THE BEGINNINGS OF ART

There are two ways in which the origin of art among primitive peoples may be studied. First, the archæological remains of the oldest races may be studied individually or by comparison. Second, the art of the most savage and backward people of our own times may be investigated. It will be found that the results of study by both of these methods will harmonize; for no band or society of men, however small, however early, or however savage, has ever wholly ignored or disregarded art. It will be found that the earliest form of art is decorative.

The distinction between decoration and idealized art is considered by the majority of students to lie in the fact that decoration is a quality added to utility, as when a savage ornaments his weapons or tools, or when we paint our walls or otherwise ornament our buildings; while idealized art is isolated as in a picture or statue.

The incentives which prompt men in their strivings after artistic effects include: (1) the sensuous pleasure which they derive from color, line, and form; (2) the desire to convey information or to communicate thought and feeling, whether by the pictorial signs of the red Indian or by the choicest allegory of brush or chisel; (3) the desire to enhance the value of personal property, whether prompted by the greed of the moneymaker or by the mere pride of ownership; and (4) the restless striving of man to enter into closer relationship with unseen power and mystery by means of visual symbols. So intimate and complex may the action and reaction of these forces upon one another become that it is not always possible to apply them or any of them as entirely adequate explanations to all art conditions. So varying is the environment of man, so different the materials with which he works, so diverse the ideas and ideals of men, and so unequal the skill of artists, that results, whether studied individually or comparatively, present most perplexing problems.

To the earlier man suggestion is a force to be reckoned with as that mysterious power which leads

To see God in clouds, to hear him in the wind." The rough, fancied resemblance of a stone to a human face at once endows the stone with the magical powers of a fetich; and the imagination peoples dark groves and lonely places with mysterious and awesome beings.

To which of these incentives may we assign the engraved bones of the reindeer man of the quaternary period eight thousand years ago in the caves of southern France, or the embellished walls of dark caverns of Dordogne or Hautes Pyréneés, or the paintings of the walls in the caves of Altamin in Spain? The most satisfactory explanation seems to be that they represent

the birth of a spiritual conception of divinity; and that they are the workings of the savage mind in that intimacy between religion and art perceptible from the earliest times, whose affinity is marked to-day in its manifestations among both savage and civilized races of men.

THE SUPERNATURAL IN ART

BY WILLIAM WALTON

By calling upon his imagination-that wonderful creative faculty-man has been able in all ages to introduce into all forms of art the element of the supernatural, i. e., of something beyond and above that which he actually sees and hears. This extraordinary widening of the scope of literature, music, painting, and sculpture is so inevitable that, with only a few exceptions, mostly in modern times, no protest has ever been raised against it. In the earliest manifestations of art expression, both of savages and of the oldest civilizations, nothing could have been more natural than that man, ignorant, surrounded by mysteries, should seek to give material representations to the unseen powers, frequently malevolent, which, he believed, encompassed him on every side. In the innumerable variations of these representations through the ages, in the great diversity of methods by which he sought to exalt his images, lies nearly the whole history of art. The success which attended these representations was dependent, in great measure, on the technical skill of the artist as poet, painter, or sculptor, but not exclusively-not infrequently we find in some rude rhyme or painting or carving, a suggestion, a mysterious message imperfectly delivered, that stirs us quite out of our usual practical and commonplace train of thought. For it is evident that in entering this quite boundless field of the Unseen and the Unknown, the success of the artist in his vocation is largely dependent upon the quality, the receptiveness, of him to whom the work of art is presented-in the latter's ability to create in his turn, or to understand when thus addressed; "in the drawings of Rembrandt," says John La Farge, are appeals to the existence in his mind and yours, of things that he does not say." Even in the very earliest examples known of human art, the scratched outlines of prehistoric mammoth and reindeer on their own bones, there has been recognized an appeal by the cave-man to unseen powers, known to him and his fellow, to subdue these animals to his club and bow, that he might live and not starve.

Imagination has been defined as the creative origin of whatever is fine, not only in art but in science, in government, in war. In art, certainly, it would seem that the best should be imaginative, but not necessarily impassioned. If the creative quality of imagination is of the first order, as that of ancient Greece, or of Shakespeare, or that of Michael Angelo, it endures

through the ages, unaffected by changing fashions, or beliefs, or new discoveries. "The Gods in whom no one any longer believes can still be invoked, to stir men's thoughts, to bring up immortal images of beauty and power. This is because-even in this field of art -the creations to be called up, to be compelling, must be founded on truth, which, as an English writer of the eighteenth century says, is the mightiest thing in the world, since it exercises sovereign rights over the creations of the imagination." This means that the wildest imaginings, the most wondrous visions, must not be seemingly entirely unnatural or impossible; the artist must start upon the foundation of the actual fact seen, to invent the probable appearance of the thing not seen. This does not, as might be thought, limit his power-as an illustration in the simplest forms, or those which most suggest the familiar, may frequently be found the most terrifying, while a creation entirely fantastic and quite unlike anything in heaven or earth strikes us as merely curious, or interesting, or even comic. The elaborate Chinese and Japanese dragons are decorative, but not terrible; in the wellknown engraving by Martin Schongauer, representing St. Anthony carried up into the air and tormented by demons, we are only amused by the artist's extraordinary power of inventing details of misshapen and impossible forms; but in a painting by Arnold Boecklin, The Cave of the Dragon," in which the great beast that comes sliding out of the cavern is a simplified version of some of the prehistoric reptiles seen in our museums we share the terror of the little human beings who flee along the pass. Of the innumerable versions of St. George killing the Dragon, the group of the French sculptor, Frèmiet, presents us with one of the most effective monsters, the head of which was suggested to him by that of a skinned rabbit which he happened to see in his kitchen.

