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.