Chapter VIII: Higher Thinking, Philosophy, Speculative and Practical Theology 213 (3)

Even in such a mighty speech as this you will notice the very scanty use of ornament. There are none of what we moderns call the flowers of rhetoric; there is no sounding peroration. It is the picture of a grave patriot vindicating his life’s work against the carping of his enemies and the criticism of his opponents. There are indeed passages of gross vituperation, wherein by scathing reflections on his opponent’s previous life, he replies to Æschines’ insinuations about his private character. Nor has the character of Æschines ever recovered from this “raking of his record,” which was probably not at all kept within the limits of the truth. But the restraints which have been usual among modern gentlemen in debate, especially the modern English gentlemen of the last century, were not regarded as essential to the dignity of the highest Greek court oration, and that was probably because the jury was composed of the middle and lower classes who were not shocked by any want of refinement.

Notwithstanding this limitation, there can be no question that in the oratory of debate the Greeks taught the Romans, then through them Mediæval Europe, then after the Renaissance, modern Europe directly, so that even now they are the acknowledged masters in this splendid art. It is all the more astonishing, as we might naturally think that a society without printing and consequently without a great reading public would not have aimed at producing an eloquence which was not only splendid to read when the heat of controversy was allayed, but worthy of study and of analysis by the critics of succeeding generations. Nevertheless, with no better means of publication for readers than manuscript copies, and without any hope of great celebrity, or of great profit as the authors of written speeches, these Greeks produced work which has perfectly stood the test even of new and exacting conditions. In spite of their limited public, the orators had attained to as clear a notion as we have of the importance of appealing to a reading and thinking public which could study their arguments and their style at full leisure, and so, not content with the orations primarily intended for delivery, they also perfected the prose essay, and even the prose dialogue, a very peculiar form of literature, inasmuch as it is the literary stereotyping of an apparently spontaneous conversation.

But when I speak of a reading public, perhaps I should limit it somewhat, and say a public accustomed to hear reading aloud. That is the intermediate stage between a mere audience and the mere readers of books. I am quite accustomed to that intermediate stage in Ireland. You may see there any day groups of people hearing a newspaper or book read out, and if the great body of the public is of this class, then the writer must think not only of what he has to say but how it will sound when read aloud. I take the same principle to have animated the composers of the splendid English Book of Common Prayer. They desired to affect the hearer not only by the sentiment, but by the sound of their Liturgy. Now this is the very step in prose writing which was taken by the Greek students of eloquence, and most notably by Isocrates, the father of the political prose essay in Europe.

There were no doubt accidental or personal causes which conspired to this result at this moment. Isocrates, with great natural gifts for style and for composition, was wholly deficient in voice and in physique for the profession of public speaking, nor had he the extraordinary energy and perseverance shown by Demosthenes in overcoming these defects. So it occurred to him that he might exercise his influence by prose writing in the form of open letters or political pamphlets, where he puts his thoughts into the most polished periods and the most refined language.

I cannot but quote to you a curious parallel of a man of genius turning a natural defect into a splendid success. When Richard Wagner began to compose operas of the received form, he failed because of his want of facility to produce a sustained melody. He then bethought himself of the use of short phrases instead of sustained songs, and in spite of his original defect he has obtained a very great and deserved popularity. There are, of course, other great qualities in Wagner, especially his novel and splendid use of the orchestra. But the question of melody is always the vital one in music, and no man ever attained the first rank that has left us so few sustained melodies. His _Rienzi_ shows what he could do when he attempted them.

The laws of prose composition, as devised and perfected by Isocrates, are the most subtle and complete ever put into practice by any living man, and though of course some of them are only applicable to the Greek language, and indeed to Attic Greek, the general principles he expounded have been applied by many writers and in many languages.[16] It is well known that Cicero modelled himself on this style and through him it became dominant in Europe. The greatest English example in older days is the _Areopagitica_ of Milton, who though manifestly inspired by Isocrates, is far from possessing his perfect control of language, perfect smoothness of period, perfect clearness of thinking, all of which make up the charm of the great master. Isocrates was the teacher of this great style, not only to pleaders and pamphleteers, but to historians, and he was blamed for making men like Ephorus and Theopompus, his favourite pupils, in writing their once famous works, think more of their diction than of their impartiality or their research. But surely the duty of making history eloquent, such as we have it in Gibbon, is of paramount value. To this I shall not now return. I rather desire to call your attention to the supremacy of a great periodic style even in English, and in these latter days, when brevity, epigram, impatience of style and an affected neglect of form are in high fashion. Among the writers of the 19th century, I take by far the greatest stylist to be John Ruskin, and I consider that far the largest part of his influence arose not from his ideas, which were often fantastic, but from the admirable way in which they were set forth. But he was essentially the master of the long period, for with him you may find a whole page consisting of one grand sentence, in which many clauses are co-ordinated, many lesser ideas balanced, many strands woven into the one great tissue which comes from the writer’s pen as from a loom. And that is the reason why he was a greater stylist than all the Froudes and Newmans and Paters, who either use short sentences, or if they attempt the period, are neither melodious nor clear.

