TAINE'S WORKS /. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 2 vols. //. ON INTELLIGENCE. III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF GREEK ART. IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART IN THE NETHERLANDS. V. THE IDEAL IN ART. VI. ITALY, ROME AND NAPLES. VII. ITALY, FLORENCE AND VENICE. HOLT & WILLIAMS, Publishers, 23 Bond Street, New York. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART. ART BY H. TAINE TRANSLATED BY JOHN DURAND NEW YORK HOLT & WILLIAMS. 1871 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by HOLT & WILLIAMS, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. STEREOTYPED BY WILLIAM McCREA & CO., NEWBUBGH, N. T. Stack Annex rt 10 TO HENRI LEHMANN PAINTER. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. THE following pages form the Jast of the series of works on the philosophy of art in various coun- tries issued by the author previous to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussi-an war. Four volumes are now translated and before the American public, namely, " The Philosophy of Art" (published in London), setting forth the theory of the subject in a general manner, " The Ideal in Art," an exten- sion of this work, " The Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands," and now " The Philosophy of Art in Greece." There is still another, " The Philoso- phy of Art in Italy," which has been omitted on account of its subject matter being contained in the author's larger work on Italy, translated and published along with the above series. vi TRANSLATOR'S P-REFACE. The translator has to express his grateful ac- knowledgments to Mr. Bryant for translations of the several passages quoted b'y the author from the Odyssey, kindly furnished uy him in advance \ of the publication of his version of that poem ; \ also for the translation of an Olympic chorus from the original Greek on page 145 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. SCULPTURE in Greece. Its remains, their insufficiency. Necessity of studying the milieu. 7 RACE. Influence of physical conditions on the early settlers of a country. Relationship of the Greek and the Latin 10 I. Circumstances causing the diversity of the two characters. Climate. Its mild effects. The soil poor and mountainous. Temperance of the inhabi- tants. Universal presence of the Sea. Induce- ments for the coasting trade. The Greeks seamen and navigators. Their natural finesse and precocious education . 12 II. Evidences of this character in their history. Ulysses. The Graeculus. Taste for mathematics and abstractions. Invention in the sciences. Phi- losophic theories. Sophists and Disputants. The Attic taste . 24 III. Lack of vastness in their landscape. Mountains, rivers and sea. Clearness of relief and transpar- ency of the atmosphere. Analogous effect in their political organization. Small dimensions of the State in Greece. The acquired aptitude of the Greek mind for positive and clear conceptions. Evidences of this trait in their history. Religion. 2 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. The sentiment of the universal feeble. Idea of the Cosmos. Their gods human and limited. The Greek finally sports with them. Government. Independence of the Colonies. Cities unable to federate. Limit and fragility of the Grecian State. Integrity and growth of human nature. Concep- tion, complete and circumscribed, of human nature and of its destiny . 33 IV. Beauty of land and sky. Natural gayety of the race. Evidences of this trait in their history. Aristophanes. Their idea of the happiness of the Gods. Religion a festivity. Opposite purposes of the Greek and the Roman State. Athenian expedi- tions, democracy and amusements. The State be- comes a spectacular enterprise. Earnestness in sci- ence and philosophy not perfect. Adventurous taste in theories. Dialectical subtleties. 49 V. Consequences of these qualities and defects. They are genuine artists. Sensitiveness to delicate rela- tionships, propriety and clearness of conception and love of beauty. Evidences of this in their art. The Temple. Its position. Its proportions. Its construction. Its refinements. Its ornamenta- tion. Its paintings. Its sculptures. The impres- sion it leaves on the mind 63 THE PERIOD. Difference between an ancient and a modern. Life and intellect more simple among the ancients than among ourselves 75 I. Influence of climate on modern civilizations. Man has greater wants. The Costume, Dwelling and Public Edifice of Greece and of our time. Social organization, including public business, military art and navigation formerly and to-day 77 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 3 II. Influence of the past on modern civilization. Dante and Homer. The idea of death and futurity in Greece. Difference of conception and sentiment in the modern. Difference between modern lan- guages and the ancient Greek. Ancient culture and education compared with the modern. Contrast between a fresh and precocious civilization and an elaborate and complicated civilization 88 III. Effects of these differences on the intellect and on art. Mediaeval, Renaissance and contemporary sen- timents, figures and characters. Antique taste op- posed to modern taste. In Literature. In Sculpture. Inherent value of the body. Love of gymnastic perfection. The Head. Slight importance of physi- ogonomy. Interest in physical action and in inex- pressive repose. Suitableness of the moral condi- tion to this form of art 103 INSTITUTIONS. I. The Orchestral system. Simultaneous development of institutions which shape the Body and of the arts which shape the Statue. Comparison of Greece in the VHth century with the Greece of Homer. Greek lyric poesy compared with the modern. Mu- sical pantomime and declamation. Their universal application. Their use in private as well as public education, and their use in public and political af- fairs. Their use in worship. Pindar's odes. Mod- els furnished to sculpture by the orchestral system. 119 II. The Gymnastic system. What it was in Homer's time. Revised and changed by the Dorians. Prin- ciple of the State, of Education and of Gymnastics at Sparta. Imitation or importation of Dorian cus- toms by other Greek communities. Revival and growth of the games. Gymnasia. Athletes. Im- SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. portance of gymnastic education in Greece. Its effect on the Body. Perfection of forms and attitudes. Taste for physical beauty. The statue follows the model 139 III. Religion. Religious sentiment in the Vth cen- tury. Analogies between this and the epoch of Lorenzo de Medici. Influence of the early philoso- phers and physicists. Man is still sensible of the divine life of natural objects. Man still distin- guishes the natural source of divine personages. Sentiments of an Athenian at the great Panathenaic festival. Choruses and Games. The Procession. The Acropolis. The Erectheum, and the legends of Erectheus, Cecrops and Triptolemus. The Parthe- nons and the legends of Pallas and Poseidon. The Pallas of Phidias. Character of the statue, impres- sion on the spectator, and idea of the sculptor 162 KACE. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART GREECE. IXTBODUCTIOX. : In preceding rears I hare pre- sented to jon the history of the two great original schools which, in modern times, hare treated the human form, those of Italy and the Netherlands. I hare now to complete this study by familiarising yon with the greatest and most original of all, the ancient Greek school. This time I shall not dis- course on painting. Excepting a few vases, some mosaics and the small mural decorations at Pompeii and Hereulaneum, the antique monuments of painting hare all perished; we cannot speak of them with certainty. Besides, in the display of the human form, there was in Greece a more national art, one better adapted to their social ways and public spirit, and probably more cultivated and more perfect, that 8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF of sculpture ; Greek sculpture, accordingly, will be the subject of this course. Unfortunately, in this, as in all other directions, antiquity is simply a ruin. The remains that have come down to us of antique statuary are almost nothing alongside of what has perished. We are re- duced to two heads,* by which to conjecture the colossal divinities in whom the great century had expressed its thought and whose majesty filled the temples. We have no authentic work by Phidias ; we know nothing of Myron, Polycleitus, Praxitiles, Scopas and Lysippus except through copies and more or less remote and doubtful imitations. The beautiful statues of our museums belong, generally, to the Roman era, or, at most, date from the succes- sors of Alexander. The best, moreover, are mutila- ted. Your collection of casts,f composed of scatter- ed torsos, heads and limbs, resembles that of a bat- tle-field after a combat. Add to this, finally, the ab- sence of any biography of the Greek masters. The * The head of Juno in the Villa Ludovisi and that of Jupiter of Otricole. t That of the Bcole des Beaux Arts studied by the students forming the author's audience. ART IN GREECE. 9 most ingenious and most patient researches of the erudites* have been required to discover in the half of one of Pliny's chapters, in a few meagre descrip- tions by Pausanias and some isolated phrases of Cic- **. ero, Lucian and Quintillian, the chronology of artists, the affiliation of schools, the nature of talents and the gradual development and changes in art. We have but one way to supply these deficiencies; in default of a detailed history there is general history ; in order to comprehend this work we are more than ever obliged to consider the people who executed it, the social habits which stimulated it, and the milieu out of which it sprung. * Geschtehte der griechischen Plastik, von J. Overbeck, and Kunstter Geschichte, von Brunn. 1* 10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAOE. LET us first try to obtain a clear idea of the race, and to do this we will study the country. A people always receives an impression from the coun- try it occupies, but the impression is the stronger" proportionately to the more uncivilized and infan- tile condition of the people at the time of its estab- lishment. When the French set out to colonize the Island of Bourbon or Martinique, and the English to settle North America and Australia, they carried along with them arms, implements, arts, manufac- tures, institutions and ideas, in short, an old and complete civilization which served to maintain their acquired type and to resist the influence of their new surroundings. But when the fresh and de- fenceless man abandons himself to nature, she devel- opes, shapes and moulds him, the moral clay, as yet quite soft and pliant, yielding to and being fash- ioned by the physical pressure against which the past provides him with no support. Philologists show us a primitive epoch where Indians, Persians, ART IN GREECE. H Germans, Celts, Latins and Greeks had a language in common and the same degree of culture ; another epoch, less ancient, when the Latins and the Greeks, already separated from their brethren, were still united,* acquainted with wine, living on tillage and grazing, possessing row-boats and having added to their old Yedic gods the new one of Hestia or Ves- ta, the domestic fireside. These are but little more than the rudiments of progress ; if they are no long- er savages they are still barbarians. From this time forth the two branches that have issued from the same stock, begin to diverge ; on encountering them later we find that their structure and fruit in- stead of being alike are different, one, meanwhile, having grown up in Italy and the other in Greece, and we are led to regard the environment of the Greek plant in order to ascertain whether the soy. and atmosphere which have nourished do not ex- plain the peculiarities of its form and the direction of its development. * Monunsen, Boemische GescMchte, Vol. I., p. 21. 12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF Let us examine a map. Greece is a peninsula in the shape of a triangle, with its base resting on Turkey in Europe, extending towards the south, burying itself in the sea and narrowing at the Isth- mus of Corinth to form another peninsula beyond, the Peloponnesus, still more southern, and a sort of mulberry leaf attached by a slender stalk to the main land. Add to this a hundred islands with the Asiatic coast opposite ; a fringe of small countries stitched fast to the great barbaric continent and a sprinkling of scattered islands on the blue sea which the fringe surrounds such is the land that has formed and maintained this highly intelligent and precocious people. It was singularly adapted to the work. To the north* of the JEgean Sea the cli- mate is still severe, like that of the centre of Ger- many ; southern fruits are not known in Roumelia, and its coast produces no myrtles. Descending to- wards the south, and on entering Greece, the con- * Curtins, Grieschesche Geschichte, Vol. I., p. 4. ART IN GREECE. 13 trast becomes striking. Forests always green be- gin in Thessaly, at the 40th degree ; at the 39th, in Phthiotis, in the mild atmosphere of the sea and the coast, rice, cotton and the olive grow. In Euboea and Attica the palm-tree appears, and almonds in the Cyclades ; on the eastern coast of Argolis we find thick groves of the orange and the lemon ; the African date lives in one corner of Crete. At Ath- ens, which is the centre of Greek civilization, the finest fruits of the South grow without cultivation. Frost is scarcely seen more than once in twenty years ; the extreme heats of the summer are modi- fied by the sea-breeze, and, save a few gales in Thrace and the blasts of the sirocco, the tempera- ture is delightful. Nowadays " the people are ac- customed to sleeping in the streets from the middle of May to the end of September, while the women sleep on the roofs."* In suoh a country everybody lives out of doors. The ancients themselves regard- ed their climate as a gift of the gods. " Mild and clement," said Euripides, " is our atmosphere ; the cold of winter is for us without rigor and the ar- * About : La Grece contemporaine, p. 345. 14: THE PHILOSOPHY OF rows of Phoebus do not wound us. 1 ' And elsewhere he adds : " The Athenians happy of old, and the de- scendants of the blessed gods, feeding on the most exalted wisdom of a country sacred and uncon- quered, always tripping elegantly through the pur- est atmosphere, where they say that of old the golden-haired Harmonia gave birth to the chaste nine Pierian muses. And they report also that Venus, drawing in her breath from the stream of the fair-flowing Cephisus, breathed over this country gentle, sweetly breathing gales of air ; and always entwining in her hair the fragrant wreath of roses, sends the loves as accessory to wisdom ; the assist- ants to every virtue."* These are the fine expres- sions of a poet, but through the ode we see the truth. A people formed by such a climate develops faster and more harmoniously than any other ; man is neither prostrated nor enervated by excessive heat, nor chilled or indurated by severe cold. He is neither condemned to dreamy inactivity, nor to per- petual labor ; he does not lag behind in mystic con- * Medea (Buckley's translation). See also the celebrated chorus in the (Edipus at Colonus of Sophocles. ART IN GREECE. 15 temptation nor in brutal barbarism. Compare a Neapolitan or a Provengal with a man of Brittany, a Hollander or a Hindoo, and you will recognize how the mildness and moderation of physical nature en- dow the soul with vivacity and so balance it as to lead the mind thus disposed and alert to thought and to action. Two characteristics of the soil operate alike in this sense. In the first place, Greece is a net- work of mountains. Pindus, its central summit, extend- ing towards the south with Othrys, ^Eta, Parnassus, Helicon, Cithaeron and their bastions, form a chain the multiplied links of which cross the isthmus, rise up again and intermingle in the Peloponnesus ; be- yond are the islands consisting of emergent spines and the tops of mountains. This territory, thus em- bossed, has scarcely any plains ; rock abounds every- where as in our Provence ; three-fifths of the surface of it is unfit for cultivation. " Look at the Views" and "Landscapes" by M. de Stackelberg, every- where barren stones, small rivers or mountain tor- rents leaving between their half-dried beds and the sterile rock a narrow strip of productive ground. 16 , THE PHILOSOPHY OF Herodotus already contrasts Sicily and Southern Italy, those fat nurses, with meagre Greece, " which at its birth had poverty for its foster-sister." In At- tica, especially, the soil is lighter and thinner than anywhere else ; the olive, the vine, barley and a little wheat are all that it provided man with. In these beautiful islands of marble, sparkling on the azure of the ^Egean Sea, is found now and then a sacred grove, the cypress, the laurel and the palm, some bouquet of rich verdure, scattered vines on rocky slopes, fine fruits in the gardens and a few scanty crops in the hollows or on a declivity ; but all this was more calculated for the eye and for a delicate sensibility than for the stomach and merely physical wants. Such a country forms lithe, active, sober mountaineers fed on the purity of its atmosphere. At the present day " the food of an English laborer would suffice in Greece for a family of six persons. The rich are quite content with a dish of vegetables for one of their repasts ; the poor with a handful of olives or a bit of salt fish. The people at large eat meat at Easter for the whole year."* It is interest- * About: La Grdce contemporaine, p. 41. ART IN GREECE. ^ ing in this respect to see them at Athens in summer. " Epicures in a group of seven or eight persons are dividing up a sheep's head which cost six cents. These temperate men buy a slice of water-melon or a big cucumber which they eat like an apple." There are no drunkards among them ; they are great drinkers but always of pure water. " If they enter a cabaret, it is to gossip." In a cafe " they call for a penny cup of coffee, a glass of water, a light for their cigarettes, a newspaper, and a set of dominoes." Such a regimen is not calculated to make the mind torpid ; in lessening the wants of the stomach it in- creases those of the understanding. The ancients themselves noticed similar contrasts between Boeotia and Attica, and the Boeotian and the Athenian. One, fed amidst fertile plains and in a dense atmosphere, accustomed to gross food and the eels of Lake Co- pa'is, was a great eater and drinker and of a sluggish intellect ; the other, born on the poorest soil in Greece, contented with the head of a fish, an onion and a few olives, growing up in a light transparent and lu- minous atmosphere, displayed from his birth a sin- gular keenness and vivacity of intellect, cease- 18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF lessly inventive and enterprising, sensitive and ap- preciative regardless of all other things, and " pos- sessing, apparently, nothing peculiar to himself but thought."* In the second place, if Greece is a land of moun- tains it is likewise a land of sea-coasts. Although smaller than Portugal it has more of these than all Spain. The sea penetrates the country through an infinity of gulfs, indentations, fissures and cavities ; in the various views brought back by travellers you will observe, every other one, even in the interior, some blue band, triangle, or luminous semi-circle on the horizon. Generally it is framed in by project- ing rocks or by islands which approach each other and form a natural harbor. A situation like this fosters a maritime life, especially where a poor soil and a rocky shore do not suffice to support the in- habitants. In primitive times there is but one spe- cies of navigation, and that is coasting, and no .sea is better adapted to invite a border trade. Every morning a north wind springs up to waft vessels from Athens to the Cyclades ; every evening a con- * Thucydides, Book I., Chap. LXX. ART IN GREECE. 19 trary breeze rises to carry them back. Between Greece and Asia Minor, islands occur like the stones of a ford ; in clear weather a ship on this track io always in sight of land. From Corcyra Italy ia visible, from Cape Malea the peaks of Crete, from Crete the mountains of Rhodes, from Rhodes, Asia Minor; two days' sail suffice to carry one from Crete to Cyrene, and only three are required to go from Crete to Egypt. Still to-day "there is the stuff of a sailor in every Greek you meet."* In this * About : La Grece contemporaine, p. 146. Two islanders chance to meet in the port of Syra, and the following dialogue ensues : "Good-day, brother, how are you?" "Very well, thank you ; what is the news?" "Demitri, the son of Nicholas, has got back from Marseilles." "Did he make any money?" "Twenty-three thousand drachmas, they say. That's a good deal." " I made up my mind long ago that I ought to go to Marseilles. But I have no boat." "We two will make one if you eay so. Have you any timber?" "A little." " Everybody has enough for a boat. I have some canvas and my cousin John has enough rigging ; we will put all this together." "Who will be captain?" "John, for he has already sailed there." "We must have a boy to help us." "There is my little godson. Basil." "A child only eight years old ! He's too small." "Anybody is big enough to go to sea." 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF country, with a population of only 900,000, there were, in 1840, 30,000 sailors and 4,000 vessels; they do nearly the whole of the coasting business of the Mediterranean. "We find the same ways and habits in the time of Homer ; they are constantly launch- ing a ship on the sea ; Ulysses builds one with his own hands ; they cruise all over, trading and pil- laging the surrounding coasts. The Greeks were merchants, travellers, pirates, courtiers, and adven- turers at the start and throughout their history ; employing skill or force they set out to drain the great Oriental kingdoms or the barbaric populations of the west, bringing back gold, silver, ivory, slaves, ship-timber, all kinds of precious merchandise bought above and below the market, other people's ideas and inventions, those of Egypt, of Phoenicia, " Bat what cargo shall we take f " "Our neighbor Petros has some bark (for tanning) ; daddy has got a few casks of wine, and I know a man in Tinos who has some cotton. We will stop at Smyrna, if you say so, for a freight of silk." The vessel is built well or ill as it happens ; the crew is obtained in one or two families, and, from friends and neighbors, whatever merchan- dise they may choose to offer. They set out for Marseilles by the way of Smyrna or even Alexandria, sell the cargo and take another ; on re- turning to Syra, the freight is found to pay for the vessel and the part- ners divide the profits out of a few drachmae left over. ART IN GREECE. 21 of Chaldea, of Persia,* and of Etruria. A regime of this kind quickens and sharpens the intellect to a remarkable degree. Proof of it lies in the fact that the most precocious, the most civilized and most ingenious people of ancient Greece were mariners ; the lonians of Asia Minor, the Colonists of Magna Grsecia, the Corinthians, .^Eginetans, Sicyonians and Athenians. The Arcadians, confined to their moun- tains, remained rural and simple ; and likewise the Acarnanians, the Epirots and the Locrians who, with their outlet on a less favorable sea, and not being sea-faring, remain semi-barbarous to the last ; their neighbors, the Etolians, at the time of the Roman conquest possessed bourgs only, without walls, and were simply rude pillagers. The spur which stimu- lated the others did not reach them. Such are the physical circumstances which, from the first, served to arouse the Greek intellect. This people may be compared to a swarm of bees born under a mild sky but on a meagre soil, turning to account the routes open to it through the air, foraging everywhere, * Alcseus extols his brother for having fought in Babylon and for bringing therefrom an ivory-handled sword. 