NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES
3 3433 07217783 9






C








THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT:
EIGHT LECTURES ON THE
HISTORY OF DECORATIVE ART,
GIVEN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LIVERPOOL.
BY
W. GERSHOM COLLINGWOOD, M.A.,
LATE SCHOLAR OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.
GEORGE ALLEN,
SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT.
.
1883.


BIBRE
ATOR
NOV
1966
19200.
POBY
Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury.


TO KIND HEARERS AND KINDEST HELPERS
: THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.





PREFATORY NOTE.
The following pages are nothing more than
rewritten notes of popular lectures delivered
to a mixed audience. · Being such, they are
not offered as in any measure supplying the
place of exhaustive and authoritative cyclo-
pædias of ornament; but as suggesting more
comprehensive views and more philosophic
principles than are ordinarily obtained in this
department of study.
It was hardly necessary, therefore, to refer
by the way to the source of each scrap of
information or illustration introduced. The
South Kensington Handbooks have been freely
used; especially those of Sir G. Birdwood,
Professor Worsaae, and Mr. Pollen; together
with such standard works as Owen Jones'
“ Grammar of Ornament," Racinet's “Poly-


PREFATORY NOTE.
chromatic Ornament,” Dr. Birch’s “Ancient
Pottery,” the writings of the Messrs. Audsley,
and others; supplemented by original research
both in and out of Museums; especially in the
Liverpool Mayer Collection, to which, and to
the kindness of its able and learned curator,
Mr. Charles T. Gatty, F.S.A., I am greatly
indebted.
The illustrations (except Plate II.) have
been engraved by Mr. W. H. Hooper ; whom
I have to thank for the great care and skill
with which he has imitated my slight pen-
drawings. The Reindeer (Plate I.) is an
astonishingly accurate facsimile of a rough
sketch from an illustration in one of Professor
Geikie's books.
But beyond all I am grateful for the teach-
ing and encouragement of my best friend and
kindest patron, Professor Ruskin; though the
reader will not hold him responsible for the
sayings and doings of his self-willed scholar.
W. G. C.


CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION.
.
.
.
.
.
Xlll
LECTURE I.
THE BEGINNINGS.
1. The Art-Instinct. -2. A Paläolithic Masterpiece.-
3. Four Canons and a Definition.—4. Barbaric
Style.—5. Conditioned by Material and Meaning.
-6. Flint, Wood, and Bone.—7. Clay.-8. Basket-
work and Cordage.-9. Metal.-10. All Ornament
adapted to represent Objects of Worship.-11.
Resultant Typical Motives or Devices.-12. Defi-
nitions of Art and Decoration.–13.-Canons : I.
Adaptation.–14. II. Significance.—15. III. Con.
ventionalization, True and False . . . .
1
LECTURE II.
EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
1. Religion and Art.—2. Egyptian Ornament.—3.
Assyrian Conventionalism.-4. Bells and Pome-
granates.—5. Other Assyrian Motives.-6. Symbo-
lism.—7. Moral Philosophy of Style.—8. Egyp-
tian Symmetry.-9. Assyrian Strength. . . 29


viii
CONTENTS.
LECTURE III.
PAGE
ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
1. The Great Races.-2. Persian Art History.-3. Persian
Style.—4. Arabesque and Moresque.-5. Indian
Art-History.-6. Indo-Aryan Style.—7. Dravidian
Style.-8. Circumstances of Art-production in the
East.-9. China and Japan ; style.-10. history 46
LECTURE IV.
GREEK.
1. Artistic Character.—2. Harmony.-3. Design.-4.
Analysis of Decorative Composition.-5. Com-
parison with Music.—6. Period I. : Archaic Greek
Decoration.—7. II. Severe.—8. III. Florid.-9.
IV. Decadent.–10. Pompeian.-11. Byzantine.-
12. Spread of Greek Influence in the Dark Ages.-
13. Continuity of Art-History
continuity of Art History . . . . 72
LECTURE V.
GOTHIC.
1. Seed and Soil.—2. Parallel Progress of Celts and
Teutons.—3. The Viking's Lion.—4. Irish and
Norse Interlacing.–5. Morals of Northern Art.-
6. Anglo-Saxon Ornament, Native and Exotic. —
7. Spread of Northern Motives throughout
Europe.—8. Gothic Inheritance from Rome; .
Architecture and Sculpture.-9. From Byzantium ;
Design of Drapery and Foliage.-10. From the
East; Decoration of Textiles and Pottery.-11.


CONTENTS.
ix
PAGB
Monasticism and Chivalry.-12. Four Periods : I.
Romanesque.--13. II. Severe.—14. III. Florid.-
15. IV. Decadent.—16. Transition to Renais-
sance . . . . . . . . . 106
LECTURE VI.
THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
1. The Classic Revival in Italy.—2. True Character of
Sixteenth Century Art.-3. Vulgarity of Aim.-
4. Cheapness of Production.-5.-Indelicacy of
Subject.-6. Scientific Spirit.—7. Machiavel.
lianism.-8. Effect on Art of these Moral
Characteristics.-9. Mediæval Survivals and Orien-
tal Importations.-10. Venice Glass.-11. Mar-
quetry and Cabinet-making.–12. Majolica.-13.
Silk.-14. Renaissance in France.-15. In Eng.
land.-16. In Germany and Flanders . . . 143
LECTURE VII.
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.
1. Apology for the Age.—2. Its Contrast with the
Preceding.—3. Its Features ; Court and Fashion.-
4. General History in France and England. -5.
Cabinet-making : Marquetry, Boule, and the
Ebenistes.-6. Chinamania and Lacquer.—7. Ro-
coco.-8. Baroque.—9. Dresden China.-10. Sèvres
China.–11. Chelsea China.–12. Nymphs and
Shepherdesses.—13. Stuart Styles.—14. Grinling
Gibbons.—15. Queen Anne and Georgian Styles.-
16. The Gothic Revival . . . . . 170


ILLUSTRATIONS.
TO FACE PAGE
Fig. 3. From a Cyprus Vase ; Early Greek.
Fig. 4. From a Sculpture at Mycenæ ; Early Greek.
Fig. 5. From a Chinese Plate ; Turanian.
Fig. 6. From an Italian Carving : Cinquecento.
PLATE VI.-LINE-HARMONY. . . . . . 78
Fig. 1. Hera's Hair.
Fig. 2. “God Save the Queen.”
(Note. This cut misses my original intent to show dif.
ferences of interval between the stave-lines; but is given
here without more ado, as sufficiently suggestive, if not
scientifically accurate.)
PLATE VII.-CELTIC AND TEUTON ART. . . . 109
Fig. 1. British Bronze Mirror; "late Celtic”
triquetra and Basket-Pattern.
Fig. 2. Gotlandic Brooch ; Teuton “ Flamboyant”
Monsters.
Fig. 3. Scandinavian “ Heraldic ” Lion.
Fig. 4. Scandinavian Debased Figures and
Knotted Monsters.
Fig. 5. King David, from an Irish Eighth-Cen-
tury Ms.


INTRODUCTION.
In biographies of the olden time it is often
told how the hero, “impelled by an ardent
thirst after information,” faced pain and peril,
destitution or death, to find some fountain-
head of knowledge.
The student of to-day cannot complain of
such a drought, cannot even comprehend it.
So far from thirsting after knowledge, he lives
under a perpetual shower of facts, over head
and ears in a rising tide of information.
We have good reason to be proud of our
Museums; but they are sadly bewildering.
We are anxious to understand art; we gladly
give spare hours of busy life to visit this
collection and that; we buy catalogues, pry
into glass cases; see things that we suppose


xiv
INTRODUCTION.
we ought to admire, and things we fear we
ought not to dislike; and go home with tired
heads and tired feet; feeling that a great
many people have been very clever,—too clever
for us to fathom their meaning, or follow their
example. But a stranger could as soon learn
London without the map, as we can under-
stand art without some chart of its history and
guide to its value.
We have still better reason to be proud of
our Handbooks, especially the splendid series
issued at South Kensington. Authoritative,
entertaining, inexpensive, well illustrated, they
are all that Handbooks on special subjects can
be. But suppose we buy them all, and read
them all, and remember them all, we still
want a simple scheme of successive periods
to frame our scattered information into an
orderly whole; some clear conception of the
right and wrong in art, and of the reasons why.
With such general outlines firmly laid down,
every added detail will fall readily into its
place. We shall be no longer bewildered on-
lookers, but clear-headed philosophers: for
what is the profoundest philosophy but the


INTRODUCTION.
XV
clearing up, the arrangement of informa-
tion ?
There is a right and wrong in Decorative
Art: but it does not depend upon anybody's
dogmatism. We say a thing is right because
we know the reasons of it, and approve their
necessity. We call a thing wrong because we
see that its aims or its means are mistaken.
We can judge a man only when we understand
his circumstances, and we can judge a style of
art only when we understand the circum-
stances in which it was created. To be critics
we must be Sociologists; we must find the
character of a nation, and in it we shall have
its artistic aims; we must examine the
practical needs and natural surroundings of
its daily life, and then we can estimate the
means it had for attaining its aims. A mere
catalogue of results is not history; the mere
description of a museum-full of specimens,
with a nod to this and a frown at that, is not
criticism ; and hinders rather than helps our
clear conception of the progress and value of
Decorative Art.
To emphasize this principle at the outset


xvi
IN'TRODUCTION.
let me quote a most emphatic passage from
Professor Ruskin's first and most valuable
lecture at Oxford.
“Now listen to me," he says, “if I have
in these past details lost or burdened your
attention : for this is what I have chiefly to
say to you. The art of any country is the
exponent of its social and political virtues. I
will show you that it is so in some detail, in
the second of my subsequent course of lectures;
meantime accept this as one of the things,
and the most important of all things, I can
positively declare to you. The art, or general
productive and formative energy, of any
country, is an exact exponent of its ethical
life.”
It was to illustrate this principle in one
special department that these lectures were
given,-treating the subject tentatively and
historically; for the sake of shortness avoiding
dogmatic discussions, and not dwelling too
long at any single point to interrupt the story
of the universal, necessary, and continuous
development of decorative art. '


THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
LECTURE I.
THE BEGINNINGS.
1. The Art-instinct.–2. A Palæolitbic Masterpiece.-3. Four
Canons and a Definition.-4. Other Barbaric Orna-
ments.-5. Conditioned by Material and Meaning.–6.
Flint, Wood, and Bone.—7. Clay.-8. Basketwork and
Cordage.-9. Metal.-10. All Early Ornament adapted
to represent Objects of Worship.-11. Resulting Typical
Motives of Ornament.-12. The Definition discussed.
-13. The Canons : I. Adaptation.-14. II. Significance.
-15. III. Abstraction or Conventionalization, True
and False.
1. THERE is a pretty tale told in more than
one poet's verses, how a Greek girl of the
Ægean, sitting in the firelight with her
lover, caught a brand from the hearth to
sketch his shadow on the wall; and how wise
men, wondering at the inspiration, carried out
the idea ; and that, they say, was the birth
and beginning of Art.


2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
But long before Greece, or even Egypt, was,
art began in a ruder and humbler way,—began
not once for all, but over and over again. For
no sooner does man appear on this world's
stage, than he sets to making something,
and never finds his work finished until it is
decorated; as if there were some dim desire
in him to create as he too has been created;
as if, made in the image of God, he must
imitate his Maker, who has made everything
beautiful in its time.
2. Curiously enough, we have examples still
left of the actual beginnings of art; relics
treasured up for us in the caves and mounds
that are the only monuments of prehistoric
peoples. One such (Plate I.) is pictured in
popular works on geology, coming to us from
the south-west of France. There, in the date-
less dawn of history, when the British lion and
the cave-bear actually fought one another on
this very soil we tread, a scattered savage
folk lurked in the caves and hunted in the
woods; hardly less untaught than the brutes
they pursued. But those of France and
England were a fine race compared with some


THE BEGINNINGS.
3
of their contemporaries, compared even with
some of modern days, with good crowns to
their heads, and good chins, sturdy-shouldered
and long-limbed.
A family of this race kept house in a cave
of the Dordogne, living even a wilder life than
Imogen's brothers; they had flint knives and
clubs to slaughter elks and elephants; they
ate raw flesh, and drank warm blood. One
day, the father (I suppose) of this palæolithic
household brought home a fine reindeer for
dinner; and having for his part smashed the
big thigh-bone, and sucked the marrow, con-
templatively sat at the cave's mouth, whittling
with his chipped flint. He had made the
broken end of the bone sharper, to stick into
hogs or hyænas, and was trimming the lumpy
end to suit his palm. “Why,” said he, “I
can make it quite pretty; this knob is like a
reindeer's haunches; and”—with a chip or two
_“there is the knee, bent as if it were going
· to sit down; there are the horns, laid along its
back, I can't carve their little branches; no
matter, they would only prick my hand when
I come to use the dagger. There is its throat,


4
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
shaggy, stretched, and lowered ; its muzzle,
snuffing the air; its eye, as big as a baby's.
What do you call this thing I have made,
children ?” “A reindeer!”
3. And so it was,--the very soul and spirit
of a deer in the substance and for the service
of a dagger; the whole nature of true and
right decorative art being then and there
discovered, at once ; and if not for ever, only
because Nature is so lavish of life that she
sows it broadcast among thorns and on the
wayside, and broadcast, too, on the good ground.
Think how many eggs never become chickens ;
think how many brains there are to one idea in
the world; and you will not be surprised if the
same necessities and the same instincts have
caused art to be invented over and over again.
The wonder is that this reindeer is so
perfect a type of Rightness in ornament. Our
palæolithic predecessor knew he must preserve
unspoiled the utility of the article on which he
applied his art; adapting his ornament to its
necessary construction and practical purpose :
there is the first canon of Decoration. He
felt that, to be interesting, his handiwork must


PLATE 1.-PALÆOLITHIC REINDEER.
[To face page 4.


THE
CAST
GRAR


THE BEGINNINGS.
suggest Nature's, that it must mean some-
thing,-a natural object, or what not: there
is the second canon of Decoration. He was
forced by circumstances to limit his repre-
sentation of nature to a simplified rendering
of the structure and the gesture of the animal;
he caught the expression of its neck and knees,
disdaining the imitation of its fur and mere
external detail: there is the third canon of
Decoration. And the result as a wbole is the
expression of his pleasure in nature, and of
interest in his work : and that is the Definition
of Decorative Art.
Here is this poor prehistoric savage evolv-
ing the complete theory and practice of art.
if not quite spontaneously, at least with the
smallest imaginable amount of traditionary
teaching. Indeed, civilization rather hinders
than helps the craftsman.
The earliest ornament is as complete a
subject for our analysis as the latest, and
gives us all the definition we shall ever get
of Decorative Art, and all the canons we shall
ever need; namely, those of Adaptation,
having in view the material in which


THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
the artist works; Significance, referring to
the meaning he wishes to introduce; and
Abstraction, or “Conventionalization” as it is
called, estimating the amount of meaning he
can put into his material. But it would be
well to defer the discussion of them till we
know a little more about barbaric ornament;
and indeed we can never fully feel their force
till we have seen how universally they control
and test all decoration from then till now.
4. This reindeer-hilt is by no means our
only relic of the early stone age. Preserved
in museums and pictured in manuals, we can
see a long series of carvings in the round and
on the flat, done by the earliest known races
of men; pictures of beasts and birds, patterns
of leaves and lines; most with a decorative
intent, and all with an artistic interest. And
in any collection, from savage lands of the
present day, of costumes, ornaments, fetishes,
idols, the same motives of decoration are
continually re-appearing, perpetually redis-
covered. For the primitive savages of to-day
are in their own stone age, just as our
predecessors were, ages ago.


THE BEGINNINGS.
If to these we add the remains of historic
nations in their prehistoric times, as the
Celts and Teutons of the stone and bronze
ages; elementary forms of Egyptian, Assyrian,
and Greek work; the rude beginnings of art
in Mexico and Peru; we shall have a large
field for the historical study of ornament in
its first stage. From this we shall observe
the consistent carrying-out of this law of
apparently spontaneous development of art,
in every race and at every age; each beginning
at the beginning, at the same beginning ;
and proceeding by slow degrees of natural
development, aided by the teaching of previous
styles and neighbouring nations; until, by
regular and ascertainable roads, the highest
goal is reached of Greek or Gothic master-
pieces.
5. The rudiments of Decorative Art commiin
to all races in their earliest stages are con-
ditioned by the material in which their
ornament was wrought, and by the meaning
which it was intended to convey; resulting
in definite typical motives of design, of which
all later work is only an elaborated develop-


THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
ment. In philology we trace the continuous
identity of a word from a remote root to the
current conversational idiom; so in art-history
we trace the continuous identity of a pattern
from beginnings even earlier than any we
know of language, down to their present form
in the very carpet on which we tread, or on
the very plate from which we ate yesterday's
dinner. And all the while, we are studying,
not barren facts, but the whole history of the
world, the quintessence of its ideas, the story
of humanity; and furnishing ourselves too with
materials for a useful and fruitful criticism, not
only of Ornament, but of Ethics.
6. First, of savage design as conditioned by
material. The earliest material used in any
manufacture is flint or other hard stone from
which knives can be chipped: the rough work
marking the early stone age, Palæolithic; the
neat and polished, the later or Neolithic. To
produce a spear or arrow-head, the flint was
chipped to a leaf-shaped point, leaving a thick-
ness, or ridge, like the rib of the leaf. By
dexterous alternate strokes the rib, which a
clumsier workman would make, not straight


Fig.I. From New Zealand.
Fig. 2. From Central America.
PLATE II.-BARBARIC IDEALS.
[To face page 9.


THE BEGINNINGS.
but vaguely crooked, is shaped into a regular
zigzag, seen in an early flint implement from
Denmark. That is about the only ornament
possible to so uncouth a material, before the
invention of metal tools.
With a flint knife, wood, bone, or hom can
be carved, if not delicately, at least adequately
for true decorative purposes, as we have seen in
the reindeer-hilt. Wood carving in the round
is also practised by the rudest tribes; and, in
the hands of the South Sea Islanders, reaches
a high degree of perfection; it is but a step
from the palæolithic style to the elaborate
carvings of Fijian canoes or the New Zealand
house at South Kensington (Plate II., Fig. 1).
In the flat, we find Eskimo ivories scratched
with figures resembling the palæolithic mam-
moth-etching, illustrated in Professor Geikie's
“ Prehistoric Europe."
7. Then follows the invention of pottery.
Once given the idea of making a clay vessel,
the mere passing of the hand round to smooth
it leaves a ridged ring, which would suggest
further ornamentation by scratching. Ac-
cordingly we find, on early British and savage


10
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
jars, lines of scratches; a long one all round,
and a little cross hatching here and there.
That would suggest the imitation of a fish's
skeleton, or bird's feather,—the herring-bone
or feather-stitch pattern. From that to more
complicated cross-hatching and zigzag is a
simple step, and every possibility and combina-
tion of such ideas can be seen on early and
savage pottery, culminating in the elaborate
but still barbaric ornament on Cyprus vases.
Then a chance thrust of the operator's
knuckles would leave a hole, the clay thrust
out of it being heaped like a dyke-wall on -
one side. Rows of such dents and knobs are
seen on ancient British pottery, and might
have suggested the earliest idea of bosses and
rings. To produce these, scraps and strips of
clay were pressed on the damp surface, like
strips of paste upon a jam tart; with that
idea the way is open to some simple forms
of Oriental pottery, ornamented” with snaky
patterns in clay strings laid on. And from
that to some rude imitation of natural forms,
plants, animals, and men, is but a step: thence
to the artistically modelled and moulded


THE BEGINNINGS
11
Samian ware the progress is easy. Finally,
the notion of painting lines upon pottery is a
late improvement upon scratching it; and the
combination of the two leads to the highest
efforts of Greek fictile art. All such inven-
tions as glazing and enamelling imply a
knowledge and ingenuity proper to a later
stage and considerable civilization.
8. Basket-work and cordage, made in very
rude times from such vegetable fibres as
nature supplies to hand, offer endless play of
pattern, from the mere necessities of plaiting
(the earliest form of making cloth), netting, and
weaving; and these patterns suggest further
elaboration of incised ornament. Indeed, it is
supposed that the interlaced design of the
later period of Celtic and Teutonic art is based
,on the baskets and plaids for which Britain
was famous, all Europe over, under the Roman
empire.
9. Metal w 'k is a later, but still barbaric,
stage. At first. thin hammered plates of gold
or bronze were engraved or incised, like early
pottery; such occur among the finds of the
bronze age in Northern Europe; and as far


12
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
as mere technique goes, the Assyrian bronze
bowls, and even Italian niello, are little more.
Next, the thin plate can be repoussé, or
beaten from behind into knobs and figures,
as in Mexican amulets. Then, with further
aid of fire, melted droplets can be made to
ornament the surface; that is Etruscan work.
With the invention of solder, wires can be
affixed, which naturally lend themselves to
circles and spirals, rather than to the style
of ornament suited to engraving or repoussé ;
this is illustrated in a little gold idol (Pl. II.,
Fig. 2) from Central America, in the Liverpool
Museum, where the features are outlined in
wire on a flat surface; the arms are similar
wires, curiously knotted to form the hands
and fingers; and on the breast is a great
spiral. Lastly, in barbaric times, we have the
fine gold thread of Danish sword-hilts, wound
and woven like so much cordage.
10. Thus we see that the first possibilities
of design were hinted by the materials in
which the work had to be done. But these
hints, even if accidentally obtained from such
necessities, produced shapes which were at


THE BEGINNINGS.
13
once recognized as resembling natural forms,
and embodying a symbolism of early nature-
worship. And thus barbaric design is con-
ditioned by the meaning which it was felt to
imply. · A savage, like a child, has a lively
imagination; he sees in a rude zigzag the
waves of the sea; in a circle, the sun; in a
spiral, a snake. Now all these were objects
of worship to such people; and the man who
could put the sun upon your jar, or a snake
upon your bit of gold, was, if not a sacred
person, at any rate a big “medicine-man.”
So the art of early times was a priestly craft;
its style, natural and free at first, as in Egypt,
became gradually rigid and hieratic; and
ornament, as representing powers which all
feared, was a mystic agency. Even to-day there
is many a one in Christendom who looks upon
the rudest sign of a cross as not only a
memento of the Saviour, but an actual sancti-
fying power, or even protection from evil
spirits, and evil men.
It was even more so in these early times;
and in the relics of the bronze age of the
north, described by Mr. Worsaae and Dr.


