With respect to the Spartans it is probable, though the testimony of ancient writers be sufficiently contradictory, that no great stress was laid even on the ability to read; for, while Plutarch[899] conceives this art to have been among their ordinary acquirements, Isocrates, a grave and more competent authority, is decidedly of the opposite opinion.[900]
Ælian,[901] too, coming in the rear of Plutarch, observes that the Lacedæmonians were ignorant of mental culture (μουσικῆς) meaning evidently as Perizonius has already observed, not “music” as Kühn would translate it, (for in this they were learned,) but a knowledge of poetry and eloquence.[902]
That the Spartans were noted for their indifference to literature, is well known. Even Xenophon, their apologist, instituting a comparison between their system of education and that prevailing among the other Greeks, observes that the latter sent their boys to school that they might learn their letters, music, and the exercises of the palæstra, while the former placed them under the care of a grave man who might punish them if slothful and inactive, and inculcate great modesty and obedience in lieu of the usual accomplishments. Plato also, in the Greater Hippias,[903] having observed that their laws were averse from the reception of foreign learning, adds immediately after that the majority of them were even ignorant of arithmetic. In another place,[904] indeed, the philosopher appears to hold a different language, and is literally understood by Perizonius. But the reader who examines the passage attentively, will probably agree with me in considering it nothing more than one of those profoundly ironical strokes in which, above all writers, he abounds. He in fact remarks, what in another sense may have been very true, that no countries were more fertile in sophists than Crete and Lacedæmon, but that they dissembled their wisdom and feigned ignorance, lest they should appear to excel all their countrymen in sapience, of which in reality there was very little danger. He observes, however, no less ironically, that those rude and unrhetorical nations were of all men most philosophical and eloquent, and that it had long been understood by a great many that to laconise, or act the Spartan, was rather to be a philosopher than a diligent student of gymnastics. Perizonius,[905] indeed, conceives that all this is to be understood of natural sound sense, applied to morals and those brief and pithy sayings or λογοὶ, which constituted the science of laconics.
But, after all, there never was, as Cicero observes, a single orator among the Spartans; nor could it be otherwise, since all the arts which beget and foster eloquence, and, more important still, every political institution which favours it, were unknown in their state. Nay, so far did they push their aversion for the oratorical art, that if any citizen of Sparta acquired, in his experience abroad, the skill artificially to wield a syllogism or a trope, he was subjected to punishment,[906] while rhetoricians were expelled the city.[907] Ignorance, therefore, of whatever learned nations prize, was their chief boast. To them the sublime speculations of the Academy, and the logic, sharp and irresistible, of the Lyceum, were equally strangers; yet their discipline, and the habits of youth, imparted to them what in modern jargon is termed a kind of practical “philosophy.” They understood the great art, at least among them, how to command their passions; as Maximus Tyrius[908] relates of Agesilaos who, though educated in no school of philosophy, was nevertheless not a slave to love, which therefore the sophist infers could not be a matter of great difficulty. However there were limitations to their aversions for learning. They opened in their state an asylum for those antique teachers of mankind, the poets,[909] proscribed by Plato, and were in this respect so superior in good taste to that philosopher, that they at length, in imitation of the Great Preceptors of Greece, instituted public recitations of Homer. And this, Maximus Tyrius adduces as a proof that many well-constituted states had existed in which Homer was not publicly studied, for he could not mean that he was once entirely unknown at Sparta.[910]
Into the character of the Greeks, generally, there entered an element but faintly discernible in the moral composition of modern nations, I mean a most exquisite and exalted sensibility, which rendered them to the last degree susceptible, and liable to be swayed irresistibly for good or for evil by poetry and music. And this characteristic distinguished in some degree the Doric as well as the Ionic race. They could be excited, past belief, by the agency of sound. Music, therefore, with us at least a mere source of enjoyment, among them was invested with a moral character, and employed in education as a powerful means of harmonising, purifying, ennobling the principles and the affections of the heart. For this reason the government, which in Greece was in reality a Committee of Public Safety,[911] watched over the music no less sedulously than over the morals of the people, which it powerfully influenced. It must, nevertheless, be confessed that many ancient authors are little philosophical in relating or reasoning upon the effects of music. They often confound consequences with causes. Thus, in the example which certain authors undoubtingly adduce of the Sicilian Dorians,[912] whose morals we are told were corrupted by their fiddlesticks, they omit to inquire whether it was not rather the natural and necessary degeneracy of a wealthy people, which corrupted the music. This is my interpretation. For, in the history of the ancient Sicilians, I can discover causes enough of lax and imperfect morals, without calling in the aid of lyre or cithara. But some writers on this point have an easy faith. They suppose that the strict domestic discipline of Sparta “would hardly have been preserved”[913] without the old-fashioned music.
