DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0082
56
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
idealize nothing. But the realism of Assyria she shares,
as I have said, with Egypt; it is not the distinctive charac-
teristic point of her thought and her art. This I con-
ceive to be the symbolic, phantastic, adjectival tendency.
This I conceive separates her entirely from Hellas, to
whom symbolism was repugnant, and in its excessive
emphasis also from Egypt, with whom symbolism was
never more than subordinate. Of idealism Assyria, I con-
ceive, knew nothing, not even those faint beginnings we
have seen in Egypt. Assyrian conceptions of the after-
life seem to have started in the same material fashion as
in Egypt. We hear also of doctrines of judgment and
purification, reward and punishment; but they never,
it seems, attained to the wonderful, spiritual thought of
the union of the dead man with his god, of the putting
on of the divine form and nature, the absorption into
the divine being, which was so powerful an element, as
we have seen, in the ideality of the Egyptians. Realism
tinged with ideality in Egypt—realism, side by side with
phantastic symbolism, in Assyria ; so far art has pro-
gressed, and beyond, as we shall see, idealism is waiting
in Hellas.
But we must return to the king’s robe, for woven into
its fabric is another thought in some sense akin to this
last, but of still wider application, and, for us, in the
history of Greek art, of peculiar interest. For this
STUDIES IN GREEK ART.
idealize nothing. But the realism of Assyria she shares,
as I have said, with Egypt; it is not the distinctive charac-
teristic point of her thought and her art. This I con-
ceive to be the symbolic, phantastic, adjectival tendency.
This I conceive separates her entirely from Hellas, to
whom symbolism was repugnant, and in its excessive
emphasis also from Egypt, with whom symbolism was
never more than subordinate. Of idealism Assyria, I con-
ceive, knew nothing, not even those faint beginnings we
have seen in Egypt. Assyrian conceptions of the after-
life seem to have started in the same material fashion as
in Egypt. We hear also of doctrines of judgment and
purification, reward and punishment; but they never,
it seems, attained to the wonderful, spiritual thought of
the union of the dead man with his god, of the putting
on of the divine form and nature, the absorption into
the divine being, which was so powerful an element, as
we have seen, in the ideality of the Egyptians. Realism
tinged with ideality in Egypt—realism, side by side with
phantastic symbolism, in Assyria ; so far art has pro-
gressed, and beyond, as we shall see, idealism is waiting
in Hellas.
But we must return to the king’s robe, for woven into
its fabric is another thought in some sense akin to this
last, but of still wider application, and, for us, in the
history of Greek art, of peculiar interest. For this