claiming no such antiquity as that of Aquitaine, is, in the primary
sense of the term, essentially prehistoric. Among the æsthetic
productions of older races of the continent, the carvings and sculptures
of the ancient Mound-Builders of Ohio not only admit of comparison with
those of Europe’s primitive workers in bone and ivory, but even, in one
respect, surpass them. For it is curious to observe that the palæolithic
artists, whose carvings and drawings manifest such a capacity for
appreciating the grace of animal form, and for reproducing with such
truthfulness objects and scenes familiar to them in the chase, seem to
have invariably failed, or at least shown a surprising lack of skill, in
their attempts to delineate the human face and figure. Professor de
Quatrefages notes of one such carving: “M. Massénat has brought from
Laugerie Basse a fragment of reindeer’s horn, on which is graven a male
aurochs fleeing before a man armed with a lance or javelin. The animal
is magnificent; the man, on the contrary, is detestable, devoid alike of
proportion and true portraiture.”[93] Some beautiful Mexican terra-cotta
human masks have been preserved; and, amid the endless varieties of
quaint and whimsical device in Peruvian pottery, singularly graceful
portrait-vases occur. But, as a rule, even among the civilised Mexicans,
imitations of the human face and figure seldom passed beyond the
grotesque; and although the sculptors of Central America and Yucatan
manifested an artistic power which accords with the civilisation of a
lettered people, yet, in the majority of their statues and reliefs, the
human form and features are subordinated to the symbolism of their
mythology, or to mere decorative requirements. In the carvings of the
old Mound-Builders, as in those of the vastly more ancient artists of
palæolithic Europe, we have to deal with miniature works of art; but
both include productions meriting the designation. The variety and
expressiveness of many of the mound sculptures, their careful execution,
and the evidence of imitative skill which they furnish, all combine to
render them objects of interest. But foremost in every trait of value
are the human heads. In view of the accuracy of many of the miniature
sculptures of animals, it has been reasonably assumed that they
perpetuate no less trustworthy representations of the workmen by whom
they were carved. Equally well-executed examples of contemporary
portraiture, recovered from palæolithic caves of Europe, would be prized
above all other relics of its Mammoth or Reindeer period. Nevertheless,
striking as is the character of the art of the Aligéwi, it differs only
in degree of merit from that of many modern Indian races; and in some of
the Algonkin stone-pipes the human figure is carved with
well-proportioned symmetry. In such carvings, moreover, even when
expended on the decoration of the pipe,—which was employed among so
many native tribes in their most important ceremonial and religious
observances,—there is rarely anything to suggest a higher aim of the
artist than mere decoration. The same may be assumed of the ancient
carvers, in such work as they expended on the hafts of the daggers found
at Montastrue or Laugerie Basse. But when a carefully executed linear
drawing occurs on a rough slab of schist, with its fractured edges left
untrimmed, as is the case in examples from the caves of Les Eysies and
Massat, the artist manifestly had some other purpose in view; and this I
conceive to have been the earliest stage of ideography or
picture-writing. He was communicating facts in detail by means of his
pencil which his best attempts at verbal description would have failed
to convey.
Language is even now a very inadequate means of communicating to others
specific ideas of form; and some of the most fluent lecturers in those
departments of science, such as geology, biology, and anthropology, in
which there is a frequent demand for the appreciation of details in form
and structure, habitually resort to the chalk and blackboard. Students
of my own earlier days will recall, as among their most pleasant
memories, the facile pencil with which the gifted naturalist, Edward
Forbes, seemed equally eloquent with hand and tongue; and no one who
enjoyed the lucid demonstrations of Agassiz in the same fields of
scientific research can think of him otherwise than with chalk in hand.
