perfectly severe in their almost conical profile;--(you are allowed on
purpose to see the outline of the right breast, under the chiton;)--also
the right arm is left bare, and you can just see the contour of the
front of the right limb and knee; both arm and limb pure and firm, but
lovely. The plant she holds in her hand is a branching and flowering
one, the seed-vessel prominent. These signs all mean that her essential
function is child-bearing.
On the contrary, in the Italian Venus the breasts are so small as to be
scarcely traceable; the body strong, and almost masculine in its angles;
the arms meager and unattractive, and she lays a decorative garland of
flowers on the earth. These signs mean that the Italian thought of love
as the strength of an eternal spirit, forever helpful; and forever
crowned with flowers, that neither know seedtime nor harvest; and bloom
where there is neither death nor birth.
189. Thirdly. The Greek Aphrodite is entirely calm, and looks straight
forward. Not one feature of her face is disturbed, or seems ever to have
been subject to emotion. The Italian Aphrodite looks up, her face all
quivering and burning with passion and wasting anxiety. The Greek one is
quiet, self-possessed, and self-satisfied: the Italian incapable of
rest; she has had no thought nor care for herself; her hair has been
bound by a fillet like the Greek's; but it is now all fallen loose, and
clotted with the sea, or clinging to her body; only the front tress of
it is caught by the breeze from her raised forehead, and lifted, in the
place where the tongues of fire rest on the brows, in the early
Christian pictures of Pentecost, and the waving fires abide upon the
heads of Angelico's seraphim.
190. There are almost endless points of interest, great and small, to be
noted in these differences of treatment. This binding of the hair by the
single fillet marks the straight course of one great system of art
method, from that Greek head which I showed you on the archaic coin of
the seventh century before Christ, to this of the fifteenth of our own
era;--nay, when you look close, you will see the entire action of the
head depends on one lock of hair falling back from the ear, which it
does in compliance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there
by the pressure of the helmet. That rippling of it down her shoulders
comes from the Athena of Corinth; the raising of it on her forehead,
from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the
angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and
their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the characteristic
difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never
representing expression, the Italian primarily seeking it; but far more,
mark for us here the utter change in the conception of love; from the
tranquil guide and queen of a happy terrestrial domestic life, accepting
its immediate pleasures and natural duties, to the agonizing hope of an
infinite good, and the ever mingled joy and terror of a love divine in
jealousy, crying, "Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon
thine arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the
grave."
[Illustration: XIV.
APOLLO AND THE PYTHON.
HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION.]
The vast issues dependent on this change in the conception of the ruling
passion of the human soul, I will endeavor to show you on a future
occasion: in my present Lecture, I shall limit myself to the definition
of the temper of Greek sculpture, and of its distinctions from
Florentine in the treatment of any subject whatever, be it love or
hatred, hope or despair.
These great differences are mainly the following.
191. First. A Greek never expresses momentary passion; a Florentine
looks to momentary passion as the ultimate object of his skill.
When you are next in London, look carefully in the British Museum at the
casts from the statues in the pediment of the Temple of Minerva at
AEgina. You have there Greek work of definite date--about 600 B. C.,
certainly before 580--of the purest kind; and you have the
representation of a noble ideal subject, the combats of the AEacidae at
Troy, with Athena herself looking on. But there is no attempt whatever
to represent expression in the features, none to give complexity of
action or gesture; there is no struggling, no anxiety, no visible
temporary exertion of muscles. There are fallen figures, one pulling a
lance out of his wound, and others in attitudes of attack and defense;
several kneeling to draw their bows. But all inflict and suffer, conquer
or expire, with the same smile.
192. Plate XIV. gives you examples, from more advanced art, of true
Greek representation; the subjects being the two contests of leading
import to the Greek heart--that of Apollo with the Python, and of
Hercules with the Nemean Lion. You see that in neither case is there the
slightest effort to represent the [Greek: lyssa], or agony of contest.
No good Greek artist would have you behold the suffering either of
gods, heroes, or men; nor allow you to be apprehensive of the issue of
their contest with evil beasts, or evil spirits. All such lower sources
of excitement are to be closed to you; your interest is to be in the
thoughts involved by the fact of the war; and in the beauty or rightness
of form, whether active or inactive. I have to work out this subject
with you afterwards, and to compare with the pure Greek method of
thought that of modern dramatic passion, ingrafted on it, as typically
in Turner's contest of Apollo and the Python: in the meantime, be
content with the statement of this first great principle--that a Greek,
as such, never expresses momentary passion.
[Illustration: XV.
HERA OF ARGOS.
ZEUS OF SYRACUSE.]
[Illustration: XVI.
DEMETER OF MESSENE.
HERA OF CNOSSUS.]
[Illustration: XVII.
