RT
l-B-STOUCHTON-HOLBORN
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
6
>7 1^
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION SERIES
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
By the Same Author
Jacopo Robusti detto il Tintoretto
Architectures of European ReUgions
Children of Fancy, a Volume of Poems
THE NEED FOR ART
IN LIFE
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT
THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
BY
I. B. STOUGHTON HOLBORN
Staff Lecturer on Art and Archaeology for Oxford University
Extension Delegacy. Cambridge University Local Lectures
Syndicate. London University Extension Board. Verein
Fiir Neuere Philologie, Dresden and Leipzic.
University Lecturers Association, New York.
"Lef hi»i that hath two loaves go sell one and buy
therewith the Howers of the Narcissus: for as bread
nourisheth the body so do the flowers of the Narcissus
nourish the Soul."
G. ARNOLD SHAW
PUBLISHER TO
UNIVERSITY LECTURERS ASSOCIATION
1735 GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
NE^V YORK
Copyright 1915, by G. Arnold Shaw
Copyright in Great Britain and Colonici
Third Thousand
n
Affectionately dedicated to my father
91L, J:?
CONTENTS
Page
Preface 11
Part I—
Introduction 15
Part II—
The Greek Gentleman 25
Part III—
Hellas and the Complete Man 43
Part IV—
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance 87
'&'
Part V—
The Modem Age 105
PREFACE
THIS little book is published in response
to a request from thousands of people
that some of my lectures should be
printed. I had always hoped that the day
would come when the material could be put
into the completer form of a book, but dis-
appointments and delays innumerable have so
frequently intervened that the completion of
such a book on the meaning and significance
of Art, still seems very uncertain. By special
request I have therefore printed these notes
just as they stand without revision. The notes
cover an immensely greater number of points
than it is possible to consider during the de-
livery of a single lecture, but they naturally
lack a certain fulness of elaboration in the
working out of any given detail, which would
be given on the platform. The lecture was
originally given as an open lecture at the Uni-
versity of Manchester. Its object is to present
no new fact, but to set forth the facts that are
known to every educated person in such a
manner that to escape the inference shall be
impossible.
In dealing with so vast a theme in so
small a compass, it has naturally been im-
11
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
possible to indulge in any sub-intents and
saving clauses. These the scholar will supply
for himself, but though there are many excep-
tions and qualifications that might be consid-
ered, they would hardly affect the general pic-
ture. Moreover, as set forth in the intro-
duction, the object is to present a picture
rather than demonstrate a fact.
Professor Wallace, the great evolutionist,
said of our age: "The social environment as
a whole, in relation to our possibilities and
our claims, is the worst that the world has
ever seen." We may think it overstated, but
the underlying truth we cannot deny. What
is the fundamental cause? Along with other
causes the most fundamental seems clearly to
be a lack of the appreciation and understand-
ing of the beautiful and its place in life.
Taking Dr. Wallace's statement, we analyse
the condition of things in Ancient Greece, and
I have given here a sketch of that epoch on
its three sides, — intellectual, artistic and moral,
the three elements of our being.
The civilization of Hellas is commonly ac-
cepted as the high-water mark of civilization,
even a scientific evolutionist like Dr. Wallace
recognizes that the high-water mark is not in
the present age.
12
PREFACE
Whether that be so or not, the charm, the
fascination, the force, the power of Hellenic
civilization lay in its all round grasp of life,
in its completeness.
But is this not just what the world has
never had again? Has not the story of its
development been one of failure to grasp this
principle? Often with a feverish earnestness
man has recognized the particular deficiencies,
the particular gaps, and endeavoured to fill
them up, but, through his failure to grasp
things as a whole, he has in so doing made
another gap elsewhere.
The pictures of the Middle Ages and the
Italian Renaissance help us to realize this.
Was not the one deficient in the intellectual
element, the love of knowledge and learning,
and the other deficient in moral earnestness?
And, too — did not the whole man suffer? It
was not merely the loss of the part itself but
the interaction upon the remainder that made
the evil. And beyond all, however perfect the
parts, the wholeness, the completeness, that
gave Greece its glory, is not to be found.
We turn then to our own day. Have we this
highest of all qualities, this quality of com-
pleteness? Comparing ourselves with the
world as a whole in its past and present, we
13
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
cannot say that our age is markedly deficient
in intellectual activity, nor is it conspicuously
lacking in the moral sense. Quite the con-
trary. But what about Art and Beauty, how
do we compare with the men of Greece, the
men who built the mediaeval Cathedrals, the
men who made the Art of Italy?
This then is our theme ; and the endeavour
is by a series of pictures, as it were, to bring
home the fact that Art is the thing that we
lack, and further, that it is the lack of this
art and love of beauty that indirectly has
affected our other activities and injured our
life as a whole.
"Let him that hath two loaves go sell one
and buy therewith the flowers of the Narcissus,
for as bread nourisheth the body, so do the
flowers of the Narcissus nourish the soul."
I. B. STOUGHTON HOLBORN,
New York City, April, 1915.
14
The Need for Art in Life
PART I
INTRODUCTION
THE need for art in life is a fact gener-
ally admitted but rarely realized. Art
perhaps, is regarded by many as a ne-
cessity, but a necessity of a minor order, not
one that is woven into the foundation warp of
existence. It is then my hope to show some-
thing of the extraordinary importance of
beauty in life, and so show why I firmly be-
lieve that the lack of art and beauty is really
the main cause of what is wrong with our
civilization, not the only cause by any means,
but the most fundamental.
Now it may sound a little startling to say
that the main cause of the social evils of to-day
is a want of art-appreciation; yet I not only
believe that it is the case, but believe that it
can be proved and that we shall never get
true social reform and never conquer the evils
of our times until a national love of beauty
has been brought about.
There are many ways of approaching the
subject. We might, as some of you have
15
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIrE
heard me do, diagnose the efTect upon the in-
dividual of the presence of artistic develop-
ment in greater or lesser degree and see how
our different modern pursuits and activities
are influenced by the presence or absence of
art.
Or again we might make a searching analy-
sis into the nature of beauty as such, and, by
a similar analysis of truth and goodness, ar-
rive at the basic relation of these things, and
so determine scientifically what m.ust be the
part that they each play in relation to life.*
This is perhaps the best way, although bj' far
the most difficult ; and indeed there are
strong reasons why another method should
be used first and prepare the way for a more
metaphysical treatment.
It is therefore my intention to turn to the
great art-epochs in our western civilization, —
Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
and, by a survey of these, arrive at some con-
clusion as to the part that beauty and art must
play in life. We shall fimd that whereas the
secret of the success of Greece, and the domin-
ant position that she occupies in the history
* The lecture on The Relation of Beauty to Goodness and
Truth, was delivered before Yale University and will be pub-
lished in a companion volume to this.
16
INTRODUCTION
of past civilization, is due to her breadth of
outlook and her all-round grasp of life, both
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance failed
to see life clearly and see it whole, and suffered
seriously in consequence. When we turn to
our own age, is not this lack of comprehen-
siveness and due balance of parts again evi-
dent; do we not suffer likwise, and is not
the part, that in our case is missing, the
national and all permeating love of art and
beauty, even in the meanest objects of life?
In approaching our subject it will be help-
ful to say a word as to the manner of that
approach. I intend to draw a series of mental
pictures, and the attitude of mind that I want
to evoke is one somewhat foreign to our age
and therefore difficult of attainment. It is, as
we shall see, the attitude of the artist and the
judgments and arguments depend in the main
upon the merits or demerits of the pictures in
themselves and have little or nothing to do
with the relation of these pictures to actual-
ity.
It is what I might term the method of art
as distinct from the method of science. This
will become more apparent as we proceed ; in-
deed the whole is an appeal for the artistic
outlook and its supreme value for this age.
17
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
We may say that the artist judges the pic-
ture as a thing in itself, just indeed as he
would judge actuality.
The picture is not judged as related to any-
thing. The artist judges actuality the same
way. Its reality affects the judgment neither
one way or another. The sunset is excellent
within itself. Whether it has any real exist-
ence is immaterial. Its relations to light, to
vibration, to physical laws are equally incon-
sequent.
Further we may say that the arguments of
art, its proofs, its judgments are not the argu-
ments, the proofs, the judgments of science.
The strictly scientific method is almost help-
less in the domain of art. To appreciate the
value of a work of art by pure scientific method
is as unsatisfactory as to try and produce
emotion by the calculations of pure reason.
It is not in the least that they are contra-
dictory or antagonistic. They are, if we may
so phrase it elements in a wider whole. They
may in a sense be regarded as supplementary;
but the passage from the emotional to the
rational, or from the artistic to the scientific,
involves a transition to the fundamentally dif-
ferent.
A simple illustration may help at the outset,
18
INTRODUCTION
although the main appeal must be in the book
viewed as a whole. Take a drama or picture.
How does it convince? Not by its realism.
Quite the contrary ; the greatest and most con-
vincing drama and art of the world has been
least realistic. It convinces by its own con-
sistency within itself, — its inherent unity. It
has no necessary relation to that which is out-
side itself.
The whole Greek mind was permeated by
this artistic outlook. It is not that they were
not scientific. They were. But it was the
development of both the scientific and artistic,
excluding neither, the absence of all exclusive-
ness and specialism that made them what they
were.
Herodotos might be taken as a case in point.
I have called him elsewhere the artistic his-
torian and said that he presents a drama. We
might almost say that for the Greek mind he
presents the drama, — the tragedy of v/3pL<i
and the triumph of the higher over the lower.
The sreatness of Herodotos is in the convinc-
ing completeness of his rounded theme, which
can be quite clearly distinguished from the
scientific qualities that he may also possess.
Whether the facts of his history are scientific-
ally correct matters little. Indeed if the whole
19
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
thing were a fiction its eternal truth would
remain unaltered.
Greek sculpture and especially Greek por-
traiture furnishes an even more telling illus-
tration. The piece of sculpture is excellent in
itself without reference to nature. The por-
trait is the perfection of the self, toward which
the individual is ever tending. The Greeks had
a saying that there is something more like
ourselves than we are ourselves ; and it is this
self, that we never reach, but which is the
perfection of the given individuality, which
was the aim of the Greek portrait painter.
"What we have to concern ourselves with
here is that true self of Hellas, or of our-
selves, which is the perfection of that toward
which each age, in its own peculiar essence,
tends.
The details may lack clearness ; indeed, with
regard to Greece, there is much that is contro-
versial; but the main tendency, the Hellenic
spirit, is unmistakable.
When our people can understand Greek
portraiture, say as opposed to Roman portrait-
ure, then they will have grasped the attitude
of mind, the mood in which our subject must,
indeed can only, be approached. It is not
enough even to understand scientifically what
20
INTRODUCTION
Greek portraiture is. We must not know it
as something outside, we must feel it, must
know it from within ; and we must feel that
from this point of view, from this side of our
being, so to speak, the Roman is not a portrait
at all. We must get out of the Roman or scien-
tific mood or world into the Greek or artistic.
And in this mood, this world, our argument or
appeal proceeds. It is, as we shall see, only one
world in a larger kosmos ; but without it we are
not men at all.
The judgment, in this world artistic, is im-
mediate ; but it is none the less valid, or, at
least, nothing can be more valid. It is the
ultimate judgment, the judgment that cannot
be reduced to lower terms. We might per-
haps say that it is an argument by universals.
Science is an argument from particular to
universal or at most from universal to par-
ticular. The artist so to speak bases his whole
appeal immediately on the universal.
