History of art . e ardor which they expended in buildingthem. The excessive climate, the great contrasts of nature,and the life of the nomad have created this ignoranceof—or this disdain for—the balance of soul that welove. The oasis is too cool after the sands, the water isso sweet to the burnt lips, the cities offer to the wan-derers such hot pleasures and such gold! The richman shall have a hundred wives and the poor manshall have none, and so there is a gap that can neverbe filled between the metaphysical absolutes and theworst bestiality. But the races of the Occident fill thisgap by expl
History of art . e ardor which they expended in buildingthem. The excessive climate, the great contrasts of nature,and the life of the nomad have created this ignoranceof—or this disdain for—the balance of soul that welove. The oasis is too cool after the sands, the water isso sweet to the burnt lips, the cities offer to the wan-derers such hot pleasures and such gold! The richman shall have a hundred wives and the poor manshall have none, and so there is a gap that can neverbe filled between the metaphysical absolutes and theworst bestiality. But the races of the Occident fill thisgap by exploring all the roads that must be traveled inorder to rise from and by means of sensual life to thethreshold of the heroic life. With these races of theOccident we must number some of the Oriental raceswhich belong to the same ethnic groups as the Euro-pean peoples. It was, doubtless for this reason, thatthe Persians—whose mind was less spacious, perhaps,but certainly more curious than that of the Semites—. Turkish (?) Art. The Repast.{From Les Miniatures Persanes.) 258 MEDIAEVAL ART never swerved from their historic role, which is tocarry on forever into the future a Httle of the immemo-rial civilizations of the country of the rivers. It wasfor this reason again that in Persian art there was nobreak in continuity between Sassanian Persia and Mus-sulman Persia, and that the carpets and the vasescontinued to be made in the same workshops. Becauseof their racial quality, also, the Persians recoveredfrom the Tartar invasions and outlived the Arabs intheir period of greatness by three centuries. It was forthe same reason, also, that the idol worshipers ofByzantium will one day be justified by the moral his-tory of the world, as they triumphed, ten centuriesago, in their struggle with those who were opposed tothe idols. A resolutely spiritual religion must, doubt-less, do without images, even at the risk of declining,at the risk of dying; but what we need to know iswhether it
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