Delphi Complete Works of Walter Pater

by Walter Pater

  Such are some of the characteristics with which Greek art is discernible in that earliest age. Of themselves, they almost answer the question which next arises — Whence did art come to Greece? or was it a thing of absolutely native growth there? So some have decidedly maintained. Others, who lived in an age possessing little or no knowledge of Greek monuments anterior to the full development of art under Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek sculpture of the age of Pheidias, were like people criticising Michelangelo, without knowledge of the earlier Tuscan school — of the works of Donatello and Mino da Fiesole — easily satisfied themselves with theories of its importation ready-made from other countries. Critics in the last century, especially, noticing some characteristics which early Greek work has in common, indeed, with Egyptian art, but which are common also to all such early work everywhere, supposed, as a matter of course, that it came, as the Greek religion also, from Egypt — that old, immemorial half-known birthplace of all wonderful things. There are, it is true, authorities for this derivation among the Greeks themselves, dazzled as they were by the marvels of the ancient civilisation of Egypt, a civilisation so different from their own, on the first opening of Egypt to Greek visitors. But, in fact, that opening did not take place till the reign of Psammetichus, about the middle of the seventh century B.C., a relatively late date. Psammetichus introduced and settled Greek mercenaries in Egypt, and, for a time, the Greeks came very close to Egyptian life. They can hardly fail to have been stimulated by that display of every kind of artistic workmanship gleaming over the whole of life; they may in turn have freshened it with new motives. And we may remark, that but for the peculiar usage of Egypt concerning the tombs of the dead, but for their habit of investing the last abodes of the dead with all the appurtenances of active life, out of that whole world of art, so various and elaborate, nothing but the great, monumental works in stone would have remained to ourselves. We should have experienced in regard to it, what we actually experience too much in our knowledge of Greek art — the lack of a fitting background, in the smaller tectonic work, for its great works in architecture, and the bolder sort of sculpture.

  But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval parallel, monuments illustrative of the earlier growth of Greek art before the time of Pheidias have come to light, and to a just appreciation. They show that the development of Greek art had already proceeded some way before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks, and point, if to a foreign source at all, to oriental rather than Egyptian influences; and the theory which derived Greek art, with many other Greek things, from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is really new in a new organism is the new cohering force — the mode of life, — so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the elements, for instance, of its peculiar national architecture. Yet all is also emphatically autochthonous, as the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man — the dignity of his soul and of his body — so that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers. Still, the original and primary motive seems, in matters of art, to have come from without; and the view to which actual discovery and all true analogies more and more point is that of a connexion of the origin of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria, proximately with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly through Cyprus — an original connexion again and again re-asserted, like a surviving trick of inheritance, as in later times it came in contact with the civilisation of Caria and Lycia, old affinities being here linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition, of which one representative is the Ionic style of architecture, traceable all through Greek art — an Asiatic curiousness, or poikilia,+ strongest in that heroic age of which I have been speaking, and distinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more than others; and always in appreciable distinction from the more clearly defined and self-asserted Hellenic influence. Homer himself witnesses to the intercourse, through early, adventurous commerce, as in the bright and animated picture with which the history of Herodotus begins, between the Greeks and Eastern countries. We may, perhaps, forget sometimes, thinking over the greatness of its place in the history of civilisation, how small a country Greece really was; how short the distances upwards, from island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris — an element which the austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a barrier; and we must think of Greece, as has been rightly said, as its whole continuous shore.

