LECTURES ON AET 
 
LECTURES ON ART 
 
 DELIVERED IN SUPPORT OF THE 
 
 SOCIETY FOE THE PEOTECTION OF 
 ANCIENT BUILDINGS 
 
 V c ' v or 
 
 (UNIVERSITY^ 
 Nfeii&S^' 
 
 REGINALD STUART POOLE 
 
 PROF. W. B. RICHMOND \ J. T. MICKLETHWAITE 
 E. J. POYNTER, R.A. | WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Hontion 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1882 
 

 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinfairgh. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 " Vitaque manciple nulli datur, omnibus usu." LUCRETIUS. 
 
 THE various courses of action taken by the Society 
 for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, in the struggle 
 to preserve what yet remains to us of our monuments 
 of Art and History, necessarily entails a certain 
 amount of expenditure, which year by year threatens 
 to become heavier, as the work of the Society is 
 carried on with greater vigour, and extended over a 
 wider field. 
 
 It was with the object of helping to provide these 
 necessary funds that the following Lectures were 
 organised ; and the hearty thanks of the Society are 
 due to the lecturers for so kindly giving their services 
 gratuitously, and also for allowing their Lectures to 
 be printed. 
 
 The subjects treated of in this volume are very 
 varied, and extend over a wide field of time and 
 place. 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 The simple and hieratic Art of the ancient 
 Egyptian, used chiefly as a means of expressing his 
 hopes and fears regarding the world beyond the grave. 
 
 The great fresco paintings of Italy, executed when 
 painter, sculptor, and architect were one ; or, at least, 
 worked together in mutual dependence and under- 
 standing. 
 
 That period of complete union of the three Arts, 
 when each had achieved power of expression suffi- 
 cient for a separate existence, and yet all worked 
 hand in hand, acknowledging the just limits and 
 scope of each. 
 
 The Decorative Art of the Greeks and Romans, 
 with its splendid harmony of composition, and per- 
 fect symmetry of form. 
 
 The mediaeval Parish Churches of our own 
 country, each with a whole history written on its walls 
 churches which for centuries were one of the main 
 outlets for the expression of what Art was in England, 
 History and Art which should be specially dear to 
 us, and sacred beyond all other, being as they are 
 our main inheritance from our forefathers, and bound 
 up so closely with the life and labours of those who 
 struggled to make this inheritance a fair and noble one. 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 Last, though not least, the " Lesser forms of Art " 
 those, that is, in which rich and poor alike have 
 their share. Less pretending than their more aristo- 
 cratic brethren, Painting and Sculpture, yet perhaps 
 more important even than they in their contribution 
 to the great mass of human happiness. 
 
 It is hoped that these Lectures may arouse a 
 keener sense of the unity and solidarity of all forms 
 of Human Art, and of the great debt we owe to those 
 bygone generations of workers, who toiled not for 
 themselves only, but also for us, to leave us a legacy 
 of harmony and grace and the many things that help 
 to make the burden of life less heavy. 
 
 Surely it is the duty of each one of us to strive 
 that this heritage may pass on to our successors 
 unimpaired in beauty, and no less instructive to them 
 than it has been to us, and to fight earnestly against 
 the modern vanity which would obliterate all traces 
 of the bygone days when Art was living, with the dull 
 nineteenth century stamp of feeble copyism or wilful 
 
 falsification. _ TT ,.. 
 
 J. JhL M. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTUKE I. 
 
 BY EEGINALD STUABT POOLE, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB AND THE FUTURE STATE . 1 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 BY PROFESSOR W. B. RICHMOND. 
 
 MONUMENTAL PAINTING 
 
 LECTUEE III. 
 
 BY EDWARD J. POYNTER, R.A. 
 SOME REMARKS ON ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART . 63 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 BY J. T. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES . 97 
 
x CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTUEE V. 
 
 BY WILLIAM MORKIS. 
 THE HISTORY OP PATTERN DESIGNING . . .127 
 
 LECTUEE VI. 
 
 BY WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE . 174 
 
LECTUKE I. 
 
 BY REGINALD STUART POOLE. 
 
 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB AND THE 
 FUTURE STATE. 
 
 IT might be thought that the subject I have chosen 
 was not altogether appropriate to the objects of the 
 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, but 
 I think I shall be able to show you that there are no 
 ancient buildings in the world which more claim our 
 protection than the monuments of Egypt. It might 
 be thought also that, in connecting the Egyptian 
 tomb with the Egyptian doctrine of the future state, 
 I had rather departed from the subjects of this course, 
 which are associated necessarily with architecture 
 and art rather than with religion ; but in the case of 
 Egypt the future state is so intimately connected 
 with everything the tomb contains, and with its^ery^ 
 structure, and all the ideas which led to its compo- 
 
 B 
 
2 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 sition, that I could not possibly divorce these two 
 subjects ; I could not take the lesser and leave the 
 greater. And to show that the Egyptian tomb 
 deserves your sympathy, I need only recount the 
 history of its fate in different ages. I must first ask 
 you to picture to yourself the old Egyptian chief, 
 the aristocrat, the great landowner at Memphis, or 
 Thebes, or in Middle Egypt, leaving his beautiful 
 vineyards, his gardens, and his hunting-grounds, and 
 coming day after day, or month after month, all 
 through his lifetime, from his majority to his death, 
 to see and work in his tomb in the desert ; to sit in 
 the gallery that overlooked the beautiful river ; 
 where the land shows so clearly the contrast of 
 death to life ; knowing that he was passing away ; 
 to face it boldly and bravely : to give so much of his 
 life in making to himself a monument, which was at 
 once a proof of his belief in the immortality of the 
 soul, and in the importance of this life as bearing on 
 that of the future, and was at the same time meant, 
 as he himself says again and again in different in- 
 scriptions, to tell future generations the history of 
 the past. Think of the man with some sympathy, the 
 man with a great idea, who was not afraid of facing 
 the unseen, as so many of us are. Then think of 
 the visitors in later times, the old Egyptians, who 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 3 
 
 came to these tombs and wrote on the walls in beau- 
 tiful characters, in the few spare inches between the 
 pictures or the sculptures, their impressions of 
 what they saw. Two scribes, who went to a tomb 
 at Benee Hassan, wrote that the interior was " like 
 the sky when the sun rises" (Maspero, Peintures 
 des Tombeaux figyptiens, Bill, de VEcole des hautes 
 Etudes; Sc. ph. hist. xxxv. 49); so did the glowing 
 pictures, which have only lately been destroyed, strike 
 the Egyptians in their fancy ! And then think of 
 the Greek and the Eoman, who left for us in neat 
 yraffiti their interesting impressions of the scene. 
 There is a very curious story of the visit to an 
 Egyptian tomb by one of the Coptic saints, which 
 has been taken out of a Coptic manuscript by Mr. 
 Kevillout of the Louvre, one of the leading men of 
 our day in the interpretation of the phases of Egypt- 
 ian life and history. This statement tells the story 
 of the gentle Egyptian saint, who, fleeing away from 
 the Persian invasion in the seventh century of our 
 era, the first sign of the storm of the great Moham- 
 medan conquest, took refuge in a tomb at Thebes ; 
 and his deacon, who tells the story, relates how, 
 going into the tomb, they found it spacious and 
 adorned, containing the mummy of a rich man, 
 enwrapped in magnificent swathings. On the walls 
 
THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 were a number of tablets. He found a roll, and gave 
 it to his master, who unrolled it, and read the names 
 of those here buried ; and then he gave him a charge 
 to return to the convent, and bring him his provisions 
 once a week. One day when he was returning he 
 heard within the tomb one weeping and beseeching 
 the aid of the saint. And then he recounts how he 
 heard his master talking to the old Egyptian who 
 was buried there. The Egyptian was complaining 
 of the misery of the future state in the place of 
 punishment into which he had been cast, but he 
 said the saint's prayers had at last given him respite. 
 The saint had examined him, and found he knew 
 nothing of Christianity, so he dismissed him to rest. 
 " Sleep till the day of the general resurrection." Then 
 the narrator, the deacon, enters the tomb, and says 
 he found no one within but his master ; but there 
 was the mummy, sleeping in his place as before 
 (Eevillout, Revue Egyptologique, 1881, 67 seqg/.) 
 Then we must think of the Arab visitor in the early 
 days, who paid great respect to these tombs. , There 
 is a very strong appeal by the great physician and 
 philosopher Abd-el-Lateef, of Bagdad, for the pro- 
 tection of ancient buildings. He lived in the time 
 when the sceptre had passed away from the Arabs, 
 and fallen into the hands of the Kurdish house of 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 5 
 
 Saladin. He says the former kings commanded that 
 these monuments should be spared, though they were 
 not of the religion of those who raised them. The 
 reasons given by this great Aristotelian philosopher 
 are worthy of being heard now. He says these monu- 
 ments are records of time; then they narrate the events 
 of history, and so confirm the truth of the sacred Book. 
 Then he adds : " They give us a warning whence we 
 come and whither we go ; " and last of all, they offer 
 us a picture of the manners and customs of ancient 
 times, and of their art and philosophy. Therefore, 
 he says, such monuments should be preserved, for 
 what better incentive could you have to study 
 than they afford ? And he laments the destruction 
 wrought by greedy seekers after treasure, who reck- 
 lessly destroyed the ancient works of art (Hist. Aeg. 
 Compend. i. 4). After this came the great building 
 kings, who raised those splendid edifices in Cairo 
 which have fallen into ruin ; though we trust the 
 Commission which we have aided to call into exist- 
 ence will do something to preserve them. The 
 remains of Memphis were destroyed by these build- 
 ing kings, and where Abd-el-Lateef saw them there 
 is now little but the fallen Colossus to mark the 
 site. 
 
 The last of the builders was the utilitarian Turk, 
 
6 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB POOLE. 
 
 and he turned the sepulchres of Egypt into mere 
 quarries, and excavated the tombs for stone. He 
 was followed by the European traveller. Before he 
 came there were, in my recollection, thirty-three 
 years ago, tombs as perfect as when they were made. 
 But then came the traveller, this reckless man, 
 with what is called high education and culture, per- 
 haps an Oxford or Cambridge scholar, who would 
 not be guilty of fraud, deceit, or lying, but who 
 deliberately destroyed history. M. Naville, the 
 greatest interpreter of Egyptian philosophy of our 
 day, was a long time at Thebes, copying inscriptions 
 in the royal tombs, in order to publish the Litany 
 of Ea, the great document of Egyptian pantheism. 
 What is the history of that task ? Here and there 
 there is a gap, which is caused by the ignorant tra- 
 veller who has cut portions out of a record without 
 knowing what it means. He did not intend to put 
 them in a museum. Museums are for entire monu- 
 ments, and not for such things as these, which are 
 worse than stolen goods. Mariette immortalises a 
 traveller who broke into the temple of Deyr-el- 
 Bahree at Thebes, and cut out the figure of an Ethio- 
 pian princess, the earliest and most curious that time 
 has preserved to us, of the sixteenth century before 
 our era. He cut out only one figure from a long 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 7 
 
 series ; hacked it out to carry it away for his own 
 pleasure, or, still worse, to offer it for sale. Such 
 things seem to us incredible, and yet I have seen 
 them done. They were done last year by educated 
 Englishmen and Americans, for very rarely are 
 Frenchmen or Germans guilty. That is another 
 reason why we should try to stop such evil doings ; 
 this is something all of us can do, with this Society or 
 without it. Time would fail me were I to preach on 
 this melancholy text. I must go on to my subject. 
 
 First of all, I will endeavour to give you the 
 Egyptian doctrine of the soul. It is quite impossible 
 here to draw an outline of the Egyptian religion, but 
 I can offer you something as a key to the knowledge 
 of it which is very important. Some religions have 
 had a regular development, others have been arrested 
 in their development by many causes. In the Egypt- 
 ian you can trace distinctly that there was, at a 
 very early period, an arrest between two ideas of 
 spiritual things ; and, consequently, two ideas have 
 ruled to the last. Within these limits there was 
 great development, but it was always controlled by the 
 conditions which obliged the Egyptians to keep the 
 old and the new, the barbarous and the civilised, 
 together. You are all familiar with the theory of 
 the solar myth in the Greek mythology ; it is first 
 
8 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 the history of the daily or yearly course of the sun ; 
 next, it is the story of the life of man, his rise, his 
 great glory in his meridian, his fall, his apparent 
 defeat, and his final triumph; then it becomes a 
 legend or story of a particular individual, perishing 
 like Achilles in .the shadowy gate of Troy, in the 
 fulness of his power. In Egypt it never goes beyond 
 the second stage. It is first the practical view of 
 the course of the sun, then the allegorical view of 
 the human life; but it never passes into the story 
 of a particular life. We must remember this re- 
 ligion had great qualities, although there are those 
 things in it which must always rightly remain bar- 
 barous to us, such as animal worship. There are 
 noble conceptions; there is the conception of the unity 
 of God, so undoubtedly true of the Egyptians, that 
 they sought in three different ways to work it out 
 and prove it ; so true that one of their philosophers 
 writes, 3000 years before our era, as a modern philo- 
 sopher would write, of God, and not of the gods ; so 
 true, that the name of God never became the name 
 of different gods, and, when the Copts threw away 
 all ideas of their old religion, in their version of the 
 Scriptures they retained the word "God" as the 
 true, holy word, which had never lost its force 
 throughout the ages. 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 9 
 
 Now as to the doctrine of the soul. With a 
 nation like the Egyptians the leading principle of 
 their religion is the relation of the soul to human 
 life and responsibility. M. Maspero, in his Histoire 
 Ancienne des Peuples de I'Orient (3d ed. 39 seqq.) f an 
 admirable little book, has given a picture of the 
 Egyptian doctrine of the soul, which I have hitherto 
 thoroughly accepted, and quoted and used ; but I now 
 think he has gone a little beyond the ancient docu- 
 ments. A very beautiful account of this doctrine 
 is found in one of the books written about the 
 third century of our era. This is the Poemander 
 of Hermes Trismegistus, an interesting dialogue, 
 which evidently embodies in the Platonic form 
 the Egyptian belief. M. Maspero has taken this, 
 and has put in the earlier equivalents wherever 
 they were necessary. I do not say he is wrong, 
 but I cannot go quite as far as he does, because I 
 think the Greek philosophers may have gone a little 
 beyond the authority they possessed to give a gram- 
 matical and logical form to the old ideas. 1 
 
 The Egyptian soul is represented to us by the 
 monuments as consisting of three different essences. 
 There are three names which apply to the different 
 elements which constitute the immaterial part of 
 
 1 See Mr. S. G. Owen's Chancellor's Latin Essay, 1882, p. 41. 
 
10 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 man. These names I will not give you in ancient 
 terms, but in their modern equivalents. There is 
 first the genius or "double." That was the old 
 notion of the inhabitant of the tomb, the notion of 
 the ghost, the exact representation of the person as 
 he was when living, and one who required the pro- 
 tection of the tomb, where he should be housed and 
 fed and even entertained. That creature, the double, 
 lived like the doppelganger of German ghost -lore, 
 during the lifetime of the man, and, in the olden 
 time, represented him after death. 
 
 Then there was also the sou], which, with the 
 Egyptians, was common to man and the animals, 
 the animal soul. "We may call it the life, but 
 it was always distinguished as the soul. It was 
 animated by the Divine intelligence, which was the 
 highest part of man, which did not come from man but 
 from God. This was the immortal part of humanity. 
 So that first there was the double or genius, then 
 the soul, and lastly the intelligence. The conscience 
 was distinguished from all these, and was proper 
 to the soul, and, according to the Egyptians, the seat 
 of the conscience was the heart. We gather this 
 from the different religious books which have been 
 found buried with the mummy for his safe passage 
 through the mysteries of the unknown world to final 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 11 
 
 happiness. The doctrine <of the future of the soul 
 was more important to the Egyptians than that of its 
 present, and the whole doctrine is consistently repre- 
 sented in the story of the god Osiris, who is the sun 
 of the night and in a lesser degree the sun of the day. 
 He is imagined as rising in his brightness, but 
 suddenly he disappears beneath the western horizon, 
 conquered by darkness. Subsequently he rises again 
 as a young sun and asserts his victory over dark- 
 ness and evil. As Osiris every man and woman 
 went into the land of shades to be judged by him, 
 and as he passed to judgment he had great trials 
 and great dangers to undergo, but the greatest trial 
 of all was the final judgment in the Hall of the 
 Double Truth, or if you like, Truth and Justice. The 
 soul went without its intelligence to judgment, but 
 the conscience remained, and the soul prayed it not 
 to bear witness against it in its trial. The trial over, 
 the soul passed away, if condemned, to the second 
 death. For to the Egyptians there was no hope after 
 condemnation. 1 After the judgment the soul had, 
 
 1 It may be thought that the Church is indebted to Egypt for 
 the dogma of eternal condemnation, which many refuse to see in 
 either the Old or the New Testament. And we must remember 
 that Origen, an Egyptian, a Platonist, and a Christian, worthy to 
 be called a Father and even a Doctor of the Church, was the first 
 to protest against the doctrine, which was not, he judged, Semitic, 
 and against which he appealed to the authority of the Bible. 
 
12 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 though justified or triumphant, to go through further 
 ordeals, to cultivate the Elysian Fields, and to pass 
 at length into blessedness. The intelligence returned 
 into the soul, which was received by the Creator, 
 and did not again resume its sad and perilous life 
 upon the earth. Every trial was passed and full 
 joy was obtained. It was absorbed in the Divine 
 Essence. 
 
 All this happened in that mysterious country, the 
 Amenti or hidden land, which means in Egyptian, 
 like the Hebrew Sheol, both the tomb and also the 
 underworld ; so that in Hebrew as in Egyptian 
 you have the double use of the same term. But 
 when the Egyptian prays in his sepulchral tablets 
 for the future, and calls for the prayers of those who 
 visit his toxnb, he speaks of the hidden land as the 
 ancient, the vast, the perfect ; and this must certainly 
 apply to the " other world," an Egyptian term, and 
 not to the tomb. Other expressions lead to the belief 
 that, in most cases, we are not dealing with material 
 but spiritual conceptions. Yet it is hard to connect 
 the mummification of the dead with the future state. 
 I believe the mummy was originally due to the 
 preserving quality of the sand of the desert and 
 the piety of the relations, but, of course, in process 
 of time became attached to the ideas of immortality. 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 13 
 
 The Egyptians were conscious of a great difficulty 
 in the association of apparently preternatural pre- 
 servation on earth with their notions of the import- 
 ance of the future state. Hence the last ceremony, 
 that sacred ceremony which was performed before 
 the mummy was inclosed in the sepulchral chamber 
 and the pit was filled up that none should ever enter 
 again, was the family and sacerdotal rite, in which a 
 priest and the eldest son conferred on the mummy 
 the power of movement. They wanted to make it 
 clear that they were not burying the man himself 
 but only the outer covering in which his soul and 
 intelligence had moved and lived. If you look for 
 a moment at a picture of the funeral ceremony you 
 will see how this doctrine is illustrated. It repre- 
 sents the funeral of a great Theban noble (Wilkinson, 
 Ancient Egyptians, 1st ed., pi. 83). 
 
 Here we see both the mummy borne along as the 
 creature to be buried, and the furniture of the tomb 
 for the double as its inhabitant ; but most strangely, 
 in the lowest line you see the dead husband and his 
 living wife who lamented him (the Egyptians were 
 much attached, the husband and wife), twice passing 
 across the sacred river, he himself as the mummy and 
 as the living double, with his wife a living person, 
 going to the other side of the river at Thebes to his 
 
14 ,/ THE EGYPTIAN TOMB POOLE. 
 
 burial-place, and, as the language of the inscription 
 tells us, also going many miles away to Abydos, 
 where there was a gap in the mountain through which 
 the souls of men flew into the underworld in the 
 wake of the setting sun. They knew exactly what 
 this was and where it happened. The intelligence 
 is not here ; it is much too sacred to be mixed up 
 with funeral rites (See Maspero, Etudes Egyptiennes, 
 t. i, fasc. 2). 
 
 Now, to show the construction of the tomb, 
 which was so great a matter to the Egyptians, I 
 have given in a diagram a very good section from 
 a paper by Mariette (Perrot, Histoire de I' Art dans 
 rAntiquiU: VEgypte, p. 186). In this there are three 
 portions of the tomb ; first the chapel, always open 
 to visitors, then the pit leading down, in this case 
 from the floor of the chapel, but in other tombs from 
 the summit of the tomb through the rock, to the 
 sepulchral chamber, which was beneath the chapel. 
 Besides these three parts, some of the most ancient 
 tombs contain a fourth, that which has been called 
 the secret chamber, closed up, and only connected 
 with the chapel by air-holes, and containing several 
 statues of the deceased, which are placed there 
 so that the double might enjoy the fragrance of the 
 sacrifices and incense offered in the chapel to his 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 15 
 
 memory. Two other diagrams represent two of the 
 oldest tombs ; those which face north have a portico 
 (Id., p. 176), and those which look westward have a 
 recessed entrance, and usually a false door besides 
 (Of. Id., 173). By a glance at the drawings of the 
 Great Pyramid, which is typical of the whole group 
 of Memphite Pyramids, you will see that the prin- 
 ciples are the same as those of the lesser tombs. In 
 the elevation you will see that in front of the pyramid 
 there was a chapel (Cf. Id., plan, p. 198); the sloping 
 passage shown in the section (Id., p. 212) was the pit 
 which led to the sepulchral chamber. There was no 
 other object in building a pyramid than to make 
 the memory of the king lasting, and to raise a fitting- 
 representation of the immortality of the soul. We 
 have not wasted our time in considering Professor 
 Smyth's speculations, which have been all destroyed 
 by recent measurements, and have all to be specu- 
 lated over again. I should also notice that I have 
 in another diagram a representation of the sepulchral 
 chapel of the largest sort, one of the great temples 
 in Western Thebes, which will show how all these 
 things are kindred and illustrative of one another. 
 
 Now as to the contents of these different chambers 
 and their decoration. The chapel was the centre of 
 all family worship. The Egyptian temple was even 
 
16 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB POOLE. 
 
 more restricted in its use than the Greek or Eoman. 
 The king, as high -priest, or his representative, 
 officiated there for all the people. Eeligion was 
 confined to the chapel of the tomb. There the 
 Egyptian family met, and made their offerings ; and 
 that is one of the reasons why we ought to have 
 some respect for these funeral monuments. There is 
 something peculiarly touching in the motive which 
 led the Egyptians to record that which they felt to 
 be most sacred, and that which was most worthy of 
 commemoration as history. Not less touching is the 
 trust placed in the visitor. Mariette says that among 
 hundreds of tombs he found only a very few with 
 evidence of a door. The ancient tombs were con- 
 sidered perfectly free from any danger at the hands 
 of the spoiler. So civilised were the Egyptians that 
 it was not thought necessary to guard their sepul- 
 chres. It was left to the higher civilisation of 
 modern times to despoil them : it needed people of 
 culture to do that; and it can never be undone. 
 This is what makes our regret the more bitter. 
 
 The purpose of the chapel was threefold. This is 
 
 E. the inscription over the door, and more fully 
 sepulchral tablet, which always faces the east, 
 in the west wall, being the entrance to the 
 underworld, the hidden land being in the west. 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 17 
 
 From it we learn that every one who should visit 
 the tomb should say a prayer for the good funeral of 
 the deceased, that he should have a happy passage 
 through the risks of the other world, and that offer- 
 ings should be made on stated days. These rites and 
 duties had a wise end in connecting the future offer- 
 ings with the funeral chapel, because the mummy so 
 became a sort of title-deed of the estate. So long as 
 he was safe there was a centre for the worship of 
 the gods, and so long as the priests received their 
 share of the offerings, which in the case of one 
 of the pyramid-building kings took place for some 
 3000 years, it was their interest to keep the estates 
 in the family. One estate was taxed for so much 
 honey, another for so much milk, and so on. That 
 is how the mummy became so very important a 
 personage, and how mummification was brought to 
 very great perfection, because it was necessary that 
 people should be quite sure that there should be 
 something real in the tomb for which these offerings 
 should be duly paid ; and that, in fact, the mummy 
 should not disappear but remain as the man himself, 
 or at least his human envelope. In these chapels 
 many scenes are represented with great freedom and 
 fulness, especially those relating to the occupations 
 of the deceased in his lifetime, and there are not 
 
 c 
 
18 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 only religious but historical pictures. In the earliest 
 tombs we find abundant subjects portraying the life, 
 the ordinary employments, and the great funeral rites. 
 All our ideas of Egyptian manners and customs down 
 to a late period come from the pictures of the tombs. 
 They were there within my memory, but have now 
 for the most part perished. The greatest scene of all 
 is the funeral feast, when the relations celebrate the 
 passage of the deceased to the other world, with the 
 desire that he should enjoy a perfect day at the last, 
 and they meet together with dancing and music, and 
 then they raise that strange dirge over him, which 
 is the most wonderful mixture of true lament and 
 the intense desire still to enjoy life as well as they 
 can. 
 
 Then the sepulchral chamber was also a place as 
 if for the living. Unfortunately all the tombs which 
 have been opened, with one exception, have been 
 rifled ; consequently we cannot speak with certainty 
 of their furniture. The sepulchral chamber being 
 below the ground has very little of decoration ; but in 
 the oldest ages we know that the sole decoration of 
 the upper chamber related to this life, while that of 
 the sepulchral chamber related to the future state ; 
 for since in these latest times pyramids of the 
 ancient period have been opened, it has been proved 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 19 
 
 that the whole decoration of the sepulchral chamber 
 should refer to the future of the soul, the inscrip- 
 tions conveying the hope and the certainty that the 
 king would pass into the celestial abodes, and repose 
 at last with the sun in his final resting-place. The 
 furniture of the chapel was probably very limited, 
 because the chapel was always open ; and I do not 
 think even the Egyptians would have placed costly 
 vessels of gold and silver and brass where some 
 passer-by, perchance not imbued with the general 
 piety of the race, might carry them off. The sepul- 
 chral chamber no doubt held the vessels, the chair, 
 couch, and so forth, carried in the funeral procession 
 and placed in the crypt for the use of the deceased, 
 or to speak more correctly, the double. Such objects 
 were actually found in an unrifled tomb. In process 
 of time the two ideas, the idea of the soul passing 
 away into the other world and the double still living 
 in the tomb, became antagonistic ; and as we reach 
 later days we find that the notion of enlivening the 
 chapel with joyous pictures disappeared, and the sub- 
 jects of the Book of the Dead took its place; and 
 at last the chapel itself disappeared, and the whole 
 labour was expended on the sepulchral chamber and 
 in the most costly stone coffins for the dead. So 
 in spite of the fixed canon of the Egyptian religion, 
 
20 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 within the limits it allowed there was a certain 
 development. 
 
