Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/32

Method and Plan pursued in this History. ii mirror of the Epos reflects back under all its aspects the image of the society which the poet had before his eyes, whence he unconsciously drew his pictures, whilst making believe that he ivas recounting the feats and adventures of heroes, the sons and companions of the gods. Although in these recitals are found numerous words, statements, and allusions which the Alexandrian commentators already found hard to explain or understand, these difficulties have been largely removed by archaeological progress ; the enormous mass of materials that has been accumulated, whose wealth daily increases, has brought systematical methods into analysis and comparison which tend to become more and more precise ; whilst a catalogue of the shapes imparted to matter by the oldest inhabitants of Greece has not only been commenced, but carried very far. These shapes are studied in works great and small executed during the period under notice, be it the enormous walls of acropoles, the plans and decoration of palaces, the tombs of. kings and private individuals, or the smallest fragments of armour, artistic furniture, costume, and ornamental objects for personal use. The tiniest chip of stone, terra-cotta, wood, glass, amber, or metal is carefully picked up and classified in the hope of making out the impress upon it, more or less distinctly marked, of notions and creeds, tastes and habits, which held sway when these objects were manufactured. Every fresh shaft which is sunk deep enough to reach old deposits brings up materials out of which new series are enlarged, new ones made, and each one after being carefully labelled is presently deposited in our museums, and helps the interpretation of this or that passage of poems, that had either remained obscure or not been understood at all. The more we advance in this line of research, the more efficacious will be the aid which texts and monuments will afford each other ; those texts wherein we . seem to hear the warm and living speech of generations that have left little or nothing behind them, or the monuments of a nascent art which, despite its clumsiness and ignorance of many things, has already its eyes open on Nature, whose lower types at least it is at pains to reproduce with truth and honesty. The rudest industrial products enable us to creep further back into the past, far beyond the period, already cultured after a certain fashion, when the brilliant bloom of epic poetry closely followed the growth of the art which it has been agreed to