erous at
Hissarlik. The conviction becomes irresistible that all these objects,
in shape, in purpose, in character of decoration, are the same, because
the mind and the materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation
especially, are the same everywhere. You might introduce old Greek bits
of clay-work, figures or vases, into a Peruvian collection, or might
foist Mexican objects among the clay treasures of Hissarlik, and the
wisest archaeologist would be deceived. The Greek fret pattern
especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw. The
svastika, as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles to each
limb, is found everywhere--in India, Greece, Scotland, Peru--as a natural
bit of ornament. The allegorising fancy of the Indians gave it a mystic
meaning, and the learned have built I know not what worlds of religious
theories on this 'pre-Christian cross,' which is probably a piece of
hasty decorative work, with no original mystic meaning at all. {289}
Ornaments of this sort were transferred from wood or bone to clay, almost
as soon as people learned that early art, the potter's, to which the
Australians have not attained, though it was familiar to the not distant
people of New Caledonia. The style of spirals and curves, again, once
acquired (as it was by the New Zealanders), became the favourite of some
races, especially of the Celtic. Any one who will study either the
ornaments of Mycenae, or those of any old Scotch or Irish collection,
will readily recognise in that art the development of a system of
ornament like that of the Maoris. Classical Greece, on the other hand,
followed more in the track of the ancient system of straight and slanted
lines, and we do not find in the later Greek art that love of interlacing
coils and spirals which is so remarkable among the Celts, and which is
very manifest in the ornaments of the Mycaenean hoards--that is, perhaps,
of the ancient Greek heroic age. The causes of these differences in the
development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one
track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early motif, while
classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at
present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later art has done
little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to untutored
races.

[Fig. 6. From a Maori's Face: 287.jpg]

It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is bet