Read Ebook: Rambles and Studies in Greece by Mahaffy J P John Pentland

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But I must say a word, before passing on, concerning the statues. No doubt, the painting of statues, and the use of gold and ivory upon them, were derived from a rude age, when no images existed but rude wooden work--at first a mere block, then roughly altered and reduced to shape, probably requiring some coloring to produce any effect whatever. To a public accustomed from childhood to such painted, and often richly dressed images, a pure white marble statue must appear utterly cold and lifeless. So it does to us, when we have become accustomed to the mellow tints of old and even weather-stained Greek statues; and it should be here noticed that this mellow skin-surface on antique statues is not the mere result of age, but of an artificial process, whereby they burnt into the surface a composition of wax and oil, which gave a yellowish tone to the marble, as well as also that peculiar surface which so accurately represents the texture of the human skin. But if we imagine all the marble surfaces and reliefs in the temple colored for architectural richness' sake, we can feel even more strongly how cold and out-of-place would be a perfectly colorless statue in the centre of all this pattern.

I will add one remarkable modern example--the monument at Florence to a young Indian prince, who visited England and this country some years ago, and died of fever during his homeward voyage. They have set up to him a richly colored and gilded baldachin, in the open air, and in a quiet, wooded park. Under this covering is a life-sized bust of the prince, in his richest state dress. The whole bust--the turban, the face, the drapery--all is colored to the life, and the dress, of course, of the most gorgeous variety. The turban is chiefly white, striped with gold, in strong contrast to the mahogany complexion and raven hair of the actual head; the robe is gold and green, and covered with ornament. The general effect is, from the very first moment, striking and beautiful. The longer it is studied, the better it appears; and there is hardly a reasonable spectator who will not confess that, were we to replace the present bust with a copy of it in white marble, the beauty and harmony of the monument would be utterly marred. To those who have the opportunity of visiting Greece or Italy, I strongly commend these specimens of colored buildings and sculpture. When they have seen them, they will hesitate to condemn what we still hear called the curiously bad taste of the old Greeks in their use of color in the plastic arts.

But all these buildings are either miserably defaced, or of such late date and decayed taste as to make them unworthy specimens of pure Greek art. A single century ago there was much to be seen and admired which has since disappeared; and even to-day the majority of the population are careless as to the treatment of ancient monuments, and sometimes even mischievous in wantonly defacing them. Thus, I saw the marble tombs of Ottfried M?ller and Charles Lenormant--tombs which, though modern, were yet erected at the cost of the nation to men who were eminent lovers and students of Greek art--I saw these tombs used as common targets by the neighborhood, and all peppered with marks of shot and of bullets. I saw them, too, all but blown up by workmen blasting for building-stones close beside them. I saw, also, from the Acropolis, a young gentleman practising with a pistol at a piece of old carved marble work in the Theatre of Dionysus. His object seemed to be to chip off a piece from the edge at every shot. Happily, on this occasion, our vantage ground enabled us to take the law into our own hands; and after in vain appealing to a custodian to interfere, we adopted the tactics of Apollo at Delphi, and by detaching stones from the top of our precipice, we put to flight the wretched barbarian who had come to ravage the treasures of that most sacred place.

These unhappy examples of the defacing of architectural monuments, which can hardly be removed, naturally suggest to the traveller in Greece the kindred question how all the smaller and movable antiquities that are found should be distributed so as best to promote the love and knowledge of art.

On this point it seems to me that we have gone to one extreme, and the Greeks to the other, and that neither of us have done our best to make known what we acknowledge ought to be known as widely as possible. The tendency in England, at least of later years, has been to swallow up all lesser and all private collections in the great national Museum in London, which has accordingly become so enormous and so bewildering that no one can profit by it except the trained specialist, who goes in with his eyes shut, and will not open them till he has arrived at the special class of objects he intends to examine. But to the ordinary public, and even the generally enlightened public , there is nothing so utterly bewildering, and therefore so unprofitable, as a visit to the myriad treasures of that great world of curiosities.

In the last century many private persons--many noblemen of wealth and culture--possessed remarkable collections of antiquities. These have mostly been swallowed up by what is called "the nation," and new private collections are very rare indeed.

The traveller is at first disposed to complain that even the portable antiquities found in various parts of Greece are not brought to Athens, and gathered into one vast national museum. Further reflection shows such a proceeding to be not only impossible, but highly inexpedient. I will not speak of the great waste of objects of interest when they are brought together in such vast masses that the visitor is rather oppressed than enlightened. Any one who has gone to the British Museum will know what I mean. Nor will I give the smallest weight to the selfish local argument, that compelling visitors to wander from place to place brings traffic and money into the country. Until proper roads and clean inns are established, such an argument is both unfair and unlikely to produce results worth considering. But fortunately most of the famous things in Greece are sites, ruined buildings, forts which cannot be removed from their place, if at all, without destruction, and of which the very details cannot be understood without seeing the place for which they were intended. Even the Parthenon sculptures in London would have lost most of their interest, if the building itself at Athens did not show us their application, and glorify them with its splendor. He who sees the gold of Mycenae at Athens, knows little of its meaning, if he has not visited the giant forts where its owners once dwelt and exercised their sway; and if, as has been done at Olympia, some patriotic Greek had built a safe museum at Mycenae to contain them, they would be more deeply interesting and instructive than they now are.

