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GREEK STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
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GREEK STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
WALTER HORATIO PATER
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CONTENTS
GREEK STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
WALTER PATER
London: Macmillan, 1910. (The Library Edition.)
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
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E-text Editor's Note
Preface by Charles Shadwell
A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew: 9-52
The Bacchanals of Euripides: 53-80
The Myth of Demeter and Persephone I. 81-112
The Myth of Demeter and Persephone II. 113-151
Hippolytus Veiled: A Study from Euripides: 152-186
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture--I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art:
187-223
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture--II. The Age of Graven Images: 224-
250
The Marbles of Aegina: 251-268
The Age of Athletic Prizemen: A Chapter in Greek Art: 269-end
PREFACE BY CHARLES L. SHADWELL
[1] THE present volume consists of a collection of essays by the
late Mr. Pater, all of which have already been given to the public in
various Magazines; and it is owing to the kindness of the several
proprietors of those Magazines that they can now be brought together
in a collected shape. It will, it is believed, be felt, that their
value is considerably enhanced by their appearance in a single
volume, where they can throw light upon one another, and exhibit by
their connexion a more complete view of the scope and purpose of Mr.
Pater in dealing with the art and literature of the ancient world.
The essays fall into two distinct groups, one dealing with the
subjects of Greek mythology and Greek poetry, the other with the
history of Greek sculpture and Greek architecture. But these two
groups are not wholly distinct; they mutually illustrate one another,
and serve to enforce Mr. Pater's conception of the essential [2]
unity, in all its many-sidedness, of the Greek character. The god
understood as the "spiritual form" of the things of nature is not
only the key-note of the "Study of Dionysus"* and "The Myth of
Demeter and Persephone,"* but reappears as contributing to the
interpretation of the growth of Greek sculpture.* Thus, though in
the bibliography of his writings, the two groups are separated by a
considerable interval, there is no change of view; he had already
reached the centre of the problem, and, the secret once gained, his
mode of treatment of the different aspects of Greek life and thought
is permanent and consistent.
The essay on "The Myth of Demeter and Persephone" was originally
prepared as two lectures, for delivery, in 1875, at the Birmingham
and Midland Institute. These lectures were published in the
Fortnightly Review, in Jan. and Feb. 1876. The "Study of Dionysus"
appeared in the same Review in Dec. 1876. "The Bacchanals of
Euripides" must have been written about the same time, as a sequel to
the "Study of Dionysus"; for, in 1878, Mr. Pater revised the four
essays, with the intention, apparently, of publishing them
collectively in a volume, an intention afterwards abandoned. [3] The
text now printed has, except that of "The Bacchanals," been taken
from proofs then set up, further corrected in manuscript. "The
Bacchanals," written long before, was not published until 1889, when
it appeared in Macmillan's Magazine for May. It was reprinted,
without alteration, prefixed to Dr. Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae.
"Hippolytus Veiled" first appeared in August 1889, in Macmillan's
Magazine. It was afterwards rewritten, but with only a few
substantial alterations, in Mr. Pater's own hand, with a view,
probably, of republishing it with other essays. This last revise has
been followed in the text now printed.
The papers on Greek sculpture* are all that remain of a series which,
if Mr. Pater had lived, would, probably, have grown into a still more
important work. Such a work would have included one or more essays
on Phidias and the Parthenon, of which only a fragment, though an
important fragment, can be found amongst his papers; and it was to
have been prefaced by an Introduction to Greek Studies, only a page
or two of which was ever written.
[4] This is not the place to speak of Mr. Pater's private virtues,
the personal charm of his character, the brightness of his talk, the
warmth of his friendship, the devotion of his family life. But a few
words may be permitted on the value of the work by which he will be
known to those who never saw him.
Persons only superficially acquainted, or by hearsay, with his
writings, are apt to sum up his merits as a writer by saying that he
was a master, or a consummate master of style; but those who have
really studied what he wrote do not need to be told that his
distinction does not lie in his literary grace alone, his fastidious
choice of language, his power of word-painting, but in the depth and
seriousness of his studies. That the amount he has produced, in a
literary life of thirty years, is not greater, is one proof among
many of the spirit in which he worked. His genius was "an infinite
capacity for taking pains." That delicacy of insight, that gift of
penetrating into the heart of things, that subtleness of
interpretation, which with him seems an instinct, is the outcome of
hard, patient, conscientious study. If he had chosen, he might,
without difficulty, have produced a far greater body of work of less
value; and from a worldly point of view, he would have been wise.
Such was not his understanding [5] of the use of his talents. Cui
multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. Those who wish to
understand the spirit in which he worked, will find it in this
volume. C.L.S.
Oct. 1894.
NOTES
2. *See p. 34.
2. *See p. 100.
2. *See pp. 220, 254.
3. *"The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture" was published in the
Fortnightly Review, Feb. and March 1880; "The Marbles of Aegina" in
the same Review in April. "The Age of Athletic Prizemen" was
published in the Contemporary Review in February of the present year.