To the uncultured, yet strangely gifted Troglodyte of the primeval dawn,
language was still more inadequate for his requirements; and hence, as I
imagine, the facile pencil was in frequent requisition for purposes of
demonstration, with ever-growing skill to the practised hand. Professor
de Quatrefages, who has enjoyed unusually favourable opportunities for
the study of those productions, thus directs attention to their artistic
merits: “The art of the draughtsman, or rather of the engraver, almost
constantly applied to the representation of animals, was first tried on
bone or horn. They have attempted it on stone. The burin must have been
almost always a mere pointed flint. With this instrument, imperfect
though it was, the Troglodytes of the Reindeer age succeeded by degrees
in producing results altogether remarkable. The first lines are simple
and more or less vague. At a later stage they become more defined, and
acquire a singular firmness and precision; the principal lines become
deeper; details, such as the fur and mane, are indicated by lighter
lines, and even the shading is expressed by delicate hatching. But what
is nearly always apparent is a sense of truthful realisation, and the
exact copying of characteristics which enable us often to recognise not
only the order, but the precise species, which the artist wished to
represent. The bear, engraved on a piece of schist which was found by M.
Garrigou in the lower cave at Massat, with the characteristic projecting
forehead, can be no other than the cave-bear, the bones of which were
recovered by that observer in the same place. When we compare the
drawings and anatomical details of the Siberian mammoth with the
engraving on ivory discovered by M. Lartet at La Madeleine, it is
impossible to avoid recognising the _Elephas primigenius_ which existed
throughout the Glacial period, and which has been recovered entire in
the frozen soil of Northern Asia. Oxen, wild goats, the stag, the
antelope, the otter, the beaver, the horse, the aurochs, whales, certain
species of fish, etc., have been found recognisable with the like
certainty. The reindeer especially is frequently represented with
remarkable skill. This may be seen by the engraving found near
Thayingen, in Switzerland.”[94]
M. de Quatrefages is disposed to estimate the artistic merit of the
carvings in ivory as even greater than that of the drawings or etchings.
But specific form and contour are more easily realisable than their
indication on a plane surface. To do full justice to the wonderful skill
of the Troglodyte draughtsman, we must compare the most highly-finished
paintings on Egyptian temples and tombs with the works of their
sculptors; or even the perfect realisations of the Greek sculptors’
chisel, with drawings on the most beautiful Hellenic vases. The mastery
of perspective, as shown in some of the works of those palæolithic
artists is remarkable when compared, for example, with the Assyrian
bas-reliefs; not to speak of the infantile efforts of the Chinese on
their otherwise justly prized ceramic ware.
The potter’s art is at all times an interesting study to the
archæologist. We owe to Etruscan and Hellenic fictile ware our sole
knowledge of painting, contemporary with the most gifted masters of the
sculptor’s art. But it is in the form, rather than the decoration, that
the chief excellency of the art of the potter consists. It is one of the
plastic arts. The clay in the hands of the skilled modeller is even more
facile than the pencil of the draughtsman; and the distinction between
the purely decorative sports of an exuberant fancy, and the purposed
symbolism of the carver or painter, is nowhere more strikingly manifest
than in the modellings of the ingenious worker in clay. But fictile art
belongs, for the most part, to periods greatly more recent than that of
the ancient Stone age. Not that the work of the primitive potter
involved such laboriously accumulated skill as lay beyond reach of the
palæolithic carver and draughtsman; for clay cylinders from the banks of
the Euphrates, and the terra-cottas from the Nile valley, carry us back
to times that long antedate definite history. But alike among the
ancient cave-dwellers of Aquitaine, and the modern Eskimo, the
prevailing conditions of an Arctic or semi-Arctic climate rendered clay,
fuel, and other needful appliances so rarely available, that among the
latter, their pots and lamps are fashioned for the most part of the
_Lapis ollaris_, or potstone. But traces of the pottery of many periods
and races abound, and furnish interesting materials for comparison. The
aptitude of the potter’s clay for a display of skill, alike in modelling
and in tracing on the surface imitative designs and ornamental patterns,
renders the fictile ware of widely different eras a ready test of
æsthetic feeling, as well as a trustworthy guide to the age and race of
its artificers. To the ancient cave-men, to whose skill such carvings as
the reindeer from Laugerie Basse, or Montastrue, are due, modelling in
clay would have been as easy and natural as to the modern sculptor; and
pottery, if well-burnt, when not exposed to violence, is little less
durable than flint or stone. The rarity, or total absence, of pottery
among the contents of the palæolithic caves accords with other
indications of a rigorous climate. A piece of plain earthenware was,
indeed, recovered from the Belgian cave of Trou de Frontal; and Sir W.