14
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Hildebrand in their South Kensington Hand-
books, you can trace the development of re-
presentative into conventional symbolism ; into
the plain ring for the moon; the ring and
cross, representing its rays, for the sun; thence
the wheel of the sun-car, a rude boat (like
the golden bowl given to Heracles by Apollo),
is the sun-ship, doubled and complicated into
elaborate devices. Three converging lines
mean the mystic triad, and bent or hooked
at the ends become the triquetra, a sacred
emblem in many mythologies, and handed
down to us in the three legs of the Isle of
Man. A figure of S is the sun-snake, connected
with several sets of early cults, and repre-
senting the vivifying powers of Nature. These
combined into a line make a rope pattern,
into a double line the plait; which, however
readily derived from other necessities of manu-
facture, are thus adapted and adopted into
the service of mystic symbolism. The feather
pattern, standing upright, is a tree—the tree
of life,—the date-palm to the southerns stand-
ing for the nourishing power of the earth ;
to the northerns, the ash-tree of existence.


THE BEGINNINGS.
15
And the zigzag, the sea's billows, toppling
over into breakers on the shore, combines
itself with the spiral ; hence the Greek wave
pattern, or Kymation, found on their earliest
monuments, no doubt with its symbolic signi-
ficance, especially among a seafaring folk.
This, done in straight lines for convenience
of rude painting and incision, is at once the
mæander or Greek fret, which we know means
a river, winding through the plain.
Other instances could be adduced to show
how simple forms, necessitated by the material
in which the earliest races of men wrought
their manufactures, suggested resemblances
which were at once invested with a meaning ;
that meaning always significant of religious
mysteries.
11. We have in result a limited number of
typical motives, bases of all ornament. The
feather or tree; the zigzag for water; the
triangle and triquetra, for the early mystic
number and triad of deities common to many
religions. The circle, or set of concentric
circles, variously and significantly combined
with straight or hooked lines; the spiral or


18
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
treats his child, his work, as Mother Nature
treats her children, her work,—by adorning it.
He treats Mother Nature as his own children
treat him, by imitating her.
Decorative art is, then, the expression of the
workman's interest, or pleasure, in Nature and
in his work.
You cannot have a simpler or truer test.
You are told by critics that a common machine-
printed calico is not art. Why? Because it
is not the expression of the workman's pleasure
in his work, but an unwilling drudgery of
degrading mechanical toil. They say such
and such a design is not artistic. Why? Be-
cause it is not the expression of the designer's
interest in Nature, but only a stupid cobweb
spun out of a dull, thoughtless brain. On the
other hand, an Indian carpet, a Persian plate,
a Greek coin, a Gothic carving, these are
decorative art, because they were made under
the strongest feelings of pleasure in Nature
and in work; and they interest you because
you discern, dimly or clearly, that human
happiness, human heart's emotion, is stored
up in them,-latent, so to speak, like lightning


THE BEGINNINGS.
19
in a Leyden jar; quiescent, hidden, but ready
to be revealed to any other human heart
that beats in sympathy with the artist.
In this alone lies the value of Art. The
real worth of anything you have is not what
it will bring, but what it costs to procure or
replace. My old coat to me is worth a guinea
(though it would fetch only half-a-crown
if I sold it), for it would cost me a guinea
to buy another. And the real value of a work
of art is not its selling price at an auctioneer's,
but depends on the thought, the truth of
observation, the depth of emotion that was
put into it by the artist, and that a sympathetic
spectator can get out of it.
That is why the ornament of barbaric or
half-civilized tribes is better than the me-
chanical manufactures of our enlightened land.
For they put their soul into their work; we
put only our capital into ours, and as little
of that as possible.
13. But there is a good and bad in deco-
rative art, and these can be judged by the
three canons already suggested. These canons
are just the simple statement of the intentions


20
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
common to all good decorators in all great
ages and nations. Wherever these canons
have been neglected, there results a fallacy
or failure in the work, generally recognized,
though not always understood.
The first is the canon of Adaptation : that
ornament must not hinder, but rather help, the
usefulness of the thing ornamented; must not
conceal, but rather express, the construction
of it; that, after all, it must only be the out-
ward and visible sign of the worker's interest
in his work, never the mask of his contempt
for it.
The most rudimentary instance of this
canon is when the threads of the fabric or
joints in the structure themselves so happily
unite use and beauty as to need no added
labour for decoration, nor added material for
ornament,-for this is a distinction not uncom-
monly made; Ornament being misunderstood
as a separate, applied thing, like removable
jewels of a Roman cup, or removable idols
of a south-Indian shrine. So far as these
are separable from the main purpose, they
show luxury and decadence in the makers,


THE BEGINNINGS.
with want of unity and consequent want of
harmony and repose either in the sentiment
or style of the work. The name “ Applied”
Art is, from these reasons, a little unsatis-
factory: because it suggests that one person
can make it, and another stick it on; that a
little extra charge to the nation for Art-Schools
will produce artists; and a little extra charge
to the customer will induce these artists to
add a little beauty to the vulgar manufactures
of the drudging million. Nothing is more
fallacious than such an idea ; and we shall
see that a great decorative school only exists
where the workmen are artists, and the artists
workmen ; where the adaptation of beauty to
use is planned and performed by those who
themselves create the useful articles.
It seems almost absurd to mention that
ornament must not be an extraneous ex-
crescence, an encumbrance to the article it
professes to adorn. But how often do we
find a thing is “ too good to use," or overlaid
with glitter and carving, pattern after pattern
piled on like a caddis-worm's nest, until it is
obviously useless, being made only for show.


THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Such things—and there are many in the shops
-are not good decorative art; they offend
against the first canon. Early barbaric deco-
ration, so far from this, in many cases no doubt
was actually adopted to increase the utility;
as the roughening of a sword or axe hilt by a
relief-pattern, to offer a firmer hold.
Most satisfactory is that style and spirit of
design which seizes upon salient points of
construction, and heightens their interest by
suitable decoration.
The maker of the reindeer noticed the
knob—the Trochanter, I suppose—which he
found on the bone, and felt that it was useful
in the construction as well as necessary in
the material: so he worked it into his design.
The Greek and Gothic architects are pre-
eminent at this adaptation, which looks like
so much mere luck; but that luck is genius.
What is it you notice most in a Greek temple ?
the pillars: what most in the pillars ? the
capital: so on the capital they spend their
design. What are the most obvious con-
structive points in a Gothic church ? the
buttress, porch, and window: upon these,


THE BEGINNINGS.
23
then, they lavish their ornament, expressing
and adorning the construction to the best
advantage.
This leads to a minor law, that of Economy.
While every part may be beautiful, some
parts must be su. There is no use in a
quantity of delicate decoration where it cannot
be seen; while the most prominent point,
the place where your eye frequently rests, is
worthy of most elaborate adornment.
14. The second canon is that of Signi-
ficance; and forbids the attempt to decorate
with nonsense ornament-expressing no in-
terest in Nature, and more self-conceit in the
workman than pleasure in his work. It says,
ornament must have a meaning, must be
significant of the worker's interest in Nature;
otherwise it will have no tale to tell, it will
only serve to cover a space and hide the dirt.
Everything in the world has a duty, and
that is, to do its best: ornament can do,
ought to do, something better than just cover
a space; and in fact all good ornament has
a significance more or less distinct.
What that significance is will be our


THE BEGINNINGS.
25
Representation of Nature in late stages of
society; and in early stages Sacred Symbolism
of Nature, to which is occasionally added
symbolism of abstract ideas, like the “three
legs” for the triad of Divinities. And we
shall find that the neglect of this canon occurs
only in periods of corrupted society and art.
15. The third canon is that of Abstraction,
or simplification of natural beauty to suit it
to the purposes of art. This is often called
Conventionalization : a word to which unfortu-
nately a double meaning attaches, which
renders it dangerous to use. The good and
useful meaning, applicable to this canon, and
to all decorative art, is this: if you make your
ornament in all respects exactly like the
natural object copied—reindeer for instance,
or rose—you must sacrifice some of the utility
of the article, some of the suitability (whether
practical or sentimental) of the decoration to
its purpose: therefore adapt beauty to use,
not use to beauty.
The reindeer's hide and horns are left un-
finished: why? because a higher finish would
add little beauty, and would subtract from the


THE BEGINNINGS.
27
silk, the Greek with his ccin, the Gothic artist
with his marble; and in all decoration imitate
only those points in Nature which you can
imitate successfully under the circumstances.
Thirdly, it suits the use. Not only would
elaborated and successful imitations of real
roses and birds be too costly for most people,
but they would spoil plates for eating from,
knives for handling, and so on; and that is
against our first canon.
False conventionalization is the contradic-
tion of the second canon; it does not tell you
to adapt beauty to use, but to adapt natural
to ideal or academical notions of beauty;
“ don't copy anything as you see it, but as
you think it ought to be.” Well, are your
ideas likely to be best, or are Nature's ?
These preliminary notions will be illustrated
in our review of the history of Ornament, in
which we shall see how universal and necessary
a thing is art; how impossible to remove, to
ignore; it is everywhere around us, like the
air we breathe. Those people who pretend
to set Utilitarianism against art, who set
charity against culture, who cry for comfort,


28
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
“and let us hear no nonsense about architec-
ture;” those people are simply attempting the
impossible. Their own houses are crammed
full of ornament, which would make them
better if it were good; but being as it is, works
an insidious mischief which they will find out
all too late. We have, at last, some hopes
of health in the house for our bodies; health
in the house for our minds we shall never
have without as much thought given to art
as is given to sanitary reform.
Some art we are bound to have; why not
see that it is worth having ? No one has
ever succeeded in expelling it altogether, as
Plato expelled the poets, and Perdita the
gillyflowers. And indeed of decoration, neces-
sitated and conditioned as it is by strictest
laws of human life, it is most profoundly
true that
“ Nature is made better by no mean,
But Nature makes that mean. ... This is an Art
Which does mend Nature,-change it, rather : but
The Art itself is Nature.”


LECTURE II.
EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
1. Religion and Art.—2. Egyptian Ornament.—3. Assyrian
“ Conventionalism.”—4. The Knop and Flower Pattern.
-5. Other Assyrian Motives.—6. Symbolism.—7.
Ethics of Style.—8. Egyptian Symmetry.-9. Assyrian
Strength.
1. THE ornament of all early ages, notably
that of ancient Egypt and Assyria, was a sacred
and mystic symbolism. Its use was primarily
for religious purposes, to adorn the tem-
ples, the sacrifices, the priests. Secondarily
it was applied to domestic uses,—not for
mere luxury's sake, as men grew richer and
could afford fine houses and fine clothes ;
but as a sign of the sanctification of daily
life, by the introduction of divine symbols,
protecting amulets and ever-present tokens of
ever-present powers. Just as in India a sacred
name is given to a child, that the parents


30
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
may utter a prayer whenever they utter their
child's name; or in ancient Greece and modern
Christendom, that the child might be under
some god's protection, or influenced by some
saint's example; so early ornaments were
shrines set up in the house, or charms worn
about the person, as a witness between God
and man.
Further, the ornament was a beautiful thing,
and, so derived, nobly beautiful; it raised
emotion, and, with such associations, noble
emotion. With us, art in the house means
luxury, and too often suggests vice; with them
it meant religion, and suggested virtue. Every
pattern to them was like a little oratory,
or like those texts which people hang in
their rooms and call them “silent com-
forters."
That such was the case universally in early
civilization is proved by the sacred character
of all motives of the European bronze age;
by the hieratic adornment of Egyptian mum-
mies ; by the continual introduction of the
figures of deities and other attributes in such
Assyrian art-work as we have left to us; by


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
31
the “tree of life,” and many another inotive
of Asiatic design. We, who are accustomed
to meaningless or vicious ornament, and who
are unaccustomed to allow that these ancient
heathens had either hopes of heaven or fear
of heaven before their eyes, may find it hard
to realize. But as we examine the decoration
of Egypt and Assyria, we shall see that these
peoples, in their prime, were seriously reli-
gious, and both wittingly and unwittingly
expressed their seriousness in their art.
2. The Egyptians are remarkable for their
want of strictly ornamental motives of pattern.
They have abundance of decoration, but it
consists chiefly in figures of deities, and in
hieroglyphic writing, itself consummately or-
namental, full of beauty and variety,-fuller
of meaning. Having this, they needed no
further ideas from flowers or birds or geometrical
arrangements, until in a later age they learnt
the arts of other nations under the dominion
of Rome.
In their architecture, however, the sacred
lotus and papyrus are frequently introduced,
severely and formally cut, not for the sake of


32
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
conventionalization, but simply because their
eye was satisfied with a simple rendering, and
their hand must suit itself to the hard syenite
in which they carved. In painting and textile
work, spare spaces are filled with squares, the
squares with suggested flowers, or monotonous
lines of simple zigzag, varied by the merest
hints at a leaf pattern. This sometimes rises
to recurring lotus blossoms, arranged in the
zigzag; alternate blossom and bud (Pl. III.,
Fig. 1); basis of the knop and flower (Fig. 2),
bell and pomegranate, Greek honeysuckle, and
infinite variations of this simple theme which
the Assyrians developed and handed on to
Persia and Greece. In Egypt itself we find
this pattern varied later by the introduction
of grapes, bulls' heads, papyrus, date palm
and fruit, but hardly attaining the ornamental
richness suggested by the remains of Assyria
and Babylonia; which with all their archaic
stiffness were even then oriental, standing to
early Greece just as Bagdad, their successor
on the same site, stood to early Europe; and
the “goodly Babylonish garment” of three
thousand years ago was no doubt as picturesque


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
and brilliant a fabric as any Syrian shawl you
can buy in the shops.
The Egyptians are powerful designers of
figures, but their figures are all drawn to
stringent rules, which prescribe proportion and
position even more severely than the academic
theorists of last century. This is not a mark
of the infancy, but of the decrepitude, of a
style, and means that the age in which we
best know Egypt, early as it was, was already
an age of decadence. In fact, extremely
ancient wooden statues have been found of
surprising life-likeness in attitude and ex-
pression; suggesting that the Egyptians began
with Naturalism, like all other good artists,
and only gradually fell into the timidity and
thoughtlessness which shirks reference to
nature,-into a prudish style, which fears
to shock conventionalities of custom by the
slightest betrayal of emotion or reference to
life and action.
3. From Egypt is derived the culture of
Assyria, Babylonia, and ancient Syria; through
whom, or with whom, are influenced the
Phænicians, Hittites, Medians, and Indians,


34
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT. .
whose animal and flower patterns show the
same degree and style of decorative treat-
ment.
The Assyrians decorated, like the Egyptians,
with pictorial relief, whose aim was not to give
the appearance, but the facts of nature ; not
attempting deception, but offering informa-
tion; not imitative, but symbolical. This way
of work is nowadays called “conventional," and
by a mistaken analogy from the mistaken
principles of modern decorators, is supposed
to be an intentional falsification of nature for
the purposes of art; but to them it was neces-
sary and natural, from the limitation of their
material, and from the liveliness of a childlike
imagination, which was easily satisfied with
the rudest hint of life-likeness, so long as the
meaning was made clear. For example, they
had to carve on a hard stone wall a multitude
of captives dragging a winged bull. The
special artist of the Illustrated News would
draw in full a figure or two in the foreground,
and by dexterous but entirely conventional
loops and knobs over the heads of the front
rank, would give you the crowd behind.