The same law holds good in eloquence, when we can find a master to illustrate it. The two greatest English orators I have heard during the last generation were Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Magee. Both dealt in the long period--the former from constant habit, which was even notable in his ordinary life, and which spoilt his conversation; the other, who was brief and pungent enough in ordinary talk, trained himself upon the model of Chalmers, a great Scotch orator before my day. I have seen Magee’s copy of Chalmers, and have noted how minutely he had dissected and analysed it. But both produced the same wonderful effect by (if I may say so) embarking the audience with them on the billows of great periods, which excited wonder how they would ever come safely to land. The rounding off and concluding of such a period not only with safety but with splendour produced an effect upon their audience unlike anything else that I have experienced. The style of neither, though both knew Greek well, was based directly on Isocrates; but most certainly their speech was based upon the principles he had taught and impressed so well upon Cicero and his like, upon Milton, upon Jeremy Taylor, upon Edmund Burke, all of whom appreciated and practised this supreme prose style.

But if the Greeks here showed the modern world the model of the highest perfection in the prose essay, they would not have been Greeks if they had not also shown us the perfection of easy conversation, of everyday talk, of the play of various styles, and the expression of various characters in the cultivated language of the day. And so Plato in his _Dialogues_ has shown the world an unapproachable example of conversation raised to a high art, which again created a distinct literary form that has never died out.[17]

All these developments are (with the exception of biography) those of the Golden Age of Greek Literature, and are the discovery of great masters who were the glory of that age. But as we shall see frequently in the course of these lectures, the silver age of Greece was almost as fruitful in the creation of models for the imitation of modern Europe. It was only after a great body of splendid authors had lived, that we could expect to find literary criticism assuming an important place. For the literary critic is after all a sort of parasite, who lives on the bodies of greater and more dignified animals. We know that when the library of Alexandria came to be collected, and the sifting of authors and of the texts of authors became necessary, there arose a great school of critical scholars, who purified the received copies, who apportioned the respective value of the texts, and who developed that censorious attitude toward the classical masterpieces which is the bane of the modern world. We still have in the critical essays of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and still more in the Tract on the Sublime, belonging to the 1st century A.D., excellent models of what is good and useful in this reflexive attitude of a later age, and of second rate ability. The great age of production had been very simple and naïve in criticism; the attitude of Aristophanes, and even of Plato, in judging poets is merely a moral judgment and seems never to take into consideration æsthetic questions. In the Tract on the Sublime we find quite a modern standpoint, and the judgments of this author have had no small effect on the literature of the last century. No less a person than Edmund Burke thought it worth while to translate this tract, and how wide was the author’s sympathy will appear at once from this fact, that he quotes as a signal instance of the sublime the opening of a work far removed in spirit from classical Greek literature--the book of _Genesis_, in the Greek version.

I need not delay over the many and various Epistles left us by the Greeks, and which you may see collected in one of Didot’s big volumes of _Epistolographi Graeci_. But I do not think that we can call letter writing a distinct form of literature, and it is very certain that every nation that could use writing materials could hardly fail to adopt it in some form. Nor do I think the letters extant are in any way remarkable, perhaps because most of them are the compilations of men attributing these documents falsely to the great ancients. The letters ascribed to Plato, Isocrates, and others give us nothing additional of literary importance.[18] I will therefore pass from these, as well as from the moral harangues of the later rhetors and sophists of whom Dion Chrysostom is far the most interesting. I wish modern sermons would borrow more from this admirable and little used source, for Dion was a man of the world, a traveller, a sound moral teacher, and gifted with a great taste for the picturesque.

