But of all these works, that which has perhaps rendered the greatest service to the science of archæology is the Handbuch der Archæologie der Kunst, which was published in Breslau in 1830.[24] Translated into French, Italian, and English, it at once took its place as the indispensable guide for all those who wished to learn something of antique art.[25] In all the universities into which archæology had made good its entrance, this manual has formed the basis of the teaching, and also has enabled the pupils to supplement for themselves the lessons which they learnt from their professors. Even now it has not been superseded, and to all appearance it will long preserve its supremacy.
The form of a handbuch or manual, which Ottfried Müller gave to his work, was well and favourably known to cultivated Germans, but it was not so with the French. They had nothing of the kind but worthless epitomes made to facilitate the passing of University examinations. In this matter the Germans are better off than any other nation in Europe. They have manuals in which every branch of history and science is treated by competent writers with as much care and skill as the most ambitious publications, a few being original works by savants of the first order. The arrangement of the Handbuch is very simple. It opens with an introduction in which the author defines art—more especially the plastic arts—divides it into classes, and indicates the principal works to be consulted, namely, those to which he himself has had continually to refer during the progress of his book. Then comes the history of Greek and Roman art divided into periods, and the paragraphs which are devoted to Etruria and the East. To this historical epitome succeed the theoretical chapters.
He takes antique art as a whole, and studies its constitution, the materials and processes which it employs, the conditions under which it works, the characteristics which it gives to form, the subjects of which it treats, and the partition of its remains over the whole territory occupied by ancient civilization. Greece, in her best days, gave most of its care to the representation of those beings, superior to humanity and yet clothed with human forms, in which her glowing imagination personified the forces and eternal laws of nature and of the moral world; it was in striving to create these types, and to endow them with outward features worthy of their majesty, that Grecian art produced its noblest and most ideal works. It will, therefore, be seen that a comprehensive manual had to include a history of those gods and heroes which, with that of their statues, formed a whole mythology of art; and this mythology occupies the larger portion of the second part of the work.
This plan has been often criticised, but we need here make no attempt to repel or even to discuss the objections which have been brought against it.
It has doubtless the inconvenience of leading to frequent repetition; monuments which have been necessarily described and estimated in the historical division are again mentioned in the chapters which treat of theory; but a better plan has yet to be found, one which will enable us to avoid such repetitions without any important sacrifice. The chief thing in a work of the kind is to be clear and complete, merits which the Handbuch possesses in the highest degree. Things are easily found in it, and, by a powerful effort of criticism, the author has succeeded in classifying and condensing into a single convenient volume, all the interesting discoveries of several generations of archæologists. Not that it is a mere compilation, for previous writers were far from being unanimous as to the dates and significance of the remains which they had described, and it was necessary to choose between their different hypotheses, and sometimes to reject them all. In such cases Müller shows great judgment, and very often the opinion to which he finally commits himself had been previously unknown. Without entering into any long discussion he sustains it by a few shortly stated reasons, which are generally conclusive. The plan of his book prevents him from launching out, like Winckelmann, into enthusiastic periods; he makes no attempt at those brilliant descriptions which in our day seem a little over-coloured; but in the very brevity of his judgments and his laconic but significant phraseology, we perceive a sincere and individual emotion, an independent intellect, a pure though catholic taste. We need say no more to the objectors who attack the mere form of the book. Its one real defect is that it was written thirty or forty years too soon. The second edition, carefully revised and largely augmented, appeared in 1835; it was the last issued during the lifetime of Müller. From that moment down to the day but lately passed when the excavations at Olympia and Pergamus were brought to an end, many superb remains of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art have risen from their temporary graves and ranged themselves in our museums. If, however, recent archæology had made no further discoveries, a few occasional corrections and additions, at intervals of ten or fifteen years, would have sufficed to prevent the manual from becoming obsolete. With a little care any intelligent editor could have satisfactorily performed what was wanted. For the Græco-Roman period especially Müller had erected so complete a historical framework that the new discoveries could find their places in it without any difficulty. Welcker, indeed, published a third edition in 1848, corrected and completed, partly from the manuscript notes left by the author in his interleaved copy, partly from information extracted by the editor from the lectures and other writings of Müller. But why does Welcker declare, in his advertisement to the reader, that but for the respect due to a work which had become classic, he would have modified it much more than he had dared. And why, for more than thirty years, has his example found no imitators? Why have we been content to reprint word for word the text of that third edition?
