Part 10

But when he came to portraying men, especially great kings, he used a different method. The king's statue was to remain through long ages, when the king himself was dead and Osirified. The artist knew--it was the tradition of his school--what the Osirified dead looked like. Not an individual sculptor, but a traditional wisdom, was to find expression. What sculptor's name is known? Who wrought the Vocal Memnon?--Not any man; but the Soul and wisdom and genius of Egypt. The last things bothered about were realism and personality. There were a very few conventional poses; the object was not to make a portrait, but to declare the Universal Human Soul;--it was hardly artistic, in any modern acceptation of the word; but rather religious. Artistic it was, in the highest and truest sense: to create, in the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.--Plato speaks of those glimpses of "the other side of the sky" which the soul catches before it comes into the flesh;--the Egyptian artist was preoccupied with the other side of the sky. How wonderfully he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to see. There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the other side of the sky. You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously, of the grandeur and reality of the Soul. Having watched Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this description of it in De Quincey;--if he was not speaking of this, what he says fits it admirably:

"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: (1) the peace which passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation--the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of memorials of flesh."

Art can never reach higher than that,--if we think of it as a factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian sculpture is of minor importance: as, that it was stiff, conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky. You may have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy, multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which passeth understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation."

If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid, luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too, the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the _raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty, and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries. Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's

"Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more.";

to Dante's

"The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";

to Talesin's

"My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars";

to Aeschylus's bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;--and the next step you come to beyond (in the West)--the next expression of the Human Soul--marked with the same kind of feeling--the same spiritual and divine hauteur--is, for lack of literary remains, this Egyptian sculpture. The Grand Manner, the majestic note of Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.

It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture--and in architecture too--should have gone on side by side, in Greece, during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but apparently it did. (They had wooden temples, painted in bright reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.) I imagine the explanation to be something like this: You are to think of an influx of the Human Spirit, proceeding downward from its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization --the Greek, in this case. Now poetry, because its medium is less material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of its descent much sooner. Perhaps music lies higher again; which is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma. Let me diverge a little, and take a glance round.--At any such time, the seeds of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of its own, and is the _inverbation_ of it. The Greek Melic poets (the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart from the words. After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in Dante before that century had passed; not raising an equal greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth. In England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts: there were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently; in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of). Painting, you see, works in a little less material medium than sculpture does. Dante's Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice, characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the Italy of the Cinquecento. But England, even in Shakespeare's day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness. James I's reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely wasted: notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off. Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force both in its higher and lower aspects: against art, and against vice;--probably the best thing that could happen under the circumstances; and the reason why England recovered so much sooner than did Italy.--On the other hand, when the influx came to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities for action in the non-material arts: to have skipped any grand manifestation in music or poetry: and at once to have hit the Dutchman 'where he lived' (as they say),--in his paintbox.--But to return:-

Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus; some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed its likeness on carved stone. I once saw a picture--in a lantern lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating, I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt it is the likeness of a Goddess. She is not merely a very fine and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of Egyptian sublimity. The artist, if he had not attained perfect mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling, as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the Gods; at his very best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian had tried to put into his representations of men; and in that sense this Athene is, after all, only a woman;--but one in whom the Soul is quite manifest. I have never been able to trace this statue since; and my recollections are rather hazy. But it stands, for me, holding up a torch in the inner recesses of history. It was the time when Pythagoras was teaching; it was that momentous time when (as hardly since) the doors of the Spiritual were flung open, and the impulse of the six Great Teachers was let loose on the world. Hithertoo Greek carvers had been making images of the Gods, symbolic indeed--with wings, thunderbolts and other appurtenances;--but trivially symbolic; mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their gods and worship had been mere conventions, about which they had felt nothing deep;--now, upon this urge from the God-world, a sense of the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of expressing it: throw off the old conventions; will carve the Gods as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect mastery: for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but--have personalized the Gods; and dear knows what that may lead to presently.

The came Pheidias, born about 496. Nothing of his work remains for us; the Elgin Marbles themselves, from the Parthenon, are pretty certainly only the work of his pupils. But there are two things that tell us something about his standing: (1) all antiquity bears witness to the prevailing quality of his conceptions; their sublimity. (2) He was thrown into prison on a charge of impiety, and died there, in 442.

Here you will note the progress downward. Aeschylus had been so charged, and tried--but acquitted. Pheidias, so charged, was imprisoned. Forty-three years later Socrates, so charged, was condemned to drink the hemlock. Of Aeschylus and Socrates we can speak with certainty: they were the Soul's elect men. Was Pheidias too? Athens certainly was turning away from the Soul; and his fate is a kind of half-way point between the fates of the others. He appears in good company. And that note of sublimity in his work bears witness somewhat.

