ARTS OF PLEASURE.
Poetry, 287—Verse and Metre, 288—Alliteration and Rhyme,
289—Poetic Metaphor, 289—Speech, Melody, Harmony, 290—Musical
Instruments, 293—Dancing, 296—Drama, 298—Sculpture and
Painting, 300—Ancient and Modern Art, 301—Games, 305.
To those who have not thought particularly about straightforward prose
talk, and poetry which is set in metre and rhyme, and song which is
chanted to a tune, it may seem that these are three clearly distinct
things. But on careful examination it is found that they shade into
one another, and it can be made out how human speech passed into all
three states. Savage tribes have some set form in their chants, which
shows they feel them different from common talk. Thus Australians,
to work themselves into fury before a fight, will chant, “Spear his
forehead!—Spear his breast!—Spear his liver!—Spear his heart!” and so on
with the other parts of the enemy’s body. Another Australian chant is
sung at native funerals, the young women taking the first line, the old
women the second, and all together the third and fourth.
“Kardang garro “Young-brother again
Mammul garro Son again
Mela nadjo Hereafter I-shall
Nunga broo.” See never.”
Here the words of the savage chant are no longer mere prose, but have
passed into a rude kind of verse. All barbaric tribes hand down such
songs by memory, and make new ones. The North American hunter has chants
which will bring him on the bear’s track next morning, or give him
victory over an enemy. The following is the translation of a New Zealand
song:—
“Thy body is at Waitemata,
But thy spirit came hither
And aroused me from my sleep.
_Chorus_—Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah, ha!”
This last shows a feature extremely common in barbaric songs, the refrain
of generally meaningless syllables. We moderns are often struck with the
absurdity of the nonsense-chorus in many of our own songs, but the habit
is one which seems to have been kept up from the stages of culture in
which the Australian savage sings “Abang! abang!” over and over at the
end of his verse, or a Red Indian hunting-party enjoy singing in chorus
“Nyah eh wa! nyah eh wa!” to an accompaniment of rattles like those which
children use with us.
It is among nations at a higher stage of culture that there appears
regular metre, where the verses are measured accurately in syllables.
The ancient hymns of the Veda are in regular metre, and this is proof
how far the old Aryans had advanced beyond the savage state. Indeed the
resemblances between the metre of the most ancient Indian and Persian and
Greek poetry show that in the remote ages of their national connection
their measured verse had already begun. Metre is best known to us from
Greek and Latin verses, but there are more metres in the world than
Horace knew of. For instance, when Longfellow versified a collection
of American native tales in his “Song of Hiawatha,” he found no metre
among the Indians themselves, who were not cultured enough to have such
a device; so he imitated the peculiar metre of the Kalewala, the epic
poem chanted by the native bards of Finland. Our own poetry, where the
verses are scanned by accent, differs in its nature from the classic
metres whose syllables are measured by quantity or length. Later than the
invention of metre, came other means by which the poet could please his
hearers with new effects of matched and balanced sounds. Thus our early
English forefathers rejoiced in alliteration, where the same consonant
comes in again and again, with a frequency which would weary our modern
taste, though our ear is pleased with occasional touches of it, as
“Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad.”—SPENSER.
“He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell.”—BYRON.
Rhyme, too, seems comparatively modern in the world’s history of poetry.
Its clumsy beginnings may be judged from such lines as these of an old
Latin poet (perhaps Ennius) quoted by Cicero:—
“Cœlum nitescere, arbores frondescere,
Vites lætificæ pampinis pubescere,
Rami bacarum ubertate incurvescere.”
Thus the Christian hymns of the middle ages, such as the famous
“Dies Iræ,” did not bring in rhyme as quite a novelty, but they used
it skilfully and made it common, and it was taken up also by the
Troubadours, the masters and teachers of Europe in the poetic art.
