It was in the attempt, however, to chain this spirit, and to imprison it in durable forms, that all the poetry and arts of Greece consisted. They beheld within them a world of loveliness, of living forms which knocked at the golden door of fancy, and demanded their dismissal from the spiritual to the material universe. All their studies were but how to dress these celestial habitants in fitting habiliments to go abroad in; and their lives were often spent in the throes of creatures big with immortal beauty. It is a privilege to the world to converse with minds of such a nature. It is ennobling to approach them. Their energy, their vivifying power continues ever active, ever operating, and if high art be ever to flourish and command, not admiration, but love in England, it can only be by kindling here the lamp removed from Greece, but essentially Greek, that is, essentially beautiful.
The proof that religion issued with art from the same womb in Greece, and was not its parent, is supplied by every other country. There is religion elsewhere, while nowhere is there art like that of the Greeks. But religion had nevertheless much to do with the forms in which the creative faculty there developed itself, as it invariably has with whatever is great or beautiful among men. The persuasion arose in them that the inhabitants of Olympos could be represented by material forms, and as they found their own reverence for the divine being represented, augment in proportion to the beauty or grandeur of its image, the conclusion was natural that the deity himself would be pleased by the same rule, so that their piety was their first and most powerful incentive to excellence. They hoped to recommend themselves to the gods, as they did to their countrymen, by the greatness of their workmanship; and veneration from without, and piety from within, united in urging them forward. And this, with the poet equally as with the artist, inflamed the desire to excel.
There are, as has already been observed,[[928]] three periods in the history of art: 1st. that, in which the necessary is sought; 2ndly, that in which the study of the beautiful is pursued; and 3dly, the period of superfluity and extravagance. But in some countries men appear to pass from the first to the third, without traversing the second. Thus, in Egypt, Persia, Etruria, in Germany, Holland, France, England[[929]] the wild, the grotesque, the terrible have been aimed at, seldom the beautiful. Even in Italy, where in modern times art has taken firmest root and most luxuriantly flourished, the object sought to be attained has lain on a lower level. Among the northern nations the grotesque variously disguised or modified is the spirit of art; among the Italians it is voluptuousness, among the Greeks the beautiful. Hence no Greek statue of the flourishing period of art is indecent.[[930]] Naked it may be, but like the nakedness of infancy, it is chaste as a mother’s love. Our thoughts are instantly carried away by it to the regions of poetry; the soft influence of the ideal descends like dew upon our fancy; we are elevated above the region of the passions to heights where all is sunny and calm and pure. The beautiful is chaste as an icicle, yet warm as love. It breathes in Raffaelle’s virgins which we regard as some “bright particular star,” things to inspire a holy affection, a love not akin to earth. Yet this beauty is not distanced from us by its severity: no! but by its intense innocence, by its unsullied purity, by its inexpressible concentration and mingling up of maternity and girlhood. It was this beauty that Milton sought in his Comus to express, when he represents chastity as its own guard. And this is preëminently the spirit breathing through Grecian art. In the Artemis, in the Athena, nay, even in Aphrodite or Leda, or an orgiastic Bacchante, the overruling sense of beauty, after the first flutter of sensation, hurries the imagination far beyond all considerations of sex or passion. The root of all the pleasures we feel, seems to be hidden under the load of three thousand years, not because the things are old, but because they are the material representatives of a period when the foot of the beautiful rested on the earth.
No doubt we come prepared to regard them with eyes coloured, and a fancy haunted by the beauties of Grecian literature. Possibly, it is under the spell of Homeric verse that our eyes grow humid with delight at the aspect of Aphrodite, that we behold divinity in Zeus or Phœbos Apollo; but this only proves that the fragments of Hellenic civilisation throw a light upon each other, and are parts of one great whole. Perhaps, too, no man ever enjoyed the sculpture of Greece as he should, unless conversant with her poetry—the right hand of her art. In this we find the first seeds and increments of those ideas, which were afterwards transplanted and bore fruit in another field. We discover, therefore, but half the subject when we see only the sculpture. It is unknown to us whether the artist has fulfilled the conditions into which he entered, by undertaking to clothe in marble, thoughts already invested with the forms of language. Hence the little sympathy between Hellenic art and the people generally of modern nations. The figures they behold are dumb to them. To a Greek, on the contrary, or to a man with a Greek’s soul, a thousand sweet reminiscences, a thousand legends, a thousand dim but cherished associations appear clustering round them. Every time they flash upon him, he lives his youth over again. The briery nook, the dewy lanes, the dim religious forests, the pebbly or wave-fretted shore, where the poetry of Greece first opened its eyes upon him in boyhood, sweep in procession over his fancy. He starts to see the hamadryad or the faun or the mountain nymph, before him but one remove from life; to him art speaks not merely in an intelligible, but in an impassioned tongue. He comprehends all the mysteries she has to reveal, and loves her because in a land as it were of foreigners they can converse with each other, and speak of the past and the future.
