Part 3
The art of the designs in these books varies, of course, very greatly, according to the current artistic capacity and taste; sometimes rich and inventive, or quaint and graceful, but often little more than a kind of pictorial heraldry, where the moral intention overmasters the artistic power, and becomes merely a label or ensign to point to the moral of the emblem writer.
There exists a ceiling at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, in the library there, which is curiously like an emblem book worked out in an ornamental scheme. It is in low relief, in plaster or some kind of gesso or stucco, and is said to have been done by Italian workmen. It is panelled out in a way characteristic of the time of the house, which bears the date 1619. In the panels are curious figure designs--allegorical representations of the senses, the virtues, and the vices--which remarkably correspond in conception and treatment with their next of kin in some of these old emblem books. The general effect is very rich and agreeable, and though now white, it was probably coloured in the manner of the elaborate ceilings of the middle Italian Renaissance taste, as we find them, for instance, in the Doria Palace at Genoa, in the work of Giovanni da Udine.
Mr. Morris tells us that all the leading types of pattern design sprang originally from ancestral forms which were definitely symbolic; so that art, which we now call purely ornamental, once was made expressive of mental ideas,--like Persian and Arabic texts in Eastern carpets and tiles, where language and ornament are often one and the same thing. The descent of our Alphabet itself has been traced in a direct line back to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs; and these again were formed into a species of alphabetical system from an earlier form of picture or emblem writing. Even after they had been systematised into the equivalent of an alphabet, pure symbols are used for the expression of abstract notions, such as thirst, for instance, where a calf is figured above the zigzag lines which signify water.
The hart drinking from a stream is a well-known early Christian symbol; we see it in mosaic in the churches at Ravenna, with the vine and the peacock. These last, too, seem to have been a favourite device to carve upon marble sarcophagi, and it may well be contrasted with later Christian taste, in its choice and treatment of symbols in the modern graveyard; and what a strange medley of emblems meet us there!
Not less mixed is the symbolism of commerce, as exemplified in the variations of the modern trade-mark. Æsop and the Bible are again drawn upon, as well as Pagan mythology; but here again perhaps the less said about art the better. It is only interesting as showing the value in the purely practical sense a figurative device may have, something which is distinctive and easily identifiable. It is in some sense a survival of picture-writing or hieroglyphic, without its old Egyptian ornamental sense and distinction of style.
Philosophy, too, in her most modern dress has recourse to symbol. The high priest of Evolution adopted a device for the cover of his book, showing a plant springing upwards from earth, and putting forth leaf, bud, and finally flower; a caterpillar among the leaves, a chrysalis pendent from the bud, and a butterfly hovering over the open blossom. Nothing could well be more tersely, and at the same time comprehensively, expressive of perhaps the greatest and most far-reaching theory of our time.
Nothing, then, appears to be beyond or beneath the range of expression in figurative design; no touch or conception of life but is made more emphatic and comprehensible by being cast into a concrete image--a kind of visible and picturesque logic to satisfy the eye as well as the mind. But while vigorous design, Atlas-like, can sustain the world of thought upon its shoulders, no breath of thought can quicken dead art into life again. It is the true test of really vital design that it should carry without effort its own intention, and never be over-weighted.
This vigorous mental vitality as manifested in art is always characteristic of the great periods. Nor is it spent in one direction only, but, like the life-blood, circulates freely through the whole body of art; so that the chased pattern upon a piece of armour or a watch-plate, the design of a dress fabric or the woodcut ornaments of a printed book, no less than the frescoed or tapestried wall and the highly-wrought easel picture, declare the same nervous energy and endless untiring inventiveness in beautiful and fertile design.
SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW
An age in which the ornamental sense in art is so little understood--an age which cares only for superficial picturesqueness or photographic naturalism is certainly not favourable to any high development of sculpture, which in times past has been the noblest and most expressive of the decorative arts. We have to recognise the fact that sculpture, in common with all art and all forms of life, lives by its capacity of adaptability to circumstances. Perhaps she has a harder struggle for existence than her sisters, and in the absence of zeal for great monumental works it is perhaps not altogether surprising that she sometimes is content to furnish toys for the drawing-room, and finds the perpetuation of nonentities more lucrative than the pursuit of heroic design.
That love of picturesqueness, of naturalism, too, which in our day asserts itself in season and out of season, and, unfortunately, often quite regardless of material or place, has left its mark on sculpture, as in painting. Perhaps it would be truer to say that it has revolutionised, or at least made a formidable insurrection in both; so much so that sculpture and painting, in some instances, appear to be striving to change places--painters sacrificing everything for an altitude of relief which suggests departure from the canvas altogether, and sculpture vying with painting in the imitation of textures and scenic effects which cry out for the palette.
