Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

W >> Walter Horatio Pater >> Greek Studies: A Series of Essays




In undergoing the action of these two opposing influences, and by
harmonising in itself their antagonism, Greek sculpture does but
reflect the larger movements of more general Greek history. All
through Greek history we may trace, in every sphere of the activity
of the Greek mind, the action of these two opposing tendencies,--the
centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, as we may perhaps not too
fancifully call them. There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the
Asiatic tendency, flying from the centre, working with little
forethought straight before it, in the development of every thought
and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected
imagination; delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful
material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy,
even in architecture and its subordinate crafts. In the social and
political order it rejoices in the freest action of local and
personal influences; its restless versatility drives it towards the
assertion of the principles of separatism, of individualism--the
separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions,
the development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and
individual in him. Its claim is in its grace, its freedom and
happiness, its lively interest, the variety of its gifts to
civilisation; its weakness is self-evident, and was what made the
unity of Greece impossible. [253] It is this centrifugal tendency
which Plato is desirous to cure, by maintaining, over against it, the
Dorian influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in society,
in culture, in the very physical nature of man. An enemy everywhere
to variegation, to what is cunning or "myriad-minded," he sets
himself, in mythology, in music, in poetry, in every kind of art, to
enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean abstractness and calm.

This exaggerated ideal of Plato's is, however, only the exaggeration
of that salutary European tendency, which, finding human mind the
most absolutely real and precious thing in the world, enforces
everywhere the impress of its sanity, its profound reflexions upon
things as they really are, its sense of proportion. It is the
centripetal tendency, which links individuals to each other, states
to states, one period of organic growth to another, under the reign
of a composed, rational, self-conscious order, in the universal light
of the understanding.

Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as a distinct
influence in the course of Greek development, was indeed the peculiar
gift of the Dorian race, certainly that race is the best illustration
of it, in its love of order, of that severe composition everywhere,
of which the Dorian style of architecture is, as it were, a material
symbol--in its constant aspiration after what is earnest and
dignified, as exemplified most evidently in the religion of its
predilection, the religion of Apollo. [254] For as that Ionian
influence, the chryselephantine influence, had its patron in
Hephaestus, belonged to the religion of Hephaestus, husband of
Aphrodite, the representation of exquisite workmanship, of fine art
in metal, coming from the East in close connexion with the artificial
furtherance, through dress and personal ornament, of the beauty of
the body; so that Dorian or European influence embodied itself in the
religion of Apollo. For the development of this or that mythological
conception, from its root in fact or law of the physical world, is
very various in its course. Thus, Demeter, the spirit of life in
grass,--and Dionysus, the "spiritual form" of life in the green sap,-
-remain, to the end of men's thoughts and fancies about them, almost
wholly physical. But Apollo, the "spiritual form" of sunbeams, early
becomes (the merely physical element in his constitution being almost
wholly suppressed) exclusively ethical,--the "spiritual form" of
inward or intellectual light, in all its manifestations. He
represents all those specially European ideas, of a reasonable,
personal freedom, as understood in Greece; of a reasonable polity; of
the sanity of soul and body, through the cure of disease and of the
sense of sin; of the perfecting of both by reasonable exercise or
ascesis; his religion is a sort of embodied equity, its aim the
realisation of fair reason and just consideration of the truth of
things everywhere.

[255] I cannot dwell on the general aspects of this subject further,
but I would remark that in art also the religion of Apollo was a
sanction of, and an encouragement towards the true valuation of
humanity, in its sanity, its proportion, its knowledge of itself.
Following after this, Greek art attained, in its reproductions of
human form, not merely to the profound expression of the highest
indwelling spirit of human intelligence, but to the expression also
of the great human passions, of the powerful movements as well as of
the calm and peaceful order of the soul, as finding in the affections
of the body a language, the elements of which the artist might
analyse, and then combine, order, and recompose. In relation to
music, to art, to all those matters over which the Muses preside,
Apollo, as distinct from Hermes, seems to be the representative and
patron of what I may call reasonable music, of a great intelligence
at work in art, of beauty attained through the conscious realisation
of ideas. They were the cities of the Dorian affinity which early
brought to perfection that most characteristic of Greek institutions,
the sacred dance, with the whole gymnastic system which was its
natural accompaniment. And it was the familiar spectacle of that
living sculpture which developed, perhaps, beyond everything else in
the Greek mind, at its best, a sense of the beauty and significance
of the human form.