Dawson, in his _Fossil Men_, calls attention to the discovery, recorded
by Fournal and Christie, of fragments of pottery in the mud and breccia
of caverns in the south of France, along with bones of man and animals,
including those of the hyæna and rhinoceros. Those, however, whatever be
their true epoch, are mere potsherds, valuable in so far as they
indicate the practice of the potter’s art at such a time, but furnishing
no illustration of skill in modelling.
The pottery found in graves of the Neolithic period is mostly so
imperfectly burned, that, however abundant it may have been, it could
scarcely leave a trace in the breccia, or river gravel, from which the
larger number of relics of palæolithic man have been recovered. But the
pottery and terra-cottas which abound on the sites of Indian villages in
North America everywhere exhibit traces of imitative art, in the efforts
at modelling the human form, and the more or less successful
reproduction of familiar natural objects. Squier remarks in his
“Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York,” that “upon the site of
every Indian town, as also within all of the ancient enclosures,
fragments of pottery occur in great abundance. It is rare, however, that
any entire vessels are recovered. . . . In general there was no attempt
at ornament; but sometimes the exteriors of the pots and vases were
elaborately, if not tastefully, ornamented with dots and lines, which
seem to have been formed in a very rude manner with a pointed stick or
sharpened bone. Bones which appear to have been adapted for the purpose
are often found.”[95] Ornamentation of a more artistic kind appears to
have been most frequently reserved by the native workers in clay for
their pipes, to which at times a sacred character was attached, and on
which accordingly they lavished their highest skill as modellers and
carvers. Some of the smaller articles of burnt clay, however, which
Squier denominates terra-cottas, were probably fragments of domestic
pottery similar to those hereafter described among the relics of the
ancient Indian town of Hochelaga. One example of an ingeniously modelled
pipe, found within an enclosure in Jefferson County, New York, is
specially selected as a good illustration of Indian art. It is of fine
red clay, smoothly moulded, with two serpents coiling round the bowl.
“Bushels of fragments of pipes,” he adds, “have been found within the
same enclosure.” A carved stone pipe, from a grave in Cayuga County, is
described as fashioned in the form of a bird with eyes made of silver
inserted in the head, and Mr. Squier notes of another specimen: “The
most beautiful terra-cotta which I found in the State, and which in
point of accuracy and delicacy of finish is unsurpassed by any similar
article which I have seen of aboriginal origin, is the head of a fox.
The engraving fails to convey the spirit of the original, which is
composed of fine clay slightly burned. It seems to have been once
attached to a body, or perhaps to a vessel of some kind. It closely
resembles some of the terra-cottas from the mounds of the west and
south-west. It was found upon the site of an ancient enclosure in
Jefferson County, in the town of Ellisburg.” Again, in describing some
similar relics from the site of an old Seneca village in Munroe County,
he adds: “The spot is remarkable for the number and variety of its
ancient relics. Vast quantities of these have been removed from time to
time. Some of the miniature representations of animals found here are
remarkable for their accuracy.”[96]
The descriptions thus furnished of the traces of aboriginal art in the
State of New York closely correspond to the remains recovered on the
sites of ancient Indian villages in Canada. A finely modelled clay-pipe,
with a serpent twined round it, and holding a human head in its jaws,
now in my possession, was dug up, along with numerous other clay-pipes,
bone pins, and other relics, in Norfolk County, on the north shore of
Lake Erie. I also possess casts of some ingeniously modelled clay-pipes
found a few years since in an ossuary at Lake Medad, near Watertown,
about ten miles west from Hamilton, Ontario. This no doubt marks the
site of an ancient town of the Attiwendaronks, or Neuter Nation, who
were finally conquered and driven out by the Iroquois in 1635, when the
little remnant that survived was adopted into the Seneca nation. Mr. B.
