A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 2

It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repet.i.tion; monuments which have been necessarily described and estimated in the historical division are again mentioned in the chapters which treat of theory; but a better plan has yet to be found, one which will enable us to avoid such repet.i.tions without any important sacrifice. The chief thing in a work of the kind is to be clear and complete, merits which the _Handbuch_ possesses in the highest degree. Things are easily found in it, and, by a powerful effort of criticism, the author has succeeded in cla.s.sifying and condensing into a single convenient volume, all the interesting discoveries of several generations of archaeologists. Not that it is a mere compilation, for previous writers were far from being unanimous as to the dates and significance of the remains which they had described, and it was necessary to choose between their different hypotheses, and sometimes to reject them all.

In such cases Muller shows great judgment, and very often the opinion to which he finally commits himself had been previously unknown.

Without entering into any long discussion he sustains it by a few shortly stated reasons, which are generally conclusive. The plan of his book prevents him from launching out, like Winckelmann, into enthusiastic periods; he makes no attempt at those brilliant descriptions which in our day seem a little over-coloured; but in the very brevity of his judgments and his laconic but significant phraseology, we perceive a sincere and individual emotion, an independent intellect, a pure though catholic taste. We need say no more to the objectors who attack the mere form of the book. Its one real defect is that it was written thirty or forty years too soon. The second edition, carefully revised and largely augmented, appeared in 1835; it was the last issued during the lifetime of Muller. From that moment down to the day but lately pa.s.sed when the excavations at Olympia and Pergamus were brought to an end, many superb remains of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art have risen from their temporary graves and ranged themselves in our museums. If, however, recent archaeology had made no further discoveries, a few occasional corrections and additions, at intervals of ten or fifteen years, would have sufficed to prevent the manual from becoming obsolete. With a little care any intelligent editor could have satisfactorily performed what was wanted. For the Graeco-Roman period especially Muller had erected so complete a historical framework that the new discoveries could find their places in it without any difficulty. Welcker, indeed, published a third edition in 1848, corrected and completed, partly from the ma.n.u.script notes left by the author in his interleaved copy, partly from information extracted by the editor from the lectures and other writings of Muller. But why does Welcker declare, in his advertis.e.m.e.nt to the reader, that but for the respect due to a work which had become cla.s.sic, he would have modified it much more than he had dared. And why, for more than thirty years, has his example found no imitators?

Why have we been content to reprint word for word the text of that third edition?

A few years ago one of the most eminent of our modern archaeologists, Carl Bernhard Stark, was requested by a firm of publishers to undertake a new revision of the _Handbuch_. Why then, after having brought his materials together, did he find it more useful, and even easier, to compose an original work, a new manual which should fulfil the same requirements on a system of his own devising?--an enterprise which he would have brought to a successful conclusion had not death interrupted him after the publication of the first part.[26]

[26] Stark died at Heidelberg in October, 1879. The t.i.tle of his work was identical with that of Muller: _Handbuch der Archaeologie der Kunst_. The first 256 pages of the first volume were published in 1878 with the sub-t.i.tle: _Einleitender und grundlegender Theil_ (Leipsic, Engelmann, 8vo). A second instalment appeared in 1880, by which the introduction was completed. The entire work, which will not be continued, was to have formed three volumes. We explained its plan and made some remarks upon the part already published in the _Revue Critique_ of July 14, 1879.

The answer is easy. The East was not discovered till after the death of Ottfried Muller. By the East we mean that part of Africa and Asia which is bordered by the Mediterranean, or is so near to that sea that constant communication was kept up with its sh.o.r.es; we mean Egypt, Syrian Phnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldaea and a.s.syria, Asia Minor, and those islands of Cyprus and Rhodes which were so long dependent upon the empires on the neighbouring continents. It was between 1820 and 1830 that the young _savant_ conceived the ideas which he developed in his works; it was then that he first took an important part in the discussion as to the origin of the Greek nation, upon which archaeologists had long been engaged. What part had foreign example taken in the birth and development of the religion, the arts, the poetry, and the philosophy of Greece, of the whole h.e.l.lenic civilization? How much of it was due to suggestions derived from those peoples who had so long preceded the Greeks in the ways of civil life? No historian has answered this question in a more feeble and narrow spirit than Ottfried Muller; no one has been more obstinate than he in insisting upon the originality of the Greek genius, and in believing that the Greek race extracted from its own inner consciousness all that has made its greatness and glory.

