"'And what does he gain who possesses the good?'

"'Happiness,' I replied; 'there is less difficulty in answering that

question.'

"'Yes,' she said, 'the happy are made happy by the acquisition of good

things. Nor is there any need to ask why a man desires happiness; the

answer is already final.'

"'You are right,' I said.

"'And is this wish and this desire common to all? and do all men always

desire their own good, or only some men?--what say you?'

"'All men,' I replied; 'the desire is common to all.'

"'Then,' she said, 'the simple truth is that men love the good.'

"'Yes,' I said.

"'To which must be added that they love the possession of the good?'

"'That must be added too.'

"'Then love,' she said, may be described generally as the love of the

everlasting possession of the good?'

"'That is most true.'

"'Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further,' she

said, 'what is the manner of the pursuit? what are they doing who show

all this eagerness and heat which is called love? and what is the object

which they have in view? Answer me.'

"'Nay, Diotima,' I replied, 'if I had known, I should not have wondered

at your wisdom, neither should I have come to learn from you about this

very matter.'

"'Well,' she said, 'I will teach you:--The object which they have in

view is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.'

"'I do not understand you,' I said; 'the oracle requires an

explanation.'

"'I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. 'I mean to say, that all

men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There

is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation--

procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this

procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing: for

conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal

creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is

always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious.

Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at

birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is

propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at

the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain,

and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from

conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception

arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and

ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alleviation of the pain of

travail. For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine, the love of the

beautiful only.'

"'What then?'

"'The love of generation and of birth in beauty.'

"'Yes,' I said.

"'Yes indeed,' she replied.

"'But why of generation?'

"'Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and

immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, love

is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily

desire immortality together with good: wherefore love is of

immortality.'

"I was astonished at her words and said: 'Is this really true, O thou

wise Diotima?'

"And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of

that, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of men,

and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you

consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame.

They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for

their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and

even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be

eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus,

or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve

the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of

their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,'

she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better

they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal

virtue; for they desire the immortal.

"'Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women

and beget children--this is the character of their love; their

offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the

blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. But souls

which are pregnant--for there certainly are men who are more creative in

their souls than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for the

soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? wisdom and

virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are

deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of

wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and

families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in

youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself inspired,

when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He wanders

about, seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in deformity he

will beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful rather than the

deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble and well-

nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such a one he

is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good

man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the beautiful

which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he brings forth

that which he had conceived long before, and in company with him tends

that which he brings forth; and they are married by a far nearer tie and

have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the

children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal.

Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not

rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate

them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved

their memory and given them everlasting glory? Or who would not have

such children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours not only of

Lacedaemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is

the revered father of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many

other places, both among Hellenes and barbarians, who have given to the

world many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every

kind; and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of

children such as theirs; which were never raised in honour of any one,

for the sake of his mortal children.

"'These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates,

may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of

these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will

lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my

utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would

proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful

forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one

such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he

will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the

beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit,

how foolish would he be not to recognise that the beauty in every form

is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his

violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing,

and will become a lover of all beautiful forms. In the next stage he

will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the

outward form. So that, if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness,

he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring

to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled

to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to

understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that

personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go

on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a

servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution,

himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and

contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble

thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that store he

grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a

single science which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will

proceed; please to give me your very best attention:

"'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has

learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes

toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and

this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature

which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or

waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in

another, or at one time or in one relation or in one place fair, at

another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair

to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any

other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge,

or existing in any other being, as for example, in an animal, or in

heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute,

separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without

increase, or any change, is imparted to the evergrowing and perishing

beauties of all other things. He who, from these ascending under the

influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from

the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the

things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards

for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from

one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms

to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from

fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last

knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear Socrates,' said the

stranger of Mantineia, 'is that life above all others which man should

live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute: a beauty which if you

once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and

garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you;

and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and

conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible,--you

only want to look at them and to be with them. But what if man had eyes

to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and

unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the

colours and vanities of human life--thither looking, and holding

converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that

communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be

enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has

hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and

nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if

mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?'

"Such, Phaedrus--and I speak not only to you, but to all of you--were

the words of Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth. And being

persuaded of them, I try to persuade others, that in the attainment of

this end human nature will not easily find a helper better than Love.

And therefore, also, I say that every man ought to honour him as I

myself honour him, and walk in his ways, and exhort others to do the

same, and praise the power and spirit of Love according to the measure

of my ability now and ever." [Footnote: Plato, Symp. 201.--Translated by

Jowett.]

I have thought it worth while to quote this passage, in spite of its

length, partly for the sake of its own intrinsic beauty, partly because

no account of the Greek view of life could be complete which did not

insist upon the prominence in their civilisation of the passion of

friendship, and its capacity of being turned to the noblest uses. That

there was another side to the matter goes without saying. This passion,

like any other, has its depths, as well as its heights; and the ideal of

friendship conceived by Plato was as remote, perhaps, from the

experience of the average man, as Dante's presentation of the love

between man and woman. Still, the fact remains that it was friendship of

this kind that supplied to the Greek that element of romance which plays

so large a part in modern life; and it is to this, and not to the

relations between men and women, that we must look for the highest

reaches of their emotional experience.

Section 11. Summary.

If now we turn back to take a general view of the points that have been

treated in the present chapter, we shall notice, in the first place,

that the ideal of the Greeks was the direct and natural outcome of the

conditions of their life. It was not something beyond and above the

experience of the class to which it applied, but rather, was the formula

of that experience itself: in philosophical phrase, it was immanent not

transcendent. Because there really was a class of soldier-citizens free

from the necessity of mechanical toil, possessed of competence and

leisure, and devoting these advantages willingly to the service of the

State, therefore their ideal of conduct took the form we have described.

It was the ideal of a privileged class, and postulated for its

realisation, not only a strenuous endeavour on the part of the

individual, but also certain adventitious gifts of fortune, such as

health, wealth, and family connections. These were conditions that

actually obtained among members of the class concerned; so that the

ideal in question was not a mere abstract "ought", but an expression of

what, approximately at least, was realised in fact.

But this, which was the strength of the ideal of the Greeks, was also

its limitation. Their ethical system rested not only on universal facts

of human nature, but also on a particular and transitory social

arrangement. When therefore the city State, with its sharp antithesis of

classes, began to decline, the ideal of the soldier-citizen declined

also. The conditions of its realisation no longer existed, and ethical

conceptions passed into a new phase. In the first place the ideal of

conduct was extended so as to apply to man as man, instead of to a

particular class in a particular form of State; and in the second place,

as a corollary of this, those external goods of fortune which were the

privilege of the few, could no longer be assumed as conditions of an

ideal which was supposed to apply to all. Consequently the new ideal was

conceived as wholly internal. To be virtuous was to act under the

control of the universal reason which was supposed to dwell in man as

man; and such action was independent of all the gifts of chance. It was

as open to a slave as to a freeman, to an artisan as to a soldier or a

statesman. The changes and chances of this mortal life were indifferent

to the virtuous man; on the rack as on the throne he was lord of himself

and free.

This conception of the Stoics broke down the limitation of the Greek

ideal by extending the possibility of virtue to all mankind. But at the

same time it destroyed its sanity and balance. For it was precisely

because of its limitation that the ideal of the Greeks was,

approximately at least, an account of what was, and not merely of what

ought to be. A man possessed of wealth and friends, of leisure, health,

and culture, really could and did achieve the end at which he was

aiming; but the conception of one who without any such advantages, on

the contrary with positive disadvantages, poor, sickly, and a slave

perhaps, or even in prison or on the rack, should nevertheless retain

unimpaired the dignity of manhood and the freedom of his own soul--,

such a conception if it is not chimerical, is at any rate so remote from

common experience, that it is not capable of serving as a really

practical ideal for ordinary life. But an ideal so remote that its

realisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the conception of

the Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than that of Aristotle, was

also less practical and real.

