I write, thinking mainly of sculpture, because it was an exhibition of sculpture that set me off.  It should be remembered, however, that perhaps the most perfect achievements of these savages are to be found amongst their textiles and basket-work.  Here, their exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed gift for filling a space are seen to greatest advantage, while their shortcomings lie almost hid.  But it is their sculpture which, at the moment, excites us most, and by it they may fairly be judged.  Exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic.  Touch one of these African figures and it will remind you of the rarest Chinese porcelain.  What delicacy in the artist’s sense of relief and modelling is here implied!  What tireless industry and patience!  Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface; the thing is alive from end to end.  And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them.  I think I never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar—­except, of course, things made quite recently under European direction.  This is a delicious virtue, but it is a precarious one.  It is precarious because it is not self-conscious:  because it has not been reached by the intelligent understanding of an artist, but springs from the instinctive taste of primitive people.  I have seen an Oxfordshire labourer work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe, in the true spirit of a savage and an artist, admiring and envying all the time the lifeless machine-made article hanging, out of his reach, in the village shop.  The savage gift is precarious because it is unconscious.  Once let the black or the peasant become acquainted with the showy utensils of industrialism, or with cheap, realistic painting and sculpture, and, having no critical sense wherewith to protect himself, he will be bowled over for a certainty.  He will admire; he will imitate; he will be undone.

At the root of this lack of artistic self-consciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of Negro to the very greatest art.  Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence.  And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions.  Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here; but profundity of vision is not.  And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes.  One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely greater value than the sum of their parts.  That, it seems to me, is what savage artists generally fail to do.