A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 33

I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there exists, I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife's pa.s.sionate devotion.

The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of Wordsworth's Laodamia.

While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in the Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:

"With sacrifice, before the rising morn Perform'd, my slaughter'd lord have I required; And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn, Him of the infernal G.o.ds have I desired: Celestial pity I again implore; Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!"

Altered thus, and comparatively flat:-

"With sacrifice before the rising morn Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal G.o.ds, mid shades forlorn Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required: Celestial pity I again implore; Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!"

In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:-

"Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!

Her who, in reason's spite, yet without crime, Was in a trance of pa.s.sion thus removed; Delivered from the galling yoke of time, And these frail elements,-to gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers!"

In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:-

"By no weak pity might the G.o.ds be moved; She who thus perish'd not without the crime Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved, Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."

Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia among the criminal and unhappy lovers,-an instance of extraordinary bad taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better company than Phaedra and Pasiphae.

Wordsworth's intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice to the _original_ Laodamia.

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HIPPOLYTUS. NEOPTOLEMUS.

I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but nothing of the G.o.d's effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of Diana; while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and of his stepmother Phaedra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be undraped, or nearly so.

A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I think, untried subject-at least as a single figure-must begin by putting Racine out of his mind, whose "Seigneur Hippolyte" makes sentimental love to the "Princesse Aricie," and must penetrate his fancy with the conception of Euripides.

I find in Schlegel's "Essais litteraires," a few lines which will a.s.sist the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of Hippolytus.

"Quant a l'Hippolyte d'Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, etre initie dans les mysteres de la beaute, avoir respire l'air de la Grece. Rappelez vous ce que l'antiquite nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d'une jeunesse heroque, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Meleagre et l'Apollon du Vatican. Le caractere d'Hippolyte occupe dans la poesie a peu pres la meme place que ces statues dans la sculpture." "On peut remarquer dans plusieurs beautes ideales de l'antique que les anciens voulant creer une image perfectionnee de la nature humaine ont fondu les nuances du caractere d'un s.e.xe avec celui de l'autre; que Junon, Pallas, Diane, out une majeste, une severite male; qu' Apollon, Mercure, Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur des femmes. De meme nous voyons dans la beaute heroque et vierge d'Hippolyte l'image de sa mere l'Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un mortel."

(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)

The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.

Under the heroic and cla.s.sical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of manly chast.i.ty and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.

A n.o.ble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a fine ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles-

"Who dares think one thing and another tell My soul detests him as the gates of h.e.l.l!"

should give the leading characteristic _motif_ in the figure of his son.

There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped, and he should hold the arrows in his hand.

Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father's death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then figures as Pyrrhus-

"The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble."

The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single statue.

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IPHIGENIA.

I have often been surprised that we have no statue of this eminently beautiful subject. We have the story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in gems and bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being the Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia, as the Greek ideal of heroic maidenhood and self-devotion, exists, I believe, in antique sculpture. The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by Christian Tieck is the only modern example I have seen.

Iphigenia may be represented under two very different aspects, both beautiful.

First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed to obtain a fair wind for the Grecian fleet detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth and grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of dignity, should be the leading characteristics; for we must bear in mind that Iphigenia, while regretting life and the "lamp-bearing day," and "the beloved light," and her Argive home and her "Mycenian handmaids," dies willingly, as the Greek girl ought to die, for the good of her country.

She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations for her untimely end, but she resumes her n.o.bler self; and all her sentiments, when she is brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she is called upon to perish for the good of Greece, and to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan Helen. "I give," she exclaims, "my life for Greece! sacrifice me-and let Troy perish!" When her mother weeps, she reproves those tears: "It is not well, O my mother! that I should love life too much. Think that thou hast brought me forth for the common good of Greece, not for thyself only!" She glories in her antic.i.p.ated renown, not vainly, since, while the world endures, and far as the influences of literature and art extend, her story and her name shall live. The scene in Euripides should be taken as the basis of the character-the finest scene in his finest drama. The tradition that Iphigenia was not really sacrificed, but s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the altar by Diana, and a hind subst.i.tuted in her place, should be present to the fancy of the artist, when he sets himself to represent the majestic resignation of the consecrated virgin; as adding a touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance and simplicity of the conception.

The _picture_ of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson is wonderfully vivid; but it wants the Greek dignity and statuesque feeling; it is emphatically a picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with accessories. He represents her as encountering Helen in the land of Shadows, and, turning from her "with sick and scornful looks averse,"

for she remembers the tragedy at Aulis.

"My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse: This woman was the cause!

I was cut off from hope in that sad place Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.

My father held his hand upon his face; I, blinded with my tears, Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighs As in a dream; dimly I could descry The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes Waiting to see me die.

The tall masts quiver'd as they lay afloat, The temples and the people and the sh.o.r.e; One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat Slowly-and nothing more."

The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes, the theme of admiration and criticism for the last two thousand years, which every writer on art deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.

The a.n.a.logous idea, that of heroic resignation and self-devotion in a great cause, would be conveyed in sacred art by the figure of Jephtha's daughter; she too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less willingly. "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon." And for a single statue, Jephtha's daughter would be a fine subject-one to task the powers of our best sculptors; the _sentiment_ would be the same as the Iphigenia, but the _treatment_ altogether different.

For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern sculptor would do well to set aside the character as represented by Euripides, and rather keep in view the conception of Goethe.[3] In his hand it has lost nothing of its statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has gained immeasurably in moral dignity and feminine tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no more the victim, but herself the priestess of those very rites by which she was once fated to perish. While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute, Goethe has made her the impersonation of female devotedness, and mild, but unflinching integrity. She is like the young Neoptolemus when she disdains to use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for help and safety.

The scene in which she is haunted by the recollection of her doomed ancestry, and mutters over the song of the Parcae on that far-off sullen sh.o.r.e, is sublime, but incapable of representation in plastic art. It should, however, be well studied, as helping the artist to the abstract conception of the character as a whole.

Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy, of the Three Parcae singing their fatal mysterious song. A model of one of the figures (that of Atropos) used to stand in Goethe's library, and a cast from this is before me while I write: every one who sees it takes it for an antique.

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EVE.

I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is the only undraped figure which is allowable in sacred art, the sculptors have multiplied representations of her, more or less finely imagined; but what I conceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom, been attained. The remarks which follow are, however, suggestive, not critical.