22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF gathering supplies, swarming, relying on its own stings and dexterity for protection, building deli- cate edifices, compounding delicious honey, excited and humming amidst the huge creatures surrounding it, clashing haphazard and knowing but one master under whom to support itself. Even in our days, fallen as they are, " they have as much mind as any people in the world ; there is no intellectual effort of w r hich they are not capable. They comprehend well and quickly ; they acquire with wonderful facility every thing they wish to learn. Young merchants soon qualify themselves to speak five or six languages."* Mechanics are able in a few months to work at a somewhat dim- cult trade. A whole village, with its chief at the head of it, will interrogate and attentively listen to travellers. " A most remarkable thing is the inde- fatigable application of school-children," little and big ; hired persons find time while fulfilling their engagements to pass examinations as lawyers or physicians. " You meet at Athens every kind of student except the student who don't study." In * About : La Grece contemporaine. ART IN GREECE. 23 this respect no race has been so well endowed by nature, all circumstances apparently having con- curred to unfetter the mind and sharpen the facul- ties. TEE PHILOSOPHY OF II. Let us follow out this feature in their history. Whether we consider it practically or speculatively, it is always keenness of mind, adroitness and ingenuity, which manifest themselves. It is a strange thing, at the dawn of civilization, when man elsewhere is excit- able, rude and childish, to see one of their two heroes, the wise Ulysses, cautious, prudent and crafty, fer- tile in expedients, inexhaustible in falsehood, the able navigator, always attentive to his own interests. Returning home in disguise, lie counsels his wife to get from her suitors presents of necklaces and brace- lets, and he does not slay them until they have en- riched his mansion. When Circe surrenders herself to him, or when Calypso proposes his departure, he takes the precaution of binding them by an oath. Ask him his name and he has always ready some fresh and appropriate story and genealogy. Pallas herself, to whom, without knowing her, he relates his stories, praises and admires him : Full shrewd were he and practised in deceit, Who should surpass thee in the ways of craft, ART IN GREECE. 25 Even though he were a god, thou unabashed And prompt with shifts, and measureless in wiles.* And the sons are worthy of their sire. At the end, as at the beginning of civilization, the intellect predominates ; it was always the stamp of the char- acter, and now it survives them. Greece once subju- gated, we see the Greek a paid dilettant, sophist, rhe- torician, scribe, critic and philosopher; then the Graeculus of the Roman dominion, the parasite, buf- foon and pander, ever alert, sprightly and useful ; the complacent Protean who, good in every line, adapts himself to all characters, and gets out of all scrapes ; infinite in dexterity, the first ancestor of the Scapins Mascarilles and other clever rogues, who, with no other heritage but their art, live upon it at other peo- ple's expense. Let us return to their most brilliant era and con- sider their master work, science, that which best commends them to the admiration of humanity and which, if founded by them, is owing to the same in- stinct and the same necessities. The Phenician, who is a merchant, employs arithmetical rules in adjust- * The Odyssey, translated by W. C. Bryant. * 2 20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ing his accounts. The Egyptian, surveyor and stone-cutter, has geometrical processes by which to pile up his blocks, and estimate the area of his field annually inundated by the Nile. The Greek re- ceives from them these technical systems, but they do not suffice him ; he is not content with applying them commercially and industrially ; he is investiga- tive and speculative; he wants to know the why, the cause of things ;* he seeks abstract proof and fol- lows the delicate thread of ideas which leads from one theorem to another. Thales, more than six hundred years before Christ, devotes himself to the demon- stration of the equality of the angles of the isosceles triangle. The ancients relate that Pythagoras, trans- ported with joy on solving the problem of the square of the hypotenuse, promised the gods a hecatomb. They are interested in abstract truth. Plato, on see- * Plato's " Theaetetus." Take the whole of the part of Theeetetus and the comparison he makes between figures and numbers. See likewise the opening of the " Eivals." Herodotus (Book II., 29) is very instructive in this connection. Among the Egyptians no one could reply to him when he demanded the cause of the periodical rise of the Nile. Neither the priests nor the laymen had made this matter, which affected them so close- ly, a subject of inquiry or of hypothesis. The Greeks, on the contrary, had already suggested three explanations of the phenomenon. Herodotus discusses these and suggests a fourth. ART IN GREECE. 27 ing the Sicilian mathematicians apply their discover- ies to machinery, reproaches them with degrading science j in his view of it they ought to confine them- selves to the study of ideal lines. In fact they al- ways promoted it without concerning themselves about its utility. For example, their researches on the properties of conic sections found no application until seventeen centuries later, when Kepler discov- ered the laws which control the movements of the planets. In this work, which constitutes the basis of all our exact ^sciences, their analysis is so rigid that in England Euclid's geometry still serves as the student's text-book. To decompose ideas and note their dependencies ; to form a chain of them in such a way as to leave no link missing, the whole chain being fastened on to some incontestable axiom or group of familiar experiences ; to delight in forging, attaching, multiplying and testing all these chains with no motive but that of a desire to find them al- ways more numerous and more certain, is the especial end^ment of the Greek mind. The Greeks think for the purpose of thinking, and hence their organiza- tion of the sciences. We do not establish one to-day 28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF which does not rest on the foundations they laid ; we are frequently indebted to them for its first story and sometimes an entire wing ;* a series of inventors suc- ceed each other in mathematics from Pythagoras to Archimedes ; in astronomy from Thales and Pythag- oras to Hipparchus and Ptolemy ; in the natural sciences from Hippocrates to Aristotle and the Alex- andrian anatomists; in history from Herodotus to Thucydides and Polybius ; in logic, politics, morality and aesthetics from Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle to the Stoics and neo-platonicians. Men so thorough- ly absorbed by ideas could not fail to admire the most beautiful of all, the university of ideas. For eleven centuries, from Thales to Justinian, their phi- losophy never ceased to grow ; always some new sys- tem arose blooming above or alongside of the old systems; even when speculation is imprisoned by Christian orthodoxy it makes its way and presses through the crevices ; " the Greek language," says one of the Fathers of the Church, " is the mother of heresies." We of to-day still find in this vast store- * Euclid, Aristotle's theory of the Syllogism and the Morality of the Stoics. ART IN GREECE. 29 house our most fecund hypotheses ;* thinking so much and with such a sound mind their conjectures are frequently found in accordance with the truth. In this respect their performance has only been surpassed by their zeal. Two occupations, in their \ eyes, distinguished man from the brute and the Greek from the barbarian a devotion to public af- fairs and the study of philosophy. We have only/ to read Plato's Theages and Protagoras to see the steady enthusiasm with which the youngest pursued ideas through the briars and brambles of dialectics. Their taste for dialectics itself is still more striking ; they never weary in its circuitous course ; they are as fond of the chase as the game ; they enjoy the journey as much as the journey's end. The Greek is much more a reasoner than a metaphysician or sa- vant ; he delights in delicate distinctions and subtle analysis ; he revels in the weaving and super-refine- ment of spiders' webs.f His dexterity in this re- * Plato's ideal types, Aristotle's Final causes, the Atomic theory of Epioarus and the classifications of the Stoics. t See, in Aristotle, "Theory of Model Syllogisms," and in Plato, the " Parmenides " and " Sophistes." There is nothing more ingenious and more fragile than the whole of Aristotle's Physics and Physiology, 30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF spect is unequalled ; it is of little consequence to him whether this over-complicated and attenuated web is of any use in theory or in practice ; it satisfies him to see the threads spun out and crossing each other in imperceptible and symmetrical meshes. Herein does the national weakness manifest the na- tional talent. Greece is the mother of disputants, rhetoricians and sophists. Nowhere else has a group of eminent and popular men been seen teach- ing with the same success and fame as Gorgias, Protagoras and Polus, the art of making the worse appear the better cause, and of plausibly maintain- ing a foolish proposition however absurd.* It is Greek rhetoricians who are the eulogists of pesti- lence, fever, bugs, Polyphemus and Thersites; a Greek philosopher asserted that a wise man could be happy in the brazen bull of Phalaris. Schools existed, like that of Carneades, in which pleadings could be made on both sides; others, like that of ^Enesidemus, to establish that no proposition is truer than that of the contrary proposition. In the as may be seen in his "Problems." The waste of mental power and sagacity by these schools is enormous. * The "Euthydemus'' of Plato. ART IN GREECE. 31 legacy bequeathed to us by antiquity a collection is found, the richest we have, of captious arguments and paradoxes ; their subtleties would have been confined to a narrow field could they not have pushed their way as well on the side of error as on that of truth. Such is the intellectual finesse which, trans- ferred from reasoning to literature, fashioned the "Attic" taste, that is to say, an appreciation of niceties, a sportive grace; delicate irony, simplicity of style, ease of discourse and beauty of demonstra- tion. It is said that Apelles went to see Proto- genes, and, not caring to leave his name, took a pen- cil and drew a fine curved line on a panel ready at hand. Protogenes, on returning, looked at the mark and exclaimed, " No one but Apelles could have traced that !" then, seizing the pencil, he drew around it a second line still more refined and extend- ed, and ordered it to be shown to the stranger. Apelles came back, and, mortified to see himself sur- passed, intersected the first two contours by a third, the delicacy of which exceeded both. When Pro togenes saw it, he exclaimed : " I am vanquished, let 32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF me embrace my master !" This legend furnishes us with the least imperfect idea of the Greek mind. We have the subtle line within which it circum- scribes the contours of things, and the native dex- terity, precision and agility with which it circulates amidst ideas to distinguish and bind them together. ART IN GREEGE. 33 III. This, however, is but one feature ; there is an- other. Let us revert back to the soil and we shall see the second added to the first. This time, again, it is the physical structure of the country which has stamped fhe intellect of the race with that which we find in its labors and in its history. There is in this country nothing of the vast or gigantic ; out- ward objects possess no disproportionate, over- whelming dimensions. We see nothing there like the huge Himalaya, nothing like those boundless en- tanglements of rank vegetation, those enormous riv- ers described in Indian poems ; there is nothing like the interminable forests, limitless plains and the wild and shoreless ocean of Northern Europe. The eye there seizes the forms of objects without difficulty and retains a precise image of them; every object is medial, proportioned, easily and clearly perceptible to the senses. The mountains of Corinth, Attica, Bceotia and the Peloponnesus are 2* 34: THE PHILOSOPHY OF from three to four thousand feet high ; only a few reach six thousand; you must go to the extreme north of Greece to find a summit like those of the Alps and the Pyrenees, and then it is Olympus, of which they make the home of the gods. The Pe- neus and the Achelous, the largest rivers, are, at most, but thirty or forty leagues long ; the others, usually, are mere brooks and torrents. The sea it- self, so terrible and threatening at the north, is here a sort of lake ; we have no feeling of the solitude of immensity; some waste or island is always in sight ; it does not leave on the mind a sinister im- pression ; it does not appear like a ferocious and destructive being ; it has no leaden, pallid and ca- daverous hue ; the coasts are not ravaged by it and it has no tides strewing them with mire and stony fragments. It is lustrous, and according to an ex- pression of Homer, " dazzling, wine-colored, violet- colored;" the ruddy rocks of its shores enclose its bright surface within a fretted border which seems like the frame to a picture. Imagine fresh and primitive natures having such phenomena for their cultivation and constant education. Through ART IN GREECE. 35 these they obtain the. habit of clear and defined im- agery and avoid the vague tumult, the impetuous revery, the anxious apprehension of the " beyond." Thus is a mental mould formed out of which, later, all ideas are to issue in relief. Countless circum- stances of soil and climate combine to perfect it. In this country the mineral character of the ground is visible and appears much stronger than in our own Provence; it is not weakened or effaced, as in our northern moist countries, by the universally diffused strata of arable soil and verdant vegetation. The skeleton of the earth, the geologic bonework, the purplish-gray marble peers out in jutting rocks, pro- longs itself in naked crags, cuts its sharp profile against the sky, encloses valleys with peaks and crests so that the landscape, furrowed with bold fractures and gashed everywhere with sudden breaches and angles, looks as if sketched by a vigorous hand whose caprices and fancy in no respect impair the certainty and precision of its touch. The quality of the atmosphere increases likewise this saliency of objects. That of Attica, especially, is of extraordinary transparency. On turning Cape 36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF Sunium the helmet of Pallas on the Acropolis could be seen at a distance of several leagues. Mount Hymettus, two leagues off from Athens, seems to a European just landed a walk before breakfast. The vapory mist with which our atmosphere is always filled does not arise to soften distant contours ; they are not uncertain, half-commingled and blotted out, but are detached from their background like the fig- ures on antique vases. Add, finally, the exquisite brilliancy of the sun which pushes to extremes the contrast between light parts and shadows and which gives an opposition of masses to precision of lines. Thus does Nature, through the forms with which she peoples the mind, directly incline the Greek to fixed and precise conceptions. She again inclines him to them indirectly through the order of political association to which she leads and re- strains him. Greece, indeed, is a small country compared with its fame, and it will seem to you still smaller if you observe how divided it is. The principal chains on one side of the sea and the lateral chains on the other separate a number of distinct provinces form- ART IN GREECE. 37 ing so many circumscribed districts Thessaly, Boe- otia, Argos, Messenia, Laconia and all the islands. It is difficult to traverse the sea in barbarous ages, while mountain defiles are always available for defense. The populations of Greece -accordingly could easily protect themselves against invasion and exist along- side of each other in small independent communities. Homer enumerates thirty,* and, on the establishment and multiplication of colonies, these get to be several hundred. To modern eyes a Greek State seems in miniature. Argos is from eight to ten miles long and four or five wide ; Laconia is of about the same size ; Achaia is a narrow strip of land on the flank of a mountain which descends to the sea. The whole of Attica does not equal the half of one of our departments ; the territories of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara dwindle to a town suburb ; generally speak- ing, and especially in the islands and colonies, the State is simply a town with a beach or a surround- ing border of farms. Standing on one acropolis the eye can take in the acropolis or mountains of its neighbor. In so limited a circuit the mind embraces * Book II. The Enumeration of warriors and vessels. 38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF all distinctly ; the moral patrimony possesses no ele- ment of the gigantic, abstract or vague as with us ; the senses can take it all in ; it is compounded with the physical patrimony ; both are fixed in the citizen's mind by definite formations. In a mental conception of Athens, Corinth, Argos or Sparta he imagines the configuration of his valley or the silhouette of his city. The citizens belonging to it rise in his mind the same as its natural features ; the contracted sphere of his political domain, like the form of his natural domain, provides for him beforehand the av- erage and fixed type in which all his conceptions are to be included. In this respect consider their reli- gion ; they have no sentiment of this infinite universe in which a generation of people, every conditioned being, however great, is but an atom in time and place. Eternity does not set up before them its pyr- amid of myriads of ages like a vast mountain by the side of which a little life is simply a mole-hill or grain of sand; they do not concern themselves as others do, the Indians, the Egyptians, the Semites and the Germans with the ever-renewed circle of metempsychoses, with the still and lasting slumber ART IN GREECE. 39 of the grave ; with the formless and bottomless abyss from which issue beings like passing vapor ; with the one God, absorbing and terrible, in whom all forces of nature are concentrated, and for whom heaven and earth are simply a tabernacle and a footstool ; with that august, mysterious, invisible power which the heart's worship discovers through and beyond all things.* Their ideas are too clear and constructed on too narrow a model. The universal escapes them, or, at least, half occupies them ; they do not form a God of it and much less a person ; it remains in their religion in the back-ground, being the Moira^ the Aisa, the JE/imarmene, in other terms, the part as- signed to each. It is fixed ; no being, whether man or god, can escape the circumstances of his lot ; fun- damentally, this is an abstract truth ; if the Moires of Homer are goddesses, it is but little more than fic- tion ; under the poetic expression, as under a transpa- rent sheet of water, we see appearing the indissolu- ble chain of facts and the indestructible demarcation of things. Our sciences of to-day admit these con- * Tacitus: "De Moritras Germanorum." Deorum nominibus appel- lant secretum illiul, quod sola reverentia vident. 40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ceptions ; the Greek idea of destiny is nothing more than our modern idea of law. Every thing is deter- mined, which is what our formulae assert and which has been forecast in their divinations. "When they develope this idea it is to still more strengthen the limits imposed on beings. Out of the mute force which unfolds and assigns destinies they fashion their Nemesis,* who humbles the ex- alted and represses all excesses. One of the grand sentences of the oracle is " Not too much." Guard against inordinate desire, dread complete prosper- ity, fortify yourself against intoxication, always preserve moderation, is the counsel which every poet and every thinker of the great epoch enun- ciates. Instinct and the spontaneous reason have nowhere been so lucid ; when, at the first awakening of reflection, they try to conceive the world they form it in the image of their own mind. It is a sys- tem of order, a Kosmos, a harmony, an admirable and regular arrangement of things self-subsistent and self-transforming. At a later period the Stoics compare it to a vast city governed by the best laws. * See Tonrnier's "Nemesis on la Jalousie des Dieux." ART I3T GREECE. 41 There is no place here for mystic and incomprehen- sible gods, nor for destructive and despotic gods. The religious vertigo did not enter into the sound and well-balanced minds which conceived a wyorld like this. Their divinities soon become human be- ings ; they have parents, children, a genealogy, a history, drapery, palaces and a physical frame like ours ; they are wounded and suffer ; the greatest, Zeus himself, beheld their advent and some day per- haps will see the end of their reign.* On the shield of Achilles, which represents an army, " men marched led by Ares and Athena, both in gold, in golden vestments, tall and beautiful, as is proper for gods, for men were much smaller." There is indeed but little difference besides this between them and ourselves. Often, in the Odys- sey, when Ulysses or Telemachus encounter una- wares any tall or fine-looking personage, they ask if he is a god. Human divinities of this stamp do not disturb the minds which conceive them ; Homer manages them his own way ; he is constantly bring- ing in Athena for slight offices, such as indicating * The Prometheus of 42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF to Ulysses the dwelling of Alcinous and marking the spot where his discus fell. The theological poet moves about in his divine world with the freedom and serenity of a playful child. We see him there laughing and enjoying himself; on exhibiting to us Ares surprised in the arms of Aphrodite Apollo in- dulges his merriment and asks Hermes if he would not like to be in Ares' place : I would that it were so, Oh archer-king Apollo ; I could bear Chains thrice as many and of infinite strength, And all the gods and all the goddesses Might come to look upon'me ; I would keep My place with golden Venus at my side.* Read the hymn in which Aphrodite offers herself to Anchises, and especially the hymn to Hermes, who, the very day of his birth, shows himself a contriving, robbing, mendacious Greek, but with so much grace that the poet's narrative seems to be the badinage of a sculptor. In the hands of Aristophanes, in the " Frogs" and the " Clouds," Hercules and Bacchus are treated with still greater freedom. All this smooths the way for the decorative gods of Pompeii, * The Odyssey, translated by W. C. Bryant. ART IN GREECE. 