1.Egyptian flowered zigzag.
3.Egyptian lotus blossom and bud.
5.Indian honeysuckle or lotus.
4.Assyrian Soma,flower and fruit. 2. Assyrian "Grove or Palm and Soma,
6. Indian Iris.
CO
M
VOX VO
7. Early Cyprian lotus.
8. Greek palmette and honeysuckle
9. Renaissance Shell


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
35
But the Assyrian wants you to know how many
diffe:rent nationalities of captives are in that
crowd; their costumes, characteristics ; how
some work with a will, some are lazy, some
faint, while the taskmasters ply their whips,
and the overseers look on under the eye
of king and court. So frankly sacrificing
all attempt at landscape perspective, which
he does not feel nor care for, he gives a dia-
gram, or bird's-eye view, of the scene. We
may call it conventional, but the intent of this
treatment is quite different from that of a
modern designer of impossible shapes, vaguely,
if at all, suggesting natural objects.
4. The Assyrian writing, though used like
Egyptian hieroglyphics where it may decorate
surfaces, is less varied and picturesque. So
they amplify the rudimentary patterns just
described into more interesting and elaborate
arrangements. The Egyptian flowered zigzag
may be the basis of that universal device
known as the knop and flower (Plate III.,
Fig. 1). First we have the lotus and bud,
palmette and date, leaf and cone, bell and
pomegranate, much as in Egypt (Plate III.,


36
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Fig. 3). The palace of Koyunjik is decorated
with lotus buds and blossoms of almost
Egyptian severity. Then connected with this
arrangement comes the important device of
the palm and soma tree, described at length
by Dr. Birdwood in the South Kensington
Handbook on the Industrial Arts of India.
The soma is a leafless bindweed with fanlike
flowers and conelike fruit, which supplied
the intoxicating juice used before the vine
was known, as the palm around which it
twined afforded the date, the staff of life.
The flower and cone have mystic meanings of
their own like the thyrsus of Bacchus, and the
lotus in Egyptian and Indian art. The stem
with its snaky convolutions has significance
too: for serpent-worship is one of the oldest
cults ; in Phoenician monuments snakes are
the attributes of Moloch or Death, as the lotus
of life; even if snakes symbolize life they
generally convey some malign underthought.
The palm twined with the soma represent then
the trees of Eden; indeed there is a famous
relief of Sardanapalus' feast, where the snake
himself twines in the tree of life, Lilith-


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
headed, eating the fruit in the garden,
exactly as he appears in mediæval missals.
In Assyrian religion these trees form the
“Grove,” Asherah, sacred to their great god
Asshur. The figure of them, and combinations
of this figure into a pattern, are common in
all their work : thence carried to Media, -you
read in Herodotus of the golden tree of the
Persian kings, and adopted as a common
motive of decoration. Look at almost any
Persian rug: you will see it covered with a
rude semblance of a tree, liker the seven-
branched candlestick of the Jewish tabernacle
than any natural tree, or likest of all to a
number of capital Y's in apparently meaning-
less confusion; but these are a dimly remem-
bered tradition of the trees of Eden. And
the swinging wreaths of soma-stalks, festooned
from branch to branch of the palm, and
fringed with blossom and fruit, are adapted to
that typical pattern known by the curved line
joining alternate knop and flower beneath
(Fig. 4). This pattern travelled farther east-
ward: in Persia and India it reappears,
sometimes in a highly conventional, sometimes


38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
in a naturalistic form (Figs. 5 and 6), and is
found even on Chinese pottery. It travelled
westward : we see it on fragments dug up at
Cyprus (Fig. 7), and it develops in Greece
into the well-known palmette and honeysuckle
(Fig. 8). Thence to Rome, recurring con-
tinually in mediæval textiles, Renaissance shell
mouldings (Fig. 9), and recognised most unex-
pectedly in rustic traditions of popular design,
as the silver bells and cockle or pilgrim's
scallop shells of the nursery myth. Many
such unnoticed vulgar motives of ornament
originate in some sacred symbol of early ages;
and the history of Decorative Art in this
department might be made as curious and as
interesting as the history of common words,
or myths, or ideas, in the hands of philologists
and sociologists.
5. What may have been the richness of
decoration in the coloured tiles of Babylon,
of which we hear vague traditions, is beyond
our knowledge; but from the fragments of
pottery, ivories, and 'bronze vessels in the
British Museum, we gather that other common
motives for continuous patterns are based on


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
39
a more or less complicated cord, related to
the Greek wave-pattern (Pl. V., Fig. 4), the
northern line of “sun-snakes" (Pl. VII., Fig.
1), perhaps parent of such later ideas as the
collar of SS. Also stars and rosettes, singly or
in rows, frequently occur without great play of
invention. A round bowl, for instance, has a
star in the centre, round it a rope, a ring of
rosettes, a ring of little figures, a ring of dots ;
then the same over again, thrice repeated.
There is also a simple wreath-moulding or
laurel-leaf pattern, adopted like all the others
by the Greeks, who learnt from their prede-
cessors, altering what they took but very
slightly indeed; for the childhood of a nation
prefigures its later development as definitely
as a boy's tastes foreshadow the man's life-work.
6. In studying the philosophy of ornament
we must clearly grasp and bear in mind the
two different modes in which the human mind
manifests itself in art. There is, first and
simplest, the expression of definite intellectual
ideas in symbolism, and secondly, the uncon-
scious betrayal of national character in style.
Of symbolism enough has been said to show


40
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
that all early art is meant to mean something,
some mystery of life or nature or divinity
at first; and later, some token of ownership
or advertisement of use which we now should
express in plain writing. Beside that of
Egypt and Assyria, much of the decorative
art of Japan, for example, is heraldic or allu-
sive; a chrysanthemum is the badge of the
emperor, a crane the emblem of longevity,
and so on. Gothic and Renaissance artists,
even when playing most carelessly with the
motives of their purely decorative patterns,
keep sight of the original meaning of these
motives, attributes of saints, or heroes,—Tudor
rose, French lily, and all the “totems" or
animal cognizances of noble families,—boars,
bears, lions, salamanders, eagles, vipers, and the
rest. Ornament based on these motives has
an interest unfelt in our wall papers and
carpets, and a fitness and propriety which we
can hardly realize, overwhelmed as we are
with machine-made goods, and commonplace
patterns indefinitely reproduced, adapted to
everybody and everything in general, but to
nobody and nothing in particular.


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
41
7. Of style, as betraying national character,
we find abundant evidences in Egypt and
Assyria ; whose strongly-marked features, both
mental and moral, afford a good field for the
study. Here, as in every case, we must be-
ware of taking a symptom of national deca-
dence for a point of national character; and our
notions of the true spirit of these great nations
in their prime must be drawn from what we
can gather of their own literature and history,
not from the warnings and threats uttered
against them by the Hebrew prophets, long
after the real national greatness of Egypt and
Assyria had passed away. We find that in
their best time their culture was high, their
moral ideas healthy, and their religious beliefs
both lofty and sincere; equalled and expounded
by their dignified and powerful decoration.
The rudimentary motives of design, discussed
in Lecture I., are common to all the world,
like the rudimentary conceptions they express.
But different nations develop them differently
according to varying national character and
circumstances. Out of the common elements
of architecture the Egyptians make a pyramid,


42
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
the Assyrians a “ tower of Babel” in diminish-
ing stories (the eastern pagoda), and the Greeks
their pillared portico; each race assimilating
the special feature most suited to its wants
and ideas. Out of the common idea of the
knop and flower, the Egyptians make a stiff
and solemn hieratic ornament, the Assyrians
a springy and sturdy moulding, the Greeks
an abstract, and the Indians a natural pattern
(Plate III.) It is all summed in the axiom,
“ Art is Nature plus Man;" for the varieties
of style depend on the varying aspects of
nature in different lands, together with the still
more varying dispositions of different races.
8. Reflective and solemn minds cannot help
being impressed by the reflections of quiet
water or echoes in quiet air. In music,
the recurring insistance of a lullaby's refrain
has a power that no melody or words could
give; in painting, the repetition of a violent
shape or tint calms down its violence into
grandeur; and the silence of Turner's twilights
(Mr. Ruskin has observed) depends on doubled
cuckoo-notes of colour, re-echoed over and over
and over again.


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
43
Recurrence in art expresses repose; reflection
or symmetry, solemnity. This idea was caught
by the Egyptians, and carried out to express
their own feelings. Just as some oppressed
nations have created a plaintive music of their
own, so the Egyptian tone of mind, submissive
and awed before unapproachable, implacable
rulers of earth and heaven, finds its outcome
in subdued and solemn symmetry, broad,
massive, pensive, like trees at twilight reflected
in a quiet pool.
You see the artistic character of the
Egyptians in everything they touch. No figure
so small but it conveys this solemn sense of
something beyond the turmoil of daily life;
no ornament so slight but it suggests a re-
verential gloom, the reverse of Greek gaiety
or modern recklessness. And their ethical
character you see from beliefs in stern divinities
who bring the soul to judgment after death;
from the hieratic nature of their art itself,
regulated by rules, whose breach was not
merely an error, but a sin; and from their
sacred psalms, in which the recurring rhythm
of the sonorous invocation, quite apart from


44
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
any sense or meaning carried by the words
or images used, beats down the wandering
thoughts of the listener to silent and reve-
rential awe. Such fragments of Egyptian
liturgy as we possess reflect Egyptian Deco-
rative Art as exactly as Sophocles reflects
Phidias, or Rossetti's poems illustrate his
pictures.
9. The Assyrians were religious, but after a
different sort; and their art, as art always
must, expresses their character, whatever
their creed may be. They were warriors and
conquerors, leading an active and varied life,
holding less rigid traditions and moral code.
They felt, not so much the awfulness as the
might of Deity; their epics (like those of the
Greeks) tell of the battles of the gods, and
achievements of the mighty hunter Nimrod.
And their art depicts the might of their
kings; spearing the lion, for instance, not in
violent motion as with the Greeks, but in
irresistible power, calm but energetic, with
Michael Angelesque muscles, and attitudes of
grandeur. Egyptian solemnity was learnt by
them, but informed with a strength of action


EGYPT AND ASSYRIA.
45
which makes even their slightest ornament
powerful, and yet not restless or spasmodic.
From them the Persians learnt their grand
but lively designs; and from them the Greeks
learnt their first lessons, which, carried out
among new surroundings of Ægean isles and
Parnassian peaks, culminate in the majesty of
the Parthenon and the deities of Phidias.
As we already may discern, the course of
art-progress runs through history like a triple
thread, with these three strands :-Instinct,
spontaneously generating the elements of
design; Imitation, obediently learning from
the experience of predecessors; and Style,
unconsciously betraying national character in
the combination of the two former.
If Instinct gives its strength to the cord,
Imitation secures continuity to its length;
for though the imagination is always recreat-
ing and remodelling the material of art in
new forms, yet in this material there is
nothing new under the sun. Every pattern
is the child of some earlier device; so that
all the ages and stages of art are “ bound
each to each by natural piety.”


LECTURE III.
ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
1. The Great Races of Asia.—2. Persian Art-history.-3.
Persian Style.-4. Arabesque and Moresque.-5. Indian
Art-history.-6. Aryan Style.—7. Dravidian Style.-8.
Circumstances of the Art-workman in India.-9. China
and Japan, Character and—10. History.
1. By the examples given in the first lecture,
it has been seen how, all the world over, what-
ever the age, race, climate, or circumstances
may be, the first rudimentary ideas of art
arise out of similar wants and wishes, and
develop into similar typical forms, ruled by
three canons. By examples in the second
lecture, further development is shown to be
conditioned by the moral and intellectual
character of each race. Now we shall see still
more striking examples of this; for we have
in Asia two great races, radically different in
body and mind, Aryan and Turanian : the


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
47
former akin to us Celts and Teutons, and to
the Greeks; the latter embracing Turks and
Tartars, Mongols and Malayans, Chinese and
Japanese. Ethnologically, there are these
two great styles of intellect and of art in Asia.
Geographically, there are four great art-pro-
ducing lands,-Persia, purely Aryan; India,
mixed Aryan and Turanian, the first predomi-
nating ; China, Turanian with strong Aryan
influences; and Japan, Turanian nearly pure
and simple. All other Asiatic nations are
either insignificant as producers or incomplete
as types of artistic development.
2. Persia has always claimed an individuality
of its own: there, the Aryan mind caught
and carried out the lessons of Egypt through
Assyria, at a very early age; imparting to
primitive strength and solemnity an elegance
which we Aryans generally recognise as the
Beautiful. The love and appreciation of
beauty, rather than grandeur or grotesque,
can be traced, degenerating into mere display,
in everything Persian,-poetry, art, manners,
religion, ancient and modern. And this is
the special gift of the race; for while every


48
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
true-born Persian is an artist, the Turks
in Persia do not share their talent. And
in ancient times their various conquerors
patronized, but only partially could imitate,
their arts.
Very early they learnt valuable secrets of
decorative manufacture, such as that of lustre-
glaze for pottery, practised there until the
end of the sixteenth century. And long before
the making of fine porcelain was introduced
from China (from the thirteenth to the six-
teenth centuries A.D.), Persian ware was refined
and artistic. Indeed, Chinese influence did
more harm than good to their design, whatever
it did for technique; as you can see in many
specimens in which true Persian grace is
deformed by an attempt to imitate Chinese
grotesque.
In Persia, though we can detect a transition
(more striking when we have a completer
historical series of remains) from severe to
florid style; and yet the fixity of their dis-
tinctive character is shown by the stucco
stalactite ornament familiar in vaults and
niches; and which has been found in the ruins


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
49
of Rhé or Rhages, destroyed six hundred years
ago; and carried abroad through the Levant
and Arab and Moorish lands, testifying always
to the presence of Persian artists. For the
Arabs were rather patrons than pupils of
Persia, and the Mohammedan caliphs of the
East, and conquerors of the West, employed
Persian workmen wherever they went. A
colony of such went so far as Spain, and
called the name of their new home Xeres,
after the old one, Shiraz: an even wider ex-
tension in Europe is hinted by a tradition
which connects the Hermitage vine of
France with Shiraz, as well as the sherry
of Spain; and “Saracens " settled, not only
in Southern Italy, but even in Savoy. But
the Hispano-Moresque and Siculo-Arabian
arts, with all their imitations by European
designers, must be assigned to Persian in-
fluence more or less direct.
Their artistic nature renders the Persians
unable for the most part to adopt the extreme
tenets of Mohammedanism, which forbid the
making of images ; so that the nation as a
whole is of the Shi’ah sect: and even strict
4
-
-
-
-
-
-


50
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Sunnis in Persia relax so far as to draw figures
-but they leave the faces blank.
The great period of Persian decoration was
the reign of Shah Abbas, time of Queen
Elizabeth ; since the conquest by the Afghans
last century it has declined, and is declining
still farther and faster wherever European
influence can introduce the machinery and
competition so dear to British interests, and
so destructive to art.
3. The character of Persian ornament is
beauty, and the balance between restraint and
freedom, symmetry and picturesqueness. It
aims at producing the richest possible effect
with its means; at giving the flowing curves
of the rose and its leaves, rather than the
harsh angles of its stalks and thorns. But
with the greatest possible grace it does not
fall into languor, being rather bright than
voluptuous; the lines springing, not falling. .
The Persians in old times were taught to
ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the
truth; and saving the truth—these are their
accomplishments now. And the spring of
their line, the brightness of their colour, are


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
51
just the artistic outcome of an active if not
heroic life, under a bright sky in a land of
flowers.
Flowers are generally their motives of
ornament; naturally grouped as they grow,
with the springing lines sympathetically
given. Or else the patterns derived from
earlier art blossom out into flowers; mæander,
egg and dart, knop and flower, wave-spiral
or kymation, all brightened and blooming
with floral detail, though keeping the orderli-
ness and restraint of antiquity. The rope
and plait, they use; and especially a starry
cross, which often forms an outline to be
filled up with elaborated design. Writing
with them is ornament, its free flowing curves
making every letter almost a flower. A
special and delightful manner of covering a
large surface with varied and yet harmonious
decoration is to break it up into spaces,—not
straight panels, as in English Perpendicular,
but “arches on arches,” round or pointed;
or a network of loops elliptical or irregular,
and filled with little figure-subjects. From
this style some ideas of the later mediæval


52
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT,
church windows may have been derived,
when they show loopsful of saints, surrounded
by flowing foliage.
4. Arabesque and Moresque are adaptations
of the Persian; developing geometrical
elements at the expense of natural. Stricter
iconoclasts, like Arabs and Moors, were bound
by their religion to avoid, not only the “lust
of the eye,” but any form of ornament
whose associations might, consciously or
unconsciously, carry them back to the old-
world worship they had left. We have seen
how all ornament was symbolical of some
religious idea; therefore, to break with the
old religion meant to break with the old
art; except in certain cases, where through
wisdom or weakness the new religion sought
not to break with the old, but to emphasize
its development out of it, in which case
earlier art was retained and transformed.
5. Of the four chief Asiatic races, the
Indian is the least homogeneous, and yet,
with all the complexity of its ethnology and
politics, something of a uniform spirit
pervades the whole peninsula, and marks off


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
53
its art from that of other parts of the
world; for it is not only the origin but
the circumstances of art that determine it.
Dr. Birdwood, from whose “ Industrial Arts
of India” most of my information is drawn,
says (p. 132): “Many separate elements have
contributed toward the development of the
decorative arts of India. There are the simple
archaic forms of the aboriginal negroid tribes,
who are now found only on the hills, or in
the more inaccessible parts of the upland
plains of Central India; the wild fantastic
forms of the Indo-Chinese tribes of the
Eastern Himalaya and Burmese frontier; the
monstrous [ swami'] forms of the Dravidian
races of the Dakhan ; and the primitive Aryan
beast and flower forms of Hindustan, and
revived Aryan knop and flower pattern reintro-
duced into India by its Persianized Afghan
and Mongol [Turkoman] conquerors."
Putting aside the merely savage, as well
as distinctly foreign influences, imported in
historical times, and on historical occasions,
we have the Dravidian decoration of the South
and the Aryan of the North, both Indian, and


54
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
running into one another in Central India.
The Aryan art came in no doubt with the
Aryan race; and as it seems to have done in
other parts of the world, so probably here
transformed the pre-existing Turanian art, by
the introduction of a more human and beau-
tiful ideal. So that practically both Persia
and India start from the same point,-savage
conceptions, enlarged by the teaching of Egypt
through Assyria, and enlivened by Aryan
culture.
Alexander's conquest of the Punjab, fourth
century B.C., introduced ideas of Greek art,
eagerly caught by the imitative Hindoos, to
whom nothing in the way of copying seems
difficult, and who can assimilate with ease
Greek, Mohammedan, or British culture.
Remains of thoroughly Græcized Indian art
have been discovered, throwing light upon the
almost Byzantine draperies of early Buddhist
figures, and the palmette ornament of late
goldsmith's work,—for instance, on Lucknow
vases.
Then came periods of less archaic Persian
influence, leaving examples in early Buddhist


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
55
vases wrought before the Christian era. In the
eighth century A.D. Hindostan was added to
the Mohammedan empire by the Saracen
caliph Valid, eighty years before Haroun-al-
Rashid of Bagdad and of the “Arabian Nights.”
Again, during the whole eleventh century, the
Seljukian Turks ruled Hindostan as a part of
their vast Asiatic Empire, reaching from the
wall of China to the Mediterranean. Then at
the end of the fourteenth century Timur Lang
and the Mongols (or Moguls) overran the
country; and at the close of the fifteenth
century his descendant Baber founded the
Empire of Delhi, ruled afterwards by Akbar
and Aurungzebe, and finally overthrown by
the Persians and Afghans in the middle of
the eighteenth century, and by the English
at the end of it,—six successive invasions.
All these conquerors—not to mention
quieter immigrants—brought new ideas into
India, kept up a continual stream of influence
from without; but these ideas were only such
as they themselves had acquired in their
contact with Persia or Europe, so that during
its whole history, Aryan India has been only


56
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
more thoroughly Aryanized, and the lessons
its art had already learnt from Persia still
more thoroughly enforced.
In spite of the slow changes of oriental
civilization, a development can be traced,
parallel to that of Persia, from Archaism to
Severity, and thence to a Florid style. Vases
of even the Mogul period are almost classic
in their graceful formation, while nothing is
too florid for the more modern taste.
6. Though so perpetually under Persian
influence, Hindoo Art has a character of its
own. The Indians are less interested in
flowers, and more in figures, than the Persians.
Their figures are often well drawn, and show
an appreciation of the nude in relief-sculpture,
though treated in a special style. The Greeks
delighted in a round surface, sinking gently
and with picturesque varieties of steepness
into the background. The lines of a Greek
design are at one time marked, at another
lost, and the masses so undulating that you
can never find a square inch of flat surface.
Early Gothic sculpture delights in picturesque
light and shade; the highlights are more


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
57
relieved than in Greek work, the darks more
sharp and deep. But Indian sculptors feel no
necessity for the connection of the subject and
background, nor much for gradation, or
variety of light or modelling. The outline
everywhere is equally relieved from the deep
and dark ground, and the subject is flat, even
though the relief be anything but low. So that,
for want of a picturesqueness, such as Euro-
peans and Persians in their flower-modelling
feel and give, the clever design and charming
motives of much Indian sculpture do not
show to the best advantage. The colour of
Indian work is hot and gaudy, compared with
Persian brilliancy; but there is a still more
striking difference in their feeling for line.
There is a spring about the Persian design,
a natural living growth, as in Gothic leaf-
cutting. The Indians love a more languid
line, beautiful in its way, but recalling sultry
skies, and expressing a less energetic and
vivacious race, a more submissive spirit. If
you compare the borders of Indian sculpture
on the stairs of the British Museum, as an acces-
sible example, with such a specimen of their


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
59
—a want of repose and breadth ; a predomi-
nance of hard lines; a fretful insistence on
recurring forms, generally the least graceful
in the design, something akin to the hard
strap work, straight framing, and cartouches
of the Renaissance. Flowers are less fre-
quent; their place is taken by geometrical,
monotonously conventional, often rectangular
patterns; and very rich but coarsely felt
fluting is prominent. And in Central India
you see the junction of north and south
ideas in the combination of pretty floral
ornament with this southern fluting on the
vases of Hyderabad, figured in Dr. Birdwood's
work.
Indo-Chinese ornament is a third style:
in Nepaul you have it, with much of the
grotesque inconsequence of true Chinese.
But rounding the Bay of Bengal into the
Malay peninsula, we find new circumstances
and a new style,-bred, in a way, between
India and China, but still different from
either; a style of hugeness without power,
of elaboration without interest, at once
uncivilized and unpoetical : at least, that is


60
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
the impression given by the specimens of
carving and sketches of architecture from
Burmah and Siam.
8. As in Egypt and Assyria, so in India,
the original motives of decoration are sym-
bolical of religious notions. As time went
on, and as the old devices were imitated for
new patrons, or by pupils who admired the
beauty but did not fathom the meaning of
early ornament, this intensity of poetical
significance to a great extent died away. No
doubt the Indian artificer of to-day weaves
many a carpet and chases many a brass vessel
without being fully alive to the historical
meaning of the patterns he depicts. Still, the
figures are images of gods or heroes; and
most Aowers and animals and other objects
are sacred emblems of ideas or of divinities
both in the Brahminical and Buddhist
religions;—the shell, wheel, and mace, for
example, of Vishnu; the trident, thunderbolt,
and bell of Buddha; the lotus of both.
This fact of the significance and propriety
of Eastern ornament is emphasized and illus-
trated in the interesting work already quoted ;


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
61
one other point of extreme importance to us
is insisted on,—the artistic life of the Indian
decorative workman. Each trade is, or was
till within the last few years, a hereditary
mystery, exercised in the security and freedom
from all worry of competition insured by the
almost parental patronage of the wealthy.
The artificer lived, if not always in the
house of his patron, yet in perpetual employ-
ment by customers who appreciated his work,
and whose maxim was not to buy in the
cheapest market, but to pay any price for
the best possible work. And so, freed from
all anxiety but the anxiety to please his own
taste and his patron's, living a healthy and
happy life, among beautiful surroundings,
respected if not rich, skilled in his own
speciality, with the accumulated tradition of
his forefathers,—the workman had all the
advantages which the poor English artist
lacks; whose life is a nightmare of hurry and
worry and disappointment, separated from the
bountiful beautiful nature who is his only
instructor and comforter.
Now, however, the old order is passing away.


