ATHENS—THE MUSEUMS—THE TOMBS.
Nothing is more melancholy and more disappointing than the first view of
the Athenian museums. Almost every traveller sees them after passing
through Italy, where everything—indeed far too much—has been done to make
the relics of antiquity perfect and complete. Missing noses, and arms, and
feet have been restored; probable or possible names have been assigned to
every statue; they are set up, generally, in handsome galleries, with
suitable decoration; the visitor is provided with full descriptive
catalogues. Nothing of all this is found in Greece. The fragments are
merely sorted: many of the mutilated statues are lying prostrate, and, of
course, in no way restored. Everything is, however, in process of being
arranged. But there is room to apprehend that in fifty years things will
still be found changing their places, and still in process of being
arranged. It is not fair to complain of these things in a nation which is
fully occupied with its political and commercial development, and where
new classical remains are constantly added to the museums. Every nerve is
being strained by the Greeks to obtain their proper rights in the possible
break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Great efforts are, besides, being made to
develop not only the ports, but the manufactures of the country. The
building of new roads is more vital to the nation than the saving and
ordering of artistic remains. Thus we must trust to private enterprise and
generosity to settle these things; and these have hitherto not been
wanting among the Greeks. But their resources are small, and they require
help both in money and in sympathy. So, then, unless foreign influences be
continuously brought to bear,—all the foreign schools act unselfishly at
their own expense,—I fear that all of us who visit Athens will be doomed
to that first feeling of disappointment.
But I am bound to add that every patient observer who sets to work in
spite of his disappointment, and examines with honest care these “disjecta
membra” of Attic art—any one who will replace in imagination the tips of
noses—any one who will stoop over lying statues, and guess at the context
of broken limbs—such an observer will find his vexation gradually changing
into wonder, and will at last come to see that all the smoothly-restored
Greek work in Italian museums is not worth a tithe of the shattered
fragments in the real home and citadel of pure art. This is especially
true of the museum on the Acropolis. It is, however, also true of the
other museums, and more obviously true of the reliefs upon the tombs. The
assistance of an experienced Athenian antiquary is also required, who
knows his way among the fragments, and who can tell the history of the
discovery, and the theories of the purport of each. There are a good many
men of ability and learning connected with the University of Athens, who
describe each object in the antiquarian papers as it is discovered. But
when I asked whether I could buy or subscribe to any recognized organ for
such information, I was told (as I might have expected) that no single
paper or periodical was so recognized. Clashing interests and personal
friendships determine _where_ each discovery is to be announced; so that
often the professedly archæological journals contain no mention of such
things, while the common daily papers secure the information.
Here, again, we feel the want of some stronger government—some despotic
assertion of a law of gravitation to a common centre—to counteract the
strong centrifugal forces acting all through Greek society. The old
_autonomy_ of the Greeks—that old assertion of local independence which
was at once their greatness and their ruin—this strong instinct has lasted
undiminished to the present day. They seem even now to hate pulling
together, as we say. They seem always ready to assert their individual
rights and claims against those of the community or the public. The old
Greeks had as a safeguard their divisions into little cities and
territories; so that their passion for autonomy was expended on their city
interests, in which the individual could forget himself. But as the old
Greeks were often too selfish for this, and asserted their personal
autonomy against their own city, so the modern Greek, who has not this
safety-valve, finds it difficult to rise to the height of acting in the
interests of the nation at large; and though he converses much and
brilliantly about Hellenic unity, he generally allows smaller interests to
outweigh this splendid general conception. I will here add a most annoying
example of this particularist feeling, which obtrudes itself upon every
visitor to Athens. The most trying thing in the streets is the want of
shade, and the consequent glare of the houses and roadway. Yet along every
street there are planted pepper-trees of graceful growth and of delicious
scent. But why are they all so wretchedly small and bare? Because each
inhabitant chooses to hack away the growing branches in front of his own
door. The Prime Minister, who deplored this curious Vandalism, said he was
powerless to check it. Until, however, the Athenians learn to control
themselves, and let their trees grow, Athens will be an ugly and
disagreeable city.
