Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an
illuminating comparison between the modern western and the
ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the
one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of
intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for
carrying all things through in some shape that will serve--the
other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental
Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit,
which invited the presence thereof;--and hence results were
attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What
Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the
great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,--
that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for
us,--but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon:
could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes
to imitate.*
------
* I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his _Problems of Greek History._ He
also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in
naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme.
------
It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long
witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age
of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed,
yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time
and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it.
The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as
exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every
detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct
spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two
measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition,
every difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the
perfection of the whole. As if the same creative force had made
it, as makes of the sea and mountains an inescapable perfection
of beauty.
It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and
his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and
Callicrates, adorned Athens. It would serve no purpose to make a
list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough
already. The simple fact to note is this: that at a certain
period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of
Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very
narrow channel. The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under
pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards
exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden
from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so
was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward
as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we
do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may
be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its
manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric
activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece.
But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European
countries, to Greece: the genius of the world, the energy of the
human spirit, was mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in
the single not too large city of Athens. It is true I am rather
enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced,
if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was
speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice--
that of Aeschylus--before the age of Pericles began. Still,
these dates are significant: 477, in which year Athens attained
the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was
after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his
message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures
appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was
the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian
equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had
passed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.--
Aristotle?--I said, _the Soul_ had little more to say. . . .
About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the
destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did
not put an end to Athenian significance. Mahaffy very wisely
goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War--as he does, too,
the Persian--from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks
ever since. As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians:
in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of
synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting
mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these
twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions
and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy
puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant:
tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens
would have fallen. Her political foundations were on the
sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying
good government and freedom: Persian rule was far less
oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens
had no self-government, no representation; they were at the
mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled
about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be
swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them. Thucydides was a great
master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of
importance all the matter of his tale. Besides, he was the
only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives.
So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this
Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty
family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples,
the Greeks.--In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who,
whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a
way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility,
of war.
Greek history is merely a phase of human history. We have looked
for its significance exclusively in political and cultural
regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not
invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only
they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political
freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just
nonsense. As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in
this: human history, the main part of it, flowing in that age
through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to
secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which
the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and
events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle
through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men.
The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too
far from the Gods. So the Gods tried a new method: let loose a
new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly
(sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had
before been concealed and revealed systematically within the
Established Mysteries. What Athens did with that new force has
affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly
for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.
Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all
Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then
morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world
as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the
subliminal to heroic endeavor. But his policy perished when the
visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean,
which passed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy,
"was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident
thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view
of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the
Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at
the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it
wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue
about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above
the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.
It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of
wars and politics; details of which you can get from any
textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit,
and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the
grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on: they come by
law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming,
and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study
history, the more the significance of my present surroundings
impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time;
behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the
civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities?
Nothing is certain about the future--even the near future;--except
that it will be immensely unlike the past. Whatever we have
learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us
daily for discovering those inward regions whence all light
shines down into the world. Genius is one method of the Soul's
action; one aspect of its glory made manifest. We are given
opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow.
To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control
of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming
in anywise foretold. But we know that the Divine Self would act,
were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the
obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.
Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later
the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it;
and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure,
stable, equable and redeeming.
This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed. Cyclically
they were bound to come: the fields ripened in due season;
but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers. The
Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English
mind, was coarse and wicked to a degree. All through the
wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little
Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth
a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was
also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to
stock the nine circles of Malebolge. So too Athens at the top of
her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and
those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which
probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself
over Greece ever since. It is a strange situation, that looks
like an anomaly: that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most,
and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark
forces that undermine life are most at work. But we should have
no difficulty in understanding it. At such times, by such
influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined;
and not only the intellect and all noble qualities are quickened,
but the passions also. The race, and the individual, are stirred
to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest. What
then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for
foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses
up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at
last, or surrender to hell. Through lack of training, and
ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be
handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own
natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is
allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement
exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down
the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the
lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to
lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a
new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy,
physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is
genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it
wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time;
fifth-century Greece stood on such another. For reasons that we
have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages
that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was
not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It
was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.
So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent
from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides
to Themistocles and Pericles. We shall see this Athenian descent
in literature, in art, in philosophy. If Athens had gone up, not
down, European history would have been a long record of the
triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of
sorrow and disaster.
At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the
stupendous figure of Aeschylus. For any such a force as he was,
there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be
traced: there are no sudden creations. Take Shakespeare, for
example. There was what he found read to his hand in English
literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.
