Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

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




The face of the young man, as you see him in the British Museum for
instance, with fittingly inexpressive expression, (look into, look at
the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth) is
beautiful, but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines
which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of
the discus as those of an onlooker might be; [289] but that head does
not really belong to the discobolus. To be assured of this you have
but to compare with that version in the British Museum the most
authentic of all derivations from the original, preserved till lately
at the Palazzo Massimi in Rome. Here, the vigorous head also, with
the face, smooth enough, but spare, and tightly drawn over muscle and
bone, is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the concentration, in
the most literal sense, of all beside;--is itself, in very truth, the
steady centre of the discus, which begins to spin; as the source of
will, the source of the motion with which the discus is already on
the wing,--that, and the entire form. The Discobolus of the Massimi
Palace presents, moreover, in the hair, for instance, those survivals
of primitive manner which would mark legitimately Myron's actual pre-
Pheidiac standpoint; as they are congruous also with a certain
archaic, a more than merely athletic, spareness of form generally--
delightful touches of unreality in this realist of a great time, and
of a sort of conventionalism that has an attraction in itself.

Was it a portrait? That one can so much as ask the question is a
proof how far the master, in spite of his lingering archaism, is come
already from the antique marbles of Aegina. Was it the portrait of
one much-admired youth, or rather the type, the rectified essence, of
many such, at the most pregnant, the essential, moment, of the [290]
exercise of their natural powers, of what they really were? Have we
here, in short, the sculptor Myron's reasoned memory of many a quoit-
player, of a long flight of quoit-players; as, were he here, he might
have given us the cricketer, the passing generation of cricketers,
sub specie eternitatis, under the eternal form of art?

Was it in that case a commemorative or votive statue, such as
Pausanias found scattered throughout Greece? Was it, again, designed
to be part only of some larger decorative scheme, as some have
supposed of the Venus of Melos, or a work of genre as we say, a thing
intended merely to interest, to gratify the taste, with no further
purpose? In either case it may have represented some legendary
quoit-player--Perseus at play with Acrisius fatally, as one has
suggested; or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid describes him in a work
of poetic genre.

And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of genre--a work merely
imitative of the detail of actual life--for the adornment of a room
in a private house, it would be only one of many such produced in
Myron's day. It would be, in fact, one of the pristae directly
attributed to him by Pliny, little congruous as they may seem with
the grandiose motions of his more characteristic work. The pristae,
the sawyers,--a celebrated creation of the kind,--is supposed to have
given its name to the whole class of like things. No [291] age,
indeed, since the rudiments of art were mastered, can have been
without such reproductions of the pedestrian incidents of every day,
for the mere pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity of the
spectator and the imitative instinct of the producer. The Terra-
Cotta Rooms of the Louvre and the British Museum are a proof of it.
One such work indeed there is, delightful in itself, technically
exquisite, most interesting by its history, which properly finds its
place beside the larger, the full-grown, physical perfection of the
Discobolus, one of whose alert younger brethren he may be,--the
Spinario namely, the boy drawing a thorn from his foot, preserved in
the so rare, veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the Museum of the
Capitol, and well known in a host of ancient and modern
reproductions.

There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the general destruction of
ancient sculpture--like the "Wolf of the Capitol," allowed by way of
heraldic sign, as in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of
Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne,--like those, but like very
few other works of the kind, the Spinario remained, well-known and in
honour, throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of Ladas the
famous runner, who died as he reached the goal in a glorious foot-
race of boys, the subject of a famous work by Myron himself, (the
"last breath," as you saw, was on the boy's lips) were told of the
half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol. [292] Of necessity, but
fatally, he must pause for a few moments in his course; or the course
is at length over, or the breathless journey with some all-important
tidings; and now, not till now, he thinks of resting to draw from the
sole of his foot the cruel thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any
case, there he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling
admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect naivete also
as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to which the somewhat
lengthy or attenuated structure of the limbs is conformable. And
then, in this attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in the
shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially, in the Phoenician
or old Greek sharpness and length of profile, and the long,
conventional, wire-drawn hair of the boy, arching formally over the
forehead and round the neck, there is something of archaism, of that
archaism which survives, truly, in Myron's own work, blending with
the grace and power of well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The
blending of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly
delightful.

Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period, and with a fame
justified by work we may still study, at least in its immediate
derivatives, had also tried his hand with success in such subjects.
In the Astragalizontes, for instance, well known to antiquity in
countless reproductions, he had treated an incident of the every-day
life of every age, which Plato sketches by the way.

[293] Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered the secret of the
expression of movement, had plucked out the very heart of its
mystery. Polycleitus, on the other hand, is above all the master of
rest, of the expression of rest after toil, in the victorious and
crowned athlete, Diadumenus. In many slightly varying forms, marble
versions of the original in bronze of Delos, the Diadumenus,
indifferently, mechanically, is binding round his head a ribbon or
fillet. In the Vaison copy at the British Museum it was of silver.
That simple fillet is, in fact, a diadem, a crown, and he assumes it
as a victor; but, as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might
be asking himself whether after all it had been worth while. For the
active beauty of the Agonistes of which Myron's art is full, we have
here, then, the passive beauty of the victor. But the later
incident, the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a
certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and work of
Polycleitus. He is already something of a reactionary; or pauses,
rather, to enjoy, to convey enjoyably to others, the full savour of a
particular moment in the development of his craft, the moment of the
perfecting of restful form, before the mere consciousness of
technical mastery in delineation urges forward the art of sculpture
to a bewildering infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease,
the freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary restraint in the
exercise of such technical mastery, [294] to achieve nothing less
than the impeccable, within certain narrow limits. He still
hesitates, is self-exacting, seems even to have checked a growing
readiness of hand in the artists about him. He was renowned as a
graver, found much to do with the chisel, introducing many a fine
after-thought, when the rough-casting of his work was over. He
studied human form under such conditions as would bring out its
natural features, its static laws, in their entirety, their harmony;
and in an academic work, so to speak, no longer to be clearly
identified in what may be derivations from it, he claimed to have
fixed the canon, the common measure, of perfect man. Yet with
Polycleitus certainly the measure of man was not yet "the measure of
an angel," but still only that of mortal youth; of youth, however, in
that scrupulous and uncontaminate purity of form which recommended
itself even to the Greeks as befitting messengers from the gods, if
such messengers should come.

And yet a large part of Myron's contemporary fame depended on his
religious work--on his statue of Here, for instance, in ivory and
gold--that too, doubtless, expressive, as appropriately to its
subject as to himself, of a passive beauty. We see it still,
perhaps, in the coins of Argos. And has not the crowned victor, too,
in that mechanic action, in his demure attitude, something which
reminds us of the religious significance of the Greek athletic
service? It was a [295] sort of worship, you know--that department
of public life; such worship as Greece, still in its superficial
youth, found itself best capable of. At least those solemn contests
began and ended with prayer and sacrifice. Their most honoured
prizes were a kind of religiously symbolical objects. The athletic
life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule and the keeping under
of one's self. And here in the Diadumenus we have one of its
priests, a priest of the religion whose central motive was what has
been called "the worship of the body,"--its modest priest.

The so-called Jason at the Louvre, the, Apoxyomenus, and a certain
number of others you will meet with from time to time--whatever be
the age and derivation of the actual marble which reproduced for
Rome, for Africa, or Gaul, types that can have had their first origin
in one only time and place--belong, at least aesthetically, to this
group, together with the Adorante of Berlin, Winckelmann's antique
favourite, who with uplifted face and hands seems to be indeed in
prayer, looks immaculate enough to be interceding for others. As to
the Jason of the Louvre, one asks at first sight of him, as he stoops
to make fast the sandal on his foot, whether the young man can be
already so marked a personage. Is he already the approved hero, bent
on some great act of his famous epopee; or mere youth only, again,
arraying itself mechanically, but alert in eye and soul, prompt to be
roused to any [296] great action whatever? The vaguely opened lips
certainly suggest the latter view; if indeed the body and the head
(in a different sort of marble) really belong to one another. Ah!
the more closely you consider the fragments of antiquity, those stray
letters of the old Greek aesthetic alphabet, the less positive will
your conclusions become, because less conclusive the data regarding
artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however, to the end that
in a congruous atmosphere, in a real perspective, they may assume
their full moral and aesthetic expression, whatever of like spirit
you may come upon in Greek or any other work, remembering that in
England also, in Oxford, we have still, for any master of such art
that may be given us, subjects truly "made to his hand."

