Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/245

 202 Primitive Grekce : Mvcenian Art. human body, to turn out an image with some approach to reality. At first they were content to endow pebbles with a slightly conventional and symmetrical shape ; so that, hieroglyph-wise, they brought up to the mind the living figure which no one as yet knew how to imitate. Then, by degrees, the hand acquired more firmness and suppleness ; the ideal aimed at became less imperfect, and the sign assumed the value of an image ; so that the rendering of the latest idols is fairly natural. Remembering the ascendency which religious feeling exercises over the sus- ceptible and simple mind of unsophisticated folk, and the terrors and emotions it stirs within their breast, one readily grasps how this feeling should have prompted man at an early date to pain- fully and arduously imitate the living form. Among the plastic works that may safely be ascribed to the tribes that preceded the Hellenes in the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean, none come up, in uncouthness, to those which open the series we are considering ; there are none which take the historian so far back as these, where he feels that he stands on the borderland of initial barbarism. Hence he is justified in considering those statuettes that look most archaic in the light of idols, and, as a necessary corollary, other figures, of certainly more recent date, but which owing to identity of types are connected with the earliest links of a chain that maintained itself there without a break through various modifications of detail and progressive practical knowledge. Divine simulacra, of no matter what nationality, are all dis- tinguished by uniformity of attitude, of costume, and attributes, these being repeated without a change from one figure to another. To-day, as in those remote times, pious people do not relish be- ing disturbed out of their confirmed habits. The image wherein they place their greatest confidence is that before which their ancestors have knelt in prayer ; changes in the workmanship, which progress brings in its wake, are only introduced by slow, imperceptible degrees, and with great difficulty. We have called attention from time to time to the constant and ever-recurring shape, the unvarying posture and costume which we meet in all these images. The impression that these figures had a symbolic and religious value would have been brought home to the reader with greater force, had we been able to exhibit all the pieces that are preserved in the Athenian museums for