62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Competition and machinery are being intro-
duced into India : and already result in the
rapid deterioration in the design, the execu-
tion, the very materials of her once magnificent
manufactures.
We cannot perhaps prevent this; but in
our own efforts for Decorative Art in England
we can learn a lesson or two from India of
the olden time. We can, in the first place,
learn to know a good thing when we see it.
A little more thought given to art would
give many of us a little more taste in art;
and an appreciative public is the first need,
more important than the founding of
schools, or the subsidizing of manufactures.
For if the rich who buy know what to demand,
the poor producers will soon learn what to
supply. Again, we can learn to want little,
but to want that little good. An Indian
house is not overcrowded with furniture, nor
that furniture necessarily overcrowded with
ornament. But whatever decoration there is,
how slight soever, or sketchy in the execution,
it is the work of thoughtful care and of a
trained hand guided by a trained eye; for


1. Aryan.
2.Turanian.
PLATE IV.-ASIATIC CONTRASTS.
[To face page 63.


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
of their tone of mind from that of the
Aryans.
Not only do they dislike elegance, but they
abhor symmetry. You will never find in
Turanian decoration anything approaching to
classic balance and repetition; and this liberty
and caprice has been one of the chief recom-
mendations of Japanese design to Europeans,
tired of Renaissance formality, both in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But
you recollect what was 'the ethical meaning
of Symmetry,-how the Egyptians being a
solemnly-minded people designed symmetrical
ornament. Now the Japanese are anything
but a solemnly-minded people. They have
their old state religion, and imported
Buddhism; but the real popular mythology
of the country consists in the recognition
of seven allegorical deities, the gods of
Longevity, of Daily Bread, of Riches, of
Contentment, of Learning, of Military Glory,
and of Love. And all those ridiculous old
men and women, hideous but not awful, the
butts of Japanese designers, are no other than
these seven deities. Well ; Europe will never
..5


66
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
be in a state of mind to assimilate Japanese
design, until the European public shall have
stooped to laugh at a comic crucifix; which
even Nihilism cannot seriously desire.
But irreverent as Japanese design is, it is
not, like our European, meaningless. The
plants and animals upon which their patterns
are based, all have some significance, heraldic,
allegorical, or fabulous; and this significance
gives an individuality, an interest, both to the
artist and the spectator, which cannot attach
to ornament that is merely meant to cover
down a wall, or to prevent a sofa-cushion from
“showing the dirt.” The fir, bamboo, and
plum, for instance, signify longevity, like the
crane ; fishes are the attributes of the god of
Daily Bread. Then there are monsters—by
each hangs a tale ;—the dragon, the phonix,
the unicorn, the hairy-tailed tortoise, and the
tufted lion, whose head appears among the
scrolls in Plate V., Fig. 5.
This illustration is Chinese, but typical
enough ; for while the Japanese have more wit
and humour, more imagination, more shrewd
observation of nature, the general description


RAR
LIBR
THE


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
67
of Turanian motives applies to both; Japan
standing to China almost if not entirely as
Hindostan to Persia. Here is an interest-
ing example of the power of evil express-
ing itself in mere lines and colours, not
in the subject, which represents only half-
a-dozen of these little monsters, like mangy
skye terriers, among a score of scrolls. But
just as the tiniest Egyptian scarab, spreading
his poised wings, impresses you with a
solemnity beyond the power of many a
modern church; as a worn Greek coin
touches whatever notes there are in your
heart, to respond to the nđusic of intellectual
beauty; so these wormy, squirmy imps,
blotched with coarse green, crude red, and
the colours of corruption, reveal, in the mere
drawing of their outline a diabolic potency
of loathsomeness hard to be believed ; and but
faintly echoed in the unctuous vulgarities of
Renaissance strap-work, and the franker
brutalities of Doré’s black-and-white, or black
without the white. That such things are
not felt to be evil and the outcome of an evil
nature, argues a curious want of thought-


68
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
fulness, if not, of sensibility, on the part of
many who might be supposed to reflect
and to feel. We hear often of the significance
of musical sound: the significance of deco-
rative line is even more striking to those
who give it their attention.
The general meaning of national or indi-
vidual moral character, in its broader sense--
the sense in which it influences art, is not
just the attempt to resist certain definite
temptations to petty crime which present
themselves to individuals in this or that
society. It means an inbred quality of nature,
noble or base, generous or mean. The ethical
character of an age or nation is not in the
keeping of a few individuals, though combined
efforts may influence it; nor can one or two
artists, however pure their lives or high their
aim, express othér than the feelings of their
age, or they cease to become artists, and are
mere experimentalists or theorists. And what-
ever be their private virtues or vices, Michael
Angelo interprets the vice of Renaissance
Rome wherever you find his line is coarse in
its power ; and Turner interprets England in


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
69
Nelson's age wherever his line is lovely in
its caprice. And so in China and Japan, the
thing we must specially note and beware of
is the absence of sensibility to seriousness
and sweetness, which renders it unfit for our
imitation or even our pleasure, in so far as
we believe that seriousness and sweetness are
qualities worth having in ethics or in
ornament.
With these limitations, we can enjoy to the
full, if we like, the humour, the liveliness,
the picturesqueness, the tenderness of colour
where it exists, and shrewd observation of
nature which we find in their design; and
imitate to the best of our power the thorough-
ness of their workmanship.
10. As elsewhere, by slow degrees only has
their art risen to its excellence. The earliest
known inhabitants of Japan, akin to the
present race of the Ainos, made pottery
resembling that of prehistoric Europe, or
savage America. The universal barbaric
symbols of the sun, moon, snake, and other
nature-powers which we have seen to be the
basis of art all the world over, are preserved


70
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
in Japan as ancient heraldic charges and
staple motives of ornament. Thus the crest
of the Prince of Satsuma is nothing else than
the sun-cross, of Kuwana the moon-ring, of
Asiu the straight swastika, common to all
barbaric cults, and remarkable especially in
India and Scandinavia. Japanese history is
said to begin 660 B.C., but it was not till our
era that the antecedent culture of China was
introduced by way of Corea, the bridge
between Asia and Japan. Then, in A.D. 200,
the Japanese Empress Jingô invaded Corea,
and thenceforward a more or less continuous
stream of influence seems to have set in from
the mainland. Later on, the Japanese learnt
directly from China, glazed pottery being
introduced only in 1223, and porcelain in
1513; while in the following century the
Dutch traders introduced or encouraged imi-
tation of Chinese and Aryan design. Old
Hizen ware, figured by Messrs. Audsley and
Bowes, exhibits a thoroughly Persian tulip
design: and all the stock patterns of Greek
ornament are found, in one shape or other,
on Japanese pottery. They may have been


ASIATIC ORNAMENT.
71
independently invented, but both probability
and possibility suggest their importation from
the west, and their adoption by this pre-
eminently imitative nation.
The Chinese, though earlier civilized than
the Japanese, cannot date their history before
the fifth century B.C., the era of Confucius; and
the art of printing, and with it, I suppose,
much of their ancient culture, does not reach
further back than the third century B.C. We
find such western motives of ornament as the
knop and flower pattern in China, which point
to intercourse with earlier civilization. If not
before, such an opportunity was given when
the Moguls united China to their great empire.
By that time Chinese art was sufficiently
advanced to teach many improvements of
technique to Persia. But ancient as the art
of China is, it is only the child of Egyptian
and Assyrian design. And as a whole, the most
valuable art work of the East seems to have
been subsequent to and derived in great
measure from Egypt and Assyria, Byzantium
and Italy, in contradiction to the old adage
that civilization travels westward.


LECTURE IV.
GREEK.
1. Artistic Character.—2. Harmony.-3. Design.-4. Ana- .
lysis of Decorative Composition.-5. Comparison with
Music.-6. Periods : I. Archaic Greek Decoration.-
7. II. Severe and Central.-8. III. Florid.-9. IV.
Decadent.--10. Pompeian.–11. Byzantine.-12. Spread
of Byzantine Influence in the Dark Ages.-13. Con-
tinuity of Art History.
1. THE Greeks were not great decorators. To
be a decorator, you must linger lovingly over
the touching and retouching of completed
work, and the Greeks had far too much work in
hand for that; to be a decorator you must love
ivy-wreaths and galaxies of daisies more than
the “human face divine,” and creeping and
flying things more than the “ quicquid agunt
homines” of human nature. But the strength
of the Greeks lay in a keen eye for commerce,
a strong hand for statesmanship, neat dis-
criminations of character in their drama, or of


74
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
manliness at the expense of godliness. This
is the Greek ideal, unattained, unsought
indeed, by any other race; this is the Greek
culture of their gymnasia by which their
youth was trained to “grace-and-goodness,"
the fair mind in the fair body which our
notion of “gentlemanliness ” but inadequately
renders.
Harmony, their moral characteristic, shows
itself in their philosophy, in its attempt after
well-balanced and rounded systems; in their
literature, in the perfect proportions of their
plays, the crystalline “form” of lyric and
elegiac verse, the antithesis and plot of their
rhetoric.
It would indeed be surprising if their art
did not exhibit this quality, even beyond the
life and power which it learned from Assyria,
and the solidity and solemnity of Egypt. As
it is, the one great lesson which all the world
must learn from Greece, and from Greece alone,
is not truth, is not beauty, is not colour, is
not chiaroscuro, is not "chic," is not finish-
all these can be better learned elsewhere; the
one thing the Greeks teach in their decorative


GREEK.
necessarily classic high art; but to design
with classic feeling, whether locks of hair, folds
of drapery, trees in the valley, clouds on the
hill, daisies in the meadow, pebbles by the
brook, to compose their lines and masses in
such perfect harmony as a Greek artist of
the great time would instinctively have done,
—that is the true high art, the only art indeed
much worth having. For portraiture may
possibly vanish before improved photography,
history painting be found useless and vain,
symbolism and allegory be no longer accepted
in the naïve spirit in which early ages.
offered it; but this art of decorative com-
position is not only compatible with the
highest imaginable attainments of moral and
intellectual perfection, but would be actually
necessary to their complete expression. It
would be the counterpart, the visible image,
of that
“ Unimagined song of pure concent
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne.”
4. By this decorative design or line-
composition is meant something quite different


78
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
One
from the picture-composition adopted by
Razzi and Raphael, and formulated by a
dynasty of theorists from Leonardo to Burnet.
Greek design has no reference to angular or
circular arrangement, to relief of the nearest
part of the subject from the remotest of the
background, to highlights on the principal
head,—and all the other tricks that make a
picture “tell.”
If you observe any good Greek coin, of
which examples are plentiful, and of which
one is rudely sketched in Plate VI., Fig. 1,
you will see how the mass of hair is divided
into unequal masses, beautiful in themselves,
and at the same time beautiful in their
relation to one another. See how the line
which divides them and that which bounds
them is full of life and interest, divided into
intervals of which no two are alike, either in
length or direction. See how every mass
is again subdivided down to the smallest
detail; every line, however unimportant, being
beautifully related to every other line, or set
of lines, and every mass beautifully pro-
portioned to every other mass or group of



1. Hera's hair.
2. "God save the Queen”
PLATE VI.-LINE-HARMONY.
[To face page 78.


RARY
LIBR
STO
HL


GREEK.
79
inasses. No two lines parallel, yet each
growing out of the other; no two masses
equal, yet every one necessary for the balance
of all the rest. And in a good Greek com-
position, however extended, you will observe
the same freedom, the same absence of
stiffness and formality, the same apparent
unrestraint of every part, from the greatest
down to the smallest ; and yet a complete
inter-dependence of everything upon every-
thing else. So that there is no greater folly
than to alter or mutilate a Greek composition,
and no greater impertinence than to pretend
to rival it without consummate grasp of the
intention of a whole and unflagging intelli-
gence in the elaboration of detail.
Compare with these Greek coins the design
of any ordinary work which satisfies modern
requirements; for example, a penny, or a penny
stamp. See how the masses of hair are not
considered in relation to one another, nor as
needing any well-defined shape of beauty for
themselves; how the locks are thready and
parallel—with a feeble crookedness, rather
than significant curvature. Look at Britannia,


80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
whose trident is the radius of the formal circle
which bounds the English coin ; a radius—the
ugliest relation, to a circle—the ugliest curve
(no Greek coin being perfectly circular, and
that not from accident, you may be sure). See
again how the most salient lines, in the figure
of Britannia, are those forming the rigid right
angle enclosed by her trident and her knee.
And then search for such a blunder in any
collection of Greek coins !
5. To justify the name of harmony as
applied to linear design, let me draw your
attention to the curious possibility of reducing
to its terms the admitted harmony of music.
The scale, scala, or “ladder," upon which its
intervals are measured, is, in our notation,
represented as a geometrical diagram, and the
notes as geometrical points in a sequence
proportioned to their duration. Now by
joining these notes you get a curve such as
a thermometer or sphygmograph traces, and
the four curves of the four parts of harmony
exhibit accurately the continuous relations of
their intervals. Here (Plate VI., Fig. 2) are
the first few bars of “God save the Queen”


GREEK.
81
treated in this way. Do you not feel that
these lines are as harmonious as the chords
they represent, with most of the elements
of grand design ? Might they not have been
copied from the hair of some Greek statue ?
And on the other hand, if you should take
the trouble to draw out in this fashion the
tedious consecutive thirds which do duty
among an unmusical congregation for
“seconds," or the trombone accompaniment
of a street brass band, you will recognise
at once the dulness of the musical effect in
the insipidity and mechanical parallelism of
the curves you obtain, and their likeness
to a cheap stucco moulding, or the ill-com-
posed hair on the penny stamp.
This interest in abstract beauty, harmony,
sequence,-as it is the highest human pleasure
and noblest profit in philosophy, in science,
and in music, being an end in itself beyond
all grosser material and practical aims,—so in
art nothing can replace it. It is this that
is meant by classicism, by the spirit of Greek
beauty or art; this that our decorators have
to study and steal, if they can, from ancient


82
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
ornament; not its technical tricks, nor its
motives of pattern, mere and mean accidents,
which have been the bane of misled theorists
ever since the Cinquecento Renaissance.
6. Mr. Ruskin says in his first series of
Oxford lectures : “The progressive course of
Greek art was in subduing monstrous con-
ceptions to natural ones: it did this by general
laws : it reached absolute truth of generic
human forces, and if its ethical force had
remained, would have advanced into healthy
portraiture. But at the moment of change
the national life ended in Greece; and portrai-
ture, there, meant insult to her religion, and
flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished
not because she became true in sight, but
because she became vile in heart."
The steps or stages in the history of Greece,
which suffice for a right understanding of the
art which illustrates it, are few and simple.
I. There is first of all the Archaic time-
the age of beginning: when throughout
scattered Aryan tribes of the Ægean Sea the
Greek spirit sprang up, from seed sown
broadcast. In many a highland or island,


84
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
grow by continual combination of qualities
and ideas previously supposed irreconcilable.
In this case barbaric Greece is the soil upon
which falls the seed of Egyptian and Assyrian
culture, together producing what each alone
could never attempt.
The Greek character sympathised with life
beyond everything else: it did not so much
seek solemnity, strength, elegance, richness,
grotesque; but it loved life, spirit, action,
motion. The Greeks were a lively restless
race of rovers by land and sea, paralleled only
by the Scandinavians, but surpassing them in
natural advantages of geographical position
and climate. For ornament, they like waves
and whirlwind, Auttering hair and flying
drapery, twining plants and meandering
streams; and every mode of expressing these
ideas they eagerly caught, from whatever
source. Archäologists dispute as to the relative
influence upon Greece of Egypt and Assyria;
but for every token of the one we have
evidences of the other. The Homeric epic is
a glorious outcome of the martial legendary
ballads of Assyria ; Pythagoras' philosophy, of


GREEK.
87
in the supernatural. So Greek art very soon
adds to its interest in nature, a more special
interest in its work; it regards the very lines
and colours not merely as representing nature,
but as being themselves matter of study;
and finds new occupation in arranging and
contrasting these curves and spaces, as if
they had no farther raison d'être. This is
abstract art; this is Greek design; the
mathematical or musical intellect showing
itself in decoration.
For example, the kymation, they know very
well, represents waves; but they get interested
still more in the delight of being able to
arrange their waves, to curl them about, and
confine them in neat order, and yet with
subtle variety of fold and fall. As if, when
a Greek watched by the seashore and the
wind was fresh from over the sea, it was not
the glassy green transparency and glitter, nor
blazing white bursts of foam, that arrested
his fancy ; it was not merely the thunder on
the beach or the sails in the offing that struck
his imagination, mariner as he was, till he
would that his tongue could utter the thoughts


88
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
that arose in him ;—but one thing above all,
the rhythm of the breakers, transfixed his
attention; the break,-break,—break,—third
crash louder, ninth crash loudest of all; each
mob-like insurrectionary billow charging the
land half undecidedly, but at a certain instant
of the charge transformed, with the same
tactics always, into a rising, leaping, threaten-
ing wall,—the same wall always; bursting
into foam along the crest, as if the word of
command passed down its ranks; curling,
coiling, plunging, crashing on the shore,—the
same breaker always; washing its fretted froth
up the sand on the same lines always, the
more fixedly so on Greek coasts, for theirs is
a tideless sea. And the circumstance that
struck the Greek mind was the law of the
sea's life; the restraint of its motion, the
orderliness of its irresistible impetuosity, the
constancy of the invariable curve, and the
limit imposed upon its licence by some
mightier Power, who stood by saying, “Thus
far shalt thou go, and no farther.” It was
not, then, the concrete representation of sea-
waves that they sought, but the abstract


GREEK.
89
mathematical or musical law of their rhyth-
mical motion. To express this abstract law
in line is Greek design,-is “ classic” art.
In the case of this scroll pattern, based as
it is upon the breakers, whence its name, the
interest in it as abstract line leads to two
developments. The Greek scroll is either a
whirlpool, gradually narrowing into a vortex;
or a maze,—involution and evolution. In
either case the delicate narrowing of the spiral
to the centre, and delicate varying of each
wave along the line, is delightful as you
follow it with eye or finger; and expresses
a new intellectual pleasure akin to that
derived from the thoughtful “classic” music
of Bach or Beethoven ; unlike the interest
and surprise created by suggestions of concrete
symbolism, profound or startling as these may
be. So that to symbolic art of former
nations, with whose intentions Holman Hunt
elaborates the significance of his sacred
pictures, the Greeks added an intellectual
art of design; which is the especial charm
of all their sculptors, of the Florentine
masters, and of Burne-Jones,—the spirit of


