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The terrible Echidna, half-woman, half-serpent, the mother of the dread chimaera, the fierce dragon of the Hesperides, the gorgons that turned to stone all who
gazed on them, the hydra of the Lernean marsh, the vulture that made itself so decidedly unpleasant to Prometheus, and several other children of an equally objectionable type, was another of the monsters once believed in, while the better known Sirens and Mermaids, half-woman, half-fish, will naturally occur to the minds of our readers.
The Sirens were originally nymphs, but Demeter trans-formed them into beings half-women, half-birds, for reasons that may be found duly set forth in any work on mythology. Ultimately they were again transformed into creatures of which the upper portion was that of a beautiful woman, while the lower was fish-like. These sirens dwelt in the cliffs on the Sicilian shore, and by the sweetness of their voices bewitched passing travellers, who, allured by the charms of their song, were drawn to them, when they were lulled into insensibility and perished. Skeletons lay thickly round their dwelling, but the warning was useless and hopeless, as, the sirens were allowed by the gods to retain this cruel power over the hearts of men until one arose who could defy their sweet allurements. Orpheus and Odysseus each fulfilled the conditions, and thus the evil power of the sirens came to an end. Orpheus, by the unsurpassable sweetness of his own music and his hymns of praise to the gods, carried himself and his crew safely past the spot so fatal to others ; while Odysseus stopped the ears of his crew with wax, that they might be deaf to the bewitching music, while he himself was bound to the mast, and incapable, there-fore, of yielding to the soft fascination. It has been surmised that the whole story can be explained by the soft beating and melodious murmur of the waves over the hidden shoals and sands that would engulf those who would attempt to land. However, this may be, the sirens were at one time a firm article of belief, and are often represented in ancient art or referred to in ancient poetry, while later moralists find the simile an apt one between the siren-song and its tragic effects and all earthly pleasures that carry within them the seeds of death. A later legend of the same type may be seen in the myth of the Lurlei, a water-spirit whose home was in the steep cliff that overshadows the Rhine near St. Goar, the fairness of whose person was as great as the unfairness of her conduct in luring to their destruction the passing travellers. Here again, of course, matter-of-fact people have stepped in and explained all away, a striking echo and a rock on which to strike being all that is left to us, the moral being, that if people will be so foolish as to awaken by bugle or song the slumbering voices of the rocks when they ought to be giving their whole attention to their steering, what wonder if they come to grief? A very good reference to the siren's lulling song will be found in the second scene in the third act of the " Comedy of Errors." Mermaids and Tritons were once fully accepted facts, and illustrations of them}, literary or artistic, abound, Ariel in the " Tempest" 'sings of the sea-nymphs, and Oberon in the " Midsummer Night's Dream " speaks of " A mermaid on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song ; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid's music." Shakespeare seems to have made a very natural error in confounding the mermaids and the sirens together, for in the "Comedy of Errors" his allusion to the one is in language more adapted to the other : " Her fair sister, Possessed with such a gentle sovereign grace, Of such enchanting presence and discourse, Hath almost made me traitor to myself. But, lest myself be guilty to self-wrong, I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song." Another illustration of this will be found in the third part of King Henry VI., a passage peculiarly appropriate to our present purpose, as it embodies in a concentrated form no less than three of the items of unnatural history we have already dealt with-the siren's death-dealing charms, the death-giving glance of the basilisk, and the changing tints of the chameleon, besides referring to the hypocritical tears of the crocodile. The passage will be found in the second scene of the third act, where Gloster exclaims " I can smile, and murther while I smile, And cry, content, to that which grieves my heart ; And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. 1'11 drown more sailors than the mermaid shall ; I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk ; I'll play the orator as well as Nestor; Deceive more slily than Ulysses could ; And like a Sinon take another Troy : I can add colours to the cameleon." Other references will be found in " Hamlet " and in " Antony and Cleopatra." It has been conjectured that the ancients derived their idea of the mermaid from the Manatees that may be found on the shores of Africa washed by the Atlantic, or from the Dugongs of the littoral of the Indian Ocean. These singular animals have been placed by naturalists in a class by themselves and called Sirenia. They have a curious habit of swimming with their heads and necks above water. They thus bear some grotesque and remote resemblance to the human form, and may have given rise to the poetical tales of mermaids and sirens found in ancient literature. When the female Dugong is nursing her offspring the position assumed is almost identical with that of a human mother. The sea-lions and seals have the same habit of raising themselves in a semi-erect position in the water, and the intelligent aspect of their faces gives them at a little distance a close resemblance to human beings-a resemblance often equally striking when they are seen recumbent on the rocks. It is but little strange, that early navigators with all the superstitions of their race, and having a very slight knowledge of natural history, should be deceived, when we find in Scoresby's Voyages the incident narrated of the surgeon of his ship so deceived by one of these creatures that he reported that "he had seen a man with his head just above the surface of the water." At the same time, it appears to us at least as probable that the mermaid, like the sea-horses of Poseidon, was purely a creature of the imagination. |