Art in line and colour is of vast antiquity, probably preceding that in shape or form, carving or sculpture. But this, too, we find was fairly understood by the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland at a time when the great glacier still covered a good part of the European continent, and there is scarcely a savage tribe to-day that does not make some rude attempts at carving the images of its deities.
A natural object which has a chance resemblance to a man or beast is chosen as a fetish, and the worshipper by chipping or rubbing increases slightly the likeness. This is the infancy of the sculptor’s art, and it is usually for a religious purpose that it is exercised. Soon it is developed, and in stone, or bone, or wood, in baked clay, or rags, or leaves, we find thousands of effigies in use to represent the tutelary deities and the other denizens of the supernatural world.
So prominent was the early progress of religious art in this direction that it gave the name to early religion itself. It was distinctly “idolatry,” or “image worship,” the objective expression overwhelming the inward sentiment.
Its excess in this direction led to reactions and protests as long ago as the dawn of history. “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything,” was a command taken so literally that it has swept away ever since in some of the Semitic peoples all interest in plastic or pictorial art, whether sacred or secular. It was believed that the contemplation of a divinity not represented by any visible object would maintain and develop a higher conception than if portrayed under tangible form, no matter how beautiful or how symbolic.
This opinion would not and did not exclude the cultivation of the beautiful under non-sensuous forms, such as appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. I refer to metre and music, to oratory and literary composition.
From some cause which it might be difficult to explain satisfactorily the natural expression of religious emotion in language is universally metrical. The rites of every barbarous tribe are conducted in or accompanied by rude chants or songs, which both stimulate the religious feelings and give appropriate vent to them. Many of these chants are mere repetitions of phrases, or refrains, destitute of meaning, but they answer the purpose, and are the germs from which, in appropriate surroundings, have been developed the great poems of the race, the inspirations of its immortal bards.
Hundreds of examples of these primitive religious chants have been collected of recent years, when, for the first time, their ethnologic importance has been understood. They present a striking similarity, whether from the Polynesian Islands, the desert-dwellers of Australia, or the Navahoes and Sioux of our own reservations. Many of them are scarcely more than inarticulate cries, but even these have a certain likeness, containing the same class of vowels, and often leading, through this physiological correlation of sound to emotion, to similar words in the religious language of far-distant peoples.
Everywhere we find these metrical outbursts controlled by the sense of rhythmical repetition; and it was to accentuate this that instruments of music were first invented. Their rudest forms may be seen in the two flat sticks which the Australians use to beat time for their singing in their corroborees, or festal ceremonies; or in the hollow log, pounded by a club, which some Central American tribes still employ. All the native American musical instruments appear to have been first invented for aiding the ritual; and tradition assigns with probability the same origin for most of those in the Old World.
Uniform rhythmic motion is a powerful means of intensifying collective suggestion; and its action is the more potent the more we yield our minds to the control of their unconscious activities,—the realm in which the religious sentiment is supreme.
In the initiation ceremonies of the Australians—called the Bora—the youth are obliged to listen to long speeches from the old men, containing instructions in conduct and the ancestral religious beliefs. Such customs as this,—and in one or another form they are universal in primitive religions—led to the development of the art of Oratory. It was cultivated assiduously in primitive conditions. We have several volumes largely filled with the prolix addresses of the Aztec priests and priestesses on various solemn occasions, as birth, entering adult life, marriage, etc.[290] To learn these long formulas by heart was one of the duties, and not an easy one, of the neophytes.