Chapter 5

Thus we have seen that the sculptor of the Niobe deliberately refused to embody his complete mental vision of the scene of massacre; that he selected among the attitudes and gestures and expressions suggested to him by this scene, rejected those which were inherently ugly, and accepted those which were intrinsically beautiful; and that he left out of his representation of the incidents its principal actors, because he could not have introduced them without either violating the nature of the whole composition to which he was bound, or violating the nature of the material in which he was working, and by so doing sacrificing the perfection of visible form which, being the only intrinsic quality to which his art could independently attain, was the one object of his desires and efforts. Such is the logical conclusion which we have consciously and perhaps wearisomely obtained from our analysis of the mode of conception and treatment of the Niobe group; and such the lesson which, unconsciously, vaguely, the child of our fairy tale must have learned from its marble teachers in the Vatican: That the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible. That by such artistic laws they themselves had come into existence, and that all other things which had come into existence by the same laws, were their brethren, was the secret which those statue-demons imparted to that child; the secret which enabled it to understand those symphony notes of Mozart's, when they said: "we also, the sounding ones, are the brethren of the statues; and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound or colour, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognize us, and distinguish us from all others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin; in return we will give thee happiness." And this, as we have told you, came to pass solely because the statues took the whim of bewitching that child into falling in love with Rome.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.

THE LESSON OF A BAS-RELIEF.

No Greek myth has a greater charm for our mind than that of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the first place, we are told by mythologists that it is a myth of the dawn, one of those melancholy, subdued interpretations of the eternal, hopeless separation of the beautiful light of dawn and the beautiful light of day, which forms the constantly recurring tragedy of nature, as the tremendous struggle between light and darkness forms her never-ending epic, her Iliad and Nibelungenlied. There is more of the purely artistic element in these myths of the dawn than in the sun myths. Those earliest poets, primitive peoples, were interested spectators of the great battle between day and night. The sun-hero was truly their Achilles, their Siegfried. In fighting, he fought for them. When he chained up the powers of darkness the whole earth was hopeful and triumphant; when he sank down dead, a thousand dark, vague, hideous monsters were let loose on the world, filling men's hearts with sickening terror; the solar warfare was waged for and against men. The case is quite different with respect to the dawn tragedy. If men were moved by that, it was from pure, disinterested sympathy. The dawn and the day were equally good and equally beautiful; the day loved the dawn, since it pursued her so closely, and the dawn must have loved the day in return, since she fled so slowly and reluctantly. Why, then, were they forbidden ever to meet? What mysterious fate condemned the one to die at the touch of the other--the beloved to elude the lover, the lover to kill the beloved? This sad, sympathising question, which the primitive peoples repeated vaguely and perhaps scarce consciously, day after day, century after century, at length received an answer. One answer, then another, then yet another, as fancy took more definite shapes. Yes, the dawn and the morning are a pair of lovers over whom hangs an irresistible, inscrutable fate--Cephalus and Procris, Alcestis and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice.

And this myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is, to our mind, the most charming of the tales born of that beautiful, disinterested sympathy for the dawn and the morning, the one in which the subdued, mysterious pathos of its origin is most perfectly preserved; in which no fault of infidelity or jealousy, no final remission of doom, breaks the melancholy unity of the story. In it we have the real equivalent of that gentle, melancholy fading away of light into light, of tint into tint. Orpheus loses Eurydice as the day loses the dawn, because he loves her; she has issued from Hades as the dawn has issued from darkness; she melts away beneath her lover's look even as the dawn vanishes beneath the look of the day.

