A RECENT BOOK ON GREEK SCULPTURE.*

A member of the Harvard Graduate School, who had performed successfully what he called "the stunt of substituting a card-index for brains" in the preparation of a thesis, once said to me: "The Germans have us today, but Thank Heaven! we are younger, and shall probably outlive them." He was embittered against our modern ideal of scholarship because it had compelled him to live for several years mentally underground, and he wanted the taste of fresh air. With no injustice to those scholars who have descended into the past with pick and shovel and increased the store of our information, one may question whether our everlasting analysis and our attention to minutiae promise any longer an honest payment for our trouble. To take a concrete instance, students in letters are engaged today in an exhaustive examination of sources. This study which ought to reanimate the past with light and color, reconstruct a living environment for great men and great books, now but half-understood because isolated from their proper background, has become instead a sort of fanaticism for names and dates, producing chiefly dust and ashes. We investigate the sources of sources. A book on Chaucer, with its patient discussion of all the facts about him except the spirit of his art, his thought, and the life of his day, is commonly about as entertaining and as instructive as those lists of the posterity of Hebrew gentlemen in the Pentateuch. We want a better sense of relative values, to keep in view the

*Greek Sculpture-Its Spirit and Principles." By Edmund von Mach. Ginn and Company, Boston.

ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

ends for which scholarship exists. It is a builder of roads, and it ought to build them to some land beloved of Gods or men, not to that "ominous tract which hides the dark tower."

Because of the absolute inertia of much of our learning, doubly gracious is that into which has been breathed the vital spark; where the scholar, impatient of the dead level of mere accuracy, has the courage to leap a little, and the vision to look behind his facts to the laws they exemplify, and the forces that called them into being. Such scholarship Dr. von Mach has brought to the study of Greek art in his Greek Sculpture. Greek art is a subject in which the specialist has been peculiarly indispensable. Because of the fragmentary condition of the monuments and the temper of the Greek mind one cannot entirely trust the first impressions made by the statues on a modern, however vivid and interesting those impressions may be. One finds occasionally in philosopher or poet criticisms of Greek art that kindle the interest and make the art infinitely more alive than libraries of archeology can ever do, but too frequently these criticisms read into the statues feelings, ideas, and motives that never were there. As a corrective, the archeologists for a century have been doing an excellent work in ascertaining the facts, but if we go on tabulating and checking facts till the crack of doom, archeology will go for naught, so far as any real culture can come of it, unless it shall be made the basis for a constructive criticism, a mental restoration of the past. Now the histories of Greek art have hitherto been archeological, mere catalogues of statues and sculptors. Even Mr. Tarbel's history, frankly designed which the specialist has been peculiarly indispensable. Because of the fragmentary condition of the monuments and the temper of the Greek mind one cannot entirely trust the first impressions made by the statues on a modern, without losing caste among the scholars, is really an abridged catalogue. Dr. von Mach, trained in the severe school of the archeologist, and fortified by it against the misconceptions of insufficient knowledge, has treated the subject with a much broader vision, and his book is the result of a happy combination of the archeologist's grip on the facts with the artist's scent for what is be

yond them. Without sweeping generalizations, keeping close to the statues, explaining them and calling his scholarship to aid in establishing his case, he yet contrives to give us an insight into the higher laws at work behind the sculptor, the moral and intellectual forces there, and the fine unity, the oneness, of the whole art. Compared with this new book of his, former histories read like mere collections of notes.

The problems of the Greek artist, the difficulties and possibilities of his material, and the conditions under which his art developed, were wisely treated in the first part of the book as a preparation for the discussion of the actual statues. This introduction is written in a firm, well-knit style, except in the first four chapters. There the style, particularly in the definition of its terminology, is not sufficiently vivid for the ideas it contains, and this is the more unfortunate as these ideas are the most important in the whole book. They provide an explanation of the part played by the temper of the Greek mind in developing not only the technique of Greek sculpture, but also what Mr. Pater calls that "intellectualization of physical form" apparent in the masterpieces. Dr. von Mach centers his discussion of the matter about his theory that the Greeks carved not from models, but from a mental image. Greek art was thus an effort to vizualize a mental image of man, and the mental image at its best was not merely the memory picture of our animated bodies, but of those bodies as expressions of the wholeness of our nature. To the artistic Greek there could have been no meaning in the phrase "to express the spirit as well as the body," for to him the spirit and the body were one, his conception, or "mental image" of man being not dual, as ours, but single and simple. The Parthenon sculptures, with their union of frank, physical beauty and high character, their appeal to the spiritual imagination, have far too much simplicity of conception to admit of our believing they grew out of an analysis of our nature. The fact is that the Greek conception of man was developed through the medium of form as ours is developed through logical abstractions; or to put it again, the Greek developed a "mental image" of the perfect man where we develop a mental formula for man in his perfection. For pur

