Greek Studies A Series of Essays 2

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 2

The religion of Dionysus takes us back, then, into that old Greek

life of the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much

there as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's

mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo Santo at Pisa-

-the family of Noah presented among all the circumstances of a Tuscan

vineyard, around the press from which the first wine is flowing, a

painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in decay, and

not without its solemn touch of biblical symbolism. For differences,

we detect in that primitive life, and under that Greek sky, a nimbler

play of fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all things with

personal aspect and incident, and a certain mystical apprehension,

now almost departed, of unseen powers beyond the material veil of

things, corresponding to the exceptional vigour and variety of the

Greek organisation. This peasant life lies, in unhistoric time,

behind the definite forms with which poetry and a refined [21]

priesthood afterwards clothed the religion of Dionysus; and the mere

scenery and circumstances of the vineyard have determined many things

in its development. The noise of the vineyard still sounds in some

of his epithets, perhaps in his best-known name--Iacchus, Bacchus.

The masks suspended on base or cornice, so familiar an ornament in

later Greek architecture, are the little faces hanging from the

vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds. That garland of

ivy, the aesthetic value of which is so great in the later imagery of

Dionysus and his descendants, the leaves of which, floating from his

hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and Tintoret, was

actually worn on the head for coolness; his earliest and most sacred

images were wrought in the wood of the vine. The people of the

vineyard had their feast, the little or country Dionysia, which still

lived on, side by side with the greater ceremonies of a later time,

celebrated in December, the time of the storing of the new wine. It

was then that the potters' fair came, calpis and amphora, together

with lamps against the winter, laid out in order for the choice of

buyers; for Keramus, the Greek Vase, is a son of Dionysus, of wine

and of Athene, who teaches men all serviceable and decorative art.

Then the goat was killed, and its blood poured out at the root of the

vines; and Dionysus literally drank the blood of goats; and, being

Greeks, with quick and mobile sympathies, [22] deisidaimones,+

"superstitious," or rather "susceptible of religious impressions,"

some among them, remembering those departed since last year, add yet

a little more, and a little wine and water for the dead also;

brooding how the sense of these things might pass below the roots, to

spirits hungry and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes. But the

gaiety, that gaiety which Aristophanes in the Acharnians has depicted

with so many vivid touches, as a thing of which civil war had

deprived the villages of Attica, preponderates over the grave. The

travelling country show comes round with its puppets; even the slaves

have their holiday;* the mirth becomes excessive; they hide their

faces under grotesque masks of bark, or stain them with wine-lees, or

potters' crimson even, like the old rude idols painted red; and carry

in midnight procession such rough symbols of the productive force of

nature as the women and children had best not look upon; which will

be frowned upon, and refine themselves, or disappear, in the feasts

of cultivated Athens.

 

Of the whole story of Dionysus, it was the episode of his marriage

with Ariadne about which ancient art concerned itself oftenest, and

with most effect. Here, although the antiquarian [23] may still

detect circumstances which link the persons and incidents of the

legend with the mystical life of the earth, as symbols of its annual

change, yet the merely human interest of the story has prevailed over

its earlier significance; the spiritual form of fire and dew has

become a romantic lover. And as a story of romantic love, fullest

perhaps of all the motives of classic legend of the pride of life, it

survived with undiminished interest to a later world, two of the

greatest masters of Italian painting having poured their whole power

into it; Titian with greater space of ingathered shore and mountain,

and solemn foliage, and fiery animal life; Tintoret with profounder

luxury of delight in the nearness to each other, and imminent

embrace, of glorious bodily presences; and both alike with consummate

beauty of physical form. Hardly less humanised is the Theban legend

of Dionysus, the legend of his birth from Semele, which, out of the

entire body of tradition concerning him, was accepted as central by

the Athenian imagination. For the people of Attica, he comes from

Boeotia, a country of northern marsh and mist, but from whose sombre,

black marble towns came also the vine, the musical reed cut from its

sedges, and the worship of the Graces, always so closely connected

with the religion of Dionysus. "At Thebes alone," says Sophocles,

"mortal women bear immortal gods." His mother is the daughter of

Cadmus, himself marked out by [24] many curious circumstances as the

close kinsman of the earth, to which he all but returns at last, as

the serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer sense lingering

there of the affinity of man with the dust from whence he came.