It is not a question of the validity of the
passage from particular to universal or uni-
versal to particular. This is the function of
science: it is indeed all that we mean by
science. It is the final assessment, the last
word. Science for instance may show that
such and such a condition involves chaos or
21
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
that such and such a condition involves sys-
tem. Which will we have? There is no
further argument. This is the judgment of
the artist in man. Though in the above in-
stance we say, — system means being, chaos
means not being, we practically only shift our
terms. Will we have being or not being? It
cannot be argued, we have reached the bed-
rock.
Simularly when we examine our picture,
science may analyse and say, — this picture
involves this or amounts to that or can be
summed up thus. Another picture involves,
amounts to or can be summed up as some-
thing else. This picture involves balance, that
picture involves lack of balance. Balance or
not balance, — which is it to be? This final
judgment is the judgment of the artist.
The "pictures" in this lecture may be
summed up scientifically and we may state
the result as completeness or insufficiency.
The final choice is for the artist. If he chooses
insufficiency there is no more to be said.
Cadit quaestio. But will we, as artists, choose
insufficiency, that insufficiency which is less
than complete, not the infinite that is more
than complete? Surely not.
22
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
PART II
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
WE will begin our survey with the
civilization of Greece, which for
many reasons is the most impor-
tant. It is the earliest in time and its art is
the fountain and origin of all subsequent
European art. It is, too, our standard, by
which we measure the rest, and on the whole
it may fairly make claim to be the greatest,
although that is not the point of the present
discussion.
But it will therefore demand the major por-
tion of our time and the main appeal is the
appeal to the excellence of the toute ensemble
of that wonderful age. The survey of the
other ages will merely serve, by comparison,
to bring out the full significance of Greece,
and the final question will be, — is that which
makes the essence of Greek civilization to be
desired in itself? If the answer be yes, then
where the other ages are deficient we must
look to Greece.
Turning then to Greece, and by Greece is
practically meant Athens, let us seek to find
3 25
/■
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
what is the relation of art and beauty to life
as a whole, to the life of the Athenian people.
Perhaps as ready a way of arriving at the
heart of the matter as we can adopt is to
turn to one of those little phrases of ordinary
life, constantly upon everyone's lips, that so
frequently embody the very essence of a
national philosophy. What was the phrase
that would correspond to our phrase, "a true
gentleman," what did the Athenian under-
stand by "a gentleman"? Was a gentleman,
for instance, to the Athenian mind a man of
large property, of great wealth? By no means,
the Athenian was not a man who set great
store by wealth, indeed there was an instinc-
tive dislike for wealth as such, for wealth in
anyway regarded as an end in itself. The
ordinary attitude of the Athenian toward
money is put by Euripides into the mouth of
the peasant in 'The Elektra,' when he makes
him say, —
" 'Tis in such shifts
As these I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness ; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are both as one."
26
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
Too much money was for the Greek mind
a form of excess, and excess was the thing he
would not tolerate. To have too much money
was to show a lack of decent restraint and
was on a par with too much dinner or too
much drink or any other vulgar exhibition of
lack of self-control.
We may parallel the above quotation by
remembering that on another occasion Euri-
pides ventured in the "Danae" to put a few
words into the mouth of a character in praise
of money: — only a character upon the stage,
not necessarily representing more than the
individual point of view of the particular part ;
but it was felt by the Greek mind to be an out-
rage upon humanity and the play was nearly
hissed off the stage in consequence/"'
Was it then a matter of blood? No it was
not that either. The Athenian was by no
means indifferent to ancestry, and, if a man's
forebears had been men of noble character
who had served the state well,they looked
to him to inherit those qualities and continue
the tradition. But if he did not come up to
sample, so to speak, they would have no more
of him.
• Senec. Epist. 115; Naiick, Trag. Gr. Frag. p. 457.
27
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
No, as Perikles shows us in his famous
speech, there probably never was a people
where a man v/as so nearly received at his
own true worth. It is not that there v/ere
no snobs in Athens. No state has ever been
entirely free from such things, but no state
has ever been able so nearly to ignore adven-
titious aids or hindrances, riches or poverty,
noble or obscure birth, and allow real worth
its opportunity unhampered by restrictions
and conventions. A mean's own personal worth
"was the true determining factor and they
summed it all up in the phrase that he was
to be Ka\o<i KciyaOo^ (kalos k'agathos), both
beautiful and good.
That before one could be considered a
gentleman it should be necessary to be beauti-
ful is to the modern mind a little astonishing,
a little dimcult to grasp ; but such was the
fact. We are partly surprised at the intimacy
of connexion implied but more still by the
immense stress that is laid upon the impor-
tance of beauty in life.
It is true that the Greek term had a wider
significance than our word beautiful, but it
does not very materially affect the point.
Beauty even in our more restricted sense of
the term was a sine qua non.
28
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
Sokrates himself, one of the ablest minds
that the world has seen, went so far as to say
that the man who is good must also be beauti-
ful, and the man who is beautiful must also
be good, and would only grudgingly admit,
when pressed, that it is just possible that a
man who is not beautiful may be good, but
that it is to be regarded altogether as an ex-
ception and not under any circumstances to
be accepted as forming a basis for a rule of
life.
And, after all, this statement which seems
paradoxical nevertheless embodies a funda-
mental truth, which even we dimly realize,
although most of us are far from grasping
its full significance. Do we not recognize,
however imperfectly, that the character within
does control the outer form? Are there not
many faces irregularly formed, of unsatis-
factory proportion, deficient in quality of con-
tour and disposition of features, lacking in
delicacy of complexion, which nevertheless
are so completely transfigured by the char-
acter of the man within as to be in the truest
sense beautiful? There is in my mind at the
present moment the face of a great man that
I once had the honour to know, that answered
to none of the accepted canons of beauty v.'ith
29
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
regard to these things, and yet which I can
honestly say was one of the most beautiful
faces that I ever met; and such faces come
within the experience of all of us. Was not
Sokrates himself just such an example whose
unpromising features nevertheless fascinated
ail who knew him because of the character
shining through him, who was, as AJkibiades
phrased it, like those images of Silenos which
fly open to reveal the beauty of the god inside?
On the other hand, as we travel about the
world, are there not other faces that we meet,
— admirable in proportion, excellent in con-
tour irreproachable in disposition of features,
quality of line and subtlety of complexion,
from which we turn away with loathing and
disgust; for they are by no means beautiful,
being but empty masks concealing, or shall we
say revealing, a brainless vacuity within?
It will even influence our actions. Someone
asks, "Why did you not trust that man?" and
we reply, "I did not like the look of him."
There is, and there ought to be, a close con-
nection between the inner and the outer man,
though we are largely blind to it, and even
more or less deliberately destroy it.
Watch the child and see how he naturally
expresses himself outwardly in his move-
30
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
ments. Tell him to go and do something and
you can see in every movement whether he is
reluctant or pleased. Tell him of something
that is to take place to-morrow and the whole
child expresses disappointment or excitement.
The child's expression may be crude and un-
developed, as are his moral faculties, but it
should be trained and encouraged; instead of
which, to his infinite detriment, we tend to
thwart and destroy it.
Sokrates, who, we must remember, was the
son of a sculptor and who for some time him-
self pursued that calling, tells us that it is the
function of the sculptor to present the work-
ings of the mind.=^= Behind this lies an impor-
tant truth that is rarely grasped. It is only
through the outer that the inner can express
itself at all. We can never see the man with-
in. You can never see my self, I can never
see your self. All you can see is my move-
ment, my gestures, my deeds, my actions, the
expression of my face; but my self, my soul,
that remains forever invisible. Nor has the
soul any other means of expression. Hence it
follows that it is possible for the sculptor to
put into hard marble, or ivory, or gold, all of
soul that it is possible to see in a living human
* Xenophon, Memorabilia, Bk. Ill, Cap. X.
31
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
being. He can even do more, because, like
Pheidias, he can give a conception of soul far
beyond that of any individual man. Pheidias
embodied something in his statue of Olympic
Zeus that went beyond anything that any man
had been able to conceive; it was a statue, as
Quintilisn says, — "cujus pulchritudo adjecisse
aliquid etiam receptee religioni videtur; adeo
majestas operis deum ffiquavit."f And we are
told by other authors that when a man had
seen it, so great was its effect that it altered
the tenor of his life and he v/ent avv^ay a
changed man.
But if all this be so, if the inner can only
express itself through the outer, of what para-
mount importance it becomes that that outer
power of expression should be as beautiful as
possible and how great the part that this ele-
ment must play in life!
This the Athenian fully recognized, and so
we may say that for him education consisted
of two parts definitely related to each other,
the inner and the outer, each of which, while
having its own value, added to the value of the
other — "Soul, which Limbs betoken, and
t Whose beauty seems even to have added something to received
religion; to such an extent did the majesty of the work equal
the deity.
32
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
Limbs, Soul informs," as the speaker in
Browning's poem phrases it/-'
And was not the Greek right; do not the
words of Sappho express a truth of the pro-
foundest significance? —
6 fiev yap /caX.o<?, oaaov cSrjv, ireXerai dyado^
6 Se K ayado<i avrixa kul /caXo? iaaerai.
Hence we find an endeavour to make the youth
beautiful in every way. The Greek was es-
sentially an artist and therefore realized that
the fundamental of beauty is the artistic unity,
the kosmic perfection, the organic whole. He
would not judge anyone as beautiful by a top-
comer, so to speak, but by the whole. The
face may be the most important single ele-
ment, but is only one element nevertheless,
and it is the relation of part to part and of
every element to the whole that makes what
we mean by beauty. Hence the Greek always
looked at the figure as a whole, and hence his
costume was always so designed, not to be a
thing in itself, but a means of setting off and
revealing the beauty of the figure. For the
same reason he would frequently dispense
with clothes altogether and display this high-
* Old Pictures in Florence.
t He who is beautiful, as far as can be discerned, is good, and
he who is good will straightway also be beautiful.
33
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
est of all God's gifts, the beauty of the human
form, the nearest approach to the divine of
anything upon earth, as Plato pointed out, far
nearer than our highest human virtues, our
righteousness that is but filthy rags.
How, then, was this to be attained? By
athletics, by developing every possibility, every
"talent" for beauty that we have. Conse-
quently we find that when any given exercise
was found to mar that beauty in any way, say
by developing one muscle at the expense of
the rest, that exercise was abandoned; for
their athletics were not the same as our ath-
letics, as beauty was definitely their aim.
But it was not enough to cultivate beauty
of limb only ; it was necessary to obtain beauty
of motion, and so we find that a large part of
the time in the palaistrai was devoted to danc-
ing, which was not, like our dancing, more or
less confined to movement of the feet, but
which involved every kind of graceful move-
ment: many Greek dances required no move-
ment of the feet at all.
But even beauty of form and beauty of
movement was not enough; the Greek boy
was taught how to stand gracefully, how to
sit gracefully, and, above all, how to use beau-
tiful gesture.
34
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
Nor was this all ; beauty of facial expression
seems also to have been considered, and cer-
tainly immense attention was given to expres-
sion of voice, to musical intonation and beau-
tiful modulation. Reading and rhetoric were
a continuous element in Greek education and
it is one of the things where we to-day lose
most in life ; — how few can read well, how few
can speak even decently! Think of the num-
bers of learned men blissfully unaware that
there is an art of expression and an art of
structure in speech (so admirably sketched in
Plato's Phaidros) requiring, as the Greeks
found, a training of years, but without which
all their erudition is practically of no avail.
Matthew Arnold says : "The great men of
culture are those who have had a passion for
diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from
one end of society to the other, the best knowl-
edge, the best ideas of their time ; who have
laboured to divest knowledge of all that was
harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional,
exclusive ; to humanize it, to make it efficient
outside the clique of the cultivated and learned,
yet still remaining the best knowledge and
thought of the time."" In a word, we may say,
* Culture V. Anarchy, p. 44, American Edition.
