The Dyak is decidedly intelligent, has a good memory and keen powers of observation, is unsuspicious and hospitable, and honest and truthful to a striking degree. The various tribes differ greatly in religious ceremonies and beliefs. They have no temples, priests or regular worship; but the father of each family performs rites. A supreme god, Sang-Sang, seems generally acknowledged, but subordinate deities are supposed to watch over special departments of the world and human affairs. Sacrifices both of animals and fruits—and in some cases even of human beings—are offered to appease or invoke the gods; divination of various kinds is resorted to for the purpose of deciding the course to be pursued in any emergency; and criminals are subjected to the ordeal by poison or otherwise. Offerings are made to the dead, and there is a very strong belief in the existence of evil spirits, and all kinds of calamities and diseases are ascribed to their malignity. Thus almost the whole medical system of the Dyaks consists in the application of appropriate charms or the offerings of conciliatory sacrifices. Many of those natives who have had much intercourse with the Malays have adopted a kind of mongrel Mahommedanism, with a mixture of Hindu elements. The transmigration of souls seems to be believed in by some tribes; and some have a system of successive heavens rising one above the other very much in the style of the Hindu cosmogony. In the treatment of their dead much variety prevails; they are sometimes buried, sometimes burned, and sometimes elevated on a lofty framework. The Dyaks have no exact calculation of the year, and simply name the months first month, second month, and so on. They calculate the time of day by the height of the sun, and if asked how far distant a place is can only reply by showing how high the sun would be when you reached it if you set out in the morning.
In agriculture, navigation, and manufactures they have made some progress. In a few districts a slight sort of plough is used, but the usual instrument of tillage is a kind of cleaver. Two crops, one of rice and the other of maize or vegetables, are taken, and then the ground is allowed to lie fallow for eight or ten years. The inland Dyaks collect the forest products, rattan, gutta-percha, beeswax and edible birds’ nests, and exchange them for clothing or ornaments, especially brass wire or brass guns in which consists the wealth of every chief. They spin and weave their own cotton, and dye the cloth with indigo of their own growing. Their iron and steel instruments are excellent, the latter far surpassing European wares in strength and fineness of edge. Their houses are neatly built of bamboos, and raised on piles a considerable height from the ground; but perhaps their most remarkable constructive effort is the erection of suspension bridges and paths over rivers and along the front of precipices, in which they display a boldness and ingenuity that surprise the European traveller. In the centre of most villages is the communal house where the unmarried men live, which serves as a general assembly hall. Some have a circuit of no less than 1000 ft. One on the banks of the Lundi was 600 ft. long and housed 400 persons.
The Dyaks have always been notorious for head-hunting, a custom which has now been largely suppressed. It is essentially a religious practice, the Dyak seeking a consecration for every important event of his life by the acquisition of one or more skulls. A child is believed ill-fated to whose mother the father has not at its birth presented skulls. The young man is not admitted to full tribal rights, nor can he woo a bride with any hope of success, until he has a skull or more to adorn his hut; a chief’s authority would not be acknowledged without such trophies of his prowess. The strictest rules govern head-hunting; a period of fasting and confession, of isolation in a taboo hut, precedes the expedition, for which the Dyak clothes himself in the skins of wild beasts and puts on an animal mask. The Dyak curiously enough prefers the head of a fellow-tribesman, and the hunt is usually one of ambush rather than of open combat. Among some tribes it was not sufficient to kill the victim. He was tortured first, his body sprinkled with his own blood, and even his flesh eaten under the eyes of priests and priestesses who presided over the rites. Skulls, especially those of enemies, were held in great veneration. At meals the choicest morsels were offered them: they were supplied with betel and tobacco: fulsome compliments and prayers for success in battle addressed to them. Head-hunting at one time threatened the very existence of the race; but in spite of their reformation in this respect the Dyaks are not on the increase, a fact for which A.R. Wallace accounts by the hard life the women lead and their consequent slight fecundity.
The Dyaks speak a variety of dialects, most of which are still very slightly known. The tribes on the coast have adopted a great number of pure Malay words into common use, and it is often hard to ascertain their own proper synonyms. The American missionaries have investigated the dialects of the west coast (Landak, &c.), and their Rhenish brethren have devoted their attention to those of the south, into one of which (that of Pulu Petak) a complete translation of the Bible has been made. Mr Hardeland, the translator, has also published a Dyak-German dictionary.
