Chapter 10

[21]See Hippolyte Taine,On the Nature of the Work of Art(translated by John Durand), pp. 130, 131, 132, 133, 134.

[22]Dr. Wilhelm Lübke,op. cit., Vol. II, p. 14, 15, says, speaking of the Gothic: "What a contrast to the quiet, sober masses of the Romanesque style ...! Here, on the other hand, everything thrusts itself into prominence, everything strives for outward effect, everything endeavours to work out its individuality with spirit and energy. ... At the choir ... a positive sense of disquiet and confusion is produced, which may indeed excite the fancy, but cannot satisfy the sense of beauty."

[23]On the Nature of Gothic Architecture(1854), p. 4.

[24]On the Nature of Gothic Architecture, p. 6.

[25]Ibid., p. 11.

[26]Ibid., p. 19.

[27]On the Nature of the Work of Art, pp. 131-33, 134.

[28]History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Vol. I, p. 211.

4. The Renaissance.

The Renaissance, in its early stages, at least, was a period neither of pure realism nor of classicalism; it was neither a revival of learning nor a revival of antiquity. These words are mere euphemisms, mere drawing-room phrases. For, at its inception, the Renaissance was nothing more nor less than man's convalescence, after an illness that had lasted centuries. It was his first walk into the open, after leaving his bed and his sick-room.

According to the Nietzschean doctrine of art, this realism of Van Eyck, of Van der Weyden, Quintin Massys, Donatello, Pisanello, Masolino, Ucello and others ought to disgust you. It is not art, or if it is, its rank is inferior. Why, then, does it claim attention? Why is it far superior to the realism of the present day, despite some appallingly ugly features?[29]

It is superior only in this sense, that it is the work of convalescents. After they had been laid on the rack in the attempt to stretch their limbs and bodies to infinity, you must not be surprised that these men could only limp along. How could they be expected to walk majestically and with grace? That they could stand at all was a mercy. That they were able to hobble along as they did was a triumph.

To expect these recovering invalids to impart something of themselves to Life, to enrich her and to transfigure her, would be to expect the impossible. But if you applaud them at all, applaud them for their recovery, for the fact that it is well that they can give us even drabby reality as it is. Do not congratulate them yet on their health. For their realism, as realism, is as hopeless, as uninteresting and as unelevating as any realism ever was and ever will be.

It is deceptive, too, for what seem to be beauties in their pictures are borrowed from such of their predecessors of the late Gothic period as were already overloading their pictures with ornamental art forms, in order to disguise the ugliness of the type they presented. Where they beguile you, it is often with a wealth of sweet ornament.[30]

In Ucello's "Battle of Sant' Eglidio," at the National Gallery, it is impossible not to recognize the pains the artist has taken to make your eye dwell on the dainty trappings and accoutrements of the knights and their steeds, on the distracting balls of gold in the shrubbery, artfully repeated in the bridles of the horses, and on the complex maze of pikes, spears and lances, which makes the glimpse of hills in the distance all the more restful and pleasing.

Also in Pisanello's "St. Anthony and St. George" (National Gallery), whatever charm there is to be seen is still a Gothic charm, and the same holds good of this painter's remarkable picture of the "Vision of St. Eustace," in which the deliberately ornamental purpose of the animals in the background charms you more than their startling realism.

If you leave these pictures, in the National Gallery, and walk over to Orcagna's "Coronation of the Virgin," you will see where the ornamental charm of the early Renaissance realists probably found its origin. For these convalescent men made no sudden and unanticipated appearance. They were preceded by painters like Orcagna, who were beginning to feel the impossibility of making a beautiful image out of the Christian type, and who therefore crammed their pictures with ornament in a manner so prodigal that the human portion of them assumed quite a subordinate place.

Look at this picture of Orcagna's. It seems positively to ring with gold. Massed halos of the precious metal convert the faces of the people into mere decorative discs of colour. The golden embroidery on the dresses and on the hangings in the background give you a feeling of sunshine, of wealth and of luxury, which makes you forget the ideal for which all this lavish display is acting but as a subtle impresario. And the utilization of every square inch of room by filigrees, festoons, frills and fretwork of gorgeousness, almost convinces you at last that you are in front of an art which says "Yea" to the glory of sunshine, beauty and life.

