As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period
and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube,
the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system;
they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late
period; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the
invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the
xlvi
empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the
substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the
wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a
civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself
over the whole surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the
Roman legions, and the construction of the great roads which united
Rome with her most distant provinces, had brought them into
constant
communication
with
the
maritime
cities
of
the
Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor
letters, nor expressive art, received them from their conquerors,
whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all this
they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had
almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those
ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or
little changed, for millenium after millenium. The old world employed
such force and vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to
that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and
political systems. These also were to have their modes of expression,
rich and sonorous enough, but dominated by analysis; they were to
have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more
complex ideas than those of antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the
Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called
barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made
an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at
so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation for
those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in
modern society.
These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are
separated from it by many things; they have no history, they have
neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the
name of art. Hidden behind a thick curtain of mountains and forests,
sprinkled over vast regions where no towns existed, they remained in
their isolation for thousands of years, furnishing to civilization nothing
but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how to
use; they took no part in the work which, throughout those ages, was
being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the
Mediterranean, in that accumulation of inventions and creations
which, fixed and preserved by writing and realized by art, form the
common patrimony
xlvii
of the most civilized portion of the human species. When, at a late
hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as disturbers and
destroyers,—and although they helped to found modern society, they
produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity and
preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of
Greece was concentrated.
V.
We have different, but equally valid, reasons for leaving that which is
called the far East—India, China, and Japan—outside the limit of our
studies. Those rich and populous countries have, doubtless, a
civilization which stretches back nearly as far as that of Egypt and
Assyria, a civilization which has produced works both of fine and of
industrial art which in many respects equalled those of the nations
with which we are now occupied. In all those countries there are
buildings which impress by their mass and by the marvellous delicacy
of their ornamentation, sculptures of a singular freedom and power,
and decorative painting which charms by its skilful use of brilliant
colour as well as by the facility and inventive fancy of its design. The
representation of the human figure has never reached the purity of
line or nobility of expression of a Greek statue, but, on the other
hand, the science of decoration has never been carried farther than
by the wood-carvers, weavers and embroiderers of Hindostan, and
the potters of China and Japan.
These styles have their fanatical admirers who see nothing but their
brilliant qualities; they have also their detractors, or at least their
severe judges, who are chiefly struck by their shortcomings, but no
one attempts to deny that each of those nations possesses an art
which is always original, and sometimes of great and rare power.
Why then, it may be asked, do we refuse to comprehend the more
ancient monuments of India and China, those which by their age
belong to the centuries with which we are concerned, in this work?
Our motives may be easily divined.
We might allege our incompetence for such an extended task, which
would be enough to occupy several lives. But we have a
xlviii
still more decisive reason. Neither Aryan India nor Turanian China
belongs to the antiquity which we have defined, and as for Indo-China
and Japan they are but annexes to those two great nations; religion,
written characters, the industrial and plastic arts—all came to them
from one or the other of those two great centres of civilization.
So far as China is concerned no doubt or hesitation is possible. Down
almost to our own days China and its satellites had no dealings with
the western group of nations. It is a human family which has lived in
voluntary isolation from the rest of its species. It is separated from
western mankind by the largest of the continents, by deserts, by the
highest mountains in the world, by seas once impassable, finally, by
that contempt and hatred of everything foreign which such conditions
of existence are calculated to engender. In the course of her long and
laborious existence China has invented many things. She was the
first to discover several of those instruments and processes which, in
the hands of Europeans, have, in a few centuries, changed the face
of the world; not only did she fail to make good use of her inventions,
she guarded them so closely that the West had to invent them anew.
We may cite printing as an example; nearly two hundred years before
our era the Chinese printed with blocks of wood. On the other hand,
every useful discovery made in the period and by the group of nations
to whom we mean to confine our attention, from the time of Menes
and Ourkham, the first historic kings of Egypt and Chaldæa, to the
latest of the Roman Emperors, has been turned to the profit of others
than its authors, and forms, so to speak, part of the public wealth. A
single alphabet, that which the Phœnicians extracted from one of the
forms of Egyptian writing, made the tour of the Mediterranean, and
served all the nations of the ancient world in turn for preserving their
thoughts and the idiom of their language. A system of numerals, of
weights and measures, was invented in Babylon and travelled across
Western Asia to be adopted by the Greeks, and, through the
mediation of the Greek astronomers and geographers, has given us
the sexagesimal division which we still employ for the partition of a
circumference into degrees, minutes and seconds.
From this point of view, then, there is a profound difference between
Egypt or Chaldæa, and China. The most remote epochs in the history
of China do not belong to antiquity as we have
xlix
defined the term. Without knowing it or wishing it, all those nations
included in our plan laboured for their neighbours and for their
successors. Read as a whole, their history proves to us that they
each played a part in the gradual elaboration of civilized life which
was absolutely necessary to the total result. But when China is in
question our impression is very different, our intellects are quite equal
to imagining what the world would have been like had that Empire
been absolutely destroyed centuries ago, with all its art, literature,
and material wealth. Rightly or wrongly, we should not expect such a
catastrophe to have had any great effect upon civilization; we should
have been the poorer by a few beautiful plates and vases, and should
have had to do without tea, and that would have been the sum of our
loss.
