to Life, to enrich her and to transfigure her, would be to expect the
impossible. But if you applaud them at all, applaud them for their
recovery, for the fact that it is well that they can give us even
drabby reality as it is. Do not congratulate them yet on their health.
For their realism, as realism, is as hopeless, as uninteresting and as
unelevating as any realism ever was and ever will be.
It is deceptive, too, for what seem to be beauties in their pictures
are borrowed from such of their predecessors of the late Gothic period
as were already overloading their pictures with ornamental art forms,
in order to disguise the ugliness of the type they presented. Where
they beguile you, it is often with a wealth of sweet ornament.[30]
In Ucello's "Battle of Sant' Eglidio," at the National Gallery, it is
impossible not to recognize the pains the artist has taken to make your
eye dwell on the dainty trappings and accoutrements of the knights
and their steeds, on the distracting balls of gold in the shrubbery,
artfully repeated in the bridles of the horses, and on the complex maze
of pikes, spears and lances, which makes the glimpse of hills in the
distance all the more restful and pleasing.
Also in Pisanello's "St. Anthony and St. George" (National Gallery),
whatever charm there is to be seen is still a Gothic charm, and the
same holds good of this painter's remarkable picture of the "Vision
of St. Eustace," in which the deliberately ornamental purpose of the
animals in the background charms you more than their startling realism.
If you leave these pictures, in the National Gallery, and walk over to
Orcagna's "Coronation of the Virgin," you will see where the ornamental
charm of the early Renaissance realists probably found its origin. For
these convalescent men made no sudden and unanticipated appearance.
They were preceded by painters like Orcagna, who were beginning to feel
the impossibility of making a beautiful image out of the Christian
type, and who therefore crammed their pictures with ornament in a
manner so prodigal that the human portion of them assumed quite a
subordinate place.
Look at this picture of Orcagna's. It seems positively to ring with
gold. Massed halos of the precious metal convert the faces of the
people into mere decorative discs of colour. The golden embroidery on
the dresses and on the hangings in the background give you a feeling of
sunshine, of wealth and of luxury, which makes you forget the ideal for
which all this lavish display is acting but as a subtle impresario. And
the utilization of every square inch of room by filigrees, festoons,
frills and fretwork of gorgeousness, almost convinces you at last that
you are in front of an art which says "Yea" to the glory of sunshine,
beauty and life.
In this very need of extravagant ornament, however, Orcagna confesses
quite openly to you that, as far as humanity is concerned, he, as
an artist, is bankrupt and destitute. His picture, like most things
connected with the art of Christianity, is a pictorial paradox; and
when you leave it, to wander through the other rooms, your mind must be
of a singularly ingenuous stamp if it feels no suspicion with regard to
Orcagna's use of such a deafening brass band in the exaltation of his
ideal.
If you doubt all this, how can you explain the fact that those painters
of the early Renaissance who remained faithful to the Christian
type--such men, I mean, as Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Alesso
Baldovinetti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio--all remained more or less
faithful, too, to Orcagna's belief in ornament and pretty accessories;
while all those painters who either carried on or developed the new
spirit in Pisanello's, Ucello's, Masolino's and Masaccio's work--
such men as Pollajuolo, Verrochio, Perugini, Bellini, and ultimately
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael--all discarded
pretty and seductive accessories, or, when they did use them, made them
completely subordinate to the human element in their work?
The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan
type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with
whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid
return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of
this type in the very heart of the Vatican--the headquarters of the
greatest negative religion on earth,--these are the facts which make
the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.
It represents the greatest stand which Europe has ever made against the
denial of life, humanity and beauty; and if some of the artists, like
Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and ultimately Titian, in their great
zeal, returned to nature with almost as much interest as to man, this
is easily accounted for when it is remembered how long nature and man
had been separated.[31]
But the fact that makes the final glory of the Renaissance type all the
more glorious is the extraordinary circumstance that almost every one
of the artists who fought for it, and for the principles it involved,
from Piero della Francesca to Titian, were one after the other captured
and enchained by the Church itself. Often it was in the very atmosphere
of the high altar, with the fumes of the incense about them, that they
asserted their positive faith in Life and Man. The greatest dangers,
the greatest temptations surrounded them But they planted their
banner, notwithstanding, in the centre of their true enemy's camp,
and, for a while, their true enemy acquiesced, because the command was
in the hands of men who were artists and pagans themselves, and who
consequently did not believe in one single tenet of the negative creed
which they professed.
Just as the realism of some of the early Renaissance artists, however,
was the inevitable outcome of their convalescent state, so the strong
realism of many of the painters and sculptors of the late Renaissance
was the natural result of their combative attitude.
Fighting for a particular kind of man, against centuries of false
and unhealthy tradition, it was necessary to bring forward the new
ideal with every characteristic plainly, emphatically and powerfully
expressed; for every characteristic of a new ideal is of the highest
importance.
These new values of the Renaissance spirit were scarcely one hundred
years old, when Michelangelo set himself the task of embodying them in
his sculpture and painting. Would it be fair to criticize him from the
standpoint of Egypt or even of Greece?
From the standpoint of Egypt he is disappointing. The preponderance
of characteristic traits over simplicity in his work spoils the power
of his conceptions. His prevailing lack of simplicity makes you guess
at the youth of the values on which he stood, and his tortuous bodies
often make you question whether his types have entirely left the
nerves of the Gothic period behind them. But are not all these defects
precisely of a kind which are unfortunately inseparable from the
position which Michelangelo assumed?
He was the greatest of the Renaissance artists. In criticizing him, I
have said all that can be said, from this particular standpoint, of his
predecessors and contemporaries. His power lies in the forcibleness,
the exhilaration, the exuberance and the wealth with which he brings
forward his type. It lies in his absolute contempt of seductive
prettiness, his sometimes terrible strength, his vehemence and his
energy, and above all in his magnificent conceptions and the types with
which he illustrates them. Compared with the art from which it had
sprung, his art was stupendous.
And where he is weak, compared with a higher--and by no means a modern
--concept of art, he suffers from the virtues of his position as a
fighter and as an innovator.
In valuing him, as I said in my first lecture, it all depends whence
you come. If you hail from Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth
century, you can but go on your knees before him. If you hail from
Memphis of the year 4000 B.C., you can but criticize and feel ill at
ease before his work.
I have not yet said anything concerning the relation of the Renaissance
artists to Greece, simply because, taking in view the circumstances of
their development, the relation seems fairly obvious. In discussing
the art of Greece itself, however, the matter will probably appear
quite clear to you. How much of the transfiguration in late Renaissance
art is actually due to Greek influence, or to the Dionysian spirit
of the age, it is difficult to determine. In my opinion, the latter
influence was more potent, and to the Greek influence I should be more
prepared to ascribe the spur which originally led to the adoption of a
thoroughly Pagan type.
