Famous Fragments

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 97, 19 January 1924, Page 13

Famous Fragments

Romance and Mystery of Broken Masterpieces

FRAGMENTS have secrets; they are the remains or beginnings of something else and full of the romance of a half-remembered dream. The Parthenon itself is but the hint of beauty lovelier still, tor the Elign Marbles are not Phidias’s greatest works; those have all perished. For such tragedies of Art wo must thank accidents, and avarice. Men threw the priceless statuary of Greece into the lime-kiln to make mortar, and when the Roman Mummius sacked Corinth in 146 8.C., its treasures of silver am] bronze were melted in the fire. Victorious Consuls filled Rome with the art work of Greece, Egypt, and the Kg,st, and the River Tiber to-day is believed to hide in its muddy treasury the candlesticks of the Temple of Jerusalem. THE VENUS OF MILO Thus are the most famous statues of antiquity now but fragments. The Venus of Milo is armless. Did she rest her arms on a pillar? Were they holding the shield of Mars as a mirror? Did they endeavour to arrest her slipping drapery ? Whose was the genius that set these questions that fascinate and baffle ? His name, like his work, is a fragment, for the broken plinth found with the statue only tells us that it ended in “ . . . sanddr.” Another marvel of antiquity, the “Victory of Samothrace,” now the glory of the Louvre, is also fragmentary. Wings outstretched she rushes forward with the rush of the ship’s prow upon which she stands. But she has neither head nor arms. From reproductions upon contemporary coins we know that she bore a trophy in one hand and with the other held a trumpet to her bps. Headless as she is, the vitality of her body makes us long know the secret of her face. So may a fragment of marble conjure up the glory that was Greece, a broken architrave bearing the letters “S.P.Q.R.” impress, ub still with the grandeur that was Rome. MELROSE ABBEY Fragments of architecture have a grace peculiarly their own. There are moments when as a ruin Melrose Abbey is more lovely than it could ever have appeared when complete. The perfect building suggests the effort to keep it up and all the weight of this unintelligible world against which it is a protest, but upon a broken chancel and a broken cross the light shines with an unearthly peace, and it is not an accident that so many beautiful pictures bear the legend “Landscape with Ruins” or that the most holy lines in English poetry were inspired by Tintern Abbey. One architectural fragment, “The Rosetta Stone,” has a special interest for Literature. Discovered by a French officer, Boussard, in 1799, it was ceded to England in 1801 as a result of the battle of Alexandria, and now lies in the British Museum. Its inscriptions in Greek and Egyptian enabled Champoilion to unlock the secrets of the hieroglyphics. Pondering on the fragments of antiquity and the Renascence a man is tempted to ask which of the lost masterpieces of the world would he like discovered first! But there live other fragments, not of works that have existed, but of works that have never existed save in the dreams of the artist. Among such axe numbered some of Art’s greatest treasures. Giotto’s Campanile at

Florence, begun in 1337, is still unfinished; if you climb to the top you may see the piers from which the spire that Giotto- designed has yet to spring. Shall 1 be alive the morning the scaffold Is broken away, and the long-pent fire Like the golden hope of the world, unbaffled Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire ? Music, too, has its marvellous fragments; Schubert’s most famous symphony bears the name “Unfinished,” and Mozart, alas, needed his own “Requiem” before he could complete it. Nor is poetry without exquisite fragments; everyone knows why Coleridge never finished “Kubla Khan.” He had dreamt, so he tells us, enough poetry for two or three hundred lines, and was engaged in writing them cut when a servant announced the arrival of “a person from Porlock.” Then all the charm Is broken, all that phantom world so fair Vanishes! He forgot the rest, and that too the poem that contains three of the five lines in literature of which Kipling says, “These are the pure magic, these are the clear vision, the rest is only Poetry.” COLERIDGE Coleridge is pre-eminently the poet of fragments, some of which have been recently published for the first time; among them is a little unpolished lyric whose singing cadences recall Shakespeare and xu'omiso Tennyson: —— Go, little Pipe! For ever I must leave thee, Ah! vainly true! Never, ah never, must I more receive thee? Adieu 1 Adieu I When thou art gone! and what remains behind Soothing the soul to Hope? The moaning wind— Hide with sere leaves my grave’s undaisied slope. In another we catch a glimpse of a girl as Her fingers shoot like streams of silver light, Amid the golden haze of thrilling strings. And what tragic pageantry might not have led up to A Sumptuous and Magnificent Revenge! . EDWIN DROOD ' Time will never complete tho mystery of Edwin Drood, and human life like Art is itself too often but a collection of fragments. Not always can we say of a man that his life was begun, continued, and ended in anything particular. Too often it is Nover the time and tho place and the loved one altogether. Just fragments! Even the most complete lives. Beethoven said on his death-bed that ho had music in his head more lovely than any ho had ever written, while Chatterton died before his eighteenth year, Keats at twentysix, Mozart at thirty-five, Raphael at thirty-seven. On the Earth tho broken arcs In tho heaven a perfect Round! Such fragments are, to adapt a phrase‘of Robert Louis Stevenson, bull’s-eye lanterns with which we search tho dim Cathedral of Reality—By Kenneth Lyon, in “John o’ London’s Weekly.”