fterwards I lived for some years in
tbe house which held Retzsch's copy of the Sistine Madonna, said to be
the best in existence; I drank it in as a boy receives the glory of the first
great picture he has seen. Is there in
the universe anything sublimer than that child's face? But the mother's calm beauty still seems humble and secular beside those Greek divinities.
Art makes in them the grander, though not the tenderer revelation. It is for
this grandeur, as I maintain, -- this, which can never be human nature's
daily food, -- that we need to turn to
art. That child is unhappy whose mother's face as it bends above him,
wears not a living tenderness which Raphael could merely reproduce. But
the resources of divine exaltation which form the just heritage of that mother's
soul, the child knows not till he sees them embodied in Greek sculpture.
Other races have made woman beautiful; it was the peculiar glory of the Greeks that they made her sublime. As Emerson says that this wondrous nation
anticipated by their language what the orator would say, so their sculpture anticipated what the priest would dream. Quintilian says of Phidias's lost statue of Athena that "its beauty seems to
have added reverence even to religion itself, so nigh does the majesty
of the work approach to that of the divinity."
I speak now of the ideal alone. Undoubtedly in ancient Greece, as in modern America, the actual woman was disfranchised, humiliated, enslaved. But nations, like men, have a right to appeal from their degradation to their dreams. It is something if they are sublime in dreams. Tried by that standard, the Greeks placed woman at the highest point she has ever reached, and if we wish for a gallery of feminine ideals we must turn to them. We must not
seek these in the indecencies of Ovid, nor in the pearl-strewn vulgarities of
Aristophanes, any more than we seek the feminine ideal of to-day in the
more chastened satire of the "Saturday
Review," or the "Spirit of '76." We must seek them in the remains of Greek
sculpture, in Hesiod and Homer, in the Greek tragedians, in the hymns of Orpheus, Callimachus, and Proclus, and in the Anthology.
We are apt to regard the Greek myths
as only a chaos of confused fancies.
Yet it often takes very little pains to disentangle them, at least sufficiently to seize their main thread. If we confine ourselves to the six primary goddesses, it needs little straining of the imagination to see what they represented to the Greek mind. In their simplest aspect, they are but so many types of ideal womanhood, taken at successive epochs. Woman's whole earthly career
may be considered as depicted, when we portray the girl, the maiden, the lover,
the wife, the mother, and the housekeeper or queen of home. These, accordingly, are represented -- to give both the Greek and the more familiar but more deceptive Latin names -- by
Artemis or Diana, Athena or Minerva, Aphrodite or Venus, Hera or Juno, Demeter or Ceres, and Hestia or Vesta.
First comes the epoch of free girlhood, symbolized by ARTEMIS, the Roman Diana. Her very name signifies health and vigor. She represents early youth, and all young things find in her
their protector. She goes among the habitations of men only that she may take new-born infants in her arms; and the young of all wild creatures must be
spared in her honor, religion taking the place of game-laws. Thus she becomes the goddess of hunters, and learns of her brother Phoebus to be a huntress
herself. To her out-door things are consecrated, -- dogs, deer, fishes, fountains, fir-trees, and the laurel. She is free, vigorous, restless, cold, impetuous, unsympathetic, beautiful. Her range
of attributes is not great nor varied, but her type of character is perfectly
marked, and we all know it. She stands for the nymph-like period of existence.
She is still among us in the person of every girl of fourteen, who wears a
short dress; and is fond of pets, and delights in roaming the woods with her
brother. Let maturer womanhood be meditative or passionate or proud, let
others be absorbed in child or home, she goes on her free way, impatient of
interference, prompt to resent intrusion. Artemis has the cold and rather crude
beauty of this early girlhood; her slender form and delicate limbs distinguish
her statues from all others, so that even when mutilated they are known at once.
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