Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

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




That rude image, a work perhaps of Calamis of shadowy fame, belongs
to a phase of art still in grave-clothes or swaddling-bands, still
strictly subordinate to religious or other purposes not immediately
its own. It had scarcely to wait for the next generation to be
superseded, and we need not wonder that but little of it remains.
But that it was a widely active phase of art, with [271] all the
vigour of local varieties, is attested by another famous archaic
monument, too full of a kind of sacred poetry to be passed by. The
reader does not need to be reminded that the Greeks, vivid as was
their consciousness of this life, cared much always for the graves of
the dead; that to be cared for, to be honoured, in one's grave, to
have tymbos amphipolos,+ a frequented tomb, as Pindar says, was a
considerable motive with them, even among the young. In the study of
its funeral monuments we might indeed follow closely enough the
general development of art in Greece from beginning to end. The
carved slab of the ancient shepherd of Orchomenus, with his dog and
rustic staff, the stele of the ancient man-at-arms signed
"Aristocles," rich originally with colour and gold and fittings of
bronze, are among the few still visible pictures, or portraits, it
may be, of the earliest Greek life. Compare them, compare their
expression, for a moment, with the deeply incised tombstones of the
Brethren of St. Francis and their clients, which still roughen the
pavement of Santa Croce at Florence, and recall the varnished
polychrome decoration of those Greek monuments in connexion with the
worn-out blazonry of the funeral brasses of England and Flanders.
The Shepherd, the Hoplite, begin a series continuous to the era of
full Attic mastery in its gentlest mood, with a large and varied
store of memorials of the dead, which, not so strangely as it may
[272] seem at first sight, are like selected pages from daily
domestic life. See, for instance, at the British Museum, Trypho,--
"the son of Eutychus," one of the very pleasantest human likenesses
there, though it came from a cemetery--a son it was hard to leave in
it at nineteen or twenty. With all the suppleness, the delicate
muscularity, of the flower of his youth, his handsome face sweetened
by a kind and simple heart, in motion, surely, he steps forth from
some shadowy chamber, strigil in hand, as of old, and with his coarse
towel or cloak of monumental drapery over one shoulder. But whither
precisely, you may ask, and as what, is he moving there in the
doorway? Well! in effect, certainly, it is the memory of the dead
lad, emerging thus from his tomb,--the still active soul, or
permanent thought, of him, as he most liked to be.

The Harpy Tomb, so called from its mysterious winged creatures with
human faces, carrying the little shrouded souls of the dead, is a
work many generations earlier than that graceful monument of Trypho.
It was from an ancient cemetery at Xanthus in Lycia that it came to
the British Museum. The Lycians were not a Greek people; but, as
happened even with "barbarians" dwelling on the coast of Asia Minor,
they became lovers of the Hellenic culture, and Xanthus, their
capital, as may be judged from the beauty of its ruins, managed to
have a considerable portion in Greek art, though infusing it [273]
with a certain Asiatic colour. The frugally designed frieze of the
Harpy Tomb, in the lowest possible relief, might fairly be placed
between the monuments of Assyria and those primitive Greek works
among which it now actually stands. The stiffly ranged figures in
any other than strictly archaic work would seem affected. But what
an undercurrent of refined sentiment, presumably not Asiatic, not
"barbaric," lifting those who felt thus about death so early into the
main stream of Greek humanity, and to a level of visible refinement
in execution duly expressive of it!