[29] Kraus, in his _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, Vol. II, denies
that the revival of the antique was predominant in the Renaissance,
and argues that individualism and nature study were the prominent
notes. Venturi, the Italian art-historian, declares that the antique
began to be paramount only in the sixteenth century, and that with
it the decadence began. While Eugène Müntz, in his monumental work,
_L'Histoire de l'Art pendant la Renaissance_, Vol. I, p. 42, speaking
of the two movements of the period, says: "Deux voies s'ouvraient aux
novateurs, ou le naturalisme à outrance, un naturalisme qui, n'étant
plus soutenu par les hautes aspirations du moyen âge, risquait fort
de sombrer dans la vulgarité (l'exemple de Paolo Ucello, d'Andrea del
Castagna, de Pollajuolo l'a bien prouvé) ou bien la nature contrôlée,
purifiée, ennoblie par l'étude des modèles anciens." The latter was the
later movement. See also Woltmann and Woermann, _History of Painting_,
Vol. II, Introduction.
[30] Muther, in his _History of Painting_, Vol. I, p. 87, actually
declares that Jan van Eyck and Pisanello in their dainty manner
remained Gothic.
[31] Of Piero della Francesca, Muther says, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 97:
"He created the grammar of modern painting.... Four hundred years ago
he proposed the problem of realism, and endeavoured, as the forerunner
of the most modern artists, to establish in what manner atmosphere
changes colour impressions."
Part II
Greece and Egypt
"The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land
make thy father and brethren to dwell."--Genesis xlvii. 6.
1. Greek Art.
I have now spoken to you of Christian Art, and you have not been taken
altogether by surprise; because, in England at least, people are not
unacquainted with the fight Art has had with Puritanism. And you were,
therefore, partly prepared for what I had to say. The views I have
expressed concerning the Renaissance were not entirely new to you
either, and, if they were, I can only hope that they will assist you in
giving to the Art of that period its proper valuation. Now, however,
I fear I am going to level a blow at what must seem to you even more
sacred, even more invulnerable and even more thoroughly established
than either Christian or Renaissance Art. I refer to the Art of Greece.
Albeit, before I proceed with my task, do not be surprised if, like
Charles the First's executioner, Brandon, I kneel to kiss the hand
of my victim, if only by so doing I may seem to you to understand
the grave nature of my business, and satisfy you that the blow I am
about to deliver is prompted more by conviction than by that cheap
irreverence for great things which is, alas, only too prevalent to-day.
Goethe says somewhere that, if we find fault with Euripides at all we
should do so on bended knees. It seems to me that this ought also to
be the attitude of people and critics in this age who attempt to value
what the Greeks achieved in the graphic arts. For the earnestness and
vigour wherewith, collectively, they set up their triumphs and ideals
in stone and marble, the moment any opportunity arose for them to
affirm and exalt their type, is deserving of the utmost praise and
admiration.
Too many great writers have exalted the Greeks, however, to make it
necessary for me to edify you with any long and enthusiastic praise of
those qualities which Nietzsche admired in them.
Fairness alone, therefore, compels me to acknowledge the grandeur
of the type their art advocates. With Nietzsche I can but extol the
yea-saying of this type to the passions, to beauty, to health, in
fact to life. The fearlessness of the Greeks before beauty was their
acknowledgment that life was a blessing to which it was worth while to
be lured and seduced. And their innocent acceptance of the strongest
passions is sufficient to show to what extent they had not only
mastered them, but had also enlisted them into their service.
Nevertheless, though it is only decent to exercise some reserve in this
matter, it certainly is necessary to point to a curious fact in regard
to Greek Art in general, and that is, that, with the exception of some
of its archaic examples, it has been revered with ever-increasing
fervour by strangers, from the second century before Christ to the
present day,--when I say strangers, I mean people whose thought and
aspirations were not necessarily the outcome of Hellenic values,--and
that this general appreciation of Greek Art by foreigners implies that
there is some quality in it which is only too common to everybody and
to anybody, irrespective of nationality and education. If it were asked
what this common factor was, I should reply, it is Nature herself, to
which Greek Art, in its so-called best period, is undeniably in close
and intimate relationship.
In examining the works of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries
before Christ, it is well to bear in mind the peculiar state of the
country in which they appeared, its division into states, and its mixed
population. It is well to think of the many ideals that dominated these
people, and of the fact that the citizen of one city was often regarded
as an alien, without any political rights whatever, if he ventured to
transfer his abode to another city but a few miles distant from his
own; and allowances should be made for the rivalry and competition this
state of affairs conduced to bring about. It is also well to remember
the individual lives the colonists lived, and the altered outlook on
life to which their independent positions were bound to lead, and
which, when they returned to their mother city, as many of them used to
do, must have shed a new and strange light upon what they saw.
Although a certain uniformity can be traced in the political history
of most Greek states, no one would dare to maintain that the Greeks,
at any time in their history, were a perfectly united people observing
the same values; whilst even in the history of each separate state,
changes occurred so constantly that a stable political type is a rare
and practically negligible fact.
In spite of the many heroes and geniuses which arose from time to time,
there never seems to have been that power, either human or superhuman,
which might have welded these peoples indissolubly together, or which,
taking its root in one of the contending races, could have made that
race completely absorb and digest the others.
Even the games of Greece, which, it might be argued, tended to unite
the various peoples, cannot be said to have gone very far in this
respect, since the very fact that the Hellenic nation enforced a
sacred armistice during the month of the games, between states that
were at war, shows that the most this institution could achieve was a
suspension of arms.
On the whole, therefore, the fact that one can talk of different
types as characteristic of particular schools or ideals is amply
accounted for, and when the general spirit of rivalry that animated
the whole nation for centuries is duly taken into consideration it
is not difficult to explain a certain preponderance of manifold
characteristics over simplicity, which is observable in the greater
part of Greek sculpture--a preponderance which sometimes led very
rapidly to the crudest realism, and which at other times approached
realism only after a considerable lapse of time. Such phenomena are the
inevitable result of that lack of the powerful master or ruler spirit
who unifies and co-ordinates heterogeneity, and who thereby makes
simplification and powerful art possible, as the outcome of relative
permanency.[32]
For, when technique is largely mastered, realism, as I have shown in
the case of Mediæval and Renaissance Art, may in a great measure be the
outcome of a desire to make one's own particular ideal unmistakably
plain, and although this kind of truth to nature always reveals a
clashing of values or types, it is of a kind which may be regarded as
infinitely superior to the realism which has nothing to say at all, and
which merely copies out of poverty of invention.
When talking to strangers about an ideal they do not share with you,
it is necessary to bring all your powers to bear upon an adequate and
perfectly vivid representation of what you have in your mind.
I, on this platform, assuming that Nietzsche as an art valuer was
strange to you, had to present him to you with all the realism and
detail I could dispose of. If I had been talking to people who knew
the Nietzschean views of art perfectly well, I might have indulged in
certain artistic simplifications and poetical transfigurations which I
considered unsuited to the present circumstances.
This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism
in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I
think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome
praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the
Hellenic spirit.
When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in
the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery
of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great
strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable
distance. You may look at these things for a moment and wonder what
they mean; you may even pass on with a feeling of indifference
amounting to scorn;[33] but whatever your sensations are, you will be
quite unable to deny that what you have seen does not belong to your
world, that it is utterly and completely separated from you, and that
you felt in need of a guide and of an initiator in its presence.
You may laugh at the lions of Gebel Barkal, you may deny that they are
beautiful; but, whoever you are, scholar, poet, painter or layman, you
will admit that they are cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote
and uncommunicative.
