The Legacy of Greece Part 21

'Then do you think any less of our argument because we cannot prove that it is possible to found a state of the kind we have described?'

'Surely not,' he said....

'Then do not compel me to show that what we have decided in our argument could in all respects be reproduced in experience. If we manage to discover how a state could be organized in any close correspondence to our description, then you must allow that we have discovered that your commands could be realized. Will you not be content with that? I certainly should be.'

'Yes, I will,' he said.

'Then next apparently we must try to discover ... what is the smallest change by which a state might arrive at this manner of const.i.tution....'

'Most certainly,' he said.

'Well, there is one change,' I said, 'which I think we could certainly prove would bring about the revolution. It is certainly neither a small nor an easy change, but it is possible.'

'What is it?' he said.

'Now,' I said, 'I am at the very topic which we likened to the greatest wave. Spoken, however, it shall be, even though it is likely to deluge me with laughter and ridicule.... Consider then what I am about to say.'

'Say on,' he said.

'Unless,' I said, 'lovers of wisdom bear sovereign rule in states, or those who are now called sovereigns and governors become sincere and capable lovers of wisdom, and government and love of wisdom be brought together, and unless the numerous natures who at present pursue either government or wisdom, the one to the exclusion of the other, be forcibly debarred from this behaviour, there will be no respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor, I fancy, for humanity; nor will this const.i.tution, which we have just described in our argument, come to that realization which is possible for it and see the light of day. It is this which has for so long made me hesitate to speak. I saw how paradoxical it would sound. For it is given to few to perceive that no other const.i.tution could ever bring happiness either to states or individuals.'

Thus far the philosopher of antiquity. His words are sometimes interpreted as a cry for some philosopher-genius to take the task of government out of our too feeble grasp. But that is not his message for us. The age in which philosopher-emperors were possible has pa.s.sed beyond recall. To us Plato's words are an appeal to become, each and all of us, in our own sphere, lovers of wisdom according to the measure of our ability. If we would amend the world around us--and it is in sore need of amendment--our first duty is to eschew falsehood and to follow truth in our own lives, in our thoughts and actions. Revolutions spring not from without inwards but from within outwards; and it is often when the external world seems most sick and sorrowful, when selfishness and irresponsibility sit enthroned in the world's seats of government, that the power of truth is most active in the silent region of the soul, strengthening it in order that it may issue forth once again to impress man's unconquerable purpose of order, justice and freedom upon the recalcitrant material which forms the stuff of men's common problems on this small globe of ours.

A. E. ZIMMERN.

THE LAMPS OF GREEK ART

Amid the superficialities and struggles of the world around us, it is refreshing to turn back for a moment to the mellow wisdom of Matthew Arnold; and I will start with a quotation from _Literature and Dogma_: 'As well imagine a man with a sense for sculpture not cultivating it by the help of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the Bible.' To Arnold the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art, are the great and eternal cla.s.sics, which for all time must be the stimulus and the models for the greatest of human achievements. Beyond doubt in the fifty years since Arnold wrote there has been a marked drift away from cla.s.sics of every kind. To acknowledge cla.s.sics at all seems a survival of the spirit of aristocracy. We are convinced that we are better than our fathers, and must break away from their tutelage. In some degree this arises out of the unrest and nervous strain produced by the great war.

But it does not come only from nervous tension. It is a definite tendency of society, which has to be considered on its merits by all who feel called on to take a share in the world movement. We cannot ignore those who are drifting away from the settled anchorages, or we run the risk of being ignored ourselves.

The task has fallen to me to try to give reasons why Greek art has still a claim on our attention. Among Englishmen the appreciation of art never has been and never can be as keen as the appreciation of poetry and philosophy. But on the other hand I think it can be shown that in the field of art our debt to Greece is even greater than in the field of philosophy and poetry. For in these latter we have a certain national genius, and have produced cla.s.sics recognized through Europe. But in art our achievements have been but moderate; and at the present time a living sense of art is probably rarer among us than in any highly civilized country except America.

I will begin with a bold a.s.sertion, which I hope to justify as we proceed. But for ancient Greece, the art of Europe would to-day be on much the same level as the fantastic and degraded art of India. And but for the continued influence of Greek art, that of Europe would continually be in danger of drifting into chaotic extravagance.

In the century before the Persian wars of 500-480 B. C., Greece, both Ionian and Dorian, was throwing out fresh shoots of life in every direction, breaking through the crust of archaic convention, producing a new standard of excellence, in poetry, in philosophy, in history, and in art. In every province, morals, intellect, imagination, Greece was striking out, to the right and the left. And in the century after the Persian wars, she reaped the full harvest of her splendid sowing, and produced the masterpieces which have remained ever since memorable, to the study of which each generation recurs, and whence it learns of what human nature is capable.

