Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/46

The Country. 25 were content to adapt both to their own needs and the taste of their foreign customers, elements borrowed from their neigh- bours, industrial processes which they perfected and made their own. In some sort or another, these several nations had finished their work ages before they lost their independence ; but their life was ended, for they had ceased to bring forth, and only endured through a long agony. Greece, on the contrary, never ceased to advance ; at any rate she never remained still. Even when as a Roman province the stock of her original inventions seemed exhausted, she did not give up on that accoimt, but still toiled upwards after a new birth, and to a certain extent she succeeded. True, she can no longer produce Homeric poems, nor the Lesbian and Theban ode, nor the Attic drama, but she devotes herself heart and soul to the cultivation of science and history. She takes up higher criticism, and turns back to her old philosophical systems that she may widqn and know them better ; the framing of the Christian dogma is mainly her work. In the domain of plastic art, if a Pheidias or a Praxiteles, a Polygnotos or a Zeuxis, is no longer born to her, she has still architects who, without imitating the Ictinoses and Mnesicleses, produce masterpieces ; however high above all others we may put classical forms, who would not admire the basilicas of Ravenna and the noble nave of St. Sophia ? In the history of the human mind, no organic development is more familiar than that of the Grecian mind, and instinct with a greater fund of wealth and simplicity. Its most con- spicuous characteristic is this : despite enormous distances by land and sea, parting the various countries in which important Hellenic populations constituted themselves, this progressive march or evolution, broadly considered, was everywhere governed by the same laws, whether on the mainland or in the islands where the Greek language was the mode of speech ; everywhere the main phases succeeded each other, if not in periods of equal duration, at least in the same order and in very similar conditions. If the growth was more rapid at one place and slower at another, the fact remains that its season of youth and creative power were more abiding. Elsewhere, happy beginnings were ere long fol- lowed by old age and sterility ; or mayhap some disastrous accident, such as the invasion of Campania and Apulia led by Sabellian tribes, which suddenly arrested the natural course of life.