Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Greek Studies: A Series of Essays




Carefully inverting the habits of her own rude childhood, she learned
to spin the wools, white and grey, to clothe and cover him
pleasantly. The spectacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at
present a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange sense
of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watching, as her own
long-deferred recreation in life, his delight in the little
delicacies she prepared to his liking--broiled kids' flesh, the red
wine, the mushrooms sought through the early dew--his hunger and
thirst so daintily satisfied, as he sat at table, like the first-born
of King Theseus, with two wax-lights and a fire at dawn or nightfall
dancing to the prattle and laughter, a bright child, never stupidly
weary. At times his very happiness would seem to her like a menace
of misfortune to come. Was there not with herself the curse of that
unsisterly action? and not far from him, the terrible danger of the
father's, the step-mother's jealousy, the mockery of those half-
brothers to come? Ah! how perilous for happiness the sensibilities
which make him so exquisitely happy now! Before they started on
their dreadful visit to the Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told
their [166] sons many tales and other things to encourage them; and,
even as she had furnished the child betimes with rules for the solace
of bodily pain, so now she would have brought her own sad experience
into service in precepts for the ejection of its festering power out
of any other trouble that might visit him. Already those little
disappointments which are as the shadow beside all conscious
enjoyment, were no petty things to her, but had for her their pathos,
as children's troubles will have, in spite of the longer chance
before them. They were as the first steps in a long story of
deferred hopes, or anticipations of death itself and the end of them.

The gift of Ares gone, the mystic girdle she would fain have
transferred to the child, that bloody god of storm and battle,
hereditary patron of her house, faded from her thoughts together with
the memory of her past life--the more completely, because another
familiar though somewhat forbidding deity, accepting certainly a
cruel and forbidding worship, was already in possession, and reigning
in the new home when she came thither. Only, thanks to some kindly
local influence (by grace, say, of its delicate air), Artemis, this
other god she had known in the Scythian wilds, had put aside her
fierce ways, as she paused awhile on her heavenly course among these
ancient abodes of men, gliding softly, mainly through their dreams,
with abundance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of [167]
grateful memory of some timely service at human hands! In these
highland villages the tradition of celestial visitants clung fondly,
of god or hero, belated or misled on long journeys, yet pleased to be
among the sons of men, as their way led them up the steep, narrow,
crooked street, condescending to rest a little, as one, under some
sudden stress not clearly ascertained, had done here, in this very
house, thereafter for ever sacred. The place and its inhabitants, of
course, had been something bigger in the days of those old mythic
hospitalities, unless, indeed, divine persons took kindly the will
for the deed--very different, surely, from the present condition of
things, for there was little here to detain a delicate traveller,
even in the abode of Antiope and her son, though it had been the
residence of a king.

Hard by stood the chapel of the goddess, who had thus adorned the
place with her memories. The priests, indeed, were already departed
to Athens, carrying with them the ancient image, the vehicle of her
actual presence, as the surest means of enriching the capital at the
expense of the country, where she must now make poor shift of the
occasional worshipper on his way through these mountain passes. But
safely roofed beneath the sturdy tiles of grey Hymettus marble, upon
the walls of the little square recess enclosing the deserted
pedestal, a series of crowded imageries, in the devout spirit [168]
of earlier days, were eloquent concerning her. Here from scene to
scene, touched with silver among the wild and human creatures in dun
bronze, with the moon's disk around her head, shrouded closely, the
goddess of the chase still glided mystically through all the varied
incidents of her story, in all the detail of a written book.

A book for the delighted reading of a scholar, willing to ponder at
leisure, to make his way surely, and understand. Very different,
certainly, from the cruel-featured little idol his mother had brought
in her bundle--the old Scythian Artemis, hanging there on the wall,
side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red,--the goddess reveals
herself to the lad, poring through the dusk by taper-light, as at
once a virgin, necessarily therefore the creature of solitude, yet
also as the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the young.
Her friendly intervention at the act of birth everywhere, her claim
upon the nursling, among tame and wild creatures equally, among men
as among gods, nay! among the stars (upon the very star of dawn),
gave her a breadth of influence seemingly coextensive with the sum of
things. Yes! his great mother was in touch with everything. Yet
throughout he can but note her perpetual chastity, with pleasurable
though half-suspicious wonder at the mystery, he knows not what,
involved therein, as though he awoke suddenly in some distant,
unexplored region of her person and activity. [169] Why the lighted
torch always, and that long straight vesture rolled round so
formally? Was it only against the cold of these northern heights?

