The Russellville Democrat., 1891-05-21
ART OF PRIMITIVE MEN.


 Two Totally Distinct Types Are Found Among Uncultured Races. Whoever has examined the handicraft of savage peoples knows well that from very early age two totally distinct types of art arise spontaneously among uncultured races One is initiative, the other decorative. Paleolithic men--for example, the cave dwellers of prehistoric Europe before the glacial epoch--had an art of their own of a purely initiative and pictorial character. They repre- scented on fragments of bone and man. moth ivory realistic scenes of their own hunting existence.
 Here, naked and hairy brave, flint spear in hand, stalks wild horses undis- mayed in the grassy plain; there, a cou- pie of reindeer engaged in desperate fight with their antlers hard locked in deadly embrace; wonder, again, mann moth charges unwieldly with wide open mouth, or snake glides unseen beneath the shoeless feet of an unsuspecting saw age. All their rude works of art repro duce living objects, and tell, in their naive way, distinct story. They are pictorial records of things done, things seen, things suffered.
 Paleolithic men were essentially draughtsmen, not decorators. But their neolithic successors, of a totally different race-the herdsmen who supplanted them in post glacial Europe-had an art of an entirely different type, purely and solely decorative. Instead of making pictures they drew concentric circles and ornamental curves on their boats and dwellings; they adorned their weap ons and their implements with knobs and hicks, with crosses and bosses; they wrought beautiful patterns in metal work as soon as ever they advanced to the bronze using stage, and they de- signed brooches and bracelets of ex- quisite elegance, but they seldom intro duced into their craft any living object; they. initiated nothing, and they never in any way told pictorial story.
 Now these two types of art-the essen tially initiative or pictorial and the es- sentially decorative or @sthetic--persist throughout in various human races, and often remain as entirely distinct as in the typical instances here quoted. The great aim of the one is to narrate fact; the great aim of the other is to produce beautiful object. The first is to speak historical, the second ornamental
 In developed forms you get the ex- treme case of the one in the galleries at Versailles; you get the extreme case of the other in the Alhambra at Granada. The modern Esquimau and the modern Bushman resemble the ancient cave dwellers in their love of purely pictorial or story telling art; man in kayak harpooning whale; man with an assegai spearing springbok; these are the subjects that engage-1 will not say their pencils - but their sharp flint knives or their Jumps of red ocher.
 On the other hand, most central Af- rican races have no initiative skill They draw figures and animals i'll or not at all, but they produce decorative pottery and other ornamental objects which would excite attention at Versailles, and be well placed at the arts and crafts in the new gallery. Everywhere racial taste and racial faculty tend most in the one or the other direction. A tribe, horde, a nation, is pictorial. or else it is deco rative. Rarely or never is it both alike in an equal degree of native excellence. --Fortnightly Review.