flJnrtttU IttiitetHUjj ffiibratg 
 
 3tljaca, Sfctn $nrk 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 Aatk 
 
 ors, 
 
"5 "ft 
 
 ;£i J i- - j't 
 
 Y'l- 
 
 '**> 
 
 *H s 
 
 JJ 
 
 MAY3 11948 Jg 
 
 P 
 
 FEB- Li 
 
 D CCl 21074 U Q 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 N5303 .B17 
 
 Art and man: 
 
 olin 
 
 II Hill III 
 
 "3" 1924 030 645 117 
 
 Overs 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/details/cu31924030645117 
 
With the compliments of the authors 
 
 ART AND MAN 
 
ART AND MAN 
 
 COMPARATIVE ART STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN SWIFT BALGH 
 
 AND 
 
 EUGENIA MAGFARLANE BALGH 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 ALLEN, LANE AND SCOTT 
 
 1918 
 5 
 
77// 
 
 A, 3?22Zla 
 
 Copyright, 1918, by 
 EDWIN SWIFT BALCH 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 ALLEN, LANE AND SCOTT 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
OTHER WORKS BY EDWIN SWIFT BALCH 
 
 Glacieres or Freezing Cavehnb Philadelphia 1900 
 
 Antarctica Philadelphia 1902 
 
 Comparative Art Philadelphia 1906 
 
 The North Pole and Bradley Land Philadelphia 1913 
 
 Mount McKinley and Mountain Climbers' Proofs Philadelphia 1914 
 
 Elise Willing Balch, In Memoriam Philadelphia 1917 
 
 Mountain Exploration Bull. Geog. Club of Phila. 1893 
 
 A Projected Railroad Across the SAhara Around The World 1894 
 
 The Highest Mountain Ascent Pop. Sci. Mon. 1895 
 
 Ascents Near Saas Appalachia 1896 
 
 Ice Caves and the Causes of Subterranean Ice J, Franklin Ins. 1897 
 
 Ice Cave Hunting in Central Europe Appalachia 1897 
 
 Reminiscences of Tyrol Appalachia 1898 
 
 Was South America Sighted Before 1448? J. School Geog. 1898 
 
 Subterranean Ice Deposits in America J. Franklin Ins. 1899 
 
 Ice Breakers in Polar Exploration J. Franklin Ins. 1900 
 
 Antarctica, A History of Antarctic Discovery J, Franklin Ins. 1901 
 
 Evaporation Underground Monthly Weather Review 1901 
 
 Tallow Cave, Etc J. Franklin Ins. 1901 
 
 Antarctic Exploration Sci. Ameh. Supp. 1903 
 
 Roman and Prehistoric Remains in Central Germany J. Franklin Ins. 1903 
 
 Savage and Civilized Dress J. Franklin Ins. 1904 
 
 The Highest Mountain Ascent Bull. Ambr. Geog. Soc. 1904 
 
 Develop the Submarine J. Franklin Ins. 1904 
 
 Antarctica Addenda J. Franklin Ins. 1904 
 
 Termination Land Nat. Geog. Mag. 1904 
 
 American Explorerb in Africa Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1904 
 
 Antarctic Nomenclature Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1905 
 
 Wilkes Land Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1906 
 
 The Survival op the Shortest xxx in Language J. Franklin Ins. 1906 
 
 Arctic Expeditions sent from the American Colonies Penn. Mag. Hist. & Biog. 1907 
 
 Art and Ethnology Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 1907 
 
 Crocker Land Bull. Amer. Geog. Sod 1908 
 
 Art in America before the Revolution Penn. Soc. Col. Wars 1908 
 
 Stonington Antarctic Explorers Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1909 
 
 High Mountain Ascents Appalachia 1909 
 
 Why America Should Re-explore Wilkes Land Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 1909 
 
 Wilkes' Antarctic Discoveries Science 1911 
 
 Charcot's Antarctic Explorations Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1911 
 
 Palmer Land Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1911 
 
 Hudson Land Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1911 
 
 Antarctic Names Bull. Amer. Geog. Soc. 1912 
 
 Atlantis or Minoan Crete Geographical Review 1917 
 
 Early Man in America Proc. Amer. Philob. Soc. 1917 
 
 American Explorers of Africa Geographical Review 1918 
 
 The Art of George Catlin Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 1918 
 
 Etc, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 All my life I have been interested in art and in geog- 
 raphy. My studies in both fields remained as separate 
 pursuits until about the year 1890, when I began to make 
 a small collection of Japanese pictures. At about that 
 time also I paid several visits to the Musee de Saint 
 Germain and studied the French prehistoric remains. 
 Shortly afterwards, I received from Dr. Vincent, surgeon 
 of the third Peary Arctic expedition, a gift of several 
 little Eskimo statuettes. Gradually I became impressed 
 with the fact that there are certain resemblances be- 
 tween these arts, and this led me to an attempt to find out 
 whether there were any such resemblances to other arts. 
 The matter expanded continuously, but it took some 
 years for cold facts to teach me that the fine arts were 
 a tremendous field, covering the entire earth, and that, 
 apparently, no one had realized this before. 
 
 In the year 1904, I published a paper Savage and 
 Civilized Dress in "The Journal of the Franklin Institute;" 
 in 1906, a book Comparative Art; in 1907, a paper Art 
 and Ethnology in "The Proceedings of the American 
 Philosophical Society;" and in 1908, a paper Art in 
 America before the Revolution in the publications of The 
 Society of Colonial Wars of Pennsylvania. Up to that 
 date and until the publication of those monographs, 
 archaeologists and art critics as a rule fought shy of 
 dealing with the arts of the African, Australasian and 
 American native races, from the art standpoint which 
 they used with the arts of Europe or even the arts of Asia. 
 The word "art" appears to have been under a sort of 
 
8 ART AND MAN. 
 
 tabu in ethnological museums, just as works of the primi- 
 tive arts were only sporadically admitted to art galleries. 
 
 After the publication of Comparative Art the eyes 
 and minds of ethnologists and of art critics seemed to 
 open. In ethnological and archaeological institutions fre- 
 quently now the lectures are about art and have the word 
 "art" in their titles: an open recognition by ethnologists 
 that art is an important part of ethnology. Art critics 
 likewise slowly are becoming aware that the arts of the 
 races of America, of Australasia, and of Africa deserve 
 recognition just as do the arts of Europe and of Asia. 
 And in answer to the new demand, we find the Archaeo- 
 logical Institute of America publishing a magazine Art 
 and Archaeology. 'Tis but the edge of the wedge which 
 has penetrated so far, but nevertheless it has cut a slit 
 which will widen in due time. 
 
 The present work is really a much enlarged revision 
 of the theoretical portions of Comparative Art. It is an 
 attempt to present the theories and ideas which my wife 
 and I, working hand in hand, have developed since 1906 
 from innumerable observations in museums and galleries. 
 As the observations multiplied, the ideas and theories 
 expanded and needed continual alteration. The book 
 itself therefore is not finished and never could be finished. 
 A hundred volumes would not cover the subject of com- 
 parative art. Our aim, in brief, has been, by the exam- 
 ination and comparison of as many art specimens from 
 as many places as possible, to find out whether thruout 
 the world art is one whole or whether there are several 
 arts, to trace resemblances and differences between the 
 arts of every nook and cranny of our little globe, and to 
 formulate therefrom the most apparently accurate deduc- 
 tions about art and man. In certain respects therefore, 
 
AET AND MAN. 9 
 
 this work is a study of the fine arts thruout the world for 
 the sake of the fine arts themselves; and in certain other 
 respects it is an attempt to trace the story of man as 
 far as can be deduced from the fine arts. Preconceived 
 notions are eliminated and the statements made are 
 either the observations jotted down directly in front of 
 specimens of the fine arts, or the ideas which have arisen 
 as a study of those specimens. Thruout this book, the 
 names "Amerind" — a contraction of American Indian — 
 and "Hindu" are used in order to distinguish the natives 
 of America from the natives of Hindustan. For the 
 name "Indian," generally applied to both, is hopelessly 
 confusing. 
 
 Edwin Swift Balch. 
 
ART AND MAN. 11 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ART AND COMPARATIVE ART. 
 
 The term "art" covers a vast field. In its broadest 
 sense it includes the mechanical arts and the fine arts. 
 Of the mechanical arts this work takes little cognizance. 
 The fine arts fall into three divisions : the arts of poetry 
 and literature; the arts of music; and the arts of sculp- 
 ture, painting and architecture. With the poetical and 
 literary arts, that is the arts of spoken or written words, 
 and with the musical arts, that is the arts of sounds and 
 hearing, this work likewise has almost nothing to do. 
 This work deals with the fine arts depending on the sense 
 of vision or sight, that is the arts of space; the glyptic, 
 plastic and graphic arts; the arts of form and color; the 
 arts of sculpture, carving, drawing, painting, etching, 
 engraving, tattooing, decoration, costume, pottery, archi- 
 tecture. And the word "art" in this book is used in this 
 limited sense, as applying to the arts of space, and not 
 to the arts of thought or sound. 
 
 Dancing is in certain respects one of the plastic arts. 
 But it hardly comes within the scope of this book. For 
 it is a fleeting art. It offers suggestions for pictures and 
 for sculptures, and when done amid sumptuous stage 
 decorations, sometimes most pictorial suggestions in 
 form and color. Nevertheless, as these pictures vanish 
 instanter, they are of little use for artistic comparison. 
 
 Attempts to define art have been made before now, 
 but I have never seen a definition which seemed more 
 than fragmentary. Art in fact is so complex a subject, 
 that I doubt whether any definition which would really 
 
12 ART AND MAN. 
 
 define it could be compressed into a few words. One can 
 say, however, that it is a human product, a form of human 
 expression, requiring life, work, force, _ ability, emotion 
 and other qualities to produce it. Art is an expression 
 of taste, of personality, of individuality. It is an expres- 
 sion of emotion rather than of intellect. It is generally a 
 search for beauty but sometimes it seems to be a search 
 for ugliness. It is, like language and music, a means of 
 communication. For while language conveys thoughts 
 thru words and music awakens emotions thru sounds, 
 glyptic art arouses emotions and communicates visible 
 facts thru sight. Of the arts studied in this work, sculp- 
 ture, drawing, painting, decoration, architecture and 
 others, briefly it may be said that they are material 
 objects; that they are the external manifestations of 
 the emotions, feelings and powers of their makers; or to 
 paraphrase the thought, art objects are the emotions, 
 feelings and powers of their makers made visible. These 
 art objects may give pleasure or pain to, or leave indif- 
 ferent, those who see and look at them. 
 
 It may be objected that art is not purely a form of 
 human expression. Is not a fossil of some plant art: art 
 of some power higher than humanity? There are certainly 
 many things in the world, springing from some other cause 
 than man, which are artistic and might be placed, without 
 being out of keeping, in an art museum. But while these 
 objects are beautiful and artistic, they should not be 
 classed under the term art, because this word as a part 
 of language, distinctly refers to some product of man, 
 and not to some product of nature. 
 
 How much must be included under the term art? 
 If the Venus of Milo is sculpture, is a Maori wooden 
 figure sculpture? If Edward Whymper's woodcuts of the 
 
ART AND MAN". 13 
 
 Alps or M&yon's etching of le Vieux Paris are drawing, 
 are the Sioux rectangular humans on buffalo robes 
 drawings? If "Rain, Steam and Speed" is painting, are 
 Masai colored patches on war shields paintings? Up to 
 within three or four years, art critics and ethnologists 
 by their actions more forcibly than by their words said 
 "No." It seems to me this is a complete error. When 
 a Maori cut a block of wood roughly into the shape of a 
 man, or a Mandan made some lines resembling a box for a 
 body with other lines sticking from it as arms and legs, 
 or a Masai daubed masses of bright colors on his shield, 
 those poor untaught human brothers were doing the 
 best they k^ew how to give expression to an instinct to 
 make something not useful but something ornamental 
 and probably beautiful to the mind of its maker. It 
 seems to me that the arts of primitive races are just as 
 much an expression of the art instinct as are the arts of 
 advanced peoples and that they vary in degree and not 
 in kind from them. And therefore I most unhesitatingly 
 class the sculptures, drawings, paintings, decorations, of 
 all primitive tribes as belonging to the fine arts, and I 
 therefore include them under the term art, recognizing, 
 however, that many persons would not accept this 
 classification. 
 
 Art is found in every part of the world except 
 Antarctica. Some of its branches, such as modern 
 European art, Roman art, Greek art, Egyptian art and 
 Assyrian art have been studied carefully and voluminous 
 treatises have appeared about them. But when we turn 
 to such arts as African art or Brazilian art, there have 
 been no special studies or no special publications about 
 them. In the case of the wonderful art of China, it is only 
 in the twentieth century that the first serious attempt 
 
14 AKT AND MAN. 
 
 was made to trace it back. From an artistic or an ethno- 
 logical standpoint, the art of the world as a whole is so 
 far almost untouched. The only attempt to study it in 
 totality I know of is the one I made in this book's pre- 
 decessor: Comparative Art. It is high time that the art of 
 the world should be studied as an entity from an esthetic 
 and a scientific point of view, not only locally and individ- 
 ually, but in totality in its broadest relations, in its resem- 
 blances and its differences. At present there is a gap in 
 knowledge and this gap must be filled in and the art of the 
 entire world must be worked out as a whole according to 
 its geographical distribution and its historical sequence. 
 Our knowledge of man has been largely increased 
 during the past century by studies, done from the com- 
 parative standpoint, in a number of directions. Com- 
 parative philology, comparative anatomy, comparative 
 archaeology have advanced in this way to the dignity of 
 separate sciences. Of late years, the comparative study 
 of implements, that is of the early mechanical arts, has 
 been pushed apace, and this study of implements, if it 
 has not furnished much information as to race, has fur- 
 nished a great deal of information as to the conditions of 
 social development prevailing at given times in certain 
 localities. Now works of the fine arts certainly afford a 
 more extended and a more advanced field than the early 
 mechanical arts to gauge the condition of man and there- 
 fore the fine arts, of all times and all peoples everywhere, 
 need to be compared. Comparisons of the arts of to-day, 
 the characteristics of whose makers we know, with the 
 arts of the past are bound to shed fresh light on the races 
 of the past and enable us to fathom more accurately the 
 character of our early ancestors. Comparisons among the 
 arts of the past must tell us more of the history and 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 15 
 
 Fig. 1. Snake woman, Minoan Crete. 
 
16 ART AND MAN. 
 
 geographical distribution of each art and this must 
 be of value to ethnology and history. The subject is an 
 enormous one and in my opinion it should be recognized 
 as a special field of study called "comparative art," a 
 name I used already in 1906. 
 
 That resemblances or similarity in art signify more 
 and convey more ethnographical information than many 
 persons think possible, may perhaps be shown by the 
 following occurrence. In 1.905 I visited the British 
 Museum and in the Sumatra exhibit noticed that some 
 Sumatra art, especially two little heads from the Batta 
 tribe, resembled the art of Easter Island. I mentioned 
 this in Comparative Art* adding that I felt sure that the 
 carvers of those heads were blood relations of the artists 
 of Hawaii and Easter Island. I heard no more of the 
 matter until 1917, when a paper Easter Island was 
 read before the Royal Geographical Society, and in the 
 discussion of that paper Sir Henry Howarth saidf that 
 the only place he knew of where inscriptions in the least 
 like those of Easter Island are to be found was among 
 some of the wild races of Sumatra, such as the Battas; 
 and he infers from this that the Malays may be related 
 to or have had relations with the primitive people of 
 Easter Island. Here therefore is an opinion based on the 
 resemblance of primitive writings which corroborates 
 exactly my opinion based wholly on the resemblance 
 or similarity between sculpted heads and moreover on an 
 exceedingly small number of these. 
 
 Now these Batta, Easter Island and Hawaiian heads 
 bring forward some other most interesting problems. No 
 such heads are found in America. And why not? If their 
 
 * Page 140. 
 
 t "The Geographical Journal," 1917, Vol. XLIX, page 347. 
 
ART AND MAN. 17 
 
 makers belong to one family, it implies either that form- 
 erly the land connections between Sumatra, Easter Island 
 and Hawaii were more complete than they are now or else 
 that the makers of these heads could navigate great dis- 
 tances. If the latter, unquestionably they could have gone 
 to South and to Central America. If their makers carried 
 their art instinct with them between three such distant 
 places as Sumatra, Easter Island and Hawaii, surely they 
 would have carried also their art instinct with them 
 intact had they landed either in Chile or Mexico. Had 
 they done so, it seems as if some Easter Island or Hawaiian 
 heads would have been found there. But there is no 
 trace of such heads in America. This evidence, therefore, 
 while not conclusive, certainly strongly indicates that 
 the American Continent was not reached from the 
 Australasian Islands across the South Pacific. 
 
 In speaking of resemblances or similarity between arts, 
 one must be careful not to confuse similarity with identity. 
 Arts may be similar and not be identical. The art of no 
 one race is identical with the art of any other race. Even 
 the art of one race, tho it may be similar thruout, varies 
 locally: it is not identical anywhere. Every great art 
 has a certain family likeness, but each of its offspring 
 has its own individuality. Despite the Declaration of 
 Independence and the French Revolution, there are no 
 two men absolutely equal, there is no perfect egalite in 
 the world. Likewise in the fine arts, no two arts are 
 identical, indeed no two works of art are identical. 
 
 One of the most interesting phases of studying art 
 comparatively is learning to recognize the thousand and 
 one varieties of art in the world. The painting of Japan 
 is different from the painting of France, even tho there 
 are some similarities. The painting of Holland and the 
 
18 ART AND MAN. 
 
 painting of Italy resemble each other much more closely 
 than the painting of Japan resembles the painting of 
 France. Yet so different are Dutch pictures and Italian 
 pictures that any expert can place at a glance any one of 
 them in its own niche. While Eskimo carvings and 
 Japanese netzkes are exceedingly similar, yet one becomes 
 able to tell unfailingly where each specimen comes from. 
 Easter Island heads are unique, and yet there is a family 
 resemblance to Hawaiian wicker and feather heads, and 
 to Batta heads. And in time one learns to recognize 
 the innumerable local arts, solely because each local art 
 has its own individuality and identity. 
 
 Comparative art in time doubtless will form a connect- 
 ing link between science and art. Practically it will amount 
 to forming a new branch of science in which art critics 
 and ethnologists must work hand in hand in a scientific 
 and artistic investigation of art. It is certainly just as 
 necessary that there should be a science of compara- 
 tive art as a science of comparative anatomy or a 
 science of comparative philology. 
 
 Comparative art may be defined as a comparative 
 study of the glyptic arts in all forms; painting, sculpture, 
 drawing, architecture, decorative art, decoration, tattoo- 
 ing, etc. It is not a study of written inscriptions, nor 
 primarily of implements, but it can compare implements 
 in their forms, and the decorations on implements must 
 be one of its chief objects. It must be applied to every 
 district of the globe, not only to the remotest past in 
 which there was art, but to the actual present and to the 
 future. It must deal with the art of advanced and of 
 primitive races: with such arts as those of the 
 Egyptians, the Kaldeans, the Chinese, the Greeks and 
 the Europeans; and also with those of the Pleistokenes, 
 
ART AND MAN. 19 
 
 the Bushmen, the Benin negroes, the tribes of the Amazon 
 and Kongo forests, the South Sea islanders, and the inhabi- 
 tants of Arctic shores. 
 
 Comparative art must not be confounded with com- 
 parative archaeology: for altho they touch at certain 
 points they are different subjects. Comparative arch- 
 aeology is a study of things of the past, based mainly on 
 results obtained by digging with the pick and spade. 
 It includes studies of certain phases of art and architec- 
 ture, of inscriptions, of implements, and of some other 
 things. It does not deal with the art of the Bushman 
 or the Papuan or the Samoyede of to-day. It is more a 
 historic than an artistic study. It can be followed and 
 carried forward by persons who are in no wise art critics. 
 Comparative art is the study of the relations of the arts 
 of the world and can be advanced only by trained art 
 critics who are also ethnologists. It is not going to do 
 away with ethnology, or comparative anatomy, or history, 
 or archaeology, or anything else of that kind, but properly 
 worked out it is certain to throw some new light on the 
 story of man. It is a field still largely untitled, in which 
 there is much work to do, and from which, when it is 
 thoroly plowed up, a valuable crop of scientific data will 
 grow. 
 
 In the elucidation of the problems of the origin, evo- 
 lution, descent and history of man, geography, geology, 
 paleontology, natural history, anatomy, history, philology, 
 archaeology, and other sciences have been called upon to 
 help clear up somewhat the complex genealogy of the 
 human race. Much has been done already, altho the 
 problem of man is bound never to be entirely cleared up. 
 The evidence which has been gathered already about 
 man and his origin can perhaps be divided roughly into 
 
20 ART AND MAN. 
 
 three classes: that which is extraneous to him personally, 
 such as geographical environment, climate, etc., that is 
 the terrestial conditions under which he has existed; that 
 which is obtained from his own remains and his own per- 
 sonality, that is his anatomical and physiological charac- 
 teristics, and his relationship in natural history to other 
 animals; and that which is obtained from his own works, 
 from what he has himself produced. This latter class of 
 evidence may be subdivided into three classes, namely, 
 language and written records, implements, and art, and 
 this monograph deals principally with this third sub-class. 
 
 Language and written records are, of course, most 
 available as evidence in tracing the story of the human 
 race, and whenever we find written records which we can 
 interpret, they bring their part of man's story within the 
 domain of history. But when, as in the case of old 
 Mexico, we cannot read the records, or when, as in 
 the case with primitives, there are no written records, 
 the subject changes from history into prehistory and 
 archaeology. 
 
 Implements form another great class of evidence: 
 the term "implements" being used as a comprehensive 
 name to describe all the products of the mechanical 
 arts. A chair or a boat or an automobile, a stone 
 ax or a gun, can be classed as "implements," and 
 without some implements at least no man could live. 
 All our modern implements have evolved from primitive 
 beginnings, as for instance, the modern ocean liner, which 
 is the direct descendant of the floating log, the raft, the 
 dug-out and the canoe. Much light has been shed already 
 and more will be shed on the story of man by comparing 
 the various implements used in different places and at 
 different times. 
 
ART AND MAN. 21 
 
 Art is the third great source from which much evidence 
 about the history of man can be obtained, but so far it has 
 been investigated only in a fragmentary manner. A com- 
 parative study of the arts of the world has never obtained, 
 as it has, for instance, in the case of language with com- 
 parative philology, or in natural history with comparative 
 anatomy. One reason unquestionably why art, as a 
 totality, is still so largely unstudied, is that it is only 
 in our generation that art specimens from wild parts of 
 the earth have been collected by scientific expeditions, 
 placed in museums, and made accessible to the public. 
 
 Another reason why art is still unstudied as a whole 
 is that there never has been, there is not, and there prob- 
 ably never will be, a museum of the fine arts from all parts 
 of the world. Art specimens are divided: some are placed 
 in art museums; others in ethnological museums. There 
 is no place where anyone can go and get a compre- 
 hensive view of art. The art of at least half the races 
 of the world has found its way into ethnological 
 museums, where it is not yet culled out as art, but 
 where the specimens are looked on mainly as belong- 
 ing to the class which is called "implements." This 
 rather curious fact, however, shows that there is a sort 
 of borderland between art and science, in which much 
 art is stranded at present. 
 
 That this is a fact may be verified in almost any big 
 city. For instance, in Philadelphia, art specimens are 
 divided between the Pennsylvania Academy of the 
 Fine Arts and the University Archaeological Museum; 
 in Washington, between the Corcoran Gallery and the 
 United States National Museum; in New York, between 
 the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of 
 Natural History; in Boston, between the Museum of 
 
22 ART AND MAN. 
 
 Fine Arts and the Harvard University Peabody Museum; 
 in London, between the National Gallery and the British 
 Museum; in Paris, between the Louvre and the Musee 
 de Saint Germain; etc. 
 
 In other words, much fine art is at present treated 
 and looked on as ethnology or natural history, not as art. 
 Half of the art of the world is studied by artists and art 
 critics, the other half by ethnologists. Artists and art 
 critics have so far paid almost no attention to such arts 
 as African art or Australasian art. In the majority of 
 cases they are unaware of the existence of such arts. 
 Moreover, if they did know of them, they would in many 
 cases despise them, because these arts do not have the 
 qualities of Greek art or Japanese art or French art. Art 
 critics haunt art galleries, not ethnological museums; 
 they know nothing of ethnology and doubtless care less; 
 and it takes a good deal of time and thought and study 
 to learn something of ethnology. The result of this is 
 that art critics do not study art at all from geographical 
 or ethnological standpoints, and that at least half the 
 art of the world is entirely without their ken. And it is 
 strange to realize how completely many of the arts of 
 the world have been neglected by art critics. Chinese 
 art and Hindu art, for instance, did not attract the 
 attention of writers competent to deal with their prob- 
 lems until the end of the last century. African art, 
 Australasian art, and Amerind art so far have been 
 noticed only by ethnologists: their qualities and their 
 deficiencies, their relations, their resemblances to and 
 differences from the arts of other races, as yet have 
 never been taken up by the persons most competent 
 to deal with them, namely trained art critics. 
 
 Ethnologists, on the contrary, keep away from art 
 
ART AND MAN". 23 
 
 museums. As a rule they have not had any art training, 
 hence, when they see works of art in ethnological 
 museums, usually they treat them from the standpoint of 
 implements. Only a scientific specialist can really give an 
 opinion about any special science, and similarly only a 
 trained artist-art-critic can write intelligently about art, 
 indeed the present prevailing opinions about art are 
 largely the consensus of opinion of many artist-art-critics 
 of modern times. Whilst possibly unconscious of this 
 fact, ethnologists are usually aware of their inability to 
 discuss the esthetic qualities of art specimens — supposing 
 that they perceive these esthetic qualities — and hence, 
 while they frequently study the decorative art of primi- 
 tives, its patterns and its origins, they are apt to leave 
 the esthetic qualities of art alone. 
 
 To sum up this matter briefly. Artists see half the 
 art of the world from the esthetic but rarely from the his- 
 toric or ethnologic standpoint. Ethnologists see the 
 other half of the art of the world, from the historic 
 or ethnologic but seldom from the esthetic standpoint. 
 Neither artists nor ethnologists appear to look at the 
 whole of art from an esthetic, an ethnologic, and a his- 
 toric standpoint. The result is comparisons are rarely 
 instituted and the lessons to be learned from art have so 
 far largely remained hidden. The forest is not seen on 
 account of the trees. As a whole, the art of the world is 
 a still open field, in which may be made further discov- 
 eries which will throw much light not only on art but also 
 on the story of man. 
 
24 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ... THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ART. 
 
 Art is universal. Art is found everywhere, among 
 all races and in all places. From the Cape of Good 
 Hope to Kamchatka, from Grant Land to Cape Horn, 
 wherever in historic times the human biped dwells or 
 has dwelt, there in some form art is found. Wherever 
 digging with the pick and the spade has revealed in 
 any quantity traces of man in Recent times, and in 
 some places in Pleistokene times, usually also it has 
 brought forth some fragments of art. Of course, buried 
 art is rarer than surface art, but all the evidence goes 
 to show that the ancestor of modern man everywhere 
 soon developed art and that it grew wherever he 
 appeared. The only continent where there is no art is 
 Antarctica, which is not surprising, since neither in 
 East Antarctica nor in West Antarctica have any 
 traces of man been found. 
 
 It is indeed one of the most striking facts connected 
 with man that all races of men, whatever their con- 
 dition, whether advanced or primitive, have some "art. 
 The most backward tribes have some art instinct and 
 some art, even if in some cases this does not get 
 beyond rudimentary tattooing or signs intended per- 
 haps as property marks. Some primitive races have 
 the instinct to decorate their implements and weapons, 
 for instance their canoes and shields, with patterns and 
 colors. Many races sculpt figures of humans and 
 animals; sometimes they reach a pictorial stage; often 
 they obtain results which may well take rank as fine 
 
ART AND MAN". 
 
 25 
 
 ,y <?,) 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 
 Fig. 3. 
 
 £.■$.& 
 
 Fig. 4. 
 
 Fig. 5. 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 Fig. 3. 
 Fig. 4. 
 Fig. 5. 
 
 Little Egyptian stone figure. 
 
 Prehistoric pottery from Etruria: may be Neolithic divinity. 
 Egyptian high relief figure modelled on one side. 
 Egyptian bas relief figure twisted into impossible position. 
 
26 ART AND MAN. 
 
 art. It is a fact, not only that primitive men have 
 art, but that sometimes they have good art. 
 
 The first thought almost which arises when one 
 thinks of art as universal, is whether it is all one art, 
 or whether there are several distinct arts. Without 
 attempting to answer this question here, it is certain 
 that there are many branches or varieties of art. So 
 far these have not been thoroly classified. Possibly the 
 first attempt at a classification of the arts of the 
 world is the one I made in 1906 in Comparative Art. 
 Steady work on the subject since then has suggested 
 certain modifications in that classification, and these 
 are embodied in the present work. They are based 
 purely on my own and my wife's observations, as 
 there is nothing, as far as I know, extant on the sub- 
 ject as a whole and our observations and deductions 
 must be looked on as original preliminary studies, sub- 
 ject to correction and revision. 
 
 Starting now from the basis that all races have art, 
 it will be noticed that art varies in different places, 
 that these various species grew up more or less in certain 
 centers, and that some of them spread thence over 
 other territories and to other peoples. The points of 
 inquiry in the distribution of art therefore are : how 
 many branches of art are there, where did they start 
 from, and what courses did they take? And to these 
 questions definitive answers can not be returned as yet. 
 Sufficient work has not been put on the subject and 
 sufficient specimens are not as yet easily accessible to 
 do more than to draw up preliminary conclusions. 
 
 Any classification of the distribution of art as a 
 whole must be geographical and historical: geo- 
 graphical in relation to space, historical in relation to 
 
ART ATSTD MAN. 27 
 
 time. It must take into account whether any art is 
 sufficiently separate and distinct from other arts as to 
 be classified by itself, or whether it is only a part of a 
 bigger separate art. As a geographical instance, there 
 is an art along the Arctic shores, which is sufficiently 
 distinct to be classified as a primary or separate art. 
 But of this there are two branches, one in Siberia, one 
 in America, and these might be classified perhaps as 
 secondary arts. As a historical instance, West Asiatic 
 art flourished for several millenniums among the Kal- 
 deans, the Hittites, and the Assyrians; West Asiatic 
 art standing sufficiently alone to be called one of the 
 great primary arts, with Kaldean, Hittite and Assyrian 
 art as three secondary divisions. 
 
 From one point of view, namely from that of 
 the same kind of development, art might be divided 
 into art families as follows: Pleistokene, Bushman and 
 Arctic; Neolithic; Egean, Greek and European; Egyptian 
 and West Asiatic; South Asiatic; East Asiatic; African, 
 Australasian and Amerind. 
 
 Possibly the best way of classifying the main 
 arts of the world is geographically, namely in accord- 
 ance with their distribution in the five great inhabited 
 divisions of the world. In Europe one might perhaps 
 specify Pleistokene art; Neolithic-Bronze Age art; 
 Egean art; Graeco-Roman art; Byzantine art; modern 
 European art. In Africa: Bushman art, Negro art, 
 Zimbabwe art, Egyptian art. In Asia: West Asiatic 
 art; Early East-South Asiatic art; South Asiatic art; 
 East Asiatic art. In Asia and Africa: Arab art. In 
 Australasia: Polynesian art; Melanesian art. In Asia 
 and America: Arctic art. In America: Amerind art. 
 Whilst there are certainly many more arts than these, 
 
28 ART AND MAN. 
 
 it seems as if most of them were derived from one 
 or more of these primary arts, and that they may be 
 considered as secondary arts. Let us now take up 
 seriatim the main arts, looking a little at their char- 
 acteristics, the centers where they probably sprang up, 
 their geographical movements, and their divisions into 
 secondary arts. 
 
 The oldest art that we know of, without question, 
 is European Pleistokene art. This may be divided 
 into two periods. The first of these appears to date 
 back to the Acheuleen horizon. To explain what this 
 means we must mention briefly the archaeological 
 horizons of Europe. Following the Pleiocene epoch, 
 in the Pleistokene we find first several still debatable 
 horizons, and then come in turn the Chell6en, 
 Acheuleen, Moustenen, Aurignacien, Solutr^en and 
 Magdaleneen horizons. These are followed in sequence 
 by the transitional Azilien, the Neolithic, Bronze, and 
 Iron horizons. Of their dates in years, no one as yet 
 can form any estimate much above the character of 
 a guess, but the Chell^en may well have begun 
 200,000, the Moustenen 100,000, and the Aurignacien 
 50,000 years ago. The most up to date anthropological 
 investigations of the skeletons and skulls of European 
 man* seem to show that while the ChellSen and 
 Acheuleen horizons were being laid down, the ancestor 
 of modern man was dwelling in Europe. He appears 
 to vanish in the Moustenen, where his place is taken 
 by Neanderthal man, a more primitive type than 
 modern man. Men of very much the same type as 
 the men of today reappear in the Aurignacien, and 
 continue to the present time. 
 
 * Arthur Keith: The Antiquity of Man, 1915. 
 
ART AND MAN. 29 
 
 In the Chelleen horizon, there are no fine art 
 remains, but in the Acheuleen, which may easily date 
 from 150,000 to 100,000 B. C, or even further back, 
 the great Boucher de Perthes* found in the Somme 
 Valley stones which very roughly resemble animals. 
 And quite recently Mr. W. M. Newtonf found similar 
 figure-stones in the valley of the Thames. Apparently 
 archaeologists and art critics have neglected these relics, 
 but the plates in Boucher de Perthes' book seem con- 
 clusive. And it appears to be justifiable to assert 
 that art began in the European Acheuleen and there- 
 fore that it is not less than 125,000 years old and 
 that its makers were the ancestors of the man of 
 today. In the Mousterien horizon, no art as yet has 
 been found. 
 
 The second period of Pleistokene art comes after 
 the Mousterien horizon and extends thru the Aurig- 
 nacien, Solutreen and Magdaleneen horizons up- 
 wards. The art of this later Paleolithic period has 
 become well known of late years. It is much more 
 advanced than Acheuleen Paleolithic art and in certain 
 respects is on a par with the best French art of today. 
 The habitat of the Pleistokene artists was central 
 western Europe and at present, therefore, we must 
 look on that part of the world as the cradle of art 
 and of social organization. Whilst there are not 
 sufficient data as yet to connect the Pleistokenes 
 positively with any race now in existence, many 
 indications lead me to believe that they were the 
 ancestors of some of the Europeans of today. 
 
 * Antiquitts Celtiques et AntSdiluviennes. 
 
 f Arthur Keith: The Antiquity of Man, 1915, page 166. 
 
30 AET AND MAN". 
 
 The next European art in the order of time is that- 
 of the Polished Stone period. The most interesting 
 relics of this Neolithic art are architectural, namely the 
 widely scattered megaliths, dolmens and menhirs. What 
 little graphic art remains is wholly decorative and 
 almost surely does not descend from Pleistokene art. 
 The birthplace of Neolithic art is uncertain, but the 
 art extends all over central and southern Europe and 
 some parts of western Asia, and it may have moved 
 from east to west. In the Bronze Age and Early Iron 
 Age in Europe, there was also a little exceedingly 
 rough, poor art. 
 
 Some 4000 to 3000 B. C. a great art springs up in 
 the regions of the Egean sea. Its center appears to 
 have been in Crete, which seems to be Plato's lost 
 Atlantis.* It is probably mainly native or autoch- 
 thonous, but it may have some roots in Neolithic- 
 Bronze Age art and it may have received some nourish- 
 ment from Egypt. It does not appear to have had 
 much relationship with West Asiatic Euphratic art. This 
 Egean art includes the arts of Crete, of Mykene, 
 and of adjacent coasts of Asia Minor, and extends 
 down to perhaps 1200 B. C. 
 
 In the last millennium B. C. art went thru a 
 rebirth in Greece, and developed into what is known as 
 Greek art, in which sculpture reached possibly its most 
 idealized heights. Greek art was not only almost 
 wholly adopted by the old Romans, but it has pro- 
 foundly influenced later European art. 
 
 In the Italian peninsula, before the rise of historic 
 Rome, there was some art, most conveniently called 
 
 * Edwin Swift Balch: Atlantis or Minoan Crete: "The Geographi- 
 cal Review," 1917, pages 388-392. 
 
ART AND MAN. 31 
 
 Etruscan art, which must have been partly native, but 
 which was also closely in touch with late Egean and 
 early Greek art. 
 
 Roman art, from about 300 B. C. to 400 A. D., 
 springing from Etruscan art and Greek art, made 
 certain innovations, principally architectural, of its own. 
 
 Byzantine art superseded Roman art in Europe. 
 The later Roman artists tried to adapt Roman art to 
 the religious subjects the early Christian church wished 
 to commemorate. Owing to the decadence of social 
 conditions, however, their technic in drawing deteriorated. 
 But from Byzantium came a great wave of vivid colors, 
 whose roots are traceable to Syria and to Persia. And 
 despite the weakened naturalistic native European sense 
 of form, the later Roman artists produced some art 
 which tho imperfect pictorially nevertheless makes 
 gorgeous decorations, and of which there are brilliant 
 examples at Monreale and Ravenna. Romanesque archi- 
 tecture, about 800 A. D.-1200 A. D., was also partly 
 due to this Oriental color inroad. 
 
 Towards the beginning of the second millennium 
 A. D. European art started afresh in Europe. Gothic 
 architecture, about 1150 A. D. to 1450 A. D., evolved 
 gradually new forms of structures and of embellishments 
 in response to fresh needs and conditions. Sculpture 
 and painting, abandoning Byzantine decorative technic, 
 turned once more to realism and obeyed more and more 
 the natural art instincts of the White races. Beginning 
 with Giotto, while the religious subjects are still 
 imaginative, the humans and landscapes are studied 
 more and more from nature, and realism in the 
 handling becomes more and more apparent. And these 
 idealistic subject religious pictures, with realistic treat- 
 
32 ART AND MAN. 
 
 ment, are still produced in Europe. The unearthing 
 of Greek and Roman remains, beginning with about 
 1500 A. D., and their study by European artists, 
 brought about some changes in European art which, 
 nevertheless, followed its own course of natural evolu- 
 tion and is still progressing, according to its needs and 
 environments, as the art of Europe and America of 
 today. 
 
 In Africa there are several well differentiated arts, 
 which cannot, however, be classified like European arts 
 according to their historic time. For nothing of the 
 beginnings of several of them is known. 
 
 The oldest African art may be Libyan art. It much 
 resembles Pleistokene art and may be part of it, altho 
 it may perhaps last into Neolithic times. Of this art 
 we know very little. 
 
 Closely in touch with Libyan art is Bushman art. 
 Altho positively recognized so far only south of the 
 Zambezi, the art of the Kongo pygmies may possibly 
 be a branch of it. How far back Bushman art dates is 
 unknown, but it certainly belongs to the same artistic 
 family as Pleistokene art. Some of the figures in hunt- 
 ing disguises show kinship to Egyptian animal headed 
 monsters. 
 
 Negro art, or African art proper, is found in the 
 whole of Africa south of the Sahara. Except at Benin 
 City, it is independent of any European or Asiatic art, 
 and must be looked on as one of the great autochthonous 
 arts. Almost all the specimens of this art, mostly 
 wooden sculptures, are recent in date. Nevertheless, it 
 may date back to many thousand years B. C. 
 
 Zimbabwe art, also found south of the Zambezi, 
 remains a puzzle, both as to its makers and its date. 
 
ART AND MAN. 33 
 
 The nearest which can be said of the latter is that it 
 probably antedates 1000 A. D. 
 
 One of the oldest arts is Egyptian art. It dates 
 back to at least 5000 B. C, and there are indications 
 that it may begin even earlier. It is possible that there 
 may be Libyan, Bushman and Negro ancestry in its 
 parentage. While it nourished almost entirely in the 
 lower Nile Valley, it must have some cousinship with 
 West Asiatic art, and it certainly had some influence on 
 art in North Africa and Crete. 
 
 In Asia there are several great distinct arts. One of 
 these, West Asiatic art, as far as known at present, 
 developed probably on the lower Euphrates, among the 
 Sumerians, perhaps 5000 B. C. This art descended to, 
 or was reborn among the Hittites in Asia Minor, about 
 3000-1000 B. C, and among the Assyrians about 1500- 
 500 B. C. Any art the Jews may have had, and it 
 was very little, was part of this West Asiatic art. 
 Early Persian art was an offspring of this, as was also 
 Phenician art, and the Phenicians apparently carried 
 some fragments of West Asiatic art to Carthage and to 
 some other places round the Mediterranean. 
 
 In Western Asia also, there sprang up later a great 
 almost wholly decorative art which belongs to both the 
 continents of Asia and Africa. This is Arab art, which 
 arising in Arabia, invaded Egypt about 750 A. D., 
 spread westward across North Africa and into Spain, 
 and eastward to Central Asia and Hindustan. Arab 
 art is certainly not an autochthonous art, but neverthe- 
 less it evolved certain new art forms in answer to its 
 needs. 
 
 In southern and eastern Asia there was long ago 
 some art which might be called Early Asiatic or Pre- 
 
34 ART AND MAN. 
 
 historic Asiatic art. There are at least surviving rem- 
 nants in Korea, in China, in Cochin China, in Hindu- 
 stan, of an art which at one time must have extended 
 over a good deal of Asia, and which was not unlike 
 Australasian art. It is possible that the South and East 
 Asiatic arts developed from this foundation: certain it 
 is, I think, that Early Asiatic art is the earliest art 
 known in Asia east of Baluchistan. 
 
 South Asiatic art sprang up at some indefinite time, 
 doubtless several millenniums B. C, in southern Asia. 
 It may or may not be autochthonous. Everything con- 
 nected with its origin, however, is totally hazy and 
 nebulous. It extends from Persia to Tibet, Siam and 
 Java, its center being Hindustan. 
 
 East Asiatic art probably arose autochthonously in 
 China, also at some indefinite time, several millenniums 
 B. C. From China, East Asiatic art is supposed to 
 have wandered to Japan, sometime about 500 A. D. 
 From southern Asia a wave of the Buddhist religion, 
 some time after 600 B. C, rolled into China, and 
 brought with it a series of religious subjects which 
 became part of East Asiatic art. It seems certain, 
 however, that these subjects were merely grafted on an 
 already developed art, not that they started art. 
 
 Australasia is the home of one of the great autoch- 
 thonous arts of the world. It belongs to the same 
 artistic family as Negro art and Amerind art, and it is 
 closely related to the surviving fragments of what was 
 probably the prehistoric Asiatic art. There are two 
 main branches of Australasian art, which are most 
 distinct and individual in Melanesia and Polynesia 
 respectively and which blend to some extent or grow 
 weaker in Malaya and Micronesia. 
 
AET AND MAN. 
 
 35 
 
 Fig. 6. African man 
 
 £& fi. 
 
 with pelele and with ax hafted thru body. 
 
36 ART AND MAN. 
 
 Melanesian art is found at its purest in New 
 Guinea, New Caledonia, and New Ireland. It extends 
 to Fiji and Australia and is a main factor thruout 
 Malaya; it spreads northward to Formosa, perhaps to 
 Yezo, and may have been part of the prehistoric art 
 of Japan. 
 
 Polynesian art is at its best in Hawaii, New Zea- 
 land, Easter Island, Samoa, and some other island 
 groups. It is found to some extent in Malaya; in a 
 weakened form in Micronesia, and it may also have 
 had something to do with the prehistoric art of Japan. 
 
 Probably it would be inaccurate to speak of either 
 Melanesian or Polynesian art as superior to the other. 
 They have resemblances in being in about the same 
 stage of development; and decided differences in technic 
 and subjects. But altho they show kinship thruout, in 
 every archipelago, often in single islands of an archi- 
 pelago, they show also individual distinctions found 
 nowhere else in the world. And everywhere, with all 
 their apparent ethnologic differences, the Australasians 
 reveal an unmistakable art impulse and art power. 
 
 Arctic Asia and Arctic America, as desert and 
 inhospitable regions, except Antarctica and the Sahara, 
 as the world offers, nevertheless are the home of a 
 distinct art, which may well be called Arctic art. It 
 is found among the Chukchees, Koryaks, Yakaghirs 
 and Eskimo in northern Siberia, and among the Eskimo 
 in Alaska, Greenland and Labrador. Altho the art of 
 each tribe and each locality has its individual peculiari- 
 ties and varies from that of all the other tribes and 
 localities, nevertheless it is all one art. It belongs to 
 the same artistic family as Pleistokene art and Bush- 
 man art, and might be, but probably is not, related 
 
ART AND MAN. 37 
 
 to them. It has some resemblances to East Asiatic 
 art, and only some more superficial ones to European 
 art and Amerind art. With the West Asiatic, South 
 Asiatic, Negro and Australasian arts, on the contrary, 
 it has practically nothing but differences. The Arctic 
 races are certainly more closely allied ethnologically to 
 the East Asiatic races than to any other races of the 
 old world, and this points to their art being a separate 
 development of East Asiatic art, rather than a descend- 
 ant of Pleistokene art, whose makers are almost surely 
 ancestors of the modern European races. 
 
 The American continent is the home of one great 
 art, Amerind art, which, altho generically the same, is 
 differentiated in a number of places and regions. These 
 different branches all more or less dovetail, so that it 
 is difficult to specify their exact boundaries. Nor can 
 their limits in time be set down but approximately. 
 
 Until within a year or two, Pleistokene art was 
 known to exist only in Europe. In 1915, however, at 
 Vero, Florida, a Pleistokene horizon was discovered, in 
 which not only were there bones of several species 
 of extinct animals, but also human bones in the same 
 state of fossilization as those of the animals and 
 numerous stone artifacts. There was also unearthed 
 with these one tusk on which are a number of marks, 
 recalling somewhat the marks of the European Azilien 
 horizon, and a small, crude, rather square drawing of 
 a head.* The squareness of the drawing suggests rudi- 
 mentary Amerind drawing. As the Vero horizon is 
 unquestionably Pleistokene and Paleolithic it may be 
 
 * E. H. Sellards: Human Remains and Associated Fossils from the 
 Pleistocene of Florida: "Eighth Annual Report of the Florida State 
 Geological Survey, 1916." 
 