The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate
melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once
pictures for the imagination and music for the ear. But besides this,
it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in
our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic
art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when
poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means
to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. The modern poet
still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were
real helps to express his sense. This may be seen in analyzing a poem of
Shelley’s:—
“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother, Sleep!
One, pale as yonder waning moon,
With lips of lurid blue;
The other, rosy as the morn
When throned on ocean’s wave
It blushes o’er the world.”
Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of
calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illustrate the notion of
paleness, and the dawn of redness; while to convey the idea of the dawn
shining over the sea the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced,
and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the
other to blushing. Now this is the very way in which early barbaric man,
not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to
convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature. Even our
daily prose is full of words, now come down to ordinary use, which show
vestiges of this old nature-poetry, and the etymologist may, if he will,
set up again the pictures of the old poetic thoughts which made the words.
To read or recite poetry as we moderns do is to alter its proper nature,
for the purpose of poetry was to be chanted. But this very chanting or
singing grew out of talking. On listening carefully to the talk going on
around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone,
but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and
fall of pitch marking the phrases, distinguishing question and answer,
and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. This half-melody of
common speech may be roughly written down in notes; it is not the same
in English and German; and indeed one way in which a Scotchman’s talking
is known from an Englishman’s is the different intoning of his phrases.
When speech becomes solemn or impassioned, it passes more and more into
natural chanting, which at devotional meetings may be heard nearly
passing into distinct tune. The intoning in churches arose from the same
natural utterance of religious feeling, but in course of time it became
fixed by custom, and was forced into the regular intervals of the musical
scale. So the artificial recitative of the opera is a modern musical
working up of what has come down by tradition of the ancient tragic
declamation, which once swayed the listening throng of the Greek theatre.
We are apt to take it as a matter of course that all music must be made
up of notes in scale, and that scale the one we have been used to from
childhood. But the chants of rude tribes, which perhaps best represent
singing in its early stages, run in less fixed tones, so that it is
difficult to write down their airs. The human voice is not bound to a
scale of notes, for its pitch can glide up and down. Nor among nations
who sing and play by musical scales are the tones of these scales always
the same. The question how men were led to exact scales of tones is not
easy to answer fully. But one of the simplest scales was forced upon
their attention by that early musical instrument the trumpet, rude forms
of which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown by forest
tribes in South America and Africa. A trumpet (a six feet length of iron
gas-pipe will do) will sound the successive notes of the “common chord,”
which may be written _c e g c_, on which the trumpeter performs the
simple tunes known so well as trumpet-calls. This natural scale, perfect
so far as it goes, contains the most important of musical intervals, the
octave, fifth, fourth, and third. Another scale, of more notes than this,
though of fewer than our full scale, is not less familiar to English
ears. This is the old five-tone scale, without semitones, which can be
played on the five black keys of the pianoforte, and the best-known
form of which may be written _c, d, e, g, a, c_. Old Scotch airs are
on the five-tone scale, which indeed may still be met with across the
world, as where some traveller in China watching a funeral procession
has been surprised to hear a melancholy dirge like what he last heard
played by a piper on the shore of a Highland loch. Engel, in his _Music
of Ancient Nations_, shows that music of this pentatonic or five-toned
kind has belonged since early times to other Eastern nations, so that any
genuine Scotch melody like “Auld Lang-syne” may give some idea of the
music of antiquity. The more advanced seven-tone scale which prevails in
the modern world is nearly taken from that of the musicians of classic
Greece, who accompanied the singer’s voice on the eight-stringed lyre.
Pythagoras, who first brought musical tones under arithmetical rule, had
the curious fancy that the distances of the seven planets are related as
the seven tones of the octave, an idea which still dimly survives among
us in the phrase “music of the spheres.”
