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Updated: June 15, 2025
I think it must have been that there was on her part a total absence of vanity, and this the more strange in one whose vocation in her earlier life had been to attract and live on popular applause; but I have seen her quit theatres ringing with admiration and enter her carriage with the serenity of a Phidian muse." "I adored her," said Lothair, "but I never could quite solve her character.
Our next difficulty in discovering the real Watts arises because he did not look at nature or life directly. He was overcome by great traditions. He almost persistently looks at nature through one or two veils. There is a Phidian veil and a Venetian or rather an Italian veil, and almost everything in life and nature which could not be expressed in terms of these traditions he ignored.
The wonderful setting of the head and neck upon the Phidian shoulders was admirably complemented by the long arms, bare, round, and of the whiteness of an almond kernel freshly broken, the hands, blue-veined and dimpled, and the fingers, tapering, pliant, nimble, rapid, each seemingly possessed of a separate intelligence.
This is still Athena as the morning air, but upon the earth instead of in the sky, with the nymphs of the dew beside her; the flowers and leaves opening as they breathe upon them. Those of you who are often out in the dawntime know that there is no moon so glorious as that gleaming crescent, though in its wane, ascending before the sun. Underneath, Artemis, and Apollo, of Phidian time.
But in spite of this, one does not feel that the artist has the same belief in the gods and in their power as we can see in the Phidian age. If his artistic attainment is possibly more skilful, the religious import of his work is certainly less. In the Hellenistic age we find the Greek types of the gods adapting themselves to new conditions and new meanings.
Tints like flitting clouds, Titianic, the mystery and despair of art, disclosed to the intelligent eye the feeling that mastered her spirit and her sense. Admirable beauty! Unrivalled, unhappy! The Phidian idol of gold and ivory, into which a demon had entered, overthrown, and the worshippers gazing on it with a scorn unmixed with pity!
Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and gathered together by Grecian fillets.
Her nose was Phidian Greek; her chin, but for an added youthful tenderness, was almost a replica of Madame Duse's; a long round throat carried nobly a gallant round head, upon which the hair was of three distinct colors. The brown in the Master's workshop had not, it seemed, held out; she had been finished with tones of amber and deep red.
I look upon her as such, for I know nothing more divine." "I fear the Phidian type is very rare," said Lothair. "In nature and in art there must always be surpassing instances," said Mr. Phoebus. "It is a law, and a wise one; but, depend upon it, so strong and perfect a type as the original Aryan must be yet abundant among the millions, and may be developed.
Some fine forms there were here and there, models of a peculiar style of beauty; a style, I think, never seen in England; a solid, firm-set, sculptural style. These shapes have no angles: a caryatid in marble is almost as flexible; a Phidian goddess is not more perfect in a certain still and stately sort.
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