In this very need of extravagant ornament, however, Orcagna confesses quite openly to you that, as far as humanity is concerned, he, as an artist, is bankrupt and destitute. His picture, like most things connected with the art of Christianity, is a pictorial paradox; and when you leave it, to wander through the other rooms, your mind must be of a singularly ingenuous stamp if it feels no suspicion with regard to Orcagna's use of such a deafening brass band in the exaltation of his ideal.

If you doubt all this, how can you explain the fact that those painters of the early Renaissance who remained faithful to the Christian type—such men, I mean, as Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Alesso Baldovinetti, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio—all remained more or less faithful, too, to Orcagna's belief in ornament and pretty accessories; while all those painters who either carried on or developed the new spirit in Pisanello's, Ucello's, Masolino's and Masaccio's work— such men as Pollajuolo, Verrochio, Perugini, Bellini, and ultimately Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael—all discarded pretty and seductive accessories, or, when they did use them, made them completely subordinate to the human element in their work?

The gradual growth in the importance of the human body and of the Pagan type, in the Renaissance painters, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, with whom there can no longer be any question of convalescence, the rapid return to a healthy life-affirming type, and the ultimate triumph of this type in the very heart of the Vatican—the headquarters of the greatest negative religion on earth,—these are the facts which make the art of this age so admirable and so thrilling.

It represents the greatest stand which Europe has ever made against the denial of life, humanity and beauty; and if some of the artists, like Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and ultimately Titian, in their great zeal, returned to nature with almost as much interest as to man, this is easily accounted for when it is remembered how long nature and man had been separated.[31]

But the fact that makes the final glory of the Renaissance type all the more glorious is the extraordinary circumstance that almost every one of the artists who fought for it, and for the principles it involved, from Piero della Francesca to Titian, were one after the other captured and enchained by the Church itself. Often it was in the very atmosphere of the high altar, with the fumes of the incense about them, that they asserted their positive faith in Life and Man. The greatest dangers, the greatest temptations surrounded them But they planted their banner, notwithstanding, in the centre of their true enemy's camp, and, for a while, their true enemy acquiesced, because the command was in the hands of men who were artists and pagans themselves, and who consequently did not believe in one single tenet of the negative creed which they professed.

Just as the realism of some of the early Renaissance artists, however, was the inevitable outcome of their convalescent state, so the strong realism of many of the painters and sculptors of the late Renaissance was the natural result of their combative attitude.

Fighting for a particular kind of man, against centuries of false and unhealthy tradition, it was necessary to bring forward the new ideal with every characteristic plainly, emphatically and powerfully expressed; for every characteristic of a new ideal is of the highest importance.

These new values of the Renaissance spirit were scarcely one hundred years old, when Michelangelo set himself the task of embodying them in his sculpture and painting. Would it be fair to criticize him from the standpoint of Egypt or even of Greece?

From the standpoint of Egypt he is disappointing. The preponderance of characteristic traits over simplicity in his work spoils the power of his conceptions. His prevailing lack of simplicity makes you guess at the youth of the values on which he stood, and his tortuous bodies often make you question whether his types have entirely left the nerves of the Gothic period behind them. But are not all these defects precisely of a kind which are unfortunately inseparable from the position which Michelangelo assumed?

He was the greatest of the Renaissance artists. In criticizing him, I have said all that can be said, from this particular standpoint, of his predecessors and contemporaries. His power lies in the forcibleness, the exhilaration, the exuberance and the wealth with which he brings forward his type. It lies in his absolute contempt of seductive prettiness, his sometimes terrible strength, his vehemence and his energy, and above all in his magnificent conceptions and the types with which he illustrates them. Compared with the art from which it had sprung, his art was stupendous.

And where he is weak, compared with a higher—and by no means a modern —concept of art, he suffers from the virtues of his position as a fighter and as an innovator.

In valuing him, as I said in my first lecture, it all depends whence you come. If you hail from Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth century, you can but go on your knees before him. If you hail from Memphis of the year 4000 B.C., you can but criticize and feel ill at ease before his work.

I have not yet said anything concerning the relation of the Renaissance artists to Greece, simply because, taking in view the circumstances of their development, the relation seems fairly obvious. In discussing the art of Greece itself, however, the matter will probably appear quite clear to you. How much of the transfiguration in late Renaissance art is actually due to Greek influence, or to the Dionysian spirit of the age, it is difficult to determine. In my opinion, the latter influence was more potent, and to the Greek influence I should be more prepared to ascribe the spur which originally led to the adoption of a thoroughly Pagan type.

