PATER'S GREEK STUDIES" THIS posthumous volume is devoted to ancient
Greece. The essays here collected (to quote the editor's preface) " 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 unity, in all its many-sidedness, of the Greek character." To the student of mathetics, bent upon interpret- ing the idea of Beauty and its various expression in art, no other people and no other period perhaps offer so much com- pleted material. Mr. Pater's name is, for many readers, associated more especially with that medieval art and thought which he expounded, with original and illuminating insight, in his earliest volume, The Renaissance. But the central ideas which guided him in those studies were won quite as much from the ancient world as from the medimval. We may venture even to say that the artistic achievement of the Middle Ages—perfect often in its many forms, and yet veiled and clouded with the shadows of mysticism and symbolism— gives up its secrete most readily to the critic who has imbued his mind with the principles of the simpler and purer art of the Greeks.
The second set of essays in this book "are all that remain of a series which, if Mr. Pater had lived, would, probably, have grown into a still more important work." Each paper is, however, complete in itself ; and the author's real bent was scarcely towards the composition of a continuous and com- plete history of any art. What he has here actually done is to present (following the historical order) a series of fine "appre- ciations " of the chief phases in the evolution of Greek sculp- ture. He does not compete with the " standard " histories, though he has evidently read them carefully, and uses their results to assist him in his own direct study of the existing remains. The following passage, from the paper on " The Marbles of .Egina," exemplifies his method of delicate, pic- turesque, and vivifying criticism, which, while interpreting the ideal significance of a work of art, never loses sight of technical considerations of form and material :- " And although the actual material of these figures is marble, its coolness and massiveness suiting the growing severity of Greek thought, yet they have the irreminiscences of work in bronze, in a certain slimness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness of poise in their grouping, which remains in the memory as a peculiar note of their style ; the possibility of such easy and graceful balancing being one of the privileges or opportunities of statuary in cast metal, of that hollow casting in which the whole weight of the work is so much less than that of a work of equal size in marble, and which permits so much wider and freer a disposition of the parts about its centre of gravity The seemingly stronger hand which wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest in the rigid expres- sion of the truth of pain, in the mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet tender,' when he Speaks of the flesh of his heroes. And together with this touch- ing power there is also in this work the effect of an early sim- plicity, the charm of its limitations. For as art which has passed its prime has sometimes the charm of an absolute refinement in taste and workmanship, so immature art also, as we now see, has its own attractiveness in the ttaiveto, the freshness of spirit, which finds power and interest in simple motives of feeling, and in the freshness of hand, which has a sense of enjoyment in mechanical processes still performed unmechanically, in the spending of care and intelligence on every touch. As regards Italian art, the sculpture and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic value of this naiseta is now well understood ; but it has its value in Greek sculpture also Effects of this we may note in that sculpture of .gins, not merely in the sim- plicity, or monotony even, of the whole composition, and in the exact and formal correspondenee of one gable to the other, but in the simple readiness with which the designer makes the two second spearmen kneel, against the proba- bility of the thing, so as just to fill the space he has to com- pose in. The profiles are still not yet of the fully developed Greek type, but have a somewhat sharp prominence of nose and thin, as in Etrurian design, in the early sculpture of Cyprus, and
• Greek Studies. By Waler Pater. Prepared for the Press by Charles L. ithadwall. Loudon: Macmillan and 0a
in the earlier Greek vases ; and the general proportions of the body in relation to the shoulders are still somewhat archaically slim. But then the workman is at work in dry earnestness, with a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish painter ; he communicates to us his still youthful sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome. And withal, these figures have in them a true expression of life, of animation. In this monument of Greek chivalry, pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Eginetan workman is, at it were, the Chaucer of Greek sculpture."