So, then, the Greeks will not even agree to tell us where we may find a
complete list of newly-discovered antiquities. Nor, indeed, does the
Athenian public care very much, beyond a certain vague pride, for such
things, if we except one peculiar kind, which has taken among them
somewhat the place of old china among us. There have been found in many
Greek cemeteries—in Megara, in Cyrene, and of late in great abundance and
excellence at Tanagra, in Bœotia—little figures of terra cotta, often
delicately modelled and richly colored both in dress and limbs. These
figures are ordinarily from eight to twelve inches high, and represent
ladies both sitting and standing in graceful attitudes, young men in
pastoral life, and other such subjects. I was informed that some had been
found in various places through Greece, but the main source of them—and a
very rich source—is the Necropolis at Tanagra. There are several
collections of these figures on cup-boards and in cabinets in private
houses at Athens, all remarkable for the marvellous modernness of their
appearance. The graceful drapery of the ladies especially is very like
modern dress, and many have on their heads flat round hats, quite similar
in design to the gipsy hats much worn among ladies of late years. But
above all, the hair was drawn back from the forehead, not at all in what
is considered Greek style, but rather_ à __l’__ Eugénie_, as we used to
say when we were young. Many hold in their hands large fans, like those
which we make of peacocks’ feathers. No conclusive theory has yet been
started, so far as I know, concerning the object or intention of these
figures. So many of them are female figures, that it seems unlikely they
were portraits of the deceased; and the frequent occurrence of two figures
together, especially one woman being carried by another, seems almost to
dissuade us from such a theory. They seem to be the figures called _Κόραι_
by many old Greeks, which were used as toys by children, and, perhaps, as
ornaments. The large class of tradesmen who made them were called
_Κορόπλαθοι_, and were held in contempt by real sculptors. Most of them
are, indeed, badly modelled, and evidently the work of ignorant tradesmen.
If it could be shown that they were only found in the graves of children,
it would be a touching sign of that world-wide feeling among the human
race, to bury with the dead friend whatever he loved and enjoyed in his
life on earth, that he might not feel lonely in his cold and gloomy
grave.(19) But it seems unlikely that this limitation can ever be proved.
There is an equal difficulty as to their age. The Greeks say that the
tombs in which they are found are not later than the second century B. C.,
and it is, indeed, hard to conceive at what later period there was enough
wealth and art to produce such often elegant, and often costly, results.
Tanagra and Thespiæ were, indeed, in Strabo’s day (lib. ix. 2) the only
remaining cities of Bœotia; the rest, he says, were but ruins and names.
But we may be certain that in that time of universal decay the remaining
towns must have been as poor and insignificant as they now are. Thus, we
seem thrown back into classical or Alexandrian days for the origin of
these figures, which in their bright coloring—pink and blue dresses, often
gilded fringes, the hair always fair, so far as I could find—are, indeed,
like what we know of old Greek statuary, but in other respects
surprisingly modern.(20) If their antiquity can be strictly demonstrated,
it will but show another case of the versatility of the Greeks in all
things relating to art: how, with the simplest material, and at a long
distance from the great art centres, they produced a type of exceeding
grace and refinement totally foreign to their great old models, varying in
dress, attitude—in every point of style—from ordinary Greek sculpture, and
anticipating much of the modern ideals of beauty and elegance.
But it is necessary to suspend our judgment, and wait for further and
closer investigation. The workmen at Tanagra are now forbidden to sell
these objects to private fanciers; and in consequence, their price has
risen so enormously, that those in the market, if of real elegance and
artistic merit, cannot be obtained for less than from £40 to £60. As much
as 2000 francs has been paid for one, when they were less common. From
this price downward they can still be bought in Athens, the rude and badly
finished specimens being cheap enough. The only other method of procuring
them, or of procuring them more cheaply, is to make diligent inquiries
when travelling in the interior, where they may often be bought from poor
people, either at Megara, Tanagra, or elsewhere, who have chanced to find
them, and are willing enough to part with them after a certain amount of
bargaining.
It is convenient to dispose of this peculiar and distinct kind of Greek
antiquities, because they seem foreign to the rest, and cannot be brought
under any other head. These figurines have now found their way into most
European museums.(21)
I pass to the public collections at Athens, in which we find few of these
figures, and which rather contain the usual products of Greek plastic
art—statues, reliefs, as well as pottery, and inscriptions. As I have
said, the statues are in the most lamentable condition, shattered into
fragments, without any attempt at restoring even such losses as can be
supplied with certainty. What mischief might be done by such wholesale
restoration as was practised in Italy some fifty years ago, it is hard to
say. But perhaps the reaction against that error has driven us to an
opposite extreme.
