What is still more interesting than all these discoveries, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements, as well as some stones, are engraved, or even rudely sculptured, generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful, and really give us a picture of the animals which were man’s contemporaries upon the earth; so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth’s tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old-stone age, this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little could the scratcher of this rough sketch--for it is not equal in skill to drawings which have been found in other caves--dream of the interest which his performance would excite thousands of years after his death! Not the greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for so near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man’s bones been only found in juxtaposition with those of the mammoth and his contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance disturbances of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth’s bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since come into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes seems to us almost fabulous, animal, by one who actually saw him in real life, gives a strange picture of the antiquity of our race, and withal a strange feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to-day.[4]
It is worth while to look well at these cave-drawings. They are of various degrees of merit, for some are so skilful as to excite the admiration of artists and the astonishment of archæologists. And it is a curious fact that during ages which succeeded those of the cave-dwellers, all through the polished stone period and the age of bronze--of which we shall have to speak anon--no such ambitious imitative works of art seem to have been attempted. So far as we can tell, these after generations of men aimed at no such thing as a drawing of an animal or even of a plant. They confined themselves to ornamental _patterns_, to certain arrangements of points and lines. The love of imitation is doubtless one of the rudimentary feelings in the human mind; as we may see by watching children. But, rudimentary as it is, it springs from the same root as the highest promptings of the intellect--that is to say, from the wish to _create_--to fashion something actually ourselves. This is sufficient to explain the origin of these carvings; yet we need not suppose that when the art of making them was once known they were used merely for amusement. Long afterwards we find such drawings and representations looked upon as having some qualities of the things they represent; as, for instance, where in an ancient grave at Mæshow, in the Orkney islands, we find the drawing of a dragon, which had been supposed to watch over the treasures concealed therein. Savages in the present day often think that part of them is actually taken away when a drawing of them is made, and exactly a similar feeling gave rise to the superstition so prevalent in the Middle Ages, that witches and magicians could make a figure in wax to imitate the one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and that all the pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were reproduced in the body of the victim. On such confusion of ideas do all idolatries rest. So may we not, without too bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions, touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the industry of our first forerunners on the earth, and contributed to their wonderfully acquired skill in their art? May they not have thought that their representations gave them some power over the animals they represented: that the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient against the mammoth’s hide; that the harpoon containing the representation of a deer or a fish was the weapon best adapted for transfixing either?[5]