The origin of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is beautiful; the myth itself, as evolved by spontaneous poetry, is still more so, and more beautiful still are the forms which have successively been lent it by the poet, the sculptor, and the musician. Its own charm adds to that of its embodiments, and the charm of its embodiments adds in return to its own; a complete circle of beautiful impressions, whose mysterious, linked power it is impossible to withstand. The first link in the chain are those lines of Virgil's, for which we would willingly give ten Æneids, those grandly simple lines, half-hidden in the sweet luxuriance of the fourth book of the _Georgics_, as the exquisitely chiselled fragment of some sylvan altar might lie half-hidden among the long grasses and flowers, beneath the flowering bays and dark ilexes, broken shadows of boughs and yellow gleams of sunlight flickering fantastically across the clear and supple forms of the sculptured marble "And already upwards returning, he had escaped all mishaps, and the given-back Eurydice was coming into the upper air, walking behind him, for Proserpina had made this condition. When, of a sudden, a madness seized on the unwily lover--pardonable, surely, if ghosts but knew how to pardon. He stood, and back on his Eurydice, already in our sunlight, he looked, forgetful, alas! and broken of will. Then was all the work undone, broken was the compact with the unkind lord, and vainly had he thrice heard the waters of hell sounding. Then she--'What madness has ruined me, wretched one, and thee, also, Orpheus? For I am called by the cruel Fates to return, and sleep closes my swimming eyes. So, farewell. I am borne away muffled in thick night, stretching forth to thee (alas, thine no longer!) my helpless hands.' She spoke, and from his sight suddenly, even as thin smoke mingles with air, disappeared; nor him, vainly clasping the shadows, and many things wishing to say, did she see again." These lines suggest a bas-relief to us, because a real bas-relief is really connected with them in our mind, and this connection led to a curious little incident in our æsthetic life, which is worth narrating. The bas-relief in question is a sufficiently obscure piece of Greek workmanship, one of those mediocre, much-degraded works of art with which Roman galleries abound, and among which, though left unnoticed by the crowd that gathers round the Apollo, or the Augustus, or the Discobolus, we may sometimes divine a repetition of some great lost work of antiquity, some feeble reflection of lost perfection. It is let into the wall of a hall of the Villa Albani, where people throng past it in search of the rigid, pseudo-Attic Antinous. And it is as simple as the verses of Virgil: merely three figures slightly raised out of the flat, blank back-ground, Eurydice between Orpheus and Hermes. The three figures stand distinctly apart and in a row. Orpheus touches Eurydice's veil, and her hand rests on his shoulder, while the other hand, drooping supine, is grasped by Hermes. There is no grouping, no embracing, no violence of gesture--nay, scarcely any gesture at all; yet for us there is in it a whole drama, the whole pathos of Virgil's lines. Eurydice has returned, she is standing beneath our sun--_jam luce sub ipsa_--but for the last time. Orpheus lets his lyre sink, his head drooping towards her--_multa volens dicere_--and holds her veil, speechless. Eurydice, her head slightly bent, raises her eyes full upon him. In that look is her last long farewell:--

Jamque vale, feror ingenti circumdata nocte, Invalidas tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas.

Behind Eurydice stands Hermes, the sad, though youthful messenger of the dead. He gently takes her hand; it is time; he would fain stay and let the parting be delayed for ever, but he cannot. Come, we must go. Eurydice feels it; she is looking for the last time at Orpheus, her head and step are prepared to turn away--_jamque vale_. Truly this sad, sympathising messenger of Hades is a beautiful thought, softening the horror of the return to death.

And we look up again at the bas-relief, the whole story of Orpheus laying firmer hold of our imagination; but as our eyes wander wistfully over the marble, they fall, for the first time, upon a scrap of paper pasted at the bottom of it, a wretched, unsightly, scarce legible rag, such as insult some of the antiques in this gallery, and on it is written:--"Antiope coi figli Anfione e Zeto." A sudden, perplexed wonder fills our mind--wonder succeeded by amusement. The bunglers, why, they must have glued the wrong label on the bas-relief. Of course! and we turn out the number of the piece in the catalogue, the solemn, portly catalogue--full of references to Fea, and Visconti, and Winckelmann. Number--yes, here it is, here it is. What, again?

"Antiope urging her sons, Amphion and Zethus, to avenge her by the murder of Dirce."

We put down the catalogue in considerable disgust. What, they don't see that that is Orpheus and Eurydice! They dare, those soulless pedants, to call _that_ Antiope with Amphion and Zethus! Ah!--and with smothered indignation we leave the gallery. Passing through the little ilex copse near the villa, the colossal bust of Winckelmann meets our eyes, the heavy, clear-featured, strong-browed head of him who first revealed the world of ancient art. And such profanation goes on, as it were, under his eyes, in that very Villa Albani which he so loved, where he first grew intimate with the antique! What would he have said to such heartless obtuseness?

We have his great work, the work which no amount of additional learning can ever supersede, because no amount of additional learning will ever enable us to feel antique beauty more keenly and profoundly than he made us feel it--we have his great work on our shelf, and as soon as we are back at home, our mind still working on Orpheus and Eurydice, we take it down and search for a reference to our bas-relief. We search all through the index in vain; then turn over the pages where it may possibly be mentioned, again in vain; no Orpheus and Eurydice. Ah! "A bas-relief at the Villa Albani"--let us see what that may be. "A bas-relief," &c., &c.--horror beyond words! The bas-relief--our bas-relief--deliberately set down as Antiope with Amphion and Zethus--set down as Antiope with Amphion and Zethus, by Winckelmann himself!

Yes, and he gravely states his reasons for so doing. The situation is evidently one of great hesitation; there is reluctance on the one hand, persuasion on the other. Moreover, the female figure is that of a mourner, of a supplicant, draped and half-veiled as it is; the figure with the lyre, in the Thracian or Thessalian costume, must necessarily be Amphion, while the other in the loose tunic of a shepherd, must as evidently be his brother, Zethus; and if we put together these facts, we cannot but conclude that the subject of the bas-relief is, as previously stated, Antiope persuading Amphion and Zethus to avenge her on Dirce.

