DR. SCHLIEMAAN : BJS LJIE AND WORK. 37 



peculiar character of their architecture and sculpture, and painting was their own 

 invention, and due to no foreign source. The old legends of Cadmus and Age- 

 nor and Danaus bringing the arts from the east to the south were rejected, and 

 Greek art was considered to be purely autochthonous, as the scholars were pleased 

 to disguise the term indigenous. 



What has been now found to be the real state of the case ? The historical 

 Greeks have been everywhere preceded either by Greek ancestors, or by some 

 kindred race who possessed both wealth and ingenuity, and had advanced no 

 small distance both in the useful and the ornamental arts of life. Let us take, 

 for example, the great stone buildings of Mycenas. Here we find enormous 

 stones squared, or even shaped into curves, so as to form the inner surface, per- 

 fectly regular, of a great bee-hive vault. We find heraldic sculpture used over 

 their gates, and such massive defenses as must have mocked any assailant of 

 those days. When Dr. Schliemann found the royal tomb within these walls, he 

 found a vast store of ornaments, and vessels not only beautiful in shape, but 

 delicately and gracefully ornamented, while the sculptures on stone and the gold 

 masks on the faces of the dead were rude and ugly in the extreme. The general 

 character of these ornaments could not be called Greek; it was strictly pre his- 

 toric, barbarous, if you please; nor could it be called Oriental; but there were 

 not wanting traces of Oriental influence and cases of Oriental (including Egyp- 

 tian) manufacture. A portion of an ostrich egg proved beyond doubt the exist- 

 ence of a trade with Africa. Engraved gems of strange designs pointed unmis- 

 takably to similar Babylonian or Hittite ornaments. And if we had fuller knowl- 

 edge of the early art of Asia Minor, there can be no doubt that we should find 

 the Mycenaean art was more imported than original. Not that we mean to deny 

 the originality of the Greeks. We desire rather to correct the meaning attached 

 to the word originality, and insist that in both art and literature pure invention is 

 both rare and unsuccessful, and that true greatness consists in the genius of 

 adapting and perfecting the forms or ideas handed down from earlier minds. 

 There are some productions in which perfection of form was very early attained. 

 The earliest and rudest pots are generally very ugly and clumsy imitations of a 

 female human figure, sometimes of birds or beasts, and so long as this fashion 

 persisted, no beauty was attained. But no sooner was this idea abandoned, and 

 mere curves studied with the aid of the wheel, than we find shapes as graceful as 

 any that can be designed in the present day — nay, superior to most of them. 

 This is very remarkable in the gold jugs found at Mycenae, and which, though 

 of very perfect workmanship, are undoubtedly of great antiquity. And here not 

 only the shape, but the decoration of the surface, is both ingenious and beauti- 

 ful. In terra cotta ware the surface decoration was slower in coming to perfec- 

 tion, but the*shapes of many of the vessels found in pre-historic sites are not to 

 be excelled. There was one vessel found at Mycenae made of some kind of ala- 

 baster, and probably imported from Egypt, which at first sight looked for all the 

 world like a Renaissance vase, the rim being actually a waved circle. The reader 

 must go back to the earlier Ilios and Mycence of Dr. Schliemann for examples to 



