Greeks, who here also founded a form of literature that has assumed
gigantic importance in the modern world. The novel may be regarded as
the last legitimate offering, a child born out of due time, as Saint
Paul calls himself, but like Saint Paul a greater influence in our
modern life than any of his older brethren. It might have been thought
that from the modern Comedy of Menander and his rivals to a prose novel
in the modern sense was but a small and inevitable step, and yet no
branch of Greek literature had less influence upon the rise and
development of so kindred a subject. The very frame on which all
Menander’s plays were stretched with wearisome iteration, I mean the
rehabilitation of a respectable girl, who solely through the neglect or
the violence of others, has become a mother without being a wife--such a
topic would be wholly repugnant to any Greek novelist we know. For in
all the stories we possess the main interest turns upon the preservation
of the heroine’s purity through every sort of temptation, and every sort
of attempted violence. This was a topic quite strange to Greek sentiment
and foreign to Greek literature till it was imported from the East by
those who had there learned that sort of love-story. There are
indications of it in the romantic episodes of Xenophon’s _Cyrus_, but
the adoption of it as a striking topic is later, and due to Callimachus,
whose poem called _Acontius and Cydippe_ was perhaps the first
love-story of our modern type offered to the Greek world. A youth and a
maiden, whose beauties were described in great detail, meet at a
religious ceremony, and fall deeply in love at first sight. The various
and commonplace obstacles to their union which are familiar in every
modern society--worldly parents, a richer suitor for the maiden, threats
of broken hearts and of suicide--these occupy the story, which through
many untoward delays ends in a happy marriage.[19] It may cause
amazement in this audience that such a plot should ever have been new in
literature, especially in that of the Greeks, who had every sort of
human experience before them. Yet it was new in the Alexandria of the
Ptolemies, and made its fortune in that world-weary and artificial
society. In all the Greek novels we possess, some such love-story is the
necessary thread which glitters through the tissue, so much so that the
German pedants edit them under the title _Scriptores Erotici Graeci_.
Yet the relation between the lovers being absolutely pure, any
temptations which occur arise from the passions of violent people who
create no interest in the reader. By far the best specimen we have,
owing to its simplicity and its natural scenery, is the famous _Daphnis
and Chloe_, which has found so many imitators ever since the French of
Amyot has made it accessible to modern Europe. We feel indeed that the
unknown author was far from possessing the innocence of his characters,
or the spontaneous appreciation of the nature he describes. The work is
from the time of Decadence in Greek literature, and has the faults of
its generation. But for all that it is a beautiful work of art, just as
the _Idylls_ of Theocritus are beautiful, just as the _Hero and Leander_
of Musæus is beautiful, just as the Martinmas summer of your woods is
beautiful, and all the more beloved because we feel it is but “the
gilded halo hovering round decay!”
I said it was our best specimen because of its simplicity, and yet it is
not wanting in violent and improbable adventures toward its close. But
these are as nothing compared to the adventures of lovers in the other
stories of this kind, because there then was a wholly different vein of
prose story, which came into fashion with the love-story, and became
amalgamated with it, to the great detriment of both--I mean the stories
of wild adventures in strange and fabulous lands.
With the wonderful invasion of the East, there were opened to the
astonished Greeks new regions of fabulous splendour, of astounding
treasure, of amazing nature. So violently was their imagination
stimulated by what they saw that they set themselves to construct books
of travels beyond the rising sun and beneath the ocean wave, into the
homes of monstrous beasts, and still more monstrous men. The schemes of
Alexander himself were baulked by his soldiers, who positively refused
to embark in his wild dreams of universal conquest, but there was
nothing to impede the imagination of the writers of his deeds, who
combined the real narrative of his conquests with his quest after the
hidden wonders of the East. Hence we have the so-called _Life of
Alexander_, which I consider to have originated shortly after his death,
but to have been amplified and glorified by succeeding generations of
those that told their stories to delighted audiences. In this _Life and
Acts_ we have the starting point of a whole literature of Fabulous
Travels, mixed with descriptions not only of odious savages, but of
ideal societies that lived hidden away from the vices and troubles of
old and decrepit civilisation. But this literature, so popular in the
Middle Ages, is outside the pale of Hellenism. It is not only the last
child, but the illegitimate child of their once pure and lofty
imagination.