As with these, so with their prototypes at Olympia, or at the
Isthmus, above all perhaps in the Diadumenus of Polycleitus, a
certain melancholy (a pagan melancholy, it may be rightly called,
even when we detect it in our English youth) is blent with the final
impression we retain of them. They are at play indeed, in the sun;
but a little cloud passes over it now and then; and just because of
them, because they are there, the whole aspect of the place is
chilled suddenly, beyond what one could have thought possible, into
what seems, nevertheless, to be the proper and permanent light of
day. For though they pass on from age to age the [297] type of what
is pleasantest to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is,
of course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of them
individually. Assuredly they have no maladies of soul any more than
of the body--Animi sensus non expressit. But if they are not yet
thinking, there is the capacity of thought, of painful thought, in
them, as they seem to be aware wistfully. In the Diadumenus of
Polycleitus this expression allies itself to the long-drawn facial
type of his preference, to be found also in another very different
subject, the ideal of which he fixed in Greek sculpture--the would-be
virile Amazon, in exquisite pain, alike of body and soul--the
"Wounded Amazon." We may be reminded that in the first mention of
athletic contests in Greek literature--in the twenty-third book of
the Iliad--they form part of the funeral rites of the hero Patroclus.
It is thus, though but in the faintest degree, even with the
veritable prince of that world of antique bronze and marble, the
Discobolus at Rest of the Vatican, which might well be set where
Winckelmann set the Adorante, representing as it probably does, the
original of Alcamenes, in whom, a generation after Pheidias, an
earlier and more earnest spirit still survived. Although the crisply
trimmed head may seem a little too small to our, perhaps not quite
rightful, eyes, we might accept him for that canon, or measure, of
the perfect human form, which [298] Polycleitus had proposed. He is
neither the victor at rest, as with Polycleitus, nor the combatant
already in motion, as with Myron; but, as if stepping backward from
Myron's precise point ofinterest, and with the heavydiscusstill in
the left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand
carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally,
entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning
while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal
glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the
narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with
a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without
vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in
that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but
also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that,
was the Greek's truest claim for furtherance in the main line of
human development. He had been faithful, we cannot help saying, as
we pass from that youthful company, in what comparatively is perhaps
little--in the culture, the administration, of the visible world; and
he merited, so we might go on to say--he merited Revelation,
something which should solace his heart in the inevitable fading of
that. We are reminded of those strange prophetic words of the
Wisdom, the Logos, by whom God made the world, in one of [299] the
sapiential, half-Platonic books of the Hebrew Scriptures:--"I was by
him, as one brought up with him; rejoicing in the habitable parts of
the earth. My delights were with the sons of men."+

NOTES

271. +Transliteration: tymbos amphipolos. Translation: "a much
frequented tomb."

274. In some fine reliefs of the thirteenth century, Jesus himself
draws near to the deathbed of his Mother. The soul has already
quitted her body, and is seated, a tiny crowned figure, on his left
arm (as she had carried Him) to be taken to heaven. In the beautiful
early fourteenth century monument of Aymer de Valence at Westminster,
the soul of the deceased, "a small figure wrapped in a mantle," is
supported by two angels at the head of the tomb. Among many similar
instances may be mentioned the soul of the beggar, Lazarus, on a
carved capital at Vezelay; and the same subject in a coloured window
at Bourges. The clean, white little creature seems glad to escape
from the body, tattooed all over with its sores in a regular pattern.

279. +Transliteration: Ariston hydor. Translation: "Water is best..."
The ode goes on to praise the Olympic contests. Pindar, Odes,
Book O, poem 1, line 1. The Odes of Pindar including the Principal
Fragments with an Introduction and an English Translation by Sir John
Sandys, Litt.D., FBA. Sir John Sandys. Cambridge, MA., Harvard
University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1937.

280. +Transliteration: epeon hoimon ligyn. Translation: "the clear
strain of words [i.e. song]." Pindar, Odes, Book O., poem 9, line
47. See page 279 note for reference.

281. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: "any
art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and
sung to music...."

288. +Transliteration: to de phya hapan kratiston. Pater's translation:
"The natural is ever best!" Pindar, Odes, Book O., poem 9, line 100.
See See page 279 note for reference.

299. +Proverbs 8.30-31.

THE END

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