There is, indeed, one—a naked athlete, with his cloak hanging over the
left shoulder, and coiled round the left forearm—which seems almost as
good as any strong male figure which we now possess. While it has almost
exactly the same treatment of the cloak on the left arm which we see in
the celebrated Hermes of the Vatican,(22) the proportions of the figure
are nearer the celebrated _Discobolus_ (numbered 126, Braccio Nuovo).
There are two other copies at Florence, and one at Naples. These
repetitions point to some very celebrated original, which the critics
consider to be of the older school of Polycletus, and even imagine may
possibly be a copy of his _Doryphorus_, which was called the _Canon_
statue, or model of the perfect manly form. The Hermes has too strong a
likeness to Lysippus’s _Apoxyomenos_ not to be recognized as of the newer
school. What we have, then, in this Attic statue seems an intermediate
type between the earlier and stronger school of Polycletus and the more
elegant and newer school of Lysippus in Alexander’s day.
There can, however, be no doubt that it does not date from the older and
severer age of sculpture, of which Phidias and Polycletus were the highest
representatives. Any one who studies Greek art perceives how remarkably
not only the style of dress and ornament, but even the proportions of the
figure change, as we come down from generation to generation in the long
line of Greek sculptors. The friezes of Selinus (now at Palermo), and
those of Ægina (now in Munich), which are among our earliest classical
specimens, are remarkable for short, thick-set forms. The men are men five
feet seven, or, at most, eight inches high, and their figures are squat
even for that height. In the specimens we have of the days of Phidias and
Polycletus these proportions are altered. The head of the _Doryphorus_, if
we can depend upon our supposed copies, is still heavy, and the figure
bulky, though taller in proportion. He looks a man of five feet ten inches
at least. The statue we are just considering is even taller, and is like
the copies we have of Lysippus’s work, the figure apparently of a man of
six feet high; but his head is not so small, nor is he so slender and
light as this type is usually found.
It is not very easy to give a full account of this change. There is, of
course, one general reason well known—the art of the Greeks, like almost
all such developments, went through stiffness and clumsiness into dignity
and strength, to which it presently added that grace which raises strength
into majesty. But in time the seeking after grace becomes too prominent,
and so strength, and with it, of course, the majesty which requires
strength as well as grace, is gradually lost. Thus we arrive at a period
when the forms are merely elegant or voluptuous, without any assertion of
power. I will speak of a similar development among female figures in
connection with another subject which will naturally suggest it.
This can only be made plain by a series of illustrations. Of course, the
difficulty of obtaining really archaic statues was very great.(23) They
were mostly sacred images of the gods, esteemed venerable and interesting
by the Greeks, but seldom copied. Happily, the Romans, when they set
themselves to admire and procure Greek statues, had fits of what we now
call pre-Raphaelitism—fits of admiration for the archaic and devout, even
if ungraceful, in preference to the more perfect forms of later art.
Hence, we find in Italy a number of statues which, if not really archaic,
are at least _archaistic_, as the critics call it—imitations or copies of
archaic statues. With these we need now no longer be content. And we may
pause a moment on the question of archaic Greek art, because, apart from
the imitations of the time of Augustus and Hadrian, we had already some
really genuine fragments in the little museum in the Acropolis—fragments
saved, not from the present Parthenon, but rather from about the ruins of
the older Parthenon. This temple was destroyed by the Persians, and the
materials were built into the surrounding wall of the Acropolis by the
Athenians, when they began to strengthen and beautify it at the opening of
their career of dominion and wealth. The stains of fire are said to be
still visible on these drums of pillars now built into the fortification,
and there can be no doubt of their belonging to the old temple, as it is
well attested.(24) But I do not agree with the statement that these older
materials were so used in order to nurse a perpetual hatred against the
Persians in the minds of the people, who saw daily before them the
evidence of the ancient wrong done to their temples.(25) I believe this
sentimental twaddle to be quite foreign to all Greek feeling. The
materials were used in the wall because they were unsuitable for the newer
temples, and because they must otherwise be greatly in the way on the
limited surface of the Acropolis.
A fair specimen of the old sculptures first found is a very stiff, and, to
us, comical figure, which has lost its legs, but is otherwise fairly
preserved, and which depicts a male figure with curious conventional hair,
and still more conventional beard, holding by its four legs a bull or
calf, which he is carrying on his shoulders. The eyes are now hollow, and
were evidently once filled with something different from the marble of
which the statue is made. The whole pose and style of the work is stiff
and expressionless, and it is one of the most characteristic remains of
the older Attic art still in existence.