ATHENA OF THURIUM.
SIREN LIGEIA OF TERINA.]
193. Secondly. The Greek, as such, never expresses personal character,
while a Florentine holds it to be the ultimate condition of beauty. You
are startled, I suppose, at my saying this, having had it often pointed
out to you, as a transcendent piece of subtlety in Greek art, that you
could distinguish Hercules from Apollo by his being stout, and Diana
from Juno by her being slender. That is very true; but those are general
distinctions of class, not special distinctions of personal character.
Even as general, they are bodily, not mental. They are the distinctions,
in fleshly aspect, between an athlete and a musician,--between a matron
and a huntress; but in nowise distinguish the simple-hearted hero from
the subtle Master of the Muses, nor the willful and fitful girl-goddess
from the cruel and resolute matron-goddess. But judge for yourselves. In
the successive plates, XV.-XVIII., I show you,[38] typically represented
as the protectresses of nations, the Argive, Cretan, and Lacinian Hera,
the Messenian Demeter, the Athena of Corinth, the Artemis of Syracuse;
the fountain Arethusa of Syracuse, and the Siren Ligeia of Terina. Now,
of these heads, it is true that some are more delicate in feature than
the rest, and some softer in expression: in other respects, can you
trace any distinction between the Goddesses of Earth and Heaven, or
between the Goddess of Wisdom and the Water Nymph of Syracuse? So little
can you do so, that it would have remained a disputed question--had not
the name luckily been inscribed on some Syracusan coins--whether the
head upon them was meant for Arethusa at all; and, continually, it
becomes a question respecting finished statues, if without attributes,
"Is this Bacchus or Apollo--Zeus or Poseidon?" There is a fact for you;
noteworthy, I think! There is no personal character in true Greek
art:--abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue
and vice,--yes: but there is no individuality; and the negative holds
down to the revived conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo,
when he tells you how you are to paint young women, and how old ones;
though a Greek would hardly have been so discourteous to age as the
Italian is in his canon of it,--"old women should be represented as
passionate and hasty, after the manner of Infernal Furies."
194. "But at least, if the Greeks do not give character, they give ideal
beauty?" So it is said, without contradiction. But will you look again
at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just
set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful?
Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren,
and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure
that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither
reaches even the average standard of pretty English girls. The Venus
Urania suggests at first the idea of a very charming person, but you
will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked
at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples,--the best I can
find of art current in Greece at the great time; and if even I were to
take the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not
one of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already
asserted, in the 'Queen of the Air,' has nothing notable in feature
except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic
type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could
tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by
the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three
vases of the best time to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was,
in popular art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and, finally,--and
this you may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness
to the most subtle beauty,--there is little evidence even in their
literature, and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any
beauty in infancy, or early childhood.
195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do
not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of
these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their
calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some
expression of divine mystery or power.
I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these
respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin,
images of the most mysterious of their deities, and the most
powerful,--Demeter, and Zeus.
Remember that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch first
on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the Western Peloponnese
arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of Arcadia, the
moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of Elis, Pylos,
and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was naturally felt to be
granted by Zeus; as, on the east coast of Greece, the greater clearness
of the air by the power of Athena. If you will recollect the prayer of
Rhea, in the single line of Callimachus--[Greek: "Taia phile, teke kai
su; teai d' odines elaphrai]," (compare Pausanias, iv. 33, at the
beginning,)--it will mark for you the connection, in the Greek mind, of
the birth of the mountain springs of Arcadia with the birth of Zeus. And
the centers of Greek thought on this western coast are necessarily Elis,
and, (after the time of Epaminondas,) Messene.
[Illustration: XVIII.
ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE.
HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE.]
196. I show you the coin of Messene, because the splendid height and
form of Mount Ithome were more expressive of the physical power of Zeus
than the lower hills of Olympia; and also because it was struck just at
the time of the most finished and delicate Greek art--a little after the
main strength of Phidias, but before decadence had generally pronounced
itself. The coin is a silver didrachm, bearing on one side a head of
Demeter, (Plate XVI., at the top); on the other a full figure of Zeus
Aietophoros, (Plate XIX., at the top); the two together signifying the
sustaining strength of the earth and heaven. Look first at the head of
Demeter. It is merely meant to personify fullness of harvest; there is
no mystery in it, no sadness, no vestige of the expression which we
should have looked for in any effort to realize the Greek thoughts of
the Earth Mother, as we find them spoken by the poets. But take it
merely as personified Abundance,--the goddess of black furrow and tawny
grass,--how commonplace it is, and how poor! The hair is grand, and
there is one stalk of wheat set in it, which is enough to indicate the
goddess who is meant; but, in that very office, ignoble, for it shows
that the artist could only inform you that this was Demeter by such a
symbol. How easy it would have been for a great designer to have made
the hair lovely with fruitful flowers, and the features noble in mystery
of gloom, or of tenderness. But here you have nothing to interest you,
except the common Greek perfections of a straight nose and a full chin.
