TRITONS AND MEN OF THE SEA. BY LEIGH HUNT. HAVING treated of sirens, mermaids, and other female phenomena connected with the ocean, we here devote an article to its male gentrypersonages for whom, though we may speak of them with a certain familiarity on the strength of old acquaintance, we entertain all the respect due to their ancient renown, and to those sacred places of poetry in which they are still to be found. And first of the most ancient. The Triton is one of a numerous race begotten by Triton the son of Neptune, whose conch allayed the deluge of Deucaleon. Like his ancestors, he is half a man and half a fish, with a great muscular body, and a tail ending in a crescent. There is a variety which has the fore-feet of a horse. And sometimes he has two thighs like a man, or great, round, divided limbs resembling thighs, and tending to the orbicular, which end in fish-tails instead of legs. He serves Neptune and the sea-nymphs; is employed in calming billows and helping ships out of danger; and blows a conch-shell before the car he waits on, the sound of which is heard on the remotest shores, and causes the waves there to ripple. You may see him in all his jollity in the pictures of the Italians, waiting upon Galatea and sporting about the chariot with her nymphs; for with the strength he has the good humour of the most gambolling of the great fish; and when not employed in his duties, is for ever making love, and tumbling about the weltering waters. In one of the divine drawings of Raphael, lately exhibited in St. Martin's-lane, (and to be detained, we trust, among us for ever, lest our country be dishonoured for want of taste,) is a Triton with a nymph on his back, whom he is carrying through the water in a style of exquisite grace and affectionateness; for the higher you go in art, the more lovely does love become, and the more raised above the animal passion, even when it most takes it along with it. Imagine yourself on a promontory in a lone sea, during an autumnal morning, when the heavens retain the gladness of summer-time, and yet there is a note in the wind prophetical of winter, and you shall see Neptune come by with Amphitrite, strenuously drawn through the billows, in which they are half washed, and Triton blowing his conch before them. "First came great Neptune with his three-forkt mace Under his diadem imperiall ; And by his side his queene with coronall, As with a robe, with her owne silver haire, And deckt with pearles which th` Indian seas for her prepaire. And all the way before them, as they went, THAT MADE THE ROCKS TO ROARE AS THEY WERE RENT." April.-VOL. XLIX. NO. CXCVI. Faerie Queene, Book iv. Canto 2. 2 M These pearls which Amphitrite wears, were probably got for her by the Tritons, who are great divers. In one of the pictures of Rubens there are some of them thrusting up their great hands out of the sea (the rest of them invisible), and offering pearls to a queen. Some writers have undertaken to describe these sea-deities more minutely, and as partaking a great deal more of the brute-fish than the man. According to them, the Triton has hair like water-parsley; gills a little under the ears; the nostrils of a man; a wide mouth with panther's teeth; blue eyes; fins under the breast like a dolphin; hands and fingers, as well as nails of a shelly substance; and a body covered with small scales as hard as a file. Be this as it may, he was in great favour with the sea-goddesses, and has to boast even of the condescension Hear what a triumphant note he strikes up in the pages of of Venus. Marino. Per lo Carpazio mar l'orrida faccia Sicome fera sbigottita in caccia. Seguiala il rozzo: e con spumose braccia Scorreva intento a l'amorosa traccia : Qual pro,' dicendo, ov' ha più folta e piena A dreadful face in the Carpathian sea Came ploughing up a trough of thunderous might- Rugged and fierce, and all a froth, came he, In weedy thicks, and run a race with him Of this huge tail, midst all this fishy trim, According to Hesiod, Triton is a highly "respectable" god, in the modern sense of the word, for he lives "in a golden house." To be sure, he does that, as residing with his father and mother; but, moreover, he is a god redoubtable on his own account―deinos—a god of “awful might," as Mr. Elton excellently renders it; not "eximius" merely, or egregious, as feeble Natalis Comes interpreteth it; nor simply "vehemens," as the common Latin version saith better, but implying the combination of force and terror. "From the god of sounding waves, Shaker of earth, and Amphitrite, sprang (excellently rendered, that) Beneath the deep He dwells in golden edifice, (but with his father and mother, quoth Hesiod), Mr. Elton appends a curious