But I cannot conclude without a word about the prose novel of the Greeks, who here also founded a form of literature that has assumed gigantic importance in the modern world. The novel may be regarded as the last legitimate offering, a child born out of due time, as Saint Paul calls himself, but like Saint Paul a greater influence in our modern life than any of his older brethren. It might have been thought that from the modern Comedy of Menander and his rivals to a prose novel in the modern sense was but a small and inevitable step, and yet no branch of Greek literature had less influence upon the rise and development of so kindred a subject. The very frame on which all Menander’s plays were stretched with wearisome iteration, I mean the rehabilitation of a respectable girl, who solely through the neglect or the violence of others, has become a mother without being a wife--such a topic would be wholly repugnant to any Greek novelist we know. For in all the stories we possess the main interest turns upon the preservation of the heroine’s purity through every sort of temptation, and every sort of attempted violence. This was a topic quite strange to Greek sentiment and foreign to Greek literature till it was imported from the East by those who had there learned that sort of love-story. There are indications of it in the romantic episodes of Xenophon’s _Cyrus_, but the adoption of it as a striking topic is later, and due to Callimachus, whose poem called _Acontius and Cydippe_ was perhaps the first love-story of our modern type offered to the Greek world. A youth and a maiden, whose beauties were described in great detail, meet at a religious ceremony, and fall deeply in love at first sight. The various and commonplace obstacles to their union which are familiar in every modern society--worldly parents, a richer suitor for the maiden, threats of broken hearts and of suicide--these occupy the story, which through many untoward delays ends in a happy marriage.[19] It may cause amazement in this audience that such a plot should ever have been new in literature, especially in that of the Greeks, who had every sort of human experience before them. Yet it was new in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, and made its fortune in that world-weary and artificial society. In all the Greek novels we possess, some such love-story is the necessary thread which glitters through the tissue, so much so that the German pedants edit them under the title _Scriptores Erotici Graeci_. Yet the relation between the lovers being absolutely pure, any temptations which occur arise from the passions of violent people who create no interest in the reader. By far the best specimen we have, owing to its simplicity and its natural scenery, is the famous _Daphnis and Chloe_, which has found so many imitators ever since the French of Amyot has made it accessible to modern Europe. We feel indeed that the unknown author was far from possessing the innocence of his characters, or the spontaneous appreciation of the nature he describes. The work is from the time of Decadence in Greek literature, and has the faults of its generation. But for all that it is a beautiful work of art, just as the _Idylls_ of Theocritus are beautiful, just as the _Hero and Leander_ of Musæus is beautiful, just as the Martinmas summer of your woods is beautiful, and all the more beloved because we feel it is but “the gilded halo hovering round decay!”

I said it was our best specimen because of its simplicity, and yet it is not wanting in violent and improbable adventures toward its close. But these are as nothing compared to the adventures of lovers in the other stories of this kind, because there then was a wholly different vein of prose story, which came into fashion with the love-story, and became amalgamated with it, to the great detriment of both--I mean the stories of wild adventures in strange and fabulous lands.

With the wonderful invasion of the East, there were opened to the astonished Greeks new regions of fabulous splendour, of astounding treasure, of amazing nature. So violently was their imagination stimulated by what they saw that they set themselves to construct books of travels beyond the rising sun and beneath the ocean wave, into the homes of monstrous beasts, and still more monstrous men. The schemes of Alexander himself were baulked by his soldiers, who positively refused to embark in his wild dreams of universal conquest, but there was nothing to impede the imagination of the writers of his deeds, who combined the real narrative of his conquests with his quest after the hidden wonders of the East. Hence we have the so-called _Life of Alexander_, which I consider to have originated shortly after his death, but to have been amplified and glorified by succeeding generations of those that told their stories to delighted audiences. In this _Life and Acts_ we have the starting point of a whole literature of Fabulous Travels, mixed with descriptions not only of odious savages, but of ideal societies that lived hidden away from the vices and troubles of old and decrepit civilisation. But this literature, so popular in the Middle Ages, is outside the pale of Hellenism. It is not only the last child, but the illegitimate child of their once pure and lofty imagination.

IV

GREEK ART--I: ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE

It is of course an illogical division to separate art from literature. Among the Greeks, at all events, literature in all its forms, was not only an art but the most perfect art. No statue of Lysippus is more perfect than a drama of Sophocles. But for convenience’ sake, and in this age where literature is seldom an art, we may speak of Greek art as that division of their work where they dealt not with words, but with other materials, and where they combined the uses of life with the love of the beautiful, as no other nation ever did. We may add that in regard to Greek influence on modern life (which is our proper subject), none has been greater and more permanent than that of art in this sense. Thousands of men have copied, or imagined they copied, Greek art, who were never able to read one word of Greek and who never cared one jot about Greek literature. I take to-day its more solid and larger expressions--architecture and sculpture, reserving for my next lecture the more subjective arts and those of mere ornament.

It is not true, as you might suppose, that these latter were later in development than the art of architecture. Far from it. In rude pre-historic ages, when the knowledge of building had not advanced beyond the question of mere safety, we find delicate and beautiful ornaments put upon arms and on personal decorations. The most elaborate tattooing of the savage is consistent with extreme rudeness in his dwelling.[20]

