimate betrayal. Judas leaves the light of the Upper Room and goes into darkness. “And it was night.”(John 13:30) Why does he leave? Because he loves, answers the Gospel, and his fateful love is stressed again and again in the hymns of Holy Thursday. It does not matter, indeed, that he loves the “silver.” Money stands here for all the deviated and distorted love which leads man into betraying God. It is, indeed. Love stolen from God and therefore, Judas is the Thief. When he does not love God and in God, man still loves and desires, for he was created to love and love is his nature, but it is then a dark and self-destroying passion and death is its end. Each year, as we immerse ourselves into the unfathomable light and depth of Holy Thursday, the same decisive question is addressed to each one of us: do I respond to Christ’s love and accept it as my life, or do I follow Judas into the darkness of the night?

Love, in brief, is the reason Judas betrays Christ, a love for the wrong things but love nonetheless, even if this love leads to an end of Love Himself.

Reflecting on this, and, inevitably, on the things, the personal idols of self and material, which I worship rather than identifying with and adoring What brings us into existence moment to moment, I thought of Tom Riddle, Jr., Lord Voldemort, and his idolatry. Dumbledore says several times to Harry that the Dark Lord does not love and knows nothing of love. I think Fr. Alexander’s exegesis of Judas’ love of silver, the lunar quality of reflected light compared to the solar light of gold and of Love properly, suggests strongly that the Dark Lord for all his inhumanity loved nonetheless because, as images of God, we are designed to love. His love of his ego existence and persona, however, was the love felt by the fallen person for ephemera rather than the eternal. Hence his agony, his transformation into a serpent, and his death when he meets a man who has chosen instead the path of sacrificial love and identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful, the Heir of the Potter.

I thought, too, of Suzanne Collin’s Mockingjay song, ‘The Hanging Tree,’ and the call Katniss feels, Finnick, too, to join the man singing to them. I wrote about this heavy Calvary resonance embedded in the Hunger Games finale last year this way:

(1) When a writer puts a symbol or a poem or story into the narrative line, it is a very good bet that understanding this image, poem, play, or prose piece is a key that unlocks the story-line. Think of Nabokov’s Pale Fire for an over the top example of imbedded poetry or of the ‘triangular eye’ symbol and ‘Tale of the Three Brothers’ in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I explain in ‘The Seeing Eye’ chapter of The Deathly Hallows Lectures, Ms. Rowling is explaining via her characters’ attempts to understand the Hallows symbol and Brothers tale how to interpret the most important artistry and meaning of her book.

(2) Oddly enough, the meaning of that Hallows symbol — the bisected triangle enclosing a circle — was most profoundly explained in text not by Xenophilius Lovegood, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger (no relation), or even Albus Dumbledore. Harry shows us what it means when he buries Mad-Eye Moody’s magical eye in the shadow of the oldest oak tree he can find and carves a cross on the tree trunk (again, see Lectures). The tree is the heart of the symbol in Hallows as it is to the esoteric meaning of ‘The Hanging Tree’ in Mockingjay; as the country western tune puts it, the Hanging Tree is the “Tree of Life.”

A tree is an apt symbol of God and His relationship to the world because, like a tree, especially an ancient one,

• He is relatively immortal or timeless,
• His beginning is unknowable and invisible,
• He is a unity at His core or base
• that grows into a seemingly infinite extension at His periphery.

All traditional cultures, consequently, understand trees as natural transparencies through which any thinking person can see God, the Creator who brings everything into existence (see, for instance, Romans 1:20). ‘The Hanging Tree,’ from this understanding, is death to the individual ego and carnal concerns but the greater life and love available in God. The seeming contradiction of having to lose your life to gain it, of course, is at the heart of the teachings of the Galilean (see John 12:24-25 and Luke 17:33).

The “tree” of this song, in one word, is the Cross, the “murdered three” is a not-so-opaque reference to the three who were murdered by the state at Calvary, and the criminal calling his beloved to take up his cross is Christ.

“The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree.” (Acts 5.30.)

“And we are witnesses of all things which he [Jesus] did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree” (Acts 10.39.)

“And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre.” (Acts 13.29.)

“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness” (Peter 2.24.)

This is the Mockingjay’s song because sacrificial love and death to one’s ego is the most radical and revolutionary politics that no regime, the World, can tolerate. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Just as at the beginning of Games, when Katniss sacrifices herself to save Prim, she offers herself as a sacrifice at the end of the series to save all the Prims who will die in the revived Hunger Games if Coin lives.

Katniss, in having embraced the Pearl of Great Price in Fire, the example and teaching of Peeta the Christ figure, and committing herself to die for him becomes the sacrifice that redeems the world in Mockingjay; she answers the call of Christ on the Cross and becomes a “murderer,” executing President Coin, knowing it means her death, which, of course, means her greater life with Peeta as Christ.

This is why he intervenes at the assassination to prevent Katniss’ death. She answers the call of the man on the tree, her beloved, the light and life of the world, to join him, a sacrifice prefigured in Fire by “the lightning tree” that is her means of transcending the fallen, murderous world of the arena if she is willing to die to herself and confront “the real enemy.” Mockingjay, throughout which she and Finnick are making nooses from rope pieces as Katniss did as a child on hearing the ‘Hanging Tree’ song, is the story of her preparation to die to self and join her beloved on the tree.

I offer for your consideration that this sacrificial love and means to transcendence is also the meaning of Hunger Games that resonates most profoundly in the hearts of Ms. Collins’ readers, who with Katniss, have the message of ‘The Hanging Tree’ if not its words within them.

End exegesis of ‘The Hanging Tree.’ Several readers found this interpretation forced and even evangelical; others thought it spot-on. I still find the Calvary echoes here hard to overlook in light of the Eliade thesis that books serve a mythic or religious function in as secular culture and our corollary that the most popular books will be the ones that serve that function most deftly and powerfully.

I’d offer as my closing thought before heading out to Royal Hours that this kind of reading of text and of history as transparencies to eternal truths and realities is an atrophied human capability that needs to be nourished rather than a denominational tick one should suppress in company of others. As evidence of that, I offer St. Maximos the Confessor’s reading of Jesus of Nazareth’s meeting with Pontius Pilate and a Parthian thought about those at the Cross this Holy Friday.

71. Pilate is a type of the natural law; the Jewish crowd is a type of the written law. He who has not risen through faith above the two laws cannot therefore receive the truth which is beyond nature and expression. On the contrary, he invariably crucifies the Logos, for he sees the Gospel either, like a Jew, as a stumbling-block or, like a Greek, as foolishness (cf. 1 Cor. 1:23)

72. When you see herod and Pilate making friends with each other in order to destroy Jesus (cf. Luke 23:12), you may discern in this the concurrence of the demons of unchastity and self-esteem, who combine together to put to death the Logos of virtue and spiritual knowledge. For the demon of self-esteem, making a pretence of spiritual knowledge, refers to the demon of unchastity, and the demon of unchastity, putting on a hypocritical show of purity, refers back to the demon of self-esteem. Thus it is said, ‘When Herod had arrayed Jesus in a gorgeous robe, he sent Him again to Pilate’ (Luke 23:11)

73. The intellect should not yield to the flesh or cling to the passions. For, it is said, ‘men do not gather figs from thorns’, that is, they do not gather virtue from the passions, ‘nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush’ (cf. Matt. 7:16), that is, they do not gather from the flesh that spiritual knowledge which gladdens the heart.

74. An ascetic tested by the patient acceptance of trials and temptations, purified by bodily training, and perfected by attention to the higher forms of contemplation, receive the blessings of divine grace. ‘For the Lord’, says Moses, ‘came from Sinai,’ that is, from trials and temptations, ‘and appeared to us from Seir,’ that is, from bodily hardships, ‘and hastened down from mount Paran with ten thousands of Kadesh’ (Deut. 33:2. LXX), that is, from the mountain of faith with untold sacred knowledge.

75. Herod exemplifies the will of the flesh; Pilate, the senses; Caesar, sensible things; and the Jews, the soul’s thoughts. When the soul through ignorance associates with sensible things, it betrays the Logos into the hands of the senses to be put to death and proclaims within itself the kingship of perishable things. For the Jews say, ‘We have no king but Caesar’ (John 19:15).

76. Again, Herod exemplifies the activity of the passions; Pilate, a disposition that is deluded by them; Caesar, the ruler of the world of darkness; and the Jews, the soul. When the soul submits to the passions and betrays virtue into the power of an evil disposition, it manifestly denies the kingdom of God and transfers itself to the destructive tyranny of the devil.

First Century on Theology (Philokalia, Vol II, pp 128-129)

In brief, St. Maximos sees in the persons of the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ the story of every person’s faculties of soul and the right ordering as well as the fallen hierarchy and relationship of these faculties. I don’t doubt that a modern or postmodern reader of St. Maximos sees only an overly enthusiastic believer projecting his spiritual anthropology onto text; we, as a rule, see history and text relating history as more or less accurate one-to-one correspondences of each other.

St. Maximos, however, sees both text and the historical events relayed as both such a mechanical correspondence and as a window through which to see an account of human psychology and, more important, soteriology. In the events leading to Calvary, we see fallen man and the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice as Logos in a transparency, a historical event window through which we see and know specific time and space events in Jerusalem and, in them, the verities of human life transcending history and the individuals involved.

I thought of this last night while looking at the icon of the Crucifixion and listening to the Passion Gospels as they were read in church. We talk a lot here about ‘soul triptychs’ and their use in popular fiction. It’s a powerful imagery that is obviously effective; why else do we see variants of it in Harry-Hermione-Ron, Bella-Edward-Jacob, and Peeta-Katniss-Gale? They are shadows of Alyosha-Ivan-Dmitri Karamazov, and, to the point, of the soul’s intellect (nous) or ‘inner heart,’ the spirit in popular parlance, and mind or will with body, the Biblical ‘belly’ or desires. ‘Call it  Body-Mind, and Spirit,’ these fictional characters are stand-ins or transparencies in which and through which our souls’ faculties see and experience their right alignment and are imaginatively transformed.

I thought of this while looking at the icon of the Crucifixion and listening to the Passion Gospels because of the triptych of onlookers there, specifically, St. Gestas, the crucified thief forgiven by Christ and promised deliverance to the Kingdom, and Sts. John the Theologian and Longinus the Centurion at the foot of the Cross. It doesn’t take a St. Maximos to see in the three men looking to Christ as He dies the suffering body, the will in obedience, and the loving spirit all recognizing in wonder the Christ as dying, sacrificial God.

Rene Guenon, a Sufi sheikh, observes in his The Symbolism of the Cross that

The cross is a symbol which in its various forms is met with almost everywhere, and from the most remote times; it is therefoe far from belonging peculiarly and exclusively to the Christian tradition as some might be tempted to believe. It must even be stated that Christianity, at any rate in its outward and generally known aspect, seems to have somewhat lost sight of the symbolic character of the cross and come to regard it as no longer anything but the sign of a historical event. Actually, these two viewpoints are in no wise mutually exclusive; indeed the second is in a sense a consequence of the first; but this way of looking at things is so strange to the great majority of people today that it deserves dwelling on for a moment in order to avoid possible misunderstandings.

The fact is that people too often tend to think that if a symbolical meaning is admitted, the literal or historical sense must be rejected; such a view can only result from unawareness of the law of correspondence, which is the very foundation of all symbolism. By virtue of this law, each thing, proceeding as it does from a metaphysical principle, translates or expresses that principle in its own fashion and in accorsdance with its own order of existence; so that from one order to another all things are linked together and correspond in such a way as to contribute to the universal and total harmony, which, in the multiplicity of manifestation, can be likened to a reflection of the principial unity itself….

This holds good for historical facts no less than for anything else; they likewise conform to the law of correspondence just mentioned, and, thereby, in their own mode, translate higher realities, of which they are, so to speak, a human expression. We would add that from our point of view (which obviously is quite different from that of the profane historians), it is this that gives to these facts the greater part of their significance. The symbolical character, while common to all historical events, is bound to be particularly clear-cut in the case of of events connected with what may be called “sacred history”; thus it is recognizable in a most striking way in all the circumstances of the life of Christ. If the foregoing has been properly grasped, it will at once be apparent not only that there is no reason for denying the reality of these events and treating them as mere myths, but on the contrary that these events had to be such as they were, and could not have been otherwise; it is clearly impossible to attribute a sacred character to something devoid of all transcendent significance.

In particular, if Christ died on the cross, it can be said that this was by reason of the the symbolic value which the cross possesses in itself and which has always been recognized by all traditions; thus without diminishing in any way its historical significance, the latter may be regarded as directly derived from the symbolical significance that goes with it.

Symbolism of the Cross (Luzac, 1975, pp xi-xii)

Christ dies on the cross, in other words, because it was the Roman instrument of tortuous execution at that time and place, yes, but more importantly because of the metaphysical significance of that symbol and death. The cross is the revelation of the center, it defines the point which is the origin and unknown and unknowable beginning of the circle reflecting the principial unity and totality to which Guenon refers. Christ as God’s Creative Word or Logos is this mystical center, simultaneously the origin and resolution of all contraries, and his loving, sacrificial death or resolution on the cross at Calvary reveals his divine nature in its way in as profound a way as His Transfiguration, Theophany, and Resurrection do,

St. Maximos writes:

The centre of a circle is regarded as the the indivisable source of all the radii extending from it; similarly, by means of a certain single and indivisible act of spiritual knowledge, the person found worthy to dwell in God will perceive pre-existing in God all the inner essences (logoi) of created things.

Second Century on Theology #42, op.cit., p 138

We are called, in other words, as persons created in the image of God wanting to grow in His likeness, to pursue a specific vision by which we recognize in everything existent the creative logos of God which is their metaphysical cause or center. As triptychs of body-mind-and-spirit we experience stories that are told as rings, with alchemical drama of contraries seeking resolution, and with character triptychs with whom we identify as shadows of Sts. John-Longinus-and Gestas on Calvary seeing the Logos center Himself in resolution, even seeming dissolution, to transcend by this act in His person the polarity without duality of time and space, a sacrifice that delivers us, as much as we join ourselves to this death, to our eternal life in Him.

