In writing the life of any great man and attempting to account for his actions, it is important to know where he was born, and who were his parents; to learn the circumstances of his education, and the surroundings of his youth. The biographer who should have no information on these points, or none but what was false, would be likely to fall into serious mistakes and misapprehensions. He would find great difficulty in explaining his hero's opinions and the prejudices and sentiments by which he may have been influenced, or he would give absurd explanations of them. Peculiarities of character and eccentricities of idea would embarrass him, which, had he but known the hereditary predisposition, the external circumstances during infancy and adolescence, the whole course of youthful study, of the man whose life he was describing, he might easily have understood. It is the same with the history of a people and of their highest intellectual manifestations, such as their religion, arts, and literature.
It was not the fault of Ottfried Müller, it was that of the time in which he lived, that he was deceived as to the true origin of Greek art. The baneful effects of his mistake are evident in the very first pages of the historical section of his work, in the chapters which he devotes to the archaic period. These chapters are very unsatisfactory. Attempt, under their guidance alone, to study the contents of one of those museum saloons where the remains of Oriental art are placed side by side with those from Etruria and primitive Greece; at every step you will notice resemblances of one kind or another, similarities between the general aspects of figures, between the details of forms and the choice of motives, as well as in the employment of common symbols and attributes. These resemblances will strike and even astonish you, and if you are asked how they come to exist among differences which become ever more and more marked in the succession of the centuries, you will know not how to reply. In these archaic remains there are many traits for which those who, like Ottfried Müller, begin with the history of Greece, are unable to account. He wishes us to believe that Greece in the beginning was alone in the world, that she owed all her glory to the organic development of her unequalled genius, which, he says, "displayed a more intimate combination than that of any other Aryan nation of the life of sensibility with that of intelligence, of external with internal life." He goes no further back than the Greece described to us in the heroic poems; he never has recourse to such comparisons as we are now continually making; at most he lets fall at lengthy intervals a few words which seem to imply that Oriental civilization may have had something to do with the awakening of Greek thought and the directing of her first endeavours. He never formally denies her indebtedness, but he fails to perceive its vast importance, or to declare it with that authoritative accent which never fails him in the expression of those ideas which are dear to him, of those truths which he has firmly grasped.
This tendency is to be seen even in the plan of his work. There is nothing surprising in the fact that Müller, in 1830, or even in 1835, had but a slight acquaintance with the art of the Eastern Empires; but as he thought it necessary not entirely to ignore those peoples in a book which pretended to treat of antiquity as a whole, it would perhaps have been better not to have relegated them to a few paragraphs at the end of his historical section. He knew well enough that the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phœnicians, even the Phrygians and the Lydians were much older than the Greeks; why should he have postponed their history to that of the decline and fall of Græco-Roman art? Would it not have been better to put the little he had to tell us in its proper place, at the beginning of his book?
This curious prejudice makes the study of a whole series of important works more difficult and less fruitful. It prevents him from grasping the true origin of many decorative forms which, coming originally from the East, were adopted by the Greeks and carried to perfection by their unerring taste, were perpetuated in classic art, and thence transferred to that of modern times; and this, bad though it is, is not the worst result of Müller's misapprehension. His inversion of the true chronological order makes a violent break in the continuity of the phenomena and obscures their mutual relations. There is no sequence in a story so broken up, falsified, and turned back upon itself. You will there seek in vain for that which we mean to strive after in this present history of antique art—a regular and uninterrupted development, which in spite of a few more or less brusque oscillations and periods of apparent sterility, carried the civilization of the East into the West, setting up as its principal and successive centres, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, Carthage, Miletus and the cities of Ionia, Corinth and Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Pergamus, and finally Rome, the disciple and heir of Greece.
Ottfried Müller saw clearly enough the long and intimate connection between Greece and Rome, but he did not comprehend—and perhaps in the then state of knowledge it was impossible that he should comprehend—that the bonds were no less close which bound the Hellenic civilization to the far more ancient system which was born upon the banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to spread itself over the plains of Iran on the one hand and of Asia Minor on the other; while the Phœnicians carried it, with the alphabet which they had invented and the forms of their own worship of Astarte, over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. His error lay in his arbitrary isolation of Greece, in dragging her from the soil in which her roots were deeply imbedded, from which she had drawn her first nourishment and the primary elements of that varied and luxuriant vegetation which, in due time, became covered with the fairest hues of art and poetry.
III.
Thanks to the numerous discoveries of the last fifty years, and to the comparisons which they have suggested, thanks also to the theories for which they afford a basis, history has been at last enabled to render justice to certain nations whose activity had never before been properly understood, to give to them their proper place in the civilization of ancient times. But Greece—the Greece which Ottfried Müller worshipped, and for which he was too ready to sacrifice her predecessors and teachers, to whom she herself was more just in her early legends—has lost nothing by the more exact information which is now at our command. Served by her situation on the confines of Europe and Asia and not far from Africa, by the superiority of the genius of her people and the marvellous aptitudes of her language, Greece was able to arrange and classify previous discoveries and to bring them to perfection, to protect from destruction and oblivion the machinery of progress, the processes of art, the newly-born scientific methods, in a word, all the complex and fragile apparatus of civilization which was so often threatened with final destruction, and which has more than once been overwhelmed for a time in epochs of national conflict and social decadence.
This is not the place for insistence upon all that Greece has accomplished in the domains of pure thought, philosophy, and science, nor even for calling attention to her literature. We are writing the history of the arts and not that of letters, a history which we wish to conduct to the point where Müller left off, to the commencement of those centuries which are called the Middle Ages; and Greece will occupy by far the most important place in our work. We shall endeavour to bring the same care and conscience, the same striving after accuracy, into every division of our history; but the monuments of Greece will be examined and described in much greater detail than those of Egypt and Assyria, or even those of Etruria and Latium. It was our love for Greece that drove us to this undertaking; we desire and hope to make her life better known, to show a side of it which is not to be found in the works of her great writers, to give to our readers new and better reasons for loving and admiring her than they have had before. A combination of circumstances that is unique in the history of the world gave to the contemporaries of Pericles and Alexander the power of approaching more nearly to perfection, in their works of art, than men of any other race or any other epoch. In no other place or time have ideas been so clearly and completely interpreted by form; in no other place or time have the intellectual qualities been so closely wedded to a strong love for beauty and a keen sensibility to it. It results from this that the works of the Greek artists, mutilated by time and accident as they are, serve as models and teachers for our painters and sculptors, a rôle which they will continue to fill until the end of time. They form a school, not, as some have thought, to enable us to dispense with nature, the indispensable and eternal master, but to incite to such an ardent and intelligent study of her beauties, as may lead to the creation of great works, works capable, like those of the Greeks, of giving visible expression to the highest thoughts.