Semele, an old Greek word, as it seems, for the surface of the earth,

the daughter of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus, desires to see her lover in

the glory with which he is seen by the immortal Hera. He appears to

her in lightning. But the mortal may not behold him and live.

Semele gives premature birth to the child Dionysus; whom, to preserve

it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in a part of his thigh, the

child returning into the loins of its father, whence in due time it

is born again. Yet in this fantastic story, hardly less than in the

legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has become a story of human

persons, with human fortunes, and even more intimately human appeal

to sympathy; so that Euripides, pre-eminent as a poet of pathos,

finds in it a subject altogether to his mind. All the interest now

turns on the development of its points of moral or sentimental

significance; the love of the immortal for the mortal, the

presumption of the daughter of man who desires to see the divine form

as it is; on the fact that not without loss of sight, or life itself,

can man look upon it. The travail of nature has been transformed

into the pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the

pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as

Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its

enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest,

the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite

sacred objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image

which fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-flash, and

which the piety of a later age covered with plates of brass; the Ivy-

Fountain near Thebes, the water of which was so wonderfully bright

and sweet to drink, where the nymphs bathed the new-born child; the

grave of Semele, in a sacred enclosure grown with ancient vines,

where some volcanic heat or flame was perhaps actually traceable,

near the lightning-struck ruins of her supposed abode.

 

Yet, though the mystical body of the earth is forgotten in the human

anguish of the mother of Dionysus, the sense of his essence of fire

and dew still lingers in his most sacred name, as the son of Semele,

Dithyrambus. We speak of a certain wild music in words or rhythm as

dithyrambic, like the dithyrambus, that is, the wild choral-singing

of the worshippers of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems to have been,

in the first instance, the name, not of the hymn, but of the god to

whom the hymn is sung; and, through a tangle of curious etymological

speculations as to the precise derivation of this name, one thing

seems clearly visible, that it commemorates, namely, the double birth

of the vine-god; that [26] he is born once and again; his birth,

first of fire, and afterwards of dew; the two dangers that beset him;

his victory over two enemies, the capricious, excessive heats and

colds of spring.

 

He is pyrigenês,+ then, fire-born, the son of lightning; lightning

being to light, as regards concentration, what wine is to the other

strengths of the earth. And who that has rested a hand on the

glittering silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes

of sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is out of the bitter

salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most

curious virtues. The mother faints and is parched up by the heat

which brings the child to the birth; and it pierces through, a wonder

of freshness, drawing its everlasting green and typical coolness out

of the midst of the ashes; its own stem becoming at last like a

tangled mass of tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as

fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry,

of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense

blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English

gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the leafless

twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's

rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when

Tannhäuser's repentance is accepted.

 

And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of which he was born

would destroy him in [27] his turn, as it withered up his mother; a

second danger comes; from this the plant is protected by the

influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky,

in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is born again, its

second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hyé--the Dew.

The nursery, where Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in

Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but

really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of

fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside,

nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of

the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain

it from below--the Hyades, those first leaping maenads, who, as the

springs become rain-clouds, go up to heaven among the stars, and

descend again, as dew or shower, upon it; so that the religion of

Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, but also with

ancient water-worship, the worship of the spiritual forms of springs

and streams. To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea,

the original of all rain and springs, whence, in early summer, the

women of Elis and Argos were wont to call him, with the singing of a

hymn. And again, in thus commemorating Dionysus as born of the dew,

the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of water.

For not the heat only, but its solace--the freshness of the [28] cup-

-this too was felt by those people of the vineyard, whom the prophet

Melampus had taught to mix always their wine with water, and with

whom the watering of the vines became a religious ceremony; the very

dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the stream. And

who that has ever felt the heat of a southern country does not know

this poetry, the motive of the loveliest of all the works attributed

to Giorgione, the Fête Champêtre in the Louvre; the intense

sensations, the subtle and far-reaching symbolisms, which, in these

places, cling about the touch and sound and sight of it? Think of

the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with the delicate

ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening; of the sound of the

fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into the houses of

Venice, on summer mornings; of the cry Acqua frésca! at Padua or

Verona, when the people run to buy what they prize, in its rare

purity, more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite

appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets, the very beggars,

one thinks, might exhaust all the philosophy of the epicurean.