For in sculpture, at least in marble, despite all the resources of tangible relief and rotundity, it is curious that naturalism of treatment should be far less suggestive of nature than the same thing in painting. The most elaborate imitation of textures and surfaces (such as we see among the modern Italians) has, in the absence of local tint, an exaggerated and, consequently, unreal look; and if there is no strong element of design to counterbalance the elaboration--which, indeed, is offered in its place--the failure as a work of art is complete.
The importance of designing power in sculpture is obvious enough when we consider that a sculptor, in designing a figure or group in the round, has really to make, or ought to make, not one design merely, but a whole series, in order that his work shall be expressive from every point of view. This necessity, which is one of the difficulties, is also one of the advantages of sculpture, and develops its capabilities for expressive design to the utmost. Thus, while the witchery of imitative skill may lead painters astray, in sculpture we are forced back to what may be called the more purely artistic qualities of design of style; terms which imply much--which comprehend, perhaps, all the essentials of good art. Without distinction in these the craze for imitative naturalism, or whatever we like to call it, only ends, so far as I am aware, in attempts more or less unsuccessful to turn sculpture into portrait painting or _tableaux vivants_.
It is very much the difference between imitation and expression, or repetition and creation in art; and this means of course all the difference in the world, both as regards the artist and his public.
Imitation only requires industry, but design demands inventive power. Design might be defined as the constructive sense controlled by the sense of beauty. One may have plenty of energy, plenty of frank naturalism in a work, but if we have not the sense of beauty in art it profiteth nothing.
This is of course obvious enough as applied to art with a distinctly decorative purpose, but it seems curious that while it is taken for granted that you cannot do without grace or charm of some sort in this direction, as regards what may be called pictorial art, whether in painting or sculpture, given plenty of force and fact, grace and charm seem often quite secondary considerations, hardly missed if altogether absent.
To me, I confess, such distinctions seem artificial and injurious to art. A statue, or a picture, or a pattern must be an organic whole, whether it is itself a whole or a part. It must agree with itself, or it will agree with nothing, whether it be a frieze, a string-course, or a bust.
And after all it is this humanising and controlling sense--this sense of beauty, balance, decorum--this sixth or artistic sense, in short, manifested in so many different materials, methods, and styles, varying with climate and character, but articulate in every tongue--which is the really permanent quality. Without it you may have science, archæology, antiquarianism, imitation of nature--many things very useful in their way, but not art.
PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW
I will ask you to figure to yourselves an aspiring decorator, filled with the latter-day enthusiasm for beautifying human surroundings, and recognising a manifest, if superficial, improvement in domestic architecture and adornment,--recognising the excellent and sympathetic work that has been done by certain individual workers, or associated workers, in various arts and crafts, and still undaunted by the rapacity with which competitive commerce and the modern industrial system seize upon and spoil their ideas, and like
----the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said,--
undaunted, I say, let us suppose our decorator filled with this fine enthusiasm, so as to have almost persuaded himself that we are on the brink of a second Renaissance; let us suppose him to turn for a moment from his all-engrossing studies in stained glass, tapestry, _repoussée_ metal work, wood-carving, pottery, and the like, amid which he may have become possibly oblivious of the progress of painting; to turn from wall-hanging and wall-paper to what might be supposed to be the crown and summit of its decoration, the wall picture, or, to speak figuratively, from the courts of South Kensington to the galleries of Burlington House--I mean in the time of its May blossoming.
He enters the exhibition hoping to find his aspirations stimulated, if not satisfied, by some show of what he has been accustomed to consider the higher aims and influences in art--primarily the search for beauty of line, colour, and execution, where indeed they are practically unfettered, in the technical sense, except by the four sides of a frame (which in itself might contribute as the setting to the gem). Here, as our decorator would reasonably suppose, these qualities would be considered the prime necessities, the indispensable ingredients of the work, whatever sort of pathetic, dramatic, or high poetic expression a picture might bear.
But what are the actual evidences that meet his eye? To begin with, he is appalled by the effect of the galleries as a whole--a number of odd-sized painted panels in gilt mouldings, jostled together with scarcely any reference to scale or harmony, either of subject or colour. Here, perhaps, a life-sized human head and shoulders in startling relief appears almost bursting through some silvery retiring landscape distance; there tragedy and farce side by side, and on the same wall tradition on crutches next the most naked naturalism, with “no language but a cry,” or perhaps some piece of sentimentality leaning, as it were, on the shoulder of the coldest academic style.