To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her solitude, to this virgin
mother, who, with no husband, no lover, no fruit of her own, is so
tender to the children of others, in a full heart he devotes himself-
-his immaculate body and soul. Dedicating himself thus, he has the
sense also that he becomes more entirely than ever the chevalier of
his mortal mother, of her sad cause. The devout, diligent hands
clear away carefully the dust, the faded relics of her former
worship; a worship renewed once more as the sacred spring, set free
from encumbrance, in answer to his willing ministries murmurs again
under the dim vault in its marble basin, work of primitive Titanic
fingers--flows out through its rocky channel, filling the whole
township with chaste thoughts of her.

Through much labour at length he comes to the veritable story of her
birth, like a gift direct from the goddess herself to this loyal
soul. There were those in later times who, like Aeschylus, knew
Artemis as the daughter not of Leto but of Demeter, according to the
version of her history now conveyed to the young Hippolytus, together
with some deepened insight into her character. The goddess of
Eleusis, on a journey, in the old days when, as Plato says, [170] men
lived nearer the gods, finding herself with child by some starry
inmate of those high places, had lain down in the rock-hewn cubicle
of the inner chamber, and, certainly in sorrow, brought forth a
daughter. Here was the secret at once of the genial, all-embracing
maternity of this new strange Artemis, and of those more dubious
tokens, the lighted torch, the winding-sheet, the arrow of death on
the string--of sudden death, truly, which may be thought after all
the kindest, as prevenient of all disgraceful sickness or waste in
the unsullied limbs. For the late birth into the world of this so
shadowy daughter was somehow identified with the sudden passing into
Hades of her first-born, Persephone. As he scans those scenes anew,
an awful surmise comes to him; his divine patroness moves there as
death, surely. Still, however, gratefully putting away suspicion, he
seized even in these ambiguous imageries their happier suggestions,
satisfied in thinking of his new mother as but the giver of sound
sleep, of the benign night, whence--mystery of mysteries!--good
things are born softly, from which he awakes betimes for his
healthful service to her. Either way, sister of Apollo or sister of
Persephone, to him she should be a power of sanity, sweet as the
flowers he offered her gathered at dawn, setting daily their purple
and white frost against her ancient marbles. There was more
certainly than the first breath of day in them. Was there [171] here
something of her person, her sensible presence, by way of direct
response to him in his early devotion, astir for her sake before the
very birds, nesting here so freely, the quail above all, in some
privileged connexion with her story still unfathomed by the learned
youth? Amid them he too found a voice, and sang articulately the
praises of the great goddess.

Those more dubious traits, nevertheless, so lightly disposed of by
Hippolytus (Hecate thus counting for him as Artemis goddess of
health), became to his mother, in the light of her sad experience,
the sum of the whole matter. While he drew only peaceful inducements
to sleep from that two-sided figure, she reads there a volume of
sinister intentions, and liked little this seemingly dead goddess,
who could but move among the living banefully, stealing with her
night-shade into the day where she had no proper right. The gods had
ever had much to do with the shaping of her fortunes and the fortunes
of her kindred; and the mortal mother felt nothing less than jealousy
from the hour when the lad had first delightedly called her to share
his discoveries, and learn the true story (if it were not rather the
malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he has thus
absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this absolute chastity itself
a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight
offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger;
creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies,
against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the
coverlet; with the nice black head deep in the fleecy pillow he is
sleeping quietly, he dreams of that other mother gliding in upon the
moonbeam, and awaking turns sympathetically upon the living woman, is
subdued in a moment to the expression of her troubled spirit, and
understands.

