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THE BEGINNINGS OF ART

 

THE BEGINNINGS
OF ART

BY

ERNST GROSSE, PH. D.

WITH THIRTY—TWO ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
AND THREE PLATES

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY-
1898

Connery, 1897,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY;

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HIRARY

EDITOR’S PREFACE.

THE author of this book, Dr. Ernst Grosse, is a
professor in the University of Freiburg in Baden. He
‘is still a young man. He was born at Stendal, in the
Altmark (Prussia), in 1862. From the Gymnasium of
his native place he went to the Universities of Berlin,
Munich, and Heidelberg, where he studied philosophy
and the natural sciences. In 1887 he wrote a disser-
tation—Die Literatur - Wissensohaft—wherein he at-
tempted to show the necessity and possibility of treat-
ing the history of poetry after the methods of the
natural sciences. In 1890 his critical analysis of Her-
bert Spencer’s doctrine of the Unknowable appeared ;
it was entitled Lehre' von dem Unkennbaren, and se-
cured its author admission to the philosophical lecture—
ship at the University of Freiburg. At this institution
Dr. Grosse has really not conﬁned himself strictly to
philosophical lines; he has rather specialized in the
ﬁelds of ethnology and sociology. Among his courses
of lectures have been the following: General Ethnology,
General Anthropology, Outlines of Sociology, Ethics

V

015

€ \,J

Vi EDITOR’S PREFACE.

from the Standpoint of Ethnology, Forms of tile
Family, Artfrom a Sociological Standpoint, Pictorial
Arts of Japan, Art of Lower Peoples. In addition to
his class lectures, Dr. Grosse conducts a Seminari’am,
in which a number of students are trained to conduct
independent research in ethnology. Dr. Grosse is an
instructor of unusual power, and is popular with his
students, who quickly catch his earnestness and enthu-
siasm. ‚

In the Beginnings ofArt, Dr. Grosse enters into a
new ﬁeld and applies a new method. The results are
more than encouraging. The book makes no claim to
exhaust the subject, but aims to suggest and to incite
other workers. To ﬁnd “beginnings,” Dr. Grosse con-
ﬁnes his attention to the few most primitive peoples
now living; he distinctly criticises those writers who
have drawn illustrations of beginnings from peoples at
every stage of culture. His criticism is just, though
rather sweeping, for there can be no question that quite
primitive conceptions are to be found among peOples
well up the scale of culture, either as survivals or as
undeveloped culture elements. Still, it is safer to do
as Dr. Grosse does, and study only such material as is
supplied by the lowest stage of culture to be found
among existing tribes.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

THE present work is a pioneer eﬁort, and should be
judged as such. Whoever ventures upon a new region
where nobody has made earnest explorations can not
expect to ﬁnd numerous and inestimable facts; but he
must be satisﬁed if he only ﬁnds the way there. The
value of this book lies less in the answers it gives than
in the questions it raises. In any case, I hope that I
may have done a service to my readers, especially to
those who are not able to share my views, in having
given my thoughts the briefest expression at my com-

mand.
ERNST GROSSE.
FREIBURG IN BADEN, October 9, 1893.
vii

 

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
L—THE AIM 0F THE SCIENCE OF ART . . . . .
History of art—Philosophy of art and science of art—The

problem of the science of art—Its limits—its value.

II. ——THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART . . . .

The two forms of the problem of the science of art—The
individual form and its diﬂiculties~—The social form—Its
history—Dubos, Herder, Taine, Iiennequin, Guyau—The
old and the new methods—The comparative ethnological
method—The study of primitive forms—Its difﬁculties—
Collection and signiﬁcance of the material.

III.—THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES . . . .

The conception of primitive peoples in sociology and
ethnology—Peoples and races—The signiﬁcance of produc-
tion to culture—Inﬂuence of production on the develop—
ment of the family and of religion—The degeneration hy-
pothesis—The primitive peoples of the present—Their
culture.

IV.—ART . . . . . . . . . . .

The nature of artistic activity—Art, play, and exercise—-
Art as a social phenomenon and a social function—Classiﬁ-
cation of the arts.

V.—PERSONAL DECORATION . . . . . . .

Decoration and clothing among the primitive peoples—-
Division of decoration—Body painting—Signiﬁcance of col—
ours—Fixed‘decoration—Scariﬁcation of the Australians and
Mincopies and its meaning—The tattooing of the Bushmcn
and Eskimo—Ear, lip, and nose ornaments—Hair dressing
—Movable decoration of the head, the neck, the loins—Loin

IX

PAGE

32

53

X CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE
decoration and the feeling of shame—Limb decoration—
Decoration of clothing of the Eskimo—Fashion in the low-
est grades of culture—Eat!) etic value of primitive dress deco-
ration—Lustre, colours, forms, symmetry, and eurhythmy—
Associations—Decoration of primitive and civilized peoples
——Practical signiﬁcance of decoration—attractive dress and
terrifying dress—Relation of male and female ornament——
Meaning of ornament among the higher peoples—Ornament
as a mark of rank—Duration and change of fashions in
dress ornament—The future of dress ornament.

VI.—ORNAMENTATION . . . . . . . . 115

Ornamentation of implements in the lowest degrees of
culture—The “geometrical pattern” of primitive ornamen-
tation—The sources of ornamcntation—Natural motives
—Technical motives—Original meaning of primitive orna-
ment—Inscriptions, property marks, tribal symbols, reli-
gious symbols—limitations of technical motives—Primary
and secondary ornaments—Esthetical signiﬁcance of writ—
ing—Esthetical value of primitive ornaments—Inﬂuence of
primitive culture on ornainentation—Inﬂuence of primitive
ornamentation on culture.

VII.—REPRESENTATIVE ART . . . . . . . 163

Pictorial works from the reindeer period—Cave paint-
ings, rock carvings and bark drawings of the Australians——
Paintings of the Bushmcn—Pictorial work of the hyperbo—
reans; drawings and carvings—The masks of the south
western Eskimo—Diffusion of pictorial talent among the
hunting peoples—Pictorial art of primitive peoples and
pictorial art of children—Primitive pictorial art and primi-
tive production—Relation to religion—Pictures and picture
writing—Practical signiﬁcance of pictorial art.

VIII.—THE DANCE . . . . . . . . . 207

Kinds of primitive dances—Gymnastic dances—Mimetic
dances—Esthetic value—Religious dances—The social sig-
niﬁcance of primitive dances—Decline of the art of dancing
—The modern dance.

IX.—POETRY . . . . . . . . . . 232

Quantitative and qualitative lack of material—Nature of
poetry—Spencer’s undifferentiated primitive poetry—The
primitive lyric—Examples—Contents and form—General

CONTENTS. xi

CHAPTER PAGE
character—Value of the primitive lyric for poet and public

—Lyric and music—The primitive epic—Poetical narration,
historical tradition, and scientiﬁc myth—Compass of primi—
tive epics—Content—Treatment and characters—Animal
stories of the Buslinien—Märchen of the Eskimo—The his-
tory of little Kagsagsuk—Forcign inﬂuence—The primitive
drama—Its two sources—A pantomime of the Aleuts—An
Australian moral piece—Social signiﬁcance of poetry.

X.—-MUSIC . . . . . . . . . . 278

Connection of music with the dance and poetry—The two
views on the nature and origin of music—Schopenhauer and
Spencer—Matter and form of music—Primitive vocal music
—Primitive instrumental music——General character of primi-
tive music—Primitive music and Spencer’s speech theory——
Darwin on the ﬁrst development of musical talent—Develop-
ment of rhythm and harmony-Peculiar inﬂuence of music
——Praetieal signiﬁcance of music—Martial and dancing music
———Essential signiﬁcance of music—Music and culture.

XI.—CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . 305
Retrospect—Nature of primitive art—Its conditions—Its
effects—Art as a means in the struggle for existence—Social
and individual signiﬁcance of art.

 

FNL
. Australian scratched Designs from Shields and Clubs.

14.A

15.

16.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

(After Brough Smyth.)

. Ornaments of the Karaya. (After Eh1enreich.).
. Ornaments of the Karaya (After Ehrenreich. ).
. Shield from South Australia (after Eyre), and Shield from

Queensland (Berlin M uscnm)

. Australian Shields from Victoria, with scratched Designs.

(After Brough Smyth. )

. Austlalian Throw- stick, With a Map of the Country

scratched on it. (After Brough Smy th.)

. Ornaments of the Mincopies. (From Man.)
. Bone Implements of the Eskimo, with Animal Ornaments.

(Afte1 Jacobsen. )

. Bone Implements of the Eskimo in the Form of Animals.

(After Jacobsen. )

. Bone Implements of the Eskimo, with Ornaments from

Technical Motives. (From photographs.)

. Ornamental Details of Bone'Implements of the Eskimo.

(From photographs.)

. Potsherds fiom the Andaman Islands. (After Man.) .
. Australian Spear, with Technic Ornament. (After Brough

Sm1th.) .
Message Stick (after Hewitt) and 3. Shield from Aus-
tralia. .

An Indian Picture- writing Sign for a Lapse of Time (after
1\Tallery), and a Drill Bow of the Eskimo (from a photo-
graph) . . . . . . . . . .

Property Marks. (After Lartet, Christy, and Choris) .

x111

PAGE

117
119
121
122
124

125
126

127

128

129

130
131

132

134

136
138

xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FIG. PAGE
17. Mincopy Girdle. (After Man.) . . . . . 148
18. Australian Shields. (After Brough Smyth.) . . . 152
19. Dagger-Handle of Reindeer Horn. (From a cast.) . . 164

20. Australian Cave Painting at Glenelg. (After Grey.) . . 166
21. Australian Cave Painting at Glenelg. (After Grey.) . . 167

22. Australian Cave Painting at Glenelg. (After Grey.) . . 169
23. Australian Rock Sculptures on Depuch Island. (After
Stokes.) . . . . 171
24. Australian Drawing. (After Brough Smyth.) . 176
25. Australian Grave Tablet of Bark. (After Brough Smyth..) 177
26. Rock Drawings of the Bushmen. (After Fritsch.) . . 182
27. Carving by an Eskimo on a piece of Walrus Tusk . . 186
28. Drawing by a Tchukchi. (After Hildebrand.) . . . 187
29. Hyperborean Bone Carvings. (After Hildebrand.) . . 188
30. Aleut Carvings on Bones. (After Hildebrand.) . . . . 189
31. Bone Carvings of the Eskimo. (After Boas.) . . . 191

32. Picture Writing from Alaska. (After Mallery.) . . . 202

FULL—PAGE PLATES.

PLATE I.——Australian Bark Drawing. (After Andrée.)
PLATE II.—Pen Drawing by an Australian. (After Andrée.)
PLATE III.—A Cave Painting of the Bushmen. (After Andree.)

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

CHAPTER I.

THE AIM OF THE SCIENCE OF ART.

IN the multitude of researches and essays on art—
art in the wide sense, including not only the represent-
ative arts in all their branches but all the arts of
aesthetic creation—two lines of work are distinguish-
able, which may be designated the history of art and
the philosophy of art. The two courses only rarely
diverge far apart; but on this very account it is neces-
sary to make the distinction between them clear.

The history of art examines the historical data in
the development of art and artists. It clears tradition
from all questionable and false features, and tries to
unite the elements that are shown to be trustworthy
into as correct and clear a picture as possible. Its task
consists not so much in the elucidation as in the inves-
tigation and statement of the facts; but a work which
contents itself with establishing and combining single
facts, be they ever so fundamental and comprehensive,
can never satisfy the spirit of inquiry; and the study
has already taken in, besides the review of the history

of art, general considerations concerning the nature,
1

2 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

conditions, and objects of art. These considerations,
whether disjointed 0r presented in systematic order,
represent the two courses which we have deﬁned as
the history and the philosophy of art. . The history and
the philosophy of art together form what is now desig-
nated the science of art.

Our age has used the word “science” so carelessly
that it seems prudent to test the claim of the “science
of art” to that title of honour before recognising it.
The ofﬁce of a science is the presentation and explana-
tion of a deﬁnite group of phenomena.- Every science
is accordingly divided into two branches—a descriptive
branch, which investigates the actual conditions in their
speciﬁc character and sets them forth, and an explana-
tory branch, which refers them back to general laws.
The two branches are mutually dependent one upon
the other. The ﬁgure with which Kant expressed the
relation of perception and conception applies to them.
Facts without theories are delusive ; theories without
facts are vain. Does the “science of art” fulﬁl the re-
quirements which we have a right to make of a science?
So far as the ﬁrst part of its ofﬁce is concerned, the
question may be answered in the afﬁrmative.

The reproach might be cast against the present his-
tory of art that it has made the ﬁeld of its research too
narrow, and has shown preference for the art of West-
European civilization to the neglect of foreign arts ; but
the reproach does not affect its scientiﬁc character, for
the scientiﬁc character of a work is not determined by
its extent but by its method. The method of research
in the history of art is not less conformed to scientiﬁc
principles than the method of any other branch of cul-
turistic or scientiﬁc study. Still, a scientiﬁc history of

THE AIM OF THE SCIENCE OF ART. 3

art is not a science of art. It has as little right to that
name as a pile of building stones has to the name of
building. The pile does not become a building until
the several stones have been arranged in ﬁxed archi-
tectural order. And knowledge of the history of art
does not become a science of art till the individual
facts have been grouped in logical connection. The
question arises whether the branch of the philosophy
of art is adequate to this purpose. Attempts at a phi-
losophy of art in the narrower sense have hitherto
been nearly always pursued in immediate connection
with certain speculative philosophical systems. They
have for a little while obtained with these a more or
less extensive acceptation, and after a short time they
have sunk into a common oblivion. It is not our pur-
pose here to pass judgment on the general value of
these speculations. If we measure them by the strict
standard of science, we shall .have to admit that they
deserved their fate. We may admire their brilliancy,
but we can not on that account fail to see that the
foundation of facts was not sufﬁcient for these totter-
ing constructions, and afforded very little security for
their permanence. The philosophy of art of the
Hegelians and the Herbartians has to-day only a his-
torical interest. Our conception of the philosophy of
art comprises, however, far more: it includes also all
those works which in current speech are called critical
rather than philosophical. While in the former case
we have to do with perfected systems, we deal in this
instance only with more or less fragmentary deductions
and indications. Nevertheless, those art-critical frag-
ments usually bear the same majestic appearance of in-
errancy as marks the philosophical systems. We are
2

4 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

consequently somewhat surprised when we perceive
that the views of several critics concerning the nature,
the conditions, and the objects of art not only differ
widely, but that most of the dogmas assuming to be
raised above all doubt are irreconcilably contradictory
of one another. But this surprise quickly passes away,
for, if we subject any one of these art critics to a
closer examination, we ﬁnd in every case that his opin-
ions and dogmas are not based on any objective scien-
tiﬁc researches and considerations, but upon an uncer-
tain subjective fancy which depends upon quite other
than pure scientiﬁc motives. Of course, we have no
thought of denying the value of art criticism. Its
very prevalence is sufﬁcient evidence that it answers to
a demand. But a work can be very valuable indeed
without for that reason possessing the least scientiﬁc
merit. The exclamations of an emotional lover of N a-
ture over the beauties of the world of plants may be
in many respects highly edifying and interesting; but
they can not, for all that, take the place of the investi—
gations of a botanist. It is under some circumstances
very proﬁtable and pleasant to know the subjective
thoughts of a brilliant man on art; but when it is at-
tempted to impress them upon us as scientiﬁcally
founded and valid knowledge, we must decisively repel
the claim. The essential principle of investigation is
always and everywhere the same. No matter whether
the inquiry concerns a plant or a work of art, it must in
any instance be objective. It is no doubt much easier
to maintain the requisite cool calmness in the presence
of a plant than before a work of art that appeals imme-
diately to our feelings; but if we are to have a science
of art we must maintain it. In science the objective

THE AIM OF THE SCIENCE OF ART. 5

reigns; in art criticism the subjective. Art criticism
assumes to give laws; science is contented to ﬁnd laws.
The principle and the object of the two are funda-
mentally diiferent, and we must not be confused over
their antithesis. The reason for the existence of art
criticism need not be attacked, but, if it would wear
the lion’s skin of science, it should see that the skin
covers the ears.

. Neither the philosophy of art nor art criticism is as
yet competent to account satisfactorily for the facts of
the history of art. Aside from a few isolated essays,
to which we shall refer hereafter, it must be conceded
that we have no right to boast of a science of art.
Through the industry of the historians of art, however,
a considerable portion of the material for the structure
has been collected. Yet, valuable as their labours may
prove to be when they are scientiﬁcally applied, if they
' are allowed to remain unemployed they will be worse
than useless. The proverb, “ What one does not use is
a heavy load,” applies as well to intellectual as to ma-
terial possessions; and it is pre-eminently appropriate
in our age, which is so prone to forget the object in
contemplating the means. Facts are only the means to
knowledge ; otherwise the accumulation of them smothers
thought. We may pile up mountains of facts with the
only result that they will shut out light and air from
the mind. Nothing can give order and value to this
waste of isolated facts in the history of art but laws,
and laws are the one thing that is not sought.

It is indeed high time for the work to begin, for it
will not be short or easy. Even the simplest sociologi-
cal problem is a very complicated one, and the problem
of the science of art in particular is subject to diﬂicul—

6 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ties which it is easier to underestimate than to exag-
gerate.

It is right, before entering upon so toilsome and
tedious an undertaking, to ask what object it will serve.
Perhaps, however, in the present case it will be of
more proﬁt if we make clear what objects it can not
serve. In this way we may guard ourselves against
illusions, and science against false accusations. As we
„ look for an El Dorado in every newly discovered coun-
try, so we are apt to expect from every new science all
possible theoretical and practical marvels, the solution
of all mysteries, and the cure of all ills. When, then,
after a little while we learn that the new land is, after
all, only a part of this earth, not much better or much
worse than the old, and that the new science is, after all,
only a science, we are apt to comfort ourselves for the
former overestimation by a commensurate depreciation.
The ﬁrst thing which we would be likely to demand of
a science of art would be a means of setting the order
for a development of art according to our desire—a
kind of formula for invoking an artiﬁcial blossoming of
art in a naturally unproductive age. It is, unfortunately,
very doubtful whether the science of art could practi-
cally fulﬁl such hopes. If we were to judge from the
fruits of the other branches of sociolog , we might
perhaps, on the contrary, be convinced that the factors
on which the life of art depends are so manifold and so
intangible that possibly no disadvantage would accrue,
at least to art, if we did not interfere. We need not,
however, be concerned for fear that such an acknowl—
edgment would embarrass active efforts to ennoble art
through civil and academic instruction. The inﬂuence
of sociological theory on social practice has, so far at

THE AIM OF THE SCIENCE OF ART. 7

least, been so slight that a practical social polity can
only be Wished for.

The immediate purpose of science is not practical
effect, but theoretical knowledge; and the primary ob-
ject of the science of art is not the application, but the
knowledge of the laws that control the life and devel-
opment of art. This aim, however, for which the sci-
ence of art must strive, is only an ideal that can never
be reached. When we require it to explain any phe-
nomenon within its domain in all its details down to
the fundamental principle, we make a demand which
no science can fulﬁl. As it is impossible for the bota-
nist to trace back the special form of any plant, point
by point, to its primary causes, so it is impossible for
the art student to show why a work of art is, down to
its ﬁnest feature, just what it is and nothing else, not
because the details are the caprice of an incomprehen-
sible and arbitrary fancy, but because our faculties are
not suﬂicient for the comprehension of the multitude of
the normally operating factors, which in any given case
are inﬁnite. We can not get to the bottom of anything,
because nothing has a bottom. Science has to content
itself with demonstrating the normal sequence of phe-
nomena in the general aspects; but it can content itself
with that. We are convinced of the perfect regularity
of things, and remain so even when it can not be fully
shown forth. The conviction of the universal regular—
ity and comprehensibility of all phenomena is in no way
based on any empirical researches; but, on the other
hand, all research is based on this a priori maxim. If
the science of art has taught us one of the laws that
reign in the seemingly incalculable and capricious de-
velopment of art, it has done all that can be asked of

8 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

it. It has won a new province from the barren sea of
vague speculation, on which ground the human mind
can secure a ﬁrm footing, and sow and reap. A piece
of tillable ground is indeed a poor substitute for the
mysterious treasures which the old art philosophers
promised their adepts. A scientiﬁc explanation is, how-
ever, no metaphysical illumination; it remains on the
empirical surface of things, and does not penetrate into
the transcendent depths. The science of art has com-
pleted its message when it has shown that regular and
ﬁxed relations exist between certain forms of culture
and art; and when the philosophy of art asks it con-
cerning the inner substance of these forms and rela-
tions, concerning the forces that are manifested in the
progress of the history of art, it is obliged to confess
squarely that it not only can not answer these questions,
but can not even understand them.

CHAPTER II.

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART.

THE problem of the science of art is the description
and explanation of those phenomena which are com-
prehended in the conception of art. This problem has
two forms—an individual and a social. In the former
case we are concerned with the study of a single work
or the life work of a single artist, with the demonstra-
tion of the normal relations that exist between an indi-
vidual artist and his individual work, and with the ex-
planation of the artistic creation as the normal product
of an artistic individuality working under certain con-
ditions. Individual manifestations are, for the most of
us, far more interesting than social ones, especially in
art, where the individuality is so important; and con-
sequently most of us have heretofore studied individual
forms of the problem, although we might have assured
ourselves from the beginning that the prospect of a
successful result was very slight. The individual form
of this problem is, in fact, capable of solution only for
a small minority of cases, all of which are of the last
one hundred years. In every other instance the most
patient labour and the most penetrating scrutiny will
invariably be wasted on the entirely inaccessible ma-

terials of individual art history.
9

10 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Rembrandt died in Amsterdam in 1669, two hun-
dred years ago; but we know so little of the life of the
master, who stood for many years in the light of a
European fame, that a dispute was recently possible as
to whether Rembrandt was really the author of the
works that Will hear his name into the farthest future.
The greatest English poet has had to share the same
fate as the greatest Dutch master. It helps us very
little at the bottom, however, to know that not Lord
Bacon, but William Shakespeare, wrote Hamlet. Who
was Shakespeare? The son of a citizen of an English
country town, who was punished for poaching, married
in hisnineteenth year, left his family shortly afterward
and went to London, Where he lived ﬁrst as a player and
afterward as a co-proprietor of atheatre, returned at ﬁfty
years of age to his native town, and died not long after-
ward. Further than this we know that he was a true
friend and a genial companion. In spite of all our re-
searches we do not know so much of the life of the
great poet as we do of the stranger with whom we have
spent an hour at table. Yet we know much more of
him than of his associates. The “biographies” of the
Elizabethan dramatists are like the epitaphs which we
read on the broken tombstones of an old churchyard.
The most certain things we know of the most of them
are the dates of the registries of their births and deaths.
In an old parish register of St. Saviour’s Church we
ﬁnd under the date of March 20, 1639, the laconic
notice, “Buried, Philip Massinger, a stranger.” This
“stranger,” of whose life we know nothing further than
that he was born in 1584, the son of a servant, was
taught from 1602 to 1606 in St. Alban’s Hall at Ox-
ford, and that he once, when in “ unfortunate extremi-

THE WAY TO _;l‘HE SCIENCE OF ART. 11

as

ties,” went to the pawnbroker Henslowe for a loan of
ﬁve pounds, was the author of The Duke of Milan and
The Fatal Dowry. An entry in the account book of the
same Henslowe is all—except his works and his name-
that is left of the history of John Webster, creator of
the terrible Duchess of Malﬁ. They have all disap-
peared in the deep, silent darkness, of which they
dreamed so often and gruesomely.

Where nothing is but all oblivion,
Dust and an endless darkness.

We ﬁnd it darker and more silent with each step
we take further into the past. Who was the master of
the Altar of Isenheim, that most happy work of Ger-
man genius in painting? Who was Matthias Grüne-
wald? “ It is to be lamented,” wrote Sandrart, “that
this extraordinary man and his works have been so far
forgotten that I do not know of a person living who
could give me a line or a word concerning what he
did.” The great epics of the Middle Ages have been
compared to their cathedrals; they resemble those piles
also, in that their masters are unknown. Occasionally
a name and a pair of half-effaced dates can be found on
a stone, but that is all. Who was Erwin van Stein-
bach? Who was Gottfried von Strassburg? Who
was Wolfram von Eschenbach ? Who was the poet of
the Gudrun? Who was the poet of the Niebelungen-
lied? The art works of antiquity have been partly
lifted out of their graves, but the artists lie forever
buried under the rubbish of centuries. How scanty
and indeﬁnite is all that the most toilsome inquiry has
brought to light concerning the characters and careers
of the great Grecian and Roman masters! One could

12 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

more easily restore a lost statue from a few mutilated
fragments than reconstruct the picture of a rich artistic
life out of such meagre accounts. As we go further
back, even the names disappear. In the presence of
the gigantic structures and sculptures of the Central
American peoples, or the Polynesian songs of heroes
and gods, or the cave paintings of the Bushmen, every-
where we search in vain for the individual artists; we
see only the mass of the peoples, out of which no single
ﬁgure is recognisable. In all these cases—and they
form the immense majority—the problem of the sci-
ence of art is solvable only in its second or social form.
As it is impossible to illustrate the individual character
of an art work from the individual character of an
artist, we can only undertake to relate the aggregated
character of the art groups of a period or a district to a
whole people or a whole age. The ﬁrst form of the
problem is psychological, the second sociological.

The sociological form of the problem of the science
of art has been set up and worked at for a long time.
The ﬁrst person who tried to account for art as a social
phenomenon was the Abbé Dubos, who started the in-
quiry into the causes of the diﬂerent artistic talents
of different peoples and different ages, in 1719, in his
Réﬂewiones critiques sur la poésie et la peimfure. If
we smile at this author’s simplicity when he ﬁnds the
cause to be the air, we forget perhaps that the modern
answer really tells not much more, although it has sub-
stituted the nobler climate of exact science for the air
of Dubos. A new word is not a new fact. A half
century after Dubos, Herder took up the problem with
enthusiasm. If it had been possible to give a scientiﬁc
solution he would have succeeded. His writings are

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 13

full of general thoughts on the inﬂuence of national
character and climate upon poetry. But his ideas stride
along so fast that he never has time to deﬁne a fact
clearly and establish it. The value of his work lies
not in his investigations, but in the stimulus he gives;
in this case, however, his words kindled no ﬁre. His
desires were too little in accord with the needs of his
contemporaries. Instead of building a science of art
on broad ethnological foundations, as Herder had im-
agined it, the Germans let the airy construction of spec-
ulative philosophy rise into the clouds.

The next essay toward a sociology of art was, after
a long pause, made in France. Taine has been some-
times honoured as the founder of sociological art re-
searches, but neither his conception nor his solution of
the problem gives him a right to such fame. He rises
above his predecessors only by purely external excel-
lence. His conception seems to be extremely clear, but
it is not. The clearness of the form only serves to hide
the obscurity of the content. Taine’s deductions cul-
minate in the famous phrase which he utters as a law :
“L’aeuvre d’art est determine'e par un ensemble qui est
l’e'tat général de Z’esprit et des magmas environnantes”
(The work of art is determined by a whole which is the
general condition of mind and of surrounding customs).
This “ general condition ” constitutes the temperature
morale, or moral temperature, which has the same sig-
niﬁcance for the development of art as the temperature
physique or physical temperature for the development
of ﬂora. Art, however, owes not its origin, but its
character, to the moral temperature. About the same
number of persons inclined to art are born in every
period. But of this number only those attain develop-

14 . THE BEGINNINGS or ART.

ment whose life and works are adapted to the existing
moral temperature, the expression of which is the pre-
vailing taste. The rest go to the background or utterly
fail. The development of art, too, is accomplished
under the great law of natural selection. If we study
the moral temperature more closely, we shall ﬁnd three
elements by the co-operation of which it originates——
the race, the climate, and the period; or the sum of the
cultural products already present. Hennequin has very
easily shown, in his Critique Scientiﬁque, that all the
notions which Taine played with as coolly as a juggler
with his balls, are extremely questionable fabrications.
The peculiar character of a national art is supposed to
depend, ﬁrst, on the peculiar race character of the na-
tion. But this peculiar race character, the existence of
which Taine assumes to be self-evident, really can not
be discovered. Not only is it wanting among the great
civilized peoples of whom Taine speaks, but it has never
been found among the savage peoples. Equally unten-
able are the propositions concerning climate and its inﬂu-
ence on the character of the artist. Taine, indeed, does
not explain what he means by the term climate; but he,
nevertheless, assumes most decidedly that a particular
form of his undeﬁned climate will impress a peculiar,
deﬁnite stamp upon the artists, and consequently upon
their works. We must admire the boldness of this as-
sertion when we recollect that, for example, Chateau-
briand and Flaubert were both natives of the same part
of northern France, Burns and Carlyle of the High-
lands of Scotland, Shakespeare as well as Wycherley
and Shelley and Browning and Swinburne and Dickens
and Kipling of the English climate, and Haller as well
as Meyer and Keller andBoecklin of German Switzer-

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 15

land. Finally, the peculiar taste of the public is sup—
posed to affect the development of art through a kind
of natural selection. But there is no more unity of
taste than unity of race among any people. “In a
milieu,” says Hennequin, “ that seems to possess a very
deﬁnite physiognomy—great excitability and high emo-
tional susceptibility—in Paris of the present time, ro-
mance has room for Feuillet and Goncourt, Zola and
Ohnet; story-telling for Halévy and Villiers de l’lsle
Adam; poetry for Leconte de l’Isle and Verlaine;
criticism for Sarcey and Taine and Renan; comedy
for Labiche and Becque; painting for Cabanel and
Puvis de Chavanne, for Moreau and Redon, Raﬁaelli
and Hebert; music for César Franck and Gounod and
Offenbach.” * Above all, however, Taine overlooks the
fact that art not passively only but actively opposes
taste. While the artist is to a certain extent taught by
the public, the public is in a far higher degree taught
by the artist. The relations are really the direct re-
verse of those predicated in the Philosophy of Art.
Were Beethoven’s symphonies at all adapted to the
musical knowledge of the good-natured Viennese?
Was Goethe’s Faust intended to be the tea-table com-
panion of the fashionable aesthetic clubs of its time?
Did Boecklin’s painting correspond with the prevailing
taste of the German public ? Nearly every great work
of art is created not conformably to, but against, the
prevailing taste. Nearly every great artist is not
chosen but rejected by the public, and it is indeed not
the fault of the public that he survives in the struggle
for existence. Great art has always been a princess by

 

* Hennequin. La. Critique scientiﬁque, 116.

16 -THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the grace of God, and not a servant by the grace of the
mob. That art which the prevailing taste actually
selects and supports would hardly have moved Taine
to write a Philosophy of Art. There has, however,
always been an art that prostituted itself to the public,
and at no time has it carried on its trade so extensively
and with such success as in this enlightened demo-
cratic epoch, which has brought forth the Operetta, the
farce, and the sensational novel. From the playhouse
to the tingle-tangle variety show—in this way is art
improved by the prevailing taste. In fact, if Taine
had wished to write a satire on a certain form of Dar-
winism, he could not have conceived a crueller one than
his application of the law of natural selection to the
development of art. We shall see, however, that the
art of a people depends on its civilization, and that cer—
tain forms of culture forbid certain forms of art and
favour others. But, in the ﬁrst place, this inﬂuence
does not proceed from the prevailing taste; and, in the
second place, it is not of such a character as to justify
us in accounting for the whole development of art by
natural selection. The grounds on which Taine bases
his conclusions are wholly untenable. The worth of
his “laws” is therefore self—evident. Taine’s Philoso-
phy of Art is a typical production of the so-called exact
research which is all the time entering further and
more boldly into all the ﬁelds of mental science, while
it dresses its most trivial thoughts, wherever it is pos-
sible, in mathematical vesture, as psychological or socio-
logical laws.* Truly, the young science of art has every

 

* Taine’s Philosophie d’Art, 1865. Histoire de la littérature An-
glaise. Essais, 1858. Preface. We expressly remark that our con-

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 17

reason to defend itself vigorously against devices of
this sort.

Hennequin has done a great service to our science
by his noble criticism of Taine. Further than this, his
Critique scientiﬁque is as good and as bad a methodics as
a methodics of a science of the future can be; but it is
nothing more. While Hennequin puriﬁed the science
of art, Guyau strove further to perfect it.* Art is a
function of the social organism which possesses the
highest importance for its maintenance as well as for
its further development—that is the thought with
which he is ﬁlled, and which he expresses with uncom-
mon eloquence. Guyau is like Herder in the move-
ment of his thought and in his language. He resem-
bles Herder, too, in asserting more than he proves.
His deductions, as a rule, leave a feeling that they may
be true. But in science we can not be satisﬁed with that
feeling; we require the certainty of a clear insight,
which can be obtained only through an exhaustive and
comprehensive study. Guyau’s studies are anything
but comprehensive. They never extend beyond the re-
gions of art which lie nearest to him in space and time.
We do not say that his views have on that account
no general validity; but we can not conceal from our-
selves the fact that they lack a sufﬁciently broad basis.
Perhaps Guyau would himself have remedied the
defect; but his work ended at an age when that of
others usually begins. He died as young as did Hen-

 

demnation applies only to these writings on the theory of art, and
not at all to Taine’s later historical works, for the masterly charac-
ter of which we have a genuine admiration.

* Guyau. Problémes esthétiques. L’Art au point du vue socio-
logique.

18 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

nequin, and the science of art lost in him one of its
best men. '

When we survey the results of sociological research
in the ﬁeld of art, we have to concede that they are
modest enough. The number of investigators who
have devoted themselves to the sociology of art is rela-
tively very small; the ﬁeld is incontestably a little
neglected. This scientiﬁc neglect is the natural result
of the general depreciation of art which characterizes
our age, with all its museums, theatres, exhibitions, and
criticism. To the bulk of men art is an idle pastime,
good enough to occupy a leisure hour, but, like play
without productive result, of no worth for the earnest
and real problems of life. A theoretical consideration
of art must, moreover, appear to our practical earnest-
ness a doubly trivial pursuit, as a playing with a play,
and entirely unworthy of a right-minded man. If this
prejudice had not been so strong, the science of art
would long ago have shown how vain it is. It is, in-
deed, no play to make this demonstration, for art is not
the simplest and most comprehensible of the complicated
phenomena of social life. Yet sociology has already
solved other problems in which it had to contend with
no slighter objective difﬁculties and with far stronger
prejudices. If it has been possible to cast some light
on the nature and development of religion, morals, and
law, why is the nature and life of art still in the dark?
We answer, because the science of art still holds to a
wrong method, and because it still limits itself to an
insuﬂicient material. In all other ﬁelds of sociology
the lesson has been learned to begin at the beginning;
We study ﬁrst the simplest forms of social phenomena,
and do not attempt to explain the more complicated

&

a

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 19

ones till we have informed ourselves concerning the
nature and condition of these simple forms. The sci-
ence of religion begins, not with the consideration of
the most highly developed and complicated systems of
civilized peoples, not with Buddhism, Islam, or Chris-
tianity, but with the primitive beliefs in ghosts and
demons of the rudest tribes. There was, however, a
time when another course was followed here, too, and
in that time the principles of the science of religion
were involved in the same confusion as now prevails
in the teachings of the science of art. Since then all
sociological studies have been gradually turned into new
ways; the science of art alone still wanders with up-
raised head in the old labyrinths. All the other branches
have recognized how powerful and indispensable a
helper to the science of culture has arisen in ethnology ;
only the science of art still disdains to honour with a
glance the rude productions of the primitive peoples
which ethnology spreads out before it. Its backward-
ness has become even more marked in the course of
time. Dubos brought the art of the Mexicans and
Peruvians, so far as it was accessible to him, within the
circle of his comparative View. Herder collected the
inconspicuous ﬂowers of foreign and native popular
poetry. But Taine, who had access to incomparably
richer material than his predecessors, speaks exclusively
of the art of the civilized nations of Europe, and, in-
deed, as if there were no other art anywhere. His
critic, Hennequin, is fully at one with him on this
point. The title which Guyau gave to his last book—
Art from the Sociological Point of View—would lead
us to anticipate a change of method toward our accep-
tation, for sociology in its present stage engages itself
3

20 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

with primitive forms before all others; but the art
which Guyau considers from the sociological point of
view is French art of the nineteenth century. In this
respect his outlook is much more limited than Taine’s.
Can the theories which one can build on so arbitrarily
limited a foundation be of any general validity ? What
would a general theory of propagation be worth if it
were based exclusively on a study of the dominant
forms among the mammalia? The ﬁeld to which the
science of art has heretofore devoted its work may be
the most interesting to the great public; but it is, or at
least has been, by no means the most fruitful for sci-
ence. Nobody asks the science of art to renounce the
study of the highest. and most richly developed forms
of art. On the contrary, these heights are and will con—
tinue to be the ultimate aim to which it looks. Heights
are, however, not reached by ﬂight, but only by climbing,
and in climbing we must begin at the bottom, even at
the risk that a science of art which deals with the
monotonous songs and the monotonous ornaments of
wretched savages will not at once excite that general
interest upon which bold and original utterances on the
art of the present and the future can always depend.
We are speaking here of a demand which one may miss
hearing, but can never put away. When Dubos and
,Herder suggested the ethnological method, rather than
applied it, they were excusable because the facts were
not within reach of their time. But there is no excuse
whatever in our time for a student who constructs the-
ories of art without recognising that European art is
not the only art. An ethnological museum is Open in
nearly every large city ; a constantly expanding litera-
ture carries the knowledge of the productions of foreign

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 21

tribes by description and picture into the widest cir-
cles, and yet the science of art remains as it was. It
can, however, no longer ignore ethnological material
unless it wishes to ignore it.

The science of art should extend its researches to
all peoples; but especially should it apply itself to those
groups which it has heretofore most neglected. All
forms of art have in themselves an equal claim on its
interest, but under present conditiOns all the forms do
not promise the same success to the student. The sci-
ence of art is not now in a position to solve the problem
in its most difﬁcult form. If we are ever to attain a
scientiﬁc knowledge of the art of civilized peoples, it
will be after we have ﬁrst investigated the nature and
condition of the art of savages. We have to learn the
multiplication table before we can solve the problems
of the higher mathematics. The ﬁrst and most press-
ing task of the social science of art lies, therefore, in
the study of the primitive art of primitive peoples. In
order to compass this object, the study of the science
of art should not turn to history or pre-history, but to
ethnology. History knows no primitive peoples. The
childish ideas which the Greeks of Homer and the Ger-
mans of Tacitus had of the peoples of primeval times are
not worthy of contradiction. It is nevertheless a very
suggestive thought that we have received our best infor-
mation concerning the original forms of art from archze- '
ology. Yet all which archaeology can show us is a mass
of more or less fragmentary productions of prehistoric
representative art. Most of these prehistoric ornaments
and ﬁgures have in fact a much more primeval charac-
ter than works of the historical period. But in order
to decide Whether we really have the primitive forms

22 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

we are looking for, we evidently must know the forms
of culture in which they arose. We ask, but the an-
_ swers are always indeﬁnite and often contradictory, and
after we have studied a few dozen of the most famous
books on prehistoric culture, we shut the last, resigned
to the conviction that prehistoric archaeology is the R0—
mance of Sociology. Neither history nor archaeology
being able to give us information, only ethnology is
left ; and in it we ﬁnd what we are seeking. We shall
see hereafter that ethnology is able to show us a whole
series of primitive peoples in the bright light of the
present. The ethnological method is, nevertheless, not
perfect. The ﬁrst difﬁculty the study of the arts of
primitive peoples has to meet lies in the collection of
the material. A great deal has certainly been done in
this line during the last ten years, but quite as much
remains to be done. While we are relatively well ac-
quainted with the poetry of the Australians, we have
only two or three songs of the savages of the Andaman
Islands, and not a line of the songs of the Fuegians has
been reported. Even less is our knowledge of primi-
tive music. We gain no conception of it from general
sketches and descriptions, and we generally get a false
one from the transcriptions of primitive melodies that
are given us; for the music of the primitive peoples
does not move in the intervals to which we are accus-
tomed, and can not be written down by our system of
notation. The student of plastic and graphic art is in
a better position. Rich stores of material lie accumu-
lated in the ethnological museums, and where the origi-
nals are wanting copies take their place. Yet even
when the primitive art works are well arranged and
properly displayed in the transparent glass cases of the

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 23

museum, it is not always easy to ﬁnd them out. In the
Australian division of most collections may be seen long
wooden staves indented with combinations of points
and lines. These ﬁgures can hardly be distinguished at
ﬁrst sight from the familiar designs on the Australian
clubs and shields which have usually been described as
ornaments. Yet there is an essential difference be-
tween them. We have recently learned that the sup-
posed ornaments on those staves are really a kind of
rude writing—marks to help the messenger, to whom
the staff is given to take with him, recollect the most
important points of his commission; they have, there-
fore, not an aesthetic but a practical signiﬁcance. In
this case our knowledge saves us from a mistake; but
in how many others does it leave us in the lurch ! Who
can assure us that the ﬁgures on the Australian shields
are really ornaments ? May they not just as probably
be marks of ownership or tribal emblems ; or may we,
lastly, regard them as religious symbols ? Questions of
this kind present themselves in regard to most of the
ornaments of primitive peoples, and can be answered
for only extremely few. Can such insecure ground
afford the safest foundation for the whole structure of
the science of art? Is not this already a difﬁculty great
enough fully to justify the neglect of primitive art?
We have said that it is primarily necessary to study the
art works of the'loWest peoples, and now we have to
confess that it is never possible to distinguish them with
certainty: very much as some psychologists who ﬁrst
declare their belief that the life of the soul is com-
posed of individual sensations, and then turn round
and demonstrate that there can not be any individual
sensations.

24 ' THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Fortunately, our situation is not so hard that we
have to invoke exact psychology. First, we can show
against the multitude of doubtful cases a number always
considerable, the purely aesthetic signiﬁcance of which
can not be questioned. Then even the doubtful cases
are not without value for the science of art. The birds’
heads on the prows of the Papuan canoes may be ﬁrst
religious symbols, but they certainly serve secondarily
as decorations. While the choice of an ornamental
motive may be determined by a religious interest, its
execution and its combination with other similar or dis-
similar motives into a design are carried out under the
inﬂuence of aesthetic requirements. We may demon-
strate that the ﬁgures on the Australian shields are
property marks or tribal emblems, but we do not
thereby prove that they are not works of art. It
would, on the contrary, be unaccountable if they were
not. Why should the primitive man, to whom aesthetic
needs are no more foreign than to civilized man, not
try to make his marks and his symbols as pleasing as
possible 3 It is true that other than aesthetic consider-
ations may be regarded in the execution of a motive.
It is conceivable, for example, that the New Zealander
gives his ornamental ﬁgures ill-proportioned forms, not
because his aesthetic faculties are imperfectly developed
in that direction, but because he follows, in all its rude-
,ness, an ancient ﬁxed conventional model, with the idea
perhaps that the magical power of the ﬁgure is in some
way associated with its traditional form. Many similar
instances may be found in our own religious art. Under
the circumstances the execution of the ﬁgures does not
permit any certain conclusion as to the aesthetic endow-
ment of the New Zealanders. Happily, we are not in

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 25

this, or in most of the other cases, limited to a single
group of ornamental motives. We can compare the
human ﬁgures of the Maori with their other pictorial
works; and if this comparison should result in show-
ing that the New Zealander manifests the same inca-
pacity for comprehending and representing natural
forms and relations, not only in his human ﬁgures but
in all other pictorial works, we should then have sufﬁ-
cient justiﬁcation for drawing a conclusion respecting
his aesthetic faculty.

The science of art is in the same position-as all
the other sciences that depend on observation. A
single phenomenon proves little or nothing; the truth
ﬁnally emerges out of the patient comparison of nu-
merous and various facts. Most of the material
which ethnology aﬁords has no purely aesthetic char-
acter; but, while this is a disadvantage, it is not one
peculiar to the science of art. Every science regards
only one side of things, while everything has many
sides.

Having deﬁned the aesthetic character of a primitive
work in its general features, we come to the second and
more difﬁcult problem of comprehending its msthetic
peculiarities in detail. Among the treasures of the
Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde are two wooden»
doors which a Haussa negro has ornamented with
sculptures. It can not be doubted that these remark-
able reliefs, which represent scenes in the life of the
Soudan, were intended for decoration. But what spe—
cial kind of aesthetic feeling did the sculptor seek to
express in his ﬁgures? The coarse forms and the dis-
torted faces seem to permit but one answer : the Haussa
artist intended the effort to be comical. In fact, the

26 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

majority of Europeans would form a judgment of this
kind, not of those doors only, but of most of the works
of negro sculpture. The basis for such a judgment
is, however, very much like that on which the child
innocently concludes that the bumblebee is angry be-
cause it buzzes. The negro’s clumsy ﬁgure has indeed
an effect of the comic upon us; but is that any evi-
dence that it has or would be likely to have a similar
eﬂect on the artist‘s fellows in culture? We laugh at
the grotesque ﬁgure which a ﬁve-year-old European
child has drawn on its slate; but the little artist is
deeply hurt by our merriment, because in his eyes the
picture is not a comical caricature at all, but a serious
representation of an imposing soldier. We apprehend
that the sculptor in Haussaland would experience a
similar feeling if he could witness the effect of his .work
in Berlin. We can, however, assert, without a trial of
that kind, that the impressions which such sculptures
make on the negro and on the European are very dif-
ferent—as different as the negro and the European are
themselves. Not only because the negro regards them
with different eyes, but chieﬂy because he carves them
under the inﬂuence of diﬂerent ideas. Each work of
art is in itself only a fragment. The artist’s presenta-
tion needs for its completeness to be complemented by
the beholder’s conception of it; and in that way only
can the whole which the artist intended to create be
called into existence. At all events, the eﬁect of a
work of art is essentially diﬂerent upon a person who
is able to interpret the signiﬁcance of it and upon
another who receives the impression only of what is
shown. Suppose, for instance, a cultivated native J ap-
anese, unacquainted with European art, to be looking

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 27

at Rembrandt’s hundred-guilder picture.* He sees in
the middle ground of a dusky vault a man in a long
robe, around whose pleasant face hovers a peculiar glow
which reminds him perhaps of the divine radiance of
his native Buddha pictures; in front of him a woman
carrying an infant in her arms; to the right, in the
shadow, groups of poor and sick who, sad and sor-
rowful, gaze upon that man; to the left, in the light,
a number of richly dressed men with indifference or
scorn expressed in their faces and bearing; all this
masterfully drawn and grouped in a marvellous rich-
ness of lights and shades. Our J apanese—a country-
man of Korin and Hokusai—knows how to appreciate
such things. He feels an aesthetic pleasure at what he
sees, in addition to which he probably has a more or
less deﬁnite impression that the scene has a deeper
meaning. But his appreciation, which is limited to
what is immediately visible, can go no further, and he
therefore never reaches the experience of the deep
emotion that a European feels before Rembrandt’s can-
vas; for he knows that it is Jesus of Nazareth, the
Saviour of the weary and heavy—laden, to whom the
poor and miserable ﬂock and whom the rich and power-
ful avoid, who is there healing a sick child. Why does
not the Japanese reach a full appreciation of our art?
For the same reason that excludes a European from the
complete enjoyment of Japanese art. A foreigner sees
in a foreign work of art only what is visible to the eye;
under the best conditions he enjoys the same imme-
diate impression as the artist’s equal in culture re-
ceives ; but he does not gain all that is conveyed to the

 

* Christ Healing the Sick.

a»
28 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

latter by means of this impression. Here is the real
origin of the false supposition that with all its outer
grace Japanese art is deﬁcient in deeper meaning. The
deeper feeling is there, and if a European art critic who
knows nearly as much about Japanese culture as about
European art can nevertheless not ﬁnd it, is it therefore
necessarily the Japanese art that is superﬁcial?

What is true of the highly developed art of the
Europeans and the Eastern Asia‘tics is also true of the
primitive art of the Australians, the Bushmen, and the
Eskimo. There is, at least, no reason for supposing
that it should not be true of it. Who can tell what an
Australian sees in the pictures which Grey discovered
in the cave at Glenelg? We see nothing in them but
somewhat rude representations of men and kangaroos.
But what would the West Australian see in Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna? It may always be conceived that
those ﬁgures express to the culture fellows of the
primitive artist a meaning which to them has like sig-
niﬁcance with the supernatural mystery which beams
upon us from the great eyes of the Christ child. As
we have said, we do not know what this meaning is;
we do not even know whether the pictures have a
meaning. Can we then say, under such conditions, that
we are acquainted with the art of Australians? -

We have so far taken our examples from representa-
tive art. But poetry is not less fragmentary than paint-
ing and sculpture ; and nowhere is it more fragmentary
than among the primitive peoples. “ In all their verse
and songs,” says Man of the inhabitants of .the Anda-
man Islands, “ a considerable part is left to the imagina-
tion of the bearer”; and in proof of this he cites the
following characteristic specimen:

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 29

Bring the canoe to the shore,
I would see thy noble, valiant son—
Thy valiant son, who throws the young men,
Thy noble son, valiant son:
My axe is rusty, I would dye my lips with his blood.

This song is almost wholly incomprehensible to a Eu-
ropean, and is therefore of no import to him; but it un-
doubtedly makes a very strong impression on the Min-
copy, who is acquainted with the bloody tradition to
which it relates.* VTravellers who have collected the
simple songs of the Australians are nearly always obliged
to attach a very long commentary to the short text,
without which the lines would be incomprehensible to
a European reader. So, too, the Eskimo relate their
tales and traditions in a very abbreviated form, as the
story is supposed to be familiani'

Under such circumstances it is certainly not easy to
form an adequate conception of the signiﬁcance which
primitive art possesses to primitive peoples. There can,
of course, be no doubt, so far as the principle is involved,
concerning the way that will lead to a correct under-
standing of it. It-is not hard to say that one can not
understand the art of a people till he understands its
Whole culture ; it is very hard to follow this good coun—
sel, and it is all the harder the more remote the culture
of the people in question is from our own. The prob-
lem would therefore be almost unsolvable as for the

 

* Compare E. H. Man on the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the
Andaman Islands. Journal of the Anthropological Institute,
vol. xii, pp. 168, 169, where the corresponding tradition is also
given. .

J(Boas, The Central Eskimo. Annual Report of the United
States Bureau of Ethnology, 1884—85, p. 648. Compare also Rink,
Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, p. 65.

30 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

lowest peoples were it not made easier by the other fact
that while primitive culture is the most remote from
ours, it is also the simplest culture. The circle in which
the life and thought of the lowest tribes move is ex-
traordinarily narrow, and consequently we always suc-
ceed much better in comprehending a rude Australian
than a civilized Chinese. However, even in the lowest
depths of culture we only rarely ﬁnd perfectly sure
ground. The soil is yielding, and here and there yawn-
ing gaps open, which put a stop to investigation. The
deductions and conclusions which we gather from vari-
ous accounts are for the most part incomplete and un-
trustworthy, derived, as they usually are, from men‘ who
have not the most elementary previous sociological
preparation. The science of art has taken no part in
systematic investigations from the scientiﬁc point of
view, which ethnology has recently entered upon. N 0
historian of art or aesthetics has condescended to follow
the example of Lane Fox and prepare a suitable set of
instructions for travellers and expeditions.

In View of these facts, the doubt becomes more and
more serious whether the science of art will ever be able
to solve the problem presented in its inquiries into
natural and cultural conditions of art among the primi—
tive peoples. The question can be answered only by
experiment, but not, certainly, by the ﬁrst experiment
which we here venture. It would be a great mistake
to believe that such difﬁculties can be overcome by a
ﬁrst effort. We hope that the science of art of the
future will replace many of our theories with better
and more substantial ones. But even if our answers
possess no- lasting validity, our questions will have a.
value. This book will have fulﬁlled its purpose if it

THE WAY TO THE SCIENCE OF ART. 31

satisﬁes those students of culture and art who are seek-
ing light that information, Which is worth their labour,
can be found in those remote and neglected primitive
regions. If our explanations provoke doubt and con-
tradiction, so much the better for our science; for
Where doubt and contradiction are active, there the
most essential conditions of progress are present.

CHAPTER III.

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES.

THE beginnings of art lie, then, Where the begin-
nings of culture lie. But the light of history illuminates
only the last, shortest stretch of the long road that
mankind has left behind it, and history can give no
cleW to those beginnings. Ethnology, on the other
hand, is competent to show us primitive peoples in the
light of the present. But, before giving ourselves up
to its leading, we must make clear one term which
pressingly requires a more exact deﬁnition than has
been usually given to it. Every sociologist talks of
primitive peoples, and nearly every one uses the word
in a somewhat diﬁercnt sense. It is saying much, but
not too much, to call the idea of primitive peoples one
of the most varying and obscure ideas in the Whole sci-
ence of culture. Except the ancient civilized nations
of Asia, there is hardly a people outside of Europe
' which has not at some time or other been declared to
be a primitive people.* The corresponding term,

 

* In this insufficient deﬁnition of the fundamental idea. lies per-
haps the most dangerous weakness of the young science of sociology,
and a justiﬁcation, at the same time, of the distrust with which the
representatives of the more mature branches of research are accus-
tomed to regard its conclusions.

32

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 33

ATaturvölker (peoples in a state of Nature), which pre-
vails in ethnology, likewise leaves much to be desired.
It is therefore unavailable for our special purpose, be-
cause it covers too much, even when its boundary lines
are more exactly and distinctly drawn. Waitz’s usage,
for example, is to designate the civilly organized ne—
groes of the Soudan and the straggling Bushmen of the
Kalahari Desert, as both people in a state of Nature.
Ratzel tries to specialize the people of the ﬁrst sort as
half civilized; but the term Naturvölker is still with
him wide enough to include a motley mixture of the
most diverse forms of culture. The tribes of dwarfs
that lead a rude hunter’s life in the primitive forests of
central Africa are in his view a Naturvölk equally with
the ﬁrmly organized, agricultural, and cattle-raising
'Zulu nation, and he puts the garden-ﬁlling, dexterous,
and artistic Polynesians alongside of the miserable
Australians. A cultural difference exists between a.
citizen of the Sandwich Islands and a native of the
Australian continent, which is undoubtedly much greater
than the interval that separates a reﬁned Arab from an
enlightened European. Yet Ratzel, who carefully sep-
arates the Arabs as a. half-civilized people from the
European civilized peoples, relegates the Polynesians to
the company of the Australians. So summary a dispo-
sition may have some value as a provisional, very gen-
eral orientation, but it is utterly reprehensible as a basis
for sociological conclusions. The evil results of these
superﬁcial classiﬁcations are evident enough in many '
sociological fancies of the day, which have currency
for a few years as laws of the history of civilization.
What are primitive peoples, or, in other words,
what peoples possess the relatively lowest and most

34 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

nearly original form of culture? We confront the
problem of arranging the various culture forms with
which history and ethnology have made us acquainted
into a series of gradations as more highly or more
lowly developed. It is not superﬂuous to recollect that
we are not dealing here with the physical but with the
cultural peculiarities of the different human groups;
for the problem has been often hopelessly confused by
trying to solve it from the somatological standpoint.
The construction of the cultural step—ladder of peoples
is a problem of ethnology With which physical anthro-
pology has nothing to do. Somatology could, at most,
only furnish a physical gradation of the races.* 7 But
races and peoples are very different things. The char-
acters which indicate that an individual belongs to a
particular race decide nothing as to his appurtenancy
or adaptation to a particular form of culture. We can
account for racial characteristics as the effects of differ-
ent forms of culture With far more right than we can
accept the reverse view that the forms of culture are
conditioned upon characteristics of race. Indeed, our
researches concerning primitive art will furnish a new
evidence that the inﬂuence of race character on the
form of culture is very slight.

The question of the more or less primitive character
of a people is of equal importance with that of a greater
or less height of its civilization. Is there any means of
deﬁning the relative height of a form of culture with
approximate accuracy? What we call culture is even

 

* This problem has not yet been solved, and, if we can trust the
judgment of the highest anthropological authorities, is likely to be
very difﬁcult of solution in thc_future.

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 35

in its simplest form an inﬁnitely complex whole, com-
posed of numerous factors which for the most part, at
least for the present, baﬂie exact deﬁnition. A. com-
parison of the forms of culture in their aggregate would
also hardly lead us to our end. On the other hand,
the problem would evidently be easy of solution if
we could discern a single cultural factor, which is,
ﬁrst, susceptible of an objective and exact deﬁnition,
and, secondly, so signiﬁcant that it can be regarded as
a characteristic of an entire form of culture. There is,
in fact, one factor of culture that fulﬁls both of these
conditions—production. The form of domestic econ-
omy which rules or prevails in a social group, the man-
ner in which the members of the group earn their living,
is a fact which can be directly observed and can be de-
termined everywhere, as to its leading features, with
reasonable accuracy. We might be ever so uncertain
about the religious and social views of the Australians,
but not the slightest doubt is possible concerning the
character of their productive industries. The Austra-
‘ lians are hunters and gatherers of plants. It is perhaps
impossible to inquire into the mental culture of the
ancient Peruvians, but it is obvious to every eye that the
citizens of the kingdom of the Incas were an agricul-
tural people. But little would be gained for our pur—
pose by the determination of the form of the productive
industry of a people if it could not be shown at the same
time that the form of their culture is dependent upon it.
The idea of a graded classiﬁcation of a people accord-
ing to their domestic industries is anything but new.
We ﬁnd in the oldest writings on the science of culture
the well-known groups of hunting peoples, and ﬁshing
peoples, of nomadic herdsmen, and of sedentary farm-
4

36 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ers. But only a few historians of civilization ap-
pear to have grasped all the signiﬁcance of the produc- '
tive industry. It is certainly easier to underestimate it
than to exaggerate it. Domestic industry is, as it were,
the life centre of every form of culture; it inﬂuences
all the other factors in the deepest and most irresistible
way, while it is determined not so much by cultural as by
natural factors, such as geographical and meteorological
conditions. We might with some correctness call the
form of production the primary culture manifestation,
compared with which all other phenomena of culture
appear derivative and secondary; not, indeed, in the
sense that these other branches have grown out'from
the stem of production, but because, although of inde-
pendent origin, they have been formed and developed
under the overwhelming pressure of the predominant
factor. Religious ideas have certainly not proceeded
from economical conditions, yet the form of religious
views which rules among a people may for the most
part be traced back to the prevailing industry. The
Kaﬁir belief in spirits has grown from an independent
root; but the peculiar form of it, the belief in a hie-
rarchal order of ancestral spirits, is evidently only the
reﬂection of the hierarchal order of the living, which
is again a resultant of the prevailing occupation of cat-
tle-raising, with its warlike and centralizing tendencies.

Among the hunting peoples, in whose unsettled life
no ﬁxed social organization can be built up, we ﬁnd—
signiﬁcantly—the belief in spirits, but not the concep-
tion of orders of souls. Nowhere, however, does the
cultural signiﬁcance of production stand in so strong a
light as in the history of the family. The strange forms
of human families, which sociology has invested with still

THE PRIMITIVE' PEOPLES. 37

stranger hypotheses, appear remarkably reasonable as
soon as they are considered in connection with the forms
of production. Man in his lowest stage maintains him-
self by hunting, in the widest sense, and by gathering
plant products. Together with this most primitive form
of production appears the most primitive form of the
division of labour—the division between the sexes
based on physiological principles. While the man as-
sumes the responsibility for the animal food, the collec-
tion of roots and fruits is made the duty of the woman.
' Under these circumstances the economical centre of
gravity is nearly always on the man’s side, and conse-
quently the primitive form of the family bears an un-
mistakably patriarchal character. Of whatever charac-
ter his views of blood relationship may be, the primitive
man, even if he is not regarded as the blood relative
of his posterity, stands in fact as lord and proprietor
in the midst of his wives and children.* From this
lowest stage production can advance in two directions:
the further development may be made on the side of
the feminine or of the masculine industries. But
which of the two branches shall become the main stem
depends, ﬁrst, on the natural conditions under which
the primitive group lives. If the ﬂora and climate of
the country favour and make proﬁtable the saving and
care of useful plants, the feminine industries are devel—

 

* It has often been accepted without further question that the
theoretical views concerning blood relationship corresponded with
the actual form of the family; but the study of Australian civiliza-
tion has already suﬂiced to show us that that view is destitute of
foundation. The Arabians, who have carried the patriarchal form
of family to its extreme consequences, have, nevertheless, the con-
ception that “ the womb colours the child.”

