Further east, it is difficult for us to enter sufficiently into the fundamental feelings of the races, to enable us to value their art truly. But we can at least feel the grand sense of profusion when looking at the mountainous structures of the immense topes and pagodas of India, peopled with innumerable figures on countless stages. To the minds which produce and live amongst such forms, all other work must seem poor and bare. In Chinese art we can admire the fine adaptation and the sense of minute perfection in the articles before us, the dignity and reserve shown; and, in the literature, even a stranger to the land can feel the intimate harmony with Nature, and the mystic sense of mood in the mountains and trees and lakes around. Hardly any other poetry that we know touches the spirit of life so essentially.

The facile Japanese may well claim an unsurpassed skill and deftness in the painting of Nature, and a power to grasp the greatest amount of reality with the least means. Their perception of Nature in its strange and mysterious moods, which they show by the brush, is almost as penetrating as in the literature of China. Their exquisite sense of fitness, and of taste for beauty of workmanship, only makes us begin to realise the clumsiness of our own cast-iron performances.

To wander so far from Egypt may seem needless; and it would be so if the essentials of other arts were more familiar in English works. We have read lately of an alleged “tyranny of the Nile”; but the real tyranny over English minds for a century past has been the “tyranny of the Hellene.” The one side of art in sculpture has obscured all others; and the English mind has, with its usual idolatry, made the standard of Greece its sole measure. We need to see that a dozen national arts have each been supreme over the others in some one aspect. Then we shall see how meaningless it is to contrast the excellence of one national art with another. Each country has to confess that it has only fully expressed one aspect out of many in the immense range of human life.

Now we can begin to see the real meaning of the so-called limitations of Egyptian art. Every people has had its limitations likewise, fitting it to its conditions; and if we look at them all impartially, and not by the standard of any one of them, we shall see that the deficiencies and limitations of most races are of much the same extent. If the Egyptian had tried to render not only character, but emotion also, he would have been defying his true conditions, as much as if we put a dado of Persian glazed tiles on the Parthenon. To refer this artistic perception to the uniformity of the Nile, is about as true as if we attributed any deficiencies in German art or literature to the prevalence of cold and snow, which is a far greater tyranny than the inundation. Every physical circumstance is a factor in human work, but none of them singly dominates it. There is no point in calling the Egyptian childish in his abilities, as every other nation has been equally childish in some other respects—the Roman in his abject submission to omens, the Greek in playing with words, the Assyrian in his inaccuracy, the Arab in his drawing. In short, there is no essential difference in the capacity for showing national life and feeling by the art of each country; and in the facility and truth of expression Egypt stands in the first rank of those lands where Art has exhibited the character of man.

INDEX