remains of Britain has already been noted. It made a strong impression
on my mind at an early stage of my archæological researches; for this
characteristic of European art extends over a period of greatly
prolonged duration, marked by the advent and disappearance of races,
dissimilar alike in physical and mental characteristics. We have the
laboriously finished implements of neolithic art, the pottery of at
least two distinct races seemingly prior to the Celts, and then the
graceful artistic productions of the Bronze period, but still only the
rarest traces of any effort at imitation. Long before the imitative arts
of the American continent were known to me otherwise than from
description, I remarked, of the archaic art of the first British
metallurgists: “The ornamentation consists, almost without exception,
only of improvements on the accidents of manufacture. The incised
decorations of the pottery appear, in many cases, to have been produced
simply by passing twisted cords round the soft clay. More complicated
designs, most frequently consisting of chevron, saltire, or herring-bone
patterns, where they are not merely the results of a combination of such
lines, have been suggested, as I conceive, by the few and
half-accidental patterns of the industrious female knitter. In no single
case is any attempt made at the imitation of a leaf or flower, of
animals, or any other simple objects.”[83] At the date of those remarks
the art of Europe’s Palæolithic era was unknown; but with the arts of
other primitive races, and especially those of the American continent,
in view, I then added: “It is curious, indeed, and noteworthy, to find
how entirely every trace of imitative art is absent in British archaic
relics; for it is by no means an invariable characteristic of primitive
arts.” Dr. Hoffman, when commenting on aboriginal American art among the
Indians of California, adds: “I have not met with any attempts at
objective drawings or etchings which may be attributed to the Tshuma
Indians, who were the former occupants of the island;[84] but
ornamentations upon shells and bone beads, soap-stone pipes, shell
pendants, and other ornaments, seem to consist entirely of straight or
zigzag lines, cross-lines, circles,” etc. The earliest examples of
native metallurgy in Britain are to be found in the works of the
primitive goldsmith; but the same conventional ornamentation which
occurs on early pottery, is characteristic of the beautiful personal
ornaments of gold belonging, for the most part, to the first period of
working in metals. It is not till a late stage of the European Bronze
period that imitative art reappears, and zoomorphic decorations become
common.
The discovery in 1868, and subsequent years, of numerous specimens of
the artistic ability of the cave-men of palæolithic Europe, revealed a
singularly interesting phase of primitive history. Remains of the
so-called “Reindeer period” are now familiar to us from many localities;
for the range of this animal in palæolithic times appears to have
extended from the Baltic to the Pyrenees. But a special interest was
conferred on the first disclosures by the locality itself, where the
Vézère, an affluent of the river Dordogne, winds its way through the
cretaceous limestone, in which occur numerous caves and rock-shelters,
rich in remains of primitive art. In this region of South-western
France, where many historical and legendary associations carry the fancy
back to elder centuries, the Dordogne unites with the Garonne at its
estuary below Bordeaux. The upper waters of the Dordogne form the
boundary between Limousin and Auvergne, and the Vézère is one of its
highest tributaries in Limousin. There, nearly in the latitude of
Montreal, but with the genial climate which, throughout the whole
historic period, has characterised Southern France, lie the caves of
Cro-Magnon, La Moustier, Gorge d’Enfer, Laugerie Haute and Basse, and La
Madelaine: the long-sealed art galleries of prehistoric Gaul. The
reindeer and the aurochs haunted its forests; the woolly rhinoceros and
the mammoth still frequented its glades; and the long-extinct fossil
horse was not only an object of the chase, but was possibly already
subdued to the companionship and service of man. Such, at least, is the
idea suggested by a scene graven on the portion of a baton or staff,
found by M. Lartet and Mr. Christy in La Madelaine cave, which
represents a man between two horses’ heads, apparently walking past,
with a staff or spear over his shoulder. Nor were those man’s sole
contemporaries.
The drawings of the ancient cave-men are of varying degrees of merit,
showing the efforts of the unskilled tyro as well as of the practised
artist. Some of the examples found at Laugerie Basse—as, for instance,
the assumed representation of an ibex, with its legs folded as if
sitting,—are the crude efforts of unpractised draughtsmen, and would
compare unfavourably with many examples of graphic art, the work of
modern Eskimo and Indian gravers and draughtsmen. But other
specimens—such as the mammoth from La Madelaine cave, and the Alpine
ibex and reindeers from Laugerie Basse, in Southern France, and, still
more, the remarkably spirited drawing of the reindeer grazing, from the
Kesserloch, near Thayingen, sketched on a piece of reindeer
horn,—evince powers of observation, and a freedom of hand in sketching
from nature, such as would be found exceptional among pupils of our best
training schools of art. On this point my friend, Sir Noel Paton, writes
me: “I entirely concur in your view as to the immense superiority as
works of art of the engravings on horn and ivory found in the
prehistoric caves, over any modern work of the same kind which I have
seen, executed by the Eskimos or other savage, tribes of our own day. As
compared with the latter, the prehistoric productions are like the swift
and direct studies from nature of Landseer, compared with the laboured
scrawlings from memory of a rather dull schoolboy.”
