A GREEK MADONNA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9581, 4 August 1894, Page 1 (Supplement)

A GREEK MADONNA.

The following is the conclusion of the text, abridged in places, of the lecture delivered by Professor Arnold Tubbs, ab the Auckland Insbibate, on .Monday, July 16 :—

> Greek arb arrived at the ideal expression of a perfect beauty immanent in human life. ' In Myron it is a beauty of absolute physical I development informed by the mind. In Pheidias character is most to the front; the permanent qualities of mail are, says Pheidias, the man. Man is rendered architectonically. But it is not man as we know him fchab Pheidias treats : ib is bhab subsumption of the human in the dirine which the 'Greek calls deity. This is the proper subjecb of Pheidias' chisel. Take human life out of the narrowing restrictions of everyday surroundings; eliminate what is sorrowful, ignoble, remove all that limits and confines,'and there remains the large, full, ideal life, which, to the Greeks, it seemed the life of the gods must be. The highest, holiest thought) of Greece upon humanity— thoughb vaguely present to the general conscience—Pheidias has expressed has given a living and permanent reality. The laws of the gods ate the laws of human life; by human justice made I divine the eternal heavens themselves are

pure and strong. Only ab long intervals and for a brief space does man, limited as is his vision, envisage these laws; to the gods they are ever present. But there is another side to human life— the emotional. The emotional life also has its beauty—its law of form., The blithe serenity of Pheidias' conceptions takes comparatively little account of the emotional life. In the age of Pheidias Greek life was at its fullest; enjoyed its period of greatest expansion. In the triumph over barbarism, signalised by the repulse of Persia, the Greek reached to complete consciousness of all that national life was and meant for him. The struggle had brought out all that was best in the Greek character, had lifted it into the largor air, above the pettier conflicts of the day; where the world-signifi-cance of the victory of Hellenism over barbarism, of form over chaos, of beauty over that which was inimical to beauty, entered into the felt experience of each ' Athenian. There succeeded an age of con- ! acted life. To the war with Persia succeeded the internecine struggle between Athens and Sparta. The life of the city replaced the life of the nation. The interplay of passion replaced the great worlddrama. The fervour of action was exchanged for a fervour of emotion. Man was brought into contact nob with law, with principle, not with ideal form, but with man. The close hot wrestle of party supplanted the free open temper of a national effort. The spectacle before the artist was one of passion. The old ideals were passing ; a new wine was held to the lips.-..- : , From 1875-1881 the German Government carried out in many ways the most important and successful excavation of modem times, Olympia, the heart of Greek national life, was restored to the day. In 1877 was found in fair preservation the statue which has since become so famous— the Hermes of Praxiteles; one of our few Greek originals. . The work is youthful work, done, probably, under the immediate influence of his father, Kephisodotos ; and it is by no means free from imperfections ; yet the statue has from the first won a place in the affection of the public such as has hardly been conceded to any other reek marble. One imperfection impresses the eye at once. The baby Dionysos is no baby at all; he is a mannikin. Nearly a hundred years more had to pass before Greek art made itself thoroughly conversant with childlife, or attempted to convey in marble the roundness and softness of infant forms. The imperfection is hero the less noticeable as the child is a subordinate part of the conception : we have not here a group, but rather a single figure with an attribute. As to the explanation of the subject, it is this. Dionysos, child of Zeus by Semele, was given by his father to the nymphs of Mount Nysa to be reared safe from the jealousy of Hera. Hermes, the messenger god, "the winged child of heaven, who runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn," is entrusted with the duty of conveying the child to its foster-mothers. Wearied with the heat, his mantle flung aside, he stops to rest a moment, and in that moment forgets . his charge, forgets all around him, while he broods upon the destiny of the boy, who, unconscious of the future, strains forward to reach the grapes which the god holds in his right hand. For the story of Dionysos is not unlike the story of the Christ; the religion which he will in due time manifest to the Greek world is a religion of purification through suffering and through faith;' and Dionysos himself must exhaust all possibilities of suffering. Endowed with prophecy, the god foresees all that is to come in the child's life. It is as though Hermes hesitated from his mission. Hermes looks away from beyond his charge into the distance. But though his thoughts might not unnaturally be sorrowful, the meaning of the face is not sorrow. It is the beauty of a thought self-contained ; as in the Olympos wo may see the majesty of repose of a character selfcontained. The confident appeal which the child Dionysos. makes is the warrant of a smile that has passed ; the rippling Hps of the god promise a smile to follow. Deep as is the sorrow of the child's life to come, that sorrow is only the shadow which throws into fuller relief the glorious beauty of the gods, as types of a severe law of fitness and truth and righteousness. That is the Greek attitude towards sorrow : ib is the darker background, without which we could not know how bright this life is. I must not stop here to call attention to the new value which in this statue, first in the history oF Greek art, is assigned to the drapery, but will pass on to show you ono or two other aspects of the art of Praxiteles.

