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THE dust of bones, primitive weapons, coal, and buried wood—the old human as well as solar energy—come down to us tangled like roots in the fermentation of the dampness under the earth. The earth is the giver of life and the murderess, the diffused matter which drinks of death to nourish life. Living things are dissolved by her, dead things move in her. She wears down the stone, she gives it the golden pallor of ivory or of bone. Ivory and bone before they are devoured become rough as stone at her touch. The wrought flints have the appearance of big triangular teeth; the teeth of the engulfed monsters are like pulpy tubercles ready to sprout. The skulls, the vertebrae, and the turtle shells have the gentle and somber patina of the old sculptures with their quality of absoluteness. The primitive engravings resemble those fossil imprints which have revealed to us the nature of the shell formations, of the plants and the insects which have disappeared, of turbans, arborescences, ferns, elytra, and nerved leaves. A prehistoric museum is a petrified garden where thee slow action of earth and water on the buried materials unifies the work of man and the work of the elements. Above lies the forest of the great deer—the open wings of the mind.
THE dust of bones, primitive weapons, coal, and buried wood—the old human as well as solar energy—come down to us tangled like roots in the fermentation of the dampness under the earth. The earth is the giver of life and the murderess, the diffused matter which drinks of death to nourish life. Living things are dissolved by her, dead things move in her. She wears down the stone, she gives it the golden pallor of ivory or of bone. Ivory and bone before they are devoured become rough as stone at her touch. The wrought flints have the appearance of big triangular teeth; the teeth of the engulfed monsters are like pulpy tubercles ready to sprout. The skulls, the vertebrae, and the turtle shells have the gentle and somber patina of the old sculptures with their quality of absoluteness. The primitive engravings resemble those fossil imprints which have revealed to us the nature of the shell formations, of the plants and the insects which have disappeared, of turbans, arborescences, ferns, elytra, and nerved leaves. A prehistoric museum is a petrified garden where thee slow action of earth and water on the buried materials unifies the work of man and the work of the elements. Above lies the forest of the great deer—the open wings of the mind.
[The
illustrating of this chapter having presented special difficulties, we offer
our warmest thanks to Messrs. Capitan and Breuil, on one hand, and to the firm
of Masson et Cie., on the other, without whom we should not have been able to
carry through our task. The works of Abbé Breuil, most of all,
constitute the basis which will henceforth be indispensable for the artistic
illustrating of any book devoted to the prehistoric period. It is, thanks to
his admirable pastels, that the troglodyte frescoes of Périgord
and of Spain have been given back to us in what is most probably their original
character.]
The
discomfiture which we experience on seeing our most ancient bones and
implements mingled with a soil full of tiny roots and insects has something of
the religious in it. It teaches us that our effort to extricate the rudimentary
elements of a social harmony from animalism surpasses, in essential power, all
our subsequent efforts to realize in the mind a superior harmony which,
moreover, we shall not attain. There is no invention. The foundation of the
human edifice is made of everyday discoveries, and its highest towers have been
patiently built up from progressive generalizations. Man copied the form of his
hunting and industrial implements from beaks, teeth, and claws; from fruits he
borrowed their forms for his first pots. His awls and needles were at first
thorns and fishbones; he grasped, in the overlapping scales of the fish, in the
articulation and setting of bones, the idea of structure, of joints and levers.
Here is the sole point of departure for the miracle of abstraction, for
formulas wholly purified of all trace of experience, and for the highest ideal.
And it is here that we must seek the measure at once of our humility and
strength.
The
weapon, the tool, the vase, and, in harsh climates, a coarse garment of
skins—such are the first forms, foreign to his own substance, that primitive
man fashions. He is surrounded by beasts of prey and is assailed constantly by
the hostile elements of a still chaotic nature. He sees enemy forces in fire,
in storms, in the slightest trembling of foliage or of water, in the seasons,
even, and in day and night, until the seasons and day and night, with the
beating of his arteries and the sound of his steps, have given him the sense of
rhythm. Art is, in the beginning, a thing of immediate utility, like the first
stammerings of speech; something to designate the objects which surround man,
for him to imitate or modify in order that he may use them; man goes no
farther. Art cannot yet be an instrument of philosophic generalization, since
man could not know how to utilize it. But he forges that instrument, for he
already abstracts from his surroundings some rudimentary laws which he applies
to his own advantage.
The men
and youths range the forests. Their weapon is at first the knotty branch torn
from the oak or the elm, the stone picked up from the ground. The women, with
the old men and the children, remain hidden in the dwelling, an improvised
halting place or grotto. From his first stumbling steps man comes to grips with
an ideal—the fleeing beast which represents the immediate future of the tribe;
the evening meal, de our d to make muscle for the hunters; milk for the
mothers. Woman, on the contrary, has before her only the near and present
reality—the meal to prepare; the child to nourish; the skin to be dried; later
on, the fire that is to be tended. It is she, doubtless, who finds the first
tool and the first pot; it is she who is the first workman. It is from her
realistic and conservative role that human industry takes its beginnings.
Perhaps she also assembles teeth and pebbles into necklaces, to draw attention
to herself and to please. But her positivist destiny closes the horizon to her,
and the first veritable artist is man. It is man, the explorer of plains and
forests, the navigator of rivers, who comes forth from the caverns to study the
constellations and the clouds; it is man, through his idealistic and
revolutionary function, who is to take possession of the objects made by his
companion, to turn them, little by little, into the instruments that express
the world of abstractions which appears to him confusedly. Thus from the
beginning the two great human forces realize that equilibrium which will never
be destroyed; woman, the center of immediate life, who brings up the child and
maintains the family in the tradition necessary to social unity; man, the focus
of the life of the imagination, who plunges into the unexplored mystery to
preserve society from death through his directing of it into the courses of
unbroken evolution.
Masculine
idealism, which later becomes a desire for moral conquest, is at first a desire
for material conquest. For primitive man it is a question of killing animals in
order to have meat, bones, and skins, and of charming a woman so as to
perpetuate the species whose voice cries in his veins; it is a question of
frightening the men of the neighboring tribe who want to carry off his mate or
trespass on his hunting ground. To create, to pour forth his being, to invade
surrounding life—in fact, all his impulses have their center in the
reproductive instinct. It is his point of departure for all his greatest
conquests, his future need for moral communion and his will to devise an
instrument through which he may adapt himself intellectually to the law of his
universe. He already has the weapon—the plate of flint; he needs the ornament
that charms or terrifies—bird plumes in the knot of his hair, necklaces of
claws or teeth, carved handles for hiss tools, tatooings, bright colors
decorating his skin.
Art is
born. One of the men of the tribe is skillful in cutting a form in a bone, or
in painting on a torso a bird with open wings, a mammoth, a lion, or a flower.
On his return from the hunt he picks up a piece of wood to give it the
appearance of an animal, a bit of clay to press it into a figurine, a flat bone
on which to engrave a silhouette. He enjoys seeing twenty rough and innocent
faces bending over his work. He enjoys this work itself which creates an
obscure understanding between the others and himself, between him and the
infinite world of beings and of plants that he loves, because he is the life of
that world. He obeys something more positive also—the need to set down certain
acquisitions of primitive human science so that the whole of the tribe may
profit by them. Words but inadequately describe to the old men, to the women gathered
about, to the children especially, the form of a beast encountered in the woods
who is either to be feared or hunted. The artist fixes its look and its form in
a few summary strokes. Art is born.
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