[213] _Totem_ is the name generally given by travellers and
interpreters to the family crests of the Red Indians. Cf. p. 105.
[214] Plutarch, _Quaest. Rom._, vi. Cf. M'Lennan, _The Patriarchal
Theory_, pp. 206-208.
[215] Cf. Maine, _Early Law and Custom_, pp. 227, 228.
[216] _Domestic Manners of the Chinese_, i. 99.
[217] _Fortnightly Review_, June 1, 1877.
[218] Cf. Sir John Lubbock, _Origin of Civilisation_, pp. 104, 125 _et
seq._
[219] We do not, however, make this presumption. Considering what sort
of affair truly _primitive_ marriage must have been, there may have
risen a prejudice against it within the group. Any one acquainted with
New Caledonian and Arab marriage usages will understand this
suggestion.
[220] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 169. Natives call these objects their
kin, 'of one flesh' with them.
[221] _Studies_, p. 112.
[222] From _The Patriarchal Theory_ (Preface, p. vii.) it appears that
Mr. M'Lennan gave up his hypothesis and ceased to have any view on the
origin of totemism.
[223] Some critics have understood me to maintain that traces of Aryan
totemism survive. I merely point out indications which appear (when
taken with other evidence) to point in that direction. What other
equally plausible explanation is offered?
[224] Cf. 'Apollo and the Mouse,' p. 118.
[225] O'Curry, _Manners of Ancient Irish_, l. ccclxx., quoting Trin.
Coll. Dublin MS.
[226] See also Elton's _Origins of English History_, pp. 299-310.
[227] Kemble's _Saxons in England_, p. 258. _Politics of Aristotle_,
Bolland and Lang, p. 99.[A]
[A] Mr. Grant Allen kindly supplied me some time ago with a list of
animal and vegetable names preserved in the titles of ancient English
village settlements. Among them are: ash, birch, bear (as among the
Iroquois), oak, buck, fir, fern, sun, wolf, thorn, goat, horse, salmon
(the trout is a totem in America), swan (familiar in Australia), and
others. It may be argued, as by Mr. Isaac Taylor, that such names, in
England, merely described local characteristics, though, in Asia,
India, Africa, Australia, Samoa, Egypt, similar names are derived from
totemism.
[228] 'Gentiles sunt qui inter se eodem nomine sunt. Qui ab ingenii
oriundi sunt. Quorum majorum nemo servitutem servivit. Qui capite non
sunt deminuti.'
[229] The arguments on the other side in M'Lennan's _Patriarchal
Theory_ seem overpowering.
[230] _Studies in Ancient History_, p. 212.
[231] _Fortnightly Review_, Oct., 1869: 'Archaeologia Americana,' ii.
13.
[232] Suidas, 3102.
[233] Herod., i. 173. It is not agreed that the Lycians were Aryans,
but surely the Locrians were!
[234] Cf. Bachofen, p. 309.
[235] Compare the _Irish Nennius_, p. 127.
[236] Tacitus, _Germania_, xx.
_THE ART OF SAVAGES._[237]
'Avoid Coleridge, he is _useless_,' says Mr. Ruskin. Why should the
poetry of Coleridge be useful? The question may interest the critic,
but we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His
disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief
that art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He
imitates nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite
practical purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made
for a magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory
that art is a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is
scarcely warranted by the little we know of art's beginnings. We shall
adopt, provisionally, the hypothesis that the earliest art with which
we are acquainted is that of savages contemporary or extinct. Some
philosophers may tell us that all known savages are only degraded
descendants of early civilised men who have, unluckily and
inexplicably, left no relics of their civilisation. But we shall argue
on the opposite theory, that the art of Australians, for example, is
really earlier in kind, more backward, nearer the rude beginnings of
things, than the art of people who have attained to some skill in
pottery, like the New Caledonians. These, again, are much more
backward, in a state really much earlier, than the old races of Mexico
and Peru; while they, in turn, show but a few traces of advance
towards the art of Egypt; and the art of Egypt, at least after the
times of the Ancient Empire, is scarcely advancing in the direction of
the flawless art of Greece. We shall be able to show how savage art,
as of the Australians, develops into barbarous art, as of the New
Zealanders; while the arts of strange civilisations, like those of
Peru and Mexico, advance one step further; and how, again, in the
early art of Greece, in the Greek art of ages prior to Pericles, there
are remains of barbaric forms which are gradually softened into
beauty. But there are necessarily breaks and solutions of continuity
in the path of progress.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.--An Australian Shield.]
