A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present DayFergusson, James
History
A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volumes 1 and 2, 3rd ed.: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Fergusson, James
Architecture -- History
The same remarks apply to painting, properly so called. This never can
attain its highest development except when it is the exponent of
phonetic utterances. In Greece the painter strove only to give form and
substance to the more purely intellectual creation of the poet, and
could consequently dispense with all but the highest elements of his
art. In Egypt the picture was all in all; it had no text to refer to,
and must tell the whole tale with all its adjuncts, in simple
intelligible prose, or be illegible, and the consequence is that the
story is told with a clearness that charms us even now. It is however,
only a story; and, like everything else Turanian, however great or
wonderful, its greatness and its wonder are of a lower class and less
intellectual than the utterances of the other great divisions of the
human family.
We have scarcely the means of knowing whether any Turanian race ever
successfully cultivated music to any extent. It is more than probable
that all their families can and always could appreciate the harmony of
musical intervals, and might be charmed with simple cadences; but it is
nearly certain that a people who did not possess phonetic poetry could
never rise to that higher class of music which is now carried to such a
pitch of perfection, that harmonic combinations almost supply the place
of phonetic expression and influence the feelings and passions to almost
the same extent.
There is also this further peculiarity about their arts, that they seem
always more instinctive than intellectual, and consequently are
incapable of that progress which distinguishes most of the works of man.
At the first dawn of art in Egypt, in the age of the Pyramid builders,
all the arts were as perfect and as complete as they were when the
country fell under the domination of the Romans. The earliest works in
China are as perfect—in some respects more so—as those of to-day; and in
Mexico, so soon as a race of red savages peopled a country so densely as
to require art and to appreciate magnificence, the arts sprung up among
them with as much perfection, we may fairly assume, as they would have
attained had they been practised for thousands of years under the same
circumstances and uninfluenced by foreigners. It is even more startling
to find that the arts of the savages who inhabited the south of France,
on the skirts of the glacial period, are identical with those of the
Esquimaux of the present day, and even at that early time attained a
degree of perfection which is startling, and could hardly be surpassed
by any people in the same condition of life at the present day.
SCIENCES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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