Chapter 18

Separation between the Greeks and us.—Criticism.—Greek Sense of Beauty.—Greek Morality.—Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the Modern Spirit.

TheGreeks had no past, "no hungry generations trod them down;" whereas the multitudinous associations of immense antiquity envelop all our thoughts and feelings.[274]"O Solon, Solon," said the priest of Egypt, "you Greeks are always children!" The world has now grown old; we are gray from the cradle onwards, swathed with the husks of outworn creeds, and rocked upon the lap of immemorial mysteries. The travail of the whole earth, the unsatisfied desires of many races, the anguish of the death and birth of successive civilizations, have passed into our souls. Life itself has become a thousandfold more complicated and more difficult for us than it was in the spring-time of the world. With the increase of the size of nations, poverty and disease and the struggle for bare existence have been aggravated. How can we, then, bridge over the gulf which separates us from the Greeks? How shall we, whose souls are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake hands across the centuries with those young-eyed, young-limbed, immortal children? Can we make criticism our Medea—bid the magnificent witch pluck leaves and flowers of Greek poetry and art and life, distilling them for us to bathe therein and regenerate our youth like Æson?

Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted, and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks appears before us. Upon his soul there is as yet no burden of the world's pain; the creation that groaneth and travaileth together has touched him with no sense of anguish, nor has he yet felt sin. The pride and the strength of adolescence are his—audacity and endurance, swift passions and exquisite sensibilities, the alternations of sublime repose and boyish noise, grace, pliancy, and stubbornness and power, love of all fair things and radiant in the world, the frank enjoyment of the open air, free merriment, and melancholy well beloved. Of these adolescent qualities, of this clear and stainless personality, this conscience whole and pure and reconciled to nature, what survives among us now? The imagination must be strained to the uttermost before we can begin to sympathize with such a being. The blear-eyed mechanic, stifled in a hovel of our sombre Northern towns, canopied through all the year with smoke, deafened with wheels that never cease to creak, stiffened by toil in one cramped posture, oblivious of the sunlight and green fields, could scarcely be taught even to envy the pure, clear life of art made perfect in humanity, which was the pride of Hellas. His soul is gladdened, if at all, by a glimpse of celestial happiness far off. The hope that went abroad across the earth so many centuries ago has raised his eyes to heaven. How can he comprehend a mode of existence in which the world itself was adequate to all the wants of the soul, and when to yearn for more than life affords was reckoned a disease?

We may tell of blue Ægean waves, islanded with cliffs that seem less real than clouds, whereon the temples stand, burning like gold in sunset or turning snowy fronts against the dawn. We may paint high porches of the gods, resonant with music and gladdened with choric dances; or describe perpetual sunshine and perpetual ease—no work from year to year that might degrade the bodyor impair the mind, no dread of hell, no yearning after heaven, but summer-time of youth and autumn of old age and loveless death bewept and bravely borne.[275]The life of the schools, the theatre, the wrestling-ground, the law-courts; generous contests on the Pythian or Olympian plains; victorious crowns of athletes or of patriots; Simonidean epitaphs and funeral orations of Pericles for fallen heroes; the prize of martial prowess or poetic skill; the honor paid to the pre-eminence of beauty—all these things admit of scholar-like enumeration. Or we may recall by fancy the olive-groves of the Academy; discern Hymettus pale against the burnished sky, and Athens guarded by her glistening goddess of the mighty brow—Pallas, who spreads her shield and shakes her spear above the labyrinth of peristyles and pediments in which her children dwell. Imagination can lead us to the plane-trees on Cephisus's shore, the labors of the husbandmen who garner dues of corn and oil, the galleys in Peiræan harborage. Or, with the Lysis and the Charmides beneath our eyes, we may revisit the haunts of the wrestlers and the runners, true-born Athenians, fresh from the bath and crowned with violets—chaste, vigorous, inured to rhythmic movements of the passions and the soul.

Yet, after all, when the process of an elaborate culture has thus been toilsomely accomplished, when we have trained our soul to sympathize with that which is so novel and so strange and yet so natural, few of us can fairly say that we have touched the Greeks at more than one or two points.Novies Styx interfusa coercet: between us and them crawls the nine times twisted stream of death. The history of the human race is one; and without the Greeks we should be nothing. But just as an old man of ninety is not the same being as the boy of nineteen—nay, cannot even recall to memory how and what he felt when the pulse of manhood was yet gathering strength within his veins—even so now civilized humanity looks back upon the youth of Hellas and wonders what she was in that blest time.