Harry Potter travels every year to an inner chamber where he dies a sacrificial death and rises from the dead in the presence of a symbol of Christ. Bella Swan, similarly, sacrifices herself in each book of the Forks Saga on her path to apotheosis, the conjunction of the human heart and the Divine Mind. Katniss Everdeen, the Mockingjay on Fire or Phoenix, is the resurrection bird of her Hunger Games adventures, too, who identifies and joins herself to the man calling from the Hanging Tree. I suggest in brief that these stories have their power and hold on us largely through their shared powerful resonance with the events of Calvary and the consequent Resurrection, whose historical-metaphysical meaning is our means to transcending self and our hope of immortality.

I pray that your observances of this Holy Week have been edifying and challenging and that your celebrations of our Lord’s Resurrection will be joyous. “Re-member us in Thy Kingdom,” as St. Gestas cries from his cross, as triptychs in disarray all looking to Thee, the Divine Origin and Cause of all things.

Fraternally,

John

Hey, the Contact Tab is working and I have received two Guest Posts and a YouTube musical from Russia, no less, in as many days. Here — after the jump — is the short Wandlore piece that revealed the broken Contact Form:

Wandlore: Yuletide Reflections on the Meaning of Harry and Voldemort’s Wand Woods and Cores

As I was re-reading Sorcerer’s Stone the other night, I had an epiphany:  One can almost predict the destiny of Harry and Voldemort by the way their wands are made.

Harry’s wand is holly, with a phoenix feather in the core.  We know the phoenix is a symbol of resurrection because it dies in fire and then is re-born from its own ashes.  The fact that Harry’s wand is holly is also significant.  Remember the old Christmas carol, The Holly and the Ivy:

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.

The holly bears a bud
As bitter as any gall,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.

The holly bears a blossom

As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

To be our sweet Savior.

The holly bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Holly thus stands for the sacrificial death of Christ.  But holly is also an evergreen, a symbol of eternal life.  Sacrificial death, resurrection, and eternal life: all are present in Harry’s wand, and he is thereby marked as the Christ figure for the series.

Voldemort’s wand, on the other hand, is at odds with itself.  It’s made of yew, a tree commonly planted in cemeteries, so it has an association with death,  Voldemort’s greatest fear.  Like Harry’s it has a phoenix-feather core, and Voldemort is “resurrected” after a fashion in Goblet of Fire.  But his “rebirth” is only temporary, mundane and mortal, with none of the transcendent power of  Harry’s self-sacrifice and return from King’s Cross in Deathly Hallows.  Voldemort’s wand stands for both death and life, containing and channeling both his power and his fear.  A wand so conflicted could not possibly be the instrument to defeat Harry, whose sacrificial love finally transcends both death and life.

Jesus said, “He who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will save it.”  Voldemort seeks to become immortal – to save his life – and ultimately loses it.  Harry consents to the loss his life, and gets it back.  Voldemort is motivated by fear, seeking immortality only for himself, and for the power he thinks it will confer on him.  Harry is motivated by love, and in laying down his life earns the title Master of Death.  This outcome is prefigured in the materials that make up their wands.

Jane Hawes

A guest post from John Stanifer in Indiana! It is a paper he will be delivering this weekend at Taylor University’s Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C. S. Lewis and Friends. Who knew that Twilight and Till We Have Faces share a mythic antecedent and common cause? Enjoy!

Tale as Old as Time:

A Study of the Cupid and Psyche Myth, with Particular Reference to C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces

In 1956, C.S. Lewis saw the publication of his final novel, Till We Have Faces. “Everyone says it’s my best book,” he wrote to one correspondent (Hooper, 647).  Lewis lovers may argue that point till they have blue faces, but one thing they can agree on is that the novel stands as a testament to Lewis’s love for Greek myth.  For those who are unfamiliar with Till We Have Faces or who simply need a refresher, the novel’s basic plot is a reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, a myth that centers on the love between a gorgeous god and a mortal woman.  As we will see, this myth in all its numerous forms is designed to resonate in the hearts of book lovers, playgoers, film audiences, and human beings everywhere.

The goal of this discussion will be to trace the various adaptations of the Cupid and Psyche myth and its echoes in works as various as the poetry of John Milton, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Though I’ll be referring back to Lewis and Till We Have Faces often, my aim is to unveil the threads that run through each and every one of these works.  At heart, I believe that the Cupid and Psyche myth is a reflection of man’s struggle to transcend his human nature and embrace the God of Love who created him.  Stick around and find out how this proves true every single time the story is retold.

Let’s start by examining the roots of the Cupid and Psyche myth.  Our earliest written record of the myth comes from a Classical novel titled The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses. By strange literary device, a drunken old woman narrates the myth to the novel’s protagonist while he suffers in the captivity of a gang of thieves (Apuleius, 106, bk. 6).  Though the myth comes across as a side story to the main plot, one gets the feeling it’s there for a reason.

Here’s a summary.  A king and queen have three beautiful daughters, one of whom outshines the rest in beauty and in virtue.  This Helen of Troy lookalike, whose real name is Psyche, is so beautiful that men are afraid to ask her hand in marriage and instead decide to worship her as a goddess.  Venus, the goddess of love herself, becomes jealous of Psyche’s popularity and commands her son Cupid to afflict Psyche with a lust for the lowest kind of scumbag he can find.  Instead, Cupid falls in love with the girl himself (71-76, 89, bks. 4-5).

Psyche is taken to the god’s palace, where they are wed.  Homesick for her sisters, Psyche invites them to her palace, but the two sisters are filled with envy at everything they see and concoct a plan to ruin Psyche’s happiness.  Because Cupid refuses to let Psyche see his face, the sisters convince her that her husband must be a monster.  But when Psyche finally gazes on Cupid’s face by candlelight, the god’s beauty overwhelms her.  Unfortunately, Cupid wakes and banishes Psyche to wander the earth while he returns to his home with Venus at the bottom of the sea (77-91, bk. 5).

Before she can be reunited with her divine husband, Psyche must complete four impossible tasks concocted by Venus.  With the help of a few unexpected allies, she does just that.  Cupid petitions Jupiter for a blessing on their marriage, and Psyche is transformed into a true goddess.  The cliché “happily ever after” certainly applies here, since the marriage of Cupid and Psyche is for eternity (97-106, bk. 6).

Till We Have Faces pays tribute to this myth by retaining the central characters and keeping most of the major plot points intact.  However, in the scene where Psyche’s sisters visit Cupid’s palace, the two jealous sisters make way for one: Orual, the narrator and hence the focus of Lewis’s novel.  Orual is actually the older of the two, which creates a great deal of tension when Psyche becomes the god’s bride and Orual is literally unable to see or hear or touch any part of the god’s palace.  Orual begins to believe that Psyche is insane—or worse, that Psyche is being duped by a man or beast coming to her at night (122, 136-37, 142-43).

That Orual is blind to the reality of the god’s existence gives the myth a whole new direction.  I’ll let C.S. Lewis explain in his own words to close friend Katharine Farrer:  “It is the story of every nice, affectionate agnostic whose dearest one suddenly ‘gets religion,’ or even every luke warm [sic] Christian whose dearest gets a Vocation” (Hooper, 590).  Orual’s inability to take part in Psyche’s joy is an illustration of what Christ meant when He said “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword…a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household” (Life Application Study Bible, Matt. 10:34-36).  Faith in Cupid or God as the case may be becomes a source of conflict rather than a point of common interest.

Milton alludes to the Cupid and Psyche myth in the conclusion to his poem “Comus” or “A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle.”

Celestial Cupid her fam’d son advanc’t

Holds his dear Psyche sweet intranc’t

After her wandering labours long,

Till free consent the gods among

Make her his eternal Bride,

And from her fair unspotted side

Two blissful twins are to be born,

Youth and Joy; so Jove hath sworn.  (72)

Okay, we get it.  The myth of Cupid and Psyche appeals to learned men like C.S. Lewis and Milton who play Scrabble in Greek and read so many books that they go blind.  Why should the rest of humanity care?  Why would a hip, cutting-edge audience give a rat’s hind end about a story embedded in the middle of a larger story that was written thousands of years ago in another language and hasn’t even been featured on Oprah or made into a movie starring Brad Pitt?

The answer is simple.  Even those among us with little exposure to ancient Greek myth are familiar with Cupid and Psyche’s modern counterparts.

Take Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as an example.  Though critics like Harold Bloom and Stephen King have managed to stereotype the series as a fad for teenyboppers and other readers too stupid to recognize a bad book even if it tried to bite them, Twilight is worth examining here if for no other reason than its startling parallels to the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

For the three people left on Earth who haven’t been exposed to Twilight one way or another, here’s the gist.  Girl named Bella meets boy named Edward.  Bella falls in love with Edward.  Bella finds out Edward is a vampire who loves her but is constantly tempted to have her over for “lunch.”  Bella wants Edward to bite her so she can be a vampire too and live with him forever.  Edward reluctantly agrees to the transformation, but only if Bella marries him first.  That covers the plot of the first two books, Twilight and New Moon, and most of the third.

The parallels become obvious with a closer look.  Twice within the first Twilight novel, Bella describes Edward as a statue of Adonis come to life (299, 317).  In Greek mythology, Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite, better known as Venus (Hamilton, 117).  Venus, of course, is the mother of Cupid in the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

Both Cupid and Edward are described as excessively good-looking.  E.J. Kenney’s translation of the original Cupid and Psyche tale puts it like this: “She [Psyche] saw a rich head of golden hair dripping with ambrosia, a milk-white neck…the god’s body was smooth and shining and such as Venus need not be ashamed of in her son” (Apuleius, 88, bk. 5).  Edward is said to have a sculpted chest, “scintillating arms,” and skin that is “smooth like marble” and glitters in the sunlight (Twilight, 260).  It should be noted that Lewis’s physical description of the son of Ungit, his stand-in for Cupid, is similarly flattering (Till We Have Faces, 111, 172).

Does the resemblance go any deeper than the flesh?  Let the audience judge for itself with the following examples.  Perhaps the most obvious is that Cupid and Edward are both immortal.  Both fall in love with humans.  Both avoid being seen in the light, because doing so reveals their beauty and therefore their true identities (Apuleius, 88, bk. 5; Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 123; Meyer, Twilight, 260).  Near the end of their respective tales, both give in and allow their loved ones to undergo the process of becoming immortal (Apuleius, 105, bk. 6; Till We Have Faces, 241; Breaking Dawn, 378-86).  Both father a child that is part-human and part-immortal (Apuleius, 106, bk. 6; Breaking Dawn, 443-45).

The similarities between Cupid and Edward go hand-in-hand with the similarities between their lovers, Psyche and Bella.  Both are mortal women who admit to feeling inferior next to their god husbands (Apuleius, 104, bk. 6; Till We Have Faces, 113; New Moon, 70).  Both have friends and family who just don’t get it (Apuleius, 81, bk. 5; Till We Have Faces, 117-19; New Moon, 544-45).  Both are warned that their husbands are monsters who are bound to make a meal out of them sooner or later (Apuleius, 85-86, bk. 5; Till We Have Faces, 160; Twilight, 195).  Both are persecuted by the divine elite (Apuleius, 97-98, bk. 6; Till We Have Faces, 242; Eclipse, 576-79).

Most importantly, Psyche and Bella endure a period of “wandering” in which they are forcibly separated from their lovers and must attempt to put themselves back together again.

In the myth, this separation occurs when Psyche gives in to her curiosity and sneaks a look at Cupid in the candlelight while he’s sleeping.  Cupid discovers her violation of trust and flies away, condemning her to exile (Apuleius, 88-89, bk. 5; Till We Have Faces, 173-74).  Bella’s separation occurs when Edward decides, once and for all, that it’s just too dangerous for her to be around him and his family (New Moon, 44-45).  Whatever the reason, the results are the same.  Psyche and Bella must wander and suffer before being reunited to their respective lovers.  Interestingly, both attempt to throw themselves off of a high precipice into the water at some point (Apuleius, 89, bk. 5; Till We Have Faces, 279; New Moon, 359).

Before we get into the spiritual meaning behind this God-centered love story, let’s bring in one more modern-day adaptation of the Cupid and Psyche myth, promised in the introduction to our discussion: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

You’ll remember that Belle, the heroine of Disney’s fairy tale, encounters the Beast for the first time while searching his castle for her lost father.  In the process, she is also introduced to the castle servants, including a candlestick named Lumiere, a clock named Cogsworth, and a bubbly teapot known as Mrs. Potts.  When Belle later agrees to become the Beast’s prisoner in exchange for her father’s freedom, the servants do everything they can to make her welcome and to help her appreciate their master’s better qualities.  This is particularly well exemplified by the song-and-dance number “Be Our Guest.”

In many ways, Belle’s first visit to the castle is mirrored in Psyche’s first visit to the god’s palace in The Golden Ass.  Let’s take a look:

As she gazed at all this with much pleasure there came to her a disembodied voice: ‘Mistress, you need not be amazed at this great wealth.  All of it is yours.  Enter then your bedchamber, sleep off your fatigue, and go to your bath when you are minded.  We whose voices you hear are your attendants who will diligently wait on you; and when you have refreshed yourself a royal banquet will not be slow to appear for you.’  (Apuleius, 78, bk. 5)

Once readers have made the connection between the two stories, it’s difficult to avoid hearing the voice of Lumiere when one reads of Psyche’s visit to the palace, since the words of the “disembodied voice” are very similar to the opening lyrics of “Be Our Guest:” “Ma chere Mademoiselle, it is with deepest pride and greatest pleasure that we welcome you tonight.  And now we invite you to relax, let us pull up a chair as the dining room proudly presents your dinner” (Beauty and the Beast)!

Till We Have Faces adds another layer of depth to this scene, largely because Lewis’s version of the myth takes up more space, allowing him more room to develop his characters.  For example, we are told early on in Till We Have Faces that Psyche dreams of being “a great queen, married to the greatest king of all” (23).  She goes on to say, “he will build [her] a castle of gold and amber…on the very top [of the Grey Mountain]” (23).  Later, when Psyche is telling the tale of her visit to Cupid’s palace to her sister Orual, she brings up this childhood dream again (109).