38 ART AND MAN". 
 
 that this drawing is Pleistokene and from its square- 
 ness the work of a Pleistokene ancestor of the present 
 Amerinds. We must await further discoveries for any 
 certainty in the matter, but, if this drawing is Pleis- 
 tokene, there is a possibility that art was born inde- 
 pendently in America a good many thousand years ago.* 
 
 It is exceedingly difficult to divide Amerind art 
 into secondary arts, and any classification can be 
 considered only an attempt to specify variations in the 
 type. In Alaska and British Columbia, art is indi- 
 vidual enough to bear one name, West North Amerind 
 art. To the south of this, art might be classified as 
 Californian art. In the United States, east of the 
 Rocky Mountains, there was some prehistoric art made 
 by the Moundbuilders which was followed by the vari- 
 ation of Amerind art, extending also in Canada, which 
 may be called East North Amerind art. In the south- 
 western United States there was formerly Cliff Dweller 
 art and at present there is Pueblo art which also 
 extends into northern Mexico. 
 
 In southern Mexico there were several prehistoric 
 branches of art, among which Aztec, Zapotecan, and 
 Mayan are prominent. Some of this art may be five 
 or six thousand years old, while some of it lasted until 
 the time of Hernando Cortez. In Central America and 
 in the Antilles there were two local variations of the 
 parent Amerind art. 
 
 In South America west of the Andes, there was in 
 prehistoric times a great art which culminated in Inca 
 art. This was closely allied to Mayan and Aztec art 
 and largely died out with the invasion of the Spaniards. 
 It might be called West South Amerind art. East 
 
 * Fig 24. 
 
ART AND MAN. 39 
 
 of the Andes, to this day, there survives another 
 branch of Amerind art, which has certain individual 
 characteristics and may be called East South Amerind 
 art. 
 
 Amerind art has some traits which distinguish it 
 from other arts and rank it as one of the great arts 
 of the world. It resembles most closely in certain 
 respects Australasian art, but it has also certain 
 resemblances to East Asiatic art and South Asiatic art. 
 In Alaska the Australasian resemblances predominate, 
 whilst the Asiatic resemblances are most apparent in 
 Mexico and Central America. Altho Amerind art must 
 be considered as partly autochthonous, yet one must 
 also recognize that it gradates away almost imper- 
 ceptibly from its nearest western neighbors and thus is 
 a proof that all art is one with many subdivisions. 
 
40 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF THE ARTIST. INSTINCT AND 
 IMPULSE. PATRONAGE. 
 
 Among every agglomeration of men, call we them 
 as we prefer, races or peoples or nations or tribes or 
 clans or families, we find art. Art is infinite in its 
 varieties, it is not identical in any two localities, it is 
 not identical at any two periods, but the rule seems 
 to be absolute that in every clime, at every time, 
 among every tribe, we find art in some form or shape. 
 Art is not universal among persons, in fact it crops 
 out strongly only sporadically among individuals, but 
 it is universal in man racially, since it is found everyr 
 where. How can this be accounted for? Apparently 
 there is but one answer, which is that an instinct to 
 like art, and an impulse to make art is ingrained in 
 many members of the human family. 
 
 The art instinct might be defined as a love for 
 and observation of form and color. It is not a seeking 
 after intellectual thoughts and ideas. It is a purely 
 human instinct, as no quadruped — except that in a 
 few cases some animals seem to distinguish differences 
 in colors — ever showed the faintest glimmer of it. 
 It varies with different peoples, different periods, 
 different circumstances, different environments. Never- 
 theless underneath it is always the same thing, a love 
 of form and color, a product of the same emotions 
 cropping out in different ways, a mental ability to 
 appreciate and enjoy the craftmanship and accom- 
 plishments of other artists. The art impulse might 
 
ART AND MAN. 41 
 
 be defined as the desire to express and make visible 
 the feelings aroused by the art instinct. When the 
 art instinct and the art impulse are found in the same 
 person, that person may become an artist. 
 
 This instinct, which appears among all races of men, 
 is the same as and is usually called the esthetic sense. 
 Certain members of all races appear to have this 
 esthetic sense, and those who have it are the ones who 
 want to paint or sculpt. They are the men who, because 
 forms and colors appeal to their artistic or esthetic 
 faculties, try to reproduce in painting or sculpture 
 men or animals or landscapes, or who like to decorate 
 their persons and possessions with patterns and designs. 
 
 The art instinct might be called a primal instinct 
 in man. It is certainly universal, as people made or 
 make art in every part of the world. It seems to 
 spring up instinctively and naturally among men 
 much as does for instance speech, indeed art itself 
 is a mode of human expression just as is language, 
 in fact one might say art is perhaps the most universal 
 of languages. 
 
 There is certainly a universal instinct to make art. 
 Does now this instinct grow up everywhere of its 
 own accord, or is it a transmitted quality? An 
 answer to this psychological question might help 
 towards solving the problem whether art thruout the 
 world is all one art or whether there are many arts. 
 
 All art has its roots in and evolves from an art 
 instinct and art impulse, that is from the enjoyment of 
 and desire to produce things seen by the eye. All the 
 beginnings of every art must spring originally from an 
 art instinct and art impulse based on vision. That 
 that art instinct and art impulse were born once and 
 
42 ART AND MAN. 
 
 since then transmitted to man everywhere is mani- 
 festly impossible. On the contrary it appears self 
 evident that the art instinct has been born over and 
 over again with the individuals themselves who have 
 applied it because they also had the impulse. It is 
 therefore more probable on the whole, that races like 
 the Eskimo or the Melanesians were impelled by their 
 own feelings and went to work to make some art of 
 their own in their own way, much as a bird sits on a 
 branch and sings, rather than that different tribes or 
 races should have inherited qualities descended among 
 all men generation by generation. 
 
 The art of the European Pleistokenes is the earliest 
 art known to us. Admitting that it is the oldest art 
 implies that it could not have been influenced by any 
 other art, and therefore it must have sprung solely 
 from an art instinct and art impulse. It must have 
 begun in some of the Pleistokenes becoming interested 
 in things they actually saw and a desire to mimic 
 these things being aroused. The observation and 
 attempted imitation of the animals and men the Pleis- 
 tokenes looked at around them must have been the 
 elemental factors in the start of naturalistic art. 
 
 Decorative art appears to be due in the main to an 
 innocent desire to play with lines and colors. Some of 
 it is a degeneration of naturalistic art, but some of it 
 does not imitate anything in nature. Many people 
 love bright colors and make use of them simply because 
 they do like them, without any meaning behind them. 
 This may not result in art, or perhaps only in the 
 crudest art, but the impulse which prompts applying 
 patches of bright color in any way to things, is really 
 a result of the art instinct. 
 
AET AND MAN. 43 
 
 That the esthetic sense is the underlying motive 
 power, the art impulse, of all artists in the glyptic 
 arts, is easily seen in the proclivities of some young 
 children to make pictures. Their first art work is 
 observing and trying to delineate in some way what 
 they see, because they like to do it. It is the art 
 instinct working crudely which finds expression in the 
 pictures made by children. At four or five years of 
 age, if a boy has the gifts of a sculptor, he probably 
 makes extra pretty mud pies, whilst if he is cut out 
 for a future painter he begins to draw pictures of 
 men or houses or cats on the side-walk. It is this 
 desire to imitate, to reproduce figures or scenes he 
 observes, which eventually leads an older child to 
 become an artist. If he does not have this faculty, 
 he turns to some other work, never to art. 
 
 The recognition of this underlying impulse among 
 children is of great importance when seeking for the 
 starting point of the arts of primitive peoples, of the 
 Kongo Negroes, the Papuans, the Amazon Amerinds, etc. 
 Their minds in many ways appear to act much like 
 the minds of the children of advanced races, and it 
 seems therefore prima facie probable that their wooden 
 figurines in most cases are simply the outcome of 
 their esthetic desire to reproduce the human form. 
 
 But while all art apparently appears to spring 
 primarily from an art instinct depending on the sense 
 of vision, some art. proceeds secondarily from an attempt 
 to visualize mental conceptions. This sometimes brings 
 forth good results but sometimes it produces dire fail- 
 ures in which it is difficult to perceive any art impulse 
 due to the eye. The Neolithic European peoples, for 
 instance, left a great many pieces of pottery whose 
 
44 ART AND MAN. 
 
 upper parts vaguely resemble an owl's head. Whether, 
 as some ethnologists believe, these potteries personate 
 some female anthropomorphic divinity or whether they 
 do not, and whether they are or are not decorative 
 degenerations, it is difficult to associate a genuine 
 ocular art impulse with the specimens themselves.* 
 
 The artist's impulse is not unlike that of a good 
 mouser cat, which, as soon as its eyes are opened, 
 goes for the first mouse it sees. The artist's impulse 
 might also be likened to that of a spider when it 
 makes its web, a wonderful and beautiful piece of 
 work, which the spider, untrained and untaught, makes 
 by its natural instinct and impulse. Why does a duck 
 take to water? Why do little cackling ducklings, 
 hatched by a hen, waddle off from their distracted 
 foster mother to go swimming on the farmyard puddle?. 
 And the answer is, because it is their nature to! 
 Instinct impels them to go swimming. And it is the 
 same with the real artist. His instinct drives him to 
 art, just as the cat's instinct prompts it to catch mice, 
 just as the duck's instinct drives it to water. All the 
 best art of the world comes from this impulse, and in 
 many cases artists do not know exactly how they do 
 their work and are unable to teach others. They 
 simply do as they do because it is their nature to. 
 
 Certain men have the art instinct so strongly devel- 
 oped as to overbalance their reasoning powers. Things 
 seen, the glyptic rudimentary art sense, and not things 
 heard or things thought out, control them. The art 
 genius of such men sometimes dominates and stalks 
 away with them so completely, that in the everyday, 
 commonplace affairs of life, they act in the strangest 
 
 * Fig. 3. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 45 
 
 £S.ff 
 
 Fia. 7. 
 
 Woman with dwarfed figure and with drum on head, 
 statue from Gold Coast, Africa. 
 
 Large wooden 
 
46 ART AND MAN. 
 
 way, and are considered eccentric, if not insane. These 
 men must follow their instinct. They do not reason 
 about art in general: they just do. They can not tell 
 others why they do, or how they do. But they do. 
 
 This does not mean that artists never reason. On 
 the contrary, some of the best intellects in the world 
 have been painters or sculptors or musicians, as for 
 instance Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and Hector Berlioz. 
 Leonardo was a great engineer and a good geographer. 
 Rubens was as polished a courtier and diplomat as ever 
 lived. Berlioz was a witty and incisive writer. These 
 men and a great many others also, used their minds 
 and reasoned out all they could of the principles of 
 their art. The best painting is not all instinct. The 
 best paintings show knowledge of composition, masses, 
 values, harmony, etc. Without the art instinct these 
 would be useless. With the instinct added, great work 
 is sometimes produced. It is the same with music. A 
 knowledge of harmony, counterpoint, fugue, etc., is 
 necessary. But the gift of melody, the underlying musi- 
 cal instinct, is imperative. And how few composers 
 have had the real gift! 
 
 Turner may be taken as a type of a thoro artist. 
 He lived in a little, dirty, uncomfortable London 
 suburban house. After his father's death, he had no 
 one with him but an old ignorant housekeeper. But 
 he lived in a world of dreams. He probably never 
 noticed his surroundings. He saw visions, of rainbows, 
 and breaking waves, and rising suns. And he trans- 
 ferred those visions to the most heavenly landscapes 
 ever shown to the world. His art instinct obliterated 
 the man. He was uneducated, gruff, unsociable, and 
 illiterate. But what difference does it make if Turner 
 
AET AND MAN. 47 
 
 in his everyday life often acted like a bear with a 
 sore head, since he transposed for us the facts of 
 nature into the dream land of Turneria. 
 
 Richard Wagner is another artist who may be 
 mentioned here, since many of his scenic effects fall 
 within the confines of pictorial art. He was queer 
 and eccentric. Some of his biographers have said 
 hard things about him. He is reported to have stood 
 on his head whilst leading the rehearsal for a concert. 
 The fact of the matter is that Wagner had an 
 abnormal brain. As an ordinary personage, he was a 
 little mad. A man who could hear the Ldebestodt, or 
 the Pilgrim's Chorus or the Funeral March singing in 
 his brain, could not put on his clothes straight or 
 talk like a boarder in a summer hotel. But his 
 personal eccentricities do not alter the fact that 
 Wagner was the most universally creative artist that 
 ever lived. 
 
 Besides the art instinct and impulse which are the 
 driving powers within the artist himself, however, 
 there is a great extraneous force which has much to 
 do with shaping the lives and output of artists. When 
 an artistic child begins to grow up, he may turn to 
 art as a pursuit. If so, he tries at first to work in 
 the field he enjoys the most, whether sculpture or 
 painting or architecture, specializing besides in this in 
 whatever direction appeals to him most. If he is rich 
 and ambitious, he may follow his own chosen path 
 without hindrance. But if he is poor, and the 
 majority of artists are poor, the need of finding food 
 and shelter and raiment, that is the great extraneous 
 force of the struggle for existence, is bound to affect 
 him. And the necessities for the support of life he 
 
48 AET AND MAN". 
 
 must obtain from persons who will pay him for his 
 art work. These persons are spoken of as "art 
 patrons," and this art work, done for pay, is descrip- 
 tively termed by artists "potboiling." 
 
 Potboilers in fact represent a large part of art. 
 Artists mainly spend their time in working at something 
 which will enable them to live, in fact they have to. 
 They paint portraits of old gentlemen in black coats 
 or illustrations, or they sculpt clocks and candelabras, 
 or they erect skyscrapers, or in fact they do some- 
 thing by which they can earn an honest penny. It is 
 simply the working of the law of supply and demand: 
 the customer wants some kind of art work and the 
 artist does the rest. It is the stomach and not the 
 brains of the artist which rules in this case, and not 
 infrequently with direful consequences. 
 
 Patronage, therefore, is really a main force in regard 
 to the output in the fine arts. It is entirely distinct 
 from the esthetic sense. It is hostile to it, in the 
 sense that it forces many artists to work against the 
 grain at things they do not care about, and it is 
 largely responsible for much of the inartistic art of 
 the world. It is an aid, however, to the artists in 
 many cases, in impelling them to work and produce 
 something, which if perhaps not their best, is at 
 least better than nothing. And in many cases, if it 
 were not thru the push of potboiling, the artistic 
 temperament would fritter itself away in laziness and 
 the artist accomplish less in his favorite line than 
 he does thru the stress of necessity in some direction 
 he is not specially interested in. 
 
ART AND MAN. 49 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE PERSONAL EQUATION OF AN ARTIST. SINCERITY. 
 PERSONALITY. STYLE. OBSERVATION. IMAGINATION. 
 MEMORY. 
 
 "Soyez naif! — Cherchez Men les masses! "' were two 
 of the favorite sayings of my first painting teacher, Henri 
 Marcette, of Spa, Belgium. And they are sayings which 
 might well be taken to heart by all painters. For what 
 the French convey in the word naivete is an important 
 element in a work of art. Unfortunately there is no 
 exact equivalent in English for the French word naif as 
 used by Henri Marcette. It can be paraphrased in the 
 adjectives sincere, genuine, natural, truthful, individual, 
 personal, instinctive, spontaneous, straightforward, but 
 none of them renders absolutely Marcette's thought. 
 What he meant, however, was that you should look at 
 nature and paint what you see in your own way without 
 regard to any traditions or anyone else's work. Naivete 
 means that an artist allows his art instinct to express 
 itself untrammelled by convention. When he does so, 
 his individuality crops out, his work shows freshness 
 and is not quite like any other work. 
 
 There are three main stages in an artist's life. When 
 he is a child he is sincere and his one desire is to put 
 down and express something that he sees or some idea 
 in his head. He works hard to do this and the result, 
 even if shapeless, is at least genuine and is not a copy 
 of some one else. Then comes his period of training. 
 In this he is pretty sure to follow others, in fact he can 
 hardly help doing so. Whether working in an academy 
 
50 ART AND MAN. 
 
 or with one master, he is bound to be more or less 
 influenced by his education and to do copying rather 
 than original work. He may never get beyond this 
 stage, in which he may leave his freshness or person- 
 ality behind, except to gain more ease of expression: 
 and continuing to follow others, his natural development 
 may be arrested. But if he is strong enough, after 
 having acquired technical knowledge thru his training, 
 he may throw traditions to the wind and obey only his 
 own youthful art instincts. In that case he probably 
 becomes a real artist, a leader. 
 
 Excellent examples of sincere, genuine personality, 
 can be found in many of the works of the early Italian 
 and Flemish painters, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, 
 Pinturichio, the Van Eycks, Memling, etc. These men 
 did not know everything. They had few pictures round 
 them to lean on. They had to forge ahead for them- 
 selves and do things as they felt them. In other words 
 they were thoroly naif and their work has enduring 
 freshness. 
 
 An exact contrast to the work of the early Italian and 
 Flemish painters is found in that of their imitators, the 
 English Pre-Raphaelites. The early Italians and Flemish 
 were striving to do the best they could, they used all 
 their knowledge, they moved steadily forward towards 
 later art. The Pre-Raphaelites were trying to go back- 
 wards, they left out knowledge which was already a 
 common possession, in an attempt to attain the quali- 
 ties which the Italians and the Flemish got thru lack 
 of knowledge. Their work was not genuine, it was 
 imitation. It is like modern printed tapestry as com- 
 pared with the old original article. The result was that 
 the Pre-Raphaelite machine skidded into the ditch. 
 
ART AND MAN. 51 
 
 Some of the most artistic art work in the world, 
 nevertheless, has been done by one of the least naif 
 of races, the Chinese. Probably the same rule applies 
 with them as with us, that the best work is done when 
 an artist has been thoroly trained yet is strong enough 
 to cause his individuality to stand out above his train- 
 ing. But I suspect that a good deal of Chinese art is 
 conventional, precisely from the lack of sincerity among 
 the lesser men causing a loss of spontaneity in their 
 productions. 
 
 The art of primitive races depends for its strength 
 partly on its freshness and sincerity. It stands to 
 advanced European or East Asiatic art somewhat in the 
 same relation that the scribblings of an artistic child do 
 to his matured work. European and East Asiatic art 
 show greater intellect, knowledge and training than 
 primitive art, but they sometimes lack its freshness and 
 sincerity. Primitive art is the result of the art instinct 
 and sincerity acting freely without much knowledge or 
 training. Much of it is real art, even tho often 
 undeveloped. Lots of the art of primitive races, in 
 truth, is ever so much better than much of the art of 
 civilized races. Primitive men, for instance, do not 
 know enough to ruin their instinctive desire for vivid 
 colors. And they frequently instinctively make pretty 
 things; whilst civilized men, reasoning and putting intel- 
 lect into their work, make ugly stuff. 
 
 Sincerity alone, however, without the artistic instinct, 
 is useless in art. The Negroes have plenty of sincerity, 
 they are in fact all sincerity, and nevertheless much of 
 their art is inartistic. This is possibly because appar- 
 ently many Negroes lack a sense of beauty. Sincerity 
 is only another mental trait urging the art instinct to 
 
52 ART AND MAN. 
 
 work freely: it_ does not take the place of the art 
 instinct if this is wanting. 
 
 Personality or individuality is closely associated with 
 sincerity, and again is closely associated with style. 
 Personality is practically synonymous with individuality 
 and both terms are used about an artist when he puts 
 enough of himself into his work for it to be recognized 
 as his work at a glance. Every strong artist has his 
 own personal way of working, which is his style, and 
 this becomes just as recognizable to an expert as a 
 man's handwriting. Style is an expression of the 
 artist's taste and it is mainly from the individual style 
 that an expert can often see at a glance who it was 
 painted a picture. For art is like handwriting. It is 
 not a mechanical performance like printing or photog- 
 raphy. Like handwriting, art is carried out by the 
 hand in obedience to an impulse from the brain, 
 and as a result, art reveals character just as does hand- 
 writing. 
 
 Style is found in all arts. Style applies both to 
 schools of art and to individual artists. It means the 
 special manner in which a work of art is carried out, 
 that is it refers to the technic. When a number of 
 works of art come from some one place and epoch, they 
 are designated as a school. All glyptic arts from all 
 places, all schools of art, have their individual style, and 
 by much observation and comparison one may become 
 able to tell, almost with certainty, to what art any 
 piece belongs and where it came from. 
 
 With personality it is different. In Modern Euro- 
 pean art and in East Asiatic art we can often tell from 
 the work the name of the artist. In some other arts, 
 like South Asiatic, we can do so occasionally, but in 
 
ART AND MAN. 53 
 
 many arts, such as the African, Australasian, and 
 Amerind arts we can not do so at all. 
 
 Personality in art, it must be added, refers only to 
 the work and not to the moral or mental character of 
 an artist. He may be a good man or a bad man, a 
 sensible one or a foolish one, but his work rarely gives 
 any clue on which to form a judgment. Many popular 
 notions about artists, however, are entirely erroneous. 
 The great majority of artists are perfectly decent citi- 
 zens, and the amount of labor they are forced to do to 
 forge ahead, prevents their being anything else. 
 
 Observation undoubtedly is at the bottom of all 
 art. Artists sculpted and drew and painted in the 
 beginning what they actually saw. They worked from 
 the animals they knew: they sculpted and painted the 
 forms and features of their own race. Enlarged ears 
 or small waists or long finger nails in art imply that 
 they originated in fact. Observation underlies not only 
 all sculptural and pictorial art but also most decora- 
 tive art, for this is based on human, animal and plant 
 forms, or on basketry patterns, and in nearly all cases 
 it starts in observation, which, when accurate, is per- 
 sonal and sincere. 
 
 A good example of this principle is offered by the 
 fabulous animals which are found in many arts over 
 the greater part of the globe. So many artists, in so 
 many places, could not have dreamed them. They 
 must have started in something actually seen. And 
 the only apparent solution is that animal headed 
 humans and human headed animals originated in 
 hunting disguises : while such an unnatural beastie as 
 the Chinese dragon was an invention made from 
 animals which had been observed, an artistic evolution 
 
54 AKT AND MAN". 
 
 from the crocodiles and pythons, or possibly even from 
 now extinct reptiles, which had scared the artists' 
 forefathers. 
 
 Everything therefore actually represented in art 
 must be assumed to be based on something the artist 
 or his ancestors actually saw. Artists did not dream 
 first. Underlying any use of the imagination or the 
 memory there was observation of the things around 
 the artist. Art is thus a record of ethnology, of 
 zoology, of botany, of customs, of history. 
 
 Nevertheless imagination, invention and memory are 
 important vital factors in an artist's make up and 
 but little good art is produced without their help. 
 The idea commonly accepted among Europeans, that 
 all sculpture, drawing and painting must be done while 
 looking directly at nature is a fallacy based on the 
 equally prevalent fallacy that art must be true to 
 nature, must be a photographic imitation of her. It is a 
 fact, on the contrary, that great painters and sculptors 
 often work largely from memory or imagination. They 
 either make studies until they know their subject, or 
 they look at it until they memorize it, or they invent. 
 Memory and imagination are of perhaps greatest value 
 in obtaining life and motion, and fleeting effects of 
 color and light. When a work of art is produced to 
 some extent from memory or imagination, the figures 
 are seldom wooden and rarely posing; but when it is 
 not so produced, the life is often arrested, and the 
 figures seem petrified and are merely models in an 
 unhappy state of rest. 
 
 Imagination, invention and memory are more or 
 less present in all good art. In European art hundreds 
 of artists may be cited as exponents of these qualities: 
 
ART AND MAN". 
 
 55 
 
 Fig. 8. Woman with dwarfed figure and protruding abdomen with glass window 
 inserted. West Coast, Africa. 
 
56 ART AND MAN. 
 
 Giotto, Fra Angelico, Pisano, Tintoretto, Michael 
 Angelo, Turner, Bocklin, Millet, Boutet de Monvel, 
 Cheret, William Morris Hunt, George Inness, etc. 
 The Chinese and Japanese masters all painted almost 
 entirely from memory and imagination. But the artists 
 of other races also show these same qualities. The 
 Pleistokenes certainly had them, for how otherwise 
 could they have painted their wall pictures at Altamira 
 and Fond de Gaume, in dark .caverns, whose only 
 access is a tiny opening no bison nor mammoth could 
 possibly have squeezed thru. The Bushman and the 
 Eskimo certainly have capital memories. And some 
 other races, whose art is less realistic, such as the 
 Melanesians of New Ireland with their strange figures, 
 or the Alaskans with their totem poles, or the Poly- 
 nesians with their wood carvings, or the Arabs with 
 their patterns and arabesques, evince the liveliest 
 imagination and invention in producing strange, 
 original and beautiful works of art. * 
 
 *Figs. 11, 12, 18, 19. 
 
ART AND MAN. 57 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 TRAINING AND ENVIRONMENT. 
 
 Training in art has much to do with the shaping 
 of art and artists. It is not part of the art impulse, 
 but an outside influence. As a rule training is of value, 
 but sometimes it has a deleterious effect. The saying 
 that as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined, applies 
 perfectly to art training. For the training given to 
 some artists is not always suitable to them, and makes 
 one wonder whether no training would not sometimes 
 be best. It seems well therefore to examine training 
 from both points of view, from its helpful and from its 
 damaging side. 
 
 Technical training up to a certain point is usually a 
 good thing. It, at any rate, saves time and often much 
 floundering to a beginner. Unfortunately sometimes it 
 destroys individual imagination and naivete. It gener- 
 ally happens that an embryo artist is recognized because 
 he does art work, out of his head or from nature, as he 
 himself feels. Then he goes to an art school, where he 
 is taught art as at that time understood in that coun- 
 try. Sometimes by the time he has got thru with his 
 course of study, he has lost his own individuality and 
 become conventionalized. Sometimes, however, he keeps 
 or recovers his personality and his imagination, and 
 then, with his training to boot, he does good work. 
 Manet, for instance, shed his academic training and 
 showed the absolute sincerity of a child in looking at 
 nature: he painted what he saw, not what he was told 
 
58 ART AND MAN. 
 
 ought to be there or what other people had seen, and 
 the result was he did something new, something no train- 
 ing of that time could have taught him. 
 
 This is frequently the case with the pioneers in art. 
 The art pioneer is the man who is least influenced by 
 his artistic predecessors, training and environment. The 
 art pioneer is a man who thruout his artistic training 
 preserves his own personal way of looking at nature or 
 seeing visions of beautiful things. And these art pio- 
 neers truly deserve the title of great artists. Some mili- 
 tary critics claim that the great soldiers are those who 
 found war one thing and left it another, and they assign 
 special rank on this account to Alexander, Hannibal, 
 Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great and 
 Napoleon. It is the same with artists and any one of 
 them who, like Ruysdael or Durer or Constable or 
 Gericault, made one, even if but a small, advance in 
 art must be considered a pioneer and deserves to rank 
 among great artists. All these men had training, but 
 they all broke thru training and convention, and went 
 into fresh fields. The greatest artists indeed always go 
 beyond their training. 
 
 The importance of training can easiest be seen by 
 considering the innumerable art academies of the present 
 day, and how the thousands and thousands of living 
 artists are all trained and taught at first. The history 
 of art in Italy, in Flanders, etc., tells the same story: 
 that all the successful artists in those countries were 
 trained in their youth by older men. Japanese artists, 
 it is well known now, are trained for years, in copying 
 calligraphy and works of art, repeating one form over 
 and over again, and it is this continual training which 
 eventually gives them their power. 
 
ART AND MAN. 59 
 
 It is evident, therefore, that training has had much 
 to do with the forming of the greater arts. When we 
 find art of a certain sameness with a certain amount 
 of quality, it is safe to infer that it shows training in 
 its makers. That is, when the general level of art 
 in any place is high, it implies that the artists had a 
 training which could only have come with a surround- 
 ing civilization. 
 
 Judging by the arts whose histories we know, it is 
 safe to infer that training was a factor in all the 
 greater arts. Whether there are any data in the matter 
 or not, we may rest assured that there must have been 
 training among the artists of Crete, of Egypt, of 
 western Asia and of southern Asia. There may have 
 been schools of some sort answering to our art acade- 
 mies, or there may have been teaching by older artists 
 to pupils as in Italian and Flemish studios, but un- 
 doubtedly there was some sort of regular art instruction. 
 
 When one looks at the primitive arts, the problem 
 becomes more difficult. Still, by analogy, it seems as 
 tho we are warranted in thinking that training played 
 a part in Mexican art, Peruvian art and Benin art. 
 In the other Amerind and Negro arts, in Australasian 
 art, and in Arctic, Bushman and Pleistokene art, it 
 seems as tho training must have been a more limited 
 force. It scarcely seems as if this could have been 
 more than what might come thru propinquity. Younger 
 artists in the same community may have followed or 
 copied their elders more or less consciously. But there 
 could scarcely have been anything like regular instruc- 
 tion. 
 
 Environment is one of the chief factors in the 
 making of an artist and of his art. The lie of the 
 
60 ART AND MAN. 
 
 land, cKmate, material substances, means of subsist- 
 ence, patronage, customs, in fact many surrounding 
 causes all have their effect on him. No artist gets 
 away really from his environment and available 
 materials any more than he gets away wholly from 
 his race. The most original artist at best does work 
 only triflingly different from that of his friends and 
 neighbors. An artist is bound to do something like 
 the work of his immediate predecessors and of those 
 around him and it is only geniuses who break the way 
 by something a little different and new. This may be 
 looked on as a universal law, except in some sporadic 
 cases, due for instance to transplanting, as where a 
 Japanese has settled in Europe. Then he is usually 
 influenced by his new environment, altho some of his 
 racial qualities may persist. 
 
 Environment is always more or less local. The 
 character of countries is different: one is mountainous, 
 another flat; one is wooded, another treeless. Climates 
 are different, cold or hot, wet or dry. Customs are 
 different. Religions are different. Materials are different; 
 in one place there is wood, in another stone, in a 
 third bone or ivory, or something else. Conditions of 
 life are different; in one place an artist lives in the 
 wilds by hunting; in another he lives in towns on 
 starvation patronage. There are many different factors in 
 fact which go to make up the environment of an artist 
 and all these as well as his race help to mould his art. 
 
 The influence of the actual physical materials on 
 art is of importance and must be looked on as a part 
 of environment. A race that lives on open plains, as 
 that of the American prairies or that of the Russian 
 steppes, and which therefore has no wood or stone 
 
ART AND MAN. 61 
 
 does not bring forth much sculpture. The marble of 
 Greece and the granite of Egypt played definite parts 
 in shaping the arts of those countries. The soft paint 
 brush and water colors in Asia brought about different 
 results from those obtained in Europe with hard points 
 and oil colors. In fact the materials offered to an 
 artist have much to do with his accomplishment. 
 
 The fact that some one vital condition of life is 
 similar in different places, does not necessarily : imply 
 similarity in art. Take hunting for instance. In the 
 Eskimo and the Amerinds of the northern plains, we 
 have two races of hunters whose arts are essentially 
 different. And this shows that hunting as a condition 
 of life does not always develop the same art. The 
 reason is, that in each of these cases, there are many 
 other environing influences which are different from those 
 of the other, as well as a difference in race and hence 
 in art instinct. Therefore when we find some race to 
 whom hunting is of such prime importance that it 
 depends on it for its means of subsistence, we must not 
 assume that necessarily this means similarity in art to 
 that of some other race equally dependent on hunting 
 to keep body and soul together. 
 
 Judging by certain examples, it would seem as if 
 commercial prosperity and advanced social organization 
 often helped to bring forth great art. The Greece of Phi- 
 dias and Praxiteles, the China of the Sung and the Ming 
 artists, the Venice of Giorgione and Titian, the Nether- 
 lands of Rembrandt and Rubens, are good instances of 
 the principle that when art flourishes in any one spot, 
 that place is probably in a condition of material pros- 
 perity and that some of its inhabitants have reached an 
 advanced stage of mental development. 
 
62 ART AND MAN. 
 
 It sometimes happens, however, that too rigid a civil- 
 ization destroys some of the qualities of art thru con- 
 ventionalizing it. This would seem to have been the 
 case, for instance, in Egypt and in Assyria. In both 
 these countries the artists apparently were so hampered 
 by tradition, by custom, by convention, that their art 
 never matured to the highest planes. The environment 
 was only partly favorable. 
 
 Nor does it necessarily follow that great commercial 
 prosperity implies great art. A certain amount of art is 
 pretty sure to follow commercial prosperity, as the latter 
 means patronage, but the art instinct and impulse is 
 also necessary and may be lacking. In the England 
 and America of today, for instance, art is an important 
 element in life. Art is advancing in these countries, 
 partly as a matter of education, and possibly also from 
 the increasing immigration of the Mediterranean race. 
 For art is not a strong inborn instinct with the Anglo- 
 Saxon peoples, who lean more towards business, politics 
 and the exact sciences, than towards the more poetical 
 and less profitable fine arts. In fact race, as well as 
 environment, is one of the factors which plays a part 
 in the formation of the fine arts, and an artistic race 
 will probably accomplish more in an unfavorable mater- 
 ial environment than an inartistic race in a favorable 
 material environment. 
 
 Too much stress must not be laid on prosperity and 
 ease of life as art developers. Artistic ability is far 
 more important. For among the Bushmen and Eskimo, 
 and some Africans and Australasians, there was some 
 decidedly good art, altho there was neither material 
 prosperity nor advanced social organization. They must 
 therefore have had a tolerably strong art instinct and 
 
AET AND MAN. 63 
 
 art impulse to counterbalance material disadvantages. 
 It follows from this that when we find good art among 
 any race, even if we know little of its makers, we may 
 be pretty sure, as for instance with the Pleistokenes, that 
 some at least of their race had advanced intellectually 
 into full fledged modern manhood. Good art in fact 
 implies a certain mental ability, but not necessarily 
 what might be considered a favorable environment. 
 
64 AET AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 It is an unfortunate fact that the men who pass 
 upon the merits of works of artj and especially those 
 who use their pen to do so, are called art critics. For 
 the word critic now implies condemnation. Criticism 
 has come to mean an adverse judgment, and it has 
 come to mean this because it is so much easier as well 
 as more human to pick flaws in another man's work 
 rather than to praise it that most persons pick flaws. 
 Much criticism is mere fault finding: often it implies 
 an element of hate, of superiority. And the adjective 
 most commonly associated with the noun criticism is 
 severe: some one criticised "severely" some one else. 
 But criticism should be based on love as well as on 
 comprehension. For art implies love: no one produces 
 real art unless he loves to do it. And anyone writing 
 about art or even only studying it should try to feel 
 and explain that love and not merely scold about it. 
 If "that is all one can do, better leave discussing art 
 alone. The best critics are the least violent. "Tout 
 comprendre, c'est tout pardonner!" 
 
 It is a pity that the term art critic cannot be 
 abolished but unfortunately there is no other term in 
 the English language which would take its place 
 exactly and act as a substitute. There are several 
 words, however, which might sometimes be used to 
 paraphrase it. These are art lover, art connoisseur, 
 art teacher, art judge, art expert, art. writer. These 
 would all be better in certain respects than art critic, 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 65 
 
 Fra. 9. Wooden statuette of man with palm leaf headdress. Nias Island, Sumatra. 
 
66 ART AND MAN. 
 
 which in some cases almost seems to mean artist hater. 
 Anyone of course may be an art lover. An art con- 
 noisseur may be perhaps described as the first step 
 beyond plain liking, when a person begins to discrim- 
 inate. Art judge or art expert might perhaps be used 
 when persons have reached an advanced stage of 
 knowledge about the fine arts in general, and art 
 writer of course applies to persons who put their 
 knowledge into print. 
 
 Accepting, however, as an unfortunate necessity, 
 the unpleasant term art critic, the first point that 
 suggests itself is: what qualifications entitle a person 
 to be considered an art critic? Some persons with a 
 general education only and no art training apparently 
 assume to a greater or lesser degree that they are 
 warranted in discussing and passing upon the merits of 
 works of art. Now there are various degrees of 
 untrained-in-art persons. Some untrained-in-art persons 
 seem to know and to care so little about art that it 
 may be doubted whether they would recognize the 
 difference between "Botticelli and Chianti." Some 
 untrained-in-art persons on the contrary love art dearly 
 and even if perhaps they know but little about it, 
 yet they can be called art lovers, the most favorable 
 state of mind towards good criticism. And some of 
 these untrained-in-art-technic persons go a step further 
 and by study learn to recognize and to discriminate 
 between the works of different painters and different 
 schools so that they are entitled to the name of art 
 connoisseurs. 
 
 As a general proposition, it may be said that the 
 views of persons who have not done any practical art 
 work are often of little critical value. I have been 
 
ART AND MAN. 67 
 
 assured, for instance, on two occasions that Turner was 
 color blind. Volumes have been written by untrained- 
 in-art-technic persons and many of them are incorrect 
 but patronizing. "What people are not up on they are 
 down on" someone has said, and it truly applies to a 
 good deal of chatter about art. It is probably accurate 
 to say also that, as a rule, the greater the number of 
 persons who admire a work of art, the poorer is the 
 work; which of course is only another instance of the 
 fairly universal law, that the minority is usually right. 
 
 A favorite remark of unfledged talkers about art 
 is "I don't know much about art, but I know what 
 I like." If artists are present, this generally causes 
 them to wink at each other. For it is not infrequently 
 followed up by positive, wide of the mark statements. 
 Nevertheless "I know what I like" is sometimes a 
 criticism of more importance than artists are inclined 
 to admit. For it means that to that particular onlooker 
 art conveys or does not convey some pleasant or 
 unpleasant emotions. And if it happen that that 
 particular individual is an art lover, it may also 
 happen that his judgment is more accurate than that 
 of other more highly trained persons who lack the 
 discrimination which proceeds from real feeling. 
 
 There are a certain number of persons, who while 
 not having had a practical art training, nevertheless 
 are good judges of certain phases of art work. These 
 are the art dealers and the art collectors, that is the 
 men who sell and the men who buy art works. They 
 are forced to study art to pursue either their business 
 or their hobby, and the fact that there is sometimes a 
 good deal of money involved in the transaction sharpens 
 the wits wonderfully. Some of the employes in museums 
 
68 ART AND MAN. 
 
 also become good judges of art. But while such art 
 connoisseurs or art experts in their own lines frequently 
 are clever and show the keenest possible appreciation, 
 still often they are uncertain judges, because they do 
 not understand technical points and also because they 
 are too apt to be specialists in their sympathies. 
 
 Artists, men who have had a practical training in 
 art, are sometimes excellent critics. Often however 
 they are poor judges of art: they are too narrow, too 
 much wrapped up in their own work; they are too 
 much swayed by their emotions and see good only in 
 work of the same kind as their own. Whilst often 
 able to judge of the technical merits of art works, 
 they sometimes seem unable to gauge the relative 
 merits of many arts. The mind has sharpened too 
 much to a, point to enable it to act as a critic's mind 
 should, namely from a wide and tolerant standpoint. 
 Artists are sometimes jealous and intolerant of other 
 artists. I believe they almost always rate highest 
 artists whose work, whether for better or worse, is 
 on the same lines as their own. And in many cases 
 they condemn artists who do not work as they do 
 themselves. In other words artists are apt to be 
 uncertain critics. 
 
 A common fallacy among artists is to think and 
 say that poor art is better than good criticism. This 
 remark is often made and is as pointless as it would 
 be to say that General Grant's victories were greater 
 than Benjamin Franklin's scientific discoveries. One 
 cannot compare nor gauge art and art writing by the 
 same standards, because they are different things. Art 
 is painting, sculpture and architecture: art writing is 
 literature. Compare pictures or sculptures as much as 
 
ART AND MAN. 69 
 
 you please and assign them any relative rank you 
 choose. But if you want to judge what merits any 
 book on art may have, compare it with other books 
 on art: not even with poems or novels: and certainly 
 not with paintings or automobiles or anything else 
 which it is not. 
 
 Apparently there are two classes of men, namely art 
 connoisseurs and artists, who each respectively have 
 some of the qualifications necessary for art critics. To 
 unite therefore, in one person, all the qualifications 
 necessary, implies two kinds of training. One is a 
 practical manual training with brush and modelling 
 tools, the other is an extensive acquaintance with many 
 art works in numerous galleries and museums. That 
 is to say, to be a reliable art expert or art writer 
 necessitates being both an artist and a connoisseur. 
 An artist alone is too narrow; a connoisseur alone is 
 lacking in technical knowledge. It is indeed only per- 
 sons who have had a long training both in practical 
 work and in the study of many works of art who 
 really become experts. And it is only experts who can 
 tell with any approach to certainty the work of most 
 well known painters or sculptors, and this they deduce 
 as a rule from the style or quality of the painting or 
 sculpture which varies with every art worker. 
 
 An art writer must have an artistic temperament 
 and emotions, but he must also have a scientific bent 
 and a judicial restraint. All the best art critics are 
 practical artists to the extent at least of having had 
 a good deal of manual training and practice. They 
 are really artists up to a certain point, a point at 
 which their intellect seems to overwhelm their art 
 impulse. They begin to think, to compare, to reason 
 
70 AET AND MAN. 
 
 out the why and wherefore of art. They see too much 
 and too widely. Instead of producing in the narrow 
 groove of their art impulse, they spread out over too 
 wide a field, they are influenced from too many 
 extraneous sources. Sometimes their art production is 
 arrested fruitlessly thru this, but occasionally it leads 
 to their producing in another direction for which they 
 are better suited, namely art writing. And the best 
 writers about art, such as Philip Gilbert Hamerton and 
 Eugene Fromentin, and great art teachers like William 
 Morris Hunt will, I believe, always be found to be 
 persons who have had some serious practical training 
 but who have studied also extensively the works of a 
 great many other artists. 
 
 An art writer, to do good work, requires breadth of 
 mind perhaps more than any other quality. He must 
 be able to sympathize with — which means to suffer 
 with, to enter into the feelings of — many different 
 artists and their works. He needs the art instinct but 
 not the art impulse. He must have the art instinct to 
 understand art, but he does not require the art impulse 
 which urges a working artist to produce graphic art. 
 It is especially necessary for an art writer to look out 
 for the good points of all kinds of art works of his 
 own race and it would broaden him to study the art 
 of other races than his own. And he should always 
 remember that if works of art are different from those 
 he is used to, it does not necessarily follow that they 
 are bad. Art writing should be based on knowledge 
 and on an intelligent appreciation of art, and it should 
 be an attempt to present the strong points and not 
 merely the weak points of art. In fact an art writer 
 is an art judge, and he should be towards art matters 
 
ART AND MAN. 71 
 
 what a law judge is in legal matters, namely a man 
 learned in the law who tries to give an impartial 
 opinion. It might be, however, the truest wisdom 
 for an art writer to cogitate over the Biblical text 
 "Judge not that ye be not judged": then to keep 
 his opinions to himself, since he is certain to displease 
 many and to be criticized "severely." 
 
 To write or even to talk intelligently about art is 
 intrinsically difficult, and a paramount reason is that 
 the basal qualities of the fine arts are intangible and 
 elusive. Art writing is really a science, in that it 
 should — it does not always — tell the truth. But, from 
 the nature of the facts studied, it can never be an 
 exact science. Since art does not need to be true to 
 nature, and nine-tenths of it is not, one cannot usually 
 apply scientific tests in criticising it. Since art may 
 seem beautiful to some persons and ugly to others, one 
 cannot lay down the law about it from any esthetic 
 standpoint. A certain amount of cold fact can usually 
 be stated about the externals of a work of art, but 
 underneath lies its soul or feeling. And about this soul 
 or feeling, an art writer can only feel this feeling as 
 well as he can, and then try to express his own feeling. 
 And this at best is only his opinion, and not an 
 authoritative statement. He needs therefore some of 
 the faculties of a scientific man, to deal accurately with 
 the technical parts of works of art; he must also have 
 the feeling of an artist, to be able to peep into the 
 soul of other artists; and he must have some of the 
 qualities of a judge on the bench, in order to give a 
 well balanced, impartial opinion on the numerous points 
 of a work of art. 
 
 An art writer's life work should be modelled on a 
 
72 ART AND MAN. 
 
 plan which might be likened to an open fan or a cart- 
 wheel. Starting with a knowledge located at the handle 
 or hub, he should try to keep on extending that knowl- 
 edge along the ribs of the fan or the spokes of the 
 wheel. The more his knowledge widens and spreads, 
 the more he compares and gauges the relative values 
 and places of different arts, the more likely are his 
 opinions to be worth something. But he must see to it 
 that his art instinct does not become swamped by his 
 reasoning powers: he must make them keep in pace 
 together. For if any one lets his esthetic sense be over- 
 mastered by his historical or ethnological learning, his 
 art writing almost surely will suffer thru his judgments 
 becoming scientific rather than artistic. 
 
 Nobody can possibly foretell what his likes and dis- 
 likes may become with advancing years. For taste 
 sometimes widens and sometimes narrows. But, as a 
 rule, it is probably correct to say that if a child likes 
 certain forms of art before his taste is vitiated or has 
 been tampered with, in all likelihood he will enjoy the 
 same and similar forms of art when he has grown to 
 man's estate. He may also learn to like many other 
 forms of art, besides those he did at first. It may be 
 explanatory to mention here how my own sympathies 
 have acted in regard to art. Starting out with a love 
 for European art, I later became fascinated with East 
 Asiatic art, and afterwards gradually got interested in 
 all the other arts. And as my eye got more and more 
 accustomed to those, I began to see beauties in some 
 of the specimens I certainly did not at first. Going on 
 one occasion to a museum not far from my own abode, 
 in its great hall, besides many pictures by little known 
 French painters, there happened to be half a dozen 
 
ART AND MAN. 73 
 
 Papuan shields from New Guinea labelled •■'- from the 
 South Sea Islands." And my impression then was and 
 still is that these naive works by untrained wildmen 
 were more genuine art than some of the surrounding 
 works of the trained civilized painters. 
 
 It seems inevitable that to an observer of many arts 
 there comes with time a change of feeling, a change in 
 his view point about art. The more he studies art and 
 the more arts he studies, the more will his sympathies 
 broaden and gradually he will learn to like many things 
 unnoticed or perchance despised at first. The average 
 European or American grows up with certain feelings 
 and notions naturally acquired from the European or 
 American art he sees around him. These act as deter- 
 rents, so to speak, when he begins to look at African 
 art or Australasian art or Amerind art. These arts do 
 not conform to our conceptions and at first blush there 
 is a tendency to belittle them. But starting out, as do 
 most European and American art writers, with the basal 
 idea that Greek sculpture and European painting are 
 the top notch of art, protracted observation may lead 
 an art lover thru East Asiatic art into recognizing that 
 many other arts have beauties of their own which are 
 entirely unthought of at first. After awhile, when the 
 eye has got used to fresh conceptions, one begins to 
 realize that often there is much feeling for form, for 
 color, in art which at first seemed strange, and in time 
 one begins to wonder whether sometimes naive untutored 
 primitives do not conceive art which, while different from 
 our own, may have qualities which are sometimes lack- 
 ing in our own more learned, but in some ways less 
 natural, modern art. And the realization that a Masai 
 shield or a New Ireland paddle may be a pleasing 
 
74 ART AND MAN. 
 
 work of art need not detract in the least from one's 
 appreciation of the Elgin Marbles nor of the portraits 
 of Velasquez. In time one gets to understand that these 
 are all expressions of the emotion and the knowledge of 
 their makers, some in the stone axe and others in the 
 shrapnel stage of culture. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 75 
 
 £.$>$, 
 
 Fia. 10. Large wooden figure from New Guinea or New Ireland. 
 