poses of art the Greek habit of mind was obviously superior, for the expression of his highest imagination could be visible and direct. Dr. Donne had caught a glimpse of this Hellenic temper when he wrote

"Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought

That one would almost say her body thought.”

The growth of the Greek conception of man, of his mind, his character, his power and amplitude of soul, was thus written in an ever nobler picture of his beauty, as if the Hellenic mind were all eye, and the sculptor had the simple task of carving true to this "mental image." Such a view explains why the Greek of the fifth century refused special attention to the head in his sculpture, choosing rather to express himself in the body; it helps one appreciate the Greek's love for the nude, his delicate sense of character in drapery from its intimate connection with the human body. It explains even the accidents of the sculpture-for instance, the anomalous position of Polykleitos. It might bring new light to bear on the subtle change that came over Greek sculpture when the philosophers and poets had begun to give a new definition of voûs, though Dr. von Mach does not press it so far. The idea, in fact, is almost infinitely applicable to every stage in the progress of Greek art, and though Dr. von Mach does not drive home its consequences as he might have done, and, though when we first read those chapters on the "appeal" of Greek art, and on its relation to nature we catch perhaps only the drift of their meaning, we find them recurring to us as we go on, find them illuminating the dark places of criticism, and finally we come back to them with a new insight for their implications.

In the discussion of technique Dr. von Mach has applied his idea at some length, and in so doing supplies a criticism lacking in most writers on the subject. Walter Pater, in his essay, The Heroic Age of Greek Art, remarks that a complete criticism of the statues "must approach them from both sides, realizing that they address themselves in the first instance, not to the purely reflective faculty, but to the eye." "People forget," says Dr. von Mach, "that

the appeal of a work of art is directed to the higher faculties of man; but that it is made through the eye." The Greek took this into account, made allowances for the peculiarities of human vision, and his statues gave a physical pleasure to the eye. He never overlooked the humbler duties of art in performing its higher duties-partly, it might be said, because the physical and imaginative pleasures were not separate in his consciousness, and one was not possible without the other. This ministration to our nature as a whole, and not to one or another side of it, is what really constitutes an art as classic. Dr. von Mach's criticism, by approaching the sculpture "from both sides" leads to a more reasonable conception of the function of form, or style, in art, and could be applied to other arts besides sculpture, correcting the common impression that form or technique is somehow uppermost in the classic temper. The abiding satisfaction one gets from Greek sculpture is due partly to its freedom from physical discords, because that freedom permits the perfect accord of every human faculty involved in the enjoyment of the art. The clear perception of such matters gives to Dr. von Mach's discussions of technique their suggestiveness, and transforms what otherwise would be the mere inert matter of the archeologist.

Bringing to the discussion of the statues themselves the light got from much experience, much living with the whole subject, as it were, Dr. von Mach treats the individual monuments with a semi-dramatic interest. We see the archaic sculptor at his block of stone and realize the forces that work in and through him-Nature sitting upon his neck and working through his hand, to adapt a phrase of Emerson's. The merit of all Dr. von Mach's criticism of individual artists is his use of the phenomena as means for getting at the spirit and principles of the art. He has a fine sense for the relative value of details. He has no vain glory of facts, no wish to marshal them into a spectacle, imposing perhaps from the point of view of scholarship, but unimportant, if true. His archeological discussions are brief. But at the same time the book seems valuable even to the specialist. The discussion of Lysippus, of the Aphrodite of Melos, of perspective in early reliefs,