of the race. In the first place, everything | divinities with the men of the heroic age, was the first and most potent cause of the greatness of Greek art. To this must be added another cause : these Greeks were not the third or fourth civilized race which possessed the country; they had not built up a new civilization and a new religion on the ruins of old ones; they had emerged from barbarism, but not from decay. In this respect their civilization was different from that of modern times, different from that of the Renais ple, more cheerful; they had, perhaps, not received the greatest culture, but they had not been weakened by the greatest vices. This simple, nay, primitive, state, when joined to a peculiarly limited country, produced an even more important effect. in Greece is small and strongly marked: the hills are low, and instead of being covered with a thick layer of arable soil, they show the forms of the rock sharp and clear; its largest rivers are rivulets compared to the Po or the Adige, as its most extensive plains are mere parade squares compared to the vast level expanses of Lombardy and Latium. The sea, eating away the land and reducing the small country to yet smaller dimensions, enters into hundreds of bays and creeks, which heighten the lake-like ap-sance; their minds were younger, more simpearance of the Mediterranean. In so small a country, the single states, separated from each other by ranges of hills and inlets of the sea, are necessarily extremely limited, so that the territory of Florence, Sienna, or Perugia could contain several of the most important of the Greek commonwealths. The result of this universally small standard dinated his institutions to himself, instead of In Greece (says M. Taine) man has suborwas, first, to increase to a remarkable degree subordinating himself to his institutions. He that love of the definite and the distinct in- has made them a means, and not an end; he nate in the Greek people; and, secondly, to has used them to develop harmoniously all his give them that reliance on the human ele- faculties; he can be at the same time poet, ment, that tendency to give a human shape philosopher, critic, magistrate, priest, judge, to everything, and to conceive no higher citizen, and athlete; he can exercise his ideal than perfected humanity, which was body, his mind, and his taste; he can unite possible only in a state of things in which none interferes with the others; he can be a in himself twenty different talents, of which man was perfectly in proportion with his soldier without being an automaton; a dancer surroundings. But while these surround- and a singer without turning into a stage perings were such as to inspire a love for dis- former; a thinker and a writer without betinctness and simplicity, they were also cal- coming a bookworm; he can decide on public culated to foster the feeling for beauty affairs without delegating his authority to which was equally innate in the race. The representatives; he can worship his gods withoutlines of the hills were noble; the sea, it-out confining himself within the limits of a self showing the most exquisite combination of colours, broke not against dreary expanses of shingle, but against grandly-shaped rocks, tinted warm and golden by the sun. The vegetation, while not so abundant as to confuse the outlines of the land, comprised the most beautiful trees-the oak, the sycamore, the laurel, the olive, the pine, the poplar, and the palm-besides vines and corn. Every combination of tints was heightened, every shape was defined, by an atmosphere far lighter and more luminous than that of Italy. These two peculiarities of the aspect of Greece produced in a young and impressionable people an aversion to everything vague, ugly, or monstrous; a desire to enjoy life serenely and simply; and a tendency to give a purely human shape to those vague natural forces whose worship they had brought from Asia. Thus while men acquired a happy serenity of mind and inclined constantly towards the beautiful, the gods descended on earth and assumed human shape and life-a combination of material and spiritual life which, expressed in fable by the familiar intercourse of the 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 os tensibly 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 performances, which, like the Odes of Pindar, are at once declaimed, sung, and acted, in honour of the gods and When we 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. men. 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 palæstra; 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 palastra, 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 at- | body perfected by gymnastic and orchestitude; he is doing nothing, he is saying noth- tric exercises; they still preserved that ing, 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 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 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. The season But nothing arrested this decline when the Romans, constitutionally inartistic, and largely tainted with Asiatic customs, became the chief patrons of art. 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 it must arise and repel a bellowing troop of had time to instal itself in the chaos, before 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, climatized. The world, said a contemporary the plague and leprosy being, so to speak, acwriter, had become a mere sink of wicked ness and licentiousness. About the year 1000 A.D. people began to expect the end | glass, blood-red, amethyst, and topaz-hued, of the world, and, seized with terror, gave in mystic gem-like splendours, in strange their fortunes to churches and convents. illuminations, which seem so many openings into paradise. 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 night-mare 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, galleries are suspended in the air, the vault is raised to the skies, spires are built on spires. Delicacy of form is exaggerated, the portals are enchased in rows of little figures, the sinuosities of the stone work are interwoven with the manyshaded purple of the windows; the choir is embroidered like lace-work; and, spread over the tombs, the altar, the towers, is a network of tiny columns, of complicated ornaments, of leaves, and of statues. The artists appear to aim at both the infinitely large and the infinitely small, at crushing the mind by both extremes. The interior of the edifice remains lost in cold and lugubrious shadow. The light enters only transformed by the stained But while such was the state of things in the North, events had taken a more favourable turn in Italy. The barbarians had crushed the old civilization, but they had not left the country 'absolutely barbarous ; the northern blood had revivified but not altered the southern constitution. The sea was accessible from all parts of the country, and its navigation fostered that spirit of freedom and enterprize of which the inhabitants of more inland countries were necessarily deficient. The sea