Volume I Part 2 (1/2)

It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repetition; monuments which have been necessarily described and estiain mentioned in the chapters which treat of theory; but a better plan has yet to be found, one which will enable us to avoid such repetitions without any i in a work of the kind is to be clear and cohest degree Things are easily found in it, and, by a powerful effort of criticis into a single convenient voluenerations of archaeologists Not that it is aunaninificance of the remains which they had described, and it was necessary to choose between their different hypotheses, and soreat judgment, and very often the opinion to which he finally commits hi into any long discussion he sustains it by a few shortly stated reasons, which are generally conclusive The plan of his book prevents hi out, like Winckelmann, into enthusiastic periods; he makes no attempt at those brilliant descriptions which in our day seey, we perceive a sincere and individual eh catholic taste We need say no more to the objectors who attack the mere form of the book Its one real defect is that it ritten thirty or forty years too soon The second edition, carefully revised and largely aug the lifetime of Muller From that moment down to the day but lately passed when the excavations at Olyht to an end, many superb remains of Greek, Etruscan, and Roed they had made no further discoveries, a few occasional corrections and additions, at intervals of ten or fifteen years, would have sufficed to prevent the ent editor could have satisfactorily performed anted For the Graeco-Roman period especially Muller had erected so complete a historical framework that the new discoveries could find their places in it without any difficulty Welcker, indeed, published a third edition in 1848, corrected and completed, partly from the manuscript notes left by the author in his interleaved copy, partly from information extracted by the editor fros of Muller But why does Welcker declare, in his advertisement to the reader, that but for the respect due to a hich had become classic, he would have modified it much more than he had dared And why, for more than thirty years, has his example found no imitators?

Why have we been content to reprint word for word the text of that third edition?

A few years ago one of the ists, Carl Bernhard Stark, was requested by a firm of publishers to undertake a new revision of the _Handbuch_ Why then, after having brought his ether, did he find it inal work, a new manual which should fulfil the sa?--an enterprise which he would have brought to a successful conclusion had not death interrupted him after the publication of the first part[26]

[26] Stark died at Heidelberg in October, 1879 The title of his as identical with that of Muller: _Handbuch der Archaeologie der Kunst_ The first 256 pages of the first volume were published in 1878 with the sub-title: _Einleitender und grundlegender Theil_ (Leipsic, Engelmann, 8vo) A second instalment appeared in 1880, by which the introduction was completed The entire work, which will not be continued, was to have formed three volumes We explained its plan and made some remarks upon the part already published in the _Revue Critique_ of July 14, 1879

The answer is easy The East was not discovered till after the death of Ottfried Muller By the East we mean that part of Africa and Asia which is bordered by the Mediterranean, or is so near to that sea that constant coypt, Syrian Phnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldaea and assyria, Asia Minor, and those islands of Cyprus and Rhodes which were so long dependent upon the e continents It was between 1820 and 1830 that the young _savant_ conceived the ideas which he developed in his works; it was then that he first took an iin of the Greek nation, upon which archaeologists had long been engaged What part had foreign exaion, the arts, the poetry, and the philosophy of Greece, of the whole hellenic civilization? How estions derived fro preceded the Greeks in the ways of civil life? No historian has answered this question in a more feeble and narrow spirit than Ottfried Muller; no one has been inality of the Greek genius, and in believing that the Greek race extracted froreatness and glory

When Muller first attacked this question, Egypt alone had begun to ee from the obscurity which still enveloped the ancient civilization of the East It was not until three years after his death, that Botta began to excavate the reuest and most confused information was to be had about the ruins in Chaldaea Noever, we can follow the course of the Phnician shi+ps along the Mediterranean, from the Thracian Bosphorus to the pillars of Hercules From the traces left by the coinians, we can estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which they visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over the various peoples ere tributary to thes of ancient authors were our sole source of knowledge as to the style and taste of Phnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were of necessity inexact and incomplete

Wherever they passed the Phnicians left behind them numbers of objects manufactured by theerly collected, and the inian makers exanize and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives, which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian peninsula by the ”watery highway” of the Mediterranean Fifty years ago the land routes were as little known as those by sea The roads were undiscovered which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and aeolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still ies

Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tos, one of whom bore that naend;[27] but he had given no drawings of them, and the work of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842, was the first froe of their appearance could be obtained Muller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows, of Texier, or of Ha a far ion A few years afterwards they drew the attention of European _savants_ to the remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which extends froaean to the furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper assyria The Lycian reive evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in the British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Muller's death

[27] _Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, with Coraphy of that Country_ (1 vol in 8vo London, Murray, 1821, pp 31-33)

[28] _A Description of so in Lydia and Phrygia_ London, 1842, in folio

The clear intellect of Ottfried Muller easily enabled hi to explain the birth of Greek art by direct borrowing fro reatived such a supposition, but ment of the intensity and duration of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for many centuries, influences which caents of intercourse between Egypt and the East, partly froians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and hom they coance of the hypothesis which Muller advocated in all his writings; and, as the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and their incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook than in his history of Greek literature

In writing the life of any greatto account for his actions, it is important to knohere he was born, and ere his parents; to learn the circus of his youth The biographer who should have no information on these points, or none but as false, would be likely to fall into serious reat difficulty in explaining his hero's opinions and the prejudices and sentiive absurd explanations of them Peculiarities of character and eccentricities of idea would embarrass him, which, had he but known the hereditary predisposition, the external circu infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the ht easily have understood It is the sahest intellectual ion, arts, and literature

It was not the fault of Ottfried Muller, it was that of the tiin of Greek art The baneful effects of his es of the historical section of his work, in the chapters which he devotes to the archaic period These chapters are very unsatisfactory

