correspondence between the partly mythical ornaments imaginatively
enlarged of the heroic age, and a world of actual handicrafts. In
the shield of Hercules another marvellous detail is added in the
image of Perseus, very daintily described as hovering in some
wonderful way, as if really borne up by wings, above the surface.
And that curious, haunting sense of magic in art, which comes out
over and over again in Homer--in the golden maids, for instance, who
assist Hephaestus in his work, and similar details which seem at
first sight to destroy the credibility of the whole picture, and make
of it a mere wonder-land--is itself also, rightly understood, a
testimony to a real excellence in the art of Homer's time. It is
sometimes said that works of art held to be miraculous are always of
an inferior kind; but at least it was not among those who thought
them inferior that the belief in their miraculous power began. If
the golden images move like living creatures, and the armour of
Achilles, so [205] wonderfully made, lifts him like wings, this again
is because the imagination of Homer is really under the stimulus of
delightful artistic objects actually seen. Only those to whom such
artistic objects manifest themselves through real and powerful
impressions of their wonderful qualities, can invest them with
properties magical or miraculous.
I said that the inherent usefulness of the material of metal-work
makes the destruction of its acquired form almost certain, if it
comes into the possession of people either barbarous or careless of
the work of a past time. Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a
fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat
visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and more or less make
substitution; and of the finer work of the heroic age, thus dimly
discerned as an actual thing, we had at least till recently almost
nothing. Two plates of bronze, a few rusty nails, and certain rows
of holes in the inner surface of the walls of the "treasury" of
Mycenae, were the sole representatives of that favourite device of
primitive Greek art, the lining of stone walls with burnished metal,
of which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey is the ideal picture,
and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen House at Sparta, adorned in
the interior with a coating of reliefs in metal, a later, historical
example. Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture, that
"treasury," [206] a building so imposing that Pausanias thought it
worthy to rank with the Pyramids, is a sufficient illustration.
Treasury, or tomb, or both (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed
still to find enjoyment in the costly armour, goblets, and mirrors
laid up there), this dome-shaped building, formed of concentric rings
of stones gradually diminishing to a coping-stone at the top, may
stand as the representative of some similar buildings in other parts
of Greece, and of many others in a similar kind of architecture
elsewhere, constructed of large many-sided blocks of stone, fitted
carefully together without the aid of cement, and remaining in their
places by reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the general
tendency to use vast blocks of stone for the jambs and lintels of
doors, for instance, and in the construction of gable-shaped
passages; two rows of such stones being made to rest against each
other at an acute angle, within the thickness of the walls.
So vast and rude, fretted by the action of nearly three thousand
years, the fragments of this architecture may often seem, at first
sight, like works of nature. At Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, the skeleton
of the old architecture is more complete. At Mycenae the gateway of
the acropolis is still standing with its two well-known sculptured
lions--immemorial and almost unique monument of primitive Greek
sculpture--supporting, herald-wise, a symbolical pillar on the [207]
vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The heads are gone, having
been fashioned possibly in metal by workmen from the East. On what
may be called the façade, remains are still discernible of inlaid
work in coloured stone, and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs
of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible. Connect them with
those metal war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole
grandiose character of the place, as it may really have been. Shut
within the narrow enclosure of these shadowy citadels were the
palaces of the kings, with all that intimacy which we may sometimes
suppose to have been alien from the open-air Greek life, admitting,
doubtless, below the cover of their rough walls, many of those
refinements of princely life which the Middle Age found possible in
such places, and of which the impression is so fascinating in Homer's
description, for instance, of the house of Ulysses, or of Menelaus at
Sparta. Rough and frowning without, these old châteaux of the Argive
kings were delicate within with a decoration almost as dainty and
fine as the network of weed and flower that now covers their ruins,
