abundantly prove that it needed no wanderers from the cradlelands of Old
World civilisation to that strange Atlantis lying in the engirdling
ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to engraft their artistic
capacities on the “Achoriens” by whom it was peopled. The innate faculty
for art has manifested itself in individuals and in nations, among
widely diverse Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Arabian, and mediæval
races, as in later Frank, Fleming, and Dane, with unaccountable
partiality. For its absence, or very subordinate manifestation, is seen
to be compatible with the highest intellectual triumphs in other
directions. The arts of Britain’s Allophyliæ manifest no instinctive aim
at a reproduction of familiar natural objects, such as is characteristic
of some races at a very primitive stage. Nor was it till a recent
generation that the stock from which Shakespeare and Newton sprung put
forth its first efforts at rivalling the great masters of the
Renaissance, or entering into competition with the skilled painters of
the Low Countries. It is otherwise with the nations of the New World.
The highest stage of civilisation attained there is a very partial one.
But among the various characteristics of the American aborigines which
invite attention, the very wide diffusion of an aptitude for imitative
art is one that merits careful study as typical of American man. It is
not, indeed, to be overlooked that if due allowance be made for the
narrow range in degrees of civilisation among the races of the New
World, the same diversity of racial characteristics is observable there
as elsewhere. The tendency, moreover, of civilisation is to efface, or
greatly to modify, such distinctions. Civilised nations habitually
borrow the arts and imitate the social habits of neighbouring races, or
accept some common standard of intellectual and moral pre-eminence.
Nevertheless, while the capacity for imitative art is neither peculiar
to the New World, nor characteristic of all its diverse nationalities,
it appears to be more generally diffused among the races of America than
elsewhere. It is prevalent among tribes in nearly every condition, from
the rude Indian nomad, or the Eskimo, to the semi-civilised Zuñi, and
the skilled metallurgists and architects of Central America and Peru.
This development of a feeling for art in savage races is at all times
interesting as indicative of intellectual capacity and powers of
observation, even when manifested, as it frequently is, within a very
narrow range. It is by no means a general characteristic either of
savage or civilised man. Yet recent archæological discoveries prove it
to have been one of the earliest forms of intellectual activity among
the cave-dwellers of Europe’s palæolithic dawn. The most civilised
nations have differed widely in the manifestations of this æsthetic
faculty. The city of Dante was the Athens of the Middle Ages in art as
well as letters; while the land which gave birth to Shakespeare can
scarcely be said to have had a native school of painting or sculpture
till late in the eighteenth century. The like differences are observable
among barbarous nations. Races are met with, to whom the drawing of a
familiar object suggests no idea of the original; while others, in
nearly the same stage of savage life, habitually practise the
representation of natural objects in the decorative details of their
implements and articles of dress, and in the carvings which furnish
occupation for many leisure hours.
A special interest attaches to the disclosures of archæology relative to
the prehistoric races of Europe, owing to the evidence thereby furnished
of striking resemblances in their arts and conditions of life to those
of uncultured races of our own day. In many respects it seems as though
the present condition of some existing races of America only repeats
that of Europe’s infancy. But so far as imitative art is concerned, the
analogy fails when the more recent contents of the barrows, cairns, and
grave mounds of prehistoric Europe are brought into comparison with
those of the New World. If, indeed, we leave behind us the age of
cromlechs, kistvaens, cairns, and barrows, and seek to estimate aright
the disclosures of artistic ability pertaining to the far more ancient
men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, it is otherwise. But,
before reviewing the wonderfully definite glimpses thereby furnished of
tribes of rude yet skilful hunters of that post-glacial world, it may be
of some help, in the comparisons which they suggest, to recall
impressions derived from a study of that Stone period in which the
natives of the British Islands appear to have approximated, in many
respects, to the Red Indian nomad of the American forest.
One little-heeded point of evidence of this correspondence, to which I
long since drew attention, is to be found in the traces of artificial
modification of the head-form in ancient British crania; a comparison of
which with skulls recovered from Indian grave mounds helps to throw
light on the habits and social life of the British Islands in
prehistoric times. In illustration of this I may refer to an
exploration, now of old date. In the early summer of 1851, I learned of
the accidental exposure of a stone cist, in trenching a garden at
Juniper Green, a few miles distant from Edinburgh, and immediately
proceeded to the spot. There, under a slightly elevated knoll—the
remains, in all probability, of the ancient barrow,—lay a rude
sarcophagus of unhewn sandstone, within which was a male skeleton, still
in good preservation. The body had been laid on its left side, with the
arms folded over the breast, and the knees drawn up so as to touch the
elbows. A flat water-worn stone formed the pillow, from which the skull
had rolled to the bottom of the cist. Above the right shoulder stood a
gracefully formed clay vase, containing only a little sand and black
dust, the remains, it may be presumed, of food which it originally
contained when deposited there by affectionate hands, in some
long-forgotten century. It was recovered uninjured, and is now
deposited, along with the skull, in the Archæological Museum of
Edinburgh.