90
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
harmony, whose connection with the ethics
of Greece we have already hinted.
7. II. Out of these Archaic times early
Greece developed, by decay of ancient here-
ditary monarchies, increase of popular life,
extended intercominunication of this little
group of islands and valleys, upon whose con-
sciousness it began to dawn that it was one
- Hellas. With the new society came political
changes; popular despots, Phidon of Argos,
who introduced coinage; Periander of Corinth
and Pisistratus of Athens, patrons of art and
literature. With these, a new style of
art, now distinctively Greek, but young,
stiff, unformed, timid, schoolgirlish, Early
Greek.
Then the Persian wars: the Greek spirit
realized, politically in the union of Greece
against Persia, artistically in Periclean Athens,
its Parthenon and its pottery. The great
central age is of short duration ; at its furthest
stretch but a century (500-400 B.c.); but the
best work was all done in the few decades
between Salamis and Arginusæ; that is,
during the transient supremacy of Athens ;


GREEK.
91
Greece, the maid Athena, in ripened charm,
but still fancy-free.
These two periods, the Early and the
Central or Perfect, contrast so strongly with
previous Archaism and subsequent Florid
and Decadent ages, that they may be put
together, for the sake of clearness, as the
Serere Period. For, in spite of development
of style and increase of knowledge, between
600 and 400 B.C., the aim of art throughout
shows the same nobility and truthfulness,
culminating in Phidias.
During this Severe period, the arts of
pottery and metal work were brought to a
high state of development; and these are
the chief remains of their ornament we have
to judge from: sufficient, because terracotta
was used freely,—for architecture, statuary,
studs, spindles, tickets, dolls, lamps, and a
host of domestic purposes. Athenian pottery
was the “china” of ancient Europe and the
South ; its exportation was a source of national
wealth, and carried it to remote lands : it was
welcomed throughout Italy, and so successfully
imitated, that archæologists have never been


92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
able authoritatively to distinguish Etruscan
from Greek wares.
To us, accustomed to the facility of modern
china-painting, it seems rough and rude in
execution. This is owing to the extreme
difficulty of painting on a dark absorbent
ground, where the lines are no sooner laid
than they swell, shrink, disappear: so that
the work must be rapid, decisive, and
dexterous; the style simple monochrome;
and the work as much done in the dark
as etching would be, if no proof could be
taken.
Greek pottery was made, on Egyptian
models, in the Archaic age: first, uncoloured ;
then, all black, and called Libyes -- negroes.
Then the uncoloured pot was ornamented
with black or brown lines. As people
acquired more skill or more confidence,
figures, chiefly of animals, later only of men,
were done in the same black or brown; but
as these lines could not be made fine enough
for outlines, the whole mass of the figure
must be put on with a clever touch, as you
might paint with a brush on blotting-paper,


GREEK.
93
leaving a light for the eye. No guide to
keep the drawing right was possible beyond
a scratched sketch with a sharp point, which
itself must be lightly and rightly done on
pain of spoiling the neatness of the painting.
The early Dionysiac and Panathenaic present-
ation vases are in this style: stiff black
figures on a light red or buff ground.
This restriction of the figures, faces and
all, to uniform black patches, was felt to be
unsatisfactory; and so the idea was conceived,
about the time of the Persian wars, of painting
the ground, and leaving the figures; requiring
even more thought and skill in the artist,
but producing a more natural result. By
the invention of an opaque white paint, the
faces and arms of goddesses and women
could be better represented, the men always
being left hrown and sunburnt. So that
there are two periods important to remember
in Greek vase-painting: the Early, black
figures on light ground; the Later, beginning
with the Central or Perfect Period, light
figures on dark ground.
The other great art from which we can


94
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
judge the development of Greek design was
that of die-sinking and coinage. A complete
discussion of the laws of design as applicable
to coins is wrought out in Mr. Ruskin's
“ Queen of the Air," the standard work on
the spirit of Greek Art. It is enough here
to say that the canons of Ornament are
exemplified in Greek coins, by perfect
adaptation to their use, by most observant
significance in their representation of nature,
and by a right and wise conventionalization,
or selection of the qualities and elements of
natural beauty and interest proper to the
designer's purpose.
There are few Greek coins illustrating
archaic design, because it was not till the close
of that archaic period that coinage was intro-
duced from Lydia to Argos, 660 B.C. But
the two steps in the Severe style are clearly
marked; the early Athenian owl exhibiting
a naïve attempt to give the spirit and ex-
pression of the creature, especially the eyes,
its most noteworthy feature and connecting
link with their goddess Athena. The Central
style is illustrated by the well-known “Rose


GREEK.
95
of Rhodes,” and the “ Thunderbolt of Elis”;
which retaining the directness of expression,
add a picturesqueness and correctness of design
unsought before the Periclean age. Examples
of this standard decorative art are now so
easily to be had, in the photographs and
reproductions of British Museum specimens,
that it is needless here to give woodcut illus-
trations, which would be but rude reminders
of the infinite, inimitable grace and delicacy
of the originals.
8. III. Then follows the Florid style (400
to 300 B.C.), outcome of an age of wasted effort,
state against state, man against man, style
against style, school against school ; each
alternately winning and losing in struggles
which, unlike those of the earlier age, brought
art no nobility of character, and left no sta-
bility of result. The art of this time, though
infinitely interesting with its Euripidean
“touches of things common till they rise
to touch the spheres,” yet wearies us with
its attempts at effect, and cloys us with its
competitive elegance. But so far as it is more
than ever realistic, catching expression, rival-


96
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
ling nature, there is life in it, and hope for
it. Think how the highest results of the
greatest European art could have been sur-
passed, had it been possible for the Greeks
themselves to superadd to the knowledge and
nobility of Phidias the intimity and life-
likeness of Florence and Flanders. But there
seems to exist some law of Unsuccess which
prevents every individual—whether wave, or
crystal, or animal, or society—from completely
realizing perfection; and at the moment when
Greece might have reached a greater than
her greatest, she fell under the foreign yoke
of Alexander, and thence from bad to worse.
The Florid style shows itself in pottery in
less thoughtful and more ornate design, and
in attempts to make things prettier by poly-
chromatic decoration. The background is
black, the figures yellow, with white flesh for
females, and draperies of blue, vermilion and
green. But no prettiness can compensate for
the weakening of that grand design which
is the chief attraction in all ornament, and
most of all in Greek. In its sculpture this
age seeks picturesqueness at the expense of


GREER.
99
any longer possible? The artists who designed
and executed the paintings of Pompeii and
other such monuments of so-called “classical ”
art, did slaves' work for slaves' wages. The
masters for whom they worked had no eye
for the beauty of Greek work, only for its
piquancy; no heart for its nobility, only for
its effect; and to please such patrons as these,
their Greek slaves chose from debased tradition
just what was weak, just what was affected,
whatever was poor and pretty, mechanical or
obscene. This gradual corruption of the Greek
spirit, of the Maid Athena, is like the most
hideous dream come true: “Cæli, Lesbia
nostra, Lesbia illa ”-if you know the rest, you
know the passionate pain with which a lover
of Greece regards her degradation,
. 11. And yet there was redemption even for
her: for the redemption of the world was the
redemption also of art : how could it be other-
wise ? To get a clear notion of the change,
look at any well-known illustrations of Pom-
peian style. Take the prettiest examples; take
baby Cupid in his bower of vine; it is Greek
art, Greek in whatever interest varies the


100
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
symmetry of the leaves and ribands, or en-
livens the design with fluttering folds or
graceful alternations of line. But compare this
starved wreath, clipped and trimmed into
poverty-stricken parallelism, the meaningless
drapery, the foolish bows and useless buckles,
the pointlessness, the triviality, the insipidity,
alike of conception and execution—with the
interest, the variety, the life, and the meaning
of any coin or vase-design of the great ages.
And setting aside decorative figure-composi-
tion it is curious to note how the Romans
in their purely ornamental design have chosen
out and insisted upon whatever was feeblest
and weakest in the Greek. There is an
ordinary mosaic pavement of Pompeii, too
often thought worth copying, in which the
Greek mæander, their dullest idea, is not only
copied but emphasized; not only elaborated,
but vulgarized into an illegitimate appearance
of relief, with the Greek vine tendrils debased
into atrocities of whip-cord penmanship.
But take, on the other hand, such a specimen
of Byzantine ivory-carving as exhibited in the
Liverpool Museum, or figured in Mr. Maskell's


102
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Christian Greek art of all those mosaics, paint-
ings, and ivory-carvings called Byzantine ?
It is sometimes said that Christianity killed
classical art in Byzantium; this is no more
true than that realism killed it in Athens.
Not only did the Christian spirit raise classical
design from the low state to which it had
fallen by reviving the great traditions of the
Periclean age (thus creating the first Renais-
sance), but by the building of churches and
their decoration on a grand scale a very strong
material impulse was given to all the fine
arts. Constantine himself built St. John
Lateran and old St. Peter's at Rome, not to
speak of magnificent works at Constantinople,
whose art and artists thenceforward became
authoritative even throughout India and the
East. And this artistic activity was only one
side of the intensely energetic life of the time
during which the theology of the Christian
Church was discussed and determined, and the
whole of Europe brought out of barbarism into
civilization.
There were two important stages which
mark the decline of art in Italy and Greece.


GREEK.
103
First, the disunion and dismemberment of
the Roman empire after the death of Alexander
Severus, that is, in the third and fourth
centuries A.D. A hopeless insecurity of life
and property made the production and collec-
tion of all works of art impossible; while the
rapacity of the powerful and insolence of the
ignorant destroyed and dispersed those temple-
treasuries which had always been standards
and schools of right classical tradition.
12. A still heavier blow was struck at the
Byzantine Renaissance by the Iconoclastic
heresy, which for a whole century (750 to
850 A.D.) burnt, broke, overthrew, and utterly
rooted out every image, every work of art,
in fact, within the limits of the Byzantine
church.
Under such circumstances it was obviously
hopeless to cultivate any artistic pursuit,
and the ivory-carvers, painters, and designers
of the East migrated westward; some few to
Italy, which was not only far from peaceful,
but had its own art-traditions. But in North-
western Europe, the barbarians, who soon
after were formed into the civilized empire


104
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
of Charlemagne, and at that time were
developing an aboriginal archaic art of their
own, welcomed the Byzantines, employed and
imitated them; so that all the early religious
art-ideas not distinctly Scandinavian or Celtic,
all those missals and carvings, frescoes and
monuments of the dark ages, in Germany
especially, and in England, are Greek.
13. It is most interesting to note, and
most important to remember the continuity
of art-history. So far from Greek art being
a mysterious and spontaneous growth, we
have traced its development out of natural
barbaric motives, common to the infancy of
all nations and individuals, but impelled
and instructed by Egypt and Assyria. So far
from its extinction under the Roman Empire,
we have shown its vitality, degraded though
it might be, until the Christian Byzantine
Renaissance, which restored it, if not to all
its former glories, yet to its highest walks
and worthiest aims.
So far from the total disappearance of living
Byzantine Art, which the exclusive study of
the history of Italian painting leads one


LECTURE V.
GOTHIC.
1. Seed and Soil.-2. Parallel Art-progress of Celts and
Teutons.—3. The Vikings' Lion.-4. Irish and Norse
Interlacing.–5. The Ethics of the same.-6. Anglo-
Saxon Art; Native and Exotic.—7. Spread of Northern
Motives throughout Europe.-8. Inheritance of Gothic
Art from Rome, in Sculpture and Architecture.—9.
From Byzantium, in Design of Drapery and Flowers.
-10. From the East, in Decoration of Textiles and
Pottery.–11. Monasticism and Chivalry.-12. The
Four Periods : I. Romanesque.-13. II. Severe.—14.
III. Florid.-15. IV. Decadent, and 16. Transition to
Renaissance.
1. It is too little noticed by those who profess
to trace the history of events that for every
plant there must be both a seed and a soil,
for every effect a plurality of causes. And in
the history of art we find that no style ever
develops out of a different one preceding it,
without co-operation of one or more foreign
influences. In the case of Greek art, we
saw that the soil was the Greek spirit, naturally


GOTHIC.
107
developing the natural beginnings of universal
decorative art, while Egypt and Assyria
supplied the seed; in Byzantium, the debased
Greek traditions of the empire were the soil
upon which fell the seed of Christianity. And
now in the Middle Ages the soil is the native
art of the Celts and Teutons, the seed survives
from Greece, Rome, and the Orient.
Students of painting and architecture-
that is to say, most art-historians—have found
no materials for their study among the early
Celts and Teutons, and the impression left
upon the mind of the general reader has con-
sequently been that there is no art-history
of these races or of these periods; but a slight
acquaintance with their decoration, especially
in metal-work, shows that not only had these
nations, commonly called barbarous, great
capacities and instincts for art, and a culture
of peculiar interest; but that we can trace the
history and fix the periods of its development,
and find from it exactly those motives which
need to be added to the traditions of the South,
in order to completely explain the origin of
Gothic ornament.


108
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
2. It would be interesting, and some day
perhaps will be possible, to unravel the con-
fused ethnology and archæology of our ances-
tors before the Christian era. We can see,
however, that they slowly emerged from the
lowest barbarism by the same stages, and with
much the same ideas of religion, manners,
and art, as the early Greeks,-indeed as the
earliest races everywhere. Celts and Teutons
grew up side by side, apart though not
without intercourse (as indeed they live at
this day); into a comparative civilization of
practically the sañe character. For example,
in Denmark and Scandinavia the Stone Age,
the Bronze and the Iron Ages follow upon one
another irrespective (so far as we can find)
of the races which appeared on the scene in
successive acts of the drama. In Britain we
know at what period the Teutons replaced
the Celts; in Ireland we know that the Teu-
tons never replaced the Celts; and yet the
history of the development of native art in
these three countries was substantially the
same.
In all cases the beginning is out of universal


RARI
LIBR
THA


OVA
OOOO
1. British bronze mirror,
"LATE CELTIC" triquetra & basketwork.
6.King David from a manuscript.
IRISH. VIII. century.
2.Gotlandic brooch.
TEUTON "flamboyant" monsters.
(
5
.
3. "Heraldic" lion.
4. Debased figures & knotted monsters.
SCANDINAVIAN.
PLATE VII.—CELTIC AND Teuton Art.
m. fons occa 100


GOTHIC.
109
barbaric motives, the sun-symbols and snake-
signs described in Lecture I. Through at least
a great part of the Bronze Age all ornament
is made up of a repetition rather than an
elaboration of the circle, cross, spiral, triangle,
and triquetra, or three-rayed sun, together
with early attempts at figure and animal
drawing (e.g., Plate V., Fig. 1). In the Iron
Age, if not before, these ideas are combined
and elaborated, the rays of the triquetra, for
example, ending in a spiral (Fig. 2), or more
artificially combined curves, curiously fascinat-
ing in their apparently free and yet actually
limited scope, form trumpet-shaped devices,
mystic in their aim, and mysterious in their
suggestiveness; the triquetra so treated, with
a basket-work background, is here figured from
a British specimen in the Liverpool Museum
(Plate VII., Fig. 1). The next example
(Fig. 2), from Gotland, very early the home
of Teutons, shows another stage in the general
development; the pattern is believed to be
based on corrupted animal forms; but is
little but a study of harmonious curvature in
thoroughly Flamboyant feeling; and Mr. Gatty,


110
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
in pointing out that resemblance, suggests
that the French Gothic designers may have
been led to some of the features of their style
by the survival of early Celtic and Teuton
ideas and character. But none of these show
full involution as yet; for the basket-work
of Fig. 1 is not at all the same kind of thing
with the knotting of Figs. 4 and 5.
And yet it is supposed very generally that
the Runic knot-work is based on British plaid
and basket-work. But it is not enough, in
explaining a national style, to find possibilities
of its suggestion ; for these are generally
common to all the world: and if the Britons
were famous for their weaving and plait-
ing, yet these processes were perfectly well
known, ages before, to every other nation ;
and South Sea Islanders actually use a plaited
pattern of the simplest style.
But from whatever hint, the Northerns, both
Celts and Teutons, found this involution ex-
press some feeling of their own, found it suit
their character,—and that was cause enough
for employing it.
3. There are three distinct types of this


GOTHIC.
113
VII., Fig. 3). It becomes the typical heraldic
charge of later times, Lancelot's lion, to whom
Sir Gareth cried :-
“Ramp, ye lance-splintering lions, on whom all spears
Are rotten sticks ! ye seem a-gape to roar !”
Then the lion's body becomes elongated,
he becomes a very lithe lion, a very lean lion,
he writhes, he lashes himself with his tail
into such a fury that he is everywhere at
once, like the piano-playing virtuoso on the
German fly-leaf; he ties himself into knots
inextricably; the eyes drop out of his head
to stud his strap-like body; he becomes a
very debased lion, of whom you can make
neither head nor tail (Figs. 2 and 4); and yet,
beneath these lowest depths, are lower depths
of nonsensical conventionalization.
4. All Scandinavian metal-work of the
Viking Age (750—1000 A.D.) shows this
gradual degradation from more or less natural
animal forms, and corresponding development
of intricacy in the interlacing of netted and
knotted mazes. But just as the flamboyant
and trumpet-patterns of an earlier age were


114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Teutonic as well as Celtic (Fig. 2 being a Goth-
landic, Fig. 1 a British example), so during
the Dark Ages, as they are called, interwoven
design is as characteristic of Celtic as of
Scandinavian work. The Book of Kells, that
great Irish manuscript which the late Professor
Westwood has made famous, is full of the
most elaborate interlacing; and this example
(Fig. 5), taken from an eighth-century Irish
psalter, shows the Celtic style of convention-
alized figure-drawing which corresponds to
the debased Scandinavian figures and lion
(Fig. 4). You may not believe it, but this
is King David, playing upon the actual
"... harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed”;
lles
and while one admires the ingenuity of
labyrinthine convolutions, one cannot but
feel that people who had the hand to draw
and the head to design with such skill and
ingenuity, must have been guilty of wilful
neglect and culpable ignorance in remaining
content with so absurd a caricature of the
human form in a man, a king, and a saint.