A. The Parthenon.
Now, if you turn round and bear to the right in the Egyptian Gallery at
the British Museum, you will find a broad passage lined with statues
that seem very much more familiar to you than those which you are just
leaving behind; and, in the distance, you will espy the maimed figures
of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon. In a moment you will be in
the Elgin Room, and everywhere about you you will see all that remains
of the ancient temple of Athens which is worth seeing.
If you have not been to Athens, you must not suppose that you have
missed much, as far as the Parthenon is concerned. Unless you are very
modern and very romantic, and can take pleasure in visiting a gruesome
ruin by moonlight, you would be only depressed and disappointed by
the decayed and ugly mass of stones that now stands like a battered
skeleton on the Acropolis. You may take it, therefore, that, as
you stand in the Elgin Room, you have around you the best that the
Parthenon could yield after its partial destruction and dismantlement
in 1687 by the victorious Veneto-German army. And what is it that you
see?
Remember that you are a man of the twentieth century A.D., and that you
have just been bored to extinction by a walk in the Egyptian Gallery.
Remember, too, that you have very few fixed opinions about Art, and
that the artistic condition of your continent is one of chaos and
anarchy.
In spite of all this, however, you will walk up to the horse's head at
the extreme right of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon, and the two
thousand and four hundred years that separate you from it will vanish
as by magic.
For years I have taken men, women and children up to this horse's
head. In some cases these people have been technical connoisseurs of
a horse's points; in others they have been mere bourgeois people,
indifferent both to the art of Greece and to equine anatomy; and with
the children I was concerned with raw manhood that cared not a jot for
Art, and whose one sole, savage instinct was to recognize and classify
what was before them.
If you supposed, however, that the verdict of these different people
was anything but unanimous, you would be vastly mistaken. The children
cried with delight. Their powers of recognizing things was stimulated
to the utmost. One of them told me it was like a real bus-horse. The
connoisseurs of a horse's points began to draw plausible conclusions
from the existing head as to the probable conformation of the body
which the artist had deliberately omitted, and the bourgeois people
declared that they loved the fascinating softness and convincing
looseness of the mouth.--All of them were charmed. All of them
understood. Not one of them felt that this horse held itself aloof from
them and kept its distance, as the austere Egyptian lions had done. And
all of them were children of the twentieth century A.D., and over two
thousand years separated them from the objects they were inspecting.
Their comments on the Parthenon Frieze were much the same. Once or
twice one of them would say that there was a monotonous similarity of
feature in the men and in the horses--a comment which immediately
revealed to me that 2,400 years had indeed wrought some change. On the
whole, however, the attitude of those I escorted amazed me; for, with
but few exceptions, it was one of sympathy and understanding. I will
not say that I did not stimulate their interest a good deal, by making
them feel that their criticism was valuable to me; I will not pretend
that if they had been alone they would have troubled to concentrate
their minds to any great extent upon the exhibits around them; but this
I will affirm, with absolute confidence: that if all the men, women
and children who stream through the Elgin Room daily were given the
same stimulus to exercise their critical faculty, and were similarly
induced to give particular attention to all they saw, the sympathy and
understanding which I observed among the groups of visitors I escorted
would be found to be a fairly general, if not a common occurrence.
[Illustration: The Apollo of Tenea, Glyptothek, Munich.]
B. The Apollo of Tenea.
Take the same people down to the Cast Room and show them the Apollo of
Tenea, and what will they say?
When I first halted before this bewilderingly beautiful statue in the
Glyptothek at Munich, I felt I was in the presence of something very
much more masterful, very much more impressive, and infinitely more
commanding than anything Greek I had ever seen in London, Paris, or
Athens.
Here was a style which was strange. But it was evidently a style which
was the product of a will, and of a long observance of particular
values that had at last culminated in a type; for this Apollo resembled
nothing modern, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mediæval, or of the Renaissance.
This statue scorns to make a general appeal. It is the apotheosis of
a type. Of this there can be no question. It is the work of a loving
and powerful artist, who could simplify the human frame, and express
stenographically, so to speak, the essential features of the people
he represented, because he knew the essential features to which their
values aspired.
The arms, alone, transcend everything that I have ever seen in Hellenic
Art for consummate skill in transfiguring and retaining bare essentials
alone; and although, here and there, particularly in the breast,
there is a broadness and a sweeping ease, which I admit ought to be
attributed more to incomplete control of essentials than to their
actual simplification, the whole figure breathes a spirit so pure, so
certain and so sound, that it is the nearest approach I can find in
Greek Art to that ideal artistic fact in which the particular values
of a people find their apotheosis in the transfigured and simplified
example of their type.
I would deny that the qualities of this statue are not ultimate
qualities. I would deny that there is anything transitional or archaic
in them. What is archaic, what is transitional, is the weak treatment
of the chest and abdomen. Compared with the simplified chest and
abdomen of an Egyptian statue of the fourth or fifth dynasty, it shows
a minimum rather than a maximum of command of, and superiority over,
reality. Any healthy development of such an art, however, ought only to
have led to greater perfection in the treatment of the parts mentioned,
and I seriously question the general belief that it marks a progress in
sculpture which must ultimately lead to the rendering of the athletic
types for which the sculptors of Argos and Sicyon became famous. There
is something strange and foreign in this statue which does not reappear
in the Hellenic Art of the Periclean age.[34] Like the vases of the
sixth century and some of the ante-Periclean Acropolis statues, there
is a Ruler form in its execution that makes quite a limited appeal--
a fact which would be consistent with its having been the apotheosis
of a type. Its exhortation is not directed at mankind in general. It
communicates little to the modern European, and the crowds that stream
through the Elgin Room of the British Museum would probably pass it by
without either sympathy or understanding.
And yet, as I have shown, it cannot be regarded as a perfect specimen
of Ruler-art; there are too many uncertainties and too many doubts in
it.
As marking an advanced stage in a very high class of Ruler-art,
however, it is magnificent, and any transformation of its form to
greater realism would be a descent, rather than an ascent, in taste.
If you turn from it to the sculptures of the temple of Selinus, which,
as far as one can say, must have been carved not more than about half
a century earlier, you will see that these are indeed archaic. They
are beneath realism in their coarseness and crudity. But it is in the
sculptures of Selinus, and not in the Apollo of Tenea, or in the best
vases of the sixth century, that you must seek the motive spirit of the
Art which has made the Periclean age so glorious; This striving after
realism, although unsuccessful in the metopes of Selinus, reveals a
different aspiration, a totally different will, from that which created
the Munich Apollo, and it was precisely this aspiration that was fully
realized, with but a slight admixture of the other will, in Athens of
the fifth century.
Some will say that Egyptian influence is apparent in the Apollo of
Tenea, and they will add that the Greek colonists in Selinus, finding
themselves in very close contact with their commercial rivals the
Phœnicians, very naturally scorned all Eastern canons and ideas when
erecting their temples.
Both of these suggestions are perfectly legitimate. The Apollo of
Tenea either betrays Egyptian influence or, owing to its Ruler form,
it takes one's mind back involuntarily to the Ruler-art of the Nile.