In whatever way we decide on the metaphysics of the matter, certain it is that in old times music was an universal accomplishment in most parts of Greece; but this was when it was little more than the chanting of savages, in which, however ignorant, any one may join. Exactly in proportion as it rose into an art its cultivators diminished in number, until, when a high degree of perfection had been attained, it was abandoned almost wholly to professional musicians. The Athenians had been commanded by the Pythian oracle to chant chorically in the streets, a divine service in honour of Bacchos.[914] At Sparta similar performances took place during the gymnopædia, when choruses of naked men and boys, with crowns of palm leaves on their heads, proceeded through the streets singing the songs of Thaletas and Alcman and the pæans of Dionysidotos.[915] Mr. Müller, who loves to complete or round off the accounts he finds in ancient authors, says that, doubtless, a large portion of the inhabitants of the city took part in these exhibitions. Perhaps they did, but we have no authority for such a supposition. The place in the agora which contained statues of Apollo, Artemis and Leto, was called Choros,[916] because there the Ephebi danced in choruses in honour of Apollo. On these occasions unwarlike persons were sometimes thrust into the least honourable places,[917] while bachelors were excluded; so that, as Schneider has well remarked, cowardice was less dishonourable than celibacy. But it does not at all appear that the Spartans themselves were ever good musicians, though they were not incapable of relishing good music;[918] and hence the foreign musicians who flocked thither found a welcome reception. The developement of the warlike constitution of the state threw the favourable side of their discipline into the shade.[919]
The Arcadians, likewise, made great use of music in their system of education, and, though otherwise a rude race, continued to practise it up to the age of thirty. Among them alone, in fact, were children accustomed from infancy to sing, in certain measures, hymns and poems, in which they celebrated the praises of the gods and heroes of their country. After this, observes Polybius,[920] they learned the nomoi of Timotheus and Philoxenos, and every year during the Dionysia formed choruses in the theatre, where they danced to the sound of the flute. Here boys contended with antagonists of their own age, and the young men with those more advanced towards their prime. During the whole of their lives they frequented these public assemblies, where they instructed each other by their songs, and not by means of foreign actors. With respect to other branches of education they considered it no disgrace to profess themselves ignorant; but not to know how to sing would, in Arcadia, have been a mark of extreme vulgarity. They habituated themselves to walk with gravity to the sound of the flute, and, having been thus instructed at the expense of the state, proceeded once a year in public procession to the theatre. Their ancestors introduced these customs, not with any view to pleasure, or that they might grow rich by the exercise of their talents, but in order to soften the austerity of character which their cold and murky atmosphere would otherwise have engendered. For the character of nations is invariably analogous to the air they breathe, and it is the geographical position of races which determines alone their temper of mind and the colour and configuration of their bodies.
Besides what has already been said of the Arcadians, it may be added, that it was customary among them for the men and women to unite in chanting certain odes, and to offer up sacrifices in common. There were also dances in which the youth of both sexes joined, and their object was to create and diffuse humane and gentle manners.
But the same habits were not prevalent throughout the whole country. The Kynæthes made no progress in these humanising arts, and as they dwelt in the rudest districts of Arcadia, and breathed the crudest air, their ferocity became proverbial; they addicted themselves to strife and contention, and degenerated into the fiercest and most untameable savages in Greece. In fact, obtaining possession of several cities, they shed so much blood that the whole nation was roused, and at length united in expelling them the land. Even after their departure the Mantinæans thought it necessary to purify the soil by sacrifices, expiations, and the leading of victims round the whole boundary line.
Dancing very naturally constituted a separate branch of education at Sparta as in Crete. In both places the execution of the Pyrrhic appears to have been regarded as a necessary accomplishment, the youths, from the age of fifteen or earlier, having been taught to perform it in arms.[921] It was or is—for the Pyrrhic still lingers in Greece,
an exhibition purely military. The dancers, accoutred with spear and shield, went gracefully and vigorously through a number of movements, wheeling, advancing, giving blows or shunning them, as in real action.[922] In other parts of Greece, however, the Pyrrhic quickly degenerated in character, becoming little better than a wild dance of Bacchanals.[923] It has been rightly observed that at Sparta “the chief object of the Gymnopædia was to represent gymnastic exercises and dancing in intimate union, and, indeed, the latter only as the accomplishment and end of the former.”[924] One of the dances, resembling the Anapale, partook of a Bacchanalian character.”character.”[925] The youth, also, when skilled in these exercises, danced in rows behind each other to the music of flutes, both military and choral dances, at the same time, repeating an invitation in verse to Aphrodite and Eros to join them, and an exhortation to each other.[926]
It will be seen from the above details that the object of education at Sparta was rather the formation of habits and the disciplining of the mind to act in exact conformity with the laws, than to develope to their fullest extent the intellectual powers of individuals. They desired to amalgamate the whole energies of the people into one mass, upon the supposition that being thus impelled in any particular direction they would prove irresistible. No account was made of private happiness. Everything seems to have been devised for the effecting of national purposes, though from the known laws of the human mind even the restraint and tyrannical interference of such a system would with time be reconciled to the feelings and contribute to individual content. But very much of what renders life sweet, was sacrificed. Letters and arts, that subordinate creation, that world within a world which the beneficence of Providence has permitted man to call into existence, were at Sparta unknown. They enjoyed little or nothing of that refined delight which arises from multiplying the almost conscious fruits of the soul, from sending winged thoughts abroad to move, enchant, electrify millions, from deifying truth and confounding error, from ascending to the greatest heights of mortality, and diffusing from thence a light and a glory to warm and illuminate and gladden the human race for ever. This greater felicity was reserved for the education of Athens, which must, therefore, in all enlightened times, bear away the palm of excellence and utility.