In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this
broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or
he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which
Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called
English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this
glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all
large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one
finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also. But there
is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in
English literature before him: the Grandeur from within, the
high Soul Symbol. In him suddenly that portentous thing appears,
like a great broad river emerging from the earth.--Of which we do
not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and
fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the
mountains, unseen; they sank under the earth-surface somewhere,
and are not special new creations. Looking back behind Shakespeare,
from this our eminence in time, we can see beyond the intervening
heights this broad water shine again over the plain in Dante;
and beyond him some glimmer of it in Virgil; until at last
we see the far-off sheen of it in Aeschylus, very near the
backward horizon of time. We can catch no glimpse of it
farther, because that horizon is there.
We can trace Aeschylus' outward descent--as Shakespeare's from
Chaucer--from the nascent Greek drama and the rudimentary plays
at the rustic festivals; but the grand river of his esotericism
--there it shines, as large and majestic, at least, as in
Shakespeare; and it was, no more than his, a special creation or
new thing. Our horizon lies there, to prevent our vision going
further; but from some higher time-eminence in the future,
we shall see it emerge again in the backward vastnesses of
pre-history; again and again. The grandeur of Aeschylus his no
parent in Greek, or in western extant literature; or if we say
that it has a parent in Homer (which I doubt, because not seeing
the Soul Symbols in Homer), it is only putting matters one step
further back.... But behind Greece, there were the lost literatures
of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, of which we know nothing; aye, and
for a guess, lost and mighty literatures from all parts of Europe
too. If I could imagine it otherwise, I would say so.
Almost suddenly, during Aeschylus' lifetime, another Greek Art
came into being. When he was a boy, sculpture was still a very
crude affair; or perhaps just beginning to emerge from that
condition. The images that come down to us, say from Pisistratus'
time and earlier, are not greatly different from the 'primitive'
carvings of many so-called savage peoples of our own day. That
statement is loose and general; but near enough the mark to
serve our purpose. You may characterize them as rude imitations
of the human form, without any troublesome realism, and with a
strong element of the grotesque. Says the _Encyclopeadia
Britannica_ (from which the illustration is taken):
"The statues of the gods began either with stiff and ungainly
figures roughly cut out of the trunk of a tree, or with the
monstrous and symbolical representations of Oriental art.... In
early decorations of vases and vessels one may find Greek deities
represented with wings, carrying in their hands lions or
griffins, bearing on their heads lofty crowns. But as Greek art
progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism... What the
artists of Babylonia and Egypt express in the character of the
gods by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of
storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal
heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the
scultptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant
addition of something which is above the ordinary levels of
humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Dimeter of
Cnidus. When the decay of the high ethical art of Greece sets
in, the Gods become more and more warped to the merely human
level. They lose their dignity, but they never lose their charm."
In which, I think, much light is once more thrown on the inner
history of the race, and the curious and fatal position Greece
holds in it. For here we see Art emerging from its old Position
as a hand-maid to the Mysteries and recognized instrument of the
Gods or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal,
personal. There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek
sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not
speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and
Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the
year 870 B. C.). For the real art that came next before the
Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Take Egypt first. There the sculptor thinks of himself far less
as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries: that is,
of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested
world, and the official channel which connected It with the
latter. The Gods, for him, are frankly unhuman--superhuman--
unlike humanity. We call them 'forces of Nature'; and think
ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with
this perfectly meaningless term. We have dealt so wisely with
our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and
things in themselves we shall never bother about:--like the
Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia's death and
burial with his three branches of an act. But the Egyptian, with
mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own,
would not so feed 'of the chameleon's dish,'--needed something
more than words, words, and words. He knew also that there were
elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in
ours. So he gave them purely symbolic forms: a human body, for
that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity;
and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their
consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of
human personality. While affirming that they were conscious
entities, he stopped short of personalizing them. What was
beneath the mask or symbol belonged to the Mysteries, and was not
to be publicly declared.
But when he came to portraying men, especially great kings, he
used a different method. The king's statue was to remain through
long ages, when the king himself was dead and Osirified. The
artist knew--it was the tradition of his school--what the
Osirified dead looked like. Not an individual sculptor, but a
traditional wisdom, was to find expression. What sculptor's name
is known? Who wrought the Vocal Memnon?--Not any man; but the
Soul and wisdom and genius of Egypt. The last things bothered
about were realism and personality. There were a very few
conventional poses; the object was not to make a portrait, but
to declare the Universal Human Soul;--it was hardly artistic, in
any modern acceptation of the word; but rather religious.
