The Legacy of Greece Part 24

It is not, however, till far down in the progress of history that this differentiation a.s.serts itself. Greek art is relatively a late development. The Great Pyramid at Ghizeh was built some 2,000 years before a stone was laid of the masonry of Mycenae. The Hall of Columns of Karnak, with its columns sixty feet high, was probably coeval with the Treasury of Atreus: in other words, when the art of Greece and of the islands was scarcely out of the barbaric stage, a wonderful art had been in existence across the Mediterranean from time immemorial. Both Egypt and Chaldea attained a high degree of civilization long before the Dorians were ever heard of. At some remote period the Egyptian influence penetrated to Crete and Cyprus, the islands of the Aegean, and the mainland of Greece; and the intermediaries were the Phoenicians, that enterprising race of merchant adventurers, whose home was in Syria, and whose fleets traversed the Mediterranean from East to West. The Phoenicians were traders and not artists. In Egypt they came into contact with a highly developed art, beyond their comprehension in its essential features, yet including details which could easily be apprehended by their quick commercial intelligence. Wherever they touched on their voyages, Cyprus, Crete, the southern islands of the Aegean, the mainland of Greece, the south of Italy, Sicily, Carthage, the Balearic islands, Spain in the far west, they probably carried with them, for trading purposes, minor articles of Egyptian workmanship which may have supplied hints to the indigenous peoples. Where they established settlements, they reproduced what they could recollect of the methods of Egyptian architecture, possessing at second-hand a knowledge of technical methods in advance of anything within the knowledge of the people among whom they settled. Rudimentary antic.i.p.ations of the Ionic volute are found in Phoenician capitals, vague reminiscences of what the traders had seen in Egypt and elsewhere.

Moreover, the Phoenicians, who possessed the skill of sailors in the use of tackle, would have had little difficulty in handling large stones set dry in more or less regular courses, which was a characteristic feature of Cretan and Mycenaean building. It is too soon to describe the work as architecture. It is doubtful if the Phoenicians possessed any apt.i.tude for the arts. Their role was that of intermediaries only.

Obscure as was the part played by the Phoenicians in the early origins of art in Greece and the islands, there was another channel through which Eastern influences came to bear on its development, which is even more uncertain. To the west of Chaldea and north of Syria, dwelt a race of which little is known, the Hitt.i.tes. Carchemish, their capital, was on the upper Euphrates, north-east of Antioch, and their power appears to have extended westward through Asia Minor to the sh.o.r.es of the Aegean. Dr. Sayce says that in the thirteenth century B. C. it extended from 'the banks of the Euphrates to the sh.o.r.es of the Aegean, including both the cultured Semites of Syria and the rude barbarians of the Greek Seas', he even says that the Hitt.i.tes 'brought the civilization of the East to the barbarous tribes of the distant West'. What actually remains of Hitt.i.te art hardly bears out this statement. When the Hitt.i.te power was at its height, Minoan 'art' had long been practised in Crete, and according to the most popular chronology, had already pa.s.sed its prime and given way to the art of Mycenae and Tiryns. The scanty evidence of Hitt.i.te art consists of bas-reliefs of figures and animals cut on the face of rocks along the natural caravan routes through Asia Minor from East to West. This and the evidence of seals and engraved gems show that Hitt.i.te art was derived first from Chaldea, later from Egypt. It undoubtedly exercised some influence on the art of the early Greek settlers on the eastern side of the Aegean, and gave it an Asiatic cast, which it never lost throughout all its later developments. For the Greeks of Asia Minor never really understood the austere ideal of Doric art. Ionian art crossed westward to Greece, but the Dorian never went east. It was the art of a strong northern race, that found no place for itself among the softer peoples of Asia Minor.

At this point we can take up the first rudimentary beginnings of Greek art. The discoveries of the last forty years have proved the existence in Crete and Cyprus, Southern Greece, and the islands of the Aegean, of an archaic art of obscure origin, of very great interest, and of remarkable attainment in certain directions, long before the earliest beginnings of what we mean when we speak of Greek architecture. So far as architecture is concerned, this archaic art is of relatively minor importance. It plays a small part, if any, in subsequent developments, and though enthusiastic explorers claim to find in it antic.i.p.ations of the details of modern domestic architecture, the evidence produced is unconvincing. Great movements in the arts always owe some debt to the periods that have preceded them, but Minoan and Mycenaean art, at any rate in regard to architecture, was rather the last word of a decaying civilization than the first herald of the glorious art of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. We are still far back in remote ages, remote that is so far as Greek art is concerned, anywhere between 2000 and 1000 B. C. or even earlier,[128] back in the Minoan age of Crete with its rudimentary architecture, and its relatively high excellence in the crafts, and in the age of Mycenae and Tiryns, the age that produced the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and that strange half-barbaric work, if I may be pardoned the term, the Treasury of Atreus. It is worth pausing to consider these archaic buildings, not so much to show a relationship to later work (which scarcely existed), as to call attention to the fact that the Minoan and Mycenaean builders were moving unconsciously in a direction that would never have led to the column and lintel architecture of the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. It might have led to some form of dome construction, it could never have led to the Doric of the Sicilian temples. No stronger evidence of the genius of the Dorian invaders could be produced than that, with this unpromising art in possession, they were yet able in the course of three or four centuries to create Greek architecture. The design of the Lion Gate is a strange jumble of ill-adjusted motives. It is set in a wall of great stones roughly squared and laid dry. Two monolith jambs support a huge lintel, cambered in the middle like the tie-beams of our sixteenth-century roofs. Above the lintel the courses are gathered over, leaving between their lower faces and the top of the lintel a triangular s.p.a.ce of a steep pitch (about 60), in which was inserted a frontispiece carved on a single stone representing two lions standing up on either side of an archaic column supporting a fragment of a rudimentary architrave.[129] The heraldic pose of the lions and the technique of their sculpture, so suggestive of a.s.syrian reliefs with their splendid sense of muscular form and energy, are far ahead of an architecture that is still barbaric, scarcely architecture at all. There is here nothing to suggest the Doric of Paestum and Selinus, much to recall the megalithic buildings of Syria, and the sculpture of the farther East.