Modern music is thus plainly derived from ancient. But there has arisen
in it a great new development. The music of the ancients scarcely went
beyond melody. The voice might be accompanied by an instrument in unison
or at an octave interval, but harmony as understood by modern musicians
was as yet unknown. Its feeble beginnings may be traced in the middle
ages, when musicians were struck by the effects got by singing two
different tunes at once, when one formed a harmony to the other. It is
still a joke among musicians to sing together in this old-fashioned way
two absurdly incongruous tunes, for instance, “The Campbells are coming”
and “The Vesper hymn,” so arranged that one makes a sort of accompaniment
to the other. The old rounds and catches, still popular, thus make one
part of the tune serve as a harmony for the other. The Roman church
part-music, and the Protestant singing by the congregation, with the
organ to accompany them, had great effect in making the change by which
the mere melody of the ancients grew into the harmonized melody of the
moderns. This great step once understood, the student can follow in the
history of music its successive stages in part-singing and orchestral
composition, in the church and the concert-room, till in the hands of the
great composers of the last three centuries the full resources of modern
musical art were developed.
The musical instruments of the present day may all be traced back to rude
and early forms. The rattle and the drum are serious instruments among
savages; the rattle has come down to a child’s toy with us, but the drum
holds its own in peace and war. Above these monotonous instruments comes
the trumpet, which, as has just been seen, brings barbaric music a long
step further on. The pipe or flageolet appears in its simplest form in
the common whistle, and is improved by holes, by which the player alters
the length of the pipe so as to give several notes. From very remote
times, and far and wide over the earth, the familiar pipe is found,
played single or double, and sometimes blown with the nostril instead
of the mouth. Already in the ancient world it was often provided with a
skin wind-bag which made it into the bagpipe, or, held sideways and blown
across the mouth-hole, it became the flute. Another way of bringing out a
range of notes is seen in the Pan’s pipes, the row of reeds of different
lengths, in old classic days associated with the grace of rural poetry,
but now come down to sound the vulgar pipings of the street showman. In
the modern orchestra, the cornet is a trumpet provided with stops. The
clarionet is a development of the grass-stem with a vibrating slit or
tongue such as children cut in the fields in spring. The whole class
of musical instruments to which the harmonium belongs, work with these
vibrating tongues, which by their name of “reeds” still keep up the
memory of their origin. The organ carries out in the widest range and
grandest proportions the principle of the simple pipe or whistle, so
that there is scientific correctness in the disrespectful name of “kist
o’ whistles” given it by the Scotch, who disliked its use in church.
Not less primitive are the rudest forms in which stringed instruments
appear. It is told in the _Odyssey_ (xxi. 410) how the avenging hero,
when he has strung his mighty bow compact of wood and horn, gives the
stretched string a twang that makes it sing like a swallow in a soft tone
beautifully. One might well guess that the strung bow of the warrior
would naturally become a musical instrument, but what is more, it really
is so used. The Damara in South Africa finds pleasure in the faint tones
heard by striking the tight bowstring with a little stick. The Zulu
despises the bow as a cowardly weapon, but he still uses it for music;
his music-bow, shown in Fig. 75 _a_, has a ring slid along the string to
alter the note, and is also provided with a hollow gourd acting as a
resonator or sounding-box to strengthen the feeble twang. Next, looking
at _b_ in the figure, it is seen how the ancient Egyptian harp may have
been developed from such a rude music-bow, the wooden back being now
made hollow so as to be bow and resonator in one, while across it are
strung several strings of different lengths. All ancient harps, Assyrian,
Persian, even old Irish, were made on this plan, yet we can see at a
glance that it was defective, the bending of the wooden back putting the
strings out of tune. It was not till modern ages that the improvement
was made of completing the harp with the front-pillar, as seen in _c_,
which makes the whole frame rigid and firm. Looking at the three figures,
it is seen how the course of invention was by gradual growth; the harp
with the pillar could not have been first invented, for no men could have
been so stupid as to go on making harps and leave out the front-pillar
when once the idea of it had come into their minds. The harp, though now
made more perfect than of old, is losing its ancient place in music;
but the reason of this is easy to see, it has been supplanted by modern
instruments which have come from it. The very form of a grand piano shows
that it is a harp laid on one side in a case, and its strings not plucked
with the fingers but struck with hammers worked from a keyboard. It is
the latest development from the bowstring of the præhistoric warrior.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.—Development of the Harp, _a_, music-bow with
gourd resonator (South Africa); _b_, ancient harp (Egypt); _c_, mediæval
harp with front-pillar (England).]