We have the work of his pupils, and know that in their hands the marble--Pheidias himself worked mostly in gold and ivory--had become docile and obedient, to flow into whatever forms they designed for it. We know what strength, what beauty, what tremendous energy, are in those Elgin marbles. All the figures are real, but idealized: beautiful men and horses, in fullest most vigorous action, suddenly frozen into stone. The men are more beautiful than human; but they are human. They are splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say, to music: they are music expressed in terms of the human body. Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of the Soul. It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at expressing: a perfect body--and a sound mind in it: a perfectly healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)--was the ideal they sought and saw. Very well, so far; but, you see, Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries; it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.

In Pheidias' own work we might have seen the influx at that moment when, shining through the soul plane, its rays fell full on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor of the Soul. We might have seen that it was still the Soul that held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and mastered: that it was the light he aimed to express, not the thing it illumined. In the work of his pupils, the preoccupation is with the latter; we see the physical grown beautiful under the illumination of the Soul; not the Soul that illumines it. The men of the Egyptian sculptors had been Gods. The Gods of these Greek sculptors were men. Perfect, glorious, beautiful men --so far as externals were concerned. But men--to excite personal feeling, not to quell it into nothingness and awe. The perfection, even at that early stage and in the work of the disciples of Pheidias, was a quality of the personality.

It was indeed marvelously near the point of equilibrium: the moment when Spirit enters conquered matter, and stands there enthroned. In Pheidias himself I cannot but think we should have found that moment as we find it in Aeschylus. But you see, it is when that has occurred: when Spirit has entered matter, and made the form, the body, supremely beautiful; it is precisely then that the moment of peril comes--if there is not the wisdom present that knows how to avoid the peril. The next and threatening step downward is preoccupation with, then worship of, the body.

The Age of Pericles came to worship the body: that was the danger into which it fell; that was what brought about the ruin of Greece. That huge revelation of material beauty; and that absence of control from above; the lost adequacy of the Mysteries, and the failure of the Pythagorean Movement;--the impatience of spiritual criticism, heedlessness of spiritual warning;--well, we can see what a turning-point the time was in history. On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . . It is a thing to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a thing that depends for its efficacy on mosquitos. Great men simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with that oppression and enervation sapping them. Greece has been malarial; Rome, too, to some extent; the Roman Campagna terribly; as if the disease were (as no doubt it is) a Karma fallen on the sites of old-time tremendous cultural energies; where the energies were presently wrecked, drowned and sodden in vice. Here then is a pretty little problem in the workings of Karma: on what plane, through what superphysical links or channels, do the vices of an effete civilization transform themselves into that poor familiar singer in the night-time, the mosquito? Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial; if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone in them.

In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now; we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.--And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.--Whereupon Nature, wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish Influenza;--and spread it over three continents, with greater scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific. Whereof the moral is: _He laughs loudest who laughs last;_ and just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma. Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of manifested Time. When shall we stop imagining that any possible inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the fundamental laws of Nature? Not the printing-press, nor steam, nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor _vril_ itself when we come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn themselves out by wrong-doing--or even that have come to old age and the natural time when they must die. But their passings need not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they would learn decently to live.

But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the literature again:--

After Aeschylus, Sophocles. The former, a Messenger of the Gods, come to cry their message of _Karma_ to the world; and in doing so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;--the latter, a "good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school, upsets no faith."--thus Browning sums him up. A "faultless" artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most academic critics with him) he can improve something on old Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a genial companion, well-loved by his friends--and who is not his friend?--all through his long life; twenty times first-prize winner, and never once less than second.--Why, solely on the strength of his _Antigone,_ the Athenians appointed him a strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not fail of victory in mere war. But don't lose hope!--upon an after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that sort. What more shall we say of Sophocles?--A charming brilliant fellow in his cups--of which, as of some other more questionable pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man worshiped during his life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;--does that sound like the story of a Messenger of the Gods?

He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so of dramas, seven come down to us. His age saw in him the very ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them. "Indeed," says Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more successful rival." Without trying to give you conclusions of my own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well, and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry. Comparing the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus, the second play in the Oreseian Trilogy, with the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which deals with the same matter, he says:

"Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos! Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the _Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would... Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences; they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos...

"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him--'I draw men as they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are'; 'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'--all imply the academic standpoint... Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist. Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments. But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus, who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke himself against the bars of life and poetry."