43 the pretty and sinister pleasantries of Lucian, and the entire Olympic circle of the agreeable the social and the dramatic. Gods so closely resembling man soon become his companions, and later his sport. The clear mind which, to bring them within its reach, de- prives them of mystery and infinity, regards them as its own creations and delights in the myths of its own formation. Let us now glance at their ordinary life. Here, again, they are wanting in veneration. The Greek cannot subordinate himself, like the Roman, to one grand unity, a vast conceivable but invisible patri- mony. He has not progressed beyond that form of association in which the State consists of the City. His colonies are their own masters ; they receive a pontiff from the metropolis and regard him with sen- timents of filial affection ; but there their dependence rests. They are emancipated children, similar to the young Athenian who, on reaching manhood, is dependent on nobody and is his own master ; whilst the Roman colonies are only military posts, similar to the young Roman who, though married, a magis- trate and even consul, always feels on his shoulder 4:4: THE PHILOSOPHY OF the weight of a father's hand, a despotic authority from which nothing, save a triple sale can set him free. To forego self-control ; to submit to distant ru- lers, never seen by them ; to consider themselves part of a vast whole ; to lose sight of themselves for a great national benefit, is what the Greeks never could do with any persistency. They shut themselves up and indulged in mutual jealousies ; even when Darius and Xerxes invaded their country they could scarce- ly unite ; Syracuse refuses assistance because she is not given the command; Thebes sides with the Hedes. When Alexander combines the Greek forces to conquer Asia, the Lacedemonians do not respond to the summons. No city succeeds in forming a confederation of the others under its lead; Sparta, Athens, Thebes, all in turn fail ; rather than yield to their compatriots the vanquished apply for money to Persia and make concessions to the Great King. Factions in each city exile each other, .and the ban- ished, as in the Italian Republics, attempt to return through violence with the aid of the foreigner. Thus divided, Greece is conquered by a semi-barbar- ous but disciplined people, the independence of sep- ART IN GREECE. 45 arate cities ending in the servitude of the nation. Tliis downfall is not accidental, but fatal. The State, as the Greeks conceived it, was too small ; it was incapable of resisting the shock of heavy external masses ; it is an ingenious and perfect work of art, but fragile. Their greatest thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, limit, the city to a community of five or ten thousand free men. Athens had twenty thou- sand, beyond which, according to them, it was sim- ply a mob. They cannot conceive of the good or- ganization of a larger community. An acropolis covered with temples, hallowed by the bones of the heroes who founded it and by the images of nation- al gods, an agora, a theatre, a gymnasium, a few thousands of temperate, brave, free and handsome men, devoted to "philosophy or public business," served by slave cultivators of the soil and slave arti- sans, is the city which they conceive, an admirable work of art, daily established and perfected under their own eyes, in Thrace, on the shores of the Eux- ine, of Italy and of Sicily, outside of which every form of society seems to them confusion and barbar- ism, but whose perfection, nevertheless, denotes lit- 46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF tleness, and which, amidst the rude shocks of human encounter, lasts only for a day. These drawbacks are accompanied by corre- sponding advantages. If their religious conceptions are wanting in gravity and in grandeur ; if their po- litical organization lacks stability and endurance, they are exempt from the moral deformities which the greatness of a religion or of a State imposes on humanity. Civilization, everywhere else, has dis- turbed the natural equilibrium of the faculties ; it has diminished some to exaggerate the others ; it has sacrificed the present to the future life, man to the Divinity, the individual to the State ; it has pro- duced the Indian fakir, the Egyptian and Chinese functionary, the Roman legist and official, the medi- aeval monk, the subject, administrb and bourgeois of modern times. Man, under this pressure, has in turn simultaneously exalted and debased himself; he becomes a wheel in a vast machine, or con- siders himself naught before the infinite. In Greece he subjected his institutions to himself instead of subjecting himself to them; he made of them a means and not an end. He used them for a com- AST IN GREECE. 47 plete and harmonious self-development ; he could be at once poet, philosopher, critic, magistrate, pontiff, judge, citizen, and athlete ; exercise his limbs, his taste and his intellect ; combine in himself twenty sorts of talent without one impairing the other ; he could be a soldier without being an automaton, a dancer and singer without becoming a dramatic buf- foon, a thoughtful and cultivated man without find- ing himself a book-worm ; he could decide on public matters without delegating his authority to others, honor his gods .without the restrictions of dogmatic formulas, without bowing to the tyranny of a super- human might, without losing himself in the contem- plation of a vague and universal being. It seems that, having designated the visible and accurate con- tour of man and of life, they omitted the rest and thus expressed themselves : " Behold the true man, an active and sensitive body, possessing mind and will, the true life of sixty or seventy years between the whining infant and the silent tomb ! Let us strive to render this body as agile, strong, healthy, and beautiful as possible ; to display this mind and will in every circle of virile activity ; to deck this life 48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF with every beauty which delicate senses, quick com- prehension and a proud and animated consciousness can create and appreciate." Beyond this they see nothing ; or, if there is a " beyond," it is for them like that Cimmerian land of which Homer speaks, the dim and sunless region of the dead, enshrouded with mournful vapors where, like winged bats, flock helpless phantoms with bitter cries to fill and refresh their veins from its channels, drinking the red gore of victims. The constitution of their mind limited their desires and efforts to a circumscribed sphere, lit up in the full blaze of sunshine, and to this arena, as glowing and as restricted as their stadium, we must resort to see them exercise. ART IN OREEGE. 49 IV. To do this we have to look at the country once more and draw together our impression of the whole. It is a beautiful land, inspiring one with a joyous sentiment and tending to make man re- gard life as a holiday. Scarcely more than its skeleton exists to-day. Like our Provence, and still more than it, it has been shorn and despoiled, scraped, so to say; the ground has sunk away and vegetation is rare ; bare, rugged rock, here and there spotted with meagre bushes, absorbs the expanse and occu- pies three-fourths of the horizon. You may, never- theless, form an idea of what it was by following the still intact coasts of the Mediterranean from Toulon to Hyeres and from Naples to Sorrento and Amalfi, except that you must imagine a bluer sky, a more transparent atmosphere and more clearly de- fined and more harmonious mountain forms. It seems as if there was no winter in this country. Evergreen oaks, the olive, the orange, the lemon, and the cypress form, in the valleys and on the sides of 50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF % the gorges, an eternal summer landscape; they even extend down to the margin of the sea ; in February, at certain places, oranges drop from their stems and fall into the water. There is no haze and but little rain ; the atmosphere is balmy and the sun mild and beneficent. Man here is not obliged, as in our northern climates, to protect himself against inclemencies by complicated contrivances, and to employ gas, stoves, double, triple and quad- ruple garments, sidewalks, street-sweepers and the rest to render habitable the muddy and cold sewer through which, without his police and his energy, he would have to paddle. He has no need to invent spectacular halls and operatic scenery ; he has- only to look around him and find that nature furnishes more beautiful ones than any which his art could devise. At Hyeres, in January, I saw the sun rise behind an island ; the light increased and filled the atmosphere ; suddenly, at the top of a rock, a flame burst forth; the vast crystal sky expanded its arch over the immense watery plain while the in- numerable crests of the waves and the deep blue of the uniform surface were traversed with ripples ART IN GREECE. 51 of gold ; at evening the distant mountains assumed the delicate hues of the rose and the lilac. In sum- mer this sunny illumination diffuses through the at- mosphere and over the sea such splendor that the surcharged senses and imagination seem to be car- ried away in triumph and glory ; every wave sparkles; the water takes the hues of precious stones, turquoises, amethysts, sapphires, lapis-lazuli, all in motion and undulating beneath the universal and immaculate celestial brightness. It is in this in- undation of luminousness that we have to imagine the coasts of Greece like so many marble ewers and fountains scattered here and there through the field of azure. We need not be surprised if we find in the Greek character that, fund of gayety and vivacity, that need of vital and conscious energy which we meet even now among the Provenyals, the Neapolitans, and, generally, in southern populations.* Man ever * " These races are lively, quiet and gay! The infirm man there is not cast down; he calmly awaits the approach of death; every thing smiles around him. Here is the secret of that divine complacency of the Homeric poems and of Plato; the narrative of the death of Soc- rates in the "Phsedon" scarcely shows a tinge of sadness. To live is 52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF continues to move as nature first directs him, for the aptitudes and tendencies which she firmly implants in him are precisely the aptitudes and tenden- cies which she daily satisfies. A few lines from to flower and then to give fruit could it be more? If, as some may contend, the pre-occupation with death is the distinguishing trait of Christianity and of- the modern religious sentiment, the Greek race is the least religious of all'. It is a superficial race, regarding life as a thing void of the supernatural or a hereafter. Such simplicity of conception belongs, in great part, to the climate and to the purity of the atmosphere, to the wonderful joyousness which one experiences there, but much more to the instincts of the Hellenic race so adorably Idealis- tic. Any trifle a tree, a flower, a lizzard, or a tortoise brings to mind thousands of metamorphoses, sung by the poets ; a stream of water, a little crevice in a rock are designated as the abode of nymphs ; a well with a cup on its margin, an inlet of the sea so narrow that the butter- flies cross it and yet navigable for the largest vessels as at Paros ; orange and cypress trees extending their shadows over the water, a small pine grove amid the rocks suffice, in Greece, to produce that contentment which awakens beauty. To stroll in the gardens at night listening to the cicada, and to sit in the moonlight playing the flute; to go and imbibe water from the mountain source, with a piece of bread, a fish and a flask of wine to be drank while singing ; to suspend, at family festivals, a crown of leaves over the portal, and to go with chaplets of flowers ; to carry to public festivities a thyrsus decked with verdure ; to pass whole days in dancing and to play with tame goats, are Greek enjoyments the enjoyments of a poor, economical, eternally youthful race, inhabiting a charming country, finding its well-being in itself and in the gifts which the gods have bestowed upon it. The pastoral model of Theocritus was a truth in Hellenic countries ; Greece always delighted in this minor kind of refined and pleasing poetry, one of the most characteristic of its literature, a mirror of its own life almost everywhere else silly and af- fected. The pleasure of living and sprightliness of humor are pre-emi- ART IN GREECE. 53 Aristophanes will portray to you this frank, spright- ly and radiant sensuousness. Some Athenian peas- ants are celebrating the return of peace. " I am delighted ! I am delighted at being rid of helmet, and cheese, and onions ; for I find no pleasure in battles, but to continue drinking beside the fire with my dear companions, having kindled whatever is the driest of firewood which has been sawn up in summer, and roasting some chick-peas, and putting on the fire the esculent a,corn, and at the same time kissing my Thracian maid while my wife is washing herself. For there is not any thing nently Grecian traits. The foliage of youth was always peculiar to that race ; for it Indulgere genio is not the stolid intoxication of the English nor the vulgar pastime of the French ; it is rather simply to think that nature is gracious and that one may and ought to yield to her. To the Greek, in fine, nature is the suggestor of elegance, a mistress of recti- tude aiid virtue. ' Concupiscence,' the idea that nature incites us to do evil, has no meaning for him. The taste for ornamentation which dis- tinguishes the Greek palikary and shows itself so innocently in the Greek maiden, is not the pompous vanity of the city damsel inflated with the ridiculous conceit of a parvenue ; it is the pure and simple sentiment of unaffected youth conscious of being the legitimate offspring of the true parents of beauty." [" Saint Paul," by B. Kenan, p. 202.] Afriend who has travelled some time in Greece tells me that the horse-drivers and guides will often pluck some attractive shrub and carry it carefully in their hand during the day, put it safely by in the evening on going to bed, and resume it in the morning for farther pleasure in it. 54: THE PHILOSOPHY OF more agreeable than for the seed to be already sown, and the god to rain upon it, and some neigh- bor to say : ' Tell me, O Comarchides, what shall we do at this time of day ?' I've a mind to drink, since the god acts so favorably. Come, wife, wash three chenixes of kidney-beans and mix some wheat with them, and bring out some figs, for it is in no wise possible to strip off the vine leaves to-day, or to grub round the roots, since the ground is so wet. And let some one bring forth from my house the thrush and the two finches. And there were also within some beestings and four pieces of hare. * * * Bring in three pieces, boy, and give one to my father, and beg some fruit-bearing myrtles from JEschineades, and at the same time let some one call on Charniades that he may drink with us, since the god benefits and aids our crops. * * * Most august goddess queen, venerable Peace, mistress of choral dancesj mistress of nuptials, receive our sacri- fice ! * * * Grant that our market be filled with multifarious good things ; with garlic, early cucum- bers, apples and pomegranates ; * * * and that we may see people bringing from the Boeotians geese, ART W GREECE. 55 ducks, wood-pigeons and sand-pipers, and that bas- kets of Copaic eels come, and that we, collected in crowds around them, buying fish, may jostle with Morychus and Teleas and other gourmands. * * * Come quick, Dicseopolis, for the priest of Bacchus sends for you. Make haste, all things are in readiness couches, tables, cushions for the head, chaplets, ointments, sweetmeats ; the courtesans are- there, cakes of fine flour, honey-cakes, lovely danc- ing girls, Harmodius' delights." { stop the quota- tion which becomes too free ; antique sensuality and southern sensuality make use of bold gestures and very precise language. Such a cast of mind leads man to regard life as a continuous holiday. The most, serious ideas and insti- tutions in the hands of the Greek become gay ; his divinities are " the happy gods that never die." They dwell on the summits of Olympus, " which the winds do not shake ; which are never wet by rain or visited by snow ; where the cloudless ether is disclosed and where the bright light nimbly dances." Here in a glittering palace, seated on golden thrones, they drink nectar and eat ambrosia while the muses 56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF " sing with their beautiful voices." Heaven to the Greek, is eternal festivity in broad daylight, and consequently the most beautiful life is that which most resembles the life of the gods. With Homer the happy man is he who can " revel in the bloom of his youth and reach the threshold of old age." Re- ligious ceremonies are joyous banquets at which the gods are content because they obtain their share of wine and meat. The most imposing festivals are operatic representations. Tragedy, comedy, dancing, choruses and gymnastic games form a part of their worship. In honoring the gods it never occurs to them that it is necessary to fast, mortify the flesh, pray in fear and trembling, and prostrate one's self de- ploring one's sins ; but on the contrary, to take part in their enjoyments, to display before them the most beautiful nude forms, to deck the city in their behalf, and, abstracting man for a moment from his mortal condition, elevate him to theirs by every magnifi- cence which art and poesy can furnish. This " en- thusiasm" to them is piety ; and, after giving vent in tragedy to their grand and solemn emotions, they again seek in comedy an outlet for their extravagant ART IN GREECE 57 buffooneries and their voluptuous license. One must have read Aristophanes' " Lysistrata" and " Thesmo- phoriazusa3" to imagine these transports of animal life, to comprehend a public celebration of the Dio- nysia and the dramatic dance of the cordax, to com- prehend that, at Corinth, a thousand courtesans per- formed the service of the temple of Aphrodite, and that religion consecrated all the scandal and infatu- ation of a kermess and a carnival. The Greeks partook of social life as thoughtless- ly as the religious life. The conquest of the Roman is for acquisition ; he utilizes vanquished nations as he would so many farms, methodically and continu- ously, with the spirit of an administrator and busi- ness man ; the Athenian explores the sea, disembarks and fights without establishing any thing, at irregu- lar times, according to the impulse of the hour, the necessity of action and to gratify a freak of the im- agination ; through a spirit of enterprise, a love of glory and for the satisfaction of being first among the Greeks. The people, with the funds of their al- lies, adorn their eity and, commanding their artists to produce temples, theatres, statues, decorations 3* 58 TEE PHILOSOPHY OF and processions, avail themselves daily, and in every sense, of the public wealth. Aristophanes amuses them with caricatures of their magistrates and politicians. The theatres are open free of ex- pense ; at the end of the Dionysia the money on hand in the treasury, contributed by their allies, is distributed. They soon demand pay for their ser- vices as dicasts and in the public assemblies. Every thing is for the people. They oblige the rich to de- fray the expense of choruses, actors, the representa- tions and all the finest spectacles. However poor they may be, they have baths and gymnasia, sup- ported by the treasury, as pleasant as those of the knights.* Towards the last they give themselves no further care ; they hire mercenaries to carry on their wars ; if they concern themselves with politics, it is simply for discussion ; they listen to their orators as dilettanti and attend to their debates, recriminations and eloquent assaults as they would a performance in a cock-pit. They sit in judgment upon talent and applaud judiciously. The main thing with them is to ensure perfect festivals ; they decree the penalty * Xenophon: " The Athenian Republic." ART m GREECE. 59 of death against whosoever shall propose to divert any portion of the money set aside for them to war purposes. Their generals bear witness to this: " Except one alone whom you send to battle," says Demosthenes, " the others follow the sacrifices in the adornment of your festivals." In the equipment and despatch of a fleet they do not act, or else act too late; while, on the contrary, for processions and public performances, every thing is foreseen, arranged, and exactly fulfilled as it ought to be and at the ap- pointed hour. Little by little, under the dominion of primitive sensuality, the State becomes reduced to a spectacular enterprise, whose business it is to pro- vide poetic enjoyment for people of taste. Likewise, finally, in philosophy and in science, they aimed only to cull the flower of things ; they possessed none of the abnegation of the modern sa- vant, who devotes his genius to the elucidation of an obscure point ; who gives up years of observation to some species of animal ; who incessantly multiplies and verifies his experiments ; who, abandoning him- self voluntarily to thankless labor, passes his life in patiently hewing two or three stones for an immense 60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF edifice which he cannot see completed, but which is to be of vast service to generations to come. Phi- losophy, here, is talk ; it is born in the gymnasia, un- der porticoes, and in groves of sycamore ; the master converses as he walks, and his pupils follow him. All, at the outset, rush on to lofty conclusions ; to generalize is their pleasure ; they delight in it and care but little for constructing a good, solid founda- tion ; their proofs dwindle down most frequently to the mere resemblance of truths. They are, in short, speculators, fond of flying over the summit of things, of traversing in three paces, like Homer's gods, a vast new realm, of embracing the entire universe in a single glance. A system is a sort of sublime opera, the opera of comprehensive and inquisitive minds. Their philosophy, from Thales to Proclus, has, like their tragedy, entwined itself around thirty or forty principal themes, and with a multitude of varia- tions, amplification and admixtures. The philo- sophic imagination manipulated ideas and hypothe- ses, just as the mythologic imagination manipulated legend and divinity. Passing from their works to their methods we see ART IN GREECE. 61 the same intellectual efforts. They are as much sophisfs as they are philosophers ; they exercise the mind for the mind's sake. A subtle distinction, a long and refined analysis, a captious argument of difficult elaboration, attracts and absorbs them. They amuse themselves with and linger over dialec- tics, quibbles and paradoxes ;* they are not suffi- ciently in earnest ; if they undertake any research it is not with a view to obtain a fixed and definite acquisition ; they do not love truth wholly and ab- solutely, forgetful of and indifferent to the rest. She is game which they often run down, but, to see their reasoning, we soon recognize that, without acknowl- edging it to themselves, they prefer the chase, the chase with its manceuvrings, its artifices, its cir- cuits, its inspiration and that sentiment of free dis- cursive and victorious action with which it stimulates the nerves and imagination of the hunter. " O * See logical methods in Plato and Aristotle, and especially the proofs of the immortality of the soul in the "Phsedon." In all this philosophy the faculties are superior to the work in hand. Aristotle wrote a treatise on Homeric problems following the example of the rhetoricians who sought to ascertain whether, when Aphrodite was wounded by Diomed, the wound was in the right hand or in the left. 62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF Greeks ! Greeks !" said an Egyptian priest to Solon, " what children ye are !" They played, in fact, with life, and all life's gravest things } with religion and the gods, with government and law, with phi- losophy and truth. ART IN GREECE. 