A VERY OLD MASTER. 105 



can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric 

 Phidias, the horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal 

 peculiarity ; his tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was 

 still in the intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural 

 mule still struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horschood. In all 

 other matters the two creatures the cave-man's horse and Prjevalsky's 

 closely agree. Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, 

 and a general disregard of " points " which would strike disgust and 

 dismay into the stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact, over a 

 T. Y. C. it may be confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the sport- 

 ing papers, that Prjevalsky's and the cave-man's lot wouldn't be in it. 

 Nevertheless, a candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of 

 clumsiness, they both mean staying. 



So much for the two sitters ; now let us turn to the artist who 

 sketched them. Who was he, and when did he live ? Well, his name, 

 like that of many other old masters, is quite unknown to us ; but what 

 does that matter, so long as his work itself lives and survives ? Like 

 the Comtists he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The 

 work, after all, is for the most part all we ever have to go upon. " I 

 have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey," 

 said Lewis Carroll ( of "Alice in Wonderland ") once in Christ Church 

 common-room ; " it is that they weren't really written by Homer, but 

 by another person of the same name." There you have the Iliad in a 

 nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know 

 about the supposed Homer (if anything) is that he was the reputed 

 author of the two unapproachable Greek epics ; and all we know di- 

 rectly about my old master, viewed personally, is that he once carved 

 with a rude flint flake on a fragment of reindeer-horn these two clumsy 

 prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two and two together we can 

 make, not four, as might be naturally expected, but a fairly connected 

 history of the old master himself and what Mr. Herbert Spencer would 

 no doubt playfully term his "environment." 



The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of 

 a cave in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the name- 

 less artist himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously ten- 

 anted by various other early families, as well as by bears who seem to 

 lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers. 

 Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the 

 bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case 

 the freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French 

 artist. But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent ; for 

 since he lived there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or 

 Glacial Epoch, has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and 

 swept before it the shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old 

 master. Now, how long ago was the Great Ice Age ? As a rule, if 

 you ask a geologist for a definite date, you will find him very chary of 



