It is more important, from our point of view, to determine the influence which the purely intellectual motive of conveying with the greatest possible clearness a thought-content, be it historical, religious, or philosophical, has exercised on the artistic representations of life and nature. Although of itself essentially non-æsthetic, this purpose has nevertheless called into existence some most important æsthetic qualities. Especially in narrative painting we may often observe how the virtues of exactness, explicitness, and comprehensibility give a character of beauty to representations which may have originated in a purely practical intention. As has been clearly pointed out by Mr. Walter Crane, the Egyptian hieroglyphs have reached their “wonderful pitch of abstract yet exact characterisation” precisely because they had the character and the purpose of a “decorative record.” The same necessity, viz. that “every object had to be clearly defined so as to be recognised at once and easily deciphered,”[259] is undoubtedly to a great degree responsible for the element of beauty which is to be found in the pictography of North American Indians. Practical utility has in this way subserved the development of an attention to the picturesque side of things. But one has only to look at the more symbolical systems of ideographic writing, such as the Assyrian, the Mexican, and the Chinese, in order to understand that the intellectual requirement by itself never would have created an _artistic_ representation of nature.[260] This distinction is especially indispensable for a right conception of the intellectual elements in poetry. It is undeniable that some of the most important qualities in literature were developed during the time when it was used chiefly as a means for conveying information. The practical considerations therein have undoubtedly influenced the form of the oral narrative. It is evident, for example, that the metrical and rhythmical recital must have proved the more serviceable whenever a thought-content was to be preserved for futurity. But this fact gives no authorisation to those curious theories according to which poetry was invented and developed, thanks to its merits as a mnemonic device. It is, as was long since remarked by Brown,[261] difficult to understand how rhythm, numbers, and verse could have been devised as assistance for the memory, supposing nothing of that kind to have been existing before. And even if we admit that they could have been invented by accident, it is plain, when we fix our mind on the _essential_ qualities of poetry, that the use of rhythm and metre to aid memory could only have supplied a _mechanical_ condition to facilitate the development of poetic art. CHAPTER XIV ANIMAL DISPLAY