superiority in art of a people who had not a tithe of our experience or
of our mechanical resources: I shall give it to you in the words of a
gifted Italian essayist. Professor Pasquale Villari: “The problem,” he
says, “set before the famous sculptor Donatello, at the dawn of the
Renaissance, could not be solved by the mere study of ancient art. The
Greeks had no means of expressing Christian spirit or emotion. Their
quest was for outward beauty of form, and their nature, being simpler,
more spontaneous, and more harmonious than ours, could be adequately
expressed in marble. They had no experience of the mental maladies, the
tortures of remorse, or the whole inner life created by Christianity. In
their times, no ascetics, no hermits, no anchorites, no martyrs, no
crusaders, no knight errants had appeared in the world. But in
Donatello’s day all things were changed; the faculties of the human
mind had been altered and multiplied. Therefore, a new art was needed to
represent the new inner life. Assuredly, Christ and the Virgin cannot be
chiselled in the same way as a Venus or an Apollo. Outward beauty was no
longer the sole aim of art. It was now bound to express character, which
is the mind’s outward form. Even the very soul of man, with all its load
of new struggles, sorrows, and uncertainties, must show through the
envelope of marble. Was this possible, and if so, to what extent? That
was the question put to Donatello.”[24]
To criticise this interesting passage, to show what a partial and
imperfect view it expresses of Greek genius, might be a task instructive
to my hearers, but too wide and irrelevant to my present discourse. Some
points, however, will help us directly to the understanding of Greek
sculpture.
It is only too true that the Middle Ages, from which Donatello’s
generation was emerging, were a period of spiritual gloom and
depression. But this was due not to the larger troubles and experiences
of men, but to the spiritual tyranny of the Church, which had distorted
the sweetness and benevolence of the Gospel of Christ to include a
hideous engine of torture. The clearest picture of this odious
manufacture of artificial horrors may be seen not only in the many
grotesque representations of the tortures of hell, which were anything
but grotesque to the public of the Middle Ages, but by attending a
mediæval play, which has been brought out in Boston, as well as in
London--the play called _Everyman_, which magnifies the horrors of death
by representing the Deity as a gloomy tyrant, served by a greedy and
heartless Church, which exacts half a man’s fortune for the boon of
saving him from eternal torments. These artificial horrors were not
indeed unknown to the Greeks, for we hear that the punishments of the
wicked, not to speak of Tantalus, Ixion, and the rest, formed part of
the revelations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but they would on no
account have been permitted a place in ordinary life or in art. If the
Attic public fined the poet Phrynichus 10,000 drachmas for bringing
before them their national sorrows in his _Fall of Miletus_, what would
they not have fined the author of _Everyman_, for importing darkness and
horror into the day of death and libelling the gods as cruel tyrants
with no mercy for the frailties of men?
But, apart from this imported gloom, it is in my opinion false to say
that the Greek was not just as experienced as any modern man in the
great problems and the inevitable sorrows of human life. The whole of
Greek tragedy consists in the representation of these dolours, and if
Professor Villari wants proofs that the terrors of conscience, the
agonies of remorse, were perfectly known to the Greeks, I ask him to
turn to the picture of the tyrant’s soul in the eighth book of Plato’s
_Republic_ or to Xenophon’s _Hiero_. The Greeks were not at all that
simple, joyous, spontaneous set of grownup children who appear in many
of our books upon the subject. They had a large and varied experience of
life.[25] But they had the good sense--or shall I say the genius?--to
confine their art to what it ought to convey. They felt that marble and
bronze should not be used to represent the violent emotions of tragedy,
the violent moments in human life, and when they lost this reserve,
their sculpture had begun its decadence. The _Laocoon_ with the two
little men representing his children is indeed a work of art of which a
modern sculptor might well be proud. It would not have been approved by
the Greeks of the Golden Age, and Phidias would have looked upon the
group with contempt, in spite of its technical excellence.
