Alfred C. Haddon

“ Rather are we dealing with the elaborated gain of ages of scientific knowledge, with the thoughts of a people whose very temples were oriented to particular stars, or to critical points in the journey of the sun; whose representations of Art, on frieze and pediment, in tragedy and epic, were governed by what would at first appear to be a tyrannical convention, which convention, however, so far from hampering their genius, seems, under the influence of a wholesome restraint, to have moulded their art into more beautiful, more poetic, and more sanctified forms.... ”

“ There is some reason in every ornament why it recommended itself to some particular people. We do not know what the reason was, but the difference itself is of the deepest moment.” He points out that the spirit or feeling of art may be made the measure of culture when the workman is at liberty to impose what form and lines he will upon his material. Quite recently Professor Flinders Petrie said, [213] “Art is one of the most important records of a race. Each group of mankind has its own style and favourite manner, more particularly in the decorative arts. ”

“ The spiritual and temporal power and authority of religion has also had immense and direct influence on art.
In a very large number of cases what I have termed the four needs of man act and react upon one another, so that it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish between them, nor do I profess to do so in every case. It is sufficient for our present purpose to acknowledge their existence and to see how they may affect the form, decoration, or representation of objects. ”

“ I suppose it is one of the best established teachings of history that the evolution of a nation has not been consciously directed by the individuals which compose it. A few men may have sought to guide the course of politics or to adjust its foreign policy; but their efforts are futile unless supported by the people themselves, and the luxuriousness of living of the majority, the laxity of their morals, or some other irresponsible factor, may entirely wreck individual effort. ”

“ The direction which evolution takes, whether it makes for a more highly sensitive being or for degeneration, has reference to offspring alone and not to their parents, immediate or remote. There is no conscious and protracted effort on the part of a particular group of animals to evolve in a determinate direction, this latter is circumscribed by the environment. Thus it comes about that consciousness has no part in evolution whether of an animal or of a pattern. ”

“ The pleasure which people take in beauty prompts them to ornament almost everything which admits of decoration, and it is the old patterns and designs which are most frequently copied. So it comes about that these are scattered [117] with an impartial hand, and often without any regard to appropriateness. By inappropriateness I do not wish to imply that the ornament may not be suitable, but merely that it has no meaning so far as the decorated object is concerned. As a rule the decorative art of the less advanced peoples is far more appropriate [48] than that of civilised. ”

“ I would like to point out in this place that there is a very instructive field for study in the consideration of the decorative methods of various peoples. The way in which areas are decorated, the idea of symmetry, and such-like subjects; for example, the essence of Japanese decorative art is asymmetry, and the results are charming to our eyes although we have been reared amongst symmetrical designing. ”

“ I. Application of Biological Deductions to Designs. At present, however, we are only concerned with the biological treatment of art. Nor need surprise be felt if an attempt is made to deal with art as a branch of biology. For is not art necessarily associated with intelligence? Is not intelligence a function of the brain? And is not the brain composed of some form of protoplasm? Art is thus one only of the myriad results of the activity of protoplasm. If this be true, art must be subject to the same general laws which act on all living beings. ”

“ Grosse then goes on to point out that “most of the ornament of the lower folk, as far as it has been investigated and as the Australian should be studied, is known to be imitations of animal or human forms. Nowhere has ornament so markedly a geometrical character as among the Brazilian tribes. Their rectilinear patterns suggest to a European, who contemplates them in a museum, anything else rather than natural forms. But Ehrenreich, who has studied them on the spot, has irrefutably demonstrated that they represent neither more nor less than animals or parts of animals.” ”

“ At one stage of its evolution in the human mind, deity, like the Spectre of Brocken, is the shadowy image of man projected on the clouds. So the gods are most naturally represented as men, but often with special attributes. Now, these attributes are worthy of special study as being the milestones which indicate the distance which any given religious conception has traversed. ”

“ Any stage of the life-history of a biomorph, whether it is the expression of decorative or religious art, is liable to be infected by heteromorphism. The only section of graphic art which must from the nature of the case be free from it is pictorial art. Where heteromorphs are introduced into pictures they form one of the subjects of those pictures, the picture itself is not subject to this modifying influence; for example, the introduction of the representation of a sphinx or a gryphon into a picture does not constitute the latter a heteromorph. ”

