I have now spoken to you of Christian Art, and you have not been taken altogether by surprise; because, in England at least, people are not unacquainted with the fight Art has had with Puritanism. And you were, therefore, partly prepared for what I had to say. The views I have expressed concerning the Renaissance were not entirely new to you either, and, if they were, I can only hope that they will assist you in giving to the Art of that period its proper valuation. Now, however, I fear I am going to level a blow at what must seem to you even more sacred, even more invulnerable and even more thoroughly established than either Christian or Renaissance Art. I refer to the Art of Greece.
Albeit, before I proceed with my task, do not be surprised if, like Charles the First's executioner, Brandon, I kneel to kiss the hand of my victim, if only by so doing I may seem to you to understand the grave nature of my business, and satisfy you that the blow I am about to deliver is prompted more by conviction than by that cheap irreverence for great things which is, alas, only too prevalent to-day.
Goethe says somewhere that, if we find fault with Euripides at all we should do so on bended knees. It seems to me that this ought also to be the attitude of people and critics in this age who attempt to value what the Greeks achieved in the graphic arts. For the earnestness and vigour wherewith, collectively, they set up their triumphs and ideals in stone and marble, the moment any opportunity arose for them to affirm and exalt their type, is deserving of the utmost praise and admiration.
Too many great writers have exalted the Greeks, however, to make it necessary for me to edify you with any long and enthusiastic praise of those qualities which Nietzsche admired in them.
Fairness alone, therefore, compels me to acknowledge the grandeur of the type their art advocates. With Nietzsche I can but extol the yea-saying of this type to the passions, to beauty, to health, in fact to life. The fearlessness of the Greeks before beauty was their acknowledgment that life was a blessing to which it was worth while to be lured and seduced. And their innocent acceptance of the strongest passions is sufficient to show to what extent they had not only mastered them, but had also enlisted them into their service.
Nevertheless, though it is only decent to exercise some reserve in this matter, it certainly is necessary to point to a curious fact in regard to Greek Art in general, and that is, that, with the exception of some of its archaic examples, it has been revered with ever-increasing fervour by strangers, from the second century before Christ to the present day,—when I say strangers, I mean people whose thought and aspirations were not necessarily the outcome of Hellenic values,—and that this general appreciation of Greek Art by foreigners implies that there is some quality in it which is only too common to everybody and to anybody, irrespective of nationality and education. If it were asked what this common factor was, I should reply, it is Nature herself, to which Greek Art, in its so-called best period, is undeniably in close and intimate relationship.
In examining the works of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, it is well to bear in mind the peculiar state of the country in which they appeared, its division into states, and its mixed population. It is well to think of the many ideals that dominated these people, and of the fact that the citizen of one city was often regarded as an alien, without any political rights whatever, if he ventured to transfer his abode to another city but a few miles distant from his own; and allowances should be made for the rivalry and competition this state of affairs conduced to bring about. It is also well to remember the individual lives the colonists lived, and the altered outlook on life to which their independent positions were bound to lead, and which, when they returned to their mother city, as many of them used to do, must have shed a new and strange light upon what they saw.
Although a certain uniformity can be traced in the political history of most Greek states, no one would dare to maintain that the Greeks, at any time in their history, were a perfectly united people observing the same values; whilst even in the history of each separate state, changes occurred so constantly that a stable political type is a rare and practically negligible fact.
In spite of the many heroes and geniuses which arose from time to time, there never seems to have been that power, either human or superhuman, which might have welded these peoples indissolubly together, or which, taking its root in one of the contending races, could have made that race completely absorb and digest the others.