The sculptures of Selinus may also be the outcome of the conscious
renunciation of Eastern influence, or they may be the manifestation of
a particular "Art-Will," as Worringer has it, which aimed at realism
and was quite guiltless of any other ulterior motive. In both cases
I favour the latter alternative, and I should like to believe that
in addition to the influences I have already mentioned in respect
of realism there were two Art-Wills active in ancient Greece--each
striving for supremacy and power.
C. The two Art-Wills of Ancient Greece.
I cannot see how any one rising from a study of Hellenic Art can arrive
at any other conclusion. A superior will aiming at a Ruler-art form is
the one, an inferior will aiming at realism is the other. And it is a
significant fact, that while the first will sent forth its last blooms
in the sixth century--a period when, according to Freeman, Hellenic
life readied its zenith,[35] the ultimate triumphs of the other and
inferior will, in the fifth century, marks the first stage in a decline
that was never to be arrested.[36]
[Illustration: The Medusa Metope of Sellinus, Palermo.]
This is not the usual view, I know. As a rule, the art of the age of
Pericles is considered to be the highest that Greece ever produced.
But in this art I see a preponderance of realism which reveals to what
extent the other and inferior will was beginning to prevail. And when I
study Hellenistic art, and see this evil assuming such proportions as
to make even modern historians and Art-scholars deliberately denounce
it, I cannot help but recognize the germs of this decay in the art
which hitherto has been most praised and admired.
As I say, I am judging purely from the artistic records. But I have no
doubt that, if I possessed the necessary scholarship, I could trace
the two Art-wills to two distinct races of men who, from the days of
the fall of Mycenæan culture, strove for mastership in Greece. I also
entertain no doubts that the fall of Greece might be attributed to the
gradual triumph of that race which possessed the inferior Art-will, and
nothing I have read, either in Grote, Bury, Oman, Curtius, Schnaase,
Miss Harrison and others, has led me seriously to hesitate before
suggesting this hypothesis.
Professor Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece leads me to suppose that
the problem might be solved in the way I suggest. But, in any case,
whether this is so or not, the style of the art of Pheidias shows
a descent from the style of the Apollo of Tenea, which only an age
with a mistaken conception of what art really is could possibly have
overlooked.
The art of the fifth and fourth centuries, I will not and cannot deny,
contains a large proportion of Ruler form, or what modern and ancient
art-historians call the "ideal."[37] No people, any portion of which
had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided
it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history,
alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.
The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all
Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance
realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has
been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values
of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general
appeal.
D. Greek Painting.
In regard to the painting of Greece, I will not detain you long.
Practically all I have said in regard to Greek sculpture may be applied
with equal force to Greek painting, and I cannot do better than sum
up this side of the question with the words of that profound Japanese
artist Okakura-Kakuzo.
In speaking of the great style of the Greeks, in painting--a style
which vanished with the sixth century,--he says--
"The great style of the Greeks in painting--that style which was
theirs before a stage chiaroscuro and imitation of Nature were brought
in by the Appellesian school,--rises up before us with ineffaceable
regret ... and we cannot refrain from saying that European work, by
following the later school, has lost greatly in power of structural
composition and line expression, though it has added to the facility of
realistic representation."[38]
When it is remembered that the demands of theatrical scenery are
generally admitted to have exercised considerable influence over
Greek painting, we need feel no surprise at the necessarily vulgar
nature of its ultimate development; while in raising this point about
chiaroscuro, Okakura-Kakuzo really opens a very serious and needful
inquiry.
It may be seriously questioned whether the chiaroscuro which
Apollodorus is said to have introduced in the fifth century was not the
worst possible blow that has ever been levelled at Ruler-Art, and it is
difficult to separate this discovery from the people who made it.
Once it is recognized that chiaroscuro implies a blending of colours
together, an elimination of all those sharp contrasts which the
compromising spirit of a democratic age cannot abide, and a general
hugging and embracing of all colours by each other, at the cost of the
life of all definite lines; once it is acknowledged, moreover, that all
gradations and blurred zones of contact lead inevitably to the very
worst forms of Police Art, such as Zeuxis, Parrhasius and Timanthus
practised, and that escape from realism is not only difficult,
but almost impossible under such conditions, the question whether
Apollodorus is to be praised or cursed becomes a very weighty and vital
one; and in saying that he ought to be cursed, I make a very important
statement, however unreasonable it may seem to you at present.
You have noticed that until now I have not compared the Periclean art
of Greece with the art of any other country, but simply with what
is generally called the archaic art of Greece itself. I have spoken
Only of the Apollo of Tenea, and of certain promising features in the
sixth-century sculptures which were discovered on the Acropolis within
recent years.
[32] See Edward A. Freeman, _The Chief Periods of European History_, p.
6: "The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the beacons,
of mankind, but not their rulers." Page 9: "The tale of Hellas shows us
a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to
show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for
long."
[33] The attitude of such men as Lübke and Winckelmann to Egyptian art
is typical of the lack of understanding with which modern Europeans
have approached the monuments of the Nile. See _History of Sculpture_,
by Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, Vol. I, pp. 22-25, and _History of Ancient Art_,
by John Winckelmann, Vol. I, pp. 169, 171, 175.
[34] This view seems quite opposed to that of a great authority on the
subject, Mr. A. S. Murray; but how this author comes to the conclusion
that "... in describing the progress of sculpture from its early days
to its highest development, it is convenient to speak of it as a
gradual elimination of realism," I am quite at a loss to understand.
See _A History of Greek Sculpture_, p. 239.
[35] See _The Chief Periods of European History_, pp. 21-23. See also
Bury, _History of Greece_, Chaps. IV and V.
[36] In studying the actual decline of Greek art it would, I think, be
very necessary to lay some stress upon the part taken by the people
in general, in judging and criticizing artistic productions under the
democracies. See Rev. J. Mahaffy (_Social Life in Greece_), who is
talking entirely from the Hellenic standpoint, p. 440: "The really
vital point was the public nature of the work they (the Athenian Demos)
demanded; it was not done to please private and peculiar taste, it was
not intended for the criticism of a small clique of partial admirers,
but it was set up, or performed for all the city together, for the
fastidious, for the vulgar, for the learned, and for the ignorant. It
seems to me that this necessity, and the consequent broad intention of
the Greek artist, is the main reason _why its effects upon the world
has never been diminished, and why its lessons are eternal_" (the
italics are mine).
[37] T. G. Tucker, in his _Life in Ancient Greece_, does his best
to reconcile the realism of Greek art with the "ideal," and helps
himself out of the difficulty by reasserting Schelling's claim in
_The Philosophy of Art_ (see note to p. 91 in this book). Mr. Tucker
says, p. 186: "Many people imagine that Greek sculpture--to take that
salient province again--deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed
at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be
more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the
living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only
when the carving seemed instinct with life--a life not merely of the
limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was
felt to be controlling every limb. A Greek sculptor like Praxiteles
studied long and lovingly.... To anatomy he is as true as an artist
need wish to be. But are not his figures ideal? Doubtless, but what
does 'ideal' mean? That they are abstract, conventional, or frankly
superhuman? Anything but that. It means simply that he carves figures
which, while entirely true to strict anatomy, entirely lifelike in
all their delicate modelling ... are examples of nature in happiest
circumstances...."