One of the oldest problems has already risen before us in connection
with the question stated: Is art the gratification of the imitative
faculty? Now, among the lowest, the most untutored, the worst equipped
savages of contemporary races, art is rather decorative on the whole
than imitative. The patterns on Australian shields and clubs, the
scars which they raise on their own flesh by way of tattooing, are
very rarely imitations of any objects in nature. The Australians, like
the Red Indians, like many African and some aboriginal Indian races,
Peruvians, and others, distinguish their families by the names of
various plants and animals, from which each family boasts its descent.
Thus you have a family called Kangaroos, descended, as they fancy,
from the kangaroo; another from the cockatoo, another from the black
snake, and so forth. Now, in many quarters of the globe, this custom
and this superstition, combined with the imitative faculty in man, has
produced a form of art representing the objects from which the
families claim descent. This art is a sort of rude heraldry--probably
the origin of heraldry. Thus, if a Red Indian (say a Delaware) is of
the family of the Turtle, he blazons a turtle on his shield or coat,
probably tattoos or paints his breast with a figure of a turtle, and
always has a turtle, _reversed_, designed on the pillar above his
grave when he dies, just as, in our mediaeval chronicles, the leopards
of an English king are reversed on his scutcheon opposite the record
of his death. But the Australians, to the best of my knowledge, though
they are much governed by belief in descent from animals, do not
usually blazon their crest on their flesh, nor on the trees near the
place where the dead are buried. They have not arrived at this pitch
of imitative art, though they have invented or inherited a kind of
runes which they notch on sticks, and in which they convey to each
other secret messages. The natives of the Upper Darling, however, do
carve their family crests on their shields. In place of using
imitative art, the Murri are said, I am not quite sure with what
truth, to indicate the distinction of families by arrangements of
patterns, lines and dots, tattooed on the breast and arms, and carved
on the bark of trees near places of burial. In any case, the absence
of the rude imitative art of heraldry among a race which possesses all
the social conditions that produce this art is a fact worth noticing,
and itself proves that the native art of one of the most backward
races we know is not essentially imitative.
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
Any one who will look through a collection of Australian weapons and
utensils will be brought to this conclusion. The shields and the clubs
are elaborately worked, but almost always without any representation
of plants, animals, or the human figure. As a rule the decorations
take the simple shape of the 'herring-bone' pattern, or such other
patterns as can be produced without the aid of spirals, or curves, or
circles. There is a natural and necessary cause of this choice of
decoration. The Australians, working on hard wood, with tools made of
flint, or broken glass, or sharp shell, cannot easily produce any
curved lines. Every one who, when a boy, carved his name on the bark
of a tree, remembers the difficulty he had with S and G, while he got
on easily with letters like M and A, which consist of straight or
inclined lines. The savage artist has the same difficulty with his
rude tools in producing anything like satisfactory curves or
spirals. We engrave above (Fig. 1) a shield on which an Australian has
succeeded, with obvious difficulty, in producing concentric ovals of
irregular shape. It may be that the artist would have produced perfect
circles if he could. His failure is exactly like that of a youthful
carver of inscriptions coming to grief over his G's and S's. Here,
however (Fig. 2), we have three shields which, like the ancient Celtic
pipkin (the tallest of the three figures in Fig. 3), show the earliest
known form of savage decorative art--the forms which survive under the
names of 'chevron' and 'herring-bone.' These can be scratched on clay
with the nails, or a sharp stick, and this primeval way of decorating
pottery made without the wheel survives, with other relics of savage
art, in the western isles of Scotland. The Australian had not even
learned to make rude clay pipkins, but he decorated his shields as the
old Celts and modern old Scotch women decorated their clay pots, with
the herring-bone arrangement of incised lines. In the matter of colour
the Australians prefer white clay and red ochre, which they rub into
the chinks in the woodwork of their shields. When they are determined
on an ambush, they paint themselves all over with white, justly
conceiving that their sudden apparition in this guise will strike
terror into the boldest hearts. But arrangements in black and white of
this sort scarcely deserve the name of even rudimentary art.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Savage Ornamentation.]
[Illustration: Fig. 4.--An Australian Stele.]