A few fragments yet remain from which we strive to reconstruct the past. Criticism is the product of the weakness as well as of the strength of our age. In the midst of our activity we have so little that is artistically salient or characteristic in our life that we are not led astray by our own individuality or tempted to interpret the past wrongly by making it square with the present. Impartial clearness of judgment in scientific research, laborious antiquarian zeal, methodic scrupulousness in preserving the minutest details of local coloring, and an earnest craving to escape from the dreary present of commonplace routine and drudgery into the spirit-stirring freedom of the past—these are qualities of the highest value which our century has brought to bear upon history. They make up in some measure for our want of the creative faculties which more productive but less scientific ages have possessed, and enable those who have but little original imagination to enjoy imaginative pleasures at second hand by living as far as may be in the clear light of antique beauty.

The sea, the hills, the plains, the sunlight of the South, together with some ruins which have peopled Europe with phantoms of dead art, and the relics of Greek literature, are our guides in the endeavor to restore the past of Hellas. Among rocks golden with broom-flowers, murmurous with bees, burning with anemones in spring and oleanders in summer, and odorous through all the year with thyme, we first assimilate the spirit of the Greeks. It is here that we divine the meaning of the myths, and feel those poems that expressed themselves in marble mid the temples of the gods to have been the one right outgrowth from the sympathy of man, as he was then, with nature. In the silence of mountain valleys thinly grown with arbutus and pine and oak, open at all seasons to pure air, and breaking downwards to the sea, we understand the apparition of Pan to Pheidippides, we read the secret of a nation's art that aimed at definition before all things. The bay of Naples, the coast of Sicily, are instinct with the sense of those first settlers, who, coasting round the silent promontories, ran their keels upon the shelving shore, and drew them up along the strand, and named the spot Neapolis or Gela. The boys of Rome were yet in the wolf's cavern. Vesuvius was a peaceful hill on which the olive and the vine might slumber. The slopes of Pozzuoli were green with herbs, over which no lava had been poured. Wandering about Sorrento, the spirit of theOdysseyis ours. Those fishing-boats with lateen sail are such as bore the heroes from their ten years' toil at Troy. Those shadowy islands caught the gaze of Æneas straining for the promised land. Into such clefts and rents of rock strode Herakles and Jason when they sought the golden apples and the golden fleece. Look down. There gleam the green and yellow dragon-scales, coiled on the basement of the hills, and writhing to each curve and cleavage of the chasm. Is it a dream? Do we in fact behold the mystic snake, or in the twilight do those lustrous orange-trees deceive our eyes? Nay, there are no dragons in the ravine—only thick boughs and burnished leaves and snowy bloom and globes of glittering gold. Above them on the cliff sprout myrtle-rods, sacred to Love, myrtle-branches, with which the Athenians wreathed their swords in honor of Harmodius. Lilies and jonquils and hyacinths stand, each straight upon his stem—a youth, as Greeks imagined, slain by his lover's hand, or dead for love of his own loveliness, or cropped in love's despite by death that is the foe of love. Scarlet and white anemones are there, some born of Adonis's blood, and some of Aphrodite's tears. All beauty fades; the flowers of earth, the bloom of youth, man's strength, and woman's grace, all wither and relapse into the loveless and inexorable grave. This the Greeks knew, mingling mirth with melancholy, and love with sadness, their sweetest songs with elegiac melodies.

Beneath the olive-trees, among the flowers and ferns, move stately maidens and bare-chested youths. Their eyes are starry-softened or flashfire, and their lips are parted to drink in the breath of life. Some are singing in the fields an antique, world-old monotone of song. Was not the lay of Linus, the burden of μακραὶ ταὶ δρύες ὦ Μενάλκα (High are the oak-trees, O Menalcas), some such canzonet as this? These late descendants of Greek colonists are still beautiful—like moving statues in the sunlight and the shadow of the boughs. Yonder tall, straight girl, whose pitcher, poised upon her head, might have been filled by Electra or Chrysothemis with lustral waters for a father's tomb, carries her neck as nobly as a Fate of Pheidias. Her body sways upon the hips, where rests her modelled arm; the ankle and the foot are sights to sit and gaze at through a summer's day. And where, if not here, shall we meet with Hylas and Hyacinth, with Ganymede and Hymenæus, in the flesh? As we pass the laughter and the singing die away. Bright dresses and pliant forms are lost. We stray onward through the sheen and shade of olive-branches.

