Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/27

 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. classic age, whether they come from Troy, Thera, Rhodes, and other islands, from Mycenae, Tiryns, and a number of other points of Greece. They one and all help us to gain some faint notion of the daily life of these tribes, their social status, the degree of culture they had attained, and the handicrafts which they practised. Many difficulties are still in the way ; high criticism notices certain signs apparently belying each other, and is often obliged to suspend its judgment ; nevertheless, the consciousness of having data that were wanting less than half-a-century ago, though prudence may counsel reserve in many cases, puts it in a position to express from the outset a well-pondered and abiding opinion on the main questions submitted to its criterion. At the threshold we are met with the problem which is the most difficult of all to determine. The Hellenic race appeared very late on the world's stage ; how did it manage to step so quickly in the foremost rank and cut so brave a figure ? How are we to explain its having gained the supremacy, and gathered in its firm grasp universal dominion, in so short a space of time ? To try and unfathom the unknown quantity, the figure or sign which might represent the inherent value of the Grecian race, its peculiar aptitudes, the special moral dispositions which it brought to that soil on which it settled so long ago that no date can now be fixed even by approximation, would be vain in the extreme. When we take to study the life and labours of a truly eminent man, and endeavour to define the elements which entered into the composition of his genius, there is no great difficulty in apportioning what he owed to the surroundings and the outward circumstances amidst which his life was spent, or the various influences which helped the growth of his genius ; let the analysis however be never so subtle, it is sure to be met at the end of its operations by a something, a residuum which will resist its most powerful tests, a combination of atoms whose arcana are not to be unravelled. This irreducible and undefinable something is genius itself, whether we call it superior intellectual energy, exceptionable power of one faculty or group of faculties which at once place the individual in whom the phenomenon shows itself immeasurably above his fellows, and whose manifestations generally appear in early youth, sometimes even during infancy. We might go on speculating for ever to no purpose as to why one individual rather than another should