CHAPTER IX.
INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS ON EDUCATION.
It behoves us now to quit the circle of studies, which, taken together, are commonly supposed to constitute the whole of education, and consider the influence exercised by other elements on the minds of the Hellenic youth. Even in these days we speak intelligibly and correctly of that experience which young men gain on their first entrance into life, from travel and fashionable society, as of a particular stage in their education, it being during that period that they learn to estimate the value of their school acquirements, how advantageously to conceal or display them according to circumstances, and to bend the neck, perchance, of their lofty theories and sublime speculations to the yoke of the world. But in Greece this was more palpably the case; for, though escaped from the formal rule of preceptors and pædagogues, the youth had still to master several departments of study, either by their own independent exertions or under the guidance of judicious friends: I mean those infinitely varied creations of art and literature, which, as they are in harmony with them or otherwise, confirm or subvert the principles and discipline of the schools.
Thoroughly to comprehend, therefore, the nature and extent of that sway which the state and its institutions directly or indirectly exerted over the minds of the citizens, it is necessary briefly to inquire into the character of the plastic and mimetic arts which found encouragement in the Grecian commonwealths, and afterwards to examine for a moment the stores of thought and sentiment and passion, and piety and virtue, which the literature and religion of Greece laid open to the contemplation of those who were entering upon the career of life. We shall begin with the arts, as they were the inculcators of the principle of the beautiful, advance next to literature, the teacher of wisdom and patriotism, concluding with religion, which opened up to their view a prospect, though dim, of heaven, and directed their footsteps thitherward.
It is certain that, to the generality, the vast superiority of the Greeks in the arts, which like an universal language need no translation, is more palpable and apparent than their superiority in literature; though Demosthenes be in reality as much above any orator, Thucydides above any historian, Plato above any philosopher, Homer above any epic poet, Milton perhaps excepted, who has since written, as Pheidias, or Polycletos, or Praxiteles rose above any sculptor of the north. Nor can we account for this any more than we can explain why Shakespeare was superior to Ford or Massinger. Nature infused more genius into their souls. They loved or rather worshiped the beautiful. It breathed within and around them: their minds were pregnant with it, and, when they brought forth, beauty was their offspring. Thus Aristophanes[927] insinuates, that even the gods borrowed much of their majesty and splendour from the human mind, when he says, that heaven-born peace derived her loveliness from some relationship to Pheidias.
Religion, in one sense, may be called the parent of the fine arts; but it would perhaps be more philosophical to consider religion and the arts as twin sisters, both sprung from that yearning after the ideal which constituted the most marked feature in the Hellenic mind. We must carry back our investigations very far, if we would discover them radiant with loveliness in their cradle; but when they issued thence it was to shed light over the earth, a light derived from the skies. For man does not originate his ideas of the beautiful, which fall like images from heaven on the speculum of his mind; he gives back but what he receives. The conception of beauty is an inspiration, a thing which does not come when called upon; or rather, shining on all, it is lost on the dull and opaque fancy, and is reflected only from the luminous and bright.
Man needs companionship always, and the creative and imaginative make to themselves companions of their own ideas, and clothe them in material forms to render the illusion more complete. There is an impassioned intercourse between the soul and its offspring. We love nothing like that which has sprung from ourselves, and in this we are truly the image of God, who saw all things that he had made, and, behold, they were very good. And he loved his creation; and from him we inherit, as his children, the love we bear to our creations. Hence the enthusiasm for art, hence the power and the inspiration of poetry. They are not things of earth. They are the seeds of immortality ripening prematurely here below; and therefore we should love them. They are the warrant, the proof that we are of God; that we are born to exercise an irresistible sway over the elements; that our thrones are building elsewhere; that in the passion for whatever is spiritual we exhibit instinctively indubitable tokens that spirits we are, and in a spiritual world only can find our home.
It does not belong to this work to attempt a history of Grecian art, which in a certain sense has been already written. My object, if I can accomplish it, is to describe the spirit by which that art was created and sustained, and this I should do triumphantly if love were synonymous with power; for never, since the fabled artist hung enamoured over the marble he had fashioned, did any man’s imagination cleave more earnestly to the spirit that presided over Grecian art, not the plastic merely but every form of it, from the epic in poetry and sculpture down to the signet ring and the drinking song. But the thing is an ample apology for the enthusiasm. There, if anywhere, we discover the culminating point of human intellect and human genius;—there
meet us at every step. Even the fragments of her literature and her art are gathered up and treasured in all civilised countries, as if the fate of our race were mystically bound up in them. And so it is: for when we cease to love the beautiful, of which they are the most perfect realisation we know, our own race of glory and greatness will have been run: we shall be close on the verge, nay, within the pale of barbarism.
Socrates used to say, that whatever we know we can explain; but not so always with what we feel. There is in the ideal of beauty, which formed the vivifying principle of Greek art, a certain subtile and fugitive delicacy, a certain nameless grace, a certain volatile and fleeting essence, which defy definition, and, rejecting the aid of language, persist in presenting themselves naked to the mind. And by the mind only, and only, moreover, by the inspired mind, can they be discerned.