 Here I would draw your attention to the fact that 
 art in Egypt, first in the tomb, and then elsewhere, 
 is the expression of the noble ideas which the Egypt- 
 ian carried with him to the decoration of his sepul- 
 chre. Of course it may be said that the forms of 
 Egyptian art are those most suited to permanence. 
 That I quite admit; but the forms most suited to 
 permanence are suggestive of permanence. The 
 pyramids are permanent; but they undoubtedly 
 suggest permanence. They stand there on their 
 pedestal of rock and defy the efforts of successive 
 quarrymen to destroy them. Not only in the 
 pyramids, but in the other forms, I think you see 
 the development of the same idea. Kemember the 
 enormous size of the columns of some of the temples, 
 and the great size of the stones of which the struc- 
 tures are built. Kemember too that by a trick of 
 perspective the Egyptians increased to the eye of 
 the visitor the dimensions of the temples, by making 
 each great court or hall rather smaller than that 
 before it, a practice to which I recall but one excep- 
 tion. As you visit these monuments it strikes you 
 forcibly that they portray that which was most 
 in the Egyptian's heart, his belief in immortality. 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 
 
 ^ 
 
 He has succeeded in embodying for himself on earth 
 
 its best material representation. fy < 
 
 The colour, I think, no less than the form, is true 
 to the same doctrine. Egyptian colour must be seen 
 in the Egyptian sunlight, which almost blots it out, 
 or in the dim interior of an Egyptian temple, and 
 then the strong contrasts of bright hues are very 
 much sweeter and more musical than they seem to 
 us. There is a gentle harmony in them. J. F. Lewis, 
 the greatest recent painter of light after Turner, 
 remarked to me in Egypt that the sun made the 
 light cold and the shadows warm. It is impossible, 
 without seeing a very fine Egyptian monument under 
 the conditions of light in which the builders meant 
 it to be seen, for us to apprehend their colouring, 
 which, certainly, when represented in pictures or seen 
 in our own generally diffused light, has an aspect of 
 harshness, though the harmony of colour is main- 
 tained in the use the Egyptians make of it. Of 
 course I do not go into the more intricate question 
 of the use of the compound colours in place of the 
 simple ones, for this innovation is of the Graeco- 
 Egyptian age ; nor do I think we can judge the old 
 colouring unless we can see it in its original form. 
 Take ivory and ebony, gold, lapis lazuli, green and 
 red jasper, and let a great master make a mosaic in 
 
22 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB 
 
 Egyptian style, and you would see how really grand 
 it is, and how it has in it that large simplicity 
 which connects it with the expression of durability. 
 I think if you will study Egyptian decoration you 
 will find this to be true. 
 
 Now I must pass to our Society, but in leaving 
 Egypt I would entreat you to do all you can to 
 study the remains of these precious monuments, and 
 honour that long antiquity and religion which the 
 Egyptians have bequeathed to us. It is a science at 
 once the most instructive and entertaining. You can- 
 not do better than read M. Eevillout's essays in the 
 Revue Egyptologigue, essays of profound learning, all 
 full of the most delightful touches of humour, and 
 written with the keen insight of a Frenchman and 
 with the thorough knowledge of a scholar. So 
 do not desert the old subject while you cultivate 
 new ones ; but keep a corner of your hearts for the 
 study of that which is the oldest, and one of the most 
 sacred of human records, the Egyptian. 
 
 Now a word about the Society. You are here to 
 help the Society for the Protection of Ancient Build- 
 ings, which did me the honour to call me in with 
 reference to the Arab monuments, and which has im- 
 pressed me as being not only in earnest, but as being 
 composed of hard-working and hard -worked men, 
 

 POOLE. AND THE FUTURE STATE. 23 
 
 not rich men, but men who give their time for a great 
 principle. It is a Society which has worked through 
 good and evil report. It fights with infallibility. It 
 wishes to call the attention of people all over England 
 to the value of that which they are about to hand over 
 to an irresponsible authority. I remember last year 
 going to a church in Cornwall. I remarked upon its 
 beauty, but thought that it looked suspiciously new. 
 A friend said, "Yes, that church has a curious history. 
 It was one of the very few Early English churches 
 in England that had Norman transepts. It was re- 
 stored, and the work of the Norman transepts put 
 into the chancel as their appropriate place." That is 
 the way the sculptures of antiquity have been treated, 
 and it is only the statues dug out of the earth, or 
 raised aloft above it, that are yet as when they were 
 made, changed only by the chances of time ; like the 
 priceless marbles of the Mausoleum and the Parthenon. 
 My feeling, as Keeper of Coins in the National Museum, 
 is very strong against restoration, because I have 
 suffered long and tedious labour, and have had to 
 draw upon the national purse for thousands of pounds, 
 to replace the Eoman coins which had been touched 
 up and restored, and consequently had lost all their 
 historical value. I have been told that this Society is 
 a radical society, but on looking over the members of 
 
24 THE EGYPTIAN TOMB POOLE. 
 
 the Council I find it is very much like two distin- 
 guished assemblies which meet in another place, and 
 consist of many political sections. But in our policy 
 we are intensely conservative. However different our 
 views, we are all agreed upon one principle, and that 
 is, that what must be done upon all occasions when 
 " restoration " is proposed, is to excite the attention 
 of those who are responsible, first, local authorities, 
 and then the nation at large, so that our noble and 
 ancient monuments should not be ruined. They 
 exist for the- benefit of the nation, and it is our 
 duty to wake public interest in the matter, and to 
 do our utmost to save for future instruction those 
 treasures which, like the Egyptian tombs, we may live 
 to lament in vain. I would give three short reasons 
 for sympathising with and supporting us. I would 
 appeal to your historical sense to save the monu- 
 ments of history, to your religious sense to save the 
 temples of your fathers, and to your personal feelings. 
 Here is one who has wrought for us in the field of 
 art, hard and unceasing work, and who, more than 
 any other living man, has brought this great duty 
 home to our hearts. If we owe him gratitude for 
 having delighted the hearing ear as much as tne 
 seeing eye, if we feel that our homes have been 
 made by him more restful to the weary head, more 
 
POOLE. AND THE FUTUEE STATE. 25 
 
 educating to the young intelligence; if we feel all 
 this, and that as we look around us we may say 
 of him while he is yet in his meridian, that which 
 was said of Sir Christopher Wren when he had 
 passed away " If you ask for his monument, look 
 around!" then, as he has done these things for us, 
 let us in gratitude care for the Society which William 
 Morris has most at heart. 
 
 [This Lecture has been printed from a shorthand 
 report, as spoken, with as little alteration as 
 possible. E. S. P.] 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 BY PROFESSOK W. B. RICHMOND. 
 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 
 
 To deal satisfactorily with such a vast subject as 
 " Monumental Painting," or to follow it into the dif- 
 ferent fields of art to which the subject leads, would be 
 more than could be expected from a single Lecture ; 
 for the many classes of painting that may be, in the 
 most comprehensive sense, called monumental, cover 
 the whole area of the history of art. They embrace 
 epic and history painting, portrait and landscape. 
 
 Monumental painting is not of necessity imme- 
 diately connected with architecture and sculpture, as 
 decorative painting is. Nor is it necessary that, to 
 be monumental in character, a painting should be 
 executed upon a wall; for there are many works 
 easily cited which, while they bear a distinctly 
 monumental character and treatment, are painted 
 upon both canvas and 'panel. Thus it is not at all 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 27 
 
 with this largest and most comprehensive view that 
 we shall occupy ourselves to-day. The subject would 
 be too large and too varied, but the remarks in this 
 Lecture will be confined to a general review of the 
 progress of painting from Giotto to Michael Angelo ; 
 and as, during this period of time, almost all the 
 most important works in painting were executed on 
 walls, monumental painting in the sense of mural 
 painting will alone be considered, and we will con- 
 sider alone that side of the art which is most generally 
 accepted as "monumental." 
 
 Further, it is my object to show the importance 
 upon art generally of the influence of architecture 
 upon both painting and sculpture. And how painting 
 grew under the wing of architecture and sculpture, 
 and how greatly she profited by contact with them. 
 
 Before Mr. Kuskin had opened the eyes of us all, 
 or most of us, to the beauties of the early Italian Art, 
 whether the conventionalities of the Bolognese 
 Schools in academic lines, the affectations of Cor- 
 reggio in sentiment, or the pedantic brown trees of the 
 landscape painters, stood for truth these traditions 
 entirely governed taste; while the real expressive 
 quality of early art was forgotten or passed unnoticed. 
 And whatever difference of opinion there may be 
 about Mr. Euskin's art teaching on some matters, it 
 
28 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 must be acknowledged that lie has chastened the 
 taste of England, that he has greatly added to what- 
 ever there might be of observation or love of natural 
 beauty in us, besides withdrawing all sympathy from 
 pretentious, inexpressive, or blatant art. Let me 
 remind you that there is no reason now whatever for 
 any of us to remain ignorant concerning Italian art ; 
 we can all possess excellent reproductions of what 
 is best; nor need we remain insular in our taste, 
 nor always harp upon that monotonous string of 
 national art ; but rather should we endeavour to en- 
 large our sympathies and spread our ground, learning 
 all we can from the other side of the silver streak, 
 and especially should we study the severer work of 
 early art. Tor we have much to learn. Our English 
 school began, we may say, with Hogarth; since Gothic 
 times, we have had no archaic art, we have no paint- 
 ing in connection with architecture, and our sculp- 
 ture, such as there has been, invariably was heedless 
 of its relationship to architecture. Nearly all the 
 religious painting, and the tempera pictures or frescoes 
 which existed in our churches or public buildings, 
 were destroyed at or after the Eeformation ; so here 
 English painting received a check in decorative art 
 from which she has not yet recovered. So in paint- 
 ing, England has no archaic traditions, and the art 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 29 
 
 special to her has been of a far more Dutch than 
 Italian character. It cannot be doubted that hitherto 
 we have suffered by the want of the severe training 
 special to the mural painter ; and our art would be 
 greatly enlarged, and would become even more com- 
 prehensive than it is, were the education of our 
 young artists carried on with the severe example of 
 the earlier Italian painters in view. 
 
 While advocating study of the art of Italy, it is 
 not at all with a view that English art should become 
 like Italian art that I speak, but that such an educa- 
 tion would be best to develop the best execution, 
 the soundest and most direct methods, and the choice 
 of the most interesting subjects for representation. 
 
 In Italy, both fresco and tempera painting were 
 the means of decoration when mosaic ceased. When 
 the architect admitted more light into his buildings 
 the dull surface of fresco took the place of the 
 glorious glitter of mosaic. Fresco leads of necessity 
 to a noble style of work; it cannot be done hurriedly; 
 nothing can be achieved by accident ; design, in all 
 its branches of form, light and shade, and colour, 
 must be planned and ready before the fresco painter 
 can begin his work upon the wall. And much, very 
 much, of the dignified restraint of early Italian art 
 is due, not only to the conjunction of the three 
 
30 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 arts, and their mutual help, but to the precise and 
 methodical nature of the art -training which the 
 process of fresco painting demands. 
 
 This, then, it appears to me, is a lesson of 
 no small importance, and one to be followed. For 
 whether the modern painter is or is not to be a 
 mural painter, an education formed upon the severest 
 practical lines will assist rather than retard his pro- 
 gress, whatever branch of the art he may choose to 
 follow. 
 
 Perhaps it is no use to hope that fresco painting, 
 if only as an education, will ever be taught in our 
 schools ; but it is distinctly a pity that it should not, 
 on account of the chastening severe influence it has 
 had upon art, as I have indicated. Still with all the 
 aids there are, or are not, we must not expect to 
 progress too quickly. Our hope lies in the fact that 
 the section of the educated public is becoming larger, 
 and the study of a severer form of art is more uni- 
 versal than it was. 
 
 The dread of Idolatry, the terror of Eomanism, 
 and the cold hand of Puritanism, chilled the warm 
 stream of art; and a cold one -day-a- week respect- 
 ability has warned the country of the seductive 
 power of beauty. 
 
 Hence for the most part our churches are caves 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 31 
 
 or white-washed sepulchres, uncoloured, or if coloured 
 at all, only in parts, patchily, and with little gene- 
 ral idea of design; and such designs as have been 
 attempted are formed, for the most part, after 
 mechanical patterns and mechanical colours, under 
 the uniform glitter of tile glazes. And indeed, as 
 yet, there appears but little hope that the demand for 
 real decoration will arise, or the necessity for it in 
 our churches or public buildings will become a part 
 of public feeling. But, however this may be, it is 
 the plain duty of those who have voices to be heard, 
 and who are earnestly desiring the progress of the 
 highest forms of art, at every opportunity they may 
 have of appealing to the public to do so frankly, 
 and in every way to open the eyes of the people to 
 a great want, and if possible to excite them to action. 
 Yet while so large a section of exhibition -goers is 
 satisfied with the dreary commonplace platitudes upon 
 morbid or sentimental daily life ; is satisfied with art 
 that tells of the unfortunate girl, the hungry baby, 
 the affectionate grandmother, the funeral of the first- 
 born, Sunday morning in the village, and such -like, 
 for pictures, any future for true art in connection 
 with the deeper thoughts and aspirations of man 
 appears still far off. Now let me remind you of a 
 truism. The works of the great masters, and these 
 
32 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 the severest and least florid whether of architect- 
 ure, painting, sculpture, poetry, or music, should 
 be the groundwork of education; the more austere 
 form of each art should guide the earliest steps of 
 the progress of taste. I say the austere and severest 
 arts, because these are always sincere, always untram- 
 melled by affectation, pedantry, or self-consciousness. 
 They are invariably marked by modesty, spontaneity, 
 and directness. The very stammering or halting 
 power of expression so easily discovered in them is 
 full of charm. In fact, in all the arts, the progress 
 towards perfection is even more interesting and 
 instructive than the moment of culmination; and 
 certainly, when expression becomes too easy, when 
 language whether of words, or of the pencil, or 
 of the chisel becomes facile, the tendency is to trust 
 to such facility, and allow clumsy or undigested 
 thoughts to be decked in ornamental declamations 
 of rhetorical expressions. So* the longer the mind 
 dwells upon the earliest works, those works that after 
 all contain the most valuable motives, which may be 
 developed and enriched by greater exactness, pre- 
 cision, or science of expression, the more alive will 
 it become to their real, strong beauty of thought 
 and concentrated power of expression, and the more 
 wary will judgment be of trusting to florid accom- 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 33 
 
 plishment and the egoism of talented facility. So 
 it remains that, in order to comprehend the fullest 
 development of the art, we must follow her step by 
 step from her childhood, and being trained by the 
 severest mood of her beauty, we shall be disinclined 
 for extravagant exhibitions of merely a voluminous 
 and artificial expression, and shall turn (having tasted 
 the simplest food) from all that may be over-flavoured 
 or rank. And now we shall try and see how severest 
 monumental painting grew, and under what condi- 
 tions it flourished, and how the union between the 
 three arts has produced all that is monumental in 
 painting in Italy. In the first place, the architect, the 
 sculptor, and painter of Italy did not hold separate 
 functions. All the three arts were in many, indeed 
 in most, instances combined in one man. Giotto, 
 Brunelleschi, Andrea Verrocchio, Mantegna, Eaphael, 
 Lionardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo, are names 
 that recall masters in each separate sphere of the 
 formative arts ; if all of these did not practise archi- 
 tecture, sculpture, and painting, they were at least 
 conversant with them, and were complete masters 
 of their principles. That complete union of the trio 
 which existed from the earliest times between archi- 
 
 k lecture, sculpture, and painting, each having achieved 
 the power of expression sufficient for a separate 
 ' 
 
34: MONUMENTAL PAINTING. BICHMOKD. 
 
 existence, led indeed to the maturity of the noblest 
 characteristics by the habit of mutual constraint ; and 
 the three, wherever or whenever they have remained 
 hand-in-hand in unison of motive, and in acceptance 
 of this, have brought out strongly and defined clearly 
 the limits, natural or philosophical, of one another. 
 The just limit, over which there must be no passing 
 for each art on to the confines of another art, was, 
 in the purest times of art, perfectly understood and 
 recognised. 
 
 Architecture enriched her lines with sculpture, her 
 spaces with painting. At the same time, both painting 
 and sculpture were guided and constrained by the 
 severity of contact with the austere lines, geometrical 
 shapes, mathematical proportions, science of structure, 
 and, above all, the conditions of lighting imposed upon 
 both by architecture. While it is the function of 
 sculpture to enliven and enrich, both with subject and 
 ornament, the baldness of many architectural forms, 
 it must be remembered of course that no structure 
 should be weakened thereby, nor must simple masses 
 of unadorned spaces, where these are designedly so, 
 be encroached upon or broken up. The builder has 
 taught the sculptor symmetry, proportion, construc- 
 tion, and restraint, and, as he became riotous and 
 unregardful of simplicity, the sculptor followed him. 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 35 
 
 Italian sculpture and painting of the twelfth century, 
 and on to the seventeenth, were all in unison, whether 
 for right or wrong. The three arts lived together in 
 constant contact, and there has been no time, whilst 
 they remained acting in conjunction, that a common 
 influence failed them. The Egyptian, Greek, Eoman, 
 Byzantine, and Gothic arts of architecture, sculpture, 
 and painting, were in perfect harmony, and in all 
 time where laxity crept into one, it crept into all, 
 so strong is the natural union of the three. 
 
 As sculpture has been checked by architecture, so 
 painting has been restrained by architecture ; where 
 the one has been simplest and severest, the other has 
 been simplest in design, but often most splendid in 
 colour ; her own peculiarity, her veriest function, that 
 of colour, has been brought into full power by the 
 severest forms of architecture. Think of the mere 
 shell of St. Mark's at Venice ; what can be simpler of 
 construction ? yet every space is so inviting in form, 
 so suggestive for decoration, that it seems constructed 
 for that purpose. The windows are few, the pro- 
 portions are grandly simple, and suggest the employ- 
 ment of the brilliancy of gold, its glitter and reflecting 
 qualities. Rich marbles are carved with unending 
 invention and beauty of the severest kind. The 
 designs of the Greek mosaics are masterpieces of 
 
36 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 decoration, and for colour these are as perfect as it is 
 possible to imagine. It was, as we all know, through 
 St. Mark's that the revival of the arts of Italy canie 
 about ;. and if we would understand the principles 
 of design that governed the art of Giotto, we must 
 study the Greek mosaics in Venice, in Kome, and in 
 Eavenna. A few remarks on the unity of the arts 
 may help the subject we have in hand, and let us 
 glance at the specialities of each art. 
 
 With all the individuality of the function of 
 painting, both as regards her power over form and 
 colour, the same laws of fitness, constraint, and com- 
 munity with the other arts, should control her ; and 
 they did do so in the times when monumental art was 
 really alive, and was exercising its influence upon all 
 the work of the time, the easel pictures, and the por- 
 traits, as well as the mural paintings. In all the 
 three there was then a conjugal vitality. 
 
 Then the true faculties of each of the three sisters 
 had been discovered, and their separate spirits were 
 clearly defined ; one supplied that which the other 
 lacked, yet generously yielded to special individual- 
 ities and superiorities of special functions. And so 
 the three grew on together in mutual interest, as- 
 similating qualities from each other without robbery 
 or encroachment, aware that perfect unity must be 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 37 
 
 accompanied by constraint and respect. These grace- 
 ful arts demanded no single rewards or individual 
 praise; but they were content that perfect beauty 
 was found in their combination, and that the true 
 life of art must find in them one common pulsation. 
 Architecture calls, being conscious of her own limits,) 
 for the fanciful, sensitive blow of the chisel to enrich/ 
 and moderate her severity; sculpture, while she 
 adorns, is awed by and constrained by the naked 
 beauty of architecture; painting, when in contact 
 with both sculpture and architecture, catches their 
 chastity of form, their reserve, their regulated quan- 
 tities, while her full tones of colour give life to the 
 bare surfaces that are permitted to her. 
 
 Yet this special gift of painting her colours, is 
 not recklessly sown broadcast in the best times of 
 art, but the sensuous excess of it is dominated by 
 the atmosphere of judgment, calculated care, and the 
 studied definitions of the two severer arts. What, 
 then, is the monumental painting we are considering ? 
 In the strictest sense it is painting connected with 
 architecture and sculpture, and it was through such 
 connection that the art of the painter caught much 
 of the severer qualities of those others. The noblest 
 painting is architectonic in the simplicity and clear- 
 ness of the arrangements of lines, andjjhe preservation 
 
38 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 
 
 RICHMOND. 
 
 _of masses, whether of form or colour, and preserves 
 
 /as much as possible thereby all dignity and nobility 
 of aspect, not frittering by ornament, not emascu- 
 lating strength and simplicity of line by multi- 
 tudinous details, nor insisting jipp&^any definite 
 representation of nature to the eye, in place of its 
 presentation to the mind. While monumental 
 painting gives to us the forms of the objects she 
 seeks to interest us upon, and the colours of them, 
 she does so only in the simplest and largest manner ; 
 indeed, in the childhood of her career, there were 
 scarcely more than emblems of the facts attempted at. 
 " But they were the expressions of the minds of men 
 in the hands of children." Monumental painting is 
 sculpturesque in the placidity and constraint of both 
 action and expression. Trivial human emotions have 
 no part there ; the steady march of man's life, the 
 noblest of his feelings, the greatest episodes of his 
 career, the highest hopes of his soul and of its 
 immortality, are the points upon which the painter of 
 eternal truths loves to dwell. Then the mind which sets 
 in forms and colours only such noblest emotions, 
 the mind that will chiefly give to man the reflection 
 of himself at his best moments, in his greatest likeness 
 to his Creator, is the most ideal mind and still the 
 most useful ; for thus we are reminded of our possi- 
 
 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 39 
 
 bilities, charged with our responsibilities, and being 
 honoured by the highest appreciation of our moment- 
 ary yearnings in a busy, hurried world, we are calmed 
 by hope, and ennobled by the presentation to ourselves 
 of the real nature within us. It is, as I believe, 
 considered a somewhat sentimental fallacy that 
 man may be called to a sense of his true dignity 
 as a creature of the highest poetic or intellectual 
 capacity by any work of art. As an ethical factor, 
 art is rather supposed to be of no importance, nor to 
 possess aught for man's service, but some passing and 
 sensuous pleasure. And if this be so, it must be 
 admitted that many, nay, most of the greatest works 
 of the world of art have been executed in vain ; that 
 the great human poem of the Sistine Chapel is a 
 vacuum ; and that Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and 
 most of the painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries, lost their time following a vain shadow, and 
 indulging only in empty fancies. Perhaps it is still 
 worth while to cling to the old-fashioned idea that 
 the best artist is he who expresses the greatest number 
 of beautiful thoughts, who lifts us out of our common 
 drudging life into his own world of beautiful ideas, 
 and into the fields of his fancy and inner quiet life, 
 and be thankful to him for opening the gates of a 
 paradise, even for a moment, that we may see, though 
 

 40 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 but mistily, through the clouds of critical antagon- 
 ism, some revelation of poetic and truly human sug- 
 gestions. That character of the painter's art which 
 dwells alone upon the noblest mental attributes, will 
 also deal largely arid comprehensively with all 
 physical detail. And though nothing that has to be 
 presented at all will appear too small to be well 
 presented, the painter who grasps and accentuates 
 the salient points of moral character, depicting these 
 with the constraint and style we have been thinking 
 of, will carry into all the details of his work the same 
 manly and sound execution, the same judgment and 
 due relation. And this largeness of aspect existed 
 in the great monumental works of the Italians, not 
 only in their ideas and treatment of form, but also in 
 their treatment of colour; at a glance we perceive 
 the whole unity of their workmanship, the same 
 delicacy of perfection, the same calm reflection in 
 the thought first, the form second, the colour third^ 
 and the careful and harmoniotls execution of the 
 whole in combination. 
 
 It is my wish to impress upon you that the quali- 
 ties of the noblest painting those dealing with the 
 highest subjects in the highest manner did come 
 by the union of the three arts ; and if I have made 
 myself clear, you will see that the greatest painting 
 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 41 
 
 is that which has most of the influence of architecture \ 
 and of sculpture, but yet has not been robbed of 
 the essential elements belonging to it alone; that 
 painting has been content to be restrained where 
 licence might have entered without loss of individual 
 freedom, acknowledging constraint, and hailing the 
 vigorous help of the more solid and less emotional 
 arts. What is it that holds and charms all who are 
 capable in the frescoes by Giotto at Padua ? Is it that 
 we are brought face to face with what is called natu- 
 ral truth in them ? are they the looking-glass to the 
 common outside facts of faces, of drapery, of animals, 
 of landscape ? are we surprised by the very simili- 
 tude of all that is the embodied to their prototypes ? 
 Not at all ! There is a spirit here, dwelling far deep 
 down below the surface of the work ; there is not 
 only the perfection of story-telling in the simplest 
 and most direct artistic language, but, moreover, 
 there is the justice and clearness of a child's unedu- 
 cated philosophy. Would we take away that archaic 
 expression ? should we seek to add conscious science 
 where already there is unconscious perception, all 
 the unity of the work with the thought would vanish. 
 And yet this purest art was until quite lately here 
 in England almost held up to ridicule ; and even in 
 the latter part of the last century, when certainly 
 
42 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. EICHMOND. 
 
 Keynolds, Gainsborough, "Wilson, and Turner later, 
 were doing great work in another direction, early 
 Italian art was looked upon as dry or insipid. 
 
 Giotto's art was the outcome of Greek tradition 
 grafted upon an Italian spirit ; he is at the end of an 
 almost unbroken tradition. The mosaicist who made 
 the figure of the Virgin in the church at Torcello 
 that mighty mother of awe-inspiring dignity and 
 beauty might have been the brother of the later 
 painter, as far as the style and dignified artistic 
 means are concerned. The artists of Kavenna, who 
 in the sixth century made the mosaic in St. Vitale, 
 representing Justinian and Theodora, had hold of 
 the more impressive traditions of art traditions 
 never quite lost sight of, till the end of the sixteenth 
 century and later, through the Greek influence of 
 St. Mark's and its mosaic workers, and these were 
 brought into Umbria through the efforts of Cimabue, 
 and from him transmitted to his pupil Giotto. And 
 this monumental art of Giotto, complete in unity of 
 design and execution indeed, being a sort of key- 
 stone of all the best principles of design was the 
 foster-mother of the art that followed in Italy ; and, 
 moreover, as long as a vestige of its influence re- 
 mained active, as long as the simple and modest 
 language of Giotto's art prevailed and influenced, 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 43 
 
 sentiment held science in check, and the constraint 
 of tradition, based upon sound simplicity of thought, 
 prevented the too rapid but at last crushing advance 
 of artistic licence. 
 