[29]Kraus, in hisGeschichte der christlichen Kunst, Vol. II, denies that the revival of the antique was predominant in the Renaissance, and argues that individualism and nature study were the prominent notes. Venturi, the Italian art-historian, declares that the antique began to be paramount only in the sixteenth century, and that with it the decadence began. While Eugène Müntz, in his monumental work,L'Histoire de l'Art pendant la Renaissance, Vol. I, p. 42, speaking of the two movements of the period, says: "Deux voies s'ouvraient aux novateurs, ou le naturalisme à outrance, un naturalisme qui, n'étant plus soutenu par les hautes aspirations du moyen âge, risquait fort de sombrer dans la vulgarité (l'exemple de Paolo Ucello, d'Andrea del Castagna, de Pollajuolo l'a bien prouvé) ou bien la nature contrôlée, purifiée, ennoblie par l'étude des modèles anciens." The latter was the later movement. See also Woltmann and Woermann,History of Painting, Vol. II, Introduction.

[30]Muther, in hisHistory of Painting, Vol. I, p. 87, actually declares that Jan van Eyck and Pisanello in their dainty manner remained Gothic.

[31]Of Piero della Francesca, Muther says,op. cit., Vol. I, p. 97: "He created the grammar of modern painting.... Four hundred years ago he proposed the problem of realism, and endeavoured, as the forerunner of the most modern artists, to establish in what manner atmosphere changes colour impressions."

"The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land make thy father and brethren to dwell."—Genesis xlvii. 6.

1. Greek Art.

I have now spoken to you of Christian Art, and you have not been taken altogether by surprise; because, in England at least, people are not unacquainted with the fight Art has had with Puritanism. And you were, therefore, partly prepared for what I had to say. The views I have expressed concerning the Renaissance were not entirely new to you either, and, if they were, I can only hope that they will assist you in giving to the Art of that period its proper valuation. Now, however, I fear I am going to level a blow at what must seem to you even more sacred, even more invulnerable and even more thoroughly established than either Christian or Renaissance Art. I refer to the Art of Greece.

Albeit, before I proceed with my task, do not be surprised if, like Charles the First's executioner, Brandon, I kneel to kiss the hand of my victim, if only by so doing I may seem to you to understand the grave nature of my business, and satisfy you that the blow I am about to deliver is prompted more by conviction than by that cheap irreverence for great things which is, alas, only too prevalent to-day.

Goethe says somewhere that, if we find fault with Euripides at all we should do so on bended knees. It seems to me that this ought also to be the attitude of people and critics in this age who attempt to value what the Greeks achieved in the graphic arts. For the earnestness and vigour wherewith, collectively, they set up their triumphs and ideals in stone and marble, the moment any opportunity arose for them to affirm and exalt their type, is deserving of the utmost praise and admiration.

Too many great writers have exalted the Greeks, however, to make it necessary for me to edify you with any long and enthusiastic praise of those qualities which Nietzsche admired in them.

Fairness alone, therefore, compels me to acknowledge the grandeur of the type their art advocates. With Nietzsche I can but extol the yea-saying of this type to the passions, to beauty, to health, in fact to life. The fearlessness of the Greeks before beauty was their acknowledgment that life was a blessing to which it was worth while to be lured and seduced. And their innocent acceptance of the strongest passions is sufficient to show to what extent they had not only mastered them, but had also enlisted them into their service.

Nevertheless, though it is only decent to exercise some reserve in this matter, it certainly is necessary to point to a curious fact in regard to Greek Art in general, and that is, that, with the exception of some of its archaic examples, it has been revered with ever-increasing fervour by strangers, from the second century before Christ to the present day,—when I say strangers, I mean people whose thought and aspirations were not necessarily the outcome of Hellenic values,—and that this general appreciation of Greek Art by foreigners implies that there is some quality in it which is only too common to everybody and to anybody, irrespective of nationality and education. If it were asked what this common factor was, I should reply, it is Nature herself, to which Greek Art, in its so-called best period, is undeniably in close and intimate relationship.

In examining the works of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, it is well to bear in mind the peculiar state of the country in which they appeared, its division into states, and its mixed population. It is well to think of the many ideals that dominated these people, and of the fact that the citizen of one city was often regarded as an alien, without any political rights whatever, if he ventured to transfer his abode to another city but a few miles distant from his own; and allowances should be made for the rivalry and competition this state of affairs conduced to bring about. It is also well to remember the individual lives the colonists lived, and the altered outlook on life to which their independent positions were bound to lead, and which, when they returned to their mother city, as many of them used to do, must have shed a new and strange light upon what they saw.