In such a town as Athens, on the contrary, it seems to me that the true solution of the problem has been attained, though it will probably be shortly abandoned for a central museum. There are at Athens at least six separate museums of antiquities--one at the University, one called the Varvakion, one in the Theseum, one, or rather two, on the Acropolis, one in the Ministry of Public Instruction, and lastly, the new National Museum, as it is called, in Patissia Street--devoted to its special treasures. If these several storehouses were thoroughly kept,--if the objects were carefully numbered and catalogued,--I can conceive no better arrangement for studying separately and in detail the various monuments, which must always bewilder and fatigue when crowded together in one vast exhibition. If the British Museum were in this way severed into many branches, and the different classes of objects it contains were placed in separate buildings, and in different parts of London, I believe most of us would acquire a far greater knowledge of what it contains, and hence it would attain a greater usefulness in educating the nation. To visit any one of the Athenian museums is a comparatively short and easy task, where a man can see the end of his labor before him, and hence will not hesitate to delay long over such things as are worth a careful study.

It may be said that all this digression about the mere placing of monuments is delaying the reader too long from what he desires to know--something about the monuments themselves. But this little book, to copy an expression of Herodotus, particularly affects digressions. I desire to wander through the subject exactly in the way which naturally suggests itself to me. After all, the reflections on a journey ought to be more valuable than its mere description.

Before passing into Attica and leaving Athens, something more must, of course, be said of the museums, then of the newer diggings, and especially of the splendid tombs found in the Kerameikus. We will then mount the Acropolis, and wander leisurely about its marvellous ruins. From it we can look out upon the general shape and disposition of Attica, and plan our shorter excursions.

As some of the suggestions in my first edition have found favor at Athens, I venture to point out here the great benefit which the Greek archaeologists would confer on all Europe if they would publish an official guide to Athens, with some moderately complete account of the immense riches of its museums. Such a book, which might appear under the sanction of M. Rousopoulos, or Professor Koumanoudis, might be promoted either by the Greek Parliament or the University of Athens. Were it even published in modern Greek, its sale must be large and certain; and, by appendices, or new editions, it could be kept up to the level of the new discoveries. The catalogues of Kekul? and of Heydemann are already wholly inadequate, and unless one has the privilege of knowing personally one of the gentlemen above named, it is very difficult indeed to obtain any proper notion of the history, or of the original sites, of the various objects which excite curiosity or admiration at every step. Such a book as I suggest would be hailed by every Hellenist in Europe as an inestimable boon. But in a land where the able men are perpetually engaged in making or observing new discoveries, they will naturally despise the task of cataloguing what they know. Hence, I suggest that some promising young scholar might undertake the book, and have his work revised by his masters in the sober and practical school of Athens.

ATHENS--THE MUSEUMS--THE TOMBS.

Nothing is more melancholy and more disappointing than the first view of the Athenian museums. Almost every traveller sees them after passing through Italy, where everything--indeed far too much--has been done to make the relics of antiquity perfect and complete. Missing noses, and arms, and feet have been restored; probable or possible names have been assigned to every statue; they are set up, generally, in handsome galleries, with suitable decoration; the visitor is provided with full descriptive catalogues. Nothing of all this is found in Greece. The fragments are merely sorted: many of the mutilated statues are lying prostrate, and, of course, in no way restored. Everything is, however, in process of being arranged. But there is room to apprehend that in fifty years things will still be found changing their places, and still in process of being arranged. It is not fair to complain of these things in a nation which is fully occupied with its political and commercial development, and where new classical remains are constantly added to the museums. Every nerve is being strained by the Greeks to obtain their proper rights in the possible break-up of the Ottoman Empire. Great efforts are, besides, being made to develop not only the ports, but the manufactures of the country. The building of new roads is more vital to the nation than the saving and ordering of artistic remains. Thus we must trust to private enterprise and generosity to settle these things; and these have hitherto not been wanting among the Greeks. But their resources are small, and they require help both in money and in sympathy. So, then, unless foreign influences be continuously brought to bear,--all the foreign schools act unselfishly at their own expense,--I fear that all of us who visit Athens will be doomed to that first feeling of disappointment.

There is an equal difficulty as to their age. The Greeks say that the tombs in which they are found are not later than the second century B. C., and it is, indeed, hard to conceive at what later period there was enough wealth and art to produce such often elegant, and often costly, results. Tanagra and Thespiae were, indeed, in Strabo's day the only remaining cities of Boeotia; the rest, he says, were but ruins and names. But we may be certain that in that time of universal decay the remaining towns must have been as poor and insignificant as they now are. Thus, we seem thrown back into classical or Alexandrian days for the origin of these figures, which in their bright coloring--pink and blue dresses, often gilded fringes, the hair always fair, so far as I could find--are, indeed, like what we know of old Greek statuary, but in other respects surprisingly modern. If their antiquity can be strictly demonstrated, it will but show another case of the versatility of the Greeks in all things relating to art: how, with the simplest material, and at a long distance from the great art centres, they produced a type of exceeding grace and refinement totally foreign to their great old models, varying in dress, attitude--in every point of style--from ordinary Greek sculpture, and anticipating much of the modern ideals of beauty and elegance.