By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, the Stoic ideal is

more akin to modern tendencies than that of the soldier-citizen in the

city-state. To provide for the excellence of a privileged class at the

expense of the rest of the community is becoming to us increasingly

impossible in fact and intolerable in idea. But while admitting this, we

cannot but note that the Greeks, at whatever cost, did actually achieve

a development of the individual more high and more complete than has

been even approached by any other age. Whether it will ever be possible,

under totally different conditions, to realise once more that balance of

body and soul, that sanity of ethical intuition, that frank recognition

of the whole range of our complex human nature with a view to its

harmonious organisation under the control of a lucid reason--whether it

will ever be possible again to realise this ideal, and that not only in

the members of a privileged class, but in the whole body of the State,

is a question too problematical to be raised with advantage in this

place. But it is impossible not to perceive that with the decline of the

Greek city-state something passed from the world which it can never

cease to regret, and the recovery of which, if it might be, in some more

perfect form, must be the goal of its highest practical endeavours.

Immense, no doubt, is the significance of the centuries that have

intervened, but it is a significance of preparation; and when we look

beyond the means to the wished-for end, limiting our conceptions to the

actual possibilities of life on earth, it is among the Greeks that we

seek the record of the highest achievement of the past, and the hope of

the highest possibilities of the future.

CHAPTER IV

THE GREEK VIEW OF ART

Section 1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life.

In approaching the subject of the Art of the Greeks we come to what,

more plausibly than any other, may be regarded as the central point of

their scheme of life. We have already noticed, in dealing with other

topics, how constantly the aesthetic point of view emerges and

predominates in matters with which, in the modern way of looking at

things, it appears to have no direct and natural connection. We saw, for

example, how inseparable in their religion was the element of ritual and

ceremony from that of idea; how in their ethical conceptions the primary

notion was that of beauty; how they aimed throughout at a perfect

balance of body and soul, and more generally, in every department, at an

expression of the inner by the outer so complete and perfect that the

conception of a separation of the two became almost as impossible to

their thought as it would have been unpleasing and discordant to their

feeling. Now such a point of view is, in fact, that of art; and

philosophers of history have been amply justified in characterising the

whole Greek epoch as pre-eminently that of Beauty.

But if this be a true way of regarding the matter, we should expect to

find that art and beauty had, for the Greeks, a very wide and complex

significance. There is a view of art, and it is one that appears to be

prevalent in our own time, which sets it altogether outside the general

trend of national life and ideas; which asserts that it has no

connection with ethics, religion, politics, or any of the general

conceptions which regulate action and thought; that its end is in

itself, and is simply beauty; and that in beauty there is no distinction

of high or low, no preference of one kind above another. Art thus

conceived is, in the first place, purely subjective in character; the

artist alone is the standard, and any phase or mood of his, however

exceptional, personal and transitory, is competent to produce a work of

art as satisfying and as great as one whose inspiration was drawn from a

nation's life, reflecting its highest moments, and its most universal

aspirations and ideals; so that, for example, a butterfly drawn by Mr.

Whistler would rank as high, say, as the Parthenon. And in the second

place, in this view of art, the subject is a matter of absolute

indifference. The standards of ordinary life, ethical or other, do not

apply; there is no better or worse, but only a more or less beautiful;

and the representation of a music-hall stage or a public house bar may

be as great and perfect a work of art as the Venus of Milo or the

Madonna of Raphael.

This theory, which arises naturally and perhaps inevitably in an age

where national life has degenerated into materialism and squalor, and

the artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philistines, we need

not here pause to examine and criticise. It has been mentioned merely to

illustrate by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically opposed

to this, and valued art in proportion as it represented in perfect form

the highest and most comprehensive aspects of the national ideal.

To say this, is not, of course, to say that the Greek conception of art

was didactic; for the word didactic, when applied to art, has usually

the implication that the excellence of the moral is the only point to be

considered, and that if that is good the work itself must be good. This

idea does indeed occur in Greek thought--we find it, for example,

paradoxically enough, in so great an artist as Plato--but if it had been

the one which really determined their production, there would have been

no occasion to write this chapter, for there would have been no Greek

art to write about. The truer account of the impulse that urged them to

create is that given also by Plato in an earlier and more impassioned

work, in which he describes it as a "madness of those who are possessed

by the Muses; which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there

inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these

adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of

posterity. But he who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul,

comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the

help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is

nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman." [Footnote:

Plato, Phaedrus, 245a.--Translated by Jowett.]

The presupposition, in fact, of all that can be said about the Greek

view of art, is that primarily and to begin with they were, by nature,

artists. Judged simply by the aesthetic standard, without any

consideration of subject matter at all, or any reference to

intellectual or ethical ideals, they created works of art more purely

beautiful than those of any other age or people. Their mere household

crockery, their common pots and pans, are cast in shapes so exquisitely

graceful, and painted in designs so admirably drawn and composed, that

any one of them has a higher artistic value than the whole contents of

the Royal Academy; and the little clay figures they used as we do china

ornaments put to shame the most ambitious efforts of modern sculpture.

Who, for example, would not rather look at a Tanagra statuette than at

the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington?

The Greeks, in fact, quite apart from any theories they may have held,

were artists through and through; and that is a fact we must carry with

us through the whole of our discussion.

Section 2. Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical Points of View.

But on the other hand, it seems to be clear from all that we can learn,

that their habitual way of regarding works of art was not to judge them

simply and exclusively by their aesthetic value. On the contrary, in

criticising two works otherwise equally beautiful, they would give a

higher place to the one or the other for its ethical or quasi-ethical

qualities. This indeed is what we should expect from the comprehensive

sense which, as we have seen, attached in their tongue to the word which

we render "beautiful." The aesthetic and ethical spheres, in fact, were

never sharply distinguished by the Greeks; and it follows that as, on

the one hand, their conception of the good was identified with that of

the beautiful, so, on the other hand, their conception of the beautiful

was identified with that of the good. Thus the most beautiful work of

art, in the Greek sense of the term, was that which made the finest and

most harmonious appeal not only to the physical but to the moral sense,

and while communicating the highest and most perfect pleasure to the eye

or the ear, had also the power to touch and inform the soul with the

grace which was her moral excellence. Of this really characteristic

Greek conception, this fusion, so instinctive as to be almost

unconscious, of the aesthetic and ethical points of view, no better

illustration could be given than the following passage from the Republic

of Plato, where the philosopher is describing the effect of beautiful

works of art, and especially of music, on the moral and intellectual

character of his imaginary citizens:

"'We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral

deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon

many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they

silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let

our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of

the beautiful and graceful: then will our youth dwell in a land of

health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything;

and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and

ear, like a healthgiving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw

the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty

of reason.'

"'There can be no nobler training than that,' he replied.

"'And therefore,' I said, "'Glaucon, musical training is a more potent

instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way

into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten,

imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated

graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he

who has received this true education of the inner being will most

shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true

taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the

good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad,

now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason

why: and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with

whom his education has made him long familiar."[Footnote: Plato,

Republic III. 401.--Translated by Jowett.]

This fusion of the ideas of the beautiful and the good is the central

point in the Greek Theory of Art; and it enables us to understand how it

was that they conceived art to be educational. Its end, in their view,

was not only pleasure, though pleasure was essential to it; but also,

and just as much, edification. Plato, indeed, here again exaggerating

the current view, puts the edification above the pleasure. He criticises

Homer as he might criticise a moral philosopher, pointing out the

inadequacy, from an ethical point of view, of his conception of heaven

and of the gods, and dismissing as injurious and of bad example to

youthful citizens the whole tissue of passionate human feeling, the

irrepressible outbursts of anger and grief and fear, by virtue of which

alone the Iliad and the Odyssey are immortal poems instead of ethical

tracts. And finally, with a half reluctant assent to the course of his

own argument, he excludes the poets altogether from his ideal republic,

on the ground that they encourage their hearers in that indulgence of

emotion which it is the object of every virtuous man to repress. The

conclusion of Plato, by his own admission, was half paradoxical, and it

certainly never recommended itself to such a nation of artists as the

Greeks. But it illustrates, nevertheless, the general bent of their

views of art, that tendency to the identification of the beautiful and

the good, which, while it was never pushed so far as to choke art with

didactics--for Plato himself, even against his own will, is a poet--yet

served to create a standard of taste which was ethical as much as

aesthetic, and made the judgment of beauty also a judgment of moral

worth.