Although a certain uniformity can be traced in the political history of most Greek states, no one would dare to maintain that the Greeks, at any time in their history, were a perfectly united people observing the same values; whilst even in the history of each separate state, changes occurred so constantly that a stable political type is a rare and practically negligible fact.

In spite of the many heroes and geniuses which arose from time to time, there never seems to have been that power, either human or superhuman, which might have welded these peoples indissolubly together, or which, taking its root in one of the contending races, could have made that race completely absorb and digest the others.

Even the games of Greece, which, it might be argued, tended to unite the various peoples, cannot be said to have gone very far in this respect, since the very fact that the Hellenic nation enforced a sacred armistice during the month of the games, between states that were at war, shows that the most this institution could achieve was a suspension of arms.

On the whole, therefore, the fact that one can talk of different types as characteristic of particular schools or ideals is amply accounted for, and when the general spirit of rivalry that animated the whole nation for centuries is duly taken into consideration it is not difficult to explain a certain preponderance of manifold characteristics over simplicity, which is observable in the greater part of Greek sculpture—a preponderance which sometimes led very rapidly to the crudest realism, and which at other times approached realism only after a considerable lapse of time. Such phenomena are the inevitable result of that lack of the powerful master or ruler spirit who unifies and co-ordinates heterogeneity, and who thereby makes simplification and powerful art possible, as the outcome of relative permanency.[32]

For, when technique is largely mastered, realism, as I have shown in the case of Mediæval and Renaissance Art, may in a great measure be the outcome of a desire to make one's own particular ideal unmistakably plain, and although this kind of truth to nature always reveals a clashing of values or types, it is of a kind which may be regarded as infinitely superior to the realism which has nothing to say at all, and which merely copies out of poverty of invention.

When talking to strangers about an ideal they do not share with you, it is necessary to bring all your powers to bear upon an adequate and perfectly vivid representation of what you have in your mind.

I, on this platform, assuming that Nietzsche as an art valuer was strange to you, had to present him to you with all the realism and detail I could dispose of. If I had been talking to people who knew the Nietzschean views of art perfectly well, I might have indulged in certain artistic simplifications and poetical transfigurations which I considered unsuited to the present circumstances.

This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the Hellenic spirit.

When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable distance. You may look at these things for a moment and wonder what they mean; you may even pass on with a feeling of indifference amounting to scorn;[33]but whatever your sensations are, you will be quite unable to deny that what you have seen does not belong to your world, that it is utterly and completely separated from you, and that you felt in need of a guide and of an initiator in its presence.

You may laugh at the lions of Gebel Barkal, you may deny that they are beautiful; but, whoever you are, scholar, poet, painter or layman, you will admit that they are cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote and uncommunicative.

A. The Parthenon.

Now, if you turn round and bear to the right in the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, you will find a broad passage lined with statues that seem very much more familiar to you than those which you are just leaving behind; and, in the distance, you will espy the maimed figures of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon. In a moment you will be in the Elgin Room, and everywhere about you you will see all that remains of the ancient temple of Athens which is worth seeing.

If you have not been to Athens, you must not suppose that you have missed much, as far as the Parthenon is concerned. Unless you are very modern and very romantic, and can take pleasure in visiting a gruesome ruin by moonlight, you would be only depressed and disappointed by the decayed and ugly mass of stones that now stands like a battered skeleton on the Acropolis. You may take it, therefore, that, as you stand in the Elgin Room, you have around you the best that the Parthenon could yield after its partial destruction and dismantlement in 1687 by the victorious Veneto-German army. And what is it that you see?

Remember that you are a man of the twentieth century A.D., and that you have just been bored to extinction by a walk in the Egyptian Gallery. Remember, too, that you have very few fixed opinions about Art, and that the artistic condition of your continent is one of chaos and anarchy.

In spite of all this, however, you will walk up to the horse's head at the extreme right of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon, and the two thousand and four hundred years that separate you from it will vanish as by magic.

For years I have taken men, women and children up to this horse's head. In some cases these people have been technical connoisseurs of a horse's points; in others they have been mere bourgeois people, indifferent both to the art of Greece and to equine anatomy; and with the children I was concerned with raw manhood that cared not a jot for Art, and whose one sole, savage instinct was to recognize and classify what was before them.

