Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/23

Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. taken on our word, assuming the reader to be acquainted with much which he could not possibly know. In appearance, fortunately in appearance only, this has all the air of a defective method. To render intelligible such facts as he deems worthy of retention and allow the mind to grasp their connection with one another, the historian brings out those he has selected from an enormous mass of phenomena, and in so doing unavoidably breaks their natural sequence ; were he to act other- wise and allow equal weight to all the facts, they would soon become unwieldy and difficult to move within the circles which he has prefixed to himself, the ordering of which varies according as he intends to call attention to this or that set of deeds or events. Our aim has been to study in its collective form the growth of that primitive and polite humanity which handed down to Hellas so many instances of its activity, so immense an array of tools and artistic shapes, so large an amount of materials both rough-hewn and Wrought. We have striven to define the peculiar intellectual bent of each nationality by the works which it produced in its season of independence, during what may be termed its golden age. We should however have failed to convey an exact notion of its qualities and its defects, had not we followed it from beginning to end, e.g. during the whole period of its evolution, and shadowed forth the nature of its latest manifestation when its last say was said. Only when this has been pronounced, in other words when the work is complete, can high criticism feel competent to pass a judgment that will stand. For then, and then alone, it knows both the strength and weak- ness of the art whose productions have passed before its eyes ; the conditions in which it was called to live and move and have its being, whilst in the schemes which it chose from the first it finds the explanation of its merits and demerits, it perceives and points out the limits within which were necessarily confined its boldest flights. Now, the Eastern world carried on its plastic and industrial activity long after the day when Hellas began to fix her gaze on the ideal reached by the generations that came after the Medic wars. Old though that world was, it nevertheless succeeded in creating in Persia, during the reign of Darius and his successors, a new, grand, and truly noble type. It is impossible to imagine an Art-history of the East which