Excess of detail does not always disturb the impression of the unreal created by the picture-as may be seen in the paintings of Gustave Moreau; and not infrequently the definiteness with which some small or comparatively unimportant object is given, is curiously effective in making the whole scene seem like some half-forgotten dream. This probably is because just such sudden details are seen in dreams, fever visions, and other imaginings. In all this, as in all art, the quality of the artist is of the first importance; no general equipment of taste, or intelligence, or technical skill will avail, if the painter have not the inward vision, if he be not "a dreamer, hoping to get at the secrets of the nature whose image he is in love with," if he have not, like Michael Angelo, "throughout his life the idea of another world remaining continuously with him."

The most important manifestations of this attempt to present the supernatural have been in the religious art of all peoples; and as all the great religions have been anthropomorphistic, the devices adopted in painting and sculpture to give greater majesty and power to these human forms have been most varied. Some

of them appear at widely separated periods of space and time, as the gold nimbus around the heads of Japanese sages, Greek divinities and potentates, and Christian saints; or the furnishing with birds' wings, usually attached to the shoulders, as in Greek figures of Iris, of Victory, etc., in Assyrian sculptured genii, and in the angels of Christian art. The ancient Assyrians and Egyptians represented their gods and other supernatural beings with the heads of birds and beasts in certain cases, and this presentation which might be thought repulsive, is made acceptable, even imposing, in our eyes, by the dignity, the seriousness of the sculptor's or the painter's art. With a few exceptions, as in the attachment of the slender neck of the ibis head to the broad shoulders of Thoth, these

attributes, as the lioness heads of Tefnut and Sekhet, or the hawk heads of Horus and Khons, are more acceptable than was that of the crucifixion in the eyes of the early Christians. With such personifications as that of the hippopotamus goddess, Taouris, or the deformed dwarf, Bes, we find it more difficult to become reconciled. This deification of the animal forms, and of the animals themselves, as in the Bull Apis, the sacred ibis of Thoth, and the hawk of Horus, is considered to be a relic of the ancient animal fetishism, or the Animistic origin" of the religions of the Nile Valley-a pantheistic tendency in the symbolism. In the Sphinx, in which the human head is placed on the body of an animal, the art of civilization has consented to recognize the symbol of mystery, of the eternal secret of Nature; and the human-headed bird, which symbolized death, may be considered a more artistic personification than the skeleton of European art.

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In Assyrian sculpture reliefs many images have been found of the Supreme God, supposed to be Assur, in a modification of the Egyptian winged globe, generally shown only at half length, with flowing robes below his waist, bearded and carrying a bow. The god Anou, or Dagon, to whom the introduction of arts and letters on the earth was due, corresponds to the description given in a fragment of Berosus: He had the whole body of a fish, but beneath his fish's head he had another head (that of a man), while human feet appeared below his fish's tail. He had also the voice of a man." There was also an eagleheaded god, possibly Nisroch; and the lion heads on the fighting demons of the sculptured reliefs in the Assyrian palaces are rendered with great vigor. These figures have eagles' feet. The human headed genii frequently are supplied with two pairs of wings, one pair raised and the other drooping; their conical caps are adorned with two pairs of horns, similar to those on the higher and richly ornamented headdresses of the great winged, human-headed bulls which guarded the entrance to the palaces, and which have excited the admiration of modern archæologists and artists as symbolic representations of the highest powers of life and nature. The chief god of Carthage, Baal-Hammon, the burning Baal,' was a fire or sun god, and is represented, like Jupiter Ammon, with the horns of a ram.

In the divinities of the great religions of the East, Brahminism and Buddhism, we find the wildest and most inartistic perversions of the human form—Brahma presented as carrying his foot to his mouth, like an infant; Vishnu with four arms and hands; Ganesha, the god of arts and wisdom, with the head of an elephant; Agni, the god of fire, with two heads looking in opposite directions, and six arms and hands, etc. The degradation of Buddhism in Mongolia and Thibet, known as Lamaism, has produced a creed which is declared to have "nothing in common with the pure morality preached by Gautama," and an art in which the finest skill of the bronze founder is bestowed upon statuettes, in many cases of three-headed and sixarmed divinities or demons in violent attitudes, covered with tasteless detail, hideous and obscene.

The Scandinavian and Teutonic mythology, on the contrary, presents art with figures almost as noble or as beautiful as the Greek, but which have been very inadequately rendered-Odin or Woden, a tall, oneeyed, bearded old man, with his broad hat, his cloak and spear, his two attendant wolves, and the two ravens on his shoulders; his son, Thor, the red-bearded, carrying his terrible hammer, riding through the air on his thunder car drawn by goats; Baldur, the beautiful, for whom all nature wept when he was slain by treachery; the Valkjur, or Valkyries, beautiful and terrible maids, clad in bloody armor, riding white horses, who sweep through the air over the battlefield and bear