Evolution of Expression, vol 1 | Page 2

greatness. The ancient theory to account for greatness was preternatural birth; the modern theory is evolution. To-day the interest of the child is awakened, his mind is aroused, and then led onward in regular steps.
The study of all forms of art, so far as methods are concerned, should be progressive. For correct guidance in our search for the best methods, we must understand the order of the development of the human mind. A child, before he arrives at an age where he can be taught definitely, is simply a little palpitating mass of animation. Soon he begins to show an attraction toward surrounding objects. Next he begins to show a greater attraction for some things than for others. His hands clutch at and retain certain objects. He now enters the period of development where he makes selections, and thus is born the power of choice. Objects which, at first, appeared to him as a mass now begin to stand out clearly one from another; to become more and more differentiated, while the child begins to separate and to compare. Thus the brain of the child passes through the successive stages from simple animation to attraction, to selection or choice, to separation or analysis. This principle of evolution, operating along the same lines, is found in the race as in the individual. In all man's work he has but recorded his own life or evolution. All history, all religions, all governments, all forms of art bring their testimony to this truth, and in each the scholar may find these successive stages of development.
In the age of Phidias the art of sculpture reached its maturity. No race and no people have ever surpassed the consummate achievements of that period. But this perfection was the result of a process of evolution. There had been graduated steps, and those same steps must to-day be taken in the education of the artist. Art had passed into its second period before authentic Greek history began. The first stage was shown in that nation so justly called the "Mother of Arts and Sciences." In Egypt we find probably the first real manifestations of mind in art forms. They are colossal exhibitions of energy, such as the Temple of Thebes, seven hundred feet in length, statues seventy feet tall, monuments rearing their heads almost five hundred feet in air.
"Those temples, palaces, and piles stupendous Of which the very ruins are tremendous."
To Assyria we turn in our search for the next step in the progress of art. Here we find the artists making melodramatic efforts to attract the attention and fascinate the mind with weird and incongruous shapes of mongrel brutes and hydraheaded monsters.
Finding art at this point, the Greeks, true to their race instinct, at once began to evolve from it higher forms. They soon awoke to the perception that beauty itself is the true principle of fascination. Reducing their new theory to practise, the Greek artists turned their attention to perfecting the details of the art they had borrowed. To works originally repellant from their very crudeness, they supplied finish and perfection of the parts. The ideal was still before them; the grotesque monsters might fascinate the beholder, but, however skilfully executed, however perfected in finish, the impression produced was but transitory, and failed to satisfy the craving of the soul Beauty was found to be the only abiding source of satisfaction. As the conceptions of the past no longer satisfied the criterion which their own minds had embraced, the Greek artists sought in nature herself for models of that beauty, which, when placed in art forms, should be a joy forever. The monsters of antiquity disappeared, and in their places, came attempts to faithfully copy nature. To be sure, some specimens of the art era from which the Greeks had just emerged appeared at much later periods of their history; but these creations, as in the case of the Centaur, were usually representations of what were believed to be historical facts, rather than fantastic creations designed by the artist to startle the beholder. The Greek still gratified his passion for beauty of detail, while he was pursuing his new-born purpose of copying nature. It was not long before he found that nature, however skilfully copied, could be perfectly mirrored to the eye of the beholder only when presented as she appears to the mind of man. This discovery budded and blossomed into the consummate flower of true art, the fourth or suggestive era, which reached its acme in the work of Phidias and his contemporaries. Every creation was the expression of some state of mind. Everything was made as it appeared to the eye of the poet, not as it might seem to the man of no sentiment. The impression of the poetic mind found its