63 V. Hence their position as the greatest artists of the world. They possessed the charming freedom of mind, the superabundance of inventive gayety, the gracious intoxication of invention which leads the child to constantly form and arrange little poems with no object but that of giving full play to new and over lively faculties suddenly awakened. The three leading traits that we have distinguished in their character are just those which constitute the artistic soul and intellect. Delicacy of perception, an aptitude at seizing nice relationships, the sense of gradation, is what allows the artist to construct a totality of forms, colors, sounds and incidents, in short, elements and details, so closely united among themselves by inward dependencies, that their or- ganization constitutes a living thing, surpassing in the imaginary world the profound harmony of the actual world. The necessity of clearness, a feeling for proportion, dislike of the vague and the ab- stract, contempt for the monstrous and exaggerated, 64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF and a taste for accurate and defined contours, is what leads him to give his conceptions a shape which the imagination and senses can easily grasp, and, consequently, to execute works comprehensible to every race and all ages, and which, being human, are eternal. The love and worship of this life, the sen- timent of human energy and the necessity of calm- ness and gayety, is what leads him to avoid depicting physical infirmity and moral ills, to represent the health of the spirit and perfection of the body, and to complete the acquired beauty of expression by the fundamental beauty of the subject. These are the distinct traits of their entire art. A glance at their literature compared with that of the Orient, of the middle ages and of modern times ; a perusal of Homer compared with that of the Divine Com- edy, of Faust or of the Indian epics ; a study of their prose compared with the prose of every other age and country, will soon furnish convincing proof of it. Every literary style relatively to theirs is pompous, heavy, forced and obscure ; every moral type rela- tively to theirs is overstrained, mournful and mor- bid ; every oratorical and poetic model, every model ART IN GREECE. 65 in fact which has not been borrowed from them, is disproportioned, distorted and badly put together by the work which it contains. Our space is limited, and among a hundred ex- amples we can choose but one. Let us take an ob- ject exposed to the eye, and that which first attracts attention on entering the city. I refer to the temple. It stands usually on a height called the Acropolis, on a substructure of rocks, as at Syracuse, or on a small eminence which, as at Athens, was the first place of refuge and the original site of the city. It is visible from every point on the plain and from the neighboring hills ; vessels greet it at a distance on approaching the port. It stands out in clear and bold relief in the limpid atmosphere.* It is not, like our mediaeval cathedrals, crowded and smoth- ered by rows of houses, secreted, half-concealed, in- accessible to the eye save in its details and its up- per section. Its base, sides, entire mass and full proportions appear at a glance. You are not obliged to divine the whole from a part ; its situa- * See the restorations, accompanied with memoirs, by Tetaz, Pac- card Boitte and Gamier. 5 66 THE- PHILOSOPHY OF tion renders it proportionate to man's senses. In order that there may be no lack of distinctness of impression, they give it medium or small dimensions. There are only two or three of the Grecian temples as large as the Madeleine. They bear no resem- blance to the vast monuments of India, Babylon and Egypt, the storied and crowded palaces, the mazes of avenues, enclosures, halls and colossi, so numer- ous that the mind at last becomes disturbed and be- wildered. They do not resemble the gigantic cathe- drals whose naves contain the entire population of a city ; which the eye, even if they were placed on a height, could not wholly embrace; whose profiles are lost and the total harmony of which cannot be appreciated except on a perspective plan. The Greek temple is not a place of assembly but the special habitation of a god, a shrine for his effigy, a marble monstrance enclosing an unique statue. At a hundred paces im- 84: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ilar manner, he is priest in his own house, and from time to time the pontiff of his phratry or tribe ; for his faith is a beautiful fairy tale, the. ceremony he performs consisting of a dance or chant familiar to him from his infancy, and of a banquet at which he presides in a certain garment. Again, he is judge in the civil, criminal, and religious dicasterion, an advo- cate, and obliged to plead in his own suit. A man of the South, a Greek, is naturally of a vivacious in- tellect and a fluent and fine speaker ; laws are not yet multiplied and jumbled together in a code and in confusion ; he knows them in a mass ; pleaders cite them to him, and, moreover, custom allows him to consult his instincts, his common sense, his feeling, his passions, to as great an extent, at least, as the strict letter and legal arguments. If he is rich he is an impresario. You are aware of their theatre being less complicated than ours, and that a Greek, an Athenian, always has a taste for seeing dancers, sing- ers, and actors. Rich or poor he is a soldier ; mili- tary art being still primitive and the machinery of war unknown, the national militia forms the army. There was no better one up to the appearance of the AET IN GREECE. 85 Romans. In order to organize it and form the per- fect soldier, two conditions are requisite, and these two conditions are provided by the common educa- tion, without special instruction, drill, discipline or exercise in the barracks. They require, on the one hand, that each soldier shall be as good a gladiator as possible, with the most robust, supple and agile body, the best calculated to strike, ward off blows and run ; the gymnasia suffice for this purpose ; they are the youths' colleges ; whole days and long years are devoted to teaching them wrestling, jumping, running, and throwing the discus, and, methodical- ly, every limb and every muscle is exercised and for- tified. On the other hand, they require the soldiery to march, run and perform their evolutions in regu- lar order,; the orchestra suffices for this purpose; all their national and religious festivals teach children and young people the art of forming and separating groups ; at Sparta, the chorus of the public dance and of the military company* are arranged on the same plan. Thus prepared for it by their social arrange- ments, we can comprehend how the citizen becomes * Cliaros and LocJios. 86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF a soldier without an effort and from .the very begin- ning. He gets to be a mariner without much great- er apprenticeship. A ship of war in those days was only a coasting vessel, and contained, at most, two hundred men, and never lost sight of land. In a city with a port, and which is supported by a maritime trade, there is no one who cannot manoeuvre a ves- sel of this description, and who cannot judge of, or soon learn, the signs of the weather, the chances of the wind, positions and distances, the technics in full, and every accessory/which our sailors and marine officers acquire only after ten years' study and prac- tice. All these peculiarities of antique life proceed from the same cause, which is the simplicity of a civilization without any precedent ; and all end in the same effect, which is the simplicity of a well-bal- anced mind, no group of aptitudes and inclinations being developed at the expense of others, free of any exclusive direction, and not deformed by any special function. We have at the present day the cultivated and the uncultivated man, the citizen and the peasant, the provincial and the Parisian, besides as many distinct species as there are classes, profes- AET IN OEEECE. 87 sions and trades ; the individual everywhere penned up in compartments of his own making and fettered with innumerable self-assigned necessities. Less ar- tificial, less special, less remote from the primitive condition of things, the Greek acted in a political cir- cle better proportioned to human faculties, amidst social ways more favorable to the maintenance of the animal faculties. Nearer to a natural life and less bound down by a superadded civilization he was more emphatically man. 88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF II. These are but the surroundings and the exterior moulds which shape the individual. Let us look into the individual himself, his sentiments and his ideas ; we shall be yet more impressed with the distance between these and our own. Two kinds of culture fashion them in every age and in every land, relig- ious culture and secular culture, both operating in the same sense, formerly to maintain them simple, now to render them complex. Modern people are Christian, and Christianity is a religion of second growth which opposes natural instinct. We may liken it to a violent contraction which has inflected the primitive attitude of the human mind. It proclaims, in effect, that the world is sinful, and that man is de- praved which certainly is indisputable in the cen- tury in which it was born. According to it, man must change his ways. Life here below is simply an exile ; let us turn our eyes upward to our celestial ART IN GREECE. 89 home. Our natural character is vicious ; let us stifle natural desires and mortify the flesh. The experi- ence of our senses and the knowledge of the wise are inadequate and delusive ; let us accept the light of revelation, faith and divine illumination. Through penitence, renunciation and meditation let us devel- op within ourselves the spiritual man ; let our life be an ardent awaiting of deliverance, a constant sacri- fice of will, an undying yearning 'for God, a revery of sublime love, occasionally rewarded with ecstasy and a vision of the infinite. For fourteen centuries the ideal of this life was the anchorite or monk. If you would estimate the power of such a conception and the grandeur of the transformation it imposes on human faculties and habits, read, in turn, the great Christian poem and the great pagan poem, one the Divine Comedy and the other the Odyssey and the Iliad. Dante has a vision and is transported out of our little ephemeral sphere into eternal regions ; he be- holds its tortures, its expiations and its felicities ; he is affected by superhuman anguish and horror; all that the infuriate and subtle imagination of the lover of justice and the executioner can conceive of he sees, 90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF suffers and sinks under. He then ascends into light ; his body loses its gravity ; he floats involuntarily, led by the smile of a radiant woman ; he listens to souls in the shape of voices and to passing melodies ; he sees choirs of angels, a vast rose of living brightness representing the virtues and the celestial powers ; sacred utterances and the dogmas of truth reverber- ate in ethereal space. At this fervid height, where reason melts like wax, both symbol and apparition, one effacing the other, merge into mystic bewilder- ment, the entire poem, infernal or divine, being a dream which begins with horrors and ends in ravish- ment. How much more natural and healthy is the spectacle which Homer presents ! We have the Troad, the isle of Ithaca and the coasts of Greece ; still at the present day we follow in his track ; we rec- ognize the forms of mountains, the color of the sea, the jutting fountains, the cypress and the alders in which the sea-birds perched ; he copied a steadfast and persistent nature ; with him throughout we plant our feet on the firm ground of truth. His book is a historical document ; the manners and customs of his contemporaries were such as he describes ; his Olym- ART IN GREECE. 91 pus itself is a Greek family. We are not obliged to strain and exalt ourselves to ascertain if we possess the sentiments he utters, nor to imagine the world he paints the combats, voyages, banquets, public discourses, and private conversations, the various scenes of real life, of friendships, of paternal and con- jugal affection, the craving for fame and action, the quarrels and reconciliations, the love of festivals, the relish of existence, every emotion and every passion of the natural man. He confines himself to the visi- ble circle realized by every generation of human ex- perience ; he does not travel out of it ; this world suf- fices for him ; it alone is important, the beyond being simply the vague habitation of dissatisfied spectres when Ulysses encounters Achilles in Hades and con- gratulates him on being first among the dead, the latter replies : Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death As if thou could'st console me. I would be A laborer on earth and serve for hire Some man of mean estate who makes scant cheer, Bather than reign o'er all who have gone down To death. Speak rather of my noble son ; Whether or not he joined the war to take A place among the foremost in the fight. 92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF Thus beyond the grave he is still most concerned with this present life. Then, the soul of swift .iEacid.es Over the meadows thick with asphodel Departed with long strides, well-pleased to hear From me the story of his son's renown.* Different shades of the same sentiment reappear at every epoch of Greek civilization ; theirs is the world lit up by sunshine ; the hope and consolation of the dying parent is the survival in bright day of his son, his glory, his tomb, and his patrimony. " The happiest man I have seen," said Solon to Croe- sus, " is Tellus of Athens ; for his country was flour- ishing in his day, and he himself had sons both beautiful and good, and he lived to see children born to each of them, and these children all grow up ; and farther, because after a life spent in what our people look upon as comfort, his end was surpassingly glo- rious. In a battle between the Athenians and their neighbors, near Eleusis, he came to the assistance of his countrymen, routed the foe, and died upon the field most gallantly. The Athenians gave him a * The Odyssey, translated by W. C. Bryant. ART IN GREECE. 93 public funeral on the spot where he fell, and paid bun the highest honors."* When philosophical reflection comes to dwell up- on it the beyond does not appear terrible, infinite, dis- proportioned to this present life, as certain as it, ex- haustless in torments and delights, and like a fright- ful gulf or an angelic elysium. " One of two things," said Socrates to his judges, " either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain ; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death * Rawlinson's Herodotus. 94: THE PHILOSOPHY OF is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, oh my friends and judges, can be greater than this ? If, indeed, when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and -^Eacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musseus and Hesiod and Homer ? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again."* In both cases, then, we " should nourish good hope on the subject of death." Twenty centuries later, Pas- cal, taking up the same question and the same doubtj could see for the incredulous no other hope but " the horrible alternative of utter annihilation or eternal misery." A contrast like this shows the turmoil which for eighteen hundred years has disordered the human mind. The prospect of a happy or miserable eterni- ty destroyed its balance ; up to the close of the mid- dle ages, with this incalculable weight upon it, it was * The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Jowett. ART IN GREECE. 95 like uncertain and disjointed scales, now up to the highest point, now down to the lowest, and always in extremes. When, toward the Renaissance, man's oppressed nature recovered itself and assumed the ascendant, -the old ascetic and monastic doctrine stood there to confront and to beat it back, not only with its traditions and institutions, maintained or* revived, but again with the enduring unrest with which it had infected dolorous souls and over-excited imaginations. This discord subsists at the present day ; there are in us and about us two moral theories, two ideas of nature and of life, whose constant antagonism makes us feel the harmonious ease of a young society where natural instincts displayed themselves intact and loyal under a religion that favored instead of repressed their outgrowth. If religious culture, with us, has grafted incon- gruous sentiments on spontaneous tendencies, secular culture has confused our mind with a maze of elab- orated and foreign notions. Compare the first and most powerful of educations, that which language gives, in Greece and among ourselves. Our modern tongues, Italian, Spanish, French, and English are 96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF dialects, the shapeless remains of a beautiful idiom impaired by a long decadence and which importa- tions and intermixtures have still further tended to change and obscure. They resemble those edifices built with the ruins of an ancient temple and with other materials picked up at random ; the result of which is that, with Latin stones, mutilated and com- bined in another style, along with pebbles gathered in the street and other rubbish, we have constructed the building in which we live, once a gothic castle and nowadays the modern mansion. Our mind dwells in it because it has become domiciliated ; but how much more freely did that of the Greeks move in theirs ! We do not readily comprehend our some- what generalized terms ; they are not transparent ; they do not expose their root, the evident fact from which they are derived ; words have to be explained to us which formerly man understood without an ef- fort 'through the sole virtue of analogy, genus, spe- cies, grammar, calculus, economy, law, thought, con- ception, and the rest. Even in German, where this obstacle is slighter, the conducting thread is want- ing. Almost the whole of our philosophic and scien- AST IN GREECE. 97 tific vocabulary is foreign ; we are obliged to know Greek and Latin to make use of it properly, and, most frequently, employ it badly. Innumerable terms find their way out of this technical vocabulary into common conversation and literary style, and hence it is that we now speak and think with words cumbersome and difficult to manage. We adopt them ready made and conjoined, we repeat them ac- cording to routine ; we make use of them without considering their scope and without a nice apprecia- tion of their sense ; we only approximate to that which we would like to express. Fifteen years are necessary for an author to learn to write, not with ge- nius, for that is not to be acquired, but with clearness, sequence, propriety and precision. He finds himself obliged to weigh and investigate ten or twelve thou- sand words and diverse expressions, to note their ori- gin, filiation and relationships, to rebuild on an orig- inal plan, his ideas and his whole intellect. If he has not done it, and he wishes to reason on rights, duties, the beautiful, the State or any other of man's important interests, he gropes about and stumbles ; he gets entangled in long, vague phrases, in sonorous 98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF commonplaces, in crabbed and abstract formulas. Look at the newspapers and the speeches of our pop- ular orators. It is especially the case with workmen who are intelligent but who have had no classical education ; they are not masters of words and, con- sequently, of ideas; they use a refined language which is not natural to them ; it is a perplexity to them and consequently confuses their minds; they have had no time to filter it drop by drop. This is an enormous disadvantage, from which the Greeks were exempt. There was no break with them between the language of concrete facts and that of abstract reasoning, between the language spoken by the peo- ple and that of the learned ; the one was a counter- part of the other ; there was no term in any of Plato's dialogues which a youth, leaving his gymnasia, could not comprehend ; there is not a phrase in any of De- mosthenes' harangues which did not readily find a lodging-place in the brain of an Athenian peasant 01 blacksmith. Attempt to translate into Greek one of Pitt's or Mirabeau's discourses, or an extract from Addison or Nicole, and you will be obliged to recast and transpose the thought ; you will be led to find ART IN GREECE. 99 for the same thoughts expressions more akin to facts and to concrete experience;* a flood of light will heighten the prominence of all the truths and of all the errors ; that which you were wont to call natural and clear will seem to you affected and semi-obscure, and you will perceive by force of contrast why, among the Greeks, the instrument of thought being more simple, it did its office better and with less effort. On the other hand, the work with the instru- ment, has become complicated, and out of all pro- portion. Besides Greek ideas, we have all that have accumulated for the past eighteen centuries. We have been overburdened, from the first, with our ac- quisitions. On issuing from a brutal barbarism at the dawn of the middle age, a simple intellect, which could scarcely do more than stammer, had to be en- * I would refer the reader to the writings of Paul-Louis Courier, who formed his style on the Greek. Compare his translation of the first chapters of Herodotus with those of Larcher. In "Frangois le Champi," the " Maitres Sonneurs" and in the "Mare au Diable," George ^Sand at- tains in a great degree to the simplicity, naturalness and admirable di- rectness of the Greek style. The contrast is singular between this and the modern style which she employs when she speaks in her own name or when she gives the conversation of cultivated characters. 100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF cumbered with the remains of classic antiquity and an ancient ecclesiastical literature, with a cavilling Byzantine theology, and the vast and subtle Aristo- telian encyclopedia rendered still more obscure and subtle by his Arabian commentators. Then, after the Renaissance, came a revived antiquity to super- add its conceptions to ours, frequently to confuse our ideas and wrongfully impose on us its authority, doc- trines and examples ; to make us Latin and Greek in mind and language like the Italian men of letters of the fifteenth century; to prescribe to us its dramatic forms and the style of the seventeenth cen- tury ; to suggest to us its political maxims and Uto- pias as in the time of Rousseau and during the Rev- olution. The stream, nevertheless, greatly enlai'ged, grew with the immense influx ; with the daily increas- ing volume of experimental science and hitman in- vention ; with the separate contributions of growing civilizations, all of them spread over five or six grand territories. Add, after another century, the knowl- edge diffused among modern languages and litera- tures, the discovery of Oriental and remote civiliza- tions, the extraordinary progress of history, reviving ART Itf GREECE. 101 oefore our eyes the habits and sentiments of so many races and so many ages ; the current has become a river as variegated as it is enormous ; all this is what a human mind is obliged to absorb, and it demands the genius, long life and patience of a Goethe to moderately appreciate it. How much more simple and limpid was the primitive source ! In the best days of Greece a youth " learned to read, write, and cipher,* play the lyre, wrestle and to perform all other bodily exercises."! Education was reduced to this " for the children of the best families." Let us add, however, that in the house of the music-master he was taught how to sing a few national and relig- ious odes, how to repeat passages from Homer, He- siod and the lyric poets, the psean to be sung in war and the song of Harmodius to be recited at the table. When he got to be older he listened in the Agora to the discourses of orators, to the decrees and the pro- mulgation of the laws. In the time of Socrates, if inquisitive, he attended the disputes and dissertations of the sophists ; he tried to procure a book by Anax- * Grammata. As letters served as ciphers, this term includes all three, t The " Theages" of Plato. 102 THE PHILOSOPHY OF agoras, or by Zeno of Elea ; a few interested them- selves in geometrical problems ; but, as a whole, ed- ucation was entirely gymnastic and musical, while the few hours that were devoted to a philosophical discussion, between two spells of bodily exercise, can no more be compared to our fifteen or twenty years of study, than their twenty or thirty rolls of papyrus manuscript to our libraries of three million volumes. All these opposing conditions may be reduced to one, that which separates a fresh and impulsive civiliza- tion from an elaborate and complex civilization. Fewer means and tools, fewer industrial implements and social wheels, fewer words learnt and ideas ac- quired ; a smaller heritage and lighter baggage and thus more easily managed; a single, straightfor- ward growth without moral crisis or disparity, and consequently a freer play of the faculties, a healthier conception of life, a less disturbed, less jaded, less deformed spirit and intellect ; this is the capital trait of their existence and it will be found in their art. ART I/Y GREECE. 