I have elsewhere drawn attention to the fact that some of the drawings
of the Perigord cave-men and their palæolithic contemporaries,
especially, among the latter, the Kesserloch sketch of a reindeer
grazing, are left-hand drawings.[85] So far as this class of evidence is
of value, the examples from the caves in the valley of the Vézère are
exceptionally numerous. There, it may be, a family, or possibly a tribe,
dwelt, among whom left-handedness prevailed to an unusual extent, along
with a degree of skill and dexterity, such as is frequently found to
accompany the instinctive use of the left hand.
In this, as in other respects, the recovery of evidences of a
well-developed æsthetic faculty among the men of Europe’s Mammoth and
Reindeer period, furnishes materials for many suggestive inferences; for
we shall very imperfectly estimate the significance of the primitive
drawings so unexpectedly discovered, if we regard them as no more than
the pastimes of those ancient cave-men, whose artistic ability they so
unmistakably reveal. They are rather to be classed with the
picture-writing of the American aborigines—including its most advanced
Mexican stage abundantly illustrated in Lord Kingsborough’s folios,—as
one of the primitive supplements of language among uncultured races. As
such it is a form of visible speech, and an important step in advance of
the stage of gesture-language. The historical value of the palæolithic
drawings is indisputable. They furnish a record, more trustworthy than
any written chronicle, of the strange conditions of life in a region
familiar to us throughout the whole historic period for its genial
climate and social civilisation. It is in this aspect, as a contemporary
chronicling of current events, that palæolithic art has its chief value.
It furnishes a graphic picturing of the habits of life, and of many of
the attendant circumstances of that remote period, recorded with such
vivid truthfulness, that we realise very definitely the character of its
long-extinct fauna, and, to some considerable extent, the occupations
and modes of life of the cave-men by whom they were hunted, and in
leisure hours were reproduced graven or carved, on bone, horn, or ivory,
or traced in free outline on slabs of schist or other soft stone.
Viewed simply as examples of imitative art among a people still in the
rudest Stone age, the drawings are significant and instructive. They
furnish evidence of observation and artistic capacity, and consequently
of intellectual powers capable of very different results from anything
that could be realised in the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, or
of anything beyond the crudest appliances for developing mechanical
skill. The conditions of climate probably forbade any attempt at
agriculture. They were hunters, fowlers, fishers, subsisting mainly, if
not wholly, by the chase. They not only successfully pursued the wild
horse, the reindeer, and other swift-footed herbivora, but assailed the
cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other formidable carnivora, as well as the
huge rhinoceros and the mammoth. They also made excursions to the
sea-shore, and no doubt left there shell mounds similar to those which
have been explored with such interesting results on the Danish coast;
and which have their New World equivalents on the seaboards of
Massachusetts, Georgia, and Florida, where at certain seasons the
Indians resorted to feast on the shell-fish. From their drawings and
carvings we not only learn this, but also that they were not unfamiliar
with the whale, the seal, and other marine fauna. The presence of the
whale and seal in the same latitude as the reindeer need not surprise
us. The occupation of Europe by palæolithic man contemporary with the
_Elephas primigenius_ and other extinct mammalia, belongs to an era when
the relative levels of sea and land, and the relations of the Atlantic
coast-line to the ancient continent, differed widely from their present
conditions. If the genial current of the Gulf Stream then reached the
shores of Europe, its influence extended over areas very diverse from
those now affected by it. But the range of the fauna of that Palæolithic
era was a wide one. Tusks of the mammoth and antlers of the reindeer
occur in the Scottish boulder-clay; and the discovery of skeletons of
the whale far inland in the carse of Stirling, accompanied in more than
one case by implements made of perforated stag’s horn, tells of the
presence of the Greenland whale on the ancient Scottish sea coast, while
the stag haunted its forests, and the Allophylian savage paddled his
canoe in estuaries marked for us now by old sea-margins that preceded
the last great rise of the land. Skulls and horns of the elk occur in
the Scottish peat-bogs, seemingly indistinguishable from those of the
_Cervus alces_, or North American moose.[86] As to the reindeer, not
only are its remains found in Scottish mosses and the underlying marl,
but they have been dug up in the ruined brochs, as at Cill-Trolla,
Sutherlandshire, and Keiss in Caithness. The favourite haunts of the
Greenland whale are in seas encumbered with floating ice; and when they
were stranded in the estuary of the Forth by a tide rising on a
shore-line now nearly thirty feet above the tide-mark of the present
day, the highlands of Scotland were capped with perpetual snow, and
great changes of level had still to occur. But neither the whale nor the
Eskimo retreated within the Arctic circle because they could only be at
home among polar ice and snow. Remains of the whale in Scottish kitchen
middens of greatly more modern date show that it must have haunted the
Scottish shores when the temperature of the surrounding ocean differed
little from that of the present day. There is preserved in the Museum of
the Scottish Antiquaries a drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a
whale, which was found in a weem, or subterranean dwelling, on the Isle
of Eday, Orkney, along with implements of stone, horn, bone, bronze, and
iron; and other evidences of the presence of the whale in the Scottish
seas are of frequent occurrence.
