Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/28

 Method and Plan pursued in this History. be favoured with so rare and priceless a gift ; what the conditions required to enable Nature to bring forth this prodigy, or how their combination should be effected so as to produce the desired effect. As well conceive a method of observation so nice in its calculations, as to enable us to guess and point out beforehand the mother in whose bosom the miracle would be accomplished. Nobody knows and never will know. Just as there are men of genius, so there are what may be termed nations of genius, and of all deserving the name none assuredly can match itself with the Greek race. And what is true of individuals, is equally true of peoples. With them also, no matter the care and nicety brought to bear on researches re- garding them, sooner or later a primordial stock is reached which must be accepted as a fact which does not admit of explanation. Researches, however conducted, will at best but elucidate the process according to which this residuary stock or fund was modified by climate and events, now favouring, now opposing the upward flight of initial force ; but they are powerless to penetrate the mystery of those qualities and primary aptitudes, necessarily pre-existing and preceding all manifestations, fixed as they were long before by heredity, and began to make their appearance as soon as the nation which they characterize set about expressing by words and shapes its creeds and thoughts. When the Hellenes created the Epos, they were already Greeks, V.^. the chosen people of poetry and art. At that time Egypt, Chaldaea, and Assyria were in the enjoyment of a social organization, a political power and culture richly supplied with appliances of every kind, which seemed to place them far above those obscure Achaean tribes whose bards sang even then songs represented to-day by the two epic Homeric poems. Yet the Hellenes were, in a certain sense, already superior to those who would have looked upon them as illiterate and almost in the light of savages, had circumstances brought them together. Neither Homer nor his predecessors knew how to write. But they already could* express in the fairest idiom, set off with all the resources of rhythm, those simplest, purest, and most pathetic feelings, which are as the soul's first blossom, and as such will never cease to appeal to man, so long as he remains pretty much what he is at present. Of course, among the people that witnessed the birth of these admirable fictions, the artist was as yet but a very timid novice ; he had