V

So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, Ideality. It is in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the Greeks have surpassed all other peoples and left an imperishable record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.

In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world, stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist full-face, the body below the waist in profile, with no transition between the two. The well-known metopes from Selinus in Sicily are good examples. It is a kind of procedure common to the early art of all peoples. But the Greeks differ from other nations in this; that when they improved away these early crudities they retained the predominance of thought over things, of man over nature, in a word of the ideal element in art. They regarded the body of man not, as the materialists do, as man himself, but as a shell produced by the inner working of the spirit, to be seen by the eyes of thought and imagination, as well as by the bodily eyes. Hence they were always aspiring from that which exists in appearance to that which lies behind the mere phenomenon. They realized that nature, when she produces an individual, never wholly succeeds, she falls short of the idea. And the artist by a loving sympathy with the creative Spirit, may venture to improve what she has made, to carry out her intentions more fully, to incorporate more completely the idea. The Greek artist, appreciating and venerating the body, tries to raise it to a higher and more perfect level. A simple kind of idealism may be found in athletic art. In their practice of athletics the Greeks did not, like the moderns, think only of the number of feet an athlete could leap, or the space of time he would take to run a distance. They thought also of his form, of the rhythmic and harmonious character of his action. If an athlete showed ugly form, they would hiss him, as they would an incompetent actor. Most of their exercises were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In all the statues of athletes which have come down to us, not one shows an inharmonious development, powerful chest and weak legs, or muscular legs and poor arms. It is more than probable that as the features of Alexander the Great influenced the portraits of his officers and followers, so the specially beautiful forms of some of the athletes who were most admired, tended to create a type, something of which appears in all the athlete figures of the time.

No doubt any one who is well acquainted with Greek types and with the forms of modern athletes will observe that the Greek physical build is not identical with that of our days. The equable climate and the unstrained life of the young men produced something more rounded and fleshy than we see in the north. Our athletes are less harmoniously built, with more prominent sinews, more harsh and wiry in type. An American trainer who is also a sculptor, Dr. Tait McKenzie, working as some of the Greek sculptors worked, from the average measurements of a number of young men, has produced types of strength and beauty, by no means exactly like the statues of Greece, but in their way almost equally beautiful. I instance the beautiful fifth-century figures of Greek boxers, softened by idealism, but admirable for strength and symmetry; and the Apoxyomenos, a man scraping himself with a strigil, as was the custom in the baths (Fig. 12). This is a work of the third century, after the artists had imported their knowledge of anatomy into their works, which had effects both good and bad. And beside the Apoxyomenos I place an athlete by Tait McKenzie, produced from the careful comparison and measurements of hundreds of young athletes of Harvard and Philadelphia (Fig. 13). This is a work of modern idealism produced by similar processes to those to which we owe the excellence of Greek athletic sculpture.

Fig. 12 ATHLETE WITH STRIGIL

Fig. 13 ATHLETE, by Tait McKenzie

The types of female beauty come into Greek sculpture later than the types of male beauty. In Ionian and early Attic sculpture women appear closely wrapped up in drapery. Pheidias and his contemporaries did not venture to represent undraped women. They showed the beauties of the female form not apart from, but by the help of, drapery. It was reserved for the age of Praxiteles and Scopas to represent the Goddess of Love in the guise of a nude woman; and Praxiteles made an apology for the innovation by introducing the motive of bathing as an explanation and a palliation. And even the Aphrodite of Praxiteles is remarkably free from all attempt at sensuous attraction, or self-consciousness. Solid, noble, and stately in form, she is a type or model rather than an individual. Later sculptors, it is true, departed from this line of simple harmoniousness, and tried to make the figure more attractive to the average man. But it does not become weak, and it does not become vulgar. The noble Aphrodites of the fourth century have fixed the type of female beauty in school after school of artists down to our own time.

This ideal is perhaps for us best incorporated in the Aphrodite of Melos in the Louvre, a work of the Hellenistic age, combining with the great fourth-century tradition a perfection of detail and an informing life which belong to a later time. But while most people of taste profess a devotion to her, that devotion is usually untinged by knowledge or real appreciation; for there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the bodily forms of the Goddess of Melos and those of the women who are most admired in our days. I was almost disposed to figure side by side the Goddess and the bodily forms which figure in our fashion plates. The fashion plates do not represent women as they are, but as they would like to be; they represent not the actual, but the modern ideal. And what an ideal!

Some readers may smile at the notion of taking seriously these ephemeral productions. But no one would take them lightly who was familiar with the facts of psychology. We well know that when certain types of women are set constantly before the rising generation as beautiful and to be imitated they will necessarily exercise a great influence on the future of the race. Young men will look out for such types to admire and to court: young women will try to resemble them. The hideous mistake in aesthetics will exercise a constant dragging power, pulling the young away from the light and the air of heaven towards the caves of evil spirits.

Few more charming representations of young womanhood in Greece exist than the Artemis from Gabii already cited (Fig. 5). One must confess that the divine element in it is but slight. But what could be fresher, simpler, more exquisitely natural?

No doubt as in the case of men, so in the case of women, we must make allowance for race and climate. A full and rotund development of physique is far rarer in northern than in southern Europe. The English race is taller, less solidly built, slighter than the ancient Greek. Among us hard tendons usually take the place of solid muscles. And the practise of athletic games by women undoubtedly tends to make them in some respects conform more to the male type. In moderation physical exercises may improve health and strength without tending to deprive the vital organs of nourishment. But the overtrained woman is farther from the healthy life of nature than the overtrained man. And whether the overexertion be of the body or of the intelligence, it tends to destroy true womanliness.

It is a pity that some sculptor does not do for the ideal of womanhood what Dr. Tait McKenzie has done for the ideal of athletic manhood. Of course the process would not be the same. No one wants an ideal type of the female athlete, unless we wish to restore the race of Amazons, but we do sorely need to have before our eyes types which embody the physical ideal of efficient womanhood. At present while nude womanhood in art conforms in a great measure to the Greek tradition, clothed womanhood follows the types of the street, modified by the baseless caprices of fashion. The two stand in unreconciled contrast. The Greeks when painting women on a vase often drew their figures in outline before they added clothes. But any one who tries to draw the outline of the female figure beneath the clothes on a fashion-plate will stand aghast at what he has produced.

Cicero repeats an instructive story in regard to the painter Zeuxis, who lived about 400 B. C. He was commissioned to make for the people of Croton a painting of Helen of Troy. He first inquired, what seems to have been a matter of common knowledge, who were the most beautifully made young men in that city, which was noted for its athletes. He next asked that he should be allowed to study the forms of the sisters of these men, judging that the sisters must partake of the beauty of the brothers. Out of these he selected five girls for more continued study, and by such aid produced his picture. We cannot suppose that he would be so clumsy as to select at random beautiful details from each of the five; in that way he would produce only an eclectic monstrosity. But, working in the presence of beautiful examples, his sense of beauty would rise in tone to the highest of which he was capable.

In this story several points are noteworthy. It shows that the type of beauty in men was more advanced and more generally recognized than the type of beauty in women. And it shows the Greek artistic mind ever on the watch to catch some new note of beauty to add to the traditional stock. Professor Brücke, in his excellent work on the beauties of the human form, observes that in the ideal statues of Greece many features may be discovered which in the actual world of men and women are very rare, but the charm of which can scarcely be disputed. There went on from school to school, and from period to period, a sort of accumulation of beauty which was ever increasing. Every beautiful model which was studied added something to what Brücke calls the stock of beauty at the disposal of artists.