[128] Sir Arthur Evans has drawn up an ingenious chronology of Early Minoan (2800-2200 B. C.), Middle Minoan (2200-1700 B. C.), and Late Minoan (1700-1200 B. C.). The evidence is almost entirely that of pottery discovered on the site. The whole question of the relations of Minoan to Mycenaean art, and of this archaic art to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, is very obscure and uncertain.

[129] The heraldic treatment of the lions is of Eastern origin. The Greeks had a tradition that the chieftains of Mycenae came from Lydia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 1. LION GATE, MYCENAE]

The Treasury of Atreus is still more remarkable, not only because it shows more skill in building, but because its design is based on a structural motive which seems to have been wholly abandoned by the successors of the Mycenaean builders. The Treasury of Atreus (or Tomb of Agamemnon) was excavated in a hill, and consists of a long pa.s.sage about 120 ft. by 21 ft. wide, with retaining walls of megalithic masonry on either side, terminating in a great entrance doorway. This doorway is flanked on either side by columns tapering downwards, and decorated with chevrons in a manner very similar to Norman work of the eleventh century, and apparently intended solely for ornament.[130] The entrance opened into a circular domed chamber about 48 ft. 6 in. in diameter, 45 ft. 4 in. high, out of which opened another smaller chamber. The dome, in section, is built on the curve of a parabola, formed with courses projecting over one another, and not set out radial to the curve of the dome--in other words it is not a true dome or arch, but a succession of corbels. The internal face of the dome is dressed down, and was covered with ornament of some sort, whether metal rosettes, or enamelled terra-cotta, or wholly in metal, possibly the famous gold of Mycenae, is not known. The whole of this chamber was covered in with a mound of earth, in accordance with the primitive custom of concealing the chieftain's grave. It is impossible to find, in this extremely interesting monument or in the domed chamber of Orchomenos in Boeotia, any trace of future developments in Greek architecture. Both in intention and in its psychological background it seems almost as remote from the Doric Temple as the Great Pyramid itself. In point of fact architecture was still in a rudimentary stage. It has been proved abundantly that Architecture comes late in the sequence of the Arts.

People could draw well, long before they could design. Among the cavemen, for example, there were admirable draughtsmen, but they had to make their drawings on the sides of caves. That there existed in the Minoan and Mycenaean ages skilful potters and metal-workers, is shown by the vases of Knossos and the gold cups found at Vaphio near Sparta; that they built habitable buildings and decorated them to the best of their ability is also proved, as, for example, the palace of Tiryns, but it has not yet been shown that their builders reached the degree of skilled design, at which building becomes architecture. Architecture had not yet found itself in Greece.

[130] Portions of these columns are now in the British Museum.

Then somewhere about 1000 B. C. came the Dorian invasions, and the art of Crete and Mycenae vanished into s.p.a.ce--possibly the legend was right which said that the conquered people of the mainland carried it away with them to Asia. Anyhow, the three or four centuries following the Dorian invasions are a blank which future research may fill out for us, and so far as art is concerned, there appears to have been a _detente_, during which the new race was settling down to its conquest, finding itself, and a.s.similating something at any rate of the older civilization. The survival of such buildings as the Treasury of Atreus show that the Dorians were not simple barbarians, destroying all that came in their way. Even Sparta in its earlier days was not a mere military machine. Discoveries made in 1906-9 suggest that from the ninth to the seventh centuries B. C. Sparta had some sort of an art of its own showing traces of Asiatic influence in its pottery--a little later Sparta concluded an alliance with Croesus, King of Lydia, and Bathycles, an artist of Magnesia in Ionia, was treated with honour in Sparta. The Dorians were something more than fighters, they seem to have possessed some sort of civilization, and to have been endowed with a natural capacity for the arts, which after two or three centuries of experiment will find its own splendid expression within very definite and original lines. The legend of the return of the Heracleidae was to be justified by their later history. No merely imitative race could have evolved the perfect manner of the great Doric temples from the sc.r.a.ps of Egypt and the East, and the rudimentary buildings of Crete and Mycenae.

