The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Manual of the Historical Development of Art, by G. G. (Gustavus George) Zerffi

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A MANUAL OF THE
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ART.

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A MANUAL
OF THE HISTORICAL
DEVELOPMENT OF ART
Pre-historic—Ancient—Classic—Early Christian
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO
Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, and Ornamentation

BY
G. G. ZERFFI, Ph.D., F.R.S.L.
ONE OF THE LECTURERS OF H. M. DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND ART.

LONDON:
HARDWICKE & BOGUE, 192 PICCADILLY, W.
1876.

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

The right of translation is reserved.

This Book is Inscribed
TO
E. J. POYNTER, Esq., R.A.
DIRECTOR OF THE ART TRAINING SCHOOLS,
SOUTH KENSINGTON,
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS GENIUS AS A PAINTER,
AND OF
HIS UNTIRING EFFORTS IN PROMOTING
HIGHER ART EDUCATION.

[PREFACE.]

An experience of more than eight years as Lecturer on the ‘Historical Development of Art,’ at the National Art Training School, South Kensington, has convinced me of the necessity for a short and concise Manual, which should serve both the public and students as a guide to the study of the history of art. In all our educational establishments, colleges, and ladies’ schools, the study of art-history, which ought to form one of the most important subjects of our educational system, is entirely neglected. To suggest and to excite to such a study is the aim of this book. It would be impossible to exhaust in a short volume even that section of the subject which I propose to treat, and the most that can be done is to give outlines, which must be filled in by further studies.

Art is at last assuming a better position with us, thanks to the influence of the lamented Prince Consort, to whom we undoubtedly owe the revival of the culture of sciences and arts, and the indefatigable exertions of the Government, aided by munificent grants of Parliament. But much more is to be desired from the public. If the ‘National Association for the Promotion of Social Science’ is a faithful mirror of our intellectual stand-point, we certainly have not yet attained a very high position as an artistic national body. For twenty years the Association has met and has discussed a variety of topics, and this year, for the first time, it occurred to the learned socialists that there was such a factor in humanity as art, and the congress allowed an art-section to be opened under the presidency of Mr. E. J. Poynter, R.A., the director of the ‘National Art Training School.’ Four questions were proposed for discussion, and I gave anticipatory answers to these, before the congress was opened, in my introductory lecture to the students of the Art Training School. These answers will serve as so many reasons for the issue of this book, and I therefore reproduce them here, with the questions to which they refer.

1. ‘What are the best methods of securing the improvement of Street Architecture, especially as regards its connection with public buildings?’

Answer.—Architects must be trained in art-history to prevent them from committing glaring anachronisms in brick, mortar, stone, iron, wood, or any other building material. Our street architecture cannot improve so long as we allow any original genius to copy mediæval oddities, and revive by-gone monstrosities at random, in perfect contradiction to the spirit of our times.

2. ‘How best can the encouragement of Mural Decoration, especially Frescoes, be secured?’

Answer.—This might be attained by enlarging the area of national interest beyond horse-racing, pigeon-shooting, and deer-stalking, the buying of old china, mediæval candlesticks, ewers and salvers, or of old pictures, that can scarcely be seen; and extending our general art-support to our own talented artists, even though they may not all be Michael Angelos or Raphaels. We could allow them to decorate the walls of our town-houses, public buildings, chapels, churches, banks, and museums. We must, however, first train their minds to a correct appreciation of art-history, of the world’s history, and of the glorious History of England, thus enriching their imaginations with the illustrious deeds of the past, in which they may mirror our present state, and foreshadow a continually progressing glorious future. For there is a mysterious and marvellous ‘one-ness’ in the religious, social, and artistic development of humanity which I have tried in the pages of this book continually to point out.

No civilised and wealthy country on the surface of our globe, can boast of more heroic deeds on sea and land, in and out of Parliament; of more splendid conquests by warlike and peaceful means than ours. The Wars of the Roses, the colonisation of America, the occupation of India, the peopling of Australia, the struggles of conformists and non-conformists, of Cavaliers and Roundheads, of Churchmen and Puritans, of Independents and Royalists, of Papists and Covenanters, of Iconoclasts and Free-thinkers, all offer stirring scenes; and yet, if we want to see on canvas pictures of our past, we must turn to France or Germany for them. I am sorry to say that until lately the Iconoclasts have borne all before them. As, however, the ‘National Association’ has at length consented to allow the discussion of art, and as words are in general precursors of deeds, we may expect some results from our awakened interest in art-matters.

3. ‘What is the influence of academies upon the art of the nation?’

Answer.—Academies have no influence whatever, if the nation itself takes no interest in art, and has no art-education from a general, theoretical, and historical point of view. So long as art is considered a mere luxury, because a house does not keep out cold and wet better, if it be outwardly decorated; so long as it is thought that a parlour need but have red curtains to be a parlour; that our walls may be covered with any description of hideously-shaped, realistically-wrought Chinese or Japanese flowers, if they are only kept in greenish or brownish neutral tints; so long as we fancy that our wainscotings may be bright light, though the paper above be dark; and that a window is admirable, if only provided with a pointed arch, and some trefoil or quatrefoil to keep out as much light as possible; academies can do nothing. So long as we neglect higher esthetical culture and training in our public schools, our academy will but reflect this neglect. In reviewing the past I have throughout endeavoured to show the close connection of art-forms with the general, social, religious, intellectual, and moral conditions of the different nations and periods in which they appeared. It is erroneous to suppose that art has only to treat of straight or waving lines, of triangles, squares, and circles, of imitations of flowers, animals, and men, of nature and nothing but nature. The study of art comprises man in all his thoughts and actions, and has to add to this the phenomena of the whole outer world, from crystallisations to the heavenly vault, studded with innumerable stars at night, or glowing with light and life in colours at day-time. If our academy were to take this to heart, and expand its curriculum so as to have the students taught the beauties of Greek, English, and German poetry, we should not be obliged to turn to foreigners for worthy illustrations of our immortal Shakespeare, Milton, or even Tennyson. The art-historian knows that academies neither produced a Pheidias nor a Praxiteles, neither a Raphael nor an Albert Dürer; neither a Rubens nor a Holbein; neither a Gainsborough nor a Hogarth; neither a Canova nor a Flaxman. For art-academies, as mere outgrowths of fashion, unless rooted in the earnest, artistic spirit of a nation, only foster mannerism, pander to the general bad taste of the wealthy classes, and one-sidedly cultivate portrait-painting, whilst they shut out landscape or historical figure-painting. Academies have rarely encouraged grand ideas; they create a kind of parlour or bed-room art, with nice, but very small, sentiments, water-colour effusions and flower imitations, in which the Chinese surpass us by far. So long as our academy will have great names on its programmes, as nominal lecturers, so called because they do not lecture; so long as it will systematically neglect to teach our rising artists Universal History, Art History, Archæology, Comparative Mythology, Symbolism, Iconography, Esthetics from a higher scientific point, and Psychology with special reference to artistic composition, and so long as these subjects are ignored in our general educational establishments, we shall in vain try to compete at large with other nations, however many isolated great artists we may produce. Artists in all ages reflected in their products the general sentiments of the times in which they lived, and of the people for whom they worked; every page of this book bears out this assertion. Art is a mighty civiliser of humanity and elevates the whole of our earthly existence, for it purifies passions and pacifies our mind. Art is the eternally-active genius of humanity. Let our academy acknowledge this, and it will at least try to imitate the Art Training School at South Kensington, which has continually worked in the direction of enlarging the range of the studies of its students.

4. ‘What is the influence upon society of Decorative Art and Art-workmanship in all household details?’

Answer.—If this question had been asked with an eye to business, we might answer that decorative art makes trade brisk, induces people to buy ornaments, and fills the pockets of dealers in curiosities. But this is not our aim. So long as we fail to look upon art as an earnest and serious study, as important and necessary to our social wellbeing as either ethics or science, the influence of decorative art must be confined to enticing people to plaster their walls with all sorts of China plate, or pay dearly for Japanese trays, screens, or cupboards, because they have not learnt to distinguish between the quaint and the comical, the beautiful and the ugly. Their taste is still on a level with that of untrained children, who have plenty of money in their pockets, do not know what to buy, and rush to purchase the ugliest monstrosities. If half the money that is wasted in these directions were to be devoted to the encouragement of our hard-working rising artists, we might soon boast of still greater successes than we can proudly point to, despite the adverse circumstances under which artists have to labour amongst us. Art with us is still looked upon as an extravagance, a luxury, as it was with the Romans of old, and this produces a craving for oddities. We hang up big china cockatoos, or place big china dogs, or stags with big china antlers, on our hearth-rugs. We have coarse china frogs and lizards, crabs or lobsters, from which we eat our fruit or fish; or a life-like salmon with staring eyes is brought on our table, its back takes off, and we scoop out the real cooked salmon with which its inside is filled. Form of dish, association of ideas, and action of the host are more worthy of anthropophagi than civilised beings of the nineteenth century. So long as art-history and esthetics are not made regular studies, not only in art-schools but also in general educational establishments, and especially ladies’ schools, our national consciousness of art in general and the requirements of our age in particular cannot improve. Art is a branch of human knowledge, ingenuity, and creative force in which ladies, trained to appreciate beauty, might be made better ‘helps,’ than in the kitchen, the pantry, or the larder. The national wealth of France consists in the nation’s superiority in taste and artistic skill. The French arrange a few artificial flowers with an exquisite understanding of the juxtaposition of colours and the combination of forms, and make us pay for a ‘bouquet’ on a bonnet from fifty to sixty francs, whilst the raw material costs from five to six francs; they do the same in terra-cotta, bronze, or iron. So long as everyone with us thinks himself justified in having his own bad taste gratified, because he can pay for it, decorative artists will serve that bad taste in all our household details. Art-history comprises not merely measurements of temples, heights of spires in feet, or of statues in cubits and inches.

We have of late years made gigantic strides in the advancement of street-architecture, though we do not yet know how to create perspective views of artistic beauty; we still indulge too much in mediæval crookedness and unintelligible windings. We still decorate too gaudily, or, falling into the other extreme, too much in neutral colours; but we are beginning to understand that man does not live on stone and brick alone, but also on taste in arranging and decorating the stone. London, with the exception of some of our monstrous railway bridges and railway stations, begins to look worthy of its position as the centre of the world’s commerce. Our streets have lately put on some stately ‘Sunday clothing’ in terra-cotta, Portland cement, and iron railings. Our glass and china, our furniture and carpets, begin to have more variegated patterns, though I am sorry to hear that foreigners are still generally appointed as the principal modellers. I base this assertion on the Report on the National Competition of the Works of Schools of Art for 1876, in which the examiners say: ‘Our want of that workman-like power over the material, which is so noticeable in all French productions in modelling, is still very conspicuous. As long as this continues a large proportion of the decorative figure or ornamental designs in relief made for the English market will be in the hands of foreign artists.’ The panacea of this evil will and can only be a higher intellectual training, not merely of the faculty of imitating and combining given forms in nature, but of endowing them with ideal beauty, fostered by a correct study of art-history.

There are no illustrations to this work, but I have annexed a long list of illustrated works on art. My aim in teaching, and writing, has been consistently to induce my hearers and readers to think and study for themselves. Bad or even good wood-cuts are by no means essential in art-books, for we possess in the British, Christy’s, and South Kensington Museums such invaluable art-collections, that we may write books without illustrations if we can induce readers and students to verify what we say by a diligent study of these specimens. Theoretical generalisation ought always to precede our special studies. We only then know when we are able to systematise, to group, to draw analogies, or to arrange our details according to some general principle. If we enter on any study without having prepared our mind to grasp the connecting links in an artistic or scientific subject, our knowledge of an incoherent mass of details will only dwarf our understanding, instead of brightening and clearing it, and we shall become technically-trained machines, instead of self-conscious and self-reasoning creators in any branch of art. The Art Library at the South Kensington Museum is, without any exaggeration, the completest in the world; it abounds in the best illustrated works of all nations. Art-books with bad or indifferent illustrations, or even with good illustrations, are not so much needed as art-books with unbiased theories, esthetical principles, and philosophical ideas, which may awaken the power of reasoning in both readers and students. It is only too often the case that, in seeing bad illustrations, the student imagines he knows everything about the work spoken of and produced in outlines. He must, however, go and see for himself. Art has its own fairy domain and its own most catholic realm, in which everyone is welcome who can contribute to the improvement, delight, and happiness of man. To induce readers and students to visit, with some fore-thought and fore-knowledge, our vast and unparalleled art-collections, and to convince them, that to detach the study of art from a correct appreciation of the ideas that engendered its forms, is an impossibility, was the task I set myself in writing the pages of this book.

London: October 1876.

[CONTENTS.]

MANUAL
OF THE
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ART

[CHAPTER I.]
PROLEGOMENA.

Gazing at the heavens on a starry night, we see, in addition to myriads of sparkling worlds floating in the air, a great quantity of nebulæ—either decayed systems of worlds, or worlds in formation. Worlds which have lost their centre of gravity and fallen to pieces; or worlds which are seeking, according to the general law of gravitation, to form a central body by the attraction of cosmical ether. The one phenomenon is that of destruction, the other that of new formation.

This double process is continually repeating itself in the development of art. Consciously or unconsciously, the artists of the different nations, at different periods, devote themselves to the dissolution or reconstruction of artistic products. To become acquainted with this process, to trace the elements from which art is built up, or the influences which engender a dissolution of artistic forms, is of the greatest importance.

Art must be looked upon as the phenomenal result of certain religious, social, intellectual, and natural conditions. To trace these conditions, their origin, influence, and gradual development, by means of a critical and historical investigation into the causes which produced them, will be our task. For art is like a mirror: whatever looks into it is reflected by it. If a poor, untrained imagination stares into it, no one must be astonished that poor and distorted images result.

It is usually accepted as a truism that the essence of art is the reproduction of nature. Wherever, then, nature were reflected in the ‘Art-mirror,’ we should have the best work of art. But this is not so. For art has to reflect the phenomena of the makrokosm as a subjectively-conceived mikrokosm. We do not see matters as they really are, as each thing is surrounded by a thick fog of incidental, objective, and subjective peculiarities. This fog must be cleared away, to show us nature in the bright colours of intellectual and self-conscious idealisation.

Nature furnishes us with mortar and stones for the building, but the architect’s intellectual power has to arrange these elements, and to bring them into an artistic shape. Nature furnishes us with flowers, trees, animals and men; but the ornamental designer or painter has to reproduce and to group them so as to impress the forms of nature with an intellectual vitality.

Before the artist proceeds to his work he must become thoroughly conscious of the distinction between the SUBLIME and the BEAUTIFUL. It is essential that he should draw a strict line of demarcation between the two conceptions; in order not to waste his energies on the reproduction of objects which are beyond the powers of art.

During the long period of the cosmical formation of the earth, when mountains were towered upon mountains, rocks upheaved, islands submerged; when air, water, fire, and solid matter seemed engaged in never-ending conflict—nature was sublime. The dynamic force appeared to be the only element, and the counterbalancing static force was without influence. Gradually vegetable and animal life, in their first crude forms, commenced to show themselves.