After 400 B. C. there was not, as many suppose, a sudden decline in the quality of artistic production. Many of the works of the later centuries were in their way almost unsurpa.s.sable. The philosophy of Aristotle, the poetry of Theocritus, such statues as the Aphrodite of Melos and the Victory of Samothrace, are great lights for all time. But the works of maturity have seldom the charm which marks those which are full of the optimism and promise of youth.

Ruskin has written an admirable work on the Seven Lamps of Architecture, a work which, though it sometimes pa.s.ses into extravagance, is full of suggestion and even inspiration. It seems to me strange that while the economic views of Ruskin, full of generosity, but also wanting in measure and any basis of fact, should still be current among us, his writings on art, in which his genius had full course, should be comparatively neglected. However that may be, as one who has been greatly stimulated by those writings, I propose to try to produce a faint echo of one of them by speaking successively of the lamps of Greek art, lamps which give us light and serve to show our way. I find in Greek art eight notable features: (1) Humanism, (2) Simplicity, (3) Balance and Measure, (4) Naturalism, (5) Idealism, (6) Patience, (7) Joy, (8) Fellowship.

As my s.p.a.ce is closely limited I cannot attempt to develop the subject of Greek art in all its provinces and in all its bearings. I must limit myself to the art of sculpture, the most characteristic branch, and the only branch which has left us sufficient materials for the formation of a satisfactory notion. And I must limit myself further to such of the sculpture as represents the human form. In the representation of some animals, such as the horse, the later Greeks produced some wonderful examples, but in the depiction of animals other peoples have rivalled them, whereas in the depiction of men and women they stand alone.

I

_Humanism._ Three great discoveries lay open to the awakened spirit of man, when he began to realize and reflect upon his surroundings. The first was the discovery of G.o.d, which was mainly the work of the Prophets of Israel, though no doubt Greece added much on the intellectual side; and the religions both of Judaea and Greece were carried to a higher point by Christianity. The second was the discovery of man himself, which was in all essentials the great work of Greek thinkers and writers. The third, begun in Greece, has been carried very much farther in modern times, the discovery of nature and her laws. I think that reflection will show that of the three discoveries the last is the least important, for though it has vastly changed the habits and the surroundings of mankind, and has offered him long vistas of material progress, yet it has not changed his nature much, nor added greatly to his happiness. We know how the delights of thought, of art, of poetry and music have overcome barbarism and given to mult.i.tudes a new pleasure in existence. But the results of scientific progress have not as yet done all that we might have hoped for mankind. Every great discovery in physical science has been turned, primarily, not to the welfare but to the destruction of mankind. The ocean-going ship is tracked by the submarine; air-ships are used to drop bombs on defenceless cities, some of the most notable achievements of chemistry are poison-gases. We may of course hope that this is but a pa.s.sing phase, and that brighter times are before us. But I venture to suggest that the true road to progress cannot be found unless we preserve the Jewish and the Greek points of view. We must not lose sight of the ethical and religious bearing of science, and not be content with merely regarding it as a means of exploiting the material world. Instead of harnessing the forces of nature to true human ends, to happiness, we have allowed them to be used for any purpose, moral or immoral, by any one who by cunning or pushing has gained control of them. We have dehumanized the world, and allowed it to ride rough shod over human life.

The discovery of man and his capacities, then, is the great gift of Greece to the world. There were epics before the _Iliad_, but no epic full of charm, of tragedy, of tears and laughter. There were philosophers before Socrates; but they were busied in trying to find the physical const.i.tuents of the world. Socrates took up the motto of Delphi 'Know thyself', and became the progenitor of all who study the nature of duty and of happiness. In the same way there was much art in the world before the rise of Greece, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Crete. But it was not a humanist art. It represented the worship of the G.o.ds, battles, and sieges, the life of the fields. But the human figures in these scenes were conventional: there was nothing in them to stir the finer feelings, to produce a love of beauty, to raise man above the ordinary daily level. The Greeks knew of earlier works of art; but they declined to be seduced, as the Phoenicians and Etruscans were seduced, into a facile imitation of them. They realized, no doubt subconsciously rather than consciously, that they were called to set forth a new and human art, and had in them powers which could produce it. They began a process which developed with astonishing rapidity, and which cannot cease, unless, as seems now not impossible, barbarism reinvades a weary world.