and of the delicacy of which, as I said, that golden flower on its
silver stalk or the golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might be taken as
representative. In these metal-like structures of self-supporting
polygons, locked so firmly and impenetrably together, with the whole
mystery of the reasonableness [208] of the arch implicitly within
them, there is evidence of a complete artistic command over weight in
stone, and an understanding of the "law of weight." But over weight
only; the ornament still seems to be not strictly architectural, but,
according to the notices of Homer, tectonic, borrowed from the
sister arts, above all from the art of the metal-workers, to whom
those spaces of the building are left which a later age fills with
painting, or relief in stone. The skill of the Asiatic comes to
adorn this rough native building; and it is a late, elaborate,
somewhat voluptuous skill, we may understand, illustrated by the
luxury of that Asiatic chamber of Paris, less like that of a warrior
than of one going to the dance. Coupled with the vastness of the
architectural works which actually remain, such descriptions as that
in Homer of the chamber of Paris and the house of Alcinous furnish
forth a picture of that early period--the tyrants' age, the age of
the acropoleis, the period of great dynasties with claims to "divine
right"' and in many instances at least with all the culture of their
time. The vast buildings make us sigh at the thought of wasted human
labour, though there is a public usefulness too in some of these
designs, such as the draining of the Copaic lake, to which the backs
of the people are bent whether they will or not. For the princes
there is much of that selfish personal luxury which is a constant
trait of feudalism in [209] all ages. For the people, scattered over
the country, at their agricultural labour, or gathered in small
hamlets, there is some enjoyment, perhaps, of the aspect of that
splendour, of the bright warriors on the heights--a certain share of
the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in those tombs and
dwellings. Some surmise, also, there seems to have been, of the
"curse" of gold, with a dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities
for cruelty in the command over those skilful artificers in metal--
some ingenious rack or bull "to pinch and peel"--the tradition of
which, not unlike the modern Jacques Bonhomme's shudder at the old
ruined French donjon or bastille, haunts, generations afterwards, the
ruins of those "labyrinths" of stone, where the old tyrants had their
pleasures. For it is a mistake to suppose that that wistful sense of
eeriness in ruined buildings, to which most of us are susceptible, is
an exclusively modern feeling. The name Cyclopean, attached to those
desolate remains of buildings which were older than Greek history
itself, attests their romantic influence over the fancy of the people
who thus attributed them to a superhuman strength and skill. And the
Cyclopes, like all the early mythical names of artists, have this
note of reality, that they are names not of individuals but of
classes, the guilds or companies of workmen in which a certain craft
was imparted and transmitted. The Dactyli, the Fingers, are the
[210] first workers in iron; the savage Chalybes in Scythia the first
smelters; actual names are given to the old, fabled Telchines--
Chalkon, Argyron, Chryson--workers in brass, silver, and gold,
respectively.+ The tradition of their activity haunts the several
regions where those metals were found. They make the trident of
Poseidon; but then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's
instrument, the tunny-fork. They are credited, notwithstanding, with
an evil sorcery, unfriendly to men, as poor humanity remembered the
makers of chains, locks, Procrustean beds; and, as becomes this dark
recondite mine and metal work, the traditions about them are gloomy
and grotesque, confusing mortal workmen with demon guilds.
To this view of the heroic age of Greek art as being, so to speak, an
age of real gold, an age delighting itself in precious material and
exquisite handiwork in all tectonic crafts, the recent extraordinary
discoveries at Troy and Mycenae are, on any plausible theory of their
date and origin, a witness. The aesthetic critic needs always to be
on his guard against the confusion of mere curiosity or antiquity
with beauty in art. Among the objects discovered at Troy--mere
curiosities, some of them, however interesting and instructive--the
so-called royal cup of Priam, in solid gold, two-handled and double-
lipped, (the smaller lip designed for the host and his libation, the
larger for the guest,) has, in the [211] very simplicity of its
design, the grace of the economy with which it exactly fulfils its
purpose, a positive beauty, an absolute value for the aesthetic
sense, while strange and new enough, if it really settles at last a
much-debated expression of Homer; while the "diadem," with its
twisted chains and flowers of pale gold, shows that those profuse
golden fringes, waving so comely as he moved, which Hephaestus
wrought for the helmet of Achilles, were really within the compass of
early Greek art.
