Charles Frederick Hartt

“ It is verily surprising what an important element ornament is in life. Is it, then, wonderful that man, striving everywhere to please the same eye by lines, should occasionally invent, independently, similar ornamental forms, or that decorative art should, in its beginning, evolve in the same direction in different countries? ”

“ The elephants, driven by thirst, come down to the lake to drink, and break in the burrows as they walk, killing and maiming the hares. The hare, in the name of the moon, in which is the palace of the hare-king, remonstrates with the elephant-king, saying that the moon is angry. The hare shows him the reflection of the moon in the water. The elephant, disturbing the water, causes the reflection to be multiplied. The hare tells him that the moon is more angry still, whereupon the elephant king begs pardon and retires, leaving the hares in peace. ”

“ Purely æsthetic decorative art has had its origin in the attempt to please the eye by lines and colors, just as music has originated in the attempt to give pleasure to the ear by a rhythmic series of sounds. Imitative decorative art appeals to the understanding as well as to the feelings: it is a song with words, but mere aesthetic ornament is visible music without words, and it is to this latter division of ornament that I shall principally invite your attention. ”

“ I soon found that the Indian myth was always recited without mental effort, its function being simply to please, like a ballad, and not to communicate information, and that when the Indian, unsurrounded by the evening circle of listeners about the camp-fire, and by all those circumstances that make story-telling proper and enjoyable, is soberly asked to relate a mythical tale, he is incapable of the mental effort required to to recall it, and, for that reason, he promptly and stoutly pleads ignorance. ”

“ Man, the world over, seeks to give pleasure to the eye. He is not satisfied that an object should be useful to him; it must be at the same time beautiful; and indeed he is usually quite as anxious that it should look well, as that it should minister to his comfort. It is not enough that clothing should be warm: it must be graceful in form, and covered, more or less, with ornament. ”

“ Instead of fixing my eye immovably upon one point, I deliberately run it over the leading lines of the view, and then trace lines upon the paper that produce the same effect upon my eye as those in Nature have done. My sketch will at best be imperfect, but its accuracy will be in proportion to the care with which I have examined the outlines in the landscape. In observing an object, we do not then look fixedly at it—we run the eye over it. Let us see what this means.
The retina is not in all parts equally sensitive to light, and the whole of a visual image is not distinctly perceived at once. ”

“ The tortoise, or sun, has a trial of strength with the jaguar or tapir, the moon, and vanquishes by substituting another in his place, in which case, we have simply a different form of the myth of the Tortoise and Deer. ”

“ After one has obtained his first myth, and has learned to recite it accurately and spiritedly, the rest is easy. I may here remark, in passing, that one must be on his guard on the Amazonas, and elsewhere, for that matter, among savages or people of low culture, not to ask a leading question, for an Indian will always unconciously acquiesce with the interrogator, who is thus likely to be misled. ”

“ When I look out of my window, the image of a very large tract falls upon my retina. I see at once a multitude of houses, and the infinitude of objects that go to make up the picture, and apparently I see every thing distinctly, but this is really far from being the case. If I look suddenly out at a landscape that I have never seen before, and fix my gaze upon a church-spire for a few moments, the image of the landscape falls immovably upon the retina ”

“ First the whale, swimming vigorously, dragged the tapir backward to the sea, but the latter, resisting with all his might, finally gained a firm foothold, and began to get the better of the whale, drawing him in toward the shore. Then the whale made another effort, and, in this manner, they kept tugging against one another, each thinking the tortoise at the other end of the sipó, until at last, both gave up the struggle from sheer exhaustion.
The tortoise went down to the shore to see the whale, who said: "Well! you are strong, jabutí; I am very tired." ”

“ The secret of the pleasant effect produced upon us by beautiful lines is, I believe, to be found in the structure of the eye itself, and I shall attempt to show that a line is beautiful, not because of any inherent quality of its own, but, primarily, because of the pleasure we take in making the muscular movements necessary to run over it with the eye, though, through education, we may afterward come to recognize, at a glance, and get the full effect of a form that has once given us pleasure ”