Zoophites were developed into megatheriums and mastodons. Mammoths and elks sported on plains which now form the mountain tops of our continents. Scarcely visible coral animals were still engaged in constructing mountain chains, and a luxuriant vegetation covered the small continents. Such transformations, convulsions, and changes are gigantic, grand, awe-inspiring—sublime, but not beautiful. Whenever nature is at work, disturbing the air with electric currents or shaking huge mountains, so that they bow their lofty summits, or when the dry soil is rent asunder, and sends forth streams of glowing lava, we are in the presence of the sublime, not of the beautiful. Whenever man’s nature is overawed, whenever he is made to feel his impotence by the phenomena of nature, he faces the sublime. In art, only a few divinely-gifted and chosen geniuses have ever reached the sublime.

When, however, the cosmical forces had expended their exuberant powers—when a diversified climate had produced those plants and animals that surround us—when man appeared on this revolving planet, and by degrees reached self-consciousness as his highest development—then only beauty acquired existence and dominion on earth. Without men capable of understanding what is beautiful, art would have no meaning.

The aim of science is to vanquish error; the province of industry to subdue matter, and the vocation of art to produce beauty. The artist must not neglect science, for he has to be truthful, as error is ugly; he must make himself well acquainted with matter, for he has to use, to transform, and to modify it; and, finally, he has to hallow this scientifically-treated matter by impressing it with the stamp of ideal beauty.

The attainment of this, the perfection of art, has been slow and gradual. Though art, like all the inventions, took its origin in want and necessity, the utilitarian spirit is the very bane of art, for art flourishes only under the influence of the very highest intellectual culture.

Nature produces like art; but the products of nature are the unconscious effects of the immutable law of causation. The products of art are the results of the conscious intellectual power of the artist. It is the free, yet well-regulated, consciousness of the artist that elevates his productions into works of art. Undoubtedly the great store-house of the artist is nature; he learns from nature how to ornament, but he has to discern, to combine, to adapt, to select, his forms. The whole success of the artist, in whatever branch he works, must depend on an earnest and severe use of the word CHOICE.

‘He is truly great who knows the value of everything, and distinguishes what is more or less great, and what is most estimable, so as to begin from that, and to apply the genius, and fix the desires upon the execution of things worthy and great.’ This mode of thinking was followed by the most celebrated and enlightened artists from the ancient Greeks to our own time. They knew to distinguish that which was most worthy in nature, and to this they directed their study, diligence, and industry. Inferior geniuses, because they are attached to mediocrity, believe that a mere clinging to nature constitutes all art; and the lowest artists are enchanted with the minutiæ of little works, taking them for principal things; so that human ignorance passes from the trifling to the useless, from the useless to the ugly, and from the ugly to the false and chimerical.

In treating of the historical development of art, to enable artists to distinguish and to choose the best, and not only to imitate but to create consciously for themselves, it is necessary to make them theoretically acquainted with the progress of art.

To trace historically the changes art had to undergo is necessary for all really self-conscious artists. Art with us is still looked upon as entirely subject to individual taste. Everyone thinks himself competent to have an opinion on products of art. ‘De gustibus non est disputandum’ is heard not only in our drawing-rooms, but also in art-circles. This false and utterly untenable adage is the cause of the chaotic anarchy in our art-world.

So little as there can be differences in truth, can there be differences in beauty. It is the duty of philosophy to strive for truth; it is the task of the theoretical artist to point out what is beautiful.

We may treat art from three different points of view:—

1. From a realistic point of view, taking nature and geometry as its basis.

2. From an historical point of view; showing by antiquarian and archæological researches its gradual development.

3. From a critical point of view; propounding abstract principles of speculative philosophy and esthetics as applied to art.

A.

The realistic school has in later years had an immense influence with us. Art-critics have almost gone so far as to demand from the artist a correct rendering of the very stratification of rocks; or of the different kinds of soil, to such a degree that the farmer should be able to recognise the ground in which to sow oats or wheat. Pictures, according to these estheticists, should be geological maps, mineralogical collections, and, so far as flowers are concerned, perfect herbariums. When this school takes up the archæological view, it clings with indomitable tenacity to given forms, and checks imagination. Art is then only to be handled as the Greeks or Romans practised it. Either the Gothic or the Renaissance style is to be slavishly imitated. This school has one great drawback: it considers all things natural beautiful, and looks upon an imitation of that which was as better than an exertion of the self-creative originality of the artist.

B.

The historical school endeavours to bring before our eyes the past, so as to enable us to understand the present, and to influence the future of art. This school has followed two divergent directions, the Antique and the Gothic, the classical or romantic; the one holding that everything beautiful must be based upon Greek patterns; the other that all beauty is confined to the Gothic. The writers of these two schools bewilder the students; either driving them into a cold, soulless imitation of classic forms, or forcing them to sacrifice everything to trefoils, pinnacles, tracery, finials, buttresses, thin spires, painted windows, and pointed arches.

C.

The critical school indulges in tall phrases, mere hypothetical paradoxes, often startling the world with speculations of the wildest sort. Art-critics frequently roam in the spheres of surmises; they have their good points, but often neglect reality, or the historical ground; they sacrifice everything to the idea, which is with them the only productive basis of everything existing in art.

We shall try to be realistic, as it would be vain to attempt to detach art from the influences of nature; for art borrows its principal elements from the impressions of natural phenomena. We shall be historical, and point out the progressive development of art; and, lastly, we shall endeavour to be critical. Speculative philosophy has its merits in art. Esthetical criticism suggests new ideas, and new ideas engender new forms. We shall endeavour to adopt from each of the three schools what is best. Our age is an age of eclecticism in art. We must, however, try to prepare for a period of original vitality, which can only be done by avoiding one-sidedness and heedless originality. We shall try to suggest and to excite in our readers new thoughts. As music speaks in sounds, poetry in words, so art in forms; but music, poetry, and art are subject to certain rules, without which harmony would become dissonance, poetry an inflated prose, and art a tasteless entity, of which quaintness will be the only distinguishing attribute. What we call our sense of beauty is based on those laws which make the existence of the universe possible.

The Greeks used for beauty in art the same word, as for order, or the perfect arrangement of the universe. The word κόσμος {kosmos} (from which we have ‘cosmetic,’ any beautifying application) may teach us how we should look upon works of art, which ought to be a reflection of the general laws ruling nature.

Two forces guide our material and intellectual life. We possess two means of acquiring knowledge and of practising art: reason and experience. Impressions from without are the everlasting source of all our conceptions. Hunger and thirst drive us to seek nourishment, to become fishers, hunters, herdsmen, or agriculturists. Cold and heat force us to seek a shelter, to construct wigwams, huts, dwellings on piles, cottages, houses, palaces, and temples.

Though order and harmony prevail in the outer world, every atom of the universe is endowed with an unconscious will or life of its own. Atoms seek atoms according to inherent laws, or fly from or annihilate one another. The whole process of life around us appears to be one never-ending struggle. Apparently there rules only the law of chance and might; what cannot conquer is conquered.

History is one long catalogue of appearing and disappearing nations, of devouring and devoured kingdoms and empires. It is as though generation after generation had emerged from the spectral past into the sanguinary present, to destroy or to be destroyed. This conflict in the outer world is seconded by everlasting conflicts in our inner world. Fear, hope, love—passions of all kinds, imagination and reality, ignorance and knowledge, pride and humility, prejudice and wisdom, form an intellectual hurricane not less destructive than the warfare of the cosmical elements. Religion, Science, and Art, this divine triad, step in. Religion excites in us the hope of higher and better morals; science creates consciousness of the laws according to which we are governed; the link between cause and effect is traced, and the rule of arbitrary chance narrowed. Lastly, art throws its beautifying halo on everything. Thus these three are instrumental in elevating our mind, expanding our intellectual powers, and bringing harmony and beauty into the eternal conflict. Faith is the element of religion, experience the element of knowledge, and beauty the element of art. Whilst faith and experience are possible without an artistic elevation of the mind, art must combine the elements of religion and science, and form through beauty a visible link between these elements.

The sublime, as we have said, rules in the universe. Clouds chase one another and are subject to everlasting changes. Trees cover the surface of our globe, forming woods at random. Mountains are towered up, as if hurled together by chance. Seas form a bewildering variety of coasts. Streams wind their paths through mountains and valleys with capricious irregularity. All these phenomena confuse and oppress us, they engender an incomprehensible, indistinct feeling in us. But so soon as we begin with our intellectual force to sift, to separate, and to detach single phenomena from the general mass—as soon as choice begins to work, the isolated phenomenon displays at once its symmetrical beauty.

This is the case with crystallisations, the first artistic products of unconscious nature. If we look at a vast plain covered with snow, a feeling of sublime cold and wretchedness overcomes us; but if we take up one isolated snow-flake, and place it under a microscope, we find that the elements of the crystallised drop of water surround with harmonious regularity a common centre, which is the body, from which radiate as integral parts the diversified forms of the flake. In studying snow-flakes, we find that the three dimensions of space—height, breadth, and depth, limited by symmetry, proportion and direction—are the principal elements of every form which in itself has to represent a detached total. In all the crystallisations there is one ‘momentum’ of formation—the centre, from which all the parts emanate perfectly well-balanced and complete in themselves. The elements of which all artistic works, whether natural or produced by men, are composed, are the straight line and the waving line. With these elements we can obtain the three principal conditions of every work of art—symmetry, proportion, and direction. Snow-flakes may be used in any direction, and therefore they may be set down as without distinct direction. The rays with their radiation, however, are formed according to the principal law of the universe. They represent the dynamic force; they strive at isolation from the centre which must be looked upon as their static momentum. Thus in the first artistic products of nature positive and negative, or rather dynamic and static forces are clearly perceptible. The horizontal line is the representative of the static, whilst the vertical line is the indicator of the dynamic force.

Symmetry is a perfect equality of form to the right and left of a vertical line on a horizontal base.

Eurythmy consists in a repetition of variegated forms.

In order to produce eurythmy we must confine symmetry within a certain compass; for this purpose we have the frame. Our doors are nothing but frames for the entering or departing individuals; as our windows are frames for the landscape, sky, or walls on which we look, or for ourselves when seen from without. The frame, whether it be real or imaginary, as the correct limitation of forms, is of the very highest importance in decorative and pictorial art.

Eurythmy may be alternating. This alternating principle is observed in metopes and triglyphs. The alternation may be interrupted by a cæsura (a mark or sign of rest). Masks, heads of lions, or any other figures may form the cæsura, as decorative elements in the long lines of the tops of houses, palaces, or temples. The cæsura, combined with eurythmy and symmetry, will give us the best patterns for flat decorations, as in carpets, paper-hangings, keramic works and metal or wood ornaments.

Applying what we have said of crystallisations to plants and animals, we find that symmetry is undoubtedly the predominant element in every flower. The plant developes itself from the ground, which is its horizontal basis. It shoots up generally in a vertical direction, as a radiation from our globe. In trees the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits are clustered around a central line in eurythmical proportion. In flowers symmetry predominates, whilst in trees eurythmy prevails. In considering the branches of a tree in relation to its trunk, we find the same symmetry and eurythmy, though the direction be changed. We can study these forms best in plants of the coal formation—the Sigillaria, Stigmaria, Lepidodendra, and Calamites; and in ferns, fir-trees, cedars, &c.

In the palm tree we see most distinctly the working of the conflicting forces of nature. The dynamic force of vitality drives the stem upwards, and the static force of gravitation towards a common centre is expressed in the beautifully-drooping curves of the leaves. Symmetry is further to be observed in the lowest animals, in polyps, radiata, &c., but never in higher species, in which it is not planimetrical (viz., cannot be treated on a plane) but linear, none of them being perfectly regular in any of the three dimensions of space.

Man is altogether different from the products of the mineral or vegetable kingdoms, which give us the prototypes of conventional art. Man is not in all directions symmetrical in the strict sense of the word. He has not two heads, two noses, or two mouths. The component elements in man are different. His very nature revolts against a planimetrical treatment. This was perfectly understood by the masters of arabesque, who have always turned man half into a fish, a plant, a serpent, a tendril, or some other form adapted for planimetrical treatment. Eurythmy and Proportion are the elements of higher organic forms—to which must be added direction or Action, and finally Expression.

In most of the lower animals the vertebræ are horizontal, and coincident with the moving direction of the whole creature. In man, on the other hand, the vertebræ are vertical, in opposition to the moving direction which is horizontal; so that the vertebræ and line of motion are at right angles.

In men, detached as they are from their horizontal basis, the soil—carrying their static force with them, and able to change it either from below, upwards, or from front to back—direction is of a complicated nature, and must be well studied, so as not to produce incongruities.

If a woman or man were painted with the most beautiful and expressive face, but having it twisted round, so as to crown the spine, we should turn from it with disgust, as anyone endowed with the sense of beauty turns from acrobats, because the natural laws of gravitation and symmetry would be violated. This illustration may serve to prove, that there are laws in art with which we must make ourselves acquainted, and that the mere ‘right of taste,’ in the general sense of the words, cannot promote the understanding and appreciation of our artistic productions.

Next to direction we have to take into account motion. This element is in animals and men produced by their inherent dynamic force, counteracted by the body itself, which represents the static force, or the ‘vis inertiæ,’ chaining them to the centre of gravitation in the earth.

Motion again leads to expression and action.

Expression is the effect of the conflicting static or dynamic (passive or active) state of the mind, so far as this state is revealed in the lineaments of the face.

Action is the effect of the same conflicting force so far as it is expressed in the limbs and the position of the body.

A third force, which is often used unconsciously, necessarily grows out of these elements—the controlling or ruling element, or, as Vitruvius has it, ‘the principle of authority.’ This element points out the preponderance of certain forms as the visible representatives of the general principles which we have stated, bringing into the variety of details, harmony and unity. This controlling element stands to the surrounding and united parts in the same relation as the key-note to a harmonious melody. Without that key-note no harmony—without the controlling element no beauty, were possible.

Having proceeded step by step from the formation of matter in crystals to man, we may set down the following as the five principal elements necessary to beauty in art:—

1. Symmetry.
2. Eurythmy.
3. Proportion.
4. Direction or motion.
5. Expression.

α. Symmetry has already been amply treated.

β. Eurythmy is either stereometric or planimetric. It is stereometric in balls and in regular solid bodies, such as the tetrahedron, a figure of four equal triangular faces, or the polyhedron, a figure with many sides. These forms are symmetrical without any controlling element. Such an element shows itself first in the ellipsoid—distinct from the oval—in the prism, and the pyramid. Planimetric eurythmy preponderates in snow-crystals, flowers, plants, trees, and the lowest animals.

The controlling element shows itself in the grouping of the single parts round a common centre, which is often distinguished by a contrast in forms or colours. It is unconsciously expressed by a sign or mark.

Ornamentation takes its origin in the effort to express, to designate, or to mark out the controlling element. The ornamented object has only then a meaning, when it expresses visibly the hidden idea of the controlling element, say the idea of fastening or keeping together, as in clasps, brooches, buckles; or the idea of equilibrium, as in earrings. Such signs or marks were very early used, and are spread all over our globe; they developed into the rough tombs in Phrygia, Greece and Italy; took a higher form in Central America and Assyria; became crystallised in the Pyramids; and attained the highest perfection in the tombs of Mausolus, Augustus, and Hadrian. The mark or sign is also used in games, as on race-courses, in the stadium, the circus, or the amphitheatre. A more distinct expression is gained when the mark or sign, as divine statue, altar, &c., is surrounded by rhythmically-arranged circles or encompassing walls, as the visible expression of the union of the many, or variety, for one religious or ceremonial purpose. The mark or sign reflects, on the one hand, the idea of harmony, whilst, on the other, the rhythmically-arranged surroundings form an impressive total, heightening the force of the controlling element. This law explains the awe, veneration, mysterious feeling, and secret fear with which men at all times have looked upon the central mark or sign, whether in the simple stone-circles of Abury, Stonehenge, and Carnac, the rock-hewn temples of India, the temples of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, or the synagogues and churches of our own times.

