her leman.'J He is polishing his dainty armour, and combing the scarlet plume. With squire and page, her husband passes from tent to tent. She can see his bright hair, and hears, or fancies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the courtyard below, the son of Priam is buckling on his brazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache1 are around his neck. He sets his helmet on the ground, lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles,2 in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and silver the friend of his souP arrays himself to go forth to fight. From a curiously carven chest that his mother Thetis had brought to his shipside, the Lord of the Myrmidons4 takes out that mystic chalice that the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, and, having washed his hands, fills with black wine its burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood upon the ground in honor of Him whom at Dodona5 barefooted prophets worshipped, and prays to Him, and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son, Euphorbus, whose love- locks were looped with gold, and the Priamid,6 the lion-hearted, Patroclus, the comrade of comrades, must meet his doom. Phantoms, are they? Heroes of mist and mountain? Shadows in a song? No: they are real. Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
ERNEST While you talk it seems to me to be so.
GILBER T It is so in truth. On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, oivoip Jtovrog,7 as Homer
5. Antigone defied Creon, king of Thebes, by sprinkling earth on the body of her brother whose burial Creon had forbidden, and was punished by death; see Sophocles' play Antigone (ca. 441 B.C.E.). 6. Cf. Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.647: 'The sweet war-man [Hector] is dead and rotten.' 7. Greek satirist (b. ca. 120 C.E.), one of whose main influences was Menippus (early 3rd century B.C.E.), a Greek philosopher who was the first to express his views in a seriocomic style. The reference is to Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead. 8. Priam. Homer in Iliad 3.156?58 describes the old men of Troy admiring the beauty of Helen, daughter of Leda and of Zeus (who came to Leda in the form of a swan).
9. Lover (i.e., Paris). 1. Wife of Hector, one of the sons of Priam and the finest Trojan warrior. 2. Son of Peleus and of the sea nymph Thetis; Achilles was the greatest Greek warrior fighting in the Trojan War. The scene set here is a tissue of recollections from the Iliad. 3. I.e., Patroclus. 4. Warriors who accompanied Achilles to Troy. 5. Seat of a very ancient oracle of Zeus. 6. The son of Priam, i.e., Hector. With Euphorbus's help he killed Patroclus, and in turn he was slain by Achilles. 7. Wine-dark sea (Greek).
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THE CRITIC AS ARTIST / 1691
calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the
Danaoi8 came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher9 sits in his
little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet, every morning the
doors of the city are thrown open, and on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot,
the warriors go forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind their
iron masks. All day long the fight rages, and when night comes the torches
gleam by the tents, and the cresset1 burns in the hall. Those who live in
marble or on painted panel know of life but a single exquisite instant, eternal
indeed in its beauty, but limited to one note of passion or one mood of calm.
Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and
terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons
come and go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or leaden feet
the years pass by before them. They have their youth and their manhood,
they are children, and they grow old. It is always dawn for St. Helena, as
Veronese saw her at the window.2 Through the still morning air the angels
bring her the symbol of God's pain.3 The cool breezes of the morning lift
the gilt threads from her brow. On that little hill by the city of Florence,
where the lovers of Giorgione4 are lying, it is always the solstice of noon,
made so languorous by summer suns that hardly can the slim naked girl dip
into the marble tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long fingers
of the lute player rest idly upon the chords. It is twilight always for the
dancing nymphs whom Corot5 set free among the silver poplars of France.
In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous figures, whose trem
ulous white feet seem not to touch the dew-drenched grass they tread on.
But those who walk in epos,6 drama, or romance, see through the labouring
months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening
unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting
day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and
wither, and the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her,7
alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one
