drawings are entirely uninfluenced by the concepts which even the most
primitive people must form. Indeed, the preference for the profile view
of animals--though as we have seen other aspects are frequent--would
alone indicate this, but they appear to have been at a stage of
intellectual development where the concepts were not so clearly grasped
as to have begun to interfere with perception, and where therefore the
retinal image passed into a clear memory picture with scarcely any
intervening mental process. In the art of even civilised man we may, I
think, find great variations in the extent to which the conceptualising
of visual images has proceeded. Egyptian and Assyrian art remained
intensely conceptual throughout, no serious attempt was made to give
greater verisimilitude to the symbols employed. The Mycenæan artists, on
the other hand, seem to have been appreciably more perceptual, but the
Greeks returned to an intensely conceptualised symbolism in which some
of their greatest works of art were expressed, and only very gradually
did they modify their formulæ so as to admit of some approach to
verisimilitude, and even so the appeal to vision was rather by way of
correcting and revising accepted conceptual images than as the
foundation of a work of art. The art of China, and still more of Japan,
has been distinctly more perceptual. Indeed, the Japanese drawings of
birds and animals approach more nearly than those of any other civilised
people to the immediacy and rapidity of transcription of Bushman and
Palæolithic art. The Bushman silhouettes of cranes (Fig. 8) might almost
have come from a Japanese screen Like Japanese drawings, they show an
alertness to accept the silhouette as a single whole instead of
reconstructing it from separately apprehended parts. It is partly due to
Japanese influence that our own Impressionists have made an attempt to
get back to that ultra-primitive directness of vision. Indeed they
deliberately sought to deconceptualise art. The artist of to-day has
therefore to some extent a choice before him of whether he will _think_
form like the early artists of European races or merely _see_ it like
the Bushmen. Whichever his choice, the study of these drawings can
hardly fail to be of profound interest. The Bushmen paintings on the
walls of caves and sheltered rocks are fast disappearing; the race
itself, of which Miss Bleek gives a fascinating account, is now nothing
but a remnant. The treatment that they have received at the hands of the
white settlers does not seem to have been conspicuously more sympathetic
or intelligent than that meted out to them by negro conquerors, and thus
the opportunity of solving some of the most interesting problems of
human development has been for ever lost. The gratitude of all students
of art is due to Miss Tongue and Miss Bleek, by whose zeal and industry
these remains of a most curious phase of primitive art have been
adequately recorded.
NEGRO SCULPTURE[14]
What a comfortable mental furniture the generalisations of a century ago
must have afforded! What a right little, tight little, round little
world it was when Greece was the only source of culture, when Greek art,
even in Roman copies, was the only indisputable art, except for some
Renaissance repetitions! Philosophy, the love of truth, liberty,
architecture, poetry, drama, and for all we knew music--all these were
the fruits of a special kind of life, each assisted the development of
the other, each was really dependent on all the rest. Consequently if we
could only learn the Greek lessons of political freedom and intellectual
self-consciousness all the rest would be added unto us.
And now, in the last sixty years, knowledge and perception have poured
upon us so fast that the whole well-ordered system has been blown away,
and we stand bare to the blast, scarcely able to snatch a hasty
generalisation or two to cover our nakedness for a moment.
Our desperate plight comes home to one at the Chelsea Book Club, where
are some thirty chosen specimens of negro sculpture. If to our ancestors
the poor Indian had “an untutored mind,” the Congolese’s ignorance and
savagery must have seemed too abject for discussion. One would like to
know what Dr. Johnson would have said to any one who had offered him a
negro idol for several hundred pounds. It would have seemed then sheer
lunacy to listen to what a negro savage had to tell us of his emotions
about the human form. And now one has to go all the way to Chelsea in a
chastened spirit and prostrate oneself before his “stocks and stones.”