Artistic it was, in the highest and truest sense: to create, in
the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul
in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite
proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.--Plato
speaks of those glimpses of "the other side of the sky" which the
soul catches before it comes into the flesh;--the Egyptian artist
was preoccupied with the other side of the sky. How wonderfully
he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to
see. There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall
facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may
view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but
from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of
the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the
other side of the sky. You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously,
of the grandeur and reality of the Soul. Having watched
Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this
description of it in De Quincey;--if he was not speaking of this,
what he says fits it admirably:
"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British
Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this
sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the memnon's head, then
recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must
suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here
ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic
head; and what it symbolized to me were: (1) the peace which
passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and
confounds all faculty of computation--the eternity which had
been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not
such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality,
not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a
procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. You
durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the
radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of
memorials of flesh."
Art can never reach higher than that,--if we think of it as a
factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian
sculpture is of minor importance: as, that it was stiff,
conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting
bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and
eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this
Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the
revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky. You may
have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able
to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable
graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy,
multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in
reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who
shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which passeth
understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all
faculty of computation."
If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a
people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid,
luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot
look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too,
the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible
power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one
end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and
proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian
sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but
calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and
fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or
leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated
symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might
hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the
beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the
_raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty,
and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.
Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon
of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the
kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.
Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's
"Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep
no more.";
to Dante's
"The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";
to Talesin's
"My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars";
to Aeschylus's bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;--and the next
step you come to beyond (in the West)--the next expression of the
Human Soul--marked with the same kind of feeling--the same
spiritual and divine hauteur--is, for lack of literary remains,
this Egyptian sculpture. The Grand Manner, the majestic note of
Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream
flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.
It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture--and in
architecture too--should have gone on side by side, in Greece,
during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very
finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but
apparently it did. (They had wooden temples, painted in bright
reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.) I
imagine the explanation to be something like this: You are to
think of an influx of the Human Spirit, proceeding downward from
its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization
--the Greek, in this case. Now poetry, because its medium is less
material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit
on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of
its descent much sooner. Perhaps music lies higher again; which
is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this
nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma. Let me diverge a
little, and take a glance round.--At any such time, the seeds
of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be
quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be
true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has
been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of
its own, and is the _inverbation_ of it. The Greek Melic poets
(the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate
musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their
language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart
from the words. After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the
greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the
thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in
Dante before that century had passed; not raising an equal
greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth. In
England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so
far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts: there
were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently;
in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of). Painting, you see,
works in a little less material medium than sculpture does.
Dante's Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice,
characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the
Italy of the Cinquecento. But England, even in Shakespeare's
day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness.
James I's reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan
reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely
wasted: notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off.
Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force
both in its higher and lower aspects: against art, and against
vice;--probably the best thing that could happen under the
circumstances; and the reason why England recovered so much
sooner than did Italy.--On the other hand, when the influx came
to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities
for action in the non-material arts: to have skipped any grand
manifestation in music or poetry: and at once to have hit the
Dutchman 'where he lived' (as they say),--in his paintbox.--But
to return:-
Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some
ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing
remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress
in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus;
some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed
its likeness on carved stone. I once saw a picture--in a lantern
lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating,
I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is
advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The
figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt
it is the likeness of a Goddess. She is not merely a very fine
and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of
Egyptian sublimity. The artist, if he had not attained perfect
mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to
him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling,
as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the Gods; at his very
best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he
tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian
had tried to put into his representations of men; and in that
sense this Athene is, after all, only a woman;--but one in whom
the Soul is quite manifest. I have never been able to trace this
statue since; and my recollections are rather hazy. But it
stands, for me, holding up a torch in the inner recesses of
history. It was the time when Pythagoras was teaching; it was
that momentous time when (as hardly since) the doors of the
Spiritual were flung open, and the impulse of the six Great
Teachers was let loose on the world. Hithertoo Greek carvers had
been making images of the Gods, symbolic indeed--with wings,
thunderbolts and other appurtenances;--but trivially symbolic;
mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious
feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their gods and
worship had been mere conventions, about which they had felt
nothing deep;--now, upon this urge from the God-world, a sense of
the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of
expressing it: throw off the old conventions; will carve the
Gods as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect
mastery: for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but--have
personalized the Gods; and dear knows what that may lead
to presently.
The came Pheidias, born about 496. Nothing of his work remains
for us; the Elgin Marbles themselves, from the Parthenon, are
pretty certainly only the work of his pupils. But there are two
things that tell us something about his standing: (1) all
antiquity bears witness to the prevailing quality of his
conceptions; their sublimity. (2) He was thrown into prison on a
charge of impiety, and died there, in 442.
