is the result of a desire to represent an object as
it is known to be, and not as it appears. Thus Catlin, among the Red
Indians, found that the people refused to be drawn in profile. They
knew they had two eyes, and in profile they seemed only to have one.
Look at the Selinus marbles, and you will observe that figures, of
which the body is seen in profile, have the full face turned to the
spectator. Again, the savage knows that an animal has two sides; both,
he thinks, should be represented, but he cannot foreshorten, and he
finds the profile view easiest to draw. To satisfy his need of realism
he draws a beast's head full-face, and gives to the one head two
bodies drawn in profile. Examples of this are frequent in very archaic
Greek gems and gold work, and Mr. A. S. Murray suggests (as I
understand him) that the attitude of the two famous lions, which
guarded vainly Agamemnon's gate at Mycenae, is derived from the archaic
double-bodied and single-headed beast of savage realism. Very good
examples of these oddities may be found in the _Journal of the
Hellenic Society_, 1881, pl. xv. Here are double-bodied and
single-headed birds, monsters, and sphinxes. We engrave (Fig. 15)
three Greek gems from the islands as examples of savagery in early
Greek art. In the oblong gem the archers are rather below the Red
Indian standard of design. The hunter figured in the first gem is
almost up to the Bushman mark. In his dress ethnologists will
recognise an arrangement now common among the natives of New
Caledonia. In the third gem the woman between two swans may be Leda,
or she may represent Leto in Delos. Observe the amazing rudeness of
the design, and note the modern waist and crinoline. The artists who
engraved these gems on hard stone had, of necessity, much better tools
than any savages possess, but their art was truly savage. To discover
how Greek art climbed in a couple of centuries from this coarse and
childish work to the grace of the AEgina marbles, and thence to the
absolute freedom and perfect unapproachable beauty of the work of
Phidias, is one of the most singular problems in the history of art.
Greece learned something, no doubt, from her early knowledge of the
arts the priests of Assyria and Egypt had elaborated in the valleys of
the Euphrates and the Nile. That might account for a swift progress
from savage to formal and hieratic art; but whence sprang the
inspiration which led her so swiftly on to art that is perfec