'O brave Poets, keep back nothing; Mix not falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest truth, the fairest Beauty! Pan, Pan is dead.'
As we have already intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, resulting in varied gods and goddesses; but the soul could find no satisfaction for its deeper needs in such conceptions; urged on by its secret instincts, it sought to recompose the broken unity of the divine nature.
All government requires a Head; and when an attempt was made to apply the heterogeneous qualities and contradictory powers of the gods to the regulation of society--when it was necessary to find in an Olympus filled with quarrels and scandals, a steady Power capable of directing the destinies of a great people toward a single aim--men were again forced to recompose the fractioned Unity, to form an idea of one God superior to those with whom they had peopled earth and heaven. They were thus forced upon the conception of a Being superior to Jupiter, who subjected all the gods to his inflexible laws; and giving wings to those instincts of dread always present in the soul of a fallen race, they invented an invisible Divinity who never manifested himself to men; who dwelt in inaccessible and dreadful regions, in which an inscrutable Horror forever reigned; and through this new Terror, Unity was again brought into the design of creation, for all beings were, in despite of themselves, forced to fulfil the decrees of its pitiless will. All struggle was vain, all effort useless, prayer was without avail, and human anguish utterly unheeded by this terrific phantom of irresistible and crushing Power without a heart!
It is this dread idea which, pervading the pages of Eschylus, gives them that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could conciliate--this dark Fate, the creation of his own misled and perverted intuitions--and vainly seeking to escape from the inflexible circle which he had traced around himself, is an object which cannot fail to awaken the deepest pity. He asks from his fellow men, from nature, from the gods, the meaning of the dire enigma of life. Alas! they leave him to struggle in the stony hands of an unbending Fate! no reply is ever given to his wild demand, and the 'veil of Isis is never raised!' The world quivered under some strange anathema; a mystic malediction wreathed its thorns round the anguished heads of men; even in the midst of their festivals, when seeming to drink deep of joy from the brimming cup of life, the invisible hand of a Gorgon Fate was forever felt tracing upon their walls the decrees of a dark, inscrutable, inflexible, and terrible destiny!