E. Charlton, who explored the Lake Medad ossuaries, after describing the
human remains, along with large tropical shells, shell-beads and other
relics, adds: “With these were found antique pipes of stone and clay,
many of them bearing extraordinary devices, figures of animals, and of
human heads wearing the conical cap noticed on similar relics in Mexico
and Peru.”[97] Similar discoveries rewarded the researches of Dr. Taché
in the Huron ossuaries on the Georgian Bay, examples of which are now in
the museum of Laval University.
On the site of the famous Indian town of Hochelaga, the precursor of the
city of Montreal, detached fragments, in well-burnt clay, including
modellings of the human head and neck, had been repeatedly found, before
the recovery of larger portions of the Hochelaga pottery showed that
projections modelled in this form within the mouths of their earthern
pots or kettles were designed to admit of their suspension over the
fire. Any projection within the mouth of the pot would have answered the
purpose of protecting the cord or withe from the risk of burning; so
that the moulding of it into the human form furnishes an illustration of
the play of the imitative faculty under circumstances little calculated
to call it forth.
The decoration of domestic pottery by the American Indian workers in
clay is greatly developed among the more southern tribes. The
ornamentation of a few prominent points, moulded more or less rudely
into human or animal heads, gives place with them to the modelling of
the vessel itself into animal forms, or to its decoration, chiefly with
human or animal figures. Among the examples of native art in the
National Museum at Washington are two large vases, remarkable for their
elaborate workmanship, which were brought from Mexico, by General Alfred
Gibbs. They are figured, along with other specimens of Mexican pottery
and terra-cottas, in Mr. Charles Rau’s account of the Archæological
Collection of the United States National Museum. They are there spoken
of as “two large vases of exquisite workmanship,” and one of them is not
only described as an admirable specimen of Mexican pottery, but it is
added: “As far as the general outline is concerned, it might readily be
taken for a vessel of Etruscan or Greek origin. The peculiar
ornamentation, however, stamps it at once as a Mexican product of
art:”[98] and, it may be added, in doing so, places it in very marked
contrast to any example of Etruscan or Greek workmanship. Its modelling,
both in general form and in all its curious zoomorphic details, is
essentially barbarous, yet manifesting ingenious skill in the
workmanship, and exuberant fancy in design. The influence of Mexican art
extended northward; and its characteristics may be traced in much of the
native pottery of the Southern States. But throughout Mexico, Central
America, and the Isthmus, the modeller in clay appears to have revelled
in feats of skill. Clay masks and caricatures, and heads of men and
animals, in endless variety of dress and fashioning, abound. Utility is
in many cases rendered altogether subsidiary to the sports of fancy.
