"we don't want to study cinquecento. We want severer, purer
conventionalism." What will you have? Egyptian ornament? Why, the whole
mass of it is made up of multitudinous human figures in every kind of
action--and magnificent action; their kings drawing their bows in their
chariots, their sheaves of arrows rattling at their shoulders; the
slain falling under them as before a pestilence; their captors driven
before them in astonied troops; and do you expect to imitate Egyptian
ornament without knowing how to draw the human figure? Nay, but you
will take Christian ornament--purest mediaeval Christian--thirteenth
century! Yes: and do you suppose you will find the Christian less
human? The least natural and most purely conventional ornament of the
Gothic schools is that of their painted glass; and do you suppose
painted glass, in the fine times, was ever wrought without figures? We
have got into the way, among our other modern wretchednesses, of trying
to make windows of leaf diapers, and of strips of twisted red and
yellow bands, looking like the patterns of currant jelly on the top of
Christmas cakes; but every casement of old glass contained a saint's
history. The windows of Bourges, Chartres, or Rouen have ten, fifteen,
or twenty medallions in each, and each medallion contains two figures
at least, often six or seven, representing every event of interest in
the history of the saint whose life is in question. Nay, but, you say
those figures are rude and quaint, and ought not to be imitated. Why,
so is the leafage rude and quaint, yet you imitate that. The coloured
border pattern of geranium or ivy leaf is not one whit better drawn, or
more like geraniums and ivy, than the figures are like figures; but you
call the geranium leaf idealized--why don't you call the figures so?
The fact is, neither are idealized, but both are conventionalized on
the same principles, and in the same way; and if you want to learn how
to treat the leafage, the only way is to learn first how to treat the
figure. And you may soon test your powers in this respect. Those old
workmen were not afraid of the most familiar subjects. The windows of
Chartres were presented by the trades of the town, and at the bottom of
each window is a representation of the proceedings of the tradesmen at
the business which enabled them to pay for the window. There are smiths
at the forge, curriers at their hides, tanners looking into their pits,
mercers selling goods over the counter--all made into beautiful
medallions. Therefore, whenever you want to know whether you have got
any real power of composition or adaptation in ornament, don't be
content with sticking leaves together by the ends,--anybody can do
that; but try to conventionalize a butcher's or a greengrocer's, with
Saturday night customers buying cabbage and beef. That will tell you if
you can design or not.
I can fancy your losing patience with me altogether just now. "We asked
this fellow down to tell our workmen how to make shawls, and he is only
trying to teach them how to caricature." But have a little patience
with me, and examine, after I have done, a little for yourselves into
the history of ornamental art, and you will discover why I do this. You
will discover, I repeat, that all great ornamental art whatever is
founded on the effort of the workman to draw the figure, and, in the
best schools, to draw all that he saw about him in living nature. The
best art of pottery is acknowledged to be that of Greece, and all the
power of design exhibited in it, down to the merest zigzag, arises
primarily from the workman having been forced to outline nymphs and
knights; from those helmed and draped figures he holds his power. Of
Egyptian ornament I have just spoken. You have everything given there
that the workman saw; people of his nation employed in hunting,
fighting, fishing, visiting, making love, building, cooking--everything
they did is drawn, magnificently or familiarly, as was needed. In
Byzantine ornament, saints, or animals which are types of various
spiritual power, are the main subjects; and from the church down to the
piece of enamelled metal, figure,--figure,--figure, always principal.
In Norman and Gothic work you have, with all their quiet saints, also
other much disquieted persons, hunting, feasting, fighting, and so on;
or whole hordes of animals racing after each other. In the Bayeux
tapestry, Queen Matilda gave, as well as she could,--in many respects
graphically enough,--the whole history of the conquest of England.
Thence, as you increase in power of art, you have more and more
finished figures, up to the solemn sculptures of Wells Cathedral, or
the cherubic enrichments of the Venetian Madonna dei Miracoli.