103 III. The ideal work, indeed, has ever been the summa- ry of real life. Examine the modern spirit and you will find modifications, inequalities, maladies, hyper- trophies, so to say, of sentiments and faculties of which its art is the verification. In the middle ages the exaggerated development of the inner and spirit- ual man, the pursuit of tender and sublime revery, the worship of sorrow and the contempt of the flesh, lead the excited feelings and imagination on to vis- ions and seraphic adoration. You are familiar witli those of the "Imitation" and the " Fioretti" those of Dante and Petrarch, and with the subtle refinements and extravagant follies of chivalry and the courts of love. In painting and sculpture, consequently, the figures are ugly or lacking in beauty, often out of proportion and not viable, almost always meagre, at- tenuated, wasted and suffering ; overcome and ab- sorbed by some conception which turns their thoughts 10-1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF away from this nether world ; transfixed in anticipa- tion or in ravishment ; displaying the meek sadness of the cloister or the radiance of ecstasy, too frail or too impassioned to live and already belonging to par- adise. At the time of the Renaissance the universal amelioration of the human condition, the example of antiquity revived and understood, the transports of the mind liberated and ennobled by its grand dis- coveries, renew pagan sentiments and art. Mediae- val institutions and rites however still subsist ; in It- aly as in Flanders, you see in the finest works the disagreeable incongruity of' figures and subjects ; there are martyrs who seem to have issued from an antique gymnasium ; Christs consisting of destroying Jupiters or tranquil Apollos ; Virgins worthy of pro- fane love ; angels with the archness of Cupids ; Mag- dalens often the most blooming of sirens, and St. Se- bastians only so many hale Hercules ; in short, an as- sembly of male and female saints who, amidst the implements of penance and passion, retain the vigor- ous health, the lively carnations and the spirited at- titudes common to the joyous fetes of perfect athletes and noble young Athenian virgins. At the present ART JL?f GREECE. 105 day, the accumulations 01 the human brain, the mul- tiplicity and discord of doctrines, the excesses of cer- ebral application, sedentary habits, an artificial re- gime and the feverish excitement of capitals have aug- mented nervous agitation, extended the craving for new and strong sensations, and developed morbid melancholy, vague aspirations and illimitable lusts. Man is no longer what he was, and what, perhaps, he would have done well to remain, an animal of su- perior grade, happy in thinking and acting on the earth which nourishes him and beneath the sun which gives him light. On the contrary, he is a prodigious brain, an infinite spirit of which his members are only appendages and of which his senses are simply servants; insatiable in his curiosity and ambition, ever in quest and on conquest, with tremors and out- bursts which rack his animal organization and ruin his corporeal strength ; led hither and thither within the confines of the actual world and even into the depths of the imaginary world ; now exalted and now overwhelmed with the immensity of his acquisitions and of his performances ; raging after the impossible or buried in occupation ; grand and intense like Beet- s'* 106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF hoven, Heine and tne Faust of Goethe, or restrained by the pressure within his social cell, or warped all on one side by a specialty and monomania like the characters of Balzac. For this spirit plastic art no longer suffices ; its interest in a figure centres not in the members, the trunk and the entire animated frame- work, but in the expressive head, the mobile physi- ognomy, the transparent soul declared in gesture, passion or incorporeal thought pulsating and over- flowing through form and externalities; if it loves the beautiful sculptural form that is owing to educa- tion, after long preparatory culture, and through the disciplined taste of the dilettant. Multiple and cos- mopolite as it is it finds interest in all phases of art, in every period of the past, in every grade of society, and in all the situations of life ; it can appreciate the resurrections of foreign and ancient styles, incidents of rustic, popular or barbarous customs, foreign and remote landscapes, all that affords aliment for curi- osity, documents for history and subjects for emo- tion or instruction. Satiated and dissipated as it is it demands of art powerful and strange sensations, new effects of color, physiognomy and site, stimulants ART IN GREEGE. 10? which, at any cost, disturb, provoke, or amuse it, in short, a style which depends on manner, theory, and exaggeration. In Greece, on the contrary, the sentiments are simple, and, consequently, taste. Consider Greek dramatic works ; there are no profound and compli- cated characters in them like those of Shakspeare ; no intrigue cleverly contrived and unravelled, no surprises. The piece turns upon a heroic legend with which people are familiar from their infancy ; they know beforehand its incidents and catastrophe. The action can be described in a few words. Ajax, seized with delirium, massacres the cattle of the camp, thinking he is slaying his enemies ; chagrined at his folly, he bewails it and kills himself. Philoctetes, wounded, is abandoned on an island with his weapons ; he is sought for and found because his arrows are needed ; he becomes exasperated, refuses, and, at the command of Hercules, yields. The comedies of Me- nander, which we know through those of Terence, are made, so to say, out of nothing ; it takes two of them to make one Roman piece ; the richest scarcely con- tains the matter of one scene in our comedies. Read 108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF the opening of the " Republic," in Plato, the " Syra- cuse Women" of Theocritus, the " Dialogues" of Lu- cian, the last Attic poet, or again, the " Cyropedia" and " CEconomicus"" of Xenophon ; there is no aim at ef- fect, every thing being uniform ; they are common, every-day scenes, the merit of which lies in their charming naturalness ; there is no strong emphasis, no vehement, piquant trait ; you scarcely smile, and yet are pleased just as when you stop before a wild flower or a limpid brook. The characters sit down and get up, look at each other and say the simplest things with no more effort than the painted figures on the walls of Pompeii. With our forced and paralyzed taste, accustomed to strong drink, we are inclined, at first, to pronounce this an insipid beverage ; but, after moistening our lips with it for a few months, we are unwilling to imbibe any but this pure water, and find other literature spice, ra- gout or poison. Trace this disposition in their art, and especially in that we are now studying, sculpture. It is owing to this turn of mind that they have brought it to perfection, and that it is truly their na- tional art, for there is no art which more demands a ART IN GREECE 109 simplicity of mind, sentiment and taste. A statue is a large piece of marble or bronze, and a large statue generally stands isolated upon a pedestal ; it could not express too vehement action nor a too impassion- ed air, such as painting admits of, and which is al- lowable in a bas-relief, for this reason, that the figure would seem affected, got up for effect, running the risk of falling into the style of Bernini. A statue, moreover, is solid ; its limbs and torso are weighty ; the spectator moves around it and realizes its mate- rial mass ; it is, besides, generally nude, or almost nude ; the statuary, accordingly, is obliged to give the trunk and members equal importance with the head, and to appreciate animal life to as great an ex- tent as moral life. Greek civilization is the only one which has conformed to these two conditions. At this stage of things, and in this form of culture, the body is an interesting object; the spirit has not sub- ordinated it and cast it in the background ; it has its own importance. The spectator attaches equal val- ue to its different parts, noble or ignoble, to the breast which breathes so freely, to the strong and flexible neck, to the muscles rising and falling around 110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF the spine, to the arms which project the discus, to the legs and feet whose energetic spring impel the man ahead in racing and jumping. A youth in Plato reproaches his rival for having a stiff body and a slender neck. Aristophanes promises the young man who will follow his advice the best of health and gymnastic beauty : " You will ever have a stout chest, a clear complexion, broad shoulders, large hips. . .You shall spend your time in the gymnastic schools sleek and blooming; you shall descend to the Academy and run races beneath the sacred olives along with some modest compeer, crowned with white reeds, redolent of yew and careless ease, and of leaf-shed- ding white poplar, rejoicing in the season of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to the elm."* These are the pleasures and perfections of a blood horse, and Plato somewhere compares young men to fine coursers dedicated to the gods, and which are allow- ed to stray at will in their pasture-grounds with a view to see if they will not through instinct obtain wisdom and virtue. Such men have no need of study to enable them to contemplate understandingly and * Aristophanes, translated by Hickie ; Bonn's Classical Library. ART IN GREECE HI with pleasure a form like the " Theseus" of the Par- thenon or the " Achilles" of the Louvre, the easy position of the body on the pelvis, the suppleness of the joints and limbs, the clean curve of the heel, the network of moving and flowing muscles under- neath the firm and transparent skin. They appre- ciate its beauty the same as an English gentleman fond of hunting appreciates the breed, structure and fine points of the dogs and horses he raises. They are not surprised to see it naked. Modesty has not yet become prudery ; the spirit, with them, does not sit by itself enthroned at sublime heights to obscure and degrade organs which fulfil less noble functions ; it does not blush at and does not hide them ; they excite no shame and provoke no smile. The terms which designate them are neither offensive, provoca- tive nor scientific ; Homer's mention of them is the same in tone as that of other portions of the body. The thoughts they awaken are, in Aristophanes, joy- ous without being filthy as in Rabelais. There is no secret literature devoted to them which austere peo- ple and delicate minds avoid. The idea occurs over and over again, on the stage, before full audiences, at 112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF the festivals in honor of the gods, in the presence of magistrates, in the phallus borne by young virgins and which of itself is invoked as a divinity.* In Greece all the great natural forces are divine, the divorce between the animal and the spirit not yet having taken place. Here, then, we have the living body, complete and without a veil, admired and glorified, standing on its pedestal without scandal and exposed to all eyes. What is its purpose and what idea, through sympathy, is the statue to convey to spectators ? An idea which, to us, is almost without meaning because it belongs to another age and another epoch of the human mind. The head is without significance; un- like ours it is not a world of graduated conceptions, excited passions and a medley of sentiments ; the face is not sunken, sharp and disturbed ; it has not many characteristics, scarcely any expression, and is gener- ally in repose. Hence its suitableness for the statu- ary ; fashioned as it is to-day and as we now see it, its importance woxild be out of proportion to and a sacrifice of the rest ; we would cease to look at the * Aristophanes, in the " Acharnians. ART IN GREECE. 113 trunk and limlbs or would be tempted to clothe them. On the contrary, in the Greek statue, the head ex- cites no more interest than the trunk and other por- tions of the figure ; its lines and its planes are simply continuations of other lines and other planes; its physiognomy is not meditative, but calm and almost dull ; you detect no habitude, no aspiration, no ambi- tion transcending present physical existence, the gen- eral attitude, like the entire action, conspiring in the same sense. When a figure displays energetic action for a given purpose, like the " Discobulus" at Rome, the "Fighting Gladiator" in the Louvre, or the "Dancing Fawn" of Pompeii, the effect, entirely physical, exhausts every idea and every desire within its capacity ; so long as the discus is well launched, the blow well bestowed or parried, the dance anima- ted and in good tune, it is satisfied, the mind making no further effort. Generally speaking, however, the attitude is a tranquil one ; the figure does nothing, and saya nothing ; it is not fixed, wholly concentrated in a profound or eager expression ; it is at rest, re- laxed, without weariness; now standing, slightly leaning on one or the other foot now half turning, 114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF now half reclining ; a moment ago it was running like the young Lacedemonian girl;* now, like the Flora, it holds a crown ; its action, almost always, is one of indifference ; the idea which animates it is so indefinite and, for us, so far removed that we still, after a dozen hypotheses, cannot precisely determine what the Yenus of Milo is doing. It lives, and that suffices, and it sufficed for the spectator of antiquity. The contemporaries of Pericles and Plato did not re- quire violent and surprising effects to stimulate wea- ry attention or to irritate an uneasy sensibility. A blooming and healthy body, capable of all virile and gymnastic actions, a man or woman of fine growth and noble race, a serene form in full light, a simple and natural harmony of lines happily commingled, was the most animated spectacle they could dwell on. They desired to contemplate man proportioned to his organs and to his condition and endowed with every perfection within these limits ; they demanded nothing more and nothing less ; any thing besides would have struck them as extravagance, deformity * See the collection of casts by M. Kavaissoninthe Ecole des Beaux Arts. ART IN GREECE. 115 or disease. Such is the circle within which the sim- plicity of their culture kept them, and beyond which the complexity of our culture has impelled us ; here- in they encountered the art, statuary, which is ap- propriate to it ; hence it is that we have left this art behind us, we of to-day having to resort to them for our models. INSTITUTIONS. ART IN GREECE. H9 I. IP ever the correspondence of art with life dis- closed itself through visible traits, it is in the history of Greek statuary. To produce man in marble or bronze, the Greek first formed the living man, per- fect sculpture with them being developed at the same moment as the institution through which was produced the perfect body. One accompanies the other, like the Dioscuri, and, through a fortunate con- junction, the doubtful dawn of distant history is at once lit up by their two growing rays. The two appear together in the first half of the seventh century (B. C.). At this epoch occur the great technical discoveries of art. About 689 Buta- des of Sicyon undertakes to model and bake figures of clay, which leads him to decorate the tops of roofs with masks. At the same time Rhoikos and Theo- doros of Samos discover the process of casting bronze in a mould. Towards 650 Malas of Chios executes the first statues in marble, and, in successive olympi- 120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ads, during the latter part of that century, and the whole of the following century, we see statuary blocked out to become finished and perfect after the glorious Median wars. This is the period at which orchestral and gymnastic institutions become regular and fully developed. A social cycle terminates, that of Homer and the epos, while another begins, that of Archilochus, Callinus, Terpander and Olympus and of lyric poesy. Between Homer and his followers, who belong to the ninth and eighth centuries, and the inventors of new metres and new music who be- long to the next century, there occurs a vast trans- formation of social habits and organization. Man's horizon becomes more and more extend- ed every day. The Mediterranean is thoroughly ex- plored ; Sicily and Egypt, which Homer only knew through storied reports, become well known. In 632 the Samians were the first to sail as far as Tartessus, and, out of the tithes of their profits, they consecrated to their goddess Hera a huge bronze cup decorated with griffons and supported by three kneeling fig- ures, eleven cubits high. Multiplied colonies -arise to people and cultivate the coasts of Magna Grsecia, ART IN GREECE. 121 / Sicily, Asia Minor and the Euxine. Industrial pur- suits of all kinds flourish ; the fifty-oared boats of an- cient poems become galleys with two hundred rowers. A native of Chios discovers the art of softening, tem- pering and welding iron. The Dorian temple is erect- ed. Money, figures and writing, of which Homer was ignorant, are known. There is a change in tactics ; men fight on foot and in line instead of combating in chariots and without discipline. Human society, so scattered in the Iliad and Odyssey, becomes more closely united. Instead of an Ithaca where each family lives apart under its independent head, where there is no public authority, where twenty years could pass without convoking a public assembly, walled and guarded cities, provided with magistrates and sub- ject to a police, are founded and become republics of equal citizens under elected chiefs. At the same tune, and in consequence of this, in- tellectual culture is diversified, diffused and re-invig- orated. It unquestionably remains poetic as prose does not appear until later, but the monotonous mel- opoeia which the epic hexameter sustains gives way to a multitude of varied songs and different metres 122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF The pentameter is added to the hexameter ; the tro- chee, iambic and anapest are invented ; new and old metrical measures are combined in the distich, the strophe and others of all descriptions. The cithern which had but four strings receives seven ; Terpander establishes his modes and gives the nomes of music ;* Olympus, and, next, Thales succeed in adapting the rhythms of the cithern, flute and voice to the various shades of poetic diction which they accompany. Let us attempt to picture to ourselves this world, so re- mote, and whose fragments are almost all lost ; there is none which differs so much from our own and which, to be comprehended, demands so great an ef- fort of the imagination. It is nevertheless the prim- itive and enduring mould from which the Greek world issued. When we form a conception of lyric poetry we recur at once to the odes of Victor Hugo or the stanzas of Lamartine, a poesy which is read silently or in a low voice, alongside of a friend in some quiet and secluded spot ; our civilization renders po- * These nomes were simple tunes from which others could be de- rived by slight variations. Smith's Dictionary. ART IN GREECE. 123 esy the confidential intercourse of two kindred spir- its. That of the Greeks was uttered not only in a loud tone but it was declaimed and chanted to the sound of instruments and, again, accompanied with pantomime and dance. Suppose Delsarte or Mad- ame Yiardot singing a recitative from "Iphigenia" or " Orpheus," Rouget de 1'Isle or Rachel declaim- ing the "Marseillaise" or a chorus from Gluck's " Alceste," such as we see on the stage, with a cor- ypheus, orchestra and groups moving about before the steps of a temple, not as nowadays before the foot- lights and surrounded by painted scenery, but on a public square and beneath the splendor of sunshine, and you will have the least imperfect idea of Gre- cian fetes and customs. The entire man, body and soul, is in commotion ; the verses that remain to us are simply the detached leaves of an opera libretto. At a funeral in a Corsican village the " voceratrice" improvises and declaims songs of vengeance over the corpse of a murdered man ; also wailing-songs over the coffin of a young girl who has died before her maturity. In the Calabrian mountains and in Sicily the young people, on days given up to dancing, rep- 124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF resent in their postures and gestures petty dramas and amatory scenes. Imagine, in a similar climate, under a still finer sky, in small cities where every- body is well acquainted with each other, equally gesticulative and imaginative men, as quick in emo- tion and expression, with a still more animated and fresher impulse, more creative and ingenious mental- ly, and much more inclined to embellish every ac- tion and moment of human existence. This musical pantomime, which we only encounter in isolated fragments and in out-of-the-way places, is that which is to develope and branch out in a hundred different directions and furnish the matter for a complete lit- erature ;' there is no sentiment that it will not ex- press, no scene of public or private life which it will not adorn, no motive or situation to which it will not suffice. It becomes the natural language, as uni- versal and of as common usage as our written or printed prose ; the latter is a sort of dry notation by which nowadays one pure intellect communicates with another pure intellect ; when compared with the wholly imitative and material language of the for- mer it is nothing more than algebra and a residue. AST IN- GREECE. 125 The accent of the French language is uniform; it has no rhythmical modulation ; its long and short syllables are slightly marked and scarcely distin- guishable. One must have heard a musical tongue, the prolonged melody of a beautiful voice reciting one of Tasso's stanzas, to appreciate the effect of au- ricular sensation on inward emotion ; to know what power sound and rhythm exercise over the entire being ; how contagious their influence is throughout our nervous machinery. Such was that Greek lan- guage of which we have simply the skeleton. We see by the commentators and scholiasts that sound and measure were of equal importance with idea and image. The poet inventor of a species of metre in- vented a species of sensation. This or that group of long and short syllables is necessarily an allegro, another a largo, another a scherzo, and not only af- fects the thought, but likewise the action and music, its inflections and character. Thus did the age which produced a vast system of lyric poesy produce at the same stroke the no less vast orchestral system. We are familiar with the names of two hundred Greek dances. Up to sixteen years of age, at Athens, edu- 126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF cation was entirely orchestral. "In those days," says Aristophanes, " the youth of the same quarter of the town marched together through the streets to the school of the Harp-master, in good order and with bare feet, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. There they had their places without sitting cross-legged, and were taught the hymn ' Mighty Pallas, devastator of cities,' or ' The shout heard afar,' raising their voices to a higher pitch with the strong and rugged harmony transmitted by their fathers." A young man named Hippocleides, belonging to one of the first families, came to Sicyon to the court of the tyrant Cleisthenes and, being skilled in all phys- ical exercises, was desirous of exhibiting his good ed- ucation.