3. Caricatures distinguished by grotesque quaintness. This style predominates at periods, when nations look upon art as superfluous; not as one of the most important factors of civilization. Taste degenerates, and the higher aspirations of art are crippled by distorted products. The quaint is preferred to the beautiful, and the dynamic force of the artistic element, driven into this direction, loses itself in a broad grin at everything sacred and elevated in State, religion, and science, fostering a deplorable spirit of vulgar egotism, which looks down upon the sublime exertions of artists, as the mere vagaries of simpletons or madmen.
4. Works in the best Greek style, but only in bronze, as frames and handles of mirrors. Whenever the higher spirit of art is neglected, the power of the artist is directed to small matters; he serves trade and nothing but trade. We have in these ‘Articles of Etruria’ the prototypes of our ‘Articles de Paris.’
5. Mechanical products, such as helmets, weapons, swords, shields, hatchets, clubs, wall-breakers, cooking utensils, pots, pans, and saucers, were of exquisite workmanship, but without any attempt at artistic forms. The utilitarian incubus is as bad as the hierarchical canon; both expel all higher aspirations from the realm of art.
The Etruskans thought, with many of us, that if the house were only built of dry bricks, the carpet thick, the furniture solid and heavy, and the knife sharp, it was unnecessary to care for anything else. Whilst such ideas exist, art, in a higher sense, will remain as little possible, as it was with the Etruskans.
[CHAPTER X.]
ROMAN ART.
The Greeks, from a poetical, artistic, and esthetical, and the Romans, from a social, legal, and political point of view, are still our masters. Historical art-critics, and a certain class of writers, who would wish to see the whole universe one great court of justice with an infinite variety of crimes, subdivided into felony, misdemeanour, petty larceny, &c., will never agree as to the place that should be assigned to the Romans in the world’s history. We are bold enough to assert that the whole of the criminal and sanguinary history of Rome, with her products in literature and art, might be wiped out, and yet philosophically, poetically, and artistically, not the slightest gap in the progressive development of humanity would be found. Socially and legally, we should be sorry to miss a state, which had a mission of its own, which, if well understood, may teach us the causes why the gentler feelings of morality were oppressed, imagination defiled, and every higher artistic aspiration deadened in Rome.
From beginning to end, Roma, read backwards Amor, was an ambiguous ‘state-abstraction,’ which absorbed the individual. The State with the Greeks was a concrete association of freemen. With the Romans, it was the abstract principle of an imaginary union of heterogeneous citizens. The Greeks fostered science and art, poetry and philosophy. The Romans despised science, mocked art, scorned poetry, and never condescended to trouble themselves about philosophy. The Greeks colonised and civilised their colonies, which became the free daughters of a free mother-country, attached to it by the ties of a common worship of beauty and intellectual enjoyment. The Romans conquered, and the conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage. The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. The Roman was cowed down in religion, politics and life, by the inexorable despotic force of legal phantoms, which turned men into mere machines. The despotism of the East was the despotism of some invisible god, or some visible ruler; and it often overlooked the individual in its almighty position. The democracy of Greece gave fair play to individual talent and genius in art and science; but the Roman self-constituted aristocracy, or rather triple theocracy, invented the inexorable and meddlesome monster authority, to which everything was to be sacrificed. Under the tragi-comical sobriquet, Salus reipublicæ suprema lex (in free translation, ‘whatever we in authority find good, is good’), they committed the blackest crimes, which no historian could venture to commit to paper in their whole truthfulness.
This triple theocracy presented itself in the shape of seven mythical kings; in the form of a nominal republic, which was in reality a military and theocratic aristocracy; and lastly in the theocracy of the Cæsars, which in course of time was changed into a papal theocracy.