NOTHING in the history of our Western civilisation is more romantic nor for us more tantalising than the story of the discovery and the wanton destruction of the ancient civilisations of America. Here were two complex civilisations which had developed in complete independence of the rest of the world; even so completely independent of each other that, for all their general racial likeness, they took on almost opposite characters. If only we could know these alternative efforts of the human animal to come to terms with nature and himself with something like the same fulness with which we know the civilisations of Greece and Rome, what might we not learn about the fundamental necessities of mankind? They would have been for us the opposite point of our orbit; they would have given us a parallax from which we might have estimated the movements of that dimmest and most distant phenomenon, the social nature of man. And as it is, what scraps of ill-digested and ill-arranged information and what fragments of ruined towns have to suffice us! Still, so fascinating is the subject that we owe Mr. Joyce[16] a debt of gratitude for the careful and thorough accumulation of all the material which the archÆological remains afford. These by themselves would be only curious or beautiful as the case may be; their full value and significance can only come out when they are illustrated by whatever is known of their place in the historical sequence of the civilisations. Mr. Joyce gives us what is known of the outlines of Mexican and Peruvian history as far as it can be deciphered from the early accounts of Spanish invaders and from the original documents, and he brings the facts thus established to bear on the antiquities. Unfortunately for the reader of these books, the story is terribly involved and complicated even when it is not dubious. Thus in Mexico we have to deal with an almost inextricable confusion of tribes and languages having much in common, but each interpreting their common mythology and religion in a special manner. Even Greek mythology, which we once seemed to know fairly well, takes on under the pressure of modern research an unfamiliar formlessness—becomes indistinct and shifting in its outlines; and the various civilisations of Mexico, each with its innumerable gods and goddesses with varying names and varying attributes, produce on the mind a sense of bewildering and helpless wonder, and still more a sense of pervading horror at the underlying nature of the human imagination. For one quality emerges in all the different aspects of their religions, its hideous inhumanity and cruelty, its direct inspiration of all the most ingenious tortures both in peace and war—above all, the close alliance between religion and war, and going with both of these the worship of suffering as an end in itself. Only at one point in this nightmare of inhumanity do we get a momentary sense of pleasure—itself a savage one—that is in the knowledge that at certain sacred periods the priests, whose main business was the torturing of others, were themselves subjected to the purificatory treatment. A bas-relief in the British Museum shows with grim realism the figure of a kneeling priest with pierced tongue, pulling a rope through the hole. Under such circumstances one would at least hesitate to accuse the priesthood of hypocrisy.

When we turn to Peru the picture is less grim. The Incas do not seem to have been so abjectly religious as the Aztecs; they had at least abolished human sacrifice, which the Aztecs practised on a colossal scale, and though the tyranny of the governing classes was more highly organised, it was inspired by a fairly humane conception.

But we must leave the speculations on such general questions, which are as regards these books incidental to the main object, and turn to the consideration of the archÆological remains and the investigation of their probable sequence and dating.

Our attitude to the artistic remains of these civilisations has a curious history. The wonder of the Spanish invaders at the sight of vast and highly organised civilisations where only savagery was expected has never indeed ceased, but the interest in their remains has changed from time to time. The first emotion they excited besides wonder was the greed of the conquerors for the accumulated treasure. Then among the more cultivated Spaniards supervened a purely scientific curiosity to which we owe most of our knowledge of the indigenous legend and history. Then came the question of origins, which is still as fascinating and unsettled as ever, and to the belief that the Mexicans were the lost ten tribes of Israel we owe Lord Kingsborough’s monumental work in nine volumes on Mexican antiquities. To such odd impulses perhaps, rather than to any serious appreciation of their artistic merits, we owe the magnificent collection of Mexican antiquities in the British Museum. Indeed, it is only in this century that, after contemplating them from every other point of view, we have begun to look at them seriously as works of art. Probably the first works to be admitted to this kind of consideration were the Peruvian pots in the form of highly realistic human heads and figures.[17]

Still more recently we have come to recognise the beauty of Aztec and Maya sculpture, and some of our modern artists have even gone to them for inspiration. This is, of course, one result of the general Æsthetic awakening which has followed on the revolt against the tyranny of the GrÆco-Roman tradition.

Both in Mexico and Peru we have to deal with at least two, possibly four, great cultures, each overthrown in turn by the invasion of less civilised, more warlike tribes, who gradually adopt the general scheme of the older civilisation. In Mexico there is no doubt about the superiority, from an artistic point of view, of the earlier culture—the Aztecs had everything to learn from the Maya, and they never rose to the level of their predecessors. The relation is, in fact, curiously like that of Rome to Greece. Unfortunately we have to learn almost all we know of Maya culture through their Aztec conquerors, but the ruins of Yucatan and Guatemala are by far the finest and most complete vestiges left to us.

In Peru also we find in the Tihuanaco gateway a monument of some pre-Inca civilisation, and one that in regard to the art of sculpture far surpasses anything that the later culture reveals. It is of special interest, moreover, for its strong stylistic likeness to the Maya sculpture of Yucatan. This similarity prompts the interesting speculation that the earlier civilisations of the two continents had either a common origin or points of contact, whereas the Inca and Aztec cultures seem to drift entirely apart. The Aztecs carry on at a lower level the Maya art of sculpture, whereas the Incas seem to drop sculpture almost entirely, a curious fact in view of the ambitious nature of their architectural and engineering works. One seems to guess that the comparatively humane socialistic tyranny of the Incas developed more and more along purely practical lines, whilst the hideous religiosity of the Aztecs left a certain freedom to the imaginative artist.