Quite in accordance with this view we find that the central aim of all

Greek art is the representation of human character and human ideals. The

interpretation of "nature" for its own sake (in the narrower sense in

which "nature" is opposed to man) is a modern and romantic development

that would have been unintelligible to a Greek. Not that the Greeks were

without a sense of what we call the beauties of nature, but that they

treat them habitually, not as the centre of interest, but as the

background to human activity. The most beautiful descriptions of nature

to be found in Greek poetry occur, incidentally only, in the choral odes

introduced into their dramas; and among all their pictures of which we

have any record there is not one that answers to the description of a

landscape; the subject is always mythological or historical, and the

representation of nature merely a setting for the main theme. And on the

other hand, the art for which the Greeks are most famous, and in which

they have admittedly excelled all other peoples, is that art of

sculpture whose special function it is not only to represent but to

idealise the human form, and which is peculiarly adapted to embody for

the sense not only physical but ethical types. And, more remarkable

still, as we shall have occasion to observe later, the very art which

modern men regard as the most devoid of all intellectual content, the

most incommensurable with any standard except that of pure beauty--I

refer of course to the art of music--was invested by the Greeks with a

definite moral content and worked into their general theory of art as a

direct interpretation of human life. The excellence of man, in short,

directly or indirectly, was the point about which Greek art turned; that

excellence was at once aesthetic and ethical; and the representation of

what was beautiful involved also the representation of what was good.

This point we will now proceed to illustrate more in detail in

connection with the various special branches of art.

Section 3. Sculpture and Painting.

Let us take, first, the plastic arts, sculpture and painting; and to

bring into clear relief the Greek point of view let us contrast with it

that of the modern "impressionist." To the impressionist a picture is

simply an arrangement of colour and line; the subject represented is

nothing, the treatment everything. It would be better, on the whole, not

even to know what objects are depicted; and, to judge the picture by a

comparison with the objects, or to consider what is the worth of the

objects in themselves, or what we might think of them if we came across

them in the connections of ordinary life, is simply to misconceive the

whole meaning of a picture. For the artist and for the man who

understands art, all scales and standards disappear except that of the

purely aesthetic beauty which consists in harmony of line and tone; the

most perfect human form has no more value than a splash of mud; or

rather both mud and human form disappear as irrelevant, and all that is

left for judgment is the arrangement of colour and form originally

suggested by those accidental and indifferent phenomena.

In the Greek view, on the other hand, though we certainly cannot say

that the subject was everything and the treatment nothing (for that

would be merely the annihilation of art) yet we may assert that, granted

the treatment, granted that the work was beautiful (the first and

indispensable requirement) its worth was determined by the character of

the subject. Sculpture and painting, in fact, to the Greeks, were not

merely a medium of aesthetic pleasure; they were ways of expressing and

interpreting national life. As such they were subordinated to religion.

The primary end of sculpture was to make statues of the gods and heroes;

the primary end of painting was to represent mythological scenes; and in

either case the purely aesthetic pleasure was also a means to a

religious experience.

Let us take, for example, the statue of Zeus at Olympia, the most famous

of the works of Pheidias. This colossal figure of ivory and gold was

doubtless, according to all the testimony we possess, from a merely

aesthetic point of view, among the most consummate creations of human

genius. But what was the main aim of the artist who made it? what the

main effect on the spectator? The artist had designed and the spectator

seemed to behold a concrete image of that Homeric Zeus who was the

centre of his religious consciousness--the Zeus who "nodded his dark

brow, and the ambrosial locks waved from the King's immortal head, and

he made great Olympus quake." [Footnote: Iliad i. 528.--Translated by

Lang, Leaf and Myers.] "Those who approach the temple," says Lucian, "do

not conceive that they see ivory from the Indies or gold from the mines

of Thrace; no, but the very son of Kronos and Rhea, transported by

Pheidias to earth and set to watch over the lonely plain of Pisa." "He

was," says Dion Chrysostom, "the type of that unattained ideal, Hellas

come to unity with herself; in expression at once mild and awful, as

befits the giver of life and all good gifts, the common father, saviour

and guardian of men; dignified as a king, tender as a father, awful as

giver of laws, kind as protector of suppliants and friends, simple and

great as giver of increase and wealth; revealing, in a word, in form and

countenance, the whole array of gifts and qualities proper to his

supreme divinity."

The description is characteristic of the whole aim of Greek sculpture,--

the representation not only of beauty, but of character, not only of

character but of character idealised. The statues of the various gods

derive their distinguishing individuality not merely from their

association with conventional symbols, but from a concrete reproduction,

in features, expression, drapery, pose, of the ethical and intellectual

qualities for which they stand. An Apollo differs in type from a Zeus,

an Athene from a Demeter; and in every case the artist works from an

intellectual conception, bent not simply on a graceful harmony of lines,

but on the representation of a character at once definite and ideal.

Primarily, then, Greek sculpture was an expression of the national

religion; and therefore, also, of the national life. For, as we saw, the

cult of the gods was the centre, not only of the religious but of the

political consciousness of Greece; and an art which was born and

flourished in the temple and the sacred grove, naturally became the

exponent of the ideal aspect of the state. It was thus, for example,

that the Parthenon at Athens was at once the centre of the worship of

Athene, and a symbol of the corporate life over which she presided; the

statue of the goddess having as its appropriate complement the frieze

over which the spirit of the city moved in stone. And thus, too, the

statues of the victors at the Olympian games were dedicated in the

sacred precinct, as a memorial of what was not only an athletic meeting,

but also at once a centre of Hellenic unity and the most consummate

expression of that aspect of their culture which contributed at least as

much to their aesthetic as to their physical perfection.

Sculpture, in fact, throughout, was subordinated to religion, and

through religion to national life; and it was from this that it derived

its ideal and intellectual character. And, so far as our authorities

enable us to judge, the same is true of painting. The great pictures of

which we have descriptions were painted to adorn temples and public

buildings, and represented either mythological or national themes. Such,

for example, was the great work of Polygnotus at Delphi, in which was

depicted on the one hand the sack of Troy, on the other the descent of

Odysseus into Hades; and such his representation of the battle of

Marathon, in the painted porch that led to the Acropolis of Athens. And

even the vase paintings of which we have innumerable examples, and which

are mere decorations of common domestic utensils, have often enough some

story of gods and heroes for their theme, whereby over and above their

purely aesthetic value they made their appeal to the general religious

consciousness of Greece. Painting, like sculpture, had its end, in a

sense, outside itself; and from this very fact derived its peculiar

dignity, simplicity, and power.

From this account of the plastic art of the Greeks it follows as a

simple corollary, that their aim was not merely to reproduce but to

transcend nature. For their subject was gods and heroes, and heroes and

gods were superior to men. Of this idealising tendency we have in

sculpture evidence enough in the many examples which have been preserved

to us; and with regard to painting there is curious literary testimony

to the same effect. Aristotle, for example, remarks that "even if it is

impossible that men should be such as Zeuxis painted them, yet it is

better that he should paint them so; for the example ought to excel that

for which it is an example." [Footnote: Artist, Poet, xxv.--1461. 6.

12.]

And in an imaginary conversation recorded between Socrates and

Parrhasius the artist admits without any hesitation that more pleasure

is to be derived from pictures of men who are morally good than from

those of men who are morally bad. In the Greek view, in fact, as we saw,

physical and moral excellence went together, and it was excellence they

sought to depict in their art; not merely aesthetic beauty, though that

was a necessary presupposition, but on the top of that, ideal types of

character representative of their conception of the hero and the god.