Musical instruments are made in the form of animals; and vases and
earthenware vessels of every kind are modelled in imitation of
vegetables, fruit, and shells, or decorated with familiar natural
objects. This is still more apparent in Peruvian pottery, where an
unrestrained exuberance of fancy sports with the pliant clay. Animal and
vegetable forms are combined. Men and women are represented in their
daily avocations, as porters, water-carriers, etc. Portrait-vases
represent the human head, characterised at times by grace and beauty;
but more frequently grotesquely caricatured. The human head surmounts
the lithe body of the monkey, sporting in ape-like antics; melons and
gourds have animal heads for spouts; while the duck, parrot, toucan,
pelican, turkey, crane, land-turtle, lynx, otter, deer, llama, cayman,
shark, toad, etc., are ingeniously reproduced, singly or in groups, as
models for bottles, jars, or pitchers. The double or triple goblets, and
two-necked bottles or jugs, acquire a fresh interest from resemblances
traceable between some of them and others belonging to distant
localities and remote ages. The Fijians, on the extreme western verge of
the Polynesian archipelago, have already been referred to for their
skill in the finished workmanship of their implements, and of their
pottery, some of which suggest curious analogies to Peruvian types. But
it is more interesting to note the apparent reproduction of Egyptian,
Etruscan, and other antique forms in Peruvian fictile ware; and to
recognise on the latter the Vitruvian scroll, the Grecian fret and other
ancient classic and Assyrian patterns—not as evidence of common origin,
but as originating independently from the ornamentation naturally
produced in the work of the straw-plaiter and weaver. Still more curious
are their analogies to ancient Asiatic art, as disclosed in a comparison
with many of the objects recovered by Dr. Schliemann on Homeric sites.
Among the relics which rewarded his exploration of the site of the
classic Ilios, are examples of double-necked jugs, terra-cotta groups of
goblets united as single vessels, along with others terminating with
mouthpieces in the forms of human or animal heads; or modelled with such
quaint ingenuity to represent the hippopotamus, horse, pig, hedgehog,
mole, and other animals, that, were it not for the strange fauna
selected for imitation, they would seem little out of place in any
collection of Peruvian pottery.
The same exuberant sportiveness of the imitative faculty, so
characteristic of the races of the New World, reappears in productions
of the native metallurgists of Mexico and Central America. Casting,
engraving, chasing, and carving in metal, were all practised by the
Mexicans with a lavish expenditure of misspent labour. Ingenious toys,
birds and beasts with moveable wings and limbs, fish with alternate
scales of gold and silver, and personal ornaments in many fanciful
forms, were wrought by the Mexican goldsmiths with such skill that the
Spaniards acknowledged the superiority of the native workmanship over
any product of European art. The ancient graves of the Isthmus of Panama
have yielded immense numbers of gold relics of the same class, though
inferior to the finest examples described above. They include beasts,
birds, and fishes, frogs and other natural objects, wrought in gold with
much skill and ingenuity. The frog is made with sockets for the eyes, an
oval slit in front, and within each a detached ball of gold, executed
apparently in a single casting. Balls of clay are also frequently found
enclosed in detached chambers in the pottery of the Isthmus. Human
figures wrought in gold, and monstrous or grotesque hybrids, with the
head of the cayman, eagle, vulture, and other animals, attached to the
human form, are also of frequent occurrence; though in this class of
works the modelling of the human form is generally inferior to that of
other animate designs. All of those curious relics are found in graves,
which, judging from the condition of the human remains, are of great
antiquity; if, indeed, they do not point to the central cradle and
common source of Aztec and Peruvian art.
It is thus apparent that the imitative faculty, which manifests itself
in very different degrees among diverse races, was widely diffused
throughout the native tribes of the American continent. But, while a
certain aptitude for art is seen to be prevalent among some of the
rudest tribes, there were, no doubt, among all of them exceptional
examples of artistic ability. There were the Jossakeeds and the Wabenos,
skilled in picturing on bark and deer-skin; and the official annalists
or “Wampum-keepers,” who perpetuated the national traditions. Among the
arrow-makers were some famed for their dexterity in fashioning the
hornstone or jasper into arrow heads; and, while the art of the potter
proved no less easy to female hands than that of the baker, there were,
doubtless, among them some few rarely-gifted modellers, whose skill in
fashioning clay into favourite forms of imitative art won them a name
among the ceramic artists of their tribe. Pabahmesad, the old Chippewa,
of the Great Manitoulin Island, in Lake Huron, famed for his skill in
pipe carving, has been referred to in illustrating the trade and
manufacture of the Stone age.
