a stage performer; a thinker and a writer without becoming a bookworm; he can decide on public affairs without delegating his authority to representatives; he can worship his gods without confining himself within the limits of a creed. A people thus constituted will speedily free art from being a mere historical record, as with the Assyrians, or a mere sacerdotal symbol, as with the Egyptians: art to them will soon become a thing not for use, but an intellectual necessity. Their desire for beauty seizes on every opportunity, on every pretext for satisfying itself. The gods 'living on the heights of Olympus, which the winds cannot shake, which are never wetted by rain or snow, where the sky extends cloudless and the white light circulates freely, drinking nectar and eating ambrosia, seated on their golden thrones, while the muses sing with their beautiful voices' — such gods as these are glad of feasts in which the city is garlanded, the most beautiful youths and maidens dance and sing in chorus, the strongest and fleetest athletes run and leap and wrestle in their honour. So, as the Homeric heroes light fires and slaughter bullocks and pour out wine for Zeus or Athene, and themselves make merry over the food and drink, the Greeks organize pageants and plays ostensibly to please the gods, but really to satisfy their own love of beauty. The sanctuary of the divinity is not a dark lofty pile, in which, awe-stricken by the gloom, the mystic lights, and the peal of the organ, thousands sink on their knees and quail at the thought of their sins; but the chief ornament of a town, the shrine in which are kept the relics of the original founder, a statue of the god and the offerings given it. It crowns the city, and to it wind up processions of athletes and priests, with chariots and horses; to it the sailor looks up after he has left the port. It is a place neither of public prayer nor of private confession. It is the most useless, the most conspicuous, the most beautiful edifice of a city, given as residence to the statue of the divinity. The gods of the Greeks are in reality the same as the Greeks themselves: what seems lovely and pleasant to a citizen of Athens or to a tyrant of Samos must necessarily seem so to Athene or to Hera. The Greek religious ceremonies consist therefore mainly in cavalcades of handsome youths, in processions of beautiful maidens, and of citizens bearing torches, offerings, and wreaths; of games where the young men and boys show their prowess in running, leaping, wrestling, and chariot-driving; of choral performsances, which, like the Odes of Pindar, are at once declaimed, sung, and acted, in honour of the gods and men. When we Greek Cultivation of the Body. 9 say acted, it is for want of a modern word to express an ancient thing: they were not acted to the accompaniment of mere commonplace gestures like a play, nor danced in imitative caprioles like a ballet; above all, they were not performed behind stage lights by stage mimes: it was a theatrical performance, but performed in honour of the gods by a whole people. But if the Greek artistic capacities were early fostered by the peculiar nature of their religious worship, they owed their further development to the institution of the gymnasium and the stadium; nor did art begin to arise until the high cultivation of the body had become an intrinsic part of Greek civilization. The Spartans, encamped, as it were, among a conquered people far more numerous than themselves, were obliged to organize a system of bodily training by which every citizen could be rendered as robust as possible, and the race be brought to the highest point of physical perfection. All the laws of the commonwealth were calculated to promote this end sobriety and hardiness were enforced; the women and children as well as the men were taught to run, leap, and wrestle, for the military state required not only present but future generations of warriors. The gymnastic system of the Spartans spread to the other Greek states, in which it lost its appalling severity, and became not so much a necessity of the state as a requirement of liberal education. Pliny recognized a Greek city by its palestra; in the same way Greek civilization might be recognized by the high esteem for the human body, and Greek art by the wonderful physical perfection due to this feeling. The Greeks, thus educated in the palestra, accustomed to see the naked human body perfected by every kind of exercise, accustomed also to the measured movements of the Pyrrhic and sacred dances, needed no special instruction to appreciate the grand forms of the Theseus or the Ilissus. The sculptors on their side did not need to dissect for years, like Michael Angelo, in order to become acquainted with every line and movement of the human body: they saw it daily, hourly, developed and proportioned by exercise, moving freely and gracefully, knowing how to bend, stand erect, lean one shoulder against a column, and in all these attitudes to be as beautiful as a statue.' 'The Greeks,' says M. Taine in another passage, interested themselves in real living bodies before interesting themselves in drawn or modelled ones: they formed real groups before forming sculptured ones.' For a long time Greek art is a mere sacerdotal handicraft, like that which produced the Egyptian idols and the Byzantine virgins; then it becomes purely realistic, imitating without attempting to improve. But as soon as the scientific knowledge and the mechanical skill have been obtained, it creates an ideal. Now what is this ideal of Greek art ? M. Taine has defined it in words which have no equivalent in English. It is le bel animal humain, the well-made body, showing a fine race, perfect training, and a vigorous and well balanced, but placid and contented, mind. But what interests the Greeks is not the expression of face or attitude, nor the indication of character and race: it is the lines and curves, the muscles and sinews, it is the body itself. The artist rarely attempts to represent passion or even emotion, nor does he care to infuse into the face the expression of thought or of feeling. If the limbs be well turned and the attitude graceful, if the line of the brows and the curve of the lips be lovely, he is satisfied with his work, and we ought to be satisfied with him, for he has shown us the noblest of material forms, the noble human body. Usually the man or god is in a tranquil attitude; he is doing nothing, he is saying nothing, he is not paying attention to anything; he is reposing, but without weariness, sometimes standing, leaning a little on one side; sometimes he is half sitting, sometimes he is half reclining. . . . His action is nearly always a trifling one, and the idea occupying him is so undefined, nay, for us, so totally absent, that even now, after a dozen different surmises, no one can tell with accuracy what the Venus of