To the early Greeks came the aim of Beauty, perfection of form, and above all the beauty of the Human. These early Greeks of the islands and sea-coasts of the Ægean created a civilisation that had passed and was but a memory when Homer struck his lyre some eight hundred years before the coming of the Christ-three thousand years before Salome danced before Herod, these seafaring folk had been using copper, which they found in large quantities in their island of Cyprus-does not indeed the very name of copper come from this same Kupros ? And always the aim is to fashion the human form-and what is more, the habit of Egypt and Chaldæa is swept aside, and the nude is ever in the vogue-the very jugs and the jars being modelled on the human design. When Troy was unburied, six cities deep, one upon another, the painting habit appears in the sixth, the uppermost buried one, vases being discovered with paintings upon them, as Priam's artists had painted them before Achilles dragged the body of Hector round the walls ; whilst, hard by, at Tiryns, a palace revealed its walls painted and decorated. At Cnossus, in Crete, in that ' Palace of the Axe ' where king Minos [I2] ruled, and which from its confusion of paths and passages gave us the word "labyrinth," is much painting on the walls, and wondrously modern in feeling. Thus was art rapidly advancing in Mycenæ when the northern barbarians fell upon and swept away the first Greek civilisation, before Homer. But the Greeks, fleeing before the onrush, spread their art to Chios and Cyprus and the coasts of Asia Minor and Syria-and it was the descendants of these who, after three hundred years, took back to the barbarians of Greece the seed of the Renaissance of art which was to be there planted again and to blossom to such splendid flowering.

The new Greek civilisation advanced with giant strides. Unlike all other peoples before them or of their time, the Greek loved liberty-he looked to beauty as his aim in life -and the earth on which he stood held the stone best fitted for his artistry : marble abounded in the land, and some of the islands, such as the famed Paros, were little else. Liberty was in his blood, it was his very instinct ; progress was his breath ; and the human entity his god. From Egypt and Assyria he caught the fashioning of sculpture, but soon left all tradition behind in his aim to glorify the human in marble. Five hundred years before the Christ, the Greeks were sculpturing winged goddesses, the woman appears in natural form, and the smile ripples across the face of the human-and not only does the passing mood of the human take possession of the face, but the figures are painted. What wall-paintings there were have perished ; but the earlier vases with black figures and the later ones with red figures show astounding sense of design. Rapidly the arts developed. Pindar sang; and Æschylus wrote his tragedies ; and soon Myron and Polyclitus and Phidias were creating their masterpieces, glorifying human beauty and athletic strength ; with the [13] figure leaning on one foot instead of the stolid Egyptian and Assyrian art that ever set the human with both feet firm planted on the earth-and the ideal woman was the Amazon or huntress. So it came that Pericles, the lover of the beautiful, and dictator of beauty as of all else to the Greece of his day, called Phidias to the beautifying of Athens, raising the famed Parthenon upon her heights, one of the achievements of the ages. Here were paintings upon the walls, but they have vanished, as has the gold and ivory statue of Athene, the masterpiece of Phidias. Yet one cannot but think that the high gifts that created the mighty masterpiece of the Venus of Milo, whether wrought immediately after Phidias or within three hundred years thereafter, must have been highly skilled also in painting forms.

