Also, they lack originality.  I do not forget that Negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention.  They have been making figures of tribal gods and fetiches, and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition.  But were not European Primitives and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations?  That the African artists seem hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure afresh for themselves and realize in wood a personal vision does, I think, imply a definite want of creative imagination.  Just how serious a defect you will hold this to be will depend on the degree of importance you attach to complete self-expression.  Savage artists seem to express themselves in details.  You must seek their personality in the quality of their relief, their modulation of surface, their handling of material, and their choice of ornament.  Seek, and you will be handsomely rewarded; in these things the niggers have never been surpassed.  Only when you begin to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we Europeans, at any rate, expect to find in the greatest art will you run a risk of being disappointed.  It will be then, if ever, that you will be tempted to think that these exquisitely gifted black artists are perhaps as much like birds building their nests as men expressing their profoundest emotions.

And now come the inevitable questions—­where were these things made, and when?  “At different times and in different places,” would be the most sensible reply.  About the provenance of any particular piece it is generally possible to say something vague; about dates we know next to nothing.  At least, I do; and when I consider that we have no records and no trustworthy criteria, and that so learned and brilliant an archaeologist as Mr. Joyce professes ignorance, I am not much disposed to believe that anyone knows more.  I am aware that certain amateurs think to enhance the value of their collections by conferring dates on their choicer specimens; I can understand why dealers encourage them in this vanity; and, seeing that they go to the collectors and dealers for their information, I suppose one ought not to be surprised when journalists come out with their astounding attributions.  The facts are as follows.

We know that Portuguese adventurers had a considerable influence on African art in the sixteenth, and even in the fifteenth, century.  There begins our certain knowledge.  Of work so influenced a small quantity exists.  Of earlier periods we know nothing precise.  There are oral traditions of migrations, empires, and dynasties:  often there is evidence of past invasions and the supersession of one culture by another:  and that is all.  The discoveries of explorers have so far thrown little light on archaeology; and in most parts of West and Central Africa it would be impossible even for trained archaeologists to establish a chronological sequence such as can be formed when