352 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Mediaeval art in its early stages oxAj changed its characters to saints 

 and angels, priests and bishops. But, as it progressed from its Byzan- 

 tine type, it also gradually gave more and more importance to acces- 

 sories in the background, in which hills, cities, rocks, and trees, began 

 to play a conspicuous part. At last, after the Renaissance, landscape- 

 painting became a recognized and separate branch of pictorial art, first 

 Avith an admixture of figures, wild animals, or still life, but afterward 

 in a more fully differentiated form, with all its varieties of marine, 

 architectural, forestine, or river subjects, its waterfalls, its clouds, its 

 rocks, its valleys, and its heather-clad hills. Even in our own day, 

 very young people and the uncultivated classes care little for any but 

 figure-painting : children pass over the landscapes in their picture- 

 books, and fasten at once upon the man on horseback or the boy with 

 a top. The first object they try to draw for themselves is a human 

 face. So, too, with literature. All primeval literary works consist of 

 a legend, a story historical or mythical, the tale of what some man or 

 some god has done. To the very end, novels, plays, and biography, 

 the most human in their interest, are the favorite forms of literature. 

 Poetry at first is all epic or narrative : lyric and descriptive verse only 

 come in at a much later point of evolution, and are seldom thoroughly 

 relished by any but the most cultivated. " Tell me a story," says the 

 youngest child. " History is the most delightful of studies," says the 

 Roman philosopher. 



We may take the Homeric poems as an excellent illustration of 

 human aesthetic feeling in this its naively anthropinistic stage. In 

 them we find human beauty abundantly recognized and admired : 

 Helen, for Avhose sake Trojans and Achaiaus may well contend through 

 ten long years ; Paris, on whose eyes and hair Aphrodite pours the 

 gift of loveliness ; the golden locks of Achilles, the white arms of 

 Here, the hazel eyes of Athene, the fair cheeks of Briseis. There is 

 much admiration, too, for works of primitive art the golden-studded 

 scepter, the polished silver-tipped bow of horn, the jeweled girdle of 

 Aphrodite, the wrought figures on Achilles's shield, the embroidered 

 pattern on the many-colored peplum which Theano offers on the knees 

 of Athene. The palaces of Priam and of the Phaeacians excite the 

 warmest praise of the rhapsodist. But of scenery there is little said, 

 as is also the case in the Hebrew poets. The garden of Alcinous is, 

 after all, but a well-ordered fruit-orchard. Nature is only alluded to 

 as a difiiculty to be overcome by man the barren, harvestless sea ; 

 the high, impassable mountains ; the forests where roam the savage 

 wild beasts. In the Periclean age, we have a higher but still not a 

 very exalted standard as regards natural beauty ; the " Bacchse " of 

 Euripides being the high-water mark of Athenian love for the pic- 

 turesque, and standing out in this respect as a solitary example among 

 its contemporaries. With the greater security of Roman rule, life 

 became less confined to the immediate neighborhood of cities ; moun- 