The argument is a good one, there can be no denying it, although it is very strange that Winckelmann should not have perceived that the bas-relief represented Orpheus and Eurydice. But, after all, we ask ourselves, as the confusion in our minds gradually clears up: how do we know that this _is_ Orpheus and Eurydice, and not Antiope and her sons? How! and the answer rises up indignantly, Because we see to the contrary; because we know that it must be Orpheus and Eurydice because we feel morally persuaded that it is. But a doubt creeps up. We are morally convinced, but whence this conviction? Did we come to the bas-relief not knowing what it was, and did we then cry out, overcome by its internal evidence, that it must represent Orpheus and Eurydice? Did we ourselves examine and weigh the evidence as Winckelmann did? And we confess to ourselves that we did none of these things. But how, then, explain this intense conviction, and the emotion awakened in us by the bas-relief? Yet that emotion was genuine; and now we have, little by little, to own that we had read in a book, by M. Charles Blanc, that such and such a bas-relief at the Villa Albani represented Orpheus and Eurydice, and that we had accepted the assertion blindly, unscrutinisingly, and coming to the bas-relief with that idea, did not dream of examining into its truth. And did we not then let our mind wander off from the bas-relief to the story of Orpheus, and make a sort of variation on Virgil's poem, and mistake all this for the impression received from the bas-relief itself? May this not be the explanation of our intense conviction? It seems as if it were so. We have not only lost our sentimental pleasure in the bas-relief, but we have been caught by ourselves (most humiliating of all such positions) weaving fantastic stories out of nothing at all, decrying great critics for want of discernment, when we ourselves had shown none whatever.

It may have been childish, but it was natural to feel considerable bitterness at this discovery; you may smile, but we had lost something precious, the idea that art was beginning to say more to us than to others, the budding satisfaction of being no longer a stranger to the antique, and this loss was truly bitter; nay, in the first bitterness of the discovery, we had almost taken an aversion to the bas-relief, as people will take an aversion to the things about which they know themselves to have been foolish. However, as this feeling subsided, we began to reflect that the really worthy and dignified course would be to attain to real certainty on the subject, and finding that our recollection of the bas-relief was not so perfectly distinct as to authorise a final decision, we determined coolly to examine the work once more, and to draw our conclusions on the spot.

