vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of wine flow
along the earth; while the left supports the forehead, shadowing
heavily a face, comely, but full of an expression of painful
brooding. One knows not how far one may really be from the mind of
the old Italian engraver, in gathering from his design this
impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus. But modern
motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in
the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and
very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the
bitterness of wine, "of things too sweet"; the sea-water of the
Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the
sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether
anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of
Greek ideas;--had some antitype of this fascinating figure any place
in Greek religion? Yes; in a certain darker side of the double god
of nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of Thebes and Naxos,
but never quite forgotten, something corresponding to this deeper,
more refined idea, [43] really existed--the conception of Dionysus
Zagreus; an image, which has left, indeed, but little effect in Greek
art and poetry, which criticism has to put patiently together, out of
late, scattered hints in various writers; but which is yet
discernible, clearly enough to show that it really visited certain
Greek minds here and there; and discernible, not as a late after-
thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and harmonious with the
original motive of the idea of Dionysus. In its potential, though
unrealised scope, it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious
poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiognomy of
Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the modern student, after
a complete survey.