GOTHIC.
115
And though the Scandinavians had no lions to
copy, their design also of this period shows
not childishness but decrepitude, not archaic
ignorance but the listlessness, the carelessness,
the insincerity of a debased decadence. Many
hundred years before, even in their Bronze
Age, they had designed figures of their gods
with naïve vigour, and copied Southern sculp-
ture with life and expression; just as the
Egyptians, at the dawn of their history, seem
to have carved statues with surprisingly life-
like qualities. We saw that the first effort of
an individual or a race is in the direction
of naturalism, not of conventional ornament,
and sure to be highly successful, because com-
pletely frank and painstaking; it is only as
these efforts of primitive genius are imitated
by later dullards,—who get to regard them as
supernatural, and their own imitations as
something sacred,—that we get the hieratic
Egyptian figure-drawing, and worse still, the
wormy and spotty nonsense of the wall-paint-
ings at Veii (figured in Dr. Birch’s “Ancient
Pottery'), which have close resemblance to the
Scandinavian animal-drawing at the period


116
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
when it was changing from childish naturalism,
or copies of the classic, to the vagaries of the
Viking period.
5. This knotted and tangled design reflects
the intellectual character of the society in
which it was produced. Among the Scandi-
navians, paganism expired in almost metaphy-
sical speculation : it was not replaced by the
simpler creed of Christianity until it had lost
itself in mazes of thought too deep for Northern
knowledge, and in self-torture of puzzles too
abstruse for the Northmen to grapple with.
The Greeks had loved abstract thought, but
they had kept it clear and orderly; the
Northerns wanted that grasp of the classic
mind; and so the self-analysis which was
play to the Greeks was death to them,—the
more so for the physical energy and practical
vigour of their character. .
Now these mazy patterns, in which abstract
composition of line overwhelms concrete re-
presentation of fact, far more than was ever
the case with the Greeks ; in which everything
is a puzzle, a perplexity; fascinating with
weird power, but requiring, even to look at,


118
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
actually became debased in corresponding
decadence; so that by the time of the intro-
duction of Christianity, it was simply "played
out,” having lost all reference to nature, and
exhausted its repertory of ideas. For each
development of art is based on a preceding
style; superseding it when it has done its
best and lived its life to the end; then only,
then necessarily, replaced by a new order
of things. In the north, as in Byzantium,
Christianity was the saviour of society, and
with it, of art.
6. Before this late or Viking Iron Age the
Anglo-Saxons had invaded Britain, and there
established a power remarkable for culture
much beyond its age. It is noticeable that
they did not bring with them the interwoven
patterns, and never adopted them in their
extravagance. The Anglo-Saxons had the
northern vigour, but not the Norse wildness;
and their love of order, which led to our
English law and constitution, led also to a
singularly neat and tidy school of design, as
may be seen on Anglo-Saxon brooches in our
museums. They are partitioned out into


GOTHIC.
119
symmetrical panels, filled with not very
original devices; and almost modern English
in the trimness, the solidity, the respectability,
the “Philistinism," of their ideas.
Saxon England of the ninth and tenth
centuries was far from being a mere abode
of barbarians; in spite of Danish invasions,
and before the Danish conquest, it had a
national culture and national art. On the
breaking out of iconoclasm in Byzantium, the
artists fled to Charlemagne's Rhineland;
thence, on his death, and the dismemberment
of his empire, Greek art and learning found
its way to England; which thereupon took,
if not the lead, at any rate high rank, among
European nations; for the civilized Saracens
were disappearing in Spain, and Central Europe
was in the greatest commotion throughout
these Dark Ages.
7. The union of Northern decorative prin-
ciples with Greek design of figures, drapery,
and floral ornament is the beginning of
Gothic. In Irish and Norse ornament, figures
are ridiculously conventional; and foliage does
not appear. The combination becomes at once


120
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Gothic. This combination occurs very early
in Russia, through which there was a much-
frequented route of commerce between the
north and the east; whose national exist-
ence is believed by some to centre upon a
Scandinavian colony; and where the earliest
manuscripts of Greek liturgies show Northern
knitted designs.
But Byzantine art was patronized and im-
itated more eagerly and not much later (ninth
and tenth centuries) by Germany and England,
and very soon“Byzantine ” ivory-carvings are
found in their turn to be leavened with a
Celtic character; until all over the north of
Europe a new style springs up, in which
ideas from both sources coexist, but do not coal-
esce; like “a clear stream flowing by a
muddy one.”
This is practically the first stage of Gothic,
and grows into the great Romanesque style,
so called, of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
In that age, Northern involution penetrated
far southward, as Greek draperies had pene-
trated to northward. Not only do we find
the double style splendidly illustrated in the


GOTHIC.
121
Boulogne psalter, with its deftly ravelled
sleaves (as in Plate VII., Fig. 5, only more
elaborate and graceful), and elegantly con-
ceived figures; but the builders of early
Italian cathedrals, with remains of classic
art before their eyes, and Byzantine teaching
in their ears, now run wild with the northern
tangle-tailed mysteries. On the facade of the
Duomo at Lucca, one of the piers is ornamented
with a bas-relief of the Garden of Eden. The
serpent is twined in the tree, the branches
of the tree are all twined together; Adam
and Eve are somehow woven up with every-
thing else; and Eve's flowing hair is a wonder-
ful study of ingenious involution.
And in strictly Gothic art for a hundred
years to come, and more, the Northern “worm-
twist” is a distinctive feature.
8. Such then was the soil upon which fell
the seed of Southern art, to create the great
Gothic styles of the Middle Ages. The seed
was threefold, being the inheritance of
Europe from Byzantium, as we have seen,
and from Rome; that is, the two great results
of classical art; and the various Saracenic,


122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Arabian, and Moorish styles, derived from the
Persians.
The remains of Roman civilisation, which
for centuries had filled Europe, were not de-
stroyed, if dispersed, by the barbarians. The
story of the rude soldier who broke a precious
vase rather than relinquish it to his captain,
is exactly a case of the exception which proves
the rule; and when the Arabs invaded Spain,
they found, admired, and recorded marvellous
relics of Roman art which the rapacious but
not iconoclastic Vandals had carried thither;
less barbarous than those too politely called
Vandals to-day, who not only remove but
destroy the most precious relics of the past;
and add, to the injury of unjustified violence,
the insult of impertinent restoration. Every
student must be grateful to Mr. Morris and
the Society for the Preservation of Ancient
Monuments; and to Signor Boni, the able
Venetian architect and earnest defender of the
remains of early Italian art.
That the Goths learned from Roman remains
the construction of the arch is admitted.
They also learned what they had never known


GOTHIC.
123
before, what they could not learn from the
portable ivories and textiles of Byzantium, or
the potteries of the East, and what played
so important a part in all the architectural
ornamentation of after ages; namely, the idea
of leaf-sculpture, which they saw in profusion
in the capitals and cornices, tombs and temples
of the previous age, and which certain features
of their character enabled them to assimilate.
For the transition from the Dark into the
Middle Age is in fact a renaissance five
centuries before the greater Renaissance; and
all throughout these centuries we find an
uninterrupted out-crop of a vein of classic
feeling tingeing the surrounding soil, so to
speak, with the unmistakable warmth of
paganism.
Not only in leaf-sculpture is this manifest;
the front of the cathedral at Sens is covered
with carvings of figures treated in a thoroughly
antique Roman style, which cannot be mis-
taken for Byzantine, so different is the plump
surface of the one from the hard though
well-disposed lines of the other; exactly the
difference which Niccola Pisano felt between


124
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
his Roman sarcophagus, alive with round,
supple, ripe-limbed nymphs, and the starved
and meagre severity of his late Byzantine
models. At Sens you have a nude female
figure treated as no Byzantine ever ventured
to treat such a subject; but evidently motived
from some Roman Venus. You have in-
numerable draperies in high relief, a Roman
Herodias separated by a Tuscan pillar from
a Roman executioner and St. John, and con-
trasting in the strongest manner with the
Centaur on the porch at Avallon, done after
the best Byzantine traditions, with the Greek
fluttering fringe of shaggy locks around his
loins.
One other important industry of the Middle
Ages, undoubtedly derived from Roman re-
mains, was that of tile-making, extensively
practised in England, as can be seen from
many relics in the floors of abbeys and castles ;
and Roman patterns, copied along with the
Roman technique, by this channel entered
largely into the composite European ideals of
the Middle Ages, roughly grouped together
as Gothic.


126
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
composition, which depends on the relative
disposition and weight of the flower-masses
(Plate IV., Fig. 1). In short, the Greeks
looked for line, the Persians for point and
mass. And all through the Middle Ages,
flower patterns are of one kind or the other :
in glass and earlier embroidery and missal-
painting, generally Greek; in pottery, and
in later fabrics and illuminations, generally
Oriental; while the architectural carving,
based on Roman festoons and Corinthian
capitals, has a separate development of its
own.
10. From the East, beside these motives of
flowering, the Mediævals possibly learnt the
hint of those loopsful of saints, common in
the glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies ; and the panelling of Gothic deca-
dence; though direct imitation of Orientalism
was confined to the south in general decorative
art, and in the north extended only to
embroidery
Most names of stuffs and styles of textile
art are Oriental; for example, Baudekins,
Baldacchino—the gold tissue of Baldac, or


128
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
down to the last century,—was a reminiscence
of Orientalism.
Similarly the pottery of Southern Europe
was formed and ornamented on Eastern models:
the great Italian Majolica wares show their
origin in every leaf and flower upon them, if
by no other sign. And the extensive import
of southern wares into northern Europe would
have been quite enough to have kept up a
perpetual interest in Orientalism, even had
there been no crusades.
11. Gothic art, then, has for its elements
the savage strength of Celts and Teutons,
shown in Irish and Scandinavian interlaced
abstract design ; the sweetness, the surface,
the foliage of Rome; the seriousness, the line,
the figures, and leafy stems of Byzantium;
the richness, point, and disposition of masses
of the East. There is another of the many
elements which combine into that complex
ideal called Gothic, — their childlike en-
joyment of nature, their interest, whether
serious or humorous, in expression of human,
animal, or vegetable life. And this is a home-
bred influence, the effect of monasticism and


GOTHIC.
129
chivalry; and these, in their time of strength,
results of sincere and healthy Christianity,
sincerely and healthily accepted.
Monasticism and chivalry in their decay and
downfall, no doubt offer lamentable and ridi-
culous spectacles. But throughout the central
period of modern history, when the nations
of Europe were being formed, and their cha-
racters fixed, like lads fresh come to a great
public school,-at that critical period, monas-
ticism and chivalry, with their Christian code,
were at once the exponents and the instructors
of society. The monk and knight were both
the result of, and the incentive to, very high
aims and ideas; and Gothic art is their monu-
ment, their record.
We do not often grasp the sort of life spent
by cultured men in the olden time, who were
not town dwellers, but tillers of a wild wood-
land or unvisited vale; who were pioneers of
civilization like American backwoodsmen, but,
unlike them, pioneers of culture also, and of
art. We educated moderns know the country,
especially forest or mountain lands, as a place
of utter ennui, or exhausting excitement; as


130
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
a place to shoot in, to fish in, for pedestrianism
or bicycling; as interminable railroads and
hotels. We civilized moderns rarely know
the country as a place to live in; we rarely
know the feeling created in a thinking, read-
ing, literary, and artistic man, who carries
on his intellectual studies, together with daily
necessary labour—not mere athletic exercise-
by land and water, in wood and wild ; and
that, remote from the competition and high-
pressure-life of towns. It is a totally different
thing from the squire's life, or the peasant's,
or even the parson's ; still more different from
the townsman's or gownsman's hurried holi-
day: and leads to curious contemplative moods,
together with the most active energy of mind
and body—to a sort of Wordsworthism.
So in the time when monks were the salt
of the earth (there was such a time, but it is
a long while ago), their life,
“Exempt from public haunt,
Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones.”
Yes, and fixed these sermons into stones
with an iron pen. For theirs was peculiarly


GOTHIC.
131
the art which was at once didactic and de-
corative, hinted indeed by Roman models, but
based on deep sympathy with the tongues
that are in trees, or the leaping lines of the
brooks, expressing aspirations born of forest
and mountain, powers of the rugged strength
of the rocks, and rich redundance of their
ferneries and foliage.
You have noticed that in the Scandinavian
metal-work there is never a flower or a leaf;
that the Greeks adored the forces, but rarely
loved the facts, of nature. The monks, by
whom and for whom Gothic art was created out
of all those elements we have just recounted,
were the first to see in landscape artistic
possibilities of expressing human thought and
emotion which had hitherto been found only
in man and the animal creation. As modern
art is especially landscape painting, so Gothic
art is landscape sculpture. A Gothic cathedral's
lines are mountain lines; its pillared aisle
differs from the Greek portico in being the
image of a forest glade; whose sunlit leafage
suggests like emotions with their window-
traceries; whose rock foundations match their


132
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
buttresses and porches, over-grown with inex-
haustible wealth of wild flowers, and festoons
of the ivy-tree. No wonder we, who know so
little of their feelings, can grasp so little of
their faculties ; when we pretend to imitate
the work, but never imitate the workers.
A part of monasticism, rather than its
counterpart, was chivalry. The knight and
monk were brothers, sworn to similar vows,
and bred in the same belief. Both have the
same spirit of solemnity, both are accustomed
to the same woodland wildness; and if the
monk loved order and quiet, while the knight
loved variety and adventure, both had before
their eyes the same presence of death and
diabolic powers, but the same hope of resur-
rection. Gothic art, then, as all other styles
of decoration, is simply and fully the reflex
of the mind of the age: in reading the ethics
of Gothic ornament you read the ethics of
the middle ages. And as this was true in
its origin, so we shall find it true throughout
its history.
12. The history of Gothic ornament falls
into four periods—Romanesque, to the end


GOTHIC.
133
of the twelfth century; Severe, thirteenth
century; Florid, fourteenth century; and
Decadent and Transitional of the fifteenth
century: and these periods advance in simul-
taneous progression, all Europe over.
The Romanesque of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, developed in France and England
as Norman, includes in the south the Lom-
bardic styles, and whatever other name is
given to the round-arched architecture of
Tuscany and Provence.
In this period the various motives which
afterwards coalesced to form the more popu-
larly known pointed styles are seen side by
side,—Roman arches, Byzantine mosaic, North-
ern interlacing; Roman foliage, Byzantine
figures, Northern grotesqueness and gloom.
In missal and glass-painting, you see, for
example, a Greek King David, far different
from the Irish one, sitting in a web of Scan-
dinavian device; the elements being not yet
entirely fused.
The ornament peculiar to the Norman style,
both in architecture and other art-work, con-
sisted in mouldings, zigzag, chevron, or billet-


134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
pattern; very little leafage yet, but grotesque
heads of monsters, birds, or beasts, or rudely-
drawn figures copied from the warriors and
hunters of the time. The colour, rich with
blue and crimson and vivid green.
13. The Severe, or thirteenth-century, style
is known in England as Early Pointed Gothic,
and characterised by its stiff foliage. The
Norman dog-tooth moulding blooms out into
delicate four-leaved flowers ; and the hollows,
before filled with grotesque beakheads, are
overlaid with tendrils of twining plants and
creepers, deeply and delicately cut to show the
dark background. Circles filled with flowered
trefoils and quatrefoils, tufted finials, and
capitals of upright leaves; stiff springy curves
in painted books and windows, outlining
strange creatures, whose twining limbs betray
their northern origin,—all these ornaments
mark the Severe Gothic style, in the age of
St. Louis and Edward I.
14. The Florid art of the fourteenth century
is seen in our Decorated Gothic; in its free
foliage, flowered mouldings, no longer tediously
undercut, but woven and tossed about in


GOTHIC.
135
natural profusion and superb redundance; in
traceries, showing elaborate ingenuity of geo-
metrical arrangement; in painting of natural
vegetative form, always arranged with the
most acute sensibility to beautiful composi-
tion. For these decorators desired not only
truth, but beauty; and feeling both so keenly,
seeing both in nature, reproduced not only
the actual semblance of her shapes, but also
the delicate disposition of her lines and masses;
knowing that a mere crude vulgar photogra-
phic realism is not all in all, any more than
a mere cold vulgar academic idealism. It is
only when both these facts of nature and feel-
ings of the human heart co-exist that you can
expect a true and complete Decorative Art.
15. During the fifteenth century Gothic
art expires; or rather suffers a change into
something rich and strange,-a transition
which goes on simultaneously, but differently,
in England, France, and Italy. The history
of this period of art and the true relation of
the Middle Ages to the Renaissance has yet
to be written in full; for the attention of his-
torians is soonest attracted to definite central


136
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
styles and ages ; and only after these have
been described and defined, have people leisure
and material to map out the borderlands.
In England, between the Decorated and
the Tudor styles, we have the Perpendicular,
worked out in that unhappy age of the Wars
of the Roses, reflecting their anarchy in its
aimlessness, their rudeness in its rigidity,
their commotion in its inelegance, and their
divisions in the broken, reposeless wastes of
its interminable panelling, overblown flowers,
and spotty crockets.
In France, the thoughtful geometrical
traceries of Florid Gothic lose their character
in the fantastic free curves of Flamboyant
architecture. All the ornament of this age
follows suit in rejecting anything that might
seem to suggest formalism, and in substituting
a picturesque grace with realistic details, the
Rococo of Gothic. Manuscript illumination of
this period is still more florid than before;
covering large cantles of margin with long
acanthus-leaves running into daisies on- a
spotted and dotted ground, or with unsteady
useless tendrils here and there attached to
.


138
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
between distinct Gothic and distinct Renais-
sance as we shall find it to be, on closer
examination, is a period when the seriousness
of the Middle Ages had not given place to
the despairing levity of the sixteenth century,
nor early earnestness, though leading to Re-
formation, to the party quarrels which marked
the post-Reformation era. The Gothic love
of wild nature, of strange and subtle thought,
of adventure in things terrestrial and celestial,
was now fanned to its fiercest flame, in marked
contrast to the callous and calculating spirit
of the sixteenth century. The Quattrocentisti
showed Gothicism in its last and most vigorous
effort, straining every nerve to grasp at a great
ideal, an ideal to which all the greatest minds
had been always tending,—that of the per-
fection of humanity by means of a knowledge
and beauty yet beyond it. The object which
the fifteenth-century students of Greek philo-
sophy had in view was the same with that
of the schoolmen (the fact that they did not
recognize the relationship makes no difference
whatever, and must not mislead us), wholly
different from the aims of modern post-


GOTHIC.
139
Renaissance science: it was the search for a
mysticism or pantheism—to know God, and
nature as His manifestation of Himself. The
earlier mediævals sought the key to the mystery
of the Bible in Aristotle ; these later ones in
Plato and Plotinus ; and the revival of classical
general search after a rational theology. What
was the end and result of it was never to be
known till the sixteenth century showed the
futility of the attempt, and the disappointed
world of thinkers fell back upon party dogmat-
ism and diplomacy, or upon Baconian method-
ology and Cartesian positivism.
So, in art, the Quattrocentisti work with a
boy's ideal before them, like all their prede-
cessors of the Middle Ages, the ideal of classic
perfection; which we have seen to be a motive
of Gothic throughout. They knew of the
glories of antiquity just so much as to fire
Rome-
“Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O’er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall,
Bounding all,


140
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed
Twelve abreast. . .
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, and aqueducts,—and then,
All the men !”
Glorious figures of heroes and heroines of old,
and the life they led, the more glorious to
them that they knew so little of that life,-
these were the ideals for the imagination, not
the models for the imitation, of the last of the
Gothic artists. It was not the mere copying
of scraps of the antique that created the great
Florentine schools of design; little they knew
of the antique but its fame; but if that could
stimulate them to lay out their whole energies
of passionate power and emotion, what more
did they need ?
As the century closed in, the great idea was
grasped. Rome was rediscovered; the casket
of classical learning was unlocked, and, like
Nitocris' 'tomb, contained nothing but dust
and ashes. Ancient art was pieced together
in exhumed palaces and galleries of restored
statues; there was the reality, and the dream
was over. To have an ideal before you, that


GOTHIC.
141
makes life worth living! But the sixteenth
century's ideal was behind it; it could only
look back, criticise, and copy. The Middle
Ages spent their whole strength, from Abelard
to Pico, in the pursuit of knowledge, which
they believed was laid up for them in the
store-houses of antiquity. They staked heart
and soul in search of beauty, which they ever
hoped to find in the art of Greece and Rome.
But all the knowledge, all the beauty they
achieved for us was won by the way, and cast
by the wayside ; they found indeed what they
sought, to their own bitter surprise, since it
proved valueless for all those purposes they
had planned. Plato brought them no nearer
God's truth, and the Baths of Titus brought
them only farther from His beauty; and so
the sixteenth century fell back disillusioned
from the search.
I suppose the first intimation one has that
one's boyhood is gone is a great disappointment
about something or other, and a little cynicism
as the result. With the fifteenth century, the
world's boyhood was gone, and with it the
high aims and hopes of boyhood. As for the
✓


142
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
splendid vision by which the Middle Age was
on its way attended, the Renaissance
“Perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.”


