Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays

by Julia Ward Howe

This expedition occupied the whole of a winter day. We started from the hotel after early breakfast, and did not regain it until long after dark. Our carriages were accompanied by an escort of dragoons, which the Greek government supplies, not in view of any real danger from brigands, but in order to afford strangers every possible security. A drive of some three hours brought us to the spot.

A level plain, between the mountains and the sea; a mound, raised at its centre, marking the burial-place of those who fell in the famous battle; a sea-beach, washed by blue waves, and basking in the golden Attic sunlight—this is what we saw at Marathon.

Here we gathered pebbles, and I preserved for some days a knot of daisies growing in a grassy clod of earth. But my mind saw in Marathon an earnest of the patriotic spirit which has lifted Greece from such ruin as the Persians were never able to inflict upon her. Worthy descendants of those ancient heroes were the patriots who fought, in our own century, the war of Greek independence. I am glad to think that all heroic deeds have a fatherhood of their own, whose line never becomes extinct.

Those who would institute a comparison between ancient and modern art should first compare the office of art in ancient times with the function assigned it in our own.

The sculptures of classic Greece were primarily the embodiment of its popular theology and the record of its patriotic heroism. They are not, as we might think them, fancy-free. The marble gods of Hellas characterize for us the morale of that ancient community. They expressed the religious conviction of the artist, and corresponded to the faith of the multitude. If we recognize the freedom of imagination in their conception, we also feel the reverence which guided the sculptor in their execution. As Emerson has said:—

Himself from God he could not free.

How necessary these marbles were to the devotion of the time, we may infer from the complaint reported in one of Cicero's orations,—that a certain Greek city had been so stripped of its marbles that its people had no god left to pray to.

In the city of the Cæsars, this Greek art became the minister of luxury. The ethics of the Roman people chiefly concerned their relation to the state, to which their church was in great measure subservient. The statues stolen from the worship of the Greeks adorned the baths and palaces of the Emperors. This we must think providential for us, since it is in this way that they have escaped the barbarous destruction which for ages swept over the whole of Greece, and to whose rude force, column, monument, and statue were only raw material for the lime-kiln.

Still more secondary is the position of sculpture in the civilization of to-day. Here and there a monument or statue commemorates some great name or some great event. But these are still outside the current of our daily life. Marble is to us a gospel of death, and we grow less and less fond of its cold abstraction. The glitter of bric-à-brac, bits of color, an unexpected shimmer here and there—such are the favorite aspects of art with us.

In saying this, I remember that many beautiful works of art have been purchased by wealthy Americans, and that a surprising number of our people know what is worth purchasing in this line. And yet I think that in the houses of these very people, art is rather the servant of luxury than the embodiment of any strong and sincere affection.