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The development of Greek sculpture furnishes a good example of the gradual penetration of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian stiffness melts away, first from the bodies of the minor figures, afterwards of those of the gods, and finally the face is varied, and the hieratic smile almost disappears.
If any one is irked by the condition of a "masterless man," the Roman Catholic Church holds wide its doors for him. It seems very doubtful whether any less ancient, dogmatic, hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will serve his turn. It has sometimes seemed to me that the one great advantage of Western Christianity lies in the fact that nobody very seriously believes in it.
The ancient hieratic civilizations of the Orient decay, and through their dissolution they give birth to the Graeco-Roman world, which in turn is followed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Central Europe; it also decays and disintegrates through its own excesses, like the preceding civilizations, and it is replaced by the bourgeois civilization which has reached its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world.
He does not sit on a pedestal in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose greatness consists in being too stupid to care. He cares immensely for his Nabobs, his kings, his book-keepers, his Colettes, and his Saphos. He vibrates together with his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows M. de Montpavon on that last walk along the Boulevards.
They sat in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows. Scriabine There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine. And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to some degree the influence of Wagner.
THE WRITING. Four distinct graphic systems were in use in ancient Egypt: the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, the demotic, and Coptic. The first expresses words partly by representation of the object and partly by signs indicating sounds, and was used chiefly for inscriptions.
Herophilus, one of the first scholars of the Alexandrine Museum, studied not only the bodies of executed criminals, but made his experiments also on living malefactors. The physician took the reed, moistened it with black color prepared from burnt papyrus, and in elegant hieratic characters
In truth his soul was not complicated. He could never have attacked the psychology of Zarathustra, Hamlet, or Peer Gynt. A Salome from him would have been a delightfully decorative minx, set blithely dancing in some many-hued and enchanted garden of Armida. She would never have worn the air of hieratic lasciviousness with which Gustave Moreau inevitably dowered her.
Suddenly I saw before me in a puny boat a beautiful beardless youth. He was attired in some symbolical garments and upon his head a triple tiara. I could not believe my aged eyes. He sat upright. His attitude was hieratic. His eyes were lifted heavenwards. He clasped his hands and prayed: "O Lord, remove thy servant. The time is at hand foretold by thy slaughtered saints.
Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence, at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes missionaries of nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.
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