38 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

oped, and the collection of plant products gradually
gives way to the cultivation of plants. This occupa-
tion is, in fact, always among primitive agricultural
peoples in the hands of the women, and the economical
centre of gravity is thereby borne upon the side of the
women. Consequently, we ﬁnd a matriarchal form of
the family, or traces of one, in all primitive societies
that maintain themselves chieﬂy by agriculture. The
woman, as chief supporter and as mistress of the soil,
has her place as the centre of the family. The estab-
lishment of a matriarchate, in the proper sense of a
real supremacy of woman, has, however, only rarely
been accomplished—only, that is, Where the social group
were removed from the attacks of enemies from with-
out. In all other instances man has recovered as pro-
tector the predominance which he had lost as sup-
porter. Thus have arisen the forms of the family which
prevail among most of these agricultural peoples, and
which represent a compromise between the matriarchal
and the patriarchal systems. A larger part of man-
kind has, however, passed through a quite different de-
velopment. Those hunting tribes which live in regions
where agriculture is precarious, while they furnish man
with animals that can be domesticated with proﬁt, have
not, like the former people, advanced to the cultivation
of plants, but to cattle-raising. This pursuit, which has
gradually developed out of hunting, seems to have been
everywhere, just like that, formerly the prerogative of
the man. The already existing economical predomi-
nance of the masculine side was thus re-enforced, and
this relation ﬁnds a consequent expression in the fact
that all the peoples who maintain themselves by stock-
raising live under the patriarchal form of family. The

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 39

controlling position of the man in pastoral communities
is further advanced by another circumstance which is
likewise connected with the form of their production.
Stock-raising peoples continually tend to military de-
velopment, and consequently to the form of a central-
ized military organization. The inevitable result is
that extreme form of the patriarchate in which the
woman is a slave Without rights under a marital lord
clothed with despotic power. These two chief lines of
development—the matriarchal and the patriarchal—d0
not, however, run their parallel courses without mutual
disturbances. The aggressive, warlike character of the
pastoral tribes constantly incites them to attacks on the
more peaceful agriculturists, and the superior military
capacity and organization of the pastoral peoples always
assure them ultimate victory. Life is left to the con-
quered agriculturist, but his property is taken away from
him. He tills the soil no longer for his own proﬁt, but
in the service of the foreigner, who occupies the con-
quered country as its lord. All the great civilized
states have arisen, as is demonstrable, from such for-
cible unions of agricultural and pastoral groups. The
form of their families bears plain evidence of the fact.
The victors in the course of time, by the pressure of
force and custom, impose the patriarchal system upon
the matriarchal vanquished, and thus we ﬁnd all civil-
ized nations at the present time more or less sharply
marked with the patriarchal family type.* N ow, this
decisive inﬂuence which production exercises on the

 

* A clear elaboration and conﬁrmation of this sketch of the
history of the development of the family will be given shortly in
a. separate work. We can here, of course, only present the out-
lines of it.

40 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

shaping of religion and of the family applies, together
with all other branches of the life of culture, also to
art. This assertion must for the present rest only on
the analogies we have already cited; but the researches
that follow will furnish direct proof of it, in that they
will show that the same primitive form of art corre-
sponds to the same primitive form of production in all
the various zones and races.

Primitive peoples are thus those tribes which have
a primitive form of getting a living. The most pri-
mary forms of production are the chase and plant-
gathering. All the higher peoples have used these
forms at some time, and a considerable number of more
or less populous social groups have not yet elevated
themselves above them. These last are those to which
we must turn in order to become acquainted with the
most primitive forms of art which are accessible to in-
vestigation.

We have, however, ﬁrst to remove one objection
from our way. thile the civilization of the hunting
tribes is a low one, is it therefore necessarily an orig-
nal, primitive civilization? These tribes are possibly
not primarily rude but they may have become rude;
perhaps they have not remained at a lower stage, but
have sunk to it from a higher; perhaps their civiliza-
tion is not a physiological but a pathological manifesta-
tion—a phenomenon of degeneration—from which no
conclusion can be drawn concerning the normal de-
velopment of civilization. This view, which has long
been expressed and has not yet been refuted, may pro-
ceed from one of two theories between which a de-
cision must he made. In one case it results as the con-
sequence of the dogma that the human race did not

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 41

begin its development at so low a stage, but that all men
were endowed from the beginning by a divine inﬂuence
with certain means of civilization which some peoples
richly improved, while others have lost them in conse-
quence of their sinful conduct. This view, it will be
seen, does not rest on any scientiﬁc basis, and can not
therefore be contradicted through scientiﬁc considera-
tions. Since it is presented as a part or a consequence
of a religious faith which invokes supernatural au-
thority, science, which deals only with data perceptible
to the senses, has nothing to do but to ignore it.*
Still, the objection is not put forward in all cases on
religiously dogmatic grounds. We may be perfectly
satisﬁed that the culture of any people began with
hunting and plant-gathering, and say at the same time
that the present hunting peoples are in whole or in
part not primitive peoples, but the degenerate posterity
of social groups which had climbed to a higher stage in
earlier ages. It can not be denied that such a thing is
possible, but the question is whether it can be shown
that it has anywhere happened. We know at least
that evidence of the conditions supposed has never
been brought forward in the case of any actual hunt-
ing tribe, though such evidence has been sought often
enough. Martins was of the opinion that the wild In-
dians of Brazil “were once in a quite different state, and
that in the course of dark centuries yarious calamities

 

* Schneider, for example, author of the otherwise eminently use-
ful book, Die Naturviilker, rests on these grounds. With a frank-
ness that deserves recognition. he declares this view in his preface:
philosophia quwrit, religio possedet veritatem. This is nobly said,
and as long as he stands on this ground ﬁrmly he is in fact unas-
sailable.

42 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

overtook them which have reduced them to their pres-
ent condition of very peculiar decay and degeneracy. ,
The Americans,” he says, “are not a savage race, but
one that has sunk to a savage condition.” * The argu-
ments, however, which he adduces in support of his
assertion will to-day hardly convince an impartial
sociologist. Gerland believes that “the condition of
Australian sculpture points to an earlier higher stage” ;
but although he studied Australian civilization with his
customary thoroughness, he could base his view only
on an “ impression ” which is not shared by most other
studentsd‘ While on the one hand decisive evidence‘
of the hypothesis of degeneration is sought in vain, on
the other hand a multitude of facts are found that
speak plainly against it. Ethnology has shown that the
cultural attainments of the lower peoples, to whatever
race they may belong, exhibit a striking uniformity
even to details, while such an agreement is not evident
in a like degree among peoples of the higher stages.
These circumstances are easily and naturally accounted
for from our point of view. The scanty stock of cul-
ture that can be gained by a hunting people necessarily
exhibits similar points everywhere because it is every-
where the result of the same simple and uniform con-
ditions. From the point of view of the hypothesis of
degeneration, on the contrary, this uniformity is an un-
solvable puzzle. For if such peoples had sunk from
higher grades of civilization, how can we account for
their having been impoverished all in the same manner,

 

* Martins, Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Ameri-
kas, vol. i, p. 6.
1 Waitz—Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vol. vi, p. 796.

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 43

for their having always saved precisely the same frag-
ments from the former diversiﬁed elements of their
culture? There is no reason to prevent us from regard-
ing the hunting and plant-gathering tribes with which
ethnology makes us acquainted as the bearers of a
primitive culture and with it also of a primitive art.
We, of course, use the word “primitive” here not in
the absolute but in the relative sense. Even the hunt-
ing peoples no longer remain at the ﬁrst beginning, if
we can speak here of a ﬁrst beginning, but they have
already passed through a perhaps very long develop-
ment. When we nevertheless designate them as primi-
tive peoples, we mean nothing else than that their form
of civilization represents the most primitive form as
compared to all others that are within our reach to in-
vestigate, that they stand nearer to the original condi-
tion than any other. The following studies will be
limited, as we have said, strictly to the hunting peoples
proper, and the products of the art of the more highly
civilized groups will be brought into view only for
comparison. In this respect this work is distinguished
from the majority of sociological writings which regard
hunters and agriculturists as of about equal value for
the study of primitive conditions. The distinction is
essential. One standing at our point of View would
ﬁnd it impossible to approve those prevailing methods,
but would rather be convinced that no clear knowledge
can be gained from so turbid a mixture of materials.*

 

* Lubbock, in his well—known book Prehistoric Times, represents
as savages, for example, Hottentots, Veddahs, Andaman Islanders,
Australians, Tasmanians, Fiji islanders, Maoris, Tahitians, Tongans,
North American Indians, Paraguay Indians, Patagonians, and
Fuegians. The study of the family has suﬁered exceedingly from

44 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Tribes which support themselves by hunting and by
gathering plants are still found in all parts of the world
except Europe. It is true that they appear, as they did
in fact before the time of the European colonies, in a
decided minority as compared with the more advanced
groups, a fact which hardly needs a special explanation.
The African continent accommodates in its immense ex—
tent, aside from the dwarf tribes of the centre, of
whose civilization we know almost nothing, only a
single hunting people, the Bushmen, who lead an un-
settled life in the Kalahari Desert and the adjacent
regions.

In America exclusively hunting tribes are found
only in the extreme nerth and the extreme south—the
Eskimo, with the Aleuts, and the Fuegians. All the
rest practise more or less agriculture. Only individual
Brazilian tribes, like the notorious Botocudo, live still
in a very primitive condition. In Asia the primitive
form of culture is represented in its purity only by the
Mincopies of the Andaman group; the iVeddahs of
Ceylon have been too much exposed to Singhalese in-
ﬂuences, and the reindeer-keeping Tschuktschis and
their kindred in the north of Siberia have already ad-
vanced to cattle-raising. Only one continent is still in-
habited, outside of the European settlements, wholly
by primitive tribes: Australia stands out into our age

 

such confusion. To say nothing of earlier works. Dr. Westermark,
author of the latest work on the history of the family, The History
of Human Marriage, London, 1891, cites the conditions among the
Botocudo, the Queenslanders, the people of New Britain, the Ton-
gans, the Samoans, and the Tuaregs in one series, to show that it
was the husband’s duty in the beginning to support the family,
p. 15 et seq.

THE PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. 45

in an ethnological respect like the remnant of a long-
sunken world. Here in deep seclusion a form of civili-
zation has kept itself alive over a broad area, which
has in most other regions been sunk for innumerable
centuries in the darkness of oblivion. We ﬁnd, there-
fore, in Australia the richest and most valuable material
for the study of the beginnings of culture.

The culture of all these peoples has, as we have
said, an extraordinary uniformity. As hunters they
are all forced to lead an unsettled life. Consequently
their industrial art presents only a very insigniﬁcant
and one-sided development. A proper architecture,
for instance, can be predicated among them only of the
Eskimo, for whom solid dwellings are one of the ﬁrst
conditions of existence: and only among the Mincopios
is there a rude beginning of a ceramics. Weapons
alone, responding to the most pressing necessities of
their life, have reached a very high and most ingenious
degree of perfection, in illustration of which we need
only to point to the harpoon of the Eskimo, the boom-
erang of the Australians, and the poisoned arrow of the
Bushmen. In these respects the hunting peoples are
incontestably superior to rude agriculturists and herds?
men. We ﬁnd among them nothing in the way of re-
ligious ideas except an essentially rude belief in spirits
and demons, which has never been elevated to a ﬁxed
orderly form of worship. Their family relations have
already been brieﬂy characterized. Hardly a trace of a
social organization can be remarked among them. As
a rule, all the men are a horde of equals, one to the
other; if they recognise a temporary chief, his power is
neither ﬁrmly founded nor deﬁnitely limited. Lastly,
their political conditions are only slightly developed:

4.6 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

a hunting population has never become a hunting na-
tion—that is, has never consolidated itself into a larger
political unity. The small tribes live rather in a state
of constant war. We should therefore, in the strict
sense, never have the right to speak of hunting peoples.
There are only hunting tribes.

CHAPTER IV.

ART.

IF a traveller, about to explore a strange country,
has not at least a general idea of the situation of his
objective point and the direction of his route, he will
be very liable to go wrong from the beginning. So
we, before we enter upon our study, need a preliminary
general orientation as to the nature of the phenomena
to which we are to direct our attention. What is art ?
A suitable and exhaustive answer to this question
must be left to the end of the researches which we
have not yet begun. The characterization which we
attempt here at the beginning is to serve, as we have
said, only for a preliminary orientation; and it is pos-
sible that we shall be compelled, at the end, to modify
it materially.

We inquire into the nature of art. A fundamental
study should begin with an inquiry into the nature of
the arts. It is certainly the task of science to discern
the general in the special; but to discern the general
in the special is not to overlook the special in the gen-
eral. If the aesthetic criticism of an age is the expres-
sion of its aesthetic theories, then one of the most pecul-
iar features of modern aesthetics consists in its having
disregarded that distinction. The criticism of the eight-

47

48 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

eenth century was concerned with comprehending the
peculiar qualities of single arts and measuring the work
of each by its own standard. To the criticism of the
nineteenth century such limitation of single arts ap—
pears - from its higher point of view so vain that it
rather demands from each art what only another has
the means to furnish. A poem to—day must, before all
things, have the effect of a picture, While we ask of a
picture that it be poetical or musical. In a word, the
arts now enjoy about the same equality in the view of
criticism as citizens of the state have before the penal
laws. With all proper admiration for this liberal gain,
we can not avoid a doubt whether such progress would
have been possible if the peculiar qualities of single arts
had been longer dwelt upon.

If we nevertheless begin our detailed researches ac-
cording to the approved methods of the older aesthetics,
with a general deﬁnition of art, we shall still be no
nearer reaching a fundamental principle than was the
older aesthetics in its deﬁnitions. Our deﬁnition is
nothing more than a scaffold, which can be pulled down
after the building. By an aesthetic or artistic activity
we mean one which in its course or in its direct result
possesses an immediate emotional factor——in art it is
usually a pleasurable one. Esthetic activity is there—
fore not entered upon as a means toward an end out-
side of itself, but as in itself the end. In this respect
it presents itself to us as the exact opposite of practical
activity, which always serves as a means. The Athenian
epheboi, who attacked the Persians on the ﬁeld of Mara-
thon, were engaged in practical activity; but when they
afterward swung themselves in a weapon dance in cele-
bration of the victory, they exerted themselves in aes-

ART. 49

thetic activity. Between practical and aesthetic activity
is the transitional form of play. It is distinguished
from art by its always seeking, like practical activity, an
external object; and from practical activity in that the
pleasurable factor, as in art, does not lie in the rather
insigniﬁcant outer object, but in the activity itself. We
can get a view of the relation of practical activity, play,
and art by the simple device of representing practical
activity by a straight line, play by a winding line, and
art by a circle. The direct return in pleasure which
characterizes artistic activity is realized, as we have said,
either through the whole course or in the result of the
activity. An Australian corroborry is an example of
the former case, in which the dancers experience an im-
mediate pleasure in their rhythmical motions; an ex-
ample of the second case is the painting of the body
previous to the festival, the aesthetic effect of which is
not in the act itself, but in its ﬁnal result.

In both cases—at least under normal conditions—the
aesthetic enjoyment is not limited to those who engage
in the aesthetic activity, but shared with those who look
on or listen. This effect of art on the hearers and
spectators is in no way occasional and unessential ; it is
contemplated by the artist. The artist works not only
for himself, but also for others; and although he can
not say that aesthetic creation proceeds alone from the
purpose of affecting others, it is nevertheless essentially
determined as to its form and direction with reference
to the public—not, indeed, so much to the public as it
is, but to the public as conceived by the artist. In any
case a work of art presupposes a public as well as an
artist. Mill falls into a great mistake when he believes
he has found the characteristic peculiarity of poetry to

50 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

be that the poet never thinks of a listener.* Quite the
contrary, the poet would never poetize if there were no
hearers. An individual art in the strictest sense of the
word is, even if it were conceivable, nowhere demonstra-
ble.1' Art appears among all peoples and in all periods
as a social manifestation, and we renounce at once the
comprehension of its nature and its signiﬁcance if we
regard it simply as an individual phenomenon. In the
following studies we shall, as we have said, regard ex-
clusively the social sides and relations of artistic pro-
duction. We shall consider the art of primitive peoples
as a social phenomenon and a social function. This
view can make no claim to originality, but is rather the
oldest and, except in recent times, the commonest con-
ception of art. No other conception was known in
antiquity; at least the ancient writers always treated
art as a public aﬂair. Only to modern individualism
did this view appear no longer the only possible and
just one.

We have, further, only to determine in what order
we shall investigate the different arts. The question is

 

* “ All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. The peculiarity of
poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a
listener.” Thoughts on Poetry and its Various Dissertations and
Discussions, vol. i, p. 71.

, + The artistic productions of prisoners in solitude, which are re-
garded as intended for the artist alone, might be cited in opposition
“to this. Yet the argument proves nothing. In the ﬁrst place, the
prisoner is isolated in his cell under very abnormal circumstances,
Which allow no conclusions as to his normal conditions. In the
second place, he has not always been in these conditions. The in-
clination toward artistic expression which he indulges in his isola-
tion has been like his whole individuality, shaped by the social
environment from which he came and in which he formerly lived.

ART. 51

of a purely practical nature. It Will therefore be best
to utilize for our purpose the best known and most
favourite classiﬁcation of arts, without on that account
supposing any deeper signiﬁcance in it.

The arts are usually divided into two great groups
———the arts of rest and motion. The distinction is
sharply and clearly deﬁned by Fechner : “ That the arts
of the former kind strive to please through resting,
those of the other kind through moving or transient
forms; the former, therefore, so transform or combine
masses at rest, the latter produce such bodily motions
or temporal changes that the artist’s object is accom-
plished.” * We begin with the arts of rest, which are
commonly designated the plastic and graphic arts. The
most original form of representative art is probably not
independent sculpture but decoration, and the object
to which decoration was earliest applied is the human
body. We therefore study ﬁrst primitive bodily adorn-
ment. Even the rudest tribes are, however, not sat-
isﬁed with decorating their bodies, but also decorate
their implements and weapons. We shall study, sec—
ondly, this decoration of implements. In the third
place, and ﬁnally, we shall contemplate the primitive
works of free painting and sculpture, or those paintings
and sculptures which did not serve purposes of orna-
mentation as productions of decorative art, but have an
independent signiﬁcance. The dance, which may be
conceived as a living sculpture, forms the transition
from the arts of rest to the arts of motion. We shall
devote special attention to this art; for the study of
the dance, which has an essentially different and higher

 

* Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, vol. ii, p. 5.
5

52 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

signiﬁcance among primitive tribes than among civilized
peoples, is adapted more than any other to deepen the
knowledge of the social importance of art. In the
lower stages of civilization the dance is always associ-
ated with song; and in this way we are led over to ‚.
poetry, with the most original forms of which we shall
become acquainted and appraise in at least their most
essential traits. Finally, we shall apply ourselves to
primitive music. With this our study Will be com-
pleted, and we shall have further only to collate its
general results.

CHAPTER V.

PERSONAL DECORATION.

WHEN Darwin gave a piece of red cloth to a native
Fuegian he was astonished to see that it was not used
for clothing, but was torn into small bits, which the re-
ceiver and his companions bound round their freezing
limbs as ornaments. This observation does not charac-
terize the Fuegians alone. Darwin might have made it
as well in the Kalahari Desert and in the Australian
bush as at Cape Horn. With the exception of the
arctic tribes who could not live at all without complete
clothing, all hunting peoples are much more richly and
carefully decorated than clothed. What Cook once said
of the Fuegians may be said with no less truth also of
the Australians, the Mincopies, Bushmen, and the B0-
tocudo: “They are content to be naked, but ambitious
to be ﬁne.” Those writers on the history of culture
who devote themselves to the pleasant task of demon-
strating in a popular scientiﬁc way to cultivated people
of all conditions how magniﬁcent our achievements =
have been, are wont to regard this disproportion of
clothing and ornament as a pleasing example of the
childish simplicity of savages, which can not distinguish
the superﬂuous from the necessary. This demonstration

has, in fact, only the one fault of proving a little too
53

54 _THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

much. If savages are really the great imbecile children
they are represented to us to be, it is somewhat hard to
comprehend how they can still continue to exist, for
by rights they should long ago have perished, to be
warning examples against their irrationality to all more
highly gifted beings. Creatures who are not qualiﬁed
to know their own wants can certainly not live more
than a little time. But primitive peoples, with all their
lack of clothing and excess of decoration, have already
maintained themselves on the earth for a whole series
of millenniums, although the higher peoples have solici—
tously tried to make it not too easy for them. Either
the primitive peoples have no right to existence, or
have the historians cf culture not been able in this case
to distinguish the superﬂuous from the necessary? Pos—
sibly the decoration of the primitive peoples is not so
superﬂuous as it seems to be to the practical sense of
the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is, to the “ savage ”
at least, as necessary and indispensable as clothing is
to us.

But before we can inquire into the signiﬁcance of
primitive ornament we must become acquainted with
it. It is partly ﬁxed, partly movable. Under ﬁxed dec—
oration we include all permanent cosmetic modiﬁca-
tions of the body, such as scariﬁcation, tattooing, and
boring of the septum, the lips, and the ears. Movable
ornament, on the other hand, is only loosely and tem—
porarily connected with the body. It includes the
numerous forms of tassels, bands, girdles, rings, and
pendants, which form the costliest possessions of primi-
tive peoples. We shall, however, especially and ﬁrst
consider the simplest form of movable decoration—paint-
ing; for, in the ﬁrst place, painting, in our opinion,

PERSONAL DECORATION. 55

most eminently represents the original form of decora-
tion, and, in the second place, it apparently stands in
causal connection with some kinds of ﬁxed decoration.

The custom of painting the body prevails quite
generally in the lowest grade of culture. Only the
Eskimo who have to keep their bodies (at least out of
doors) completely covered, do not practise it.

The Australian always carries in his travelling sack
of Kangaroo hide, a provision of White earth and red
and yellow ochre. Is his everyday life he is satisﬁed
with a few spots on his cheeks, shoulders, or breast, but
on festive occasions he extends the painting over his
whole body.* There is no important event in Aus-
tralian life which is not marked by some special paint-
ing of the body. The young Australian receives his
ﬁrst red or white painting on the festival of the initia-
tion of youth, by which he is received into the commu-
nity of the men of his tribes]L The adults who take
part in the ceremony likewise cover their dusky skins
with various white and red designs. When the men
go out to battle “they paint themselves with various
colours. These colours are probably not selected by
every individual brave at his own pleasure, but are ap-
pointed for the occasion according to well-understood
rules. But the arrangement, the lines, and ﬁgures are
left to each one’s fancy.” 1: In the battle which Hodg-
kinson witnessed on the Macleay River one party had
painted themselves with red stripes.it Red is, in fact,

 

* Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i, p. 275.

+Angas, South Australia Illustrated, No.22. Brough Smyth,
vol. i, p. 58 et seq.

1: Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i, p. 165.

# Hodgkinson, Australia from Port Macquarie to Moreton Bay.

56 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the war colour of most of the tribes, but in the north
and west the braves use white. * The Australian, how-
ever, paints himself most richly and most carefully for
his dance festivals. “ For the festival,” says Lumholtz
of the natives of Queensland, “they smear themselves
partly or wholly with red or yellow earth; frequently
they also paint the whole body with a mixture of pow-
dered charcoal and fat, as if they were not already
black enough.” 1' As a rule, however, the colours are
drawn in patterns. “The orbits of the eyes of the
dancers,” says Thomas, in an account of a great corro-
borrg/ in Victoria, “are surrounded with white rings,
white streaks are drawn along the nose, and light paral—
, lel stripes on the forehead. The lines on the body are
fantastic, but always arranged after a certain plan.”i
While the dancers nearly always appear in white paint
in the corroborry through all Australia, various colours
are used for other dances. “In the palti dance they
paint themselves with red as well as white, and in the
pideku, natives of Moorunde decorate themselves with
stripes of red ochre. In the canoe dance the bodies
are painted with white clay and red ochre.it As red
painting in Australia marks the entrance into life, so it
denotes, too, the exit from life. The N arrinyeri adorn
the bodies of the dead with bright-rod ochre, H and this
custom is quite widespread, for H. E. Meyer observed
it also among the tribes on Encounter Bay. In the
north the bones, at least, of the putreﬁed corpse are

 

* Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vol. vi, p. 739.
+ Lumholtz, Unter Menschenfressern, p. 153.

1 Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 167.

” Ibid., vol. i, p. 153.

l] Taplin, The Narrinycri.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 57

painted, after which they are carried for a long time
as a memoria].* Finally, the system of painting as
mourning prevails over the whole continent. Austra-
lian and European mourning colours are as different as
their skin colours. The white European mourns in
black clothes, the black Australian mourns in white
earth. In certain tribes the women, besides covering
their heads with a cap of white earth, besmear their
whole bodies, while the men colour only their faces or
their backsxf The prevalent colour of mourning is, as
we have said, white, but here and there other colours
are used besides. On King George’s Sound, for exam-
ple, the survivors put black and white spots upon their
foreheads, on the temples, and down to the cheek bones,
and among the Dyeri the mourners bespeckle their
whole bodies with white and red spots. It has been
proved, in individual cases at least, that the different
colours are not applied in a wholly arbitrary way. Ac-
cording to the statements of Schuermann, in many dis-
tricts white is used only on the death of a blood rela-
tive, while black expresses mourning for a relative by
marriage.

The body painting of the extinct Tasmanians was
not diﬁerent in any essential point from that of the
Australians. This correspondence between two neigh-
bouring peoples, related by race and culture, is not
wonderful; but it is very striking that we also ﬁnd the
same characteristic features of body painting among the
far-distant Andamanese. Moreover, this analogy be-
tween the Mincopies and the Australians is, as we shall

 

* Waitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 808.
Jr Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 118.

58 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

see, only the ﬁrst of a long series. Care must indeed
be taken to guard against the besetting sin of ethnolo-
gists of attaching ﬁne-spun hypotheses concerning the
primitive connection or relationship of now separated
peoples to single parallels of this kind. The resem- -
blance between the Australian and Andamanese cul-
tures are, nevertheless, so numerous, and extend to so
many and so minute details, that it will not be easy for
us to believe in a wholly independent parallel develop-
ment of the two peoples. “The Mincopies use three
colouring substances for their body painting; and by
the way they apply them they let it be known whether
a person is ill or in mourning, or going to a festival.” *
Contrary to the custom of the Australians, where the
body painting of the women is far behind that of the
men, no distinction is made here between the sexes.
The only limitation is applied to the unmarried, who
are forbidden to paint their necks. The ﬁrst of the
three colouring materials of the Andamanese is a pale,
olive-coloured earth, which, mixed with water, is spread
thickly over the whole body, to signify mourning for a
deceased person. The peculiar clay mourning cap is
also worn by the Andamanese as in Australia. This
earthen crust further occasionally serves a practical
purpose: it is customary, for example, to put it on
when one is excessively heated by hunting or dancing.
The second pigment, a pure white earth, is, on the other
hand, used only for embellishment. The women paint
themselves, and the men especially, with this colour for
the festivals, drawing with the foreﬁnger nail neat

 

* E. H. Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman
Islands. Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xii, p. 333.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 59

rectilinear patterns on the cheeks, the body, and the
limbs. The third material, a mixture of burned yellow
ochre and fat, is likewise used principally for cosmetic
purposes. It is sometimes applied besides as a curative,
“ but never, as has often been said, to protect the skin
against insects.” As a decorative colour yellow ochre
is always laid on in patterns, which, however, answer-
ing to the nature of the pigment, do not go beyond
rude streaks and zigzag lines. As in Australia, so here
likewise, the dead are adorned with the colours which
they loved in life; corpses are painted with yellow
ochre.*

The painting of the Bushmen is very uniform.
They rub their faces and hair with red ochre.

A great diversity of colours and patterns is found
again among the Fuegians. Red is here, too, the fa-
vourite colour; but besides it we ﬁnd black, and, more
rarely, white. “ The region around the eyes,” says
Coo , “was commonly white, and the rest of the face
was adorned with perpendicular red and black streaks.”
In another place Cook speaks of two men “who
had painted their whole bodies crosswise with black
streaks.”+ Giacomo Beve has given a little more exact
information concerning the most usual patterns: “Very
frequently they draw parallel lines of different colours
across the face, crooked lines on the cheeks and nose,
and most curious ﬁgures on the breast and arms.” 1

The body-painting of the Botocudo is poorer in

 

* Man, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xii, pp.
333, 334.

+ Cook, from Banks’s Daybook. Joest, Körperbemalen, Nar-
benzeichnen, und Tattauiren, p. 13.

t Globus, vol. xliii, p. 157.

60 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

colours than that of the Fuegians. They have no white,
but make all the more effective use of the other two
colours, a yellowish red of vegetable origin and a deep
blue-black. “With the red,” says the Prince von Wied,
“which is easily washed off from the skin, they paint
especially the face from the mouth upward, by which
they are given an extremely wild, ﬁery aspect. They
usually paint the whole body black, excepting only the
face, the forearms, and the feet and ankles from the
calves down, while the painted part of the legs is
marked off from the unpainted part by a red stripe.
Others divide the body lengthwise, leaving one half in
the natural condition and painting the other half black;
still others paint only the face a bright red. I have
found only these three kinds of colouring among them.
With the body painted black, they are accustomed to
adorn themselves further with a black streak which is
drawn like a mustache from one ear to the other across
the red-coloured face and under the nose.” * The
prince, unfortunately, says nothing about the meaning
of the different patterns.

It follows undoubtedly from our sketch that the
primitive body painting served chieﬂy for aesthetic pur-
poses; that it was a decoration, and not, as has some-
times been said, a kind of primitive clothingst We are

 

* Wied, Reisen in Brasilien, vol. ii, p. 11.

+ With certain higher tribes, painting certainly takes the place
of protective clothing. The Hottentots, for example, rub them-
selves with ashes and fat for defence against the cold, and the
Shillooks smear their black bodies with a reddish mixture of cow-
dung and ashes for protection against mosquito bites. In all these
cases the painting, in correspondence with its purpose, is as unin-
terrupted as possible over the Whole body. The primitive peoples,

PERSONAL DECORATION. 61

thus fully justiﬁed in regarding the painting of the body
ﬁrst from an aesthetic point of View.

The number of colours at the disposal of primitive
cosmetics is not great. Not more than four can be used
under the most favourable circumstances; and of these
four, only one is of general occurrence—red.

Red—and particularly yellowish red—is the fa-
vourite colour of the primitive as it is the favourite
colour of nearly all peoples. We need only observe
our children to satisfy ourselves how little taste on this
point has changed. In every box of water colours the
saucer that contains the Cinnabar red is the ﬁrst one
emptied; and, “if a child expresses a particular liking
for a colour, it is nearly always a bright, dazzling red.
Even adults, notwithstanding the modern impoverish-
ment and blunting of the colour sense, still, as a rule,
feel the charm of red.” Goethe certainly expresses the
general impression when, in his F arbenlchre, he praises
the incomparable power of yellowish red over the emo- ‘
tions.* Red has then, at all time, played an important
part in ornament, especially in masculine decoration.
The custom of the triumphant general painting himself
red disappeared, indeed, with the Roman Republic, but
scarlet was a favourite colour for the masculine festal
dress till within the last centuryﬂ' and the European

 

on the other hand, paint themselves with single lines and points
which can not possibly serve for the protection of the skin.

* “ Yellowish red: the active side is here in its highest' energy,
and it is no wonder that energetic, healthful, nude men especially,
rejoice in this colour. The fondness of savage men for it has been
remarked everywhere.” Farbenlehre, p. 775.

+ Compare especially the pictures of the Middle Ages, and the
Renascence.

62 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

war dress still preserves clear red in a richer measure
than is desirable in the presence of the improved long
shooters. It may be questioned whether the strong
effect of red is called out by the direct impression of
the colour, or by certain associations. Many animals
have a feeling for red similar to that of man. Every
child knows that the sight of a red cloth drives oxen
and turkeys into the most passionate excitement, and
every zoologist has observed how strikingly often the
secondary sexual marks are coloured red, from the
glowing red callosities of the buttocks of the ardent
baboon and the scarlet crest of the cock to the yellow-
ish-red comb which the male triton carries on his back
during pairing time. ' These facts show undoubtedly
that the aesthetic effect of red depends essentially on
the immediate impression. It is, however, on the other
hand, no less probable that the direct effect on men is
strengthened by strong emotional associations. As to
the primitive peoples, one circumstance is here sig-
niﬁcant above all others. Red is the colour of blood,
and men see it, as a rule, precisely when their emotional
excitement is greatest—in the heat of the chase and of
the battle. In the second place, all the ideas that are
associated with the use of the red colour come strongly
into play—recollections of the excitement of the dance
and the combat. Notwithstanding all these considera-
tions, painting with red would hardly have been so gen-
erally diffused in the lowest stages of civilization if the
red colouring material had not been everywhere so
easily and so abundantly procurable. Probably the
ﬁrst red with which the primitive man painted himself
was nothing else than the blood of the Wild beast or of
the enemy he had slain. At present most of the deco-

PERSONAL DECORATION. 63

ration is done with a red ochre,* which is very abundant
nearly everywhere, and is commonly obtained through
exchange by those tribes in Whose territory it is want-
ing. The Dyeri in Australia undertake expeditions of
several weeks’ duration to renew their supplies—an evi-
dence of the esteem in which the red colour is held.
All these facts taken together make the predominance
of red in primitive body-painting fully comprehensible.
Above all, the aesthetic value of red is actually so great
and so obvious that there is no need of framing in ad-
dition a hypothesis of religious signiﬁcance to explain
its used"

Yellow has a like aesthetic character, and enjoys
therefore a similar cosmetic application. In the Anda-
man Islands it takes the exact place of red; the yellow
painting of the Mincopies corresponds precisely with
the red of the Australiansi The latter use yellow al-
most equally with red as a decorative colour. That it
is more rarely seen in the south is accounted for not by
its being in less esteem, but because of the less abun-

 

* The use of red ochre is indeed extremely ancient. The diluvial
relies on the Schusscnquelle include, for example, a ball of red chalk
which was probably intended for painting the body. Nevertheless,
painting with blood is still practised in some places, even in Aus-
tralia. The tribes on Cooper’s Creek paint themselves with blood
which is taken from a bird or some other small animal. Hewitt, in
Brough Smyth, vol. ii, p. 302.

fWaitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 738: “Red seems to be the most
sacred colour With them (the Australians); in various places the
dead are painted with it.” The supposition seems more reasonable
to us that corpses were painted red in Australia for the same reason
that they are crowned with ﬂowers in Europe—to decorate them.

; The yellow of the Andaman Islands is, furthermore, very close
to the Australian yellowish or brownish red.

64 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

dance of yellow ochre, which through extensive dis-
‘tricts is‘ not found. The absence of yellow from the
body-painting of the Bushmcn, Fuegians, and Boto—
cudo has, however, probably another cause. Of the
Bushmen at least we know deﬁnitely, that they are
acquainted with a yellow ochre and use it in their
wall paintings. That they nevertheless reject this pig-
ment in their body—painting is evidently for the very
valid reason that a yellow painting would hardly show
on their yellow skins, and as the Botocudo and Fue-
gians, although they are called red-skins, are rather
yellow-skins, it is reasonable to suppose that they re-
frain from a yellow painting for the same reason.

The inﬂuence which the colour of the skin exercises
on the choice of the colour for painting stands out still
more plainly when we come to white. White appears
in the primitive body-painting at least as much as red,
but only among the dark Australians and Mincopies.
Among other fairer-coloured peoples it is either wholly
absent or is given a prominence, as among the Fuegians,
behind that of the other colours. While red and yellow
are worn almost exclusively for decoration, white has
besides another signiﬁcance. We shall ﬁrst consider it
in its property as an ornamental colour. Both the Aus-
tralians and the Mincopies paint their bodies for festi—
vals with lines of white earth, and with good reason;
for no other colour could bring out the designs so clearly
and sharply and at the same time so strongly deepenby
glaring contrast the black of their skins, of which the
dark races are as proud as the fair ones of their white.
In the latter respect the lines in white earth of the
Australians and Mincopies represent the original form
of the black beauty-patch which the ladies of the Rococo

PERSONAL DECORATION. 65

period stuck upon their fair rouged cheeks. European
Observers, it is true, do not regard the white painting for
the dance as exactly a pleasing docoration. Bulmer
thinks that the Australian corroborry dancers “ Wished
to make themselves as terrible as possible. They
marked every rib with a stripe Of white earth, and
painted besides white streaks on their arms, legs, and
faces in such a way that they looked in the ﬂaring light
of the camp ﬁre like living skeletons.” * It is highly
questionable whether the gruesome impression of their
skeleton ﬁgures, so often described, was contemplated
by the dancers or was felt by the native spectators.
Our European horror arises not so much from the im-
pression of the skeleton in and of itself as from certain
associations which we link with it. Most authors seem
to regard it as self-evident that these associations are at
least as inevitable and as suggestive to a nude Austra-
lian as to a civilized European ; but it can not in reality
be supposed that the skeleton has the same effect upon
the former as the ghostlike apparition upon the latter.+
We therefore, till the contrary is shown, give a some-
what more sober explanation of the preference. The
Australian corroborry is always performed at night.
The dancing place is regularly lighted by a ﬁre and usu-
ally also by the moon, but the light is nevertheless so
dim that the motions of the dark-hued dancers can
not be perceived plainly without the help 'of these daz-
zling streaks, which are not at all intended to imitate

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 275.

J[Ghosts swarm in the stories of the Australians, but we have
never met in them any Of the skeleton ghosts which play so promi-
nent a part in our stories. '

66 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the bones of a skeleton, but simply serve to make the
principal lines upon the body conspicuous. Both among
the Australians and Mincopies white curiously appears
also to be the mark of the exact opposite of festive joy.
White mourning paint is, however, often distinguished
without difﬁculty from white festal painting. In the
Andaman Islands the latter is always traced in patterns,
while the former covers the whole body evenly with a
continuous coating. In Australia, too, where the dance
painting is likewise always in patterns, the mourning
colours are laid on without design among some tribes,
while in other cases the mourners are painted with va-
rious ﬁgures which sometimes indicate the degrees of
relationship between-the mourner and the deceased.*
Why have the Australians and Mincopies chosen white
as the colour of mourning? When we consider paint-
ing in mourning, we receive a decided impression that

 

* “In order to express their grief,” says Wilhelmi, of the Port
Lincoln tribes, “the women paint their whole forehead, a ring
around each eye, and a perpendicular streak over the stomach; the
men paint their breasts with stripes and points, which proceed
downward from the shoulders and join at the navel. The diﬁerent
patterns show the diﬁerent degrees of relationship between the
mourners and the dead.” When a Dyeri in mourning was asked
why he painted red and white spots upon himself, he answered, in
order that touching the corpse might not make him ill (literally-—
“You see very good make-im like that ; suppose me no make-im, me
tumble down too; that one—via, the corpse—growl along—a—me”).
The custom prevails in the same tribe of eating the fat of the dead
at the mourning feast. “Afterward the men paint a black ring
around the mouth with charcoal and fat. This mark is called
munamurroomurroo. The women do the same, and paint besides
two white streaks on their arms, as a. sign that they have partaken
of the meal. The rest of the men smear themselves over and over
again with white earth, in order to attest their grief.” Brough
Smyth, vol. i, p. 120.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 67

it is designed chieﬂy to make its wearer unrecognizable.*
“ This custom,” says Joest, “ may be traced back to the
fear of meeting the wandering and lingering soul of
the dead one. The people try, in order to avoid the
persecutions of evil spirits, to make themselves unrec-
ognizable to them by painting themselves with a colour
to which they are not accustomed.” J oest’s explana-
tion is indeed purely hypothetical, but it has neverthe-
less a degree of probability, and we may accept it until
it is replaced by a better one.

Lumholtz states that the Queenslanders often paint
themselves with a mixture of powdered charcoal and
fat, and adds, “just as if they were not already black
enough”! The blacks, indeed, do not consider them-
selves blaek enough, just as white ladies often think they
are not white enough, and as these enhance their interest-
ing paleness with powder and white chalk, so the blacks
try to increase the attractions of their dark skin by means
of charcoal dust and fat. It is occasionally admitted,
even by Europeans, that this black decorative painting,
which is very much in vogue among numerous tribes
in Australia, has a not unpleasing effect. More than
one traveller has extolled the deep, metallic tone which
it lends to the skin of the natives. Black painting has,
of course, a diﬁerent meaning to the yellow Americans
than to the dark Australians. Deep blue-black has the
same value to them as white to the Australians. They
prize it and use it as that colour in which the painted
design is most sharply deﬁned against their skin.

 

* For Andainanese painting in mourning we refer to the Journal
of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xii, pl. iX, Fig. 2; for Austra-
lian. among others, to Brough Smyth, vol. i, Fig. 2, where the White
painting of the face strongly suggests a mask.

6

68 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

While we are relatively well informed about the
colours of primitive body-painting, our knowledge of
the patterns is very defective. An exhaustive presen-
tation of these, such as we have to thank the Prince of
Wied for as regards the Botocudo, is a rare exception.
Most of those who speak of them think they have said
enough when they observe that the patterns are “ fan-
tastic,” or “strange,” or “remarkable,” and they can
only rarely be deﬁned more or less plainly and com—
pletely in the pictures and the photographs. Under
these circumstances it would be presumption to express
a deﬁnite opinion of their meaning.

Are the primitive painted designs individual inven—
tions, or are they c0pied from some model? There
are reasons that indicate that imitation plays an impor-
tant part in body-painting. First, original designs are
very rare in all primitive art; on the other hand, there
prevails generally, in ornamentation as well as in paint-
ing and sculpture, imitation of motives which are pre-
sented to the primitive artist in his daily occupation.
The study of the decoration of implements in particu-
lar teaches us that the designs with which the Austra-
lians adorn their robes, shields, and clubs, and which,
too, seem generally similar to the patterns on their skin,
are nothing else than conventionalized imitations of
drawings of animals. The thought of disguising them-
selves as animals by a corresponding painting of their
bodies is surely not too remote from the conception of
the hunting tribes which worship in animals some of
the protecting divinities of their kindred, and which
generally take pleasure in mimetic representations of
animals. Lastly, We have succeeded in discovering at
least one case in which the body-painting undoubtedly

PERSONAL DECORATION. 69

represents the drawing of an animal. Howitt mentions,
in an account of the initiation of youth in Gippsland,
“that the bullerawreng—that is, the godfathers—paint
the faces of the jerryale—that is, the candidates—With
pipeclay, so that they shall resemble nurt-ducks—
namely, with a white ring around each eye and .a white
band across the cheek bones or the eyebrows.” * We
do not think, however, that all the painted patterns
without exception are to be accounted for as imitations
of this sort. Mourning .paint, for instance, in most
cases simply makes the wearer unrecognisable without
any resemblance being attempted, and when the Boto-
cudo brave colours half of his body blue-black he cer-
tainly imitates no natural ﬁgure thereby, but only pro-
poses to produce fear in his enemies through the most
unusual and strangest appearance possible.

Bodily decoration by painting is subject to a serious
defect: it is very transitory. As a natural consequence,
pains have been taken to impress the design on the
body in some lasting way. Two means of accomplish-
ing this have been found in the lowest stages of civili-
zation which have spread over almost the whole earth-—
scariﬁcation and tattooing. The ethnical distribution of
these processes depends, again, on the colour of the skin.
The yellow Bushmen and the copper-coloured Eskimo
practise tattooing; the dark Australians and the Min-
copies limit themselves to scariﬁcation.

The nature of scariﬁcation is sufﬁciently indicated
by its name. The skin and the ﬂesh are cut in vari-
ous places with a ﬂint or a piece of mussel shell, or
with some other primitive knife, so that the scariﬁed

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 64.

70 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

wound shall afterward form a paler-coloured raised
ﬁgure on the dark cuticle. Some Australian tribes try
to enlarge the scar by ﬁlling the ﬂesh wounds for a
considerable time with earthﬁ" while others in the north
and northwest rub in the juice of a certain plants}
The scariﬁcation is extended by the different Australian
tribes over diﬁerent parts of the body. By some it is
applied chieﬂy on the back, by others on the arms, the
breast, the belly, and the legs. The scars are home by
both sexes, but the men are generally more fully scari!
ﬁed than the women. The designs consist of points
and curved or straight lines, which are sometimes ex-
tended over the whole width of the chest: In the
vicinity of Torres Strait, the men bear a thick horse-
shoe—shaped scar on each shoulder, which in the picture
resembles a European epanlet. The operation of scari-
ﬁcation forms a part of the ceremony that marks en-
trance into the age of manhood. But it is too painful
and exhausting to be completed on this occasion. It is,
therefore, taken up again afterward at different times ;
and the design does not appear in full except upon the
older persons. “ The lines,” says Lumholtz of the
Queenslanders, “always denote a certain order of rank,
and here it depends upon age. Boys under a certain
age are not decorated ; but in time they receive a few
cross-stripes upon their chests and stomachs. The

 

* Brough Smyth, vo]. i, p. 296.

f VVaitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 739.

1 Good pictures of Australian scar decoration may be found—to
mention only the most accessible works—in Ratzel, Völkerkunde,
vol. ii, pp. 20, 36, 38, 39, 40; Wood, Natural History of Man, vol. ii;
and in Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 11, where the scars on the back of
a native of Victoria are seen in monstrous development. '

PERSONAL DECORATION. '71

number of stripes is gradually increased, and when the
subjects have grown up a half-moon-shaped line is cut
around each nipple.” * In the southeast different ages
are known from the different stages of scariﬁeation, of
which there are ﬁve for adultsj‘

The Tasmanians, too, seem to have all submitted to
the painful operation. Cook speaks of dotted lines which
they have on their breasts and arms, and Bonwick calls
the single sears star-shaped. Cuts in the form of a semi-
circle were seen besides on the bellies of the women:

The custom of scariﬁcation prevails generally among
the different tribes and with both sexes in the Anda—
man Islands. The operation is begun earlier here and
completed earlier than in Australia. “ Only a very few
children are allowed to pass longer than their eighth
year without scariﬁcation ; and the marking is com-
pleted in their sixteenth or eighteenth year.” No
special festival is held, as in Australia. The execution
of the work, except among the northern tribes, is com-
mitted to the women, who use a quartz ﬂake in the
process. The scars are made principally on the back
and shoulders, on the nape of the neck, on the chest,
groins, belly, and on the backs of the feet and hands.
Thelines on the back are, however, not cut by a woman
but always by a male friend. The designs are very sim—
ple, consisting in all the tribes of short horizontal and
vertical cuts, which form rows, and only the arrange-
ment and number of these rows vary somewhat among
the several tribes?

 

* Lumholtz, p. 177.

fWaitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 740 (from Tiechelmann and Schür-
mann). 1 Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 812.

” Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 333.

72 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

A European who sees an Australian or a Mincopy
adorned with scars ﬁnds it hard at ﬁrst to believe that
scariﬁcation really is intended for decoration, for it ap-
pears far more repulsive than pleasing to him. It is
therefore very easy to comprehend why it has been as-
serted that scariﬁcation has not so much a cosmetic as
a secret religious signiﬁcance. The view is supported _
principally by the authority of Gerland, who explains
such scariﬁcation as well as tattooing as the mark, the
symbol of property, of the divinity to whom the bearer
has dedicated himself.*

It is not, of course, incumbent on us here to in-
vestigate the meaning of scariﬁcation and tattooing in
general; we are concerned simply with the question
whether scariﬁcation in the lowest grades of civilization
——that is, in Australia and the Andaman Islands—has a
religious or an aesthetic signiﬁcance. Gerland ﬁnds an
evidence in favour of his view in a tradition, according
to which “a spirit taught men the art of scariﬁcation,
and was then changed into a great kangaroo.”+ But
in this tradition, concerning which we have no knowl-
edge whether it has a great age or a wide diffusion, noth-
ing is said, in the ﬁrst place, of a god, but only of a spirit,
or, in the second place, of the meaning of the scariﬁca-
tion. If we must, from the circumstance that the in-
troduction of an art is ascribed to a spirit, necessarily
conclude that it originally had a religious signiﬁcance,
we might with far greater right than to scariﬁcation
ascribe a religious meaning to the kindling of ﬁre, as
this art—and that, not only according to one, but ac-

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, pp. 37, 575.
f Waitz-Gerland, Vol. vi, p. 740.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 73

cording to numerous Australian traditions—was taught
to the natives by supernatural beings. There is also a
myth concerning the origin of scariﬁcation among the
Andamanese. “ Maia Duku, who seems to be identical
with Tomo, the mythical ancestor of the Mincopies,
was the ﬁrst one to mark himself with scars. One day
while ﬁshing he shot off an arrow; it missed its aim
and struck a hard object, which was a piece of iron, the
ﬁrst one that was found. Duku made himself an arrow-
head out of this piece, tattooed himself with it, and then
sang the verse:

‘ Who can kill me now? I am tattooed, I am tattooed !’ ” *

It will be observed that the Andaman tradition gives
even less evidence, if possible, in favour of Gerland’s
supposition than the Australian. In it the discoverer is
neither a god nor a Spirit, but the ﬁrst Mincopy, and
there is not the slightest hint in it that with the scari-
ﬁcation he cut the mark of a divinity upon himself.
His declaring the scar in his song a protecting power
may most naturally be interpreted as meaning that a
man who has tested his fortitude by going through the
ordeal of scariﬁcation need no longer be afraid of an
enemy. In fact, the Mincopies regard scariﬁcation as a
means “ of testing courage and endurance against bodily
pain.” + Gerland then relies on the high festivity with
which the scariﬁcation is completed, but this festivity is
not usual. among the Andamanese, and in Australia it
bears less a religious than a social character. So far as
we really know of the initiation of youth, it does not de-
note the reception of the youth into union with any

 

* Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 170.
f Ibid., vol. xii, p. 331.

74 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

divinity, but his reception into the society of grown
men, and this fact gives us at once a fully satisfac-
tory and natural explanation of his being subjected to
scariﬁcation on this occasion. The operation fulﬁls a
double purpose: it tests the manly enduranceof the
candidate, and it veriﬁes his tribal relation by an in-
delible sign. Gerland himself does not deny that “the
scars are often tribal and family marks,” but he says
that “it directly follows from that fact that they were
originally religious tokens.” * We must confess that
we do not at all understand this conclusion. It is cer-
tainly possible that a tribe may have chosen some re-
ligious symbol for its distinctive mark, but that all
tribes should have actually chosen thus has not been
proved by Gerland or anybody. No more is the fact
mentioned by Gerland that “ Perron discovered on a
Tasmanian grave marks which were very like the char-
acters with which the natives tattooed their forearms,”
conclusive “testimony that in this case also tattooing
was originally the painting of the representation of the
guardian divinity.” 1“ This is indeed a peculiar proof;
for, ﬁrst, it is not clearly evident why a non—religious
name mark or tribal mark should not be put on the
grave of a deceased person ; and, secondly, it is an en-
” tirely arbitrary assumption to suppose that the lines
and points with which the Tasmanians scariﬁed (not
tattooed) themselves were representations of their guar-
dian divinities. The evidences in favour of Gerland’s
assertion, so far as it relates to the lowest peoples,
are thus very weak, while on the other hand facts are
not wanting that speak unequivocally against it. 4 Ger-

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 740. + Ibid.‚ vol. vi, p. 814.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 75

land himself admits, as we have said, that the scars are
“ often tribal and family marks,” and he can cite for .
this the testimony of the best experts and the most
indefatigable observers of Australian life, who unani-
mously account for a part at least of the scars as tribal
marks.* In single cases these tribal marks might have
also a religious signiﬁcance, although that has not been
proved as yet in any instance. But even if Gerland
had proved it for all, we should nevertheless have been
justiﬁed in regarding the scariﬁcation of the Austra-
lians and Mincopies as in the ﬁrst instance a decoration.
Aside from the fact that a tribal mark or a religious
symbol may be at the same time an ornament, the most
' various‘ accounts assert undoubtedly and uniformly that
While certain scars or groups of scars are tribal marks,
by far the greatest number of the scars have a purely
ornamental signiﬁcance. How much this aesthetic
meaning has dominated the other social one may be
concluded from the fact that it has led more than one
observer wholly to deny the other.)L In most accounts,
however, the relation of the tribal scars and the orna-

 

* “ They decorated themselves with raised scars, according to a.
design which was common to all the members of the tribe. One
certain form had always to be executed, although others were left to
individual tastes.” (Brough Smyth, vol. i, pl. xli.) Bulmer not only
accounts for the soars as being most decidedly tribal marks, but also
gives ﬁgures that distinguish individual tribes. The ﬁrst sign has
the form of a boomerang, and the others consist of series of points
and stripes. The investigations of Wilhelmi, Lumholtz, and others
may be compared.

+ Curry for example (Australia, vol. ii, p. 475), says that the scars
were only for ornament; so likewise Palmer (J our. Anthrop. Inst.,
vol. xiii, p. 286), who adds expressly, “ They convey no idea of tribal
connection.”

76 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

mental scars is correctly set forth. Wilhelmi, for ex-
ample, in a sketch of the initiation of youth among
the tribes of Port Lincoln, distinguishes the tribal
marks on the shoulders and neck very sharply from
the incisions on the breast and arms, which “serve
only for ornament.” * The distinction is no less clear
among the Queenslanders. Lumholtz continues, after
describing their tribal marks: “Besides these tokens
of rank, the man bears also other lines, which serve
only for ornament, and are found on the arms; they
are short, straight, parallel lines which are drawn in
groups across the arms, and when the wounds heal are
not very plainly prominent. Here and there incisions
are also made on the back and shoulder blades, but I
have never seen incisions in the face. Only the men are
marked with these various lines; they are forbidden to
the women, for it is not considered proper for women
to adorn themselves much. They have therefore to
content themselves with a few lines on the breast, back,
and arms, and attach great value to the decoration that
is permitted them, while in spite of their sensitiveness
in other respects, they have no fear of the pain when
it is for their embellishment.” + That the women of
Queensland are not the only ones who suﬁer as martyrs
to stern fashion is shown by a remark of Eyre’s, who
witnessed the completion of an operation on a girl in
the south with which no special ceremony was con-
nected. “Notwithstanding the terrible pain,” he says,
“ the girls without exception have an ardent desire to
have the marking performed upon them, for a well-
scariﬁed back is regarded as a material addition to their

 

* Wilhelmi, Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 68. + Lumholtz, p. 17’.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 77

charms.” Brough Smyth ﬁnally sums up the result of
the numerous careful accounts which were furnished
for his work in the words, “Although the scars cer-
tainly serve as tribal marks, the pain of the wounds is
borne more for the sake of embellishment than on any
other ground.” * Of the Mincopies, Man, who lived
for years among them, afﬁrms “ that seariﬁcation pos-
sesses primarily the meaning of a decoration.” 1' These
judgments, which only reproduce the expressions of the
natives themselves, are not unknown to Gerland, the
thorough expert in ethnological literature; yet he be-
lieves them to be weakened by assuming that the origi-
nal meaning had in the course of time been forgotten
by the natives themselves: Such a change of mean-
ing might be very possible in itself. In this case, how-
ever, the question is not whether it might have taken
place in such a way, but whether such a change has
actually occurred ; for until this is proved we have no
right to cast doubt upon the direct, unequivocal declara-
tion of the natives, in order to prefer the hypothesis
we have constructed in our closets.

We have already said that it is very diﬁicult for a
European to appreciate the pleasure with which the
Australians and Mincopies regard their scar marks.
Yet taste in respect to bodily embellishment has under-
gone remarkable changes even in short periods, and we
hope that a generation will some time arrive to which
the wasp-waists and cramped feet of our ladies will ap-
pear quite as problematical embellishments as the dec-

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 296.
+ Man, Jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 331.
i; Gerland, Atlas der Völkerkunde; text p. 4.

78 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

_orative scars of the primitive hunters do to us. The
attempt has been made to account for the contradiction
between civilized and primitive tastes by the supposition
that the scars are admired by the Australians not for
themselves, but simply as marks of courage and endur-
ance; but the circumstance that the scars are so highly
prized by the women, from whom manly courage is
not usually expected, is evidence that they are really
borne also on account of their intrinsic beauty. Fur-
ther, even a European is able to appreciate the aesthetic
charm of scariﬁcation when he regards the elegant de-
signs which the peoples of the Congo basin, especially
the Bakuba and the. Baluba, cut or burn into their
black skins. In Australia and the Andaman Islands
the designs are indeed too uniform and rude to over-
come our dislike, yet even here the inﬂuence of aesthetic
considerations can be plainly recognised. The lines
and points are not irregularly scattered over the body,
but the effort is everywhere shown to arrange the scars
rhythmically and symmetrically. Of the meaning of
the different patterns, unfortunately, we know nothing
-—nothing that tells against and nothing that tells in
favour of Gerland’s supposition that they were origi-
nally representations of guardian divinities. _
Scariﬁcation has found practice only among dark-
skinned peoples, for the scars stand out plainly only on
a dark skin. For a similar reason, tattooing has spread
only among the fairer peoples. It is practised in the
lowest stages of civilization by the Bushmen and the
Eskimo. The process consists in the introduction of a
colouring substance, usually pulverized charcoal, under
the skin; after the inﬂammation has subsided, the in-
serted design appears in deep blue, indelible colour.

\

PERSONAL DECORATION. 79

Tattooing permits an incomparably ﬁner and richer
execution of the skin pattern than scariﬁcation, and has
continued in use even among some more highly civilized
peoples, especially among the Japanese; hunting tribes
are still satisﬁed with forms which but little excel those
of primitive scariﬁcation.

The tattooing of the Bushmen is as poor in designs

as the scariﬁcation of the Mincopies. The specimens

which Farini saw consisted of short, straight lines on
the cheeks, arms, and shoulders; and Virchow found
on the individuals whom he examined in Berlin just
such lines, forming parallel rows.* Nothing has been
learned as yet of their signiﬁcance. A somewhat more
highly developed form is found among the Eskimo, or

,rather among their women; for, curiously, tattooing,

which is regarded in most other places as the preroga-
tive of the masculine sex, is here a privilege of the
women. Girls are tattooed in their eighth year, either
with a pointed instrument, as in Polynesia, or with a
thread which is drawn under the skin. The pigment
is soot, and in recent times gunpowder. The tattooing
is usually put upon the face, arms, hands, hips, and
breast. Boas has copied some designs; the leading
outlines, as appears from his description, are fairly con-
stant.1- On the forehead the eyebrows are duplicated
by two oblique curves, two others are drawn from the
wings of the nose across the cheeks, and a number of
lines run in‘the shape of a fan from the lower edge of
the mouth over the chin. The whole gives the impres-
sion of an intentional imitation of a man’s beard. The

A

* Verhandl. der Berliner Anthrop. Gesellsch., 1886, p. 222;
+ Boas, The Central Eskimo. Annual Report of the Bureau of

Ethnology, 1884-’85, p. 561.

80 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

designs on the hands and calves consist of parallel lines
and rows of dots, between which appears sometimes
a zigzag line or row of small rectangles. We know
nothing of the meaning of this pattern. From its ap-
pearance one might at ﬁrst consider it an imitation of
an embroidery.* On the other hand, we know deﬁ-
nitely, at least, that tattooing is regarded by the Eskimo
as an embellishment. Cranz relates, in his History of
Greenland, that mothers tattoo their daughters in early
youth “for fear that otherwise they would not get a
husband.” This view is not contradicted in the least
by Armstrong’s remark that the designs serve also for
the distinction of the different tribes and conditions.
“ In some hordes the lower (probably the poorer) women
ornament their chins only with a vertical line in the
middle and two side streaks, while the higher women
draw two vertical lines down from each corner of the
mouth.”+ Even in Europe, as we all know, certain
ornaments served as signs of rank without their having
therefore been anything else than ornaments. N o sup-
port whatever is found for the supposition that the
tattooing of the Eskimo possesses or ever possessed a
religious signiﬁcance—neither in any of their numerous
myths, nor in the execution of the Operation which is
performed Without any ceremony.