 As I said in the earlier part of my Lecture, I say 
 again now, with a definite instance before me, that 
 those who would study monumental art, who would 
 become conversant with its limits and the true 
 boundaries of just taste, must feed, before attempt- 
 ing to advance in hurry to the greater luxuries of 
 more extended artistic grounds, upon these earliest 
 expressions of the mind of as great a painter as 
 ever lived, whose shortcomings were only of science, 
 whose work is always clear in invention, absolute in 
 taste, right in feeling, whose colour for its purpose 
 is quite perfect, and, above all, whose serious and 
 noble design no art ever surpassed. But no hasty 
 observer will get out of the work of Giotto what he 
 may. The quaintness will startle, and the subtlety 
 of human expression is too great to strike at a glance ; 
 and the gestures and indications of action relating 
 to the event of the design are too really natural and 
 dignified to be immediately or strikingly apparent. 
 It is essentially work that needs study and sympathy 
 to enjoy or profit by ; it is so delicately felt, and so 
 childlike in expression, and, withal, it is always 
 
44 
 
 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 
 
 RICHMOND. 
 
 robust in thought. When all the stories expressed 
 by Giotto are made out and understood, when each 
 motive of every figure has been clearly followed, 
 there yet remain many purely physical beauties to 
 be studied and enjoyed physical beauties that have 
 been but too little recognised. If trouble be taken, 
 hands may be found as perfect in beauty as need 
 be (this I mean in the drawing of them) ; and 
 as for the invention of their actions, it cannot be 
 better, for no greater designer of simple action ever 
 existed than Giotto. And in the drawing of hair 
 Giotto was again remarkable, and will stand com- 
 parison with painters of more studied knowledge, 
 while in the design of it none surpass him. The 
 heads, too, throughout the Padua series especially 
 of the Virgin are as varied in emotional beauty as 
 can be imagined. Observe this invention. At the 
 Annunciation the Virgin is calm, expectant, and 
 hopeful. Later, anticipation of trouble ages the 
 beautiful countenance without spoiling it. But we 
 find the sob of agony marring it as Christ is led 
 away to Calvary; and physical strength gives way 
 at the Crucifixion, passionate humanity of feeling 
 overrides all ideal feeling ; and then, most marvel- 
 lous touch of all for poetic thought, at the Ascen- 
 sion, the drama being complete, the suffering of her 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 45 
 
 Son over, that early calm of youth but slightly 
 aged, again is reclaimed, and the face of the Virgin 
 assumes an evidence of satisfied revelation. In all 
 these designs of Giotto there is not one single strain 
 for artistic effect, neither is there any expression not 
 justified, nor gesture unnatural; all is stately without 
 stiffness, simple without monotony, profound in senti- 
 ment with no weakness, sensible without common - 
 placeness ; and wherever nude form appears, though 
 it is evidently not understood from any scientific 
 knowledge, it is never ugly, and, though incomplete, 
 it is mostly beautiful. We have mentioned the 
 desirability of the influence of sculpture upon paint- 
 ing; now note this influence upon these works of 
 Giotto. As compositions, apart altogether from the 
 sentiment of them, structurally, each of these designs 
 might well be executed in bas-relief. The planes 
 are few, simply distinguished, without any abrupt 
 or disturbing perspective diminution of any of the 
 figures ; there are very few instances of fore-shorten- 
 ing, or of any distortion of limbs, and, even when 
 slight fore -shortening has been adopted, it is not 
 greater than might be admitted into a relief. Great 
 perspective diminution is never to be found in 
 paintings of the purest style. It was not until 
 painting broke loose from its proper or chief function 
 
46 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 as an aid to adorn and enrich architecture, that 
 perspective, both of form and atmosphere, became a 
 necessity. The light and shadow in Giotto's work 
 falls directly, without artifice, as in the open air, 
 and is pronounced only strongly enough to give an 
 amount of relief, agreeable and in due relation to the 
 simplest decorative effect. The colour is throughout 
 of extreme beauty, yet little more than unbroken 
 hues of unmixed and pure colour are admitted, 
 shaded by a darkening only of the local tint, and 
 yet we are satisfied. In the flesh painting, only a 
 slight tint of carnation is used, this quite unbroken 
 by shadow, but by delicate gradations and soft 
 modelling becoming quite satisfactory, and sufficiently 
 real for such purpose of art as Giotto went in search 
 of. One of the very marked characteristics of the 
 work of Giotto, and one much to be noticed, is the 
 admirable design of his drapery ; without being in 
 the modern sense naturalistic or elaborate, there is 
 not one touch of mannerism of design, not one fold 
 that is drawn by rule of thumb, or without a distinct 
 motive, although a traditional style or arrangement 
 is evident. Indeed, on close examination, there 
 will be found a greater truth in the motive of 
 the drapery, as it answers to the gestures of the 
 figures it covers, than in much more elaborate and 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 47 
 
 studied work of a more cultured period of art. 
 Here, again, the art of Giotto may be compared 
 to Greek art. For just as in Greek bas-relief we 
 find an ordered similarity of style in the folding of 
 drapery, varied sufficiently to give interest and avoid 
 monotony, so in Giotto's drapery there is a definite 
 style, a large and simple folding, relieved by small 
 puckering where such action is necessary to give life, 
 but no lifeless monotony of design is ever present. 
 At no period of art, even in its most cultivated 
 moments, can we find work in more perfect concord, 
 or in more complete union with itself, than the work 
 of Giotto contains. There are no more beautiful 
 designs anywhere in Italy ; there are no works more 
 subtle in intention, or purer as decorative art, or 
 intellectually stronger than the frescoes at Padua ; 
 their shortcomings, that any tyro can see plainly 
 enough, are those only of inexperience in certain 
 technical matters of structural knowledge and exact 
 draughtsmanship. Giotto attained perfection in ex- 
 pression of simple and childlike emotion ; beyond 
 this he could not go, and the natural restraint 
 imposed by the time of comparative scientific 
 infancy of art in which he lived was rather of 
 advantage to him than otherwise ; as far as it went 
 his work is to us quite satisfactory, because all that 
 
48 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 is of reality necessary to fine art is there complete. 
 Later, and only a little later, expression of emotions 
 and attempts at greater mobility of expression became 
 more or less of grimace ; and when action of a 
 momentary character was attempted by inferior 
 painters, it was forced and self-conscious, showing 
 in a very naive way the not unnatural pride of the 
 workman at having achieved something new in art, 
 or having conquered some technical difficulty. Buffal- 
 macco was an instance of this, and even in a minor 
 degree that great Simone Memmi, whose grimness of 
 imagination is Dantesque, but whose artistic sense 
 was less than Giotto's. And it may be said that 
 for some time after the death of Giotto the art of 
 painting progressed very little ; no painters arose 
 who rivalled his invention, and it was long before 
 the art of a single painter showed such com- 
 pleteness, such satisfying balance of all the attri- 
 butes of art. 
 
 As an artist Giotto stands quite alone in his 
 logical completeness. Whilst he seems to end the 
 period of classic art in Italy, he opens the way for 
 realistic art. He is the end and the beginning. 
 His work will stand by the side of the frieze of 
 the Parthenon, and not suffer excepting through 
 hypereriticism ; and yet at the same time it will hold 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 49 
 
 a dignified ground when side by side with Luca 
 Signorelli or Michael Angelo. Here it may be said 
 that all really great art has kinship ; no true art will 
 materially suffer from juxtaposition. However dif- 
 ferent the results may be, the general aim of all 
 great art is alike ; it is the search for the noblest, 
 the most characteristic, or the most beautiful, and 
 therein there is an affinity. 
 
 Now I must ask you to pass over a period of history 
 slightly with me, that we may arrive at Michael 
 Angelo, and his work as a monumental painter. The 
 art of painting from the time of Giotto to Michael 
 Angelo was chiefly employed upon walls, hence an 
 architectural symmetry and a sculpturesque reserve 
 was practised. But, even when the art was not 
 mural, the dignity of decorative art maintained its 
 ascendency over design generally, and the portraits 
 and pictures were conducted with the same large 
 manner of preception, design, colour, and execution, 
 which had been thus inculcated by contact. 
 
 Art having been pretty nearly perfected as to 
 pure sentiment and general decorative effect very 
 early in its career, but remaining feeble and limited 
 concerning science, had to find a road for its advance- 
 ment in another channel, and, to advance, it had to 
 
 E 
 
50 
 
 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 
 
 extend the field of its observation of nature, and 
 knowledge concerning her laws. 
 
 So each painter kept adding something of know- 
 ledge, one of perspective, like Andrea Verrocchio, 
 whose last years were spent almost exclusively in 
 the study of it and of geometry, another of anatomy, 
 and so on ; and Benozzo Gozzoli painted landscapes 
 in so delicate and living a manner as had not before 
 been dreamed of, he delighted in the designing of 
 cities in his pictures, in fanciful arabesque, elaborate 
 mouldings, and reliefs to his architecture; he delighted 
 too in the painting of plants and flowers in his fore- 
 grounds, done with great truth and delicacy. But, 
 above all, he was a painter of character, a portrait 
 painter. Indeed the Campo Santo at Pisa, where 
 Benozzo did his chief work from 1469, may be called a 
 school for portrait painting. Yet, with all the beauty 
 of workmanship, diligent and keen observation, we 
 cannot claim for Benozzo any high place as a man of 
 imagination. Indeed, where that quality is called 
 for in his design, there is little satisfaction given ; but 
 of fancy he was full, and a certain dignified silent 
 grace is his. Born before Benozzo in 1402, Masaccio 
 marks a great realistic period of the development 
 of art. It must have been indeed a marvel to the 
 painters in Florence when, at the consecration of the 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 51 
 
 Brancacci chapel in 1428, the works of Masaccio, 
 which had employed him for some years, were exposed 
 to view. But little of the romantic invention of many 
 other painters, and especially of the greatest invent- 
 ors, is to be found in his work. Yet in another 
 direction he made a great stride towards realisation 
 of absolute truth and exact knowledge. And yet there 
 is a dignity of arrangement always, an unimpassioned 
 treatment, magnificent workmanship, in his work, 
 and truth in delineation of human character. The 
 interest of his work lies much in the dignity of design 
 and in the full colour of it, but most of all in 
 the variety of marked types of his heads and in 
 their distinct individuality ; these are evidently all 
 portraits of the utmost fidelity, grandly drawn, and 
 painted with astonishing firmness and precision, 
 incisive as to character and personality. To the 
 Brancacci chapel we may well go, as Michael Angelo 
 and Eaphael went, to study what true realistic paint- 
 ing may be, without loss of dignity. With all the 
 truth, with all the unflinching fidelity of an extraor- 
 dinarily strong and fine perception, however ugly 
 according to canons of beauty his models were, not 
 one breath of vulgarity, not a line of exaggeration 
 or caricature finds its way into Masaccio's work. In 
 his colour there is a wholeness without monotony, it 
 
52 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 is select, large in style, healthy, and truthful. His 
 heads represent perhaps as monumental a character as 
 any portrait painting has done ; as dignified as Titian, 
 as true as Holbein, they are as full of character but 
 much nobler than those of Velasquez. Not only was 
 this wonderful faculty of perception consummated in 
 him during the short period of his life of twenty-six 
 years, but also in the science of form, got by careful 
 study of the human frame, he achieved a very distinct 
 position of progress in that direction, thereby most 
 markedly helping the science of art towards a still 
 greater knowledge and achievement. Purely as a 
 colourist, Masaccio far distanced his contemporaries, 
 and as a fresco painter he was the first among Italians 
 who added rich transparency to his shades and deep 
 tones by means of strong glazes of colour upon the 
 surfaces of his painting ; in fact, the impression left 
 upon the mind concerning the colour of Masaccio's 
 work is that of fulness, richness, and harmony ; but, 
 in the design, there is less feeling, a more restricted 
 invention, more limited poetic capacity than in the 
 works of many painters of less accomplishment who 
 preceded him. But this was not only natural but 
 desirable. It has been, in the history of art, always a 
 privilege that certain painters should be told off by 
 their natural gifts in special practical directions to 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 53 
 
 excavate the road for some complete genius who is 
 to combine the essence and purity of early and 
 intense thought with structural knowledge, the 
 authors of which had only the strong vision of 
 their subject to express, having been untrammelled 
 by the intricacies of science. Masaccio was distinctly 
 one of these practical pioneers. He added no poetry 
 to art, but he added much of broad natural fact, 
 powerful skill in handiwork, and the science of many 
 difficult problems. No doubt Paolo Uccelli greatly 
 assisted in his active development, being a contem- 
 porary and a man of scientific interest. Yet note, 
 while all the more natural or intimate faculties of 
 art as they relate to nature were started into action 
 for future generations by the labours of Masaccio, 
 that symmetry of design, and its constraining power 
 over liberty hitherto practised by the earlier schools, 
 was still not only a tradition for him, but showed 
 itself in practice in his mature and more realistic art. 
 For the influence of sculpture upon this epoch of 
 painting Ghiberti was making his mark, and during 
 the short life of Masaccio he was executing the gates 
 of the baptistery of Florence. This great advance 
 upon the previous art of the sculptor, going on at the 
 most impressionable time of the young painter's life, 
 must have decided the lines in which he would study, 
 
54 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 and matured both his judgment and taste with 
 great rapidity, also ordering his realistic tendencies. 
 The friendship between Brunelleschi (sculptor and 
 architect) and Masaccio must have greatly aided the 
 latter in his adherence to the severer methods of 
 design, and thus retarded a too rapid advance of 
 one whose natural genius might have led on to 
 excess in obedience to his special instincts. Here 
 we must break off and leave the point of a new era 
 of realistic art, established by Masaccio, and start 
 on later ground. Forty years after the death of 
 Masaccio we find Luca Signorelli beginning a life of 
 eighty -one years, therein finding himself a contem- 
 porary of Michael Angelo, Eaphael, and Titian. 
 In his art, again, there comes about still further a 
 development, and yet a greater kinship with the past, 
 carrying us nearer, than did Masaccio's work, in 
 sentiment to Giotto, and in science pointing to 
 Michael Angelo. Already Pollaiuolo was studying 
 the structure of the human form upon scientific 
 principles of anatomical research; these were still 
 further developed by Signorelli, who, twelve years 
 younger than Lionardo da Vinci (the special inspirer 
 of the limitless achievements both of Eaphael and 
 Michael Angelo), advanced the art by rapid strides of 
 the science of human form to its ultimate and com- 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 55 
 
 prehensive perfection; of his works at Orvieto, the 
 frescoes in the chapel of Santo Brizio, I have left 
 myself but little time to speak. That it is evident 
 that Michael Angelo studied them deeply, and that 
 they greatly influenced his design, no one who knows 
 them can doubt. And, while the physical know- 
 ledge arrives far nearer to the attainments of Michael 
 Angelo than does any of the art preceding him, the 
 poetic and inventive genius of Signorelli was, in 
 relation to the intermediate art from Giotto, equally 
 extended ; for in his frescoes at Orvieto (these alone 
 I instance as his most remarkable works), while the 
 evident progress of freedom and action combined 
 with knowledge of the structure of the human body 
 is found, and that charm of invention and feeling of 
 the earliest art is present, there is added a powerful 
 dramatic element of design and an impetuous imagi- 
 nation. The beauty of the art of Piero della Francesca 
 under whom Luca studied by its early influence kept 
 in check a daring and original genius which, in the 
 case of Luca, might otherwise have found a vent in 
 unrestrained freedom of expression. As a colourist 
 Masaccio was the superior of Signorelli ; as a designer 
 he was his inferior. Era Angelico the most spiritual, 
 perhaps, of all the painters of the fifteenth century 
 had already completed the ceiling of the chapel of St. 
 
56 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 Brizio in the Duomo of Orvieto, and had thereon left 
 the mark not only of his deep feeling but of his 
 highest strength and commanding dignity, when 
 Signorelli began his work there a worthy ideal 
 for Signorelli to work up to, and a calm example 
 to restrain extravagant invention and cool a too 
 impulsive judgment. In 1489, Luca Signorelli 
 began to decorate this chapel of St. Brizio ; in this 
 year Michael Angelo was fourteen years old and 
 had gone to live with Lorenzo de' Medici having 
 already shown very marked evidence of his strong 
 artistic individuality. And here, probably in 
 daily companionship with the most learned and 
 accomplished men of the time, with Angelo 
 Poliziano, and Pico della Mirandola, Michael Angelo, 
 during four years of a most important period of his life, 
 gained such mental instruction and guidance of the 
 very nature to develop his philosophic and poetic 
 temperament. That the influence of Signorelli upon 
 Michael Angelo was very considerable, history and 
 evidence tell us; indeed, Michael Angelo borrowed 
 groups and evidently ideas also from Signorelli. 
 The daring of design, originality of conception, and 
 scientific research into the anatomy of the human 
 body is everywhere apparent in the work of Luca, 
 and excited Michael Angelo (similar as he was to 
 
MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 57 
 
 v > *& 
 
 him in impulsive desire towards the advancement 
 
 *^ 
 
 \ ^^N 
 
 of the art) to still greater and more extended achieve*? 
 
 ment than had yet been attained. It has been my 
 endeavour hitherto to sketch the chains of connec- 
 tion between the old art and the new, and to point 
 out some of the more important links which mark 
 some points in the progress of monumental painting. 
 Art, we have seen, in her progress added to her- 
 self more and more freedom of expression, greater 
 science, greater knowledge of perspective and anatomy, 
 and far more command over the multitudinous actions 
 of which the human body is capable. And in all 
 these attainments she gained ; but the inner soul of 
 her expressiveness, the mastery over subtle emotions, 
 tender passions, or exalted grief, was, as we have 
 seen in the art of Giotto, already gained, and in the 
 interval between his time and the time we have now 
 entered upon, but little of the purest aesthetics had 
 been added to art. But now comes the climax. 
 Lionardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Eaphael, all 
 three distinctly different in genius from one another, 
 yet as individual as it is possible to imagine, each 
 one, according to his special gifts, aimed at perfection. 
 Of the works of Lionardo, excepting by his drawings 
 which are scattered in multitude throughout the 
 museums of Europe, we know comparatively little 
 
58 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 as compared with the completed works of both 
 Eaphael and Michael Angelo. His name as a painter 
 has a spell about it ; it fills us with curiosity, and 
 excites our imagination perhaps beyond that of any 
 other artist. It may be said that no work exists by 
 which we can test him as a mural painter, by which 
 we can compare him with Michael Angelo or Eaphael. 
 His "Last Supper" scarcely exists; probably there are 
 few touches of his pencil remaining on the wall. 
 His great cartoon of the "Battle of the Standard," 
 which gave to Michael Angelo a spring forward, and 
 showed to him the chances of still greater liberation 
 for his own genius, is destroyed, portions of it re- 
 maining in copies only. What his power over the 
 expression of the human face was we can fully realise 
 in the portrait of the Mona Lisa ; as a completed 
 work this is probably the most important of Lionardo 
 in existence. With regard to his great influence, we 
 all know how Eaphael was awakened by him from his 
 gentle dreaming, under the influence of Perugino, and 
 how Michael Angelo was, though many years younger, 
 spurred into competition with the veteran Lionardo. 
 The cartoon of Pisa, executed when Michael Angelo 
 was about thirty years old, came upon the world as a 
 miracle ; and, indeed, displaced the design of Lionardo 
 by the still greater command of form (therein shown) 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 59 
 
 from the foremost position, and was accepted as the 
 greatest achievement of modern art. There is a 
 painter to whom I have not alluded, but whose 
 place in the design of my remarks must not be 
 forgotten, for Domenico Ghirlandaio a thorough 
 painter, of the soundest skill, and of a well ordered 
 talent, had the instruction of Michael Angelo, who 
 in Santa Maria Novella assisted his master in the 
 frescoes now to be seen on the walls of the choir of 
 that church. This art, so thoroughly learnt by the 
 young Michael Angelo, remained in abeyance as far 
 as he was concerned for many years, and it was not 
 until 1508, he being then thirty -three years old, 
 that the sculptor was called away from his chisel 
 by Julius II. to take up the brush, and, over the 
 vast ceiling of the Sistine chapel, to employ it to the 
 climax of perfection in design and painting. And 
 now, after all the gathering together of knowledge, 
 the accumulation of experiences, and the hard labour 
 of centuries, the perfection of monumental painting 
 is arrived at under the most individual genius in the 
 whole history of art. 
 
 It is to be regretted that only at the end of a 
 Lecture such a subject as the Sistine frescoes should 
 be considered ; but the excuse for this must be that 
 the object of the remarks to which you have listened 
 
60 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 has not been (as will be apparent to all) to do more 
 than tread lightly upon some stepping-stones of 
 art as they make a way over the wide stream of time. 
 And as one who may perhaps claim to have given 
 some care, and many hours of labour, in order to 
 understand not only the artistic scheme of the in- 
 comparable work of Michael Angelo as a painter, but 
 also having tried to comprehend every poetic episode 
 of this mighty epic of art, I shrink from the difficulty, 
 and avoid the audacity which would be involved by 
 a hasty glance over so vast and sublime a subject. 
 
 In the history of art this work stands alone, alone 
 in sublimity of conception, alone in limitless inven- 
 tion, alone in the mastery of its execution. As the 
 courage of the handiwork is great, so is the finish 
 exquisite. Inasmuch as the impetuous wealth of 
 poetry from the most austere grandeur to an archaic 
 beauty is within the range of this complete art, 
 and is kept in orderly reserve, this work belongs 
 truly to traditions of sound monumental painting. 
 The severity of early art the severity of Giotto is 
 not departed from, and the romantic spirit of the Sien- 
 ese school may be traced while the highest science 
 is there. Beauty of the strongest, strangest, least 
 expected, and yet most gentle character, is to be 
 found. Kaphael, with all his grace of grouping in 
 
RICHMOND. MONUMENTAL PAINTING. 61 
 
 his Madonnas and children, with all his charm, never, 
 except in his Madonna di S. Sisto, touched the 
 pathetic chord of mothers' love with the same strength 
 or beauty that Michael has in the groups of the 
 ancestors of Christ in the spandrels. We stand in 
 awe before this sublime history of man. We see 
 man in his perfect purity, in his highest physical 
 beauty, inspired to prophecy, as immortals under the 
 spirit of the Divine being, wielding the sword of 
 retributive justice, obedient to the dictates of faith 
 in a Divine power of healing, by faith overcoming 
 physical strength ; and from these high themes we 
 are led to the touching simplicity of the life of men 
 and women in their childhood, youth, maturity, and 
 old age. We are in the presence of an art before 
 which the greatest minds have bowed with respect 
 and admiration, and before which criticism should 
 respectfully keep silence except to appreciate. 
 
 We look back from the year when this mighty 
 work was completed, into the distant past, and see 
 the great array of workers, each adding something, 
 and, as we arrive at the last of this long line of great 
 souls, we see one the simplest of all, the thoughtful 
 Giotto, he the beginner of the new art which ends 
 with Michael Angelo. The last echo of the voice of 
 Giotto dies away in the vault of the Sistine chapel. 
 
62 MONUMENTAL PAINTING. RICHMOND. 
 
 Art has done all she can do ; she has gathered from 
 science all she dare do without injury to her youth- 
 ful instincts ; she has accepted as much freedom as 
 she can; every addition to the links of the chain that 
 bound her to the rock of severest tradition, has been 
 made that can be made ; and yet, in the full power of 
 her strength, in the full bloom of her mature beauty, 
 she stands on the edge of a fatal abyss. At the 
 birth of completeness the death -knell of monu- 
 mental art sounded. The influence of the sister arts 
 one upon the other must begin to cease. Sculpture is 
 to assert her independence of architecture ; she is to 
 run loose of all constraint and to become for a time 
 at least hopelessly imbecile. Painting is to be 
 picturesque, not monumental ; her ordered garments 
 are to go in tatters, her serious demeanour is to be 
 changed for the flush of lawless liberty. 
 
 Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto are yet to hold on 
 to the true principles of art by the healthy vigour 
 of their love of nature a little longer. But with the 
 end of these, when the breath left their bodies, all 
 that was truest in art slept. 
 
 
LECTUKE III. 
 
 BY EDWARD J. POYNTER, R.A. 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 
 
 A Lecture given at the South Kensington Museum. 
 
 IT is rather difficult to find anything new to say on 
 Decorative Art. Details, going further into a subject 
 than general criticisms and broad principles, require 
 much reading and study, and the knowledge of a 
 specialist who has time to exhaust the literature of 
 the subject. There is no subject on which law is so 
 much laid down at present as art, especially deco- 
 ration. Infallible nostrums, as it were, are offered 
 on all sides for the adornment of our houses and even 
 of our persons. For rules are even given for the 
 artistic regulation of ladies' dress, though I observe 
 that those ladies who have most regard for their per- 
 sonal appearance avoid availing themselves of the 
 excellent advice offered to them. But general criti- 
 cisms are easy to make, and general principles are 
 easily laid down. When I presided at the Art Sec- 
 tion of the Social Science Association at Liverpool 
 
64 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTEK. 
 
 in 1876, I prepared, with much labour, a Lecture in 
 which I laid down such rules as to what is right and 
 wrong in practical art as occurred to me. By an 
 arrangement which could not be avoided my address 
 was not delivered until the end of the first day's 
 meeting, and I heard, to my dismay, every one of 
 my carefully elaborated principles, which were to 
 convince the world, enunciated by one speaker after 
 another in every paper that was read. There was in 
 fact no discussion among the practical men, as every 
 one was agreed as to the general principles, whether 
 regarding propriety of construction or appropriate 
 styles of decoration. But it is doubtful whether we 
 should approve of all the works executed by the 
 several speakers in accordance with the admirable 
 principles they evidently understood, and on which 
 they spoke so well. I am led to the conclusion, there- 
 fore, that to propound general principles is not of 
 much use. People either agree upon them, in which 
 case there is no need of discussion, or they disagree, 
 in which case discussion is of no use. Training and 
 example, not argument, are the only means by which 
 right judgments can be formed. The requisites of 
 decorative, as of all art, are good taste and good 
 workmanship ; and for good taste there are no rules. 
 My object, therefore, to-day will be not to set up 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 65 
 
 any general rules, but to draw some attention to the 
 art of painting as practised by the ancients, illustrat- 
 ing my remarks with a specimen of decoration which 
 has been for a long time in the possession of the 
 Museum, but which, having been placed on a stair- 
 case not generally used by the public, may easily 
 have escaped special observation. As regards the 
 historical and literary side of the subject of antique 
 painting, the writings of ancient authors have been 
 ransacked, and everything that is to be learned from 
 them has long ago been published and is familiar to 
 all who have made a study of the subject. It would 
 be impossible for me, therefore, to present you with 
 any information which cannot be gathered from the 
 numerous books, erudite or popular, which are pub- 
 lished on this subject, and come out in increasing 
 numbers from year to year. Thus, all the remarks 
 which I have to offer are those of an artist and not 
 of a specialist ; and it is probable that many, if not 
 all, of the conclusions to which I shall arrive have 
 been forestalled by others, and that some of them 
 may be contradicted by passages in ancient authors 
 of which I am ignorant. My attention was freshly 
 drawn towards a subject which has always interested 
 me by a visit to Eome and Naples made last autumn, 
 especially by the paintings in the Museo Borbonico, 
 
 o 
 F 
 
66 
 
 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 
 
 and still more by those in two houses lately dis- 
 covered in Eome that of Germanicus,on the Palatine, 
 of the paintings in which you see admirable copies 
 before you ; and that still more beautiful house dis- 
 covered in the excavations in the garden of the Far- 
 nesina palace, neither of which had I ever seen. 
 These copies were presented to the Museum by the 
 Emperor of the French after the house had been 
 discovered in the excavations made by the French 
 on the site of the Palatine hill. They give you now 
 a better idea of the original paintings than even the 
 originals themselves, which have much suffered, since 
 the house has been uncovered, from damp and from 
 fading. As copies they are excellent. 
 
 It is quite hopeless to imagine that we shall now 
 ever find any trace of the works of those great painters 
 of antiquity which are known to us from the writings 
 of Pliny or Pausanias. None of them have come 
 down to us. People have even questioned whether 
 they were really deserving of the immense reputation 
 they enjoyed. But, putting aside that, as I shall 
 endeavour to point out, the remains of antique painting 
 which exist appear to me to fully justify the highest 
 praise, it is doubtful whether any work has acquired 
 and retained a high traditional reputation without 
 deserving it. My object in the first place will be 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 67 
 
 to show what grounds there may be for arriving at 
 any opinion as to what these paintings were. 
 
 None of these great works, as I have said, exist to 
 speak for themselves. There is not, as far as I know, 
 any instance of an antique painting signed by the 
 name of a known artist. Indeed the only signed 
 picture existing, of which I am aware, is the beautiful 
 little painting, or rather drawing in outline, on white 
 marble, which was discovered at Herculaneum, re- 
 presenting four maidens playing at knuckle -bones, 
 and signed, AAEHANAPO2 A6HNAIO2, an artist 
 whose name is not otherwise recorded. The painting 
 no longer exists ; nothing but a faint image is now 
 to be seen; as is, alas! too frequently the case with the 
 paintings from Pompeii, which were fresh and brilliant 
 when first discovered. 
 
