Novels are taken up to amuse the vacant hour--in this consists their use. They are read without effort--the mind lies fallow as they are perused, and no study is required, no cultivation of any taste is necessary, to place this amusement within reach. With music and the fine arts, this is not so. The taste for these pursuits requires cultivation; and in order to estimate and appreciate them correctly, the judgment must be formed by a process of education, far different from that which enables all who read to value our poets and authors in the various departments of literature.
On examining the records of mankind, it will be found that this has been the ordinary succession of events in the history of civilization; and that poetry and oratory, the more independent efforts of the human mind, appear in the earlier stages of society, and that by them man is first distinguished as an intellectual and rational creature.
Of Egyptian literature, we know nothing. The destruction of the library of the Ptolemies may be the principal cause of our ignorance. The gigantic remains of this people, and the manner in which they worked in a stone which no modern tool will touch, show that among them the useful arts were considerably advanced. We have, however, abundant evidence of the small degree of proficiency in the fine arts. Their sculptors are characterized by Flaxman as "mere beginners," or "laborious mechanics;" their works as "lifeless forms, menial vehicles of an idea." When Egyptian art ended, then Grecian art began. It appears, however, to have made but little progress down to the time of Homer; and Dædalus and his disciple Eudæus are, we believe, the only artists of that early period whose fame has survived. These sculptors worked in wood, and by their proficiency we may form a pretty accurate idea of the state of art in Greece when Homer wrote. The works of Dædalus are described by Pausanias as rude and uncomely in aspect. In his Grecian tour, Pausanias twice makes mention of a statue of Hercules by Dædalus, from which circumstance it would appear to have been held in high estimation. On this statue Flaxman observes--"In the British Museum, as well as in other collections in Europe, are several small bronzes of a naked Hercules, whose right arm, holding a club, is raised to strike; whilst the left is extended, bearing a lion's skin as a shield. From the style of extreme antiquity in these statues--from the rude attempt at bold action, which was the peculiarity of Dædalus--the general adoption of this action in the early ages--the traits of savage nature in the face and figure, expressed with little knowledge, but strong feeling--by the narrow loins, turgid muscles of the breast, thighs, and calves of the legs, will all find reason to believe they are copied from the above-mentioned statue." Greece, it must be owned, possessed musicians long anterior to Homer: Chiron the Centaur, regarded by the ancients as one of the inventors of medicine, botany, and chirurgery, who, when eighty-eight years of age, formed the constellations for the use of the Argonauts; Linus, the preceptor of Hercules, who added a string to the lyre, and is said to be the inventor of rhythm and melody; Orpheus, who also extended the scale of the lyre, and was the inventor and propagator of many arts and doctrines among the Greeks; and Musæus, the priest of Ceres, are all remembered as musicians, as well as poets, historians, and philosophers; characters which, in those days, were all combined in the same individuals. The ancients, indeed, appear to have used the term music in a much more extended sense than has been attached to it in modern times, and to have applied it to all the arts and sciences. But even if the ancient meaning of the term were identical with its modern signification, there may be good reason to suppose that their fame as musicians would principally survive. The memory of these first preceptors of mankind was long preserved as the general benefactors of their species. But while the other arts they taught advanced, it does not appear that music made any progress. Thus, they came chiefly to be remembered for that talent in which posterity had produced no equals. As poets they were once celebrated; but, eclipsed by the glory and splendour of the great historian of Troy, their poetical productions were forgotten; whilst, as musicians, unrivalled through many centuries, their skill was long remembered as the most excellent the world had ever known. The arts of sculpture and painting appear to have remained even more stationary than music.