The Legacy of Greece Part 23

Among us hard tendons usually take the place of solid muscles. And the practise of athletic games by women undoubtedly tends to make them in some respects conform more to the male type. In moderation physical exercises may improve health and strength without tending to deprive the vital organs of nourishment. But the overtrained woman is farther from the healthy life of nature than the overtrained man. And whether the overexertion be of the body or of the intelligence, it tends to destroy true womanliness.

It is a pity that some sculptor does not do for the ideal of womanhood what Dr. Tait McKenzie has done for the ideal of athletic manhood. Of course the process would not be the same. No one wants an ideal type of the female athlete, unless we wish to restore the race of Amazons, but we do sorely need to have before our eyes types which embody the physical ideal of efficient womanhood. At present while nude womanhood in art conforms in a great measure to the Greek tradition, clothed womanhood follows the types of the street, modified by the baseless caprices of fashion. The two stand in unreconciled contrast. The Greeks when painting women on a vase often drew their figures in outline before they added clothes. But any one who tries to draw the outline of the female figure beneath the clothes on a fashion-plate will stand aghast at what he has produced.

Cicero repeats an instructive story in regard to the painter Zeuxis, who lived about 400 B. C. He was commissioned to make for the people of Croton a painting of Helen of Troy. He first inquired, what seems to have been a matter of common knowledge, who were the most beautifully made young men in that city, which was noted for its athletes. He next asked that he should be allowed to study the forms of the sisters of these men, judging that the sisters must partake of the beauty of the brothers. Out of these he selected five girls for more continued study, and by such aid produced his picture. We cannot suppose that he would be so clumsy as to select at random beautiful details from each of the five; in that way he would produce only an eclectic monstrosity. But, working in the presence of beautiful examples, his sense of beauty would rise in tone to the highest of which he was capable.

In this story several points are noteworthy. It shows that the type of beauty in men was more advanced and more generally recognized than the type of beauty in women. And it shows the Greek artistic mind ever on the watch to catch some new note of beauty to add to the traditional stock. Professor Brucke, in his excellent work on the beauties of the human form, observes that in the ideal statues of Greece many features may be discovered which in the actual world of men and women are very rare, but the charm of which can scarcely be disputed. There went on from school to school, and from period to period, a sort of acc.u.mulation of beauty which was ever increasing. Every beautiful model which was studied added something to what Brucke calls the stock of beauty at the disposal of artists.

VI

The sixth lamp of Greek art is _Patience_ in striving after perfection.

In the finer work of Greek sculptors one finds an utterly ungrudging expenditure of time and care which reminds one of the working of Nature herself, Nature who is never in a hurry, who is never contented with a hasty sketch, but works regardless of time. We are told of Protogenes that he spent seven years on a single figure, and I think he would have spent seven more if he had thought that he could thereby have improved his painting. Nothing strikes one more strongly in such works as the charioteer of Delphi and the Hermes of Praxiteles than the pains taken with every detail. It is by careful work, continued through successive generations, that sculpture attained such mastery in the representation of the muscles of the body as we find in the Borghese fighting figure of the Louvre, and such delicacy in the rendering of drapery as we find in the Victories of the Bal.u.s.trade at Athens, or the Victory of Samothrace.

But the delicacy and minuteness of Greek work is of course most obvious in the reliefs of coins and in gems. The coins were not primarily meant to please the eye, but to circulate in the fish-market; yet a mult.i.tude of the dies are so exquisitely finished that they lose little when magnified to many diameters, and will bear the most critical examination. The intaglio gems were meant for the sealing of doc.u.ments, the seal taking the place of the modern signature; but the figures upon seals are in their way as finished as great works of sculpture. Seals even more usually than coins gain rather than lose if they are enlarged.

Yet they were executed without the help of magnifying gla.s.ses. Their subjects are taken from the widest field, the figures of deities, tales from mythology, portraits, animal forms; like the coins they introduced as an undercurrent to the prosaic life of every day an element of poetry and imagination.

