Greek Studies: A Series of Essays | Page 6

outside the greater, covered
the whole of life, and was a complete religion, a sacred representation
or interpretation of the whole human experience, modified by the
special limitations, the special privileges of insight or suggestion,
incident to their peculiar mode of existence.
Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the scope of the religion
of Dionysus was to the Greeks who lived in it, all it represented to them
by way of one clearly conceived yet complex symbol, let him reflect
what the loss would be if all the effect and expression drawn from the
imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of the whole body of existing
poetry; how many fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and
substance would therewith have been deducted from it, filled as it is,
apart from the more aweful associations of the Christian ritual, apart
from Galahad's cup, with all the various symbolism of the fruit of the
vine. That supposed loss is but an imperfect measure of all that the
name of Dionysus recalled to the Greek mind, under a single
imaginable form, an outward body of flesh presented to the senses, and
comprehending, as its animating soul, a whole world of thoughts,
surmises, greater and less experiences.
[11] The student of the comparative science of religions finds in the
religion of Dionysus one of many modes of that primitive tree-worship
which, growing out of some universal instinctive belief that trees and
flowers are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost
everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, enshrined in legend or
custom, often graceful enough, as if the delicate beauty of the object of
worship had effectually taken hold on the fancy of the worshipper.
Shelley's Sensitive Plant shows in what mists of poetical reverie such
feeling may still float about a mind full of modern lights, the feeling we
too have of a life in the green world, always ready to assert its claim
over our sympathetic fancies. Who has not at moments felt the scruple,
which is with us always regarding animal life, following the signs of
animation further still, till one almost hesitates to pluck out the little
soul of flower or leaf?

And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude
and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic,
imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of
Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the
fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for certain
prepared and chosen ears, intelligible voices; they could believe in the
transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint and hyacinth;
and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid [12] are but a fossilised form of
one morsel here and there, from a whole world of transformation, with
which their nimble fancy was perpetually playing. "Together with
them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, of the Hamadryads, the
nymphs which animate the forest trees, "with them, at the moment of
their birth, grew up out of the soil, oak-tree or pine, fair, flourishing
among the mountains. And when at last the appointed hour of their
death has come, first of all, those fair trees are dried up; the bark
perishes from around them, and the branches fall away; and therewith
the soul of them deserts the light of the sun."+
These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it with interchange of sun
and shade. They bathe, they dance, they sing songs of enchantment, so
that those who seem oddly in love with nature, and strange among their
fellows, are still said to be nympholepti; above all, they are weavers or
spinsters, spinning or weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest,
many-coloured threads, the foliage of the trees, the petals of flowers,
the skins of the fruit, the long thin stalks on which the poplar leaves are
set so lightly that Homer compares to them, in their constant motion,
the maids who sit spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs of
Naxos, where the grape-skin is darkest, weave for him a purple robe.
Only, the ivy is never transformed, is visible as natural ivy to the last,
pressing the [13] dark outline of its leaves close upon the firm, white,
quite human flesh of the god's forehead.
In its earliest form, then, the religion of Dionysus presents us with the
most graceful phase of this graceful worship, occupying a place
between the ruder fancies of half-civilised people concerning life in
flower or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of the Sensitive
Plant. He is the soul of the individual vine, first; the young vine at the

house-door of the newly married, for instance, as the vine-grower
stoops over it, coaxing and nursing it, like