Greek Studies A Series of Essays 11

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 11

They know him now from afar, by his emphatic, shooting, arrowy

movements; and on [178] the day of the great chariot races "he goes

in and wins." To the surprise of all he compounded his handsome

prize for the old wooden image taken from the chapel at home, lurking

now in an obscure shrine in the meanest quarter of the town. Sober

amid the noisy feasting which followed, unashamed, but travelling by

night to hide it from their mockery, warm at his bosom, he reached

the passes at twilight, and through the deep peace of the glens bore

it to the old resting-place, now more worthy than ever of the

presence of its mistress, his mother and all the people of the

village coming forth to salute her, all doors set mystically open, as

she advances.

 

Phaedra too, his step-mother, a fiery soul with wild strange blood in

her veins, forgetting her fears of this illegitimate rival of her

children, seemed now to have seen him for the first time, loved at

last the very touch of his fleecy cloak, and would fain have had him

of her own religion. As though the once neglected child had been

another, she tries to win him as a stranger in his manly perfection,

growing more than an affectionate mother to her husband's son. But

why thus intimate and congenial, she asks, always in the wrong

quarter? Why not compass two ends at once? Why so squeamishly

neglect the powerful, any power at all, in a city so full of

religion? He might find the image of her sprightly goddess

everywhere, to his [179] liking, gold, silver, native or stranger,

new or old, graceful, or indeed, if he preferred it so, in iron or

stone. By the way, she explains the delights of love, of marriage,

the husband once out of the way; finds in him, with misgiving, a sort

of forwardness, as she thinks, on this one matter, as if he

understood her craft and despised it. He met her questions in truth

with scarce so much as contempt, with laughing counter-queries, why

people needed wedding at all? They might have found the children in

the temples, or bought them, as you could buy flowers in Athens.

 

Meantime Phaedra's young children draw from the seemingly unconscious

finger the marriage-ring, set it spinning on the floor at his feet,

and the staid youth places it for a moment on his own finger for

safety. As it settles there, his step-mother, aware all the while,

suddenly presses his hand over it. He found the ring there that

night as he lay; left his bed in the darkness, and again, for safety,

put it on the finger of the image, wedding once for all that so

kindly mystical mother. And still, even amid his earthly mother's

terrible misgivings, he seems to foresee a charming career marked out

before him in friendly Athens, to the height of his desire. Grateful

that he is here at all, sharing at last so freely life's banquet, he

puts himself for a moment in his old place, recalling his old

enjoyment of the pleasure of others; [180] feels, just then, no

different. Yet never had life seemed so sufficing as at this moment-

-the meat, the drink, the drives, the popularity as he comes and

goes, even his step-mother's false, selfish, ostentatious gifts. But

she, too, begins to feel something of the jealousy of that other

divine, would-be mistress, and by way of a last effort to bring him

to a better mind in regard to them both, conducts him (immeasurable

privilege!) to her own private chapel.

 

You could hardly tell where the apartments of the adulteress ended

and that of the divine courtesan began. Haunts of her long,

indolent, self-pleasing nights and days, they presented everywhere

the impress of Phaedra's luxurious humour. A peculiar glow, such as

he had never before seen, like heady lamplight, or sunshine to some

sleeper in a delirious dream, hung upon, clung to, the bold, naked,

shameful imageries, as his step-mother trimmed the lamps, drew forth

her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant change of raiment the

almost formless goddess crouching there in her unclean shrine or

stye, set at last her foolish wheel in motion to a low chant, holding

him by the wrist, keeping close all the while, as if to catch some

germ of consent in his indifferent words.

