Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/127



seven o'clock when the burning heat of day is over the different inmates of the house appear from their rooms. Some take a ride on horseback, others walk in the fields. A few of the elders are content with a walk in the garden. Last night, when our host had dismounted from his horse by the lawn before the veranda, and Miss Helen had come in after a long conversation in the garden about the future of mankind, religion, morals, love, and other subjects, I laid before our hostess the number of the Revue de Paris, containing part of the Hymn to Apollo (music and words), found in Delphi, and asked her to sing and play it. She did so, and exclaimed with surprise; "Wagner! It is pure Wagner!" I told her that it was just the impression this music had made on the French scientific man who published it, and we lost ourselves in reflections on the honour it was for Wagner, that those melodies so long hidden beneath the earth of that ancient, wonderful land of beauty, should present an analogy with his art. If Nietzsche had lived to see this it would have made a deep impression on him, and his criticism of Wagner would have been deprived of a point of support. For it would be startling, indeed, to insist on the decadence of art in Greece in the fifth century before Christ.

From old Greek music the conversation glided to old Greek vase-paintings. I showed a reproduction of the remarkable painting of Eos carrying the corpse of her son, which so absolutely anticipates the Christian Mater dolorosa. We spoke of the satyr with the wooden leg painted on an old vase showing, that the ancients practised amputation, and replaced the lost limb by an artificial one. Then we left Greece for Poland, Greek paintings for Wiwiorski's ceiling