This rule is extremely convenient for men, but it is indispensable for animals. A performing horse must find, in whatever spot he appears before the public, a ring of fourteen [p186] yards nine inches sanded to a depth of three inches and a quarter, surrounded by a palisade opening in two places only, and low enough to enable it to walk round it, with the fore hoofs on the red cushion and the hind legs in the arena.
The Hippodrome is not restricted to these dimensions. Its arena is an elastic parallelogram, rounded at the four angles to assist the horses in turning. Its shape excludes all acts of equestrian vaulting, based upon the support given by the centrifugal force to circus acrobats.
It is not only the name but the principles of art which the Hippodrome has borrowed from Greece. No doubt the circus gives us an opportunity of admiring the human body, after the education of the ancients has restored it to the forms chosen by them for the eternal life of marble; but the purest lessons in Greek æsthetics are to be found at the Hippodrome. [p187]
You know that one of the most important differences which distinguish our conception of human beauty from that formed by Greek art lies in this principle: the subordination of the body to the head.
Christian civilization has taught us that we must seize [p188] every opportunity of mortifying and humiliating the flesh to secure the predominance of the superior and spiritual principle—the soul. No doubt the passions and emotions of this soul manifest themselves by gesture to some extent; but they are chiefly revealed in the expression of the face, of the mouth and eyes. Hence the preponderance given to the head, which, at the first appearance of Christianity, when the art of the ancients escaped from the Byzantine bonds, led the early painters to represent hydrocephalic Christs and angels, with the enormous eyes of batrachians, and emaciated, anchylosis, meagre bodies. Hence also the habit that we all have at the present time of judging beauty—and particularly feminine beauty, which is more expressive than the other—from the features of the face.
Greece never despised corporeal beauty in this way. She taught that if the soul be divine, the body is the temple of a god. And on the same principle that she decorated the houses of the Olympians, so that it might please them to dwell therein, she also commanded the body, the habitation of the soul, to be embellished by gymnastics. She placed the musikè, the tutor of the soul, and the gumnastikè, the tutor of the body, on the same level in the practical education of her heroes.
This is why the artists who embodied her ideal of beauty did not give more expression to the face than to the torso. Suppose that the Venus had lost her head instead of an arm; she would not appear more mutilated. One of the most beautiful legacies that Greek sculpture has bequeathed to us is a headless Victory.