Therefore, I will tell you fearlessly, for I know it is true, you must
raise your workman up to life, or you will never get from him one line
of well-imagined conventionalism. We have at present no good ornamental
design. We can't have it yet, and we must be patient if we want to have
it. Do not hope to feel the effect of your schools at once, but raise
the men as high as you can, and then let them stoop as low as you need;
no great man ever minds stooping. Encourage the students, in sketching
accurately and continually from nature anything that comes in their
way--still life, flowers, animals; but, above all, figures; and so far
as you allow of any difference between an artist's training and theirs,
let it be, not in what they draw, but in the degree of conventionalism
you require in the sketch.
For my own part, I should always endeavour to give thorough artistical
training first; but I am not certain (the experiment being yet untried)
what results may be obtained by a truly intelligent practice of
conventional drawing, such as that of the Egyptians, Greeks, or
thirteenth century French, which consists in the utmost possible
rendering of natural form by the fewest possible lines. The animal and
bird drawing of the Egyptians is, in their fine age, quite magnificent
under its conditions; magnificent in two ways--first, in keenest
perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly,
in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and
insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of
asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this
gift again (_some_ only, for I believe the fulness of the gift
itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting
intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something about
hawks and ibises, when to kill one was to be irrevocably judged to
death) is never to pass a day without drawing some animal from the
life, allowing themselves the fewest possible lines and colours to do
it with, but resolving that whatever is characteristic of the animal
shall in some way or other be shown. [Footnote: Plate 75 in Vol. V. of
Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt" will give the student an idea of how to set
to work.] I repeat, it cannot yet be judged what results might be
obtained by a nobly practised conventionalism of this kind; but,
however that may be, the first fact,--the necessity of animal and
figure drawing, is absolutely certain, and no person who shrinks from
it will ever become a great designer.
One great good arises even from the first step in figure drawing, that
it gets the student quit at once of the notion of formal symmetry. If
you learn only to draw a leaf well, you are taught in some of our
schools to turn it the other way, opposite to itself; and the two
leaves set opposite ways are called "a design:" and thus it is supposed
possible to produce ornamentation, though you have no more brains than
a looking-glass or a kaleidoscope has. But if you once learn to draw
the human figure, you will find that knocking two men's heads together
does not necessarily constitute a good design; nay, that it makes a
very bad design, or no design at all; and you will see at once that to
arrange a group of two or more figures, you must, though perhaps it may
be desirable to balance, or oppose them, at the same time vary their
attitudes, and make one, not the reverse of the other, but the
companion of the other.
I had a somewhat amusing discussion on this subject with a friend, only
the other day; and one of his retorts upon me was so neatly put, and
expresses so completely all that can either be said or shown on the
opposite side, that it is well worth while giving it you exactly in the
form it was sent to me. My friend had been maintaining that the essence
of ornament consisted in three things:--contrast, series, and symmetry.
I replied (by letter) that "none of them, nor all of them together,
would produce ornament. Here"--(making a ragged blot with the back of
my pen on the paper)--"you have contrast; but it isn't ornament: here,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,"--(writing the numerals)--"You have series; but it
isn't ornament: and here,"--(sketching a rough but symmetrical "stick-
figure" sketch of a human body at the side)--"you have symmetry; but it
isn't ornament."
My friend replied:--
"Your materials were not ornament, because you did not apply them. I
send them to you back, made up into a choice sporting neckerchief:"
[Illustration: Sketch of a square of cloth decorated with a diagonal
grid pattern of stick-figure human forms, with repeated and reflected
ink-blot shapes at the corners and the digits 1 through 6 arranged into
simple symmetrical shapes and repeated around the border.]
Symmetrical figure Unit of diaper.
Contrast Corner ornaments.
Series Border ornaments.
"Each figure is converted into a harmony by being revolved on its two
axes, the whole opposed in contrasting series."
My answer was--or rather was to the effect (for I must expand it a
little, here)--that his words, "because you did not apply them,"
contained the gist of the whole matter;--that the application of them,
or any other things, was precisely the essence of design; the non-
application, or wrong application, the negation of design: that his use
of the poor materials was in this case admirable; and that if he could
explain to me, in clear words, the principles on which he had so used
them, he would be doing a very great service to all students of art.
