Amid the superficialities and struggles of the world around us, it is refreshing to turn back for a moment to the mellow wisdom of Matthew Arnold; and I will start with a quotation from Literature and Dogma: ‘As well imagine a man with a sense for sculpture not cultivating it by the help of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the Bible.’ To Arnold the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art, are the great and eternal classics, which for all time must be the stimulus and the models for the greatest of human achievements. Beyond doubt in the fifty years since Arnold wrote there has been a marked drift away from classics of every kind. To acknowledge classics at all seems a survival of the spirit of aristocracy. We are convinced that we are better than our fathers, and must break away from their tutelage. In some degree this arises out of the unrest and nervous strain produced by the great war. But it does not come only from nervous tension. It is a definite tendency of society, which has to be considered on its merits by all who feel called on to take a share in the world movement. We cannot ignore those who are drifting away from the settled anchorages, or we run the risk of being ignored ourselves.

The task has fallen to me to try to give reasons why Greek art has still a claim on our attention. Among Englishmen the appreciation of art never has been and never can be as keen as the appreciation of poetry and philosophy. But on the other hand I think it can be shown that in the field of art our debt to Greece is even greater than in the field of philosophy and poetry. For in these latter we have a certain national genius, and have produced classics recognized through Europe. But in art our achievements have been but moderate; and at the present time a living sense of art is probably rarer among us than in any highly civilized country except America.

I will begin with a bold assertion, which I hope to justify as we proceed. But for ancient Greece, the art of Europe would to-day be on much the same level as the fantastic and degraded art of India. And but for the continued influence of Greek art, that of Europe would continually be in danger of drifting into chaotic extravagance.

In the century before the Persian wars of 500-480 B. C., Greece, both Ionian and Dorian, was throwing out fresh shoots of life in every direction, breaking through the crust of archaic convention, producing a new standard of excellence, in poetry, in philosophy, in history, and in art. In every province, morals, intellect, imagination, Greece was striking out, to the right and the left. And in the century after the Persian wars, she reaped the full harvest of her splendid sowing, and produced the masterpieces which have remained ever since memorable, to the study of which each generation recurs, and whence it learns of what human nature is capable.

After 400 B. C. there was not, as many suppose, a sudden decline in the quality of artistic production. Many of the works of the later centuries were in their way almost unsurpassable. The philosophy of Aristotle, the poetry of Theocritus, such statues as the Aphrodite of Melos and the Victory of Samothrace, are great lights for all time. But the works of maturity have seldom the charm which marks those which are full of the optimism and promise of youth.

Ruskin has written an admirable work on the Seven Lamps of Architecture, a work which, though it sometimes passes into extravagance, is full of suggestion and even inspiration. It seems to me strange that while the economic views of Ruskin, full of generosity, but also wanting in measure and any basis of fact, should still be current among us, his writings on art, in which his genius had full course, should be comparatively neglected. However that may be, as one who has been greatly stimulated by those writings, I propose to try to produce a faint echo of one of them by speaking successively of the lamps of Greek art, lamps which give us light and serve to show our way. I find in Greek art eight notable features: (1) Humanism, (2) Simplicity, (3) Balance and Measure, (4) Naturalism, (5) Idealism, (6) Patience, (7) Joy, (8) Fellowship.

As my space is closely limited I cannot attempt to develop the subject of Greek art in all its provinces and in all its bearings. I must limit myself to the art of sculpture, the most characteristic branch, and the only branch which has left us sufficient materials for the formation of a satisfactory notion. And I must limit myself further to such of the sculpture as represents the human form. In the representation of some animals, such as the horse, the later Greeks produced some wonderful examples, but in the depiction of animals other peoples have rivalled them, whereas in the depiction of men and women they stand alone.

I

Humanism. Three great discoveries lay open to the awakened spirit of man, when he began to realize and reflect upon his surroundings. The first was the discovery of God, which was mainly the work of the Prophets of Israel, though no doubt Greece added much on the intellectual side; and the religions both of Judaea and Greece were carried to a higher point by Christianity. The second was the discovery of man himself, which was in all essentials the great work of Greek thinkers and writers. The third, begun in Greece, has been carried very much farther in modern times, the discovery of nature and her laws. I think that reflection will show that of the three discoveries the last is the least important, for though it has vastly changed the habits and the surroundings of mankind, and has offered him long vistas of material progress, yet it has not changed his nature much, nor added greatly to his happiness. We know how the delights of thought, of art, of poetry and music have overcome barbarism and given to multitudes a new pleasure in existence. But the results of scientific progress have not as yet done all that we might have hoped for mankind. Every great discovery in physical science has been turned, primarily, not to the welfare but to the destruction of mankind. The ocean-going ship is tracked by the submarine; air-ships are used to drop bombs on defenceless cities, some of the most notable achievements of chemistry are poison-gases. We may of course hope that this is but a passing phase, and that brighter times are before us. But I venture to suggest that the true road to progress cannot be found unless we preserve the Jewish and the Greek points of view. We must not lose sight of the ethical and religious bearing of science, and not be content with merely regarding it as a means of exploiting the material world. Instead of harnessing the forces of nature to true human ends, to happiness, we have allowed them to be used for any purpose, moral or immoral, by any one who by cunning or pushing has gained control of them. We have dehumanized the world, and allowed it to ride rough shod over human life.

The discovery of man and his capacities, then, is the great gift of Greece to the world. There were epics before the Iliad, but no epic full of charm, of tragedy, of tears and laughter. There were philosophers before Socrates; but they were busied in trying to find the physical constituents of the world. Socrates took up the motto of Delphi ‘Know thyself’, and became the progenitor of all who study the nature of duty and of happiness. In the same way there was much art in the world before the rise of Greece, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Crete. But it was not a humanist art. It represented the worship of the Gods, battles, and sieges, the life of the fields. But the human figures in these scenes were conventional: there was nothing in them to stir the finer feelings, to produce a love of beauty, to raise man above the ordinary daily level. The Greeks knew of earlier works of art; but they declined to be seduced, as the Phoenicians and Etruscans were seduced, into a facile imitation of them. They realized, no doubt subconsciously rather than consciously, that they were called to set forth a new and human art, and had in them powers which could produce it. They began a process which developed with astonishing rapidity, and which cannot cease, unless, as seems now not impossible, barbarism reinvades a weary world.

‘Man is the measure of all things’ is the doctrine ascribed to Protagoras of Abdera, which shocked the people of Athens and is attacked by Plato in his more constructive mood. It is a doctrine lending itself to abuse, and still more to caricature; but it is really the teaching of Socrates no less than of Protagoras; and it has held its own from his times to those of the Utilitarians and Pragmatists. Certainly it is at the basis of the Greek view of life, in which man with his feelings, his faculties, and his endeavours, stands in the foreground, and all else appears as a vague background.

It was quite natural that as the Greek thinkers interpreted all experience in relation to human powers and faculties, so the artists of Greece thought of all nature in terms of the human body. Thus while the stern monotheism of later Israel absolutely prohibited the representation in art of any living thing, and especially of man, Greek artists entirely devoted themselves to such representation.

The great result of the working of the spirit of humanism in Greek art was the representation of the Gods in human form. There is still prevalent among us a survival of the Jewish hatred of the representation of the divine element in the world by the mimetic art of sculpture. We still repeat, day by day, the Jewish commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image’. Now I am not going to find any fault with the intense feeling of iconoclasm, which was one of the mainsprings of Jewish religion. I have no doubt that in the development of that religion, hatred and contempt for the idols of the surrounding nations was of inestimable value to the race. The struggle, ever renewed, against the invasion of idolatry was necessary to the development of that pure prophetic religion which it was the highest mission of the Jewish race to set forth and propagate in the world. I would not even speak against the echoes of it in the modern world. To the Moslems of our days, as to the ancient Jews, it appears to be a necessary corollary of any lofty and spiritual conception of the divine. And when we read of the destruction of religious images by our Puritan ancestors we cannot withhold from them an inner sympathy. The hatred of images was one side of the pure and passionate belief in spiritual religion which it was the mission of the great Reformers to revive and propagate in Europe.

