[CHAPTER VIII.]
GREEK ART.
Art has appeared to us till now under peculiar circumstances. We have seen it in Asia and Africa, and in both parts of the world it represented the uninterrupted struggle of humanity for self-consciousness. Humanity was too much under the influence of the marvellous and incomprehensible, and neither the marvellous nor the incomprehensible can be brought into shape. The Indians tried to give forms to the metaphysical phenomena of nature; the Persians were bent on the glorification of the power of one visible earthly despot; the Egyptians tried to copy the realistic phenomena of nature, and inscribed them with mystic signs, uniting Indian abstractions with the real phenomena of nature. When a thought was fixed into a form; the thought, being at the same time a religious conception, could no more be changed; it became in art what a technical name for a natural phenomenon is in science. Oxygen is oxygen, and designates only that element; so when once a form was settled, as that of Vishnu or Amn, S’iva or Osiris—or the serpent fixed as a symbol of eternity, or the hawk as a symbol of light—the inner or spiritual life of the artist was fettered down to outward forms with special inward meanings. Thus the constraining sway of misunderstood nature on one side, and the stationary precepts of an omnipotent hierarchy on the other, entangled the artist’s imagination and paralysed every effort of his subjective power of production. The different nations began to be wrapped up in their different artistic forms, which became by degrees hard and impenetrable national and religious incrustations; the masses, held in abeyance, led by theocratical art, had only to glorify one visible or invisible tyrant, with whom the universe was blessed. Eastern art was to a certain degree plastic, only too plastic as in India; but it was too penetrated with an incomprehensible spiritualism to find the right objects for its plastic tendencies. Even where geometrical figures, flowers, or trees were used, the effect of their simple combination was marred by a want of harmony between thought and form, or idea and body. This harmony between outward form and inner spirit, wherein real beauty consists, this balance between the dynamic and static cosmogonical elements, was wanting in Eastern art. The East rent nature asunder, and looked upon matter as evil; and yet matter was to be used, to bring spirit into form. The element of S’iva, Ahriman, or Typhon was to give visible form to the conceptions of Brahmă, Ormuzd, or Osiris, and could not do this, because the connecting link to blend the apparently-opposed powers into one, was wanting. A uniting force for this mysterious antagonism, a mediator between heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, was sought for, but not found. The Persian unconsciously set Meshiah (man, mensch) down as that element, but Meshiah was not yet allowed to come to any free development, and he sank into the pitiful and degraded position of a slave to despotic oligarchs, or still more intolerant spiritual hierarchs. Meshiah (humanity) was first freed by the Greeks in form and by Christ in spirit.
There can be no doubt that the Greeks were, for a short time at least, the ancient representatives of the well-balanced static and dynamic forces in humanity. Of all the geographical districts of the world, whether in the Eastern or Western hemisphere, none are so admirably adapted for the cultivation of social intercourse as the Grecian isles, and the Grecian peninsula, the classical region of the Ægean Sea. Nowhere is so large a coast-line found, surrounding so small a territorial surface; nowhere such a variety of creeks, capes, promontories, inlets, and harbours as round the Peloponnesus, and the islands uniting Asia Minor with Greece and Italy. No streams like the Ganges, or the Hoang-ho; no mountains like the Belur Tag or Himâlâya. Gorgeous uniformity is the characteristic of China and India; variety and change the very element of the Greek world. Mountains, plains, valleys, streams, are all of a limited size; there rules a sweet, eternal harmony between spirit and form; nothing is exaggerated, nothing overawes man; he feels at home; the dark-blue sky over-arches his verdant, hilly, amiable earth, adorned with brooks and hills, boskets and flowers. Valley chases valley; rivulet pursues rivulet; clouds follow clouds; the morning dawn flies before the bright noon, and the noon dies away, in the cool sighs of the evening breezes, into the embrace of dark night. The self-conscious spirit of youthful humanity came into life for the first time in Greece. Everything with the Greeks was feeling, but a feeling, conscious of a real purpose in religion, the State, the family, and in art. We shall see that intuitive feeling grow by degrees into critical reflection, but in the first instance everything with the Greeks was ingenuous, or, as the French call it, ‘naïve.’ This classical ‘naïveté,’ this unconscious, unaffected simplicity, enabled them to become masters of intuitive productions, and to look upon this world with an unbiassed eye, prone only to see what was harmonious and beautiful. The whole life of the Greeks was thus one long ideal dream of poetical and artistic reality. They took an interest, however, in objective individuality only; the beauties of nature as one great total did not yet affect their subjective comprehension. They could not grasp the pantheistic notion of the Indians, who saw in every detailed phenomenon of the universe the working of ONE indivisible and incomprehensible first cause. They shuddered at the Egyptian monsters, which were to serve as symbols of that sublime conception which lost on the Nile all its primitive grandeur. They found the Persian absorption of the universe into a conflict between light and darkness too dreary, and ascribed to it the loss of all individual freedom. They worked out a system of their own, based on Indian grandeur, Egyptian symbolism, and Persian abstractions. To be thoroughly acquainted with this combination of influences is the very first step towards an understanding of Greek art.
