characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every
direction it is a law of restraint. It keeps passion always below
that degree of intensity at which it must necessarily be transitory,
never winding up the features to one note of anger, or desire, or
surprise. In some of the feebler allegorical designs of the middle
age, we find isolated qualities portrayed as by so many masks; its
religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed immovably into
blank types of placid reverie. Men and women, again, in the
hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one absorbing
motive, from which it is said death sets their features free. All
such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the
Hellenic ideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It
allows passion to play lightly over the surface of the individual
form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity, its depth
and repose. To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of
the gods will ever have something of insipidity.
[217] Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility
has been stirred, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion ever
kept in reserve, and very seldom committed to any definite
action. Endless as are the attitudes of Greek sculpture, exquisite
as is the invention of the Greeks in this direction, the actions or
situations it permits are simple and few. There is no Greek
Madonna; the goddesses are always childless. The actions
selected are those which would be without significance, except in
a divine person--binding on a sandal or preparing for the bath.
When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is
most often represented as just finished, so that eager expectancy
is excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of
the Python, or of Venus with the apple of Paris already in her
hand. The Laocoon, with all that patient science through which it
has triumphed over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a
period in which sculpture has begun to aim at effects legitimate,
because delightful, only in painting.
The hair, so rich a source of expression in painting, because,
relatively to the eye or the lip, it is mere drapery, is withdrawn
from attention; its texture, as well as its colour, is lost, its
arrangement but faintly and severely indicated, with no broken or
enmeshed light. The eyes are wide and directionless, not fixing
anything with their gaze, nor riveting the brain to any special
[218] external object, the brows without hair. Again, Greek
sculpture deals almost exclusively with youth, where the
moulding of the bodily organs is still as if suspended between
growth and completion, indicated but not emphasised; where the
transition from curve to curve is so delicate and elusive, that
Winckelmann compares it to a quiet sea, which, although we
understand it to be in motion, we nevertheless regard as an image
of repose; where, therefore, the exact degree of development is so
hard to apprehend. If a single product only of Hellenic art were
to be saved in the wreck of all beside, one might choose perhaps
from the "beautiful multitude" of the Panathenaic frieze, that line
of youths on horseback, with their level glances, their proud,
patient lips, their chastened reins, their whole bodies in exquisite
service. This colourless, unclassified purity of life, with its
blending and interpenetration of intellectual, spiritual, and
physical elements, still folded together, pregnant with the
possibilities of a whole world closed within it, is the highest
expression of the indifference which lies beyond all that is
relative or partial. Everywhere there is the effect of an awaking,
of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these effects are united in a
single instance--the adorante of the museum of Berlin, a youth
who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted and open,
in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image of a
man as he springs first from the sleep of nature, his white light
[219] taking no colour from any one-sided experience. He is
characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the
accidental influences of life.
"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of
divine and human forms was pre-eminently at home in Greece.
In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece
cannot be conceived from a central point, unless one brings, as a
key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of
sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers,
as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the artistic point of
view. For those who act, as well as those who create and think,
have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic character.
They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their
own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and
moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. The
age of Pericles was rich in such characters; Pericles himself,
Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophocles, Thucydides also, Xenophon
and Socrates, each in his own order, the perfection of one
remaining undiminished by that of the others. They are ideal
artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of
art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the
gods. Of this modelling also are those bodily works of art, the
victors in the Olympic games; yes! and even Phryne, who, as the
most beautiful of women, [220] ascended naked out of the water,
in the presence of assembled Greece."
This key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann
possessed in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical
antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere.
To the criticism of that consummate Greek modelling he brought
not only his culture but his temperament. We have seen how
definite was the leading motive of that culture; how, like some
central root-fibre, it maintained the well-rounded unity of his life
through a thousand distractions. Interests not his, nor meant for
him, never disturbed him. In morals, as in criticism, he followed
the clue of instinct, of an unerring instinct. Penetrating into the
antique world by his passion, his temperament, he enunciated no
formal principles, always hard and one-sided. Minute and
anxious as his culture was, he never became one-sidedly self-
analytical. Occupied ever with himself, perfecting himself and
developing his genius, he was not content, as so often happens
with such natures, that the atmosphere between him and other
minds should be thick and clouded; he was ever jealously
refining his meaning into a form, express, clear, objective. This
temperament he nurtured and invigorated by friendships which
kept him always in direct contact with the spirit of youth. The
beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty: the statues of
the gods had the least traces of sex. [221] Here there is a moral
sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a
true beauty and significance of its own.
