An early work by John G. Wright, who was then a chemistry student at Harvard. Soon to marry Edith Rose Konikow, daughter Dr. Antoinette Konikow, Wright would become a major intellectual figure in the U.S. Trotskyist movement of the 30s and 40s.

‘An Introduction to a Social Basis of Grecian Art’ by Joseph Vanzler (John G. Wright) from Modern Quarterly. Vol. 3 No. 4. September-December, 1926.

ISOLATED from its social background a work of art is meaningless. Taine wrote that “a work of art is not isolated and it is necessary to study the conditions out of which it proceeds and by which it is explained. In order to comprehend a work of art, an artist or a group of artists, we must clearly comprehend the general social and intellectual condition of the times to which they belong.” But before a study of any period may be undertaken and the art interpreted in the terms of its social and intellectual conditions, it is necessary to comprehend the material economic conditions underlying.

The productions of the human mind, like those of animated nature, can only be explained by their milieu. Moreover, not only is the significance of art to be found in these conditions, but they also determine the production of art. Taine held this opinion:

“If we pass in review the principal epochs of history of art, we find that the arts appear and disappear along with certain accompanying social and intellectual conditions.”

For the production of art, expanding Taine’s theory, a certain “moral temperature” is required; this determining factor results from the surrounding social and intellectual conditions.

“Properly speaking, this temperature does not produce artists; talent and genius are gifts like seeds; what I mean to say is that the same country at differing epochs probably contains about the same number of men of talent and of men of mediocrity Nature is a sower of men, and putting her hand constantly in the same sack distributes nearly the same proportion, the same quantity, the same quality of seed. But in these handfuls of seed which she scatters as she strides over time and space, not all germinate. A certain moral temperature is necessary to develop certain talents; if this be wanting, those prove abortive.

Taine, after clearly postulating the materialistic conception of art which precludes the possibility of divine or metaphysical origin, remained content. He did not seek to discover the nature or import of those forces upon which his all-important factor “moral temperature” depends, leaving this oracular phrase of doubtful aptness uninterpreted.

If we turn to the arts in their inception-in Egypt, India, Mexico, or Peru–we discover them flourishing in ancient civilizations based on slavery; and where the religious class is dominant, being the sole depository of the education and science of the country, the fountain-head of all natural and artistic progress, we find that they express inevitably the ideology of the dominant classes. They are invested entirely with religious character and present a striking similarity in their salient characteristics. Because these religious castes that held sway and stood in the way of all progress were never superseded by other classes coming to power, the arts rise to a certain level and remain fixed there.

Ancient Greece presents an instance of the passing of power from the hands of religious castes to other classes that rose to supremacy because of new economic developments. And I propose to interpret Greek art, literature in particular, in the terms of the ideology of the classes that successively produced it.

The oldest civilizations of which we have historical record–China, India, Egypt, and Assyria-were located on plains cut by great rivers. These regions were most desirable because of their fertility, the comparative ease with which the land could be irrigated, thus safeguarding the population against drouth. The river, moreover, along its navigable length, was a great water-way serving to bind together into an organic unit sections through which it passed. Settlements on these river plains date back to prehistoric periods. These regions were subject to frequent invasions, as the natural wealth of the soil and relative ease of gaining subsistence attracted thither tribes migrating from barren or overpopulated districts, until finally some one tribe or group of tribes extended their conquest, welding the whole into a unit–an empire; and maintained its boundaries safe against incursions of migrating barbarians.

Two of these civilizations, China and India, have lasted in a comparative state of fixation, almost to our own era. That they did not suffer the fate of other ancient civilizations is due to their geographical position. A civilization becomes extinct only when it clashes with another civilization. History offers repeated instances of barbaric conquerors that adopted the civilization of peoples they overcame, preserving it in the main unchanged. This assimilation is, of course, not spontaneous, nor does it take place without causing certain modifications. These, however, are not of such nature as to disturb the state of fixation.

On the other hand, the civilization of the Nile would, in the course of time, because of its geographical position, clash with the civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates–not on account of religious or racial differences but for economic reasons. When the empire of Egypt spread, as it naturally would, to include all of the Nile valley up to the delta, and the empire of Assyria took in the fertile crescent-shaped belt of Northern Arabia, which stretches clear around to the Mediterranean, these two powers faced one another in rivalry.

As early as 2000 B.C., the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings from Arabia or Phoenicia invaded and seized a great part of lower Egypt, and Memphis itself; but upper Egypt remained unconquered. These foreign invaders were in time expelled. Four hundred years later, Egyptians in turn invaded Asia Minor and extended their conquests under Sesostris.

Ancient civilization undertook conquests for the purpose of obtaining slaves, and because an outlet was required for that part of the population which was not enslaved but remained landless. At times parts of the population migrated. The migration of the Jews from Egypt cannot be considered as a unique or isolated instance in history. It was clearly an instance of the natural spreading of population. Of similar nature, in part, is the settling of a colony led out of Egypt by Cecrops at Athens, in the fourteenth century B.C.; also, the founding of Thebes by Cadmus from Phœnicia; and the settlement of Argos by Danaos from Egypt. Later, when the Medes invaded Egypt, Scythia, Thrace, and lastly Greece, their families accompanied them. Hegel conjectured that a march of this kind looked almost like an emigration—that such was its character, at least in part, we have no reason to doubt.

