Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/56

 as that could not satisfy the ambitions of a race that already possessed the poetry of Hesiod and Homer.

The art of Greece was profoundly original in the best sense of the word. It was far superior to all that went before it; it alone deserved to become classic, that is, to furnish a body of rules and laws capable of being transmitted by teaching. In what does its superiority consist? How does its originality show itself, and how can its existence be explained? These are the questions which we propose to answer; but in order to arrive at a just conclusion we must begin with the study of those nations to whom the Greeks went to school, and of whose art they were the heirs and continuers. We should be unable to grasp the exclusively Greek features of Greek art did we not begin by defining the foreign elements which have taken their part in the work, and that we can only do by going back to the civilizations in which they were produced; we must endeavour to penetrate into the spirit of those civilizations, to discover whence they started and how far they progressed; we must first define their ideas of the beautiful, and then show, by well-chosen examples, by what means and with how great a measure of success, they realised their own conception.

We undertake this long detour in order that we may arrive in Greece instructed by all that we have learnt on the way, and prepared to understand and to judge; but during the whole voyage our eyes will be turned towards Greece, as those of the traveller towards his long-desired goal. Our route will conduct us from the shores of the Nile to those of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the plains of Medea and Persia and Asia Minor to the shores of Phœnicia, to Cyprus and Rhodes. But beyond the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, beyond the towers of Chaldæa and the domes of Nineveh, the lofty colonnades of Persepolis, the fortresses and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia and Lycia, beyond the huge ramparts of the cities of Syria, we shall never cease to perceive on the horizon the sacred rock of the Athenian acropolis; we shall see it before us, as our history of the past advances, lifting into the azure sky the elegant severity of its marble porticoes, the majesty of those pediments where live and breathe the gods of Homer and Phidias.

When we have crossed the threshold of the Propylæa, and