skilled and habituated to wield the knife with unerring dexterity in the chase or in war. The use of the tried weapon in superfluous work of the kind, is due to little more than a physical need of setting to some kind or another of 'play' powers which at the moment lack the stimulus of serious aims, and so far the case is parallel to that of the cat exercising on the tree-trunk the claws that have no prey at hand to capture or rend. For a third illustration, imagine the triumphant return home of the primitive hunter or warrior, accompanied by mimic gestures from his followers that bring vividly before the home-keeping crowd the incidents of the combat or the chase; and note that we have also on a lower grade examples of mimicry in the imitative gestures indulged in so freely by certain species of apes. These acts are all forms of 'play' and at the same time are rudimentary beginnings of such important forms of art as the dance and song, ornamental decoration, and the mimic dance which leads on to the drama. Yet the acts as just described are not in themselves artistic. They can only become so by the addition of another essential element which the animals seem powerless to supply and which may be claimed as distinctively human. This is the element that may be described generally as ORDER, but which includes under the main idea such manifestations of the principle of Order as Rhythm, Measure, Proportion, and all those modes of arrangement used by artists that may be summarised as Composition.

§ 8. Art is 'play' under the influence of the principle

of Order.

Without the action in some form or another of this principle of Order art is impossible. caper only develops into the dance

The leap or the when it learns a

CHAP. I The artistic principle of Order

II

certain rhythm, and without measure or refrain the cry and shout cannot become the song. The idle streaks and notches of the knife are not ornamental until arranged in some sort of pattern, and the most cunning imitator or mimic is not an artist unless his performance conform to certain canons of treatment and arrangement. In an interesting little volume entitled L'Optique et les Arts,1 M. Auguste Laugel enforces this point in the following terms: The beautiful cannot have its origin in tumult, in the simultaneous reverberation of a crowd of sounds in which the ear can distinguish no measure or harmony, nor can the plastic arts discover it in the mere wanton medley of colours and of lines. The ideas which these arts endeavour to express can only be made clear when they are translated into an intelligible language, of which monuments and forms and figures, lights, shades and masses are, as it were, the characters. If the eye is offended; if it is asked to regard spectacles violating the laws of its sensibility, if the intelligence can find no common measure for the masses, if the contrasts are not skilfully managed, if the minute and the vast, shadow and colour, simplicity and richness jostle against each other and are mingled without judgment or rule, then the mind finds no longer its pleasure in the sensation, it no longer apprehends an idea and a design under the material envelope; the bronze is then only a metal, the marble but a piece of stone, the colour only a more or less brilliant dash of pigment. Works of art must have a rule of life, and he who speaks of life understands by it harmony, order, the `co-relation of all the parts into a single whole.'

1 In the series Bibliothèque de Philosophie Contemporaine, Paris, 1869, p. vi. f.

§ 9. The element of Order is wanting in the 'play'

of animals.

It is in regard to this essentially rational element in all art properly so called that we shall find the line of demarcation between man and the higher animals. There are, as we now see, two elements that must combine for the production of even the simplest form of art. (1) There

must exist a certain raw material in the form of a movement, an act, a process, which may be the mere instinctive throwing off of superfluous nervous energy, or may possess more or less pronounced emotional or intellectual character, and (2) this material must be disciplined into a certain distinctness of form by the principle of Order' till it become a rational product.

It must be observed that this first element will always be something, so to say, abnormal, the product of an excitement that carries the being a little out of the ordinary course of existence. If for example mere bodily movement made orderly' by regularity or rhythm, became a form of art, then the natural walk or run or flight or dart of all the more highly organised creatures would be artistic. The beats of the bird's wing and the bounds of an antelope succeed each other with beautiful smoothness, just as do the steps of a well-made and graceful woman, but this is only a consequence of the proper working of the animal machine, which would suffer if subjected to sudden and dislocating turns and changes of pace and direction. Before such bodily movement can become a form of art the natural pace must be broken and the gesture become free and empassioned. Then if the quickened motion with its élan of enthusiasm becomes subject to an inward control which brings back in a higher form the regularity that has been lost, there is at once a simple though beautiful form of art,

CHAP. I The 'play' of animals and of men

6

13

and one in which the natural gracefulness of the well-knit and rounded figure will have its full opportunity of display. For rhythm' in the sense in which it applies to the dance is not mere regularity, as of successive steps in the walk or the run where we have simple repetition of a single element, but rather the repetition of a series, in which several elements in combination regularly recur in the same order. The regularity of a pattern, in the same way, consists not in the repetition of single forms but of combinations of forms, while in more advanced instances of artistic composition, we find, as we shall see, not symmetry or mechanical regularity but balance, and a harmony of parts not equal, but related to each other according to a more subtle scheme of proportion. Now it is impossible to credit the animals with a perception of order and arrangement of this kind, however well supplied they may be with the emotional excitement which leads to different forms of play.' This limitation is one form of that difference in mental power between man and all other animals which Mr. Darwin himself admits is enormous.1 Thus, the bird's song is just the free outpouring of lovely notes, exquisite in themselves and endeared through the poetic associations they arouse in us, but wanting the element of 'time' and that accentuation of a measure so essential to the effect of music. The æsthetic perception of some species of birds is remarkably acute; they will show delight in brightly coloured objects and even use these in a deliberate attempt at decoration, but they never go on to space these out in such a way as to form a pattern. They will relieve a mood of strong excitement, as at pairing time, by curious gestures and contortions, by strutting up and down or running round in a ring, by soaring and then making a sudden drop,2 and all the while utter their notes and cries, but no further step is made towards the evolu

1 The Descent of Man, i. p. 98. 2 Darwin, ibid. ii. pp. 50, 74 f.

tion of that most primitive of human arts—the rhythmical dance performed in unison with the rhythmical song. What is wanting no doubt is sufficient power of abstraction. It is evident that for the perception of the charm of alternation, of the regular recurrence of complex forms, and of periodical emphasis as in the dance or song, what is needed is a certain capacity in the intelligence of holding one impression for a while till another comes to companion it, and then making comparison between them. The animal is either too much at the mercy of the present sensation to be able in this way to retain impressions and compare them, or has never turned what faculties it possesses into this direction, and though it would be too much to say that this constitutes a difference in kind between the 'play' of the animal and that of man, it forms a fairly valid working distinction which is all that is required for the purpose of this chapter.

§ 10. An Illustration from the most artistic work of

animals.

An examination of what is unquestionably the most artistic achievement in the circle of the brute creation bears out what is here said. Birds,' writes Mr. Darwin, 'appear to be the most æsthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.' 1 The most artistic of these creatures are the Bower Birds of Australia, by whom the arts of building and decoration are carried up to a result which is highly instructive for the investigation before us. These creatures are accustomed to erect for themselves on the ground bowers or covered avenues of twigs and grass, sometimes as much as four feet in length and eighteen inches in height.

1 The Descent of Man, ii. p. 44.