Into that bewildered, dazzling world of minute [256] and dainty
handicraft--the chamber of Paris, the house of Alcinous--in which the
form of man alone had no adequate place, and as yet, properly, was
not, this Dorian, European, Apolline influence introduced the
intelligent and spiritual human presence, and gave it its true value,
a value consistently maintained to the end of Greek art, by a steady
hold upon and preoccupation with the inward harmony and system of
human personality.

In the works of the Asiatic tradition--the marbles of Nineveh, for
instance--and, so far as we can see, in the early Greek art, which
derives from it, as, for example, in the archaic remains from Cyprus,
the form of man is inadequate, and below the measure of perfection
attained there in the representation of the lower forms of life; just
as in the little reflective art of Japan, so lovely in its
reproduction of flower or bird, the human form alone comes almost as
a caricature, or is at least untouched by any higher ideal. To that
Asiatic tradition, then, with its perfect craftsmanship, its
consummate skill in design, its power of hand, the Dorian, the
European, the true Hellenic influence brought a revelation of the
soul and body of man.

And we come at last in the marbles of Aegina to a monument, which
bears upon it the full expression of this humanism,--to a work, in
which the presence of man, realised with complete mastery of hand,
and with clear apprehension of how he actually is and moves and
looks, [257] is touched with the freshest sense of that new-found,
inward value; the energy of worthy passions purifying, the light of
his reason shining through, bodily forms and motions, solemnised,
attractive, pathetic. We have reached an extant work, real and
visible, of an importance out of all proportion to anything actually
remaining of earlier art, and justifying, by its direct interest and
charm, our long prelude on the beginnings of Greek sculpture, while
there was still almost nothing actually to see.

These fifteen figures of Parian marble, of about two-thirds the size
of life, forming, with some deficiencies, the east and west gables of
a temple of Athene, the ruins of which still stand on a hill-side by
the sea-shore, in a remote part of the island of Aegina, were
discovered in the year 1811, and having been purchased by the Crown
Prince, afterwards King Louis I., of Bavaria, are now the great
ornament of the Glyptothek, or Museum of Sculpture, at Munich. The
group in each gable consisted of eleven figures; and of the fifteen
larger figures discovered, five belong to the eastern, ten to the
western gable, so that the western gable is complete with the
exception of one figure, which should stand in the place to which, as
the groups are arranged at Munich, the beautiful figure, bending down
towards the fallen leader, has been actually transferred from the
eastern gable; certain fragments showing that the lost figure [258]
corresponded essentially to this, which has therefore been removed
hither from its place in the less complete group to which it properly
belongs. For there are two legitimate views or motives in the
restoration of ancient sculpture, the antiquarian and the aesthetic,
as they may be termed respectively; the former limiting itself to the
bare presentation of what actually remains of the ancient work,
braving all shock to living eyes from the mutilated nose or chin;
while the latter, the aesthetic method, requires that, with the least
possible addition or interference, by the most skilful living hand
procurable, the object shall be made to please, or at least content
the living eye seeking enjoyment and not a bare fact of science, in
the spectacle of ancient art. This latter way of restoration,--the
aesthetic way,--followed by the famous connoisseurs of the
Renaissance, has been followed here; and the visitor to Munich
actually sees the marbles of Aegina, as restored after a model by the
tasteful hand of Thorwaldsen.

Different views have, however, been maintained as to the right
grouping of the figures; but the composition of the two groups was
apparently similar, not only in general character but in a certain
degree of correspondence of all the figures, each to each. And in
both the subject is a combat,--a combat between Greeks and Asiatics
concerning the body of a Greek hero, fallen among the foemen,--an
incident so characteristic [259] of the poetry of the heroic wars.
In both cases, Athene, whose temple this sculpture was designed to
decorate, intervenes, her image being complete in the western gable,
the head and some other fragments remaining of that in the eastern.
The incidents represented were probably chosen with reference to the
traditions of Aegina in connexion with the Trojan war. Greek legend
is ever deeply coloured by local interest and sentiment, and this
monument probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax his son, the heroes
who established the fame of Aegina, and whom the united Greeks, on
the morning of the battle of Salamis, in which the Aeginetans were
distinguished above all other Greeks in bravery, invited as their
peculiar, spiritual allies from that island.