Summarizing the results of our investigations of the
signiﬁcance of primitive scariﬁcation and tattooing, we
ﬁnd that the marks serve partly as tribal tokens and
have perhaps as such sometimes a religious meaning,

 

* Tattooed imitations of articles of clothing and decoration are
very common, particularly in Polynesia. Consult pictures in J oest’s
book.

f Bancroft, Native Races of the Paciﬁc States, vol. i, p. 48.

PERSONAL DECORATION. - 81

although this can not be proved for a single instance.
But in other and the largest number of cases the scars
and tattoo marks are for ornament. Nothing shows
that the ornamental marks are less primitive than the
social. On the contrary, if we must recognize the
priority of either function, we shall have to decide in
favour of the ornamental. The taste for embellish-
ment is one of the ﬁrst and strongest needs of man; it
probably prevailed for a very long time before the idea
of. tribal connection was formed. In any case it ap-
pears far more natural to us that the decorative marks
should have gradually become tribal marks by imitation
than that tribal scars should have sunk to be merely
decorative marks. Furthermore, there is nothing to
prevent our supposing that the two groups have de-
veloped independently.

The Botoeudo and the Fuegians are not acquainted
with either scariﬁcation or tattooing. Instead of these
we ﬁnd among the former another widespread form of
permanent decoration carried out to an extravagant ex-
tent—those lip and ear plugs (botogue) from which the
name of the tribe is derived. The children receive the
curious ornament usual with their tribe as early as their
seventh or eighth yearﬁ“ First, incisions like button-
holes are made in the under lip and the lobes of the ear,
into which plugs made of a very light wood are pushed.
In a short time the ﬁrst small plugs are replaced by
slightly larger ones; the process is continued until at
last plugs are used four inches in diameterd' The lip
and ear plugs, which are peculiar to the Botocudo only

 

* Wied, vol. ii, p. 5.
f Martins, Beiträge zur Ethnographic Amerikas, vol. i, p. 321.

82 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

in their excess, serve, Without doubt, as tribal marks.
The question arises whether, at least in the eyes of the
natives, they are besides ornamental. The appearance
of the plugs can not at all events he so disagreeable to
the Botocudo as to Europeans, else they would hardly
adhere so tenaciously to the painful and unpleasant
fashion. Perhaps it has, through the hardening inﬂu-
ence of custom, become less disagreeable to them; the
plug may have been originally made and worn, on ac-
count of its terrifying aspect, for its effect upon others
—upon enemies. According to this supposition, the
plugs may possibly at ﬁrst have been as little regarded
a pleasing decoration by the Botocudo as they now are
by Europeans, but probably, chieﬂy under the inﬂu-
ence of associations connecting them with tribal em-
blems, grew to be ornaments. On the other side, their
value might be supposed to consist in their being testi—
monials to the courage of their wearers. In that case,
not so much the plugs as the slits might be regarded as
the true ornament, since the former only served to
make the latter more strikingly prominent. All these
interpretations are possible, but the only certain thing
about the matter is that the Botocudo are proud of
their plugs, so far as the ridicule of Europeans has not
marred their pleasure in them.

We have already said that wearing the lip plugs is
not the peculiar privilege of the Botocudo. The cus-
tom has gained a very wide extension among Amer-
ican tribes, and is found even in the most northern
part of the earth—among the Eskimo.* While the

 

* But only among the western tribes, who have possibly received
the lip plug from their Indian neighbours.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 83

women are tattooed the men embellish themselves in
a not less painful way. The lower lip is pierced
under both corners of the mouth, and a piece of bone,
ivory, shell, stone, glass, or wood, shaped like a Euro-
pean cuff-button, is inserted in each opening. Here,
too, the wound, which has at ﬁrst only the diameter of
a quill, is gradually increased, till the opening is at' last
about three quarters of an inch wide. Bancroft *
presumes that a considerable importance is ascribed
to this decoration, for a religious festival is cele-
brated at the piercing of the lips. We have, unfortu-
nately, not been able to obtain details and trustworthy
particulars regarding the ceremony.

These and similar forms of permanent decoration
are not at all or are only sparingly represented among
the other hunting peoples. The Fuegians and the Min-
copies do not wear any ornament whatever in their lips,
noses, or ears; the Bushmen, on the other hand, hang
iron and brazen rings in their ears; and the Austra-
lians, at least in some districts, pierce the septum so
that they may wear a stick or a bone in their nose, the
place of which is taken, on festive occasions, by two
feathersd‘ The women on the lower Murray River
wear a small nose-ring carved out of the wing bone of a
buzzard.:t Like scariﬁcation, the piercing of the sep-
tum forms part of the ceremony by which the youth
“ are made men.” The belief exists among the natives
of Gippsland that every one who does not put on the
nose ornament will suffer a terrible punishment in the

 

* Bancroft, vol. i, pp. 47, 48. The festival is not described.
f Hewitt. Brongh Symth, vol. i, p. 278.
1: Brough Smyth, vol. i, p 277.

7

8.1. THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

next world.* If any one concludes from this that a
mystic religious signiﬁcance is attached to the Austra-
lian nose ornament, he will hardly be diverted from it
by the objection that the heavenly displeasure could
not take eﬁect upon the obstinate candidate until a
later time, and could therefore give no infallible ex-
planation of the original meaning of the stick, which
is now “gladly worn as an ornament that secures the
good Will of men and women for its owner.” +

The study of permanent decoration has taught us
that primitive man conquered his cowardice to gratify
his vanity; variable decoration will show us that he
brings it a still greater oﬁering—he overcomes his in-
dolence. Not only that he zealously collects every-
thing that can possibly serve him for embellishment as
he views it, but he applies to the fabrication of his
necklaces, bracelets, and other ornaments a patience
and a care which stand in striking contrast with his
habits in other respects. It can be said without exag-
geration that the primitive man attaches to his body
all the ornaments he can get, and that he adorns all the
parts of his body that can hear an ornament. Lippert
has made the pertinent remark in his Kulturgeschichte
that “the principle of the selection of the parts to be
adorned is practical throughout and contemplates no
ideal. Bearers of ornament,” he says, “are all those
naturally constricted parts of the body which recede
above expansions of the muscles and bones capable of
sustaining a load. These placesare the forehead and
the temples, with the bones projecting beneath them

 

* Bulmer. Brough Smytb, vol. i, p. 274.
+ Thomas. Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 271.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 85

and the subsidiary supports of the ear muscles; the
neck, with the prominent supports of the shoulders; the
loins, with the projecting hips; on the legs, the region
over the ankle; and on the arms, besides the wrist, the
upper arm with its swelling muscle, and in smaller
measure the ﬁnger. All these places are with savage
men bearers of ornaments, not because any artistic con-
ception of the body and its points of advantage has
chosen them for that purpose, but because they have
the capacity for carrying the load.”

The dressing of the hair forms a transition from
movable to permanent decoration, so far as it is gov-
erned by aesthetic considerations. This is, however,
not the rule among primitive peoples. While the art
of dressing the hair on the heads of African and Oceanic
agriculturists has reached the boldest fanciful develop-
ment, its achievements among the hunting tribes have
generally been very modest. As regards single in-
stances this is not strange. When the Fuegians, who
let their rough, black manes grow in other respects as
they will, occasionally crop the tuft over the foreheads,
they are hardly governed in their operation by aesthetic
but simply by pressing practical considerations. So
the hair-dressings which the Botoeudo of both sexes
wear, besides their plugs, as tribal marks, have certainly
no high value for ornament. They shave and cut the
hair around the skull along a line three ﬁngers’ breadth
above the cars, so that only a tuft is left covering the
crown. We can not divine why and how they hit upon
this peculiar style of dressing. The same tuft curiously
appears among the far-distant Mincopies. It is worn
on the Andaman Islands only by the men, and indeed
not universally by them. The tonsure is carried still

86 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

further by the women, who shave the whole skull to
two parallel lines of hair that extend from the crown
to the neck.* Possibly this is not an ornament, but a
symbol of the subordinate position of the women. The
tonsure has at least such a meaning among many other
peoples.+ Only a few of the many styles of hair-dress-
ing among the Eskimo men are of aesthetic interestd;
The style of the women’s hair-dressing, on the other
hand, has undoubtedly been inﬂuenced by considera-
tions of decoration.’ The description given by Boas
ﬁts all the tribes: “The women arrange their hair in
two ways. In either case they part it in the middle of
the head. The back hair is either twisted into a bunch
that rises over the back of the head, or else is neatly
done up in a knot. The side hair is braided, laid over
the ears, and joined to the bunch behind. In the sec-
ond way of dressing, the side locks are braided into
small cues which reach down to a little below the
ears and are held in order by a ring of ivory or

 

* Man, Jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol xii, pp. 77, 78. »)

fCompare Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Part IV, 5361.
There are, however, two circumstances that bear against this inter-
pretation: the relatively free position of the Mincopy women and
the partial prevalence of the tonsure among the men.

i On Davis Strait and Hudson Bay the men let their hair grow
tolerably long, cutting it, however, square across the forehead, and
hold it back by means ‚of a band. Frobisher says that the Nugu-
mint partly shave their heads; the Kinipetu shave the crown; the
Netchillirmiut wear the hair short. (Boas, Annual Report of the
Bureau of Ethnology, 1884—’85. p. 558.) Most of these methods of
dressing the hair evidently correspond With practical requirements.
They probably serve besides as tribal marks. The tribe of the
Iglulirmiut, on the other hand, possesses a real headdress, which,
according to Parry’s description, has an essential resemblance to
the women’s frisure.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 87

bronze.”* The tonsure is likewise found among the
Bushmen, and most frequently, again, among their
women. Moreover, both sexes smear their hair copi-
ously with a mixture of red ochre and fat, so that it
covers the head like a close cap. Not rarely, too, the
men draw their scanty locks out as long as possible,
the cues reaching at most not more than an English
inch, in order to bind hares’ tails, metallic buttons, and
similar rarities to the tipsxf On the whole, the Bush-
men must be accredited with having carried the hair
dresser’s art to as high a development as is possible
with a soil so unproductive of hair.

They do not, however, reach the abundance of fanci-
ful forms in which the Australians arrange their thick,
curly hair. The Australian frisures are the highest
achievement of primitive art in hair-dressing. The
women, indeed, let their black locks grow as irregular
and tangled as do the Fuegians; while their Tasmanian
sisters wore tonsures; but the men, on the other hand,
particularly on festive occasions, apply much labour
and pains to dressing their hair. First, the custom of
powdering the hair with red ochre prevails all over the
continent—a decoration which was likewise in much
favour among the Tasmanian men. Sometimes the
hair is so thickly kneaded with red ochre and fat as to
form a hard, caked mass. The Quecnslanders, instead
of this mixture, put wax on their hair, which makes it
shine in the sunlight as if it were polishedi With
such excellent material more aesthetic forms may be

 

* Boas, Annual Report, 1884—’85, p. 558. Picture on page 561.
+ Fritsch, Eingeborene Süd-Afrikas, p. 429.
1 Lumholtz, p. 153.

88 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

executed. Feathers, tufts of moss, and crabs’ claws are
stuck in the viscous locks; they are sprinkled with the
snow-white down of the cockatoo; they are arranged
in long tufts, each of which is ornamented at the end
with a white tooth. Costumes of this kind approach
the marvellous achievements of the Fijian artists in
hair.* The beard, too, is not neglected, and a white
shell or the tail of the wild dog is often tied to its tip.

The dressing of the head appears so .closely' con-
nected with the dressing of the hair that it is hardly
possible in some cases clearly to separate them. So
much the more distinctly should the theoretical consid-
eration bring out the difference between the hair-dress-
ing, which belongs essentially to the class of ﬁxed dec-
orations, and the headdress, which is movable.

The most important and usual piece of primitive
headdress is the head band, which is worn by all
hunting people, except the Eskimo. It exists in its
rudest form on the Andaman Islands, where it consists
of a rolled pandanus leaf. Not less primitive is the
strip of hide with which some Australian t1 1bes ale
content. Most of these, however, adorn’ their forehead
with bands neatly and substantially made of kangaroo
sinew or vegetable ﬁbres, and painted with white or red
ochre, which make a very effective ornament.)L The

 

* Besides these styles, simpler dressings are found. Thus the
natives in the i11terio1 of the Cape York peninsula singe their hair
and beards.

1- Compare the pictures and descriptions of Brough Smyth, vol.
i, p. 276. Sometimes the web is of human hair. Fillets are found
in Queensland on which oval pieces of nautilus shell are fastened.
The Narrinyeri wear ﬁllets made out of the hair of corpses, which
are wound about their heads by soldiers for amulets. Whoever
wears such a magic head band will have keen vision, be swift of

PERSONAL DECORATION. 89

Bushmen and the Fuegians wear likewise either strips
of hide or bands of woven sinew, and the Botocudo
wind around their heads cords decked with shining
black berries and white monkeys’ teeth. The head
band, which afterward comes to be in so high honour
as the symbol of the rank of a ruler, is also of practical
service to the primitive man. It holds his hair and
may occasionally carry his throw-stick, his arrow, or
some other small implementﬁ But its principal service
is as a decoration and an ornament holder. The Aus—
tralian head bands frequently bear near the temples
two small pendants of kangaroo teeth, while a wild
dog’s tail is attached behind, which falls down over the
back.+ On the north coast a white mussel shell is
hung over the black forehead. But the most sumptu-
ous part of the headdress rises above the ﬁllet—a tuft
of black emu feathers, the yellow crest of a cockatoo,
the tuft of hair of the ears of a bear, the aigrette of a
bird, of prey, or the splendid tail feathers of a lyre
birdd; Not rarely imitation feathers are worn, as
freshly shredded sticks, which look at a distance like
real feathers. Lastly, the inside of the head band is
further elaborated by some of the tribes. Mitchell saw
on the head of a man on the river Bogan a netlike
woven fabric, which included all the hair, with a tuft of
cockatoo feathers inserted in front. But the highest
and most remarkable form of Australian headdress is

 

motion, and in battle avoid all hostile spears. Brough Smyth, vol.
i, p. 112.

* The Bushmen, for example, are accustomed to carry their poi-
soned arrows in their head bands.

+ A good picture is given of it in Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 276.

:|: Brough Smyth, vol. i, pp. 271, 274, 280.

90 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the oogee, which the men at Cape York wear in the
corroborryﬁ It is a helmet—shaped cap covered with a
material like linen and painted with red ochre, over
which extends, from one ear to the other, a tall fan of
cockatoo feathers. Brough Smyth has accompanied
his graphic description of it with a picture that reveals
very clearly how much patience and skill the Austra-
lians are able to bring to bear upon anything that is
intended to adorn them.

The Bushmen utilize their head bands in the same way
as the Australians ; they hang them around with small
thongs, in which pieces of ostrich—egg shells are strung,
and adorn them with feathers. Baines saw a peculiar
style of headdress on two Bushmen, one of whom wore
the head of a bird of prey and the other that of a crow
on his foreheacHL Birds have to bear the principal part
of the expense of the primitive headdress everywhere.
The Botocudo, according to‘ the Prince Von W ied, glue
large, bright-yellow feather fans in their front hair-‚1:
and the Fuegians weave feathers with great skill into
their head bands ; and thus stately crowns are evolved
among them from the primitive diademsﬁi

The neck is the most convenient bearer of orna-
ments on the human body; and consequently it wears
the richest decoration. Sometimes, too, it carries the

 

* The discovery of the oogee is of additional interest, from its
having cast an unexpected light upon the darkness that rested over
the cave paintings discovered by Grey at Glenelg. A specimen of
the 00933, which fully corresponds with Brough Smyth’s picture, is
to be found, if we are not very much mistaken, in the ethnological
department of the British Museum.

+ Baines, Explorations in Southwest Africa, p. 143.

1; Prinz von Wied, vol. i, pp. 12, 15.

# Ratzel, Völkerkunde, vol. ii, p. 672.

PERSONAL DECORATION. ' 91

single primitive piece of clothing; and hence that pe—
culiar relation which exists in the lowest grades of civil-
ization between clothing and ornament never presents
itself so clearly as when neck ornaments are under con-
sideration.

The only protection against cold, storm, and wet,
which the Fuegians wear, is a skin which hangs from
the neck over the back, and even this poor cloak is worn
only exceptionally in particularly bad weather. On
the other hand, hardly a man can be seen who has not
adorned his neck with a pair of cords or bands. The
variety of their neck decoration is astonishing when
compared with the extreme poverty of their other pos-
sessions. In our museums may be seen neckbands of
sealskin, cords on which bones, teeth, and shells of most
various kinds are strung, woven fabrics of sinew of
guanaco, and collars of feathers; and all these “ use-
less triﬂes” are worked up with the same care as the
weapons with which the designers have to procure their
daily food.*

We make precisely the same observation among the
Bushmen. Besides the scanty lam-088, which is put on
only in cold weather, a real load of ornament is carried
-——variegated bead—necklaces, which are bought or stolen
from the neighbouring Kaﬂirs; cords of sinew twisted
and coloured with red ochre, from which depend teeth,
shells, cloths, turtle shells, antelope horns, and other
similar treasures, which partly serve as receptacles for
salve and tobacco, and partly as amulets, but are for
the most part simply ornamentst

 

* Ratzel, Völkerkunde, vol. ii, p. 6'72, with pictures. There is a
good collection of Fuegian decorations in the Kircheriano Museum
in Rome. f Fritsch, p. 430.

92 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Man found among the Mincopies, who are not ac-
quainted with protective clothing of any sort, not less
than twelve different kinds of bands and cords which
both sexes wear around their backs. There were bands
of rolled leaves, ﬁne network woven from vegetable
ﬁbres, cords with various fresh-water and salt-water
shells, mangrove seeds and red coral, bones of turtles
and iguanas; and even human ﬁnger bones are made
into ornaments, for while the well-known Andamanese
bone chains are regarded in the ﬁrst place as charms,
the circumstance that they are usually very prettily
adorned with little shells shows that they are worn be-
sides as ornaments.*

The naked Botocudo hang those pretty chains which
they wind around their heads also around their necks.
The cords of bright—red am feathers, which the Prince
of Wied admired on the leader of a horde, are much
too costly to be commoni'

The most usual neck ornament of the Australians,
which is permitted also to the women, is a cord of opos-
sum hair, into which short pieces of reed are worked.
This cord, which is sometimes not less than thirty feet
long, is wound several times around the neck and hangs
down over the breasti The Widely current neck orna-
ments of kangaroo teeth are of more modest size, but
give evidence of very careful working. They consist
of a thong of kangaroo skin, from which the white in-
cisors hang in a close row. Every tooth is tied by the

 

* Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xiii, p. 401 ; vol. Xi, p. 295. P1. xii,
Fig. 7.

+ Wied, vol. i, p. 15.

i Picture in Brough Smyth, vol. 1", p. 278. Bits of lobster shell
are worn instead of pieces of reed on the lower Murray. .

PERSONAL DECORATION. 93

root into a small piece of leather, and this in turn is
very neatly bound to the main cord. The time and
trouble required for the ﬁnishing of such a necklace
can not be little.* The Queenslanders are fond of
cords to which a pair of large oval pieces of white
nautilus shell are hung. The Tasmanians wore little
greenish glittering shells strung on cords of vegetable
ﬁbre or sinew Of kangaroo.

The most interesting part of all the primitive deco-
rations of the body is that of the loins; not because it
is particularly rich or peculiar—it is, on the contrary,
rather scanty—but because it has become the evidence
most in demand in the famous discussion concerning
the origin of the feeling Of shame. Thus, while one
party asserts that the existence of a primitive covering
of the person—which is nothing else than our loins
dress or a pendant from it—can be accounted for only
through an innate feeling of modesty, the other party
avers the direct reverse : that the feeling of shame was
ﬁrst inculcated by the custom of concealing the parts.
But, in the debate over the meaning of the dressing of
the loins, we must not forget the loins dress itself. We
look for it in vain among more than one hunting people.
The Fuegians do not wear even a band around the loins,
to say nothing of an apron, and the persons of both
sexes are totally uncovered. Ehrenreich says Of the
Botocudo, “The Wild tribes still live in absolute naked-
ness, and I did not observe among the Pankas the veil-
ing of the genitals under a cover of leaves mentioned
by the Prince Of VVied.+ On the Andaman Islands the

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i. p. 278.
+Ehrenreich, Ueber die Botokudos. Zeitschr. für Ethnologie,
vol. xix, p. 22.

94 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

men wear either a narrow girdle made of pandanus
leaves or a cord of plant ﬁbres, but neither the cord nor
the girdle conceals the sex organs.* The women, on
the other hand, keep these parts of their body always
covered. They wind not only one but several pandanus
girdles about their hips, from the lowest of which hangs
an apron of leaves. Among some tribes married per-
sons, moreover, dress themselves with a girdle of leaves
of somewhat different form. There is, further, a tribe
in which the female dress, aside from indispensable
neck and arm bands, consists simply of a light cord to
which a pair of short bunches of ﬁbre are attached “ ap-
parently solely for ornament.”+ The Bushmen tie a
strap around the body, from which hangs a small tri-
angular leather apron, which is drawn back between
the legs and tied again to the strap behind. If this
apron is intended to cover their nakedness, it fulﬁls its
purpose rather imperfectly. The women wear an apron
of springbok’s skin, ornamented with beads and egg
shells, which is slit in front into strips; “ but the strips
are so small and narrow that they do not serve as a cov-
ering at all, and in fact neither the young women nor
the old ones seemed 1n the slightest degree ashamed of
their nakedness in our presence. ” i The most instruc-
tive forms of the primitive loins dress are, however,
found in Australia. The men are, as a rule, provided
with a girdle which is cut out of skin or woven out of
vegetable ﬁbres. This girdle is usually not ornamented,
and probably serves not so much decorative as practical

 

* Man, J our. Anthrop. Inst., vol. Xii, p. 330.

+ Ibid., vol. xii, p. 330.

t Barrow, Travels into the Interior of South Africa, vol. i,
p. 276.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 95

purposes.* Besides this, a second girdle is often worn,
which is esteemed a precious ornament; a cord is twisted
either from vegetable ﬁbre or from human hair, and
reaches regularly among some tribes the length of three
hundred English ellsqL Both pieces, as they are usually
worn, cover only the hips; but occasionally a pendant
is attached to the front of the girdle——a leafy twig, a
bunch of emu feathers, a tuft of hair from a ﬂying
dog or a squirrel, a dingo’s tail, or something of the
kind, a pendant that hangs down over the sex parts
without really concealing them. These pendants are
generally put on only on festive occasions, more espe-
cially for the dance.

“When the men were preparing themselves for the
corroborry,” says Bulmer, “they attached to their gir-
dles, in front and behind, bunches of strips of hide,
although they usually wear no covering of any kind.
\Vhat they wear is not for clothing but for orna-
ment”: The apron of narrow strips of hide, too,
which is worn through many districts, is put on only
as a festive dress, and an exclusively ornamental sig-
niﬁcance must, without doubt, be likewise ascribed
to the aprons of white rabbits’ tails, with which the
Dyeri sometimes adorn themselves? The only mem-
bers of Australian society who always wear an apron
for cover, even where both sexes otherwise go perfectly
naked, are the unmarried girls; and they lay this dress
aside as soon as they have entered into wedlock. The
women usually appear without any covering of the

 

* That is ﬁrst for carrying smaller weapons and tools, and sec-
ondly as “ a hunger belt.”

+ Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 281. i Ibid., vol. i, p. 275.

** Ibid., vol. i, p. 281.

96 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

10ins and the person. Only for their lascivious dances
do they adorn themselves with a girdle of feathers
which reaches down to about the knees.* The loins
dress of the Tasmanians left, at least, quite as much to
be supplied. Men and women were a narrow girdle;
“but only for practical purposes, not for clothing or
ornament.” 1“

These are the facts, and the question now arises as
to What they indicate. Are those pendants of the loins-
dress ornaments or' concealments? The majority of
historians of culture have decided without hesitation
that they are concealments. The latest writer on the
philosophy of clothing (Schurtz) gives an unusually
energetic expression of this View. Having just cited
several examples of the absence of any modest covering,
he informs us that “the best evidence of the universal
existence of the feeling of shame is the existence of
the covering of the parts, which can hardly be other-
wise satisfactorily accounted for ”; and on the next
page he rises to the categorical assertion, “The origin
of dress for clothing can not be ascribed to other causes
than the motives of the feeling of shame.”;t If the
existence of a covering is really the best evidence of
the feeling of shame, that trait is certainly very poorly
demonstrated among the primitive peoples. We have
just seen that both sexes among the Fuegians and the
Botocudo go entirely naked; that the Mincopy men
never hide their nakedness ; that in Australia men and
women, with the single exception of the unmarried girls,

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 272, with picture.
+ Ibid., vol. ii, p. 399.
i Schurtz, Grundzüge einer Philosophie der Tracht, pp. 9, 10.

” .
PERSONAL DECORATION. 97

customarily appear without any aprons *—in a word,
that the feeling of shame is by no means a general pos-
session of primitive tribes. This nakedness is not a
temporary exception in the lowest grades of civilization,
but everything indicates, on the contrary, that covering
is the transitory, exposure the abiding, condition. The
apron is put on in Australia only on festive occasions,
but for every day the mere girdle is enough. And as
here, so nearly everywhere the primitive covering of
the sexual parts is only an ornamental dependency of
the loins band; not as clothing, but as a decoration.
Why should primitive man feel the necessity of con-
cealing his genitals? The animals know no shame of
this kind; whence has man learned it? An orthodox
philosopher would settle the question with the observa-
tion that the feeling of shame is innate in every man.
But if the philosopher is right, what shall we think of
our children, who, until they are instructed by their
nurse, exhibit their sexual organs without the slightest
reserve, and can not understand at ﬁrst why they are
forbidden to do it? One who is not so deferential as
to trust the words of another rather than his own eyes
should tremble for his philosophy in the face of this
childish innocence. In fact, the dogma that the neces-
sity of concealing his person is innate in every man
seems to us no more just than the assertion would be
that the necessity of wearing a cylinder hat is innate in
every Englishman. But it seems to have been over-
looked, in the ﬁrst place, that it is not the same thing
whether a European philosopher or an Australian

 

* Compare the numerous notes in Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, pp.
735—738.

a

98 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

brave shows his nakedness. Westermarck has well ob-
served on this point: “ Where all go absolutely naked,
nakedness would appear quite natural, for what we
have before our eyes every day makes no particular
impression upon us. But as soon as either the man or
the woman began to put on a brightly coloured fringe,
a pair of variegated feathers, a string of beads, a tuft of
leaves, or a glittering shell, it could not escape the atten-
tion of his companions, and the scanty garment worked
as the strongest inciter of the sexual feeling that could
be contrived.” * If innate modesty introduced clothing
of the sexual parts, it was sadly mistaken in its means,
for this clothing is not at all adapted to diverting atten-
tion from the parts, but serves the contrary purpose of
drawing attention to them. It can not, in fact,be doubted
that this and no other was the primary object of primitive
sexual coverings. We can explain in this way why the
Australian women, who at other times go naked, wear an
apron of feathers in their lascivious dances, which are
obviously intended to excite sexual passion, and why
the women of the Mincopies in their dances, the char-
acter of which is not less unmistakable, wear a particu-
larly large leafd‘ All such dresses are evidence, not of
the necessity of concealing something, but of the desire
to show something. In short, the primitive covering
of the person is, in its ﬁrst and most important signiﬁ-
cance, not clothing, but an ornament, and, indeed, one
which, like most ornaments everywhere, is intended to
win the favour of the other sex for the wearer.

 

* \Vestermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 192.

+Jour. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 390. Man offers the curious
supposition that this is done for the sake of at least a. moderate
measure of decency.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 99

The origin. of clothing for modesty’s sake can there
fore not be traced to the feeling of shame, but the ori-
gin of the feeling of shame can be accounted for as the
result of the custom of wearing dress. The function of
this primitive dress which we have just characterized
would give it a general extension. While it is not regu-
larly worn in the lower grades of civilization, it appears
very soon in the further development of culture as the
most indispensable part of male and female costume.
Under these circumstances the exposure of the person
is soon felt to be something uncommon, strange; and
the collision with general custom calls out, as it does in
all other cases, a feeling of embarrassment. The feel-
ing of shame with its physiological symptoms—blush-
ing, depression of the eyes, etc—always arises when the
individual becomes conscious of a violation of social
usages. It is, in fact, nothing else than the reaction
of the herding instinct. The women of Alaska are
ashamed to be seen without their ancient tribal mark
——the lip—plug. “We induced them occasionally,” re-
lates La Pérouse, “ to take out that ornament, although
they consented to it with reluctance, while they exhib-
ited the same embarrassment and agitation as a Euro-
pean woman who uncovers her bosom.” A European
woman would indeed be ashamed to go on the street
with bare bosom, because it is against custom ; but she
is not at all ashamed to expose her charms, according
to custom, in the bright light of the ballroom. For no
other reason does the negro woman of the Nile carry
her breast open to view, while she carefully hides her
lower parts with a leather apron. In the meantime a
second and very powerful motive comes in to make her

chaste aversion to exposure of the sexual parts as strong
8

100 ' THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

as it is in the higher grades of civilization. In the low—
est stages the occasional covering of the parts serves as
a sexual exeitant, but as the covering of them develops
into a general and regular dress it loses its primary
signiﬁcance; for “what we see every day no longer
makes any special impression.” Consequently, not the
customary covering, but the unusual baring, operates
now as a sexual excitant. Cultural development has
now, moreover, materially changed the social feeling
concerning such excitants. The primitive man caused
no shock to his associates when he concealed his sexual
organs; but the more highly civilized man stirs up
great scandal‘when he exposes them. In the interval
a very important ethical advance has been made—sexual
continence has become a virtue. This ethical advance
is, like all other steps forward, the result of a social ad-
vance—the culmination of the patriarchal form of the
family and of society—which regards the wife as the
property of the husband, and condemns and punishes
every inﬁdelity on her part as a violation of his property
rights. A woman, therefore, who exposes herself now
commits a doubly aggravated offence against social
laws; and sexual reserve is in fact found most uni-
versal and strongest in the female sex. It passed over
to the men very gradually, and a marked diﬁerence in
respect to it may still be perceived between the sexes.
Covering of the person has thus really been derived, in
the higher grades of civilization, from sexual modesty,
but in the lowest grades it originated from a quite dif-
ferent feeling. It is, then, nothing but a decoration;
and we have therefore a perfect right .to include it with-
in the scope of our review.

Decoration of the limbs can be reviewed very brieﬂy.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 101

The arms and the legs are adorned with essentially the
same kind of bands and cords as the neck. Moreover,
not all the objects which primitive peoples put upon
their limbs are ornaments. The bunch of leaves, for
example, which the Australian corrobowy dancers tie
round their ankles are intended simply to augment the
rustling of the dance movements. Some arm bands are
worn as amulets, like the strips of the skin of the ﬂy-
ing squirrel which the men of the Yarra tribe bound
to their arms to make them strong. The stout leath-
ern straps, too, with which the Bushmen arm the lower
parts of their legs, are designed less to adorn them
than to protect them against the dreaded thorns of the
steppes.

In our account of movable ornament we have so
far omitted one primitive people—the Eskimo. They
occupy, in fact, a wholly peculiar position. While all
other hunting tribes neglect clothing and seek decora-
tion, the Eskimo have ﬁrst of all things to provide for
a dress that will completely protect their bodies from
the deadly arctic cold of their home. Yet they do not
forget ornament; but their bodily decoration can not be
forced into the category in which we classify, according
to its character, the ornaments of the unclad hunting
peoples. We ﬁnd among them ornaments neither of
the neck, hips, nor arms, but only of their clothing.
They trim their fur garments with variously coloured
strips of hide, and attach to them in front and on the
back, and especially at the seams, leather fringes, teeth,
jewels of bone and metal, bronze bells, and other simi-
lar objects. The women appear tovdo this as much at
least as the men, and further distinguish themselves
from them by an ornament which may be considered

102 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

a kind of hip dress, a tail-like prolongation of the back
of the jacket, which hangs down to the bend of the
knees.* This participation in ornamentation by both
sexes distinguishes the Eskimo from all other peoples
of their grade of civilization.

Shall we end our sketch of primitive decoration of
the body Without saying a word concerning change of
fashions ? The hunting peoples are the only ones that
have not been subject to its caprices. Single parts of
the primitive decorations are often varied according to
individual tastes ; painting in particular may be applied
by individuals in the course of time in the most diverse
and peculiar forms; but change of fashion consists in
a general social modiﬁcation, rather than in such various
individual variations. Social decoration, however, by
which we mean those ornaments that are worn alike
by all the members of a tribe, and which form the
largest and most essential part of a primitive dress
after it was once adopted, has been kept unaltered by
the hunting tribes. The descriptions of the oldest ob-
servers agree exactly in every essential feature with
those of the latest.)L This ﬁxed persistency of primi-
tive dress constitutes one of the most fundamental
qualities distinguishing it from the changeable deco-
ration of the higher peoples. It is observed that the
duration of fashion stands in the closest relation with
the different forms of social organization. Therefore,
before we turn to the social signiﬁcance of ornament,

 

* Boas, Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1884—’85, p.
554. Text and pictures.

+Those cases must,-of course, be excepted in which primitive
decoration has been changed or abolished through European inﬂu-
ences.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 103

let us consider it for an instant from the aesthetic point
of view.

The ornamental dress of hunting peoples, though
not in the ﬁgurative sense, can well be called brilliant
in the literal sense. There is hardly another property
that can give so high a decorative value to an object, in
the eyes of primitive men, as lustre. The F uegians
attach a glittering bottle-sherd to their neckbands as
their most conspicuous ornament, and the Bushmen are
happy if they can get a ring of iron or brass. The
lower peoples, however, are by no means solely depend-
ent on the industrial wastes of the higher, and when
they can not command the brightest treasures of bar-
baric and civilized decoration—precious metals and
stones *——Nature gives them, nevertheless, sufﬁcient
means for satisfying their preferences. The sea casts
bright shells on the shore, the ﬂora affords them bright
fruits and stems, and the animals are made to furnish
them shining teeth, lustrous furs, and gaudy feathers.

We have already spoken of the aesthetic value of
the primitive decorative colours so far as they are ap-
plied to the painting of the body. If one would appre-
ciate the colour effects of movable ornaments, he
should regard them not as against a background of his
own taste, nor as they are seen in most ethnological
museums, but should always consider them in relation to
the colour of the skin for which they are intended. In
our museums, with the cases coloured a uniform white,
yellow, or maroon, one gets not only unsatisfactory

 

* The Australians attach an exceedingly high value to quartz
crystals, which they use not for ornament, but as charms, which are
kept carefully concealed from the sight of intruders.

104 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

but false ideas concerning these effects.* An Australian
neckband of white kangaroo teeth produces scarcely
any effect upon a light ground, but as soon as it is seen
against a dark brown we can understand at once why
the Australians like to wear it. Light-coloured orna-
ments are especially admired by dark-skinned peoples,
while peoples of fair complexions for a like reason pre-
fer dark ones. The yellow Bushmen, for example,
adorn themselves with dark beads, which the dusky
Kaﬁirs reject. Hunting peoples generally choose the
same colours for their movable decorations as for paint-
ing their bodies. The Australians besmear their gir-
dles, neckbands, and headbands with red, white, and
yellow ochre, and the same or similar colours are in
use among the Bushmen and F uegians. Red ara,
feathers, as being the most costly ornaments, are the
mark of a leader among the Botocudo. Others wear
fans of yellow feathers in their hair, and yellow feath-
ers wave likewise over the forehead of the Australian
hunter. Cold colours rarely appear by the side of yel-
low and red in primitive dress. Blue ornaments are
exceedingly rare, and the green nephrite lip-plugs of
the Eskimo are quite distinctly set off by their colour.
We have accounted for the preference of the hunt-
ing peoples for feather decoration by the pleasing effect
of its lustre and colour, but the aesthetic value of feath-
ers depends at least as much on their form. It is not
possible to describe and analyze the endless and various

 

* And yet a great improvement might be obtained, with rela-
tively small expense and trouble, if it were agreed to place the orna-
ments on a piece of paper or pasteboard of a colour at least approxi-
mately corresponding with the colour of the skin of the people to
whom they appertain.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 105

grace which feathery forms display in rest as well as in
motion, and it is likewise unnecessary, for everybody
who has a feeling for visible forms has experienced it
often and clearly. The feather has indeed maintained
its original place in decoration throughout the changes
of culture until to—day. It waves on the helmets of the
civilized as well as on the headband of the primitive
warrior, and while it disappeared long ago from the
festal costume of men, it has become all the more widely
prevalent in the dress of women. Even the Bushman’s
fashion of wearing whole birds’ heads has been lifted
into honour again by modern ladies~—an evident testi-
mony of the mental unity of the human race. Shells, too,
are doubtless not prized least as ornaments on account
of their form. Shell chains and shell pendants often
consist, it is true, only of pieces ground into arbitrary
shapes, but the Tasmanians, the Mincopies, and the
' Fuegians evidently preferred the extremely graceful
natural forms. Whether the similarity of these pretty
natural forms with those carefully worked out by men
is a factor in this esteem, as Grant Allen thinks, must
remain undecided. The further development in embel-
lishment has not been so favourable to shells as to
feathers. Shell ornament has indeed been richly de-
veloped in Oceania, but it has been nearly banished
from the decoration of higher peoples.*

The aesthetic grace of the primitive decoration of
the body is thus in great part a gift of Nature; yet

 

* The shell has maintained itself only here and there in the
ornaments of the poorer classes. In Venice, for example, armlets
may be seen made of little nacreous periwinkle shells. Shells, how-
ever, play a considerable ﬁgure in decorative work. The great gold-
smiths of the Renascence made much use of them in ﬁne vessels.

106 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the part Which art has had in it is not insigniﬁcant.
Even the rudest people do not use these natural orna-
ments as it ﬁnds them, but endeavours to give them a
higher value by working them in an aesthetic manner.
The skin is cut into fringes, the teeth, fruits, and shells
are arranged regularly into chains, and the feathers are
bound into a tuft or into a crown. It is sufﬁcient to
indicate the aesthetic principles which are expressed in
these different decorative forms. They are the same
as govern the bodily embellishment of all grades of
culture—the principle of symmetryvand the principle
of rhythm. The former is subject to the nature of the
body, the second to the nature of the ornament. The
symmetrical form of the body compels a symmetrical
arrangement of the decoration. In fact, both the ﬁxed
and the movable ornaments of primitive peoples are
symmetrically arranged, except in cases in which a
ludicrous or terrifying effect is sought through a sym- "
metry as implying something unusual and unpleasant.
The application of scariﬁcation and tattooing on only
one side does not show that a symmetrical disposition
was not desired, but that it could not be accomplished.
Decorations of this sort require many years for their
completion. Asymmetrical patterns on the skin are,
as a rule, unﬁnished; the completed ﬁgures are nearly
always symmetrical.* The principle of rhythmical
arrangement is likewise not far to seek. As soon as
a man strings a number of teeth or shells on a cord
to wear on his neck he forms a rhythmical series. But

 

* The scars, especially common in Australia, which are caused
by incisions for sanitary purposes should not be confounded with
scars for purposes of ornamentation.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 107

if we were to conclude from this that the rhythmical
arrangement of primitive decoration had in the main
merely a practical signiﬁcance, we have only to look at
the common necklace of the Botocudo—black berries
and white teeth in regular alternation—t0 ﬁnd clear
evidence that the maker was not insensible to the
charm of rhythm, for otherwise he would have strung
the pieces carelessly and irregularly. At the same
time we see in this collar—Which, with its two rhythmic
elements, already represents a higher form than the
single chain of shells or teeth—that it is not much
harder for the primitive man to carry out the rhythmic
principle into various and richer forms than to dis-
cover it.

We have shown repeatedly that primitive decora-
tion owes its effect not to what it is only, but in a large
part also to what it represents. An Australian loins
dress, which is composed of three hundred white rab-
bits’ tails, excites much admiration on its own account,
but it will be admired most, probably, because it is an
evidence of the Sportsman’s skill which the wearer was
obliged to exercise in order to collect such a number of
tails ; and a considerable number of primitive ornaments
made of teeth and feathers have no doubt a similar sig-
niﬁcance.* The appreciation of permanent ornament,
which is purchased by bodily pains, rests primarily on
associations of this kind. We certainly can not doubt
that the Australians regard the scars which they raise
in pale colours upon their dark skins as a real embel-
lishment; but we may well question whether the price

 

* The war trophies which ﬁgure so conspicuously among pastoral
and agricultural peoples are not found among hunting tribes.

108 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

they pay for them would not be considered too dear if
the ornament was not at the same time an honourable
evidence of their courage and endurance. The Aus-
tralian hunter bears his scars with the same pride as the
German student his sword cuts.

At the beginning of our study the difference be-
tween civilized and primitive ornament seemed so great
that we had some trouble in perceiving a simply aesthet-
ic value in the latter, but the more closely we regarded
the primitive ornament the more like the civilized it
appeared; and now at the end we have to admit that
it is hard to ﬁnd any essential difference between the
two. There are few things which seem to have changed
so much and have changed so little as ornament in the
course of the growth of culture. Civilization has never
succeeded in freeing itself from the decorative forms
which strike us most strangely and most unpleasantly
in primitive men. On the contrary, scars, the very
rudest form of barbaric ornament, are worn with pride
at the central point of the highest modern culture, and
are regarded with corresponding admiration. While the
sons of our higher ranks honour Australian scariﬁcation,
the lower classes, after the example of the Bushmcn,
delight in tattooing. This practice is much more gen-
eral among European peoples than is commonly sup-
posed. We have indeed renounced lip-plugs and nose-
sticks; but even our cultivated women do not hesitate
to wear earrings, which are no less barbaric. We have
already shown that civilized rougeing corresponds to
certain kinds of primitive painting. But the most com-
plete agreement is exhibited in the forms of movable
ornaments. Our tufts, pendants, diadems, necklaces,
bracelets, girdles—all these forms have been seen already

PERSONAL DECORATION. 109

among the primitive tribes. They are indeed not grand
discoveries, but the whole higher decorative art has not
made any greater. The difference between a gold-
mounted bead necklace from Venice and a leathern
tooth collar from Australia lies not so much in the
form as in the material and the workmanship, and this
condition is typical for all movable ornaments. The
development of decoration has indeed increased the
range of material of ornament and reﬁned its technic,
but it has never been able to contribute even so much
as one essentially new piece to the primitive stock Of
forms.

From this point of view the costly decorations, glit-
tering with precious metals and stones, of the higher
peoples appear poor as compared with the modest orna-
mentation of the hunting tribes, and the latter appears
the richer when we consider it in connection with the
scanty civilization in which it has developed. The spe-
ciﬁc relations between primitive culture and the ma-
terial and technical execution of primitive ornament
are so evident that they do not need to be demonstrated;
but, as a rule, a contradiction, nevertheless, exists be-
tween the richness Of the decorative elaboration and
the poverty of the hunter’s life, which appears so great
that some historians of culture have felt obliged to
solve it at the expense of the understanding of primi-
tive man. We are thus brought back to the question
with which we started: Why was so extremely rich a
bodily decoration developed in the lowest grade Of cul-
ture? We have indicated the answer more than once
in the course Of our study: bodily decoration has really
a potent practical meaning to the primitive tribes—ﬁrst
as a means of attracting, and secondly as a means of

110 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

inspiring fear. In both cases it is in no sense a super-
ﬂuous triﬂe, but is one of the most indispensable and
most eﬁcctive weapons in the struggle for existence.

All primitive bodily decoration can be divided, ac-
cording to its purpose, into attractive and repelling, but
this division should not be interpreted as meaning that
each individual form belongs to either one or the other
class; on the other hand, by far the most numerous
articles of decoration serve both purposes at the same
time. What makes a man terrible to men makes him
lovely to women. This maxim does not apply alone to ‘
the military states of civilized Europe.

The ﬁrst and most powerful motive that induces
men to decorate themselves is undoubtedly the desire
to please. But while we regard embellishment as a
natural privilege of the female sex, in the lowest grade
of civilization the men are, as a rule, more richly adorned
than the women.* This anomaly seems at ﬁrst sight to
be an argument against our theory, but it is really an
evidence in favour of it. The division of ornament
among the lower men is the same as among the higher
animals, and is accounted for in both cases by the fact
that the masculine sex is the wooing party. Among
primitive peoples, as among animals, there are no old
maids. The woman is sure of marriage in any case,

 

* G. Bove observed among the Fuegians that the men were more
solicitous about decoration than the women (Globus, vol. xliii, p.
157). Lumholtz says of the Queenslanders that they did not think
it proper for the women to adorn themselves (Lumholtz, p. 178);
and Brough Smyth remarks of the South Australian tribes: “The
ornaments of the women were not particularly esteemed by the
men. The woman did little to improve her appearance. She was
satisﬁed if her natural charms excited admiration.” Brough Smyth,
vol. i, p. 275.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 1 1 1

while the man has often to make very great efforts in
order to obtain a partner for life. In Australia, for
example, most of the young men are obliged to remain
bachelors for many years. In civilized societies the
relation is reversed. N ominally, indeed, the men do
the wooing, but really the women court the men, and
consequently they are forced to embellish themselves,
while men are accustomed to give no great atten—
tion to their own decoration. But if any one still
doubts that the decoration of primitive men serves
chieﬂy as a sexual attraction, he need only ask them
why they embellish themselves. “ To please our wom-
en,” an Australian replied to Bulmer. On Flinders Is-
land the surviving Tasmanians almost broke out in re-
bellion when the Government issued a decree prohibiting
the painting of the body with red ochre and fat, “for
the young men were afraid they would lose the favour
of their countrywomen.” * From this chief motive of
primitive decoration we have a very simple explanation
of its being applied for the ﬁrst time at or immediately
after the initiation that marks the entrance of the youth
into manly age.

The man, however, is not a suitor only, but a war-
rior too. He has thus a double reason for decorating
himself. As we have said, most of the ornaments
which are worn to attract serve also to terrify. Red
is not only a festal colour, it is also a war colour. The
headdress of feathers, which increases the stature of
the wearer, is worn both in battle and in the dance;
and the scars on the breast, which gain the admiration
of the women, arouse fear in the enemy. It is not

 

* Bonwick, Daily Life of the Tasmanians, p. 25.

112 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

easy to ﬁnd a primitive decorative form which is ex-
clusively intended to produce a repelling effect. Only
a few patterns of skin-painting appear, to our eyes at
least, purely frightful.

In the higher stages of civilization, bodily decora-
tion has none of its primitive signiﬁcance. ‘ It, on the
contrary, fulﬁls in them a more extended and impor-
tant function: it serves for the distinction and separa-
tion of different ranks and classes. There are no cos.
tumes distinctive of ranks and classes among primitive
peoples, because there are no ranks and classes. Hardly
a trace of social distinction can be perceived among
the hunting tribes. In Australia the oldest and most
experienced men of the horde enjoy a kind of au-
thority; “ but they give no orders, only counsel; for
‘every father of a family—who rules despotically in his
' own household—every man is absolutely free.” * “ The
authority of the leader in the Andaman Islands is very
limited. He has no power to punish, and is not in a
position to compel obedience to his wishes, but it is left
to each one to seek his rights with his own hands.” +
The Bushmen live in complete anarchy. Among the
Fuegians “no trace of a social organization or of a
government has yet been found,” 1 and in the Eskimo
tribes no man has a right to raise himself above another,
so slight are the differences of power Within a primi-
tive horde. The gulf between rich and poor which
rends civilized societies has not opened there. A skil-
ful hunter, it is true, gets more game than an unskil-

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 790.
+ Man, J our. Anthrop. Inst-., vol. xii, p. 109.
j; Waitz-Gerland, vol. iii, p. 508.

PERSONAL DECORATION. 113

ful one; but the best of them can collect no property
under the insecure, always ﬂuctuating, conditions of
life, and he is at the end as poor as the others. We
have gone somewhat fully into these relations because
they contain the explanation of the constancy of primi-
tive fashions. The change of styles in the higher
social groups is essentially the result of social differen-
tiationf“ Fashion always moves from above downward.
A certain style is worn at ﬁrst only in the highest stage
of society, and thus serves as a mark of class or rank.
But for this very reason the lower ranks strive all the
more earnestly to acquire the elegant dress, and in the
course of time the dress of rank becomes the dress of
the nation. The higher classes, who are still desirous
as they were before to distinguish themselves from the
lower, then invent or adopt another special form of
dress, and the game is begun anew. Nowhere else,
perhaps, can so clear a view of this mechanism of
fashion be gained as in South Africa, that great socio-
logical laboratory of Nature. The Kaﬂirs have built
up a social hierarchy rich in ranks, and their fashions
change in a rapid ﬂow despite all regulation of dress

 

*Social diﬂerentiation is the most important reason for the
change of fashions, but it is not the only one. In many cases, for
example, the introduction of a new fashion is the consequence of a.
peaceful or a hostile relation with a foreign social group. But even
this external motive is lacking with most primitive peoples, who, at
least before European intrusion, lived entirely isolated in the in-
hospitable and unproductive territories in which they were conﬁned
by stronger and more highly civilized tribes. The feverish, rapid
change of modern fashion is not a physiological but a pathological
phenomenon; a symptom and a result of our nervous overexcite-
ment, with its constant morbid thirst for more “original” and
stronger stimulants.

114 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and ornament; the neighbouring Bushmen, on the
other hand, realize the social ideal of anarchism, and
their fashion is as immovable as the water of a swamp.
When we consider how powerfully the visible works
upon the feelings, and how much consequently the cos-
tumes of rank and ofﬁce contribute to the ﬁxedness and
maintenance of the social organism, our View is strength-
ened that the advance of civilization has not diminished
the social signiﬁcance of dress, as Herbert Spencer
thinks, but has vastly augmented it. It may be asked
whether the future development will correspond with
that of the past. On one side a daily increasing
danger is threatening decorative costume. The for-
midably advancing improvement of ﬁrearms is mak-
ing military decorations dangerous as well as super-
ﬂuous, and the time may already be foreseen when the
waving helmet tassel, the bright colours, and the shin-
ing metallic ornaments must be laid aside. On the
other hand, the democratic, or more properly the anti-
aristocratic, drift of the times imperils the rule of orna-
ment. But even if these humane efforts should result
in freeing modern society, together with ranks, ofﬁcers,
and all the other perishable outgrowth of civilization,
from their distinctive costume and ornament, and in
leading it back to the liberty and equality of the Aus-
tralians and Bushmen, there would still remain one
social distinction, whether for good or evil—the differ-
ence between the sexes; and as long as there are two
sexes, so long will there be personal decoration.

CHAPTER VI.

ORNAMENTATION.

THE development of the ornamentation of imple-
ments in the lower grades of civilization has remained
far behind that of the decoration of the body. Even
the most wretched tribe of the Fuegians possesses a rela-
tively rich system of bodily embellishment, while even
the most highly developed hunting people of the north
have arrived at only a scanty decoration of their im-
plements. If we mean, by embellishment of imple-
ments, decoration by putting ornaments on them, it has
no existence among several primitive groups. We have
never seen an ornament on a digging stick or a bow of
the Bushmen; and an ornamented production of the
F uegians is a great rarity. The idea of embellishment
of implements has with us, however, a Wider compre-
hension than this. We recognise embellishment, not in
ornamental decoration only, but in the smooth and even
ﬁnish of an implement.

Smoothness and evenness have, however, in most
cases, primarily not so much an aesthetic as a practical
value. An unsymmetrically shaped weapon does not
hit with the same accuracy as a symmetrical one; and
a well-polished arrowhead or spearhead pierces more

easily and. deeply than a badly smoothed blade. But
9 115

116 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

articles are found among every primitive people which
possess these qualities without any external purpose
being discernible. The soapstone lamp of the Eskimo
need not be so very regularly shaped or so smoothly
polished to serve the purpose of giving light and heat.
The baskets of the Fuegians would, without doubt, be
no less useful if they were less regularly woven. The
Australians always cut their incantation sticks sym-
metrically, but, from all we know of the use of them,
they would be just as good if they were asymmetrical.
In all cases of this kind it is safe to assume that the
workman wanted to satisfy an aesthetic as well as a
practical need. The object should be useful, but it
should be pleasing too. This simplest form of embel-
lishment of implements is not wanting, as we have said,
among any peoples. Even among the poorest of the
primitive peoples, the F uegians, we ﬁnd implements
of admirable smoothness and evenness.

A real ornamentation, on the other hand, has been
developed only among the Australians, the Mincopies,
and the hyperboreans. Ornamentation is the single
art of savages which has so far received a somewhat
general and penetrating consideration. Within the last
few years a series of very meritorious works on the
ornamentation of lower peoples has been produced;
but, unfortunately, not one of them treats of the o'rna-
mentation of the lowest peoples, to'which our studies
are directed. Primitive ornamentation is a ﬁeld which
a student here and there has occasionally glanced at,
but nobody has gone into. We shall have to clear the
way with our own hands.

The forms that grow on this niggardly soil are
neither luxuriant nor diversiﬁed. The designs which

ORNAMENTATION. . 117

the Australians, Mincopies, and partly the hyperbo-
reans scratch and paint on their implements remind
Europeans of simple geometrical ﬁgures. These primi-
tive ornaments are usually described as geometrical;
and, as it is not diﬂicult to confound the name with
the thing, the geometrical designs are occasionally
brought forward in evidence of the natural love of

 

FIG. 1.—ACSTRALIAN san’rann DESIGNS FROM SHIELDS AND CLUBS.
(After Brough Smyth.)

the simplest men for the simplest aesthetic relations,
although this preference needs no proof, for it is es-
tablished a ])riori like most of the philosophy of art.
But primitive ornaments are not What they appear.
We shall see that fundamentally they have nothing
in common with geometrical ﬁgures.‘

Figures constructed with entire freedom nowhere
play any important part in ornamentation. They are
comparatively rare among civilized, and will be sought

118 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

in vain among the primitive, peoples. In general, or-
namentation does not draw its motives at all from
fancy, but from Nature and practical art.

'The ornamentations of primitive peoples are derived
for the most part from the former source; they are
copies of natural forms. Our own ornamental art like- .
wise applies such natural motives in richest measure;
we see them everywhere in our immediate surroundings
——on carpets, tapestry, vases ; there is not an ornamented
object that is not adorned with leaf, ﬂower, or vine
work. But while the ornamentation of the civilized
peoples prefers to choose its motives from the world of
plants, primitive ornamentation is limited almost en-
tirely to human and animal forms. Plant ornament,
which occurs here so richly and gracefully, is there not
to be discerned even in the germ. We shall see here-
after that this difference has a deep signiﬁcance.

It is, indeed, not always easy to discover the original
form of a primitive ornament. When we contemplate
the zigzag or lozenge pattern on an Australian shield,
our theory that it is derived from animal forms un-
doubtedly seems to be hazardous; and it appears to be
doubly hazardous'when we acknowledge that in most
cases we can not directly substantiate it. It would cer—
tainly be a wonder if we could. Australian ornamen-
tation‘has never been studied systematically. Even in
the comprehensive work of Brough Smyth it is dis-
missed with a few very general and very superﬁcial re-
marks. No one has ever, in fact, taken the trouble to
question the aborigines concerning the meaning of their
various designs. What is there, then, under such cir3
cumstances to justify our explanation ? First, the fact
that most of the ornaments of lower peoples that have

ORNAMENTATION. 1 19

been studied as the Australian ornaments ought to have
been studied, have been found to be imitations of ani-
mal or human forms. Nowhere is there ornamentation
of so distinct a “ geometrical” character as among the
Brazilian tribes. Its rectilinear patterns suggest any-
“ thing else than natural forms to a European who looks at
them in a museum. But Ehrenreich, who studied them

___; DEE
5+,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FIG. 2.—ORNAMENTS OF ml; KARAYA. (After Ehrenreich.)

on the spot, has irrefragably demonstrated that they are
nevertheless nothing but animals or parts of animals.
“ In the chief’s house of the Bakairi,” he says, “ stretch-
. ing like a frieze along the wall, are black tablets of bark
painted in white earth with characteristic ﬁsh ﬁgures
and designs of all the ornaments used by the Bakairi,
the proper meaning of which we could hereby easily

120 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ﬁnd out. The important fact in the history of civiliza-
tion was thus established that all these ﬁgures appearing
to be geometrical drawings are really abbreviated, partly
conventionalized representations of concrete objects,
mostly of animals. Thus, a waving line with alternat-
ing points represents the gigantic serpent, the ana-
conda, which is marked by large dark spots; a rhom-
bus, with its angles ﬁlled out in“ black, denotes a lagoon
ﬁsh; while a triangle signiﬁes not that simple geomet-
rical ﬁgure, but the little three-cornered garment of the
women.” * The ornaments of the Karaya consist of
designs in zigzag lines, curves, points, lozenges, and
peculiar interrupted meanderings, while squares and
triangles are only casually introduced (as, for example,
in the ﬁlling out of the ﬁgures), and circles are wholly
wanting. As in the ornamentation of the Xingu
tribes, deﬁnite concrete types lie at the bottom of these
apparently quite arbitrarily chosen geometrical com-
binations, of which the characteristic features at most
are repeated, conventionalized, in them. It is not, un-
fortunately, always possible to ascertain with certainty
what natural object is intended. The frequently recur-
ring cross (Fig. 2, a), which has so often given occasion,
in America, for airy hypothesis, is here nothing but a
kind of lizard. Whoever has seen the large, stumpy-
knobbed wasps’ nest of the logwood forests will recog-
nise its characteristic mark at once in the comb orna-
ment (Fig. 2, 6). We likewise mention as peculiarly
characteristic the bat with outspread wings (Fig. 2, 0),
as well as the most frequently occurring snake pat—
terns (as Fig. 3, b, the rattlesnake, and Fig. 3, c, the

 

* Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol. xxii, p. 89.

ORNAMENTATION. 1 2 1

casse'naußß ; another snake is represented in Fig. 3,
a). Real drawings of men and animals, which we
know so well among the Bushmen and Eskimo, are not
found among the Karaya.* This discovery of Ehren-
reich does not stand by itself, but is one in a consider-
able series. William H. Holmes has succeeded, by the

 

    

V VVV
>.

 

 

 

 

 

FIG. 3.-—ORNAMENTS or THE KARAYA. (After Elirenreich.)

comparison of large series, in proving that a consider-
able number of apparently purely geometrical ﬁgures on
Indian articles of pottery are conventionalized repre-
' sentations of alligators, While others are copies of the
skin markings of various animalsd' Hjalmar Stolpe,
who studied the supposed geometrical ornamentation of

 

* Ehrenreich, Beiträge sur Völkerkunde Brazilians, p. 25.

1- Holmes, Ancient Art of the Province of Chiriqui. Annual Re-
port of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, 1884 and 1885, pp.
178—183.

122 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the Raratonga-Tubuai group after the same method,
has shown it to be in the highest degree probable that

    

 

    

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F10. 4.——a, SHIELD FROM Sourn AUSTRALIA (After Eyre) ; b, Snann FROM
QUEENSLAND (Berlin Museum). The pattern on a is partly scratched,
partly painted; that on b is all painted.

the designs on them are almost exclusively composed of
conventionalized human forms.* Still earlier, Lane Fox

 

*Stolpe, Entwickelungserscheinungen in der Ornamentik der
Naturvölker, Vienna, 1892.

ORNAMENTATION. > 123

succeeded in tracing an apparently independently con-
structed motiveof the New Britain people back to a
human ﬁgure. In fact, wherever the question has been
asked, the same answer has been returned. In this light
the individual observations on Australian ornaments
which we have collected from diﬁerent accounts acquire
decisive signiﬁcance. “ Some old peoples,” writes
Chauncy, “like to decorate their shields with all possi-
ble ﬁgures, such as birds, animals, and inanimate natural
objects. The aborigines of West Australia decorate
their small shields in like manner.” * “They represent
on their shields, in rude lines, the ﬁgures of animals—-
the iguana, for example,” says Brough Smyth of the
tribes in Victoria. “They copy Nature in the decora-
tion of their robes. A man told Bulmer that he formed
his conceptions from the observation of natural objects.
He had copied on a stick marks derived from a larva
which they called kramg, and he had designed new
forms from the scales of snakes and the markings of
lizards. So far as Bulmer knows, the natives never
copy the forms of plants and ﬂowers in their garments
and weapons.” + The information imparted by Bulmer
solves the mystery of Australian ornament. It tells us
not only how we should interpret it, but also why we
could not interpret it at ﬁrst. If the whole aspect of an
animal was applied as an ornamental motive we could, as
a rule, at least approximately perceive the type even in
the conventionally distorted ﬁgure ; but most Australian
designs seem to be only parts of animals, and to repre-
sent primarily their principal skin-markings ; and in this
case it is almost impossible for a European to divine

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. ii, p. 251. f lbid., vol. i, p. 294.