It was in the attempt, however, to chain this spirit, and to imprison it in durable forms, that all the poetry and arts of Greece consisted. They beheld within them a world of loveliness, of living forms which knocked at the golden door of fancy, and demanded their dismissal from the spiritual to the material universe. All their studies were but how to dress these celestial habitants in fitting habiliments to go abroad in; and their lives were often spent in the throes of creatures big with immortal beauty. It is a privilege to the world to converse with minds of such a nature. It is ennobling to approach them. Their energy, their vivifying power continues ever active, ever operating, and if high art be ever to flourish and command, not admiration, but love in England, it can only be by kindling here the lamp removed from Greece, but essentially Greek, that is, essentially beautiful.
The proof that religion issued with art from the same womb in Greece, and was not its parent, is supplied by every other country. There is religion elsewhere, while nowhere is there art like that of the Greeks. But religion had nevertheless much to do with the forms in which the creative faculty there developed itself, as it invariably has with whatever is great or beautiful among men. The persuasion arose in them that the inhabitants of Olympos could be represented by material forms, and as they found their own reverence for the divine being represented, augment in proportion to the beauty or grandeur of its image, the conclusion was natural that the deity himself would be pleased by the same rule, so that their piety was their first and most powerful incentive to excellence. They hoped to recommend themselves to the gods, as they did to their countrymen, by the greatness of their workmanship; and veneration from without, and piety from within, united in urging them forward. And this, with the poet equally as with the artist, inflamed the desire to excel.
There are, as has already been observed,[928] three periods in the history of art: 1st. that, in which the necessary is sought; 2ndly, that in which the study of the beautiful is pursued; and 3dly, the period of superfluity and extravagance. But in some countries men appear to pass from the first to the third, without traversing the second. Thus, in Egypt, Persia, Etruria, in Germany, Holland, France, England[929] the wild, the grotesque, the terrible have been aimed at, seldom the beautiful. Even in Italy, where in modern times art has taken firmest root and most luxuriantly flourished, the object sought to be attained has lain on a lower level. Among the northern nations the grotesque variously disguised or modified is the spirit of art; among the Italians it is voluptuousness, among the Greeks the beautiful. Hence no Greek statue of the flourishing period of art is indecent.[930] Naked it may be, but like the nakedness of infancy, it is chaste as a mother’s love. Our thoughts are instantly carried away by it to the regions of poetry; the soft influence of the ideal descends like dew upon our fancy; we are elevated above the region of the passions to heights where all is sunny and calm and pure. The beautiful is chaste as an icicle, yet warm as love. It breathes in Raffaelle’s virgins which we regard as some “bright particular star,” things to inspire a holy affection, a love not akin to earth. Yet this beauty is not distanced from us by its severity: no! but by its intense innocence, by its unsullied purity, by its inexpressible concentration and mingling up of maternity and girlhood. It was this beauty that Milton sought in his Comus to express, when he represents chastity as its own guard. And this is preëminently the spirit breathing through Grecian art. In the Artemis, in the Athena, nay, even in Aphrodite or Leda, or an orgiastic Bacchante, the overruling sense of beauty, after the first flutter of sensation, hurries the imagination far beyond all considerations of sex or passion. The root of all the pleasures we feel, seems to be hidden under the load of three thousand years, not because the things are old, but because they are the material representatives of a period when the foot of the beautiful rested on the earth.
No doubt we come prepared to regard them with eyes coloured, and a fancy haunted by the beauties of Grecian literature. Possibly, it is under the spell of Homeric verse that our eyes grow humid with delight at the aspect of Aphrodite, that we behold divinity in Zeus or Phœbos Apollo; but this only proves that the fragments of Hellenic civilisation throw a light upon each other, and are parts of one great whole. Perhaps, too, no man ever enjoyed the sculpture of Greece as he should, unless conversant with her poetry—the right hand of her art. In this we find the first seeds and increments of those ideas, which were afterwards transplanted and bore fruit in another field. We discover, therefore, but half the subject when we see only the sculpture. It is unknown to us whether the artist has fulfilled the conditions into which he entered, by undertaking to clothe in marble, thoughts already invested with the forms of language. Hence the little sympathy between Hellenic art and the people generally of modern nations. The figures they behold are dumb to them. To a Greek, on the contrary, or to a man with a Greek’s soul, a thousand sweet reminiscences, a thousand legends, a thousand dim but cherished associations appear clustering round them. Every time they flash upon him, he lives his youth over again. The briery nook, the dewy lanes, the dim religious forests, the pebbly or wave-fretted shore, where the poetry of Greece first opened its eyes upon him in boyhood, sweep in procession over his fancy. He starts to see the hamadryad or the faun or the mountain nymph, before him but one remove from life; to him art speaks not merely in an intelligible, but in an impassioned tongue. He comprehends all the mysteries she has to reveal, and loves her because in a land as it were of foreigners they can converse with each other, and speak of the past and the future.