In that old burial-place of Xanthus, then, a now nameless family, or
a single bereaved member of it, represented there as a diminutive
figure crouching on the earth in sorrow, erected this monument, so
full of family sentiment, and of so much value as illustrating what
is for us a somewhat empty period in the history of Greek art,
strictly so called. Like the less conspicuously adorned tombs around
it, like the tombs in Homer, it had the form of a tower--a square
tower about twenty-four feet high, hollowed at the top into a small
chamber, for the reception, through a little doorway, of the urned
ashes of the dead. Four sculptured slabs were placed at this level
on the four sides of the tower in the manner of a frieze. I said
that the winged creatures with human faces carry the little souls of
the dead. The interpretation of these mystic [274] imageries is, in
truth, debated. But in face of them, and remembering how the
sculptors and glass-painters of the Middle Age constantly represented
the souls of the dead as tiny bodies, one can hardly doubt as to the
meaning of these particular details which, repeated on every side,
seem to give the key-note of the whole composition.* Those infernal,
or celestial, birds, indeed, are not true to what is understood to be
the harpy form. Call them sirens, rather. People, and not only old
people, as you know, appear sometimes to have been quite charmed away
by what dismays most of us. The tiny shrouded figures which the
sirens carry are carried very tenderly, and seem to yearn in their
turn towards those kindly nurses as they pass on their way to a new
world. Their small stature, as I said, does not prove them infants,
but only new-born into that other life, and contrasts their
helplessness with the powers, the great presences, now around them.
A cow, far enough from Myron's famous illusive animal, suckles her
calf. She is [275] one of almost any number of artistic symbols of
new-birth, of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is, after
all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, as some have
thought, the Goddess of Death; on the opposite side the Goddess of
Life, with her flowers and fruit. Towards her three young maidens
are advancing--were they still alive thus, graceful, virginal, with
their long, plaited hair, and long, delicately-folded tunics, looking
forward to carry on their race into the future? Presented severally,
on the other sides of the dark hollow within, three male persons--a
young man, an old man, and a boy--seem to be bringing home, somewhat
wearily, to their "long home," the young man, his armour, the boy,
and the old man, like old Socrates, the mortuary cock, as they
approach some shadowy, ancient deity of the tomb, or it may be the
throned impersonation of their "fathers of old." The marble surface
was coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal here and
there. The designer, whoever he may have been, was possessed
certainly of some tranquillising second thoughts concerning death,
which may well have had their value for mourners; and he has
expressed those thoughts, if lispingly, yet with no faults of
commission, with a befitting grace, and, in truth, at some points,
with something already of a really Hellenic definition and vigour.
He really speaks to us in his work, through his symbolic and [276]
imitative figures,--speaks to our intelligence persuasively. The
surviving thought of the lad Trypho, returning from his tomb to the
living, was of athletic character; how he was and looked when in the
flower of his strength. And it is not of the dead but of the living,
who look and are as he, that the artistic genius of this period is
full. It is a period, truly, not of battles, such as those
commemorated in the Marbles of Aegina, but of more peaceful contests-
-at Olympia, at the Isthmus, at Delphi--the glories of which Pindar
sang in language suggestive of a sort of metallic beauty, firmly cut
and embossed, like crowns of wild olive, of parsley and bay, in crisp
gold. First, however, it had been necessary that Greece should win
its liberty, political standing-ground, and a really social air to
breathe in, with development of the youthful limbs. Of this process
Athens was the chief scene; and the earliest notable presentment of
humanity by Athenian art was in celebration of those who had
vindicated liberty with their lives--two youths again, in a real
incident, which had, however, the quality of a poetic invention,
turning, as it did, on that ideal or romantic friendship which was
characteristic of the Greeks.

With something, perhaps, of hieratic convention, yet presented as
they really were, as friends and admirers loved to think of them,
[277] Harmodius and Aristogeiton stood, then, soon after their heroic
death, side by side in bronze, the work of Antenor, in a way not to
be forgotten, when, thirty years afterwards, a foreign tyrant,
Xerxes, carried them away to Persia. Kritios and Nesistes were,
therefore, employed for a reproduction of them, which would naturally
be somewhat more advanced in style. In its turn this also
disappeared. The more curious student, however, would still fancy he
saw the trace of it--of that copy, or of the original, afterwards
restored to Athens--here or there, on vase or coin. But in fact the
very images of the heroic youths were become but ghosts, haunting the
story of Greek art, till they found or seemed to find a body once
more when, not many years since, an acute observer detected, as he
thought, in a remarkable pair of statues in the Museum of Naples, if
freed from incorrect restorations and rightly set together, a
veritable descendant from the original work of Antenor. With all
their truth to physical form and movement, with a conscious mastery
of delineation, they were, nevertheless, in certain details, in the
hair, for instance, archaic, or rather archaistic--designedly
archaic, as from the hand of a workman, for whom, in this subject,
archaism, the very touch of the ancient master, had a sentimental or
even a religious value. And unmistakeably they were young assassins,
moving, with more than fraternal unity, the younger in advance of and
covering [278] the elder, according to the account given by
Herodotus, straight to their purpose;--against two wicked brothers,
as you remember, two good friends, on behalf of the dishonoured
sister of one of them.

