Greek Studies A Series of Essays 10

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 10

At sight of this new foe, at any rate, she came to a strange

submission. The savage virgin had turned to very woman, and was

presently a willing slave, returning on the gaily appointed ship in

all haste to Athens, where in supposed wedlock she bore King Theseus

a son.

 

With their annual visit--visit to the Gargareans!--for the purpose of

maintaining their [162] species, parting with their boys early, these

husbandless women could hardly be supposed a very happy, certainly

not a very joyous people. They figure rather as a sorry measure of

the luck of the female sex in taking a hard natural law into their

own hands, and by abnegation of all tender companionship making shift

with bare independence, as a kind of second-best--the best

practicable by them in the imperfect actual condition of things. But

the heart-strings would ache still where the breast had been cut

away. The sisters of Antiope had come, not immediately, but in

careful array of battle, to bring back the captive. All along the

weary roads from the Caucasus to Attica, their traces had remained in

the great graves of those who died by the way. Against the little

remnant, carrying on the fight to the very midst of Athens, Antiope

herself had turned, all other thoughts transformed now into wild

idolatry of her hero. Superstitious, or in real regret, the

Athenians never forgot their tombs. As for Antiope, the conscience

of her perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse to her

own desertion, when King Theseus, with his accustomed bad faith to

women, set her, too, aside in turn. Phaedra, the true wife, was

there, peeping suspiciously at her arrival; and even as Antiope

yielded to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a male child

might be the instrument of her anger, and one day judge her cause.

 

[163] In one of these doomed, decaying villages, then, King Theseus

placed the woman and her babe, hidden, yet secure, within the Attic

border, as men veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away,

they and their story, together with the memory of other antiquated

creatures of such places, who had had connubial dealings with the

stars. The white, paved waggon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to

Eleusis, zigzagged through sloping olive-yards, from the plain of

silvered blue, with Athens building in the distance, and passed the

door of the rude stone house, furnished scantily, which no one had

ventured to inhabit of late years till they came there. On the

ledges of the grey cliffs above, the laurel groves, stem and foliage

of motionless bronze, had spread their tents. Travellers bound

northwards were glad to repose themselves there, and take directions,

or provision for their journey onwards, from the highland people, who

came down hither to sell their honey, their cheese, and woollen

stuff, in the tiny market-place. At dawn the great stars seemed to

halt a while, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity, on

those distant, obscurely named heights, like broken swords, the rim

of the world. A little later you could just see the newly opened

quarries, like streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms. Thither

in spring-time all eyes turned from Athens devoutly, intent till the

first shaft of lightning gave signal for the departure of the [164]

sacred ship to Delos. Racing over those rocky surfaces, the virgin

air descended hither with the secret of profound sleep, as the child

lay in its cubicle hewn in the stone, the white fleeces heaped warmly

round him. In the wild Amazon's soul, to her surprise, and at first

against her will, the maternal sense had quickened from the moment of

his conception, and (that burst of angry tears with which she had

received him into the world once dried up), kindling more eagerly at

every token of manly growth, had at length driven out every other

feeling. And this animal sentiment, educating the human hand and

heart in her, had become a moral one, when, King Theseus leaving her

in anger, visibly unkind, the child had crept to her side, and

tracing with small fingers the wrinkled lines of her woebegone brow,

carved there as if by a thousand years of sorrow, had sown between

himself and her the seed of an undying sympathy.

 

She was thus already on the watch for a host of minute recognitions

on his part, of the self-sacrifice involved in her devotion to a

career of which she must needs drain out the sorrow, careful that he

might taste only the joy. So far, amid their spare living, the

child, as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love above him,

seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his moments of childish

sickness, the first passing shadows upon the deep joy of her

motherhood, she teaches him betimes to soothe [165] or cheat pain--

little bodily pains only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him

of the harsh necessities of life: "Courage, child! Every one must

take his share of suffering. Shift not thy body so vehemently.

Pain, taken quietly, is easier to bear."

 

Carefully inverting the habits of her own rude childhood, she learned

to spin the wools, white and grey, to clothe and cover him

pleasantly. The spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at

present a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange sense

of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watching, as her own

long-deferred recreation in life, his delight in the little

delicacies she prepared to his liking--broiled kids' flesh, the red

wine, the mushrooms sought through the early dew--his hunger and

thirst so daintily satisfied, as he sat at table, like the first-born

of King Theseus, with two wax-lights and a fire at dawn or nightfall

dancing to the prattle and laughter, a bright child, never stupidly

weary. At times his very happiness would seem to her like a menace

of misfortune to come. Was there not with herself the curse of that

unsisterly action? and not far from him, the terrible danger of the

father's, the step-mother's jealousy, the mockery of those half-

brothers to come? Ah! how perilous for happiness the sensibilities

which make him so exquisitely happy now! Before they started on

their dreadful visit to the Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told

their [166] sons many tales and other things to encourage them; and,

even as she had furnished the child betimes with rules for the solace

of bodily pain, so now she would have brought her own sad experience

into service in precepts for the ejection of its festering power out

of any other trouble that might visit him. Already those little

disappointments which are as the shadow beside all conscious

enjoyment, were no petty things to her, but had for her their pathos,

as children's troubles will have, in spite of the longer chance

before them. They were as the first steps in a long story of

deferred hopes, or anticipations of death itself and the end of them.