In looking at the artistic remains of so remote and strange a civilisation one sometimes wonders how far one can trust one’s Æsthetic appreciation to interpret truly the feelings which inspired it. In certain works one cannot doubt that the artist felt just as we feel in appreciating his work. This must, I think, hold on the one hand of the rich ornamental arabesques of Maya buildings or the marvellous inlaid feather and jewel work of either culture; and on the other hand, when we look at the caricatural realistic figures of Truxillo pottery we need scarcely doubt that the artist’s intention agrees with our appreciation, for such a use of the figure is more or less common to all civilisations. But when we look at the stylistic sculpture of Maya and Aztec art, are we, one wonders, reading in an intention which was not really present? One wonders, for instance, how far external and accidental factors may not have entered in to help produce what seems to us the perfect and delicate balance between representational and purely formal considerations. Whether the artist was not held back both by ritualistic tradition and the difficulty of his medium from pushing further the actuality of his presentation—whether, in fact, the artist deplored or himself approved just that reticence which causes our admiration. At times Maya sculpture has a certain similarity to Indian religious sculptural reliefs, particularly in the use of flat surfaces entirely incrusted with ornaments in low relief; but on the whole the comparison is all in favour of the higher Æsthetic sensibility of the Maya artists, whose co-ordination of even the most complicated forms compares favourably with the incoherent luxuriance of most Indian work.

In this, as in so many of its characteristics, Maya art comes much nearer to early Chinese sculpture; and again one wonders that such a civilisation should have produced such sensitive and reasoned designs—designs which seem to imply a highly developed self-conscious Æsthetic sensibility. Nor do the Maya for all their hieratic ritualism seem to fall into the dead, mechanical repetition which the endless multiplication of religious symbols usually entails, as, for instance, most markedly in Egyptian art. But this strange difference between what we know of Mexican civilisation and what we might have interpreted from the art alone is only one more instance of the isolation of the Æsthetic from all other human activities. The Frontispiece to this book gives an example of Maya sculpture from Piedras Negras. Mr. Joyce, in his learned and plausible theory of the dating of Mexican monuments, ascribes these remains to a date of about 50-200 A.D.

They are certainly among the finest remains of Maya sculpture, and this example shows at once the extreme richness of the decorative effect and the admirable taste with which this is co-ordinated in a plastic whole in which the figure has its due predominance. Though the relief of the ornamental part is kept flat and generally square in section, it has nothing of the dryness and tightness that such a treatment often implies.

Mr. Joyce’s books are compiled with amazing industry, and contain a vast accumulation of information. If we have a complaint, it is that for those who are not specialists this information is poured out in almost too uniform a flood, with too little by way of general ideas to enable the mind to grasp or relate them properly. If some of the minor details of obscure proper names had been relegated to the notes, it would have been possible to seize the general outlines more readily. The books are rather for reference than adapted to consecutive reading. In his judgments on the various speculations to which these civilisations have given rise Mr. Joyce is, as one would expect from so careful a scholar, cautious and negative. He does not, as far as I remember, even allude to the theory of the Lost Ten Tribes, but he does condescend to discuss the theory of cultural influence from Eastern Asia which has more than once been put forward by respectable ethnologists. He decides against this fascinating hypothesis more definitely than one would expect—more

definitely, I should say, than the facts before us allow. He declares, for instance, that the calendrical system of Mexico shows no similarity with those of Eastern Asia, whereas Dr. Lehmann gives a circumstantial account of a very curious likeness, the almost exact correspondence of two quite peculiar systems of reckoning. My own bias in favour of the theory of Eastern Asiatic influence is, I confess, based on what may seem very insufficient grounds, namely, the curious likeness of the general treatment of naturalistic forms and the peculiar character of the stylisation of natural forms in early Chinese and American art. It is of course impossible to define a likeness of general character which depends so largely on feeling, but it consists to some extent in the predilection for straight lines and rectangles—a spiral in nature becoming in both early Chinese and American art a sequence of rectangular forms with rounded corners. What is more remarkable is that the further back we go in Chinese art the greater the resemblance becomes, so that a Chou bronze, or still more the carved horns which have survived from the Shang dynasty, are extraordinarily like Maya or Tihuanaco sculpture. Again, it is curious to note how near to early Chinese bronzes are the tripod vases of the Guetar Indians. All these may of course be of quite independent origin, but their similarity cannot be dismissed lightly in view of the long persistence in any civilisation of such general habits of design. Thus the general habits of design of the Cretan civilisation persisted into Greek and even Roman and Christian art; the habits of design of Chinese artists have persisted, though through great modifications, for more than three thousand years. One other fact which may seem almost too isolated and insignificant may perhaps be put forward here. In a history of the Mormons, published in 1851, there is given a figure of an inscribed bronze (see Figure) which was dug up by the Mormons in Utah in 1843. Since Brigham Young pretended to have dug up the original book of Mormon his followers had a superstitious reverence for all such treasure trove, and probably the bronze still exists and might be worth investigation. Now this drawing, here reproduced, looks to me like an extremely bad and unintelligent reproduction of an early Chinese object, in general appearance not unlike certain early pieces of jade. It is fairly certain that at the time the Mormons discovered this, no such objects had found their way out of China, since the interest in and knowledge of this period of Chinese art is of much later growth. So it appears conceivable that the object, whatever its nature, is a relic of some early cultural invasion from Eastern Asia. The physical possibilities of such invasions from the Far East certainly seem to be under-estimated by Mr. Joyce.