One result of this temperament is a serenity--Heiterkeit--which
characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of
Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative
quality: it is the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or
shame. With the sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the
pagan manner; and what is implied in that? It has been
sometimes said that art is a means of escape from "the tyranny of
the senses." It may be so for the spectator: he may find that the
spectacle of supreme works of art takes from the life of the senses
something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for the
spectator only because the artist, in producing those works, has
gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous
form. He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like
that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more
immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal to sense
has interest for him. How could such an one ever again endure
the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is
satisfied as he watches the escape of the sensuous elements from
his conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches
in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again
into the fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion in [222] the
sensuous was, religiously, at least, indifferent. Greek
sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the conscience: it is
shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other hand,
discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has from time to time
provoked into strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism to
itself, of the artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness.--I did
but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine
hand, and lo! I must die.--It has sometimes seemed hard to
pursue that life without something of conscious disavowal of a
spiritual world; and this imparts to genuine artistic interests a
kind of intoxication. From this intoxication Winckelmann is free:
he fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no
sense of shame or loss. That is to deal with the sensuous side of
art in the pagan manner.
The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at
unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward
world, the more we may be inclined to regret that he should ever
have passed beyond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the
blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world
about us. But if he was to be saved from the ennui which ever
attaches itself to realisation, even the realisation of the perfect
life, it was necessary that a conflict should come, that some
sharper note should grieve the existing harmony, and the spirit
chafed by it beat out at last only a larger and profounder music.
[223] In Greek tragedy this conflict has begun: man finds himself
face to face with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how such a
conflict may be treated with serenity, how the evolution of it may
be a spectacle of the dignity, not of the impotence, of the human
spirit. But it is not only in tragedy that the Greek spirit showed
itself capable of thus bringing joy out of matter in itself full of
discouragements. Theocritus too strikes often a note of romantic
sadness. But what a blithe and steady poise, above these
discouragements, in a clear and sunny stratum of the air!
Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann did not enter.
Supreme as he is where his true interest lay, his insight into the
typical unity and repose of the highest sort of sculpture seems to
have involved limitation in another direction. His conception of
art excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently and
serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world of exquisite
but abstract and colourless form, he could hardly have conceived
of the subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque art of the
modern world. What would he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor
Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of
Fantine in the first part of Les Misérables, penetrated as those
books are with a sense of beauty, as lively and transparent as that
of a Greek? Nay, a sort of preparation for the romantic temper is
noticeable even within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, [224]
which for his part Winckelmann failed to see. For Greek religion
has not merely its mournful mysteries of Adonis, of Hyacinthus,
of Demeter, but it is conscious also of the fall of earlier divine
dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Oceanus to Poseidon.
Around the feet of that tranquil Olympian family still crowd the
weary shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world. The
placid minds even of Olympian gods are troubled with thoughts
of a limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession.
Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of those divine
forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of
the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the pale, medieval
artists. That high indifference to the outward, that impassivity,
has already a touch of the corpse in it: we see already Angelico
and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. The
suppression of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the
ascetic interest, may be even now foreseen. Those abstracted
gods, "ready to melt out their essence fine into the winds," who
can fold up their flesh as a garment, and still remain themselves,
seem already to feel that bleak air, in which like Helen of Troy,
they wander as the spectres of the middle age.
Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest,
native in the human soul, reasserted its claims. But Christian art
was still dependent on pagan examples, building the [225] shafts
of pagan temples into its churches, perpetuating the form of the
basilica, in later times working the disused amphitheatres as
stone quarries. The sensuous expression of ideas which
unreservedly discredit the world of sense, was the delicate
problem which Christian art had before it. If we think of
medieval painting, as it ranges from the early German schools,
still with something of the air of the charnel-house about them, to
the clear loveliness of Perugino, we shall see how that problem
was solved. In the very "worship of sorrow" the native blitheness
of art asserted itself. The religious spirit, as Hegel says, "smiled
through its tears." So perfectly did the young Raphael infuse that
Heiterkeit, that pagan blitheness, into religious works, that his
picture of Saint Agatha at Bologna became to Goethe a step in
the evolution of Iphigenie.* But in proportion as the gift of
smiling was found once more, there came also an aspiration
towards that lost antique art, some relics of which Christian art
had buried in itself, ready to work wonders when their day came.
The history of art has suffered as much as any history by
trenchant and absolute divisions. Pagan and Christian art are
sometimes harshly opposed, and the Renaissance is represented
as a fashion which set in at a definite period. That is the
superficial view: the deeper view is that which preserves the
identity of European culture. [226] The two are really continuous;
and there is a sense in which it may be said that the Renaissance
was an uninterrupted effort of the middle age, that it was ever
taking place. When the actual relics of the antique were restored
to the world, in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if an
ancient plague-pit had been opened. All the world took the
contagion of the life of nature and of the senses. And now it was
seen that the medieval spirit too had done something for the new
fortunes of the antique. By hastening the decline of art, by
withdrawing interest from it and yet keeping unbroken the thread
of its traditions, it had suffered the human mind to repose itself,
that when day came it might awake, with eyes refreshed, to those
ancient, ideal forms.