Next to the controlling element, we must take into consideration the grouping of the whole object on a horizontal basis around a vertical axis. This axis becomes the seat of the linear, symmetrical, controlling element. It is especially marked by richly ornamented reliefs or by gaudier colours, so pronounced that the other parts of the ornamented object appear as mere accompaniments of the horizontal and vertical lines. Remarkable in their incongruity, but often unsurpassed in the application of this principle, are the tattooed heads of savages, in which the linear central line is ornamented symmetrically on both sides of the face—the prominent parts being marked by spirals to make them appear still more prominent.

γ. Proportion, as an element of art, cannot work by itself, but must be considered in relation to its parts and the controlling element. Proportion consists of a basis, a middle piece, and a dominant. To illustrate this, we have in plants and trees, the root (basis), the stem or trunk (middle piece), and the top, crown or flower (dominant).

The basis represents the cosmical element of gravitation by powerful masses, simplicity of forms, and dark colouring. This law was especially observed in the excellent decoration of the Roman houses at Pompeii, and is still followed in our wainscoting. We try unconsciously to express the static force from which the dynamic rises.

The middle piece, growing out of the basis, is supported and supporting; it unites the elements of the basis with the top or dominant; it is the connecting link between these two extremes. The basis stands in the same relation to the middle piece, as the latter to the dominant.

The dominant harmoniously reconciles the conflicting forces of striving upwards, and being drawn downwards. Variations in these relations are not only allowable, but form the very element of the artist’s creative originality—so long as he clearly marks the purpose of the three elements.

δ. Direction, or motion, in its highest form is only to be found in man. In fishes the axis, or seat of the controlling element, is not fixed as in plants. If fishes pursue some point of attraction, they shoot forward in a straight line, so that a conflict between the static and dynamic forces is never visible in them, because the axes of these two forces are always one and the same. This is entirely different with birds, quadrupeds, and especially with men, who, to a great extent, are masters of their motions; for will, as the force of their conscious intellect, changes their static as well as their dynamic direction.

Man is the symbol of earthly perfection. In him all laws and elements of the universe are united. What is with inanimate nature a static point of attraction, is with man moral; the dynamic force of activity, is with him intellect. Animals also work, but their works are in general the result of their instinct; whilst with man, though he may also be ruled by unconscious impulses, intellect—self-conscious intellect—is the mainspring of all his actions. These have a reflecting mirror in the glance of his eyes, whilst the changing and changeable effects of scorn, love, wrath, delight, happiness, or despair are pictured in the mysteriously-woven lineaments of his countenance.

ε. Expression, of intellectual and moral impressions, is most concentrated in MAN.

[CHAPTER II.]
ETHNOLOGY IN ITS BEARING ON ART.

Man is placed on this globe as a radius,—a detached radius. The axis of his body is part of the diameter of the earth, and divides him into symmetrical halves. A line, that passes at an equal distance through the double organs, also divides the single ones into two equally-arranged portions. We possess two eyes, to receive the impression of light; two ears, to be touched simultaneously by the waves of sound; two tubes are opened, to receive the refined, imponderable bodies producing odour; the lips are grouped round a marked central line to the chin. We have two shoulders, two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet; both hands have the same number of fingers, and both feet the same number of toes. On the other hand, the parts, taken by themselves, break through all the laws of symmetrical uniformity. The arms are longer than the trunk; the legs are longer than the arms; hands end in unequally-subdivided fingers; feet in similarly-treated toes. But notwithstanding this want of symmetry there is perfect harmony in the relations of the parts to the whole, so that man may be said to be the very master-piece of creation. In considering the controlling linear elements, in the three grand groups into which humanity may be best divided for a comprehensive study of art, we find that the very fundamental facial lines differ.

I.

We have first the Negro, the fossil, the black, or antediluvian man. The eyes, nostrils, and lips are drawn downwards in melancholy lines. He is cross-toothed (prognathous), triangular-headed, has flat feet, long heels, an imperfect pelvis, but a very powerful digestive organ, and a correspondingly enormous mouth.

The Oceanic Negro is the best example of this group. He is slow of temperament, unskilled, his mechanical ingenuity being that of a child; he never goes beyond geometrical ornamentation; builds tumuli or triangular wigwams; lives on what he finds by chance, and, at the best, hunts or fishes. His reasoning faculty is very limited, his imagination slow, but his perceptive faculties (the senses) are highly developed. He is altogether incapable of rising from a fact to a principle. He cannot create beauty, for he is indifferent to any ideal conception. He possesses only from 75–83½ cubic inches of brain, his facial angle being about 85½ degrees. This lowest group of mankind branches off into different types. The general features of the group have neither changed nor improved. The Negro is still the woolly-headed, animal-faced being, represented on the tombs of the Pharaohs, because his bodily structure, his facial lines have not altered during thousands of years. In studying the artistic products, the customs and manners of this group, we can picture to ourselves the state in which Asiatics and Europeans must have lived during the oldest stone period. The Negroes use the same kind of flint instruments, manufacture the same crude kind of pottery, adorn their clubs, paddles, and the cross-beams of their huts with the same rope and serpent-like entangled windings and twistings, that are found in various parts of the globe of pre-historic times. The ruling lines of the face and head of the Negro are reflected in his triangular or mound-like architectural constructions.

II.

Next we have the Turanian (from tura, ‘swiftness of a horse’), the Mongol, the square or short-headed (brachikephalous), the traditionary, the yellow man. His face is flat, his nose deeply sunken between his prominent cheeks; his reasoning faculty is developed only to a certain degree. He has small, oblique eyes, the lines being turned upwards, expressing cunning and jocularity. His mouth is less powerful than that of the negro. He has broad shoulders, an expansive chest, thin and small bow legs, as if formed to use those of horses instead of his own; he is an excellent rider, but a slow though steady walker. He looks on nature with a nomadic shepherd’s eye, and not with that of a settled artist. He excels in technical ability, has great powers of imitation, can produce geometrical ornamentation of the most complicated and ingenious character, and a realistic imitation of flowers, butterflies, and birds, but has no sense for perspective and no talent for shading. He is incapable of drawing the human form. Sculpture of a higher kind is unknown to him, though he can execute perfectly marvellous carvings, which, though quaint in design and composition, are wanting in proportion and expression. Faithful to his nomadic traditions, and the lines of his head and face, his architectural constructions take an according form. Like his facial lines, the roofs of his houses are twisted upwards.

The amount of brain in the Turanian averages 83½ cubic inches, and his facial angle is 87½ degrees.

III.

Finally we have the Aryan, the long or oval-headed man (dolichokephalous), the historical, the white man, the crowning product of the cosmical forces of nature. His facial lines are composed of the two conflicting elements, the horizontal and the vertical line, and are framed in by an oval. His amount of brain is on an average 92 cubic inches, and his facial angle 90 degrees. His development is not limited. This group of mankind, though divided into many different types (races or nations), which have arisen from an intermixture with the other two groups, or through the influences of climate, food, and the aspect of nature, stands at the highest point of civilisation. As the lines of his face are admirably counterbalanced, and his body is a master-piece of regularity and proportion, he has tried to establish a perfect balance between the conflicting forces in his moral and intellectual nature. To him exclusively we owe art in its highest sense. Once he stood on the same level with the primitive black savage, then he advanced to the ingenuity of the yellow man, and left both far behind him in his gradual but always progressive development. He surpasses the other two groups of humanity, not only in technical skill, but especially in inventive and reasoning power, critical discernment, and purity of artistic taste. The white man alone, has produced idealised master-pieces in sculpture and painting.

The white man in his architecture uses either the horizontal or the vertical line, or both; he takes the triangular building of the negro and places it on the square tent of the yellow man, making his house as perfect as possible; he goes further, and, in accordance with his powerfully-arched brow, over-arches not only rivers and chasms, but builds his magnificent cupolas and pointed arches, the acme of architectural forms.

Ethnology then serves us as a foundation for the study of art in its different phases.

Conforming to the general tendency of modern science, we have tried to express the cause of the artistic development of the three groups of humanity by figures; we have measured the seat and instrument of our intellectual faculty, and have thus tried to leave the sphere of mere conjecture, or unfounded opinion, in order to place the phenomena of art-history on a firm basis. Though art, undoubtedly, belongs ‘to the magic circle of the imagination, and the inner powers of the mind,’ those powers are dependent on our very bodily construction, the amount of brain and the facial angle. We do not deal in mere hypothesis, but submit to our readers a complete theory borne out by facts.

In considering the frontispiece of our manual, representing the ‘Tree of Art,’ we can visibly trace the slow and gradual development of the white man. The negro fixes our attention only as savage; the yellow man has a line of his own, and has remained stationary in his artistic development; the white man has passed through the savage stages, and by his own exertions, undergoing various phases of rise and decline (the real signs of historical vitality), has steadily progressed till he began to attempt, and to succeed in bringing about, ‘a harmonious connection between the representation of nature and the expression of awakened emotion, and a mysterious analogy between the emotions of his mind and the phenomena perceived by his senses.’

As all phenomena must take place in space and time (the two fundamental forms of all existence), the products of art must also have been executed under these two conditions, and can therefore be treated historically.

Space is the expansion and extension of the forces of nature into the infinite. Time is the limitation of this activity. Without space no object could arrive at completion. Without time the subject would be eternal. These are the two counteracting elements. The one, space, is positive—the other, time, negative. Time is either relative or absolute. If relative, it can be measured by an ascertained succession of events. If absolute, it becomes measurable by years. In both we can trace a gradual and successive development of artistic forms. In general, time relative, with its succession of products, is more reliable than time labelled with voluntary and more than doubtful dates. For instance, we cannot measure the periods of the formation of the earth’s crust by years, and still we are perfectly convinced that the tertiary formation could not have taken place before the primary; thus we are justified in assuming that the iron period must have succeeded the stone or bronze period; bronze instruments never being found with iron handles, whilst iron blades have ornamented wooden or bronze handles. Man naturally scarcely ever uses the worse material for a practical purpose when he has once found a better one; but he will use the softer material as a means of ornamentation.

That we have plenty of ‘survivals’ in art, as well as in nature, does not in any way militate against the strict logic of facts. The lowest forms of animals have mostly survived (like the lowest forms of ornamentation), yet no one can doubt or deny the gradual and systematic development of the vegetable and animal kingdoms. If we find no fragments of pottery in Australia, New Zealand, or the Polynesian islands, we cannot assume that a grand and powerful civilisation has perished there, leaving no traces behind. In finding different kinds of pottery, gradually improving even in the quality of the material—the clay being first unwashed, then mixed with grains of quartz and felspar, next carefully washed, then sun-baked, then fire-baked; first hand and then wheel turned, and at last glazed, unornamented or ornamented—we cannot assume that the order was inverted, and that man first ornamented glazed pottery, which he turned out on the wheel, and then went back to unwashed clay and hand-made pottery. The ‘degeneration theory’ has exploded as entirely as the geocentric and anthropocentric theories have vanished. We know that man, like flowers, trees, rocks and animals, is the product of the combined forces of nature and the influences of climate and food, and that his religious, social, and political conditions are closely reflected in his art. As little as our globe is the centre of the universe, or man the centre of creation, so little did art or science spring at once perfectly armed, provided with spear and shield, from Jupiter’s head like blue-eyed Athene. In a certain sense art and science are both of divine origin, but only so far as the originating and creative power is concerned, which, once set in motion, had to grow and to develop according to definite and immutable laws. To trace this development step by step in general outlines, from time relative to the mythical and traditional periods, and thence to the age of history, is the aim of our manual. In generalising thus, and separating the special from the universal, we are enabled to embrace at once with greater clearness a wider range of knowledge, and to give to the treatment of art-history a more elevated and useful character. By a suppression of details, the great periods and features of a common development are rendered more intelligible, and our reasoning faculty is enabled to grasp that which might otherwise escape our limited powers of comprehension.

[CHAPTER III.]
PRE-HISTORIC AND SAVAGE ART.

Art, like nature, is its own interpreter. A well-finished pattern has not preceded a more simple one; circular ornamentations are of a later date than ornamentations with straight lines. The cave-habitation must have been in use before the construction of independent temples. Art must have had a beginning like language; for it is a language—a language in forms, speaking to our eyes. If what the Arabs say is true, that the best description is that in which the ear is transformed into an eye, the best picture will be one that transforms our eyes into ears. Art speaks through light, as language through sounds. We have tried to discover by means of philology—which in modern times has become a science—a more or less close relationship between idioms and idioms; in the same way we try to trace some general primitive types from which we may deduce the innumerable works of art.

In times long by-gone we find traces of man’s inventive and decorative force. The products of that force even in pre-historic ages widely differ in their degrees of workmanship. There are more or less finished hatchets, chisels, knives, arrow-heads, paal-stabs, celts and armlets. The ornamentation, from mere varying straight lines, goes over into spiral forms of different direction and combination. We have therefore no difficulty in classifying the products of pre-historic art in the following way:—

• a. The Palæolithic, or old stone age.
• b. The Neolithic, or new stone age.
• c. The Bronze age, and
• d. The Iron age.

The first two subdivisions belong to savage life, the third to the mythical or traditionary, and the fourth to the historical periods.

During the old stone age we have scarcely any traces of ornamentation; during the new stone age we find some attempts at geometrical lines, and some sketches of animals on ivory blades; during the bronze age we have winding and twisting patterns of excellent geometrical design; and, finally, during the iron age, animals and even human forms are used as means of ornamentation.

During the pre-historic period of man’s artistic development we find a peculiar similarity between his dwellings and his tombs. The mountain cavern, and the hut constructed of beams and boughs, covered with skins, were undoubtedly men’s first stately palaces. The very oldest traditions bear out this statement. The earliest inhabitants of Greece dwelt in mountain caverns. The people of Siberia, anterior to the Samoyedes, lived, according to Erman, in subterranean caves. The Kyklops of Homer are but nomads, residing in mountain caverns. Of the Hittites, a tribe in Canaan in the times of Abraham, it is recorded that they buried their dead in caves. But it is an incontestable fact that the burial-places resembled the dwellings of the pre-historic man. Crypts, catacombs, and rock-hewn temples may be set down as having originated from man’s first mountain home. The tombs of the Tartars in Kasan resemble their houses on a small scale. A Circassian tomb resembles a Circassian cottage. The tombs of the Karaite Jews in the valley of Jehoshaphat, are like their houses. Laplanders live in caves. The aborigines of Germany and France, the contemporaries of the mammoth, rhinoceros, auerochs and elk, dwelt in caves, as their bones are found mingled with those of these now extinct animals, together with various implements, such as adzes, flint arrows, stone knives, and even, as in the cave at Perigord on the borders of the Dordogne, works of art of great artistic power. Jordanes, in his ‘De Rebus Geticis,’ mentions people in Sweden (Scania) living like wild animals in caves, cut out in the rocks. But the nomad savage could find such dwellings only where there were mountains. If he wandered out of such a district into the plains, and wanted to shelter himself from the inclemency of the weather, he had to collect blocks of stone, and to form with them artificial caves. In this manner cromlechs, Dös, Dyss or dolmens, and gallery chambers arose, in which the long, narrow gallery corresponds to the confined entrance of the mountain-cave, and the chamber to the cavern.

