Greek Studies A Series of Essays 12

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 12

porpas te gnamptas th' helikas, kalukas te kai hormous+

 

--the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty are still undivided;

all that men's hands are set to make has still a fascination alike

for workmen [198] and spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy,

indeed, is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans are

essentially Greeks--Greeks of Asia; and Troy, though more advanced in

all elements of civilisation, is no real contrast to the western

shore of the Aegean. It is no barbaric world that we see, but the

sort of world, we may think, that would have charmed also our

comparatively jaded sensibilities, with just that quaint simplicity

which we too enjoy in its productions; above all, in its wrought

metal, which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work by

becoming mechanical. The metal-work which Homer describes in such

variety is all hammer-work, all the joinings being effected by pins

or riveting. That is just the sort of metal-work which, in a certain

naïveté and vigour, is still of all work the most expressive of

actual contact with dexterous fingers; one seems to trace in it, on

every particle of the partially resisting material, the touch and

play of the shaping instruments, in highly trained hands, under the

guidance of exquisitely disciplined senses--that cachet, or seal of

nearness to the workman's hand, which is the special charm of all

good metal-work, of early metal-work in particular.

 

Such descriptions, however, it may be said, are mere poetical

ornament, of no value in helping us to define the character of an

age. But what is peculiar in these Homeric descriptions, [199] what

distinguishes them from others at first sight similar, is a sort of

internal evidence they present of a certain degree of reality, signs

in them of an imagination stirred by surprise at the spectacle of

real works of art. Such minute, delighted, loving description of

details of ornament, such following out of the ways in which brass,

gold, silver, or paler gold, go into the chariots and armour and

women's dress, or cling to the walls--the enthusiasm of the manner--

is the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all that. The Greek

poet describes these things with the same vividness and freshness,

the same kind of fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers;

speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that higher sort of

poetry which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things

recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally

sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But

with how many poets would not this constant intrusion of material

ornament have produced a tawdry effect! The metal would all be

tarnished and the edges blurred. And this is because it is not

always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or

refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of

oriental art, the imitations of it at home, in which for Homer this

actual world of art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity,

and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stimulate without

[200] surfeiting the imagination; it is an exotic thing of which he

sees just enough and not too much. The shield of Achilles, the house

of Alcinous, are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming winds

continuously through the entire Iliad and Odyssey--a child's dream

after a day of real, fresh impressions from things themselves, in

which all those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is as

pleased in touching and looking at those objects as his own heroes;

their gleaming aspect brightens all he says, and has taken hold, one

might think, of his language, his very vocabulary becoming

chryselephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though enlarged by

fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments

of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that

dream in a tamer but real world.

 

The art of the heroic age, then, as represented in Homer, connects

itself, on the one side, with those fabulous jewels so prominent in

mythological story, and entwined sometimes so oddly in its

representation of human fortunes--the necklace of Eriphyle, the

necklace of Helen, which Menelaus, it was said, offered at Delphi to

Athene Pronoea, on the eve of his expedition against Troy--mythical

objects, indeed, but which yet bear witness even thus early to the

aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper. But, on the other

hand, the art of the heroic age connects itself also with the actual

early beginnings [201] of artistic production. There are touches of

reality, for instance, in Homer's incidental notices of its

instruments and processes; especially as regards the working of

metal. He goes already to the potter's wheel for familiar, life-like

illustration. In describing artistic wood-work he distinguishes

various stages of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning

and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer, whirled round with

a string; he mentions the names of two artists, the one of an actual

workman, the other of a craft turned into a proper name--stray

relics, accidentally preserved, of a world, as we may believe, of

such wide and varied activity. The forge of Hephaestus is a true

forge; the magic tripods on which he is at work are really put

together by conceivable processes, known in early times.

Compositions in relief similar to those which he describes were

actually made out of thin metal plates cut into a convenient shape,

and then beaten into the designed form by the hammer over a wooden

model. These reliefs were then fastened to a differently coloured

metal background or base, with nails or rivets, for there is no

soldering of metals as yet. To this process the ancients gave the

name of empaestik,+ such embossing being still, in our own time, a

beautiful form of metal-work.

