of its care to the representation of those beings, superior to humanity
and yet clothed with human forms, in which her glowing imagination
personified the forces and eternal laws of nature and of the moral
world; it was in striving to create these types, and to endow them with
outward features worthy of their majesty, that Grecian art produced its
noblest and most ideal works. It will, therefore, be seen that a
comprehensive manual had to include a history of those gods and
heroes which, with that of their statues, formed a whole mythology of
art; and this mythology occupies the larger portion of the second part
of the work.
This plan has been often criticised, but we need here make no
attempt to repel or even to discuss the objections which have been
brought against it.
It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repetition;
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 repetitions 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 classifying and condensing into a single convenient
volume, all the interesting discoveries of several generations of
archæologists. 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 Müller 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
xxv
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 Müller. From that
moment down to the day but lately passed 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 archæology 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 Græco-Roman
period especially Müller 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 manuscript notes left
by the author in his interleaved copy, partly from information extracted
by the editor from the lectures and other writings of Müller. But why
does Welcker declare, in his advertisement to the reader, that but for
the respect due to a work which had become classic, 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
archæologists, 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
xxvi
a successful conclusion had not death interrupted him after the
publication of the first part.[26]
The answer is easy. The East was not discovered till after the death
of Ottfried Müller. 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 shores; we mean Egypt,
Syrian Phœnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldæa
and Assyria, 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 archæologists 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 Hellenic 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 Müller; 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 Müller 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 Assyrian art; and nothing but
the vaguest and most confused information was to be had about the
ruins in Chaldæa. Now, however, we can follow the course of the
Phœnician 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
xxvii
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 Phœnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were
of necessity inexact and incomplete. Wherever they passed the
Phœnicians 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 classified, 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 Æolia,
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. Müller 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 shores of the Ægæan to the
furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their
style and by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper
Assyria. The Lycian remains, which give evidence of a similar
inspiration and are now in the British
xxviii
Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Müller's death.
The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller 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
Phœnicians, 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
Assyrians, 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 Müller 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 circumstances 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 embarrass him, which, had he but known
the hereditary predisposition, the external circumstances 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 Müller, 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
xxix
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 Müller, 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 Müller, 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 Phœnicians, even the
Phrygians and the Lydians
xxx
were much older than the Greeks; why should he have postponed
their history to that of the decline and fall of Græco-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 classic art, and thence transferred
to that of modern times; and this, bad though it is, is not the worst
result of Müller'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 principal 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 Müller 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 Hellenic 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 Phœnicians 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.
xxxi
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
Müller 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 aptitudes of her language,
Greece was able to arrange and classify 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 Müller 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 Assyria, 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
xxxii
before. A combination of circumstances 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 rôle 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 æsthetic 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 pass 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 illustrate 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 æsthetic desires.
The study of oriental art will really, therefore, be merely an
introduction to our history as a whole, but an introduction which
xxxiii
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 illustrious 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