 On vases the names of the artists who painted 
 them are not uncommon, but a list of them would 
 tell us nothing. Of more importance, as throwing 
 some light on the style of antique pictures, are the 
 paintings on the vases themselves. The subject of 
 antique vases is much too vast for me to enter upon 
 here. I give you, as an illustration of style, a single 
 figure from a vase, but any other would illustrate 
 just as well the purity of outline and the complete- 
 ness of composition which is to be found in all the 
 
68 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 designs on the Greek vases of the archaic and best, 
 and even of the later periods. Some of these, as I 
 have elsewhere pointed out, may present to us the 
 treatment *by celebrated painters of some of the great 
 traditional subjects. The superb composition on a 
 vase at Naples representing the "Last Night of Troy" 
 may probably be a free copy of the same subject by 
 Potygnotus at Delphi. The resemblance, though not 
 complete, tallies very closely with the description by 
 Pausanias of this work, and the incident of Cassandra 
 clutching the statue of Minerva is in the two cases 
 identical. If this vase painting be not a free render- 
 ing of the picture, both are probably in accordance 
 with a fixed traditional treatment. Mr. Birch con- 
 jectures the same from the fact that the composition 
 on these vases is frequently better than the drawing. 
 No doubt the paintings of Polygnotus were in a 
 severe style on a simple background, without per- 
 spective and without incident, possibly of one colour. 
 There was probably no light and shade, and not much 
 modelling. We may indeed conceive him to have 
 held the sort of place in Greek art that Orcagna 
 and the Lorenzetti held in that of Florence and 
 Siena. Sufficiently emancipated from the earliest 
 styles to give full expression to the incidents por- 
 trayed, but as yet undeveloped on the side of imita- 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 69 
 
 tion, their art was incapable of rendering the full 
 force of nature in its more material aspects. But 
 the art of Polygnotus would, in the one quality 
 which makes Greek art superior to any other, far 
 excel the works of the painters I have mentioned, 
 or indeed of any painters of the earlier period of 
 Italian art until it attained its highest eminence 
 with Michael Angelo and Eaphael I mean in the 
 splendid harmony of composition and symmetry of 
 form which we find not only in the Greek sculpture 
 but on the best Greek vases. This splendour of 
 composition for I can find no other word we find 
 indeed on the vases of the archaic periods, but the ex- 
 quisite perception of form, and that wonderful preci- 
 sion of outline which makes us understand the meaning 
 of the anecdote about the rival lines of Apelles and 
 Polygnotus, did not come until later. In these 
 qualities, no doubt, the works of Polygnotus were 
 pre-eminent. We may be certain that the composi- 
 tion was not inferior to the best of those on the 
 vases, and we may assume that the drawing and the 
 style of the form had all the superiority over those 
 beautiful creations which would be the result of an 
 exceptionally gifted artist working on a large scale, 
 and not trammelled by the difficulties of surface and 
 material with which the vase-painter had to contend ; 
 
70 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 not the least remarkable feature of Greek art being 
 the steadiness with which the vase -painter would 
 draw figures full of life and action on a rounded 
 surface, in perfect proportion and with an exact line, 
 a perfection which is unknown to us in any but 
 a mechanical sense. 
 
 The sculptures in the pediment of the temple of 
 ^Egina were executed between B.C. 500 and 480, more 
 than twenty years before Polygnotus became a citizen 
 of Athens, 460 B.C. These figures, though purely 
 archaic as to the treatment of the head, are much 
 more natural in the limbs, which are remarkable for 
 subtlety of modelling and attention to nature, though 
 treated with the grand generalisation of form which 
 was instinctive with the Greeks. Polygnotus would 
 no doubt pay special attention to his outline, in 
 which he would at least be as perfect as the author 
 of those sculptures. Beyond this it is difficult to 
 realise how far his paintings were carried in the 
 matter of light and shade, or rather of modelling, 
 and gradation of tint and roundness of form for 
 of light and shade in his works, in the sense of 
 chiaroscuro, there was probably none at this epoch, or 
 indeed for a long period after. The paintings found 
 about fifteen years ago in a tomb at Vulci, although 
 probably much later than Polygnotus, may give us a 
 

 POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 71 
 
 clue to his style. These are arranged in the bas-relief 
 form, are somewhat advanced in modelling, and on a 
 background of a single colour white, I think. 1 
 
 Nor is it easy to guess at Polygnotus's style of 
 colouring. If we are to believe Pliny he was very 
 limited as to the colours he used, for Pliny distinctly 
 informs us that the ancients used none but white, 
 yellow, red, and black, in the production of their 
 immortal works, naming painters down to Apelles 
 and Mcomachus, who lived from about B.C. 350 
 to 300. But Athenian lekythoi, with other colours 
 than these four, are found dating from an earlier 
 time than Apelles. Moreover, we know that other 
 colours blue certainly were used in the decora- 
 tion of temples long before the time of Apelles, 
 or indeed of Polygnotus. It is hardly necessary to 
 mention that the Egyptians used a great variety of 
 colours a thousand years or more before the commence- 
 ment of Greek art. The statement, therefore, is incred- 
 ible. It is true that these four colours exclusively were 
 commonly used in the wall-paintings in the Etruscan 
 tombs, and probably also in the temples which have 
 disappeared. It is possible, therefore, that Pliny had 
 
 1 When I was in Rome I saw these paintings, but being out of 
 health I was not in a position to make notes, and am uncertain 
 on this point. 
 
72 ANCIENT DECORATIVE AET.- POYNTER. 
 
 made a mistake in his notes, and referred to a wrong 
 one. This is a hazardous conjecture, but I cannot ac- 
 count for his assertion in any other way. Now, accord- 
 ing to Pliny, Polygnotus was not included by the Greeks 
 in the category of their great painters. He informs 
 us that they reckoned the origin of their school of 
 painting from the 90th Olympiad about 420 B.C. 
 twenty-five years after Phidias had made his reputa- 
 tion, and forty years after Polygnotus was made a 
 citizen of Athens. They looked upon him and the 
 painters of his time, no doubt as the critics of the last 
 century looked on the painters previous to Eaphael, 
 i.e. they did not acknowledge their existence ; the 
 only exception made by our writers on art being in 
 favour of Masaccio, who seems to have been known 
 as having supplied the original from which Eaphael 
 borrowed his figure of Paul preaching at Athens. In 
 remote parts of England it would appear that until 
 lately there were owners of pictures who still lived in 
 this faith, for it was not uncommon in the earlier days 
 of the Old Masters' Exhibition at the Eoyal Academy 
 for pictures of the pre-Eaphaelite school, of the most 
 incongruous styles and dates, to come up under the 
 name of Masaccio, by which they were christened 
 probably early in the century. Latterly, Botticelli 
 has been the favourite. Such was the view the Greek 
 
POYNTEB. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 73 
 
 writers took apparently of the founders of their school; 
 but Pliny was more enlightened or more inquisitive, 
 and he has begun his history of Greek painting from 
 the year 700 B.C. Still we may suppose that before 
 Polygnotus there was no painter whose works had 
 a very distinctive or independent character : most 
 probably they were painted in perfectly flat tints, 
 like the generality of those in the Etruscan tombs, 
 and like the Egyptian wall-pictures ; and it is quite 
 in accordance with what we know of the superior 
 difficulty of painting over sculpture, that the art 
 should have still been in an imperfect stage of 
 development, and not considered worthy of record, 
 at a time when Phidias was producing his immortal 
 works. I cannot but feel, however, that imperfect 
 as they were, there must have been a special charm 
 about such paintings as ornamented the Propylaea 
 at Athens and the council-chamber at Delphi. The 
 absence of chiaroscuro and of background must have 
 enhanced the perfection of the outline and brought 
 into relief the balance and symmetry of the com- 
 position, just as the simple colouring in the vases 
 leaves us free to concentrate our admiration on the 
 same qualities. As far as the art was then developed 
 the painting of Polygnotus was probably perfect. 
 Limited in colour, the modelling, if there were any, 
 
74 
 
 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 
 
 of the simplest kind, and carried no further than 
 with the early painters of the Italian school, but 
 highly idealised and extremely subtle in form and 
 outline, it must have had that splendour of com- 
 position which, to judge from the vases and the 
 bas-reliefs, lost nothing of its richness and harmony 
 in the transition from the archaic to the finest 
 style. 
 
 The school of painting soon developed the qualities 
 which were to make it more complete and more 
 acceptable to a people who were nourished on the 
 unsurpassable grandeur of the architecture and sculp- 
 ture of the age of Pericles. Henceforward in Pliny 
 we meet with numerous anecdotes which, though 
 trivial, all point in the same direction, to the con- 
 tinually increasing perfection of the imitative power. 
 I have no intention of taking you through the 
 whole history of Greek painting as recorded by 
 Pliny. If I have dwelt so long on speculations as 
 to the art of Polygnotus, it was, first, because this 
 state of the Greek art where form predominates. over 
 the lower, but not unnecessary, arts of effect, is one 
 which is peculiarly attractive ; and secondly, by way 
 of suggesting that where the art which they ignored 
 or put in the second place must have been so per- 
 fect in itself, the art which they acknowledged must 
 
POYNTEB. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 75 
 
 have risen to transcendent heights of skill, combining 
 qualities any one of which, completely acquired, is in 
 itself sufficient to make a great painter. It is true 
 that Pliny, as I have hinted, relates a number of 
 childish anecdotes about Zeuxis and other painters, 
 which are evidently mere popular traditions founded 
 on the wonder of the ignorant, always first aroused 
 by skill in imitation. The birds, indeed, who pecked 
 at the grapes of Zeuxis must have been very dis- 
 criminating; and, as it seems, he could reckon on 
 their judgment, for, according to the story, he 
 exposed a second picture purposely to their criticism, 
 of a young man carrying a basket of the same fruit, 
 when the birds came again to peck at the grapes, to 
 the great disappointment of Zeuxis, who would thus 
 appear to have painted the young man so badly that 
 the birds took no notice of his presence ; a presump- 
 tion which it is difficult to entertain concerning the 
 painter whose Helen was world-renowned. 
 
 But besides these and similar foolish and im- 
 possible stories Pliny constantly dwells on the 
 increasing perfection of form which the Greek 
 painters developed from the time of Zeuxis to the 
 culmination of the art under Apelles and Protogenes. 
 The Venus Anadyomene of Apelles seems to have 
 been universally admired as having attained the 
 
76 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 highest point to which the art of painting could 
 reach, and we must suppose it to have combined all 
 possible excellencies of form, colour, and workman- 
 ship. But when we have come to this conclusion 
 we have exhausted conjecture, for I doubt if it be 
 possible for us to form any exact conception of such 
 a painting. 
 
 In expression I believe the Greek painters to have 
 been paramount. I have a vivid recollection of the 
 head of the young Achilles in a painting at Naples, 
 a painting by an artist evidently not of the highest 
 rank, where he is being taught to play on the lyre 
 by Chiron. A more glowing expression of absorbed 
 interest in a face radiant with youth and life it 
 would be impossible to imagine. Aristides, a con- 
 temporary of Apelles, is thus referred to as " paint- 
 ing the soul ;" he painted a suppliant with such a 
 look that you seemed to hear the words coming out 
 of his mouth ; and the portraits of Apelles were said 
 to be so living that fortune-tellers drew horoscopes 
 from them. 
 
 If, again, there be any doubt in your minds as 
 to the Greek painters having understood the use of 
 light and shade to produce the effects of nature, as 
 we understand it in these days, I would draw your 
 attention to the painting of the street which you 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 77 
 
 have before you in this copy of the paintings from 
 the house of Germanicus. 
 
 With the aid of the Greek vases, the Etruscan 
 wall-paintings, especially the later and more advanced 
 works from the tomb at Volsci, and the well-known 
 style of Greek bas-reliefs, we can, as I have shown, 
 form a fair idea of the appearance of the works 
 of Polygnotus. But there is this great difference 
 between these and the paintings of later artists, 
 that the style of Polygnotus was distinctly decora- 
 tive and monumental; although asserting its claim 
 to admiration on its own account, it was still as 
 much part of the general architectonic scheme as 
 the Panathenaic frieze or the statue of Theseus are 
 parts of the decorative scheme of the Parthenon. 
 Not so the works of Zeuxis or Apelles and Protogenes, 
 which are described as separate works, forming no 
 part of a system of design, although frequently 
 painted for and placed in temples. "We know that 
 they were movable, for many of them were trans- 
 ferred to Eome, and were bought and sold at the 
 public auctions. The Venus of Apelles, for instance, 
 was in the temple of Julius Caesar at Eome ; it had 
 partly perished in the time of Augustus, and was 
 finally destroyed by worms in the panel, and removed 
 by Nero. I imagine, then, that the style of Polyg- 
 
78 ANCIENT DECOKATIVE ART. 
 
 notus, if his works were before us, would give us no 
 more clue to the style of the Alexandrian painters than 
 we should gain from a painting by Orcagna towards 
 forming a conception of Titian or Eembrandt. 
 
 On the other hand, all the paintings of a later 
 date which have been preserved are wall-paintings, 
 and executed by such different methods from encaustic 
 and varnished cabinet pictures painted on panel, that 
 they can hardly help us towards forming an opinion. 
 We may probably find in them, as we find in the 
 vases, repetitions of the earlier paintings of the 
 Greek school, and I think it extremely likely that 
 in the panels, which form a conspicuous feature of 
 the mural decorations at Pompeii and elsewhere, we 
 should frequently, if we only knew, find copies 
 traditional copies only of some of their great works. 
 Unfortunately we have no means of judging, except, 
 as far as I know, in one instance, to which I 
 shall now refer. It is probable that in the works 
 of Zeuxis, and Timanthes his contemporary, atten- 
 tion to form and composition still predominated 
 over colour and effect. A painting from Pompeii, 
 of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, may possibly preserve 
 for us the treatment of this subject by Timanthes 
 in his celebrated picture, which we may the more 
 readily believe as Agamemnon is there represented 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 79 
 
 with his face veiled, as in the well-known de- 
 scription ; but this painting is by a very inferior 
 hand, and can give us but the tradition of a 
 tradition : it is indeed so imperfect that the painter 
 has forgotten to finish the legs of Iphigenia where they 
 should appear on the farther side of the personage 
 who is carrying her to sacrifice. This very imper- 
 fection, however, would seem to point to its being 
 a copy executed in a perfunctory manner, probably 
 from a bad sketch ; for in a first conception an artist 
 would hardly forget to complete his figure. The 
 painting, however, as it is, is still decorative in form 
 and manner of treatment, far less pictorial than 
 many others found at Pompeii. We may thus con- 
 ceive Timanthes and Zeuxis to have arrived at that 
 fine stage of development of the art when the figure, 
 carried to its highest perfection, still predominates 
 in the composition, the background and accessories 
 being kept quite subordinate. If it be permitted 
 to hazard a conjecture as to the character of the 
 paintings of Zeuxis, I should be inclined to regard 
 them as combining the pictorial and monumental 
 character in about the same degree as the exquisite 
 little picture of the Graces by Eaphael, avowedly 
 an attempt at the antique style ; or, may we venture 
 to bring into the comparison, at least as regards sini- 
 
80 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 plicity of arrangement and perfection of composition, 
 the Creation of Adam and the Creation of Eve in the 
 Sistine chapel ? 
 
 After this we are lost in conjecture. Apelles and 
 Protogenes, a century later, may have added the 
 richness and colouring of Titian to the grace of 
 Parrhasius, and may have even achieved the fulness 
 of light and shade to be found in Eembrandt ; but 
 of this we know nothing. This alone is pretty cer- 
 tain, that their paintings had lost the distinctive 
 characteristics of a purely decorative art, and had by 
 this time taken a widely different form from those of 
 the time of Polygnotus. 
 
 When the particular style of decoration which is 
 familiar to us from the wall-paintings of Pompeii 
 first came into vogue it is difficult to say. From 
 the tomb of Volsci, in which the figures are arranged 
 as in a bas-relief and form the chief feature of 
 the decorative scheme, to the Pompeian paintings, 
 where they are quite subordinate to a more or less 
 extravagant, but always elegant, architectural frame- 
 work, there is a gap, which the discovery of the 
 house in the gardens of the Farnesina at Eome, 
 supposed to be of the Eepublican period, does not 
 entirely fill; for the system in this, though more 
 sober and consistent, and less fantastic, is already the 
 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 81 
 
 same as at Pompeii. In this beautiful house, and in 
 the house of Livia or Germanicus, as it is variously 
 called, we have, with the exceptions I shall proceed to 
 mention, the finest specimens of antique decoration 
 that exist. The former especially is evidently painted 
 by the best artists of the time, and various painters 
 have been employed on the figure subjects in the 
 panels. There are no paintings so good from Pompeii, 
 except from one house, the name of which I do not 
 remember, and these remain only in small frag- 
 ments, arranged on a wall in one of the corridors 
 of the Museo Borbonico, as nearly according to their 
 original disposition as their imperfect state permitted. 
 These fragments, however, display an art of design 
 and a skill of execution which fully justifies the 
 most extravagant estimate which is recorded of Greek 
 artists. In certain qualities of execution they are 
 unrivalled by the best work of any of the great 
 schools of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. 
 Freedom of hand and certainty of touch are the first 
 requisites of decorative painting in no matter what 
 style ; but they are combined here with a rich 
 quality of impasto, laid on with a full brush (but 
 with supreme delicacy), in gradations which, though 
 as clean as mosaic in their precision, are as full and 
 round in modelling as though done by Velasquez : 
 
 G 
 
82 ANCIENT DECOKATIVE ART. POYNT 
 
 or a better comparison may be found, as we are 
 treating of ornamental and foliated forms, in the fine 
 but broadly treated details of the wreaths of ivy and 
 vine which adorn the figures in a Bacchanalian picture 
 by Nicholas Poussin in the Eoyal Academy Winter 
 Exhibition; the same, indeed, may be seen, though 
 more obscured by time and varnish, in the two 
 magnificent pictures of similar subjects by the same 
 master in the National Gallery : they will at least 
 convey an idea of the special quality of painting to 
 which I refer. Imagine the whole decorations of 
 a room carried out with the artistic perfection of 
 these details, and with all the beauty of surface 
 which the elaborately prepared stucco grounds of 
 the ancients provided for their artists, and you may 
 realise for yourselves a specimen of decorative art 
 such as none but Greek artists have ever produced, 
 and such as in our hurried world is not likely to 
 be produced again. From these disconnected frag- 
 ments I have gained a more certain belief in the 
 surpassing excellence of Greek painting than reading 
 or imagination or analogy could ever have supplied. 
 I do not know that there are engravings of these 
 paintings, but if there are, they would give no idea 
 of the wonderful execution : Giovanni da Udine is a 
 coarse dauber by comparison. 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 83 
 
 The walls of the house from the Farnesina garden 1 
 are divided by columns of great elegance, the inter- 
 columnar spaces being filled with panels, some con- 
 taining figure subjects, others ornament pure and 
 simple, others figures combined with ornament, and 
 are enriched with compartments framed by columns 
 and pediments, everything being executed in painting, 
 and with as close an imitation of the true relief of 
 nature as the artist could achieve. A reference to 
 the copy of the paintings in the Palatine house will 
 show you a treatment so precisely similar in char- 
 acter, note the bases of the columns, that it is 
 difficult to resist the inference that the same artist 
 was employed in the decoration of both these houses. 
 
 This arrangement of columns and panels is the 
 universal system, though varied infinitely, and carried 
 in some of the Pompeian- decorations to extremes of 
 fanciful arrangement, involving complex and im- 
 possible architectural construction. But there is a 
 peculiar feature in the decoration of the Farnesina 
 house which, so far as I know, is unique ; I mean 
 
 1 The decorations in fresco and stucco of this house have been 
 removed from the walls, and placed in a museum in the Lungara. 
 They are in remarkably good preservation on the whole. Photo- 
 graphs of them are to be had in Rome (possibly in England), and 
 may be compared with the copy of the Palatine house, which is in 
 the South Kensington Museum. 
 
84 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 the occasional introduction of panels with figures 
 in outline on a white ground, drawn evidently by 
 artists of the highest skill, for they have all the 
 beauty of the best outlines on the Greek vases. The 
 exquisite taste with which these outlines are enriched 
 with slight touches of colour reminds one of the 
 same graceful treatment on the Athenian lekythoi. 
 
 Those who have not seen the original Pompeian 
 paintings, nor noticed the copies now before you 
 (which are admirably faithful in colour to the 
 originals), have probably conceived a very false 
 idea of antique decoration, for, with the exception 
 of some ill -coloured prints, the only other guide 
 within reach that I know of is the Pompeian 
 court at the Crystal Palace, done, I believe, under 
 the direction of Mr. Owen Jones. Mr. Owen Jones 
 appears to have thought that in decoration one blue 
 is as good as another, and one red as good as 
 another ; 1 and he was evidently quite satisfied to 
 have produced the coarse and offensive result we 
 see in his Pompeian court, instead of the harmonious 
 
 1 Owen Jones's book is, unfortunately, the only book in English 
 giving anything like a consistent history of styles with illustra- 
 tions, and as such is in use in the Art Department schools. If it 
 were not for that, I should like to see the whole edition at the 
 bottom of the sea, rather than that it should be put into the 
 student's hand. 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 85 
 
 effect which is the constant characteristic of antique 
 decorative art ; in which the harmonies, though fre- 
 quently vigorous in their contrasts of colour, are 
 always splendid in their vigour; while no less 
 frequently they are remarkable for delicacy and 
 refinement. 
 
 A masterly freedom of hand is a marked char- 
 acteristic of all the antique decorative painting 
 which has come down to us. The work, although 
 very highly finished, is done with extreme simpli- 
 city. There is no loading of colour, but perfect 
 expression of touch, and everything appears to be 
 done at once and without the slightest effort. 
 Certainty of hand and executive skill held as high 
 a place in the estimation of ancient artists as the 
 conception of the subject, or its composition and 
 design. They owe their freedom, moreover, to 
 the fact that their art was a vivid and vigorous 
 expression of their impressions of nature. Nothing 
 is more remarkable in the Pompeian painting, 
 even when by an inferior hand, than the impres- 
 sion it conveys of a fresh and healthy life; the 
 creations all live, the gestures are spontaneous and 
 natural ; there is no straining after emotions. In 
 this sense the very finest art of the Italian school in 
 no way approaches the antique, because it is not in 
 
86 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 the same way the expression of life and humanity. 
 In their statues and pictures the Greeks made every 
 effort to attain perfection; but in their works of 
 decoration they seen quite unconscious of any effort 
 at producing a fine thing: they merely expressed 
 without after-thought their instinctive feeling for the 
 grace and beauty of the life surrounding them. The 
 only parallel I can think of to this perfectly spontane- 
 ous art, is in the vivacity with which Leech gave vent 
 to his feeling for the humour of English life. The 
 Greek's instinct for beauty was expressed just as 
 spontaneously and completely, and equally without 
 any intention of making a fine work of art. If 
 you wish to know further what I mean by this 
 freedom, I would refer you to some stuccoes in 
 the Museum from a Greek tomb in Southern Italy, 
 especially to a reclining female figure executed with- 
 out the slightest effort, apparently with a few strokes 
 of a knife or a stick, and the finger and thumb ; 
 but which, nevertheless, is a model of grace and 
 elegance, both as to movement and in the form of 
 the limbs. The state of mind which gives life to 
 so delightful an art is one that we cannot approach ; 
 for you will see at once the vast difference between 
 an art such as Leech's, which is on the verge of 
 caricature, and one in which the most exquisite 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 87 
 
 perceptions of refinement and beauty are not only 
 instinctive but exclude everything else. The only 
 other art which has the same spontaneous character 
 is that of the Japanese, and for the same reason. 
 Their art is the expression of the enjoyment they 
 derive from nature, and from producing the best 
 workmanship of which they are capable. There 
 is again no conscious effort at the production of 
 a fine work of art : but with them the sense of 
 beauty does not extend to the human figure ; in the 
 representation of birds and flowers they are unrivalled, 
 and their landscapes are vivid expressions of the 
 charm of nature, especially in her homelike charac- 
 teristics. And while we find the highest perfection 
 and completeness in their workmanship, we find also 
 that, like the Greeks, they do not depend upon 
 laborious finish for arriving at truth of nature ; for 
 the merest blot of a bird on the wing is as full 
 of life and expression as their most highly- wrought 
 productions in bronze or lacquer. 
 
 There is a curious point for consideration in con- 
 nection with the decorative effect of the wall-paintings 
 of the ancients, and here again we find a resemblance 
 to Japanese art I mean as to how far ignorance of 
 perspective was an assistance to them in covering 
 their walls with the scenic architecture with which 
 
88 
 
 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 
 
 we are so familiar. That the Greeks never dis- 
 covered the correct rules of perspective is certain. 
 They came very near it, as I have elsewhere pointed 
 out, for some of the lines occasionally converge to 
 one point, but it is evidently a point selected at 
 random ; they never discovered that all parallel lines 
 in perspective converge to a point on the horizon ; 
 and the fact that we never find correct perspective 
 in the works that are preserved is a proof that the 
 great artists of the school were equally ignorant 
 with the decorators, for the rules once known could 
 never be lost. 
 
 To refer again to this copy from the paintings in 
 the house of Germanicus, the lines of the cornice 
 and of the bases of the columns are drawn to one 
 point, about the centre of the picture, and so far they 
 are in correct perspective ; but in the view of the 
 street, which is introduced into the composition, there 
 are no two lines running to one point ; all are drawn 
 at random, showing that the painter had no real 
 knowledge. On the other hand, this very painting, 
 and another of an interior, show that the Greeks were 
 perfectly conversant with the manner of producing 
 the effects of Nature by light and shade in the manner 
 in which we understand it. Frequently the painter 
 has given up all attempt at perspective, and having, 
 
POYNTEE. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 89 
 
 as in many of the Pompeian paintings, chosen an 
 angle at which the receding lines should be drawn, 
 has made them all parallel to each other, which is 
 nothing more or less than isometric projection. This 
 is also not unfrequent in Japanese art. In other 
 cases he is in hopeless confusion ; some perspective 
 lines are drawn to one point, some to another, and 
 some even diverge as they recede from the eye. 
 This may be seen in the decorations of the Baths of 
 Titus; and we have only to look at these decora- 
 tions, which cover a very extensive wall -surface, to 
 feel that it would be very convenient in decorative 
 art not to know perspective ; for beyond a certain 
 distance from the centre of vision the drawing 
 becomes so exaggerated, and correct perspective 
 looks so untrue from every point of view but one, 
 that it is impossible to use it ; and in any extended 
 decorative scheme it has to be wilfully falsified ; as 
 we see in the Sistine chapel, where a separate 
 point of sight is chosen for each of the prophets 
 and sibyls ; so skilfully managed, however, as to 
 create no unpleasant effect. I must confess that 
 I consider that the ancients were fortunate in know- 
 ing as little as they did. The daring with which 
 they crowd a wall with complicated architectural 
 structures of the most fantastic nature, and with the 
 
90 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTER. 
 
 happiest effect, would perhaps have failed them if 
 they had been obliged to restrain it within rules ; 
 though doubtless they would have found a way to 
 get over the difficulty. Meanwhile the struggle 
 with conscience must have been sore with the more 
 scrupulous of their artists : the effort to do right 
 is so obvious that we feel they must have known 
 that they were wrong. In their landscapes, which 
 are delightfully suggestive, though entirely subordi- 
 nated to the human interest, they fall into the wildest 
 confusion. These little paintings of landscapes will 
 show you how very far they were from giving a 
 true representation. Pure landscape was a subject 
 to which the Greeks never turned their eyes in art 
 or poetry. 
 