note to this passage, from the learned and ingenious, but most gratuitous "Mythology" of Bryant; who, out of a mistaken zeal for identifying everything with Scripture, undoes half the poetry of old fable" at a jerk," and makes stocks and stones of the gods with a vengeance. We are sorry to find that so poetical a translator has allowed himself, out of a like respectable error, to contract his larger instincts into those of a dogmatist so prosaical. According to Mr. Bryant, Triton is no better than an old brick building; and Amphitrite herself "another." "The Hetrurians," says he, "erected on their shores towers and beacons for the sake of their navigation, which they called Tor-ain; whence they had a still farther denomination of Tor-aini (Tyrrheni). Another name for buildings of this nature was Tirit, or Turit; which signified a tower, or turret. The name of Triton is a contraction of Tirit-on, and signifies the tower of the sun; but a deity was framed from it, who was supposed to have had the appearance of a man upwards, but downwards to have been like a fish. The Hetrurians are thought to have been the inventors of trumpets; and in their towers on the sea-coast there were people appointed to be continually on the watch, both by day and by night, and to give a proper signal if anything happened extraordinary. This was done by a blast from the trumpet. In early times, however, these brazen instruments were but little known; and people were obliged to use what were near at hand, the conchs of the sea: by sounding these they gave signals from the tops of the towers when any ship appeared: and this is the implement with which Triton is more commonly furnished. Amphi-tirit is merely an oracular tower, which, by the poets, has been changed into Amphitrite, and made the wife of Neptune." Don't believe a word of it; or, if you do, admit the possibility of just enough to enable you to admire how the noble imagination of the Greeks restored their rights to the largeness and loudness of nature, and forced this watchman's tower back again into the ocean which it pretended to compete with. What! Was the sea itself nothing? its roaring nothing? its magnitude, and mystery, and eternal motion. nothing, that out of all this a Triton and a Neptune could not be framed, without the help of these restorers of Babel? Bochart, speaking of the river Triton, (and, by the way, he was an eastern scholar, which Bryant was not,) derives the name from the Phoenician word tarit. Mr. Bryant brings his Triton from tirit. In fact, you may bring anything from anything by the help of etymology; as Goldsmith has shown in his famous derivation of Fohi from Noah; and Horne Tooke, in his no less learned deduction of "pickled cucumber" from "King Jeremiah."+ To pretend to come to any certain conclusion in etymology, is to defy time, place, and vicissitude. *Elton's Hesiod, p. 194. Goldsmith's proof is very simple. "Change Fo into No," says he, "and Hi into Ah, and there you have it." The pedigree of the cucumber is as follows:"King Jeremiah, Jeremiah King, Jeremy King, Jerry King, Jerkin, Girkin, Pickled Cucumber." 2 M 2 Allegorically, Triton is the noise, and tumbling, and savageness of the sea; and therefore may well be represented as looking more brutal than human; but the savageness of the sea, taking it in the gross, and not the particular, is a thing genial and good-natured, serving the healthiest purposes of the world; and therefore the same Triton may be represented as abounding in humanity, and appearing in a nobler shape. Be his shape what it may, Venus (universal love) understands his nature; and with the eye of a goddess sees fair play between him and what is beauteous, difference being only a form, and the elements and essences of things being the same throughout the globe, and secretly harmonizing with one another. (There is a fine blowing wind, while we are writing this, with a deep tone in its cadences, as if Triton were assenting to what we wrote). Boccaccio, in identifying him with the noise of the sea, finely says that he signifies that especial sound of it which announces a more than ordinary swell of the waters, and the approach of his lord and master in his vehemence, "as trumpeters blow their song before the coming of an emperor. ** But allegories are secondary affairs. Triton is a good fellow on his own account, and puts a merriment and visible humanity in the sea, linking us also with things invisible. On this latter account, a living poet, in a fit of tedium with the common-places of the "workiday world," and their habitual disbelief in anything beyond themselves, has expressed a wish to see him. But surely, being the great poet he is, he has seen