“ Concerning symbols as well as artistic products, we everywhere find, by the side of aboriginal types, the deposit of a powerful current which has its more or less distant origin in the symbolism of the banks of the Euphrates, or the Nile. In a word, the two classes of importations are joined together to such a degree that in writing the history of art we write to a great extent the history of symbols, or, at least, of their migrations. ”

“ At the upper end is what appears, at first sight, to be a spear-point. “This portion, however, does not serve the purpose of offence, but is simply a conventional representation of the human tongue, which, when thrust forth to its utmost conveys, according to Maori ideas, the most bitter insult and defiance. When the chief wishes to make war against any tribe, he calls his own people together, makes a fiery oration, and repeatedly thrusts his hani in the direction of the enemy, each such thrust being accepted as a putting forth of the tongue in defiance. ”

“ My object in this has been to show that there has been quite a considerable number of investigators who have approached the subject of decorative art from a similar point of view to that elaborated in the present essay. A quotation brings one more face to face with the author than does a mere abstract, and personally I like to feel the comradeship of similar studies. We all contribute our mites, and the only pity is we cannot all be personally known to one another. ”

“ Behind early Hellenic civilisation was all the wisdom of Egypt and the East, and the first Greeks of whom we have knowledge looked upon the old Heaven and the old Earth not with the half-open, wondering eyes of wakening intelligence, but with perceptions trained in an ancient inheritance of accumulated learning. ”

“ It is inconceivable that a savage should copy or adapt a certain design because it promises to develop into a more pleasing pattern. While there is a certain amount of conscious selection, the variation as a whole of any design is an entirely unguided operation so far as the intelligence of the human units is concerned. ”

“ With the discovery of the art of weaving, cloths of a definite size everywhere become a medium, as the silk cloth of ancient China, the woollen cloths of the old Norsemen, the toukkiyeh of the Soudan, and the blanket of North America. ”

“ It is impossible to prove whether or no the artist has ever seen either a similar pattern, or at all events the elements of which his design is composed. It is very difficult to conceive that the latter is not the case. All that we can do is to fall back on the simple conditions, and we have already seen what obtains there.
This argument is strengthened by the fact that those who wish to “invent” new designs so often have recourse to objective assistance. The students in our schools of art are instructed to study natural forms, especially plants. ”

“ We are absolutely certain that no race, no art, no motive or element in nature or in art can claim the exclusive origination of any one of the well-known or standard conventional devices, and that any race, art, or individual motive is capable of giving rise to any and to all such devices. ”

“ As pictography belongs to a low plane of culture, so far as the visual communication of information is concerned, the representations are generally very crude. By no means should they be regarded as typical examples of the artistic skill of the people who execute them. They are intended for picture-writing, not for pictures. An examination of pictographs shows at once that only essential or salient characters are noted, and when objects are frequently repeated they become conventionalised, and in their later forms cannot be regarded as in any sense objective portraitures. ”

“ It is too often supposed that all savages are lazy, and have an abundance of spare time, but this is by no means always the case. Savages do all that is necessary for life; anything extra is for excitement, æsthetics, or religion; and even if there is abundance of time for these latter, it does not follow that there is an equivalent superfluity of energy. The white man, who has trained faculties and overflows with energy, is apt to brand as lazy those who are not so endowed. In the case of British New Guinea it appears pretty evident that art flourishes where food is abundant. ”

“ All primitive ornaments are not what they seem to be. We shall see that they have at bottom nothing whatever in common with geometric figures.... It is certainly not always easy to recognise the original form of a primitive ornament. When one considers the zigzag or the diamond pattern of an Australian shield, it appears that our assertion is without doubt that this is destitute of animal forms, and it will appear doubly certain when we acknowledge that in most cases we cannot directly know it. It was certainly a wonder to us when we knew it. ”

“ All human handiwork is subject to the same operation of external forces, but the material on which these forces act is also infinitely varied. The diverse races and people of mankind have different ideas and ideals, unequal skill, varied material to work upon, and dissimilar tools to work with. Everywhere the environment is different. So we get that bewildering confusion of ideas which crowd upon us [8] when inspecting a large ethnographical collection or a museum of the decorative arts. ”

