The art is _good_ for a barbarous people,
but it is certainly barbarian art. The range of designs is quite
great: horses, bears, mammoths, reindeer, are among the figures. The
people who did this work were an artistic people. To carve and
represent animal forms was almost a mania with them. An ethnic impulse
seems to have driven them on to such work, just as a similar impulse
drives the Haida slate carver to-day; just as a similar impulse has
driven the Bushman to cover the walls of his caves in South Africa
with pictures whose boldness and fidelity are the amazement of all who
see them.
We have, then, in the French cave dwellers a people who had a well
defined art, and who, as art workers, were isolated and unlike all
neighbors. An eminent English scientist believes that neither they nor
their art are gone. There is a people who to-day lives much as a cave
man of France lived so long ago, who hunts and fishes as he did, who
dresses as he did, who builds houses in whose architecture some think
they can see evidence of a cavern original, who above all still carves
batons from ivory, and implements from bone, adorning them with
skillfully cut figures of animals and scenes from the chase.
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