GREEK STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
GREEK
STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
WALTER
HORATIO PATER
CONTENTS
GREEK
STUDIES: A SERIES OF ESSAYS
WALTER
PATER
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
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
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
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
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
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
pyrigenes,+ 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
Tannhauser'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, Hye--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 Fete Champetre 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 fresca! 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