Dancing may seem to us moderns a frivolous amusement; but in the infancy
of civilization it was full of passionate and solemn meaning. Savages and
barbarians dance their joy and sorrow, their love and rage, even their
magic and religion. The forest Indians of Brazil, whose sluggish temper
few other excitements can stir, rouse themselves at their moonlight
gatherings, when, rattle in hand, they stamp in one-two-three time round
the great earthen pot of intoxicating kawi-liquor; or men and women dance
a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka
step; or the ferocious war-dance is performed by armed warriors in paint,
marching in ranks hither and thither with a growling chant terrific to
hear. We have enough of the savage left in us to feel how Australians
leaping and yelling at a corrobboree by firelight in the forest can work
themselves up into frenzy for next day’s fight. But with our civilized
notions it is not so easy to understand that barbarians’ dancing may mean
still more than this; it seems to them so real that they expect it to act
on the world outside. Thus among the Mandan Indians, when the hunters
failed to find the buffalos on which the tribe depended for food, every
man brought out of his lodge the mask made of a buffalo’s head and horns,
with the tail hanging down behind, which he kept for such an emergency,
and they all set to dance buffalo. Ten or fifteen masked dancers at a
time formed the ring, drumming and rattling, chanting and yelling; when
one was tired out he went through the pantomime of being shot with bow
and arrow, skinned, and cut up; while another, who stood ready with his
buffalo-head on, took his place in the dance. So it would go on, without
stopping day or night, sometimes for two or three weeks, till at last
these persevering efforts to bring the buffalo succeeded, and a herd came
in sight on the prairie. The description and sketch of the scene will be
found in Catlin’s _North American Indians_. Such an example shows how,
in the lower levels of culture, men dance to express their feelings and
wishes. All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one
of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and
dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said that all dancing ought
to be thus an act of religion. In fact, it was so to a great extent in
Greece, as where the Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns
to Apollo, and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating
their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. Modern
civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than ever, has mostly
cast off the sacred dance. To see this near its old state the traveller
may visit the temples of India, or among the lamas of Tibet watch the
mummers in animal masks dancing the demons out, or the new year in, to
wild music of drums and shell-trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies,
come down from the religion of England before Christian times, are still
sometimes to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the Midsummer
bonfire, or of the mummers at Yuletide; but even these are dying out.
The dances of choristers in plumed hats and the dress of pages of Philip
III.’s time, still performed before the high altar of Seville Cathedral,
are now among the quaintest relics of a rite all but vanished from
Christendom. Even sportive dancing, as a graceful exercise, is falling
off in the modern world. The pictures from ancient Egypt show that the
professional dancers were already skilful in their art, which perhaps
reached its highest artistic pitch in classic Greece and Rome. Something
of the old-fashioned picturesque village-dancing may still be seen at
festivals in most countries of Europe except England, but the ball-room
dances of modern society have lost much of the old art and grace.
At low levels in civilization it is clear that dancing and play-acting
are one. The North American dog-dance and bear-dance are mimic
performances with ludicrously faithful imitations of the creatures’
pawing and rolling and biting. So the scenes of hunting and war furnish
barbarians with subjects for dances, as when the Gold Coast negroes
have gone out to war, and their wives at home dance a fetish-dance in
imitation of battle, to give their absent husbands strength and courage.
