is guise will strike
terror into the boldest hearts. But arrangements in black and white of
this sort scarcely deserve the name of even rudimentary art.

[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Savage Ornamentation.]

[Illustration: Fig. 4.--An Australian Stele.]

The Australians sometimes introduce crude decorative attempts at
designing the human figure, as in the pointed shield opposite (Fig. 2,
_a_), which, with the other Australian designs, are from Mr. Brough
Smyth's _Aborigines of Victoria_. But these ambitious efforts usually
end in failure. Though the Australians chiefly confine themselves to
decorative art, there are numbers of wall-paintings, so to speak, in
the caves of the country which prove that they, like the Bushmen,
could design the human figure in action when they pleased. Their usual
preference for the employment of patterns appears to me to be the
result of the nature of their materials. In modern art our mechanical
advantages and facilities are so great that we are always carrying the
method and manner of one art over the frontier of another. Our poetry
aims at producing the effects of music; our prose at producing the
effects of poetry. Our sculpture tries to vie with painting in the
representation of action, or with lace-making in the production of
reticulated surfaces, and so forth. But the savage, in his art, has
sense enough to confine himself to the sort of work for which his
materials are fitted. Set him in the bush with no implements and
materials but a bit of broken shell and a lump of hard wood, and he
confines himself to decorative scratches. Place the black in the large
cave which Pundjel, the Australian Zeus, inhabited when on earth (as
Zeus inhabited the cave in Crete), and give the black plenty of red
and white ochre and charcoal, and he will paint the human figure in
action on the rocky walls. Later, we will return to the cave-paintings
of the Australians and the Bushmen in South Africa. At present we must
trace purely decorative art a little further. But we must remember
that there was once a race apparently in much the same social
condition as the Australians, but far more advanced and ingenious in
art. The earliest men of the European Continent, about whom we know
much, the men whose bones and whose weapons are found beneath the
gravel-drift, the men who were contemporary with the rhinoceros,
mammoth and cave-bear, were not further advanced in material
civilisation than the Australians. They u