We have the habit of thinking that the power to create expressive
plastic form is one of the greatest of human achievements, and the names
of great sculptors are handed down from generation to generation, so
that it seems unfair to be forced to admit that certain nameless
savages have possessed this power not only in a higher degree than we at
this moment, but than we as a nation have ever possessed it. And yet
that is where I find myself. I have to admit that some of these things
are great sculpture--greater, I think, than anything we produced even in
the Middle Ages. Certainly they have the special qualities of sculpture
in a higher degree. They have indeed complete plastic freedom; that is
to say, these African artists really conceive form in three dimensions.
Now this is rare in sculpture. All archaic European sculpture--Greek and
Romanesque, for instance--approaches plasticity from the point of view
of bas-relief. The statue bears traces of having been conceived as the
combination of front, back, and side bas-reliefs. And this continues to
make itself felt almost until the final development of the tradition.
Complete plastic freedom with us seems only to come at the end of a long
period, when the art has attained a high degree of representational
skill and when it is generally already decadent from the point of view
of imaginative significance.
Now, the strange thing about these African sculptures is that they bear,
as far as I can see, no trace of this process. Without ever attaining
anything like representational accuracy they have complete freedom. The
sculptors seem to have no difficulty in getting away from the
two-dimensional plane. The neck and the torso are conceived as
cylinders, not as masses with a square section. The head is conceived as
a pear-shaped mass. It is conceived as a single whole, not arrived at by
approach from the mask, as with almost all primitive European art. The
mask itself is conceived as a concave plane cut out of this otherwise
perfectly unified mass.
And here we come upon another curious difference between negro sculpture
and our own, namely, that the emphasis is utterly different. Our
emphasis has always been affected by our preferences for certain forms
which appeared to us to mark the nobility of man. Thus we shrink from
giving the head its full development; we like to lengthen the legs and
generally to force the form into a particular type. These preferences
seem to be dictated not by a plastic bias, but by our reading of the
physical symbols of certain qualities which we admire in our kind, such,
for instance, as agility, a commanding presence, or a pensive brow. The
negro, it seems, either has no such
[Illustration:
Negro Sculpture Collection Guillaume
Plate III.]
preferences, or his preferences happen to coincide more nearly with what
his feeling for pure plastic design would dictate. For instance, the
length, thinness, and isolation of our limbs render them extremely
refractory to fine plastic treatment, and the negro scores heavily by
his willingness to reduce the limbs to a succession of ovoid masses
sometimes scarcely longer than they are broad. Generally speaking, one
may say that his plastic sense leads him to give its utmost amplitude
and relief to all the protuberant parts of the body, and to get thereby
an extraordinarily emphatic and impressive sequence of planes. So far
from clinging to two dimensions, as we tend to do, he actually
underlines, as it were, the three-dimensionalness of his forms. It is in
some such way, I suspect, that he manages to give to his forms their
disconcerting vitality, the suggestion that they make of being not mere
echoes of actual figures, but of possessing an inner life of their own.
If the negro artist wanted to make people believe in the potency of his
idols he certainly set about it in the right way.
Besides the logical comprehension of plastic form which the negro shows,
he has also an exquisite taste in his handling of material. No doubt in
this matter his endless leisure has something to do with the marvellous
finish of these works. An instance of this is seen in the treatment of
the tattoo cicatrices. These are always rendered in relief, which means
that the artist has cut away the whole surface around them. I fancy most
sculptors would have found some less laborious method of interpreting
these markings. But this patient elaboration of the surface is
characteristic of most of these works. It is seen to perfection in a
wooden cup covered all over with a design of faces and objects that look
like clubs in very low relief. The _galbe_ of this cup shows a subtlety
and refinement of taste comparable to that of the finest Oriental
craftsmen.
It is curious that a people who produced such great artists did not
produce also a culture in our sense of the word. This shows that two
factors are necessary to produce the cultures which distinguish
civilised peoples. There must be, of course, the creative artist, but
there must also be the power of conscious critical appreciation and
comparison. If we imagined such an apparatus of critical appreciation as
the Chinese have possessed from the earliest times applied to this
negro art, we should have no difficulty in recognising its singular
beauty. We should never have been tempted to regard it as savage or
unrefined. It is for want of a conscious critical sense and the
intellectual powers of comparison and classification that the negro has
failed to create one of the great cultures of the world, and not from
any lack of the creative æsthetic impulse, nor from lack of the most
exquisite sensibility and the finest taste. No doubt also the lack of
such a critical standard to support him leaves the artist much more at
the mercy of any outside influence. It is likely enough that the negro
artist, although capable of such profound imaginative understanding of
form, would accept our cheapest illusionist art with humble enthusiasm.