The Australians sometimes introduce crude decorative attempts at
designing the human figure, as in the pointed shield opposite (Fig. 2,
_a_), which, with the other Australian designs, are from Mr. Brough
Smyth's _Aborigines of Victoria_. But these ambitious efforts usually
end in failure. Though the Australians chiefly confine themselves to
decorative art, there are numbers of wall-paintings, so to speak, in
the caves of the country which prove that they, like the Bushmen,
could design the human figure in action when they pleased. Their usual
preference for the employment of patterns appears to me to be the
result of the nature of their materials. In modern art our mechanical
advantages and facilities are so great that we are always carrying the
method and manner of one art over the frontier of another. Our poetry
aims at producing the effects of music; our prose at producing the
effects of poetry. Our sculpture tries to vie with painting in the
representation of action, or with lace-making in the production of
reticulated surfaces, and so forth. But the savage, in his art, has
sense enough to confine himself to the sort of work for which his
materials are fitted. Set him in the bush with no implements and
materials but a bit of broken shell and a lump of hard wood, and he
confines himself to decorative scratches. Place the black in the large
cave which Pundjel, the Australian Zeus, inhabited when on earth (as
Zeus inhabited the cave in Crete), and give the black plenty of red
and white ochre and charcoal, and he will paint the human figure in
action on the rocky walls. Later, we will return to the cave-paintings
of the Australians and the Bushmen in South Africa. At present we must
trace purely decorative art a little further. But we must remember
that there was once a race apparently in much the same social
condition as the Australians, but far more advanced and ingenious in
art. The earliest men of the European Continent, about whom we know
much, the men whose bones and whose weapons are found beneath the
gravel-drift, the men who were contemporary with the rhinoceros,
mammoth and cave-bear, were not further advanced in material
civilisation than the Australians. They used weapons of bone, of
unpolished stone, and probably of hard wood. But the remnants of their
art, the scraps of mammoth or reindeer bone in our museums, prove that
they had a most spirited style of sketching from the life. In a
collection of drawings on bone (probably designed with a flint or a
shell), drawings by palaeolithic man, in the British Museum, I have
only observed one purely decorative attempt. Even in this the
decoration resembles an effort to use the outlines of foliage for
ornamental purposes. In almost all the other cases the palaeolithic
artist has not decorated his bits of bone in the usual savage manner,
but has treated his bone as an artist treats his sketch-book, and has
scratched outlines of beasts and fishes with his sharp shell as an
artist uses his point. These ancient bones, in short, are the
sketch-books of European savages, whose untaught skill was far greater
than that of the Australians, or even of the Eskimo. When brought into
contact with Europeans, the Australian and Eskimo very quickly, even
without regular teaching, learn to draw with some spirit and skill. In
the Australian stele, or grave-pillar, which we have engraved (Fig.
4), the shapeless figures below the men and animals are the dead, and
the _boilyas_ or ghosts. Observe the patterns in the interstices. The
artist had lived with Europeans. In their original conditions,
however, the Australians have not attained to such free, artist-like,
and unhampered use of their rude materials as the mysterious European
artists who drew the mammoth that walked abroad amongst them.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.--_a_, A Maori Design; _b_, Tattoo on a Maori's
Face.]
We have engraved one solitary Australian attempt at drawing curved
lines. The New Zealanders, a race far more highly endowed, and, when
Europeans arrived amongst them, already far more civilised than the
Australians, had, like the Australians, no metal implements. But their
stone weapons were harder and keener, and with these they engraved the
various spirals and coils on hard wood, of which we give examples
here. It is sometimes said that New Zealand culture and art have
filtered from some Asiatic source, and that in the coils and spirals
designed, as in our engravings, on the face of the Maori chief, or on
his wooden furniture, there may be found debased Asiatic
influences.[238] This is one of the questions which we can hardly deal
with here. Perhaps its solution requires more of knowledge,
anthropological and linguistic, than is at present within the reach of
any student. Assuredly the races of the earth have wandered far, and
have been wonderfully intermixed, and have left the traces of their
passage here and there on sculptured stones, and in the keeping of the
ghosts that haunt ancient grave-steads. But when two pieces of
artistic work, one civilised, one savage, resemble each other, it is
always dangerous to suppose that the resemblance bears witness to
relationship or contact between the races, or to influences imported
by one from the other. New Zealand work may be Asiatic in origin, and
debased by the effect of centuries of lower civilisation and ruder
implements. Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of
ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already
attained. One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite
Maori spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a
bishop's crozier at the top, taken by the great native ferns. Examples
of resemblance, to be accounted for by the development of a crude
early idea, may be traced most easily in the early pottery of Greece.
No one says that the Greeks borrowed from the civilised people of
America. Only a few enthusiasts say that the civilised peoples of
America, especially the Peruvians, are Aryan by race. Yet the remains
of Peruvian palaces are often by no means dissimilar in style from the
'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of gigantic stones which remain
on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and Mycenae. The probability is
that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar
implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived at like
results.
[Illustration: Fig. 6.--From a Maori's Face.]
