The parallel which I have drawn may be carried farther. A reversion to the letter of the New Testament writers has been often attempted by considerable religious leaders of our time, especially Tolstoi and the Quakers. They have gone back to the injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount, and tried literally to abide by them. But it has become apparent to all but fanatics that such procedure would be fatal to civil government and civilized life. It is the spirit not the letter of the teaching of Jesus which is life-giving. In just the same way an acceptance of the mere externals of Greek art would not help us at all; but a revival of its spirit would be a great inspiration to modern artists. The lamps of Greek art will give light in any age. Greek idealism, Greek balance and measure, Greek love of what is natural and healthful, Greek simplicity and moderation are of the very essence of good art in all ages. We can no more revive the exact conditions under which art arose than we can import into England the clear air, the bright sun, the clear-cut shadows of the Greek landscape. But we can still look up to the philosophy, the poetry, and the art of Greece as classical, as a revelation of what is most pleasing and most enduring in human nature. And if we neglect them and reject them from the education of our children, we shall destroy what has been ever since the Renaissance the source of pure joy and refined feeling in the majority of cultured men; we shall make a great gap which material prosperity, a deeper knowledge of the secrets of nature, the invention of fresh modes of amusement, can never fill. And if we trust merely to the reflections of the Greek spirit in modern literature and art, we shall be acting as the Roman Church in its darker ages has acted, in shutting away from the people recourse to the primary documents of religion, and obliging them to be content with such interpretations of those documents as the ruling hierarchy judged to be useful. We must retain the right of appeal to our classical examples, whether in religion, in literature, or in art. Arnold was right. The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art remain the stars by which we may direct our course over stormy seas.
P. Gardner.
ARCHITECTURE
Nobody has ever disputed the beauty of Greek Architecture. We recognize the justice of a description of the Parthenon as ‘le suprême effort du génie à la poursuite du beau’; but the layman must sometimes ask himself what does it mean? Where did it come from, where did it go to, why is it thought so beautiful, how was it that this people relatively insignificant in power, in territory, and in numbers, was able to attain to this astonishing supremacy in art? These are questions not easily answered. The evidence is fragmentary and not always conclusive, the ruins of a few temples and buildings, a technical treatise by a garrulous third-rate writer in the first century A. D.,[125] the anecdotes of an indefatigable collector[126] a little later, the notes of a traveller in the second century,[127] and the materials collected by the patient research of scholars and archaeologists, pieced together on more or less ingenious hypotheses. Indeed, a great part of what is written on Greek Architecture is simply hypothesis. There is not much to go on, yet Greek Architecture (and by this I mean the architecture of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.) remains one of the great outstanding facts in the history of the Architecture of the Western world, and the Art of the age of Pericles is the fountain-head to which artists still return.
Where that art sprang from, and how it grew, is largely a matter of speculation. There have been legends of civilizations wiped out in tremendous cataclysms that left no trace behind them. Vague suggestions are made that the cradle of the race was in Asia. All we know for certain is that the earliest civilizations of which actual historical evidence remains are those of Chaldea and Egypt, and that the art of these countries reached a high degree of attainment long before we come upon the earliest traces of art of any sort in Greece. That both these countries contributed in varying degrees to the art of Greece is certain, but that is not the whole of the story. As we shall see, another element comes into play, which made of that art almost a new creation, differing in outlook and ideal from any art that preceded it, stamped by the genius of a vigorous northern race with a character all its own. The art of the East and the art of the West never really fused. There is a difference in kind between the joyous vitality of pure Greek art, and the gloomy vision of Asia, with its craving for the vast and terrible, its sombre imagination, its lack of humanity and indifference to the individual.
It is not, however, till far down in the progress of history that this differentiation asserts itself. Greek art is relatively a late development. The Great Pyramid at Ghizeh was built some 2,000 years before a stone was laid of the masonry of Mycenae. The Hall of Columns of Karnak, with its columns sixty feet high, was probably coeval with the Treasury of Atreus: in other words, when the art of Greece and of the islands was scarcely out of the barbaric stage, a wonderful art had been in existence across the Mediterranean from time immemorial. Both Egypt and Chaldea attained a high degree of civilization long before the Dorians were ever heard of. At some remote period the Egyptian influence penetrated to Crete and Cyprus, the islands of the Aegean, and the mainland of Greece; and the intermediaries were the Phoenicians, that enterprising race of merchant adventurers, whose home was in Syria, and whose fleets traversed the Mediterranean from East to West. The Phoenicians were traders and not artists. In Egypt they came into contact with a highly developed art, beyond their comprehension in its essential features, yet including details which could easily be apprehended by their quick commercial intelligence. Wherever they touched on their voyages, Cyprus, Crete, the southern islands of the Aegean, the mainland of Greece, the south of Italy, Sicily, Carthage, the Balearic islands, Spain in the far west, they probably carried with them, for trading purposes, minor articles of Egyptian workmanship which may have supplied hints to the indigenous peoples. Where they established settlements, they reproduced what they could recollect of the methods of Egyptian architecture, possessing at second-hand a knowledge of technical methods in advance of anything within the knowledge of the people among whom they settled. Rudimentary anticipations of the Ionic volute are found in Phoenician capitals, vague reminiscences of what the traders had seen in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the Phoenicians, who possessed the skill of sailors in the use of tackle, would have had little difficulty in handling large stones set dry in more or less regular courses, which was a characteristic feature of Cretan and Mycenaean building. It is too soon to describe the work as architecture. It is doubtful if the Phoenicians possessed any aptitude for the arts. Their rôle was that of intermediaries only.