It is scarcely philosophical to regard poetry, sculpture, and painting, as the offspring of pleasure, though pleasure in some sense be as necessary to man as food. Man possesses creative and imitative faculties, and must, at certain stages of society, employ them. The moment his merely animal wants are provided for, he begins to feel that he has others which demand no less imperiously their gratification. First, he desires to clothe with material forms the things he worships, and hence the first-born of art are gods. At the outset, indeed, (and this is a strong argument against their having borrowed their arts from the East,)[[931]] the Greeks were content with setting up rude stones, as symbols rather than representations of their divinities; then followed the head upon a rude pillar; then, the indications of the sex; next, the round thighs began to swell out of the stone; to these succeeded legs and feet; and, lastly, arms and hands completed the figure. Dædalos, a mythological personage, is supposed to have been the first who carried the art to this point of improvement. His figures were of wood, and already executed with considerable skill, though they would have been despised in the days of Socrates.[[932]]
For some ages, perhaps, a stiff, unanimated manner, not unlike the Egyptian, prevailed; but the impulse, once given, went on increasing in strength. One improvement imperceptibly followed another. Artists, together with their experience, acquired professional learning, the results of which soon became visible in their productions. Movement and variety of position succeeded. But though knowledge of art was enlarged and strict rules laid down, there still remained a hard, square massiveness in the style, resembling what we find in modern sculpture as improved by Michael Angelo. And this manner became the type of the Æginetan school, which expressed the character of the Doric mind, powerful but rude, harmonious but heavy, wanting in grace, wanting in elegance, and aiming rather at effect than beauty.[[933]]
Numerous causes, however, concurred in ripening the principle of art in Greece,—the climate, the form of government, the happy taste of the people, and, lastly, the high respect which was there paid to artists. Nor is it at all paradoxical to affirm, that moral causes concurred powerfully with physical, in begetting that radiant beauty of countenance which distinguished the nation. The consciousness of freedom and independence produces satisfaction in the mind; the serenity thus originated communicates itself to the features; thence arise harmony and dignity of aspect and mien; these are so many elements of beauty, and such feelings long indulged would operate powerfully on the countenance, and, seconded by the tranquillising influences of external nature, end by creating symmetry and proportion, which, joined with intellect, are beauty. Artists in such a country, besides that they must themselves involuntarily be impressed with a veneration for it, would soon discover the reverence paid to beauty and the value set upon accurate representations of it.
Of the high estimation in which beauty was held innumerable proofs exist in Greek literature. At Ægion in Achaia, the priest of Zeus was chosen for the splendour of his personal charms, to determine which a sort of contest was instituted. This office he held till his beard began to appear, when the honour passed to the youth then judged to excel[[934]] in the perfection of his form. So, also, at Tanagra, the youth selected to bear the lamb round the walls in honour of Hermes was supposed to be the first for beauty in the city.[[935]] Of the involuntary power of beauty history has recorded various instances. Phrynè, accused of impiety and on the point of being condemned, obtained her acquittal through the hardihood of her advocate, who bared her bosom before the judges. Another example is said to have been afforded by Corinna, sole poetess of Tanagra, who, contending with Pindar for the prize of verse, obtained the victory more by her beauty, (she being the loveliest woman of her time,) and the sweetness of the Æolic dialect in which she wrote, than by the greatness of her genius.[[936]]
In another instance heroic honours were paid to a man after death for the beauty of his person.[[937]] This happened at Egestum in Sicily, where Philippos, a native of Crotona, obtained this distinction, which Herodotus observes never fell to any other man’s lot before.[[938]]
It was to its artists that Greece delegated, at least in some instances, the privilege of deciding on the rival pretensions of the fair and beautiful. They were permitted to select from the loveliest women of the land models for their female divinities, and at other times made their mistresses the representatives of goddesses. Pains were taken, by filling their apartments with beautiful statues, to impress upon the imagination of pregnant women the perfect forms of gods and heroes, as of Nireus, Narcissos, Hyacinthos, Castor and Polydeukes, Bacchos and Apollo.[[939]] This was at Sparta. In other parts of the Peloponnesos a species of Olympic contest for the prize of beauty took place, instituted, it is said, by Cypselos, an ancient king of Arcadia. Having founded a city in the plain on the banks of the Alpheios, in which he fixed a colony of Parrhasians, he dedicated a temple and altar, and instituted a festival in honour of Eleusinian Demeter, during which the women of the neighbourhood disputed with each other the prize, and received from some circumstance connected with the contest the name of Chrysophoræ. The first woman who won was Herodice, wife of the founder Cypselos. This institution flourished upwards of fourteen hundred years, having been established in the time of the Heracleidæ, and still existing in the age of Athenæus.[[940]]