And first let us see the perfect typo of female beauty which we owe to Praxiteles. Two fairly good replicas—one in the Vatican, one at Munichreproduce for us the Venus of Cuidos, a work as immeasurably transcending the better-known Venus of Milo— grandiose as the Milo statue isas the Venus of Milo transcends the comparatively coarse and fleshly Venus di Medici. The replica here reproduced is the Vatican statue, unfortunately deformed by the hideous plaster drapery which the prudery of a bygone Pope caused to be placed about the lower limbs. Contrast this wretched wooden stuff with the original and most beautiful drapery in the left hand ; and unless you can feel at once the difference you need not trouble yourselves with any further attempt to appreciate Greek- art. This is the story of Aphrodite Anadyomene. From the deep violet sea which rolls round the island of Cyprus, out of the white foam, which, as the waves break, wreathes itself into shapes that seem almost human ; or, in the grfciter majesty of the storm, resemble the couriers of the wind, the horses of Neptune, which bound forward upon the beach only to retire for a wilder leap; out of this foam rose in the early dawn, when the water was all rosy under the crimson sky, a goddessform of a beauty indescribable, the Aphrodite whom Cyprus worshipped and Greece loved. Here for u<4 the sea is symbolised by the urn. But the beauty of the goddess of love and laughter was too great for the eye of mortal man ; and, in the purest womanliness, Aphrodite takes the chiton with which she is about to invest her radiant form. I will not dwell upon the details of the conception ; this is one of those master-works whose perfection we can feel, but cannot in our imperfect language describe. Let us pass rather to another of Praxiteles' creations— the one in which, perhaps, ho comes nearest to the modern spirit. Almost without number, in tho various museums and galleries or Europe, are the statues which reflect with more or less of fidelity the satyr which Praxiteles carved for the town of Thebes. Deservedly the best known is the Marble Faup in the capitol at Home. . What is a satyr? Well, wo must cast our thought back into an earlier age of human belief. We must think with the men who taw in the mystic processes of nature not the silent working of laws of science, but a full throbbing life, nob unlike the life of human kind. We must people afresh each stream with its god, its naiad ; each foresb with its wood nymphs, its dryads; or see, in fancy, roaming through the glades those rustic shapes, impersonations of the earlier life of nature, fauns, sileni, satyrs. An earlier thought had clothed these forms with attributes more animal than human ; had given the satyr the tail and hoof and pointed ears of the horse, the flattened patulous nose of the brute. Here almost all animal forms have disappeared or been softened and made beautiful. - You can still mark only the nose and the pointed shape given to the upper lobe of the ear. For the rest the form is human ; but it is the clean agility of the wild thing, nob the developed shape of the human body trained in the exorcises of the palaestra. The faun has paused in one of those moments of rest in which nature seems sometimes bo hush to silence her unceasing process. The flute on which he has been making notes of a mystic music which rustles in every leaf or breathes in the murmurous sigh of the breeze is idle in his hand. The timid yet strong life is still; brooding over the echoes of the music even now dying; a creature responding through all its organism, to every note which the goddess nature strikes, yet coy, untameable, as nature herself, ready as nature to fly the approach of man, and hide her secrets and her loveliness from a prying civilisation which has ceased to be her child. Nob a man, but nature's own, learned in all the lore which flower. and tree and running water have; breathed into him with the