Again, we have a significant parallel with Disney’s Belle.  Long before she visits the Beast’s castle, the cry of Belle’s heart is expressed in her song: “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere.  I want it more than I can tell, and for once it might be grand to have someone understand: I want so much more than they’ve got planned!”  We also learn that Belle’s favorite book contains “far off places, daring swordfights, magic spells,” and “a prince in disguise.”  She gets all this and more in her romance with the Beast, just as Psyche finally gets her king and her gold and amber palace in the end.

During a key scene in Beauty and the Beast, the filmmakers come quite close to advertising their debt to the myth of Cupid and Psyche explicitly.  This may or may not have been intentional, but for viewers familiar with both stories, it’s hard to ignore the allusion.  I’m referring, of course, to the famous ballroom scene where Belle and the Beast dance for the first time.  As the camera pans around the scene, tracking their graceful movements, we get a brief glimpse of the ceiling, a painted panorama that features little Cupids watching down on the ballroom from the heavens.

I hope by now I’ve succeeded in making the connections between all these Cupid and Psyche stories plain.  It’s time now we turned to their deeper meaning.  I’ll let Twilight apologist John Granger summarize that meaning for us: “In a nutshell, the reason we and millions…around the world respond to these stories is that their allegorical and anagogical meanings are about the central drama and relationship of human existence—our life with God—told in compelling, engaging fashion” (Spotlight, 76).

This goes not only for Twilight, but also for Till We Have Faces, The Golden Ass, and Beauty and the Beast.

Allow me to elaborate.  Like Psyche and Belle, we all have a longing to be joined to a great king, a “prince in disguise,” if you will.  Although this longing is sometimes distorted by sin and all kinds of false ideas about God, the Apostle Paul said that “[we] have no excuse for not knowing God,” because all Creation is full of “his invisible qualities” (Rom. 1:20-23).  We may disbelieve in the existence of our God at first, like Psyche’s sister Orual, who is skeptical when her sister tries to make her see the glorious palace all around her.  We may be terrified of surrendering ourselves to God, because we can’t see past the Lion of Judah to the Lamb of God within, just as Belle is terrified of the Beast until she perceives his gentle soul.

But once we see past the forbidding exterior of the God of Love, we are bound, like Bella, to be swept up in our desire to be with Him forever.  Like the Psalmist, we will long to “live in the house of the Lord” (23:6).  After all, God is constantly speaking to us through the “disembodied voices” of His servants, including the apostles and prophets in the Bible and godly modern day Christians like Lewis.  These voices speak to our inner heart, inviting us to pull up a chair to the banquet God has prepared for us.  He has pulled out all the stops.  He has spared no expense.  He will do everything he can to impress us with His love, short of overriding our free will.

How else are we to respond?  Like Lewis’s Psyche, we must name Him the “Master of [our] House” (Till We Have Faces, 122).  Only then can we experience the “rich and satisfying life” that Christ speaks of in the Gospel of John (10:10).

Cupid and Psyche.  God and Man.  It’s a tale as old as time, told again and again by different people.  In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the storyteller is an Oxford academic, a Mormon housewife, a “drunken garrulous old woman” (Apuleius, 106, bk. 6), or a team of animators and musicians working for a multinational corporation.  The same message will always be there just beneath the surface.

Who could put it better than Mr. Beaver from Lewis’s classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?  “Who said anything about safe?  ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.  He’s the King, I tell you” (80).

That’s the heart of Till We Have Faces. It’s the heart of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.  It’s a summary of our relationship with God.  May we never forget it.

Works Cited

Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Trans. E.J. Kenney. Rev. ed. 1998. London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 2004. Print.

Beauty and the Beast Special Edition. Dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise.  Music by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. 1991. Walt Disney Home Video, 2002. DVD.

Granger, John. Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2010. Print.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. 1942. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998. Print.

Hooper, Walter, ed. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. Vol. 3. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007. Print.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Illus. Pauline Baynes. Leather Bound ed. 1950. Norwalk, CT: The Easton Press, 1978. Print. The Chronicles of Narnia 2.

- – -. Till We Have Faces. Harvest Book ed. 1956. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc., 1980. Print.

Life Application Study Bible. 1988. Ed. Tyndale House Foundation. 2nd ed. Carol Steam, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2007. Print. New Living Translation.

Meyer, Stephenie. Breaking Dawn. Special Edition ed. 2008. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print. The Twilight Saga 4.

- – -. Eclipse. 2007. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print. The Twilight Saga 3.

- – -. New Moon. 2006. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Print. The Twilight Saga 2.

- – -. Twilight. 2005. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006. Print. The Twilight Saga 1.

Milton, John. “A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle.” 1634. The Complete English Poems of Milton. Ed. Malcolm Elwin. London: Macdonald & Co., Ltd., 1953. 43-72. Print. Macdonald Illustrated Classics 25.

Where have I been over the holidays? Mostly on Prince Edward Island with Anne of Green Gables. I’m working on a new book, tentatively titled Bella Swan’s Bookshelf (creative, I know) about the literary influences playing on the Twilight series and that requires a lot of reading time with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s green and grey-eyed red-head.

We’ve discussed the possible influence of Anne on the Hogwarts Saga before (see Anne Shirley vs. Harry Potter from the archives of the Anne Lexicon site and my response here if you missed that). I want to re-visit the topic for three reasons:

In order of least to most important:

(1) I have been corresponding this past week with an Anne expert who will go unnamed until she chooses to join this conversation. S/he assures me that Ms. Rowling herself has confirmed that she is an Anne fan and that Lucy Maud Montgomery (hereafter ‘LMM’) was an influence. A quick search at Accio-quotes does not bring up anything more than an aside about Anne but the sources my expert-friend noted seem more than credible. The critical Anne community in Canada accepts the Anne-Harry link as a given.

(2) Reading LMM biographical pieces, it’s hard to miss the Rowling-Montgomery parallels: successful author of Bildungsroman-orphan novels, with something of a Cinderella story, whose work was neglected (despised?) by critics, an unhappy marriage, wish-fulfillment qualities in the writing, and a life struggling with depression. Ms. Rowling got the help and medication she needed to deal with this last; LMM, tragically, did not, through the ‘failing’ of being born too soon, alas.

(3) If you read the Anne novels, I think you have to be struck by the number of Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth allusions and quotations. As striking are the near constant descriptions, “florid” literally and figuratively, of the natural beauty of PEI and Avonlea. My Anne expert and correspondent confirms that LMM, like Anne Shirley, was a close reader of the Victorian Romantics and John Ruskin.

So what?

I think it is more than plausible that these books are as popular as they are today — and there is an international Anne fandom, especially in Japan — because of their allegorical and anagogical meanings. The anagogical meaning is in the scaffolding of beauty, the succession of natural landscape paintings LMM draws for the reader, the character of which mind-pictures work subliminally (as do our real world surroundings, eh?) to transform our interior landscape in edifying fashion.

That’s quite the jump from this sort of Modern Painters anagogical artistry to Rowling’s literary alchemy — just as there is a considerable chasm separating the prose heights and comic touches of both writers — but I don’t think that it is here that we see the influence of Anne on Harry. That is in the allegorical meaning they share.

Harry, as I have explained in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, is the allegorical ‘heart’ or ‘spirit,’ as a stand-alone character and subject of the alchemical purification and theosis of the series as well as a member of the series’ soul triptych, body-mind-spirit, Ron-Hermione-Harry. Potter-mania is largely a consequence of reader engagement with Harry and experiencing his spiritual chrysalis imaginatively.

Any reader of LMM’s Anne novels knows that Anne begs her adopted family to call her “Cordelia” at their first meeting, and, unlike the several names she calls herself in the first book (to include a Coleridge Christabel reference in ‘Geraldine’), this name is recalled several times in the follow-on books. Diane Barry, for example, names her first daughter “Little Anne Cordelia” to honor her best friend to the mystification of her family.

Why is “Cordelia” an important marker? I think there is a reason more obvious and more meaningful than the tragic King Lear echoes, which are something of a stretch for the later Anne Shirley to make (or for the child Anne to know!) even given Cordelia’s virtues or the original Welsh meaning (“jewel of the sea”), both of which possibilities are cited in The Annotated Anne of Green Gables as the most likely connections. “Cordelia” is from the Latin for “warm-hearted” and this is the core, if you will, of the Anne books’ allegorical meaning: Anne Shirley is the “heart,” very much as Harry Potter is.

Three quick points in this regard:

(1) In Coleridgean anthropology, the Primary Imagination is the uncreated Logos in the human person and the Secondary Imagination is the same faculty engaged in art. (See Chapter five of The Deathly Hallows Lectures for more on this.) This noetic quality is the “heart” of Christian scripture and Patristic writing, whence Coleridge’s natural theology, and of imaginative literature, especially poetry and fantasy post-Coleridge. Anne Shirley is a creature of “imagination” whose vision recreates PEI and its rather mundane existence into an endless series of visions bordering on the supernatural, which seems to infuse her world. Her life-long hope is only for a “greater scope of imagination.”

(2) There is a brotherhood of people in the Anne books, her “kindred spirits” and the “house of Joseph” from Anne’s House of Dreams, who recognize each other, usually by the light shining in their eyes and their distinctively sacramental or un-empirical way of seeing things. They are as distinct from the non-kindred and as “magical” a group as Witches and Wizards in Rowling’s sub-creation are from her Muggles. This quality of light in the eyes is another pointer to Coleridgean and Romantic cardiac intelligence and logos (cf., John 1:9). Anne Shirley’s enlightened crew are another Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

(3) There is a borderline disdain for religious conformity in the Anne books, which, while never crossing over into impiety or heresy, is nonetheless always a note contrary to hollow devotion or hypocritical faith-without-living-works. The real faith of the books isn’t the Methodism or Presbyterianism LMM gently mocks as being little better than Grips or Tory political parties in their partisan differences but the vibrant faith evident in Anne’s love and her imagination. This is the logos-Christ within her heart that shines through her and transforms her world. The references to books like Drummond’s Natural Law in the Supernatural World and LMM’s constant stream of Romantic poet and scripture citations as well as the story transformations centering on hearts opening highlight this meaning repeatedly.

Anne of Green Gables and the follow-on books, then, like Harry Potter, are carrying a boatload of meaning, allegorical and anagogical, via the Romantic tradition’s understanding of imagination as the spiritual heart of the human person. I offer for your consideration the thesis which I think obvious, namely, that it is just these levels of meaning and artistry which account for the longevity of fascination with and the power and universal appeal of LMM’s Anne Shirley adventures.

Your comments and corrections are coveted as always.

I’m speaking tonight at the New York Public Library tonight (6:30 pm, 455 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Lions) on Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures. I hope to see you there!

If you cannot come to that, please enjoy the photos below and at Flickr as well as stories about Azkatraz 2009, and here, and here, and here, HPEF’s biggest and best Potter con yet. More tomorrow!

(photo credits — Wendy Bierman on the Red Hen/Hogs Head with Cable Car back drop, Robert Trexler on all others)

If you’d like to purchase mp3 files from conference talks, I’m told they can still be had at SoftConference.com.

My thanks to HPEF champions Lee, Heidi, Becki and daughter, Stina, Zossima Bob, Travis, Pepperdine James, Aurora David and Toni, Rev. George, HPL Steve, Leaky Melissa, Lev, AQ Lisa, Niki, my San Diego friends, B&N Megan, HPA Andrew, and the host of serious readers that made this San Francisco adventure a treat from start to finish. Hats off to the HPEF crew who work throughout the year so that every base is covered!

Grateful John, off to Manhattan

Mirrors are a big part of fantasy literature in the English tradition. It starts in a big way with the Alice classics by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), an Oxford Platonist, Anglican clergyman, and mathematician, when he sends his heroine Through the Looking Glass and it echos through Goudge’s work (as we saw yesterday), Tolkien’s Mirror of Galadriel and Frodo’s Light which is essentially a phial of water taken from the pool-mirror, up to the Godfather mirror fragment that plays such a large part in Deathly Hallows.

The tradition of mirrors in fantasy fiction and its origin in the natural theology and logos epistemology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed at length in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, chapter 5, ‘The Seeing Eye,’ so I won’t beat that to death again here. What I want to share today is what I think may be the first and what is certainly the most important pre-Coleridge use of a mirror that reflects the ‘I’ that is, as Lewis says, “a sacred name.”

It’s from Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 2, Section 4, the Delectable Mountains, a passage brought to my attention by James Devine, a dear friend of mine I met in Marine Corps boot camp, believe it or not.

To set the scene in Pilgrim’s Progress, at the passage we’re about to jump into, we’re in the second part of the story during which Christian’s family makes the journey he made solo in the first part. Mercy, Matthew, and Christiana are traversing the Delectable Mountains after escaping the Giants of Despair. Mercy asks for a detour to see “the hole in the hill,” a glimpse of hell, and then, after entering the Shepherd’s Palace (the Shephers defeated the Giants), she discovers a Mirror. Unbelievably, she asks if she can buy it from the Shepherds. Here is the Bunyan passage:

Then said Mercy, the wife of Matthew, to Christiana her mother, Mother, I would, if it might be, see the hole in the hill, or that commonly called the By-way to hell. So her mother brake her mind to the shepherds. Then they went to the door; it was on the side of an hill; and they opened it, and bid Mercy hearken a while. So she hearkened, and heard one saying, “Cursed be my father for holding of my feet back from the way of peace and life.” Another said, “Oh that I had been torn in pieces before I had, to save my life, lost my soul!” And another said, “If I were to live again, how would I deny myself, rather than to come to this place!” Then there was as if the very earth groaned and quaked under the feet of this young woman for fear; so she looked white, and came trembling away, saying, “Blessed be he and she that is delivered from this place!”

They also gave to the other young women such things as they desired, and to their husbands great commendations, for that they had joined with Mr. Great-Heart in the slaying of Giant Despair, and the demolishing of Doubting Castle.