  The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the heroic age, so far as we can discern them, are those also of Phoenician art, its delight in metal among the rest, of metal especially as an element in architecture, the covering of everything with plates of metal. It was from Phoenicia that the costly material in which early Greek art delighted actually came — ivory, amber, much of the precious metals. These the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return for the mussel which contained the famous purple, in quest of which they penetrated far into all the Greek havens. Recent discoveries present the island of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper- work in ancient times, as the special mediator between the art of Phoenicia and Greece; and in some archaic figures of Aphrodite with her dove, brought from Cyprus and now in the British Museum — objects you might think, at first sight, taken from the niches of a French Gothic cathedral — are some of the beginnings, at least, of Greek sculpture manifestly under the influence of Phoenician masters. And, again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic facts. It is through Cyprus that the religion of Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to Greece. Here, in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred elements of mythological tradition, above all with the beautiful old story of Pygmalion, in which the thoughts of art and love are connected so closely together. First of all, on the prows of the Phoenician ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euploea, the protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus — to Cythera; it is in this simplest sense that she is, primarily, Anadyomene.+ And her connexion with the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus her worship is connected with an architecture, not colossal, but full of dainty splendour — the art of the shrine-maker, the maker of reliquaries; the art of the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in which we have seen to be characteristic of the true Homer.

  And now we see why Hephaestus, that crook-backed and uncomely god, is the husband of Aphrodite. Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as fire he is flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous contest between Achilles and the river Xanthus in the twenty-first book of the Iliad, he intervenes in favour of the hero, as mere fire against water. But he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of the functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively representative of one only of its aspects, its function, namely, in regard to early art; he becomes the patron of smiths, bent with his labour at the forge, as people had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri. That the god of fire becomes the god of all art, architecture included, so that he makes the houses of the gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite, marks a threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a pecul
iar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful metal-work, with which he is bound and bent; secondly, the connexion of this, through Aphrodite, with an almost wanton personal splendour; the connexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia, whence, literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is the “spiritual form” of the Asiatic element in Greek art.

  This, then, is the situation which the first period of Greek art comprehends; a people whose civilisation is still young, delighting, as the young do, in ornament, in the sensuous beauty of ivory and gold, in all the lovely productions of skilled fingers. They receive all this, together with the worship of Aphrodite, by way of Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from the older, decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself long since surfeited with that splendour; and they receive it in frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts always go back to the East, where there is the fulness of it, as to a wonder-land of art. Received thus in frugal quantity, through many generations, that world of Asiatic tectonics stimulates the sensuous capacity in them, accustoms the hand to produce and the eye to appreciate the more delicately enjoyable qualities of material things. But nowhere in all this various and exquisite world of design is there as yet any adequate sense of man himself, nowhere is there an insight into or power over human form as the expression of human soul. Yet those arts of design in which that younger people delights have in them already, as designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to ends, of which the fully developed admirableness of human form is but the consummation — a consummation already anticipated in the grand and animated figures of epic poetry, their power of thought, their laughter and tears. Under the hands of that younger people, as they imitate and pass largely and freely beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the reasonable soul will kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus of the Parthenon and the Venus of Melos.

  The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest elements of man’s nature and destiny, to command and express these, but to deal with them in a manner, and with a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and simple, if it may be, as that of the Japanese flower-painter. And what the student of Greek sculpture has to cultivate generally in himself is the capacity for appreciating the expression of thought in outward form, the constant habit of associating sense with soul, of tracing what we call expression to its sources. But, concurrently with this, he must also cultivate, all along, a not less equally constant appreciation of intelligent workmanship in work, and of design in things designed, of the rational control of matter everywhere. From many sources he may feed this sense of intelligence and design in the productions of the minor crafts, above all in the various and exquisite art of Japan. Carrying a delicacy like that of nature itself into every form of imitation, reproduction, and combination — leaf and flower, fish and bird, reed and water — and failing only when it touches the sacred human form, that art of Japan is not so unlike the earliest stages of Greek art as might at first sight be supposed. We have here, and in no mere fragments, the spectacle of a universal application to the instruments of daily life of fitness and beauty, in a temper still unsophisticated, as also unelevated, by the divination of the spirit of man. And at least the student must always remember that Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the illustrations of a classical dictionary might induce him to think. Some of the ancient temples of Greece were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous modern museum. That Asiatic poikilia,+ that spirit of minute and curious loveliness, follows the bolder imaginative efforts of Greek art all through its history, and one can hardly be too careful in keeping up the sense of this daintiness of execution through the entire course of its development. It is not only that the minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting, intaglio, coin, or cameo, often reduces into the palm of the hand lines grander than those of many a life-sized or colossal figure; but there is also a sense in which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for instance, is but a supremely well-executed object of vertu, in the most limited sense of the term. Those solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best made things of their kind, as an urn or a cup is well made.

