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The Great Island
The lonely mountains o’er
And the resounding shore
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
So Milton. And even Swinburne accepted the general terms of this
picture, though he reacted against it – the picture of Pan dying, wither-
ing away as it were from shame, but mourned by thousands of lamenting
voices and defiant always, at the coming of Christ. Though those
that were Gods are dead, he wrote, ‘Yet thy kingdom shall pass,
Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.’
Of course Pan never died. Nineteenth-century folklorists seized on
this fact and proved it, understandably, at great length. But they went
too far in attempting to show that the basic dogmata of Christianity
had never had a grip on the mass of the Greek people, nor indeed on
any people. My favourite among these controversialists is Mr John
Stuart Stuart-Glennie, who tangled with the splendid Neo-Hellenist
Tozer in the pages of the Academy. Stuart-Glennie succeeded in fitting
the survival of paganism into a theory of general Progress according
to his own law of Mental Development, which deserves quotation:
‘Thought, in its Historic Development, advances from the concrete
conception of One-sided Causation, through successively less concrete
Conceptions of Differentiated Agents, to the abstract conception of
Reciprocal Causation; and this advance is effected in Forms and
Periods determined by, and corresponding to, Physical and Social
Conditions.’ Stuart-Glennie found proof of this in laws of Functional
Races, Periodicity, and Correlative Unity. And he thought that,
ignored and suppressed as his theory had been by editors, the results
obtained in twenty years’ verification of it justified the prediction that
it would be the basis of all future scientific histories of civilization. But
this was not surprising, for the facts used to verify were chosen to fit the
theory.
Stuart-Glennie thought that Pan’s survival showed that Christianity
had been as it were imposed on the Greeks, a naturally pagan
people, by cunning propaganda which happened to coincide with
peculiar temporary conditions. Pan was a good type of pagan divinity
to choose, since he was so unarguably pagan and primitive. (He was a
bad choice, though, in that there is less evidence of his survival than
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