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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

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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."

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the
viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural
superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor
Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view
of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of
the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians.
The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand
thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless
beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to
Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to
Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful
psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just
before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But
the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

".... gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."

--divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic
significance: because he has built like a titan, you do not at
first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as
someone has said. But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to
see. His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just
and beautiful almost always. I put in the almost in view of that
about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with
her mother. The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on
Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian
chiton of his day. He was personal, where the other had been
impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime;
conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the
super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

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