religion. We are accustomed to think of Greek religion as the
religion of art and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian
Zeus and the Athena Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the
sacred books. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of "the classical
polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was natural in a
civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial one. In it the eye
is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture, but
loses sight of the sombre world across which it strikes. Greek
religion, where we can observe it most distinctly, is at once a
magnificent ritualistic system, and a cycle of poetical
conceptions. Religions, as they grow by natural laws out of
man's life, are modified by whatever modifies his life. They
brighten under a bright sky, they become liberal as the social
range widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human
life, where the spirit is narrow and confined, and the stars are
visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of these differences is one
of the gravest functions of religious criticism. Still, the broad
foundation, in mere human nature, of all religions as they exist
for the greatest number, [201] is a universal pagan sentiment, a
paganism which existed before the Greek religion, and has
lingered far onward into the Christian world, ineradicable, like
some persistent vegetable growth, because its seed is an element
of the very soil out of which it springs.
This pagan sentiment measures the sadness with which the
human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from
what is here, and now. It is beset by notions of irresistible natural
powers, for the most part ranged against man, but the secret also
of his fortune, making the earth golden and the grape fiery for
him. He makes gods in his own image, gods smiling and flower-
crowned, or bleeding by some sad fatality, to console him by
their wounds, never closed from generation to generation. It is
with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents
itself. He would remain at home for ever on the earth if he could.
As it loses its colour and the senses fail, he clings ever closer to
it; but since the mouldering of bones and flesh must go on to the
end, he is careful for charms and talismans, which may chance to
have some friendly power in them, when the inevitable shipwreck
comes. Such sentiment is a part of the eternal basis of all
religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but
indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's
nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few
"rise up with wings as eagles," [202] but the broad level of
religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress,
like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. This
sentiment attaches itself in the earliest times to certain usages of
patriarchal life, the kindling of fire, the washing of the body, the
slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and
dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at first as occasional
and unfixed as the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to
become the permanent element of religious life. The usages of
patriarchal life change; but this germ of ritual remains, promoted
now with a consciously religious motive, losing its domestic
character, and therefore becoming more and more inexplicable
with each generation. Such pagan worship, in spite of local
variations, essentially one, is an element in all religions. It is the
anodyne which the religious principle, like one administering
opiates to the incurable, has added to the law which makes life
sombre for the vast majority of mankind.
More definite religious conceptions come from other sources, and
fix themselves upon this ritual in various ways, changing it, and
giving it new meanings. In Greece they were derived from
mythology, itself not due to a religious source at all, but
developing in the course of time into a body of religious
conceptions, entirely human in form and character. To the
unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself-
hê pterou dynamis, the power of the wing--an element [203] of
refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an endless destiny.
While the ritual remains unchanged, the aesthetic element, only
accidentally connected with it, expands with the freedom and
mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed element
is the religious observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the
myth, the religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and
has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does not at
once, and for the majority, become the higher Hellenic religion.
The country people, of course, cherish the unlovely idols of an
earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found still devoutly
preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who,
coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy
presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing only
a shapeless wooden figure. The wilder people have wilder gods,
which, however, in Athens, or Corinth, or Lacedaemon, changing
ever with the worshippers in whom they live and move and have
their being, borrow something of the lordliness and distinction of
human nature there. Greek religion too has its mendicants, its
purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered to
the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated
superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its
addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or
melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by
Greek polytheism! What should [204] we have thought of the
vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion? The
supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this
gloom. The fiery, stupefying wine becomes in a happier climate
clear and exhilarating. The Dorian worship of Apollo, rational,
chastened, debonair, with his unbroken daylight, always opposed
to the sad Chthonian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force
and spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. Out of Greek
religion, under happy conditions, arises Greek art, to minister to
human culture. It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able
to transform itself into an artistic ideal.
For the thoughts of the Greeks about themselves, and their
relation to the world generally, were ever in the happiest
readiness to be transformed into objects for the senses. In this
lies the main distinction between Greek art and the mystical art of
the Christian middle age, which is always struggling to express
thoughts beyond itself. Take, for instance, a characteristic work
of the middle age, Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, in the
cloister of Saint Mark's at Florence. In some strange halo of a
moon Jesus and the Virgin Mother are seated, clad in mystical
white raiment, half shroud, half priestly linen. Jesus, with rosy
nimbus and the long pale hair--tanquam lana alba et tanquam
nix--of the figure in the Apocalypse, with slender finger-tips is
setting a crown of pearl on the head of Mary, who, [205] corpse-
like in her refinement, is bending forward to receive it, the light
lying like snow upon her forehead. Certainly, it cannot be said of
Angelico's fresco that it throws into a sensible form our highest
thoughts about man and his relation to the world; but it did not do
this adequately even for Angelico. For him, all that is outward or
sensible in his work--the hair like wool, the rosy nimbus, the
crown of pearl--is only the symbol or type of a really
inexpressible world, to which he wishes to direct the thoughts; he
would have shrunk from the notion that what the eye
apprehended was all. Such forms of art, then, are inadequate to
the matter they clothe; they remain ever below its level.
