On a wall of fresh plaster,stained with bright sandyx or mixed with milk and saffron,he pictured one who trod with tired feet the purple white-starred fields of asphodel,one 'in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan War,'Polyxena,the daughter of Priam;or figured Odysseus,the wise and cunning,bound by tight cords to the mast-step,that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the Sirens,or wandering by the clear river of Acheron,where the ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed;or showed the Persian in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon,or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.
He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar.Upon ivory and rose-coloured terracotta he painted with wax,making the wax fluid with juice of olives,and with heated irons making it firm.Panel and marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his brush swept across them;and life seeing her own image,was still,and dared not speak.All life,indeed,was his,from the merchants seated in the market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the hill;from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the faun that pipes at noon,to the king whom,in long green-curtained litter,slaves bore upon oil-bright shoulders,and fanned with peacock fans.Men and women,with pleasure or sorrow in their faces,passed before him.He watched them,and their secret became his.Through form and colour he re-created a world.
All subtle arts belonged to him also.He held the gem against the revolving disk,and the amethyst became the purple couch for Adonis,and across the veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds.He beat out the gold into roses,and strung them together for necklace or armlet.He beat out the gold into wreaths for the conqueror's helmet,or into palmates for the Tyrian robe,or into masks for the royal dead.On the back of the silver mirror he graved Thetis borne by her Nereids,or love-sick Phaedra with her nurse,or Persephone,weary of memory,putting poppies in her hair.
The potter sat in his shed,and,flower-like from the silent wheel,the vase rose up beneath his hands.He decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern of dainty olive-leaf,or foliated acanthus,or curved and crested wave.Then in black or red he painted lads wrestling,or in the race:knights in full armour,with strange heraldic shields and curious visors,leaning from shell-shaped chariot over rearing steeds:the gods seated at the feast or working their miracles:the heroes in their victory or in their pain.Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion lines upon a ground of white the languid bridegroom and his bride,with Eros hovering round them -an Eros like one of Donatello's angels,a little laughing thing with gilded or with azure wings.On the curved side he would write the name of his friend.[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]tells us the story of his days.Again,on the rim of the wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing,or the lion at rest,as his fancy willed it.From the tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite at her toilet,and,with bare-limbed Maenads in his train,Dionysus danced round the wine-jar on naked must-stained feet,while,satyr-like,the old Silenus sprawled upon the bloated skins,or shook that magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir-cone,and wreathed with dark ivy.And no one came to trouble the artist at his work.No irresponsible chatter disturbed him.He was not worried by opinions.By the Ilyssus,says Arnold somewhere,there was no Higginbotham.By the Ilyssus,my dear Gilbert,there were no silly art congresses bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth.By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art,in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.On the reed-grown banks of that little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism monopolising the seat of judgment when it should be apologising in the dock.The Greeks had no art-critics.
GILBERT.Ernest,you are quite delightful,but your views are terribly unsound.I am afraid that you have been listening to the conversation of some one older than yourself.That is always a dangerous thing to do,and if you allow it to degenerate into a habit you will find it absolutely fatal to any intellectual development.As for modern journalism,it is not my business to defend it.It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.I have merely to do with literature.
ERNEST.But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
GILBERT.Oh!journalism is unreadable,and literature is not read.
That is all.But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics,I assure you that is quite absurd.It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.
ERNEST.Really?
GILBERT.Yes,a nation of art-critics.But I don't wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that you have drawn of the relation of the Hellenic artist to the intellectual spirit of his age.To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian,but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.Still less do I desire to talk learnedly.Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.And,as for what is called improving conversation,that is merely the foolish method by which the still more foolish philanthropist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the criminal classes.No:let me play to you some mad scarlet thing by Dvorek.The pallid figures on the tapestry are smiling at us,and the heavy eyelids of my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep.