124 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

their meaning, especially as the natural forms in ques-
tion are almost always conventionally represented (Figs.
4 and 5). Our explanation is, as we have said, not
strictly susceptible of proof ; but the old doctrine which
regarded the primitive ornaments as independently
constructed geometrical ﬁgures is no more demonstrable.
Our view is in perfect harmony with all else that we
know of the nature of the primitive peoples, and there-
fore possesses a high degree of probability. Advocates
of the other View have nothing to support their rather
improbable hypothesis except the ﬁrst impression, and
we have learned through Ehrenreich that this may de-
ceive. As long as no better argument can be opposed

 

FIG. 5.—AUSTRALIAN SHIELDS FROM VICTORIA, WITH SCRATCHED DESIGNs.
(After Brough Smyth.)

to us, we therefore believe we are fully justiﬁed in ex-
plaining the design on the shield from Queensland
(Fig. 4, b) as being not a geometrical construction, but
the imitation of a snake’s skin; the bark shield (Fig. 4,

ORNAMENTATION. 125

@) as the imitation of a bird; and the lozenge-shaped
and zigzag hatching on the other pieces (Fig. 5, a 6) as
conventionalized representations of feathers, hairs, and
scales. Besides» skin patterns of this kind, Australian
ornamentation utilizes the whole outline of men and

 

FIG. 6.—AUSTRALIAN THROW—STICK, WITH A MAP or THE COUNTRY
SCRATCHED ON IT. (After Brough Smyth.)

animals. Outlines of kangaroos, lizards, snakes, and
ﬁshes are found frequently scratched on clubs and
throw-sticks; and perhaps most- frequently the ﬁgure
of a corroborry dancer in his characteristic sprawling
attitude. The execution of the ﬁgures is generally ex-
tremely rude and conventional, but their meaning is
nearly always immediately comprehensible. All the
more problematical appear a series of other motives
seen on certain weapons, sometimes alone, sometimes
associated with those ﬁgures. The mark on the throw-
stick (Fig. 6) is indeed of so curious a character that
it would certainly have continued to be a puzzle to
us, if it had not been explained by the Australians
themselves. This snare of lines is really nothing else
than a map. “It represents a lagoon, and probably a
branch of the Broken River, and the space between
the lines is the region in which the tribe of the owner
of the weapon dwelt.” * Other hunting peoples know

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 284.

126 _THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

how to draw maps. We are acquainted especially with
excellent sketches by the Eskimo; but among no other

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Flo. 7.—-ORNAMENTS or THE BIINQOPIES. (From Man.) a, with white clay
' painted on bows and eating plates; I), painted on girdles; c, with white
on shells; d and e,With white on women’s girdles and frontlets ; f,with
yellow and white on bows, pails, canoes, and oars; g, scratched on
women’s girdles and painted with white on time—boards; k, with white
and brown on girdles, bands, plates, and shells. .

people than the Australians has the idea of decorating
their weapons and implements with maps been observed.
It is certainly evident that the maps of the Australians
are to be regarded, not as in the ﬁrst place ornaments,
but as a kind of writing.

The ornaments which the Mincopics paint on their
implements with white, brown, and red earth colours,

ORNAMENTATION. . 127

or scratch with sharp pieces of shell, for the most part
resemble the Australian ornaments so much that one is
tempted to account for them in the same way. But in
this case no certain clew has been found. While it has
been repeatedly said of the Australians that they take
their motives from Nature, Man expressly asserts that
the Mincopies always repeat the traditional designs
without any variation. These designs are neither rich
nor diversiﬁed. The circumstance that each one is only
used for a particular kind of implement leaves us to
suppose that they have a deﬁnite meaning. But Man,
who gives the names of all the patterns, unfortunately —

 

 

 

FIG. (%.—Born; IMPLEMENTS or THE Esxmo, wrm ANIMAL ORNAMENTS.
(After Jacobsen.) a, knife; [2, pail—handle; c, arrow-smoother.

tells us nothing about their signiﬁcance. It might,
perhaps, be possible to determine the meanings by
comparison of older and newer forms ; but the material
is very far from being sufﬁcient for such a study, and

128' THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

we shall therefore be obliged to leave the question
whether the motives of Mincopy ornamentation have
been drawn from Nature for the present unanswered.
The decorative art of the Eskimo and their relatives,
which is considerably richer and more lively, oﬁers in-
comparably fewer difﬁculties. No protracted researches
are required to prove that the hyperboreans owe the
largest proportion of their ornaments to the observation
of Nature. One need only cast a glance at the ﬁgures
which they engrave or carve on their implements of
bone and wood: the bird’s head on the knife (Fig. 8, a),
the ﬁshes on the pail-handle (Fig. 8, b), the reindeers
on the arrow-smoother (Fig. 8, c), are all so well char-
acterized that it is impossible not to recognise them.
The Whole implement is often given the form of an

 

 

nit-«(5°29)»: willlllllml

FIG. 9.—BONE IMPLEMENTS OF THE Esmmo IN THE FORM OF ANIMALS.
(After Jacobsen.) a, arrow-smoother; b and c, needle cases.

animal. Our picture (Fig. 9, a) represents an arrow-
smoother of bone, Which the maker has carved into
the shape of a reindeer, and two needle cases (Fig. 9. I), c),
of which the ﬁrst represents a ﬁsh and the second a
seal; and similar pieces may be seen in every large
ethnological collection. Besides these free and natural-

ORNAMENTATION. 129

istic ﬁgures, natural motives are also found, which have
been stiﬁened into conventional form. We refer here
. to only one example, the small concentric circles with
sharply prominent central points, which appear on

@

sm.

    

(7

FIG. 10.-—BONE IMPLEMENTS or THE ESKIMO, WITH ORNAMENTS FROM
TECHNICAL MoriVEs. (From photographs.) (1, staff of office; I), bor—
ing bows; c, d, and e, needle cases.

nearly every hyperborean article of bone. In most
cases they undoubtedly denote eyes, and in others
probably the sun or the moon; and in still other
cases they are, in our opinion, to be regarded as sub-
stituted for beads which are highly esteemed as orna-
ments by the hyperboreans as by nearly all lower
peoples. Taken in the last sense, these circles belong
no longer among the natural motives; but they lead us

130 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

over to the second kind of ornamentation, which stands
out in hyperborean art as unmistakably as the ﬁrst.
The designs of this second kind are very sharply
distinguished from those which we have just been con-
sidering. Not a single motive of them points to a
natural prototype; the parallel bands, the seams, the
zigzag and cross lines rather resemble the ﬁgures pro-

!
W .

l! 0.

FIG. 11.—ORNAMENTAL DETAILS on BONE IMPLEMEXTS OF THE ESKIMO.
(From photographs.)

duced by tying, sewing, and weaving. We have ex-
plained the different patterns in characterizing them.
If their execution leaves any doubt of their nature, a
glance at their application will overcome it. They are
all drawn from the second great source of ornament,
technique, and are indeed imitations and repetitions of
ﬁgures that originate in textile art, in the widest sense
of the term. In comparison with the motives from
Nature, these technic forms appear very scanty and
uniform. Hyperborean ornamentation has indeed used
them in tolerably rich measure, but it has given them
only a very slight development. As a whole they
hardly comprehend more than the simplest textile
motives—the band, the stitch, and the seam.

Whether the ornamentation of the Mincopies has
taken up similar technic motives can in general neither

ORNAMENTATION. 131

be asserted nor denied. The ﬁrst impression of a de-
sign seems to declare in favour of the supposition ; but
we have already learned that we can not trust a ﬁrst
impression in these cases. It would not be impossible
that a pattern which looks like imitation weaving, or a
band, is really the conventionally modiﬁed representa-
tion of an animal’s skin or of a- snake. Only in one case
does the conclusion that a design is of technic origin
seem to us fairly permissible. The Mincopies are the
only people at the lowest grade of culture who exer-
cise the potter’s art. They make rude earthen vessels
of various sizes with free hand, which serve them as
cooking dishes. A large number of these pots hear an
ornament which we regard as the imitation of woven
work. The superﬁcial resemblance would indeed give
no great force to our supposition ; it is far better sup-
ported by the fact that the Mincopies are accustomed
to invest their vessels, for the purpose of holding them

 

Fm. 12,—POTSHERDs FROM THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS. (After Man.)

and carrying them, with a woven covering—a usage
which brings the thought of woven ornament so directly
to the potter that it is almost unavoidable. We shall
hereafter consider somewhat more thoroughly the ground

of the transference of woven patterns to potters’ wares.
10

132 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

In Australian ornamentation technic motives are
certainly demonstrated in the painting of certain baskets
of woven grasses and on the spears, the shafts of which
are liberally adorned with carved or painted bands.*
Patterns are not rarely seen on shields and clubs strik-
ingly like bands and knit and woven work; and in
many cases the origin of the design can be certainly
recognised from this similarity. We have, however,
already accounted for most of these patterns as con—
ventionalized representatives of hair, feathers, or scales.
While the ﬁrst glance may seem to contradict this in-

 

 

FIG. Iii—AUSTRALIAN SPEAR, WITH TECHNIC ORNAMENT. (After Brough
Smyth.)

terpretation, internal reasons are decidedly in its favour.
It is not easy to understand why the Australian should
A impose bands and woven patterns on objects which
have nothing to do with textile art, either in their
origin or use ; while on the other hand we can readily
see that he would be very likely to ornament his
weapons with conventionalized ﬁgures of animals and
skins.

Colours are subordinated in primitive ornamentation
to forms. The Australian weapons of offence are, as a
rule, not painted; but the designs on the shields are
generally brought out by polychrome painting. - Most
usually the sunken lines of the incised ﬁgure are ﬁlled

 

* A picture of two such baskets may be found in Ratzel, Völker-
kunde, vol. ii, p. 58.

ORNAMENTATION. 133

up with different pigments—with white and red, for in-
stance, in alternation. In other cases the pattern is only
painted. The colours which the Australians use on their
implements are the same ‘as those with which they
decorate their bodies. Red and white are likewise pre-
ferred here, while black and yellow appear less fre-
quently. Blue, which is rarely seen, appears to be
mostly of European introduction. Among the com-
binations that are formed with the ﬁve colours, the jux-
taposition of red and white conspicuously prevails.
Further than this, no one has succeeded in discovering
any leading principle in the arrangement of Australian
decorative colours. It may, nevertheless, be supposed
that the colouring of the Australian ornaments is often
suggested by natural prototypes. The coloured design
on the shield from Queensland (Fig. 4, 5), for example,
has a striking resemblance to a snake’s skin. But the
choice of colours may also not rarely be wholly arbitrary.
Andaman ornamentation is much like Australian in
colouring, as in drawing. The Mincopies, too, do not
tire of repeating combinations of white and red lines.
Besides these, a brown is used as it is in painting the
body; but black and yellow seem to be entirely want-
ing. The ornamental art of the hyperboreans is poor-
est in colours, their patterns being brought out from the
yellowish white ground of the bone chieﬂy by black,
sometimes by red, but always in monochrome.

This is all that we can say with certainty concern-
ing the origin of primitive ornamentation. It is little
enough; but more can hardly be expected, for it is not
easy to harvest where no one has sown. The problem
of the origin of primitive ornament can be solved only
by thorough and comprehensive investigation on the

134 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

spot, and this has so far never been attempted any-
where. Since it is not easily within our power to make
such an investigation we must be satisﬁed with urging
it by exposing the total poverty and untrustworthiness
of our knowledge.

We have thus far called all the ﬁgures we have
found upon the implements of primitive peoples, orna-
ments. We have nevertheless acknowledged, in open-
ing the present subject, that this name belongs in strict
right to only a part of them, While the others—such as

 

FIG. 14.——A MESSAGE STICK AND A SHIELD FROM AUSTRALIA. The mes-
sage stick (after Hewitt) contains in its scratched marks an invitation
to an emu (a) and wallaby (b) hunt.

inscriptions, property marks, and tribal symbols—pose
sess at least no purely aesthetic signiﬁcance. We proceed
to inquire whether the two groups can be separated.
Our writing has generally so little resemblance to our
ornaments that they can hardly be confounded; but in
Australia inscriptions and ornaments are so alike that
they can hardly be distinguished. If we should ﬁnd
the carvings of the message stick (Fig. 14)—which,
according to the explanation of a native, express an in-
vitation to a community hunt—on a shield, we should

ORNAMENTATION. 135

certainly regard them as an ordinary ornamental design.
A European could hardly recognise the inscriptions of
the Australians unless they were on such sticks. The
Australians do not, however, carve their runes on mes-
sage sticks only. It is told of a southern tribe that
“they are accustomed to mark important things on
their throw-sticks ” ; and a similar usage seems to exist
in the north, for Brough Smyth copies some ﬁgures
from a Queensland boomerang, with the remark that
“ all these ﬁgures have a meaning that is intelligible to
the blacks.”* But if we should undertake, starting
from those laconic hints, to separate the inscribed
weapons from the decorated ones, we should be very
soon convinced that all our pains ‚were lost. There is
no sufﬁcient criterion. We do not as yet know with
any degree of certainty whether the Australians have
any conventionally ﬁxed charactersl' Equally insufﬁ-
eient is all that weyare able to say of the relations of
ornament and inscription among the hyperborcans. It
has been supposed that the animal ﬁgures on their im-
plements often have the signiﬁcance of inscriptions—
that, for example, six reindeer on an arrow-smoother are
intended to express the number of animals the owner
has killed.' This interpretation is possibly correct in
some instances, but it is not probable in most cases.

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. ii, p. 259, and. vol. i, p. 285. '

‘r “ There are undoubtedly conventional forms among some
tribes, and it is of the utmost importance to determine to what ex-
. tent they are used, and by what tribes they are understood. Studies
of these and other interesting questions were still in progress when
it became necessary to publish the results of my investigations.”
Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. liv. According to this, we may hope that
the results of those extremely important studies may yet be given
to the world. Our knowledge of the subject is still as nothino.

136 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

The hunting peoples of the north certainly use a picture-
writing. But the mark that characterizes the hyper-
borean as well as every other picture-writing—the con-
ventionally and uniformly abbreviated form of the
ﬁgures—is absent from these thoroughly naturalistic
and freely executed drawings. Yet motives of a picto-
graphic kind occur among the hyperborean ornaments
—for example, those circles which we interpret as repre-
senting the sun or the moon. Such circles are often

 

 

FIG. 15.—a, AN INDIAN PICTURE-WRITING SIGN FOR A LAPSE OF TIME
(after Mallcry); b, DRILL Bow OF THE Esnmo (from a photograph).

connected by a line into a regular series; and since a
quite similar design in Indian picture-writing represents
a lapse of time, it is very possible in this instance that
the series of the hyperboreans has a corresponding
meaning. But if we were asked whether the design
did not represent a string of beads, we should have to
admit that such an interpretation is quite as probable
as the other. We may weigh and set one supposition
against the other, but, after all, we have nothing but
supposition.

Property marks are much more easily and surely
distinguished from ornaments proper. It has long been
known that among nearly all hunting tribes the

ORNAMENTATION. 137

weapons of each individual are identiﬁed by a special
mark; and it is not difﬁcult to see why this use of
property marks has been so generally developed in the
hunting stage of civilization. The animal which is
fatally wounded by an arrow or a spear does not always
fall on the spot, but is most frequently found dead
afterward in some other place. Under these circum-
stances the hunter would lose his prey if he could not
establish his claim by the weapon still sticking in the
wound. The Australian who has discovered a bees’
nest cuts his mark in the bark of the tree; and the
nest is from that time considered his personal property,
as much as the weapons and implements which bear the
same mark. Sometimes, however, the marks on the
Australian weapons designate the maker rather than
the owner. “Every piece,” says Honery of one tribe,
“bears the mark of the maker. The signs consist of
curved or toothed lines and notches.” * He has, un-
fortunately, given no pictures, and it is therefore impos-
sible to decide whether these designs consist only of
special signs, or are identical with the skin patterns
already described. If we may judge for all, from Aus-
tralian property marks ﬁgured in Reliquiae Aquitanicae,
it can not be hard to distinguish such marks from orna-
ments, for in these examples the sign is formed only
of some separate notches which present no similarity to
decorative patternd‘ The marks with which the Eskimo
are accustomed to identify their implements, especially
their arrows and harpoons, are tolerably well known,

 

* Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. vii, p. 253.

+The scratchings which we have found on the backs of many
shields, and which are supposed to be owners" or makers’ marks, have
a like undecorative character.

138 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and will generally not be easily confounded with orna-
ments. They consist, as a rule, of straight or slightly
curved lines, from which shorter lines diverge in various
numbers and directions (compare Fig. 11, b). There are
other more ornamental fOrms. ()f such sort are, for
example, the marks on the oars from Kotzebue Gulf,
which we copy here from Choris, “on which various
signs are painted in different colours, whereby each per-

 

FIG. 16.—PP.OPERTY MARKS. a. Australian club (after Lartet and Christy)
b, c, d, e, Alcut oars (or paddles) (after Choris).

son knows his property.” The property marks of the
Mincopies have absolutely nothing in common with
their ornaments. Every hunter identiﬁes his arrows
and spears by a peculiar tying of the cord that binds
the weapon to the shaft.

We are undoubtedly still very far from having a
thorough knowledge of the primitive property maiks ,
but so far as our knowledge goes, it gives us a right to
say that only a relatively small part of primitive “ or-
nament ” served the purpose of marks of individual

ORNAMENTATION. 139

ownership. The social property marks, the tribal and
family tokens are, however, much more numerous, at
least among the ornaments of the Australians. Collins
declared that each Australian tribe used a special form
for the decoration of its tools and weapons, so that it
was possible to know to what region the object be-
longed ; and Brough Smyth indicates What these forms
were, at least among the tribes on the Upper Darling.
“ They put upon their shields the kobo‘ngs of their
tribes.” The kobong of the Australian corresponds
with the totem of the Indian. It is in most cases some
animal—a kangaroo, a hawk, a lizard, or a ﬁsh—from
which the natives name their gens or tribe, and which
they revere as a protecting demon, and perhaps as an
ancestor. “ The kobong of the native,” says Gerland,
“is his best friend, who always gives him protection
and help.” The Australian brave stands in the same
relation to his kobong animal as the European knight
to his heraldic beast; for our heraldic beasts were not
originally those clever symbols of virtues which a later‘
rationalistic interpretation has made them, but nothing
more and nothing less than the protecting powers or
the ancestors of the race. The nearest and most nat-
ural consequence of these conceptions is certainly the
thought of using the ﬁgure of the family animal upon
the weapon as a fetich or protecting power, and so the
European soldier painted a bear or an eagle on his
shield, while the Australian adorns his with the ﬁgure
of a kangaroo or a snake skin.

The knowledge that the ornaments of Australian
weapons are largely heraldic ﬁgures clears up two
points which we have already mentioned, but have not
yet explained—the frequent application of patterns of

140 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

animal skins and their peculiar conventionalization.
The native whose kobong is a large animal—and this
is the fact with the majority—could obviously not
adorn his shield with a more appropriate tribal mark
and with a more powerful fetich than the skin of his
heraldic beast. But while reverence for his kobong
pointed him with one hand to this natural decoration,
it held him back from it with the other. The Aus-
tralian indeed could not slay his kobong animal; yet
he might, where the prohibition was not in full force,
give himself a little indulgence. The real skin thus
could not be used for the purpose; its carved or painted
ﬁgure was therefore substituted for it. These ﬁgures
are never true to Nature : most of them have in their
angular and stiff regularity more resemblance to a
woven piece than to a furred or feathered skin. This
fact might at ﬁrst sight be regarded as excusable in
consideration of the slight artistic skill of the rude
Australians. But the Australians certainly exhibit in
other respects a remarkable talent for lifelike repre-
sentation. The material and the technical execution,
although they have certainly not been without inﬂu-
ence, do not give a sufﬁcient explanation ; for engrav-
ings are abundantly found on Australian implements
of wood which have been executed much more freely
and naturally with the same means. Since, then, the
reason for this style can not be traced to the capacity
of the Australians, it must be referred to the will; and
here it lies, in fact. These skin designs are heraldic
ﬁgures; and heraldry in Australia aims as little at truth
to Nature as it does in Europe. It therefore never
happens that the real ﬁgure of a kangaroo or a snake
is copied true to Nature, but the reproduction of the

ORNAMENTATION. 141

kangaroo or snake pattern of a particular tribe is given.
The Australian who ﬁrst painted the skin-markings of
a snake on his battle—shield probably tried to come as
close to Nature as possible; while later artists no longer
copied the natural prototype, but the artiﬁcial picture,
which became a symbol; and since the natural aim,
furthermore, was to stamp the tribal symbol in a ﬁxed
and easily recognisable form, and at the same time—
and chieﬂy—convenience constantly dictated a more
simple form, the representation became in course of
time further and further removed from nature. In
this way those curious ﬁgures were ﬁnally developed
in which the aesthetic critic perceives evidence in
favour of his theory of the geometrical as the prime
motive of ornamentation. The Australians doubtless
chose their tribal marks principally from the animal
world; yet this usage is in no way general. We have
become acquainted with at least one remarkable ex-
ample of another sort—maps, with which some of the
southern tribes mark their weapons.

As not all tribal marks are animal ﬁgures, so we
have yet less reason to regard all the animal ﬁgures
found on Australian implements as tribal marks. Noth-
ing forbids our assuming that the natives frequently
picture animals that stand in no sort of relation to
their belief in the kobong, and for no other purpose
than for ornament. Bulmer’s informant, for example,
arbitrarily selected the most various forms for his dec-
orations.

Least of all does it avail to draw a conclusion by the
“method of mutual illustration ” as to the meaning of
a portion of the Australian animal ornamentation from
the “hidden sense ” of the hyperborean animal ﬁgures.

142 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

The animal ornaments of the hyperboreans are cer-
tainly not fruits, of totemism, for totemism, so widely
spread over the American continent, has not struck
root in the extreme north.* We do not know whether
the hyperboreans use tribal marks of any kind on their '
implements. It is possible, yet the tribal bond has so
little force for these peOples, living in small groups
widely scattered, that it is hardly probable. Lastly, the
ornaments of the Mincopies are not differentiated ac-
cording to the various tribes, but according to the dif-
ferent implements ; and they can therefore, in no case,
serve for social distinction.

We have now found among the primitive ornaments
inscriptions, property marks, and tribal symbols; it
would be strange if religious symbols and magic signs
were not also concealed among them. We have, in
fact, found a considerable number of such tokens in
the Australian kobong ﬁgures, which probably stand
for fetiches as well as for symbols. There are besides
in Australia what are called magic sticks—that is, wands
and tablets—which the “ Wise men ” use in their arts.
They are almost invariably covered with carvings.
Outlines of men and animals can be perceived on some
of them; but most of them bear a tangle of curious
ﬁgures, which we can hardly separate, much less in-
terpret. These puzzling ﬁgures, however, so far as we
know, appear only on these magic sticks, and can not
therefore be easily confounded with ornaments, but as-

 

?" At least we do not ﬁnd it there, as in Australia and in many
parts of America, as a general institution and principle of social
division. The relation of the hyperborean witches to their serving
demon, which is often represented as a gigantic polar bear, is, how-
ever, similar to the relation of an Indian brave to his totem.

ORNAMENTATION. 143

. sociated at most with inscriptions, with which they are
perhaps afﬁliated. We are satisﬁed that more than
one magical sign may be found among the ﬁgures
which the hyperboreans cut on their implements; but,
unfortunately, the descriptions furnish hardly any basis
for the study of them.*

We have found but few technic motives among all
the ornaments for which we have so far proved a non-
aesthetic signiﬁcance; it might be inferred from this
that in primitive decorative art at least technic motives
were chosen only from purely msthetic considerations.
What, indeed, should move an indolent Mincopy to cut
basketry patterns on the outside of his earthen cook-
ing pot, if not a direct pleasure in the regular design?
Perhaps it was really his indolence, his lazy and per-
sistent adherence to the traditional. Holmes has ex-
plicitly shown, in his treatise on the ceramics of the
Indian tribes, why a primitive potter so often decorated
his productions with textile patterns. Pottery is a
comparatively young art; it is at least very much
younger than basketry, which even the rudest tribes
have rather highly developed. The basket is every-
where the forerunner of the pot, and has consequently
been everywhere its prototypei' “ The vessel of clay

 

* An Australian woman, When ill, told her European physician
that her name had been cut- in a tree by a native—a sure sign of her
approaching death. The name of the patient was Murran, which
means leaf ; and, in fact, ﬁgures of leaves were found after her death
cut on the stem of a eucalyptus, which the Witch ascribed to a
spirit (Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 469). Such ﬁgures on trees are also
found near graves and at places Where the initiations of youth have
been celebrated. Nothing is known of their meaning.

1' Baskets are still used by various tribes for water vessels; for
example, by Kaiﬁrs and several American tribes.

144 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

is a usurper, which has taken possession of the place
as well as of the dress of its predecessor.” The work-
man tries to make the new pot as like as possible to
the familiar basket, in all respects, unessential as well
as essential. He is not satisﬁed with giving the new
vessel the convenient curvature of the old, but he also
gives it the pattern of a woven basket ; not because he
considers it suitable or pretty, but because he is so ac-
customed to it that he can not easily think of a vessel
without it. We remind those who ﬁnd so conservative
a taste irrational even in “ savages” that the country
people in some districts of our own civilized German
fatherland always want the same paintings repeated on
their dishes or on the dial-plates of their clocks, simply
because the coarse roses on the dial—plates and the ugly
white lines on the dishes “ ought to be on them.” The
ornamental bands on the spears of the Australians can be
accounted for in a similar way. The painted or carved
band takes the place of a real band which was formerly
in general use to fasten the blade, and subsequently
became obsolete by an advance in technical skill.*
May not the graceful “ geometrical ” scratchings on
the bone implements of the hyperboreans have had a
similar origin? It is, at all events, probable that the
most of them are not mere imitations of technical

 

* In the Freiburg Museum are two north Australian javelins,
which form a good illustration of our proposition. The quartzite
blade of the ﬁrst is tied to the shaft, the obsidian blade of the
second is glued to it with a gummy mass, While the layer of gum
which binds shaft and blade together is painted with a band orna-
ment. . The converse relation can also be conceived, in the sense
that the fastening by gluing, as the less expensive, was to be at
least superﬁcially like the more perfect and costly binding. Even
in that case the painting would have no zesthctic meaning.

ORNAMENTATION. 145

forms, but are free renderings and representations of
technical motives. In any case we may suppose that -
the decoration began here, too, with the imitation of
real bands and strings, which was afterward applied
purely from habit.

We shall not conceal from ourselves or from others
that all which we have said here concerning the origin
of technic ornament is based only on suppositions;
but these suppositions have so high a degree of prob-
ability that we do not venture to ascribe to technic
ornaments that purely aesthetic value which we have
been obliged to deny to naturalistic ornaments. At
any rate, our studies are sufﬁcient to compel us to
admit that a very large number of ﬁgures which we
designated at the beginning as primitive ornaments——
that is, as decorations—did not originate in the ﬁrst in-
stance from an aesthetic want, but from quite different
motives. \Ve have to acknowledge, besides, that it is
in practice impossible to separate these apparent orna-
ments from the real. We fortunately can add that it
is also not necessary. It has been previously shown
that all these religious symbols, tribal badges, property
marks and inscriptions have an aesthetic function be-
sides their practical one, and that we can therefore
regard them, as it were, as secondary ornaments addi-
tional to the proper primary ornaments. Instead of
repeating these general deductions, we prefer to dem-
onstratethem here by a single example. We choose
for this purpose that group which is farthest from pure
ornament—picture-writing. In order to satisfy our-
selves of the artistic character of writing, we do not
have to produce the miniatures of the middle ages,
shining with gold and varied colours, or the splendid

146 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

press work of the renascence with its lordly majuscule
type. Any letter is enough, such as the post brings
daily to the house, provided it is not written by an
extremely uncultivated or by an extremely cultivated

hand. The ﬁrst thing we ask of a handwriting is that

it be plain; but this is not the only thing. The mer-
chant who is looking for an assistant demands of the
candidate not only a good but a handsome handwrit-
ing; and even those who do not earn their bread by
calligraphic art make some effort—unless they have re-
tained the idea from their gymnasial period that the
most obscure and worst handwriting is the clearest and
most proper evidence of an extraordinary genius—to
write not only plainly but also beautifully. Look for
a moment at an autograph of Goethe’s, particularly at
one from his later years—that album leaf for the United
States, for example, which is reproduced in the edition
of the Bibliographical Institute. If Goethe had done
no more than write plainly, he would evidently have
been able to spare himself many pen-lines. The beauti-
ful formation of the capitals, the gracefully and yet
ﬁrmly waving curves and strokes, the careful adjust-
ment of the intervals between the lines—all this dem-
onstrates that the autograph was intended to produce
an aesthetic effect, not only through its intrinsic signiﬁ-
cance, but likewise through its external appearance.
In fact, a writing of Goethe’s like this produces on us
at least a far more agreeable artistic impression than
any of his drawings, which he contemplated with such
great pleasure.* Calligraphy is treated and regarded

 

* One who is not endowed with the aesthetic spirit will perhaps
be unable to comprehend why it has never yet occurred to any one

ORNAMENTATION. 147

by the reﬁned Japanese as on an equal footing with the
other ﬁne arts. Many great masters of Japanese paint-
ing owe their fame not less to their writing than to the
ﬁgures which their pencils have created.* What is >
valid of writing is, as we have said, not valid of writ-
ing alone. The symbols, the badges, the marks, and all
those signs which serve practical purposes as their ﬁrst
and essential objects, collectively belong, according to
their form, to the domain of aesthetics. So far, how-
ever, aesthetics have not deigned to exercise their right
of sovereignty. Fechner, whose clearer look perceived
in the investigation of the simplest agreeable relations
one of the most urgent tasks of aesthetics, commended
and employed “ the method of application of compar-

 

to study the aesthetic character of handwriting. It is apparent that
a comparative study of this material, than which hardly any other
is richer or more accessible, might afford very valuable contribu-
tions to the knowledge of the tastes of all conditions, peoples, and
times. The thought is indeed too banal to disturb aesthetics even
for an instant in its ingenious speculations and experiments.

* “Kosé mo Kanaoka, the famous old master of the painters,
and Ono no Tofu, the most highly prized Japanese master of writ-
ing, are esteemed in equally high degree ” (Brinekmann, Kunst und
Handwerk in Japan, vol. i, p. 174; compare also Gonde, L’Art Jap-
onaise, vol. i, p. 195). The art of writing is not less esteemed in
China. “ The Chinese painters have been, before all else, designers
and calligraphers. The nature itself of Chinese writing imposes on
one about to trace the characters a study, an education of eye and
hand, like those exacted by drawing. The lines of these characters
have in fact tenuities, suppleness, abrupt stoppings, graces of curva-
ture, sudden outbursts or gradual fadings, which a long apprentice-
ship in pencil-strokes alone can give. It is, besides, an accepted
opinion among the literati in China that the characters of writing
transmit to the idea they express something of their graphic beauty,
and that the thought they envelop takes within them a delicate shad-
ing, a particular turn.” Paléologue L’Art Chinois, p. 242.

11

148 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ing forms and the relation of forms as they appear
in the use.” * But While investigating the pictures
on tiles, on chocolate tablets, on writing paper, and
in galleries, we have unfortunately forgotten to look

. for the “simplest relations” where "they are to be '

found. It can not be said too often and strongly
that the complete neglect of the study of primitive
forms is the most
serious omission of
which aesthetics can
be accused. We deal
here with nothing
, less than the ques-
FIG. 17.—-MINCOPY GIRDLE. (After Man.) tion Whether there

are universally valid
conditions for aesthetic pleasure—whether there is, in a
human sense at least, an absolute beauty. Esthetes
are accustomed to take the absolute validity of their
principles as self-evident; but there has been already
much regarded as self—evident till it was discovered
that things may appear quite different in reality
from the shape given them in the dreams of school
wisdom. The universal validity of the aesthetic prin-
ciples requires in any case to be ﬁrst demonstrated,
and it can be demonstrated only by a comparative eth-
nological investigation beginning with the lowest peo-
ples. If it is proved thereby that the same principles
which control the artistic creations of civilized peoples
also avail for the aesthetic productions of primitive
peoples, then the further question is raised whether
these principles are presented in the same form in the

 

 

* Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetick, v01. i, p. 190.

ORNAMENTATION. 1 4 i)

lower grades as in the higher ; or whether a difference
can not be demonstrated between their newer or older
forms, a development from ruder to ﬁner, from simple
to composite. We do not profess to give an exhaustive
answer to these questions in the following remarks, but
shall have to content ourselves with indicating a few of
the most pertinent points.

When we compare the pattern of an Andaman
girdle with the designs on our parlor carpets we ﬁnd
that among all the differences one principle underlies
both. The oblique strokes on the girdle are repeated,
just like the ﬂowers on the carpet, at regular intervals,
and, like the ﬂowers, form rhythmical series. But this
analogy is not limited to this single instance. If we
continue our comparative observations we become con—
vinced that the principle of rhythmic arrangement is
not less plainly and frequently evident in the art of the
lowest savages than in that of the most highly civilized
peoples. We have a right, therefore, to presume that
pleasure in rhythm is in reality a universal human

property.* The essential feature of rhythm is the
' regular repetition of some particular unit; a tone, a
movement, and—in the present instance—a ﬁgure. The
rhythmic unit need not, however, be a unit in the
strict sense , it is even the rule that it is composed
of several elements ; but it must in every case have the
effect of a unit. The simplest conceivable case is evi-
dently the one cited, in which a rhythmical series is

 

* We shall not here examine into the basis of this pleasure. It
would furthermore be impossible to give a satisfactory elucidation
of it. Gurney, in his book, The Power of Sound, has thoroughly
exposed the insufﬁciency of all the hypotheses which have hitherto
done service in the matter.

150 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

formed by the regular repetition of a real unit—of a
point or a straight or a curved line. In the decorative
art of the highest peoples examples of this extreme
simplicity are comparatively rare, but they are very
abundant in primitive ornamentation.* Rhythmic
series consisting merely of oblique parallel strokes of
red earth following one another at regular intervals are
not rarely seen on the implements of the Mincopies.
The Australians sometimes adorn the edges of their
shields with a series of simple little circles; and the
same modest ornament is in general favour among the
hyperboreans. The series of animal ﬁgures which the
Eskimo put upon their tools of bone still belong entirely
to this lowest stage of development of rhythmical ar-
rangement. No tribe, however, is limited to this simple
style, but, as a rule, even primitive ornamentation takes
pleasure in the formation of far more complicated
rhythms. Advance is, in fact, so easy that it could
hardly be avoided. In the Andamanite series of
oblique lines, for example, it was only necessary to con-
nect the upper terminal of each line with the lower
one of the next, and a rhythm of a higher order—
the zigzag line—was created}L The zigzag line, the
rhythmic unity of which is constituted of two elements,

 

* In civilized Europe such simple series are still used almost
solely in folk art—that is, in pottery. They may be seen often, for
instance, on the borders of the beautiful earthen vessels which are
sent annually from the home industry of Heimberg bei Thun to the
Swiss and south German markets.

{We do not, however, intend to assert that the zigzag line
originated in this way everywhere. An origin in a very different
way can be conceived for it even among the Mincopies. It is our
purpose here only to present it as a higher development of the most
nearly related lower form.

ORNAMENTATION. 151

is that form of rhythmic organization which prevails
most decidedly in primitive life. It adorns most of
the shields and clubs of Australians. It shines in red
and brown colours on nearly all the implements and
weapons of the Mincopies; and no motive is so often '
cut as it is on the needle cases, drill-bows, and pail-
handles of the Eskimo. Yet the ornamentation, even
of the Mincopies, has in many instances advanced far
beyond the zigzag line. On the girdle (Fig. 17), for
example, the two parallel lines of this form are only a
part of a larger rhythmic unity. The graceful decora-
tion of the needle-case represented on a former page
(Fig. 10, e) exempliﬁes the complicated character of
the rhythmic series which the hyperboreans sometimes
constructed. In recognising an aesthetic signiﬁcance
in the rhythmical arrangement, which prevails so gen—
orally in the ornamentation of the hunting tribes, we
do not mean in any sense to assert its aesthetic origin.
On the contrary, we regard it as indubitable that the
primitive artists did not invent this principle, but dis-
covered it just where we have to ﬁnd it—in their basket-
work, which requires a rhythmical arrangement of the
material. The textile pattern was probably imitated at
ﬁrst more from habit than on account of any particular
pleasure in it, till men gradually became aware of its
aesthetic value, and began to extend the rhythmical
series for its own sake. It would be hard indeed to
determine the point where mechanical imitation ceases
and aesthetic continuation begins; but we have in any
case the same right to assert that rhythmical division
has evolved pleasure in rhythm as that pleasure in
rhythm has evolved rhythmical division.

While the principle of rhythm was, without doubt,

152 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

introduced into ornamentation by. the imitation of
technical motives, another likewise generally dominant,
formal principle—symmetry—may be deduced from
the imitation of natural motives. We have seen that
primitive decorative art prefers to use natural proto-
types, and especially human and animal forms. As
Nature has shaped these prototypes symmetrically, s0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

('n

FIG. 18.—-AUSTRALIAN SHIELDS. (After Brough Smyth.)

« art has formed the designs copied from them likewise
symmetrically. That this deduction is more than an
arbitrary construction is proved, among other evi-
dences, by a special limitation in the application of
symmetry, which has been observed especially in the
ornamentation of the Australians or just in that school
which adheres most to animal patterns, and also in
ancient and Gothic decorative art. Let us look at the

ORNAMENTATION. 1 53

three Australian shields (Fig. 18) in the vertical position,
as they are usually carried. The upper one is decorated
symmetrically throughout, in the vertical as well as in
the horizontal direction. The designs on the two lower
ones, on the contrary, are symmetrical only in the hori-
zontal direction. The numbers of ﬁgﬁires on their ver-
tical halves do not correspond. We see in this pecul-
iarity, which is common throughout Australia and is
regarded in Europe as a law of good style,* a proof, as
we have said, for our deduction. The partial—only
horizontal—symmetry of these shield patterns corre-
sponds exactly to the partial—only horizontal—sym-
metry of animal forms. But the knowledge that primi-
tive ornamentation learned the principle of symmetrical
form from Nature does not give us the slightest right
to contend that it could not be derived also from
other sources. We have shown in the beginning of
this chapter that it was necessary to give symmetrical
forms to implements and weapons for the sake of
adaptation to their purpose; and it is self—evident that
the symmetrical form of an implement called strongly
for a symmetrical arrangement of its decoration. The
principle of symmetry certainly has immediate and
universal basis, for there is hardly a people by Whom it
has not been observed; and the carvers of the Austra-
lian shields as unquestionably recognise its value as the
architects of the Parthenond' In execution, primitive

 

* Compare Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, vol. iv, chap.
xxvm.

1- The sole exception that can be recalled is only apparently one.
The Japanese always arrange their decorations unsymmetrically.
But the peculiar charm of these unsymmetrical decorations arises
from their connection with the symmetrical forms of the decorated

154 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

peoples fall far short of meeting the demands which we
make upon the higher grades. They are satisﬁed when
their picture simply makes a symmetrical impression as
a whole; and in Australia and the Andaman Islands
especially they put up with faults which would doubt-
less seem unendurable to a Grecian eye. Furthermore,
there are in Australia, besides these symmetrical forms,
which constitute by far the larger proportion, a number
of wholly unsymmetrical designs. Clubs and shields
may be seen in the carvings of which not a trace of
symmetrical arrangement can be discovered: the devi-
ation from the rule is most frequently exempliﬁed on the
throw—sticks. One is involuntarily reminded by them
of the account cited above concerning a custom of a
southern tribe of “marking important events on their
throw-sticks.” It is at least possible that some of these
asymmetrical designs are not ornaments, but inscriptions,
in which aesthetic considerations are only a secondary
matter. Lastly, we have become acquainted with a
considerable group of ﬁgures which are put upon
weapons—not rarely, as it appears—for the purpose of
designating the tribe or as marks of property, the na-
ture of which excludes a symmetrical arrangement from
the beginning, and which may be exempliﬁed by the
remarkable sketch-maps, of one of which a representa-
tion is given in Fig. 6. We must leave the further
pursuit of these researches to writers on aesthetics. As
our purpose here is less to answer questions than to
suggest them, what we have said must suﬁ‘ice.

We have already found more than one occasion to

 

objects. Japanese art is thus in no way independent of the principle
of symmetry. It rather employs it just where it seems to contra-
dict it.

ORNAMENTATION. 155

point out certain relations between primitive orna-
mentation and primitive culture. Now that we have
gained a knowledge of the general character of the
former, we may try to obtain a general view of those
relations. In a preceding chapter we have declared
the economical occupation to be the essential factor in
culture—the one that gives a deﬁnite character to all
the other life—expressions of a social group. If this
proposition is correct a connection should be traceable
between the ornamentation and the occupation of the
hunting tribes. The inﬂuence of the chase does in
fact appear plainly enough in the general character of
primitive ornamentation. The poverty and rudeness
of its motives and forms are a result and at the same
time a picture of the whole mental and material dearth
to which these peoples are condemned by their form of
production. Need which, on account of their meagre
and precarious means of subsistence, can never be kept
away long at a time—forbids their looking beyond the
narrow circle of those things which stand for their good
or ill in the most immediate relation to them; and the
instability which necessarily appertains to the hunter’s
life even in the richest hunting ﬁelds prevents that
higher perfection of technical skill without which a
ﬁne and rich development of ornamentation is impos-
sible. The poverty of primitive decorative art is all
the more striking because it appears among all peoples
in the same form ; in the high north, as well as in Aus-
tralia and in the Andaman Islands, everywhere we ﬁnd,
with a few unimportant exceptions, the same scanty
motives. This uniformity points again to the inﬂuence
of the occupation, which is similarly uniform. If the
character of ornamentation depends, as has been so.

 

156 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

often assumed, on the climate or the race, it should be
fundamentally different among the Australians and the
hyperboreans at least. The relations between primitive
production and decoration can further be shown in
details. The ornamental motives which the hunting
tribes have borrowed from Nature consist almost ex—
clusively of animal and human forms. These peoples
choose thus precisely these phenomena that have the
highest practical interest for them. The primitive
hunter leaves the care for the plant—food, which he can
not indeed dispense with, to the women, as being a lower
occupation, and himself gives to the plants no special
attention. In this way we explain why no traces are
found in his ornamentation of plant motives which are
so richly and gracefully unfolded in the decorative art
of civilized peoples.* We have already remarked that
this contrast has a deep signiﬁcance. The transition
from animal to plant ornament is in fact the symbol of
the greatest advance that has been accomplished in the ‘
history of culture—the transition from hunting to agri-
culture. This proposition should not, howeve1, be un-
derstood as implying that the transition to plant orna-
ment was accomplished simultaneously with the change
from the hunting to the agricultural life. The further
development of ornamentation among the primitive
agricultural peoples is ﬁrst effected rather by the tech- _
nieal motives being more variously and carefully exe-

 

* It is known that primitive men seldom adorn themselves with
ﬂowers; yet the homes of the Bushmen and Australians are resplen-
dent at times with the richest and most variegated ﬂoral displays.
The unfortunate Tasmanians constituted the only exception. Bon-
Wiek says, at least, that they lived to decorate themselves with ﬂow-
ers and scattered ﬂowers on their graves.

ORNAMENTATION. ' 157

euted, while the naturalistic motives are stiffened into
conventional forms and thrown relatively into the back-
ground. Plant ornament is used, so far as we know,
by only a single people of this grade, the Dyaks of Bor-
neo, and was without doubt introduced to them from
the Chinese and Indians. We look for it likewise in
vain on the splendid Peruvian cloths of Ancon. On
the other hand, we believe, it is plainly distinguishable
on some of the oldest Chinese bronzes; and it was in
general use in Egypt at a very early period. The rest
of the motives of primitive decoration are derived from
technical industry and from that branch of it which
even the unstable hunter’s life permitted and promoted
—basket—work. The poverty and narrowness of the
conditions permitted, indeed, of only a certain not very
high standard of execution. The extraordinary aesthetic
fertility of textile art could not appear except under
more favourable culture conditions. The hunting tribes
have utilized only its simplest and most uniform de-
signs.

Both naturalistic and technic motives are transformed
as well as copied. Sometimes the forms of the proto-
types are given a richer and ﬁner shaping in order to
heighten their aesthetic value. Examples of this sort
are the graceful ornaments derived from textile pat-
terns on the bone pipes and the needle cases of the
hyperboreans. Far more frequently the original forms
are simpliﬁed, 'in order to make their representation
easier. Many of the curious ﬁgures of Australian
ornamentation, the meaning of which seems quite puz-
zling at ﬁrst sight, doubtless originated in this way.
The workman for his convenience has shaped the natu-
ral forms more and more simply and summarily in the

.

158 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

course of time, till ﬁnally hardly even a distant resem-
blance to the natural ﬁgure remained in the copy.*
The technic motives, too, have often had to suffer un-
der the pressure of this indolence. The Mincopy, for
example, never takes the trouble to copy exactly a
piece of woven work on his jar, but satisﬁes himself
with a superﬁcial resemblance. While transformation
of this or other motives may result, no particularly
lively or strong inventive faculty is ever revealed.
Some historians of culture have ascribed to primitive
man an excess of fancy. If he really possesses any-
thing of the kind, it is doubly remarkable that he never
exhibits even a trace of it in the productions of his
representative art.

The form of primitive ornamentation is in large
part immediately dependent on the material. The often
observed preference for angular and rectilinear forms
is explained, for example, in most cases, as a result of
the imitation of textile prototypes. Indeed, this tex-
tile style is frequently applied, especially in Australia,
in the representation of natural forms. We need only
recollect how illusively the picture of a skin or of
plumage on an Australian shield sometimes resembles
woven work. Brough Smyth, whom this peculiarity has
not escaped, traces it back to the incapacity of the
“ savages,” who “ can not, without an effort, make a large
circle or a large curve, . . . for they appear to have
the greatest difficulty in emancipating themselves from

 

* We have already observed that other factors are effective in
these transformations. The Whole process, which is not limited to
the art of hunting peoples, can be followed best in Melanesian orna-
mentation. Compare Stolpe, Entwicklungserscheinungen in der
Ornamentik der Natur-Völker.

ORNAMENTATION. 159

the control which geometrical ﬁgures exercise on the
mind.” *

Unfortunately, the value of his explanation is some-
what damaged by the illustrations Mr. Smyth has in-
troduced into his Work, and from which anybody so
fortunate as to have eyes can fully satisfy himself that
the Australian “ savages ” drew large curves quite as
well and as often as small ones. According to our view,
the true reason does not lie in the sociological depths
into which Brough Smyth has immersed it. If the
learned author of the Aboriginies of Victoria had once
tried the experiment of scratching a ﬁgure upon a
stick of wood with an Australian graving tool, with
a tooth, a piece of shell, or a sharp stone, he would
doubtless have remarked that even he, whose civilized
mind was much more easily emancipated from the
dominion of geometrical ﬁgures, could in this wise exe-
cute a curve “ not without effort”; and would perhaps,
in consequence of this experiment, agree with us in
accounting for the Australian ﬁgures as a natural result
of the necessary conditions under which the carvers

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. xliii. The whole passage is so typical
an example of the usual treatment of primitive ornamentation that
we can not refrain from quoting it entire: “Savages, when they
attempt ornamentation, appear to have the greatest difﬁculty in
emancipating themselves from the control which geometrical ﬁgures
exercise on the mind. They can not, without an effort, make a large
circle or a large curve. A snake drawn by an Australian is angular,
and the neck of the emu is angular. Perhaps it is correct to say
that whenever curved lines prevail in the decorations of a race (!)
there is an approach to a state as regards art somewhat higher than
that of the savage. It may be that of barbarism; but still the
use of the curve indicates a higher culture than that known to the
races who have exclusively geometrical patterns.” In this way so-
ciological laws are discovered.

160 > THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

worked. The geometrical character is, in fact, often
and evidently prominent in the cut designs, whilethe
simply painted ﬁgures are regularly distinguished by a
much freer treatment, and chieﬂy by their easy and cor-
rectly drawn eurves.* Gottfried Semper has demon-
strated in his famous book that the artistic style of the
higher peoples is very largely controlled by the tech-
nical conditions. We see that his proposition is no less
applicable to the art of the primitive tribes.

It is not difﬁcult to recognise the inﬂuence of primi-
tive culture on primitive ornamentation; but it is not
quite so easy. conversely, to determine the inﬂuence of
primitive ornamentation on culture. Our concern is
obviously only with those functions of ornamentation
which it performs as ornamentation—that is, as decora~
tive art; and, since we know that the aesthetic signiﬁ-
cance of decoration among hunting tribes is for the
most part only secondary, we must henceforth expect
that its inﬂuence also will be only subordinate. It
might at ﬁrst be supposed that the decoration of imple-

ments played a similar part in social life as means of ‚

attraction and repulsion with decoration of the body.
Perhaps the ornamentation of the weapons of an Aus-
tralian suitor is not wholly without inﬂuence upon the
decision of the woman wooed, or of the relatives who

 

* Compare our pictures, particularly the spindle-shaped shield
(Fig. 4, a). The geometrical ground pattern is scratched, while the
large curves, at least on the similar shield in possession of the Frei-
burg Museum, are painted with red chalk. The large shield from
Queensland (Fig. 4, b), which is in the Berlin Völker-Museum, is
likewise simply painted, and consequently bears an abundance of
large curves. All the other shields with geometrical patterns which
we have reproduced are scratched.

\

ORNAMENTATION. 1 6 1

have the disposal of her hand. Yet it seems to us a
little hazardous to conclude concerning primitive condi-
tions in this matter from those which prevail among our
civilized peoples. The “inner qualities” alone of the
candidate do not carry the point in Australia any more
than they do in Europe; but, so far as we know, the
person is far more regarded in the transaction than the
always very inconsiderable property. Still less is the
value that may be ascribed to the primitive ornamen-
tation of implements a means of fortifying the social
distinctions. It is certainly probable that the most dis-
tinguished men of the tribe, the best and most experi-
enced hunters, possess more richly and carefully adorned
weapons than the others; it is not less probable, how-
ever, that they exercise the same authority, even when
they do not possess such. Only the decorations of the
shield, ﬁnally, can serve as a means for terrifying; and
the use of the shield is far from being universal among
the hunting peoples, and is almost conﬁned to the Aus-
tralians. The designs on Australian shields are never
put there to frighten an enemy, as are sometimes the
threatening demoniac-looking caricatures on the shields
of the Dyaks; but they are obviously intended only to
be marks for recognition and sometimes amulets. The
most important and beneﬁcent inﬂuence which decora-
tion of implements exercises on the life of the primi-
tive tribes consists, in our opinion, in the stimulus it
gives to technical development. Decoration demands
and promotes a technical skill, which works in its turn
to the beneﬁt of practical interests. Even the strong-
est aesthetic needs are not competent to raise technical
execution above the lower stages to which the pressure
of economical exigencies holds it inexorably fastened.

162 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Only when this pressure has been broken by means of
the transition to the higher forms of production can the
rich interworking between technical execution and or-
namentation which we admire in the Polynesians and
the Americans unfold itself. At any rate, the inﬂu-
ence of the primitive ornaments on social life is opera-
tive through their extra aesthetic meaning, so far as
they serve as symbols, property marks, or emblems,
vastly more variously and deeply than through their
artistic form. Ornamentation has in this lowest stage of
development only a secondary artistic character; pleas—
ing forms attach themselves to the practical, signiﬁcant
features only as the tendrils of a young climbing plant
to the branches of a tree. But later on the vine devel-
ops faster and more richly than the tree, and ﬁnally the
form of the tree almost disappears under the dense
green foliage and bright blossoms of the vine. The
tree ornaments, which at ﬁrst play so relatively modest a
part, continuously expand more Widely and luxuriantly,
while at the same time the secondary ornaments gradu-
ally lose their original meaning and likewise develop
into purely aesthetic forms. There is thus a great
difference between the ornamentation of the primitive
and that of the higher peoples in nature, and conse-
quently in inﬂuence. The attempt to follow the social
inﬂuences of the higher forms of ornamentation would
lead us too far beyond the limits of this work. They
are certainly not insigniﬁcant, wherever, at least, the
shameful prostitution of ornamental art to the interests
of our modern manufacturing enterprise has not de-
stroyed its charm and force.

CHAPTER VII.

REPRESENTATIVE ART.

FEW prehistoric discoveries have attracted so gen-
eral attention as the sculptures of the reindeer period,
which were brought to light from the grottos of Dor-
dogne. Among human and animal remains and im-
plements of stone and bone were discovered a number
of pieces of reindeer horn which bore scratched designs.
The engravings principally represented animals, and
were so clearly and correctly characteristic that most of
them could be zoologically determined at once. The
wild horse, the reindeer, the wild goat, and the aurochs
were unmistakable. The masterpiece was a dagger of
reindeer horn, the handle of which was carved into the
ﬁgure of a springing reindeer, a work which would do
no discredit to an artist of the present time. The ma-
terial of the carving was, as we have said, reindeer
horn ; and since, according to the judgment of experts,
horn can be worked only when it is fresh, we have to
assume that the unknown artists were contemporaneous
with the reindeer in southern France ; in other words,
that the ﬁgures are of an extremely remote antiquity.
~ Ideas concerning the age of the human race have been
considerably extended since the discoveries of Boucher

de Perthes ; but no one would have anticipated such
12 163

164 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

artistic achievements from primeval men. The art
work which was seen here corresponded so little with
the civilization of the primeval age, as it had been con-
ceived that an inclination was naturally manifested to
dismiss the inconvenient discoveries by declaring them
to be falsiﬁcations.* But it was necessary to prove

 

FIG. 19,—DAGGER—IIANDLE 0E REINDEER HORN. (From a cast.)

the fraud, and for this the circumstances under which
the discoveries were made oﬁered no point open to at-
taclmL Thus the art works of the men of the reindeer
period would probably have been laid aside among
the other unsolved problems of prehistoric times had

 

* Two pieces, drawings of a fox and a bear, said to have been
discovered in Kesler Lake at Thayingen, are really known to be
modern falsiﬁcations. The excavations at Thayingen were begun.
however, as is well known, after the French ﬁnds had long occupied
general attention.

+These ﬁnds have been more recently considerably increased.
A series of carvings were exhibited in the anthropological division
at the World’s Exposition of 1889, which had been dug up in the
grotto of the Jlfas d’Azz'l. Some pieces showed an artistic perfection
which even far surpassed that of the famous reindeer ﬁgure of
Laugeric Busse. An express assurance was in fact necessary that
the discoveries had been made under the supervision of approved
experts, to suppress the doubts concerning the age of these admi-
rable sculptures.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 165

it not been recollected that traces of a similar artistic
activity had been observed by travellers among some
of the rude peoples of the present age. Curiously, the
most primitive tribes are the very ones which have
distinguished themselves by a high faculty for making
pictorial representations true to Nature.

Let us ﬁrst consider the facts as they are presented
in the several accounts. We begin again with the Aus-
tralians. At the time when it was found convenient
in works on ethnology and the history of culture to
represent the Australians as a kind of half men, even
the most inconsiderable artistic capacity was of course
denied them. Even in the year 1871 Wake could re-
peat to the Anthropological Society in London Old-
ﬁeld’s assertion that “the Australians are not capable
of distinguishing the picture of a man from any other
animal unless some part, like the head, is represented
in exaggerated size ”~without being contradicted.*
And yet some of the most interesting works of Aus-
tralian sculpture had been excellently pictured and de-
scribed thirty years before. At the end of the thirties
George Grey discovered some caves at Upper Glenelg,
in northern Australia, the walls of which were adorned
with paintings. On the obliquely ascending roof-
stones of the ﬁrst cavern the white-painted upper half
of a human ﬁgure rose from a black background. The
head was surrounded by a crown of bright-red rays,
probably intended to represent a headdressd' In the
face, which was turned toward the observer, the eyes

 

* Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. i, p. 75.
1- The natives in the north wear a similar headdress at their cor-
roborries—oogee. Picture in Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 280.

166 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART,

and nose were plainly marked, but the mouth was
curiously wanting, as it was in all the other ﬁgures.*
The face was white,
and the eyes were
black and bordered
. with red and yellow
lines. On the arms,
which hung down,
the ﬁngers were in-
dicated by strokes.
The short strokes
which covered the
body may have rep-
resented the scariﬁ-
cation usual in Aus-

 

“\.Hluhll—l „ll

ill" “115:; '21s tralia, or perhaps a

’" Ii 5 : 7’: _
é‘g :— «JH ; ? garment of skin.
„%\>>>i\“‘éj>‚‘ The rock wall on

/ /

\\‘l/l/l A /\'\‘„1////, the left bore a
e)“ Fiﬁ/l {ll/i LE group of four heads
{ \ ": \\ 1n lively colours.
( ‘ “ From the mild

FIG. 20.—AUSTRALIAN CAVE PAINTING AT

GLENELG. (After Grey.) express1ons Of then.

faces I took them
to be women,” says Grey; “and they seemed to be
, drawn so as to appear looking up at the principal ﬁgure

 

* Andree, who thinks that the “Australian natives had acted
upon the idea of preventing the delineated ﬁgures from speaking,” is
wrong when he says that “the Australian always avoids drawing
the mouth.” Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen, new series, p. 62.
Examples to the contrary will be found in Brough Smy th, v.01 i,
p. 288; vol. ii, plate at pp. 257, 258; also in Ratzel, Völkerkunde,
vol. ii, pp2 955.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 167

described above; each had a very remarkable head—
dress coloured deep blue, and one were a neekband.
The two lower ﬁgures had on a kind of dress, and one
were a girdle around the loins. Each of the four faces
exhibited a totalbr different expression; and although
the mouth was wanting in all of them, two of them ap-

 

FIG. 2L—AUSTRALIAN CAVE PAINTING AT GLENELG. (After Grey.)

peared to me rather good—looking. The whole picture
was executed on a white ground.”* On the roof was
a bright golden—yellow elliptical ﬁgure, traversed by
red-dotted lines and divided lengthwise by a white
band edged with blue lines, within which was a kangaroo
drawn in red, among some ﬁgures that appeared to rep-

 

* George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in
Northwest and Western Australia, 1841, vol. i, p. 203.

168 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

resent spear-heads. By the side of this picture stood a
human ﬁgure traced in red, bearing a red kangaroo on
its shoulders, besides also a number of other ﬁgures of
animals and men, which were very badly drawn.

In front of a second cave a human head was hewn
in proﬁle in the sandstone rock. “The head measured
two feet in height and sixteen inches in its greatest
breadth; the depth increased gradually from the even
edges to the middle, where it was an inch and a half;
the car was rather badly represented ; but the work as a
whole was well done and far excelled the efforts usually
accredited to a savage race.” *

The most astonishing work, however, was awaiting
the discoverer in the third cave. “The principal pic-
ture therein was the ﬁgure of a man ten feet six inches
high, which was clad from the chin down in a red gar—
ment, reaching to the wrists and ankles, so that only
the badly executed hands and feet were visible. The
head of the °ﬁgure was surrounded by a series of circu-
lar bands painted red, yellow, and white. Of the face,
only the eyes were given. A series of red lines were
marked on the outer band so regularly that they seemed
to express some kind of a meaning, but it was impossi-
ble to determine whether they were intended for writ-
ten characters or only as an ornament. Grey himself
did not doubt that the paintings and sculptures in the
caves at Grlenelg were the work of aborigines. Yet this
opinion has been so often contested that it seems neces-
sary to verify it. It has been assumed that the work
must have been that of some European castaway or of
the Malays, who resort to this coast for trade, for it

 

* Grey, vol. i, p. 205.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 169

was inconceivable that so rude savages as the Austra-
lians could have been capable of such artistic achieve—

- ments. This capacity has,
however, been demonstrated
beyond a doubt, for we have
Australian drawings that far
excel these paintings in artis-
tic worth. Further, the tech-
nical execution of the Grey
ﬁgures exhibits the same
characteristic traits as are
found in all the works of
Australian pictorial art.
Rock paintings and sculp-
tures are no rarity, as we
shall see, in the northern part
of the continent. “The col-
ours, too,” as Gerland says,
who regarded the paintings
at Glenelg somewhat skep-
tically, “are not remarkable,
and are known to all the
New Hollandcrs: the black
is coal; the white and yel-
low, kinds of clay, one of
which when burned gives
red.” * The subjects of the
representations, with a sin-

   
 

 

 

'an

"
/
z/oaéß
{.

