touch, but we can see that they were
always acting and reacting on each other in the later centuries before
our era, and that Greece profited by them. The first efforts of both
to break through this chrysalis stage, resulted in the early Greek
archaic style. Its strongly marked, muscular humanity reminds one of
all the conflicting impressions struggling in the conception of the
great artist who first embodied them. They appear to be breaking out
from the trammels of Egyptian and Assyrian styles, which by meeting
had engendered life; and Greek art was the child of their union. Then
art, having shaken off symbolism as its only purpose, and seeking to
represent the forms of men, yet possessed by a guiding spirit, first
sought to convey the idea of expression. The worship of humanity,
mingling with that of their gods, produced the Heroic ideal; and all
the attributes of their heroes--majesty, beauty, grace, and
passion--had to be depicted; as well as rage, sorrow, despair, and
revenge. These were soon to be surrounded with all the splendours of
the arts of decoration.

Greece had prepared for this outburst of excellence and the perfect
science of art, by collecting the traditions, the symbols, the
experience in colouring, and the knowledge of beautiful forms, human
and ideal. All that was needed for the advent of the man who could
design and create types of beauty for all ages was thus accumulated,
and the man came, and his name was Pheidias. A crowd followed him, all
steeped in the same flood of poetry and art; and for several
centuries they filled the world with the sense and science of beauty.
Then the function of the designer--the artist--was changed and
elevated, and he became, through the great days of Greek and Roman
Pagan art, and afterwards through the rise of that of Christianity,
the exponent of all that was poetical and ennobling in the life of
man.

But though the Greek artist had broken the chains of prescribed form,
he still adhered to the "motive"--the inner symbolical thought--and
strove to express it as it had never been expressed before.[81] New
principles were evoked, and the artist, while revelling in the
"sweetness and light" of freedom, framed for himself standards of
taste and refinement, which he left as a heritage to all succeeding
generations.

I fear that I am repeating a platitude when insisting that freedom in
all design, but especially that employed in decoration, must be kept
within cer