Something of this kind is true also of oriental art. As in the
middle age from an exaggerated inwardness, so in the East from a
vagueness, a want of definition, in thought, the matter presented
to art is unmanageable, and the forms of sense struggle vainly
with it. The many-headed gods of the East, the orientalised,
many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, like Angelico's fresco, are at
best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at an idea which art
cannot fitly or completely express, which still remains in the
world of shadows.
But take a work of Greek art,--the Venus of Melos. That is in no
sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own
victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite
image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. [206] That motive
is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its
meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. The
Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion,
but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental thought there is
a vague conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation
of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's
nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused
with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable
world. In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the
soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to
human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into
the background. But just there Greek thought finds its happy
limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not yet
learned to boast its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not
yet absorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its own
colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself to a train of
reflexion which must end in defiance of form, of all that is
outward, in an exaggerated idealism. But that end is still distant:
it has not yet plunged into the depths of religious mysticism.
This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip or lie
beyond the proper range of its sensible embodiment, could not
have arisen out of a phase of life that was uncomely or poor.
That delicate pause in Greek reflexion was joined, by [207] some
supreme good luck, to the perfect animal nature of the Greeks.
Here are the two conditions of an artistic ideal. The influences
which perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of the
process by which "the ideal" was evolved. Those "Mothers"
who, in the second part of Faust, mould and remould the typical
forms that appear in human history, preside, at the beginning of
Greek culture, over such a concourse of happy physical
conditions as ever generates by natural laws some rare type of
intellectual or spiritual life. That delicate air, "nimbly and
sweetly recommending itself" to the senses, the finer aspects of
nature, the finer lime and clay of the human form, and modelling
of the dainty framework of the human countenance:--these are
the good luck of the Greek when he enters upon life. Beauty
becomes a distinction, like genius, or noble place.
"By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been so highly
esteemed as by the Greeks. The priests of a youthful Jupiter at
Aegae, of the Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra led
the procession of Mercury, bearing a lamb upon his shoulders,
were always youths to whom the prize of beauty had been
awarded. The citizens of Egesta erected a monument to a certain
Philip, who was not their fellow-citizen, but of Croton, for his
distinguished beauty; and the people made offerings at it. In an
ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epicharmus, [208] of
four wishes, the first was health, the second beauty. And as
beauty was so longed for and prized by the Greeks, every
beautiful person sought to become known to the whole people by
this distinction, and above all to approve himself to the artists,
because they awarded the prize; and this was for the artists an
occasion for having supreme beauty ever before their eyes.
Beauty even gave a right to fame; and we find in Greek histories
the most beautiful people distinguished. Some were famous for
the beauty of one single part of their form; as Demetrius
Phalereus, for his beautiful eyebrows, was called Charito-
blepharos. It seems even to have been thought that the
procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by prizes.
This is shown by the existence of contests for beauty, which in
ancient times were established by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by
the river Alpheus; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philae, a prize
was offered to the youths for the deftest kiss. This was decided
by an umpire; as also at Megara, by the grave of Diocles. At
Sparta, and at Lesbos, in the temple of Juno, and among the
Parrhasii, there were contests for beauty among women. The
general esteem for beauty went so far, that the Spartan women set
up in their bedchambers a Nireus, a Narcissus, or a Hyacinth, that
they might bear beautiful children."
So, from a few stray antiquarianisms, a few [209] faces cast up
sharply from the waves, Winckelmann, as his manner was,
divines the temperament of the antique world, and that in which it
had delight. It has passed away with that distant age, and we may
venture to dwell upon it. What sharpness and reality it has is the
sharpness and reality of suddenly arrested life. The Greek system
of gymnastics originated as part of a religious ritual. The
worshipper was to recommend himself to the gods by becoming
fleet and fair, white and red, like them. The beauty of the
palaestra, and the beauty of the artist's workshop, reacted on one
another. The youth tried to rival his gods; and his increased
beauty passed back into them.--"I take the gods to witness, I had
rather have a fair body than a king's crown"--Omnymi pantas theous
mê helesthai an tên basileôs archên anti tou kalos einai+--that
is the form in which one age of the world chose the higher life.--
A perfect world, if the gods could have seemed for ever only fleet
and fair, white and red! Let us not regret that this unperplexed
youth of humanity, satisfied with the vision of itself, passed, at
the due moment, into a mournful maturity; for already the deep joy
was in store for the spirit, of finding the ideal of that youth still
red with life in the grave.
It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently in
sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound--in
poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound,
joyful sensuousness of motion, and each [210] of them may be a
medium for the ideal: it is partly accident which in any individual
case makes the born artist, poet, or painter rather than sculptor.