By degrees man began to construct detached houses for himself, and at last temples for his god or gods. No traces of temples are found in pre-historic times, except in the Western hemisphere. The Stiens of Cambodia, in the central parts of Cochin-China, have no temples. From the southern promontory of Africa to far beyond the banks of the Zambesi no temples are found. The pastoral and agricultural people of Madagascar have no temples, though they have huts and houses, ornamented pottery, and are to a certain degree acquainted with textile art. Before man constructs a temple he constructs a house, to protect himself, his herds, and family from wild animals, but above all from his still more dreaded fellow-creature, in whom he sees a dangerous rival. This propensity serves to explain the origin of lake-dwellings—the most ancient proofs of man’s constructing capacity, and of his talent to unite for a certain purpose, and to enclose a given space. Herodotus already tells us of a settlement on Lake Prasias, the modern Tachyno (in Rumelia, European Turkey), where men lived on platforms, supported by tall piles. Abulfeda, the Syrian geographer (b. 1273; d. 1313), speaks of Christian fishermen living in wooden huts, built on piles in one of the Apamean lakes on the Orontes (in Asia). The Papuans of New Guinea still live in such pile-dwellings, the floors of which are supported by rudely-carved human figures, an attempt at telamons. These are ‘survivals,’ but the lake-dwellings in Italy and Switzerland belong to pre-historic times. In tracing their different modes of construction, we find three periods of a progressive architectural development recorded.

We have pile-dwellings of the most primitive construction. Rough piles were used, pointed with the aid of fire or with stone hatchets, later with bronze, and finally with iron tools. They were placed either close together or in pairs, or wide apart—generally in regular order. The heads of the piles were brought to a level above the water to receive the beams of the platform, which were fastened down with wooden pins. Later, as an improvement, mortices were cut in the tops of the vertical piles to receive the cross-beams.

Other constructions, especially those near Nidau (niedere Au, lower meadow), are built on a foundation artificially strengthened with stones, which is, undoubtedly, an improvement on the former method.

Experience taught the pre-historic architects that the piles were not quite safe, and ought to have some support against the turbulent risings of the lake. This produced the still more improved fascine constructions, which certainly gave still greater strength to the dwelling. The platform did not rest on mere piles but on artificial foundations, built up from the bottom with horizontal layers of sticks or small branches of trees, the vertical piles serving as connecting links to the whole construction.

Cranoges, or wooden islands, are chiefly found in Ireland and Scotland. They differ from the fascine constructions in that they frequently were built on natural islands, or on shallows approaching to this character. The huts built upon these pile-constructions were rectangular; some may have been round, like the huts of savages, in imitation of mole-hills, the prototypes of the numerous mounds strewn all over the globe. The huts contained an artificial hearth, made of three or four slabs of stone.

That the inhabitants of the lake-dwellings were acquainted with textile art, is proved by the discovery of an innumerable quantity of clay-weights for weaving purposes, and by pieces of burnt woven flax. The crude pottery, tools and wooden pegs, fibres twisted into ropes, remains of different cereals, fruits, and domestic animals found in these settlements, clearly prove that a certain kind of family life must have existed. At all events, the inhabitants must have reached a higher degree of civilisation than some of the South-Sea Islanders of our century, who, on receiving some iron nails, planted them, in the expectation of reaping a rich crop of this valuable vegetable.

We see that in pre-historic times art was already practised, not only for a merely utilitarian but also for an ornamental and artistic purpose.

This may be said, in a much higher sense, of the pre-historic art-remains in the Western hemisphere. Art had there a threefold development, corresponding to the three groups of humanity. We find the mounds of the Negro; the pottery of the yellow man, with its quaint ornamentation; and the remarkable temples, fortresses, viaducts, and aqueducts of the Aryan group. We possess in our museums abundant specimens of the works of these three groups, as also of their singular hieroglyphic writings, resembling the first attempts of the Chinese and Egyptians to represent ideas in forms. Imagination with savages supplies the form; the mere outlines therefore suffice. The horse drawn in this way (a) is a real horse; (b) this forms a real goose; (c) this is the sun; and (d) this a real man. It is a kind of pictorial writing or ideography, to be seen for miles and miles hewn in rocks at Massaya, and practised by humanity at large, as by our own children, in the first stage of awakening consciousness.

We find not only ethnological, but also philological and artistic traces of the fact, that at an unknown pre-historic period, the Western hemisphere must have been in close connection with the Eastern. The name of the supreme Divinity, Dyaus, Θεός {Theos}, Deus, is in the far West Teotl.

Art in the North of the Western hemisphere is primitive, kyklopean walls and sepulchral mounds being the principal remains.

In the Centre of the Continent, art bears all the traces of a gradually-developed progress. It almost reached the forms of Egypt, but stopped half way. By some means Atalanta was separated from the East, and the pyramids, temples and palaces of central America remained in the same relation to the pyramids, temples and palaces of Egypt as the tapir to the elephant; the alligator to the crocodile; and the llama to the camel.

The West possessed a knowledge of astronomy analogous to that of the Chinese, and their mode of ornamentation in excellent stucco reached a high degree of technical and even pictorial skill. They went so far as to represent scenes of an historical character with some degree of dramatic power; as the stucco of the rock-hewn temple of Mitla in Mexico proves. Their ornamentation is irregular and confused, like their wild vegetation, in which creepers predominate.

Some figures are striking in their resemblance to Egyptian forms.

A sculptured divinity of granite, 3½ feet high, found near a finely-built pyramid not far from Guatusco or Huatusco, is excellently worked and finished in a simple style. Still more curious is a small statue executed in lava, with a head-dress resembling those of Isis, the Sphinx, the capitals of the temple of Denderah, or at a later period those of Antinous. Even the position of the feet reminds us of the sphinx, and proves the absence of a knowledge of proportion.

In South America, in the regions of Lake Titicaca in Peru, lying at an elevation of 13,000 feet above the level of the sea, i.e. about four times as high as Snowdon, we have proofs of a very high civilisation. Artificially-constructed causeways lead over the surrounding marshes to the sacred town of Cuzco, the capital and central spot of the empire of the fabulous yet real Incas. Of those times we have a garden of the Incas, in the warmest and most sheltered part of the island, ‘with its baths, and its fountains still flowing with silvery sheen and murmur.’ Not far from Titicaca is the island of Coati, sacred to the moon. Here stood the famous palace of the Virgins of the Sun (reminding us of the Vestals instituted by one of the Roman rulers), flanked by two shrines dedicated to the sun and moon. These are the best-preserved specimens of American pre-historic architecture. Round Lake Umayo, on a peninsula, we find a remarkable group of ancient square burial towers, known as the Chulpas of Silustani.

Cuzco was the Rome of the south of the Western hemisphere. The town was traversed by four high-roads in the direction of the four points of the compass. It was divided into an upper (Hanau) and a lower (Hurin) town. Grouped around the central square in the form of an oval were twelve subdivisions (Carrios). Here stood the great palace, one mile in length and a quarter of a mile broad; the Yachahuasi (Huasi, houses) dedicated to the instruction of the youth; the Galpones, edifices in which festivals were held; the convent of the Virgins of the Sun, the Corichanca or Palace of Gold, and the temple dedicated to the sun, surrounded by chapels dedicated to the moon, the stars, and to thunder and lightning. Here also stood the eighth wonder of the world—the great fortress Sacsahuaman; the entrances with slanting jambs, and a large plinth, constructed like inverted stairs, sometimes in stone, sometimes in excellent stucco, either with or without ornament. The three lines of massive walls round the town, forming the defence, were constructed ‘en tenaille,’ the entering angles all being ninety degrees; the very best European fortifications, planned by Vauban or Moltke, could not surpass the terrace-like arrangement of these three lines of defence. The polygonal blocks, of which the walls are constructed, are of blue limestone, from eight to ten feet in length, half as much in width and depth, and weigh from fifteen to twenty tons each. The first wall has an average height of about twenty-five feet, the second eighteen feet, and the third fourteen feet. Total elevation of walls, fifty-seven feet.

However cursorily we have touched upon art as it developed in the Western hemisphere, the reader must be impressed by two facts. (1) That there are analogies between East and West which are too striking to be attributed to mere chance; and (2) that those who built the edifices of Uxmal, Palenque, Copan, Chichen, Itza, and Cuzco must have been far beyond a mere nomadic state. They had palaces, temples, and therefore a kind of social organisation and religion. Their religion must have been of a low and cruel character, judging from the representations of their divinities, and from their using detached limbs of the human body as arabesques; though we can trace in their calendar, as in their conceptions of the personified powers of nature, Eastern influences, connecting the pre-historic West with the historic East. Whilst the Eastern world used incense at its religious ceremonies, the West used tobacco smoke. In both hemispheres some mysterious power was attributed to animals. The helmets of all nations took their origin in this common belief. Eagles, vultures, wolves, tigers, lions, dragons and serpents are used to adorn the fighter or to charm his weapons. The custom of wearing masks and helmets or head-dresses of some terrifying form, exaggerating the size of the head, is of purely barbarous origin. In the remains of ancient Mexico, Peru, and the South Sea Islands we find a variety of carved masks; some resembling human faces, adorned with false hair, beards and eyebrows; others representing the heads of birds. They are generally painted, often ornamented with pieces of foliaceous mica to make them glitter, or with turquoises and other precious stones.

That the pre-historic man, whether of the East or the farthest West, had some sort of civilisation may be best studied in his keramic products. Earthenware vessels, pots, jugs, vases, urns, and amphoræ are as interesting to the art-historian as fossil plants and animals to the paleontologist, or the different strata of the earth’s crust to the geologist.

Pottery is one of the most reliable historical documents for fixing the degree of civilisation of a nation. Fossil pottery very much resembles antediluvian animals—it is without shape and form. Shells, leaves and fruits suggested it. By degrees gourds and eggs gave man better patterns. At a certain period it must have been the fashion in Egypt, Etruria, Greece, China, Mexico and Peru to use animal and human forms for vases, bottles, jugs and goblets, whilst horns, skulls and boots are found amongst Teutons and some savage tribes. The Teutons hoped to drink sweet honey out of the skulls of their slain enemies in Walhalla. We cannot wonder that so amiable a creed should have engendered quaint drinking vessels. We see in our own times plates and dishes adorned with frogs and lizards, which indisputably prove that there are pre-historic ‘survivals.’ From Kyprus we have, in the Imperial Cabinet of Antiquities at Vienna, an urn with a human face, which is very much like those found in Mexico, of which the South Kensington Museum and the Christy collection of the British Museum possess excellent specimens.

The wild and fantastic mode of ornamentation in the Western hemisphere, in pre-historic times, is entirely due to the aspect of nature. Man seems to have received patterns from India, Egypt and Greece, and worked them out by reflecting the impressions of an exuberant nature. Flowers, feathers, pearls, trinkets, hieroglyphs, animals, human bodies—all are mingled together in endless confusion. Here and there a symmetrical echo of times long by-gone can be traced. Though, however, the Western artists of pre-historic times sometimes attained symmetry, they continually sin against eurythmy. Of proportion and action they have no conception. They have a style, but a style of their own, devoid of all those requisites which elevate a product to artistic beauty.

[CHAPTER IV.]
CHINESE ART.

The Chinese undoubtedly reached a high degree of culture earlier than all the historical nations, and still they are in a state of civilised infancy. They possess reliable historical records referring to periods when branches of the Aryan group of humanity were still nomads. They knew that our globe is flattened at the poles, at a time when we thought it to be a square supported by pillars; they were acquainted with the properties of the magnet-needle; worked metal; cultivated the mulberry-tree, systematically fed the silk-worm with its leaves, weaving its product into the very best silk. In pottery they have attained the greatest perfection so far as the material is concerned. In engineering they were not less clever. They have aqueducts, executed with great daring; innumerable bridges span their rivers; they drained and irrigated the land at a time when other people assumed a universal deluge; and yet they remained babies in thoughts and customs, whilst they grew older and older in age. They have all the manners of precocious children with prematurely aged faces. This phenomenon can be explained in figures. There are 400,000,000 of Chinese, nearly all Turanians. Taking an equal number of Aryans, we shall find that they are not less than 3,400,000,000 cubic inches short of brain, of which each inch represents a certain amount of intellectual force. This deficiency in ‘brain-force’ shows itself in their totally different development, and the stationary character of their institutions. They ingeniously play in science, art, politics, and religion. 4,500 years ago they reached a high degree of civilisation, and they remained stationary in their civilised childhood, which they preserve with a pious veneration. To look back, to believe that the past was better than the present, has become the static law of China, and has checked every progress. Their language is agglutinative, only one degree higher than the savage monosyllabic, and forms a link between this and the flexible languages. The 450 monosyllables are used to form 1,230 word-sounds, out of which they compose from 40,000 to 60,000 compounds. They cannot pronounce certain consonants, resembling in this some badly-taught European children. They say: ‘Yoo-lo-pa’ instead of Europe; ‘Ya-me-li-ka’ instead of America; ‘Ma-li-ya’ instead of Maria; ‘cu-lu-su’ instead of crux; ‘Ki-li-tu-su’ for Christus. Their mode of writing has developed from pictorial signs. They preserved these; and, although arbitrary characters have supplanted picture-writing, or hieroglyphs, they still retain the clumsiness of this form, and have for every word a special sign.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks they possess an encyclopædia in 5,000 volumes, and a collection of works of fiction amounting to 180,000 volumes. They can boast of a Socrates in Confucius, of a Plato in Mem-tsu, and of a Xenophon in Tsem-tsu.

Five is with them a holy number: they had five emperors during their Golden Age; there are five great principles on which they base the possibility of a regulated social existence, viz. humanity, justice, conformity, uprightness, and sincerity. They have five holy books: the Shoo-King (political precepts); the Y-King (a philosophy of emanations based on figures); the Shi-King (a collection of didactical odes and songs about 3,000 years old); the Li-King (a record of ceremonial customs and social manners); and the Yo-King (a book on music, regulating harmony on the most discordant principles). They have five domestic principles, five elements, five primitive colours, five seasons of the year, five ruling spirits, five planets, five points of the compass, five sorts of earth, five different precious stones, five degrees of punishment, five different kinds of dresses; and their whole principle of ornamentation is based on five points

. By uniting these five points they produce that ingenious system for the conventional treatment of flowers and animals, which has been divided by Owen Jones into—

• a. The continuous stem system;
• b. The united fragmentary system; and
• c. The interspersed fragmentary system.

In these three systems they observe the natural laws of radiation and tangential curvature.

But in all their works of art appears the spectre of childishness, with wrinkles in its withered face. Their patterns in textile art are such as some people delight in for the sake of their quaint originality. They altogether neglect the laws of ornamentation; and we never know whether in ornamenting a vase they did not intend to dress a Chinese lady for a tea party, or whether in dressing a high-standing mandarin, or a lady in stiff brocade, they did not intend to ornament one of their peculiarly-shaped tea-pots. In fact their vases are ladies in brocade dresses, whilst their gentlemen and ladies look like ambulatory vases. We often see on a lady, ‘doves as big as bustards, cooing; flowers and trees growing on plates and vases upside down, and inside out.’ We see a mandarin strutting about, adorned with an embroidered tree with fifty different foliages. One screen is decorated with fishes with feathers, another with birds with fins, or monstrous dragons creep on the ground or fly in the air. Everything in art is done as it ought not to be done. It is as if some merry and mischievous hobgoblin had instructed the Chinese to make up a kind of artistic patchwork out of all the odds and ends of ornamental fancies, distorted figures, and incomprehensible combinations.