Art, in a word, was subordinate to the ethical ideal; or rather the

ethical and aesthetic ideals were not yet dissociated; and the greatest

artists the world has ever known worked deliberately under the direction

and inspiration of the ideas that controlled and determined the life of

their time.

Section 4. Music and the Dance.

Turning now from the plastic arts to that other group which the Greeks

classed together under the name of "Music"--namely music, in the

narrower sense, dancing and poetry--we find still more clearly

emphasised and more elaborately worked out the subordination of

aesthetic to ethical and religious ends. "Music," in fact, as they used

the term, was the centre of Greek education, and its moral character

thus became a matter of primary importance. By it were formed, it was

supposed, the mind and temper of the citizens, and so the whole

constitution of the state. "The introduction of a new kind of music,"

says Plato, "must be shunned as imperilling the whole state; since

styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important

political institutions." "The new style," he goes on, "gradually gaining

a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs; and from

these it issues in greater force, and makes its way into mutual

compacts: and from compacts it goes on to attack laws and constitutions,

displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning

everything, both in public and in private." [Footnote: Plato, Rep. IV.

4240.--Translated by Davies and Vaughan.] And as in his Republic he had

defined the character of the poetry that should be admitted into his

ideal state, so in the "Laws" he specially defines the character of the

melodies and dances, regarding them as the most important factor in

determining and preserving the manners and institutions of the citizens.

Nothing, at first sight, to a modern mind, could, be stranger than this

point of view. That poetry has a bearing on conduct we can indeed

understand, though we do not make poetry the centre of our system of

education; but that moral effects should be attributed to music and to

dancing and that these should be regarded as of such importance as to

influence profoundly the whole constitution of a state, will appear to

the majority of modern men an unintelligible paradox.

Yet no opinion of the Greeks is more profoundly characteristic than this

of their whole way of regarding life, and none would better repay a

careful study. That moral character should be attributed to the

influence of music is only one and perhaps the most striking

illustration of that general identification by the Greeks of the ethical

and the aesthetic standards on which we have so frequently had occasion

to insist. Virtue, in their conception, was not a hard conformity to a

law felt as alien to the natural character; it was the free expression

of a beautiful and harmonious soul. And this very metaphor "harmonious,"

which they so constantly employ, involves the idea of a close connection

between music and morals. Character, in the Greek view, is a certain

proportion of the various elements of the soul, and the right character

is the right proportion. But the relation in which these elements stand

to one another could be directly affected, it was found, by means of

music; not only could the different emotions be excited or assuaged in

various degrees, but the whole relation of the emotional to the rational

element could be regulated and controlled by the appropriate melody and

measure. That this connection between music and morals really does exist

is recognised, in a rough and general way, by most people who have any

musical sense. There are rhythms and tunes, for example, that are felt

to be vulgar and base, and others that are felt to be ennobling; some

music, Wagner's, for instance, is frequently called immoral; Gounod is

described as enervating, Beethoven as bracing, and the like; and however

absurd such comments may often appear to be in detail, underlying them

is the undoubtedly well-grounded sense that various kinds of music have

various ethical qualities. But it is just this side of music, which has

been neglected in modern times, that was the one on which the Greeks

laid most stress. Infinitely inferior to the moderns in the mechanical

resources of the art, they had made, it appears, a far finer and closer

analysis of its relation to emotional states; with the result that even

in music, which we describe as the purest of the arts, congratulating

ourselves on its absolute dissociation from all definite intellectual

conceptions,--even here the standard of the Greeks was as much ethical

as aesthetic, and the style of music was distinguished and its value

appraised, not only by the pleasure to be derived from it, but also by

the effect it tended to produce on character.

Of this position we have a clear and definite statement in Aristotle.

Virtue, he says, consists in loving and hating in the proper way, and

implies, therefore, a delight in the proper emotions; but emotions of

any kind are produced by melody and rhythm; therefore by music a man

becomes accustomed to feeling the right emotions. Music has thus the

power to form character; and the various kinds of music, based on the

various modes, may be distinguished by their effects on character--one,

for example, working in the direction of melancholy, another of

effeminacy; one encouraging abandonment, another self-control, another

enthusiasm, and so on through the series. It follows that music may be

judged not merely by the pleasure it gives, but by the character of its

moral influence; pleasure, indeed, is essential or there would be no

art; but the different kinds of pleasure given by different kinds of

music are to be distinguished not merely by quantity, but by quality.

One will produce a right pleasure of which the good man will approve,

and which will have a good effect on character; another will be in

exactly the opposite case. Or, as Plato puts it, "the excellence of

music is to be measured by pleasure. But the pleasure must not be that

of chance persons; the fairest music is that which delights the best and

best-educated, and especially that which delights the one man who is

pre-eminent in virtue and education." [Footnote: Plato Laws. II. 6586.--

Translated by Jowett.]

We see then that even pure music, to the Greeks, had a distinct and

definite ethical bearing. But this ethical influence was further

emphasised by the fact that it was not their custom to enjoy their music

pure. What they called "music," as has been already pointed out, was an

intimate union of melody, verse and dance, so that the particular

emotional meaning of the rhythm and tune employed was brought out into

perfect lucidity by the accompanying words and gestures. Thus we find,

for example, that Plato characterises a tendency in his own time to the

separation of melody and verse as a sign of a want of true artistic

taste; for, he says, it is very hard, in the absence of words, to

distinguish the exact character of the mood which the rhythm and tune is

supposed to represent. In this connection it may be interesting to refer

to the use of the "_leit-motiv_" in modern music. Here too a

particular idea, if not a particular set of words, is associated with a

particular musical phrase; the intention of the practice being clearly

the same as that which is indicated in the passage just quoted, namely

to add precision and definiteness to the vague emotional content of pure

music.

And this determining effect of words was further enhanced, in the music

of the Greeks, by the additional accompaniment of the dance. The

emotional character conveyed to the mind by the words and to the ear by

the tune, was further explained to the eye by gesture, pose, and beat of

foot; the combination of the three modes of expression forming thus in

the Greek sense a single "imitative" art. The dance as well as the

melody came thus to have a definite ethical significance; "it

imitates," says Aristotle, "character, emotion, and action." And Plato

in his ideal republic would regulate by law the dances no less than the

melodies to be employed, distinguishing them too as morally good or

morally bad, and encouraging the one while he forbids the other.

The general Greek view of music which has thus been briefly expounded,

the union of melody and rhythm with poetry and the dance in view of a

definite and consciously intended ethical character, may be illustrated

by the following passage of Plutarch, in which he describes the music in

vogue at Sparta. The whole system, it will be observed, is designed with

a view to that military courage which was the virtue most prized in the

Spartan state, and the one about which all their institutions centred.

Music at Sparta actually was, what Plato would have had it in his ideal

republic, a public and state-regulated function; and even that vigorous

race which of all the Greeks came nearest to being Philistines of

virtue, thought fit to lay a foundation purely aesthetic for their

severe and soldierly ideal.

"Their instruction in music and verse," says Plutarch, "was not less

carefully attended to than their habits of grace and good-breeding in

conversation. And their very songs had a life and spirit in them that

inflamed and possessed men's minds with an enthusiasm and ardour for

action; the style of them was plain and without affectation; the subject

always serious and moral; most usually, it was in praise of such men as

had died in defence of their country, or in derision of those that had

been cowards; the former they declared happy and glorified; the life of

the latter they described as most miserable and abject. There were also

vaunts of what they would do and boasts of what they had done, varying

with the various ages; as, for example, they had three choirs in their

solemn festivals, the first of the old men, the second of the young men,

and the last of the children; the old men began thus:

We once were young and brave and strong;

The young men answered them, singing;

And we're so now, come on and try:

The children came last and said:

But we'll be strongest by and bye.

Indeed if we will take the pains to consider their compositions, and the

airs on the flute to which they marched when going to battle, we shall

find that Terpander and Pindar had reason to say that music and valour

were allied." [Footnote: Plutarch, Lycurgus, ch. 21.--Clough's ed.]

