Chapter V: The æsthetic Faculty in Aboriginal Races (1)

THE ingenious arts of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of the Vézère 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.

The absence of nearly every trace of imitative art in the prehistoric 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.

The ingenious artist of the Palæolithic era not only ornamented the hafts of his tools and weapons with representations of familiar objects of the chase, but is also accredited with carving, on his mace or baton, symbolic emblems expressing the rank and official duties of the owner. The analogous practice of the Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands at the present day shows that there is nothing inconsistent with primitive thought in the symbolic, significance assigned to some of the carved batons; and, if so, we have there examples of imitative art employed in a way which involved the germ of ideographic graving or picture-writing. The mere fact of pictorial imitation implies the interpretation of its representations. Eskimo implements are to be seen in various collections, as at Copenhagen and Stockholm, in the British Museum, in those of San Francisco and the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, ornamented with representations of adventures incident to their habits of life. An Arctic collection, presented by Captain Beechy to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, furnishes interesting illustrations of the skill of the Eskimo draughtsman. The carvings and linear drawings represent, for the most part, incidents in the life of the polar hunter; and this is so effectively done that, as Captain Beechy says: “By comparing one with another, a little history was obtained which gave us a better insight into their habits than could be elicited from any signs or intimations.”[88] Mr. W. H. Dall figures in his _Alaska and its Resources_, analogous examples of Innuit or Western Eskimo art; and in an interesting communication by Dr J. W. Hoffman to the Anthropological Society of Washington, on Eskimo pictographs as compared with those of other American aborigines, he figures and interprets similar examples.[89] One of these, copied from an ivory bow used in making fire, which he examined in the Museum of the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco, depicts three incidents in the Innuit hunter’s experience. In one, the hunter supplicates the _Shaman_, or native medicine-man, for success in the chase; another group represents the results of the chase; while the third records the incidents of an unsuccessful appeal to another shaman. Another graving from the same locality embodies the incidents of success and failure in a prolonged hunting expedition. In their interpretation, Dr. Hoffman was assisted by a Kadiack half-breed who happened to visit San Francisco at the time. A design of the same class copied from a piece of walrus ivory, carved by a Kiatégamut Indian of Southern Alaska, records a successful feat of the shaman in curing two patients. He is represented in the act of exorcising the demons, who are seen just cast out from the men restored to health by his agency. From the interpretations thus given, it may be inferred that such drawings as those described by Captain Beechy represent in nearly every case actual incidents. The hunter celebrates his return from a successful chase, his experience in the attempt to propitiate the supernatural powers on his behalf, or any other notable event, by recording the impressive incidents on the handle of his hunting knife or his ivory bow, or even in some cases on a tablet of walrus ivory; just as the enthusiastic sportsman will at times enter in his journal the special occurrences of the fox-hunt, or the more adventurous feats of deer-stalking, or commission an artist to perpetuate them on canvas. Incidents of exceptional skill or daring are no doubt recalled, and listened to with eager interest by the home circle in the Arctic snow-hut; and are confirmed in their most thrilling details by appeals to such graven records.

The more durable material employed alike by the ancient cave-dwellers of Europe and by the modern Innuit and Eskimo, has secured their preservation in a form best calculated to command attention. But similar graphic representations of incidents and ideas are common to various tribes of North American Indians. Throughout the wide region of the old Algonkin tribes rock-carvings, such as that of the famous Dighton Bock, abound. The same are no less frequent in the South-West from New Mexico to California; while similar pictographs are executed by the Ojibways in less durable fashion on their grave-posts, or even on strips of birch-bark. In like fashion, the Crees and Blackfeet of the Canadian North-West adorn their buffalo-skin tents with incidents of war and the chase, and blazon on their buffalo robes their personal feats of daring, and the discomfiture of their foes. In this way, the aboriginal draughtsman is seen in his pictorial devices to aim at the like result with that achieved by the old minstrel chronicler or the courtly herald.

