An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its beautiful marble
impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo of Mercury with his dancing
train giving over the infant Bacchus to a seated nymph of Nysa. He who
conceived you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus, lived among those
white temples which the Greeks built for the adoration of their gods,
but which remain for our adoration. He mounted that hill agleam with the
marble pillars of immortal shrines, he passed the Areopagus, and the
altar “to the unknown God”; he entered the Propylæa and gazed through
the columns of the Acropolis upon the blue Ægean. He sat in that
marmoreal amphitheatre and saw the mimes in sock and buskin take the
proscenium to the sound of lyres and flutes. Perchance ’twas while
seeing the Mercury fable treated in a choric dance in the sanded
orchestra that he composed this grouping. Perhaps he but copied it from
some play lost to us, for the Greek theatre, with its long declamations,
had more analogy with sculpture than with our agitated drama of to-day.
The legend itself is in Lucian and Apollonius. But Salpion is not the
beginning of this vase’s story. For the artist himself belonged to the
Renaissance, the scholars say; not our Renaissance, but a neo-Attic.
Salpion did but deftly reproduce the archaic traditions of the first
great period of Greek sculpture. Even in those days men’s thoughts
turned yearningly to a nobler past, and the young _prix de Rome_ who
should find inspiration in Salpion would be but imitating an imitation.
Nor is Athenian all the history this fair Attic shape has held. Much
more we know, yet much is dim. In what palace or private atrium did it
pass its first years? How did it travel to Italy? Was it exported
thither by a Greek merchant to adorn the house of some rich provincial,
or—more probably—the country seat of a noble Roman? For the ruins of
Formiæ were the place of its discovery, and mayhap Cicero himself—the
baths of whose villa some think to trace in the grounds of the Villa
Caposele—was its whilom proprietor.
But, once recovered from the wrack of the antique world, it falls into
indignity, more grievous than its long inhumation through the rise and
fall of the mediæval world. It drifts, across fields of asphodel, to the
neighbouring Gaeta—the Gibraltar of Italy, the ancient _Portus Caeta_,
itself a town-republic of as many mutations and glories—and there,
stuck in the harbour mud, performs the function of a post to which boats
are fastened. Stalwart fishermen, wearing gold earrings, push off from
it with swarthy hands; bronzed women, with silver bodkins pinning in
their black hair with long coils of many-coloured linen, throw their
ropes over its pedestal. Year after year it lies in its ooze while the
sun rises and sets in glory on the promontory of Gaeta: it reeks of tar
and the smell of fishing-nets; brine encrusts its high-reliefs. The
clatter of the port drowns the hollow cry of memory that comes when it
is struck by an oar: there is the noise of shipping bales; the crews of
forth-faring argosies heave anchor with their ancient chant; the sails
of the galleons flap; the windlasses creak. Perchance a galley-slave,
flayed and fretted by chain and lash, draws up with grappled boat-hook,
and his blood flows over into Salpion’s vase.
And then a tide of happier fortune—perhaps the same that bore the
Sardinians to the conquest of Gaeta and the end of the war for Italian
independence—washes the vase from its harbour mud and deposits it in
the cathedral of Gaeta. The altar of Bacchus returns to sacerdotal uses:
only now it is a font, and brown Italian babies are soused in it, while
nurses in gilt coronets with trailing orange ribbons stand by, radiant.
Doubtless the priests and the simple alike read an angel into Mercury,
the infant Jesus into the child of Jupiter and Semele, and into the
nymph of Nysa the Madonna whose Immaculate Conception Pio Nono
proclaimed from this very Gaeta.
Its Bacchantes are now joyous saints, divinely uplifted. And why not? Is
not the Church of Santa Costanza at Rome the very Temple of Bacchus, its
Bacchic processions in mosaic and fresco unchanged? Did not the early
Church make the Bacchic rites symbolic of the vineyard of the faith, and
turn to angels the sportive genii? Assuredly Salpion’s vase is as
Christian as the toe of Jupiter in St. Peter’s, as the Roman basilicæ
where altars have usurped the ancient judgment-seat, as the Pantheon
wrested from the gods by the saints. Nay, its Bacchic relief might have
been the very design of a Cinquecento artist for a papal patron, the
figures serving for saints, even as the Venetian ladies in all their
debonair beauty supplied Tintoretto and Titian with martyrs and holy
virgins, or as the beautiful, solemn-robed, venerable-bearded Bacchus on
another ancient vase, which stands in the Campo Santo of Pisa, served
Niccolo Pisano for the High Priest of his pulpit reliefs.
Outside Or San Michele in Florence you may admire the Four Holy
Craftsmen, early Roman Christians martyred for refusing to make Pagan
deities. They had not yet learned to baptize them by other names.
And now Salpion’s vase has reached the Museum, that cynosure of
wandering tourists. But it belongs not truly to the world of glass
cases: it has not yet reached museum-point. It is of the Exhibition: not
of the Museum proper, which should be a collection of antiquities. Other
adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For museums themselves die and
are broken up. Proteus had to change his shape; Salpion’s vase has no
need of external transformations. Will it fume with incense to some yet
unknown divinity in the United States of Africa, or serve as a spittoon
for the Fifth President of the Third World-Republic?
O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and fall, and the
tears of things! Yet Salpion’s vase remains as beautiful for baptism as
for Pagan ritual; symbol of art which persists, stable and sure as the
sky, while thoughts and faiths pass and re-form, like clouds on the
blue.
And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of changelessness,
when at most he may one day determine the law of the flux.
Everything changes but change. Yet man’s heart demands perfections—I
had almost said petrifactions—perfect laws, perfect truths, dogmas
beyond obsolescence, flawless leaders, unsullied saints, knights without
fear or reproach; throws over its idols for the least speck of clay, and
loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose absoluteness for all time
and place is surrendered.
Yet is there something touching and significant in this clinging of man
to Platonic ideals: the ruder and simpler he, the more indefectible his
blessed vision, the more shining his imaged grail. And so in this
shifting world of eternal flux his greatest emotions and cravings have
gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is named God.