[35] See The Chief Periods of European History, pp. 21-23. See also Bury, History of Greece, Chaps. IV and V.
[36] In studying the actual decline of Greek art it would, I think, be very necessary to lay some stress upon the part taken by the people in general, in judging and criticizing artistic productions under the democracies. See Rev. J. Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece), who is talking entirely from the Hellenic standpoint, p. 440: "The really vital point was the public nature of the work they (the Athenian Demos) demanded; it was not done to please private and peculiar taste, it was not intended for the criticism of a small clique of partial admirers, but it was set up, or performed for all the city together, for the fastidious, for the vulgar, for the learned, and for the ignorant. It seems to me that this necessity, and the consequent broad intention of the Greek artist, is the main reason why its effects upon the world has never been diminished, and why its lessons are eternal" (the italic are mine).
[37] T. G. Tucker, in his Life in Ancient Greece, does his best to reconcile the realism of Greek art with the "ideal," and helps himself out of the difficulty by reasserting Schelling's claim in The Philosophy of Art (see note to p. 91 in this book). Mr. Tucker says, p. 186: "Many people imagine that Greek sculpture—to take that salient province again—deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only when the carving seemed instinct with life—a life not merely of the limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was felt to be controlling every limb. A Greek sculptor like Praxiteles studied long and lovingly.... To anatomy he is as true as an artist need wish to be. But are not his figures ideal? Doubtless, but what does 'ideal' mean? That they are abstract, conventional, or frankly superhuman? Anything but that. It means simply that he carves figures which, while entirely true to strict anatomy, entirely lifelike in all their delicate modelling ... are examples of nature in happiest circumstances...."
[38] Ideals of the East, p. 53.
[2. Egyptian Art.—A. King Khephrën.]
If, however, I now choose to compare the art of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Parthenon at Athens[39] with that of Egypt, the first falls absolutely to pieces. If I walk from the lions of Gebel Barkal, which Reginald Stuart Poole considers as the "finest example of the idealization of animal forms that any age has produced,"[40] over to the horses of the Parthenon, the latter seem poor, feeble, and slavish beside the powerfully simplified and commanding work of Egypt. And if, with vivid recollections of the diorite statue of King Khephrën at Cairo, I walk up to the best Greek work of the Periclean age, or after, either in London or Paris, I marvel at the denseness of an age which can put the Egyptian Pharaoh second in the order of rank.