Happily there is little doubt what the statue means. It is the votive
offering of the Marathonians, which Pausanias saw in the Acropolis, and
which commemorated the legend of Theseus having driven the wild bull, sent
against them by Minos, from Marathon to the Acropolis, where he sacrificed
it. Pausanias does not say how Theseus was represented with the bull; but
it certainly was not a group—such a thing is clearly beyond the narrow and
timid conceptions of the artists of that day. It being difficult to
represent this hero and bull together except by representing the man
carrying the bull, the artist has made the animal full grown in type, but
as small as a calf, and has, of course, not attempted any expression of
hostility between the two. The peaceful look, which merely arises from the
inability of the artist to render expression, has led many good art
critics to call it not a Theseus but a Hermes. Such being the obscure
history of the statue, it is not difficult to note its characteristics. We
see the conventional treatment of the hair, the curious transparent
garments lying close to the skin, and the very heavy muscular forms of the
arms and body. The whole figure is stiff and expressionless, and strictly
in what is called the hieratic or old religious style, as opposed to an
ideal or artistic conception.
There are two full-length reliefs—one which I first saw in a little church
near Orchomenus, and a couple more at Athens in the Theseon—which are
plainly of the same epoch and style of art. The most complete Athenian one
is ascribed as the stele of Aristion, and as the work of Aristocles,(26)
doubtless an artist known as contemporary with those who fought at the
battle of Marathon. Thus we obtain a very good clue to the date at which
this art flourished. There is also the head of a similar figure, with the
hair long and fastened in a knot behind, and with a discus raised above
the shoulder, so as to look like a nimbus round the head, which is one of
the most interesting objects in the Varvakion. But of the rest the
pedestal only is preserved. Any impartial observer will see in these
figures strong traces of the influence of Asiatic style. This influence
seems about as certain, and almost as much disputed, as the Egyptian
influences on the Doric style of architecture. To an unbiassed observer
these influences speak so plainly, that, in the absence of strict
demonstration to the contrary, one feels bound to admit them—the more so,
as we know that the Greeks, like all other people of genius, were ever
ready and anxious to borrow from others. It should be often repeated,
because it is usually ignored, that it is a most original gift to know how
to borrow; and that those only who feel wanting in originality are anxious
to assert it. Thus the Romans, who borrowed without assimilating, are
always asserting their originality; the Greeks, who borrowed more and
better, because they made what they borrowed their own, never care to do
so. The hackneyed parallel of Shakespeare will occur to all.
Unfortunately, the museums of Athens show us but few examples of the
transition state of art between this and the perfect work of Phidias’s
school. The Æginetan marbles are less developed than Phidias’s work; but
from the relief of Aristion, and the Theseus of the Acropolis, to these,
is a wide gulf in artistic feeling. The former is the work of children
shackled by their material, still more by conventional rules; the latter
the work of men. There is also the well-known Apollo of Thera; a similar
Apollo found at Athens, with very conventional curls, and now in the
National Museum; and two or three small sitting statues of Athene which,
though very archaic, begin to approach the grace of artistic sculpture.
But Italy is sufficiently rich in imitations of this very period. There
are four very remarkable statues in a small room of the Villa Albani, near
Rome, which are not photographed, because the public would, doubtless,
think them bad art, but which, could I procure copies and reproduce them,
would illustrate clearly what I desire. We have also among the bronzes
found at Pompeii statues precisely of this style, evidently copies from
old Greek originals, and made to satisfy the pre-Raphaelitism (as I have
already called it) of Italian amateurs. I select a bronze Artemis as an
interesting example of this antiquarian taste in a later age. The
statuette maintains in the face the very features which we think so
comical when looking at the relief of Aristion, or the women of the
Acropolis. They are, no doubt, softened and less exaggerated, but still
they are there. The so-called Greek profile is not yet attained. The
general features of the old Greek face in monuments were a retreating
forehead, a peaked nose, slightly turned up at the end, the mouth drawn
in, and the corners turned up, flat elongated eyes (especially full in the
profiles of reliefs), a prominent angular chin, lank cheeks, and high
ears. These lovely features can be found on hundreds of vases, because,
vase-making being rather a trade than an art, men kept close to the old
models long after great sculptors and painters had, like Polygnotus, begun
to depart from the antique stiffness of the countenance.(27) The Artemis
in question has, however, these very features, which are very clear when
we can see her in profile. But the head-dress and draping are elaborate,
and though formal and somewhat rigid, not wanting in grace. The pose of
the arms is stiff, and the attitude that of a woman stepping forward,
which is very usual in archaic figures—I suppose because it enlarged the
base of the statue, and made it stand more firmly in its place. The
absence of any girdle or delaying fold in the garments is one of the most
marked contrasts with the later draping of such figures.