* Ordering a flute-player to play an appro- priate air, he danced it accordingly, and, soon after, causing a table to be brought, he got upon it and danced the Lacedemonian and Athenian figures. Thus disciplined, they were both "singers and dancers,"f all furnishing all with noble, picturesque and poetic spectacles, and which at a later period * Herodotus, VI. ch. cxix. t Luclan. ART IN GREECE. 127 were obtained for hire. In the banquets of the clubs,* after the repast, they made libations and sang the paeon in honor of Apollo ; and then came the fete properly so called (ITomos), the pantomimic decla- mation, the lyric recitation to the sound of the cith- ern or flute, a solo followed by a refrain, as subse- quently the song of Harmodius and Aristogiton, or a duett sung and danced, like, at a later period, in the banquet of Xenophon, the meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne. When a citizen constituted himself a tyrant, and wished to enjoy his position, he extend- ed festivities of this kind around him and perma- nently established them. Polycrates of Samos had two poets, Ibycos and Anacreon, to superintend their arrangement and to compose for them music and verses. The actors of these poetic compositions consisted of the handsomest youths that could be found; Bathyll who played the flute and sang in the Ionian manner, Cleobulus with the beautiful vir- gin eyes, Simalos who wielded the pectis in the cho- rus, and Smerdis with the flowing locks whom they went in quest of among the Cicones of Thrace. It * Philities, societies of friends. 128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF was an operatic entertainment in private. The lyric poets of this epoch are, in a similar manner, chorus, masters ; their dwelling is a species of conservatory,* a " House of the Muses :" there were several of them at Lesbos, besides that of Sappho, and which were conducted by women; they had pupils from the neighboring islands and coasts, from Miletus Colophon, Salamis and Pamphylia; here, during long years were taught music, recitation and the art of beautiful posture; they ridiculed the ignorant " peasant girls who did not know how to raise their dress above the ankle ;" a corypheus was furnished by these establishments and choruses drilled for fu- neral lamentations and wedding pomps. Thus did private life throughout, in its ceremonies as well as amusements, contribute to make of man in the best sense of the term, however, and with perfect dignity what we designate as a singer, a figurant, a model and an actor. Public life contributed to the same end. In Greece the orchestral system enters into religion and * Simonides of Ceos usually occupied the "choregion" near the tem- ple of Apollo. ART IN GREECE. 129 politics, during peace and during war, in honor of the dead and to glorify victors? At the Ionian fete of Thargelia Miranermus the poet and his mistress Nanno led the procession playing the flute. Calli- nos, Alcseus and Theognis exhorted their fellow-citi- zens or their party, in verses which they themselves sung. When the Athenians, repeatedly vanquished, had decreed the penalty of death against whoever should propose to recover Salamis, Solon, in a her- ald's costume, with Mercury's cap on his head, ap- peared suddenly in the assembly, mounted the her- ald's stone, and recited an elegy with so much power that the young men set out immediately " to deliver the lovely island and relieve Athens of shame and dishonor." The Spartans, on a campaign, recited songs in their tents. At evening, after their repast, each in turn arose to repeat and gesticulate the ele- gy, while the polemarchus gave to the one who bore away the prize a larger ration of meat. It was cer- tainly a fine spectacle to see these tall young men, the strongest and best formed in Greece, with their long hair carefully fastened at the top of the head, and in a red tunic, broad polished bucklers and with 6* 130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF an air of hero and athlete, arise and sing an ode like this : " With spirit let us fight for this land, and for .our children die, being no longer chary of our lives. Fight, then, young men, standing fast one by anoth- er, nor be beginners of cowardly flight or fear. But rouse a great and valiant spirit in your breasts, and love not life, when ye contend with men. And the elders, whose limbs are no longer active, the old de- sert not or forsake. For surely this were shameful, 9 that fallen amid the foremost champions, in front of the youths, an older man should lie low, having his head now white and his beard hoary, breathing out a valiant spirit in the dust ; whilst he covers with his hands his gory loins. Yet all this befits the young whilst he enjoys the brilliant bloom of youth. To mortal men and women he is lovely to look upon, whilst he lives ; and noble when he has fallen in the foremost ranks. Shameful too is a corpse lying low in the dust, wounded behind in the back by the point of a spear. Rather let every one with firm stride await the enemy, having both feet fixed on the ground biting his lip with his teeth, and having cov- ered with the hollow of his broad shield thighs and ART IN GREECE. 131 shins below and breast and shoulders. Then let him learn war by doing bold deeds, nor let him stand with his shield out of the range of weapons. But let each drawing nigh in close fray, hit his foe, wound- ing him with long lance and sword. Having set foot beside foot, and having fixed shield against shield and crest on crest, and helmet on helmet, and breast against breast struggle in fight with his man."* There were similar songs for every circumstance of military life, and, among others, anapests for at- tacks to the sound of flutes. A spectacle of this kind occurred during the early enthusiasm of our Revolu- tion, the day when Dumouriez, placing his hat on the end of his sword, and, scaling the parapet of Jem- mapes, burst forth with the " Chant du Depart," the soldiers, on a run, singing it with him. In this great discordant clamor we can imagine a regular battle- chorus, an antique musical march. There was one of these after the victory of Salamis, when Sophocles, fifteen years old, and the handsomest youth in Athens, stripped himself as the ceremony prescribed Tyrtaeus. Bolm's classical library. 130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF an air of hero and athlete, arise and sing an ode like this : " With spirit let us fight for this land, and for our children die, being no longer chary of our lives. Fight, then, young men, standing fast one by anoth- er, nor be beginners of cowardly flight or fear. But rouse a great and valiant spirit in your breasts, and love not life, when ye contend with men. And the elders, whose limbs are no longer active, the old de- sert not or forsake. For surely this were shameful, that fallen amid the foremost champions, in front of the youths, an older man should lie low, having his head now white and his beard hoary, breathing out a valiant spirit in the dust ; whilst he covers with his hands his gory loins. Yet all this befits the young whilst he enjoys the brilliant bloom of youth. To mortal men and women he is lovely to look upon, whilst he lives ; and noble when he has fallen in the foremost ranks. Shameful too is a corpse lying low in the dust, wounded behind in the back by the point of a spear. Rather let every one with firm stride await the enemy, having both feet fixed on the ground biting his lip with his teeth, and having cov- ered with the hollow of his broad shield thighs and ART IN GREECE. 131 shins below and breast and shoulders. Then let him learn war by doing bold deeds, nor let him stand with his shield out of the range of weapons. But let each drawing nigh in close fray, hit his foe, wound- ing him with long lance and sword. Having set foot beside foot, and having fixed shield against shield and crest on crest, and helmet on helmet, and breast against breast struggle in fight with his man."* There were similar songs for every circumstance of military life, and, among others, anapests for at- tacks to the sound of flutes. A spectacle of this kind occurred during the early enthusiasm of our Revolu- tion, the day when Dumouriez, placing his hat on the end of his sword, and, scaling the parapet of Jem- mapes, burst forth with the " Chant du Depart," the soldiers, on a run, singing it with him. In this great discordant clamor we can imagine a regular battle- chorus, an antique musical march. There was one of these after the victory of Salamis, when Sophocles, fifteen years old, and the handsomest youth in Athens, stripped himself as the ceremony prescribed Tyrtaeus. Bohn's classical library. 132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF and danced a pseon in honor of Apollo in the midst of the military parade and before the trophy. "Worship, however, furnished a much larger contri- bution to the orchestral system than war or politics. According to the Greeks, the most gratifying spec- tacle to the gods was that afforded by fine, blooming ? fully developed bodies in every attitude that could display health and strength. Hence it is that their most sacred festivals were operatic processions and grave ballets. Chosen citizens, and sometimes as at Sparta, the whole city* formed choruses in honor of the gods ; each important town had its poets who composed music and verse, arranged the groups and evolutions, taught postures, drilled the actors a long time and regulated the costumes ; we have but one instance of the kind at the present day to suggest the ceremony, that of the series of performances still given, every ten years, at Ober-Ammergau in Bava- ria, where, since the middle ages, the inhabitants of the village, some five or six hundred persons, educa- ted for it from infancy, solemnly perform Chi'ist's Passion. In these fe'tes, Alcman and Stesichorus, * The Gymnopsedia. ART IN GREECE. 133 were at the same time poets, cnapel-masters, and bal- let directors ; sometimes officiating themselves and as leaders in the great compositions wherein chorusea of young men and women publicly appeared in hero- ic or divine legends. One of these sacred ballets, the dithyrambus, became, at a later period, Greek tragedy. This in itself, is at first simply a religious festival, reduced and perfected, and transported from the public square to the enclosure of a theatre ; a succession of choruses broken by recitation and by the melopoaia of a principal personage analogous to an "Evangile" by Sebastian Bach, the "Seven Works" of Haydn, an oratorio, or a Sixtine-chapel mass in which the same personages would sing the parts and constitute the groups. Among all these poetic works, the most popular and the best adapted to making us comprehend these remote customs, are the cantatas which honor the victors in the four great games. People came to Pindar for these from all parts of Greece, Sicily and the islands. He went or sent his friend, JSneas of Stymphalus, to teach to the chorus the dance, the music, and the verses of his song. The festival began 136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF we catch, from time to time an accent of these vibra- ting tones ; we see as in a flash the grandiose atti- tude of the crowned youth, advancing out of the chorus to utter the words of Jason or the vow of Hercules; we divine the quick gesticulation, the outstretched arms, the large muscles swelling his breast ; we encounter here and there a fragment of the poetic hue as brilliant as a lately disinterred painting in Pompeii Now it is the corypheus who advances : "As when a man takes and gives out of his wealthy hand a drinking-cup, frothing within with the dew of the * grape, presenting it to a youthful son-in-law on his passing from one house to another^* * * so I now in sending liquid nectar, the gift of the Muses and the sweet fruit of my mind, to men who have carried off prizes from the contest, compliment them as victors at Olympia and Pytho."* Now the chorus ceases and then the alternating half-chorus developes in crescendo the superb sonor- ousness of the rolling and triumphant ode. " "What- ever Zeus loveth not flies in alarm on hearing the * The Odes of Pindar, translated by Paley. ART IN GREECE. 137 loud call of the Pierides both on earth and in the raging sea ; and he who lies in the awful hell, that enemy of the gods, Typho3us with his hundred heads, whom erst the Cilician cave of many names did rear, but now the sea-enclosing cliffs beyond Cumse (do hold,), while Sicily presses down his shaggy breast, and that pillar of heaven keeps him fast, the snowy ^tna, all the year through the nurse of bright daz- zling snow. From it are belched forth out of its in- most depths the purest jets of unapproachable fire. In the daytime the streams (of lava) pour forth a lurid torrent of smoke, but in the dark ruddy flame rolling in volumes carries rocks into the deep level sea with a horrible clatter. 'Tis that snake-formed monster that sends up from beneath these most dread- ful founts of fire, a prodigy marvellous to behold, and a wonder even to hear of from passers-by, how that he lies imprisoned between the dark-leaved heights of ^Etna and the plain below, and his rocky bed, furrowing all his back, galls him as he lies upon it* The bubbling flow of images ^n creases broken at * The Odes of Pindar, translated by Paley. 138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF each step by sudden jets, refluxes and leaps whose "boldness and enormity permit no translation. It is plain that these Greeks, so lucid and calm in their prose, become intoxicated and are thrown off their balance by lyric inspiration and madness. These are excesses out of all harmony with our blunted organs and our circumspect civilization. Nevertheless we can divine enough of them to comprehend what such a culture contributes to the arts which represent the human form. It shapes man through the chorus ; it teaches him attitudes and gestures, the sculptural action ; it places him in a group which is a moving bas-relief; it is wholly directed to making him a spontaneous actor, one who performs fervidly and for his own pleasure, who sets himself up as a spec- tacle to himself, who carries the gravity, freedom, dignity and spirit of a citizen into the evolutions of the figurant and the mimicry of the dancer. The or- chestral system provided sculpture with its postures, action, draperies, and groupings ; the motive of the Parthenon frieze is the Panathenaic procession, while the Pyrrhica suggests the sculptures of Phigalia and of Bud rum. ART IN GREECE. 139 II. Alongside of the orchestra there was, in Greece, an institution still more national and which formed the second half of education, the gymnasium. We already meet with it in Homer; his heroes wrestle, launch the discus, and hold foot and chariot races ; he who is not skilled in bodily exercises passes for a man of a low class ; .... A mere trader, looking out For freight and watching o'er the wares that form The cargo.* The institution, however, is not yet either regular, pure or complete. There are no fixed localities or epochs for the games. They are celebrated as the opportunity offers, on the death of a hero or in honor of a stranger. Many of the exercises which serve to increase vigor and agility are unknown in them ; on the other hand, they add exercises with weapons, * The Odyssey, translated by W. C. Bryant. 14:0 THE PHILOSOPHY OF the duel even to blood, and practise with the bow and pike. It is only in the following period, as with the orchestral system aud lyric poesy, that we see them develope, take root and assume the final shape aud importance with which we are familiar. The signal was given by the Dorians, a new population of pure Greek race, who, issuing from the mountains, invaded the Peloponnesus, and, like the Neustrian Franks, introduced their tactics, imposed their rule and renewed the national life with their intact spirit. They were rude and energetic men bearing some re- semblance to the mediaeval Swiss; not so lively as and much less brilliant than the lonians ; possessing a fondness for tradition, a sentiment of reverence, tho instinct of discipline, a calm, virile, and elevated spirit, and whose genius showed its imprint in the rigid severity of their worship, as in the heroic and moral character of their gods. The principal section, that of the Spartans, established itself in Laconia- amidst the ancient inhabitants either subdued or un- der serviie dominion ; nine thousand families of proud and hard masters in a city without walls, to keep obedient one hundred and twenty thousand farmers ART IN GREECE. 141 and two hundred thousand slaves, constituted an army immovably encamped amidst enemies ten times more numerous. On this leading trait all the others depend. The regime, prescribed by the situation, gradually be- came fixed, and, towards the epoch of the restora- tion of the Olympic games, it was complete. Indi- vidual interests and caprices had disappeared before the idea of public safety. The discipline is that of a regiment threatened with constant danger. The Spartan is forbidden to trade, to follow any pursuit, to alienate his land, and to increase its rent ; he is to think of nothing but of being a soldier. If he trav- els, he may use the horse, slave and provisions of his neighbor; service among comrades is a matter of right, while proprietorship is not strict. The new- born child is brought before a council of elders, and if it is too feeble or deformed, it is put to death ; none but sound men are admitted into *he army, in which all, from the cradle, are conscripts. An old man past begetting children selects a young man whom he takes to his home, because each household must furnish recruits. Perfect men interchange THE PHILOSOPHY OF wives in order to be better friends ; in a camp there is no scrupulousness about family matters, many things being held in common. People eat together in squads, like a mess which has its own regulations and in which each furnishes a part in money or its equivalent. Military duty takes precedence of ev- ery thing. It is a reproach to linger at home ; bar- rack life is superior to domestic life. A young bridegroom seeks his wife in secret and passes the day as usual in the drilling-school or on the parade- ground. Children, for the same reason, are military pupils (agelai)) brought up in common, and, after sev- en years of age, distributed into companies. In re- lation to them every perfected adult is an elder, an officer (Paidonomos), and can punish them without paternal interference. Barefoot, clothed with a sin- gle garment, and with the same dress in winter as in summer, they march through the streets, silently and with downcast eyes, like so many youthful con- scripts to the recruiting-station. Costume is a uni- form, and habits, like the gait, are prescribed. The young sleep on a heap of rushes, bathe daily in the cool waters of the Eurotas. eat little and fast, and ART IN GREECE. live worse in the city than in the camp, because the future soldier must be hardened. Divided into troops of a hundred, each under a young chief, they fight together with fists and feet, which is the ap- prenticeship for war. If they wish to add any thing to their ordinarily meagre diet, they must steal it from the dwellings or the farms : a soldier must know how to keep himself alive by marauding. Now and then they are let loose in ambush on the highways, and, at evening, they kill belated Helots : a sight of blood is a good thing, and it is well to get the hand in early. As to the arts, these consist of those suitable for an army. The Dorians brought along with them a special type of music, the Dorian mode, the only one, perhaps, whose origin is purely Grecian.* It is of a grave, manly, elevated character, very simple and even harsh, admirable for inspiring patience and en- ergy. It is not left to individual caprice ; the law prohibits the introduction of the variations, enerva- tions and fancies of the foreign style ; it is a public * Plato, in the " Theages," says, speaking of the good man who dis- courses on virtue, "In the wonderful harmony of action and speech we recognize the Dorian mode the only one which is truly Greek." 144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF and moral institution ; as with the drum and the bu- gle-call in our regiments, it regulates marches and parades ; there are hereditary flute-players similar to the bagpipers of the Scottish clans.* The dance it- self is a drill or a procession. Boys, after five years of age, are instructed in the Pyrrhica, a pantomime of armed combatants, who imitate manoeuvres of de- fense and attack, every attitude taken and every move- ment made with a view to strike, ward off, draw back, spring forward, stoop, bend the bow and launch the pike. There is another named " anapale," in which young boys simulate wrestling and the pancratium. There are others for young men ; others for young girls, in which there is violent jumping, "leaps of the stag," and headlong races where, " like colts and with streaming hair, they make the dust fly."f The prin- cipal ones, however, are the gymnopsedia, grand re- views, in which the whole nation figures distributed in choruses. That of the old men sang, " Once were we young men filled with strength ;" that of the young men responded, " We of to-day are thus endowed ; * See the "Fair Maid of Perth," by Walter Scott ; and the combat of the Clan Clhele and Clan Chattan t Aristophanes. ART IN GREECE. let him who is so disposed make trial of us ;" that of the ^children added ; " And we, at some future day, will be still more valiant."* All, from infancy, had learnt and rehearsed the step, the evolutions, the tone and the action ; nowhere did choral poesy form vast- er and better regulated ensembles. If nowadays we would find a spectacle very remotely resembling this, but still analogous, St. Cyr, with its parades and drills and, still better, the military gymnastic school, where soldiers learn to sing in chorus, might perhaps, suffice. There is nothing surprising in a city of this kind CHORDS. OP OLD MEX. We are old and feeble now ; Feeble hands to age belong ; But when o'er our youthful brow Fell the dark hair, we were strong. CHORUS OF YOUNG MEN. Though your youthful strength departs With your children it endures ; In our arms and in our hearts Livee the valor that was yours. CHORUS OF BOYS. We shall soon that strength attain ; Deeds like yours shall make us known. And the glory we shall gain Haply may surpass your own. BBTANT : translated from the Greek. 146 THE PHILOSOPHY OF organizing and perfecting gymnastics. At the cost of his life a Spartan had to be equal to ten Helots ; as he was hoplite and foot-soldier and had to fight man to man, in line and resolutely, a perfect educa- tion consisted of that which formed the most agile and most robust gladiator. In order tt> obtain this it began previous to birth ; quite the opposite of other Greeks the Spartans not only prepared the male but likewise the female, in order that the child which in- herited both bloods should receive courage and vig- or from his mother as well as from his father.* Girls have their gymnasia and are exercised like boys, nude or in a short tunic, in running, leaping, and throwing the discus and lance ; they have their own choruses ; they figure in the gymnopredia along with the men. Aristophanes, with a tinge of Athenian raillery, admires their fresh carnation, their blooming health and their somewhat brutal vigor.f The law, moreover, fixes the age of marriages, and allots the most favorable time and circumstances for generating good progeny. There is some chance for parents of * Xenophon, The Lacedemonian Kepublic. t The part of Lampito in the "Lysistrata." AST IN GREECE. 