  

 

 

FIG. 22.—-AUSTRALIAN CAVE PAINT-

ING AT GLENELG. (After Grey.)

gle exception, are taken from the usual round of ex-
The ﬁgure in the third
cave is dressed in a robe of a kind which the Austra-

periences of the aborigines.

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 761.

170 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

lians, so far as we know, never wear. The feet of the
ﬁgure, too, seem to be dressed contrary to the Austra-
lian usage. Finally, Gerland supposes that “those
superscribed characters, as Grey has ﬁgured them, are
letters from the Bugi or Macassar alphabet.” * But
even if it should be shown that the painted ﬁgure is a
Malay, that will not prove that the painter was not an
Australian. This question will be settled above all by
the technical method, and a glance at Grey’s copy shows
that the execution of the ﬁgure in question does not '
differ in any essential feature from that of other paint-
ings, the Australian origin of which is indubitable. In
case the marks on the headdress are Macassar letters,
the artist was probably a native who had had inter-
course for some time with the Burisj' Thus we are
justiﬁed inregarding the paintings at Glenelg, with
Grey, as works of real Australian art. We have already
said that they are by no means the only ones of their
kind. Rock ﬁgures are very common in the north.
Stokes discovered on Depuch Island, a small island of
the Forestier group, a whole gallery of pictures, or,
more correctly, of reliefs, which were cut into the
smooth rock wall. “The red, hard crust of the rock
had been removed from within the outlines of the
ﬁgures, so that the designs were brought out in the
original green colour of the stone. Many of the repre-
sentations, the subjects of which could be recognised at
the ﬁrst glance, revealed great skill.’ ’ 1: The copies pub-

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 762.

+ Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi. p. 762. “ Indeed, the New Hollanders
of these regions visit the Malay countries not rarely.” J ukes, Nar-
rative of the Survey Voyage of H. M. S. Fly, vol. i, p. 139.}

* Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, vol. ii, pp. 170 et seq.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 171

lished by Stokes fully conﬁrm this judgment. Most of
the reliefs represent animals: a shark accompanied by
a pilot-ﬁsh, a dog, a beetle, a crab, a kangaroo, etc.,
all executed as simple silhouettes, and nevertheless so
strikingly characterized that they can indeed “ be rec-
ognised at ﬁrst sight.” Man also is not absent, but the

 

FIG. 23.—AUSTRALIAN ROCK SCULPTURES ON DEPUCH ISLAND.
(After Stokes.)

warrior, armed with spear and shield, which Stokes
copies, is much more unskilfully drawn than those
animals, and so likewise is the representation of a
corroborry. “ The number of designs was so immense
that the aborigines must have been amusing themselves
for a long time in this innocent way. While I was
looking at the different ﬁgures—the men, animals, birds,
weapons, implements, and scenes in the life of the
savages—I began to reﬂect on the singular mental bent
that led those rude men, perhaps at particular seasons,
to this solitary picture gallery among the waves of the
sea, to admire and add to the works of their fathers.
They without doubt applied as much patience, labour,
and enthusiasm to their works of art as Raphael and
Michaelangelo to the wall paintings in the Sistine
Chapel and the Vatican, and perhaps the admiration
and applause of their fellow—tribesmen ﬁlled them with
the same delight as the favour of popes and princes

172 _ THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and the praise of the whole civilized world could give
to the great Italian masters.” *

“ On Chasm Island, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, is a
cave in which ﬁgures have been drawn with black and
red colours on the white rock—kangaroos, tortoises, a
hand, then a kangaroo, followed by thirty-two men, the
third of whom carries a kind of a sword, and is twice as
large as the others.” + “Likewise a rock on Clack’s
Island on the northeast coast was ﬁrst primed with red
ochre, after which fairly good sharks, tortoises, trepangs,
starﬁsh, clubs, canoes, kangaroos, dogs, etc., were painted
I with white earth, more than a hundred and ﬁfty ﬁg-
ures.” it On the peninsula of Cape York “Norman
Taylor found a smooth rock wall, on which numerous
ﬁgures were drawn in outlines of red ochre and ﬁlled
out with white, A similar ﬁgure in outline of a man
was further spotted with yellow. On the hard slabs
along the shore were the incised outlines of a few well-
drawn tortoises, which reminded him of the sculptured-
rocks at Bondi, near Sydney, Where men, sharks, and
ﬁshes are cut in the smooth sandstone.” # The rock
drawings at Sydney, which are mentioned here, prob-
ably resemble the sculptures in the neighbourhood of
Port Jackson, for the examination and description of
which we are indebted to Angas. “When we exam-
ined the ﬂat rocks in every direction,” says Angas, “ we
found enough examples of these curious outlines to con~

 

* Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, vol. ii, p. 170.

+ Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 760. Flinders’s Voyage to Terra
Australis, vol. ii, p. 158.

$ Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 760. King, Narrative of a Survey of
the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia, vol. ii, p. 25.

# Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 292.

. REPRESENTATIVE ART. 173

ﬁrm us in the Opinion that they were executed by
natives; at what time is, however, quite uncertain.
From the half-obliterated condition in which many of
these are found (although the lines are out nearly an
inch deep in the hard rocks), and from the circum-
stance that we had to remove earth and shrubbery of
considerable age from several of the ﬁgures, it follows
that they were executed a very long time ago. At
ﬁrst we could not bring ourselves to believe that these
sculptures were the work of savages, and we supposed
that the ﬁgure of the kangaroo, the ﬁrst that was found,
was of European origin; but when we extended our
investigations further and found that the farthest and
most inaccessible shore rocks were adorned with similar
sculptures, all of which represented truly indigenous
objects—such as kangaroos, opossums, sharks, shields,
the boomerang, and, most of all, human ﬁgures in the
positions of the corroborry dance—no other conclusion
was left us than that they were the work of aborigines.
Europeans, if they had undertaken so laborious and
protracted a work, would have drawn ships, horses, and
men with hats. An old writer on New South Wales
remarked, about 1803, of the aborigines: “They have
a taste for sculpture; most of their implements are
decorated with rude carvings which they make with
pieces of shell, and on the rocks may be seen various
ﬁgures of ﬁshes, birds, swords, animals, etc., which are
not badly represented. . . . Some ﬁgures of ﬁshes are
twenty-ﬁve feet long, and it is noteworthy that the
shield in the picture corresponds exactly with that
which the aborigines of Port Stephen still carry. We
found similar works at Lane Cove, Port Aiken, and
Port Piper. When I visited the last place I thought

174 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

that such sculptures as those on the cliff might possibly
be found on the ﬂat rocks at the end of the park be-
longing to the estate, and after a careful search I found
a considerable number, which were still in fairly good
condition.” * “ Philipp saw everywhere at Botany Bay
and Port Jackson, as well as in the interior, ﬁgures of
animals (ﬁshes, birds, lizards, the last quite large), of
shields, weapons, men, and similar objects, rude but
plainly and rather well drawn, engraved in the rocks.
A dancing man out on a rock wall at the top of a hill
was particularly good.” 1-

The examples cited are sufﬁcient to indicate the ex-
tent and the character of the Australian rock carvings.
While the works of this kind correspond to the fresco
paintings and reliefs of European ornaments, our can-
vas paintings also have their analogies in Australia in
the drawings which the aborigines make on soot-black-
ened pieces of hide. These sketches, which are scratched
with the aid of a sharp stone or a tooth or simply with
the ﬁnger nail, are without doubt the highest achieve-
ments of Australian pictorial art, and it is much to be
regretted that they have not been collected and pub-
lished in greater numbers. While the rock paintings
and sculptures are mostly limited to the representation
of single ﬁgures, the hide drawings display large asso-
ciated groups of men and animals with the landscapes
around them. Brough Smyth has published a remark-
ably characteristic work of this kind. The hide on
which it appears constituted originally a part of the
roof of a but which a native had built on Lake Tyrrell.

 

* Angas: Wood, Natural History of Man, vol. ii, p. 95.
+ Waitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 759.

 

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REPRESENTATIVE ART. 175

The man was not unacquainted with the customs of
' the Whites‚ “ but had received no guidance from them.”
The ﬁgures are drawn with the ﬁnger nail on the soot-
blackened hide. In the lower part of the picture is
seen ﬁrst a pond surrounded by low trees. On the
right of this rises the stone house of a European set-
tier. Immediately above this is a group of natives
dancing the corroborry ; on the left sit the singing and
time-beating women; by their side are several specta-
tors. Farther up are individual groups separated from
one another by division lines. On the left in a circle
are two men armed with hatchets approaching a snake.
In the centre is a native in his canoe pursuing a water
bird. On the right is a pond fringed with bushes on
Which two birds are swimming. On the other side of
this pond rises a group of trees under which a native
stands with a gun in his arms. By his side squats
another smoking a pipe. Near the two lie weapons
and implements. Above them a plain dotted with
scattered trees extends to the upper end of the picture,
which is enlivened with all sorts of animals. The trees
and animals are excellently well drawn. The tall euca-
lyptus on the left, whose trunk a native is climbing
with the aid of his hatchet; the squatting kangaroo;
the emus, the turkeys ; a snake raising itself up—all are
delineated with surprising accuracy. The waving line
that incloses the whole is probably intended for a river.
The execution of the entire picture is rude enough, and
yet every line betrays an artistic talent which nobody
would have looked for on Lake Tyrrell.

Quite as admirable as this hide picture are the pen-
cil-and-pen sketches of a native from the upper Mur-
ray which Brough Smyth has reproduced in his second

176 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

volume. We should not conclude from the European
materials, which the artist had obtained from a settler,
that he had enjoyed a European training. He was
rather an “ untaught aboriginal lad.” The sketches
were made very rapidly, without model, and of his own
suggestion. A war dance is represented on the upper
part of the first sheet. The dancers, brandishing
shields, clubs, and boomerangs, are in the characteristic
attitude of jumping. Below
them is seen the ordinary cor-
fmborry ; to the left the clan-
cers decorated with bunches of
leaves; to the right, on a small
elevation, the woman orches-
tra in full activity, over-
topped by a tree, on the crown
of which a bird is sitting.

FIG. 24,—AUSTRALIAN DRAWING. .
(After Brough Smyth.) Two hunting scenes occupy
the lower portion of the pict-
ure. A native in his little canoe is aiming with his spear
at a ﬁsh. Three hunters who have covered themselves
with herbage are creeping up toward four emus. The
group of three hunters deserves special attention, for it
exhibits the single effort at perspective drawing which
we have been able to discover in Australian art. The
principal group of the second sheet is again a corro-
borry, which an excellently characterized pair of Euro-
peans are witnessing. Above it lies the farm and two
houses with peaked roofs and smoking chimneys. The
rest of the sheet is filled with hunting scenes : a native
who is running with uplifted hatchet after an iguana;
another in a canoe spearing a ﬁsh; a third, likewise in
a canoe, grappling for a tortoise; and a fourth threat-

 
   
 
 
    
  

 
    

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REPRESENTATIVE ART.

177

ening a pair of emus with his javelin. Most of the
ﬁgures are silhouettes, the outlines being ﬁlled in with

an even black, but nevertheless are
full of expression and life. An-
other sketch which is given by
Brough Smyth is quite as fresh in
design but more carefully carried
out. The groups of farmers which
it represents attest a marked gift of
observation, and besides, as Brough
Smyth suggests, a strong sense of
humour. The designer was a native
youth.* Sometimes the designs are
engraved on a stick with a piece of
shell or with a tooth in the same
way as the ornaments on shields
and clubs. Brough Smyth has illus-
trated these marks, too, by a good
example. It is a grave tablet which
a native of the Yarra tribe made for
a deceased friend. The ﬁgures are
remarkably neat and plainly cut
into the wood, and the animals es-
pecially are not inferior to those
previously described. “ The artist
is now dead, and it is therefore im-
possible to explain the picture. His
tribesmen do not know the meaning
of the individual ﬁgures, but they
think that the ﬁve men at the top

   
     

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Fro. 25,—AUSTRALIAN
GRAVE TABLET or
BARK. (Af‘terBrough
Smyth.)

are friends of the deceased who are inquiring into

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. ii, p. 258.

178 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the cause of his death, that the ﬁgures of animals in-
dicate that the deceased did not die from want of
food, and that the curious ﬁgures at the lower end are
mooroops, or spirits, which have brought about the
death by malicious sorcery.” * Similar pictures were
found in the huts of the exterminated Tasmanians.
“In the Western Mountains,” says Calder, “huts were
found which were decorated with rude charcoal pic-
tures. The ﬁrst represented a kangaroo of unnatural
form, the fore legs of which were twice as long as the
hind legs; another was intended for an emu; a third
showed an animal which might be taken at will for a
dog, a horse, or a crocodile. But the master work was
a battle piece—a conﬂict between natives, with men
ﬁghting and persons falling”)L

Let us try to extract and combine from these single
sketches the general characteristic traits of Australian
pictorial art. The pictures of the Australians are, for
the most part, drawings, and only the smallest part of
them are polychrome paintings. The Australians do
not use any different colours in their painting from
those they employ in their ornamentation—red, yellow,
and White—all three mostly of mineral origin; a black
of charcoal; and a blue the nature of which is not
known. These pigments are applied with fat, and
then, as has been determined in the caves at Glenelg,
are covered with a pitchy insoluble gumd; No signs oi
shading have been discovered in the paintings.

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 289. »

1- Calder, Native Tribes of Tasmania. Journ. Anthrop. Inst.,
vol. iii, p. 21.

1 “ The aborigines procured a red colouring matter either from
weathered rocks Where it is found as a clay or by the burning of trap

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 179

The pictures are engraved or scratched on stone or
wood, or are drawn in one colour on a primed or un-
primed rock wall. As a rule, the artists are satisﬁed
with marking the outlines of the ﬁgures, which are
then generally ﬁlled in with an even tone. In these
outline drawings the proﬁle is decidedly preferred, but
is not used exclusively. Only one group suggests an
effort at a perspective arrangement, and even this
faint indication is perhaps only accidental. It may
be assumed as certain that both linear and aerial per-
spective are foreign to Australian pictorial art in gen-
eral. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Australian places
things which really stand one behind the other, one
over the other. The subjects of Australian pictorial
work are partly single ﬁgures that have no relation to
one another, and partly connected groups, often rich in
ﬁgures. Both the single ﬁgures and the groups, with
few exceptions, belong to the usual circle of experi-
ence of the aborigines. It should be said with empha-
sis that “the unbridled fancy” which is so frequently
ascribed to savages never appears in the Australian
pictures. They reveal rather a want than an excess of
fancy. The form of these pictures is as soberly natu-
ralistic as their substance; the artist endeavours to

 

or porphyry. Yellow clay and yellow ochre are not abundant and
are wanting in many districts. White clay is found everywhere in
the region of the granite and the paleozoic formations. In the
tertiary regions, Where white clay does not occur on the surface, the
aborigines burned a very good colouring material out of gypsum
and selenite. A black colour was obtained from charcoal or soot.”
Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 294. “ Yellow is also obtained from the in-
terior of the nests of certain ants which collect yellow dust, and from
a fucus. Some other plant juices are used for colours—for example,
to colour red.” Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 761.
13

180 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

repeat the natural forms and movements in the most
characteristic manner possible; and he has with his
rude tools reached a degree of success in this which
the most cultivated Europeans, with abundant appli-
ances, are never able to attain.

This pictorial talent does not appear in individual
Australians alone, but seems to be almost a common
property of the aboriginal population. “Many of the
young people,” says Chauncey, “are capable of de-
lineating objects. On the Murray, where they usually
cover their huts with hides, the young men very often
amuse themselves by scratching or drawing with char-
coal various ﬁgures and scenes on the inner sides of the
skins. Many of the young people have a talent for
drawing, and sketch With great rapidity.” * Albert Le
Souéﬂ likewise avers that “the aborigines in general
possess considerable capacity for carving and draw-
ing.”+ There are evidently great differences in this
capacity, as a glance at our examples shows There
are good and bad draughtsmen, even in Austialia; but,
as a whole, the talent for drawing seems to be more
generally diffused than in Europe.

As to the Australians, so has the most insigniﬁcant
knowledge and capacity for pictorial art been denied
by critics to the “half-brute” Bushmen; and like the
, Australians, the “half-brute” Bushmen, too, possess,
despite these denials, a gift for observation and repre-
sentation such as are sometimes not found in the sharp-
sighted anthropologists who discover everywhere re-
semblances to monkeys.

The rock sculptures and paintings of the Bushmen

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. ii, p. 258. ‘r lbid., vol. ii, p. 299.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. _ 181

are so numerous in South Africa that the investigating
traveller can not easily overlook them. Fritsch found
upon ﬂat stones, on a hill not far from Hopetown,
“thousands of ﬁgures of various animals, often twenty
or more on one block.” * “ The area of distribution of
such ﬁgures,” he says, “is very great, and extends from
the immediate vicinity of the Cape, where there are still
remains of them at Tulbagh Kloof, through the whole
colony and across the Orange River.” Mark Hutch-
inson found in the Drachenherg the walls of caves in
which Bushmen had lived wholly covered with such
paintings; and Hübner saw at “ Gestoppte F ontein,”
in the Transvaal, between two and three hundred ﬁg-
ures engraved on soft slateq“

The technical style of these South African pictures
agrees perfectly with that which we have learned to
know in Australia. The ﬁgures are either scratched
on a dark rock with a harder stone, so that they appear
on the ground in lighter colours, or are painted in col-
ours on a light-lined rock, and with the same limited
provision of earth colours as that of the Australians—
bright red, brown ochre, yellow, and black. A green
also occurs sometimes. The colours are mixed with fat
or blood, and laid on with the assistance of a featherq:
The subjects represented by the Bushmen are taken
from the same source in which the Australian ﬁnds
his—from his everyday surroundings. Fritsch says,
however, that “the artists appear sometimes to give
their fancy free play”; but the only example he ad-
duces hardly bears witness to any special strength of

 

* Fritsch, Eingeborene Süd-Afrikas, p. 426.
{Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 464; Zeitschr. für Ethnol.,
vol. iii, p. 51. 5; Wood, vol. i, p. 298.

182 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

this artistic fancy—“ a naked human ﬁgure With red
zigzag lines on its loins and something like a folded
umbrella in its hand, on a rock at Keypoort, which could
not well be interpreted.”* The Bushman generally
represents only such things as he has seen and which

 

FIG. 26.—Rocx DRAWINGS OF THE BUSHMEN. (After Fritsch.)

immediately interest him—animals and men. ~Nothing
else could be expected than that the plants should be
neglected by so speciﬁcally a hunting people. In com-
pensation for that the higher fauna of South Africa is
exceedingly well represented—the elephant, the rhi-

 

* Fritsch, p. 426.

 

 

 

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(After Andrée.)

PLATE lII.-—A CAVE PAINTING OF THE BUSHMEN.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 183

noceros, the. giraffe, the eland, the buffalo, the various
kinds of antelope, the ostrich, the hyena, the apes, and,
besides wild animals, the larger domesticated beasts,
dogs, cattle, and horses. Among them appear equally
unmistakable the human types of South Africa: the
little Bushman with his bow, the large Kaﬂir with his
assegai, and the Boer with his broad-brimmed hat and
his terrible gun. Most of these ﬁgures stand with-
out relation to one another; but in particular cases the
Bushman has ventured, like the Australian, on larger
compositions. The most remarkable example of this
kind which has come under our notice is the picture of
a battle between Bushmen and Kaﬁirs which Andree
has copied from a communication to the Société des
Missions Evangéliques of Paris. The original paint-
ing is in a cave two kilometres from the mission station
of Hermon. A horde of Bushmen who have stolen
a herd of cattle is pursued by the plundered Kaﬁirs.
While some of the robbers hurriedly drive the cattle
onward, the larger number turn with their bows to-
ward the enemy, who are rushing forward, armed
with spears and shields. “Remarkable,” says Andree,
“is the exaggeration of the difference in size between
the little Bushmen and the large Kaﬂirs, through which
the artist perhaps sought to express the heroism of the
fact that those little people dared to oppose the gigantic,
muscular Kaﬂirs.” * The pictorial works of the Bush-
men display the same excellences that have been re-
marked in the primitive drawings of the Australians;
the wonderfully sharp comprehension and accurate rep-
resentation of natural forms and movements. “The

 

* Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen, new series, p. 67.

184 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

characteristic features of the several species were so
distinctly stamped,” says Büttner, “ that we were never
in doubt as to the meaning of a ﬁgure even where the
inﬂuence of the weather had allowed little of it to re-
main.”* The ﬁrst feature of that battle picture that
strikes the eye is the extraordinary truthfulness and
vivacity with which the motions of the men and ani-
mals are reproduced, such as have only been brought
so sharply to our comprehension by means of instanta-
neous photography. In other respects this remarkable
painting suffers from the same lack of perspective that
we have found prevailing in Australian art. There
is, however, an exception here. At least the better
draughtsmen among the Bushmen are acquainted with
the elementary principles of perspective. “It is re-
markable,” writes Büttner, “that the ﬁgures in the
several groups which are to be regarded ‘as farther
away are drawn considerably smaller”; and he after-
ward mentions the picture of a chase of springbok “in
which it could be clearly perceived that the hunters,
ranged in a wide circle, were driving the game in from
every side. The perspective reduction mentioned above
was seen in this picture also, and both hunters and
springbok in the distance were delineated on a smaller
scale.” 1' Hutchinson avers, likewise: “ Perspective
and foreshortening are correctly reproduced. A draw-
ing of a rear view of an ox or elafrd is so remarkable
for this trait that it might be regarded as a study or
demonstration for the purpose of instruction.” i

 

* Zeitschr. für Ethnol., vol. x, p. (17). + Ibid., vol. x, p. (17).

i Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 464. Baines, however, asserts
exactly the contrary. “The Bushman knows nothing of perspec-
tive, and has not the slightest idea of foreshortening a horn or a

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 185

The characterization which we have given of the.
pictorial art of the Australians and Bushmen applies
almost word for word to the drawings of the northern
tribes of hunting peOples. All the tribes that live in
the extreme north of America and Asia—the Tchuk-
tchis, the Aleuts, and the Eskimo—are very fond of
drawing; and there is hardly an ethnographical mu-
seum in which a few of their artistic productions can
not be seen. The dimensions of the pictures are, how-
ever, very modest. The monumental rock paintings of
Australia and South Africa are not to be found in the
north. The hyperborean artist scratches his ﬁgures in
miniature on a walrus’ tooth, or he paints it with red
ochre and charcoal, which he has mixed with oil, on a
piece of walrus hide.* In other respects his represen-
tations have the same naturalistic character which the
drawings of the Bushmen possess in common with
those of the Australians.

 

limb so as to conceal it behind another as it appears to the eye.”
But he has evidently, as also appears undoubtedly from his descrip-
tion, only seen bungling pieces, such as are mentioned by other
travellers in addition to better works. The painting which Wood,
who agrees with Baines’ judgment. has copied is a bungling piece
of this kind, wholly unﬁt to give a conception of the capacity of the
Bushman to make pictures.

* “The drawings of the Eskimo are put upon slightly curved
pieces of walrus ivory and on bows, the strings of which are used to
set in motion the borer with which ﬁre is produced.” Hildebrand,
Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Kunst der ni'éderen Naturvolker; Nor-
denskiold, Studien und Forsehungen. p. 313. See there, on the plate,
p. 320, the ﬁgure of a piece of walrus hide with drawings of the
Tchucktchis. The other Tchuktchi drawings which Hildebrand
ﬁgures were made with pencil or red ochre on paper for the Vega
Expedition. Choris (Voyage pittoresque auteur du Monde) ﬁgures
the wooden cap-visor of an Aleut having upon it the representation
of a seal and Whale hunt.

186

FIG. 27.—CARV!NG BY AN ESKIMO ON A PIECE or WALRUs TUSK.

 

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.’

The hyperboreans also take special
pleasure in copying ﬁgures and scenes
which are brought before them in their
daily life. On the carved walrus tusks of
the Eskimo may be seen the round snow
huts and the skin-covered summer tents;
bears and walruses, at which the hunter
aims his harpoon; men who are pad-
dling in boats of hide to the land, on
which others are gliding along in dog
sledges. In the drawings of the Tchuk-
tchis, besides scenes like these, the famil-
iar reindeer are most prominent; and the
Aleuts adorn the visors of their curious
caps with ﬁgures of Img/ak men on the
hunt for whales and ﬁsh. Fanciful crea-
tures are of rare occurrence. Only one
being, that does not belong to the real
world, is found in the considerable num-
ber of Tchuktchi drawings which Hilde-
brand has reproduced: it is the man in
the moon, in the shape of a manikin
dressed in the Tchuktehi style, with a
large head standing in the middle of a
very imperfect circle.* The same super-
natural being appears in an interesting
drawing of an Eskimo which Boas has
annexed to his translation of the Saga of
Qandjaqdjuq.+ In this picture, however,
the man in the moon is not distinguish-

 

* Hildebrand, Beiträge, p. 311, Fig. 6.
J[Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1884—’85; Boas,
The Central Eskimo, pp. 631, 632.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 187

able from an ordinary Eskimo. The delineatory style
of the hyperboreans does not differ in any essential re-
spect from that of the two peOples already mentioned.
The observance of perspective is as lacking in all their
pictures as in those of the Australians. Yet single
drawings manifest an unmistakable advance in this
direction.* On the other side, the excellences are the
same. The several ﬁgures and groups of the hyper-
boreans are reproduced with the same absolute truth to

 

FIG. 28.—DRAWI:<G BY A Tcucxcm. (After Hildebrand.)

Nature in form and motion that has excited our ad-
miration in the pictures of the Australians and Bush-
men.

While the hyperboreans do not excel their culture
fellows as draughtsmen, they have developed another
branch of their pictorial art to a height which still
remains unattainable to all the other known hunting
tribes. Neither the Australians nor the Bushmen have
sculpture, but the hyperboreans are famous master
carvers; and, in fact, we observe in their ﬁgures out
from bone the best achievements of primitive repre-
sentative art.

These little pieces of sculpture—they are all insig-
niﬁcant in size— represent either men or animals. The

 

* Compare, for example. Hildebrand, p. 311, Fig. 10, where the
more distant reindeer are represented on a plainly reduced scale;
but especially Boas, p. 631, Fig. 538.

188 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

human ﬁgures are generally rather rudely executed,
although they are still always sufﬁciently characterized;
but they are certainly much “inferior to the animal

 

FIG. 29.-—HYPERBOREAN BONE CARVINGS. (After Hildebrand.)

ﬁgures.”* But the latter are wonderful works. The
various cetaceans, walruses, sea-dogs, hears, dogs, foxes,
ﬁshes, and birds—in short, all the animals that play any
part in the life of the hyperboreans—are so sharply
comprehended and so characteristically copied that the
carvings might serve the zoologist as objects of study.
As we have said, nothing like them is found among
the other hunting peoples of the present time. If we
would see primitive sculptures of equal merit we must
go back to the reindeer periodJ' Finally, we may men-

 

* Yet there are exceptions to this. The University Museum of
Ethnology at Freiburg has, for example, a plaster cast of a female
torso, which might be taken for a sketch by a European sculptor.

+Pictures of such carvings may be found in Hildebrand, pp.
324—334, and Boas, Plates VIII and IX.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 189

tion here the remarkable masks of the Eskimo, though
they can hardly be regarded as primitive works. Con-
trary to the case of bone carvings, the masks are not
the common possessions of the Eskimo, and still less of
the hyperboreans; but their distribution is limited at
this time to the tribes inhabiting the peninsula of
Alaska. It is therefore highly probable that the masks,
as well as the peculiar dances in which they are worn,
are not an original property of the Eskimo, but have
been borrowed from the Indians of the northwest
coast, who have developed the use of masks in an ex-
traordinarily rich and original way.* Yet the masks
are not without value as helps to the appreciation of
the pictorial talent of the Eskimo. Even the most
hasty glance must show the profound difference that
exists between them and the really primitive drawings
and ﬁgures in bone. While the last, like the primitive
pictorial works of the Australians and Bushmen, ex-

 

Fxc. 30.—ALEUT CARVINGS ON’ BONES. (After Hildebrand.)

hibit throughout a sober naturalistic character, the
masks for the most part simulate the productions of an
unbridled fancy ; and, most signiﬁcantly, are espe-
cially fanciful among the southern tribes, who dwell in

 

*Compare Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen, new series,
p. 155.

190 " THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the immediate neighbourhood of the Northwestern In~.
dians.* When we consider the rich collection which
Jacobsen obtained for the Berlin Völker-Museum and
Bastian has published in the new series of his Ameri-
kas Nordwestkuste, we might believe we were looking
at the caricatures of a wild fever-dream. The natural-
istic basis of primitive pictorial art is, however, still ap-
parent in them. The numerous masks representing
animals are at least as lifelike as the best bone ﬁgures;
and in some of the human faces the characteristic fea-
tures of the Eskimo can be studied as well as in the liv-
ing originalst But most of the animals, and especially
the human ﬁgures, are unnaturally distorted—horrible
demoniac faces with grinning teeth in wide-open, blood-
stained mouths, one with gaping red wounds in the
forehead, another with one frightful staring eye, while
a grinning head rises out of the socket of the other.
Very often the animal and human forms may be seen
most strangely amalgamated. One mask represents a
puﬁ‘in, another an otter——both perfectly true to N ature—
as far as the back, from which a devil’s face looks out:
One demon’s head is furnished with six hands; two
wings grow out of a second. There are pictures that
remind us of the creatures of. the primitive chaos of

 

* In the masks of the most northern part of Alaska “the gro-
tesque element, which is so abundantly prominent in Bristol Bay
and in the delta of the Kuskoquim and the Yukon, is, judging from
the collected specimens, almost wholly wanting.” Dall, Masks and
Labrets. Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p.v122.

+ Compare Bastian Gri’mwedel, Amerikas Nordwestkﬁste, new
series, Plate 1, Fig. 7 ; Plate V, Figs. 19, 20.

t Compare Amerikas Nordwcstki‘iste, new series, Plate I, Fig. 3;
Plate IH, Fig. 5. Such combinations are Well—known characteristics
of Indian pictorial a-rt.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 191

Lucretius. Sometimes a whole proceeding is symboli-
cally represented in one of these composite masks, as
in the Shamanic mask amam gawk, which is used for
the ceremony of “enticing the ﬁshes, especially the
salmon, and the seals into the river to be caught.” The
ﬁgures on the mask are intended to bring the subject
spirits of the Shaman before the eyes. The mask con-
sists of a face painted gray and white, with two hands
by the side of it, two Shaman’s wands over the face, and

 

FIG. 31.—BONE CARVINGS OF THE Esxmo. (After Boas.)

a seal between them. On the right and left beneath
the face are two square holes, and under these a red
hollow ball with several holes representing the mouths
of the river, into which the salmon, which are likewise
symbolically represented, are driven by the power of
the Shaman.* These complex ﬁgures are evidently no
primitive works. If we have nevertheless considered
them somewhat closely, it has been because they show

 

'" Amerikas Nordwestküste, new series, Plate I, Fig. 2.

192 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

of what achievements the artistic talent of a hunting
people is capable under favourable conditions. The
dance masks of the Aleuts, which have now, through
the eﬂorts of the missionaries, almost wholly disap-
peared, seem to have been no more primitive. We
only know that they mostly represented sea animals,
and covered their wearer to the shoulders. The masks
which these people were accustomed to put on the
dead in the grave have at least in part come down to
us, and Dall has collected a number of remains of
them. “The masks were all made after one type, al-
though they differed from one another in details.
They were on the average fourteen English inches
in height and—including the curvature—from ten
to twelve inches in breadth. All had a broad and
thick but not ﬂattened nose; straight, ﬂat eyebrows;
thin lips and a large mouth, in which small wood-
en teeth were inserted. They were all painted with
various colours, most of them black and red; bore
tufts of hair fastened with pegs, which represented
the beard and hair along the upper border of the
forehead; were pierced only in the nostrils and the
mouth; and had broad, ﬁat ears, which were placed, un-
naturally high, on the upper hinder corners of the mask.
Numerous curves of different kinds were scratched or
painted on the cheeks. These masks reveal great skill
in the carver’s art, especially when it is considered that
they were executed with tools of stone and bone.” *

 

*Dall, loo. cih. pp. 140, 141. Illustrated in Plates XXVIII and
XXIX. There is also a picture of a dance mask there—from Saucr’s
report of Billings’s J ourney—that plainly shows the Aleut physiog-
nomy, which most strangely. as Dall justly remarks, never appears
on the corpse masks. The latter are rather of the Indian type.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 193

The talent for pictorial representation is thus widely
diffused among the hunting peoples. Yet it is not uni-
versal. There are at least three peoples to Whom repre-
sentative art seems wholly foreign. Nothing has thus
far been discovered among the wretched Fuegians or
the Botocudo to indicate the existence of a gift of this
kind: and Man, who knows them best, says expressly
of the people of the Andaman Islands, that “in their
wild condition they never make an effort to represent
any object, and apparently have no idea of drawing.” *

Before endeavouring to explain the primitive pic-
torial works which we have been considering, let us
summarize the characteristic traits that are common to
them. Primitive representative art is decidedly natu-
ralistic in material and form. With few exceptions, it
selects its objects from its usual natural and cultural
surroundings, and it seeks to represent this as naturally
as it can with its limited means. Its materials are
scanty; the perspective, even in its best works, is very
deﬁcient. But it, nevertheless, succeeds in giving its
rude ﬁgures a truthfulness to life which is missed in the
carefully elaborated designs of many higher peoples.
The chief peculiarity of primitive pictorial art lies just
in this union of truth to life and rudeness. It is there-
fore more surprising than accurate that the drawings of
the primitive peoples are always and again put on a par
with those of children; for not a trace of the sharp
observation which is always unmistakably prominent in
the pictures of the hunting peoples can be discovered
in the unaided scrawls of the most earnest children.
The art works with which our children decorate tables

 

* Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 115.

194 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and walls are much more symbolical than naturalistic.
The only real similarity between the art of children and
the art of primitive peoples is that the latter seem to
know as little of perspective as the former. The draw—
ings of children and those of savages are usually re-
garded as caricatures; and this view is usually as false
in one case as in the other. When a child or an Aus-
tralian exaggerates any part of the body or of the dress
in a picture, it means, if it is done not from want of skill
but designedly, primarily nothing more than that that
feature, for some reason, seemed to the artist especially
worthy of notice. Children and savages really have a
strong inclination toward satire; and it is therefore safe
to suppose that caricatures, too, will be found among
the productions of primitive pictorial representation.
But it is not easy to pick them out, and it is well to
declare only those primitive designs to be caricatures
the satirical intent of which is expressly manifest. We
have ourselves followed this principle, and have there-
fore ventured to designate only one primitive pictorial
work as a caricature.

We have said that ethnology is able to cast light
upon the darkness that covers the origin of the French
reindeer etchings. Yet the problem is not solved, but
only enlarged by what we have so far advanced. We
have seen that these prehistoric representations are in
no sense a solitary phenomenon, but that quite similar
works are still produced in great numbers by some of
the rudest peoples of the present time. Yet the artistic
productions of the present Australians, Bushmen, and
hyperboreans are not less problematical to us than the
works of the unknown men of the reindeer period.
Very little is gained toward the comprehension of a

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 1 95

phenomenon by the proof of the extent of its diﬂusion,
unless that is accompanied by the possibility of demon-
strating the basis of it. It is a question Whether we
can discover the conditions that made so high artistic
achievements possible in so low a grade of culture.
The art works of primitive peoples have been described ‘
often, but they have never thus far been accounted for.
It is, nevertheless, probable that learned ingenuity has
overlooked the explanation, while it lies quite near.
What, besides the materials, are the requisites for the
execution of such pictorial works as we have observed
among the hunting peoples? Two qualities are prima-
rily requisite: ﬁrst, capacity for keen comprehension
and a correct impression of the original; and, secondly,
a corresponding perfection of the motor and sensorial
apparatus that come into play in pictorial work. Can
we assume that both these properties are present in
these peoples? They must be present, or the peoples
themselves would be no longer in existence. Austra-
lians, Bushmen, and hyperboreans would long ago have
perished in the struggle for existence if they had not
improved eye and hand, their best and most indispen-
sable weapons, to higher eﬂiciency. Nature has directed
them to the product of the chase for the largest part of
their subsistence. But their prey would be very scanty,
V even in the richest hunting grounds, without that name-
less gift of perception and observation by means of
which the primitive hunter acquires an exact knowl-
edge of the nature and habits of the several wild spe-
cies. “ The vision of the Australians,” says Collins,* “is
extraordinarily good, and their existence in fact depends

 

* Collins, Northwest and Western Australia, vol. i, p, 315.
14

196 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

often enough on the sharpness of their eye.” The
Australian hunter can follow the trail of a kangaroo all
day through thicket and grass; he can, without fail,
ﬁnd the claw marks of an opossum on the bark of a
eucalyptus tree, when they are hardly visible to a Eu-
ropean, and further can tell, almost at the ﬁrst glance,
whether they are fresh or old, and whether the animal
climbed up or down. “The memory of the Australian
for sense impressions is really astonishing. Stuart re-
lates that he was recognised again after fourteen years
by aborigines who had previously seen him for only
one or two hours, and other travellers mention similar
experiences.” * Fritsch boasts of the Bushmen that
“they surpass all the other South Africans in the
sharpness of their senses. Most surprising to me,” he
says, “were the feats of the Bushmen in tracking.
They follow a track at a rapid pace over ground rather
thickly covered with vegetation, hardly seeming to give
it any attention, and only when it makes a sudden turn
or something unusual happens, do they betray, by a
gesture, the strict observation which they give to the
most inconspicuous objects.” 'f‘ Hardly a polar ex-
plorer has failed to speak with admiration of the sharp
and active power of observation of the hyperboreans.
“They are thoroughly acquainted,” says Kane, “with
their desolate home. Every change in the weather, the
wind, and the ice is remarked, and the inﬂuence of the
change on the ﬂight of the birds of passage is predicted
with the same keen sense with which they watch the
habits of the sedentary animals.” The hunter, more-

 

* Waitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 736.
+ Fritsch, Die Eiugeborenen Süd-Afrikas, p. 424.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 197

over, needs not his eye alone, but his hand, too. It is
not enough that he can track and observe his game; he
must know how to bring it down, and for that he re-
quires suitable weapons above all other things. That
the hunting peoples have distinguished themselves by a
high and adequate development of their weapons is
therefore not at all wonderful. They have indeed
every reason for cultivating their skill in this direction,
for it is with these weapons that they have to struggle
for their existence. In fact, the implements of the
chase of all the hunting peoples attest a technical skill
which appears the greater the poorer the tools which
the primitive peoples have to use. To a superﬁcial ob-
server the weapons of the Australians appear indeed
exceedingly rude, but the more closely we examine
them the more we wonder at the skill with which they
are fabricated. The throw-sticks especially are not such
very simple works as they seem to be.* The Bushman
knows 110w to construct his ingenious poisoned arrows,
to which, surrounded by enemies, he owes his existence
with the simplest means. But the highest technical
mastery is found where harsh Nature strains the -facul—
ties to their extreme tension—among the hyperborean
tribes. “ When we consider the rude condition of their
culture, their northern situation in a country which lies
almost constantly covered with snow, and the compara-
tively miserable materials which they have to work, we
receive the impression that they are the equals, at least,
of the peoples on the islands of the Paciﬁc Ocean.” So
Cook declared of the tribes on Prince William Sound,

 

* Compare on this point the discussion of Australian throw-
sticks in Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 313.

198 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and so says every student of the hyperborean tribes
whose weapons and tools he has examined. When we
consider the remarkably neat and carefully ﬁnished
harpoons, bows, and arrows we can hardly regard it as
surprising that the men who made such weapons were
able to carve an animal form true to Nature.* Power
of observation and skill with the hand are the qualities
demanded for primitive naturalistic pictorial art, and
the faculty of observation and handiness of execution
are at the same time the two indispensable requisites
for the primitive hunter life. Primitive pictorial art,
with its peculiar characteristics, thus appears fully com—
prehensible to us as an aesthetic exercise of two facul-
ties which the struggle for existence has developed and
improved among the primitive peoples. We learn now,
likewise, why pictorial talent is almost universally dif-
fused among primitive peoples. W’here every one has
to be a good hunter and hand worker, every one may be
a passable draughtsman and carver. On the other hand,
an equally simple explanation is given of the fact that
the talent for naturalistic representation is as rare among
the lower farming and herding pe0ples as it is abundant
among the hunters. Fritsch expressly refers to the con-
trast between the lifelike sketches of the Bushmen and
the “ stiff, grotesque ﬁgures of animals which the Bantu
painfully model and carve.” This contrast is manifest
‘also, though perhaps nowhere so sharply prominent as
in South Africa, between people of the two grades of
culture everywhere. High as the agriculturists and
herdsmen stand above the hunters in civilization, they

 

* See the pictures of weapons of the Eskimo in Boas, The Gem
tral Eskimo.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 199

are as far beneath them in representative art—an
evidence, we remark by the way, that the relation
between culture and art is not so simple as some art
philosophers believe. To us this apparently abnormal
phenomenon is perfectly comprehensible. Neither the
agriculturists nor the herdsmen require for their main-
tenance so high a perfection of the power of observa-
tion and of skill with the hand; consequently these
faculties deteriorate among them, and with these the
talent for naturalistic representation.

The problem of the reindeer carvings is thus sub—
stantially solved by ethnology. The much-discussed
ﬁgures are the work of a primitive people. Their
truth to Nature is in fact not any evidence against
their high antiquity, but the best evidence in favour
of it.

We have called the carvings and drawings of the
primitive peoples works of art. It is still to be consid-
ered whether they really have a title to that designa-
tion, for it is by no means self-evident that these picto-
rial works owe their origin to an aesthetic need. The
Philosophy of Art inclines to another view. One of its
oldest and most dogmatic precepts declares that picto-
rial art has always arisen in the beginning as the servant
of religion and that it has only gradually grown into
independence. This venerable dogma does not ﬁnd
sufﬁcient support in the facts which we have examined.
Grey, it is true, expresses the opinion that the pictures
at Glenelg may have some religious signiﬁcance, but
neither he nor any other student has been able to dis-
cover the mysterious meaning. Nobody has ever yet
sought for such a meaning in the other Australian rock
drawings. It is indeed conceivable that a few at least

200 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

of these representations may be a kind of religious
symbols. The thought of representing the protecting
and heraldic animals of the different tribes in such a
monumental way may not have been remote from the
Australian mind, and many analogies may be called up
from Egyptian and Christian art; but so long as this
assumption can not be demonstrated—and we have not
yet seen the shadow of a demonstration of it—we have
no right to say that these ﬁgures of animals and men are
anything else than they appear to be. We know posi-
tively of the pictures on bark that they have no relation
to religious ideas and uses.*

The South African rock drawings have no deeper
meaning than the Australian. One of the best-in-
formed men concerning the Bushmen—Theophilus
Hahn—expressly assures us that “they practise their
art purely from a fondness for representing things.” 1'
The conditions among the hyperboreans are not so
clear. It will not readily occur to anybody who has
seen their drawings to doubt their secular character.
The sculptures, on the other hand, have at least partly
a religious import. Cranz says that “the Greenlanders
attach to the kayak a small model of it with the ﬁgure
of a man, so that it shall not cant.”¢ Hildebrand re-
marks of the carvings of the Tchuktchis that “some of

 

* The Australian drawings which seem to have a religious mean-
ing—the ﬁgures on the supposed magic sticks, for example—exhibit
a quite different character. They are unintelligible combinations of
lines which sometimes suggest the ornaments on the shields and
throw-sticks, but are as diﬁerent as possible from the naturalistic
representations of the rock and drawings on bark. Compare, for
example, the picture in Ratzel, vol. ii, p. 91.

+ Zeitsch. für Ethnol., 1879; Verh. der Anth. Ges., p. (307).

i Crauz, Historic von Grönland, 1765, p. 276.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 201

them at least served as amulets and thereby testiﬁed to
the mysterious connection which was supposed to exist
between the destiny of animals and of men.” * J acob-
sen mentions models of bows, kayaks, reindeer, and
whales which were laid on graves by the Eskimo on the
southwest coast of Alaska “as evidence that the de—
ceased who was commemorated there had perished in
the walrus, seal, or reindeer hunt.” In the same region
monuments for the dead are found “ which consist of
rudely worked and partly clad ﬁgures.” Finally, J a-
cobsen says that many of the young girls “wear a
wooden idol fastened into the hood of their dress of
furs.”+ Yet on the one side all these observations
cover only one part, and, as it seems, a small part, of
the sculptures; on the contrary, other accounts indi-
cate indubitably that the ﬁgures as a rule have no re-
ligious signiﬁcance. When the Philosophy of Art ap-
peals ﬁnally to the Shaman masks of the southwestern
Eskimo it forgets that they are in no sense primitive
works.

Thus representative art as a rule arises in the lowest
stage of culture independent of religion. Still, while it
is not proved that the pictures of primitive peoples are
religious, it has also not been shown that they are
aesthetic.

An interpretation has often been sought of these
drawings on rocks, wood, and bones that would make _
them a picture writing. In a certain sense every picto-
rial representation is a writing, for every picture stands
for an event or a fact. In this widest sense the Aus-

 

* Hildebrand, Beiträge, p. 323.
f Jacobsen, Reise an der Nordwest Küste Amerikas, p. 334.

202 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

tralian pictures representing a corrobom'y, and the
South African cave painting which describes a combat
between Bushmen and Kaﬂirs, are certainly writings;
but so also in this sense are Raphael’s frescoes. A

(After Mallery.)

picture does not, however, become a

% €! writing in the proper sense until the pic-
torial representation is no longer an ob-

_ ject in itself, but is only a means to ex-
ä :: press some signiﬁcance. Impression is
the essential purpose of the picture; ex-

25 S pression, that of writing. But when the
ﬁgures are intended only as a means of

_ expression they are no longer required to
:: be true to Nature and carefully elabo-
rated. It is enough if they are recog-

k °° nizable in a general way. In fact, we
can distinguish a picture writing from a

Ä“ " picture at ﬁrst glance by the schematic
and conventional method in which the

0 “’ ﬁgures are treated. We do not ﬁnd this
X h characteristic mark of pictography in the

pictures of the Australians and Bush-
9 ‚. men. On the contrary, every trace proves

that the artists intended nothing more

and nothing less than the truest and

& most lifelike possible representation of
6'"

FIG. 32.—PICTURE WRITING mom ALASKA.

their models. Hence it happens that the

Australians use a wholly different method

k ° for their demonstrably written expres-
sions. The marks on their message-

sticks * have absolutely nothing in common with their

 

* Howitt, On Australian Messengers and Message—sticks. Journ.
Anthrop. Inst., vol. xviii.

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 203

pictures; they‘are entirely arbitrarily chosen lines and
points. When, on the other hand, we consider the
drawings which the hyperboreans engrave on wood
and bone, we are struck at once by the characteristic
schematizing of the ﬁgures on some of the examples,
and these pieces are in reality not so much works of art
as writings. .

Mallery has ﬁgured and interpreted a series of such
picture writings in his instructive essay, Pictographs of
the North American Indians."“ These are used on the
most various occasions. The specimen which we re-
produce here from Mallery, for example, scratched on
a wooden tablet and fastened near the house door, is
intended to announce that the proprietor of the hut has
gone on a long huntl" In a similar way hunters call
upon their fellow-tribesmen for assistance when they
are destitute of provisions or are in any other need.

 

* Mallery, Pictographs of the North American Indians. Fourth
Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.

1- The original was drawn and interpreted by a native of Alaska,
Naumoﬂt', for Dr. Hoffmann in San Francisco. The meaning of the
ﬁgures, singly, is as follows: 1, The speaker, who points to himself
with his right hand, and with his left indicates the direction taken ;
2, he holds an oar to show that he has gone by water; 3, the right
hand against the head means sleep, and his left hand with one ﬁnger
extended, one night; 4, a circle with two points in the middle de-
notes an island with huts; 5, repetition of 1; 6, a circle, means a
second island; 7, repetition of 3, but with two extended ﬁngers,
meaning two nights; 8, the speaker with a harpoon makes the sign
with his left hand for a sea lion; 10, a hunter with arrow and how;
11, a boat with two rowers; 12, the speaker’s lodge. Read in con-
nection, the whole gives the sense: “ I am going with my boat that
way toward that island, where I shall sleep one night, and shall then
go to another island, Where I shall stay two nights. I expect to kill
a sea lion and then return home.” Mallery, pp. 147, 148.

204 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

All representations of this kind are undoubtedly picture
writings, but these are unmistakably diﬂerent from the
real pictures which we have previously considered.
Further than this, picture writing does not appear to be
a common possession of the hyperborean tribes. At
least the numerous examples which Mallery publishes
are all from Alaska and from that part of the Terri-
tory in which the Indian inﬂuence is so strong that
they can not furnish any sure basis for our researches.
At any rate there is not the slightest occasion for pro-
nouncing the drawings of the hyperboreans in gen-
era], to say nothing of their sculptures, to be picture
writing.

We have thus satisﬁed ourselves that, with compara-
tively few exceptions, neither a religious nor any other
outside purpose can be proved to be intended in the
pictorial works of primitive men. We have a full right,
therefore, to give credit to the numerous witnesses who
assure us that these representations originate from the
pure pleasure of making them.

The hunter’s life, under the most unfavourable cir-
cumstances, affords the leisure required for such pur-
poseless creations; the hyperborean ﬁnds it in his icy
desert, as well as do the Australian and the Bushman
in their subtropical hunting grounds. It is not incum-
bent on us to give here an explanation of this inclina-
tion of primitive man toward pictorial representation;
we have fulﬁlled our purpose in showing that the pleas-
ure of aesthetic creation, together with the faculty
of observation and the manual skill of the hunting
tribes, account satisfactorily for their artistic achieve-
ments.

It is self-evident that these beginnings of repre-

REPRESENTATIVE ART. 205

sentative art have to the primitive peoples, through the
pleasure they produce, a value that should not be
too lightly estimated. There is a question, however,
whether they do not, besides, exercise an inﬂuence on
the social life. In culture of the higher grades picto-
rial representation has more than once appeared as the
wsthetically and practically most eﬁicient art. It was
the one which inspired the creation of their palladiums
for the Grecian communes and the Italian cities. In
antiquity and in the renaissance it, as the queen of the
arts, incorporated in marble, bronze, and colours, the
religious and social ideas around which the burghcrs
rallied and in sight of which they felt as one people and
one community. It may be said that the history of the
Grecian and the Italian free cities is the history of their
representative art. The survey of graphic and plastic
art teaches us, however, that we can, without further
knowledge, as little draw conclusions from higher con-
ditions as to lower as the reverse.

There is no point on which the supposition can be
based that pictorial art had a meaning to the primitive
tribes even approximately like that which it possesses
for the more highly civilized societies. How slight the
social inﬂuence is in the lower grades of civilization is
attested by the fact that the cultural character of the
hunting peoples which know nothing of it is in no
essential respect distinguishable from that of those who
experience it. Some picture or another—as, for exam-
ple, that South African battle piece which preserves to
succeeding generations the remembrance of an impor-
tant tribal event—may in this way contribute to the
strengthening of the social bond. Yet, in general,
the scope of primitive pictorial art is too limited, its

206 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

means are too rude and meagre, for a more profound
social effect to be possible. Hence, admirable as its
works are in many respects, the essential characteristics
of primitive culture would undoubtedly have been the
same Without primitive pictorial art.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ‚DANCE.

WHILE the signiﬁcance which pictorial art in life-
less material has acquired among the higher peoples can
be discerned, at least in the germ, among the lower
tribes, the great social power which the living picture,
the dance, once possessed, can hardly be guessed to-day.
The modern dance is only a degenerated aesthetical and
social remnant; the primitive dance is the most imme-
diate, most perfect, and most efﬁcient expression of the
primitive aesthetic feeling.

The characteristic mark of the dance is the rhyth-
mical order of the motions. There is no dance with-
, out rhythm. The dances of hunting peoples can be
divided, according to their character, into two groups—
mimetic and gymnastic dances. The mimetic dances
consist of rhythmical imitations of the motions of ani-
mals’and men, while the movements in gymnastic dances
follow no natural model. Both kinds appear side by
side among the most primitive tribes.*

 

* The question might be asked whether the gymnastic dances
were not originally mimetic dances. It is certainly possible that in
some cases we can not recognise the imitation, because we are not
acquainted with the model. On the other side, the most primitive
dances of which we know, the love dances of certain species of birds,
have no mimetic but a gymnastic character.

207

208 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Best known are the gymnastic dances of the Aus-
tralians, the corroborriesﬁ which have been described
in nearly every account of Australian travel, for they
are known over the whole continent. The corroborries
are always performed at night, and generally by moon-
light. We do not, however, consider it necessary, for
that reason, to regard them as religious ceremonies.
Moonlight nights are chosen probably not because they
are holy, but because they are clear. The dancers are
usually men, While women form the orchestra. F re-
quently several tribes join in a great dancing festival;
four hundred participants have occasionally been count-
ed in Victoria.1‘ The largest and most noteworthy
festivals apparently take place on the conclusion of a
peace; i: moreover, all the more important events of
Australian life are celebrated by dances—the ripening of
a fruit, the beginning of the oyster dredging, the initia-
tion of the youth, a meeting with a friendly tribe, the
march to battle, a successful hunt. The corroborm’es of
different occasions and of different tribes are so like one
another that the observer is acquainted with them all
when he has seen one. Let us suppose ourselves attend—
ing one described by Thomas in the colony of Victoria?
The scene is a clearing in the bush. In the middle of
it blazes a large ﬁre, the ruddy glare of which is min-
gled with the bluish light of the full moon. The dan-
cers are not yet visible; they have retired into the dark
shrubbery to put on their festal decorations. On one
side of the ﬁre are assembled the women who are to

 

* Occasionally mimic dances have been called corroborm'es, but
as a rule, the name is used only for gymnastic dances.

1- Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 175. f Lumholtz, p. 286.

** According to Brough Smyth, vol. i, pp. 167, 168.

THE DANCE. 209

form the orchestra. All at once a crackling and rust-
ling are heard, and the dancers appear. The thirty
men whohave entered within the circle of the ﬁrelight
have all painted, with white earth, rings around the eyes
and long streaks on the body and limbs. They wear,
besides, tufts of leaves on their ankles and an apron of
hide around their loins. Meanwhile the women have
arranged themselves, facing one another, into a horse-
shoe-shaped group. They are entirely naked. Each
holds on her knees a neatly folded and tightly stretched
opossum skin, which serves at other times as a robe.
Between them and the ﬁre stands the director. He
wears the usual apron of opossum skin, and holds a stick
in each hand. The spectators sit or stand around in
a large circle. The director casts a searching glance
at the dancers, then turns and slowly approaches the
women. He strikes his two sticks abruptly together;
the dancers have arranged themselves with the rapidity
of lightning in a line, and advance; then they halt. A
new pause, while the director reviews the line. All is
in order, and now at last he gives the signal. He be-
gins by beating the time with his two sticks; the dan-
cers fall in with the movement; the women sing and
beat on the opossum hides, and the corroborry begins.
It is astonishing how accurately the time is kept; the
tunes and the movements are all in unison. The dan-
cers move as smoothly as the best-trained ballet troupe.
They assume all possible positions, sometimes springing
aside, sometimes advancing, sometimes retiring one or
two steps ; they stretch and bend themselves, swing their
arms and stamp with their feet. Nor is the director
idle. While he is beating the time with his sticks, he
continually executes a peculiar nasal song, louder or

210 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

more softly by turn, as he makes a step forward or
backward. He does not stand in the same place for an
instant; now he turns toward the dancers, now toward
the women, who then lift up their voices with all their
might. The dancers gradually become more excited;
the time-sticks are struck faster; the motions become
more rapid and vigorous; the dancers shake themselves,
spring into the air to an incredible height, and ﬁnally
utter a shrill cry, as if from one mouth. An instant
later, and they have all vanished into the bushes as sud-
denly as they came out of them. The place remains
empty for a while. Then the director gives the signal
anew, and the dancers again appear. This time they
form a curved line. In other respects the second part
is like a continuation of the ﬁrst one. The women ad-
vance, beating and singing at times as loud as if they
would split their throats, at other times so softly that
their murmuring is hardly audible. The ending is sim-
ilar to that of the ﬁrst part; and a third, fourth, and
ﬁfth act are performed in a similar style. At one time,
however, the dancers form a band four ﬁles deep: the
ﬁrst line springs aside; those behind it advance, and in
this way the mass moves forward toward the women.
The troop looks now like an inextricable tangle of
bodies and limbs; and one would think the dancers
were about to break one another’ s skulls with their
wildly brandished sticks. But in reality a strict regu—
lation prevails now as in the earlier part of the dance.
The excitement is at its height; the dancers cry out,
stamp, and jump ; the women beat time as if they were
crazy, and sing with all the strength of their lungs; the
ﬁre, which is blazing up high, scatters a shower of red
sparks over the wild scene; and then the director raises

THE DANCE. 211

his arms high over his head; a loud clapping breaks
through the tumult, and the next instant the dancers
are gone. The women and the spectators rise and dis-
perse to their miams. A half hour later nothing is
stirring in the moonlit clearing except the waning ﬁre.
Such is an Australian corroborry.

The corroborrg/ of the men, as we have said, always
offers substantially the same spectacle, but the dance of
the women, which is apparently much more rarely in-
troduced, presents a very diﬂferent character. We owe
the best description of the woman’s‘dance to Eyre.*
“The dancing women,” he says, “clasp their hands
over their heads, lock their feet, and press their knees
together. Then the legs are thrown outward from the
knee—while the feet and hands remain in their original
position—and are brought together again so quickly as
to give a sharp sound when they strike. This dance is
performed either by one girl alone, or by several, at
pleasure. Sometimes, too, a woman dances it alone
before a ﬁle of male dancers in order to excite their
passion. In another ﬁgure the feet are kept close to-
gether on the ground, and the dancers move forward,
while describing a small semicircle, by a peculiar wrig-
gling of the body. This dance is almost solely per-
formed by young girls in concert.” The corrobowies
of the Tasmanians, so far as can be judged from the
scanty accounts we have of them, did not differ from
those of the Australians.

The striking resemblance which we have so far
remarked at every step between the Australians and
the Mincopies extends also to the dance. The dances

 

15 * Eyre, vol. ii, pp. 235, 236.

212 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

of the Mincopies so resemble those of the Australians
that they might be interchangeable with them. The
occasions are the same—a visit of friends, the begin-
ning of a season, recovery from illness, and the end of a
period of mourning; in short, every event which would
excite a joyful feeling in the people. In addition to
these, larger festivals are celebrated, to which several
tribes resort. 011 a little clearing in the midst of the
thick jungle, says Man, are collected more than a hun-
dred bepainted men and women. The moon pours
down its soft light, while out of every but the ruddy
glow of ﬁres casts weird shadows through the scattered
groups. On one side sit in a row the women who are
to sing in chorus the refrain of the dancing song; on
the other side are seen the dusky forms of the specta-
tors, many of whom take part in the performance by
clapping their hands in unison. The director, who is
likewise the poet and composer of the (lance melody,
stations himself where he can be seen by all; his foot
resting on the narrow end of the sounding—board,* and,
supporting his body on a spear or a how, he beats the
time for the singers and dancers, tapping on the sound—
ing-board with the sole or the heel of his other foot.
During his solo, which has the character of a recitative,
all the other voices are silent, and the spectators remain
motionless; but as soon as the sign for the refrain is
given, a number of dancers plunge in wild excitement
into the arena, and, while performing their parts with
passionate energy, the song of the women becomes
stronger. The dancer bends his back and throws his

 

* Concerning the sounding-board of the Mincopies, see Chap-
ter X.