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS:
THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW
[9] WRITERS on mythology speak habitually of the religion of the
Greeks. In thus speaking, they are really using a misleading
expression, and should speak rather of religions; each race and class
of Greeks--the Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers--having
had a religion of its own, conceived of the objects that came nearest
to it and were most in its thoughts, and the resulting usages and
ideas never having come to have a precisely harmonised system, after
the analogy of some other religions. The religion of Dionysus is the
religion of people who pass their lives among the vines. As the
religion of Demeter carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads
of Greece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive race, in the
furrow and beside the granary; so the religion of Dionysus carries us
back to its vineyards, and is a monument of the ways and thoughts of
people whose days go by beside the winepress, and [10] under the
green and purple shadows, and whose material happiness depends on the
crop of grapes. For them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a
little Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of life, and
was a complete religion, a sacred representation or interpretation of
the whole human experience, modified by the special limitations, the
special privileges of insight or suggestion, incident to their
peculiar mode of existence.
Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the scope of the
religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks who lived in it, all it
represented to them by way of one clearly conceived yet complex
symbol, let him reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and
expression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of
the whole body of existing poetry; how many fascinating trains of
reflexion, what colour and substance would therewith have been
deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more aweful
associations of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with
all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine. That supposed
loss is but an imperfect measure of all that the name of Dionysus
recalled to the Greek mind, under a single imaginable form, an
outward body of flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, as
its animating soul, a whole world of thoughts, surmises, greater and
less experiences.
[11] The student of the comparative science of religions finds in the
religion of Dionysus one of many modes of that primitive tree-worship
which, growing out of some universal instinctive belief that trees
and flowers are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost
everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, enshrined in legend
or custom, often graceful enough, as if the delicate beauty of the
object of worship had effectually taken hold on the fancy of the
worshipper. Shelley's Sensitive Plant shows in what mists of
poetical reverie such feeling may still float about a mind full of
modern lights, the feeling we too have of a life in the green world,
always ready to assert its claim over our sympathetic fancies. Who
has not at moments felt the scruple, which is with us always
regarding animal life, following the signs of animation further
still, till one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of
flower or leaf?
And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude
and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic,
imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of
Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate
the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for
certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible voices; they could
believe in the transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint
and hyacinth; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid [12] are but a
fossilised form of one morsel here and there, from a whole world of
transformation, with which their nimble fancy was perpetually
playing. "Together with them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite,
of the Hamadryads, the nymphs which animate the forest trees, "with
them, at the moment of their birth, grew up out of the soil, oak-tree
or pine, fair, flourishing among the mountains. And when at last the
appointed hour of their death has come, first of all, those fair
trees are dried up; the bark perishes from around them, and the
branches fall away; and therewith the soul of them deserts the light
of the sun."+
These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it with interchange of
sun and shade. They bathe, they dance, they sing songs of
enchantment, so that those who seem oddly in love with nature, and
strange among their fellows, are still said to be nympholepti; above
all, they are weavers or spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest
fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured threads, the foliage of the
trees, the petals of flowers, the skins of the fruit, the long thin
stalks on which the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer
compares to them, in their constant motion, the maids who sit
spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs of Naxos, where the
grape-skin is darkest, weave for him a purple robe. Only, the ivy is
never transformed, is visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing
the [13] dark outline of its leaves close upon the firm, white, quite
human flesh of the god's forehead.
In its earliest form, then, the religion of Dionysus presents us with
the most graceful phase of this graceful worship, occupying a place
between the ruder fancies of half-civilised people concerning life in
flower or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of the
Sensitive Plant. He is the soul of the individual vine, first; the
young vine at the house-door of the newly married, for instance, as
the vine-grower stoops over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet
animal or a little child; afterwards, the soul of the whole species,
the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines, as
the higher intelligence, brooding more deeply over things, pursues,
in thought, the generation of sweetness and strength in the veins of
the tree, the transformation of water into wine, little by little;
noting all the influences upon it of the heaven above and the earth
beneath; and shadowing forth, in each pause of the process, an
intervening person--what is to us but the secret chemistry of nature
being to them the mediation of living spirits. So they passed on to
think of Dionysus (naming him at last from the brightness of the sky
and the moisture of the earth) not merely as the soul of the vine,
but of all that life in flowing things of which the vine is the
symbol, because its most emphatic example. At Delos he bears a son,
from whom [14] in turn spring the three mysterious sisters Oeno,
Spermo, and Elais, who, dwelling in the island, exercise respectively
the gifts of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and wine.
In the Bacchae of Euripides, he gives his followers, by miracle,
honey and milk, and the water gushes for them from the smitten rock.
He comes at last to have a scope equal to that of Demeter, a realm as
wide and mysterious as hers; the whole productive power of the earth
is in him, and the explanation of its annual change. As some embody
their intuitions of that power in corn, so others in wine. He is the
dispenser of the earth's hidden wealth, giver of riches through the
vine, as Demeter through the grain. And as Demeter sends the airy,
dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptolemus to bear her
gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus goes on his eastern journey,
with its many intricate adventures, on which he carries his gifts to
every people.