Archaeologists have loved to adjust them tentatively, with various
hypotheses as to the precise manner in which they thus went together.
Meantime they have figured plausibly as representative of Attic
sculpture at the end of its first period, still immature indeed, but
with a just claim to take breath, so to speak, having now
accomplished some stades of the journey. Those young heroes of
Athenian democracy, then, indicate already what place Athens and
Attica will occupy in the supreme age of art soon to come; indicate
also the subject from which that age will draw the main stream of its
inspiration--living youth, "iconic" in its exact portraiture, or
"heroic" as idealised in various degrees under the influence of great
thoughts about it--youth in its self-denying contention towards great
effects; great intrinsically, as at Marathon, or when Harmodius and
Aristogeiton fell, or magnified by the force and splendour of Greek
imagination with the stimulus of the national games. For the most
part, indeed, it is not with youth taxed spasmodically, like that of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and the "necessity" that was upon it,
that the Athenian mind and heart are now busied; but with youth [279]
in its voluntary labours, its habitual and measured discipline,
labour for its own sake, or in wholly friendly contest for prizes
which in reality borrow all their value from the quality of the
receiver.

We are with Pindar, you see, in this athletic age of Greek sculpture.
It is the period no longer of battle against a foreign foe, recalling
the Homeric ideal, nor against the tyrant at home, fixing a dubious
ideal for the future, but of peaceful combat as a fine art--pulvis
Olympicus. Anticipating the arts, poetry, a generation before Myron
and Polycleitus, had drawn already from the youthful combatants in
the great national games the motives of those Odes, the bracing words
of which, as I said, are like work in fine bronze, or, as Pindar
himself suggests, in ivory and gold. Sung in the victor's supper-
room, or at the door of his abode, or with the lyre and the pipe as
they took him home in procession through the streets, or commemorated
the happy day, or in a temple where he laid up his crown, Pindar's
songs bear witness to the pride of family or township in the physical
perfection of son or citizen, and his consequent success in the long
or the short foot-race, or the foot-race in armour, or the
pentathlon, or any part of it. "Now on one, now on another," as the
poet tells, "doth the grace that quickeneth (quickeneth, literally,
on the race-course) look favourably." Ariston hydor+ he declares
indeed, and the actual prize, as we know, was in itself of little or
no worth--a [280] cloak, in the Athenian games, but at the greater
games a mere handful of parsley, a few sprigs of pine or wild olive.
The prize has, so to say, only an intellectual or moral value. Yet
actually Pindar's own verse is all of gold and wine and flowers, is
itself avowedly a flower, or "liquid nectar," or "the sweet fruit of
his soul to men that are winners in the games." "As when from a
wealthy hand one lifting a cup, made glad within with the dew of the
vine, maketh gift thereof to a youth":--the keynote of Pindar's verse
is there! This brilliant living youth of his day, of the actual
time, for whom, as he says, he "awakes the clear-toned gale of song"-
-epeon hoimon ligyn+--that song mingles sometimes with the splendours
of a recorded ancient lineage, or with the legendary greatness of a
remoter past, its gods and heroes, patrons or ancestors, it might be,
of the famous young man of the hour, or with the glory and solemnity
of the immortals themselves taking a share in mortal contests. On
such pretext he will tell a new story, or bring to its last
perfection by his manner of telling it, his pregnancy and studied
beauty of expression, an old one. The tale of Castor and Polydeukes,
the appropriate patrons of virginal yet virile youth, starred and
mounted, he tells in all its human interest.

"Ample is the glory stored up for Olympian winners." And what
Pindar's contemporaries asked of him for the due appreciation, the
[281] consciousness, of it, by way of song, that the next generation
sought, by way of sculptural memorial in marble, and above all, as it
seems, in bronze. The keen demand for athletic statuary, the honour
attached to the artist employed to make his statue at Olympia, or at
home, bear witness again to the pride with which a Greek town, the
pathos, it might be, with which a family, looked back to the victory
of one of its members. In the courts of Olympia a whole population
in marble and bronze gathered quickly,--a world of portraits, out of
which, as the purged and perfected essence, the ideal soul, of them,
emerged the Diadumenus, for instance, the Discobolus, the so-called
Jason of the Louvre. Olympia was in truth, as Pindar says again, a
mother of gold-crowned contests, the mother of a large offspring.
All over Greece the enthusiasm for gymnastic, for the life of the
gymnasia, prevailed. It was a gymnastic which, under the happy
conditions of that time, was already surely what Plato pleads for,
already one half music, mousike,+ a matter, partly, of character and
of the soul, of the fair proportion between soul and body, of the
soul with itself. Who can doubt it who sees and considers the still
irresistible grace, the contagious pleasantness, of the Discobolus,
the Diadumenus, and a few other precious survivals from the athletic
age which immediately preceded the manhood of Pheidias, between the
Persian and the Peloponnesian wars?

