Part 4

The Peruvians had manifestly not advanced beyond a system of mnemonics, a kind of _memoria technica_. With certain knots in strings of different colours they had associated certain ideas. A Peruvian woman could show you a bundle of knotted strings and tell you her whole life “was there.” To her it was, but to no one else. If all the Peruvians agreed to associate the history of Peru with other bundles of knotted cords, their _quipus_ would still be only an aid to memory; the history itself must be conveyed from one mind to another by oral communication. Some of the North American Indians had their _wampum_, their many-coloured belt, into which _they talked their treaty_, or any other matter it was desirable to remember. The Mexicans had mingled symbols with their picture-writing, but they had not wrought the hieroglyphic into a system, by means of which alone ideas could be conveyed from one generation to another. With them it could not be said that the art of writing was known. But antiquarians have formed, it seems, a different opinion of the mixture of symbol and picture discovered in the ruins of Copan and Palenque; and, partly on this ground, they arrived at the conclusion that these cities were built and inhabited by a people in advance of the Mexicans or Aztecs discovered by the Spaniards. Mr Wilson says very distinctly of those mysterious sculptures: “They are no rude abbreviations, like the symbols either of Indian or Aztec picture-writing; but rather suggest the idea of a matured system of ideography in its last transitional stage, before becoming a word-alphabet like that of the Chinese at the present day.”

We should be open to the charge of great presumption, if, with nothing before us but a few engravings by which to guide our judgment, we ventured to offer an opinion opposed to that of Mr Wilson, or of others who have made the subject one of especial study. But opposite to the very page (p. 140, vol. ii.) from which we take this last sentence we have quoted, Mr Wilson gives us an engraving of what are denominated “hieroglyphics.” It appears to us as if the pillar here represented had been divided into compartments, and each compartment had been filled by the artist with some appropriate subject, generally some human figure whose action and attitude are unintelligible to us; but the whole conveys the idea, not of a series of hieroglyphics, but of individual representations, each of which has its own independent meaning. Other engravings, indeed, approximate more nearly to the hieroglyphic; the arbitrary sign is more conspicuous, and there is a more frequent repetition of the same subject; but when we consider the poverty of invention that even in later times afflicts the arts, and the tendency to repeat and to copy which is very noticeable in rude times, we are not surprised that the same subject is often found on the same monument, or that it has spread from Copan to Palenque. There is nothing in the engravings before us, or in the account given of them, which proves that a really hieroglyphic system had been invented; and we cannot but suspect that those who undertake the task of deciphering them will inevitably fail, not because the key cannot be found, but because no key ever existed.

Suppose a monument erected or a medal struck in honour of one of our own excellent missionaries; suppose it represented the missionary-standing with one foot on a broken image, or idol, and that by his side knelt some half-naked savage with a cross in his hands—this mixture of picture and of symbol would tell its tale very intelligibly to us, for we have heard before of the labours of the missionary. But suppose this and other pictures of the same kind were handed down to a remote posterity, who had no information except what the pictures themselves conveyed by which to understand them, what hopeless perplexities would they for ever remain! And the use of the repeated symbol might lead to the persuasion that they were composed on some hieroglyphic system. We might imagine learned men toiling for ever over such representation, and never coming to any satisfactory result.

What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ, at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,” without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone.

We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. He says:—

“On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined, representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the characteristics of this form of writing.”

What is the antiquity of these ruined cities? The first tendency was to carry them back into some very remote period, far beyond the memory or knowledge of the Mexicans and Peruvians. This was the first impression of Mr Stephens; afterwards he was disposed to bring them nearer the epoch of the Spanish conquest. He had lent a credulous ear to the story of some good _padre_, who had assured him that a native Indian city, greater than Copan could have ever been, still existed in a flourishing and populous condition, in some district untrodden by the European traveller. And this faith, that a Copan still existed, naturally induced him to believe that the ruined Copan, not belonging to an extinct civilisation, might not be so old as he first presumed it to be. He seems to have thought it possible that some of these cities might have been inhabited at the time of the Spanish conquest, and that others at that period were already a heap of ruins. War appears to have been incessant amongst almost all the tribes of the native Americans. On this account it appears to us very probable that many cities may have been built and destroyed, and a partial civilisation won and lost in them, prior to the epoch of the Spanish conquest. Such _oscillations_, very likely, occurred in the progress of American civilisation. And in some of these oscillatory movements a nearer approach might have been made to the art of writing than in that one phase of this civilisation in which the European discovered and destroyed it for ever. But our impression is, that, viewing the history of this continent as a whole, there has been a slow irregular progress, which had reached its highest point in the epoch of Montezuma and the Incas of Peru.

The earliest stages of human progress are very slow, and much interrupted by wars of conquest and extermination. We find no difficulty, therefore, in assigning a great antiquity to some of these ruined cities, and a still greater antiquity to the curious mounds and earthworks in the valley of the Mississippi, without necessarily inferring that these are the remains of any civilisation superior to what history has made known to us. And before these mounds were constructed, there might have passed a long epoch in which man wandered wild by the rivers and in the forests of this continent. This last-mentioned epoch of mere savage existence, some of our speculative philosophers would extend to an enormous duration. We are not disposed, by any evidence yet submitted to us, to expand this period to what we must not call a _disproportionate_ length, because we have not the whole life of the human race before us; but which, arguing on those progressive tendencies which, notwithstanding the impediments and checks they receive, constitute the main characteristic of the species, seems an _improbable_ length. Let the geologist, however, to whom this part of the problem must be handed over, pursue his researches, and we need not say we shall be happy to receive whatever knowledge of the now forgotten past he can bring to light.

CAXTONIANA: A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XVI.

NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.

Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason. Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions, as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and science have their meeting-point in method.

And though Kant applies the word _genius_ (_ingenium_) strictly to the cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science, yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect, because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far intuitive or innate (_ingenium_) that, though study and practice perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while, in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the curves of grace.

And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination are works of Art _par emphasis_, for they require much more than the elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The _beau ideal_ is not in the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived, and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who have denied that genius in reality _creates_; inasmuch as the forms it presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form, though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature; for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer is alive to-day.

By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind, other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets; ‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.

But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious, that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.

Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination, and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed. The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered. Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction, one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy contemplations of our age.