35
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
— to make it beautiful and raise mere knowl-
edge to the realms of art.
And so, by beauty of form, beauty of move-
ment, beauty of pose and beauty of gesture,
beauty of expression and beauty of intonation,
the Greek was given a power of which we do
not even dream. Life takes on a wider aspect,
its significance is doubled, and each side reacts
upon the other until man almost seems to have
raised his being to a superhuman plane in that
brief golden period of art and poetry, architec-
ture and craftsmanship, music and philosophy.
But with ourselves how many a soul, born
to be great, remains trammelled and confined,
unable to express itself, unable to develop the
inner into the outer beauty ! And the one re-
acts upon the other and consequently the in-
ner itself remains narrow, prejudiced, limited,
academic, lacking that kosmic wholeness which
constitutes beauty, lacking the larger con-
sciousness and light, only to be found in the
open beauty of a world, not hidden within, but
outwardly revealed. Knowledge, life, all
things must be made beautiful; to miss this is
to miss the end of our being: as Theognis
says, —
OTTt KaXov (f)i\ov ecrrt to S'ou koXov 6v cJjlXov ecrri,
TOUT e'TTO? aOavaroiv rfkOe Sea (TTO^arcov*
* What is beautiful is beloved, what is not beautiful is not
beloved. From lips immortal did this saying come.
36
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
Such, then, are the two great points that first
strike the modern on approaching the life of
Greece, the intimacy of connexion between
the good and the beautiful, and also the part
that beauty played in life.
With regard to the first point the Greeks,
although much more correct than ourselves,
were not entirely right ; with regard to the
second point they were absolutely and com-
pletely right.
With regard to the first point it might be
argued: "What does it matter? — for surely it
comes to the same thing either way! One
man calls a heroic action good and approves
it; another man calls it beautiful and equally
he approves it; similarly, the mean action is
condemned whether we call it ugly or bad —
is it not a mere question of words?"
No; it matters very much; the beautiful
and the good are intim.ately connected, it is
true, but they are eternally distinct neverthe-
less and a greater disaster can hardly befall
a nation than to confuse the one with the
other. It may end in so confusing them that
we only get one when we think we are getting
both.
In practice, as we shall see, the Greek was
sound, and in theory he was logically far more
0/
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
correct than ourselves. It is much more
nearly correct to use the standards of beauty
in judging the good than to use the standards
of the good in judging the beautiful.
No attempt at an analysis of the nature of
the good and the beautiful can be made, but
there is a certain sense in which it is not en-
tirely illogical to say that the class to which
the terms beautiful and unbeautiful or ugly
apply is a larger class than that to which the
terms good and bad apply, and it may be said
metaphorically to contain it. Or we may even
say the outside includes the inside.
Hence it does not follow that, because good
and bad things are beautiful or the reverse,
therefore the converse is true and all things
of beauty and ugliness are therefore good or
bad. What is true of a larger class is neces-
sarily true of the smaller, but the converse
does not follow.
All squares are things with four sides,
whether they be big squares or medium
squares or very little squares ; but it is not
therefore true that all things with four sides
are squares.
It is in a certain sense true that an act of
heroism or self-sacrifice is beautiful. But it
is entirely untrue to say that a beautiful flower
38
THE GREEK GENTLEMAN
is good. God is good who made the flower,
but the flower, as we understand it, has neither
consciousness nor volition, without which
goodness is impossible.
Our ordinary criticisms of works of art, pic-
tures, poems or anything else, as good or bad
are not merely wholly beside the point, any
such qualities that they may express being
additional (accidental in the technical sense),
but they are grossly misleading and mis-
chievous, and probably largely explain that
fundamental disease of our civilization which
produces our social and economic troubles and
the general misery of our great cities.
39
HELLAS
AND THE COMPLETE MAN
PART III
HELLAS
AND THE COMPLETE MAN
Now, if we probe a little deeper we shall
find that this stress upon beauty in its rela-
tion to character was not an isolated, unre-
lated phenomenon, but was inseparably con-
nected with the Greek conception of life as a
whole.
On the ends of the great temple at Delphi,
which in some respects may be considered the
centre of Greek religion, were two mottoes
which may be taken as the mottoes of Greek
life. At the one end yvcodc creavrov (gnothi
seauton) know thyself; at the other end
^irjhkv ayav (meden agan) nothing in excess.
TvmOl aeavTov: know thyself — if ever there
was a people who made it their aim to under-
stand the nature of man it was the Greeks.
They were humanists in the highest sense.
Know thyself, find out what it is to be a
man, find out all that marks him out and dis-
tingushes him from the lower creation, that
lifts him above the mere physical nature which
he shares with them and then endeavour to
the utmost of thine ability to develop all these
essentials and to be a man.
43
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
It is the fundamental spirit of humanism,
the spirit that realises the glory and signifi-
cance of man. It is the spirit that neither
with boasting nor self-depreciation declares
that "the proper study of mankind is man."
After all, man is put here upon earth to per-
form his own proper function; whatever may
be the animal state from which he has risen
or the future state to which he may rise. It is
a plain neglect of his duty to dally with the
one or idly sigh in vain aspiration after the
other. Every thing has its proper function to
perform, man or angel, clod or precious stone;
it is, as Marcus Aurelius phrases it: — "as
though the emerald should say, — 'whatever
happens I must be an emerald.' "
Humanism is opposed to sensationalism,
materialism and the uncultivated pleasures of
a savage or boorish existence, but it stands
equally for the value and dignity of human
life as such, and refuses to regard the visions
of a future existence as the only reality. The
advent of that future will not be hastened by
the spurning of opportunities and obligations
in relation to our development in this world.
We are here for a definite purpose, with
definite powers, intelligencies, emotions and
capacities, and the earth and its wonders are
44
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
to be appreciated and understood, the lilies
to be considered and the truth to be learned.
These things are neither brutishly to be made
subservient to the senses nor utterly despised.
It stands for breadth and it stands for sym-
pathy. Whatever happens, I must be a man.
Man is a reasoning creature. The lower
animals may have the rudiments of this fac-
ulty, but it is in the great development of his
reasoning povi^er that we see one of the es-
sential distinctions between him and the beast.
If one, then, is to be a man, it is necessary to
develop one's intelligence, to quicken one's in-
tellectual desire for knowledge.
Man, too, is moral, and again, although the
animals may exhibit an elementary morality,
it is this higher development that distin-
guishes him from them and it is one of his
primary functions to live an upright life.
But there is also implanted in every man a
capacity to distinguish between the beautiful
and the ugly which may be dwarfed or unde-
veloped just as the moral sense may be
dwarfed or undeveloped but which neverthe-
less is there. This element is as universal as
the moral sense, even though it be untrained.
Even the philistine who most prides himself
upon being entirely indifferent to such things
45
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
is nevertheless continually revealing the fact
that it is not so.
This point is so important and at the same
time so frequently overlooked that a whole
lecture, in the series of which this is one, has
been devoted to it.
We may, then, say
that, starting with a
physical nature that
is common to man
and other animals,
we have these three
great fundamentals
that make man man,
the artistic, the intel-
lectual and the moral.
This diagram, then, represents the aim of man,
A.I.M.,* man's complete being.
But we have yet to consider the motto at
the other end of the temple. Know thyself:
be all that it is to be a man, but fxr^hev a^yav
nothing in excess, and we may take with it its
corollary, nothing too little.
It is the even, all-round development of the
Greek that is his most marked characteristic.
No side was over developed, nothing was left
* This was an accident only noticed afterwards, but it makes a
handy mnemonic.
46
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
out. No side was developed at the expense of
another. All extremes were avoided.
This fxi)8ev ciyav is responsible for the re-
serve of Greek life and Greek feeling. Every-
thing exaggerated, ostentatious, vulgar, was
abhorrent to him. Consequently we find
Greek Art marked by a reserve and restraint
and refinement that we find in no other art.
Gothic Art is wonderful in its own way, but
there is an exuberance about it which is totally
unlike Greek Art, which at first sight might
appear to us, more used to the warmer art of
the North, almost austere or cold. All this is
true in the relationship of the higher and the
lower elements in man's being. None realized
more clearly than the Greek the value and im-
portance of the body and the part that our
animal nature plays in life. The right rela-
tionship of athletics to mental activity, of the
pleasures of sense to the pleasures of the
higher man, have never been so clearly
grasped; nothing is left out, but nowhere do
we find excess.
But for the present it is the inter-relation
of the higher activities, the more purely human
elements of our nature, with which we are to
deal.
It is most essential that we should grasp
47
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
this fact of the even, all-round development of
the Greek, who saw life clearly and saw it
whole. Indeed, it is the foundation upon
which the rest depends. It is the absolute
necessity for beauty in life that is to be dem-
onstrated and beauty is a necessity because
an all-round development is a necessity.
Beauty is a necessity just as the other ele-
ments in man's life are a necessity and in the
same way. To leave out any one of these
three fundamentals, the artistic, the intellec-
tual or the moral, or to develop any one at
the expense of the rest, spells disaster.
Now, in taking the Greek as the example of
the all-round man, let there be no misunder-
standing. The claim is not that he reached
the highest point in each department that has
ever been reached. He may have done or he
may not have done — that does not exactly
concern us now. Still less is it to be main-
tained that he was altogether perfect. All
that is sought to be shown is that no side of
his nature was left out of consideration but
that every side received full attention and
was thoroughly developed, no one side at the
expense of the rest.
First, then, with regard to the intellectual
side, there is no need to dwell at length. We
48
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
all know that he was the founder of all West-
em culture and modern knowledge and that
in many departments of intellectual activity
he still remains our master, — in philosophy,
history, oratory and certain branches of mathe-
matics. In other cases we have only built
where he has founded and but for him might
never have built at all. In logic, in economics,
in political outlook generally, we are eternally
his debtors. So are we in law, and not to the
Romans, as the text-books would have us be-
lieve, quoting such things as the Roman testa-
mentum or laws of contract. Innumerable
Greek wills exist and the legal system of
Rome, like the Roman constitution itself, was
an importation from Greece. Nor must we
ever forget that the Greeks were the first to
conceive the idea of a free, self-governing
people, one of their many precious gifts to
mankind.
There was in the Greek an unparalleled de-
sire to pursue the truth for truth's sake, no
matter what cherished prejudices it might up-
set, and this desire for truth led to the most
remarkable intellectual advance in human his-
tory.
It is almost needless to call attention to
the intellectual subtlety of the Greek, and par-
49
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
ticularly the Athenian, or to make mention of
the fact that the standard of education in
Athens was such that even the slave could
read and write and keep accounts, a condition
of things to which our free people have but
recently attained.
The Renaissance and modern times might
indeed with little exaggeration be described
as the re-birth, the renaissance of the Greek
spirit of enquiry and the Greek scientific spirit,
so that we may say, as one of our greatest
modern writers has phrased it, "Save the
blind forces of nature, nothing moves in mod-
ern life which is not Greek in its origin."
On the develop-
ment 01 the intellec-
tual side, then, there
is no need to dwell
at length. But the
other sides will re-
quire miOre attention.
In order to mark
this fact we may,
then, shade over one-
third of our disc.
Turning to the moral side, one finds many
people inclined to speak slightingly of Greek
national morality as compared with our own.
50
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
To deal with the question at all adequately
would take a whole lecture, but some things
at any rate can be made clear.
In the first place, we live too near our own
conditions to be able to assess them. They
are out of focus, as a thing held a few inches
in front of the eyes. Further, we are tempted
to use our current standards of judgment.