[282] Now, this predominance of youth, of the youthful form, in art,
of bodily gymnastic promoting natural advantages to the utmost, of
the physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign that essential
mastery has been achieved by the artist--the power, that is to say,
of a full and free realisation. For such youth, in its very essence,
is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical,
world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for
symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful imagination of
the spectator, the legitimate scope of which is a large one, when art
is dealing with religious objects, with what in the fulness of its
own nature is not really expressible at all. In any passable
representation of the Greek discobolus, as in any passable
representation of an English cricketer, there can be no successful
evasion of the natural difficulties of the thing to be done--the
difficulties of competing with nature itself, or its maker, in that
marvellous combination of motion and rest, of inward mechanism with
the so smoothly finished surface and outline--finished ad unguem--
which enfold it.

Of the gradual development of such mastery of natural detail, a
veritable counterfeit of nature, the veritable rhythmus of the
runner, for example--twinkling heel and ivory shoulder--we have hints
and traces in the historians of art. One had attained the very turn
and texture of the [283] crisp locks, another the very feel of the
tense nerve and full-flushed vein, while with another you saw the
bosom of Ladas expand, the lips part, as if for a last breath ere he
reached the goal. It was like a child finding little by little the
use of its limbs, the testimony of its senses, at a definite moment.
With all its poetic impulse, it is an age clearly of faithful
observation, of what we call realism, alike in its iconic and heroic
work; alike in portraiture, that is to say, and in the presentment of
divine or abstract types. Its workmen are close students now of the
living form as such; aim with success at an ever larger and more
various expression of its details; or replace a conventional
statement of them by a real and lively one. That it was thus is
attested indirectly by the fact that they busied themselves,
seemingly by way of a tour de force, and with no essential interest
in such subject, alien as it was from the pride of health which is
characteristic of the gymnastic life, with the expression of physical
pain, in Philoctetes, for instance. The adroit, the swift, the
strong, in full and free exercise of their gifts, to the delight of
others and of themselves, though their sculptural record has for the
most part perished, are specified in ancient literary notices as the
sculptor's favourite subjects, repeated, remodelled, over and over
again, for the adornment of the actual scene of athletic success, or
the market-place at home of the distant Northern or Sicilian town
[284] whence the prizeman had come.--A countless series of popular
illustrations to Pindar's Odes! And if art was still to minister to
the religious sense, it could only be by clothing celestial spirits
also as nearly as possible in the bodily semblance of the various
athletic combatants, whose patrons respectively they were supposed to
be.

The age to which we are come in the story of Greek art presents to us
indeed only a chapter of scattered fragments, of names that are
little more, with but surmise of their original significance, and
mere reasonings as to the sort of art that may have occupied what are
really empty spaces. Two names, however, connect themselves
gloriously with certain extant works of art; copies, it is true, at
various removes, yet copies of what is still found delightful through
them, and by copyists who for the most part were themselves masters.
Through the variations of the copyist, the restorer, the mere
imitator, these works are reducible to two famous original types--the
Discobolus or quoit-player, of Myron, the beau ideal (we may use that
term for once justly) of athletic motion; and the Diadumenus of
Polycleitus, as, binding the fillet or crown of victory upon his
head, he presents the beau ideal of athletic repose, and almost
begins to think.

