Chesterton on cave art

This week Michial and Josh of the Before They Were Live podcast, a monthly show working its way through the Disney Classics canon, dropped their latest episode. In it they discuss Brother Bear, which I have never seen, but a part of their discussion that I greatly enjoyed was a rabbit trail on cave paintings.

Any mention of cave paintings is going to bring Chesterton’s 1925 book The Everlasting Man to my mind, and just after I thought of this Michial raised exactly the passage I was thinking of. (I actually did a fist-pump in my car this morning.) I quote at length—from Part I, Chapter 1, “The Man in the Cave”—to give Chesterton space to make his point, which is a critique of the nasty modern assumptions a lot of people bring to the life of the “cave man”:

A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection. . . . This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

In discussing the stylization and artistic judgment evident in cave paintings, recall that Chesterton was himself a trained artist, and many of his books, notably The Man Who Was Thursday, which begins and ends in a garden at sunset, have a painterly quality in their description. He recognized artistic sensibility when he saw it.

Chesterton continues from the paintings’ artistic merit to the character of the artist:

Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall. When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.

But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral here to be drawn from them.

Here is where Michial begins quoting Chesterton on this month’s Before They Were Live:

That moral is something much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist may have had another side to his character besides that which he has alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be true that when the cave-man's finished jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook. These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.

And Chesterton concludes this paragraph with:

But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

Following this is my own favorite part of this passage, which I mention on the first day of every Western Civ course I teach when I show pictures of the cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet:

Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school.

A wonderfully human suggestion, without an ounce of condescension in it. Chesterton goes on to complete one strand of his critique of uncharitable modern assumptions about “cave men”:

And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another cavern and another child.

That other child is the subject of Part II, Chapter 1, “The God in the Cave.”

There’s a lot going on here that I won’t belabor. Chesterton’s goal throughout “The Man and the Cave” is to question and critique recent archaeological and anthropological speculations, especially those he saw as grounded in assumptions of cave man crudity and inferiority. (This was later called “chronological snobbery” by CS Lewis and Owen Barfield. I’ve blogged about that before here.) It’s a great passage, and one that has profoundly affected my own approach to studying the past.

The Everlasting Man was published too early for this to be a reference to Lascaux (discovered in 1940) or Chauvet (discovered in 1994), though his reference to a priest and a boy’s explorations is strikingly close to the story of Lascaux, probably the most famous group of cave paintings in the world and, indeed, discovered by some boys, who then brought in priest-archaeologist Fr Henri Breuil through their schoolmaster. Chesterton may be referring to Pech Merle, also in southern France, which has a similar story of discovery from 1922, and was therefore still recent news when he wrote The Everlasting Man in 1925. Pech Merle was opened to the public a year later. Chesterton’s descriptions of the paintings themselves as accomplished works of art are very broadly applicable, though, as are his summaries of scholarly uninterest in the actual human reasons the painters may have done their work. (Cf. the early controversy around the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain.)

I recently got the early reader Discovery in the Cave and read it with my kids. It’s a nice retelling of the story of the discovery of Lascaux, and gave me a chance to talk about some of what Chesterton brings up above. I highly recommend it if you want a kid-friendly introduction to cave art.

And check out Before They Were Live. I’ve enjoyed plenty of Disney cartoons in my time, but I’m by no means an aficionado. Michial and Josh bring an enthusiasm and charity to their discussion—both celebration and criticism—that makes their show a joy to listen to.