[38] _Ideals of the East_, p. 53.
2. Egyptian Art.--A. King Khephrën.
If, however, I now choose to compare the art of the Temple of Zeus at
Olympia, and the Parthenon at Athens[39] with that of Egypt, the first
falls absolutely to pieces. If I walk from the lions of Gebel Barkal,
which Reginald Stuart Poole considers as the "finest example of the
idealization of animal forms that any age has produced,"[40] over to
the horses of the Parthenon, the latter seem poor, feeble, and slavish
beside the powerfully simplified and commanding work of Egypt. And if,
with vivid recollections of the diorite statue of King Khephrën at
Cairo, I walk up to the best Greek work of the Periclean age, or after,
either in London or Paris, I marvel at the denseness of an age which
can put the Egyptian Pharaoh second in the order of rank.
[Illustration: King Khephrën, Cairo Museum]
We now know too much to believe that the noble simplicity of King
Khephrën--the builder of the second pyramid of Gizeh--is the result
of incompetence or of limited means in dealing with the stone out
of which he was carved. No artist who follows the careful lines and
profiles of this statue, and who understands the broad grasp with
which each undulation, however sweeping, comprehends and comprises all
that is essential and indispensable, can doubt for an instant that the
sculptor who carved it was not only capable of realism, but infinitely
superior to it. And he who does not admire the consummate Ruler form
of this statue, and see in it the expression of the greatest artistic
power that has ever existed on earth, and probably the portrait of the
greatest human power that has ever existed on earth, confesses himself,
immediately, unfamiliar with the fundamental spirit of great art.[41]
The type of King Khephrën it is quite impossible to admire and to
like, unless one is to some extent in sympathy with his ideals and his
aspirations. His features will remain strange and quite inscrutable
as long as one does not feel one's self leaning, however slightly, to
his side, in thought and emotion; but the masterly treatment of his
apotheosized portrait by a man who was probably his greatest artist,
ought to be apparent to all who have thought and meditated upon the
question of what constitutes the greatest art.
Here is to be seen that autocratic mode of expression which brooks
neither contradiction nor disobedience; the Symmetry which makes the
spectator obtain a complete grasp of an idea; the Sobriety which
reveals the restraint that a position of command presupposes; the
Simplicity proving the power of a great mind that has overcome the
chaos in itself and has reflected its order and harmony upon an object,
the most essential features of which it has selected with unfailing
accuracy; the Transfiguration that betrays the Dionysian ecstasy and
pathos from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes
it reflect his own glory back upon him; the Repetition which ensures
obedience, and finally the Variety which is the indispensable condition
of all living Art.[42]
For the artist who carved this monument was no coward. His duty was to
surpass the beauty of the most beautiful subject on earth in his time.
This man whom he has bequeathed to us in stone was not only a king, but
a god, and none but the most masterful mind, none but the most ultimate
product of ages spent in the observance of a definite and particular
set of values, could have been capable of giving this simplified
rendering, this selection of essentials, of a man-god who was the
highest outcome of these same values.
How was this possible? How were these values maintained so long?
In the first place, it can now be affirmed with confidence that the
Egyptians, in the days of Khephrën, were a very pure and united race,
having remained, thanks to their isolated position on the Delta of
the Nile, aloof and free from the ethical and blood influence of the
foreigner for probably thousands of years. Secondly, everybody seems to
agree that, whatever its ultimate purity may have been, the Egyptian
people, thanks to the inordinate power of their values, certainly had
a capacity for absorbing and digesting foreign elements which was
simply extraordinary;[43] and, thirdly, we have it on the authority
of Wilkinson that "the superiority of their legislation has always been
acknowledged as the cause of the duration of an empire which lasted
with a very uniform succession of hereditary sovereigns, and with the
same form of government for a much longer period than the generality of
ancient states."[44]
We can understand King Khephrën, then, only as the apotheosis of a type
which was the product of the values of his people. For that they loved
him and worshipped him quite willingly and quite heartily, no honest
student of their history can any longer doubt.
It was with great rejoicings, and not, as Buckle and Spencer thought,
with the woeful and haggard faces of ill-used slaves, that his people
assembled annually to continue and to complete the building of his
pyramid. Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, Wilkinson, Dr. Petrie,[45] and
many others have cleared up all our doubts on this point, and only
an Englishman like Buckle,[46] who could not divorce labour from the
modern idea of sweating, and absolute monarchy from the modern idea of
cruelty, and slavery from the modern idea of brutality,[47] was able
to think otherwise.
For it was highly probable that King Khephrën had no standing army. It
is certain that his predecessor had not.[48] It is even probable that
he had no armed bodyguard. What, then, was the power which, every year,
could muster thousands of his fellow-countrymen about him, and which
induced them cheerfully to undertake this most strenuous, this most
skilful, and this most highly artistic labour for him?
This power, there can no longer be any doubt, was the power of
affection and profound and sincere reverence. An examination of the
pyramids of Gizeh, alone, apart from all historical evidence, is
sufficient to convince any one who has any knowledge of what forced
labour produces, that love was very largely active in the work of
these Egyptians of the third and fourth dynasties;[49] and, if we turn
from the actual monuments themselves to the sculpture that adorned
them, we become convinced that the people who built them were a united,
law-abiding race, who recognized in Khephrën the highest product of
their values. And yet, that enormous power was wielded by this one
man-god, is proved by every detail that history and the archæological
records have handed down to us. He was the remote predecessor of a king
who one day would be able to declare--
"I teach the priests what is their duty: I turn away the ignorant man
from his ignorance.... The gods are full of delight in my time, and
their temples celebrate feasts of joy. I have placed the boundaries of
the land of Egypt at the horizon. I gave protection to those who were
in trouble, and smote those who did evil against them. I placed Egypt
at the head of all the nations, because its inhabitants are at one with
me in the worship of Amon!"[50]
He was a man the moral standards of whose people were in many respects
higher than those of the Greeks;[51] he and his subjects felt very strongly
the value of strength of character and of self-control;[52] though perhaps
they laid "greater stress upon discretion and quietness than on any
qualities of character. In the repudiation of sins an Egyptian would
say: 'My mouth hath not run on;' 'My mouth hath not been hot;' 'My
voice hath not been voluble in my speech;' 'My voice is not loud.'"[53]
"Ptahotep urged similar discreetness; he said: 'Let thy heart be
overflowing, but let thy mouth be restrained.'"[54] While another Egyptian
moralist said: "Do not be a talker!"[55]
Thus we find all the evidences of precisely that principle which goes
to rear a great people--the belief that restraint is necessary,
and part of the art of life, and that in order to have one group of
advantages, another group must be sacrificed.
For this is the principle of all great legislation; it is the principle
of all great art,--and it is the principle of all great life.
A great legislator has to discover what sacrifices his people can
afford to make, what things they will be able for ever to discard in
order to reap the advantages of a certain mode of life. His teaching
must include restraint. It is the renunciation of some things and the
careful cultivation of others that builds up a noble type. As Mr.
