DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9188#0062
46
The Lamps of Greek Art
Church. And ever since, at intervals, there has arisen, alike
in the field of culture and in that of religion, an echo of the
appeal to the classical past. It is to the New Testament that
Apostles like John Wesley and George Fox made their appeal,
setting up in opposition to the conventions and worldliness of
the Church in their times the spirituality and simplicity of
the apostolic age, just as Goethe and Lessing turned men's
minds from what was contrary to reason and good taste in
their surroundings to Greek beauty and simplicity. And
however some of the followers of Wesley and Fox may have
gone beyond due bounds towards fanaticism, yet in every
branch of the Christian Society the influence of those modern
prophets has been renovating and purifying, just as the schools
of critics which followed Goethe tended greatly to increase
among us sweetness and light.
In our schools and colleges, until quite lately, the religion
of the New Testament and the tradition of the Greek and
Roman Classics have gone together, the one preserving us from
superstition and materialism in religion, the other making
war upon the inherited barbarisms and brutalities which we
have from our not very distant ancestors. The spirit of anarchy
in religion would persuade us that there is no divine sanction
for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is
a matter of convention which every society and every nation
has a right to invert .if it judges such inversion in the line of
its interests. • The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all
the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly,
that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our
galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue
arouses a sentiment it does not matter whether the sentiment
be one of delight and aspiration or one of horror. If once the
idea of beauty as the end to be aimed at be expelled from art,
art sinks like a stone to the bottom of the sea. Some people
are ready to tolerate any monstrosity in art, however remote
The Lamps of Greek Art
Church. And ever since, at intervals, there has arisen, alike
in the field of culture and in that of religion, an echo of the
appeal to the classical past. It is to the New Testament that
Apostles like John Wesley and George Fox made their appeal,
setting up in opposition to the conventions and worldliness of
the Church in their times the spirituality and simplicity of
the apostolic age, just as Goethe and Lessing turned men's
minds from what was contrary to reason and good taste in
their surroundings to Greek beauty and simplicity. And
however some of the followers of Wesley and Fox may have
gone beyond due bounds towards fanaticism, yet in every
branch of the Christian Society the influence of those modern
prophets has been renovating and purifying, just as the schools
of critics which followed Goethe tended greatly to increase
among us sweetness and light.
In our schools and colleges, until quite lately, the religion
of the New Testament and the tradition of the Greek and
Roman Classics have gone together, the one preserving us from
superstition and materialism in religion, the other making
war upon the inherited barbarisms and brutalities which we
have from our not very distant ancestors. The spirit of anarchy
in religion would persuade us that there is no divine sanction
for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is
a matter of convention which every society and every nation
has a right to invert .if it judges such inversion in the line of
its interests. • The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all
the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly,
that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our
galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue
arouses a sentiment it does not matter whether the sentiment
be one of delight and aspiration or one of horror. If once the
idea of beauty as the end to be aimed at be expelled from art,
art sinks like a stone to the bottom of the sea. Some people
are ready to tolerate any monstrosity in art, however remote