300 The Evolution of Art. 



rightly to weigh or judge the varying conditions of man- 

 kind. 



Consider for a moment the state of government, the 

 habits of life, the narrow horizon of that cultivated people 

 who carried the realm of taste in the early age of Greece to 

 such a height that in all the long centuries which have suc- 

 ceeded them no more perfect conception has been known, 

 no more skillful hand has executed than that which buried 

 its identity in the charming outlines of the Venus of Milo, 

 so that in an age which boasts of the elevation of its masses 

 and the erudition of its scholars, which has cloven the bed 

 of ocean for the passage of its thought, its most hopeful 

 students of art are sitting at the feet of artists dead for two 

 thousand years, and are faithfully copying the clear lines 

 and proportions of the human form laid down for them on 

 the banks of the Mediterranean centuries before the Christ- 

 ian era. 



There also had thriven painting, poetry, and architect- 

 ure, and the race that crowded the halls of the Parthenon 

 at its dedication had heard for fifteen generations the mel- 

 low Grecian syllables of Homer repeated in all its house- 

 holds. 



Now, this people was largely an enslaved race; their 

 inventive genius was still slumbering ; the husbandmen of 

 that day plowed, sowed, and reaped with the rudest devices ; 

 the most limited forms of communication existed ; commun- 

 ion with the outer world, and especially with other nation- 

 alities, hardly existed at all. No true conceptions of state- 

 craft were known to their rulers. They had no dealings 

 with humanity in the aggregate. A few independent cities, 

 allied by the most slender threads of mutual interest, consti- 

 tuted their entire state. Their habits of life were of the 

 simplest kind. Their moral culture was at so low an ebb 

 that they banished the wisest man among them from their 

 chiefest city because they were tired of hearing him called 

 the just. And yet the universal consensus of cultivated peo- 

 ple is that in beauty of outline, in matchless expression, in 

 absolute perfection of delineation, their art stands unap- 

 proachable as yet in the history of the Avorld. 



What, then, was the producing cause of their creative 

 effort? Let it be noticed first that the achievements of 

 this age were valued by a limited class of people. It is pos- 

 sible that not a hundred thousand Grecians ever saw all 

 the great works of art which came from the cunning hands 