But it is possible to appreciate this side of religion without being blind to other aspects of it. Our religion comes not only from Judaea, but also from Greece. The Jewish passion for the divine righteousness lies at its roots. But that passion is consistent with narrowness, bigotry, inhumanity. For the modifications of it which come from the working of the spirit of humanism we have to turn to the Hellenes, for the feeling of the likeness in nature between God and man, the love of the beauty of the created works of God, the joy in whatever is sweet, whatever is comely, whatever is charming. The beauty and majesty of God appealed to the Greek, as the unapproachable transcendence of God inspired the Jew.

So it fell to the Greek artists to try to set forth in marble and in bronze the gentler and more social side of the divine nature. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of Maximus of Tyre: ‘The Greek custom is to represent the Gods by the most beautiful things on earth—pure material, the human form, consummate art. The idea of those who make divine images in human shape is quite reasonable, since the spirit of man is nearest of all things to God and most godlike.’

The whole history of Greek sculpture, from its rise in the sixth century to its decline in the third, is inspired by this desire to represent the divine by the most beautiful things on earth. The sculpture of the great nations of the East, Egypt and Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human. The gods appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women. And to distinguish them from mortal beings, the artists of the East proceed in the manner of symbolism: they make additions to the human types which are to signify the divine attributes, but do not really embody them. They add wings to represent the swiftness of the deity, wings not meant for actual flight, but only symbols of rapid motion. They represent them as victoriously overthrowing wild beasts and monsters, which stand for the powers of evil, ever bent on thwarting their action. In some of their most archaic works, the Greeks fall into the imitation of this way. They represent Apollo flanked by two vanquished griffins, Artemis with wings, and holding in her hands captive lions. But their artistic sense soon revolted against such crude and clumsy ways of representation. They began to try to represent the divine character of their deities, not by arbitrary and external symbols, but by modifying the human types in the direction of the ideal. Sometimes, indeed, in later art we find survivals of early symbolism in the form of an attribute. Hermes is still winged, but the wings are transferred to his cap or his boots. Zeus may still carry the thunderbolt, the symbol of his rule over the storm. Apollo may be still radiate, combining human form with the rays which proceed from the visible sun.

But these are only survivals, and do not affect the process, carried on by artist after artist and school after school, by which the gods absorbed ever more fully the qualities of the most perfect manhood. Zeus, as father of gods and men, is an idealization of the human father, combining justice and dignity with benevolence and kindness; Athena becomes the embodiment of the divine reason and wisdom, perhaps the most fully idealized of all the forms of the gods, since this armed and victorious virgin with wisdom seated on her brow had little in common with the secluded and domestic women of her city of Athens. Apollo has not the muscles of the trained athlete, but in his nobleness of countenance and perfect symmetry of shape, he stands for all that a young man might grow towards by self-restraint and aspiration. At a somewhat lower level Herakles bears the form of the wrestler, admirably proportioned but more powerful than even the greatest of athletes; Hermes is the ideal runner, every muscle adapted to swift and lithe movements.

Thus in the types of the gods which were produced when Greek art was at its best we have a series of supermen and superwomen who represent the highest and best to which mortals can hope to attain, types embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as a raising and purifying element.

It was not until the decay of the Olympic religion in the fourth century that these types fell to a lower level. The sense of beauty in the artist remained as keen as ever, the technique of art even improved, but the religion of humanism was debased by less noble tendencies, and the gods took on too much not the nature of man as he might become, but the form of man as he actually is in the world.

Not the forms only of the gods, but the history of their appearances on earth and their dealings with mankind found expression in painting and relief. Plato, as we know, condemned the myths of the gods as unworthy from the ethical point of view. But we shall misjudge myths if we suppose that they were actually believed in, or served to regulate conduct. What they did was greatly to further the picturesqueness and joy of life. And when they became less important in cultus they survived in poetry, and served greatly to temper the harsh prose of actual life. We must remember that some of the Jewish tales which have so much interested and charmed our forefathers are hardly to be defended on strict ethical principles, yet they have been a leavening and widening influence. Who would wish to expel from churches the stories of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and David, on grounds of ethical purism? The life of the many is not so highly decorated that we should wish to expel from it elements so pleasing.

As the Gods tend more and more to take forms beautiful but entirely human, so do the notable features of the landscape, rivers and mountains, sky and sea, take on themselves human shape. Sun and moon, wind and storm, are completely humanized. The society of Olympus, the powers manifested in nature, appear in sculpture as a human society, but of more than human beauty and dignity. And such rendering of the gods leads, as we shall presently see, to an ideal rendering of men. As the gods come down in the likeness of men, so men are raised to the level of the gods. Hence the intrinsic and inexhaustible idealism of Greek sculpture, to which I will presently return.

Few works of art more fully and more attractively show the anthropomorphic tendency of Greek art than the sunrise vase of the British Museum. It shows us the whole morning pageant of nature humanized. On the right appears the sun-god driving a chariot of winged horses, who rise out of the sea. Before him the stars, represented as youths, plunge into the water. To the left is the moon-goddess on horseback, setting behind the hills, on one of which is a mountain-god in an attitude of surprise. Before the sun hurries Eos, the winged dawn, who by a bold citation of mythology is represented as pursuing Cephalus the hunter, of whom she was enamoured. We have the features of the daybreak; but they are all represented not as facts of nature, but in their influence on Gods and men.

I do not figure this vase, as I have already done so in my Principles of Greek Art; but instead I give an almost equally beautiful representation from the lid of a toilet vase in the Sabouroff Collection at Berlin. We have here the same three figures of the sun-god, the moon-goddess, and the winged dawn, who, however, in this case is driving a chariot. The form of the whole group and the radiate symbol in the midst stands admirably for the vault of heaven (Fig. 1).

Another extreme example of anthropomorphism is the embodiment of the sustaining power of the pillar in the so-called Caryatids of the Erechtheum (Fig. 2). Really they are Corae, maidens dedicated to Athena, and willingly in her service bearing up the weight of the architrave of her temple. Possibly the notion is not wholly satisfactory; but if it be tolerated, could it have been more nobly carried out? The square and stalwart form of the women, the mass of hair which strengthens their necks, the easy pose, all make us feel that the task is not beyond their strength or oppressive.

Beside the Greek Caryatid I must be allowed to place a modern version, by Rodin. For the power and the technique of Rodin I have great admiration; but when his works are placed beside those of Greece, we feel at once their inferiority in dignity, in simplicity, in ideality (Fig. 3).

II

The second lamp of Greek art is Simplicity. The artist sees quite clearly what he desires to produce, and sets about producing it without hesitation, without self-consciousness, with no beating about the bush. Of course the more primitive and less conventional a society is, the easier it is for artists to be simple. In a complicated society simplicity and directness are apt to be confused with what is commonplace or even with the foolish. The simplicity of Wordsworth and of Tennyson does sometimes cross the line. The Greeks had the great advantage of coming before other cultivated peoples, so that there was no commonplace to avoid. They could be simple, as the wild rose and the primrose are simple. What could be more simple than the Iliad? The same simplicity marks Greek sculpture. It requires no great exercise of the intellect to understand it. It presents every figure in a clear and unsophisticated way.

As there is no more sure sign of a fine nature than the absence of self-consciousness, so there is no more sure sign of greatness in art than simplicity. The Greeks did not strive to be original, to make people stare, to do the unusual. One of the most usual subjects in Greek relief is a battle between male warriors and Amazons. Such battles adorn many temples. And in every case they are distinctive in style. One could not mistake a group from the temple at Phigaleia for a group from the Mausoleum. And there is no sameness: almost every group has some point or touch of its own, which makes it a variety on the usual theme. One Amazon is falling from her horse, one is asking for quarter, one is following up a retreating foe. But no group is insistent that the passer-by should look at it. The relief was the decoration of a temple; and if its originality drew men’s attention from the temple itself, or from the Deity seated enthroned within, it might justly be accused of impertinence, of exceeding due measure. The sculptor did his best; but he was careful to do nothing which was out of harmony with its surroundings. He sank himself in his work. And even when he was engaged on a more serious substantive work, what he most avoided was the incongruous and unbecoming. He so worked that the attention of the spectator was concentrated not on the character of the workmanship, but on the person or the subject portrayed. The idea which he tried to incorporate in marble or bronze was not his own thought about the subject, but the character which really belonged to it in the mind of the people.

