In the Land of Temples
9781465544087
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
IT is a happy thing that the Greek race came into being, because they showed the world once at least what is meant by a man. The ideal Greek virtue ????????? means, that all parts and faculties of the man are in proportion, each trained to perfection and all under control of the will: body, mind, and spirit, each has its due place. Elsewhere we see one of these in excess. Thus the Indian philosopher soars in the highest regions of speculation, and sees great truths, but they intoxicate him: he does not bring them to the test of daily life, nor does he check them by reason. The Hebrew prophet has his vision of one God, and in rapt devotion prostrates himself below the dignity of manhood. The Roman deals with practical politics and material civilisation; he has a genius for organizing, and for combining the rule of the best with the freedom and direct influence of all: he, however, despises the spirit and the imagination. In our own day, what is called science arrogates almost divine honours to the faculty for measuring and observing, and neglects both the religious instinct and the philosopher’s theoric; nor is this ideal less deadly than the Roman’s to imagination and the sense of beauty. In modern times also, each person strives to excel in some one specialty, mental or bodily; and if there is any feeling at all for proportion it is the proportion of a group, while the members of the group are ????????, excessive in one way and defective in the others. But the Greek aimed at perfect proportion for the man; and his ideal was, that the man’s will should use all the faculties to some worthy end. His body is to be trained by music and gymnastic: the aim of the first being grace and beauty; of the second, strength; of the whole, health and joy in all bodily uses. His mind is to be trained by poetry, oratory, and philosophy; his spirit by the worship of the gods, in which all that was best in his life is concentrated into a noble ritual. Such would be the life of the ordinary Greek; the greater intellects would look beyond the ritual to the essence; and we have ample evidence to show that their ideals were as high as any that have been known to other peoples. Aeschylus dealt with the same problems that baffled the Hebrew prophets, divine justice and mercy, and the immutable moral law; Plato’s speculation took him into regions where logic and formal philosophy had to be cast aside; Pheidias by his art added a new dignity to godhead.[1] Nowhere is the Greek ?????????, their sense of restraint and proportion, shown better than in their architecture: and this both in the method of growth and in the final results. The Doric style has grown out of a wooden building. When and how the first steps were taken, we do not know, nor whether the Doric be directly descended from the Mycenæan style, as Perrot and Chipiez will have it. There is this great difference: that the Mycenæan and Cretan columns are like a Doric column reversed, the thick end upmost, and they show none of the Greek refinements to which we shall come later. A simpler origin is possible: for to-day the traveller may see, in the verandah of some wayside cottage (Homer’s ?’?????? ?????????) a primitive Doric column, some bare tree-trunk with a chunk of itself for capital, supporting a primitive architrave of the same sort. In the Doric order, other traces of woodwork are left in the stone, such as the triglyphs, or beam-ends, with round pegs beneath, or the gouged flutings of the column itself. And we have direct evidence in the history of the Olympian Heræum; where we are told that the columns were once of wood, and that stone columns were put in place of these as they decayed, one of the ancient oak columns being preserved down to the time of Pausanias. The early architects would seem to have been nervous as to how much weight stone would bear, so that their columns are very thick and set close together; in fact, less than one diameter apart. By degrees they learnt from experience, but the changes were slow and careful. The plan of the temple always remained the same, and there is little variation in the number of pillars at each end, or in any of the general features. As in statuary, here also they kept to their tradition as much as they could, and got their effects with the least possible change. But what effects! Compare the heavy masses of Corinth or Pæstum with the airy grace of the Parthenon, and measure the infinite delicacy of the changes which produce this effect. The builders found out that straight lines do not look straight, and that if the lines of a building do not look straight, the building looks as if it is going to topple over and fall. A column which decreases upwards in straight lines looks to the eye concave; and this illusion they tried to correct by making the columns bulge from the top about one third down, and then decreased this curve towards the bottom. The first attempts gave too much convex curving, but this again was corrected until the architect found perfection: yet the differences measured in inches are small. Again, each column was inclined slightly inwards, because a column that stands quite straight looks as though it were inclined out-wards; and the stylobate, upon which the columns stand, is curved from each end upwards to the centre. Other adjustments were necessary in the abacus and capital, to make all harmonious; and we may say that there was hardly a straight line in the building. Sculpture and ornament were adjusted to the eye in the same way; and it would seem that the effect of the whole building also was judged not alone, but in connection with the lines of the landscape—that background of hills, always noble but never over-powering, which is found all over the Greek world. For instance, in the Parthenon certain minute corrections were made because of the way in which the sun’s rays fell on it. These adjustments have been measured and tabulated—or at least a great many of them, for there are doubtless many we do not notice, and the building is a ruin—but they show a delicacy of sense which is nothing short of miraculous. These builders, however, were not only artists with miraculous keenness of sense, but members of a true trade-guild, with its accumulated wisdom handed down from generation to generation, and themselves were men who worked with their own hands. Neither could they have built the Parthenon with books of logarithms in an office; nor can we ever have noble buildings again so long as the architect and the builder are not one. Every common workman must have had his share of this traditional skill. Indeed, inscriptions lately discovered show that the building of the Parthenon went on after Pheidias was banished; so that the sculptures which are the wonder of the world must have been done in part at least without their designer. But even without such evidence, the perfection of every detail of building, the fitting of the joints, the strength and finish of each part, is enough to show what the Athenian workman was like. [1] Quintilian, Inst. Orat. xii., 10, 9. Olympium in Elide Jovem… cuius pulchritudo adiecisse aliquid etiam receptæ relligioni videtur: adeo maiestas operis deum æquavit. But we must remember also that the stones that remain are only ruins. Even in these we may trace many of the perfections of the ancient artist; but if we could see them as they were, we should see, not stones bleached and weathered, but buildings resplendent with colour and gold. Columns, capitals, architraves, all were a blaze of colour, decorated with graceful patterns and painted to match the blue sea and the golden sunlight. And now for us Sunium is a white ghost like the light of the moon, the Parthenon a rose in decay