Historians trace from the sacred dances of ancient Greece the dramatic
art of the civilized world. Thus, in the festivals of the Dionysia, the
wondrous life of the Wine-god was danced and sung, and from its solemn
hymns and laughable jests arose tragedy and comedy. In the classic ages
the player’s art divided into several branches. The pantomimes kept up
the earliest form, where the dancer acted in dumb show such pieces as
the labours of Herakles, or Kadmos sowing the dragon’s teeth, while the
chorus below accompanied the play by singing the story; the modern
pantomime ballets, which keep up remains of these ancient performances,
show how grotesque the old stage gods and heroes must have looked in
their painted masks. In Greek tragedy and comedy the business of the
dancers and chorus was separated from that of the actors, who recited or
chanted each his proper part in the dialogue, so that the player could
now move his audience by words of passion or wit, delivered with such
tone and gesture as laid hold on all who listened and looked. Greek
tragedy, once begun, soon reached its height among the fine arts, so that
the plays of Æschylos and Sophokles are read as examples of the higher
poetry, and the modern acted imitations like the Phèdre of Racine give
an idea of their power when the genius of the actors can rise to their
height of emotion. The modern drama belongs not so much to the sacred
mystery-plays of the middle ages as to the classic revival or renaissance
of four centuries ago. Those who have seen the ruins of classic theatres
at Syracuse, or on the hill-side of Tusculum, will best understand how
a modern playhouse shows its Greek origin not only in the arrangement,
but in the Greek names of its parts—the _theatre_, or spectators’ place,
which still keeps its well-planned horse-shoe shape; the _scene_ with
its painted background and curtain in front; while the _orchestra_ or
dancing-place, which was formerly for the _chorus_, is now given up to
the musicians. The change in the _tragedy_ and _comedy_ performed in the
modern theatre from those of the classic world is partly due to their
having dropped the stiff solemn declamation which belonged to them while
they were still religious ceremonies, and their personages divine. In
the hands of modern dramatists, of Shakspere above all, the characters
came to be more human, though representing human nature in its most
picturesque extremes, and life in its intensest moments. Modern plays
are not indeed bound to be strictly natural, but can still call in the
supernatural, as where now fairies or angels may hover over the scene
where in classic days the gods used to pass in mid-air borne in their
machines. In the modern comedy the persons dress and talk as near as may
be like daily life; yet, even here, when the audience gravely fall in
with the pretence that some of the speeches, though spoken aloud, are
“asides” not heard by the actors close by, this shows that the modern
world has not lost the power to make-believe, on which all dramatic art
is founded.
On this same power of make-believe or imagination are founded the two
other fine arts, sculpture and painting. Their proper purpose is not to
produce exact imitations, but what the artist strives to bring out is
the idea that strikes the beholder. Thus there is often more real art in
a caricature done with a few strokes of the pencil, or in a rough image
hacked out of a log, than in a minutely painted portrait, or a figure at
a waxwork show which is so like life that visitors beg its pardon when
they walk up against it. The painter’s and sculptor’s art seems to have
arisen in the world from the same sort of rude beginnings which are still
to be seen in children’s attempts to draw and carve. The sheets of bark
or skins on which barbarous tribes have drawn men and animals, guns and
boats, remind us of the slates and barn-doors on which English children
make their early trials in outline. Many of these children will grow up
and go through their lives without getting much beyond this childish
stage. The clergyman of a country parish some years ago set the cottagers
to amuse themselves with carving in wood such figures as men digging or
reaping. They produced figures so curiously uncouth, and in style so
like the idols of barbarous tribes, that they were kept as examples of
the infancy of sculpture, and are now to be seen in the museum of Kew
Gardens. Yet mankind, under favourable circumstances, especially with
long leisure time on their hands, began in remote antiquity to train
themselves to skill in art. Especially the sketches and carvings of
animals done by the old cave-men of Europe have so artistic a touch that
some have supposed them modern forgeries. But they are admitted to be
genuine and found over a wide district, while forgeries which have been
really done to palm off on collectors are just wanting in the peculiar
skill with which the savages who lived among the reindeer and mammoths
knew how to catch their forms and attitudes. Two of these ancient
carvings are drawn in Figs. 3 and 4, and others in Lubbock’s _Prehistoric
Times_. The art of colouring would naturally arise, for savages who paint
their own bodies with charcoal, pipeclay, and red and yellow ochre,
would daub their carved figures and fill in their outline drawings with
the same colours. Travellers in Australia sheltering from the storm in
caves, wonder at the cleverness of the rude frescos on the cavern-walls
of kangaroos and emus and natives dancing, while in South Africa the
Bushmen’s caves show paintings of themselves with bows and arrows, and
the bullock-waggons of the white men, and the dreaded figure of the Dutch
boer with his broad-brimmed hat and pipe. Among such people as the West
Africans and Polynesians, the native sculptor’s best skill has been used
on images of demons and gods, made to receive worship and serve as bodies
in which the spiritual beings are to take up their abode. Thus the idols
of barbarians, as specimens of early stages of sculpture, have a value in
the history of art as well as of religion.