197. We pass, on the reverse of the die, to the figure of Zeus
Aietophoros. Think of the invocation to Zeus in the Suppliants, (525,)
"King of Kings, and Happiest of the Happy, Perfectest of the Perfect in
strength, abounding in all things, Jove--hear us, and be with us;" and
then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very
mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a
well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist.
The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the
action of the arm shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I believe,
the twisted rays were triple. In the presumably earlier coin engraved by
Millingen, however,[39] it is singly pointed only; and the added
inscription "[Greek: ITHOM]," in the field, renders the conjecture of
Millingen probable, that this is a rude representation of the statue of
Zeus Ithomates, made by Ageladas, the master of Phidias; and I think it
has, indeed, the aspect of the endeavor, by a workman of more advanced
knowledge, and more vulgar temper, to put the softer anatomy of later
schools into the simple action of an archaic figure. Be that as it may,
here is one of the most refined cities of Greece content with the figure
of an athlete as the representative of their own mountain god; marked as
a divine power merely by the attributes of the eagle and thunderbolt.
198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given
to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give
divine sadness? Shall we find in their art-work any of that pensiveness
and yearning for the dead which fills the chants of their tragedy? I
suppose, if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in after-life is
to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about
the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts
of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oileus, and Helen; and in which
the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds
with their wings, dipping them in the sea.
Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the
representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the
history of human imagination more lovely than their leaving always a
place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their
sculptural representation of the phantom, (lower figure, Plate XIX.);
and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be
impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might
more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul,
unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the
feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you
have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves
flowing round it.
[Illustration: XIX.
ZEUS OF MESSENE.
AJAX OF OPUS.]
199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to
these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always
intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can
speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the
Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island,
and that he could not make it so; that, at its best, his sculpture can
be little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its
encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had
merely given you a letter L, or written 'Leuce.' If you know anything of
beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in
recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the
novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus
appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And
the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in
your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;--if you have none
to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole,
would rather that you should not look at his work.
200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that
whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so.
It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full
of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads
of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach,
you may trust him. Is not this saying much?
And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured
symbol, he strove only to carve what was--Right. He rules over the arts
to this day, and will forever, because he sought not first for beauty,
not first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to
display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with,
in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course
every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or
preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that
are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false, or fanciful,
is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or
Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern
nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with
two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew
them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and
indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and
exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.
201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which incumbered our
thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of
its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That
relation is strangely duplicate; for, on one side, Greek art is the root
of all simplicity; and, on the other, of all complexity.
On one side, I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for
some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin
room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the
Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship,
you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand,
simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys
of the rest of mankind.
[Illustration: XX.
GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.]
202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean
decoration--all wreak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms
of man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true
flesh, and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other
races, as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the
work of the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement
to what was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school,
hereafter, it belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests
them with the brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of
the myth of Daedalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal
change from the binding together of the feet to their separation, and
the other modifications of action which took place, either in
progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition
from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have
necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these
literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the
bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods on Indian
temples have their legs separate enough; but they are infinitely more
dead than the rude figures at Branchidae sitting with their hands on
their knees. And, briefly, the work of Daedalus is the giving of
deceptive life, as that of Prometheus the giving of real life; and I can
put the relation of Greek to all other art, in this function, before
you, in easily compared and remembered examples.
203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and
elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad
art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with
wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the
eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere, and forever. Now, beside this
colossal bull, here is a bit of Daedalus-work, enlarged from a coin not
bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to know,
henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.
204. In this aspect of it, then, I say it is the simplest and nakedest
of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole,
for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most
complex of human art. I told you in my Fifth Lecture, showing you the
spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a
liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how
often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of
Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikile]," occurs to the Greeks as connected
with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the
simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find
that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it
"[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the
third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the
idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and
sound--the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek:
poikiloi hymnoi]"--runs through the compass of all Greek
art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles, you
were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for
instance, to Plate IV. here,) your impression of it would be, instead of
breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and checkeredness,
"[Greek: en angeou Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's
delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted
things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly.
Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a
'spotty.' Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon,
which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes, and
which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek:
poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them
caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited
beside the river till sunset."
205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.
The Greeks have been thus the origin, not only of all broad, mighty, and
calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous;
"variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as
first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of
glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple,
burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian
roof,--quartering of the Christian shield,--rubric and arabesque of
Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of
adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous
pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan
Chapel of the Thorn.
[Illustration: XXI.
THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY.]