Here you will note the progress downward. Aeschylus had been so
charged, and tried--but acquitted. Pheidias, so charged, was
imprisoned. Forty-three years later Socrates, so charged, was
condemned to drink the hemlock. Of Aeschylus and Socrates we can
speak with certainty: they were the Soul's elect men. Was
Pheidias too? Athens certainly was turning away from the Soul;
and his fate is a kind of half-way point between the fates of the
others. He appears in good company. And that note of sublimity
in his work bears witness somewhat.
We have the work of his pupils, and know that in their hands the
marble--Pheidias himself worked mostly in gold and ivory--had
become docile and obedient, to flow into whatever forms they
designed for it. We know what strength, what beauty, what
tremendous energy, are in those Elgin marbles. All the figures
are real, but idealized: beautiful men and horses, in fullest
most vigorous action, suddenly frozen into stone. The men are
more beautiful than human; but they are human. They are
splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily
perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say,
to music: they are music expressed in terms of the human body.
Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of
the Soul. It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at
expressing: a perfect body--and a sound mind in it: a perfectly
healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really
sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)--was the
ideal they sought and saw. Very well, so far; but, you see,
Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries;
it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.
In Pheidias' own work we might have seen the influx at that
moment when, shining through the soul plane, its rays fell full
on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor
of the Soul. We might have seen that it was still the Soul that
held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and
mastered: that it was the light he aimed to express, not the
thing it illumined. In the work of his pupils, the preoccupation
is with the latter; we see the physical grown beautiful under
the illumination of the Soul; not the Soul that illumines it.
The men of the Egyptian sculptors had been Gods. The Gods of
these Greek sculptors were men. Perfect, glorious, beautiful men
--so far as externals were concerned. But men--to excite personal
feeling, not to quell it into nothingness and awe. The perfection,
even at that early stage and in the work of the disciples of
Pheidias, was a quality of the personality.
It was indeed marvelously near the point of equilibrium: the
moment when Spirit enters conquered matter, and stands there
enthroned. In Pheidias himself I cannot but think we should have
found that moment as we find it in Aeschylus. But you see, it is
when that has occurred: when Spirit has entered matter, and
made the form, the body, supremely beautiful; it is precisely
then that the moment of peril comes--if there is not the
wisdom present that knows how to avoid the peril. The next and
threatening step downward is preoccupation with, then worship of,
the body.
The Age of Pericles came to worship the body: that was the
danger into which it fell; that was what brought about the ruin
of Greece. That huge revelation of material beauty; and that
absence of control from above; the lost adequacy of the
Mysteries, and the failure of the Pythagorean Movement;--the
impatience of spiritual criticism, heedlessness of spiritual
warning;--well, we can see what a turning-point the time was in
history. On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were
growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . . It is a thing
to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last
two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a
thing that depends for its efficacy on mosquitos. Great men
simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because
they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with
that oppression and enervation sapping them. Greece has been
malarial; Rome, too, to some extent; the Roman Campagna
terribly; as if the disease were (as no doubt it is) a Karma
fallen on the sites of old-time tremendous cultural energies;
where the energies were presently wrecked, drowned and sodden in
vice. Here then is a pretty little problem in the workings of
Karma: on what plane, through what superphysical links or
channels, do the vices of an effete civilization transform
themselves into that poor familiar singer in the night-time, the
mosquito? Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial;
if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone
in them.
In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary
science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly
translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances
and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now;
we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions
lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are
wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children
of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with
us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out
of commission.--And sure enough, the mere foulness of the
battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had
circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is
only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the
physical links, and blocked the material channels through which
wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.--Whereupon Nature,
wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and
inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through
these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again
on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish
Influenza;--and spread it over three continents, with greater
scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred
plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific.
Whereof the moral is: _He laughs loudest who laughs last;_ and
just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma.
Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of
manifested Time. When shall we stop imagining that any possible
inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the
fundamental laws of Nature? Not the printing-press, nor steam,
nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor _vril_ itself when we
come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn
themselves out by wrong-doing--or even that have come to old age
and the natural time when they must die. But their passings need
not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and
beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they
would learn decently to live.
But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the
literature again:--
After Aeschylus, Sophocles. The former, a Messenger of the Gods,
come to cry their message of _Karma_ to the world; and in doing
so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;--the latter, a
"good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school,
upsets no faith."--thus Browning sums him up. A "faultless"
artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most
academic critics with him) he can improve something on old
Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a
genial companion, well-loved by his friends--and who is not his
friend?--all through his long life; twenty times first-prize
winner, and never once less than second.--Why, solely on the
strength of his _Antigone,_ the Athenians appointed him a
strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that
one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not
fail of victory in mere war. But don't lose hope!--upon an
after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who
suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in
his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details
of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that
sort. What more shall we say of Sophocles?--A charming brilliant
fellow in his cups--of which, as of some other more questionable
pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man worshiped during his
life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;--does
that sound like the story of a Messenger of the Gods?