The following Tuesday, therefore, we started betimes for the Villa Albani, intending to have a good hour to ourselves before the arrival of the usual gaping visitors. The gallery was quite empty; we drew one of the heavy chairs robed in printed leather before the bas-relief, and settled ourselves deliberately to examine it. We were now strangely unbiassed on the subject, for the reaction against our first positive mood, and the frequent turning over one view, then the other, had left in us only a very strong critical curiosity, the desire to unravel the tangled reason of our previous unexplained conviction. Of course we found that our memory had failed in one or two particulars, that the image preserved in our mind was not absolutely faithful, but we could discover nothing capable of materially influencing our views. We looked at the bas-relief again and again; strictly speaking, there is in it nothing beyond a woman standing between two men, of whom the one touches her veil, and the other, to whom she turns her back, grasps her right hand, while her left hand rests lightly on the shoulder of the first male figure; so far there is reason for saying that the bas-relief represents either Orpheus and Eurydice, or Antiope and her sons; indeed, all that could fairly be said is that it represents a woman between two men, with one of whom she appears to be in more or less tender converse, whereas she is paying no attention to the other, who is taking her passively drooping hand. There is, however, the additional circumstance that one of the men holds a lyre and is dressed in loose trousers and mitre-like head-dress, while the other man wears only a short tunic, leaving the arms and legs bare, and his head is uncovered and shows closely-cut curly locks; the woman being entirely draped, and her head partially covered with a veil. Now, we know that this costume of trousers and mitre-shaped head-gear was that of certain semi-barbarous peoples connected with the Greeks, amongst others the Thracians and Phrygians, while the simple tunic and the close-cut locks were distinctive of Hellenic youths, especially those admitted to gymnastic training. Moreover, we happen to know that Orpheus was a Thracian, and that Hermes on the other hand, although in one capacity conductor of the souls to Hades, was also the patron divinity of the Greek ephebi, of the youths engaged in gymnastic exercises. Now, if we put together these several facts, we perceive great likelihood of these two figures--the one in the dress of a barbarian, which Orpheus is known to have been, and holding a lyre, which Orpheus is known to have played, and the other in the dress of a Greek ephebus, which Hermes is known to have worn--of these two figures really being intended for Orpheus and Hermes. At the same time, we must recollect that Amphion also is known to have worn this barbaric costume and to have played the lyre, while his brother, Zethus, is equally known to have worn the habit of the ephebus; so that Winckelmann has quite as good grounds for his assertion as we have for ours. If only the sculptor had taken the trouble to give the figure in the tunic a pair of winged sandals or a caduceus, or a winged cap; then there could remain no doubt of his being Hermes, for it is a positive fact that no one except Hermes ever had these attributes; the doubt is owing to the choice of insufficiently definite and distinctive peculiarities. But it now strikes us: all this is founded upon the supposition that we know that the barbarians wore trousers and mitres, that Orpheus was a sort of barbarian, that Greek ephebi wore tunics and short-cut hair, that Hermes was a sort of ephebus, that, moreover, he was a conductor of souls; now, supposing we knew none or only some of these facts, which we certainly should not, if classical dictionaries had not taught them us, how could we argue that this is Orpheus and that Hermes? Is the meaning of a work of Art to depend on Lempriere and Dr. William Smith? At that rate the sculptor might as well have let alone all such distinctions, and merely written under one figure _Orpheus_ or _Amphion_, whichever it might be, under the other _Hermes_ or _Zethus_; this would not have presupposed more knowledge on our part, since it seems even easier to learn the Greek alphabet than the precise attributes of various antique gods and demi-gods, and then, too, no mistake would have been possible, we should have had no choice, the figure _must_ be either Orpheus or Amphion, Hermes or Zethus, since the artist himself said so. But this would be an admission of the incapacity of the art or the artist, like the old device of writing--"This is a lion," "This is a horse;" well, but, after all, how are we able to recognise a painted lion or a horse? Is it not, thanks to previous knowledge, to our acquaintance with a live horse or live lion? if we had never seen either, could we say, "This is a lion," "That is a horse?" evidently not. But then, most people can recognise a horse or a lion, while they cannot be expected to recognise a person they have never seen, especially a purely imaginary one; the case is evidently one of degree; if we had never seen a cow, and did not know that cows are milked, we should no more understand the meaning of a representation of cow-milking than we should understand the meaning of a picture of Achilles in Scyros if we knew nothing about Achilles. The comprehension of the subject of a work of art would therefore seem to require certain previous information; the work of art would seem to be unable to tell its story itself, unless we have the key to that story. Now, this is not the case with literature; given the comprehension of the separate words, no further information is required to understand the meaning, the subject of prose or verse; Virgil's lines pre-suppose no knowledge of the story of Orpheus, they themselves give the knowledge of it. The difference, then, between the poem and the bas-relief is that the story is absolutely contained in the former, and not absolutely contained in the latter; the story of Orpheus is part of the organic whole, of the existence of the poem; the two are inseparable, since the one is formed out of the other; whereas, the story of Orpheus is separate from the organic existence of the bas-relief, it is arbitrarily connected with it, and they need not co-exist. What then is the bas-relief? A meaningless thing, to which we have wilfully attached a meaning which is not part or parcel of it--a blank sheet of paper on which we write what comes into our head, and which itself can tell us nothing.

As we look up perplexedly at the bas-relief, which, after having been as confused, has now become well nigh as blank as our mind, we are startled by hearing our name from a well-known voice behind us. A young painter stands by our side, a creature knowing or thinking very little beyond his pencils and brushes, serenely unconscious of literature and science in his complete devotion to art. A few trivial sentences are exchanged, during which we catch our friend's eye glancing at the bas-relief. "I never noticed that before," he remarks, "Do you know, I like it better than anything else in this room. Strange that I should not have noticed it before."

"It is a very interesting work," we answer; adding, with purposely feigned decision, "Of course you see that it represents Orpheus and Eurydice, not Antiope and her sons."

The painter, whose instinctive impression on the point we have thus tried to elicit, seems wholly unmoved by this remark; the fact literally passes across his mind without in the least touching it.

"Does it? Ah, what a splendid mass of drapery! That grand, round fold and those small, fine vertical ones. I should like to make a sketch of that."

A sort of veil seems suddenly to fall off our mental eyes; these simple, earnest words, this intense admiration seem to have shed new light into our mind.

This fellow, who knows or cares apparently nothing whatever about either Orpheus or Antiope, has not found the bas-relief a blank; it has spoken for him, the clear, unmistakeable language of lines and curves, of light and shade, a language needing no interpreters, no dictionaries; and it has told him the fact, the fact depending on no previous knowledge, irrefutable and eternal, that it is beautiful. And as our eyes follow his, and we listen to his simple, unaffected, unpoetical exclamations of admiration at this combination of lines, or that bend of a limb, we recognise that if poetry has its unchangeable effects, its power which, in order to be felt, requires only the comprehension of words; art also has its unchangeable effects, its power, its supreme virtue, which all can feel who have eyes and minds that can see. The bas-relief does not necessarily tell us the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as Virgil's lines do, that is not inherent in its nature as in theirs; but it tells us the fact of its beauty, and that fact is vital, eternal, and indissolubly connected with it.