A brief sketch of the development of sculpture will illustrate this
principle. In the first place you must hold fast to the truth, not
frequently enough insisted upon, that sculpture among the Greeks
developed with extraordinary quickness after a long infancy into its
perfect manhood. The work of 550 B.C., in the full brilliancy of the
courts of Polycrates and Periander was still rude and helpless, wanting
altogether the beauty which we desiderate in that art. As soon as we
turn 500 B.C. we have such things as the _Charioteer_ of Delphi, figures
which are on the very threshold of perfection, and indeed in some
respects, such as the modelling and texture of the arms and feet, quite
perfect. In another fifty years we have the splendours of Phidias.
Not less remarkable than this rapid growth is the very gradual decay of
the art. The age of animals, as is well known, is in proportion to the
period of gestation. It was not so with Greek sculpture. Coming to
perfection in a couple of generations, it lasted all through the
greatness of Greek history into Macedonian times, when it produced such
wonders as the _Nike_ of Samothrace, down to the Roman conquest, when it
gave us the _Aphrodite_ of Melos, and even still later, when empresses
borrowed from it those splendid portrait figures which we admire in the
Vatican and the Lateran museums at Rome. And it is not only the Golden
Age but the Silver Age of this sculpture which is the eternal model for
modern artists.
The next feature of great importance which concerns us is that this
branch of art began (as did mediæval art) in the service of religion. It
was to represent the figure of the god, it was to decorate his temple,
that the sculptor made his great efforts. And I hasten to add that the
art was never dissociated from its sister art of painting, for the
Greeks always called in the help of colour; not only in architecture,
but even in representing single human figures. They felt the utter
coldness of Parian or Pentelican marble and they were not afraid to use
rich colours and even kindred materials to increase the majesty of their
representations of the Divine.
It is very remarkable how timid and sporadic, mainly from a
misinterpretation of Greek teaching, have hitherto been the attempts to
return to this sound principle. In the twelfth century, indeed,
admirable work was done by the sculptor in producing coloured statues,
generally, I think, of wood. Thus the kings and bishops of that time in
the Cathedral of Henry the Lion at Brunswick are most striking and
lifelike specimens of the art, and there are many more in the churches
and the museums of Northern Europe.[26] But it seems that the discovery
in the Renaissance of Græco-Roman statues from which all the colour had
been effaced by the action of time, damp, and the contact with clay,
misled the early sculptors of that day into the belief that Greek
statues were always in the purest white marble; that form only and not
colour was the aim of that art; and so we have had our galleries flooded
with cold figures, which are only beginning to give way, as may be seen
in the recent exhibitions of the Royal Academy in London, to more or
less delicate tinting, or even to relief in high colours, using other
materials than marble. Thus the Greeks have been our masters as well in
our mistakes as in our successes. But we can now have no doubt as to
their principles. Even in their bronze statues, they were so anxious to
give expression by colour that they commonly made the eyes of their
figures in black and white.
I turn now to speak for a moment on the principles of composition in
Greek sculpture, for in such a discourse as this it is obviously better
to spend time on general considerations than in emphasising details.
There were, of course, from archaic times single figures, first of gods,
then of men, which ultimately became portrait statuary; but in early
days a composition of figures in stone or wood was unknown till they
came to decorate architecture with friezes and pediments. Thus the
statues which adorned the state entrance to the old temple at Miletus
were simply a row of sitting figures like the rows of sphinxes guarding
the approach to the Egyptian temple, but there is no composition. It was
not till the rise of the fashion of ornamenting buildings with the
sculptor’s art that, as before said, compositions come into play; and
mainly in two forms--triangular pediments which filled the once open end
or gable of a roof, and bands of decoration along the walls of the
building. The form of the gable--a very flat triangle, with the obtuse
angle at the vertex--determined the sculptor, just as the shackles of
metre determine the poet. But even as these apparent shackles have
produced the most splendid effects in poetry, so the limitations of
space have suggested to the Greek sculptors the most poetical devices.
