The Greeks loved Beauty, especially the Athenians of the fifth century B.C., but they did not spend all their time in a conscious search for it. They were very busy about and interested in a great many other things: the administration of the city, relations with other states, often fighting, trading and travelling, building ships and sending out colonies. We have already seen what the Greeks meant by Beauty,[[34]] and an appreciation of it touched all these things.
Now a great mistake has been made in modern times in that art has too often been looked upon as a luxury, as something that the rich can have but not the poor, something that has not very much to do with a practical every-day life. But to believe that is to misunderstand altogether what art is, for art is something that is done, not something that is merely looked at. All men have within them a vision of what kind of world they would make, if it was left to them to order, and in its widest meaning art is the outward and concrete expression of that vision. To confine art to architecture, sculpture and painting, is to rob it of half its meaning. The forms of art are as many and varied as are the interests of every-day life, and this belief is one of the great gifts of Greece to the world. It was not given to every Greek to be a great artist. Not every one could be an Aeschylus and write the Agamemnon, a Sophocles and write the Antigone, a Pheidias and create the Parthenon, or a Praxiteles and model the Hermes, but every one could work in the spirit of which these great works are the supreme examples.
The history of a nation is an enquiry into how that nation expresses itself in stone and marble, as well as into what it thinks and does; and its architects, artists and sculptors stand beside its historians, philosophers, dramatists and statesmen as the men who have made its history.
In its narrower, modern sense, art is the outward sign of the spirit of a nation as it is expressed in painting and in stone and marble. Except for the vase-paintings, Greek painting has almost entirely disappeared, but the achievements of the Greeks in architecture and sculpture are amongst the greatest that the world has ever seen. Something has already been said about Greek architecture[[35]]; the same spirit expressed itself in Greek sculpture. To know the Greeks and the real worth of what they have given to the world, it is not enough to read about them; one must learn to know them at first-hand. To do that one must read what they wrote (if not in Greek, then in translations), and look at what they built and at their sculpture (if not at the originals, then by means of casts and photographs), and when one does that, one begins to know a little of what the spirit was that produced such things. The Greeks considered that the human form was the most fitting subject for representation in sculpture, yet they were not great portrait makers; that was left for a later race to achieve. What they aimed at doing was to give outward expression to those qualities of the mind and spirit which they, as a people, prized so highly: Beauty, Self-control, Harmony, Restraint. The greatest Greek sculpture was, as it were, the answer, wrought in marble, to the prayer of Socrates to Pan: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one."[[36]]
The Greeks lived at a time when so much was being done for the first time, and to all their art they brought a spirit of Youth and of Joy in creation, yet also a spirit of Patience in achieving results, for they were never in a hurry, and they knew that there were no short cuts to the perfection which was to them so important a part of beauty. Their statues are very idealistic, but their idealism was practical, and though, as we know, they did not always fulfil their ideals, they knew that fulfilment was possible. Though the sculpture of the Greeks represented man, not as he always was, but as they believed he might be, did he but follow where his best instincts led, it did sometimes result in something that to them was not only an ideal, but something so real and life-like that they could say of a sculptured figure of a Sleeping Ariadne:
Strangers, touch not the marble Ariadne, lest she even start up on the quest of Theseus.[[37]]
[[1]] The Book of the Ancient World.
[[2]] Thucydides, VII.
[[3]] Plato: Symposium, translated by Jowett.