Chapter I: Style (2)

From what we know, it would seem that a vital change in a national style is never produced by the inspiration of one individual genius or great original inventor. It invariably evolves itself slowly, by the patient, persistent efforts of generations, polishing and touching up the same motive, and at last reaching human perfection.

The annihilation of a style is oftenest caused by war passing over the land, or revolution breaking up the fountains of social life, and swamping the art and the artist.

But another cause of such an extinction--perhaps the saddest--is that having reached perfection as far as it may, it deteriorates, sickens, corrupts, and finally is thrown aside--superseded, hidden, and overlapped by a newer fashion; and the worst and latest effort discredits in the eyes of men, the splendid successes that preceded its fall. Though the next succeeding phase may be less worthy to live than the last, yet, carrying with it the freshness of a new spring, it is acceptable for the time being.

The moral I should draw from this is, that you cannot force style; you may prune, direct, and polish it, but you must accept that of your day, and only in accordance with that taste can your work be useful. Not accepting it idly or wearily, but cheerfully, on principle, seeking to raise it; refusing by word or deed to truckle to the false, the base, or the lawless in your art, or to act against the acknowledged canons of good taste. Not for a moment should ambition be checked, but it should always be accompanied by the grace of modesty.

To the young decorator or artist who feels the glow of original design prompting him to reject old lines, and follow his own new and perhaps crude ideas, a few words of warning, and encouragement also, may be of use.

In art, as in poetry, we may recognize the Psalmist's experience: "My heart burned within me, and at the last I spake with my tongue."

In small as in great things, crude ideas should not be brought to the front. No one should give his thoughts to the world till his heart has _burned_ within him, and he has been _forced_ to express himself.

Another wise saying, "Read yourself full, and then write yourself empty," also applies to art. Knowledge must first be accumulated before you can originate.

Wait till your experience and your thoughts insist on expression; then subject the expressed idea to cultivated criticism, and profit by the opinion you would respect if another's work, and not your own, were under discussion.

It is true that taste is surprisingly various. Some will dislike your design, because its style is a reflection of the Gothic; another may be objected to as being frivolously Oriental-looking and brilliant, whereas the critic likes only the sober and the dull. Few are sufficiently educated to appreciate style: and we cannot rule our own by anybody's opinion; but we can generalize and find something that shall be agreeable to all--something approaching to a golden mean. The artist for decoration should be sensitively alive to any suggestion from the style of that which he is to adorn, remembering the antecedent motives of its form, its history, and its date. He should try to make his new work harmonize with the old; but of one thing he may be certain--unless he absolutely copies an old design, his own will carry the visible and unmistakable stamp of his day.

Even while suggesting copies this difficulty arises--how can a perfect facsimile be obtained? No reproduction is ever really exact, unless cast off by the hundred, stamped or printed by a machine.

It has been said that the translator of a poem adds to, or takes from the original, that which he has or has not of the same poetical power; and in art the copy requires the same qualities to guide the hand that transmits the original motive to another material. An artist usually carries out his own ideas from the first sketch blocked out on the canvas, or scribbled on the bit of waste paper, to the last finishing touch. It is, as far as it can be in human art, the visible transcript of his own thought. In needlework this can hardly ever be. The designer, whether he be St. Dunstan, Pollaiolo, Torrigiano, or Walter Crane, only executes a drawing which leaves his hands for good, and is translated into embroidery by the patient needlewoman who simply fills in an outline, ignorant of art, unappreciative of its subtleties, and incapable of giving life and expression, even when she is aware that they are indicated in the original design. This is almost always the case; but there are exceptions. Charlemagne's dalmatic, for instance, shows signs of having been either the work of the artist himself, or else carried out under his immediate supervision.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Boyd Dawkins' "Early Man in Britain," p. 285. See
also chapter on stitches (_post_), p. 195.

[16] Some of these styles survive; some are still
perceptible as traditions or echoes; some have totally
disappeared in our modern art, such as the Primitive or
the Egyptian.

[17] See Semper, "Der Stil."

[18] The history of Gaul begins in the 7th, and that of
Britain in the 1st century B.C., while the civilization
of Egypt dates back to more than 4000 B.C.; therefore
the historical overlap is very great. It is probable
that a large portion of Europe was in its neolithic age,
while the scribes were composing their records of war
and commerce in the great cities on the Nile, and that
the neolithic civilization lingered in remote regions
while the voice of Pericles was heard in Athens, and the
name of Hannibal was a terror in Italy.--See Boyd
Dawkins' "Early Man in Britain," p. 481.

