Greek Studies: A Series of Essays | Page 7

a pet animal or a little child;
afterwards, the soul of the whole species, the spirit of fire and dew,
alive and leaping in a thousand vines, as the higher intelligence,
brooding more deeply over things, pursues, in thought, the generation
of sweetness and strength in the veins of the tree, the transformation of
water into wine, little by little; noting all the influences upon it of the
heaven above and the earth beneath; and shadowing forth, in each
pause of the process, an intervening person--what is to us but the secret
chemistry of nature being to them the mediation of living spirits. So
they passed on to think of Dionysus (naming him at last from the
brightness of the sky and the moisture of the earth) not merely as the
soul of the vine, but of all that life in flowing things of which the vine
is the symbol, because its most emphatic example. At Delos he bears a
son, from whom [14] in turn spring the three mysterious sisters Oeno,
Spermo, and Elais, who, dwelling in the island, exercise respectively
the gifts of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and wine. In the
Bacchae of Euripides, he gives his followers, by miracle, honey and
milk, and the water gushes for them from the smitten rock. He comes at
last to have a scope equal to that of Demeter, a realm as wide and
mysterious as hers; the whole productive power of the earth is in him,
and the explanation of its annual change. As some embody their
intuitions of that power in corn, so others in wine. He is the dispenser
of the earth's hidden wealth, giver of riches through the vine, as
Demeter through the grain. And as Demeter sends the airy,
dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptolemus to bear her
gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus goes on his eastern journey, with
its many intricate adventures, on which he carries his gifts to every
people.
A little Olympus outside the greater, I said, of Dionysus and his
companions; he is the centre of a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures of
water and sunlight in many degrees; and that fantastic system of
tree-worship places round him, not the fondly whispering spirits of the
more graceful inhabitants of woodland only, the nymphs of the poplar
and the pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening between the
headship of the vine and the mere earth, the grosser, less human [15]

spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more coarse and sluggish
sorts of vegetable strength, the fig, the reed, the ineradicable
weed-things which will attach themselves, climbing about the
vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot stones. For as Dionysus,
the spiritual form of the vine, is of the highest human type, so the
fig-tree and the reed have animal souls, mistakeable in the thoughts of a
later, imperfectly remembering age, for mere abstractions of animal
nature; Snubnose, and Sweetwine, and Silenus, the oldest of them all,
so old that he has come to have the gift of prophecy.
Quite different from them in origin and intent, but confused with them
in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his children.
Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful
tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the
spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the
reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild
honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its
children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags,
across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar
upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the
homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook
Molpeia.
Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which [16] is so profound in
the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines, the foldings of the hills, the
leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights,
"the bird, which among the petals of many-flowered spring, pouring out
a dirge, sends forth her honey-voiced song," "the crocus and the
hyacinth disorderly mixed in the deep grass"+--things which the
religion of Dionysus loves--Pan joins the company of the Satyrs.
Amongst them, they give their names to insolence and mockery, and
the finer sorts of malice, to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the best
spirits have found in them also a certain human pathos, as in displaced
beings, coming even nearer to most men, in their very roughness, than
the noble and delicate person of the vine; dubious creatures, half-way
between the animal and human kinds, speculating wistfully on