He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so
of dramas, seven come down to us. His age saw in him the very
ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the
Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them. "Indeed," says
Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of
both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more
successful rival." Without trying to give you conclusions of my
own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who
is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well,
and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to
his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry.
Comparing the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus, the second play in the
Oreseian Trilogy, with the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which deals
with the same matter, he says:
"Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he
carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of
confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of
course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after
it. In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored.
Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the
climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide,
but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!
Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see
them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.
Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the
_Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for
blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire
satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest
and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as
grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would...
Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows
that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences;
they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to
make them real to himself at the cost of making them false
to the spirit of the epos...
"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him--'I draw men as
they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are';
'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'--all
imply the academic standpoint... Even his exquisite diction,
which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his
predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist.
Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman
speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that
an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments.
But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an
Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes
them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect
model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and
grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus,
who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke
himself against the bars of life and poetry."
You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the
viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural
superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor
Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view
of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of
the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians.
The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand
thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless
beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to
Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to
Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful
psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just
before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But
the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as
".... gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."
--divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic
significance: because he has built like a titan, you do not at
first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as
someone has said. But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to
see. His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just
and beautiful almost always. I put in the almost in view of that
about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with
her mother. The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on
Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian
chiton of his day. He was personal, where the other had been
impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime;
conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the
super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.
And then we come to third of the trio: Euripides, born in 480.
"He was," says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of
his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of
the stage--he won only four prizes in fifty years of production--
yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece." Athens hated,
jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and
adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian
captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in
later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other
two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens
of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive,
to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his
larger and longer popularity.
He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his
intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from
being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was. He questioned
all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in
comfortable fat acquiescence. He came to make men 'sit up and
think.' He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung
them at the head of the world. He must stir and probe things to
the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the
perfection of his poetry. Admetus is to die, unless someone will
die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the
worst of all possible happenings. Alcestis his wife will die for
him; and he accepts her sacrifice. Now, that was the old saga;
and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right. Woman was an
inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that
Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point
plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in
Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into
the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt,
too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization. In
Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about
women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic
Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a
state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which,
indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past. These great
Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were
as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to
the Greece of their time--of historic times; they were, I think,
as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and
revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have
been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for
memory. I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to
get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the
Lodge--to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.--But
to return to the story of Alcestis:--
You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a
symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I
do not quite see how. Sophocles would have been aware of nothing
wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course.
Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and
rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave
it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules
at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is
great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional
callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:--leaves
you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, in
_Balaustion's Adventure,_
".... Euripides
The human, with his droppings of warms tears";
--it is a just verdict, perhaps. Without Aeschylus' Divine Wisdom,
or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some
means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not
thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the
other.--I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are
not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of
criticism; but for the sake of history;--understand them, and
you have the story of the age illumined. You can read the inner
Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of
Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you
can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian
acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the
character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age. When
Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone. He was blindish;
he would not accept the Gods without question. Yet was he on the
side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must
count him on their side, and loved by them. He was not panoplied,
like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet
what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions'
batterings. Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon
his own flesh. . . . Not even a total lack of humor, which I
suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than
a most sympathetic, an heroic figure. He was the child and
fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens
declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to
Athens in her early glory. He was not so much bothered (like
Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had
no clear and saving message. His realism--for compared with the
other two, he was a sort of realist--was the child of his
despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.
He was, or had been, in close touch with Socrates (you might
expect it); lived a recluse somewhat, taking no part in affairs;
married twice, unfortunately both times; and his family troubles
were among the points on which gentlemanly Athens sneered at him.
A lovely lyricist, a restless thinker; tender-hearted; sublime
in pity of all things weak and helpless and defeated:--women
especially, and conquered nations. Prof. Murray says:
"In the last plays dying Athens is not mentioned, but her death-
struggle and her sins are constantly haunting us; the Joy of
battle is mostly gone; the horror of war is left. Well might old
Aeschylus pray, 'God grant that I may sack no city!' if the
reality of conquest is what it appears in the last plays of
Euripides. The conquerors there are as miserable as the
conquered; only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked."
He died the year before Aegospotami, at the court of Archelaus of
Macedon. One is glad to think he found peace and honor at last.
Athens heard with a laugh that some courtier there had insulted
him; and with astonishment that the good barbarous Archelaus had
handed said courtier over to Euripides to be scourged for his
freshness. I don't imagine that Euripides scourged him though-to
amount to anything.