And the story of the excavations at Mycenae reads more like some
well-devised chapter of fiction than a record of sober facts. Here,
those sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in
dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for every one, are more
than fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings, lying in the
splendour of their crowns and breastplates of embossed plate of gold;
their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their sides, as in some
feudal monument; their very faces covered up most strangely in golden
masks. The very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with gold-
dust--the heavy gilding fallen from some perished kingly vestment; in
another was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this
profusion of thin fine fragments, were rings, bracelets, smaller
crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for ornaments of
dresses, and that golden flower on a silver stalk--all of pure, [212]
soft gold, unhardened by alloy, the delicate films of which one must
touch but lightly, yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into
wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undulating arms
appearing frequently.
It is the very image of the old luxurious life of the princes of the
heroic age, as Homer describes it, with the arts in service to its
kingly pride. Among the other costly objects was one representing
the head of a cow, grandly designed in gold with horns of silver,
like the horns of the moon, supposed to be symbolical of Here, the
great object of worship at Argos. One of the interests of the study
of mythology is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of the
people who conceived it; and this religion of Here, the special
religion of Argos, is congruous with what has been here said as to
the place of art in the civilisation of the Argives; it is a
reflexion of that splendid and wanton old feudal life. For Here is,
in her original essence and meaning, equivalent to Demeter--the one
living spirit of the earth, divined behind the veil of all its
manifold visible energies. But in the development of a common
mythological motive the various peoples are subject to the general
limitations of their life and thought; they can but work outward what
is within them; and the religious conceptions and usages, ultimately
derivable from one and the same rudimentary instinct, are sometimes
most diverse. Out of [213] the visible, physical energies of the
earth and its system of annual change, the old Pelasgian mind
developed the person of Demeter, mystical and profoundly aweful, yet
profoundly pathetic, also, in her appeal to human sympathies. Out of
the same original elements, the civilisation of Argos, on the other
hand, developes the religion of Queen Here, a mere Demeter, at best,
of gaudy flower-beds, whose toilet Homer describes with all its
delicate fineries; though, characteristically, he may still allow us
to detect, perhaps, some traces of the mystical person of the earth,
in the all-pervading scent of the ambrosial unguent with which she
anoints herself, in the abundant tresses of her hair, and in the
curious variegation of her ornaments. She has become, though with
some reminiscence of the mystical earth, a very limited human person,
wicked, angry, jealous--the lady of Zeus in her castle-sanctuary at
Mycenae, in wanton dalliance with the king, coaxing him for cruel
purposes in sweet sleep, adding artificial charms to her beauty.
Such are some of the characteristics with which Greek art is
discernible in that earliest age. Of themselves, they almost answer
the question which next arises--Whence did art come to Greece? or was
it a thing of absolutely native growth there? So some have decidedly
maintained. Others, who lived in an age possessing little or no
knowledge of Greek monuments anterior to the full development of art
under [214] Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek sculpture of
the age of Pheidias, were like people criticising Michelangelo,
without knowledge of the earlier Tuscan school--of the works of
Donatello and Mino da Fiesole--easily satisfied themselves with
theories of its importation ready-made from other countries. Critics
in the last century, especially, noticing some characteristics which
early Greek work has in common, indeed, with Egyptian art, but which
are common also to all such early work everywhere, supposed, as a
matter of course, that it came, as the Greek religion also, from
Egypt--that old, immemorial half-known birthplace of all wonderful
things. There are, it is true, authorities for this derivation among
the Greeks themselves, dazzled as they were by the marvels of the
ancient civilisation of Egypt, a civilisation so different from their
own, on the first opening of Egypt to Greek visitors. But, in fact,
that opening did not take place till the reign of Psammetichus, about
the middle of the seventh century B.C., a relatively late date.
Psammetichus introduced and settled Greek mercenaries in Egypt, and,
for a time, the Greeks came very close to Egyptian life. They can
hardly fail to have been stimulated by that display of every kind of
artistic workmanship gleaming over the whole of life; they may in
turn have freshened it with new motives. And we may remark, that but
for the peculiar usage of Egypt concerning the tombs of the dead, but
[215] for their habit of investing the last abodes of the dead with
all the appurtenances of active life, out of that whole world of art,
so various and elaborate, nothing but the great, monumental works in
stone would have remained to ourselves. We should have experienced
in regard to it, what we actually experience too much in our
knowledge of Greek art--the lack of a fitting background, in the
smaller tectonic work, for its great works in architecture, and the
bolder sort of sculpture.