Few people who are interested in the question can afford to visit Peru
and Mycenae and study the architecture for themselves. But any one who
is interested in the strange identity of the human mind everywhere,
and in the necessary forms of early art, can go to the British Museum
and examine the American and early Greek pottery. Compare the Greek
key pattern and the wave pattern on Greek and Mexican vases, and
compare the bird faces, or human faces very like those of birds, with
the similar faces on the clay pots which Dr. Schliemann dug up at
Troy. The latter are engraved in his book on Troy. Compare the
so-called 'cuttle-fish' from a Peruvian jar with the same figure on
the early Greek vases, most of which are to be found in the last of
the classical vase-rooms upstairs. Once more, compare the little clay
'whorls' of the Mexican and Peruvian room with those which Dr.
Schliemann found so numerous at Hissarlik. The conviction becomes
irresistible that all these objects, in shape, in purpose, in
character of decoration, are the same, because the mind and the
materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation especially,
are the same everywhere. You might introduce old Greek bits of
clay-work, figures or vases, into a Peruvian collection, or might
foist Mexican objects among the clay treasures of Hissarlik, and the
wisest archaeologist would be deceived. The Greek fret pattern
especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw.
The _svastika_, as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles
to each limb, is found everywhere--in India, Greece, Scotland,
Peru--as a natural bit of ornament. The allegorising fancy of the
Indians gave it a mystic meaning, and the learned have built I know
not what worlds of religious theories on this 'pre-Christian cross,'
which is probably a piece of hasty decorative work, with no original
mystic meaning at all.[239] Ornaments of this sort were transferred
from wood or bone to clay, almost as soon as people learned that early
art, the potter's, to which the Australians have not attained, though
it was familiar to the not distant people of New Caledonia. The style
of spirals and curves, again, once acquired (as it was by the New
Zealanders), became the favourite of some races, especially of the
Celtic. Any one who will study either the ornaments of Mycenae, or
those of any old Scotch or Irish collection, will readily recognise in
that art the development of a system of ornament like that of the
Maoris. Classical Greece, on the other hand, followed more in the
track of the ancient system of straight and slanted lines, and we do
not find in the later Greek art that love of interlacing coils and
spirals which is so remarkable among the Celts, and which is very
manifest in the ornaments of the Mycenaean hoards--that is, perhaps, of
the ancient Greek heroic age. The causes of these differences in the
development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one
track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early _motif_, while
classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at
present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later art has done
little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to
untutored races.
It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is better
adapted to both the purposes and materials of savages than the art
which aims at representation. As a rule, the materials of the lower
savages are their own bodies (which they naturally desire to make
beautiful for ever by tattooing), and the hard substances of which
they fashion their tools and weapons. These hard substances, when
worked on with cutting instruments of stone or shell, are most easily
adorned with straight cut lines, and spirals are therefore found to
be, on the whole, a comparatively late form of ornament.
[Illustration: Fig. 7.--Bushman Dog.]
We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here,
again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the
materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical
purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily,
to consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake. In modern
art, in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by
painting or sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born
instinct. But there must be some 'reason why' for this; and it does
not seem at all unlikely that we inherit the love, the disinterested
love, of imitative art from very remote ancestors, whose habits of
imitation had a direct, interested and practical purpose. The member
of Parliament who mimics the crowing of a cock during debate, or the
street boy who beguiles his leisure by barking like a dog, has a
disinterested pleasure in the exercise of his skill; but advanced
thinkers seem pretty well agreed that the first men who imitated the
voices of dogs, and cocks, and other animals, did not do so merely for
fun, but with the practical purpose of indicating to their companions
the approach of these creatures. Such were the rude beginnings of
human language; and whether that theory be correct or not, there are
certainly practical reasons which impel the savage to attempt
imitative art. I doubt if there are many savage races which do not use
representative art for the purposes of writing--that is, to
communicate information to persons whom they cannot reach by the
voice, and to assist the memory, which, in a savage, is perhaps not
very strong. To take examples. A savage man meets a savage maid. She
does not speak his language, nor he hers. How are they to know
whether, according to the marriage laws of their race, they are lawful
mates for each other? This important question is settled by an
inspection of their tattooed marks. If a Thlinkeet man of the Swan
stock meets an Iroquois maid of the Swan stock they cannot speak to
each other, and the 'gesture-language' is cumbrous. But if both are
tattooed with the swan, then the man knows that this daughter of the
swan is not for him. He could no more marry her than Helen of Troy
could have married Castor, the tamer of horses. Both are children of
the Swan, as were Helen and Castor, and must regard each other as
brother and sister. The case of the Thlinkeet man and the Iroquois
maid is extremely unlikely to occur; but I give it as an example of
the practical use, among savages, of representative art.