And when the child departed from her for the first time, springing
from his white bed before the dawn, to accompany the elders on their
annual visit to the Eleusinian goddess, the after-sense of his
wonderful happiness, tranquillising her in spite of herself by its
genial power over the actual moment, stirred nevertheless a new sort
of anxiety for the future. Her work in life henceforward was defined
as a ministry to so precious a gift, in full consciousness of its
risk; it became her religion, the centre of her pieties. She missed
painfully his continual singing hovering about the place, like the
earth itself made audible in all its humanities. Half-selfish for a
moment, she prays that he may remain for ever a child, to her solace;
welcomes now the promise of his chastity (though chastity were itself
a kind of death) as the pledge of his abiding always with her. And
these thoughts were but infixed more deeply by the sudden stroke of
joy at his return home in ceremonial trim and grown more manly, with
much increase of self-confidence in that brief absence among his
fellows.

[173] For, from the first, the unwelcome child, the outcast, had been
successful, with that special good fortune which sometimes attends
the outcast. His happiness, his invincible happiness, had been found
engaging, perhaps by the gods, certainly by men; and when King
Theseus came to take note how things went in that rough life he had
assigned them, he felt a half liking for the boy, and bade him come
down to Athens and see the sights, partly by way of proof to his
already somewhat exacting wife of the difference between the old love
and the new as measured by the present condition of their respective
offspring. The fine nature, fastidious by instinct, but bred with
frugality enough to find the charm of continual surprise in that
delicate new Athens, draws, as he goes, the full savour of its
novelties; the marbles, the space and finish, the busy gaiety of its
streets, the elegance of life there, contrasting with while it adds
some mysterious endearment to the thought of his own rude home.
Without envy, in hope only one day to share, to win them by kindness,
he gazes on the motley garden-plots, the soft bedding, the showy
toys, the delicate keep of the children of Phaedra, who turn
curiously to their half-brother, venture to touch his long strange
gown of homespun grey, like the soft coat of some wild creature who
might let one stroke it. Close to their dainty existence for a
while, he regards it as from afar; looks forward all day to the
lights, the prattle, the laughter, the white [174] bread, like sweet
cake to him, of their ordinary evening meal; returns again and again,
in spite of himself, to watch, to admire, feeling a power within him
to merit the like; finds his way back at last, still light of heart,
to his own poor fare, able to do without what he would enjoy so much.
As, grateful for his scanty part in things--for the make-believe of a
feast in the little white loaves she too has managed to come by,
sipping the thin white wine, he touches her dearly, the mother is
shocked with a sense of something unearthly in his contentment, while
he comes and goes, singing now more abundantly than ever a new
canticle to her divine rival. Were things, after all, to go
grudgingly with him? Sensible of that curse on herself, with her
suspicions of his kinsfolk, of this dubious goddess to whom he has
devoted himself, she anticipates with more foreboding than ever his
path to be, with or without a wife--her own solitude, or his--the
painful heats and cold. She fears even these late successes; it were
best to veil their heads. The strong as such had ever been against
her and hers. The father came again; noted the boy's growth.
Manliest of men, like Hercules in his cloak of lion's skin, he has
after all but scant liking, feels, through a certain meanness of
soul, scorn for the finer likeness of himself. Might this creature
of an already vanishing world, who for all his hard rearing had a
manifest distinction of character, one day become his rival, full of
[175] loyalty as he was already to the deserted mother?