LECTURE VI.
THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
1. The Classic Revival in Italy.—2. True Character of the
Age.—3. Vulgarity of Aim.—4. Cheapness of Produc-
tion.–5. Indelicacy of Subject.-6. Scientific Spirit. —
7. Machiavellianism.-8. Effect on Art of these Moral
Characteristics.-9. Mediæval Survivals and Oriental
Importations.—10. Venice Glass.-11. Marquetry and
Cabinet-Making.-12. Majolica.-13. Silk.-14. Re-
naissance in France.-15. In England.–16. In Ger-
many and Flanders.
1. Many of the popular names for leading
ideas or complex movements prove, on analysis,
to be misnomers. Why should all the art of
Athens be called “classic”? Why should
that of the Middle Ages be called “Gothic,”
except by the most arbitrary of conventions ?
And when we group together the many-sided
life of the sixteenth century under the title
of “Renaissance," let us clearly understand
that the revival of classicism played but a


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
145
Middle Ages we find the classic spirit con-
tinually manifest; when we note the free
thought of an Abelard, the antinomianism of
Provençal poetry, the ripe modelling of a
Niccola Pisano, touches of classic tenderness
or classic truth here and there throughout
the Middle Ages,—all these are just as truly
part and parcel of that complex mediæval age
as similar motives are of the hardly more
complex Renaissance. In a word, it is not
Classicism that makes the Renaissance, if by
classicism one means a respect for the antique,
and a reference to it.
2. Nor was it a superior sweetness or light
which made the sixteenth century what it was.
Continually, throughout both earlier and later
art and literature, lurking traces of tenderness
and hidden springs of strength are to be found
for the seeking. Nor, again, is the Renaissance
in any exclusive and especial degree an age
of luxury, of crime, of cruelty, or of impiety.
All these are only too rife in every age; cer-
tainly, it is not to any of these that the six-
teenth century owes its remarkable distinctive
character.
10


146
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
For a hundred and fifty years Greek learning
had been cultivated throughout Europe among
scholars ; by the beginning of the sixteenth
century its ideas had become popular and
common. For fifty years printing had been
practised; by the year 1500 it was becoming
common. During all the previous century
maritime discovery, mechanical invention, ideas
of social democracy, habits of free thought,
means of scientific investigation, all those
things which make modern life different from
ancient civilization or patriarchal simplicity,
had been gradually creeping into every-
day use, and were become common. And
decorative art became—not more classic, not
more refined, not more powerful; but decora-
tive art became common, and—well, and
unclean.
3. The sixteenth century was the age, in
the first place, when things that had hitherto
been secret were laid open; when things that
had been sacred were made profane; when
private rights were publicised; when princely
prerogatives were usurped by the bourgeoisie
(then first to any great extent); when the


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
147
decorative art hitherto treasured in churches,
in abbeys, or in palaces, hitherto applied with
reverence to objects of reverence, hitherto con-
sidered as something in itself sacred to heaven
or to heaven's lieutenant,—now was simply
vulgarised, that is, spent on unworthy objects
for the satisfaction, not for the enjoyment,
still less for the instruction, of an unapprecia-
tive public.
Renaissance decoration is essentially a style
applicable to the houses and furniture of the
well-to-do bourgeois, of the great middle class,
which in that age for the first time rose into
being, partly owing to the long comparative
peace following long universal war. Descen-
dants of the men who had looked with awe
and wonder upon the painted windows, the
embroidered vestments, the chased armour
of the church and the castle, now in all the
pride of new-gotten wealth sought to rival
what they had formerly revered; forgetting
that the art-treasures which they only half
appreciated were the work of long ages and
produced at untold expense. And so in filling
their houses with ornament supplied in a


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
149
guarantee of thorough and thoughtful design.
For its only law is strict repetition, that is,
cheap production, and its unlimited licence
allows the introduction of any object in earth,
or heaven, or hell; for a characteristic feature
is its insistence upon hideous indecency-not
in alluring forms, but in the combinations of
everything that can disgust a healthy imagina-
tion, and fascinate a diseased fancy. This
revolting indelicacy of the sixteenth century
ideas-gratuitously degraded, for they teach
no moral lesson, and raise no hearty laugh,
as do Gothic grotesques—need not be further
insisted upon, but is too universal to be passed
in silence.
5. And yet, for fear you should suspect
special pleading masked under the cloak of
modesty, look in any museum, or in the illus-
trated catalogues to any museum, and you
will see that almost anything dated from the
sixteenth century is ornamented chiefly with
a particular style of nymphs and satyrs. Now
a truly classical artist makes of his nymph
the ideal of beauty; of his satyr the perfection
of the picturesque. But the Renaissance


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
151
minate application of all kinds of ornament to
all kinds of common use, and, as further study
shows, of unsuitable material; and secondly,
a new feeling of unrest, of feverish energy,
of haste and hurry, fatal to many of the higher
qualities of decorative art; which flourishes
most among those who have leisure to add
beauty to use, thought to beauty, and truth
to thought.
6. There are two other signs of the time,
which have very strong bearing upon Renais-
sance art. The first is the scientific interest,
new lights, adventurous free-thought, inquiry
into the nature both of things in general
and of things in particular, leading to the Re-
formation, to Baconian philosophy, to Para-
celsus and Chemistry, and so forth. In art,
this leads to a desire for correctness,—that is
to say, for muscular anatomy, for a style of
drawing the figure with which the man of
science, the surgeon, will be content; however
little it may satisfy the psychologist, the poet,
the lover of human nature, the designer of
fine abstract form,-in fact, either the true
Gothic artist or the true Greek sculptor.


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
153
the case of Keats, or they come to a compro-
mise to keep apart, as in the well-known
amateurs of the present day.
Correctness, cleverness, “cock-sureness,” has
other dangers. Aiming at a low standard, try-
ing for a hard-and-fast quality which he can
attain without much reflective thought, without
any sympathy or imagination, the artist is soon
content, and no sooner content than dissatisfied.
So that he cannot rest with nature, and accept
her suggestions from leaves and flowers for
ornament, relying upon her hints for perpetual
variety and perennial interest, but he must
have material upon which to show off his cheap
cleverness and conventional correctness. And
so, ornament in the Renaissance gives up
natural forms of vegetation to hunt for violent
combinations of impossible associations, of sur-
prising monsters, of scrolls and straps, acanthus
and the nude torso, at which you never are,
because you always expect to be, astonished.
One does not tire of copying Gothic ornament,
any more than of copying Nature; but a very
few hours exhaust all the impressions that can
be obtained from even the finest Renaissance
i


154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
detail. The truth is, that physical science,
and all work done in its spirit, takes in only
half of what is possible for us to know and
feel; while art, even decorative, should touch
the whole diapason of human emotions: and
cleverness, correctness, perfection, carried up to
a low standard only, make one feel more keenly
the absence of a higher ideal.
7. One more trait of the Cinquecento is its
Machiavellianism. With whatever motives of
purely scientific principle, Machiavelli formu-
lated into a consistent philosophy the dia-
bolically selfish and cruel maxims of statecraft
current in his time; and his time accepted
him as its typical philosopher, as readily as
the past generation recognised its own spirit
in John Stuart Mill. In so doing, that age
stamped itself with a self-conscious character
of deliberate departure from a religious and
moral standard which it did not deny, but
which it defied. Selfishness, cruelty, want of
faith in God and man, have always existed,
but it was reserved for this sixteenth century
to approve them as motives and to adopt them
as means.


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
155
With all their cleverness, such men could
not but become callous to suffering, cold to
enthusiasm, insensible to all finer feeling,
unsympathetic to goodness, beauty, and truth;
with seared conscience and sealed eyes. Now
the chief thing needful for worthy art is
sensitiveness, sympathy, quickness of appre-
hension; and a clever but callous man can
never become an artist of any high order.
More than that, callousness in action goes
hand in hand with coarseness in passion ;
and coarseness in life with coarseness in line,
that is, want of refinement in curvature, want
of thoughtful gradation, of spring, of sweep,
of rush, of fall, of tension, of play, of power.
Now the very stamp and seal of six-
teenth century ornament is a certain sort of
dull, stupid, uneventful, brutish line; hard,
cold, strictly symmetrical fore and aft, star-
board and larboard ; compounded of circular,
and straight, and feebly crooked; a line like
the raucous voice of some argumentative bully,
from whom pleasant conversation shrinks in
a numb despair. So is this Renaissance line
like a torpedo-shock to all the faculties and


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
157
refined line and modelling, and yet, contrasted
with any earlier ornament, is a cheap thing to
produce. Take paper and pencil, flourish at
haphazard in one corner of the page; rule
vertical tangents to these casual curves, double
the paper down the middle, and rub off a
reversed impression,—you will have a capital
Tudor linen-pattern, produced without the
slightest thought or feeling. Unconsciously
but seriously one tires of such ornaments;
one soon sees the trick of them, and could
oneself add
“ The superimpending eighty thousand lines,
Which might, odds bobs, sir ! in judicious hands
Extend from here to Mesopotamy!”.
Life, in nature and in art, is the thing
which defies analysis : to analyse a motive,
whether of ethics or of ornament, is to anni-
hilate it. And only that decoration will give
living pleasure which is beyond analysis, whose
secret cannot be found out, but only felt.
That can always be, if the decorator lives the
life of an artist, loves nature, and loves his
work; seeking thought and imagination,


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
159
SO
to resist the prevailing tendency; and just
as examples can be shown of thoroughly bad
work in the best periods of Gothic art,
so examples can be given of good work in
the midst of this age of vulgarity, callousness,
coarseness, hurry, indelicacy, and licence in
thought and in execution. And in the Teu-
tonic countries, where the older traditions were
still strong, German strength and dignity,
Flemish solidity, English humour and good
sense, often overwhelm the worse tendencies of
the time. So that we have our Nuremburg
school, our Flanders woodwork, our Tudor
style, and our Shakespeare, to contrast with
the mass of corruption in art and literature
from which this account of the character of the
Renaissance sixteenth century has been drawn.
There were some industries, too, in which
either the traditions of the trade or the nature
of the material kept the motives of ornament
more or less pure. Such were the Venice
glass works and marquetry, the Urbino potteries,
and the Lucchese and Lyons silks.
10. Venice glass—factories at Murano exist-
ing from time immemorial, but now most


160
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
active and widely known—was, from the
nature of its material and working, kept from
the hardness and coarseness of current ideas.
Like coils of their fishermen's ropes and
swathes of their nets, the ductile “metal”
could only be drawn and blown into such
whorls and wreaths as the curves of tension
regulate, and therefore certainly beautiful.
And the translucency of the material, tempered
by an undulating surface, which focusses every
light in delicate gradation, goes far to trans-
form even the most gaudily or clumsily devised
glass ornament.
To take an interest in it one need not be
a connoisseur or collector. It is enough to
know that there are six possible sorts,-clear,
enamelled, crackled, marbled, flowered, and
netted, of which the first sort shows all the
virtues of the manufacture; the rest being
freaks and fancies more or less imitated from
the shards of ancient glass found among
Roman ruins.
11. Of the Venetian marquetry we shall
have more to say in discussing the earliest
work of next century, which takes its rise now


162
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
ings, and their proper use and construction is
disguised and invalidated by extraneous orna-
ment of brackets and columns, and so forth.
So that you are to sit on a tomb, to eat off
a triumphal arch, to drink out of a shrine,
to wash your hands in a sarcophagus, and
brush your hair before a pediment. See how
whatever nobility and removedness stirred the
imaginations of the Quattrocentisti now are
vulgarized'; how ideas which should be specially
elevating are now, as I said, made common
and unclean!
12. A quite unique combination of classic
and Oriental ideas is found in the majolica,
of the sixteenth century, made in many towns,
but chiefly and principally in the territory
of Urbino, under an enlightened dynasty of
dukes; whose court is celebrated in Castiglione's
“Cortegiano,” a Platonic dialogue on courtesy,
about which there is accessible gossip in Mr.
J. A. Symonds? “Renaissance in Italy.” During
the fifteenth century, these manufactures grew;
introduced proximately from Sicily or Majorca
(whence the name Majolica), and more re-
motely from the Arabs and Persians, retaining


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
165
English travellers, who have wondered at the
gorgeous restorations in the salons of Blois,
the picturesque pile of Chenonceaux, the
romantic and historical associations—balls,
burials, massacres—of Amboise, and wondered
most at the finish of everything; which
catches an English eye, sympathetic to sand-
papered smoothness. But a tourist's hasty
inspection does not reveal the superficiality,
the haste, the mechanical repetition of their
redundant detail, and when the conception
is finest it leaves no guarantee that the exe-
cution shall be thoughtful and satisfying.
Indeed, nothing is more disappointing than
the arabesques of the Loire; if you attempt to
draw them in the same spirit of admiration
and affection with which you approach the
grotesques of Normandy and Champagne.
15. England, with France, received direct
influence from Italy. Torregiano came from
Florence-after breaking Michael Angelo's nose
-and built Henry VII.'s tomb. We had other
masters, as Holbein, for instance; but we pre-
ferred to develop our own art in our own way;
and so the Renaissance ideas made very slow


166
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
progress. The Perpendicular style was an
English style, and the few new ideas sufficed
only to turn Perpendicular into Tudor.
The Tudor, whatever be its shortcomings,
was the style of a noble age in England—the
age of Elizabeth, of Drake, of Spenser, and
of Shakespeare ; holding its own individuality
while not refusing whatever of real progress
it learnt from its neighbours; and cultivating
the substantial, if too rustic, comfort of merry
England in those moated granges which a
generation ago were the delight of painters
and novelists. And the types of ornament
belonging to the Tudor style, inferior as they
are to the grand Gothic religious design, are
neither so degraded nor so degrading as the
stucco and sensuality of contemporary France
and Italy. The linen-pattern was a little
wearisome, but not disgusting; and the abuse
of heraldry in Tudor decoration betrayed pride,
but not licentiousness. It was distinctly a
step downward from this to the Palladian
mouldings of the Stuart style, and the “Five
Orders” of the Oxford Pigmarket.
16. In essential respects, Spain imitates


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
167
Italy in cinquecento work; while Germany
retains much of the Gothic power, showing,
even in compositions most influenced by
classicism, rough dignity and picturesqueness,
remarkable in the Nuremberg carvers and
metal-workers, of whom Peter Vischer and
Adam Kraft are most familiar names—contem-
poraries with Dürer, and illustrating, in their
materials, the same general impulses as he in
his engraving. Side by side with Nuremberg
and the German merchant towns, commercial
Flanders received the new light; not shining
as elsewhere upon a chamber empty, swept,
and garnished, but upon the storehouse of
Gothic tradition, which it lit up into clear-
ness and correctness, without swamping all the
past in its blaze. The great merchants of
Antwerp were almost the richest people in
the world; their wives were all like queens,
the French Queen said, and their houses like
palaces. So that there was great stimulus to
the arts of domestic decoration, which pro-
gressed, however, rather in quantity than in
quality. Flemish Renaissance wood-carving
and glass-painting are familiar enough to


168
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
us through their extensive importation into
England during the end of the sixteenth and
beginning of the seventeenth centuries. At
Oxford much of the old furniture in halls
and chapels is of this type ; stained windows
of a homely humour, whose quaint mirth does
not at all contradict the sanctity of the subject,
if one accept it in the childlike, spirit in which
it is offered.
One of the quaintest pieces of Flemish fun
is in a French country church, which crowns
the ruins of an ancient city set upon a hill,
still by tradition Montréal, the Royal Mount;
though crumbling cottages niched into crumb-
ling ruins of sculptured oolite, and deep wells,
choked with ivy, capped with rope-worn
cornices, are all that remain. Up the solemn
street you climb, and everything as old as the
hills, as quiet as death. From the overgrown
churchyard you see a forlorn valley, treeless
côteaux, and granite tors of the silent Morvan.
Inside it is strange and cold—Norman arches
and massive piles; something oppresses you
in the place; it is cramped and closed in.
But just under the pulpit are carved stalls,


THE CINQUECENTO RENAISSANCE.
169
and ramping along the edge of one, aloft, à
jour before the congregation, two lions tugging
at a bone. And one of them is winning it,
ecstatic and triumphant; and the other of them,
writhing in an agony of despair, knows that
the prize is slipping, slipping, slipping from
his weakened grasp. Nothing could be more
ludicrous than this pure northern humour,
which alone rescues Teutonic art from the
blight of the Romance Renaissance of the
sixteenth century.
nore


LECTURE VII.
THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.
1. Apology for the Age.-2. Its Contrast with the Cin.
quecento.—3. Court and Fashion.—4. General History
in France and England.-5. Cabinet-making :-Mar-
quetry, Boule, and the Ebenistes.—6. China-mania
and Lacquer.—7. Rococo.-8. Baroque.-9. Dresden
China.—10. Sèvres China.-11. Chelsea China.-12.
Nymphs and Shepherdesses.-13. Stuart Style.—14.
Grinling Gibbons.—15. Queen Anne and Georgian
Styles.-16. The Gothic Revival.
1. The nineteenth century is accustomed to
look down upon the eighteenth, as a freshman
at college looks down upon the still un-
emancipated schoolboy. But there are things
to study in a schoolboy; and a freshman is
not the highest evolutionary outcome of the
human species. We call the age of our grand-
fathers the Age of Shams. Poor grandfathers !
and happy grandsons to live in an age of
Realities—such bright Realities too!


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 171
An apology seems almost necessary for
drawing your attention to the arts of this
age, which are often thought to be represented
only by the Caracci, by Spagnoletto, by Dutch
landscapes and Flemish Kermesses, -and by
that dreary gallery at the Louvre where every
academic insipidity crowds the walls. To be
sure there were great artists even then,-
Vandyke, Velasquez, Hogarth, Reynolds. But
every age has its special department of art,
beyond which one must not too confidently
expect excellence; its one industry, on which
all its power is spent, leaving little for other
artistic aims. The Egyptians could build; the
Greeks carve statues, the Byzantines inlay
mosaic, the Scandinavians work metal; the
Gothic artists were supreme at strictly deco-
rative stone and glass-work; the Cinquecentisti
at painting the figure. And as the nineteenth
century is a landscape age whose king is
Turner, so the seventeenth and eighteenth
were greatest at Cabinet-making; whose king
was Boule.
2. Considering the new order of things, the
new wants and new domestic life, now that


172
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
people really lived in houses, and not only
crept into them at night like foxes into their
holes and birds into their nests, considering
in short that houses were now seen rather from
the inside than from the outside, it is not
surprising that domestic furniture of all sorts,
and cabinet-making in particular, should assert
itself as a great branch of art, hitherto un-
recognised, but no longer unrecognisable.
As to style, it must be understood that the
Renaissance of the Cinquecento was a very
definite and limited affair, dependent on style,
not on subject; on manner, not on matter. It
is confined to the century of which the last
lecture treated, except for a dribbling vein of
dull classicism, surviving indeed to this day,
but not truly characteristic of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
Renaissance ornament, properly so called,
was marked by a vulgarization, a cheapening
of ideas; which made its lines coarse, and its
figures meaningless : poor reproductions, at
best, of a poor class of degenerate Roman
work. The next centuries are marked by the
abandonment of these to the lower orders,


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 173
and the rise of a refined but domestic deco-
ration for princes and palaces.
3. Each idea was promptly imitated by the
vulgar; no sooner imitated, than abandoned
for a fresh fashion : and here we trace the
beginning of the age of fashions as distinct
from the ages of natural and national styles.
At the French court, and elsewhere, refine-
ment was an aim; refinement of deportment
and conversation was the study of society
from Louis Quatorze to Marie Antoinette. And
the standard was kept up by continual fresh
starts and new departures, each one farther
and farther away from the cinquecentist
ideals.
Many of these fashions were anything but
Greek; were Chinese or what not: some were
classical, but not the classicism of the Renais-
sance,-fresh discoveries of new ideas in the
old mine of Græco-Roman culture. And
throughout all, since Rome was, the mere fact
of doing nymphs and cupids does not constitute
Classicism nor even Renaissance, in its true
sense. It all depends on the way in which
such subjects are treated, on the style; of


174
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
which one definite kind only is peculiar to the
sixteenth century.
The study of this period is useful to
sociology, as showing how different modern
times are from antiquity, in the self-conscious
changes of fashion, as opposed to quiet
development of national ideas ; exactly the
difference between the hot-house cultivation
of exotics and the spontaneous sowing of wild
flowers.
And yet political changes and national
character are not without their influence on
art. It is from political reasons that France
takes the lead throughout ; Italy and Spain
gradually sinking, and Germany too troubled
generally with war to attend to the arts of
peace. England, however, along with imita-
tions of France, and a survival of late-imported
Renaissance motives, has ideas of her own; a
healthy common-sense naturalism, gradually
rising to the great Gothic revival.
4. The useful Racinet tells how the artists
of the sixteenth century, after having recon-
structed the art of the ancients, wanted a fresh
start; and so the volute scroll, the “greatest


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 175
glory of the Italian Renaissance," was substi-
tuted for the leaf scroll,—" the volute scroll,
so logical in an age of woodwork,-like natural
rolls of fine shavings.”
We have seen, however, that the volute
scroll was logical in more ways than one; the
logical outcome of an age of coarseness. That
was the beginning upon which the next age
had to work. Then under Louis XIII. (1610-
1643; see the historical scheme overleaf),
Europe was convulsed by the Thirty Years'
War; France not so disturbed.
The volute scroll died out; the strap be-
coming less hard and parallel, becoming free
and foliated : the shell appearing as a motive
of ornament, and afterwards developing into
Rococo. The architectural models till then
used as furniture disappeared ; nor was the
idea revived till the nineteenth century, when
the Gothic Revival took it up.
England flourished under James I.; the
riches of the Spanish main went to enhance
the comforts of a healthy country life. Inigo
Jones adopted as much Palladianism as the
British Philistine of that day would endure ;


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 177
but most of our decoration was that sort of
admixture of Gothic and Renaissance variously
nicknamed Stuart, Jacobean, Baronial or Nash-
and-Cattermole style.
Then under Louis XIV. (1643–1714) a
great activity in building and decorating was
displayed. His minister Colbert established
the Academy of Design in 1664,—the Gobelins
tapestry-works in 1667. Marot and Berain
imitated, but with a difference, the Renaissance
grotesques; and Robert de Cotte made carpets
and tapestries, pink and blue. Now we trace
the gradual inroad of Eastern motives; in
his marquetry, Boule brings into play new
luxuries of colour and curvature ; but more of
him when this rough description of the
historical scheme is completed.
In England, in the later half of the seven-
teenth century, Sir Christopher Wren cham-
pioned classicalism ; upon which Grinling
Gibbons grafted his naturalistic carving, and
saved much English decoration from that
dulness to which pedantic architecture tends.
In the reign of Louis XV. (1714-1774) the
oriental idea culminated in Chinamania and
12


178
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
Lacquer, ending in Rococo. Gillot, Watteau,
and the panel-painters came to the front; and
the porcelain factories, begun at St. Cloud and
Vincennes in 1700, were transferred to Sèvres
in 1756, thereupon doing their finest work.
In England it was the time of Hogarth and
Thornhill—the dullest time, in original deco-
ration; for French fashions were the rage,
and Chinamania at its height; which, however
popular, could not be, and cannot be, acclima-
tized. All the grand houses were dismally
classic; but under Queen Anne there came
into prominence the middle classes, whom the
Restoration had crushed, as being the movers
of the Commonwealth. Their houses were
simply Palladian cottages, whose virtue was
a homely absence of pretence,-cosy red brick
with a little green paint here, and white paint
there, harmonizing with the duck-pond in the
foreground, and the elm trees behind. Inside
simplicity itself,—necessary furniture, as useful
as possible; a few Dutch tiles, brought over
in the days of Dutch William, and a bit of
Gibbons carving; Chippendale furniture and
Chelsea pottery for the better sort later on.


