When the potter applied colored designs to the surface of the vessel he had formed, he was creating the art of painting. In primitive hands painting is not yet an independent art; it exists as an adjunct to pottery and statuary. Nature men made colors out of clay, and the Andamanese made oil colors by mixing ochre with oils or fats.61 Such colors were used to ornament weapons, implements, vases, clothing, and buildings. Many hunting tribes of Africa and Oceania painted upon the walls of their caves or upon neighboring rocks vivid representations of the animals that they sought in the chase.62 #51 | | |
Sculpture, like painting, probably owed its origin to pottery: the potter found that he could mold not only articles of use, but imitative figures that might serve as magic amulets, and then as things of beauty in themselves. The Eskimos carved caribou antlers and walrus ivory into figurines of animals and men.63 Again, primitive man sought to mark his hut, or a totem-pole, or a grave with some image that would indicate the object worshiped, or the person deceased; at first he carved merely a face upon a post, then a head, then the whole post; and through this filial marking of graves sculpture became an art.64 So the ancient dwellers on Easter Island topped with enormous monolithic statues the vaults of their dead; scores of such statues, many of them twenty feet high, have been found there; some, now prostrate in ruins, were apparently sixty feet tall. #52 | | |
How did architecture begin? We can hardly apply so magnificent a term to the construction of the primitive hut; for architecture is not mere building, but beautiful building. It began when for the first time a man or a woman thought of a dwelling in terms of appearance as well as of use. Probably this effort to give beauty or sublimity to a structure was directed first to graves rather than to homes; while the commemorative pillar developed into statuary, the tomb grew into a temple. For to primitive thought the dead were more important and powerful than the living; and, besides, the dead could remain settled in one place, while the living wandered too often to warrant their raising permanent homes. #53 | | |
Even in early days, and probably long before he thought of carving objects or building tombs, man found pleasure in rhythm, and began to develop the crying and warbling, the prancing and preening, of the animal into song and dance. Perhaps, like the animal, he sang before he learned to talk,65 and danced as early as he sang. Indeed no art so characterized or expressed primitive man as the dance. He developed it from primordial simplicity to a complexity unrivaled in civilization, and varied it into a thousand forms. The great festivals of the tribes were celebrated chiefly with communal and individual dancing; great wars were opened with martial steps and chants; the great ceremonies of religion were a mingling of song, drama and dance. What seems to us now to be forms of play were probably serious matters to early men; they danced not merely to express themselves, but to offer suggestions to nature or the gods; for example, the periodic incitation to abundant reproduction was accomplished chiefly through the hypnotism of the dance. Spencer derived the dance from the ritual of welcoming a victorious chief home from the wars; Freud derived it from the natural expression of sensual desire, and the group technique of erotic stimulation; if one should assert, with similar narrowness, that the dance was born of sacred rites and mummeries, and then merge the three theories into one, there might result as definite a conception of the origin of the dance as can be attained by us today. #54 | | |
From the dance, we may believe, came instrumental music and the drama. The making of such music appears to arise out of a desire to mark and accentuate with sound the rhythm of the dance, and to intensify with shrill or rhythmic notes the excitement necessary to patriotism or procreation. The instruments were limited in range and accomplishment, but almost endless in variety: native ingenuity exhausted itself in fashioning horns, trumpets, gongs, tamtams, clappers, rattles, castanets, flutes and drums from horns, skins, shells, ivory, brass, copper, bamboo and wood; and it ornamented them with elaborate carving and coloring. The taut string of the bow became the origin of a hundred instruments from the primitive lyre to the Stradivarius violin and the modern pianoforte. Professional singers, like professional dancers, arose among the tribes; and vague scales, predominantly minor in tone, were developed.66 #55 | | |
With music, song and dance combined, the “savage” created for us the drama and the opera. For the primitive dance was frequently devoted to mimicry; it imitated, most simply, the movements of animals and men, and passed to the mimetic performance of actions and events. So some Australian tribes staged a sexual dance around a pit ornamented with shrubbery to represent the vulva, and, after ecstatic and erotic gestures and prancing, cast their spears symbolically into the pit. The northwestern tribes of the same island played a drama of death and resurrection differing only in simplicity from the medieval mystery and modern Passion plays: the dancers slowly sank to the ground, hid their heads under the boughs they carried, and simulated death; then, at a sign from their leader, they rose abruptly in a wild triumphal chant and dance announcing the resurrection of the soul.67 In like manner a thousand forms of pantomime described events significant to the history of the tribe, or actions important in the individual life. When rhythm disappeared from these performances the dance passed into the drama, and one of the greatest of art-forms was born. #56 | | |
In these ways precivilized men created the forms and bases of civilization. Looking backward upon this brief survey of primitive culture, we find every element of civilization except writing and the state. All the modes of economic life are invented for us here: hunting and fishing, herding and tillage, transport and building, industry and commerce and finance. All the simpler structures of political life are organized: the clan, the family, the village community, and the tribe; freedom and order—those hostile foci around which civilization revolves—find their first adjustment and reconciliation; law and justice begin. The fundamentals of morals are established: the training of children, the regulation of the sexes, the inculcation of honor and decency, of manners and loyalty. The bases of religion are laid, and its hopes and terrors are applied to the encouragement of morals and the strengthening of the group. Speech is developed into complex languages, medicine and surgery appear, and modest beginnings are made in science, literature and art. All in all it is a picture of astonishing creation, of form rising out of chaos, of one road after another being opened from the animal to the sage. Without these “savages,” and their hundred thousand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been. We owe almost everything to them—as a fortunate, and possibly degenerate, youth inherits the means to culture, security and ease through the long toil of an unlettered ancestry. #57 | | |
I Such onomatopoeia still remains a refuge in linguistic emergencies. The Englishman eating his first meal in China, and wishing to know the character of the meat he was eating, inquired, with Anglo-Saxon dignity and reserve, “Quack, quack?” To which the Chinaman, shaking his head, answered cheerfully, “Bow-wow.”4 #58 | | |
II E.g., divine is from Latin divus, which is from deus, Greek theos, Sanskrit deva, meaning god; in the Gypsy tongue the word for god, by a strange prank, becomes devel. Historically goes back to the Sanskrit root vid, to know; Greek oida, Latin video (see), French voir (see), German wissen (know), English to wit; plus the suffixes tor (as in author, praetor, rhetor), ic, al, and ly (═ like). Again, the Sanskrit root ar, to plough, gives the Latin arare, Russian orati, English to ear the land, arable, art, oar, and perhaps the word Aryan—the ploughers.6 #59 | | |
III Extract from an advertisement in the Town Hall (New York) program of March 5, 1934: “Horoscopes, by,—————————Astrologer to New York’s most distinguished social and professional clientele. Ten dollars an hour.” #60 | | |
