Greek art on Greek soil

Chapter I. The Land Of Greece

/J27<f John Winckelmatm, who stood in a rank with

Lessing and Goethe, and who still remains the subtlest critic of art, in his ■ ' History of Ancient Art ' ' that was written a hundred and thirty years ago, made some capital errors in his estimate of Greek sculpture, setting up statues which belonged to Greek art in its decline, as if they were perfect works. In this he was excusable, and excusable also for not recognizing the supreme merit of Pheidias, because Greece in his time was comparatively unvisited by scholars and artists ; though, by a fortunate chance, a French artist, Jean Jacques Carrey, had been in Athens previous to the destruction of the Parthenon in 1687. He made sketches in red chalk of the sculptures on the pediments of the Parthenon, that are now invaluable as enabling us to define and posit these groups, and especially those that were afterwards destroyed. But Winckelmann drew his knowledge of Greek art from Rome, from art-collections in Italy and Germany, and he made a skillful use of the materials that these afforded him ; yet he would have infinitely enlarged his aesthetic and critical vision, had he seen the Acropolis. Other German writers since Winckelmann have taken advantage of a better acquaintance with Greece itself, and do not greatly err in this matter ; and it is one of the excellencies of the most recent of them and, perhaps, of the highest living authority in this department of knowledge, Furtwaengler, that lie made a careful study of Greek sculpture on Greek soil, in the environment of place and scene in which this art was created.

In the field of painting, who, we would ask, could sympathetically know Giotto's frescoes in the upper church of Assissi, or the religious pictures of the Umbrian school, who had not first made a pilgrimage to that Umbrian land, which was the home of early Italian painting, and where the hills over which St. Francis walked still glow and palpitate with the life of religious poetry and the spirit of monkish meditative art ?

vl In this, then, and the succeeding chapter, I would sayHn a plain, straightforward way, something of the land of Greece and of the people who live there ; for the people who live on the soil, and the very earth, the sun and atmosphere, the geography, the language, the racial derivations and peculiarities, the political events which have occurred, tell us of those influences, subtle though they be, which originate and color a nation's art, while, of course, there ever remains the unknown factor of genius.

The best-hated man in Greece since he published his book in 1847, has been the German author, Dr. Philip Fallmerayer, who, in his " History of the Morea during the Middle Ages, ' ' declared and proved to his own satisfaction that modern Greeks, established in their national existence in 1832, are not Greeks, are not lineal descendants of the old Hellenic race, but Slavs. This has awaked a tempest of criticism and aroused the wrath of the modern Greeks against the writer. His undeniably learned reasonings have been met and mostly done away by the labors of more accurate investigators, who have shown that modern Greeks, with a confessedly large admixture of alien blood, may claim the name of Greeks. These scholars maintain that the Greek germ not only exists undestroyed and indestructible, but that the Greek element has absorbed other races, and that Greeks of the present day may be held to be " a modification of the ancient Achaian, Dorian, Ionic and Ktolian, in a word Hellenic populations, though greatly affected by the changes wrought through war and conquest. "X,/

I speak now of the Hellenes, not of the prehistoric people who inhabited Greece, and no Greek scholar would or could affirm who these were, be they called Aryans, Pelasgians, or Hittites ; and speculation seems now to run to the theory that they sprang from Kuropean centers and themselves emigrated into Asia, and made and mixed with the Aryan stock. Who, truly, were " the brass-greaved Achaians " whom Homer calls Greeks, and makes splendid as the rulers of Mycenae, Argos and Sparta? Agamemnon and Menelaos arose from Greek soil and represented a veritable Greek civilization, or one on Greek earth, existing before Homer and from which he drew ; and the Achaians, who were pre-Dorians, are held to be one of the four original Greek races — but these are vexed questions about which scholars are disputing.