The olive was Athene's gift to Hellas, and Athens carved its leaves and berries on her drachma with the head of Pallas and her owl. The light which never leaves its foliage, silvery beneath and sparkling from the upper surface of burnished green, the delicacy of its stem, which in youth and middle and old age retains the distinction of finely accentuated form, the absence of sombre shadow on the ground beneath its branches, might well fit the olive to be the symbol of the purity of classic art. Each leaf is cut into a lance-head of brilliancy, not jagged or fanciful or woolly like the foliage of Northern trees. There is here no mystery of darkness, no labyrinth of tortuous shade, no conflict of contrasted forms. Excess of light sometimes fatigues the eye amid those airy branches, and we long for the repose of gloom to which we are accustomed in our climate. But gracefulness, fertility, power, radiance, pliability, are seen in every line. The spirit of the Greeks itself is not more luminous and strong and subtle. The color of the olive-tree, again, is delicate. Its pearly grays and softened greens in nowise interfere with the lustre which is the true distinction of the tree. Clear and faint like Guido's colors in the Ariadne of St. Luke's at Rome, distinct as the thought in a Greek epigram, the olive-branches are relieved against the bright blue of the sea. The mountain slopes above are clothed by them with light as with a raiment; clinging to knoll and vale and winding creek, rippling in hoary undulations to the wind, they wrap the hills from feet to flank in lucid haze. Above the olives shine bare rocks in steady noon or blush with dawn and evening.[276]Nature is naked and beautiful beneath the sun—like Aphrodite, whose raiment falls waist-downward to her sandals on the sea, but whose pure breasts and forehead are unveiled.

Nature is thus the first, chief element by which we are enabled to conceive the spirit of the Greeks. The key to their mythology is here. Here is the secret of their sympathies, the well-spring of their deepest thoughts, the primitive potentiality of all they have achieved in art. What is Apollo but the magic of the sun whose soul is light? What is Aphrodite but the love-charm of the sea? What is Pan but the mystery of nature, the felt and hidden want pervading all? What, again, are those elder, dimly discovered deities, the Titans and the brood of Time, but forces of the world as yet beyond the touch and ken of human sensibilities? But nature alone cannot inform us what that spirit was. For though the Greeks grew up in scenes which we may visit, they gazed on them with Greek eyes, eyes different from ours, and dwelt upon them with Greek minds, minds how unlike our own! Unconsciously, in their long and unsophisticated infancy, the Greeks absorbed and assimilated to their own substance that loveliness which it is left for us only to admire. Between them and ourselves—even face to face with mountain, sky, and sea, unaltered by the lapse of years—flow the rivers of Death and Lethe and New Birth, and the mists of thirty centuries of human life are woven like a veil. To pierce that veil, to learn even after the most partial fashion how they transmuted the splendors of the world into æsthetic forms, is a work which involves the further interrogation of their sculpture and their literature.

The motives of that portion of Greek sculpture which bring us close to the incidents of Greek life are very simple. A young man binding a fillet round his head; a boy drawing a thorn from his foot; a girl who has been wounded in the breast raising her arm to show where the sword smote her; an athlete bending every sinew to discharge the quoit; a line of level-gazing youths on prancing horses, some faring forward with straight eyes, one turning, with bridle-hand held tightly, to encourage his companion, another with loose mantle in the act to mount, others thrown back to rein upon their haunches chafing steeds; a procession of draped maidens bearing urns; a maiden, draped from neck to ankle, holding in both hands a lustral vase—such are the sculptured signs by which we read the placid physical fulfilment of Greek life. That the serenity of satisfied existence is an end in itself, and that death in the plenitude of vigor is desirable, the reliefs of Pheidias and the Æginetan marbles teach us. In these simple but consummate works of art the beauty of pure health, physical enjoyment, temperance, mental vigor, and heroic daring mingle and create one splendor of a human being sensitive to all influences and vital in every faculty. Excess can nowhere be discovered. Compare with these forms for a moment the Genii painted by Michael Angelo upon the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Over them has passed the spirit with its throes:la maladie de la penséeis there. Of no Phœbus and no Pallas are they the servants; but ministers of prophets and sibyls, angels of God fulfilling his word, they incarnate the wrestlings and the judgments and the resurrections of the soul. Now take a banquet-scene from some Greek vase. Along the cushioned couch lie young men, naked, crowned with myrtles; in their laps are women, and at their sides broad jars of honeyed wine. A winged Eros hovers over them, and their lips areopened to sing a song of ancient love. Yet this is no forecast of Borgia revels in Rome, or of the French Regent's Parc aux Cerfs. When Autolycus entered the symposium of Xenophon, all tongues were stricken dumb; man gazed at man in wonder at his goodliness. When Charmides, heading the troop of wrestlers, joined Socrates in the palæstra, the soul of the philosopher was troubled; such beauty was for him a sacred, spirit-shaking thing. Simætha, in thePharmaceutriaof Theocritus, beheld the curls of youths on horseback like laburnum-flowers, and their bosoms whiter than the moon.