Obscure as was the part played by the Phoenicians in the early origins of art in Greece and the islands, there was another channel through which Eastern influences came to bear on its development, which is even more uncertain. To the west of Chaldea and north of Syria, dwelt a race of which little is known, the Hittites. Carchemish, their capital, was on the upper Euphrates, north-east of Antioch, and their power appears to have extended westward through Asia Minor to the shores of the Aegean. Dr. Sayce says that in the thirteenth century B. C. it extended from ‘the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Aegean, including both the cultured Semites of Syria and the rude barbarians of the Greek Seas’, he even says that the Hittites ‘brought the civilization of the East to the barbarous tribes of the distant West’. What actually remains of Hittite art hardly bears out this statement. When the Hittite power was at its height, Minoan ‘art’ had long been practised in Crete, and according to the most popular chronology, had already passed its prime and given way to the art of Mycenae and Tiryns. The scanty evidence of Hittite art consists of bas-reliefs of figures and animals cut on the face of rocks along the natural caravan routes through Asia Minor from East to West. This and the evidence of seals and engraved gems show that Hittite art was derived first from Chaldea, later from Egypt. It undoubtedly exercised some influence on the art of the early Greek settlers on the eastern side of the Aegean, and gave it an Asiatic cast, which it never lost throughout all its later developments. For the Greeks of Asia Minor never really understood the austere ideal of Doric art. Ionian art crossed westward to Greece, but the Dorian never went east. It was the art of a strong northern race, that found no place for itself among the softer peoples of Asia Minor.
At this point we can take up the first rudimentary beginnings of Greek art. The discoveries of the last forty years have proved the existence in Crete and Cyprus, Southern Greece, and the islands of the Aegean, of an archaic art of obscure origin, of very great interest, and of remarkable attainment in certain directions, long before the earliest beginnings of what we mean when we speak of Greek architecture. So far as architecture is concerned, this archaic art is of relatively minor importance. It plays a small part, if any, in subsequent developments, and though enthusiastic explorers claim to find in it anticipations of the details of modern domestic architecture, the evidence produced is unconvincing. Great movements in the arts always owe some debt to the periods that have preceded them, but Minoan and Mycenaean art, at any rate in regard to architecture, was rather the last word of a decaying civilization than the first herald of the glorious art of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. We are still far back in remote ages, remote that is so far as Greek art is concerned, anywhere between 2000 and 1000 B. C. or even earlier,[128] back in the Minoan age of Crete with its rudimentary architecture, and its relatively high excellence in the crafts, and in the age of Mycenae and Tiryns, the age that produced the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and that strange half-barbaric work, if I may be pardoned the term, the Treasury of Atreus. It is worth pausing to consider these archaic buildings, not so much to show a relationship to later work (which scarcely existed), as to call attention to the fact that the Minoan and Mycenaean builders were moving unconsciously in a direction that would never have led to the column and lintel architecture of the seventh and sixth centuries B. C. It might have led to some form of dome construction, it could never have led to the Doric of the Sicilian temples. No stronger evidence of the genius of the Dorian invaders could be produced than that, with this unpromising art in possession, they were yet able in the course of three or four centuries to create Greek architecture. The design of the Lion Gate is a strange jumble of ill-adjusted motives. It is set in a wall of great stones roughly squared and laid dry. Two monolith jambs support a huge lintel, cambered in the middle like the tie-beams of our sixteenth-century roofs. Above the lintel the courses are gathered over, leaving between their lower faces and the top of the lintel a triangular space of a steep pitch (about 60°), in which was inserted a frontispiece carved on a single stone representing two lions standing up on either side of an archaic column supporting a fragment of a rudimentary architrave.[129] The heraldic pose of the lions and the technique of their sculpture, so suggestive of Assyrian reliefs with their splendid sense of muscular form and energy, are far ahead of an architecture that is still barbaric, scarcely architecture at all. There is here nothing to suggest the Doric of Paestum and Selinus, much to recall the megalithic buildings of Syria, and the sculpture of the farther East.