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From her beginnings Rome is herself. She diverts to her profit the moral sources of the old world as she diverts the waters of the mountains to bring them inside her walls. The source once captured, her avidity exhausts it, and she goes on farther to capture another. At the beginning of the third century Etruria has been crushed by Rome, and her blood and nerves have been mingled with those of the Latins and the Sabines. And this is the cement which holds together the block on which Rome is to support herself, to spread over the world the concentric circles of her vital effort. All the resistance she encounters. Pyrrhus, Carthage, and Hannibal, will be to her only so many instruments for cultivating her will and for increasing it. The legions progress like the regular deposit of a river.
From her beginnings Rome is herself. She diverts to her profit the moral sources of the old world as she diverts the waters of the mountains to bring them inside her walls. The source once captured, her avidity exhausts it, and she goes on farther to capture another. At the beginning of the third century Etruria has been crushed by Rome, and her blood and nerves have been mingled with those of the Latins and the Sabines. And this is the cement which holds together the block on which Rome is to support herself, to spread over the world the concentric circles of her vital effort. All the resistance she encounters. Pyrrhus, Carthage, and Hannibal, will be to her only so many instruments for cultivating her will and for increasing it. The legions progress like the regular deposit of a river.
If
Roman positivism had not pressed the Latin and Etruscan together, one asks, as
one reads Plautus, Lucretius, Vergil, and Juvenal, what art could have realized
this rough synthesis of the Italic peoples, with their love of woods and
gardens, their genius, as bitter as the leaves of their trees, and as rich as
their plow-lands? But the Roman was bent too much on external conquests to
conquer all his own vigor and harshness. As long as war continued
methodically—five or six centuries—he had not the time to express himself. As
soon as the springs relaxed, the mind of conquered Greece upset the whole
mechanism. Mummius, after the sack of Corinth, said to the contractors charged
with getting the spoil to Rome: "I warn you that if you break those
statues you will have to make new ones to replace them."
Such a
misunderstanding of the higher role of the work of art has about it something
sacred. A candor is revealed therein from which a people may expect everything,
if it is also the characteristic of that people's viewing of life. For Rome it
would have been salvation, if she had refused the masterpieces which the Consul
sent to her. But she accepted them eagerly, she had others sent, and still
others; she devastated Greece, and her hard spirit wore itself down on that
diamond.
We
have, in this, one of the fatalities of history, and the proof of the tendency
in the ensemble of human societies to seek its equilibrium. Subjected
materially, a people of superior culture morally subjects the people that
conquered it. Chaldea imposed its mind on Assyria, Assyria and Ionian Greece
did the same with Persia, Greece transforms the Dorian. Rome wants to please
Greece as the parvenu does the aristocrat, Greece wants to please Rome as the
weak does the strong. In this contact Greece can no longer prostitute a genius
which had long since escaped from her; but Rome loses part of her own genius.
The
Roman, in his manners, his temperament, his religion, his whole moral
substance, differed totally from the Greek. In the case of the latter we have a
simple, free, investigating life, given over completely to realizing the inner
harmony which a charming imagination pursues along every path. In the case of
the Roman, life is disciplined, egoistic, hard, and firm: it seeks its
nutriment outside of itself. The Greek makes the city in the image of the
world. The Roman wants to make the world in the image of the city. The true
religion of the Roman is the hearth, and the chief of the hearth is the father.
The official cult is purely decorative. The divinities are concrete things,
fixed, positive, without connection, without harmonious envelope, one
personified fact beside another personified fact. They belong to a domain apart
and, in reality, quite secondary. On one side divine right and religion, on the
other human right and jurisprudence. It is the contrary of Greece where the
passage is an insensible one from man to god, from the real to the possible.
The Greek ideal is diversity and continuity in the vast harmonic ensemble of
actions and reactions. The Roman ideal is the artificial union of these
isolated elements in a stiff and hard ensemble. If the art of this people is
not utilitarian, it is certain to be conventional.
Why
should Rome take the elements of these formal conventions from others than
Greece, who offered them to her? There are to be, indeed, attempts at
transformation, and even her instinct is to rebel confusedly. In spite of
itself, against itself, a people is itself. The Greek temple cannot be
transported to Rome, like the statues and the paintings, and when the Roman architect
returns from Athens, from Sicily, or from Paestum, he has had the time on his
journey unconsciously to transform the science he has brought back from those
places. The column becomes thick and smooth, often useless, placed against the
wall in the guise of an ornament. If the Corinthian order dominates, the Doric
and Ionic transformed, make frequent appearances, often mingling or superposing
themselves in the same monument. The temple, almost always larger than in
Greece, loses its animation. It is voluntarily symmetrical, massive, heavy,
positive. Outside of Rome—in Gaul, in Greece, in Asia especially, Rome
constructs formidable temples, resplendent with force and sunlight, on which
the high plant growth of the Corinthian looks like living trees cemented into
the wall. But buildings like these are rare on Italian soil. In then,
doubtless, Rome only played her habitual part of severe administrator. The
temples of Hellenic Gaul are Greek, the temples of Asia have the sumptuousness
and the redoubtable grandeur of everything that rises above this mystic,
feverish soil, saturated with rottenness and heat, and for which time does not
count. Everywhere, for the utilitarian monuments even—for the arenas of
Provence (to cite no more than these) present themselves with a discretion, a
grace, an unstudied elegance which one does not find in those of
Italy—everywhere the native soil imposes on Rome its collaboration and,
sometimes, its domination. In ornament, for example, we find among the Greeks,
the Asiatics, the Africans, or the Spaniards working under the Roman
constructor, the silent insurrection of personal sentiment. Certain Gallo-Roman
bas-reliefs, by their savor and their verve, by the blithe vigor with which the
stone is attacked, by the concrete and perhaps slightly bantering tenderness of
their accent, immediately make one think of the leaves, the fruits, the
garlands, and the figures which, ten centuries later, are to adorn the
capitals, the porches, and the façades of the French cathedrals.
It is only in the general ordonnance of the edifice that the Roman retains his
rights.
The
Greeks variegated their monuments with ocher and vermilion, blue, green, and
gold; the building shone in the light. How should the Roman understand
polychromy? Painting has something mobile and fugitive about it, something
almost aerial, which is repellent to his genius. He sees it already paling and
wearing off from the marbles of the Acropolis. Therefore, he incorporates it in
the material, he makes a temple wherein multicolored marbles, simple or veined,
alternate with granites, porphyries, and basalts. Harmony scarcely counts; the
color is to change no more.
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