Custom and Myth

relationship or contact between the races, or to influences imported by
one from the other.  New Zealand work may be Asiatic in origin, and
debased by the effect of centuries of lower civilisation and ruder
implements.  Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of
ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already
attained.  One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite Maori
spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a bishop's crozier
at the top, taken by the great native ferns.  Examples of resemblance, to
be accounted for by the development of a crude early idea, may be traced
most easily in the early pottery of Greece.  No one says that the Greeks
borrowed from the civilised people of America.  Only a few enthusiasts
say that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are
Aryan by race.  Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by no means
dissimilar in style from the 'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of
gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and
Mycenae.  The probability is that men living in similar social
conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and
unintentionally arrived at like results.

[Fig 5.  a, A Maori Design; b, Tattoo on a Maori's face: 285.jpg]

Few people who are interested in the question can afford to visit Peru
and Mycenae and study the architecture for themselves.  But anyone who is
interested in the strange identity of the human mind everywhere, and in
the necessary forms of early art, can go to the British Museum and
examine the American and early Greek pottery.  Compare the Greek key
pattern and the wave pattern on Greek and Mexican vases, and compare the
bird-faces, or human faces very like those of birds, with the similar
faces on the clay pots which Dr. Schliemann dug up at Troy.  The latter
are engraved in his book on Troy.  Compare the so-called 'cuttle-fish'
from a Peruvian jar with the same figure on the early Greek vases, most
of which are to be found in the last of the classical vase-rooms
upstairs.  Once more, compare the little clay 'whorls' of the Mexican and
Peruvian room with those which Dr. Schliemann found so numerous at
Hissarlik.  The conviction becomes irresistible that all these objects,
in shape, in purpose, in character of decoration, are the same, because
the mind and the materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation
especially, are the same everywhere.  You might introduce old Greek bits
of clay-work, figures or vases, into a Peruvian collection, or might
foist Mexican objects among the clay treasures of Hissarlik, and the
wisest archaeologist would be deceived.  The Greek fret pattern
especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw.  The
svastika, as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles to each
limb, is found everywhere--in India, Greece, Scotland, Peru--as a natural
bit of ornament.  The allegorising fancy of the Indians gave it a mystic
meaning, and the learned have built I know not what worlds of religious
theories on this 'pre-Christian cross,' which is probably a piece of
hasty decorative work, with no original mystic meaning at all. {289}
Ornaments of this sort were transferred from wood or bone to clay, almost
as soon as people learned that early art, the potter's, to which the
Australians have not attained, though it was familiar to the not distant
people of New Caledonia.  The style of spirals and curves, again, once
acquired (as it was by the New Zealanders), became the favourite of some
races, especially of the Celtic.  Any one who will study either the
ornaments of Mycenae, or those of any old Scotch or Irish collection,
will readily recognise in that art the development of a system of
ornament like that of the Maoris.  Classical Greece, on the other hand,
followed more in the track of the ancient system of straight and slanted
lines, and we do not find in the later Greek art that love of interlacing
coils and spirals which is so remarkable among the Celts, and which is
very manifest in the ornaments of the Mycaenean hoards--that is, perhaps,
of the ancient Greek heroic age.  The causes of these differences in the
development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one
track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early motif, while
classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at
present to ascertain.  But it is plain enough that later art has done
little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to untutored
races.

[Fig. 6.  From a Maori's Face: 287.jpg]

It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is better adapted
to both the purposes and materials of savages than the art which aims at
representation.  As a rule, the materials of the lower savages are their
own bodies (which they naturally desire to make beautiful for ever by
tattooing), and the hard substances of which they fashion their tools and
weapons.  These hard substances, when worked on with cutting instruments
of stone or shell, are most easily adorned with straight cut lines, and
spirals are therefore found to be, on the whole, a comparatively late
form of ornament.

[Fig. 7.  Bushman Dog: 290.jpg]

We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent.  Here,
again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the
materials which are at his service.  His pictures have a practical
purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily, to
consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake.  In modern art,
in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by painting or
sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born instinct.  But
there must be some 'reason why' for this; and it does not seem at all
unlikely that we inherit the love, the disinterested love, of imitative
art from very remote ancestors, whose habits of imitation had a direct,
interested, and practical purpose.  The member of Parliament who mimics
the crowing of a cock during debate, or the street boy who beguiles his
leisure by barking like a dog, has a disinterested pleasure in the
exercise of his skill; but advanced thinkers seem pretty well agreed that
the first men who imitated the voices of dogs, and cocks, and other
animals, did not do so merely for fun, but with the practical purpose of
indicating to their companions the approach of these creatures.  Such