In this, as in other respects, the recovery of evidences of a well-developed æsthetic faculty among the men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer period, furnishes materials for many suggestive inferences; for we shall very imperfectly estimate the significance of the primitive drawings so unexpectedly discovered, if we regard them as no more than the pastimes of those ancient cave-men, whose artistic ability they so unmistakably reveal. They are rather to be classed with the picture-writing of the American aborigines—including its most advanced Mexican stage abundantly illustrated in Lord Kingsborough’s folios,—as one of the primitive supplements of language among uncultured races. As such it is a form of visible speech, and an important step in advance of the stage of gesture-language. The historical value of the palæolithic drawings is indisputable. They furnish a record, more trustworthy than any written chronicle, of the strange conditions of life in a region familiar to us throughout the whole historic period for its genial climate and social civilisation. It is in this aspect, as a contemporary chronicling of current events, that palæolithic art has its chief value. It furnishes a graphic picturing of the habits of life, and of many of the attendant circumstances of that remote period, recorded with such vivid truthfulness, that we realise very definitely the character of its long-extinct fauna, and, to some considerable extent, the occupations and modes of life of the cave-men by whom they were hunted, and in leisure hours were reproduced graven or carved, on bone, horn, or ivory, or traced in free outline on slabs of schist or other soft stone.
Viewed simply as examples of imitative art among a people still in the rudest Stone age, the drawings are significant and instructive. They furnish evidence of observation and artistic capacity, and consequently of intellectual powers capable of very different results from anything that could be realised in the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, or of anything beyond the crudest appliances for developing mechanical skill. The conditions of climate probably forbade any attempt at agriculture. They were hunters, fowlers, fishers, subsisting mainly, if not wholly, by the chase. They not only successfully pursued the wild horse, the reindeer, and other swift-footed herbivora, but assailed the cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other formidable carnivora, as well as the huge rhinoceros and the mammoth. They also made excursions to the sea-shore, and no doubt left there shell mounds similar to those which have been explored with such interesting results on the Danish coast; and which have their New World equivalents on the seaboards of Massachusetts, Georgia, and Florida, where at certain seasons the Indians resorted to feast on the shell-fish. From their drawings and carvings we not only learn this, but also that they were not unfamiliar with the whale, the seal, and other marine fauna. The presence of the whale and seal in the same latitude as the reindeer need not surprise us. The occupation of Europe by palæolithic man contemporary with the Elephas primigenius and other extinct mammalia, belongs to an era when the relative levels of sea and land, and the relations of the Atlantic coast-line to the ancient continent, differed widely from their present conditions. If the genial current of the Gulf Stream then reached the shores of Europe, its influence extended over areas very diverse from those now affected by it. But the range of the fauna of that Palæolithic era was a wide one. Tusks of the mammoth and antlers of the reindeer occur in the Scottish boulder-clay; and the discovery of skeletons of the whale far inland in the carse of Stirling, accompanied in more than one case by implements made of perforated stag’s horn, tells of the presence of the Greenland whale on the ancient Scottish sea coast, while the stag haunted its forests, and the Allophylian savage paddled his canoe in estuaries marked for us now by old sea-margins that preceded the last great rise of the land. Skulls and horns of the elk occur in the Scottish peat-bogs, seemingly indistinguishable from those of the Cervus alces, or North American moose.[[86]] As to the reindeer, not only are its remains found in Scottish mosses and the underlying marl, but they have been dug up in the ruined brochs, as at Cill-Trolla, Sutherlandshire, and Keiss in Caithness. The favourite haunts of the Greenland whale are in seas encumbered with floating ice; and when they were stranded in the estuary of the Forth by a tide rising on a shore-line now nearly thirty feet above the tide-mark of the present day, the highlands of Scotland were capped with perpetual snow, and great changes of level had still to occur. But neither the whale nor the Eskimo retreated within the Arctic circle because they could only be at home among polar ice and snow. Remains of the whale in Scottish kitchen middens of greatly more modern date show that it must have haunted the Scottish shores when the temperature of the surrounding ocean differed little from that of the present day. There is preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries a drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale, which was found in a weem, or subterranean dwelling, on the Isle of Eday, Orkney, along with implements of stone, horn, bone, bronze, and iron; and other evidences of the presence of the whale in the Scottish seas are of frequent occurrence.
As to the ivory of the narwhal and the rostungr, or walrus, it was in use by Scoto-Scandinavian carvers after the disappearance of the reindeer from Scotland. A curious large sword, probably of the fourteenth century, at Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, has the hilt made of the narwhal’s tusk; and the famous Lewis chessmen, found at Uig in the Isle of Lewis, as well as examples of chess and tablemen recovered from time to time in other Scottish localities, are all made of the walrus ivory, the “huel-bone” of Chaucer. But when the whale haunted the shores to which the hunters of the Perigord resorted, it is doubtful if Britain was an island. In that age of the mammoth and the reindeer of the Pyrenees, when art flourished in the valley of the Vézère, and men, scarcely less strange than the long-extinct fauna on which they preyed, sheltered in their rock-dwellings from the ice and snow, the relative levels of sea and land, and the lines of the Atlantic coast, bore no relation to their present aspect; for the old region of ice and snow was what is now familiar to us as the vine-clad sunny land of France. All this we learn from the archæological remains of those old times, and especially from the carvings and gravings which, happily for us, were then executed, whether for pastime or as actual records. Like many of the native races of the American continent at the present day, the old cave-dwellers employed their leisure time in carving in bone, horn, or ivory; and like them too, as we believe, they applied their skill in graphic art as a means of recording events and communicating facts to others. The broad palinated antlers of the reindeer, prepared sections of mammoth ivory, and slabs of schist, all furnished tablets on which they not only delineated the objects of the chase, but incidents and observations of daily experience. And if so, we have in such drawings the germ of ideographic symbolism, and of hieroglyphic writing. By just such a process of recording facts in a form readily intelligible to others, the early dwellers in the Nile valley originated the mode of object-drawing and ideographic chronicling, from which hieroglyphic, demotic, and ultimately, phonetic writing were evolved.