We now know that even the pre-Persian Parthenon had such a composition
on its gable, of which great serpentine monsters, carved in local stone,
and then coloured, have been recently recovered. But when the art
reached its perfection, we have the device of a notable mythical event,
or a struggle, with agitated or combating figures, arranged
symmetrically on either side of a central god, who is greater, calmer
than the rest; while in the acute angles, the aspects of nature--rivers,
woods, the rising and setting sun--were suggested by graceful lying
figures, which show that air of peaceful and silent indifference that is
the usual aspect of nature around a great human tragedy.[27]
These marvellous compositions, full of symmetry and of variety, have
been the examples set before scores of European sculptors, in their
imitations of classical architecture; but I cannot say that I know a
single specimen that I should like to show here to you in direct
comparison with the work of the ancients. It is in this, as in so many
walks of art: all the modern resources of science, all the study of the
old masterpieces, have not sufficed to kindle the spark of genius in our
inartistic age. We have a thousand resources that the Greeks had not--we
have a thousand volumes of exposition, analysis, criticism, telling how
these things were done--yet we are like the civilised man trying to
elicit flame from the sticks which furnish the primitive man with his
fire. All our efforts only succeed in producing smoke; the living spark
will not come.[28]
Much the same may be said of the second favourite form of Greek
composition in sculpture, the ornamenting of long flat surfaces with
rows or successions of figures, of which the frieze of the Parthenon is
the most familiar, but not the only example. We now know from the
recoveries at Delphi, especially the so-called treasury of Siphnos, that
this theme was derived by Phidias from older examples.
What is the strange fascination in this long row of figures? There is
that peculiar combination of sameness and of variety which affords us
delight in all the occupations of our life. This procession has one
general scope. It is bringing offerings to do honour to the gods, and
bringing them with pomp and circumstance. But while all these men and
maidens are bent on the same pursuit, they are represented with an
endless variety in detail. Some are on curvetting horses, some are
leading bulls both quiet and uneasy, some are carrying weights upon
their shoulders, some have them on the ground--and are lifting them.
There is the unity and difference which in music we know as harmony, and
each figure is carried out with such simple perfection, with such
unassuming grace and beauty, that it is hard indeed to point out any
insufficiency or defect. There is even this subtlety in the detail of
the work--that, as this band of figures was intended to be seen high
above the spectator, care was taken to carve the lower limbs in slightly
flatter relief than the upper, and the limbs of the horses were even
made a little lighter than in nature, in order to counterbalance the
predominance which the part nearer to the spectator’s vision might
assume.
When such are the shattered fragments of an art which once adorned every
city and every public building in Greece, it seems impossible to
conjecture what would have been the effect on modern Europe had the
great mass of it survived. Perhaps not so great as we should be
disposed to assert at the first blush of the suggestion. For we could
hardly avoid calling in the analogy of other arts, and of other times,
where the works of genius preserved and known do not inspire modern
artists. There is plenty of splendid mediæval architecture existing, and
yet our modern architects have not been able to take their place as
independent successors. In literature we have had many similar facts
discussed during previous lectures. All the models in the world will not
suffice without the divine spark in the teacher as well as the pupil,
and this gift is rare and sporadic not only in the individual, but among
the nations which have hitherto appeared in the course of history. There
is, moreover, in using workers of a remote age or country as models, one
concomitant circumstance which may make our efforts wholly
incommensurate with theirs. It is the atmosphere in which every society
lives, by which it has been created or at least fed, and which it
creates in its turn. As the modern artist cannot possibly reproduce
these surroundings, it is wellnigh impossible that he should reproduce
the subtle spirit, once the very breath of Greek art, which has long
vanished, and which has never since been recalled by the wit of man.