It is scarcely philosophical to regard poetry, sculpture, and painting, as the offspring of pleasure, though pleasure in some sense be as necessary to man as food. Man possesses creative and imitative faculties, and must, at certain stages of society, employ them. The moment his merely animal wants are provided for, he begins to feel that he has others which demand no less imperiously their gratification. First, he desires to clothe with material forms the things he worships, and hence the first-born of art are gods. At the outset, indeed, (and this is a strong argument against their having borrowed their arts from the East,)[931] the Greeks were content with setting up rude stones, as symbols rather than representations of their divinities; then followed the head upon a rude pillar; then, the indications of the sex; next, the round thighs began to swell out of the stone; to these succeeded legs and feet; and, lastly, arms and hands completed the figure. Dædalos, a mythological personage, is supposed to have been the first who carried the art to this point of improvement. His figures were of wood, and already executed with considerable skill, though they would have been despised in the days of Socrates.[932]
For some ages, perhaps, a stiff, unanimated manner, not unlike the Egyptian, prevailed; but the impulse, once given, went on increasing in strength. One improvement imperceptibly followed another. Artists, together with their experience, acquired professional learning, the results of which soon became visible in their productions. Movement and variety of position succeeded. But though knowledge of art was enlarged and strict rules laid down, there still remained a hard, square massiveness in the style, resembling what we find in modern sculpture as improved by Michael Angelo. And this manner became the type of the Æginetan school, which expressed the character of the Doric mind, powerful but rude, harmonious but heavy, wanting in grace, wanting in elegance, and aiming rather at effect than beauty.[933]
Numerous causes, however, concurred in ripening the principle of art in Greece,—the climate, the form of government, the happy taste of the people, and, lastly, the high respect which was there paid to artists. Nor is it at all paradoxical to affirm, that moral causes concurred powerfully with physical, in begetting that radiant beauty of countenance which distinguished the nation. The consciousness of freedom and independence produces satisfaction in the mind; the serenity thus originated communicates itself to the features; thence arise harmony and dignity of aspect and mien; these are so many elements of beauty, and such feelings long indulged would operate powerfully on the countenance, and, seconded by the tranquillising influences of external nature, end by creating symmetry and proportion, which, joined with intellect, are beauty. Artists in such a country, besides that they must themselves involuntarily be impressed with a veneration for it, would soon discover the reverence paid to beauty and the value set upon accurate representations of it.
Of the high estimation in which beauty was held innumerable proofs exist in Greek literature. At Ægion in Achaia, the priest of Zeus was chosen for the splendour of his personal charms, to determine which a sort of contest was instituted. This office he held till his beard began to appear, when the honour passed to the youth then judged to excel[934] in the perfection of his form. So, also, at Tanagra, the youth selected to bear the lamb round the walls in honour of Hermes was supposed to be the first for beauty in the city.[935] Of the involuntary power of beauty history has recorded various instances. Phrynè, accused of impiety and on the point of being condemned, obtained her acquittal through the hardihood of her advocate, who bared her bosom before the judges. Another example is said to have been afforded by Corinna, sole poetess of Tanagra, who, contending with Pindar for the prize of verse, obtained the victory more by her beauty, (she being the loveliest woman of her time,) and the sweetness of the Æolic dialect in which she wrote, than by the greatness of her genius.[936]
In another instance heroic honours were paid to a man after death for the beauty of his person.[937] This happened at Egestum in Sicily, where Philippos, a native of Crotona, obtained this distinction, which Herodotus observes never fell to any other man’s lot before.[938]
It was to its artists that Greece delegated, at least in some instances, the privilege of deciding on the rival pretensions of the fair and beautiful. They were permitted to select from the loveliest women of the land models for their female divinities, and at other times made their mistresses the representatives of goddesses. Pains were taken, by filling their apartments with beautiful statues, to impress upon the imagination of pregnant women the perfect forms of gods and heroes, as of Nireus, Narcissos, Hyacinthos, Castor and Polydeukes, Bacchos and Apollo.[939] This was at Sparta. In other parts of the Peloponnesos a species of Olympic contest for the prize of beauty took place, instituted, it is said, by Cypselos, an ancient king of Arcadia. Having founded a city in the plain on the banks of the Alpheios, in which he fixed a colony of Parrhasians, he dedicated a temple and altar, and instituted a festival in honour of Eleusinian Demeter, during which the women of the neighbourhood disputed with each other the prize, and received from some circumstance connected with the contest the name of Chrysophoræ. The first woman who won was Herodice, wife of the founder Cypselos. This institution flourished upwards of fourteen hundred years, having been established in the time of the Heracleidæ, and still existing in the age of Athenæus.[940]
A similar practice prevailed in the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos, where likewise the ebullitions of vanity were concealed beneath the veil of religion. The exhibition took place in the temple of Hera, to whom, as the goddess of marriage, beauty should be dear. Priapos, however, was in some places supposed to be the deity who awarded the prize of loveliness in the Callisteia, on which account Niconoë, a Bacchante perhaps, dedicated to him her fawn-skin and golden ewer.[941] But the ladies were not singular in these displays. For among the Eleians, who had as favourable an opinion of themselves as Oliver Goldsmith, a similar show took place, and the pretensions of the male candidates were as carefully sifted as if they had been to take academical honours on their figures. And honours in fact they did take. They were presented with a complete suit of armour, which the winner consecrated with extraordinary pomp and rejoicing in the temple of Athena, whither he was led garlanded with fillets by his triumphant friends. According to Myrsilos, he was likewise decorated with a myrtle crown.[942]
