“I don’t know,” says Alice, “I lost count.”
“She can’t do addition,” says the White Queen.
Well—she “lost count,” and, therefore, that series of ones failed to have any fresh meaning or association for her.
In the same way the primitive savage loses count; beyond three, numbers are too many for him—they become merely a “lot.” But war and the chase begin to teach him the relative value of numbers; and he finds out that if one lot goes out to fight a bigger lot, the smaller lot probably gets beaten; so that, before long, calculation of some sort becomes necessary for the preservation of existence. He finds out also (and this is where ornament begins to come in) that a certain amount of wilful miscalculation has a beauty and a value of its own. So, after going out to fight ten against ten, and defeating them, he comes back and says to his wives and the surrounding communities by whom he wishes to be held in awe—“My lot killed bigger lot—much, much bigger lot.” And so, when he comes later on to set down his wilful miscalculations in records of scripture, he provides delightful problems for the Bishop Colensos of future ages—problems the undoing of which may shake to the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally inspired—not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its reasons for having plunged into war.
You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated truths but of calculated untruths.
But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use, which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic forms of expression the higher grades of civilization.
And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good.
Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; his weapons—first of the chase, and then of war. No sooner had he proved their use than he began to ornament them—to make them records, trophies, and so—objects of beauty. He cannot stop from doing so; his delight in the skill of his hands breaks out into ornament. It is the same with the arts of peace, the work of the woman-primitive—she moulds a pot, or weaves a square of material, and into it—the moment she has accomplished the rudiments—goes pattern, beauty, something additional and memorable that is not for use material, but for use spiritual—pleasure, delight.
And that quite simple example, from a time when man was living the life, as we should now regard it, of a harried and hunted beast—with his emergence from surrounding perils scarcely yet assured to him—goes on consistently up and up the scale of human evolution; and the more strongly it gets to be established in social institutions, the more noble is likely to be the form of civilization which enshrines it. And the less it shows, the less is that form of civilization likely to be worthy of preservation, or its products of permanent value to the human race.
It is not the millionaire who leaves his mark on the world so that hereafter men are glad when they name him; it is the “maker” who has turned uses into delights; not the master of the money-market, but the Master of Arts. The nearest thing we have on earth to that immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms of ornament—of embellishment over and above mere use—which man’s genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts—the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy through which men—many now nameless—made permanent the vision of delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become heirs. The self-realisation of that age—all the best of it that we inherit—comes to us through embodiment in forms transcending material use.