The earliest form of house we know, which was designed not only for shelter and durability, but also for safety, is the _underground_ beehive house. Beehive huts of stone are common in many nations, and may perhaps best be seen now in the huts of the monks on the wild rock of Skellig Michael, which is the nearest land in the British Islands to the traveller coming from America. But such huts are not easily defended against an enemy. This latter advantage is obtained by making the hut a chamber underground,[21] and only to be entered by a passage long, narrow, and low, in fact a sort of horizontal shaft into which the enemy can only creep on hands and feet, and so can have his head chopped off as soon as it appears within the chamber, without possibility of using his weapons. I have seen this form of house in the most primitive village of the stone and bone age, which is known as the Weem of Scale, on a very wild bay of the main island of the Orkneys, looking northwest into the Atlantic. There, under the sands accumulated by the gales of thousands of years, we find small subterranean huts, with nooks in the stone work to hold rude vessels and implements, and with a low covered way for the owner to creep in and find himself at home. The weapons found in such houses, many of which are yet unexplored, are either of stone or bone or shell. These dwellings, once a very general type--for remember, similar wants in mankind produce similar satisfactions of that want in the most widely severed parts of the world--usually come to us in the stage of survival, when men had already learned other kinds of architecture. Hence they often preserved for the dwellings of the dead this type of underground beehive house with a long and narrow approach, though as time went on the house was made higher, and the avenue of approach better (as we have it in the famous New Grange in Ireland), and they even ornamented the inner surface of the slabs that formed the walls. As usual, the prehistoric Greeks did it all more perfectly than the rest of the world. The beehive house known in former days as the Treasury of Atreus, but now recognised as a tomb of some prehistoric king, is a splendid building fifty feet high, and made of thirty-three horizontal courses of stone overlapping as they rise, with the inner surfaces cut to form a conical chamber. Not only are large lintel stones used, but there were rosettes of bronze ornamenting the inner surface of the walls, and the stately avenue (_dromos_) lined with stone work of great finish and open to the sky, led to an ornamented gate or entrance. A restoration of this entrance, made by the aid of the actual pillars carried home long ago by the Marquis of Sligo, now astonishes the student of prehistoric art in the British Museum.[22] Why do I, however, delay over this very perfect and beautiful kind of building of which another noted specimen is the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos in Bœotia?[23] In the first place, to show you how the highly developed and finished forms were the gradual perfection of the oldest and rudest protected house, to which they merely added height, careful finish, and ornament, which ornament we know from Egyptian parallels to date some fifteen centuries before Christ; secondly, to bring home to you the important fact that the beehive or round house was at an early date abandoned to the use of the dead, and not employed for the use of the living till quite late in Greek history, when a few round public buildings show that the idea had not been lost. The men that built the great and elaborate tomb of Atreus probably never themselves lived in a round or beehive, but in a square house. They only maintained the round form out of respect for the dead, and indeed for the sake of the safety of the treasures buried with the dead.

To the square house (of course I include under this short word all rectangular buildings) we now turn. It seems to me that the earliest model which suggested this form was the hut of logs, laid one over the other alternately at right angles so as to enclose a square space. Two upright posts with a horizontal beam over them would supply the first rude doorway in an opening left by using shorter logs on each side of it, and then it was very obvious that a gable roof to cover the house would be made by laying logs from the top of the wall to rest one against the other at their upper ends, or of course a flat roof in a similar way.

We can derive from this simple form the whole classical architecture of Europe. In the first place, the gaps between the logs were filled with clay, and so even the great stones at Tiryns are treated. Thus the wall was made staunch against rain and wind. But then someone discovered that by making clay into bricks and drying them slowly in the sun, they would have a building material much more serviceable than wooden logs or stones. And so the filling up stuff became the main stuff of the wall; yet how persistent the idea of using wood can be inferred from the fact that early brick walls have wooden beams built into them longitudinally by way of giving firmness, but also affording a danger of complete ruin, if the building was attacked by fire. The door posts and the lintels were of wood; for the mud brick wall ending beside the door would rapidly suffer if not protected by a facing of wood, and later on, terra cotta casing was used to replace the wood. Ultimately, stone door frames and pillars replaced the older wooden work. But everywhere the traces of the primitive wood work survives. The oldest pillars were tree stems set on a stone base. At the top where the weight laid on them tended to flatten them out, they were probably bound with a metal band. This you see perpetuated by the Doric pillar, standing on its base without plinth, and at the top we have a band running round, and over it a splaying capital with a slab or abacus over it, to protect the inwards of the wood from being soaked with rain.

There is no more persistent ornament in a Doric Temple than that course over the actual wall which consists of what are called metopes and triglyphs. The metopes are not foreheads (μέτωπα) as even some persons who know Greek might imagine, but interstices (μετόπαι), in fact open spaces or holes between the triglyphs. Originally, when the roofs were of opaque tiles, these openings were necessary to let in light. But the triglyphs, what were they? Vitruvius notes them as beam ends, for he calls the metopes _intertignia_; and why were they always marked with three grooves, as their name implies? Apparently because two horizontal beams, intended to make a ceiling, had a third pinned between them which rose to the gable, where it met another, and so formed the skeleton of the sloping roof. When marble tiles, which were semi-transparent, or when a higher false roof was set on, the metopes were no longer necessary to let in light, and the Greeks made the now closed interstice an ornamented surface, showing groups, either painted, or carved in relief, to vary the severe lines of the building.