If you supposed, however, that the verdict of these different people was anything but unanimous, you would be vastly mistaken. The children cried with delight. Their powers of recognizing things was stimulated to the utmost. One of them told me it was like a real bus-horse. The connoisseurs of a horse's points began to draw plausible conclusions from the existing head as to the probable conformation of the body which the artist had deliberately omitted, and the bourgeois people declared that they loved the fascinating softness and convincing looseness of the mouth.—All of them were charmed. All of them understood. Not one of them felt that this horse held itself aloof from them and kept its distance, as the austere Egyptian lions had done. And all of them were children of the twentieth century A.D., and over two thousand years separated them from the objects they were inspecting.

Their comments on the Parthenon Frieze were much the same. Once or twice one of them would say that there was a monotonous similarity of feature in the men and in the horses—a comment which immediately revealed to me that 2,400 years had indeed wrought some change. On the whole, however, the attitude of those I escorted amazed me; for, with but few exceptions, it was one of sympathy and understanding. I will not say that I did not stimulate their interest a good deal, by making them feel that their criticism was valuable to me; I will not pretend that if they had been alone they would have troubled to concentrate their minds to any great extent upon the exhibits around them; but this I will affirm, with absolute confidence: that if all the men, women and children who stream through the Elgin Room daily were given the same stimulus to exercise their critical faculty, and were similarly induced to give particular attention to all they saw, the sympathy and understanding which I observed among the groups of visitors I escorted would be found to be a fairly general, if not a common occurrence.

The Apollo of Tenea, Glyptothek, Munich.

B. The Apollo of Tenea.

Take the same people down to the Cast Room and show them the Apollo of Tenea, and what will they say?

When I first halted before this bewilderingly beautiful statue in the Glyptothek at Munich, I felt I was in the presence of something very much more masterful, very much more impressive, and infinitely more commanding than anything Greek I had ever seen in London, Paris, or Athens.

Here was a style which was strange. But it was evidently a style which was the product of a will, and of a long observance of particular values that had at last culminated in a type; for this Apollo resembled nothing modern, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mediæval, or of the Renaissance.

This statue scorns to make a general appeal. It is the apotheosis of a type. Of this there can be no question. It is the work of a loving and powerful artist, who could simplify the human frame, and express stenographically, so to speak, the essential features of the people he represented, because he knew the essential features to which their values aspired.

The arms, alone, transcend everything that I have ever seen in Hellenic Art for consummate skill in transfiguring and retaining bare essentials alone; and although, here and there, particularly in the breast, there is a broadness and a sweeping ease, which I admit ought to be attributed more to incomplete control of essentials than to their actual simplification, the whole figure breathes a spirit so pure, so certain and so sound, that it is the nearest approach I can find in Greek Art to that ideal artistic fact in which the particular values of a people find their apotheosis in the transfigured and simplified example of their type.

I would deny that the qualities of this statue are not ultimate qualities. I would deny that there is anything transitional or archaic in them. What is archaic, what is transitional, is the weak treatment of the chest and abdomen. Compared with the simplified chest and abdomen of an Egyptian statue of the fourth or fifth dynasty, it shows a minimum rather than a maximum of command of, and superiority over, reality. Any healthy development of such an art, however, ought only to have led to greater perfection in the treatment of the parts mentioned, and I seriously question the general belief that it marks a progress in sculpture which must ultimately lead to the rendering of the athletic types for which the sculptors of Argos and Sicyon became famous. There is something strange and foreign in this statue which does not reappear in the Hellenic Art of the Periclean age.[34]Like the vases of the sixth century and some of the ante-Periclean Acropolis statues, there is a Ruler form in its execution that makes quite a limited appeal— a fact which would be consistent with its having been the apotheosis of a type. Its exhortation is not directed at mankind in general. It communicates little to the modern European, and the crowds that stream through the Elgin Room of the British Museum would probably pass it by without either sympathy or understanding.

And yet, as I have shown, it cannot be regarded as a perfect specimen of Ruler-art; there are too many uncertainties and too many doubts in it.

As marking an advanced stage in a very high class of Ruler-art, however, it is magnificent, and any transformation of its form to greater realism would be a descent, rather than an ascent, in taste.