This singleness of purpose is well illustrated by a story about the painter Protogenes. He painted the figure of a Satyr, and beside it, as a trifle, he inserted a partridge. But when he found that admiration for the lifelikeness of the partridge tended to distract the attention of visitors from the main figure, he painted it out.

No doubt simplicity implies limitation. It is not easy in any age to strike the deepest note without some surrender of simplicity. The higher phases of the mental and spiritual life, mysticism, symbolism, and the like are not to be expressed with complete simplicity in any form of art. One cannot deny that the Greek view of life was limited; that the Greeks did not attempt to represent in art the highest aspirations of the soul. It was an entirely perverted ingenuity which sought a generation ago to find mystic meaning in the representations on Greek vases. Attempts to portray the Deities of the Mysteries scarcely count as works of art. Such figures as Sabazius, Isis, Mithras, only come into ancient art in its decadence. I would not maintain that the modern world, with its infinitely varied emotions, or the higher aspirations of religions like the Christian or the Buddhist, could be satisfied with such simple schemes as those of Greek sculpture, which appeal to human instinct and human intelligence rather than to the more recondite emotions. Such emotions, however, in my opinion, do not find any appropriate embodiment in the arts of which I am treating—the graphic and plastic arts. In poetry they have at all times found a noble expression; and in modern days a perhaps still completer expression in music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition. But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little sympathy with the art which has moved most on mystic lines, the art of India, which in such efforts has abandoned the search for beauty, and so given up the really artistic point of view. Mere prettiness no doubt is an unsatisfying ideal: but a loftier beauty, in harmony with the world around us and the soul within us, is another thing.

In order that simplicity may be in the highest degree admirable, it must be combined with two other qualities—intense love of beauty, and the utmost patience in execution. It must not lead on the one side to a mere unideal copy of nature, nor on the other to a hasty and slovenly kind of work.

The figure already mentioned, the Caryatid of the Erechtheum, is a model of perfect simplicity. For further illustration of the quality I have chosen the bronze charioteer from Delphi, and the Artemis from Gabii, now in the Louvre. The former (Fig. 4) is a youth of noble family, clad in the long dress necessary to protect from the wind a man driving a chariot. The latter (Fig. 5), a work of the school of Praxiteles, represents a young girl fastening her dress on her shoulder. Both are as free as they can be from any attempt at novelty or originality: yet no one with any taste could for a moment hesitate to pronounce them admirable. The object of the artist was to make works as perfect as possible. And to that end he goes straight, without any complication, and without the least care that others may have done similar works, against which he must assert originality.

Beside the two figures I have cited I place a more modern group (Fig. 6), also by a man of genius, Peter Vischer. It has the same simplicity and the same care in execution as the Greek works, but in beauty it will not compare with them; and one feels regret that so great an artist should have spent his powers on so unsuitable a subject as the rivets and plates of a suit of armour. The lady, though not without charm, seems artificial and affected beside the exquisite freshness of the girl of Praxiteles.

III

The third lamp of Greek art is Balance and Measure, the recognition of limit and law. This is most obvious in architecture, and especially in its most characteristic production, the temple. The form of the temple, when once established, remained fixed, within certain limits of variation, for all time. A most accomplished writer, M. Boutmy, has admirably shown how all the constituent parts of the temple are related one to the other, how a plan, a consistent rhythm, runs throughout it. Each part has a definite function, which it accomplishes in the simplest and clearest way. The pillars are made simply to support, and their shape and slight decoration is in accordance with that purpose. Their form ensures a maximum of stability. The channeling or fluting carries the eye of the spectator upwards to the capital which swells outwards to support the heavy straight line of the cornice. Above the cornice, the grooves of the triglyphs carry on the lines of fluting from the columns towards the roof. The walls of the temple are not primarily intended to support, but to enclose the sacred cella, and are adorned only at their upper edge, as a curtain might be, with a decorative frieze. The whole building is thought out as a home for the statue of the deity which it encloses; and no part is allowed to adorn itself except in subordination to this general purpose. Like the shells of molluscs or the hives of bees, it is the direct embodiment of an idea, a purpose, only a conscious and reflective, not a merely instinctive purpose.

The sculptural decoration, which is so striking a feature of the temple, is also carefully subordinated to purpose and idea. No part of the structure which bears a strain, if we except one or two early and unsatisfactory experiments, was decorated. The business of column and architrave was to bear weight; and if they were ornate they would seem less well adapted to that purpose. Only in parts of the building which were from the point of view of construction otiose, such as pediment and metope, was the art of the sculptor allowed to play; and even then it was bound to play appropriately to the nature of the deity within and the festivals of which the temple was to be the focus. There was no room for cross-purposes or disturbing thoughts.

This rigidity of form and subordination to reason is as characteristic of Attic tragedies as of temples. It would indeed be possible to work out a close parallel between the two forms of art. But we must return to our immediate subject, sculpture. Temple sculpture exhibits the qualities of balance and measure in the highest degree. In case of the pediment there is a central point, just under the apex, where the dominant figures of the scene portrayed are placed; and on either side of this central figure or group, figure balances figure, until we come to the corners, which are occupied by reclining forms, dying warriors, or river-gods or spectators. In case of the metope, the square field is filled with two or three figures balanced about a central line, a scheme self-contained and harmonious, which may be compared to a geometrical diagram, and carries simplicity to the farthest point.

Rhythm, balance, symmetry are the translation into sculpture of the spirit of discipline and self-control, which the Greeks learned by hard necessity. The civilization of the Ionians in Asia is a brilliant sunrise, an overflowing of the delight in life, in beauty, in the exercise of all the faculties, which for a time dominated Greece itself. And their art was joyous and free. The artists of Ionia invaded Athens in the sixth century, visiting the luxurious court of Peisistratus, and inspiring Peloponnesus, even Sparta, as the excavations of the British School in Athens have abundantly shown. But the Ionians were trodden down under the heavy foot of Persia: excess of freedom and want of cohesion and discipline was their ruin. The Great King of Persia was determined to trample in a like manner on Greece Proper; and he would have succeeded but for the discipline and devotion of the Dorians. It was the Spartans, aided by the brilliant military talent of Miltiades and Themistocles, who saved Greece from slavery. A military caste, like the Templars and Hospitallers of mediaeval Europe, they furnished the backbone of the Greek army and dispersed the hordes of Asia as easily as did the hardy Macedonians of Alexander the Great a century and a half later.

The Athenians, with their quick wits, understood whence came their salvation, and in the early part of the fifth century the tide of Ionian influence was turned back, and Dorian manners, Dorian dress, Dorian art, became dominant from Thessaly to Laconia. It is precisely the Dorian ideas of discipline, of measure, of self-control, which entering into the art of Greece made it a noble and continuous development, instead of a mere brilliant flash. Plato was well aware of the dangers which beset the Athenians from their extreme versatility and want of reverence, and he foresaw how these qualities would in the end destroy the civilization which they had adorned. He so clearly saw this that he was inclined to prefer the conventional and monotonous art of Egypt to the brilliant Greek art of his own time. This is, of course, to carry ethical prejudice to the length of fanaticism, and to transgress the very law of moderation which inspired him. But it was only in his old age that he went thus far.

This careful balance and proportion may be observed, as has often been pointed out, in the designs of Greek vases, where the painted subject not only is in itself a balanced scheme, but is also planned in relation to the shape of the vases themselves. A group suitable to an amphora would look out of place on a drinking cup. And in the cup itself the outside requires a different treatment from the inside. The whole is planned not merely to give free scope to the artist, but to be appropriate, fitting, harmonious. Our first figure well illustrates this thesis.