“ I want to see who can run the faster." Now I am going to cheat that deer. Do you scatter yourselves along the edge of the campo, in the forest, keeping not very far from one another, and see that you keep perfectly still, each in his place! To-morrow, when we begin the race, the deer will run in the campo, but I will remain quietly in my place. When he calls out to me, if you are ahead of him, answer, but take care not to respond if he has passed you."
So, early the next morning, the deer went out to meet the tortoise. ”

“ But quite invariably, this old woman was absent, or inaccessible. Once only, at Ereré, did I find an ancient squaw, said to be a wonderful repository of lendas, but nothing could I obtain from her.
One night, while wearily paddling up the parand-mirím of the Itukí, near Santarem, my faithful steersman, Maciel, began to talk to the Indian boatmen in Tupí to keep them from going to sleep. I listened with all my ears, and, to my great delight, found him recounting a story of the Kurupíra. ”

“ Pleasure-giving, graceful, muscular movements are always in curves, and their grace depends upon the subtileness of the curve.
If decorative art has had a beginning and an evolution, we should expect to find a progress from straight lines to circles, spirals, and ellipses, while more subtile curves, such as we find in Nature, would be adopted later, and this is the case, not only in the art-history of nations, but also in that of individuals, for the child must be educated not only to make, but to appreciate and enjoy beautiful lines. ”

“ Meanwhile, the tortoise had hidden himself in a thicket, in a burrow having two openings. While the man was looking in at one hole, the jabutí would appear at the other, and then when the man came to this opening, he would quickly go to the first; so that we have here, once more repeated, the story of the race between the slow tortoise or sun, and the swift moon or man. We have already seen the tortoise escape from the jaguar by going into a burrow by one opening and retiring by another, just as the sun appears to go into its burrow in the west, and come out in the east. ”

“ Yet, while it is quite easy to understand how pottery might be invented by two different tribes, how is it possible that the same series of ornamental forms should arise among several independent and disconnected peoples? ”

“ So, the myth collector will usually go empty away, if he attempts to gather a harvest simply by asking. The only way is to seek for, and create occasions when story-telling would be natural, and, if necessary, to set the ball rolling by recounting some native myth, with which those present are known to be well acquainted, taking care not to show too much curiosity in the stories it elicits. ”

“ An Amazonian Indian will listen enrapt for hours to the repetition of the same monotonous song, which produces on civilized ears only increasing torture. The fret is at first drawn with all its unity running in the same direction, but in course of time it is found that a change of direction not only relieves the eye but gives greater pleasure, and the series comes to be broken up into bars, alternating in direction. This is observable not only in the classic Greek frets, but also in similar ornaments in America. ”

“ In this myth the jabutí is still the sun, who conquers and kills the jaguar moon. The taking of one of the bones of the latter, for a fife, naturally suggests itself to the Indian, who is accustomed to make whistles of the bones of his enemies. Another jaguar, or another moon, gives chase to the jabutí, who, entering his burrow by one hole, escapes by another, as the sun, descending into the earth in the west, comes up out of the east. ”

“ Perpendicular and horizontal straight lines are the more easy to examine, because their images fall directly between two opposing muscles. An oblique line is difficult to examine, and we instinctively turn the head, in order to bring it in the plane of rotation of one or the other set of muscles. In following a curved line with the eye, two muscles are used together, one contracting more rapidly than the other. A curve is therefore more difficult to observe, or run the eye over, than a straight line, and the difficulty increases with the subtileness of the curvature. ”

“ It has, however, suggested itself to me that the tortoise, in this myth, might perhaps be the sun or moon, provoking the everlasting tidal contest between the sea and the land. [24] It is worth noting that Brazil is so situated geographically, that the sun and moon are rarely seen to set in the sea. On the Amazonas, however, the sight of their disappearance behind a water horizon is a familiar one to the Indian. If this myth is really of native growth, it would be interesting to discover whether it originated on the Amazonas, or on the coast. ”

“ If the myth collector wishes to obtain the myth in its purity, and prevent his own personality entering into it, he must, above all, avoid asking of his pundit a leading question, either in writing out the myth for the first time, or in its after revision.
The Indian myths are, so far as my experience goes, rarely ever heard in Portuguese, those of the Tupi speaking population being quite invariably related in the Lingua Geral. Their form is a stereotyped one, and the same myth may be found, with but little variation, from near the mouth of the Amazonas, to Tabatfnga, on the frontier of Peru. ”