But it is necessary to suspend our judgment, and wait for further and closer investigation. The workmen at Tanagra are now forbidden to sell these objects to private fanciers; and in consequence, their price has risen so enormously, that those in the market, if of real elegance and artistic merit, cannot be obtained for less than from ?40 to ?60. As much as 2000 francs has been paid for one, when they were less common. From this price downward they can still be bought in Athens, the rude and badly finished specimens being cheap enough. The only other method of procuring them, or of procuring them more cheaply, is to make diligent inquiries when travelling in the interior, where they may often be bought from poor people, either at Megara, Tanagra, or elsewhere, who have chanced to find them, and are willing enough to part with them after a certain amount of bargaining.

It is convenient to dispose of this peculiar and distinct kind of Greek antiquities, because they seem foreign to the rest, and cannot be brought under any other head. These figurines have now found their way into most European museums.

I pass to the public collections at Athens, in which we find few of these figures, and which rather contain the usual products of Greek plastic art--statues, reliefs, as well as pottery, and inscriptions. As I have said, the statues are in the most lamentable condition, shattered into fragments, without any attempt at restoring even such losses as can be supplied with certainty. What mischief might be done by such wholesale restoration as was practised in Italy some fifty years ago, it is hard to say. But perhaps the reaction against that error has driven us to an opposite extreme.

It is not very easy to give a full account of this change. There is, of course, one general reason well known--the art of the Greeks, like almost all such developments, went through stiffness and clumsiness into dignity and strength, to which it presently added that grace which raises strength into majesty. But in time the seeking after grace becomes too prominent, and so strength, and with it, of course, the majesty which requires strength as well as grace, is gradually lost. Thus we arrive at a period when the forms are merely elegant or voluptuous, without any assertion of power. I will speak of a similar development among female figures in connection with another subject which will naturally suggest it.

A fair specimen of the old sculptures first found is a very stiff, and, to us, comical figure, which has lost its legs, but is otherwise fairly preserved, and which depicts a male figure with curious conventional hair, and still more conventional beard, holding by its four legs a bull or calf, which he is carrying on his shoulders. The eyes are now hollow, and were evidently once filled with something different from the marble of which the statue is made. The whole pose and style of the work is stiff and expressionless, and it is one of the most characteristic remains of the older Attic art still in existence.

Happily there is little doubt what the statue means. It is the votive offering of the Marathonians, which Pausanias saw in the Acropolis, and which commemorated the legend of Theseus having driven the wild bull, sent against them by Minos, from Marathon to the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it. Pausanias does not say how Theseus was represented with the bull; but it certainly was not a group--such a thing is clearly beyond the narrow and timid conceptions of the artists of that day. It being difficult to represent this hero and bull together except by representing the man carrying the bull, the artist has made the animal full grown in type, but as small as a calf, and has, of course, not attempted any expression of hostility between the two. The peaceful look, which merely arises from the inability of the artist to render expression, has led many good art critics to call it not a Theseus but a Hermes. Such being the obscure history of the statue, it is not difficult to note its characteristics. We see the conventional treatment of the hair, the curious transparent garments lying close to the skin, and the very heavy muscular forms of the arms and body. The whole figure is stiff and expressionless, and strictly in what is called the hieratic or old religious style, as opposed to an ideal or artistic conception.

There are two full-length reliefs--one which I first saw in a little church near Orchomenus, and a couple more at Athens in the Theseon--which are plainly of the same epoch and style of art. The most complete Athenian one is ascribed as the stele of Aristion, and as the work of Aristocles, doubtless an artist known as contemporary with those who fought at the battle of Marathon. Thus we obtain a very good clue to the date at which this art flourished. There is also the head of a similar figure, with the hair long and fastened in a knot behind, and with a discus raised above the shoulder, so as to look like a nimbus round the head, which is one of the most interesting objects in the Varvakion. But of the rest the pedestal only is preserved. Any impartial observer will see in these figures strong traces of the influence of Asiatic style. This influence seems about as certain, and almost as much disputed, as the Egyptian influences on the Doric style of architecture. To an unbiassed observer these influences speak so plainly, that, in the absence of strict demonstration to the contrary, one feels bound to admit them--the more so, as we know that the Greeks, like all other people of genius, were ever ready and anxious to borrow from others. It should be often repeated, because it is usually ignored, that it is a most original gift to know how to borrow; and that those only who feel wanting in originality are anxious to assert it. Thus the Romans, who borrowed without assimilating, are always asserting their originality; the Greeks, who borrowed more and better, because they made what they borrowed their own, never care to do so. The hackneyed parallel of Shakespeare will occur to all.