Now to unwrap the allegory:

Note that she looks into the Hole-In-the-Side-of-the-Hill, the By-way to Hell, immediately before the mirror episode. She opens the doors and hears souls in hell lamenting choices they made that sent them there. On the surface, it is a morality play type allegory: repent before it is too late! As preface to the Mirror reflecting the ‘Prince of Pilgrims,’ it is a little more. Mercy looks into a cave (think Plato) or place of darkness. She sees no light (John 1:9). She comes to the home of the Shepherds named Knowledge (gnosis), Watchfulness (nepsis), Experience (pieros), and Sincere, looks in the Dining Room (!) mirror, and sees Christ as her reflection, the Light of the World, because she has “a mind (nous) to see him.”

The scripture references are St. Paul’s pointers to the idea of a mirror, in which subject and object are dissolved and, in which, “I shall know even as also I am known;” note that the word for “know” here is epigignosko, ‘to recognize’ or, literally, ‘have gnosis (spiritual knowledge) upon.’ Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection and his equating all knowledge with “the coincidence of subject and object” is not anything that St. Paul or Bunyan would have struggled with — and we see how Lewis’ ‘Seeing Eye’ picked it up in MacDonald, Barfield, even Blyton, Hodgson Burnet, and Goudge, as well as in Coleridge.

This idea of recognizing the reflection of the divine aspect or logos within us as represented by a mirror in which we can see Christ, the incarnate Logos, is important in Deathly Hallows because Harry sees the ‘eye’ in the Godfather mirror fragment where his ‘I’ should be. Harry, as spirit in the body-mind-spirit triptychs of Ron-Hermione-Harry as well as Voldemort-Dumbledore-Harry, is the story symbol of the logos aspect within us, the creative principle we experience as intelligence and knowledge because we only know anything through its recognition of its reflection in the inner principles or logoi in every created thing. Like Christiana, Harry sees in the magic mirror he has been given his sacred self and real nature, the eye/I of the Invisibility Cloak that, while not being seen, sees all because it is “continuous with,” as Lewis puts it, “the unity of existence,” the fabric of reality.

For more on the mirror in Deathly Hallows, Harry as spirit and eye, and the meaning of his trip to King’s Cross and the conversation there Ms. Rowling says is “the key” to the series she “waited 17 years to write,” see The Deathly Hallows Lectures. For more on Ms. Rowling’s use of allegory, especially the Platonic, Bunyan, and Swiftian echoes in her ‘Hagrid’s Tale’ from Phoenix, pre-order a copy of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures. It’s all in there.

Your thoughts, comments, and correction are, as always, coveted. What mirrors in fantasy fiction conform to the Bunyan-Coleridge tradition taken from Christian scripture and hermetic natural theology? Which depart from it? We know this is why vampires have no reflection in a mirror. Are there are such conventions in gothic fiction? Lemmeno!

I turned in drafts for four chapters of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf yesterday, and, while waiting for guidance about what to do next, I read Twilight, the first of Stephenie Meyer’s Bella Swann novels. Here are 10 thoughts from my first pass through it:

1. Ms. Meyer has admitted to five important influences on her writing: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, William Shakespeare, several rock music bands, and Orson Scott Card. In Twilight, four of these five influences were evident. She isn’t being coy about the hat-tips, either, because she drops explicit references to Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Macbeth (especially with respect to the 3rd act of same and to Shakespeare’s portrayal of women as problematic and relevant). I have not read anything by Orson Scott Card but, qua ‘notable LDS writer,’ I’ll be touching on LDS influence in a minute.

As a rule I do not listen to popular music, but Ms. Meyer is very involved in the poetry of her age, to the point of creating a music video and doing an interview with Rolling Stone about her musical preferences and how they shape her creative work. Anyone doing serious research into the backdrops of Twilight, consequently, will have to listen attentively to Muse, Blue October, My Chemical Romance, Coldplay, and Linkin Park.

This was a wake-up call to me as a Potter Pundit because I have neglected Ms. Rowling’s musical favorites, The Smiths and Siouxsie Sioux, “whose look she adopted early on and maintained for many years; when she began university she still sported startling back-combed hair and heavy black eyeliner . I expect much of her postmodern underdog identification and support for WRock bands begins in the poetry of these groups’ lyrics.

2. I thought there were several other influences in Twilight not mentioned on the Wikipedia entry or the few articles I have read on the subject, most notably, Harlequin-Gothic romances, Young Adult adventure stories, Judy Blume’s books on divorce (It’s Not the End of the World) and teen sexuality (Forever), and the Zeitgeist popular deconstructions of occult characters, most notably Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Anne Rice vampire novels (if Ms. Meyer has said she has not read any of the latter).

More importantly, there is the shadow of Herman Hesse’s Demian and Narcissus and Goldmund in being an exploration and celebration of the artist’s coming to self-realization or some understanding of himself as a creature who is different and of a different mind than his Apollonian contemporaries. (The much shorter and less challenging version of this artist’s bildungsroman frequently read in American literature survey courses is Fitzgerald’s Curious Case of of Benjamin Button, the biography of a man who is much older than his contemporaries as a youth, younger than they are, even eternally youthful, as they age, and always different in being concerned with timeless things; it’s popularity with literature teachers, I think, led to the film released on Western Christmas, 2008). Bella Swann’s story is her writer’s chrysalis, what she calls her “self-chosen purgatory,” and I’d say is her Portrait of the Artist as Young Man.

And Harry Potter? Yes, I think there is an important and fairly obvious echo in Ms. Meyer’s work of those best selling novels. To belabor the obvious (all in a single run-on sentence), we have a de facto orphan with clueless relations going into sacrificial exile for a new school where she relates best to the magic folk and decidedly “other” in a seamless cross-genre bildungsroman laden with postmodern themes and religious meaning (Ms. Rowling waited until the last book in the Harry Potter series to quote scripture; Ms. Meyer puts an apple on the cover and a quotation from Genesis (2:17) as her frontispiece). The buzz words tag on Twilight specifically and the Bella Swann novels in general as “the new Harry Potter” is justifiable beyond the popularity it enjoys with young readers; it’s in many ways the same story. More on this, of course, in a minute and in a few days.

3. C. S. Lewis wrote in Of Other Worlds that “To construct plausible and moving `other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real `other world’ we know, that of the spirit” (pp 35-36). Ms. Meyers is a faithful member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (usually known as “the Mormons,” whom I will refer to as LDS), a graduate of Brigham Young University, the principal LDS academic institution, and is married to another Mormon who are raising their children in that faith. “The only real ‘other world’” she knows, “that of the spirit,” is the spiritual world of LDS revelation and understanding; we can safely assume, therefore, that it informs her work. In setting, even the drinks in her setting, the book shouts “LDS” from the rooftops; in what other mental and spiritual universe could there be clandestine teen parties without alcohol, an Olympic Peninsula without coffee shops and bars, and a secret lover’s tryst in which a woman drinking two Cokes in a rush is the gateway to the dropping of inhibitions and openness?

More significant is Brigham Young’s teaching about God being a man (not Jesus, mind you, but God the Father being Adam), though the God-Adam theory has been disavowed by LDS leaders. The “Divine Man” heresy continues to be reflected both in LDS ideas of “eternal Progression” [thank you, MaryannF!), "celestial marriage," "sealed in the Temple," as the sole means to a woman's salvation, and in the persistence of polygamy in LDS states with man-child unions a commonplace among LDS fundamentalists.

Edward Cullen is described as "perfect" and a "godlike creature" to whom Bella longs to submit herself, sacrificially and forever. This has a universal spiritual content that is important and I'll speak about in a moment; its LDS aspect, however, is hard to miss. Forgive me for thinking that the idea of hooking up with a centenarian, even if an Adonis, would make the skin crawl on any teenager not raised in a faith that adores a Prophet who married girls in their early teens.

Also in the LDS column for influence tracings are the occult backdrop of the story, which differs from Gothic literature in having vampires as misunderstood heroes. This is partially postmodern deconstruction and rejection of "myths" that create an alienated minority, the "other," of course, but it also reflects vividly several realities of LDS life and belief.

Occult or secret teachings are at the origin and core of LDS revelations, in which Joseph Smith's study and acceptance of aspects of Masonic, Swedenborgian, and the Millerites' teachings are evident. No, vampires aren't held up as gods to LDS believers -- but ideas of divinization or eternal progression through marriage and procreation unheard of in orthodox Christian faiths are, ideas that the world disavows as uniformly as it thinks of vampires as evil. The self-conception of an LDS believer in the United States, consequently, can be that the LDS are a minority faith whose correct views on eternal life and the means to it are misunderstood by the larger world as upside down and dangerous. Hence the deconstructed vampire.

Joseph Smith's revelations, too, were largely about indigenous peoples of North and South America and the revelation of Jesus Christ to these Native populations. LDS faithful, consequently, feel a special relationship with Native Americans, even a bond with them beyond other mission fields, perhaps, beyond the content of the golden plates, because of their shared persecution and status as foreigners in their own country. This feeling, however, to my limited understanding is not reciprocated, Native to LDS (perhaps due to historical events like Mountain Meadows). I suggest this is reflected in the history of the Cullens and the Blacks, who are both magical people whose spiritual lives, if not joined or even at peace, are radically different than conventional Americans.

On my first run through the book, my thought is that the Cullen family are LDS believers and Bella Swann a wannabe-initiate to their salvific community, whatever the cost. I would have to know a lot more about LDS beliefs, history, and current practice than I know or want to know to make this assertion as anything more than an observed possibility; I'd suggest, however, that it would be silly to discount or dismiss said possibility. That the first chapter title of the first book, 'First Sight,' a reference to Bella's first seeing the Cullen "children" at Forks High School, points to 'The First Vision' which is the historic, supernatural origin of LDS faith alone makes this credible.

4. Along the lines of Twilight being both an LDS morality drama and artist's bildungsroman, we come to Orson Scott Card or, because I haven't read anything by Mr. Card, to the idea of Twilight as a "Portrait of the Mormon Artist as a Young Woman." In a thumbnail sketch, this first novel by a Mormon artist seems to be her story as a woman of considerable talent in a patriarchal community.

Again, only as suggestion for your reflection: the "decision" she makes in the Forest (in answer to her dream about the Forest), in Chapter 7, 'Nightmare,' can be read as a the trial of a faithful, intelligent woman drawn to LDS beliefs and the choice or decision she must make to escape or join this "dangerous" cult. It is an apology or self-explanation for her decision and it amounts to no more than her recognizing she is unable to imagine any other life.

The two questions she asks herself, "Do I believe this is true?" (p. 137) and "What must I do if it is true?" (138) is the two-step dance every missionary offers to inquirers and strangers. Her "twilight" (139) is recognizing she is already in "too deep" to escape. What is left to her is the seemingly impossible task of full initiation into this community while retaining her full integrity and individual powers. This last she does through her gift of an impenetrable mind, the refuge of the artist and especially women artists in such communities.

The biggest failing of the book as I experienced it on my rush through it yesterday was in my inability to believe the narrator was a 17 year old girl. She acts, thinks, and responds more like a postgraduate student of English at BYU might if sent back to High School as a student (in Ms. Meyer's defense, she notes Bella's unnatural maturity in several exchanges between Edward and Bella). I think, though, as a representative of the LDS woman writer and of humanity longing for God, this Ancient-of-Days Bella in her sacrificial purgatory surrounded by Lilliputian tweenies is a winner, even when her language (topaz, garnet, and onyx, noting that the girls listened to whining rock music, etc) suggests too strongly that the narrator is the author rather than the character involved.

5. I think after my first reading of Twilight I understand the parallel in critical response to Ms. Meyer's work and Ms. Rowling's. Both were greeted with significant critical warmth and attention. Each then suffered critical pigeon-holing as "slop" "not worthy of adult attention." Ms. Rowling has largely recovered from this patronizing dismissal; Ms. Meyer may be reaching the nadir of her critical misapprehension by the Ivory Tower and literary pundits. If she will ever be able to regain the opinion of the New York Times which put Twilight on its Editor's Choice list in 2005 or of Publisher's Weekly which gave the title its Best Book of the Year Award is very much in doubt at this point, but why she has fallen as far as she has among the chattering class I think is evident in Ms. Rowling's dismissal year's ago.

Ms. Rowling was discounted by academic critics because they saw (and continue to see her) as a genre writer in a tradition they despise, namely, schoolboy serials and penny dreadfuls. Yale’s Harold Bloom, for example, Harry's most noted Ivy League hater, sees Tom Brown’s Schooldays as Rowling’s “ultimate model,” albeit Tom Brown “reseen… in the magical mirror of Tolkien.” Anthony Holden, a despiser in the UK, asks, “Why, in the weariest tradition of English children's literature from Tom Brown's Schooldays on, did she have to send Harry to a neo-Dotheboys Hall, complete with such arcane rituals as weirdly named hierarchies and home grown sports with incomprehensible rules?”

Citing the anti-hero of Charles Hamilton’s Greyfriars boarding school books, Holden describes Potter as ”a tedious, clunkily written version of Billy Bunter on broomsticks.” And the highest praise that Alan Jacobs, English professor at Wheaton College and C. S. Lewis biographer, can give Ms. Rowling's work is that she "has produced, in the vast, seven-book, thirty-five-hundred-page arc of Harry's story, the greatest penny dreadful ever written.”

But what the academic criticism misses is that Ms. Rowling's writing is not a function of a single "tired schoolboy novel tradition" or of one, maybe two other genres, say "fantasy" and "gothic romance," but of as many as ten genres woven together masterfully (hence my Harry Potter's Bookshelf, about which more later). And what they miss in Ms. Meyer is the same thing.