76 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ART AND NATURE. NATURALISM. IMITATION. 
 REALISM. IDEALISM AND IMAGINATION. 
 
 Art is a world of its own. Art is in large part 
 based on nature, but it is not nature. Art is a 
 product of human emotion, thought and work. Art 
 starts originally in observation of nature. Some art 
 sticks closely to nature and attempts to imitate or 
 interpret forms or colors: while some art diverges more 
 or less widely from nature. In its extremest forms, 
 some art has an almost scientific accuracy of resem- 
 blance to nature, while some art is absolute fiction. 
 But even in its most naturalistic renderings, art is not 
 nature but is only a human interpretation or present- 
 ment of it. 
 
 Art is one thing; nature is another. Art is a 
 human product: nature is not a human product. But 
 man, thruout most of the world, fashions nature to 
 suit himself. Does he in so doing make nature more 
 artistically attractive? And the answer seems to be 
 that, as a rule, he does not. Nature left to itself, in 
 mountain, in plain, in forest, in fertile country or in 
 desert, is almost invariably artistically interesting. The 
 forces of nature, wind, water, fire, carve the surface 
 of the earth into forms whose lines and shapes and 
 colors usually are attractive to the eye. In woods, 
 in savannahs, in wastes, there is almost always some- 
 thing pleasing or terrifying to the eye, something 
 which will arouse artistic emotion, something from 
 which a landscape painter can make a picture. 
 
ARE AND MAN". 77 
 
 But when man tackles nature, what does he do? 
 The numberless, endless, sinuous, artistic lines of 
 nature he intersects with the straight inartistic lines of 
 railroads and streets and fences. The beautiful flank 
 of a rocky bluff he makes hideous by digging a quarry. 
 He takes a piece of moorland, variegated by wild 
 roses and burdocks and thousands of beautiful plants 
 anathematized as weeds, pulls up all these eye-pleasing 
 growths, and changes the bewitching wild ground into 
 a green grass lawn which, while excellent as a pasture 
 for cattle, is deficient in arousing artistic emotion in a 
 painter. 
 
 In saying this there is no intention of running 
 down the works of man nor of denying the interest 
 and the beauty of much of what man does fashion 
 nature into. What it is proposed to bring out is that 
 when man tampers with nature he changes it into 
 something radically different. And this different thing 
 while generally less beautiful than the original, in 
 many cases is beautiful in itself. And this beauty 
 comes from the mind of man and is what we call art. 
 Wild nature is one thing: nature altered by man is 
 another thing. Wild nature is almost always, if not 
 always beautiful: nature altered by man is often ugly, 
 but sometimes beautiful. But whether ugly or beauti- 
 ful, nature altered by man is no longer nature: it is 
 something else, and that something else, if beautiful, 
 springs from the art instinct. 
 
 There is a rather widespread misconception among 
 European peoples that good art means "truth to 
 nature." This notion is to a large extent crooked and 
 is probably responsible for a great deal of the poorer 
 art of Europe. To combat this harmful dictum some- 
 
78 ART AND MAN". 
 
 what, it may be as well to mention briefly in what 
 field of human endeavor truth takes precedence. 
 
 There are three sets of human efforts which can 
 be classed as science, ethics and art. While philo- 
 sophically these three fields of thought are distinct, 
 yet in the actions and works of man they are not 
 absolutely separate, but overlap at certain points and 
 in certain ways. These three great products of the 
 human mind may be placed also under the three head- 
 ings of the true, the good and the beautiful, for it 
 may be said, speaking in general terms, that truth is 
 the foundation of science, goodness the principle of 
 ethics, and beauty the mainstay of art. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to tell scientists that truth 
 is the bed rock of science. Science might almost be 
 called a search for knowledge, and in seeking knowl- 
 edge, science is steadily groping for something much 
 tried for but never wholly reached, namely that most 
 elusive phantom, truth. 
 
 What people really mean when they seak of "truth 
 to nature" about the fine arts, is nature as reflected 
 in a mirror or as reproduced in an untouched photo- 
 graph. Now of course there is some art which is 
 an attempt to imitate nature absolutely, and it is 
 accurate to say of this art that it is true or is not 
 true to nature. But it is wholly inaccurate to say 
 that truth to nature, that is mechanical photographic 
 imitation, is the basis of all art: for the greater part 
 of art is not imitation at all. 
 
 There are several words which convey approximately 
 how much any art leans or does not lean towards nature. 
 These terms are naturalism, realism, imitation and 
 interpretation, idealism, imagination. Naturalistic art 
 
ART AND MAN. 79 
 
 is any art based on nature. Naturalistic art has two 
 main subdivisions: realistic art and idealistic art, the 
 latter implying imagination, the poetical faculty, also 
 as a sponsor. Naturalistic, realistic, and idealistic 
 are terms applied principally to the sculptural and 
 pictorial arts. 
 
 Realistic imitative art is art which counterfeits 
 nature to the limit of the artist's abilities. In its 
 extremest form it might perhaps be denned as an 
 absolute imitation of the reflection in a mirror fixed 
 into permanency. Any such slavish imitation, however, 
 is rare, as generally almost any artist, no matter how 
 imitative, interprets nature to some extent and puts in 
 at least some other attributes thru his own feelings. A 
 purely imitative art work almost always lacks charm, 
 and falls into the class of what is termed a study or an 
 academy rather than a work of art. 
 
 Realistic interpretative art is art which interprets and 
 suggests nature without pretending to absolutely imitating 
 her. Realistic art is based entirely on observation of 
 nature. It does not necessarily need to be done directly 
 in front of nature, as it may be carried out thru the 
 memory. In fact much of the best realistic interpreta- 
 tive work is memorized observation. 
 
 Idealistic art is art in which imagination succeeds 
 in inventing something which, tho based on nature, 
 was never seen in the natural world. In its extremest 
 form, it might perhaps be defined as art made up in 
 the artist's head. It is an attempt to represent to 
 some extent in the concrete some abstract thought or 
 dream about forms and colors. That is the conception 
 of an imaginative art work is something dreamed about 
 rather than something observed. But the dream is 
 
80 AKT AND MAN. 
 
 always of something which the artist sees in his mind's 
 eye. Idealistic art is a mental vision. 
 
 Idealistic art which is good, which has quality, 
 implies artistic ability in its maker. An inartistic per- 
 son cannot produce idealistic art, any more than an 
 ordinary commonplace mind can write great poetry or 
 compose great music. "Poeta nascilur, non ^"applies 
 perfectly to an artist, and especially to one who works 
 idealistically. Inartistic persons, however, are some- 
 times guilty of making certain graphic productions, 
 which other inartistic persons sometimes think are 
 idealistic art. Many things, however, thus looked on as 
 idealistic art are mere unintelligent unobserved symbols as, 
 for instance, drawings of a cart with the body and horses 
 drawn in profile and with two of the wheels drawn above 
 and the other two drawn below the cart. Such drawings 
 are not idealistic art, they are merely silly performances 
 by inartistic minds, who could not do an ideal drawing 
 if they tried to for a thousand years. 
 
 Decorative art, that is the art of decoration or 
 ornament, usually is based on nature or on patterns 
 produced by man in basketry, etc. Decorative art 
 based directly on nature might be called naturalistic 
 decorative art, altho no such delineating terminology 
 is of common usage. Some decorative art also, like 
 the Solomon Islands' human and the Alaska grizzly 
 bear, is distinctly idealistic* 
 
 Whatever the nearness or aloofness of any art to 
 nature, it may be good, bad or indifferent. This 
 depends principally on the ability of the artist, but art 
 may also seem good, bad or indifferent to the onlooker, 
 according to his temperament and intelligence. A 
 
 * Figs. 12, 19. 
 
ART AND MAN. 81 
 
 necessary corollary of this is that no universal rules can 
 be laid down for the production of works of art or for 
 their appreciation, because the individual mind of each 
 person, whether artist or onlooker, is such a varying 
 entity. There can be no standard. 
 
 Whether realistic or idealistic, art, to be good, 
 must convey some artistic sensation, some pleasure or 
 emotion, to the mind: there must be some technical 
 qualities: there must be form, or color, or drawing, or 
 grandeur, or beauty: that is there must be something 
 artistic. 
 
 While it is certain that any art, whether imitative 
 or imaginative, might be classified thruout by different 
 critics as good, bad or indifferent, it is equally certain 
 that one can say truthfully that good idealistic art is 
 one peg higher than imitative art. And the reason is 
 that idealistic art implies imagination: it requires the 
 mind of an artist to work poetically. 
 
 The whole of architecture is evolved, without refer- 
 ence to nature, out of man's brain for his own 
 necessities. Hut or palace or shed or skyscraper or 
 cathedral, they are all the invention of man, and not 
 in the least the imitation of natural things. Caverns 
 and intertwined branches of trees may have given a 
 hint in the start, but beyond that nature has not 
 aided. The forms and colors of temple and church and 
 hotel and private residence are sometimes beautiful and 
 artistic. But there is nothing in nature like them. 
 Architecture is a useful and mechanical art which often 
 is also a fine art, but it is never in the least a nature 
 art. No one thinks of speaking of the Pennsylvania 
 railroad station in New York as true to nature. 
 
 Sculpture proper is one of the most imitative and 
 
82 AET AND MAN. 
 
 one of the most closely allied to nature of the arts. 
 For, as a rule, all sculptures are suggested at least by 
 something in nature. Generally they represent a human 
 or an animal of some kind, except a certain number 
 which are more purely ornaments, carvings for other 
 objects. But tho a great deal of sculpture is realistic, 
 a great deal of sculpture is idealistic. Most Greek 
 sculpture is surely an attempted improvement on human 
 forms, or perhaps rather an attempt to bring together 
 into one imaginative composite figure the best points 
 of numerous models. And when one turns to the 
 sculptures and carvings of some of the more primitive 
 races, it will be found that they usually diverge widely 
 from any objects in nature. 
 
 There is an immense class of objects, which properly 
 belong to the mechanical arts, but many of which are 
 sufficiently esthetic in their make up to become semi- 
 sculptural fine arts. Many articles of household use such 
 as beds, chairs, tables, water pitchers, coffee urns, tea- 
 pots, etc., fall into this class and any one of these in its 
 forms and colors, independent of any decoration, may 
 be good enough to rank as a work of the fine arts. 
 And surely no one would claim that a chair or a tea- 
 pot resembled anything in nature or was based on 
 nature. They are therefore not naturalistic art nor are 
 they decorative art. Perhaps they might be classed 
 most accurately as semi-sculptural art. 
 
 Painting may or may not be imitative. Which it is 
 rests wholly in the volition of the artist. The most 
 imitative painting at best only suggests the appearance 
 of things and is largely a deception. But there is not, 
 in fine art painting, the slightest compulsion on an 
 artist to be accurate. As long as he does not offend 
 
ART AND MAN. 83 
 
 his public by departing too widely from recognized con- 
 ventions, he can revel in fiction as much as he chooses. 
 And it is surprising how much is accepted as "true to 
 nature" which is principally made up. It is especially 
 to the subjects that this statement applies. All religious 
 subjects for instance are wholly inventions of incidents, 
 some of which never occurred, and those which did 
 occur did not resemble in the least what the painters 
 made of them. Most historic subjects equally are 
 largely imaginary. And many other pictures, Claude's 
 and Wilson's landscapes for instance, are partly dreams 
 or visions, which evoke a desire to see such scenes, a 
 desire which is never quite fulfilled. 
 
 To obtain deceptive imitation in painting it is neces- 
 sary to use, not only line and color, which are the 
 essential concomitants of non-imitative pictorial art and 
 of decorative art, but also perspective and light and 
 shade. The best imitation, however, can never come up 
 quite to the reality. Art therefore should not try to 
 literally duplicate nature which it cannot do, but rather 
 to suggest something like nature, a something which the 
 observer nevertheless never has seen nor will see in the 
 real world. 
 
 There is an anecdote which illustrates to some extent 
 what idealistic painting should be. The well known 
 French impressionist painter Degas, while standing in 
 front of a little pool overshadowed by three great willow 
 trees, once said: "How beautiful they would be, if 
 Corot were to paint them!" 
 
 Most good decorative art is untrue to nature. 
 Decoration in itself does not exist in nature. A rock 
 on which some beautiful mosses grow, does not thereby 
 become a decorated rock: it is one form of nature 
 
84 ART AND MAN. 
 
 covered by other forms of nature. Only man decorates. 
 He decorates sometimes with imitations of certain 
 natural objects, but he decorates also with all sorts of 
 patterns in lines and curves and rectangles which are 
 never found in nature. If one takes some phase of 
 decoration, for instance tattooing, what has it to do 
 with nature? Nothing! A man may permit his skin to 
 be pricked full of colored dots, and these may or may 
 not imitate a little something in nature. But they are 
 not true to anything in the natural world. 
 
 It would be difficult to state positively the definite 
 amount of imitation or imagination underlying any 
 individual work of art: one could only point out its 
 general tendency. Perhaps a few illustrations may 
 clear up a little some of the intricacies of the matter. 
 For instance if an artist sits down before nature and 
 observes carefully and tries to reproduce imitatively 
 what he sees, he is doing a realistic subject in a 
 realistic way. Carried to an extreme, this method pro- 
 duces sometimes some very inartistic work. When the 
 imitation is not pushed to the limit and nature is 
 interpreted rather than imitated, especially if memory 
 is called to some extent into play, some very fine 
 work sometimes results. As examples of this more 
 thoughtful method one might cite most of Fortuny's 
 and of Manet's pictures and of Barye's sculptures. 
 
 Suppose now an artist paints a picture of some 
 historic or religious scene. As he did not see his 
 subject, he has to invent it, that is his subject is 
 imaginative. Then he may turn to nature or to 
 models for his details and his figures, in which case his 
 picture becomes partly realistic. Holbein's "Madonna," 
 or Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," or Rubens' "Descent 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 85 
 
 Fia. 11. Paddle from Nissan Island, Solomon Islands. 
 
86 ART AND MAN. 
 
 from the Cross," may be mentioned as widely known 
 successful instances of this method. The attempts at 
 religious pictures by Velasquez and Manet on the other 
 hand illustrate the danger even the greatest realistic 
 interpretative painters incur in trying to paint subjects 
 which require primarily imaginative conception. 
 
 Among modern European artists, there is one, whose 
 drawings of mountains are unapproached in their vivid- 
 ness and naturalism. This is Edward Whymper, the 
 conqueror of the Matterhorn, the Aiguille Verte, Chim- 
 borazo and many other great peaks. His merits as 
 an artist have been too much overshadowed by his 
 fame as the greatest of mountaineers. His composi- 
 tion is first class, his tiny figures on the mountain side 
 are portraits, altogether there is no one who comes 
 within miles of Edward Whymper in the rendition of 
 that most difficult part of all landscape, Alpine scenery. 
 
 The subjects of the great Swiss artist Bocklin are 
 pure pieces of imagination, but his pictures are both 
 realistic and idealistic. For his humans and land- 
 scapes are admirably done. And tho he invented 
 strange figures of mermaids and satyrs, they look as if 
 Bocklin had actually seen them: that is his work 
 looks like reality, even when it was pure invention. 
 But it may be well to add that Bocklin was a genius. 
 
 In contrast to these, some perfect examples of 
 highly idealized form in art may be seen in Australa- 
 sian and Amerind art. The strange human on paddles 
 from the Solomon Islands, for instance, is entirely 
 imaginative in its subject and decorative technic. So 
 are some of the so called deities in Zuni sand pictures* 
 
 * Copies Harvard Univ. P. Mus. 
 
ART AND MAN. 87 
 
 which do not look like anything seen. They are 
 simply dreams, symbols of Zuni conceptions and are 
 perhaps less anthropomorphic than any other deities 
 ever pictured. 
 
 There is perhaps no art which is absolutely imita- 
 tive or absolutely imaginative. All art probably has 
 some imitative and some imaginative qualities; only 
 usually it leans more, sometimes much more, in one 
 direction than in the other. And the fact that some 
 arts have imitation tempered by imagination, and other 
 arts imagination steadied by imitation, makes it 
 difficult to classify the arts of the world by any 
 absolute realistic or idealistic standard. It seems to be 
 correct, however, to say that the Pleistokene, Bushman, 
 and Arctic arts and the arts of Europe are mainly 
 realistic and imitative, and that their makers saw the 
 appearance of things and tried to render it: with the 
 result, however, that much inferior European art gives 
 you what you see, only much better, in nature. The 
 arts of southern and eastern Asia, on the contrary, are 
 imaginative but with a great deal of realism: with the 
 result that much good East Asiatic art gives you what 
 you never saw in nature. Finally the African, Austral- 
 asian and Amerind arts are mainly imaginative and 
 decorative, either because their makers did not look 
 at nature at all or at any rate did so more rarely and 
 less observingly than the Europeans and the Asiatics. 
 
88 AET AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SCULPTURAL, PICTORIAL AND DECORATIVE ART. TWO 
 DIMENSIONAL AND THREE DIMENSIONAL ART. 
 
 Sculptural art, pictorial art and decorative art are 
 three classes of art which have certain relations of 
 great importance and of great complexity. In speaking 
 of these relations, sculptural art must be held to include 
 all the arts especially of form, such as architecture and 
 pottery, as well as sculpture proper. Sculptural art, 
 pictorial art, and decorative art in the main are due 
 to the same instinct and the same impulse: and the 
 fact that these three classes of art are parts of the 
 same thing and yet are different, and that they are 
 separate and yet work into each other, makes their 
 relationships most complicated and involved. So com- 
 plicated are they in fact, that an attempt to explain 
 them a little makes one think of the old definition of 
 philosophy "When one fellow explains to another fellow 
 what he doesn't understand himself, that's philosophy." 
 Sculptural art and pictorial art, because they are almost 
 wholly naturalistic arts, are more closely related to each 
 other than is either to decorative art: indeed in certain 
 ways they may be included under one heading: sculp- 
 tural-pictorial art. And also because they are natural- 
 istic arts and in the main attempt to represent things, 
 sometimes also, not inappropriately, they are called the 
 arts of representation. 
 
 The fundamental feature which differentiates func- 
 tionally sculptural art and pictorial art from decorative 
 art is whether the art work is itself the object, the 
 
ART AND MAN. 89 
 
 result sought for; or whether the art work is intended 
 to beautify some other object. In sculptural art and 
 pictorial art the sculpture or picture is the primary 
 interest; in decorative art the decoration is the secondary 
 interest. In sculptural art and pictorial art everything 
 should be subordinated to the sculpture or picture: in 
 decorative art the decoration should be subordinated to 
 the object decorated. To give some concrete examples: 
 the "Dying Gaul" is sculptural art, but the carvings on 
 medieval furniture are decorative art; the "Angelus" by 
 Jean Francois Millet is pictorial art, but the color 
 daubings by an Amerind on his person are decorative 
 art. 
 
 One of the complexities of the matter is due to the 
 fact that some art is naturalistic, and some art is non- 
 naturalistic. And in sculptural, in pictorial and in 
 decorative art respectively we find that some of each 
 is naturalistic and some non-naturalistic. Nevertheless 
 it is possible to lay it down as an axiom that most 
 sculptural and pictorial art is naturalistic, while a great 
 part of decorative art is non-naturalistic. 
 
 Another complexity of the matter comes from the 
 fact that sculptures and paintings are frequently used 
 to decorate buildings with. One has only to think of 
 the thousands of figures and heads placed on all parts 
 of Gothic cathedrals: the Cathedral of Milan is decorated 
 with statues all over the roof. Hundreds of great 
 buildings have mosaics and frescoes and other paintings 
 on their walls. Some painters — Puvis de Chavannes is 
 the best known modern instance — have subdued or 
 dulled their colors in order to subordinate them to the 
 architecture. But many of these wall paintings and 
 most of these statues are not decorative art: and yet 
 
90 ART AND MAN. 
 
 they are unmistakably decorations. Here therefore is 
 a case where decorative art and decorations are not 
 synonymous terms. 
 
 Sculptural art, pictorial art and decorative art spring 
 from the same art impulse and have so many traits in 
 common that it is sometimes difficult to specify to 
 which class an art work belongs. The very terms used 
 in connection with them tend to confusion. For 
 instance, leaving aside sculptural art, and speaking only 
 of pictorial art and decorative art, some misunder- 
 standings arise on account of the word "painting." 
 For whether in colors or in monochrome, in lines or in 
 patches, all pictorial art comes within the generic term 
 painting. But much decorative art also is painting. 
 Yet altho they are thus both painting, they are not the 
 same thing. Again most decorative art is two dimen- 
 sional, and omits perspective, light and shade, and 
 values; but some decorative art is three dimensional. 
 On the other hand, while a great deal of pictorial art is 
 three dimensional, a great deal of it also is two dimen- 
 sional. Here therefore are two points on which it is 
 impossible to dogmatize and extremely difficult to. talk 
 clearly. 
 
 Underlying the whole question of pictorial and 
 decorative art, is the most fundamental material fact 
 in all graphic art, namely that painting is formed of 
 spots, or dabs, or patches, or masses, of pigments and 
 paints, black or colored, on a flat plane. Every 
 painting, whether pictorial or decorative, consists of 
 some material, canvas or silk or paper or wood or 
 stone or burnt clay or live human skin, with some 
 paint or color put upon it. It has, except in the case 
 of painted sculptures, only two real dimensions, height 
 
ART AND MAN. 91 
 
 and width. All other material facts connected with 
 painting are secondary to this one that painting is 
 nothing but a layer of spots of color on a surface, 
 whether that surface is flat or cubical. 
 
 Many pictures however suggest a third dimension, 
 depth. An attempt is made in them to cause the 
 onlooker to think he sees not a flat plane but a cube 
 stretching away into distance. It is with this third 
 dimension that many of the technical points of painting, 
 such as perspective, atmosphere, distance, are connected. 
 These technical attributes which have to do with this 
 third dimension, depth, in painting, are not an actual 
 part of the hard material substances out of which a 
 picture is constructed, they are pictorial learned devices, 
 tricks, and conventions intended to produce certain 
 illusions. Put all the technical devices suggesting the 
 third dimension you can into a picture, yet it remains 
 a piece of canvas or paper with paint on it and with 
 this paint all in the same plane, that is in two dimen- 
 sions, no matter how much people may delude them- 
 selves into believing that there is distance, atmosphere, 
 perspective, etc., and that these have changed a flat 
 rectangle into a cube. Depth, or the third dimension, 
 in painting, is really an illusion; but an illusion of 
 paramount importance. 
 
 It is, however, precisely the use of drawing, line, 
 colors, values, light and shade, and many such varied 
 devices, which makes a picture. A picture is a paint- 
 ing, but it is something more than painting, for 
 painting is not necessarily a picture. The word paint- 
 ing is used too loosely in this connection. You can 
 cover a wall with a coat of paint of one color or of 
 two or more colors and it would correctly be a paint- 
 
92 ART AND MAN. 
 
 ing, but it would not be a picture. If a variegated 
 coat of paint is applied to a house wall and sub- 
 ordinated to the architecture with the intention of 
 enhancing the appearance of the house and not of 
 taking the leading place, it would be a decoration, 
 it would be decorative art. But if a painting is 
 applied on the wall of the house regardless of the 
 architecture and is carried realistically or idealistically 
 so far forward as to become a work of art standing on 
 its own merits and not as a part of the architecture 
 which it might entirely obliterate artistically, it becomes 
 a picture, that is pictorial art. 
 
 Decorations, or decorative art, as the name implies, 
 is art used to ornament a person or an object, and 
 therefore it should be secondary or subordinate in 
 importance to that person or object. A flashily dressed 
 man in the street or a frumpily dressed woman at a 
 ball, violate this canon of art, and people who see them 
 often instinctively comment adversely. Decorative art 
 being secondary to some other object utilizes line and 
 color to enhance that object. As it is not therefore 
 necessarily either sculptural or pictorial, it does not 
 need to bring in many other art attributes, which 
 belong properly to sculptural or pictorial art. As a 
 rule, provided a decoration is pretty and appropriate, 
 the simpler it is, the better. 
 
 Perhaps the nearest approach that can be made to a 
 definition of painted decorative art is to say that it is 
 pattern art. Its special technical points are lines and 
 colors, subordinated to the object decorated. It should 
 be two dimensional, and perspective, values, and light 
 and shade, do not properly belong to it. Persian rugs 
 are among the most obvious examples of the special 
 
AET AND MAN. 93 
 
 technical points of decorative art. It is especially in 
 some European art, such as Sevres, Meissen and English 
 porcelains, and in some paintings on architecture in 
 Europe and possibly in Hindustan, that decorative art 
 runs away from its true subordinate function, and is 
 clapped on regardless of the object decorated. 
 
 Decorative art is not infrequently looked on as an 
 inferior branch of art. Sculptors and painters some- 
 times use the term "decorative" as an adverse criti- 
 cism, applying it for instance to paintings with brilliant 
 colors, or to plein air pictures, or to Chinese and 
 Japanese art. But miscalling such works "decorative" 
 does not make them decorative art, it does not prove 
 they are bad: it only means that those who use the 
 term do not feel color, or are unable to produce fine 
 color, or at any rate do not like that kind of art. 
 When one considers that decorative art is something dif- 
 ferent from pictorial art, it is hard to see how it could 
 be inferior to something which it is not. It is a differ- 
 ence of kind, not of degree. 
 
 A classification of the arts of the world according to 
 their sculptural, pictorial and decorative qualities is an 
 extremely complex matter. For some arts are mainly 
 sculptural and pictorial; some are sculptural and decora- 
 tive; while some are sculptural, pictorial and decora- 
 tive. And in attempting to classify the various arts 
 into sculptural, pictorial, and decorative, it should be 
 understood that any such classification can be made 
 only in the most general way. 
 
 Of the primitive arts, the Pleistokene, Bushman and 
 Arctic decidedly lean towards the pictorial and sculp- 
 tural. Their makers produced many two dimensional 
 pictures and, while they do not achieve perspective, 
 
94 AET AND MAN. 
 
 atmosphere or values, they arrive at form and some 
 color. As part Of their instinct and impulse to repre- 
 sent natural objects, they seek for correct form in their 
 sculpture; while they neglect any arrangements of spots 
 of color. 
 
 Neolithic art, in Europe and Western Asia, is almost, 
 probably altogether, purely decorative. 
 
 European art is sculptural and pictorial. European 
 artists have always shown an instinctive preference for 
 sculptural form and for pictorial drawing, rather than 
 for decoration. Much of the best European decorative 
 art is an exotic. European painting is almost wholly 
 three dimensional. In the Egean, in Greece and Rome, 
 and in modern times, European painting has sought 
 for form, drawing, perspective, values, atmosphere, etc., 
 in preference to spots of color. The European artists, 
 in fact, often do not appear to understand, or else 
 they forget that a painting consists of spots of color 
 on a flat plane. In tens of thousands of pictures 
 they evidently never thought of making the spots 
 of color "a thing of beauty" and "a joy forever;" 
 and the most fundamental fact that the materials force 
 on the workman is lost sight. The fact that European 
 art is three dimensional, and East Asiatic art is mainly 
 two dimensional, tends to show that European art and 
 East Asiatic art are independent. 
 
 The decorations on the more expensive European 
 porcelains, furnish a good example of the lack of the 
 decorative sense among Europeans. The whole basal 
 idea of what decoration on porcelain should be seems 
 to be wanting; pictures instead of decorations are 
 attempted. The first thing about a piece of porcelain 
 is its fitness and serviceability for actual use, the 
 
ABT AND MAN. 
 
 95 
 
 MR 
 
 Fig. 12. Figure in black and red on paddle from Solomon Islands. 
 
96 ART AND MAN. 
 
 second is the beauty of its form and color. Any 
 decoration put upon it should be an enhancement of 
 its form and a part of its color scheme. This, Euro- 
 pean porcelain makers apparently do not realize. They 
 take a plate or a jar and paint a picture upon it 
 "Napoleon's return from Elba," or something equally 
 incongruous. As a picture, the work is usually a 
 failure, a weak copy of some oil painting; but the 
 worst art phase is that it is inappropriate- as a decora- 
 tion: the picture becomes the thing and the porcelain 
 itself is forgotten. Barring certain exceptions, such as 
 some Copenhagen porcelain, a frank imitation of Japa- 
 nese porcelain, Dutch tiles, a descendent of Arab or 
 Chinese tiles, and Valencia pottery, a legacy from the 
 Moors, European porcelain decoration, it seems to me, 
 is artistically inferior to Chinese or Japanese porcelain 
 or even to Zuni pottery decoration The essence or 
 spirit of decorative art is lacking, and neither the 
 makers nor the purchasers seem aware of what is 
 suitable and fit in porcelain decoration. 
 
 Egyptian art and West Asiatic art may be classified 
 together as principally sculptural and decorative arts. 
 They both have some excellent and some poor sculp- 
 ture, and some fine and some ugly decoration. Some 
 of their bas reliefs and colored paintings are evidently 
 intended to represent events which probably happened 
 or scenes which were actually seen, but the artists 
 scarcely ever thought of drawing anything in artistic 
 perspective, much less in mechanical perspective, and 
 they seldom achieved artistic two dimensional, much 
 less three dimensional pictorial art. 
 
 Arab art is purely decorative. 
 
 South Asiatic art takes in all three classes of art: 
 
ART AND MAN. 97 
 
 sculptural, pictorial and decorative. It occasionally 
 produces some first class sculpture: it certainly never 
 rises to the front rank in pictorial art; but in decora- 
 tive art, for instance in Persian rugs, it is unsurpassed. 
 Thru its inclusion of the three forms of art, it evinces 
 in certain respects a closer relationship to East Asiatic 
 art than it does to European art. 
 
 East Asiatic art, like South Asiatic art, is sculptural, 
 pictorial, and decorative. It has produced some great 
 work in all three lines, but it seems to me that it is in 
 its painting that it is unsurpassed, and in its painting 
 it leans towards the two dimensional. East Asiatic 
 artists have always placed foremost the arrangement into 
 beautiful patterns of the lines and spots of color of 
 their pictures. Apparently the art instinct of the 
 Chinese and the Japanese led them to discern that 
 the underlying material fact in a painting is that it 
 consists of spots of pigment on a flat or curved plane, 
 and as a rule they appear to try, altho not always 
 successfully, to make the arrangement of the spots of 
 pigment agreeable to the eye. They have always made 
 a more secondary matter of the qualities in painting 
 connected with the third dimension or depth, with atmos- 
 phere, perspective, values, etc. There is plenty of atmos- 
 phere, and values, and artistic perspective in their work, 
 especially in their landscapes which sometimes are three 
 dimensional, but in the main these qualities are less 
 sought for than is the production of a beautiful arrange- 
 ment of lines and spots. As a result their work usually 
 suggests flatness and not depth, a picture in a rectangle 
 with height and width, rather than a picture in a cube 
 with height, width, and depth. 
 
 Of primitive arts, Negro art and Amerind art lean 
 
98 AET AND MAN. 
 
 towards the sculptural and decorative, and Australasian 
 towards the decorative and sculptural. In these arts 
 there is almost never any pictorial work; there is 
 never a trace of perspective or values or atmosphere 
 but, in their stead, there are often most beautiful 
 patterns in colors or carvings. In some of the African 
 and Amerind sculptures we find imitative attempts, 
 which show the faculty of observation, but all the 
 painting of these three arts is two dimensional and 
 almost all of it is decorative. 
 
 The Negroes have made some good decorative art 
 and some poor decorative art, much bad sculptural art 
 and some sculptural art which has certain good points. 
 The Amerinds have produced some good decorative art 
 and some poor decorative art, a good deal of bad 
 sculptural art and some sculptural art, namely the heads 
 on monoliths in Mexico and Central America, which is 
 distinctly good. The Australasians have produced an 
 immense amount of really beautiful decorative art, and 
 some sculptural art which is usually poor but neverthe- 
 less most interesting ethnologically. It is perhaps not 
 incorrect to say that the Australasians have the weakest 
 sculptural-pictorial art sense and the most distinctly 
 decorative art sense of any peoples. 
 
 The geographical habitats and courses of the sculp- 
 tural, pictorial and decorative arts are instructive. In 
 Europe art is sculptural and pictorial, with decorative 
 art as an adjunct; in Asia art is sculptural, pictorial 
 and decorative; in Africa, Australasia and America art 
 is sculptural and decorative. Sculptural art is thus found 
 almost everywhere, a hint that the sense of form is the 
 starting point in the fine arts. Pictorial art and decor- 
 ative art on the contrary are not so universal. Taking 
 
ART AND MAN. 99 
 
 Europe as a starting point there is a sort of gradation 
 from the pictorial art of Europe into the decorative art 
 of Africa, Australasia, and America which suggests a 
 gradual change both in the way of looking at things 
 and in the impulse in carrying out an artist's ideas. 
 
 In looking over the arts of the world, the specimens 
 show that the arts of Europe are mainly sculptural 
 and pictorial, the arts of Asia are sculptural, pictorial 
 and decorative, the arts of Africa, Australasia and 
 America are mainly decorative. The peoples of Europe 
 paint pictures; the peoples of Asia paint pictures and 
 patterns; the peoples of Africa, of Australasia and of 
 America paint patterns. Does this imply that the 
 distinction is one of civilization? That advanced or 
 semi advanced races make imitative art, and primitive 
 races decorative art? It might seem so and yet this 
 cannot be laid down as an axiom. For three primitive 
 races, the Pleistokene tribes of Central Europe, the 
 Bushmen of South Africa, and the Chukchees and 
 Eskimo of the Arctic regions, make two dimensional 
 pictorial art. No statements in regard to the matter, 
 however, can be made too baldly nor as more than 
 general hints. It is only general tendencies which can 
 be stated in words, and to these tendencies in probably 
 all cases there are exceptions. 
 
100 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 SUBJECT AND MOTIVE. TASTE. SELECTION. BEAUTY. 
 ETHICS. MORALITY. 
 
 Subject or theme, and motive, are terms applied to 
 certain important phases or attributes of art work. 
 Objectively these terms apply to the same thing: 
 subjectively they mean different things. The art phases 
 these words represent are so dovetailed into one another 
 that the terms subject and motive, which are used 
 to describe them, are often confused and misunder- 
 stood. Nevertheless subject and motive are such vital 
 points in comparative art that it is imperative to make 
 some attempt to formulate their meanings. 
 
 Subject or theme in the fine arts might perhaps be 
 defined as any object or scene in the world of nature 
 or in that of imagination which any person tries to 
 sculpt, draw, or paint. Subjects are as universal as art 
 itself. Anything is a subject; humans, faces, animals, 
 plants, landscapes, whether taken from the real world 
 or mere figments of the imagination, may be subjects. 
 
 Motive might perhaps be defined as any object or 
 scene in the world of nature or in that of imagination 
 which an artist tries to sculpt, draw, or paint because 
 he likes that object or scene. Any such object or 
 scene may be a subject, but it is only when the 
 emotions of the artist are stirred, when he is moved by 
 the object or scene, when it appeals to his taste, that 
 it becomes a motive to him. Humans, faces, animals, 
 flowers, or dreams of the imagination, provided they 
 appeal to the artist, may all be motives. One man 
 
AET AND MAN. 101 
 
 enjoys painting portraits, another animals, a third 
 landscapes, a fourth visions of the unseen, and to each 
 of the four respectively these different subjects are 
 motives. 
 
 In looking at works of art one can do so from two 
 points of view: from the literary standpoint, or from 
 the artistic standpoint. One can look at the subject or 
 theme, that is for the scientific or historical or religious 
 meaning of the work. Or one can look for the esthetic 
 motive, that is for the sculptural or pictorial or decora- 
 tive value of the work, and in the latter case one 
 must perforce examine its technical qualities. In study- 
 ing an art work from the literary standpoint, that of 
 the subject, one may be studying the ostensible subject, 
 while the esthetic qualities of the work were the real 
 subject, the motive which the artist was seeking. 
 Someone denned genre painting as "Art in its anecdot- 
 age" and this dictum in certain ways hints at what is 
 meant by subject. 
 
 The subject might also be denned as being that 
 part of a work of art which appeals to a literateur or 
 a scientist, and the motive might be denned as that 
 part of a work of art which appeals to an artist. And 
 the remarks made or questions put about a work of 
 art show clearly the attitude of an onlooker. If a 
 person says: What is the title of this work? What is 
 its nam 3? Is this a statue of a god or a king? Does 
 this picture represent the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian 
 or the Rape of the Sabines? he is thinking of the 
 ostensible subject, of what the work illustrates, that is, 
 he is looking from the standpoint of the literateur or 
 scientist. But if a person says: How is a work of art 
 done? Is the color harmonious? Are the figures in 
 
102 ART AND MAN". 
 
 proportion? Does it hang together? he is thinking of 
 the esthetic motive, of the technical qualities and 
 handling which appeal to the eye, that is, he is looking 
 from the standpoint of the artist. 
 
 It is who or what a statue or picture represents or 
 illustrates which usually interests primarily an archaeolo- 
 gist or historian: its beauty or art value and its tech- 
 nical qualities are, to him, only secondary: he wants to 
 understand the ostensible subject. In looking too hard 
 for the subject and neglecting the motive, it seems as if 
 ethnologists and missionaries have often been misled 
 themselves and have misled others. For instance, the 
 moment missionaries see a rough sculpture of a human 
 in the hut of some primitive man, they seem to jump 
 to the conclusion that this sculpture must be a repre- 
 sentation of some supernatural being and so they call it 
 an idol: and many ethnologists follow as close seconds 
 on the same trail. That the poor primitive artist may 
 have been, and probably was, merely obeying his artistic 
 impulse and making the best work of art he could in 
 sculpting a man is usually passed by, and the real 
 significance of his work as art is thus lost sight of. 
 
 What an artistic person is interested in primarily in 
 a work of art, is in what the eye takes in, what can be 
 felt wholly thru vision. A statue or a picture, tech- 
 nically well done, is, regardless of what it represents, 
 interesting to an artist. It is how that statue or pic- 
 ture is handled, how it affects the artist by merely 
 looking at it, which is the basic cause of his for min g a 
 favorable or unfavorable opinion of a work of art. It 
 is not the literary or historic side of a statue or picture, 
 it is not its ostensible name, which rouses the esthetic 
 feeling of an artist. An artist may easily tire of a sub- 
 
ART AND MAN. 103 
 
 ject picture, good tho it may be; but he will not tire 
 of a figure or landscape motive he is in tune with. 
 
 An anecdote will perhaps make my meaning clearer. 
 An American lady was invited to lunch in Paris at the 
 house of a well known American painter. His wife 
 received her cordially, but the painter himself came in 
 hours behind time, and apologized by saying he had 
 been with another painter at the Louvre looking at a 
 recently acquired Perugino, whose technical qualities 
 caused him to forget his lunch. When his guest, who 
 related the incident to me, asked him what was the title of 
 the picture, he said he really had not the slightest idea. 
 This is a practical illustration of a profound esthetic truth, 
 namely, that the best art needs no title for an artist. 
 
 There are, of course, pleasant and unpleasant subjects, 
 and a pleasant one is naturally more attractive to an 
 artist as well as to a literateur. A peaceful Corot, or 
 Titian's "Medea and Venus," would be more agreeable 
 to live with for any instinctively right minded person 
 than would be a representation of an auto-da-fe or a 
 gladiatorial show. Whilst unpleasant subjects may be 
 equally well done as pleasant ones, yet the graphic arts, 
 like literature, may be debased and degraded thru the 
 choice of unpleasant themes. 
 
 In comparing arts for their resemblances and their 
 differences it must be done principally from the artistic, 
 not the literary side. It is the motive and technic, not 
 the subject, which must be the main base of comparative 
 art studies. A subject may be similar in different arts, 
 but the technic or handling furnishes endless variations 
 and it is largely by comparisons of these variations that 
 one may hope to find resemblances and differences in 
 art of value to ethnology. 
 
104 ART AND MAN. 
 
 As an example, take the figure of a man. As an 
 art motive, the human is almost universal. In most 
 arts we find statues, and in some arts pictures also of 
 humans. From the point of view of comparative art, 
 what is most important about them is how they are 
 done, among different races, at different times, and in 
 different places. Their proportions, their various feat- 
 ures, their action; whether their legs are too long, or 
 their heads too big; or whether they are too rigid, or 
 unnaturally soft; these and many other points are the 
 vital ones in comparative art. Any man or woman is 
 an art motive, but it is the manner in which that 
 motive is treated by various artists in all races, which 
 underlies any comparison of them. To look for instance 
 at a more concrete case, take such a religious subject 
 as the mother and child. It is found in Egyptian, in 
 Hittite, in East Asiatic, in European art. But while 
 the pose may be identical, yet the technic is different 
 in all four arts and expresses the race of the artist. 
 
 While placing the motive ahead of the theme in 
 studying art comparatively, nevertheless the theme is 
 of importance. It often reveals much ethnologic, archaeo- 
 logic and historic fact. It may show the fauna sur- 
 rounding the artist, or the manner of dressing in a 
 country, or the period of history, or the style of 
 architecture; in fact it may illustrate many points 
 about the manners and customs of the race of the artist 
 which writings or language or anatomy or implements 
 do not. And for this reason, when studying art 
 comparatively, it is worth while not only to seek the 
 esthetic motives in a work of art but also to see what 
 else it can tell us thru its theme. But, despite these 
 facts, ethnologists who may happen to study the arts 
 
AKT AND MAN. 
 
 105 
 
 Fig. 13. Wooden statue about six feet high, from a Morai or cemetery, Hawaii. 
 
106 ART AND MAN. 
 
 of various races comparatively should never forget that 
 motive and technic are much more vital than subject 
 in tracing racial characteristics and relationship, and 
 they should not allow themselves to be misled by the 
 subjects when searching for resemblances and differ- 
 ences in art. 
 
 Choice of subjects, which from the artistic stand- 
 point is synonymous with motives, varies with different 
 races and peoples according to their characteristics, 
 their development, their training, their environment, 
 their customs, their religion and other circumstances, 
 but especially it varies with their taste. The Pleisto- 
 kenes and Bushmen were led to draw by a liking for 
 animals; the Greeks sculpted from their innate sense of 
 the beauty of the nude human figure; the Asiatics 
 painted largely because harmonious colors pleased them. 
 It is difficult to specify about the subjects and motives 
 used by different races. All one can say is that certain 
 subjects rather than others appealed as motives to 
 various races, and that certain subjects which did not 
 appeal as motives were sometimes forced on artists by 
 their customs or religion. 
 
 In a certain number of works of art, the visible 
 subject, such as a lamb surrounded by kneeling men 
 and women, or a dragon amid clouds, is clear and 
 definite. There may be no suggestion of mystery thru 
 the technic or handling. Nevertheless the subject may 
 be intended to represent something different from what 
 it apparently does. The object or model treated may 
 seem clearly evident, yet have some hidden meaning, 
 express some attribute of a deity or some force in 
 nature, which is intelligible only to the initiated; that 
 is it is symbolical, one thing is used as a symbol for 
 
ART AND MAN. 107 
 
 another. The lamb and the dove in Christianity, the 
 asp in Egypt, the serpent in India, the dragon in 
 China, are such symbols. Artistically there is nothing 
 mysterious about such works of art, except that the 
 apparent subject is sometimes misleading. It is not 
 always possible to tell by looking at art specimens 
 whether they are symbolic or not, and for this reason 
 it is difficult to tell sometimes whether there is sym- 
 bolism of this kind in some primitive art. 
 
 There is another form of art symbolism which finds 
 expression in repeating or exaggerating that part of the 
 human anatomy which is associated with the chief 
 quality or attribute of the subject represented. Such 
 are the many breasts of Diana of the Ephesians, and 
 the numerous arms of some Hindu deities. Something 
 very similar is found on some Polynesian figures from 
 the Hervey Islands and the Austral Islands;* and these 
 tend to prove, that if primitive races have no art 
 mystery, some of them have symbolism. And in all 
 these cases, the artistic result is absurd and hideous 
 and quite lacking in mystery or charm. 
 
 If one looks at the great arts of the world, it 
 would seem as if the taste of their makers, which 
 may be paraphrased as their ideals of beauty and 
 which caused their choice of motives, is always, in 
 one locality, at one time, more or less similar. To 
 a great extent, taste as manifested by art works is 
 racial, that is underlying artistic ideals are a part of 
 a race much as is its straight or woolly hair or its 
 white or yellow skin. These racial art characteristics, 
 however, are sometimes trained out of an individual 
 or even out of a race by some external force, the 
 
 * British Mus. 
 
108 ART AND MAN. 
 
 result to art not being always beneficial. But even 
 when they seem to be trained out, they sometimes 
 bob up in unexpected ways. 
 
 Taste, or the underlying racial ideals of beauty, 
 really rules and makes art. The lowest primitive artist 
 unconsciously and the more advanced civilized artist 
 often unconsciously follows his taste. Taste leads an 
 artist into selection. He has to select his subject, 
 select his technic. Selection is one of the most 
 important factors in art, a choice of what to put in, 
 what to leave out; what to emphasize, what to 
 subordinate. It comes entirely from the taste, the 
 feeling of an artist; and by his selections, by his 
 eliminations, one can tell what his taste and feelings 
 were. Selection has a great" deal to do with beauty. 
 For unconsciously the artist selects what to him seems 
 beautiful, and apparently the members of his own 
 race as a rule agree with him in their ideals of what 
 is beautiful. 
 