VII

The seventh lamp, which goes as naturally with idealism as care and patience go with naturalism, is joy, _joie de vivre_. Keats has expressed the Greek sense of art in an immortal line, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'. It was the overflowing gladness which lies at the root of creation and evolution which took eternal form in the painting and sculpture of the Greeks and inspired all their works. The same irrepressible joy which gives colour to the flowers, sweetness to the fruit, song to the birds, and s.e.xual desire to mankind reached here one of its most perfect manifestations. The life of the Greeks was by no means one of unmixed happiness. Each city was not unfrequently at war with its neighbours; and the penalty of complete defeat was sometimes the razing of its walls, the slaughter of its men, and the enslavement of its women. Disease, even plague, constantly ravaged the land; and the resources of modern surgery and modern anaesthetics were not present to curb their ravages. The life of the majority in country huts, and still more in the slums of the cities, most of all in the mines, was rougher and more sordid than is the case in the modern world, in countries in their normal state. And the people had not even that hope of a blessed hereafter which sustained the people of the Middle Ages. Yet under all these clouds, their spirit was hopeful and aspiring. And their art reflects ever the brighter side of things. Surely they were wise and right. We seek out works of art not to foster pessimism but to inspire optimism, not to show us the world of nature on its repulsive side, but to reveal to us how much underlying beauty is to be found in it. ''Tis life not death for which we pant, More life and fuller that we want.'

At the same time, Greek art in some forms was extremely serious and keenly alive to the darker side of existence. The Greeks invented tragedy, the poetical reflection of the severity of fate. Would any modern audience be found, which would be prepared to sit for a whole summer day listening eagerly to the grand expression by such poets as Aeschylus and Sophocles of the power of Nemesis, the instability of all prosperity, the misfortunes which hunt those who have the ill luck to displease the G.o.ds? Surely not. And not in Greek tragedy only, but in elegiac poetry and in epigram, we find perfect reflections of our most gloomy moods. But for such expressions of sorrow and despair the Greeks felt that sculpture, and even painting, were not suitable vehicles. They belong to moods, and are not suitable for ill.u.s.tration in the market place and the temple. The roads which led to Greek cities were frequently bordered with monumental tombs. If in the reliefs and inscriptions of these tombs there had been any telling echo of the sorrow and regret of bereaved survivors, every one would have entered the cities in a black mood. As it is, as every one who has been in the museums of Athens knows, the sepulchral artists carefully avoided anything which might harrow the feelings. They represented the dead at their best, engaged in victorious warfare, or in athletic sports or in the happy family circle. A gentle air of melancholy could not be avoided; but there was nothing to shock, nothing to oppress the spirits.

The deceased represented seemed still to share the occupations and pleasures of the living, not to be shut off from the world of happiness.

Milton has expressed, in his magnificent prose, the profound joy of the world of the Renaissance at the recovery of the Bible, and free liberty of reading it, after it had been shut away from the laity by the organized Church. Equally intense, and more exuberant, was the delight of scholars and artists, when the asceticism and pessimism of the Middle Ages, which had given birth to such bodies as the Carmelite monks and the mendicant friars, gave way before the revival of Greek literature and art. The world seemed suddenly to have renewed its youth. No doubt the sudden expansion led to foul excesses; but it was yet a great landmark in human progress.

VIII

The eighth light of Greek art is _Fellowship_. Perhaps there is no quality in it which is more instructive for our days than this. The extreme individualism which is the most remarkable characteristic of modern times lays the utmost stress on the right or the duty of an artist to express _himself_ in his work, to work out his own vein of originality, to give to the world a rendering of his own qualities and individuality. And no doubt no great artist can help doing this in a measure. When he works he must be himself; he can only see the world through the medium of his character and talents. And as every man is a microcosm, a reflection in miniature of the great world of human beings, what is really good and original in an artist must appeal to something in the human world; must have a meaning for people of a certain cla.s.s or a certain training, or a certain country. But whether an artist is the better for a conscious attempt thus to externalize his personality; whether he is improved by being self-conscious and reflective in his art is a different question.

