Fig. 63.—Earthen Vase found in the Cave of Furfooz (Belgium).
It is in the reindeer epoch that we find the earliest traces of any artistic feeling manifested in man.
It is a circumstance well worthy of remark, that this feeling appears to have been the peculiar attribute of the tribes which inhabited the south-west of the present France; the departments of Dordogne, Vienne, Charente, Tarn-et-Garonne, and Ariége, are, in fact, the only localities where designs and carvings representing organised beings have been discovered. The departments in the east have not furnished anything of a similar character, any more than Belgium, which has been so thoroughly explored by M. Édouard Dupont, or Wurtemburg, where M. Fraas has lately described various settlements of this primitive epoch.
It is not sufficient to allege, in order to explain this singular circumstance, that the caves in the south of France belong to a later period of the reindeer epoch, and that the others go back to the earliest commencement of the same age. Apart from the fact that this assertion is in no way proved, a complete and ready answer is involved in the well verified circumstance, that even in later ages—in the polished stone, and even in the bronze epoch—no representation of an animal or plant is found to have been executed in these localities. No specimen of the kind has, in fact, been found in the kitchen-middens of Denmark, or in the lacustrine settlements of the stone age, or even of the bronze age.
It must, then, be admitted that the tribes which were scattered over those portions of the European continent which now correspond to the south-west of France, possessed a special talent in the art of design. There is, moreover, nothing unreasonable in such a supposition. An artistic feeling is not always the offspring of civilisation, it is rather a gift of nature. It may manifest its existence in the most barbarous ages, and may make its influence more deeply felt in nations which are behindhand in respect to general progress than in others which are much further advanced in civilisation.
There can be no doubt that the rudiments of engraving and sculpture of which we are about to take a view, testify to faculties of an essentially artistic character. Shapes are so well imitated, movements are so thoroughly caught, as it were, in the sudden fact of action, that it is almost always possible to recognise the object which the ancient workman desired to represent, although he had at his disposal nothing but the rudest instruments for executing his work. A splinter of flint was his sole graving-tool, a piece of reindeer horn, or a flake of slate or ivory, was the only plate on which primitive man could stamp his reproductions of animated nature.
Perhaps they drew on stone or horn with lumps of red-chalk or ochre, for both these substances have been found in the caves of primitive man. Perhaps, too, as is the case with modern savages, the ochre and red-chalk were used besides for painting or tatooing his body. When the design was thus executed on stone or horn, it was afterwards engraved with the point of some flint instrument.
Those persons who have attentively examined the interesting gallery of the Histoire du Travail in the International Exposition of 1867, must have remarked a magnificent collection of these artistic productions of primeval ages. There were no less than fifty-one specimens, which were exhibited by several collectors, and were for the most part extremely curious. In his interesting work, 'Promenades Préhistoriques à l'Exposition Universelle,' M. Gabriel de Mortillet has carefully described these objects. In endeavouring to obtain some knowledge of them, we shall take as our guide the learned curator of the Archæological Museum of Saint-Germain.