IV
GREEK ART--I: ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE
It is of course an illogical division to separate art from literature.
Among the Greeks, at all events, literature in all its forms, was not
only an art but the most perfect art. No statue of Lysippus is more
perfect than a drama of Sophocles. But for convenience’ sake, and in
this age where literature is seldom an art, we may speak of Greek art as
that division of their work where they dealt not with words, but with
other materials, and where they combined the uses of life with the love
of the beautiful, as no other nation ever did. We may add that in regard
to Greek influence on modern life (which is our proper subject), none
has been greater and more permanent than that of art in this sense.
Thousands of men have copied, or imagined they copied, Greek art, who
were never able to read one word of Greek and who never cared one jot
about Greek literature. I take to-day its more solid and larger
expressions--architecture and sculpture, reserving for my next lecture
the more subjective arts and those of mere ornament.
It is not true, as you might suppose, that these latter were later in
development than the art of architecture. Far from it. In rude
pre-historic ages, when the knowledge of building had not advanced
beyond the question of mere safety, we find delicate and beautiful
ornaments put upon arms and on personal decorations. The most elaborate
tattooing of the savage is consistent with extreme rudeness in his
dwelling.[20]
The earliest form of house we know, which was designed not only for
shelter and durability, but also for safety, is the _underground_
beehive house. Beehive huts of stone are common in many nations, and may
perhaps best be seen now in the huts of the monks on the wild rock of
Skellig Michael, which is the nearest land in the British Islands to the
traveller coming from America. But such huts are not easily defended
against an enemy. This latter advantage is obtained by making the hut a
chamber underground,[21] and only to be entered by a passage long,
narrow, and low, in fact a sort of horizontal shaft into which the
enemy can only creep on hands and feet, and so can have his head chopped
off as soon as it appears within the chamber, without possibility of
using his weapons. I have seen this form of house in the most primitive
village of the stone and bone age, which is known as the Weem of Scale,
on a very wild bay of the main island of the Orkneys, looking northwest
into the Atlantic. There, under the sands accumulated by the gales of
thousands of years, we find small subterranean huts, with nooks in the
stone work to hold rude vessels and implements, and with a low covered
way for the owner to creep in and find himself at home. The weapons
found in such houses, many of which are yet unexplored, are either of
stone or bone or shell. These dwellings, once a very general type--for
remember, similar wants in mankind produce similar satisfactions of that
want in the most widely severed parts of the world--usually come to us
in the stage of survival, when men had already learned other kinds of
architecture. Hence they often preserved for the dwellings of the dead
this type of underground beehive house with a long and narrow approach,
though as time went on the house was made higher, and the avenue of
approach better (as we have it in the famous New Grange in Ireland),
and they even ornamented the inner surface of the slabs that formed the
walls. As usual, the prehistoric Greeks did it all more perfectly than
the rest of the world. The beehive house known in former days as the
Treasury of Atreus, but now recognised as a tomb of some prehistoric
king, is a splendid building fifty feet high, and made of thirty-three
horizontal courses of stone overlapping as they rise, with the inner
surfaces cut to form a conical chamber. Not only are large lintel stones
used, but there were rosettes of bronze ornamenting the inner surface of
the walls, and the stately avenue (_dromos_) lined with stone work of
great finish and open to the sky, led to an ornamented gate or entrance.