 In all antique decorative art, except of the lowest 
 order of housepainting, there is a certain vigour, an 
 exuberance, I know not how to express it, which is 
 peculiarly its own, and which does not preclude 
 elegance. Look at the festoons of fruit in these 
 frescoes from the house of Germanicus. The peculiar 
 quality is indescribable, but we feel that nothing in 
 Italian art has precisely the same. The borders to 
 the Eaphael paintings in the Farnesina palace by 
 Giovanni da Udine, are rich, finely drawn, full of 
 growth ; but after all they cannot be compared with 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 91 
 
 these festoons by a nameless artist. Is it the way 
 in which they hang ? is it that they are more real ? 
 is it the effect of the strong contrast of dark foliage 
 with the ivory white ground ? or is it the delicacy of 
 the ribbons contrasting with the ponderous festoons ? 
 Which of these makes the difference ? Or is it not 
 rather all combined, with the life and vigour of a 
 young world added? The ancient artist saw such 
 wreaths continually before his eyes, for they were 
 a constant form of adornment in houses and temples. 
 The Italian was making an imitation of the antique, 
 not without an intention to realise as regards growth 
 and arrangement ; but he was painting a conven- 
 tional, not an actual, form of decoration, and he was 
 conscious of doing a fine thing. l 
 
 1 I have made no mention of the exquisite stucco decorations of 
 the ceiling of the antique house from the Farnesina garden. They 
 are the best that have come down to us ; and for taste, design, and 
 delicacy of execution, combined as usual with a manipulative skill 
 which, though rapid, never fails by the thickness of a line, they are 
 unrivalled. The wings of the genii are a study in themselves for 
 the way in which they grow from the shoulder (very different to the 
 cumbrous naturalism and academic style of the newly discovered 
 reliefs at Pergamus) ; the limbs and extremities, the feet especially, 
 are lightness and elegance itself; the draperies move and float. 
 But without illustrations it is hopeless to convey any impression 
 of the perfect taste and feeling for life which distinguishes these 
 reliefs, and brings them into competition with the finished works of 
 known sculptors of the best period, such as Scopas in his Bacchan- 
 alian figures. 
 
92 ANCIENT DECORATIVE AET. 
 
 I have said that I was about to lay down no rules 
 for decorative art ; and I have merely drawn your 
 attention discursively to some points of interest in 
 the history of painting, and to some examples. If my 
 remarks should tend in any way to revive the interest 
 in antique art, in which cultivated Englishmen took 
 the lead at the end of the last century and at the 
 beginning of this, they will not have been useless. 
 We have become so familiar with the Pompeian 
 style of decoration, and the very simplicity of Greek 
 art is so misleading, that there is a danger lest its 
 infinite superiority to every other should be lost 
 sight of. I say superiority to every other art, for we 
 know that their sculpture exceeds anything done 
 since, and I affirm that on certain points of spon- 
 taneity of life and vigour, the best Italian painters 
 were children even to those secondary artists whose 
 works remain for us to judge from. In the great 
 painting of Ceres from Pompeii, at Naples, fortu- 
 nately admirably preserved, though somewhat faded, 
 there is in the representation of the goddess a 
 dignity which is truly superhuman, and all the 
 more striking because it is felt, not studied. No one 
 of the moderns gave more majesty to the hand than 
 Michael Angelo witness the hands of the Almighty 
 in the Creation of Adam, and in the Division of Light 
 
POYNTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 93 
 
 from Darkness but the majesty is, so to speak, 
 intentional. You can trace the process of mind, 
 and the study from nature of which these hands are 
 the expression. Not so with the hand and arm of the 
 Ceres ; pure instinct led to its conception ; the hand 
 has the breadth and power of a powerful woman's 
 hand, with the softness and innocence of a baby's, which 
 has never felt toil or exertion. The attitude is 
 simplicity itself, the drawing is executed with a few 
 sweeping strokes of the brush, and the modelling 
 with equally simple washes. I know nothing which 
 gives the impression of absolute mastery over material 
 so completely as this painting. The grapes in the 
 basket are done equally with a few strokes and 
 touches, yet they are as luscious, as transparent, and 
 as round as in any Dutch picture. The antelope is 
 life itself. The wings of the attendant genius, done 
 also with light washes of colour, and a few freely but 
 accurately drawn lines, have in texture all the light- 
 ness and feathery character which could be expressed 
 by the most laboured painting ; while the growth 
 and radiation of the feathers is exact to nature. It 
 is a sketch in fact, but a sketch which gives not only 
 the truth, but all the beauty of nature. And yet this 
 is not the work of a celebrated artist ; and it is of 
 a late date three hundred years and more later than 
 
94 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POTOTER. 
 
 Apelles. We remain now, as before, lost in wonder 
 as to what the works of the great period of Greek 
 art must have been. 
 
 I the more regret the decline of the taste for antique 
 art in England, because so many of the beautiful works 
 collected up to fifty years ago by cultivated men are 
 leaving the country, and none seem to be entering 
 it. The French have replaced us in this respect, while 
 our collectors of the present day devote themselves 
 to blue china ; a taste, it is true, which requires no 
 education. Of all the hundreds of the exquisite little 
 terra -cotta figures from Tanagra, which have been 
 discovered within the last ten or twelve years, not a 
 dozen, I believe, have found their way into private 
 collections in this country ; there are a few in the 
 British Museum. The French have the good taste 
 to buy them all. I do not imagine that the best of 
 these exquisite works, the purest expression of the 
 Greek artistic instinct, ever rose in price to that of a 
 hawthorn jar at Christie's, and yet there is more art 
 in the little finger of the man who made one of those 
 figures than in the whole Chinese nation. 
 
 To return to my subject, and to conclude. The 
 experiment of decorating in the Pompeian style has 
 been tried, and it is now completely out of fashion ; 
 and it cannot be said that a satisfactory result has 
 

 POSTER. ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. 95 
 
 hitherto been arrived at in our modern imitations. 
 All decoration which is not Gothic is, it is true, in 
 a certain sense, in the antique style, in that it has 
 descended with constant modification from the imita- 
 tion which sprang up with the Italian Eenaissance ; 
 notably in the works of Udine and Poccetti. But I 
 refer now to the modern imitations which arose from 
 the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 
 last century. These cannot be said to have led to 
 much ; partly on account of that indifference to the 
 quality of colour to which I have already referred ; 
 but still more because the mistake has been in the 
 literal copying of the art of another age, when the 
 conditions of life were absolutely different to our 
 modern life ; especially in taking accessories and 
 ornaments which have no meaning for us. But I 
 can conceive that with due modifications, derived 
 from whatever charm and beauty is to be found in 
 our own surroundings, combined with architecture 
 (the principles of which are eternal), a consistent 
 form of decoration might be devised, which should 
 have all the elegance and picturesqueness of antique 
 decorative art, and which would certainly afford play 
 for the invention of individual artists. In any case 
 it would make a cheerful variety from the eternal 
 dados and diapers with which we are so wearisomely 
 
96 ANCIENT DECORATIVE ART. POYNTEK. 
 
 surrounded. I cannot but think that the recent 
 discoveries at Eome, which have been the principal 
 subject of this Lecture, might form a new starting- 
 point for fresh experiments in this direction. 
 
LECTUKE IV. 
 
 BY J. T. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 1 
 
 I COME to-day partly to describe the history of our 
 old churches and partly to plead their cause. 
 I shall begin with a description of the life of the 
 English parish church, from the very beginning of 
 its history, and in fact almost before that, until the 
 present time, and then I shall have a few words to 
 say at the end about what we ought to do with it 
 now. I claim for our English parish churches that 
 they are the most interesting relics of the past which 
 remain in the land, far more so than pre-historic 
 antiquities like Stonehenge and the like, because the 
 history of them is done, and we have no share in it. 
 They had their life in the far past, but it was over 
 before what we know of history began, and we know 
 them only as dead relics. Our churches, on the 
 
 1 This Lecture was not given from MS. , and has been written out 
 since, partly from memory and partly from a shorthand writer's 
 report. 
 
 H 
 
98 ENGLISH PAEISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 other hand, are still what they were when first built; 
 and now, as then, people go for worship and for 
 the sacraments to them as they have done for, it may 
 be, fifteen hundred years. Parish churches seem to 
 me to be in a manner more interesting than the 
 cathedral or abbey churches, because they are more 
 specially the spontaneous product of the people, and 
 not, as the others often were, the work of powerful 
 magnates or rich corporations. The parish churches 
 are also actually older in their traditions than the 
 cathedral or abbey churches. We generally know 
 the history of these. Many of them date only from 
 the eleventh or twelfth century ; and the oldest from 
 the mission of Augustine at the end of the sixth 
 century. Now, I claim for parish churches that they 
 are older than that. When Augustine and his monks 
 came here from Italy, they came to a land where 
 Christianity had been known before. Augustine and 
 his people were all monks and foreigners ; the early 
 bishops of his line were also monks, and, if not 
 foreigners themselves, were at least educated by 
 foreigners, and in foreign traditions. They were 
 missionaries, and it was natural that the churches 
 which they built should be as nearly as they could 
 make them what they had been accustomed to at 
 home. The church which Augustine built at Can- 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 99 
 
 terbury, and the few others of that date of which 
 we know anything, have a very distinct type about 
 them. They are, as many of you know, rude imi- 
 tations of the contemporary Italian churches, and 
 are what is called Basilican in plan. Augustine's 
 cathedral at Canterbury has been gone for the last 
 eight hundred years. But at Brixworth there may 
 still be seen the greater part of a church built by his 
 followers as early as 680. Although it was not a 
 church of the first class, it is a good-sized building. 
 It has a broad nave with aisles, and an apse at the 
 end, with a sort of passage round it encircling a crypt. 
 That is totally different from anything we have in 
 our parish churches, and one may fairly say that the 
 earlier we trace them the less like it do we find them. 
 We have, then, the curious fact that the people, when 
 building churches for their own use, did not follow 
 the type set before them by their spiritual teachers, 
 and we are led to seek whence they obtained their 
 model. Now, Augustine came to a land, though 
 not to a people, which had known Christianity 
 before. At the time of the withdrawal of the 
 Eomans we must remember that all the more civi- 
 lised Britons were Christians. I know that this has 
 been denied, but the little knowledge we have of the 
 history of Britain after the withdrawal of the Eomans 
 
100 
 
 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 almost proves that the Christians were then in such 
 a majority as to form what may be called the public 
 opinion of the time. We may gather this from the story 
 of St. Germanus and the Alleluia victory. St. Ger- 
 manus was a Gallic bishop who had come here on some 
 ecclesiastical business just at the time of the chaos 
 caused by the withdrawal of the Eomans. That 
 withdrawal, it should be remembered, was not simply 
 the retirement of a few troops, but the entire removal 
 of the whole official organisation, both military and 
 civil, to which the Britons had been accustomed for 
 centuries to look for government and protection. 
 Thus abandoned, the Britons could afford no effectual 
 resistance to the barbarous Picts and Scots who in- 
 vaded them. They had courage, but to make it 
 effective they wanted leaders whom they could trust ; 
 and in their need they turned to Germanus, probably 
 because they looked on him as one of the old governing 
 class. The bishop accepted the command, and you 
 all know the story of how he planted his men in a 
 valley where the enemy found themselves suddenly 
 assailed on all sides by loud cries of Alleluia, and 
 fled in panic without striking a blow. Now the 
 point I wish to call attention to is, that Germanus 
 could not have used this stratagem with success 
 unless the men under him, or at least the greater 
 
MICKLF.THWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 101 
 
 part of them, had been Christians, with whom the cry 
 was a household word. 
 
 If, then, these men were Christians they would 
 have churches of some sort. And although nothing 
 of the kind now exists in England which can with 
 any likelihood be assigned to a date earlier than the 
 coming of St. Augustine, we may, I think, form a very 
 good idea of what these early churches were like. 
 Ireland and Scotland both received their Christianity 
 from the civilised Britons, and it is evident that their 
 usages were like those of the parent church. Now 
 in these, and especially in Ireland, there are still the 
 remains of churches of a type quite distinct from 
 the Italian. Some are of very early date. How 
 early I will not now stay to discuss. It is enough 
 to say that there are amongst them some which, by 
 their construction, seem to be contemporary with 
 the rude dwellings known as " bee-hive " houses. I 
 give a plan of one of them at Killaloe, which is a 
 typical example of a large class. This, which we 
 may call the Celtic type of plan, is made up of a 
 small sanctuary, always square at the east end, and 
 communicating, by an arch scarcely larger than a 
 doorway, with a rectangular nave, always without 
 aisles. 
 
 A church like this differs altogether from the 
 
KILLALOE IRISH 
 
 BOARHUNT SAXON 
 
 KEMPLEY NORMAN 
 
 10 5 
 
 SCALE OF FEET. 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 103 
 
 Italian basilica, with its aisles, its apse, and its wide 
 transverse arches. But its plan is exactly that of 
 many of the earliest English churches which remain. 
 As an example I have given the plan of Boarhunt in 
 Hampshire, drawn to the same scale as the Celtic 
 example, and it will be at once seen that the two are 
 the same in their differences from the basilica. Here 
 again we have absence of aisles, the square end and 
 the narrow sanctuary arch. It is, then, evident that, 
 notwithstanding the influence and example of the 
 Italian missionaries, the Celtic type of church 
 survived the Pagan period, and in fact became that 
 of the parish churches as against the monastic and 
 cathedral churches, which for the most part followed 
 the Italian tradition. Whether this comes from a 
 survival of the Britons and their church amongst the 
 English inhabitants after their settlement here, or 
 from the earliest English Christians having restored 
 to use the Celtic churches, the ruins of which would 
 exist amongst them, I leave to others to dispute ; 
 but the fact remains, and it was due to some widely 
 spread cause, for we find it the same in all parts of 
 England, from the north to the south, and from the 
 east to the west. 
 
 It is exceedingly probable that many of our old 
 parish churches stand on sites already so occupied 
 
104 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITR. 
 
 even in British times. The division into parishes is 
 of remote antiquity. We find it already existing as 
 far back as we can carry our inquiries, and it may 
 well have been here before even the earliest intro- 
 duction of Christianity. Until almost our own time 
 new parishes were never made. Where towns 
 decayed, parishes in them became united for lack of 
 ability in the remaining inhabitants to keep them up 
 separately ; but where they increased, new parishes 
 were not formed. In such a case the parish church 
 was enlarged, and if that did not suffice chapels of 
 ease were provided, but no one ever thought of divid- 
 ing the parish. Thus it comes that towns which, 
 like London, York, Norwich, and Exeter, were import- 
 ant places in the Eoman times, have come down to 
 us divided into many parishes, each with its own 
 church, generally not large ; whilst Lynn and Boston, 
 and others, which rose to importance during the 
 middle ages, were, till modern times, each of but one 
 parish ; and in them we find churches which, although 
 they had only the status of chapels of ease, yet rank 
 in size with the largest parish churches in the country. 
 So far as I know, we have not any record of the 
 building of a new parish church earlier than the 
 seventeenth century. Old ones were rebuilt over and 
 over again, but except in such a case as Winchelsea, 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 105 
 
 where circumstances led to the abandonment of an 
 old site and the removal of the church to another 
 place, we never hear of a new one being built. Even 
 so far back as Canute's restoration of Christianity 
 here, after the ravages of the Danes, we are told, not 
 that he built churches, but that he rebuilt those 
 which he and his father had destroyed. 
 
 With such evidence of the unchangeableness of 
 the old parishes, it is not unreasonable to suppose 
 that the divisions are themselves older than Chris- 
 tianity, and that, when the time came for the men of 
 each parish to provide themselves with a church, they 
 often did it on a site already appropriated to some 
 public use. When St. Gregory, probably not knowing 
 that the remains of Christian buildings already 
 existed in the land, advised St. Augustine to conse- 
 crate heathen temples for churches, he advised what 
 it is likely enough the Britons themselves had done 
 centuries before St. Gregory's time. 
 
 But to return to the fabrics. We have seen that 
 in the first centuries of English Christianity there 
 were in use two distinct types of plan, the monastic, 
 introduced by the Italian missionaries, and being a 
 copy of the Italian basilica, and what we may call 
 the secular, used by the people generally, and being a 
 continuation of the British type. It is natural that 
 
106 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLBTHWAITE. 
 
 as time went on there should have been some mixing 
 of the two types. The original British plan was not 
 adapted either to the accommodation of any consider- 
 able number of people, or to any sort of architectural 
 display, and whilst it continued in use for small 
 churches, when larger ones were wanted their 
 builders borrowed the wide transverse arches and 
 sometimes the apsidal end from the basilica, I think 
 this mixed type was not in use earlier than the tenth 
 century. Transepts were added to it, very timidly 
 indeed at first; but by the middle of the eleventh 
 century we find regular cross churches, with central 
 towers, as at Stow, Dover, and Stanton Lacy. Aisles 
 are borrowed from the basilica, and I do not know of 
 any instance of them in a secular church earlier than 
 the Conquest. 
 
 The middle of the eleventh century was the 
 beginning of a new architectural .era in England. 
 Even before the coming of William and his followers 
 the Norman style had made its appearance here, 
 and brought with it a new set of traditions, which 
 completely supplanted the old, so far as the monastic 
 type of church is concerned. Before the end of the 
 twelfth century, besides the foundation of a large 
 number of new ones, every cathedral and abbey 
 church in the land was rebuilt on a plan which, 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 107 
 
 although it may be remotely derived from the basilica, 
 is quite different from anything to be found here in 
 what are called Saxon times, and is not in any way 
 descended from it. But the secular type of church, 
 which it is our present purpose to consider, survived 
 this Conquest as it had done the earlier one, and, in 
 spite of the change in architectural style, continued 
 to rule in parish churches. Nearly all old parish 
 churches which do not contain remains of pre-Norman 
 work can be traced back to rebuilding in the twelfth 
 century. Small churches of this date, with the plans 
 practically unaltered, axe not uncommon. I figure one 
 from Kempley in Gloucestershire, to the same scale 
 as the Celtic and Saxon examples already described, 
 and a glance will show that it is practically identical 
 with them. "We have, again, the aisleless nave, the 
 small chancel, the narrow arch between them, and 
 the square easfe end. Now, nearly all our smaller 
 parish churches, if they do not still keep this form, 
 can be traced back to it. The apse, indeed, occurs 
 in a few examples ; but it was never common, and the 
 square end soon again became the rule in English 
 parish churches, as, in spite of occasional eccentricities, 
 it has continued to be to the present day. 
 
 As the smaller Norman parish churches continued 
 the Celtic type of plan, so the larger did the " mixed " 
 
108 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 type, which had already been developed before the 
 introduction of Norman architecture ; and they may 
 nearly all be traced back to either an aisleless cross 
 church, with a central tower, or to a like form with the 
 omission of the transepts. As these larger churches 
 generally belong to more important places, it is not 
 so common to find unaltered examples of them as it 
 is of the smaller, which serve for many a village as 
 well now as when they were first built. 
 
 The general rebuilding was scarcely complete when 
 there began a series of alterations and additions which 
 so completely changed most of the churches that it 
 is only by a careful study and comparison of them 
 that we can discover that they all did at first belong 
 to one of the types I have described. The course of 
 these changes is singularly alike in all, although some 
 began it earlier and went on faster and farther than 
 others did. Sometimes, where a church, or a part of 
 it, has been rebuilt after additions have been made, 
 elements in the plan which really belong to different 
 periods may at first sight appear as though they 
 were of the same. But a little examination will 
 generally reveal the true history, and when a link 
 is wanting it may be supplied from what we have 
 learned in other places ; for there is a comparative 
 anatomy of churches, just as there is of beasts. 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 109 
 
 One important matter to be remembered in study- 
 ing the history of old churches is, that the old men 
 never ceased to use them if they could help it. They 
 never pulled a church down to build a new one on 
 its site. They wanted it for daily use, and however 
 extensive their alterations were, they carried them 
 out bit by bit, so that some part of it was always fit 
 for use. 
 
 I will now, by way of illustration, trace the history 
 of one church from the twelfth century to the six- 
 teenth ; and I select that of Wakefield, my native 
 town, not because it has changed more than others, 
 for its growth has been exactly the normal one, but 
 because I have had the opportunity to study it closely, 
 when it was dissected in the process of " restoration/' 
 and have proofs of each successive change. 1 
 
 A church probably stood on this site from the 
 earliest times, but we cannot trace it in the fabric 
 earlier than the twelfth century. At that time there 
 was an aisleless cross church, which, if it had not 
 a central tower, was at least intended to have one ; 
 but it probably had it. As nearly always happened 
 to important churches, very soon after it was built 
 
 1 When this Lecture was delivered, a series of plans of the church 
 in the many stages of its growth were exhibited, which it has not 
 been thought necessary to reproduce here. 
 
110 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 it received the addition of a north aisle to the nave. 
 This aisle was added for the sake of the additional 
 accommodation it gave, and was put on the north 
 side rather than the south, because the cemetery was 
 on the south, and our ancestors were unwilling to 
 encroach upon it, except in what they considered a 
 case of necessity. In due time the necessity generally 
 came, as it did here in the thirteenth century, when 
 a south aisle was added to the nave. And I may 
 here remark in passing that those large collections of 
 bones which we have seen stowed away at Eipon 
 and Hythe and elsewhere, and of which the guides 
 delight to tell such strange tales, are simply what 
 have been collected when the graveyards have been 
 dug up at the time of the extension of the churches 
 over them. At both the places named there have 
 been large additions of this sort, and in the accounts 
 of the rebuilding of the nave of Eipon there is a 
 regular item, pro carriando les bones. 
 
 The next change at Wakefield was a considerable 
 one, little less than a complete rebuilding of the 
 church, and enough to call for its reconsecration, 
 which took place in 1329. The central tower was 
 now gone ; probably it either fell or had to be taken 
 down on account of its insecurity. Twelfth century 
 towers were often badly built, and this one would 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. Ill 
 
 have had its supports much weakened by the addition 
 of the aisles. In its place was built a chancel, with 
 a span roof, to which the transepts became side 
 chapels. A wide and lofty chancel arch was built, 
 and the pillars on both sides of the nave were raised 
 considerably, and new arches put above them. The 
 aisles were also rebuilt, probably taking in more 
 ground than they had done before, and the church 
 was entirely transformed into one of the " Decorated " 
 period. 
 
 After this there came a pause, during which, per- 
 haps, men employed themselves in furnishing their 
 new church. But early in the fifteenth century 
 they began to think of adding a tower to it ; and as 
 nearly everybody else did in like case, they chose to 
 put it at the west end. These western towers are, I 
 believe, always additions, however early they may be. 
 We find them of all dates, although it was not the 
 rule for parish churches to be provided with steeples 
 before the fifteenth century. A steeple was an ex- 
 pensive addition to a church, and the old men often 
 spread the cost of it over a great number of years, 
 not by borrowing money and paying it off by degrees, 
 as might be done now, but by building slowly, as 
 they collected funds to do it with. This went on 
 sometimes for the greater part of a century ; and as 
 
112 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 people wanted to use the church meanwhile, they 
 took care so to arrange the work that it should not 
 be necessary to interfere with the main building until 
 it was nearly finished. This they generally managed 
 by building the tower on new ground, outside the 
 existing church, at the west end ; and then, when all 
 was ready, and it could be done without any delay, 
 they lengthened the nave till it joined on to the new 
 tower. This process has been applied to by far 
 the greater number of our old parish churches, and 
 it may generally be traced in them. We find it 
 not only in churches which had before been without 
 towers, but in a great many which, like this at 
 Wakefield, had once had them in the middle. If, 
 for any reason, a central tower had to come down, it 
 would be most inconvenient to block up the middle 
 of the church for years whilst it was being rebuilt, 
 and so men generally preferred to build a new one at 
 the west end. And most central towers did have to 
 come down, either from their own weakness or 
 because, after the addition of aisles to the church, 
 the great piers of the towers were found to be too 
 much in the way. 
 
 The tower was sometimes built close to the church, 
 so that very little lengthening was necessary to join 
 them; but sometimes it was some distance away, 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 113 
 
 and a bay or more was added to the nave. This was 
 the case at Wakefield. 
 
 When the tower was added, men seem to have 
 thought the nave rather dark; for here, and in a 
 great number of other places, the next work was the 
 addition of a clerestory to the nave. We find cleres- 
 tories of all dates ; but as they generally came after 
 the towers, they are not common in parish churches 
 before the fifteenth century. 
 
 The addition of the clerestory was, at Wakefield, 
 the beginning of a series of works quite as extensive 
 as those which had taken place in the fourteenth 
 century. The chancel was rebuilt from the ground, 
 with aisles to its whole length. These aisles were 
 the full width of the projection of the original tran- 
 septs, which thus disappear from the plan, although 
 a tradition of them remained in the arrangement 
 of the windows, until the aisle walls were again 
 rebuilt in the eighteenth century, and the bays 
 spaced equally. 
 
 After the chancel, the aisles of the nave were 
 rebuilt, their walls being also brought out to the face 
 of the transepts ; and this completed a transformation 
 of the church as complete as that which had preceded 
 the reconsecration in 1329. And from the aisleless, 
 cross church, with a central tower, which it was in 
 
 I 
 
114 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 the twelfth century, it had changed, step by step, 
 until at the end of the fifteenth it had become a large, 
 broad church, with aisles along its whole length, a 
 tower and spire at the west end, and not a trace of 
 the cross form remaining. Of the original church 
 nothing now remains but part of a winding stair, 
 once at the south-west corner of the south transept. 
 It is now concealed by modern work, but I saw it 
 fifteen years ago when it was exposed. Of the 
 twelfth century addition we have the bases and 
 part of the shafts of some of the pillars on the north 
 side of nave. Of the thirteenth century aisle we 
 have the bases and shafts of the pillars, now forming 
 the lower halves of the pillars on the south side of 
 the nave. Of the great fourteenth century rebuilding 
 there remain the nave arcades, except the earlier 
 parts of them just mentioned, and also the chancel 
 arch. All the rest that is, all which gives its present 
 form to the building is later. The history of this 
 church is, as I have said, that of hundreds of others ; 
 and there is one farther change, common in town 
 churches, which was not made here. It is the re- 
 moval of the chancel arch, and the carrying the roof 
 uniformly and without break from one end to the 
 other. 
 
 The later history of our old parish churches deals 
 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 115 
 
 more with their furniture than their fabrics, which 
 remained for three centuries without alteration, 
 except in matters of detail. We will therefore, 
 before going further, take a rapid survey of the 
 history of church fittings. The early churches of 
 the Celtic type were not arranged for sermons or for 
 choral services. When they were built, and long 
 afterwards, sermons were generally preached out-of- 
 doors. And choral services belonged to abbeys and 
 cathedrals, and such other places as had a staff 
 sufficient to keep them up. The idea that every 
 decent parish church must have a choir of laymen 
 attached to it is only the growth of the latter half of 
 the nineteenth century. The early parish churches 
 were built for Mass that is, for the celebration of the 
 Holy Eucharist. The presbyteries, or chancels, if we 
 may call them so, were only large enough to receive 
 the altar, with the priests and ministers officiating at 
 it. At first these churches had probably no fixed 
 furniture except the single altar. The font was an 
 early addition. But even so late as the twelfth 
 century there was nothing else, except that the altars 
 had now become three, the minor ones being in the 
 transepts in cross churches, and on each side of the 
 chancel arch in others. We find a few screens in the 
 next century, and some churches had pews. But it 
 
116 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 was the prosperity of the middle classes in the 
 fourteenth, and especially in the fifteenth century, 
 that wrought the greatest improvements in parish 
 churches. The feudal aristocracy interested them- 
 selves chiefly in the monasteries and collegiate 
 foundations, each of which recognised some one 
 family as its patron. But the interests of the people 
 at large were in their parish churches, and as they 
 increased in prosperity, so did their churches in 
 splendour. The custom of founding chantries con- 
 tributed much to this. Chantries were of various 
 sorts. A chantry is generally understood to mean a 
 foundation for the maintenance of certain services 
 for the good of the soul of the founder and his family. 
 But sometimes a chantry was founded, as we should 
 now say, ly subscription, simply to provide a living 
 for an additional priest in places where the popula- 
 tion required his services. The Morrow Mass Priest, 
 whom we often find named in old accounts, was a 
 cantarist of this kind. The returns of the chantries 
 at their suppression show that the date and occasion 
 of their foundation had often been forgotten. They 
 were benefices, and their incumbents were presented 
 by the patrons and admitted by the bishops, just as 
 the rectors and vicars were. It was not easy to found 
 a perpetual chantry, as its endowment required a 
 
MICKLETHWAITK ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 117 
 
 license in mortmain, which it was both difficult 
 and expensive to obtain ; but there were often two 
 or three of them in a church. There were also a 
 much larger number of temporary chantries endowed 
 for periods varying from one to twenty years, the 
 holders of which were, so long as their engagements 
 lasted, held to the same duties as those of the 
 perpetual chantries. Many guilds, too, maintained 
 chaplains in their parish churches. And as all these 
 priests worked to a certain extent under the rector or 
 vicar, and were bound to assist at the principal 
 public services, many town churches had attached to 
 them a body of as many as twelve or even twenty 
 priests. Such churches became practically collegiate ; 
 indeed, sometimes a dwelling was provided, in which 
 the cantarists lived together, as a sort of college. 
 
