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6 National Music of the World. |
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if formal accuracy. When we get back to the art of an elder world, we must allow for ideality, mysticism, and other conventions, as modifying precise representation. If the truth to nature of the honeysuckle in the well-known Greek border, of the Mosaic olive-tree selected by Mr. Ruskin in his ' Stones of Venice' (vol. iii. p. 178), as a touching example of earnestness and generalisation combined, be considered, we surely find in the result a warning for more caution than appears to have been exercised. Who could reason on the genera or habits of those flowers from the presentments specified above? If we must translate (so to say) the motionless attenuated figures arranged in flat procession on the walls of Egyptian tombs and temples, before we can accept them as portraits, an analogous process may fairly be applied to harp, pipe, and sistrum, as depicted by the primitive sculptors and painters of old. To the harp in particular, as the instrument to which, beyond all others, legendary fancy has attached itself, this remark belongs; nor can any speculations on its compass and capacities, as derived from the number of strings depicted under such circumstances, be accepted without great hesitation.
Such are some of the few uncertainties through |
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