VI
The sixth lamp of Greek art is Patience in striving after perfection. In the finer work of Greek sculptors one finds an utterly ungrudging expenditure of time and care which reminds one of the working of Nature herself, Nature who is never in a hurry, who is never contented with a hasty sketch, but works regardless of time. We are told of Protogenes that he spent seven years on a single figure, and I think he would have spent seven more if he had thought that he could thereby have improved his painting. Nothing strikes one more strongly in such works as the charioteer of Delphi and the Hermes of Praxiteles than the pains taken with every detail. It is by careful work, continued through successive generations, that sculpture attained such mastery in the representation of the muscles of the body as we find in the Borghese fighting figure of the Louvre, and such delicacy in the rendering of drapery as we find in the Victories of the Balustrade at Athens, or the Victory of Samothrace.
But the delicacy and minuteness of Greek work is of course most obvious in the reliefs of coins and in gems. The coins were not primarily meant to please the eye, but to circulate in the fish-market; yet a multitude of the dies are so exquisitely finished that they lose little when magnified to many diameters, and will bear the most critical examination. The intaglio gems were meant for the sealing of documents, the seal taking the place of the modern signature; but the figures upon seals are in their way as finished as great works of sculpture. Seals even more usually than coins gain rather than lose if they are enlarged. Yet they were executed without the help of magnifying glasses. Their subjects are taken from the widest field, the figures of deities, tales from mythology, portraits, animal forms; like the coins they introduced as an undercurrent to the prosaic life of every day an element of poetry and imagination.
VII
The seventh lamp, which goes as naturally with idealism as care and patience go with naturalism, is joy, joie de vivre. Keats has expressed the Greek sense of art in an immortal line, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. It was the overflowing gladness which lies at the root of creation and evolution which took eternal form in the painting and sculpture of the Greeks and inspired all their works. The same irrepressible joy which gives colour to the flowers, sweetness to the fruit, song to the birds, and sexual desire to mankind reached here one of its most perfect manifestations. The life of the Greeks was by no means one of unmixed happiness. Each city was not unfrequently at war with its neighbours; and the penalty of complete defeat was sometimes the razing of its walls, the slaughter of its men, and the enslavement of its women. Disease, even plague, constantly ravaged the land; and the resources of modern surgery and modern anaesthetics were not present to curb their ravages. The life of the majority in country huts, and still more in the slums of the cities, most of all in the mines, was rougher and more sordid than is the case in the modern world, in countries in their normal state. And the people had not even that hope of a blessed hereafter which sustained the people of the Middle Ages. Yet under all these clouds, their spirit was hopeful and aspiring. And their art reflects ever the brighter side of things. Surely they were wise and right. We seek out works of art not to foster pessimism but to inspire optimism, not to show us the world of nature on its repulsive side, but to reveal to us how much underlying beauty is to be found in it. ‘’Tis life not death for which we pant, More life and fuller that we want.’
At the same time, Greek art in some forms was extremely serious and keenly alive to the darker side of existence. The Greeks invented tragedy, the poetical reflection of the severity of fate. Would any modern audience be found, which would be prepared to sit for a whole summer day listening eagerly to the grand expression by such poets as Aeschylus and Sophocles of the power of Nemesis, the instability of all prosperity, the misfortunes which hunt those who have the ill luck to displease the gods? Surely not. And not in Greek tragedy only, but in elegiac poetry and in epigram, we find perfect reflections of our most gloomy moods. But for such expressions of sorrow and despair the Greeks felt that sculpture, and even painting, were not suitable vehicles. They belong to moods, and are not suitable for illustration in the market place and the temple. The roads which led to Greek cities were frequently bordered with monumental tombs. If in the reliefs and inscriptions of these tombs there had been any telling echo of the sorrow and regret of bereaved survivors, every one would have entered the cities in a black mood. As it is, as every one who has been in the museums of Athens knows, the sepulchral artists carefully avoided anything which might harrow the feelings. They represented the dead at their best, engaged in victorious warfare, or in athletic sports or in the happy family circle. A gentle air of melancholy could not be avoided; but there was nothing to shock, nothing to oppress the spirits. The deceased represented seemed still to share the occupations and pleasures of the living, not to be shut off from the world of happiness.
Milton has expressed, in his magnificent prose, the profound joy of the world of the Renaissance at the recovery of the Bible, and free liberty of reading it, after it had been shut away from the laity by the organized Church. Equally intense, and more exuberant, was the delight of scholars and artists, when the asceticism and pessimism of the Middle Ages, which had given birth to such bodies as the Carmelite monks and the mendicant friars, gave way before the revival of Greek literature and art. The world seemed suddenly to have renewed its youth. No doubt the sudden expansion led to foul excesses; but it was yet a great landmark in human progress.
VIII
The eighth light of Greek art is Fellowship. Perhaps there is no quality in it which is more instructive for our days than this. The extreme individualism which is the most remarkable characteristic of modern times lays the utmost stress on the right or the duty of an artist to express himself in his work, to work out his own vein of originality, to give to the world a rendering of his own qualities and individuality. And no doubt no great artist can help doing this in a measure. When he works he must be himself; he can only see the world through the medium of his character and talents. And as every man is a microcosm, a reflection in miniature of the great world of human beings, what is really good and original in an artist must appeal to something in the human world; must have a meaning for people of a certain class or a certain training, or a certain country. But whether an artist is the better for a conscious attempt thus to externalize his personality; whether he is improved by being self-conscious and reflective in his art is a different question.