Unfortunately, the museums of Athens show us but few examples of the transition state of art between this and the perfect work of Phidias's school. The AEginetan marbles are less developed than Phidias's work; but from the relief of Aristion, and the Theseus of the Acropolis, to these, is a wide gulf in artistic feeling. The former is the work of children shackled by their material, still more by conventional rules; the latter the work of men. There is also the well-known Apollo of Thera; a similar Apollo found at Athens, with very conventional curls, and now in the National Museum; and two or three small sitting statues of Athene which, though very archaic, begin to approach the grace of artistic sculpture. But Italy is sufficiently rich in imitations of this very period. There are four very remarkable statues in a small room of the Villa Albani, near Rome, which are not photographed, because the public would, doubtless, think them bad art, but which, could I procure copies and reproduce them, would illustrate clearly what I desire. We have also among the bronzes found at Pompeii statues precisely of this style, evidently copies from old Greek originals, and made to satisfy the pre-Raphaelitism of Italian amateurs. I select a bronze Artemis as an interesting example of this antiquarian taste in a later age. The statuette maintains in the face the very features which we think so comical when looking at the relief of Aristion, or the women of the Acropolis. They are, no doubt, softened and less exaggerated, but still they are there. The so-called Greek profile is not yet attained. The general features of the old Greek face in monuments were a retreating forehead, a peaked nose, slightly turned up at the end, the mouth drawn in, and the corners turned up, flat elongated eyes , a prominent angular chin, lank cheeks, and high ears. These lovely features can be found on hundreds of vases, because, vase-making being rather a trade than an art, men kept close to the old models long after great sculptors and painters had, like Polygnotus, begun to depart from the antique stiffness of the countenance. The Artemis in question has, however, these very features, which are very clear when we can see her in profile. But the head-dress and draping are elaborate, and though formal and somewhat rigid, not wanting in grace. The pose of the arms is stiff, and the attitude that of a woman stepping forward, which is very usual in archaic figures--I suppose because it enlarged the base of the statue, and made it stand more firmly in its place. The absence of any girdle or delaying fold in the garments is one of the most marked contrasts with the later draping of such figures.

But now at last we can show the reader how far the antiquarians of later days were able to imitate archaic sculpture. Another characteristic archaic statue was one of the seventeen found in 1885-86 on the Acropolis, where they had been piled together with portions of pillars and other stones to extend the platform for new buildings. The style and the mutilation of all these statues, which, from their uniform type, are more probably votive offerings than sacred images, point to their being the actual statues which the Persians overthrew when ravaging the Acropolis . They were so broken and spoiled that the Athenians, when restoring and rebuilding their temples, determined to use them for rubbish. Thus we have now a perfectly authentic group of works showing us the art of the older Athens before the Persian Wars. They are each made of several pieces of marble, apparently Parian, dowelled together like wooden work, and the figure here reproduced has a bronze pin protruding from the head, apparently to hold a nimbus or covering of metal. They were all richly colored, as many traces upon them still show.

Let us now leave this archaic art and go to the street of tombs, where we can find such specimens as the world can hardly equal, and in such condition as to be easily intelligible. A good many of these tombs, and some of them very fine, have lately been removed to the National Museum, where they are no doubt safer, and more easily studied and compared, though there is something lost in not having them upon their original site, with some at least of their original surroundings. What I have said of the museums is, even so, disappointing, as indeed it should be, if the feelings of the visitor are to be faithfully reproduced. But I must not fail to add, before turning to other places, that in inscriptions these museums are very rich, as well as also in Attic vases, and lamps, and other articles of great importance in our estimate of old Greek life. The professors of the University have been particularly diligent in deciphering and explaining the inscriptions, and with the aid of the Germans, who have collected, and are still collecting, these scattered documents in a complete publication, we are daily having new light thrown upon Greek history. Thus Kohler has been able from the recovered Attic tribute-lists to construct a map of the Athenian maritime empire with its dependencies, which tells the student more in five minutes than hours of laborious reading. The study of vases and lamps is beyond my present scope; and the former so wide and complicated a subject, that it cannot be mastered without long study and trouble.

We then come on to the railway station, which is, indeed, in this place, as elsewhere, very offensive. With its grimy smoke, its shrill sounds, and all its other hard unloveliness, it is not a meet neighbor for the tombs of the old Greeks, which are close to it on all sides.

They lie--as almost all old ruins do--far below the present level of the ground, and have, therefore, to be exhumed by careful digging. When this has been done they are covered with a rude door, to protect their sculptured face; and when I first saw them were standing about, without any order or regularity, close to the spots where they had been found.

A proper estimate of these tombs cannot be attained without appreciating the feelings with which the survivors set them up. And we must consider not only the general attitude of Greek literature on the all-important question of the state of man after death, but also the thousands of inscriptions upon tombs, both with and without sculptured reliefs, if we will form a sure opinion about the feelings of the bereaved in these bygone days.