The case of India is different. Less remote than China, bathed by an
ocean which bore the fleets of Egypt, Chaldæa, Persia, Greece and
Rome, she was never beyond the reach of the western nations. The
Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks carried their arms into the
basin of the Indus, some portions of which were annexed for a time to
those Empires which had their centre in the valley of the Euphrates
and stretched westwards as far as the Mediterranean. There was a
continuous coming and going of caravans across the plateau of Iran
and the deserts which lie between it and the oases of Bactriana, Aria,
and Arachosia, and through the passes which lead down to what is
now called the Punjab; between the ports of the Arabian and Persian
gulfs and those of the lower Indus and the Malabar coast, a continual
commercial movement went on which, though fluctuating with time,
was never entirely interrupted. From the latter regions western Asia
drew her supplies of aromatic spices, of metals, of precious woods, of
jewels, and other treasures, all of which came mainly by the sea
route.
All this, however, was but the supply of the raw material for Egyptian,
Assyrian, and Phœnician industries. There is no evidence that up to
the very last days of antique civilization the inhabitants of Hindostan
with all their depths and originality of thought ever exercised such
influence upon their neighbours as could have made itself felt as far
as Greece. The grand lyric poetry of the Vedas, the epics and dramas
of the following epoch, the religious and philosophical speculations,
those learned grammatical analyses which are now admired by
philologists, all the rich and
l
brilliant intellectual development of a race akin to the Greeks and in
many ways no less richly endowed, remained shut up in that basin of
the Ganges into which no stranger penetrated until the time of the
Mohammedan conquest. Neither Egyptians, Arabs nor Phœnicians
reached the true centres of Hindoo civilization; they merely visited
those sea-board towns where the mixed population was more
occupied with commerce than with intellectual pursuits. The
conquerors previous to Alexander did no more than reach the gates
of India and reconnoitre its approaches, while Alexander himself
failed to penetrate beyond the vestibule.
Let us suppose that the career of the Macedonian hero had not been
cut short by the fatigues and terrors of his soldiers. So far as we can
judge from what Megasthenes tells us of Palibothra, the capital of
Kalaçoka, the most powerful sovereign in the valley of the Ganges in
the time of Seleucus Nicator, the Greeks would not, even in that
favoured region, have found buildings which they could have studied
with any profit, either for their plan, construction, or decoration.
Recent researches have proved Megasthenes to be an intelligent
observer and an accurate narrator, and he tells us that in the richest
parts of the country the Hindoos of his time had nothing better than
wooden houses, or huts of pisè or rough concrete. The palace of the
sovereign, at Palibothra, impressed the traveller by its situation, its
great extent, and the richness of its apartments. It was built upon an
artificial, terraced mound, in the midst of a vast garden. It was
composed of a series of buildings surrounded by porticos, which
contained large reception halls separated from one another by
courtyards in which peacocks and tame panthers wandered at will.
The columns of the principal saloons were gilt. The general aspect
was very imposing. The arrangements seem to have had much in
common with those of the Assyrian and Persian palaces. But there
was one capital distinction between the two; at Palibothra the
residence of the sovereign, like those of his subjects, was built of
wood. With its commanding position, and the fine masses of verdure
with which it was surrounded, it must have produced a happy and
picturesque effect, but, after all, it was little more than a collection of
kiosques. Architecture, worthy of the name, began with the
employment of those solid and durable materials which defend
li
themselves against destruction by their weight and constructive
repose.
The other arts could not have been much more advanced. Ignorant
as they were of the working of stone for building, these people can
hardly have been sculptors, and as to their painting, we have no
information. There is, moreover, no allusion to works of painting or
sculpture in their epics and dramas, there are none of those
descriptions of pictures and statues which, in the writings of the
Greek poets and dramatists, show us that the development of the
plastic arts followed closely upon that of poetry. This difference
between the two races may perhaps be explained by the opposition
between their religions and, consequently, their poetry. In giving to
their gods the forms and features of men, the oldest of the Greek
singers sketched in advance the figures to be afterwards created by
their painters and sculptors. Homer furnished the sketch from which
Phidias took his type of the Olympian Jupiter. It was not so with the
Vedic hymns. In them the persons of the gods had neither
consistence nor tangibility. They are distinguished now by one set of
qualities and again by another; each of the immortals who sat down
to the banquet on Olympus, had his or her own personal
physiognomy, described by poets and interpreted by artists, but it was
not so with the Hindoo deities. The Hindoo genius had none of the
Greek faculty for clear and well-defined imagery; it betrays a certain
vagueness and want of definition which is not to be combined with a
complete aptitude for the arts of design. It is the business of these
arts to render ideas by forms, and a well marked limit is the essence
of form, which is beautiful and expressive in proportion as its contours
are clearly and accurately drawn.
