Volume I Part 3 (1/2)

Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze hiravity; by numerous exa to the Aryan fa the same everywhere, all those peoples whose development has been normal, neither interrupted nor accelerated by external causes, have, at some period of their lives, turned to the style in question for the decoration of their weapons, of their earthenware, their furniture, their apparel and their personal orna them would have stopped at that point but for the exahbours, who stirred theress; others advanced without impulse froetable and aniure in all its beauty and nobility It was the sa the nations which have made a name in history ho there are that possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical! All however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is more or less varied and expressive

The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first nave product of the iination, never entirely disappears in a literature which is life-like and sincere; it is found even in the most perfect works of its classic period In the same way the most advanced and refined foreometrical decoration This style therefore should be studied both for its principle and for the resources of which it disposes, but as we shall have to notice it e treat of Greece, it seems to us better to adjourn till then any discussion of its iven to the monuments which it ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position, which is by no hout central Europe

There is another consideration of still greater importance; the artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in passing fro lines, from all mere abstract combinations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, whichfor this development, or evidence of the transition has escaped our researches Nothing can be ures which we find upon some of the painted vases from Mycenae and Cyprus,[31] upon which the work by thosecould be farther fro organis of this desire to reproduce the beauty andfor of a hich had not yet become self conscious; but, at last the intellect divined the use to which it ht be played by the plastic instincts hich it felt itself endowed All the rest depended upon natural gifts, upon tiress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was certain to arrive, if not always at the production of masterpieces of divine beauty, at least at sufficient co to transes of its Gods to posterity

[31] SCHLIEMANN, _Mycenae_, see figs 33 and 213; CESNOLA, _Cyprus_, see pls 44 and 46

The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of this tendency until we coin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion beyond the lienerally called antiquity The conventional es who chipped the first flint, nor the cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant cities of northern Africa and hither-Asia, of Greece and Italy, hich our school-days have made us familiar; it reminds us of those nations whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose works we read in our youth; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose monuments of architecture and sculpture, to their reat works of literature in which we took our first lessons in the art of writing and speaking Behind all these ience of an educated man tells him--and the discoveries of science every day make the fact more certain--that in the ancient as in the e of history were not isolated; they each had neighbours who influenced them, or whom they influenced, by co from its predecessors, and in turn transmitted the results of its labour to those which came after it; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and universal The nations which, for three or four thousand years, were grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one historical systerasp of facts they are but the reat body, in which the nervous centres, the sources of life, of ravitated with the effluxion of time from the east to the west, from Memphis and Babylon to Athens and Ro before the opening of this period and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system; they were attached to it by the Ro, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe As soon as the victories of the Roreat roads which united Roht them into constant communication with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received thee they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all this they gave practically nothing in return Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task It had exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for millenium after millenium The old world e birth to the new, to that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems These also were to have their h, but dominated by analysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they did so ht and feeling which are only to be found in , then, to e call antiquity They are separated fros; they have no history, they have neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the name of art Hidden behind a thick curtain of ions where no towns existed, they remained in their isolation for thousands of years, furnishi+ng to civilization nothing but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how to use; they took no part in the hich, throughout those ages, was being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in that accumulation of inventions and creations which, fixed and preserved by writing and realized by art, form the common patrimony of the most civilized portion of the human species When, at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as disturbers and destroyers,--and although they helped to found modern society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity and preserved for us by that Roe of Greece was concentrated

V

We have different, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which is called the far East--India, China, and japan--outside the limit of our studies Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and assyria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations hich we are now occupied In all those countries there are buildings which impress by their mass and by the marvellous delicacy of their ornaular freedo which charms by its skilful use of brilliant colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design

The representation of the huure has never reached the purity of line or nobility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other hand, the science of decoration has never been carried farther than by the wood-carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and the potters of China and japan

These styles have their fanatical ad but their brilliant qualities; they have also their detractors, or at least their severe judges, who are chiefly struck by their shortcos, but no one attempts to deny that each of those nations possesses an art which is always original, and soreat and rare power Why then, it may be asked, do we refuse to comprehend the more ancientto the centuries hich we are concerned, in this work? Our e our incoh to occupy several lives But we have a still more decisive reason Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China belongs to the antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China and japan they are but annexes to those two great nations; religion, written characters, the industrial and plastic arts--all careat centres of civilization

So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible Down als with the western group of nations It is a human family which has lived in voluntary isolation from the rest of its species It is separated froest of the continents, by deserts, by the highest mountains in the world, by seas once impassable, finally, by that conten which such conditions of existence are calculated to engender In the course of her long and laborious existence China has invented s She was the first to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in the hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face of the world; not only did she fail to uarded them so closely that the West had to invent the as an example; nearly two hundred years before our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood On the other hand, every useful discovery roup of nations to e mean to confine our attention, fros of Egypt and Chaldaea, to the latest of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others than its authors, and forle alphabet, that which the Phnicians extracted fro, made the tour of the Mediterranean, and served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving their thoughts and the idiohts and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the iven us the sexagesimal division which we still erees, minutes and seconds

From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between Egypt or Chaldaea, and China Theto antiquity as we have defined the ter it, all those nations included in our plan laboured for their neighbours and for their successors Read as a whole, their history proves to us that they each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life which was absolutely necessary to the total result But when China is in question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal to i what the world would have been like had that Eo, with all its art, literature, and ly, we should not expect such a catastrophe to have had any great effect upon civilization; we should have been the poorer by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should have had to do without tea, and that would have been the sum of our loss