Greek architecture for the purpose of this study is Dorian architecture, and its elements are simple. It was evolved in the design of their temples, and with the exception of their theatres it was summed up in these temples. From the period during which Greek architecture was being built up to its maturity, say from the seventh century B. C. to the completion of the Parthenon in the fifth century B. C., the whole life of the Greek was coloured and dominated by his religion and its observances; and his religion was not the sinister mystery of Egypt, but on the whole a cheerful open-air Pantheism that gloried in the life and beauty of the visible world in which he lived. He himself was content to live in a poor house, so long as he had his market-place, his ceremonial theatre, and the glorious temples of his G.o.ds. Moreover, to whatever depths the Athenians may have sunk in the time of St. Paul, in the heroic days of Pericles they were remarkable for constancy of purpose and the steadfastness of their ideals. They stood on the ancient ways, and it never occurred to them to abandon the tradition of their fathers, their business was to carry it forward to perfection. The result was that the architecture of their temples proceeded on lines that long use had made sacrosanct; and its technique is summed up in the history of two orders, the Doric and the Ionic.[131]

[131] The order, I may say for the uninitiated, means the complete ordonnance of the column, the architrave resting immediately on its capital, the frieze and the cornice. It is the final expression of the simple device of the post and lintel, of the beam resting on the heads of two or more posts; and there is little doubt that in its ultimate origin, the Order is the translation into stone of the details of a rudimentary wooden construction.

Now, the order, its character, dimensions and disposition, with the wall of the Cella (or enclosed shrine) within the colonnade, summed up the elements, the vocabulary, if one may so put it, of Greek architecture; and we come here at the outset on a curious quality of the Greek genius, and one that differentiates it from the Roman. The properties of wood and stone as materials are clearly different, things can be done with the one which are impossible with the other; but the Greeks either did not realize this or did not trouble their heads about it. They found that the post and lintel was a simple means of building, and they adopted it as their permanent method of construction. If the span became too wide, they thickened the posts (the columns of Paestum are 7 ft. in diameter) and increased the strength of the beam (the architrave). Hence the vast solidity of the Doric order of the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia. The Greek was incurious about construction _qua_ construction.

He found, in the column and the lintel, means perfectly adequate to realize his ideal of high unalterable beauty, and he was content. The Romans, who for a time were satisfied with these simple methods, became impatient of the constructive limitation of the post and lintel. They wanted to cover in great s.p.a.ces, and to leave the floor unenc.u.mbered; and concentrating on this they arrived at the arch, the vault, and the dome, and so became the greatest builders of the world. To them, the orders were a mere appanage of decoration, which they never properly appreciated, of which they mistook the intention, adopted the worst elements, and often enough made a gross misuse. The Greeks took another line. They adopted the column and lintel once for all as the only possible method of construction, and devoted all their labours to the incessant refinement of this type, eliminating the unessential, arriving by constant selection at the most perfect expression of their purpose, and their purpose was not that of the Roman and the modern architect, mainly utilitarian, it was directed entirely to the aesthetic appeal, the appeal to the emotions through beauty of line, of form, and in a less degree of colour. 'The whole fabric of Greek art goes to pieces when it is brought into contact with a purely utilitarian nation like Rome.'[132]

[132] _h.e.l.lenistic Sculpture_, by Guy d.i.c.kins, p. 85. The author, who wrote with something of the insight of the artist as well as the accurate knowledge of the scholar, died of wounds, on the Somme, in 1916.

Of the two orders, the Doric and the Ionic, the Doric seems to me the purest embodiment of the true Greek spirit, in its faultless form, and its austere restraint and rejection of the unessential. It was, moreover, the order _par excellence_ of the Greek temple of the mainland. The Erechtheum was the only Ionic temple of first-rate importance in Greece, and the employment of the Ionic order in Greece was confined to interiors and minor buildings. As for the Corinthian order, the favourite order of the Romans, it was scarcely recognized by the Greeks. In all their great temples, in Greece, in Sicily, and Magna Graecia, they used the Doric order.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 2. TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE AT PAESTUM]

How this order was arrived at we do not really know. Ingenious conjectures have been made as to its origin in wooden construction, and though some of these conjectures are more probable than others they leave us pretty well where we were in regard to the stages by which it reached its final form. It has been suggested that the Doric column originated in the wooden post of the earliest temples, such as are supposed to have existed in the Heraion at Olympia. The square post would have its angles taken off, and become an octagon, and the further elimination of the angles would gradually produce a form nearly circular in plan, in which the arrises of the chamfered angles would remain, and this might easily suggest to artists so sensitive as the Greeks, their further refinement and definition by a slight hollow between the arrises which would const.i.tute the flutings of the Doric column. Its derivations from the Minoan and Mycenaean columns seems most improbable. There are two essential parts in the Doric column, the shaft and the capital (the Greeks did not use any base for this order). The Minoan columns taper downwards instead of upwards, an utterly unconstructional form, and though in the palace of Knossos and at Tiryns columns of this shape appear to have been used to carry lintels, the stone columns on either side of the entrance to the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae were used for decorative and not for structural purposes. On the other hand columns of great ma.s.siveness tapering upwards had been used long before in Egypt; and though there is evidence against it, it still seems probable that the suggestion of the shaft of the Doric column may have come from Egypt. We first find it in Greece in the seventh century B. C. at the period when Psammetichus I (671-617 B. C.) opened Egypt to Greek trade and settlement. The Greek colony of Naukratis on the west side of the Nile delta was founded by Milesians about 650 B. C. and by the middle of the sixth century B. C. definite trade relations were established between Naukratis and the mainland of Greece. The Greek settlement at Daphnae on the eastern arm of the Nile appears to have been founded at about the same time as Naukratis, in both cases with the sanction and encouragement of the Egyptian king. The earliest Doric temples in Greece, Sicily, and Magna Graecia date from the end of the seventh century and early part of the sixth century. The nearness of date makes it probable that the shaft of the Doric order had its origin in the Egyptian column seen by some quick-witted Greek when trading in Egypt.