The two racial factors in Greek art, were, originally, the Dorians and Ionians, the one bringing strength and the other beauty into Greek art ; but since those vastly early days, Macedonians, Gauls, Romans, Goths, Normans, Venetians, Slavs and Turks have swept over Greece and left their stamp on the people, but none of them have utterly stamped out and destroyed the primitive race. It is true that in the bloody wars of the Diadochoi, successors of Alexander,

Greece was fearfully depopulated, and down to this day it has not recovered its former population, but the Greek is a tenacious race like the Hebrew and other strong races that have influenced the world, and the survival of race is one of the best established laws of ethnic science ; and so true is this in relation to Greece, that Professor Jebb says : ' ' The central facl: of Greek history, from the earliest age down to the present daj', is the unbroken life of the Greek nationality."

There are said to be at present chiefly three races, or classes, of people, who inhabit Greece, clearly distinguishable from one another, the Wallachians, Albanians and Greeks, the last being the germinal or unifying one, which is especially the case in the central regions of Phocis and Boeotia about Mt. Parnassos, where ten old Hellenic names of towns and villages are found for one that is Slavic, or foreign.

The first of these, the Wallachians, who are affiliated in their Thracian ancestry to the Greeks, came into Greece from the southern slopes of the Carpathian mountains, in several streams of invasion in the Middle Ages, sometimes securing permanent foothold and being sometimes driven out by succeeding invaders ; and they are now represented by the nomad population of the regions about the foot of Mt. Olympos in northern Greece, largely shepherds with no very settled place of abode ; and the traveler meets them on the sterile hills and in the narrow valleys, clad in sheepskins, stalwart but savage-looking men, driving their flocks to pick up the scanty pasturage.

The second class, the Albanians, form a more marked and diffused element, comprising as they do the land-possessors, agriculturists and soldiers, the bone and muscle of the state, who came also from the north, descendants of the ancient Illyrians, mountaineers of those rugged countries of Albania and Epirus who, in unsettled times, swarmed into Greece, meaning to stay there, and who, though not exactly Greeks, are more closely allied to them than the Wallachians in speech, blood and traditions, and have become Greeks and formed the most vigorous fighting element in the war of Independence, and would do so in any other war that should arise. They brought new blood into the degenerate Greek race. You see these striding with haughty carriage about the streets of Athens, dressed in their jaunty red caps with long tassels, snowy fustanellas, embroidered jackets, close-fitting white leggings splaying over the foot, and large shoes upturned at the toes, with a tuft of wool at the extremity, an armory of silver-mounted pistols and daggers in their belts, and swinging big rosaries, which, like their petticoats, are not quite in keeping with their martial character. They are handsome fellows. " The mountains are his palaces, " the Palikari says, and when he comes straight down from them he is as ragged, lean and wolfish as we imagine Walter Scott's highlanders to have been when they strolled into the streets of Perth ; but the Albanian grows into an orderly soldier, farmer and citizen.

He is a stay-athome man, who gets all he can and keeps all he gets. The third class are, in some of their traits, more properly, Greeks, who, in Athens especially, and sometimes with good cause, boast of their pure blood ; for Athens and Attica were more exempt from the Slavic invasions that occurred between the 6th and 14th centuries, than other provinces. They are, morally and intellectually, children of Odysseus, man of many devices and who saw many cities ; they are the traders, merchants, sailors, commercial travelers, shop-keepers, stock -brokers, money-changers, dragomen, rich men (if there be such), as well as intermeddlers in all arts, students, artists, professional men, and, above all, politicians. They have the versatility of the Greek character, and I shall have occasion to speak of yet another simpler type who possess still stronger claims to pure Greek blood. ../it is a weighty argument in favor of the theory of ^Hellenistic survival, or the continuous nationality of the Greeks, that they speak Greek, as they have always done. £ Latin continued to be spoken in Italy till the middle of the 13th century A. D., and this was in a few exceptional Italian provinces ; and yet Greek has been the language of Greece from the earliest days until now, and even Romaic, the vernacular language, comes, in some respects, nearer to classic Greek than Italian does to l,atin, although greatly barbarized. In construction, and very widely in pronunciation, modern Greek departs from classic Greek, the moods, case-endings and inflections being swept away, so that the resemblance between the two is, in many instances, wholly artificial, but it is nevertheless, at base, Greek, Vith the same alphabet and forms. It is a debased idiom from a similar root, so that it may be built up again into the same language. ^ It is, in fact, as it has been called, Neo- Hellenic. It grew out of loose conversational usages of the earlier language, but not until the fifteenth or sixteenth century did the popular spoken tongue become fully developed, while the literary language remained unchanged to the time of the taking of Constantinople ; and even the Phanariot and literary language continued the same. In Greek schools now the grammar of classic Greek is used, and children are taught to read Xenophon and other classic authors.