 Thus among some of the primitive races, the 
 Negroes, the Australasians and the Amerinds, we 
 find a predeliction for a distortion of the human 
 figure, an exaggeration of certain parts of the anatomy. 
 They place a big head on a small body and short 
 legs, and insist on certain minor points. It seems 
 evident that their selection is made because they are 
 most interested in the heads and the other things they 
 dwell on. Apparently they are unable to grasp the 
 relations of different portions of the human figure as 
 a whole. Their attraction to certain details with 
 corresponding neglect of the whole, leads them 
 frequently to such a lack of proportions as to make 
 their figures almost caricatures. Their taste seems to 
 
AKT AND MAN. 109 
 
 be that of a grown up mind in certain ways and of 
 a youthful mind in others.* 
 
 With Europeans, taste leads to distortions and 
 exaggerations which are the exact opposite of the 
 taste of some primitive races for big heads and small 
 bodies. English and French fashion plates show this 
 taste carried out to its extreme. The female figures 
 are elongated sometimes to twelve heads; the heads, 
 hands, feet, and waists are Lilliputian, whilst the busts 
 and hips are Brobdignagian. In these fashion plates 
 one sees one European ideal of beauty carried beyond 
 all bounds into unconscious caricature. The bad taste 
 of the fashionable dress makers who rule costume 
 runs riot, and thru their selection of proportions and 
 of increases and diminutions of certain parts of the 
 figure, for the sake of supposed elegance and grace, 
 the facts of the human figure are distorted out of all 
 anatomical reality. As long as Europeans continue 
 making fashion plates, they cannot shy bricks at 
 primitive artists on the plea of lack of beauty or taste. 
 
 When we turn to artists like Titian or Chardin or 
 Sesshiu or Mori-Sosen, it will be found that their 
 selection is governed by their taste, just as is the 
 case with African or Australasian or Amerind artists. 
 The art of the former is more matured and fuller 
 and the ideal of beauty is thoughtful instead of purely 
 instinctive but the difference in selection is rather one 
 of degree than of kind. As examples of selection 
 among Europeans one might cite Greek sculptors. 
 They liked rather small heads and rather long bodies, 
 to enable them to reach an expression of athletic 
 grace and strength, points which apparently were to 
 
 * Figs. 7, 8, 13, 26. 
 
110 AET AND MAN. 
 
 the Greeks the ideal of beauty. Some details are 
 somewhat enlarged, others diminished, not as they 
 usually are in humans, but as they might be. Rem- 
 brandt in his etchings draws carefully all the details in 
 the shadows, but leaves his lights largely bare paper. 
 It was his taste, his selection which guided his needle, 
 and his selection was so good that you feel the detail 
 all over his plates, even in the places where there is 
 none. 
 
 The subjects which artists choose when they have a 
 free choice, are those which move them, that is they 
 select the subjects which appeal to their taste. And 
 as a general rule taste leads an artist to pick some- 
 thing he thinks is beautiful. Beauty indeed seems to 
 hold the same relation to art, that truth holds to 
 science, and that goodness holds to ethics and religion. 
 Beauty is not the only factor in art, for truth and 
 goodness and many other forces also play a part, but 
 beauty is certainly a predominating power in the 
 shaping of the fine arts. "A thing of beauty is a joy 
 forever." Art might be defined in one sense as the 
 visible productions of man which seek beauty. The 
 French recognize this, for they call the fine arts "les 
 Beaux Arts." They say of works of art: "Ce n'est 
 pas mal": "C'est tres bien": "C'est beau": in gradu- 
 ally strengthening praise, and the last and strongest 
 "C'est beau" tells the tale. 
 
 One must not, however, assign too absolute a role 
 to beauty in the fashioning of the fine arts. To the 
 artist, the production of art is largely an expression of 
 his emotions, and these may be aroused by something 
 in itself ugly. To the layman, the products of art 
 are also largely an appeal to his emotions: and if 
 
AET AND MAN". Ill 
 
 these products give pleasure, so much the better. But 
 one cannot lay down any dogmatic canon that art is 
 a search for beauty. Beauty is not at the bottom of 
 all art; for imitation, sometimes of ugly things, causes 
 some of it; and ideas, sometimes hideous ones, are also 
 responsible for a good deal more. 
 
 In stating that beauty is the base of most art, one 
 is immediately confronted by the question: what is 
 beauty? To this one can only say that beauty is an 
 intangible something, based on feeling or taste, another 
 intangible something. Beauty and feeling and taste are 
 elusive and variable, changing in different climes, at 
 different times and among different races. "One man's 
 meat is another man's poison" and "De gustibus non 
 est disputandum" are certainly most accurate dictums 
 about ideals of beauty when looked at from a broad 
 minded standpoint. What beauty is and what taste 
 is, it seems impossible to really define. One thing is 
 certain, and that is that the taste for external things, 
 which one perhaps might call the underlying ideal of 
 beauty, varies in different races. What appeals to one 
 race does not appeal to another. Even in the same 
 race taste, the ideal of beauty, varies at different 
 times; and in more complex societies, the ideal of 
 beauty varies with different individuals. All these 
 varying ideals of beauty cause differences in art. 
 
 One test of beauty in art which applies especially 
 to decorative art is based on the fact that in decora- 
 tive art beauty cannot be divorced from use. There 
 is no greater beauty in a decoration than its perfect 
 adaptation to the purpose for which it is used. 
 
 One phase of beauty in art results from the 
 attainment by the artist of character. Character in 
 
112 ART AND MAN. 
 
 art is difficult to define but it may perhaps be 
 explained. It is mainly associated with imitative art, 
 and especially with portraiture. When the sitter is 
 really suggested in a portrait, when his living person- 
 ality seems to have been transferred to a canvas, 
 when the technic in other words is first rate, an artist 
 would say the work had character. The model might 
 be ugly, but if that ugliness be artistically handled, if 
 the figure has vitality, the portrait may be a beautiful 
 work of art. Character is one of the intangible some- 
 things in art whose presence or whose absence means 
 a great deal in the value of many a sculpture or 
 picture. 
 
 The beauty in a work of art is of course a perma- 
 nent quality and reveals the feeling and taste of the 
 maker. But that very beauty is certainly an intangible 
 something, for it is apprehended differently by different 
 onlookers, according to their feelings and taste. Some 
 examples of how various people see the same thing will 
 perhaps illustrate how difficult it is to speak of the 
 absolute beauty of a work of art. In the Harvard 
 University Peabody Museum is a life size model of an 
 Amerind of the northern plains, in full war dress of 
 buckskin shirt and eagle feathers. To me this seems 
 beautiful, that is artistic. But standing before this 
 figure once a stranger chanced to look at it also and he 
 said to me that he could not see any beauty in this 
 costume, that to him it looked grotesque. The beauty, 
 that is the art, which I thought was there, to him was 
 a non existent entity. In the Salem Peabody Museum 
 is the root of a banyan tree, carved into a number of 
 semi-tangible forms by some clever Chinese artist. I 
 consider it a great work of art. But whoever wrote the 
 
ART AND MAN. 113 
 
 label for it evidently did not think so, for the label 
 reads "Banyan tree root, grotesquely carved by the 
 Chinese." Perhaps the labeler assumed that some coolies 
 carved this root when not occupied in other manual 
 labor. One can only say that the standpoints of art 
 students are many and various. 
 
 Beauty in fact is so uncertain a quality, it seems so 
 different to different persons, that there is no positive 
 standard of beauty to go by when judging works of art. 
 Nevertheless when a number of educated people exclaim 
 on seeing a work of art, "What a beautiful picture!" 
 "What a beautiful statue!" there is some probability 
 that that picture or statue deserves the studio adjective 
 "good." And in using the word good, or the word bad, 
 to particularize a work of art, it should be remembered 
 that artists do not refer to the moral or ethical qualities of 
 that work. Good or bad or poor really refers to beauty, 
 to the qualities connected with technic, not to the subject. 
 Good or bad means whether a picture or statue rouses 
 pleasant or unpleasant esthetic emotions in the onlooker, 
 not whether it teaches morality or tends to immorality. 
 Beautiful and ugly would be more accurate and descrip- 
 tive terms than good or bad, nevertheless good and bad 
 have been adopted by artists and their meaning must 
 be recognized and accepted. And since the words good 
 and bad have acquired a specific meaning in reference 
 to the technical and esthetic qualities of a work of art, 
 the words moral or immoral must be used if one refers 
 to its moral significance. 
 
 Now the words moral and immoral present for dis- 
 cussion another point connected with subject and 
 motive in art, namely ethics. What are the ethics of 
 art and what have they to do with morality? 
 
114 ART AND MAN. 
 
 It would seem to one not learned in either ethics 
 or religion, as tho the inspiring force in ethics and 
 religion was goodness, to be good oneself and to "teach 
 others to be good. Ethics and religion both might be 
 assumed to try to teach man his duty and to lay down 
 rules of conduct, saying what man should or should 
 not do, and in the main to urge him to higher and 
 better things. 
 
 Art in itself is certainly nothing of the kind. Much 
 art teaches nothing whatever. Ordinary architecture 
 and decorative art certainly do not. Sculpture pri- 
 marily deals with form, and painting with lines and 
 colors, irrespective of any ethics or goodness: and they 
 deal with human figures, and animals and landscapes, 
 from their outside and their appearance, without bother- 
 ing about any mental or moral qualities within. 
 Glyptic art in itself has nothing to do with morality 
 or religion. Glyptic art springs primarily from observa- 
 tion made by the eye and from delight in things seen. 
 Morality and religion come from mental causes, they 
 are not the result of sharpened vision. 
 
 The ethics of art, in fact, are different from the 
 ethics of human life. Morality in art is different from 
 morality in human life. Art is a world of its own 
 with its own code of ethics and this has to do with 
 other laws than those which govern human conduct. 
 The morals of art do exist, they are fundamental, but 
 they are not the same as the morals of life. For 
 instance "thou shalt not steal" is a law of humanity. 
 But "thou shalt not draw the two eyes on the same 
 side of a human face:" "keep the limbs of a figure in 
 proportion with the body:" "it is wrong to make mis- 
 takes in drawing:" might be considered laws of art. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 115 
 
 C$.R. 
 
 Fig. 14. 
 
 Fig. 15. 
 
 C. O . A?. 
 
 2. X /3. 
 
 Fig. 16. 
 
 e.s.fi. 
 
 Fig. 17. 
 
 Fig. 14. Hei tiki or neck ornament of greenstone, New Zealand. 
 
 Fig. 15. Wood carving, possibly a bear, Amoor River region. 
 
 Fig. 16. Iroquois mask. 
 
 Fig. 17. Koryak mask. 
 
116 ART AND MAN". 
 
 The right and wrong of art are not the right and 
 wrong of life and they differ in different parts of the 
 artistic world, but they are established with variations 
 just as moral codes are. The point of departure 
 between morality in art and morality among men is 
 different, but there is such a thing as ethics in art 
 and this consists in not transgressing artistic laws. 
 
 Battle pictures may perhaps be taken as an example 
 that morality is not the fundamental basis of art. 
 There is certainly nothing more immoral than a war 
 of aggression, which besides legalized murder, includes 
 burglary, perjury and other crimes. Yet battle subjects 
 have appealed to some painters, such as Horace Vernet 
 and De Neuville. And altho there is an element of 
 patriotism in their work, yet in their case there seems 
 to have been a liking for that class of subject, because 
 it offers violent action as well as form and color. 
 Soldiers appealed to them as motives and as a result 
 they did some good painting. 
 
 There have been other artists, however, who have 
 painted battle scenes with the avowed intention of 
 moralizing and of showing the hideousness of war. 
 And tho as moralities their war pictures are successful, 
 as art they are inferior to the portrait or landscape 
 work of these same men. It is another example of 
 the unwritten law that an art work must primarily be 
 artistic: if it is primarily didactic, the art is sure to 
 suffer. 
 
ART AND MAN". 117 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 SOME ART ATTRIBUTES. COMPOSITION. SYNTHESIS 
 AND ANALYSIS. HARMONY AND FINISH. QUALITY. 
 CONVENTIONALITY. MYSTERY. 
 
 Composition might be defined perhaps as the 
 planning of a work of art. Composition is a technical 
 term and refers to the design or pattern of a picture 
 or decoration, or to the placing or grouping of a 
 sculpture. Composition is a mental act of an artist, 
 the one thru which he decides how he will place or 
 arrange the technical parts, the forms, lines, colors, 
 light and shade, etc., of his work. 
 
 Composition is one of the points which most 
 differentiates art from nature. As soon as an artist 
 begins a work of art, he is obliged to compose. He 
 may decide to imitate something in nature as nearly 
 as possible, but even if he does only that, he has to 
 select, an act already on the high road to composition. 
 But if he departs in the least from a photographic 
 imitation of nature, he perforce selects and changes 
 and alters, that is he composes. Composition implies 
 therefore that an artist puts his brain to some use and 
 does not act wholly mechanically. Composition in 
 one sense therefore is synonymous with idealization. 
 
 Composition can be taught or explained only to 
 a most limited extent. There are a few facts which 
 can be set down about composition; and these cannot 
 be considered as rules or laws, but merely as guides, 
 which may be utilized or neglected, according to the 
 
118 ART AND MAN. 
 
 volition of the artist. Among these facts are such 
 ones as the following. Lines running horizontally or 
 vertically across a picture attract the attention to the 
 foreground: lines concentrating from the edge of a 
 picture towards one point of it tend to produce the 
 illusion of distance. Straight lines accentuate curved 
 lines and vice versa. Darks and lights may be 
 darkened or lightened by the placing of other darks 
 or lights near by or far off. Colors may be toned 
 down or enhanced by other colors, thru similarity or 
 contrast. A violent action of a figure may be increased 
 or diminished by another figure in repose or action. 
 
 Altho there are a few guiding facts which can be 
 told about composing a work of art, yet no one can 
 tell another how to compose a picture or statue. The 
 art instinct and art impulse must take care of that. 
 Anyone who attempted to compose by rule would 
 immediately become conventional. Indeed much con- 
 ventional art is precisely the result of following set 
 rules of composition. The repetition of a subject, 
 which has taken place scores of times, especially in 
 religious pictures or statues, has enforced time and 
 again repeating a composition with merely subordinate 
 changes, and nothing has ever crystallized art into 
 convention quicker than this. 
 
 As an instance of good composition, one might 
 study Giorgione's great picture at Castelfranco, North 
 Italy. A mother and child above with a vista of 
 landscape on each side; a knight and a monk below, 
 with a wall behind them. The light is wholly in the 
 upper part of the picture, forcing the eye instantly 
 to the intended center of interest, the Madonna. 
 While the subject is religious, and the picture therefore 
 
AET AND MAN. 119 
 
 due to the force of patronage, the composition and 
 everything connected with technic is magnificent and 
 reveal how the art instinct and art impulse were 
 stirring Giorgione, regardless of his ostensible subject. 
 
 Composition is found, more or less, in every art. 
 Much of it is instinctive racial selection and taste. 
 It is mainly in this respect that primitive arts some- 
 times reveal incipient instinctive composition. It seems 
 doubtful if the composition of the Africans, the 
 Amerinds, the Australasians, was ever reasoned out. 
 Among the Asiatics and the Europeans, on the con- 
 trary, composition is frequently reasoned out. And 
 while sometimes great results are obtained thereby, 
 often it does more harm than good. Undoubtedly 
 when artists were forced to obey certain, already 
 selected sets of forms and fines and colors it repressed 
 their originality and injured their art. 
 
 Synthesis and analysis are present, in varying degree, 
 in all art work. Synthesis means getting the whole cor- 
 rect, in preference to the detail; analysis implies elabor- 
 ation of detail, sometimes at the expense of the whole. 
 Synthesis is more important than analysis because it is 
 more important to shape out the masses, the great 
 features, than to attend to the smaller bits. It is, for 
 instance, more important to get the proportions, the 
 swing, the action, the center of gravity of a statue, 
 than the shape of the nose or the ear. Tony Robert 
 Fleury used to express this to the students at Julian's 
 atelier in the catch aphorisms: "Clignez les yeux. Ne 
 ch&rchez pas la petite bSte." Analysis, however, is also 
 necessary. Detail need not be elaborated, but an under- 
 lying suggestion of detail, even if apparently invisible, 
 must be present in a work of art: otherwise it is not 
 
120 ART AND MAN. 
 
 vapory or mysterious, but empty or sloppy. Detail is 
 indispensable, but detail subordinated to the whole, or 
 the result is poor art. In painters' parlance, a well 
 painted picture hangs together and carries across the 
 room, but it also reveals, when examined nearby, lots 
 of careful detail which at a distance melts into the 
 whole. 
 
 In all the arts we find synthesis and analysis, vary- 
 ing with the different artists, varying with the times, 
 varying with the development of the arts. Sometimes 
 there is more synthesis, sometimes more analysis. In 
 comparing the various arts, there is undoubtedly apparent 
 a greater leaning towards synthesis in some arts and 
 towards analysis in others. It is impossible to lay 
 down any strict dicta about the various arts, but in 
 the main it seems correct to say that European and 
 Asiatic artists are more apt to get their masses and 
 ensemble correct, than either African, Australasian or 
 Amerind artists, who often achieve much elaborate 
 detail with incorrect wholes. This is synonymous with 
 saying that synthesis is more an attribute of natural- 
 istic art, and analysis an attribute of decorative art. 
 
 Harmony is essential in any work of art. However 
 many elements are introduced they must be blended 
 together. Whether the work is roughly hewn out of 
 smoothly elaborated matters not, but if all its various 
 constituents are not in harmony, it is bad. 
 
 The feeling for harmony seems to be almost universal, 
 to be one of the constituents of the art instinct. How- 
 ever undeveloped a primitive man's faculties are, how- 
 ever rough or elementary his art productions . may be, 
 he is pretty sure to obtain harmony in his results. It 
 is not until he begins to get learning or training from 
 
ART AND MAN. 121 
 
 some extraneous source, that this great quality seems to 
 leave him. A native primitive may draw some outlines, 
 or carve a semblance of humanity, or put down some 
 splotches of color, but as long as he is not interfered 
 with, he will bring them sufficiently in harmony to 
 be artistic: and this is one main reason why primitive 
 work is generally, to some extent, good. But when he 
 no longer follows his feelings, his work gets out of har- 
 mony and becomes poor. This may be seen among the 
 Amerinds and the Australasians, but the most salient 
 example I know of is the deterioration of Japanese art 
 thru European contact. 
 
 Decorative patterns are frequently repeated on the 
 same object, apparently partly from the instinctive 
 desire for harmony or perhaps more accurately sym- 
 metry. Thus among the Peruvians, patterns were 
 often repeated in sevens. There is some attempt on 
 Greek vases also at making symmetrical patterns. 
 Among the East Asiatics, there is less of this, showing 
 that they do not care for the somewhat commonplace 
 harmony obtained thru repetition of mechanical decora- 
 tive patterns. In their better decorative work at least, 
 the East Asiatics do not attain harmony thru sym- 
 metrical repetition, but by giving free rein to their 
 instinct for form and color. 
 
 Harmony is a chief factor in finish. No art work, 
 in one sense, is ever finished. Any art work in 
 harmony, is finished as far as it goes. There is abso- 
 lutely no rule or law by which an outsider can deter- 
 mine when an art work is finished. A vapory myste- 
 rious picture, may be elaborated into endless detail. 
 A carefully analyzed canvas, labored to minuteness, 
 may be all blotted out into vagueness. Finish is a 
 
122 ART AND MAST. 
 
 question of volition or power on the part x>i the artist. 
 When he feels that he has done what he wanted as far 
 as his ability permits, when he has carried his work 
 forward so as to express his idea, if the work is in 
 harmony, it is finished to that extent. About the 
 only restriction one can make is to say that a work of 
 art which does not give one impression of a harmonious 
 whole needs something to be done to it. 
 
 Quality is a technical term applied entirely to tech- 
 nical matters. Quality cannot easily be defined but 
 might perhaps be explained as meaning that the 
 technical processes used in the making of a work of 
 art have been thoroly well carried out. Quality has 
 nothing to do with the subject or motive, but every- 
 thing with the way a thing is done: it is a matter 
 of handling. Quality in a work of art implies that the 
 artist knew his business thoroly and had the true art 
 instincti It is often found in the better European 
 and East Asiatic art. Some Pleistokene drawing is 
 full of quality. There is a great deal of it in Arab 
 art, and some, altho less, in Egyptian art. It is a 
 rarer attribute in African, Australasian, or Amerind 
 art, altho it is sometimes present, as for instance in 
 some Polynesian wood carving. But it is also rather 
 surprising to find how lacking it is occasionally in arts 
 where one might expect it, as in Assyrian or Hittite 
 and in some Hindu art. 
 
 Conventionality is an important factor in all art. 
 All art is more or less conventional, that is, all art is 
 more or less similar to the art produced in about the 
 same place at about the same time. No artist gets 
 entirely away from his environment, but when an artist 
 is spoken of as unconventional it generally means that 
 
ART AND MAN. 123 
 
 he has seen and done something a little different from 
 his contemporaries. The principle on which conven- 
 tionality acts is that in all arts the master minds, 
 urged on by their own power and perhaps tired with 
 what has been done before, do something fresh and 
 branch off into some unbeaten track. Other artists 
 then follow and imitate these leaders, and run into a 
 groove forming a so-called school, which in time 
 generally becomes mannered and conventional, when 
 some other original mind usually breaks away again 
 in some new direction. 
 
 In all art there is conventionality, but in some arts 
 less than in others. The classical or Greek ideal for 
 instance is just as much a convention as the Egyptian 
 or the Assyrian ideal, altho it is less pronounced, 
 because it is closer to nature. In European and East 
 Asiatic art, while there is always more or less conven- 
 tionality, there is also always a constant change, not 
 always a progress, but at least a breaking up of set 
 customs. But in some art on the contrary, such as 
 Egyptian, Assyrian and Mexican, conventionality ruled 
 with an iron grip. These arts reached a certain point, 
 which became accepted as correct, and then the 
 patron or potboiling forces of church and state kept 
 them in statu quo, and they petrified into pure con- 
 vention. In regard to most African, Australasian, and 
 Amerind arts, while some of their output was too naive 
 and unformed to be due to convention, certain other 
 parts of them, such as Alaska totems, followed the 
 dictates of tribal legends and laws, and became conven- 
 tionalized in accordance with the beliefs and customs 
 of their makers. 
 
 There are a certain number of paintings which are 
 
124 ART AND MAN. 
 
 so undefined that it is hard sometimes to know exactly 
 what they mean. The technic is so little carried for- 
 ward apparently that one cannot tell what any of the 
 details are. But in their very indefiniteness these pic- 
 tures have charm, the charm of mystery. 
 
 A little gray landscape, of some trees, a river and a 
 sail boat, in perfect harmony, belongs to this class. It 
 is scarcely more detailed than this sentence. But it 
 sets the mind to thinking of pleasant places, of floating 
 down sylvan waters, where vistas open on to cheerful 
 landscapes. Its mysteriousness forms its charm. 
 
 Mystery in art, indeed, is one of the most subtle 
 attributes of painting. The French have an admirably 
 expressive term for it, Vau-deld. Mystery is in some 
 ways the highest development, almost the vanishing 
 point of painting. It is the product of an art which has 
 evolved to a degree where some of the artists have 
 learned to leave out almost everything: where without 
 actual representation of things, by means principally of 
 values and colors, the spectator may be made to think 
 and to dream: to feel visions which he does not 
 actually see. 
 
 Mystery as produced by a few wide washes or spaces 
 of colored values without detail is found, I believe, both 
 in modern European and in East Asiatic painting. 
 Turner, Corot, Rembrandt and some of the Sung and 
 Ming landscapists may be mentioned among those who 
 have given us visions of Vau-deld,. 
 
 As a rule, however, the mystery in East Asiatic art 
 is of a somewhat different kind from that of European 
 art. It is produced mainly by the painting of a few 
 details and the omitting of the many details. One streak 
 of cloud will suggest a sky. Large empty spaces are 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 125 
 
 Fig. 18. Drawing of human on skin, Alaska. 
 
126 ART AND MAN. 
 
 -peopled by the mind from seeing a few. East Asiatic 
 art when thus simplified, can be called perhaps sugges- 
 tive more appropriately than mysterious. 
 
 To take an example of mystery from another art. 
 Compare the description of the Grail in the Grail Song 
 of Lohengrin, with the representation of the Grail in 
 Parsifal. In the first there is the charm of mystery: 
 the mind imagines something far away, something entran- 
 cing. But in the other, the red glass vase, lit by elec- 
 tricity, never comes up to the dream vision of the 
 Grail: the real is inferior to the ideal. 
 
 There is no mystery of any account in any of the 
 other arts. South Asiatic may perhaps show a glimmer 
 of it: but Egyptian and West Asiatic; Egean, Greek 
 and Roman; Pleistokene, Bushman and Eskimo; Amerind, 
 Australasian and Negro wholly lack mystery. 
 
ART AND MAN. 127 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE TECHNIC OF FORM. MATERIALS. DRAWING. OUT- 
 LINE. LINE. PERSPECTIVE. ACTION AND MOTION. 
 
 When a conclave of artists gets together and damns 
 the art productions of their brethren with faint praise, 
 the point on which their criticism is always first directed 
 is technic. And this is correct enough, because all fine 
 art consists in the carrying out thru the hands of a 
 plastic idea in the artist's brain. This carrying out 
 thru the hands, or handling, or mechanical part of art, is 
 what conveys or makes visible to others the artist's con- 
 ception, and if this handling or technic is poor or weak, 
 the idea is vitiated and the art is bad. Technic then refers 
 to the manner in which a work of art is carried out. 
 It deals with such art attributes as form, drawing, outline, 
 line, perspective, action, masses, colors, color, values, effect, 
 light, and it is by the knowledge and use of these tech- 
 nical attributes that artists are able to convey their 
 sense of beauty or their emotions to other people. 
 
 Technic is greatly influenced by materials; in fact 
 materials have an immense deal to do with the technic 
 of art. Where an artist has oil paints, he is apt to 
 try for light and shade and often lands in mud, to 
 which the bristle brush also may have contributed. 
 Where an artist has water colors there is more likeli- 
 hood of his securing delicacy. Where oil paints were 
 scarce, as among the Italian primitives, they were put 
 on thinly and carefully and with less resulting mud. 
 Where a sculptor has a soft, pliable stone, he gets 
 flowing, curvilinear sculpture; where he has basalt and 
 granite, he gets rigid, rectangular sculpture. While no 
 
128 ART AND MAN. 
 
 definite dogmas can be laid down about art materials 
 it can be asserted that the tools and materials furnished 
 to the artist have a great deal to do with his output. 
 
 Drawing and painting are attempts to represent, by 
 means of lines, spots and washes, objects on a plane 
 surface. Much of this pictorial art takes cognizance of 
 two dimensions only, height and width: some of it 
 includes a third, depth. 
 
 The first thing an immature artistic mind, child or 
 primitive, tries to grasp and to represent is the form 
 of definite objects. This he does by insisting on the 
 contours of the objects, and these he tries to define 
 with one or more lines. These lines, which act as 
 boundaries, are called outlines. They do not, however, 
 exist in nature, which the eye sees only as more or 
 less big or minute planes or spots of color. But where 
 the planes of color of an object meet the surrounding 
 planes of color, a beginner feels an imaginary line 
 between, and, for some reason, this is what a beginner 
 most seeks after. Later when an artist has realized 
 that there is no real outline in nature he still uses 
 outline in art, but less strongly and rather as a means 
 to an end. And he draws also with spots and masses 
 of monochrome or colored lights and darks. 
 
 The drawings of immature inartistic minds are 
 almost always done in pure outline. Frequently they 
 reveal no glimmer of a sense of form and show an 
 utter lack of observation. For instance drawings of a 
 circle for a face with the two eyes looking at you 
 from the center and with the nose in profil on one 
 side or such like freaks are often done by inartistic 
 European children, and we find instances of such mis- 
 takes in certain arts, such as in Egyptian art and 
 
ART AND MAN. 129 
 
 Assyrian art. Blunders of this kind, however, are rare 
 among primitive arts, among Amerind, Australasian, or 
 African arts. The reason for this possibly is that 
 among primitive peoples only the artistic members of 
 the tribe attempt to make any art at all, and such 
 artistic persons would in the nature of things have 
 some gift of observation or imagination. When one 
 finds utterly impossible or grotesque drawings anywhere, 
 it is wrong to attribute them to any artistic invention 
 or imagination and they should be ascribed simply to 
 their real cause, lack of artistic feeling. 
 
 Wherever we find drawing, we find outline, and the 
 more or less insistence and dependence on outline may 
 be used as one gauge of racial artistic development. 
 The West Asiatics and the Egyptians stuck mainly to 
 hard and often incorrect outlines, and perhaps partly 
 therefore they never matured as painters. The Ame- 
 rinds, the Australasians and the Africans rarely got 
 beyond the simplest outline when they tried to draw 
 . anything. The Pleistokenes started with outlines of 
 profils, but grew beyond this to a stage using broad 
 washes of paint, and broken outlines. The Bushmen 
 altho drawing outlines showed rather a distinct leaning 
 towards drawing by washes and masses. It is probably 
 only the European and the East Asiatic artists who 
 ever reached a full comprehension of the function of 
 outline, and who use it or not, as they choose. 
 
 Line in art is something altogether different from 
 outline. It refers in a general way to the lengths and 
 dimensions of objects and the way in which they point. 
 Rivers, roads, trees, fences, for instance, may be 
 referred to as lines. Each of these might or might 
 not have definite outlines. Groups of animals or of 
 
130 ART AND MAN. 
 
 humans may be placed in such positions as to suggest 
 lines. 
 
 Lines in art are a most vital point. They are of 
 especial importance in composition, particularly in 
 producing the illusion of the third dimension, depth, in 
 drawings and paintings. If, for instance, a river and 
 a road are introduced starting in the foreground and 
 vanishing in the background of a picture, a feeling of 
 distance and space is produced. It is in fact by some 
 such artifice, that an object like a mountain can be 
 made to seem big and far away. But if the road and 
 river are represented as running across the picture from 
 side to side, quite different feelings are aroused; the 
 mind concentrates on the foreground, distance is not 
 suggested in the same way, and objects in the back- 
 ground seem smaller and nearer. 
 
 When lines suggesting the third dimension, depth, 
 are found in art it may be accepted as certain that 
 that art is far advanced. They are found in European, 
 and in some East Asiatic and South Asiatic art. 
 There are perhaps one or two Pleistokene and one or two 
 Eskimo drawings which suggest a glimmer of a notion of 
 depth, but in every other art this is absent. And it is a 
 proof that only the Europeans and the Asiatics ever looked 
 into nature as into a cube, and that the Amerinds, Austral- 
 asians, and Africans never saw nature except as height 
 and breadth. 
 
 In European art and in East Asiatic art we find 
 outlines and lines used in two distinct ways, which 
 have been termed classical and picturesque lines. Clas- 
 sical lines might be defined as long sweeping lines: 
 picturesque lines might be defined as short broken 
 lines. In the history of both arts classical lines appear 
 
ART AND MAN. 131 
 
 earliest. And this is in accord with the mental develop- 
 ment of a painter in regard to nature, for the more he 
 looks at nature, the less does he feel the imaginary 
 line outlining form. This by no means implies that the 
 picturesque line is the best, for one must always 
 remember that art is not nature. As examples of well 
 known painters in Europe and Asia using classical lines 
 one might cite Ingres and Utamaro and among those using 
 picturesque lines one might cite Fortuny and Hokusai. 
 All four men are good sound draughtsmen and painters. 
 And no critic could lay down the law as to which 
 outranked the other, any more than any critic could 
 say aught in regard to the superiority of the classical 
 or the picturesque line beyond stating his individual 
 taste : that is, unless he is more conceited than truthful. 
 Perspective perhaps may be defined as the science 
 of representing objects on a plane surface in suGh a 
 way that the eye sees them in the same position and 
 of the same size as they appear in nature. Perspec- 
 tive is mechanical and geometric, as well as artistic. 
 It is principally useful in drawing buildings and 
 machinery, and some painters of indoor scenes and 
 architectural effects go so far as to have their pictures 
 put into perspective by professional perspecteurs. In 
 free hand drawings of figures and landscapes, scientific 
 perspective is seldom resorted to, as an accurate eye 
 and ability to draw will obtain a perspective correct 
 enough for artistic purposes, the only rule almost 
 which it is necessary to remember being that "twice 
 the distance, half the size." Moreover, in free hand 
 drawing or paintings, artists often purposely violate 
 absolute perspective, as they transpose or alter or 
 change things to suit their artistic wishes. 
 
132 AET AND MAN. 
 
 Scientific perspective, if I mistake not, has been 
 carried to the full limit only by Europeans. Artistic 
 or free hand perspective has been attained not only by 
 the Europeans, but by the South Asiatics and the 
 East Asiatics. It is also reached in some cases, and a 
 start made to it in other cases, among the Pleisto- 
 kenes, the Eskimo and the Bushmen, who all were on 
 the highroad towards drawing scenes, not merely single 
 figures, as they appear. Among the Negroes, the 
 Australasians and the Amerinds on the contrary, nothing 
 of the kind is apparent, and it is a more noteworthy 
 fact that the West Asiatics and the Egyptians were 
 also in a pictorial stage in which even artistic per- 
 spective had scarcely dawned. 
 
 Action and motion are not quite synonymous terms 
 in the fine arts. Action applies to every object 
 depicted in sculpture Or painting, whether at rest or in 
 movement. A man, an animal, a tree or a rock is 
 depicted in some attitude or position, and this is 
 called its action. The word motion is used in art 
 when animate or inanimate things are supposed to be 
 in movement. An animal running hard or a tree blown 
 by the wind, not only has its position or action, but it 
 shows a movement, and this is its motion: movement 
 and motion are synonymous. 
 
 Action, of course, therefore, is found in all art. 
 Motion, on the contrary, is not so invariably present. 
 It is common in European and Asiatic art and in 
 Pleistokene, Bushman and Eskimo art. But it is rare 
 in Amerind, Australasian or African art, and curiously 
 enough in Egyptian art. From one standpoint, action 
 and motion, that is life, is the best thing in Japanese 
 art. 
 
ART AND MAN. 133 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 CURVILINEAR ART AND RECTILINEAR ART. 
 
 Curved lines and straight lines play an important 
 role in art. All the arts utilize both curved lines and 
 straight lines. But certain arts tend more to curved 
 lines, rounded forms, circles and spheres; while other 
 arts run to straight lines, angles, rectangles and cubes. 
 The first kind might not improperly be called cur- 
 vilinear arts and the second kind rectilinear arts and 
 they offer a so far almost unnoticed field of study in 
 comparative art. 
 
 Why certain races should prefer certain lines and 
 other races certain other lines is not easy to fathom. 
 Apparently, however, the races who observe nature 
 and who draw their impressions from it are the ones 
 who develop their lines and forms principally in curves. 
 And the races who follow mainly the patterns of 
 woven or plaited vegetable fibers and grasses in 
 basketry work or garments are the ones who develop 
 straight lines. That is to say, curved lines coincide 
 mainly with the more realistic sculptural and pictorial 
 arts while straight lines are found principally in some 
 of the more conventional primitive decorative arts. 
 But it must be emphasized that only general tendencies 
 of arts can be indicated under the terms curvilinear 
 and rectilinear: for all arts utilize some curved and 
 some straight fines. 
 
 In Europe, the naturalistic Pleistokene art is dis- 
 tinctly curvilinear: straight lines and angles are almost 
 lacking. After Pleistokene curves, art goes into straight 
 
134 ART AND MAN. 
 
 lines in Neolithic decorations and these continue 
 thruout Europe well into the Iron Age. Beginning 
 with Cretan-Mykenian times and continuing in Greek, 
 Roman and modern times, European art, except in 
 certain forms of architecture and to some extent in 
 the partially Oriental descended Byzantine art, is an 
 art of curved lines. The straight line and right angle 
 have never been the rulers in classical or modern 
 Europe. 
 
 In Africa, Libyan, Bushman and Pygmy art is 
 distinctly curvilinear. Likewise the African Negroes, 
 in their sculptures of humans, and especially in the 
 bronzes of Great Benin, show full recognition of the 
 curved line. This is verified by the observations of 
 Dr. Livingstone who says of the natives southeast of 
 the Kalahari desert that if you want bricks to build a 
 house, the people cannot assist you much, for the 
 Bakwains have a curious inability to make things 
 square and, as with all Bechuanas, their own dwellings 
 are round.* This is passing strange, for African 
 Negro decorative art is mainly rectilinear. At least 
 in their decorations on shields and in bead work, etc., 
 the Negroes generally use straight lines. In Egyptian 
 art the architecture is generally rectangular: the 
 sculpture, on the contrary, is curvilinear. Some of 
 the paintings have curved lines but most of them tend 
 to straight lines. They have a strongly convention- 
 alized decorative rigidity and it is not impossible that 
 this decorative tendency may, to some extent, have 
 come from the Negroes. 
 
 West Asiatic art has both curves and straight lines. 
 
 * Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, Chap. II. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 135 
 
 Fig. 19. Drawing of grizzly bear on skin, Alaska. 
 
136 ART AND MAN". 
 
 It is much like Egyptian art in those respects. A good 
 deal of it is decorative, and in its later phases some of 
 it is highly colored. The early art of South and 
 East Asia appears to have been a decorative recti- 
 linear art. Nevertheless in South Asiatic art and in 
 East Asiatic art, the curved or rounded line is 
 predominant, a hint that these arts at bottom are 
 more realistic than decorative. Arab art is strongly 
 curvilinear. At the same time it is wholly decorative. 
 The explanation probably is that the racial art instincts 
 of the Arabs were realistic. They were blocked from 
 following their natural bent to the extent of not using 
 the human figure as a motive. So they turned to 
 plants and flowers and other natural forms for motives and 
 apparently they kept on going afresh to nature and thus 
 their decorations did not run down into stiff and rigid 
 conventions. 
 
 In Australasia there are straight lines but also 
 many curves in Polynesian art; while Melanesian art 
 is mainly an art of straight lines and rectangles. 
 
 Amerind art is the extremest example of a rectilinear 
 art. Straight lines, zigzags, rectangles, diamond shaped 
 lozenges, cubes, predominate to such an extent that they 
 almost swamp any attempts at circles or curves. The 
 straight line is king from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, 
 and it is only on the Arctic shores of America that 
 the curved line commands. 
 
 Look, for a moment, at the art of Mitla. At first 
 blush, the decorations on Mitla walls seem geometric, 
 in right angles and sharp points. They imitate nothing 
 in the natural world. Some travelers have asserted 
 that Mitla art is totally unlike all the other Mexican 
 arts. But examined carefully, the Mitla pattern reveals 
 
ART AND MAN. 137 
 
 itself to be a highly decorative rattlesnake: the head 
 of the snake attached to and rising above the body, 
 the rattles placed in separate bunches, with the tip 
 pointing downwards. Altho the Mitla people used as 
 their model, as did the other Mexicans, the most curving 
 and sinuous of all living creatures, the snake, yet they 
 turned him artistically into right angles. They also 
 used the snake markings as decorations. The Mitla 
 snake pattern is one of the most curious evolutions in 
 all art. 
 
 Of course, there are some curves and rounded lines 
 in Amerind art. And they are found as a rule in its 
 non-decorative attempts, in Peruvian pottery, sculptures, 
 Mexican monolithic heads, and North Amerind pipes. 
 Occasionally also, for instance among the Moundbuilders 
 and Cliffdwellers, decorations were in curves and rounded 
 lines. But in the main Amerind art is based on the straight 
 line and the geometric angle. 
 
138 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE TECHNIC OF COLOR. PAINTING. MASSES. COLORS 
 AND COLOR. VALUES. ATMOSPHERE. LIGHT AND 
 SHADE. EFFECT. CAST SHADOWS. LIGHT. SUN- 
 SHINE. 
 
 There are some few painters who go far in their 
 neglect of outline and even of line, and who work 
 mainly by means of light and shade or of colors. 
 Among such men was my second teacher, Thomas 
 Eakins. He told me many times that he worked out 
 his figures on a middle fine and let the outline come 
 of itself. His idea was rather sculptural than pictorial 
 and he sought for form by putting large dabs of paint 
 on a broken line giving the center of gravity of a 
 figure, much as a sculptor puts big lumps of wet clay 
 on an upright wire acting as a support or skeleton 
 for his figure. Delacroix also apparently worked on 
 somewhat the same principle, only more for color and 
 less for light and shade than Eakins. This manner of 
 procedure apparently suited these two artists and 
 enabled them to express themselves, and their use of it 
 goes to show that there is no right or wrong way of 
 arriving at good results in the fine arts: everything 
 depends on the individual. 
 
 Colors and color are two of the most important 
 and vital parts of glyptic art. "Colors" refers to the 
 individual shades of the spectrum, represented on the 
 artist's palette by pigments such as cadmium yellow or 
 cobalt. "Color" is a harmonious arrangement of all 
 the "colors." There has always been much confusion 
 
ART AND MAN. 139 
 
 in regard to colors, pigments and color. People have 
 talked for years about the three primary colors. There 
 is no such thing. There are three primary pigments: 
 blue, yellow, red. With these three pigments, one can 
 produce all intermediate pigment tints, tho with less 
 brilliancy than if one has the pure intermediate pig- 
 ments, such as green, orange and purple, in addition. 
 But there are no primary colors in the spectrum. The 
 spectral band consists of any number of colors. The 
 eye can perhaps detect plainly, and language can 
 express easily the name of about seven of those colors, 
 but there are many more. The eye can also see, and 
 words can state that there are three masses of colors 
 in the spectrum far wider than the others and these 
 are green, yellow and red. But the misunderstanding 
 of the terms "colors" and "pigments" has, it seems to 
 me, up to now misled many a painter as well as the 
 laity. 
 
 Colors are one of the earliest apprehended art attri- 
 butes among all races, for they are used almost every- 
 where with early or budding art. Almost if not quite 
 as soon as man begins to show recognition of form 
 and line, he also begins to show a sense of colors, 
 which he is apt to reveal by daubing himself with 
 colored earths mixed with grease. Colors are first 
 used in patches or spots often with most variegated 
 effects without any thought of producing a harmony or 
 what is called color. 
 
 About color it is difficult to speak. For what 
 pleases one person, displeases another. Moreover color 
 is a purely glyptic art attribute, which must be seen 
 to be appreciated, and which cannot be described thru 
 language. Colors, used in a very simple manner such 
 
140 ART AND MAN. 
 
 as in heraldry, can be specified in words but no one 
 can convey to another in words anything like the 
 appearance of or the sensation produced by a work in 
 color. Pictorial color, that is colors used as a har- 
 monious pictorial whole, is only a late development of 
 art, and in some cases, drifts so far away from colors 
 as to become inferior to less learned but more naive 
 attempts. 
 
 This is especially the case where the imitation of 
 local colors is carried too far. Matching shades is 
 deadly. If one imitates as nearly as possible each spot 
 of the colors of a scene in nature, the whole picture 
 is apt to suffer. A more thoughtful method of pro- 
 cedure is to think of the relations of color. If one 
 part of a picture, for instance, is bright yellow, the 
 other parts must, of necessity, be more orange, more 
 red, more purple, more blue, more green. And atten- 
 tion to the relations of the more subordinate tones to 
 the dominant color key note of a picture, will more 
 certainly produce a good color harmony, than will an 
 attempt to imitate on the palette each individual color 
 note in nature. 
 
 The sense of colors and color among various 
 peoples can be compared only in the most general way. 
 Environment has something to do with it; so has 
 training; so has the degree of social development: but 
 race probably has most of all. 
 
 When a lot of people are herded together in big 
 towns of Europe or America the color sense often 
 seems lacking; possibly it becomes atrophied: possibly 
 also dull colors are used for practical reasons, because 
 they show less the dirt of our manufacturing centers. 
 Then again climate and geographical position have an 
 
ART AND MAN". 141 
 
 effect. There is certainly more color and more sense 
 of color in Naples and in Cairo than in London or in 
 Stockholm. Then again the sense of color seems often 
 better among primitive or semi-advanced races than 
 among highly advanced peoples. Moscow is far more 
 beautiful in its colors than Vienna. And our own 
 surviving Amerinds to this day reveal more liking for 
 and sometimes better feeling for color than the 
 American descendants of the European invaders. 
 
 From the geographical standpoint, Asia is pre- 
 eminently the land of colors and color. The East 
 Asiatics and the South Asiatics both have a fine sense 
 of color. The Russians, a semi-Asiatic people, have a 
 strong inborn love of colors. No peoples perhaps, have 
 developed colors more into color harmonies than the 
 South West Asiatics, with their beautiful rugs and 
 woven fabrics. 
 
 Thruout North Africa, in Egypt, Tunis and Morocco, 
 we also find a great sense of color, and this seems 
 largely to coincide with the lands inhabited by Arab 
 races. 
 
 Among the Amerinds, the Australasians, and the 
 African Negroes, we find a good deal of feeling for 
 colors. In some of their decorations or personal 
 ornamentation they not infrequently show a naive, 
 untrained liking for colors, and sometimes unconsciously 
 they reach harmonious effects of much beauty. 
 
 In Europe we find a lesser feeling for colors than 
 for tone. Form and light and shade have ruled in 
 European art and have rather deadened the joy in 
 beautiful tints. There was a naive liking for colors 
 among the primitive Flemish and Italians. But the 
 abuse of dark brown, of Imperial Pharaoh dead and 
 
142 ART AND MAN. 
 
 turned to paint, while conducive to shade, was destruc- 
 tive of colors. Europeans get color harmony, but 
 generally a dull color harmony. Huysmans said that 
 Millet colored in "boue de sabot" and Corot in "leg&re 
 fumie de pipe," and underneath his flippancy there 
 is some truth. Of late years the plein-airistes have 
 brought back colors into European art. But the inborn 
 racial tendency of the White Race is not towards colors 
 and color: it is towards form, drawing, and light and 
 shade. 
 
 Values means the quantity of light or dark, irre- 
 spective of colors, in any part of a picture. 
 Chiaroscuro, or light and shade, is an artistic arrange- 
 ment of values. Atmospheric perspective is a phase 
 of values and refers to the softening and increasing 
 paleness of colors and lights and darks thru distance. 
 
 No one can realize absolute values, that is the 
 absolute relations between lights and darks in nature, 
 since the scale of paint does not include light. The 
 artist can only transpose into a very limited scale 
 what nature gives in a very extended scale. 
 
 To obtain values, that is the relations of lights and 
 darks, as realistically correct on the limited scale as 
 possible, necessitates close observation and also the 
 nearly entire covering of the picture by the paint. 
 Values may be suggested with only some lines and 
 spots, but this means doing without a part of their 
 strength. No matter how accurate they are, values 
 must always remain an artistic convention. 
 
 It is perhaps by careful attention to values, more 
 than to anything else, that the European artist reaches 
 his deceptive effects in imitating nature in oil paint, 
 that is, well considered values add greatly to making 
 
AET AND MAN. 143 
 
 a flat painted surface into an illusion suggesting 
 reality. 
 
