We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. He says:—
“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined, representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the characteristics of this form of writing.”
What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story of some good padre, who had assured him that a native Indian city, greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them, prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such oscillations, very likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.
The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed, by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we must not call a disproportionate length, because we have not the whole life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems an improbable length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten past he can bring to light.
CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.
By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’
PART XVI.
NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.
Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason. Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions, as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and science have their meeting-point in method.
And though Kant applies the word genius (ingenium) strictly to the cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science, yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect, because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far intuitive or innate (ingenium) that, though study and practice perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while, in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the curves of grace.