Chesterton once observed, with really uncustomary wisdom, you cannot
be King of England and the Beadle of Balham at the same time. To be
the one you must sacrifice the advantages which are associated with
the other. All values, all art,[56] and all life is based upon this
principle--that if you grasp all, you lose all; or, as Nietzsche
has it: "The belief in the pleasure which comes of restraint--this
pleasure of a rider on a fiery steed."[57]
You may argue that the enjoyment of one set of joys is better in your
opinion than the enjoyment of another set; but you cannot claim the
enjoyment of all; that is impossible. It is only among an uncultured
or democratic people that every one aspires to all pleasures, and it
is precisely among such a people that some form of Puritanism becomes
an urgent need--that is to say, as a substitute for the art of life.[58]
Because the indiscriminate pursuit of all joys perforce ends in
failure, and therefore in unhappiness. But measure is the delight only
of æsthetic natures;[59] hence, where the art of living has not yet been
learned, some kind of severe puritanical morality will be a condition
of existence, and if that is dropped excesses will soon begin to make
their presence felt.
I do not wish you to imagine, therefore, that the Egyptians were an
austere, ascetic and self-castigating race; on the contrary, as all
authorities declare, they were full of the joy of life and of the
love of life;[60] and it was precisely because they recognized
well-defined limits in particular things that they could allow
themselves a certain margin in others.
In the art of Egypt I recognized this principle of restraint, long
before I discovered that it existed in their life and system of
society, and I was not surprised to find it observed with greater
severity by their rulers than by the mass of the people themselves.[61]
No one can command who has not first learnt to obey his own will.
Nobody could command as that Man-God Khephrën commanded,[62] before
he had become complete master of himself.
"He who cannot command himself shall obey," says Zarathustra.[63] And about
five thousand years ago Ptahotep--the great moralist of the fifth
dynasty of Egypt--said: "He that obeyeth his heart, shall command!"[64]
This atmosphere is strange to us. We, who are used to seeing liberty
and authority granted indiscriminately as ends in themselves, to
everybody and anybody, find it difficult to realize this manner of
thought. If we know of it at all, we misunderstand it and confound the
moderation of weak natures with the restraint of the strong.[65]
This art of life which takes as a fundamental principle that every joy
is bought by some sacrifice, is strange and archaic now. The people it
reared communicate little to our age, as their statues will prove if
you look at them; the art it created leaves modern spectators cold;
and yet, as every great legislator and artist should know, it is
precisely upon the principle with which the Egyptian people of the
fourth dynasty were reared, and with which the splendid statue of King
Khephrën was carved, that all great life and art repose.
It cannot be said too often, therefore, that the Egyptians were a happy
and contented people, and this they were because there was some power
abroad in their world, and because he who wielded that power could make
them believe that the human race was as high as a pyramid, although but
one man perhaps could ever represent the apex.
B. The Lady Nophret.
But you may object that in some of the works of this period the
Egyptian artists showed a lack of restraint, a lack of the instinct
that knows how much to sacrifice, which far surpassed this same vice
in the art of the Greeks. You may point to the perfectly stupendous
realism of the Lady Nophret and her husband or brother, and declare
with Fergusson that "nothing more wonderfully truthful and realistic
has been done since that time, till the invention of photography."[66]
[Illustration: The Lady Nophret (Cairo Museum)]
I confess that when I drew near to these statues in the Museum at
Cairo, it is no exaggeration to say that I was literally startled by
their lifelike appearance. Like Miss Jane Harrison, I felt that the
"Lady Nophret," at least, must be able to rise and come forward,[67] so
ridiculously fresh and warm did she appear in her spotless white dress
and her majestic wig. I soon realized that I was in the presence of a
kind of realism which transcended anything I had ever seen in ancient
or modern art, for its convincingness and truth; and it was difficult
to believe that this piece of wholesale deception--certainly more
perfect than any waxwork figure I had ever known,--like the statue of
the Man-God Khephrën, was a product of the pyramid period.
You must not gather, from what I have just said, that the Lady Nophret
is in the slightest degree as vulgar or as commonplace as an ordinary
waxwork figure or modern portrait. Though its vitality cannot be
denied,[68] there are artistic qualities in the simple moulding of the
figure which place it very much higher than the realistic work either
of ancient Greece or of modern Europe. It is only beside the statue
of King Khephrën that it appears so weak; and, as it is almost a
contemporary of this magnificent person, the manner in which it has
been presented to us by the artist seems to be a problem.
The first lesson it teaches you is this--that whatever you may think
about the conventionalism of King Khephrën, such conventionalism has
nothing whatever to do with archaic clumsiness, inability to see
Nature, or incompetence. It is clear that the Egyptians were greater
masters in rendering nature realistically than any people before or
after them.[69] If they had not been, they could never have produced
the portrait-statues of the architect Ti; the two portrait-statues of
Ranofir, priest of Ptah of Memphis, and that of the Scribe and of the
Cheikh-el-Beled[70]--all in the museum at Cairo.
When they are not realistic, then, it is because they do not wish to
be; it is because they deliberately desire to rise above nature, to
transfigure it, simplify it, and arrange it--in fact, to be artists.
What, then, was the object of these realistic portrait-statues about
which I have chosen to speak collectively in my references to the Lady
Nophret?
They were never intended by the artist who made them to be seen by the
eye of man. They were never intended to be works of Ruler-art, set up
to emphasize and underline the values of a people. They had a definite
purpose, of course, but this purpose was quite foreign to that of Art
as I defined it in my last lecture. What was this purpose?
It was related to Death.[71] No realistic sculptural work was
associated with Life by the ancient Egyptians. As men who were still
able to believe in a Man-God, and were still convinced of the power
of man-wrought miracles, how could they associate realism or that
principle of manufacture whereby a man deliberately suppresses his
will to art and makes himself subservient to nature--how could they
associate this with Life,--Life which to these dwellers on the Nile
was inextricably bound up with the hand, the thought, the will, and the
power of man?
No--these realistic sculptures which throw all our puerile Police Art
into the shade were associated not with Life, but with the opposite of
Life--with Death, with underground tombs and sarcophagi, with mummies
and musty mastabas, and with the hope of conquering Eternal Sleep.
The Egyptians believed that a living man consisted of a body, a Ka or
ghost, and a Ba or soul. At death, the Ka and Ba were supposed to be
liberated; but it was hoped that a day would nevertheless come when the
Ka, which was the element in which the life of the deceased person was
specially believed to reside, would come back to the body and effect
its resurrection. Hence the care with which a body was embalmed and
preserved from putrefaction.
Accidents, however, might happen, thought the ancient Egyptians. The
embalmed mummy might perish, it might be destroyed. What would the
unfortunate Ka do, if it returned and found the mummy of its former
body annihilated? A way out of this difficulty quickly occurred to the
nimble minds of these imaginative people. If the mummy had perished,
they thought, the Ka might possibly enter an effigy of its former
body, provided that effigy were sufficiently lifelike. In this way the
realistic Ka-statues were introduced, and for fear lest even these
might perish, wealthy people would sometimes multiply their number to
what would seem a ridiculous extent.