A restoration of this entrance, made by the aid of the actual pillars
carried home long ago by the Marquis of Sligo, now astonishes the
student of prehistoric art in the British Museum.[22] Why do I, however,
delay over this very perfect and beautiful kind of building of which
another noted specimen is the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos in
Bœotia?[23] In the first place, to show you how the highly developed
and finished forms were the gradual perfection of the oldest and rudest
protected house, to which they merely added height, careful finish, and
ornament, which ornament we know from Egyptian parallels to date some
fifteen centuries before Christ; secondly, to bring home to you the
important fact that the beehive or round house was at an early date
abandoned to the use of the dead, and not employed for the use of the
living till quite late in Greek history, when a few round public
buildings show that the idea had not been lost. The men that built the
great and elaborate tomb of Atreus probably never themselves lived in a
round or beehive, but in a square house. They only maintained the round
form out of respect for the dead, and indeed for the sake of the safety
of the treasures buried with the dead.
To the square house (of course I include under this short word all
rectangular buildings) we now turn. It seems to me that the earliest
model which suggested this form was the hut of logs, laid one over the
other alternately at right angles so as to enclose a square space. Two
upright posts with a horizontal beam over them would supply the first
rude doorway in an opening left by using shorter logs on each side of
it, and then it was very obvious that a gable roof to cover the house
would be made by laying logs from the top of the wall to rest one
against the other at their upper ends, or of course a flat roof in a
similar way.
We can derive from this simple form the whole classical architecture of
Europe. In the first place, the gaps between the logs were filled with
clay, and so even the great stones at Tiryns are treated. Thus the wall
was made staunch against rain and wind. But then someone discovered that
by making clay into bricks and drying them slowly in the sun, they would
have a building material much more serviceable than wooden logs or
stones. And so the filling up stuff became the main stuff of the wall;
yet how persistent the idea of using wood can be inferred from the fact
that early brick walls have wooden beams built into them longitudinally
by way of giving firmness, but also affording a danger of complete ruin,
if the building was attacked by fire. The door posts and the lintels
were of wood; for the mud brick wall ending beside the door would
rapidly suffer if not protected by a facing of wood, and later on, terra
cotta casing was used to replace the wood. Ultimately, stone door frames
and pillars replaced the older wooden work. But everywhere the traces
of the primitive wood work survives. The oldest pillars were tree stems
set on a stone base. At the top where the weight laid on them tended to
flatten them out, they were probably bound with a metal band. This you
see perpetuated by the Doric pillar, standing on its base without
plinth, and at the top we have a band running round, and over it a
splaying capital with a slab or abacus over it, to protect the inwards
of the wood from being soaked with rain.
There is no more persistent ornament in a Doric Temple than that course
over the actual wall which consists of what are called metopes and
triglyphs. The metopes are not foreheads (μέτωπα) as even some persons
who know Greek might imagine, but interstices (μετόπαι), in fact open
spaces or holes between the triglyphs. Originally, when the roofs were
of opaque tiles, these openings were necessary to let in light. But the
triglyphs, what were they? Vitruvius notes them as beam ends, for he
calls the metopes _intertignia_; and why were they always marked with
three grooves, as their name implies? Apparently because two horizontal
beams, intended to make a ceiling, had a third pinned between them which
rose to the gable, where it met another, and so formed the skeleton of
the sloping roof. When marble tiles, which were semi-transparent, or
when a higher false roof was set on, the metopes were no longer
necessary to let in light, and the Greeks made the now closed interstice
an ornamented surface, showing groups, either painted, or carved in
relief, to vary the severe lines of the building.
We have drifted into some of the leading features of temples, and they
are indeed the buildings which have most influenced subsequent
centuries, but the features of the temple were originally those of the
stately house, as we can see clearly in the remains discovered at
Tiryns. The roofs and upper stories are all gone, but the arrangements
of the doorways are quite the same in principle as those of the historic
temples, except that in the Tirynthian doorways, there are many
evidences remaining of the actual use of wooden pilasters and pillars.