Indian art then, for the reasons which we have given, and others
which are unknown, was only in its cradle in the time of Alexander,
while the artists of Greece were in full possession of all their powers;
they had already produced inimitable master-pieces in each of the
great divisions of art, and yet their creative force was far from being
exhausted. It was the age of Lysippus and Apelles; of those great
architects who, in the temples of Asia Minor, renewed the youth of the
Ionic order by their bold and ingenious innovations. Under such
conditions, what would the effect have been, had these two forms of
civilization entered
lii
into close relations with each other? In all probability the result would
have been similar to that which ensued when the ancestors of the
Greeks began to deal with the more civilized Phœnicians and the
people of Asia Minor. But in the case of the Hindoos, as we have
said, the disciples had a less, instead of a greater, aptitude for the
plastic arts than their teachers, and, moreover, the contact between
the two was never complete nor was it of long duration. The only
frontier upon which the interchange of idea was frequent and
continuous was the north-west, which divided India from that Bactrian
kingdom of which we know little more than the mere names of its
princes and the date of its fall. But before the end of the second
century B.C. this outpost of Hellenism had fallen before the attacks of
those barbarians whom we call the Saci. In such an isolated position
it could not long hope to maintain itself, especially after the rise of the
Parthian monarchy had separated it from the empire of the
Seleucidæ. Its existence must always have been precarious, and the
mere fact that it did not succumb until the year 136 B.C. is enough to
prove that several of its sovereigns must have been remarkable men.
Should their annals ever be discovered they would probably form one
of the strangest and most interesting episodes in the history of the
Greek race.
Through the obscurity in which all the details are enveloped we can
clearly perceive that those princes were men of taste. They were, as
was natural, attached to the literature and the arts which reminded
them of their superior origin and of that distant fatherland with which
year after year it became more difficult to communicate. Although
they were obliged, in order to defend themselves against so many
enemies, to employ those mercenary soldiers, Athenians, Thebans,
Spartans and Cretans, which then overran Asia, and to pay them
dearly for their services, they also called skilful artists to their court
and kept them there at great expense; the beautiful coins which have
preserved their images down to our day are evidence of this, the
decoration of their cities, of their temples, and of their palaces must
have been in keeping with these; everywhere no doubt were
Corinthian and Ionic buildings, statues of the Greek gods and heroes
mixed with those portraits and historic groups which had been
multiplied by the scholars of Lysippus, wall paintings, and perhaps
some of those easel pictures signed by famous masters, for which
the heirs of
liii
Alexander were such keen competitors. Artisans, who had followed
the Greek armies in their march towards the East with the object of
supplying the wants of any colonies which might be established in
those distant regions, reproduced upon their vases and in their terra-
cotta figures the motives of the painting, the sculpture, and the
architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths, jewellers and
armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it was not
only the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the Scythian
tribes among whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were planted, the
nations to the north of India were astonished and delighted by the
elegance of their ornament and the variety of its forms. They imported
from Bactriana these products of an art which was wanting to them,
and soon set themselves, with the help perhaps of foreign artists
settled among them, to imitate Grecian design in the courts of the
Indian rajahs.
That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse
such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse
Greek inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Græco-
Buddhic art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley
of the Indus in the third or second century before our era. These
remains, formerly much neglected, are now attracting much attention.
They have been carefully studied and described by Cunningham[32];
Dr. Curtius has described them and published reproductions of the
most curious among them.[33] They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations have been made.
Some of them have been transported to Europe in the collection of
Dr. Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lahore,
and Calcutta.[34] In those sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the isolated
members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details of
its ornament are everywhere made use of. It is the same with the
sculpture; in the selection of types, in the arrangement of drapery, in
the design, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India,
of elements borrowed from foreign, and those drawn from
liv
the national, beliefs. The helmeted Athené and Helios in his quadriga
figure by the side of Buddha.
Traces of the same influence are to be found in a less marked degree
in other parts of India. Near the mouth of the Indus and upon the
Malabar coast, the native sculptors and architects were able to obtain
more than one useful suggestion, more than one precious hint as to
their technique, from the works of art brought in the ships of maritime
traders. It is even possible that Greek workmen may thus have been
introduced into seaport towns, and there employed upon the
decoration of palaces and temples. However this may be it is
incontestable that all the important sacred edifices of that region,
whether stone-built or carved in the living rock, date from a period
more recent than that of Alexander, and that most of them show
details which imply acquaintance with Greek architectural forms and
their imitation. We are thus on all hands forced to this conclusion:
that, in the domain of the plastic arts, Greece owed nothing to India,
with which she made acquaintance very late and at a period when
she had no need to take lessons from others. That, moreover, India
had little or nothing to give; that her arts were not developed till after
her early relations with Greece, and it would even seem that her first
stimulus was derived from the models which Greece put within her
reach.
From all this it will be seen that we need not go as far as China, or
even as the Punjab, in order to explain the origin of Greek art. During
the period with which we are concerned, China might as well have
been in the planet Saturn for all she had to do with the ancient world,
and we need refer to her no more, except now and then perhaps for
purposes of illustration. We cannot treat India quite in the same
fashion, because there were, as we have said, certain points of
contact and reciprocal inf