Their towns look like large encampments of nomad hordes, ready at a moment’s notice to take up their tents and run away. Though they have constructed a huge wall, which is 25 feet thick at the base, diminishing to 15 at the platform, provided at distances of 100 yards with towers about 40 feet square at the base, diminishing to 30 at the top, and about 37–48 feet in height; though they have carried this over the ridges of lofty hills (one of them 5,000 feet above the level of the sea), and led it through the deepest valleys, or upon arches over rivers—their architecture is still in its very infancy. It is a kind of toy-architecture. The walls of their houses may be pulled down, and the houses still remain standing. For architecture with the Chinese is in no way an organic total; it is not even a chemically-united composition; but a mechanically-joined something, without any ruling and connecting idea. Contrary to all rules of good architecture, they express in their constructions the principle of the separation and independence of the active elements of the building, instead of their union and harmony. It is variety without unity. Their walls are mere screens in bricks or wood, mere frameworks for tapestry. The wall with them does not support; it appears movable and totally distinct from the roof. The scaffolding which supports the horizontal, as also the vertical enclosures, belongs more to textile than to tectonic art The Turanian is still addicted to fascine work, like the pre-historic lake-dweller, or our contemporary aboriginal New Zealander. The divisions in the interior of the house are movable; either consisting of real carpets, lattice-work, wooden-jointed leaves, or boards, ornamented to imitate carpets or movable screens. Imitations of flowered woven-stuffs, lacquered panels with impossible perspectives, bamboo tress-work, with protruding knobs, carved and turned into gaping and grinning fantastic monsters, are also among the principal characteristics of Chinese architectural ornamentation. Chinese trellis-work has a fairy-like appearance. The patterns are infinitely varied, either closely fitting or perforated, dividing and enclosing spaces, surrounding terraces as railings, running up the staircases, or forming large borders between column and column.

The trellis-work of the Chinese may be divided into three classes:—

1. The bamboo wicker-work, a close imitation of textile fabrics; in fact, woven wood-work.

2. The lattice-work, a kind of transition or metamorphic work between trellis and cross-barred work. The patterns are of a grosser kind.

3. The mixed-work, a combination of the two classes.

The first is generally used in ornamenting the interior of the basements of the houses. The natural bright yellow tint of the bamboo is either left, or it is lacquered in variegated colours to heighten the effect of the patterns.

The lattice-work is used for door and window-frames. In the latter case the holes are filled up with transparent shells, coloured paper, or painted glass, which has been in use since 3000 B.C.

The mixed-work runs along the walls, forming a frieze of gilt metal or alabaster. The last-named material is employed in summer-houses as a finish to the outer space, connecting bright red or light blue columns. When thus used the effect is undoubtedly charming. The roofs are tinted dark green, an unconscious reminiscence of by-gone times, when they were made of the leafy branches of trees or the broad foliage of plants. The dark azure of heaven shining through the perforated trellis-work, contrasting with the white marble of the substructure and the red columns, forms a combination both striking and agreeable. The upper parts of a building appear to swim in the air.

The brick walls of the Chinese are bare of stucco; the void predominating. They use the walls either as enclosures for court-yards, as isolated protecting walls before the entrances of houses—reminding us of the gates of India or the propylæa of Egypt—as substructures, or as enclosures and partitions for dwelling-places. All these walls are constructed of air-dried, fire-baked, or glazed tiles and bricks. The latter are only used for temples or imperial buildings. Whilst we possess a Board of Public Works that unfortunately has no administrative power, and cannot prevent our thoroughfares from being constructed according to the principles of a most inveterate symmetrophobia (hatred of all order, shape, style, and homo-geneousness), the law in China goes so far as to regulate even the use of building material, not according to any esthetical rule, but pandering merely to rank and class interest. White marble may only be used for imperial substructures, the enclosure of imperial courts, and in the construction of imperial bridges, and must never be used as wall-decoration. Their cement for coating walls is like ours; the stucco flat coloured, and the colours mixed with the plaster before laying on. According to his station in the State, the owner of a house may surround it with a wall of clay or lime, or with one of air-dried or fire-baked bricks. Only the walls of princes may have stone plinths. The encircling walls of imperial palaces have a roof of bright yellow, and light-green glazed tiles. The Tshao-Pings, or protecting walls, placed before the entrance doors of houses, like screens before our fire-places, have large protruding plinths. They differ in colour according to the rank of the owner. Generally they are white, with painted ornamentation. Before the houses or palaces of princes the colours are red with gold, and the covering green or yellow. Before Miaos, temples of honour, they are nearly always of bright yellow. The outer walls are mostly white, decorated with incrusted landscapes or other conventional decorations. The inner walls are red and richly ornamented with gold; they have a kind of frieze ornamented with trellis-work, so as apparently to detach the support from the supported roof. In the houses of the higher classes the walls are decorated with damask, and in those of the commoners with paper-hangings, which latter we have adopted. Drapery is also freely used, hanging down and serving to divide the interior spaces of the houses. Doors and windows are still formed of curtains, as in the primitive times of civilisation in Assyria, India, and Babylon.

We are all acquainted with the excellence of Chinese silk-weaving, interspersed with golden threads, as also with the brightness and originality of some of their patterns, whenever they keep to an imitation of nature in their floral forms. They are generally, however, too realistic, the material not unfrequently appearing like a botanist’s herbarium, or like a collection of butterflies or stuffed birds. Their embroidery is not less old than their silk-weaving. As early as 2205 B.C. in their statistical records (numbering about 4,768 volumes) gold, silver, copper, ivory, precious stones—five sorts of pigments of mineral extraction—silk, hemp, cotton, weavings of these materials, and the feathers of all sorts of birds are mentioned. The woven stuffs are of one colour. Silk is either red, black, white, or yellowish, weaving in colours not being known. The frequent mention made of birds’ feathers may serve as a proof that they were used for embroidery, which in primitive times was more an ‘opus plumarium’ than embroidery proper, which is the forerunner of the art of painting. Feather crowns, kilts, and dresses are still in use amongst the savages of our own times. The colours are given by nature, and suit the grotesque taste of the undisciplined mind by their bright variegations and incongruities.

The oldest Chinese embroidery in colours was perfectly plastic. The plants, flowers, animals, and even figures, formed a polychromatic relief on the flat surface of the stuff. This style is still fashionable in China, though, instead of feathers, artificially coloured threads are used, always so as to make the objects appear raised from the surface. Even at present life-size figures in relief, or whole scenes, are executed with the needle in brightly-coloured silk threads. We are here involuntarily reminded of the reliefs of Nineveh, and we may assume that they are nothing but a transformation of embroidery into stone or alabaster.

The dresses, furniture, saddles, tea-pots, shoes and boots, jackets, covers, weapons, doors, and windows of the Chinese are all ornamented with patterns which have had their origin in this kind of relief-embroidery, traces of which are found even in their lacquered and keramic products.

The roofs of their houses are curved and drawn up like their features; they are copies of lids of baskets, tea-caddies, urns, or of caps and hats. The protruding parts are richly ornamented with dragons. The dragon with the Chinese is the prototype out of which man developed; the dragon is therefore the symbol of the imperial power.

Whilst the Chinese are altogether deficient in painting, because they have no idea of perspective or shading, they certainly excel in the technical treatment of keramic works of art, especially in the paste, which they make of kaolin, a decomposed feldspathic granite. The forms of their genuine pottery are most primitive in outline; dishes, cups, plates, and bowls are cylindrically shaped, as are their bottles and jars. Our South Kensington Museum abounds in specimens illustrating this.

Sharp naturalism and an exact reproduction of the forms of nature, without any skill in the conventional treatment of flowers, creepers, leaves, stems, fruits, and animals, prevail in all Chinese and Japanese works. The artist, if he intends to work in the Chinese style, must divest himself of all considerations for the higher esthetical principles of art; he must stoop to the tastes and delights of children, must study thoroughly their every-day customs and manners, enter into their mode of thinking, try to make the quaint quainter, and the grotesque still more grotesque. A big sun with thick rays in a corner to the right; some sharply-drawn trees in the middle; a bridge up in the clouds with a dog running over it; some children with large heads playing to the left; a bright stream marked with rough waves, through which fishes are peeping; the whole excellently finished so far as the lacquered work goes—and a Chinese tray is complete. The coloured enamel on keramic works, and their lacquered or varnished ware, notwithstanding their unimaginative naturalism and monstrously fantastic delineation, surpass anything we are capable of producing in the West of Europe. Their magnificent folding-screens, trays, tubs, wash-hand basins, toilet-cases, work-tables, perfume-cases, frames for looking-glasses; their jewel-tables—full of little drawers, secret nooks and corners, puzzling openings, and hidden shuttings—are so many additional proofs of their childish nature. They use the fret, which they have in common with the Mexicans, Peruvians, and Greeks. Whilst, however, the latter arrived at a continuous system of fret ornamentation, the Chinese still use it mostly fragmentarily, either one link after the other, or one above the other, without forming a continuous ornament.

We see in the Chinese one of the most interesting phenomena in the history of mankind, whether we look upon them from a social, religious, or artistic point of view. They govern their State on paternal principle, and on the grand rule, ‘Do to another what you would he should do unto you, and do not unto another what you would not should be done unto you. Thou only needest this law alone; it is the foundation of all the rest’ (Confucius in the sixth century B.C.), and yet they have made no progress in sciences and arts. The paternal government and home-rule check every thought. A moral principle of the very highest meaning has, as with many of us, worked badly. They have done unto others what others have done unto them. They cheated because they were cheated; they told falsehoods because they were deceived by others; they were hypocritical because others were so too; and they robbed and plundered others, because they were robbed and plundered themselves. In this moral chaos they forgot to cultivate the intellectual force of reasoning; they thus further disturbed the already deranged equilibrium between morals and intellect. And though they had gunpowder before the West of Europe, it remained in the far East of Asia a mere toy to amuse young and old at festivals, whilst in the possession of Western Europe it became, next to the art of printing, the most powerful agent of civilisation. They had paper before the West of Europe; they knew how to print at least five centuries before Europe thought of re-inventing this Chinese invention. They are as polite, if not politer, than the most civilised Frenchman, and are witty and good-humoured. They have no fear of death; trade with the same skill and perseverance as we; cultivate the soil with even greater industry and ability than we; so that their territory, about equal in extent to the whole of Europe, looks like one great well-drained and irrigated garden, in which no spot which can yield some return for assiduous labour is left uncultivated. There is amongst the 400,000,000 of subjects of one single emperor not one who cannot read and write. All places in the administration are assigned after a severe competitive examination, and still they lack the capacity of self-conscious, independent reasoning both in science and art. They can paint a tiger-skin with such truthfulness that it appears a real skin, framed under glass; but in the conception and reproduction of the head of the ferocious brute, with its bloodthirsty jaws and its merciless cruelty, they altogether fail. They have an aversion to a proportionate division of space; they never attempt to counterbalance their artistic ideas, and to arrange them according to a law. They abhor spiritual, imaginary, and all higher intellectual culture to such a degree, that they concentrate all their powers on mere technicalities. Therefore they have remained stationary, whilst others, who began their self-conscious national existence thousands of years later, have left them far behind. The Chinese sacrifice everything to preconceived ideas of custom—in morals, science, and art. As our forefathers did, let us do also. The result of this principle has been that curious, grotesque, and ingenious, but above all childish art, which we must study as the link between savage and Aryan art. Whilst the Negro scarcely went beyond geometrical figures, we find the Turanian already capable of using plants and the lower kinds of animals in ornamentation, in addition to geometrical figures. As soon, however, as he approaches beings, in whom proportion, action, and expression, as the higher elements of form, prevail, he loses his power of reproduction altogether.

Matter-of-fact prose is the element of the Turanian; he is without every higher artistic feeling, because his mode of writing, speaking, and thinking, his religious, social, and political organisation, has till lately checked all expansion of the imagination, and the use of the intellectual faculties. Art with him has remained undeveloped, and however interesting his products may be, they form only a subject for our curiosity and perhaps momentary fashion, showing what humanity at large did when in its infancy.

[CHAPTER V.]
INDIA, PERSIA, ASSYRIA, AND BABYLON.

Our tree of art, with its manifold branches, flowers, and fruits, rooted in the unknown origin of the three great groups of humanity, shows that the Negro, or black branch, had a very short growth. It still lives on in savage art, but is crippled, and has no vitality. Next we have seen the long line of Turanian art, represented by the Chinese; it originates in the geological age, passes through the mythical, traditional, and historical periods, and continues uninterruptedly to modern times. We have up to this point treated of the artistic productions of the Negro and Turanian groups, both of which stand without the pale of real history.

We now take up the art-history of the Aryan, the historical group. The birth-place of this group undoubtedly was Central Asia. Thence the pure Aryan group took two divergent roads. One division crossed over the Himâlâya Mountain chain, and settled round the Brahmapootra, the Indus and Ganges rivers, and the other remained on this side of the mountains. The Aryans may, therefore, be best divided into Trans-Himâlâyans and Cis-Himâlâyans. In these two groups we find the oldest traces of a power slowly awakening to full consciousness. We can perceive in remote ages, only measurable by means of analogy and deduction, an endeavour to solve the greatest problems of our existence.

To find answers to these three questions: Where from? What for? Where to? To measure the three dimensions of space and time; to trace the cause of which the three, ever stable and still ever varying, phenomena are the effect; and to know what creation, preservation and annihilation, or rather only transformation, are, has been the chief aim of the Aryan mind; and, as history teaches us, they have found more or less distinct answers to these questions. We are not only capable of philologically tracing the development of the different languages of the Aryan group step by step to one common parent-language—the Sanskrit, but the art-historian may trace every mysterious conception of the powers of nature, every form of personification or incarnation, and every religious tenet or mystery, symbol or myth, to these same Indians, who with the words Pitâ, Matâ, Brahtâ, Duihtâ, have taught us the holiest relations of our family life. For words, like pictures, are only representatives of outward impressions. To the Trans-and Cis-Himâlâyan Aryans we can trace all theogonies, cosmogonies, systems of esoteric pathology and mythic anthropology. They first saw in geometrical forms the phenomena of the material as well as the spiritual world; gave meaning and interpretation to these mystic types; peopled heaven and earth with visible and invisible, good and evil, gods, goddesses, and spirits. They first acknowledged the ‘noumenal,’ or invisible, divine nature with its creative force; and recognised the ‘phenomenal,’ or visible, nature of the world as an emanation, evolution, development, outgrowth, or mere work of the invisible Creator. All the gods of the Persians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and a great number of the customs of Hebrews and Christians, may be traced back to Indian conceptions, forms, and modes of worship.