ANCIENT AMERICAN ART[15]
Nothing in the history of our Western civilisation is more romantic nor
for us more tantalising than the story of the discovery and the wanton
destruction of the ancient civilisations of America. Here were two
complex civilisations which had developed in complete independence of
the rest of the world; even so completely independent of each other
that, for all their general racial likeness, they took on almost
opposite characters. If only we could know these alternative efforts of
the human animal to come to terms with nature and himself with something
like the same fulness with which we know the civilisations of Greece and
Rome, what might we not learn about the fundamental necessities of
mankind? They would have been for us the opposite point of our orbit;
they would have given us a parallax from which we might have estimated
the movements of that dimmest and most distant phenomenon, the social
nature of man. And as it is, what scraps of ill-digested and
ill-arranged information and what fragments of ruined towns have to
suffice us! Still, so fascinating is the subject that we owe Mr.
Joyce[16] a debt of gratitude for the careful and thorough accumulation
of all the material which the archæological remains afford. These by
themselves would be only curious or beautiful as the case may be; their
full value and significance can only come out when they are illustrated
by whatever is known of their place in the historical sequence of the
civilisations. Mr. Joyce gives us what is known of the outlines of
Mexican and Peruvian history as far as it can be deciphered from the
early accounts of Spanish invaders and from the original documents, and
he brings the facts thus established to bear on the antiquities.
Unfortunately for the reader of these books, the story is terribly
involved and complicated even when it is not dubious. Thus in Mexico we
have to deal with an almost inextricable confusion of tribes and
languages having much in common, but each interpreting their common
mythology and religion in a special manner. Even Greek mythology, which
we once seemed to know fairly well, takes on under the pressure of
modern research an unfamiliar formlessness--becomes indistinct and
shifting in its outlines; and the various civilisations of Mexico, each
with its innumerable gods and goddesses with varying names and varying
attributes, produce on the mind a sense of bewildering and helpless
wonder, and still more a sense of pervading horror at the underlying
nature of the human imagination. For one quality emerges in all the
different aspects of their religions, its hideous inhumanity and
cruelty, its direct inspiration of all the most ingenious tortures both
in peace and war--above all, the close alliance between religion and
war, and going with both of these the worship of suffering as an end in
itself. Only at one point in this nightmare of inhumanity do we get a
momentary sense of pleasure--itself a savage one--that is in the
knowledge that at certain sacred periods the priests, whose main
business was the torturing of others, were themselves subjected to the
purificatory treatment. A bas-relief in the British Museum shows with
grim realism the figure of a kneeling priest with pierced tongue,
pulling a rope through the hole. Under such circumstances one would at
least hesitate to accuse the priesthood of hypocrisy.
When we turn to Peru the picture is less grim. The Incas do not seem to
have been so abjectly religious as the Aztecs; they had at least
abolished human sacrifice, which the Aztecs practised on a colossal
scale, and though the tyranny of the governing classes was more highly
organised, it was inspired by a fairly humane conception.
But we must leave the speculations on such general questions, which are
as regards these books incidental to the main object, and turn to the
consideration of the archæological remains and the investigation of
their probable sequence and dating.
Our attitude to the artistic remains of these civilisations has a
curious history. The wonder of the Spanish invaders at the sight of vast
and highly organised civilisations where only savagery was expected has
never indeed ceased, but the interest in their remains has changed from
time to time. The first emotion they excited besides wonder was the
greed of the conquerors for the accumulated treasure. Then among the
more cultivated Spaniards supervened a purely scientific curiosity to
which we owe most of our knowledge of the indigenous legend and history.