 

The gift of Ares gone, the mystic girdle she would fain have

transferred to the child, that bloody god of storm and battle,

hereditary patron of her house, faded from her thoughts together with

the memory of her past life--the more completely, because another

familiar though somewhat forbidding deity, accepting certainly a

cruel and forbidding worship, was already in possession, and reigning

in the new home when she came thither. Only, thanks to some kindly

local influence (by grace, say, of its delicate air), Artemis, this

other god she had known in the Scythian wilds, had put aside her

fierce ways, as she paused awhile on her heavenly course among these

ancient abodes of men, gliding softly, mainly through their dreams,

with abundance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of [167]

grateful memory of some timely service at human hands! In these

highland villages the tradition of celestial visitants clung fondly,

of god or hero, belated or misled on long journeys, yet pleased to be

among the sons of men, as their way led them up the steep, narrow,

crooked street, condescending to rest a little, as one, under some

sudden stress not clearly ascertained, had done here, in this very

house, thereafter for ever sacred. The place and its inhabitants, of

course, had been something bigger in the days of those old mythic

hospitalities, unless, indeed, divine persons took kindly the will

for the deed--very different, surely, from the present condition of

things, for there was little here to detain a delicate traveller,

even in the abode of Antiope and her son, though it had been the

residence of a king.

 

Hard by stood the chapel of the goddess, who had thus adorned the

place with her memories. The priests, indeed, were already departed

to Athens, carrying with them the ancient image, the vehicle of her

actual presence, as the surest means of enriching the capital at the

expense of the country, where she must now make poor shift of the

occasional worshipper on his way through these mountain passes. But

safely roofed beneath the sturdy tiles of grey Hymettus marble, upon

the walls of the little square recess enclosing the deserted

pedestal, a series of crowded imageries, in the devout spirit [168]

of earlier days, were eloquent concerning her. Here from scene to

scene, touched with silver among the wild and human creatures in dun

bronze, with the moon's disk around her head, shrouded closely, the

goddess of the chase still glided mystically through all the varied

incidents of her story, in all the detail of a written book.

 

A book for the delighted reading of a scholar, willing to ponder at

leisure, to make his way surely, and understand. Very different,

certainly, from the cruel-featured little idol his mother had brought

in her bundle--the old Scythian Artemis, hanging there on the wall,

side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red,--the goddess reveals

herself to the lad, poring through the dusk by taper-light, as at

once a virgin, necessarily therefore the creature of solitude, yet

also as the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the young.

Her friendly intervention at the act of birth everywhere, her claim

upon the nursling, among tame and wild creatures equally, among men

as among gods, nay! among the stars (upon the very star of dawn),

gave her a breadth of influence seemingly coextensive with the sum of

things. Yes! his great mother was in touch with everything. Yet

throughout he can but note her perpetual chastity, with pleasurable

though half-suspicious wonder at the mystery, he knows not what,

involved therein, as though he awoke suddenly in some distant,

unexplored region of her person and activity. [169] Why the lighted

torch always, and that long straight vesture rolled round so

formally? Was it only against the cold of these northern heights?

 

To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her solitude, to this virgin

mother, who, with no husband, no lover, no fruit of her own, is so

tender to the children of others, in a full heart he devotes himself-

-his immaculate body and soul. Dedicating himself thus, he has the

sense also that he becomes more entirely than ever the chevalier of

his mortal mother, of her sad cause. The devout, diligent hands

clear away carefully the dust, the faded relics of her former

worship; a worship renewed once more as the sacred spring, set free

from encumbrance, in answer to his willing ministries murmurs again

under the dim vault in its marble basin, work of primitive Titanic

fingers--flows out through its rocky channel, filling the whole

township with chaste thoughts of her.

