A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

Then I saw that her eyes were brimming.

‘Ought I to have told you before?’ she said. ‘Forgive me if I ought.’

In that first hour of day we came closer to each other than ever before. My beloved was mine, and the time of the singing-birds had come.

APRIL

I MUST remind the indulgent reader, lest Helen and I should appear tediously opulent, that our Swiss trip in the winter was due to a windfall of a hundred pounds—a thing which may conceivably happen to anybody, and in this instance happened to us. Consequently, the fact that we went abroad again in April does not, if it is considered fairly, argue aggressive riches. In any case, refuse to stoop to degrading justifications. We did not go because it was good for our healths, which were both excellent, nor because foreign travel improves and expands the mind. As a matter of fact, I do not believe it does, for the majority of travellers are always comparing the foreign scenes they visit with spots in their native land, vastly to the advantage of the latter, and the farther and more frequently they go, the more deep-rooted becomes their insularity. We went merely because we enjoyed it, and had formed a careful plan of retrenchment afterwards, being about to let the Sloane Street house for the three summer months. That was rather a severe decision to come to, since we both hate the idea of strangers using ‘our things’ and sleeping in our beds; but by these means this expedition to Greece became possible, and when once it was possible it had already become necessary.

So here we sat this morning on the steps of the little temple of Wingless Victory, wingless, as the old sunlit myth said, because, when the nymph lighted on the sacred rock of the Acropolis, she stripped off her wings, which were henceforward useless to her, since she would abide here for ever, just below the great house of defence that the Athenians had raised to the Wisdom of God, Athene, who was born full-grown and in panoply of shield, and helmet, and spear, from the head of Zeus. Out of his head she sprang in painless birth, with a cry that was heard by Echo on Hymettus, and rang back in Echo’s voice across the plain, the shout of the wisdom of God incarnate.

And then Poseidon, the lord of the sea, who coveted these fair Attic plains, challenged Athene for the ownership thereof. Each must produce a sign of godhead, and the most excellent should win for its manifestor all the plain of Attica. There, high on the rock, where the great birth had taken place, were the lists set, and with his trident Poseidon struck the mountain-top, and from the dent there flowed a stream of the salt sea, which was his kingdom; and then the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom laid aside her spear, and from the waving of her white hands there sprang an olive-tree, the sign of peace and of plenty. So Poseidon went down to his realm again, where no man may gather the harvest; for none could question which was the more excellent sign.

It was after this, after the Athenians had raised the great house to the Wisdom of God, that Wingless Victory came to abide here. It was not fit, for all her greatness, to build her a house on the ground that had been given to Athene, so just outside the gates they made this platform of stone, and raised on it the shrine that looks towards Salamis.

Fables, so beautiful that they needed no further evidence of their truth, sprang from ancient Greece, as flowers from a fruitful field. Whether they were true or not, whether that peerless woman’s form that stands now in stone in the Louvre, alighting with rush of windy draperies on the ship’s prow, ever was seen here by mortal eye, or whether the myth but grew from the brain of this wonderful people, matters not at all. Beauty, according to their creed, was one with truth, just as ugliness was falsehood. They denied ugliness: they would have none of it, and it was from the practice of that conviction that there rose the flawless city of art. Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful century and a half, when from the ground, maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there shot up that transcendent flower of loveliness, of which even the fragments that remain to us now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in another zone of beauty compared to all that went before or has come afterwards, was anything ugly produced at all, except as deliberate caricature. It was no Renaissance—it was Naissance itself—the birth of the beautiful. On every side shot out the rays of the miraculous many-coloured star: from the marble of Pentelicus flowed that torrent of statues which make all others look coarse and unlovely, for the speed of the Greek eye was such that they saw attitudes which pass before we of slower vision have perceived them. Sometimes they saw things that were in themselves ungraceful, but how Pheidias must have laughed with glee when, among the seventy horses of the great procession on the frieze, he put in one that, cantering, stood upon one leg, while the other three were bunched underneath it. Taken by itself, it is a grotesque; taken with the others, it gives to the jubilant procession of youths and horses the one perfect touch. More than two thousand years ago a Greek saw that; two thousand years later we with our focal planes in photography can say he was right.

In all arts the Greeks were right; they cut through the onyx of the sardonyx, leaving the lucent image in the sard; in the less eternal clay they made the statuettes of Tanagra—those sketches of attitudes so natural and momentary that, looking, we can scarcely believe that they do not move: where a woman has already made up her mind to take a step forward, but has just not taken it; where she is in act of throwing the knuckle-bones, but has yet not thrown them; where a boy has determined to push back his chiton (for the day is hot), but has just not made the movement. You cannot hope to understand the Greek genius, unless you realize that our eyes are snails as compared with theirs. They saw with the naked eye what our instantaneous photograph now tells us is the case.