 Values are not a primal art instinct: they are a 
 late phase of art. They come only with advanced 
 knowledge, with advanced artistic mental development. 
 In primitive arts, in the African, Australasian and 
 Amerind arts, they are not found at all. They are 
 found only among the European and Asiatic arts and 
 in these they come forward only gradually and do not 
 become perfected until most other technical points 
 have reached full development. 
 
 Effect refers to the appearance of a scene or an 
 object at some one time. The time of day, the 
 position of objects, the play of light and shade, the 
 atmospheric conditions, and many other factors combine 
 to make an effect. A commonplace scene, uninterest- 
 ing in itself, if seen under some advantageous effect, 
 where there is interesting light and shade, may be 
 fine and artistic. 
 
 Effect as an art attribute, belongs mainly to the 
 modern Europeans and to a slighter extent to the 
 South and East Asiatics. It does not seem to have 
 ever dawned on any other races or peoples that effect 
 has a great deal to do with the picturesque. Curious 
 as it may seem, however, there is comparatively little 
 use of effect in East Asiatic art, altho the artists 
 certainly know of it and use it occasionally. As a 
 rule East Asiatics do not represent cast shadows: 
 apparently they look on shadows as something too 
 transitory to perpetuate in painting. As a result of 
 this, their light and shade is much less pronounced 
 than that of Europeans, and partly also for the same 
 reason they do not imitate nature as closely as do 
 
144 ART AND MAN. 
 
 the Europeans. -Their aim is rather for form and 
 color and therefore partly it is that their work is 
 usually more brilliant than ours. 
 
 Light plays a leading role both in nature and in 
 art. Everything is subordinate to light; unless there is 
 natural or artificial light everything is invisible. If a 
 person shuts his eyes tight and then opens them slowly, 
 he becomes cognizant of light before he recognizes 
 any detail whatever. Indeed, if a person with sensitive 
 eyes revolves slowly, with his eyes shut, before an 
 open window thru which sunlight is streaming, he will 
 be aware of when he is facing the room and when he 
 is facing the window: that is a person with closed 
 eyelids may be conscious of light, when he is uncon- 
 scious of any forms or colors. 
 
 In the world of pictorial and decorative art absolute 
 light cannot be attained. Real light does not exist 
 in art. There is, however, what may be called artistic 
 light and this is an important attribute in painting. 
 
 The nearest approach to light, the highest value in 
 art is pure white and therefore the nearest approach 
 which could be made to actual light in pictorial art 
 would be to leave a surface of snow white material 
 bare of paint. Any work put on this will actually dull 
 the light of the material and lower the values. And yet 
 it is only by so doing that an effect of light can be 
 suggested in painting. This can be done in two ways. 
 
 One method of suggesting an effect of light in black 
 and white work is by leaving a piece of bare white 
 paper and working darks in around it, as one sees for 
 instance in some etchings of Rembrandt. In the same 
 way light may be suggested in colored work by 
 painting a bright, pale spot with darker tones sur- 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 145 
 
146 ART AND MAN. 
 
 rounding it, as is often seen in Turner landscapes. By 
 thus centering the brightest spot in a picture in a 
 border of darkness, something like an effect of light can 
 be produced. 
 
 This method, as far as I know, belongs almost 
 wholly to modern European and to later South Asiatic 
 art. Both in Europe and in India it probably dates 
 back to somewhere about 1500 A. D. Whether it was 
 invented independently in both regions or traveled 
 from one to the other I do not know but possibly it 
 went from Europe to India. Certain it is that it 
 occurs in these two arts. It also occurs sporadically in 
 East Asiatic art, but it is distinctly rarer. Nothing of 
 the kind is found in any African, Australasian nor 
 Amerind art; neither does it occur, I believe, in any 
 pre-Gothic European, nor in West Asiatic art. 
 
 The other method of producing an effect of light in 
 a picture is by painting this entirely with brilliant pure 
 spectral colors. At bottom this is an attempt to throw 
 the spectrum on canvas. By making observations on 
 the beveled edge of a mirror and thru a cut glass 
 bottle of water, one can see for oneself that the 
 center of light of the spectrum is pale cadmium yellow 
 placed between emeraude green and vermilion-rose 
 madder. By moving the head a trifle the other colors 
 appear, and blue and violet lead to darkness. The 
 ochres, the earths, black, are not apparent in the 
 spectrum, which means that they do not belong to true 
 spectral colors. The use of the spectral colors as a 
 method of suggesting light is thoroly artistic, but it is 
 also scientific and is susceptible of the following 
 scientific explanation. A ray of sunlight which passes 
 thru drops of misty water or thru a glass prism, 
 
AET AND MAN. 147 
 
 becomes decomposed into the rainbow or spectrum; 
 that is the rainbow or spectrum is the equivalent in 
 colors of a ray of white sunshine. But since painters 
 cannot paint a picture by leaving a bare white surface, 
 the nearest material approach to white light, they are 
 forced to resort to pigments to produce their effects, and 
 if they want to suggest light without centering a light 
 spot in surrounding darkness, the nearest they can do 
 with pigments is to paint pictures in the colors of the 
 spectrum. A copy in pigments of the spectrum itself, 
 would undoubtedly be the closest possible presentation of 
 an effect of light because the pale colors are centered by the 
 dark colors, but since the various accidental forms of nature 
 are infinite and as these furnish the basis of all pictures, 
 all a painter can do is to clothe all these accidental forms, 
 as far as possible, in the colors of the spectrum. 
 
 For an example, suppose we take a clean white 
 canvas, and a palette with the following paints: cobalt, 
 emeraude green, white, lemon cadmium, cadmium, 
 vermilion, rose madder. Then if we paint a picture, 
 toning the colors as much as we choose with white, 
 but mixing greens, yellows, reds and blues as little as 
 possible, we will obtain a result possibly somewhat garish 
 in effect and inaccurate in local color, which however 
 will produce something like a suggestion of light. In 
 fact the picture would be not so much an attempt to 
 suggest the local colors of trees and buildings and 
 humans as an attempt to suggest the vibration of light. 
 
 Now it is not necessary to have a picture with 
 distinct forms to produce such an effect of light. Any 
 pattern or arrangement of spots and lines formed out 
 of the various colors of the spectrum will produce 
 something like the sensation of light. In other words, 
 
148 ART AND MAN. 
 
 this method can be utilized in decorative art. And in 
 fact we do find it used to some extent in decorative 
 art as well as in pictorial art, altho, except in rare 
 instances, probably unconsciously on the part of the artists. 
 
 Among many primitive races of Africa, Australasia 
 and America, we certainly find some brightly colored 
 decorative work. If they have any materials, such as 
 beads, they are sure to work them into patterns which 
 suggest brilliancy. A great deal of East Asiatic work, 
 both decorative and pictorial, is brilliantly colored; 
 and a great deal of their pictorial work, therefore, with- 
 out any centering of the light with a fringe of dark- 
 ness, certainly suggests light. In other words, the 
 desire for brilliant colors which suggest light, that is 
 the unconscious use of the spectrum in art, is general 
 among many races. 
 
 In European art the clothing of pictorial forms 
 in colors of the spectrum has quite recently been 
 advanced to the point of suggesting not only light but 
 also sunshine. This evolution is usually miscalled 
 Impressionist painting, but it is also more correctly 
 called plein air painting. The reason that the ap- 
 pearance of sunshine is attained is because the cast 
 shadows as well as the lights are put in in spectral 
 colors. It was not the great Turner so much as 
 Japanese color prints which set the ball rolling. And 
 this is curious, because there are no cast shadows in 
 Japanese prints and altho there is plenty of light, 
 there is no sunshine. But the latest development of 
 European naturalistic art, evolved in France, depends 
 in itself on the superseding of bituminous light and 
 shade by the vivid coloring which has always belonged 
 to the Asiatic, African, Australasian and Amerind arts. 
 
ART AND MAN. 149 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE HUMAN FIGURE. PROPORTIONS. NUDE. POR- 
 TRAITURE. EYE. EAR. LIP. WAIST. ABDOMEN. 
 HAND. FOOT. 
 
 The sense of form is found more or less in all arts. 
 The conceptions due to the sense of form, the way in 
 which figures and objects are conceived sculpturally, 
 in their proportions, in their action, in their motions, 
 quite apart from the ostensible subject, are called by 
 the French "idee plastique" which may be translated into 
 "plastic thought." In a statue like the Venus of Milo, 
 for instance, we see a plastic thought of the highest 
 type, showing a most idealized sense of form: altho 
 what her ostensible subject is, whether a Venus or a 
 Victory or something else, we do not know nor does it 
 matter. Altho all races have a sense of form, the 
 search for beauty in plastic thoughts is much more 
 developed and advanced among the Europeans and the 
 Asiatics, than among the Africans, the Australasians or 
 the Amerinds. 
 
 Proportions, that is the relative size and length of 
 different parts of the human body, vary in different 
 arts. The sense of proportion varies among different 
 races. Among the European races, the tendency is to 
 make the humans rather tall, with relatively small 
 heads. Even as early as Minoan Crete, the figures are 
 tall and rather thin, with pinched in waists, in fact the 
 Cretan type is a forerunner of the elongated Greek type. 
 The Greeks, among whom form or sculptural sense was 
 
150 ART AND MAN. 
 
 the pre-eminent art characteristic, improved on the 
 Cretan prototype, and it seems as if they were 
 seeking for ideal type forms, rather than for portraits 
 of individuals. During the Gothic art period, circa 
 1100-1450 A. D., there was a temporary lull in seeking 
 for type form: at any rate a good deal of the early 
 medieval sculpture is in natural and realistic rather 
 than in ideal and heroic proportions. When Greek 
 art became known again, however, classical traditions 
 revived. These still continue to a great extent in 
 Europe, altho during the last hundred years various 
 extraneous influences and increased liberalism in art 
 have caused many artists to become more interested in 
 the individual than in the type. 
 
 The Chinese and the Japanese have an excellent 
 sense of form, and in many cases the proportions of 
 their humans are fairly accurate, about six to seven 
 heads in height. But in some of their art nevertheless, 
 notably in the colored prints of certain Japanese 
 artists like Koriusai and Utamaro, the humans are 
 sometimes eight or nine heads in height. Their 
 tendency, however, is to make the head of its natural 
 size in relation to the figure, and not to make it 
 smaller as is done in European figures of eight or 
 more heads in height. The hands and feet, however, 
 in much of their work, for instance in many Japanese 
 prints, are frequently exaggeratedly slender and short. 
 
 Among the Pleistokenes, Bushmen and Arctics, 
 there is always an attempt at purely naturalistic 
 proportions. There are so few sculptures or drawings 
 of humans among the Pleistokenes, that one can only 
 say that apparently they tried to be accurate. With 
 Bushman drawings and Arctic sculptures, however, one 
 
AET AND MAN. 151 
 
 can go farther and say that their makers tried to be 
 accurate and to bring out individual and racial char- 
 acteristics. There is no parti-pris with them: they merely 
 tried naively to reproduce what they saw, and they 
 largely succeeded. In neither of these arts does one 
 see humans with the big heads, small bodies, and tiny 
 legs one finds in other primitive arts. 
 
 In the African, Australasian and Amerind arts, we 
 find frequently, altho not invariably, that the humans 
 have disproportionately big heads, small bodies and 
 tiny legs. The African Negro races, and the Austral- 
 asians, both Melanesians and Polynesians, are especially 
 prone to make short squat figures, averaging four to 
 five heads only in height. Among both Africans or 
 Australasians, however, the proportions are sometimes 
 fairly accurate, perhaps six or seven heads in height. 
 Among the Amerinds, the proportions vary very much: 
 sometimes there are big heads, small bodies and tiny 
 legs, but often the proportions are good and realistic, 
 about the same as naturalistic European art propor- 
 tions. On the whole it may be said that Amerind 
 proportions are, as a rule, better than either African or 
 Australasian proportions. 
 
 It would be hard to say to what causes these 
 exaggeratedly short figures are due. I thought at one 
 time they implied Negro blood, but this is evidently 
 incorrect, as they are found all over Polynesia and in 
 Peru and Yucatan. They certainly show lack of 
 observation and of comprehension of the human figure 
 as a whole. For sometimes African figures with 
 enormous heads, with the hands perhaps extending 
 as low as the instep, nevertheless have the details 
 of each part nicely modelled and worked out. Parts 
 
152 ART AND MAN. 
 
 are observed rather carefully, yet the whole is beyond 
 the grasp of the sculptor. There are endless variations 
 in these proportions, but on the whole, it seems as if 
 realistic proportions were beyond the ken of most 
 primitive race artists. 
 
 Proportions usually are considered only in con- 
 nection with height, but they should be considered also 
 in regard to width and breadth. What do different 
 peoples feel artistically about leanness and obesity? 
 Corpulency, except in caricature, is eschewed as a rule 
 in European art and in South and East Asiatic art. 
 This is certainly a sign that among European and 
 South and East Asiatic races corpulency is not looked 
 on as an element of beauty. In Egyptian art and in 
 West Asiatic art we find many stocky, strong figures 
 but no obese figures. Nor do we find any carvings 
 among the African negroes, the Australasians or the 
 Amerinds which seem to indicate any admiration for 
 overfat human models. On the contrary, we often find 
 in European fashion plates and in some tHe-de-coiffeur- 
 keepsake modern portraits, and occasionally in some 
 Japanese prints, figures which cross the border line from 
 slimness into exaggerated leanness. It seems as if every 
 race on earth preferred normal or below the normal 
 girths for their humans rather than exaggerated bulk. 
 
 Nevertheless it is on record that some races deliber- 
 ately fatten up their females. John Hanning Speke, for 
 instance, describes how the wives of King Rumanika 
 were virtually imprisoned in their kraals and how they 
 were forced, by the rod if necessary, to drink gallons 
 upon gallons of rich milk, until they were perfect moun- 
 tains of flesh and could barely waddle. Whether this 
 custom is due to esthetic reasons, -that is whether cer- 
 
AET AND MAN. 153 
 
 tain races admire overfat women, is hard to say. For 
 it may be due, on the contrary, to the opposite cause, 
 namely to the desire to make the women unattractive, 
 as has certainly been done by various other devices 
 among certain savage tribes, in order to make the 
 women less desirable for other tribes to steal. 
 
 Nude figures are found more or less in almost all 
 arts. In the primitive arts, my impression is that 
 nudes simply represent lack of clothing among the 
 makers, and not in the least any interest in the figure 
 as an art motive. Primitive draughtsmen and sculptors 
 generally saw their neighbors in a state of nature, the 
 more so the nearer they were to the Equator, and as 
 they saw them they tried to make their counterfeit 
 presentments. 
 
 This is, to some extent, also the case in East Asiatic 
 Art. Nude figures never seem to have been a strong 
 impelling art motive for either Chinese or Japanese. To 
 them they are simply an incident in the picture; they 
 are not the picture. If, for instance, East Asiatics paint 
 a bathing scene, they introduce nude figures as part of the 
 scene. But they do not study the nude academically 
 as a solitary object: they do not paint nude figures in 
 front of a meaningless background, as Europeans do, for 
 the sake of the nude figure. They also rarely sculpt 
 nude figures. They are, in fact, not interested artisti- 
 cally in the nude, and their art naturally therefore pays 
 much less attention to it than does European art. This 
 might perhaps be used as an argument to show that the 
 Chinese and Japanese are or were more primitive than 
 the Europeans; and it is certainly one of the strongest 
 possible proofs that their art is not in the least descended 
 from the Greeks. 
 
154 AKT AND MAN. 
 
 It is the Europeans, the Greeks especially, who have 
 been inspired by the nude human figure as an art motive. 
 The Greeks certainly brought the nude in sculpture to 
 perfection. As a race they attached more importance 
 than any other race to athletic men and women. The 
 strong, well developed man or woman appealed to them 
 in nature, and naturally enough it appealed to them 
 also in art. The nude in modern European art is per- 
 haps rather an inheritance from the Greek nude than a 
 spontaneous growth. Modern Europeans undoubtedly 
 never see unclothed humans round them to the extent the 
 Greeks did, and the attempts of the earlier sculptors, the 
 Pisanos, Peter Vischer, etc., were usually at draped figures. 
 Still even thus, next to the Greeks, the modern Euro- 
 peans have probably made the most of the nude human 
 figure. 
 
 Portraits are the counterfeit presentment of a person. 
 In a good portrait, likeness, resemblance, character, are 
 sine qua nons; without them there is no portrait. In 
 portraiture, likeness and character supersede beauty or 
 imagination. But beauty may be put into the technic 
 and handling, and character brought out even if the 
 subject of the portrait is ugly. To obtain these, it 
 does not make any difference whether a portrait painter 
 likes or dislikes his model personally, so long as he 
 loves him artistically as a motive. 
 
 Sculpted portraits are found in more arts than are 
 painted portraits. Some splendid heads in Egypt date 
 back already to the IVth Dynasty. From the Euphrates 
 valley come the Goudeas. The Greeks certainly made 
 some magnificent portrait sculpture, and the art was 
 continued among the Romans. In eastern Asia many 
 of the heads are extremely lifelike, altho, as a rule, 
 
ABT AND MAN. 
 
 155 
 
 Fig. 21. 
 
 <^/3, 
 
 Painting in black of woman's body with pointed legs, head of white 
 wood. Bow of canoe, Alaska. 
 
 ^_E^2_<>£> c^2__££H 
 
 Fig. 22. Metate of puma, Central America. 
 
156 AET AND MAN. 
 
 they are more or less conventionalized. Some of 
 these, as heads of the Buddha, of Kouan Yin, of 
 Kwannon, etc., with their calm expressions and long 
 ear lobes, even tho in some respects symbolic and 
 representing a type rather than an individual, are 
 handled with breadth, accuracy and dignity. The 
 same criticisms also may be made of some, altho 
 fewer, South Asiatic heads. 
 
 Of the primitive races, the Amerinds, in Mexico and 
 Peru, went furthest in sculpture heads. Most of the 
 heads on monoliths and bas reliefs in Mexico and 
 Central America usually show pronouncedly the racial 
 Amerind type, and some of them are really fine 
 sculpture altho it could not be stated that they are 
 portraits of individuals. The Peruvian Incas went a 
 little further in the direction of individuality and 
 produced some heads, especially in terra cotta, which 
 if less impressive than Central Amerind monolith heads, 
 may be considered as sculpted resemblances, that is 
 portraits of particular individuals. In this department 
 of art, the Amerinds show good observation of nature. 
 Among the African negroes, the heads of their wooden 
 statuary are not infrequently good representations of 
 racial type: they are hardly portraits, but they are 
 African negroes. The Australasians scarcely ever reach 
 as far as the African negroes in this respect in their 
 wooden statuary and it is only very sporadically, as 
 for instance in a few small heads from Easter Island, 
 that they show anything like real observation. 
 
 The attainment of resemblance to the human head 
 among various races is distinctly rarer in drawing and 
 painting than in sculpture. There is nothing among the 
 Pleistokenes, Bushmen or Arctics, nor among the 
 
ART AND MAN. 157 
 
 Amerinds, Africans or Australasians, even remotely 
 suggesting pictorial facial portraiture. The West Asiatics 
 and Egyptians drew, perhaps with no exceptions, all 
 their faces in profil and with the eye, perhaps also 
 with no exceptions, full or partly full face: in other 
 words they never drew nor painted a head from obser- 
 vation: a strange fact, considering their excellent 
 sculpted heads. 
 
 It is among the East Asiatics, and the Europeans 
 and South Asiatics that we find real pictorial por- 
 traiture. There are certain resemblances and certain 
 differences in the portraiture in these arts corresponding 
 in the main with their technics. Before touching on 
 these, however, it must be noted that the underlying 
 technical attribute of pictorial portraiture is drawing. 
 Form must be brought out in portraiture. Color and 
 light and shade are wholly secondary. You can get a 
 splendid portrait in few or many lines with neither 
 color nor modelling: and in this method Holbein left 
 us many brilliant examples. You can also get splendid 
 portraits in dabs of color of varying values without any 
 visible lines: but those dabs of color must be in the 
 place where form requires them. In other words, a 
 portrait in dabs of color needs just as accurate draw- 
 ing as a portrait entirely in line. 
 
 Among the East Asiatics, portraiture belongs rather 
 to line drawing than to painting. Sometimes the lines 
 are left to themselves but sometimes they are strengthened 
 by washes of color. As a rule, the East Asiatics, 
 dating from far back, drew and painted the face three 
 quarters, but sometimes full or in profil. In general, 
 their heads are highly conventionalised and do not 
 represent the individual: they lack individual char- 
 
158 ART AND MAN. 
 
 acter: they are typical rather than specialized. And 
 since the East Asiatics omit shadows and do not 
 model the colors much, the absence of shadows and of 
 modelling produces flatness. And this method is so 
 much of a convention with them, that in the inter- 
 esting portrait by an American woman of the late 
 Empress of China,* the artist, it is said, was prevented 
 from putting in the shadows. It has also been said, 
 and doubtless accurately, that some East Asiatic so 
 called portraits were painted after the person's death 
 and were really symbols to memorialize that person 
 and not at all an attempt to get a likeness. 
 
 In many instances, however, the East Asiatics 
 reached character and expression and almost certainly 
 likeness in some of their heads. With a few lines and 
 spots they drew the form. There are some Chinese 
 heads that one can call splendid examples of sincere, 
 straightforward observation. Many kakemonos of the 
 Sung and Ming Dynasties f show heads worthy of any 
 artist. A splendid example of head drawing is a 
 "Portrait of Lu Tong-Pin, One of the Eight Immortals, by 
 T'eng Tch'ang-Yeou, Northern T'ang Dynasty, IX 
 Century."! That is to say, a thousand years ago, some 
 Chinese could draw a head with a snap and a vividness 
 which is unsurpassable. 
 
 Among Japanese painters, there is one whose heads 
 may be mentioned as among the most original works 
 of art ever produced. This is Sharaku, who painted 
 towards the end of the eighteenth century A. D. 
 Little is known of the man, but he left a number of 
 
 * U. S. Nat. Mus. 
 t Boston M. F. A. 
 j Met. Mus. N. Y., November 1917. Lent by Mr. A. F. Jacacci. 
 
AET AND MAN. 159 
 
 colored prints of heads, supposed to be of "No" 
 actors, which, with a few vital lines, reach a strength 
 of character and expression unsurpassed in art. They 
 may or may not be masks: they may or may not be 
 likenesses: but they are psychological drawings of the 
 very highest type. 
 
 European painted portraiture has its roots already 
 in Cretan-Mykenian art. It advanced to the stage of 
 being thoroly comprehended in Greek art, as is shown 
 by the portraits dug up in the Fayum. It is similar to 
 East Asiatic portraiture in that it has good drawing: 
 it is different from it in that it has light and shade 
 and modelling. And the carrying to the extreme of 
 these latter art attributes, gives something of a sculpt- 
 ural effect to European painted heads, it makes them 
 seem round as the living head is. European portraiture 
 thru these means arrives at a more imitative quality 
 than does East Asiatic portraiture without necessarily 
 being superior in regard to likeness. In fact in many 
 cases it seems as if in the laying on of the colors 
 the expressive lines of the face were lost, and likeness 
 weakened rather than strengthened. 
 
 Fine pictorial portraiture is one of the highest 
 achievements of European art, and great European 
 masters of the figure, men like Rembrandt, Velasquez 
 and Moroni, have certainly reached the top-notch in 
 the painted portrayal of human faces. But to obtain 
 anything approaching their results, implies not only a 
 man of ability but also a man having a free rein to 
 get character in his own way. Unfortunately patronage, 
 the potboiling power, often steps in under the guise of 
 the family of the sitter to interfere with and boss the 
 artist. And in addition many of the sitters, well 
 
160 ART AND MAN. 
 
 knowing the defects of their appearance, wish to be 
 improved on and instead of seeming commonplace, to 
 become handsome and distinguished on canvas. And 
 in consequence of such various extraneous causes, 
 ordinarily our portraits are apt to be a sort of com- 
 promise between what the sitter looks like, what the 
 artist thinks the sitter looks like, what the sitter 
 thinks he himself looks like and what he would like 
 to look like, and what the friends and relatives of the 
 sitter think and want the sitter to look like. As each 
 of the persons involved thinks he knows best and each 
 wants something different, the portrait is apt to suffer. 
 A painter must and can paint a portrait only according 
 to his vision, gifts, knowledge and feelings. And when 
 all the aunts and cousins of the sitter each want 
 changes and imaginary beauty instead of character, the 
 portrait loses freshness, life and snap. 
 
 Among the South Asiatics, pictorial portraiture has 
 much more the qualities of European painted portraiture 
 than those of East Asiatic drawn portraiture. This is 
 very apparent in the heads of Persian and Hindu 
 pictures of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries A. D.: 
 and their characteristics might, it could be argued, have 
 come from modern European art. But there are certain 
 fragments of Hindu paintings, notably some in a sort 
 of fresco in the caves of Ajanta, supposed to date 
 from the first to the seventh centuries A. D., which, 
 in an incipient form, show the European characteristics. 
 They are certainly not descended from East Asiatic art: 
 they might be descended from Greek art: but it seems 
 far more probable that they are a native indigenous 
 growth of a race which is more closely allied to the 
 White races of Europe than to the Yellow races of Asia. 
 
ART AND MAN. 161 
 
 Photography, it is sometimes said, is doing away 
 with art. It is true that there is some beautiful 
 photography now: far removed from what it was only 
 two or three decades ago. Certain artistic results are 
 obtained by taking photographs out of focus, but the 
 photographs which are most admired are photographs 
 which have been worked over, which means that many 
 of the most artistic results are obtained by retouching. 
 The camera made the drawing: and on this the photog- 
 rapher drew and painted, softened and accented, 
 darkened and lightened, so as to pull the picture into 
 an artistic whole. These artistic photographs are no 
 longer merely the mechanical performance of a machine, 
 but they have the added work of a human intelligence. 
 In fact, the artistic value of a photograph is usually in 
 inverse ratio to its mechanical accuracy. 
 
 Artistic photography seems to reach its acme in 
 portraiture. Photography is a purely imitative mechani- 
 cal art, and as pictorial portraiture is based largely on 
 imitation, it is more closely in touch with photography 
 than is almost any other phase of art. And the very 
 beginnings of photography emphasize this point. For 
 as soon as Nicephore Niepce, at Lux on the river 
 Saone in France, succeeded in fixing the photographic 
 image on a plate, his commercial partner Daguerre 
 utilized it in his daguerrotypes of people. The first 
 photographs thus were inartistic portraits; and the 
 latest ones are many of them artistic portraits which, if 
 lacking much that a good portrait painter obtains, never- 
 theless have a great many merits which a poor portrait 
 painter is not always able to embody in his work. 
 
 The eye has attracted special notice in various arts.- 
 The eyeball itself, however, without its muscular sur- 
 
162 ART AND MAN. 
 
 roundings and settings of the lids and eyebrow, has no 
 expression of its own, excepting what comes from the 
 expansion and contraction of the pupil. 
 
 A big single eye, drawn full face, is occasionally used 
 for a decoration, in Australasian art, in North West 
 Amerind art, in Central Amerind art, etc. Chilkat 
 blankets often show the single eye. The European 
 Neolithic supposed divinity sometimes consists of little 
 more than two great owl like eyes.* 
 
 The most curious artistic freak connected with the 
 eye consists in drawing the eye full face, in a face in 
 profil. The Egyptians committed this blunder, and are 
 perhaps the only people who did so habitually. It may 
 have been due to some religious notion with them, but 
 artistically it shows lack of observation. 
 
 In some Assyrian slabs the eyes usually are three 
 quarters in faces in full profil. This would seem due to 
 want of observation and poor drawing rather than to 
 an attempt to draw them in the strange Egyptian way, 
 altho of course the Assyrians may have been influenced 
 by this in depicting the eye. 
 
 In some arts, the eyes of the humans are inserted 
 in some shining substance or are colored differently from 
 the heads. For instance, in Polynesian art in New 
 Zealand and Hawaii, some of the eyes are of shell or 
 mother of pearl, and in Easter Island some eyes are 
 made of a stone resembling obsidian. In Amerind art 
 there are some Aztec humans with inset eyes and some 
 Peruvian pottery figures with colored eyes. There are 
 some cases from Africa also; there are some cases in 
 Roman art and perhaps in other arts also; in fact it is a 
 rather widespread custom. 
 
 * Fig. 3. 
 
ART AND MAN. 163 
 
 The ear, in some arts, has the lobe lengthened and 
 widened, occasionally several times more than its natural 
 size. In Asia this distortion is traceable from Baluch- 
 istan to the Malay peninsula and Korea; in Australasia 
 it is found in various islands, such as Easter Island, and 
 notably in Borneo: in America it is most common in 
 Mexico and Central America, and sporadic in the Antilles 
 and Peru. In a protrait drawing of an Amerind by 
 Saint Menin of about A. D. 1800, now in the American 
 Philosophical Society, the ear shows a cut extending across 
 the lobe and around the edge of the ear up to its top, 
 and this ribbon of flesh has been pulled till it rests on 
 the shoulder. This appears to be an extreme case. 
 
 The lips of figures are also occasionally found enlarged 
 in art, principally among the West North Amerinds and 
 the Negroes.* 
 
 The enlarged ear in art some writers have held to 
 be due, I believe, to some such rather fanciful notion as 
 that the Buddha had enlarged ears in order the better 
 to hear the prayers of poor people. In reality it is almost 
 surely due to the habit some Asiatics, Australasians, and 
 Amerinds had of extending their ear lobes with rings or 
 some other inserted article. The same explanation doubt- 
 less holds true of enlarged lips. Both these distortions 
 of parts of the human body in sculpture are really merely 
 renderings of what the artists observed in nature. 
 
 Small waists, that is waists pinched in or con- 
 stricted to below normal size, occur in various arts. 
 They are common in female figures, and even a little in 
 male figures, in Minoan Crete. They are found in 
 Egypt both in some prehistoric statuettes and in some 
 later dynastic sculptures. Some early Babylonian terra 
 
 * Fig. 6. 
 
164 ART AND MAN. 
 
 cotta female figures have exaggeratedly small waists. 
 Certain strange drawings from Australia* show pinched 
 in waists. Some Papuan men constrict their waists 
 with belts, but I have seen no evidence of this in their 
 art. It is hardly necessary to mention how frequently 
 small waists appear in cheap European art, in fashion 
 plates and Meissen porcelain. Undoubtedly all these 
 exaggerations of the human form are based on nature, 
 and they go to show how widely prevalent is the custom 
 of crushing in the inner man regardless of health and 
 pain, for the sake of obtaining a fashionable figure. 
 
 The abdomen is sometimes treated abnormally in 
 sculpture. From the Pleistokenesf, the Kongo Negroes J 
 and the Alaska Amerinds § there are statuettes where 
 the abdomen protrudes, in some cases almost forming a 
 cube. Some of the Alaska Amerind protruding abdo- 
 mens have a hole cut in them. This is also the case 
 with some of the West African statuettes, but more- 
 over these also have a piece of glass inserted. None 
 of these figures can be considered handsome, and most 
 of them are hideous. || 
 
 There is no certain cause which can be assigned for 
 these sculptural freaks. It has been suggested that 
 some of these peoples ate mud or clay in times of 
 famine and that their abdomens swelled out of pro- 
 portion thereby. It has also been thought that the 
 cubical abdomen may represent the fines of the feminine 
 figure at certain moments. For the glass windows no 
 
 * N. W. Thomas: Natives of Australia, 1906. 
 
 f Mus£e de Saint Germain. 
 
 | Amer. M. N. H. 
 
 § Harvard Univ. P. M. 
 
 II %• 8. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 165 
 
 £.S,j3 
 
 Fig. 23. Stone statuette, Eastern United States. 
 
166 ART AND MAN. 
 
 explanation, I believe, has yet been offered. Whatever 
 the cause of this queer distortion of the figure, however, 
 it seems strange that it should appear sporadically in three 
 places and races, quite unconnected with one another. 
 
 There is one curious probably unique instance, in 
 White Race art, of using the abdomen of a statue for 
 utilitarian purposes. Some crank took a small copy of 
 the Venus of Milo and inserted a large watch in the 
 center of the abdomen, resulting in an as insane looking 
 artistic freak as ever was perpetrated. 
 
 The abdomen also is treated sometimes in another 
 abnormal manner. This is where it caves in below 
 the breastbone, in some cases hollowing back almost 
 to the spine. Such fallen in abdomens are found only, 
 I believe, on certain lean and gaunt wooden figures 
 from Easter Island.* There seems no reason to doubt 
 that they are characteristic of humans in the last 
 pangs of starvation, and it requires no stretch of the 
 imagination to associate these starvation abdomens with 
 cannibalism. 
 
 The hand is, of course, found in all arts. In 
 general it is better in sculpture than in painting. In 
 painting it is only the best Europeans and a few East 
 Asiatics who have conquered the hand. There is, as a 
 rule, little character in Chinese and Japanese painted 
 hands: they are much alike and are often dispro- 
 portionately small. They are rather a type form, than 
 individual hands. Among the East Asiatics the long 
 finger nails which a few higher personages indulge in 
 are sometimes represented in art. Sculpted hands 
 are more frequently rendered successfully than are 
 
 * British Mus. Harvard Univ. P. M. Salem P. M. Univ. Penn. 
 M. A. 
 
ART AND MAN. 167 
 
 painted hands and they are found not only in 
 Europe and Eastern Asia, but sporadically in other 
 places. For instance, some African Negro wooden 
 statuettes' hands are fair and betray observation. 
 
 But there is one pictorial rendition of the hand, 
 found among certain races, which is rather strange. 
 This is where a single hand is painted or drawn on 
 rocks or sculpted by itself. The single hand is found 
 in Pleistokene, Australasian, Amerind and Arab, and 
 perhaps in other arts. 
 
 Some hands of this type have been observed on 
 rocks in Australia, and they are quite numerous in 
 Southern California. From Alabama, there is a stone 
 known as the "Rattlesnake Disc"* on which is carved 
 a single hand. 
 
 Single hands are painted or perhaps rather printed 
 on the rock walls of some of the French and Spanish 
 caves. Usually they are reddish in color, as a rule 
 they point upwards, and they are almost always left 
 hands. The inference is that the painter traced his 
 own hand on the rock and then colored the tracing. 
 Some of these hands are now believed to date as far 
 back as Aurignacien Pleistokene art. 
 
 In Arab art, a single hand is frequently modelled 
 alone, usually in some metal like silver. It is known 
 as the hand of Fatma, and is used as a charm. 
 Artistically it is the same thing as the Pleistokene or 
 Amerind hands painted on rock walls. 
 
 What now do these hands mean, and why are they 
 painted or sculpted thus in a few such widely apart 
 places? No definite answer as yet can be given to the 
 
 * Smithsonian Inst. 
 
168 ART AND MAN. 
 
 query. One can only say that something impelled 
 their makers to leave a print or tracing of their hands 
 on rocks, and that it is one of the earliest and most 
 primitive manifestations of the art instinct. 
 
 One must be on one's guard, however. Some years 
 ago, on a rock slab in some forest near Towanda, 
 Pennsylvania, I found a black painted hand. As many 
 Amerinds formerly lived in the vicinity, I thought for 
 a moment I had made a discovery. But the initials, 
 G. B., in the same paint, close by, showed that white 
 men occasionally indulge in this primitive form of art. 
 
 The foot as a rule is drawn or sculpted normally 
 in almost all arts. There are a few exceptions, however. 
 
 Among these are the rare cases from Alaska, from 
 Australia and from Egypt, where the legs, instead of 
 terminating in feet, finish in sharp points.* 
 
 In some Assyrian and some Egyptian bas reliefs, where 
 the figures are niodelled facing the spectator, the feet are 
 modelled in profil. This may be due to the great diffi- 
 culty of suggesting a foreshortened foot in a relief, f 
 
 Distorted feet are found in European art and in 
 East Asiatic art. From Caen, for instance, comes a 
 stone statue of a monk of the fifteenth century, 
 which has a pointed toe. J Europeans, in fact, have 
 distorted their feet for many centuries. In Moscow is 
 a pair of emerald green leather boots of one of the 
 early Tsars, dating back to perhaps 1500 A. D., which 
 end in the sharpest of points in the middle of the 
 foot. And much modern European sculpture shows 
 more or less distorted feet, proving that many sculptors 
 are unaware of what the natural foot looks like. 
 
 * Fig. 21. t Fig. 5. 
 
 % Met. Mus. N. Y. 
 
ART AND MAN. 169 
 
 There are some few Chinese drawings which show 
 the feet of high class women turned inwards and 
 crushed into a stump. As far as I know, these are 
 the only representations of distorted feet in Asiatic art. 
 
 Among all primitive peoples, on the contrary, the 
 feet, when drawn or sculpted, usually are done so nor- 
 mally. Primitive peoples may distort their heads or their 
 ears, or some other parts of the body. But they never 
 distort their feet, probably because under primitive 
 conditions of life, a person with damaged feet would 
 have but a poor chance in the struggle for existence. 
 The Japanese also never show distorted feet in their art. 
 On the contrary, in some of the prints of Hokusai, the 
 bare foot in action is often to the fore. This is simply a 
 record of what Hokusai must frequently have seen. For 
 with the Japanese, the toes, untrammelled and undamaged 
 by leather shoes, have almost the prehensile qualities of 
 fingers and are used by mechanics almost as if they were 
 a second set of hands. I have never noticed the foot in 
 action in Chinese art, and maybe it is found only in 
 Japanese art. 
 
170 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 HUNTING DISGUISES. MONSTEES. MASKS. MONOLITHS. 
 
 CARVED POLES. 
 
 Hunting disguises have been used from time 
 immemorial among many races. A hunter would put 
 on the skinned head and sometimes the whole skin 
 of some animal or bird in order to stalk his game more 
 easily. The idea of such disguises evidently originated 
 in many places. The Pleistokenes and the Bushmen 
 used them, the Eskimo still use them, they have been 
 reported as worn in East Africa, and doubtless in 
 other parts of the world hunting tribes have benefited 
 by them. Even in Europe of late years, hunting 
 disguises have been utilized, as for instance by the 
 guide Laurent Lanier of Courmayeur* who, when after 
 chamois, donned a cap made of a chamois head with 
 horns affixed and on one occasion was nearly shot in 
 consequence. 
 
 In certain arts there are representations of men 
 wearing the heads and sometimes the skins of animals 
 or birds. In most, perhaps in all cases these drawings 
 are taken from hunting disguises. 
 
 There are several such drawings from the Pleis- 
 tokene Magdal6neen, of hunters wearing chamois skins 
 and heads. There are a number of Bushman pictures 
 which show hunters dressed up with the skins and horns 
 of animals such as antelopes, or the heads and feathers of 
 birds such as ostriches. In both these arts, these draw- 
 ings are evidently representations of hunting disguises. 
 
 * Alpine Journal, 1911, Vol. XXV., page 676. 
 
AET AND MAN. 171 
 
 In various arts, monsters or fabulous animals, 
 in the form of human headed animals, or animal 
 headed humans, are found. There are many such 
 monsters, of which the Sphinx is the most noteworthy 
 example, in Egyptian art. From Nuffer, Babylonia, 
 there are some badly done small sculptures of bulls 
 with human heads dating from perhaps 2500 B. C. 
 A sort of sphinx is found in Hatti art. From 
 Khorsabad, Assyria, come many monsters, among which 
 are human headed winged lions and eagle headed 
 humans. From Hindustan, there are some animal 
 headed humans, known as Vishnu, Ganesh, etc., whose 
 technic, however, is quite different from that of 
 Egyptian or West Asiatic monsters. 
 
 These various monsters are usually looked on as 
 representations of deities, or as symbolic or allegorical 
 figures. Possibly they may be, but their artistic origin, 
 it seems to me, must be sought for in something 
 actually seen, and the only thing which can be sug- 
 gested is the hunting disguise. It is true that in 
 Egypt, in Western Asia, and in Southern Asia, statues 
 of monsters have got away entirely from hunting dis- 
 guises. But altho the original idea was obliterated, 
 it seems much more probable that these monsters are 
 reminiscent of an early hunting stage, than that they 
 were inventions springing out of some religious or 
 mystical conceptions. 
 
 Certain other fabulous animals, however, such as 
 dragons and griffins, probably are conventionalized 
 memories of wild animals and do not spring from hunt- 
 ing disguises. The Chinese dragon, for instance, may 
 easily be a degenerate crocodile. 
 
 There are some other statues, such as the Brahm- 
 
172 ART AND MAN. 
 
 anistic Hindu figures with sometimes as many as forty- 
 two arms, which may also be called monsters. But 
 they have nothing to do with hunting disguises or 
 animals, for they are wholly human. Possibly they 
 are intended to symbolize by repetition some special 
 attribute of some deity. This would seem the most 
 available explanation for these freaks, which certainly 
 lack any genuine imaginative invention and artistically 
 are hopeless. 
 
 Masks for the face are another widely distributed 
 art form which bears relationship to hunting disguises. 
 They are found numerously among the Greeks, Romans, 
 Europeans, South Asiatics, Chinese, Japanese, Malays, 
 Australasians, West North Amerinds, East North 
 Amerinds, and Mexicans. They are less numerous 
 among the African Negroes. They are still rarer 
 among the Egyptians, the West Asiatics and the 
 Arctics. Among the latter masks were perhaps im- 
 portations: the few among the Alaska Eskimo, for 
 instance, being very likely imitated from those of the 
 West North Amerinds. Among the Pleistokenes and 
 the Bushmen, masks proper seem to have been entirely 
 wanting. 
 
 Masks, as a rule, appear to be connected with 
 religious or dancing ceremonies. Among the Greeks 
 and Romans, and the Chinese and Japanese, they were 
 largely used for theatrical purposes. It may be that 
 masks started in hunting disguises, indeed it seems most 
 probable that they did: that originally they sprang up 
 because they were useful adjuncts in obtaining food. 
 Later they may have drifted away naturally from their 
 primal purpose, and have survived, because they were 
 utilized for something else. But it would seem reason- 
 
AET AND MAN. 173 
 
 able to think that the makers of dancing or religious 
 masks got their first idea from seeing hunters equipped 
 for the chase. 
 
 Monoliths of stone, and carved poles of wood, are 
 found scattered over most of the globe. Of the stone 
 monoliths or megaliths, some are plain, some are 
 carved and decorated. The wooden poles are all more 
 or less carved and decorated. Altho the materials out 
 of which stone monoliths and wood poles are formed 
 are different, the underlying thought is the same, to 
 erect an upright monument in one piece. 
 
 Undecorated stone monoliths, usually called megaliths, 
 were set up already in early times. In western Europe, 
 they are common. Brittany is perhaps the locality 
 most famous for them, and Stonehenge and Carnac are 
 perhaps the best known places where there are numbers 
 of megaliths close together. West European megaliths 
 belong to Neolithic times, when art was almost lacking, 
 and for that reason perhaps, are not carved in any 
 way. 
 
 Undecorated megaliths are found in other parts of 
 the world. Some are reported from Abyssinia; there 
 seem to be some at Zimbabwe; in Hindustan they are 
 common; and they occur in still other places. Whether 
 these megaliths are all Neolithic is perhaps uncertain, 
 but it seems as if they might be. 
 
 Decorated stone monoliths are especially common 
 in two localities, Egypt and Central America. The 
 Egyptian obelisks are nothing but megaliths decorated 
 with hieroglyphs, and the Mayan monoliths are some- 
 what of the same nature, except that besides bearing 
 hieroglyphs, they are also sculpted occasionally with 
 heads or figures. 
 
174 ART AND MAN. 
 
 There are some Hindu monuments, which are a 
 sort of decorated monolith. There is such a piece, 
 called a "Burso," in the Salem Museum, with figures, 
 animals, shrines, etc., carved one above the other. 
 
 The art form of wooden posts or poles with sculp- 
 tures one over the other, is found in western North 
 America, in Korea, in Australasia, in western Central 
 Africa. 
 
 The carved wooden pole reaches its acme in Alaska, 
 whose totem poles are the best known instances of 
 carved wooden post art. They are genuine family- 
 trees, for the totems carved on them show the descent 
 of the owner. These totems represent various animals 
 and birds, bear, beaver, seal, eagle, etc., and the 
 impelling force to make totems is probably akin to the 
 one prompting us to found genealogical societies and 
 the Chinese to ancestor worship. The Australian 
 Churinga marks are practically totems. The Scotch 
 plaid designs are really the surviving totems of the 
 clans. All heraldry is totemistic; it is a descent from 
 totems; in fact coats of arms are nothing but totems. 
 
 There are some guide posts from Korea, which are 
 wooden poles carved at the top into one big head: 
 their technic is closely related to Australasian art, and 
 they are doubtless a survival of Early Asiatic art. 
 
 From various parts of Australasia, there come carved 
 wooden posts. In Borneo, wooden poles with superposed 
 decorations are sometimes placed by the Kayans in front of 
 their houses. From the Hervey Islands, Polynesia, 
 there comes a pole with one big head and two smaller 
 heads under it. From New Guinea, Melanesia, there 
 are some poles which have as many as three heads and 
 three patches of decorative work sculpted one over the 
 
ART AND MAN. 175 
 
 other: the technic is Melanesian and quite unlike West 
 North Amerind work. 
 
 There are a few carved wooden poles from Africa. 
 From Nigeria for instance, there come wooden posts 
 with several figures carved one above the other.* The 
 technic is purely Negro, not in the least Amerind nor 
 Australasian. But the idea of several sculptures one 
 over the other is the same in Alaska, Australasia, and 
 Nigeria. 
 
 That all the makers of megaliths or of carved 
 wooden posts are related by blood, is of course impos- 
 sible. Unless there is similarity in the artistic manner 
 of work, therefore, it is safe to assume a certain 
 amount of independent development for megaliths and 
 carved poles. 
 
 The makers of plain megaliths appear to be mainly 
 European or Asiatic: of decorated megaliths Egyptian 
 and Mexican: of carved wooden posts Amerind, Aus- 
 tralasian and Negro. In Pleistokene, Bushman, and 
 Arctic art there is nothing of the kind. It is a some- 
 what curious phase of art, for whose widespread distri- 
 bution it is difficult to account, except that big stones 
 and tree trunks gave an opportunity for a sculptor to 
 display his ingenuity. 
 
 * British Mus. 
 
176 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 POTTERY AND FRAMES. 
 