In some places, not named by historians, a contest was instituted which, though unconnected with the arts, we will intreat the reader’s permission to introduce here, for its extraordinary nature. This was a contest in prudence and good housewifery, in which certain barbarian nations followed the example. And, to show that character and mental qualifications were properly esteemed by the Greeks, it is added by Theophrastos[943] that it is these that render beauty beautiful, and that without them it is apt to degenerate into wantonness. Winkelmann, who has noticed several of these facts, is betrayed into some errors. He speaks of an Apollo of Philesia[944] at whose festival a prize was bestowed on the youth who excelled in kissing. The contest took place under the inspection of a judge, he supposes, at Megara. Meursius, though under the name of Diocleia he notices the Megarean festival, overlooks the writer who gives the fullest account of it;—I mean the scholiast on Theocritus, who observes that Diocles was an Athenian exile who took refuge at Megara. In a battle in which he was engaged, he fought side by side with a friend, whose life he saved at the expense of his own. He was interred by the Megareans, who instituted an annual festival in his honour, where the youth who excelled his companions was crowned and led in triumph to the arms of his mother.[945]
The exercises, discipline, and moral notions of the Greeks had doubtless much effect on their form; for in the decline of their states, when despotism had succeeded to freedom, and vice to virtue, beauty became exceedingly rare. Cotta, in the De Naturâ Deorum, observes that he found few handsome youths at Athens, where in the age of Demosthenes the most beautiful in Greece flourished;[946] and Dion Chrysostom observes that in his time there were scarcely any that could be so considered.[947]
If we come now to the other causes which account for the progress of the arts in Greece, we shall find the principal of these to have been the high consideration and esteem[948] in which artists were held. Riches, no doubt, obtained credit there as elsewhere, but not to the exclusion of other recommendations as in modern Europe, or at least in England. Winkelmann scarcely comprehends the irony of Socrates, however, when he supposes him seriously to mean that artists alone were wise; though, since the sage had himself been a sculptor, he had some reason to think well of them. It is, nevertheless, perfectly true that men of this profession might become legislators or generals, or even behold a statue erected to them beside those of Miltiades and Themistocles, or among the gods themselves.[949] The historian of art observes with pride that Xenophilos and Straton were permitted at Argos to place their own statues, even in a sitting posture, near those of Asclepios and Hygeia.[950] Cheirisophos, who sculptured the Apollo at Tegea, dedicated in the same fane a statue of himself in marble, which was erected close to his great work.[951] The figure of Alcamenes occupied a place among the bassi-rilievi on the temple of Demeter at Eleusis. Parrhasios and Silanion shared the reverence paid to their picture of Theseus; and Pheidias affixed his name to his Olympian Zeus, the nearest approach perhaps which the arts have ever made to perfection.[952]
If the satisfaction of beholding a whole nation, I might say a whole world, smitten with delight and wonder at his performance, would repay an artist for years of toil and study, Pheidias had his reward. And not to the narrow circle of his life was this admiration confined; for six hundred years after his death pilgrims from all parts of the civilised world flocked to Olympia[953] to behold his matchless performance; for to die without having partaken of this enjoyment was considered a misfortune. But neither praise, nor encouragement, nor honour, nor gain will suffice to bring the arts to perfection. To ensure this, the nation to which the arts address themselves must comprehend their language. For, if the people be incapable of deciding when an artist has succeeded and when he has failed, it is very certain that he will seldom succeed at all. Men soon find the uselessness of producing what no one around them can appreciate. Even in the matter of virtue and vice, few will soar very high in countries where a low standard of morals prevails generally; and, in the arts, no one will devote himself to the creation of forms which he knows will be dumb to the public eye.
In Greece every condition required to ripen the genius of an artist existed. He knew that his reputation and fortune would depend on the caprice of no particular individual or class of individuals. He perceived among his countrymen at large the knowledge, the taste, and the enthusiasm which just decisions in art demand, and laboured fearlessly for them, not doubting that he should obtain the reward his genius merited. There were public exhibitions, as among us, both at Corinth and at Delphi;[954] but, instead of converting them into a sordid traffic, the whole world was invited to behold their performances, and judges were appointed to decide upon the merits of the exhibitors. Instances no doubt there were of artists showing their performances for money: at least the memory of one example has come down to us. Zeuxis of Heraclea, having finished his picture of Helen, opened an exhibition and fixed a certain admission price, by which he cleared a large sum of money; but to mark their disapprobation of such conduct, his contemporaries bestowed on his picture the name of the courtesan.[955]
In the public exhibitions they appear to have looked solely to merit, and not to have allowed themselves to be dazzled by great names; for when Panænos, brother of Pheidias, entered the lists, neither his own reputation, nor that of the illustrious sculptor, could obtain for him the preference over Timagoras, who was allowed to have excelled. A like spirit prevailed among the judges of Olympia, whither artists sometimes brought their pictures during the games to delight assembled nations, and reap a harvest of joy and glory in a day. Thus when Ætion appeared with his “Marriage of Alexander and Roxana,” before the Hellanodicos Proxenides,[956] he not only obtained the credit due to his genius, but that magistrate, more emphatically to express his admiration, bestowed on him the hand of his daughter. And Lucian, who had seen the picture in Italy, has left a description of it which justifies the enthusiasm of Proxenides.