Supposing our decorator to have at least partially recovered from the first shock of this impressionistic picture, and to have sufficient presence of mind to go more into detail, what does he find? Much ability certainly, much energy, much industry, but wasted for the most part upon objects and subjects either unrewarding or repulsive, and squandered in aimless, and therefore inartistic imitation; much striving after instantaneous photographic effects both in figures and landscapes--miscalled Realism; much academic learning and archæology; much sentimental as well as melo-dramatic feeling; plenty of domestic and quasi-historical incidents, some symptoms of war fever breaking out in red coats; plenty of sporting and animal life--live and dead stock; a superabundance of the personal element as in individual portraits, although the term portrait might often be more justly claimed by landscape painters, portraits so called being as often as not treated as if they were landscapes, and landscapes as portraits, in these days.
In these, and such as these, then, our decorator will haply discover the leading tendencies in modern painting. But he will reflect it does not need that men should be specially painters to exhibit such qualities as these. For any strong evidence of any feeling for, or search after style, design, composition, beauty of form, beauty of colour, or perfection of workmanship, not to speak of poetic expression--for those qualities, in short, most peculiarly and distinctively artistic--qualities at least inseparable from art with any title to be called decorative--our decorator might look long and far without finding much to cheer his drooping spirits.
He will depart from the exhibition a sadder, if not a wiser man; but he will say to himself, “It was not always so.” He will go into our national collection, and there he will find abundant evidence that painting was once what he fondly hoped it might be again, at the head of the decorative arts. Then perhaps he would go down to his house justified, possibly to dream, and, especially if he had an impression of Dürer’s “Melancholia” in his room, his dream might take some such shape as this (were it possible to conceive in an emblematic spirit such a being): The genius of modern painting would appear amidst the ruins and relics of ancient art attired in the last Paris fashion, leaning upon a photographic camera, with canvas and palette set, and looking in her paint-box for an idea. Instead of Amorini should flit around her the bats and owls of criticism, uttering discordant cries, and one flying with a scroll on which should be inscribed, “There is no beauty but where you would least expect to find it; there is no truth but literalism.”
ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN
Man might be distinguished from other animals by his pronounced love of ornament alone, or at least by the capacity for producing it. Evidences of the impulse to ornament are found mixed up with his earliest traces on the earth, and some of his most elaborate efforts have been upon his own person. In North Borneo, for instance, I believe, to this day a very elaborate system of tattooing is still practised by special artists, a great part of the body being covered with elaborate patterns of fantastic animals and other devices.
From the poetic or artistic side pattern might be defined as the Notation of silent music. Certain decorative units are the keynotes. Primitive patterns, like primitive music, consist of very simple elements--of very few notes. Repetition is the chief factor in the development of both--Repetition and Rhythm. If music was discovered by blowing into a hollow reed, design might have begun by experiments with a stick on the sand or soft clay. “Here is a sound,” says the musician, “let us make music.” “Here is a surface,” says the designer, “let us make a pattern.”
The art of pattern-making might be defined as the constructive sense applied to surfaces. The ornamental designer is not so absolutely bound by structural laws as the architect; but the fact that the structural laws which govern his art are more mental than physical does not make them less binding or less real. Designing is not mathematics or geometry, but there appears to be a certain logic of line and colour in design which, given certain fundamental forms and characters, demands certain necessary sequences.
The system on which a design is built bears much the same relation to it as the skeleton does to the outward human form, and a knowledge of the skeleton is considered indispensable to the student of the figure. If a pattern, for instance, be rectangular in its general plan, however enriched by detail, the law of its fundamental construction must be acknowledged. Every line, every form, demands a reason for its existence. The designer commits himself to a curve; that curve cannot remain as an isolated fact, or it would be meaningless. It leads naturally to a counterbalancing curve, and then probably asks to be repeated; for in dealing with curves and angles we are really dealing with forms of a most expressive language, and one which cannot be clearly articulated even, unless we have something to say. The character of a pattern, then, is governed by its plan; and although there is no limit to the diversity and variety of a design, this organic necessity will make itself felt--much as a backbone is a necessity to a vertebrate. Beyond this the character of a design must be determined by the physical conditions of its execution and its ultimate purpose.