A little Olympus outside the greater, I said, of Dionysus and his
companions; he is the centre of a cycle, the hierarchy of the
creatures of water and sunlight in many degrees; and that fantastic
system of tree-worship places round him, not the fondly whispering
spirits of the more graceful inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs
of the poplar and the pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening
between the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the grosser,
less human [15] spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more
coarse and sluggish sorts of vegetable strength, the fig, the reed,
the ineradicable weed-things which will attach themselves, climbing
about the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot stones. For
as Dionysus, the spiritual form of the vine, is of the highest human
type, so the fig-tree and the reed have animal souls, mistakeable in
the thoughts of a later, imperfectly remembering age, for mere
abstractions of animal nature; Snubnose, and Sweetwine, and Silenus,
the oldest of them all, so old that he has come to have the gift of
prophecy.
Quite different from them in origin and intent, but confused with
them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his
children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the
uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but
a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life
there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and
orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness
in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run,
in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to
startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and
solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan
first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.
Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which [16] is so profound in
the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, the foldings of the hills, the
leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the
heights, "the bird, which among the petals of many-flowered spring,
pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song," "the crocus
and the hyacinth disorderly mixed in the deep grass"+--things which
the religion of Dionysus loves--Pan joins the company of the Satyrs.
Amongst them, they give their names to insolence and mockery, and the
finer sorts of malice, to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the
best spirits have found in them also a certain human pathos, as in
displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men, in their very
roughness, than the noble and delicate person of the vine; dubious
creatures, half-way between the animal and human kinds, speculating
wistfully on their being, because not wholly understanding themselves
and their place in nature; as the animals seem always to have this
expression to some noticeable degree in the presence of man. In the
later school of Attic sculpture they are treated with more and more
of refinement, till in some happy moment Praxiteles conceived a
model, often repeated, which concentrates this sentiment of true
humour concerning them; a model of dainty natural ease in posture,
but with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods are used
to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble of youth, you might wish
for a moment [17] to smoothe away, puckering the forehead a little,
between the pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal
strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of brute nature are
subordinated, or disappear; and at last, Robetta, a humble Italian
engraver of the fifteenth century, entering into the Greek fancy
because it belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most
exquisite form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom their
mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck-
noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover,
you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those
hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at
her side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or
weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful
Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn, steps across a
country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely to her, with a child's
peevish trouble in its face, and its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs
folded over together, precisely after the manner of a little child.
There is one element in the conception of Dionysus, which his
connexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being one of them, and with Pan,
from whom the flute passed to all the shepherds of Theocritus, alike
illustrates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species of
music. One form of that wilder vegetation, of which the Satyr race
is the soul made visible, is the reed, which [18] the creature plucks
and trims into musical pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over
all the music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over all the
music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the ideas of water and
of vegetable life are brought close together, natural property,
therefore, of the spirit of life in the green sap. I said that the
religion of Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete
religion, a complete sacred representation and interpretation of the
whole of life; and as, in his relation to the vine, he fills for them
the place of Demeter, is the life of the earth through the grape as
she through the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in his
relation to the reed, he fills for them the place of Apollo; he is
the inherent cause of music and poetry; he inspires; he explains the
phenomena of enthusiasm, as distinguished by Plato in the Phaedrus,
the secrets of possession by a higher and more energetic spirit than
one's own, the gift of self-revelation, of passing out of oneself
through words, tones, gestures. A winged Dionysus, venerated at
Amyclae, was perhaps meant to represent him thus, as the god of
enthusiasm, of the rising up on those spiritual wings, of which also
we hear something in the Phaedrus of Plato.
The artists of the Renaissance occupied themselves much with the
person and the story of Dionysus; and Michelangelo, in a work still
remaining in Florence, in which he essayed [19] with success to
produce a thing which should pass with the critics for a piece of
ancient sculpture, has represented him in the fulness, as it seems,
of this enthusiasm, an image of delighted, entire surrender to
transporting dreams. And this is no subtle after-thought of a later
age, but true to certain finer movements of old Greek sentiment,
though it may seem to have waited for the hand of Michelangelo before
it attained complete realisation. The head of Ion leans, as they
recline at the banquet, on the shoulder of Charmides; he mutters in
his sleep of things seen therein, but awakes as the flute-players
enter, whom Charmides has hired for his birthday supper. The soul of
Callias, who sits on the other side of Charmides, flashes out; he
counterfeits, with life-like gesture, the personal tricks of friend
or foe; or the things he could never utter before, he finds words for
now; the secrets of life are on his lips. It is in this loosening of
the lips and heart, strictly, that Dionysus is the Deliverer,
Eleutherios; and of such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain
sense, an older patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi, the
centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion of Apollo, his claim
always maintained itself; and signs are not wanting that Apollo was
but a later comer there. There, under his later reign, hard by the
golden image of Apollo himself, near the sacred tripod on which the
Pythia sat to prophesy, was to be seen a strange object--a sort [20]
of coffin or cinerary urn with the inscription, "Here lieth the body
of Dionysus, the son of Semele." The pediment of the great temple
was divided between them--Apollo with the nine Muses on that side,
Dionysus, with perhaps three times three Graces, on this. A third of
the whole year was held sacred to him; the four winter months were
the months of Dionysus; and in the shrine of Apollo itself he was
worshipped with almost equal devotion.
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.