 

Even in the marvellous shield there are other and indirect notes of

reality. In speaking of the shield of Achilles, I departed

intentionally from [202] the order in which the subjects of the

relief are actually introduced in the Iliad, because, just then, I

wished the reader to receive the full effect of the variety and

elaborateness of the composition, as a representation or picture of

the whole of ancient life embraced within the circumference of a

shield. But in the order in which Homer actually describes those

episodes he is following the method of a very practicable form of

composition, and is throughout much closer than we might at first

sight suppose to the ancient armourer's proceedings. The shield is

formed of five superimposed plates of different metals, each plate of

smaller diameter than the one immediately below it, their flat

margins showing thus as four concentric stripes or rings of metal,

around a sort of boss in the centre, five metals thick, and the

outermost circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrangement the

order of Homer's description corresponds. The earth and the heavenly

bodies are upon this boss in the centre, like a little distant heaven

hung above the broad world, and from this Homer works out, round and

round, to the river Oceanus, which forms the border of the whole; the

subjects answering to, or supporting each other, in a sort of

heraldic order--the city at peace set over against the city besieged-

-spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other--quite congruously

with a certain heraldic turn common in contemporary Assyrian art,

which delights in [203] this sort of conventional spacing out of its

various subjects, and especially with some extant metal chargers of

Assyrian work, which, like some of the earliest Greek vases with

their painted plants and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate

in their humble measure such heraldic grouping.

 

The description of the shield of Hercules, attributed to Hesiod, is

probably an imitation of Homer, and, notwithstanding some fine

mythological impersonations which it contains, an imitation less

admirable than the original. Of painting there are in Homer no

certain indications, and it is consistent with the later date of the

imitator that we may perhaps discern in his composition a sign that

what he had actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre-dominance

in it, as compared with the Homeric description, of effects of colour

over effects of form; Homer delighting in ingenious devices for

fastening the metal, and the supposed Hesiod rather in what seem like

triumphs of heraldic colouring; though the latter also delights in

effects of mingled metals, of mingled gold and silver especially--

silver figures with dresses of gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees

of gold for staves in their hands. Still, like the shield of

Achilles, this too we must conceive as formed of concentric plates of

metal; and here again that spacing is still more elaborately carried

out, narrower intermediate rings being apparently [204] introduced

between the broader ones, with figures in rapid, horizontal, unbroken

motion, carrying the eye right round the shield, in contrast with the

repose of the downward or inward movement of the subjects which

divide the larger spaces; here too with certain analogies in the rows

of animals to the designs on the earliest vases.

 

In Hesiod then, as in Homer, there are undesigned notes of

correspondence between the partly mythical ornaments imaginatively

enlarged of the heroic age, and a world of actual handicrafts. In

the shield of Hercules another marvellous detail is added in the

image of Perseus, very daintily described as hovering in some

wonderful way, as if really borne up by wings, above the surface.

And that curious, haunting sense of magic in art, which comes out

over and over again in Homer--in the golden maids, for instance, who

assist Hephaestus in his work, and similar details which seem at

first sight to destroy the credibility of the whole picture, and make

of it a mere wonder-land--is itself also, rightly understood, a

testimony to a real excellence in the art of Homer's time. It is

sometimes said that works of art held to be miraculous are always of

an inferior kind; but at least it was not among those who thought

them inferior that the belief in their miraculous power began. If

the golden images move like living creatures, and the armour of

Achilles, so [205] wonderfully made, lifts him like wings, this again

is because the imagination of Homer is really under the stimulus of

delightful artistic objects actually seen. Only those to whom such

artistic objects manifest themselves through real and powerful

impressions of their wonderful qualities, can invest them with

properties magical or miraculous.

 

I said that the inherent usefulness of the material of metal-work

makes the destruction of its acquired form almost certain, if it

comes into the possession of people either barbarous or careless of

the work of a past time. Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a

fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a somewhat

visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces, and more or less make

substitution; and of the finer work of the heroic age, thus dimly

discerned as an actual thing, we had at least till recently almost

nothing. Two plates of bronze, a few rusty nails, and certain rows

of holes in the inner surface of the walls of the "treasury" of

Mycenae, were the sole representatives of that favourite device of

primitive Greek art, the lining of stone walls with burnished metal,

of which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey is the ideal picture,

and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen House at Sparta, adorned in

the interior with a coating of reliefs in metal, a later, historical

example. Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture, that

"treasury," [206] a building so imposing that Pausanias thought it

worthy to rank with the Pyramids, is a sufficient illustration.

