Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/71

 themselves against destruction by their weight and constructive repose.

The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant as they were of the working of stone for building, these people can hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no information. There is, moreover, no allusion to works of painting 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 may perhaps be explained by the opposition between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving to their gods the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek singers 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 them the persons of the gods had neither consistence nor tangibility. They are distinguished now by one set of qualities and again by another; each of the immortals who sat down to the banquet on Olympus, had his or her own personal physiognomy, 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 imagery; it betrays a certain vagueness and want of definition which is not to be combined with a complete aptitude for the arts of design. 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 unknown, was 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 inimitable master-pieces in each of the great divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far from being exhausted. It was the age 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, what would the effect have been, had these two forms of civilization entered