If you turn from it to the sculptures of the temple of Selinus, which, as far as one can say, must have been carved not more than about half a century earlier, you will see that these are indeed archaic. They are beneath realism in their coarseness and crudity. But it is in the sculptures of Selinus, and not in the Apollo of Tenea, or in the best vases of the sixth century, that you must seek the motive spirit of the Art which has made the Periclean age so glorious; This striving after realism, although unsuccessful in the metopes of Selinus, reveals a different aspiration, a totally different will, from that which created the Munich Apollo, and it was precisely this aspiration that was fully realized, with but a slight admixture of the other will, in Athens of the fifth century.

Some will say that Egyptian influence is apparent in the Apollo of Tenea, and they will add that the Greek colonists in Selinus, finding themselves in very close contact with their commercial rivals the Phœnicians, very naturally scorned all Eastern canons and ideas when erecting their temples.

Both of these suggestions are perfectly legitimate. The Apollo of Tenea either betrays Egyptian influence or, owing to its Ruler form, it takes one's mind back involuntarily to the Ruler-art of the Nile. The sculptures of Selinus may also be the outcome of the conscious renunciation of Eastern influence, or they may be the manifestation of a particular "Art-Will," as Worringer has it, which aimed at realism and was quite guiltless of any other ulterior motive. In both cases I favour the latter alternative, and I should like to believe that in addition to the influences I have already mentioned in respect of realism there were two Art-Wills active in ancient Greece—each striving for supremacy and power.

I cannot see how any one rising from a study of Hellenic Art can arrive at any other conclusion. A superior will aiming at a Ruler-art form is the one, an inferior will aiming at realism is the other. And it is a significant fact, that while the first will sent forth its last blooms in the sixth century—a period when, according to Freeman, Hellenic life readied its zenith,[35]the ultimate triumphs of the other and inferior will, in the fifth century, marks the first stage in a decline that was never to be arrested.[36]

The Medusa Metope of Sellinus, Palermo.

This is not the usual view, I know. As a rule, the art of the age of Pericles is considered to be the highest that Greece ever produced. But in this art I see a preponderance of realism which reveals to what extent the other and inferior will was beginning to prevail. And when I study Hellenistic art, and see this evil assuming such proportions as to make even modern historians and Art-scholars deliberately denounce it, I cannot help but recognize the germs of this decay in the art which hitherto has been most praised and admired.

As I say, I am judging purely from the artistic records. But I have no doubt that, if I possessed the necessary scholarship, I could trace the two Art-wills to two distinct races of men who, from the days of the fall of Mycenæan culture, strove for mastership in Greece. I also entertain no doubts that the fall of Greece might be attributed to the gradual triumph of that race which possessed the inferior Art-will, and nothing I have read, either in Grote, Bury, Oman, Curtius, Schnaase, Miss Harrison and others, has led me seriously to hesitate before suggesting this hypothesis.

Professor Ridgeway's Early Age of Greece leads me to suppose that the problem might be solved in the way I suggest. But, in any case, whether this is so or not, the style of the art of Pheidias shows a descent from the style of the Apollo of Tenea, which only an age with a mistaken conception of what art really is could possibly have overlooked.

The art of the fifth and fourth centuries, I will not and cannot deny, contains a large proportion of Ruler form, or what modern and ancient art-historians call the "ideal."[37]No people, any portion of which had been capable of producing the Apollo of Tenea, could have avoided it; but that it preponderates in realism, the evidence of history, alone, apart from that of our own senses, proves beyond a doubt.

The appreciation which it has met with at the hands of almost all Europeans of all ages, and particularly at the hands of the Renaissance realists, shows how general its appeal has been; and no art which has been so very much above Nature as to apotheosize the particular values of a particular people at its zenith, has ever made such a general appeal.

In regard to the painting of Greece, I will not detain you long. Practically all I have said in regard to Greek sculpture may be applied with equal force to Greek painting, and I cannot do better than sum up this side of the question with the words of that profound Japanese artist Okakura-Kakuzo.

In speaking of the great style of the Greeks, in painting—a style which vanished with the sixth century,—he says—

"The great style of the Greeks in painting—that style which was theirs before a stage chiaroscuro and imitation of Nature were brought in by the Appellesian school,—rises up before us with ineffaceable regret ... and we cannot refrain from saying that European work, by following the later school, has lost greatly in power of structural composition and line expression, though it has added to the facility of realistic representation."[38]

When it is remembered that the demands of theatrical scenery are generally admitted to have exercised considerable influence over Greek painting, we need feel no surprise at the necessarily vulgar nature of its ultimate development; while in raising this point about chiaroscuro, Okakura-Kakuzo really opens a very serious and needful inquiry.