When we come to the capital of the column, the roles seem to be reversed, for we find nothing in Egyptian architecture to suggest the echinus moulding under the square abacus of the Doric column; whereas the Mycenaean column had a rudimentary capital which may have suggested the idea of the Doric capital. But the notable thing about it is that when we first come across the Doric capital in Sicily and Greece, it is already far in advance of anything that had gone before it in Greece, and it is quite different from the columns of Egypt. In the Doric temple of Corinth (650-600 B. C.) the columns have already reached the type form, the tapered shaft with its entasis or slight convex curvature in outline, its ma.s.sive solidity (the ratio is one of diameter to four and a quarter of height), and the bold parabolic curve of the echinus moulding under the abacus of its cap. In this form, the Doric column was an absolutely fresh note in architecture. Archaic though they were, these columns at Corinth show that the Greeks were already on the track of those refinements of form, those optical corrections and compensations, which differentiate Greek architecture from that of any other race. The exaggeration in the entasis of the archaic column disappears, its tapering was diminished, its height increased, and the overhang of the capitals reduced, till in the Theseion (465 B. C.) and the Parthenon (450-438 B. C.) we reach the final inimitable type. The column, which at Paestum was not much over four times the height of its correct diameter, is now over five times, the great overhanging capitals are reduced to reasonable dimensions, the depth of the entablature is diminished, the axis of the column is slightly inclined inwards to give the impression of stability, the shafts have the slight curve or 'entasis' just sufficiently marked to prevent the outline of the column looking incurved; the lines of the stylobate, or continuous base, on which the columns stand, and the entablature which they carry, have a slight rise toward the centre in order to correct the impression of the lines sinking in the middle; the columns at the angles are thickened, because standing free with the light all round them they would otherwise appear smaller than the columns standing against the background of the building. Nothing was left to chance; every aspect of the building, the relation of every part to the whole, and of the whole to its part, was studied profoundly, so that there should be no failure in its perfect harmony. Except in Egyptian architecture, and there to a much smaller extent, nothing like this had been done before. What the Greeks did, was to formulate a rhythmical architecture, in which each part stood in a definite and considered relation to the whole, so that even in their ruined state these Doric temples give an irresistible impression of a great idea, a great architectural epic, in which each detail, however beautiful, was subordinated to the unity of the conception as a whole. It is this abstract quality which lifts Greek Doric so far above the ambitious art of later ages, and indeed above all but the very finest work of any period of architecture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 3. DORIC TEMPLE, CORINTH]

Many attempts have been made to discover the secret of this wonderful perfection of proportion. That the Greeks had a system of their own, that they worked to definite ratios of dimension and number, and employed graphic methods of determining their proportions, such as the use of triangles and the like to determine the limits of their designs, seems certain. But no contemporary account of any such system remains; and all the explanations that are given are _ex post facto_, made by theorists a.n.a.lysing existing buildings, not by architects designing new ones. Some four or five hundred years later Vitruvius compiled a treatise on architecture, in which, following the doctrines of the school of Alexandria, he expounded a Greek theory of proportion on the basis of the human figure. Vitruvius is obscure, and does not seem to have been certain himself whether the proportion of the parts of a design were to bear a relation to the whole, a.n.a.logous to that of members of a human body to the body as a whole, or whether the proportions of the order were to be taken from the actual proportions of the human body; and he complicates the position by reference to the 'perfect numbers' of the Greeks. But here again he was uncertain whether the 'perfect number' was ten or six. After which, and having, in his reference to the human figure as the canon of proportion, unwittingly set a trap for the scholars and artists of the Renaissance, he drops the subject and digresses into a general cla.s.sification of temples, with formal rules for the placing and dimensions of columns, which have formed the staple of treatises on cla.s.sical architecture ever since. One should speak with grat.i.tude of the labours of Vitruvius, because, after all, his is the only technical treatise left us on the subject; but he applied to the pure Greek temples a system evolved centuries later by critics and theorists; he was thinking chiefly of Roman versions of Greek architecture, and he was more interested in technical rules and precepts for the use of architects than in that abstract beauty which was all the Greek cared for. No cla.s.sification, however laborious, will reach the mystery of Greek architecture. Its beauty is too subtle to be reduced to any formula.

The Doric order reigned supreme throughout the great period from the sixth till the end of the fifth century B. C. It failed with the failure of the high ideals of Athens. Other forces came into play to which it no longer responded, and later Greek critics even found fault with the Doric order for certain 'mendosae et inconvenientes symmetriae';[133]

but that order, the true symbol of the sons of Heracles, was one of the most momentous contributions ever made to the art of architecture. It was the keynote of Greek architecture throughout its finest period.

Later it was superseded by the Ionic order, and when Rome became paramount in the western world, that, in its turn, yielded its place of pride to the Corinthian order, opulent, luxurious, a little vulgar, a true register of the lowering of the sense and standard of beauty that followed the downfall of Athens.

