Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/414

 3/6 A History of Art in Chald.-ea and Assyria. employed. Writing traced upon rice paper or papyrus, with a reed pen, gradually put on an appearance very different to that of characters punched in clay with a point or stylus. The three systems were in the end perfectly distinct ; and when, by dint of long and patient effort, you have mastered all the difficulties of Chinese writing, you are no nearer than you were before to a comprehension of the wedges or the hieroglyphs. And yet these three creations of man's genius are identical in method and principle. Their point of departure was the same. They began by figuring every object to which a distinctive name had been given. The next step was to invent expedients by which these concrete signs could be used for the expression of abstract ideas, and the next again to employ them for the notation, not of ideas, but of sounds. In one country the passage from the direct to the metaphorical use of a term, and from the pure ideogram to the phonetic character, was made with more skill and rapidity than in another. Here the cor- rections and retouches suggested by practice were more cleverly used to remedy the vices of the system than there. But the fact to be remembered is that, without previous concert, all three societies solved the problem put before them in the same fashion, and that problem was how to fix their thoughts and transmit them to future generations. They began with naïve and roughly executed images, like those made by modern savages. From this stage, in which so many less gifted races stuck fast, all three nations emerged with equal decision and good fortune. By the same roads and by-ways they arrived at the expression of the most complex ideas with a most im- perfect instrument. But in spite of all their good will and their subtle intellects, neither Egypt nor Chaldasa nor China succeeded in reducing the word to its elements, and fixing upon a special symbol for each of the fundamental articulations of the human voice. A kind of hidden force, a secret instinct, seems to have urged them on to the required analysis, while they were held back by some fatality or prejudice of their birth or early education. They were all three on the point of touching the goal, but they never quite reached it, and it is to another race that the glory of having invented the alphabet must be given. These civilizations have a second characteristic at which the