It may be seriously questioned whether the chiaroscuro which Apollodorus is said to have introduced in the fifth century was not the worst possible blow that has ever been levelled at Ruler-Art, and it is difficult to separate this discovery from the people who made it.

Once it is recognized that chiaroscuro implies a blending of colours together, an elimination of all those sharp contrasts which the compromising spirit of a democratic age cannot abide, and a general hugging and embracing of all colours by each other, at the cost of the life of all definite lines; once it is acknowledged, moreover, that all gradations and blurred zones of contact lead inevitably to the very worst forms of Police Art, such as Zeuxis, Parrhasius and Timanthus practised, and that escape from realism is not only difficult, but almost impossible under such conditions, the question whether Apollodorus is to be praised or cursed becomes a very weighty and vital one; and in saying that he ought to be cursed, I make a very important statement, however unreasonable it may seem to you at present.

You have noticed that until now I have not compared the Periclean art of Greece with the art of any other country, but simply with what is generally called the archaic art of Greece itself. I have spoken Only of the Apollo of Tenea, and of certain promising features in the sixth-century sculptures which were discovered on the Acropolis within recent years.

[32]See Edward A. Freeman,The Chief Periods of European History, p. 6: "The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers." Page 9: "The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long."

[33]The attitude of such men as Lübke and Winckelmann to Egyptian art is typical of the lack of understanding with which modern Europeans have approached the monuments of the Nile. SeeHistory of Sculpture, by Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, Vol. I, pp. 22-25, andHistory of Ancient Art, by John Winckelmann, Vol. I, pp. 169, 171, 175.

[34]This view seems quite opposed to that of a great authority on the subject, Mr. A. S. Murray; but how this author comes to the conclusion that "... in describing the progress of sculpture from its early days to its highest development, it is convenient to speak of it as a gradual elimination of realism," I am quite at a loss to understand. SeeA History of Greek Sculpture, p. 239.

[35]SeeThe Chief Periods of European History, pp. 21-23. See also Bury,History of Greece, Chaps. IV and V.

[36]In studying the actual decline of Greek art it would, I think, be very necessary to lay some stress upon the part taken by the people in general, in judging and criticizing artistic productions under the democracies. See Rev. J. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece), who is talking entirely from the Hellenic standpoint, p. 440: "The really vital point was the public nature of the work they (the Athenian Demos) demanded; it was not done to please private and peculiar taste, it was not intended for the criticism of a small clique of partial admirers, but it was set up, or performed for all the city together, for the fastidious, for the vulgar, for the learned, and for the ignorant. It seems to me that this necessity, and the consequent broad intention of the Greek artist, is the main reasonwhy its effects upon the world has never been diminished, and why its lessons are eternal" (the italic are mine).

[37]T. G. Tucker, in hisLife in Ancient Greece, does his best to reconcile the realism of Greek art with the "ideal," and helps himself out of the difficulty by reasserting Schelling's claim inThe Philosophy of Art(see note to p. 91 in this book). Mr. Tucker says, p. 186: "Many people imagine that Greek sculpture—to take that salient province again—deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only when the carving seemed instinct with life—a life not merely of the limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was felt to be controlling every limb. A Greek sculptor like Praxiteles studied long and lovingly.... To anatomy he is as true as an artist need wish to be. But are not his figures ideal? Doubtless, but what does 'ideal' mean? That they are abstract, conventional, or frankly superhuman? Anything but that. It means simply that he carves figures which, while entirely true to strict anatomy, entirely lifelike in all their delicate modelling ... are examples of nature in happiest circumstances...."

[38]Ideals of the East, p. 53.

2. Egyptian Art.—A. King Khephrën.

If, however, I now choose to compare the art of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Parthenon at Athens[39]with that of Egypt, the first falls absolutely to pieces. If I walk from the lions of Gebel Barkal, which Reginald Stuart Poole considers as the "finest example of the idealization of animal forms that any age has produced,"[40]over to the horses of the Parthenon, the latter seem poor, feeble, and slavish beside the powerfully simplified and commanding work of Egypt. And if, with vivid recollections of the diorite statue of King Khephrën at Cairo, I walk up to the best Greek work of the Periclean age, or after, either in London or Paris, I marvel at the denseness of an age which can put the Egyptian Pharaoh second in the order of rank.

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