[133] _Vitruvius_, iii. 1. The difficulty was, that if the triglyph was placed on the angle of the building (the practice of the Greeks) and the next triglyph was placed over the axis of the column, the metope (or panel) between these two triglyphs would be larger than the metopes between the triglyphs axial over the other columns. The Greeks solved it by reducing the width of the end intercolumniation, but later critics disliked this, and solved it by removing the end triglyph from the angle and placing it axial over the end column.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Aegean, the Ionic order was reaching its perfect form through a similar process of systematic thought on a type definitely adopted. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were of very early origin. Legend attributed their foundation to the earlier inhabitants of Greece, driven out by the Dorians. By the sixth century B. C. the Greek colonies were well established on the west and south-west coasts of Asia Minor, and had evolved their own characteristic architectural idiom in the Ionic order and its column, more slender than the Doric, with its moulded base and its strange characteristic capital, unsuitable from the constructional point of view in stone or marble, yet ultimately attaining the exquisite beauty of line and modelling of the capitals of the Erechtheion at Athens. Two things seem fairly certain as to the origin of this capital; first, that it was derived from the wooden horizontal head-pieces fixed on posts to reduce the bearing of the primitive wooden lintels; and, secondly, that the first suggestion of the volute reached the Ionian Greeks from the East. A crude antic.i.p.ation of the volute is found in Phoenician work, and it also appears on a Hitt.i.te relief at Boghaz Keui in the middle of Asia Minor. Its origin in either case was oriental, and we have here the other motive in Greek architecture, Eastern, at any rate exotic, and, as compared with Doric, almost alien to the true Greek genius. Yet this astonishing people gave it a form as far removed from its barbarous originals, as the Doric capitals of the Parthenon from the capitals of the columns of Mycenae, and when the Greeks of both sides of the Aegean drew together after the defeat of the Persians, the Ionic order crossed the sea, and a.s.sumed a place of honour in the temples of Greece, still, however, with rare exceptions, in subordination to the Doric order. In the colonies in Asia Minor, the supremacy of the Ionic order had long been recognized. The Ionic temple of Hera at Samos, 368 ft. long by 178 ft. wide, is supposed to have been built at the end of the sixth or early in the fifth century B. C., and this was the forerunner of the great fourth-century temples of Ionia, built when Architecture had changed its direction and h.e.l.lenistic Art was beginning its adventurous career.

With these two orders as the terms and idioms of expression the Greeks built up the architecture of their temples. Their plans were the simplest possible. The rudimentary type was a simple chamber or cella, with a loggia open to the air except for two columns standing between the two extremities of the side walls, which terminated in pilasters known as 'antae'.[134] The next stage was to bring the colonnade forward,[135] stage number three repeated the column at the other end of the building,[136] stage number four continued the colonnade along the sides,[137] stage number five doubled the colonnade on all four sides,[138] and stage number six retained the outer rows of columns but omitted the inner row along the sides, leaving a wide pa.s.sage-way all round the main building.[139] Vitruvius gives a further cla.s.sification by the s.p.a.cing of columns which will be found in all the handbooks of cla.s.sic architecture. With minor variations in detail, these types remained constant for the temples of Greece and Rome. The princ.i.p.al alterations occurred in the extension of the temple proper, at the expense of the surrounding colonnade. In the Archaic temples, such as the older temples of Selinus in Sicily (sixth century B. C.), the portico and colonnade occupy three-quarters of the site. In the temple of Hephaestus (Theseion) at Athens (fifth century B. C.) the cella occupies only a little more than half the total area, and in the Parthenon, built some twenty years later, the size of the cella is still further increased. Most of these temples were covered in. Hypaethral temples, in which the cella was open to the sky, are mentioned by Vitruvius, and it is probable that some of the larger ones at any rate were partly open to the sky. But how the openings were arranged is almost entirely a matter of conjecture. The roof used was of a very flat pitch, one of height to four of base, later it was even flatter, and this dictated the slope of the pediments. This roof covered the whole of the building, that is, both the cella and the colonnades on either side of it, and as the Greeks were ignorant of the principle of the triangulated truss built up of beams in compression and tension, they were at a loss to know how to carry their roof without pushing out their walls. Hence the great solidity of their buildings, and the rather clumsy expedient of the colonnades in the interiors of temples which appear to have been the only means they could think of to carry the roof. One has to bear it in mind in thinking of Greek architecture, that the Greeks were not constructors in the sense that the Romans were; they built well, and the best of their masonry was extraordinarily skilful--only by unusual skill in the cutting and setting of stone could they have carried out the delicate curves in the columns and other parts of their buildings--but construction, in the sense of the invention of new methods to meet difficult conditions, did not interest the Greek, and one cannot help thinking that the Greeks may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside. It seems clear that they devoted most of their attention to the external elevations. It is not really known for certain how they lit their temples, though of course all sorts of suggestions of top-lighting have been made. It is possible that in some cases they were lit only from the princ.i.p.al entrance, and it is certain that the Greek did not want for the interior of his temple any such floods of light as are necessary under our northern skies. In the first place, he enjoyed a most brilliant and penetrating light, so that within his colonnades reflected light was amply sufficient to show the friezes and other ornaments, and he did not hesitate to use strong primary colours to heighten and explain their effect, wherever he found it necessary. In the second place, within the shrine itself, other considerations came into play. A certain luminous atmosphere, rather than positive light was what was aimed at, and the deep shadows of these internal colonnades might have helped this effect, adding to the mystery of the figure of the G.o.d.

[134] Vitruvius gives this as the 'aedes in antis'.

[135] Pro-style (colonnade in front).

