On the Acropolis of Athens we watched the glory and the consummation of Greek art; to the Acropolis of Pergamos we must turn to see its downfall and its ruin, and again the offering is made to the honour of Athene. It is Athene who with her shield on her arm, her ægis on her breast, is grasping the strong-winged giant by the hair, and she is the victress now as before, for near her floats Nike, the victorybringer, and conquest is assured. It is the meaning of this triumph and the manner of its expression that we must seek to understand.

The slab (Fig. 9) lies now in the Museum at Berlin, but it came to us from the summit of the hill at Pergamos; we have its history to learn in the present and the past.

More than twenty years ago a young German engineer whose name must always claim our reverence—Carl Humann—travelling on the coast of Asia Minor for his health, stayed for a while at Pergamos, now the modern Turkish Bergama (the citadel). He noticed that native workmen, in their customary ruthless manner, were breaking up large fragments of sculptured marble, building them into walls and burning them in lime-kilns. He was at the time engineer, not archæologist; but educated as he had been in a country which though poor in antique originals is rich in cast-museums, he saw at once the value of the marbles. For a time his exertions stopped the havoc, but he left Pergamos and again the barbarians began their work. Fortunately he returned in 1869 to undertake engineering work and took up his headquarters at Pergamos.

So far we have been wandering in distant lands. By the banks of the Nile we have watched the Egyptians solve the problem of expressive art by the principle of realism; by the banks of the Euphrates we have seen the Chaldæo-Assyrians add to this realism much of symbolism and a finely perfected system of decoration. By sea and by land the influence of Assyria and of Egypt has been carried to Hellas; from it she has chosen out and assimilated to her own genius what might be helpful, rejected what was hurtful. In the faroff colony of Selinus we have seen the beginnings of her own development, her struggle to master the technical difficulties of expression in marble; her high thought of the physical perfection of man; her cult of the hero; her worship of the god in human form. All this is so much clearing of the ground, so much tarrying in the outer courts of the temple of Greek art. It is time for us to draw nearer, to pass within the veil and hear the secret whisper, the peculiar message, breathed by the gods to Hellas, which she alone of nations was charged to utter to mortal man.

We leave the outlying colonies and pass to the mother country. In the studio of Ageladas, the Argive sculptor, three young men served their apprenticeship to art—three whose names were each and all, in after years, destined to resound throughout antiquity—Myron. Polycleitos, Pheidias.

In the last chapter we have seen how the Phœnician colonies spread like a net-work over the whole Mediterranean Sea, and how the treasures of Oriental art brought by these enterprising traders woke in the rude artists of Hellas a spirit of eager rivalry. But this rivalry was not confined to art; the Greek was never of the temper that loves to sit at home. It was easy to arouse in him a keen curiosity; then, as ever, he desired to hear and to see “some new thing.” With such a coast-line at his command he must have been dull indeed did he not tempt the sea. In Hellas land and water mingle lovingly. Narrow straits, little scattered islands lure on the timid ship from shore to shore. Nor was the Greek mariner ever over-bold. He did not gladly suffer the land out of sight. We find him loitering pleasantly among the Cyclades, stealing across by the island stepping-stones to Asia Minor. At last, taking heart, he pushes his way through the Hellespont into the vast land-locked waters which, in his euphemistic way, he called the Hospitable Sea (Pontus Euxinus). It is not thither we shall follow him as he coasts cautiously along the shore, and brings back with him strange legends of a magician queen and a dragon guarding a golden fleece. We have to watch him turn his prow westward.

We have tried to see again the Zeus of Pheidias, but all the while we felt, with the bitterness of irreparable loss, that we were stretching empty hands to grasp a vanished image. When we come to the art of Praxiteles our fortune is a little happier. It is true his masterpiece, the Aphrodite of Cnidus, has perished, and we dare not even think of her in connection with such vile parodies as the Venus de Medici. The familiar “Faun” of the Capitol is, we know, but a late copy of his famous Satyr. But the last ten years have given to us a safer standard, one genuine piece of work from the very hand of Praxiteles himself, of little repute indeed among the ancients, but still undoubtedly authentic. Before we speak of the altered times in which Praxiteles lived, of the altered spirit he expressed, its many and complicated causes; before we gather from tradition his repute among the critics of antiquity, let us study this statue (Fig. 8), and glean all we can from this safest and surest of sources.

It was on the morning of May 8, 1877, when the season was all but at its close, that the German excavators at Olympia came suddenly, all unsuspecting, on this statue of the Hermes. It lay face foremost on a soft heap of clay and rubbish just where it had fallen. The limbs were in part shattered, but, to the infinite joy of archæologists, face and features are perfect.

In the following pages I have made no attempt to furnish an elementary handbook—not even to write an outline of the history of Greek Art. I have only tried to develope one thought, the consideration of which it seemed to me might rightly precede such an outline.