We have drifted into some of the leading features of temples, and they are indeed the buildings which have most influenced subsequent centuries, but the features of the temple were originally those of the stately house, as we can see clearly in the remains discovered at Tiryns. The roofs and upper stories are all gone, but the arrangements of the doorways are quite the same in principle as those of the historic temples, except that in the Tirynthian doorways, there are many evidences remaining of the actual use of wooden pilasters and pillars. Pausanias in the second century still found one or two wooden pillars surviving in the ancient temple of Hera at Olympia. As they got worn out, they were replaced by stone, and Dr. Dörpfeld found that these substitutions were not all uniform, but in accord with the altering taste of the day. The capitals in particular varied from pillar to pillar, to judge from those found among the débris of the temple, which, by the way, contained the famous Hermes of Praxiteles.

The ultimate separation between the dwelling house and the temple was that the house included a central court with rooms around it, which was too large to roof over, and so the model was handed on to all southern Europe. The Italian palaces, for example, are all dark and fortified toward the street, and contain an inner court and a gallery running round it on the building within, on which the rooms open. So permanent are the right principles of architecture when once discovered by a race of genius.

The temple or house of the gods was, of course, a single chamber of moderate size with a treasure house behind it, and the gradual development of it from a simple square chamber with one end opened for a door, and adorned with two pillars between the pilasters which formed the ends of the house wall--the doorway _in antis_, to the elaborate peripteral temple with double rows of pillars running round it--all this is to be found in any handbook of ancient art. From the very use of the temple as compared with the private house, it followed that while the temple looked outward, and was meant to show its beauty to those that approached it, the private house looked inward--all its beauties were reserved for the occupants, and care was even taken to prevent any curious observation on the part of the public. But it is only of recent years that the extant ruins have been minutely measured and studied, and now we know that, in addition to building this rectangular house for the god, there were the most elaborate and minute laws observed in the proportions of the various parts, and in the optical corrections of straight lines, which were found to appear curved. This perfection, therefore, of Greek religious architecture was not merely the adoption of a good practical form, and the carrying out of it in precious materials and with clear and competent workmanship. The most delicate adaptation of curves, the most curious and subtle applications of harmonies in lengths and heights, were utilised to produce an effect which all observers have long felt to be the most marvellous in the world.

But before I go further I will dispose of an interesting point which many have thought a defect in the architectural genius of the Greeks. You will see in every book that the use of the arch was unknown to them, and that for this capital feature in our buildings we are wholly indebted to the Romans. That the arch was not in use among the Greeks, I attribute to the fact that the round house and conical roof were deliberately rejected by them in favour of the square house and wooden structure of doorways and roofs. As already observed, this form was long since devoted to funeral purposes and to the burying (not burning) of the dead, and so its associations were gloomy. But it seems to me absurd to say that people who could frame a conical stone roof, by horizontal layers of stones gradually closing inwards, should not have advanced to the principle of the arch with its keystone. This in fact Pausanias assumed them to have done in the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos. He says the top stone of the vault is the άρμονία of the whole vault. If this was not accurate in the case of Orchomenos, it at least shows that Pausanias, a very experienced observer of old Greek building, did not hold that this generic distinction existed between Greek and Roman building. But, as I said, the Greeks rejected round or conical forms for rectangular, and the Roman combination of the two, which passed on to the Renaissance, is distinctly a modification of form to which the Greeks would not have agreed. Still less would they have approved of the use of arches and of architraves as the mere ornament of a building, and supporting nothing. To the Greeks every member of their building was there for use. A pillar was set to support an architrave, this latter to support the beams of a roof. Flat surfaces were decorated with painting, or with reliefs, but these flat surfaces were necessary to close in the building from the weather. Thus, to illustrate bad building by an example, when you look at the portal of St. Mark’s at Venice, you will see groups of marble pillars with a highly decorated arch over them, making a rich doorway. But there are more pillars than are wanted to support the arch, so that some of them stand idle, as a mere added ornament. That is only one instance of the tawdriness which infects the decadence of a great style--in this case of the Romanesque architecture of eastern Italy and Sicily.

