HISTORICAL HYSTERIA

Evening Star, Issue 18533, 16 January 1924, Page 3

HISTORICAL HYSTERIA

SOME PEESISTEHT DELUSIONS.

[By Professor Tucker in the Melbourne ‘ Argus.']

The discoveries'made in the tomb of Tutankhamen have evoked a remarkable display of popular, as well as of specialist, interest. The world is always alert to appreciate new marvels and romance of Egypt and “ Old Kilo.” Some of this special curiosity may be duo to eaily association'with the story of Joseph and the book of Exodus; some is certainly due to t!ho peculiar sense of mystery which generations have felt in the presence of tho Sphinx and -tihe Pyramids. Discoveries in Mesopotamia or Crete, though no less farmidiinr in their dhastening lessons for modernity, have produced comparatively little effect upon the imagination the average reader. One of the results has bean that t'hc grandeur of Egypt and tho relative antiquity of its civilisation have been falsely accentuated. There are those who appear to take it for granted that the Kile Valley was tho cradle of all human culture, and even reputable Egyptologists have been eeduced hr the glamor of their specialty into deriving nil science, art, letters, and the commonest devices of life from, the inventive wisdom of Mamin. Tho saner inquirer finds little justification for such a theory. He is content to recognise the simple fact that, everywhere alike, civilisation is no new thing, and that the deeper the explorer digs the further he pushes back the alleged “ begfnnings ” of an organised and move or less refined society. The usual attitude towards any discovery of objects or customs 4,000, or even 3,000, years old is one of amazement. ‘‘Fancy those old follows being able to achieve things like that! Fancy their cutting, carrying, and erecting those huge monoliths, which tho modern engineer, with all his machinery, finds it so to manipulate! And what stupendous notions of constructions!’’ These and tho like exclamations not only spring to tho lips of tho ordinary untaught modem; they are actuality encouraged hy students who ought to know better. They are the outcome of a persistent delusion as to tho antiquity of man and as to the rate and consrstency Of human progress, and of an equally prevalent delusion as fo the comparative profundity of the modern intellect and its capacity for art and taste,. The person least likely to ho amazed is the classicist. The Home no poems were created 3,000 years ago, the Parthenon nearly 2,400, and the fundamental philosophy of Aristotle some 2,500. Twentyfive centuries ago the Romans wore already working out many of tho economic and constitutional questions which the “ radical reformer” of to-day imagines to afford a fresh field for his <! progressive" crudities. Doubtless (the Greeks were specialty endowed for progress in pure thinking and pure art; doubtless the Romans possessed special gifts for social organisation; hut neither of these peoples had grown a new brain all of a snaden; they did not spring into existence fully equipped, like Athena from the head o'f Zeus ; what they were and did was the outcome of an incalculably long evolution of their ancestry. Whether in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, on the Danube, or in China, wo should, if we could get back 10,000 years instead of 4,000, find human beings not essentially different from those earliest “ancients” at whom the excavator so far .arrived.

I pick up an illustrated paper and find a reproduction of “carvings on bone dons by prehistoric man 25,000 years ago/’ They are often quite good and spirited drawings. Tho mammoth and reindeer were then roaming in France, and the artist was a simple troglodyte; but these memorials prove him to harm had at least a very modern artistic eyo and interest. Being of a cautious temperament, and having but little faith in the hasty calculations of alleged science, I feel no pronounced conviction, ns to the 25,000 years. But it is a nice round number, and it would nob surprise mo if it. were approximately correct. Science has thrust bank the infancy of Homo Sapiens by ,an :n----definite number of millennia, and if there is anything at oil in evolution it would bo absurd to suppose that man's notions and social schemes remained entirely undeveloped for 50,000 or 100,000 years, and then burst inexplicably into an aloe blossom some forty centuries ago. _ External appliances have little or nothing to do with his powers of brain or his tendencies to artistic play, just as they have nothing to’ do with his feeling or conscience. Because wo have Parliaments, aniline dyes, telephones, aeroplanes, and gramophones we are not wiser than Solomon or Aristotle, better artists than Phcidias or Praxiteles, better moralists than Gautama, or Confucius, bolder designers than tho Pharaohs or Shah Johan. Nor was neolithic man necessarily a, person of inferior reason and conceptions simply because ho had to Chop and scrape and mb with stones and to use man-power where wo uso cranes and traction engines. He could at least erect and orientate a Stonehenge, cut and polish and remove stones of a. hundred tons in weight and compact them so that tho provcrinal knife blade could not be inserted at the joints. And for undertaking such labors bo had spiritual and social motives analogous to those which built the Pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Taj Mahal, or Westminster Abbey. Tho error commonly committed is to confuse tho “dawn of history’’ with the dawn of civilisation, or even of humanity. The date from which we begin to know of things is not the date from which things themselves began. The proper view is that, whereas mankind has been gradually evolving its mental and productive possibilities for untold ages, its records are ascertainable during only tho latest fringe of that vast time. Doubtless material creations and contrivances increased enormously after tho discovery of tho use of iron. But that says nothing for the mere mentality or artistic instincts of pieiron man. Material creations and contrivances have again increased enormously sinco the discovery of the uso of steam and electricity; hut that fact does not make us of the twentieth century conceive or build structures to surpass, or even to equal, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, ft does not make us write better poetry than the pre-steam Shakespeare, or paint bettor pictures than pre-olectricity 'Velasquez. If anything, it seems to have made us less capable of creating such glories and grandeurs. If the face of the civilised world were suddenly overwhelmed, to be all uncovered again by in the year 5923, the remains of our cities and monuments of 1923 would probably bo taken as damning evidence that mankind had actually retrogressed in design, structural power, aspirations, and lawe conceptions since the days of Tutankhamen, oi those of Pericles, or those of the cathednu builders. , ■, But this article is headed _ Historical Hysteria,’ and one form of this hysteria, most strongly to be deprecated, is the tendency of writers to describe all newly discovered antiquities whatsoever as being “consummate” or “superb” or incomparable.” Truth to tell, Tutankhamen s

treasure comprises, along with much that is graceful and elegant, a proportion of objects which are crude and ugly. The enthusiast, in his ecstasies of surprise, appears to lose all command of his critical faculty. In the otherwise admirable production entitled 1 Wonders of the Past,’ the editorial notes to the illustrations teem with laudatory epithets which the illustrations themselves are often sufficient to stultify. Huge but hideously inartistic structures of India, crude and formless sculptures of Mexico, rough choppings of the Hittites, receive adjectives which are fit only for tho perfect master-works of Greece, or at least for the sumptuous splendors of Romo or Karnak. Amazing bigness or impressiveness .is not necessarily amazing beauty, nor should the historian ■force himself to discover in some clumsy effort of barbarian art a “vigor” or “boldnjess” which is therein detected only because, the imagination can detect nothing more complimentary to say. The truth revealed bv all the discoveries so far made is that" anything like faultless artistry belonged only to the neighborhood of the' Mediterranean, 'that it reached its purest form and completest reign only in Greece, that in Egypt it existed only in certain departments of creation, that as you went East it was to be found only under Greek influence, and that in Central America it did not exist at all. Let us by all means recognise that “ancient” man, in the more civilised parts of the world, was in many respects quite equal, and in some respects superior, to our noble selves: hut do not let us make the mistake of imagining the whole, world to have been peopled with marvellously gifted races, who have vanished under the attacks' of tho malarial mosquito or of such other a.roncv ns the scientific monomaniac chooses to settle upon.