 Pottery apparently was invented only long after 
 the fine arts. For Pleistokene deposits in almost all 
 cases have not yielded any specimens of pottery. It 
 has been claimed, however, that Dr. Oscar Fraas, at 
 Hohlefels in Wurtemburg, found a few potsherds in a 
 Paleolithic horizon.* It is possible, therefore, that some 
 of the later European Pleistokenes did have rough pot- 
 tery. In Neolithic times, on the contrary, pottery 
 was common, and some of it was decorated. 
 
 Not only is it not known when pottery was invented, 
 but it is not known where pottery was invented. While 
 it may have spread from one center, it seems rather as 
 if it grew up in a number of places. Porcelain, which 
 may perhaps be looked on as fine pottery, developed 
 first in China. 
 
 Pottery is almost, but apparently not quite, universal. 
 It is found among the Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, Aus- 
 tralasians and Amerinds, with two possible exceptions. 
 These are the Pleistokenes and Bushmen. It may be 
 that there was some pottery among these races, but 
 if so, museums are singularly deficient in specimens. 
 The claims mentioned above that potsherds have been 
 found in Pleistokene deposits, are rather a surmise than 
 a certainty, for the Hohlefels potsherds may be Neolithic. 
 And if it is true, and it seems as if it were, that these 
 two races, with arts so similar, are lacking in one of the 
 
 * Charles Rau: The Stone Age in Europe: " Harper's New Monthly 
 Magazine, " Vol. LI, 1875, page 243. 
 
ART AND MAN. 177 
 
 most imperative necessities of life, we have a coincidence 
 at least of extreme interest. 
 
 Usefulness is the primary quality of all pottery or 
 porcelain. Is it useful? might be considered the first 
 test in judging any piece of pottery. A practical 
 shape, with a sufficiently wide base to prevent over- 
 turning easily, seems to be the elementary desideratum. 
 Beauty of form and beauty of decoration, in potteries 
 as well as in architecture, should be subservient to 
 usefulness. If potteries and buildings are not practical, 
 do not fulfill their purpose, they are inferior. Useful- 
 ness in some branches of art apparently has been con- 
 fused by certain writers with truth and has led to 
 some erroneous assertions and theories. 
 
 The potteries of primitive peoples thruout the world 
 come up well to the level of the test of usefulness. 
 Neolithic, Australasian, Amerind and African potteries 
 one might say are made invariably for some definite 
 purpose and in them beauty of form is not sought for 
 to the detriment of the function of the pottery. The 
 same apparently is true of Egyptian and West Asiatic 
 pottery. It is true also as a rule in the large majority 
 of cases of South Asiatic and East Asiatic earthen- 
 wares: altho occasionally in both these arts there are 
 some potteries which, while pretty, would be of no 
 practical benefit to anyone. 
 
 It is in Europe especially, beginning with the Greeks 
 and continuing anew among modern Europeans, that we 
 find an abandonment of useful for purely ornamental 
 shapes in potteries. Many of the Greek potteries and 
 of the Meissen, Sevres and English porcelains have such 
 small bases that they only barely overcome the attrac- 
 tion of gravitation; their delicate handles and necks are 
 
178 ART AND MAN. 
 
 so frail that the veriest zephyr would disintegrate them; 
 the spouts of jugs and pots for liquids are so contrived 
 as to empty the contents on the floor or the table 
 instead of in the cup: and the shape is planned so 
 that the inside cannot well be cleaned. This art, where 
 the appearance is placed ahead of the intrinsic purpose, 
 is bad. The primitive and the Asiatic races are really 
 ahead of the Europeans in this line. 
 
 When we turn to the decoration of pottery, we find 
 it as universal as pottery itself. Wherever pottery is, 
 there also is pottery decoration. And the essence of 
 pottery decoration is that it should be decorative and 
 not pictorial. For while a plaque or a tile may be 
 used as a surface on which to paint a picture, the 
 curves of useful potteries, vases, cups, etc., prevent, by 
 distortion, any successful painting of pictures. Such 
 attributes of pictorial art as perspective and values are 
 not suitable for pottery decorations. 
 
 Among the primitive races who had pottery, the 
 Africans, Australasians and Amerinds, and also among 
 the more advanced Egyptians and West Asiatics, pottery 
 decoration is almost wholly decorative. This comes 
 probably from the fact that these races never really 
 reached the pictorial art stage. In one or two sporadic 
 instances, as among the Zunis, an attempt appears to 
 have been made to give a naturalistic rendering of the 
 animals they drew as decorations. But the drawings 
 are not sufficiently good to be pictures, altho some- 
 times they make admirable decorations. Indeed the 
 decorative qualities of the drawings of primitive peoples, 
 obeying their art instincts and unhampered by too 
 much learning, often result in most pleasing and appro- 
 priate specimens of decorative pottery art. 
 
ABT AND MAN. 179 
 
 Naturalistic pictures, altho they do not seem to be 
 in perfect accord with the spirit of pottery decoration, 
 are painted, to some extent in eastern Asia and to a 
 much greater extent in Europe, on vases, jars, etc. In 
 the best examples, they are done on the flatter surfaces 
 of these vases, that is on the central parts or bodies. 
 The necks and feet of such vases, being more curved, 
 are often handled with purely ornamental designs, or 
 with circular bands of various kinds, corresponding to 
 collars and belts on humans. This method is found 
 commonly in Greek and modern European potteries; 
 less frequently in East Asiatic; and exceedingly seldom, 
 if indeed ever, among primitive races. It almost seems 
 as if the strong pictorial sense of the Europeans entailed 
 to some extent a weaker decorative sense. 
 
 While, as already said, it is not known when or 
 where pottery was invented but that it may well have 
 been in a certain number of places, it may be noticed 
 that there are two especially important centers of 
 dispersal, western Asia and China. Old Persian pot- 
 tery, whose possible birthplace is the Euphrates valley, 
 affected Arab glazed pottery, which affected in turn 
 Spanish pottery. These are all rather similar in their 
 make and also in their decorations, tho, of course, 
 there are local variations, such for instance as the 
 beautiful golden brown Valencia pottery of about A. D. 
 1500. Persian-Arab pottery certainly traveled into 
 India, and West Asiatic pottery may have had an 
 effect on early Chinese pottery, altho this might be 
 difficult to prove. 
 
 It was in China that pottery evolved to its highest 
 technical stage, that of true porcelain. We recognize 
 this in calling porcelain "china." The material technic 
 
180 ART AND MAN. 
 
 of porcelain does not seem to have spread to the west- 
 ward of China — since Persian, Arab and Spanish pieces 
 are glazed pottery rather than porcelain — until it came 
 to modern Europe across the seas. The improvement of 
 Chinese pottery into porcelain helped largely — just as 
 proper tools and materials bring about changes in other 
 branches of art — to bring about changes in decorations. A 
 comparison of Chinese porcelains and Greek potteries will 
 make this clear. When some hall in a museum is filled 
 with Chinese potteries and porcelains, there is an effect 
 of brilliant multi-colored variety. When a similar hall 
 is filled with Greek potteries, a reddish-black semi- 
 monochromatic somewhat monotonous effect is produced. 
 As a mass, therefore, Greek pottery must probably be 
 ranked below Chinese porcelain, a leading cause perhaps 
 being that the Greek artists were fighting with one arm 
 tied behind their backs, since they did not have at 
 their disposal the tools and substances the Chinese 
 artists played with. 
 
 The decoration of pottery in Europe is apparently 
 mainly a native growth. In Neolithic times it may 
 have been partly an exotic, to the extent at least that 
 it is very similar to the decoration of the Neolithic 
 pottery of western Asia. Later also Arab decoration 
 and still later East Asiatic decoration had some influence 
 on European pottery decoration. But Cretan-Minoan 
 pottery decoration was an independent White race art. 
 It had a rebirth in Greek pottery and was continued 
 in Roman times. Then it revived again with Italian 
 faience, which had but little affiliation to Persian-Arabic 
 pottery, to which it is inferior, whilst it is strongly 
 reminiscent of old Cretan-Minoan pottery. The Italian 
 potters did not turn to decorative patterns however, 
 
AKT AND MAN. 
 
 181 
 
 
 T3 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 e 
 
 « 
 
 oc 
 
 CO 
 
 
 
 .5 
 
 OS 
 
 g 
 
 F— 1 
 
 S 
 
 *■ 
 
 v 
 
 ►>! 
 
 <S 
 
 OJ 
 
 
 t-l 
 
 
 3 
 
 a 
 
 02 
 
 g 
 
 
 s 
 
 cd 
 
 H) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 -a 
 
 o 
 
 O 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 <D 
 
 
 72 
 
 ffi 
 
 « 
 
 w 
 
 T3 
 
 'Eh 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 «- 
 
 Pn 
 
 CD 
 
 o w 
 
 1> oS 
 M 
 
 g to 
 
 ■a 
 
 a ?o 
 
 
 'S 
 
 Ph 
 
 
182 ART AND MAN. 
 
 but attempted rough pictures, and their method and 
 manner of decorating evolved or perhaps degenerated 
 into Meissen and Sevres porcelains, where the picture is 
 painted on an already glazed surface. 
 
 Frames are an invention of man which profoundly 
 affect art. Pictorial effects in nature are not framed 
 either with rectangles or with circles. Frames are an 
 art convention and one of those which most differ- 
 entiate art from nature. The Europeans, the Asiatics, 
 and perhaps the Egyptians, thought out a surrounding 
 border for their pictures.' Possibly the earliest idea of 
 a frame dates from Minoan-Crete. The Pleistokenes, 
 Bushmen, and Arctics; the Africans, Australasians and 
 Amerinds, never thought out anything like a frame. 
 The pictures by the latter races, therefore, all lack a 
 certain conventional finish; and may be spoken of as 
 drawings, or paintings, or studies, of one or more objects, 
 rather than as finished pictures. It seems as if peoples 
 who lived out of doors with few clothes did not evolve 
 frames, which go together with indoor house trappings. 
 Nevertheless, some of the unframed paintings of primi- 
 tive peoples are more effective and suggestive than 
 some of the framed pictures of more advanced races. 
 
 The technical make up of frames, a difficult prob- 
 lem, has perhaps been best solved by the East Asiatics. 
 They surround their water colors with a colored silk or 
 brocade border, and fasten them to a round stick, on 
 which they can be rolled up. From the utilitarian 
 point of view the result is admirable. For the pictures 
 can be rolled up and stored away in safety or unrolled 
 and hung up in a moment. From the esthetic side, 
 the result is equally satisfactory. For the delicate water 
 colors not only look well in their beautiful silk borders, 
 
AKT AND MAN. 183 
 
 but they can be hung up and looked at for only a 
 brief spell of artistic enjoyment, instead of hanging on 
 the wall until the owner becomes unconscious of their 
 presence. They are in marked contrast to the heavy, 
 costly and fragile European frames, whose only redeem- 
 ing quality is the gold. 
 
184 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNIC. FORM. COLOR. STONE 
 IMPLEMENTS. SCULPTURE. BAS RELIEF. PAINTING. 
 
 Evolution in art must be held to include the birth, 
 life and death of everything connected with art. It 
 should take into account the rise and development of 
 the faculties of the artists themselves, of how they felt 
 and saw, of what caused them to sculpt and paint, of 
 their appreciation of form, of their sense of color, etc. 
 This phase of art evolution, however, is omitted here, 
 as it is sufficiently touched on in other parts of this 
 book. Evolution must cover all the beginnings, advances, 
 retrogressions and endings of technical processes, how 
 sculpture was invented, when drawing appeared, why 
 color was employed, how materials were utilized and so 
 forth. It must deal with subjects and motives, with 
 animals, humans, and landscapes in the various sculpt- 
 ural and pictorial arts; and it must include all decora- 
 tive art, its starts, its growths and expansions, and its 
 innumerable patterns. 
 
 Evolution in art as a whole progresses in certain 
 respects as a continuous movement, but in certain other 
 respects it progresses rather in a series of steps or 
 jumps which might be described as a succession of 
 births and deaths. It does not seem as if art having 
 begun, as far as we know, among the Pleistokenes, went 
 from them by direct descent to the Cretans, the Egyp- 
 tians, the Chinese, the Eskimo, and so forth. It seems 
 as if it had evolved and disappeared, and re-evolved 
 
ART AND MAN. 185 
 
 and re-disappeared, in place after place, rather than as 
 if it had swept on in one unbroken stream flowing peace- 
 fully and uninterruptedly from its source. 
 
 In a majority at least of and probably in all the vari- 
 ous arts, the earlier forms of any art were the simplest, 
 and in time by self development, and a process of give 
 and take, they were followed by more complex forms. 
 That is to say the art of each race has, like everything 
 else, obeyed the law of evolution. 
 
 The evolution of art technic is one of the most 
 comprehensive fields in the domain of comparative art. 
 Art technic begins far back in the history of man. It 
 is found, of course, in the earliest art works of the 
 earliest artists of European Pleistokene times, but in 
 fact, art technic antedates the earliest fine arts and 
 coincides with the first conscious efforts of the mechan- 
 ical arts. Art technic really first appears in stone imple- 
 ments. Man was forced, thru his necessities, to evolve 
 the mechanical art of chipping or splitting stones into 
 implements, and in so doing he unconsciously evolved 
 the method of how to chip or engrave stones and bones 
 into sculptures or bas reliefs. Stone implements are 
 really the first gropings for form and the technical start 
 of sculpture, drawing and engraving. And because 
 stone implements show the first development of the 
 sense of form in man, because the technic of the earliest 
 art undoubtedly springs from them, and because they 
 must be looked on as the beginnings of the fine arts, a 
 brief study of stone implements is imperative. 
 
 Stone implements and a few fossil human remains 
 offer the earliest clues of man's presence on the earth. 
 Stone implements have been found in Europe, Africa, 
 Asia, Australasia, and America, and altho there are 
 
186 ART AND MAN". 
 
 some localities where they have not been traced as yet, 
 still it may safely be said that they are universal. All 
 the evidence afforded by stone implements, however, 
 leaves us wholly in doubt as to man's origin. Never- 
 theless it goes a good way towards showing that 
 there was no hiatus or break in the history of early 
 man. It also hints that he developed on a large part 
 of the earth rather than that he settled the earth by 
 migrating and wandering from one spot. Man undoubt- 
 edly moved to and fro on the earth to a certain extent 
 and did not always remain in just the same places, it 
 is true, but, at any rate, at the beginning of the Pleis- 
 tokene he was scattered over the whole of Europe. 
 
 Like everything else, stone implements obeyed the 
 law of evolution and their evolution must have taken 
 place as follows. The earliest man simply picked up 
 any convenient stone and used it to hammer nuts or 
 to throw at an enemy. Then when he began to exert 
 his intelligence, he proceeded to fracture stones to get 
 cutting edges and points: that is he invented imple- 
 ments, altho at first he gave them no special form. 
 In due time he fractured stones into distinct forms 
 because he found those shapes convenient, and this was 
 really the first application of the sense of form by 
 man. Finally he polished his stone implements smooth, 
 keeping nevertheless pretty much the same forms he 
 had evolved in chipped stones. Later when he had dis- 
 covered metals, he began to substitute copper and 
 bronze for stone. In accordance with their character- 
 istics therefore, stone implements may be divided into 
 four classes. First, ordinary stones or pebbles. Second, 
 stones chipped or fractured to obtain a cutting edge or 
 point, but not fashioned into any special forms. Third, 
 
ART AND MAN. 187 
 
 stones chipped into definite forms. Fourth, stones 
 chipped into definite forms and then polished. 
 
 That prehistoric man once had depended on stone 
 implements to obtain food and shelter and to struggle 
 against wild beasts, had drifted entirely out of the ken 
 of present day man. Stone implements had to be 
 rediscovered by modern archaeologists and their dis- 
 covery was made backwards in the order of their 
 evolution. Polished stone implements were the first 
 accepted as genuine artifacts by scientists. Then 
 formed chipped stones were recognized. And only within 
 the last two decades have formless chipped stones been 
 accepted also as genuine artifacts by some, not by all, 
 archaeologists. 
 
 The names which are now generally applied to the 
 three classes of stones fashioned by man are eolith, 
 paleolith, and neolith. Eolith refers to the stones 
 without special form, but which may have been chipped 
 by man, and the name comes from the Greek 'rjw 
 meaning the dawn. Paleolith is used for formed 
 chipped or split stones and means "ancient stone." 
 Neolith is applied to polished stone implements and 
 means "new stone." It is most convenient to use this 
 nomenclature, but the French terms, pierre eclatee, that 
 is chipped stone or split stone; and pierre polie, that is 
 polished stone or smooth stone, are more accurate and 
 descriptive. The weak point of the accepted termin- 
 ology, however, is that it is associated with time, and 
 not with shape or make. Dawn stones, ancient stones, 
 new stones, are certainly not descriptive terms like 
 formless chipped stones, formed chipped stones, and 
 polished stones. Moreover they are inaccurate, for if 
 we talk of paleolithic implements, the mind instinc- 
 
188 ART AND MAN. 
 
 tively assumes that they mean implements dating back 
 to Pleistokene times. Now the fact is that all the 
 forms of stone implements are in use even in our own 
 day. They have survived in Australasia, in Brazil, in 
 Central and South Africa, and perhaps in other places. 
 We ourselves sometimes act in a pre-implement stage. 
 When, for instance, boys shy stones, or a coachman 
 picks up a pebble and dislodges with it another pebble 
 in a horse's hoof, it is simply a return to the condi- 
 tions of life of our earliest forefathers and, therefore, 
 when unformed or formed chipped stones or polished 
 stone implements are found anywhere, one must be 
 very sure before asserting that the implements date 
 back so and so many thousand years to the Pleis- 
 tokene or the Pleiocene. 
 
 Stone implements apparently took several hundred 
 thousand years for their evolution. The oldest are very 
 rough and their advance to polished forms is most gradual. 
 In Europe it has been possible, following geologic pre- 
 cedents, to classify a number of strata or horizons by the 
 stone implements found in them. The lowest strata 
 hold only the roughest kinds of stone implements, while 
 the horizons above these progressively in regular order 
 hold more and more perfect stone implements. But 
 while the rougher forms sometimes linger over into later 
 horizons, the developed forms are never found below 
 certain horizons. They therefore mark certain periods 
 of archseologic times in Europe and have thereby an 
 important bearing on Pleistokene times and Pleistokene 
 art. To how far back the earliest stone implements may 
 be assigned is still a moot question. Some ethnologists 
 claim that none of the finds antedate the Quaternary; 
 others, of whom I am one, think that some of the finds 
 
ART AND MAN. 189 
 
 show that Tertiary man lived certainly in Europe, and 
 possibly in other places, among which may be mentioned 
 India and South Africa. Many of the older implements 
 found in northern France and in Great Britain are 
 marked with glacial striae, an absolute proof that they 
 were manufactured before at least the last great ice, and 
 possibly much earlier. 
 
 Formed chipped stones or paleoliths make their 
 appearance in western Europe towards the beginnings 
 of the Pleistokene epoch. The big almond shaped 
 chipped stones, known as coups de poing or axes, which 
 were among the first to be accepted as genuine artifacts, 
 are found in Europe in the so called Chelleen horizon. 
 Similar axes have been found in many parts of the 
 world, as in Somali Land by Mr. H. W. Seton-Karr, 
 and recently in Kansas by Mr. Brower, as proved by 
 Dr. Winchell. But tho the European Chelleen, the 
 Somali Land, and the Kansas axes coincide as to form, 
 there is nothing to show that they coincide as to time. 
 They may date from tens of thousands of years apart, 
 tho again they may not. It would seem as likely, 
 however, that they were independent discoveries by 
 different races at different times, as that they were 
 forms transmitted by early travel and commerce. 
 
 As Pleistokene times progress in Europe, the forms 
 of chipped stone implements evolve. Scientists at first 
 assumed that all chipped stones were weapons, spear 
 heads, arrow heads, etc. This was gradually discovered 
 to be an error, and it was recognized that many stone 
 implements were not weapons, but tools such as 
 choppers, flayers, grinders, pestles, etc. Many of 
 them are broken away in such a manner as to form 
 a handle at one end. Others are so fashioned as to 
 
190 ART AND MAN". 
 
 suggest that they were imitations of bones, such as the 
 scapula, which themselves were probably used as 
 implements. The New Zealand patu-patu probably 
 evolved from some such bone. Many of the forms of 
 these chipped stone implements are continued in 
 polished stone implements, that is the form of the 
 implement was found long ago and the polishing was 
 an afterthought. 
 
 In America likewise, the forms and technic of stone 
 implements are an evolution. My friend, Dr. Charles 
 Conrad Abbott, discovered this fact before 1870 and 
 from his observations he reasoned out that the early 
 Amerind must have been a Paleolithic man, a con- 
 clusion he published in 1872.* Many further observa- 
 tions by Abbott showed that in the Delaware Valley 
 there are three horizons of culture, the earliest of 
 which is Pleistokene, facts which he published in 1881. f 
 Since then he has been entirely corroborated by the 
 patient researches, extending over many years, of Mr. 
 Ernest Volk.J The evidence so far goes to show 
 that early American man was the ancestor of the 
 historic "Indian;" that he was here before at least the 
 last glacial period; and that tho he is not nearly as 
 old as early European man, yet that he was here in 
 later Pleistokene times. § If 500,000 years is con- 
 ceded to European man, 50,000 years might readily be 
 conceded to American man. 
 
 * The Stone Age in New Jersey: "American Naturalist," 1872, 
 Vol. 6, page 146. 
 
 f Primitive Industry, 1881. 
 
 X The Archaeology of the Delaware Valley: " Papers of the Peabody 
 Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 
 1911." 
 
 § Edwin Swift Balch: Early Man in America: "Proceedings 
 American Philosophical Society," Vol. LVI, 1917, pages 473-483. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 191 
 
192 ART AND MAN. 
 
 The earliest formed chipped stone implements are 
 most interesting in their relation to art, because they 
 are the first sign that man puts forth of a budding 
 sense of definite form and symmetry. Of course, these 
 roughly shaped stones are only specimens of mechanical 
 or industrial art, nevertheless with them man first 
 shows a recognition of form per se. We can feel 
 certain that at about that vague period of time, the 
 beginning of the Quaternary, man had evolved to a 
 point when he had already a sense of symmetry and 
 a recognition of form. He was therefore already 
 absolutely distinct from all other animals. Whether he 
 had any idea of color at that time, is at present 
 uncertain. As far however as actual specimens show, 
 form was the first art attribute which man developed. 
 
 As man kept improving the forms of chipped stone 
 implements thru the Pleistokene period, he also kept 
 improving his technic in chipping or splitting them. 
 That is to say he sculpted his stone implements better 
 and better. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that 
 towards the middle of the Pleistokene epoch, in the 
 Acheul6en, man already began to shape stones roughly, 
 very roughly, into a semblance of animals. And at the 
 beginning of the later Pleistokene, with the appear- 
 ance of the Aurignacien, we find man already really 
 sculpting, engraving and drawing animals and human 
 figures. Splitting or chipping stone implements simply, 
 gradually, and naturally evolved into sculpture; that is 
 chipped stone implements are the technical beginning 
 of sculpture and engraving, or to put it even more 
 comprehensively, chipped stone implements are the 
 technical starting point of art. 
 
 The knowledge acquired by Pleistokene man of how 
 
ART AND MAN. 193 
 
 to chip stones into formed implements was certainly the 
 starting point of art technic in central Europe. When he 
 began to observe animals and men and tried to imitate 
 them, by sculpting or engraving them, in wood and 
 stone and ivory and bone, he found his tools and mater- 
 ials all ready at hand, as also the knowledge of how to 
 fashion his materials with his tools. These are now 
 lost technical arts. For any sculptor or engraver of 
 today who should be presented with some stones and a 
 couple of animal skeletons and requested to make his 
 tools, sculpt some figures, and carve some bas reliefs 
 out of them, would be somewhat embarrassed, and 
 doubtless decline the order. 
 
 That the technic of chipping stones into implements 
 was the start of art technic in central Europe implies of 
 course that it was the start of any art technic. For 
 European Pleistokene art is, as far as we know at 
 present, so much older than any other art that any 
 quality or attribute connected with it takes precedence 
 historically. But the question now arises, did other 
 primitive races start their art technic independently in 
 the same manner thru their knowing how to chip stones: 
 did Pleistokene art technic filter to the early Asiatics 
 and to the Australasians, to the Africans and the Amer- 
 inds, to the Bushmen and the Eskimo: or did art technic 
 among all or some of these primitive races start in some 
 different way? It is impossible to answer these ques- 
 tions in our present state of knowledge, but if they ever 
 are solved, they will go a long way towards proving 
 either that art is one, or that art is several. My own 
 opinion is that art technic was invented independently 
 in a certain number of places, and that its original base 
 in each case is possibly the technic of chipping stones. 
 
194 
 
 ART AND MAN. 
 
 The accompanying geological, ethnological, archaeolog- 
 ical and artistic classification may help to make the rela- 
 tions of early art to stone implements in Europe a little 
 clearer. The later horizons come at the top and the 
 earlier ones at the bottom of the columns, and our 
 knowledge of them becomes progressively more uncertain 
 the further down we get. 
 
 Geological Period. 
 
 Men. 
 
 Horizons. 
 
 Implements. 
 
 Art. 
 
 tt 
 
 
 14 Bronze 
 
 Bronze. 
 
 
 Recent 
 
 
 13 Neolithic 
 12 Azilien 
 11 Magdaleneen 
 10 SolutrSen 
 
 Neoliths 
 
 Neolithic Art 
 
 ,, 
 
 Modern Man 
 
 9 Aurignacien 
 
 „ 
 
 Pleistokene Art. 
 
 " 
 
 Neanderthal 
 
 8 Mousterien 
 7 Acheuleen 
 
 " 
 
 Figure stones. 
 
 •• 
 
 Modern Man 
 
 6 Chelleen 
 5 Strepyen 
 
 » 
 
 
 ., 
 
 
 4 Mesvinien 
 
 Paleoliths 
 
 Formed Chipped Stones. 
 
 Pleistokene 
 
 Heidelberg 
 
 3 Mafflien 
 2 Reutelien 
 
 » 
 
 
 Pleiocene 
 
 Piltdown 
 
 1 Kentie:n 
 
 Eoliths. 
 
 
 READ UP. 
 
 Whether sculpture precedes drawing is uncertain. It 
 seems to do so in Pleistokene art, since there are figure 
 stones but no drawings from the Acheuleen horizon. 
 But the latest finds in French caverns would seem to 
 indicate that the earliest Aurignacien drawings are 
 cotemporaneous with the earliest Aurignacien sculptures. 
 In many cases, for instance among the Amerind or the 
 Arctic races, it would be hard to tell whether sculpture 
 preceded drawing or whether they were simultaneous in 
 their birth, for there are really no assured data to go by. 
 On the other hand, some races, like the Negroes, evince 
 a greater aptitude for sculpture than for drawing, and in 
 
ART AND MAN. 195 
 
 fact hardly evolved drawing; while some races, like the 
 Bushmen, evince a greater aptitude for drawing and 
 painting than for sculpture, so much so that it is con- 
 ceivable that they evolved drawing first. But it is also 
 a fact, that sculpture in stone or bone has a better chance 
 than paintings in black or color of resisting the hostile 
 forces of time, and in some cases sculptures may have sur- 
 vived when cotemporaneous painting may have perished. 
 Whether the sense of color developed as early as the 
 sense of form is impossible to ascertain positively. 
 Both these artistic attributes are universal and are 
 found in all arts, among all races. It is certain, how- 
 ever, that there are specimens extant of works in the 
 mechanical arts showing the presence of the sense of 
 form which long antedate any specimens revealing the 
 sense of color. It seems possible that . painting origin- 
 ated as a useful art, and started from such an inar- 
 tistic cause as daubing the body with greasy ochres as 
 a protection against cold and insect bites. Color was 
 probably first used in daubs and spaces on the person 
 as a sort of underclothing, and this may be as old as 
 any form of the mechanical arts. Color spots and 
 patches doubtless appealed to the artistic eye because 
 some of them were brilliant, and the untaught mind 
 was attracted to color as a moth is to light. Then 
 some persons began to put patches of color on their 
 utensils as well as on their persons for decoration, 
 because they thought color-patches pretty. This was 
 evidently one of the starting points of decorative art, 
 as well as the origin of tattooing. Artistic painting 
 also almost surely evolved from this elementary color 
 daubing, but only after outline drawing had begun to 
 give shape to the human and animal forms. 
 
196 ART AND MAN. 
 
 Still there are some evidences which tend to show 
 that art progresses first as sculpture in the round, then 
 as drawing, engraving and bas relief, and lastly as 
 painting. For instance, modern European art was born 
 or rather reborn in Italy in the thirteenth century, 
 when with Niccolo Pisano, 1206-1278?, and his son 
 Giovanni Pisano, 1250-1328?, it reached a maturity in 
 realistic sculpture which left such brilliant examples as 
 the pulpit in the Cathedral of Siena and the pulpit in 
 the Baptistery of Pisa. Painting lagged behind. Neither 
 Cimabue, 1240-1302?, nor Giotto, 1267-1336?, attained 
 in painting anything like the technical perfection the 
 Pisanos did in sculpture. Nevertheless they stand in 
 the front rank of painters, because they were leading 
 innovators. Painters then did not know as much of 
 the principles of imitative picture making, of color, of 
 light and shade, of perspective, as sculptors did of pure 
 form. Cimabue and Giotto began to solve problems 
 which the sculptural art did not need to solve, and 
 until these problems were solved and were common 
 property, imitative painting could not reach the perfection 
 of sculpture, which did not require this knowledge. 
 
ART AND MAN. 197 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF SUBJECT AND MOTIVE. SCULPTURAL 
 AND PICTORIAL ART: ANIMALS, HUMANS, LAND- 
 SCAPE. DECORATIVE ART: BASKETRY, PICTORIAL, 
 DEGENERATE, ACCIDENTAL. 
 
 The evolution of the subject and motive in art 
 is an immense and involved matter. Subject and 
 motive have evolved among different races in different 
 ways, according to each race's characteristics, mental 
 powers, environment, customs, materials, tools and other 
 factors. In such a brief exposition of the matter as the 
 present one, one can only say that, in general, art 
 turns primarily to animals and to humans, and second- 
 arily to landscape, for subjects. This points to the 
 sense of form as the dominating force in art: the sense 
 of color evolving as a more subordinate attribute. 
 
 In regard to the evolution of the subject as affected 
 by the sense of form alone, it seems as if animals 
 appealed most strongly to certain primitive peoples. 
 They certainly do to the Pleistokene, Bushmen and 
 Arctic races. Among none of these races do we find, 
 except in the rarest instances, humans treated technic- 
 ally as perfectly as animals sometimes are. For some 
 Pleistokene animals are quite as good, and some few 
 Bushmen and Eskimo animals are nearly as good, as 
 European and Chinese animals. In these arts the sub- 
 jects best treated are certainly the animals. 
 
 That the drawing or sculpting of animals is far 
 superior to that of humans among the Pleistokenes, 
 Bushmen and Arctics, may possibly be due to the fact 
 that they were or are solely hunters, and that their 
 
198 ART AND MAN. 
 
 observations were centered on their food supply, namely 
 the surrounding wild fauna. On the other hand, among 
 the Assyrians who did not live by hunting, animals are 
 far better than humans. For their lions and wild 
 asses and antelopes are often technically excellent, 
 while their humans are conventional in the extreme. 
 
 It is rather curious that in several scarcely related 
 arts, especially the European, West Asiatic and South 
 Asiatic arts, galloping animals are often depicted with 
 their legs stretched out like a pair of open scissors. 
 It is now known that this is not the actual motion, 
 altho most persons who are ignorant of the true 
 motions of animals certainly think they see it. Some 
 bulls in Cretan art and some lions in Mykenian art 
 have this movement, and in Europe, until the advent 
 of instantaneous photography, galloping horses were 
 usually drawn with their legs extended horizontally 
 parallel to the ground. On some Assyrian slabs of 
 hunting scenes, from the palace of Assur-bani-pal, the 
 horses and some of the wild asses have this motion. 
 Some recent Hindu paintings also represent the horses' 
 legs spread out scissor-wise. Why this movement is 
 frequently represented in these arts, and rarely or not 
 at all in other arts, is something of a puzzle! 
 
 The Africans, Australasians and Amerinds turn to 
 humans more than to animals for motives, and in 
 general do them about equally well. Exceptions are 
 the heads on Old Mexican monoliths, and the animals 
 in Benin bronzes, both of which are way beyond the 
 level of most Amerind or African art. 
 
 Among the Europeans and the Asiatics, humans 
 play the central role in art. In Greek art and indeed 
 in all succeeding European arts, animals have a most 
 
AET AND MAN. 199 
 
 secondary position in quantity altho in quality they 
 sometimes are excellent. The Chinese and the Japanese 
 reach the highest mark both in their humans and their 
 animals. 
 
 It is difficult to assign reasons for the preference 
 which some races have for animals and others for 
 humans, but the fact remains. And when the human 
 figure reaches a fairly high level in any art, it seems to 
 imply that the makers of that art have gone beyond 
 the more primitive conditions of life into a more 
 settled stage. 
 
 Landscape drawing or painting is almost unknown 
 among primitive races. Landscape is really found only 
 among the Europeans, the South Asiatics and the East 
 Asiatics. This offers a curious problem about the 
 racial development and environment of an artist. For 
 the more primitive hunting peoples were surrounded by 
 landscape, yet never noticed it in their art; whilst it 
 was town dwelling agriculturalists who sought to jot 
 down the natural forms, the rocks, the trees, and the 
 waters, they saw but infrequently. That people living 
 in cities turned to landscape may be partly due to a 
 sort of reminiscent impulse towards primitive sur- 
 roundings, just as people living in cities turn today 
 towards forests and mountains to escape temporarily 
 from the highly artificial conditions of modern life. 
 Why primitive races paid so little attention to land- 
 scape is a matter worthy of serious psychological study. 
 But at least it can be laid down already as an axiom 
 that landscape art is a child of advanced social condi- 
 tions and that it may be looked on to a certain extent 
 as a gauge of the advance of a race towards a station- 
 ary condition of life. 
 
200 ART AND MAN. 
 
 The evolution of subject and pattern in decorative 
 art is an intricate problem. Formerly it was believed 
 rather generally that primitive men decorated in so 
 called geometric patterns which had no relation to 
 pictorial art; then the opinion grew that decorative art 
 patterns were nothing but degenerate pictorial art. 
 Probably there is truth in both views and it seems 
 as if there are certainly two fountain heads for decora- 
 tive art. And may be there is a third, namely acci- 
 dental invention. 
 
 One of the sources of decorative art patterns is 
 surely the lines and patterns formed by woven or 
 plaited vegetable fibers and grasses in basketry work 
 or in garments. A great many of the so called "geo- 
 metric patterns" evolved naturally from the imitating 
 or copying on substances like clay or stone or wood or 
 skin, of various forms of basketry weaving, etc. Prim- 
 itive peoples plait or weave all sorts of grasses and 
 fibers into utensils and garments. These grasses form 
 long lines, or zigzag lines, or squares, or rectangles, or 
 lozenges, etc. When primitive races begin to decorate 
 potteries or skin garments or teepees or even their own 
 persons, apparently in many cases they do so instinct- 
 ively with patterns similar to those the practice of 
 weaving their grass or fiber utensils has taught them. 
 Grasses and fibers rarely weave easily into circles, 
 and it may be that this accounts for there being so 
 many fewer "geometric" patterns in curved or circular 
 fines than in straight or angular lines. Many of the 
 decorations on potteries and skin garments, etc., in 
 truth, seem to be nothing but a reduplication in 
 another material of patterns evolved before in basketry 
 work. The blackening of pots by fire might also, 
 
ART AND MAN. 201 
 
 possibly, give sometimes a suggestion for decorative 
 patterns. 
 
 The other great source for decorative art patterns 
 is naturalistic subjects. Sometimes decorative art 
 is pictorial art used as a decoration, sometimes it is 
 degenerate pictorial art. In myriads of objects, pots, 
 rugs or what not, humans, animals, fishes, plants, etc., 
 are used as subjects for decorations. Sometimes they 
 are poor and crude in form and color from the stand- 
 point of pictorial art, and yet they make good decora- 
 tions. Such is the case, for instance, with much of the 
 pottery from the southwestern United States. Nothing 
 like what we would consider realistic pictures has been 
 found in that locality. How then did and do the 
 Pueblo people decorate so well? It seems as if the 
 answer were a simple one. The Pueblo people had a 
 certain art instinct and a certain sense of observation, 
 sufficient to cause them to want to decorate their 
 utensils and to induce them to look at natural objects. 
 In their decorations, they made the best realistic draw- 
 ings they knew how. Their decorative drawings are 
 really pictorial to them. When decorating they were 
 trying to draw the animals and plants as well as they 
 could, and tho their results are inferior to Pleistokene, 
 Bushmen or Arctic work, yet they are an attempt in 
 the same direction. And as they happened also to 
 have a strong decorative sense they succeeded in pro- 
 ducing sometimes some most artistic and original decor- 
 ative pictorial work. 
 
 But, in the majority of cases, the attempt to por- 
 tray humans or animals or plants on pots and cloaks 
 promptly runs down hill. Facilis descensus Averno. One 
 artist draws or paints humans or animals or flowers as 
 
202 ART AND MAN. 
 
 well as he can; another artist copies these drawings, 
 in doing which he is sure to leave out or alter some 
 parts; a third artist does the same with the second set; 
 and this process continues until degenerate decorative 
 patterns are evolved which become fixed and conven- 
 tionalized. And so unlike to the object in nature they 
 were originally intended to represent do these patterns 
 sometimes become, that their origin can be traced only 
 by searching backwards most carefully. 
 
 Not infrequently it is difficult to tell whether con- 
 ventional decorative patterns are degenerate pictorial art 
 or imitative basketry patterns. From the Guianas and 
 Venezuela, for instance, there are some simple but 
 pretty decorative patterns on some modern baskets and 
 jars.* If these were suggested by and intended to 
 represent certain animals and plants, they certainly do 
 so most imperfectly. Moreover there is . nothing to 
 show that these patterns are degenerate pictorial art, 
 for there is absolutely nothing like pictures in eastern 
 South America. There are in fact many cases where 
 careful inspection alone will not reveal the origin of 
 decorative patterns and this can be obtained, perhaps, 
 only by much questioning of the makers. An instance 
 of this is the cross found in some South American art. 
 Some rather fantastic explanations have been made 
 about this, but it seems to be nothing but a repre- 
 sentation of some of the markings on certain reptiles. 
 An analogous case is the art of Mitla. I have heard 
 American tourists claim that Mitla art was wholly 
 different from other Mexican art. The pattern, of 
 course, is different, but the motive, namely the diamond 
 back rattlesnake, is identical. Only from this motive, 
 
 * Harv. Univ. P. Mus. 
 
ART AND MAN. 203 
 
 the Mitla people evolved a pretty decoration, and the 
 other Mexicans a repulsive one. 
 
 There is possibly a third source from which some 
 decorative art may spring, namely invention. Take a 
 pencil and make some curvilinear or rectilinear line on 
 paper. Repeat this line in various ways. Some sort of 
 pattern will presently evolve almost accidentally. This 
 may be ugly and therefore useless as a decoration, but 
 it may be pretty and therefore appropriate as a decor- 
 ation. I doubt whether much decoration has been 
 invented thus but it certainly might be, and I am 
 inclined to think that some decoration is due to 
 invention and has not sprung from any pictorial motive 
 or any basketry pattern whatever. Decorations of this 
 kind might be termed invented, accidental decorations. 
 
 There is one cause, not often recognized, which may 
 have something to do with the start of decorative art, 
 and that is the desire to fix the ownership of an object. 
 It seems indeed not unlikely that some of the patterns or 
 marks on potteries and utensils are property marks, some- 
 what of the nature of totems, placed on them for much the 
 same reason that we label trunks with our names.* 
 
 Writing and everything connected with it, letters, 
 alphabet, handwriting, printing, is an evolution from 
 art. Writing in all known cases, possibly among the 
 Azilien Pleistokenes, almost certainly among the Egyptians, 
 Cretans, Chinese and Amerinds, started as pictorial writing; 
 that is to say rough, elementary drawings were used as 
 symbols, and gradually degenerated or evolved into 
 letters and writing. But the beginnings of writing 
 apparently are drawings, and we can safely say that art 
 antedates anything like an alphabet or handwriting. 
 
 * Christopher Wren: Aboriginal Pottery, page 26. 
 
204 ABT AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 LOCAL AND INTRUSIVE ARTS. AUTOCHTHONOUS ARTS. 
 MOVEMENTS OF ART. GRADATION IN ART. 
 
 An important problem in comparative art is whether 
 art arose in one spot and spread thence over the world, 
 or whether it arose in many spots. To formulate this 
 point more fully one might express it in the form of 
 questions like these: Is art one or are there several 
 arts? Did all art spread from one starting point, or 
 did it grow up in a number of spots? Is there one 
 fountain head for the whole of art, or are there many 
 independent centers of dispersal? Is art autochthonous 
 in only one spot and intrusive everywhere else, or is it locally 
 autochthonous in many places? These questions present 
 fairly clearly some of the most intricate problems of 
 comparative art, and altho it is impossible to answer 
 them categorically, yet by examining accessible data 
 one can reason out certain theories about them. 
 
 In considering the intricate problems touched on in 
 this chapter, it must be remembered that before the 
 days of railroads and steamers, any movement of art 
 took place under different conditions from present ones. 
 An art was affected by the environment under which it 
 grew up, it was affected by the arts of places imme- 
 diately round it, and in turn it affected them. There 
 was give and take all round, but it was a nearby, long 
 drawn out process. The spread of any art was slow and 
 its influence could not carry far rapidly. 
 
 The questions formulated in the first paragraph of 
 this chapter involve considerations in several lines, for 
 
ART AND MAN. 205 
 
 they really cover the birth, life, movements, history, 
 geography and death of arts. Examination must be made 
 of local or autochthonous art; of historical and geo- 
 graphical movements of art and of geographical barriers 
 to art; and of gradations in art. These must all be 
 considered separately and inferences drawn from them as 
 a whole. And as far as I can judge at present from the 
 data, art may be autochthonous and local, or it may be 
 intrusive. 
 
 Necessity undoubtedly forced men in different parts 
 of the world to invent certain similar objects and imple- 
 ments of mechanical art. Jars for holding liquids, for 
 instance, must have suggested themselves, on account of 
 their purpose, to various persons, and have developed 
 independently, thru the needs of their makers, in widely 
 distant localities. Many similar useful objects are found 
 in places a long ways apart which could not possibly 
 have been obtained by either of the makers from the 
 other, and which therefore must have been invented in 
 those places. For instance the boomerang of the Aus- 
 tralians is almost the same implement as the patchoku 
 of the Mokis, and the patu-patu of New Zealand is 
 duplicated in Colorado. There could not have been 
 direct intercourse in either of these cases and therefore 
 the only solution of these resemblances is that these 
 implements, thru their own merits in filling some neces- 
 sity, were invented independently. 
 
 With the decorations on such objects and still more 
 with works of art pure and simple we strike a somewhat 
 different problem. For decoration, sculpture and paint- 
 ing proceed from feeling, not from necessity. They 
 come from an artistic impulse to fashion something the 
 maker likes to look at, not from the exigencies of life 
 
206 AET AND MAN. 
 
 driving the maker to fashion something he needs. The 
 Greeks, for instance, had pottery jars. So had the 
 Hopi-Moki. As a rule, the Greeks and the Hopi-Moki 
 decorated their jars with black lines, but they both in 
 certain cases decorated with black, red and white. We 
 can accept as fairly certain that Greek jars and Hopi- 
 Moki jars were invented independently, but how about 
 the decorations. The forms and motives of the decora- 
 tions are different. They certainly tend to show a 
 different artistic impulse in the makers, and that the 
 Greeks belonged to a different artistic family from the 
 Hopi-Moki. 
 
 That the art of almost every district of the world 
 has an individuality of its own is noticeable. This 
 individuality makes every art distinct from every other 
 art, even tho it closely resembles the art from many 
 surrounding localities and perhaps also some art from 
 distant localities. Just as it is possible to tell the 
 work of every great master painter by his individual 
 quality, so it is almost always possible to tell rather 
 closely where any art comes from. This seems to 
 point to art being largely local and native in a great 
 many spots. Widely extended arts, such as Chinese 
 art or Amerind art, however, may have sprung up 
 over quite a large territory, but nevertheless have 
 sprung up in very similar forms owing to the personality 
 of the race cropping out. It is conceivable that 
 Amerind art may have started from a number of 
 points, rather than to have spread from one single 
 starting point. 
 
 In many cases however it is difficult to tell whether 
 art is native in its habitat or whether it came there 
 from some other place. As a typical example of this 
 
ART AND MAN. 207 
 
 difficulty one might take Zimbabwe art, about which 
 authorities are divided. Some explorers of Zimbabwe 
 claim the art as local, others claim it is intrusive and 
 there are evidences pro and con. 
 
 There are undoubtedly some arts fairly close together 
 which are probably of practically separate growth. 
 West Asiatic art, Egyptian art, and Cretan art, for 
 instance, whilst showing certain resemblances which 
 may to some extent be accounted for by the inter- 
 course resulting from propinquity, also • show enough 
 differences to warrant the opinion that they each 
 flowed from one separate fountain head rather than 
 that they evolved as different branches of the same 
 stock. 
 
 That similarities in arts at great distances apart do 
 not necessarily imply any other common origin than 
 the universal art impulse, may be inferred from certain 
 extremely primitive pottery statuettes, which resemble 
 the little figures which some European children knead 
 out of bread crumbs. Some of these statuettes from 
 Greece,* some from Cyprus, f some from the Huicholsf 
 and a Japanese prehistoric terra cotta horse, § belong to 
 this class. The artistic resemblance is absolute. If 
 these statuettes were placed side by side it would be 
 impossible for any art expert to tell where they came 
 from or to differentiate them. Now there can be no 
 descent nor intrusive influence in these statuettes. It 
 can be nothing but the inborn art instinct just budding 
 which produces such similar results at such distances 
 
 * Met. Mus. N. Y. 
 t Met. Mus. N. Y. 
 j Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 
 § Met. Mus. N. Y. 
 
208 ART AND MAN. 
 
 apart. It seems as if these statuettes implied the birth 
 of art as an independent development in a number of 
 places. 
 