An outlet for its population is an essential need of any empire. In the case of Egypt, bounded by a torrid belt on the south and desert strips on either side, the lands facing the Mediterranean were the sole outlet. Assyria, hemmed in by mountains on the east and north, the Arabian desert on the south, turned also to the Mediterranean. Again, with the spread of the bounds of empire another factor enters into the economic rivalry between these two civilizations, the growth of commerce.

Commerce was no doubt carried on a large scale between civilizations, but the most profitable markets were to be found among barbarians, who for glittering baubles exchanged commodities and ores pried by traders. The Phoenicians, as early as 2000 B.C., founded colonies in the south and southwest of Spain, and Carthage; they sailed down the African coast, and are even said to have circumnavigated Africa. The reputation Cretans had, from times immemorial, for being liars, clearly points to the essentially mercantile character of these people. Mention is made of merchants in the most ancient myths we possess. Herodotus, recording early history of Greece, makes constant reference to traders.

The sea-going ships of antiquity in which hazardous voyages were undertaken required ports all along the trade route, to put in for supplies and repairs, also as a necessary safeguard against pirates infesting the seas. Civilization thus spread on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and the lands facing the Mediterranean. We have early records of powerful maritime peoples at a very high stage of civilization that inhabited Crete and nearby islands previous to the eruption of Greek tribes from the mainland of Europe.

The rapid economic and intellectual development of Greece is due to the fact that this barbaric people settled on lands of Mycenæan culture, and was brought into international relation because of the sea. The Greeks may be said to have bridged the gap of centuries between barbarism and civilization in a few decades.

This rapidity of transition made it impossible for any single group to arrogate to itself the immunity and privileges of ancient religious castes that held sway in other civilizations, and made possible the liberation of the human spirit.

The coming of the Greeks took place between 2000-1500 B.C. By 1200 B.C. their conquest was completed. And the Greek tribes were now at liberty to fight among themselves for the choicest regions.

The most warlike, the Dorians, seized the mainland, the fertile regions of the Pelopennesus, while the Ionians, except those of Attica, colonized the islands and the region around the Mediterranean basin and Asia Minor.

The primitive society of the Greeks was pastoral and agricultural, depending on husbandry and herds of cows and sheep as basic sources of food supply. The large family was an economical unit; it filled its own needs with the help of a few slaves. The Doric tribes, Lacedæmonians in particular, who came to ascendancy on the mainland, remained an agricultural people; the Ionians took to the sea, became a mercantile nation. The clash between the irreconcilable interests of the landed and military aristocracy of Sparta and the interests of mercantile Athens is at the bottom of the strife which tore Greece, caused the Peloponessian War, and resulted in the down- fall of Athens.

Ancient civilizations preceding that of Greece afford us instances of the undisputed supremacy of the old order, with its characteristic predominance of agricultural and pastoral life, and the social and political supremacy of the landed aristocracy. In Greece these landed and military classes could not arrogate to themselves all spiritual and temporal power because they came into cruel competition with new social classes brought forward by the development of new economic factors.

Even in the Homeric period when we find already private ownership of land, first steps in the division of labor with the economic unit, we find at the same time the beginnings of naval commerce, admixed with piracy, which finally resulted in the growth of the city-states.

Religion, which became the property of dominant castes elsewhere, in Greece because of the clash fell into the hands of poets who transmitted it directly to the people. Herodotus was of the opinion that Hesiod and Homer framed a theogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. The facts bear out the general truth of his conjecture.

The point cannot be stressed too often that whenever religion remains the sole possession of any privileged class, human achievement in the domain of arts and sciences remains at a fixed level, the level it reached three thousand years ago. It is not due to the peculiar temperament of the Greek, or to his genius, or to any divine and superior quality in his nature, that he did not sink to the level of the Egyptian, Mede, or Hindoo, or the European under papal supremacy; but it is due to the economic development that made him heir to his religion in which, seek about as we will, is to be found the indubitable origin of all arts and sciences. And in point of fact, all arts, poetry, music, sculpture, dancing, painting, and architecture, have retained to the present day a good measure of their original religious character.

The poet in his primitive guise is but remove from a priest. He lacks not the sacerdotal character but the official standing. Through his lips the gods speak. And the gods speaking through the lips of the poet thus inspired give utterance to the ideology of the class to which the poet belongs.

Modern Quarterly began in 1923 by V. F. Calverton. Calverton, born George Goetz (1900–1940), a radical writer, literary critic and publisher. Based in Baltimore, Modern Quarterly was an unaligned socialist discussion magazine, and dominated by its editor. Calverton’s interest in and support for Black liberation opened the pages of MQ to a host of the most important Black writers and debates of the 1920s and 30s, enough to make it an important historic US left journal. In addition, MQ covered sexual topics rarely openly discussed as well as the arts and literature, and had considerable attention from left intellectuals in the 1920s and early 1930s. From 1933 until Calverton’s early death from alcoholism in 1940 Modern Quarterly continued as The Modern Monthly. Increasingly involved in bitter polemics with the Communist Party-aligned writers, Modern Monthly became more overtly ‘Anti-Stalinist’ in the mid-1930s Calverton, very much an iconoclast and often accused of dilettantism, also opposed entry into World War Two which put him and his journal at odds with much of left and progressive thinking of the later 1930s, further leading to the journal’s isolation.

PDF of full issue: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045478306