Turning from special illustrations of the artistic skill of the Mound-Builders, brief attention may be paid to their art in its more general features, and as compared with art as found among our Indian tribes.
Among some of the latter the artistic instinct, while deriving its characteristic features, as among the Mound-Builders, from animated nature, exhibits a decided tendency towards the production of conventional forms, and often finds expression in creations of the most grotesque and imaginative character.
While this is true of some tribes it is by no means true of all, nor is it true of all the art products of even those tribes most given to conventional art. But even were it true in its broadest terms, it is more than doubtful if the significance of the fact has not been greatly overestimated. Some authors indeed seem to discern in the introduction of the grotesque element and the substitution of conventional designs of animals for a more natural portrayal, a difference sufficient to mark, not distinct eras of art culture merely, but different races with very different modes of art expression.
To trace the origin of art among primitive peoples, and to note the successive steps by which decorative art grew from its probable origin in the readily recognized adornments of nature and in the mere "accidents of manufacture," as they have been termed, would be not only interesting, but highly instructive. Such a study should afford us a clew to the origin and significance of conventional as contrasted with imitative art.
The natural process of the evolution of art would seem to be from the purely imitative to the conventional, the tendency being for artistic expression of a partially or wholly imaginative character to supplant or supplement the imitative form only in obedience to external influences, especially those of a religious or superstitious kind. In this connection it is interesting to note that even among tribes of the Northwest, the Haidahs, for instance, whose carvings or paintings of birds and animals are almost invariably treated in a manner so highly conventional or are so distorted and caricatured as to be nearly or quite unrecognizable, it is still some natural object, as a well known bird or animal, that underlies and gives primary shape to the design. However highly conventionalized or grotesque in appearance such artistic productions may be, evidences of an underlying imitative design may always be detected; proof, seemingly, that the conventional is a later stage of art superimposed upon the more natural by the requirements of mythologic fancies.
As it is with any particular example of savage artistic fancy, so is it with the art of certain tribes as a whole. Nor does it seem possible that the growth of the religions or mythologic sentiment has so far preceded or outgrown the development of art as to have had from the first a dominating influence over it, and that the art of such tribes as most strongly show its effect has never had what may be termed its natural phase of development, but has reached the conventional stage without having passed through the intermediate imitative era.
It is more natural to suppose, so far, at least as the North American Indians are concerned, that the road to conventionalism has always led through imitation.
The argument, therefore, that because a tribe or people is less given than another to conventional methods of art, it therefore must necessarily be in a higher stage of culture, is entitled to much less weight than it has sometimes received. Squier and Davis, for instance, referring to the Mound-Builders, state that "many of these (i.e., sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we could only expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the minor arts, and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy and ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can claim but a slight approach."
It is clearly not the intention of the above authors to claim an entire absence of the grotesque method of treatment in specimens of the Mound-Builder's art, since elsewhere they call attention to what appears to be a caricature of the human face, as well as to the disproportionate size of the heads of many of the animal carvings. Not only are the heads of many of the carvings of disproportionate size, which, in instances has the effect of actual distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures nature, instead of being copied, has been trifled with and birds and animals show peculiarities unknown to science and which go far to prove that the Mound-Builders, however else endowed, possessed lively imaginations and no little creative fancy.
Decided traces of conventionalism also are to be found in many of the animal carvings, and the method of indicating the wings and feathers of birds, the scales of the serpent, &c., are almost precisely what is to be observed in modern Indian productions of a similar kind.