 

Through much labour at length he comes to the veritable story of her

birth, like a gift direct from the goddess herself to this loyal

soul. There were those in later times who, like Aeschylus, knew

Artemis as the daughter not of Leto but of Demeter, according to the

version of her history now conveyed to the young Hippolytus, together

with some deepened insight into her character. The goddess of

Eleusis, on a journey, in the old days when, as Plato says, [170] men

lived nearer the gods, finding herself with child by some starry

inmate of those high places, had lain down in the rock-hewn cubicle

of the inner chamber, and, certainly in sorrow, brought forth a

daughter. Here was the secret at once of the genial, all-embracing

maternity of this new strange Artemis, and of those more dubious

tokens, the lighted torch, the winding-sheet, the arrow of death on

the string--of sudden death, truly, which may be thought after all

the kindest, as prevenient of all disgraceful sickness or waste in

the unsullied limbs. For the late birth into the world of this so

shadowy daughter was somehow identified with the sudden passing into

Hades of her first-born, Persephone. As he scans those scenes anew,

an awful surmise comes to him; his divine patroness moves there as

death, surely. Still, however, gratefully putting away suspicion, he

seized even in these ambiguous imageries their happier suggestions,

satisfied in thinking of his new mother as but the giver of sound

sleep, of the benign night, whence--mystery of mysteries!--good

things are born softly, from which he awakes betimes for his

healthful service to her. Either way, sister of Apollo or sister of

Persephone, to him she should be a power of sanity, sweet as the

flowers he offered her gathered at dawn, setting daily their purple

and white frost against her ancient marbles. There was more

certainly than the first breath of day in them. Was there [171] here

something of her person, her sensible presence, by way of direct

response to him in his early devotion, astir for her sake before the

very birds, nesting here so freely, the quail above all, in some

privileged connexion with her story still unfathomed by the learned

youth? Amid them he too found a voice, and sang articulately the

praises of the great goddess.

 

Those more dubious traits, nevertheless, so lightly disposed of by

Hippolytus (Hecate thus counting for him as Artemis goddess of

health), became to his mother, in the light of her sad experience,

the sum of the whole matter. While he drew only peaceful inducements

to sleep from that two-sided figure, she reads there a volume of

sinister intentions, and liked little this seemingly dead goddess,

who could but move among the living banefully, stealing with her

night-shade into the day where she had no proper right. The gods had

ever had much to do with the shaping of her fortunes and the fortunes

of her kindred; and the mortal mother felt nothing less than jealousy

from the hour when the lad had first delightedly called her to share

his discoveries, and learn the true story (if it were not rather the

malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he has thus

absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this absolute chastity itself

a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight

offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger;

creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies,

against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the

coverlet; with the nice black head deep in the fleecy pillow he is

sleeping quietly, he dreams of that other mother gliding in upon the

moonbeam, and awaking turns sympathetically upon the living woman, is

subdued in a moment to the __EXPRESSION__ of her troubled spirit, and

understands.

 

And when the child departed from her for the first time, springing

from his white bed before the dawn, to accompany the elders on their

annual visit to the Eleusinian goddess, the after-sense of his

wonderful happiness, tranquillising her in spite of herself by its

genial power over the actual moment, stirred nevertheless a new sort

of anxiety for the future. Her work in life henceforward was defined

as a ministry to so precious a gift, in full consciousness of its

risk; it became her religion, the centre of her pieties. She missed

painfully his continual singing hovering about the place, like the

earth itself made audible in all its humanities. Half-selfish for a

moment, she prays that he may remain for ever a child, to her solace;

welcomes now the promise of his chastity (though chastity were itself

a kind of death) as the pledge of his abiding always with her. And

these thoughts were but infixed more deeply by the sudden stroke of

joy at his return home in ceremonial trim and grown more manly, with

much increase of self-confidence in that brief absence among his

fellows.

 

[173] For, from the first, the unwelcome child, the outcast, had been

successful, with that special good fortune which sometimes attends

the outcast. His happiness, his invincible happiness, had been found

engaging, perhaps by the gods, certainly by men; and when King

Theseus came to take note how things went in that rough life he had

assigned them, he felt a half liking for the boy, and bade him come

down to Athens and see the sights, partly by way of proof to his

already somewhat exacting wife of the difference between the old love

and the new as measured by the present condition of their respective

offspring. The fine nature, fastidious by instinct, but bred with

frugality enough to find the charm of continual surprise in that

delicate new Athens, draws, as he goes, the full savour of its

novelties; the marbles, the space and finish, the busy gaiety of its

streets, the elegance of life there, contrasting with while it adds

some mysterious endearment to the thought of his own rude home.

Without envy, in hope only one day to share, to win them by kindness,

he gazes on the motley garden-plots, the soft bedding, the showy

toys, the delicate keep of the children of Phaedra, who turn

curiously to their half-brother, venture to touch his long strange

gown of homespun grey, like the soft coat of some wild creature who

might let one stroke it. Close to their dainty existence for a

while, he regards it as from afar; looks forward all day to the

lights, the prattle, the laughter, the white [174] bread, like sweet

cake to him, of their ordinary evening meal; returns again and again,

in spite of himself, to watch, to admire, feeling a power within him

to merit the like; finds his way back at last, still light of heart,

to his own poor fare, able to do without what he would enjoy so much.