When Muller first attacked this question, Egypt alone had begun to emerge from the obscurity which still enveloped the ancient civilization of the East. It was not until three years after his death, that Botta began to excavate the remains of a.s.syrian art; and nothing but the vaguest and most confused information was to be had about the ruins in Chaldaea. Now, however, we can follow the course of the Phnician ships along the Mediterranean, from the Thracian Bosphorus to the pillars of Hercules. From the traces left by the commerce and the industries of the Syrians and Carthaginians, we can estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which they visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over the various peoples who were tributary to them. Forty years ago this was impossible; the writings of ancient authors were our sole source of knowledge as to the style and taste of Phnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were of necessity inexact and incomplete.

Wherever they pa.s.sed the Phnicians left behind them numbers of objects manufactured by them for exportation, and these objects are now eagerly collected, and the marks of the Sidonian and Carthaginian makers examined and cla.s.sified, and thus we are enabled to recognize and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives, which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian peninsula by the "watery highway" of the Mediterranean. Fifty years ago the land routes were as little known as those by sea. The roads were undiscovered which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and aeolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still impossible to indicate their detours, or to count their stages.

Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the Phrygian kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the Greeks attached so strange a legend;[27] but he had given no drawings of them, and the work of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842, was the first from which any definite knowledge of their appearance could be obtained. Muller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows, of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he was dying in Greece, they were exploring a far more difficult and dangerous region. A few years afterwards they drew the attention of European _savants_ to the remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which extends from the sh.o.r.es of the aegaean to the furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper a.s.syria. The Lycian remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in the British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Muller's death.

[27] _Journal of a Tour in Asia Minor, with Comparative Remarks on the Ancient and Modern Geography of that Country_ (1 vol. in 8vo. London, Murray, 1821, pp. 31-33).

[28] _A Description of some Ancient Monuments with Inscriptions still existing in Lydia and Phrygia._ London, 1842, in folio.

The clear intellect of Ottfried Muller easily enabled him to perceive the absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by direct borrowing from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both countries emphatically negatived such a supposition, but materials were wanting to him for a right judgment of the intensity and duration of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for many centuries, influences which came to them partly from the Phnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse between Egypt and the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the Cappadocians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the a.s.syrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom they communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the extravagance of the hypothesis which Muller advocated in all his writings; and, as the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and their incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook than in his history of Greek literature.

In writing the life of any great man and attempting to account for his actions, it is important to know where he was born, and who were his parents; to learn the circ.u.mstances of his education, and the surroundings of his youth. The biographer who should have no information on these points, or none but what was false, would be likely to fall into serious mistakes and misapprehensions. He would find great difficulty in explaining his hero's opinions and the prejudices and sentiments by which he may have been influenced, or he would give absurd explanations of them. Peculiarities of character and eccentricities of idea would embarra.s.s him, which, had he but known the hereditary predisposition, the external circ.u.mstances during infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the man whose life he was describing, he might easily have understood. It is the same with the history of a people and of their highest intellectual manifestations, such as their religion, arts, and literature.

It was not the fault of Ottfried Muller, it was that of the time in which he lived, that he was deceived as to the true origin of Greek art. The baneful effects of his mistake are evident in the very first pages of the historical section of his work, in the chapters which he devotes to the archaic period. These chapters are very unsatisfactory.

Attempt, under their guidance alone, to study the contents of one of those museum saloons where the remains of Oriental art are placed side by side with those from Etruria and primitive Greece; at every step you will notice resemblances of one kind or another, similarities between the general aspects of figures, between the details of forms and the choice of motives, as well as in the employment of common symbols and attributes. These resemblances will strike and even astonish you, and if you are asked how they come to exist among differences which become ever more and more marked in the succession of the centuries, you will know not how to reply. In these archaic remains there are many traits for which those who, like Ottfried Muller, begin with the history of Greece, are unable to account. He wishes us to believe that Greece in the beginning was alone in the world, that she owed all her glory to the organic development of her unequalled genius, which, he says, "displayed a more intimate combination than that of any other Aryan nation of the life of sensibility with that of intelligence, of external with internal life." He goes no further back than the Greece described to us in the heroic poems; he never has recourse to such comparisons as we are now continually making; at most he lets fall at lengthy intervals a few words which seem to imply that Oriental civilization may have had something to do with the awakening of Greek thought and the directing of her first endeavours. He never formally denies her indebtedness, but he fails to perceive its vast importance, or to declare it with that authoritative accent which never fails him in the expression of those ideas which are dear to him, of those truths which he has firmly grasped.