But now at last we can show the reader how far the antiquarians of later
days were able to imitate archaic sculpture. Another characteristic
archaic statue was one of the seventeen found in 1885–86 on the
Acropolis,(28) where they had been piled together with portions of pillars
and other stones to extend the platform for new buildings. The style and
the mutilation of all these statues, which, from their uniform type, are
more probably votive offerings than sacred images, point to their being
the actual statues which the Persians overthrew when ravaging the
Acropolis (480 B. C.). They were so broken and spoiled that the Athenians,
when restoring and rebuilding their temples, determined to use them for
rubbish. Thus we have now a perfectly authentic group of works showing us
the art of the older Athens before the Persian Wars. They are each made of
several pieces of marble, apparently Parian, dowelled together like wooden
work, and the figure here reproduced has a bronze pin protruding from the
head, apparently to hold a nimbus or covering of metal. They were all
richly colored, as many traces upon them still show.(29)
Let us now leave this archaic art and go to the street of tombs, where we
can find such specimens as the world can hardly equal, and in such
condition as to be easily intelligible. A good many of these tombs, and
some of them very fine, have lately been removed to the National Museum,
where they are no doubt safer, and more easily studied and compared,
though there is something lost in not having them upon their original
site, with some at least of their original surroundings. What I have said
of the museums is, even so, disappointing, as indeed it should be, if the
feelings of the visitor are to be faithfully reproduced. But I must not
fail to add, before turning to other places, that in inscriptions these
museums are very rich, as well as also in Attic vases, and lamps, and
other articles of great importance in our estimate of old Greek life. The
professors of the University have been particularly diligent in
deciphering and explaining the inscriptions, and with the aid of the
Germans, who have collected, and are still collecting, these scattered
documents in a complete publication, we are daily having new light thrown
upon Greek history. Thus Kohler has been able from the recovered Attic
tribute-lists to construct a map of the Athenian maritime empire with its
dependencies, which tells the student more in five minutes than hours of
laborious reading. The study of vases and lamps is beyond my present
scope; and the former so wide and complicated a subject, that it cannot be
mastered without long study and trouble.(30)
I pass, therefore, from the museums to the street of tombs, which
Thucydides tells us to find in the fairest suburb of the city, as we go
out westward towards the groves of Academe, and before we turn slightly to
the south on our way to the Peiræus. Thucydides has described with some
care the funeral ceremonies held in this famous place, and has composed
for us a very noble funeral oration, which he has put in the mouth of
Pericles.(31) It is with this oration, probably the finest passage in
Thucydides’s great history, in our minds, that we approach the avenue
where the Athenians laid their dead. We have to pass through the poorest
portion of modern Athens, through wretched _bazaars_ and dirty markets,
which abut upon the main street. Amid all this squalor and poverty, all
this complete denial of art and leisure, there are still features which
faintly echo old Greek life. There is the bright color of the dresses—the
predominance of white, and red, and blue, of which the old Athenians were
so fond; and there is among the lowest classes a great deal of that
striking beauty which recalls to us the old statues. More especially in
the form of the head, and in the expression, of the children, we see types
not to be found elsewhere in Europe, and which, if not derived from
classical Greece, are at all events very beautiful.
We then come on to the railway station, which is, indeed, in this place,
as elsewhere, very offensive. With its grimy smoke, its shrill sounds, and
all its other hard unloveliness, it is not a meet neighbor for the tombs
of the old Greeks, which are close to it on all sides.
They lie—as almost all old ruins do—far below the present level of the
ground, and have, therefore, to be exhumed by careful digging. When this
has been done they are covered with a rude door, to protect their
sculptured face; and when I first saw them were standing about, without
any order or regularity, close to the spots where they had been found.