147 this description producing strong and handsome children ; it is the system of horse-trainers, and is ful- ly carried out, since all defective products are reject- ed. As soon as the infant begins to walk they not only harden and train it, but again they methodical- ly render it supple and powerful ; Xenophon says that they alone among the Greeks exercised equally all parts of the body, the neck, the arms, the shoul- ders, the legs and, not merely in youth but through- out life and every day, and in camp twice a day. The effect of this discipline is soon apparent. " The Spartans," says Xenophon, " are the healthiest of all the Greeks, and among them are found the finest men and the handsomest women in Greece." They overcame the Messenians who fought with the disor- der and impetuosity of Homeric times ; they became the moderators and chiefs of Greece, and at the time of the Median wars their ascendancy was so well es- tablished that, not only on land but at sea, when they had scarcely any vessels, all the Greeks, and even the Athenians, received generals from them without a murmur. When a people becomes first in statesmanship H8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF and in war its neighbors closely or remotely imitate the institutions that have given it the supremacy. The Greeks gradually borrow from the Spartans, and, in general, from the Dorians, the important char- acteristics of their habits, regime and art ; the Dori- an harmony, the exalted choral poesy, many of the ceremonies of the dance, the style of architecture, the simpler and more manly dress, the more rigid military discipline, the complete nudity of the ath- lete, gymnastics worked up into a system. Many of the terms of military art, of music and of the pa- lestra, are of Doric origin or belong to the Dorian dialect. Already in the ninth century (B.C.) the growing importance of gymnastics had shown itself in the restoration of games, which had been inter- rupted, while innumerable facts show, evidently, that they annually became more popular. Those of Olympia in 776 serve as an era and a chronological starting-point for a series of years. During the two subsequent centuries those of Pytho, of the Corin- thian Isthmus and of Nemea are established. They are at first confined to the simple race of the stadi- um ; to this is added in succession the double race of ART IN GREECE. 149 the stadium, wrestling, the pentathlon, pugilism, the chariot race, the pancratium and the horse race ; and next, for children, the foot race, wrestling, the pancratium, boxing, and other games, in all twenty- four exercises. Lacedemonian customs overcome Homeric traditions; the victor no longer obtains some prized object but a simple crown of leaves; he ceases to wear the ancient girdle, and, at the four- teenth Olympiad, strips himself entirely. The names of the victors show that they come from all pai'ts of Greece, from Magna Grascia, the islands and the most distant colonies. Henceforth there is no city without its gymnasium; it is one of the signs by which we recognize a Grecian town.* The first one at Athens dates from about the year 700. Un- der Solon there were already three large public gymnasia and a number of smaller ones. The youth of sixteen or eighteen years passed his hours there as in a lycee of day-scholars arranged, not for the culture of the mind, but for the perfect development of the body. The study of grammar and music seems indeed to have ceased in order that the young * An expression by Pausanias, 150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF man might enter a higher and more special class. The gymnasium consisted of a great square with porticoes and avenues of plane-trees, generally near a fountain or a stream, and decorated with numerous statues of gods and crowned athletes. It had its master, its monitors, its special tutors and its fete in honor of Hermes ; the pupils had a playspell in the intervals between the exercises ; citizens visited it when they pleased; there were numerous seats around the race course ; people came there to prom- enade and to look at the young folks ; it was a place for gossip ; philosophy was born there at a later pe- riod. In this school, which resulted in a steady com- petition, emulation led to excesses and prodigies; men were seen exercising there their whole life. The laws of the Games required those who entered the arena to swear that they had exercised at least ten consecutive months without interruption and with the greatest care. But the men do much more than this; the impulse lasts for entire years and even into maturity ; they follow a regimen ; they eat a great deal and at certain hours ; they harden their muscles by using the strigil and cold water; they ART IN GREECE. abstain from pleasures and excitements ; they con- demn themselves to continence. Some among them renew the exploits of fabnlous heroes. Milo, it is said, bore a bull on his shoulders, and seizing the rear of a harnessed chariot, stopped its advance. An inscription placed beneath the statue of Phayllos, the CT otonian, stated that he leaped across a space fifty-five feet in width and cast the discus, weighing eight pounds, ninety-five feet. Among Pindar's ath- letes there are some who are giants. You will observe that, in the Greek civilization, these admirable bodies are not rarities, so many products of luxury, and, as nowadays, useless pop- pies in a field of grain; on the contrary, we must liken them to the tallest stems of a magnificent harvest. They are a necessity of the State and a demand of society. The Hercules I have cited were not merely for parade purposes. Milo led his fellow-citizens to combat, and Phayllos was the chief of the Crotonians who came to aid the Greeks against the Medes. A general of those days was not a strategist with a map and spy-glass occupy- ing an elevation ; he fought, pike in hand, at the 152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF head of his forces, body to body, and as a soldier. Miltiades, Aristides, Pericles, and at a much later period, even Agesilaus, Pelopidas and Pyrrhus use their arms, and not merely their intellect, to strike, parry and assault, on foot and on horseback, in the thickest of the fight; Epaminondas, a statesman and philosopher, being mortally wounded, consoles him- self like a simple hoplite for having saved hjs shield. A victor at the penthalou, Aratus, and the last Gre- cian leader, found his advantage in his agility and strength on scaling walls and in surprises. Alexan- der, at the Granicus, charged like a hussar and was the first to spring, like a tumbler, into a city of the Oxydracae. A bodily and personal mode of warfare like this requires the first citizens, and even princes, to be complete athletes. Add to ** the exigencies of danger the stimulants of festivals. Ceremonies, like battles, demanded trained bodies ; no one could figure in the choruses^ without having passed through the gymnasia. I have stated how the poet Sophocles danced the paean naked after the victory of Salamis ; at the end of the fourth century the same customs still subsisted. Alexander, on ART IN GREECE. 153 reaching the Troad, threw aside his clothes that he and his companions might honor Achilles by racing around the pillar which marked the hero's grave. A little farther on, at Phaselis, on seeing a statue of the philosopher Theodectes in the public square, he returned after his repast to dance around it and cover it with crowns. To provide for tastes and necessities of this sort, the gymnasium was the only school. It resembles the academies of our later cen- turies, to which all young nobles resorted to learn fencing, dancing and riding. Free citizens were the nobles of antiquity ; there was, consequently, no free citizen who had not frequented the gymnasium ; on this condition only could a man be well educated ; otherwise he sank to the class of tradesmen and peo- ple of a low origin. Plato, Chrysippus and the poet Timocreon were at one time athletes ; Pythagoras passed for having taken the prize for boxing ; Eurip- ides was crowned as an athlete at the Eleusinian games. Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, entertaining the suitors of his daughter, provided them with an exercising ground, " in order that," says Herodotus, " he might test their race and education." The body, 17* 154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF in fine, preserved to the end the traces of its gym- nastic or servile education ; it could be appreciated at a glance, through its bearing, gait, action and mode of dress, the same as, formerly, the gentleman, polish- ed and ennobled by the academies, could be distin- guished from the rustic clown or the impoverished laborer. Even when nude and motionless, the body testi- fied to its exercise by the beauty of its forms. The skin, embrowned and rendered firm by the sun, oil, dust, the strigil and cold baths, did not seem uncov- ered ; it was accustomed to the air ; one felt on look- ing at it that it was in its element ; it certainly did not shiver or present a mottled or goose-skin aspect ; it was a healthy tissue, of a beautiful tone, indicative of a free and vigorous existence. Agesilaus, to en- courage his soldiers, one day caused his Persian pris- oners to be stripped ; at the sight of their soft white skin the Greeks broke into a laugh and marched on- ward, full of contempt for their enemies. The mus- cles were rendered strong and supple ; nothing was neglected; the diverse parts of the body balanced each other ; the upper section of the arm, which is ART IN GREECE. 155 now so meagre, and the stiff and poorly-furnished omoplates were filled out and formed a pendant in proportion with the hips and thighs; the masters, like veritable artists, exercised the body so that it might not only possess vigor, resistance and speed, but likewise symmetry and elegance. The " Dying Gaul,"* which belongs to the Pergamenian school, shows, on comparing it with the statues of athletes, the distance which separates a rude from a cultivated body ; on the one hand, there is the hair scattered in coarse meshes like a mane, a peasant's feet and hands, a thick skin, inflexible muscles, sharp elbows, swollen veins, angular contours, and harsh lines nothing but the animal body of a robust savage; on the other hand, all the forms ennobled ; at first the heel flabby and weak,f now enclosed in a clean oval ; at first the foot too much displayed and betraying its simian origin, now arched and more elastic for the leap ; at first the knee-pan articulations and entire skeleton prominent, now half effaced and simply in- * The author thus designates the statue commonly known under the title of the " Dying Gladiator." Tr. t See the small bronze archaic Apollo in the Lonvre, also the Mgine- ten statues. , 156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF dicated ; at first the line of the shoulders horizontal and hard, now inclining and softened everywhere the harmony of parts which continue and flow into each other, the youth and freshness of a fluid exist- ence as natural and as simple as that of a tree or a flower. Numerous passages could be pointed out in " Menexenus," the " Rivals" and the " Charmides" of Plato, which seize some one of these postures on the wing ; a young man thus reared uses his limbs well and naturally; he knows how to bend his body, stand erect, rest with his shoulder against a column, and, in all these attitudes, remain as beautiful as a statue ; the same as a gentleman, before the Revolu- tion, had, when bowing, taking snuff or listening, the cavalier grace and ease observable in old portraits and in engravings. It was not the courtier, however, that was apparent in the ways, action and pose of the Greek, but the man of the palsestra. Plato depicts him as hereditary gymnastics fashioned him among a se- lect race : " Charmides, I think that you ought to excel others in all good qualities ; for, if I am not mis- taken, there is no one present who could easily point out ten Athenian houses, the alliance of which was ART W GREECE. 157 likely to produce a better or nobler son than the two from which you are sprung. There is your father's house, which is descended from Critias, the son of Dropidas, whose family has been commemorated in the panegyrical verses of Anacreon, Solon, and many other poets as famous for beauty and virtue and all other high fortune : and your mother's house is equally distinguished; for your maternal uncle Pyrilampes, never met with his equal in Persia at the court of the great king or on the whole continent in all the places to which he went as ambassador, for stature and beauty ; that whole family is not a whit inferior to the other. Having such ancestry you ought to be first in all things, and as far as I can see, sweet son of Glaucon, your outward form is no dis- honor to them."* In this scene, which takes us back much farther than its date, even to the best period of the nude form, all is precious and significant. We find in it the traditions of the blood, the result of education, the popular and universal taste for beauty, all the original sources of perfect sculpture. Homer had * The Dialogues of Plato, " Charmides,'' translated by Jowett. 158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF mentioned Achilles and Nereus as the most beauti- ful among the Greeks assembled against Troy.; He- rodotus named Callicrates, the Spartan, as the hand- somest of the Greeks in arms against Mardonius. All the fetes of the gods and all great ceremonies brought together competitors in beauty. The finest old men of Athens were selected to cany branches in the Panathenaic procession, and the handsomest men at Elis to bear the offerings to the goddess. At Sparta, in the gymnopasdia, the generals and prominent men whose figure and external nobility were not sufficiently marked were consigned to the lower ranks in the choral defile. The Lacedemoni- ans, according to Theophrastus, imposed a fine on their king, Archidamus, because he married a woman of short stature, pretending that she would give them kinglets and not kings. Pausanias found competi- tions of beauty in Arcadia in which women were ri- vals, and which had lasted for nine centuries. A Persian, related to Xerxes, and a grandee of his army, dying at Achantus, the inhabitants sacrificed to him as a hero. The Segestans had erected a small temple over the grave of Philip, a Crotonian ART IN GREECE. 159 refugee among them and a victor in the Olympic games, the most beautiful Greek of his day, and to whom during the lifetime of Herodotus, sacrifices were still offered. Such is the sentiment which edu- cation had nourished and which in its turn, reacting thereon, made the formation of beauty its end. The race, certainly, was a fine one, but it was rendered still finer through system ; will had improved nature, and the statuary set about finishing what nature, even cultivated, only half completed. We have thus seen during two centuries the two institutions which form the human body,, the orches- tral and gymnastic systems, born, developed, and diffused around the centres of their origin; spreading throughout the Greek world, furnishing the instru- ments of war, the decorations of worship, the era of chronology; presenting corporeal perfection as the principal aim of human life and pushing admiration of completed form even to vice.* Slowly, by de- grees and at intervals, the art which fashions the statue of metal, wood, ivory or marble, accompanies * Grecian vice, unknown in the, time of Homer, begins, according to all appearances, with the institution of gymnasia. See Becker, " Chari- cles" (Excursus). 160 the education which fashions the living statue. It does not progress at the same pace ; although con- temporary, it remains for these two centuries inferior and simply imitative. The Greeks were concerned about truth before they were concerned about copy- ing it ; they were interested in veritable bodies be- fore being interested in simulated bodies ; they de- voted themselves to forming a chorus before at- tempting to sculpture a chorister. The physical or moral model always precedes the work which repre- sents it ; but it is only slightly in advance ; it is ne- cessary that it be still present in all memories the mo- ment that the work is done. Art is an expanded and harmonious echo ; it acquires its fulness and completeness when the life, of which it is the echo, begins to decline. Such is the case with Greek stat- uary ; it becomes adult just at the moment the lyric age ends in the period of fifty years following the battle of Salamis, when, along with prose, the dra- ma and the first researches in philosophy, a new cul- ture begins. We see art suddenly passing from ex- act imitation to beautiful invention. Aristocles, the ^Eginetan sculptors, Onatas, Canachus, Pythagoras ART ZZV GREECE. 161 of Rhegium, Calamis and Ageladas still closely copied the real form as Verocchio, Pollaiolo, Ghir- landaijo, Fra Filippo and Perugino himself; but in the hands of their pupils, Myro, Polycleitus and Phidias the ideal form is set free as in the hands of Leonardo, Michael Angelo and Raphael. 162 THE PHILOSOPHY OF III It is not merely men, the most beautiful of all, that Greek statuary has produced; it has likewise produced gods, and, in the united judgment of an- tiquity, its gods were its masterpieces. To the pro- found sentiment of corporeal and athletic perfection was added, with the public and with the masters, an original religious sentiment, a conception of the world now lost, a peculiar mode of apprehending, venerating and adoring natural and divine powers. One must figure to himself this particular class of emotions and kind of faith if one would penetrate a little deeper into the soul and genius of Polycleitus, Agoracritus or of Phidias. It is sufficient to read Herodotus* to see how lively faith still was in the first half of the fifth centu- ry. Not only is Herodotus pious, so devout even as * Herodotus was still living at the epoch of the Peloponnesian war. He alludes to it in Book vn. 137, and in Book IX. 73. fc ART IN GREECE. 163 not to presume to give utterance to certain sacred names, or reveal certain legends, but again the entire nation brings to its worship the impassioned and grandiose seriousness simultaneously expressed in the poetry of ^Eschylus and Pindar. The gods are living and present ; they speak ; they have been seen like the Virgin and the saints in the thirteenth cen- tury. The heralds of Xerxes having been slain by the Spartans, the entrails of the victims become un- favorable, because the murder offended the dead Talthybios, Agamemnon's glorious herald, whom the Spartans worshipped. In order to appease him two rich and noble citizens go to Asia and offer them- selves to Xerxes. On the arrival of the Persians the cities consult the oracle ; the Athenians are ordered to summon their son-in-law to their aid ; they remem- ber that Boreas carried off Orythia, the daughter of Erectheus, their first ancestor, and they erect a chap- el to him near the Hyssus. At Delphi the god de- clares that he will defend himself; thunder-bolts fall on the barbarians, rocks fall and crush them, whilst from the temple of Pallas Pronea issue voices and war-cries, and two heroes of the country of superhu- 164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ^ man stature, Phylacos and Autonoos, succeed in put- ting the terrified Persians to flight. Before the bat- tle of Salamis the Athenians import from ^Egeria the statues of the ^Eacides to combat with them. During the fight some travellers near Eleusis see a great cloud of dust and hear the voice of the mysti- cal lacchus approaching to aid the Grecians. After the battle they offer the gods, as first-fruits, three captive ships ; one of them is for Ajax, while they de- duct from the booty the money required for a statue of him twelve cubits high at Delphi. I should never stop if I were to enumerate all the evidences of pub- lic piety ; it was still fervid among the people fifty years later. " Diopeithes," says Plutarch, " passed a law directing those who did not recognize the exist- ence of the gods or who put forth new doctrines on celestial phenomena to be denounced." Aspasia, Anaxagoras, and Euripides were annoyed or accused, Alcibiades condemned to death, and Socrates put to death for the assumed or established crime of impi- ety; popular indignation proved terrible against those who had counterfeited or violated the mysteries of Hermes. We see unquestionably in these details, AST IN GREECE. 165 along with the persistency of the antique faith, the advent of free thought ; there was around Pericles, as around Lorenzo de Medici, a small cluster of phi- losophers and dialecticians ; Phidias, like Michael Angelo at a later period, was admitted among them. But in both epochs, legend and tradition filled and had supreme control of the imagination and conduct. When the echo of philosophic discourse reached the soul filled with picturesque forms and made it vibrate, it was to aggrandize and purify divine forms. The new wisdom did not destroy religion ; she interpret- ed it, she brought it back to its foundation, to the poetic sentiment of natural forces. The grandiose conceptions of early physicists left the world as ani- mated and rendered it more august. It is owing, perhaps, to Phidias having heard Anaxagoras dis- course on the vou that he conceived his Jupiter, his Pallas, his heavenly Venus, and completed, as the Greeks said, the majesty of the gods. In order to possess the sentiment of the divine it is necessary to be capable of distinguishing, through the precise form of the legendary god, the great, per- manent and general forces of which it is the issue. ]G6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF One remains a cold and prejudiced idolater if, be- yond the personal form, he does not detect, in a sort of half-light, the physical or moral power of which the figure is the symbol. This was still perceptible in the time of Cimon and Pericles. Studies in compar- ative mythology have recently shown that Grecian myths, related to Sanscrit myths, originally express- ed the play of natural forces only, and that lan- guage had gradually formed divinities from the diver- sity, fecundity and beauty of physical elements and phenomena. Polytheism, fundamentally, is the senti- ment of animated, immortal and creative nature, and this sentiment lasts for eternity. The divine im- pregnated all things : these were invoked ; often in ^Eschylua and Sophocles do we see man addressing the elements as if they were sacred beings with whom he is associated to conduct the great chorus of life. Philoctetes, on his departure, salutes " ye watery nymphs of the meadows, and thou manly roar of ocean dashing onwards. Farewell, thou sea- girt plain of Lemnos, and waft me safely with fair voyage thither, whither mighty fate conveys me."* * The Tragedies of Sophocles : Oxford translation. ART IN GREECE. 167 Prometheus, bound to his crag, calls on all the mighty beings who people space : " O divine sether and ye swift- winged breezes, and ye fountains of riv- ers, and countless dimpling of the waves of the deep ; and thou Earth, mother of all, and to the all-seeing orb of the Sun, I appeal! Look upon me what treatment I, a God, am enduring at the hand of the Gods !"* The spectators simply let lyric emotion lead them on in order to obtain primitive metaphors, which, without being conscious of it, were the germs of their faith. " The serene sky," says Aphrodite, in one of the lost pieces of ^Eschylus, " delights to embrace the Earth, and Love espouses her ; the rain which falls from the life-giving Sky fecundates the Earth who then brings forth for mortals pastur- age for cattle and the corn of Demeter." To com- prehend this language we have only to leave behind us our artificial towns and formal culture. The soli- tary wanderer among mountains or by the seaside who surrenders himself wholly to the aspects of an intact nature soon holds communion with her ; she * ^Eschylus: translated by Buckley. Bohn's Classical Library. 