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 classics, 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 classics of
every kind. To acknowledge classics 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 classics 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 assertion, 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 unsurpassable. 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 passes 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 space 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 God, 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 multitudes 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 passing 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 constituents 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 Gods, 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 Gods 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 passionate 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 passion for the divine righteousness
lies at its roots. But that passion 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 Hellenes, for
the feeling of the likeness in nature between God and man, the love of
the beauty of the created works of God, the joy in whatever is sweet,
whatever is comely, whatever is charming. The beauty and majesty of God
appealed to the Greek, as the unapproachable transcendence of God
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 Gods 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 God and most godlike.'
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 Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods,
and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human.
The gods 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 gods
absorbed ever more fully the qualities of the most perfect manhood.
Zeus, as father of gods 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 gods, 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 nobleness 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 gods 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 noble tendencies, and the
gods 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 gods, 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 gods 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 Gods 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 gods
leads, as we shall presently see, to an ideal rendering of men. As the
gods come down in the likeness of men, so men are raised to the level of
the gods. 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-god 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-goddess on
horseback, setting behind the hills, on one of which is a mountain-god
in an attitude 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 Gods 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-god, the
moon-goddess, 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).
[Illustration: 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 nobly carried out? The square and
stalwart form of the women, the mass of hair which strengthens their
necks, the easy pose, all make us feel that the task is not beyond their
strength or oppressive.
[Illustration: 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).
[Illustration: Fig. 3. CARYATID by Rodin]