Even in the case of substantive sculpture, figures or groups made to stand by themselves in market-place or portico, the Greek love of harmony, or as they would have put it, of rhythm and symmetry prevails: ancient critics in those accounts of Greek sculpture, of which fragments have come down to us in the writings of Pliny and Quintilian, lay great stress on these features. They show us that whereas in early art a merely external and mechanical balance had prevailed, in the course of the fifth century this love of order and measure was taken into the very being of art. Pythagoras of Rhegium, whose works are unfortunately lost to us, made great progress in rhythm and symmetry. His contemporaries, Myron and Polycleitus, who carried the athletic art of Peloponnesus almost to its highest point, were celebrated, Myron for the rhythm in motion which he infused into his sculpture, Polycleitus for the careful balance of his athletes and the system of proportion which he embodied in their figures. Pheidias was more essentially ideal than either of these, as we shall presently see, but he also most diligently preserved in the Parthenon and other works a spirit of measure and reasonableness.

Measure and balance in art differ widely from mere convention. ‘Order is Heaven’s first law.’ All fine character is formed, not by following random impulses as they arise, but by making them conform to reason and duty, disciplining them as wild horses are disciplined and taught to serve mankind. Horses indeed may be over-disciplined, and by cruelty all spirit may be taken out of them. And men may be over-disciplined, so that their impulses die away from inanition. The Spartans were over-disciplined; and through constant repression of natural tendencies they became mere machines, and before long died out. But reasonable restraint imposed on strong natural tendencies produces noble results in all spheres of activity.

The same thing is true in art. Measure and discipline do not of course make it easier to produce works of art; for in the nature of the case discipline is at first grievous and is felt as a barrier. But for the production of good and lasting works of art, discipline and law are necessary. Take as an example the art which is simplest, poetry. It is easier to write blank verse than to write sonnets. But it is far easier to write good sonnets than good blank verse, simply because the constant restraint of the form stimulates thought and invention, prevents too great haste, exercises the ingenuity. In the same way the somewhat rigid laws of composition of pediment metope and frieze compelled the Greek artist to think out schemes suitable to those forms.

It would not be possible to find a better example of order and balance in reliefs than is furnished by the magnificent sarcophagus from Sidon (Fig. 7), on one side of which is represented one of the victories of Alexander the Great. At first sight it may seem a confused mÊlÉe. But when we look closer we see careful arrangement underlying the apparent disorder. Alexander, charging from the left, is balanced by Parmenio charging from the right: the horseman in the middle between the leaders seems to come out of the background; and on either side of him is a fighting group, to the left a Macedonian foot soldier fighting a Persian on foot, to the right a light-armed Greek resisting a Persian horseman. Two Persian archers balance one another. There are in the scene five Greeks to eight Persians, indicating the numerical superiority of the latter. And if we knew more about the battle we should probably find its principal phases hinted at in the groups. The relief tells us far more about the battle than would a naturalistic representation of one corner of the field. The Greek artist could not work without using his reason and his sense of order as well as his skilled hand.

IV

The fourth notable quality of Greek art is Naturalism. Painting and sculpture, being representative or mimetic arts, are dependent for their effects on the careful observation and loving study of nature. Probably this is not the feature in works of Greek sculpture which would be most conspicuous to a modern eye. And it cannot be doubted that the habit of exact observation produced by modern nature studies, our familiarity with such helps to sight as telescopes and magnifying glasses, our constant use of photography, have made most of us better acquainted with the phenomena of the world about us than were the Greeks. But compared with the works of preceding ages, Greek sculpture must have seemed amazingly naturalist. Even works of the archaic period, like the pediments from Aegina, show a knowledge of the human form infinitely more accurate than any to be found in Assyrian palaces or Egyptian temples. There is probably always a good deal of illusion in the minds of the schools which are constantly springing up, which profess to break away from all conventions and to go back to nature herself. To reach nature except through human senses and human combinations is quite impossible. And any artist who determines to give us nature merely as the photographic plate or the mechanical cast gives it to us simply wastes his powers, and produces a result of no interest whatever to any one. According to Pliny Lysippus professed to take nature alone for his teacher; but in fact the works of Lysippus, so far as we can recover or trace them, are full of most definite style. An artist has to look at nature through his own eyes, and those eyes give to what he sees a character based in part on his own personality. Everything he sees is refracted in the waters of his subjectivity, from which he cannot escape.

Nevertheless, the whole historic course of Greek sculpture is steeped in the study of nature; and we see as it proceeds more and more clearly the results of careful observation. The artist had in fact opportunities for the study of what he considered the one important group of phenomena, human bodies, such as a modern artist cannot hope to compass. In the baths and gymnasia where all young men of free birth spent part of their mornings in running, leaping, wrestling, or swimming, he could daily watch the beautiful bodies of athletes in every variety of pose and action. He knew them as a trainer knows horses, or a fancier knows dogs. He would have little need of a special model; but would daily observe some fresh detail of muscles, some notable pose which he could add from memory to his conception of the human body.

But in the greatest periods of art naturalism is not predominant. Its constantly working tendency is kept in check by noble ideas and noble style. There is in the development of sculpture a constant approach to nature, but nothing of the nihilism which looks on all aspects of nature as equally fit subjects for art. The artists of the pediments of Aegina could not bring themselves to conceal the beautiful bodies of the fighting warriors by rigid armour like that copied in Vischer’s group. Thus we find the paradox of armed men in battle, but without armour. The utmost pains are taken with the nude limbs. In the wonderful bronze charioteer found at Delphi (Fig. 4), which dates from about 470 B. C., the garment necessary to protect the man from the rush of air is very simply treated; but the arms and feet, which the garment does not conceal, are wrought with marvellous accuracy and truth to nature. It seems almost as if the artist were compensating himself for the extremely simple work on the drapery by an almost excessively close study of nature where it was possible. The head, on the other hand, is typical and not individual; for in fact individual portraits were scarcely possible at the time.

This would be the place to speak of Greek portraits, if space allowed it. I will only point out the erroneousness of the popular view, that Greek portraits were conventional and uninteresting; and that it was the Romans who introduced individuality into portraiture. It is strange that a view which is utterly false should have gained such currency. It is true that Greek portraits of the fifth and even the fourth century have in them much of the type, and individual traits are softened in accord with the strongly idealizing tendencies of the age. But from the third and second centuries we have a great number of portraits which are in the highest degree characteristic and individual, a wonderful gallery of philosophers and poets and statesmen which for lifelikeness cannot be surpassed. All the finest of the portraits of Romans were by Greek artists. I can give but one example of really fine Greek portraiture, a statue of Demosthenes of the third century B. C. (Fig. 8). It is a portrait indeed. The long lean arms and the pose are quite as individual and characteristic as the face with its melancholy expression and deep lines of anxiety. We have the man from head to foot; not as is so often the case in modern statues, a portrait head set on a conventional body.

For comparison with Demosthenes I set a statue of a great modern statesman, Abraham Lincoln, by Barnard (Fig. 9), not the best statue of him, but one which is approved by many. It aims at truth, but only attains caricature, by exaggerating Lincoln’s awkwardness and angularity, the size of his hands and feet, and the anxiety in his face. This exaggeration has been proved by a comparison with many photographs of Lincoln, which show that he was careful in dress and by no means wanting in dignity. The statue of Demosthenes is marvellous for truth; but it adds a touch of pathos; the statue of Lincoln misses the truth, through exaggerating the least pleasing features of the subject.