We need not embark on antiquarian or metaphysical or historical discussions in order to understand the sense of beauty which was inherent in the Greeks. Little hints scattered by the wayside are far more helpful. Take, for example, theCloudsof Aristophanes; and after reading the speech of the Dikaios Logos, stand beneath the Athlete of Lysippus,[277]in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican. "Fresh and fair in beauty-bloom you shall pass your days in the wrestling-ground, or run races beneath the sacred olive-trees, crowned with white reed, in company with a pure-hearted friend, smelling of bindweed and leisure hours and the white poplar that sheds her leaves, rejoicing in the prime of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to the lime." This life the Dikaios Logos offers to the young Athenian if he will forego the law-courts and the lectures of the sophists and the house of the hetaira. This life rises above us imaged in the sculptor's marble. The athlete, tall and stately, tired with healthy exercise, lifts one arm, and with his strigil scrapes away the oil with which he has anointed it. His fingers hold the die that tells his number in the contest. Upon his features there rests no shade of care or thought, but the delicious languor of momentary fatigue, and the serenity of a nature in harmony with itself. A younger brother of the same lineage is the Adorante of the Berlin Museum. His eyes and arms are raised to heaven. Perfect in humanity, beneath the lightsome vault of heaven he stands and prays—a prayer of joy and calm thanksgiving, a Greek prayer—no Roman adoration with veiled eyes and muttering lips, no Jewish prostration with the putting-off of sandals on the holy ground, no Christian genuflection like the bending of wind-smitten reeds beneath the spirit-breath of sacraments. The whirlwind of the mightiest religions, born in the mystic East, has not passed over him; he has not searched their depths of awe, their heights of ecstasy, nor felt their purifying fires. Iamos in the mid-waves of Alpheus might have prayed thus when he heard the voice of Phœbus calling to him and promising the twofold gift of prophecy. All the statues of the athletes bear the seal and blossom of σωφροσύνη—that truly Greek virtue, the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty. "When I with justice on my lips flourished," says the Dikaios Logos, "and modesty was held in honor, then a boy's voice was not heard; but they went orderly through the streets in bands together from their quarters to the harp-player's school, uncloaked and barefoot, even though it snowed like meal." Of this sort are the two wrestling boys at Florence, whose strained muscles exhibit the chord of masculine vigor vibrating with tense vitality. If we in England seek some living echo of this melody of curving lines we must visit the water meadows where boys bathe in early morning, or the playgrounds of our public schools in summer, or the banks of the Isis when the eights are on the water, or the riding-schools of soldiers. We cannot reconstitute the elements of Greek life; but here and there we may gain hints for adding breath and pulse and movement to Greek sculpture. What for the Greeks was a permanent and normal condition is for us an accident. Therefore our conception of existence—more intense in emotion, more profound, perhaps, in thought—contains an element of strife and pain, an interruption of the purely physical harmony, which the Greek ideal lacked.

The charm which the simplest things acquired under the hand of a Greek artificer may be seen in the adornment of a circular hand-mirror.[278]Ivy-branches, dividing both ways from the handle, surround its rim with a delicate tracery of sharp-cut leaf and corymb. The central space is occupied by four figures—on the right, the boy Dionysus, who welcomes his mother in heaven; on the left, Phœbus and a young Paniscus playing on the double pipes. Grace can go no further than in the attitude and the expression of this group. Dionysus is thrown backward; both his arms are raised to encircle the neck of Semele, who bends to kiss his upturned lips. A necklace with pendent balls defines the throat of the stripling where it meets his breast, suggesting by some touch beyond analysis the life that pulses in his veins. He has armlets too below the elbow, and his hair ripples in ringlets between cheek and shoulder. The little Paniscus is seated, attending only to his music, with such childish earnestness as shows that his whole soul goes forth in piping. Phœbus, half-draped and lustrous, stands erect beside a slender shaft of laurel planted on the ground. Such are the delights of Paradise to which, as Greeks imagined, a deity might welcome his earthly mother, leading her by the hand from Hades. It would be easy enough to fill a volume with such descriptions—to unlock the cabinets of gems and coins, or to linger over vases painted with the single figure of a winged boy in tender red upon their blackness, and showing the word ΚΑΛΟΣ negligently written at the side.

But it is more to the purpose to note in passing that delicate perception of associated qualities which led the Greeks to maintain a sympathy between cognate deities, while distinguishing to the utmost their specific attributes. Aphrodite, Eros, Dionysus, Hermes, Hermaphrodite, the Graces, the Nymphs, the Genius of Death—these, for example, though carefully individualized, are still of one kindred. They blend and mingle in a concord of separate yet interpenetrating beauties. Between the radiant Aphrodite of Melos, who in her triumphant attitude seems to be an elder sister of the brazen-winged Victory of Brescia, and the voluptuous Aphrodite Callipygos,[279]a whole rhythm of finely modulated forms may be drawn out, each one of which corresponds to some mood or moment of the enamoured soul. Her immortal son in the Eros of Pheidias[280]is imagined as the "first of gods," θεῶν πρώτιστος, upstarting in his slenderness of youth from Chaos—the keen, fine light of dawn dividing night from day. In the Praxitelean Cupid—