The way of regarding music which is illustrated in this passage, and in

all that is said on the subject by Greek writers, is so typical of the

whole point of view of the Greeks, that we may be pardoned for insisting

once again on the attitude of mind which it implies. Music, as we saw,

had an ethical value to the Greeks; but that is not to say that they put

the ethics first, and the music second, using the one as a mere tool of

the other. Rather an ethical state of mind was also, in their view, a

musical one. In a sense something more than metaphorical, virtue was a

harmony of the soul. The musical end was thus identical with the ethical

one. The most beautiful music was also the morally best, and _vice

versa_; virtue was not prior to beauty, nor beauty to virtue; they

were two aspects of the same reality, two ways of regarding a single

fact; and if aesthetic effects were supposed to be amenable to ethical

judgment, it was only because ethical judgments at bottom were

aesthetic. The "good" and the "beautiful" were one and the same thing;

that is the first and last word of the Greek ideal.

And while thus, on the one hand, virtue was invested with the

spontaneity and delight of art, on the other, art derived from its

association with ethics emotional precision. In modern times the end of

music is commonly conceived to be simply and without more ado the

excitement of feeling. Its value is measured by the intensity rather

than the quality of the emotion which it is capable of arousing; and the

auditor abandons himself to a casual succession of highly wrought moods

as bewildering in the actual experience as it is exhausting in the

after-effects. In Greek music, on the other hand, if we may trust our

accounts, while the intensity of the feeling excited must have been far

less than that which it is in the power of modern instrumentation to

evoke, its character was perfectly simple and definite. Melody, rhythm,

gesture and words, were all consciously adapted to the production of a

single precisely conceived emotional effect; the listener was in a

position clearly to understand and appraise the value of the mood

excited in him; instead of being exhausted and confused by a chaos of

vague and conflicting emotion he had the sense of relief which

accompanies the deliverance of a definite passion, and returned to his

ordinary business "purged", as they said, and tranquillised, by a

process which he understood, directed to an end of which he approved.

Section 5. Poetry.

If now, as we have seen, in the plastic arts, and in an art which

appears to us so pure as music, the Greeks perceived and valued, along

with the immediate pleasure of beauty, a definite ethical character and

bent, much more was this the case with poetry, whose material is

conceptions and ideas. The works of the poets, and especially of Homer,

were in fact to the Greeks all that moral treatises are to us; or

rather, instead of learning their lessons in abstract terms, they learnt

them out of the concrete representation of life. Poetry was the basis of

their education, the guide and commentary of their practice, the

inspiration of their speculative thought. If they have a proposition to

advance, they must back it by a citation: if they have a counsel to

offer, they must prop it with a verse. Not only for delight, but for

inspiration, warning and example, they were steeped from childhood

onwards in an ocean of melodious discourse; their national epics were to

them what the Bible was to the Puritans; and for every conjunction of

fortune, for every issue of home or state, they found therein a text to

prompt or reinforce their decision. Of this importance of poetry in the

life of ancient Greece, and generally of the importance of music and

art, the following passage from Plato is a striking illustration: "When

the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is

written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his

hands the works of great poets, which he reads at school; in these are

contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of

ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order

that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them. Then

again the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young

disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have

taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other

excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music

and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's

souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle and harmonious and

rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of

man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm," [Footnote: Plato

Prot. 325c.--Translated by Jowett.]

From this conception of poetry as a storehouse of practical wisdom the

transition is easy to a purely ethical judgment of its value; and that

transition, as has been already noted, was actually made by Plato, who

even goes so far as to prescribe to poets the direct inculcation of such

morals as are proper to a tract, as that the good and just man is happy

even though he be poor, and the bad and unjust man miserable even though

he be rich. This didacticism, no doubt, is a parody; but it is a parody

of the normal Greek view, that the excellence of a poem is closely bound

up with the compass and depth of its whole ethical content, and is not

to be measured, as many moderns maintain, merely by the aesthetic beauty

of its form. When Strabo says, "it is impossible to be a good poet

unless you are first a good man," he is expressing the common opinion of

the Greeks that the poet is to be judged not merely as an artist but as

an interpreter of life; and the same presupposition underlies the remark

of Aristotle that poets may be classified according as the characters

they represent are as good as, better, or worse than the average man.

But perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this way of regarding

poetry is the passage in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, where the comedian

has introduced a controversy between Aeschylus and Euripides as to the

relative merit of their works, and has made the decision turn almost

entirely on moral considerations, the question being really whether or

no Euripides is to be regarded as a corrupter of his countrymen. In the

course of the discussion Aeschylus is made to give expression to a view

of poetry which clearly enough Aristophanes endorses himself, and which

no doubt would be accepted by the majority of his audience. He appeals

to all antiquity to shew that poets have always been the instructors of

mankind, and that it is for this that they are held in honour.

"Look to traditional history, look

To antiquity, primitive, early, remote;

See there, what a blessing illustrious poets

Conferr'd on mankind, in the centuries past.

Orpheus instructed mankind in religion,

Reclaim'd them from bloodshed and barbarous rites;

Musaeus deliver'd the doctrine of med'cine,

And warnings prophetic for ages to come;

Next came old Hesiod, teaching us husbandry,

Ploughing, and sowing, and rural affairs,

Rural economy, rural astronomy,

Homely morality, labour, and thrift;

Homer himself, our adorable Homer,

What was his title to praise and renown?

What, but the worth of the lessons he taught us

Discipline, arms, and equipment of war?"

[Footnote: Aristoph. Frogs, 1030.--Translated by Frere.]

While then there is, as we should naturally expect, plenty of Greek

poetry which is simply the spontaneous expression of passionate feeling,

unrestrained by the consideration of ethical or other ends; yet if we

take for our type (as we are fairly entitled to do, from the prominent

place it held in Greek life), not the lyrics but the drama of Greece, we

shall find that in poetry even (as was to be expected) to a higher

degree than in music and the plastic arts, the beauty sought and

achieved is one that lies within the limits of certain definite moral

pre-suppositions. Let us consider this point in some detail; and first

let us examine the character of Greek tragedy.

Section 6. Tragedy.

The character of Greek tragedy was determined from the very beginning by

the fact of its connection with religion. The season at which it was

performed was the festival of Dionysus; about his altar the chorus

danced; and the object of the performance was the representation of

scenes out of the lives of ancient heroes. The subject of the drama was

thus strictly prescribed; it must be selected out of a cycle of legends

familiar to the audience; and whatever freedom might be allowed to the

poet in his treatment of the theme, whatever the reflections he might

embroider upon it, the speculative or ethical views, the criticism of

contemporary life, all must be subservient to the main object originally

proposed, the setting forth, for edification as well as for delight, of

some episodes in the lives of those heroes of the past who were

considered not only to be greater than their descendants, but to be the

sons of gods and worthy themselves of worship as divine.

By this fundamental condition the tragedy of the Greeks is distinguished

sharply, on the one hand from the Shakespearian drama, on the other from

the classical drama of the French. The tragedies of Shakespeare are

devoid, one might say, or at least comparatively devoid, of all

preconceptions. He was free to choose what subject he liked and to treat

it as he would; and no sense of obligation to religious or other points

of view, no feeling for traditions descended from a sacred past and not

lightly to be handled by those who were their trustees for the future,

sobered or restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. He

flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer

of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it

now the cynicism of Measure for Measure, now the despair of Hamlet and

of Lear, now the radiant magnanimity of the Tempest, and departed

leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually

incompatible landscapes.

What Shakespeare gave, in short, was a many-sided representation of

life; what the Greek dramatist gave was an interpretation. But an

interpretation not simply personal to himself, but representative of the

national tradition and belief. The men whose deeds and passions he

narrated were the patterns and examples on the one hand, on the other

the warnings of his race; the gods who determined the fortunes they

sang, were working still among men; the moral laws that ruled the past

ruled the present too; and the history of the Hellenic race moved, under

a visible providence, from its divine origin onward to an end that would

be prosperous or the reverse according as later generations should

continue to observe the worship and traditions of their fathers

descended from heroes and gods.