Scarcely any feature of Greek art is more impressive to a student than its continuous and uninterrupted course. When once it has started it does not turn back, but goes forward steadily, for a time rising superior to difficulty after difficulty, attaining a higher and higher level, then in the fifth century branching out in various directions into styles and groups, then going on with great technical skill, but with a loss of inspiration. It is a course of evolution as steady as that of any kind of plant or animal. This shows that it did not depend upon the rise of successive men of talent or genius, each of whom was intent on expressing himself; but upon the rise and influence of successive artistic schools, each of which did not merely follow the personality of a founder or teacher, but stood for a phase in the development of the common life of the Greek people. The schools were Ionian or Dorian, Attic or Argive, and harmonized with the whole civilization of such fractions of the race. Ionian art went with the gay and pleasure-loving ways of the Asiatic coast. Dorian art reflected the restraint, the balance, the self-control of the people of Peloponnesus.

Attic art not only conformed to the refined taste of the people of Athens, but suited also the strong mental bias of the most intellectual city which ever existed. Of course these schools did not flourish in complete isolation one from the other; city influenced city and artist artist; but in a far less degree than would be the case now. A school of sculpture was a species; and all the individuals of the species were more like one another than they were like any of their contemporaries outside.

Thus when we examine any work of Greek sculpture, before the eclectic schools came into being, we find it easy to determine its period, often within narrow limits, and we are usually able to a.s.sign it with confidence to a particular school, imperfect as is our knowledge of the history of Greek art. But we can scarcely ever say that it is the work of an individual artist, unless it stands on a basis bearing the author's name, or unless ancient critics and historians have left us detailed descriptions of a work which survives. I am speaking of Greek originals; the copies of earlier works made by Greek artists of a late period for Roman galleries are often so confused in style and so careless in execution that they serve only to mislead, even if they have escaped the Italian restorer of recent date.

Great and connected series of statues and reliefs, such as const.i.tute the sculptural adornment of such temples as that of Zeus at Olympia or the Parthenon or the Mausoleum, are the joint productions of a number of sculptors who worked together, no doubt under the general supervision of some architect or chief mason, but probably under very little control.

Such works combine considerable variety in execution with a general similarity so great that a superficial observer does not see their differences. Public opinion in London seems to hold that Pheidias made the whole of the pediments and the frieze of the Parthenon; though in some cases contiguous figures are so markedly various amid the general likeness as to prove separate hands. In the case of the Erechtheum at Athens there is extant a long list of payments to a number of artists for the several figures of the frieze. There was no general contractor, no artist who hired his masons by the day, but every man who produced one of the figures in relief was paid for it sixty drachmas, without regard to its difficulty or its simplicity.

It is comparatively easy to get a set of skilled stone-masons to carry out with exactness a plan of which all the details are worked out for them, and which requires only faithful copying. And it must have been easy for a set of Egyptian sculptors who made their figures according to a rigid conventional pattern to produce a uniform result. But for a number of skilled workers who were allowed great liberty in detail to produce an harmonious whole was infinitely harder. And that the Greek masons regularly accomplished this result shows how strong upon them was the influence of the school. Nor did they merely work from nature; but their production was of an idealizing kind. It is clear that they must have had not merely similar tools and similar mechanical processes, but the same purposes and ideals. They must have had what we should call a collective personality. It is more than probable that among the workers on the Parthenon were Alcamenes and Agoracritus, two sculptors who rose to great fame. It is certain that among the workers on the Erechtheum was Praxias, a pupil of Calamis, and probably a relative of Praxiteles.

The distinction between artist and mason, so marked in our day, scarcely existed in Greece. The mason who had talent became a noted sculptor; and the sculptor, instead of making a model in wax or plaster, set to work, like Michelangelo, on the block of marble himself. Probably sometimes, like Benvenuto Cellini, he cast his own bronze statues.

Generally in all great periods of art there is such fellowship. And in sculpture in particular the design and the execution are so closely connected that it is an abuse to a.s.sign the two functions to different men, and even to different cla.s.ses of men. Greece was pre-eminently the land of productive guilds, of families of artists, of groups of workers who were of one heart and one spirit, and who therefore worked in one style. One of the closest parallels to a Greek school of sculpture is to be found in the group of Pre-Raphaelite artists of the middle of the last century, Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais, Collins, and their companions. This group had a religious or ideal starting-point in the revived Anglo-Catholicism which arose in Oxford at the time, and they had principles of art in common which they embodied in their work. Their paintings, before they diverged one from another, form a distinct species, and have an interest for the historian of civilization greater than that of any other English school.