To charming Athens, nevertheless, he crept back, as occasion served,
to gaze peacefully on the delightful good fortune of others, waiting
for the opportunity to take his own turn with the rest, driving down
thither at last in a chariot gallantly, when all the town was
assembled to celebrate the king's birthday. For the goddess, herself
turning ever kinder, and figuring more and more exclusively as the
tender nurse of all things, had transformed her young votary from a
hunter into a charioteer, a rearer and driver of horses, after the
fashion of his Amazon mothers before him. Thereupon, all the lad's
wholesome vanity had centered on the fancy of the world-famous games
then lately established, as, smiling down his mother's terrors, and
grateful to his celestial mother for many a hair-breadth escape, he
practised day by day, fed the animals, drove them out, amused though
companionless, visited them affectionately in the deserted stone
stables of the ancient king. A chariot and horses, as being the
showiest outward thing the world afforded, was like the pawn he moved
to represent the big demand he meant to make, honestly, generously,
on the ample fortunes of life. There was something of his old
miraculous kindred, alien from this busy new world he came to, about
the boyish driver with the fame of a scholar, in his grey fleecy
cloak and hood of soft [175] white woollen stuff, as he drove in that
morning. Men seemed to have seen a star flashing, and crowded round
to examine the little mountain-bred beasts, in loud, friendly
intercourse with the hero of the hour--even those usually somewhat
unsympathetic half-brothers now full of enthusiasm for the outcast
and his good fight for prosperity. Instinctively people admired his
wonderful placidity, and would fain have shared its secret, as it
were the carelessness of some fair flower upon his face. A victor in
the day's race, he carried home as his prize a glittering new harness
in place of the very old one he had come with. "My chariot and
horses!" he says now, with his single touch of pride. Yet at home,
savouring to the full his old solitary happiness, veiled again from
time to time in that ancient life, he is still the student, still
ponders the old writings which tell of his divine patroness. At
Athens strange stories are told in turn of him, his nights upon the
mountains, his dreamy sin, with that hypocritical virgin goddess,
stories which set the jealous suspicions of Theseus at rest once
more. For so "dream" not those who have the tangible, appraisable
world in view. Even Queen Phaedra looks with pleasure, as he comes,
on the once despised illegitimate creature, at home now here too,
singing always audaciously, so visibly happy, occupied, popular.

Encompassed by the luxuries of Athens, far from those peaceful
mountain places, among people [177] further still in spirit from
their peaceful light and shade, he did not forget the kindly goddess,
still sharing with his earthly mother the prizes, or what they would
buy, for the adornment of their spare abode. The tombs of the fallen
Amazons, the spot where they had breathed their last, he piously
visited, informed himself of every circumstance of the event with
devout care, and, thinking on them amid the dainties of the royal
table, boldly brought them too their share of the offerings to the
heroic dead. Aphrodite, indeed--Aphrodite, of whom he had scarcely
so much as heard--was just then the best-served deity in Athens, with
all its new wealth of colour and form, its gold and ivory, the
acting, the music, the fantastic women, beneath the shadow of the
great walls still rising steadily. Hippolytus would have no part in
her worship; instead did what was in him to revive the neglected
service of his own goddess, stirring an old jealousy. For Aphrodite
too had looked with delight upon the youth, already the centre of a
hundred less dangerous human rivalries among the maidens of Greece,
and was by no means indifferent to his indifference, his instinctive
distaste; while the sterner, almost forgotten Artemis found once more
her great moon-shaped cake, set about with starry tapers, at the
appointed seasons.

They know him now from afar, by his emphatic, shooting, arrowy
movements; and on [178] the day of the great chariot races "he goes
in and wins." To the surprise of all he compounded his handsome
prize for the old wooden image taken from the chapel at home, lurking
now in an obscure shrine in the meanest quarter of the town. Sober
amid the noisy feasting which followed, unashamed, but travelling by
night to hide it from their mockery, warm at his bosom, he reached
the passes at twilight, and through the deep peace of the glens bore
it to the old resting-place, now more worthy than ever of the
presence of its mistress, his mother and all the people of the
village coming forth to salute her, all doors set mystically open, as
she advances.

Phaedra too, his step-mother, a fiery soul with wild strange blood in
her veins, forgetting her fears of this illegitimate rival of her
children, seemed now to have seen him for the first time, loved at
last the very touch of his fleecy cloak, and would fain have had him
of her own religion. As though the once neglected child had been
another, she tries to win him as a stranger in his manly perfection,
growing more than an affectionate mother to her husband's son. But
why thus intimate and congenial, she asks, always in the wrong
quarter? Why not compass two ends at once? Why so squeamishly
neglect the powerful, any power at all, in a city so full of
religion? He might find the image of her sprightly goddess
everywhere, to his [179] liking, gold, silver, native or stranger,
new or old, graceful, or indeed, if he preferred it so, in iron or
stone. By the way, she explains the delights of love, of marriage,
the husband once out of the way; finds in him, with misgiving, a sort
of forwardness, as she thinks, on this one matter, as if he
understood her craft and despised it. He met her questions in truth
with scarce so much as contempt, with laughing counter-queries, why
people needed wedding at all? They might have found the children in
the temples, or bought them, as you could buy flowers in Athens.