I have already in a former chapter accounted in some measure for the diffusion of a correct taste among the great body of the people. It formed with them an indispensable branch of study. The arts of design were cultivated by the philosopher, the politician, in short, by every one who claimed to be considered a gentleman.[957] Nay, gentlewomen also enjoyed these advantages, and instances are recorded of their arriving at professional excellence and celebrity; for example, Timarete,[958] daughter of the younger Micon, an Athenian, and Helen an Alexandrian Greek, who painted the “Battle of the Issos,” afterwards consecrated in the temple of Peace.[959] It was in the nature of things, that artists moving in such a moral atmosphere should partake largely of the national grandeur of sentiment, and look rather to the perpetuation of their name than to any sordid considerations of gain, above which they were elevated by the form which the national gratitude assumed. For we may be sure that what is related of the great historian of Halicarnassos was, to a certain extent, true of great artists. Men pointed at him, we are told, as he moved through the public assemblies, exclaiming, “That is he! That is the man who has celebrated our victories over the Barbarians!”
Winkelmann, who understood human nature no less than the arts, enumerates similar facts among the causes why art flourished in Greece;[960] and though sometimes mistaken, as in so large a work was to be expected, his reasoning generally, and his illustrations, deserve that every lover of art should be familiar with his writings.
This distinguished historian, however, is not sufficiently guarded in his expressions, when he contends that the productions of art were consecrated solely to the deity or to public utility; for, though they were principally directed to these ends, many individuals possessed collections in their houses,[961] which were by no means the humble dwellings he supposes. However the public constituted the great patron of art, and uniting in itself natural aptitude, acquired knowledge, and an inherent leaning towards grandeur, communicated to those who laboured to gratify it corresponding taste and elevation. In many cases the whole population of a city identified its own glory with that of some celebrated picture or statue within its walls. Olympia, though peopled by works of art of surpassing excellence, still looked upon the Pheidian Zeus[962] as the apex of its glory; and even Athens, where probably more objects of art were crowded together than in any other city of the world, the colossal statue of Athena stood preëminently the ornament of the Acropolis. In one respect we have begun to imitate the Greeks, who often erected by general subscription the statue of a divinity, or of some Athletæ victorious in the sacred games. Some minor cities are solely remembered for the works of art they contained: for example, that of Aliphera which owed its celebrity entirely to its statue of Athena in bronze, the work of Hecatodoros and Sostratos.[963]
Winkelmann supposes that both sculpture and painting arrived earlier at a certain degree of perfection than architecture, and, assuming the fact, proceeds philosophically to account for it. But his theory itself, on this point, appears to be erroneous. In Egypt, at least, where the mind would necessarily be guided by the same laws as in Greece, it is certain that while sculpture and painting never escaped from the swaddling bands of infancy, architecture advanced to a very high degree of perfection. The force of necessity, which leads to the creation of architecture, communicates a far more lasting impulse than the instinct of imitation. Men must everywhere build to protect themselves from the fury of the elements; and the first step thus made, and leisure supervening, that sense of proportion and symmetry and arrangement, which is almost an instinct, would soon lead to the contemplation of the ideal and the creation of architecture as an art. Sculpture sprang later into existence, and still later painting; but like the children of one family,—of whom some are older, others younger,—all the arts flourish nearly together, and nearly together decay. Nevertheless we may subdivide this period into minuter cycles, when we shall find that architecture and sculpture reached almost like twins their acme together, while, like a younger sister, painting attained its greatest beauty when the former two had fallen something from their perfection. Thus, the Zeus of Pheidias and the Hera of Polycletos, two of the most celebrated statues of antiquity, already existed, while Hellenic painting exhibited no knowledge of chiaro-scuro and was wholly destitute of harmony.
Apollodoros and after him Zeuxis, master and disciple,[964] who flourished about the ninetieth Olympiad, were the first who rendered themselves remarkable for a knowledge of light and shade.[965] But, arrived at this pitch, the beauty of the art began to be felt, picture galleries were commenced in various temples,[966] and, a new world of forms and colours disclosing itself to the imagination, the versatile Greeks transferred to it a large share of the admiration hitherto monopolised by sculpture. Painting, in fact, speaks a more popular language. It tells a story, while sculpture can but embody a thought or fix an incident. Its accessories realise events more completely. The Apollo, in sculpture, has bent his bow and discharged his arrow—the remainder of the action the imagination must shape for itself. Painting gives us the whole scene teeming with life,—the writhing dragon, the rocks, the woods, the mountain, the sky, with all the illusions spread before the eye by many-coloured light. Sculpture furnishes the nucleus of glorious associations, but ’tis we that must group them into sublime beauty. It asks more knowledge, more fancy, more in short of every element of genius in its admirers than does painting. Hence the latter will always number, and justly, more partisans. In most persons a preference for sculpture would be mere affectation. It cannot equally please the many.