[136] Amphipro-style (colonnade at both ends).

[137] Peripteral (single colonnade all round).

[138] Dipteral (double colonnade all round).

[139] Pseudo-dipteral (inner row of columns omitted).

This, too, may be the explanation of what must strike an architect as an anomaly of design, the Greek habit of placing enormous figures in the interior of their temples. The Greek, in his own way, was a very religious man. In his temple, he was doing his utmost to set forth the majesty of his G.o.d, and if it was necessary for this purpose he was even prepared to sacrifice his principles as an artist, to ignore the scale of his interior and the rhythmic harmony of his design, by the introduction of gigantic figures. The eye judges by what it knows, and the readiest way of arriving at some idea of the size of a building or a monument is by relating it to the normal size of the human figure.

Vitruvius, in his confused way, suggested that the human figure was the canon and standard of architectural design, but how is it possible to determine the scale of a building which contained a figure at least six times the size of a man, reaching from the floor to the roof? The chryselephantine figure of Zeus at Olympia, made by Pheidias, is supposed to have been some thirty-five feet high, and to have reached nearly to the roof, pa.s.sing the double tier of columns and the gallery above the aisles of the cella. Moreover, this G.o.d was represented as seated on his throne, so that by no possibility could it have been in scale with the building so far as the architecture was concerned. Even the gigantic temple of Zeus at Agrigentum with its external columns 61 ft. 9 in. in height, and large enough for a man to stand within one of the flutings of the columns, could hardly have stood up to figures on such a scale as this. Such a violent contrast in scale broke the principle of s?et??a {symmetria}, that strict relation of the part to the whole which the Greek artists maintained elsewhere with scrupulous care. Artists with such a consummate sense of proportion as the Greeks possessed would hardly have made a mistake here, and the conclusion one comes to is that where their religion was in question, everything had to give way. Indeed, one can imagine the tremendous effect of this colossal figure seen dimly in the half-light of the cella, filling the whole temple with its presence. The same anomaly in scale occurred in the Akropolis at Athens, where the vast figure of Athene Promachos must have reduced the beautiful Caryatides of the Erechtheum to insignificance. M.

Choisy makes a gallant effort to show that this want of relationship in scale, and also in the siting of the temples, was deliberate and considered. As a fact, the general rule that seems to have been observed in the time of Pericles was that new temples should always be built on the site of the older ones,[140] but axis lines were neglected, and even the ma.s.ses of the Propylaea, beautiful building as it must have been, did not balance. The Akropolis was just a collection of unrelated buildings, and in the great Temenos of Delphi the various monuments were all anyhow.[141] The Sacred Way meandered about like an S, and the only method it observed was to clear the various treasuries and shrines which appear to have been scattered about within the enclosure, with a disregard of each other little less than brutal--a rather suggestive symbol of the internecine rivalry of the small Greek states. At Delphi, also, there was a huge figure of Apollo Sitalkas said to have been seventeen metres high, which must have been hopelessly out of scale. The fact was that Greek architects of the fifth century had not yet arrived at the conception of the city as a whole. They had an admirable eye for a site, for example, the position of the Parthenon itself, and the temple of Hera Lacinia at Agrigentum placed high above the sea, but it is unhistorical to invest even the architects of the Parthenon and the Propylaea with a knowledge and outlook which was not thought of till a hundred years later. Even the Greek architects and sculptors of the fifth century B. C. were not omniscient, yet within their limits, in their mastery of what they set themselves to do, the artists of the age of Pericles remain unapproachable, and theirs was the Golden Age of Architecture. They had fixed for all time essential elements of the art, and had set up a standard of attainment in pure form which no subsequent architecture has ever been able to reach.

[140] The Erechtheum was an exception.

[141] See _Delphi_, by Dr. Frederick Poulsen, p. 52. It is suggested that the Sacred Way was in existence before the shrines were built, and that its wanderings were necessitated by the gradients of the hillside. No sort of attempt, however, seems to have been made to correct this, or to treat it as an element of design.

The fall of Athens closed this splendid chapter, but Greek architecture was by no means done with. The Silver Age, the h.e.l.lenistic art that followed, is of intense interest. With the rise of the Macedonian monarchy the stage of history shifted from the mainland to the Ionian colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Cities such as Ephesus and Miletus became immensely prosperous, Mausolus of Halicarna.s.sus, the Attalids of Pergamon, possessed wealth that would have been unimaginable to the Greeks of Marathon. The City State, fighting desperately for its existence, inspired by high ideals of patriotism and religion, was a thing of the past. These Greeks of Ionia were well content to enjoy the comfort and prosperity of a settled civilization without having to fight for it; and the whole atmosphere of their existence must have been different from the strenuous life of Greece in the fifth century.

