Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/169

Rh which unlocks all secrets also, there finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams; sometimes, like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep and waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still living on in heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even: it is meant to make us in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina. Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under-world, and the tranquillity, born of it, has "passed into her face;" for the Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not very different from that House of Fame where Dante places the great souls of the classical world; Aidoneus himself being conceived in the highest Greek sculpture as but a gentler Zeus, the great innkeeper; so that when a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his portraiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little in the eyes and brow of the open and cheerful sky, he only changed its title, and the thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks and shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead. The image of Persephone, then, as it is here composed, with the tall tower-like head-dress, from which the veil depends — the corn-basket, originally carried thus by the Greek women, balanced on the head — giving the figure unusual length, has the air of a body bound about with grave-clothes; while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiffness in the folds of the drapery, give it something of a hieratic character, and to the modern observer may suggest a sort of kinship with the more chastened kind of Gothic work. But quite of the school of Praxiteles is the general character of the composition; the graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the little face, of the eyes and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower — a flower risen noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust — though still with that fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, which, in the delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand maybe, perhaps, a stiff archaic flower, but is probably the partly-consumed pomegranate, one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of Persephone being this mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude of its seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and was sold at the doors of the temples of Ceres, that the women might offer it there, and bear numerous children; and so, to the Middle Age, became a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed sown in the dark under-world; and at last of that whole hidden region, so thickly sown, which Dante visited, Michelino painting him, in the Duomo of Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men "go down into hell, is there also."

There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the earth akin to the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light, tranquillizing voices; for me, at least, I know it has been good to be with Demeter and Persephone, all the time I have been reading and thinking of them; and all through this essay, I have been asking myself, what is there in this phase of ancient religion for us at the present day? The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas, of conceptions, which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnizing power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognized and habitual inhabitants; and abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

 " villas must be very pretty in the summer," observed Yorke, still disposed for the present to cover the 