Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 7

of that Greek sculpture, which is
still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the
world.
Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods. This is an
historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece
save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that the usual
tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less
monstrous. Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly
with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of
Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they

attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human
sacrifice. Or the monstrosity, as with the hawk- headed or cat-headed
Egyptian idols, the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the
many-handed deities of Hindostan--merely symbolised powers which
could not, so the priest and the sculptor held, belong to mere humanity.
Now, of such monstrous forms of idols, the records in Greece are very
few and very ancient--relics of an older worship, and most probably of
an older race. From the earliest historic period, the Greek was
discerning more and more that the divine could be best represented by
the human; the tendency of his statuary was more and more to honour
that divine, by embodying it in the highest human beauty.
In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured,
dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work
wonders on the European continent. In the mysterious cavern of
Phigalia, for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may
have been in remote times--so the legend ran-- an old black wooden
image, a woman with a horse's head and mane, and serpents growing
round her head, who held a dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other.
And this image may have been connected with old nature-myths about
the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon--that is, of encroachments of the
sea upon the land; and the other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother,
may have clustered round the place, till the Phigalians were glad--for it
was profitable as well as honourable--to believe that in their cavern
Demeter sat mourning for the loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had
carried down to Hades, and all the earth was barren till Zeus sent the
Fates, or Iris, to call her forth, and restore fertility to the world. And it
may be true--the legend as Pausanias tells it 600 years after--that the
old wooden idol having been burnt, and the worship of Demeter
neglected till a famine ensued, the Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of
Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary of Polygnotus and Phidias, to
make them a bronze replica of the old idol, from some old copy and
from a drama of his own. The story may be true. When Pausanias went
thither, in the second century after Christ, the cave and the fountain,
and the sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside, which was to be
polluted with the blood of no victim--the only offerings being fruits and
honey, and undressed wool--were still there. The statue was gone.

Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some were not
sure that it had ever been there at all. And meanwhile Praxiteles had
already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the ideal of Demeter,
mother-like, as Here--whom we still call Juno now-- but softer-featured,
and her eyes more closed.
And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of the
divine was the human. Now, conceive such an idea taking hold,
however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for
proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure
such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted,
moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that inmate diligence, of
which Mr. Carlyle has said, "that genius is only an infinite capacity of
taking pains," and we can understand somewhat of the causes which
produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the
artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation--we
can understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the
careful study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered
fragment of beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily
walks, and consecrating it in his memory to the service of him or her
whom he was trying to embody in marble or in bronze. And when the
fashion came in of making statues of victors in the games, and other
distinguished persons, a new element was introduced, which had large
social as well as artistic results. The sculptor carried his usual reverence
into his careful