A few years ago one of the most eminent of our modern archæologists, Carl Bernhard Stark, was requested by a firm of publishers to undertake a new revision of the Handbuch. Why then, after having brought his materials together, did he find it more useful, and even easier, to compose an original work, a new manual which should fulfil the same requirements on a system of his own devising?—an enterprise which he would have brought to a successful conclusion had not death interrupted him after the publication of the first part.[26]
The answer is easy. The East was not discovered till after the death of Ottfried Müller. By the East we mean that part of Africa and Asia which is bordered by the Mediterranean, or is so near to that sea that constant communication was kept up with its shores; we mean Egypt, Syrian Phœnicia, and its great colony on the Libyan Coast, Chaldæa and Assyria, Asia Minor, and those islands of Cyprus and Rhodes which were so long dependent upon the empires on the neighbouring continents. It was between 1820 and 1830 that the young savant conceived the ideas which he developed in his works; it was then that he first took an important part in the discussion as to the origin of the Greek nation, upon which archæologists had long been engaged. What part had foreign example taken in the birth and development of the religion, the arts, the poetry, and the philosophy of Greece, of the whole Hellenic civilization? How much of it was due to suggestions derived from those peoples who had so long preceded the Greeks in the ways of civil life? No historian has answered this question in a more feeble and narrow spirit than Ottfried Müller; no one has been more obstinate than he in insisting upon the originality of the Greek genius, and in believing that the Greek race extracted from its own inner consciousness all that has made its greatness and glory.
When Müller first attacked this question, Egypt alone had begun to emerge from the obscurity which still enveloped the ancient civilization of the East. It was not until three years after his death, that Botta began to excavate the remains of Assyrian art; and nothing but the vaguest and most confused information was to be had about the ruins in Chaldæa. Now, however, we can follow the course of the Phœnician ships along the Mediterranean, from the Thracian Bosphorus to the pillars of Hercules. From the traces left by the commerce and the industries of the Syrians and Carthaginians, we can estimate the duration of their stay in each of the countries which they visited, and the amount of influence which they exercised over the various peoples who were tributary to them. Forty years ago this was impossible; the writings of ancient authors were our sole source of knowledge as to the style and taste of Phœnician art, and the ideas which they imparted were of necessity inexact and incomplete. Wherever they passed the Phœnicians left behind them numbers of objects manufactured by them for exportation, and these objects are now eagerly collected, and the marks of the Sidonian and Carthaginian makers examined and classified, and thus we are enabled to recognize and describe the industrial processes and the decorative motives, which were conveyed to the Greeks and to the races of the Italian peninsula by the "watery highway" of the Mediterranean. Fifty years ago the land routes were as little known as those by sea. The roads were undiscovered which traversed the defiles of the Taurus and the high plateaux of Asia Minor, to bring to the Greeks of Ionia and Æolia, those same models, forms, and even ideas, and it was still impossible to indicate their detours, or to count their stages.
Leake had indeed described, as early as 1821, the tombs of the Phrygian kings, one of whom bore that name of Midas to which the Greeks attached so strange a legend;[27] but he had given no drawings of them, and the work of Steuart,[28] which did not appear till 1842, was the first from which any definite knowledge of their appearance could be obtained. Müller knew nothing of the discoveries of Fellows, of Texier, or of Hamilton; while he was dying in Greece, they were exploring a far more difficult and dangerous region. A few years afterwards they drew the attention of European savants to the remains which they had discovered, dotted about over the country which extends from the shores of the Ægæan to the furthest depths of Cappadocia, remains which recall, both by their style and by their symbolic devices, the rock sculptures of Upper Assyria. The Lycian remains, which give evidence of a similar inspiration and are now in the British Museum, were not transported to Europe until after Müller's death.
The clear intellect of Ottfried Müller easily enabled him to perceive the absurdity of attempting to explain the birth of Greek art by direct borrowing from Egypt. He saw that the existing remains in both countries emphatically negatived such a supposition, but materials were wanting to him for a right judgment of the intensity and duration of the influence under which the Greeks of the heroic age worked for many centuries, influences which came to them partly from the Phœnicians, the privileged agents of intercourse between Egypt and the East, partly from the people of Asia Minor, the Cappadocians, Lycians, Phrygians, and Lydians, all pupils and followers of the Assyrians, whose dependants they were for the time, and with whom they communicated by caravan routes. We may thus explain the extravagance of the hypothesis which Müller advocated in all his writings; and, as the originality of the Greek intellect displayed itself in the plastic arts much later than in poetry, the partial falsity of his views and their incompleteness is much more obvious and harmful in his handbook than in his history of Greek literature.