Of course, if we judge the Greek by our cur-
rent standards he is likely to be found want-
ing, as we should certainly be found wanting
if judged by his.
What, then, we have to endeavour to do is
to put ourselves as far as possible into the
position of posterity and dispassionately out-
side all standards, where we may even judge
the standards themselves. We make a great
claim, and rightly, for the modern standards
of national morality, but does that justify us
in belittling the national morality of Athens?
I have no desire to cast an undue slur upon
our own morality, but it is necessary to point
out that in spite of our immeasurably loftier
religious faith there is still much that we may
learn from Greece. In the main the object is
rather to show the positive value of Greek
national standards than to call attention to the
51
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
negative shortcomings of our day, but to do
the one without the other is impossible.
When in that day of remote posterity the
impartial witness looks back upon the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and upon the
golden days of Hellas, certain striking fea-
tures cannot be overlooked.
Certainly there has never been in the world's
history so great a disparity between riches and
poverty, with all its attendant evils, as is ex-
hibited by the modern state. Take Britain, for
instance, with its population not much in ex-
cess of forty millions, where we find that there
are over two million wage earners earning less
than 25 shillings per week ($6.25). Think of
the wives and children dependent upon these
wage earners and the enormous proportion of
the population that is thus represented. Do
you think that it is possible for a man and his
wife and children to live a civilized life under
modern conditions on less than $6.25 per week?
Or turn to the terrible conditions of sweated
labor in London, New York, or particularly in
Carolina, but indeed in any large city, and what
is to be said? There is not a shadow of doubt
that a very large proportion of our free citizens
live under conditions infinitely worse than that
of the worst slaves of the ancient world. The
52
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
condition of Athenian slaves was so superior
as not even to offer a parallel.
What can be the average standard of na-
tional morality that can allow such a condition
of things to exist?
We say, "Oh, but the size of the modem
state makes it impossible to approach the con-
ditions of the city-state of Greece." But if that
be true and the city-state does show a higher
moral condition than the modern state, then
it seems that the process of aggrandisement
that made the modern state may not be an
exhibition of the highest form of virtue. On
the other hand, the excuse may be inadequate
and false, which is probably a truer way of re-
garding it.
Still more significant of the brutal callous-
ness of our so-called morality are the little
phrases that we use without a thought, "the
submerged tenth," "the criminal classes." The
submerged tenth of whom? Of our ov^m kith
and kin, our own fellow-citizens. Athenian citi-
zenship had its faults undoubtedly, but one
can hardly conceive it regarding with absolute
equanimity a submerged tenth or any other
fraction. Some of their methods of dealing
wdth these problems may have been a little
crude, as, for instance, the seisachtheia, and the
53
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
later methods were certainly not above criti-
cism. But the right spirit existed, undoubtedly
existed, however faulty the methods.
As for the criminal classes — classes, indeed!
— there have been criminals the world over,
but it seems to have been left for modern
progress to produce a complete class of recog-
nizable physical type.
Now what lies at the back of all this? The
Athenian, and indeed the Greek generally, had
a much more living and present sense of citi-
ship than we have, and it naturally coloured
his whole morality. We have to admit that we
are more selfish, because we have not as yet
so keen a sense of our duty to our fellows and
to society as a whole. In Athens a man might
almost be said to live as much for the state as
for himself, although in many ways Athens
was the most highly developed individualistic
state that the world has ever knov/n.
We see it at every turn, both among the
richer and the poorer, and both are remark-
able. We are more surprised at the rich be-
cause we do not expect much of them any way.
The institution known as the Xetrovpyia
(leitourgia), under which the wealthier citi-
zens provided for many of the expenses of the
state, such as the equipment of the navy, by a
54
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
voluntary offering is an interesting case. It
was not like our compulsory taxation, and yet
we know of several instances in which a man
deliberately spent his whole fortune and
ruined himself in the service of the state, and
as personal ostentation and display was hateful
to the Athenian there seems to have been noth-
ing that gave greater pleasure to the wealthier
citizens than spending their money in this
manner.
We find throughout the state a far greater
attention to duties and far less talk about
rights than we find amongst ourselves. Even
Athens' bitterest enemies, the Korinthians, ad-
mitted that this was so, pointing out at the
same time that remarkable intellectual devel-
opment of the Athenian which was the secret
of so much of his greatness. The individual
was to be developed to the uttermost; he was
to fight his own battles, shape his own destiny,
pay for his own education, which was neither
compulsory nor free, and that was why he
valued it and made such a lofty use of it.
Then, having developed that individual re-
source and initiative and mental calibre that
made him what he was, it is not his cry for
rights that attracts us, but his devotion to the
state, as the Korinthian envoys at Sparta de-
55
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
clared of these Athenians whom they hated so :
"Their bodies they devote to their country as
though they belonged to other men ; their true
self is their mind, which is most truly their
own when employed in her service."*
And surely this sense of duty to one's neigh-
bour is one of the first principles of morality?
Indeed, it is difficult to see how a nation can
have a morality without it.
Again, what will posterity say of the fact
that Great Britain spends over 160 million
pounds (800 million dollars) every year upon
alcoholic liquor. Let us put aside entirely the
question as to whether drunkenness is wrong;
let us suppose for the sake of argument that it
is quite a harmless amusement to get drunk.
Even then what would the Athenian have said?
He would have said, — "What do you mean by
spending $800,000,000 on anything at all, even
though it be only a harmless luxury? Where is
your sense of fxrjhev a'^av (nothing in ex-
cess), where is your sense of proportion.
Have you any sense of proportion when all
these other urgent needs are clamouring for
attention?"
And is not the sense of proportion another
of the very first things that we must have if
Thukydides, I, 70.
56
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
we are to have a morality at all. We must
know what are the things that are worth hav-
ing and what are not, how much of our life's
energy can be reasonably devoted to this and
how much can be reasonably devoted to that.
Go down Fifth Avenue, New York, and look
into the windows and ask how many of those
things are really worth having. Those idle
fripperies, none of real value and many bane-
ful and hideous, with no touch of the true
spirit of beauty and restraint that made every-
thing to which the Greek turned his hand a
joy for ever. Think of the pitiable waste of
human energy, of human wealth, that goes to
make these degraded fineries and tawdry ma-
chine-made nick-nacks, that never gave one
touch of clean and healthy joy to any human
being. Compare them with the simple costumes
of Hellas and the unrivalled individuality of
the articles of Athenian commerce.
But this matter of proportion leads us on
and on. It is one thing to have a sense of pro-
portion, but another thing to have the moral
restraint that will enable us gladly to live up
to that appreciation of the true value of things.
But this moral restraint stands out as one
of the most splendid things about the Greek.
In Sparta it even went too far, but in Athens
5 57
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
we find it resulting in a true simplicity of life
that is not an asceticism of false values, due to
a lack of a sense of proportion in another di-
rection. We, to-day, may know what is worth
having and what is not worth having, but
we have not the moral restraint to live up to
our knowledge.
Even so late as the time of Marcus Aurel-
ius, v.;hen Greece had been corrupted by the
luxury and voluptuousness of Rome, there
was a marked contrast between the two
peoples and we find the Emperor speaking of
the Greek plank and the Greek discipline as
the synonyms of the simple life. We find the
parallels to our luxury, our empty society, our
rich living, our freak dinners, our motor cars
and the reckless extravagance of rich and poor
alike, in the Roman empire, not in the golden
age of Greece.
This simplicity of life leads us to notice two
outstanding characteristics of the Athenian, —
his anti-materialism and his anti-sensational-
ism. With regard to the former we have al-
ready noticed his sound assessment of the
value of money, and speaking generally, the
whole materialistic outlook would have been
almost unintelligible to the Greek. With us
school is a preparation for business ; with him
58
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
business was a preparation for school, that is,
for axoXi], schole (leisure). His conception of
leisure was the pursuit of what we call
"study." What of our trusts and combines
whereby a limited number accumulate wealth
at the expense of the many ; what of the social
power of riches ; what of our so-called prac-
tical outlook, our bread and butter education,
our greedy materialism that is so largely the
cause of our social and economic evils !
How does materialism fit in with morality;
how is the materialistic outlook of the present
day to be reconciled with a spiritual or moral
outlook at all?
But not only was the Greek anti-materialist;
he was the great anti-sensationalist of all time.
Again the modern craving for sensation is
only to be paralleled in the days before the
fall of the Roman empire; our amusements,
our dances, our spectacular drama, our Coney
Islands and White Cities, our vast crowds at
football and baseball matches and athletic
events, where the Greek had the excellent
rule, except at the great festivals, of "Strip
or go home," every variety of sensationalism,
from the battue of the wealthy sportsman
to the humble kinematograph show. It would
cause consternation among some of our sen-
59
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
sation-seeking loafers if they were compelled
to strip and take part or be taken home by
the police.
Look at the following from an advertise-
ment of a kinematograph show in an Edin-
burgh paper: "Great Fist Fight Scenes be-
tween the 'Slogger' and his Pals. The Dark
Side of London Life with its Streaks of
Brightness are vividly laid bare in this splen-
did Film." Why do we wish to see the dark
side laid bare and the fact announced with
hysterical capitals?
So much for Britain; what of America? On
going to a lecture I saw not long ago a flam-
ing announcement of another moving picture
show representing, — "The Loss of the Ti-
tanic." It is really difficult to conceive how
any one could desire to see such a thing.
What an appalling condition of mind it de-
notes, sunken in its morbid depravity below
the condition of the beasts !
The example is interesting because we hap-
pen to have a side-light upon the Greek point
of view. After the sack of Miletos, when a
whole Greek city was wiped off the map of
Greece by the Persians, Phrynikos, the great
Greek poet, took it as a subject for the con-
struction of a tragic drama. The play is not
60
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
extant, but we know sufficient of Greek drama
to know that it must have been upon the
lofty plane in which that drama moved, deal-
ing with the immensity of the powers that
govern our fate and the terrible inevitableness
of human destiny.
"But thus it is, all bides the destined hour,
And man, albeit with justice at his side,
Fights in the dark against a secret power.
Not to be conquered, — and how pacified."*
In any case it must have been removed as
far as possible from a vulgar kinematograph
show.
But how did the Athenians regard it? They
thought it too sensational. A realization of
horrors may be carried too far and a sensitive
and cultured mind, rather than gloat over
them, is likely to imagine only too vividly
the horrors of the future. We may suppose
that those who gloat over the horrors of the
Titanic, with other people's relatives, find in
them a delicious foretaste of the loss of their
own in the Empress of Ireland or some other
of the ever present dangers of modern life.
Anyway the Athenians found it sensational.
• From Fitzgerald's translation of the Agamemnon. The
passage though Greek in spirit is not in the original.
61
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
decided he had gone too far, and fined Phry-
nikos an enormous fine, which must have
practically ruined him, and forbade the play
ever to be produced again.
What, again, of the modern newspaper,
with its murders, adulteries and accidents and
the pictures with a cross marking the place
where the body was found?
What are we to think of the staring head-
lines, the vermilion type and the choice se-
lection of items from the American press in
the following examples taken from only two
pages chosen practically at random:
BANGOR THEATRE FIRE KILLS 2
NEEDLE FIEND ATTACKS THIRD
WORCESTER GIRL
MANNING AND SISTER HELD IN
SLAYING
RICH BROKER'S DEATH PROBED
(Why cannot the man die in peace, or if it
is a matter for the police, what business of
ours is that?)