Accordingly, antiquarians are, for the most part, of opinion that the
eastern gable represents the combat of Hercules (Hercules being the
only figure among the warriors certainly to be identified), and of
his comrade Telamon, against Laomedon of Troy, in which, properly,
Hercules was leader, but here, as squire and archer, is made to give
the first place to Telamon, as the titular hero of the place.
Opinion is not so definite regarding the subject of the western
gable, which, however, probably represents the combat between the
Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus. In both cases an
Aeginetan hero, in the eastern gable Telamon, in the western [260]
his son Ajax, is represented in the extreme crisis of battle, such a
crisis as, according to the deep religiousness of the Greeks of that
age, was a motive for the visible intervention of the goddess in
favour of her chosen people.

Opinion as to the date of the work, based mainly on the
characteristics of the work itself, has varied within a period
ranging from the middle of the sixtieth to the middle of the
seventieth Olympiad, inclining on the whole to the later date, in the
period of the Ionian revolt against Persia, and a few years earlier
than the battle of Marathon.

In this monument, then, we have a revelation in the sphere of art, of
the temper which made the victories of Marathon and Salamis possible,
of the true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in the Persian war,
and in the highly ideal conception of its events, expressed in
Herodotus and approving itself minutely to the minds of the Greeks,
as a series of affairs in which the gods and heroes of old time
personally intervened, and that not as mere shadows. It was natural
that the high-pitched temper, the stress of thought and feeling,
which ended in the final conflict of Greek liberty with Asiatic
barbarism, should stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic
legends of the earlier conflict between them in the heroic age. As
the events of the Crusades and the chivalrous spirit of that period,
leading men's minds back to ponder over the deeds of [261]
Charlemagne and his paladins, gave birth to the composition of the
Song of Roland, just so this Aeginetan sculpture displays the Greeks
of a later age feeding their enthusiasm on the legend of a distant
past, and is a link between Herodotus and Homer. In those ideal
figures, pensive a little from the first, we may suppose, with the
shadowiness of a past age, we may yet see how Greeks of the time of
Themistocles really conceived of Homeric knight and squire.

Some other fragments of art, also discovered in Aegina, and supposed
to be contemporary with the temple of Athene, tend, by their
roughness and immaturity, to show that this small building, so united
in its effect, so complete in its simplicity, in the symmetry of its
two main groups of sculpture, was the perfect artistic flower of its
time and place. Yet within the limits of this simple unity, so
important an element in the charm and impressiveness of the place, a
certain inequality of design and execution may be detected; the hand
of a slightly earlier master, probably, having worked in the western
gable, while the master of the eastern gable has gone some steps
farther than he in fineness and power of expression; the stooping
figure of the supposed Ajax,--belonging to the western group in the
present arrangement, but really borrowed, as I said, from the
eastern,--which has in it something above the type of the figures
grouped round it, being this later sculptor's work. Yet Overbeck,
[262] who has elaborated the points of this distinction of styles,
commends without reserve the technical excellence of the whole work,
executed, as he says, "with an application of all known instruments
of sculpture; the delicate calculation of weight in the composition
of the several parts, allowing the artist to dispense with all
artificial supports, and to set his figures, with all their complex
motions, and yet with plinths only three inches thick, into the basis
of the gable; the bold use of the chisel, which wrought the shield,
on the freely-held arm, down to a thickness of scarcely three inches;
the fineness of the execution even in parts of the work invisible to
an ordinary spectator, in the diligent finishing of which the only
motive of the artist was to satisfy his own conviction as to the
nature of good sculpture."