As, grateful for his scanty part in things--for the make-believe of a

feast in the little white loaves she too has managed to come by,

sipping the thin white wine, he touches her dearly, the mother is

shocked with a sense of something unearthly in his contentment, while

he comes and goes, singing now more abundantly than ever a new

canticle to her divine rival. Were things, after all, to go

grudgingly with him? Sensible of that curse on herself, with her

suspicions of his kinsfolk, of this dubious goddess to whom he has

devoted himself, she anticipates with more foreboding than ever his

path to be, with or without a wife--her own solitude, or his--the

painful heats and cold. She fears even these late successes; it were

best to veil their heads. The strong as such had ever been against

her and hers. The father came again; noted the boy's growth.

Manliest of men, like Hercules in his cloak of lion's skin, he has

after all but scant liking, feels, through a certain meanness of

soul, scorn for the finer likeness of himself. Might this creature

of an already vanishing world, who for all his hard rearing had a

manifest distinction of character, one day become his rival, full of

[175] loyalty as he was already to the deserted mother?

 

To charming Athens, nevertheless, he crept back, as occasion served,

to gaze peacefully on the delightful good fortune of others, waiting

for the opportunity to take his own turn with the rest, driving down

thither at last in a chariot gallantly, when all the town was

assembled to celebrate the king's birthday. For the goddess, herself

turning ever kinder, and figuring more and more exclusively as the

tender nurse of all things, had transformed her young votary from a

hunter into a charioteer, a rearer and driver of horses, after the

fashion of his Amazon mothers before him. Thereupon, all the lad's

wholesome vanity had centered on the fancy of the world-famous games

then lately established, as, smiling down his mother's terrors, and

grateful to his celestial mother for many a hair-breadth escape, he

practised day by day, fed the animals, drove them out, amused though

companionless, visited them affectionately in the deserted stone

stables of the ancient king. A chariot and horses, as being the

showiest outward thing the world afforded, was like the pawn he moved

to represent the big demand he meant to make, honestly, generously,

on the ample fortunes of life. There was something of his old

miraculous kindred, alien from this busy new world he came to, about

the boyish driver with the fame of a scholar, in his grey fleecy

cloak and hood of soft [175] white woollen stuff, as he drove in that

morning. Men seemed to have seen a star flashing, and crowded round

to examine the little mountain-bred beasts, in loud, friendly

intercourse with the hero of the hour--even those usually somewhat

unsympathetic half-brothers now full of enthusiasm for the outcast

and his good fight for prosperity. Instinctively people admired his

wonderful placidity, and would fain have shared its secret, as it

were the carelessness of some fair flower upon his face. A victor in

the day's race, he carried home as his prize a glittering new harness

in place of the very old one he had come with. "My chariot and

horses!" he says now, with his single touch of pride. Yet at home,

savouring to the full his old solitary happiness, veiled again from

time to time in that ancient life, he is still the student, still

ponders the old writings which tell of his divine patroness. At

Athens strange stories are told in turn of him, his nights upon the

mountains, his dreamy sin, with that hypocritical virgin goddess,

stories which set the jealous suspicions of Theseus at rest once

more. For so "dream" not those who have the tangible, appraisable

world in view. Even Queen Phaedra looks with pleasure, as he comes,

on the once despised illegitimate creature, at home now here too,

singing always audaciously, so visibly happy, occupied, popular.

 

Encompassed by the luxuries of Athens, far from those peaceful

mountain places, among people [177] further still in spirit from

their peaceful light and shade, he did not forget the kindly goddess,

still sharing with his earthly mother the prizes, or what they would

buy, for the adornment of their spare abode. The tombs of the fallen

Amazons, the spot where they had breathed their last, he piously

visited, informed himself of every circumstance of the event with

devout care, and, thinking on them amid the dainties of the royal

table, boldly brought them too their share of the offerings to the

heroic dead. Aphrodite, indeed--Aphrodite, of whom he had scarcely

so much as heard--was just then the best-served deity in Athens, with

all its new wealth of colour and form, its gold and ivory, the

acting, the music, the fantastic women, beneath the shadow of the

great walls still rising steadily. Hippolytus would have no part in

her worship; instead did what was in him to revive the neglected

service of his own goddess, stirring an old jealousy. For Aphrodite

too had looked with delight upon the youth, already the centre of a

hundred less dangerous human rivalries among the maidens of Greece,

and was by no means indifferent to his indifference, his instinctive

distaste; while the sterner, almost forgotten Artemis found once more

her great moon-shaped cake, set about with starry tapers, at the appointed seasons.