IX

In order that we may estimate the influence of Greek art on the civilization of Europe, it is necessary briefly to trace its reappearances through the ages. Its first conquest was Rome. The victorious Roman Generals, Marcellus, Scipio, Flamininus, Mummius, and others, brought to the imperial city, to adorn their triumphs, an immense quant.i.ty of Greek sculpture and paintings, of which they robbed the great storehouses of works of art in the temples and stoae of h.e.l.las, Sicily, and Asia Minor. The earlier Emperors, especially Nero, followed their example, so that in the time of Pliny the naturalist all the public places of Rome were crowded with sculptures of bronze and marble and with the painted masterpieces of great artists. It became fashionable for wealthy Romans, such as Hortensius and Cicero, to stock their country-houses with such works. Even so, the demand was not satisfied; and Greek artists were imported into Rome, where they set up great workshops, and poured out an incessant stream of fresh works of art. Of such our modern museums are full. Generally speaking they are of little artistic merit, copies of various degrees of excellence of the great works of earlier generations. For the Roman plutocrats had little taste. Because certain figures or groups had a great reputation, and especially because they had been purchased at a high price by Greek cities and kings, the Roman collector liked to have copies of them in his villa; and the artists who produced these copies were mere workers for hire, without originality and without aspirations. Sometimes when employed on such works as the Arch of t.i.tus, or the Column of Trajan, the novelty of the theme stimulated the artist to attempt something of a more original kind. And occasionally the fire within took course and produced a finer work than ordinary. Under the art-loving Emperor Hadrian there was a sort of St. Martin's summer of sculpture; but its productions were smooth, elegant and refined rather than original or interesting. The charm of art was not appreciated by the Roman people; only the few who professed cultivation really cared whether a figure was good or bad, and even the few were a little ashamed of their preferences.

Into the Roman Empire, in the first three centuries of our era, Christianity gradually ate its way. It originated among the Jews, to whom all representation of living things was hateful. And it developed under the influence of Greek oriental mysticism, which had no kinship with sculpture and painting; and so far as it had any expression in those arts worked in the direction of that symbolism against which Greek art was a protest. Thus we could not expect any fresh inspiration for art from early Christianity; on the contrary, Christianity would work upon it as a blighting influence. If we examine the remains of Christian art in those early centuries, in sarcophagus and mural painting, we find that it merely copied the contemporary pagan art, only changing the subjects portrayed, and introducing a further development in the symbolic interpretation of ordinary scenes.

Christianity offered almost no field for the exercise of Greek anthropomorphism. The latter was closely bound up with polytheism and hero-worship. The Christian Apostles and Saints, who took the place of the pagan Deities, were men who had lived on the earth and whose deeds belonged not to mythology but to history, although at the time the line between history and mythology was not clearly drawn, and history was largely diluted with myth. A few impersonations of nature, such as river-G.o.ds, lingered on in the paintings of the Roman catacombs. And winged genii were common there, whether cupids or cherubs it would be hard to say. But there was no realm into which artistic fancy could stray, filling it with super-men and super-women. Angels might be portrayed; but they all came from the Jewish angelology; and there was no artistic tradition as to their types: it was only later that the types of Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and others were distinguished.

The second principle of Greek art, balance and symmetry, had almost disappeared in pagan art in the Antonine age. The reliefs of triumphal arches and of sarcophagi are crowded with figures inserted without order or method. Even the mural paintings of Pompeii have escaped from control; and show no purposeful arrangement. Law and order have given place to individual fancy, unless in cases where earlier schemes are adopted. And with artistic arrangement has disappeared all attempt to idealize, to produce forms n.o.bler and more beautiful than those seen every day. The figure of Antinous is the latest in which we find any attempt to produce a type of ideal beauty. Even the Virgin Mary and her Son are depicted without any attempt to render them beautiful. Nor indeed does naturalism fare better than idealism. The representation of the human body is no longer studied. The figures are clothed: and the clothing is purely conventional, while the features of the landscape are far less carefully introduced than in h.e.l.lenistic Greek art.

