become cruel and vicious when it loses the power to conquer. A sensitive, artistic people is prone to sensuality and weakness in its latter days. An industrous commercial race degenerates into sordid greed. That is why a loss of national pride is such a serious loss in history. A characteristic virtue of the Greeks was, as we have seen, their supple facility of intellect, their
Plate XCI. THE FARNESE BULL
Brogi
adaptability to environment. This made them, in the days of their decline, sink readily to the position of flatterers and parasites. We find this character attached to the “Hungry Greekling” of Juvenal’s days. In history we meet him as the hanger-on of aristocracy or the crafty tool of emperors. The Romans started as a virile race of warriors, and ended as brutal gluttons with a craving for sensationalism, which the Greeks were only too ready to supply. Hence we get Græco-Roman art in the worst sense of the term, wretched stuff made by sneaks to satisfy the taste of bullies. Most of the sculpture galleries of Europe can supply examples. The Vatican and the Naples Museum are full of them. In the nineteenth century, when the taste of Europe had sunk to its lowest depth of artificiality, work of this kind appealed very strongly to critics. It is only fair to them to say that they had not much opportunity of knowing better, since genuine Greek work of the best periods was mostly lying below the surface unexcavated. Out of this mass of inferior material critics picked one or two examples for admiration. Even great men like Lessing and Winckelmann based excellent maxims of criticism on these rotten foundations. The “Laocoön,” a sensational work by Rhodian sculptors of the first century B.C., was taken by Lessing as the text of his great discourse on the proper functions of the arts. We, on the other hand, can see that this tangled triangle of writhing forms expressing violent emotion of pain and terror has a theatrical and sensational character abhorrent to the very spirit of Greek moderation. Exactly the same is true of the two Farnese masterpieces, the Bull[116] and the Hercules. Such facts as these give one cause to ponder on the mutability of taste and the fallibility of artistic criticism. Restlessness, the symptom of nerves overwrought, is a feature of decadence, which we can observe in the late Greek vase-paintings. The spaces are covered with trivial ornament, the drawing is slack, the sole aim is prettiness. The vigour of the composition is frittered away upon trivial details. In short, the name of the disease from which Greek art was to perish is Vulgarity. Idealism without romanticism was the secret of Greek art at its best. When we find romance without ideals we have reached the nadir.
Late Greek Vase-painting: from a Pelike in the British Museum.