Not historical events only, but the whole life of humanity centres round religion. For science and art were in olden times the direct offsprings of religion. Neither science nor art can be understood, unless we have a clear insight into the mythologies and religious conceptions of the ancient peoples. Our great mistake has been, that till very lately we detached one of the different branches of the tree of knowledge. We criticised its bark, leaves, blossoms, and fruits separately, never concerning ourselves about the ramifications of the root, the soil in which it first spread, the chemical substances on which it fed, the conditions of climate under which it flourished or withered, never enquiring whether it brought forth only flowers and never fruits, or for what purposes its fruits and flowers were used by those who gathered both. Now without such understanding artists are mere unconscious machines, groping in the dark of ignorance, never capable of a clear reproduction of forms. Education and a higher conception flow like invisible magnetic streams through the hand, whether it hold pencil, paint-brush, chisel, or engraver’s needle, and endow the work of art with a vitality which forms its real charm. It is never the technical correctness that appeals to us most strongly when contemplating even the smallest work of art, but the thought which animated the artist when constructing his forms.

Whilst the savage scarcely ever acquires a correct notion of time and space, and the Turanian only a limited one, the Aryan gathers from them the first dim recognition of the Infinite. In time and space perceptible changes take place, through the influence of an invisible power which creates all visible things. In time and space all created things are preserved, and in time and space all either perish or assume different forms. The Aryans endeavoured to express these abstract, yet concrete phenomena by signs. A triangle with three equal sides appeared best to express the mystery of the three equally powerful forces—creation, preservation, and transformation.

In the very earliest dawn of civilisation, therefore, the triangle became the hallowed symbol of the Divinity. After the Symbolic and Dialectic period had given place to the Mythological, time and space were looked upon as the origin of all things, out of which Brahmā, Vishnu, and S’iva had sprung. These three incomprehensible forces were expressed by geometrical figures, or, so to speak, crystallised, before they became incarnate persons. The creator had the sign of a double triangle

which formed three triangles symbolically representing the three forces in ONE, the CREATOR. Vishnu was designated by an equilateral triangle with the apex pointing downwards,

meaning the preserver; whilst S’iva had for his symbol a triangle with the apex upwards,

denoting the transformer.

The divinities were placed in the following order: S’iva first, then Vishnu, and Brahmā last, to whom no temples were built. This was the case with nearly all the races of the Aryan group; there are scarcely any temples to Amn, Brahmă, Zeruane-Akerene, Uranos, Wodan, &c.

The order of the symbols, as given below, with their five significations—

produced the most sacred word—

expressed by this triangular combination—

This was the mysterious Trimurty of the Indians, from which in time, according to the influences of nature, the degree of intellectual development, and the social and political condition of the different groups of the Aryan races, grew the different mystic conceptions of the triune power in one, working in nature.

Whilst the Trans-Himâlâyans, influenced by a gorgeous nature, allowed their imagination to run wild, and to distort the primitive mystic simplicity of these religious conceptions, the Cis-Himâlâyans remained more faithful to the first impressions of nature, and worshipped Light and Fire as the symbols of intellect, righteousness, and virtue, in opposition to Night, as the symbol of ignorance, injustice, and sin. To the triangular forms, the circle,

the serpent, was added, the form without beginning and end; no wonder that, encircling the equilateral triangle and joined to the square, it became the symbol of the mysterious, incomprehensible forces of nature. The triangle, square, and the circle

united, intersected, combined, isolated, and crossed, formed the fundamental lines of temples and their decorations. It was only at a later period that animal and monstrous human forms were conceived to personify abstract divine powers. The attributes of Ether, Water (Indra), and Fire (Agni), were transformed into acting persons. The three equal sides of the triangle, influenced by the imagination of the expounders of matters divine, were changed into an individual with three heads, so as to give a more comprehensible form to the incomprehensible divine power.

The Trans-Himâlâyans, once settled on the gigantic triangular peninsula stretching into the Indian Ocean, had leisure to work out a vast theogony, which has served the Aryans down to our own days as a store-house for different mythologies and religious systems.

The Divespiter of India (Deus pater, Jupiter) became the Lord of the sky, the Lord of hosts; his weapon was the thunderbolt. He possessed a splendid garden, the paradise, nandana.

Gânesa is Janus, the god with two heads. He was the guardian of ways; he had a rod or sceptre in his hand (the shepherd’s crook or crosier) and a key—symbolic of his power to enter upon all the important undertakings of mankind.

S’rî or S’rîs (Seris—Ceres), also Lakshmî, Padmâ, and Camalâ, was the goddess of abundance, sprung from the sacred Lotus.

S’iva, the Greek Zeus, the Egyptian Jao, the Hebrew Javeh, the Roman Jovis, with their analogous attributes of revenge, jealousy, indomitable caprices, terror, and irreconciliation, all point to one and the same origin. Of S’iva (as of Zeus, Jovis, or Javeh elsewhere) it is recorded in Indian mythology that he had to fight with Daityas (Titans, or fallen angels), the children of Dity. Indra, on this occasion, provided the God of Fire, Justice, and Transformation with fiery shafts. Again, Jove overthrew the Titans and giants, whom Typhon, Bisareus, and Tityus led against the ruler of Olympus. The same is done by Javeh or Jehovah, who hurled the legions of proud and overbearing angels under Satan’s rule into the infernal regions. The analogy is too striking to require any further comment.

Paulastya (the Greek and Roman Pluto), or Kuvêra, the Egyptian Typhon, the Hebrew Satan, bears a general family resemblance to the conceptions of the chiefs of the lower regions.

Garuda, the beautiful bird with a lovely human face attending on Vishnu, is the prototype of the youthful, blooming Ganymede attending on Zeus, not only in similarity of name, but especially in similarity of function.

Durga, who takes her name from brandishing a lance, is, like Pallas or Minerva, the Indian representative of heroic valour and reflecting wisdom. Both Durga and Pallas slew demons and giants with their own hands; both protected the wise and virtuous who paid them due respect and adoration. Seraswati and Minerva have also much in common. The Minerva of Italy invented the flute, and Seraswati presided over melody.

Is’wara and Is’i of India are undoubtedly the originals of Osiris and Isis.

Dypuc read backwards gives us Cupid. The Indian name is derived from De’paka, the inflamer. The mischief-maker of India and Greece had one and the same name. We find his name and character in Shakespeare’s masterly delineation of Puck.

These analogies go much farther and deeper than is at first sight apparent.

S’iva is said to have had three eyes, symbolic of the three dimensions of time. A serpent, denoting the measurement of time by years, formed his necklace. A second necklace of human skulls marked the lapse and revolution of ages, and the extinction and succession of the generations of mankind. He holds a trident in one hand, signifying that the attributes of the other gods are united in him. S’iva is also called Trilôchana (three looks—lôchan, the eye, the look). Pausanias tells us that Zeus was honoured with the name of Triophthalmos (three-eyed), and that a statue of Jupiter had been found at the taking of Troy exhibiting the father of the gods with a third eye in his forehead.

Vishnu appeared on earth in several incarnations. The Indians look upon the planets as habitable. The sun was set down as the motor, directing the movements of these planets, furnishing them with light, and endowing them with the genial heat of vitality. Krishna (the black or blue one) was, like the Greek Apollo, the symbol of the sun, of light, of purity, and of love. He is represented as the promised Saviour, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu. According to the Vedas, the Earth complained to Vishnu, and demanded redress. It then received the promise of a Comforter and of a total renovation. Time is then said to have hastened to the birth of Krishna, ‘that bright offspring of the gods, who sets forward on his way to signal honours. The world with its globular, ponderous frame, nodding signs of congratulation, when the sweet babe will distinguish his mother by her smiles!’ Krishna, whom the Samaritans believed to have been Joshua, the long hoped-for Messiah, at last appeared on earth, where he passed a life of a most extraordinary and incomprehensible nature. He is said to have been the son of Devaki, a virgin, by King Vasudévas, but his birth was concealed for fear of the tyrant Kansa, his uncle, to whom it had been predicted that a child, born of that mother, would destroy him, and put an end to his dominion. Krishna had to hide, and was brought up in Mal’hurâ by honest herdsmen. He performed most amazing miracles, saved multitudes by his supernatural powers, raised the dead, and descended into the infernal regions of Pátàla, where the king of serpents, Séshánàga (suggestive of the name of Satana), ruled, that he might reanimate the six sons of a pious Brahman, who had been killed in battle. Krishna obtained a glorious victory on the banks of the Yamuná over the great serpent Kaliya Nága, which poisoned the air, destroying the herds of that region. Apollo also destroyed with his arrows the serpent Python. The whole legend, in both instances, took its origin in the action of the rays of the sun, purifying the air, and dispersing the noxious vapours of the atmosphere, which bred loathsome animals. Krishna and Apollo are thus identical in their actions. Krishna is disappointed by Tulasi, Apollo by Daphne; both conceptions liked the companionship of shepherds and shepherdesses. The Tulasi (or lotus) was sacred to Krishna, as the Laurus (laurel) to Apollo.

These and similar legends ought to be studied by artists to enable them not only to understand Indian art from a higher point of view, but to learn that many a monstrous form had a sacred symbolic meaning, that outward signs may be hallowed by hidden conceptions; and that, wherever this is the case, art will not succeed in reaching the bright spheres of beauty. The finest sculptured Durga without her necklace of human skulls, the protruding red tongue, the four arms with outstretched fingers balancing severed human heads, &c., would no longer convey to the mind of an Indian worshipper the idea of the goddess of valour and wisdom. Thus we may understand how a baked clay Indian idol, in spite of its revolting form, may be the symbol of some grand idea, through which it obtains value in the eyes of the credulous believer. In considering the causes that produced the peculiar development of Indian art, we must not omit to refer to the continually increasing power of the Brahmans.

Symbolism and mysticism were used by the priests of all ancient nations for thousands of years in preparing intoxicating draughts of superstition for the people, and proving the necessity for making sacrifices. At first depraved passions only were to be sacrificed, but by degrees they tried to typify those passions by animals, with analogous propensities. Goats became the representatives of licentiousness; bulls, types of indomitable fury and insubordination; and these animal types were offered to the gods. As soon as the priests had convinced the people that the blood of animals, the smoke from their burning bodies, the odour of roasting sheep, might appease the anger of S’iva, fanaticism went a step further, and drew human beings into the awful vortex of prejudice, and thousands of men and women were crushed, joyfully screaming, under the heavy wheels of Jugurnaut’s, S’iva’s, or Harris’s cars. Men and women were burned alive; intellectual progress stopped, asceticism and blind submission to priestly despotism were enforced, and the possibility of a progressive art was crushed for thousands of years.

This desolate state of society required reform, and Manû stepped forward. He divided society into four distinct layers: the Brahmans, Kshattryas, Vaisyas, and S’udras, of which the two first were Aryans, the third caste Turanians, and the fourth Negroes; consequently, in spite of the excellence of his laws, which were assumed to have been dictated by Brahma himself, no real art was possible.

The Indians have two great national epic poems, containing nearly the whole substance of all the epic poems of the other Aryan races, and the many scenes from the Ramâyâna and Mahâbhârata in carvings and sculptures stand in the same relation to Greek art, as these poems to the Iliad and Odyssee. In both, scenes of heroism are displayed; but, whilst symmetry and proportion rule in the Greek poems, fantastic irregularity, wild incongruities, exaggerations and impossibilities are heaped up in the Indian. The beauty of some thought is effaced by overburdened metaphors, gushing forth in an endless stream like the waters of the Ganges. There are passages in the 28,000 double verses of the Ramâyâna surpassing anything written.

As an indisputable proof I will quote a few lines from the opening passages of the Ramâyâna. The gods are assembled before the first, incomprehensible cause, and address it in the following words:—

O Thou, whom threefold might and splendour veil,
Maker, Preserver, and Transformer, hail!
Thy gaze surveys this world from clime to clime,
Thyself immeasurable in space and time:
To no corrupt desires, no passions prone:
Unconquered conqueror, infinite, unknown;
Though in one form Thou veil’st Thy might divine,
Still, at thy pleasure, every form is Thine.
Pure crystals thus prismatic hues assume,
As varying lights and varying tints illume;
Men think Thee absent, Thou art ever near;
Pitying those sorrows which Thou ne’er canst fear.
Unsordid penance Thou alone canst pay;
Unchanged, unchanging—old without decay:
Thou knowest all things—who Thy praise can state?
Createdst all things—Thyself uncreate!

The endeavour to give forms to such sublime abstractions made the Indians lose their regulating power in pictorial and plastic art. A god was to be made powerful, and he was provided with four or twenty arms, and three heads. The miraculous and symbolic were the greatest enemies of Indian art.

In the Mahâbhârata, exceeding Homer’s combined poems seven times in quantity, having not less than 110,000 double verses, we read of sentiments, feelings, and deeds which are our own—but nothing is within the pale of the credible. The birth of all the heroes is miraculous. Their deeds surpass the standard of human acts. They constantly associate with the gods, talk, argue, and dispute with them; their palaces are of immeasurable grandeur and splendour: ivory gates inlaid with jewels, golden pillars, diamond thrones, glittering with the splendour of a thousand suns; their armies are reckoned by millions; their heroes uproot trees, and kill hundreds of thousands at one blow; time and space have no meaning with them. Kings reign 27,000 years; Prathama-Raja reigned 6,300,000 and lived 8,400,000 years.[1] How could art in a higher sense exist under such conditions?

[1] By striking off the zeros, which are put on by the Brahmans out of respect, the figures may be reduced to some natural compass of possibility.

Art in a more comprehensible form appeared in India only when Buddha came to attempt a second regeneration of the people. He abolished castes, preached equality and freedom, and succeeded in awakening a high force of artistic activity in the dreamy Indians. But their art was altogether confined to the construction of rock-hewn temples, of stupas, topes, and religious buildings—architectural constructions in comparison with which even our greatest cathedrals dwindle into mere child’s play. Their works of art are tinged with the same exaggerations as their great heroic poems, and when Buddhism was stamped out in its birth-place about the seventh century A.D., the Brahmans constructed their temples, vying with those of the Buddhist artists in architectural grandeur. They went back to their monstrosities, but they could no longer check the artistic power of the Aryan spirit.

The rock-hewn and isolated temples of India have details in stucco, of ornamentation, foliage, and general decoration, which, like their mythology, their heroic poems, and their abstruse philosophy, went through all the artistic metamorphoses of pliable, plastic, elastic and solid substances. In all we observe an unbounded play of imagination, uncontrolled by any law of symmetry. The walls are decorated with the most exquisite shawl and lace patterns, either in stucco or hewn in stone; a proof that before the application of those delicate forms to wall decorations they must have existed as textile fabrics of high finish. The rock-hewn temples exhibit clear imitations of rafters and cross-beams; wood had, therefore, been long in use before they attempted to imitate it in stone. Their sculptures are wood-carvings, terra-cotta or plaster-of-Paris works, turned into stone. The pliability of the softer materials visibly predominates. The gateways before the Sanchi Tope (see the masterly cast of one of these in the South Kensington Museum), though hewn in stone, are a close imitation of wooden posts and cross-beams joined together. This imitation is so faithful that even the rough and crooked outlines of the badly-cut posts and beams are preserved. The richness and variety of their decorative patterns, as also the minuteness of the details, prove that such patterns must have been carved in wood or fashioned in clay long before they were executed in the harder material—stone. Stucco must have served as a means of transition from wood-carving to sculpture. In the Ramâyâna the town of Agodhyá, built by Manû (the father and lawgiver of mankind), is thus described: ‘It was adorned with beautiful palaces, high as mountains, and with houses of many stories; everything shining as in Indra’s heaven. Its aspect had a charming effect. The town was enlivened by ever-changing colours; regular bowers and sweetly-blooming trees delighted the eyes. It was full of precious stones. Its walls were covered with variegated-coloured fields resembling a chess board,’ &c.; the latter allusion giving a description of tesselated or mosaic work with which the walls must have been decorated. In a description of a palace in the Sakuntalâ, by Kalidâsa, who lived a century B.C., we read: ‘Over the gate rises an arch of ivory; above it float flags of a deep yellow hue, the tassels of which appear to beckon and to call to you: Step in—step in. The panels of the door are of gold and stucco, glittering like the diamond breast of a god. Look here! there is a row of palaces shining like the moon, like shells, like the stem of a water-lily. The stucco is laid on as thick as a hand. Golden steps adorned with different stones lead to the higher rooms, from which crystal windows surrounded with pearls look down, glittering like the bright eyes of a beautiful maiden.’ The passage that the stucco was laid on as thick as a hand can only mean that the ornament was worked in relief. Richly-painted ornamentation in stucco with mosaic and other patterns must therefore have existed. These undoubtedly originated, like the Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian wall-decorations, in textile fabrics, which, having been found to perish too quickly, were made of a stronger, more durable material, preserving, however, all the character of the original patterns and material.