This tendency is to be seen even in the plan of his work. There is nothing surprising in the fact that Muller, in 1830, or even in 1835, had but a slight acquaintance with the art of the Eastern Empires; but as he thought it necessary not entirely to ignore those peoples in a book which pretended to treat of antiquity as a whole, it would perhaps have been better not to have relegated them to a few paragraphs at the end of his historical section. He knew well enough that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phnicians, even the Phrygians and the Lydians were much older than the Greeks; why should he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of Graeco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he had to tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?

This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important works more difficult and less fruitful. It prevents him from grasping the true origin of many decorative forms which, coming originally from the East, were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by their unerring taste, were perpetuated in cla.s.sic art, and thence transferred to that of modern times; and this, bad though it is, is not the worst result of Muller's misapprehension. His inversion of the true chronological order makes a violent break in the continuity of the phenomena and obscures their mutual relations. There is no sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned back upon itself. You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to strive after in this present history of antique art--a regular and uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less brusque oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the civilization of the East into the West, setting up as its princ.i.p.al and successive centres, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, Carthage, Miletus and the cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and finally Rome, the disciple and heir of Greece.

Ottfried Muller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection between Greece and Rome, but he did not comprehend--and perhaps in the then state of knowledge it was impossible that he should comprehend--that the bonds were no less close which bound the h.e.l.lenic civilization to the far more ancient system which was born upon the banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of Iran on the one hand and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phnicians carried it, with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their own worship of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. His error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from the soil in which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had drawn her first nourishment and the primary elements of that varied and luxuriant vegetation which, in due time, became covered with the fairest hues of art and poetry.

III.

Thanks to the numerous discoveries of the last fifty years, and to the comparisons which they have suggested, thanks also to the theories for which they afford a basis, history has been at last enabled to render justice to certain nations whose activity had never before been properly understood, to give to them their proper place in the civilization of ancient times. But Greece--the Greece which Ottfried Muller worshipped, and for which he was too ready to sacrifice her predecessors and teachers, to whom she herself was more just in her early legends--has lost nothing by the more exact information which is now at our command. Served by her situation on the confines of Europe and Asia and not far from Africa, by the superiority of the genius of her people and the marvellous apt.i.tudes of her language, Greece was able to arrange and cla.s.sify previous discoveries and to bring them to perfection, to protect from destruction and oblivion the machinery of progress, the processes of art, the newly-born scientific methods, in a word, all the complex and fragile apparatus of civilization which was so often threatened with final destruction, and which has more than once been overwhelmed for a time in epochs of national conflict and social decadence.

This is not the place for insistence upon all that Greece has accomplished in the domains of pure thought, philosophy, and science, nor even for calling attention to her literature. We are writing the history of the arts and not that of letters, a history which we wish to conduct to the point where Muller left off, to the commencement of those centuries which are called the Middle Ages; and Greece will occupy by far the most important place in our work. We shall endeavour to bring the same care and conscience, the same striving after accuracy, into every division of our history; but the monuments of Greece will be examined and described in much greater detail than those of Egypt and a.s.syria, or even those of Etruria and Latium. It was our love for Greece that drove us to this undertaking; we desire and hope to make her life better known, to show a side of it which is not to be found in the works of her great writers, to give to our readers new and better reasons for loving and admiring her than they have had before. A combination of circ.u.mstances that is unique in the history of the world gave to the contemporaries of Pericles and Alexander the power of approaching more nearly to perfection, in their works of art, than men of any other race or any other epoch. In no other place or time have ideas been so clearly and completely interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the intellectual qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and a keen sensibility to it. It results from this that the works of the Greek artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as models and teachers for our painters and sculptors, a _role_ which they will continue to fill until the end of time. They form a school, not, as some have thought, to enable us to dispense with nature, the indispensable and eternal master, but to incite to such an ardent and intelligent study of her beauties, as may lead to the creation of great works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of giving visible expression to the highest thoughts.