 The effect of all this on the fabric of the church 
 was very considerable. The increase in the number 
 of clergy led to a corresponding increase in that of 
 the altars at which they officiated. And the founders 
 of chantries often added chapels in which to place 
 them. It also led to the use of choral services in 
 parish churches, and their chancels were furnished 
 in imitation of the choirs of the monastic and 
 collegiate churches. Thence came the choir stalls 
 and the central lectern ; thence also the rood loft, 
 
118 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITK. 
 
 which is an adaptation, as close as the differing 
 conditions would permit, of the pulpitum of a choir. 
 The rood loft was a music gallery, and was used for 
 singing certain parts of the service from, as the 
 pulpitum was. It was also used for pricksong, or 
 singing in parts, which was not generally done in the 
 chancel. All the clergy were expected to take their 
 share in the plain song of the ordinary services. But 
 on feast days the churchwardens would sometimes 
 hire a company of minstrels, vocal and instrumental, 
 and their place was in the rood loft. 
 
 Churches which could not maintain regular choral 
 services might have them occasionally. There were 
 funeral services, for instance, not only those at the 
 time of burial, but commemorative services afterwards, 
 as the month's mind, one month after death, and the 
 anniversary or year's mind, at the end of a year. At 
 such times it was customary to pay fees to any 
 men or boys who came with their surplices and took 
 part in the services. Indeed there seems to have 
 existed a class of vagabond clerks who made their 
 living by attending such services. Chantry chapels 
 are the earliest form of family pews in parish 
 churches. When a family built or appropriated part 
 of a church for the purpose of a chantry, it was 
 common to enclose it with screens, and fit up the en- 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 119 
 
 closure with respect both to the chantry services at its 
 own altar and to the public services in the chancel, 
 during which they were occupied as pews. The 
 squints in the direction of the high altar which are 
 often to be seen in old churches were made for the 
 convenience of the occupants of these "closets," as 
 they were called. Their use as pews survived the 
 suppression of the chantries, and has sometimes con- 
 tinued even to the present day. They are placed in 
 all sorts of positions, but generally somewhere near 
 the chancel. Eecent "restorations" have unfortu- 
 nately destroyed a good many. 
 
 The sermon was not a usual accompaniment to the 
 services before the sixteenth century, but many had 
 pulpits from the fifteenth. In 154*7 they were ordered 
 to be provided where they did not before exist. 
 
 I have already spoken of guilds as sometimes 
 maintaining chaplains : that was but one of their 
 many links with the church. A guild was said 
 to be founded at some spot in the church, before an 
 altar, or an image, or perhaps the great rood, and 
 even the poorest of them would keep a light burning 
 there continually as a sort of symbol of their cor- 
 porate existence. They would often, too, undertake the 
 repair, or rebuilding, or adornment of some particular 
 part of the church, and where the "restorer" has spared 
 
120 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES* MICKLETHWAITE, 
 
 them we may sometimes find their traces even now. 
 At St. Neot in Cornwall, for example, is a series of 
 painted windows, with inscriptions which tell that 
 they were given one by the young men, one by the 
 married men, one by the girls, and so on. These are 
 the work of guilds or confraternitus of the classes 
 named, and when we read that they gave a thing we 
 must not conclude that they always paid for it out 
 of their own pockets. They would sometimes under- 
 take work beyond their own means, and raise money 
 for it by means of a popular entertainment, or Ale, 
 as they called it, just as in our time people in like 
 case will get up a fancy bazaar. Such Ales were an 
 important part of the social life of our ancestors. 
 Many parishes had a supply of vessels for use at 
 them, which they kept in the Church home, a building 
 provided for the secular and festive business of the 
 parish. I have seen a great copper cauldron in 
 Frensham Church, Surrey, once used for the brewing, 
 which formed an important part of the preparation 
 for an Ale. Its use is forgotten now, and they tell 
 an absurd tale of witchcraft to explain its presence 
 in the church. Ales were kept up in some places as 
 late as the last century. The country May games 
 were one form of them. 
 
 The Eeformation did not produce much visible 
 
... ,, ^ 
 
 MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 121 
 
 ^>y 
 
 change in parish churches until the reign of Edwar4**V^ 
 VI. The courtiers of Henry VIIL's time had en-\*%^% ^ 
 riched themselves by the plunder of the abbeys ; 
 and the extraordinary set of adventurers who got 
 the government of the country into their hands in 
 the days of his son tried to wring all they could 
 from the secular churches. I need not now repeat 
 the tale of havoc. It is enough that our churches 
 have nothing but scars to tell of this period. It 
 takes longer to replace than it does to destroy, and 
 the reign of Mary was too short for much to be done ; 
 and it was not until about 1620 that the Church had 
 sufficiently recovered the shock of the Eeformation to 
 turn attention again to the improvement of the 
 fabrics. Between that time and the beginning of 
 the civil wars a great deal was done. It is curious 
 work, marked with the style of its age, but with a 
 great deal of the mediaeval tradition remaining in it. 
 There are a few whole churches of this date, as St. 
 John's, Leeds, for example ; and altars and screens, 
 and more especially pulpits, were very common till 
 they were "restored" away within our own time. 
 Even now there remain some, and it is for us to pro- 
 tect them and prevent further destruction as far as 
 we can, for they belong to a most interesting period 
 of the Church. 
 
122 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLBTHWAITK. 
 
 The time of the civil wars was again more fruitful 
 in destruction than in production. But we have 
 some interesting work of the Kestoration date, espe- 
 cially in the north of England, where fonts of this 
 time are common, and often very good of their kind ; 
 and about Durham we find chancel screens and other 
 furniture imitating the work of the fifteenth century, 
 but set up in the time of Bishop Cosin. 
 
 The sermon went on increasing in importance 
 through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
 Galleries were set up to increase the number of the 
 audience, and high pews to make them comfortable. 
 Everything was made to centre on the pulpit, and 
 the church was transformed from a place of worship 
 to a mere place of preaching. This movement went 
 on together with a corresponding degradation of the 
 work used until it was first checked and then re- 
 versed by the Church revival of our own time. After 
 the middle of the eighteenth century there was not 
 much done which is of any value or interest, but the 
 lowest depth was not reached till about a hundred 
 years later. 
 
 When new churches were built in these late times 
 they were of course built in accordance with the 
 ideas of their respective dates, which they exhibit 
 more plainly than could be done by the mere alter- 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 123 
 
 ation of older buildings. The few new churches 
 built in the first half of the seventeenth century are 
 of mediaeval type and Gothic architecture, and we 
 find remains of both even in the London churches 
 rebuilt after the great fire. That period was, how- 
 ever, the beginning of a new state of things, for then 
 did the Italian style of architecture come into general 
 use for church work, and the first steps were made 
 in the direction which ultimately led to the preaching 
 house of Georgian times, with its central pulpit and 
 galleries all round the walls. 
 
 Quite modern churches may be passed over with 
 the remark that, whatever be their faults, they are 
 certainly better than those of fifty years ago, and 
 there is reasonable hope of further improvement. 
 But the movement which has produced this result 
 has affected old churches in a way about which I 
 would say a few words in conclusion. The men who 
 have studied old churches, and imitated them in new 
 ones, have gone on to set the old churches themselves 
 in order, and have invented what they call "re- 
 storation," which they tell us is the putting of a 
 church back into its original state. Their theory 
 is that each building belongs to some one period, 
 and their practice has been too often to destroy 
 everything which is not of that chosen date, and to 
 
124 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 set up modern work which they think may be mis- 
 taken for it. Now, what can be more absurd than to 
 talk of the " period " of a building which men have 
 used and altered according to their wants and tastes, 
 for, it may be, a thousand years ? And what can be 
 more barbarous than the deliberate destruction of its 
 record? Your old church belongs not to one date, 
 but to all dates, from the first coming of Christianity 
 into that parish down to the present time ; and 
 every stone of it has a tale to tell if you will listen 
 to it. It is a living thing, and the contemporary of 
 thirty generations, many of which have left us no 
 memory of themselves except what it can reveal. 
 What, then, shall we say of the murdering " restorer " 
 who comes and sweeps all this away, and gives us, 
 in its place, his fancy model of what the church may 
 once before have been, a new church, in fact, which 
 may have merit of its own, and may, perhaps, as 
 centuries go on, develope a new history of its own, 
 but which, if it retain anything at all of its past, has 
 it only in the form of scraps so blurred and defaced, 
 and mixed up with modern forgeries, that they can- 
 not be understood ? 
 
 If "restoration" as it has been preached and 
 practised for the last thirty years is to be condemned, 
 it does not follow that old churches are to be left 
 
MICKLETHWAITE. ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. 125 
 
 just as they are. That is the proper thing to do 
 with monuments whose life is past. But churches 
 which still live must continue to do so. The present 
 generation have as much share in them as any of the 
 past, and has the same right as they to alter them 
 according to their wants. But in doing so let them 
 be careful not to take away their past, and not to 
 make their own work pretend to be anything else 
 than it is. There is much in the churches which 
 may with advantage be removed, as, for instance, the 
 shabby, deal, tank -shaped pews of fifty years ago, 
 and a lot of modern stuff which is called Gothic. 
 But before doing anything let men search out the 
 history of the building, and learn how it came to 
 be what it is; not merely, like the "restorers," by 
 giving dates to the mouldings, but by tracing out 
 each successive change, and the causes which led to 
 it. When men have properly learned this lesson 
 they will not willingly become destroyers. It is one 
 of the objects of the Society which has arranged this 
 series of lectures to help men to the understanding 
 of the buildings in their charge; and if they will 
 apply to it before undertaking any work on them, 
 they will be sure to receive interesting information 
 and sound advice. It is for all who value the record 
 of our old churches to work together for their pre- 
 
126 ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES. MICKLETHWAITE. 
 
 servation. The "restorers" have destroyed much, 
 but something is left ; and, as in the old story of the 
 Sibylline books, it is of the same value as the whole, 
 not because what is gone is worthless, but because 
 what remains is priceless. 
 
LECTUKE V. 
 
 BY WILLIAM MOERIS. 
 THE HISTORY OF PATTERN DESIGNING. 
 
 To give anything like a history of the art of pattern- 
 designing would be impossible within the limits of 
 one Lecture, for it would be doing no less than 
 attempting to tell the whole story of architectural or 
 popular art, a vast and most important subject. All 
 I can pretend to do at present is to call your atten- 
 tion to certain things I have noticed in studying the 
 development of the art of pattern -designing from 
 ancient times to modern, and to hint at certain 
 principles that have seemed to me to lie at the bottom 
 of the practice of that art, and certain tendencies 
 which its long course has had. Even in doing this I 
 know I shall have to touch on difficult matters and 
 take some facts for granted that may be, and have 
 been, much disputed over ; and I must, therefore, 
 even treating the subject thus, claim your indulgence 
 for a necessary curtness and incompleteness. 
 
 I have just used the word modern ; so, to clear the 
 
128 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 ground for what follows, I will say that by modern 
 art I do not mean the art of the Victorian era. I 
 need not speak of the art of our own day, because, on 
 the one hand, whatever there is of it that is worth 
 considering is eclectic, and is not bound by the chain 
 of tradition to anything that has gone before us ; and, 
 on the other hand, whatever of art is left which is in 
 any sense the result of continuous tradition is, and 
 long has been, so degraded as to have lost any claim 
 to be considered as art at all. The present century 
 has no school of art but such as each man of talent 
 or genius makes for himself to serve his craving for 
 the expression of his thought while he is alive, and 
 to perish with his death. The two preceding centuries 
 had indeed styles, which dominated the practice of 
 art, and allowed it to spread more or less widely over 
 the civilised world; but those styles were not alive and 
 progressive, in spite of the feeling of self-sufficiency 
 with which they were looked on by the artists of 
 those days. When the great masters of the Renais- 
 sance were gone, they, who stung by the desire of 
 doing something new, turned their mighty hands to 
 the work of destroying the last remains of living 
 popular art, putting in its place for a while the 
 results of their own wonderful individuality when 
 these great men were dead, and lesser men of the 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 129 
 
 ordinary type were masquerading in their garments, 
 then at last it was seen what the so-called new birth 
 really was ; then we could see that it was the fever 
 of the strong man yearning to accomplish something 
 before his death, not the simple hope of the child, 
 who has long years of life and growth before him. 
 
 Now the art, whose sickness this feverish energy 
 marked, is the art which I should call modern 
 art. Its very first roots were spreading when the 
 Koman Empire was tending towards disruption ; 
 its last heavily fruited branches were aloft in air 
 when feudal Europe first felt shaken by the coming 
 storm of revolution in Church and State, and the 
 crown of the new Holy Roman Empire was on the 
 eve of changing from gold to tinsel. 
 
 Three great buildings mark its first feeble begin- 
 ning, its vigorous early life, its last hiding away 
 beneath the rubbish heaps of pedantry and hopeless- 
 ness. I venture to call those three buildings in their 
 present state, the first the strangest, the second the 
 most beautiful, the third the ugliest of the buildings 
 raised in Europe before the nineteenth century. 
 
 The first of these is the Palace of Diocletian at 
 Spalato; the second, the Church of St. Sophia at 
 Constantinople ; the third, the Church of St. Peter at 
 Koine. 
 
 K 
 
130 THE HISTORY OF MOKRIS. 
 
 At Spalato the movement of new life was first felt. 
 There is much about the building that is downright 
 ugly, still more that is but a mass of worn-out 
 tradition; but there first, as far as we know, is 
 visible the attempt to throw off the swathings of 
 ill-understood Greek art, with which Eoman archi- 
 tecture had encumbered itself, and to make that 
 architecture reasonable, and consistent with the living 
 principles of art. 
 
 But at Spalato, though the art was trying to be 
 alive, it was scarcely alive, and what life is in it is 
 shown in its construction only, and not in its 
 ornamentation. Our second building, St. Sophia, 
 early as it is in the history of the art, has utterly 
 thrown aside all pedantic encumbrances, and is most 
 vigorously alive. It has gathered to itself all those 
 elements of change, which, having been kept apart for 
 so long, were at last mingling and seething, and 
 bringing about so many changes so much of death 
 and life. It is not bound by the past, but it has 
 garnered all that there was in it which was fit to live 
 and produce fresh life ; it is the living child and the 
 fruitful mother of art, past and future. That, even 
 more than the loveliness which it drew forth from its 
 own present, is what makes it the crown of all the 
 great buildings of the world. 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 131 
 
 The new-born art was long in coming to this. Spal- 
 ato was built about 313 A.D., St. Sophia in 530. More 
 than 200 years are between them, by no means fertile 
 of beautiful or remarkable buildings ; but St. Sophia 
 once built, the earth began to blossom with beautiful 
 buildings, and the thousand years that lie between 
 the date of St. Sophia and the date of St. Peter at 
 Eome may well be called the building age of the 
 world. But when those years were over, in Italy at 
 least, the change was fully come ; and, as a symbol of 
 that change, there stood on the site of the great mass 
 of history and art, which was once called the Basilica 
 of St. Peter, that new Church of St. Peter which still 
 curses the mightiest city of the world the very type, 
 it seems to me, of pride and tyranny, of all that 
 crushes out the love of art in simple people, and 
 makes art a toy of little estimation for the idle hours 
 of the rich and cultivated. 
 
 Between that time and this, art has been shut up 
 in prison ; all I can say of it in that condition is that 
 I hope it has not died there. We can draw no lesson 
 from its prison days save a spurring on to whatsoever of 
 hope and indignant agitation for its release we may 
 each of us be capable of. As an epoch of art it can 
 teach us nothing ; so the nearest possible period to 
 our own days must stand for modern art and to my 
 
132 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 mind that is the period between the days of the 
 Emperor Justinian and the Emperor Charles Y. ; 
 while we must call ancient art all the long period 
 from the beginning of things to the time of Justinian 
 and St. Sophia of Constantinople. 
 
 And now I will set about my business of noting 
 certain things which have happened to the very 
 subordinate art of pattern -designing in its various 
 changes, from those earliest days till the time when 
 it was landed amidst that rich and varied time of 
 modern art afore-mentioned. 
 
 Let us consider what place it held among the 
 ancient peoples classical and barbarian; you will 
 understand what I mean by those words without 
 pressing home their literal meanings. 
 
 Broadly speaking, one may say that the use of this 
 subordinate, but by no means unimportant, art is to 
 enliven with beauty and incident what would other- 
 wise be a blank space, wheresoever or whatsoever it 
 may be. The absolute necessities of the art are 
 beauty of colour and restfulness of form. More 
 definite qualities than these it need not have. Its 
 colour may be brought about by the simplest com- 
 binations ; its form may be merely that of abstract 
 lines or spaces, and need not of necessity have any 
 distinct meaning, or tell any story expressible in 
 
MOERIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 133 
 
 words. On the other hand, it is necessary to the 
 purity of the art that its form and colour, when these 
 bear any relation to the facts of nature (as for the 
 more part they do), should be suggestive of such facts, 
 and not descriptive of them. 
 
 Now all the art of the ancient historical world 
 is in a way one, and has similar and sympathetic 
 thoughts to express. I mean that there is a much 
 wider gulf between the ideas of that part of ancient 
 art which comes nearest in thought to modern, than 
 there is between any two parts of ancient art that are 
 furthest from one another. Nevertheless there are 
 wide differences between the art of the different races 
 of the ancient world. Ancient art, in fact, falls 
 naturally into two divisions ; the first is archaic, in 
 style at least, if not always in date. It is mostly 
 priestly and symbolic ; lacking, willingly or not, the 
 power of expressing natural facts definitely and 
 accurately. It is mystic, wild, and elevated in its 
 spiritual part its soul; limited, incomplete, often 
 grotesque in its form its bodily part. 
 
 The other ancient art is only priestly and symbolic 
 accidentally, and not essentially. I mean that, since 
 this priestly symbolism clung to it, it did not take 
 the trouble to cast it off, but used it and expressed 
 it ; but would as willingly and easily have expressed 
 
134 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 purely intellectual or moral ideas. Furthermore, it 
 is an art of perfection ; it has perfectly attained the 
 power of expressing what thoughts it allows itself, 
 and will never forego any whit of that power, or 
 tolerate any weakness or shortcoming in it. What- 
 ever its soul may be, its body at least it will not have 
 incomplete. 
 
 Of the first of these arts, ancient Egypt is the 
 representative of the second, classical Greece; and 
 we must admit that in each of these systems the art 
 of mere pattern-designing takes but an unimportant 
 place. In Egyptian art, and the school which it 
 represents, the picture-work itself was so limited by 
 rule, so entirely suggestive only, that a certain canon 
 of proportion having been once invented and estab- 
 lished, it was easy and effortless work for a people 
 who were full of feeling for quiet beauty; and, 
 moreover, suggestion, not imitation, being the end 
 aimed at, the picture- work easily, and without strain- 
 ing, fulfilled any office of decoration it was put to ; so 
 that the story which was necessary to be told on 
 religious or public grounds became the very ornament, 
 which merely as a matter of pleasant colour and line 
 the eye would most desire. In more modern and 
 less forbearing art the pictured wall is apt to become 
 a window through which a man quietly at work or 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 135 
 
 resting looks on some great tragedy, some sad memory 
 of the past, or terrible threat for the future. The 
 constant companionship of such deeply emotional 
 representations are too apt to trouble us at first, and 
 at last to make us callous, because they are always 
 claiming our attention, whether we are in a mood to 
 be stirred by them or not. But in the older and 
 more suggestive art the great subjects symbolised 
 rather than represented by its pictures, only reached 
 the mind through the eye when the mind was awake 
 and ready to receive them. The wall was a wall 
 still, and not a window; nay, a book rather, where, if 
 you would, you might read the stories of the gods and 
 heroes, and whose characters, whether you read them 
 or not, delighted you always with the beauty of their 
 form and colour. 
 
 Moreover, the expression of these great things 
 being so well understood and so limited, it was not 
 above the powers of execution of numbers of average 
 workmen, and there was no danger of the holy and 
 elevating subjects being treated absurdly or stupidly, 
 so as to wound the feelings of serious men. 
 
 For all these reasons there is in the archaic or 
 suggestive art of the ancients scarce any place for the 
 elaborate pattern-designing which in later times men 
 were driven more or less to put in the place of 
 
136 
 
 THE HISTORY OF 
 
 picture- work, now become more liable to ridiculous 
 and ignoble failure, more exciting to the emotions, 
 less restful and therefore less beautiful than it had 
 been. 
 
 On the other hand, in the perfect art of Greece 
 the tendency was so decidedly towards fact of all 
 kinds, that it could only give a very low place to 
 ornament that had not a quite definite meaning ; and 
 its demand for perfection in quality of workmanship 
 deprived effort of all hope of reward in this lower 
 region of art, and crushed all experiment, all invention 
 and imagination. In short, this perfect art preferred 
 blankness to the richness that might be given by the 
 work of an unrefined or imperfectly taught hand, 
 whatever suggestions of beauty or thought might be 
 in it ; therefore, as in the art of Egypt, picture-work 
 was not thought too good to fill the place of the 
 elaborate pattern- work we are thinking of, so in that 
 of Greece mere emptiness was good enough for the 
 purpose ; so that in both cases there was no room for 
 finished and complete pattern-designing; nor was 
 there in any of the schools of ancient art all of 
 which, as aforesaid, tended either to the Greek or the 
 Egyptian way of looking at things. 
 
 So you see we are met by this difficulty in the 
 outset, that wishing to see whence our art of pattern- 
 
MORBIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 137 
 
 designing has been developed in the ancient world, 
 we find but little of any importance that looks 
 like the seed of it. 
 
 However, let us look at the matter a little closer, 
 beginning with the art of Egypt. If it had no place 
 for the elaborate and imaginative pattern-designs of 
 modern art, at any rate it by no means loved blank 
 spaces. Apart from the histories, and the picture- 
 writing which so often cover walls, pillars, and all, even 
 smaller things, kings' robes, musical instruments, 
 ship-sails, and the like, are striped and diapered 
 with variety enough and with abundant fancy, inven- 
 tion, and delicacy. Many of these patterns are familiar 
 to modern art; but to what extent they owe their 
 presence there to the influence of Egypt I do not 
 know, but rather suppose that they are the result 
 of men's invention taking the same path in diverse 
 times and places, and not of direct transmission ; and 
 this all the more as I cannot see that Greek pattern- 
 designs follow the Egyptian work closely. One 
 thing certainly strikes one about many of these early 
 designs of Egypt which does connect them with 
 what follows, and that is that they seem distinctly 
 not only Eastern, but even African. Take as an 
 indication of this their love for stripes and chequers, 
 that look as if they were borrowed from the mat- 
 
138 THE HISTORY OF MOKRIS. 
 
 maker's craft, and compare them with the work of 
 African tribes and people, so late as up to our own 
 time. 
 
 The Egyptian love of colour also is of the East, 
 and their boldness in the use of it, and the ease and 
 success with which they put one bright tint beside 
 another without shading or gradation. On this point 
 it is interesting to note that whatever wilful short- 
 comings clung to ancient Egypt in its dealings with 
 the higher forms of art, its skill in all handicrafts 
 was a wonder and a lesson to the ancient world. 
 1400 years before Christ they understood perfectly 
 what may fairly be called the mysteries, of figure- 
 weaving and dyeing, even the more abstruse part of 
 the last craft, which is now represented by chintz- 
 printing; they were skilled in glass-making and 
 pottery, not merely in the always early-acquired art 
 of making a vessel that shall hold water, but in that 
 of earthenware glazed with an opaque glaze variously 
 coloured and figured ; and lastly, they were as skil- 
 ful joiners and cabinetmakers as their successors of 
 modern Egypt, who are (or were) so clever in making 
 the most of the little scraps of wood which an un- 
 timbered country affords them. 
 
 With all this, and strange as it may seem, I 
 cannot see that this wonderful art which lasted so 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 139 
 
 many hundred years, which had reached its blossom- 
 ing time 1400 years before Christ, and was still in 
 use in the second century after, has had much 
 direct or lasting influence on the modern pattern- 
 designer's art. Doubtless these flowers here look as 
 if they might have been the prototypes of many that 
 were drawn in the fourteenth century of our era ; 
 but you must remember that, though they are conven- 
 tional and stiffly drawn, they are parts of a picture, 
 and stand for the assertion that flowers grew in such 
 and such a place. They are not used in mere fancy 
 and sportiveness which condition of art indeed, as I 
 said before, will be found to be common to all these 
 primitive archaic styles. Scarce anything is drawn 
 which is not meant to tell a definite story ; so that 
 many of the members of the elaborate Egyptian 
 diapers are symbols of the mysteries of nature and 
 religion ; as, for example, the lotus, the scarab, the 
 winged orb, the hooded and winged serpent. 
 
 I suppose that there is no doubt that the gigantic 
 and awful temples of Egypt are the earliest columnar 
 buildings of which the world knows ; nevertheless, 
 I cannot think that the columnar Greek temple was 
 derived from them, whatever of detail the Greeks 
 borrowed frankly and obviously from them. The 
 enormous and terrible scale on which they are 
 
140 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 designed, and especially the battering in of walls and 
 door-jambs, which adds such gloom to these primeval 
 buildings, surely shows that one at least, and that the 
 most venerated, of the types of the Egyptian temple 
 was a cave, and that their pillars are the masses left 
 to support the huge weight of the hillside ; while, on 
 the other hand, it is not easy to doubt that timber- 
 building was the origin of the Greek temple. The 
 Greek pillar was a wooden post, its lintel a timber 
 beam, and the whole building a holy memory of 
 the earlier days of the race and the little wooden 
 hall that housed the great men and gods of the 
 tribe. 
 
 Nevertheless, the two forms of Capital which have 
 gone round the world, the cushion or lotus-bud form, 
 and the bell-shaped or open-lily form are certainly 
 the forms of Egyptian Capitals, nor has any other 
 radical form been invented in architecture, or perhaps 
 can be. Whether these have been taken consciously 
 or unconsciously from the first finished art of the 
 world who can affirm or deny ? 
 
