Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic | Page 7

are, it is possible to
isolate such a phase, to throw it into relief, to be divided against
ourselves in zeal for it; as we may hark back to some choice space of
our own individual life. We cannot truly conceive the age: we can
conceive the element it has contributed to our culture: we can treat the
subjects of the age bringing that into relief. Such an attitude towards
Greece, aspiring to but never actually reaching its way of conceiving
life, is what is possible for art.
The modern poet or artist who treats in this way a classical story comes
very near, if not to the Hellenism of Homer, yet to the Hellenism of
Chaucer, the Hellenism of the Middle Age, or rather of that exquisite
first period of the Renaissance within it. Afterwards the Renaissance
takes its side, becomes, perhaps, exaggerated or facile. But the choice
life of the human spirit is always under mixed lights, and in mixed
situations, when it is not too sure of itself, is still expectant, girt up to
leap forward to the promise. Such a situation there was in that earliest
return from the overwrought spiritualities of the Middle Age to the
earlier, more ancient life of the senses; and for us the most attractive
form of [225] classical story is the monk's conception of it, when he
escapes from the sombre atmosphere of his cloister to natural light. The

fruits of this mood, which, divining more than it understands, infuses
into the scenery and figures of Christian history some subtle
reminiscence of older gods, or into the story of Cupid and Psyche that
passionate stress of spirit which the world owes to
Christianity,
constitute a peculiar vein of interest in the art of the fifteenth century.
And so, before we leave Jason and The Earthly Paradise, a word must
be said about their medievalisms, delicate inconsistencies, which,
coming in a poem of Greek subject, bring into this white dawn thoughts
of the delirious night just over and make one's sense of relief deeper.
The opening of the fourth book of Jason describes the embarkation of
the Argonauts: as in a dream, the scene shifts and we go down from
Iolchos to the sea through a pageant of the Middle Age in some French
or Italian town. The gilded vanes on the spires, the bells ringing in the
towers, the trellis of roses at the window, the close planted with
apple-trees, the grotesque undercroft with its close-set pillars, change
by a single touch the air of these Greek cities and we are at Glastonbury
by the tomb of Arthur. The nymph in furred raiment who seduces
Hylas is conceived frankly in the spirit of Teutonic romance; her song
is of a garden [226] enclosed, such as that with which the old church
glass-stainer surrounds the mystic bride of the song of songs. Medea
herself has a hundred touches of the medieval sorceress, the sorceress
of the Streckelberg or the Blocksberg: her mystic changes are
Christabel's. It is precisely this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved
against the sorrow of the Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of
The Earthly Paradise: with an exquisite dexterity the two threads of
sentiment are here interwoven and contrasted. A band of adventurers
sets out from Norway, most northerly of northern lands, where the
plague is raging--the bell continually ringing as they carry the
Sacrament to the sick. Even in Mr. Morris's earliest poems snatches of
the sweet French tongue had always come with something of Hellenic
blitheness and grace. And now it is below the very coast of France,
through the fleet of Edward the Third, among the gaily painted
medieval sails, that we pass to a reserved fragment of Greece, which by
some divine good fortune lingers on in the western sea into the Middle
Age. There the stories of The Earthly Paradise are told, Greek story and
romantic alternating; and for the crew of the Rose Garland, coming

across the sins of the earlier world with the sign of the cross, and
drinking Rhine-wine in Greece, the two worlds of sentiment are
confronted.
[227] One characteristic of the pagan spirit the aesthetic poetry has,
which is on its surface--the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate,
of the shortness of life. This is contrasted with the bloom of the world,
and gives new seduction to it--the sense of death and the desire of
beauty: the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death. But that
complexion of sentiment is at its height in another "aesthetic" poet of
whom I have to speak next, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
1868.
NOTES
213. +This essay appeared only in the 1889 edition of Appreciations.
219. *Fauriel's Histoire de la Poesie Provencale, tome ii. ch. xviii.
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