MYSTERY SURROUNDS TRAGEDY
FIREMEN CRUSHED TO DEATH
CHINESE TATAO TO SUCCEED TANGO
62
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
MUST WED BY JULY TO OBTAIN
$250,000
NAT WILLS SEEKS TO ANNUL
MARRIAGE
(A vulgar divorce scandal)
MRS. WILLIAMS FREE TO MARRY
HILLIARD
(An equally pleasant item to above)
U. S. AVIATOR KILLED BY 500 FOOT
FALL
"THE DEAR FOOL"
The Sensational Story of the Love of a
Woman of 40 for a Boy of 27
Begins To-Day on Magazine Page
BAPTIZED IN ICE WATER; MAY DIE
LOVE AND CASH LOST, GIRL LEAPS
TO DEATH FROM A FERRY-BOAT
MAY NOW SUE LLOYD AT LAW TO
GET BALM
FIREMAN INJURED IN FALL FROM
ROOF
DOCTORS FIND CURE FOR BRAIN
SOFTENING
(In view of all the above, this is none too
soon.)
63
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
"What of our public justice and political free-
dom?" some have objected. Yet even here we
have no cause to disparage the Greek. He
would have denied our claim to political free-
dom as he understood it, and pointed to our
"wire-pullers," our "bosses," and above all our
party system, in which the freedom of indi-
vidual political expression disappears.
With regard to public justice there were
undoubtedly faults in the Athenian system,
but the revelations of corruption that we have
recently seen may bid us pause.
Moreover, how very recently is it that our
justice has advanced beyond a semi-savage
state ! I have myself spoken to a man who had
seen a woman hanged in England for stealing
a coat from a stall. I came across another case
of a boy of 12 hanged for horse stealing. With-
in living memory a child of 9 years old was
condemned to death for stealing two penny
worth of paint. The sentence was commuted,
but the astonishing thing was that such a sen-
tence could be passed. It was not till 1861
that capital punishment was abolished save for
the offences for which it is still inflicted.
Germany broke human victims on the wheel
as late as the 19th Century. The brutal treat-
ment in some of the American prisons and
64
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
reformatories to-day is almost incredible, and
the flagrant iniquity of Lynch law would have
been absolutely incredible to the Greek mind.
"How about slavery?" some have urged, as
though that entirely disposed of any claims
that the Athenian might have in other direc-
tions.
But as a matter of fact, although one would
not uphold Athenian slavery for a moment, it
must be remembered that Athenian slavery
was not by any means what we understand by
slavery.
When we think of slavery we are thinking of
our slavery or Roman slavery, which is a very
different kind of thing. Our slavery was an al-
together abominable institution, for which
very little can be said.
The Athenian slave, on the whole, was un-
doubtedly well treated. The domestic slave
was admitted by a religious ceremony to mem-
bership of the family, and his status was prac-
tically that of the child whom the parent can
punish and whose occupation is at the parents'
bidding. He was duly looked after and, in the
event of sickness, was tended in person by the
mistress of the household.
The slave was carefully protected in the
Athenian courts of law, and if he was ill-
65
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
treated his master was compelled by public
opinion to part with him. The slaves in the
mines seem to have been the only ones whose
lot in itself, apart from the lack of freedom,
was a hard one, and even their condition would
not compare with that of our sweated indus-
tries in the slums of our great cities.
The Greek slave could own property and fre-
quently bought his freedom, and apparently
might even, at any rate in theory, be wealthier
than his master. It is necessary for us to dis-
miss from our minds the fancy pictures of the
pernicious little text books which would lead
us to suppose that the Athenians lived a life
of leisured ease upon the labour of the slaves.
On the one hand, the free Athenian citizens
were engaged in every kind of occupation
from the highest to the lowest, and a large
proportion of them certainly possessed no
slaves at all. A man in the economic position
of Sokrates would be very unlikely to own a
slave. On the other hand the slaves were by no
means engaged entirely in menial occupations.
It would appear that the heads of most of the
large business houses of Athens were slaves.
Pasion, the greatest banker of Greece, was a
slave and a bank manager for the major part
of his life. The police, who arrested the free
66
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
Athenian citizens, were slaves, and many of
the under-secretaries of state, holding positions
analogous to our civil service clerks, to whom
we may award a C. B. or even a knighthood.
There was much that was objectionable
about Athenian slavery ; but it was not what
we mean by slavery and the lot of the slave
compared more than favourably with that of
a large fraction of our free population.
And how recently have we been clear of
this stain? Britain since 1838. The United
States since 1865. There are plenty of slaves
alive now and owners who inherited slaves in
their youth. Indeed, can we say that our
modern Vvestern Civilizations are clear of
this thing? What of the Congo atrocities?
What of the Putamayo atrocities? What of
the white-slave traffic? Immorality there has
been at all times in the world's history, but
it appears to be one of the trium.phs of mod-
ern civilization to reduce it to a science.
Now we must not make a mistake. With all
these blots on our civilization it does not mean
that its moral standards are not high in the
story of man's development. To think so would
be to make as unjust a mistake as we are apt
to make with regard to Athens. But to deny
to a people the claim to have developed their
67
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
moral being, who can set us an example and
teach us with regard to our duty to our neigh-
bour, the sense of proportion of the values of
life, moral restraint, anti-materialism, anti-
sensationalism, and even in certain directions
with regard to freedom and justice amounts to
something very like arrogance and imperti-
nence, particularly when we remember the
inestimable advantages of our religion, which
might have been expected to lead to more
striking results.
We may, there-
fore, be justified in
shading over the
second section of our
disc.
We turn, then, to
the third element,
the artistic, the cen-
tral element of our
inquiry. We have al-
ready seen some-
thing of the Greek love of beauty in the in-
timacy of the relationship of beauty to life.
How did this work out in the environment of
the Greek?
In the first place, he practically never built
a city or temple without some regard to the
68
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
beauty of site, and the site of the city of Athens
is one of the most beautiful in the world. It
is interesting for those who have not seen it to
remember its remarkable resemblance to the
site of Edinburgh. In the centre of each city is
a lofty rock, the castle-rock of Edinburgh cor-
responding to the Akropolis. The Calton Hill,
although somewhat larger, corresponds more
or less to the Areopagos. Arthur's Seat, over-
hanging the city, corresponds to Lukabettos.
The port of Leith corresponds to the Peiraieus,
and as we stand upon the great city rock in
either case we look across the water to the op-
posite shore, the Firth of Forth taking the
place of the Saronic Gulf, the islands of Inch-
colm and Inchkeith the place of the larger
islands of Aigina and Salamis, and the hills of
Fifeshire and the West the place of the hills
of the Peloponnese. Looking backward again,
the hills of Pentelikos or the Pentlands close
the view.
But when we turn to look at the architec-
ture, except for the copy of the Parthenon, the
resemblance ceases. Athens was crowded
with beautiful buildings from end to end, won-
derful in that perfection and restraint of their
artistic conception which has never been sur-
passed.
69
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
Throughout the city were numbers of tem-
ples of magnificent proportion and consum-
mate workmanship, represented for us now
by a few columns of the temple of Olympic
Zeus and the fairly complete temple of Hep-
haistos.
Dominating the city stood the grand rock
of the Akropolis, approached by its exquisite
gateway, — the Propulaia, the triumph of the
skill of Mnesikles, resplendent in, the mar-
velous white marble of Pentelikos, and mount-
ing guard, as it were, upon the bastion was
the exquisite little gem, the temple of Athene
Nike Apteros. Within the Gates toward the
North was the graceful, picturesque Erec-
theion, a perfect example of the delicate Ion-
ian style and, to crown all, on the South was
the noble Doric Parthenon itself, the subtlety
and refinement of whose construction puts
into the shade as rude and coarse all the
work of the world done at any other period.
But these things by no m.eans exhaust the
architectural wonders, — the theatres, choregic
monuments, stoai, the agora, the palaistrai,
the gymnasia, the stadion, the hospitals, the
horologion, the prutaneion, the music or con-
cert halls, the bouleuterion, and many others
combined to make a city of beauty. Enter the
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
houses and the same love of beauty will be
found. Notice the exquisite and chaste de-
signs of their chairs, tables and bedsteads, such
as only a Greek could produce. Not only
was that so, but every common household-
implement was a work of art, over which,
when any survive, the dealers wrangle to-day
that we may put them in the place of honour
in our galleries and drawing rooms, a fate to
which our saucepans and gallipots and tinned
meat cans and beer bottles are not likely ever
to attain.
But come out into the street again and
what do we find? — literally thousands and
thousands of statues of incomparable loveli-
ness, almost any one of which would be the
greatest treasure of a national museum if pos-
sessed complete and uninjured today. Of
these not a single complete work by a great
master remains.
The number of the statues was actually as
great, or nearly as great, as the number of
the population, greater than the number like-
ly to be in the streets or open spaces at one
time. Let us try and imagine ourselves get-
ting up tomorrow morning and coming down
into the streets of London or of New York to
find a number of statues greater than the
71
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
number of the people moving there. Then we
shall realize what art in the daily life of a
people means. It is difficult for the modern
to realize this intense and all pervading love
of the beautiful, but we find evidence of it
everywhere, not only in Athens but through-
out Greece. We notice Simonides, for ex-
ample, in his verses on happiness praying first
for health and then for beauty as the most de-
sirable of all things. How many of our people
would put beauty before wealth, for instance?
Similarly the women used to have statues
of Narkissos or Huakinthos or Nireus (the
most beautiful of the Greeks, after Achilles, at
the siege of Troy) in their lying-in chambers
in order that they might be the mothers of
beautiful boys.
Or we may notice such an incident as the
erection of a special monument at Plataia to
Kallikrates, because he was the fairest of the
Greeks who fell on that day.
A still more remarkable instance is re-
corded of the citizens of Egesta in Sicily who
erected a monument to a certain Philip of
Kroton, — not a fellow citizen — and made of-
ferings before it on account of his extreme
beauty. We can hardly imagine the citizens
of New York erecting a statue to some man
72
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
who visited the town because he happened to
be exceptionally beautiful.
Beauty contests were quite common in
Greece, as, for instance, the beauty contests
by the river Alphaios instituted by Kypselos,
king of Arkadia.
And what was perhaps the crowning event
in the life of the Athenian Citizen? The great
Pan-Athenaic festival, which occurred once
every four years in honour of Athene, the
goddess of Athenai (Athens), when every-
thing that took place seems to have been done
with the main intention of producing some-
thing beautiful.
God delights in that which is beautiful and
good, they argued, and our lives to please
Him must pursue the beautiful and the good.
Most of all must this be so in the case of any-
thing connected with religion and especially
in this great central ceremony of Athenian re-
ligion, the Panathenaia.
The Greek may have been wrong, but that
was his point of view; and the modern might
even reconsider his own position.
Think of that wonderful festival with the
athletic contests in which men displayed their
beauty of limb, and the dancing contests
where they displayed their beauty of move-
6 72>
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
ment. Think of the rhetorical contests and
the beauty of vocal expression in that unap-
proachable vehicle of thought, the language
of Hellas!
But the crowning event of all was the great
procession in which her birthday gift was car-
ried to the house of Athene upon her high
hill. Four skilful maidens, the ergastinai,
specially selected for their beauty, wove and
embroidered a beautiful peplos or robe for the
goddess during the four years that intervened
between one festival and the next. This was
hung on the yard of a model ship and con-
ducted in triumph through the city. Maidens
and youths who also were chosen for their
beauty bore beautiful gifts. Victims chosen for
their beauty were sacrificed. The priests, the
priestesses, nay even the policemen in their
comely garments, were beautiful. How out of
place the modern policeman would have looked
in that fair company ! Ever^' detail down to the
horse trappings and the broidered borders of
their clothes v/ere beautiful and one thinks of
our modern trousers and corsets and other
abominations.