Once they were manufactured, these Ka-statues would be placed far away
from the sight of living man, in the tomb of the departed person, and
in this way his resurrection was supposed to be ensured.[72]
For the Egyptians could imagine no world better than their own. And
even a resurrection could but occur amid surroundings which were as
like as possible to those of everyday life on earth.
The realism of the Ka-statue of the Lady Nophret, therefore, need
not frighten us. On the contrary, it only helps to throw the
transfiguration and power of King Khephrën's diorite statue into
greater relief. The Egyptians knew perfectly well that a Ka-statue was
only a duplication, a copy, and a repetition of reality, and they knew
also that its proper place was underground and out of sight.[73]
If Lady Nophret and her companion Ka-statues had never been found,
however, we might have believed, as many have believed, that the
conventionalism of Egyptian sculpture was beneath instead of very much
above Nature.
But even when we know what we do know, it is only with the utmost
difficulty that an artist who is a child of this weak and impotent age
can feel any love for these strange, transcendentally powerful, and
almost superhuman figures in granite and diorite which the sculptors
of Egypt have left us. The artist may perhaps get nearer to them than
any one else in his age, because he, by virtue of the modicum of
creative power that is in him, initiates himself almost automatically
into the mysteries of this great Egyptian simplicity, order, and
transfiguration. But others who are not artists can only pass them by.
For these figures are the apotheosis of a particular type. They are
what all art should be, a stimulus, and a spur to a life based upon a
definite set of values. How, then, could people stop and admire them
who are living under values which are possibly the very reverse of
those which this art advocates, or under no definite values at all?
The style of the statue of King Khephrën, with but a few modifications,
was the style of all Egyptian statuary until the days of Psammetichus,
over two thousand years later: how can we, the changeable and restless
children of Europe, understand these things?
C. The Pyramid.
How can we admire and understand even the symbol of King Khephrën's
social organization--the Pyramid, when we know and love only the level
plain?
The Pyramid, which in its form embodies all the highest qualities of
great art, and all the highest principles of a healthy society, is the
greatest artistic achievement that has been discovered hitherto.
This symbolic wedlock of Art and Sociology still stands, with all its
six thousand years of age, on the threshold of the desert--that is
to say, on the threshold of chaos and disorder, where none but the
wind attempts to shape and to form; and reminds us of a master will
that once existed and set its eternal stamp upon the face of the world
in Egypt, so that posterity might learn whether mankind had risen or
declined.
In its synthesis of the three main canons, simplicity, repetition and
variety,[74] nothing has ever excelled it; in its mystic utterance
of the conditions of the ideal state, in which every member takes his
place and ultimately succeeds in holding highest man uppermost and
nearest the sun, it is unparalleled in history; and in its sacred
revelation that Man can attain to some height if he chooses, that
he can believe in Man the God, and Man the Hierophant, and Man the
Prophet, if he chooses, and that he can be noble, happy, lasting and
powerful in so doing--in this treble advocacy of these sublime ideals,
the pyramid and the Egyptians who created it stand absolutely alone in
the history of the world.
The best in Greece was borrowed from them; the best we still possess is
perhaps but a faint after-glow of their setting sun, and the cold and
unfamiliar tone in which their art seems to appeal to modern men ought
to prove to us how remote, how incalculably far off, they are from
our insignificant age of progress and advancement, of feebleness and
mediocrity, and of hopeless errors, in which "the prince proposes, but
the shopkeeper disposes!"[75]
I cannot go into the details of their society with you now. I can but
assure you that the more you read about it in the works of men like
Wilkinson, Petrie and Brugsch-Bey, the more convinced you will become
of its transcendental superiority. And if, in praising their art above
that of any other nation, I have been forced to deal all too hastily
with their morals and their State, it is simply because I can conceive
of no such perfect art being possible, save as the flower of the noble
and man-exalting values which I find at the base of the Egyptian
Pyramid.
In identifying Nietzsche's art canon with that admired and respected
by Egypt at its best, I have done nothing at all surprising to those
who know Nietzsche's philosophy. Everything he says on Art in his
maturest work, _The Will to Power_, drove me inevitably, not to Italy,
not to Greece, not to Holland, and not to India--but to the Valley
of the Nile; while in two books already published I forestalled these
lectures, in one respect, by declaring Nietzsche's ideal aristocratic
state to have been based symbolically upon the idea of the Egyptian
Pyramid.
Only a romantic idealist would have the sentimental fanaticism to stand
up before you now to preach an Egyptian Renaissance. I wish to do
nothing of the sort. I know too well to what extent the Art of Egypt
was the product of a people reared by a definite set of inviolable
values, to hope to transplant it with any chance of success on to our
democratic and anarchical soil. What I do wish to advocate, however,
is, that when you think of the best in Art, your mind should go back to
the severe and vigorous culture of Egypt and not to that of any other
country.
This will at least give you a standard of measurement, according to
which most of the culture of the present day will strike you as tawdry
and putrescent. In this way a salutary change may be brought about, and
the words of Disraeli concerning the Egyptians may also come true, in
which he said: "The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the
high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people."[76]
Nothing can be done, however, until our type is purified,[77] until we have
at least become a people. For until that time it will be impossible to
discover a type which may become the subject-matter of the graphic arts.
"Upwards life striveth to build itself with columns and stairs: into
remote distances it longeth to gaze: and outwards after blissful
beauties--_therefore_ it needeth height!
"And because it needeth height, it needeth stairs and contradiction
between stairs, and those who can climb! to rise striveth life, and in
rising to surpass itself!
"Verily, he who here towered aloft his thought in stone knew as well as
the wisest ones about the secret of life!
"That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty and war for power
and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable.
"Thus spake Zarathustra."[78]
[39] I am quite willing with Mr. Gardner to acknowledge the superiority
of the latter over the former. See _Handbook to Greek Sculpture_, p.
216 _et seq._
[40] _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (9th Edition), Article, "Egypt."
[41] See Dr. Petrie, _A History of Egypt_. On page 54 of this book,
the author says, speaking of King Khephrën: "It is a marvel of art;
the precision of the expression combining what a man should be to win
our feelings, and what a King should be to command our regard. The
subtlety shown in this combination of expression--the ingenuity in the
over-shadowing hawk, which does not interfere with the front view; the
technical ability in executing this in so resisting a material--all
unite in fixing our regard on this as one of the leading examples of
ancient art."
[42] Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, _A History of Art in Ancient
Egypt_, Vol. II, p. 239: "The true originality of the Egyptian style
consists in its deliberately epitomizing that upon which the artists
of other countries have elaborately dwelt--in its lavishing all its
executive powers upon chief masses and leading lines, and in the
marvellous judgment with which it seizes their real meaning, their
proportion, and the sources of their artistic effect."
[43] _A History of Egypt_, by Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, Vol. I, p. 7:
"Although in so long a space of time as sixty centuries, events and
revolutions of great historical importance must of necessity have
altered the political state of Egypt, yet, notwithstanding all, the old
Egyptian race has undergone but little change; for it still preserves
to this day those distinctive features of physiognomy, and those
peculiarities of manners and customs, which have been handed down to
us by the united testimony of the monuments and the accounts of the
ancient classical writers, as the hereditary characteristics of this
people."