"Tell me, therefore (I asked), these main points:
"1. How did you determine the number of figures you would put into the
neckerchief? Had there been more, it would have been mean and
ineffective,--a pepper-and-salt sprinkling of figures. Had there been
fewer, it would have been monstrous. How did you fix the number?
"2. How did you determine the breadth of the border and relative size
of the numerals?
"3. Why are there two lines outside of the border, and one only inside?
Why are there no more lines? Why not three and two, or three and five?
Why lines at all to separate the barbarous figures; and why, if lines
at all, not double or treble instead of single?
"4. Why did you put the double blots at the corners? Why not at the
angles of the chequers,--or in the middle of the border?
"It is precisely your knowing why _not_ to do these things, and
why to do just what you have done, which constituted your power of
design; and like all the people I have ever known who had that power,
you are entirely unconscious of the essential laws by which you work,
and confuse other people by telling them that the design depends on
symmetry and series, when, in fact, it depends entirely on your own
sense and judgment."
This was the substance of my last answer--to which (as I knew
beforehand would be the case) I got no reply; but it still remains to
be observed that with all the skill and taste (especially involving the
architect's great trust, harmony of proportion), which my friend could
bring to bear on the materials given him, the result is still only--a
sporting neckerchief--that is to say, the materials addressed, first,
to recklessness, in the shape of a mere blot; then to computativeness
in a series of figures; and then to absurdity and ignorance, in the
shape of an ill-drawn caricature--such materials, however treated, can
only work up into what will please reckless, computative, and vulgar
persons,--that is to say, into a sporting neckerchief. The difference
between this piece of ornamentation and Correggio's painting at Parma
lies simply and wholly in the additions (somewhat large ones), of truth
and of tenderness: in the drawing being lovely as well as symmetrical--
and representative of realities as well as agreeably disposed. And
truth, tenderness, and inventive application or disposition are indeed
the roots of ornament--not contrast, nor symmetry.
It ought yet farther to be observed, that _the nobler the materials,
the less their symmetry is endurable_. In the present case, the
sense of fitness and order, produced by the repetition of the figures,
neutralizes, in some degree, their reckless vulgarity; and is wholly,
therefore, beneficent to them. But draw the figures better, and their
repetition will become painful. You may harmlessly balance a mere
geometrical form, and oppose one quatrefoil or cusp by another exactly
like it. But put two Apollo Belvideres back to back, and you will not
think the symmetry improves them. _Whenever the materials of ornament
are noble, they must be various_; and repetition of parts is either
the sign of utterly bad, hopeless, and base work; or of the intended
degradation of the parts in which such repetition is allowed, in order
to foil others more noble.
Such, then, are a few of the great principles, by the enforcement of
which you may hope to promote the success of the modern student of
design; but remember, none of these principles will be useful at all,
unless you understand them to be, in one profound and stern sense,
useless. [Footnote: I shall endeavour for the future to put my self-
contradictions in short sentences and direct terms, in order to save
sagacious persons the trouble of looking for them.]
That is to say, unless you feel that neither you nor I, nor any one,
can, in the great ultimate sense, teach anybody how to make a good
design.
If designing _could_ be taught, all the world would learn: as all
the world reads--or calculates. But designing is not to be spelled, nor
summed. My men continually come to me, in my drawing class in London,
thinking I am to teach them what is instantly to enable them to gain
their bread. "Please, sir, show us how to design." "Make designers of
us." And you, I doubt not, partly expect me to tell you to-night how to
make designers of your Bradford youths. Alas! I could as soon tell you
how to make or manufacture an ear of wheat, as to make a good artist of
any kind. I can analyze the wheat very learnedly for you--tell you
there is starch in it, and carbon, and silex. I can give you starch,
and charcoal, and flint; but you are as far from your ear of wheat as
you were before. All that can possibly be done for any one who wants
ears of wheat is to show them where to find grains of wheat, and how to
sow them, and then, with patience, in Heaven's time, the ears will
come--or will perhaps come--ground and weather permitting. So in this
matter of making artists--first you must find your artist in the grain;
then you must plant him; fence and weed the field about him; and with
patience, ground and weather permitting, you may get an artist out of
him--not otherwise. And what I have to speak to you about, tonight, is
mainly the ground and the weather, it being the first and quite most
material question in this matter, whether the ground and weather of
Bradford, or the ground and weather of England in general,--suit wheat.