 Now before we venture to insult the aristocrati- 
 cally perfect art of Periclean Greece by making an 
 important matter of what it despised, and trying to 
 connect the work of its hewers of wood and drawers 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 141 
 
 of water with the crafts of modern Europe, let us 
 look a little into the art of another river- valley ; the 
 land between Tigris and Euphrates. This art is 
 important enough to our immediate subject, quite 
 apart from the wonderful historical interest of the 
 great empires that ruled there ; but there are left no 
 such riches of antiquity to help us as in Egypt. Of 
 Babylon, who was the mother of the arts of those 
 regions, there is but little left, and that little not of 
 the art in which she most excelled. What is left 
 joined to the derived art of Assyria, which is almost 
 all that represents the earlier Babylonian art, seems 
 to show us that if more yet had survived we might be 
 nearer to solving the question of the origin of a great 
 part of our pattern- designs ; and this all the more as 
 colour was an essential of its master art. The Baby- 
 lonians built in brick (sunburnt much of it), and 
 ornamented their wall-spaces with painted pottery, 
 which (taking the whole story into consideration) 
 must surely have been the source from which flowed 
 all the art of pottery of Persia, and the kindred or 
 neighbour lands of the East. From the very nature 
 of this art, there are but a few scraps of it left, as I 
 have said, and Assyrian art must fill the gap for us 
 as well as it can. The great slabs of alabaster with 
 which that people decorated the palaces raised on 
 
142 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 their mounds of sunburnt bricks, these things with 
 which we are so familiar, that we are almost likely 
 to forget the wonder that lies in them, tell us without 
 a doubt what the type of Mesopotamian art was. 
 It had started, like that of Egypt, from the archaic 
 and priestly idea of art; but, in Assyrian days at 
 least, had grown less venerable and more realistic, 
 less beautiful also, and, if one may say so, possessed 
 by a certain truculence both of form and spirit, 
 which expresses well enough the ceaseless violence 
 and robbery which is all that we have recorded of 
 the history of Assyria. Its pattern-designing takes a 
 lower place than that of Egypt, as far as we can judge 
 in the absence or decay of what colour it once had. 
 Its system of colour one must needs judge from the 
 fragments remaining showed no great love for that 
 side of the art, and was used rather to help the 
 realism to which it tended, and which, had it lived 
 longer, would most likely have driven it out of the 
 path of monumental and decorative art. Nevertheless, 
 by strange accidents in the course of history, there 
 are some of the forms of its decoration that have been 
 carried forward into the general mass of civilised art. 
 A great part of its patterns, indeed, were diapers or 
 powderings, like much of Egyptian work, only carried 
 out in a bossy, rounded kind of relief, characteristic 
 
MOKRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 143 
 
 enough of its general tendencies. These minor and 
 natural forms died out with the Assyrian monarchy ; 
 but several of its borderings were borrowed by the 
 Greeks, through the Asiatic traders doubtless, who, 
 on their own wares, seem to have used both Egyptian 
 and Chaldaean mythological figures without under- 
 standing their meaning, simply because they made 
 pretty ornaments for a bowl or a vase. 
 
 As an example of these running patterns, take the 
 interlacement which we now nickname the guilloche, 
 or the ornament called the honeysuckle, which I 
 rather suppose to be a suggestion of a tuft of flowers 
 and leaves breaking through the earth, and which 
 learned men think had a mystical meaning beyond 
 that simple idea, like that other bordering, which, for 
 want of a better word, I must call the flower and 
 pine-cone. 
 
 There is another mystical ornament which we first 
 come upon in Assyrian art, which we shall have to 
 come to again, but which I must mention here, and 
 which has played a strangely important part in the 
 history of pattern-designing this is the Holy Tree 
 with its attendant guardian angels or demons. 
 Almost all original styles have used this form, some, 
 doubtless, as a religious symbol, most driven by vague 
 tradition and allured by its convenience as a decor- 
 
144 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 ative form. I should call it the most important and 
 widely spread piece of ornament ever invented. 
 
 Again, before we affront the majesty of Pallas 
 Athene by looking curiously at her sleeve-hem, rather 
 than reverently at herself, I must say a word about 
 the conquerors of Assyria, the Persians. 
 
 To us pattern-designers, Persia has become a holy 
 land, for there in the process of time our art was 
 perfected, and thence above all places it spread to 
 cover for a while the world, east and west. But in 
 the hierarchy of ancient art the place of Persia is 
 not high ; its sculpture was borrowed directly from 
 Assyrian and Babylonian art, and has not the life 
 and vigour of its prototype ; though some gain it has 
 of architectural dignity, which the Aryan stock of the 
 Persians accounts for I think. Still more is this shown 
 in the leap the Persians took in architecture proper. 
 The palaces of the Assyrian kings do not know, or 
 do not use the column ; they are one and all a con- 
 geries of not very large chambers connected by doors 
 very oddly placed. How they were roofed we can no 
 longer tell ; probably the smaller chambers had some 
 kind of dome for a roof, and the larger no roof, only 
 a sort of ledge projecting from the wall. The palace 
 of the ancient Persians, on the other hand, was fairly 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 145 
 
 made up of columns ; the walls could not have been 
 of much importance ; the whole thing is as a forest 
 of pillars that upholds the canopy over the summer- 
 seat of the great king. 
 
 For the rest, though this is the work of an Aryan 
 race, that race had far to go and much to suffer 
 before they could attain to the measured, grave, and 
 orderly beauty which they alone of all races have 
 learned to create, before they could attain to the 
 divine art of reasonable architecture. The majesty of 
 the ancient Persian columnar building is marred by 
 extravagance and grotesquery of detail, which must be 
 called ugliness; faults which it shares with the ancient 
 architecture of India, of the earlier form of which it 
 must have been an offshoot. 
 
 We have thus touched, lightly enough, on the 
 principal styles of the archaic type of art ; and have 
 seen that our craft of pattern-designing was developed 
 but slowly among them, and that, with few excep- 
 tions, its forms did not travel very far on the road of 
 history. We are now come to that period of perfection 
 which, as it were, draws a bar of light across the history 
 of art, and is apt to dazzle us and blind us to all that 
 lies on either side of it. As we pass from the Egyptian 
 and Assyrian rooms at the British Museum and 
 
 L 
 
146 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 come upon the great groups of the Parthenon, full as 
 we may be of admiration for the nobility of the 
 Egyptian monuments, and the eager and struggling 
 realism of Assyria, how our wonder rises as we look 
 on the perfection of sculpture, cut off as it seems by 
 an impassable gulf from all that has gone before it, 
 the hopeless limitations, or the hopeless endeavours of 
 the great mass of mankind ! Nor can we help asking 
 ourselves the question if art can go any further, or 
 what there is to do after such work ? 
 
 Indeed the question is a hard one, and aftertimes 
 of art, and even many cultivated people of to-day, may 
 be blamed but lightly if they, in their helplessness, 
 must needs answer : " there is nothing to do but to 
 imitate, and again to imitate, and to pick up what 
 style the gods may give us amidst our imitation, 
 even if we are driven to imitate the imitators." 
 
 And yet, I must ask you above all things to join 
 me in thinking that the question must be answered 
 in quite a different way to this, unless we are to be for 
 ever the barbarians which the Athenians of the time 
 of Pericles would certainly, and not so wrongly, have 
 called us ; for to me these works of perfection do not 
 express everything which the archaic work suggested, 
 and which they might have expressed if they had 
 dared to try it : still less do they express all that 
 
 
PATTERN DESIGNING. 
 
 147 
 
 the later work strove to express, often maybe with 
 halting skill, seldom without some vision of the 
 essence of things, which would have been lost to us 
 for ever had they waited for the day, never to come, 
 when the hand of man shall be equal to his thought, 
 and no skill be lacking him to tell us of the height 
 and depth of his aspirations. 
 
 No, even these men of Ancient Greece had their 
 limitations, nor was it altogether better with them 
 than it is with us ; the freedom of these free people 
 was a narrow freedom. True they lived a simple life, 
 and did not know of that great curse and bane of art 
 which we call luxury yet was their society founded 
 on slavery ; slavery, mental as well as bodily, of the 
 greater part of mankind, the iron exclusiveness which 
 first bound their society, after no long while unsettled 
 it, and at last destroyed it. 
 
 When we think of all that classical art represents, 
 and all that it hides and buries, of its pretensions and 
 its shortcomings, surely we shall not accuse the fates 
 too loudly of blindness for overthrowing it, or think 
 that the confusion and misery of the times that 
 followed it was too great a price to pay for fresh life 
 and its token, change of the forms of art which express 
 men's thoughts. 
 
 Now if you should think I have got on to matters 
 
148 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS 
 
 over serious for our small subject of pattern-designing, 
 I will say, first, that even these lesser arts, being pro- 
 duced by man's intelligence, cannot really be separated 
 from the greater, the more purely intellectual ones, or 
 from the life which creates both ; and next, that to my 
 mind the tokens of the incompleteness of freedom 
 among the classical peoples, and their aristocratic 
 and rigid exclusiveness, are as obvious in one side of 
 their art, as their glorious simplicity of life and 
 respect for individuality of mind among the favoured 
 few are obvious in the other side of it ; and it is in 
 our subject matter of to-day that their worser part 
 shows. 
 
 The pattern-designs of Greek art under a system 
 which forbade any meddling with figure-work by 
 men who could not draw the human figure unexcep- 
 tionably, must have been the main resource of their 
 lower artists (what we call artisans) ; they are gen- 
 erally, though not always, thoroughly well fitted for 
 the purpose of decoration which they are meant to 
 serve, but neither are, nor pretend to be, of any 
 interest in themselves; they are graceful, indeed, 
 where the Assyrian ones are clumsy, temperate where 
 those of Egypt are over-florid ; but they have not, 
 and do not pretend to have, any share of the rich- 
 ness, the mastery, or the individuality of nature, as 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 149 
 
 much of the ornament of the earlier periods, and most 
 of that of the later have had. I must ask you not to 
 misunderstand me, and suppose that I think lightly of 
 the necessity for the due and even severe subordina- 
 tion of architectural ornament; what I do want you to 
 understand is, that the constant demand which Greek 
 art made for perfection on every side was not an un- 
 mixed gain to it, for it made renunciation of many 
 delightful things a necessity, and not unseldom drove 
 it into being hard and unsympathetic. Of the system 
 of Greek colour we can know very little, from the 
 scanty remains that are left us. I think they painted 
 much of their carving and sculpture in a way that 
 would rather frighten our good taste to hear of, I 
 mean, though probably not to see. Some people, on 
 the other hand, have supposed that they were all but 
 colour-blind, a guess that we need not discuss at 
 great length. What is to be said of it is, that certain 
 words which to us express definite tints of colour, 
 are used in their literature, and that of Eome which 
 imitated it, in such a way as to show that they noticed 
 the difference between tones of colours more than that 
 between tints. For the rest, it would be unreasonable 
 to suppose that a people who despised the lesser 
 arts, and who were on the look-out, first for scientific 
 and historic facts, and next for beauty of form, 
 
150 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 should give themselves up to indulgence in the 
 refinements of colour. The two conditions of mind 
 are incompatible. 
 
 As to what the development of pattern-designs 
 owes to Greek art, all that side of the craft which, 
 coming directly and consciously from classical civil- 
 isation, has helped to form the ornament of modern 
 architecture, has, whoever invented the patterns, 
 originally passed through the severe school of Greece, 
 and thus been transmitted to us. 
 
 Of all these ornamental forms the most important 
 is that we choose to call the Acanthus leaf, which 
 was borne forward with the complete development of 
 the column and capital. As I have said before, the 
 form of the timber hall, with its low-pitched roof, 
 its posts and beams, had got to be considered a holy 
 form by the Greeks, and they did not care to carry 
 dignified architecture further, or invent any more 
 elaborate form of construction; but the prodigious 
 care they took in refining the column with its 
 cushion, or horned, or bell-shaped capital, impressed 
 those forms on the world for ever, and especially 
 the last of these, the bell-shaped one, whose special 
 ornament was this glittering leafage we now call 
 Acanthus. No form of ornament has gone so far, or 
 lasted so long as this ; it has been infinitely varied, 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 151 
 
 used by almost all following styles in one shape or 
 another, and performed many another office besides 
 its original one. 
 
 Now this question of the transmission of the forms 
 of Greek architecture leads us at once to thinking 
 of that of Eome, since it was by this road that all 
 of it went, which was consciously accepted as a gift 
 of the classical times. The subject of the origin of 
 all that is characteristic in Eoman art is obscure 
 enough, much too obscure for my little knowledge 
 even to attempt to see into it ; nay, even in speaking 
 of it, I had better call it the art of the peoples 
 collected under the Eoman name ; so that I may be 
 understood to include all the influences that went 
 to its creation. 
 
 Now if we are asked what impression the gathered 
 art of these peoples made upon modern art, I see 
 nothing for it but to say that it invented architecture 
 no less. Before their time, indeed, temples took 
 such and such forms among diverse nations, and 
 such and such ornament grew on them; but what 
 else was done with these styles we really do not 
 know ; a frivolous pleasure -town built in a late 
 period, and situate in Italy, which destruction, so 
 to say, has preserved for us, being the only token left 
 
152 THE HISTOEY OF MORRIS. 
 
 to show what a Greek house might perhaps have 
 been like. For the rest, in spite of all the wonders 
 of Greek sculpture, we must needs think that the 
 Greeks had done little to fix the future architecture 
 of the world : there was no elasticity or power of 
 growth about the style; right in its own country, 
 used for the worship and aspirations which first gave 
 it birth, it could not be used for anything else. But 
 with the architecture of the men of the Bom an name 
 it was quite different. In the first place, they seized 
 on the great invention of the arch, the most important 
 invention to house -needing men that has been, or 
 can be made. They did not invent it themselves of 
 course, since it was known in Ancient Egypt, and 
 apparently not uncommon in brick -building Baby- 
 lonia ; but they were the first who used it otherwise 
 than as an ugly necessity, and, in so using it, they 
 settled what the architecture of civilisation must 
 henceforward be. Nor was their architecture, stately 
 as it was, any longer fit for nothing but a temple, 
 a holy railing for the shrine or symbol of the god ; 
 it was fit for one purpose as for another church, house, 
 aqueduct, market-place, or castle ; nor was it the style 
 of one country or one climate, it would fit itself to 
 north or south, snow-storm or sand-storm alike. 
 Though pedants might make inflexible rules for its 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 153 
 
 practice when it was dead or dying, when it was alive 
 it did not bind itself too strictly to rule, but followed, 
 in its constructive part at least, the law of nature ; in 
 short, it was a new art, the great art of civilisation. 
 True it is that what we have been saying of it 
 applies to it as a style of building chiefly ; in matters 
 of ornament the arts of the conquered did completely 
 take the conqueror captive, and not till the glory of 
 Eome was waning, and its dominion become a tax- 
 gathering machine, did it even begin to strive to shake 
 off the fetters of Greece ; and still, through all those 
 centuries, the Eoman lords of the world thought the 
 little timber god's house a holy form, and necessary 
 to be impressed on all stately architecture. It is a 
 matter of course that the part of the architectural 
 ornament of the Eomans, which may be definitely 
 called pattern-design, shared fully in this slavery ; it 
 was altered and somewhat spoiled Greek work, less 
 refined and less forbearing. Great swinging scrolls 
 mostly formed of the Acanthus foliage, not very 
 various or delicate in their growth, mingled with 
 heavy rolling flowers, form the main part of the 
 Roman pattern-design that clove to the arts. There 
 is no mystery in them, and little interest in their 
 growth, though they are rich and handsome ; indeed, 
 they scarcely do grow at all, they are rather stuck 
 
154 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 together ; for the real connected pattern, where one 
 member grows naturally and necessarily out of another, 
 where the whole thing is alive as a real tree or flower 
 is, all this is an invention of what followed Eoman art, 
 and is unknown both to the classical and the ancient 
 world. Nevertheless, this invention, when it came, 
 clothed its soul in a body which was chiefly formed 
 of the Greco-Eoman ornament, so that this splendid 
 Eoman scroll-work though not very beautiful in itself, 
 is the parent of very beautiful things. It is, perhaps, 
 in the noble craft of mosaic which is a special craft 
 of the Eoman name that the foreshadowings of the 
 new art is best seen. In the remains of this art you 
 may note the growing formation of more mysterious 
 and more connected, as well as freer and more natural- 
 istic design ; their colour, in spite often of the limita- 
 tion forced on the workman by simple materials, is 
 skilfully arranged and beautiful ; and in short, there is 
 a sign in them of the coming of the wave of that great 
 change which was to turn late Eoman art, the last of 
 the old, into Byzantine art, the first of the new. 
 
 It lingered long. For long there was still some 
 show of life in the sick art of the older world ; that 
 art had been so powerful, so systematised, that it was 
 not easy to get rid even of its dead body. The first 
 stirrings of change were felt in the master -art of 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 155 
 
 architecture, or, once more, in the art of building. As 
 I said before in speaking of the earliest building 
 that shows this movement, the Palace at Spalato, the 
 ornamental side of the art lagged long behind the 
 constructional. In that building you see for the first 
 time the arch acting freely, and without the sham 
 support of the Greek beam-architecture ; henceforth, 
 the five orders are but pieces of history, until the 
 time when they were used by the new pedants of the 
 Kenaissance to enslave the world again. 
 
 Note now, that this first change of architecture marks 
 a new world and new thoughts arising. Diocletian's' 
 palace was built but a few years before the Eoman 
 tyranny was rent in twain. When it was raised, that 
 which men thought would last for ever, had been 
 already smitten with its death-stroke. Let your minds 
 go back through all the centuries to look on the years 
 that followed, and see how the whole world is chang- 
 ing ; unheard of peoples thrusting on into Europe ; 
 nation mingling with nation, and blood with blood ; 
 the old classical exclusiveness is gone for ever. Greek, 
 Eoman, Barbarian, are words still used, but the old 
 meaning has departed from them ; nay, even, they 
 may mean pretty much the reverse of what they did. 
 Dacians, Armenians, Arabs, Goths ; from these come 
 the captains of the Eoman name ; and when the 
 
156 THE HISTORY OF MOREIS. 
 
 Eoman army goes afield, marching now as often to 
 defeat as victory, it may well be that no Italian goes 
 in its ranks to meet the enemies of Eome. More 
 wonder is it, therefore, that the forms of the old world 
 clave so close to art, than that a new art was slowly 
 and unobtrusively getting ready to meet the new 
 thoughts and aspirations of mankind ; that modern 
 art was near its birth, though modern Europe was 
 born before its art was born. 
 
 Meanwhile let us turn aside from Europe to look for 
 a little at the new birth of an ancient nation Persia, 
 to wit and see what part it took in carrying on the 
 forms of decoration from the old world into the new. 
 
 I will ask you to remember that, after the contest 
 between Persia and Greece had been ended by Alex- 
 ander, and when his dream of a vast European- Asiatic 
 Empire, infused throughout with Hellenic thought 
 and life, had but brought about various knots of 
 anarchical and self-seeking tyrannies, a new and 
 masterful people changed the story ; and Persia, with 
 the surrounding countries, fell under the dominion 
 of the Parthians, a people of a race whose office in 
 the furthering of civilisation is perhaps the punish- 
 ment of its crimes. The ancient Parthians, like the 
 modern Ottomans, scarcely mingled with the nations 
 which they conquered, but rather encamped among 
 
PATTERN DESIGNING. 
 
 157 
 
 them. Like the Ottomans, also, the decline of their 
 warlike powers by no means kept pace with the 
 decline of their powers of rule, or the steady advance 
 of their inevitable doom. Artabanus, the last of the 
 Pa,rthian kings, turned from the victorious field of 
 Nisibis, where he had overcome the men of the "Roman 
 name, to meet the rising of his Persian subjects; which, 
 in three days of bloody battle, swept away his life and 
 the dominion of his race. A curious lesson, by the way, 
 to warring tyrannies. The Eoman Empire had con- 
 tended long with the Parthian kingdom, had wrested 
 many a province from it, and weakened it sorely, all 
 for this that it might give birth to the greatest and 
 most dangerous enemy of the Eoman Empire, and 
 one who was soon to humiliate it so grievously. 
 
 Now as to the art of these kingdoms. That of the 
 Parthians must be set aside by treating it in the way 
 which was used by the worthy Norwegian merchant 
 in writing of the snakes in Iceland there was no 
 art among the Parthians ; no native art, that is to 
 say, and scarcely any borrowed art which they made 
 quasi-native. In earlier times Greek hands fashioned 
 their coins and such-like matters; in later they 
 borrowed their art from the borrowed art of their 
 Persian subjects, with whom, doubtless, they were 
 often confused by classical writers. 
 
158 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 Neither can I say that of the art of the new-born 
 Persian kingdom there is much left that is important 
 in itself. I have said that much of the art of AchsG- 
 menian Persia was borrowed directly from Assyria, 
 its wild and strange columnar architecture being the 
 only part of it that seems to bear any relation to the 
 Aryan race. For 350 years the Persians lay under 
 the domination of Turan, and certainly, to judge 
 from what we know of their architecture during and 
 after that time, they were not receptive of ideas from 
 other branches of their race. 
 
 The most notable works of the new-born or 
 Sassanian Kingdom of Persia are certain rock-sculp- 
 tured monuments of diverse dates, the earliest being 
 that which commemorates Sapor the Great, and his 
 triumph over the Koman emperor Valerian, which 
 happened A.D. 260, only forty years after Artaxerxes, 
 the first Sassanian king, had overthrown and slain 
 the last of the Parthians on the field of Hormuz. To 
 my mind these sculptures still show the influence 
 of that Assyrian or Chaldaean art, which is the first 
 form that art took in Persia, though they are by no 
 means lacking in original feeling, and are obviously 
 and most interestingly careful in matters of costume 
 the Komans being dressed as Eomans, and the Per- 
 sians in their national dress; the chief difference 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 159 
 
 between which and the costume of the Achaemenian 
 time being in the strange and, I suppose, symbolical 
 head-dress of Sapor himself, who wears over his 
 crown an enormous globe, seemingly made of some 
 light material inflated. 
 
 There is no mere ornamental detail in these sculp- 
 tures ; but in a monument to Chosroes II., whose 
 reign began A.D. 590, there is a good deal of it ; and 
 in this the Chaldsean influence is unmistakable, and 
 all the more marked, since it is mingled with visible 
 imitation of late Eoman figure-sculpture as well as 
 with inferior work of the kind found in Sapor's monu- 
 ment. The existence of this Chaldsean influence is 
 all the more important to note because of its late 
 date. 
 
 Besides these sculptured works, there are also left 
 in Persia and Mesopotamia some remains of im- 
 portant Sassanian buildings, which, however scanty, 
 are of great interest. To what earlier style is due 
 the origin of their characteristic features it would 
 be impossible to say ; but one thing is clear to me, 
 that some of those features at least have been fixed 
 on modern Persian architecture ; as, for example, the 
 egg-shaped dome, and the great cavernous porch 
 with the small doorway pierced in its inside wall, 
 both of which features are special characteristics of 
 
160 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 that modern Persian architecture which is in fact 
 the art of the Mussulman world. A word must be 
 said further on a feature of the Sassanian architec- 
 ture that lies nearer to our subject the capitals of 
 columns still existing. The outline of these is 
 curiously like that of fully developed Byzantine 
 architecture; the carved ornament on them is in 
 various degrees influenced by ancient Chaldsean art, 
 being in some cases identical with the later Assyrian 
 pattern-work, in others mingled with impressions 
 of Eoman ornament ; but the general effect of them 
 in any case shows a very remarkable likeness to the 
 ruder capitals of the time of Justinian, more espe- 
 cially to his work at Eavenna, a fact to be carefully 
 noted in connection with the development of that art. 
 
 Some very rich and lovely architectural carving 
 at the palace of Mashita, wrought late in the Sas- 
 sanian time, about 630, bears a strong resemblance to 
 elaborate Byzantine work at its best it might almost 
 be work of Comnenian Greeks at Venice or Milan - 
 nevertheless, and this also I beg you to remember, it 
 is as like as possible to designs on carpets and tiles 
 done nearly a thousand years after the battle of 
 Cadesia, under the rule of Shah Abbas the Great. 
 
 Furthermore, I believe the Persians have preserved 
 and handed down to later ages certain forms of orna- 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 161 
 
 ent which, above all, must be considered parts of 
 attern designing, and which have clung to that art 
 with singular tenacity. These forms are variations of 
 the mystic symbols of the Holy Tree, and the Holy 
 Fire. The subject of the shapes these have taken, 
 and the reasons for their use and the diversities of 
 them, is a difficult and obscure one ; so I must, 
 before I go further, remind you that I lay no claims 
 to mythological and ethnological learning, and if I 
 blunder while I touch on these subjects as I can- 
 not help doing I shall be very glad of correction 
 from any one who understands this recondite subject. 
 However, what I have noticed of these in my 
 studies as a pattern-designer is this. There are two 
 symbols ; the one is a tree, more or less elaborately 
 blossomed, and supported, as heralds say, by two 
 living creatures, genii, partly or wholly manlike, or 
 animals, sometimes of known kinds, lions or the like, 
 sometimes invented monsters; the other symbol is 
 an altar with a flame upon it, supported by two living 
 creatures, sometimes man-like, sometimes beast-like. 
 Now these two symbols are found, one or other, 
 
 t)r both of them, in almost all periods of art ; the 
 ion gate at Mycenae will occur to all of you as one 
 example. I have seen a very clear example figured, 
 vhich is in a pot found in Attica, of the very earliest 
 
 
 
162 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 period. The Holy Tree is common in Assyrian art, 
 the Holy Fire is found in it. The Holy Fire with the 
 attendant figures, priests in this case always, is on 
 the coins of all the Sassanian kings ; the Holy Tree, 
 supported by lions, is found in Sassanian art also. 
 Now it is clear that the two symbols are apt to 
 become so much alike in rude representations, that 
 sometimes it is hard to say whether the supporters 
 have the tree or the fire-altar between them ; and this 
 seems to have puzzled those who used them after the 
 Sassanian period, and when, doubtless, they had for- 
 gotten or perverted their original meaning. They 
 are used very often in Byzantine art in carvings and 
 the like, where again they sometimes take another 
 form of peacocks drinking from a fountain ; but, of 
 all things, are commonest perhaps in the silken stuffs 
 that were wrought in Greece, Syria. Egypt, and at last 
 in Sicily and Lucca, between the eleventh and the fif- 
 teenth centuries. In these, at first, it was a toss-up 
 whether the thing between the creatures should be 
 the altar or the tree, though the latter was always 
 commonest ; but at last the tree won the day, I ima- 
 gine rather because it was prettier than for any 
 more abstruse reason ; still, even in quite late times, 
 the fire crops up again at whiles. I should mention 
 also, that in these later representations man -like 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 163 
 
 figures are seldom, if ever, seen ; beasts of all kinds, 
 from giraffes to barn-door fowls, take their place. 
 
 It would be absurd of me to attempt to be authori- 
 tative as to the meaning of these far-travelling sym- 
 bols; but I may be allowed to say, perhaps, that 
 both the fire and the tree are symbols of life and 
 creation, and that, when the central object is obviously 
 a fire, the supporters are either ministers of the altar 
 or guardian spirits. As to the monsters supporting 
 the tree, they also, I suppose, may be guardians. I 
 have, however, seen a different guess at their meaning 
 to wit, that they represent the opposing powers of 
 good and evil that form the leading idea of the dual- 
 ism that fixed itself to the ancient Zoroastrian creed ; 
 the creed in which the Light and the Fire had become 
 the recognised symbol of deity by the time of the 
 Sassanian monarchs. I cannot pretend to say what 
 foundation there may be for this theory, which 
 would fuse the two symbols into one. The only 
 thing I feel pretty certain of is this : that whatever 
 the forms may mean, they are never found but among 
 peoples who, it may be at the end of a very long 
 chain, have had some dealings with the country 
 between the two Eivers ; that they therefore are 
 Chaldaean in origin; that, though they have been 
 transmitted by other means in earlier days, it is to 
 
164 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 the Sassanian Persians that we owe their presence in 
 modern art. 
 
 But it is not difficult to see that such an incom- 
 plete and even languid art as that of new-born 
 Persia, which had but little character of its own, 
 at any rate on its ornamental side, would have had 
 no strength to carry these strange figures so far 
 figures which, I repeat, have played a greater part 
 than any others among the pattern-designs of Europe 
 and the East, however those who used them might be 
 unconscious of their meaning. It was on another 
 and mightier art that they were borne. The influ- 
 ence of Persia, indeed, was felt amongst a people 
 ready to receive it, in a time that was agape to take 
 in something new to fill the void which the death of 
 classical art had made ; but other influences were at 
 work among the people, whose mother city was New 
 Kome, which was a kind of knot to all the many 
 thrums of the varied life of the first days of modern 
 Europe. 
 
