The Crown of Wild Olive
at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples; the best I can find
of art current in Greece at the great time; and if even I were to take
the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not one
of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already asserted,
in _The Queen of the Air_, has nothing notable in feature except dignity
and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great
beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in
their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin
represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the
best time, to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular
art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and finally,--and this you
may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness to the
most subtle beauty--there is little evidence even in their literature,
and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any beauty in
infancy, or early childhood.
195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do
not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of
these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their
calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some
expression of divine mystery or power.
I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these
respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin,
images of the most mysterious of their Deities, and the most
powerful,--Demeter and Zeus.
Remember, that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch
first on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the western
Peloponnese arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of
Arcadia, the moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of
Elis, Pylos, and Messene, the strength and sustenance of men was
naturally felt to be granted by Zeus; as, on the east coast of Greece,
the greater clearness of the air by the power of Athena. If
you will recollect the prayer of Rhea, in the single line of
Callimachus--"[Greek: Gaia phile, teke kai su teai d' odines elaphrai],"
(compare Pausanias iv. 33, at the beginning,)--it will mark for you the
connection, in the Greek mind, of the birth of the mountain springs of
Arcadia with the birth of Zeus. And the centres of Greek thought on this
western coast are necessarily Elis, and, (after the time of
Epaminondas,) Messene.
196. I show you the coin of Messene, because the splendid height and
form of Mount Ithome were more expressive of the physical power of Zeus
than the lower hills of Olympia; and also because it was struck just at
the time of the most finished and delicate Greek art--a little after the
main strength of Phidias, but before decadence had generally pronounced
itself. The coin is a silver didrachm, bearing on one side a head of
Demeter (Plate XVI., at the top); on the other a full figure of Zeus
Aietophoros (Plate XIX., at the top); the two together signifying the
sustaining strength of the earth and heaven. Look first at the head of
Demeter. It is merely meant to personify fulness of harvest; there is no
mystery in it, no sadness, no vestige of the expression which we should
have looked for in any effort to realize the Greek thoughts of the Earth
Mother, as we find them spoken by the poets. But take it merely as
personified abundance;--the goddess of black furrow and tawny grass--how
commonplace it is, and how poor! The hair is grand, and there is one
stalk of wheat set in it, which is enough to indicate the goddess who is
meant; but, in that very office, ignoble, for it shows that the artist
could only inform you that this was Demeter by such a symbol. How easy
it would have been for a great designer to have made the hair lovely
with fruitful flowers, and the features noble in mystery of gloom, or of
tenderness. But here you have nothing to interest you, except the common
Greek perfections of a straight nose and a full chin.
197. We pass, on the reverse of the die, to the figure of Zeus
Aietophoros. Think of the invocation to Zeus in the Suppliants, (525),
"King of Kings, and Happiest of the Happy, Perfectest of the Perfect in
strength, abounding in all things, Jove--hear us and be with us;" and
then, consider what strange phase of mind it was, which, under the very
mountain-home of the god, was content with this symbol of him as a
well-fed athlete, holding a diminutive and crouching eagle on his fist.
The features and the right hand have been injured in this coin, but the
action of the arms shows that it held a thunderbolt, of which, I
believe, the twisted rays were triple. In the, presumably earlier, coin
engraved by Millingen, however,[137] it is singly pointed only; and the
added inscription "[Greek: ITHOM]," in the field, renders the conjecture
of Millingen probable, that this is a rude representation of the statue
of Zeus Ithomates, made by Ageladas, the master of Phidias; and I think
it has, indeed, the aspect of the endeavour, by a workman of more
advanced knowledge, and more vulgar temper, to put the softer anatomy of
later schools into the simple action of an archaic figure. Be that as it
may, here is one of the most refined cities of Greece content with the
figure of an athlete as the representative of their own mountain god;
marked as a divine power merely by the attributes of the eagle and
thunderbolt.
198. Lastly. The Greeks have not, it appears, in any supreme way, given
to their statues character, beauty, or divine strength. Can they give
divine sadness? Shall we find in their artwork any of that pensiveness
and yearning for the dead, which fills the chants of their tragedy? I
suppose if anything like nearness or firmness of faith in afterlife is
to be found in Greek legend, you might look for it in the stories about
the Island of Leuce, at the mouth of the Danube, inhabited by the ghosts
of Achilles, Patroclus, Ajax the son of Oileus, and Helen; and in which
the pavement of the Temple of Achilles was washed daily by the sea-birds
with their wings, dipping them in the sea.
Now it happens that we have actually on a coin of the Locrians the
representation of the ghost of the Lesser Ajax. There is nothing in the
history of human imagination more lovely, than their leaving always a
place for his spirit, vacant in their ranks of battle. But here is their
sculptural representation of the phantom; (lower figure, Plate XIX.),
and I think you will at once agree with me in feeling that it would be
impossible to conceive anything more completely unspiritual. You might
more than doubt that it could have been meant for the departed soul,
unless you were aware of the meaning of this little circlet between the
feet. On other coins you find his name inscribed there, but in this you
have his habitation, the haunted Island of Leuce itself, with the waves
flowing round it.
199. Again and again, however, I have to remind you, with respect to
these apparently frank and simple failures, that the Greek always
intends you to think for yourself, and understand, more than he can
speak. Take this instance at our hands, the trim little circlet for the
Island of Leuce. The workman knows very well it is not like the island,
and that he could not make it so; that at its best, his sculpture can be
little more than a letter; and yet, in putting this circlet, and its
encompassing fretwork of minute waves, he does more than if he had
merely given you a letter L, or written "Leuce." If you know anything of
beaches and sea, this symbol will set your imagination at work in
recalling them; then you will think of the temple service of the
novitiate sea-birds, and of the ghosts of Achilles and Patroclus
appearing, like the Dioscuri, above the storm-clouds of the Euxine. And
the artist, throughout his work, never for an instant loses faith in
your sympathy and passion being ready to answer his;--if you have none
to give, he does not care to take you into his counsel; on the whole,
would rather that you should not look at his work.
200. But if you have this sympathy to give, you may be sure that
whatever he does for you will be right, as far as he can render it so.
It may not be sublime, nor beautiful, nor amusing; but it will be full
of meaning, and faithful in guidance. He will give you clue to myriads
of things that he cannot literally teach; and, so far as he does teach,
you may trust him. Is not this saying much?
And as he strove only to teach what was true, so, in his sculptured
symbol, he strove only to carve what was--Right. He rules over the arts
to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not first for beauty,
nor first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to
display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with,
in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course,
every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or
preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that
are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false or fanciful,
is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or
Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern
nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with
two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew
them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and
indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and
exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.
201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which encumbered our
thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of
its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That
relation is strangely duplicate; for on one side, Greek art is the root
of all simplicity; and on the other, of all complexity.
On one side I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for
some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin
Room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the
Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship,
you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand,
simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys
of the rest of mankind.
202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean
decoration--all weak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of
man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh,
and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races,
as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of
the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what
was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it
belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the
brotherhood of the Greek. And this is the deep meaning of the myth of
Daedalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal change from the
binding together of the feet to their separation, and the other
modifications of action which took place, either in progressive skill,
or often, as the mere consequence of the transition from wood to stone,
(a figure carved out of one wooden log must have necessarily its feet
near each other, and hands at its sides), these literal changes are as