A great deal of sad nonsense is talked in our day by critics of art, music, and literature about “restraint.” With them the word has become a mere parrot cry, a most blessed word, like Mesopotamia. They preach restraint very often to those who have little or nothing to restrain. The result is nullity. In striving to become “Greek,” too many unhappy ones become nothing at all. Standing before the Hermes of Olympia, one realizes as never before the meaning, the loveliness, of restraint, of the restraint of a great genius, one who could be what he chose to be, and who has chosen to be serene. This it is to be Greek. Desire of anything else fails and lies dead. In the small and silent room, hidden away from the world in the green wilderness of Elis, one has found that rare sensation, a perfect satisfaction.
Naked the Hermes stands, with his thin robe put off, and flowing down over the trunk of a tree upon which he lightly leans. He is resting on his way to the nymphs, but not from any fatigue. Rather, perhaps, because he is in no haste to resign his little brother Dionysus to their hands for education. Semele, the mother, is dead, and surely this gracious and lovely child, touching because of his innocent happiness, his innocent eagerness in pleasure, looks to Hermes as his protector. He stretches out one soft arm in an adorable gesture of desire. The other clings to the shoulder of Hermes. And Hermes watches him with an expression of divine, half-smiling gentleness, untouched by sadness, by any misgiving, such as we often feel as to the future of a little child we love; Hermes watches him, contemplative, benign, celestial.
There is a pause in the hurry, in the sorrow, of this travailing world; there is a hush. No more do the human cries sound in the midst of that darkness which is created by our misunderstanding. No longer do the frantic footfalls go by. The golden age has returned, with its knowledge of what is not needed—a knowledge that we have lost.
I looked up from Hermes and the little brother, and, in the distance, through the doorway of the museum, I saw a tiny picture of Elis bathed in soft, golden light; a calm hillside, some green and poetic country, and, in the foreground, like a message, a branch of wild olive.
That is what we need, what secretly we desire, our branch, perhaps our crown, of wild olive. And all the rest is as nothing.
(To be continued)
AN ELEPHANT ROUND-UP
BY D. P. B. CONKLING