When we want to ascertain how close Greek sculpture could come to actual fact, we turn from the great ideal age to the Hellenistic period. Lysistratus, the brother of Lysippus, began to take moulds in plaster from individual faces. At the great medical school of Alexandria the anatomy of the human frame, from which earlier ages in a spirit of piety had shrunk, became usual: some of the great physicians, such as Herophilus and Erasistratus, being noted for the completeness of their study of anatomy. In the art of the third century B. C. we see the inevitable result of such studies in a more precise and learned rendering of the muscles and the skin. And artists no longer hesitated to represent bodies wasted with toil and exposure to the weather, or emaciated with fasting. There are many such figures in our museums, showing a marvellously close study of the forms of peasants and old women and children. I figure one of these, preserved in the museum of the Conservatori of the Capitol at Rome, an aged shepherdess carrying a lamb (Fig. 10). But it will be observed that close as this form is to the facts of common life, there is yet in it nothing repulsive. It is in a sense a type rather than an individual, a poem of nature rather than a portrait. It is parallel to the pastorals of Theocritus. It strongly contrasts with such loathsome figures as some modern sculptors in their exaggerated love of fact, even if repulsive, have inflicted upon us, such as the Vieille HÉaulmiÈre of Rodin (Fig. 11), a figure of an aged and decayed prostitute. I know, of course, that some critics would defend the last-mentioned work on ethical grounds, as showing how hideous the decay of sensual beauty may become; but I venture to doubt whether sculpture is an appropriate vehicle for a moral lesson of that kind, because it can only represent and cannot explain.

V

So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, Ideality. It is in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the Greeks have surpassed all other peoples and left an imperishable record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.

In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world, stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist full-face, the body below the waist in profile, with no transition between the two. The well-known metopes from Selinus in Sicily are good examples. It is a kind of procedure common to the early art of all peoples. But the Greeks differ from other nations in this; that when they improved away these early crudities they retained the predominance of thought over things, of man over nature, in a word of the ideal element in art. They regarded the body of man not, as the materialists do, as man himself, but as a shell produced by the inner working of the spirit, to be seen by the eyes of thought and imagination, as well as by the bodily eyes. Hence they were always aspiring from that which exists in appearance to that which lies behind the mere phenomenon. They realized that nature, when she produces an individual, never wholly succeeds, she falls short of the idea. And the artist by a loving sympathy with the creative Spirit, may venture to improve what she has made, to carry out her intentions more fully, to incorporate more completely the idea. The Greek artist, appreciating and venerating the body, tries to raise it to a higher and more perfect level. A simple kind of idealism may be found in athletic art. In their practice of athletics the Greeks did not, like the moderns, think only of the number of feet an athlete could leap, or the space of time he would take to run a distance. They thought also of his form, of the rhythmic and harmonious character of his action. If an athlete showed ugly form, they would hiss him, as they would an incompetent actor. Most of their exercises were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In all the statues of athletes which have come down to us, not one shows an inharmonious development, powerful chest and weak legs, or muscular legs and poor arms. It is more than probable that as the features of Alexander the Great influenced the portraits of his officers and followers, so the specially beautiful forms of some of the athletes who were most admired, tended to create a type, something of which appears in all the athlete figures of the time. No doubt any one who is well acquainted with Greek types and with the forms of modern athletes will observe that the Greek physical build is not identical with that of our days. The equable climate and the unstrained life of the young men produced something more rounded and fleshy than we see in the north. Our athletes are less harmoniously built, with more prominent sinews, more harsh and wiry in type. An American trainer who is also a sculptor, Dr. Tait McKenzie, working as some of the Greek sculptors worked, from the average measurements of a number of young men, has produced types of strength and beauty, by no means exactly like the statues of Greece, but in their way almost equally beautiful. I instance the beautiful fifth-century figures of Greek boxers, softened by idealism, but admirable for strength and symmetry; and the Apoxyomenos, a man scraping himself with a strigil, as was the custom in the baths (Fig. 12). This is a work of the third century, after the artists had imported their knowledge of anatomy into their works, which had effects both good and bad. And beside the Apoxyomenos I place an athlete by Tait McKenzie, produced from the careful comparison and measurements of hundreds of young athletes of Harvard and Philadelphia (Fig. 13). This is a work of modern idealism produced by similar processes to those to which we owe the excellence of Greek athletic sculpture.

The types of female beauty come into Greek sculpture later than the types of male beauty. In Ionian and early Attic sculpture women appear closely wrapped up in drapery. Pheidias and his contemporaries did not venture to represent undraped women. They showed the beauties of the female form not apart from, but by the help of, drapery. It was reserved for the age of Praxiteles and Scopas to represent the Goddess of Love in the guise of a nude woman; and Praxiteles made an apology for the innovation by introducing the motive of bathing as an explanation and a palliation. And even the Aphrodite of Praxiteles is remarkably free from all attempt at sensuous attraction, or self-consciousness. Solid, noble, and stately in form, she is a type or model rather than an individual. Later sculptors, it is true, departed from this line of simple harmoniousness, and tried to make the figure more attractive to the average man. But it does not become weak, and it does not become vulgar. The noble Aphrodites of the fourth century have fixed the type of female beauty in school after school of artists down to our own time.

This ideal is perhaps for us best incorporated in the Aphrodite of Melos in the Louvre, a work of the Hellenistic age, combining with the great fourth-century tradition a perfection of detail and an informing life which belong to a later time. But while most people of taste profess a devotion to her, that devotion is usually untinged by knowledge or real appreciation; for there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the bodily forms of the Goddess of Melos and those of the women who are most admired in our days. I was almost disposed to figure side by side the Goddess and the bodily forms which figure in our fashion plates. The fashion plates do not represent women as they are, but as they would like to be; they represent not the actual, but the modern ideal. And what an ideal!

Some readers may smile at the notion of taking seriously these ephemeral productions. But no one would take them lightly who was familiar with the facts of psychology. We well know that when certain types of women are set constantly before the rising generation as beautiful and to be imitated they will necessarily exercise a great influence on the future of the race. Young men will look out for such types to admire and to court: young women will try to resemble them. The hideous mistake in aesthetics will exercise a constant dragging power, pulling the young away from the light and the air of heaven towards the caves of evil spirits. Few more charming representations of young womanhood in Greece exist than the Artemis from Gabii already cited (Fig. 5). One must confess that the divine element in it is but slight. But what could be fresher, simpler, more exquisitely natural?

No doubt as in the case of men, so in the case of women, we must make allowance for race and climate. A full and rotund development of physique is far rarer in northern than in southern Europe. The English race is taller, less solidly built, slighter than the ancient Greek. Among us hard tendons usually take the place of solid muscles. And the practise of athletic games by women undoubtedly tends to make them in some respects conform more to the male type. In moderation physical exercises may improve health and strength without tending to deprive the vital organs of nourishment. But the overtrained woman is farther from the healthy life of nature than the overtrained man. And whether the overexertion be of the body or of the intelligence, it tends to destroy true womanliness.

It is a pity that some sculptor does not do for the ideal of womanhood what Dr. Tait McKenzie has done for the ideal of athletic manhood. Of course the process would not be the same. No one wants an ideal type of the female athlete, unless we wish to restore the race of Amazons, but we do sorely need to have before our eyes types which embody the physical ideal of efficient womanhood. At present while nude womanhood in art conforms in a great measure to the Greek tradition, clothed womanhood follows the types of the street, modified by the baseless caprices of fashion. The two stand in unreconciled contrast. The Greeks when painting women on a vase often drew their figures in outline before they added clothes. But any one who tries to draw the outline of the female figure beneath the clothes on a fashion-plate will stand aghast at what he has produced. Cicero repeats an instructive story in regard to the painter Zeuxis, who lived about 400 B. C. He was commissioned to make for the people of Croton a painting of Helen of Troy. He first inquired, what seems to have been a matter of common knowledge, who were the most beautifully made young men in that city, which was noted for its athletes. He next asked that he should be allowed to study the forms of the sisters of these men, judging that the sisters must partake of the beauty of the brothers. Out of these he selected five girls for more continued study, and by such aid produced his picture. We cannot suppose that he would be so clumsy as to select at random beautiful details from each of the five; in that way he would produce only an eclectic monstrosity. But, working in the presence of beautiful examples, his sense of beauty would rise in tone to the highest of which he was capable.

