Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/544

 General Characteristics ok the Mvcenian Period. 487 succeeded in making the reader share the impression which we felt when we journeyed to the several sites where Schliemann had prosecuted his excavations, in order that we might form a just appreciation of his labours, and have the opportunity of looking long and at close quarters into his numerous finds ; with Dorpfeld, we attentively followed the trace of fortifications perceptible almost along the whole extent of the circuit — and noted down by him with scrupulous and minute care — whether at Tiryns or Mycense ; then a few days afterwards we as eagerly bent over the Trojan trenches — when the names of all these ancient cities and those of their reputed heroic founders surged in my memory, and assumed a meaning and substance such as they never had had before, and for which book-learning had not prepared me. I felt in some wise as the champion of young Hellas, as if I were winning back for her a great piece of her past of which she had been unjustly deprived — eight, perhaps ten centuries of her early existence, in the course of which she had essayed, by slow and laborious apprenticeship, to execute works which were as the prelude of those of her splendid youth and manhood ; eight or ten centuries which had well-nigh a history of their own ; for if they are destitute of literary docu- ments, and of a narrative recording the events of her infantine days, yet the instances of the art they have handed down to us show a sufficiently-advanced technique to enable us to guess the intellectual bent of that gifted race, how it was even then deeply affected by the spectacle of nature, and its conception of beauty. As I thus gleaned information, such as one who knows how to go to work may excogitate from the manifold objects which bear upon them the impress of thought and intention, my ear grew finer and quicker in catching every sound. Out of the confused hum and murmur of the Epic tales, wherein the Hellenes account for their mysterious beginnings, and that of their townships, I seemed to distinguish many a faithful vibration, many an echo, of sounds which had filled that world in the distant past. Surprised at having to acknowledge that recent finds, in many respects, confirm the data which up to that moment had appeared most unsatisfactory, I was led to ask whether ancient writers, Herodotus, Pausanias, and Diodorus, had not gone farther astray in accepting and repeating the traditions current in primitive Hellas, than those sceptical scholars for whom the