Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/29

 8 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. nothing to show that could compare with the countless figures of men and gods, whether painted, sculptured, or cast in bronze, which adorned the buildings of Memphis and Thebes, of Babylon and Nineveh. His treatment of the human figure, when he dared to attack it, was clumsy in the extreme ; despite it all, Grecian imagination thenceforth descried and in a manner mentally blocked out those types which statuary was later to endow with a real and concrete existence, as it modelled its figures in marble and brass ; these types owe to their noble character and infinite breadth to have outlived the old world and of imposing them- selves on modern plastic art. It is well known that Pheidias turned to Homer as to a fount of inexhaustible suggestions and inspirations. This superiority, we are told, is to be accounted for by the fact that the Greeks belong to the privileged Aryan stock, whilst the Egyptians, Chaldaeans, and Phoenicians are more or less pure Semites. Peoples of the Aryan family, it is affirmed, have alone created mythologies, both grand and varied, the true fountain-heads whence the epics and the noble arts sprang ; they alone at a subsequent period gave proof of aptitude in science and philosophy. Such sweeping assertions as these are very much open to question ; but this is not the place for discussing them. We may be allowed one observation. The Greeks are not the only people of that family who, in the course of ages, were placed in pre-eminently favourable climatic conditions, and whose surroundings were almost perfect. Yet they alone produced a Homer and iEschylus, a Plato and Aristotle, a Phei4ias and Praxiteles. Another point — even more striking — is this : there are at this moment clans whose titles of nobility, if so they may be called, are firmly established, but whose manners and habits, nevertheless, strongly savour of barbarism. Such are the Skipetars, who are descended from the old Illyrians, and the near kinsmen of the Greeks. Between the coarse rudeness of these turbulent populations and such culture as that of Greece, many grades must necessarily have intervened ; yet there is not a rung of this imaginary ladder on which, at a given time, has not rested one or other of these nationalities, ethno- graphically classified in the Indo-European group with a great flourish of trumpets, and among these not a few have remained far below the level reached by peoples whose name is not