Myron was a native of Eleutherae, and a pupil of Ageladas of Argos.
There is nothing more to tell by way of positive detail of this so
famous [285] artist, save that the main scene of his activity was
Athens, now become the centre of the artistic as of all other modes
of life in Greece. Multiplicasse veritatem videtur, says Pliny. He
was in fact an earnest realist or naturalist, and rose to central
perfection in the portraiture, the idealised portraiture, of athletic
youth, from a mastery first of all in the delineation of inferior
objects, of little lifeless or living things. Think, however, for a
moment, how winning such objects are still, as presented on Greek
coins;--the ear of corn, for instance, on those of Metapontum; the
microscopic cockle-shell, the dolphins, on the coins of Syracuse.
Myron, then, passes from pleasant truth of that kind to the
delineation of the worthier sorts of animal life,--the ox, the dog--
to nothing short of illusion in the treatment of them, as ancient
connoisseurs would have you understand. It is said that there are
thirty-six extant epigrams on his brazen cow. That animal has her
gentle place in Greek art, from the Siren tomb, suckling her young
there, as the type of eternal rejuvenescence, onwards to the
procession of the Elgin frieze, where, still breathing deliciously of
the distant pastures, she is led to the altar. We feel sorry for
her, as we look, so lifelike is the carved marble. The sculptor who
worked there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubtless by the
study of Myron's famous work. For what purpose he made it, does not
appear;--as [286] an architectural ornament; or a votive offering;
perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at
any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of
Pliny's phrase regarding Myron--Corporum curiosus. And when he came
to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner,
he did not for a moment forget that they too were animals, young
animals, delighting in natural motion, in free course through the
yielding air, over uninterrupted space, according to Aristotle's
definition of pleasure: "the unhindered exercise of one's natural
force." Corporum tenus curiosus:--he was a "curious workman" as far
as the living body is concerned. Pliny goes on to qualify that
phrase by saying that he did not express the sensations of the mind--
animi sensus. But just there, in fact, precisely in such limitation,
we find what authenticates Myron's peculiar value in the evolution of
Greek art. It is of the essence of the athletic prizeman, involved
in the very ideal of the quoit-player, the cricketer, not to give
expression to mind, in any antagonism to, or invasion of, the body;
to mind as anything more than a function of the body, whose healthful
balance of functions it may so easily perturb;--to disavow that
insidious enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul as such.

Yet if the art of Myron was but little occupied with the reasonable
soul (animus), with those mental situations the expression of which,
though [287] it may have a pathos and a beauty of its own, is for the
most part adverse to the proper expression of youth, to the beauty of
youth, by causing it to be no longer youthful, he was certainly a
master of the animal or physical soul there (anima); how it is, how
it displays itself, as illustrated, for instance, in the Discobolus.
Of voluntary animal motion the very soul is undoubtedly there. We
have but translations into marble of the original in bronze. In
that, it was as if a blast of cool wind had congealed the metal, or
the living youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest which
lies between two opposed motions, the backward swing of the right
arm, the movement forwards on which the left foot is in the very act
of starting. The matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble,
thus rests indeed; but the artistic form of it, in truth, scarcely
more, even to the eye, than the rolling ball or disk, may be said to
rest, at every moment of its course,--just metaphysically, you know.

This mystery of combined motion and rest, of rest in motion, had
involved, of course, on the part of the sculptor who had mastered its
secret, long and intricate consideration. Archaic as it is,
primitive still in some respects, full of the primitive youth it
celebrates, it is, in fact, a learned work, and suggested to a great
analyst of literary style, singular as it may seem, the "elaborate"
or "contorted" manner in literature [288] of the later Latin
writers, which, however, he finds "laudable" for its purpose. Yet
with all its learned involution, thus so oddly characterised by
Quintilian, so entirely is this quality subordinated to the proper
purpose of the Discobolus as a work of art, a thing to be looked at
rather than to think about, that it makes one exclaim still, with the
poet of athletes,--The natural is ever best!"--to de phya hapan
kratiston.+ Perhaps that triumphant, unimpeachable naturalness is
after all the reason why, on seeing it for the first time, it
suggests no new view of the beauty of human form, or point of view
for the regarding of it; is acceptable rather as embodying (say, in
one perfect flower) all one has ever fancied or seen, in old Greece
or on Thames' side, of the unspoiled body of youth, thus delighting
itself and others, at that perfect, because unconscious, point of
good-fortune, as it moves or rests just there for a moment, between
the animal and spiritual worlds. "Grant them," you pray in Pindar's
own words, grant them with feet so light to pass through life!"

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