 

And little by little he perceives that all this is for him--the

incense, the dizzy wheel, the shreds of stuff cut secretly from his

sleeve, the sweetened cup he drank at her offer, unavailingly;+

[181] and yes! his own features surely, in pallid wax. With a gasp

of flighty laughter she ventures to point the thing out to him, full

as he is at last of visible, irrepressible dislike. Ah! it was that

very reluctance that chiefly stirred her. Healthily white and red,

he had a marvellous air of discretion about him, as of one never to

be caught unaware, as if he never could be anything but like water

from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of

the morning star turned to human flesh. It was the self-possession

of this happy mind, the purity of this virgin body, she would fain

have perturbed, as a pledge to herself of her own gaudy claim to

supremacy. King Theseus, as she knew, had had at least two earlier

loves; for once she would be a first love; felt at moments that with

this one passion once indulged, it might be happiness thereafter to

remain chaste for ever. And then, by accident, yet surely reading

indifference in his manner of accepting her gifts, she is ready again

for contemptuous, open battle. Is he indeed but a child still, this

nursling of the forbidding Amazon, of that Amazonian goddess--to be a

child always? or a wily priest rather, skilfully circumventing her

sorceries, with mystic precautions of his own? In truth, there is

something of the priestly character in this impassible discretion,

reminding her of his alleged intimacy with the rival goddess, and

redoubling her curiosity, her fondness.+ [182] Phaedra, love-sick,

feverish, in bodily sickness at last, raves of the cool woods, the

chase, the steeds of Hippolytus, her thoughts running madly on what

she fancies to be his secret business; with a storm of abject tears,

foreseeing in one moment of recoil the weary tale of years to come,

star-stricken as she declares, she dared at last to confess her

longing to already half-suspicious attendants; and, awake one morning

to find Hippolytus there kindly at her bidding, drove him openly

forth in a tempest of insulting speech. There was a mordant there,

like the menace of misfortune to come, in which the injured goddess

also was invited to concur. What words! what terrible words!

following, clinging to him, like acrid fire upon his bare flesh, as

he hasted from Phaedra's house, thrust out at last, his vesture

remaining in her hands. The husband returning suddenly, she tells

him a false story of violence to her bed, and is believed.

 

King Theseus, all his accumulated store of suspicion and dislike

turning now to active hatred, flung away readily upon him,

bewildered, unheard, one of three precious curses (some mystery of

wasting sickness therein) with which Poseidon had indulged him. It

seemed sad that one so young must call for justice, precariously,

upon the gods, the dead, the very walls! Admiring youth dared hardly

bid farewell to their late comrade; are generous, at most, in [183]

stolen, sympathetic glances towards the fallen star. At home, veiled

once again in that ancient twilight world, his mother, fearing solely

for what he may suffer by the departure of that so brief prosperity,

enlarged as it had been, even so, by his grateful taking of it, is

reassured, delighted, happy once more at the visible proof of his

happiness, his invincible happiness. Duly he returned to Athens,

early astir, for the last time, to restore the forfeited gifts, drove

back his gaily painted chariot to leave there behind him, actually

enjoying the drive, going home on foot poorer than ever. He takes

again to his former modes of life, a little less to the horses, a

little more to the old studies, the strange, secret history of his

favourite goddess,--wronged surely! somehow, she too, as powerless to

help him; till he lay sick at last, battling one morning, unaware of

his mother's presence, with the feverish creations of the brain; the

giddy, foolish wheel, the foolish song, of Phaedra's chapel, spinning

there with his heart bound thereto. "The curses of my progenitors

are come upon me!" he cries. "And yet, why so? guiltless as I am of

evil." His wholesome religion seeming to turn against him now, the

trees, the streams, the very rocks, swoon into living creatures,

swarming around the goddess who has lost her grave quietness. He

finds solicitation, and recoils, in the wind, in the sounds of the

rain; till at length delirium [184] itself finds a note of returning

health. The feverish wood-ways of his fancy open unexpectedly upon

wide currents of air, lulling him to sleep; and the conflict ending

suddenly altogether at its sharpest, he lay in the early light

motionless among the pillows, his mother standing by, as she thought,

to see him die. As if for the last time, she presses on him the

things he had liked best in that eating and drinking she had found so

beautiful. The eyes, the eyelids are big with sorrow; and, as he

understands again, making an effort for her sake, the healthy light

returns into his; a hand seizes hers gratefully, and a slow

convalescence begins, the happiest period in the wild mother's life.