As the Greeks excelled all other nations in the width and depth of their aesthetic sentiments; as their architects, their sculptors, and their painters, were superior both to their pupils and their masters, to the orientals on the one hand, and the Etruscans and the Latins on the other, we need feel no surprise at their central and dominating position in the history of antique art. Other national styles and artistic manifestations will pa.s.s before the eye of the reader in their due order and succession; they will all be found interesting, because they show to us the continual struggle of man against matter, and we shall endeavour to distinguish each by its peculiar and essential characteristics, and to ill.u.s.trate it by the most striking remains which it has left behind. But each style and nationality will for us have an importance in proportion to the closeness of its connection with the art of Greece. In the case of those oriental races which were the teachers of the Greeks, we shall ask how much they contributed to the foundations of Greek art and to its ultimate perfection; in the case of the ancient Italians, we shall endeavour to estimate and describe the ability shown by them in apprehending the lessons of their instructors, and the skill with which they drew from their teachers a method for the expression of their own peculiar wants and feelings and for the satisfaction of their own aesthetic desires.

The study of oriental art will really, therefore, be merely an introduction to our history as a whole, but an introduction which is absolutely required by our plan of treatment, and which will be completely embodied in the work. The history of Etruscan and Roman art will be its natural and necessary epilogue.

This explanation will show how far, and for what reasons we mean to separate ourselves from our ill.u.s.trious predecessor. We admit, as he did, we even proclaim with enthusiasm, the pre-eminence of Greece, the originality of its genius and the superiority of its works of plastic art; but we cannot follow him in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, which he suspends, so to speak, in air. Our age is the age of history; it interests itself above all others in the sequence of social phenomena and their organic development, an evolution which Hegel explained by the laws of thought. It would be more than absurd in these days to accept Greek art as a thing self-created in its full perfection, without attempting to discover and explain the slow and careful stages by which it arrived at its apogee in the Athens of Pericles. In this history of ours of which we are attempting to sketch the form, we must, in order to get at the true origin of Greek art, penetrate far beyond its apparent origin; to describe the springing of Greek civilization, we must first study the early history of those races which surround the eastern basin of the Mediterranean.

The Greece which we call ancient entered late into history, when civilization had already a long past behind it, a past of many centuries. In this sense, the words which, as we are told by Plato, a priest of Sas addressed to Solon, were perfectly true, "You Greeks, you are but children!"[29] In comparison with Egypt, with Chaldaea, with Phnicia, Greece is almost modern: the age of Pericles is nearer to our day than to that which saw the birth of Egyptian civilization.

[29] _Timaeus_, p. 22.

Appearing thus lately upon the scene, when the genius of man had, by efforts continued without intermission through a long procession of centuries, arrived at the power of giving clear and definite expression to his thoughts, by means either of articulate sounds and the symbols which represent them or by the aid of plastic forms, the Greeks could only have remained ignorant of all that had been achieved before their time if they had sprung into existence in some distant and isolated corner of the world, or in some inaccessible island.

Their actual situation was a very different one. In the earliest epoch of which we have any record we find them established in a peninsula, which is on one hand upon the very borders of Asia, and upon another seems to hold out a hand to Africa by the innumerable islands which surround its sh.o.r.es. Between the sh.o.r.es of this peninsula and those of Asia, these islands are sprinkled so thickly over the narrow seas that nature seems to have intended them for stepping-stones which should tempt the least venturesome to cross from one continent to the other.

The Greek race thus found itself, by the accident of its geographical situation, in contact with the Egyptian, a.s.syrian, and Median empires, the masters of the Eastern Mediterranean; while the insular or peninsular character of most of the region which it inhabited, together with the numerous colonies attached to the surrounding coasts like vessels at anchor, had the effect of greatly multiplying the points of contact. The Greek frontier was thus one of abnormal extent, and was, moreover, always open, always ready to receive foreign ideas and influences. Her eyes were ever turned outwards; the Greek nationality was not one of those which remain for ages inaccessible to foreign merchandize and modes of thought.