But the loveliest thing of all was that band
of youths picked for their beauty from the
noblest of the Athenians. The custom was
74
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
that when they had been chosen they should
go to the Agora and then send home all their
clothes save the light chlamys, a sort of half
cape hanging down the back, and there walk
up and down to reveal that beauty of figure
that God had given. The Greek mind was
clear from the morbid and degrading thoughts
that barbarous nations have associated with
the loveliest thing in creation. The Greeks
considered it one of the distinguishing marks
of the barbarian that he associated nudity with
indecency. The divine beauty of the human
form which Plato made the stepping stone to
God, has been surrounded by the unclean
minds of the barbarous races with the asso-
ciations of evil.
After they had exhibited their beauty the
youths took part in the procession on horse-
back, or in chariots, where it was necessary,
not only that they should show their beauty
of form, but that they should show their
beauty of movement by leaping on and off the
chariots as gracefully as possible while they
were being driven at full speed. There prob-
ably never has been a pageant that for purity
of beauty would approach the procession of
the Pan-Athenaic festival.
75
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
But not only was there all this, not only
were the arts of architecture, sculpture, and
painting of supreme excellence, and, too, the
arts of music and dancing and all the com-
mon arts of daily life, dress, furniture, and
every item in the citizen's environment, but
there was, in addition, the great art of poetry,
so far unconsidered.
Of the wonder of that poetry itself, I should
have liked to speak, but in this course it is
impossible, yet its relationship to the life of
the people is, perhaps, the most remarkable
thing of all, which I could choose to use as
an illustration of the artistic spirit of the
population of Athens.
The great theatre of Dionysos, in Athens,
where the great Dionysiac festival took place,
would seat 30,000 people,* the great bulk of the
adult populace.. The whole performance was
regarded as a national religious observance, for
which we can hardly find a parallel in modern
days, — the nearest approach, namely a highly
elaborated choral service in one of our grand
old cathedrals, differs in such marked essen-
tials.
* Modern scholars generally give a lower number. My own
estimate from existing remains would be much greater. So I
have given Plato's figures for the old theatre.
76
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
In the first place we did not build the build-
ing. No, it was built long ago by our artistic
ancestors.
In the second place the artlessness of the
service would have seemed inadequate to the
Greek. It is not that there is not much beauty
in such a service, but that it is largely a mere
agglomeration lacking in organic and artistic
unity which the Greek would have thought an
unworthy work of art to offer to the deity.
But thirdly, his sense of artistic restraint
would probably have been most shocked by the
vulgarity of the huge concert organ thrust into
a lovely building, never meant to contain it,
so as entirely to spoil it — to say nothing of any
such fundamental of any music in worship as
that the actual voice of the worshippers should
come first and to this the instrument should
be a subordinated accompaniment. Pratinas
even objected to a single flute as interfering
with the sound of the voices.
When we come to look at the ceremonial
part of the choral service, — the processions, the
aesthetic and purely ritualistic part of the pro-
ceedings,— the fact that the officiating clergy
or choir on these occasions are not selected on
any grounds of beauty is too obvious to need
further comment.
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
To the Greek mind ceremony or ritual that
was not beautiful becam.e worse than useless,
and the tendency of Greek development
throughout was to substitute for the ruder
and earlier forms those that were more and
increasingly beautiful. Moreover the concep-
tion of the priestly office was different from
our own. It is impossible at this point to
enter into the complex question of Greek re-
ligion, but in most cases the office of priest was
the office of priest pure and simple, unasso-
ciated with any notion of prophet, preacher,
pastor, or minister in the modern sense of the
term. Hence it was possible in certain offices
to make beauty an absolute sine qua non.
The office of the priest to the youthful Zeus
at Aigai, and again that of the priest of the
Ismenian Apollo, or the priest of Hermes at
Tanagra, who led the procession of Hermes
bearing the lamb upon his shoulder, were con-
fined to youths to whom a prize of beauty had
been awarded in one of the many beauty com-
petitions throughout Hellas.
Fifthly, and perhaps most important of all,
the whole thing is not national. What propor-
tion of the modern congregation know any-
thing of the theory of music? Probably an
even smaller proportion know anything of
78
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
architecture and would be entirely incompetent
to judge either.
It is impossible in a short space of time to
give any conception of this wonderful drama,
the most consummate form of literary art that
the world has ever seen.
It is remarkable for the lofty plane upon
which it moves, — in its choice of theme, its
grandeur of manner, its diction and its atmos-
phere. Our nearest parallel is to be found in
Milton, not in Shakespeare. Perhaps the in-
tensity of its atmosphere, only equalled in Ho-
mer, is its most remarkable quality, particularly
the sense of all-pervading destiny. "But fate
I say no one of those that are born of men can
escape neither evil nor good when once he
hath been born." For the true tragic note,
moreover, there is nothing except Homer
again to touch the Attic drama, the tragedy
that must be, the tragedy that we could not
even wish otherwise, because it is in the heart
of things.
Or we might turn to the wonder of its artis-
tic and organic unity, a unity not mechanical
as some people have imagined, but inevitable,
arising from the fundamental principles of
beauty. Beside a Greek drama a play of
Shakespeare becomes chaotic.
79
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
Perhaps to the modem mind its technique
and artistry is the most surprising thing, — the
quahty of its verse, the construction of its
choruses, the balance, corespondence and
cross correspondence between part and part,
line and line.
To find a parallel in our literature is not
easy, but to compare small things with great
the sonnet may be taken as an example ;
although it is now a fossil of what was once
a living organism, follov/ing by rule what was
originally evolved by a nicety of artistic sense
for subtle proportion and detail. We can all
plead guilty to having written sonnets and
remember the iambic decasyllabic pentameter,
the restriction to fourteen lines, the division
into octave and sestet, the subdivision of the
octave into two quatrains and of the sestet
into two tercets. We remember the almost
Greek restraint showm in the use of rime,
only two being allowed for the octave, and
those arranged in a particular way, first, fourth,
fifth and eighth, and again, second, third,
sixth and seventh, while the sestet has its own
more complex rules. Nor may the thought
move chaotically at random, but must rise, as
some curve of beauty, to a culmination at the
end of the octave and then, in the sestet, make
80
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
use of the artistic principle of repetition for
a further rise, or the wave must die away in
a symmetrical recession.
It is not easy to write a sonnet! It was
still less easy for geniuses like Petrarch to
evolve the subtle artistic form, but it is child's
play, a bagatelle, in comparison with Greek
tragedy.
Such, then, was the drama of Hellas, a
thing of supreme intellectual quality, never
playing to the gallery as is not infrequently
the case in the Elizabethan drama, and yet
appreciated and understood by the great citi-
zen crowd of Athens, the people who flock to
our picture palaces.
We might have expected that the output of
anything on so high a level would have been
exceedingly small. But quite the contrary is
the case. During the golden century of
Athens the number of these dramas, the high-
est form of literary production ever conceived
by the mind of man, must, at a low estimate,
have been at least 4,000.'-' Sophokles pro-
duced nearly 130, Euripides between 90 and
100 and Choirilos 160.
Now, the free population of Athens was
* It is a complicated question, but my own estimate would
make it about 8,000. We are therefore well within the mark.
81
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
only about that of Toledo in the United
states or of Leicester in Britain. Could we
imagine Toledo, even though we gave it a
century, producing 4,000 examples of the high-
est form of literary production ever conceived
by the mind of man? No, nor any other mod-
ern city.
But suppose we were to hold a sonnet com-
petition here in Manchester ; whom should
we get to be our judges? Doubtless there
would be plenty of learned literary students
in the University and elsewhere. But what
we should not do would be to go out into the
streets and buttonhole the first man we met
and say, — "Come along in here, for we want
you to judge a sonnet competition." For the
chances would be that the man had never
heard of a sonnet, let alone the question of
being able to judge one.
Now, the method of judgment of the Greek
Drama is a difncult and controversial ques-
tion, but it seems clear that the preliminary
judgment, before the plays were produced, was
conducted by the Archons, the archon-epony-
mos at the greater festival and the archon-
basileus at the lesser festival. And we find
that the archons were chosen by lot. Tom,
82
HELLAS AND THE COMPLETE MAN
Dick and Harry, then, as we say, could judge
the Greek drama.
Now, we have an interesting parallel to
this where Tom, Dick and Harry, men chosen
at random, judge questions of life and death,
of right and wrong. We can take no particu-
lar credit for our jury system, as the Athen-
ians had a jury before we, so to speak, were
invented. But the point is that the average
standard of honour and justice and fair play
amongst us is such that we can entrust these
questions of life and death, of right and
wrong, to any twelve men taken at random.
But the remarkable thing to notice is that
this average standard of honour and justice
amongst us in the field of morality is paral-
leled, in the case of Athens, by an average
standard of artistic insight and critical acu-
men in the field artistic that enabled it to pass
a judgment on the highest form of literary
production ever conceived by the mind of
man.
Probably no single illustration brings out
so forcibly the national permeating artistic
sense as the relation of the populace to this
supreme example of art.
We are therefore justified in shading over
83
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
the remaining sec-
tion of our disc,
marking the fact that
the Greek, and par-
ticularly the Athen-
ian, stands as the
example of the all-
round man who did
see life clearly and
see it whole.
We may take him then as our standard with
regard to this completeness of being, our cri-
terion, by which other men and other ages are
to be judged. As has been said before, his ex-
cellence in the several parts of his nature is re-
markable ; but that is not what engages our at-
tention now, but the fact of his full and pro-
portionate development of the whole; nothing
was omitted, nothing was developed at the ex-
pense of the rest.
84
THE MIDDLE AGES AND
THE RENAISSANCE
PART IV
THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE
RENAISSANCE
We turn the page then to the Middle Ages
and again find ourselves in surroundings of
loveliness. It would be interesting to enter
equally fully into the nature of the mediaeval
epoch, but in a single lecture a comparatively
hasty survey must suffice.
We approach the mediaeval city and once
more are struck by the beauty of the thing.
It rises, with its towers and gateways, like a
jewel set in the surrounding landscape, clear-
ly defined in its artistic and organic unity by
its circumscribing walls. There are no acres
and acres of soul-destroying suburbs. We ap-
proach through one of the beautiful gates,
perhaps over one of those delightful old
bridges with its exquisite little bridge chapel,
and find ourself in a city of romance, a very
fairyland of wonder. Above all towers the
glorious cathedral, the centre of the religious
life, and to balance it some mighty castle, the
centre of the secular authority. On every
hand are beautiful chantry chapels, elegant
well heads, fascinating niches, charming arch-
87
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
ways over the street or market crosses. Here
are the splendid gild-halls with their sculp-
ture and carving, their colour and gilding,
their tapestry and glass, their woodwork and
iron work; there are the cloisters of some ab-
bey, the hall of some college or the attractive
houses of the citizens.
And just as was the case in Greece, when
we enter the buildings we find the same lov-
ing care in the beauty of every detail, the
locks, the handles, the hinges and the furni-
ture marked by a certain sparing simplicity
such as we found in Greece or might find in
Japan to-day. Even the gutter-pipes and things
of baser use are all made beautiful.
The extraordinary beauty of the crafts of the
Middle Ages is by no means so generally re-
alized as it should be. Nothing has ever ap-
proached the forged iron-work of the earlier
period or the chisel and file-work of the later.
The work in precious metals rivals everything
except the unapproachably chaste designs of
the Keltic artists ; and although but a mere bat-
tered fragment of mediaeval woodwork re-
mains, something of its extreme beauty must
be more or less familiar to everyone. Probably
the best needlework that the world has ever
seen was the famous English work of the thir-
88
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
teenth century, sought after in its own day all
over Europe. Better known to our generation
is the glorious stained glass, which later ages
have struggled, and struggled wholly in vain,
even to approach. Tiles, enamels, bookbind-
ings, illuminations, all offer examples to which
modern art can turn for inspiration.