When he longed for flowers for the goddess, she went a toilsome

journey to seek them, growing close, after long neglect, wholesome

and firm on their tall stalks. The singing she had longed for so

despairingly hovers gaily once more within the chapel and around the

house.

 

At the crisis of that strange illness she had supposed her long

forebodings about to be realised at last; but upon his recovery

feared no more, assured herself that the curses of the father, the

step-mother, the concurrent ill-will of that angry goddess, have done

their utmost; he will outlive her; a few years hence put her to a

rest surely welcome. Her misgivings, arising always out of the

actual spectacle of his profound happiness, seemed at an end in this

meek bliss, the more as [185] she observed that it was a shade less

unconscious than of old. And almost suddenly he found the strength,

the heart, in him, to try his fortune again with the old chariot; and

those still unsatisfied curses, in truth, going on either side of him

like living creatures unseen, legend tells briefly how, a competitor

for pity with Adonis, and Icarus, and Hyacinth, and other doomed

creatures of immature radiance in all story to come, he set forth

joyously for the chariot-races, not of Athens, but of Troezen, her

rival. Once more he wins the prize; he says good-bye to admiring

friends anxious to entertain him, and by night starts off homewards,

as of old, like a child, returning quickly through the solitude in

which he had never lacked company, and was now to die. Through all

the perils of darkness he had guided the chariot safely along the

curved shore; the dawn was come, and a little breeze astir, as the

grey level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when in a

moment an earthquake, or Poseidon the earth-shaker himself, or angry

Aphrodite awake from the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface; a

great wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the Attic

shore, and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses,

a moment since enjoying so pleasantly with him the caress of the

morning air, but now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate

habit of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the rough

pavements. [186] Evening and the dawn might seem to have met on that

hapless day through which they drew him home entangled in the

trappings of the chariot that had been his ruin, till he lay at

length, grey and haggard, at the rest he had longed for dimly amid

the buffeting of those murderous stones, his mother watching

impassibly, sunk at once into the condition she had so long

anticipated.

 

Later legend breaks a supernatural light over that great desolation,

and would fain relieve the reader by introducing the kindly

Asclepius, who presently restores the youth to life, not, however, in

the old form or under familiar conditions. To her, surely, counting

the wounds, the disfigurements, telling over the pains which had shot

through that dear head now insensible to her touch among the pillows

under the harsh broad daylight, that would have been no more of a

solace than if, according to the fancy of Ovid, he flourished still,

a little deity, but under a new name and veiled now in old age, in

the haunted grove of Aricia, far from his old Attic home, in a land

which had never seen him as he was.

 

 

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE

I: THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART

 

[187] THE extant remains of Greek sculpture, though but a fragment of

what the Greek sculptors produced, are, both in number and in

excellence, in their fitness, therefore, to represent the whole of

which they were a part, quite out of proportion to what has come down

to us of Greek painting, and all those minor crafts which, in the

Greek workshop, as at all periods when the arts have been really

vigorous, were closely connected with the highest imaginative work.

Greek painting is represented to us only by its distant reflexion on

the walls of the buried houses of Pompeii, and the designs of

subordinate though exquisite craftsmen on the vases. Of wrought

metal, partly through the inherent usefulness of its material,

tempting ignorant persons into whose hands it may fall to re-fashion

it, we have comparatively little; while, in consequence of the

perishableness of their material, nothing [188] remains of the

curious wood-work, the carved ivory, the embroidery and coloured

stuffs, on which the Greeks set much store--of that whole system of

refined artisanship, diffused, like a general atmosphere of beauty

and richness, around the more exalted creations of Greek sculpture.

What we possess, then, of that highest Greek sculpture is presented

to us in a sort of threefold isolation; isolation, first of all, from

the concomitant arts--the frieze of the Parthenon without the metal

bridles on the horses, for which the holes in the marble remain;

isolation, secondly, from the architectural group of which, with most

careful estimate of distance and point of observation, that frieze,

for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation, thirdly, from the

clear Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our modern galleries.