The better the people the better the Greek they speak ; while the written tongue, the language of books and periodicals, even of newspapers is, approximately, the same with that of Homer. Corruptions, of course, X\ ^tS have come in, but even as far back as Alexander's day, the Attic dialedt had undergone great changes. \y With the unification and improvement of the laiA guage thus constantly going on, a Greek scholar would have no difficulty in learning to read modern Greek books and newspapers. Two or three months' study at Athens with this object in view, would make him master of the written tongue. Foreign phrases have been introduced to describe foreign and new things, and many dialedts have poured in, as in the Greek-speaking population of Constantinople the Turkish, and in the Ionian isles the Cypriote and Italian, and in Athens the Albanian, French, German, Italian, English and a medley of other dialedts, but the living language which you hear in street, market-place, shop, house and senate-chamber, on the dock and road, is sonorous Greek. You may, indeed, hear " mit6ra " for " //.rp-ipa" and " yinaeka " for "fYwuKa," but this is not such a very wide difference. The streets of Athens have the names of Hermes, iEJolus Athene, Lysocrates, Piraeus. The land is classified in nomarchies bearing the old familiar titles of Attica, Boeotia, Phthiotis, Phocis, Akarnania, and so on. It is Greece. You are at home with its spirit, and are not shocked in your classic associations, as you would be, probably, in Syria, in your religious feelings. You take your Plato and walk in the locality of the Akademe, meeting, it may be, some Greek acquaintance with a name quite familiar in the ' ' Dialogues, " and with a salutation of the still beautiful xatpejH^ou ride or drive a few miles to the north, over the plain of

Attica, until you come to the deme of Poeania (still so called), under the shadow of Mt. Pentelikon, and there you are at the birthplace of Demosthenes, where his paternal acres lay, for which, when a young man, he contested in the courts, and brought himself before the public eye. In half an hour's stroll outside of Athens, you seat yourself to take breakfast on the stoop of a little vine-trellised coffee-house (Ka$ev#>v) in a grove of olive trees, where Sophocles' villa, in its olive grove, stood. You say to your guide 80s, fape, $a£e — give, bring, show. The railway, indeed, that you get aboard, is the o-tS^poS/ao/Mos, the steel-way, and, if an American, you may hear America called Bao-tyKTuv rj yrj — the land of Washington. Greek was never a dead, but has been a debased, language, a prince in beggar's clothes. A century, or nearly a century ago, since the Greeks have waked up to something like new intellectual life, the question of a common language began to be mooted, and this served to bring the scattered elements of the Greek race together ;rand I draw from a little book by a native Greek Profealsor, the fadt, that three views are held on this question. Opinions, in a word, have formed themselves into three parties : 1 . those who contend that the common language of modern Greeks has been settled by the Greek people as they commonly employ it, the popular tongue spoken by Greek-speaking people, not only in Greece but in Constantinople and the Turkish empire, and all over the Levant. 2.