THE DANCE. 2 l 3

whole weight upon one leg, which is bent at the knee.
His hands are extended forward at the height of his
breast, the thumb of one being held between the thumb
and foreﬁnger of the other, while the other ﬁngers are
extended upward. In this position he advances, hop-
ping on one foot and stamping on the ground with the
other at every second motion. He thus crosses the
whole arena forward and backward, to the time of the
sounding—board and the song. When the dancer tires,
he indulges himself in a little change by giving the
time in a peculiar fashion, bending his knees and rais-
ing his heels from the ground exactly according to the
measure.* As in Australia, in the Andaman Islands
the women do not take part in the dances of men. But
they have their own dances, which, according to the
accounts of some eyewitnesses, are of rather doubt-
ful propriety. Man’s description, however, furnishes
nothing remarkable concerning them. He says that
the women swing their arms forward and backward,
While their knees are bent and moved up and down.
N ow and then the dancer advances two steps and be-
gins the movements anew.

The Bushmen have so lively a talent for mimicry
that we might expect to see it exercised in their dances.
Nevertheless, the accounts, which are scanty enough,
mention only gymnastic dancers. The most complete
description of a Bushman dance is found in Burchellxl'
The dance took place in the evening in a hut that be-
longed to the head man, “ and there were in it as many
persons of both sexes as could sit in a circle and leave

 

* Man, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, pp." 390. 391.
4} Burchell, Reisen in das Innere von Süd-Afrika. Weimar, 1825,
vol. ii, pp. 81 et seq.

214 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the dancers standing room. A bright ﬁre was blazing
close by the entrance. The dancer was in an ecstasy of
vivacity and satisfaction, in which he cared nothing
about him and hardly thought of himself. As an adult
can hardly stand up, even in the largest hut, the dancer
was obliged to support himself on two long sticks,
which he held in his hands and which rested on the
ﬂoor as far apart as was conveniently practicable. Con-
sequently his body was bent forward in an extremely
constrained position, and a very awkward one for
dancing. On the other hand, his limbs were not re-
strained by clothing, for he wore nothing but his
jackal’s skin. In this position he danced without paus-
ing. Sometimes he did not even support himself on
the sticks. It was the privilege of each of the com-
pany, when his turn came, to take his place and dance
as long as he pleased; then another put on the rattle,
which is there generally used. This dance is peculiar,
and so far as I know there is nothing like it among any
other savage tribes on the globe.* One foot was ﬁrmly
planted, while the other was kept in rapid and irregu-
lar motion, but without suffering any notable change of
place, although the knee and lower part of the leg
moved hither and thither as far as the position per-
mitted. The arms, having to support the body, were
only slightly moved. The dancer sang all the while,
keeping time with his movements. Sometimes he let
his body down and raised it again quickly, till at last,
wearied by the difﬁcult motions, he sank to the ground
to catch his breath. He continued to sing, however,

 

* Burchell was not acquainted with the dance of the Mincopies,
for his Bushman dance was very like it. A Mincopy dancer would,
in fact, have moved himself just as the Bushman did.

THE DANCE. 21 5

and moved his body, keeping time with the singing of
the spectators. After a few minutes he rose again and
resumed his dance with new vigour. When one leg
was tired, or when the course of the dance brought it
about, the turn of the other came. The dancer wore a
kind of rattle on each ankle, which was made of four
springboks’ ears joined together, containing a number
of pieces of ostrich-egg shells, which gave at each
movement of the foot a sound that was not unpleasant
or harsh, and considerably enhanced the effect of the
performance. Although only one person could dance
at a time, the whole company present took part in the
ceremony, all the members, as well as the dancers, ac-
companying and assisting in the evening’s entertainment.
This accompaniment consisted of singing and drum-
ming; all sang and kept time by gently clapping their
hands. The words they used, which mean nothing in
themselves, were Ae-o, ae-o, continually repeated. The
hands were struck together at the sound 0, and the
dancer pronounced the syllables Wa-wa—kulz. Neither
sex was excluded from the singing, and, though the
voices did not all give the same tone, they were still in
good accord. The girls sang ﬁve or six tones higher,
and in a much more animated manner.” A dance
which was performed in the open air in the presence of
Arbousset and Daumas was of an entirely different
character. The Bushmen, according to their account,
“would not dance until they had eaten and were full,
and then in the middle of the kraal by moonlight. The
movements consisted of irregular leaps, and were, to
borrow a native comparison, like those of a herd of
gambolling calves. The dancers jumped till they were
tired out and covered with perspiration. The thousand-

216 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

voice cries they uttered and the movements they exe-
cuted were so diﬁicult that now one, now another were
seen to fall to the ground completely exhausted and
covered with blood, which streamed from their nostrils.
On that account this dance was called mokoma, or
blood dance.”*

Our information concerning the dances of the Fue-
gians is very scanty. Dramatic representations, some
of which may be mimetic dances, are mentioned of
only one tribe, the. Yahgans.+ Of gymnastic dances
among them we know absolutely nothing, but we
should not therefore presume that they have none. Of
the dances of the Botocudo, too, not a word can be
found in most of the accounts. The Prince of Wied
expressly denied that there were any, but Ehrenreich saw
some after the prince’s visit and has described them:
“On festive occasions, as when a successful hunt or a
victory is celebrated or a stranger is received, the whole
horde collects at night around the camp ﬁre for the
dance. Men and wdmen form a circle in motley ar-
rangement, each dancer places his arms around the necks
of his neighbours, and then the whole circle begins to
turn toward the right or the left, all stamping at once
lustily with the foot of the side toward which they are
turning and drawing the other foot quickly after it.

 

* There are several points in this account that call for criticism.
Two features are missing which, so far as we know, are never want-
ing in primitive dances—the musical accompaniment and the rhyth-
mical motion. If they are merely unmentioned in the account, then
it is very defective; if they are really absent, then the mokoma is
probably not a. real dance, but perhaps a Wild outburst of a general
intoxication by hasheesh, like those which take place among many
of the tribes of the Congo.

1* Globus, vol. xlvii, p. 332.

THE DANCE. 217

Soon with bowed heads they press more and more
closely upon one another, after which they break ranks.
All the while a monotonous song is sung, the time of
which is followed by the feet.” *

Among the Eskimo, at least in the descriptions,
the gymnastic dances are of somewhat less account
than the mimetic. “The dances,” says Boas, “are held
in summer in the open air, but in winter in a feast-
house built on purpose for them. This house is a large
dome of snow, about ﬁfteen English feet high and twenty
feet in diameter. In the middle of it is a pillar of snow
about ﬁve feet high on which the lamps stand. When
the villagers collect in this building for singing and
dancing, the married women station themselves in a
line along the wall and the unmarried ones form a sec-
ond concentric circle, while the men sit in the inner
circle. The children form two groups by the sides of
the door. At the beginning of the festival one of the
men seizes the drum, steps into the open space near the
door, and begins to sing and dance. The songs are
composed by the singer himself, and satirical composi-
tions are most in favour on these occasions. While the
men are silently listening, the women join in a chorus
with the words ‘amna aya.’ The dancer, who re-
mains at the same place, stamps rhythmically with his
feet and swings his body hither and thither, beating
the drum all the time. While dancing he strips him-
self to the waist, keeping on only his breeches and
boots.” + In another gymnastic dance, which Bancroft,
for some reason unmentioned, calls the national dance

 

* Ehrenreich, Zeitschr. für Eth., 1887, p. 33.
f Boas, An. Rep. Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 600 et seq.

’218 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

of the Eskimo,* each of the girls steps in succession
into the midst of the circle while the others dance
around her with hands entwined, singing. “ The most
extravagant motions gain the greatest applause.” While
the gymnastic dances are usually solos, several actors
may appear at the same time in the mimetic dances.
“The dancers, who are commonly young men, bare
themselves to the waist or even appear quite naked.
They execute numerous burlesque imitations of birds
and animals, While their movements are accompanied
with the beating of tambourines and singing. They
are sometimes fantastically dressed in breeches of seal—
skin and reindeer hide and wear feathers or a coloured
cloth on their heads.” The representations are, how-
ever, not limited to animal life. “A monotonous re-
frain, accompanied by drumming, calls one young man
after another upon the dancing place till a circle of
about twenty is formed. Then begins a series of pan-
tomimic representations of love, jealousy, hatred, and
friendship.” i"

As compared with the uniform character of the
corroborry, the mimetic dances in Australia afford a
great diversity. The animal dances, again, have the
ﬁrst place. There are emu, dingo, frog, and butterﬂy
dances, but no other seems to enjoy such general popu-
larity as the kangaroo dance, which has been described
by numerous travellers. All agree in admiring the
mimetic talent which the natives display in them.
Nothing more comical and no more successful imita-

 

* Bancroft, The Native Races of the Paciﬁc Coast, vol. i, p. 67.

+ Bancroft, Zoo. cit, vol. i, p. 67. We pass by the mask dance of
"the Northwestern tribes for the same reason as we passed the masks
in a former chapter.

THE DAN CEf 219

tion, says Mandy, could be imagined than to see the
dancers all hopping round in rivalry.* Eyre saw the
kangaroo dance on Lake Victoria “so admirably exe-
cuted that it would have called down thunders of ap—
plause in any European theatre.” 1' Subjects for mi-
metic dances are afforded by the two most important
events of human life—love and the battle. Mundy de—
scribes a mimic war dance which he saw in New South
Wales. The dancers performed ﬁrst a series of com-
plicated and wild movements in which clubs, spears,
boomerangs, and shields were brandished. Then “all
at once the mass divided into two groups, and with
deafening shrieks and passionate cries they sprang upon
one another in a hand-to-hand ﬁght. One side was
speedily driven out of the ﬁeld and pursued into the
darkness, whence howls, groans, and the strokes of
clubs could be heard, producing the perfect illusion of
a terrible massacre. Suddenly the whole troupe again
came up close to the ﬁre, and, having arranged them-
selves in two ranks, the time of the music was changed.
The dancers moved in slower rhythm, accompanying
every step with stamping and a grunting sound. Grad-
ually the drum beats and the movements became more
rapid till they attained as nearly a lightning—like ve-
locity as the human body can reach. Sometimes the
dancers all sprang into the air to a surprising height,
and when they struck the ground again the calves of
their widely spreading legs trembled so violently that
the stripes of white clay looked like wriggling snakes,
and a loud hissing ﬁlled the air.” 1 The love dances of

 

* Brough Smyth; vol. i, p. 173. f Eyre, vol. ii, p. 233.
i Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 173.

220 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the Australians are passed over in most of the accounts
with a few suggestive references. They are hardly
suitable for exhaustive descriptions. “I have seen
dances,” writes Hodgkinson, “which consist of the
most repulsive exhibitions of obscene motions that one
can imagine, and, although I was alone in the darkness
and nobody observed my presence, I was ashamed to be
a witness of such abomination.”.* It will be sufﬁcient
- to consider one dance of this sort—the Imam of the
Wachandi: “The festival begins with the ﬁrst new
moon after the yams are ripe, and is opened by the men
with an eating and drinking bout ; then a dance is exe-
cuted in the moonlight around a pit which is surrounded
with shrubbery. The pit and the shrubbery represent
the female organ, which they are made to resemble,
while the spears swung by the men represent the male
member. The men jump around, betraying their sex-
ual excitement with the wildest and most passionate
gestures, thrusting their spears into the pit.” In this
dance Scherer, the historian of literature, has discov-
ered the “primitive germ of poetry.” War and love
are, as we have said, the chief motives stimulating the
Australians to mimetic dances, but less suggestive scenes
are also represented. Thus a canoe dance is performed
in the north. For it the participants “paint themselves
with white and red and carry sticks to represent pad-
dles. The dancers arrange themselves in two ranks;
each one holds the stick behind his back and moves his
feet alternately with the rhythm of the song. At a
signal all bring their sticks forward and swing them

 

* Hodgkinson, Australia. from Port Macquerie to Moreton Bay,
1845. '

THE DANCE. 221

rhythmically back and forth like paddles, as if they
were paddling in one of their light canoes.* Finally,
we may mention a mimetic dance that symbolizes death
and the resurrection. Parker saw it when among the
aborigines at Loddon. The performance was led by
an old man who had learned the dance from the North-
western tribes. “ The dancers held boughs in their
hands, with which they gently fanned themselves over
the shoulders, and after they had danced for some time
in rows and half circles they gradually collected into a
close circular group. They then slowly sank to the _
ground, and, hiding their heads under the boughs, they
represented the approach, and, in the perfectly motion-
less position in which they remained for some time, the
condition of death. Then the old man gave the sign
by abruptly beginning a new lively dance and wildly
ﬂourishing his bough over the resting group. All
sprang up at once and fell into the joyous dance that
was intended to signify the return to life of the soul
after death.”

No protracted research is needed to estimate the
pleasure these gymnastic and mimetic performances
afford to the performers and the spectators. There is
no other artistic act which moves and excites all men
like the dance. In it primitive men doubtless ﬁnd the
most intense aesthetic enjoyment of which they are gen-
erally Capable. Most primitive dance movements are
very energetic. We need only to go back to the years
of our childhood to recollect the lively pleasure that
was associated with such vigorous and rapid motions,
provided that in them a certain measure of duration

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 173.

222 ' THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

and exertion was not exceeded. And this feeling was
the stronger as the emotional tension relieved by them
was more intense. To continue unmoved outwardly
when inwardly disturbed is a great pain, and it is a
delight to give vent to inner pressure by outer move-
ments. We have seen, in fact, that occasion is given
for dances among hunting tribes by any event that ex-
cites the mobile feelings of the primitive peoples. The
Australian dances around the booty he has secured as
the child hops around his Christmas tree.

Yet if the dance movements were only active the
pleasure of energetic motion would soon give place to
the unpleasant feeling of weariness. The aesthetic
character of the dance lies less in the energy than in
the order of the movements. We have pronounced
rhythm the most important property of the dance, and
have thereby only given expression to the peculiar
feeling of primitive men, who observe before all else
a strict rhythmical regulation of the movements in
their dances. “It is astonishing,” says Eyre in his
description of Australian dances, “to see how perfectly
the time is maintained, and how admirably exact is the
coincidence of the motions of the dancers with the in-
tonations of the music.” * And a similar impression
has been made upon all who have observed the dances
of the primitive men.1- This enjoyment of rhythm}? is

 

* Eyre, vol. ii, p. 231.

{The characteristic rhythmical arrangement of the primitive
dances is prominently mentioned in all the accounts; the only
exception known to us is the very questionable description of a
Bushman dance by Arbousset and Daumas.

‚’; Darwin believes that enjoyment of rhythm is a general prop-
erty of animals. “ The perception if not the enjoyment of musical
cadence and rhythm is probably common to all animals.”

THE DANCE. , 223

without doubt deeply seated in the human organiza-
tion. It is, however, an exaggeration to say that the
rhythmical is always the natural form of our move-
ments; however, a large portion of them, particularly
those which serve in making a change of place, are
executed naturally in rhythmical form. Further, every
stronger emotional excitement, as Spencer has justly
observed, tends to express itself in rhythmical move-
ments of the body; and Gurney adds the pertinent re-
mark that every emotional movement is in and of itself
rhythmical. In this way the rhythm of the motions of
the dance appears to be simply the natural form of the
movements of locomotion sharply and powerfully ex-
alted by the pressure of emotional excitement. The
value of rhythm as a factor of pleasure is still not ac-
counted for by this observation; although we can not
make a deﬁnition avail as an explanation, we are com-
pelled to receive it for the present as a ﬁnality. In
any case the pleasure is felt by primitive at least as
strongly as by civilized peoples. The study of their
poetry and music will supply us with further evidence.

So far it has not been necessary to distinguish be-
tween gymnastic and mimetic dances, for the pleasure
in energetic and rhythmical movements is enjoyed in
both kinds alike. The mimetic dances afford primitive
man a further delight which he does not ﬁnd in the
gymnastic dances. They gratify his propensity for
imitation, which sometimes appears to be developed
into a real passion. The Bushmen take the greatest
pleasure in “imitating with deceptive exactness the
movements of particular men or animals”; “all the
Australian aborigines have a surprising gift of mim-
icry,” which they exercise on every occasion; and it is

224 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

told of the Fuegians that “they repeat with perfect
accuracy every word of a remark pleasing to them that
is made in their presence, copying even the manner and
the bearing of the speaker.” In respect to this trait, a
striking analogy exists between primitive peoples and
the primitive individual, the child. The same passion
for mimicry can be observed in our children, and in
them, too, it is not unfrequently gratiﬁed in mimetic
dances. The propensity to imitation is certainly a uni-
versal human property, but it does not prevail with the
same force in all grades of development. In the lowest
stages of culture it is almost irresistible in all members
of society. But the more the differences between the
several social members increase with the progress of
civilization the less does its power become, and the
most highly cultivated person strives above all to be
like himself only. Consequently the mimetic dances
which play so large a part among the primitive tribes
are put further and further into the background, and
have a place left for them only in the child world,
where the primitive man is forever returning to live
anew. The highest pleasure-giving value must doubt-
less be ascribed to those mimetic dances which repre-
sent the working of human passions—as, in the ﬁrst
rank, war dances and love dances; for while they, no
less than the gymnastic and the other mimetic dances,
satisfy the liking for active and rhythmic movements
and the propensity to imitate, they afford besides that
beneﬁcent cleansing and freeing of the mind from the
wild, turbulent passions that vent themselves through
them—that kart/Lama's which Aristotle declared to be
the highest and best eﬁect of tragedy. This last form
of mimetic dance constitutes in fact the transition to

THE DANCE. 225

the drama, which appears, from the point of view of
development of history, as a differentiated form of the
dance. When we seek to distinguish between the
dance and the drama among primitive peoples, we have
to depend on an external mark—the presence or ab-
sence of rhythm. But both are at the bottom identical
in nature and effect at this stage of development.
Pleasure in vigorous and rhythmical motions, pleas-
urc in imitation, pleasure in the discharge of violent
emotions—«these factors afford a satisfactory explanation
of the passion with which primitive peoples cultivate
the dancing art. The joys of the dance are of course
most intensely and immediately experienced by the
dancers themselves. But the delights which blaze in
the actors stream out likewise over the spectators, and
these have further an enjoyment which is denied the
others. The dancer can not regard himself or his as-
sociates; he can not enjoy the view of the lusty, regu-
lar, alternating movements, singly and in mass, as the
beholders do. He feels the dance, but does not see it;
the spectator does not feel the dance, but sees it. On
the other hand, the dancer is compensated by the
knowledge that he is drawing the good will and admira-
tion of his public toward himself. In this way both
parties rise to a passionate excitement; they become in-
toxicated by the tones and movements; the enthusiasm
rises higher and higher, and swells ﬁnally into a real
madness, which not rarely breaks out with violence.
When we contemplate the powerful effects which the
primitive dances produce upon the actors as well as
upon the spectators, we can understand without fur-
ther inquiry why the dance has often acquired the sig-
niﬁcance of a religious ceremony. It is quite natural

226 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

for the primitive man to suppose that the exercises '
which make so powerful an impression upon him can
also exert a deﬁnite inﬂuence on the spiritual and the
demoniacal powers whose disposition controls his fate.
So he executes dances in order to frighten away or to
propitiate the ghosts and demons. Parker has described
an Australian dance which was intended to propitiate
Mimdi, a terrible demon, and secure his aid against the
enemies of the tribe: “Rude images, one large ﬁgure
and two small ones, carved out of bark and painted, were
set up in a distant spot. The place was strictly tabooed.
The men, and after them the women, decked in foliage
and carrying a small rod with a tuft of feathers in their
hands, danced up to the spot in a single, sharply curved
line; and, having gone round it several times, they ap-
proached the principal ﬁgure and touched it timidly
with their rods.” * A similar ﬁgure appeared in the
religious dance observed by Eyre at Moorunde. “ The
dancers, who were painted and adorned as usual, wore
tufts of cockatoo feathers on their heads. Some also
carried sticks with similar tufts in their hands, while
others held bunches of green foliage. After they had
danced a while they withdrew, and when they appeared
again they carried a curious rude ﬁgure which rose high
in the air. It consisted of a bundle of grass and reeds
wrapped in a kangaroo skin, the inner side of which
was turned out and was painted all over with little
white circles. A slender stick with a large tuft of
feathers, which was intended to represent the head,
projected from the upper end, and at the sides were

 

* Parker, The Aborigines of Australia. Brough Smyth, vol. i,
p. 166.

THE DANCE. 227

two sticks with tufts of feathers coloured red, repre-
senting the hands. In front was a stick about six
inches long, with a thick knot of grass at the end,
around Which was wrapped a piece of old cloth. This
was painted white, and represented the navel. The
whole ﬁgure was about eight feet long, and was evi-
dently intended to represent a man. It was carried
for a considerable time in the dance. Afterward two
standards took its place, which were formed of poles
and were borne by two persons. These, too, ﬁnally dis-
appeared, and the dancers advanced with their spears.” *
It is very probable that other primitive peoples have
religious dances; but they have not yet been described.
Even in Australia religious dances have been compar-
atively seldom observed. Gerland says, indeed, that
“originally all dances were religious ” ; but he has not
been able to prove this assertiond“ In fact, it has no
support, so far as is known to us. There is nothing to
require us to suppose that the Australian dances pos-
sessed originally any other meaning than the one they
now suggest to an unprejudiced view. Only the smaller
number bear the character of religious ceremonies; the
great majority aim only at aesthetic expression and the
aesthetic stimulation of passionate emotional movementsﬁ;

The purpose is not identical with the effect. While
the purpose of most primitive dances is purely zesthetic,
their effect extends Widely and mightily beyond aesthetic
limits. N 0 other primitive art has so high a practical
and cultural meaning as the dance. From the height

 

* Eyre, vol. ii,.p. 236. f Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 755.
tIn Australia the aesthetic dances are always performed at
night, while the religious dances which have been described are
performed in the clear light of day.
16

228 THE BEGINNINGS or ART.

of our civilization we are at ﬁrst inclined to look for
this meaning in the association of the sexes which the
dance brings about. This is, indeed, the only social
function that is left to the modern dance. But the
primitive dance and the modern dance are so extremely
different in their character that no conclusion whatever
can be drawn from the one as to the other. The par—
ticular feature which has caused the modern dance to
be favoured by both sexes—the close and familiar pair-
ing of the male and female dancers—is abSent from
most of the primitive dances. The dances of hunting
peoples are usually executed by the men alone, while
the women have only to care for the musical accom-
paniment. There are, however, dances in which men
and women take part together, and these are for the
most part undoubtedly calculated to excite sexual
passion. We may further assert that even the male
dances promote sexual association. A skilful and
sturdy dancer will certainly not fail to make a profound
impression upon the female spectators; and as a skilful
and sturdy dancer is also a skilful and strong hunter
and warrior, the dance may contribute in this way
to sexual selection and to the improvement of the race.
Yet, however great may be the signiﬁcance of the
primitive dance. in this respect, it is still not great
enough to justify by itself the assumption that no other
primitive art exercises so important a cultural function
as the dance.

The dances of the hunting peoples are, as a rule,
mass dances. Generally the men of the tribe, not rare-
ly the members of several tribes, join in the exercises,
and the whole assemblage then moves according to one
law in one time. All who have described the dances

THE DANCE. 229 .

have referred again and again to this “ wonderful” uni-
son of the movements. In the heat of the dance the
several participants are fused together as into a single
being, which is stirred and moved as by one feeling.
During the dance they are in a condition of complete
social uniﬁcation, and the dancing group feels and acts
like a single organism. The social signiﬁcance of the
primitive dance lies precisely in this eﬂ‘ect of social
uniﬁcation. It brings and accustoms a number of men
who, in their loose and precarious conditions of life, are
driven irregularly hither and thither by different indi-
vidual needs and desires to act under one impulse with
one feeling for one object. It introduces order and
connection, at least occasionally, into the rambling, ﬂuc-
tuating life of the hunting tribes. It is, besides wars,
perhaps the only factor that makes their solidarity vital-
ly perceptible to the adherents of a primitive tribe, and
it is at the same time one of the best preparations for
war, for the gymnastic dances correspond in more than
one respect to our military exercises. It would be hard
to overestimate the importance of the primitive dance
in the culture development of mankind. All higher
civilization is conditioned upon the uniformly ordered
cc)-operation of individual social elements, and primitive
men are trained to this co-operation by the dance.

The hunting tribes appear to have some perception
of the socializing inﬂuence of their dances. In Austra-
lia the corroborry at least serves “as an assurance of
peace between single tribes. Two tribes, desiring to
conﬁrm mutual good feeling, dance it together.” * On

 

* Waitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 755. Among the Queenslanders
“the corroborries are usually appointed for the conﬁrmation of
peace after the conclusion of wars and disputes.” Lumholtz, p. 286.

. 230 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the Andaman Islands the tribes hold a market fair in
connection with their joint dancing festivals.* It is
proper to remark, ﬁnally, in order to estimate the full in-
ﬂuence of these intertribal festivals, that they are often
of very considerable duration. Lumholtz tells, for‘ex-
ample, of one that occupied six entire weeks.

The fact that the highest signiﬁcance of the dance
lies in its socializing inﬂuence accounts for its former
power and its present decay. Even under the most
favourable conditions only a somewhat limited number
of persons can engage in a dance at once. We have
seen that among the Australians and on the Andaman
Islands men of several tribes dance together ; but hunt-
ing tribes have only small poll listsxl- With the prog-
ress of culture and the improvement of the means of
production the social groups increase; the small hordes
grow into tribes, the members of which are much too
numerous for all to join in a common dance; and in
this way the dance gradually loses its socializing func-
tion, and consequently loses also its importance.
Among hunting peoples the dance is a public festival
ceremony; among modern civilized nations it is either
an empty theatrical spectacle on the stage, or, in the
ballroom, a simple social enjoyment. The only social
function left it is that of facilitating the mutual ap-
proach of the sexes, and even in this respect its value

 

* Man, J our. Anthrop. Inst., vol. xii, p. 392.

+ See the precise estimates of the numbers of the several tribes
in Victoria, in Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 43. The Whole native popu-
lation of the Andaman group is estimated by Man at four thousand
persons. The strongest Eskimo group among those which Boas
studied did not count more than twenty-six men. Boas, An. Rept.
Bureau of Eth., 1884—85, p. 426.

THE DANCE. 231

has become very questionable. We can, moreover,
suppose that the primitive dance served as a medium
for sexual selection toward the improvement of the
race, as the most active and skilful hunter is also usu-
ally the most persistent and nimble dancer. But men-
tal rather than bodily vigour prevails in our stage of
civilization, and the heroes and heroines of the ball-
room often enough play but a sorry part in sober life.
The ballet of civilization, ﬁnally, with its repulsive
sprawling attitudes and distorted perversions of Nature,
may, to speak mildly, at best but satisfy vulgar curios-
ity. It can not be said that the dance has won in aesthetic
what it has lost in social signiﬁcance by the develop-
ment of civilization. We have already pronounced upon
the artistic value of our ballet, and the purely aesthetic
enjoyment which our society dances as dances afford to
the participants and to the spectators is hardly sufﬁcient
to account for their popularity. The‘modern dance
presents itself to us in every aspect as a vestigial organ
which has become useless in consequence of changed
conditions of life, and has therefore degenerated. Its
former great function has been long since transferred
to other arts. What the dance was for the social life of
the hunting tribes, poetry is for civilized nations.

CHAPTER IX.

POETRY.

GOETHE has called the poetry of civilized nations 9.
fragment of fragments. What shall we style the poetry
of primitive peoples? The poetry of the civilized
peoples is for the most part ﬁxed by writing and print-
ing; the poetry of savages lives chieﬂy only in uncer-
tain and inconstant memories, and the small fragments
of it Which have been recorded by European investiga-
tions are quantitatively and qualitatively so insuﬁicient
that it seems almost presumptuous to venture upon any
conclusion from them as to the whole. Formerly the
“senseless” stories and the “unpoetical” songs of
“savages ” were regarded as hardly worth considering.
More recently, scientiﬁc travellers and missionaries
have taken pains to gather up the despised material;
but the work of collecting is not even yet generally
begun, and where it has been undertaken the harvest
has thus far not been rich. We are acquainted with
only one Fuegian poetical production of any kind.
The poetry of the Botocudo is represented onlyby two
short dancing songs. Man’s Andaman collection con-
tains, besides a number of mythological stories, only
two songs. We are somewhat better informed con-
cerning the poetry of the Australians, the Bushmen,

and the Eskimo. But can we accept the songs and
232

POETRY. 233

stories of these peoples which have been collected and
translated into European languages as really suﬁicient
material for study? We would not cast the slightest
doubt on the linguistic equipment and care of Grey,
Bleek, and Rink. But the languages of those peoples
are so thoroughly foreign to us that even the greatest
linguistic endowment and care can not afford sure pro-
tection against occasional sore mistakes. And even if
all errors were excluded in the collecting of primitive
poems, could they be excluded also in the repetition?
When we recollect that it has never been possible to
express the charm of one of Goethe’s songs in French
verse, that the peculiar character of a German poem is
always for the most part lost in translating into the
nearly related ‘English language, we can hardly expect
that European translations can even approximately re-
semble the original poetical expressions of the hunting
deoples, whose language and culture are so extremely
remote from our own.* Under such circumstances
it would be unreasonable to expect from this ﬁrst at—
tempt a comprehensive representation and estimation
of primitive poetry. At any rate we are not prepared
to give more than a rough sketch that probably con-
tains few lines that will not require correction or com-
pletion.

 

* We will demonstrate by at least one example how greatly the
original character of a primitive poem is changed by a European
translation. Compare the text of the following Australian song
from Encounter Bay with the literal English translation and a free
rendering:

Miny-el-ity yarluké an ämbe, Aly-el-arr yerk-in yai’igaiak-ar.

What is it road me for, Here are they standing up hills.

What a. ﬁne road this is for me Winding between the hills !

234: THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Poetry is the verbal representation of external or
internal phenomena in an aesthetically effective form
for an aesthetic purpose. This deﬁnition embraces
subjective poetry, the lyric, which affords expression to
the phenomena of the inner world—the subjective feel-
ings and ideas, and objective poetry, which represents
in epic or dramatic form the phenomena of the outer
world—objective facts and events. In both cases the
expression serves an aesthetic purpose; the poet in-
vokes not acts, but feelings, and nothing but feelings.
Our deﬁnition thus distinguishes the lyric from the un-
poetical expression of feeling on the one hand, and, on
the other hand, the epic and the drama from didactic
and rhetorical representation and description.* All
poetry comes from feeling and goes to feeling, and
therein lies the mystery of its creation and inﬂuence.

Herbert Spencer, in his First Principles, has ad-
vanced the doctrine that the poetry of the lowest stages
of culture is an “undifferentiated ” poetry; that it has
as yet formed no separate poetical species, but unites in
each of its productions lyric, epic, and dramatic ele-
ments, though only potentially. This view ﬁts in ex-
cellently with the modern scientiﬁc theory of develop-
ment; but, unfortunately, it does not agree with the
facts. In the lowest stage of culture which is acces-
sible to investigation by us, we ﬁnd the leading kinds
of poetry quite as independently and characteristically
formed as in the highest. It can not, however, be de-
nied that the lyric of the primitive peoples contains

 

* “A political song a nasty song,” said Goethe, with true poet-
ical feeling. Even the most ﬁnely ﬁnished political songs are not
poetry, but rhetoric in rhyme. Likewise the profoundest philo-
sophical poems are not poetry, but didactics in rhyme.

\.

POETRY. 235

many epic elements, and that their epic very often
assumes a lyric or dramatic character. But if we
should call primitive poetry undifferentiated on that
account, we should have no right to contrast culti-
vated poetry with it as undifferentiated, for a pure
lyric, epic, or dramatic poetry has never been realized
anywhere.

There is no material so close to man as his own feel-
ings. Hence the lyric is the most natural form of
poetry, and as no expression lies so close to man as
that of speech, the lyric is therefore the most natural
form of art. Verbal expression of feeling needs only
to take on an aesthetically effective form—it requires
only rhythmical repetition, for example—t0 be lyrical.
A child ﬁve years of age has found a bright butterﬂy,
and expresses its joy over its discovery in the cry, “ O
the pretty butterﬂy ! ” This cry expresses a feeling, not
in order to impart it, but simply to express it; it is
thus not practical, but it does not give the expression
in an artistically eﬂective form, and is therefore not
lyrical. If, however, the butterﬂy has so charmed the
child that it repeats its joyous cry, and that at regular
intervals, giving the words at the same time a rhythmi-
cal cadence, singing, “ 0’ the pret’ ty but’ terﬁy ! ” the cry
becomes a song.

The songs in which the primitive peoples chant
their sufferings and joys are usually no more than such
simple expressions uttered in the simplest aesthetic
form in rhythmical order and repetition. Ehrenreich
has communicated some specimens of the songs on the
events of the day, which the Botocudo are accustomed
to improvise in the evening. “ To-day had we good
hunt; we killed a beast; we now have food; meat is

\

236 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

good; strong drink is good ”; or “Woman young steal
nothing; I, I, too, will not steal.” A song of praise
to the leader of the band is still more laconic. It
says, brieﬂy and well, “The Chieftain has no fear.” *
Each of these phrases is intoned rhythmically and
repeated.

The Australian lyric does not rise materially above
the level of that of the Botocudo. We now possess a
fairly comprehensive collection of songs from all parts

of the continent. They nearly all consist simply of *

one or two short rhythmical phrases, which are re—
peated indeﬁnitely, with or without a refrains!“ Such
songs are improvised on all possible occasions. “To
an old Australian,” says Grey, “his song is what a quid
of chewing tobacco is to a sailor. If he is angry, he
sings; if happy, he sings; if hungry, he sings; and if
he is drunk, provided he is not dead drunk, he sings
more lustily than ever.” The tribe, on returning from
a successful hunt, chant a kind of a national song:

The Narrinyeri are coming,
The N arrinyeri are coming,
They soon will be here;
Kangaroos they are bringing,
And stepping fast—

The Narrinyeri are coming.1

 

* Ehrenreich, Zeitsch. für Ethnol., vol. xix, pp. 33, 61.

f A singular exception is aﬂforded by two longer poems, com-
municated by Grey, who says that he translated them literally from
the originals. Gerland, however, has pointed very justly to the
artiﬁcial structure of the strophes and the cross—rhymes as thor-
oughly un-Australian. We regard both songs as rather free Eng-
lish poems on Australian motives. Grey, vol. ii, pp. 312, 315.
Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, pp. 757, 758.

i Taplin, The Narrinyeri.

POETRY. - .. ' 237

The wayworn wanderer complains:

I’m tired with my journey.
Through all the Yerna hither
It was a never-ending way.*
As the hunter sits in the evening by his camp ﬁre
he enjoys anew the Sportsman’s pleasures of the day in
the song:

The kangaroo ran very fast,
But I ran faster.

The kangaroo was fat,

I ate him.

Kangaroo! kangarool‘r

But another one longs for civilized food:

The peas the white man eats—
I wish I had some,
I wish I had somai

The life of Europeans furnishes a particularly rich
fund of material for Australian lyrics. When the rail—
road was opened in the region of the Narrinyeri the
sight of the locomotive made so deep an impression on
the aborigines that they gloriﬁed it in a song that was
sung at the corroborry :

See you the smoke at Kapunda!
The smoke rising in puffs.

Quick! it looks like a cloud;
It blows like a whale.

When the golden eagle of the beak of a stranded
ship was placed upon the gable of a house in Gulwa a
song was immediately made concerning the circum-

 

* Eyre, vol. ii, p. 239, from Teichelmann and Schürmann.

’r Spencer, Descriptive Sociology.

1 In the original, “ Pindi mai birki—birki parmto parrato.”
Eyre, vol. ii, p. 2-39, from Teichelmann and Schürmann.

238 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

stance, which consisted of a single verse describing the
event and the refrain:

O the turkey of Gulwal O the turkey of Gulwa ! *

The braves, when they are preparing for battle, re-
lieve their angry hearts with a song in which they an-
ticipate their vengeance on the hated enemy:

Spear his forehead,
Spear his breast,
Spear his liver,
Spear his heart,
Spear his loins,
Spear his shoulder,
Spear his belly,
Spear his ribs.+

And so on, till every part of his body is doomed. Or

they encourage themselves by enumerating their

weapons I
Shield of Burru, club and spear,
Bring the throw-stick of Berar,
The broad boomerang of Waroll,
Belt, tassel, apron of Boodan:
Up! Spring, and take good aim
With the straight-poised emu-speak:

Sometimes the song itself is made to serve as the
dangerous weapon. Satirical songs are general favour-
ites with the Australians. Grey heard the words:

Oh, What a leg,

Oh. what a leg,
You kangaroo-footed churl !

sung in scorn of a native? When native police offi-

 

* Taplin, The Narrinyeri. 1- Grey, vol. ii, p. 309.
1 Honery, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. vii, p. 245.
** Grey, vol. ii, p. 308.

POETRY. 239'

cers were seen for the ﬁrst time in the district of Wail—
wun the words were sung in ridicule of them :

Run away, all you blind fellows,

Run on, forever, I hope,

To Sydney, to Sydney, forever,

Good-bye.*

When a friend has gone away, those whom he has

left chant mournfully:

Come back, oh, come back again—oh!

When the ﬁrst native embarked from Perth for
England, the others sang, repeating the words indeﬁ-
nitely:

Whither wanders the lonely ship?
I shall never see my dear one again !
Whither wanders the lonely ship“

When a relative has gone to the country “from
whose bourn no traveller returns” the women of the
tribe lift up their cry of mourning. Grey has con-
tributed a mourning song that was sung at the burial of
a young man in the southwest :

The young Women sang,

My young brother—
The old women sang,

My young son—
Both together,

I never shall see him again,

1 never shall see him again !
In conclusion, we give a specimen of the “religious”
lyrics of the Australians, a song that was sung on the
lower Murray at the festival of the initiation of youth :

 

* Honery, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. vii, p. 244.
‘r Grey, vol. ii, p. 310.

240 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

You are ill to-day,

But soon your beard will grow,
Then you will eat with the men
Of the magical meat.*

Most of the poems of this sort, particularly those
which are sung at conjurations and for the healing of
the sick, are wholly imcomprehensible to us, and prob-
ably so to the Australians, except to the initiated.

Man has, unfortunately, omitted to give us specimens
of the Andaman lyrics. But there is at least one gen-
eral characteristic of them, from which it ensues that
the songs of the Mincopies are not essentially diﬂerent
from those of the Australians. “ The object—either
an adventure or an event, which has recently occurred
to the poet or his tribe—is embodied into a distich or
pair of verses; this is followed by a refrain, which
sometimes consists only in the repetition of the two
solo verses.” +

“Almost every Eskimo,” says Boas, “has his own
melody and his own song. In content, they deal with
every conceivable thing : the beauty of the summer,
the thoughts and feelings of the poet—on various occa-
sions—when waiting for a seal, for instance, or when
angry with another, etc. ; or they tell of some important
event, as of a long journey. Satirical songs are very
much liked. . . . The form of the song is strictly ﬁxed.
They are divided into verses of different lengths, which
alternate.”i Boas has recorded a considerable list of
such songs, but has not translated any of them. Rink,
on the other hand, gives some extremely characteristic

 

* Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 62.
+ Man, J our. Anth. Inst.. vol. xii, p. 389.
i Boas, An. Rep. Bureau of Eth., 1884—’85, p. 649.

POETRY. 241

poems in translation,* from which we select here three
specimens. It will be seenthat the achievements of
Australian and Botocudo lyric poetry are surpassed by
them in more than one respect. The ﬁrst song was
obtained from a Greenland Eskimo, Kukook, “ who was
a poor hunter, but a great friend of the Europeans,”
and had been sung about seventy years before at a
festival in the southern part of Greenland. “The
had little Kukook—imalcaya/z kayo/L, imakayah/zah—
kayak—speaks thus: ‘I will leave the country, In a
great ship. For the pretty little woman. I will get
me pearls, Such as look as if they were cooked. Then,
after I have gone among strangers, I will return again.
My mean little relatives—I will call them all to me—
and will give them a good sound cudgelling—with a
thick rope’s end. Then I will marry—And will take
two at a time; The dearest little thing—Shall wear
clothes of spotted sealskin only, And the other little
treasure—Shall have a dress of young sealskin.’ ” +

Our second example is a satirical duet by two
East Greenlanders. It is strikingly like the jeering
Schnaderhélpferln with which the “ burschen” in Up-
per Bavaria and the Tyrol rally one another:

 

* Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, pp. 66 et seq.
+ We give here some verses in the original:

Kukérssuanguak imakaja haija
imakaja ha
haija okalulerangame imakaja haijä.
imakaja ha
haija avalagkumarpunga imakaja haija
imakaja ha, etc.

'A „

The refrain “ imakaja haiJa
to our Tra-la-la or Fol-de-rol.

is without meaning, and corresponds

242 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Savdlat : The South, the South, 0 the South, over there—

When I was living on the middle coast, I met Pulangitsissok,
Who had grown fat and strong from eating halibut.

The people of the middle coast do not know how to talk,

Because they are ashamed of their speech.

More than that, they are stupid.

Their language is not the same,

Some speak like those in the North, other like those in the South;
Therefore we can not understand their speech.

Pulangitsissok : There was a time when Savdlat wished that I
was a good kayakman,

That I could take a good load on my kayak.

Many years ago he wished that I could take a heavy load on my
kayak.

That was at the time when Savdlat tied his kayak to mine, for
fear that it might tip over:

Then he could carry a great quantity on his kayak,

When I had to tow you and you cried out pitifully—

And were afraid—

And were nearly upset—and had to hold to my kayak-ropes.

The third song is one of a kind very rare in this
stage of culture. It is a lyrical gloriﬁcation of one of
Nature’s spectacles—the hovering of the clouds around
a mountain-top 1.

The great Koonak Mountain in the South, over there—-
I see it;
The great Koonak Mountain in the South, over there——
I am looking at it;
The bright shining in the South, over there—
I admire it;
The other side of Koonak—
It stretches out—
That which Koonak—
Seaward incloses.
See how they (the clouds) in the South——
Move and change—
See how in the South—
They beautify one another;

..

POETRY. ' 243

While it (the mountain—top) toward the sea
Is veiled—by changing clouds—veiled toward the sea.—
Beautifying one another.*

The substance of most of the primitive songs is ex—
ceedingly meagre and rude. Nevertheless, it is in the
highest degree deserving of our attention, for it gives
us an immediate insight into the emotional life of primi-
tive peoples. The lyric poetry of hunting tribes very
rarely soars to a higher ﬂight; it rather abides with
unmistakable preference in the lower regions of sensu-
ality. The coarsest material pleasures occupy a very
large space in primitive verse; and we do these poets
no wrong when we say that their lyric inspiration is
quite as often of the stomach as of the heart. It must
indeed appear a real sacrilege to an ideal aesthete that
we presume to pass off the eating and drinking songs
of the Australians and Botocudo especially as poetical
productions. They are nevertheless such, as they are
truly expressions of feeling in verbal rhythmic form.
N 0 feeling is in and of itself poetic; and there is no
feeling which can not be made poetical if it is expressed
in an aesthetic form for an aesthetic purpose. It may,
moreover, soften the indignation that arises against the
use that is made here of the name of poetry if we rec-
ollect that even the tenderest lyric poets of civilization
occasionally do not consider it unworthy of them to
extol the pleasures of the table.

While we constantly meet features in the primitive
lyrics that have to us little resemblance to the poetical,
we look to them in vain for the subjects which possess

 

* These two songs, too, like the ﬁrst, contain in .the original an
unmeaning refrain which is attached to each verse.
17

244 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

in Europe an indisputable title to gloriﬁcation in lyrics.
When we open any volume of lyric poems we ﬁnd
that by far the largest part of the contents is devoted
to the joys and sufferings of love. In the primitive
lyrics the relations of the sexes are hardly touched upon
except in the coarsest manner. We have never suc-
ceeded in discovering a single love song among the .
Australians, Mincopies, or Botocudo; and Rink, who
is best acquainted with it, says of the poetry of the Es-
kimo that “it has but little room for the feeling of
love.” * We are at ﬁrst bewildered in the presence of
this lack. Is there, then, a feeling that excites deeper
passion, that impels more powerfully to vent itself in
poetry than love, “the crown of life ” ? F01- the civil-
ized man certainly not, but we have more than once
declared that we can not draw any conclusions from
the feelings of the higher grades of culture as to those
of the lower. Love in our sense is a ﬂower that can
not blossom in the poor and uncongenial soil of the
hunting life. What is called love in Australia and
Greenland is no spiritual affection, but a sensual pas-
sion, which is quickly cooled in enjoyment. It can not
be denied that examples of what is called romantic love
occur even among the lowest peoples, but they are al-
ways exceptional. On the other hand, an affection of
the heart is not infrequently developed between mar-
ried couples. But this marital love, which is in per-
petual satisfaction, needs no more to publish itself in

 

* Rink, p. 89. It should never be forgotten that our knowledge
of primitive lyrics is very defective. But if the taste for this kind
of poetry had only approximately the signiﬁcance to savages that it
has among civilized peoples, our collections, limited as they are,
would have contained a considerable number of love songs.

POETRY. 245

songs in Australia than in Europe. Westermarck says
justly, on the whole, that “in the lower stages of hu-
man development the strength of sexual love is far
less than that of the tender affection with which parents
embrace their children.” * Our collections, in fact,
contain a number of mourning songs on the death of a
blood relative or a fellow-tribesman, but not a lyric
lamentation over the loss of a lover or a sweetheart can
be found in them.

Far less surprising is it that the appreciation of Na-
ture, which has caused innumerable ﬂowers of lyric to
blossom in civilized nations, is of very rare occurrence
in the poetry of the hunting tribes. The savage is the
slave of Nature, and the slave who has to work under
the lash for his precarious living has neither time nor
disposition to admire the greatness and beauty of his
hard mistress. Consequently we wonder less that the
lyrics of the Australians, Mincopies, and Botocudo be-
tray no trace of an aesthetic appreciation of Nature
than that Rink should have found that song among the
Eskimo, which, with its description of the glittering
snow peak enveloped in clouds, resembles the latest
European poetry of Nature.

The lyrics of hunting peoples generally betray a
thoroughly egoistic character. The poet sings of his
personal sufferings and joys ; the fortunes of his fellow-
men rarely elicit a sound from him. The only examples
of sympathetic lyrics that have been found in Australia
are mourning songs, and even they relate only to rela-
tives by blood and tribal afﬁnity. The sympathy of the
primitive man does not usually extend beyond the nar-

 

* Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 357.

246 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

row circle of his tribe. If his lyric mentions a stranger,
it is either in a hostile or a scornful way. It is character-
istic of all the lower peoples that they take a particular
pleasure in satirical songs,* and we have seen in our
specimens how base and rude the mockery is; bodily
defects are its favourite subject. The primitive peoples
are as egotistic and pitiless as the children of civilized
life. We met a troop of children one day before the
gateway of a school in Berlin who were pursuing a
little lame girl with the mocking song :
Ho! ho! ho!

Anna has a wooden leg.
Ho! ho ! ho !

Oh, what a leg, oh, What a leg,
You kangaroo-footed churl!

sang the Australians on King George’s Sound.

The primitive lyric is as meagre and rude as the
primitive life. Nevertheless, these rude expressions of
rude feeling probably have for the Australian or An-
damanese poets no less value than the more reﬁned ex-
pression of higher and more sympathetic emotions have
for Europeans. Song is in its lowest as in its highest
form the relief of an oppressing feeling, and therefore
its effect is essentially the same in its lowest as in its
highest form—that is, one of deliverance and relief to
the singer. Even the rudest Australian poet can say,
with Goethe’s Tasso:

Die Thräne hat uns die Natur verliehen,
Den Schrei des Schmerzes, wenn der Mann zuletzt
Es nicht mehr trägt. Und'mir noch über alles—

 

* Among the ﬁve songs of Greenland published by Rink, three
are of this character.

POETRY. 247

Sie liess inSchmerz mir Melodie und Rede

Die tiefste Fülle meiner Noth zu klagen ;

Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, wie ich leide.

(Tears, balmy tears, kind Nature has bestowed,
The or)r of anguish when the man at length
Can bear no more. Yes, and to me besides,
She leaves, in sorrow, melody and speech,

To utter forth the fulness of my woe ;

Though in mortal anguish men are dumb,

To me a God hath given to tell my grief.)-

When Grey had one day eaten tabooed mussels on
his terrible retreat to Perth without heeding the anxious-
warnings of his native companion, Kaiber, the supersti-
tious terror of the Australian vented itself in song, and
Grey heard him till late at night singing:

Oh, Why did he eat the mussels”!
Now brew the witches’ storm and thunder.
Oh, why did he eat the mussels?

He sang his fear to sleep. “Poetry,” says Stuart
Mill, “ is the lullaby of our woes.”

Even if these egoistic lyrics have a value for the
poet, of what worth can they be to others? The primi-
tive man cares little for .the good and ill of his neigh-
bour, and we might suppose that he would be likewise
quite indifferent to those songs which relate generally
only to the personal sufferings and joys of the poet;
but we learn to our surprise that the exact contrary is
really the case. “Many songs,” says Boas, “are great
favourites with the Eskimo and are sung as all popu—
lar songs are sung.” * In the Andaman Islands a poet

 

* Boas, An. Rept. Bureau of Eth., 1884—’85, p. 649.

248 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

can win “immortality” with a single song.* In Aus-
tralia single songs are carried all over the continent and
preserved through several generations. “ There are
famous poets among the aborigines whose songs are
spread from district to district and sung as much as any
popular song in Europe”)L Our surprise will not be
less when we hear that “such famous songs are even
sung by tribes that can not understand their words.” i;
In this last curious fact, indeed, we ﬁnd the solution of
the whole problem.. The primitive public is evidently
less concerned with the meaning than with the form of
the songs.“t

It should be recollected that every primitive lyric
poet is at the same time a composer, that every primi-
tive poem is not only a poetic but equally a musical
work. To the poet the words of the song may have a
sense of their own, but to others they are in most cases
only bearers of the melody. In fact, we usually have
not the slightest hesitation in sacriﬁcing the sense of a

 

* Man, Jour. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 389.

l Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 755. it Ibid., p. 756.

** There is no lack of similar instances in Europe. An interest-
ing example is found in Boccaecio’s Decamerone. After the ﬁfth
Novella of the fourth day—it is the story of the unhappy lover who
was slain by the brother of the girl, and whose head the bereaved hid .
in a ﬂower pot—we read : “ But then after a time this thing having
become manifested, some one composed a. song which is still sung
to-day, thus:

‘Quale esso fu 10 mal Cristiano
Che mi furö la grasca,’ etc.

This story that Filemena told was very dear to all the ladies, be-
cause they had heard the song sung many times, but had never
been able to learn by asking what the incident was on which it was
based.”

POETRY. 249

song to the form. “ Many Australians,” says Eyre,
“can give no information concerning the meaning. of
the songs of their own home, and I am inclined to be-
lieve that the explanations they offer are very imper-
feet because more importance is ascribed to the measure
and quantity of the syllables than to the meaning.” *
Another author writes: “ In all the corroborry songs
they repeat and transpose the words so as evidently to
sing pure nonsense in order to vary or maintain the
rhythm.”+ The interest in the form is not less decid-
edly preponderant among the Mineopies. “ Their prin-
cipal eﬁort,” says Man, “is evidently to keep strictly
in time. In their songs everything is subordinated to
rhythm, even the sense. . . . They take the greatest
liberties in them, not only with the form of the words,
but even with the grammatical construction of the sen-
tences. For example, the refrain of one of their songs
runs: ‘Cheklﬁ ya lak’u-myr-a?’ or ‘Who missed the
hard tortoise?’ While the same phrase should read in
prose, ‘ Mij’a-ya-di ehé’—balen la kaehi’re ? ’ . . . It is evi-
dent at once to the eye how great the difference is be-
tween the two forms, for in this as well as in most of
their songs the words are so mutilated in their poetic
form, for the sake of the metre, that they are hardly rec-
ognisable. 1; In fact, it occurs not rarely that the poet of
a new song has to interpret the sense into ordinary lan-
guage to the singer as well as to the public.” ** As to the

 

* Eyre, vol. ii, p. 229.

l Barlow, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. ii, p. 174.

t The origin of a special poetical language, which has been re-
marked among several lower peoples, may be accounted for in this
way.

# Man, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, pp. 118, 389.

250 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Eskimo, it is enough to point to the fact that there are ﬁve
among the few songs which Boas has collected, the text of
which consists merely of a rhythmical repetition of an
entirely meaningless interjection.* We are thus forced
to the conclusion that lyric poetry in the lowest stages
of culture has primarily a musical character and only
secondarily a poetical meaning.

It has often been said that the development of po-
etry begins with the epic. It is true that the literary
history of the civilized peeples of Europe begins with
epic poems, but the Homeric epics are as little primi-
tive poems as the bronze helmets and swords of Homer’s
heroes are primitive weapons. An epic poem is the re-
lation of an event from an aesthetic point of view for
an aesthetic purpose. It is not absolutely necessary for
a poetical narration to appear in a metrical form. A
narration in absolutely correct rhythm and blameless
rhyme is not necessarily poetical, while another story
told in free, unadorned prose may be extremely poet-
ical. The epic poems of the Australians, Mincopies,
and Bushmen, except for a few rhythmical passages, are

 

* We add here a few observations on the form of primitive
lyric poetry. Boas has furnished some precise information cou-
eerning the rhythmic laws of Eskimo poetry: “Each long syllable
can be replaced by two or three short ones; other short syllables
stand as unaccented parts before the accented parts of a foot. Re-
ally, the rhythmical adaptation of the words to the melody is very
arbitrary and changeable. so that it is really impossible to speak of
metrical feet. Herein, too, is a plain evidence that the musical
rhythm is before everything else decisive as to the form. The
rhythmical arrangement of the words is governed closely by the
quantity, not by the accent of the syllables.” Boas, loc. cit, p. 651.
The rhythm of the Australians seems, on the other hand; “to depend
on the laws of accent. The Australians. furthermore, use rhyme in
their songs.” Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 756.

POETRY. 251

in prose. Only the Mdlwchen of the Eskimo are told
for the most part in precise rhythmical recitative.
The distinctive marks of a poetical narrative consist in
its being intended to inﬂuence the feelings and only
the feelings. Every story that possesses another exte-
rior object, whether it be the instruction of the auditor
or the stimulation of him to action, is alike essentially
unpoetical, whether it be dressed in prosaic or poetic
form.

In theory an epic poem can be very easily and
clearly deﬁned; but as soon as we step out from the
theoretical workroom into practical life we suffer the
unwelcome experience which incautious theorists who
have not wisely avoided this step seldom escape. We
stand helpless with our simple deﬁnition in the presence
of the variously bewildering abundance of actual phe~
nomena. How shall we distinguish an epic poem from
a historical tradition? Here is an Andaman story:
“One of the ancestresses of the Mincopies had a son
who gained great repute by means of his strength and
his deeds. But he also on account of them, excited
the envy and the mortal hatred of another man, named
Berebi. Qne day, at the beginning of the rainy season,
Berebi went to the mother and son and asked to be
permitted to sail with them in their canoe. They con-
sented, and Berebi, carrying a rusty axe and a whet—
stone, stepped into the boat. Having placed his im-
plements on the bottom of the canoe, he went up to
the youth, took his arm and smelled of it from the
hand to the shoulder, as if admi1ing the development of
the muscles, murmming while doing so that he wished
to colour his lips withb blool Suddenly he treacher-
ously bit the youth in the arm and killed him; but the

252 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

murderer’s teeth stuck fast in the flesh of the victim,
so that he could not release them, and he was seized
and slain by the friends of the murdered man. The
two corpses were then cast into the sea, where the
youth was changed into a lizard and the murderer into
a poisonous ﬁsh. The mother in her despair committed
such offences that the god Puluga for punishment sent
a ﬂood.” * Except for its ending, this story might have
passed for a historical tradition, while, on the other
hand, it might just as plausibly be a poetical inventiond“
We confess that we are not able to decide the point.
Most writers have at hand a very convenient expedient
for such cases—every fanciful story is poetical. But
they forget, ﬁrst, that the idea of “fanciful” covers
very different breadths among different persons and
peoples. A cultivated European will ﬁnd the story of
a man’s being changed into a ﬁsh or a lizard very fan-
ciful; but such a wonder would probably ﬁt naturally
into a rude Mincopy’s View of the world. We should
be especially on our guard against the popular confu-
sion of fancy and poeti y The poet employs fancy, or
c1eat1ve imagination, but the 1nves tigator uses it no less.
It requires quite as much fancy to solve a mathematical
problem 01 construct a physical hypothesis as to relate
a fairy tale poetically. The essential difference lies
in the object toward which the imaginative faculty 1s
directed. Not every ﬁction, however fanciful it may
seem to 11s, is poetical; but it is so only in case it serves
the purpose of arousing and keeping up the aesthetic

 

*Man Jour. Anth. Inst., vol. xii pp. 167 et seq. The poem which
we have published on page 29 relates to this story. _
+ The circumstance of the murderer carrying a rusty (theiefore
an iron) axe indicates that the tradition is not very old.

POETRY. 253

feeling. An Australian story tells how the pelican
acquired its colouring of black and white: “ In the
beginning all pelicans were black. One day a pelican
was deceived by an Australian, and was so enraged that
it painted itself white in order to contend with men.
When it was half through with its painting another
pelican came to it, and, as it did not know what to make
of the curious black and white thing, it gave the ﬁrst
pelican a blow with its beak and killed it. Before this
all pelicans were black, but now they are black and
white, and this is the reason.” * This story is certainly
fanciful, yet it does not bear a poetical but rather a
scientiﬁc character. It was not invented for amuse-
ment, but for instruction. It is, in fact, nothing less
than a primitive zoological theory. The characteristic
of a theory is the arrangement of a phenomenon the
cause of which is not known with a class of phenomena
the causes of which are known. The Australian story
conforms exactly to this principle. The Australians are
black; and when they are white, it is because they have
painted themselves, and that for battle. The pelican is
black and white, therefore it has painted itself for
battle; but, ithas not completed the painting, else it
would have been all white. The explanation appears
ridiculous to a European; it is not, however, intended
for civilized Europeans, but for primitive Australians.
The Bushmen account for the origin of the stars
with a story relating that “a maiden of a former people
—-from whom the Bushmen sprang—wanted to make
light by which men could ﬁnd their way home. She

 

‘

* Brongh Smyth, vol. i, p. 478. We have given the story in an
abbreviated form.

254 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

therefore threw glowing ashes in the air, and the sparks
became stars.” The train of thought through which
the Bushmen conceived this childish story is the same
in principle as that which has since led man to his
greatest discoveries and his deepest insight. By the
side of such efforts of primitive science are found all
sorts of philological hypotheses. 'In the language of
the Mincopies, the same word, gar-7mg, stands for night
and for a certain caterpillar. The fact has to be ac-
counted for, and so the following story is told: “ One
day the sun shone with such burning heat as to cause
great distress. Two women who had become fretful
over the heat vented their ill humour upon a poor
caterpillar, which they crushed. The god Puluga was
so enraged at this oﬁence that he sent men a long
night, in order that they might learn to prize the bless-
ing of the sunlight more highly. Therefore night is
called by the same name as that caterpillar, gu-rug.”*
The literature of primitive peoples is full of stories of
this sort, and all such stories are in their substance not
poetical. It is highly probable, indeed, that they con-
tain poetical elements, but it is impossible for us to ex-
tract them. Consequently we have no alternative except
in our study of primitive epic poetry to turn aside from
this whole group, notwithstanding it has poetical constit-
uents, and conﬁne ourselves exclusively to those stories
which bear neither the character of historical traditions
nor of scientiﬁc hypotheses. Unfortunately, we can
not, in making such a separation, proceed upon any
universal principle, but must decide each case by itself,
and it is more than probable that we shall frequently

 

* Man, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 172.