The Indians are distinguished by a keen observation of nature, and, so far as the conventional treatment of flowers, fruits, creepers, trees, and animals is concerned, we may learn much from them; but we have carefully to avoid their over-ornamentation. In their treatment of architecture, want of subordination of the single parts to a well-proportioned total is the greatest fault; in their sculptures of the human figure, the soft and waving lines predominate, creating a kind of voluptuous sensuality which is entirely opposed to good sculpture. Their naturalism is objectionable, and leads to a wild, fantastic coarseness which can never be pardoned in art. Measure and harmony are wanting. Gorgeous and mean, powerful and petty, sublime and ugly, are their products. Indian art, religion, and poetry are so closely united that it is impossible to understand the one without a diligent study of the other two. We have in Indian art the first attempts of humanity to step out of childhood. To children, wisdom is best communicated in symbols, mystic signs, fables, legends, and fairy-tales, and therefore Indian art is distinguished by these characteristics. The tupo, sutupo or sutheouphu, from the Sanskrit stûpa, a heap (our word top) or a pile of earth, corresponding to a tumulus, was at the same time a symbol of the religious principles of the Hindoos. It is said of Buddha that he once preached to his disciples, on the shores of the Ganges, on the instability of all things, the frailty of human life, on the grief and sorrows of our existence, comparing life to a water-bubble, consisting of the four elements and still perishing so quickly. The water-bubble thus lent its form to the tope and daghopa, which latter, according to W. v. Humboldt, means ‘hider of the body,’ destined for the reception of Buddha’s relics. The tower which rises inside the tope is symbolic of the nine incarnations of Vishnu. We have in the Indian temple, as in our Gothic churches, a homily in stone. The arched dome has to remind us of the perishableness of life; the daghopa, with its seven or nine divisions, tells us that there is hope for the immortal soul to reach heaven through seven or nine degrees of purification. The protecting canopies (umbrellas) are symbolic of Buddha’s intercession, which he is sure to accord, if we only recognise the nihilism (nothingness) of our earthly existence.

The religious construction was also extended to every-day utensils, a tendency which was universal with all the people of the Aryan group. To these typical ornamentations belong the lotus flower and the tree and serpent ornament. The religious conception is everything with the Indian. It is not the form itself that he cares for, but the religious thought which is expressed emblematically, allegorically, or symbolically. This is the reason why he clings to his fourteen-armed divinities. It is God and His powers that he wishes to represent; but, whenever man attempts to express the incomprehensible or the abstract in visible and concrete forms, he errs. The soul of the Indian is absorbed in God: in Him is everything; the world is without Him and still within Him. All beings take their origin in Him and return to Him. An everlasting emanation and absorption is continually proceeding before the eyes of the Indian, and, looking for a type of this wonderful process, he found it in the ‘Aswatha’ tree, the Indian fig-tree (Ficus Indica). The banyan takes root, so to speak, in the air, grows downwards, grasps the earth with its branches, shoots upwards again, and repeats this process ‘ad infinitum.’ Everything coming near its feelers is embraced, covered over, and in this mystic encircling, annihilated. From time immemorial this sacred tree has been the tree of life, the symbolic tree of the petrifaction, vivification, and incarnation of God’s spirit in minerals, plants, animals and man. This pantheistic conception is not favourable to art: it crushes the powers of the artist, who has to deal with too great an ideal weight in forms.

There is another species of fig-tree (Ficus religiosa) which does not take root again, but the leaves of which appear eternally to tremble; it became the symbol of the ever-moving and oscillating spheres filling the universe. The tree combines two working cosmical forces, it partly remains the same and still continually changes and varies; it is now covered only with leaves, by degrees with leaves and blossoms, and at last with leaves and fruits; then its vitality apparently dying away, leaves, blossoms, and fruits vanish, to be renewed again with the same regularity and abundance. The mind, not yet accustomed to account for every phenomenon by simple or compound gases, globules, or atoms, set in motion by affinities, is altogether absorbed by the miraculous phenomena of nature, and, having been kept for thousands of years in this absorption, is incapable of seeing objects in their proper light. It sees in every form a metaphysical cause, which leads in ornamental art to those entwined, confused, monstrous, and bizarre combinations, which mar symmetry, mock eurythmy, distort proportion, have no direction, and, trying to express the inexpressible, have no expression at all.

The artist, if he wishes to work in the Indian style, must make himself acquainted with the feelings that animate the Indian mind. He will do best by generally using their arabesques, and arranging them after a careful study of the antique into symmetrical forms. The Indian conventional treatment of plants in surface-decorations is unsurpassed, and in this we may learn from them; but we have to beware of their monotonous excellence, and their everlasting repetitions. We may, here and there, use their forms, but we must bring order and measure into the wild and unintelligible chaos. If we want to produce entirely Indian patterns we must not alter them, or else we destroy their effect; but we may be original in merely using the form, and endowing it with a spirit of our own; this being the great advantage of the historical study of art.

Indian architecture has been well systematised by Mr. Fergusson. We have in the north the Bengallee, in the south the Dravidian, and in the west the Chalúkyan style; besides these we have three distinct religious styles—the Brahmanic, the Buddhistic, and, at a later period, the Mahomedan.

Turning to the Cis-Himâlâyans, who appear under numberless names of tribes, nations, and races, and by degrees peopled Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Northern Europe, Italy, Spain, France, and England, and carried religion and civilisation into Egypt; we begin to tread, for the first time, on really historical ground, for we shall be able to place events in time absolute.

Persia—the Hebrew Elam, the Indian Paraça, from Pars, or Fars, or Fardistan—differs entirely in geographical position, climate, and natural products from China or India. Hekatæos, Artemidoros, Eratosthenes, and Strabo describe the climate and soil of Persia as cold and sterile in the north, temperate and fertile in the central or valley regions, and hot and enervating in the south. We have, therefore, enterprising activity, energetic courage from the north, and a counteracting regulating element in the centre, tinged with the dreamy idleness of the south. The aspect of nature is less oppressive. Instead of gigantic creepers, the vine, with its juicy grapes, clings to tall and fruitful trees; bright-eyed gazelles abound; lions and tigers excite to daring hunts; exquisitely-coloured and fragrant roses perfume the air, and open the mind to the gentler impressions of a tender beauty. The Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians rose to power, declined, and passed away with all their grandeur; but in these very changes there were activity and life. The Persians were the first to proclaim a governing universal unity, which endowed men with forces, enabling them to become virtuous and intellectual by their own exertions. They remained faithful to the first impressions of nature, in which the Eternal Spirit revealed himself.

The Persians, like the Indians, expressed the cosmical elements of creation symbolically by means of geometrical signs, which are given below.

This five in one comprised the creation; it was the work of Chudâ (Khuda), Choda from the Sanskrit Svadâtta (self-given, God-given). From the Zend word Chuda, or Choda, we have the words Gott and God. At a later period man’s imagination soon perceived in these abstract signs a concrete form; it turned Cha into the head of a being, Ka into the arms, Ra into the chest, Wa into the lower parts of the body, and A into the feet, and thus the first embryonic, ill-shapen incarnation, or embodiment, of the creative power of nature was formed. This embryo, by degrees, developed into the master-pieces of Greek sculpture.

In Persia, the pure and exalted consciousness of a first, incomprehensible cause leaving its products, the special manifestations of its creative power, free in themselves, was fostered and developed. To the Persians we owe the first clear conception of a God independent of nature. Spirit and matter are not one with them, as with the Indians. With the Persians God is separated from His creation—the universe. God, as the ruling Spirit, acquires subjective reality; man, His creature, whether good or bad, whether poor or rich, whether righteous or unrighteous, whether high or low, is, as His creature, equal and free. Man thus obtained a free position face to face, if we may say so, with the Supreme Being—the Creator. What a totally different mode of thinking to that in China or India! In China man is a mere machine, regulated by stereotyped moral maxims. In India duties and rights depend on the chance of birth; the Brahman is a born priest, whether he has talent or not for his vocation; the Kshattriya, a born soldier, though he may be the greatest coward; the Vaisya, a born merchant or artisan, in spite of his utter incapacity for business; and the S’udra, a born slave, though he may be gifted with greater wisdom than the Brahman, more heroic virtues than the Kshattriya, and more talent for commerce, trade, or art than the Vaisya.

In Persia the Aryans acquired, for the first time, a kind of collective freedom, but not yet an individual consciousness as free agents. The Indian language and Indian metaphysics, in the garb of mythology, were undoubtedly components of Egyptian, Persian, Assyrian, Chaldæan, and Babylonian art, and the forms thus produced, in their turn, became the direct elements out of which Grecian art in its infancy developed itself.

The Persians are direct descendants of the Zend people. Their language is nearly the same as Sanskrit. Out of ten Zend words, seven or eight are Sanskrit.

Persian history may be traced back into time relative; for, when it passes into time absolute, the advanced state of the people in science, especially in astronomy, their social condition, and their architecture and ornamental art, prove that they must have existed in a social bond for thousands of years, in order to develop and to attain that progress which excites our astonishment even after the lapse of more than 6,000 years.

Their history may be divided into the following periods:—

1. The mythic period, from an unknown time down to the foundation of the vast, well-organised, and powerful Persian empire by Kai-Khorus, or Kyrus, in the sixth century B.C.

2. The second period affords reliable accounts of the existence of the empire down to Alexander the Great, from 560 B.C.-330 B.C.

3. The history of the Persians, as members of the Greek-Makedonian empire, ending with the conquest of Persia by the Arabs from 330 B.C.-137 B.C.

4. The empire of Central Persia, under the Arabs, down to its extinction by the Mahomedans in 651 A.D.

5. The dominion of the Kaliphs down to its destruction in 1258 A.D.

6. The last period continuing to our own time.

The mythic and historical periods of Persia resemble two diverging lines, of which the undoubted fact of the reign of Kai-Khorus forms the connecting point. Whilst the historical line grows more and more distinct as it proceeds, the mythic line retreats farther and farther into the dim region of the unknown. Passing from the known to the unknown, we must assign to the development of Zend thoughts, institutions, mode of writing, and mode of building, a greater antiquity than to the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments. Of Persian remains we possess nothing but skeleton buildings, which, from the entire absence of connecting walls, lead us to infer that they were still mere tents, and that the textile fabric had not yet undergone the further process of incrustation in stucco or stone sculpture.

This is not the case with Nineveh and Babylon, the great towns, or, as we should say, the great empires, on the Tigris and Euphrates. Through the indefatigable exertions of the Right Hon. Mr. Layard, M. Botta, Lord Loftus, and Mr. Rassam, we possess now, in London and Paris, tablets with records more than 3,000 years old. The boundary stones prove that some fixed laws regulated territorial property, even at these remote periods. The personal ornaments, consisting of mother-of-pearl studs, silver rings, bracelets, gold and pearl earrings, beads, and shell-bosses with bronze pins, testify to a high civilisation. The mode of writing in Nineveh and Babylon was borrowed from the Zend people; and the religious conceptions of the Persians are undoubtedly older than the already-complicated idolatry based on the astronomical notions of the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The Zend-Avesta (meaning the living word) may be said to be like an Egyptian Nile-meter, erected on the primeval soil of history, measuring the yearly deposits and alluvial sediments of by-gone ages. Through the pure crystals of myth and poetry we may see the inner formation of society, whilst from without the vast construction of history is mysteriously going on. We wander through endless lines of Memnon statues, all resounding with the legends of past ages, in perusing the Zend-Avesta, and are suddenly led before the fountain of all matter, at which the high-priest stands, commanding in the harmony of the seven planets the birth of the world, and the origin of all things.

Our first parents, according to the Zend-Avesta, dwelt in Eriene Veedjo, or Iran Veji, or Aria, Aturia, Asshuria, meaning the fiery or bright land, figuratively the blessed land, in a happy garden, the paradise, assigned to them by Ormuzd—contraction of Ahura-Mazda (the divine Being or the Great Lord). From this they were driven by Agrômainyus, Ahriman, the murderer from the beginning, who changed the seasons, transforming the seven beautiful summer months into ten cold and dreary winter months, leaving only two tolerably warm months. The division of the year into twelve months is clearly proved by this mythic statement. Can anyone count the ages, and describe the means by which Persians, Chaldæans, Medes, Egyptians, and Indians arrived at a systematic arrangement of time, dividing the year into twelve months? After the reign of the Abads (fathers, abbas) Azer-Abad ruled; then Dshey-Afram, Kedor-la-Omer (Cadam, Adam) followed; he ruled 560 years, and attained the venerable age of one thousand years. We find here, as in all old records, the tendency to ascribe to man a longevity which he has long lost. Like shadows which are more gigantic in the rising and setting sun than in the broad mid-day, historical facts in the first dawn of consciousness are exaggerated and turned into fables, which again vanish in the bright light of scientific criticism. Cadam was followed by Siamek, who was succeeded by Tahamur, who conquered the Devas, or evil spirits. He learned from them the art of writing and reading, constructed aqueducts and viaducts, and taught his people music and the use of iron. The Aryans on this side of the Himâlâyas had passed the savage state (the palæolithic period of art), entered into the nomadic (the neolithic period), settled down and used bronze instruments, and then were taught, no longer as with the Indians, Egyptians, and Greeks by a divinity, but by one of their rulers, to extract iron from the ore and to work it. With Tahamur we step into the iron or historical age.

Dshemshid, the Greek Achæmenes, the Biblical Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord, pierced the earth with a golden dagger—allegorically meaning that he improved agriculture. Dshemshid ruled 616½ years; he built Persepolis, or Takt-i-Dshemshid (the throne of Dshemshid). He was, however, conquered by Zahok and sawn into two pieces, meaning that the empire of Dshemshid had been divided by Zahok, who was a descendant of the cursed race of Aad. He is said to have been the Sesostris, or Sesoosis, of the third dynasty of the Egyptians, the 332nd king after Menes the builder of Memphis, a great conqueror who went to India, took possession of Thracia and Skythia, and united Æthiopia, Libya, and Egypt into one mighty empire in the fortieth century B.C. He is also said to have been Ninus, who with Semiramis, the night-born queen of doves, and the daughter of the water-sprung Derceto, is set down as the builder of Nineveh, and the founder of the empire of Babel. Takt-i-Dshemshid existed before either Nineveh or Babylon; its priority is borne out not only by these records, but, as we have said, by the very ruins left of the Persian metropolis. The name Parsagad, or Passagarda, means ‘camp of the Persians,’ and points to an early, unsettled state of society; as also do the ruins, which may be divided into two classes:—

1. The ancient Persian monuments of Dshemshid.

2. The monuments of the reign of the Sassanides.

The name Persepolis was first used by the Greek historiographers who accompanied Alexander the Great, to denote that part only of the vast town in which the tomb of Kyrus was situated, and this gave rise to much confusion.