There is a very widespread belief that the arch was invented and first used in Italy, and high authorities, like Viollet-le-Duc in his famous _Entretiens sur l’architecture_, put forth the theory that the Romans learned its use from the Etruscans, from whom they borrowed so much of their early civilisation. But if they did, is it certain that the real origin was not Greek? Is it likely that this enigmatical nation found out a great principle of construction unknown to the Greeks? I think not; and all the more so, as I hold all the early Etruscan culture to have been stimulated by the Greeks, with whom Etruria had an older and deeper connection than was suspected a generation ago. For now we come back to the statement of Herodotus, that this nation came from Asia Minor, and by sea, to Italy. The settlers of the earliest Greek colony in Italy--Cumæ--followed in their track, and their immigration seems not to have been very early. Hence they may very well have borrowed their use of the arch from early Greek teachers, and thus imposed it upon the Romans and upon the world. But does it really matter to my argument? Even the Romans, who perfected the use of the arch, were not satisfied with it unless they had put it inside a Greek face of pillars and architraves. The Greek temple has afforded a model which has been copied in every capital of Europe, and in its most perfect form has an artistic splendour which is second to none among the buildings of the world.

I will repeat that, as the Greeks determined at a very early age that domed or circular buildings were the proper receptacle of the dead, so they have transmitted that decision through the Romans to modern Europe. The Pantheon, whatever its original use, has come to be the solemn resting-place of national heroes. The great tomb of Hadrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, was built under the same prepossession, and so through all ages down to the _Invalides_ in Paris, and the memorial to Shelley at Oxford, all these houses of the dead are the offspring artistically of the Treasure-house of Atreus, of the Tomb of the Minyæ, and of the rest, consecrated by the old Greeks. Quite recently, when our King brought me to see the Mausoleum of Queen Victoria and her Consort at Frogmore, I was able to point out to him that the builders of this circular chamber also, though they probably knew it not themselves, were copying the ancient and almost universal model of a house for the dead. The Greeks very possibly derived this old idea from a northern race. The occurrence of similar forms in the early tombs of Ireland and of other parts of Europe seem to show that there was some prehistoric agreement about this form of tomb--the most distinguished, as well as the safest, residence they could devise, first for living men, then for departed kings or chiefs who demanded cult and sacrifice. That may be all very true, but it does not alter the fact that it was from the Greeks that civilised Europe adopted the idea.

* * * * *

I now pass to another field of art, in which this gifted nation has exercised an undoubted supremacy down to the present day. The very idea of exceeding the excellence of a great Greek statue hardly enters the mind of the modern sculptor. If he could but approach the work of Praxiteles, or even of the nameless workers who carved the great tomb of Sidon, he would regard it as an astounding achievement.

We shall find not a few who attribute this perfection of Greek sculpture to the great opportunities they had of observing the play of limb and muscle in their daily exercises in the _palæstra_, where men and boys exercised naked. That I take to be so far true, that I have often suggested to modern sculptors, who complain of the insufficiency of their models, to make a pilgrimage for a couple of years to Samoa, or the Solomon Islands, where they may study very noble forms, exercising in the purest state of nature, so far as they have not been depraved into clothes by well-meaning, but mischievous, missionaries; and I think that the first sculptor who ventures upon this education may do great things in his art. But it only touches a fringe of the question as regards the old Greek triumphs. Naked figures were not the earliest or greatest Greek achievement in sculpture. There are indeed some archaic nude Apollos, but all the early goddesses, so far as I know, were draped, and it is in drapery also that Greek sculpture is unique for its supreme grace. Need I add that it is not only in single figures, but in composition that the Greeks are still our masters? If any of you will compare the frieze of the Parthenon, even as we have it, with any modern composition of the same sort, it will require no argument to persuade him of the truth of what I say.

There is another somewhat more subtle reason given for this strange superiority in art of a people who had not a tithe of our experience or of our mechanical resources: I shall give it to you in the words of a gifted Italian essayist. Professor Pasquale Villari: “The problem,” he says, “set before the famous sculptor Donatello, at the dawn of the Renaissance, could not be solved by the mere study of ancient art. The Greeks had no means of expressing Christian spirit or emotion. Their quest was for outward beauty of form, and their nature, being simpler, more spontaneous, and more harmonious than ours, could be adequately expressed in marble. They had no experience of the mental maladies, the tortures of remorse, or the whole inner life created by Christianity. In their times, no ascetics, no hermits, no anchorites, no martyrs, no crusaders, no knight errants had appeared in the world. But in Donatello’s day all things were changed; the faculties of the human mind had been altered and multiplied. Therefore, a new art was needed to represent the new inner life. Assuredly, Christ and the Virgin cannot be chiselled in the same way as a Venus or an Apollo. Outward beauty was no longer the sole aim of art. It was now bound to express character, which is the mind’s outward form. Even the very soul of man, with all its load of new struggles, sorrows, and uncertainties, must show through the envelope of marble. Was this possible, and if so, to what extent? That was the question put to Donatello.”[24]

To criticise this interesting passage, to show what a partial and imperfect view it expresses of Greek genius, might be a task instructive to my hearers, but too wide and irrelevant to my present discourse. Some points, however, will help us directly to the understanding of Greek sculpture.