V
GREEK ART--II: PAINTING AND MUSIC
When we pass from the monumental arts of architecture and sculpture to
those of a more subjective character, which use more fleeting vehicles
for their expression, we have in modern life painting and music, which
we may expect to be more independent of Greek models than the rest. For,
_ex hypothesi_, pictures so far as they are on panels of wood or canvas
can hardly survive the lapse of ages of neglect,[29] and as for music,
the notation is so small and poor a clue to its real meaning, that even
if we understood it perfectly, we should still be a long way from
grasping the full meaning as felt by the Greek public. I will give you
an illustration of this from my own experience. There is in our English
and Irish cathedrals a tradition of the way in which certain anthems are
to be sung--a tradition generally derived from those who sang them in
the composer’s presence, or under his influence. The older editions of
these anthems seldom give any expression marks, the performance being
entrusted to the taste of the choir or its knowledge of the composer’s
intentions. A signal example is the finest of Blow’s anthems, “I beheld
and lo! a great multitude,” composed in the reign of Charles II. (1680),
and sung ever since by sundry cathedral choirs, amongst others those of
Dublin, where there has from long since been a great school of church
music. In Dublin, this is one of the most moving and dramatic anthems,
owing to the great liberties taken with the time by the Vicars Choral,
who have kept the tradition unbroken. I chanced to hear it sung by the
very excellent choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, on their high day--All
Saints’ Day, when it is annually performed. I was astonished to find
that they merely sang it from the text without any of the traditional
liberties. The effect was so poor and unmeaning as to be almost
ridiculous to one who had been taught to understand the inner sense of
the work.
We are not quite so destitute as to Greek painting, for we have at least
a good many fresco pictures, by more or less obscure and incompetent
workmen of the Hellenistic age, to show us what the Greeks aimed at; we
have on the many beautiful examples of pottery preserved to us the
representations of mythical or other scenes which must have had some
analogy with the paintings of the same or similar scenes. Lastly, we
have many descriptions and epigrams from those who admired the
masterpieces of this art, and although these are inadequate, and are
often the observations of incompetent rhetorical critics, they still
give us far more definite ideas than any description of a musical work
could possibly supply. As to the Golden Age of painting, we have nothing
but these, for our specimens of frescoes on the walls are all either
from pre-historic palaces, or from Græco-Roman houses. If we wish,
therefore, to obtain any understanding of this side of Greek art, we
must not be content with our poor and sporadic examples, but must enter
upon some general considerations which will afford a larger and deeper
basis for our judgment. For our inferences from the Pompeiian frescoes
to the lost masterpieces are just as hazardous as if we had lost all the
masterpieces of sculpture, and endeavoured to judge of their quality by
reasoning from the terra cotta figurines of Tanagra and other places,
which are often graceful, but almost always faulty in their modelling.
Should we indeed have inferred that the modelling of statues in marble
and in bronze was absolutely perfect?
The two æsthetic qualities requisite for success in painting are
obviously a sense of form, and a sense of colour; without a natural
appreciation of the beauty inhering in each of these, the highest
technical skill, however valuable, does not suffice. After what you have
heard about Greek architecture and sculpture, I need not say another
word to show that in the sense of form the Greeks were supreme and
unapproachable. But what about their sense of colour? On this the
evidence is not so clear and has given rise to divers interpretations.
First of all, the Homeric poets, in their vivid pictures of old Greek
life, are singularly vague and confused in their words for colour, so
much so that people used to imagine that the poet, because he was blind,
or the poets, because they were primitive, had no distinct colour-sense.
I remember this latter view being pressed upon me by Mr. Gladstone in
conversation, together with the reply he had from Charles Darwin, which
he gave me to read, that as even insects are guided by a very clear
sense of colour, it was absurd to say that the most primitive men should
not possess it. This argument seamed both to him and to me hardly
conclusive, for the faculties which are now human need not have
developed at the same rate from lower forms, or kept abreast of one
another in acuteness. Thus human development might not require an acute
sense of colour, while that of the insect made it essential, and so
lower forms of life might be infinitely more developed in some respects
than those far higher in the general condition of their senses and their
intelligence. I therefore took another line in my objection: that we
know the Egyptians, centuries before the oldest date allowed for Homer,
had at least ten distinct names for colour. And this was not because
they felt the difference more distinctly, but because in their arts and
crafts they produced the varied shades, and therefore found names for
them. Even nowadays, it is not the poet, or even the artist, that
invents names for subtle shades of colours, but the milliner or the
modiste. When I was young, there were two shades of grey known in the
phraseology of these people--one as _gris de souris_, the other as _gris
de souris poursuivie_. This is but a more minute subdivision of our
sensations of colour invented by those that produce it for trade
purposes. The want of names for colours is therefore not confined to the
Greeks. More important is the fact that their early painters are known
to have used but a few and primary colours, and also the further fact
that their temples, which they always coloured (and, to my mind,
rightly) for effect, were adorned on a simple and primitive plan,--red,
blue, white, yellow, being, so far as I know, the colours generally
used.