Passagarda, Isthakr, or Estakar, was situated on the border of one of the richest and most beautiful plains of Central Asia, watered by the Bendemir (the Araxes of the ancients), and surrounded by lofty mountains, ‘whose rugged masses rise from the verdant plain like islands from the ocean.’

The oldest monuments are:—

1. The ruins of the palace now called by the Arabs Tshil-Minar (the forty columns), and two great tombs close by.

2. Four other tombs, about four and a half English miles to the north-west, and in the plains of Murghab the ruins of Passagarda, built by Kyrus to commemorate his victory over Astyages, who came from Hamadan (Ecbatana). Here is situated the pyramidically-constructed tomb of Kyrus, made of white marble blocks. Farther north are the ruins of Bisutun.

Passing to the monuments under the reign of the Sassanides; they consist of reliefs and inscriptions hewn in rock at a distance of about four and a half miles from the ruins of Persepolis. They are called Naksh-i-Rustam (the image of Rustam), because it was assumed that the exploits of this hero were here glorified. De Sacy, in his ‘Mémoires sur diverses Antiquités de la Perse,’ has explained the inscriptions as referring to the kings of the Sassanide dynasty. The reliefs are portraits of these kings, recognisable by their head-dresses.

The distance from Passagarda to Tshil-Minar is about forty-nine English miles, and this space is crowded with Persian monuments. It is most probable that the more recently-made subdivisions did not exist, but that the capital of the ancient Persian empire extended from Passagarda to Tshil-Minar, including Isthakr, Naksh-i-Rustam, and the king’s palace, called by the Greeks Persepolis. The palace was cut out of the beautiful grey marble rock towering over it, and stood on three well-defined, gradually-rising platforms. The arrangement was like that of the Indian, Egyptian, and later Greek temples; the first terrace corresponding to the Pronaos, where the people paid their homage to the king; the second to the Naos, where the ambassadors of the different nations assembled; and the third to the Adytum, where the king had his special temple and private abode. The whole foundation was constructed of bold Kyklopean masonry.

At the gates stood colossal fabulous animals, fantastic representations combined of the lion, the bull, the horse, the wild ass, the rhinoceros, the ostrich, the eagle, the scorpion, and the unicorn. Besides these there were winged and horned animals, and others having the winged body of a lion, the feet of a horse, and the head of a man, with well-curled, long beard and crowned with the tiara—the symbol of the king’s power, endowed with intellect, force, and swiftness. The bull with the Persians was, like Nundi with the Indians, Apis with the Egyptians, and Taurus with the Greeks, a sign of strength and power.

The capitals of Persian columns were not yet made to support a heavy stone weight, but only a light wooden beam. The foundation walls were, like those of Nineveh and Babylon, covered with sculptures, the designs of which were all of textile origin. But in these sculptures, as in those of Kouyunjik and the Palace of Nimrod, the theological, or religious, and symbolical element is entirely left in the background. We have the friends, relations, and servants of the king; tributaries submitting to kings; officers holding fly-flaps of feathers; horses crossing rivers; kings hunting and slaying lions; armies before besieged towns; warriors returning from battle; battering rams; chains to destroy the action of rams; soldiers mining ramparts; infantry with bows and shields; removals of cattle and spoil from captured cities; boats floating on rivers; galleys going to sea; damsels and children with musical instruments; and mathematical tablets with calculations of square roots. We have man active, warring, scientific, and only here and there some scenes of a religious character, and these more frequently in Nineveh and Babylon.

The cause of this phenomenon was the religion of the Zend people. Its founder was Zarathustra, Zerdusht, Σοροάθεος {Soroatheos}, Zoroaster—partly a mythical, partly a real person. His name appears to have been derived from the Sanskrit Sûrya-dêvas, meaning ‘the Sun-god.’ According to Aristotle Zoroaster lived 6,000 years before Plato. The Biblical Abram, Sesostris the Egyptian king, and Moses, were all honoured by this name. Svedius mentions a Zoroaster 500 years before the Trojan war. The historical Zoroaster, the compiler of the religious tenets of the Zend people in the Zend-Avesta, lived about 589 B.C.; he was therefore a contemporary of Confucius, Pythagoras, Jeremiah, and Ezra. He received the holy books from Ormuzd on Mount Elbruz.

The Zend-Avesta assumes one Universal Being, clothed in an outward form, but this form is Light. Light is neither a serpent, nor a stone, nor a four-handed monster, nor a three-headed Brahmā, nor a bull, owl, or hawk; it is a simple manifestation, it has no particular existence, it perceptibly pervades universality. It admits of a highly symbolical interpretation; it is virtue, it is truth, proficiency, knowledge, and directing will. Light involves an opposite—darkness, just as virtue has an antithesis—evil. Both light and darkness took their origin in the unlimited All (Zeruane-Akerene). We have here clearly a purer Trinitarian conception. We have (1) the Infinite All, producing (2) light or good (Ormuzd), and (3) darkness or evil (Ahriman). With the Indians Brahmā is ether; Vishnu, water; and S’iva, fire; and in spite of all spiritualisation we have matter before us. The Persians, in becoming conscious of light and darkness, destroyed the innocence of mankind, but proclaimed to the world moral consciousness. Without a knowledge of evil there is no knowledge of good; to be virtuous is to know the evil and to do the good.

This led the Cis-Himâlâyans a step further. The two opposing phenomena, light and darkness, were placed, like good and evil, purity and impurity, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, in eternal conflict. Creation was thus considered as in everlasting strife. This strife was life-activity in honour of Ormuzd or Ahriman. This activity was carried beyond this world; for the followers of Ormuzd, there was a heaven, and for the followers of Ahriman, a hell in the future. Ormuzd had Fervers as attendants; Ahriman, Dews or Devas (in Keltic Dusii, devils). On the Persian and Assyrian slabs we see, floating over the heads of the kings, their winged portraits; these represent their protecting Fervers, one of whom continually watched over each good man, and protected him from the influences of Ahriman’s servants.

The worship of Ormuzd, in whose sight all creatures were equal, but equally dependent, was threefold:—

(a) Pure thoughts, through which alone we may approach the beginning of all things, wisdom and light—God.

(b) Pure words, the word of God (the Logos), which is no longer personified as some visible form, but is the mere vibration of the spirit of God, embodied in abstract signs in the Zend-Avesta.

(c) Pure deeds, accomplished by one’s own efforts, as we are endowed with perfect individual freedom.

This religion was the cause why the Persians had no special temples, but only small altars. The vaulted azure heavens were the glorious temple of Ormuzd, which he was compelled to share with Ahriman. Neither light nor darkness, however, could be carved or painted; the dynamic force of the artists was therefore directed to matter-of-fact scenes, to ornamentations, showing a better balance between forms and ideas. The rosette, the palmette, the sun with its disc, the moon, the pine-cone, the pomegranate, intermixed with clearly-defined, and not much entwined, geometrical patterns, were the principal means of ornamentation.

At a later period a tendency to allegorical and emblematic figures appeared. The artists composed cherubim, chimeras, basilisks, griphons, kentaurs, and sphinxes; undoubtedly influenced by Indian and Egyptian ideas, for Nineveh and Babylon were the ancient Venice and Genoa of the far East, situated as they were on the commercial high-roads, the twin-rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Babylonian textile fabrics were highly appreciated from time immemorial. Serpents and trees, winged witches and flying-fish, were first spell-bound in Babylonian tapestry, and then carved in stone on the walls of Nineveh. The immense riches which we possess in the British Museum, enable every student of art-history to see before him the active life of the Cis-Himâlâyans, whether as Assyrians, Persians, Medes, or Babylonians, in clear and distinct outlines. Their knowledge of embossing gold and silver was considerable. Their household furniture, drinking cups, tables, candelabra, bracelets, and rings are of strictly architectural construction. We miss that overburdening confusion in ornamentation which distinguishes the Indian products; and the more correct treatment of ornamental outlines, especially to be seen in their mosaics and tesselated pavements, approaches Greek forms.

The commercial spirit, which swayed this portion of the river-valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, engendered a powerful activity in a practical direction. Whilst we build railways—the Babylonians dug canals, connected the two rivers, and constructed aqueducts. They built palaces at Nineveh, castles (El Kassr) at Babylon, and an immense nekropolis at Vurka, about 180 English miles from Bagdad, and about 8 miles to the east of the Euphrates. At every step in the interior of these ruins we find clay-coffins piled up to a height of from 15–20 feet. All these ruins are now covered with saltpetre, small shells and broken pottery. The remains of the walls are from 12–22 feet thick, partly of unbaked and partly of baked bricks. The construction everywhere closely imitates wood-work, and the decoration reproduces textile fabrics such as carpets and striped tent covers. There are capitals in stucco of the Ionic and even of the Corinthian type; though the leaves are those of the palm-tree instead of the Acanthus. The volute of the Ionic capital is rather in the form of two serpents drinking from a cup, than in the form of rams’ horns. We might call this old Babylonian stucco capital, the proto-Ionic type.

On the two shores of the Euphrates, as far as Babylon, coffins of green glazed clay and small terra-cotta tablets with cuneiform inscriptions have been found by thousands. These coffins were imitations of dead bodies, swathed in cloths and tied with cords. In addition to this reproduction of textile fabrics in clay, we find with the Cis-Himâlâyans a tendency to overlay wood-carvings with metal coatings. When they advanced more in metallotechnic they still held to patterns which clearly had their origin in wood-carvings. The plant-like forms predominate; then we have the quilloche, palm-leaves, or feathers arranged in the form of palm-leaves, and the pine-cone, which is often used in eurythmical variation with the conventionally-treated open or closed tulips, and open or closed lotus flowers.

The pictorial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians shows us two distinct periods—an older and a more recent one. The older works had a bluish-green ground; the later a light, either whitish or yellowish, ground. In both styles the outlines are marked strongly in black or dark red. In the older, the sinews are more rope-like and less correct in their anatomy. In the more recent style a finer treatment, and a more correct knowledge of the human frame, may be traced. Wild animals are reproduced with a keen eye of observation, and a strong tendency to naturalism.

Polychromy was known to them, but it is very difficult to decide whether they coloured in tempera or in fresco, with wax or by some other means—perhaps even in oil. The incrustation of clay walls with baked and painted, and even glazed, tiles it is difficult to explain. In many instances, as at Vurka, each cone has its own colour, and, by a proper arrangement, squares, imbrications, diapers, and networks were produced; but at Babylon and Nineveh the tiles show clear marks of painting. Diodorus (probably after Ktesias) gives us a description of the interior circular wall of the royal palace at Babylon, and says: ‘It was decorated with all sorts of coloured human and animal forms baked in clay, much resembling nature. The whole represented a hunt. The figures were more than four yards high. Semiramis was to be seen by the side of her husband Ninus, she killing a panther, he piercing with his dart a lion.’ The principles of decoration with the Assyrians far surpass mere ornamentations in geometrical patterns. Dramatic life of a higher kind is introduced, showing greater artistic power than the reliefs in stone. The outlines are neither black nor red, the treatment is tasteful, the colours a tender blue, brown, white or yellow, and the ground a lightish green. These paintings are not mosaics, as at Vurka.

The baking and glazing must have taken place in the following manner. The unbaked tiles were arranged and numbered in a horizontal position on the ground, then they were painted and placed vertically on the wall as a tapestry decoration. When the wall was finished it must have been heated, so as to change the light and fluid colours into a kind of enamel, giving the clay-wall a thin terra-cotta coating.

The utilitarian purpose was everything with the Persians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. This is evident in their furniture, especially in their tables, chairs, and footstools. The construction of the frame was taken from plants and trees, whilst wild animals were used as silent and obedient domestic creatures. In supporting their furniture with the legs of the lion, tiger, or leopard, they used these animals for an excellent ornamental purpose. The legs of the brute were made to support, the body was turned into a seat, and the head was conventionally used as a side-ornament for the backs or arms of the throne or chair. We see in the Cis-Himâlâyans, in accordance with their greater activity in life, a further progress in art. Merely geometrical figures do not suffice; not monstrous divinities, but animals and men, are the most important subjects of sculpture. Their architecture was without symmetry and proportion, the material of their buildings in no accordance with the monumental tendencies of their construction, and their efforts did not carry them further than the vague attempts of half-settled nomads. Their walls, which once consisted of textile hangings, retained this character, stretching for thousands of feet without any interruption, except that the doorways had their colossal symbolic guards, which to a certain extent relieved the monotony of the construction. The art of Persia and Assyria is in every sense the transition-link between nomadic and monumental art.

[CHAPTER VI.]
EGYPTIAN ART.

‘Anything capable of uniting many souls—is sacred,’ says Goethe. The sacredness of religious tenets or monumental buildings is at once explained by this. To unite humanity into one great brotherhood was first attempted by the Babylonians with their huge tower of Belus, Baal, or Babel. Men for the first time left patriarchal particularism, and tried to build a beacon reaching up to the stars, calling humanity together to one spot, by a work produced by their united labour as a visible sign of their union. This first attempt at a really monumental building was made in the plains of the Euphrates. Whilst the people of Asia still struggled to settle down, and changed their habitations and with them their forms of art, we see monuments emerge from the dim past, which reflect man for the first time in his grandeur as wielder of matter.

The sphinx in its incomprehensible, mysterious form, half brute, half human being, may be looked upon as the very emblem of Egyptian art.

It is written in one of the Hermetic books, ‘O Egypt, fables alone will be thy future history, wholly incredible to later generations, and nought but the letter of thy stone-engraved monuments will survive.’ Our knowledge of Egypt is scarcely half a century old. It originated in a black basalt stone, the so-called Rosetta-stone, deposited, at the beginning of the century, in the British Museum. Approached by Dr. Young, of Cambridge, with the wand of investigation, this stone poured forth a little spring, which has now swollen into a mighty river, carrying off with irresistible force all those little souls who, on their small boats of prejudice, with tiny chronological ladles, try to stop the sweeping power of historical truth. We know something at least of Egypt; we have monumental evidence, which surpasses all written documents, which may be voluntarily or involuntarily falsified. Egyptologists may be divided into two parties:—the long and the short chronologists. The short chronologists, in the face of our advanced knowledge of geology, of the vast accumulation of pre-historic relics, consisting of flint instruments, pottery, weavings, and architectural remains (lake and pile-dwellings), deserve no consideration. They follow the chronological dislocation of Rabbi Hillel, of the first half of the fourth century A.D., with childish ignorance. This view is the most charitable, as otherwise we should be driven to accuse them of interested knavery. After the exertions of a Champollion-Figeac, Böckh, Barucchi, Bunsen, Brugsch, Henry, Lesueur, Lepsius, Hincks, Kenrick, Uhleman, &c.—who all belong to the long chronologists, to turn to the short chronology is impossible.