There is little need to emphasize the love of
beauty in the middle ages. It was considered
a mark of the gentleman to know something
about architecture. The king, the statesman,
the bishop vt'as artist as well, and all the Plan-
tagenet Kings seem to have made some study
of architecture and the other arts, and they
heaped honours on such men as William of
Wykeham, 1324-1404, who could add to the
beauty of the surroundings of life. We re-
member how Richard I, when visiting his new
castle, the Chauteau Gaillard, stood back, lost
in admiration, and then exclaimed, — "Is she
not fair, my one year old?"
Mediaeval costume was beautiful as com-
pared with our own and the mediaeval festa
and pageant, if less beautiful than the Pan-
Athenaic procession, was a scene of colour
and beauty that our drab-coloured people can
not parallel. There is often a tendency to
forget how great the achievements of our
7 89
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
mediaeval forefathers were in the realm of
pure art. Take sculpture, for instance, which
we are wont to think of as belonging rather
to the age of Greece or the Renaissance. The
sculpture of the Middle Ages is quite different,
it is true, but has a wonderful charm about
it nevertheless. It is less serious perhaps as
a whole than Greek sculpture and there is of-
ten a degree of playfulness about it which
would surprise one in Greek v/ork. It is not
so masterly, of course, in its technique, but it
is full both of grace and character. Much of
it is extraordinarily subtle and delicate, with
a delightful sweep of line and simplicity of
effect. Its best examples are full of expres-
sion and character, carefully studied and most
artistically treated. The French work is, on
the whole, better than English, but it is all
full of fascination and it will be found a singu-
larly attractive study by those who care to
pursue it. It is true that there is not much
free sculpture, but both the architectural
work and the smaller work in wood and ivory
show masterpieces to be ranked among the
great work of the world.
Even painting was carried to a very high de-
gree of excellence, particularly in England,
which was ahead of the rest of Europe, al-
90
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
though we rush over in crowds to see dis-
tinctly inferior work among the early masters
of Italy.
Again the artistic side of the literature of the
Middle Ages must not be overlooked. Poetry
and belles lettres were not the possession of a
select few, but the possession of the people as a
whole. We have such things as the "Chansons
de Geste," the Arthurian Cycle, "The Romance
of the Rose." There were the Trouveres and
the Troubadours in France and the Meister-
singers and Minnesingers in Germany; and no
one can forget Chaucer or the exquisite thir-
teenth century lyrics in our own language, such
as "Sumer is icumen in" or the unsurpassable
"Alisoun," or again in other fields such master-
pieces as "Pearl' or "The Knight of the Green
Girdle."
It was undoubtedly an age of art and the
portion of our disc that represents art can be
filled. So we turn to the moral side and what
do we find here? We find that we speak of
these ages as the ages of faith and we also
describe them as the ages of chivalry. There
was about them an earnestness of moral pur-
pose and religious endeavour, marred, as we
shall see, by its crudity, but nevertheless such
that many a modern reformer would be glad
91
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
to see the same devotion, the same self-sacri-
fice, the same enthusiasm and zeal.
It may have been wrong headed, but think of
the religious pilgrimages, think of the undying
generosity and fervid self-abandonment of the
people who built the great cathedrals. In
England alone with a population of under two
millions and without our wealth and modern
appliances or means of transit, there were built
between three and four hundred great churches
of cathedral size during the single century
from 1090 A. D. onward.
However we may criticize the Middle Ages
we must admit the spirit of high moral pur-
pose at the back of the superstition and the
ro.ore uncouth elements of the age, and we
cannot deny that the second portion of the disc
must be shaded in its turn.
But when we turn to the intellecual side of
life what do we see? Do we see as in Greece
that burning desire for knovv^ledge and truth
for truth's sake, no mattter where it led, no
matter what heartburnings it might cause at
first or what prejudices it might overset, that
man might reach the calm light of the true
and eternal that nothing can quench.
V/as it an age of learning and universal edu-
cation such as we saw in Athens? We must
92
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
confess that it was not so, that it was a rare
thing for a layman to be able even to read
or write. John, King, of Bohemia, could not
read even so late as the middle of the four-
teenth century, nor Philip the Hardy, King of
France, although he was the son of St. Louis.
Perhaps the most striking fact is that even
authors themselves not infrequently were un-
able to read or write, as for instance. Wolfram
von Eschenbach, the composer of the Parzival.
Intellectual activity, of course, there was of
a kind; but it was narrow and starved and in
spite of the universities and the monastic
schools, which were practically confined to
those taking orders, it really did not touch
either the upper classes, except the clerics, or
the masses of the people. The scholasticism
of the Middle Ages, although exhibiting a power
of mental gymnastic, which within its limits
was very remarkable, was a poor thing com-
pared with the philosophy of Greece from
which it was descended. It lacked the freedom
and entire disinterestedness of Greek thought.
The schoolmen were engaged mainly in solv-
ing problems arising from their study of the
works of Aristotle and relating these to Christ-
ian theology. Aristotle was their authority and
they did not seek to go behind the authority,.
93
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
"the Master," to the facts and fundamentals.
This can be contrasted with the spirit of Sok-
rates and Greek teaching, which allowed no
assumptions and no authorities, and demanded
that everything must be carried down to the
bed-rock of reason.
In the main it may be said that there was
comparatively little genuine search after
knowledge and truth until toward the end
of the period. And how were the men received
who made any attempt of the kind? Taking
the greatest of the thinkers of the Middle Ages,
how many suffered persecution in one form or
another! Roscellinus was condemned by a
council at Rheims and only escaped being
stoned to death by fleeing to England. Beren-
garius, 999-1088 A. D., was imprisoned and
only saved from death by recantation, Abelard
himself, perhaps the outstanding intellectual
figure of the twelfth century, was continuously
persecuted and his books burned.
Innocent III, at the beginning of the thir-
teenth century, declared that to lead a solitary
life or to refuse to accommodate oneself to the
prevailing customs of society was heretical
and liable to punishment. Compare this with
Perikles' public declaration about Athens ; —
"There is no exclusiveness in our public life
94
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
and, in our private intercourse, we are not sus-
picious of one another, nor angry with our
neighbour if he does what he Hkes ; we do not
put on sour looks at him which, though harm-
less, are not pleasant. "=•= Roger Bacon, the
greatest of all the thinkers of the thirteenth
century, was imprisoned for fourteen years.
William of Occam, the last of the great me-
diaeval scholastics, also suffered imprison-
ment. What of the treatment of Copernicus
or Galileo or even Columbus! The inquisition
was founded in Spain in 1248 A. D. and the
principal atrocities took place under the in-
famous Torquemada in 1483 A. D., when the
light was beginning
to break.
Consequently the
age as a whole must
be considered defi-
cient in the intel-
lectual side and the
third portion of our
disc must remain un-
filled.
But what was the result? It was not merely
the loss of the intellectual side in itself, but it
was a loss to the whole man that influenced
Thuk>dides, II, 37.
95
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
the other fields. The Middle Ages are marred
as a whole by a narrowness of outlook and a
bigotry that brought with it oppression and
cruelt}^ The want of the intellectual basis
made the morality crude and barbaric in spite
of its enthusiasm and zeal. Man cannot at-
tempt to develop two-thirds of his nature only
without suffering as a whole. Even the won-
derful art of the Middle Ages lacks the intel-
lectual refinement, the full subtlety of the
Greek. There is a certain barbaric profusion,
a certain lack of the Greek sense of fitness,
which would not have injured the splendid in-
dividuality and glow of this glorious art.
Fascinating and attractive as the Middle
Ages are, we cannot but feel that there was
something missing as compared with the
wider and larger culture of the spirit of
Greece.
So v/e turn the page again and come to the
Renaissance and Italy ; and once more we find
ourselves in a land of beauty, glowing with col-
our and charm. There is even less need to dwell
upon the beauty and art of the Renaissance
than upon that of any other age. Art and the
Renaissance are almost synonyms for many
people; and we think of Michelangelo,
Raphael and Lionardo in painting; of Bra-
96
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
mante and Sansovino in architecture, or Ari-
osto in literature. Cities like Florence or
Venice rise before our eyes and we know that
the common objects of daily life, in this period
also, still attract our taste and are a joy for-
ever. Italy sent its messengers and spirit all
over Europe, while in the North a like spirit
was at work in Flanders, and men in that age
in Italy, in France, in Spain, lived for beauty
with an abandon hardly surpassed by Greece.
Indeed, everything was judged from an aes-
thetic standpoint; it was the keynote of life.
Men woke up to the fact that we cannot live
without knowledge and so we get that desire
for truth that gives us the "Revival of Learn-
ing." Manuel Chrysoloras, b. 1355 A. D., pupil
of Gemistus, first brings the study of Greek
to Italy in 1393, and becoming professor in
1395, thus definitely marks a stage in the
stirring of intellectual life that had been
struggling to assert itself for some time
over the cramping conventions of the age.
The world saw the danger of intellectual
starvation. So we come to the great age of
discovery, of the earth's explorers, the age of
the students, Bruno, Landino, Politian and
others. We get the beginnings of modern
science : — Alberti, Lionardo da Vinci, Tosca-
97
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
nelli and da Porta make practical experiments,
invent scientific instruments and study anat-
omy. Every field of know^ledge is opened up,
and the flame spreads to other lands, Telesio
and Campanella become the precursors of
Francis Bacon. Grocyn and Linacre in Eng-
land labour at the lore of the classical v^^orld.
It was a strenuous age of manifold intellectual
activity.
But the strange side of the picture is this:
When we come to mark the sections of our
disc, we find that in moving on to the one be-
fore they left out the one behind.
In reaching out to the intellectual, Italy lost
hold of the moral; and Italy, beautiful Italy,
became a sink of moral corruption almost
unique in the development of our civilization.
98
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
It was not like the moral failings of the Mid-
dle Ages, which arose rather from a want of
head, a want of intellectual basis, than a want
of heart. It was a lack in the fundamental de-
sire, in the spirit of morality itself. Lust,
pride, greed jostled each other at every turn.
Even the very popes themselves, the leaders
of all, did things that we cannot mention be-
fore a public audience. And if the leaders
fell, what can we expect of their followers?
So again the whole man suffers by leaving
out a part. Two-thirds of a man, as we saw
before, can never be enough; and there is a
pride and ostentation, an ugly intellectual cun-
ning, that runs through the whole epoch. We
find a cruelty about the Italian Renaissance
as we did in the Middle Ages; yet it is not a
barbaric cruelty, but a refined, a studied and
cunning cruelty; and as we look deeper and
deeper we see how the whole man suffered.
The great intelligences of the Renaissance
could not escape, and a man like Machiaevelli
is an extreme example of what is typical of
the whole age. As John Ruskin characteris-
tically remarks, Robert Browning has drawn
a picture of this aspect of the period in a page
or two that sums up all that he himself could
have put into thirty pages, when he gives us
99
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
that fascinating but terrible sketch of the
Bishop in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at
St. Praxed's Church":
"Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas, while I gasp
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles
at!
Nay, boys, ye love me — all of jasper, then?
'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas?
One block, pure green as a pistachio nut,
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the
world, —
And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great, smooth, marbly
limbs?
— That's if ye carve my epitaph aright.
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every
word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line —
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries.
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long.
And feel the steady candle-flame and taste
Good strong, thick, stupefying incense-
smoke !"
100
MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE
We vision again such a family as that of
the Borgias, typical children of their day; and
we realize that with all its intellectuality there
was failure.