[19] See chapter on patterns.

[20] In the Troad.

[21] Some of the Egyptian arts we know are pre-Homeric
(if Homer really sang 800 B.C.), and Asiatic art was
then in its highest development.

[22] See chapter on stitches, cut work (_post_). This
funeral tent is a monumental work, inasmuch as the
inscription inwrought on it gives us the name and title
of her in whose honour it was made, and whose remains it
covered. See Villiers Stewart's "Funeral Tent of an
Egyptian Queen."

[23] Herodotus, book ii. c. 182; book iii. c. 47
(Rawlinson's Trans.). See Rock's Introduction, p. xiv.

[24] Homer mentions "Sidonian stuffs and Phœnician
skill" (Iliad, v. 170); also "Sidonian Embroidery."
Ibid. vi. 287-295.

[25] The Assyrian designs are such as are now still
worked at Benares, and being full of animals, they are
called Shikurgah, or "happy hunting-grounds." See Sir G.
Birdwood's "Industrial Arts of India," p. 236. See also
Plate 4.

[26] See Perrot and Chipiez (pp. 737-757); also Clermont
Ganneau's Histoire de l'Art, "L'Imagerie Phénicienne,"
Plate 1, pt. 1. Coupe de Palestrina. He says that
certain scenes from the "Shield of Achilles" are
literally to be found on Phœnician vases that have
come down to us--vases of which Homer himself must have
seen some of analogous design.

[27] Homer speaks of Sidonian embroideries, "Iliad,"
vi., 287-295.

[28] See Egyptian fragments in the British Museum, and
the specimens of Peruvian textiles; and Reiss and
Stübel's "Necropolis of Ancon in Peru."

[29] At Cervetri, Dennis' "Etruria," ed. 1878, i. p.
268.

[30] The restless activity of the Phœnicians has
often helped to confuse our æsthetic knowledge, and has
caused the waste of much speculation in ascertaining how
certain objects of luxury, belonging to distant
civilizations, can possibly have arrived at the places
where we find them.

[31] "The Beautiful Gate of the Temple was covered all
over with gold. It had also golden vines above it, from
which hung clusters of grapes as tall as a man's
height.... It had golden doors of 55 cubits altitude,
and 16 in breadth: but before these doors there was a
veil of equal largeness with the doors. It was a
Babylonian curtain of blue, fine linen, and scarlet and
purple; of an admixture that was truly wonderful. Nor
was the mixture without its mystical interpretation; but
was a kind of image of the universe. For by the scarlet
was to be enigmatically signified fire; by the fine
flax, the earth; by the blue, the air, and by the
purple, the sea;--two of them having their colours for
the foundation of this resemblance; but the fine flax
and the purple have their own origin for this
foundation, the earth producing the one, and the sea the
other. This curtain had also embroidered upon it all
that was mystical in the heavens excepting the twelve
signs of the zodiac, representing living creatures."
Josephus (Trans. by Whiston), p. 895.

[32] See also M. E. Harkness and Stuart Poole, "Assyrian
Life and History," p. 66.

[33] The visions of Ezekiel and St. John remind us of
the composite figures and animals in Ninevite
sculptures, and the prophetic poetry helps us to
interpret their symbolism.

[34] G. Smith's "Ancient History of the Monuments,"
Babylonia, p. 33. Edited by Sayce.

[35] In the British Museum. See "Bronze Ornaments of
Palace Gates, Balawat," pl. E 5.

[36] See Auberville's "Ornement des Tissus," pl. 1.

[37] The Egyptian queen in question was mother-in-law to
Shishak, whose daughter married Solomon. After his
son-in-law's death, Shishak plundered the "King's
House," and carried to Egypt the golden shields or
panels (1 Kings xiv. 26). The golden vessels went to
Babylon later, and the golden candlesticks to Rome.

[38] Sir G. Birdwood repeatedly points out that the
Vedic was the art that worshipped and served nature. The
Puranic is the ideal and distorted. The Moguls, about
700 B.C., introduced their ugly Dravidian art. Through
the Sassanian art of Persia, that of India was
influenced. Possibly the very forms which in India are
copied from Assyrian temples and palaces, may have
travelled first to Assyria upon Indian stuffs and
jewellery (Sir G. Birdwood's "Industrial Arts of India,"
i. p. 236).