The case of India is different Less remote than China, bathed by an ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, Greece and Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations The assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates and stretched ards as far as the Mediterranean There was a continuous co of caravans across the plateau of Iran and the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria, and Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down to what is now called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual co with tiions western Asia drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea route

All this, however, was but the supply of the raw yptian, assyrian, and Phnician industries There is no evidence that up to the very last days of antique civilization the inhabitants of Hindostan with all their depths and originality of thought ever exercised such influence upon their neighbours as could have rand lyric poetry of the Vedas, the epics and draious and philosophical speculations, those learned graists, all the rich and brilliant intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in many ways no less richly endowed, rees into which no stranger penetrated until the tiyptians, Arabs nor Phnicians reached the true centres of Hindoo civilization; they merely visited those sea-board tohere the mixed population was more occupied with commerce than with intellectual pursuits The conquerors previous to Alexander did no ates of India and reconnoitre its approaches, while Alexander himself failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule

Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been cut short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers So far as we can judge froasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of Kalacoka, the es in the time of Seleucus Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that favoured region, have found buildings which they could have studied with any profit, either for their plan, construction, or decoration

Recent researches have proved Megasthenes to be an intelligent observer and an accurate narrator, and he tells us that in the richest parts of the country the Hindoos of his ti better than wooden houses, or huts of pise or rough concrete The palace of the sovereign, at Palibothra, ireat extent, and the richness of its apartments It was built upon an artificial, terraced arden It was cos surrounded by porticos, which contained large reception halls separated from one another by courtyards in which peacocks and tame panthers wandered at will The colueneral aspect was very iements seem to have had much in common with those of the assyrian and Persian palaces But there was one capital distinction between the two; at Palibothra the residence of the sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of wood With its co position, and the fine masses of verdure hich it was surrounded, it must have produced a happy and picturesque effect, but, after all, it was little more than a collection of kiosques

Architecture, worthy of the naan with the employment of those solid and durable ainst destruction by their weight and constructive repose

The other arts could not have beenof stone for building, these people can hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no infor or sculpture in their epics and dramas, there are none of those descriptions of pictures and statues which, in the writings of the Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the development of the plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry This difference between the two races ions and, consequently, their poetry In giving to their Gods the forers sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by their painters and sculptors Homer furnished the sketch from which Phidias took his type of the Olympian Jupiter It was not so with the Vedic hymns In theibility They are distinguished now by one set of qualities and again by another; each of the immortals who sat down to the banquet on Olynomy, described by poets and interpreted by artists, but it was not so with the Hindoo deities The Hindoo genius had none of the Greek faculty for clear and well-defined iueness and want of definition which is not to be con It is the business of these arts to render ideas by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence of form, which is beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours are clearly and accurately drawn

Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others which are unknoas only in its cradle in the time of Alexander, while the artists of Greece were in full possession of all their powers; they had already produced inireat divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far froe of Lysippus and Apelles; of those great architects who, in the temples of Asia Minor, renewed the youth of the Ionic order by their bold and ingenious innovations Under such conditions, ould the effect have been, had these two forms of civilization entered into close relations with each other? In all probability the result would have been similar to that which ensued when the ancestors of the Greeks began to deal with the more civilized Phnicians and the people of Asia Minor But in the case of the Hindoos, as we have said, the disciples had a less, instead of a greater, aptitude for the plastic arts than their teachers, and, moreover, the contact between the tas never co duration The only frontier upon which the interchange of idea was frequent and continuous was the north-west, which divided India frodom of which we know little more than the mere names of its princes and the date of its fall But before the end of the second century BC this outpost of hellenism had fallen before the attacks of those barbarians e call the Saci In such an isolated position it could not long hope to maintain itself, especially after the rise of the Parthian monarchy had separated it from the empire of the Seleucidae Its existence must always have been precarious, and the mere fact that it did not succuh to prove that several of its sovereigns must have been remarkable men Should their annals ever be discovered they would probably for episodes in the history of the Greek race

Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can clearly perceive that those princes were men of taste They were, as was natural, attached to the literature and the arts which rein and of that distant fatherland hich year after year it becah they were obliged, in order to defend theainst so many enemies, to employ those mercenary soldiers, Athenians, Thebans, Spartans and Cretans, which then overran Asia, and to pay them dearly for their services, they also called skilful artists to their court and kept thereat expense; the beautiful coins which have preserved their ies down to our day are evidence of this, the decoration of their cities, of their te with these; everywhere no doubt were Corinthian and Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek Gods and heroes roups which had been s, and perhaps soned by famous masters, for which the heirs of Alexander were such keen competitors Artisans, who had followed the Greek armies in theirthe wants of any colonies which ions, reproduced upon their vases and in their terra-cotta figures the , the sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths, jewellers and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal And it was not only the Greek colonists who e whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were planted, the nations to the north of India were astonished and delighted by the elegance of their ornament and the variety of its forms They imported fro to then artists settled an in the courts of the Indian rajahs

That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Graeco-Buddhic art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the Indus in the third or second century before our era These re much attention They have been carefully studied and described by Cunningham[32]; Dr Curtius has described the them[33] They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations have been made Some of them have been transported to Europe in the collection of Dr Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lahore, and Calcutta[34] In those sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the isolated members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details of its ornament are everywhere made use of It is the same with the sculpture; in the selection of types, in the arrangen, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of elen, and those drawn from the national, beliefs The helure by the side of Buddha