Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/26

Method and Plan pursued in this History. flag or another, whether by the hand of Scipio i^milianus or Alexander, it is Hellenic genius which remains master of the field ; Polybius, in the company of the Roman pro-consul, witnesses the last night of Carthage. By and by, however, the East will take its revenge. It will take its revenge in the religious domain, with the creed of the man of Nazareth against the creed of Muham- mad ; in the domain of art with cupolas surmounting Byzantine churches, with Persian mosques, with Arabian architecture and its exuberant ornamentation. But when armed Hellas, in the full pride of her manhood, gathered into her hands the management of the affairs of mankind, to hand it over later to Rome, her pupil and heir, who would not have deemed the cause of Hellenism, its language, literature, and arts, assured for all time against the freaks of fortune ? The point when Europe appeared triumphant along the whole line in her long strife against the East, was the natural goal of that part of our scheme which, starting with Egypt, terminated in Persia, and forms the first part of our work. A new path now opens before us : the history of that Hellas whose triumph we have just proclaimed. As yet we have seen her only in profile and from the outside ; all we know of her up to the present time is the action she exercised by contact and example on that older world which outwardly looked so strongly constituted ; it is the power which was in her for loosening little by little its barriers, finally breaking them down, and withering with her touch as with palsy all its traditions, and in the end succeeding in having her language and the forms with which she clothed her ideas accepted, both in science and in arts. We recorded the phenomenon ; it behoves us now to justify and explain it away ; to this end, we shall have to retrace our steps and go up the path of those far-off ages in the twilight of which are hidden the beginnings of mankind, where, too, primitive germs unclose. In this retrospective progress we shall scarcely be guided by mythic lore, far less by history ; but even at those points where their last flickering rays are lost in obscurity, we shall not on that account lose our foothold ; we are enabled to creep further back by the aid of the very primitive monuments brought to light by Schliemann and his fellow-workers within the last thirty years. These discoveries have handed over to the archae- ologist thousands of objects wrought by the hands of folk who, under various names, were the ancestors of the Hellenes of the