The primitive grave, thus discovered within sight of the Scottish
capital, has a curious interest as a link connecting the present with a
remote past. But the special point which throws light on the habits of
the ancient race, is a parieto-occipital flattening, such as is of
common occurrence in skulls recovered from American ossuaries and grave
mounds. This feature is clearly traceable to the use of the cradle-board
in infancy. The mode of nursing the Indian papoose, by bandaging it on a
cradle-board, is specially adapted to the vicissitudes of a nomad forest
life. The infant is carried safely, slung on the mother’s back, leaving
her hands free; and in the pauses of her journey, or when engaged in
field work, it can be laid aside, or suspended from the branch of a
tree, without risk of injury. But one result of this custom is that the
soft bones of the skull are subjected to a continuous pressure in one
direction during the whole term of suckling, which is necessarily
protracted, among a nomad people, much longer than is usual in settled
communities; and to this cause is undoubtedly traceable the occipital
flattening of many skulls recovered from European cists and barrows. Dr.
L. A. Gosse, after discussing in his _Essai sur les déformations
artificielles du Crâne_ certain artificial modifications of the skull,
of common occurrence among the aborigines of the New World, thus
proceeds: “Passant dans l’ancient continent, ne tardons-nous pas à
reconnaître que ce berceau plat et solide y a produit des effets
analogues. Les anciens habitants de la Scandinavie et de la Calédonie
devaient s’en servir, si l’on en juge par la forme de leurs crânes.”[79]
Full-sized representations of the Juniper Green skull, and others of the
same type, are given in _Crania Britannica_.[80] Bateman also, in his
_Ten Years’ Diggings in Celtic and Saxon Gravehills_, concurs with
earlier writers in ascribing to the use of the cradle-board the
flattened occiput observed in skulls recovered from British barrows. The
employment, indeed, of the cradle-board among prehistoric races of
Northern Europe, and their nomad life of which it is so characteristic a
feature, may now be considered as generally recognised. The implements
and pottery recovered from graves of the period show their constructors
to have been, for the most part, devoid of any knowledge of metals; or,
at best, in the mere rudimentary stage of metallurgic arts. But the
Juniper Green cist, that of the large Staffordshire barrow of Wotton
Hill, that of Roundway Hill, North Wilts, another of Green Lowe,
Derbyshire, and others described in the works above referred to, while
all disclosing evidence of correspondence in habits and social condition
between ancient races of the British Isles and the Indians of the New
World, also furnished characteristic examples of their fictile ware; and
here the analogy fails. There are, indeed, abundant specimens of broken
Indian pottery on many of their deserted village sites, which might be
mingled with the fragments of a like kind from early European grave
mounds without attracting special attention. Simple chevron and saltier
or herring-bone patterns, scratched with a pointed bone on the soft
clay, are common to both; and many of the more elaborate linear and bead
patterns of the primitive British potters reappear with slight variation
on the Indian ware. But besides those, few ancient Indian village sites
fail to yield fragments of pottery, including clay tobacco pipes,
ornamented with more or less rude imitations of the human face and of
familiar animals, such as the beaver, the bear, the lynx, and the deer.
Before my first visit to the American continent, while still preoccupied
with the arts of the ancient British savage, and the more graceful
devices of the metallurgists of Europe’s Bronze period, I noted the
prevalence of a conventional ornamentation, consisting mainly of
improvements on what may be called the accidents of manufacture, or
possibly of linear decorations borrowed from patterns of the plaiter or
knitter.[81] No attempt appears to have been made by the old European
decorator at such imitations of familiar natural objects as are now
known to have been practised among the far more ancient cave-dwellers of
Europe, the contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, and
which are familiar to us in the primitive arts of the New World. Objects
recovered from the mounds of the Ohio and the Mississippi valleys, as
well as the diversified products of the native artificers of Mexico and
Peru, attract special attention by their endless variety of imitative
design; and similar skill and ingenuity are apparent in the pottery, the
plaited manufactures, the stone and bone carvings, and even in many of
the great animal mounds and other earthworks of the North American
continent. An observant recognition of analogies, traceable in the
rhetorical construction of many American Indian holophrasms, appears to
be only another phase of this widely prevalent imitative faculty. At the
same time, whether we study the physical form or the intellectual
characteristics of native American races, it becomes more and more
apparent that the New World has been peopled from different centres, and
still presents essentially distinct types of race. It had its ferocious
Caribs, its Mexicans, with their revolting human sacrifices and other
bloody rites, and its stealthy, treacherous nomads, less courageous but
not less cruel. But it has also gentler races, in whom, as in the
Peruvians, the Zuñis, and others of the Pueblo Indians, the æsthetic
faculty predominates, and overlays with many a graceful concomitant the
utilitarian products of their industrial arts.
