Page:Fineartasketchi01wyatgoog.djvu/26
A comparison of the conditions of more or less savage races in various stages of social progress, has shewn us an inherent tendency on man's part, after the supply of the first and indispensable wants of his nature, to something more than the satisfaction of those necessities. That something more has generally taken the form, originally of Ornament, naturally of a barbaric kind; tattooing in patterns upon his flesh, adorning his person with feathers, flowers, skins, and ultimately with plaited and woven apparel, then of the enrichment by cutting notches, and ultimately patterns, upon his arms, his boat, his dwelling. All such tendencies exhibit the savage as mindful only of to-day. What quickens or makes enjoyable an existence beginning and ending with his short span of life is all the propensity to Fine Art, which, in the first stages of his culture, dawns upon the savage.
His second condition is to note the passage of time by a reference to something beyond his own existence. This tendency to seek a record, for the first time lifts him out of himself. The cairn or mound which marks the burial place, the heap of stones that indicates the site of the battle field, and ultimately the rude temple in which men meet together for worship, however dreadful or barbaric, mark those stages in the cultivation of memory and imagination which ultimately lead to the development of artistic individuality.
Language marches with ideas, and words are found gradually to express more than the first wants and sensations of humanity; epithets enrich language, new substantives are created of epithets; and attentive students of the history of language have been enabled to trace how terms, corresponding with qualities distinctly expressing perceptions of Art, have been gradually incorporated into vocabularies; proving conclusively the development at definite periods of those advanced perceptions, which correspond with the emotions derived from things sublime and beautiful, in Nature first and ultimately in Art.