In the ancient nations of Egypt and Babylonia art had already risen to
higher levels. Indeed Egyptian sculpture reached its best in the earlier
rather than the later ages, for the stone statues of the older time stand
and step with more free life in their limbs, and the calm proud faces
of the colossal Thothmes and Rameses portraits (like Fig. 19) show the
grandest ideal of an eastern despot, half tyrant, half deity. In the
sculpture halls of the British Museum, it is seen that the early school
of Egyptian sculptors were on their way to Greek perfection, but they
stopped short. With trained mechanical skill they wrought statues by tens
of thousands, hewing gigantic figures of the hardest granite and porphyry
which amaze the modern stonecutter, but their art, bound by tradition,
grew not freer but more stiff and formal. They might divide their plans
into measured squares, and set out faces and limbs by line and rule, but
their conventional forms seldom come up to the Greek lines of beauty, and
their monuments are now prized, not as models of art, but as records of
old-world history. In the British Museum also, the alabaster bas-reliefs
that adorned the palace-courts of Nineveh give a wonderfully clear idea
of what Assyrian life was like, how the king rode in his chariot, or let
fly his arrows at the lion at bay, or walked with the state umbrella held
over his head; how the soldiers swam the rivers on blown skins and the
storming party scaled the fortress, while the archers shot down among
them from the battlements, and the impaled captives hung in rows full in
view outside the walls. But in such scenes proportion did not much matter
if only the meaning were conveyed. It did not seem artistically absurd
to the Assyrians to make archers so big that two fill a whole parapet;
nor did the Egyptians feel the comic impression made on our modern minds
by the gigantic figure of the king striding half across the battle-field
and grasping a dozen pigmy barbarians at a grip, to slash their heads
off with one sweep of his mighty falchion. It was in Greece that the
rules of art were developed which reject the figures of the older nations
as stiff in form and unlifelike in grouping. Greek art is sometimes
written of as though it had itself begun in the rudest stage, with
clumsy idols of wood and clay, till by efforts of their own surpassing
genius the Greek sculptors came to hew in marble the forms which are
still the wonders of the world. But great as Greek genius was, it never
did this. The Greek nations had been for ages in contact with the older
civilizations of the Mediterranean; their starting-point was to learn
what art could do in Egypt, Phœnicia, Babylonia, and then their genius
set them free from the hard old conventional forms, leading them to model
life straight from nature, and even to fashion in marble shapes of ideal
strength and grace. The Egyptian sculptors would not spoil polished
granite with paint, but many of their statues were coloured, and there
are traces of paint left on the Assyrian sculptures and on Greek statues,
so that we are apt to have a wrong idea of a Greek temple, as though its
marble gods and goddesses used to be of the glaring whiteness of a modern
sculpture-gallery. The Greek terra-cotta statuettes in the British Museum
are models of antique female grace in form and costume, only wanting the
lost colour restored to make them the prettiest things in the world.
