I
Have you ever watched the attempt of any one who does not know how to
draw to put down on paper the roughest kind of representation of a house
or a horse or a human being?
The difficulty and perplexity (to any one not born with the drawing
instinct) caused by the effort of reproducing an object one can walk
around are extraordinary and unexpected. The thing is there, facing the
draughtsman, the familiar everyday thing--and a few strokes on paper
ought to give at least a recognisable suggestion of it.
But what kind of strokes? And what curves or angles ought they to
follow? Try and see for yourself, if you have never been taught to
draw, and if no instinct tells you how. Evidently there is some trick
about it which must be learned.
It takes a great deal of training and observation to learn the trick and
represent recognisably the simplest three-dimensional thing, much less
an animal or a human being in movement. And it takes a tradition too: it
presupposes the existence of some one capable of handing on the trick,
which has already been handed on to him.
Thirty thousand years ago--or perhaps more--there were men in France so
advanced in observation and training of eye and hand that they could
represent fishes swimming in a river, stags grazing or fighting, bison
charging with lowered heads or lying down and licking their own
shoulders--could even represent women dancing in a round, and long lines
of reindeer in perspective, with horns gradually diminishing in size.
It is only twenty years ago that the first cavern decorated with
prehistoric paintings was discovered at Altamira, in north-western
Spain. Its discoverer was regarded with suspicion and contempt by the
archæologists of the period: they let him see that they thought him an
impostor and he died without having been able to convince the learned
world that he had not had a hand in decorating the roof of the cave of
Altamira with its wonderful troops of inter-glacial animals. But ten or
twelve years later the discovery of similar painted caves in all
directions north and south of the Pyrenees at last vindicated Señor
Sautola's sincerity, and set the students of civilisation hastily
revising their chronologies; and since then proofs of the consummate
skill of these men of the dawn have been found on the walls of caves and
grottoes all over central and southern France, throughout the very
region where our American soldiers have been camping, and where our
convalescents are now basking in the warm Mediterranean sun.
The study of prehistoric art is just beginning, but already it has been
found that drawing, painting and even sculpture of a highly developed
kind were practised in France long before Babylon rose in its glory, or
the foundations of the undermost Troy were laid. In fact, all that is
known of the earliest historic civilisations is recent in date compared
with the wonderful fore-shortened drawings and clay statues of the
French Stone Age.
The traces of a very ancient culture discovered in the United States and
in Central America prove the far-off existence of an artistic and civic
development unknown to the races found by the first European explorers.
But the origin and date of these vanished societies are as yet unguessed
at, and even were it otherwise they would not count in our artistic and
social inheritance, since the English and Dutch colonists found only a
wilderness peopled by savages, who had kept no link of memory with those
vanished societies. There had been a complete break of continuity.