Neither Ms. Rowling nor Ms. Meyer are anything more than workmanlike writers in their prosedy. There simply aren't any flights of magisterial prose to make the angels weep in either one of their series. Both make obligatory gestures to scenery, weather, and setting; both plan their work in light of important literary predecessors and drop their pointers in plain sight for those attentive to such things (the theme of Deathly Hallows, the struggle to believe and the consequences of that choice, for example, is given away in Hallows' second chapter title 'In Memoriam,' which is Tennyson's masterpiece on this very subject). Despising Ms. Meyer's writing style as miserable, unbearable, and the like reflects a critic's disdain for the genre strain that any critic finds most obvious in the genre-mix of the series, to which tradition's conventions the author is simply conforming. I suspect what especially grates on Ms. Meyer's critics is the Young Adult novel or Harlequin gothic romance qualities (the soft porn of the 'bodice-ripper' yarn) of her work or the absence of conventions they do like, say, those of satire, fantasy, and comedy.

I can only say I really enjoyed reading Twilight and look forward to reading the next three books in the series (and to re-visiting Austen, Bronte, and Shakespeare in between). No, I wasn't dazzled by the artistry or the heights of eloquence in the telling of the tale; I wasn't put off by the writing, though, either, which I found engaging enough to keep me turning pages eagerly.

6. I wrote her before I read Twilight that I suspected Eliade's thesis that entertainments, especially novels, serve a mythic or religious function in secular culture would almost certainly be relevant in explaining why this paranormal romance is as popular as it is. I think I was right. LDS issues aside, the power of this book is in its expression of universal human longings much more than it is in satisfying Harry Potter's teen girl fandom with a second fix.

I'll expand on this later I hope but in the books we see the fundamental desire for union between God and man expressed as a divine sexuality involving restraint and respect from both parties to retain the human being's integrity, free will, and idea of him/herself. I thought the tension between Adam-God and his human lover was a well-done conceit or allegory about longing between God and man for communion or congress and the dance of synergy involved if this is not to result in the eradication of the human individual's identity and freedom.

7. Do I think this was intentional on the author's part? Wouldn't bother me if it was or wasn't, truth be told, because I think it is the aspect of the story that really engages readers anagogically. But, yes, the Genesis references make it pretty clear this is what the story is about. Between the cover 'apple,' the forbidden fruit quotation in the frontispiece, and Bella's referring to herself as "Eve" in her first biology class with Edward (oh, and Jacob, lest we forget), I think the author has thrown down her hand to reveal she's writing about man's full relationship with God -- and how not to blow this chance at a return to paradise.

Chapters 12 and 13's time in the Circle of Light where Edward reveals himself as a "godlike creature" of crystalline immobile perfection and where both confess their longing for one another and her confession of her fear that submitting to him will mean her destruction (and his assurance if he takes her on his terms alone that this is exactly what that would mean!) is the most upfront depiction of Man-God synergy I can remember reading in popular fiction. It is the drama of giving oneself totally to God in the faith that He will respect your free will offering and the grace of impenetrability so that you retain your self (if those boundaries are re-drawn in dying to oneself) while communing with Self.

I thought this was very well done, however disconcerting the Adam-God Edward. Though neither is Orthodox, I prefer this re-casting of the Garden of Eden and return to paradise to Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden.

[I've learned Ms. Meyer had no input into the cover art of the first two books. The apple was a very good choice, whoever made it, to represent the novel's meaning!]

9. Like Harry Potter, Twilight‘s themes resonate with postmodern core beliefs while illuminating a few of its blind-spots. Certainly we have the celebration of the misunderstood “other,” the tribe(s) alienated by the predominant metanarrative, as the secret keepers holding the answers longed for by those despising them as evil and inhuman. And there’s quite the conflation of sexuality and spirituality, a real signature of our times, if love of the divine has been expressed in carnal language since the ‘Song of Songs.’

The potholes filled in and spiritual needs addressed that cannot be addressed outside of entertainment and theology in our times are an imaginative experience of union with God and the desire to belong to a community of believers in which our individual gifts and qualities will be respected. Again, Twilight is another footnote for Eliade’s Sacred and the Profane.

10. I wrote back in point number (2) that both Harry Potter and Twilight are “cross-genre bildungsroman novels laden with postmodern themes and religious meaning.” Which is better?

I don’t want to go there right now, especially as I haven’t read three of the four books or spent much time with the first. I can say, though, with some confidence on this first pass through Twilight that it is much better than its critics allow, that its fans are largely unaware of its meaning baggage (though it almost certainly this meaning that they are responding to and why they are returning to it repeatedly), and that, with Orson Scott Card, we now have two significant LDS writers on the American fiction scene.

I look forward to your comments and correction.

FYI: Tomorrow is Orthodox Nativity so I’ll be gone, but, family and Bookshelf commitments allowing, I’ll return on Thursday to talk about the Twilight ‘big finish’ specifically to fill out some of the thoughts expressed here. Merry Christmas!

I was asked by a friend at The Hog’s Head’s thread about ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’ to discuss its meaning in the light of the symbols on Ms. Rowling’s drawing of the Fountain. I started an answer there that grew to such a length that I have brought it here lest it hijack the Hog’s Head thread entirely.

I have already posted on Dumbledore’s Commentary on this Tale, and, though few agree with me about what Ms. Rowling is after in Dumbledore’s dispute with Lucius Malfoy, I think there is little doubt that the meaning of his commentary is Ms. Rowling’s veiled opinion about gay marriage. ‘The Tale of Fair Fortune’ itself, however, is less political than spiritual, and, with Dumbledore’s Commentary, it confirms her assertion that the Tales are a “distillation of the themes” in the Potter books.

This is a hurried interpretation through the names of the women and the Fountain symbols, but the moral seems clear. Just as Rowling equates denial of gay marriage rights with her anti-racism themes of the books, so the redemption of the Three Maidens is in their recognition and reflection of the Christ or Logos within themselves, “the key” she offers in Harry’s conversation with Dumbledore at King Cross. Forgive me my haste here — and please share your comments and correction in the comment boxes below.

The names: Asha, Altheda, and Amata.

Asha, the terminally ill woman in search of a cure, is “burnt out.” Her tears of despair satisfy the White Worm’s demand for “proof of your pain,” and she is healed by Altheda’s herbs mixed in Sir Luckless’ previously unmentioned gourd of water, a grail of sorts. “Asha” is a reference to her being a wasted version of herself as a cinder is of a log in a fireplace. She has died to herself and no longer looks for earthly cure but asks her friends to go on without her. Asha is the figure of repentance and renunciation.

Altheda, the woman who had been robbed of home and wand and is in search of a cure for her “powerlessness and poverty,” satisfies the inscription demanding “the fruit of your labors” with the sweat of her brow. She heals Asha’s illness with her knowledge of herb qualities. “Altheda” is a name derived from “Alitheia,” the Greek word for “truth” and one of the names of Christ (cf., John 14:6), a name with the meaning “healer.” Atheda is gnosis, the “key of saving knowledge” (Luke 11:52), the kingdom of heaven within (Matthew 13:44-47).

Amata, the witch with the broken heart seeking a remedy for her grief and longing, satisfies the “smooth stone’s” requirement of “the treasure of your past” with the memories of her beloved (which magically produce “stepping stones” to ford the river) and is united with Sir Luckless after his bath in the Fountain of Fair Fortune. “Amata” is Latin for “a woman having been loved” (substantive perfect passive participle); at story’s end, in embracing the Luckless, she is a reflection of the God who is Love (1 John 4:8).

The Fountain Symbols as drawn by Ms. Rowling: Hallows, Eye, Omega, and Sun/Moon

The Deathly Hallows “triangular eye” and the All Seeing Eye symbols I have discussed at length in The Deathly Hallows Lectures, chapter 5, ‘The Seeing Eye.’ I think this is the chapter Travis Prinzi was referring to in his review of Lectures when he said the book was “truly eye-opening.”

The Omega on the fountain is mysterious because it is usually paired with the letter Alpha to denote the God who is both “beginning and end” for human beings. The Alpha/Omega have this meaning because these letters are the first and last of the Greek alphabet, their ‘A’ and ‘Z.’ Beginning and end, of course, are not temporal markers here (start and finish) but translations of arche the Greek word for ‘principle’ or origin, in the sense that a center point is the creative origin and defining principle of a circle, and telos, the Greek word for end, destination, and purpose (think of ‘teleology’ quite literally: telos = logos).

The conjunction of the astrological ciphers for sun and moon at the top is the resolution of contraries and qualities in the creative principle or logos. Rowling uses the ascending layers of the fountain and their astrological glyphs as visual stepping stones to this height.

The Moral of the Story

The women’s names all begin and end with the missing Alpha for the Omega on the Fountain. Each is a picture of a broken person who recovers herself in recalling an aspect of Christ. Asha is redeemed by her patient, long suffering, Altheda discovers the great treasure in the healing powers of esoteric knowledge or gnosis, powers of “truth” and “life,” and Amata loves the Luckless, “a man worthy of” her hand and heart. The names, the women’s individual and collective redemption, and the fountain symbols are all pointers to Christ.

And the parting shot? “That the Fountain’s waters carried no enchantment at all”? On first reading it seems to mock the seekers who gather every year for a chance to reach the Fountain, folks in search of a “magical cure” (those waiting for an angel at the pool of Bethaisda? in hospitals? through online dating services?), not to mention the four players in the Tale. If there is no magic in the Fountain, no enchantment, aren’t they just deluded dupes who healed themselves?

A second look suggests the magic is in our consciousness (Asha’s suffering being the “origin of consciousness” in the Dostoevsky formula), in our recognition of the truth within us that is salutary and healing, even Life itself (Altheda’s wealth), and in our capacity to love, though unworthy, even as we are loved unconditionally by God (Amata’s victory). The magic is not ‘other,’ in other words, but in the logos within us and common to us and all things.

There is no magic in this other than our recognizing or seeing and then reflecting the principle which is the unity of existence and that is evident in all things as our identity. The symbols on the Fountain, all ciphers for the Logos and of vision, are pointers to our looking for this greater reality within, beneath, and behind our mundane life and surroundings.

Why a Fountain? The fountain of redeeming waters in the story is an echo of “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst,” He told her. “But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). Don’t forget the obstacles of the story; one is just “words” and another is a stream with words on a smooth stone that become stepping stones to elevated heights. These obstacles are actually points of entry and Self-discovery in being words when understood as logoi, inner principles, words. They are the rivers of the Word Himself in John 7:37-39, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink,” said Jesus. ”He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”

Ms. Rowling points to a feminist meaning of this Tale in saying that “Beedle’s witches are much more active in seeking their fortunes than our fairy-tale heroines” and in the Commentary’s call for gay marriage rights she gives a further political-allegory spin on the tale. Beneath her allegory, however, is an anagogical meaning which is as profound as a story can get. I know that some readers struggle to see how a writer can advance spiritual meaning at the center of their lives (or contrary to their atheism or agnosticism) alongside political positions that may make them want to SPEW (or stand up and cheer). But interpreting the Tales as given means seeing surface, moral, allegorical, and mythic meanings as they are rather than as we wish them to be. Ms. Rowling obviously sees her political and theological meanings as a seamless garment.

Whatever your thoughts, I hope we agree that few writers today can engage a reader at all four traditional layers as Ms. Rowling does.

Your comments and correction, please.

Certainly it would take days to unpack all the upside-down and almost exactly backwards ideas in this Salon article, A Spy in the House of Narnia, an interview with the Salon founder and author of the new title, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia. Long story short: child loves the Chronicles of Narnia until she learns they are largely allegorical. She returns to them years later to demonstrate they really aren’t Christian books but works of remarkable imaginative artistry.

Two quick notes:

(1) To all those writers of books reducing imaginative literature to cardboard, tit-for-tat allegory, shame on you. Here is the life story of a reader-casualty of that school of faux literary criticism that is largely projection and mechanical mix-and-match. Be it Baum’s Wizard of Oz as silver-and-gold political allegory, Narnia as the Fifth Gospel, The Lord of the Rings as World War II, or Harry Potter as the veiled Jesus, this woman’s inability to grasp (even after reading Lewis’ OHEL volume!) that there is an explicitly Christian artistry that is profound and edifying without being primarily didactic is your legacy. As much as my first book, Hidden Key to Harry Potter, leaned in this direction to make headway against the heavy winds blowing from the Harry Haters, is almost exactly as much as I regret writing it (and the reason it has been revised three times since 2002). Can someone please send this woman Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia? Or is it too late for her to get that she lives in a false dilemma (“A poem or novel can only be either Christian allegory or profound artistry, not both, just one or the other”)?

(2) What a shame that it seems to have never occurred to her that the beauty, truth, and nobility she loved in Lewis’ imaginative subcreation could be the heart of the Christian faith whose outward forms were so repugnant to her as a young woman and as an adult. I am baffled that she believes after reading all Lewis’ letters, literary criticism, and imaginative fiction that he lived in two antiseptically sealed and separated worlds, his art and his faith, and that having experienced the books so intimately and joyously as a child that she could conclude as an adult, a la Pullman, that Lewis was a racist, sexist, homophobe and pervert, a pathetic man that Christians refuse to see as he was.

I covet your comments and correction.

Another tale of three brothers, subtitled ‘The Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria,’ this fairy tale by the very young John Ruskin (1841) should get you in the mood for Tales of Beedle the Bard. I couldn’t find a version online with Dumbledore’s commentary so I hope we can fill it in. My bet is that Ruskin, as a serious reader of Coleridge and as a Romantic in recovery from consumption, wrote this with the Dantean three layers: narrative line, moral line, and almost invisible alchemical artistry to transform our vision in a kind of esemplastic epiphany. Let me know what you see, especially in the description of the glacier and the transparency of nature.

The King of the Golden River

By John Ruskin

PREFACE by R.H. COE

“The King of the Golden River” is a delightful fairy tale told with all Ruskin’s charm of style, his appreciation of mountain scenery, and with his usual insistence upon drawing a moral. None the less, it is quite unlike his other writings. All his life long his pen was busy interpreting nature and pictures and architecture, or persuading to better views those whom he believed to be in error, or arousing, with the white heat of a prophet’s zeal, those whom he knew to be unawakened. There is indeed a good deal of the prophet about John Ruskin. Though essentially an interpreter with a singularly fine appreciation of beauty, no man of the nineteenth century felt more keenly that he had a mission, and none was more loyal to what he believed that mission to be.