It is only too true that the Middle Ages, from which Donatello’s generation was emerging, were a period of spiritual gloom and depression. But this was due not to the larger troubles and experiences of men, but to the spiritual tyranny of the Church, which had distorted the sweetness and benevolence of the Gospel of Christ to include a hideous engine of torture. The clearest picture of this odious manufacture of artificial horrors may be seen not only in the many grotesque representations of the tortures of hell, which were anything but grotesque to the public of the Middle Ages, but by attending a mediæval play, which has been brought out in Boston, as well as in London--the play called _Everyman_, which magnifies the horrors of death by representing the Deity as a gloomy tyrant, served by a greedy and heartless Church, which exacts half a man’s fortune for the boon of saving him from eternal torments. These artificial horrors were not indeed unknown to the Greeks, for we hear that the punishments of the wicked, not to speak of Tantalus, Ixion, and the rest, formed part of the revelations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but they would on no account have been permitted a place in ordinary life or in art. If the Attic public fined the poet Phrynichus 10,000 drachmas for bringing before them their national sorrows in his _Fall of Miletus_, what would they not have fined the author of _Everyman_, for importing darkness and horror into the day of death and libelling the gods as cruel tyrants with no mercy for the frailties of men?

But, apart from this imported gloom, it is in my opinion false to say that the Greek was not just as experienced as any modern man in the great problems and the inevitable sorrows of human life. The whole of Greek tragedy consists in the representation of these dolours, and if Professor Villari wants proofs that the terrors of conscience, the agonies of remorse, were perfectly known to the Greeks, I ask him to turn to the picture of the tyrant’s soul in the eighth book of Plato’s _Republic_ or to Xenophon’s _Hiero_. The Greeks were not at all that simple, joyous, spontaneous set of grownup children who appear in many of our books upon the subject. They had a large and varied experience of life.[25] But they had the good sense--or shall I say the genius?--to confine their art to what it ought to convey. They felt that marble and bronze should not be used to represent the violent emotions of tragedy, the violent moments in human life, and when they lost this reserve, their sculpture had begun its decadence. The _Laocoon_ with the two little men representing his children is indeed a work of art of which a modern sculptor might well be proud. It would not have been approved by the Greeks of the Golden Age, and Phidias would have looked upon the group with contempt, in spite of its technical excellence.

A brief sketch of the development of sculpture will illustrate this principle. In the first place you must hold fast to the truth, not frequently enough insisted upon, that sculpture among the Greeks developed with extraordinary quickness after a long infancy into its perfect manhood. The work of 550 B.C., in the full brilliancy of the courts of Polycrates and Periander was still rude and helpless, wanting altogether the beauty which we desiderate in that art. As soon as we turn 500 B.C. we have such things as the _Charioteer_ of Delphi, figures which are on the very threshold of perfection, and indeed in some respects, such as the modelling and texture of the arms and feet, quite perfect. In another fifty years we have the splendours of Phidias.

Not less remarkable than this rapid growth is the very gradual decay of the art. The age of animals, as is well known, is in proportion to the period of gestation. It was not so with Greek sculpture. Coming to perfection in a couple of generations, it lasted all through the greatness of Greek history into Macedonian times, when it produced such wonders as the _Nike_ of Samothrace, down to the Roman conquest, when it gave us the _Aphrodite_ of Melos, and even still later, when empresses borrowed from it those splendid portrait figures which we admire in the Vatican and the Lateran museums at Rome. And it is not only the Golden Age but the Silver Age of this sculpture which is the eternal model for modern artists.

The next feature of great importance which concerns us is that this branch of art began (as did mediæval art) in the service of religion. It was to represent the figure of the god, it was to decorate his temple, that the sculptor made his great efforts. And I hasten to add that the art was never dissociated from its sister art of painting, for the Greeks always called in the help of colour; not only in architecture, but even in representing single human figures. They felt the utter coldness of Parian or Pentelican marble and they were not afraid to use rich colours and even kindred materials to increase the majesty of their representations of the Divine.

It is very remarkable how timid and sporadic, mainly from a misinterpretation of Greek teaching, have hitherto been the attempts to return to this sound principle. In the twelfth century, indeed, admirable work was done by the sculptor in producing coloured statues, generally, I think, of wood. Thus the kings and bishops of that time in the Cathedral of Henry the Lion at Brunswick are most striking and lifelike specimens of the art, and there are many more in the churches and the museums of Northern Europe.[26] But it seems that the discovery in the Renaissance of Græco-Roman statues from which all the colour had been effaced by the action of time, damp, and the contact with clay, misled the early sculptors of that day into the belief that Greek statues were always in the purest white marble; that form only and not colour was the aim of that art; and so we have had our galleries flooded with cold figures, which are only beginning to give way, as may be seen in the recent exhibitions of the Royal Academy in London, to more or less delicate tinting, or even to relief in high colours, using other materials than marble. Thus the Greeks have been our masters as well in our mistakes as in our successes. But we can now have no doubt as to their principles. Even in their bronze statues, they were so anxious to give expression by colour that they commonly made the eyes of their figures in black and white.