Atteuidance alone, to study the contents of one of those museum saloons where the remains of Oriental art are placed side by side with those from Etruria and primitive Greece; at every step you will notice reseeneral aspects of figures, between the details of forms and the choice of motives, as well as in the employment of common symbols and attributes These resemblances will strike and even astonish you, and if you are asked how they co differences which become ever more and more marked in the succession of the centuries, you will know not how to reply In these archaic remains there are in with the history of Greece, are unable to account He wishes us to believe that Greece in the beginning was alone in the world, that she owed all her glory to the organic developenius, which, he says, ”displayed a more intimate combination than that of any other Aryan nation of the life of sensibility with that of intelligence, of external with internal life” He goes no further back than the Greece described to us in the heroic poems; he never has recourse to such co; at thy intervals a feords which see to do with the awakening of Greek thought and the directing of her first endeavours He never formally denies her indebtedness, but he fails to perceive its vast importance, or to declare it with that authoritative accent which never fails him in the expression of those ideas which are dear to hirasped

This tendency is to be seen even in the plan of his work There is nothing surprising in the fact that Muller, in 1830, or even in 1835, had but a slight acquaintance with the art of the Eastern Enore those peoples in a book which pretended to treat of antiquity as a whole, it would perhaps have been better not to have relegated theraphs at the end of his historical section He kneell enough that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phnicians, even the Phrygians and the Lydians were much older than the Greeks; why should he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of Graeco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he had to tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?

This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important works rasping the true origin of inally from the East, were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by their unerring taste, were perpetuated in classic art, and thence transferred to that of h it is, is not the worst result of Muller's ical order makes a violent break in the continuity of the phenomena and obscures their mutual relations There is no sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned back upon itself You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to strive after in this present history of antique art--a regular and uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less brusque oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the civilization of the East into the West, setting up as its principal and successive centres, Mee, Miletus and the cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and finally Rome, the disciple and heir of Greece

Ottfried Muller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection between Greece and Rome, but he did not coe it was impossible that he should comprehend--that the bonds were no less close which bound the hellenic civilization to the far more ancient system which was born upon the banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of Iran on the one hand and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phnicians carried it, with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their oorshi+p of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean His error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from the soil in which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had drawn her first nourishetation which, in due time, became covered with the fairest hues of art and poetry

III

Thanks to the numerous discoveries of the last fifty years, and to the coested, thanks also to the theories for which they afford a basis, history has been at last enabled to render justice to certain nations whose activity had never before been properly understood, to give to them their proper place in the civilization of ancient times But Greece--the Greece which Ottfried Muller worshi+pped, and for which he was too ready to sacrifice her predecessors and teachers, to whoends--has lost nothing by the more exact information which is now at our command Served by her situation on the confines of Europe and Asia and not far froenius of her people and the e, Greece was able to arrange and classify previous discoveries and to bring them to perfection, to protect froress, the processes of art, the newly-born scientific ile apparatus of civilization which was so often threatened with final destruction, and which has more than once been overwhelmed for a time in epochs of national conflict and social decadence

This is not the place for insistence upon all that Greece has accoht, philosophy, and science, nor even for calling attention to her literature We are writing the history of the arts and not that of letters, a history which ish to conduct to the point where Muller left off, to the coes; and Greece will occupy by far thethe sa after accuracy, into every division of our history; but the reater detail than those of Egypt and assyria, or even those of Etruria and Latium It was our love for Greece that drove us to this undertaking; we desire and hope to make her life better known, to show a side of it which is not to be found in the works of her great writers, to give to our readers new and better reasons for loving and ad her than they have had before A combination of circuave to the conte more nearly to perfection, in their works of art, than men of any other race or any other epoch In no other place or time have ideas been so clearly and completely interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the intellectual qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and a keen sensibility to it It results from this that the works of the Greek artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as models and teachers for our painters and sculptors, a _role_ which they will continue to fill until the end of tiht, to enable us to dispense with nature, the indispensable and eternal ent study of her beauties, as reat works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of giving visible expression to the highest thoughts

As the Greeks excelled all other nations in the width and depth of their aesthetic sentiments; as their architects, their sculptors, and their painters, were superior both to their pupils and their masters, to the orientals on the one hand, and the Etruscans and the Latins on the other, we need feel no surprise at their central and do position in the history of antique art Other national styles and artistic manifestations will pass before the eye of the reader in their due order and succession; they will all be found interesting, because they show to us the continual struggle of uish each by its peculiar and essential characteristics, and to illustrate it by theremains which it has left behind But each style and nationality will for us have an importance in proportion to the closeness of its connection with the art of Greece In the case of those oriental races which were the teachers of the Greeks, we shall ask how much they contributed to the foundations of Greek art and to its ultimate perfection; in the case of the ancient Italians, we shall endeavour to esti the lessons of their instructors, and the skill hich they drew from their teachers a method for the expression of their own peculiar wants and feelings and for the satisfaction of their own aesthetic desires

The study of oriental art will really, therefore, be merely an introduction to our history as a whole, but an introduction which is absolutely required by our plan of treatment, and which will be completely embodied in the work The history of Etruscan and Roue

This explanation will sho far, and for what reasons we mean to separate ourselves from our illustrious predecessor We admit, as he did, we even proclaiinality of its genius and the superiority of its works of plastic art; but we cannot follow him in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, which he suspends, so to speak, in air Our age is the age of history; it interests itself above all others in the sequence of social phenoel explained by the laws of thought It would beself-created in its full perfection, without attees by which it arrived at its apogee in the Athens of Pericles In this history of ours of which we are atteet at the true origin of Greek art, penetrate far beyond its apparent origin; to describe the springing of Greek civilization, we must first study the early history of those races which surround the eastern basin of the Mediterranean