While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave occasion and direction to this mission. A certain English reviewer had ridiculed the work of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin held Turner to be the greatest landscape painter the world had seen, and he immediately wrote a notable article in his defense. Slowly this article grew into a pamphlet, and the pamphlet into a book, the first volume of “Modern Painters.” The young man awoke to find himself famous. In the next few years four more volumes were added to “Modern Painters,” and the other notable series upon art, “The Stones of Venice” and “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” were sent forth.

Then, in 1860, when Ruskin was about forty years old, there came a great change. His heaven-born genius for making the appreciation of beauty a common possession was deflected from its true field. He had been asking himself what are the conditions that produce great art, and the answer he found declared that art cannot be separated from life, nor life from industry and industrial conditions. A civilization founded upon unrestricted competition therefore seemed to him necessarily feeble in appreciation of the beautiful, and unequal to its creation. In this way loyalty to his mission bred apparent disloyalty. Delightful discourses upon art gave way to fervid pleas for humanity. For the rest of his life he became a very earnest, if not always very wise, social reformer and a passionate pleader for what he believed to be true economic ideals.

There is nothing of all this in “The King of the Golden River.” Unlike his other works, it was written merely to entertain. Scarcely that, since it was not written for publication at all, but to meet a challenge set him by a young girl.

The circumstance is interesting. After taking his degree at Oxford, Ruskin was threatened with consumption and hurried away from the chill and damp of England to the south of Europe. After two years of fruitful travel and study he came back improved in health but not strong, and often depressed in spirit. It was at this time that the Guys, Scotch friends of his father and mother, came for a visit to his home near London, and with them their little daughter Euphemia. The coming of this beautiful, vivacious, light-hearted child opened a new chapter in Ruskin’s life. Though but twelve years old, she sought to enliven the melancholy student, absorbed in art and geology, and bade him leave these and write for her a fairy tale. He accepted, and after but two sittings, presented her with this charming story. The incident proved to have awakened in him a greater interest than at first appeared, for a few years later “Effie” Grey became John Ruskin’s wife. Meantime she had given the manuscript to a friend. Nine years after itwas written, this friend, with John Ruskin’s permission, gave the story to the world.

It was published in London in 1851, with illustrations by the celebrated Richard Doyle, and at once became a favorite. Three editions were printed the first year, and soon it had found its way into German, Italian, and Welsh. Since then countless children have had cause to be grateful for the young girl’s challenge that won the story of Gluck’s golden mug and the highly satisfactory handling of the Black Brothers by Southwest Wind, Esquire.

For this edition new drawings have been prepared by Mr. Hiram P. Barnes. They very successfully preserve the spirit of Doyle’s illustrations, which unfortunately are not technically suitable for reproduction here.

In the original manuscript there was an epilogue bearing the heading “Charitie”–a morning hymn of Treasure Valley, whither Gluck had returned to dwell, and where the inheritance lost by cruelty was regained by love: The beams of morning are renewed The valley laughs their light to see And earth is bright with gratitude And heaven with charitie.

R.H. COE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

HOW THE AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM OF THE BLACK BROTHERS WAS INTERFERED WITH BY SOUTHWEST WIND, ESQUIRE

CHAPTER II

OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE THREE BROTHERS AFTER THE VISIT OF SOUTHWEST WIND, ESQUIRE; AND HOW LITTLE GLUCK HAD AN INTERVIEW WITH THE KING OF GOLDEN RIVER

CHAPTER III

HOW MR. HANS SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED HEREIN

CHAPTER IV

HOW MR. SCHWARTZ SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN

CHAPTER V

HOW LITTLE GLUCK SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED HEREIN, WITH OTHER MATTERS OF INTEREST THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER

CHAPTER I

HOW THE AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM OF THE BLACK BROTHERS WAS INTERFERED WITH BY SOUTHWEST WIND, ESQUIRE

In a secluded and mountainous part of Stiria there was in old time a valley of the most surprising and luxuriant fertility. It was surrounded on all sides by steep and rocky mountains rising into peaks which were always covered with snow and from which a number of torrents descended in constant cataracts. One of these fell westward over the face of a crag so high that when the sun had set to everything else, and all below was darkness, his beams still shone full upon this waterfall, so that it looked like a shower of gold. It was therefore called by the people of the neighborhood the Golden River. It was strange that none of these streams fell into the valley itself. They all descended on the other side of the mountains and wound away through broad plains and by populous cities. But the clouds were drawn so constantly to the snowy hills, and rested so softly in the circular hollow, that in time of drought and heat, when all the country round was burned up, there was still rain in the little valley; and its crops were so heavy, and its hay so high, and its apples so red, and its grapes so blue, and its wine so rich, and its honey so sweet, that it was a marvel to everyone who beheld it and was commonly called the Treasure Valley.

The whole of this little valley belonged to three brothers, called Schwartz, Hans, and Gluck. Schwartz and Hans, the two elder brothers, were very ugly men, with overhanging eyebrows and small, dull eyes which were always half shut, so that you couldn’t see into THEM and always fancied they saw very far into YOU. They lived by farming the Treasure Valley, and very good farmers they were. They killed everything that did not pay for its eating. They shot the blackbirds because they pecked the fruit, and killed the hedgehogs lest they should suck the cows; they poisoned the crickets for eating the crumbs in the kitchen, and smothered the cicadas which used to sing all summer in the lime trees. They worked their servants without any wages till they would not work any more, and then quarreled with them and turned them out of doors without paying them. It would have been very odd if with such a farm and such a system of farming they hadn’t got very rich; and very rich they DID get. They generally contrived to keep their corn by them till it was very dear, and then sell it for twice its value; they had heaps of gold lying about on their floors, yet it was never known that they had given so much as a penny or a crust in charity; they never went to Mass, grumbled perpetually at paying tithes, and were, in a word, of so cruel and grinding a temper as to receive from all those with whom they had any dealings the nickname of the “Black Brothers.”

The youngest brother, Gluck, was as completely opposed, in both appearance and character, to his seniors as could possibly be imagined or desired. He was not above twelve years old, fair, blue-eyed, and kind in temper to every living thing. He did not, of course, agree particularly well with his brothers, or, rather, they did not agree with HIM. He was usually appointed to the honorable office of turnspit, when there was anything to roast, which was not often, for, to do the brothers justice, they were hardly less sparing upon themselves than upon other people. At other times he used to clean the shoes, floors, and sometimes the plates, occasionally getting what was left on them, by way of encouragement, and a wholesome quantity of dry blows by way of education.

Things went on in this manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight. Only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked and got it, except from the poor people, who could only beg, and several of whom were starved at their very door without the slightest regard or notice.

It was drawing towards winter, and very cold weather, when one day the two elder brothers had gone out, with their usual warning to little Gluck, who was left to mind the roast, that he was to let nobody in and give nothing out. Gluck sat down quite close to the fire, for it was raining very hard and the kitchen walls were by no means dry or comfortable-looking. He turned and turned, and the roast got nice and brown. “What a pity,” thought Gluck, “my brothers never ask anybody to dinner. I’m sure, when they’ve got such a nice piece of mutton as this, and nobody else has got so much as a piece of dry bread, it would do their hearts good to have somebody to eat it with them.”

Just as he spoke there came a double knock at the house door, yet heavy and dull, as though the knocker had been tied up–more like a puff than a knock.

“It must be the wind,” said Gluck; “nobody else would venture to knock double knocks at our door.”

No, it wasn’t the wind; there it came again very hard, and, what was particularly astounding, the knocker seemed to be in a hurry and not to be in the least afraid of the consequences. Gluck went to the window, opened it, and put his head out to see who it was.

It was the most extraordinary-looking little gentleman he had ever seen in his life. He had a very large nose, slightly brass-colored; his cheeks were very round and very red, and might have warranted a supposition that he had been blowing a refractory fire for the last eight-and-forty hours; his eyes twinkled merrily through long, silky eyelashes; his mustaches curled twice round like a corkscrew on each side of his mouth; and his hair, of a curious mixed pepper-and-salt color, descended far over his shoulders. He was about four feet six in height and wore a conical pointed cap of nearly the same altitude, decorated with a black feather some three feet long. His doublet was prolonged behind into something resembling a violent exaggeration of what is now termed a “swallowtail,” but was much obscured by the swelling folds of an enormous black, glossy-looking cloak, which must have been very much too long in calm weather, as the wind, whistling round the old house, carried it clear out from the wearer’s shoulders to about four times his own length.

Gluck was so perfectly paralyzed by the singular appearance of his visitor that he remained fixed without uttering a word, until the old gentleman, having performed another and a more energetic concerto on the knocker, turned round to look after his flyaway cloak. In so doing he caught sight of Gluck’s little yellow head jammed in the window, with its mouth and eyes very wide open indeed.

“Hollo!” said the little gentleman; “that’s not the way to answer the door. I’m wet; let me in.”

To do the little gentleman justice, he WAS wet. His feather hung down between his legs like a beaten puppy’s tail, dripping like an umbrella, and from the ends of his mustaches the water was running into his waistcoat pockets and out again like a mill stream.

“I beg pardon, sir,” said Gluck, “I’m very sorry, but, I really can’t.”

“Can’t what?” said the old gentleman.

“I can’t let you in, sir–I can’t, indeed; my brothers would beat me to death, sir, if I thought of such a thing. What do you want, sir?”

“Want?” said the old gentleman petulantly. “I want fire and shelter, and there’s your great fire there blazing, crackling, and dancing on the walls with nobody to feel it. Let me in, I say; I only want to warm myself.”

Gluck had had his head, by this time, so long out of the window that he began to feel it was really unpleasantly cold, and when he turned and saw the beautiful fire rustling and roaring and throwing long, bright tongues up the chimney, as if it were licking its chops at the savory smell of the leg of mutton, his heart melted within him that it should be burning away for nothing. “He does look very wet,” said little Gluck; “I’ll just let him in for a quarter of an hour.” Round he went to the door and opened it; and as the little gentleman walked in, there came a gust of wind through the house that made the old chimneys totter.

“That’s a good boy,” said the little gentleman. “Never mind your brothers. I’ll talk to them.”

“Pray, sir, don’t do any such thing,” said Gluck. “I can’t let you stay till they come; they’d be the death of me.”

“Dear me,” said the old gentleman, “I’m very sorry to hear that. How long may I stay?”

“Only till the mutton’s done, sir,” replied Gluck, “and it’s very brown.”

Then the old gentleman walked into the kitchen and sat himself down on the hob, with the top of his cap accommodated up the chimney, for it was a great deal too high for the roof. “You’ll soon dry there, sir,” said Gluck, and sat down again to turn the mutton. But the old gentleman did NOT dry there, but went on drip, drip, dripping among the cinders, and the fire fizzed and sputtered and began to look very black and uncomfortable. Never was such a cloak; every fold in it ran like a gutter.

“I beg pardon, sir,” said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long, quicksilver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; “mayn’t I take your cloak?”

“No, thank you,” said the old gentleman.

“Your cap, sir?”

“I am all right, thank you,” said the old gentleman rather gruffly.

“But–sir–I’m very sorry,” said Gluck hesitatingly, “but–really, sir–you’re–putting the fire out.”

“It’ll take longer to do the mutton, then,” replied his visitor dryly.

Gluck was very much puzzled by the behavior of his guest; it was such a strange mixture of coolness and humility. He turned away at the string meditatively for another five minutes.

“That mutton looks very nice,” said the old gentleman at length. “Can’t you give me a little bit?”

“Impossible, sir,” said Gluck.

“I’m very hungry,” continued the old gentleman. “I’ve had nothing to eat yesterday nor to-day. They surely couldn’t miss a bit from the knuckle!”

He spoke in so very melancholy a tone that it quite melted Gluck’s heart. “They promised me one slice to-day, sir,” said he; “I can give you that, but not a bit more.”

“That’s a good boy,” said the old gentleman again.

Then Gluck warmed a plate and sharpened a knife. “I don’t care if I do get beaten for it,” thought he. Just as he had cut a large slice out of the mutton there came a tremendous rap at the door. The old gentleman jumped off the hob as if it had suddenly become inconveniently warm. Gluck fitted the slice into the mutton again, with desperate efforts at exactitude, and ran to open the door.

“What did you keep us waiting in the rain for?” said Schwartz, as he walked in, throwing his umbrella in Gluck’s face. “Aye! what for, indeed, you little vagabond?” said Hans, administering an educational box on the ear as he followed his brother into the kitchen.

“Bless my soul!” said Schwartz when he opened the door.

“Amen,” said the little gentleman, who had taken his cap off and was standing in the middle of the kitchen, bowing with the utmost possible velocity.

“Who’s that?” said Schwartz, catching up a rolling-pin and turning to Gluck with a fierce frown.

“I don’t know, indeed, brother,” said Gluck in great terror.

“How did he get in?” roared Schwartz.

“My dear brother,” said Gluck deprecatingly, “he was so VERY wet!”

The rolling-pin was descending on Gluck’s head, but, at the instant, the old gentleman interposed his conical cap, on which it crashed with a shock that shook the water out of it all over the room. What was very odd, the rolling-pin no sooner touched the cap than it flew out of Schwartz’s hand, spinning like a straw in a high wind, and fell into the corner at the further end of the room.

“Who are you, sir?” demanded Schwartz, turning upon him. “What’s your business?” snarled Hans.

“I’m a poor old man, sir,” the little gentleman began very modestly, “and I saw your fire through the window and begged shelter for a quarter of an hour.”

“Have the goodness to walk out again, then,” said Schwartz. “We’ve quite enough water in our kitchen without making it a drying house.”

“It is a cold day to turn an old man out in, sir; look at my gray hairs.” They hung down to his shoulders, as I told you before.

“Aye!” said Hans; “there are enough of them to keep you warm. Walk!”

“I’m very, very hungry, sir; couldn’t you spare me a bit of bread before I go?”

“Bread, indeed!” said Schwartz; “do you suppose we’ve nothing to do with our bread but to give it to such red-nosed fellows as you?”

“Why don’t you sell your feather?” said Hans sneeringly. “Out with you!”

“A little bit,” said the old gentleman. “Be off!” said Schwartz.

“Pray, gentlemen.”