'Man is the measure of all things' is the doctrine ascribed to Protagoras of Abdera, which shocked the people of Athens and is attacked by Plato in his more constructive mood. It is a doctrine lending itself to abuse, and still more to caricature; but it is really the teaching of Socrates no less than of Protagoras; and it has held its own from his times to those of the Utilitarians and Pragmatists. Certainly it is at the basis of the Greek view of life, in which man with his feelings, his faculties, and his endeavours, stands in the foreground, and all else appears as a vague background.

It was quite natural that as the Greek thinkers interpreted all experience in relation to human powers and faculties, so the artists of Greece thought of all nature in terms of the human body. Thus while the stern monotheism of later Israel absolutely prohibited the representation in art of any living thing, and especially of man, Greek artists entirely devoted themselves to such representation.

The great result of the working of the spirit of humanism in Greek art was the representation of the G.o.ds in human form. There is still prevalent among us a survival of the Jewish hatred of the representation of the divine element in the world by the mimetic art of sculpture. We still repeat, day by day, the Jewish commandment, 'Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image'. Now I am not going to find any fault with the intense feeling of iconoclasm, which was one of the mainsprings of Jewish religion. I have no doubt that in the development of that religion, hatred and contempt for the idols of the surrounding nations was of inestimable value to the race. The struggle, ever renewed, against the invasion of idolatry was necessary to the development of that pure prophetic religion which it was the highest mission of the Jewish race to set forth and propagate in the world. I would not even speak against the echoes of it in the modern world. To the Moslems of our days, as to the ancient Jews, it appears to be a necessary corollary of any lofty and spiritual conception of the divine. And when we read of the destruction of religious images by our Puritan ancestors we cannot withhold from them an inner sympathy. The hatred of images was one side of the pure and pa.s.sionate belief in spiritual religion which it was the mission of the great Reformers to revive and propagate in Europe.

But it is possible to appreciate this side of religion without being blind to other aspects of it. Our religion comes not only from Judaea, but also from Greece. The Jewish pa.s.sion for the divine righteousness lies at its roots. But that pa.s.sion is consistent with narrowness, bigotry, inhumanity. For the modifications of it which come from the working of the spirit of humanism we have to turn to the h.e.l.lenes, for the feeling of the likeness in nature between G.o.d and man, the love of the beauty of the created works of G.o.d, the joy in whatever is sweet, whatever is comely, whatever is charming. The beauty and majesty of G.o.d appealed to the Greek, as the unapproachable transcendence of G.o.d inspired the Jew.

So it fell to the Greek artists to try to set forth in marble and in bronze the gentler and more social side of the divine nature. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of Maximus of Tyre: 'The Greek custom is to represent the G.o.ds by the most beautiful things on earth--pure material, the human form, consummate art. The idea of those who make divine images in human shape is quite reasonable, since the spirit of man is nearest of all things to G.o.d and most G.o.dlike.'

The whole history of Greek sculpture, from its rise in the sixth century to its decline in the third, is inspired by this desire to represent the divine by the most beautiful things on earth. The sculpture of the great nations of the East, Egypt and a.s.syria, is full of figures of the G.o.ds, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human.

The G.o.ds appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women.

And to distinguish them from mortal beings, the artists of the East proceed in the manner of symbolism: they make additions to the human types which are to signify the divine attributes, but do not really embody them. They add wings to represent the swiftness of the deity, wings not meant for actual flight, but only symbols of rapid motion.

They represent them as victoriously overthrowing wild beasts and monsters, which stand for the powers of evil, ever bent on thwarting their action. In some of their most archaic works, the Greeks fall into the imitation of this way. They represent Apollo flanked by two vanquished griffins, Artemis with wings, and holding in her hands captive lions. But their artistic sense soon revolted against such crude and clumsy ways of representation. They began to try to represent the divine character of their deities, not by arbitrary and external symbols, but by modifying the human types in the direction of the ideal.

Sometimes, indeed, in later art we find survivals of early symbolism in the form of an attribute. Hermes is still winged, but the wings are transferred to his cap or his boots. Zeus may still carry the thunderbolt, the symbol of his rule over the storm. Apollo may be still radiate, combining human form with the rays which proceed from the visible sun.

But these are only survivals, and do not affect the process, carried on by artist after artist and school after school, by which the G.o.ds absorbed ever more fully the qualities of the most perfect manhood.