In fact one feels that the artist had little interest in his art. Scenes from the Old and the New Testament are the usual subjects. But the depiction is little more than picture-writing, mere copies of traditional groups. The only thing regarded as of any interest is the meaning. The ethical and spiritual point of view overlies and smothers any interest in the representation.

And this predominance of the didactic element over the sense of proportion, the love of beauty, the appreciation of nature prevails more and more as Europe slowly moves towards the dark ages. The lamps of Greek art burn more and more dimly. They are never wholly extinguished; for in all ages there are born artists to whom they are the light of life; and in mediaeval carvings one finds here and there a touch of humanism, most often in grotesque or satyric figures. We must never forget that some of the later masterpieces of Greek work, such as the Column of Trajan and the Arch of Beneventum, were always to be seen. And little as they were appreciated by ordinary people, an artist here and there derived from them some appreciation of the beauty of humanity.

Then in the thirteenth century the dry bones began to come together. The breath of fresh life stirred Europe, or at least parts of Europe, such as North Italy, Southern Germany, Eastern France. The magnificent Gothic Cathedrals rising in the north called forth the talent of the painter and the sculptor for their adornment. A great Christian art arose, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries flourished widely. Certain qualities of high art it certainly had. It was lighted by the lamp of fellowship. The sculpture was the work not of individuals, but of guilds, groups of workers of the same style, and inspired by the same motives. It attained to great beauty in decoration, in the adaptation to architectural purpose of the forms of plants and flowers. Where it was most defective was in the rendering of the human form, whether nude or draped, for in such matters the artists had no schooling to be compared with that of the Greeks.

When the full Renaissance came with the dispersion of the educated Greeks through Europe, there was a conscious reawakening of the artistic influence of Greece, contemporaneously with the revived interest in Greek literature and philosophy. A few great works of ancient sculpture, the Laoc.o.o.n, the Dying Gaul of the Capitol, the Apollo Belvedere were discovered; and collections of ancient gems and coins were formed by many of the wealthy. We can judge from the life of Benvenuto Cellini how profound was the effect produced by such discoveries. The great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries felt as if they had climbed out of darkness into light. To rival works of Greek art was looked upon as the highest ambition which an artist could cherish. Sculptors so great as Donatello and Michelangelo took the scanty remains of Greek masterpieces as their models, and measured their attainments by the degree of success which they reached in copying them. The lamps of Greek balance and symmetry, Greek idealism, and Greek naturalism were rekindled, and the crowd of artists vied one with another in walking by their light.

We may mark four stages in the rediscovery of Greek sculpture. The first is the Italian Renaissance already mentioned. The second originated in the visit of Winckelmann to Italy in 1755, and the application by Goethe and Lessing of his discoveries to the judgement of contemporary art. It tended greatly to the raising and purifying of the artistic taste of Europe. The splendid promise of the Renaissance had degenerated into the mannerism and extravagance of Bernini and his contemporaries.

Winckelmann called it back to simplicity, to self-restraint, to ideality. But before long this teaching also was perverted; and such sculptors as Thorwaldsen and Canova were misled by the defects of the inferior examples of Greek sculpture, which were the only ones accessible to Winckelmann, into a slavish copy of the antique or works of an artificial grand style. Then came the third wave of revived Greek influence, when the sculptures of the Parthenon found a home in London, and critics were able to observe how infinitely superior the masterpieces of a really great age were to the copies of Roman times and the adaptations of the h.e.l.lenistic age. When Haydon the painter first saw the Parthenon marbles he was immensely impressed; but that which struck him most strongly was not the ideality, for which they have since become proverbial, but the wonderful naturalism of much of their detail in contrast to the grandiose conventions of his contemporaries. The fourth stage in our knowledge of Greek sculpture comes from the very fruitful excavations on Greek soil, especially at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi, which have shown us how widely varied is the range of the ancient sculptors, how many their styles, how admirable their technique.