That most perfect of antiques,They call the Genius of the Vatican,Which seems too beauteous to endure itselfIn this rough world—

he becomes the deity described by Plato in thePhædrus, an incarnation of passion, tinged, in spite of his own radiance, with sadness. What thought has made him sorrowful and bowed his head? Perhaps Theognis can tell us:

ἄφρονες ἄνθρωποι καὶ νήπιοι, οἵτε θανόνταςκλαίουσ' οὐδ' ἥβης ἄνθος ἀπολλύμενον.[281]

The winged boy, again, bending his bow against the hearts of lovers, with his lion's skin beside him,[282]is the Eros of Agathon—he who delights to walk delicately upon the tender places of the soul. Next we find him asleep upon his folded pinions, the mischievous child who rewarded Anacreon's hospitality by wounding him, and who gave to the thirsty heart of Meleager scalding tears to drink. How, in the last place, are we to distinguish Love from Harpocrates, the silent, with one finger on his lip?

Turn next to Hermes. When the herald of Olympus met Priammidway between Troy-town and Achilles' tent, he was, says Homer,

νεηνίῃ ἀνδρὶ ἐοικώς,πρῶτον ὑπηνήτῃ, τοῦπερ χαριεστάτη ἥβη,

"like a young man, with budding beard, whose bloom is in the prime of grace." This adolescent loveliness belongs throughout to Hermes. As the genius of the gymnasium,[283]he is a deified athlete, scarcely to be distinguished from the quoit-throwers and the runners he protects. The Hermes, who woos a nymph with his arm around her waist,[284]has Persuasion for his parent. Again, the seated Hermes, with wings upon his ankles, is the swiftness of auroral light incarnate.[285]Nor lastly, when, with chlamys thrown upon his shoulder and petasos slung from his neck, he leads souls to Hades, caduceus in hand, has he lost this quality of youth and lustre.[286]He upon Aphrodite begat Hermaphrodite. Their union—the union of athletic goodliness and consummate womanhood—produced a blending of two beauties forgotten by an oversight of nature.

How various again is Bacchus, passing from the stately mildness of the bearded Indian god to the wantonness of Phales, the "night-wandering reveller!" At one time you can scarcely distinguish him from young Apollo or young Herakles; at another his brows and tresses have the chastity of Love; again he assumes the voluptuous form which befits the sire by Aphrodite of Priapus. The fascination of the grape-juice lends itself to all qualities that charm the soul of man. Yet another of these cognate deities may be mentioned. That is the Genius of Eternal Slumber,[287]reclining with arms folded above his head, upright against a tree. To judge by his attitude, he might be Bacchus, wine-drowsy, as in a statue of the gallery at Florence. Looking at his long tresses, we call him Love: and what deities are of closer kin than Love and Death? His stately form, not unlike that of Phœbus, makes us exclaim in Æschylean language, ὦ θάνατε παιάν (O Death, the healer!). But he is stronger and more enduring, less swift to move, less light of limb, than any of these. It was a deep and touching intuition of the Greeks which prompted them to ascribe these kinships to Death. Who knows even now whether the winged and sworded genius of the Ephesus column be Love or Death? To trace such analogies further would be fanciful: it is enough to pluck at random a few blossoms, and to scatter them for lovers. To Winckelmann and the antiquaries may be left the accurate distinctions of the Greek deities. Without seeking to confound these, but rather studying them most carefully, we may yet discern by passing hints that purity of tact which enabled the Greeks to interpret in their statuary everynuanceof feeling and of fancy, and to mark by subtlest suggestions their points of agreement as well as of divergence.

When Hippolytus in Euripides first appears upon the scene, he greets Artemis with these words:

Lady, for thee this garland have I wovenOf wilding flowers, plucked from an unshorn meadow,Where neither shepherd dares to feed his flock,Nor ever scythe hath swept, but through the grassesUnshorn in spring the bee pursues her labors,And maiden modesty with running rillsWaters the garden.

