The Evolution of Art. 301 



of Scopas, Lysippus, or Polycleitus during the lives of the 

 artists, and of these, few, perhaps none, had any concep- 

 tion of the posthumous glory which was to immortalize 

 the names of men then walking in their midst, and the 

 principal feature of the situation, as it impresses one who 

 searches for the impulse to this art, will be seen to be 

 that it met the current demand of the ruling sources of 

 power. 



The upper life of Greece was given over to sensuous de- 

 light and to one phase of that ambition that of form. It 

 was reserved for the Roman artist to glut the senses of a 

 later people with the glowing hues of the canvas. Rubens, 

 Titian, and Raphael were to make the coming centuries 

 radiant with their brilliant devices of color, but the luxury 

 of the Greek delighted itself with graceful flowing out- 

 lines. The balmy atmosphere, the languid temperature, 

 the softly breathing winds from the -<Egean waters,. were 

 an ever-present inspiration to well-rounded shapes, and 

 the artist of that time studied industriously the human 

 form and wrought with such matchless cunning that the 

 demand of his generation congealed into the simple, grace- 

 ful beauty of the disentombed statues of the Greek tem- 

 ples. 



And yet for fifteen centuries before the walls of the Par- 

 thenon rose in that golden age of Pericles, when Phidias 

 sculptor, artist, and architect was rearing his monuments 

 of wonder and beauty, there had stood on the banks of the 

 sluggish Nile the most colossal product of human hands, and 

 two hundred years after the walls of the Parthenon were to 

 be shattered by gunpowder the prying eyes of the present 

 century were to explore for the first time the hidden recesses 

 of the Egyptian pyramids. But, if we seek for the beginnings 

 of art, we shall wander back into the age of myths and 

 romances. 



It is impossible for any historian, archaeologist, or evolu- 

 tionist to assert as an established proposition that what we 

 call civilization has not attained heights in the past far be- 

 yond the possibilities of the present to conceive ; and even 

 the signal products of art which are preserved to us may be 

 but the lesser productions of some preceding age, the glories 

 and beauties of which are locked deep in the foundations 

 of the earth. No greater error can be made than to consider 

 our own as the apex age of the world ; for, however humili- 

 ating may be the fact, candor must compel us to admit at 