This extension of our knowledge has not, it is true, as yet much affected contemporary art, as art was affected by the teachings of Winckelmann and the publishing of the marbles of the Parthenon. Until last year there was no book in English setting forth the results of the excavations of Delphi; and there is even now no book in English performing the same service for the excavations at Olympia. Sculptors are so little educated in the history of their craft, that they do not easily learn from new sources of knowledge. But by degrees, beyond doubt, the new views of Greek art will filter down to them. A few recently discovered sculptures, such as the Charioteer of Delphi, the Hermes of Praxiteles, the bronze head from Beneventum in the Louvre, the Demeter of Cnidus, have by their overpowering charm affected artists and art. And most sculptors profess a great admiration for Greek works, notably Rodin, who, although the tendency of his works is not in a cla.s.sical direction, yet uses the strongest language in praising the Greek masterpieces. But in general the tendency of art towards extreme individualism and the search after novelty have more than counteracted the somewhat shallow admiration of sculptors for what is antique.

X

At present religion and culture alike are struggling against the waves of barbarism reinvading. It is not my business to speak here of the forces which are trying to crush religion among us. But I may fitly conclude by sketching some of the tendencies against which culture based upon that of Greece is our best antidote. If I have rightly set forth the principles of Greek literature and art in past pages, the nature of their influence under present conditions will be clear.

I must venture on a parallel which seems to me very suggestive, though some readers may regard it as risky. There are two great standards set up in the past, to control the wayward fanaticisms of men, and to keep them within the bounds of reason and good sense. The standard in religion is set by the New Testament: the standard in art is set by Greece. As at the Renaissance the peoples of Europe went back for their inspiration and their models to the literature and the art of h.e.l.las, so at the Reformation they, or at all events the Teutonic races, went back to the early records of Christianity, appealing to them against the venality and corruption of the dominant Church. And ever since, at intervals, there has arisen, alike in the field of culture and in that of religion, an echo of the appeal to the cla.s.sical past. It is to the New Testament that Apostles like John Wesley and George Fox made their appeal, setting up in opposition to the conventions and worldliness of the Church in their times the spirituality and simplicity of the apostolic age, just as Goethe and Lessing turned men's minds from what was contrary to reason and good taste in their surroundings to Greek beauty and simplicity. And however some of the followers of Wesley and Fox may have gone beyond due bounds towards fanaticism, yet in every branch of the Christian Society the influence of those modern prophets has been renovating and purifying, just as the schools of critics which followed Goethe tended greatly to increase among us sweetness and light.

In our schools and colleges, until quite lately, the religion of the New Testament and the tradition of the Greek and Roman Cla.s.sics have gone together, the one preserving us from superst.i.tion and materialism in religion, the other making war upon the inherited barbarisms and brutalities which we have from our not very distant ancestors. The spirit of anarchy in religion would persuade us that there is no divine sanction for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is a matter of convention which every society and every nation has a right to invert if it judges such inversion in the line of its interests. The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly, that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue arouses a sentiment it does not matter whether the sentiment be one of delight and aspiration or one of horror. If once the idea of beauty as the end to be aimed at be expelled from art, art sinks like a stone to the bottom of the sea. Some people are ready to tolerate any monstrosity in art, however remote from nature, however offensive to decency, however repugnant to humanity. The whole artistic inheritance of the race from the day when men began to climb out of barbarism is liable to be thrown away by an age which has unbounded confidence in its own wisdom.

I should, however, be sorry to stop at this point, for I might leave on readers the impression that I am in favour of the mere imitation of works of Greek art. That is by no means my view. In the last century several sculptors, overpowered by the charm of the antique, produced statues which closely followed ancient patterns, such as the Hope and the Hebe of Thorwaldsen, some of the statues of Rauch and Schadow, and the tinted Venus of Gibson. Such works were necessarily stillborn; they had not in them any breath of the life of a new age, any attempt to conform to changed conditions. Very different was the following of the antique by Michelangelo. He admired with enthusiasm such works of the Greek chisel as he knew; but he produced not dull and academic reflections of them, but works of the most splendid originality and the greatest charm. He imbibed not the letter but the spirit of Greek art; and even succeeded better than most artists in combining that spirit with a breath of Christianity.