But as the mind itself has had an historical development, one
form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more
adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that
development. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native
affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they
combine together, with completeness and ease. The arts may
thus be ranged in a series, which corresponds to a series of
developments in the human mind itself. Architecture, which
begins in a practical need, can only express by vague hint or
symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. He closes his sadness over
him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, or projects
his purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to
the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can but
lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered
from it by reflexion. Their expression is, indeed, not really
sensuous at all. As human form is not the subject with which it
deals, architecture is the mode in which the artistic effort centres,
when the thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct,
when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies, storms,
victories, of the unseen and intellectual world, which, wrought
out into the bodily form, give it an interest and significance
[211] communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt, with its
supreme architectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful
comparison, a Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek
spirit, the humanistic spirit, with its power of speech.
Again, painting, music, and poetry, with their endless power of
complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modern ages.
Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be
translated every delicacy of thought and feeling, incidental to a
consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their
gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an
external form that which is most inward in passion or sentiment.
Between architecture and those romantic arts of painting, music,
and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals
immediately with man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts,
because it is not self-analytical. It has to do more exclusively
than any other art with the human form, itself one entire medium
of spiritual expression, trembling, blushing, melting into dew,
with inward excitement. That spirituality which only lurks about
architecture as a volatile effect, in sculpture takes up the whole
given material, and penetrates it with an imaginative motive; and
at first sight sculpture, with its solidity of form, seems a thing
more real and full than the faint, abstract world of poetry or
painting. Still the fact is the reverse. Discourse and action show
man as he is, more directly than the play of [212] the muscles and
the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command.
Painting, by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of
light in the eye--music, by its subtle range of tones--can refine
most delicately upon a single moment of passion, unravelling its
subtlest threads.
But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because,
by this limitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for
one peculiar motive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore
renounces all those attributes of its material which do not forward
that motive. It has had, indeed, from the beginning an unfixed
claim to colour; but this element of colour in it has always been
more or less conventional, with no melting or modulation of
tones, never permitting more than a very limited realism. It was
maintained chiefly as a religious tradition. In proportion as the
art of sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, and subordinate
to architecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces the
power of expression by lower or heightened tones. In it, no
member of the human form is more significant than the rest; the
eye is wide, and without pupil; the lips and brow are hardly less
significant than hands, and breasts, and feet. But the limitation of
its resources is part of its pride: it has no backgrounds, no sky or
atmosphere, to suggest and interpret a train of feeling; a little of
suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming
surfaces, with pure form--only these.
[213] And it gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own
distinguishing motives; it unveils man in the repose of his
unchanging characteristics. That white light, purged from the
angry, blood-like stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is
accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him, as opposed to
the restless accidents of life. The art of sculpture records the first
naïve, unperplexed recognition of man by himself; and it is a
proof of the high artistic capacity of the Greeks, that they
apprehended and remained true to these exquisite limitations, yet,
in spite of them, gave to their creations a mobile, a vital,
individuality.
Heiterkeit--blitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheit--generality or
breadth, are, then, the supreme characteristics of the Hellenic
ideal. But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with
the lax observation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution,
which have sometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of
being "broad" or "general." Hellenic breadth and generality
come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying
and concentrating its impressions into certain pregnant types.
The basis of all artistic genius lies in the power of conceiving
humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of
its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common
days, generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power
of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it
transmits, according to [214] the choice of the imaginative
intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a
variety of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or
persons open to them is as various as life itself; no character,
however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic.
That is because those arts can accomplish their function in the
choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or
glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this
situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus
where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to
burn, the artist may have, indeed, to employ the most cunning
detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a
thousand-fold. Let us take a brilliant example from the poems of
Robert Browning. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations. The characters themselves are always of secondary
importance; often they are characters in themselves of little
interest; they seem to come to him by strange accidents from the
ends of the world. His gift is shown by the way in which he
accepts such a character, throws it into some situation, or
apprehends it in some delicate pause of life, in which for a
moment it becomes ideal. In the poem entitled Le Byron de nos
Jours, in his Dramatis Personae, we have a single moment of
passion thrown into relief after this exquisite fashion. Those two
jaded Parisians are not intrinsically interesting: they begin to
interest us only [215] when thrown into a choice situation. But to
discriminate that moment, to make it appreciable by us, that we
may "find" it, what a cobweb of allusions, what double and treble
reflexions of the mind upon itself, what an artificial light is
constructed and broken over the chosen situation; on how fine a
needle's point that little world of passion is balanced! Yet, in
spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central
motive. We receive from it the impression of one imaginative
tone, of a single creative act.
To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of
painting, with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but
significant detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and
backgrounds. To produce them in a pre-eminent degree requires
all the resources of poetry, language in its most purged form, its
remote associations and suggestions, its double and treble lights.
These appliances sculpture cannot command. In it, therefore, not
the special situation, but the type, the general character of the
subject to be delineated, is all-important. In poetry and painting,
the situation predominates over the character; in sculpture, the
character over the situation. Excluded by the proper limitation of
its material from the development of exquisite situations, it has to
choose from a select number of types intrinsically interesting--
interesting, that is, independently of any special situation into
which they may be thrown. Sculpture [216] finds the secret of its
power in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive
lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by
abstracting from it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the
simple effect upon us of the supreme types of humanity, all traces
in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges
away.