Or we turn to the art, and even the art was
not free from taint. There was an ostentation,
a worldly display, and even a certain over-
sensuousness, if not more, that in spite of its
greater intellectual finish, makes a sharp con-
trast with the more barbaric but more spiritual
atmosphere in which we find the art of the
Middle Ages.
101
THE MODERN AGE
PART V
THE MODERN AGE
There, then, they are, these three great
ages ; and we turn the page for the last time
to come to our own day. And what do we find
here?
No one could deny the intellectual activity
of the present age. The discoveries, the
achievements, of modern science will compare
with that of any epoch. It is too familiar a
fact to need any comment at all.
And men woke up to the fact that we could
not live without morality. The Borgias, the
Louis, the Stuarts were obviously insufficient;
man was not to end there, and so we get a
great moral awakening and, in spite of all
the strictures that can be passed upon the
morality of our day, there is a zeal about it,
a sympathy about it, that would strive to help
humanity and an honest general endeavour
to live an upright life that is very different
from the cynical disavowal of moral obliga-
tion that marked the Renaissance in Italy.
But have we not made exactly the same mis-
take that was made by our predecessors, and,
in moving on to the one before, have we not
8 105
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
also left out the one behind? Cromwell got
rid of the profligacy of the court of Charles,
but he also got rid of the finest art collection
in the world.
What about our Art? Can we approach the
modern city and say that it looks like a jewel
in the surrounding landscape, or must we
rather say that it is like some festering sore,
spreading its smoke and chemical fumes and
destroying the vegetation for miles around?
Picture the approach through miles of hide-
ous money-sucking advertisements. Look at
the ugly factories, the ungainly warehouses,
the mean streets and the drab costumes, and,
above all, the squalid and appalling horror of
the slums.
No, there is no general, all pervading love
of beauty; we have to confess that we have
106
THE MODERN AGE
substituted the love of material and the love
of sensational amusement for the love of
beauty, and the result is that our age is
marked by a sordidness, a hideousness, a
squalour, a sensationalism, a materialism and
a grossness, not only unsurpassed, but entirely
v^athout parallel in the history of the world.
And do we think that for us, and for us alone,
the laws of the universe are to be altered and
that we can trifle with impunity with the great
fundamental facts of our being? Can we not
see that no other age can exist upon two-
thirds alone of that tripartite nature that
makes man, without immeasurable loss to its
whole being. Is not our intellectuality base
and tending to be touched by utilitarian ends?
Are not our morals and religion lacking in
"sweetness and light," as Matthew Arnold has
demonstrated?
If we loved the beautiful it would save us
from this materialism, this grossness, this
sensationalism. These things could not be;
these cities could not exist. We could not en-
dure to behold them, quite apart from any
moral question.
We say that it is economic conditions that
cause these things and we deceive ourselves.
There is far greater wealth per head than
107
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
there has ever been amongst mankind before.
The economic trouble is simply because we
do not care to spend our enormous wealth,
that surpasses the old days' wildest dreams,
upon making things beautiful. The lack of
the love of the beautiful is the source of the
economic trouble ; otherwise its hideousness
would be a stinging pain to us, driving us to
frenzied exertion. Quite apart from whether
we had any interest in these sunken people,
our feeling for beauty could not allow these
things to last.
Go to old Japan, beautiful old Japan, before
the poison of modern industrialism had en-
tered in. The economic wealth was as noth-
ing to that of the nations of the West; but
there was none of that sordidness, that
squalour, that brooding horror of the Western
city. And there you might see whole popu-
lations trooping out in the Springtime, not
to a football match, not to a Coney Island, nor
to make money, but to enjoy the beauty of
the fruit blossoms of the early year.
We may think that we shall set the world
right on two-thirds of a man; but we never
shall. We go to these unfortunate dwellers
in the slums and we take them our science,
our economic science, our sanitary science,
108
THE MODERN AGE
our hygiene, and are surprised at the inade-
quacy of the result. Or we tackle them on
moral lines and preach at them and preach
at them and have been preaching at them for
years, but the outcome is disappointingly lit-
tle. Neither of these is enough; what we
want is all three elements. We must quicken
in them a love of the beautiful and we must
also make their environment more attractive.
Until the artistic, the intellectual and the
moral work together, we are foredoomed to
failure.
The pointing out of the evils of the present
day is not pessimism. It is the only way to
arrive at results. The true optimist is he
who scientifically diagnoses the disease and
having found the cause, can with some reason-
able confidence suggest a remedy.
The deeper we look into the matter, the
more apparent it is that this is the root evil
of the day. To make this clear would be to
analyse the nature of beauty and its relation
to truth and goodness.* But a result of such
an analysis put into simple form shows us
this. Beauty is the excellence of the thing
contemplated in itself and for itself and by it-
* The following passage is practically taken from the lecture
mentioned above and, for the sake of emphasizing the main point,
is inserted here even at the risk of repetition.
109
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
self. It is fundamentally unrelated to us as
far as its end is concerned. The attitude of
the artist is the contemplation of a thing for
its own excellence. Art and the love of beauty
is essentially the most disinterested activity
possible to humanity. But this is the thing
that it is so difficult to drive home in the case
of the self-centred person. This does not
mean that we do not take a delight in beauty.
Quite the reverse; the delight is one of the
highest that we can experience; but we must
not put the cart before the horse; its excel-
lence is not measured by reference to us. I
do not contemplate the beautiful because it
pleases me. It is not beautiful because it
pleases me; it pleases me because it is beauti-
ful. We have to lift ourselves up to its level,
not to attempt to lower its level to ours. If we
do not at first find pleasure, we must train
ourselves until we do. But even then the
function of the beautiful is not to give pleas-
ure; its end is in itself.
This is the difficulty of the modern age. It
lacks the power to appreciate anything that
does not minister to the self. The question it
always asks is, — what use is it? It is not any
use. That is just the point; if it were any
use, it would not be beautiful. It would be
110
THE MODERN AGE
useful for some end ; its end would not be in
itself. But the modern age always wants to
know, how am I benefited, or at most, with
a limited altruism, how are my kith and kin
benefited, my fellow creatures, my species, my
kind?
But the attitude toward the beautiful is the
attitude of admiration, a quality closely akin
to reverence. When we admire a personality,
we do not mean that that personality is of
benefit to us, that we expect to get something
out of it. That is not admiration at all.
To admire is to appreciate the excellence of
a thing in itself for its own sake, not for our
sake. But that is exactly what the modern
age cannot do with its ultra practical outlook
and its pragmatic philosophy. It has almost
destroyed a complete third of its being, and
it cannot admire, it cannot venerate, it cannot
reverence, it cannot respect, it cannot wor-
ship. Does the modern child know what re-
spect means? Does the modern man know
what reverence means? But the Middle Ages
knew and the Greeks knew. Plato's teaching
is the teaching we need to-day above all others.
It is the road to the element in our being that
we are in danger of losing. We must begin
with the admiration and reverence of the
111
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
earthly beauty and rise to the admiration and
worship of the heavenly.
What a curious piece of colossal conceit
it is to think that everything must have ref-
erence to ourselves and that our criterion of
things is to be whether they act, whether they
work out, whether they answer, for us.
Surely the solar system is excellent in itself,
whether we be here or not! Surely the great
universe is excellent in itself apart from man's
use or even understanding thereof! We need
to cultivate a little humility, a little meek-
ness, a little of the artist spirit of reverent
admiration, and then we can grasp the beauty
of the world. Only by losing ourselves can
we gain the earth. "Blessed are the meek for
they shall inherit the earth." How else?
Who other could do so, when its true essence,
its beauty, can only be grasped by humility?
The loss of the artistic spirit has injured
our whole nature. It has put us into a false
relation to our environment. It has reacted
upon the rest of our being and injured our
morality, just as we have seen in the earlier
periods.
Man must have an environment and there
must be a relationship to that environment,
and it must to a great extent enter into his
112
THE MODERN AGE
concept of morality. If that environment is
primarily regarded as material and possessed
of what we call material qualities, then his
morality will rest upon a material basis, a
basis of material acquisitions and a material
body. His aim for himself and others will be
to secure these material things and minister to
his material body. If his conception of virtue
is altruistic, then he will bestow material
goods upon the poor, he will be unselfish in
the matter of material wealth, he will not covet
the material goods of his neighbour, he will
tend the bodies of the sick, he will fetch and
carry material things for the bodies of the
weak, he will clothe the bodies of the naked,
he will feed the bodies of the hungry, and he
will liberate the bodies of the captive. He will
not kill, he will not steal, he will not commit
adultery; because these are sins against the
body and his morality is of the material and
the body and does not look beyond. This is
what our ordinary notion of virtue and mo-
rality implies, but it is a limited view of
morality, and to my mind the time has now
come to lift the whole concept of morality to
a higher plane. What we may call the ma-
terial qualities of our environment, what we
at all events tacitly understand to be such,
113
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
are these material goods in relation to our
material bodies.
But we want a new morality, a morality
that is not primarily of the material and the
body, but of the more elusive qualities of our
environment, that are more nearly related to
a higher aspect of our being than our body.
Although it cannot be analysed here, it may
be said that these qualities in their totality
make up what we call beauty. It is a har-
monia of individualities in a kosmic whole,
essentially possessing that quality which the
Greeks call avrapKeta. But even the ordinary
man realizes more or less what beauty is
without any analysis, and can understand a
higher morality, which, while not letting our
lower morality go, reaches on to a morality
of the beautiful. We can be generous with the
beautiful, we can be earnest and not slothful
in the creation of the beautiful, we can sacri-
fice ourselves for the beautiful and can re-
strain ourselves from violence to the beautiful,
just as we can with mere material or with re-
gard to the needs of the body. It is not unlike
our present conception of morality, indeed it
includes all these lower things, but it goes
further. The mere material and the body are
there, and consequently we can never dispense
114
THE MODERN AGE
with our present morality, but these lower
things are the means to the end and the higher
morality, while safeguarding the means, is in-
tent upon the end.
It is too late to discuss the four fundamental
causes of Aristotle, but we may say that in
life the material cause is the matter or ma-
terial of the world, including the body; the
efficient cause is the activity of the body, —
deeds, doing; but the formal and final cause
are to be found in what we term beauty. We
have treasured the material, we are worship-
pers of efficiency; but have we any clear vision
of the form and the end. It is the beauty of
holiness that is the ultimate vision, but it con-
sists in something infinitely beyond our nar-
row conception of ministration to material and
bodily needs, yet at the same time it is no
vague nebulous thing, nor a high sounding
phrase with no clear meaning behind, but it
is a clear and definite conception, as much so
as the solar system or the stellar universe it-
self.
The true reality is in the form, not in the
material. Change the bronze for marble and
the statue remains. Change the form and let
the bronze remain, and the statue has gone.
Is it not so with ourselves? The matter of
115
THE NEED FOR ART IN LIFE
our body continually changes, but the man re-
mains. Retain the matter and let the form be
that of a dog and the man has gone.
Beauty is of the reality of the form, not of
matter. What we can touch is transient, what
we can know is eternal.
What, then, is the issue? We must turn
to Greece and catch its inspiration, not in any
artificial re-naissance, re-birth, or copying,
but by realizing the significance of a man that
is whole and complete, a man that develops no
side of his being in excess and that leaves
nothing out.
Then, when we have realized our failure to
catch the spirit of humility and admiration, our
failure to grasp the significance of beauty, we
must make use of our great opportunities given
by this age in its development of means ; and,
setting forth toward an end, build up in our
own country a civilization greater and grander,
more noble and glorious, than even the civiliza-
tion of Hellas itself.
116
FINIS
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