Moreover, the Ionian Greek, influenced, even if subconsciously, by the spirit of Asia, was by temperament unable to maintain the intellectual level of the Doric architecture of the mainland; and a difference appears in the whole orientation of art, in sculpture perhaps even more than in architecture. The history of h.e.l.lenistic art has yet to be written. It has been described as decadent, and it was undoubtedly responsible for some very poor stuff, but it also produced the 'Victory'

of Samothrace, one of the finest things ever done in sculpture, and some very remarkable developments in architecture. It is not to be judged by the standards of the art that preceded it. The Ionian Greek of the fourth and third centuries B. C. broke away from the tradition of the mainland, a tradition always rather alien to his instincts. His interest lay less in a somewhat impersonal religion than in the a.s.sertion of his own individuality. He did not understand the lofty patriotism, and the high ideal of abstract beauty that had inspired Pericles and his artists in the Akropolis; indeed, there is a curiously modern feeling about much of his work, which became more marked as he came under the dominance of Rome. The individualism, the realism, the revivalism, and the commercialism of modern art, were all antic.i.p.ated by the h.e.l.lenistic artists of Ionia, of Rhodes, of Alexandria, and of Athens itself in the Roman period. Civilization was becoming more complex, and one finds this reflected in h.e.l.lenistic art, at once more florid than the Doric of the fourth century, yet also more skilful in its handling of complicated problems of planning and design. No one wanted archaic simplicity when the wealth of Asia was flowing into the treasuries of the Ionian states, and the expression of this opulent ease is found in their magnificent temples, such as the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of which the outer colonnade measured 342 ft. 6 in. by 163 ft. 9 in., or the vast temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus, 165 ft. wide by 360 ft. long out to out of the colonnades; or the amazing monument of Mausolus of Caria at Halicarna.s.sus, or the great altar of Pergamon. Fragments of the columns of the Temple of Artemis, now in the British Museum, tell of its size and richness, they also give the first hint of the downfall of art and civilization which was to follow centuries later. The Greeks of the great period had kept the structural parts of their building free of ornament. It would never have occurred to them to interfere with the lines of the column in any way that would contradict its purpose; but the Greek architects of Ephesus not only placed their columns on pedestals (making them so far less stable in appearance), but they adorned the lower part of their Ionic columns with figures, of admirable execution, but perfectly inappropriate in the position they occupy. One cannot imagine Pheidias making a mistake such as this. Splendid in execution as h.e.l.lenistic sculpture often was, it won its place at the expense of architecture; one looks in vain for that selection and restraint which give its undying distinction to the earlier work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 4. TEMPLE OF THESEUS, ATHENS]

The Greeks of the fifth century realized that architecture is an art with a definite purpose other than that of a mere vehicle for sculpture, and that it makes its aesthetic appeal by its own inherent qualities of rhythm, and proportion, s.p.a.cing, ma.s.s, and outline. Though they used sculpture and colour to heighten and intensify the effect of their architecture, they saw very clearly the function of the arts in relation to each other, and kept their sculpture and their colour in strict relation to the aesthetic purpose of their architecture. It is a point on which later architects went lamentably astray. A great deal of early Renaissance work is mere ornamentation of buildings, indeed in buildings such as the Certosa of Pavia the architecture has almost ceased to exist; and most of the bad architecture of the last fifty years is due to the deplorable fallacy that ornament is architecture. The columns of Ephesus, the sculpture of the altar of Pergamon, brilliant as they were in technical accomplishment, were the first hint of that decline which was in time to undermine the whole fabric of the Arts. Architecture was deposed from its high intellectual dominance. It tended more and more to become a conventional affair, and it was an easy transition from the exuberance of h.e.l.lenistic art to the point-blank vulgarity of Roman ornamental architecture.

It was, however, inevitable that the fine simplicity of Periclean art should vanish with its ideals, and one finds a certain compensation in the extension of the range and outlook of architecture, which we owe to the h.e.l.lenistic architects of the fourth and succeeding centuries B. C.

So far as perfection of form was concerned, it was impossible to carry the art beyond the stage to which Ictinus and Callicrates had brought it; but there still remained something, and something very important, to be done. Axial planning, the consideration of the relation of building to building, seem to have been outside the consciousness of Greeks of the fifth century, and each building was treated as an unrelated unit.

But the inconvenience of this, its loss of opportunity, and the necessity of order and method, must have become apparent, as civilization became more complex and more exacting. By the end of the fourth century B. C. the tradition of architectural technique was firmly established, and architects were able to turn their attention to problems of large planning, and these they seem to have handled with extraordinary skill. So far, what had been done in this direction had been due to religious inspiration, as in the processional ways leading to the Egyptian temples or the avenue of figures at Branchidae. What the h.e.l.lenistic architects did was to think out consecutive schemes of city planning, in which the dominant motive of arrangement was artistic. They had learnt to treat the temples, the public buildings, the open s.p.a.ces and approaches, as the elements of one harmonious composition, in which the utmost use was made of the natural opportunities of the site. At Ephesus, for example, there is supposed to have existed a consecutive scheme, larger than anything of the kind carried out even in France in the eighteenth century, though the evidence, it should be noted, is largely conjectural. As presented by sanguine and enthusiastic restorers the scheme was magnificent. Next the port, and facing it on one side, was the a.r.s.enal, a regular building opening on to a court surrounded by a colonnade, which again opened on to the great 'Place', a square enclosure some 850 ft. wide north and south, by 650 ft. east and west,[142] surrounded by a colonnade on all four sides, with exhedrae, or semicircular recesses. In the centre of this Place was an oblong water-piece, about 300 ft. by 200 ft., and on the farther side, opposite the a.r.s.enal buildings, were the Senate House and other public buildings; and behind these and to the right and left of them the Theatre and the Stadium, partly excavated in Mount Coressus. The a.r.s.enal, the great Place with its water-piece, and the public buildings, were laid out on an axis line, and on a regular rectangulated plan.