 Every art is apparently more or less local, even if 
 that locality is held to extend over a whole continent. 
 Amerind art is local to America, Melanesian art to 
 Melanesia, Negro art to Africa, etc. Art is sometimes 
 strongest in one center, as for instance Greek art is 
 purest in Greece, but sometimes art is about equally 
 strong over a large area. Polynesian art, for example, 
 altho varying somewhat in each archipelago, is nearly 
 the same thruout Polynesia. To show how local an 
 art can be, one might instance the beautiful coiled 
 basketry trays or "poata" from the pueblos of Miconi- 
 novi and Oraibi. These trays are not only different in 
 their respective pueblos, but they are unlike exactly 
 any other basketry in the world, and therefore they 
 must be a local invention. One might also instance 
 the starvation statuettes from Easter Island, those 
 where the abdomen falls in, as sculpture which is 
 sui generis and a local invention. 
 
 Art, in fact, is usually so local and so related to 
 surrounding arts, that it may be laid down almost as 
 an axiom, that propinquity causes and shows art 
 resemblances and that distance or separation causes and 
 shows art differences. Art, in any given spot of the 
 world, generally resembles more closely the art immedi- 
 ately near it than it does the art far away from it. 
 The art of Peru resembles the art of Yucatan, and this 
 resembles the art of Arizona more closely than either of 
 them resembles any African art. The natural inference 
 from this is that: if nearby arts resemble one another, 
 they are related; if distant arts resemble one another, 
 
ART AND MAN. 209 
 
 they may be related but there is less likelihood of it. 
 And hence if distant arts have resemblances to each 
 other, as for instance Pleistokene art, Bushman art, 
 and Arctic art, whilst they may be related, nevertheless 
 the chances are greater that they are of separate 
 growth and that there is a different autochthonous 
 origin for each, than if they were close together. 
 
 When one considers how many decidedly locally 
 individual arts there are, it seems as if there must have 
 been multiple centers of creation. Art must have been 
 a genuine autochthonous growth among the Pleistokenes. 
 Without laying down any dictum that it was entirely 
 autochthonous anywheres else, it would seem as if it 
 must have been of native growth among the Sumerians, 
 the Egyptians, the Egeans, the Hindus, the Chinese, 
 the Bushmen, the Arctics, the Africans, the Austral- 
 asians, the Amerinds. Art may not have been entirely 
 autochthonous in all these cases, and it may have been 
 autochthonous in other cases than these, but it seems 
 probable that art started practically independently in a 
 number of places, and that there are some eleven or 
 more great racial arts, each with more or less numerous 
 subdivisions, rather than one single homogeneous art. 
 But all these arts proceed from the same art instinct 
 and art impulse, and in that sense therefore, art is one. 
 
 I may be wrong in my opinion, but the more I 
 compare the various arts, the more local do they seem 
 to me. Art seems to grow in many centers, that is 
 people in any given locality, when uninfluenced by 
 others, are apt to develop certain original forms of 
 purely local art, which, however, are branches of the 
 art of their own race and are not widely differentiated 
 from it. In the case of arts such as Mayan art or 
 
210 ART AND MAN. 
 
 even Zimbabwe art, in the absence of other evidence 
 I should incline to the opinion that they grew up 
 on the spot in answer to the local art impulse, and 
 did not come to their abode from without. In almost 
 all the arts, it is impossible to specify exactly when, 
 where or how they started: possibly, however, it was in 
 a number of places thruout their habitat. Difficult as 
 these problems are, my own belief is, that unless the 
 intrusive connection of an art can be clearly and 
 definitely traced, the balance of probability is that art 
 is local rather than intrusive. 
 
 Nevertheless it is a fact that the greater arts filtered 
 gradually over larger and larger spaces. Whether they 
 started in one spot or in many, some of the great arts 
 certainly spread from their starting points and descended 
 or traveled to other races than their inventors: in 
 some cases they went half way round the globe. There 
 are indeed two movements among the arts; a historical 
 movement, which is vertical, in time; a geographical 
 movement, which is horizontal, in space. 
 
 In examining into the undoubtedly genuine historical 
 and geographical movements of various arts, it is well, 
 however, to be on one's guard and not to be carried 
 away beyond the bounds of plausibility. As an example, 
 let us see where a too firm belief in intrusive art may 
 land us. Take Mayan art. It has been argued that 
 Mayan art comes from the Hindu Buddhistic art of 
 Boro-Buddur.* It has also been argued that Hindu 
 art sprang from Greek art.f If we add these two 
 opinions together, we reach logically the conclusion that 
 the frightful Mayan skulls and snakes are the direct 
 
 * Arnold, C, and Frost, F. J. T.: The American Egypt, 1909. 
 t Theodore Duret : Critiques d' Avant Garde. 
 
AKT AND MAN. 
 
 211 
 
 Fig. 26. Prehistoric pottery jar, Peru. 
 
212 ART AND MAN. 
 
 descendants of the Hermes of Praxiteles and the Victory 
 of Samothrace. Is not this a reductio ad absurdum et 
 horrendum? Incidentally, in mentioning the "Victory," 
 it may be permitted to suggest how admirably that 
 beautiful fragment, with the head gone, the arms 
 smashed, and generally "busted," does typify "a 
 famous victory. " 
 
 Historical art evidence shows that art appears in 
 certain places and then dies out. Pleistokene art, 
 Sumerian art, Assyrian art, Egyptian art, Zimbabwe 
 art, Mayan art, each had its birth, life and death. As 
 an example, take Egean art. Some six thousand years 
 ago or thereabouts, an art developed in Crete and 
 Greece. As far as can be gathered from the limited, 
 imperfect sets of specimens now accessible in museums, 
 this art does not quite resemble any other. There 
 doubtless were Ideas brought to Crete, the lost Atlantis, 
 from Egypt and Asia Minor. Nevertheless Egean art 
 is a European art, not a West Asiatic nor an Egyptian 
 art. While we cannot say at present that Egean art is 
 a direct descendant of Pleistokene art, we can say that 
 it is the ancestor of Greek art and the forerunner of 
 American art. The logical conclusion is that it was 
 born among the natives of Crete and Greece and was 
 not imported from elsewhere. This can not perhaps as 
 yet be laid down as a positive fact: it can only be 
 said that the balance of probabilities is that it is so. 
 
 Not only does art grow up in certain places and 
 then die out, but it sometimes repeats the process, 
 possibly several times. This is notably the case in 
 Egypt where, according to Dr. Flinders Petrie,* art has 
 
 * The Revolutions of Civilization, 1911. 
 
ART AND MAN. 213 
 
 gone through no less than eight successive periods 
 during the past seven thousand years. The last wave 
 of art in Egypt was Arab, the preceding wave was 
 Greco-Roman, and both were clearly intrusive arts, 
 differing fundamentally from Egyptian art. But, altho 
 some extraneous influences doubtless came in from 
 Crete and from western Asia, the earlier periods were 
 true Egyptian, and show that Egyptian art was born, 
 matured, went into decrepitude, and sprouted afresh 
 in consecutive cycles. That is to say the original 
 Egyptian art was a local art which kept rising and 
 falling until finally it was superseded by the art of 
 invading conquering races who put their heel on the 
 neck of the subjugated Egyptians. 
 
 Japanese prints are another striking instance of an 
 art which started, grew up, matured and faded away 
 in its own habitat. The principles of design, line, color, 
 etc., in these prints were all taken directly from Japanese 
 painting, but the printing processes in color were new. 
 Japanese prints went thru a regular cycle between about 
 1670 A. D. and 1868 A. D. This cycle is not unlike the 
 Vorspiel of Lohengrin, so aptly described by Berlioz as a 
 chef d'ceuvre. It starts piano, then goes up crescendo to 
 a great forte, then dies away piano. It began with the 
 black and white work in long sweeping calligraphic 
 lines of Moronobu, Kiyonobu and others; evolved, with 
 Harunobo and Koriusai among the leaders, into two and 
 three color prints; then developed into the polychrome 
 prints of many such great designers as Utamaro, Toyo- 
 kuni I., Kiyonaga and Kuniyoshi, reaching its highest 
 point perhaps in the startling heads of Sharaku; 
 finally it passed into the more three dimensional 
 landscapes and the more broken picturesque lines 
 
214 ART AND MAN. 
 
 and cruder colors of Hokusai and the two Hiroshiges. 
 After this, this beautiful local art temporarily died out. 
 At the present time a new cycle has been started and 
 may be it will mature. But it will be a different crop 
 from the former one. For the old Nippon, the life, the 
 customs, the costumes, that is the inspirations both 
 internal and external, have gone. 
 
 As an instance of an art movement in time and space, 
 that is as a historical-geographical movement in art, 
 take the art of Europe after Neolithic times. Without 
 saying that art grew up in Crete and Greece absolutely 
 of its own accord, yet Egean art certainly mainly origi- 
 nated there, and it is one of the two most vital lineal 
 ancestors of European art. Greek art is surely a 
 descendant, by renascence, of Cretan-Mykenian art. 
 The art of the Latin races was derived mainly from that 
 of Greece. This modified Greek art, under Roman 
 domination, was carried into North Africa, Syria, Gaul, 
 Britain, Germany and Spain. Roman art was super- 
 seded by Byzantine art which spread over most of 
 Europe and in a modified form is still found in Russia. 
 From Byzantine art there sprang in the early Middle 
 Ages in Italy, France and the Low Countries another 
 living art, Gothic art, which was largely a genuine racial 
 rebirth of White Mediterranean race art. Still later 
 many artists turned to Greece and Rome for their inspir- 
 ation and grafted on Gothic art much of the art culture 
 of Greece, so that even today the sculpture of Greece 
 stands to a great extent as the foundation of modern 
 European and American sculpture. 
 
 Colored tiles also afford an interesting example of 
 historical-geographical movement in art. Tile making 
 undoubtedly goes back to Sumeria and early Egypt. It 
 
ART AND MAN. 215 
 
 was a very early industry in China, to which it may or 
 may not have come from western Asia. It remained over 
 in Assyria and Persia. It was inherited by the Arabs, and 
 brought by them from Egypt and Arabia in their con- 
 quest of North Africa and Spain. And from the Moors 
 of southern Spain the Spaniards learnt how to make 
 tiles. Now the Dutch have long been and still are 
 amongst the best makers of colored tiles. It is claimed 
 by some persons that the Dutch got their taste for tiles 
 from the Chinese, with whom they were trading already 
 in the seventeenth century A. D. It seems quite as 
 likely, however, that the Dutch learnt this art from the 
 Spaniards in the times when Charles the Fifth was their 
 ruling sovereign. At any rate, before the American Revo- 
 lution, Hollanders and Germans brought the methods of 
 manufacturing colored tiles to Pennsylvania, where this 
 art has now been revived. That is to say, tile making, 
 starting from its fountain heads in Babylonia, Egypt 
 and China, has traveled and spread thence over a great 
 part of the civilized world. 
 
 Sometimes two or more arts have succeeded each 
 other in one spot. Thus Egyptian art entirely died out 
 and first Greco-Roman then Arab art wholly superseded 
 it. Australasian art and Amerind art are both, unfort- 
 unately, on their last legs, and are vanishing before 
 European art. That is to say, the art of one race in 
 any locality may in time completely disappear before 
 the art of another race in the same locality. In the case 
 of the Australasian and Amerind arts they have not so 
 much died out, as been killed. 
 
 For an instance of the geographical spread of art, 
 take Arab art. This arose probably first in Arabia and 
 Egypt. Then as the Arabs went west and east, thru 
 
216 ART AND MAN. 
 
 North Africa into Spain, and thru Persia into Hindu- 
 stan, they took their art with them together with their 
 religion among the conquered peoples. With the driving 
 back of the Arabs to their own lands, the limits of Arab 
 art, after having once half encircled the globe, grew less 
 and today its only vitality is in lands where Muhan> 
 meddanism still holds sway. It has left no descendants 
 to spring anew from its roots, altho on account of certain 
 beauties, faint imitations sometimes appear in other lands. 
 
 To some extent, physical geography has had an effect 
 on art in helping or hindering it in moving from place 
 to place. Oceans, mountains, deserts, have in some cases 
 acted as barriers to art expansion. In all such cases, 
 however, natural obstructions have acted on art because 
 they have acted as obstructions to men. Where races 
 have gone and taken their commerce with them they 
 have also taken their art. Apparently the only absolute 
 obstacle to art before the time of the Vikings was the 
 Atlantic Ocean, and it seems entirely correct to call the 
 Atlantic Ocean the boundary line of art. Art started at 
 the Atlantic Ocean in Pleistokene times: art stopped at 
 the Atlantic Ocean in historic Amerind times. Art 
 crossed the Northern Pacific Ocean on its eastward 
 journey: art never crossed the Atlantic Ocean before the 
 Vikings. Twelve years ago I felt doubtful of this, but 
 much examination of many specimens has gradually led 
 me to feel that the evidences are overwhelming that the 
 Atlantic was an impassable barrier to art until the White 
 race began to explore and to colonize. 
 
 An exceedingly interesting point in comparative art, 
 and one which, I believe, has not been seen as yet by 
 either ethnologist or art critic, is that the rebirths of 
 art chronologically, except possibly in one instance, in 
 
ART AND MAN. 217 
 
 space are eastward. The oldest art known is the 
 Pleistokene art from the Acheuleen strata of France 
 and England. This may easily be more than 100,000 
 years old. The later Pleistokene art of Western Europe 
 may be perhaps somewheres between 50,000 to 15,000 
 years old. The next oldest art centers known, are 
 Crete, Egypt, and the Euphrates valley, where art has 
 been traced back some 7,000 years. To the eastward 
 again, we come to the great art center of China, where 
 Chinese historic or legendary evidences points to art 
 dating back some 5,000 years. Further east we come 
 to Australasia and to America, where there is no 
 evidence showing that there is any art more than 
 5,000 years old, except the one drawing found at Vero, 
 Florida,* which may be Pleistokene, and which there- 
 fore may be many thousand • years old. But the status 
 of this drawing is still too uncertain for scientific deduction 
 to be made safely from it. We are not speaking here of 
 what may have taken place, for some arts may be older 
 than we now have any idea of. We are only estimating 
 roughly the dates, from such specimens and historical 
 data as are now accessible; and these estimates may need 
 revision at any minute, in the light of fresh discoveries. 
 It must not be understood, however, that all art has 
 invariably spread from west to east. Sometimes, as 
 with Arab art, the move has been westward as well as 
 eastward, or, as with Egean art, the move has been 
 westward. And it may be noted here that the bull 
 fight has followed much the same line as Egean art. 
 It appears first in Crete, in legend as the Minotaur, 
 then it revived in Italy, France, Portugal and Spain, 
 from which it crossed the Atlantic to Peru and Mexico. 
 
 * Fig. 24. 
 
218 ART AND MAN. 
 
 The trend of art eastward in time means that as far 
 as we know art appears first in central western Europe; 
 then in Egypt, Crete and the Euphrates valley; then in 
 eastern Asia, southern Asia and America; and last in 
 Africa and Australasia. It may be that art is older 
 than we know in some of these places, but our knowl- 
 edge is still too limited to formulate more than pre- 
 liminary conclusions. 
 
 And in this move of art from west to east, from 
 Great Britain and France to Labrador, there is a fact of the 
 greatest importance, which so far as I know, except for a 
 few lines in Comparative Art has never been discussed 
 seriously as yet. This is gradation. Art gradates every- 
 where, in space and in time. There are no sharp demark- 
 ations, no hard and fast boundaries. Thruout the 
 whole world there is a distinct gradation in art. The 
 arts of neighboring places, at about the same time, 
 even if they belong to different races, often show 
 resemblances; they seem to slide into each other more or 
 less as the result of propinquity. For instance Egyptian 
 and Babylonian arts show resemblances; Hindu and 
 Chinese arts gradate into each other in Nepal, Tibet 
 and Burma; Australasian art characteristics appear to 
 some extent in eastern Asia, Japan, and Alaska; West 
 North Amerind art is in close touch with Mexican art, 
 etc. In brief, all arts gradate into those near by, that 
 is there is a sideways geographical movement in art. 
 
 There is also a gradation in many arts, from those 
 before or into those after them, consecutively in time; 
 that is there is often a historical gradation in art. For 
 an instance, we may cite Egean, Greek, Roman, Byzan- 
 tine, Gothic, and Modern European art. 
 
 In any one locality at any one period of its his- 
 
ART AND MAN". 219 
 
 tory a certain type of art predominates. This may 
 change as the centuries roll by and even several times, 
 but it is not cataclysmically. An art is not wiped out 
 in any spot by an art-quake, unless its makers are 
 wiped out, as apparently happened in Crete-Atlantis. 
 Art sometimes dies out and is gradually superseded by 
 another art. But as long as its own makers survive 
 it dies hard. The racial art instinct keeps it alive. 
 Equally at any one time, you do not find any one art 
 absolutely dwelling in only one locality. It radiates all 
 around. There is a transitional belt. At one and the 
 same time there may be and usually there are great 
 differences between the arts of two distant localities, 
 but between these two, arts may be said to gradate 
 the one into the other: that is starting from either end, 
 art keeps decreasing in resemblance from the art at 
 that end, until it does not look in the least like it. 
 This is again one of those facts which can only be 
 stated in general terms. 
 
 If there is any one set of facts which shows beyond all 
 others that there are several arts, it is that the peoples 
 of Europe made naturalistic art; the peoples of Asia, 
 naturalistic and decorative art; the peoples of Africa, 
 Australasia and America, decorative art. If there is 
 any one set of facts which shows that art is one, it is 
 gradation. And if we look on Europe as the geographi- 
 cal hub, we find consecutive gradation along big lines 
 to the tire in Africa, Australasia and America. And 
 this gradation of art, geographically sideways and his- 
 torically downwards, is important, because, altho there 
 are many local arts which show individuality and 
 separateness, yet the gradation of art points to the 
 oneness of art as a whole. 
 
220 ART AND MAN. 
 
 According to the evidences of the fine arts also, as 
 far as now known, in prehistoric and historic time, 
 art started in Europe and moved or was recreated to 
 the eastward and to the southward. And it is a point 
 of great ethnological significance unnoticed apparently 
 so far. For some anthropologists have held and doubt- 
 less still hold that man came from a sunken continent, 
 the so called Lemuria, near Java and beyond, and that 
 he spread from Lemuria to Asia, Europe, Africa and 
 America, by a fan shaped migration. But art contra- 
 dicts almost directly this anthropological theory that 
 man came and spread from Lemuria, for art develops 
 in a contrary direction. Again other anthropologists 
 claim that man spread from Central Asia into Europe, 
 Africa, Australasia and America. But while art does not 
 contradict this theory as directly as it does the Lemur- 
 ian theory, it distinctly contradicts it in regard to the 
 spread of man from Asia into Europe. In art the hub 
 is in Europe; and art moved along the spokes into Asia, 
 Africa, Australasia and America. 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 221 
 
 Fig. 27. Wooden figure. Karaja tribe, Brazil. 
 
222 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 ART AND RELIGION. 
 
 The various beliefs in and worships of higher powers, 
 of the supernatural, the superphysical, the occult, the 
 unknown, the unseen, the mysterious, by different races, 
 are dignified by their believers and their worshipers 
 under the name of religion, and are sneered at by their 
 unbelievers under the name of superstition. In this 
 book the term "religion" is used to designate and must be 
 understood to include all beliefs, faiths and worships, 
 Heathen and Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, Muhammedan, 
 Zoroastrian, Shinto and others, of all peoples past and 
 present, in all parts of the world. 
 
 The relations of art and religion need especial con- 
 sideration in comparative art, because many ethnolo- 
 gists and art critics at present appear to put the cart 
 before the horse in regard to the effect of religion on 
 art. Some of them at any rate seem to be of the 
 opinion that religious beliefs are fundamental in the 
 making of an artist; that great art flourishes only when 
 religious belief is also swaying a race; and that the 
 sculptures of primitive peoples are invariably idols. 
 These views seem to me to be wrong, and often to lead 
 to misconceptions about the art of many races of men. 
 
 The relations of the various beliefs, faiths and wor- 
 ships to art are identical in kind if not in degree. That 
 they have had wide reaching effects on the fine arts is 
 unquestionable. But they have not affected them in the 
 least in the way ethnologists, art critics and the laity 
 
AET AND MAN. 223 
 
 think they have. Religion has affected art in one point 
 and one point only and that is subject. And it has 
 affected subject thru patronage. Religion says "I want 
 an art work of a certain subject, and I will pay you 
 hard cash for it" and the artist answers "I am poor 
 and must make the pot boil; and I will paint you a 
 picture of any old subject if you will hand me enough 
 filthy lucre!" This crude statement lacks literary ele- 
 gance, but it covers perfectly the business relations of 
 art and religion. 
 
 Religious beliefs or faiths are certainly not funda- 
 mental in the make up of an artist. This is proved 
 thru the simple fact that artistic children scribble off 
 pictures long before they have any religious ideas what- 
 ever. The artists who turn to religious subjects do so 
 when they have left the childish age, when they are at 
 least somewhat grown up. They may be still young 
 when they begin to produce pictures of religious con- 
 cepts, when they first attempt to make beliefs in con- 
 crete form visible to others, but they are no longer 
 children. Children draw houses, or horses, or other 
 things they have seen: they do not draw saints. 
 
 Religious pictures are subject pictures: they are not 
 motive pictures: they do not spring from something the 
 artist himself has seen. It is not the external world 
 which moves the artist, it is not nature which appeals 
 to his esthetic side to paint religious pictures: that is 
 it is not the fundamental mainspring of art which is 
 acting on him. Artists paint or sculpt because they 
 have the glyptic art sense and the desire to make 
 pretty things: the two forces which are ahead of all 
 others in impelling the artist. Religious beliefs are 
 ideas: they are not visible to the eye: they do not 
 
224 ART AND MAN. 
 
 spring from vision. Ideas are most suitably expressed 
 in the spoken or written word. And therefore it is that 
 all great religious teachers and reformers, and also all 
 the lesser lights of all sects and denominations, turned 
 to oratory or to writing, not to sculpture or to paint- 
 ing, to carry out their mission. And if the religious 
 beliefs of artists were more overpowering than their 
 esthetic sense, they would do likewise. 
 
 Religious pictures are really illustrations: they are 
 illustrations of a subject which the artist never has 
 seen. Usually the artist receives his subject as an 
 order: that is it is a business transaction. (Ten per- 
 cent off for cash. Artists, like other human beings, 
 must, eat.) He thinks out the most picturesque 
 arrangement he can, in other words he tries to see a 
 picture in the subject ordered, but he also has to 
 follow the recognized conventions of that particular 
 subject. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he does 
 not, but in all cases the picture is a composition follow- 
 ing to some extent a formula. This is tantamount to 
 saying that it is patronage which prompts artists to 
 execute works of religious art. And among the various 
 forms of patronage there is none of greater importance 
 to art than religious patronage. For if there is a ruling 
 church, and if this wants works of art, artists naturally 
 paint or sculpt them for the sake of their livelihood. 
 
 That religion is a patronage force in art can be 
 exemplified by comparing the development of one art, 
 say modern European art, in different countries. In 
 Spain, for instance, in the last three centuries, altho 
 we find some fine naturalism with Velasquez, Goya 
 and Fortuny as the great masters, the chief output 
 of art was the religious painting done for churches and 
 
ART AND MAN. 225 
 
 convents. Among its leaders were Murillo, Ribera and 
 Zurbaran. And the simple reason these artists made 
 their living by painting and sculpting crucifixions and 
 madonnas and saints was because the ruling church in 
 Spain not only admitted paintings and sculptures to its 
 buildings, but paid to have them. The religious 
 pictures and sculptures of Spain, in studio English, 
 are simply potboilers. 
 
 The same thing may be said of Italian art, with 
 the exception perhaps of some Venetian art. From the 
 Pisanos and Cimabue, down to Tiepolo at least, the 
 artists sculpted and painted principally religious subjects, 
 for the same reason as in Spain, namely that the 
 church paid for their work. 
 
 A not quite similar example is furnished by the art 
 of Greece. The Greeks built beautiful temples and 
 adorned them with beautiful sculptures. And their 
 nude and draped figures they called Zeus and Hermes 
 and Aphrodite and Psyche. But these can be called 
 by any other name and remain perfect results of art 
 expression in sculptural form. For the human form 
 was a motive, not a subject to the Greeks. There is 
 nothing religious or irreligious in the figure of a nude 
 human, but there are the strongest sculptural and 
 pictorial possibilities. And the Greeks, with as refined 
 a sense of form as was ever possessed by humans, 
 seized on these sculptural possibilities and made their 
 immortal art. 
 
 In Holland, on the contrary, in the seventeenth 
 century A. D., there was a very different status for the 
 fine arts. Not only did the ruling church in Holland not 
 pay for pictures or sculptures, but it did not tolerate 
 them in its buildings, and the zeal of its adherents 
 
226 AET AND MAN". 
 
 went so far that, if I am not mistaken, in some cases 
 these iconoclasts smashed the works of art that had 
 come down to them from earlier times. The artists 
 therefore naturally turned in other directions for 
 patronage thru which to boil the pot, to portraiture, 
 to genre, to animal pictures, to landscape, and their 
 output, both in quality and quantity, was of such a 
 character that the seventeenth century in Holland must 
 be looked on as one of the great art epochs of all times. 
 And this great Dutch art, the art of Rembrandt, Hals, 
 Van der Heist, de Hooge, Potter, Cuyp, Metzu, 
 Vermeer, Hobbema, Ruysdael, was not inspired by 
 religion at all. It was inspired by the love of some 
 men for drawing and painting, and it was influenced 
 from the potboiling standpoint by the bourgeois element 
 of its patrons into painting the draped people and the 
 home life they saw around them. 
 
 Perhaps the most pertinent example of all which 
 can be cited to show that art is not the child of 
 religion is the European-American art of the nineteenth 
 and twentieth centuries. Can anyone contend that this 
 is based on religion? Look at its leaders in sculpture, 
 in painting, and in architecture. Constable, Turner, 
 Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Manet, Bargue, Rude, Car- 
 peaux, Rodin, Meryon, Bocklin, Fortuny, Gilbert Stuart, 
 Winslow Homer, Eakins: there are hundreds of dead 
 and living artists who are great in sculpture or paint- 
 ing, but not of religious subjects. Architects no longer 
 expend their efforts on cathedrals: it is skyscrapers and 
 railroad stations on which they strive: naturally 
 enough, since it is no longer the church which spreads 
 the butter on their bread. 
 
 That religion in art is a patronage force, can be 
 
ART AND MAN. 227 
 
 seen: in some cases in the work of individual artists. 
 Take Rubens, for instance. Among his best pictures 
 are his portraits of himself, of his master and wife,* 
 of draped Isabel Brandt, and nude Helene Fourment. 
 To order, that is as potboilers, he painted the series 
 of the wedding of Henry IV and Marie de Medicis 
 in the Louvre. To order also, he painted numerous 
 pictures of religious subjects, of which the splendid 
 "Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp is perhaps the 
 most famous. Can anyone maintain that it was 
 religion which inspired Rubens? If so, let them com- 
 pare his works, and they will find his portraits, or his 
 nude ladies, or his suffering saints, all painted and 
 handled in the same way. When he had a chance of 
 raking in an honest penny he simply did so. 
 
 The fact that many of the best artists, figure, 
 animal and landscape men, have never shown the 
 slightest sign of religious expression in their works is 
 one of the most patent proofs that religion is not the 
 original underlying force in art. Nevertheless a number 
 of artists have been sufficiently at one with their 
 religious beliefs to devote their lives to illustrating 
 them. And it is those men who have produced perhaps 
 the sweetest and most charming works of religious art. 
 Among such real believers Giotto and Fra Angelico 
 stand out as most perfect examples. And the one at 
 Assisi and the other at Florence, have left us those 
 naive and exquisite evidences of things not seen which 
 are unsurpassed in art. 
 
 Among primitive races the relations between art and 
 religion are almost identical with those among advanced 
 
 * Boston Mus. F. A. 1911. 
 
228 ART AND MAN. 
 
 races. That it is the elementary art instinct, not a 
 mystical train of thought, which is primarily responsible 
 for the conception in the concrete of sculptural, pictor- 
 ial and decorative art objects among primitive races, 
 can be inferred to some extent from the art of artistic 
 European children. Anyone can find in his own circle 
 some young children who like to draw pictures, and can 
 find further that they always work from their immature 
 unconscious observation of nature, unbiased and unham- 
 pered by any philosophical or religious ideas whatever. 
 Now primitive peoples are in many ways like children, 
 sufficiently so at any rate as to make it certain that their 
 art comes from the same source as children's art, namely 
 the nascent esthetic sense, undisturbed by extraneous ideals. 
 It is frequently accepted, however, as a rule without 
 any real examination of the matter, that the art of 
 primitive races is based on religion. This is shown by the 
 fact that almost all writers, whether in scientific works, 
 or books of travel, or novels, speak of any sculpted 
 humans by primitive peoples as idols. Whether they 
 mention Negro or Maori carvings, or Inca potteries, 
 or even Hindu Buddhas, the word "idol" pops in imme- 
 diately. This idea that the sculptures of humans by 
 Yellow or Brown or Black races are inevitably idols is 
 doubtless due to thoughtlessness, but at any rate it is 
 universal among the European nations, and their feeling 
 is well expressed in the lines of Bishop Heber "the 
 heathen in his blindness, bows down to wood and stone." 
 It is probable that, misled by this notion, missionaries, 
 who naturally delve into the religious ideas of primitive 
 peoples while as a rule neglecting their arts, foist on to 
 primitive art all sorts of meanings of which the poor 
 primitive artists were quite innocent. 
 
ART AND MAN. 229 
 
 But since much and usually the best art has no 
 mystical significance, it is all wrong for the Europeans 
 to blindly label and frequently libel all figures made by 
 non European races as idols. If writers would drop the 
 reckless use of the term "idol" and substitute therefore the 
 term "doll," often they would approximate more nearly to 
 the truth. The best commentary on this subject I know 
 of is the inscription attached to an early Greek grotesque 
 terra cotta statuette in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 
 Years ago someone labelled this particular figurine "doll 
 or idol," and the label has remained as an unconscious 
 recognition of the fact that many so called idols are 
 nothing of the kind, but are really dolls, that is figures 
 made to amuse small or grown up chidren, and also of 
 the fact that the mystical significance attributed to the 
 dolls is often a pure assumption, based on nothing but 
 imagination. 
 
 Some primitive sculptures, indeed a good many of 
 them, however, are objects of veneration or worship, 
 and these may be called idols. But one should be sure 
 of this before damning them thus with contemptuous 
 intolerance. And there is one way by which to tell, 
 with some probability of accuracy, whether a primitive 
 human figure should be looked on as a doll or an idol. 
 If a figurine is somewhat unique, if it is somewhat unlike 
 other figurines, if it has some sculptural and realistic 
 traits, if it is not one of many with identical traits, there 
 is likelihood that it is an attempt at art pure and simple, 
 based on nature as taken in thru the sense of vision, 
 and if badly done, it may be termed a doll. But if a 
 figurine is one of a class, if there are many figurines 
 similar in pose, in the parts indicated or laid on as orna- 
 ments, and especially if this class of figurine is found 
 
230 ART AND MAN. 
 
 over a large extent of country, then there is some prob- 
 ability that this figurine is symbolic, that it was intended 
 to represent some mythical personage, that it may have 
 been connected with some form of worship, and there- 
 fore there is some justification in speaking of it as an idol. 
 
 The White race is sometimes astute and sometimes 
 it is purblind in art criticism. Greek sculptures, for 
 instance, are seldom spoken of as idols, and this shows 
 discernment. Nor is the term applied to sculptures or 
 paintings in the edifices of any White race religious 
 bodies, except with the intent of casting a slur on 
 these. But this slur is handed out to primitive 
 figurines with singular unanimity. Undoubtedly many 
 primitive figurines are idols. But so are many figurines 
 of advanced races. The anthropomorphic conception of 
 deities is widespread, and art has been called on in 
 many places to embody it in visible form. 
 
 Religion has done both harm and good to art. 
 Some religions have handcuffed artists and curtailed art 
 by frowning down on or by forbidding the use of 
 certain motives. In Arab art, for instance, the human 
 face and figure, the motives which appeal especially to 
 most artists, were entirely excluded by Muhammed. 
 Here therefore is a religion which restricts art tremend- 
 ously, by simply not allowing the use of the most vital 
 of all art motives. 
 
 Religions, because they are moneyed patrons of the 
 fine arts, dictate subjects, and in their choice of subjects 
 often they do not recognize the need of beauty in art,- 
 and to carry out the subject, too frequently alas the 
 idea of beauty must be abandoned. Most of the 
 horrors in art are religious horrors. In European art, 
 blood, burnings, tortures of saints, crucifixions, are 
 
AET AND MAN. 231 
 
 favorite subjects. Personally I fail to see anything 
 specially beautiful, or elevating, or moral, in a man 
 being cooked on a gridiron, or in another man being 
 stuck full of arrows. Among Tibetan and South 
 Asiatic pictures, many are unpleasant representations of 
 hell and devils. In India, there are all sorts of beastly 
 statues, some with snakes around them. In Guatemala 
 and Honduras, the priestly creeds in some way led to 
 artists sculpting mainly snakes and skulls. 
 
 Religion casts also a most benumbing influence on 
 art in that it is the great foster mother of convention- 
 ality. This can be seen in the religious arts of Europe, 
 of Egypt, of western Asia, of southern Asia, of Central 
 America, etc. Forms and subjects become stereotyped. 
 The churches demand certain conventional subjects 
 carried out in certain conventional ways, and art and 
 artists invariably suffer in freshness and originality from 
 a monotonous repetition of certain subjects. Liberty 
 is just as important in art as in any other phase of 
 existence, that is if there is to be the slightest individ- 
 uality, advance, change, progress or improvement. 
 
 But in many ways religion has done good to art. 
 It has done good principally thru its patronage, thru 
 its demand bringing forth the artistic supply. The 
 influence of religion on art has been largely commercial. 
 Many an artist has earned his living and shaped his 
 output because there were funds freely spent to carry 
 out religious subjects. The Van Eycks, Memling, 
 Murillo, and many other European painters; the 
 builders of the Gothic cathedrals and those of the 
 Egyptian temples; numerous Asiatic painters of Bud- 
 dhist subjects; and many other artists of various races 
 were helped and fostered by their church and their 
 
232 ART AND MAN. 
 
 religion. And many beautiful works of art have they 
 left us which would certainly- never have been produced 
 had it not been for the needs and the determination 
 of the various churches to make visible their creeds and 
 their historic incidents. And as one thinks of all the 
 wonderful art works which religious patronage has 
 fostered, it certainly seems as if the good far surpassed 
 the harm which religion has done to art. 
 
ART AND MAN. 233 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 THE RANK OF ARTS. 
 
 In a consideration of the arts of the world there 
 are certain points which thrust themselves to the fore. 
 How many arts are there, what are their qualities, 
 what resemblances and differences are there between 
 them, are among the questions which demand priority 
 of response. Certain other points hang back, and 
 among the lingerers are how much better or worse is 
 one art than another and what are the relative merits 
 of all the arts? And while a student of comparative 
 art would certainly like to know which are the best 
 arts and which are the poorest arts and whether a 
 definite rank can be assigned to the various arts 
 thruout the world, it must be remembered that in any 
 discussion about art "de gustibus non est disputandum" 
 is always an important precept to bear in mind and in 
 none is it more important than in an attempt to 
 determine the relative rank of all the arts. For when 
 all is said and done, art is a matter of taste. 
 
 How persons may feel about art may perhaps be 
 hinted at by chance verdicts given on two occasions 
 by educated Americans. One of these men, a director 
 of one of our art museums, once said that if you saw 
 something particularly hideous, a Japanese would be 
 sure to admire it. The other man, a highly successful 
 physician, on seeing a very pretty Japanese color print 
 by Utamaro, pretended to feel quite ill and said the 
 woman seemed to be smelling onions. Now these men, 
 of course, would rank East Asiatic art as nowhere and 
 
234 ART AND MAN. 
 
 non existent. And while one might criticize them by 
 saying that a cat can look at a king and a jackass 
 can look at a picture but that he should not bray 
 about it, yet their remarks tend to show that any 
 attempt at assigning any relative rank to any art is at 
 best only an individual opinion and one which could 
 not be verified and which would certainly not be 
 universally accepted. 
 
 Whatever lack of appreciation was shown in these 
 criticisms of the poor yellow artists by superior ( !) white 
 critics, at any rate they had the merit of being genuine. 
 And genuine criticism is rare. The majority of the 
 public certainly does not criticize by an independent 
 exercise of their faculties so much as by remembering 
 what they have read or what they have been taught 
 about art. In fact the Chinese proverb "pictures are 
 mostly judged thru the ear" conveys an immense deal 
 of truth about the average criticism. 
 
 According to a widely spread popular notion, art, 
 to be good, must come up to a so called standard. 
 About this supposed standard people, including artists, 
 are most hazy: corner them and they cannot answer. 
 And the reason is really very simple: there is no 
 standard: the popular notion is a fallacy. And that 
 there cannot be any fixed standard about art may be 
 shown by an illustration. Good work and bad work 
 have been produced in two dimensional arts and also 
 in three dimensional arts. But how could any one 
 gauge two dimensional art by three dimensional art 
 canons. It cannot be done because they are different 
 things. 
 
 The so called standards of art have certainly done 
 much harm to European art for the past two hundred 
 
ART AND MAN. 235 
 
 years, by retarding its evolution, by conventionalizing it 
 and by frequently keeping in poverty artists of merit. 
 Exhibitions have been handed over to a so called jury 
 composed of a dozen or so of artists who arbitrarily 
 decided what should or should not be shown to the 
 public. The matter was left to their preferences and 
 their prejudices. The art works and even their makers 
 must suit the jury: anything or anybody which did 
 not please the jury was anathema. And hundreds of 
 young and talented artists have suffered from this 
 iniquitous foolishness. In the last century Delacroix, 
 Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Manet, Monet, for instance, 
 for years saw their works either rejected or skied by 
 hostile older men. 
 
 There was an exhibition a few years ago in New 
 York, which, for the first time in America, was based 
 on the correct idea of exhibiting what artists are 
 actually doing, good, bad and indifferent. This was 
 the exhibition where the works of Cubists and Futurists 
 appeared for the first time, and which may be remem- 
 bered by a canvas entitled "Nude descending a stair- 
 case." In this exhibition the paintings were not 
 required to come up to an artificial standard. And it 
 was the first American exhibition, therefore, which was 
 really fair. For when men are working to produce art 
 works for their bread and butter, it is most unfair to 
 prevent them from bringing out their works because 
 certain other men do not approve of them. And 
 moreover, anyone interested in art wants to know what 
 actually is being done and not merely what comes up 
 to the conventionalizing standard of academic uni- 
 formity. The breadth of feeling of artists about such 
 a genuine innovation, however, was well expressed by a 
 
236 ART AND MAN. 
 
 well-known miniature painter, who said with savage 
 emphasis of the Cubists and Futurists in that first 
 exhibition "I should like to kill them all." 
 
 The taste of various races is so different, the taste 
 of various individuals is so different, that perforce there 
 are thousands upon thousands of opinions about art. 
 It is rare for any two persons to agree thoroly about 
 the merits of numerous works of art of one kind; it 
 would be rarer still for two persons to agree thoroly 
 about the relative merits of works of art of different 
 kinds. In nothing more than in art is it true that 
 "one man's meat is another man's poison." And 
 when one thinks of the many races who have made 
 art, Pleistokenes, Greeks, Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, 
 Australasians and others, and how varied those arts 
 are, and how they evidently answer to the taste and 
 suit the needs of their makers, it seems as if any 
 fixing of the rank of arts is an impossible task. 
 
 To hazard some opinions, nevertheless. Of the 
 Europeans and the East Asiatics, we can say that their 
 mental attitude towards art, their way of looking at 
 things and their technic are entirely different; and that 
 these facts tend to prove that, as far as can be judged, 
 European art and East Asiatic art are independent and 
 autochthonous. But this does not help in the least 
 towards ranking either of these great arts as a whole 
 ahead of the other. 
 
 The Europeans and East Asiatics apparently should 
 rank side by side as the greatest painters. Both these 
 arts seek form. European art tends to fight and shade; 
 East Asiatic to color. The best works of each have some 
 of the special qualities of the other. When European 
 art is most imitative and realistic, it is rarely at its best. 
 
ART AND MAN. 237 
 
 When East Asiatic art is too unnaturalistic it sometimes 
 becomes vapid. When either of these arts includes ideal- 
 ized form and color, as with Europeans the works of Rem- 
 brandt and Turner, and among East Asiatics the works 
 of some of the Sung and Ming and of some Japanese 
 painters, then we can only say that in both cases 
 painting seems to have reached its topmost pinnacle. 
 
 The Greeks are, perhaps, the greatest sulptors. 
 Their genius ran mainly to form and their art is based 
 principally on the nude human figure idealized. Never- 
 theless when one thinks of the life and action of some 
 East Asiatic sculptures, of the realism of the West 
 Asiatic Goudeas in the Louvre, of the repose and 
 dignity of some Egyptian statues, and of the sterling 
 quality of some Modern European figures such as 
 the "King Arthur" of Peter Visscher at Innsbruck, 
 one hesitates about giving any dogmatic opinion based, 
 after all, on individual taste. 
 
 The more one studies many arts also, the more does 
 one's taste change and with it one's opinion of their 
 relative merits. The more one studies the arts of 
 primitive races, the more does one like at least some 
 of their work. Some of the work of some of the 
 primitive races is certainly better than some of the 
 work of more advanced races. Some Pleistokene 
 paintings surely have merits which, to our eyes, are 
 lacking in some Egyptian paintings. Some African and 
 Australasian decorations have color qualities not usually 
 found in ordinary European decorations. In fact when 
 it comes to assigning any relative rank to the arts of 
 the world, it seems as if the most accurate statement 
 is to say that it is impossible to do so. 
 
 Art might be compared to a great banquet replete 
 
238 ART AND MAN. 
 
 with rare viands and nectars to tickle the palate, 
 each of which has its separate flavor. Oysters, mush- 
 room soup, shad, broiled chicken, asparagus, terrapin, 
 camembert, ice cream, coffee, Chateau Yquem, Roederer, 
 White Rock, for instance, might be mentioned as dishes 
 and drinks pleasing to some palates. One man might 
 prefer rock fish and madeira: another turkey and 
 claret: tastes about food differ! But how could any- 
 one decide which individual preference was right? 
 Some like one thing, some another! You cannot assign 
 any definite rank to the various courses: you cannot 
 say which is better and which is best. In the same 
 way it seems as if art presented all the elements of a 
 feast for the eye and the emotions. The personal 
 taste, the environment, the training and other factors 
 would affect the judgment of those looking at art, 
 and if they judged honestly according to their prefer- 
 ences and expressed honestly their judgments, these 
 would be endless in their number and variety. The 
 rational opinion in regard to the rank of arts is that it 
 is mainly optional. 
 
ART AND MAN. 239 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 ART AND RACE. 
 
 Man is the only animal who has sculpted or 
 painted, and this is one of the traits differentiating 
 him from other animals and putting him in a separate 
 class. The sculptures and paintings made by man 
 shed a great deal of light on his evolution, his ancestors, 
 his history, his relationships, and his divisions into 
 races. The earliest remaining sculptures and pictures 
 especially reveal a great deal about time in the evolution 
 of man. No one can say how long it took to evolve 
 man, because geology, paleontology and prehistoric 
 ethnology, at best, can give us only relative times : 
 they cannot tell the definite number of years. Com- 
 parative art equally can not give definite dates, but 
 it can and does tell that long, long ago men endowed 
 with .great art faculties lived in south central Europe. 
 The direct evidence proves that by the middle Pleis- 
 tokene at least some men already had developed intel- 
 ligence, and it may therefrom safely be asserted that 
 the time during which man became perfected was an 
 extremely long one. 
 
 There is nothing in art, however, to show that 
 man was ever less a man than he is now. For we 
 know that the earliest sculptures and paintings which 
 have come down to us were made when man was 
 already full fledged, because there are stone imple- 
 ments and fossil human bones long antedating any 
 art works. Sculptures and paintings therefore do not 
 tell the whole story of man. They do not tell whether 
 all men evolved or descended from one common ances- 
 
240 ART AND MAN. 
 
 tor in some definite locality, or whether men evolved 
 and descended from different ancestors in different 
 localities. Indeed already it may be said with some- 
 thing like finality that art comes too late in the history 
 of man to reveal a great deal about the origin of man. 
 But it does reveal a tremendous amount about the 
 development of man. 
 
 Art tells us many things about the psychic traits of 
 men in various parts of the world and it can assuredly 
 tell us many more about racial affiliations. Yet altho 
 we are still much in the dark about these, so far the evi- 
 dences of art have been consulted scarcely at all to see 
 what light they can shed on race. Some of the points 
 to be considered are as follows: Is art racial? Do the 
 great arts correspond with the great races? Does art 
 point to one or to several original races? Does simi- 
 larity or difference in art imply similarity or difference 
 in race? Or to put the matter in a still more general 
 form, what does art tell us of the evolution, ancestry and 
 relationships of mankind? 
 
 In the first place what do we mean by race? It is 
 accepted now, from the evidences of geology and of 
 paleontology, that the earliest types of fife on the planet 
 were of a low order and that with successive geological 
 epochs higher types appeared. It is probably also 
 accepted now, from the evidence of comparative anat- 
 omy, that the structure and organs of man and of the 
 apes are identical and that the various races of today 
 are related to altho not descended from the apes. 
 Beyond this point authorities vary and there is much 
 difference of opinion and many theories about race. It 
 does not seem in the least agreed upon whether the races 
 of today all come from one stock or whether they 
 
ART AND MAN. 241 
 
 descend from several stocks. In fact, not only is the 
 origin of races unknown, but the number of races is 
 uncertain, and moreover nobody can aught but guess 
 where the various races came from. 
 
 Several ways of grouping and dividing mankind have 
 been devised by scientists. Some have divided men 
 according to nationality. Others have divided men 
 according to language. And undoubtedly there are 
 nations and linguistic families among men. But if one 
 uses one's eyes, it is a patent fact that there are dif- 
 ferent kinds of men in the world. An Englishman is 
 different from a Chinaman, and both are different from 
 a Hottentot. Even to the naked eye, there are dis- 
 tinctions in form and color. One can see that some 
 groups of men are tall, some short; that some men in 
 the color of their skin approximate to white, others to 
 yellow, others to brown, others to black; that some men 
 have straight black hair, others wavy hair of various 
 shades, others woolly hair, etc. To the mind also, there 
 are distinctions apparent in the mental traits and 
 impulses of the different kinds of men. 
 