It is obvious that a design intended to extend horizontally, as, for instance, a running border or frieze, is naturally governed by different laws from one intended to repeat and spread itself vertically as well as horizontally over a large field, such as a wall-pattern. And a design fitted for a hanging will not adapt itself to a floor or ceiling. A pattern, a design, should at once speak for itself. Its plan should declare its purpose, and its treatment acknowledge the limitations and necessities--the characteristics, in short, of the material in which it is produced, and the method by which it is worked. Such considerations as these, we all know, are necessary to the successful existence of a pattern, and when they are successfully met we have only another instance of the survival of the fittest. For it happens in practice that a pattern which precisely fits such mechanical conditions has a longer life than one which, though perhaps more beautiful, in some details does not adapt itself to its position or to the necessities of reproduction so well. This applies more particularly to patterns intended for reproduction by processes of handicraft or manufacture, but it holds good also, though in a lesser degree perhaps, in all applied art, and can never be left out of account by the designer. Perfect fitness and beauty ought, of course, always to accompany each other--as a matter of fact, other conditions being equal, they do, as beauty is really organic; but mistakes are sometimes made by introducing in design elements which properly belong to other provinces of art,--for instance, when a carver or a weaver aims at superficial _imitation_ of natural forms in his work rather than their constructive value in design, or ornamental effect as pattern. For pattern, in its simplest form, and regarded solely in its abstract technical sense, apart from symbolism or imitation of natural form, is nothing but a series of modifications in the structure and correlation of line, such modifications being suggested or determined by the necessities of adaptation to spaces, objects, and materials.
Taking line, then, as the basis of ornament, a simple horizontal line forms, as it were, the primal decorative unit. Repeat it in parallels, and we get at once the type of a whole series of the simplest, but perhaps the most widely-used of patterns. It gives us the banded courses of brick and marble, the reeded mouldings and strings in architecture, the endless linear borders in ceramics; whilst in textiles it seems, in the ever-recurring barred and striped patterns, as if it were the Alpha and Omega of design, and that like Hope--slightly to alter the well-known line--it
----springs eternal on the human _vest_.
But probably the same reasons for its perpetuation are found cogent both in building and weaving--that is to say, the fundamental structural necessities of both lend themselves naturally to that system of varying the surface, and it seems universally pleasing to the human race.
But we are not very far on the road of invention. Satisfactory as bands, bars, and horizontal mouldings may be, cunningly proportioned and nicely placed, man cannot live by parallels alone. He needs other decorative units to make him happy. It is not known who struck the first circle. The inventor of the compasses--the prehistoric Giotto--remains in obscurity. Perhaps the hollow reed is again the medium; and the circular mark which would be left by the impression of the cut end of a reed on the soft earth might have given the circle to design. So, perhaps, Pan is the father of the arts of design. However this may be, with spheres all around, the idea must soon have germinated. Man needed to look no farther than the sun and the sea to find the genesis of pattern; nay, he had its elements in his own frame, which, as Vitruvius demonstrates, comprises, or is comprised in, both square and circle; and these may be said to divide the responsibility for the whole race of pattern systems between them--to stand in the world of design as a kind of Cœlus and Terra to an endless offspring.
The types of pattern to which they give rise are suggestive, too, of different characteristics of race, language, and civilisation. Broadly speaking, the square with its derived chequers, zigzags, and diapers might almost stand as a symbol of the ornament of the northern nations, associated as these forms are with Scandinavian and Gothic pattern work; while, on the other hand, the circle, with its derived scrolls and spirals, seems figurative of the greater suppleness and sensitiveness to beauty of the Southern; and it is to ancient Greece and to Italy that we must look for their most perfect types.
Square and angular patterns strike at once by their emphasis and rigid logic; while the circular and curvilinear types appeal rather to sense of grace and rhythm. For richness and intricacy we must go to where both perhaps came from--to the home of the Arabesque--to the East--the fountain-head of patterns, poured forth in a continual stream of imaginative energy and inventive subtlety. While the Frank has spent himself in the pursuit of the superficial facts of nature, and of the portrayal of life and character, seeking energy rather than beauty, and fact rather than ideal expression, the Asiatic has been content to wrap himself in a mesh of delicate fancy; and if he regards nature it is rather through a series of carefully-chosen symbolic forms that subserve his subtle ornamental sensibility.
Returning to our primitive square and circle, we find that they not only give us patterns and pattern systems by simply reproducing themselves, but that, by subdivision and extension, they give us certain offshoots which form universal decorative units, as well as fundamental geometric plans or governing systems of the whole race of what may be called organic patterns.
The leading forms of these offshoots from the square and circle are--from the square--the Chequer, the Fret, the Zigzag, the Diaper.
From the circle--the Scroll, the Spiral, the Fan, the Scale, the Oval.