The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an
intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground. For,
after all, he is infinitely less than Goethe; and it is chiefly because
at certain points he comes in contact with Goethe, that criticism
entertains consideration of him. His relation to modern culture is
a peculiar one. He is not of the modern world; nor is he wholly
of the eighteenth century, although so much of his outer life is
characteristic of it. But that note of revolt against the eighteenth
century, which we detect in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann.
Goethe illustrates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure,
its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism,
[227] in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty--that
marriage of Faust and Helena, of which the art of the nineteenth
century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe
conceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in
harness as for victory," his brows bound with light.* Goethe
illustrates, too, the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic
element; and that element, in its true essence, was made known to
him by Winckelmann.
Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks of
Hellenic culture. Is such culture a lost art? The local, accidental
colouring of its own age has passed from it; and the greatness that
is dead looks greater when every link with what is slight and
vulgar has been severed. We can only see it at all in the
reflected, refined light which a great education creates for us.
Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, perplexed light of
modern life?
Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims,
its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many
preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of
unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it
was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet,
not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.
It is this which Winckelmann imprints on the imagination of
[228] Goethe, at the beginning of life, in its original and simplest
form, as in a fragment of Greek art itself, stranded on that
littered, indeterminate shore of Germany in the eighteenth
century. In Winckelmann, this type comes to him, not as in a
book or a theory, but more importunately, because in a passionate
life, in a personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern
interests, ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern
thought, he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal problem of
culture--balance, unity with one's self, consummate Greek
modelling.
It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of
the water, by perfection of bodily form, or any joyful union with
the external world: the shadows had grown too long, the light too
solemn, for that. It could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or
Pheidias, by the direct exercise of any single talent: amid the
manifold claims of our modern intellectual life, that could only
have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's Hellenism was
of another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the
completeness and serenity, of a watchful, exigent intellectualism.
Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben:--is Goethe's
description of his own higher life; and what is meant by life in
the whole--im Ganzen? It means the life of one for whom, over
and over again, what was once precious has become indifferent.
Every one who aims at the life of culture is met by many forms of
it, arising out [229] of the intense, laborious, one-sided
development of some special talent. They are the brightest
enthusiasms the world has to show: and it is not their part to
weigh the claims which this or that alien form of genius makes
upon them. But the proper instinct of self-culture cares not so
much to reap all that those various forms of genius can give, as to
find in them its own strength. The demand of the intellect is to
feel itself alive. It must see into the laws, the operation, the
intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that
it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles
with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets
each fall back into its place, in the supreme, artistic view of life.
With a kind of passionate coldness, such natures rejoice to be
away from and past their former selves, and above all, they are
jealous of that abandonment to one special gift which really
limits their capabilities. It would have been easy for Goethe,
with the gift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him. It
comes easily and naturally, perhaps, to certain "other-worldly"
natures to be even as the Schöne Seele, that ideal of gentle
pietism, in Wilhelm Meister: but to the large vision of Goethe,
this seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all round,
and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge the
commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics
may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we [230]
mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves
culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental
knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect
the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.
But Goethe's culture did not remain "behind the veil": it ever
emerged in the practical functions of art, in actual production.
For him the problem came to be:--Can the blitheness and
universality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic
productions, which shall contain the fulness of the experience of
the modern world? We have seen that the development of the
various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the
thoughts of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation
of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed,
emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic
depth and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have
their fortune in the modern world.
Let us understand by poetry all literary production which attains
the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its
matter. Only in this varied literary form can art command that
width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it to deal
with the conditions of modern life. What modern art has to do in
the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life,
so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit. [231] And what does
the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom.
That naïve, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will
to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can
never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have
so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. The
chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning itself
is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral
order. For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological
personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather
a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic
system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a
network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the
central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in
these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an
equivalent for the sense of freedom? Certainly, in Goethe's
romances, and even more in the romances of Victor Hugo, we
have high examples of modern art dealing thus with modern life,
regarding that life as the modern mind must regard it, yet
reflecting upon it blitheness and repose. Natural laws we shall
never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still
something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we
watch their fatal combinations. In those romances of Goethe and
Victor Hugo, in some excellent work done after them, this [232]
entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation,
in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for
themselves a supreme Dénouement. Who, if he saw through all,
would fret against the chain of circumstance which endows one at
the end with those great experiences?
1867.
NOTES
189. +Liddell and Scott definition: "late in learning, late to learn."
190. *Words of Charlotte Corday before the Convention.
191. +Pindar, Odes Book O., poem 10, line 99. E-text editor's
translation: "beautiful in appearance, and blended with the fresh
spring of youth..."
194. + +Transliteration: philosophêsas pote met' erôtos. Translation:
"Seeking knowledge alongside love."
209. +Symposium, Chapter 4, section 11, line 3. E.C. Marchant,
Xenophontis opera omnia, vol. 2, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1921 (repr. 1971).
225. *Italiänische Reise. Bologna, 19 Oct. 1776.
227. *Faust, Th. ii. Act. 3.
CONCLUSION*
Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chorei kai ouden menei.+