Such being the situation of Greece, it could not but happen, that, as soon as the Greek race drew itself clear from primitive barbarism, the fertile germs of art,--examples, models, processes,--should penetrate into the country from the neighbouring East by all the channels of communication which we have mentioned. Seeing how far civilization had advanced, would it not have been absurd for the Greeks to have turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the experience of their predecessors; to have begun again at the beginning? Was it not better to take up the work at the point where it had been left, and to make use, for future developments, of those which had already been established? Man progresses as fast as he can; as soon as he learns any new method of satisfying his wants and ameliorating his life, he makes use of it; he makes use of it at first in its original form, but with years and experience he improves it and brings it nearer to perfection.

Thus then, the more we study the past, the more surely do we recognize the truth contained in those myths and traditions which betray the influence exercised upon Greece by the people of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. To confine ourselves to the plastic arts, the historian of Greek art discovers _survivals_, forms and motives which had been employed in previous centuries and earlier civilizations, in exact proportion to the accuracy of his researches, and to the number of his elements for comparison. He also finds that the Greeks borrowed from the same instructors those industrial processes which, although not in themselves artistic, are among the antecedent conditions of art; namely, metallurgy, ceramics, smith's work, gla.s.s-making, weaving, embroidery, stone-working and carving, in a word all those trades which seem so simple when their secrets are known, but which, nevertheless, represent the acc.u.mulated efforts of countless unknown inventors.

It was not only the material outfit of civilization that the Greeks borrowed from their predecessors; they obtained, together with that alphabet which represents the princ.i.p.al sounds of the voice by a few special signs, another alphabet which has been happily named the _alphabet of art_, certain necessary conventions, combinations of line, ornaments, decorative forms, a crowd of plastic elements which they had employed in the expression of their own ideas and sentiments.

Even after Greek art had reached perfection and was in the full enjoyment of her own individuality, we still find traces of these early borrowings. Sometimes it is a decorative motive, like the sphinx, the griffin, the palm-leaf, and many others, which, invented on the banks of the Nile or the Tigris, were transported to Greece and there preserved to be handed down to our modern ornamentist. The nearer we get to the fountain head of Greek art, the more we are struck with these resemblances, which are something beyond mere coincidences. The deeper we penetrate into what is called archaism, the more numerous do those features become which are common to oriental, especially a.s.syrian, art, and that of Greece. We find a.n.a.logous methods of indicating the human skeleton, of accenting its articulations, of representing the drapery with which the forms are covered. Greek taste had not yet so transformed the details of ornamentation as to prevent us from recognizing the motives which commerce had brought for its use over the waves of the aegean or the mountains of Asia Minor. The marks of their origin are continually visible, and yet a practised eye can perceive that the Greeks were never satisfied, like the Phnicians, with merely combining in various proportions the materials furnished by the artisans of Egypt or a.s.syria; the facilities of such a soulless and indiscriminating eclecticism as that could not satisfy the ambitions of a race that already possessed the poetry of Hesiod and Homer.

The art of Greece was profoundly original in the best sense of the word. It was far superior to all that went before it; it alone deserved to become cla.s.sic, that is, to furnish a body of rules and laws capable of being transmitted by teaching. In what does its superiority consist? How does its originality show itself, and how can its existence be explained? These are the questions which we propose to answer; but in order to arrive at a just conclusion we must begin with the study of those nations to whom the Greeks went to school, and of whose art they were the heirs and continuers. We should be unable to grasp the exclusively Greek features of Greek art did we not begin by defining the foreign elements which have taken their part in the work, and that we can only do by going back to the civilizations in which they were produced; we must endeavour to penetrate into the spirit of those civilizations, to discover whence they started and how far they progressed; we must first define their ideas of the beautiful, and then show, by well-chosen examples, by what means and with how great a measure of success, they realised their own conception.

