Even the games of Greece, which, it might be argued, tended to unite the various peoples, cannot be said to have gone very far in this respect, since the very fact that the Hellenic nation enforced a sacred armistice during the month of the games, between states that were at war, shows that the most this institution could achieve was a suspension of arms.
On the whole, therefore, the fact that one can talk of different types as characteristic of particular schools or ideals is amply accounted for, and when the general spirit of rivalry that animated the whole nation for centuries is duly taken into consideration it is not difficult to explain a certain preponderance of manifold characteristics over simplicity, which is observable in the greater part of Greek sculpture—a preponderance which sometimes led very rapidly to the crudest realism, and which at other times approached realism only after a considerable lapse of time. Such phenomena are the inevitable result of that lack of the powerful master or ruler spirit who unifies and co-ordinates heterogeneity, and who thereby makes simplification and powerful art possible, as the outcome of relative permanency.[32]
For, when technique is largely mastered, realism, as I have shown in the case of Mediæval and Renaissance Art, may in a great measure be the outcome of a desire to make one's own particular ideal unmistakably plain, and although this kind of truth to nature always reveals a clashing of values or types, it is of a kind which may be regarded as infinitely superior to the realism which has nothing to say at all, and which merely copies out of poverty of invention.
When talking to strangers about an ideal they do not share with you, it is necessary to bring all your powers to bear upon an adequate and perfectly vivid representation of what you have in your mind.
I, on this platform, assuming that Nietzsche as an art valuer was strange to you, had to present him to you with all the realism and detail I could dispose of. If I had been talking to people who knew the Nietzschean views of art perfectly well, I might have indulged in certain artistic simplifications and poetical transfigurations which I considered unsuited to the present circumstances.
This same feeling, I believe, partly explains the tendency to realism in Greek art. And it is precisely to this tendency to realism that I think it is now high time to call attention, after all the fulsome praise which has for ages been lavished upon the products of the Hellenic spirit.
When you turn to the granite statue of the Egyptian goddess Sekhet in the Louvre, or to the lions of Gebel Barkal in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, you are conscious of a sensation of great strangeness, of humiliating unfamiliarity, of almost incalculable distance. You may look at these things for a moment and wonder what they mean; you may even pass on with a feeling of indifference amounting to scorn;[33] but whatever your sensations are, you will be quite unable to deny that what you have seen does not belong to your world, that it is utterly and completely separated from you, and that you felt in need of a guide and of an initiator in its presence.
You may laugh at the lions of Gebel Barkal, you may deny that they are beautiful; but, whoever you are, scholar, poet, painter or layman, you will admit that they are cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote and uncommunicative.