It was the Dorian cities, Plato tells us, which first shook off the
false Asiatic shame, and stripped off their clothing for purposes of
exercise and training in the gymnasium; and it was part of the Dorian
or European influence to assert the value in art of the unveiled and
healthy human form. And here the artists of Aegina, notwithstanding
Homer's description of Greek armour, glowing like the sun itself,
have displayed the Greek warriors--Greek and Trojan alike--not in the
equipments they would really have worn, but naked,--flesh fairer than
that golden armour, though more subdued and tranquil [263] in effect
on the spectator, the undraped form of man coming like an embodiment
of the Hellenic spirit, and as an element of temperance, into the
somewhat gaudy spectacle of Asiatic, or archaic art. Paris alone
bears his dainty trappings, characteristically,--a coat of golden
scale-work, the scales set on a lining of canvas or leather, shifting
deftly over the delicate body beneath, and represented on the gable
by the gilding, or perhaps by real gilt metal.

It was characteristic also of that more truly Hellenic art--another
element of its temperance--to adopt the use of marble in its works;
and the material of these figures is the white marble of Paros.
Traces of colour have, however, been found on certain parts of them.
The outer surfaces of the shields and helmets have been blue; their
inner parts and the crests of the helmets, red; the hem of the
drapery of Athene, the edges of her sandals, the plinths on which the
figures stand, also red; one quiver red, another blue; the eyes and
lips, too, coloured; perhaps, the hair. There was just a limited and
conventionalised use of colour, in effect, upon the marble.

And although the actual material of these figures is marble, its
coolness and massiveness suiting the growing severity of Greek
thought, yet they have their reminiscences of work in bronze, in a
certain slimness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness of poise in
their grouping, which [264] remains in the memory as a peculiar note
of their style; the possibility of such easy and graceful balancing
being one of the privileges or opportunities of statuary in cast
metal, of that hollow casting in which the whole weight of the work
is so much less than that of a work of equal size in marble, and
which permits so much wider and freer a disposition of the parts
about its centre of gravity. In Aegina the tradition of metal-work
seems to have been strong, and Onatas, whose name is closely
connected with Aegina, and who is contemporary with the presumably
later portion of this monument, was above all a worker in bronze.
Here again, in this lurking spirit of metal-work, we have a new
element of complexity in the character of these precious remains.
And then, to compass the whole work in our imagination, we must
conceive yet another element in the conjoint effect; metal being
actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its daintiest point
of refinement, as the little holes indicate, bored into the marble
figures for the attachment of certain accessories in bronze,--lances,
swords, bows, the Medusa's head on the aegis of Athene, and its
fringe of little snakes.

And as there was no adequate consciousness and recognition of the
essentials of man's nature in the older, oriental art, so there is no
pathos, no humanity in the more special sense, but a kind of hardness
and cruelty rather, in those oft-repeated, long, matter-of-fact
processions, on the [265] marbles of Nineveh, of slave-like soldiers
on their way to battle mechanically, or of captives on their way to
slavery or death, for the satisfaction of the Great King. These
Greek marbles, on the contrary, with that figure yearning forward so
graciously to the fallen leader, are deeply impressed with a natural
pathetic effect--the true reflexion again of the temper of Homer in
speaking of war. Ares, the god of war himself, we must remember, is,
according to his original import, the god of storms, of winter raging
among the forests of the Thracian mountains, a brother of the north
wind. It is only afterwards that, surviving many minor gods of war,
he becomes a leader of hosts, a sort of divine knight and patron of
knighthood; and, through the old intricate connexion of love and war,
and that amorousness which is the universally conceded privilege of
the soldier's life, he comes to be very near Aphrodite,--the paramour
of the goddess of physical beauty. So that the idea of a sort of
soft dalliance mingles, in his character, so unlike that of the
Christian leader, Saint George, with the idea of savage, warlike
impulses; the fair, soft creature suddenly raging like a storm, to
which, in its various wild incidents, war is constantly likened in
Homer; the effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending, in
Ares, into one expression, not without that cruelty which mingles
also, like the influence of some malign fate upon him, with the finer
[266] characteristics of Achilles, who is a kind of merely human
double of Ares. And in Homer's impressions of war the same elements
are blent,--the delicacy, the beauty of youth, especially, which
makes it so fit for purposes of love, spoiled and wasted by the
random flood and fire of a violent tempest; the glittering beauty of
the Greek "war-men," expressed in so many brilliant figures, and the
splendour of their equipments, in collision with the miserable
accidents of battle, and the grotesque indignities of death in it,
brought home to our fancy by a hundred pathetic incidents,--the sword
hot with slaughter, the stifling blood in the throat, the spoiling of
the body in every member severally. He thinks of, and records, at
his early ending, the distant home from which the boy came, who goes
stumbling now, just stricken so wretchedly, his bowels in his hands.
He pushes the expression of this contrast to the macabre even,
suggesting the approach of those lower forms of life which await to-
morrow the fair bodies of the heroes, who strive and fall to-day like
these in the Aeginetan gables. For it is just that two-fold
sentiment which this sculpture has embodied. The seemingly stronger
hand which wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest in
the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the mouth of the famous
recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the
corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, [267]
these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies
of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of
the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just
the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he
speaks of the flesh of his heroes.

And together with this touching power there is also in this work the
effect of an early simplicity, the charm of its limitations. For as
art which has passed its prime has sometimes the charm of an absolute
refinement in taste and workmanship, so immature art also, as we now
see, has its own attractiveness in the naivete, the freshness of
spirit, which finds power and interest in simple motives of feeling,
and in the freshness of hand, which has a sense of enjoyment in
mechanical processes still performed unmechanically, in the spending
of care and intelligence on every touch. As regards Italian art, the
sculpture and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic
value of this naivete is now well understood; but it has its value in
Greek sculpture also. There, too, is a succession of phases through
which the artistic power and purpose grew to maturity, with the
enduring charm of an unconventional, unsophisticated freshness, in
that very early stage of it illustrated by these marbles of Aegina,
not less than in the work of Verrocchio and Mino of Fiesole. Effects
of this we may note in that sculpture [268] of Aegina, not merely in
the simplicity, or monotony even, of the whole composition, and in
the exact and formal correspondence of one gable to the other, but in
the simple readiness with which the designer makes the two second
spearmen kneel, against the probability of the thing, so as just to
fill the space he has to compose in. The profiles are still not yet
of the fully developed Greek type, but have a somewhat sharp
prominence of nose and chin, as in Etrurian design, in the early
sculpture of Cyprus, and in the earlier Greek vases; and the general
proportions of the body in relation to the shoulders are still
somewhat archaically slim. But then the workman is at work in dry
earnestness, with a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness
verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish painter; he
communicates to us his still youthful sense of pleasure in the
experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome.
And withal, these figures have in them a true expression of life, of
animation. In this monument of Greek chivalry, pensive and visionary
as it may seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that
of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense
of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is
as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.



THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN:
A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART

[269] IT is pleasant when, looking at medieval sculpture, we are
reminded of that of Greece; pleasant likewise, conversely, in the
study of Greek work to be put on thoughts of the Middle Age. To the
refined intelligence, it would seem, there is something attractive in
complex expression as such. The Marbles of Aegina, then, may remind
us of the Middle Age where it passes into the early Renaissance, of
its most tenderly finished warrior-tombs at Westminster or in
Florence. A less mature phase of medieval art is recalled to our
fancy by a primitive Greek work in the Museum of Athens, Hermes,
bearing a ram, a little one, upon his shoulders. He bears it thus,
had borne it round the walls of Tanagra, as its citizens told, by way
of purifying that place from the plague, and brings to mind, of
course, later images of the "Good Shepherd." It is not the subject
of the work, however, but its style, that sets us down in thought
before some gothic [270] cathedral front. Suppose the Hermes
Kriophorus lifted into one of those empty niches, and the
archaeologist will inform you rightly, as at Auxerre or Wells, of
Italian influence, perhaps of Italian workmen, and along with them
indirect old Greek influence coming northwards; while the connoisseur
assures us that all good art, at its respective stages of
development, is in essential qualities everywhere alike. It is
observed, as a note of imperfect skill, that in that carved block of
stone the animal is insufficiently detached from the shoulders of its
bearer. Again, how precisely gothic is the effect! Its very
limitation as sculpture emphasises the function of the thing as an
architectural ornament. And the student of the Middle Age, if it
came within his range, would be right in so esteeming it. Hieratic,
stiff and formal, if you will, there is a knowledge of the human body
in it nevertheless, of the body, and of the purely animal soul
therein, full of the promise of what is coming in that chapter of
Greek art which may properly be entitled, "The Age of Athletic
Prizemen."

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