And it is the fact that in this sense it was representative of the

national consciousness, that distinguishes the Greek tragedy from the

classical drama of the French. For the latter, though it imitated the

ancients in outward form, was inspired with a totally different spirit.

The kings and heroes whose fortunes it narrated were not the ancestors

of the French race; they had no root in its affections, no connection

with its religious beliefs, no relation to its ethical conceptions. The

whole ideal set forth was not that which really inspired the nation, but

at best that which was supposed to inspire the court; and the whole

drama, like a tree transplanted to an alien soil, withers and dies for

lack of the nourishment which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciously

imbibed from its encompassing air of national tradition.

Such then was the general character of the Greek tragedy--an

interpretation of the national ideal. Let us now proceed to follow out

some of the consequences involved in this conception.

In the first place, the theme represented is the life and fate of

ancient heroes--of personages, that is to say, greater than ordinary

men, both for good and for evil, in their qualities and in their

achievements, pregnant with fateful issues, makers or marrers of the

fortunes of the world. Tragic and terrible their destiny may be, but

never contemptible or squalid. Behind all suffering, behind sin and

crime, must lie a redeeming magnanimity. A complete villain, says

Aristotle, is not a tragic character, for he has no hold upon the

sympathies; if he prosper, it is an outrage on common human feeling; if

he fall into disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it

admissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, for

that is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerable

gratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or other

aberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of high

place and birth who having a nature not ignoble has fallen into sin and

pays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more light

on the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek drama than these few

remarks of Aristotle, and nothing could better indicate how close, in

the Greek mind, was the connection between aesthetic and ethical

judgments. The canon of Aristotle would exclude as proper themes for

tragedy the character and fate, say, of Richard III.--the absolutely bad

man suffering his appropriate desert; or of Kent and Cordelia--the

absolutely good, brought into unmerited affliction; and that not merely

because such themes offend the moral sense, but because by so offending

they destroy the proper pleasure of the tragic art. The whole aesthetic

effect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is to

defeat the very purpose of tragedy.

Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures passed on

Euripides in the passage of the "Frogs" of Aristophanes to which

allusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of lowering

the tragic art by introducing--what? Women in love! The central theme of

modern tragedy! It is the boast of Aeschylus that there is not one of

his plays which touches on this subject:--

"I never allow'd of your lewd Sthenoboeas

Or filthy detestable Phaedras--not I!

Indeed I should doubt if my drama throughout

Exhibit an instance of woman in love!"

[Footnote: Aristoph. Frogs, 1043.--Translated by Frere.]

And there can be little doubt that with a Greek audience this would

count to him as a merit, and that the shifting of the centre of interest

by Euripides from the sterner passions of heroes and of kings to this

tenderer phase of human feeling would be felt even by those whom it

charmed to be a declension from the height of the older tragedy.

And to this limitation of subject corresponds a limitation of treatment.

The Greek tragedy is composed from a definite point of view, with the

aim not merely to represent but also to interpret the theme. Underlying

the whole construction of the plot, the dialogue, the reflections, the

lyric interludes, is the intention to illustrate some general moral law,

some common and typical problem, some fundamental truth. Of the elder

dramatists at any rate, Aeschylus and Sophocles, one may even say that

it was their purpose--however imperfectly achieved--to "justify the ways

of God to man." To represent suffering as the punishment of sin is the

constant bent of Aeschylus; to justify the law of God against the

presumption of man is the central idea of Sophocles. In either case the

whole tone is essentially religious. To choose such a theme as Lear, to

treat it as Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were,

bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and helpless entreaty for the

healing that is never to be vouchsafed--this would have been repulsive,

if not impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever descending from

concrete art to the abstractions of mere moralising, without ever

attempting to substitute a verbal formula for the full and complex

perception that grows out of a representation of life, the ancient

dramatists were nevertheless, in the whole apprehension of their theme,

determined by a more or less conscious speculative bias; the world to

them was not merely a splendid chaos, it was a divine plan; and even in

its darkest hollows, its passes most perilous and bleak, they have their

hand, though doubtful perhaps and faltering, upon the clue that is to

lead them up to the open sky.

It is consonant with this account of the nature of Greek tragedy that it

should have laid more stress upon action than upon character. The

interest was centred on the universal bearing of certain acts and

situations, on the light which the experience represented threw on the

whole tendency and course of human life, not on the sentiments and

motives of the particular personages introduced. The characters are

broad and simple, not developing for the most part, but fixed, and

fitted therefore to be the mediums of direct action, of simple issues,

and typical situations. In the Greek tragedy the general point of view

predominates over the idiosyncrasies of particular persons. It is human

nature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highly

specialised variation; and what we have indicated as the general aim,

the interpretation of life, is never obscured by the predominance of

exceptional and so to speak, accidental characteristics. Man is the

subject of the Greek drama; the subject of the modern novel is Tom and

Dick.

Finally, to the realisation of this general aim, the whole form of the

Greek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely of

conversations between two persons, representing two opposed points of

view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every

problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations

were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation,

bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up the

moral of the whole. Through the chorus, in fact, the poet could speak in

his own person, and impose upon the whole tragedy any tone which he

desired. Periodically he could drop the dramatist and assume the

preacher; and thus ensure that his play should be, what we have seen was

its recognised ideal, not merely a representation but an interpretation

of life.

But this without ceasing to be a work of art. In attempting to analyse

in abstract terms the general character of the Greek tragedy we have

necessarily thrown into the shade what after all was its primary and

most essential aspect; an aspect, however, of which a full appreciation

could only be attained not by a mere perusal of the text, but by what is

unfortunately for ever beyond our power, the witnessing of an actual

representation as it was given on the Greek stage. For from a purely

aesthetic point of view the Greek drama must be reckoned among the most

perfect of art forms.

Taking place in the open air, on the sunny slope of a hill, valley and

plain or islanded sea stretching away below to meet the blazing blue of

a cloudless sky, the moving pageant, thus from the first set in tune

with nature, brought to a focus of splendour the rays of every separate

art. More akin to an opera than to a play it had, as its basis, music.

For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, and retained

throughout what was at first its only element, the dance and song of a

mimetic chorus. By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant melody

the burden of the tale was caught up and echoed and echoed again, as the

living globe divided into spheres of answering song, the clear and

precise significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, being thus

brought home in music to the passion of the heart, the idea embodied in

lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse

reflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs

they stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the character

of the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was an

appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the passion and the

intellect. The circumstances of the representation, the huge auditorium

in the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of the

term, than to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots

above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones

mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon

facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but

upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of

that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a

rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become

moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of

music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator

without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of

impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor

on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear

intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and

plot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by the

accompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by such

artists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, the

recitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height of

aesthetic significance as can hardly have been realized by any other

form of art production.

The nearest modern analogy to what the ancient drama must have been is

to be found probably in the operas of Wagner, who indeed was strongly

influenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his ideal like theirs,

to combine the various branches of art, employing not only music but

poetry, sculpture, painting and the dance, for the representation of his

dramatic theme; and his conception also to make art the interpreter of

life, reflecting in a national drama the national consciousness, the

highest action and the deepest passion and thought of the German race.

To consider how far in this attempt he falls short of or goes beyond the

achievement of the Greeks, and to examine the wide dissimilarities that

underlie the general identity of aim, would be to wander too far afield

from our present theme. But the comparison may be recommended to those

who are anxious to form a concrete idea of what the effect of a Greek

tragedy may have been, and to clothe in imagination the dead bones of

the literary text with the flesh and blood of a representation to the

sense.

Meantime, to assist the reader to realise with somewhat greater

precision the bearing of the foregoing remarks, it may be worth while to

give an outline sketch of one of the most celebrated of the Greek

tragedies, the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus.

The hero of the drama belongs to that heroic house whose tragic history

was among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience.

Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the gods,

was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name.

His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sons

of the next generation, Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother Atreus;

and Atreus in return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the father

unwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered boys. Agamemnon, son of

Atreus, to propitiate Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in

revenge was murdered by Clytemnestra his wife. And Clytemnestra was

killed by Orestes, her son, in atonement for the death of Agamemnon. For

generations the race had been dogged by crime and punishment; and in

choosing for his theme the murder of Agamemnon the dramatist could

assume in his audience so close a familiarity with the past history of

the House that he could call into existence by an allusive word that

sombre background of woe to enhance the terrors of his actual

presentation. The figures he brought into vivid relief joined hands with

menacing forms that faded away into the night of the future and the

past; while above them hung, intoning doom, the phantom host of Furies.

Yet at the outset of the drama all promises well. The watchman on the

roof of the palace, in the tenth year of his watch, catches sight at

last of the signal fire that announces the capture of Troy and the

speedy return of Agamemnon. With joy he proclaims to the House the long-

delayed and welcome news; yet even in the moment of exultation lets slip

a doubtful phrase hinting at something behind, which he dares not name,

something which may turn to despair the triumph of victory. Hereupon

enter the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to the measure

of a stately march. They sing how ten years before Agamemnon and

Menelaus had led forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeus

who protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus Helen his wife,

treacherously stolen by Paris. Then, as they take their places and begin

their rhythmic dance, in a strain of impassioned verse that is at once a

narrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or rather, present in a series of

vivid images, flashing as by illumination of lightning out of a night of

veiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that darkened the

starting of the host--the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the goddess whose

wrath was delaying the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime,

the scene lives again--the struggle in the father's heart, the

insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and at

last the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like a

knell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:

"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."

At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal

announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of

the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in

imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her

withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music

of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain

doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more

the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal

beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning

haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the

slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and

blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to their

original theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode and

announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald,

enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they

have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra

announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her

sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect

of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful

watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then

follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on

the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal

song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a

profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to

which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends

insolence and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changes

to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king.

Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of a

woman. After greeting the gods of his House, the King, in brief and

stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints at

much that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right.

Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggeration

tells of her anxious waiting for her lord and her inexpressible joy at

his return. In conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread upon

his path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a show

of resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which the

dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch, always

repellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps,

as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his power

and pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestra

follows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: "Zeus who art

god of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers." As she withdraws the chorus begin

a song of boding fear, the more terrible that it is still indefinite.

Something is going to happen--the presentiment is sure. But what, but

what? They search the night in vain. Meantime, motionless and silent

waits the figure of the veiled woman. It is Cassandra, the prophetess,

daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has carried home as his prize.

Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the house; she makes no sign

and utters no word. The queen changes her tone from courtesy to anger

and rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks; and Clytemnestra at

last with an angry threat leaves her and returns to the palace. Then,

and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger's lips, a passionate

cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the sombre history of the

House to which she has been brought, the woe that has been and the woe

that is to come, passes in pictures across her inner sense. In a series

of broken ejaculations, not sentences but lyric cries, she evokes the

scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips from the palace; in

its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of Thyestes wail in

its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the past that one of

the future floats and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, the

murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful of

all, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help.

Between Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish and fear; in

the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails; till at last, at what

seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into the

calmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her message in plainer speech

and clearly proclaims the murder of the King. Then, with a last appeal

to the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace alone to meet her

death.--The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is heard from within; again,

and then again; while the chorus hesitate the deed is done; the doors

are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen standing over the corpses of

her victims. All disguise is now thrown off; the murderess avows and

triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as vengeance for the sacrifice of

Iphigenia, and sees in herself not a free human agent but the incarnate

curse of the House of Tantalus. And now for the first time appears the

adulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the whole behind the scenes. He too

is an avenger, for he is the son of that Thyestes who was made to feed

on his own children's flesh. The murder of Agamemnon is but one more

link in the long chain of hereditary guilt; and with that exposition of

the pitiless law of punishment and crime this chapter of the great drama

comes to a close. But the "Agamemnon" is only the first of a series of

three plays closely connected and meant to be performed in succession;

and the problem raised in the first of them, the crime that cries for

punishment and the punishment that is itself a new crime, is solved in

the last by a reconciliation of the powers of heaven and hell, and the

pardon of the last offender in the person of Orestes. To sketch,

however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy would be to

trespass too far upon our space and time. It is enough to have

illustrated, by the example of the "Agamemnon," the general character of

a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject further must

be referred to the text of the plays themselves.

Section 7. Comedy.

Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the Greeks, in its rendering of

a didactic intention under the forms of a free and spontaneous art, is

the older comedy known to us through the works of Aristophanes. As the

former dealt with the general conceptions, religious and ethical, that

underlay the Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition the

ancient national myths, so the latter dealt with the particular phases

of contemporary life, employing the machinery of a free burlesque. The

achievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more astonishing, in a sense,

than that of Aeschylus. Starting with what is always, _prima

facie_, the prose of everyday life, its acrid controversies, its

vulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals--for

Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his contemporaries in person

on the stage--he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings of

imagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and spite

and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals of

musical laughter and snatches of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poet

as well as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only in the

construction of his fantastic plots, not only in the inexhaustible

profusion of his humane and genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry as

melodious and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the lyrists of

Greece or of the world. The basis of the comic as of the tragic art of

the Greeks was song and dance; and the chorus, the original element of

the play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes a place important

enough to make it clear that in comedy, too, a prominent aspect of the

art must have been the aesthetic appeal to the ear and the eye. In

general structure, in fact, comedy and tragedy were alike; aesthetically

the motives were similar, only they were set in a different key.

But while primarily Aristophanes, like the tragedians, was a great

artist, he was also, like them, a great interpreter of life. His dramas

are satires as well as poems, and he was and expressed himself supremely

conscious of having a "mission" to fulfil. "He has scorned from the

first," he makes the chorus sing of himself in the "Peace":

"He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip

Peddling and meddling in private affairs:

To detect and collect every petty defect

Of husband and wife and domestical life;

But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old,

When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof

In his country's behoof."

[Footnote: Aristoph. Peace, 751 seq.--Translated by Frere.]

His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his countrymen in

political and social issues; to attack the abuses of the Assembly, of

the Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans,

professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting"

sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers and

men of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, and

these the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus in

his own person. And the result is an art-product more strange to the

modern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of aesthetic with

didactic significance, than even that marvellous creation, the Greek

tragedy. Of the character of this comedy the reader may form an idea

through the admirable and easily accessible translations of Frere;

[Footnote: In Morley's Universal Library.] and we are therefore

dispensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the case of tragedy, an

account of some particular specimen of the art.

Section 8. Summary.

And here must conclude our survey of the character of Greek art. The

main point which we have endeavoured to make clear has been so often

insisted upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it further. The

key to the art of the Greeks, as well as to their ethics, is the

identification of the beautiful and the good; and it therefore is as

natural in treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as it

was to insist on the aesthetic significance of their moral ideal. But,

in fact, any insistance on either side of the judgment is misleading.

The two points of view had never been dissociated; and art and conduct

alike proceeded from the same imperative impulse, to create a harmony or

order which was conceived indifferently as beautiful or good. Through

and through, the Greek ideal is Unity. To make the individual at one

with the State, the real with the ideal, the inner with the outer, art

with morals, finally to bring all phases of life under the empire of a

single idea, which, with Goethe, we may call, as we will, the good, the

beautiful, or the whole--this was the aim, and, to a great extent, the

achievement of their genius. And of all the points of view from which we

may envisage their brilliant activity none perhaps is more central and

more characteristic than this of art, whose essence is the comprehension

of the many in the one, and the perfect reflection of the inner in the

outer.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Now that we have examined in some detail the most important phases of

the Greek view of life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly to

recapitulate and bring to a point the various considerations that have

been advanced.