In this story several points are noteworthy. It shows that the type of beauty in men was more advanced and more generally recognized than the type of beauty in women. And it shows the Greek artistic mind ever on the watch to catch some new note of beauty to add to the traditional stock. Professor BrÜcke, in his excellent work on the beauties of the human form, observes that in the ideal statues of Greece many features may be discovered which in the actual world of men and women are very rare, but the charm of which can scarcely be disputed. There went on from school to school, and from period to period, a sort of accumulation of beauty which was ever increasing. Every beautiful model which was studied added something to what BrÜcke calls the stock of beauty at the disposal of artists.

VI

The sixth lamp of Greek art is Patience in striving after perfection. In the finer work of Greek sculptors one finds an utterly ungrudging expenditure of time and care which reminds one of the working of Nature herself, Nature who is never in a hurry, who is never contented with a hasty sketch, but works regardless of time. We are told of Protogenes that he spent seven years on a single figure, and I think he would have spent seven more if he had thought that he could thereby have improved his painting. Nothing strikes one more strongly in such works as the charioteer of Delphi and the Hermes of Praxiteles than the pains taken with every detail. It is by careful work, continued through successive generations, that sculpture attained such mastery in the representation of the muscles of the body as we find in the Borghese fighting figure of the Louvre, and such delicacy in the rendering of drapery as we find in the Victories of the Balustrade at Athens, or the Victory of Samothrace.

But the delicacy and minuteness of Greek work is of course most obvious in the reliefs of coins and in gems. The coins were not primarily meant to please the eye, but to circulate in the fish-market; yet a multitude of the dies are so exquisitely finished that they lose little when magnified to many diameters, and will bear the most critical examination. The intaglio gems were meant for the sealing of documents, the seal taking the place of the modern signature; but the figures upon seals are in their way as finished as great works of sculpture. Seals even more usually than coins gain rather than lose if they are enlarged. Yet they were executed without the help of magnifying glasses. Their subjects are taken from the widest field, the figures of deities, tales from mythology, portraits, animal forms; like the coins they introduced as an undercurrent to the prosaic life of every day an element of poetry and imagination.

VII

The seventh lamp, which goes as naturally with idealism as care and patience go with naturalism, is joy, joie de vivre. Keats has expressed the Greek sense of art in an immortal line, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. It was the overflowing gladness which lies at the root of creation and evolution which took eternal form in the painting and sculpture of the Greeks and inspired all their works. The same irrepressible joy which gives colour to the flowers, sweetness to the fruit, song to the birds, and sexual desire to mankind reached here one of its most perfect manifestations. The life of the Greeks was by no means one of unmixed happiness. Each city was not unfrequently at war with its neighbours; and the penalty of complete defeat was sometimes the razing of its walls, the slaughter of its men, and the enslavement of its women. Disease, even plague, constantly ravaged the land; and the resources of modern surgery and modern anaesthetics were not present to curb their ravages. The life of the majority in country huts, and still more in the slums of the cities, most of all in the mines, was rougher and more sordid than is the case in the modern world, in countries in their normal state. And the people had not even that hope of a blessed hereafter which sustained the people of the Middle Ages. Yet under all these clouds, their spirit was hopeful and aspiring. And their art reflects ever the brighter side of things. Surely they were wise and right. We seek out works of art not to foster pessimism but to inspire optimism, not to show us the world of nature on its repulsive side, but to reveal to us how much underlying beauty is to be found in it. ‘’Tis life not death for which we pant, More life and fuller that we want.’

At the same time, Greek art in some forms was extremely serious and keenly alive to the darker side of existence. The Greeks invented tragedy, the poetical reflection of the severity of fate. Would any modern audience be found, which would be prepared to sit for a whole summer day listening eagerly to the grand expression by such poets as Aeschylus and Sophocles of the power of Nemesis, the instability of all prosperity, the misfortunes which hunt those who have the ill luck to displease the gods? Surely not. And not in Greek tragedy only, but in elegiac poetry and in epigram, we find perfect reflections of our most gloomy moods. But for such expressions of sorrow and despair the Greeks felt that sculpture, and even painting, were not suitable vehicles. They belong to moods, and are not suitable for illustration in the market place and the temple. The roads which led to Greek cities were frequently bordered with monumental tombs. If in the reliefs and inscriptions of these tombs there had been any telling echo of the sorrow and regret of bereaved survivors, every one would have entered the cities in a black mood. As it is, as every one who has been in the museums of Athens knows, the sepulchral artists carefully avoided anything which might harrow the feelings. They represented the dead at their best, engaged in victorious warfare, or in athletic sports or in the happy family circle. A gentle air of melancholy could not be avoided; but there was nothing to shock, nothing to oppress the spirits. The deceased represented seemed still to share the occupations and pleasures of the living, not to be shut off from the world of happiness.

Milton has expressed, in his magnificent prose, the profound joy of the world of the Renaissance at the recovery of the Bible, and free liberty of reading it, after it had been shut away from the laity by the organized Church. Equally intense, and more exuberant, was the delight of scholars and artists, when the asceticism and pessimism of the Middle Ages, which had given birth to such bodies as the Carmelite monks and the mendicant friars, gave way before the revival of Greek literature and art. The world seemed suddenly to have renewed its youth. No doubt the sudden expansion led to foul excesses; but it was yet a great landmark in human progress.

VIII

The eighth light of Greek art is Fellowship. Perhaps there is no quality in it which is more instructive for our days than this. The extreme individualism which is the most remarkable characteristic of modern times lays the utmost stress on the right or the duty of an artist to express himself in his work, to work out his own vein of originality, to give to the world a rendering of his own qualities and individuality. And no doubt no great artist can help doing this in a measure. When he works he must be himself; he can only see the world through the medium of his character and talents. And as every man is a microcosm, a reflection in miniature of the great world of human beings, what is really good and original in an artist must appeal to something in the human world; must have a meaning for people of a certain class or a certain training, or a certain country. But whether an artist is the better for a conscious attempt thus to externalize his personality; whether he is improved by being self-conscious and reflective in his art is a different question.

Scarcely any feature of Greek art is more impressive to a student than its continuous and uninterrupted course. When once it has started it does not turn back, but goes forward steadily, for a time rising superior to difficulty after difficulty, attaining a higher and higher level, then in the fifth century branching out in various directions into styles and groups, then going on with great technical skill, but with a loss of inspiration. It is a course of evolution as steady as that of any kind of plant or animal. This shows that it did not depend upon the rise of successive men of talent or genius, each of whom was intent on expressing himself; but upon the rise and influence of successive artistic schools, each of which did not merely follow the personality of a founder or teacher, but stood for a phase in the development of the common life of the Greek people. The schools were Ionian or Dorian, Attic or Argive, and harmonized with the whole civilization of such fractions of the race. Ionian art went with the gay and pleasure-loving ways of the Asiatic coast. Dorian art reflected the restraint, the balance, the self-control of the people of Peloponnesus. Attic art not only conformed to the refined taste of the people of Athens, but suited also the strong mental bias of the most intellectual city which ever existed. Of course these schools did not flourish in complete isolation one from the other; city influenced city and artist artist; but in a far less degree than would be the case now. A school of sculpture was a species; and all the individuals of the species were more like one another than they were like any of their contemporaries outside.

Thus when we examine any work of Greek sculpture, before the eclectic schools came into being, we find it easy to determine its period, often within narrow limits, and we are usually able to assign it with confidence to a particular school, imperfect as is our knowledge of the history of Greek art. But we can scarcely ever say that it is the work of an individual artist, unless it stands on a basis bearing the author’s name, or unless ancient critics and historians have left us detailed descriptions of a work which survives. I am speaking of Greek originals; the copies of earlier works made by Greek artists of a late period for Roman galleries are often so confused in style and so careless in execution that they serve only to mislead, even if they have escaped the Italian restorer of recent date.

