Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

none,* certain suspicious fragments preserved in Eusebius Lut helping to show the shameful intellectual poverty of our ancient Philistine. Yet this illiterate people supplied the world with the few and simple but wonderful signs that made both ancient and modern literature possible.+ Though the Phoenician had been a nomad, he was the first to become a mariner. Perhaps these two are not so great contrasts as they look. The child of the desert is by the very necessities of his life a wanderer, over vast plains, too, where unless he can guide his feet by the stars of heaven he cannot find his way to a place of life and rest. Place him on a rock by the sea, and the sea is sure to become to him in time like another desert, to be explored for wealth, to be traversed with goods and for profit, with the way

* But see Movers, "Phönizier," i. cc. iii. iv. Cf. Renan, "Hist. des Lang. Sémit.," 188 ff.

+ Lenormant's "Essai sur la Propagation de l'Alphabet Phénicien " now enables us to trace, so far as it has been published, the diffusion of the Phoenician letters through the ancient world, and the many changes they underwent in their travels. M. L. thinks this great Phoenician invention branched almost simultaneously out in five directions, forming five currents of derivation, each with its special subdivisions. The five trunks are: 1. The Semitic, which divides into two families, Hebrew-Samaritan and Aramean. 2. The central trunk, embracing Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy. 3. The western trunk, the Spanish aborigines. 4. The northern, the German and Scandinavian runes. 5. The Indo-Homerite trunk, which has a greater number of derivations than any other. Antiquity was divided as to the nation which invented commerce, but not as to the inventor of the alphabet. Lucan, "Phars.," iii. v. 220, 224. Pliny, “H. Nat.," v. 12, 13. The purpose of a minuter account of the Phoenician trade, with its manifold agencies and extensive ramifications, has been abandoned with regret.

over it marked by the old lights that had guided his path across the great sand-ocean. And so the once nomadic but now seafaring Phoenicians, who had, too, been awhile among the famed astrologers of Babylon, turned with unerring instinct to the little star at the pole, and steered their course by it, while the Greeks, fascinated by the brilliance of the Great Bear, never reached the accuracy in nautical astronomy of their masters in navigation. And the people who conquered the secret of the sea made a conquest of the greatest moment for humanity. It marked the hour when man's victory over Nature, and his conscious fellowship with man the world over became not only possible, but sure. It prepared the way for a civilization which should make the wealth and intelligence of each land the common property of all. But the end was still distant. The conqueror was not the crowned. Phoenicia, indeed, prospered, but her prosperity was too commercial to live. She evoked the enterprise and genius of Greece,* and then could not live in their presence. She stimulated and then fell under the might of Rome. Her colonies grew up all along the shores of the Mediterranean, but only

*

It is not possible to discuss here the question of Phoenician influence on Greece. Mr. Gladstone ("Juventus Mundi," pp. 118-144) has discussed it from his own peculiar standpoint. M. Lenormant has an interesting étude on the Phoenician settlements in Greece in his "Premières Civilisations," vol. ii. One thing is certain; while Egypt may on some sides have been much more influential-as in architecturePhoenicia was more powerful on others, having been the means of introducing Greece to Egypt.

to fade before the richer civilizations they had fostered. Yet she did not die till she had proved how commerce could enrich, unify, refine, and civilize man. Her discoveries became the property of the race, so incorporated with its being as to make its thews brawnier, its life more persistent and extensive. If certain of them were lost, the memory of their existence did not perish, and their author remained for after ages a

"Pilot of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."

But in spite of their differences, the Assyrian and the Phoenician civilizations were thoroughly Semitic. They were simple, sensuous, unideal, created by men of narrow aims, but intense purposes. Their good was material rather than spiritual. They were haunted by no visions of the beautiful, of a world too ideal to be realized. Nature was to them too dead to speak with the voices the poet can hear, to be full of the shapes the artist can see. And so in art as in poetry they were uncreative. In architecture the Assyrian seemed great, but it was as a builder rather than as an architect. The Phoenician, again, had no sculpture, no native architecture. Egypt and Babylon were eminent in architectural genius, and have left, especially the first, remains that excite in us a wonder akin to awe. But the Phoenicians could only imitate the works of their ancient neighbours,* and did not imitate them well. They

[blocks in formation]

could be extravagant and gorgeous after the ostentatious manner of the genuine Philistine, but could not conceive or embody the beautiful. Herodotos admired and minutely described the monuments of Egypt and Babylon, but the only Phoenician temple he condescended to notice was that of Melkarth in Tyre, and the only thing about it he mentions is the number of rich offerings, especially two pillars, "one of pure gold, the other of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night."* At first sight this poverty in art may appear strange. The Phoenician was a famed handicraftsman, a cunning worker in metals, woods, ivory, a maker of the ornaments the rude tribes loved to buy and he to sell. But he was too good an artisan to be a good artist. Art is work done for eternity; work for the most material things of time cannot be art. What is made for the market is not meant to embody ideal truth. And so the artisan is no artist, is imitative, not imaginative, a copyist, not a creator. The Phoenician, too industrial to be ideal, dreamed not of the art that could make the dumb stone the imperishable expression of things

unseen.

The rise of the first Semitic civilizations, sensuous and unideal as they were, was a decisive event in the history of man. What the Turanian had begun the Semite carried forward, and passed on to the Indo-European. Greece received the ideal and spiritual elements the East had to

ii. 44.

give, assimilated, transfigured, and then embodied them in the perfect forms she alone had the genius to create. Greece idealized, exalted the individual, made man conscious of the glory of manhood. She gave us our models and ideals of the beautiful, interpreted for us man and nature as they exist to the imagination. "In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers," says Hegel,* "Greece cannot be conceived from a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the artistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who create and think, have in those beautiful days of Greece this plastic character. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were and willed to be. The age of Pericles was rich in such characters: Perikles himself, Pheidias, Plato, above all Sophokles, Thukydides also, Xenophon and Sokrates, each in his own order, without the perfection of one being diminished by that of others. They are ideal artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould-works of art which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods.”

While Greece perfected the free, individual, and ideal

* "Esthetik," vol. ii. p. 377. The translation here given is Mr. Pater's "Studies in the Hist. of the Renaissance," 192.

« НазадПродовжити »