We know from Homer and from Mimnermus that in the earlier periods, though the Greeks were unable to shake off a belief in life after death, they could not conceive that state as anything but a shadowy and wretched echo of the real life upon earth. It was a gloomy existence, burdened with the memory of lost happiness and the longing for lost enjoyment. To the Homeric Greeks death was a dark unavoidable fate, without hope and without reward. It is, indeed, true that we find in Pindar thoughts and aspirations of a very different kind. We have in the fragments of his poetry more than one passage asserting the rewards of the just, and the splendors of a future life far happier than that which we now enjoy. But, notwithstanding these noble visions, such high expectation laid no hold upon the imagination of the Greek world. The poems of Pindar, we are told, soon ceased to be popular, and his visions are but a streak of light amid general gloom. The kingdom of the dead in AEschylus is evidently, as in Homer, but a weary echo of this life, where honor can only be attained by the pious service of loving kinsfolk, whose duty paid to the dead affects him in his gloomier state, and raises him in the esteem of his less-remembered fellows. Sophocles says nothing to clear away the night; nay rather his deepest and maturest contemplation regards death as the worst of ills to the happy man--a sorry refuge to the miserable. Euripides longs that there may be no future state; and Plato only secures the immortality of the soul by severing it from the person--the man, and all his interests.

Nevertheless, what strikes us forcibly in these remarkable monuments is the chastened modest expression of sorrow which they display. There is no violence, no despair, no extravagance--all is simple and noble; thus combining purity of art with a far deeper pathos--a far nobler grief--than that of the exaggerated paintings and sculptures which seek to express mourning in later and less cultivated ages. We may defy any art to produce truer or more poignant pictures of real sorrow--a sorrow, as I have explained, far deeper and more hopeless than any Christian sorrow; and yet there is no wringing of hands, no swooning, no defacing with sackcloth and ashes. Sometimes, indeed, as in the celebrated tomb of Dexileos, a mere portrait of the dead in active life was put upon his tomb, and private grief would not assert itself in presence of the record of his public services.

I know not that any other remnants of Greek art bring home to us more plainly one of its eternal and divine features--or shall I rather say, one of its eternal and human features?--the greatest, if not the main feature, which has made it the ever new and ever lasting lawgiver to men in their efforts to represent the ideal.

Let us dispose at once of an apparent exception--the mediaeval pictures of the Passion of Christ, and the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Here the artist allowed himself the most extreme treatment, because the objects were necessarily the centre of the very highest sympathy. No expression of the grief of Christ could be thought exaggerated in the Middle Ages, because in this very exaggeration lay the centre point of men's religion. But when no such object of universal and all-absorbing sympathy can be found , then the Greek artist must attain by his treatment of the object what the Christian artist obtained by the object itself. Assuming, then, a mastery over his material, and sufficient power of execution, the next feature to be looked for in Greek art, and especially in Greek sculpture, is a certain modesty and reserve in expression, which will not portray slight defects in picturing a man, but represent that eternal or ideal character in him which remains in our memory when he is gone. Such, for example, is the famous portrait-statue of Sophocles.

Such are also all that great series of ideal figures which meet us in the galleries of ancient art. They seldom show us any violent emotion; they are seldom even in so special an attitude that critics cannot interpret it in several different ways, or as suitable to several myths. It is not passing states of feeling, but the eternal and ideal beauty of human nature, which Greek sculpture seeks to represent; and for this reason it has held its sway through all the centuries which have since gone by. This was the calm art of Phidias, and Polycletus, and Polygnotus, in sentiment not differing from the rigid awkwardness of their predecessors, but in mastery of proportions and of difficulties attaining the grace in which the others had failed. To this general law there are, no doubt, exceptions, and perhaps very brilliant ones; yet they are exceptions, and even in them, if we consider them attentively, we can see the universal features and the points of sympathy for all mankind. But if the appeal for sympathy is indeed overstrained, then, however successful in its own society and its own social atmosphere, the work of art loses power when offered to another generation. Thus Euripides, though justly considered in his own society the most tragic of poets, has for this very reason ceased to appeal to us as AEschylus still appeals. For AEschylus kept within the proper bounds dictated by the reserve of art; Euripides often did not, and his work, though great and full of genius, suffered accordingly.

THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS.