168 THE PHILOSOPHY OF becomes animated for him like a physiognomy; mountains, threatening and motionless, become bald- headed giants or crouching monsters; the waves which toss and gleam become laughing and playful .creatures; the grand silent pines resemble serious virgins; and on contemplating the radiant blue southern sea, adorned as if for a festival, wearing the universal smile of which JEschylus speaks, he is at once led, in expressing the voluptuous beauty whose infinity penetrates and surrounds him, to name that goddess born of sea-foam who, rising above the waves, conies to ravish the hearts of mor- tals and of gods. When a people is conscious of the divine life of natural objects it has no trouble in distinguishing the natural origin of divine personages. In the golden centuries of statuary this underlying condi- tion of things still peered out beneath the human and definite figure by which legend translated it. Certain divinities, especially those of running streams, mountains and forests, have always remain- ed transparent. The naiad or the oread was simply a young girl like her we see seated on a rock in the ART IN GREECE. 1(39 metopes of Olympia,* at least the figurative and sculptural imagination so expressed it : but in giv- ing it a name people detected the mysterious gravi- ty of the calm forest or the coolness of the spouting fountain. In Homer, whose poems formed the Bi- ble of the Greek, the shipwrecked Ulysses, after swimming a couple of days, Had reached the month Of a soft flowing river. He felt The current's flow and thus devoutly prayed ; " Hear me, oh sovereign power, whoe'er thou art, To thee, the long desired, I come. I seek Escape from Neptune's threatenings on the sea; To thy stream I come And to thy knees from many a hardship past Oh thou that here art ruler, I declare Myself thy suppliant. Be thou merciful." He ceased ; the river stayed his current, checked The billows, smoothed them to a calm, and gave The swimmer a safe landing at his mouth I It is evident that the divinity here is not a bearded personage concealed in a cavern, but the flowing river itself, the great tranquil and hospitable current. Likewise the river, angered at Achilles : * In the Louvre. 170 THE PHILOSOPHY OF " Spake, and wrathfully he rose against Achilles, rose with turbid waves, and noise, - And foam, and blood, and bodies of the dead. One purple billow of the Jove-born stream Swelled high and whelmed Achilles. Juno saw And trembled lest the hero should be whirled Downward by the great river, and in haste She called to Vulcan, her beloved son ; Then the god Seized on the river with his glittering fires. The elms, the willows, and the tamarisks Pell, scorched to cinders, and the lotus-herbs, Rushes, and reeds that richly fringed the banks Of that fair-flowing current were consumed. The eels and fishes, that were wont to glide Hither and thither through the pleasant depths And eddies, languished in the fiery breath Of Vulcan, mighty artisan. The strength Of the great river withered, and bp spake : " O Vulcan, there is none of all the gods Who may contend with thee. I combat not With fires like thine. Cease then."* Six centuries later, Alexander, embarking on the Hydaspes and standing on the prow, offered libations to the river, to the other river its sister, and to the Indus who received both and who was about to bear him. To a simple and healthy mind, a river, especi- ally if it is unknown, is in itself a divine power; man, before it, feels himself in the presence of one, eternal * The Iliad, Book XVI : translated by W. C. Bryant ART IN GREECE. 171 being, always active, by turns supporter and destroy- er, and with countless forms and 'aspects ; an inex- haustible and regular flow gives him an idea of a calm and virile existence but majestic and superhu- man. In ages of decadence, in statues like those of the Tiber and the Nile, ancient sculptors still remember- ed the primitive impressions, the large torso, the at- titude of repose, the vague gaze of the statue, showing that, through the human form, they were always mindful of and expressing the magnificent, uniform and indifferent expansion of the mighty current. At other times the name disclosed the nature of the god. Hestia signifies the hearthstone ; the god- dess never could be wholly separated from the sa- cred flame which served as the nucleus of domestic life. Demeter signifies the mother earth ; ritualistic epithets call her a divinity of darkness, of the pro- found and subterranean, the nurse of the young, the bearor of fruits, the verdant. The sun, in Homer, is another god than Apollo, the moral personage be- ing confounded in him wi^h physical light. Numer- ous other divinities, " Horae," the Seasons, " Dice," Justice, "Nemesis," Repression, bear their sense 172 ' THE PHILOSOPHY OF along with their name into the soul of the worship- per. I will cite but one of these, " Eros," Love, to show how the Greek, intellectually free and acute, united in the same emotion the worship of a divine personage and the divination of a natural force. " Love," says Sophocles, " invincible in strife ; Love, who overcomest all powers and fortunes, thou dwell- est on the delicate cheeks of the young maiden ; and thou Grossest the sea and entereth rustic cabins, and there are none among the immortals nor among pass- ing men that can escape thee." A little later, in the hands of the convivialists of the Symposiun, the na- ture of the god varies according to diverse interpre- tations of the title. For some, since love signifies sympathy and concord, Love is the most universal of the gods, and, as Hesiod has it, the author of or- der and harmony in the world. According to oth- ers he is the youngest of the gods, for age excludes love : he is the most delicate for he moves and rests on hearts, the tenderest objects and only on those which are tender ; he is oia subtle, fluid essence, be- cause he enters into souls and leaves them without, their being aware of it ; he has the tint of a flower ART IN GREEOE. 173 because he lives among perfumes and flowers. Ac- cording to others, finally, Love being desire and, therefore, the lack of something, is the child of Pov- erty meagre, slovenly and barefoot, sleeping in beautiful starlight, athirst for beauty and therefore bold, active, industrious, persevering and a philoso- pher. The myth revives of itself and passes through more than a dozen forms in the hands of Plato. In the hands of Aristophanes we see the clouds becom- ing, for a moment, almost counterpart divinities ; and if, in the Theogony of Hesiod, we follow the half considered, half involuntary confusion which he establishes between divine personages and physical elements ;* if we remark that he enumerates " thirty thousand guardian gods of the nursing earth ;" if we remember that Thales, the first physicist and the first philosopher said every thing is born of water, and, at the same time, that every thing is full of gods, we can comprehend the profound sentiment which then sustained Greek religion; the sublime emotion, the admiration, the veneration with which * See especially the generation of diverse gods in the Theogony. His mind throughout floats between cosmology and mythology. 174: THE PHILOSOPHY OF the Greek divined the infinite forces of animated na- ture under the images of his divinities. All, indeed, were not incorporated with objects to the same extent. Some there were, and they were the most popular, which the more energetic labor of legend had detached and erected into distinct per- sonages. The Greek Olympus may be likened to an olive tree towards the end of the summer. The fruit, according to the height and position of the branches, is more or less advanced ; some of it, scarcely formed, is little else than a swollen pistil and belongs strictly to the tree ; some again, already ripe, is still fast to the branch ; some, finally, is thoroughly matured and fallen, and it requires no little attention to recognize the peduncle which bore it. So, the Greek Olympus, according to the degree of transformation which hu- manizes natural forces, presents, in its different stages, divinities in which physical character prevails over personal configuration; others in which the two phases are equal ; others, at length, in which the god, become human, is only attached by a few threads, one thread only being sometimes visible, to the ele- mentary phenomenon from which it issues. To this, ART IN GREECE. 175 nevertheless, it is attached. Zeus, who in the Iliad is the head of an imperious family, and in " Prome- theus" an usurping and tyrannical king, ever remains, in many points, what he was at first, a rainy and thunder-striking sky: consecrated epithets and an- cient locutions indicate his original nature ; the streams " flow from him," " Zeus rains." In Crete his name signifies day- ; Ennius, at Rome, will tell you later that he is that " sublime, glowing brightness which all invoke under the name of Jupiter." We see in Aristophanes that for the peasantry, rural peo- ple, simple minded and somewhat antique, he is al- ways Him who " waters the ground and causes the growth of the corn." On being told by a sophist that there is no Zeus, they are surprised and demand who it is that bursts forth in flashes of lightning or descends in the showers ? He struck down the Ti- tans, the monster Typhoes with a hundred dragons' heads, the black exhalations which, born of the earth, interlace like serpents and invade the celestial cano- py. He dwells on mountain summits touching the heavens, where clouds gather, and from which the thunder descends ; he is the Zeus of Olympus, 176 THE PHILOSOPHY OF the Zeus of Ithome, the Zeus of Hymettus. Like all the gods he is, in substance, multiple, connected with various places in which man's heart is most sensible of his presence, with diverse cities and even diverse families, which, having embraced him within their horizons, appropriated him to themselves and sacri- ficed to him. " I conjure thee," says Tecmessa, " by the Zeus of thy hearthstone." To form an exact im- pression of the religious sentiment of a Greek we must imagine a valley, a coast, the whole primitive landscape in which a people fixed itself; it is not the firmament in general, nor the universal earth which it appreciates as divine beings, but its own firmament with its own horizon of undulating mountains, the soil it inhabits, the woods and the flowing streams in the midst of which it lives ; it has its own Zeus, its own Poseidon, its own Hera, its own Apollo the same as its own woodland and water nymphs. At Rome, in a religion which had better preserved the primitive spirit, Camillus said ; " There is not a place in this city that is not impregnated with religion and which is not inhabited by some divinity." " I do not fear the gods of your country, for I owe them nothing," ART IN GREECE. 177 says one of the characters of JEschylus. Properly speaking, the god is local ;* he is, through his origin, the country itself; hence it is that in the eyes of the Greek his city is sacred, his divinities being one with that city. When, on his return, he hails it, it is not, as with Tancred, a poetic compliment; he is not merely glad, like a modern, again to see familiar ob- jects and to return to his home ; his beach, his moun- tains, the walled enclosure harboring his countrymen, the highway with its tombs preserving the bones and manes of its hero-founders, all that surrounds it is for him a species of temple. " Argos, and ye its native gods," says Agamemnon, " I first salute thee, ye who have aided me in my return and in the vengeance I * have taken of the city of Priam !" The closer we examine it the more do we find their sentiment earn- est, their religion justifiable, their worship well- founded ; only later, in times of frivolity and decline, did they become idolatrous. " If we represent the gods by human figures," they said, " it is because no other form is more beautiful." But beyond the ex- pressive form, they saw floating, as in a dream, the * "La Cit6 Antique," by Fustel de Coulanges. 8* 178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF universal powers which govern the soul and the uni- verse. Let us follow one of their processions, that of the great Panathensea, and try to define the thoughts and emotions of an Athenian who, taking part in the solemn cortege, came to visit his gods. It was held at the beginning of the month of September. Foi three days the whole city witnessed the games, first, at the Odeon, the pompous orchestral series, the re- citation of Homer's poems, competitions for voice, cithern and flute, choruses of nude youths dancing the pyrrhica, and others, clothed, forming a cyclic chorus ; next, in the stadium, every exercise of the naked body wrestling, boxing, the pancratium and the pentathlon for men and for children ; the simple and double race for naked and armed men ; the foot- race with flambeaux ; the race with horses and the chariot race with two and four horses in the ordinary chariot and that of war with two men, one of whom jumping down, followed alongside running and then remounted at a bound. Pindar says that " the gods were the friends of games," and that they could not be better honored than by such spectacles. On the ART IN GREECE. 179 fourth day the procession occurred of which the Par- thenon frieze has preserved the image ; at th.0 head marched the pontiffs, aged men selected among the handsomest, virgins of noble families, the deputations of allied cities with offerings, then the bearers of chased gold and silver vases and utensils, athletes on foot or on horseback or on their chariots, a long line of sacrificers and their victims, and finally the people in their festal attire. The sacred galley was put in motion bearing on its mast the peplus or veil for the statue of Pallas which young girls, supported in the Erectheion, had embroidered. Setting out from the Ceramicus it marched to Eleusis,* making the circuit of the temple, passed along the northern and eastern sides of the Acropolis and halted near the Areopagus. There the veil was taken down to be borne to the goddess, while the cortege mounted the immense marble flight of steps, one hundred feet long by sev- enty wide, leading to the Propylsea and the vesti- bule of the Acropolis. Like the corner of ancient Pisa in which the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Campo-Santo and the Baptistery are crowded togeth- * Beule, " L'Acropole d'Athtoes," 180 THE PHILOSOPHY OF er, this abrupt plateau, wholly devoted to the gods, disappeared under sacred monuments, temples, chap- els, colossi and statues ; but with its four hundred feet of elevation it commanded the entire country ; between the columns and angles of the edifices, in profile against the sky, the Athenians could embrace the half of their Attica a circle of barren mountains scorched by the summer sun, the sparkling sea fram- ed in by the dull prominence of its coasts, all the grand eternal existences in which the gods we,re rooted ; Pentelica with its altars and the distant stat- ue of Pallas Athena; Hymettus and Anchesmus where the colossal effigies of Zeus still marked the primitive relationship between lofty summits and the thunder-riven sky. They bore the veil onward to the Erechtheum, the most imposing of their temples, a veritable shrine where the palladium, fallen from heaven, was kept, the tomb of Cecrops and the sacred olive, the parent of all the rest. There, the whole legend, all its ceremonies * and all its divine names, exalted the mind with a vague and grandiose souvenir of the early struggles and first steps taken in human civili- ART IN GREECE. 181 zation ; man, in the half-light of the myth, obtained a glimpse of the antique and fecund strife of water, earth and fire ; the earth emerging from the waters, becoming productive, overspread with kindly plants and nutritive grains and trees, growing in popula- tion and getting humanized in the hands of secret powers, who contend with savage elements and gradually, athwart their chaos, establish the ascen- dancy of mind. Cecrops, the founder, is symbol- ized by a creature of the same name as his own, the grasshopper (Kerkops), which was believed to be born of the earth, an Athenian insect if he was of it, a melodious and meagre inhabitant of the arid hills, and of which old Athenians bore the image in their hair. Alongside of him, the first inventor, Triptole- mus, the thresher of grain, had Dysaules, the double furrow, for his father and Gordys, barley, for his daughter. Still more significant was the legend of Erectheus, the great ancestor. Among the crudities of an infantile imagination, which naively and oddly expresses his birth, his name, signifying the fertile soil, the name of his daughters pure Air, the Dew and the Rain, manifest the idea of the dry earth fe- 182 THE PHILOSOPHY OF' cundated by nocturnal humidity. Numerous details of the worship serve to demonstrate its sense. Maidens who embroidered the veil are called Ar- rhephores, the bearers of dew ; they are symbols of the dew which they go for at night in a cave near the temple of Aphrodite. Thallo, the season of flowers, and Karpo, the season of fruits, honored near by, are, again, names of agricultural gods. The sense of all these expressive titles is buried in the Athen- ian mind ; he feels in them, contained by them and indistinct, the history of his race ; satisfied that the manes of his founders and ancestors continued to live around the tomb, extending their protection over those who honored their graves, he supplied them with cakes, honey and wine, and, depositing his offerings, embraced in one look, behind and before him, the long prosperity of his city and hopefully associated its future with its past. On leaving the ancient sanctuary where the prim- itive Pallas sat beneath the same roof as Erechtheus he saw, almost facing him, the new temple built by Ictinus in which she dwelt alone, and where every thing declared her glory. What she was in early ART IN GREECE. 183 days he scarcely felt ; her physical origin had vanish- ed under the development of her moral personality ; but enthusiasm is of searching insight, and fragments of legends, hallowed attributes and traditional epi- thets led the mind towards the remote sources from which she had issued. She was known to be the daughter of Zeus, the thunder-striking sky, and born of him alone ; she had sprung from his brow amidst lightning and the tumult of the elements ; He- lios had stood still, the Earth and Olympus had trem- bled, the sea had arisen, a golden shower and luminous rays had overspread the Earth. Primeval men proba- bly had first worshipped, under her name, the serenity of the illuminated atmosphere ; they had prostrated themselves on their knees before this sudden virginal brightness, possessed with the invigorating coolness which follows the storm ; they had compared her to a young, energetic* girl, and had named her Pallas. But in this Attica, where the glory and transparency of the immaculate e'ther are purer than elsewhere, she had become Athense, the Athenian. Another of her ear- liest surnames, Tritogeneia, born of water, also re- * The primitive meaning, probably, of the word Pallas. 184 THE PHILOSOPHY OF minded them that she was born of celestial rains or made them imagine the luminous reflections of the waves. Other traces of her origin were the color of her sea-green eyes and the choice of her bird, the owl, whose eyeballs at night are clairvoyant lights. Her figure, by degrees, had become distinct and her history expanded. Her convulsive birth had made of her an armed and terrible warrior, the companion of Zeus in his conflicts with the rebellious Titans. As virgin and pure light she had gradually become thought and intelligence, and she was called indus- trious because she had invented the arts ; the rider because she had bridled the horse ; the benefactor because she removed maladies. Her good deeds and her victories were all figured on the walls, and the eyes which, from the fa9ade of the temple, were di- rected to the immense landscape, embraced simulta- neously the two moments of religion, one explained by the other and united in the soul through the sub- lime sensation of perfect beauty. To the south, on the horizon, they gazed on the infinite sea, Poseidon, who embraces and shakes the earth, the azure god whose arms encircle the coast and the isles, and, with- ART IN GREECE. 185 out turning the eye, they beheld him again under the western crown of the Parthenon, erect and turbulent, rearing his muscular torso and powerful nude body with the indignant air of an angered god, whilst be- hind him Amphitrite, the almost naked Aphrodite on the knees of Thalassa, Latona with her two children, Leucothea, Halirrhothius and Eurytus disclosed in the 'waving inflection of their infantile or feminine forms, the grace and play, the freedom and eternal smile of the sea. On the same marble front Pallas, victorious, subdued the horses which Poseidon, with a blow of his trident caused to spring from the ground, driving them towards the divinities of the soil, to Cecrops the founder, to their first ancestor Erechtheus, the man of the earth, to his three daugh- ters who moisten the parched ground, to Callirhoe the beautiful fountain and to Ilissus the shaded rivulet ; the eye had only to turn downward after having con- templated their images to discern them in real signif- icance beneath the plateau. But Pallas herself radiated throughout the entire space. There was no need of reflection or of science, it needed only the eyes and heart of a poet or an artist 186 THE PHILOSOPHY OF to arrive at the affinity of the goddess with natural objects, to feel her present in the splendor of the bright atmosphere, in the glow of the agile light, in the purity of that delicate atmosphere to which the Athenians attributed the vivacity of their invention and their genius ; she herself was the genius of the territory, the spirit itself of the nation ; it was her benefactions, her inspiration, her work which they beheld everywhere displayed as far as the eye could see ; in the olive groves and on the diapered slopes of tillage, in the three harbors swarming with arsenals and crowded with vessels, in the long and strong walls by which the city joined the sea ; in the beautiful city itself, which, with its temples, its gym- nasia, its Pnyx, all its rebuilt monuments and its re- cent habitations, covered the back and declivities of the hills and which through its arts, its industries, its festivals, its invention, its indefatigable courage, be- coming the " school of Greece," spread its empire over the sea and its ascendancy over the entire na- tion. At this moment the gates of the Parthenon might open and display among offerings, vases, ART IN GREECE. 187 crowns, armor, casques, and silver masks, the colos- sal effigy, the Protectress, the Virgin, the Victorious, erect and motionless, her lance resting against her shoulder, her buckler standing by her side, holding a Victory of ivory and gold in her right hand, the golden aegis on her breast, a narrow casque of gold on her head, in a grand gold robe of diverse tints ; her face, feet, hands and arms relieving against the splendor of her weapons and drapery with the warm and vital whiteness of ivory ; her clear eyes of pre- cious stones gleaming with fixed brilliancy in the semi-obscurity of the painted cella. In imagining her serene and sublime expression, Phidias, certain- ly, had conceived a power which surpassed every human standard one of those universal forces which direct the course of things, the active intelligence which, at Athens, was the soul of the country. He heeded, perhaps, in his breast, the reverberating echo of the new physical system and philosophy which, still confounding spirit and matter, con- sidered thought as "the purest and most subtle of substances," a sort of ether everywhere diffused to produce and maintain the order of the uni- 188 ART IN GREECE. verse ;* in his mind was thus formed a still higher conception than that of the people; his Pallas surpassed that of ^Egina, already so grave, in all the majesty of the things of eternity. Through a long circuit, and in gradually approx- imating circles, we have traced the original sources of the statue, and we have now reached the vacant space, still recognizable, where its pedestal for- merly stood, and from which its" august form has disappeared. * According to the text of Anaxagoras, Phidias had listened to Anaxagoras in the house of Pericles the same as Michael Angelo lis- tened to the Platontets of the Renaissance in the domicile of Lorenzo de Medici. THE END. 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