fragrance of woodland growth and the rich smell of the dank green sward. It is in ouch a work that Greek art seems firsbbo approach the modern spirit. Although the faun is a single figure, so that he, a creature of the wild, is not brought into relation with human feeling or human thought, yeb the emotional significance of the creation is one which necessarily appeals to us. Here is nothing directly of nature's sympathy with man yet the first step.is taken towards such a view of nature when the woodland life is made for us so nearly human. Something,too,is hereof romance. And why ? Because Praxiteles tolls us here that nature thinks. As yet the thought is turned buck upon itself. Nature broods ; she is shy and wild, not yet a companion for man. A labor age will strike a fuller chord. The strange forecast of the Prometheus Bound will one day be fulfilled — And the tides of the ocean wail, bursting their . bar ; ' Murmurs still the profound, . And black Hades roars up through a chasm of the ground, • And tho fountains of pure running waters moan low In a pathos of woe. ■ Nature's cry of mourning for the fate of the earth-born Titan will find its answer after more than two hundred years in the lamenb of a Bion or a Moschus. " Woe, woe for Oypris, the mountains all are saying ; and the oak-treos answer, Woe for Cypris. The rivers bewail the sorrows of Aphrodite, and the wells are weeping Adonis on the mountains." % >> And from the poetry of Alexandria thf ; harmony will pass to the sonars of a Virgil"; and from Virgil, through reawakened Italy, to the poetry of our modern day; until there comes a sense of that union of all life in man and in nature which makes it possible to feel if we cannot voice the truth of those lines of Browning's:— *»* And God's own profound - ! ' Was above mo, an t round me the mountains, Ami tinder the sea; And within me my heart, to bear witness What was and shall be.

Or the same truth, in its simpler form, in the greatest of all folk sons's, "Hoo can ye sin?, ye little birds?" , V Now, if wo take these three works of Praxiteles together, what hare they in common It is their emotional power. Turn to the two works from the school of Pheidias which I showed you awhile ago. In them there is nothing of emotion,' in tho sense at least in which we usually employ the word. - Rather it may seem a cold, pure beauty exquisite indeed, bub far from us as men and women. In the art of Praxiteles and Scopus it is otherwise.* The self-enwrapped thought of the one, the intense striving" of the other ; in both the clear expression of a pathos, a suffering —i.e., experience—of the soul; this it is which they have in common not with themselves only, but with us. _ * And now I think we shall be prepared ,to find that in Greek art of this age there is nob wanting that nearer human interest, which wins us at once to the art of Italy. Ibis here, if anywhere, that we shall find the emotional power requisite to create such a type as that of a Madonna. Yet I would not have you suppose that a Greek Madonna is like an Italian Madonna. What shall we say is the centre round which the conception of the Madonna unfolds itself? Is ib not this of the sorrow and the beauty of maternity Italy shows us a maternity which is human. Greece asks us to understand a maternity which is divinea maternity which does not appeal to us by its individuality, its oneness with our own individual experience, but appeals not the less strongly because it is removed to a higher plane, because it plays on the chord of the larger universal nature of which we know, as we are, a part. i And now let me tell you briefly a story. When the earth awakes from the cold embrace of winter, when its pent life finds vogue in the green and gold of spring, the goddess of the smiling cornland, Demeter, wanders with her one child, Kore, the maiden, in the fields of Sicily. Kore, the flower of spring, strays to gather the flowers which are in effect her own life renewed. Suddenly, from -the opening earth, come# 1 the chariot of Dis, and the maiden is caught up to be the bride of the god of the underworld. So Greek fancy images the thought that even among the dead love reigns by the side of justice. But Demeter is left with only sorrow for her companion. She does nob rest, she will force Zeus himself to bond to her unwearying prayers. Even in her sorrow is the confidence thai Zeus will yet compel Dis to surrender his bride for six months, the six long months of summer. She may nob have her Koro wholly hers again, for the six months of winter Kore reigns in the underworld. This ;is the story, and here it is told for us. The meaning of the story is plain. But whab a theme for a sculptor. Demeter, the allmother, smiling with the richness of the land her bounty has blessed, robbed in a moment of the child who was in literal truth her life. The full matronly forms declare the corn-goddess ; on her face plays the golden light which dances over the. waving grain ; bub the dark eyes wasted with a grief that passes words give forth an eternity of sorrow. Only in the upward glance shines a ray of hope. As our Madonna could endure in the thought of her diviner son, so the Madonna of the Greeks has hope in Zeus that the parting shall not be for ever ; out when the summer returns the earth mother shall welcome back thß flower, Kore, and the sorrow of the Madonna melt in a mother's love.