also prevented the Italians from becoming isolated from the Byzantines, and put them into communication with the Arabs; and Amalfi and Gaeta got from the one the remains of ancient science, and the germs of modern science from the others. Gradually the last kingdoms of the last northern invaders disappeared, gradually the towns became independent, gradually a new Latin nation and language formed themselves. Then came what was yet needed to eliminate the foreign element, to give the Italians a distinct national life, and to confirm the establishment of the free towns, namely, a series of German invasions. When the last of them had been repulsed the national life was concentrated in a number of commonwealths, manufacturing, trading, and warlike-Pisa, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Bologna, Sienna, Lucca, and Perugia. The Gothic spirit predominated everywhere at that time, the Gothic style of art prevailed, but in Italy both underwent a great change. There the imagination was indeed mystical, but tempered by practical wisdom and social vigour. Dante was a visionary like Wolfram von Eschenbach, but he was also a politician and a word-painter. The cathedrals of Florence and Sienna are Gothic structures like those of Cologne and Rheims, but they belong to independent, prosperous southern cities. The Italian commonwealths scarcely know the middle ages: they emerge from the dark ages and arise in the Renaissance; for the Renaissance, the revival of Italian national spirit, of commerce and of art, begins with the thorough independence of the Italian republics. But art could not attain to perfection as long as there remained in the people any of the cankering malady of the dark ages; art required that the interest in the human figure should again become paramount, and this was impossible as long as men regarded this world as a sink of abomination, and pleasure in its contemplation as criminal. Acquaintance with ancient literature and art | quainted with each other, prosperous enough to give large employment to artistic talent, and separate enough to permit of a number of distinct schools. The result of these influences, common to the Greeks of antiquity and the Italians of the Renaissance, was that both Greeks and Italians brought to perfection one of the arts which are founded on an imitation of physical man. But while the Greeks had an intense subtlety of mind and a sort of pacific frivolity, the Italians were eminently practical, eminently serious, and were moreover distinguished from the Greeks by a latent irascibility which could flare up suddenly and terribly. The Greeks were in the time of Pericles in the perfection of their national life; they had re was also necessary, not because it introduced a new manner of thinking and feeling, but because it destroyed the last vestige of mediæval spirit. From the time of Petrarch, accordingly, to that of Lorenzo de' Medici, literature was exclusively in the hands of the humanists, whose only thought was to discover, comment on, and publish the works of the ancients; and from the time of Masaccio to that of Leonardo, painting and sculpture were exercised mainly by goldsmiths and bronze-workers, whose only desire was thoroughly to understand and perfectly to copy the human body. The result of the labours of the humanists was to direct the sympathy of the public into a healthier channel; the result of the endeav-pelled Oriental invasion and crushed interours of the anatomical metal-workers was that artists could think of nothing else but portraying the human body and gestures. When the public had acquired the right feeling to enable it to appreciate great art, and the artists had acquired the science and skill necessary to produce it, art arose once more, healthy, human, and perfect, as it had done in Greece nineteen hundred years before. But which of the two arts representing the human body was to gain the ascendency? Which was to be the special art of the Renaissance? An examination into the mental and social condition of this period will answer the question. Between the Renaissance and the age of Pericles there are several points of resemblance and several points of difference: the first explain why in both periods it was one of the plastic arts that attained to perfection; the second explain why sculpture predominated in one period and painting in the other. Italy, like Greece, was a southern, yet temperate country, presenting a great variety of aspects-few of them either rugged and sterile or over fertile and monotonous, and calculated for the most part to awaken and foster a love of grand shapes and harmonious colours. The race was handsome, intelligent, and frugal, and, owing to the many seaports, had acquired a habit of great commercial activity. Both peoples lived in a time when self-defence, travelling, and amusement required a great amount of bodily exercise, and when the scarcity of books and the rudimentary condition of science produced a balance of physical and mental activity. Both practised a worship in which ceremonies held a great place, and concrete representations of superior beings were regarded as proper and desirable. Finally, both lived in independent cities, small enough for all the inhabitants to be ac nal tyranny. The Italians of the age of Leo X. were, on the contrary, a declining nation; they were threatened by foreign conquest, and either actually suffering from or in fear of domestic usurpation. The Greeks had brought to perfection a system of warfare for which every man had to be trained most carefully; the Italians fought out their quarrels by means of mercenaries, who made war an art and battle a jest. The Greeks constantly saw and studied the human body naked and perfected by suitable exercise; the Italians rarely saw it except draped and busied in some commonplace occupation. The Greeks lived, eat, and slept in the streets; the Italians lived in very solid and carefully fitted-up houses. The Greeks professed a religion which deified the physical forces of nature; the Italians professed a religion which taught that physical nature was the mere prison of the soul. Finally, the Greeks were a new race in the world's youth-their feelings were fresh, their aspirations simple; the Italians were a reassemblage of old elements. formerly corrupt-they had gone through a period of exhaustion and fever, and their feelings and aspirations had become somewhat artificial. The result of this divergence was that the Italians could not, like the Greeks, take an overpowering interest in the mere lines and curves of the human body; that they were not satisfied with graceful repose, but desired action; that drapery and colour had become necessary to them; that they attempted to show emotion in the face and gesture. Beauty of form was indeed still the aim, but it was sought for in a less direct and exclusive manner. The Greeks took their types from the palestra, the Italians from the marketplace. Early Greek statues show us athletes with handsome limbs and simpering, vacant faces, undraped, and standing alone, likę |