The Greeks were Aryans in language, and in mode of thinking; Aryans who had detached themselves very early from their Cis-Himâlâyan brethren, and peopled Asia Minor and the surrounding islands. They were strengthened by Egyptian and Phœnician immigrations, and invigorated by Thracia’s warlike spirit.
Like a plant that only lives and grows by means of the antithetic activity of air, light, and water, the Greek State-body had air supplied by Orpheus from Thracia, light by Kekrops from Egypt, and water by Kadmus from Phœnicia. Independent freedom and love of the arts were the gifts of the North; the South furnished them with deep knowledge, and Phœnicia gave them the vivifying spirit of commerce. Their language is an offshoot of the Sanskrit, but stands in a more distant relation to it than the Zend—to which it is closely allied. They are principally distinguished from the Asiatic nations by their decided hatred of everything arbitrary and chaotic. From their love for individuality and diversity of customs, manners and modes of thinking, sprang the national unity of the Greeks in the fairy realms of Poetry and Art. When they began to feel themselves a people, they assumed the name of Hellenes; and their first historical deed was the admirable completion of a language which, for simplicity, power, and beauty, has remained up to our own days a model for all other languages, for it alike possesses eurythmy and power of expression. The overwhelming metaphysical subtleties of the Sanskrit are simplified; the variety of consonants and vowels reduced, and the mode of writing corrected; everything proving a deep sense for order, clearness, and moderation.
They had three dialects: the Doric, distinguished by a broader pronunciation; the Ionic, possessed of softness and a melodious richness; and the Æolic, a kind of mixture without a special character. The Dorians came southwards from the hoary mountains of Thessaly, and gained step by step an influence and dominion over the other tribes of Greece. The Ionians occupied the east, and were considered the connecting link between Hellas and Asia; but whatever the Hellenes took from Byblos, Sidon, Tyros or the Libanon, assumed a really Hellenic form, after it had passed through the purifying element of Doric correctness. The south gave ideas, and the north brought them into form.
Whatever the Hellenes touched they beautified. The powerful giant Bhîma of the Mahâbhârata is the prototype of Herakles; but in the myths concerning Herakles we recognise the mere personification of commercial daring and enterprise. Accompanied by his dog, he finds the cochineal; the goblet in which he sails to Erytheia is but the Phœnician merchantman; the Phœnicians are referred to, when it is recorded of him that he had broken the devastating horn of the mountain-streams. Moloch, to whom Assyrians, Indians and Hebrews sacrificed, without ever being capable of investing the fire-spitting monster with anything like poetry, was destroyed by Herakles. The gods of Asia became with the Hellenes demons, from whom they learned some useful trades. Poseidon, the god of the sea, is, like the element over which he rules and in which he dwells, of a sinister, implacable character; he requires human sacrifices, annihilates horses (meaning ships), in fact does, as incarnate divinity, what the sea does in our own times. The Titans are acquainted with astronomy, and are personifications of a certain knowledge in maritime matters. Proteus, the Egyptian Pharaoh, is with them the keeper of the seas, and Atlas the father of nautical astronomy, and both were companions of the Tyrean Herkules. In all the myths and legends of the Greeks we can trace some facts. The divinity they could only comprehend in the well-proportioned form of a human being, and a hero or benefactor of humanity became with them a divinity. This blending into one of the divine and human is the most important feature in Greek thought. Vishnu and Osiris also became incarnate—but their deeds were supernatural; the principal feature of their ‘man-godhead,’ or ‘divine manhood,’ is an incomprehensible mysticism. Their anthropomorphism had in it something gloomy. When the divine Apollo uttered the memorable words: ‘Man, know thyself,’ the Greeks became suddenly conscious of the inborn spark of the divine intellect in man; the gods were intelligible to them, and the Asiatic world of abstractions emerged in a thousand different human forms of divine conceptions.
Uranos (Varuna in Sanskrit) is heaven, or rather space—Kronos, time, and Gæa, earth. Uranos as well as Kronos and Pontos were offsprings of the Earth. So far we have to deal with the same mystical elements which engendered all the Asiatic cosmogonies. But Uranos and Gæa are set down as male and female, and are endowed with powerful children—the Titans and Titanides, the Hekatoncheires (or Kentimanos, hundred-handed, powerful giants with fifty heads), and the Kyklopes, who were very clever, and invented many useful arts.