Читать книгу Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin онлайн

100 страница из 120

“Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit,”

the nations conquered by their arms were made to yield up intellectual as well as material spoils. They had neither art, literature, nor science of themselves, and yet we are indebted to them for all three; for what others produced and neglected, they seized upon and made their own. Born in the black shapeless “tents of Shem,” and nursed amidst monotonous scenery, the Arabs could conceive no grander structure than the massive tetragonal Ka‘abah; but Persia was made to supply them with the graceful forms and harmonious colours suggested by the flower-gardens of Iran.^[38] The art of painting, cultivated with so much success in Persia even at the present day, found but little favour with the iconoclast followers of Mohammed; but its influence is seen in the perfection to which mural decoration, writing, and illumination have been brought by the professors of Islam. Caligraphy has been cultivated in the East to an extent which can be scarcely conceived in this country; and the rules which govern that science are, though more precise, founded on æsthetic principles as correct as those of fine art-criticism here.