I suppose there can be no doubt whatever that the ruins on the Acropolis of Athens are the most remarkable in the world. There are ruins far larger, such as the pyramids, and the remains of Karnak. There are ruins far more perfectly preserved, such as the great Temple at Paestum. There are ruins more picturesque, such as the ivy-clad walls of mediaeval abbeys beside the rivers in the rich valleys of England. But there is no ruin, all the world over, which combines so much striking beauty, so distinct a type, so vast a volume of history, so great a pageant of immortal memories. There is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden of such greatness, and so the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disappointing. When the traveller reflects how all the Old World's culture culminated in Greece--all Greece in Athens--all Athens in its Acropolis--all the Acropolis in the Parthenon--so much crowds upon the mind confusedly that we look for some enduring monument whereupon we can fasten our thoughts, and from which we can pass as from a visible starting-point into all this history and all this greatness. And at first we look in vain. The shattered pillars and the torn pediments will not bear so great a strain: and the traveller feels forced to admit a sense of disappointment, sore against his will. He has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain: and as is wont to be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not fulfil his desire. The pang of disappointment is all the greater when he sees that the tooth of time and the shock of earthquake have done but little harm. It is the hand of man--of reckless foe and ruthless lover--which has robbed him of his hope. This is the feeling, I am sure, of more than have confessed it, when they first wound their way through the fields of great blue aloes, and passed up through the Propylaea into the presence of the Parthenon. But to those who have not given way to these feelings--who have gone again and again and sat upon the rock, and watched the ruins at every hour of the day, and in the brightness of a moonlight night--to those who have dwelt among them, and meditated upon them with love and awe--there first come back the remembered glories of Athens's greatness, when Olympian Pericles stood upon this rock with careworn Phidias, and reckless Alcibiades with Pious Nicias and fervent Demosthenes with caustic Phocion--when such men peopled the temples in their worship, and all the fluted pillars and sculptured friezes were bright with scarlet, and blue, and gold. And then the glory of remembered history casts its hue over the war-stained remnants. Every touch of human hand, every fluting, and drop, and triglyph, and cornice recalls the master minds which produced this splendor; and so at last we tear ourselves from it as from a thing of beauty, which even now we can never know, and love, and meditate upon to our hearts' content.

Nothing is more vexatious than the reflection, how lately these splendid remains have been reduced to their present state. The Parthenon, being used as a Greek church, remained untouched and perfect all through the Middle Ages. Then it became a mosque, and the Erechtheum a seraglio, and in this way survived with little damage till 1687, when, in the bombardment by the Venetians under Morosini, a shell dropped into the Parthenon, where the Turks had their powder stored, and blew out the whole centre of the building. Eight or nine pillars at each side have been thrown down, and have left a large gap, which so severs the front and rear of the temple, that from the city below they look like the remains of two different buildings. The great drums of these pillars are yet lying there, in their order, just as they fell, and some money and care might set them all up again in their places; yet there is not in Greece the patriotism or even the common sense to enrich the country by this restoration, matchless in its certainty as well as in its splendor.

But the Venetians were not content with their exploit. They were, about this time, when they held possession of most of Greece, emulating the Pisan taste for Greek sculptures; and the four fine lions standing at the gate of the arsenal at Venice still testify to their zeal in carrying home Greek trophies to adorn their capital. Morosini wished to take down the sculptures of Phidias from the eastern pediment, but his workmen attempted it so clumsily that the figures fell from their place, and were dashed to pieces on the ground. The Italians also left their lasting mark on the place by building a high square tower of wretched patched masonry at the right side of the entrance gate, which had of late years become such an eyesore to the better educated public, that when I was first at Athens there was a subscription on foot to have it taken down--not only in order to remove an obtrusive reminiscence of the invaders, but in the hope of bringing to light some pillars of the Propylaea built into it, as well as many inscribed stones, broken off and carried away from their places as building material. This expectation has not been verified by the results. The tower was taken down by the liberality of M. Schliemann, and there were hardly any inscriptions or sculptures discovered.

If this great man will not silence us with his authority, but let us argue with him, we might suggest that there are, no doubt, cases where the interests of art and of history are conflicting, and where a restoration of pristine beauty must take away from the evidences of later history. The real question is then, whether the gain in art is greater than the loss in history. In the case of the Parthenon I think it is, now especially, when records and drawings of the inferior additions can be secured. It may be historically important to note the special work and character of every generation of men; but surely for the education of the human race in the laws of beauty, and in general culture, some ages are worth nothing, and others worth everything; and I will not admit that this sort of education is one whit less important than education in the facts of history.

Of course, artistic restorations are often carried too far; a certain age may be arbitrarily assumed as the canon of perfection, and everything else destroyed to make way for it. There are few ages which can lay claim to such pre-eminence as the age of Pericles; yet even in this case, were the mediaeval additions really beautiful, we should, of course, hesitate to disturb them. But the Venetian tower, though a picturesque addition to the rock when seen from a distance, so much so, that I felt its loss when I saw the Acropolis again, had no claim to architectural beauty; it was set up in a place sacred to greater associations, and besides there was every reasonable prospect that its removal would subserve historical ends of far more importance than the Venetian occupation of the Acropolis. A few inscriptions of the date of Pericles, containing treaties or other such public matter, would, in my opinion, have perfectly justified its removal, even though it did signify a victory of Christians over Turks.

Strangely enough, his theory of the absolute sanctity of old brick and mortar nearly agrees in results with the absolute carelessness about such things, which is the peculiarity of his special enemies, the Turks. The Turks, according to Dodwell, who is a most trustworthy witness, never destroyed the old buildings unless they wanted them for masonry. He tells us not to believe that the figures of the remaining pediment were used as targets by the Turkish soldiers--a statement often made in his day. However that may be, I have little doubt, from what I saw myself, that Greek soldiers in the present day might so use them. But the Turks did take down some pillars of the Propylaea while Dodwell was there, for building purposes, an occurrence which gave that excellent observer the opportunity of noting the old Greek way of fitting the drums of the pillars together. He even got into his possession one of the pieces of cypress wood used as plugs between the stone masses, and has given a drawing of it, and explained the method of its use, in his admirable book.

