Demeter is become the divine sorrowing mother. Kore, the
goddess of summer, is become Persephone, the goddess of death, still
associated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one
risen from the dead also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature
to men's gloomier fancies. Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter
enthroned, chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,
blessing the earth, in her joy at the return of Kore. The myth has
[137] now entered on the third phase of its life, in which it becomes
the property of those more elevated spirits, who, in the decline of
the Greek religion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom
of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister to their
culture. In this way, the myths of the Greek religion become parts
of an ideal, visible embodiments of the susceptibilities and
intuitions of the nobler kind of souls; and it is to this latest
phase of mythological development that the highest Greek sculpture
allies itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic expression
to the constituent parts of that ideal. As poetry dealt chiefly with
the incidents of the story, so it is with the personages of the
story--with Demeter and Kore themselves--that sculpture has to do.
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