The Legacy of Greece Part 25

What is wanted in modern art is some consciousness of this old Greek spirit, some recognition of its value. The Greeks of the age of Pericles wanted neither revivalism nor revolution; they moved forward, without haste or anxiety, on traditional lines, and they were able to do so because their art was so interwoven with their life that, in the plastic arts, they could no more have changed their methods of expression than they could have changed their manner of speech. That high outlook on life is lost and hardly to be recovered under modern conditions of social life and political government. It was perhaps only possible under the true democracy of the small Greek city state, when every citizen took his share in the ordered life of the community. Yet the Greek ideal remains. In our fitful fever of honest intention and wrong judgement, high endeavour and point-blank commercialism, Greek art, the art of Pheidias and Ictinus, is still the wise mother to whom we must return.

The lesson of the Parthenon is the lesson of a steadfast vision of beauty, held high above individual effort and failure, realizing itself not in complex detail or calculated eccentricity, but in a serene and exquisite simplicity of form. It teaches us that in the arts there are no short cuts, and that anarchy, the destruction of what has been won for us in the past, is not advance but the straight road to the bottomless pit of barbarism. Instead of repudiating the work of his fathers, the Greek carried it on to its perfection, and built his palace of art on a sure foundation because he turned neither to the right hand nor to the left, but steadily set his face towards the light.

REGINALD BLOMFIELD.