Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/38

Plan and Method pursued in this History. 17 harder. Egypt alone gave us a foretaste of this difficulty when we were called upon to examine the long period over which extended her civilization, along with the preserving qualities of her warm, dry soil ; in reality however a limited number of types sufficed to represent the whole movement and the whole effort of that art. The special features of Egyptian art are by no means monotony and unmovableness, such as at one time an ill-informed criticism was inclined to ascribe thereto ; at the same time it was neither so deeply transformed, nor did it strike out into so many different paths at once as Hellenic art. Excavations, whether in Chaldaea or Assyria, have not by a long way yielded so large a crop as those carried on in Greece and Egypt. Had they however been as productive as in certain parts of Assyria, the number of pieces that would have repaid reproduction would be exceedingly small. Amazingly strong though it was, the art of Mesopotamia was very limited in its means of expression ; it was given to much repetition. This applies in full to Persian art. Phoenicia invented still less ; to bring forward a long series of examples so as to define the processes of her mercantile eclecticism would be superfluous. There was no real difficulty in any of these cases, except that a certain measure of tact and proportion was required. On the other hand, time has dealt heavily with the work of other nations, such as the Hebrews, Hittites, Lydians, Phrygians, and Carians, important portions of which have almost been entirely destroyed. Here our anxiety was of another kind ; the burden laid upon us was to gather together all the monuments that had been preserved, so as to form them into groups that should exhibit as complete a tale as possible. How different is the case when we turn to Greece! No historian, let him assign ever so great an extent to his work, can, even in his dreams, imagine the possibility of making it complete ; so rich was the fancy of that gifted people, so skilful was it in translating its notion of beauty, which held so large a place in its existence, into a thousand different forms, not to speak of countless precious relics of which the soil of Greece and Italy has been despoiled, during the last three hundred years, by people of taste or of an inquiring mind. Let anybody enter one of our great museums, the Louvre for example, and at the very threshold he will give up the notion, if he ever entertained VOL. I. c