Before the Meleager of the Vatican, so calm and strong and redolent of forest odors, this orison rings in our memory, and the Diana of the Louvre seems ready to spring forth and loose her hind and call on the hero to hunt with her. The life of woods and mountains was divined and interpreted with fine sensibility by the Attic sculptors. Children of the earth, and conscious of their own recent birth from the bosom of the divine in nature, they loved all fair and fresh things of the open world fraternally. Therefore they could carve the mystery of the Praxitelean Faun,[288]whose subtle smile is a lure for souls, and the profound sleep of the Barberini Faun,[289]who seems to have but half escaped from elemental existence, and still to own some kindred with unconscious things. The joy of the shepherd who carries on his back a laughing child at Naples; the linked arms of Bacchus and Ampelus; the young Triton[290]who blows his horn over the crests of the waves, and calls upon his brethren the billows to rejoice with him, as he bears his nymph away; the subtle charm of double life in Hermaphrodite, in whom two sexes are hidden, like a bitter and a sweet almond in one beautiful but barren husk; the frank sensuality of Silenus and Priapus; the dishevelled hair and quivering flanks of Mænads; the laughter of Eros wreathed around with coils of the enamoured dolphin's tail;[291]the pride of the eagle soaring heavenward with Ganymede among his plumes: from tokens like these, together with the scenes of the Bacchæ and the Cyclops of Euripides, the idyls of Theocritus, and the dedicatory epigrams of the Anthology, we learn of what sort was the sympathy of the Greeks for nature. Their beautiful humanity is so close to the mother ever youthful of all life, to the full-breasted earth, that they seem calling through their art to the woods and waves and rivers, crying to their brethren that still tarry: "Come forth, and be like us; begin to feel and know your happiness; put on the form of flesh in which the world's soul reaches consciousness!" Humanity defined upon the borderland of nature is the life of all Greek sculpture. Even the gods are films of fleshly form emergent on the surface of the elements. The circle of the sun dilates, and Phœbus grows into distinctness with the glory round him; out of the liquid ether gaze the divine eyes of Zeus; Poseidon rises breast-high from the mirrors of the sea. Man, for the first time conscious of his freedom, yet clinging still to the breasts that gave him suck, like a flower rooted to the kindly earth, expresses all his thought and feeling in the language of his own shape. "The Greek spirit," says Hegel, "is the plastic artist forming the stone into a work of art." And this work of art is invariably the image of a man or woman. The most sublime aspirations, the subtlest intuitions, the darkest forebodings, the audacities of passion, the freedom of the senses, put on personality in Hellas and assume a robe of carnal beauty. In Egypt and the Orient humanity lay still upon "the knees of a mild mystery." The Egyptians had not discovered the magic word by means of which the world might be translated into the language of mankind: their art still remained within the sphere of symbolism which excludes true sympathy. The Jews had concentrated their thought upon moral phenomena: in their jealousy of the abstract purity of the soul they banned the arts as impious.

Theognis tells us that when the Muses and the Graces came down from Olympus to the marriage-feast of Cadmus and Harmonia, they sang a song with this immortal burden:

ὅττι καλὸν, φίλον ἐστί· τὸ δ' οὐ καλὸν οὐ φίλον ἐστίν.[292]

This strikes the key-note to the music of the Greek genius. Beauty is the true province of the Greeks, their indefeasible domain. But their conception of beauty was both more comprehensive and more concrete than any which a modern race, perturbed by the division of the flesh and spirit, conscious of Jewish no less than Greek tradition, can attain to. When Goethe expressed his theory of life in the following couplet,

Im Ganzen, Guten, SchönenResolut zu leben,[293]

he supplied us with a correct definition of the spirit which governed Hellas. Beauty to the Greeks was one aspect of the universal synthesis, commensurate with all that is fair in manners and comely in morals. It was the harmony of man with nature in a well-balanced and complete humanity, the bloom of health upon a conscious being, satisfied, as flowers and stars are satisfied, with the conditions of temporal existence. It was the joy-note of the whole world, heard and echoed by the sole being who could comprehend it—man. That alone was beautiful which uttered a sound in unison with the whole, and all was good which had this quality of concord. To be really beautiful was to be an integral part of the world's symphony, to be developed fully in all parts, without an undue preference for the soul before the body or for the passions before the reason—to maintain the rhythm and the measure and the balance of those faculties which characterize man, nature's masterpiece. The profounder reaches of this thought were explored by philosophers, who figured the soul as a harmony, who conceived of God as the Idea of Beauty, or who, like Marcus Aurelius, defined virtue to be a living and enthusiastic sympathy with nature. In the region of social life it led the Greeks to treat the State as an organic whole, which might be kept in preservation by the balance of its several forces. In the sphere of religion it produced a race of gods, each perfect in his individuality, distinct and self-contained, but blending, like the colors of the prism, in the white light of Zeus, who was the whole.[294]In actual life it facilitated the development of characters which, by the free expansion of personality and by a conscious culture, were themselves consummate works of art. Just as the unity of the Greek religion was not the unity of the one, but of the many, blent and harmonized in the variety that we observe in nature, so the ideal of Greek life imposed no commonplace conformity to one fixed standard on individuals, but each man was encouraged to complete and realize the type of himself to the utmost. Pericles devoted his energy to the perfecting of statesmanship, and became the incarnation of the Athenian spirit; Pindar was a poet through and through; for the Olympian victor it was enough to be physically complete; Pheidias lived in concord with the universe by his exclusive devotion to his art. Thus formed and modelled to the utmost perfection each of his own kind, these characters, when contemplated together from a distance, like the deities of Olympus, present, in the harmony that springs from difference, an ideal of humanity. The Greek no less than the Christian might need to cut off his right hand—to debar himself like Pericles from the pleasures of society, or to cast aside the sin that doth so easily beset us, like Socrates, who trampled under foot his sensual instincts—for the attainment of that self-evolution which gave him the right to be one note in the concord of the whole, one color in the prism of humanity. The one thing needful to him was, not belief in the unseen, nor of necessity holiness, but a firm resolve to comprehend and cultivate his own capacity, and thus to add his quota to the sum of beauty in the world.

