Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/48

 Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Müller's death.

The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller easily enabled him to perceive the absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by direct borrowing from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both countries emphatically negatived such a supposition, but materials were wanting to him for a right judgment of the intensity and duration of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for many centuries, influences which came to them partly from the Phœnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse between Egypt and the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the Cappadocians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the Assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom they communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the extravagance of the hypothesis which Müller 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 great man and attempting to account for his actions, it is important to know where he was born, and who were his parents; to learn the circumstances of his education, and the surroundings of his youth. The biographer who should have no information on these points, or none but what was false, would be likely to fall into serious mistakes and misapprehensions. He would find great difficulty in explaining his hero's opinions and the prejudices and sentiments by which he may have been influenced, or he would give absurd explanations of them. Peculiarities of character and eccentricities of idea would embarrass him, which, had he but known the hereditary predisposition, the external circumstances during infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the man whose life he was describing, he might easily have understood. It is the same with the history of a people and of their highest intellectual manifestations, such as their religion, arts, and literature.

It was not the fault of Ottfried Müller, it was that of the time in which he lived, that he was deceived as to the true origin of Greek art. The baneful effects of his mistake are evident in