Greek Studies: A Series of Essays | Page 8

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