Great and connected series of statues and reliefs, such as constitute the sculptural adornment of such temples as that of Zeus at Olympia or the Parthenon or the Mausoleum, are the joint productions of a number of sculptors who worked together, no doubt under the general supervision of some architect or chief mason, but probably under very little control. Such works combine considerable variety in execution with a general similarity so great that a superficial observer does not see their differences. Public opinion in London seems to hold that Pheidias made the whole of the pediments and the frieze of the Parthenon; though in some cases contiguous figures are so markedly various amid the general likeness as to prove separate hands. In the case of the Erechtheum at Athens there is extant a long list of payments to a number of artists for the several figures of the frieze. There was no general contractor, no artist who hired his masons by the day, but every man who produced one of the figures in relief was paid for it sixty drachmas, without regard to its difficulty or its simplicity.

It is comparatively easy to get a set of skilled stone-masons to carry out with exactness a plan of which all the details are worked out for them, and which requires only faithful copying. And it must have been easy for a set of Egyptian sculptors who made their figures according to a rigid conventional pattern to produce a uniform result. But for a number of skilled workers who were allowed great liberty in detail to produce an harmonious whole was infinitely harder. And that the Greek masons regularly accomplished this result shows how strong upon them was the influence of the school. Nor did they merely work from nature; but their production was of an idealizing kind. It is clear that they must have had not merely similar tools and similar mechanical processes, but the same purposes and ideals. They must have had what we should call a collective personality. It is more than probable that among the workers on the Parthenon were Alcamenes and Agoracritus, two sculptors who rose to great fame. It is certain that among the workers on the Erechtheum was Praxias, a pupil of Calamis, and probably a relative of Praxiteles. The distinction between artist and mason, so marked in our day, scarcely existed in Greece. The mason who had talent became a noted sculptor; and the sculptor, instead of making a model in wax or plaster, set to work, like Michelangelo, on the block of marble himself. Probably sometimes, like Benvenuto Cellini, he cast his own bronze statues.

Generally in all great periods of art there is such fellowship. And in sculpture in particular the design and the execution are so closely connected that it is an abuse to assign the two functions to different men, and even to different classes of men. Greece was pre-eminently the land of productive guilds, of families of artists, of groups of workers who were of one heart and one spirit, and who therefore worked in one style. One of the closest parallels to a Greek school of sculpture is to be found in the group of Pre-Raphaelite artists of the middle of the last century, Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais, Collins, and their companions. This group had a religious or ideal starting-point in the revived Anglo-Catholicism which arose in Oxford at the time, and they had principles of art in common which they embodied in their work. Their paintings, before they diverged one from another, form a distinct species, and have an interest for the historian of civilization greater than that of any other English school.

IX

In order that we may estimate the influence of Greek art on the civilization of Europe, it is necessary briefly to trace its reappearances through the ages. Its first conquest was Rome. The victorious Roman Generals, Marcellus, Scipio, Flamininus, Mummius, and others, brought to the imperial city, to adorn their triumphs, an immense quantity of Greek sculpture and paintings, of which they robbed the great storehouses of works of art in the temples and stoae of Hellas, Sicily, and Asia Minor. The earlier Emperors, especially Nero, followed their example, so that in the time of Pliny the naturalist all the public places of Rome were crowded with sculptures of bronze and marble and with the painted masterpieces of great artists. It became fashionable for wealthy Romans, such as Hortensius and Cicero, to stock their country-houses with such works. Even so, the demand was not satisfied; and Greek artists were imported into Rome, where they set up great workshops, and poured out an incessant stream of fresh works of art. Of such our modern museums are full. Generally speaking they are of little artistic merit, copies of various degrees of excellence of the great works of earlier generations. For the Roman plutocrats had little taste. Because certain figures or groups had a great reputation, and especially because they had been purchased at a high price by Greek cities and kings, the Roman collector liked to have copies of them in his villa; and the artists who produced these copies were mere workers for hire, without originality and without aspirations. Sometimes when employed on such works as the Arch of Titus, or the Column of Trajan, the novelty of the theme stimulated the artist to attempt something of a more original kind. And occasionally the fire within took course and produced a finer work than ordinary. Under the art-loving Emperor Hadrian there was a sort of St. Martin’s summer of sculpture; but its productions were smooth, elegant and refined rather than original or interesting. The charm of art was not appreciated by the Roman people; only the few who professed cultivation really cared whether a figure was good or bad, and even the few were a little ashamed of their preferences.

Into the Roman Empire, in the first three centuries of our era, Christianity gradually ate its way. It originated among the Jews, to whom all representation of living things was hateful. And it developed under the influence of Greek oriental mysticism, which had no kinship with sculpture and painting; and so far as it had any expression in those arts worked in the direction of that symbolism against which Greek art was a protest. Thus we could not expect any fresh inspiration for art from early Christianity; on the contrary, Christianity would work upon it as a blighting influence. If we examine the remains of Christian art in those early centuries, in sarcophagus and mural painting, we find that it merely copied the contemporary pagan art, only changing the subjects portrayed, and introducing a further development in the symbolic interpretation of ordinary scenes.

Christianity offered almost no field for the exercise of Greek anthropomorphism. The latter was closely bound up with polytheism and hero-worship. The Christian Apostles and Saints, who took the place of the pagan Deities, were men who had lived on the earth and whose deeds belonged not to mythology but to history, although at the time the line between history and mythology was not clearly drawn, and history was largely diluted with myth. A few impersonations of nature, such as river-gods, lingered on in the paintings of the Roman catacombs. And winged genii were common there, whether cupids or cherubs it would be hard to say. But there was no realm into which artistic fancy could stray, filling it with super-men and super-women. Angels might be portrayed; but they all came from the Jewish angelology; and there was no artistic tradition as to their types: it was only later that the types of Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and others were distinguished.

The second principle of Greek art, balance and symmetry, had almost disappeared in pagan art in the Antonine age. The reliefs of triumphal arches and of sarcophagi are crowded with figures inserted without order or method. Even the mural paintings of Pompeii have escaped from control; and show no purposeful arrangement. Law and order have given place to individual fancy, unless in cases where earlier schemes are adopted. And with artistic arrangement has disappeared all attempt to idealize, to produce forms nobler and more beautiful than those seen every day. The figure of Antinous is the latest in which we find any attempt to produce a type of ideal beauty. Even the Virgin Mary and her Son are depicted without any attempt to render them beautiful. Nor indeed does naturalism fare better than idealism. The representation of the human body is no longer studied. The figures are clothed: and the clothing is purely conventional, while the features of the landscape are far less carefully introduced than in Hellenistic Greek art.

In fact one feels that the artist had little interest in his art. Scenes from the Old and the New Testament are the usual subjects. But the depiction is little more than picture-writing, mere copies of traditional groups. The only thing regarded as of any interest is the meaning. The ethical and spiritual point of view overlies and smothers any interest in the representation.

And this predominance of the didactic element over the sense of proportion, the love of beauty, the appreciation of nature prevails more and more as Europe slowly moves towards the dark ages. The lamps of Greek art burn more and more dimly. They are never wholly extinguished; for in all ages there are born artists to whom they are the light of life; and in mediaeval carvings one finds here and there a touch of humanism, most often in grotesque or satyric figures. We must never forget that some of the later masterpieces of Greek work, such as the Column of Trajan and the Arch of Beneventum, were always to be seen. And little as they were appreciated by ordinary people, an artist here and there derived from them some appreciation of the beauty of humanity.

Then in the thirteenth century the dry bones began to come together. The breath of fresh life stirred Europe, or at least parts of Europe, such as North Italy, Southern Germany, Eastern France. The magnificent Gothic Cathedrals rising in the north called forth the talent of the painter and the sculptor for their adornment. A great Christian art arose, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries flourished widely. Certain qualities of high art it certainly had. It was lighted by the lamp of fellowship. The sculpture was the work not of individuals, but of guilds, groups of workers of the same style, and inspired by the same motives. It attained to great beauty in decoration, in the adaptation to architectural purpose of the forms of plants and flowers. Where it was most defective was in the rendering of the human form, whether nude or draped, for in such matters the artists had no schooling to be compared with that of the Greeks.

