118 A VERY OLD MASTER 



I have spoken of our old master more than once under 

 this rather question-begging style and title of primitive 

 man. In reality, however, the very facts which I have here 

 been detailing serve themselves to show how extremely far 

 our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't speak 

 of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct 

 animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense 

 primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed 

 light-hearted cannibals ; nevertheless they could design far 

 better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and 

 carve far better than the civilised being who is now calmly 

 discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own 

 study. Between the cave men of the pre- Glacial age and 

 the hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid 

 there must have intervened innumerable generations of 

 gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master, 

 when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, 

 in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and 

 necklet of bear's teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, 

 is nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human 

 being, with a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying 

 dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had in- 

 vented the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly 

 chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish- 

 hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. 

 Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with 

 artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with 

 the figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even 

 knew how to brew and to distil ; and he was probably 

 acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the 

 persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage 

 cannot reasonably be called primitive ; cannibalism, as 

 somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the 

 road to civilisation. 