As to the ivory of the narwhal and the rostungr, or walrus, it was in
use by Scoto-Scandinavian carvers after the disappearance of the
reindeer from Scotland. A curious large sword, probably of the
fourteenth century, at Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, has the hilt made of
the narwhal’s tusk; and the famous Lewis chessmen, found at Uig in the
Isle of Lewis, as well as examples of chess and tablemen recovered from
time to time in other Scottish localities, are all made of the walrus
ivory, the “huel-bone” of Chaucer. But when the whale haunted the shores
to which the hunters of the Perigord resorted, it is doubtful if Britain
was an island. In that age of the mammoth and the reindeer of the
Pyrenees, when art flourished in the valley of the Vézère, and men,
scarcely less strange than the long-extinct fauna on which they preyed,
sheltered in their rock-dwellings from the ice and snow, the relative
levels of sea and land, and the lines of the Atlantic coast, bore no
relation to their present aspect; for the old region of ice and snow was
what is now familiar to us as the vine-clad sunny land of France. All
this we learn from the archæological remains of those old times, and
especially from the carvings and gravings which, happily for us, were
then executed, whether for pastime or as actual records. Like many of
the native races of the American continent at the present day, the old
cave-dwellers employed their leisure time in carving in bone, horn, or
ivory; and like them too, as we believe, they applied their skill in
graphic art as a means of recording events and communicating facts to
others. The broad palinated antlers of the reindeer, prepared sections
of mammoth ivory, and slabs of schist, all furnished tablets on which
they not only delineated the objects of the chase, but incidents and
observations of daily experience. And if so, we have in such drawings
the germ of ideographic symbolism, and of hieroglyphic writing. By just
such a process of recording facts in a form readily intelligible to
others, the early dwellers in the Nile valley originated the mode of
object-drawing and ideographic chronicling, from which hieroglyphic,
demotic, and ultimately, phonetic writing were evolved.
It is not solely by inference that we are led to surmise that the
ingenious draughtsmen of Southern France had a higher aim than mere
pastime in some, at least, of their graphic devices. The relics
recovered from the ancient caves include what appear to be tallies and
numerical records, unmistakably indicative, not only of a method of
numeration, but of the growth of a system of mnemonic symbolism, and
distinctive graven characters, not greatly inferior to the primitive
alphabets of Celtic or Scandinavian lithology. It is curious, indeed, to
find in use in Europe’s early Post-Glacial period symbols which, but for
their undoubted execution by the ancient cave-men of Aquitania, might be
assigned with every probability to some Druid scribe, familiar with the
ogham characters of the Gauls and British Celts. Among the objects
recovered from the Dordogne caves, including tallies and inscribed
tablets of horn and ivory, with their enumeration in simple units, M.
Broca specially noted a deer’s tyne, marked with a series of notches,
which he assumed to be a hunter’s memoranda of the produce of the chase.
A more complex record, found in the rock-shelter of Gorge d’Enfer, is
inscribed on a plate of ivory. Its groups of horizontal and oblique
lines along the edges, and symmetrical rows of dots on the flat surface,
combine to furnish a record graven in characters as well-defined as many
a runic or ogham inscription. If it be no more than the memoranda of a
successful hunt, with a classification of the different kinds of game
secured for distribution among the members of the tribe, it is not
greatly inferior to the early system of numeration among the Egyptians.
But when such a piece of arithmetic was supplemented by a pictorial
record of the hunt; or by the incident, so acceptable to a bevy of
hunters over their camp-fire, of the fight of the male deer in the
rutting season; or the charge of the enraged elephant with elevated
trunk, trumpeting wrath and defiance: much had been accomplished that
admits of comparison with records of the modern penman.[87]
It is difficult for the men of a lettered age, with all the facilities
of the printing-press in fullest use, to realise the condition of
intellectual activity, or the natural modes of its expression, among an
unlettered people. The transmission of Homeric or Ossianic poems, of a
Niebelungen Lied or an Albanic Duan, from generation to generation, by
the mere aid of memory, is scarcely conceivable to us now. Yet I recall
the account given by Ozahwahguaquzuebe, an Ojibway Indian, who told of
his habitually accumulating his tobacco till he saved enough to bribe an
aged chief of the tribe to repeat to him, again and again, in all its
marvellous details, the legend of Nanaboozo and the post-diluvial
creation, in order that he might be able, in his turn, to recount it in
full, as it had come down from elder generations of his people.
