Allegorical art has, too, a modern popular form in the region of political satire and caricature, often potent to stir or to concentrate political feeling. This is almost a distinct province, to which many able and vigorous artists devote their lives and show their invention in the effective way in which the political situation is put into some piece of familiar symbolism which all can recognize and remember.
In the region of poetic design symbolism must always hold its place. When the artist desires to soar a little above the passing moment to suggest the past, to peer into the future; when he looks at human life as a complete whole, and the life of the race as an unbroken chain; when he would deal with thoughts of mans origin and destiny, of the powers and passions that sway him, of love, of hope and fear, of the mystery of life and nature, the drama of the seasons, he must use figurative language, and seek the beautiful and permanent images of emblematic design.
CHAPTER VIII.—OF THE GRAPHIC INFLUENCE, OR NATURALISM IN DESIGN
"THE graphic influence!" my readers may exclaim, "what existence has design apart from this, since the depicting power with whatever pencil, brush, modelling tool, chisel, pen is by its very nature bound up with it?"
That is quite true, yet for all that there is discernible a very distinct line of cleavage in art, a distinction of spirit and aim which seems to have divided or characterized artists and epochs from the very earliest.
I have often alluded to the drawings of the prehistoric cave men. These graphic outlines of animals, although generally incised upon the handles of weapons, always appear to me to indicate the purely naturalistic aim as distinct from the ornamental sense, as if the first object of the primitive artist had been to get as exact a profile as possible of the animals he knew; just as a modern artist, with superior facilities of pencil and paper, might make sketches at the Zoological Gardens without any idea of making them parts of a decorative design. The main difference seems to be that in purely graphic or naturalistic drawing individual characteristics or differences are sought for, while in ornamental or decorative drawing typical forms or correspondences are sought for.
PREHISTORIC GRAPHIC ART OF THE CAVE MEN.