“ The artistic expression of a highly civilised community is a very complex matter, and its complete unravelment would be an exceedingly difficult and perhaps impossible task. In order to gain some insight into the principles which underlie the evolution of decorative art, it is necessary to confine one’s attention to less specialised conditions; the less the complication, the greater the facility for a comprehensive survey. In order, therefore, to understand civilised art we must study barbaric art, and to elucidate this savage art must be investigated. ”

“ On looking through collections of Australian weapons in museums, or in glancing over the illustrations to works on Australia, one is struck by the fact that a large number of objects are decorated with simple devices, and further that there is a very great deal of uniformity in the designs. Considering the size of that continent and the numerous tribes of its sparse native population, the paucity of artistic motives is very remarkable. ”

“ At the crack of doom, the Ragnaroks, Frey, Woden, Thor, and Tyr, are predestined to perish. A wolf shall devour the sun, and another shall swallow the moon, and the stars shall vanish out of heaven. Woden shall go first, and shall encounter Fenriswolf, but the wise, one-eyed god shall die. ”

“ The philosophical student also studies the development of animals and so learns something of the way in which they have come to be what they are, and at the same time light is shed upon genealogies and relationships.
The beautifying of any object is due to impulses which [4] are common to all men, and have existed as far back as the period when men inhabited caves and hunted the reindeer and mammoth in Western Europe. The craving for decorative art having been common to mankind for many thousand years, it would be a very difficult task to determine its actual origin. ”

“ Not only does the motive of religious art vary according to the stage of evolution of the religion which it illustrates, but the art itself is subject to modification as it enters into new phases of what I have termed its life-history. ”

“ Every one who can will collect “curios,” especially those which are decorated; but out of the hundreds of collectors, how many units have ever thought of asking the natives what was the significance of the ornamentation? I have already drawn attention to this need for Australia, but it is equally pressing in many other parts of the world. Even museum curators have in the past regarded ethnographical specimens more as “trophies” than as materials for the study of a history of mankind. ”

“ The decorative art of civilised peoples is very complex, and the motives which prompt it are obscure; it appeared to me that our best chance of finding out the underlying principles was to study less complex conditions. I must confess that I have been mainly concerned to provide an efficient tool for the use of other workers, and I have not been anxious to elucidate the multitudinous designs and forms which beset us on every hand. ”

“ These strangled wolves and writhing snakes of Scandinavian art represent the portentous struggle of the powers of darkness with the gods when “the Wolf shall devour the Sire of Men; but Vid shall avenge him, and [197] shall rend the cold jaws of the Beast.” But the new religion possessed a somewhat analogous imagery, and the symbolism of the one readily passed into that of the other. Whether pagan or Christian, the symbolic animal was attacked by the plaited thong or twisted fibres, and the secular handicraft choked the religious idea. ”

“ The real talismanic cross of the countries stretching from Persia to Lybia is the crux ansata, the key of life of the Egyptian monuments. As for their principal symbol of the sun in motion, is it not the Winged Globe? There would seem to be between these figures and the gammadion, I will not say a natural antipathy, but a repetition of the same idea. Where the gammadion predominates—that is to say, in the whole Aryan world, except Persia—the Winged Globe and the crux ansata have never succeeded in establishing themselves in good earnest. ”

“ It will be found that the decorative art of primitive folk is directly conditioned by the environment of the artists; and in order to understand the designs of a district, the physical conditions, climate, flora, fauna, and anthropology, all have to be taken into account; thus furnishing another example of the fact that it is impossible to study any one subject comprehensively without touching many other branches of knowledge. ”

“ While the use of an animal or the part of an animal as a vessel has often led to the imitation of that animal in clay or other material, owing to an association of ideas, we must be very careful not to run to the extreme and to say that there was a primitively utilitarian origin for all zoomorphic vessels. Sympathetic magic and religion are responsible for many, and we must admit that mere fancy must sometimes come into play, and when this is the case theorising is necessarily at fault. ”