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Style.

Beside the discrimination of broad physical differences there is the more subtle observation of style. This cannot be discussed, or even shown to exist, without a very wide collection of examples; yet in a trained observer a long series of experience should result in an unexpressed—almost intangible and incommunicable—sense of the style of each country and each age, such that a piece of work can at once be referred to its proper place, though not a single exact comparison can be quoted for it. Special motives, outlines, curves, tastes, belong to various sources so certainly and characteristically that they show their origin at a glance. A good example of this is seen in the bronzes of Minusinsk in Central Asia; this site is almost equidistant from the North Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the China Sea, and the style seems to recall by its details almost equally the taste of Northmen, Persians, and Chinese. A good practice for such discrimination is the analysis of common ornament around us: a rug or a wall pattern may be analysed into its sources—here a bit from Assyria, there from Egypt, here from Japan, there from Norway, all hashed together by the modern designer. And until the common and obviously distinctive patterns of each country can be named at sight, and separated into their various sources, the observer cannot hope to gain that far more essential sense of the national taste of each people, and the sympathetic feeling of the relationship of any form or curve that may chance to be seen,—that conviction of the family and source of each object, which is the illumination of an archaeologist, the guide to fresh suggestions and researches, the mental framework which holds all memories in place.