However, in proportion as the public became more enlightened, and, to justify its admiration and enthusiasm, imposed harder conditions on artists, the latter enlarged the circle of their studies, which gradually expanded until it embraced a certain portion of metaphysics, the science of form and colours, with that art of grouping and arrangement which constitutes a species of narrative in painting. A complete exposition of their studies would be the best manual which could be put into the hands of contemporary artists, and at the same time would furnish the best explanation of their seemingly inexplicable superiority. But such an exposition would be out of place here. My object is simply to hint at what may be done, not to attempt it myself; and to show, that if the Greek nation afforded encouragement to its artists, it was because those artists met their countrymen more than half way, and laboured to deserve encouragement.
There existed in Greece a philosophy of art, that is, a perfect theory of what its object is, and of all the means by which that object may be accomplished. Now the object of art is delight, a delight which aggrandises and ennobles the mind, and such delight is only to be obtained through the contemplation of the beautiful. This conviction established, the studies of the Greek artist were directed to the discovery of the elements of the beautiful, not such as it exists in the original types of the intellectual world (which he abandoned to the philosopher), but such as we find it in material developements of the ideal, and chiefly in the forms of our own species.
Their researches, conducted in a philosophical spirit, by degrees taught them that perfect beauty, like perfect happiness, consists in absolute serenity and repose. Thus, the heavens are beautiful when in the noon of a summer’s day their blue depths are unstained by a cloud, and not a breath is heard among the trees. Thus, the ocean is beautiful when the most perfect calm broods upon it, and has smoothed down every ripple and converted it into a mirror for reflecting the cerulean purity of the sky. And this is what the poets signify when they represent Aphrodite, the very soul of beauty and of love, springing up from the level and glittering surface of such a sea. In the same state the human countenance is most beautiful, when every feature in the most perfect equilibrium breathes of calm, joy, and serenity, and by the force of sympathy converts all who approach it into so many mirrors reflecting its absolute bliss. This is the secret of that beauty which exists in Grecian sculpture.
It was a maxim of Greek philosophy, that the magnanimous man is seldom, under any circumstances, disturbed. In action, therefore, he would exhibit the same tranquil countenance as when at rest. Thus, Socrates at Potidæa, at Delion, in the Prison of the Eleven about to quaff the hemlock, would in looks be much the same. And this self-command, observable in one great man, art attributed generally to the gods and heroes, who, in whatever actions they might be engaged, would still retain a self-possessed and serene aspect. Hence, even the battle-pieces of the Greeks are beautiful. Men fight and die, but under the guidance of duty. We behold none of those demoniacal passions, nothing of that animal ferocity, or of that succumbing to pain which convert so many modern pictures into slaughter-house representations. We feel that the actors contemplated death only as the distributor of imperishable glory,—that imagination had coloured everything around them with its rainbow tints,—that by anticipation they enjoyed the panegyric which would be pronounced over them in the hearing of all they loved,—the monument which would be raised over their ashes,—the deathless reward which would be bestowed on their patriotism and valour in the historic page. To men, so feeling and so thinking, where was the sting of death? They could compress eternity into a moment, and grasp all future time, and live through it by the irresistible force of imagination.
To be able to represent such forms and features, it was necessary to study simultaneously the conceptions of the poets, and the progressive developement of the human figure from infancy to age. From this study resulted a body of experience, the fruit of innumerable comparisons, out of which sprang that gradually corrected and improved and elevated conception of the human figure which is denominated the ideal. Instances, isolated from the great body of artistic study, have crept into ordinary books, and been thereby invested with an air of vulgarity. But this will not hinder the philosopher or the artist from including them in his scheme of study and converting them into germs of utility. In this part of their progress religion stepped in to the aid of the artist. The several goddesses represented each a style of women of whom they might be considered the original type. Aphrodite, for example, represented the impassioned and tender,[967] naturally parasites of man and too often frail; Hera, the chaste matron, dignified, authoritative, energetic, but inclined to violence and self-will; Artemis, reserved, modest, retiring, like a nun, was the prototype of unspotted maidenhood, revered for its own purity; Athena, perfect in intellect as in form, uniting the loveliness of Aphrodite, the majesty of Hera, the delicacy and chastity of Artemis with the wisdom of Zeus, constituted properly the ideal of womanhood, loftier than Eve before the fall and such as it can exist only in the imagination.
In search, however, of female forms to represent these ideal originals artists travelled through the whole of Greece, gathering up as they went those fragments of beauty which, when united, were to approach perfection. They resembled Isis in search of the limbs of Osiris. Sometimes, as at Crotona and Agrigentum, parents did not scruple to expose their daughters naked to their eyes, that from them they might fashion that loveliness which was to represent to their senses the divine being they worshiped. But this excess of superstition was rare. In general the Hetairæ, their mistresses and companions, served for the models after which the soft divinities of Greece were moulded: