DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68796#0058
38 The Beginnings of Art part i
noticed in the sequel (§§ 129 ff.) There remains the heading
‘ Imitation,’ and we have to deal here with an extremely
obscure and puzzling topic that presents difficulties at every
stage of artistic discussion. There is nothing harder for
the critic of the advanced forms of painting in modern
times, than to fix the proper share that should be taken in
the productions of this art by the imitation of nature, and
the difficulty is hardly less when we are dealing as at
present with the arts in their most rudimentary aspects.
In certain forms imitation is extremely primitive, and
appears in stupid animals like the sheep just as in the most
intelligent apes and in every savage. Indeed, in the case
of men as Herbert Spencer remarks ‘ it is among the
lowest races that proneness to mimicry is most conspicu-
ous.’ 1 But such mimicry is very different from the gift of
imitative delineation which only appears among men, and
is then very irregularly bestowed. The ape will readily
copy any action or gesture, but no animal makes the
faintest approach to graphic or plastic imitation. On the
other hand among men the gift was fruitful, as we have
seen, even in the period of the Mammoth (§ 4), and is
exercised with curious expertness by some of the lowest
savages such as the African Bushmen, who draw capital
sketches on the walls of the caverns where they make their
wretched lairs.2 The explanation would doubtless be the
same as that suggested in § 9 for the absence of a sense of
proportion among animals—the animal lacks the necessary
power of abstraction by which the model and the copy
could be held apart in the intelligence and compared.
This man is able to do, but among men we observe
that the advanced form of the imitative gift which leads to
delineation is a matter of special endowment, and where
1 Principles of Sociology, Lond. 1885, i. p. 81.
2 Descriptive Sociology, pt. I. A. p. 45.
noticed in the sequel (§§ 129 ff.) There remains the heading
‘ Imitation,’ and we have to deal here with an extremely
obscure and puzzling topic that presents difficulties at every
stage of artistic discussion. There is nothing harder for
the critic of the advanced forms of painting in modern
times, than to fix the proper share that should be taken in
the productions of this art by the imitation of nature, and
the difficulty is hardly less when we are dealing as at
present with the arts in their most rudimentary aspects.
In certain forms imitation is extremely primitive, and
appears in stupid animals like the sheep just as in the most
intelligent apes and in every savage. Indeed, in the case
of men as Herbert Spencer remarks ‘ it is among the
lowest races that proneness to mimicry is most conspicu-
ous.’ 1 But such mimicry is very different from the gift of
imitative delineation which only appears among men, and
is then very irregularly bestowed. The ape will readily
copy any action or gesture, but no animal makes the
faintest approach to graphic or plastic imitation. On the
other hand among men the gift was fruitful, as we have
seen, even in the period of the Mammoth (§ 4), and is
exercised with curious expertness by some of the lowest
savages such as the African Bushmen, who draw capital
sketches on the walls of the caverns where they make their
wretched lairs.2 The explanation would doubtless be the
same as that suggested in § 9 for the absence of a sense of
proportion among animals—the animal lacks the necessary
power of abstraction by which the model and the copy
could be held apart in the intelligence and compared.
This man is able to do, but among men we observe
that the advanced form of the imitative gift which leads to
delineation is a matter of special endowment, and where
1 Principles of Sociology, Lond. 1885, i. p. 81.
2 Descriptive Sociology, pt. I. A. p. 45.