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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
used weapons of bone, of unpolished stone, and probably of hard wood. But
the remnants of their art, the scraps of mammoth or reindeer bone in our
museums, prove that they had a most spirited style of sketching fr