The serene temper of the Greece of the four hundreds before Christ came to an end with the Peloponnesian War which Pericles had begun, and which, twenty-five years after Pericles died of the plague, saw Athens fall in 404 B.C. The disaster that saw Athens conquered and humiliated by the Spartans roused that deep religious and political reaction which sent Socrates to his death in 399 B.C. and changed the Greek character. Plato carried on the thought of Socrates-and Greece knew self-examination, and brooded upon the deep problems of the soul. Adversity taught its lesson. The three hundreds before Christ were years of deep meditation, and Art, grappling with the utterance of the new emotions, brought forth Praxiteles and Scopas, and Praxiteles created the beautiful and spiritual head of his famed Hermes. Here we have the sculptor ridding his art of hardnesses, employing the effects of the differences of texture, as in the hair and flesh, and softening the edges of the flesh until a painter's sense of impressionism in light and shade diffuses the sculptured surface and makes the [14] marble live. Therefrom we may judge that painting in Hellas, lauded by the ancient writers as equal to her sculptures, must have been astounding-but in how great degree we shall never know, since all sign of these wonders has passed away. Yet we may trust the ancient writers, since they clearly state that whilst Polygnotus, the supreme painter of the century of Phidias, was famed for his drawing rather than for his colour, the masters of the century of Praxiteles were famed as colourists. Parrhasius, Zeuxis, and Apelles, therefore, had they carried painting to the degree of melting their light and shade and colour as far as Praxiteles had softened the surfaces of his sculptured marble, must have reached a power in uttering feeling in painting far greater than any primitive painters of whatsoever later schools. And when we remember how Scopas went even beyond the emotional statement of revery of the marbles carved by Praxiteles, and gave utterance to the passions in his haunting shadows about eyes and mouth, it is unlikely that the painters did not grasp the skill with which Scopas modelled those wondrous shadows. 'Tis true a younger sculptor than these, one Lysippus, essayed to put back the hands of Greek art by a reactionary trying back to the sterner and less subtle emotional days of the century of Phidias, mistaking sentiment for sentimentality, and fearing effeminacy and sensuality ; but he only ran to the academic by trying to see the human as eight heads high, and whilst rejecting emotion to the degree of passion, only ended in elegance, refinement, and nervousness in the bronzes which he preferred to cast instead of employing the marble preferred by Praxiteles and Scopas ; Lysippus was sculptor to Alexander the Great, and his mastery of drapery strongly suggests the influence of the painters. But it is in the greatest draped statue in movement left by [15] antiquity, the famed winged Niké (Victory) of Samothrace, poised on the prow of a galley, her robes fluttering in the breeze, that the influence of Scopas is seen in supreme fashion ; and the influence of great painting is astoundingly suggested in the years on the eve of the two hundreds before Christ.

The year of 336 B.C. struck; and its striking was full of a strange destiny for the wide world. Young Alexander, a youth of twenty, stepped to his father's throne in Macedonia, and began his short, swift, all-compelling and wondrous career. Swiftly he laid waste Thebes, overwhelmed Athens, moved out across the face of the world with his conquering Greeks, overthrowing kings, marching from victory to victory through Asia Minor, on through Syria, winning Egypt, overthrowing Persia, and sweeping over the north of India-to die in Babylon at thirty-three ! The conquered world fell to his generals, and the Greek order stood supreme from the waters of the Nile to the far Indus. To India she gave her lesson in the arts, that had begun to dawn out of Persia. From Greece the art of painting passed into India with Alexander the Great ; and later on to China, whither bastard Greek art spread from the Black Sea through Siberia and Central Asia in our own " mediæval " days some hundred years after Christ.

But the Greek thought and the Greek art passed out of Athens and spread over the conquered lands-and made their throne in Alexandria with the Ptolemies, in Syrian Antioch, and in Pergamum in Asia Minor. The small Greek states, with their free cities, now became oriental monarchies under absolute tyrants. These two hundred years, from the death of Alexander to the conquest by Rome are spoken of by the academic as a decadence. They were instead a forward moving of the human soul. The ancient [16] spirit of Greece was gone, it is true ; but a new and compelling spirit was abroad. Greek art, faced now by the tumult and anguish of the human soul amidst the chaos of change, uttered itself in heroic admiration of pity for the sufferings of man. Heretofore, art had evaded character ; portraiture was now born. At Pergamum and Rhodes and Alexandria, the Greek artist began to look upon the barbarians as fit subjects for sympathy and wonder, and the Gaul Slaying Himself after Slaying his Wife, and The Dying Gaul (Gladiator) were created, in which last the Greek sculptor, Epigonus, shows the pathos of the brave fellow whose blood ebbs from him as he lies far away from his " small barbarians at play." This emotional statement of the agonies, that would have shocked the earlier Greeks, perhaps best known to literature through the fame of Laocoon and his Sons, greatly enlarged the province and realm of art, and increased its function and significance, thereby adding to the breadth of its appeal. It is a merely childish and academic thing to compare one phase of art with the art of another age ; for art has no concern with such things. The art of The Dying Gaul and of the Laocoon is concerned with another phase of the human emotions than that of older Greece. Pity and the significance of suffering have now forced themselves as a significance upon the human feelings, where before was little or none. The technical powers of the artists may not be as astounding as those of a Phidias, a Praxiteles, or a Scopas, but there is freedom from the mere imitation of their skill of hand as there is from slavery to their thought and intention. And there are qualities dawning which are to ripen in after centuries into majestic achievement-life is looked full in the face, character and truth stand forth, and landscape receives homage.