Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/26

12 of the Written evidence. Palæography is the true guide of the historian of Art

It is this third branch of our whole subject-matter, the Monumental, which we have now to consider.

Monuments are either works of Art or works of Handicraft. Art is either Constructive or Imitative; Handicraft either Useful or Decorative.

I must recall you for a moment to the point from which I started in treating of the history of writing. I said that man was the only animal that imitated in a material external to himself; who, in other words, practised painting and sculpture. To draw and to carve are natural to man; speech, gesture, and music are his transient,—sculpture, painting. and writing, his permanent means of utterance. There is hardly any race that has not produced some rude specimens of sculpture and painting; there are a few only who have brought them to perfection.

Now, there is a point of view in which we may regard the imitative art of all races, the most civilised as well as the most barbarous—in reference, namely, to the power of correctly representing animal or vegetable forms such as exist in nature. The perfection of such imitation depends not so much on the manual dexterity of the artist as on his intelligence in comprehending the type or essential qualities of the form which he desires to represent. One artist may make the figure of a man like a jointed doll, because he discerns in human structure no more than the general fact of a head, trunk, and limbs. Another may perceive in nature and indicate in art some traces, however slight, of vital organisation, of bones and muscles, and of their relation to each other as pulleys and level's. A third may represent them in their true forms in action and repose.

This is real, intellectual art, because it represents not the forms merely, but the life which animates them. This difference between one artist and another in the mode of representing organic life is the most essential part of what is called style. As the styles of individual artists differ in this respect, so it is with the art of races.

If we compare the representation of a man in Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Medieval, Chinese, Indian, and Mexican sculpture, we shall see that the same bones and muscles, the same organisation and general type, have been very diffe-