Whether barbarous or civilised nations are classified in accordance with
their linguistic affinities, both are found to manifest other
specialties according with the diverse families of speech. The
differences which separate the Aryan from the Semitic races are not more
marked than the intellectual and moral divergencies among barbarous
tribes. But while this is apparent on the American continent, its
diverse races appear to be characterised by a more general aptitude for
artistic imitation than is observable elsewhere, except among the
long-civilised nations of the Old World, whose composite vocabularies
reveal the sources of many borrowed arts. The Peruvian potter sketched
and modelled endless quaint devices in clay; the Zuñian decorated his
gracefully fashioned ware with highly effective parti-coloured designs;
and the old Mound-Builder wrought in intaglio on his domestic and
sepulchral vessels conventional flower patterns; and in his miniature
sculptures reproduced the fauna of an area extending from the Ohio to
the Gulf of Mexico. Native artificers of widely different American races
manifest this imitative faculty. Not only is the Indian pipe sculptor
found copying animate and inanimate objects with an observant eye and a
ready hand, but even the linear patterns on pottery and straw
basket-work are frequently made to assume combinations obviously
suggested by flowers and other familiar objects of nature. The
perception of such analogies, and even the capacity for appreciating the
linear or pictorial representation of objects on a flat surface, varies
greatly in different races. Travellers have repeatedly described the
manifestation by savage races of an utter incapacity to comprehend
pictured representations. Mr. Oldfield, for example, tells how a large
coloured engraving of a native of New Holland was shown to some
Australians. “One declared it to be a ship, another a kangaroo, and so
on, not one of a dozen identifying the portrait as having any connection
with himself.”[82] The artistic faculty is unquestionably hereditary.
There are artistic families and artistic races. But if so, the pictorial
skill of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of Western Europe was not
transmitted to their successors. Guided not only by a comparison of
their tools and weapons with those of the Neolithic period, but also by
cranial and other physical evidence, we are led to assume the absence of
affinity between the men of the Perigord caves and the greatly more
modern races of Europe’s later Stone period; and their lack of the
imitative faculty, so characteristic of the elder race, adds
confirmation to this opinion.
Artistic sympathies, and a capacity for high achievements in painting
and sculpture, are neither the direct results of civilisation, nor in
many cases the product of culture and training. From the days of Giotto,
the shepherd boy, to those of Thorwaldsen, Wilkie, and Turner, art-power
is not only seen to be a direct and exceptional gift of nature, but it
is frequently the product of a singularly partial intellectual
development. Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo are examples of men of
rare and comprehensive genius, who sought in art the form in which to
give expression to their many-sided powers. But, on the other hand,
instances are not rare of artists like Thorwaldsen or Turner, who,
except within the range of their own special art, seemed exceptionally
defective in the exercise of ordinary mental powers. The same is true of
races as of individuals. Some show an aptitude for art wholly wanting in
others, who nevertheless equal or surpass them in more important
qualities. The æsthetic faculty may, indeed, be described as curiously
capricious in its manifestations. The Papuans of New Guinea and of New
Caledonia, a race of Negrillos, in some points presenting analogies to
the Australian, are nevertheless remarkable for a seemingly instinctive
ingenuity and aptitude for art. Mr. Wallace describes them as
contrasting with the Malay race in the habitual decoration of their
canoes, houses, and almost every domestic utensil, with elaborate
carving. The Fijians, who are allied to this Negrillo race, present in
many respects an unfavourable contrast to the true Polynesian. In their
physiognomy and whole physical aspect they are inferior to other island
races of the Pacific; and are further notable for repulsive habits and a
general condition of social and moral degradation. But their ferocity
and the cruel customs in which they so strikingly differ from the Malays
are vices of a vigorous race. They have frequently been observed to
indicate energy capable of being directed to useful ends, as has been
the case with the Maori cannibals of New Zealand, and was seen of old in
the Huns and the Northmen, whose descendants are now among the most
civilised races of the world. It is obvious, at any rate, that the
savage vices of the Fijians are compatible with considerable skill in
such arts as pertain to their primitive condition. Their musical
instruments are superior to those of the Polynesians, and include the
pan-pipe and others unknown in the islands beyond their range. Their
pottery exhibits great variety of form; and some of the vessels combined
in groups present a curious correspondence to familiar examples of
Peruvian art. Their fishing-nets and lines are remarkable for neat and
skilful workmanship, and they carry on agriculture to a considerable
extent. “Indeed,” remarked the ethnologist of the United States
Expedition, in summing up the characteristics of the Fijians, “we soon
began to perceive that the people were in possession of almost every art
known to the Polynesians, and of many others besides. The
highly-finished workmanship was unexpected, everything being executed
until recently, and even now for the most part, without the use of iron.
