[293] "To live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful." These two lines are sometimes misquoted—Schönen being exchanged for Wahren, Beauty for Truth.
[294] The Greek Pantheon, regarded from one point of view, represents an exhaustive psychological analysis. Nothing in human nature is omitted; but each function and each quality of man is deified. To Zeus as the supreme reason all is subordinated.
[295] See vol. i. p. 302 for a translation of this scolion attributed to Simonides, and vol. i. p. 337 for a translation of a Hymn to Health, which develops the same theme.
[296] I have already touched on this point in the chapters on the Attic drama. It is, indeed, very interesting to trace the growth of the morality of Nemesis and the divine φθόνος in the earlier Greek authors—its purification by Æschylus, and still further subsequent refinement by Sophocles; finally its rejection by Plato, who says emphatically: "Envy has no place in the heavenly choir." A childish fear of the divine government pervaded the Greeks of the age of Herodotus. This by the dramatists was exalted to a conception of the holy and the jealous God. But the good sense of the Greeks led the philosophers to eliminate from their theory of the world even the sublime theosophy of Æschylus. The soul of man, as analyzed by Plato in the Republic, has only to suffer from the inevitable consequences of its own passions. Plato theorizes the humanity implicit in Homer.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
Sculpture, the Greek Art par excellence.—Plastic Character of the Greek Genius.—Sterner Aspects of Greek Art.—Subordination of Pain and Discord to Harmony.—Stoic-Epicurean Acceptance of Life.—Sadness of Achilles in the Odyssey.—Endurance of Odysseus.—Myth of Prometheus.—Sir H. S. Maine on Progress.—The Essential Relation of all Spiritual Movement to Greek Culture.—Value of the Moral Attitude of the Greeks for us.—Three Points of Greek Ethical Inferiority.—The Conception of Nature.—The System of Marcus Aurelius.—Contrast with the Imitatio Christi.—The Modern Scientific Spirit.—Indestructible Elements in the Philosophy of Nature.
I may, perhaps, be allowed in this last chapter to quit the impersonal style of the essayist and to refer to some strictures passed upon earlier chapters of these studies. Critics for whose opinion I feel respect have observed that, in what I wrote about the genius of Greek art, I neglected to notice the sterner and more serious qualities of the Greek spirit, that I exaggerated the importance of sculpture as the characteristic Hellenic art, and that I did not make my meaning clear about the value of the study of Greek modes of thought and feeling for men living in our scientific age. To take up these topics in detail, and to answer some of these indictments, is my purpose in the present chapter. They are so varied that I may fairly be excused for adopting a less methodical and connected development of ideas than ought to be demanded from a man who is not answering objections, but preferring opinions.
To take the least important of these questions first: why is sculpture selected as the most eminent and characteristic art of the Hellenic race, when so much remains of their poetry and of prose work in the highest sense artistic? To my mind the answer is simple enough. One modern nation has produced a drama which can compete with that of Athens. Another has carried painting to a perfection we have little reason to believe it ever reached in Greece. A third has satisfied the deepest and the widest needs of our emotional nature by such music as no Greek, in all probability, had any opportunity of hearing. In the last place, Gothic architecture, the common heritage of all the European nations of the modern world, is at least as noble as the architecture of the ancients. The Greeks alone have been unique in sculpture: what survives of Pheidias and Praxiteles, of Polycletus and Scopas, and of their schools, transcends in beauty and in power, in freedom of handling and in purity of form, the very highest work of Donatello, Della Quercia, and Michael Angelo. We have, therefore, a prima facie right to lay great stress on sculpture as a Greek art, just as we have the prima facie right to select painting as an Italian art. The first step taken from this position leads to the reflection that, within the sphere of art at any rate, the one art which a nation has developed as its own, to which it has succeeded in giving unique perfection, and upon which it has impressed the mark of its peculiar character, will lend the key for the interpretation of its whole æsthetic temperament. The Italians cannot have been singularly and pre-eminently successful in painting without displaying some of the painter's qualities in all their artistic products. The Greeks cannot have made sculpture unapproachably complete without possessing a genius wherein the sculptor's bent of mind was specially predominant, and thus infusing somewhat of the sculpturesque into the sister arts. Painting for Italy and sculpture for Greece may be fairly taken as the fully formed and flawless crystals in a matrix of congenial, but not equally developed, matter. The ideal to which either race aspired instinctively in all its art was realized to the fullest, by the one in sculpture, by the other in painting. So we are justified in testing the whole of their æsthetic products by the laws of painting and of sculpture respectively. This, broadly stated, without economy of phrase or cautious reservation, is the reason why a student who has tried, however imperfectly, to assimilate to himself the spirit displayed in the surviving monuments of Greek art, is brought back at every turn to sculpture as the norm and canon of them all.
Whatever knowledge he may gain about the circumstances of Greek life and the peculiar temper of Greek thought will only strengthen his conviction. The national games, the religious pageants, the theatrical shows, and the gymnastic exercises of the Greeks were sculpturesque. The conditions of their speculative thought in the first dawn of civilized self-consciousness, when spiritual energy was still conceived as incarnate only in a form of flesh, and the soul was inseparable from the body except by an unfamiliar process of analysis, harmonized with the art which interprets the mind in all its movements by the features and the limbs. Their careful choice of distinct motives in poetry, their appeal in all imaginative work to the inner eye that sees, no less than to the sympathies that thrill, their abstinence from descriptions of landscape and analyses of emotion, their clear and massive character-delineation, point to the same conclusion. Everything tends to confirm the original perception that the simplicity of form, the purity of design, the self-restraint, and the parsimony both of expression and material, imposed by sculpture on the artist, were observed as laws by the Greeks in their mental activity, and more especially in their arts. It is this which differentiates them from the romantic nations. When, therefore, we undertake to speak of the genius of Greek art, we are justified in giving the first place to sculpture and in assuming that sculpture strikes the key-note of the whole music.