There are some results of the introduction of the printing-press still
very partially appreciated. Its direct influence on social and
intellectual progress receives ample recognition; but not so all
indirect influences traceable to its operations. In elder centuries,
before Gutenberg and Faust superseded the labours of the scribe, not a
few ballad-epics and lyrics were consigned to the wandering minstrels,
to whose tenacious memories we are so largely indebted. But there were
other avenues in those old centuries for fancy and passion, not greatly
dissimilar to those by which the observation and descriptive powers of
the post-glacial Troglodytes found vent. It is vain for a Pugin or a
Ruskin to bewail the mechanical character of modern art. It was easier
for the mediæval satirist to find free scope for his humour in a
sculptured corbel, or on a boss of the beautiful groined ceiling, or to
carve his grosser caricature within easy access under the _miserere_ in
the choir, than to spend long hours at his lectern in the scriptorium,
committing his fancies with laborious pains to less accessible
parchments. And so, both satires and sermons were then graven in stone,
which now find utterance in ways more suited to the age in which we
live:—
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times.
Taste and fancy have now a thousand avenues at their command for the
humour and satire which mingled, in quaint incongruity with the devout
aspirations inwrought into mediæval architecture. With the revival of
learning, and the introduction of the printing-press, came the
Renaissance. Europe renounced mediæval art as “Gothic.” Classic, or what
passed for classic art, ruled for the next three centuries. Architecture
became more and more mechanical; while æsthetic taste sought elsewhere,
and more especially in the novel arena of the printing-press, for
avenues where it could sport in unrestrained freedom.
The ingenious skill of the palæolithic artists and tool-makers, who
wrought in their rock-shelters and limestone caves, in that remote era
when the climate along the northern slope of the Pyrenees resembled that
of Labrador at the present day, has naturally awakened a lively
interest. The rigour of the climate during a greatly prolonged winter
prevented their obtaining stone or flint for purposes of manufacture.
They wrought, accordingly, in bone, in mammoth ivory, and in the horn of
the reindeer, fashioning from such materials their lances, fish-spears,
knives, daggers, and bodkins; turning to account the deer’s tynes for
tallies; and carving out of the larger bones what are assumed to have
been maces or official batons, elaborately ornamented with symbolic
devices designed for other purposes than mere decoration.
The Eskimo are recognised as presenting the nearest type to the cave-men
of Europe’s Post-Glacial era. It is even possible that, like the natives
of Labrador, the latter may have occupied winter snow-huts, and only
resorted to their cave-shelters during the brief heat of a semi-arctic
summer. This, however, is rendered doubtful by the occurrence of
reindeer horns and bones of young fawns, along with others of such
varying age as to indicate the presence of the hunter during nearly
every season of the year. Among a people so situated the industrial arts
are called into constant requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and
the experience of the hunter directs him to the products of the chase
for the easiest supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnished
the ready-made dagger, lance head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the
larger rodents supplied a more delicately edged chisel than primitive
art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the
larger mammalia, in order to obtain the prized marrow, produced the
splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converted
into daggers, bodkins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or
elephant is readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less
liable to fracture than flint or stone; and all those materials are
abundant in the most rigorous winters, when the latter are sealed up
under the frozen soil. Implements of horn or bone may therefore be
assumed to have preceded all but the rudest flint celts and
hammer-stones or unwrought missiles; and although, owing to the nearly
indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our
ideas of primeval tool-making are chiefly derived, enough has been
recovered from contemporary cave deposits to confirm the analogy of
their arts to those of the hyperborean workmen of the North American
continent.
The necessity which, to a large extent, determined the material of the
ancient workers in bone and ivory, was favourable to the development of
the imitative faculty. The ingenious ivory and bone carvings of the
Tawatins and other tribes of British Columbia, of the Thlinkets of
Alaska, and the Eskimo, equally suffice, with the examples of European
palæolithic art, to show how favourable such material was to the
development of artistic feeling, which must have lain dormant had the
artificers been limited to flint and stone. The same influence may be
seen in operation in many stages of art: as in massive but bald Gothic
structures, such as St. Machar’s Cathedral on the Dee, where the
builders were limited to granite, while contemporary architecture in
localities where good sandstone or limestone abounds is rich in
elaborate details; and, where the soft and easily wrought Caen stone is
available, runs to excess in the florid exuberance of its carvings.