Pausanias in the second century still found one or two wooden pillars
surviving in the ancient temple of Hera at Olympia. As they got worn
out, they were replaced by stone, and Dr. Dörpfeld found that these
substitutions were not all uniform, but in accord with the altering
taste of the day. The capitals in particular varied from pillar to
pillar, to judge from those found among the débris of the temple,
which, by the way, contained the famous Hermes of Praxiteles.
The ultimate separation between the dwelling house and the temple was
that the house included a central court with rooms around it, which was
too large to roof over, and so the model was handed on to all southern
Europe. The Italian palaces, for example, are all dark and fortified
toward the street, and contain an inner court and a gallery running
round it on the building within, on which the rooms open. So permanent
are the right principles of architecture when once discovered by a race
of genius.
The temple or house of the gods was, of course, a single chamber of
moderate size with a treasure house behind it, and the gradual
development of it from a simple square chamber with one end opened for a
door, and adorned with two pillars between the pilasters which formed
the ends of the house wall--the doorway _in antis_, to the elaborate
peripteral temple with double rows of pillars running round it--all this
is to be found in any handbook of ancient art. From the very use of the
temple as compared with the private house, it followed that while the
temple looked outward, and was meant to show its beauty to those that
approached it, the private house looked inward--all its beauties were
reserved for the occupants, and care was even taken to prevent any
curious observation on the part of the public. But it is only of recent
years that the extant ruins have been minutely measured and studied, and
now we know that, in addition to building this rectangular house for the
god, there were the most elaborate and minute laws observed in the
proportions of the various parts, and in the optical corrections of
straight lines, which were found to appear curved. This perfection,
therefore, of Greek religious architecture was not merely the adoption
of a good practical form, and the carrying out of it in precious
materials and with clear and competent workmanship. The most delicate
adaptation of curves, the most curious and subtle applications of
harmonies in lengths and heights, were utilised to produce an effect
which all observers have long felt to be the most marvellous in the
world.
But before I go further I will dispose of an interesting point which
many have thought a defect in the architectural genius of the Greeks.
You will see in every book that the use of the arch was unknown to them,
and that for this capital feature in our buildings we are wholly
indebted to the Romans. That the arch was not in use among the Greeks,
I attribute to the fact that the round house and conical roof were
deliberately rejected by them in favour of the square house and wooden
structure of doorways and roofs. As already observed, this form was long
since devoted to funeral purposes and to the burying (not burning) of
the dead, and so its associations were gloomy. But it seems to me absurd
to say that people who could frame a conical stone roof, by horizontal
layers of stones gradually closing inwards, should not have advanced to
the principle of the arch with its keystone. This in fact Pausanias
assumed them to have done in the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos. He
says the top stone of the vault is the άρμονία of the whole vault. If
this was not accurate in the case of Orchomenos, it at least shows that
Pausanias, a very experienced observer of old Greek building, did not
hold that this generic distinction existed between Greek and Roman
building. But, as I said, the Greeks rejected round or conical forms for
rectangular, and the Roman combination of the two, which passed on to
the Renaissance, is distinctly a modification of form to which the
Greeks would not have agreed. Still less would they have approved of the
use of arches and of architraves as the mere ornament of a building, and
supporting nothing. To the Greeks every member of their building was
there for use. A pillar was set to support an architrave, this latter to
support the beams of a roof. Flat surfaces were decorated with painting,
or with reliefs, but these flat surfaces were necessary to close in the
building from the weather. Thus, to illustrate bad building by an
example, when you look at the portal of St. Mark’s at Venice, you will
see groups of marble pillars with a highly decorated arch over them,
making a rich doorway. But there are more pillars than are wanted to
support the arch, so that some of them stand idle, as a mere added
ornament. That is only one instance of the tawdriness which infects the
decadence of a great style--in this case of the Romanesque architecture
of eastern Italy and Sicily.