And observe in the outset, it is not so much what the present
circumstances of England are, as what we wish to make them, that we
have to consider. If you will tell me what you ultimately intend
Bradford to be, perhaps I can tell you what Bradford can ultimately
produce. But you must have your minds clearly made up, and be distinct
in telling me what you do want. At present I don't know what you are
aiming at, and possibly on consideration you may feel some doubt
whether you know yourselves. As matters stand, all over England, as
soon as one mill is at work, occupying two hundred hands, we try, by
means of it, to set another mill at work, occupying four hundred. That
is all simple and comprehensive enough--but what is it to come to? How
many mills do we want? or do we indeed want no end of mills? Let us
entirely understand each other on this point before we go any farther.
Last week, I drove from Rochdale to Bolton Abbey; quietly, in order to
see the country, and certainly it was well worth while. I never went
over a more interesting twenty miles than those between Rochdale and
Burnley. Naturally, the valley has been one of the most beautiful in
the Lancashire hills; one of the far away solitudes, full of old
shepherd ways of life. At this time there are not,--I speak
deliberately, and I believe quite literally,--there are not, I think,
more than a thousand yards of road to be traversed anywhere, without
passing a furnace or mill.
Now, is that the kind of thing you want to come to everywhere? Because,
if it be, and you tell me so distinctly, I think I can make several
suggestions to-night, and could make more if you give me time, which
would materially advance your object. The extent of our operations at
present is more or less limited by the extent of coal and ironstone,
but we have not yet learned to make proper use of our clay. Over the
greater part of England, south of the manufacturing districts, there
are magnificent beds of various kinds of useful clay; and I believe
that it would not be difficult to point out modes of employing it which
might enable us to turn nearly the whole of the south of England into a
brickfield, as we have already turned nearly the whole of the north
into a coal-pit. I say "nearly" the whole, because, as you are
doubtless aware, there are considerable districts in the south composed
of chalk renowned up to the present time for their downs and mutton.
But, I think, by examining carefully into the conceivable uses of
chalk, we might discover a quite feasible probability of turning all
the chalk districts into a limekiln, as we turn the clay districts into
a brickfield. There would then remain nothing but the mountain
districts to be dealt with; but, as we have not yet ascertained all the
uses of clay and chalk, still less have we ascertained those of stone;
and I think, by draining the useless inlets of the Cumberland, Welsh,
and Scotch lakes, and turning them, with their rivers, into navigable
reservoirs and canals, there would be no difficulty in working the
whole of our mountain districts as a gigantic quarry of slate and
granite, from which all the rest of the world might be supplied with
roofing and building stone.
Is this, then, what you want? You are going straight at it at present;
and I have only to ask under what limitations I am to conceive or
describe your final success? Or shall there be no limitations? There
are none to your powers; every day puts new machinery at your disposal,
and increases, with your capital, the vastness of your undertakings.
The changes in the state of this country are now so rapid, that it
would be wholly absurd to endeavour to lay down laws of art education
for it under its present aspect and circumstances; and therefore I must
necessarily ask, how much of it do you seriously intend within the next
fifty years to be coal-pit, brickfield, or quarry? For the sake of
distinctness of conclusion, I will suppose your success absolute: that
from shore to shore the whole of the island is to be set as thick with
chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: and there shall
be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown
upon the housetops, reaped and threshed by steam: that you do not leave
even room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your mills, on
viaducts; or under their floors, in tunnels: that, the smoke having
rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the
light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without
its shaft and its engine; and therefore, no spot of English ground
left, on which it shall be possible to stand, without a definite and
calculable chance of being blown off it, at any moment, into small
pieces.
Under these circumstances, (if this is to be the future of England,) no
designing or any other development of beautiful art will be possible.
Do not vex your minds, nor waste your money with any thought or effort
in the matter. Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have
beautiful things about them, and leisure to look at them; and unless
you provide some elements of beauty for your workmen to be surrounded
by, you will find that no elements of beauty can be invented by them.