A proper estimate of these tombs cannot be attained without appreciating
the feelings with which the survivors set them up. And we must consider
not only the general attitude of Greek literature on the all-important
question of the state of man after death, but also the thousands of
inscriptions upon tombs, both with and without sculptured reliefs, if we
will form a sure opinion about the feelings of the bereaved in these
bygone days.
We know from Homer and from Mimnermus that in the earlier periods, though
the Greeks were unable to shake off a belief in life after death, they
could not conceive that state as anything but a shadowy and wretched echo
of the real life upon earth. It was a gloomy existence, burdened with the
memory of lost happiness and the longing for lost enjoyment. To the
Homeric Greeks death was a dark unavoidable fate, without hope and without
reward. It is, indeed, true that we find in Pindar thoughts and
aspirations of a very different kind. We have in the fragments of his
poetry more than one passage asserting the rewards of the just, and the
splendors of a future life far happier than that which we now enjoy. But,
notwithstanding these noble visions, such high expectation laid no hold
upon the imagination of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, we are told,
soon ceased to be popular, and his visions are but a streak of light amid
general gloom. The kingdom of the dead in Æschylus is evidently, as in
Homer, but a weary echo of this life, where honor can only be attained by
the pious service of loving kinsfolk, whose duty paid to the dead affects
him in his gloomier state, and raises him in the esteem of his
less-remembered fellows. Sophocles says nothing to clear away the night;
nay rather his deepest and maturest contemplation regards death as the
worst of ills to the happy man—a sorry refuge to the miserable. Euripides
longs that there may be no future state; and Plato only secures the
immortality of the soul by severing it from the person—the man, and all
his interests.
It is plain, from this evidence, that the Greeks must have looked upon the
death of those they loved with unmixed sorrow. It was the final parting,
when all the good and pleasant things are remembered; when men seek, as it
were, to increase the pang, by clothing the dead in all his sweetest and
dearest presence. But this was not done by pompous inscriptions, or by a
vain enumeration of all the deceased had performed—inscriptions which,
among us, tell more of the vanity than of the grief of the survivors. The
commonest epitaph was a simple _χαῖρε_, or farewell; and it is this single
word, so full and deep in its meaning to those who love, which is pictured
in the tomb reliefs. They are simple parting scenes, expressing the grief
of the survivors, and the great sadness of the sufferer, who is going to
his long home.
Nevertheless, what strikes us forcibly in these remarkable monuments is
the chastened modest expression of sorrow which they display. There is no
violence, no despair, no extravagance—all is simple and noble; thus
combining purity of art with a far deeper pathos—a far nobler grief—than
that of the exaggerated paintings and sculptures which seek to express
mourning in later and less cultivated ages.(32) We may defy any art to
produce truer or more poignant pictures of real sorrow—a sorrow, as I have
explained, far deeper and more hopeless than any Christian sorrow; and yet
there is no wringing of hands, no swooning, no defacing with sackcloth and
ashes.(33) Sometimes, indeed, as in the celebrated tomb of Dexileos, a
mere portrait of the dead in active life was put upon his tomb, and
private grief would not assert itself in presence of the record of his
public services.
[Illustration: A Tomb from the Via Sacra, Athens]
I know not that any other remnants of Greek art bring home to us more
plainly one of its eternal and divine features—or shall I rather say, one
of its eternal and human features?—the greatest, if not the main feature,
which has made it the ever new and ever lasting lawgiver to men in their
efforts to represent the ideal.
If I am to permit myself any digression whatever, we cannot do better than
conclude this chapter with some reflections on this subject, and we may
therefore turn, by suggestion of the Athenian tombs, to a few general
remarks on the _reserve_ of Greek art—I mean the reserve in the displaying
emotion, in the portraying of the fierce outbursts of joy or grief; and
again, more generally, the reserve in the exhibiting of peculiar or
personal features, passing interests, or momentary emotions.
