------- CHAPTER IX The human animal desires to escape from its animal prison by means of all kinds of love, by freedom of emotion no less than of action and thought. And it attains to the freedom of emotion when it is aware of beauty. It cannot be aware of beauty except in self-forgetfulness, and it cannot produce beauty except in self-forgetfulness. _Arthur Clutton-Brock._ No doubt the great question for any man in regard to himself—if he is able and willing to put one so searching—is whether he is or is not on the way to aid in the fulfilment of the promise of life. It is a question hard to answer, for the promise of life grows ever greater in our eyes once we have begun to see it at all. There was a time when for our ancestors of the caves it must have called for little more than strength and skill, courage and perseverance, in attack or in defence and in the procuring of shelter, food and wives. The bitter struggle in which they were engaged was a real struggle for existence in which every man must fight for his own hand, or at best for his little group of near kindred. There were not many differences then between the practical demands of the daily life of men and those of the daily life of the hyenas or the wolves. But there were other differences, and they were great and significant. One in particular has left a wealth of evidence behind it, evidence graven and painted in certain caverns. There are bisons, for example, painted by some of the men whom we call primitive, or savage, which are of the truest art. There is no such difference and no such likeness between those bisons and the artistic work of to-day as there is between the flint-headed arrow and the machine-gun. The arrow and the gun are products of an intellectual ingenuity, practising and becoming expert through practice and concentrated on the external relations of thing with thing; the painting comes of a direct intuition of the reality and the essential beauty in a bison's life. They are alive for us, those bisons, and they are beautiful. Their creator was a true artist, able to throw himself into the object he wished to discover, to feel and to depict; and he was able to endow his picture with the bison's life and his own. If you are in aesthetic sympathy with him you can feel the creature he paints as you feel the man painting. The intellect that devised the arrow has always to travel onward by an accumulating process, from step to step; the intuition that felt the bison arrived at once. No doubt there is not only intellect but intuition in the arrow; and there is not only intuition but intellect in the painting; but the emphasis and the proportion are contrasted in the two.