Page:John Collings Squire - Socialism and Art (1907).pdf/10

 technical faculty may vary indefinitely in different individuals. Why does the negro give the missionary a ton of rubber or other such commodity for a handful of coloured beads? Simply because the benighted black heathen has a crude craving for beauty, which is satisfied by the beads, and a certain decorative instinct to which he will give play in hanging the beads around his own or somebody else's neck. Why (en passant) does the missionary part with the beads for the rubber? Because his right and proper instincts have been crushed by a profit-mongering system of society which has led him to cherish the laughable and quite erroneous idea that india-rubber is worth more than coloured beads. I have no sympathy with those who accuse the missionary, in this instance, of swindling the native. He is not. He is swindling himself—selling his soul for a mess of caoutchouc. The black man gets the joy that form and colour can give—the European gets money, which turns to dust and ashes in his hand.

The same universal delight in form and colour, the same desire to design and to construct, that one finds in savages, one finds also in children. A very small child will play with pieces of coloured wool by the hour. In spite of the elaborate and expensive toys that are made nowadays for the offspring of the rich, it is unanimously agreed upon by educationalists that the little ones do not take half the delight in them that they do in those simpler ones, which give them the chance of bringing their artistic ingenuity into play. No girl or boy was ever born who could not amuse herself or himself with some paper and a box of crayons for drawing, or a little pile of bricks for building. And, with regard to a slightly more advanced age, is there a man here who does not remember the worthy and desirable things that he used to do with his first penknife?

It is the same all the world over. The civilised child who draws his headmaster's face, and the New Zealand aborigine who tattoos his own nose, are both giving expression to this one great impulse which they have in common with every member of the race.

Man, therefore, is essentially an imitative and a decorative animal. What effect have political, economic and social conditions with regard to the stimulation or repression of his instincts in these respects? Do we find that every system under which he has lived has encouraged his artistic aspirations to an equal extent? A glance at the designs for the new Carnegie Library at Eatanswill-on-the-Quicksands would in itself supply a sufficient