They show
that the development of Greek art had already proceeded some way
before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks, and point, if to a foreign
source at all, to oriental rather than Egyptian influences; and the
theory which derived Greek art, with many other Greek things, from
Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In Greece all things are at once
old and new. As, in physical organisms, the actual particles of
matter have existed long before in other combinations; and what is
really new in a new organism is the new cohering force--the mode of
life,--so, in the products of Greek civilisation, the actual elements
are traceable elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them; the
elements, for instance, of its peculiar national [216] architecture.
Yet all is also emphatically autochthonous, as the Greeks said,
new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit
playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all,
with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man--the dignity
of his soul and of his body--so that in all things the Greeks are
as discoverers. Still, the original and primary motive seems,
in matters of art, to have come from without; and the view to which
actual discovery and all true analogies more and more point is that
of a connexion of the origin of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria,
proximately with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly
through Cyprus--an original connexion again and again re-asserted,
like a surviving trick of inheritance, as in later times it came
in contact with the civilisation of Caria and Lycia, old affinities
being here linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition, of
which one representative is the Ionic style of architecture,
traceable all through Greek art--an Asiatic curiousness, or poikilia,+
strongest in that heroic age of which I have been speaking, and
distinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more than others;
and always in appreciable distinction from the more clearly defined
and self-asserted Hellenic influence.
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