[39] Ibid., p. 130 (ed. 1884).

[40] Nearchus (Strabo, XV. i. 67) says that the people
of India had such a genius for imitation that they
counterfeited sponges, which they saw used by the
Macedonians, and produced perfect imitations of the real
object. See Sir G. Birdwood's "Industrial Arts of
India," ii. p. 133 (ed. 1884).

[41] Ibid., ii. p. 131 (ed. 1884).

[42] See Sir G. Birdwood, p. 129 (ed. 1884). If
Fergusson is right in suggesting that the art of Central
America was planted there in the third or fourth century
of our era, it would, perhaps, appear to have taken
refuge in America when it was driven out of India by the
Sassanians, and was really Dravidian. He gives to the
Turanian races all the mound buildings, as well as the
fylfot or mystic cross, and he looks in Central India
for the discovery of some remains that will give us the
secret of the origin of the Indo-Aryan style. He thinks
the Archaic Dravidian is allied with the Chinese. See
Fergusson's "Architecture."

[43] Etruscan and Indian golden ornaments, including the
"Bolla" and the "Trichinopoly" chains and coral, are to
be found throughout Scandinavia and in Ireland. See
"Atlas de l'Archéologie du Nord," par la Société Royale
des Antiquaires du Nord. Copenhagen, 1857.

[44] Arrian tells us of the Celts, "a people near the
Great Ionian Bay," who sent an embassy to Alexander
before the battle of the Granicus--"a people strong and
of a haughty spirit." Alexander asked them if they
feared anything. They answered that they feared the "sky
might fall upon their heads." He dismissed them,
observing that the Celts were an arrogant nation
(Arrian, i. 4, 10).

[45] According to Yates, the merchandise of Eastern Asia
passed through Slavonia to the north of Europe in the
Middle Ages, without the intervention of Greece or
Italy. This may account for certain terms of
nomenclature which evidently came with goods transported
straight to the north. Yates' "Textrinum Antiquorum,"
vol. i. p. 225-246.

[46] These northern ideas, spreading over Germany,
England, and France, flourished especially on German
soil; and Oriental-patterned embroideries for hangings
and dress were worked in every stitch, on every
material, as may be seen in the museums and printed
catalogues of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, &c.

[47] Except, perhaps, the Serpent and Tree cope in
Bock's Kleinodien.

[48] The different Celtic nationalities are always
recognizable. There was found in a grave-mound at Hof,
in Norway, a brooch, showing at a glance that it was
Christian and Celtic, though taken from the grave of a
pagan Viking. Another at Berdal, in Norway, was at once
recognized by M. Lorange as being undoubtedly Irish.
There are many other instances of evident Celtic
Christian art found on the west coast of Norway under
similar conditions--probably spoil from the British
Islands, which were subject to the descents of the pagan
Vikings for centuries after the time of St. Columba's
preaching of Christianity in Scotland. For information
on the subject, see G. Stephen's "Monuments of Runic
Art," and F. Anderson's "Pagan Art in Scotland."

[49] "Scotland in Pagan Times," by J. Anderson, pp. 3-7.

[50] On a vase in the British Museum, Minerva appears
with her ægis on her breast, and clothed in a petticoat
and upper tunic worked in sprays, and a border of
kneeling lions. On another Panathenaic vase she has a
gown bordered with fighting men, evidently the sacred
peplos. (Fig. 4.)

[51] See the account of the veil of Herè in the Iliad,
and that of the mantle of Ulysses in the Odyssey.

[52] See Butcher and Lang's Odyssey.

[53] "Der Stil."

[54] The Greeks collected into one focus all that they
found of beauty in art from many distant
sources--Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian--and thus fired
their inborn genius, which thenceforth radiated its
splendour over the whole civilized world.

[55] Homer's Iliad, xviii. 480-617 (Butcher and Lang).

[56] See "Woltmann and Woermann." Trans. Sidney Colvin,
p. 64.

[57] Except, perhaps, the keystone arch.

[58] Virg. Æneid iii. Trans. G.L.G.

[59] The Indian Cush.