And if one here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks

himself of the required substitution; if he endeavours mentally to

throw them back into that proper atmosphere, through which alone they

can exercise over us all the magic by which they charmed their

original spectators, the effort is not always a successful one,

within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum.

 

And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is presented to us in such

falsifying isolation from the work of the weaver, the carpenter, and

the goldsmith, has encouraged a manner of regarding it too little

sensuous. Approaching it with full [189] information concerning what

may be called the inner life of the Greeks, their modes of thought

and sentiment amply recorded in the writings of the Greek poets and

philosophers, but with no lively impressions of that mere craftsman's

world of which so little has remained, students of antiquity have for

the most part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture, rather as

elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments, in a sort

of petrified language, of pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in

connexion with the development of Greek intellect, than as elements

of a sequence in the material order, as results of a designed and

skilful dealing of accomplished fingers with precious forms of matter

for the delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be regarded

as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially

abstracted range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman

almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental

connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed. He

is fancied to have been disdainful of such matters as the mere tone,

the fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just

perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of

the Venus of Melos; as being occupied only with forms as abstract

almost as the conceptions of philosophy, and translateable it might

be supposed into any material--a habit of regarding him still further

encouraged by the modern [190] sculptor's usage of employing merely

mechanical labour in the actual working of the stone.

 

The works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised,

if we may say so, to the utmost degree; the human figures which they

present to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them, that

profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is traceable in Greek

art, continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest

products, the oil-vessel or the urn, reaches its perfection. Yet,

though the most abstract and intellectualised of sensuous objects,

they are still sensuous and material, addressing themselves, in the

first instance, not to the purely reflective faculty, but to the eye;

and a complete criticism must have approached them from both sides--

from the side of the intelligence indeed, towards which they rank as

great thoughts come down into the stone; but from the sensuous side

also, towards which they rank as the most perfect results of that

pure skill of hand, of which the Venus of Melos, we may say, is the

highest example, and the little polished pitcher or lamp, also

perfect in its way, perhaps the lowest.

 

To pass by the purely visible side of these things, then, is not only

to miss a refining pleasure, but to mistake altogether the medium in

which the most intellectual of the creations of Greek art, the

Aeginetan or the Elgin marbles, for instance, were actually produced;

even these having, in their origin, depended for much of [191] their

charm on the mere material in which they were executed; and the whole

black and grey world of extant antique sculpture needing to be

translated back into ivory and gold, if we would feel the excitement

which the Greek seems to have felt in the presence of these objects.

To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture, it is necessary

to connect it, indeed, with the inner life of the Greek world, its

thought and sentiment, on the one hand; but on the other hand to

connect it, also, with the minor works of price, intaglios, coins,

vases; with that whole system of material refinement and beauty in

the outer Greek life, which these minor works represent to us; and it

is with these, as far as possible, that we must seek to relieve the

air of our galleries and museums of their too intellectual greyness.

Greek sculpture could not have been precisely a cold thing; and,

whatever a colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have their

coldness, a coldness which has sometimes repelled from Greek

sculpture, with its unsuspected fund of passion and energy in

material form, those who cared much, and with much insight, for a

similar passion and energy in the coloured world of Italian painting.

 

Theoretically, then, we need that world of the minor arts as a

complementary background for the higher and more austere Greek

sculpture; and, as matter of fact, it is just with such a world--with

a period of refined and exquisite [192] tectonics+ (as the Greeks

called all crafts strictly subordinate to architecture), that Greek

art actually begins, in what is called the Heroic Age, that earliest,

undefined period of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot

be dated, and which reaches down to the first Olympiad, about the

year 776 B.C. Of this period we possess, indeed, no direct history,

and but few actual monuments, great or small; but as to its whole

character and outward local colouring, for its art, as for its

politics and religion, Homer may be regarded as an authority. The

Iliad and the Odyssey, the earliest pictures of that heroic life,

represent it as already delighting itself in the application of

precious material and skilful handiwork to personal and domestic

adornment, to the refining and beautifying of the entire outward

aspect of life; above all, in the lavish application of very graceful

metal-work to such purposes. And this representation is borne out by

what little we possess of its actual remains, and by all we can

infer. Mixed, of course, with mere fable, as a description of the

heroic age, the picture which Homer presents to us, deprived of its

supernatural adjuncts, becomes continuously more and more realisable

as the actual condition of early art, when we emerge gradually into

historical time, and find ourselves at last among dateable works and

real schools or masters.