They who think that the vulgar tongue is too poor (it certainly did have a marked decline in the Byzantine and Middle Age periods, and through the period of Turkish domination) and that classic Greek should be restored as the common language. 3. They who also think the vulgar tongue to be inadequate for the scientific development of the nation, on account of its want of regularity in grammatic properties ; but as the complete restoration of classic Greek is impracticable in all relations and wants of modern life, a middle theory should be adopted, viz : that a common language be formed which does not depart substantially from the vernacular, or so far as to be unintelligible to the people, but that it shonld be corrected on the model of ancient Greek, and enriched by its wealth and power as a language. This is the opinion of the most thoughtful, and is the prevalent one at Athens, tending to banish vulgarisms, barbarisms and local dialects, such as the Wallachian, Roumanian, Cypriote and Constantinopolitan, to give a philosophic base to grammar and style, and to strengthen and elevate the language ; and, as has been said, the best people now speak the best Greek, above all write it, so that the written language more and more approaches the ancient ; and there is a strong tendency, partly pedantic and partly genuine, to restore classic Greek in all its purity. But everything one wants to say on everyday matters of business, travel, literature, politics, art, poetry, from Homer to telegraphs and telephones, can be said in modern Greek ; and, at all events, it is Greek that is spoken in Greece, however diversely it sounds from the classic tongue.

While Latin has ceased to be a spoken language, Greek is a living one, and it is an almost miraculous fact that this should be so, considering the great changes and upheavals that have occurred. Professor Jebb, from whom I before quoted, says : " It has been the unique destiny of the Greek language to have had from prehistoric times down to our own, an unbroken life. Not one link is wanting in^this chain which binds the new Greece to the old." In addition to language, the Greek people are inspired by the old names, traditions and monuments. They live among them. They are proud of them. If they do not know as well as a learned archaeologist does, what a classic ruin is, they are to a degree reverent of it. They point it out and talk about it as something that belongs to their land, even the most ignorant among them.\/\. Greek workman, when I happened to remark of /a rich altar of Pan standing near the theatre of Dionysos, that it should be protected, said, " Yes, sir, that is true ; Mr. Pan was a much respected gentleman, and ought to be better treated." He was right, for the ground in front of the theatre was in a neglected state, and I have been pleased since to see that it has been decided to fence it in and further protect this Dionysiac precinct. The Greek, peasant and learned, is aware of the importance of such monuments, and is in dead earnest when he execrates the Turk for maltreating and destroying ancient works of art. He knows his unique heritage, and the fact of the genuine interest taken by the Greek government in archaeologic research for the last forty years (the National Archaeologic Society was founded in 1858), and the brilliant results of this society's labors, prove it.>>yThe modern Greek has his eyes open} and, like the Japanese, js keenly sympathetic to old traditions and new ideas. He is sensitive and acute, and if he would discuss politics less at the caf<£, and work more on the field, he would be a worthy sort of man as he is a shrewd oneT^^^ '

I am but one fitness, and inclined, like other wit' nesses, to build large theories from a small number of observations, but I confess to a prejudice in favor of Greeks, and of a nation bearing their name and speaking their tongue. I desire (letting their boastfulness, dirt, fleas, sour wine and such small things go) to be a little blind to their faults, and to see their good qualities, or those traits which belong to a higher humanity, rather than those which lower and separate it. The Greeks have ardent aspirations that no disappointments have been able to quench, and "their very vanity is towards intellectual progress." The spark of Greek intelligence yet glows. They expect to be a nation, and are preparing for it. Education has had a development that could not be the case in a dull people.H Knowledge is the Greek's passion. ^/Education was broached, among others, by the patriot Admantius Korais, who, at the beginning of the century, as did also the poet Rangabe, began to write and teach of the need of education to prepare the people, sunk as they were in semi-barbarism under four hundred years of Turkish misrule, for liberty. He thought that the remodeling of the nation was no hasty work but required the thoroughly invigorating power of education, and that national enlightenment must precede national regeneration.* He was a reformer of the Greek language, and was born of Greek parents in Smyrna 1748, dying in 1833. He insisted on the union of literature with science in education, and especially the study of Homer, as an influence to raise the popular mind, and from him and those like him came that extraordinary impulse from which sprang the Hetairias (Iyiterary Societies) and the great multitude of schools all over Greece. >J In addition to the University and Polytechnic School at Athens, there is, throughout all the provinces, what may be called a graded system, consisting of the elementary or demotic schools, the Hellenic or grammar schools, and the gymnasia, which resemble the French lycees. The instruction in the higher * M. Constantinides.