Now these facts seem to me to harmonise with the small development of a
sense of the picturesque in landscape, which is characteristic of the
Greeks. The principles of reproducing perspective with lines and colours
on a flat surface were indeed discovered in the fifth century B.C., by a
certain Agatharchus, whose book on shade painting seems, however, to
have been a work on scene-painting, as an aid to producing illusions on
the stage. Nor does the idea of representing external nature seem to
have been a want felt by Greek artists, seeing that they had adopted the
very peculiar device of representing mountains and rivers by figures of
the gods and nymphs which inhabited them and in which they were
personified. The heads of the horses rising from the sea represented on
the Parthenon the advent of the day. The graceful figures of nymphs on
the pediments of the great temple at Olympia represented the scenery in
which the action was laid. Looking down the whole history of Greek
painting, from the rude frescoes at Tiryns to the decorations of houses
at Pompeii, I cannot find that landscape as such ever occupied Greek
artists, and here therefore we have one of the very few departments in
which the modern world may boast itself independent of its almost
universal teacher.
It is not so in the case of portrait-painting, and painting of scenes in
mythical or in real life, for here even the faint echoes of Greek genius
affected powerfully the artists of the Renaissance. In this field,
however, the influence of Hellenistic sculpture and of relief work was
so combined with that of the few specimens of actual painting from
Herculaneum, Pompeii, and other sites, that the separate effect of Greek
painting on the modern artists is not so easily appreciated. The
mythical subjects at all events were told and glorified in countless
epigrams of the Anthology, and as soon as this collection became known
and popular, it was sure to dominate the fancy of sentimental artists
like Botticelli. But if the direct influence of Greek on modern painting
was baulked for want of models, the indirect effect of Greek art on the
best of modern painters is very great. Consider for a moment the two
most refined of modern English painters, the late Lord Leighton, and the
still living and working Sir Edward Alma-Tadema. The latter generally
calls his subjects Roman, but anyone that knows what the elegances of
Roman life owe to the Greeks, sees at once that the whole spirit of the
artist, and of the subjects he delights in, is Greek. The case is still
more undisguised with Leighton. All his most striking pictures are from
Greek life or from Greek legend; his whole conception of beauty is
derived from the same models, and I well remember, when I used to visit
him in his delightful studio in Kensington, seeing it all set round with
copies of Greek sculpture, and his fervid utterance that to these
unapproachable models he owed all his art.
In the absence of the actual paintings, great use has been made of the
scenes painted on Greek vases of the best period, some of which attain
to quite a high level, and we cannot but feel with Sir Alma-Tadema that
from this source he has drawn not a few of his ideas. Surely the
products that inspired Keats with his exquisite Ode make clear to us how
the fruitfulness of Greek genius is not dead or even exhausted, but
still kindles a pure light in modern minds sensitive enough to catch the
flame.
It is to be observed, before we pass on to another subject, that the art
of painting among the Greeks began, and long remained, a branch of
decoration, and was therefore subsidiary to architecture, or stately
furniture, or fine pottery. The fashion of producing easel pictures
painted for their own sake, readily movable and therefore displayed in
galleries, as well as upon the walls of palaces, only came in with the
decadence or at least the full ripeness of other arts. The products of
the painter were akin to those of the epigrammatist, whose elegance may
well be called by a poorer word--_finish_--and is to us rather the
exhibition of great cleverness than the outcome of genius. It was the
day also of social decadence, when the mere artist became the idol of
society, and could parade his conceit and his vulgarity without fear of
censure from patrons who only valued him as the ephemeral fashion. The
gossip we hear about the old painters often exhibits this painfully
modern triviality.