The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Young Alcides, by Charlotte M. Yonge

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Title: My Young Alcides
A Faded Photograph

Author: Charlotte M. Yonge

Posting Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #4347]
Release Date: August, 2003
First Posted: January 12, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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MY YOUNG ALCIDES

A FADED PHOTOGRAPH

by

Charlotte M. Yonge

PREFACE

Ideas have a tyrannous power of insisting on being worked out, even
when one fears they may be leading in a track already worthily
preoccupied.

But the Hercules myth did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy
tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at
the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-coat
and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew deeper
and more engrossing.

For, whether the origin of the myth be, or be not, founded on solar
phenomena, the yearning Greek mind formed on it an unconscious allegory
of the course of the Victor, of whom the Sun, rejoicing as a giant to
run his course, is another type, like Samson of old, since the facts of
nature and of history are Divine parables.

And as each one's conquest is, in the track of his Leader, the only
true Conqueror, so Hercules, in spite of all the grotesque adjuncts
that the lower inventions of the heathen hung round him, is a far
closer likeness of manhood--as, indeed, the proverbial use of some of
his tasks testifies--and of repentant man conquering himself. The
great crime, after which his life was a bondage of expiation; the
choice between Virtue and Vice; the slain passion; the hundred-headed
sin for ever cropping up again; the winning of the sacred emblem of
purity;--then the subduing of greed; the cleansing of long-neglected
uncleanness; the silencing of foul tongues; the remarkable contest with
the creature which had become a foe, because, after being devoted for
sacrifice, it was spared; the obtaining the girdle of strength; the
recovery of the spoil from the three-fold enemy; the gaining of