Note 98.2 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.

Influence of religious art.—The study of the polytheism of this century is essentially also a study of the great religious art which culminated in the handiwork of Pheidias, but which continued forceful and prolific till the age of Alexander. The general effect of the iconic art upon Greek religion has been briefly indicated above; and long before this century the religious bias of the race was committed to idolatry;98.2 the people craved an image that they could love and cherish, though here and there they might retain the uncouth fetich, the block of wood or rudely hewn stone, because of the immemorial magic which it had acquired through ages of shy half-savage veneration. The achievement of Pheidias and his contemporaries was only the culmination in a process of ideal anthropomorphism that began with Homer and was helped forward by the lyric poetry and music of the post-Homeric age and by the art of the sixth century. Strictly estimated and studied in all its fullness, in the marvellous products of vase-painting, glyptic and sculpture that even the shattered fabric of antiquity presents to us, the art of the fifth and early fourth century must be called the most perfect religious art of the world. A more spiritual or more mystic religion could not have produced or could not have borne with such an art. But it was the best and most satisfying expression of the best that the religious spirit of Hellenism admitted; for this polytheism had been built up by the teachers of the people, poets and artists obeying the race-instinct, not on vague conceptions of infinite Godhead ineffable for art and inexpressible in clear speech, but on vivid perceptions of concrete divine personages, distinct in form, attributes and character robust and very real. The Greek artist, with his miraculous cunning of hand, could deal with such types as he could not have dealt with ‘the Word’ or with the ‘Buddha.’ Nor was he merely the exponent of the highest popular imagination, but, unconsciously perhaps and in obedience to a true art-tradition, at times a reformer and in any case a creator. For us his works have this value among others that, even more than the poetic literature, they reveal to us how the people at their best imagined their deities. But they also helped the people to imagine them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone. It was not till the time of Skopas in the fourth century that Greek sculpture could so deal with this orgiastic theme. The plastic work of the fifth century dealing with divine forms is mainly tranquil, majestic, ethical, intellectual; the physical perfection of the divinities sculptured on the Parthenon impresses us not merely and not so much with the sense of physical beauty and strength, but rather with the sense of a higher and nobler vital power; so instinct is the beauty with that quality that the Greeks called σεμνότης, a quality partly ethical, partly spiritual, but palpable in material forms that hint at a tranquil reserve of strength. The expressive power of such an art can show benignity and mildness of mood without sentimentality, because without voluptuousness, intellectual thought without morbidness, majesty without self-display.