This book, therefore is both a variation on the theme of my Five Arts, and
ment of my Concise History of England, a political history in which
hasize the creative activities of man, and in che Preface wrot
d to England’s creative achievements, as opposed to its crimes and
ot irrelevant.
‘St loes
Comwall = a
1966 5
|
1 Prehistoric Beginnings
Some three-quarters of million years 2go primitive man reached north-west
Some thee cure quart of milion years couless generations of
these slow-wited, shambling creatures spent their che lower animals,
gathering food and hunting, their greatest creative
tools and weapons # le to help them in
‘Phen about ory thousand years ago, during the las
new sock appeared, men not unlike ourselves, the big?
of the final period of the Old Stone Age.
Teis wit thse new men of Anrignaian and Mapdalenian cies that the
history of at begins. The cqld winds blowing off the ice-cap drove them to seek
caves, and on their hunters of southem France and northern
Is they hoped to kill: the mammoth,
to which Europe had been
cal, as was that of the
spiritual experience.
in comparison with Britain, and it
arctic climate exhaust
impulse.
Sanumerable centuries they inhabited caves, ftom Kent's Cavern in Devon to
the north of Yorkshire, they left no graphic records on their walls, and the only
remains oftheir art ate a few engravings on bone, such as those of a horse's head
dnd a masked man engaged in some magic ritual, found at Creswell Crags in
compared to the work of the artists of
xe and pei, and they ae among the
tain, some fifien thousand years ago.
necessity coaned tothe
self
during foCarving fom the tomb at
Now Grange, Ireland, «1800 3c.
called atchitecture, And even this great age of painting, which Ga vigour and
economy of execution has never been surpassed; came to an end twelve thousand
years ago
There followed the long barren centuries of Mesolithic
before 2000 5c, men of the New Stone Age, bringing 2
is the real
and succeeding Early Bronze Age
ruction covered four centuries, approximat
ly altered and added to, and nowhere el
of stones nearly fourreen feet high,
and 2 horseshoe o
cach pair with its separ
ffee-standing bluestones repeat the pat ese
ks of sandstone, or sarsens, some of them weighing fifty tons, were
1 chalk dow
lintels of the
lusion of recession
the kind of refinement that makes the perfection of the Parthenon, ‘These
subdeties, indeed, suggest the influence of Greece of Mycenean times, as do the
recently discovered carvings of bronze axcheads and a dagger on one of the
‘Belore it fll into rain Stonehenge must have had mu
an Egyptian temple, which, despite its circular shape, y
resembles, and that i¢ was a temple there can be little doubt. Surrounded by a
Gitch and bank, it stood, as it were, upon a plinth, complete, classical in its
fsolation, and Neolithic ‘worshippers on its perimeter would ‘watch the pro-
zsion of priests about the ambulatory, and the celebration of mysteries within
the sanctuary of the great trilithons. It would be not unlike wate
peformance of a play, and perhaps Stonehenge is the prototype of the ‘rounds?
Pr vhich medieval miacle plays were presented, and ultimately ofthe ‘wooden
O' for which Shakespeare wrote.
ofthe grandeur of
some ways it
ple of «1800-1400 BC. Unlike 2 for asurope W
the spa designs brought fom the Meditenancan by the megalith
las. A. combination ofthe two traditions is found on the stange litle