 

Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers' god, the spiritual

form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous representations of Dionysus

in later art and poetry--the Bacchanals of Euripides, the statuary of

the school of Praxiteles--a multitude of literary allusions and local

[29] customs carry us back to this world of vision unchecked by

positive knowledge, in which the myth is begotten among a primitive

people, as they wondered over the life of the thing their hands

helped forward, till it became for them a kind of spirit, and their

culture of it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we see him in art and

poetry, is the projected __EXPRESSION__ of the ways and dreams of this

primitive people, brooded over and harmonised by the energetic Greek

imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being,

precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things

naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of

waters, for the human soul a body of flowers; welding into something

like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man's

experiences of a given object, or series of objects--all their

outward qualities, and the visible facts regarding them--all the

hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen

forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places.

 

Dionysus came later than the other gods to the centres of Greek life;

and, as a consequence of this, he is presented to us in an earlier

stage of development than they; that element of natural fact which is

the original essence of all mythology being more unmistakeably

impressed upon us here than in other myths. Not the least

interesting point in the study of him is, that he illustrates very

clearly, not only the [30] earlier, but also a certain later

influence of this element of natural fact, in the development of the

gods of Greece. For the physical sense, latent in it, is the clue,

not merely to the original signification of the incidents of the

divine story, but also to the source of the peculiar imaginative

__EXPRESSION__ which its persons subsequently retain, in the forms of the

higher Greek sculpture. And this leads me to some general thoughts

on the relation of Greek sculpture to mythology, which may help to

explain what the function of the imagination in Greek sculpture

really was, in its handling of divine persons.

 

That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive intention, the open

sky, across which the thunder sometimes sounds, and from which the

rain descends--is a fact which not only explains the various stories

related concerning him, but determines also the __EXPRESSION__ which he

retained in the work of Pheidias, so far as it is possible to recall

it, long after the growth of those later stories had obscured, for

the minds of his worshippers, his primary signification. If men

felt, as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die without

having seen the Zeus of Olympia; that was because they experienced

the impress there of that which the eye and the whole being of man

love to find above him; and the genius of Pheidias had availed to

shed, upon the gold and ivory of the physical form, the blandness,

the breadth, the smile of the open sky; the mild [31] heat of it

still coming and going, in the face of the father of all the children

of sunshine and shower; as if one of the great white clouds had

composed itself into it, and looked down upon them thus, out of the

midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and

fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong,

who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and

hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great

Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously

apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and

really human, characteristics.

 

Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The oracle of Dodona, with

its dim grove of oaks, and sounding instruments of brass to husband

the faintest whisper in the leaves, was but a great consecration of

that sense of a mysterious will, of which people still feel, or seem

to feel, the __EXPRESSION__, in the motions of the wind, as it comes and

goes, and which makes it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere symbol

of the spirit within us. For Zeus was, indeed, the god of the winds

also; Aeolus, their so-called god, being only his mortal minister, as

having come, by long study of them, through signs in the fire and the

like, to have a certain communicable skill regarding them, in

relation to practical uses. Now, suppose a Greek sculptor to have

proposed to himself to present [32] to his worshippers the image of

this Zeus of Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of the

air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative sculptor, working as

Pheidias worked, the very soul of those moving, sonorous creatures

would have passed through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the

image; as they can actually pass into the visible __EXPRESSION__ of those

who have drunk deeply of them; as we may notice, sometimes, in our

walks on mountain or shore.

 

Victory again--Niké--associated so often with Zeus--on the top of his

staff, on the foot of his throne, on the palm of his extended hand--

meant originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great victory

of the sky, the triumph of morning over darkness. But that physical

morning of her origin has its ministry to the later aesthetic sense

also. For if Niké, when she appears in company with the mortal, and

wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide the horses,

or whom she crowns with her garland of parsley or bay, or whose names

she writes on a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the

old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in her clear-set

eyes, and the dew of the morning still clings to her wings and her

floating hair.

 

The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its

handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of

natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense

of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to

arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human

__EXPRESSION__. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the

genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted

in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable

stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to

our physical theory of our life, which never seems to fade, dream

over it as we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles with

their messages to human intelligence from birds and springs of water,

or vapours of the earth, were a witness to that connexion. Their

story went back, as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in

the very places where their later life was lived, to a past,

stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory, in which

heaven and earth mingled; to those who were sons and daughters of

stars, and streams, and dew; to an ancestry of grander men and women,

actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the qualities and

influences of those objects; and we can hardly over-estimate the

influence on the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion with

the natural world, at not so remote a date, and of the solemnising

power exercised thereby over their thoughts. In this intensely

poetical situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of the age

of Pericles, found themselves; it was as if the actual roads on which

men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible wonderland.