Milo is doing. She lives; it satisfies her, and it satisfied the spectator of antiquity. We should wish our readers to note these words, she lives, for they give the key to ancient art, and show that what may at first appear a partial, one-sided ideal, is in reality the most complete one possible. The Greek statue lives, but not the incomplete life of the oyster or of the horse, nor the crippled life of the man of business or of the thinker. It is neither feeling, nor thinking, nor acting; but it is ready to feel, to think, and to act. The ancient sculptor shows us only the perfect body, motionless and emotionless, but in the perfect body we feel the presence of the perfect mind, capable of the noblest feeling and action, and grander in well-balanced repose than in any partial employment of its force. The network of small independent Greek states, so necessary it would seem to the efflorescence of art, could not subsist long. As soon as the fear of Oriental invasion was removed, the commonwealths attacked each other. Some grew stronger, some weaker; the strong swallowed up the weak, and were in Deterioration of Art in Greece. 11 their turn swallowed up by the Macedonians and the Romans. The character of Greek art did not deteriorate less than did that of the Greek nation between the ages of Pericles and of Alexander. As the people grew undisciplined and the writers grew sophistical, so the artists became gradually careless of general nobility of form, fond of minute detail, striving after dramatic expression and sensual attraction. The grand beauty of the schools of Phidias and Polyclete turned into the effeminate grace of Praxiteles and the athletic elegance of Lysippus. Already in the time of these latter the study of the living model began to diminish, and the study of the rules of proportion to increase, till at last were produced those works of mere correct proportion and smooth workmanship which Benjamin West stigmatized as systematic school routine. art.' But even then the artists were still Greeks, and still working for Greeks. They still had a constitutional love of beauty; they still daily observed the naked human body perfected by gymnastic and orchestric exercises; they still preserved that quiet indifference to novelty which prevented their abandoning old and approved types. Weak, cold, and flimsy was certainly the art of the second and the first centuries. compared with that of the fifth, but how perfect was it not compared with modern sculpture, even that of the Renaissance! If the Theseus and the Venus of Milo make us despise the Apollo and the Laocöon, let us remember that they in their turn made Winckelmann despise the works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that it was they who first taught us to appreciate that superiority which Greek sculpture possessed even in its days of decline. But nothing arrested this decline when the Romans, constitutionally inartistic, and largely tainted with Asiatic customs, became the chief patrons of art. The season of efflorescence was over, the plant was uprooted from its native soil, and moreover exposed to the pestilential emanations of a vast mass of corruption. The Hellenic civilization had been stifled. by the Semiticized civilization of Rome; the Greeks had been crushed beneath the fall of the Romans; and then, in the words of Gibbon, the barbarians of the north rushed in to mend the puny breed.' But before this regeneration could take place the old civilization had to disappear, and the amalgamation of the barbarian with the ancient element looked more like the chaos of final destruction than the confusion of reformation. Imagine (says M. Taine) a herd of bulls let loose among the furniture of a palace; after this herd another, so that the ruins left by the first are crushed to dust beneath the hoofs of the second; and that scarcely has one herd had time to instal itself in the chaos, before it must arise and repel a bellowing troop of ferocious invaders. When at length, in the tenth century, the last band had settled itself amidst the ruins, the condition of nations did not show signs of improving. The barbarian chieftains, become feudal lords, fought amongst themselves, pillaged the peasants, burned the harvests, robbed the merchants, and maltreated the miserable serfs. The land remained uncultivated, and food became scanty. During the eleventh century forty years out of seventy were years of famine. A monk, Raoul Glaber, tells us that it had become a practice to eat human flesh. Add to this the universal squalor and filth, the neglect of the most obvious sanitary precautions, producing every kind of epidemic, the plague and leprosy being, so to speak, acclimatized. The world, said a contemporary writer, had become a mere sink of wickedness and licentiousness. About the year 1000 A.D. people began to expect the end of the world, and, seized with terror, gave their fortunes to churches and convents. The art of such a time necessarily bore the impress of general incapacity and despair. The architecture aims at no beauty of form, nay, scarcely at any form whatever. The church of the dark ages is a shapeless building, where the squalid population could cower in the gloom, listen to prophecies of impending destruction, and gaze at the monstrous beasts with beaks and wings, and the squashed, leering imps, hovering on the frieze or cowering beneath the massive pillars like a nightmare in stone. The Crusades, indeed, open a new horizon. People become less wretched and more hopeful, but the long disease of the dark ages still hangs about them; and if they feel hope and pleasure once more, it is most often the feverish hope and the feverish pleasure of men exhausted by suffering. They seem rarely to feel anything like calm affection and healthy activity. In religion, in love, in poetry, in art, they show the same passion, endless and objectless, a wistful longing after everything and nothing, a sinking and fainting, a panting and glowing, a weak and violent excitement, where groundless pleasure mingles with groundless pain, a state in which the soul, raised above all human concerns, staggers and reels in supersensual longing and ecstasy. Morbidly excited imagination like that of these people (says M. Taine) is not satisfied with ordinary forms; nay, the form alone does not interest them: it must become a symbol expressive of some august mystery. The edifice with its naves represents the cross on which the Redeemer suffered; the rose windows with diamond-like petals represent the eternal rose of which the redeemed souls form the leaves. The dimensions of all the building correspond with some sacred number; neither the simple curve of the arcade nor the simple square formed by the column and the architrave is chosen, but the complicated union of two curves broken by each other. The columns are heaped together into monster pilasters, |