It is not solely by inference that we are led to surmise that the ingenious draughtsmen of Southern France had a higher aim than mere pastime in some, at least, of their graphic devices. The relics recovered from the ancient caves include what appear to be tallies and numerical records, unmistakably indicative, not only of a method of numeration, but of the growth of a system of mnemonic symbolism, and distinctive graven characters, not greatly inferior to the primitive alphabets of Celtic or Scandinavian lithology. It is curious, indeed, to find in use in Europe’s early Post-Glacial period symbols which, but for their undoubted execution by the ancient cave-men of Aquitania, might be assigned with every probability to some Druid scribe, familiar with the ogham characters of the Gauls and British Celts. Among the objects recovered from the Dordogne caves, including tallies and inscribed tablets of horn and ivory, with their enumeration in simple units, M. Broca specially noted a deer’s tyne, marked with a series of notches, which he assumed to be a hunter’s memoranda of the produce of the chase. A more complex record, found in the rock-shelter of Gorge d’Enfer, is inscribed on a plate of ivory. Its groups of horizontal and oblique lines along the edges, and symmetrical rows of dots on the flat surface, combine to furnish a record graven in characters as well-defined as many a runic or ogham inscription. If it be no more than the memoranda of a successful hunt, with a classification of the different kinds of game secured for distribution among the members of the tribe, it is not greatly inferior to the early system of numeration among the Egyptians. But when such a piece of arithmetic was supplemented by a pictorial record of the hunt; or by the incident, so acceptable to a bevy of hunters over their camp-fire, of the fight of the male deer in the rutting season; or the charge of the enraged elephant with elevated trunk, trumpeting wrath and defiance: much had been accomplished that admits of comparison with records of the modern penman.[[87]]
It is difficult for the men of a lettered age, with all the facilities of the printing-press in fullest use, to realise the condition of intellectual activity, or the natural modes of its expression, among an unlettered people. The transmission of Homeric or Ossianic poems, of a Niebelungen Lied or an Albanic Duan, from generation to generation, by the mere aid of memory, is scarcely conceivable to us now. Yet I recall the account given by Ozahwahguaquzuebe, an Ojibway Indian, who told of his habitually accumulating his tobacco till he saved enough to bribe an aged chief of the tribe to repeat to him, again and again, in all its marvellous details, the legend of Nanaboozo and the post-diluvial creation, in order that he might be able, in his turn, to recount it in full, as it had come down from elder generations of his people.
There are some results of the introduction of the printing-press still very partially appreciated. Its direct influence on social and intellectual progress receives ample recognition; but not so all indirect influences traceable to its operations. In elder centuries, before Gutenberg and Faust superseded the labours of the scribe, not a few ballad-epics and lyrics were consigned to the wandering minstrels, to whose tenacious memories we are so largely indebted. But there were other avenues in those old centuries for fancy and passion, not greatly dissimilar to those by which the observation and descriptive powers of the post-glacial Troglodytes found vent. It is vain for a Pugin or a Ruskin to bewail the mechanical character of modern art. It was easier for the mediæval satirist to find free scope for his humour in a sculptured corbel, or on a boss of the beautiful groined ceiling, or to carve his grosser caricature within easy access under the miserere in the choir, than to spend long hours at his lectern in the scriptorium, committing his fancies with laborious pains to less accessible parchments. And so, both satires and sermons were then graven in stone, which now find utterance in ways more suited to the age in which we live:—
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times.
Taste and fancy have now a thousand avenues at their command for the humour and satire which mingled, in quaint incongruity with the devout aspirations inwrought into mediæval architecture. With the revival of learning, and the introduction of the printing-press, came the Renaissance. Europe renounced mediæval art as “Gothic.” Classic, or what passed for classic art, ruled for the next three centuries. Architecture became more and more mechanical; while æsthetic taste sought elsewhere, and more especially in the novel arena of the printing-press, for avenues where it could sport in unrestrained freedom.
The ingenious skill of the palæolithic artists and tool-makers, who wrought in their rock-shelters and limestone caves, in that remote era when the climate along the northern slope of the Pyrenees resembled that of Labrador at the present day, has naturally awakened a lively interest. The rigour of the climate during a greatly prolonged winter prevented their obtaining stone or flint for purposes of manufacture. They wrought, accordingly, in bone, in mammoth ivory, and in the horn of the reindeer, fashioning from such materials their lances, fish-spears, knives, daggers, and bodkins; turning to account the deer’s tynes for tallies; and carving out of the larger bones what are assumed to have been maces or official batons, elaborately ornamented with symbolic devices designed for other purposes than mere decoration.