Custom and Myth

were the rude beginnings of human language: and whether that theory be
correct or not, there are certainly practical reasons which impel the
savage to attempt imitative art.  I doubt if there are many savage races
which do not use representative art for the purposes of writing--that is,
to communicate information to persons whom they cannot reach by the
voice, and to assist the memory, which, in a savage, is perhaps not very
strong.  To take examples.  A savage man meets a savage maid.  She does
not speak his language, nor he hers.  How are they to know whether,
according to the marriage laws of their race, they are lawful mates for
each other?  This important question is settled by an inspection of their
tattooed marks.  If a Thlinkeet man of the Swan stock meets an Iroquois
maid of the Swan stock they cannot speak to each other, and the 'gesture
language' is cumbrous.  But if both are tattooed with the swan, then the
man knows that this daughter of the swan is not for him.  He could no
more marry her than Helen of Troy could have married Castor, the tamer of
horses.  Both are children of the Swan, as were Helen and Castor, and
must regard each other as brother and sister.  The case of the Thlinkeet
man and the Iroquois maid is extremely unlikely to occur; but I give it
as an example of the practical use among savages, of representative art.

[Fig. 8.  Red Indian Picture-Writing - The Legend of Manabozho: 293.jpg]

Among the uses of art for conveying intelligence we notice that even the
Australians have what the Greeks would have called the [Greek], a staff
on which inscriptions, legible to the Aborigines, are engraven.  I
believe, however, that the Australian [Greek] is not usually marked with
picture-writing, but with notches--even more difficult to decipher.  As
an example of Red Indian picture-writing we publish a scroll from Kohl's
book on the natives of North America.  This rude work of art, though the
reader may think little of it, is really a document as important in its
way as the Chaldaean clay tablets inscribed with the record of the
Deluge.  The coarsely-drawn figures recall, to the artist's mind, much of
the myth of Manabozho, the Prometheus and the Deucalion, the Cain and the
Noah of the dwellers by the great lake.  Manabozho was a great chief, who
had two wives that quarrelled.  The two stumpy half-figures (4) represent
the wives; the mound between them is the displeasure of Manabozho.
Further on (5) you see him caught up between two trees--an unpleasant
fix, from which the wolves and squirrels refused to extricate him.  The
kind of pyramid with a figure at top (8) is a mountain, on which when the
flood came, Manabozho placed his grandmother to be out of the water's
way.  The somewhat similar object is Manabozho himself, on the top of his
mountain.  The animals you next behold (10) were sent out by Manabozho to
ascertain how the deluge was faring, and to carry messages to his
grandmother.  This scroll was drawn, probably on birch bark, by a Red Man
of literary attainments, who gave it to Kohl (in its lower right-hand
corner (11) he has pictured the event), that he might never forget the
story of the Manabozhian deluge.  The Red Indians have always, as far as
European knowledge goes, been in the habit of using this picture-writing
for the purpose of retaining their legends, poems, and incantations.  It
is unnecessary to say that the picture-writing of Mexico and the
hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are derived from the same savage
processes.  I must observe that the hasty indications of the figure used
in picture-writing are by no means to be regarded as measures of the Red
Men's skill in art.  They can draw much better than the artist who
recorded the Manabozhian legend, when they please.

In addition to picture-writing, Religion has fostered savage
representative art.  If a man worships a lizard or a bear, he finds it
convenient to have an amulet or idol representing a bear or a lizard.  If
one adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that prayer and
acts of worship addressed to an image of the animal will please the
animal himself, and make him propitious.  Thus the art of making little
portable figures of various worshipful beings is fostered, and the craft
of working in wood or ivory is born.  As a rule, the savage is satisfied
with excessively rude representations of his gods.  Objects of this
kind--rude hewn blocks of stone and wood--were the most sacred effigies
of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the
temple.  No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared
so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with
the head of a mare.  The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are
scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked
Admiralty Islanders.  But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be
said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of
something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion.

[Fig. 9.  Bushman Wall-Painting: 295.jpg]

The singular wall-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which we
copy from the 'Cape Monthly Magazine,' probably represents a magical
ceremony.  Bushmen are tempting a great water animal--a rhinoceros, or
something of that sort--to run across the land, for the purpose of
producing rain.  The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to
civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection
between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and
success at cards--a common French superstition.  The Bushman
cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black, red, and
white.  Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and like
children, draw animals much better than the human figure.  The Bushman
dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive--almost as full of life
as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that beautiful vase
in the British Museum which represents the fostering of Achilles.  The
Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem to prove that
savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when supplied with fitting
materials.  Men seem to draw better when they have pigments and a flat
surface of rock to work upon, than when they are scratching on hard wood
with a sharp edge of a broken shell.  Though the thing has little to do
with art, it may be worth mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the
labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the
mark of a red hand.  The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red
hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of