Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
The reindeer, however, formed the favorite food and favorite model
of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the
mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these
early prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palæolithic art
is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in
Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing,
in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a
Chinese artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of
two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and
unearthed in one of the caves of Périgord, though far inferior to the
Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.
The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for
the head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of
another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or
existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably
all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether
the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote
Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, “he lived in a cave by the
seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.” The oysters are quite undoubted
and the foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.
I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather
question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however,
the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves
to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive.
You can’t speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits
of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense
primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted
cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern
Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilized
being who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities
in his own study. Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the
hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have
intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermediate
forms. The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked and
not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand
and necklet of bear’s teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is
nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with
a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously
behind him. Already he had invented the bow with its flint-tipped
arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed
fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. Already he
had learnt how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to
carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals. I have no
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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