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 179
With Louis XVI. came the discovery of
Pompeii ; Rococo was brought back to severity
and a new classicism, done in white and gold,
but admitting painted panels by Boucher and
Fragonard, and neat luxury of movables, all
changing with the Revolution. Then, the
Republican ideal fell back upon classicism, but
of a sturdier sort,—the Phrygian bonnet-rouge,
fasces, and the triumphal arch, leading to the
Style Empire ; laurel-wreaths, low necks, high
waists like Greek statues, and hair worn à la
Grecque.
During this time the Gothic Revival timidly
creeps in; beginning under the Georges,
fostered by Sir Walter Scott and Pugin, caught
up in France at the reaction to old traditions
of monarchy, and of late dominant.
5. Such being the general course of events,
we can retrace the several strands of the rope,
so to speak, -noting in the various depart-
ments of industry their motives of ornament;
taking in greater detail, but still as mere
sketches, Cabinet-making, Chinamania, Rococo
and Baroque, Pottery, Pastoralism, and the
English styles.


182
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
chasers. And it is always the best work
that is the object of criticism; you must
judge neither men nor styles from their
libellers.
Under Louis XV. Boule grew heavier, and
furniture larger. The Renaissance edgings
and mouldings were brought back, till super-
seded by Rococo, in which violent effect was
an object, and portliness rather than elegance ;
so that the chased metal was replaced by
gilded wood-carving, and the surface of every-
thing thrown into “bombé” or bossy un-
dulations. With this, Lacquer was in vogue, of
which more, in connection with Chinamania;
superseded by the new Marquetry of the
Pompeian period of Louis XVI., done chiefly
in ebony, whence its artists (of whom the best
known names are Riesener and Roentgen) are
called the Ebènistes. They used tulip, rose-
wood, holly, maple, laburnum, and ebony from
Ceylon and Madagascar, to inlay wreaths or
bouquets on a flat surface, with diapered sides
and corners to their cabinets; which were
designed to harmonize with a new, daintily
severe classicism, suggested by discovery of


184
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
of Louis XIII., silk and textiles, and Rouen
faience. During the seventeenth century, Dutch
commerce had opened out the far east, and
a new orientalism was introduced to Europe,
hitherto taught chiefly by. Aryan Persia, but
now saturated with Turanian China and Japan;
that is, we substituted a grotesque for a noble
school of teachers, and changed our standard
from grandeur of design to cleverness of manu-
facture.
The Jesuits in Japan (before the great
massacre which closed those islands to Euro-
peans), and travellers in Asia, like Bernier,
created a great interest in oriental work; and
with the eighteenth century Chinamania set
in. Hogarth's pictures show the mantel-
shelves crowded with blue china; contempor-
ary satire ridicules the rage, and contemporary
art reflects it.
A sign of the entrance of the Asiatic idea,
some time before, is the introduction in
Gillot's tapestry, otherwise the worst sort of
Renaissance arabesque, of Moguls, tents and
armour of the East, instead of nymphs and
cupids. And even the porcelain and lacquer-


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 187
interest of society in the philosophy and
antiquarianism of the pre-Revolutionist Illu-
mination.
8. The counterpart of Rococo in other
branches of art-industry is Baroque, whose
home is Dresden. Throughout Germany, the
successors of Dürer and Vischer, who worked
in that unique and interesting style which
tempered the Gothic with Italian tenderness
and classic correctness,—all these schools had
been swept away by the thirty years' war of
Gustavus Adolphus, which destroyed old art-
guilds as well as the resources and houses of
patrons, ending only in 1648. Not only the
workers, but the work was destroyed, just as
in 1688, in France, Louis XIV. melted down
all gold and silver plate upon which he could
lay hands, to pay the expenses of war.
About this time, in Germany, Frederick
Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and
King of Poland, held his luxurious and disso-
lute court at Dresden, for whose delight the
gay and affected art of the Meissen porcelain
was practised; and goldsmiths and jewellers
threw off the last remains of classic simplicity


188
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
to adopt the style called Baroque, still to be
studied in the Green Vaults at Dresden, where
all manner of monstrosities may be seen,-
ostrich eggs, shells, mis-shapen pearls, and so
forth,—worked up into vases and jewels. Much
of this is attributed to Johann Melchior Ding-
linger (1665—1731), an extremely clever man,
but one who spent his cleverness not in
furthering art, but in elaborating toys and
trifles, such as the model of the court of
Aurungzebe, his masterpiece.
9. Associated with these “Chinoiseries” is
Dresden china, charming in fresh colour and
suggestive naturalism; but coarse in curve,
and vulgar in conception; without the serious
satire and noble grotesque which made earlier
German art more valuable even than Aristo-
phanes or Hogarth. The exact value of Dresden
china is better understood by a comparison
of its character with the French and English
porcelain of the eighteenth century-Sèvres
and Chelsea.
10. Of Sèvres china, as everyone knows,
and indeed few but bric-a-brac specialists
know much more, there is the hard and the


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 189
soft paste ; the hard most scientific, the soft
most artistic. The latter manufactured during
the whole eighteenth century, the former only
since 1770. The central time lasted for twenty
or thirty years after the middle of the century,
after which the artistic value declines. During
this time the commoner pieces were made with
a plain ground painted with flowers or fruit,
presentation pieces with coloured ground, as
turquoise, rose pink, called rose dubarry, and
mostly royal blue, relieved with arabesques or
veining of gold. Later on, gems and enamel
were inlaid. Beside vases and table services,
were made especially plâques and slabs for
.furniture and statuettes, of all of which ex-
amples are to be seen in the South Kensington
Museum, in the splendid collection lately left
by Mr. John Jones. And if such hurried
hints as are here stolen from generally ac-
cessible sources serve only to awake an intelli-
gent interest in these different departments
of art, that is all they mean to do; for a series
of more appreciative studies would be quite out
of perspective in the limited space we have for
review of the whole range of decorative history.


192
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
For natural imitation, the eighteenth century
work can well be surpassed; for ideal grace,
not at all. Now there is a fitness for deco-
rative purposes in frank abandonment of
attempts to imitate nature, as you feel on
seeing real flowers in a vase decorated with
lifelike porcelain ones; and beside that, a
rightness in the ready subordination of frame
to picture, which you do not see when both
are equally natural and equally attractive.
This it is which fixes the superiority of
Sèvres and even Chelsea as decorative art
over Dresden china.
..12. The illustration of Pastoral poetry is
too prominent in Decorative Art to be passed
over without some remark on the history of
the Nymph and Shepherdess which adorn, in
very different forms, most pieces of seventeenth
and eighteenth century work. We have seen
what cruel treatment these amiable heroines
received from the Renaissance designers, who
turned them into the most insipid or unde-
sirable monsters that a delirious fancy could
suggest. In the time of Louis XIII., how-
ever, Lepautre's friezes are Raphael grotesques


SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 197
by hand, evidently without hesitation and
without mishap. Country houses abound with
this fine though unpretending work.” That
is exactly the sort of work nowadays wanted.
There is good carving done, but it is preten-
tious, expensive, and highly finished: but the
time may come when both the public and the
profession will learn to value ornament in
which there is more intellectual power and
less mechanical drudgery,—sketches in wood
by real artists; less expensive because less
laboured, while infinitely more valuable be-
cause more thoughtful and skilful, than any-
thing that is in vogue at present.
15. Middle-class domestic furniture of Queen
Anne and the early Georges followed France,
though wrought by carvers with some of the
traditions of Gibbons, degenerating into
Rococo. Later in the eighteenth century
the Chippendales produced a great variety
of designs, sometimes French, sometimes after
Sir W. Chambers and the Adains, who kept
to a certain classical severity. Thomas Chip-
pendale published his patterns in 1764, and
after him his son carried on his work; making


THE PRESENT DAY.
201
reckoned, not by the number of articles turned
out, but by the number of decorative ideas.
In barbarian Polynesia or uncivilized Asia
every new mat or bowl is a new design, not
quite intentionally so, perhaps, but so by
preference. In the ancient empires, in me-
diæval Europe, every workman left upon every
work the stamp of a human life and a human
love given to Nature and to art.
This straightforward sincerity was a constant
factor, so to speak, toward the production of
decorative art-work; and, working together
with the varying conditions of life and social
character, formed spontaneous national or
epochal styles.
2. In this sense there is no modern decor-
ative art. What is so called is imported from
barbarians, mere plagiarism; or copied from
the ancients, mere affectation. Of these
stolen or affected ornaments, there are five
classes, none of which are national or epochal,
even in the sense of being acceptable equally
to rich and poor, educated and uneducated,
common-sense natures and poetical; and all
these fashions are appreciated only by a


202
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
clique, and hardly accepted by the crowd,
which cares for none of these things.
3. The first is Gothicism, advocated once by
men who were generous enough to believe
that the nineteenth-century British public
had that seriousness and sturdiness of character
which made Gothic art the expression of
mediæval England, but without which Gothic
art is only an archæological pastime, or an
insincere affectation.
It is useless to copy the Work, and not
to copy the Workman. To be a Gothic
artist does not mean to make an inadequate
reduced model of some ancient cathedral, and
drop it down into the slums or the squares
of a modern manufacturing town or commer-
cial city,—it means to live up to the standard
of the men who made old England in their
working days of war, and made the old
English churches and castles in their holiday
intervals of peace. A modern Gothic designer,
however high may be his own private aims,
is not the full and true exponent of society,
not the artist of his age. However great
may be the educational influence of such


THE PRESENT DAY.
203
isolated endeavours, they cannot be called
national, except so far as they hint at national
regret for national decadence.
4. Another kind of ornament in vogue I
do not know whether to call Parisianism or
Philistinism. By a meretricious mixture of
staring realistic iinitation and gaudy worn-out
Renaissance motives, it appeals to the vulgar,
whose chief notion of being pleased is to be
surprised, and whose chief notion of being
surprised is to be deceived. Deception,
whether in morals or in art, is evil, and is
no less indefensible in decoration, where it
sins against those laws of constructive fitness
and utility, which, we have seen throughout,
rule all noble ornament. A carpet that pre-
tends to have real flowers upon it, or a wall
that pretends to have real panels and pictures
upon it, is so much the less a wall or a carpet ;
and if want of sensibility did not go hand in
hand with want of sense, such attempts at
imitative deception would not be easily tole-
rated. When, however, the luxury, for which
this style panders, demands in addition sug-
gestions of sensuality, as in the art of the


204
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
sixteenth century, one feels that the only claim
of such design to represent the age is based on
its representation of the age's lowest passions.
5. A third style, now very generally ac-
cepted, and so to speak the official or academi-
cal State style (for there can be a State Art as
well as a State Church), is that encouraged by
the government schools. It was evolved out
of Gothicism, adapted to the conveniences of
mechanical manufacture; and formulated by
eminent and enlightened men, now passed
away, in the hope of making the best of a bad
business, by producing articles which would
content the unappreciative, while not offending
the educated. It was a reacticn from the
school of Philistinism which accepted wax-
work and the old Berlin wool patterns.
It was based on remnants of mediæval tile-
designs and such like, where the intent and
mode of working enforced a simplification
of natural objects; and all the little varieties
(accidental or intentional, but always encou-
raged) of Gothic expression were “corrected”
according to rules of symmetry supposed to
be derived from the Greeks.


THE PRESENT DAY.
211
the society that best represents the present
age ?
The intelligent art-loving man of the world
admires the Cinquecento, and its ideas ;
literary and artistic circles are now tending
to sixteenth-century motives of thought,
of economy, of art; producers are catching
at the idea, and Renaissance patterns are
driving out all others. The populace take
kindly to the hard lines and harsh colours
which express their own lives and feelings,-
and we all congratulate ourselves upon the
“ spread of art among the masses”! In a
word, we are playing over again the drama
of the Cinquecento; only the cry then was
for culture, and now it is for “science.”
We are all, in spite of ourselves, children of
the age ; and except by special and strenuous
efforts, blind to its faults and tendencies. The
reader no doubt resented that severe criticism
upon sixteenth-century ornament in Lecture VI.
We all of us resent criticism upon the Re-
naissance, little remarking the reason. But
recollect the character of that age, and com-
pare it with the character of this, and there


THE PRESEN'T DAY.
215
create and be the symbol of pride, of ennui,
or of immorality.
Does any one sit before a machine-made
pattern and gaze at it with pleasure and profit ?
If not, for what is it there ? And further, do
not second-rate things offend you when they
are found out and fathomed? Is not second-
rateness one of the great torments of life to
anyone who has ever taken deep delight in
what is true and great ? After once you have
felt tears start at the pathos and passion of
Shakespeare, can you be thrilled by Eliza
Cook ? When you have known the supreme
joy of owning the unapproachable power of a
great master, can you go phrasing compliments
to any incapable conceited dauber and fiddler ?
To those who know what is good in art, inferior
decoration is impertinent; to those who don't,
no decoration is any use at all.
There would be no artistic or economical
advantages sacrificed in any catastrophe which
should deprive Decorative Art of machinery
and all the mean material of display which
machinery introduces. The buyer could con-
centrate his ornament upon the few points


216
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
in a house which demand it; and make sure
of a high quality rather than a distracting
quantity; content with distempered walls, and
simple furniture for the most part, like the
Greeks and Romans, the Mediævals and
Orientals. The producer, in becoming an artist
or art-workman instead of a machine-minder
(or little better), cannot help being improved
intellectually and socially; and the frequently
discontented or drunken operatives of the
Decorative Trades of England and France
would be replaced by men who were encou-
raged to think and to love their work, and
consequently had everything to make them
sober and satisfied. For you can only make
folk live rightly if you let them work rightly;
and social reform is wasted, if spent on re-
gulating their holidays, while their hours of
toil are uncheered and misdirected.
12. But supposing we should find a number
of people untainted or less tainted by the faults
and follies of the age, willing to lead honest
and true lives, working for a good time coming
in hope and heartiness and there are such,
here and everywhere), what would be their


THE PRESENT DAY.
217
attitude towards Decorative Art ? Some of
them would reply, with various ascetic
reformers, but in grave error, that they shun
art, as being mixed up with the vices and
falsehood of the world which they have left.
But we have seen that it is simply not in our
power to shun art. Art follows us wherever
we go; in whatever way ascetic, we can no
more do without it than without food. Clearly,
then, it must be recognized, and put into its
right place.
What would be the place and nature of the
right decoration for such healthier and better
lives of to-day ? Not a copy of any old-
world style, simply because we are not the
exact copies of any old-world people. But we
should watch how they set about it, and do
likewise, or at least beware of doing otherwise.
The art we hope for might express the
better life of any better class or community
in which it was practised, but only on con-
dition that it sprang up naturally; being
neither unwisely fostered nor unkindly re-
pressed. It is impossible to manufacture a
style of art; as impossible as to manufacture


220
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
of flowers or birds or beasts for the sake of con-
ventionalization or “good taste.” If you had
pointed out to them any mistakes in "drawing,"
they would not have scorned you for a fool or
Philistine, or have muttered mysteries about
high art, but would have sought to “mend
their line and sin no more.” And if we would
work as the great Greek or Gothic schools
worked, we should do our best, so far as our
material and useful purpose will allow, to make
a rose the shape and colour of a rose—not of
a bunch of ribbon ; to make a bird like a bird,
not like a dragon ; to copy nature, in accord-
ance with our Second Canon. All modern
conscious and wilful departure from this aim
has proved morally false and artistically
fatal; everybody, in his heart, laughs at
the affectations of the academic schools, and
rightly, too.
14. On these terms, and on these only, our
decoration will be art. But how can we make
our art decorative ? How exactly apply the
canons of adaptation and conventionalization ?
For this we must study the experience of our
masters. The soil alone without the good


222
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
suggestive likeness to nature. That we must
not falsify natural form and colour; but at
the same time we must not falsify the use,
material, and construction of our decorated
article.
Without study of the Decorative Art of
Barbaric tribes and ages, we should not feel
the interest and use of ornament in symbolism,
and the didactic expression of thoughts often
too deep for words.
Without study of Egypt and Assyria we
should not readily discover the secrets of
solemnity and symmetry, of vigour and breadth.
Without study of Indian and Persian art we
might never guess what beauty lies in well-
disposed masses of colour; in steady sweet
curvature of graceful contours and noble
surfaces; in harmony of tone. Without study
of the Chinese and Japanese we might still
be strangers to the charms of freedom, fun,
variety, expression, deftness, finish; and clear,
delicate or strong colour apart from tone.
Without study of Greek we could not know
the meaning of great design, of harmonious
lines and masses, of proportion and composi-


THE PRESENT DAY.
227
be impossible to make it so; for we cannot make
ourselves, nor do more than train the faculties
which our fathers and our country have given
us. But we can train them aright, or train
them wrong; and whatever the training be,
it will show itself in the work, at unawares to
the worker. If your hand is thoroughly trained
to Greek draughtsmanship, your drawing will
show it; if you have eyes accustomed to
Asiatic glow or Gothic glory of colour, your
design will show it. But there is no trick to
make a drawing Greek, no dodge to make
colour Gothic, except such shallow charlatanism
as will soon be discovered, scorned, and
ridiculed. There is nothing more lamentable
than the attempt to teach design by rote and
rule. It can only be taken in by natures which
are born for it, and at the expense of serious
study of ancient masterpieces.
17. What we desire, says everyone, is to
do great things like the Greek and Gothic
masters. Very well! and how did they do
great things? They lived artists' lives of love
to Nature and their work, of acute sensibility to
all that was good or beautiful, among a public


228
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ORNAMENT.
as ready to discern the good and beautiful, and
to abide by it. They studied the best possible
examples to begin with, and then copied
nature as they saw it. We English have not
their capacity; but if we can and will do
this,-in spite of foggy skies, of smoky towns,
of grimy homes, of social errors; in spite
of vulgarity, of greed, and the rest of our
national shortcomings, -a school of honest and
honourable decoration, representing the best of
English life and the sum of human experience,
is possible, however small its beginnings: and
once begun must rise to claim a place,-and
why not a very high place ?-in the History
of Decorative Art.
Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury.
9
но









AUG 21 1931