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 class 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 assign 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 constitute
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 assign the two functions to different
men, and even to different classes 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.