Treasury, or tomb, or both (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed

still to find enjoyment in the costly armour, goblets, and mirrors

laid up there), this dome-shaped building, formed of concentric rings

of stones gradually diminishing to a coping-stone at the top, may

stand as the representative of some similar buildings in other parts

of Greece, and of many others in a similar kind of architecture

elsewhere, constructed of large many-sided blocks of stone, fitted

carefully together without the aid of cement, and remaining in their

places by reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the general

tendency to use vast blocks of stone for the jambs and lintels of

doors, for instance, and in the construction of gable-shaped

passages; two rows of such stones being made to rest against each

other at an acute angle, within the thickness of the walls.

 

So vast and rude, fretted by the action of nearly three thousand

years, the fragments of this architecture may often seem, at first

sight, like works of nature. At Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, the skeleton

of the old architecture is more complete. At Mycenae the gateway of

the acropolis is still standing with its two well-known sculptured

lions--immemorial and almost unique monument of primitive Greek

sculpture--supporting, herald-wise, a symbolical pillar on the [207]

vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The heads are gone, having

been fashioned possibly in metal by workmen from the East. On what

may be called the façade, remains are still discernible of inlaid

work in coloured stone, and within the gateway, on the smooth slabs

of the pavement, the wheel-ruts are still visible. Connect them with

those metal war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy the whole

grandiose character of the place, as it may really have been. Shut

within the narrow enclosure of these shadowy citadels were the

palaces of the kings, with all that intimacy which we may sometimes

suppose to have been alien from the open-air Greek life, admitting,

doubtless, below the cover of their rough walls, many of those

refinements of princely life which the Middle Age found possible in

such places, and of which the impression is so fascinating in Homer's

description, for instance, of the house of Ulysses, or of Menelaus at

Sparta. Rough and frowning without, these old châteaux of the Argive

kings were delicate within with a decoration almost as dainty and

fine as the network of weed and flower that now covers their ruins,

and of the delicacy of which, as I said, that golden flower on its

silver stalk or the golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might be taken as

representative. In these metal-like structures of self-supporting

polygons, locked so firmly and impenetrably together, with the whole

mystery of the reasonableness [208] of the arch implicitly within

them, there is evidence of a complete artistic command over weight in

stone, and an understanding of the "law of weight." But over weight

only; the ornament still seems to be not strictly architectural, but,

according to the notices of Homer, tectonic, borrowed from the

sister arts, above all from the art of the metal-workers, to whom

those spaces of the building are left which a later age fills with

painting, or relief in stone. The skill of the Asiatic comes to

adorn this rough native building; and it is a late, elaborate,

somewhat voluptuous skill, we may understand, illustrated by the

luxury of that Asiatic chamber of Paris, less like that of a warrior

than of one going to the dance. Coupled with the vastness of the

architectural works which actually remain, such descriptions as that

in Homer of the chamber of Paris and the house of Alcinous furnish

forth a picture of that early period--the tyrants' age, the age of

the acropoleis, the period of great dynasties with claims to "divine

right"' and in many instances at least with all the culture of their

time. The vast buildings make us sigh at the thought of wasted human

labour, though there is a public usefulness too in some of these

designs, such as the draining of the Copaic lake, to which the backs

of the people are bent whether they will or not. For the princes

there is much of that selfish personal luxury which is a constant

trait of feudalism in [209] all ages. For the people, scattered over

the country, at their agricultural labour, or gathered in small

hamlets, there is some enjoyment, perhaps, of the aspect of that

splendour, of the bright warriors on the heights--a certain share of

the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in those tombs and

dwellings. Some surmise, also, there seems to have been, of the

"curse" of gold, with a dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities

for cruelty in the command over those skilful artificers in metal--

some ingenious rack or bull "to pinch and peel"--the tradition of

which, not unlike the modern Jacques Bonhomme's shudder at the old

ruined French donjon or bastille, haunts, generations afterwards, the

ruins of those "labyrinths" of stone, where the old tyrants had their

pleasures. For it is a mistake to suppose that that wistful sense of

eeriness in ruined buildings, to which most of us are susceptible, is

an exclusively modern feeling. The name Cyclopean, attached to those

desolate remains of buildings which were older than Greek history

itself, attests their romantic influence over the fancy of the people

who thus attributed them to a superhuman strength and skill. And the

Cyclopes, like all the early mythical names of artists, have this

note of reality, that they are names not of individuals but of

classes, the guilds or companies of workmen in which a certain craft

was imparted and transmitted. The Dactyli, the Fingers, are the

[210] first workers in iron; the savage Chalybes in Scythia the first

smelters; actual names are given to the old, fabled Telchines--

Chalkon, Argyron, Chryson--workers in brass, silver, and gold,

respectively.+ The tradition of their activity haunts the several

regions where those metals were found. They make the trident of

Poseidon; but then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's

instrument, the tunny-fork. They are credited, notwithstanding, with

an evil sorcery, unfriendly to men, as poor humanity remembered the

makers of chains, locks, Procrustean beds; and, as becomes this dark

recondite mine and metal work, the traditions about them are gloomy

and grotesque, confusing mortal workmen with demon guilds.

 

To this view of the heroic age of Greek art as being, so to speak, an

age of real gold, an age delighting itself in precious material and

exquisite handiwork in all tectonic crafts, the recent extraordinary

discoveries at Troy and Mycenae are, on any plausible theory of their

date and origin, a witness. The aesthetic critic needs always to be

on his guard against the confusion of mere curiosity or antiquity

with beauty in art. Among the objects discovered at Troy--mere

curiosities, some of them, however interesting and instructive--the

so-called royal cup of Priam, in solid gold, two-handled and double-

lipped, (the smaller lip designed for the host and his libation, the

larger for the guest,) has, in the [211] very simplicity of its

design, the grace of the economy with which it exactly fulfils its

purpose, a positive beauty, an absolute value for the aesthetic

sense, while strange and new enough, if it really settles at last a

much-debated __EXPRESSION__ of Homer; while the "diadem," with its

twisted chains and flowers of pale gold, shows that those profuse

golden fringes, waving so comely as he moved, which Hephaestus

wrought for the helmet of Achilles, were really within the compass of

early Greek art.

 

And the story of the excavations at Mycenae reads more like some

well-devised chapter of fiction than a record of sober facts. Here,

those sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in

dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for every one, are more

than fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings, lying in the

splendour of their crowns and breastplates of embossed plate of gold;

their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their sides, as in some

feudal monument; their very faces covered up most strangely in golden

masks. The very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with gold-

dust--the heavy gilding fallen from some perished kingly vestment; in

another was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this

profusion of thin fine fragments, were rings, bracelets, smaller

crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for ornaments of

dresses, and that golden flower on a silver stalk--all of pure, [212]

soft gold, unhardened by alloy, the delicate films of which one must

touch but lightly, yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into

wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undulating arms

appearing frequently.

 

It is the very image of the old luxurious life of the princes of the

heroic age, as Homer describes it, with the arts in service to its

kingly pride. Among the other costly objects was one representing

the head of a cow, grandly designed in gold with horns of silver,

like the horns of the moon, supposed to be symbolical of Here, the

great object of worship at Argos. One of the interests of the study

of mythology is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of the

people who conceived it; and this religion of Here, the special

religion of Argos, is congruous with what has been here said as to

the place of art in the civilisation of the Argives; it is a

reflexion of that splendid and wanton old feudal life. For Here is,

in her original essence and meaning, equivalent to Demeter--the one

living spirit of the earth, divined behind the veil of all its

manifold visible energies. But in the development of a common

mythological motive the various peoples are subject to the general

limitations of their life and thought; they can but work outward what

is within them; and the religious conceptions and usages, ultimately

derivable from one and the same rudimentary instinct, are sometimes

most diverse. Out of [213] the visible, physical energies of the

earth and its system of annual change, the old Pelasgian mind

developed the person of Demeter, mystical and profoundly aweful, yet

profoundly pathetic, also, in her appeal to human sympathies. Out of

the same original elements, the civilisation of Argos, on the other

hand, developes the religion of Queen Here, a mere Demeter, at best,

of gaudy flower-beds, whose toilet Homer describes with all its

delicate fineries; though, characteristically, he may still allow us

to detect, perhaps, some traces of the mystical person of the earth,

in the all-pervading scent of the ambrosial unguent with which she

anoints herself, in the abundant tresses of her hair, and in the

curious variegation of her ornaments. She has become, though with

some reminiscence of the mystical earth, a very limited human person,

wicked, angry, jealous--the lady of Zeus in her castle-sanctuary at

Mycenae, in wanton dalliance with the king, coaxing him for cruel

purposes in sweet sleep, adding artificial charms to her beauty.

 

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 [214] 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

[215] 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.