“Off, and be hanged!” cried Hans, seizing him by the collar. But he had no sooner touched the old gentleman’s collar than away he went after the rolling-pin, spinning round and round till he fell into the corner on the top of it. Then Schwartz was very angry and ran at the old gentleman to turn him out; but he also had hardly touched him when away he went after Hans and the rolling-pin, and hit his head against the wall as he tumbled into the corner. And so there they lay, all three.

Then the old gentleman spun himself round with velocity in the opposite direction, continued to spin until his long cloak was all wound neatly about him, clapped his cap on his head, very much on one side (for it could not stand upright without going through the ceiling), gave an additional twist to his corkscrew mustaches, and replied with perfect coolness: “Gentlemen, I wish you a very good morning. At twelve o’clock tonight I’ll call again; after such a refusal of hospitality as I have just experienced, you will not be surprised if that visit is the last I ever pay you.”

“If ever I catch you here again,” muttered Schwartz, coming, half frightened, out of the corner–but before he could finish his sentence the old gentleman had shut the house door behind him with a great bang, and there drove past the window at the same instant a wreath of ragged cloud that whirled and rolled away down the valley in all manner of shapes, turning over and over in the air and melting away at last in a gush of rain.

“A very pretty business, indeed, Mr. Gluck!” said Schwartz. “Dish the mutton, sir. If ever I catch you at such a trick again–bless me, why, the mutton’s been cut!”

“You promised me one slice, brother, you know,” said Gluck.

“Oh! and you were cutting it hot, I suppose, and going to catch all the gravy. It’ll be long before I promise you such a thing again. Leave the room, sir; and have the kindness to wait in the coal cellar till I call you.”

Gluck left the room melancholy enough. The brothers ate as much mutton as they could, locked the rest in the cupboard, and proceeded to get very drunk after dinner.

Such a night as it was! Howling wind and rushing rain, without intermission. The brothers had just sense enough left to put up all the shutters and double-bar the door before they went to bed. They usually slept in the same room. As the clock struck twelve they were both awakened by a tremendous crash. Their door burst open with a violence that shook the house from top to bottom.

“What’s that?” cried Schwartz, starting up in his bed.

“Only I,” said the little gentleman.

The two brothers sat up on their bolster and stared into the darkness. The room was full of water, and by a misty moonbeam, which found its way through a hole in the shutter, they could see in the midst of it an enormous foam globe, spinning round and bobbing up and down like a cork, on which, as on a most luxurious cushion, reclined the little old gentleman, cap and all. There was plenty of room for it now, for the roof was off.

“Sorry to incommode you,” said their visitor ironically. “I’m afraid your beds are dampish. Perhaps you had better go to your brother’s room; I’ve left the ceiling on there.”

They required no second admonition, but rushed into Gluck’s room, wet through and in an agony of terror.

“You’ll find my card on the kitchen table,” the old gentleman called after them. “Remember, the LAST visit.”

“Pray Heaven it may!” said Schwartz, shuddering. And the foam globe disappeared.

Dawn came at last, and the two brothers looked out of Gluck’s little window in the morning. The Treasure Valley was one mass of ruin and desolation. The inundation had swept away trees, crops, and cattle, and left in their stead a waste of red sand and gray mud. The two brothers crept shivering and horror-struck into the kitchen. The water had gutted the whole first floor; corn, money, almost every movable thing, had been swept away, and there was left only a small white card on the kitchen table. On it, in large, breezy, long-legged letters, were engraved the words:

SOUTH WEST WIND, ESQUIRE

CHAPTER II

OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE THREE BROTHERS AFTER THE VISIT OF SOUTHWEST WIND, ESQUIRE; AND HOW LITTLE GLUCK HAD AN INTERVIEW WITH THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER

Southwest Wind, Esquire, was as good as his word. After the momentous visit above related, he entered the Treasure Valley no more; and, what was worse, he had so much influence with his relations, the West Winds in general, and used it so effectually, that they all adopted a similar line of conduct. So no rain fell in the valley from one year’s end to another. Though everything remained green and flourishing in the plains below, the inheritance of the three brothers was a desert. What had once been the richest soil in the kingdom became a shifting heap of red sand, and the brothers, unable longer to contend with the adverse skies, abandoned their valueless patrimony in despair, to seek some means of gaining a livelihood among the cities and people of the plains. All their money was gone, and they had nothing left but some curious old-fashioned pieces of gold plate, the last remnants of their ill-gotten wealth.

“Suppose we turn goldsmiths,” said Schwartz to Hans as they entered the large city. “It is a good knave’s trade; we can put a great deal of copper into the gold without anyone’s finding it out.”

The thought was agreed to be a very good one; they hired a furnace and turned goldsmiths. But two slight circumstances affected their trade: the first, that people did not approve of the coppered gold; the second, that the two elder brothers, whenever they had sold anything, used to leave little Gluck to mind the furnace, and go and drink out the money in the alehouse next door. So they melted all their gold without making money enough to buy more, and were at last reduced to one large drinking mug, which an uncle of his had given to little Gluck, and which he was very fond of and would not have parted with for the world, though he never drank anything out of it but milk and water. The mug was a very odd mug to look at. The handle was formed of two wreaths of flowing golden hair, so finely spun that it looked more like silk than metal, and these wreaths descended into and mixed with a beard and whiskers of the same exquisite workmanship, which surrounded and decorated a very fierce little face, of the reddest gold imaginable, right in the front of the mug, with a pair of eyes in it which seemed to command its whole circumference. It was impossible to drink out of the mug without being subjected to an intense gaze out of the side of these eyes, and Schwartz positively averred that once, after emptying it, full of Rhenish, seventeen times, he had seen them wink! When it came to the mug’s turn to be made into spoons, it half broke poor little Gluck’s heart; but the brothers only laughed at him, tossed the mug into the melting pot, and staggered out to the alehouse, leaving him, as usual, to pour the gold into bars when it was all ready.

When they were gone, Gluck took a farewell look at his old friend in the melting pot. The flowing hair was all gone; nothing remained but the red nose and the sparkling eyes, which looked more malicious than ever. “And no wonder,” thought Gluck, “after being treated in that way.” He sauntered disconsolately to the window and sat himself down to catch the fresh evening air and escape the hot breath of the furnace. Now this window commanded a direct view of the range of mountains which, as I told you before, overhung the Treasure Valley, and more especially of the peak from which fell the Golden River. It was just at the close of the day, and when Gluck sat down at the window, he saw the rocks of the mountain tops, all crimson and purple with the sunset; and there were bright tongues of fiery cloud burning and quivering about them; and the river, brighter than all, fell, in a waving column of pure gold, from precipice to precipice, with the double arch of a broad purple rainbow stretched across it, flushing and fading alternately in the wreaths of spray.

“Ah!” said Gluck aloud, after he had looked at it for a little while, “if that river were really all gold, what a nice thing it would be.”

“No, it wouldn’t, Gluck,” said a clear, metallic voice close at his ear.

“Bless me, what’s that?” exclaimed Gluck, jumping up. There was nobody there. He looked round the room and under the table and a great many times behind him, but there was certainly nobody there, and he sat down again at the window. This time he didn’t speak, but he couldn’t help thinking again that it would be very convenient if the river were really all gold.

“Not at all, my boy,” said the same voice, louder than before.

“Bless me!” said Gluck again, “what is that?” He looked again into all the corners and cupboards, and then began turning round and round as fast as he could, in the middle of the room, thinking there was somebody behind him, when the same voice struck again on his ear. It was singing now, very merrily, “Lala-lira-la”–no words, only a soft, running, effervescent melody, something like that of a kettle on the boil. Gluck looked out of the window; no, it was certainly in the house. Upstairs and downstairs; no, it was certainly in that very room, coming in quicker time and clearer notes every moment: “Lala-lira-la.” All at once it struck Gluck that it sounded louder near the furnace. He ran to the opening and looked in. Yes, he saw right; it seemed to be coming not only out of the furnace but out of the pot. He uncovered it, and ran back in a great fright, for the pot was certainly singing! He stood in the farthest corner of the room, with his hands up and his mouth open, for a minute or two, when the singing stopped and the voice became clear and pronunciative.

“Hollo!” said the voice.

Gluck made no answer.

“Hollo! Gluck, my boy,” said the pot again.

Gluck summoned all his energies, walked straight up to the crucible, drew it out of the furnace, and looked in. The gold was all melted and its surface as smooth and polished as a river, but instead of reflecting little Gluck’s head, as he looked in he saw, meeting his glance from beneath the gold, the red nose and sharp eyes of his old friend of the mug, a thousand times redder and sharper than ever he had seen them in his life.

“Come, Gluck, my boy,” said the voice out of the pot again, “I’m all right; pour me out.”

But Gluck was too much astonished to do anything of the kind.

“Pour me out, I say,” said the voice rather gruffly.

Still Gluck couldn’t move.

“WILL you pour me out?” said the voice passionately. “I’m too hot.” By a violent effort Gluck recovered the use of his limbs, took hold of the crucible, and sloped it, so as to pour out the gold. But instead of a liquid stream there came out, first a pair of pretty little yellow legs, then some coat tails, then a pair of arms stuck akimbo, and finally the well-known head of his friend the mug–all which articles, uniting as they rolled out, stood up energetically on the floor in the shape of a little golden dwarf about a foot and a half high.

“That’s right!” said the dwarf, stretching out first his legs and then his arms, and then shaking his head up and down and as far round as it would go, for five minutes without stopping, apparently with the view of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement. He was dressed in a slashed doublet of spun gold, so fine in its texture that the prismatic colors gleamed over it as if on a surface of mother-of-pearl; and over this brilliant doublet his hair and beard fell full halfway to the ground in waving curls, so exquisitely delicate that Gluck could hardly tell where they ended; they seemed to melt into air. The features of the face, however, were by no means finished with the same delicacy; they were rather coarse, slightly inclining to coppery in complexion, and indicative, in expression, of a very pertinacious and intractable disposition in their small proprietor. When the dwarf had finished his self-examination, he turned his small, sharp eyes full on Gluck and stared at him deliberately for a minute or two. “No, it wouldn’t, Gluck, my boy,” said the little man.

This was certainly rather an abrupt and unconnected mode of commencing conversation. It might indeed be supposed to refer to the course of Gluck’s thoughts, which had first produced the dwarf’s observations out of the pot; but whatever it referred to, Gluck had no inclination to dispute the dictum.

“Wouldn’t it, sir?” said Gluck very mildly and submissively indeed.

“No,” said the dwarf, conclusively, “no, it wouldn’t.” And with that the dwarf pulled his cap hard over his brows and took two turns, of three feet long, up and down the room, lifting his legs up very high and setting them down very hard. This pause gave time for Gluck to collect his thoughts a little, and, seeing no great reason to view his diminutive visitor with dread, and feeling his curiosity overcome his amazement, he ventured on a question of peculiar delicacy.

“Pray, sir,” said Gluck, rather hesitatingly, “were you my mug?”

On which the little man turned sharp round, walked straight up to Gluck, and drew himself up to his full height. “I,” said the little man, “am the King of the Golden River.” Whereupon he turned about again and took two more turns, some six feet long, in order to allow time for the consternation which this announcement produced in his auditor to evaporate. After which he again walked up to Gluck and stood still, as if expecting some comment on his communication. Gluck determined to say something at all events. “I hope your Majesty is very well,” said Gluck.

“Listen!” said the little man, deigning no reply to this polite inquiry. “I am the king of what you mortals call the Golden River. The shape you saw me in was owing to the malice of a stronger king, from whose enchantments you have this instant freed me. What I have seen of you and your conduct to your wicked brothers renders me willing to serve you; therefore, attend to what I tell you. Whoever shall climb to the top of that mountain from which you see the Golden River issue, and shall cast into the stream at its source three drops of holy water, for him and for him only the river shall turn to gold. But no one failing in his first can succeed in a second attempt, and if anyone shall cast unholy water into the river, it will overwhelm him and he will become a black stone.” So saying, the King of the Golden River turned away and deliberately walked into the center of the hottest flame of the furnace. His figure became red, white, transparent, dazzling,–a blaze of intense light,–rose, trembled, and disappeared. The King of the Golden River had evaporated.

“Oh!” cried poor Gluck, running to look up the chimney after him, “O dear, dear, dear me! My mug! my mug! my mug!”

CHAPTER III

HOW MR. HANS SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN

The King of the Golden River had hardly made the extraordinary exit related in the last chapter, before Hans and Schwartz came roaring into the house very savagely drunk. The discovery of the total loss of their last piece of plate had the effect of sobering them just enough to enable them to stand over Gluck, beating him very steadily for a quarter of an hour; at the expiration of which period they dropped into a couple of chairs and requested to know what he had got to say for himself. Gluck told them his story, of which, of course, they did not believe a word. They beat him again, till their arms were tired, and
staggered to bed. In the morning, however, the steadiness with which he adhered to his story obtained him some degree of credence; the immediate consequence of which was that the two brothers, after wrangling a long time on the knotty question, which of them should try his fortune first, drew their swords and began fighting. The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbors, who, finding they could not pacify the combatants, sent for the constable.

Hans, on hearing this, contrived to escape, and hid himself; but Schwartz was taken before the magistrate, fined for breaking the peace, and, having drunk out his last penny the evening before, was thrown into prison till he should pay.

When Hans heard this, he was much delighted, and determined to set out immediately for the Golden River. How to get the holy water was the question. He went to the priest, but the priest could not give any holy water to so abandoned a character. So Hans went to vespers in the evening for the first time in his life and, under pretense of crossing himself, stole a cupful and returned home in triumph.

Next morning he got up before the sun rose, put the holy water into a strong flask, and two bottles of wine and some meat in a basket, slung them over his back, took his alpine staff in his hand, and set off for the mountains.

On his way out of the town he had to pass the prison, and as he looked in at the windows, whom should he see but Schwartz himself peeping out of the bars and looking very disconsolate.

“Good morning, brother,” said Hans; “have you any message for the King of the Golden River?”