We undertake this long detour in order that we may arrive in Greece instructed by all that we have learnt on the way, and prepared to understand and to judge; but during the whole voyage our eyes will be turned towards Greece, as those of the traveller towards his long-desired goal. Our route will conduct us from the sh.o.r.es of the Nile to those of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the plains of Medea and Persia and Asia Minor to the sh.o.r.es of Phnicia, to Cyprus and Rhodes. But beyond the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, beyond the towers of Chaldaea and the domes of Nineveh, the lofty colonnades of Persepolis, the fortresses and rock-cut tombs of Phrygia and Lycia, beyond the huge ramparts of the cities of Syria, we shall never cease to perceive on the horizon the sacred rock of the Athenian acropolis; we shall see it before us, as our history of the past advances, lifting into the azure sky the elegant severity of its marble porticoes, the majesty of those pediments where live and breathe the G.o.ds of Homer and Phidias.

When we have crossed the threshold of the Propylaea, and have visited the Parthenon, the Erecthaeum, and the temple of the Wingless Victory; when we have seen all Greece become covered with monuments of architecture and sculpture, which, without rivalling those of Athens in purity of line or finesse of execution, bear the impress of the same style and the same taste; when we have seen Praxiteles and Scopas succeed to Phidias and Polycletus, will it not cost us a struggle to quit the scene of so many wonders and conclude our voyage? If we leave the Athens of Cimon, of Pericles, and Lycurgus, for the pompous capitals of the heirs of Alexander; if we cross the sea to visit Veii and Clusium, to describe the Etruscan cemeteries with the fantastic magnificence of their decoration; if at last we find ourselves in imperial Rome, among its basilicas, its baths, its amphitheatres, and all the sumptuous evidence of its luxury, we shall now and again turn our eyes with regret to what we have left behind; and, although we shall endeavour to comprehend and to judge with the liberality and largeness of taste and sympathy which is the honour of contemporary criticism, we shall sometimes sigh for that ideal of pure and sovereign beauty which we adored in Greece; and shall feel, now and again, the nostalgia of the exile.

IV.

In this sketch of our plan, we have reserved no place for the art which is called _prehistoric_, the art of the caverns and the lake dwellings. This omission may surprise some of our readers, and we therefore beg to submit for their consideration the reasons which, after grave reflection, have induced us to refrain from retracing the first steps of human industry, from describing the first manifestations of the plastic instinct of mankind.

We are actuated by neither indifference nor disdain. We fully appreciate the importance of such researches, and of the results to which they have led. No sooner had it entered into the mind of man to look for and collect the humble remains upon which so many centuries had looked with indifference, than they were found almost everywhere, thickly dispersed near the surface of the earth, heaped among the bones of deer in the grottoes for which men and animals had once contended, buried in peat marshes and sandy sh.o.r.es, sometimes even sprinkled upon the surface of the fields and country roads. Pieces of flint, bone, or horn, fashioned into instruments of the chase, into fishhooks, and domestic utensils; sh.e.l.ls, perforated teeth, amber b.a.l.l.s which were once strung upon necklaces and bracelets; fragments of rough tissue and of skin garments; seeds and carbonized fruits; earthen vessels made by hand and dried in the sun or simply in the open air. In some of the cave dwellings, bones and pieces of horn have been found upon which the figures of animals are carved with a truth and spirit which allow their species to be at once and certainly recognized.

But none of these remains bear the slightest trace of a system of signs for the transmission of ideas or recollections; there is nothing which suggests writing; and, more significant still, there is a complete absence of metal. All this is evidence that the remains in question belong to a very remote antiquity, to a period much nearer the primitive barbarism than to the civilization of Egypt and Chaldaea, to say nothing of that of Greece and Rome. The comparative method, which has done so much for natural science, has also taken these remains in hand, has attempted to cla.s.sify them and to gain from them some notion of the life led by the early human families which manufactured them. These arms, tools, and instruments which have been recovered from the soil of the old and cultivated nations of Europe, have been carefully compared with similar objects still in use by the savage races which people the far corners of the world. These comparisons have enabled us to decide the former use of each of the objects discovered. By collating the observations of the various travellers who have visited the savage races in question, we have been enabled to form for ourselves a probably truthful picture, so far as it goes, of the life and social habits of those primitive Europeans who made use of similar tools and weapons. And that is not all. The general character of those early periods being established, further examination brought to light the local differences which prevailed then as now. Thus the p.r.o.neness to plastic imitation seems to have been peculiar to a few tribes--although traces of this taste are found elsewhere, it is nowhere so marked as among those primitive cave-dwellers of Perigord whom Christy and Edouard Lartet have so patiently studied.