There is a very widespread belief that the arch was invented and first
used in Italy, and high authorities, like Viollet-le-Duc in his famous
_Entretiens sur l’architecture_, put forth the theory that the Romans
learned its use from the Etruscans, from whom they borrowed so much of
their early civilisation. But if they did, is it certain that the real
origin was not Greek? Is it likely that this enigmatical nation found
out a great principle of construction unknown to the Greeks? I think
not; and all the more so, as I hold all the early Etruscan culture to
have been stimulated by the Greeks, with whom Etruria had an older and
deeper connection than was suspected a generation ago. For now we come
back to the statement of Herodotus, that this nation came from Asia
Minor, and by sea, to Italy. The settlers of the earliest Greek colony
in Italy--Cumæ--followed in their track, and their immigration seems not
to have been very early. Hence they may very well have borrowed their
use of the arch from early Greek teachers, and thus imposed it upon the
Romans and upon the world. But does it really matter to my argument?
Even the Romans, who perfected the use of the arch, were not satisfied
with it unless they had put it inside a Greek face of pillars and
architraves. The Greek temple has afforded a model which has been copied
in every capital of Europe, and in its most perfect form has an artistic
splendour which is second to none among the buildings of the world.
I will repeat that, as the Greeks determined at a very early age that
domed or circular buildings were the proper receptacle of the dead, so
they have transmitted that decision through the Romans to modern Europe.
The Pantheon, whatever its original use, has come to be the solemn
resting-place of national heroes. The great tomb of Hadrian, now the
Castle of St. Angelo, was built under the same prepossession, and so
through all ages down to the _Invalides_ in Paris, and the memorial to
Shelley at Oxford, all these houses of the dead are the offspring
artistically of the Treasure-house of Atreus, of the Tomb of the Minyæ,
and of the rest, consecrated by the old Greeks. Quite recently, when our
King brought me to see the Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and her Consort
at Frogmore, I was able to point out to him that the builders of this
circular chamber also, though they probably knew it not themselves, were
copying the ancient and almost universal model of a house for the dead.
The Greeks very possibly derived this old idea from a northern race. The
occurrence of similar forms in the early tombs of Ireland and of other
parts of Europe seem to show that there was some prehistoric agreement
about this form of tomb--the most distinguished, as well as the safest,
residence they could devise, first for living men, then for departed
kings or chiefs who demanded cult and sacrifice. That may be all very
true, but it does not alter the fact that it was from the Greeks that
civilised Europe adopted the idea.
* * * * *
I now pass to another field of art, in which this gifted nation has
exercised an undoubted supremacy down to the present day. The very idea
of exceeding the excellence of a great Greek statue hardly enters the
mind of the modern sculptor. If he could but approach the work of
Praxiteles, or even of the nameless workers who carved the great tomb of
Sidon, he would regard it as an astounding achievement.
We shall find not a few who attribute this perfection of Greek sculpture
to the great opportunities they had of observing the play of limb and
muscle in their daily exercises in the _palæstra_, where men and boys
exercised naked. That I take to be so far true, that I have often
suggested to modern sculptors, who complain of the insufficiency of
their models, to make a pilgrimage for a couple of years to Samoa, or
the Solomon Islands, where they may study very noble forms, exercising
in the purest state of nature, so far as they have not been depraved
into clothes by well-meaning, but mischievous, missionaries; and I think
that the first sculptor who ventures upon this education may do great
things in his art. But it only touches a fringe of the question as
regards the old Greek triumphs. Naked figures were not the earliest or
greatest Greek achievement in sculpture. There are indeed some archaic
nude Apollos, but all the early goddesses, so far as I know, were
draped, and it is in drapery also that Greek sculpture is unique for
its supreme grace. Need I add that it is not only in single figures, but
in composition that the Greeks are still our masters? If any of you will
compare the frieze of the Parthenon, even as we have it, with any modern
composition of the same sort, it will require no argument to persuade
him of the truth of what I say.