Schwartz gnashed his teeth with rage and shook the bars with all his strength, but Hans only laughed at him and, advising him to make imself comfortable till he came back again, shouldered his basket, shook the bottle of holy water in Schwartz’s face till it frothed again, and marched off in the highest spirits in the world.

It was indeed a morning that might have made anyone happy, even with no Golden River to seek for. Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains, their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapor but gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the angular crags, and pierced, in long, level rays, through their fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up red, splintered masses of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless, slept, in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the eternal snow.

The Golden River, which sprang from one of the lower and snowless elevations, was now nearly in shadow–all but the uppermost jets of spray, which rose like slow smoke above the undulating line of the cataract and floated away in feeble wreaths upon the morning wind.

On this object, and on this alone, Hans’s eyes and thoughts were fixed. Forgetting the distance he had to traverse, he set off at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills. He was, moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practiced mountaineer, yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water–not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short, melancholy tones or sudden shrieks resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious EXPRESSION about all their outlines–a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows and lurid lights played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveler, while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed waters. These painful circumstances increased upon him as he advanced; the ice crashed and yawned into fresh chasms at his feet, tottering spires nodded around him and fell thundering across his path; and though he had repeatedly faced these dangers on the most terrific glaciers and in the wildest weather, it was with a new and oppressive feeling of panic terror that he leaped the last chasm and flung himself, exhausted and shuddering, on the firm turf of the mountain.

He had been compelled to abandon his basket of food, which became a perilous incumbrance on the glacier, and had now no means of refreshing himself but by breaking off and eating some of the pieces of ice. This, however, relieved his thirst; an hour’s repose recruited his hardy frame, and with the indomitable spirit of avarice he resumed his laborious journey.

His way now lay straight up a ridge of bare red rocks, without a blade of grass to ease the foot or a projecting angle to afford an inch of shade from the south sun. It was past noon and the rays beat intensely upon the steep path, while the whole atmosphere was motionless and penetrated with heat. Intense thirst was soon added to the bodily fatigue with which Hans was now afflicted; glance after glance he cast on the flask of water which hung at his belt. “Three drops are enough,” at last thought he; “I may, at least, cool my lips with it.”

He opened the flask and was raising it to his lips, when his eye fell on an object lying on the rock beside him; he thought it moved. It was a small dog, apparently in the last agony of death from thirst. Its tongue was out, its jaws dry, its limbs extended lifelessly, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips and throat. Its eye moved to the bottle which Hans held in his hand. He raised it, drank, spurned the animal with his foot, and passed on. And he did not know how it was, but he thought that a strange shadow had suddenly come across the blue sky.

The path became steeper and more rugged every moment, and the high hill air, instead of refreshing him, seemed to throw his blood into a fever. The noise of the hill cataracts sounded like mockery in his ears; they were all distant, and his thirst increased every moment. Another hour passed, and he again looked down to the flask at his side; it was half empty, but there was much more than three drops in it. He stopped to open it, and again, as he did so, something moved in the path above him. It was a fair child, stretched nearly lifeless on the rock, its breast heaving with thirst, its eyes closed, and its lips parched and burning. Hans eyed it deliberately, drank, and passed on. And a dark gray cloud came over the sun, and long, snakelike shadows crept up along the mountain sides. Hans struggled on. The sun was sinking, but its descent seemed to bring no coolness; the leaden height of the dead air pressed upon his brow and heart, but the goal was near. He saw the cataract of the Golden River springing from the hillside scarcely five hundred feet above him. He paused for a moment to breathe, and sprang on to complete his task.

At this instant a faint cry fell on his ear. He turned, and saw a gray-haired old man extended on the rocks. His eyes were sunk, his features deadly pale and gathered into an expression of despair. “Water!” he stretched his arms to Hans, and cried feebly, “Water! I am dying.”

“I have none,” replied Hans; “thou hast had thy share of life.” He strode over the prostrate body and darted on. And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the East, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade. The sun was setting; it plunged towards the horizon like a redhot ball. The roar of the Golden River rose on Hans’s ear. He stood at the brink of the chasm through which it ran. Its waves were filled with the red glory of the sunset; they shook their crests like tongues of fire, and flashes of bloody light gleamed along their foam. Their sound came mightier and mightier on his senses; his brain grew giddy with the prolonged thunder. Shuddering he drew the flask from his girdle and hurled it into the center of the torrent. As he did so, an icy chill shot through his limbs; he staggered, shrieked, and fell. The waters closed over his cry, and the moaning of the river rose wildly into the night as it gushed over

THE BLACK STONE

CHAPTER IV

HOW MR. SCHWARTZ SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN

Poor little Gluck waited very anxiously, alone in the house, for Hans’s return. Finding he did not come back, he was terribly frightened and went and told Schwartz in the prison all that had happened. Then Schwartz was very much pleased and said that Hans must certainly have been turned into a black stone and he should have all the gold to himself. But Gluck was very sorry and cried all night. When he got up in the morning there was no bread in the house, nor any money; so Gluck went and hired himself to another goldsmith, and he worked so hard and so neatly and so long every day that he soon got money enough together to pay his brother’s fine, and he went and gave it all to Schwartz, and Schwartz got out of prison. Then Schwartz was quite pleased and said he should have some of the gold of the river. But Gluck only begged he would go and see what had become of Hans.

Now when Schwartz had heard that Hans had stolen the holy water, he thought to himself that such a proceeding might not be considered altogether correct by the King of the Golden River, and determined to manage matters better. So he took some more of Gluck’s money and went to a bad priest, who gave him some holy water very readily for it. Then Schwartz was sure it was all quite right. So Schwartz got up early in the morning before the sun rose, and took some bread and wine in a basket, and put his holy water in a flask, and set off for the mountains. Like his brother he was much surprised at the sight of the glacier and had great difficulty in crossing it, even after leaving his basket behind him. The day was cloudless but not bright; there was a heavy purple haze hanging over the sky, and the hills looked lowering and gloomy. And as Schwartz climbed the steep rock path the thirst came upon him, as it had upon his brother, until he lifted his flask to his lips to drink. Then he saw the fair child lying near him on the rocks, and it cried to him and moaned for water. “Water, indeed,” said Schwartz; “I haven’t half enough for myself,” and passed on. And as he went he thought the sunbeams grew more dim, and he saw a low bank of black cloud rising out of the west; and when he had climbed for another hour, the thirst overcame him again and he would have drunk. Then he saw the old man lying before him on the path, and heard him cry out for water. “Water, indeed,” said Schwartz; “I haven’t half enough for myself,” and on he went. Then again the light seemed to fade from before his eyes, and he looked up, and, behold, a mist, of the color of blood, had come over the sun; and the bank of black cloud had risen very high, and its edges were tossing and tumbling like the waves of the angry sea and they cast long shadows which flickered over Schwartz’s path.

Then Schwartz climbed for another hour, and again his thirst returned; and as he lifted his flask to his lips he thought he saw his brother Hans lying exhausted on the path before him, and as he gazed the figure stretched its arms to him and cried for water. “Ha, ha!” laughed Schwartz, “are you there? Remember the prison bars, my boy. Water, indeed! do you suppose I carried it all the way up here for you?” And he strode over the figure; yet, as he passed, he thought he saw a strange expression of mockery about its lips. And when he had gone a few yards farther, he looked back; but the figure was not there.

And a sudden horror came over Schwartz, he knew not why; but the thirst for gold prevailed over his fear, and he rushed on. And the bank of black cloud rose to the zenith, and out of it came bursts of spiry lightning, and waves of darkness seemed to heave and float, between their flashes, over the whole heavens. And the sky where the sun was setting was all level and like a lake of blood; and a strong wind came out of that sky, tearing its crimson clouds into fragments and scattering them far into the darkness. And when Schwartz stood by the brink of the Golden River, its waves were black like thunder clouds, but their foam was like fire; and the roar of the waters below and the thunder above met as he cast the flask into the stream. And as he did so the lightning glared in his eyes, and the earth gave way beneath him, and the waters closed over his cry. And the moaning of the river rose wildly into the night as it gushed over the

TWO BLACK STONES

CHAPTER V

HOW LITTLE GLUCK SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN, WITH OTHER MATTERS OF INTEREST

When Gluck found that Schwartz did not come back, he was very sorry and did not know what to do. He had no money and was obliged to go and hire himself again to the goldsmith, who worked him very hard and gave him very little money. So, after a month or two, Gluck grew tired and made up his mind to go and try his fortune with the Golden River. “The little king looked very kind,” thought he. “I don’t think he will turn me into a black stone.” So he went to the priest, and the priest gave him some holy water as soon as he asked for it. Then Gluck took some bread in his basket, and the bottle of water, and set off very early for the mountains.

If the glacier had occasioned a great deal of fatigue in his brothers, it was twenty times worse for him, who was neither so strong nor so practiced on the mountains. He had several very bad falls, lost his basket and bread, and was very much frightened at the strange noises under the ice. He lay a long time to rest on the grass, after he had got over, and began to climb the hill just in the hottest part of the day. When he had climbed for an hour, he got dreadfully thirsty and was going to drink like his brothers, when he saw an old man coming down the path above him, looking very feeble and leaning on a staff.

“Why son,” said the old man, “I am faint with thirst; give me some of that water.” Then Gluck looked at him, and when he saw that he was pale and weary, he gave him the water. “Only pray don’t drink it all,” said Gluck. But the old man drank a great deal and gave him back the bottle two thirds empty. Then he bade him good speed, and Gluck went on again merrily. And the path became easier to his feet, and two or three blades of grass appeared upon it, and some grasshoppers began singing on the bank beside it, and Gluck thought he had never heard such merry singing.

Then he went on for another hour, and the thirst increased on him so that he thought he should be forced to drink. But as he raised the flask he saw a little child lying panting by the roadside, and it cried out piteously for water. Then Gluck struggled with himself and determined to bear the thirst a little longer; and he put the bottle to the child’s lips, and it drank it all but a few drops. Then it smiled on him and got up and ran down the hill; and Gluck looked after it till it became as small as a little star, and then turned and began climbing again. And then there were all kinds of sweet flowers growing on the rocks–bright green moss with pale pink, starry flowers, and soft belled gentians, more blue than the sky at its deepest, and pure white transparent lilies. And crimson and purple butterflies darted hither and thither, and the sky sent down such pure light that Gluck had never felt so happy in his life.

Yet, when he had climbed for another hour, his thirst became intolerable again; and when he looked at his bottle, he saw that there were only five or six drops left in it, and he could not venture to drink. And as he was hanging the flask to his belt again, he saw a little dog lying on the rocks, gasping for breath–just as Hans had seen it on the day of his ascent. And Gluck stopped and looked at it, and then at the Golden River, not five hundred yards above him; and he thought of the dwarf’s words, that no one could succeed except in his first attempt; and he tried to pass the dog, but it whined piteously and Gluck stopped again. “Poor beastie,” said Gluck, “it’ll be dead when I come down again, if I don’t help it.” Then he looked closer and closer at it, and its eye turned on him so mournfully that he could not stand it. “Confound the king and his gold too,” said Gluck, and he opened the flask and poured all the water into the dog’s mouth.

The dog sprang up and stood on its hind legs. Its tail disappeared; its ears became long, longer, silky, golden; its nose became very red; its eyes became very twinkling; in three seconds the dog was gone, and before Gluck stood his old acquaintance, the King of the Golden River.

“Thank you,” said the monarch. “But don’t be frightened; it’s all right”–for Gluck showed manifest symptoms of consternation at this unlooked-for reply to his last observation. “Why didn’t you come before,” continued the dwarf, “instead of sending me those rascally brothers of yours, for me to have the trouble of turning into stones? Very hard stones they make, too.”

“O dear me!” said Gluck, “have you really been so cruel?”

“Cruel!” said the dwarf; “they poured unholy water into my stream. Do you suppose I’m going to allow that?”

“Why,” said Gluck, “I am sure, sir,–your Majesty, I mean,–they got the water out of the church font.”

‘Very probably,” replied the dwarf, “but” (and his countenance grew stern as he spoke) “the water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses.”

So saying, the dwarf stooped and plucked a lily that grew at his feet. On its white leaves there hung three drops of clear dew. And the dwarf shook them into the flask which Gluck held in his hand. “Cast these into the river,” he said, “and descend on the other side of the mountains into the Treasure Valley. And so good speed.”

As he spoke the figure of the dwarf became indistinct. The playing colors of his robe formed themselves into a prismatic mist of dewy light; he stood for an instant veiled with them as with the belt of a broad rainbow. The colors grew faint; the mist rose into the air; the monarch had evaporated.

And Gluck climbed to the brink of the Golden River, and its waves were as clear as crystal and as brilliant as the sun. And when he cast the three drops of dew into the stream, there opened where they fell a small, circular whirlpool, into which the waters descended with a musical noise.

Gluck stood watching it for some time, very much disappointed, because not only the river was not turned into gold, but its waters seemed much diminished in quantity. Yet he obeyed his friend the dwarf and descended the other side of the mountains towards the Treasure Valley; and as he went he thought he heard the noise of water working its way under the ground. And when he came in sight of the Treasure Valley, behold, a river, like the Golden River, was springing from a new cleft of the rocks above it and was flowing in innumerable streams among the dry heaps of red sand.

And as Gluck gazed, fresh grass sprang beside the new streams, and creeping plants grew and climbed among the moistening soil. Young flowers opened suddenly along the riversides, as stars leap out when twilight is deepening, and thickets of myrtle and tendrils of vine cast lengthening shadows over the valley as they grew. And thus the Treasure Valley became a garden again, and the inheritance which had been lost by cruelty was regained by love.

And Gluck went and dwelt in the valley, and the poor were never driven from his door, so that his barns became full of corn and his house of treasure. And for him the river had, according to the dwarf’s promise, become a river of gold.

And to this day the inhabitants of the valley point out the place where the three drops of holy dew were cast into the stream, and trace the course of the Golden River under the ground until it emerges in the Treasure Valley. And at the top of the cataract of the Golden River are still to be seen two black stones, round which the waters howl mournfully every day at sunset; and these stones are still called by the people of the valley

THE BLACK BROTHERS