The little remnant of the once-powerful Huron race now settled on the
river St. Charles, near Quebec, expend their ingenious art on the
manufacture of bark canoes, snow-shoes, la-crosse clubs, basket-work,
and moccasins. In this they show much skill and dexterity; but among
their most adroit workers in recent years was Zacharee Thelariolin, who
claimed to be the last full-blood Indian belonging to the band. He
manifested considerable ability as an artist, had an apt faculty for
sketching from nature, and painted successfully in oil. A portrait of
himself, in full Indian costume, now in the possession of Mr. Clint of
Quebec, is a relic of much interest as the work of an untaught native
Indian, in whom the hereditary imitative faculty thus manifested itself
under circumstances little calculated to favour its development. He was
sixty-six years of age when he executed this portrait. Had it been his
fortune to attract the attention of some appreciative patron in early
years he might have made a name for himself and his people.
Another curious and exceptional example of native artistic ability may
be noted here. The studio of Edmonia Lewis, the sculptor, has long been
known to tourists visiting Rome. Her history is a curious one. Her
father was a Negro, and her mother a Chippewa Indian. She was born at
Greenbush, on the Hudson river, and reared among the Indians till the
age of fourteen, both of her parents having died in her childhood. Her
Indian name was _Suhkuhegarequa_, or Wildfire; but she changed it to
that by which she is now known on being admitted to the Moravian school
at Oberlin, Ohio. After three years schooling she went to Boston, where,
it is said, the sight of the fine statue of Franklin awoke in her the
ambition to be a sculptor. She sought out William Lloyd Garrison, and in
simple directness told him she wanted to do something like the statue of
the printer-statesman. The great abolitionist befriended her. She
received needful training in a local studio, started an _atelier_ of her
own, and when I saw her in Boston, in 1864, she was modelling a
life-size statue emblematic of the emancipation of the race to which
she, in part, belonged. Africa was impersonated, raising herself from a
prostrate attitude, and, with her hand shading her eyes, was looking at
the dawn. Soon after the sculptor went to Rome, and she has there
executed works of considerable merit. Her most successful productions
may be assumed to reflect the artistic aptitudes of her mother’s race.
Her two best works in marble are “Hiawatha’s Wooing” and “Hiawatha’s
Wedding.” A Boston critic, in reviewing her works, says: “She has always
had remarkable power of manipulation, beginning with beads and wampum,
and rising to clay. She has fine artistic feeling and talent, a sort of
instinct for form and beauty demanding outward expression.”
The wide diffusion of this imitative faculty and feeling for form was no
doubt stimulated by its employment for representative and symbolic
purposes. The relation of imitative drawing to written language is
equally manifest in the graven records of the Nile valley and the
analogous inscriptions of Yucatan or Peru. Quipus, wampum, and all other
mnemonic systems, dependent on the transmission of images and ideas from
one generation to another, literally, by word of mouth, have within
themselves no such germ of higher development as the picture-writing or
sculpturing of the early Egyptians, from which all the alphabets of
Europe have been evolved. The phonetic signs, inherited by us directly
from the Romans, seem so simple, and yet are of such priceless value in
their application, that it seems natural to think of the letters of
Cadmus as a gift not less wonderful than speech; since, by their
instrumentality, the wise of all ages speak to us still. Plutarch tells,
in his _De Iside et Osiride_, that when Thoth, the god of letters, first
appeared on the earth, the inhabitants of Egypt had no language, but
only uttered the cries of animals. They had, at least, no language with
which to speak to other generations; nor any common speech to supersede
the confusion of tongues which characterised their great river valley,
bordering on Asia, and forming the highway from Ethiopia to the
Mediterranean Sea. The light thrown for us on the climate, the fauna,
the people, and the whole social life of Europe’s Palæolithic era, by a
few graphic delineations of its primitive artists, suffices to show how
the northern Thoth may have manifested his advent among them.