schools and the University, is, to be sure, predominantly technical, but every child in Greece can have the benefit of free public instruction. They aim to be an educated people, to acquire that knowledge/ which gives leadership in affairs?'' and they have already reaped the advantages of this, and won through the East and in the Turkish empire the place of instructors, officials and agents in every business and profession that demands intelligence. Where knowledge is needed the Greek is found. The idea of a universal education has been overdone, but it is sinning in the right direction. The old Athenian Prytanaeum would have sanctioned it, if the Dorian Ephorate would not.X In so small a land the professions are naturally overstocked, and there are more candidates than work to supply them with. This creates a class of small savaris and literary men, but the students are trained to be doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, classical scholars and archaeologists, the last having their material at hand ; and, as I shall have occasion to remark, the Greek museums of antique art are the best arranged in the world, appealing to eye and mind without need of commentator. The modern Greeks can appreciate art if they do not produce artists, though this remains to be seen when they are freed from the anxieties of national embarrassment. The Greek is keen in apprehension but lacks steadiness of application. He has, as is well known, marvelous talent for trade, which makes him the Yankee of the Mediterranean. He is sharper at a bargain than the most crafty Oriental, and, for this reason, the modern Greek has been accredited, as was of old the countryman of him who was ' ' subtle of wit and of guile insatiate, ' ' with a streak of dishonesty, and this may have some foundation in fact ; but as far as my limited experience goes I have had no reason to doubt the integrity of the Greek, although he is, like Demetrius the silversmith, not apt to yield up his own interests in a given case. I once sent a message from the island of Syros when in quarantine there for fourteen days, to Athens, for a mosquito-net, by a Greek dragoman, who, seeing the note was addressed to a hotel that was rival of the one to which he was attached, slipped round the corner and tore it up. Of course the message was not delivered.

But the Greek is not everlastingly on the lookout for his own advantage ; he is, on the contrary, and as a general rule, brusquely outspoken, and is, also, like Odysseus, a natural story-teller and bard. p^ He is never at a loss for words and eloquent wordsx On the deck of a small felucca running before a gale in the Gulf of Corinth, I heard a young Greek sailor (my guide acting interpreter) sing with kindling eye his legends of war and love, accompanied by short interludes on a kind of guitar, his voice now harsh and loud, then soft and low as a woman's ; and an undercurrent of pathos, of pathetic cadence, ran through his lyrics, coming down as they do from the sombre days of the Turk, who, when driven out of Greece^left desolation and despair behind him; and thi^ 'Vein 01s melancholy runs through the character as well as songs of the modern Greek, so that he is more ambitious than hopeful. Some of these songs have a ring of honest feeling, as in this prose translation of a rude little lyric composed by the soldier-poet, Armatole Sterghio ;

" Though the Dervens' strongholds have fallen, and the Moslem has seized upon them, Sterghio lives and cares for no pashas.

" While it snows on the hills, and the plains bloom with flowers, and the heights have ice-cool streams, we will not bend the knee to the Turk.

1 ' I,et us go and camp where the wolves have their abode, in the caves of the mountains, on the heights and rugged cliffs. Slaves live in the towns and crouch to the Turks, while we have for our dwellings solitudes and desert ravines.

" Better live with the wolves than with the Turks."

This spirit of melancholy does not, however, spoil the deeper joyousness of the Greek's temper, for he is gay on occasions, and in merry-making on festival days that occur so often, be they religious or secular, and of which, like the old Hellene, he is extravagantly fond ; then he is free as a bird, and, like the ancient -v ^ Greek, is child of the sunshine and air, changing as suddenly as the moods of the Greek sky, from clear , /c, to storm, from a hospitable friend to a suspicious foeAftM and his knife is prompt to his hand. It is stated that crimes in Greece spring from quick temper aggravated by the fierce heat of the climate, far more than from any deliberate cause.* The shining rocks and hills of Greece, now as formerly, do not breed a bad and vicious race>£ When I was at Olympia, I found the solitary inn there in a state of disorder, arising from the circumstance that two or three days before, the inn- keeper, in a sudden fit of passion, had mortally stabbed a guide and fled to the mountains, and his family were in constant apprehension of his capture and their own imprisonment. V But the Greek in a good cause as well as bad\is no coward, and a fiery courage seems to run in his veins. The achievements of the Greeks in their modern wars equal anything in their ancient story ; since, whatever other Euro- * Greece under King George, p. 167.