When the full Renaissance came with the dispersion of the educated Greeks through Europe, there was a conscious reawakening of the artistic influence of Greece, contemporaneously with the revived interest in Greek literature and philosophy. A few great works of ancient sculpture, the Laocoon, the Dying Gaul of the Capitol, the Apollo Belvedere were discovered; and collections of ancient gems and coins were formed by many of the wealthy. We can judge from the life of Benvenuto Cellini how profound was the effect produced by such discoveries. The great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries felt as if they had climbed out of darkness into light. To rival works of Greek art was looked upon as the highest ambition which an artist could cherish. Sculptors so great as Donatello and Michelangelo took the scanty remains of Greek masterpieces as their models, and measured their attainments by the degree of success which they reached in copying them. The lamps of Greek balance and symmetry, Greek idealism, and Greek naturalism were rekindled, and the crowd of artists vied one with another in walking by their light.

We may mark four stages in the rediscovery of Greek sculpture. The first is the Italian Renaissance already mentioned. The second originated in the visit of Winckelmann to Italy in 1755, and the application by Goethe and Lessing of his discoveries to the judgement of contemporary art. It tended greatly to the raising and purifying of the artistic taste of Europe. The splendid promise of the Renaissance had degenerated into the mannerism and extravagance of Bernini and his contemporaries. Winckelmann called it back to simplicity, to self-restraint, to ideality. But before long this teaching also was perverted; and such sculptors as Thorwaldsen and Canova were misled by the defects of the inferior examples of Greek sculpture, which were the only ones accessible to Winckelmann, into a slavish copy of the antique or works of an artificial grand style. Then came the third wave of revived Greek influence, when the sculptures of the Parthenon found a home in London, and critics were able to observe how infinitely superior the masterpieces of a really great age were to the copies of Roman times and the adaptations of the Hellenistic age. When Haydon the painter first saw the Parthenon marbles he was immensely impressed; but that which struck him most strongly was not the ideality, for which they have since become proverbial, but the wonderful naturalism of much of their detail in contrast to the grandiose conventions of his contemporaries. The fourth stage in our knowledge of Greek sculpture comes from the very fruitful excavations on Greek soil, especially at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi, which have shown us how widely varied is the range of the ancient sculptors, how many their styles, how admirable their technique. This extension of our knowledge has not, it is true, as yet much affected contemporary art, as art was affected by the teachings of Winckelmann and the publishing of the marbles of the Parthenon. Until last year there was no book in English setting forth the results of the excavations of Delphi; and there is even now no book in English performing the same service for the excavations at Olympia. Sculptors are so little educated in the history of their craft, that they do not easily learn from new sources of knowledge. But by degrees, beyond doubt, the new views of Greek art will filter down to them. A few recently discovered sculptures, such as the Charioteer of Delphi, the Hermes of Praxiteles, the bronze head from Beneventum in the Louvre, the Demeter of Cnidus, have by their overpowering charm affected artists and art. And most sculptors profess a great admiration for Greek works, notably Rodin, who, although the tendency of his works is not in a classical direction, yet uses the strongest language in praising the Greek masterpieces. But in general the tendency of art towards extreme individualism and the search after novelty have more than counteracted the somewhat shallow admiration of sculptors for what is antique.

X

At present religion and culture alike are struggling against the waves of barbarism reinvading. It is not my business to speak here of the forces which are trying to crush religion among us. But I may fitly conclude by sketching some of the tendencies against which culture based upon that of Greece is our best antidote. If I have rightly set forth the principles of Greek literature and art in past pages, the nature of their influence under present conditions will be clear.

I must venture on a parallel which seems to me very suggestive, though some readers may regard it as risky. There are two great standards set up in the past, to control the wayward fanaticisms of men, and to keep them within the bounds of reason and good sense. The standard in religion is set by the New Testament: the standard in art is set by Greece. As at the Renaissance the peoples of Europe went back for their inspiration and their models to the literature and the art of Hellas, so at the Reformation they, or at all events the Teutonic races, went back to the early records of Christianity, appealing to them against the venality and corruption of the dominant Church. And ever since, at intervals, there has arisen, alike in the field of culture and in that of religion, an echo of the appeal to the classical past. It is to the New Testament that Apostles like John Wesley and George Fox made their appeal, setting up in opposition to the conventions and worldliness of the Church in their times the spirituality and simplicity of the apostolic age, just as Goethe and Lessing turned men’s minds from what was contrary to reason and good taste in their surroundings to Greek beauty and simplicity. And however some of the followers of Wesley and Fox may have gone beyond due bounds towards fanaticism, yet in every branch of the Christian Society the influence of those modern prophets has been renovating and purifying, just as the schools of critics which followed Goethe tended greatly to increase among us sweetness and light.

In our schools and colleges, until quite lately, the religion of the New Testament and the tradition of the Greek and Roman Classics have gone together, the one preserving us from superstition and materialism in religion, the other making war upon the inherited barbarisms and brutalities which we have from our not very distant ancestors. The spirit of anarchy in religion would persuade us that there is no divine sanction for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is a matter of convention which every society and every nation has a right to invert if it judges such inversion in the line of its interests. The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly, that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue arouses a sentiment it does not matter whether the sentiment be one of delight and aspiration or one of horror. If once the idea of beauty as the end to be aimed at be expelled from art, art sinks like a stone to the bottom of the sea. Some people are ready to tolerate any monstrosity in art, however remote from nature, however offensive to decency, however repugnant to humanity. The whole artistic inheritance of the race from the day when men began to climb out of barbarism is liable to be thrown away by an age which has unbounded confidence in its own wisdom.

I should, however, be sorry to stop at this point, for I might leave on readers the impression that I am in favour of the mere imitation of works of Greek art. That is by no means my view. In the last century several sculptors, overpowered by the charm of the antique, produced statues which closely followed ancient patterns, such as the Hope and the Hebe of Thorwaldsen, some of the statues of Rauch and Schadow, and the tinted Venus of Gibson. Such works were necessarily stillborn; they had not in them any breath of the life of a new age, any attempt to conform to changed conditions. Very different was the following of the antique by Michelangelo. He admired with enthusiasm such works of the Greek chisel as he knew; but he produced not dull and academic reflections of them, but works of the most splendid originality and the greatest charm. He imbibed not the letter but the spirit of Greek art; and even succeeded better than most artists in combining that spirit with a breath of Christianity.

The parallel which I have drawn may be carried farther. A reversion to the letter of the New Testament writers has been often attempted by considerable religious leaders of our time, especially Tolstoi and the Quakers. They have gone back to the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount, and tried literally to abide by them. But it has become apparent to all but fanatics that such procedure would be fatal to civil government and civilized life. It is the spirit not the letter of the teaching of Jesus which is life-giving. In just the same way an acceptance of the mere externals of Greek art would not help us at all; but a revival of its spirit would be a great inspiration to modern artists. The lamps of Greek art will give light in any age. Greek idealism, Greek balance and measure, Greek love of what is natural and healthful, Greek simplicity and moderation are of the very essence of good art in all ages. We can no more revive the exact conditions under which art arose than we can import into England the clear air, the bright sun, the clear-cut shadows of the Greek landscape. But we can still look up to the philosophy, the poetry, and the art of Greece as classical, as a revelation of what is most pleasing and most enduring in human nature. And if we neglect them and reject them from the education of our children, we shall destroy what has been ever since the Renaissance the source of pure joy and refined feeling in the majority of cultured men; we shall make a great gap which material prosperity, a deeper knowledge of the secrets of nature, the invention of fresh modes of amusement, can never fill. And if we trust merely to the reflections of the Greek spirit in modern literature and art, we shall be acting as the Roman Church in its darker ages has acted, in shutting away from the people recourse to the primary documents of religion, and obliging them to be content with such interpretations of those documents as the ruling hierarchy judged to be useful. We must retain the right of appeal to our classical examples, whether in religion, in literature, or in art. Arnold was right. The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art remain the stars by which we may direct our course over stormy seas.

P. Gardner.