We feel for Greek art something more than a historical interest; our desire to know of it is a want more imperative than any antiquarian curiosity. We naturally ask, Why? what is it that impels us to learn? why, when Egypt and Assyria and Phœnicia are dead, is Greece alone untouched by time, vital for ever? why from the contemplation of Greek art do we derive not merely an impression of the senses, but also a satisfaction that abides and an impulse to growth, moral and intellectual?

The answer is, I believe, found in a certain peculiar quality of Greek art which adapts itself to the consciousness of successive ages, which has within it no seed of possible death,—a certain largeness and universality which outlives the individual race and persists for all time. The meaning of this quality, which we call Ideality, it is the sole object of this little book to develope. The chapter on Pheidias and the ideality of the Parthenon marbles was written first, and contains the gist of what I desire to say, and of what during five years of archæological teaching at the British Museum I have constantly tried to enforce. The chapters that precede and follow are only the necessary prelude and sequel.

The meaning of the term Ideality I have sought to explain by reference to the teaching of Plato.

Between Mesopotamia and Hellas there stretch some thousand miles of desert and hill country hard to traverse; between Egypt and the nearest, the southernmost, point of the Peloponnesus lies five hundred miles of open sea difficult to navigate. Assyria and Egypt seem to lie utterly aloof. If the fancy of the Greek artist was indeed stimulated by the art-treasures of Egypt and Chaldaso-Assyria, if he learnt anything of the realism of the one, the symbolism and decorative skill of the other, the technical dexterity of both, Where was the point of contact? by land or sea? By land the route from Assyria is tedious and difficult, still, as we shall see, possible; only the sea is left for Egypt, and Egypt never loved the sea. The sandy shallows of the Delta were enough to dishearten her timid sailors; what enterprise by sea she attempted was in the sheltered waters of the Arabian Gulf. With a curiosity that is well-nigh incredulity we ask again, Where and how was the point of contact?

Perhaps we may find an answer in the picture that lies before us (Fig. 4). The design is taken from a silver gilt bowl, adorned by concentric, embossed friezes. The decoration is so complicated and the details for us of such vital importance, that we must consider it bit by bit. First let us look at the centre medallion. A figure with four wings seizes with his left hand a lion, and, with his right, stabs him. We seem to be back again in Assyria, the familiar demon with his four symbolical, mechanical wings is pourtrayed, and in the equally familiar animal-taming (Thierbändigung) scheme.

Two out of six of the following chapters deal with the art of Egypt, Assyria, and Phœnicia. This for a double reason, which in a few words I wish to make clear.

In bygone days of art-criticism originality was claimed for the Greeks as their especial, distinguishing gift. Original they were, but not in the narrow sense of borrowing nothing from their predecessors. The historic instinct is wide awake among us now. We seek with a new-won earnestness to know the genesis, the origiues of whatever we study, the ancestors of the individual artist, the predecessors of a nation. If critics in the past approached archæology from the artistic and purely contemplative standpoint, critics of to-day incline to its historical, scientific aspect. Hence our first duty in speaking of Greek art is to show by the light of recent discoveries its relation to the art of Egypt, Assyria, and Phœnicia which preceded it.

There is another reason.

We can only see what was really original in Greek art when we have eliminated what was borrowed from others; we only seem to touch the secret springs of Greek genius when we have drunk somewhat of waters that flow from other sources. To drop metaphor, it is only when we know something of what Assyria, Egypt, and Phœnicia effected in art, what problems they solved, what they could, what they could not do, by what limitations they were bound, and in part the why of all this, that we are able to realize wherein what was peculiar to Greek art consisted.

We must leave the banks of the Nile, and, crossing the Arabian desert eastward for a thousand miles, we shall reach the mouth of another river, that flows through and fertilizes another barren land—the river Euphrates. The Nile flows northward to the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris and Euphrates, joining their lower course, flow together southward to the Persian Gulf. As Egypt is the gift of the Nile, so Babylonia and Mesopotamia are in a lesser degree the gift of Tigris and Euphrates. But we must not press the analogy too far. It may have seemed strange to us that the earliest known civilization of the world sprang up in the most arid and barren of the continents, Africa; but there the river which flows through this land is wholly beneficent, even in its course, regular in its rise and fall. The land of the Euphrates and Tigris is a country subject to sudden storm and flood, to the reverses of extreme heat and intense cold. It is a land of violence and excess, and we shall see this character impressed upon the people's art. It is a land, too, which nature has divided far more definitely than Egypt into two parts—the hill country, at the source of the rivers, where rain falls and a certain amount of cultivation is possible apart from the riverwater, and the country of the plain, wholly the river's gift. Into these two halves the country has always fallen, politically as physically.

About these names, Assyria, Chaldæa, Babylonia, to most of us there are gathered associations as vague as they are splendid.