[60] Except in the art of the Celts, whose Indo-Chinese
style shows evidence of Mongolian importation, and later
we find traces of a similar influence: for instance,
"Yarkand rugs are semi-Chinese, semi-Tartar, resembling
also the works of India and Persia. It is easy to
distinguish from what source each comes, as one
perceives the influence of the neighbouring native art"
("On Japan," by Dresser, p. 322).

[61] See a paper by M. Terrien de la Couperie in the
Journal of the Society of Arts, 1881.

[62] "Rome had to be overthrown that the new religion
and the new civilization might be established.
Christianity did its work in winning to it those
Teutonic conquerors, but how vast was the cost to the
world, occasioned by the necessity of casting into the
boiling cauldron of barbarous warfare, that noble
civilization and the treasures which Rome had gathered
in the spoil of a conquered universe! Had any old Roman,
or Christian father been gifted with Jeremiah's
prescience, he might have seen the fire blazing amidst
the forests of Germany, and the cauldron settling down
with its mouth turned towards the south, and would have
uttered his lamentation in plaintive tones, such as
Jeremiah's, and in the same melancholy key" ("Holy
Bible," with Commentary by Canon Cook, Introduction to
Jeremiah, vol. i. p. 319).

[63] Scandinavian art became strongly tinctured with
that of Byzantium. The Varangian Guards were, probably,
answerable for this, by their intercourse between Greece
and their native land, which lasted so many centuries.
There have come down to us, as witnesses of this
intercourse, many coins and much jewellery, in which all
that is Oriental in its style has been leavened by its
passage through Byzantine and Romanesque channels.
Gibbon, writing of this period, says: "The habits of
pilgrimage and piracy had approximated the countries of
the earth" (see Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chap. lv.).

Greek embroidered patterns and Greek forms of dress
still linger in Iceland. There was lately brought to
England a bride's dress, which might have belonged to
the Greek wife of a Varangian guardsman. It is
embroidered with a border in gold of the classical
honeysuckle pattern; and the bridal wreath of gilt metal
flowers might, from its style, be supposed to have been
taken from a Greek tomb.

[64] Evidently an imitation of the peplos of Minerva
(see fig. 4, p. 32).

[65] The descent from the Persian of Arab or Moorish
art, as we generally call it when speaking of its
Spanish development, is to be accounted for by the
presence of a considerable colony of Persians in Spain
in the time of the Moors, as attested by numerous
documents still in existence. See Col. Murdoch Smith's
"Preface to Persian Art," Series of Art Handbooks of the
Kensington Museum.

[66] Ronsard, poet, politician, and diplomatist,
compares the Queen of Navarre to Pallas Athene:--

"Elle adonnait son courage
A mainte bel ouvrage
Dessus la toile, et encor
A joindre la soie et l'or.
Vous d'un pareil exercise
Mariez par artifice
Dessus la toile en mainte traits
L'or et la soie en pourtraict."

[67] Mary de Medici brought back with her from Italy
Federigo Vinciolo as her designer for embroideries.

[68] See "Art Needlework," by E. Maxse, and "Manuel de
la Broderie," by Madame E. F. Celnart.

[69] From the Italian translation by Signor Minghetti.

[70] Gaston, Duke of Orleans (died 1660), kept hothouses
on purpose to supply models for floral textile designs.
Le Brun often drew the embroideries for the hangings in
rooms he had himself designed and decorated.

[71] We have all seen the dining-room wine-coolers
modelled in imitation of Roman tombs; and there is a
drawing-room in a splendid mansion still furnished with
cinerary urns covering the walls, while curule chairs
most uncomfortably furnish the seats.

[72] In his designs for papers and textiles, Mr. Morris'
poetical and artistic feeling--his admiration and
sensitiveness for all that is beautiful and graceful (as
well as quaint)--his respect for precedent, added to his
own fanciful originality,--have given a colour and seal
to the whole decorative art of England of to-day. It is
a step towards a new school. The sobriety and tenderness
of his colouring gives a sense of harmony, and
reconciles us to his repetitions of large vegetable
forms, which remind us sometimes of a kitchen-garden in
a tornado. For domestic decoration we should, as far as
possible, adhere to reposing forms and colours. Our
flowers should lie in their allotted spaces, quiet and
undisturbed by elemental struggles, which have no
business in our windowed and glass-protected rooms.