th savage notions of the world.
Surely, then, where they seem decaying and anomalous, as among Aryans,
these customs and laws are mouldering relics of ideas and practices
natural and inevitable among savages.

THE ART OF SAVAGES. {276}

'Avoid Coleridge, he is _useless_,' says Mr. Ruskin. Why should the
poetry of Coleridge be useful? The question may interest the critic, but
we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His
disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that
art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates
nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical
purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a
magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is
a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted
by the little we know of art's beginnings. We shall adopt,
provisionally, the hypothesis that the earliest art with which we are
acquainted is that of savages contemporary or extinct. Some philosophers
may tell us that all known savages are only degraded descendants of early
civilised men who have, unluckily and inexplicably, left no relics of
their civilisation. But we shall argue on the opposite theory, that the
art of Australians, for example, is really earlier in kind, more
backward, nearer the rude beginnings of things, than the art of people
who have attained to some skill in pottery, like the New Caledonians.
These, again, are much more backward, in a state really much earlier,
than the old races of Mexico and Peru; while they, in turn, show but a
few traces of advance towards the art of Egypt; and the art of Egypt, at
least after the times of the Ancient Empire, is scarcely advancing in the
direction of the flawless art of Greece. We shall be able to show how
savage art, as of the Australians, develops into barbarous art, as of the
New Zealanders; while the arts of strange civilisations, like those of
Peru and Mexico, advance one step further; and how, again, in the early
art of Greece, in the Greek art of ages prior to Pericles, there are
remains of barbaric forms which are gradually softened into beauty. But
there are necessarily breaks and solutions of continuity in the path of
progress.

One of the oldest problems has already risen before us in connection with
the question stated--is art the gratification of the imitative faculty?
Now,