DYCE, ALEXANDER (1798-1869), English dramatic editor and literary historian, was born in Edinburgh on the 30th of June 1798. After receiving his early education at the high school of his native city, he became a student at Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1819. He took holy orders, and became a curate at Lantegloss, in Cornwall, and subsequently at Nayland, in Suffolk; in 1827 he settled in London. His first books were Select Translations from Quintus Smyrnaeus (1821), an edition of Collins (1827), and Specimens of British Poetesses (1825). He issued annotated editions of George Peele, Robert Greene, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with lives of the authors and much illustrative matter. He completed, in 1833, an edition of James Shirley left unfinished by William Gifford, and contributed biographies of Shakespeare, Pope, Akenside and Beattie to Pickering’s Aldine Poets. He also edited (1836-1838) Richard Bentley’s works, and Specimens of British Sonnets (1833). His carefully revised edition of John Skelton, which appeared in 1843, did much to revive interest in that trenchant satirist. In 1857 his edition of Shakespeare was published by Moxon; and the second edition, a great improvement on the old one, was issued by Chapman & Hall in 1866. He also published Remarks on Collier’s and Knight’s Editions of Shakespeare (1844); A Few Notes on Shakespeare (1853); and Strictures on Collier’s new Edition of Shakespeare (1859), a contribution to the Collier controversy (see [Collier, John Payne]), which ended a long friendship between the two scholars. He was intimately connected with several literary societies, and undertook the publication of Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder for the Camden Society; and the old plays of Timon and Sir Thomas More were published by him for the Shakespeare Society. He was associated with Halliwell-Phillips, John Payne Collier and Thomas Wright as one of the founders of the Percy Society, for publishing old English poetry. Dyce also issued Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856). He died on the 15th of May 1869. He had collected a valuable library, containing amongst other treasures many rare Elizabethan books, and this collection he bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum. He displayed untiring industry, abundant learning, and admirable critical acumen in his editions of the old English poets. His wide reading in Elizabethan literature enabled him to explain much that was formerly obscure in Shakespeare; while his sound judgment was a check to extravagance in emendation. While preserving all that was valuable in former editions, Dyce added much fresh matter. His Glossary, a large volume of 500 pages, was the most exhaustive that had appeared.
DYCE, WILLIAM (1806-1864), British painter, was born in Aberdeen, where his father, a fellow of the Royal Society, was a physician of some repute. He attended Marischal College, took the degree of M.A. at sixteen years of age, and was destined for one of the learned professions. Showing a turn for design instead, he studied in the school of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, then as a probationer (not a full student) in the Royal Academy of London, and thence, in 1825, he proceeded to Rome, where he spent nine months. He returned to Aberdeen in 1826, and painted several pictures; one of these, “Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs of Nysa,” was exhibited in 1827. In the autumn of that year he went back to Italy, showing from the first a strong sympathy with the earlier masters of the Florentine and allied schools. A “Virgin and Child” which he painted in Rome in 1828 was much noticed by Overbeck and other foreign artists. In 1829 Dyce settled in Edinburgh, taking at once a good rank in his profession, and showing considerable versatility in subject-matter. Portrait-painting for some years occupied much of his time; and he was particularly prized for likenesses of ladies and children. In February 1837 he was appointed master of the school of design of the Board of Manufactures, Edinburgh. In the same year he published a pamphlet on the management of schools of this description, which led to his transfer from Edinburgh, after eighteen months’ service there, to London, as superintendent and secretary of the then recently established school of design at Somerset House. Dyce was sent by the Board of Trade to the continent to examine the organization of foreign schools; and a report which he eventually printed, 1840, led to a remodelling of the London establishment. In 1842 he was made a member of the council and inspector of provincial schools, a post which he resigned in 1844. In this latter year, being appointed professor of fine art in King’s College, London, he delivered a remarkable lecture, The Theory of the Fine Arts. In 1835 he had been elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy; this honour he relinquished upon settling in London, and he was then made an honorary R.S.A. In 1844 he became an associate, in 1848 a full member, of the London Royal Academy; he also was elected a member of the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia. He was active in the deliberations of the Royal Academy, and it is said that his tongue was the dread of the urbane President, Sir Charles Eastlake, for Dyce was keen in speech as in visage; it was on his proposal that the class of retired Academicians was established. In January 1850 Dyce married Jane, daughter of Mr James Brand, of Bedford Hill, Surrey. He died at Streatham on the 14th of February 1864, leaving two sons and two daughters.
