[208]. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, chap. x., which may be consulted for details.
[209]. Die Anfänge der Kunst (1894). This book, extremely lucid and interesting, full of ethnographic documents and general considerations, may be consulted with great advantage on the question of the beginnings of art. On the special point which occupies us, see pp. 191 et seq.
[210]. For a historical survey of the question see Grosse, Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 12 et seq.
[211]. Letourneau, L’évolution littéraire chez les différents peuples, p. 66, a work which may be consulted for documentary evidence.
[212]. Quoted by Grosse (p. 48), who gives an acute criticism of this view, rightly pointing out that a strictly individualistic art is “neither thinkable nor discoverable.”
[213]. Grant Allen (Mind, xx., Oct. 1880) points out that Homer describes beautiful districts as “fertile,” “rich in wheat,” “horse-feeding,” etc. He heard a peasant in the neighbourhood of Hyères praising the magnificence of a cultivated plain covered with vegetables, while showing the greatest contempt for a picturesque bit of woodland. An American visiting England said, “Your country, sir, is very beautiful. In many parts you may go for miles together and never see a tree except in a hedge.” Any one who has had much to do with the peasantry could quote hundreds of remarks similar to the above.
[214]. See Spencer, Essays, i. 434, 435.
[215]. Mind, 1880, p. 445.
[216]. I shall be pardoned for introducing the following passage from Théophile Gautier; it is, under its humorous form, so just from a psychological point of view: “Ideals torment even the coarsest natures. The savage, when he tattooes himself, or smears his body with red and blue, or sticks a fish-bone through his nose, is only obeying a confused sense of the beautiful. He is seeking for something beyond what exists; he is trying to perfect his type, guided by a dim notion of art. The taste for ornament distinguishes man from brute more clearly than any other peculiarity. No dog ever thought of putting rings into his ears; and the stupid Papuans, who eat clay and earthworms, make themselves earrings of shells and coloured berries.”
[217]. Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 144.