By dint of careful cla.s.sification and comparison, we have been enabled to follow the march of progress through those countless centuries whose number will never be known to us, whose total would, perhaps, oppress our imaginations if we knew it; we have been enabled to discover the slow steps by which mankind raised itself from the earliest, almost shapeless, flint axe, found with the bones of the mammoth in the quaternary alluvial deposits, to the rich and varied equipment of "lacustrian civilization," as it has sometimes been called. In this unlimited field, of which one side at least must ever be lost in unfathomable obscurity, the main divisions have been traced; the stone age has been defined and divided into the _palaeolithic_ and _neolithic_ epochs; the age of bronze followed, and then came the iron age. With the appearance of the former metal the tribes of northern and central Europe established a connection with the civilized races which surrounded the Mediterranean, and with iron we are in the full cla.s.sic period.

We can never be too grateful for the persevering labours of those who have carried on these researches in every corner of Europe; their deserts are all the greater from the fact that they could never count upon those agreeable surprises which come now and then to reward excavators on the sites of ancient and historic cities. Their chances are small of finding those objects of art which, by their beauty and elegance, repay any amount of toil and expense. The remains which they bring to light have little to say to our aesthetic perceptions; they repeat a few types with an extreme monotony; but, on the other hand, they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the cradle of our race than the myths of early history or even the monumental remains of Egypt and Chaldaea. They cast some slight illumination upon those distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. They people with unknown mult.i.tudes those remote epochs into which scientific curiosity had, but yesterday, no desire to penetrate. There can be in all this no real question of chronology, but when from the sands of Abbeville or the caverns of Perigord we dig up the first flint implements or those fragments of bone, of ivory, of reindeer horn, which have preserved to us the first attempts made by man to copy the outlines of living beings, it takes us far beyond those days of which our only knowledge comes from vague tradition, and still farther beyond those centuries which saw the first struggling dawn of history.

We have, then, decided not to embark upon these questions of prehistoric art, because, as the t.i.tle which we have chosen declares, we propose to write a _history_, and the word history, when the human race is in question, implies established relations between certain groups of facts and certain portions of time, measured at least with something approaching to probable truth.

We do not yet possess, probably we shall never possess, any means of estimating even within five or six thousand years, the actual duration of the stone age. From all a.n.a.logies progress must have been, in the beginning, exceedingly slow; like that of a falling body, the rapidity of industrial progress is continually accelerating. This acceleration is not of course quite regular; the phenomena of social life are too complex, the forces at work are too numerous and sometimes too contrary to allow us to express it by the mathematical formula which may be applied to movement in the physical world; but on the whole this law of constantly accelerated progress holds good, as indeed may be historically proved. So long as man had to do without metals, each generation, in all probability, added but little to the discoveries of that which preceded it; most likely after each happy effort many generations succeeded one another without any further attempt to advance. Ever since they have been under our observation, the savage races of the world have been practically stationary except where European commerce has profoundly modified the conditions of their lives. It is probable, therefore, that more centuries rolled away between the first chipped flints and the well polished weapons which succeeded them than between the latter and the earliest use of bronze.

But we cannot prove that it was so, nor satisfy those whom probability and a specious hypothesis will not content. Where neither written evidence nor oral tradition exist there can be little question of historic order. The remains of the stone age are not calculated to dissipate the silence which enshrouds those centuries. In the art of a civilized people we find their successive modes of feeling and thought interpreted by expressive forms; we may even attempt under all reserve to sketch their history with the sole aid of their plastic remains.

The chances of error would of course be numerous; but yet if all other materials had, unhappily, failed us, the attempt would have been well worth making. The more ancient portions of our prehistoric collections do not offer the same opportunities; they are too simple and too little varied. The primitive savage who moulded matter to his will with great and painful difficulty, could impress upon it nothing but those gross instincts which are common to man and beast; we can discover nothing from his works, beyond the means which he employed in his struggles with his enemies, and in his never-ending effort to procure food for himself.