But the same traveller was also present when a far more determined and systematic attack was made upon the remaining ruins of the Parthenon. While he was travelling in the interior, Lord Elgin had obtained his famous firman from the Sultan to take down and remove any antiquities or sculptured stones he might require, and the infuriated Dodwell saw a set of ignorant workmen, under equally ignorant overseers, let loose upon the splendid ruins of the age of Pericles. He speaks with much good sense and feeling of this proceeding. He is fully aware that the world would derive inestimable benefit from the transplanting of these splendid fragments to a more accessible place, but he cannot find language strong enough to express his disgust at the way in which the thing was done. Incredible as it may appear, Lord Elgin himself seems not to have superintended the work, but to have left it to paid contractors, who undertook the job for a fixed sum. Little as either Turks or Greeks cared for the ruins, Dodwell says that a pang of grief was felt through all Athens at the desecration, and that the contractors were obliged to bribe workmen with additional wages to undertake the ungrateful task. He will not even mention Lord Elgin by name, but speaks of him with disgust as "the person" who defaced the Parthenon. He believes that had this person been at Athens himself, his underlings could hardly have behaved in the reckless way they did, pulling down more than they wanted, and taking no care to prop up and save the work from which they had taken the supports.

He especially notices their scandalous proceeding upon taking up one of the great white marble blocks which form the floor or stylobate of the temple. They wanted to see what was underneath, and Dodwell, who was there, saw the foundation--a substructure of Peiraeic sandstone. But when they had finished their inspection they actually left the block they had removed, without putting it back into its place. So this beautiful pavement, made merely of closely-fitting blocks, without any artificial or foreign joinings, was ripped up, and the work of its destruction begun. I am happy to add that, though a considerable rent was then made, most of it is still intact, and the traveller of to-day may still walk on the very stones which bore the tread of every great Athenian.

The question has often been discussed, whether Lord Elgin was justified in carrying off this pediment, the metopes, and the friezes, from their place; and the Greeks of to-day hope confidently that the day will come when England will restore these treasures to their place. This is, of course, absurd, and it may fairly be argued that people who would bombard their antiquities in a revolution are not fit custodians of them in the intervals of domestic quiet. This was my reply to an old Greek gentleman who assailed the memory of Lord Elgin with reproaches. I told him that I was credibly informed the Greeks had themselves bombarded the Turks in the Acropolis during the war of liberation, as several great pieces knocked out and starred on the western front testify. He confessed, to my amusement, that he had himself been one of the assailants, and excused the act by the necessities of war. I replied that, as the country seemed then on the verge of a revolution, the sculptures might at least remain in the British Museum until a secure government was established. And this is the general verdict of learned men on the matter. They are agreed that it was on the whole a gain to science to remove the figures, but all stigmatize as barbarous and shameful the reckless way in which the work was carried out.

I confess I approved of this removal until I came home from Greece, and went again to see the spoil in its place in our great Museum. Though there treated with every care--though shown to the best advantage, and explained by excellent models of the whole building, and clear descriptions of their place on it--notwithstanding all this, the loss that these wonderful fragments had sustained by being separated from their place was so terribly manifest--they looked so unmeaning in an English room, away from their temple, their country, and their lovely atmosphere,--that one earnestly wished they had never been taken from their place, even at the risk of being made a target by the Greeks or the Turks. I am convinced, too, that the few who would have seen them, as intelligent travellers, on their famous rock, would have gained in quality the advantage now diffused among many, but weakened and almost destroyed by the wrench in associations, when the ornament is severed from its surface, and the decoration of a temple exhibited apart from the temple itself. We may admit, then, that it had been better if Lord Elgin had never taken away these marbles. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to send them back, as has recently been advocated by some ignorant English sentimentalists. But I do think that the museum on the Acropolis should be provided with a better set of casts of the figures than those which are now to be seen there. They look very wretched, and carelessly prepared.

There are, indeed, preserved in the little museum on the Acropolis the broken remains of the figures of the eastern pediment, which Morosini and his Venetians endeavored to take down, as I have already told. They are little more than pieces of drapery, of some use in reconstructing the composition, but of none in judging the effect of that famous group.