The Greeks were essentially a nation of artists. Of the infinite attributes of God, of the infinite qualities of the whole, they clearly apprehended beauty.Thatthey conceived largely and liberally, not narrowly and partially, as we are wont to do. And, like consummate craftsmen, they did thoroughly whatsoever in the region of things plastic their hands found to do—so thoroughly that men have only done the work again in so far as they have followed the Greek rule. When we speak of the Greeks as an æsthetic nation, this is what we mean. Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct, they trusted their αἴσθησις, delicately trained and preserved in a condition of the utmost purity. This tact is the ultimate criterion in all matters of art—a truth which we recognize in our use of the word æsthetic, though we too often attempt to import the alien elements of metaphysical dogmatism and moral prejudice into the sphere of beauty. This tact was also for the Greeks the ultimate criterion of ethics. Ὑγιαίνειν μὲν ἄριστον ἀνδρὶ θνατῷ, says Simonides.[295]A man in perfect health of mind and body, enjoying the balance of mental, moral, and physical qualities which health implies, carried within himself the norm and measure of propriety. Those were the days when "love was an unerring light, and joy its own security." What we call the conscience, our continual reference to the standard of the divine will, scarcely existed for the Greek. To that further stage in the education of the world, where moral instincts are deepened and enforced by spiritual religion, he had not advanced. But instead of it he had for a guide this true artistic sensibility, developed by centuries of training, fortified by traditional canons of good taste and prudence, and subject to continual correction by reciprocal comparison and dialectical debate. The lawgiver, the sculptor, the athlete, the statesman, the philosopher, the poet, the warrior, the musician, each added something of his own to the formation of a κοινὴ αἴσθησις, or common taste, by which the individual might regulate his instincts.

To suppose that the Greeks were not a highly moralized race is perhaps the strangest misconception to which religious prejudice has ever given rise. If their morality was æsthetic and not theocratic, it was none the less on that account humane and real. The difficulty for the critic is to seize exactly that which is Hellenic—enduring and common to the race, not transient and due to individuals—in their religion and their ethics. In order to appreciate the first fine flavor of the Greek intellect, it is necessary to go back to Homer, who represents a period when the instincts of the Hellenes had not been sophisticated by philosophical reflection or vitiated by contact with Asiatic luxury. Homer joins hands with Pheidias and Aristophanes and Sophocles in a chain of truly Greek tradition. But side by side with them there runs a deeper and more mystic strain. The blood-justice of the Eumenides, the asceticism of Pythagoras, the purificatory rites of Empedocles and Epimenides, the dreadful belief in a jealous God, and the doctrine of hereditary guilt in Theognis, Herodotus, and Solon, are fragments of primitive or Asiatic superstition unharmonized with the serene element of the Hellenic spirit. At the same time the orgiastic cult of Dionysus and the voluptuous worship of the Corinthian Aphrodite are intrusions from without. To eliminate such cruder moral and religious notions was the impulse of the vigorous Greek mind. Yet at one critical moment of history mysticism attained undue development and bid fair to force the Hellenic genius into uncongenial regions. The Persian war, by its lesson of a mortal peril escaped miraculously, quickened the spiritual convictions of the race.[296]It was then that Æschylus conceived his tragic doctrine of Retribution, whereof the motto is τῷ δράσαντι παθεῖν, and Pindar sounded with an awful sense of mystery the possible abysses of a future life. Greece, after the struggle with Xerxes, passed through a period of feverish exaltation, in which her placid contemplation of the beauty of the world was interrupted. She, whose vocation it was to see only by the light of the serene and radiant sun, seemed on the verge of becoming a clairvoyant. But the balance was soon righted. Even in Pindar, moral mysticism is, as it were, encysted, like an alien deposit, in the more vital substance of æsthetic conceptions. Sophocles corrects the gloomy extravagance of Æschylus. The law of tragedy in Sophocles is no longer that the doer of a deed must suffer, but that he who offends unwittingly will be accounted innocent. Euripides shifts the ground of moral interest from religious beliefs to sophistical analysis. Meanwhile Aristophanes, the true Athenian conservative, is equally opposed to metaphysical subtleties and to superstitious fancies; while Socrates directs his polemic against sciolism in philosophy and childishness in mythology, without thinking it worth while to attack the superstition of the mystics. In Plato's ethics the highest altitude of sane Greek speculation is attained; and here we see how much akin, in all essential matters of morality, the intuition of the Greeks was to the revealed doctrine of the Christians. Aristophanes reflects the clearest image of Greek versatility and cheerfulness. Pericles, freed by Anaxagoras from foolish fears, realizes the genuine Greek life of steadfast, self-reliant activity. The drama of Sophocles sets forth a complete view of human destiny as conceived by the most perfect of Greek intellects. Antigone dares to trust her own αἴσθησις, her moral tact, in opposition to unnatural law. Œdipus suffers no further than his own quality of rashness justifies. When we arrive at Aristotle, who yields the abstract of all that previously existed in the Greek mind, we see that the scientific spirit has achieved a perfect triumph. His science is the correlative in the region of pure thought to the art which in sculpture had pursued an uninterrupted course of natural evolution.