I turn now to speak for a moment on the principles of composition in Greek sculpture, for in such a discourse as this it is obviously better to spend time on general considerations than in emphasising details. There were, of course, from archaic times single figures, first of gods, then of men, which ultimately became portrait statuary; but in early days a composition of figures in stone or wood was unknown till they came to decorate architecture with friezes and pediments. Thus the statues which adorned the state entrance to the old temple at Miletus were simply a row of sitting figures like the rows of sphinxes guarding the approach to the Egyptian temple, but there is no composition. It was not till the rise of the fashion of ornamenting buildings with the sculptor’s art that, as before said, compositions come into play; and mainly in two forms--triangular pediments which filled the once open end or gable of a roof, and bands of decoration along the walls of the building. The form of the gable--a very flat triangle, with the obtuse angle at the vertex--determined the sculptor, just as the shackles of metre determine the poet. But even as these apparent shackles have produced the most splendid effects in poetry, so the limitations of space have suggested to the Greek sculptors the most poetical devices. We now know that even the pre-Persian Parthenon had such a composition on its gable, of which great serpentine monsters, carved in local stone, and then coloured, have been recently recovered. But when the art reached its perfection, we have the device of a notable mythical event, or a struggle, with agitated or combating figures, arranged symmetrically on either side of a central god, who is greater, calmer than the rest; while in the acute angles, the aspects of nature--rivers, woods, the rising and setting sun--were suggested by graceful lying figures, which show that air of peaceful and silent indifference that is the usual aspect of nature around a great human tragedy.[27]

These marvellous compositions, full of symmetry and of variety, have been the examples set before scores of European sculptors, in their imitations of classical architecture; but I cannot say that I know a single specimen that I should like to show here to you in direct comparison with the work of the ancients. It is in this, as in so many walks of art: all the modern resources of science, all the study of the old masterpieces, have not sufficed to kindle the spark of genius in our inartistic age. We have a thousand resources that the Greeks had not--we have a thousand volumes of exposition, analysis, criticism, telling how these things were done--yet we are like the civilised man trying to elicit flame from the sticks which furnish the primitive man with his fire. All our efforts only succeed in producing smoke; the living spark will not come.[28]

Much the same may be said of the second favourite form of Greek composition in sculpture, the ornamenting of long flat surfaces with rows or successions of figures, of which the frieze of the Parthenon is the most familiar, but not the only example. We now know from the recoveries at Delphi, especially the so-called treasury of Siphnos, that this theme was derived by Phidias from older examples.

What is the strange fascination in this long row of figures? There is that peculiar combination of sameness and of variety which affords us delight in all the occupations of our life. This procession has one general scope. It is bringing offerings to do honour to the gods, and bringing them with pomp and circumstance. But while all these men and maidens are bent on the same pursuit, they are represented with an endless variety in detail. Some are on curvetting horses, some are leading bulls both quiet and uneasy, some are carrying weights upon their shoulders, some have them on the ground--and are lifting them. There is the unity and difference which in music we know as harmony, and each figure is carried out with such simple perfection, with such unassuming grace and beauty, that it is hard indeed to point out any insufficiency or defect. There is even this subtlety in the detail of the work--that, as this band of figures was intended to be seen high above the spectator, care was taken to carve the lower limbs in slightly flatter relief than the upper, and the limbs of the horses were even made a little lighter than in nature, in order to counterbalance the predominance which the part nearer to the spectator’s vision might assume.

When such are the shattered fragments of an art which once adorned every city and every public building in Greece, it seems impossible to conjecture what would have been the effect on modern Europe had the great mass of it survived. Perhaps not so great as we should be disposed to assert at the first blush of the suggestion. For we could hardly avoid calling in the analogy of other arts, and of other times, where the works of genius preserved and known do not inspire modern artists. There is plenty of splendid mediæval architecture existing, and yet our modern architects have not been able to take their place as independent successors. In literature we have had many similar facts discussed during previous lectures. All the models in the world will not suffice without the divine spark in the teacher as well as the pupil, and this gift is rare and sporadic not only in the individual, but among the nations which have hitherto appeared in the course of history. There is, moreover, in using workers of a remote age or country as models, one concomitant circumstance which may make our efforts wholly incommensurate with theirs. It is the atmosphere in which every society lives, by which it has been created or at least fed, and which it creates in its turn. As the modern artist cannot possibly reproduce these surroundings, it is wellnigh impossible that he should reproduce the subtle spirit, once the very breath of Greek art, which has long vanished, and which has never since been recalled by the wit of man.

V

GREEK ART--II: PAINTING AND MUSIC