But we must not yet enter into this little museum, which is most properly put out of sight, at the lowest or east corner of the rock, and which we do not reach till we have passed through all the ruins. As the traveller stands at the inner gate of the Propylaea, he notices at once all the perfect features of the buildings. Over his head are the enormous architrave-stones of the Propylaea--blocks of white marble over twenty-two feet long, which span the gateway from pillar to pillar. Opposite, above him and a little to the right, is the mighty Parthenon, not identical in orientation, as the architects have observed, with the gateway, but varying from it slightly, so that sun and shade would play upon it at moments differing from the rest, and thus produce a perpetual variety of lights. This principle is observed in the setting of the Erechtheum also. To the left, and directly over the town, stands that beautifully decorated little Ionic temple, or combination of temples, with the stately Caryatids looking inwards and towards the Parthenon. These two buildings are the most perfect examples we have of their respective styles. We see at first sight the object of the artists who built them. The one is the embodiment of majesty, the other of grace. The very ornaments of the Parthenon are large and massive; those of the Erechtheum for the most part intricate and delicate. Accordingly, the Parthenon is in the Doric style, or rather in the Doric style so refined and adorned as to be properly called the Attic style.

In fact, all Athenian character, in its best days, combined the versatility, and luxury, and fondness of pleasure, which marked the Ionian, with the energy, the public spirit, and the simplicity which was said to mark the better Doric states. The Parthenon and Erechtheum express all this in visible clearness. The Athenians felt that the Ionic elegance and luxury of style was best suited to a small building; and so they lavished ornament and color upon this beautiful little house, but made the Doric temple the main object of all the sacred height.

It is worth while to consult the professional architects, like Revett, who have examined these buildings with a critical eye. Not only were the old Athenian architects perfect masters of their materials, of accurate measurement, of precise correspondence, of all calculations as to strain and pressure--they even for artistic, as well as for practical purposes, deviated systematically from accuracy, in order that the harmony of the building might profit by this imperceptible discord. They gave and took, like a tuner tempering the chords of a musical instrument. The stylobate is not exactly level, but curved so as to rise four inches in the centre; the pillars, which themselves swell slightly in the middle, are not set perpendicularly, but with a slight incline inwards: and this effect is given in the Caryatids by making them rest their weight on the outer foot at each corner, as Viollet-le-duc has admirably explained. Again, the separation of the pillars is less at the corners, and gradually increases as you approach the centre of the building. The base of the pediment is not a right line, but is curved downward. It is not my province to go into minute details on such points, which can only be adequately discussed by architects. What I have here to note is, that the old Greek builders had gone beyond mere mathematical accuracy and regularity. They knew a higher law than the slavish repetition of accurate distances or intervals; they had learned to calculate effects, to allow for optical illusions; they knew how to sacrifice real for ideal symmetry.

The sculptures of the Parthenon have given rise to a very considerable literature--so considerable that the books and treatises upon them now amount to a respectable library. The example was set by the architect of the building itself, Ictinus, who wrote a special treatise on his masterpiece. As is well known, it was sketched in chalk by the French painter, Jacques Carrey, a few years before the explosion of 1687; and though he had but very imperfect notions of Greek art, and introduced a good deal of seventeenth century style into the chaste designs of Phidias, still these drawings, of which there are copies in the British Museum, are of great value in helping us to put together the broken and imperfect fragments which remain.

There seems to me the greatest possible difference in merit between the metopes and the other two parts of the ornament. The majority of the metopes which I have seen represent either a Greek and an Amazon or a Centaur and Lapith, in violent conflict. It appeared plainly to me that the main object of these contorted groups was to break in upon the squareness and straightness of all the other members of the Doric frieze and architrave. This is admirably done, as there is no conceivable design which more completely breaks the stiff rectangles of the entablature than the various and violent curves of wrestling figures. But, otherwise, these groups do not appear to me very interesting, except so far as everything in such a place, and the work of such hands, must be interesting.

The greater number of the pieces carried away by Lord Elgin seem taken from the equestrian portion, in which groups of cantering and curveting horses, and men in the act of mounting, and striving to curb restive steeds, are brought together with extraordinary effect. We can see plainly how important a part of Athenian splendor depended upon their knights, and how true are the hints of Aristophanes about their social standing and aristocratic tone. The reins and armor, or at least portions of it, were laid on in metal, and have accordingly been long since plundered; nor has any obvious trace remained of the rich colors with which the whole was painted. There appears no systematic uniform, some of the riders being dressed in helmets and cuirasses, some in felt wide-awakes, and short flying cloaks. It must remain uncertain whether the artist did not seek to obtain variety by this deviation from a fixed dress. There can be no doubt that Greek art was very bold and free in such matters. On the other hand, the type of the faces does not exhibit much variety. At the elevation above the spectator which this frieze occupied, individual expression would have been thrown away on figures of three feet in height: the general dress, and the attitudes, may have been, when colored, easily discernible.

But I confess that this equestrian procession does not appear to me so beautiful as the rows of figures on foot , which seem to come from the north wall, and of which the most beautiful slabs are preserved at Athens. Here we can see best of all that peculiar stamp which shows the age of Phidias to have been the most perfect in the whole of Greek sculpture. This statement will not be accepted readily by the general public. The Apollo Belvedere, the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gladiator--these are what we have been usually taught to regard as the greatest wonders of Greek plastic art; and those who have accustomed themselves to this realistic and sensuous beauty will not easily see the greatness and the perfection of the solemn and chaste art of Phidias.

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