53 The Judgement of Paris
I do not conceive the Judgement of Paris as Rubens has painted it: an agricultural labourer leering at three fat women of the town who have gone into the country for a lark. This disrobing of goddesses, though there may be some ancient authority for it, does not conform to my principles of exegesis, and I pronounce it heretical. Goddesses cannot disrobe, because their attributes are their substance. They are like the images of the Virgin in Spanish churches; if you are so ill-advised, you may take off their crown, their veils, and their stiffly embroidered conical mantle; but what will remain will not be our Lady either of Mercies or of Sorrows, but a pole, with a doll’s head and two hands attached. The spell lies in the ornaments, because they alone are symbolical and richly mysterious. Similarly the virtue of those pagan goddesses did not he in what each might be in herself, either as a conscious spirit or as a beautiful titanic body endowed with free and immortal life; their relevant virtue was tutelary, and lay in their patronage of particular crafts or passions in man. For this reason it was not absurd that they should be rivals in beauty. Of course in itself every nature, celestial or even earthly, is incomparable and perfect in its own way. But goddesses may well compete for the prize of beauty in the eyes of a mortal; it is not their persons that he sees or can see, but their herds, born and bred on the mountain-side, Arcadia is full of dirt, hardship, and poverty; sunrise and sunset are heavy to them; they fatten their sheep in order to shear and to slaughter them, and they love a green pasture because it fattens the sheep. So too the eclogues of town poets, and the toy Arcadias of Versailles or of the carnival, in their satin slippers and gilded crooks, are a forced labour, and tedious; at best a new masquerade in which the jaded may continue to make love. But there is a poetic Arcadia none the less, the real Arcadia mirrored in a contemplative mind. Idle vision neither is what it looks at, nor apes it: it is infinitely other, yet in looking forgets itself, and lends its heart gladly to the spectacle. Paris shirked none of the labours or bestialities of the country swain; with a semi-divine tolerance he relished those rough sports and those monotonous pipings: anything a creature can love, some god finds lovable. He tussled with those wenches, and the crude scent of those smoking kettles did not turn his stomach. Had it been less malodorous at court? Was there not more freedom, more laughter, and greater plenty here? If Paris was not a hero, at least he was not a snob. He was a truant prince, a fop become a shepherd, with a body and a mind capable of great things, but doing easy things from choice. In his very softness, since it was voluntary, there was a kind of strength, the strength of indifference, and freedom, and universal derision. And his cynicism was voluptuous. Idle vision in him gilded alike everything it saw. He had chosen, and would never lose, possession of the Immediate.
As to Helen, I have not ignored her. The gods called Paris Alexander, and a private oracle has revealed to me that they also had another name for Helen, which was Doxa or Epiphaneia, that is to say, Glory or Evidence or (being otherwise interpreted) Seeming or Phantom. She was not substantial, but a manifestation of something else. Her beauty was her all, and what was her beauty to herself A myriad potential appearances wait in the intricate recesses of substance, or in the ethereal web of lights and motions that vibrates through the infinite, ready for the quick eye that can discern them. This discernment is at once a birth and a marriage. No sooner is the fair phantom called into existence than she has already leapt, as if carried by destiny, into her lover’s arms; for nothing can be more longed for, or more rapturously beautiful when it appears, than perfect evidence is to the mind. And the womb of nature, too, in its dark fertility, must be relieved to bring something to light at last. Yet this rare concourse of desires, and this blissful marriage, proves in the end most unhappy, for there is sin in it.
As all desperate lovers, in the absence of their true love, embrace what best they can find, though a false object, so spirit which, if not entangled in circumstance and heavy with dreams, would embrace the truth, must embrace appearance instead. There is a momentary lyrical joy even in that, because appearance has a being of its own; it has form, like Helen, and magic comings and goings, like visions of the gods: and if spirit were not incarnate and had nothing to fear or pursue, appearance would be the only reality it would care to dwell on. It was princely of Paris to love only the Immediate, but it was inhuman and unwise; and Venus had seduced him not only to his ruin (we must all die sooner or later) but to his disgrace and perpetual misery. A spirit lodged in time, place, and an animal body needs to be mindful of existence; it needs to respect the past, the hidden, the ulterior. It should be satisfied with what beauties are visible from its station, and with such truths as are pertinent to its fate. It should study appearance for the sake of substance. But as the joy of a free spirit is in perfect evidence, in Doxa or Epiphaneia, it inevitably flouts substance and embraces appearance instead. The Rape of Helen is this adulterous substitution, dazzling but criminal.