When the Arts become Masculine, Art Develops;
but in Priestly Hands it becomes Conventional

(1) If the arts and industries of Polynesia stood alone, the contrast between their primeval and advanced phases would not be so piquant. Arts develop into art; human efforts applied to the practical needs of life are the basis of the arts; human imagination overriding the mere utilities is the basis of art; in the later or higher phases of civilisation the two often coalesce, art contriving to serve a useful purpose as well as the imaginative satisfaction of the senses. In the early stages or the evolution of culture they are kept rigidly apart, though often allies in the service of religion and symbolic meaning. As soon as art appears distinct from the arts we may be sure that man has entered into his rule of domestic and social life; hunting and fishing and their subsidiary employments no longer monopolise his attention; the matriarchate in the household has passed away, with its failure to specialise, and man has become lord of the inner life as well as of the out-door. Religion has penetrated into every detail of existence, and its symbolism demands the development of art. Art, in short, appears in the period of the masculine specialisation of the arts.

(2) The earliest art we have any record of is, of course, page 179the pictorial. In the caves of Perigord have been found etchings of mammoths, reindeer, and horses that are extraordinary in their beauty of outline; and from some in Portugal finely tinted frescoes representing animal life have been lately reported. Now, these are the efforts of early palaeolithic man, who dwelt in caves and felt the sting of the glacial period, at least a hundred thousand years ago. The singular thing is that no such faithful draughts manship has been found among the remains and traces of neolithic man in Europe. He, as well as the man of the copper and bronze ages after him, satisfied himself with geometrical and conventional drawings. It seems, in fact, that this is the first advance on the primeval truth to Nature. It is probably due to religious symbolism. Palaeolithic man introduced life in its reality into his drawings and etchings and paintings, oftenest in the individual, but occasionally in the groupa man bitten by a snake, or leading a horse, or deer in flight or in combat. It was doubtless the necessity of marking out the special animal of the tribe that led to such skill in line-drawing; and it was doubtless the beginning of totemism that by frequent practice brought the palaeolithic artist to such perfection. The moment religion seized on the totem and the art of representing it, the priest or chief and not the instinctive artist drew the figures, and they became stiff and conventional and ultimately symbolic; and no one, however clever, dared to depart from their untruth to life. All the true artist could do with them was to weave them into an arabesque or pattern, that in the general effect pleased his artistic sense. In this religious or symbolic stage of the graphic arts no advance can be made except in the grouping of the symbols and in the varied artistic designs that the grouping may bear. A later stage, generally due to a new religion, frees the artist to some extent from these fetters, but never leaves him wholly at page 180liberty to move as his genius dictates amongst his materials and his imaginings.