POETRY. 255

mistake in doing that. The worst of it is, however,
that our material, already scanty without this, will be
greatly reduced by this course. The stories which Man
collected among the Mincopies are almost exclusively
mythical, and only a relatively small number of the
Australian stories are undoubtedly poetical. A large
number of the Bushmen animal stories must likewise
be taken out. Only of the Eskimo stories can we re-
gard a considerable number as purely or predominantly
inspired by poetic motives. The following character-
ization relates simply to the meagre remnant left by this
sifting:

The productions of primitive epic poetry are as a
whole very limited in scope. Monumental epics, like
those of the Indians, Greeks, and Germans, are as rare
in this stage of culture as pyramids and palaces. The
building stones for such works certainly lie ready here
and there. Many of the stories of the hunting tribes
are connected as to subject. Among the Bushmen, for
instance, the locust is the centre of a whole circle of
stories ; but the individual stories, though thus related,
have never been combined into a poetical unity. Bleek
has, indeed, given his collection of South African animal
stories the title of Reineke Fuchs in Süd-Afrika, but in
reality it at most contains the materials for a South
African Reine/766 Fuchs.

The primitive epic also takes its material from the
circle which primitive art only rarely transcendscthe
life of the men and animals which are closest to the
interest of the savage. Animal poetry predominates in
Australia and South Africa, while the hyperborean art
of story-telling generally deals with human material.
“ The stories of the Eskimo,” says Rink, “give us a

256 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

true picture of everything that most strongly engages
their imagination, of everything that appears great and
pleasing to them, and of Whatever seems hateful and
terrible to them, in life as in nature. They constantly
depict to us the great struggle for existence, which
compels recognition and admiration of personal courage
and strength which represent the primary conditions of
successful life; while, on the other hand, the thought
of increasing and securing the pleasure of life by means
of this power is. hardly suggested. Never is much
room given in this poetry to the almost universal feel-
ing of love. N 0 wonder that such poverty of material
and such simplicity of passion and feeling make these
poems monotonous and rather tiresome to us.” *

The epic of civilized peoples has been compared to
a broad, quietly ﬂowing stream; the epic of savages,
on the other hand, may be compared to a narrow, rapid,
rippling brook. Their stories have, as it were, only one
dimension. The whole interest of the poet and the
auditor follows the progress of the action, and hardly a
glance is given to all the rest. While in the best mod—
ern romances the action only serves to develop the char-
acters, the character in these primitive stories simply
serves to carry on the action. Consequently they are
never described, but only indicated, and that usually in
the slightest and most superﬁcial way. A comparison
of animal stories of the Australians and Bushmen with
the German Reineke Fuchs, with reference to this
feature, is exceedingly instructive. In the German ani-
mal epic the action is developed consistently accord-
ing to the characters of the several animals, which are

 

* Rink, p. 89.

POETRY. 257

excellently observed and described according to their
natural peculiarities. But with the Bushmen and Aus-
tralians the characters of the animals are generally
treated arbitrarily, and always in a wholly subordinate
way, and in only a very few cases can any inner rela—
tion be discovered between the characters and the
strange action. There is as little description of men in
the stories of the Eskimo. As a rule, no more is told
us of a person than that he is “ good ” or “bad.” A few
types have been developed, but an individual character
never confronts us. “The old bachelors are always
ludicrous and odd; the woman is generally presented
as solicitous only for her own household and savings;
while the poor widow is distinguished for benevolent
good humour; a band of ﬁve brothers represent pride
and rudeness, and the middle one is always envious.” *

Far less does the primitive man dwell upon the de-
scription of Nature. We have already pointed out that
Nature at large has only a practical interest to the
hunting tribes, and have accounted for the fact. Nat-
ural scenery is regarded in their stories only so far as
is strictly necessary for the comprehension of the ac-
tion. A tree is a tree, a mountain is a mountain, the
sea is the sea, and nothing more. Descriptions of Na-
ture are as rare in the primitive epics as were scenic
decorations in the old English theatres. The place of
the action is never painted, but only named.

Even the action, which so exclusively interests the
primitive story tellers and their auditors, has little in
it to attract and ﬁx our attention. The animal sto-
ries, especially of the Australians and Bushmen, could

 

* Rink, p. 90.

258 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

hardly afford any special entertainment to a European.
The substance of most of them consists of a mixed and
loosely related series of strange events, in which no
deeper poetic connection is discernible, at least to our
eyes. It will be sufﬁcient to introduce one example—a
story from the Bushnien locust cycle, in the abbrevi-
ated form in which Ratzel repeats Bleek’s version:

“ The locust took a shoe and changed it into an
eland, which it kept in the reeds for a plaything and
fed with honey. The ichneumon was despatched to
see why the locust brought home no honey; but while
the locust was calling the antelope out of the reeds, it
was shut up by the ichneumon in a sack; then, by the
advice of its grandfather, made a hole in the sack; and
the ichneumon called the antelope out of the reeds and
shot it. The locust, discovering its dead playmate,
wept bitterly, and, following the track, found two meer-
kats collecting the blood, one of which threw the locust
violently down upon the horns of the dead antelope.
But the locust surrounded itself with darkness by pier-
cing the gall of another eland-antelope, ﬂed, and lay
down at home while the sun was still high. The meer-
kats having cut the meat of the antelope into strips,
hung it upon a tree, and with it their weapons and
clothes. This tree rose in the night while they were
sleeping, and ﬂoated over to the locust and the ichneu-
mon, which by the time their enemies woke had posses-
sion of the property. One of the meerkats kept noth-
ing but its girdle, and made a tail out of it.” *

Such tales are like the stories our children tell one
another. They obviously originated in a taste for the

 

* Ratzel, Völkerkunde, vol. i, p. 75.

POETRY. ‘ 259

purely fabulous, and satisfy the requirements of poetical
interest in its rudest form. There is no trace in them
of a higher artistic unity; one fanciful thought attaches
itself to another; the more incoherent they are, the bet-
ter: As compared with these chatterings, the tales of
the Eskimo already represent a considerable higher
epic form. As against the opinion that the fanciful is
synonymous with the poetical, it is not unproﬁtable
to point to the fact that the more highly developed
poetry of the Eskimo contains far fewer fantastic ele-
ments than the rudest form of the epic which we have
found among the Aust1 alians and Bushmen. The origi-
nally wildly exuberant fancy 1s in fact more and more
pruned and tamed in the progressive development of
poetry; and the best which the greatest poets give us
is always likewise the simplest and most natural. The
Eskimo knows how to apply the principle of climax
and antithesis, and succeeds excellently in arousing
strict attention, sympathy, and anger. “The poets,”
says Rink, “display a peculiar skill in gaining effect
and variety from their scanty material. If we regard
their tales more closely, we discover a true poetic feel-
ing in the way they illustrate the development of the
highest perfection from the most modest beginnings,
and set forth on the one side the dangers and on the
other the means by which they are overcome, as the
relator wishes to direct the attention of his hearers.” *
When one has read the following story of the little
Kagsagsuk, he will acknowledge that Rink is right.
It is one of the favourites of the Eskimo, and exhibits
all the characteristic traits of their epic art. We give

 

* Rink, . 89.
18 p

260 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

it here, except for a few unimportant abbreviations, in
the form in which Rink has published it, on the basis
of nine different versions :

“ There was once a poor little orphan boy who lived
among'cruel men. His name was Kagsagsuk, and his
foster-mother was a poor old woman. They dwelt in a
miserable little kennel at the entrance of the house.
They were not permitted to go into the living room of
the house; but Kagsagsuk lay among the dogs in the
passage in order to warm himself; and when the men
woke their sledge dogs with their whips, it was no aifair
of theirs if the lash struck the poor boy too. When
the men were feasting themselves with walrus fat and
frozen meat, and little Kagsagsuk lay upon the thres-
hold, they sometimes put their ﬁngers into his nostrils
and lifted him up into the air. Consequently his nos-
trils were enlarged, but otherwise he was as small as
ever. They gave the poor fellow frozen meat, but no
knife with which to cut it up. His teeth, they said,
were good enough for that ; and sometimes they pulled
out a pair of teeth because he ate too much. His poor
foster-mother made him boots and a little spear, with
which he could go out and play with the other chil-
dren ; but they threw him down, rolled him around in
the snow, ﬁlled his clothes with snow, and plagued him
in every possible way; and the girls sometimes be-
smeared him all over with dirt. One time he was
going alone to the mountain, and was thinking about
how he-could become strong. His foster-mother had
taught him a magic formula; and as he was standing
between two high mountains he. called out : ‘ Strength,
come here! Power, come to me!’ Suddenly there
came a large animal in the shape of an amavrok (wolf).

POETRY. '261

Kagsagsuk was so frightened that he ran away; but '
the animal quickly overtook him, wound his tail like a
cord round the youth’s body, and threw him down.
Kagsagsuk thereupon heard a rattling, and saw a number
of sea dog’s bones fall from out of his body to the ground.
The amarok spoke and said, ‘These are the bones that
have hindered your growth.’ He threw the little one
down twice more, and bones fell out each time, but
fewer of them. The fourth time Kagsagsuk did .not
fall to the ground, and the ﬁfth time he remained
standing. At last the amarok said, ‘If you want to
be strong and mighty, you may come to me every day.’
On the way home Kagsagsuk felt that he was much
lighter, he could likewise run, and he threw the stones
around that lay in his way. As he came near the house
the girls cried out: ‘ Kagsagsuk is coming; let us throw
dirt on him,’ and the boys beat him and plagued him
as before ; he, however, offered no resistance, but slipped
away as usual to sleep with the dogs. From this time
on he went to the amarok and felt himself stronger
every day, and on the way home he kicked the stones
away from in front of him and about on the ground,
so that the stones ﬂew around him. At last even the
amarok could not throw him, and said: ‘ This is enough
now; human beings can now no longer overcome
you; but I advise you still to stick to your old habits.
When, however, the winter comes on, and the sea is
frozen, then will be your time. Three large bears will
appear, and they shall fall by your hand.’ That day
Kagsagsuk ran all the way back, and threw the stones
to the right and to the left. But at home he behaved
just as usual, and the people plagued him more than
ever. One day in the fall the kayak men brought

£“
262 ‘ THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

home a large piece of driftwood, which they fastened
on the shore to a pair of large stones, for it was much
too heavy for them to carry all into the house at once.
But Kagsagsuk got up secretly at night, unlashed the
log, took it on his shoulders, and rammed it deep in the
ground behind the house. The men wondered much
in the morning, when they could not ﬁnd the log, till
an old woman discovered it behind the house. Then
they all ran up in great excitement, exclaiming : ‘ Who
could have done this? There must be a man among
us as strong as a giant ! ’ The young men behaved as
if they would have it believed that they were.the heroes ’
—'—the impostors !

“ Then winter came, and the people of the house
abused Kagsagsuk more outrageously than ever, but he
continued in his old habits, and did not let them observe
anything. One day three men came running with the
report that three large bears had climbed an iceberg.
Nobody ventured to start out to capture them. Kag-
sagsuk, however, saw that his time had come. ‘ Mother,’
he said, ‘lend me your boots, so that I can go out with
them and look at the bears.’ The old woman disdain-
fully threw them to him ‚and said, scornfully, ‘Now
bring me a skin for my bed, and another for the cover-
let.’ He drew the boots on, fastened up his ragged
clothes, and ran out. The others exclaimed : ‘Is not
that Kagsagsuk ? What is he doing here ? Drive him
away ! ’ And the girls cried, ‘He is gone crazy I’ But
Kagsagsuk passed through the throng as though they
had been only a school of little ﬁshes ; ran so violently
that his heels struck his neck, and the snow ﬂew around
him glittering like a rainbow. He climbed the iceberg
with hands and feet, whereupon the largest bear in-

POETRY. 263

stantly raised his paws against him. But Kagsagsuk
turned round in order to make himself secure, seized
the bear by the fore paws, and slung it so violently
against the iceberg that the legs came OE from the
trunk, threw the body to the spectators, and exclaimed:
‘That is my ﬁrst catch; skin it and divide it I’ The
others thought, ‘The next bear will surely kill him.’
But Kagsagsuk did with the second bear as he had
done with the ﬁrst. Coming to the third bear, he held
it by the paws, and struck the spectators with it, say-
ing, ‘ That rascal there has treated me shamefully, and
that one has done worse,’ and did not stop till all had
run frightened into the house. When he went in he
proceeded with the two bear skins‘ directly to his foster-
mother and said, ‘ Here are your bed and coverlet.’
Then heyordered her to prepare the meat and cook it.
The others now invited Kagsagsuk to come into the
living room, but he went humbly under the passage as
formerly, and said, ‘Really, I can not go over there
unless one of you pulls me up by the nostrils. How—
ever, nobody ventured to try this, but his old foster-
mother came and did What he required. The men
were now all very polite to him. One of them said,
‘Pray, come nearer.’ And another, ‘Come, dear friend,
and sit down." ‘No, not there,’ said a third, ‘that
bench has no cover, here IS a ﬁne seat for Kagsagsuk. ’
He, however, declined all their invitations, and sat, as
usual, on the narrow, hard side- bench. After the meal
one of the inmates of the house sent a girl out to fetch
water for ‘dear Kagsagsuk.’ After she returned, and
he had drunk, he drew her gently to himself and thanked
her for the service, and instantly began to press her so
hard that the blood spurted out of her mouth. He

ﬂ

264: THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

only said, ‘I believe she has burst’; and her parents
said, very humbly, ‘ Oh, that is no matter, she is good
for nothing except to bring water.’ When, a little
while afterward, the youths came in, he called out to
them, ‘You will make splendid seal hunters,’ and seiz-
ing them, crushed one and then another, and tore their
limbs apart. The parents only said again: ‘That is no
matter; he was a good-for-nothing.’ Kagsagsuk con-
tinued executing his vengeance in this way till he had
killed all in the house who had ever done him wrong.
He only spared the poor people who had been friendly
toward him, and lived in peace with them on the pro—
visions that had been stored up for the winter. He
chose the best kayaks for himself, and practised so in-
dustriously in the navigation of them that he was soon
able to undertake long journeys to the north and south.
Thus he went around in the pride of his heart, and dis-
played his strength in all the land.” *

The story of little Kagsagsuk reminds us in its ex-
ceedingly effective form—and partially, too, in its sub-
stance—0f the best Mühe/zen. of the civilized peoples
of Europe; and it reminds us of them so much,’ that
the question involuntarily arises Whether this Eskimo
tale may not be a European fairy story in hyperborean
dress. With this question we meet at‘last one of the
greatest difﬁculties that the study of primitive epic has
to overcome. Are the stories of the primitive peoples
really primitive stories? For the tale of Kagsagsuk,
at least, we believewe can answer this question in the
afﬁrmative; but the Eskimo have a large number of
stories for the autochthonous origin of which we can

 

* Rink, pp. 93 et seq.

POETRY. 265

not vouch. Some have such a similarity with well-
known Norwegian sagas that it is difﬁcult, without
further knowledge, not to account for them as an
inheritance from the ancient Scandinavian settlers ; *
others, again, may have been borrowed from the neigh-
bouring Indian tribes; and still others have, perhaps,
been introduced in recent times by European mission-
aries, traders, and sailors. A like sceptical prudence
is proper toward the stories of the Australians and
Bushmen. It is always possible that Bleek may speak
of Remake Fuchs in South Africa with more justice
than he himself supposes. Our Reineke Fuchs itself
affords the best illustration of the distance to which
such animal stories can wander. Obviously the stories
which are transmitted from one people to another
suffer many transformations in the process, the greater
and more profound as the differences in civilization
between the peoples in question are greater. The
original form, and even the original sense, are fre-
quently lost; and then it is hard to recognise such an
immigrant story among the aboriginal poems as to dis-
tinguish the mixed posterity of a European waif living
in a hunting tribe from a full-blooded native. In the
meantime—and we must not deceive ourselves—so
long as criticism has not succeeded in purifying the
poetical tales of the hunting peoples from all foreign
constituents, every effort at a critical estimation of the
primitive epic will have only a doubtful value.

The drama is regarded by most historians of litera-
ture and aesthetics as the latest form of poetry ; yet we

 

* Compare, for example, the legend of Ititaujang, which Boas
(loc. cit, p. 617) has transcribed, with the Saga of Wieland the
Smith.

266 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

can say, with a certain degree of right, that it is the
earliest. The peculiar feature of the drama is the
representation of an event simultaneously by speech
and mimicry. In this sense nearly every primitive
tale is a drama, for the teller is not satisﬁed with simply-
relating history, but he enlivens his words by appro-
priate intonations and gestures—he represents the ac-
tion dramatically. “ The dramatic liveliness and the
effect of the Bushman tales,” says Ratzel, “is very
much heightened by the animals generally speaking
the Bushman language in ways indicative of each,
for which purpose the teller seeks to give his mouth
the form characteristic of the animal represented.” *
Boas says of the Eskimo story-tellers that “they
know exceedingly well how to express the feelings of
the different persons through modulations of their
v0ices.”1L We need only watch children in their
story telling to satisfy ourselves that this dramatically
enlivened form of enunciation is the most natural
and most primitive. Children and primitive peoples
likewise are indeed unable to make any narration with-
out accompanying it with the appropriate demeanour
and play of gesture. Pure relation requires a com-
mand of language and of one’s own body which is
rarely found among civilized men, and hardly ever
among savages. Pure epic is therefore probably the
latest, among the three chief kinds of poetry.

Common usage, however, means by a drama, not the
relation of an event enlivened by mimicry, but its
direct mimic and verbal representation by several per-

 

* Ratzel, Völkerkunde, vol. i, p. 78.
f Boas, loo. dt., p. 649.

POETRY. 267

sons. We can prove the existence of the drama even
in this narrow sense in the lowest stages of culture.
If we recall the duet of Greenlanders which Rink has
published, and conceive—a conception which prob-
‘ably corresponds to the reality—that the two singers
are not only relating their adventure but are repre—
senting it by mimic gestures, we have a complete
dramatic scene. In fact, we discern in these duets,
which are very much in vogue, not. only in arctic
America but also in Australia, one root of the drama.*
We have already found the second root in the mimic
dances. The duet becomes the drama as soon as it
is accOmpanied by the imitative movement ; the mimic
dance becomes the drama as soon as it is accompanied
by words. The primitive drama is outwardly distin-
guished from the mimic dance, ﬁrst by the movements
of the actors not being rhythmically regulated, and
secondly by their being occasionally accompanied by
words. It is not easy so precisely to deﬁne the inner
difference. It "can be said that the drama does not
represent a mere uniform action like, for example,
canoe paddling, but an action in progressive develop-
ment; but if we do not do violence to the facts, we
shall ﬁnd it very hard to draw a sharp line of division
where there is in reality only continuous transition.
Furthermore, words play so subordinate a part in the
dramatic performances of hunting peoples that they
rather resemble our pantomimes than our diamas.
We suppose that such pantomimes or dramas exist
among all primitive peoples; but they have thus far
been observed only among the Australians, the Aleuts,

 

* Eyre, vol. ii, p. 240.

288 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the Eskimo, and the Fuegians,* and have been fully
described only as among the ﬁrst two. The dramatic
performances of the Eskimo have been mentioned
often, but never, to our knowledge, described-f A
lively description of a pantomime which was repre-
sented by the Aleuts to the members of Krusenstern’s
Expedition may be found in Choris : “ An Aleut, who
was armed with a bow, represented a hunter, another a
bird. The former expressed by gestures how very
glad he was that he had found so ﬁne a bird; never-
theless, he would not kill it. The other imitated the
motions of a bird seeking to escape the hunter. He
at last, after a long delay, pulled his bow and shot: the
bird reeled, fell and died; the hunter danced for joy;
but ﬁnally he became troubled, repented having killed
so ﬁne a bird, and lamented it ; suddenly the dead bird
rose, turned into a beautiful woman, and fell into the
hunter’s arms”: The Australian drama, which Lang
witnessed, is related to this northern scene about as a
moral piece to a romantic fairy tale. In this, too, the
performers limited themselves to a dumb play, While
the director of the Whole accompanied the several
scenes of the pantomime with an explanatory song.
The performance took place on a moonlight night in a
clearing in the woods lighted up by a great ﬁre. The
orchestra consisted of about a hundred women, and
about ﬁve hundred native spectators were present.
“The ﬁrst scene consisted in the representation of a

 

* The dramatic performances of the Yahgans, which Bove has
mentioned but not described, may really be mimic dances.

{Compare our deductions concerning the mimic dances of the
Eskimo, pp. 208, 209.

i Ghoris, Voyage pittoresque autour du Monde.

POETRY. 269

herd of cattle which came out of the woods to pasture
on the meadow. The black players had painted them-
selves appropriately to their characters. The imitation
was skilful; the motion and behaviour of each head of
the herd were amusingly natural. Some lay on the
ground and chewed their cuds. Others stood and
scratched themselves with their horns and hind feet,
or licked their companions or their calves. Others
rubbed one another’s heads in a friendly way. After
this bucolic idyl had lasted a little while, the second
scene began- A band of blacks were perceived creep-
ing" upon the herd, with all the precautions which the
natives use in such cases. At length they were near
enough, and two cattle fell, struck by spears, to the
highest delight of the spectators, who broke out in
enthusiastic applause. The hunters pretended to skin
their prey, dress it, and cut it up—all with the most
painstaking exactness. The third scene was opened
with a trotting of horses in the wood. Immediately
afterward a troop of white men appeared on horse-
back. Their faces were painted a whitish brown; their
bodies blue or red, to represent coloured shirts; and
the lower parts of their legs, in the absence of gaiters,
were wrapped with brushwood. These white men gal-
loped straight up to the blacks, ﬁred and drove them
back. The latter collected again, and a desperate bat-
tle began, in which the blacks beat the whites and
drove them back. The whites bit off their cartridges,
ﬁxed the caps on their guns—in short, went regularly
through all the motions of loading and ﬁring. As often
as a black fell, the spectators groaned, but when a white
man bit the dust a loud shout of joy went up. At last
the whites were disgracefully put to ﬂight, to the un-

270 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

bounded delight of the natives, who were so excited
that the merest triﬂe might have changed the sham
ﬁght into bloody earnest.” *

This result of the Australian drama involves nothing
surprising to a European. We have long been accus-
tomed to honour poetry as the most eﬁective art.
Borne by mighty geniuses, poetry rose‘centuries ago to
uncontested predominance in Europe. Sometimes its
hegemony threatens to degenerate into a despotism
through the zeal of its critical champions who to try
force the laws of poetry upon the other arts. In any _
case no other art since painting 'and sculpture, newly ‘
born in the Renascence, have grown old, can compare
with poetry in the breadth and depth of its social in-
ﬂuence. Modern history marks whole epochs of civili-
zation with the name of some poet or poem; and poetry
has more than once, through a single work, impressed
a peculiar stamp upon a whole generation. Poetry
largely owes this royal position to its essential peculiar-
ity. N 0 other art has such unlimited command of so
limitless material. . There is no phenomenon in the
inner or outer world which poetry has not the means
.of grasping and illustrating; and while its means-—
spoken forms—are accessible and familiar to eyerybody,
they are at the same time capable cf the most manifold
and reﬁned aesthetic perfection. Yet all this richness .
of material and means continues unfruitful, like an
enchanted treasure, till a hero comes who is able to cap-
ture it, while generations may pass looking for him in

 

* Lang, The Aborigines of Australia. Brough Smyth, vol. i,
p. 171. The European, incidents detract nothing from the primitive
character of the representation. '

POETRY. 271

vain. For three hundred years the princes of poesy
have succeeded one another in Europe like the kings in
Macbeth’s vision; from Shakespeare to Goethe—what
a series of crowned heads! Former epochs, too, had
their great poets; yet the greatest masters of antiquity
and the middle ages did not probably exercise so broad
and mighty an inﬂuence over their contemporaries as
proceeds in modern times even from mediocre poets.
The later poetry, in fact, owes its position of power to
an advance which is wholly outside of itself—the in-
vention of the art of printing. Through the press the
poet can speak to a multitude compared with which the
thousands who can assemble in a gigantic building like
the Coliseum are as a drop in the ocean. Guttenberg
forged the weapons for poetry with which it has con-
quered the World. _ ~ '

In what does this powerful inﬂuence of poetry on
social life consist? Every poem primarily expresses
only the feeling of the poet; but it expresses it in a
form that arouses similar feeling in those who hear and
read it. The note which the poet strikes causes all the
chords of like tone which it reaches to sound in unison
or harmony with it. The great poet holds the en-
chanted ﬁddle of the German legend, and the execu-
tioner drops his cord, the smith lets his hammer fall,
the student shuts his book, to listen: the same feeling
vibrates through them all, and their hearts beat in the
same time—they have become one with the poet and
with one another. Poetry unites men, whom the in-
terests of life separate, by invoking the same feeling in
all; and, by constantly repeating the invocation, it
ﬁnally produces a lasting unityof mood. The practical
value of such poetical uniﬁcation is demonstrated to us

272 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

by history. Politics rent Italy, but poetry united it;
the mighty voices of its great poets, which spoke to the
Neapolitans as well as to the Lombards, kept alive in
Italians through the long years of separation and servi-
tude the consciousness that they were and ought to
be one people. The Germans have had equal experi-
ence of the unifying power of poetry. The “Holy
Roman Empire ” fell to pieces, and in life we felt only
as Prussians, or Swabians, or Bavarians, till our great
poetry taught us to feel again that we were Germans.
In this sense it may be said that Goethe had no less
part in the foundation of the new German Empire
than Bismarck. Poetry accomplishes still more; it not
only unites men—it elevates them, too. The poet, it
is true, can elevate his public only when he himself
stands above it. But in this case the expression of his
higher and nobler feelings awakens in the others a
more reﬁned and richer emotional life than that which
practical life has matured in them. Nevertheless, even
the greatest poet is never able to draw out from his
hearers feelings of which they are not naturally capa-
ble; he can awaken and develop only the moods that
are present; but without him these higher moods
would be even more dormant than the seed in a clod on
which no sunlight falls. In the hours when the rays
of a poetical work illuminate our souls, we feel what.
we can be and what we ought to be. And even when
the holy hour passes away—if it has been rightly lived
—it can not go without leaving its traces in our lives.
The aesthetic feelings which poetry arouses in us are
not feelings foreign to life; the poetic excitement is
rather a stimulation in peculiar shape of the same feel-
ings as determine the conduct of life, Vita; est alum

POETRY. 273

ludere videmur. In this way—and not through any
rhymed or unrhymed moral preaching, for which only
bunglers misuse poetry—the great poets have been
teachers of~ mankind. The peoples have at all times
felt, more or less clearly, what they owe to great poets.
The Greeks listened to the songs of their Homer with
the same reverence as to the voice of the Delphian
divinity. The people of the middle ages looked up to
Virgil with superstitious awe as to a magician and
prophet; the ﬁgure of Dante rises in superhuman mag-
nitude in the cities and the heart of Italy; and the
‘ hand of the critic who ventures to write about Goethe
involuntarily trembles when it touches the hem of his
garment.

Poetry can indeed as readily turn its power to evil
as to good. While it can on the one hand develop the
germs of higher and nobler feelings, it can on the’ other
develop the lower and debasing instincts that slumber
in every soul; and it can not be denied that for the
poet who elevates his readers there are a dozen others
who drag them down into the ﬁlth in which they are
themselves at home. Especially to—day, in the face of
the epidemic spread of the lowest cheap romances,
one may be pardoned for sometimes doubting whether
poetry is on the whole a curse or a blessing to social
life. Indeed, if the peoples are not successfully pro-
tected by the diffusion of good writings against poison-
ous infection by bad ones, the time will certainly come
when we shall long for Plato’s state, in which poets of
this sort were duly honoured as “holy, wonderful,
and charming men,” and then politely led across the
borders.

Has poetry a like signiﬁcance in the lives of the

274 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

hunting peoples? It has not the command of the same
means of diffusion. The primitive peoples have neither
printing nor writing ; their poems are propagated only
from mouth to mouth.* Furthermore, the language
set narrow limits to their spread. ’ Just as the primitive
peoples have been split up into numerous little, sepa-
rated tribes, so the primitive languages have been split
into numerous little, separated dialects. In South Aus-
tralia “every solitary wandering tribe has its own lan-
guage ” ;1' and not rarely tribes very near one another
in space are in speech far distanti That the mem-
bers of different tribes can, nevertheless, in case of need
come to an understanding, proves nothing against our
view that this multiplicity of languages is a great hin-
drance to the spread and inﬂuence of poetical produc-
tions. Single songs, it is true, go from their homes
into the remotest parts of the continent ; we are never-
theless satisﬁed that not the poetical substance but only
the musical form reaches the natives in this way. There
are no less than eight different dialects on the small
Andaman group. When Lieutenant Temple compared
two immediately neighbouring dialects, he found that
in every thirty words only three were identical, while
inﬂections were altogether different from one another.“It
The various tribes of Bushmen also speak their special
dialects. While Bleek remarks that no one Bushman
language exists in Cape Colony, which is so different

 

* The rude attempts at writing Which are found in this stage of
civilization, the notches of the Australians and the pictures of the
Alaskan tribes, are wholly unﬁt, by their nature, to express a. poet-
ical form.

’r Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 706. 1 Ibid., p. 707.

# Man, .l our. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 122.

POETRY. 275

from the rest as from that of the Hottentots, we have no
right to conclude that their dialects are not considerably
different from one another; for the same investigator
tells us that “the Bushman language is certainly no more
nearly related to the Hottentot than the English to the
Latin.” The dialects of the Eskimo seem to be more
nearly alike, although “the languages of the tribes west
of the Mackenzie are considerably diﬁerent from those
of the east ” ; * but the extremely scattered condition of
the thin populations here in the far north forms an in-
surmountable barrier to rapid and general distribution
of poetical works. “The small settlements of the Es-
kimo,” says Rink, “ are separated from one another by
desert wastes of ten, twenty, or even a hundred miles.
Although it is highly probable that these various scat-
tered tribes have gone out from a common home, their
intercourse is at present limited, and we may assume
without exaggeration that the tribes of Greenland and
Labrador have in all probability had no intercourse
with those who live on the coast of Bering Strait for
at least a thousand years, but, on the contrary, have no
knowledge of their existence.” 1“ Consequently all their
stories of recent origin bear “ the character of family
traditions.” The tribes of the Eskimo further possess,
like other hunting peoples, a common treasure of poet-
ical traditions. To all appearance, however, the poems
of this last sort have not been propagated independent-
ly, but are inherited from their ancestors ; the tribes

 

* Rink, p. 14. “ The difference in language between Greenland
and Labrador is less than that between Swedish and Danish.”

+ Rink, p. 84. “ When Dr. Kane visited the small Eskimo tribes
in Smith Sound, the natives there were much surprised to ﬁnd that
they were not the only men on earth.”

19

276 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

brought these with them from the old common home,
and have preserved them in their dispersion.

As poetry in the lowest grades of civilization is des-
titute of the means of uniting Wider circles in feeling,
it is also not so capable there, as in the upper grades,
of enriching and ennobling the emotional life of its
hearers. The primitive poet is only in extremely ex-
ceptional cases above the level of his public. Not at
all that Nature has not produced any pre-eminently en-
dowed individuals among these peoples; but the low
civilization which makes the same inexorable demands
on all the members of a hunting tribe alike, holds the
different individuals fast to the same inferior level in
their development. And so we see that every native
in Australia “himself provides the songs of his house,”
just as everybody makes for himself What implements
and weapons he needs ; and the songs of one are there-
fore worth quite as much or as little as those of another.
Stokes boasts of the ease and quickness with which one
of his native companions, Miago, could make a song on
every theme that struck his poetical fancy; * but this
gift of improvisation is not a privilege of any particular
person, but a common possession of all Australians.
When, however, peculiar songs gain special repute,
their fame is not due to their poetical but to their mu-
sical value. Among the Eskimo, too, “nearly every-
body has his own songs.” In their epic poems, on the
contrary, signs of individual higher talents are not
rarely found. The story of little Kagsagsuk, for ex-
ample, evidently reveals a poetic gift that rises high
above the general average. That the natives them-

 

* Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, vol. ii, p. 216.

POETRY. 277

selves are not without apprehension of this excellence
is shown by the circumstance that they closely watch
the teller of stories of the kind, lest he diverge, even
by a word, from the time-honoured form. The Aus-
tralians honour the names of a few famous poets, which
probably belong to a distant time in the past. Thus a
consciousness of the signiﬁcance of poetry lives even in
the hunting peoples. This signiﬁcance is not so power-
ful in their life, it is true, as it is for that of civilized
peoples, but it is strong enough. While primitive
poetry is destitute of means of extending its unifying
inﬂuence far over contemporary generations, it still
connects succeeding generations. In the stories and
songs which one generation transmits to another, pos-
terity recognises the voices of their ancestors; and while
they listen to their woes and share their emotions, they
feel that they are members of an aggregate which gives
support and signiﬁcance to their individual life. So
here, too, poetry exercises its ofﬁce as mediator among
men.

CHAPTER X.

MUSIC.

MUSIC appears, at the lowest stage of culture, in the
most intimate connection with the dance and with
poetry. Of a dance without musical accompaniment
the primitive tribes know as little as do civilized peo-
ples. “They never sing without dancing, and in-
versely,” says Ehrenreich of the Botocudo; “hence
they designate both by the same word.” * The Eskimo
accompany their dances with singing and drum-beating,
and the music is kept so much in the foreground in the
exercises that the building in which the dances are
held is not called the dance-house, but the singing-
house (guaggﬂi The dancing festivals of the .Minco-
pies may be regarded as equally musical festivals.
“The preparations consist chieﬂy in practising the solo
and the chorus which are to be sung at the dance”:
In Australia the women of the tribe form an orchestra
for the corroborry of the men ; and the dancing Bush-
man moves to the time of the drums and the singing of
the spectators. The musical accompaniment is as in-
dispensable to the primitive dramas and pantomimes as

 

* Zeitsch. für Eth., 1887, p. 33.
+ An. .Rep’t Bureau of Eth., 1884—’85, p. 600.
l Jour. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 389.

278

MUSIC. 279

to the mimic dances from which they have been devel-
oped. In an Australian spectacle, for example, “the
director sang an explanatory text to the single scene,
accompanied by the women, who repeated the refrain
of the song in chorus, and beat the time with sticks on
their'opossum skins.”* The primitive lyric is sung. The
words of an Australian, Andamanese, or hyperborean
song are always carried by a melody; or, rather, the
words always carry a melody, for the latter seems to
be so much the principal thing that for its sake the
words are changed and mutilated till their meaning is
lost. Lastly, the epic poems, or parts of them at least,
are not simply told, but pronounced in a recitative
song. Dance, poetry, and music thus form a natural
unity, which can only artiﬁcially be separated. If we
would correctly understand and estimate the conditions
and effects of each of these primitive arts, we should
always hear in mind that they are not independent, but
stand in the closest vital connection.

On the other hand, we are told that music, which
is externally so intimately associated with poetry and
the dance, is internally perfectly distinct from them;
that it is an art wholly of its own kind, which can
be compared, as to means and eﬁects, with no other
art. Nobody has insisted more energetically on this
distinct position of music than Schopenhauer.“ Music
is quite independent of the visible world, is absolutely
ignorant of it, and could exist in a certain way if them
were no world; which can not be said of the other

rts.”'1' All the other arts take their matelial and

 

* Lang. Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 170.
+ Schopenhauer, Sämmtliche Werke (Griesbach’s edition), vol. i,
p. 340. Even before Schopenhauer, Hoffmann had in his ingenious

280 * THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

models from the visible world, from Nature; they are
imitative, representative arts; but music, in its pure
work at least, copies no natural phenomena of any sort.
It creates, as Gurney says, audible forms, successions
and combinations of tones which have no prototype in
Nature, and do not exist outside of music. This view is
indeed opposed by another, which regards music as an
imitation of Nature equally with all the other arts; and
this latter view is not only much older, but so far as
we can see, is still much more generally accepted than
the former. It has been expressed in its simplest and
clearest form by the Abbé Dubos. “Just as a painter
imitates the forms and colours of Nature,” he says, “ so
does the musician imitate the notes, the accents, the
sighs, the modulations of the voice—in short, all the
tones through which Nature herself expresses feeling
and passions.” Since Dubos wrote, this theory has
changed its dress more than once, without having
undergone any considerable development; at last it has
been taken up in our own time by Herbert Spencer,

 

Kreisleriana described the peculiar quality of music in spirited
words. “How extremely wonderful is music!” he makes his Jo-
hannes Kreisler exclaim. “ How little can man fathom its deep mys-
teries! But does it not dwell in the heart of man, and so ﬁll him
within with its charming vision, that his whole mind turns to it,
and a new, brightened life delivers him already here below from
the pressure, the prostrating misery of the earthly? Yes, a divine
power penetrates him, and yielding, with childlike, pious disposition,
to that which the spirit stirs up within him, he is able to speak the
language of that unknown, romantic spirit realm, and unwittingly,
like a pupil who has been reading aloud in his master’s book of en-
ehantment, he calls forth all the glowing apparitions from within
himself, so that they ﬂit through life in bright round-dances, and
ﬁll everybody who is able to contemplate them with inﬁnite, name-
less aspirations.”

MUSIC. 28 1

who has endeavoured to establish it ﬁrmly and give it a
richer development for the advantage of his philosophy
of evolution.* Edmund Gurney, in his admirable work,
The Power of Sound, has summarized in a few words
all the essential points upon which Spencer supports
his theory. Spencer says that the sources of music lie
in the cadences of impassioned speech, and that it has
reacted upon speech by making these cadences more
various, complicated, and expressive. He bases this
theory on the hypothesis that the vocal qualities which
denote excitement of feeling are precisely those that
distinguish song from ordinary speech—viz., loudness,
quality of timbre, marked deviations from a medium
pitch, breadth of intervals, and exceedingly rapid
change. He is therefore of the opinion that singing
originates through the emphasizing and intensifying of
these properties.1- Spencer thus says that song and all
music in its train are a more characteristic and more
richly developed imitation of emotional speech—that is,
he afﬁrms, in substance nothing else than what Dubos
held. This derivation of music from speech evidently
does not agree with the ﬁrst expressed view of its pe-
culiar nature. The advocates of the separate right of
music trace it, therefore, logically to a completely inde-
pendent musical beginning; they are, to use Gurney’s
expression, convinced that the oak grew from an
acorn.

It is evident, without further remark, how important
as an aid in the decision of this question is the study of

 

* Herbert Spencer, On the Origin and the Function of Music.
Concerning the earlier history, compare the profound and extremely
interesting chapter, The Speech Theory, in Gurney, The Power of
Sound, London, 1880. + Gurney, p. 47 6.

282 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

primitive music. From Spencer’s point of View, we
should expect that music to be very closely like im-
passioned speech. If it should be shown, on the con-
trary, that music in its beginnings is already as sharply
diﬂerent from emotional speech as it is in its later
forms, the evidence would fall with decisive prepon-
derance into the other scale of the balance.

We can distinguish in music, as in every art, be-
tween substance and form. The substance of music
consists of tones. The forms to which these tones are
attached are controlled by two diﬁerent principles,
both of which are equally indispensable to musical
effect—the principles of rhythm and harmony. Mu-
sical rhythm in its simplest form arises through the
production of a tone or a small group of tones at
regular intervals of time. Harmony arises from the
ﬁxing of a tone of a certain pitch in a perceptible
relation to a tone of another deﬁnite pitch. On the
principle of rhythm, the tones .are quantitatively ar-
ranged, while on the principle of harmony they are
qualitatively arranged. Rhythm and harmony to-
gether form melody; in other words, melodic forms
consist of successions of notes which are rhythmically
and harmoniously arranged.

The ﬁrst musical instrument of mankind was, with-
out doubt, the voice. Vocal music prevails’very de-
cidedly over instrumental in the lowest stages of
civilization. It is very easy to collect a great series
of descriptions and criticisms of songs of primitive
tribes and illustrate them by examples; but it is diﬂi-
cult to obtain from such a compilation anything like
an adequate idea of the character of primitive Song.
European transcriptions of primitive melodies must

MUSIC. 283

be received, without exception, with the greatest cau-
tion, for our system of notation has so little corre-
spondence with the various scales of the several hunt—
ing peoples that the conveyance of the peculiarity of
the originals can not be relied upon at all. European
‘ judgments of the aesthetic value of the songs are com—
pletely and fundamentally worthless, because it is of
no importance to our study how primitive music, which
is intended for primitive ears, may affect a European.
We shall consequently select from the accounts as far
as possible only those which contain the most deﬁnite
and objective statements.

If we may trust the judgment of the Prince of
Wied, the singing of the Botocudo is the rudest to
be heard on the earth. “The singing of the men is
like an inarticulate bellowing, continuously alternating
in three or four notes, now high, now low; the breath
is drawn deeply from the chest, while they lay the left
arm over the head and stick a ﬁnger into each ear, es-
pecially when they wish to make themselves heard by
the spectators, and force the mouth, which is terribly
deformed by the botogue, wide open. The women do
not sing so loudly or so unpleasantly; at the same time,
the hearer catches only a few notes, which are con-
stantly repeated.” *

The Mincopies seem to be only a little superior to _
the Botocudo in their musical efforts. Man found that
the brief melodies, which are repeated indeﬁnitely by
the chorus in their dances, became excruciatingly mo-
notonous as they were continued. A specimen which
he publishes from Dr. Brander’s transcription moves

 

* Wied, vol. ii, p. 41.

284: THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Within three notes. However, it is more than doubtful
whether this European travesty gives a correct repre-
sentation of the Andaman melodies. An experiment
which a friend of Man’s made With ﬁve women, seven
men, and three boys, resulted in the conclusion that
“ the natives have not the most remote idea of deﬁnite
pitch.” It was impossible for them, even when they
happened to hit upon the keynote which the Euro-
pean gave them, to go up and down the scale.* On
the other hand, all Mincopies have a very strongly
marked sense of rhythm, which is always strictly
maintained.

The same preference for rhythm is apparent in the
music of the Australians. “ The natives,” says Lum-
holtz of his Queenslanders, “have a poorer ear for
melody than for time; and yet I have learned from my
people to sing several quite melodious songs. My songs
do not please them at all. They were pleased with only
one of them, when I sang it to them in strictly regular
time.”+ The general characterization drawn by Ger-
land of Australian singing conﬁrms these descriptions:
“They sing much and not badly in a well-sustained,
grave, and even melancholy way. They are also able
to sing foreign songs, though they do not generally
ﬁnd European music at all agreeable; frequently it
makes no impression on them, or they ridicule it.”*
They always kept accurately with the time, which was
generally, according to Beckler, in rapid movement.

 

* Man, J our. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 392.

‘r Lumholtz, p. 200.

i Grey relates, however, that his native servant was so impressed
with God save the Queen, which he heard in the theatre at Perth,
that he broke into sobbing.

MUSIC. 285

Indeed, the Australian melodies given by this author,
which he had learned from a German who knew them
all by heart, and what he further says of the “ abso-
lutely faultless ” concordance of the voices, of the
“charmingly pure ” enunciation of the octaves by the
women and children, of the burning log with which
the camp was illuminated, and of the death song sung
to it, form a brilliant portrayal of beauty and roman-
tic eﬁect. The single melody rising from Ö to D in
chromatic movement, in three-quarter time, and then,
still chromatically, going from Ü to H, and what he
gives of the melody, is certainly not objectively con-
ceived; still less so are his death song in E ﬂat, and
his corroborry in C sharp, which both have a European
character, and are certainly greatly modiﬁed, even
if they possess a kernel of native originality, which
they most probably do. F reycinet also gives melodies
from New Holland, but seems to have sacriﬁced much
to our time and our notation. Yet his transcriptions
agree with those of Beckler and with themselves, in
that they all show a constant fall from F to F, that
second intervals and the chromatic movement are much
favoured (one of his songs consisting of the chromatic
scale from Ü down). The transcriptions are unsatis-
factory, aside from their assimilation to European
standards, because of the inexact estimation of the
intervals; those which are written chromatically in
them are certainly only quarter tones, mere shadings,
which are perhaps never regarded or perceived as sub-
stantial tones. The fundamental motive of this music
appears to be starting with a tone or an interval of the
second, and the gradual falling of the voice from this
tone to about an octave below. The whole would then

286 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

be comprehended, although imperfectly, as merely a—
certainly well-contrived—falling of the voice from that
one note with various rhythmical alternations. Trioles
are numerous in Freycinet’s and Beckler’s transcrip-
tions. Brown’s description agrees with these: “They
begin their song loud and shrill, and then let their
voices fall to an extreme piano. Moreover, their speech
on all festive occasions passes into a recitative singing,
and every stronger emotion appears to urge them to
sing.” * ,

The music of the Eskimo, so far as we can judge,
stands at about the same level. Even in their short
melodies rhythm prevails over harmony. The number
of notes is rather limited, and the intervals are not
strictly observed. Boas has published a considerable
number of specimens, but he himself admits that the
adaptation of the melodies to our system “is somewhat
arbitrary.” He has further tried to divide the melodies
into two groups, corresponding with our major and
minor modes. But to us this eﬂort only proves how
inadequate are all such pains.

The highest place in this musical classiﬁcation be-
longs without doubt to the Bushmen. “The Bushman
possesses a special musical talent,” says Theophilus
Hahn. “He picks up melodies quickly and very cor-
rectly. My father was a missionary among the N ama-
qua Hottentots. He made experiments in the cultiva~
tion of wheat in the meadows near Angra Pequena, in
which he was assisted by the Bushmen living there;
and it was a pleasure to him to sing chorals to them in
the evening with the accompaniment of the harmonium.

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, pp. 752 et seq.

MUSIC. 237

To his astonishment, the Bushmen in a few days sang
the melodies he had played to them, with the Dutch
words, which were unintelligible to them.” The best
characterization of the native music of the Bushmen is
given by Liechtenstein. We quote his words here,
although they do not relate exclusively to singing:
“We had gradually become so accustomed to the m0-
notonous sound of the Bushman music that our sleep
was never disturbed by it, but it rather put us to sleep.
When heard in the distance it is not at all unpleasant,
but mournful and soothing. Although the music does
not comprise more than six tones, which besides do not
belong to our scale, but form intervals quite foreign to
it, yet the method of vocalization of these tones, the
unusual rhythm, and the strangeness—I might say the
wildness—of the melody give it a very peculiar charm.
I venture to use the word ‘high,’ for although the in-
tervals do not correspond with ours, they still present
perfectly regular and easily comprehensible relations
which please the ear. There are only three intervals
between the keynote and the octave. The ﬁrst is at
least a little lower than our major third; the second
lies about midway between the minor and the major
ﬁfth; and the third between the major sixth and the
minor seventh—~so that one might fancy that he was
hearing modulations ﬁrst in the chord of the minor
seventh. Yet each lies higher in its relation to the
keynote; the ear does not feel so much the need. of
closing with a pure triad, and one is even better satis-
ﬁed without it. Skilful 907% players bring out the
second and sometimes even the third interval in the
higher octave. These higher tones are, however,
somewhat broken, and rarely form pure octaves to the

288 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

corresponding lower tones. There are no melodies
proper, but always only a long, protracted alteration of
the same tones; and indeed the keynote is struck again
before every tone. It should be observed, ﬁnally, that
the intervals in question are not peculiar to the special
instrument used.”

The ﬁrst thing that strikes us in all these descrip-
tions is the fact that the hunting peoples attach greater
importance in their singing to the rhythm than to the
harmony. The rhythm, with its strictly observed regu-
larity, appears everywhere as the more important and
more complicated element as against the harmony, with
its uncertain, wavering intervals, limited to a few notes.
It is not diﬂicult to account for this relation. We need
only recollect that a great many of these melodies are
sung at the dances, and that the dance always moves in
exact time. Furthermore, the sense of rhythm has also
undoubtedly been developed through the primitive in-
strumental music.

The musical instruments of the lowest stages of
culture serve for the most part only to mark the
time. The most widespread instrument of this sort is
the kettledrum. It seems to be wanting among only
one of the hunting tribes, the Botocudo. All the
others have it in a more or less rude form. The most
primitive form of the kettledrum, which is probably,
the most primitive and oldest form of musical instru-
ment in general, is found in Australia.* The instru-
ment, with the beating of which the women there

 

* Simply noisy instruments are indeed at least quite as old ; the
tuft of leaves, for instance, Which is worn around the ankles at the
Australian corroborry, and the dance-rattles of the Bushmen, which
Burchell has described to us in his account.

MUSIC. 289

accompany the dance of the men, is nothing but the
tightly stretched or rolled opossum skin which is at
other times worn as a mantle over the shoulders.* We
regard the ingenious wooden drum with a skin drawn .
over it as not of Australian invention, but as borrowed
from the Melanesians. Another time-beating instru-
ment, used in the north, has, however, a strictly primi-
tive character—“ a thick, wedged-shaped stick of hard
wood, which, when struck, gives forth a peculiar loud
sound.” + This Queensland sounding - stick forms a
transition to the curious drum of the Mincopies—the
sounding-board, which the director of the dance treads
with his foot. It is a scutellate arched board of very
hard wood, and is sometimes ﬁve feet long and two feet
wide. The concave side is usually decorated with de-
signs in white clay. In using it the convex side is
turned up, the sharpened end is stuck in the ground
and held fast with the foot, and a stone is placed under
the board to increase the soundi The drum of the
Eskimo is a large tambourine with a handle. The ring
and the handle are of wood or whalebone, and the skin
of seal or reindeer hide. This instrument, which is
three feet in diameter, is beaten with a stick ten inches
long and three inches thick}ht The Bushmen spread a
hide over the opening of an earthen or wooden vessel
and strike this romymelpott, as it is called in the Dutch
colony, with their ﬁngers.

 

* Sometimes a. piece of earth is inclosed in the opossum skin.
Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 170.

JrLumholtz. p. 200. The instrument is so rare that Lumholtz
was able to see it only once.

1 Man, Jour. Anth. Inst., vol. xii, p. 399.

# Boas, An. Rep’t Bureau of Eth., 1884—’85, p. 601.

290 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

The drum is still the only musical instrument of a
large part of the hunting peoples. The Eskimo, the
Mincopies, and most of the Australian tribes are not
acquainted with any other. At Port Essington only,
the natives had a ﬂute, “which is made of a bamboo
stem two or three feet long, and is blown with the
nose.”* On the other hand, two wind instruments
have been found among the Botocudo, who have no
drum—a ﬂute of taguam cane, furnished with two
holes in the lower end, which is generally played by
the womenﬁ and 'a trumpet made out of the skin of
the tail of the great armadillo.;t The Bushmen, for
their part, have developed stringed instruments. We
can not believe, however, that they themselves invented
all the forms they use. The three-sided guitar is surely
borrowed from the negroes, and the gourd harp is prob-
ably derived from the Hottentots. The last is a wooden
bow, to which a gourd is attached as a resonator; and a
sliding ring is run over the single cord, by means of
which the vibrating part can be lengthened or short—
ened at pleasure.31¢ Only the 90m, the most primitive
of their stringed instruments, is undoubtedly original
to the Bushmen. It is simply a somewhat modiﬁed
form of the most’ important practical implement of the
Bushmen—the bow. The modiﬁcation consists in the
insertion, on one side, between the end of the bow-
string and the wood, of a notched, leaf-shaped, ﬂattened

 

* Waitz—Gerland, vol. vi, p. 752. In the southern part of the
continent the ﬂute was known only by name.

+ Wied, vol. ii, p. 41.

i Ehrenreich, Zeit. für Eth.‚ 1889, p. 19.

# Theophilus Hahn mentions a similar instrument—Which he
calls an embryo violin—with two strings.

MUSIC. 291

quill. This quill is pressed against the puckered lips
of the player and made to vibrate by inspiration and
expiration. The tones of this Bushman mouth har-
monicum are very weak ; the player is therefore accus-
towed to insert the foreﬁnger of his right hand, with
which he holds the bow, into his ear, in order to re-
enforce the sound and make it more perceptible to
himself.* Some of these players are capable of sitting
thus absorbed in their music for hours at a time. “ A
good player,” says Levaillant, “applies much practice
to bringing the tones out correctly; and it is a remark-
able fact that an accomplished artist produces the
octave by blowing with greater force, as is done on
the ﬂute—an instrument which is capable of giving
a very fair idea of the tones of the gore.”

Shall we undertake to summarize the characteristic
traits of primitive music? They come out quite dis-
tinctly from the different accounts. In the lower
grades of culture, vocal music predominates over in-
strumental. Both move simply—in short, one-part
melodies. Polyphony and symphony are unknown.
Of the two factors of melody, rhythm is predominantly
developed, while harmony is very defective. In re-
spect to the latter feature, the primitive melodies are
distinguished from ours—besides the difference in the
intervals—ﬁrst by a smaller range of tones, and sec—
ondly by the weakness of the pitch.

Armed with this knowledge, we are in position to
form a judgment of the value of Spencer’s theory.
The English philosopher supposes that the source of

 

* A picture of a gom player may be found in Ratzel, Völker-
kunde, vol. i, p. 70.
20

292 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

music lies in the cadences of impassioned emotional
speech; and he bases his supposition on the assump-
tion that emotional speech and music—especially sing-
ing—have the same characteristic marks. If such con-
cordance exists, it should obviously appear most plainly
in primitive song. According to Spencer, song as
well as emotional speech is distinguished from ordi-
nary speech by its greater loudness of voice. But
loudness is not really a universal feature either of
emotional speech or of singing. The primitive peo-
ples sing softly as well as loudly. We have heard
that the singing with which the Australian women
accompany the corrobowy frequently falls to an un-
intelligible murmuring. “The musical sound of the
voice,” on the other hand, without doubt, distin-
guishes primitive singing as it does singing in gen-
eral from ordinary speech, but it distinguishes it at
least as much from emotional speech; for, if we can
trust our ears, the latter is much more unmusical than
the former. “It contains a larger number of harsh
clashings and high consonances, which produce the
character of roughness.” * Thirdly, singing and im-
passioned speech agree in their marked departures
from a medium pitch. Such departures certainly
form a characteristic peculiarity of impassioned speech;
“they are abrupt and hard, spring rapidly up and
down, and pass over very wide intervals within a
single syllable, not rarely a twelfth or two octaves ”;
but what would follow if these variations were more
characteristically expressed and more richly developed?
Certainly nothing that would in the remotest degree

 

* Gurney, p. 476.

MUSIC. 293

resemble primitive singing, for primitive singing gen-
erally moves within a small number of tones, the
intervals between which also do not even approxi-
mately correspond in breadth with those of emotional
speech. No more can a trace be pointed to in emo- '
tional speech, of that rhythmical order which is so
distinct and peculiar a mark of primitive singing.
Only in one point is the singing of the hunting
tribes really in closer relation with impassioned speech
than the singing of the civilized peoples—in lack of
deﬁniteness of pitch, in the gliding from one tone to
another. Yet this one point is obviously not sufﬁcient
to support Spencer‘s construction, from under which
the ground yields and falls away in all other places.
As a rule, singing—without speaking at all of instru-
mental music—is as widely and sharply different from
emotional speech in the lowest stages of culture as in
all the other stages. Primitive music interposes an
objection to Spencer’s derivation of music from speech,
which it will be hard to overcome.*

How, then, has man arrived at music? Darwin
thinks that the faculty of producing musical tones and
rhythm was ﬁrst acquired by our animal ancestors as a
means of attracting the other sex. He deduces this
opinion from the observation that the majority of
male animals use their voices most during the breed-
ing season; ﬁrst, in order to give vent to their own
feelings, and then to attract the attention of the fe-
males. If we now assume that, besides attracting at-
tention, the tone also awakens pleasure in the female,

 

* Gurney has exhaustively shown how poorly Spencer’s theory
ﬁts the facts in the case of the higher‘music. Power of Sound,
chap. xxi.

294 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

this musical faculty will be maintained and improved
by sexual selection. The ﬁrst start would thus be
given to the development of active and passive musi-
cal capacity. Darwin then refers to the extraordinary
power of music to stir up in us tenderness, love, the
sense of triumph, and the glorious ardour for war:
“ A greater intensity of feeling can be concentrated
in a single musical note than in several written
pages.” He cites Spencer’s remark that “music
arouses dormant sentiments of whose existence we
had not dreamed, and of whose meaning we know
not,” and he adds that the feelings and conceptions
which are aroused in us by music or by the cadences
of impassioned speech with their indeﬁniteness and
profundity are like a return to the passions and the
thoughts of a long-past age. All these facts, how-
ever, are comprehensible to a certain extent if we
suppose that musical tones and rhythm were em-
ployed by our half-human ancestors during the pairing
season, when all animals are stirred by the strongest
emotions. In this case musical tones are ﬁtted from
the deep-laid principles of inherited association, to
recall to life within us—in a vague and indeﬁnite
form—the strong emotions of a long-past epoch.
When we consider that the males of some Quadru-
mana present a considerably stronger development
of their vocal organs than the females, and that one
anthropoid species produces an exact octave of musical
tones, that it really sings,* it can therefore be no

 

*This singing anthropoid species is a gibbon (Hylobafes).
Brehm describes the song in his Thierleben as follows: “The
female unko (Hylobates Raﬂlesii) in London sometimes cried out in
extremely peculiar, distinct tones. The cry could be very well

MUSIC. 29 5

longer regarded as improbable that the predecessors
of man—whether male or female, or both sexes—even
before they had acquired the faculty of expressing their
affection in articulate speech, endeavoured to please one
another by means of musical tones and rhythm. The
inspired orator, poet, or musician who arouses the
strongest emotions in his hearers by his manifold tones
and cadences, surely does not imagine that he is using
the same means by which his half-animal ancestors in
an indeﬁnitely distant past gave vent to their burn-
ing passions in war and love. Darwin believes that
he can account in this way for the fact that the
savage races—he means the negroes and the Hotten-
tots—are so capable of musical development.

Musical forms have been at ﬁrst, as we have seen,
predominantly built up on the side of rhythm—a fact
which is perfectly comprehensible to us from the inti-
mate connection of music with the dance. Harmony,
on the other hand, has been developed only slowly and
uncertainly. In the music of the hunting peoples the
pitch is wavering, and the intervals are not at all deﬁ-
nite. In what way has the formation of ﬁxed scales
been reached ? Gurney calls attention to the fact that
when we would give solemn and emphatic expression to
our deeply felt emotions we increase the resonance of

 

represented in notes. It began with the keynote E, and rose some-
times a full octave, passing through the chromatic scale. The key-
note continued audible all the time, and served as the fore—tone
for each succeeding note. In ascending the scale, the single tones
followed one another more and more slowly, but in descending, the
succession was faster and at last exceedingly rapid. The conclu-
sion was a yell, given with full force. The regularity, rapidity,
and accuracy with which the animal went through the scale ex-
cited general wonder.”

296 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

our voice and approach musical tones, and that our
vocal register involuntarily keeps the pitch within nar-
row limits; for in strengthening the resonance we in-
stinctively choose the few notes that least strain and
fatigue our voice; so that we spontaneously gravitate
toward the side of monotonyﬁi Tylor, on the other
hand, supposes that the ﬁrst exact scales were formed
through the use of musical instruments: “One of the
simplest scales was forced upon their attention by that
early musical instrument, the trumpet, rude forms of
which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown
by forest tribes in South America and Africa. A trum-
pet . . . will sound the successive notes of the ‘ com-
mon chord,’ which may be written, 0, e, g, c. . . . This
natural scale, perfect so far as it goes, contains the most
important of musical intervals, the octave, ﬁfth, fourth,
and third.”+ It is much to be regretted that our infor-
mation concerning primitive instrumental music is so
exceedingly meagre; nevertheless, we infer from the
descriptions that the Bushmen, who use the most highly
ﬁnished musical instruments, have also the best deﬁned
“ intervals ”-—intervals which are not, however,‘identical
with ours. Yet it should not be forgotten that Liech-
tenstein expressly remarks that the intervals which the
Bushmen produce on their instruments are not peculiar
to the respective instruments.

All that we have here adduced is only supposition ;
and it is doubtful whether we shall ever advance beyond
supposition on this subject. Yet these suppositions are
serviceable for making the earliest development of music
more comprehensible to us. Darwin’s hypothesis re-

 

* Gurney, p. 454. 1- Tylor, Anthropology, pp. 291, 292.