The parallel which I have drawn may be carried farther. A reversion to the letter of the New Testament writers has been often attempted by considerable religious leaders of our time, especially Tolstoi and the Quakers. They have gone back to the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount, and tried literally to abide by them. But it has become apparent to all but fanatics that such procedure would be fatal to civil government and civilized life. It is the spirit not the letter of the teaching of Jesus which is life-giving. In just the same way an acceptance of the mere externals of Greek art would not help us at all; but a revival of its spirit would be a great inspiration to modern artists. The lamps of Greek art will give light in any age. Greek idealism, Greek balance and measure, Greek love of what is natural and healthful, Greek simplicity and moderation are of the very essence of good art in all ages. We can no more revive the exact conditions under which art arose than we can import into England the clear air, the bright sun, the clear-cut shadows of the Greek landscape. But we can still look up to the philosophy, the poetry, and the art of Greece as cla.s.sical, as a revelation of what is most pleasing and most enduring in human nature. And if we neglect them and reject them from the education of our children, we shall destroy what has been ever since the Renaissance the source of pure joy and refined feeling in the majority of cultured men; we shall make a great gap which material prosperity, a deeper knowledge of the secrets of nature, the invention of fresh modes of amus.e.m.e.nt, can never fill. And if we trust merely to the reflections of the Greek spirit in modern literature and art, we shall be acting as the Roman Church in its darker ages has acted, in shutting away from the people recourse to the primary doc.u.ments of religion, and obliging them to be content with such interpretations of those doc.u.ments as the ruling hierarchy judged to be useful. We must retain the right of appeal to our cla.s.sical examples, whether in religion, in literature, or in art.

Arnold was right. The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art remain the stars by which we may direct our course over stormy seas.

P. GARDNER.

ARCHITECTURE

n.o.body has ever disputed the beauty of Greek Architecture. We recognize the justice of a description of the Parthenon as 'le supreme effort du genie a la poursuite du beau'; but the layman must sometimes ask himself what does it mean? Where did it come from, where did it go to, why is it thought so beautiful, how was it that this people relatively insignificant in power, in territory, and in numbers, was able to attain to this astonishing supremacy in art? These are questions not easily answered. The evidence is fragmentary and not always conclusive, the ruins of a few temples and buildings, a technical treatise by a garrulous third-rate writer in the first century A. D.,[125] the anecdotes of an indefatigable collector[126] a little later, the notes of a traveller in the second century,[127] and the materials collected by the patient research of scholars and archaeologists, pieced together on more or less ingenious hypotheses. Indeed, a great part of what is written on Greek Architecture is simply hypothesis. There is not much to go on, yet Greek Architecture (and by this I mean the architecture of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.) remains one of the great outstanding facts in the history of the Architecture of the Western world, and the Art of the age of Pericles is the fountain-head to which artists still return.

[125] Vitruvius, _De Architectura_.

[126] Pliny the Elder, _Historia Naturalis_, x.x.xvi.

[127] Pausanias, ???ad?? ?e?????s?? {h.e.l.lados Periegesis}.

Where that art sprang from, and how it grew, is largely a matter of speculation. There have been legends of civilizations wiped out in tremendous cataclysms that left no trace behind them. Vague suggestions are made that the cradle of the race was in Asia. All we know for certain is that the earliest civilizations of which actual historical evidence remains are those of Chaldea and Egypt, and that the art of these countries reached a high degree of attainment long before we come upon the earliest traces of art of any sort in Greece. That both these countries contributed in varying degrees to the art of Greece is certain, but that is not the whole of the story. As we shall see, another element comes into play, which made of that art almost a new creation, differing in outlook and ideal from any art that preceded it, stamped by the genius of a vigorous northern race with a character all its own. The art of the East and the art of the West never really fused.

There is a difference in kind between the joyous vitality of pure Greek art, and the gloomy vision of Asia, with its craving for the vast and terrible, its sombre imagination, its lack of humanity and indifference to the individual.