Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/37

 1 6 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. There is yet another difficulty inherent to the subject which will have to be met. The men of the Periclean age were farther removed from the beginnings of Oriental culture than they are from the nineteenth century. The work entrusted to Egypt and Chaldaea was almost done when the Greeks began to cast off the outward semblance of barbarism and rose to a spiritual life. Established in the vicinity and as it were the boundaries of the Asiatic world, they could not fail to profit by the intellectual activity of their elders : this is to say that they were brought under their influence. In dealing with Egypt, the order in which styles and artistic forms succeeded each other in that country was sufficiently accounted for by reference to the general laws which preside over the development of the human mind. The case is different for Greece. In trying to make the reader understand why her evolution was so rapid, and account for certain peculiar pheno- mena by which she is characterized, considerations other than these will have to step in. There is reason to ascribe a great deal to alien example and teaching ; but as written documents almost entirely fail for the period when this action was most effectually exercised, it will not in every instance be an easy matter to determine the point of departure or the direction taken by these currents, nor to estimate their living force. Are we to view the Ionic column whose volutes already appear curling round the flanks of Cappadocian rocks, amidst bas-reliefs bearing graven upon them signs of Hittite writing, along with those standing or seated statues of archaic style whose aspect so vividly recalls, at first sight, that of the works of the Egyptian sculptor, in the light of transmissions and intentional imitations, or of mere chance, to be accounted for by the fact that the human mind is pretty much the same in every clime, and that when it has reached a certain age it nearly everywhere bears the same fruits, provided the conditions of environment in which it is placed are not too wide apart ? These are delicate questions that will not infre- quently perplex us, until we come to the period when Hellenic genius assimilated all the elements it had derived from foreign sources, and fused them all in its own powerful and original crucible. The difficulty of how to choose amidst so prodigious, so bewildering a wealth of monuments specimens for examination and classification, will complicate our labours and make them