MUSIC. 297

lates only to the development, not to the origin, of the
active and passive musical faculty ; it sets forth the data
as they are given, and attempts only to explain its con-
servation and growth. There is in the theory also, at
least as we interpret it, no satisfactory conclusion con-
cerning the peculiar effect of music. Darwin, indeed,
believes that the characteristic property of musical ef-
fect, which he ﬁnds in the strength and indeﬁniteness
of the feelings aroused, can be accounted for by the
assumption that “from the deeply laid principle of in-
herited association, musical tones . . . would be likely
to call up vaguely and indeﬁnitely the strong emotions
of a long-past age.” Yet our ideas of the “deeply laid
principle of inherited association ” are so imperfect that
we are obliged to admit that Darwin’s explanation ap-
pears, for the present at least, quite as obscure as the
question itself of the inﬂuence of music.

We have therefore no course left but to take this in-
ﬂuence as it presents itself to us—as an emotional move-
ment unique in its nature. “The ﬁrst characteristic of
music,” says Gurney, “the alpha and omega of its effect,
is this : it produces in us an emotional condition of great
strength, which can not be given a place in any one class
of our other emotional conditions. So far as it can be
generally described, it is like a mingling of strong emo-
tions which are changed into an entirely new experi-
ence, the individual elements of which we strive in vain
to separate ; for exultation, tenderness, aspiration, pain
and consolation, compliance and pressure—all seem to
be in it at once. Yet the ﬁnal result is not at all in-
tricate or doubtful. Or it might be better to say that
there are elements therein which we seek to explain
through such relations, and which appear ill-deﬁned

298 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

to our knowledge when we try to analyze them; while
in reality beauty has that unity and individuality which
are peculiar to clear and deﬁnite form. While we
regard the essential effect of music as nothing more
and nothing less than a musical effect, we would not ‘
thereby deny that music can in a certain degree ex-
press also extra-musical emotions and moods. It has
a variety of means at its disposal for this. We insist
here, however, only on that which comes particularly
under our consideration in primitive music—rhythmical
movement. Fechner has justly remarked that the dc-
terminations and relations of music by which kindred
moods are aroused correspond in their most essential
points with the mode of active expression of the same
moods in the voices and movements of men as far as
that is possible under the various adaptations of mu-
sical instruments and of human organization. Merry
music has another tempo, another rhythm, from tragic
music, and a similar contrast is shown between the suit-
able expressions of joy and sorrow in voice and motion.”
Although the mourning melodies of the Australians
are slow and protracted, “when they sing in joy, anger,
or hunger, they sing more rapidly the more impassioned
they are, and with especial quickness in anger.” “>" It
is not necessary to suppose, Fechner continues, that in
order to be thrown by music into any particular mood
we must recollect a previous utterance of some expres-
sion of that mood; but the agreement of the moods
that are struck seems to be based upon a unison of the
emotional pulsations produced within us by the music
with those that are naturally associated with our spon-

 

* Waitz-Gerland, vol. vi, p. 754.

‘ MUSIC. 299

taneous moods. And in conclusion he adds, “ Since
the active expression of our moods is not essentially me-
lodious or harmonious, we have the less reason for mak-
ing the impression of melody and harmony in music de-
pendent on the recollection of such an expression.” *
Even in the most favourable cases the capacity of music
for extra-musical expression is so limited that this art
can not be compared in respect to that feature, even
most remotely, with other arts, such as painting and
sculpture, or poetry.1' It is therefore a complete re-
versal to deduce the emotional effect of music, which
is so powerful, from its capacity for expression, which
is so slight. Yet if music can, even imperfectly, ex-
press extra-musical feelings, it can therefore excite ex-
tra—musical feelings. “ It can,” as Fechner says, “set
in vibration the whole mental domain of man” ;' and
thus it works at times deeply and widely upon his en-
tire life. “ It is said that the whole people in the time
of the Reformation sang themselves into enthusiasm for
the new faith; and that many who were hostile to Lu-
ther’s name were converted to his doctrine by the irre-
sistible charm of the simple and taking Protestant
hymns ” ;' as “the ﬁrst conversions of some Slavic peo-

 

‘4‘ Fechner. Vorschule der Aesthetik, vol. i, p. 176. The whole sec-
tion—“ The Direct Factor in Music ”—is one of the clearest and
most truthful that has ever been written ou music.

+ “ I am inclined to think that such direct ethical inﬂuences as
can be at all attributed to music in our experience are truly to be
sought for rather in the indeﬁnite than in the deﬁnite mode of im-
pression. The suffused feeling which is perhaps best described as
a ‘ sense of multitude ’ produced by vast masses of sonorous impres-
sion—especially in connection with actual delivery by a multitude,
as in a great chorus—may involve true, though very vague and in-
tangible, social associations.” Gurney, p. 373.

300 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ples were effected by means of the sacred melodies of
the Byzantine Church.” * _Above all, music has the
power of inﬂaming the martial spirit. Luther’s power-
ful battle song, the melody of which strides along as if
it were in harness, has often enough led the German
regiments to attack and victory ; and the dashing
clangour of the Marseillaise called the citizens of the
young French Republic to arms against half of Europe.
No army has yet been able to dispense with martial
mus1c.

According to Darwin’s theory, music was primarily
cultivated as a means of sexual attraction. We should
therefore expect to ﬁnd it employed among the lowest
peoples chieﬂy with reference to this object. The ex-
pectation, however, is not fulﬁlled. We at least have
never succeeded in ﬁnding a single account authorizing
the conclusion that music in any form plays a part in
the lowest grades of culture in the intercourse of the
sexes. On the other hand, the hunting tribes are fully
as well acquainted as civilized nations with the martial
value of music. The Australians inﬂame their courage
by singing wild songs the night before a battled" “ Be-
fore the battle began,” says Buckley, “ a man came out
in front of one of the parties and began to sing and
dance.” :t The battle also which Thomas witnessed was
opened with a dance? Yet the military signiﬁcance of
music in the lowest stages of culture is rather limited ;
for war " does not play a particularly large part in the

 

* Gurney, p. 373. l Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 164.

i; Brough Smyth, vol. i, p. 159. # Ibid.

|| Most of the Australian battles have rather a judicial than a
political character; there are legally regulated expiatory combats.
War is substantially unknown to the Eskimo.

MUSIC. 301

life of the “savage” hunting tribes. Primitive music
serves chieﬂy as an accompaniment to the dance. The
drum and the singing give the dancers the time accord«
ing to which they are to execute their movements. In
this aspect a not inconsiderable share of the social inﬂu-
ence which we have ascribed to the dance certainly be-
longs to music. It is worthy of remark, however, that
the principal part in this inﬂuence has to be credited to
rhythm, or the factor which is not speciﬁcally musical.
Even in Grecian music, rhythm seems to have been
predominant ; and we can consequently understand why
Plato attached so great importance to music in the edu-
cation of the citizens of his ideal state.*

Still, in most cases where music appears independ-
ently, it probably produces no more and no less than a
musical pleasure. The Bushman can listen alone for
hours at a time to the sound of his gora without being
concerned about anything but the succession of tones

 

* “ Next in order to harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow, and
they should be subject to the same rules, for we ought not to have a
complex or manifold system of metre, but rather to discover what
rhythms are the expression of a courageous life ; and the words
should come ﬁrst, and the rhythms should be adjusted to them, not
the rhythms ﬁrst and the words after them. To say what rhythms
they are will be your business, as you have already taught me the
harmonies.

“ But, indeed, he replied, I can not tell you, I only know that there
are some three principles of rhythm . . . out of which metrical sys-
tems are formed, just as in sound there are four elements into which
the harmonies are resolved. That is an observation which I have
made. Then, I said, we shall have to take Damon into our counsels,
and he will tell us what rhythms are expressive of meanness, or im-
potence, or fury, or other unworthiness, and What there are ex-
pressive of opposite feelings.” Plato, The Republic, vol. iii, p. 121
(J owett).

302 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

which he brings out of it for his own pleasure. The
Australians generally sing for themselves alone; and we
really do not know of anything to justify us in supposing
that they seek more from it than musical enjoyment. '
While we are able in all other arts to show the ex- '
istenee of deﬁnite and appreciable relations between
the artistic faculty and execution on the one side and
other departments of aesthetical and cultural life on the
other, no one has as yet found the solution of the prob-
lem as to music, although it has been often sought.
“Any person,” says Fechner, “though he may possess
very little general culture, may receive higher and
stronger direct musical impressions, may be able to un-
derstand music in its own sense better and receive more
enjoyment from it, than the cultivated man, if he is
more versed in the apprehension and following of mu-
sical relations, and has a larger native musical talent,
notwithstanding he can associate little of consequence
with it, and the other much ; but the by-product of the
music will be of more signiﬁcance to the other.” * Mu-
sical talent seems in fact to be consistent with every kind
of mental endowment. It is not rarely found developed
to a high degree in men who stand below the average
in other respects, while it is sometimes Wholly wanting
in persons of very high intellectual and even artistic
capacityj The musical endowment of different peo-
ples, too, appears to our view just as capricious and in-
dependent in its diversity as the same gift does in its
individual manifestations. The Bushmen rise high
above all the other hunting peoples in their musical

 

* Fechner. Vorschule, vol. i, p. 163.
+ For example, Lessing, Kant, Maupassant.

MUSIC. 303

capacity, and yet their civilization in other respects is
' quite as rude and meagre as that of any other. Even
when we turn toward the higher stages of development
the relation between civilization and music is no clearer.
Why are the German people blessed with so wondrous
abundance of the highest musical talent, while the near-
ly related English have not been able to present a single
great master ? Because the Germans are better en—
dowed musically than the English, is the reply ; but the
question is precisely, VVhence is that superiority de-
rived ? We shall not deny that a normal relation may
exist between the musical gifts and the civilization of a
people or an age, but we have to confess that we do
not know what it is.

If the music of a people is independent of its civili-
zation, so inversely the civilization of a people is essen-
tially independent of its music. Even in the lowest
stages of culture the indirect practical inﬂuence of mu-
sic is far behind its immediate musical effect, and the
onward course of development has constantly given a
decided predominance to the latter. The more music
has developed the speciﬁc musical element, harmony, the
more musical its character has become, so much more
exclusively musical has its effect also become. The very
highest and purest form of music—Beethoven’s instru-
mental music—is farthest from real life; it has neithera
practical nor an ethical nor any other social signiﬁcance,
but nothing more and nothing less than an aesthetical, a
musical one. Plato’s assertion that music is a means of
popular education has been repeated in our time. But
music can, substantially, only educate to music. Who-
ever asks anything else from it only gives evidence that
he is not able to appreciate what it offers him.

304 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Music, therefore, stands thus in nature and inﬂuence
unique among the arts, as an art of its own sort. All
the other arts have to serve the purposes of life ; music
serves essentially the objects of art alone. In this sense
music may be called the purest art, the art xwr’ e’foxnv.
Especially between music and poetry, notwithstanding
their close outward connection, there exists a deep inner
contrast. Poetry is master of the whole world of phe-
nomena ; music, on the other hand, can say of itself,
“ My kingdom is not of this world.”

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

WE have rambled through the domain of primitive
art like an explorer through a newly discovered coun-
try. We could ﬁnd no plain, levelled road, but had
to strike out a path for ourselves. We have encoun-
tered obstacles at every step. At more than one place
the actual conditions presented themselves to us as in-
tricate as one of those Australian thickets which can
not be passed through, but must be gone around; in
others we had to cross yawning chasms upon tottering,
temporary bridges ; on the whole of some Wide domains
we have not been able to cast a glance, because they lay
concealed in impenetrable fogs ; and frequently enough
the mountain peaks which we thought we could see on
the horizon were nothing but deceptive cloud-forms.
The map which one brings back from such an expedi-
tion displays more blanks than inscribed spots, and we
must content ourselves with the hope that what little
knowledge we have gained may really be knowledge.

Before we began our study of primitive art we tried
to set ourselves right concerning the nature of art in
general. Our deﬁnition declared that effort to be artis-
tic which is intended, either through its whole course or

by its result, to arouse aesthetic feelings. Now, since
305

306 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

we have become acquainted with the artistic creations
of hunting peoples, we must concede that this deﬁnition
in its strict apprehension does not exactly ﬁt the real
conditions. Most of the artistic productions of the
primitive peoples have not proceeded from purely aes-
thetic motives, but have been intended at the same time
to serve some practical purpose, and frequently the lat-
ter appears as undoubtedly the prime motive, while the
aesthetic demand is satisﬁed but secondarily. Primitive
ornamentation, for example, was primarily and essen-
tially devised and made, not as decoration, but as prac-
tically signiﬁcant marks and symbols. In other cases,
however, the aesthetic intent predominates; but it ap-
pears as the single motive, as a rule, only in music.
Yet the higher peoples possess no special advantage in
this respect over the hunting tribes. In their art, too,
we ﬁnd—aside from music and ornamentation—only
rarely a work which engages and pursues exclusively
aesthetic interests.

But while artistic effort in the lowest stages of cul-
ture hardly ever appears pure, it is still plainly recog-
nisable everywhere—and in essentially the same forms
as it is presented in the higher stages of culture. One
art only have we failed to ﬁnd among the primitive
peoples; the irregular hunting life prevents the devel-
opment of artistic architecture. The shelters, roofs,
and huts with which the primitive peoples seek to pro-
tect themselves from the inclemeney of the weather
merely answer the most moderate practical require-
ments. All the other arts, on the contrary, which civil-
ized nations practise are already familiar to the hunt-
ing tribes. Especially have we satisﬁed ourselves that
the three principal kinds of poetry have not had to be

CONCLUSION. 307

marked out in the course of the upward development
of culture from some “ unditferentiated primeval
poetry,” but that they are already present in independ-
ent individuality in the lowest stages.

The agreement between the artistic works of the
rudest and of the most cultivated peoples is one not
only in breadth but also in depth. Strange and inartis-
tic as the primitive forms of art sometimes appear
at the ﬁrst sight, as soon as we examine them more
closely, we ﬁnd that they are formed according to the
same laws as govern the highest creations of art. And
not only are the great fundamental principles of
eurhythm, symmetry, contrast, climax, and harmony
practised by the Australians and the Eskimo as they
were by the Athenians and the Florentines, but we
have repeatedly determined—especially in regard to
adornment of the body—that even those details which
are cOmmonly considered sports of arbitrary caprice,
belong to the common aesthetic stock of the peoples
most remote from civilization. This fact is certainly
not without signiﬁcance in aesthetics. Our investiga-
tion has proved what aesthetics has hitherto only as-
serted: that there are, for the human race at least,
generally effective conditions for aesthetic pleasure, and
consequently generally valid laws of artistic creation.
As against this fundamental agreement, the differences
between primitive and higher art forms appear to be
more of a quantitative than a qualitative sort. The
emotions represented in primitive art are narrow and
rude, its materials are scanty, its forms are poor and
coarse, but in its essential motives, means, and aims the
art of the earliest times is at one with the art of all times.

In accordance with our appreciation of the task of

21

308 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

the science of art, we have not contented ourselves with
investigating the peculiarity of primitive art, but have
constantly endeavoured to discover the conditions on
which it depends. The ﬁrst prerequisite for artistic
effect is an artistic impulse. In strictness there is, in-
deed, no one artistic impulse, as there is no one artistic
activity. If we, nevertheless, use the expression, it is
merely for the purpose of brieﬂy and conveniently
comprehending in it that which is common in the dif-
ferent special artistic tendencies, which alone interests
us in these general ‘conclusions.* This artistic tendency,
which is substantially identical with the play impulse—
that is, with the tendency to an extreme, purposeless,
and therefore aesthetic occupation of corporeal and
spiritual powers,+ and which is more or less combined
in various forms with the propensity to imitation i—is

 

* We do not in any sense assert the existence of any one artistic
tendency, but rather deny it "as explicitly as possible. It is a mis-
take to believe that substantially the same artistic tendency is oper-
ative in every individual endowed with a faculty for art, and that it
only depends upon suitable outward conditions Whether it becomes
efﬁcient in musical, poetical, or pictorial forms. An artistic tend-
ency exists only in words: in reality there are simply poetical, pic-
torial, musical, or architectural tendencies. These diﬁerent tenden-
cies, feelings, and activities exist together with equal title and inde-
pendently of one another. A musician has not a general artistic
tendency which he satisﬁes by means of musical forms, but he lives,
feels, and acts from the beginning musically in feelings which are
entirely foreign to the other ﬁelds of life and art.

+ The analysis of the artistic impulse is not within our present
purpose. It belongs to the psychological part of the science of art.
Concerning the play impulse and its signiﬁcance for art, see
Herbert Spencer’s excellent observations, Principles of Psychology,
vol. ii, pp. 646—648.

1 The propensity to imitation plays no part, or an entirely sub-
sidiary one only, in music. i

CONCLUSION. 309

without doubt a general possession of mankind which
is probably far older than human nature itself. The
artistic tendency thus did not have to wait to be
brought forth by means of special cultural conditions,
but is developed and led in any particular way by such
conditions. ’
The artistic productions of the several hunting
tribes are marked by an extreme uniformity; in cos-
- metic art, in ornamentation, in representative art, in
gymnastics, in poetry, and even in music, everywhere
among each individual people, the same characteristic
traits meet us again and again that we have found
among all the others. This all-pervading uniformity
proves directly that the character of the race has no
decisive signiﬁcance in the development of art. The
unity of primitive art stands in the sharpest contrast
to the diversity of primitive races. The Australian and
the Eskimo are as unlike one another, from an anthro-
pological point of View, as two human races can be;
and yet the ornaments of the one are frequently so
similar to those of the other that it would sometimes
be very hard to determine the origin of a particular
pattern if we did not ﬁnd a clcw in the form and
material of the decorated object. One who has ever
compared the rock drawings of the Australians and
Bushmen, and then the Australians and Bushmen them—
selves, will hardly venture to maintain Taine’s theory
that the art of a people is, ﬁrst of all, the expression of
its racial character; at least not as having the universal
validity that Taine claims for it. Yet we would not
deny that race character exerts an inﬂuence over the
development of art, although we have not been able to
exactly deﬁne it. We only say—supported by the re-

310 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

sults of our researches—that this inﬂuence is not, in the
lowest stages of culture, decisive as to the essential
character of art, but plays at most a very subordinate
part in the determination. Only in the development
of a single art—that of music—is it possibly of greater
signiﬁcance; but our knowlege of primitive music is
too meagre to enable us to prove this. We are equally
unable to answer the question here, whether the inﬂu—
ence of race character on art does not increase with
the advancing development of culture and art. When
we consider that the individuality of peoples as well as
of men comes out with constantly increasing force
during the course of their development, we are inclined
in fact to admit that possibility. On the other hand,
we should not forget that the higher peoples have a
far less pure and simple race character than the lower
tribes.

The uniform character of primitive art points in-
dubitably to a uniform cause; and we have found this
uniform cause in that factor of civilization which pos-
sesses a Wholly uniform character among the hunting
tribes of all races and zones, and which at the same
time exercises the strongest inﬂuence among all peoples
on the other departments of cultural life—the method
of securing food. We were, however, not yet able to
follow out clearly the relations between the forms of
primitive production and the forms of primitive art in
all cases and on all sides; yet we succeeded in making
clear the signiﬁcance of hunting life in the beginnings
of art in general. It is in fact so great that one is
obliged to remark it. With the exception of music,
which holds a special position from the very beginning,
all the arts in the lowest stage of culture reveal imme-

CONCLUSION. 311

diately, in matter and form, the decisive inﬂuence
which the rude and unsettled hunter’s life has directly
or indirectly exercised upon them. We can demon-
strate this inﬂuence in no art with so great deﬁniteness
as in painting and sculpture; the lifelike pictorial and
sculptured representations of men and beasts, bvahich
the hunting peoples are distinguished, present them-
selves to us very comprehensibly as aesthetic achieve-
ments of faculties which the struggle for existence
necessarily develops to high perfection among hunting
peoples in particular.

The form of production of a people depends prima-
rily upon the geographical and meteorological condi-
tions under which it lives. The hunting peoples have
remained hunting peoples, not, as the older etlmologists
believed, because they were condemned by a defective
capacity to be stationary from the beginning, but be-
cause the character of their homes prevented their ad-
vance to a higher form of production. In this way our
researches, which were limited to the art of the lowest
stages of culture, have opened for us a View into the
much-discussed question of the relation of art and cli-
mate, which the speculations of the aesthetes who con-
ﬁned themselves to the arts of the higher stages of
culture have only obscured. The inﬂuences of cli-
mate which we have recognised in the art of the hunt-
ing tribes are, however, of a very different sort from
those which Herder and Taine thought they discovered
in the art of the higher peoples. Herder and Taine
assumed a direct inﬂuence of climate on the spirit of
the peoples and the character of their art; the inﬂuence
which we have traced is, on the other hand, indirect:
climate rules art through production. We do not,

312 THE BEGINNINGS on ART.

however, claim that we have discovered in this a uni-
versally valid law of the science of art. It appears to
us at least very doubtful whether such an inﬂuence of
climate can be proved even on the art of the higher
peoples; not because the conditions among them are
disproportionately more complicated, but because peo-
ples armed with richer cultural means have made them-
selves more independent of the inﬂuences of climate
in their production. Advance in culture leads peoples
out of servitude under Nature to mastery over Nature;
and it may be presumed that this change ﬁnds a corre-
sponding expression in the development of art.

There is no people'without art. We have seen that
even the rudest and most miserable tribes devote a
large part of their time and strength to art—art, which
is looked down upon and treated by civilized nations,
from the height of their practical and scientiﬁc achieve-
ments, more and more as idle play. And yet it seems
Wholly inconceivable, from the point of view of modern
science, that a function to which so great a mass of
energy is applied should be of no consequence in the
maintenance and the development of the social organ-
ism; for if the energy which man devotes to aesthetic.
creation and enjoyments were lost in the earnest and
essential tasks of life, if art were indeed only idle play,
then natural selection should have long ago rejected
the peoples which wasted their force in so purposeless
a way, in favour of other peoples of practical talents;
and art could not possibly have been developed so
highly and richly as it has been. We have therefore
been convinced from the ﬁrst that primitive art, besides
its immediate aesthetic signiﬁcance, possesses also a
practical importance to the hunting peoples, and the

' GONCLUSION. 313

results of our research have conﬁrmed this conviction.
The primitive arts affect primitive life in diversiﬁed
ways. Ornamentation, forexarnple, pro-eminently pro-
motes technical skill. Personal adornment and the
dance play an important part in the intercourse of the
sexes, and by means of their inﬂuence on sexual selec-
tion they have probably, as we have shown in the ap-
propriate place, contributed to the improvement of the
race. On the other side, personal decoration rises, be-
cause it frightens the enemy; poetry, the dance, and
music, because they inﬂame and inspire the warriors,
the bulwarks of the social groups against hostile as-
saults. But the most efﬁcient and most beneﬁcent
effect which art exercises over the life of peoples con—
sists in the strengthening and extension of the social
bonds to which it contributes. Not all the arts are
equally adapted for this effect. While the dance and
poetry seem to be predestined for it by their essential
property, music is for the same reason almost entirely
excluded from it. Besides these inner reasons, outward
circumstances also have a part in deciding by which art
the socializing function shall be predominantly exer-
cised among a given people at a given epoch. The dance,
for instance, loses its inﬂuence as soon as the social
groups become too large to unite in a single dance;
and, on the other side, poetry owes its present incom-
parable power to the invention of printing. Conse-
quently the hegemony passes, in the onward course of
the development of civilization, from one art to another.
We recognise the most powerful social inﬂuence among
the hunting peoples as vested in the dance; to the
Greeks, sculpture incorporated the social ideal in its
most effective form; in the middle ages, architecture

314- THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

united bodies and souls in the halls of its gigantic
cathedrals; in the Renascence, painting spoke a lan-
guage that was understood by all the cultivated peoples
of Europe; and in the modern age the soothing voice
of poetry resounds mightily over the clash of arms of
hostile conditions and peoples. But although the social
signiﬁcance of individual arts has thus changed in the
course of ages, the social signiﬁcance of art has continu-
ously increased. The educational inﬂuence which it
has exercised on the rudest tribes has steadily broad-
ened and risen. While the highest social function of
primitive art consisted in uniﬁcation, civilized art, with
its richer and more individually executed works, serves
not for uniﬁcation only, but primarily for the elevation
of the spirit. As science enriches and elevates our
intellectual life, so art enriches and elevates our emo-
tional life. Art and science are the two most powerful
means for the education of the human race. Thus art
is no idle play, but an indispensable social function, one
of the most eﬁicient weapons in the struggle for exist-
ence ; and consequently it is destined to be even more
and more richly and powerfully developed by means of
the struggle for existence; for while artistic activities
were exercised by the peoples ﬁrst for the sake only of
their immediate aesthetic value, they have been kept up
and developed through history mainly on account of
their indirect social value. A consciousness of the im—
portance of art to social welfare has, moreover, existed
in man in all ages. We could invoke a long array of
philosophers, artists, and statesmen who have pointed
out in clear words that art serves or has served for the
education of the peoples. We have in fact a right to
demand of art that it work in the direction of a social

CONCLUSION. 315

purpose—that is, morally; for art is a social function ;
and every social function should serve for the mainte-
nance and development of the social organism. But
we are wrong When we require it to be moral, or, more
correctly, moralizing, for with that requirement we
demand nothing more or less than that art be no longer
art, while art best serves social interests when it serves
artistic interests.

While we have limited our researches to primitive
art, we have at the same time conﬁned ourselves to one
side of the work of the science of art, which we des-
ignated at the outset as the sociological side. In the
lowest stage of culture art appears simply, at least to
us, as a social phenomenon; we have therefore to con-
tent ourselves with the investigation of its social condi-
tions and inﬂuences, not because we would not recog-
nise any other, but because, under these circumstances,
we consider we could not distinguish any other. In
the higher stages of civilization, however, besides the
inﬂuence which art exercises on social life, its value in
the development of individual life comes forth even
more clearly ; yes, the very highest creations of the
highest artistic genius, which rise far up above the
average of the great multitude, are primarily generally
capable of only an individual inﬂuence. This last cir-
cumstance advises us indeed that the individual and in-
dividualizing inﬂuence of art is not less to be esteemed
than the social and socializing inﬂuence which we have
endeavoured to appreciate. To us who live in the con-
viction that all social development is only a means for
the furtherance of individual development, it stands
incomparably higher. If we should undertake to show
in what the signiﬁcance of art for individual develop-

316 THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

ment consists, we should have to institute a research
which would probably be longer and more diﬂicult than
the one we have concluded. But it is enough if we
point out that in this respect, too, art is not merely a
pleasant pastime, but that it contributes to the fulﬁl-
ment of the highest and most earnest purposes of life.
Yet, or rather on account of this, there is a profound
contrast between the individual and the social function
of art. While social art binds the individual man ever
more ﬁrmly and intimately with the social whole, indi-
vidual art frees man by developing his individuality
from the bonds of social connection. The art of Plato,
teacher of the peoples, is the opposite of the art of
Schopenhauer, deliverer of men.

' INDEX.

Adormnent, importance of, 313.
Esthetic character, of colours, red,
' 61: yellow, 63; white, 64; of the
dance, 222.

}Esthetic ideas, in body painting,
60; in the dance, 227, 231; in dress,
103 et seq.; in dressing of the hair,
85; in dressing of the loins, 94,
100 ; in European art, 27 ; in hand-
writing, 146; in Japanese art, 28;
in making of implement-s, 115; in
nose ornaments, 84; in primitive
art, 24; in primitive ornaments,
108; in rhythmic arrangement in
ornamentation, 151; in scariﬁca-
tion, 72; in tattooing, 80; in wear-
ing lip and ear plugs, 82 ; aesthetic
pleasure, conditions for, 148; pur-
pose, in poetry, 234 at seq. ; purpose
in primitive art, 204; signiﬁcance
of bodily decoration, 60, 72, 81.

jEsthetics, 48: tasks of, 147, 148.

Agricultural peoples, form of the
family among, 38 ; art among, 198.

Alaska, women of, 99.

Aleuts, culture of, 44; dramas of,
267 et seq. ; drawings of, 185, 186;
masks of, 192.

Americans, body painting among,
G7.

Andamanese (see Mincopies).

Andaman Islanders (see
copies).

Min—

 

 

 

Andree, on Australian cave paint-
ings, footnote, 166; on drawings
of Bushmen, 183.

Angas, on the Australians, 55; quoted
on Australian carvings, 172 et seq.

Anthropology, physical, 34.

Animal forms, in ornamentation,
118 et seq.

Animal motives in decoration, 156.

Arabs, position in the scale of cul—
ture, 33.

Arbousset and Daumas, quoted on a
Bushman dance, 215 et seq

Archaeology, importance to the study
of art, 21. ’

Architecture, among the Eskimo,
45; artistic, 306 ; social inﬂuence
of, 313 et seq.

Aristotle, on tragedy, 224.

Armstrong, on tattooing, 80.

Art, aim of the science of, 1 et seq;
a social phenomenon, 5O ; nature of,
47 et seq. ; connection with climate,
311; with form of production, 310
et seq.; with religion, 199 et seq.;
deﬁnition of, 305 et seq. ; inﬂuence
of race on, 309 ; universality of,
312.

Arts, classiﬁcation of the, 51 ; nature
of the, 48.

Athenians, art of, 307.

Australians, 53; footnote, 43; admira-
tion for scars among,78; art of, 28,

317

318

194, 307, 309; battle songs of, 300;
body painting among, 55 ct ‚say.;
boomerang of, 45; characters of,
195, 196; colours used by, 63;
footnote, ibid., 64, 133; clubs and
shields, 23 ; culture of, 42; dancers,
101 ; dances of, 208 et seq., 218 et
wg., 226, 229, 230; decoration with
ﬂowers by, footnote, 156; dramas
of, 267 et „wg.; drawings of, 125,
165 et seq., 185, 187, 189; epic
poems of, 250 ; grade of culture of,
44; hair-dressing among, 87 ; head—
dresses of, 88, 89; illustrations of
shields of, 122,124; industries of,
35; inscriptions of, 135; lack of
clothing among, 96; languages,
hindrance to spread of poetry,
274; loins, dress of, 94, 107; love
songs of, 244, 245; lyrics of, 236 et
say.; magic sticks of, 142; maps
made by, 126: marks on weapons
among, 137, 139 ; message stick of,
134; mourning colours used by, 66;
mourning melodies of, 298; mourn-
ing patterns among, 69; musical
instruments of, 288; music of, 278
et 829., 284, 292, 302; neck bands
of, 104; necklace of, 109 ; neck br—
namcnts worn by, 92; nose orna—
ments worn by, 83; ornamenta-
tion among, 116, 118, 123, 157, foot—
note, 159; ornamentation, technic
motives in, 132 ; ornamented spears
of, 144: paintings and carvings,
165 et seq. ; pictures of, 202; pleas-
ure in imitating among, 223 ; poetry
of, 22, 29, 232, 243; poets of, 277;
position in the scale of culture, 33;
poverty of decorative art among,
155; purpose of decoration among,
111; rhythmic series of, 150, 151;
rock drawings of, 199; shields of,
161; scariﬁeation among, 70, 75,
footnote, ibid. 76; signiﬁcance of

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

scariﬁcation among, 72; social dis-
tinctions among, 112, 114; songs of,
248, 276; stories of, 253, 255, 257,
259 ; symmetry of ornamentation
among, 152 et wg.; wearing of
clothing in dances by, 98; weapons
of, 197.

Baines, on a Bushman headdress,
90; quoted on Bushman perspec—
tive, footnote, 184.

Bakairi, ornamentation among, 119.

Bakuba, scariﬁcation among, 78.

Bal uba, scariﬁcation among, 7 8.

Bancroft, on lip piercing among the
Eskimo, 83; on Eskimo dancers,
218.

Bantu, artistic ability of, 198.

Barlow, quoted on Australian songs,
249.

Barrow, quoted on the Bushmcn, 94.

Bastian, on Northwest coast Indians,
190.

Beckler, on music of the Australians,
284 et seq.

Beethoven, music of, 303.

Black, a colour used in decoration,
133.

Black on Bushman language, 274 et
seq.

Blue, a colour used in decoration,
133.

Boas, Franz, on the central Eskimo,
29, 102, 186; on Eskimo music,
286; on numbers of the Eskimo,
footnote, 230; on tattooing among
the Eskimo, 79; quoted on the
Eskimo, 86; on Eskimo dances,
217; on Eskimo poetry, footnote,
250; on Eskimo songs, 240, 247;
on Eskimo stories, 266.

Boecaccio’s Decameron quoted, foot—
note, 248.

Body painting, for aesthetic purposes,
60 et seq; patterns used in, 68.

INDEX.

Boers, 183.

Bonwick, on the Tasmanians, 71;
quoted on the Tasmanians, 111.

Botany Bay, 174.

Botocudo, 53, foot-note, 44; body
painting among, 60, 64; culture of,
44; dances of, 216; Ehrenreeich,
quoted on, 93; feathers worn by,
104; hair-dressing among, 85;
headdresses of, 89, 90; lack of
clothing among, 96; lack of pie—
torial art among, 193; lip and ear
plugs worn by, 81; love songs of,
244, 245; musical instruments of,
288; music of, 278, 283; necklace
of, 107; ornaments worn by, 92;
patterns used in body painting,
68, 69; poetry of, 232, 241, 243;
songs of, 236; wind instruments
of, 290.

Boucher de Perthes, 163.

Bove, G., on the Fuegians, 59; foot-
note, 110.

Brazil, Indians of, 41; ornamenta—
tion among, 119.

Brelim, quoted on song of a gibbon,
footnote, 294.

Brown, quoted on primitive music,
286.

Buckley, quoted on Australians, 300.

Bugi alphabet, 170.

Bulmer, on Australian ornamenta—
tion, 123; on the Australians, 111 ;
quoted on Australian dancers, 65;
on the Australians, 95.

Burchell, quoted on a Bushman
dance, 213 et seq.

Büttner, quoted on drawings of Bush-
men, 184.

Buris, 170.

Bushmen, 53; art of, 28, 194, 309;
beads worn by, 104; body painting
among, 59; characters of, 195, 196;
colours used by, 64; culture of, 33,
44; dances of, 213 et seq. ; decora—

.

 

319

tion with ﬂowers by, footnote, 156;
drawings among, 121,185,187, 189;
earrings worn by, 83; epic poems
of, 250; fashions among, 114; hair-
dressing among, 87; headdresses
of, 89, 90; lack of ornamentation
of implements among, 115; lack
of social organization among, 112;
language of, 274; leg bands worn
by, 101; loins, dress of, 94; music
of, 278, 286 et sog., 296, 301, 302;
musical instruments of, 289 et seq. ;
neck ornaments worn by, 91 ; orna-
ments of, 103 ; paintings and carv-
ings of, 180 et seq. ; pictures of, 202;
pleasure in imitating among, 223;
poetry of, 232; poisoned arrows of,
45,197; stories of, 253, 255, 257 et
seq, 266; tattooing among, 78, 79;
use of birds’ heads as ornaments,
105 ; weapons of, 197.

Calder, quoted on Tasmanians, 17 8.

Canoe dance, 220.

Cape York, 172.

Carpentaria, Gulf of, 172.

Carvings, of northern peoples, 187 et
seq; in Australia, 172; in France,
163 et seq.

Cassinauhe, 121.

Ceramics, among the Mincopies, 45.

Chasm Island, 172.

Chauncy, quoted on the Australians,
123,180.

Chinese bronzes, 157 ; writing, foot-
note, 147.

Choris, illustrations of Aleut pad—
dles, 138; on Alcut drawings, foot-
note, 185 ; quoted on an Aleut
pantomime, 268.

Clack’s Island, 172.

Climate, as affecting art, 14; relation
to art, 311.

Collins on the Australians. 139 ;
quoted on the Australians, 195.

320

Colour of. the skin, inﬂuence of, on
colours used in painting, 64; on
scariﬁeation and tattooing, 69. 78.

Colours used in body painting, 55
et seq.; used in ornamentation,
132 et seq.; used in paintings, 169,
178, 181.

Cook, on the Tasmanians, 71 ; quoted
on the Fuegians, 53, 59; on tribes
of Prince William Sound, 197.

Corroborry, 49, 56, 65, 90, 95, 101, 125,
footnote, 165,171, 173, 175, 176, 202,
218, 229, 278, 285, 292; description
of a, 208 et seq.

Cranz, quoted on the Gr'eenlanders,
200; on tattooing among the Es—
kimo, 80.

Culture, difﬁcult to deﬁne, 35 ; knowl-
edge of, important to study of art,
29; relation to the dance, 227 et
seq.; relation to ornamentation,
155; relation to production, 35 et
seq.

Curr, on seariﬁeation in Australia,
footnote, 75.

Dall, quoted on the Aleuts, 192.

Dance, a living sculpture, 51; of
hunting peoples, 228; importance
of the, 313 ; importance to culture,
227 et seq. ; pleasure in the, 221 et
wg., 225; relation to music, 278,
301; religious signiﬁcance of, 225
et seq. ; social inﬂuence of the, 313;
the modern, 228; varieties of the,

_ 207.

Darwin, 53; on music, 293 et seq.;
quoted on rhythm, footnote, 222.
Decoration, personal, 51, 53 et 369.;
by body ornaments, 90._et ml.; by
hair-dressing, 85 et wg.; by head—
dresses, 88 et seq.; by lip and ear
plugs, 81 et scq.; by painting, 55 et
seq.; by scariﬁeation, 69 et seq.; by
tattooing, 78 et wg.; forms of, 54;

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

purpose of, 109 et wg.; of imple-
ments, 51 ; of the limbs, 100 et wg.;
social, 102.

Degeneration of peoples, theory of,
40.

Depuch Island, 170.

Division of labour, 37.

Dordogne, grottos of, 163.

Drachenberg, 181.

Drama, 265 ; developed from the
dance, 225; relation to duet and
mimic (lance, 207.

Dress, origin of, 96 et seq.

Dubos, Abbe, on causes of artistic
talents, 12; on ethnological method
in study of art, 19; quoted on
music, 280.

Dyaks of Borneo, plant ornament
among, 157 ; shields of, 161.

D ycri, footnote, 66 ; colours used by,
63; loius dress of, 95; mourning
colours among, 57.

Earrings worn by cultivated peoples,
108.

Egypt, plant ornaments in, 157.

Egyptian art, analogies to Australian,
200; compared with Australian,
179.

Ehrcnreich, on Botocudo songs, 235
et wg.; on con ventionalized draw—
ings, 124; on the Karaya, 121;
quoted on Botocudo dances, 216 et
seq: on Brazilian tribes, 119; on
the Botocudo, 93, 278.

Epic poetry, 250; of civilized peo-
ples, 256 ; primitive, characteristics
of, 255.

Eskimo, animal ornaments of', 142;
art of, 194, 200, 201, 307, 309; carv—
ings of, 187 et seq.; characters of,
195,196; clothing of, 101: colours
used in ornamentation by, 133;
culture of, 44; custom of painting
wanting among, 55 ; masks of, 189

INDEX. 321

et wg.; dances of, 217 et seq.;
dramas of, 268; drawings among,
121, 185,186 ; drum of, 289; dwell-
ings of, 45; follbtales of, 251 ; hair-
dressing among, 86; harpoon of,
45; headband not found among,
88; illustrations of implements
of, 127—130; inscriptions of,
135; lack of social distinctions
among, 112; lamp of, 116; Ian—
guages of, 275; lip plugs of, 82,
104; love songs of, 244; magical
signs of, 143; maps made by, 126 ;
music of, 278 et seq., 286 ; origin of
ornamentation of, 128 et seq. ; num—
bers of, footnote, 230; ornamenta—
tion among, 116, 144; ornamenta-
tion from textile patterns, 157 ; or-
naments of, 101 ; perspective, 187;
poetry of, 232; property marks of,
137; rhythmic series of, 150, 151;
songs of, 240 et wg., 247, 250, 276;
stories of, 255, 257, 259, 266; tales
and traditions of, 29; tattooing
among, 78, 79, 80; weapons of, 197,
198.

Ethnological method difﬁculties in
the application of, 22.

Ethnology, 194, 199; importance to
science of art, 19 et seq., 32.

Eyre, Australian songs from, 237;
on Australian dances, 219; quoted
on an Australian dance, 222, 226 et
seq.; on Australian songs, 249; on
corroborries, 211.

Family, as showing relation of pro-
duction to culture, 36 et seq. : matri-
archal form,38 ; patriarchal form,
37.

Farini, on tattooing among the Bush-
men, 7 9.

Fashions, change of, 102; constancy
of, 102, 113.

Feathers as ornaments, 104.

 

Fechner, quoted on aesthetics, 147 ;
on music, 298 et seq., 302; on the
arts, 51.

Fijian hair-dressing, 88.

Fiji Islands, footnote, 43.

Florentines, art of, 307.

Forestier Islands, 170.

Frcycinet, on melodies from New
Holland, 285 et seq.

Fritsch, on ornaments worn by Bush«
men, 91 ; on primitive pictorial art,
198; on the Bushmcn, 87; quoted
on Bushmen, 181, 196.

Frobisher, on the Nugumint, foot—
note, 86.

Fuegiaus, footnote, 43; baskets of,
116; body painting among, 59;
colours used by, 64; culture of, 44;
dances of, 216; decoration among,
53, footnote, 110, 115; dramas of,
268 ; hair-dressing among, 87 ; head—
dresscs of, 89, 90 ; lack of clothing
among, 96; lack of pictorial art
among, 193; lack of social organi-
zation among, 112; lip and ear
plugs not found among, 81, 83;
loins dress not worn by, 93; neck
ornaments worn by, 91 ; orna—
ments of, 103; pleasure in imi-
tating among, 224; poetry of,
232 ; use of shell ornaments by, 105.

Geometrical patterns governed by
the material, 159.

Gcrland, on Australian songs, foot—
note. 236; on the Australians, 42;
on the dance, 227; on scarilication,
77; quoted on paintings at Upper
Glenelg, 169, 170; on the Austra-
lians, 139.

“ Gestoppte Fontein,” 181.

Goethe, handwriting of, 146 ; on
poetry, 232, footnote, 234; quota-.
tion from, 246 et ‚wg.; quoted on
colours, footnote, 61.

322

Gora, a Bushman musical instru-
ment, 287,290,291, 301.

Graphic art, study of, 23.

Greenlanders, drama among. 267.

Grey, George, on Australian songs,
247, footnote, 236, 239; on paint
ings at Upper Glenelg, 165 et ‚wg.;
on religious signiﬁcance of pie-
tures, 199; quoted on Australian
songs, 236.

Guyau, art from the sociological point
of View, 19; contribution to science
of art, 17.

Gurney, on music, 280. 295 et ‚ml.; on
rhythm, 223; the power of sound,
footnote, 149; quoted on music,
292, 297 et seq, footnote, 299.

Gymnastic dances, 207; of Austra—
lians, 208; of Mincopies, 211; of
Bushmen, 218; of Eskimo, 217 et
seq.

Hahn, Theophilus, on a musical in-
strument, footnote, 290 ; quoted
on Bushman art, 200 ; on the
Bushmen, 286.

Hair-dressing as a tribal mark, 85 ;
forms of, 85 et seq.

Haussa negro, carvings of, 25.

Headdresses, 88 et seq.

Hennequin, quotations from La Cri-
tique scientiﬁque, 14 et seq.

Heraldic ﬁgures in Australia, 140.

Herder, ethnological method in study
of art, 19 ; on climate and art, 311 ;
on inﬂuence of climate upon poetry,
12.

Herders, art among, 198.

Hildebrand, on Tchuktchis carvings,
200; quoted on Eskimo drawings,
footnote, 185, 186.

History of art, 1 et seq.

History, value to science of art, 21,32.

Hodgkinson, on the Australians, 55 ;
quoted on Australian dances, 220.

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

0

Holmes, W. H., on geometrical ﬁg.
ures, 121 ; on Indian pottery, 143.
Honery, quoted on the Australians,

137.

Hopetown, 181.

l-lottentots, 286, footnotes, 43, 60;
gourd harp of, 290; language of,
275 ; music of, 295.

Howitt, quoted on the Australians,
69.

Hunting peoples, belief in spirits
among, 36; culture of, 40; dances
of, 228; development of, 43; pic-
torial art among, 193, 195; present
locations of, 44; primitive art of,
43; social organization among, 45;
weapons of, 197.

Hutchinson, quoted on Bushman per-
spective, 184.

Hyperboreans, picture writings of,
203, 204.

lglulirmiut, footnote, 86.

Indians, North American, footnote,
43; Paraguay, ibid.

Inscriptions of Australians, 135, 154;
of Eskimo, 135, 136.

Jacobsen, 190 ; on the Eskimo, 201.

J ocst, quoted on painting in mourn—
ing, G7.

Japanese opinion of European art,
27; tattooing among, 79; unsym—
metrical decorations of, footnote,
153 ; writing of, 147.

Kaaro, an Australian dance, 220.

Katﬁrs, 91, 183 ; belief in spirits
among, 36; fashions among, 113;
pictures of, 202.

Kagsagsuk, story of, 260 et seq., 276.

Kalahari Desert, 33, 44, 53.

Kane, quoted on the hyperboreans,
196.

INDEX.

Karaya, illustration of ornaments of,
119 ; lack of drawings among, 121;
ornaments of, 120.

Kaross worn by Bushmen, 91.

Kayak, 186.

Kettledrum, 288.

Keypoort, 182.

King George’s Sound, 57, 246.

Kinipetu, footnote, 86.

Kobong, 139—141.

Kosé mo Kanaoka, Japanese painter,
footnote, 147.

La Pérouse, quoted on women of
Alaska, 99.

Lake Tyrrell, 174.

Lane Cove, 173.

Lane Fox, instructions for travellers,
30; on conventionalized drawings,
122.

Lang, quoted on
drama, 268 et seq.

Laugerie Basse, footnote, 164.

Law of copy, 144.

Le Souéli', Albert, quoted on the Aus—
tralians, 180.

Levaillant, quoted on Bushman mu—
sic, 291.

Liechtenstein, quoted on Bushmcn
music, 287 et seq, 296.

Limbs, decoration of. 100 et seq.

Lippert, quoted on wearing of orna—
ments, 84.

Lip plugs, worn by Botocudo, 81 ; by
Eskimo, 82.

Loins dress, 93 ;
96.

Love dances, 220.

Love, ideas of, 244. et seq.

Lumholtz, on dancing festivals, 230;
on the Queenslanders, 67, 87, foot-
note, 110; quoted on Australian
dances, footnote, 229; on musical
instruments, 289; on the Queens-
landers, 56, 70, 7 6, 284.

22

an Australian

signiﬁcance of,

 

323

Lubbock, Sir John, footnote, 43.
Lyrics, Australian, 236 et seq.

Macassar alphabet, 170.

Magic .. sticks of the Australians,
142.

Malays, supposed artists at Upper
Glenelg, 168.

Mallery, Garrick, on North American
pictographs, 203; illustration from,
202; quoted on North American
pictographs, footnote, 203.

Man, E. 11., on dances of the Min-
copies, 212 et seq; on numbers of
Mincopics, footnote, 230; on seari-
ﬁeation, 71 ; on songs of the Min-
copics, 28; on the Mincopies. 77,
86, 92, 94, 98, 127, 230, 283 et seq;
quoted on the Mincopies, 28, 58,
73,112,240, 249, 251, 254.

Maori, drawings of the, 25, footnote,
43.

Marriage, human, history of, foot-
note, 44.

Martins, quoted on Indians of Brazil,
41.

Mas d’AziI, grotto of, footnote, 164.

Masks of the Aleuts, 192 : of Eskimo,
189 et seq.

Massinger, Philip. 10.

Matriarchal form of family, 38.

Melanesians, inventors of the wooden
drum, 289; ornamentation of, foot—
note, 158.

Message sticks, from Australia, 134,
202.

Meyer, H. E., on the Australians, 56.

Miams, 211.

Michaelangelo, 171.

Military organization, development
of, 39.

Mill, on poetry, 49, 247.

Mimetie dances, 207; of Australians,
218 et ser]. ; of Eskimo, 218—220;
of Bushmen, 223.

324

Mimicry, 223 et seq.

Mincopies, body painting among, 57 ;
ceramics among, 45; clothing of,
53: colours used in ornamentation
by, 58, 63, 64, 133; culture of, 44;
footnote, 43; dances of, 211 et wg.,
230; drum of, 289; epic poems of,
250; girdles worn by, 94, - 149;
hair-dressing among, 85; head-
dresses of, 88; illustrations of or-
naments of, 126; lack of pictorial
art among, 193; language of, 274;
lip, nose, and ear plugs not found
among, 83; love songs of, 244, 245;
lyrics of, 240; mourning painting
among, 66, music of, 283; num-
bers oi‘, footnote, 230; origin of
ornamental designs of, 127 et say.,
130 et seq.; origin of scariﬁcation
among, 73; ornaments worn by,
92,142; ornamentation among, 116 ;
ornamentation of weapons among,
126; painting among, 66; poetry
of, 28, 232; pottery decorations
of, 143,158; poverty of decorative
art among, 155 ; property marks of,
138: rhythmic series of, 150, 151;
scariﬁcation among, 71, 72, 75, 77,
78; social distinctions among, 112;
songs of, 22, 249, 278 et seq. ; stories
of, 251 et seq., 254, 255: symmetrical
ornamentation among, 154: use of
shell ornaments by, 105; wearing
of clothing in dances by, 98.

Mindi, an Australian demon, 226.

Mitchell, on an Australian headdress,
89.

Modesty, inﬂuence of, in clothing,
99, 100; origin of, 93 et seq., 97
et seq.

Mokoma, 216.

Mooroops, 178.

Moorunde, natives of, 56, 226.

Mourning, cause of painting in, 67;
colours used in, 57, 66.

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Mundy, on Australian dances, 219.

Museum für Völkerkunde, 25. '

Music, footnote, 280: connection of,
with poetry and the dance, 278; in
ﬂuence of, 297 et wg.; origin of,
279 et seq. ;primitive,characteristics
of, 291 et seq ; primitive, impor—
tance of study of, 281 et seq.; rela—
tion to civilization, 302 et seq. ; sig-
niﬁcance of, 303 et seq.

N arrinyeri, an Australian tribe, 56,
236, 237; headdresses of, footnote,
88.

Natural selection, development of
art by, 15 et seq. '

Nature, in primitive poetry, 245, 257.

Naturvolkcr, 33.

Neck ornaments, 90 et seq.

N etchiilirmiut, footnote, 86.

New Britain, people of, footnote, 44;
drawings of, 123.

New Zealandcrs, aesthetic endow-
ment of, 24 et seq.

Northwestern Indians, 190.

Norwegian sagas, 265.

N ugumint, footnote, 86.

Ono no Tofu, Japanese writing-mas-
ter, footnote, 147.

Oogee, Australian headdress, 90:,
footnote, 165.

Ornamentation, among Americans,
162; among Polynesians, 162; im-
portance of, 313; of implements,
115 et seq.; origin of, 118 et seq.,
133; among the Australians, 139
et seq.; origin of, among the Es-
kimo, 128 et seq; relation to cul-
ture, 155, 160; to material used,
158; to occupation, 155.

()rnamentation of weapons, impor-
tance of, for recognition marks, 161 ;
in social distinctions, 161; in woo-
ing, 160.

INDEX.

Ornaments, civilized, derived from
primitive, 108 et seq.

Painting, social inﬂuence of, 314; the
body, 54 et seq.

Paintings, Australian, 165 et seq, 172
et seq.; Bushman, 180 et seq.

Palmer, on scariﬁcation, footnote, 75.

Palti, an Australian dance, 56.

Papuan canoes, birds’ heads on, 24.

Parker, quoted on an Australian
dance, 221, 226.

Pastoral peoples, form of family
among, 38.

Patagonians, footnote, 43.

Patriarchal form'of family, 37.

Patterns used in body painting, 68.

Perspective, 179, 184, 187, 193.

Peruvians, an agricultural people, 35.

Philosophy of art, 1 et seq.

Pictorial art, among the Australians,
165 et wg.; the Botocudo, 193; the
Bushmen, 180 et seq. ; the Fuegians,
193; the Mincopies, 193; northern
peoples, 185 et seq.; characteristics
of primitive, 193; connection with
occupation, 195, 198; naturalistic
basis of, 190, 193; primitive, com-
pared with that of children, 193
et seq.; social inﬂuence of, 205.

Picture—writing, 145 et seq., 201 et seq.

Pideku, an Australian dance, 56.

Plate. art of, 316 ; on music, 303 ; The
Republic, quoted, footnote, 301.

Play, distinguished from practical
and aesthetic activity, 49.

Poetry, among primitive peoples. 28,
232; connection with drama, 265 et
wg.; deﬁnition of, 234; importance
of, in civilized life, 270 et seq.; im—
portance to hunting peoples, 274 et
seq.; lyric, 234 et seq.: Mill on,
49; primitive and civilized com—
pared, 243, 244; social inﬂuence of,
314.

 

325

Polynesians, position in the scale of
culture, 33.

Port Aiken, 173.

Port Jackson, 172, 174.

Port Piper, 173.

Port Stephen, 173.

Pottery, 143.

Primitive art, importance of the study
of, 21. _

Primitive music, 22.

Primitive peoples, art of, 306, 309;
deﬁned,40 ; need of deﬁning term,
32.

Prince William Sound, 197.

Production, form of, as controlling
culture, 36 et seq; inﬂuencing art,
40.

Property marks on weapons, indi-
vidual, 136 et seq; social, 139.

Puluga, a Mincopy god, 252, 254.

Queensland, boomerang from, 135;
shield from, 133; illustration, 122.

Queenslanders, footnote, 44; decora-
tion among, 56, footnote, 110 ; Lum—
holtz on the, 67, 87 : Lumholtz on
scariﬂeation among, 76; music of,
284; ornaments worn by, 93; scari-
ﬁcation among, 7 0: sounding stick
of, 289.

Race character, inﬂuence of, on form
of culture, 34.
Raphael, 171.

Raratonga-Tubuai peoples, geomet-
rical ornamentation among, 122.
Ratzel, on headdresses, 90; on neck

ornaments, 91 ; quoted on Bush-
man stories, 258, 266; use of term
“ Naturvolker,” 33.
Red, 21 colour used in body painting,
61 et seq.; used in decoration, 133.
Reindeer period, 163, 164, 194, 199.
Religious ideas, inﬂuenced by eco-
nomic conditions, 36.

326

Religious signiﬁcance, of ornamenta-
tion, 142; of pictures, 199 et seq.,
204; of scariﬁcation, 72, 80 ; of the
dance, 225 et seq.

Rembrandt, 10, 27.

Resurrection dance, 221.

Rink, on the Eskimo, 244; quoted on
Eskimo stories, 255 et seq, 259 et
seq; on the Eskimo, 241, 275.

Rhythm, 149 et seq.; Darwin on,
footnote, 222; in the dance, 207,
222 et seq; in Grecian music, 301 ;
in personal decoration, 106; in
poetry, 235; in primitive music,
284, 286, 288, 295, 301. '

Rougeing, 108.

Samoans, footnote, 44.

Sandwich Islanders, position in the
scale of culture, 33.

Scariﬁcation, 54, 69 et seq. ; found
only among dark peoples, 78 ; sig-
niﬁcance of, 72 et seq.

Scherer, on the dance, 220.

Schopenhauer, art of, 316 ; quoted on
music, 279.

Schuermann, on mourning colours,
57.

Sculpture, social inﬂuence of, 313.

Schurtz, quoted on origin of dress, 96.

Schusscnquelle, footnote, 63.

Science of art, aim of, 2 et seq ; Hen-
nequin’s contribution to, 14; hin-
drances to developmentof,18 et seq. ;
studied by ethnological method, 19
et seq. ; way to, 9 et seq.

Sempcr, Gottfried, on artistic style,
160.

Shakespeare, 10.

Shaman masks, 201.

Shamans, 191.

Shame, feeling of, origin of, 93 et seq.,
99.

Shells, as ornaments, 105.

Shillooks, footnote, 60.

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART.

Smyth, Brough, on Australian prop-
erty marks, 13.9; on corroborries,
208 et seq; on the Australians, 55,
56, 57, 65, 69, 70, 77, 83, 84, 88, 89,
93, 95, 96, 118, 174, 175, 177, 300,
footnotes, 63, 66, 67, 75, 143 ; quoted
on the Australians, 123, 125, 135,
159, 172, 177, 178, 220 et seq., 253,
footnote, 110.

Social organization, importance of art
to, 313 et seq.

Sociology, of art, 12, 13, 18; relation
of, to archaeology, 22.

Somatology, not important to study
of art, 34.

Songs, of primitive peoples, 282 et seq.

Songs of satire, 246.

Soudan, negroes of, 33.

Spencer, Herbert, an Australian song
from, 237; on music, 281, 292; on
primitive poetry, 234; on rhythm,
223 ; on social signiﬁcance of dress,
114.

Stokes, on Australian songs, 276;
quoted on Australian paintings,
170 et seq.

Stolpe, Hjalmar, on geometrical or-
namentation, 121 ; referred to, foot-
note, 158.

Stories, spread of, 264 et seq.

Symmetry, in personal decoration,
106.

Tahitians, footnote, 43.

Taine, ethnological method in study
of art, 19; on climate and art, 311;
on race and art, 309 et seq. ; on
sociological art, 13 et seq.

Taine’s Philosophy of Art, 16.

Taplin, an Australian song from,
236.

Tasmanians, footnote, 43 ; body paint-
ing among, 57 ; corroborries of, 211;
decoration with ﬂowers by, foot-
note, 156 ; hair-dressing among, 87 ;

INDEX.

loins dress of, 96; pmaments worn
by, 93: paintings of, 178; purpose
of decoration among, 111 ; scaritica—
tion among, 71; tattooing among,
74; use of shell ornaments by, 105.

Taste, in body decoration. 77 ; inﬂu-
ence of, on art, 15 et seq. '

Tattooing, 54, 69; found only among
the fairer peoples, 78.

Tchuktchis, carvings of, 200 ; culture
of, 44; drawings of, 185, 186.

Technic ornament, origin of, 145.

Technique, a source of ornament,
130.

Textile art, a source of ornament, 130
et seq. ; connection with ornamen—
tation, 157.

Thayingen, excavations at, footnote,
164.

Thomas, on corroborries, 208 et seq.;
quoted on the Australians, 56.

Tongans, footnote, 43, 44.

Torres Strait, 70.

Traditions, relation to epic poems,
251 et seq.

Transvaal, 181.

Tribal marks, 139 et seq. ; hair-dress-
ing as, 85 ; lip andvear plugs as, 82;
made by scariﬁcations, 74, 77, 80.

Tschuktschis (see Tehuktchis).

Tuaregs, footnote, 44.

Tulbagh Kloof, 181.

Tylor, E. B., quoted on music, 296.

Veddahs, culture of, 44; footnote,
43.

Virchow, on tattooing among the
Bushmen, 79.

Wachandi, 220.

Waitz, use of term “ N aturvolker,” 33.

THE

 

327

Waitz--Gerland, on clothing, 97; on
signiﬁcance of scariﬁcation, 72 et
869.; on the Australians, 56, 57, 70
et seq.; quoted on Australian lan-
guages, 274; on Australian musical
instruments, 290; on Australian
songs, footnote, 250; on colours
used by the Australians, footnote,
63; on dances of the Australians,
229; on drawings of the Austra-
lians, 172, 174, footnote, 179; on
memory of the Australians, 196;
on poetry of the Australians, 248;
on the Australians and Fuegians,
112.

Wake, on the Australians, 165.

War dances, 219.

Westermarck, footnote, 44; quoted
on love, 245; wearing of clothing,
98.

White, a colour used in decoration,
133.

Wied, Prince of, on a Botocudo head-
dress, 90 ; on Botocudo dances, 216 ;
on the Botocudo, 68, 81, 92; quoted
on the Botocudo, 60, 283.

Wilhelmi, on scariﬁcation among
Australians, 76; quoted on the
Australians, footnote, 66.

Xingu tribes, ornamentation of, 120.

Yahgans, dances of, 216; dramas of,
footnote, 268.

Yarra tribe, grave tablet from, 177.

Yellow, colour used in body paint—
ing, 63.

Zulus, position in the scale of cul-
ture, 33.

END.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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