In a philosophy now rather forgotten than extinct, and which once
commanded no small attention, Adam Smith was led to analyze the indirect
effects of _sympathy_, from which, as a single principle, he desired to
deduce all the rules of ethics. While straining many points unduly, he
must be confessed to have explained with great justice the origin of good
taste or tact in ordinary life, which he saw to be the careful watching of
the interest of others in our own affairs, and the feeling that we must
not force upon them what concerns ourselves, except we are sure to carry
with us their active sympathy. Good breeding, he says, consists in a
delicate perception how far this will go, and in suppressing those of our
feelings which, though they affect _us_ strongly, cannot be expected to
affect in like manner our neighbor, whose sympathy should be the measure
and limit of our outspokenness. There can be no doubt that whatever other
elements come in, this analysis is true, so far as it goes, and recommends
itself at once to the convictions of any educated man. The very same
principle applies still more strongly and universally in art. As tragedy
is bound to treat ideal griefs and joys of so large and broad a kind that
every spectator may merge in them his petty troubles, so ideal sculpture
and painting are only ideal so far as they represent those large and
eternal features in human nature which must always command the sympathy of
every pure human heart.
Let us dispose at once of an apparent exception—the mediæval pictures of
the Passion of Christ, and the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Here the artist
allowed himself the most extreme treatment, because the objects were
necessarily the centre of the very highest sympathy. No expression of the
grief of Christ could be thought exaggerated in the Middle Ages, because
in this very exaggeration lay the centre point of men’s religion. But when
no such object of universal and all-absorbing sympathy can be found (and
there was none such in pagan life), then the Greek artist must attain by
his treatment of the object what the Christian artist obtained by the
object itself. Assuming, then, a mastery over his material, and sufficient
power of execution, the next feature to be looked for in Greek art, and
especially in Greek sculpture, is a certain modesty and reserve in
expression, which will not portray slight defects in picturing a man, but
represent that eternal or ideal character in him which remains in our
memory when he is gone. Such, for example, is the famous portrait-statue
of Sophocles.
Such are also all that great series of ideal figures which meet us in the
galleries of ancient art. They seldom show us any violent emotion; they
are seldom even in so special an attitude that critics cannot interpret it
in several different ways, or as suitable to several myths. It is not
passing states of feeling, but the eternal and ideal beauty of human
nature, which Greek sculpture seeks to represent; and for this reason it
has held its sway through all the centuries which have since gone by. This
was the calm art of Phidias, and Polycletus, and Polygnotus, in sentiment
not differing from the rigid awkwardness of their predecessors, but in
mastery of proportions and of difficulties attaining the grace in which
the others had failed. To this general law there are, no doubt,
exceptions, and perhaps very brilliant ones; yet they are exceptions, and
even in them, if we consider them attentively, we can see the universal
features and the points of sympathy for all mankind. But if the appeal for
sympathy is indeed overstrained, then, however successful in its own
society and its own social atmosphere, the work of art loses power when
offered to another generation. Thus Euripides, though justly considered in
his own society the most tragic of poets, has for this very reason ceased
to appeal to us as Æschylus still appeals. For Æschylus kept within the
proper bounds dictated by the reserve of art; Euripides often did not, and
his work, though great and full of genius, suffered accordingly.
It seems to me that the tombs before us are remarkable as exemplifying,
with the tact of genius, this true and perfect reserve. They are simple
pictures of the grief of parting—of the recollection of pleasant days of
love and friendship—of the gloom of the unknown future. But there is no
exaggeration, nor speciality—no individuality, I had almost said—in the
picture. I feel no curiosity to inquire who these people are—what were
their names—even what was the relationship of the deceased.(34) For I am
perfectly satisfied with an ideal portrait of the grief of parting—a grief
that comes to us all, and lays bitter hold of us at some season of life;
and it is this universal sorrow—this great common flaw in our lives—which
the Greek artist has brought before us, and which calls forth our deepest
sympathy. There will be future occasion to come back upon this
all-important feature in connection with the _action_ in Greek sculpture,
and even with the draping of their statues—in all of which the calm and
chaste reserve of the better Greek art contrasts strangely with the
Michael Angelos, and Berninis, and Canovas, of other days; nay, even with
the Greek sculpture of a no less brilliant but less refined age.
But, in concluding this digression, I will call attention to a modern
parallel in the portraiture of grief, and of grief at final parting. This
parallel is not a piece of sculpture, but a poem, perhaps the most
remarkable poem of our generation—the _In Memoriam_ of Lord Tennyson.
