Giddy with victory and joy, the Greeks discarded ethics; truth was made the handmaid of sophistry, superstition, and scepticism; and beauty, in losing her ideal glory, sank into the depths of sensualism and realism. The harmony of the triad, which artists, philosophers, and moral teachers had succeeded in establishing, was destroyed, and a discordant strain of melancholy woe resounded through history, echoing here and there some remnants of the old and charming melodies. The conquests of Philip of Makedon and Alexander the Great brought the East into contact with the Greek spirit. The East furnished mystic incomprehensibilities, and an egotistic hatred of all art that could not be turned into money, or used for serving some deity to buy up its good graces. Buddhistic tenets joined hands with Brahmanic conceits; Egyptian symbols were intermingled with Hebrew practical enactments, without any ideal aspirations. Greek philosophical diatribes were used to prove the impossible possible, and the ‘supernatural’ most natural. Some Greeks attempted to revive the antique mode of thinking, but they were silenced by the Neo-Platonists, and thus the Greeks themselves became the most successful apostles of unnaturally-shaped superstitions, deadening the vivifying spirit of Christ’s teachings.
The Romans had only one aim in history—to regulate their conquests. The State was everything with them; they taught us how to systematise the actions of men, to make them useful citizens in this world, and, when they left their legacy of infallible authority to the Romish Church, how to prepare fit inhabitants for another world. The outward realistic form, proclaiming some inward mystic grace or meaning, became everything. Base hollowness in art and morals, vapid verbiage in philosophy, unnatural profligacy and licentiousness, mean covetousness and heartless egotism, brought humanity intellectually, morally, and spiritually, to the brink of destruction. Everyone thirsted for a change—reality was unbearable.
Men strove, in deadening their bodies, to seek the salvation of their souls. The realistic tendency of the degenerated ancient times gave way to blind faith, which by degrees obtained an exclusive hold on the ideal in man, ignoring his reflective and reasoning nature, working only on the emotional, and burying antiquity under the gloomy ruins of the Middle Ages. For more than 1000 years beauty had to yield to mystic symbolism, truth to superstitious prejudice, and ethics to a morbid sentimentality and a cruel hierarchical despotism. Dogmatic scholasticism sought to foster elegance of forms; to create artistic enthusiasm; but this attempt was vain. When, however, the dogmatic ice began to melt in the burning rays of the rising sun of a freer inquiry; when the Romish Church, anxious for some powerful helpmate to check the rays of this sun, and work on the gloomy, stupified emotions of the masses, called in to aid her the spirit of the Greeks in art, she prepared a bright and happy future for humanity. The reformation in art-forms, and the revival of the antique spirit in poetry, was soon followed by a revival in science and ethics. Philosophy began to unravel the mysteries of nature, and to make natural forces subservient to man’s wants and happiness. Ethics, based on freedom of thought, grew day by day more powerful, and Greek forms were used in the purified spirit of Christ, divested of strange and unintelligible dogmas.
Having secured the right freely to store up the results of our intellectual investigations, we must devote our artistic energies, through an assiduous study of the historical development of art, to a corresponding culture of our sense of beauty. This is essential, if we hope to stand as high artistically, as we do technically and mechanically. Without culture we cannot hope to vie with other nations in high art, in historical paintings, frescoes, sculpture, and architecture. A thorough knowledge of art-history will destroy tasteless prejudices, and enable us progressively to develop the past without becoming guilty of anachronisms. Inspired by the firm conviction that the culture of taste leads to the very highest development of ethics, and that art can only flourish in strict harmony with truth and goodness, we can progress, but not otherwise.
In this volume we have brought the reader down to the art of the Mahomedans, and trust in a future work to trace the historical development of art to our own times. What we have said in praise of Greek art, must not be misunderstood to imply that, since it flourished, we have not made gigantic progressive strides in sculpture, architecture, and painting; but we have done so only when we have worked in the Greek spirit, that is, on the principles which stamped their works of art with perfection.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE STUDY OF THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ART.]
Agincourt, ‘Histoire de l’Art par les Monuments’. 6 vols. Fol. Paris, 1823.
Asiatic Researches.