Of the ornamented handles of implements recovered from the abodes of the ancient cave-dwellers of Europe, the most notable examples are far in advance of any Eskimo carvings. One of those, from the cave at Laugerie Basse, has been repeatedly engraved. It is fashioned from a piece of reindeer’s horn. The carver has so modified his design, and availed himself of the natural contour of his material, as to adapt it admirably to its purpose as the handle of a poignard. It was apparently intended to include both handle and blade; but probably broke in the process of manufacture, and was flung aside unfinished. The design is a spirited adaptation to the special requirements. The horns are thrown back on the neck, the fore legs doubled up, and the hind legs stretched out, as if in the act of leaping. Another finely finished example of a dagger-handle, from Montastrue, Peccadeau de l’Isle, figured by Professor de Quatrefages in his _Hommes fossiles_, also represents the deer with its horns thrown back; but from its fractured condition the position of the limbs can only be surmised to have corresponded to the example from Laugerie Basse. With those may be classed such carvings as the pike, so characteristically represented on a tooth of the cave-bear, recovered from a refuse heap in the cave of Durntly in the Western Pyrenees, and other similar sports of primitive artistic skill.

Such carvings had no other aim, we may presume, than the decoration of a favourite weapon, or the beguiling of a leisure hour. But they show the fruits of skill, and the observation of a practised eye, by the ingenious workmen whose drawings and etchings merit our careful study. Considerable taste and still more ingenuity are exhibited by many of the American aborigines, in their decorative carvings, and the ornamentation both of their weapons and dress. The characteristics of Eskimo art have been noted. The Thlinkets of Alaska, lying on their western border, manifest a like skill, making ladles and spoons from the horns of the deer, the mountain sheep, and goat, and carving them with elaborate ingenuity. They also work in walrus ivory, fashioning their bodkins, combs, and personal ornaments with varied ornamentation; decorate their knife-handles of bone, their paddles, and other implements; and carve grotesque masks, with much inventive ingenuity in the variety of the design, though scarcely in a style of high art. But it is interesting to note the different phases of this imitative faculty. Some tribes, such as the Algonkins, confine their art mainly to literal reproductions of natural objects; while others, such as the Chimpseyans or Babeens, the Tawatins, and the Clalam Indians of Vancouver Island, have developed a conventional style of art, often exhibiting much ingenious fancy in its grotesque ornamentation. This is specially apparent in the claystone pipes of the Chimpseyans, in carving which they rival the ingenious Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands in exuberance of detail. But while the art has become conventional, where it is not displaced by imitations of the novel objects brought under their notice in their intercourse with Europeans its combinations are in most cases referable to native myths.

In many of the elaborately carved Chimpseyan pipes, their special purpose seems to be lost sight of in the whimsical profusion of ornament, embracing every native or foreign object that has chanced to attract the notice of the sculptor. Nevertheless, it may help us to do justice to the true aim of the Indian artist, if we call to remembrance how much of Christian symbolism was embodied in many a mediæval sculpturing of what, to the unsympathetic observer, seem now only conventional vines and lilies, or a mere fanciful grouping of dragons and snakes, with apples, figs, grapes, and thorns. This has to be kept in view while noting in the pipe sculptures human figures in strangest varieties of posture, intertwined with zoomorphic devices, in which the bear and the frog have a prominent place; and, as will be seen, a mythic significance. It is no less suggestive to note, alike in the Chimpseyan and in the Tawatin and Haidah carvings, curious analogies to the sculptures of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America. This resemblance has been noticed, independently, by many observers.

Marchand, a French navigator who visited the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1791, after having recently seen the Mexican sculpture and paintings, formed the opinion that the Haidah works of art could be distinctly traced to Aztec origin.[90] He remarks of their paintings and carvings: “The taste for ornament prevails in all the works of their hands; their canoes, their chests, and different little articles of furniture in use among them, are covered with figures which might be taken for a species of hieroglyphics; fishes and other animals, heads of men, and various whimsical designs, are mingled and confounded in order to compose a subject. It undoubtedly will not be expected that these figures should be perfectly regular and the proportions in them exactly observed, for here every man is a painter and sculptor; yet they are not deficient in a sort of elegance and perfection.”