pean nations did in aid of the Greeks, they wrought^^S^ out their own independence, and showed themselves v worthy to be free. ~r The Greek is a good seaman, having special aptitude for all kinds of marine service, and his proper ^_ place would seem to be on the deck of his antiqueshaped bark, such as you see scudding before the wind off every headland of the coast, and he meets the sea in his ocean-bound land everywhere, no part of it being more than forty miles from the sea ; and it is estimated that Greece " has a sea-line in propor- ^y tion to its area seven times as great as that of France, and twelve times as great as that of England, y * The sea has been the main resource of Greece, 'especially when we reckon in the Ionian and iEgean islands and Crete as belonging to Greece. The ancient Ionians if not the Lacedaemonians, were lovers of the sea. Tritons, amphitritons and dolphins gambol gracefully through Greek sculpture, even as they do on the lovely friezes of the choragic monument of Lysikrates at Athens, and the temple of Poseidon in Bithynia carved by Skopas. The sound of the sea reverberates through all ages of Greek literature, and its voice, like that of the mountains, is the voice of freedom. * Sergeant's New Greece.

Chapter II. The Land Of Greece

The Greek is a man admirably fitted to be a sailor, and he lives in sight of the sea that runs around and into all his land. The sea is his pathway to freedom, power, and enlarged thought and life. The intrepid deeds of Kanares, with his terrible fireships, will not soon be forgotten. They struck dismay into the heart of the foe. The Greek, at present, is building up again a respectable commerce, and doing the carrying-trade of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek marine consists of some one hundred and twenty steamships, and seven hundred and fifty sailing vessels, and yet Greece should be, on her own account, a far more important commercial nation than she is, when we consider how Athens, at the height of her power, was the center of the marine activity of the Mediterranean, and how splendid was the commerce of Rhodes immediately after the period of Alexander ; but now the entire wealth of the country in cereals, currants, olives, fruits, wines, marbles, minerals, pottery and many other products agricultural and industrial, is most inadequately maintained, and but twenty per cent, of its good though light soil is brought under cultivation, the husbandry itself being of an obsolete kind, with the wooden ploughshare shaped like that of Triptolemos. ^k.

The government is a poor nurse of commerce and industries, seeming to have but feeble power to foster national activities and internal improvements, and has been called ' ' a system of bureaucracy and narrow centralization." It may be honestly inclined, as it has been under the leadership of Tricoupis, who was a life-long student of English administrative methods, to do better things, and has not been without its efforts in this direction. Delyannis, the successor of Tricoupis, has much of his administrative ability and more popularity, but not the moral power, the firm will, that steered the Greek ship of state through so many dangers and difficulties. The country is bankrupt, with a forced depreciated currency, and unpaid loans saddled on it by foreign governments from the beginning of its new existence. The public debt (the interest of which is paid by a process of legerdemain) now amounts, it is said, to 820,000,000 francs. There is six times the amount of silver in circulation to that of gold. The paper money looks like rags, if it be not so in fadt, and you tear a bill in two in order to halve it. In spite of this financial lowness, the state maintains a standing army of more than 20,000 men. YetAit were well for us to recognize the fact, that notwithstanding the pressure on his government by monarchical powers, the Greek is, at core, »a genuine republican. His political creed is an antique inheritance, which his land, name, and the air he breathes, nourish. The democratic principle, native to the Greek, is another argument for his persistent nationality. He is an enthusiastic lover of popular government, and he has abolished all orders of nobility. The voting in Greece is by eptarchies, and every voter may give as many votes as there are candidates, exercising his independent choice, of which he is extremely jealous, cherishing the right of ballot, and, it is said, " more Greeks to the thousand have votes than is the case of iS GREEK ART ON GREEK SOIL