Though written from personal feeling, and to commemorate a special
person—Arthur Hallam—whom some of us even knew, has this poem laid hold of
the imagination of men strongly and lastingly owing to the poet’s special
loss? Certainly not. I do not even think that this great dirge—this
magnificent funeral poem—has excited in most of us any strong interest in
Arthur Hallam. In fact, any other friend of the poet’s would have suited
the general reader equally well as the exciting cause of a poem, which we
delight in because it puts into great words the ever-recurring and
permanent features in such grief—those dark longings about the future;
those suggestions of despair, of discontent with the providence of the
world, of wild speculation about its laws; those struggles to reconcile
our own loss, and that of the human race, with some larger law of wisdom
and of benevolence. To the poet, of course, his own particular friend was
the great centre point of the whole. But to us, in reading it, there is a
wide distinction between the personal passages—I mean those which give
family details, and special circumstances in Hallam’s life, or his
intimacy with the poet—and the purely poetical or artistic passages, which
soar away into a region far above all special detail, and sing of the
great gloom which hangs over the future, and of the vehement beating of
the human soul against the bars of its prison house, when one is taken,
and another left, not merely at apparent random, but with apparent
injustice and damage to mankind. Hence, every man in grief for a lost
friend will read the poem to his great comfort, and will then only see
clearly what it means; and he will find it speak to him specially and
particularly, not in its personal passages, but in its general features;
in its hard metaphysics; in its mystical theology; in its angry and
uncertain ethics. For even the commonest mind is forced by grief out of
its commonness, and attacks the world-problems, which at other times it
has no power or taste to approach.
By this illustration, then, the distinction between the universal and the
personal features of grief can be clearly seen; and the reader will admit
that, though it would be most unreasonable to dictate to the poet, or to
imagine that he should have omitted the stanzas which refer specially to
his friend, and which were to him of vital importance, yet to us it is no
loss to forget that name and those circumstances, and hold fast to the
really eternal (and because eternal, really artistic) features, in that
very noble symphony—shall I say of half-resolved discords, or of suspended
harmonies, which faith may reconcile, but which reason can hardly analyze
or understand?(35)
Within a few minutes’ walk of these splendid records of the dead, the
traveller who returns to the town across the Observatory Hill will find a
very different cemetery. For here he suddenly comes up to a long cleft in
the rock, running parallel with the road below, and therefore quite
invisible from it. The rising ground towards the city hides it equally
from the Acropolis, and accordingly from all Athens. This gorge, some two
hundred yards long, sixty wide, and over thirty feet deep, is the
notorious _Barathrum_, the place of execution in old days; the place where
criminals were cast out, and where the public executioner resided. It has
been falsely inferred by the old scholiasts that the Athenians cast men
alive into the pit. It is not nearly deep enough now to cause death in
this way, and there seems no reason why its original depth should have
been diminished by any accumulation of rubbish, such as is common on
inhabited sites. “Casting into the Barathrum” referred rather to the
refusing the rights of burial to executed criminals—an additional
disgrace, and to the Greeks a grave additional penalty. Honor among the
dead was held to follow in exact proportion to the continued honors paid
by surviving friends.
Here, then, out of view of all the temples and hallowed sites of the city,
dwelt the public slave, with his instruments of death, perhaps in a cave
or grotto, still to be seen in the higher wall of the gorge, and situated
close to the point where an old path leads over the hill towards the city.
Plato speaks of young men turning aside, as they came from Peiræus, to see
the dead lying in charge of this official; and there must have been times
in the older history of Athens when this cleft in the rock was a place of
carnage and of horror. The gentler law of later days seems to have felt
this outrage on human feeling, and instead of casting the dead into the
Barathrum, it was merely added to the sentence that the body should not be
buried within the boundaries of Attica. Yet, though the _Barathrum_ may
have been no longer used, the accursed gate (_ἱερὰ πύλη_) still led to it
from the city, and the old associations clung about its gloomy seclusion.
Even in the last century, the Turks, whether acting from instinct, or led
by old tradition, still used it as a place of execution.
In the present day, all traces of this hideous history have long passed
away, and I found a little field of corn waving upon the level ground
beneath, which had once been the _Aceldama_ of Athens. But even now there
seemed a certain loneliness and weirdness about the place—silent and
deserted in the midst of thoroughfares, hidden from the haunts of men, and
hiding them from view by its massive walls. Nay, as if to bring back the
dark memories of the past, great scarlet poppies stained the ground in
patches as it were with slaughter, and hawks and ravens were still
circling about overhead, as their ancestors did in the days of blood;
attached, I suppose, by hereditary instinct to this fatal place, “for
where the carcase is, there shall the eagles be gathered together.”