 These anatomical, biological and psychical charac- 
 teristics are now increasingly accepted as the basic 
 attributes of race. It is understood that the political 
 divisions of mankind or nations and the linguistic 
 families do not necessarily correspond with race. A 
 race may be one nation or it may be divided politically 
 into several nations: a race may speak one language 
 or it may hold intercourse in numerous tongues. And 
 so it is coming about that the groups of men with 
 similar anatomical, biological and psychical character- 
 istics are becoming recognized as the ones deserving the 
 appellation of race. 
 
242 
 
 ART AND MAN. 
 
 Now art is a product of humanity just as is nation- 
 ality or language. There are many arts, exactly as 
 there are many nations and many languages. And just 
 as the various nations and languages have been formed 
 by various bodies of men, so have the various arts been 
 fashioned by various bodies of men. Nations and lan- 
 guages unfortunately so seldom correspond with race that 
 they cannot be used with any certainty as criterions of 
 race. And it is therefore of importance to science to find 
 out how much the arts correspond to race because the 
 arts unquestionably offer many clues to race problems. 
 
 It is axiomatic that an artist is the product of his 
 own time and of his own environment. It should 
 be equally almost as axiomatic that an artist is 
 the product of his own race. For the evidences of the 
 fine arts unquestionably show that mental racial 
 characteristics play a large part both in the start and 
 in the growth of an artist and of his art. No artist, 
 without some sudden new external influence, starts out 
 and does something very different from his immediate 
 artistic forefathers and relatives. No Melanesian sud- 
 denly begins to paint kakemonos: no Amerind suddenly 
 abandons rectangles to draw circles. A Melanesian 
 or an Amerind continues to produce Melanesian or 
 Amerind art, unless some other art force, Chinese or 
 European or what not, intervenes, and compels some 
 new departure. That is to say, the art of any tribe, 
 of any set of persons in one locality, belongs to the 
 art of their race. White race artists instinctively pro- 
 duce a White race art, Yellow race artists a Yellow race 
 art, and so forth. A comparative study of art cer- 
 tainly warrants the assertion that original art is almost 
 invariably, perhaps invariably, racial. 
 
ART AND MAN. 243 
 
 In two ways art may tell of the characteristics and the 
 relationships of mankind. One is in regard to the men- 
 tality, the other to the biology of man. Art tells fairly 
 clearly about the mental impulses and the psychical 
 traits of a race, that is it lets us know with some 
 accuracy the kind and degree of development of a race. 
 Art also places before us more or less fully and uncon- 
 sciously according to the racial ability for portraiture 
 the physical characteristics of a race, that is it opens 
 our eyes to some extent to the bodily appearance of 
 the units of a race. 
 
 When we find resemblances or differences among 
 arts, we must therefore look at these from two stand- 
 points: resemblances or differences in mentality and in 
 portraiture. Resemblances or differences in the kinds 
 and degrees of art tell fairly accurately whether races 
 are or are not mentally similar and in the same stage 
 of development: resemblances or differences in the por- 
 traiture of arts, that is in the sculptures or drawings 
 of humans, tell with some accuracy whether the physical 
 characteristics of the makers of various arts are similar 
 or different. 
 
 Similarity in kind and degree of art, that is in 
 mentality, does not necessarily imply similarity in 
 racial physique, that is in portraiture. If the arts 
 of two peoples are similar in kind it may be that the 
 races are related, but it may be also that they are 
 not related. But if any arts have even crude por- 
 traiture, this offers an almost infallible test as to 
 whether the makers are related by blood. In some 
 primitive arts, however, portraiture is so exceedingly 
 incipient that very little can be gleaned from it. 
 
 In many obvious cases, where we find similarity in 
 
244 ART AND MAN. 
 
 art, we find similarity in race; and where we find 
 difference in art, we find difference in race. For 
 instance, we know that the art of modern France is to 
 some extent similar to the art of old Rome; and we 
 know also that the French belong partly to the same 
 race as the Romans: this then is a case of a partial 
 similarity in art and a partial similarity in race. 
 Again we know that the art of modern France is 
 different from the art of old Mexico; and we know also 
 that the races of France and of old Mexico are different: 
 here then is a case of difference in art and difference 
 in race. 
 
 When we find similarity in the fine arts of two 
 geographically distant peoples, it clearly implies kinship 
 in their mental traits. When we find similarity in the 
 physical appearance of two geographically distant 
 peoples, it clearly implies kinship by blood. When we 
 find similarity both in fine arts and in appearance, the 
 evidence seems overwhelming that these two geograph- 
 ically distant peoples are sprung from the same stock 
 and that one of them has become transplanted. In 
 support of these statements, I will cite some observa- 
 tions of my own. I had the pleasure on one occasion 
 of a long talk with Mene Wallace, an Eskimo from 
 Etah, North Greenland, who speaks English very Well. 
 A rather short, strong, stocky man, his physique was 
 not in the least that of an Amerind. Moreover, his 
 face diverged wholly from the Amerind type face. It 
 resembled the Japanese face and what would, I sup- 
 pose, be called the Mongol face. Now there is no 
 doubt that most Eskimo art is unlike Amerind art 
 and, on the contrary, resembles closely some naturalistic 
 East Asiatic art. And the inference, it seems to me, is 
 
ART AND MAN. 245 
 
 obvious. The Eskimo are not related to the Amerinds, 
 but they are related to the Japanese, and perhaps to 
 some of the Chinese. And while we cannot say 
 definitely as yet that the Eskimo came to America from 
 Asia, still the balance of probabilities is in favor of 
 this, because of the numbers of the Asiatic racial 
 relations of the Eskimo. 
 
 On the other hand, two or more races may be 
 physically different, while their mental development and 
 artistic instincts may be very similar. And compari- 
 sons show that in such cases races produce art which 
 is very similar altho not identical. As an instance, 
 consider the African, Australasian, and Amerind arts. 
 They might not improperly be termed one great 
 artistic family. These arts are principally decorative 
 pattern art, evincing a weak sense of form and a 
 great love of colors. These arts vary in many respects 
 from one another: they are never identical: their por- 
 traiture is wholly different: and moreover each one of 
 these arts itself varies locally everywhere. But these 
 arts each display an art instinct and art impulse 
 implying behind them much the same mental power 
 and mental traits: in other words, there is great 
 similarity, tho no identity between them. Now we 
 know positively that the races of Africa and America, 
 and that at least some of the races of Australasia and 
 America are physically different. Hence we must 
 logically conclude that similar arts do not necessarily 
 mean physical racial relationship; and also that races 
 may be entirely different physically and yet be suffi- 
 ciently similar mentally to produce arts similar in 
 kind and degree. 
 
 Influences extraneous to a race, however, occasion- 
 
246 ART AND MAN". 
 
 ally bring about changes in an artist's work or even 
 in the art of a race. It is especially external forces 
 such as the conquest of one race by another that 
 sometimes causes art to depart from its original racial 
 basis. The effect of extraneous influences on art may 
 be exemplified in South and East Asiatic arts. In 
 Hindustan, China, Korea and Japan, we have four 
 countries, whose inhabitants are all Asiatics but who 
 belong to several separate races. Among the ancestors 
 of these several races there seems to have grown up 
 at some remote time a pattern decorative art, not 
 unlike Australasian art and which might be called 
 Early Asiatic art. About this Early Asiatic art we 
 are still much in the dark but, judging wholly from 
 our own observations, apparently such an art existed 
 in Asia east of Baluchistan in prehistoric times. 
 
 On this Early Asiatic art foundation, there grew up 
 in China, Korea and Japan the great East Asiatic 
 naturalistic art. According to legendary history, this 
 art started in China and spread to Korea and Japan. 
 In the last two countries it put forth branches varying 
 from the parent stem. Altho the makers apparently 
 belong to different races, yet we must remember that 
 they are all Asiatics and moreover East Asiatics. And 
 the ready acceptance and successful fruition of Chinese 
 naturalistic art especially in Japan, implies that Chinese 
 and Japanese artistic traits are nearly identical. It is 
 a case fairly parallel to that of the Dutch and the 
 Italians who both belong to the White races, the one 
 to the northern the other to the southern family, and 
 whose arts generically belong to the same artistic 
 family. 
 
 On this Early Asiatic art base also, there arose 
 
ART AND MAN. 247 
 
 in Hindustan some art, principally sculpture, dealing 
 mainly with Buddhistic themes. These Buddhistic sub- 
 jects crossed the Himalaya with the religion and became 
 grafted on the East Asiatic autochthonous naturalistic 
 art. It is evident therefore that occasionally extraneous 
 causes, as in this instance religious beliefs acting under the 
 force of patronage, may introduce foreign subjects into 
 the art of a race. But these Buddhistic subjects did not 
 affect East Asiatic pictorial technic, which was invented 
 in Eastern Asia and which was and remains racial. 
 
 One of the greatest puzzles connected with race is 
 that of the Pleistokenes. Who were they? Of the 
 Pleistokene race we know but little. Pleistokene art, 
 however, has great similarities to Bushman art and to 
 Arctic art. These arts might well be called one great 
 artistic family, just as one might call the African, Aus- 
 tralasian, and Amerind arts one great artistic family. 
 But we know that the makers of the African and 
 Amerind arts are entirely, and the makers of the 
 Australasian and Amerind arts are almost entirely 
 physically different races. Therefore also unquestion- 
 ably, the makers of the Pleistokene, Bushman, and 
 Eskimo arts may be physically different races. More- 
 over their habitats are situated at forbidding distances 
 from one another. In the light of these facts there- 
 fore, it seems improbable that the similarities of the 
 Pleistokene, Bushman and Arctic arts are due to a 
 physical race relationship dating from way back. On 
 the contrary, it seems probable that we have three 
 distinct physical races with very similar mental art 
 impulses and whose struggle for existence was solved 
 much in the same way by following the chase. 
 
 Art, however, points to a solution of the Pleisto- 
 
248 ART AND MAN. 
 
 kene puzzle. Free hand drawing or sketching of an 
 advanced type is found especially in two areas of the 
 earth: China-Japan, and southern and central Europe. 
 The East Asiatics sketch to perfection: so do the 
 rather small dark-white peoples dwelling in the southern 
 part of Europe: the branch of the White race now 
 usually spoken of as the Mediterranean race. In both 
 cases this ability seems to be largely racial. Of the 
 Mediterranean race in Minoan Crete there were artists 
 who decorated pottery with free hand sketches of plants 
 and sea forms; in Italy and Spain dozens of artists 
 have shown what free hand drawing can be: no nation- 
 ality has ever surpassed the French in free hand 
 sketching. And the Pleistokene drawings are typically 
 French: some of them might have been done by a 
 Barye or a Troyon. Moreover, Pleistokene art flourished 
 in precisely the same habitat where the Mediterranean 
 race now holds sway. 
 
 But especially important is the fact that there is a 
 little Pleistokene portraiture left. And this portraiture 
 reveals neither Negroid nor Mongoloid types. When 
 Mr. Champion, curator of the Mus£e de Saint Germain, 
 showed me the little Pleistokene ivory heads there, I 
 exclaimed "Mais c'est Egyptien!" and he replied "Ah, 
 Monsieur, d'autres I'ont dit aussi." While it is princi- 
 pally the arrangement of the hair that gives the 
 Egyptian look, there can be no doubt, it seems to me, 
 that the faces suggest a south European type. Artistic- 
 ally, geographically and physically therefore, the most 
 rational explanation of the Pleistokene race, indeed the 
 conclusion which seems to be forced on us, is that the 
 Pleistokenes were the ancestors of the Mediterranean 
 branch of the White race. 
 
ART AND MAN. 249 
 
 While many things point out that European Pleisto- 
 kene art was the first wave of White race art, many 
 other things point out that it was not the father of 
 any of the later arts of other races thruout the world. 
 Art, it is true, proceeds everywhere from the same 
 instinct and the same impulse, and from the creative 
 side therefore art is always more or less the same 
 thing. But there are a number of arts which are suffi- 
 ciently distinct to show that they ' are mainly autoch- 
 thonous and not descended from one another. The 
 African, Australasian and Amerind arts, for instance, are 
 evidently not the children of European Pleistokene art. 
 It is safe therefore to say that the fine arts point to a 
 multiplicity of races; and also that the fine arts offer 
 no evidence that man sprang from one stock in one 
 locality any more than they offer any evidence about 
 the origin of races. If there was one original race, of 
 which the others are offshoots, that race antedated any 
 art: at least any art of which we have any fragments 
 left. 
 
 It seems also fairly certain that European Pleistokene 
 art originated probably more than 100,000 years ago. 
 For Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme* and 
 Mr. W. M. Newton in the valley of the Thames found 
 rudimentary figure-stones in the Acheuteen.f But so 
 far apparently no Pleistokene art has been discovered 
 in Asia nor in Africa. Not only therefore is Pleistokene 
 art coincident with the habitat of the most artistic 
 European nationalities of today, but also — unless the 
 spade of some archaeologist of the future shows us to 
 the contrary — art must be accepted as having begun in 
 
 * Antiquity's Celtiques et Antediluviennes. 
 
 f Arthur Keith: The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 166. 
 
250 AET AND MAN. 
 
 Europe long before there was any art in Asia or Africa. 
 At present all the evidences of art point out that 
 Pleistokene art was autochthonous in Europe; that the 
 Pleistokene art makers, from Acheul6en times on, were 
 autochthonous European races; and that man first 
 matured into an intelligent man in Europe. In addi- 
 tion to this, if we consider that in the European 
 ChellSen and even earlier, man showed a sense of form 
 in the manufacture of stone implements; that the Heid- 
 elberg remains were dug out of the earliest Pleistokene; 
 and that the Piltdown skull may date back to the later 
 Pleiocene: surely there is food for thought. 
 
 It is perhaps premature and speculative to suggest 
 that it seems most in accord with these evidences to 
 think that man descended from several ancestors in 
 different parts of the world and that these descendants 
 stayed to some extent on their native soil, rather than 
 that man descended from one ancestor in one spot and 
 that his descendants thence spread over the earth. But 
 it is timely and correct to say that the evidences of 
 the fine arts, of the mechanical arts, and of man's 
 own remains directly contradict the commonly accepted 
 theory that man wandered from Asia into Europe. 
 While there is nothing in art to suggest that man 
 wandered from Europe into Asia, all of the artistic 
 and much of the scientific evidence is totally at vari- 
 ance with the usual belief that Europe was peopled 
 from Asia: indeed it points out squarely as a fact, that 
 the European races were autochthones, born and bred 
 on the continent of Europe. 
 
 This brief study of the relations of art to race 
 brings out, it seems to me, certain facts which appar- 
 ently are new. But even these few remarks — unampli- 
 
ART AND MAN. 251 
 
 fied in order to keep them, in accordance with artistic 
 law, in harmony with the rest of the book — show that 
 much may be learnt about race from art, much more 
 than from nationality or language, because while these 
 may or may not correspond with race, art almost 
 invariably does. And because art is so nearly coinci- 
 dent with race, students of man should study art and 
 study it along comparative lines. For by so doing it 
 is certain that a great deal which is now unknown will 
 be discovered about the ancestors and relationships of 
 mankind. 
 
252 
 
 art :and man. 
 
 THE FINE ARTS 
 THRUOUT 
 
 THE WORLD 
 
 N-y- 
 
 Fig. 28. Sketch map of the geographical distribution 
 
ART AND MAN. 
 
 253 
 
 of the Fine Arts thruout the World. 
 
AET AND MAN. 255 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS AND INDEX. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 How this work started 7 
 
 First publications on subject 7 
 
 Change of view among art critics and ethnologists 8 
 
 Book an enlargement of Comparative Art. General aim of book 8 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Art and Comparative Art. 
 
 Term "art." What it covers and limited use thereof 11 
 
 Dancing 11 
 
 Definition of art 11 
 
 Art a production of man, not of nature 12 
 
 Primitive art part of fine arts 12 
 
 Art as one whole still unstudied 13 
 
 Necessity of comparing arts 14 
 
 Batta and Easter Island heads 16 
 
 Easter Island art did not cross to America 16 
 
 Similarity does not mean identity 17 
 
 Every art is locally individual and not identical with any other art 17 
 
 Comparative art a link between science and art 18 
 
 Definition of comparative art 18 
 
 Comparative art not comparative archaeology 19 
 
 Many sciences used in study of man 19 
 
 Written records 20 
 
 Implements 20 
 
 Art specimens 21 
 
 Art in a borderland 21 
 
 Art specimens divided 21 
 
 Art experts not ethnologists 22 
 
 Ethnologists not art experts 23 
 
 Art as one whole a still open field 23 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Geographical Distribution of Art. 
 
 Art is universal 24 
 
 All races have art, sometimes good 24 
 
 Is art one or several? 26 
 
 Art varies in different places 26 
 
 Classification must be geographical and historical 26 
 
256 AET AND MAN. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Various classifications possible 27 
 
 Main arts of the world 27 
 
 Europe. Pleistokene 28 
 
 " Neolithic. Bronze Age 30 
 
 " Egean 30 
 
 " Greek 30 
 
 Etruscan : 30 
 
 Roman 31 
 
 Byzantine 31 
 
 Modern European 31 
 
 Africa. Libyan 32 
 
 " Bushman 32 
 
 " Negro 32 
 
 " Zimbabwe 32 
 
 " Egypt 33 
 
 Asia. West Asiatic 33 
 
 Arab 33 
 
 " Early Asiatic 33 
 
 " South Asiatic 34 
 
 " East Asiatic 34 
 
 Australasia. Melanesian 34 
 
 " Polynesian 36 
 
 Asia and America. Arctic 36 
 
 America. Pleistokene? 37 
 
 West North Amerind and East North Amerind 38 
 
 Mexican and Central Amerind 38 
 
 " West and East South Amerind 38 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Evolution of the Artist. Instinct and Impulse. Patronage. 
 
 Art everywhere: hence art instinct in all races 40 
 
 Definition of art instinct and art impulse 40 
 
 Art instinct same as esthetic sense 41 
 
 Art instinct, like language, a primal instinct in man 41 
 
 Does art instinct grow up or is it transmitted? 41 
 
 Art comes primarily from art instinct based on vision and is born many 
 
 times anew 41 
 
 Pleistokene art instinct 42 
 
 Decorative art from art instinct 42 
 
 Esthetic sense is underlying motive power. Proof from development of chil- 
 dren into artists 43 
 
 Primitives act like children about art impulse 43 
 
 Art comes secondarily from visualizing mental conceptions 43 
 
 Artist's instinct like mouser cat's, spider's, or duckling's instinct 44 
 
 Art instinct may swamp reason 44 
 
 Best artists reason 46 
 
 Turner 46 
 
 Wagner 47 
 
 Esthetic sense first: then patronage 47 
 
 Patronage implies demand and supply: stomach versus brains 48 
 
 Patronage hostile, but also friendly to art 48 
 
ART AND MAN. 257 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Personal Equation of an Artist. Sincerity. Personality. 
 Style. Observation. Imagination. Memory. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "Soyez naif." Henry Marcette. Naivete or sincerity means that artist 
 
 allows his art instinct to express itself freely 49 
 
 Three stages in artist's work: in childhood, sincerity: in training, copying: 
 
 in maturity, either copying or return to sincerity 49 
 
 Early Italian and Flemish art sincere 50 
 
 Pre-Raphaelites insincere 50 
 
 Chinese art most artistic, yet Chinese not a naif race 51 
 
 Primitive art depends largely on sincerity. Often better than advanced art. . 51 
 
 Sincerity without art impulse, useless. Example, some Negro art 51 
 
 Personality implies sincerity and produces style 52 
 
 Style refers to technic and applies to artists and to schools of art 52 
 
 Personality appears only in some arts 52 
 
 Personality in art has nothing to do with moral character of artist 53 
 
 Observation at bottom of all art 53 
 
 Observation of hunting disguises led to fabulous animals 53 
 
 All art based on something seen, and thus a record of ethnology, zoology, etc. 54 
 Imagination and memory necessary. Not all art is done from nature. 
 
 Imagination and memory obtain life and motion 54 
 
 Imagination and memory in all good art: Europeans, Bushmen, Australasians, 
 
 etc., have them 56 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Training and Environment. 
 
 Training shapes art and artists for good or bad 57 
 
 Training saves time, but may destroy individuality. Best artists leave their 
 
 training behind 57 
 
 Pioneers in art go one step further than their training and their predecessors 58 
 Importance of training shown by art academies of today, by Italian and 
 
 Flemish art, etc 58 
 
 Training has played part in forming some great arts 59 
 
 By analogy therefore training must have acted the same in Crete, Western 
 
 Asia, etc 59 
 
 Training more doubtful in Africa, Australasia and America, but must have 
 
 done something 59 
 
 Environment a chief factor in art 59 
 
 What environment is: local, physical, etc 60 
 
 Influence of materials 60 
 
 A hunting stage does not cause similarity in art 61 
 
 Great art sometimes means prosperity 61 
 
 Civilization sometimes blunts art 62 
 
 Commercial prosperity does not necessarily imply good art 62 
 
 Good art implies mental ability 62 
 
258 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Criticism. paqe 
 
 Term "critic" unfortunate: implies condemnation 64 
 
 Substitute terms for "art critic" 64 
 
 Three stages of untrained-in-art-technic persons 66 
 
 Untrained persons usually incorrect 66 
 
 "I know what I like" 67 
 
 Connoisseurs as critics 67 
 
 Artists as critics 68 
 
 Art and criticism different things 68 
 
 Critic must be both artist and connoisseur 69 
 
 Best writers about art. Men with art instinct and reasoning powers sometimes 
 
 become art critics 69 
 
 Art writer must be broad minded: needs art instinct but not art impulse: 
 
 must act like a law judge 70 
 
 It is difficult to write about art because its qualities are intangible 71 
 
 Art writer's work should radiate from center like a fan 71 
 
 Change in view point of the author 72 
 
 Every art writer's view point must enlarge 73 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Art and Nature. Naturalism. Imitation. Realism. Idealism 
 
 and Imagination. 
 
 Art is a world of its own: art is not nature 76 
 
 In pure nature there is always beauty 76 
 
 Man usually spoils nature 77 
 
 Man's alterations of nature sometimes beautiful 77 
 
 Misconception of "truth to nature" 77 
 
 Truth foundation of science: goodness of ethics: beauty of art 78 
 
 Truth the bed rock of science 78 
 
 By "truth to nature" people mean mirror like imitation 78 
 
 Terms naturalistic, realistic, idealistic 78 
 
 Realistic imitative art is reflection in mirror 79 
 
 Realistic interpretative art interprets nature 79 
 
 Idealistic art a mental vision 79 
 
 "Poeta nascitur, non fit" 80 
 
 Decorative art based on nature or on patterns 80 
 
 Whether imitative or imaginative, art may be good, bad or indifferent 80 
 
 Imaginative art higher type than imitative art 81 
 
 Architecture not based on nature 81 
 
 Sculpture closely allied to nature: Greek sculpture idealistic 81 
 
 Chairs, teapots, etc., semi sculptural art which is not "true to nature" 82 
 
 Painting may or may not be imitative 82 
 
 Perspective and light and shade necessary for imitation 83 
 
 Anecdote of Degas 83 
 
 Most decorative art not "true to nature" 83 
 
 Fortuny. Manet. Barye 84 
 
 Holbein. Veronese. Rubens 84 
 
 Edward Whymper 86 
 
 BOcklin 86 
 
 Solomon Islands and Zuni figures 86 
 
 No art wholly imitative or wholly imaginative 87 
 
ART AND MAN. 259 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Sculptural, Pictorial and Decorative Arts. Two Dimensional 
 and Three Dimensional Art. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Relations between sculptural art, pictorial art and decorative art intricate ... 88 
 In pictorial and sculptural art, art work is primary; in decorative art, it is 
 
 secondary 88 
 
 Some art naturalistic, some non naturalistic 89 
 
 Sculptures and pictures sometimes decorations for architecture. Puvis de 
 
 Chavannes 89 
 
 Confusion in terminology 90 
 
 Painting is spots of pigment: has only two dimensions 90 
 
 Third dimension, depth, a suggestion and illusion 91 
 
 Difference between a painting and a picture on a house wall 91 
 
 What decorative art is. Should be simple 92 
 
 Painted decorative art is pattern art 92 
 
 Decorative art not inferior to imitative: something different 93 
 
 Classification of arts of world 93 
 
 Pleistokene, Bushman and Arctic arts pictorial and sculptural 93 
 
 Neolithic art decorative 94 
 
 European art sculptural and pictorial 94 
 
 European decorative art sense weak: shown by decorations on pottery 94 
 
 Egyptian and West Asiatic arts sculptural and decorative 96 
 
 Arab art decorative 96 
 
 South Asiatic art sculptural, decorative and pictorial 96 
 
 East Asiatic art sculptural, pictorial and decorative 97 
 
 Negro, Australasian and Amerind arts sculptural and decorative. 97 
 
 Good and bad points of Negro, Amerind and Australasian arts 98 
 
 Gradation from pictorial art of Europe to decorative art of Africa, Australasia 
 
 and America 98 
 
 All statements about these matters can be only general hints 99 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Subject and Motive. Taste. Selection. Beauty. Ethics. 
 
 Morality. 
 
 Subject and motive 100 
 
 Definition of subject 100 
 
 Definition of motive 100 
 
 How to look at works of art. Ostensible subject. Real motive 101 
 
 Questions put show literateur or artist 101 
 
 Literateurs and ethnologists look for subject 102 
 
 Artists look for motive 102 
 
 Anecdote of an American painter 103 
 
 Pleasant and unpleasant subjects 103 
 
 Comparative art should turn mainly to motive 103 
 
 Examples, human figure, mother and child 104 
 
 Subjects nevertheless important, but ethnologists should not be misled by 
 
 them 104 
 
 Choice of subjects by various races 109 
 
260 ART AND MAN. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The subject in some art works is symbolical, that is, is something else than 
 
 appears 106 
 
 Symbolism sometimes shown in repeating parts of figure 107 
 
 Taste is racial 107 
 
 Taste rules art. Taste causes selection 108 
 
 Taste of Africans, Australasians and Amerinds 108 
 
 European fashion plates 109 
 
 Titian and Sesshiu, Greek sculptures, Rembrandt's etchings: governed by 
 
 taste and selection 110 
 
 "C'est beau!" 110 
 
 Beauty not an absolute canon of art 110 
 
 Beauty and taste undefinable entities: vary thruout world Ill 
 
 In decorative art, beauty cannot be divorced from use Ill 
 
 Character a phase of beauty Ill 
 
 Beauty in art varies with taste of spectator: Amerind war dress, banyan.root. 112 
 
 Meaning of words good and bad in art 113 
 
 What are the ethics of art? 113 
 
 Human ethics and religion a rule of conduct 114 
 
 Art due to sharpened vision: not to morality 114 
 
 Ethics of art different from ethics of human life 114 
 
 If battle pictures are motives they may be good. Vernet and de Neuville. 116 
 
 But if battle pictures are moralities, they are apt to be weak 116 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Some Art Attributes. Composition. Synthesis and Analysis. 
 Harmony and Finish. Quality. Conventionality. Mystery. 
 
 Composition is the planning of a work of art: a mental act of artist 117 
 
 Composition differentiates art from nature: artist must use his brain 117 
 
 Composition cannot be taught: only a few rules can be given 117 
 
 Artist must compose mainly thru his art instinct 118 
 
 Giorgione's Madonna a fine composition 118 
 
 Composition found to some extent in all arts 119 
 
 Synthesis and analysis in all art: what they are: importance of both 119 
 
 Synthesis and analysis vary in different arts: in which arts most prominent. . 120 
 
 Harmony essential in art 120 
 
 Feeling for harmony universal: part of art instinct 120 
 
 Decorative patterns repeated symmetrically for the sake of harmony 121 
 
 Harmony chief factor in finish: a work of art in harmony is finished as far 
 
 as it goes 121 
 
 Quality means that technical processes are well done : in which arts it is present. 122 
 
 Conventionality is when art becomes crystallized into set forms 122 
 
 Conventional and unconventional arts 123 
 
 Some paintings so undefined one scarcely knows what they mean 123 
 
 Mysteriousness a charm 124 
 
 Mystery in some ways a high level mark of art 124 
 
 Mystery essentially European 124 
 
 East Asiatic art suggestive rather than mysterious 124 
 
 " Grail song" more mysterious than seeing Grail 126 
 
 No mystery in other arts 126 
 
ART AND MAN. 261 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 The Technic of Form. Materials. Drawing. Outline. Line. 
 Perspective. Action and Motion. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Definition of technic 127 
 
 Materials 127 
 
 Drawing. Outline 128 
 
 Immature mind insists on outline 128 
 
 Drawings of immature inartistic minds 128 
 
 Outline among various races 129 
 
 Line. Difference from outline 129 
 
 Importance of line in composition 130 
 
 Lines suggesting third dimension show advanced art 130 
 
 Classical lines and picturesque lines 130 
 
 Perspective. What it is. Mechanical rather than artistic 131 
 
 Among what races perspective is found 132 
 
 Action and motion. Every object has its action. Motion only when a move- 
 ment is depicted 132 
 
 Among what arts found 132 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Curvilinear Art and Rectilinear Art. 
 
 Curved and straight lines in all arts. But more of one kind or the other in every 
 
 art 133 
 
 Races who observe nature develop curved lines. Races who follow grass pat- 
 terns develop straight lines 133 
 
 European art curvilinear 133 
 
 African arts curvilinear and rectilinear 134 
 
 Asiatic arts mainly curvilinear 134 
 
 Australasian arts mainly rectilinear 136 
 
 Amerind arts strongly rectilinear 136 
 
 Mitla art 136 
 
 Some curves in Amerind art 137 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 The Technic of Color. Painting. Masses. Colors and Color. 
 Values. Atmosphere. Light and Shade. Effect. Cast 
 Shadows. Light. Sunshine. 
 
 Masses. Drawing on a middle line. Eakins. Delacroix 138 
 
 Difference between colors, color and pigments 138 
 
 Colors used early on person and in art 139 
 
 Color late discovery; cannot be described in words 139 
 
 Imitation of local shades dangerous: relations of color must be sought 140 
 
 Hard to compare colors and color among races 140 
 
 Color sense often better among primitives than among civilized: often lacking 
 
 in cities 140 
 
262 ART AND MAN. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Asia pre-eminently land of colors and color 141 
 
 Good sense of colors among Arabs, Amerinds, Australasians and Africans. . . 141 
 
 In Europe preference for tone "'■ 
 
 Values. Atmospheric perspective * 4 
 
 Values never realized. May be suggested *■ 
 
 Values a late development of art. Among what arts found 
 
 Effect. Appearance of scene or object at one time "" 
 
 Effect is European and South Asiatic. Cast shadows omitted in East Asiatic 
 
 art 143 
 
 Everything is subordinate to light in nature 1" 
 
 Light cannot be real in art _• 144 
 
 Bare white surface nearest approach to light 144 
 
 Light can be centered by surrounding darkness 144 
 
 This is European and South Asiatic 146 
 
 Light suggested by brilliant colors. Explanation of spectrum 146 
 
 How to paint a luminist picture 147 
 
 Any pattern will do for this 147 
 
 Brilliant colors in rather general use 148 
 
 European pictures in spectral colors. Plein air movement 148 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 The Human Figure. Proportions. Nude. Portraiture in 
 Art and Photography. Eye. Ear. Lip. Waist. 
 Abdomen. Hand. Foot. 
 
 Sense of form called by French id£e plastique 149 
 
 Proportions vary in different arts. Europeans make tall figures with small 
 
 heads 149 
 
 East Asiatics usually make realistic proportions 150 
 
 Pleistokene, Bushmen, Arctics make realistic proportions 150 
 
 African, Australasian, Amerind arts tend to big heads, small bodies, short legs 151 
 
 The wherefore of squat figures is hard to explain 151 
 
 No race seems to record or care for obese humans 152 
 
 Some Negro tribes fatten females 152 
 
 Nudes in all arts. Primitives make them because they do not wear clothes .... 153 
 
 East Asiatics care little for nudes 153 
 
 Europeans especially inspired by nude humans in art 154 
 
 For a good portrait, likeness and character imperative 154 
 
 Sculpted portraiture in more arts than painted portraiture. Egypt, Western 
 
 Asia, Greece, Eastern Asia , 154 
 
 Sculpted heads of Amerinds, Africans, and Australasians 156 
 
 Painted portraits lacking among many races 156 
 
 Drawing and form essential in pictorial portrait I57 
 
 East Asiatic portraiture mainly drawing in line I57 
 
 Old Chinese portraits ■. co 
 
 Sharaku jco 
 
 European portraiture has drawing, light and shade, and color 150 
 
 Portraits largely a compromise between family and artist 159 
 
 South Asiatic heads show European art characteristics 160 
 
 Best photographs retouched by hand: that is are art Igi 
 
 Best photographs are portraits Igj 
 
 Eye ball has no expression 1 61 
 
ART AND MAN. 263 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Single eye, in some arts, a decoration 162 
 
 Full face eye in profil face in Egypt 162 
 
 In some Assyrian slabs three quarter eyes in profil faces 162 
 
 Eyes inserted in some arts 162 
 
 Ear lobe extended in some arts. Portrait of Amerind by Saint Menin 163 
 
 Lips extended in some arts 163 
 
 These distortions not due to religion, due to observation 163 
 
 Waist constricted in various arts: due to observation 163 
 
 Abnormal abdomens: Pleistokenes, Africans, Amerinds 164 
 
 Causes of protruding abdomens not clear 164 
 
 Utilitarian Venus of Milo 166 
 
 Starvation abdomens from Easter Island 166 
 
 Hand in all arts. In most arts best hands in sculpture. Best painted hands 
 
 in Europe and Eastern Asia 166 
 
 Single hands in Pleistokene, Australasian, Amerind, Arab arts 167 
 
 Pleistokene hands probably tracings 167 
 
 Hand of Fatma 167 
 
 Causes of single hands not clear 167 
 
 Hand at Towanda, Pennsylvania 168 
 
 Foot usually normal 168 
 
 Occasionally legs finish in points 168 
 
 In some Egyptian and Assyrian full face reliefs, feet in profil 168 
 
 Distorted feet in European art 168 
 
 Distorted feet in Chinese art 169 
 
 Primitive arts never show distorted feet. Bare foot in action 169 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Hunting Disguises. Monsters. Masks. Monoliths. Carved 
 
 Poles. 
 
 Hunting disguises used since oldest times 170 
 
 Hunting disguises are represented in some arts 170 
 
 Drawings of hunting disguises from Pleistokenes and Bushmen 170 
 
 Monsters are found in several arts, as Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian and 
 
 Hindu 171 
 
 Monsters looked on as deities: but they spring from hunting disguises 171 
 
 Chinese dragon probably a degenerate crocodile 171 
 
 Many limbed humans spring from other causes 171 
 
 Masks widely distributed: among what peoples found 172 
 
 Masks used in ceremonies: but originate in- hunting disguises 172 
 
 Monoliths and carved posts widespread 173 
 
 Megaliths mainly Neolithic: common in Brittany 173 
 
 Undecorated megaliths in Abyssinia, Zimbabwe, India 173 
 
 Decorated megaliths in Egypt and Central America 173 
 
 Hindu bursos 174 
 
 Carved posts found in many places 174 
 
 Finest carved posts in Alaska: totems, heraldry 174 
 
 Guide posts from Korea 174 
 
 Carved posts from Australasia 174 
 
 Carved posts from Africa 175 
 
 j All makers of monoliths or carved posts not related 175 
 
 Big stones and tree trunks handy materials for sculptors 175 
 
264 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 Pottery and Fbames. 
 
 PAGtt 
 
 Pottery invented after fine arts 176 
 
 Not known where pottery was invented 176 
 
 Pottery almost universal. Not found among Pleistokenes or Bushmen . . 176 
 
 Usefulness primary test of pottery: beauty secondary 177 
 
 Pottery of primitives, Egyptians and most Asiatics, useful 177 
 
 European pottery less useful 177 
 
 Pottery decoration should be decorative 178 
 
 Among primitives pottery decoration is decorative 178 
 
 Among Asiatics and Europeans some pottery decoration is imitative 179 
 
 Persian, Arab, Spanish pottery 179 
 
 Chinese porcelain: its movements: comparison with Greek pottery 179 
 
 Evolution of European pottery decoration 180 
 
 Frames an art convention. Europeans, Asiatics, and perhaps Egyptians have 
 
 frames: other races have not 182 
 
 Frames best solved by East Asiatics 182 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 The Evolution of Technic. Form. Color. Sculpture. Stone 
 Implements. Bas Relief. Painting. 
 
 Field covered by term evolution 184 
 
 Evolution a series of steps 184 
 
 Simplest forms first 185 
 
 Stone implements start of art technic 185 
 
 Stone implements universal 185 
 
 Four classes of stone implements 186 
 
 Stone implements forgotten by modern man 187 
 
 Eoliths, paleoliths, neoliths not a good terminology 187 
 
 Stone implements date back to Pleiocene 188 
 
 Paleoliths appear towards beginning of Pleistokene 189 
 
 Stone implements evolve with time 189 
 
 Abbott's discovery of American paleoliths. Ernest Volk 190 
 
 Paleoliths first sign of sense of form 192 
 
 Chipping stones led naturally to sculpture 192 
 
 Chipping stones the start of art technic in Europe 192 
 
 Chipping stones may be start of art in other places 193 
 
 Table showing relations of art to stone implements in Europe 194 
 
 Is form or color first? 194 
 
 Daubs of color protected persons against cold: led to tattooing 195 
 
 Evolution of Renaissance art: sculpture, bas relief, painting 196 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 The Evolution of Subject and Motive. Sculptural and Pic- 
 torial Art: Animals, Humans, Landscape. Decorative Art: 
 Basketry, Pictorial, Degenerate, Accidental. 
 
 Art evolves first animals and humans, then landscape: form, then color 197 
 
 Animals better than humans among Pleistokenes, Bushmen, and Arctics. . . . 197 
 
 Also among Assyrians 197 
 
ART AND MAN. 265 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Scissor action in animals 198 
 
 Africans, Australasians, Amerinds prefer humans to animals 198 
 
 Humans among Europeans and Asiatics play central role 198 
 
 Human figure when well done implies advanced social condition 199 
 
 Landscape unknown among primitive races 199 
 
 At least two starting points in decorative art 200 
 
 Basketry a source of decorative patterns 200 
 
 Sculptural and pictorial art a source of patterns 201 
 
 Degenerate decorative patterns: difficulty in tracing some of them 201 
 
 South American patterns. Mitla art 202 
 
 Accidental patterns 203 
 
 Property marks 203 
 
 Handwriting 203 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 Local and Intrusive Arts. Autochthonous Arts. Movements 
 of art. Gradation in Art. 
 
 Is art one or several. Did it rise in one spot or many 204 
 
 Art moved slowly before advent of railroads 204 
 
 Birth, life, movements and death of arts 204 
 
 Necessity caused invention of objects like jars in many places 205 
 
 Decoration comes from feeling, not necessity 205 
 
 Individuality of every art very noticeable 206 
 
 Difficult to tell sometimes whether art is native or intrusive 206 
 
 Some arts close together of separate growth 207 
 
 Some pottery statuettes from different localities resemble each other 207 
 
 Every art more or less local 208 
 
 Propinquity causes resemblance: distance causes difference 208 
 
 Multiple centers of creation 209 
 
 As a rule, art is local rather than intrusive 209 
 
 Historical and geographical movements found among the greater arts 210 
 
 One should not carry this fact into an absurdity 210 
 
 Art appears in some place, then dies out. Egean art 212 
 
 Cycles in art of Egypt 212 
 
 Japanese prints 213 
 
 European art historically and geographically 214 
 
 Colored tiles historically and geographically 214 
 
 Sometimes two arts succeed each other 215 
 
 The geographical spread of Arab art 215 
 
 Geographical barriers. Atlantic Ocean 216 
 
 Rebirths of art to the eastward 216 
 
 Move of art eastward does not apply to branches of art, but to the main 
 
 centers of probable creation 217 
 
 Gradation of art geographically 218 
 
 Gradation of art historically 218 
 
 One type of art predominates in one locality at one time and radiates all 
 
 around 218 
 
 Gradation of art points to oneness of art 219 
 
 Move eastward of art opposes theory that man dispersed from Lemuria or 
 
 theory that man dispersed from Central Asia 220 
 
266 ART AND MAN. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 Art and Religion. page 
 
 The word religion 222 
 
 Viewpoint of ethnologists and art critics incorrect 222 
 
 Religion affects mainly the subject in art 222 
 
 Religious belief not fundamental in art: how religious painters grow up. . . . 223 
 
 Religious pictures are subject pictures 223 
 
 Religious pictures illustrations; due to patronage of church 224 
 
 Spanish art depended on church 224 
 
 Italian art depended on church 225 
 
 Greek art had human figure for impelling motive 225 
 
 Dutch art flourished without religion 225 
 
 Nineteenth century art not due to religion 226 
 
 Rubens 226 
 
 Giotto and Fra Angelico 227 
 
 Religion in same relations to primitive as to advanced art. Primitive art 
 
 from same source as child art 227 
 
 Primitive sculptures of humans miscalled "idols" 228 
 
 "Doll" should be substituted for "idol" 229 
 
 Some primitive sculptures are idols. How to distinguish them from dolls . . 229 
 
 White race also makes idols 230 
 
 Arabs forbidden humans 230 
 
 Religion dictates subjects : often neglects beauty; produces tortures and snakes 230 
 
 Religion fosters conventionality 231 
 
 Good effects of religion on art; probably superior to ill effects 231 
 
 CHAPTER XXL 
 
 The Rank of Arts. 
 
 Can definite rank be assigned to arts. "De gustibus" 233 
 
 Remarks by two educated Americans 233 
 
 "Pictures are mostly judged thru the ear" 234 
 
 No fixed standards 234 
 
 Harm of art juries 234 
 
 The new exhibition 235 
 
 No two persons agree: different races have different tastes 236 
 
 Europeans and Asiatics different 236 
 
 Europeans and East Asiatics best painters 236 
 
 Greeks perhaps best sculptors 237 
 
 The arts of primitive races improve on acquaintance. Impossible to rank arts . 237 
 
 Comparison of a banquet and art 237 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Art and Race. 
 
 Art tells of time in evolution of man. Pleistokenes intelligent: hence man's 
 
 development a long one 239 
 
 Nothing in art to show origin of man 239 
 
 Questions for solution thru art about race 240 
 
ART AND MAN. 267 
 
 PAGE 
 
 What does race mean? Facts geology, paleontology and anatomy tell 240 
 
 Divisions of man into families: nationalistic, linguistic, physical 241 
 
 Bodily characteristics superseding nationalistic and linguistic as tests of race. 241 
 Nations and languages may or may not correspond with race. Is this the case 
 
 with the arts? 242 
 
 Artist product of his own time, environment and race. Melanesian produces 
 
 Melanesian art, etc 242 
 
 Art tells of mental qualities of a race and if there is portraiture of its physical 
 
 characteristics 243 
 
 Resemblances and differences in art must be sought in mentality and por- 
 traiture 243 
 
 Similarity of art in kind does not necessarily imply similarity in race 243 
 
 Similarity or difference in art often corresponds to the same in race. France, 
 
 Rome, Mexico ^ 243 
 
 Similarities in appearance and in arts of distant peoples imply similarity in 
 
 race. Mene Wallace, Eskimo, Japanese 244 
 
 Races maybe physically different, but have similar artistic instincts. Africans, 
 
 Australasians, Amerinds 245 
 
 Extraneous influences may affect art of a race. Hindus, Chinese, Koreans, 
 
 Japanese 245 
 
 Chinese naturalistic art probably spread to Korea and Japan 246 
 
 Hindu Buddhist subjects traveled to China and Japan 246 
 
 Pleistokene, Bushman, Arctic arts very similar: races probably dissimilar 247 
 
 Pleistokenes probably ancestors of Mediterranean race 247 
 
 Pleistokene heads resemble Egyptian heads 248 
 
 Art points to multiplicity of races, but is dumb about origin of races 249 
 
 Pleistokene art points to autochthonous European races 249 
 
 Pleistokene art contradicts theory that early European races came from Asia . 250 
 Art surer criterion of race than nationality or language. Comparative art 
 
 should reveal much more about mankind 250 
 
268 ART AND MAN. 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Fig. 1. Snake woman, Minoan Crete 15 
 
 Fig. 2. Little Egyptian stone figure 25 
 
 Fig. 3. Prehistoric pottery from Etruria: may be Neolithic divinity 25 
 
 Fig. 4. Egyptian high relief figure modelled on one side 25 
 
 Fig. 5. Egyptian bas relief figure twisted into impossible position 25 
 
 Fig. 6. African man with pelele and with ax hafted in body. Small 
 
 wooden figure 35 
 
 Fig. 7. Woman with dwarfed figure and with drum on head. Large 
 
 wooden statue, Gold Coast, Africa. 45 
 
 Fig. 8. Woman with dwarfed figure and protruding abdomen with glass 
 
 window inserted, West Coast, Africa 55 
 
 Fig. 9. Wooden statuette of man with palm leaf headdress, Nias Island, 
 
 Sumatra 65 
 
 Large wooden figure from New Guinea or New Ireland 75 
 
 Paddle from Nissan Island, Solomon Islands 85 
 
 Figure in black and red on Solomon Island paddle 95 
 
 Wooden statue about six feet high, from a Morai or cemetery, 
 
 Hawaii : 105 
 
 Hei tiki or neck ornament of greenstone, New Zealand 115 
 
 Wood carving, possibly a bear, Amoor River region 115 
 
 Iroquois mask 115 
 
 Koryak mask 115 
 
 Drawing of human on skin, Alaska 125 
 
 Drawing of grizzly bear on skin, Alaska '. 135 
 
 Bird's head on bow of canoe, Alaska 145 
 
 Painting in black of woman's body with pointed legs, head of white 
 
 wood. Bow of canoe, Alaska 155 
 
 Metate of puma, Central America 155 
 
 Stone statuette, Eastern United States 165 
 
 Pleistokene (?) marks and drawing, from Vero, Florida 181 
 
 Statue of Chacmool, Yucutan 191 
 
 Prehistoric pottery jar, Peru 211 
 
 Wooden figure. Karaja tribe, Brazil 221 
 
 Sketch map of the geographical distribution of the Fine Arts thru- 
 out the World 252, 253 
 
 Fig. 
 
 10. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 11. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 12. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 13. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 14. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 15. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 16. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 17. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 18. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 19. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 20. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 21. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 22. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 23. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 24. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 25. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 26. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 27. 
 
 Fig. 
 
 28.