But it is in the first set of essays that the writer's peculiar faculty for imaginative criticism finds the most striking expres- sion. " The Study of Dionysus " and " The Myth of Demeter and Persephone " are a brilliant effort to revivify and recreate for the modern reader those old fundamental stories of re- ligion which, in their essence always mysterious, were yet in a sense so real, and meant so much, to the Greek mind. Every one has felt the difficulty of comprehending these in- tangible shadow-pictures (as they now seem) of the Greek re- ligion ; every one, that is to say, who has turned his attention to Greek art and literature, which are pervaded with allusion to them. Mr. Pater, taking two of the most profound of these myths for his theme, has excellently exemplified one way of interpreting their meaning. It is not the strait way of modern " comparative" science ; he has not sought assistance from the " variants" of savage beliefs ; Dionysus is not assimilated to a totem in his hands, nor is Demeter explained as a comparative type. His method is simply to study the myths themselves in their authentic sources,—the extant literature and art—remains ; " as regards this story of Demeter and Persephone, what we actually possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture." It is half way or more towards grasping the significance of a myth when its leading incidents, and the aspect of its leading figures, are so skil- fully described as in this elaborate account of the "dread goddesses," drawn from Homer and all later poets, and from monuments such as the famous statues of Cnidos. But the author also attempts to unfold, in each case, the inner and spiritual meaning of the story,—to show that these concep- tions of Greek religion, " because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind." He has not neglected the suggestions of modern theorists where they are legitimate and valuable; he finds Dionysus to be "the spiritual form of fire and dew," while Demeter and Persephone symbolise " the earth, in the fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the accident and detail of the growth and decay of its children." But he employs such explanation imaginatively, not with the cold handling of modern science. He does not merely refer the myth to its origin in some aspect or phenomenon of Nature, but explains by the virtue of his own creative insight and sympathy what was essentially a spiritual and poetic process in the Greek mind. An example or two will illustrate the successful charm of his treatment. First, of Demeter, as she appears in the Homeric Hymn, " the mater dolorosa of the ancient world, with a certain latent reference, all through, to the mystical person of the earth ":—
" Her robe of dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also the blue robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it in Titian's land- scapes ; her great age is the age of the immemorial earth ; she becomes a nurse, therefore, holding Demophoon in her bosom; the folds of her garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense of Elensis, but with the natural perfume of flowers and fruit. The sweet breath with which she nourishes the child Demophoon is the warm west wind, feeding all germs of vegetable life ; her bosom, where he lies, is the bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat, reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinise too closely its secret chemistry ; it is with the earth's natural surface of varied colour that she has, in time past, given pleasure to the sun ;' the yellow hair which falls suddenly over her shoulders, at her transformation in the house of Celeus, is still partly the golden corn ; — in art and poetry she is ever the blond goddess ; tarrying in her temple, of ,which an actual hollow in the earth is the prototype, among the spicy odours of the Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit of the earth, lying hidden in its dark folds until the return of spring, among the flower-seeds and fragrant roots, like the seeds and aromatic woods hidden in the wrappings of the dead."
And again of Dionysus, the vine-god, in these passages of exquisite fancy and exquisite expression :— "He is Tvinyerit, 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 elope 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.
A type of second birth, from first to last, ho opens, in his series of annual changes, for minds on the look out for it, the hope of a possible analogy between the resurrection of nature, and something else, as yet unrealised, reserved for human souls ; and the beautiful, weeping creature, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and rejuveneacent again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of the hardness and stony dark- ness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering."
The essay on " The Bacchanals of Euripides," while it serves to give further illustration of the writer's conception of Dionysus, also does much to elucidate this beautiful but difficult work of the sophist-poet. The remaining essay, "Hippolytus Veiled : a Study from Euripides," though admirably written in parts, is over-fanciful and unduly romantic in its point of view ; it is not so much a study of Euripides' play as a set of variations on the same theme, from which the dramatist's name were best omitted. This Aphrodite, in particular, who " was just then the best-served -deity in Athens," and who, having " looked with delight " upon the young Hippolytus, " was by no means indifferent to his indifference,"—this is surely not the mysterious goddess of Euripides, but a quite modern Aphrodite of the boulevards.
These essays show Walter Pater at his best as a writer. He was first and last an azathetic critic of a high order. And
his characteristic and peculiar merit is that he can deal subtly with things that are in their nature subtle and elusive ; that he can interpret the mystical, or the suggestive, or the symbolical without losing himself or his reader in the merely vague. He has written with sincerity and feeling and felicity on topics which many a critic wisely shuns,—on the spiritual and inner meaning of a concrete work of art, the half-lights of an ancient myth, the shifting dmdal aspects of Nature; on things which it is hard to see and feel truly, harder still to convey one's vision of them to others. This was always his chosen function as a writer : and for his instru- ment he elaborated a style which has been variously praised or blamed in different quarters, but cannot fairly be denied
the merits of originality and fitness. At its worst, it is lax, involved, fatiguing; or over-ornamental, luscious, with a
tendency to preciositi. Self-conscious it is invariably. But, on the other hand, it is often flexible, graceful, incisive, and picturesque; a style altogether his own, unlike anything else in English prose, and invaluable for the work he set himself to do. It is true that his sentences and constructions are often strangely loose and incoherent, adverbs and participles dislocated, and notuinatives left hanging. But along with this looseness he has succeeded in shunning the formula, the stereotyped phrase, the unyielding mould in which so many writers straiten and deform their thought ; his epithets, how- ever loosely inserted, are in a high degree expressive and beautiful,—" the beat words," in fact, if not always "in the best order," though there is often a charm in the dislocation itself. It was a style consciously contrived to express ideas and impressions which were novel and not easy to express in regular prose; it was to a large extent an artistic experiment in language, and at its best it has achieved a singular success.
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