Part 17 (1/2)

[Footnote 354: Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which countervails the remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity of art in Asiatic Greece, he writes: ”Art as a rule flourishes--we do not say, reaches its highest point, _for that is impossible without freedom_--where wealth is to be found combined with good taste. And good taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-barbarians acquire.”]

[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i, 117, 118.]

[Footnote 356: K.O. Muller, _History of Greek Literature_, 1847, pp.

208, 210.]

[Footnote 357: Schomann, _Griechische Alterthumer_, ii, 362.]

[Footnote 358: The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu and Mazarin, and of the decay in the latter part of Louis's reign, are discussed, _apropos_ of the _laissez-faire_ argument of Buckle, in the author's _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 324-39.]

[Footnote 359: An interesting corroboration of the above general view was presented in an article on the state of German art in the _Century Magazine_ for July, 1898. The writer thus described the position of German art under the Kaiser's patronage: ”Moved by the best of intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his efforts to encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man power.

Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like skill in ill.u.s.trations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of the period of Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his own line rather than the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It is not by making sketches for the Knackfusses to carry out that the Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its present stagnation, but by allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow through the art world.

The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce recruits who have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is the Emperor's fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon running things artistic, no one else can, or will--and the artists themselves least of all.”]

[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, _Liberty_, ch. iii, People's ed. p. 38.]

[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill's a.n.a.lysis of ”benevolent despotism” in ch.

iii of his _Representative Government_.]

[Footnote 362: Prof. Mahaffy (_Greek Life and Thought_, p. 112) attributes the same sense of superiority to the men of the period of the earlier successors of Alexander. This could well be, and such a feeling would serve to inspire the great art works of the period in question.

Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth set up by the commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.]

[Footnote 363: Finlay. _History of Greece_, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]

[Footnote 364: D. Bikelas. _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_, translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]

[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]

[Footnote 366: Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, _History of Greece_, iv, 351-52. That this was no Christian innovation becomes clear when we compare the status of women in Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 173-74. And see his _Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 328, as to pre-Christian developments.]

[Footnote 367: Bikelas, p. 104.]

[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to the internal forces of routine.]

[Footnote 369: _De bello Gothico_, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn ed. v, 243; and Prof. Bury's App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.]

[Footnote 370: Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43, end.]

[Footnote 371: ”The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century ... was the ignorant credulity of the richer cla.s.ses” (Bury, _History of the Later Empire_, ii, 387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.]

[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]

[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]

Chapter II

THE SARACENS

While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old h.e.l.lenic science and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to _(a)_ the constrictive force of religious systems under certain conditions, and _(b)_ the nullity of the theory of race genius. Yet these very circ.u.mstances have been made the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the ”Semitic” character in general, and of the Arab in particular.

Concerning no ”race” save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after another[374] has explained Semitic ”faculty” in terms of Semitic experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran, inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with architecture, he p.r.o.nounces the Semites averse to that also; and as regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues that we know not ”how far entirely alien models were imitated by the Semites.”[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of imaginative fiction in the _Arabian Nights_ is credited bodily to the ”Indo-Germanic” account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M.