Zeus, as father of G.o.ds and men, is an idealization of the human father, combining justice and dignity with benevolence and kindness; Athena becomes the embodiment of the divine reason and wisdom, perhaps the most fully idealized of all the forms of the G.o.ds, since this armed and victorious virgin with wisdom seated on her brow had little in common with the secluded and domestic women of her city of Athens. Apollo has not the muscles of the trained athlete, but in his n.o.bleness of countenance and perfect symmetry of shape, he stands for all that a young man might grow towards by self-restraint and aspiration. At a somewhat lower level Herakles bears the form of the wrestler, admirably proportioned but more powerful than even the greatest of athletes; Hermes is the ideal runner, every muscle adapted to swift and lithe movements.

Thus in the types of the G.o.ds which were produced when Greek art was at its best we have a series of supermen and superwomen who represent the highest and best to which mortals can hope to attain, types embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as a raising and purifying element.

It was not until the decay of the Olympic religion in the fourth century that these types fell to a lower level. The sense of beauty in the artist remained as keen as ever, the technique of art even improved, but the religion of humanism was debased by less n.o.ble tendencies, and the G.o.ds took on too much not the nature of man as he might become, but the form of man as he actually is in the world.

Not the forms only of the G.o.ds, but the history of their appearances on earth and their dealings with mankind found expression in painting and relief. Plato, as we know, condemned the myths of the G.o.ds as unworthy from the ethical point of view. But we shall misjudge myths if we suppose that they were actually believed in, or served to regulate conduct. What they did was greatly to further the picturesqueness and joy of life. And when they became less important in cultus they survived in poetry, and served greatly to temper the harsh prose of actual life.

We must remember that some of the Jewish tales which have so much interested and charmed our forefathers are hardly to be defended on strict ethical principles, yet they have been a leavening and widening influence. Who would wish to expel from churches the stories of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and David, on grounds of ethical purism? The life of the many is not so highly decorated that we should wish to expel from it elements so pleasing.

As the G.o.ds tend more and more to take forms beautiful but entirely human, so do the notable features of the landscape, rivers and mountains, sky and sea, take on themselves human shape. Sun and moon, wind and storm, are completely humanized. The society of Olympus, the powers manifested in nature, appear in sculpture as a human society, but of more than human beauty and dignity. And such rendering of the G.o.ds leads, as we shall presently see, to an ideal rendering of men. As the G.o.ds come down in the likeness of men, so men are raised to the level of the G.o.ds. Hence the intrinsic and inexhaustible idealism of Greek sculpture, to which I will presently return.

Few works of art more fully and more attractively show the anthropomorphic tendency of Greek art than the sunrise vase of the British Museum. It shows us the whole morning pageant of nature humanized. On the right appears the sun-G.o.d driving a chariot of winged horses, who rise out of the sea. Before him the stars, represented as youths, plunge into the water. To the left is the moon-G.o.ddess on horseback, setting behind the hills, on one of which is a mountain-G.o.d in an att.i.tude of surprise. Before the sun hurries Eos, the winged dawn, who by a bold citation of mythology is represented as pursuing Cephalus the hunter, of whom she was enamoured. We have the features of the daybreak; but they are all represented not as facts of nature, but in their influence on G.o.ds and men.

I do not figure this vase, as I have already done so in my _Principles of Greek Art_; but instead I give an almost equally beautiful representation from the lid of a toilet vase in the Sabouroff Collection at Berlin. We have here the same three figures of the sun-G.o.d, the moon-G.o.ddess, and the winged dawn, who, however, in this case is driving a chariot. The form of the whole group and the radiate symbol in the midst stands admirably for the vault of heaven (Fig. 1).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1. VASE REPRESENTING SUNRISE]

Another extreme example of anthropomorphism is the embodiment of the sustaining power of the pillar in the so-called Caryatids of the Erechtheum (Fig. 2). Really they are Corae, maidens dedicated to Athena, and willingly in her service bearing up the weight of the architrave of her temple. Possibly the notion is not wholly satisfactory; but if it be tolerated, could it have been more n.o.bly carried out? The square and stalwart form of the women, the ma.s.s of hair which strengthens their necks, the easy pose, all make us feel that the task is not beyond their strength or oppressive.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2. CARYATID of Erechtheum]

Beside the Greek Caryatid I must be allowed to place a modern version, by Rodin. For the power and the technique of Rodin I have great admiration; but when his works are placed beside those of Greece, we feel at once their inferiority in dignity, in simplicity, in ideality (Fig. 3).

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 3. CARYATID by Rodin]

II

The second lamp of Greek art is _Simplicity_. The artist sees quite clearly what he desires to produce, and sets about producing it without hesitation, without self-consciousness, with no beating about the bush.