objects are found buried in the sand one above the other.  But, in fact, it is to vague traders and missionaries, rather than to trained archaeologists, that we owe most of our fine pieces, which, as often as not, have been passed from hand to hand till, after many wanderings, they reached the coast.  Add to all this the fact that most African sculpture is in wood (except, of course, those famous products of early European influence, the bronze castings from Benin), that this wood is exposed to a devastating climate—­hot and damp—­to say nothing of the still more deadly white ants, and you will probably agree that the dealer or amateur who betickets his prizes with such little tags as “Gaboon, 10th century” evinces a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gullibility.

Whenever these artists may have flourished it seems they flourish no more.  The production of idols and fetiches continues, but the production of fine art is apparently at an end.  The tradition is moribund, a misfortune one is tempted to attribute, along with most that have lately afflicted that unhappy continent, to the whites.  To do so, however, would not be altogether just.  Such evidence as we possess—­and pretty slight it is—­goes to show that even in the uninvaded parts of West Central Africa the arts are decadent:  wherever the modern white man has been busy they are, of course, extinct.  According to experts Negro art already in the eighteenth century was falling into a decline from some obscure, internal cause.  Be that as it may, it was doomed in any case.  Before the bagman with his Brummagem goods an art of this sort was bound to go the way that in Europe our applied arts, the art of the potter, the weaver, the builder and the joiner, the arts that in some sort resembled it, have gone.  No purely instinctive art can stand against the machine.  And thus it comes about that, at the present moment, we have in Europe the extraordinary spectacle of a grand efflorescence of the highly self-conscious, self-critical, intellectual, individualistic art of painting amongst the ruins of the instinctive, uncritical, communal, and easily impressed arts of utility.  Industrialism, which, with its vulgar finish and superabundant ornament, has destroyed not only popular art but popular taste, has merely isolated the self-conscious artist and the critical appreciator; and the nineteenth century (from Stephenson to Mr. Ford), which ruined the crafts, in painting (from Ingres to Picasso) rivals the fifteenth.

Meanwhile, the scholarly activities of dealers and journalists notwithstanding, there is no such thing as nigger archaeology; for which let us be thankful.  Here, at any rate, are no great names to scare us into dishonest admiration.  Here is no question of dates and schools to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our pleasure.  Here is nothing to distract our attention from the one thing that matters—­aesthetic significance.  Here is nigger sculpture:  you may like it or dislike it, but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it on anything but its merits.