Then came the question of origins, which is still as fascinating and
unsettled as ever, and to the belief that the Mexicans were the lost ten
tribes of Israel we owe Lord Kingsborough’s monumental work in nine
volumes on Mexican antiquities. To such odd impulses perhaps, rather
than to any serious appreciation of their artistic merits, we owe the
magnificent collection of Mexican antiquities in the British Museum.
Indeed, it is only in this century that, after contemplating them from
every other point of view, we have begun to look at them seriously as
works of art. Probably the first works to be admitted to this kind of
consideration were the Peruvian pots in the form of highly realistic
human heads and figures.[17]
Still more recently we have come to recognise the beauty of Aztec and
Maya sculpture, and some of our modern artists have even gone to them
for inspiration. This is, of course, one result of the general æsthetic
awakening which has followed on the revolt against the tyranny of the
Græco-Roman tradition.
Both in Mexico and Peru we have to deal with at least two, possibly
four, great cultures, each overthrown in turn by the invasion of less
civilised, more warlike tribes, who gradually adopt the general scheme
of the older civilisation. In Mexico there is no doubt about the
superiority, from an artistic point of view, of the earlier culture--the
Aztecs had everything to learn from the Maya, and they never rose to the
level of their predecessors. The relation is, in fact, curiously like
that of Rome to Greece. Unfortunately we have to learn almost all we
know of Maya culture through their Aztec conquerors, but the ruins of
Yucatan and Guatemala are by far the finest and most complete vestiges
left to us.
In Peru also we find in the Tihuanaco gateway a monument of some
pre-Inca civilisation, and one that in regard to the art of sculpture
far surpasses anything that the later culture reveals. It is of special
interest, moreover, for its strong stylistic likeness to the Maya
sculpture of Yucatan. This similarity prompts the interesting
speculation that the earlier civilisations of the two continents had
either a common origin or points of contact, whereas the Inca and Aztec
cultures seem to drift entirely apart. The Aztecs carry on at a lower
level the Maya art of sculpture, whereas the Incas seem to drop
sculpture almost entirely, a curious fact in view of the ambitious
nature of their architectural and engineering works. One seems to guess
that the comparatively humane socialistic tyranny of the Incas developed
more and more along purely practical lines, whilst the hideous
religiosity of the Aztecs left a certain freedom to the imaginative
artist.
In looking at the artistic remains of so remote and strange a
civilisation one sometimes wonders how far one can trust one’s æsthetic
appreciation to interpret truly the feelings which inspired it. In
certain works one cannot doubt that the artist felt just as we feel in
appreciating his work. This must, I think, hold on the one hand of the
rich ornamental arabesques of Maya buildings or the marvellous inlaid
feather and jewel work of either culture; and on the other hand, when we
look at the caricatural realistic figures of Truxillo pottery we need
scarcely doubt that the artist’s intention agrees with our appreciation,
for such a use of the figure is more or less common to all
civilisations. But when we look at the stylistic sculpture of Maya and
Aztec art, are we, one wonders, reading in an intention which was not
really present? One wonders, for instance, how far external and
accidental factors may not have entered in to help produce what seems to
us the perfect and delicate balance between representational and purely
formal considerations. Whether the artist was not held back both by
ritualistic tradition and the difficulty of his medium from pushing
further the actuality of his presentation--whether, in fact, the artist
deplored or himself approved just that reticence which causes our
admiration. At times Maya sculpture has a certain similarity to Indian
religious sculptural reliefs, particularly in the use of flat surfaces
entirely incrusted with ornaments in low relief; but on the whole the
comparison is all in favour of the higher æsthetic sensibility of the
Maya artists, whose co-ordination of even the most complicated forms
compares favourably with the incoherent luxuriance of most Indian work.