him, often; and need not have desponded for a moment over the common-places of the world, more than over any other parcel of atoms playing their parts in the vicissitudes and progress of all things. "Great God!" he exclaims, (and beautiful is the effusion,) "I'd rather be A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; Wordsworth's Sonnets. But what is there more marvellous in Triton than in the lea itself? and what glimpses need we desire to reassure us, greater than the stars above our heads, and the wonders in such a man's own brain and bosom? To see these, if we look for them, in a healthy spirit (for the gods, after all, or rather before all, love health and energy, and insist upon them), is to see "the shapes of gods, ascending and descending," and to know them for what they are-no delusions, nor unbeneficent. All that they require is, that we should help the intellectual and moral world to make progress; and as our poet was not doing this at the moment, we suppose that the gods suspended his gift, and would not allow him to see them. And yet, behold! he did so, in the midst of his very disbelief! so unable to get rid of his divinity is a true poet. * Genealogia Deorum, 1511, p. 55. "Voluere ex illo sono compræhendi futurum maris majorem solito æstum ; ut sono illo adventante majori cum impetu dominum suum ostendat Triton; uti et tibycines imperatorum de proximo advenire designant tibiarum cantu." In playful reverence, not presumptuous scorn Our old friend Sandys, in the delightful notes to his Ovid, quotes an Italian author to show that a Triton was once seen and felt, as you might handle a lobster. "Pliny," says he, "writes how an ambassador was sent on purpose from the Olissiponensi (the Lisbon people) unto Tiberius Cæsar, to tell him of a Triton, seene and heard in a certaine cave, winding a shell, and in such a form as they are commonly painted. But I cannot omit what is written by Alexander ab Alexandro, who lived in the last century, how he heard one Draconet Boniface of Naples, a souldier of much experience, report in an honourable assembly, that in the wars of Spaine he saw a sea-monster with the face and body like a man, but below the belly like a fish, brought thither from the farthest shores of Mauritania. It had an old countenance; the hairs and beard rough and shaggy; blew of colour; and high of stature; with finnes between the arms and the body. These were held for gods of the sea, and propitious to sailors! ignorance producing admiration, and admiration superstition. However, perhaps they erre not, who conceived them to be onely Divells, assuming that form, to nourish a false devotion."* Mr. Wordsworth's wish, in certain "moods of the mind," is natural and touching; but we believers of the Muses' "train" are startled, when a great poet, even for a moment, seems to lose sight of those final wonders, which it is poetry's high philosophic privilege to be for ever aware of. The deities of past ages are alive still, as much as they ought to be; the divinity that inspires their conception is always alive, and he evinces himself in a thousand shapes of hope, love, and imagination; ay, and of the most common-place materiality too, which, to beings who beheld us from afar, would be quite as good proof of the existence of things beautiful and supernatural, as Galatea, with all her nymphs, would be to one of us. Let the reader fancy a world, which had but one-half the lovely things in it which ours possesses, or but imagination enough to conceive them, and then let him fancy what it would think of us, and of our right to hope for other things supernatural, and to be full of a noble security against all nullification. But to return from these speculations, fit as they are for the remoteness and universality of the seas. We have nothing to do here with Nereus, Proteus, and other watery deities, whose form, though they could change it, was entirely human; neither have we any concern with deities in general, however mixed up with animal natures, unless, like the Triton, they have survived to modern fable, and thus remain tangible. Tritons have been seen in plenty in latter times. Ariosto found them on the shores of romance: they figure in the piscatory dialogues of his countrymen; and our own later poets have beheld them by dozens, whenever they went to the sea-coast, just as other men see fishermen and boats. In the pretty drama entitled "Alceo," written by a promising young poet of the name of Ongaro, who died early, and which the Italians call the Aminta bagnato (Amyntas in the water), a Triton performs the part of the Satyr in Tasso. Our great poet of romance makes express mention of a Sea-Satyr. Sandys's Ovid, Fol., p. 19. |