In colour-drawing, or painting, the Egyptian wall-paintings show a style
half-way between the lowest and the highest. Here the scenes of old
Egyptian life are caught at their characteristic moments, the shoemaker
is seen drawing his thread, the fowler throwing at the ducks, the lords
and ladies feasting and the flute-players and tumblers performing before
them. Yet with all their clever expressiveness, the Egyptian paintings
have not quite left behind the savage stage of art. In fact they are
still picture-writings rather than pictures, repeating rows of figures
with heads, legs, and arms drawn to pattern, and coloured in childish
daubs of colour—hair all black, skin all red-brown, clothing white,
and so on. The change from these to the Greek paintings is surprising;
now we have no more rows of man-patterns, but grouped studies of real
men. The best works of the Greek painters are only known to moderns by
the admiring descriptions of the ancients, but more ordinary specimens
which have been preserved give an idea what the paintings of Zeuxis
and Apelles may have been. The tourist visiting for the first time the
museum of Naples comes with a shock of surprise in face of Alexander
of Athens’ picture of the goddesses at play, the boldly drawn frescos
of scenes from the Iliad, and the groups of dancers elegant in drawing
and colouring. Most of these pictures from Herculaneum and Pompeii were
done by mere house decorators, but these tenth-rate Greek painters had
the traditions of the great classic school, and they show plainly that
from the same source we also have inherited the art of design. Modern
European painting comes in two ways from ancient art. On the one hand,
Greek painting spread over the Roman Empire and into the East, and for
ages found its chief home in the Christian art of Constantinople, whence
arose the Byzantine style, often called pre-Raffaelite, which though
wanting in the older freedom of classic Athens, was expressive and rich
in colour. On the other hand, when in the fifteenth century the knowledge
of classic art and thought revived in Europe, the stiff pictures of
saints and martyrs gave place to more natural and graceful forms, and
modern painting arose under Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, Titian and
Murillo, in whom the two streams from the fountain-head of Greek art, so
long separated, joined again. The ancients mostly painted on walls like
the present fresco-painting, or on waxed wooden panels; they did not know
the use of oil to mix the ground colours with. This is just mentioned in
the tenth century, so that the story of the brothers Van Eyck inventing
oil-painting in the fifteenth century is not quite true. But they turned
it to practical use, and from their time painters brought the substance
and play of colour to a perfection which there is no reason to suppose
the ancients ever approached. In modern times water-colour painting, used
by the old masters for light sketches and studies, has also become an art
of itself, especially in England. One branch of painting in which the
moderns unquestionably surpass the ancients is landscape. Of old, however
admirably the figures might be drawn, the hard conventional mountains,
forests, and houses behind were still in the picture-writing stage, they
rather stood as signs of the world outside than depicted it as it is.
But now the artist’s eyes are turned on nature, which he renders with a
truthfulness unknown to the old masters who first gave living form to
gods and heroes, apostles and martyrs.
Something has now to be said of games, for play is one of the arts of
pleasure. It is doing for the sake of doing, not for what is done. One
class of games is spontaneous everywhere, the sports in which children
imitate the life they will afterwards have to act in earnest. Eskimo
children play at building snow huts, and their mothers provide them
with a tiny oil-lamp with a bit of wick to set burning inside. Among
the savages whose custom it is to carry off their wives by force from
neighbouring tribes, the children play at the game of wife-catching, just
as with us children play at weddings with a clergyman and bridesmaids.
All through civilization, toy weapons and implements furnish children
at once play and education; the North American warrior made his boy a
little bow and arrow as soon as he could draw it, and the young South Sea
Islander learnt by throwing a reed at a rolling ring how in after-life to
hurl his spear. It is curious to see that when growing civilization has
cast aside the practical use of some ancient contrivance, it may still
survive as a toy, as where Swiss children to this day play at making fire
by the old-world plan of drilling one piece of wood into another; and in
our country lanes the children play with bows and arrows and slings, the
serious weapons of their forefathers.