In this, as in so many of its characteristics, Maya art comes much
nearer to early Chinese sculpture; and again one wonders that such a
civilisation should have produced such sensitive and reasoned
designs--designs which seem to imply a highly developed self-conscious
æsthetic sensibility. Nor do the Maya for all their hieratic ritualism
seem to fall into the dead, mechanical repetition which the endless
multiplication of religious symbols usually entails, as, for instance,
most markedly in Egyptian art. But this strange difference between what
we know of Mexican civilisation and what we might have interpreted from
the art alone is only one more instance of the isolation of the æsthetic
from all other human activities. The Frontispiece to this book gives an
example of Maya sculpture from Piedras Negras. Mr. Joyce, in his learned
and plausible theory of the dating of Mexican monuments, ascribes these
remains to a date of about 50-200 A.D.
They are certainly among the finest remains of Maya sculpture, and this
example shows at once the extreme richness of the decorative effect and
the admirable taste with which this is co-ordinated in a plastic whole
in which the figure has its due predominance. Though the relief of the
ornamental part is kept flat and generally square in section, it has
nothing of the dryness and tightness that such a treatment often
implies.
Mr. Joyce’s books are compiled with amazing industry, and contain a vast
accumulation of information. If we have a complaint, it is that for
those who are not specialists this information is poured out in almost
too uniform a flood, with too little by way of general ideas to enable
the mind to grasp or relate them properly. If some of the minor details
of obscure proper names had been relegated to the notes, it would have
been possible to seize the general outlines more readily. The books are
rather for reference than adapted to consecutive reading. In his
judgments on the various speculations to which these civilisations have
given rise Mr. Joyce is, as one would expect from so careful a scholar,
cautious and negative. He does not, as far as I remember, even allude to
the theory of the Lost Ten Tribes, but he does condescend to discuss the
theory of cultural influence from Eastern Asia which has more than once
been put forward by respectable ethnologists. He decides against this
fascinating hypothesis more definitely than one would expect--more
[Illustration]
definitely, I should say, than the facts before us allow. He declares,
for instance, that the calendrical system of Mexico shows no similarity
with those of Eastern Asia, whereas Dr. Lehmann gives a circumstantial
account of a very curious likeness, the almost exact correspondence of
two quite peculiar systems of reckoning. My own bias in favour of the
theory of Eastern Asiatic influence is, I confess, based on what may
seem very insufficient grounds, namely, the curious likeness of the
general treatment of naturalistic forms and the peculiar character of
the stylisation of natural forms in early Chinese and American art. It
is of course impossible to define a likeness of general character which
depends so largely on feeling, but it consists to some extent in the
predilection for straight lines and rectangles--a spiral in nature
becoming in both early Chinese and American art a sequence of
rectangular forms with rounded corners. What is more remarkable is that
the further back we go in Chinese art the greater the resemblance
becomes, so that a Chou bronze, or still more the carved horns which
have survived from the Shang dynasty, are extraordinarily like Maya or
Tihuanaco sculpture. Again, it is curious to note how near to early
Chinese bronzes are the tripod vases of the Guetar Indians. All these
may of course be of quite independent origin, but their similarity
cannot be dismissed lightly in view of the long persistence in any
civilisation of such general habits of design. Thus the general habits
of design of the Cretan civilisation persisted into Greek and even Roman
and Christian art; the habits of design of Chinese artists have
persisted, though through great modifications, for more than three
thousand years. One other fact which may seem almost too isolated and
insignificant may perhaps be put forward here. In a history of the
Mormons, published in 1851, there is given a figure of an inscribed
bronze (see Figure) which was dug up by the Mormons in Utah in 1843.
Since Brigham Young pretended to have dug up the original book of Mormon
his followers had a superstitious reverence for all such treasure trove,
and probably the bronze still exists and might be worth investigation.
Now this drawing, here reproduced, looks to me like an extremely bad and
unintelligent reproduction of an early Chinese object, in general
appearance not unlike certain early pieces of jade. It is fairly certain
that at the time the Mormons discovered this, no such objects had found
their way out of China, since the interest in and knowledge of this
period of Chinese art is of much later growth. So it appears conceivable
that the object, whatever its nature, is a relic of some early cultural
invasion from Eastern Asia. The physical possibilities of such invasions
from the Far East certainly seem to be under-estimated by Mr. Joyce.
THE
MUNICH EXHIBITION OF MOHAMMEDAN ART[18]