Meantime Phaedra's young children draw from the seemingly unconscious
finger the marriage-ring, set it spinning on the floor at his feet,
and the staid youth places it for a moment on his own finger for
safety. As it settles there, his step-mother, aware all the while,
suddenly presses his hand over it. He found the ring there that
night as he lay; left his bed in the darkness, and again, for safety,
put it on the finger of the image, wedding once for all that so
kindly mystical mother. And still, even amid his earthly mother's
terrible misgivings, he seems to foresee a charming career marked out
before him in friendly Athens, to the height of his desire. Grateful
that he is here at all, sharing at last so freely life's banquet, he
puts himself for a moment in his old place, recalling his old
enjoyment of the pleasure of others; [180] feels, just then, no
different. Yet never had life seemed so sufficing as at this moment-
-the meat, the drink, the drives, the popularity as he comes and
goes, even his step-mother's false, selfish, ostentatious gifts. But
she, too, begins to feel something of the jealousy of that other
divine, would-be mistress, and by way of a last effort to bring him
to a better mind in regard to them both, conducts him (immeasurable
privilege!) to her own private chapel.

You could hardly tell where the apartments of the adulteress ended
and that of the divine courtesan began. Haunts of her long,
indolent, self-pleasing nights and days, they presented everywhere
the impress of Phaedra's luxurious humour. A peculiar glow, such as
he had never before seen, like heady lamplight, or sunshine to some
sleeper in a delirious dream, hung upon, clung to, the bold, naked,
shameful imageries, as his step-mother trimmed the lamps, drew forth
her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant change of raiment the
almost formless goddess crouching there in her unclean shrine or
stye, set at last her foolish wheel in motion to a low chant, holding
him by the wrist, keeping close all the while, as if to catch some
germ of consent in his indifferent words.

And little by little he perceives that all this is for him--the
incense, the dizzy wheel, the shreds of stuff cut secretly from his
sleeve, the sweetened cup he drank at her offer, unavailingly;+
[181] and yes! his own features surely, in pallid wax. With a gasp
of flighty laughter she ventures to point the thing out to him, full
as he is at last of visible, irrepressible dislike. Ah! it was that
very reluctance that chiefly stirred her. Healthily white and red,
he had a marvellous air of discretion about him, as of one never to
be caught unaware, as if he never could be anything but like water
from the rock, or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of
the morning star turned to human flesh. It was the self-possession
of this happy mind, the purity of this virgin body, she would fain
have perturbed, as a pledge to herself of her own gaudy claim to
supremacy. King Theseus, as she knew, had had at least two earlier
loves; for once she would be a first love; felt at moments that with
this one passion once indulged, it might be happiness thereafter to
remain chaste for ever. And then, by accident, yet surely reading
indifference in his manner of accepting her gifts, she is ready again
for contemptuous, open battle. Is he indeed but a child still, this
nursling of the forbidding Amazon, of that Amazonian goddess--to be a
child always? or a wily priest rather, skilfully circumventing her
sorceries, with mystic precautions of his own? In truth, there is
something of the priestly character in this impassible discretion,
reminding her of his alleged intimacy with the rival goddess, and
redoubling her curiosity, her fondness.+ [182] Phaedra, love-sick,
feverish, in bodily sickness at last, raves of the cool woods, the
chase, the steeds of Hippolytus, her thoughts running madly on what
she fancies to be his secret business; with a storm of abject tears,
foreseeing in one moment of recoil the weary tale of years to come,
star-stricken as she declares, she dared at last to confess her
longing to already half-suspicious attendants; and, awake one morning
to find Hippolytus there kindly at her bidding, drove him openly
forth in a tempest of insulting speech. There was a mordant there,
like the menace of misfortune to come, in which the injured goddess
also was invited to concur. What words! what terrible words!
following, clinging to him, like acrid fire upon his bare flesh, as
he hasted from Phaedra's house, thrust out at last, his vesture
remaining in her hands. The husband returning suddenly, she tells
him a false story of violence to her bed, and is believed.

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