But, first, one preliminary remark must be made. Throughout the

preceding pages we have made no attempt to distinguish the Greek "view"

from the Greek "ideal"; we have interpreted their customs and

institutions, political, social, or religious, by the conceptions and

ideals of philosophers and poets, and have thus, it may be objected,

made the mistake of identifying the blind work of popular instinct with

the theories and aspirations of conscious thought.

Such a procedure, no doubt, would be illegitimate if it were supposed to

imply that Greek institutions were the result of a deliberate intention

consciously adopted and approved by the average man. Like other social

products they grew and were not made; and it was only the few who

realised fully all that they implied. But on the other hand it is a

distinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the ideal formulated

by thought was the direct outcome of the facts. That absolute separation

of what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiate

modern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealist

though he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect

republic he bases on the institutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfect

man he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation of the

spirit which opposed the body to the soul, heaven to earth, the church

to the state, the man of the world to the priest, was altogether alien

to the consciousness of the Greeks. To them the world of fact was also

the world of the ideal; the conceptions which inspired their highest

aims were already embodied in their institutions and reflected in their

life; and the realisation of what ought to be involved not the

destruction of what was, but merely its perfecting on its own lines.

While then, on the one hand, it would be ridiculous so to idealise the

civilisation of the Greeks as to imply that they had eliminated discord

and confusion, yet, on the other, it is legitimate to say that they had

built on the plan of the ideal, and that their life both in public and

private was, by the very law of its existence, an effort to realise

explicitly that type of Good which was already implicitly embodied in

its structure.

The ideal, in a word, in ancient Greece, was organically related to the

real; and that is why it is possible to identify the Greek view with the

Greek ideal.

Bearing this in mind we may now proceed to recapitulate our conclusions

as to what that view was. And, first, let us take the side of

speculation. Here we are concerned not with the formal systems of Greek

thought, but with that half-unconscious working of imagination as much

as of mind whose expression was their popular religion. Of this

religion, as we saw, the essential feature was that belief in

anthropomorphic gods, by virtue of which a reconciliation was effected

between man and the powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Behind

phenomena, physical or psychic, beings were conceived of like nature

with man, beings, therefore, whose actions he could interpret and whose

motives he could comprehend. For his imagination, if not for his

intellect, a harmony was thus induced between himself and the world that

was not he. A harmony! and in this word we have the key to the dominant

idea of the Greek civilisation.

For, turning now to the practical side, we find the same impulse to

reconcile divergent elements. That antithesis of soul and body which was

emphasised in the mediaeval view of life and dominates still our current

ethical conceptions, does not appear in the normal consciousness of the

Greeks. Their ideal for the individual life included the perfection of

the body; beauty no less than goodness was the object of their quest,

and they believed that the one implied the other. But since the

perfection of the body required the co-operation of external aids, they

made these also essential to their ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul,

not merely health and beauty of the body, but noble birth, sufficient

wealth and a good name among men, were included in their conception of

the desirable life. Harmony, in a word, was the end they pursued,

harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment;

and it is this that distinguishes their ethical ideal from that which in

later times has insisted on the fundamental antagonism of the inner to

the outer life, and made the perfection of the spirit depend on the

mortification of the flesh.

The same ideal of harmony dominates the Greek view of the relation of

the individual to the state. This relation, it is true, is often

described as one in which the parts were subordinated to the whole; but

more accurately it may be said that they were conceived as finding in

the whole their realisation. The perfect individual was the individual

in the state; the faculties essential to his excellence had there only

their opportunity of development; the qualities defined as virtues had

there only their significance; and it was only in so far as he was a

citizen that a man was properly a man at all. Thus that opposition

between the individual and the state which perplexes our own society had

hardly begun to define itself in Greece. If on the one hand the state

made larger claims on the liberty of the individual, on the other, the

liberty of the individual consisted in a response to the claims. So that

in this department also harmony was maintained by the Greeks between

elements which have developed in modern times their latent antagonism.

Thus, both in speculation and in practice, in his relation to nature and

in his relation to the state, both internally, between the divergent

elements of which his own being was composed, and externally between

himself and the world that was not he, it was the aim, conscious or

unconscious, and, in part at least, the achievement of the Greeks, to

create and maintain an essential harmony. The antitheses of which we in

our own time are so painfully and increasingly aware, between Man as a

moral being and Nature as an indifferent law, between the flesh and the

spirit, between the individual and the state, do not appear as factors

in that dominant consciousness of the Greeks under whose influence their

religion, their institutions and their customary ideals had been formed.

And so regarded, in general, under what may fairly be called its most

essential aspect, the Greek civilisation is rightly described as that of

harmony.

But, on the other hand, and this is the point to which we must now turn

our attention, this harmony which was the dominant feature in the

consciousness of the Greeks and the distinguishing characteristic of

their epoch in the history of the world, was nevertheless, after all,

but a transitory and imperfect attempt to reconcile elements whose

antagonism was too strong for the solution thus proposed. The factors of

disruption were present from the beginning in the Greek ideal; and it

was as much by the development of its own internal contradictions as by

the invasion of forces from without that that fabric of magical beauty

was destined to fall. These contradictions have already been indicated

at various points in the text, and it only remains to bring them

together in a concluding summary.

On the side of speculation, the religion of the Greeks was open, as we

saw, to a double criticism. On the one hand, the ethical conceptions

embodied in those legends of the gods which were the product of an

earlier and more barbarous age, had become to the contemporaries of

Plato revolting or ridiculous. On the other hand, to metaphysical

speculation, not only was the existence of the gods unproved, but their

mutually conflicting activities, their passions and their caprice, were

incompatible with that conception of universal law which the developing

reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with

nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic gods was

a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of

the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements

that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original

opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal

evolution of their own consciousness.

And in the sphere of practice we are met with a similar dissolution. The

Greek conception of excellence included, as we saw, not only bodily

health and strength, but such a share at least of external goods as

would give a man scope for his own self-perfection. And since these

conditions were not attainable by all, the sacrifice of the majority to

the minority was frankly accepted and the pursuit of the ideal confined

to a privileged class.

Such a conception, however, was involved in internal contradictions. For

in the first place, even for the privileged few, an excellence which

depended on external aids was, at the best, uncertain and problematical.

Misfortune and disease were possibilities that could not be ignored; old

age and death were imperative certainties; and no care, no art, no

organisation of society, could obviate the inherent incompatibility of

individual perfection with the course of nature. Harmony between the

individual and his environment was perhaps more nearly achieved by and

for the aristocracy of ancient Greece than by any society of any other

age. But such a harmony, even at the best, is fleeting and precarious;

and no perfection of life delivers from death.

And, in the second place, to secure even this imperfect realisation, it

was necessary to restrict the universal application of the ideal.

Excellence, in Greece, was made the end for some, not for all. But this

limitation was felt, in the development of consciousness, to be self-

contradictory; and the next great system of ethics that succeeded to

that of Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be at once

independent of the aids of fortune and open alike to all classes of

mankind. The ethics of a privileged class were thus expanded into the

ethics of humanity; but this expansion was fatal to its essence, which

had depended on the very limitations by which it was destroyed.

With the Greek civilisation beauty perished from the world. Never again

has it been possible for man to believe that harmony is in fact the

truth of all existence. The intellect and the moral sense have developed

imperative claims which can be satisfied by no experience known to man.

And as a consequence of this the goal of desire which the Greeks could

place in the present, has been transferred, for us, to a future

infinitely remote, which nevertheless is conceived as attainable.

Dissatisfaction with the world in which we live and determination to

realise one that shall be better, are the prevailing characteristics of

the modern spirit. The development is one into whose meaning and end

this is not the place to enter. It is enough that we feel it to be

inevitable; that the harmony of the Greeks contained in itself the

factors of its own destruction; and that in spite of the fascination

which constantly fixes our gaze on that fairest and happiest halting-

place in the secular march of man, it was not there, any more than here,

that he was destined to find the repose of that ultimate reconciliation

which was but imperfectly anticipated by the Greeks.