It is not quite easy to say whether man in a low savage state ever goes
beyond these practical sports, and invents games of mere play. But higher
up in civilization, such games are known from very ancient times. A
trifling game, if it exactly takes hold of the playful mind, may last
on in the world almost for ever. The ancient Egyptians, as their old
paintings show, used to play our childish game of hot-cockles, where the
blind-man who stoops down has to guess who thumped him on the back. These
Egyptians played also the game of guessing the sum of the fingers held up
by the two players, which is still popular in China, and in Italy, where
one hears it half the night through with shouts of “three!” “seven!”
“five!” “_mora!_”; it is a pity we have not this as a children’s game in
England, for it trains a sharp eye and a quick hand. While some of our
games, such as hoops and whipping-tops, have gone on in the Old World
for thousands of years, others are modern importations; thus it was only
about Stuart times that English children learnt from the Chinese, or some
other nation in the far East, the art of flying kites. Or modern sports
may be late improvements on old ones; the split shank-bones fastened
under the shoes for going on the ice delighted the London ’prentices for
centuries before they were displaced by steel skates. How a game may
sometimes go on for ages unchanged, and then suddenly turn into a higher
form, is curiously seen in the game of ball. The ancients tossed and
caught balls like children now, and a famous Greek and Roman lad’s game
was “common ball,” where there were two sides, and each tried to get the
ball and throw it to the opposite goal. This is still played in a few
country-places in England; its proper name is “hurling,” and football
with the great leather ball is a variety of it. The ancients never seem
to have used a stick or bat in their ball-play. But some 1,000 or 1,500
years ago the Persians began to play ball on horseback, which of course
could only be done with a long stick, mallet, or racket; in this way
there came into existence the fine sport of _chaugán_, which has lasted
ever since in the East, and lately established itself in England under
the name of _polo_. When once the club or racket had been invented for
horseback, it was easy to use it on foot, and thus in the middle ages
there began the whole set of games in which balls are hit with bats, such
as pall-mall and croquet, tennis, hockey and golf, rounders and cricket.
Indoor games, too, have their curious history. Throwing lots or dice is
far too ancient for any record to remain of its beginning, and the very
draught-boards and men which the old Egyptians used to play on are still
to be seen. The Greeks and Romans were draught-players, but their games
were not like our modern game of draughts. On the other hand our merells
or morris belongs to an old classical group of games, and Ovid alludes to
the childish game of tit-tat-to. These games are played in China as well,
and it is not known at which end of the earth they were first devised.
The great invention in intellectual games may have been made a thousand
years or so ago, when some Hindu, whose name is lost, set to work upon
the old draught-board and men, and developed out of them a war-game,
where on each side a king and his general, with elephants, chariots,
and cavalry, and the foot-soldiers in front, met in battle array. This
was the earliest chess, which with some little change passed into the
modern European chess that still holds pre-eminence among sports, taxing
the mind to its utmost stretch of foresight and combination. Our modern
draughts is a sort of simplified chess, where the pieces are all pawns
till they get across the board and become queens. The story in the
history-books that cards were invented in France to amuse Charles VI.
is a fiction, for they were known in the East centuries earlier. But at
any rate the Europeans make with them combinations of skill and chance
which excel anything contrived by their Asiatic inventors. Games which
exercise either body or mind have been of high value in civilization as
trainers of man’s faculties. Games of pure chance played for money stand
on quite a different footing; they have been from the first a delusion
and a curse. In our own time, there is perhaps no more pitiable sign
of the slowness with which scientific ideas spread, than to hear the
well-dressed crowds round the gaming-table at Monaco talking about runs
of luck, and fancying that it makes a difference whether one backs the
black or the red. This goes on although schoolboys are now taught the
real doctrine of chances, and how to reckon the fixed percentage of each
week’s stakes that will be raked in by the croupier, and not come back.