  A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic crafts, a state such as the art of some nations has ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere opportunity, a mere starting-ground for their imaginative presentment of man, moral and inspired. A world of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold, polished stone; — the informing, reasonable soul entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the real warm body itself; the presence of those two elements is continuous throughout the fortunes of Greek art after the heroic age, and the constant right estimate of their action and reaction, from period to period, its true philosophy.

  NOTES

  192. The related Greek noun technκ is defined as follows: “art, skill, regular method of making a thing.” (Liddell and Scott.)

  193. *Il. xviii.468-608.

  193. *Od. vii.37-132.

  197. Transliteration: porpas te gnamptas th’ helikas, kalukas te kai hormous. Translation: “delicate brooches, spriralled bracelets, rosettes, and necklaces.” Homer, Iliad 18.400.

  201. Empaestik derives from the verb empaiτ, “to strike in, stamp.” (Liddell and Scott.)

  210. The names are etymological — chalkos, argyros, and chrysos signify, respectively, brass (or copper), silver, and gold.

  216. Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: “embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning.” The metaphorical sense is the one Pater invokes.

  218. Euploea . . . Anadyomene. Euploea means “fair voyage”; Anadyomene, a participial form derived from the verb anadyτ, “to rise, esp. from the sea,” (Liddell-Scott) may be rendered “she who emerges from the sea.”

  222. Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: “embroidery . . . (metaph.) cunning.” The metaphorical sense is the one Pater invokes.

  BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE II: THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES

  CRITICS of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly animated development of human existence — the energetic movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily clothed — amid scenery as poetic as Titian’s. If shapes of colourless stone did come into that background, it was as the undraped human form comes into some of Titian’s pictures, only to cool and solemnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculptor being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always or chiefly in fastidiously selected marble even, but often in richly toned metal (this or that sculptor preferring some special variety of the bronze he worked in, such as the hepatizτn or liver-coloured bronze, or the bright golden alloy of Corinth), and in its consummate products chryselephantine, — work in gold and ivory, on a core of cedar. Pheidias, in the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the Parthenon, fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths’ age, dimly discerned in Homer, already delighted in; and the celebrated work of which I have first to speak now, and with which Greek sculpture emerges from that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense historical, is a link in that goldsmiths’ or chryselephantine tradition, carrying us forwards to the work of Pheidias, backwards to the elaborate Asiatic furniture of the chamber of Paris.

  When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards the end of the second century after Christ, he beheld, among other precious objects in the temple of Here, a splendidly wrought treasure-chest of cedar-wood, in which, according to a legend, quick as usual with the true human colouring, the mother of Cypselus had hidden him, when a child, from the enmity
of her family, the Bacchiadae, then the nobility of Corinth. The child, named Cypselus after this incident (Cypsele being a Corinthian word for chest), became tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful descendants, as it was said, offered the beautiful old chest to the temple of Here, as a memorial of his preservation. That would have been not long after the year 625 B.C. So much for the story which Pausanias heard — but inherent probability, and some points of detail in his description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at a date at least somewhat later; and as Herodotus, telling the story of the concealment of Cypselus, does not mention the dedication of the chest at Olympia at all, it may perhaps have been only one of many later imitations of antique art. But, whatever its date, Pausanias certainly saw the thing, and has left a long description of it, and we may trust his judgment at least as to its archaic style. We have here, then, something plainly visible at a comparatively recent date, something quite different from those perhaps wholly mythical objects described in Homer, — an object which seemed to so experienced an observer as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek art. Relatively to later Greek art, it may have seemed to him, what the ancient bronze doors with their Scripture histories, which we may still see in the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to later Italian art.