The word history cannot then be p.r.o.nounced in connection with these remote periods, nor can their remains be looked upon in any sense as works of art. Art commences for us with man's first attempts to impress upon matter some form which should be the expression of a sentiment or of an idea. The want of skill shown in these attempts is beside the question; the mere desire on the part of the workman renders him an artist. The most hideous and disgusting of those idols in stone or terra-cotta which are found in the islands of the Greek Archipelago, at Mycenae and in Botia, idols which represent, as we believe, the great G.o.ddess mother whose worship the Phnicians taught to the Greeks, are works of art; but we are unable to give that t.i.tle to the axes and arrowheads, the harpoons and fish-hooks, the knives, the pins, the needles, the crowds of various utensils which we see in the gla.s.s cases of a pre-historic museum; all this, interesting though it be to those who wish to study the history of labour, is nothing but an industry, and a rudimentary industry, which is content with supplying the simplest wants. It is not until we reach the sculptures of the cave-dwellings that we find the first germs of artistic effort, and in truth, man did not cut the figures of animals upon the handles of his tools and upon those objects which have been called, perhaps a little recklessly, batons of command, for any utilitarian purpose; it was to give himself pleasure, it was because he found true aesthetic enjoyment in copying and interpreting living nature. Art was born, we may acknowledge, with those first attempts at the representation of life, and it might fairly be expected that our history should commence with them, were it not that they offer no sequence, no starting point for any continuous movement like that which, beginning in Egypt and Chaldaea, was prosecuted in Greece and led in time to such high developments; even its competent students confess that the art of the cave-men was an isolated episode without fruition or consequence. Specimens of this art are found at but a few points of the vast surface over which the vestiges of primitive man are spread, and neither in the neolithic age, nor even in that of bronze--both far in advance in other ways of that of the cave-dwellings--does it ever seem to have entered into the mind of man to copy the types offered to him by the organic world, still less those of mankind, which, however, had long before been roughly figured in one or two caves in the Dordogne.[30]

[30] _Dictionnaire archeologique de la Gaule_, vol. i., Cavernes, figure 28. Al. BERTRAND, _Archeologie celtique et gauloise_ (1 vol. 8vo. Didier, 1876, p. 68).

Towards the close of the prehistoric age the taste for ornament becomes very marked, but that ornament is always of the kind which we call geometric. Hardly a single decorative motive is taken from the vegetable world. Like the rude efforts of the cave-men, this decoration proves that those by whom it was imagined and who frequently employed it with such happy results, were not contented with bare utility, but, so far as they could, sought after beauty. A secret instinct worked in them and inspired them with the desire to give some appearance of elegance to the objects which they had in daily use. This geometrical style of decoration prevailed all over central Europe until, in the first place, the movements of commerce with Greece and Etruria, and secondly the Roman conquest, introduced the methods of cla.s.sic art.

From what we have said, it will be seen that we could not have pa.s.sed over in silence this system of ornamentation; but we shall again find it in our path when we come to treat of that prehistoric Greece which preceded by perhaps two or three centuries the Greece of Homer. By the help of the discoveries which have been lately made in the Troad, at Mycenae, and in other ancient sites, we shall study the works produced by the ancestors of the Greeks before they went to school to the nations of the East. But even with the discoveries which carry us farthest back, we only reach the end of the period in question, when maritime commerce had already brought to the islands and the mainland of Greece objects of Egyptian, Phnician or Chaldaic manufacture, but before those objects were sufficiently numerous or the relations with those countries sufficiently intimate to produce any great effect upon the habits of native workmen. Among the deposits to which we have alluded, it is generally possible to distinguish those works which are of foreign origin; and such works excluded, it is easy to form a sufficiently accurate general idea of the art practised by the forefathers of the historic Greeks--by the Pelasgians, to use a conventional term. So long as it was left to its own inspiration, Pelasgic art did not differ, in its general characteristics, from that of the various peoples spread over the continent of Europe, and still practised for centuries after the dawn of Greek civilization in the great plains to the north of the Alps and the Danube. Its guiding spirit and its motives are similar. There is the same richness, or rather the same poverty, the same combinations produced by a small number of never-changing linear elements. One would say that from the sh.o.r.es of the great ocean and the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean, all the workmen laboured for the same masters. Struck by this resemblance, or rather uniformity, one of the most eminent of German archaeologists, Herr Conze, has proposed that this kind of ornament shall be called Indo-European; he sees, in the universality of the system, a feature common to all branches of the Aryan race, a special characteristic which may serve to distinguish it from the Semites.