But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval parallel, monuments
illustrative of the earlier growth of Greek art before the time of
Pheidias have come to light, and to a just appreciation. They show
that the development of Greek art had already proceeded some way
before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks, and point, if to a foreign
source at all, to oriental rather than Egyptian influences; and the
theory which derived Greek art, with many other Greek things, from
Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once
old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of
matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is
really new in a new organism is the new cohering force--the mode of
life,--so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements
are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the
elements, for instance, of its peculiar national [216] architecture.
Yet all is also emphatically autochthonous, as the Greeks said,
new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit
playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all,
with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man--the dignity
of his soul and of his body--so that in all things the Greeks are
as discoverers. Still, the original and primary motive seems,
in matters of art, to have come from without; and the view to which
actual discovery and all true analogies more and more point is that
of a connexion of the origin of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria,
proximately with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly
through Cyprus--an original connexion again and again re-asserted,
like a surviving trick of inheritance, as in later times it came
in contact with the civilisation of Caria and Lycia, old affinities
being here linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition, of
which one representative is the Ionic style of architecture,
traceable all through Greek art--an Asiatic curiousness, or poikilia,+
strongest in that heroic age of which I have been speaking, and
distinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more than others;
and always in appreciable distinction from the more clearly defined
and self-asserted Hellenic influence. Homer himself witnesses to the
intercourse, through early, adventurous commerce, as in the bright
and animated picture with which [217] the history of Herodotus
begins, between the Greeks and Eastern countries. We may, perhaps,
forget sometimes, thinking over the greatness of its place in the
history of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how
short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of
Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and
Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all
sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction
and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was
right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants
superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and
perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and
with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by
the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris--an element which the
austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will
one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands,
is, then, a bond of union, not a barrier; and we must think of
Greece, as has been rightly said, as its whole continuous shore.
The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the heroic age, so far
as we can discern them, are those also of Phoenician art, its delight
in metal among the rest, of metal especially as an element in
architecture, the covering of everything with plates of metal. It
was from [218] Phoenicia that the costly material in which early
Greek art delighted actually came--ivory, amber, much of the precious
metals. These the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return
for the mussel which contained the famous purple, in quest of which
they penetrated far into all the Greek havens. Recent discoveries
present the island of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper-
work in ancient times, as the special mediator between the art of
Phoenicia and Greece; and in some archaic figures of Aphrodite with
her dove, brought from Cyprus and now in the British Museum--objects
you might think, at first sight, taken from the niches of a French
Gothic cathedral--are some of the beginnings, at least, of Greek
sculpture manifestly under the influence of Phoenician masters. And,
again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic facts. It is
through Cyprus that the religion of Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to
Greece. Here, in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred
elements of mythological tradition, above all with the beautiful old
story of Pygmalion, in which the thoughts of art and love are
connected so closely together. First of all, on the prows of the
Phoenician ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euploea, the
protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus--to Cythera; it is in this
simplest sense that she is, primarily, Anadyomene.+ And her
connexion [219] with the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus
her worship is connected with an architecture, not colossal, but full
of dainty splendour--the art of the shrine-maker, the maker of
reliquaries; the art of the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the
Homeric hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in which we
have seen to be characteristic of the true Homer.
And now we see why Hephaestus, that crook-backed and uncomely god, is
the husband of Aphrodite. Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as
fire he is flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous contest
between Achilles and the river Xanthus in the twenty-first book of
the Iliad, he intervenes in favour of the hero, as mere fire against
water. But he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of the
functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively representative of
one only of its aspects, its function, namely, in regard to early
art; he becomes the patron of smiths, bent with his labour at the
forge, as people had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly
developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. That the god of
fire becomes the god of all art, architecture included, so that he
makes the houses of the gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite,
marks a threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a
peculiar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful metal-work, with
[220] which he is bound and bent; secondly, the connexion of this,
through Aphrodite, with an almost wanton personal splendour; the
connexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia, whence,
literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is the "spiritual form" of
the Asiatic element in Greek art.