 

The history of Greek art, then, begins, as some have fancied general

history to begin, in a [193] golden age, but in an age, so to speak,

of real gold, the period of those first twisters and hammerers of the

precious metals--men who had already discovered the flexibility of

silver and the ductility of gold, the capacity of both for infinite

delicacy of handling, and who enjoyed, with complete freshness, a

sense of beauty and fitness in their work--a period of which that

flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked up lately in one of the

graves at Mycenae, or the legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus,

might serve as the symbol. The heroic age of Greek art is the age of

the hero as smith.

 

There are in Homer two famous descriptive passages in which this

delight in curious metal-work is very prominent; the description in

the Iliad of the shield of Achilles* and the description of the house

of Alcinous in the Odyssey.* The shield of Achilles is part of the

suit of armour which Hephaestus makes for him at the request of

Thetis; and it is wrought of variously Coloured metals, woven into a

great circular composition in relief, representing the world and the

life in it. The various activities of man are recorded in this

description in a series of idyllic incidents with such complete

freshness, liveliness, and variety, that the reader from time to time

may well forget himself, and fancy he is reading a mere description

of the incidents of actual life. [194] We peep into a little Greek

town, and see in dainty miniature the bride coming from her chamber

with torch-bearers and dancers, the people gazing from their doors, a

quarrel between two persons in the market-place, the assembly of the

elders to decide upon it. In another quartering is the spectacle of

a city besieged, the walls defended by the old men, while the

soldiers have stolen out and are lying in ambush. There is a fight

on the river-bank; Ares and Athene, conspicuous in gold, and marked

as divine persons by a scale larger than that of their followers,

lead the host. The strange, mythical images of Kêr, Eris, and

Kudoimos mingle in the crowd. A third space upon the shield depicts

the incidents of peaceful labour--the ploughshare passing through the

field, of enameled black metal behind it, and golden before; the cup

of mead held out to the ploughman when he reaches the end of the

furrow; the reapers with their sheaves; the king standing in silent

pleasure among them, intent upon his staff. There are the labourers

in the vineyard in minutest detail; stakes of silver on which the

vines hang; the dark trench about it, and one pathway through the

midst; the whole complete and distinct, in variously coloured metal.

All things and living creatures are in their places--the cattle

coming to water to the sound of the herdsman's pipe, various music,

the rushes by the water-side, a lion-hunt with dogs, [195] the

pastures among the hills, a dance, the fair dresses of the male and

female dancers, the former adorned with swords, the latter with

crowns. It is an image of ancient life, its pleasure and business.

For the centre, as in some quaint chart of the heavens, are the earth

and the sun, the moon and constellations; and to close in all, right

round, like a frame to the picture, the great river Oceanus, forming

the rim of the shield, in some metal of dark blue.

 

Still more fascinating, perhaps, because more completely realisable

by the fancy as an actual thing--realisable as a delightful place to

pass time in--is the description of the palace of Alcinous in the

little island town of the Phaeacians, to which we are introduced in

all the liveliness and sparkle of the morning, as real as something

seen last summer on the sea-coast; although, appropriately, Ulysses

meets a goddess, like a young girl carrying a pitcher, on his way up

from the sea. Below the steep walls of the town, two projecting

jetties allow a narrow passage into a haven of stone for the ships,

into which the passer-by may look down, as they lie moored below the

roadway. In the midst is the king's house, all glittering, again,

with curiously wrought metal; its brightness is "as the brightness of

the sun or of the moon." The heart of Ulysses beats quickly when he

sees it standing amid plantations ingeniously watered, its floor and

walls of brass throughout, with continuous [196] cornice of dark