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THE AIM OF GREEK ART.

the symbolical in subjection, until, in the best examples of the Grecian chisel which have descended to our day, we perceive art not only to be wholly emancipated from priestly servitude, but, through its inherent intellectual force. or, more strictly speaking, genius, to have won for itself the position of teacher. Art and religion were indeed, in one sense, identical; but the mind was unshackled, and left to its normal action. Thus the poets and artists of Greece, instead of being made the mouth-pieces and artisans of a formal faith, became the creators of a more beautiful, refined, and natural mythology, by which the sculptured gods, while emblematic to the philosophic mind of the highest possibilities of nature and humanity, were brought home to the sympathies and thoughts of the people. The word was indeed made flesh, though in a sensuous, æsthetic sense, inferior by far to the Christ-love which descended later upon men, to elevate them to a still higher phase of life, but superior to the religious notions which had heretofore governed the world. Grecian art became, therefore, a joint revelation of the emancipated intellect and imagination, inspired by the beautiful to deify the natural man by making him the pivot upon which God and nature turned. An exaggerated standard of the intellectual and physical powers and passions, aiming at the god like in expression by the elimination of material weakness and all signs of imperfection, or a personification of natural phenomena and of the thought and feeling suggested

by their action, taking the guise of poetry and embodied by art, - not, as in India, in a grotesque accumulation of the unnatural and purely symbolical, but in shapes drawn from the visible creation, idealized into the highest beauty of form and meaning the imagination could conceive, and approved by science, because analogous to and founded upon the visible examples of nasuch were the mythology and art of

ture; Greece.

CHAPTER VI.

- Examples.

Origin of Mythology. - Effect on Grecian Art. — Its Emancipation from Egyptian Art. The Egyptian Apollo. The great Law of Change as applied to Art. Antagonistic Qualities of Greek and Egyptian Art. — How we are to judge of Past Art. — Analysis of the Causes of the Perfection of Grecian Art. Reaction of Philosophy vs. Polytheism. - Grecian Faith and Art perish together. Rise of Monotheism. - Effect upon Art. Christianity repeats the Practice of Paganism. - Better Seed. New Unfoldings of Faith, followed by Relapse to Primitive Ignorance in Art.-Laws and Examples of Grecian Art.

HE foundation of the earliest religions was either in external nature, the effect suggesting a cause, or in the mind of man himself, repeating, as it were, his own sensuousness or intellectual force in superhuman shapes. Both these causes tended to the development of a prolific mythology. So fixed in a mental childhood is the disposition to personify the objects of belief, that even the Jews themselves were very far from reposing in absolute monotheism. They were the Puritans of antiquity; as the Egyptians may be said to have shown, in their priestly assumption, flexibility of action, and unchangeableness of dogma, the likeness of Romanism; while

BEAUTY THE INSPIRER.

29

the Greeks more resembled those modern nations which have thrown off priesteraft. Inspired by love of philosophy, they opened up their minds to the widest ranges of thought and poetry, and, borrowing from the learning and experience of all nations, culminated their wisdom in Aristotle and Plato, and their art in Phidias and Apelles.

Although beauty was the inspiration of Greek art, it was not left to the dubious direction of mere feeling, but subjected so skilfully to the acutest rules of science, that their best sculpture makes us forget art by its seeming naturalness. Whether their painting was equally advanced with their statuary still remains a mooted question; but we may be assured, that, so far as it went, it was subjected to similar rules.

That the beauty and freedom of Greek art were emphatically due to the genius of the nation itself is amply proved by the earliest specimens of their sculpture. One of the most remarkable of these is the bas-relief of Leucotea, Bacchus and Ninfé, of the Villa Albani, at Rome. In it we see the dawning emancipation of Greek from Egyptian art, showing, by the greater freedom of treatment, an attempt to adapt the still rigid attitudes, bound limbs, massive and imposing formalism of the latter,—which can be properly expressed only by the kindred qualities of granite, porphyry, and other adamantine rocks, and owes its character as much to their color as to form, - to the more perfect uses of marble, and the natural suggestiveness of that more flexible material for greater liberty, a nicer

30

EGYPTIAN FORMALISM.

sense of beauty, and a more refined expression. In striking contrast with this beginning of Greek art upon the rules and practice of the Egyptian, thus declaring its derivative origin, is the example of the later reflex influence of the former upon the latter in the Egyptian Apollo of the Vatican, which combines, in the most harmonious degree, while retaining the main characteristics of each, the motives and excellence of either school. The god now walks, - or, rather, can, if he see fit, - for his legs are at liberty, and yet retains the severe majesty, grandeur, and simplicity of his Egyptian temperament, exhibiting a superhuman strength and firmness of body and character, united to the Grecian purity and refinement of form, material, and expression.

By the force of his artistic liberty and more correct appreciation of man as his highest type, the Greek artist had thoroughly freed himself from the dogmatic formalism and rigidity of Egyptian art. In taking away its prominent characteristics of painful endurance, passivity of inert strength, preponderance of matter in size and weight, stereotyped posture and expression, he not only emancipated art from prescribed forms and the dictation of priests, but also endowed it with individual liberty of thought and workmanship. Egyptian artists were accounted as artisans or image-cutters of the lowest castes, and their craft by law descended from father to son. Yet, as a whole, the art of Egypt atoned in large degree for its want of freedom of progress by the mysterious sublimity of character arising from the