In the adolescent age of the Greek genius, mankind, not having yet fully arrived at spiritual self-consciousness, was still as sinless and simple as any other race that lives and dies upon the globe, forming a part of the natural order of the world. The sensual impulses, within reasonable limits, like the intellectual and the moral, were then held void of crime and harmless. Health and good taste controlled the physical appetites of man, just as the appetites of animals are regulated by unerring instinct. In the same way a standard of moderation determined moral virtue and intellectual excellence. But in addition to this protective check upon the passions, a noble sense of the beautiful, as that which is balanced and restrained within limits, prevented the Greeks of the best period from diverging into Asiatic extravagance of pleasure. License was reckoned barbarous, and the barbarians were slaves by nature, φύσει δοῦλοι: Hellenes, born to be free men, took pride in temperance. Their σωφροσύνη, or self-restraint, coextensive as a protective virtue with the whole of their τὸ καλόν, or ideal of form, was essentially Greek—the quality beloved by Phœbus, in whom was no dark place nor any flaw. With the Romans, humanity, not having yet transcended the merely natural order, remaining unconscious of a higher religious ideal, and at the same time uncontrolled by exquisite Greek sense of fitness, began to wax wanton. To the state of paradisal innocence succeeded the fall. The bestial side of our mixed nature encroached upon the spiritual, and the sense of beauty was perturbed by lust. That true health, without which the unassisted tact is a false guide, failed; no fine law of taste corrected appetite. It was at this moment that Christianity convicted mankind of sin. The voice of God was heard crying in the garden. The unity of man with nature was abruptly broken. Flesh and spirit were defined and counterpoised. Man, abiding far from God in his flesh, sought after God in his spirit. His union with God was no longer an actual state of mundane innocence, but a distant, future, dim, celestial possibility, to be achieved by the sacrifice of this fair life of earth. "Your lives are hid with Christ in God." Together with this separation of the flesh and spirit wrought by Christianity, came the abhorrence of beauty as a snare, the sense that carnal affections were tainted with sin, the unwilling toleration of sexual love as a necessity, the idealization of celibacy and solitude. At the same time humanity acquired new faculties and wider sensibilities, those varied powers which make the modern man more complex and more mighty both for good and evil than the ancient. A profounder and more vital feeling of the mysteries of the universe arose. Our life on earth was seen to be a thing by no means rounded in itself and perfect, but only one term of an infinite and unknown series. It was henceforward impossible to translate the world into the language of purely æsthetic form. This stirring of the spirit marks the transition of the ancient to the modern world.

At the time of the Renaissance the travail was well-nigh over; the lesson had been learned and exaggerated; mankind began to resent the one-sidedness of monastic Christianity, and to yearn once more for the fruit and flowers of the garden which was Greece. Yet the spirit and the flesh still remained in unreconciled antagonism. Over the gate of Eden the arm of the seraph waved his terrible sword. But humanity in rebellion, while outcast from God and convicted of sin, would not refrain from plucking the pleasure of the sense. This was the time of the insolence of the flesh, when antichrist sat in St. Peter's chair, and when man, knowing his nakedness, submitted to the fascinations of the siren, Shame. The old health of the Greeks, their simple and unerring tact, was gone: to recover that was impossible. Christ crowned with thorns, the Sabbaths and ablutions of the Jews, the "thunderous vision" of St. Paul, had intervened and fixed a gulf between Hellas and modern Europe. In that age the love of beauty became a tragic disease like the plague which Aphrodite sent in wrath on Phædra. Even Michael Angelo, at the end of a long life spent in the service of the noblest art, felt constrained to write:

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