In the collection of implements and manufactures brought home by the
Expedition, the observer will distinguish in the Fijian division
something like a school of arts for the other Pacific islands.”
All this has to be kept in view, in any attempt to gauge the
intellectual development, or determine the degree of civilisation, of
the palæolithic draughtsmen and carvers of the Garonne. One of the
scenes introduced by M. Figuier, in the fanciful illustrations of his
_L’Homme primitif_, represents a group of artists, such as, except for
their costume, might have been sketched from the students of the École
des Beaux Arts. Their mode of work was probably much more akin to the
intermittent labours of the Indian, whose elaborately sculptured pipe is
laid aside, and resumed again—often after prolonged intervals,—before
it receives the finishing touch. But though the drawings and the
carvings of those primitive artists alike manifest remarkable skill and
observant imitation, the former are the objects of special interest.
Their carvings appear to have been executed, with rare exceptions, for
the decoration of favourite implements and weapons, in accordance with a
practice common to many diverse races and conditions of society. But the
drawings have no such motive. They more nearly correspond to the sketch
or drawing from nature of the modern artist; and furnish evidence of
peculiar attributes, strikingly distinguishing the race of that remote
age from most others that have succeeded them.
Certain it is that, so far as present evidence goes, the greatly
prolonged Neolithic period was characterised by no such artistic feeling
or imitative skill. Specimens of the ingenious handiwork of the
artificers of Europe’s later Stone age abound. We have numerous relics
from the kitchen middens of Denmark, the pile villages of Switzerland,
the crannoges of Scotland and Ireland, as well as the varied contents of
cromlechs, cists, cairns, and barrows, diligently explored throughout
Europe. But no such examples of carvings, or graven representations of
animals or other natural objects, have been found. The “clay in the
hands of the potter” is a familiar symbol of plastic response to the
will of the designer. It is, indeed, easier for the practised modeller
to fashion the clay into any desired form, than to draw it, subject to
rules of perspective, on a flat surface. Linear devices and the
representation of objects in intaglio, or in low relief, are also
accomplished with great facility on the soft clay. Hence the art of
diverse races, periods, and stages of progress, finds its aptest
illustration in fictile ware; and the imitative faculty of widely
different American races may be studied in their pottery. In Mexico,
apparently, we have to look for the northern school of ceramic art.
There, the aggressive races of the North first came in contact with the
civilisation of Central America; and the native aptitude for imitative
representation received a fresh impulse. The Indian modeller learned to
work skilfully in clay; and the variety of design, combined with the
quaint humour of the caricaturist, displayed in many of the Mexican
terra-cottas, serves to indicate this class of work as specially
significant in relation to the present inquiry. The inventive fancy and
skill of the Peruvian potter illustrates in ampler variety the progress
achieved by the races of the southern continent. But this will more
fitly come under review along with other examples of modern native art.
For no analogous traces of contemporary modelling in clay furnish
material for comparison with the art of the Palæolithic era; though the
skill of its bone and ivory carvers was in no degree inferior to that of
the Mexican or Peruvian modeller. But the æsthetic aptitude of that old
race of Europe’s intellectual dawn is in some respects unique. In so far
as their ingenious arts furnish any evidence of true racial
characteristics, the men of the Neolithic era inherited none of their
æsthetic feelings; nor did the imitative faculty manifest itself with
exceptional power until the advent of the Aryan races brought with it
the potentialities of Hellenic inspiration.