“ The connection between the manufacture of pottery and the evolution of ornament is exceedingly close; and some of the most beautiful ornamental borders, etc., have originated on pottery, the soft, easily-scratched clay furnishing an excellent surface for drawing upon. In savage America the manufacture of pottery falls everywhere to the lot of women, since, as it is a branch of cooking, she, having the charge of domestic affairs, naturally makes the vessels in which to prepare food. But the-Indian woman not only makes the pottery, she also ornaments it. ”

“ The moon, or jaguar, follows his example safely, but on repeating the experiment is destroyed, the extinction of the old moon probably appearing to the Indiana destruction, the new moon being another moon, or a second onça.
That the tortoise should enter into, be imprisoned in, and issue unharmed from the forest, is a most natural form for the myth; for, in a forest-clothed country like the Amazonas, the sun ordinarily seems to set among, and rise out of the trees. The sun also has the power of splitting the trunks of trees ”

“ It will be observed that the sides of the little triangles are approximately parallel to the parts of the sigmoids and bounding lines to which they are adjacent, thus producing a pleasant effect on the eye. The next step in the evolution of this border consists in uniting the little triangles with the sigmoids, as in Fig. 14, and this form I have observed on a Peruvian vase.
With progress in culture comes the love of variety and change. Savage music, savage art, every thing in fact in uncivilized life, is monotonous. ”

“ According to Gubernatis, [33] the elephant is the sun who goes down to drink at the lake of the moon: "the hare warns the elephant that, if he does not retire, if he continues to crush the hares on the shores of the lake, the moon will take back his cold beams, and then the elephants will die of hunger."
In the African Kanurí tale, an elephant sits down upon a cock, and the latter, in revenge, picks out one of the elephant's eyes.
The Amazonian story seems susceptible of the following interpretation:—The tapir is the sun, the tortoise the moon. ”

“ I do not know whether her greater susceptibility to the influence of decorative art-forms springs from her greater delicacy of physical organization, or whether, what is perhaps more probable, it is owing to the wants of an entirely different life from that which man leads. ”

“ The tortoise laughed in turn, and answered:—"Ya! You will never marry the deer's daughter." "Why not?" asked the tapir. "Because she will run away from you," replied the jabutí. "Well," said the tapir "I also can run. I break down the branches before me as I go."
Besides the jabutí stories, there are others found on the Amazonas that seem to me to be solar myths, but the limits of this article will not allow me to do much more than refer to them.
In one of these stories, the kingfisher marries the daughter of the mukúra, and with his wife goes out fishing. ”

“ Unless care is taken in drawing a current fret, one is apt to round down the angles, and, in running the eye over this ornament, there is a tendency not to follow lines down to the angles, but to swerve from one line to another, avoiding the corners—the muscular movements of the eye being such as would be necessary to follow a curve. It was soon found that frets drawn, probably at first unintentionally, with rounded corners, were pleasant to examine with the eye, and afterward they were purposely rounded down, giving rise to the beautiful linked scrolls, Fig. ”

“ The hare, mistaking one for the other, acknowledges himself beaten. In Northamptonshire [13] the fox is substituted for the hare, but, in other details, the myth is identical with the German.
Sometimes, in Old World mythology, it is a hare that runs a race with a tortoise [14] but who, confiding in his swiftness, goes to sleep, while the tortoise, persevering slowly, first reaches the goal.
In Siam the myth takes the following form:— [15]
"The bird Kruth, no doubt a limited and particular form of Garudas, wishes to eat a tortoise (here perhaps the moon) which lies upon the shores of a lake. ”

“ The rising sun extinguishes the old moon, and buries her, but after a time, the new moon appears and begins the pursuit of the sun. The fact that the race continues day after day, and that the scent grows constantly stronger suggests, however, that the pursuer may, after all, be the sun. May not the story, perhaps, have become confused through an interchange of characters?
THE TORTOISE KILLS THE OPOSSUM BY INDUCING HIM TO BURY HIMSELF.
A jabutí made a bet with a mukúra, or Amazonian opossum, to see which could the longer stay buried. ”

“ We still, today, use straight lines and frets, and a multitude of beautiful forms, many of which, doubtless, have come down to us from an immense antiquity. They are normally beautiful and we shall always need them. ”