I was struck forcibly by the bearing of this great fact upon our modern
efforts at ornamentation in an afternoon walk, last week, in the
suburbs of one of our large manufacturing towns. I was thinking of the
difference in the effect upon the designer's mind, between the scene
which I then came upon, and the scene which would have presented itself
to the eyes of any designer of the middle ages, when he left his
workshop. Just outside the town I came upon an old English cottage, or
mansion, I hardly know which to call it, set close under the hill, and
beside the river, perhaps built somewhere in the Charles's time, with
mullioned windows and a low arched porch; round which, in the little
triangular garden, one can imagine the family as they used to sit in
old summer times, the ripple of the river heard faintly through the
sweetbrier hedge, and the sheep on the far-off wolds shining in the
evening sunlight. There, uninhabited for many and many a year, it had
been left in unregarded havoc of ruin; the garden-gate still swung
loose to its latch; the garden, blighted utterly into a field of ashes,
not even a weed taking root there; the roof torn into shapeless rents;
the shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten wood; before
its gate, the stream which had gladdened it now soaking slowly by,
black as ebony, and thick with curdling scum; the bank above it trodden
into unctuous, sooty slime: far in front of it, between it and the old
hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth perpetual plague of
sulphurous darkness; the volumes of their storm clouds coiling low over
a waste of grassless fields, fenced from each other, not by hedges, but
by slabs of square stone, like gravestones, riveted together with iron.
That was your scene for the designer's contemplation in his afternoon
walk at Rochdale. Now fancy what was the scene which presented itself,
in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the Gothic school of Pisa--Nino
Pisano, or any of his men.
On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter palaces,
arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry, and with
serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of
knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse
and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light--the purple,
and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over the strong limbs and
clashing mail, like sea-waves over rocks at sunset. Opening on each
side from the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters; long
successions of white pillars among wreaths of vine; leaping of
fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange: and still along the
garden-paths, and under and through the crimson of the pomegranate
shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women that Italy ever
saw--fairest, because purest and thoughtfullest; trained in all high
knowledge, as in all courteous art--in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in
lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love--able alike to
cheer, to enchant, or save, the souls of men. Above all this scenery of
perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white
alabaster and gold; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of mighty
hills, hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea of peaks
of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up
their steadfast flames of marble summit into amber sky; the great sea
itself, scorching with expanse of light, stretching from their feet to
the Gorgonian isles; and over all these, ever present, near or far--
seen through the leaves of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds
in the Arno's stream, or set with its depth of blue close against the
golden hair and burning cheek of lady and knight,--that untroubled and
sacred sky, which was to all men, in those days of innocent faith,
indeed the unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men; and
which opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew into
the awfulness of the eternal world;--a heaven in which every cloud that
passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its
Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.
What think you of that for a school of design?
I do not bring this contrast before you as a ground of hopelessness in
our task; neither do I look for any possible renovation of the Republic
of Pisa, at Bradford, in the nineteenth century; but I put it before
you in order that you may be aware precisely of the kind of difficulty
you have to meet, and may then consider with yourselves how far you can
meet it. To men surrounded by the depressing and monotonous
circumstances of English manufacturing life, depend upon it, design is
simply impossible. This is the most distinct of all the experiences I
have had in dealing with the modern workman. He is intelligent and
ingenious in the highest degree--subtle in touch and keen in sight: but
he is, generally speaking, wholly destitute of designing power. And if
you want to give him the power, you must give him the materials, and
put him in the circumstances for it. Design is not the offspring of
idle fancy: it is the studied result of accumulative observation and
delightful habit. Without observation and experience, no design--
without peace and pleasurableness in occupation, no design--and all the
lecturings, and teachings, and prizes, and principles of art, in the
world, are of no use, so long as you don't surround your men with happy
influences and beautiful things. It is impossible for them to have
right ideas about colour, unless they see the lovely colours of nature
unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action
in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the
world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form
and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and
in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still be
spurious, vulgar, and valueless.