[44] _The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_, Vol. I, p. 293.
[45] _A History of Egypt_, p. 40: "It is said that a hundred
thousand men were levied for three months at a time (i.e. during
the three months of the inundation, when ordinary labour would be
at a standstill); and on this scale the pyramid building occupied
twenty years." [He is speaking of the Great Pyramid built by Kheops,
Khephrën's predecessor; but this does not affect my contention.] "On
reckoning number and weight of the stones, this labour would fully
suffice for the work. The skilled masons had large barracks, now behind
the second pyramid, which might hold even four thousand men; but
perhaps a thousand would quite suffice to do all the fine work in the
time. Hence there was no impossibility in the task, and no detriment
to the country in employing a small proportion of the population at a
season when they were all idle by the compulsion of natural causes. The
training and skill which they would acquire by such work would be a
great benefit to the national character."
And the same writer says in _The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh_, p.
211: "Thus we see that the traditional accounts that we have of the
means employed in building the great Pyramid, require conditions of
labour supply which are quite practicable in such a land, which would
not be ruinous to the prosperity of the country, or oppressive to the
people, and which would amply and easily suffice for the execution of
their work."
[46] _History of Civilization in England_ (Ed. 1871), Vol. I, pp. 90,
91, 92, 93. And Herbert Spencer's _Autobiography_, Vol. II, pp. 341-343.
[47] Quite typical of Western inability to understand the basis of a
patriarchal government, and of the misinterpretation of such a form,
which writers like Buckle did their best to increase and spread, was
the first Act of the play _Fallen Idols_, recently presented at His
Majesty's Theatre, London, in which Egyptian slaves were seen cringing
and crawling before an inhuman taskmaster, who continually lashed out
at them with a big whip.
[48] Fergusson, _History of Architecture_, Vol. I, p. 95: "Nor is our
wonder less when we ask ourselves how it happened that such a people
became so strongly organized at that early age as to be willing to
undertake the greatest architectural works the world has since seen
in honour of one man from among themselves. A king without an army,
and with no claim, so far as we can see, to such an honour, beyond the
common consent of all, which could hardly have been attained except by
the title of long-inherited services acknowledged by the community at
large." And on p. 94, speaking of the pictures in the Great Pyramid,
the author says: "On these walls the owner of the tomb is usually
represented seated, offering first-fruits on a simple table-altar to
an unseen god. He is generally accompanied by his wife, and surrounded
by his stewards, who enumerate his wealth in horned cattle, in oxen,
in sheep and goats, in geese and ducks. In other pictures some are
ploughing and sowing, some reaping or thrashing out corn, while others
are tending his tame monkeys or cranes, and other domesticated pets.
Music and dancing add to the circle of domestic enjoyments, and fowling
and fishing occupy his days of leisure. No sign of soldiers or of
warlike strife appears in any of these pictures, no arms, no chariots
or horses. No camels suggest foreign travel."
[49] I should like to reproduce here Fergusson's enthusiastic account
of the work in the interior of the Great Pyramid. I have not space,
however, and earnestly recommend readers to refer to it on pp. 93, 94
of Vol. I in his _History of Architecture_.
[50] Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, _History of Egypt under the Pharaohs_, Vol.
I, pp. 444-445.
[51] Dr. Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_, p. 86.
[52] _Ibid._, p. 112.
[53] _Ibid._, p. 116.
[54] Dr. Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_, p. 116.
[55] _Ibid._, p. 117. This moralist was Any.
[56] _G. E._, p. 107: "Every artist knows how different from the
state of letting himself go, is his 'most natural' condition, the
free arranging, locating, disposing and constructing in the moments
of 'inspiration'--and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a
thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy all
formulation by means of ideas."
[57] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 309.
[58] See Nietzsche's remarks on the great need of Christianity in
England, _G. E._, p. 211.
[59] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 309.
[60] See Brugsch-Bey, _A History of Egypt_, Vol. I, p. 25; Wilkinson,
_The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_, Vol. I, p. 156;
Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, _A History of Art in Ancient
Egypt_, p. 38; Dr. Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_,
p. 162.
[61] See Wilkinson, Vol. I, p. 179.
[62] See _Ibid._, p. 167. Where he is speaking of the Pharaohs he says:
"By the practice of justice towards their subjects, they secured to
themselves that good-will which was due from children to a parent ...
and this, Diodorus observes, was the main cause of the duration of the
Egyptian state."
[63] _Z._, III, LVI.
[64] Dr. Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_, p. 120.
[65] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 309.
[66] _History of Architecture_, Vol. I, p. 95.
[67] Miss Jane Harrison, _Introductory Studies in Greek Art_, p. 6.
[68] Dr. Petrie, _A History of Egypt_, p. 35. Referring to the Lady
Nophret and her husband, the author says (speaking quite in the style
of a modern art-critic): "These statues are most expressive, and stand
in their vitality superior to the works of any later age in Egypt."
[69] On the walls of some of the tombs I inspected at Sakarah, the
consummate mastery with which some of the minutest characteristics of
domestic animals were represented in bold outline gave me a standard
by the side of which even M. Boutet de Monvel's beautiful studies of
animals seemed to fall into the shade. (See his illustrations to La
Fontaine's fables.)
[70] Models of the Scribe and of the Cheikh-el-Beled are to be seen at
the British Museum; but they give one but a poor idea of the originals.
[71] Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, _A History of Art in Ancient
Egypt_, Vol. II, p. 181. Speaking of these portrait statues, they say:
"They were not ideal figures to which the desire for beauty of line
and expression had much to say; they were stone bodies, bodies which
had to reproduce all the individual contours of their flesh-and-blood
originals; when the latter was ugly, its reproduction had to be ugly
also, and ugly in the same way."
[72] See Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, _A History of Art in
Ancient Egypt_, Vol. II, p. 181. Speaking of the arrangements which
were necessary to enable the inhabitants of the tomb to resist
annihilation, the authors say: "Those arrangements were of two kinds, a
provision of food and drink, which had to be constantly renewed, either
in fact or by the magic multiplication which followed prayer, and a
permanent support for the Ka or double, a support that should fill the
place of the living body of which it had been deprived by dissolution."
[73] Okakura-Kakuzo passes a funny remark in regard to our modern
realistic portraits; he says: "In Western houses we are often
confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it
trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us
from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture, or
he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be a
fraud."--The Book of Tea, p. 97.
[74] See Hogarth, _The Analysis of Beauty_ (Ed. 1753), p. 21: "There
is no object composed of straight lines that has so much variety, with
so few parts, as the pyramid: and it is its constantly varying from
its base gradually upwards in every situation of the eye (without
giving the idea of sameness as the eye moves round it) that has made
it esteemed in all ages, in preference to the cone, which in all views
appears nearly the same, being varied only by light and shade."
[75] _Z._, III, LI.
[76] Contarini Fleming.
[77] _W. P._, Vol. II, p. 318: "Purification of taste can only be the
result of strengthening of the type;" and p. 403: "Progress is the
strengthening of the type, the ability to exercise great will power;
everything else is a misunderstanding and a danger."
[78] _Z._, II, XXIX.
End of Project Gutenberg's Nietzsche and Art, by Anthony M. Ludovici