Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-histories of Designs

by Alfred C. Haddon

INTRODUCTION.

Notwithstanding the immense number of books, dissertations, and papers which have been written on pictorial and decorative art, I venture to add one more to their number. I profess to be neither an artist nor an art critic, but simply a biologist who has had his attention turned to the subject of decorative art. One of my objects is to show that delineations have an individuality and a life-history which can be studied quite irrespectively of their artistic merit.

We are not now concerned with the æsthetic aspect of the arts of design, nor with those theories of art which artists and art critics like to discuss, and concerning which John Collier, in his masterly little Primer of Art, has expressed himself in no uncertain terms. According to this author, art may, speaking broadly, be defined as “a creative operation of the intelligence, the making of something either with a view to utility or pleasure.” As a matter of fact the term “art” now has a tendency to be confined to designate the Fine Arts as opposed to the Useful Arts; not only so, but instead of including personal decoration, ornamentation, painting, sculpture, dancing, poetry, music, and the drama, the term is very often limited to ornamentation, painting, and sculpture. It is with these three that we are now more immediately concerned, and more particularly with the first of them, or decorative art. “In this narrower sense art may be defined as the making of something to please the eye.... As to what is pleasing, that each person must decide for himself.”

Art has also a physical and a physiological aspect, such as “the questions of harmony of line and colour, which lie at the root of all art.” With Dr. Collier, we may leave these “untouched, not because they are unimportant, but because, not enough is known about them to make their discussion in the least profitable.”

The scope, then, of the following pages is to deal with the arts of design from a biological or natural history point of view.

When difficult problems have to be investigated the most satisfactory method of procedure is to reduce them to their simplest elements, and to deal with the latter before studying their more complex aspects. The physiology of the highest animals is being elucidated largely by investigations upon the physiology of lower forms, and that of the latter in their turn by a knowledge of the activities of the lowest organisms. It is among these that the phenomena of life are displayed in their least complex manifestations; and they, so to speak, give the key to a right apprehension of the others.

So, too, in studying the arts of design. The artistic expression of a highly civilised community is a very complex matter, and its complete unravelment would be an exceedingly difficult and perhaps impossible task. In order to gain some insight into the principles which underlie the evolution of decorative art, it is necessary to confine one’s attention to less specialised conditions; the less the complication, the greater the facility for a comprehensive survey. In order, therefore, to understand civilised art we must study barbaric art, and to elucidate this savage art must be investigated. Of course it must be understood that no hard and fast line can be drawn between any two of these stages of culture; I employ them merely as convenient general terms. These are the reasons why I shall confine myself very largely to the decorative art of savage peoples.

There are two methods of studying the art of savages; the one is to take a comparative view of the art of diverse backward peoples; the other is to limit the attention to a particular district or people. The former is extremely suggestive; but one is very liable at times to be led astray by resemblances, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out in the following pages. The latter is in some respects much more certain in its conclusions, and is the only way by which certain problems can be solved. In the first part of this book I shall adopt the latter plan in order to indicate its particular value, and to afford data for subsequent discussion. In the remaining parts of the book I shall draw my illustrations from the most convenient sources, irrespective of race or locality.

In my first section the decorative art of a particular region has been studied much in the same way as a zoologist would study a group of its fauna, say the birds or butterflies. Naturally, the methods of the purely systematic zoologist neither can nor should be entirely followed, for the aim in life of the analytical zoologist is to record the fauna of a district and to classify the specimens in an orderly manner. To the more synthetically-minded zoologist the problems of the geographical distribution of animals have a peculiar fascination, and he takes pleasure in mapping out the geographical variations of a particular species and in endeavouring to account for the diversity of form and colour which obtains, as well as to ascertain the place of its evolution and the migrations which have subsequently taken place. The philosophical student also studies the development of animals and so learns something of the way in which they have come to be what they are, and at the same time light is shed upon genealogies and relationships.