 

[34] With such habitual impressions concerning the body, the physical

nature of man, the Greek sculptor, in his later day, still free in

imagination, through the lingering influence of those early dreams,

may have more easily infused into human form the sense of sun, or

lightning, or cloud, to which it was so closely akin, the spiritual

flesh allying itself happily to mystical meanings, and readily

expressing seemingly unspeakable qualities. But the human form is a

limiting influence also; and in proportion as art impressed human

form, in sculpture or in the drama, on the vaguer conceptions of the

Greek mind, there was danger of an escape from them of the free

spirit of air, and light, and sky. Hence, all through the history of

Greek art, there is a struggle, a Streben, as the Germans say,

between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating essence

it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid

world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat

formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which

is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to

speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself

has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire,

water, cold, sound--attesting a deep susceptibility to the

impressions of those things--yet with edges, most often, melting into

each other. On the other hand, there was that limiting, controlling

tendency, [35] identified with the Dorian influence in the history of

the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and wholly self-conscious

intelligence; bent on impressing everywhere, in the products of the

imagination, the definite, perfectly conceivable human form, as the

only worthy subject of art; less in sympathy with the mystical

genealogies of Hesiod, than with the heroes of Homer, ending in the

entirely humanised religion of Apollo, the clearly understood

humanity of the old Greek warriors in the marbles of Aegina. The

representation of man, as he is or might be, became the aim of

sculpture, and the achievement of this the subject of its whole

history; one early carver had opened the eyes, another the lips, a

third had given motion to the feet; in various ways, in spite of the

retention of archaic idols, the genuine human __EXPRESSION__ had come,

with the truthfulness of life itself.

 

These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and were harmonised in

the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture--of Aeschylus, in

the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which the

Greek imagination became the dwelling-place; beautiful, perfectly

understood human outlines, embodying a strange, delightful, lingering

sense of clouds and water and sun. Such a world, the world of really

imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see, reflected in many a humble

vase or battered coin, in Bacchante, and Centaur, and Amazon; [36]

evolved out of that "vasty deep"; with most command, in the

consummate fragments of the Parthenon; not, indeed, so that he who

runs may read, the gifts of Greek sculpture being always delicate,

and asking much of the receiver; but yet visible, and a pledge to us,

of creative power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence, which,

without that material pledge, had but vaguely haunted the fields and

groves.

 

This, then, was what the Greek imagination did for men's sense and

experience of natural forces, in Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon; for

men's sense and experience of their own bodily qualities--swiftness,

energy, power of concentrating sight and hand and foot on a momentary

physical act--in the close hair, the chastened muscle, the perfectly

poised attention of the quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of

ethical qualities--restless idealism, inward vision, power of

presence through that vision in scenes behind the experience of

ordinary men--in the idealised Alexander.

 

To illustrate this function of the imagination, as especially

developed in Greek art, we may reflect on what happens with us in the

use of certain names, as expressing summarily, this name for you and

that for me--Helen, Gretchen, Mary--a hundred associations, trains of

sound, forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of degrees, which,

through a very wide and full experience, they have the power of

bringing with [37] them; in which respect, such names are but

revealing instances of the whole significance, power, and use of

language in general. Well,--the mythical conception, projected at

last, in drama or sculpture, is the name, the instrument of the

identification, of the given matter,--of its unity in variety, its

outline or definition in mystery; its spiritual form, to use again

the __EXPRESSION__ I have borrowed from William Blake--form, with hands,

and lips, and opened eyelids--spiritual, as conveying to us, in that,

the soul of rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.

 

To illustrate this, think what the effect would be, if you could

associate, by some trick of memory, a certain group of natural

objects, in all their varied perspective, their changes of colour and

tone in varying light and shade, with the being and image of an

actual person. You travelled through a country of clear rivers and

wide meadows, or of high windy places, or of lowly grass and willows,

or of the Lady of the Lake; and all the complex impressions of these

objects wound themselves, as a second animated body, new and more

subtle, around the person of some one left there, so that they no

longer come to recollection apart from each other. Now try to

conceive the image of an actual person, in whom, somehow, all those

impressions of the vine and its fruit, as the highest type of the