Dyce was one of the most learned and accomplished of British painters—one of the highest in aim, and most consistently self-respecting in workmanship. His finest productions, the frescoes in the robing-room in the Houses of Parliament, did honour to the country and time which produced them. Generally, however, there is in Dyce’s work more of earnestness, right conception, and grave, sensitive, but rather restricted powers of realization, than of authentic greatness. He has elevation, draughtsmanship, expression, and on occasion fine colour; along with all these, a certain leaning on precedent, and castigated semi-conventionalized type of form and treatment, which bespeak rather the scholarly than the originating mind in art. The following are among his principal or most interesting works (oil pictures, unless otherwise stated). 1829: “The Daughters of Jethro defended by Moses”; “Puck.” 1830: “The Golden Age”; “The Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents” (now in the National Gallery, Edinburgh); “Christ crowned with Thorns.” 1835: “A Dead Christ” (large lunette altarpiece). 1836: “The Descent of Venus,” from Ben Jonson’s Triumph of Love; “The Judgment of Solomon,” prize cartoon in tempera for tapestry (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1837: “Francesca da Rimini” (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1838, and again 1846: “The Madonna and Child.” 1839: “Dunstan separating Edwy and Elgiva.” 1844: “Joash shooting the Arrow of Deliverance” (the finest perhaps of the oil-paintings). 1850: “The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel.” 1851: “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm.” 1855: “Christabel.” 1857: “Titian’s first essay in Colouring.” 1859: “The Good Shepherd.” 1860: “St John bringing Home his Adopted Mother”; “Pegwell Bay” (a coast scene of remarkably minute detail, showing the painter’s partial adhesion to the “pre-Raphaelite” movement). 1861: “George Herbert at Bemerton.” Dyce executed some excellent cartoons for stained glass:—that for the choristers’ window, Ely Cathedral, and that for a vast window at Alnwick in memory of a duke of Northumberland; the design of “Paul rejected by the Jews,” now at South Kensington, belongs to the latter. In fresco-painting his first work appears to have been the “Consecration of Archbishop Parker,” painted in Lambeth palace. In one of the Westminster Hall competitions for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, he displayed two heads from this composition; and it is related that the great German fresco-painter Cornelius, who had come over to England to give advice, with a prospect of himself taking the chief direction of the pictorial scheme, told the prince consort frankly that the English ought not to be asking for him, when they had such a painter of their own as Mr Dyce. The cartoon by Dyce of the “Baptism of Ethelbert” was approved and commissioned for the House of Lords, and is the first of the works done there, 1846, in fresco. In 1848 he began his great frescoes in the Robing-room—subjects from the legend of King Arthur, exhibiting chivalric virtue. The whole room was to have been finished in eight years; but ill-health and other vexations trammelled the artist, and the series remains uncompleted. The largest picture figures “Hospitality, the admission of Sir Tristram into the fellowship of the Round Table.” Then follow—“Religion,” the Vision of Sir Galahad and his Companions; “Generosity,” Arthur unhorsed, and spared by the Victor; “Courtesy,” Sir Tristram harping to la Belle Yseult; “Mercy,” Sir Gawaine’s Vow. The frescoes of sacred subjects in All Saints’ church, Margaret Street, London; of “Comus,” in the summer-house of Buckingham Palace; and of “Neptune and Britannia,” at Osborne House, are also by this painter.
Dyce was an elegant scholar in more ways than one. In 1828 he obtained the Blackwell prize at Aberdeen for an essay on animal magnetism. In 1843-1844 he published an edition of the Book of Common Prayer, with a dissertation on Gregorian music, and its adaptation to English words. He founded the Motett Society, for revival of ancient church-music, was a fine organist, and composed a “non nobis” which has appropriately been sung at Royal Academy banquets. His last considerable writing relating to his own art was published in 1853, The National Gallery: its Formation and Management.