[142] The Place Vendome measures 450 ft. 420 ft.; Grosvenor Square about 650 530; and Lincoln's Inn Fields about 800 630, measured from wall to wall of buildings.

A scheme such as this (if it is possible to accept a conjectural restoration), thought out in all its bearings, meant a real advance in the range of architecture. It is useless to look for the faultless beauty of the fifth century, but the resourcefulness and skill of the h.e.l.lenistic architects gave a new meaning to the art; and indeed they might almost be said to have established the first stage in the development of its modern practice. It was from these able h.e.l.lenistic architects that the Romans learnt the monumental planning of their cities, and for centuries the architects most frequently employed were Greeks of Asia Minor. At this point, h.e.l.lenistic architecture merges into Roman, and loses its distinctive character. Through Roman it pa.s.ses on to modern architecture, and so in a sense the chain is complete; but between this later art and pure Greek architecture there is a great gulf fixed, differences not only of technique but of outlook, of ideal, and of temperament. The mighty Doric of Paestum, Selinus, and Segesta, the Theseion and the Parthenon, remains for all time the perfect expression of the soul of ancient Greece.

It is one of the ironies of history that when in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries scholars and artists awoke to the fact that there had been a great architecture in the past they should have known of no other version of it but the Roman. What splendid developments might have followed if the finer spirits of the Renaissance, Alberti, Bramante, or Peruzzi, had founded their theories of architecture on the temples of Sicily and Magna Graecia, instead of on the debased examples of Imperial Rome! They, at least, would have caught a glimpse of the beauty of abstract form and perfect harmony, the secret of which seems to have been revealed to the Greeks alone among the peoples of the world--and to them for only a transient period of their history. Unfortunately, when Greek architecture was discovered in the second half of the eighteenth century, it became the shibboleth of the 'virtuosi'. The national traditions, both of France and England, were lost, Greek architecture became the fashion, and the misguided enthusiasm of pedants and amateurs insisted on literal reproductions which completed the extinction of architecture as a vernacular art, and replaced it by the series of revivalisms from which it has suffered for the last one hundred and fifty years. Conscious and deliberate tinkering with the art of architecture ended by destroying it.

We can never hope to revive Greek architecture, nor should we attempt to do so. There was once a well-known Scotch architect who held that the column and the lintel was the only permissible form of construction, and with this limitation and ill-selected Greek details he produced some fantastically ugly buildings. Following a similar line of thought a famous critic of the last century condemned methods of construction not sanctioned by the Old Testament. Both were wide of the mark; because, above and beyond all technical details of architecture is the spirit in which it is approached, the intellectual outlook of the artist on his art, and this may express itself in widely differing forms. In Greek architecture of the Golden period, that outlook was definite and distinctive, and it was one that has a very urgent lesson for us to-day.

The aim and ideal of the Greek was beauty of form, and this beauty, which he sought in the first instance as the expression of his religion, ultimately became almost a religion in itself. To the realization of this ideal he devoted all his powers, sparing himself no pains in chastening his work till it had attained the utmost perfection possible.

He merged himself in this work, without thought of the expression of himself in his vision of a divine and immutable beauty. It hardly occurred to him that his individual emotions were worth preserving. (In the sculpture of the great period the expression of the face is usually one of unruffled calm.) Although religious emotion was the source and inspiration of his work, his work was impersonal. He was aloof from that feverish anxiety for self-revelation which has made much modern art so interesting pathologically, and so detestable otherwise. Nor again had he anything of the virtuoso about him. To him technique was not an end in itself. In h.e.l.lenistic art it became so, but not in the Golden Age.

Indeed, he was sometimes almost careless of exact modelling, and in architecture he did not use the order as a mere exhibition of scholarship. In his search for beautiful form, he stood upon the ancient ways, patient and serene, moving steadily to his appointed end. 'Ainsi procede le genie grec, moins soucieux du nouveau que du mieux, il reporte vers l'epuration des formes l'activite que d'autres depensent en innovations souvent steriles, jusqu'a ce qu'enfin il atteigne l'exquise mesure dans les efforts, et dans les expressions l'absolue justesse.'[143] There have been rare periods since, when Architecture has moved with the same calm unhesitating purpose, Gothic architecture, for example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and certain phases of eighteenth-century architecture in France and England, when tradition was still active and vital, and artists were content to let well alone.

[143] Choisy, _History of Architecture_, vol. i, p. 298.

Modern conditions seem to be wholly against the Greek standpoint in art.

The Arts are in the melting-pot, the old standards of attainment are trampled under foot, and the prophets prophesy falsely. Quite lately we were asked to find our inspiration in the fetishes of the Gold Coast, and if the aim of the artist is to outstrip his brethren in brutality, the advice is sound. A recent critic justified the antics of certain artists by the necessity they were under of advertising themselves.

That, no doubt, is the readiest way to immediate success. But the question for the critic is, not the personal advancement of the artist but the value of his work; and one would ask if any good work at any period in the history of art has been inspired by this ambition to shout louder than one's neighbours. Certainly, the standpoint of the Greek was the exact opposite. He did not seek advertis.e.m.e.nt and notoriety. He was happy with his inner vision of beauty, and intent only on its realization. He had not the smallest desire to shock or startle any one. There are occasions when shock tactics are necessary, but they are not necessary every day in the week, nor is it necessary to make a clean sweep of the past before one sets to work in one's own little corner of art.