 While men slept a new art was growing up in 
 that strange empire, on whom so many centuries of 
 change still thrust the name of Eome, although the 
 deeds and power of Eome were gone from it. Many 
 of you have doubtless heard this art spoken of with 
 contempt as the mere dregs of the dying art of the 
 
MOKBIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 165 
 
 ancient world. Well, doubtless death was busy 
 among what was left of the art of antiquity, but it 
 was a death that bore new quickening with it ; it 
 was a corruption which was drawing to it elements 
 of life, of which the classical world knew nothing ; 
 and the chief element of life that it gave expression to 
 was freedom the freedom of the many in the realm 
 of art at least. In the earlier days the workman 
 had nought to do but to grind through his day's 
 work, stick tightly to his gauge lest he be beaten 
 or starved, and then go; but now he was rising 
 under the load of contempt that crushed him, and 
 could do something that people would stop to look at 
 no less than the more intellectual work of his better- 
 born fellow. What has come of that in later times, 
 nay, what may yet come of it in days that we shall 
 not live to see, we may not consider now. But 
 one thing came of it in those earlier days an archi- 
 tecture which was pure in its principles, reasonable 
 in its practice, and beautiful to the eyes of all men, 
 even the simplest; which is a thing, mind you, 
 which can never exist in any state of society under 
 which men are divided into intellectual castes. 
 
 It was a matter of course that the art of pattern 
 designing should fully share in this exaltation of the 
 master art. Now at last, and only now, it began to 
 
166 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 be really delightful in itself; good reason why, 
 since now at last the mind of a man, happy in his 
 work, did more or less guide all hands that wrought 
 it. No beauty in the art has ever surpassed the 
 beauty of those, its first days of joy and freedom ; 
 the days of gain without loss the time of boundless 
 hope. I say of gain without loss ; the qualities of 
 all the past styles which had built it up are there, 
 with all that it has gained of new. The great rolling 
 curves of the Eoman Acanthus have not been forgot- 
 ten, but they have had life, growth, variety, and re- 
 finement infused into them ; the clean-cut accuracy 
 and justness of line of one side of Greek ornament 
 has not been forgotten either, nor the straying wreath- 
 like naturalism of the other side of it ; but the first has 
 gained a crisp sparkling richness, and freedom and 
 suggestion of nature which it had lacked before ; and 
 the second, which was apt to be feeble and languid, 
 has gained a knitting-up of its lines into strength, 
 and an interest in every curve, which make it like 
 the choice parts of the very growths of nature. Other 
 gain it has of richness and mystery, the most neces- 
 sary of all the qualities of pattern- work, that without 
 which, indeed, it must be kept in the strictly subor- 
 dinate place which the scientific good taste of Greece 
 allotted to it. Where did it get those qualities from ? 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 167 
 
 If the art of the East had been what it has since 
 become, we might perhaps answer, from the East ; 
 but this is by no means the case. On the contrary, 
 though, as I have said or implied above, Byzantine 
 art borrowed forms from Persia and Chaldaea at the 
 back of her, nothing is more certain, to my mind, 
 than that Byzantine art made Eastern art what 
 it became ; that the art of the East has remained 
 beautiful so long because for so many centuries, it 
 practised the lessons which New Eome first taught 
 it. Indeed, I think the East had much to do with 
 the new life of this true Kenaissance, but indirectly. 
 The influence of its thought, its strange mysticism 
 that gave birth to such wild creeds, its looking to- 
 wards equality amidst all the tyranny of kings that 
 crushed all men alike ; these things must have had 
 then, and long before, great influence on men's 
 thoughts at the verge of Europe and Asia. 
 
 But surely, when we have sought our utmost for 
 the origins of all the forms of that great body of 
 the expression of men's thoughts which I have called 
 modern art (you may call it Gothic art if you will, 
 little as the Goths dealt with it), when we have 
 sought and found much, we shall still have to con- 
 fess that there is no visible origin for the thing that 
 gave life to those forms. All we can say is, that 
 
168 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 when the Eoman tyranny grew sick, when that re- 
 curring curse of the world, a dominant race, began 
 for a time to be shaken from its hold, men began 
 to long for the freedom of art ; and that, even amidst 
 the confusion and rudeness of a time when one 
 civilisation was breaking up that another might be 
 born of it, the mighty impulse which this longing 
 gave to the expression of thought created speedily a 
 glorious art, full of growth and hope, in the only form 
 which in such a time art could take architecture 
 to wit, which, of all the forms of art, is that which 
 springs direct from popular impulse, from the part- 
 nership of all men, great and little, in worthy and 
 exalting aspirations. 
 
 So was modern or Gothic art created ; and never, 
 till the time of that death or cataleptic sleep of the 
 so-called Kenaissance, did it forget its origin, or 
 fail altogether in fulfilling its mission of turning the 
 ancient curse of labour into something more like a 
 blessing. As to the way in which it did its work, 
 as I have no time, so also I have but little need to 
 speak, since there is none of us but has seen and felt 
 some portion of the glory which it left behind, but 
 has shared some portion of that most kind gift it gave, 
 the world ; for even in this our turbulent island, the 
 home of rough and homely men, so far away from the 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 
 
 centres of art and thought which I have been spe 
 of, did simple folk labour for those that should 
 after them. Here, in the land we yet love, they 
 built their homes and temples ; if not so majestically 
 as many peoples have done, yet in such sweet accord 
 with the familiar nature amidst which they dwelt, 
 that when by some happy chance we come across 
 the work they wrought, untouched by any but 
 natural change, it fills us with a satisfying untroubled 
 happiness that few things else could bring us. Must 
 our necessities destroy, must our restless ambition 
 mar, the sources of this innocent pleasure, which rich 
 and poor may share alike this communion with the 
 very hearts of departed men ? Must we sweep away 
 these touching memories of our stout forefathers and 
 their troublous days, that won our present peace and 
 liberties ? 
 
 If our necessities compel us to it, I say we are an 
 unhappy people ; if our vanity lure us into it, I say 
 we are a foolish and light-minded people, who have 
 not the wits to take a little trouble to avoid spoiling 
 our own goods. 
 
 Our own goods ? Yes, the goods of the people of 
 England, now and in time to come ; we who are now 
 alive, are but life-renters of them. Any of us who 
 pretend to any culture, know well that in destroying 
 
170 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 or injuring one of these buildings, we are destroying 
 the pleasure, the culture, in a word, the humanity 
 of unborn generations. It is speaking very mildly to 
 say that we have no right to do this for our tem- 
 porary convenience ; it is speaking too mildly. I say 
 any such destruction is an act of brutal dishonesty. 
 Do you think such a caution is unnecessary ? how I 
 wish that I could think so ! It is a grievous thing to 
 have to say, but say it I must, that the one most 
 beautiful city of England, the city of Oxford, has been 
 ravaged for many years past, not only by ignorant 
 and interested tradesmen, but by the University and 
 College authorities. Those whose special business it 
 is to direct the culture of the nation have treated the 
 beauty of Oxford as if it were a matter of no moment, 
 as if their commercial interests might thrust it aside 
 without any consideration. To my mind in so doing 
 they have disgraced themselves. 
 
 For the rest, I will say it, that I think the poor 
 remains of our ancient buildings in themselves, as 
 memorials of history and works of art, are worth 
 more than any temporary use they can be put to. 
 Yes, apply it to Oxford if you please. There are 
 many places in England where a young man may get 
 as good book-learning as in Oxford ; not one where 
 he can receive the education which the loveliness of 
 
MORRIS. PATTERN DESIGNING. 171 
 
 the gray city used to give us. Call this sentiment if 
 you please, but you know that it is true. 
 
 Before I go further let me tell you that our 
 Society has had much to do in cases of what I should 
 call the commercial destruction of buildings ; that we 
 have carefully examined these cases to see if we had 
 any ground to stand on for resisting the destruction ; 
 that we have argued the matter threadbare on all 
 sides; and that above all we have always tried to 
 suggest some possible use that the buildings could be 
 put to. As a branch of this subject, I must ask leave 
 to add, at the risk of wearying you, that the Society 
 has taken great pains (and been sometimes called 
 rude for it, if that mattered) to try to get guardians of 
 ancient buildings to repair their buildings. For we 
 know well, by doleful experience, how quickly a 
 building gets infirm if it be neglected, There are 
 plenty of cases where a parish or a parson will spend 
 two or three thousand pounds on ecclesiastical finery 
 for a church, and let the rain sap the roof all the 
 while ; such things are apt to make the most polite 
 people rude. 
 
 I have one last word to say on the before-men- 
 tioned restless vanity that so often mars the gift our 
 fathers have given us. Its results have a technical 
 name now, and are called "restoration." Don't be 
 
172 THE HISTORY OF MORRIS. 
 
 afraid. I am going to say very little about it ; my 
 plea against it is very simple. I have pleaded it before, 
 but it seems to me so unanswerable that I will do so 
 again, even if it be in the same words. Yet first let 
 me say this : I love art, and I love history ; but it is 
 living art and living history that I love. If we have 
 no hope for the future, I do not see how we can look 
 back on the past with pleasure. If we are to be less 
 than men in time to come, let us forget that we have 
 ever been men. It is in the interest of living art and 
 living history that I oppose "restoration." What 
 history can there be in a building bedaubed with 
 ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but 
 a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and 
 vigour of the earlier world ? As to the art that is 
 concerned in it, a strange folly it seems to me for us 
 who live among these bricken masses of hideousness, 
 to waste the energies of our short lives in feebly trying 
 to add new beauty to what is already beautiful. Is 
 that all the surgery we have for the curing of England's 
 spreading sore ? Don't let us vex ourselves to cure 
 the antepenultimate blunders of the world, but fall to 
 on our own blunders. Let us leave the dead alone, 
 and, ourselves living, build for the living and those 
 that shall live. 
 
 Meantime, my plea for our Society is this, that 
 
PATTERN DESIGNING. 
 
 173 
 
 since it is disputed whether restoration be good or 
 not, and since we are confessedly living in a time 
 when architecture has come on the one hand to Jerry 
 building, and on the other to experimental designing 
 (good, very good experiments some of them), let us 
 take breath and wait; let us sedulously repair our 
 ancient buildings, and watch every stone of them as 
 if they were built of jewels (as indeed they are), but 
 otherwise let the dispute rest till we have once more 
 learned architecture, till we once more have among 
 us a reasonable, noble, and universally used style. 
 Then let the dispute be settled. I am not afraid of 
 the issue. If that day ever comes, we shall know 
 what beauty, romance, and history mean, and the 
 technical meaning of the word " restoration " will be 
 forgotten. 
 
 Is not this a reasonable plea ? It means prudence. 
 If the buildings are not worth anything they are not 
 worth restoring ; if they are worth anything, they are 
 at least worth treating with common sense and 
 prudence. Come now, I invite you to support the 
 most prudent Society in all England. 
 
LECTUKE VI. 
 
 BY WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 THE Lesser Arts of Life may not seem to some of 
 you worth considering, even for an hour. In these 
 brisk days of the world, amidst this high civilisation 
 of ours, we are too eager and busy, it may be said, 
 to take note of any form of art that does not either 
 stir our emotions deeply, or strain the attention of 
 the most intellectual part of our minds. 
 
 Now for this rejection of the lesser arts there 
 may be something to be said, supposing it be done 
 in a certain way and with certain ends in view; 
 nevertheless it seems to me that the lesser arts, 
 when they are rejected, are so treated for no suffi- 
 cient reason, and to the injury of the community ; 
 therefore I feel no shame in standing before you as 
 a professed pleader and advocate for them, as indeed 
 I well may, since it is through them that I am the 
 servant of the public, and earn my living with 
 abundant pleasure. 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 175 
 
 Then comes the question, What are to be con- 
 sidered the Lesser Arts of Life ? I suppose there 
 might be pros and cons argued on that question, but 
 I doubt if the argument would be worth the time 
 and trouble it would cost ; nevertheless, I want you 
 to agree with me in thinking that these lesser arts 
 are really a part of the greater ones which only a 
 man or two here and there (among cultivated people) 
 
 will venture to acknowledge that he contemns, what- 
 
 jf* 
 ever the real state of the case may be on that matter. 
 
 The Greater Arts of Life, what are they ? Since 
 people may use the word in very different senses, I 
 will say, without pretending to give a definition, that 
 what I mean by an art is some creation of man 
 which appeals to his emotions and his intellect by 
 means of his senses. All the greater arts appeal 
 directly to that intricate combination of intuitive 
 perceptions, feelings, experience, and memory which 
 is called imagination. All artists, who deal with 
 those arts, have these qualities superabundantly, and 
 have them balanced in such exquisite order that 
 they can use them for purposes of creation. But 
 we must never forget that all men who are not 
 naturally deficient, or who have not been spoiled by 
 defective or perverse education, have imagination in 
 some measure, and also have some of the order which 
 
176 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 guides it; so that they also are partakers of the 
 greater arts, and the masters of them have not to 
 speak under their breath to half-a-dozen chosen men, 
 but rather their due audience is the whole race of 
 man properly and healthily developed. But as you 
 know, the race of man, even when very moderately 
 civilised, has a great number of wants which have 
 to be satisfied by the organised labour of the com- 
 munity. From father to son, from generation to 
 generation, has grown up a body of almost myste- 
 rious skill, which has exercised itself in making the 
 tools for carrying on the occupation of living; so 
 that a very large part of the audience of the masters 
 of the greater arts have been engaged like them in 
 making things ; only the higher men were making- 
 things wholly to satisfy men's spiritual wants ; the 
 lower, things whose first intention was to satisfy 
 their bodily wants. But though, in theory, all these 
 could be satisfied without any expression of the 
 imagination, any practice of art, yet history tells us 
 what we might well have guessed would be the case, 
 that the thing could not stop there. Men whose 
 hands were skilled in fashioning things could not 
 help thinking the while, and soon found out that 
 their deft fingers could express some part of the 
 tangle of their thoughts, and that this new pleasure 
 

 IB. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 177 
 
 hindered not their daily work, for in their very labour 
 that they lived by lay the material in which their 
 thought could be embodied ; and thus though they 
 laboured, they laboured somewhat for their pleasure 
 and uncompelled, and had conquered the curse of 
 toil, and were men. 
 
 Here, then, we have two kinds of art : one of 
 them would exist even if men had no needs but 
 such as are essentially spiritual, and only accident- 
 ally material or bodily. The other kind, called into 
 existence by material needs, is bound no less to 
 recognise the aspirations of the soul, and receives 
 the impress of its striving towards perfection. 
 
 If the case be as I have represented it, even the 
 lesser arts are well worthy the attention of reason- 
 able men, and those who despise them must do so 
 either out of ignorance as to what they really are, 
 or because they themselves are in some way or other 
 enemies of civilisation, either outlaws from it or 
 corrupters of it. 
 
 As to the outlaws from civilisation, they are 
 those of whom I began by saying that there are or 
 were people who rejected the arts of life on grounds 
 that we could at least understand, if we could not 
 sympathise with the rejecters. There have been in 
 all ages of civilisation men who have acted, or had 
 
 N 
 
178 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 a tendency to act, on some such principle as the 
 following words represent : The world is full of 
 grievous labour, the poor toiling for the rich, and 
 ever remaining poor; with this we, at least, will 
 have nought to do; we cannot amend it, but we will 
 not be enriched by it, nor be any better than the 
 worst of our fellows. 
 
 Well, this is what may be called the monk's way 
 of rejecting the arts, whether he be Christian monk, 
 or Buddhist ascetic, or ancient philosopher. I be- 
 lieve he is wrong, but I cannot call him enemy. 
 Sometimes I can't help thinking, Who knows but 
 what the whole world may come to that for a little ? 
 the field of art may have to lie fallow a while that 
 the weeds may be known for what they are, and be 
 burnt in the end. 
 
 I say that I have at least respect for the dwellers 
 in the tub of Diogenes ; indeed I don't look upon 
 it as so bad a house after all. With a plane-tree 
 and a clear brook near it, and some chance of daily 
 bread and onions, it will do well enough. I have 
 seen worse houses to let for 700 a year. But, 
 mind you, it must be the real thing. The tub of 
 Diogenes lined with padded drab velvet, lighted by 
 gas, polished and cleaned by vicarious labour, and 
 expecting every morning due visits from the milk- 
 
THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 179 
 
 man, the baker, the butcher, and the fishmonger, 
 that is a cynical dwelling which I cannot praise. 
 If we are to be excused for rejecting the arts, it 
 must be not because we are contented to be less 
 than men, but because we long to be more than 
 men. 
 
 For I have said that there are some rejecters of 
 the arts who are corrupters of civilisation. Indeed, 
 they do not altogether reject them ; they will eat 
 them and drink them and wear them, and use them 
 as lackeys to eke out their grandeur, and as nets 
 to catch money with, but nothing will they learn or 
 care about them. They will push them to the 
 utmost as far as the satisfying of their material 
 needs go, they will increase the labour infinitely that 
 produces material comfort, but they will reach no 
 helping hand to that which makes labour tolerable ; 
 and they themselves are but a part of the crowd 
 that toils without an aim; for they themselves 
 labour with tireless energy to multiply the race of 
 man, and then make the multitude unhappy. There- 
 fore let us pity them, that they have been born 
 coarse, violent, unjust, inhuman ; let us pity them, 
 yet resist them. 
 
 For these things they do unwitting indeed, but are 
 none the less oppressors oppressors of the arts, and 
 
180 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 therefore of the people, who have a right to the solace 
 which the arts alone can give to the life of simple 
 men. Well, these men are, singly or in combination, 
 the rich and powerful of the world ; they rule civil- 
 isation at present, and if it were not through igno- 
 rance that they err, those who see the fault and 
 lament it would indeed have no choice but to reject 
 all civilisation with the ascetic ; but since they are 
 led astray unwittingly, there is belike a better way 
 to resist their oppression than by mere renunciation. 
 I say that if there were no other way of resisting 
 those oppressors of the people whom we call in 
 modern slang "Philistines" save the monk's or 
 ascetic's way, that is the way all honest men would 
 have to take, whose eyes were opened to the evil. 
 But there is another way of resistance, which I shall 
 ask your leave to call the citizen's way, who says : 
 There is a vast deal of labour spent in supplying 
 civilised man with things which he has come to 
 consider needful, and which, as a rule, he will not 
 do without. Much of that labour is grievous and 
 oppressive ; but since there is much more of grievous 
 labour in the world than there used to be, it is clear 
 that there is more than there need be, and more 
 than there will be in time to come, if only men 
 of goodwill look to it; what therefore can we do 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 181 
 
 towards furthering that good time and reducing the 
 amount of grievous labour ; first, by abstaining from 
 multiplying our material wants unnecessarily ; and 
 secondly, by doing our best to introduce the elements 
 of hope and pleasure into all the labour with which 
 we have anything to do ? 
 
 These, I think, are the principles on which the 
 citizen's resistance to Philistine oppression must be 
 founded ; to do with as few things as we can, and, 
 as far as we can, to see to it that these things are 
 the work of freemen and not of slaves; these two 
 seem to me to be the main duties to be fulfilled by 
 those who wish to live a life at once free and refined, 
 serviceable to others, and pleasant to themselves. 
 
 Now it is clear that if we are to fulfil these duties 
 we must take active interest in the arts of life which 
 supply men's material needs, and know something 
 about them, so that we may be able to distinguish 
 slaves' work from freemen's, and to decide what we 
 may accept and what we must renounce of the 
 wares that are offered to us as necessaries and com- 
 forts of life. It is to help you to a small fragment 
 of this necessary knowledge that I am standing 
 before you with this word in my mouth, the Lesser 
 Arts of Life. Of course it is only on a few of these 
 that I have anything to say to you, but of those 
 
182 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 that I shall speak I believe I know something, 
 either as a workman or a very deeply interested 
 onlooker ; wherefore I shall ask your leave to speak 
 quite plainly and without fear or favour. 
 
 You understand that our ground is, that not only 
 is it possible to make the matters needful to our 
 daily life works of art, but that there is something 
 wrong in the civilisation that does not do this : if 
 our houses, our clothes, our household furniture and 
 utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched 
 make-shifts, or what is worse, degrading shams of 
 better things. 
 
 Furthermore, if any of these things make any 
 claim to be considered works of art, they must show 
 obvious traces of the hand of man guided directly 
 by his brain, without more interposition of machines 
 than is absolutely necessary to the nature of the 
 work done. 
 
 Again, whatsoever art there is in any of these 
 articles of daily use must be evolved in a natural 
 and unforced manner from the material that is dealt 
 with : so that the result will be such as could not 
 be got from any other material : if we break this 
 law we shall make a triviality, a toy, not a work of 
 art. 
 
 Lastly, love of nature in all its forms must be the 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 183 
 
 ruling spirit of such works of art as we are consider- 
 ing ; the brain that guides the hand must be healthy 
 and hopeful, must be keenly alive to the surround- 
 ings of our own days, and must be only so much 
 affected by the art of past times as it is natural for 
 one who practises an art which is alive, growing, 
 and looking toward the future. 
 
 Asking you to keep these principles in mind, I 
 will now, with your leave, pass briefly over the Lesser 
 Arts with which I myself am conversant. 
 
 Yet, first, I must mention an art which, though it 
 ministers to our material needs, and therefore, accord- 
 ing to what I have said as to the division between 
 purely spiritual and partly material arts, should be 
 reckoned among the Lesser Arts, has, to judge by 
 its etymology, not been so reckoned in times past, 
 for it has been called Architecture ; nevertheless, it 
 does practically come under the condemnation of 
 those who despise the lesser or more material arts ; 
 so please allow me to reckon it among them. 
 
 Now, speaking of the whole world and at all 
 times, it would not be quite correct to say that the 
 other arts could not exist without it ; because there 
 both have been, and are large and important races 
 of mankind who, properly speaking, have no archi- 
 tecture, who are not house-dwellers but tent-dwellers, 
 
184 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 and who, nevertheless, are by no means barren of 
 the arts. 
 
 For all that it is true that these non-architectural 
 races (let the Chinese stand as a type of them) have 
 no general mastery over the arts, and seem to play 
 with them rather than to try to put their souls into 
 them. Clumsy-handed as the European or Aryan 
 workman is (of a good period, I mean) as compared 
 with his Turanian fellow, there is a seriousness and 
 meaning about his work that raises it as a piece of 
 art far above the deftness of China and Japan ; and 
 it is this very seriousness and depth of feeling which, 
 when brought to bear upon the matters of our daily 
 life, is in fact the soul of Architecture, whatever the 
 body may be ; so that I shall still say that among 
 ourselves, the men of modern Europe, the existence 
 of the other arts is bound up with that of Architect- 
 ure. Please do not forget that, whatever else I may 
 say to-day, you must suppose me to assume that we 
 have noble buildings which we have to adorn with 
 our lesser arts : for this art of building is the true 
 democratic art, the child of the man-inhabited earth, 
 the expression of the life of man thereon. I claim 
 for our Society no less a position than this, than in 
 calling on you to reverence the examples of noble 
 building, and to understand and protect the con- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 185 
 
 tinuity of its history, it is guarding the very springs 
 of all art, of all cultivation. 
 
 Now I would not do this noble art such disrespect 
 as to speak of it in detail as only a part of a subject. 
 I would not treat it so even in its narrower sense 
 as the art of building ; its wider sense I consider 
 to mean the art of creating a building with all 
 the appliances fit for carrying on a dignified and 
 happy life. The arts I have to speak of in more 
 detail are a part, and comparatively a small part, of 
 Architecture considered in that light ; but there is 
 so much to be said even about these, when we have 
 once made up our mind that they are worth our 
 attention at all, that you must understand that my 
 talk to-night will simply be hints to draw your 
 attention to the subjects in question. 
 
 I shall try, then, to give you some hints on these 
 arts or crafts pottery and glass-making; weaving, 
 with its necessary servant dyeing ; the craft of 
 printing patterns (a) on cloth, (&) on paper ; furni- 
 ture ; and also, with fear and trembling, I will say 
 a word on the art of dress. Some of these are lesser 
 arts with a vengeance ; only you see I happen to 
 know something about them practically, and so 
 venture to speak of them. 
 
 So let us begin with pottery, the most ancient and 
 
186 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 universal, as it is perhaps (setting aside house- 
 building) the most important of the lesser arts, and 
 one, too, the consideration of which recommends 
 itself to us from a more or less historical point of 
 view, because, owing to the indestructibility of its 
 surface, it is one of the few domestic arts of which 
 any specimens are left to us of the ancient and 
 classical times. 
 
 Now all nations, however barbarous, have made 
 pottery, sometimes of shapes obviously graceful, 
 sometimes with a mingling of wild grotesquery 
 amid gracefulness ; but none have ever failed to 
 make it on true principles, none have made shapes 
 ugly or base till quite modern times. I should say 
 that the making of ugly pottery was one of the 
 most remarkable inventions of our civilisation. 
 
 All nations with any turn for art have speedily 
 discovered what capabilities for producing beautiful 
 form lie in the making of an earthen pot of the 
 commonest kind, and what opportunities it offers 
 for the reception of swift and unlaborious, but rich 
 ornament ; and how nothing hinders that ornament 
 from taking the form of representation of history 
 and legend. In favour of this art the classical 
 nations relaxed the artistic severity that insisted 
 otherwhere on perfection of Figure-drawing in archi- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSEE ARTS OF LIFE. 187 
 
 tectural work ; and we may partly guess what an 
 astonishing number there must have been of capable 
 and ready draughtsmen in the good times of Greek 
 Art from the great mass of first rate painting on 
 pottery, garnered from the tombs mostly, and still 
 preserved in our museums after all these centuries 
 of violence and neglect. 
 
 Side by side with the scientific and accomplished 
 work of the Greeks, and begun much earlier than 
 the earliest of it, was being practised another form 
 of the art in Egypt and the Euphrates valley ; it 
 was less perfect in the highest qualities of design, 
 but was more elaborate in technique, which elabora- 
 tion no doubt was forced into existence by a -craving 
 for variety and depth of colour and richness of 
 decoration, which did not press heavily on the 
 peoples of the classical civilisation, who, masters of 
 form as they were, troubled themselves but little 
 about the refinements of colour. This art has 
 another interest for us in the fact that from it 
 sprang up all the great school of pottery which has 
 flourished in the East, apart from the special and 
 peculiar work of China. 
 
 Though the fictile art of that country is a develop- 
 ment of so much later date than what we have just 
 been considering, let us make a note of it here 
 
188 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 as the third kind of potter's work, which no doubt 
 had its origin in the exploitation of local material 
 joined to the peculiar turn of the Chinese work- 
 man for finesse of manual skill and for boundless 
 patience. 
 
 Northern Europe during the Middle Ages, includ- 
 ing our own country, could no more do without a 
 native art of pottery than any other simple peoples ; 
 but the work done by them being very rough, and 
 serving for the commonest domestic purposes (always 
 with the exception of certain tile-work), had not the 
 chance of preservation which superstition gave to 
 the Greek pottery, and very little of it is left ; that 
 little shows us that our Gothic forefathers shared 
 the pleasure in the potter's wheel and the capabili- 
 ties of clay for quaint and pleasant form and fanciful 
 invention which has been common to most times 
 and places, and this rough craft even lived on as a 
 village art till almost the days of our grandfathers, 
 turning out worthy work enough, done in a very 
 unconscious and simple fashion on the old and true 
 principles of art, side by side with the whims and 
 inanities which mere fashion had imposed on so- 
 called educated people. 
 
 Every one of these forms of art, with many 
 another which I have no time to speak of, was good 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER AETS OF LIFE. 189 
 
 in itself; the general principles of them may be 
 expressed somewhat as follows : 
 
 1. Your vessel must be of a convenient shape 
 for its purpose. 
 
 2. Its shape must show to the greatest ad- 
 vantage the plastic and easily -worked nature of 
 clay ; the lines of its contour must flow easily ; but 
 you must be on the look-out to check the weakness 
 and languidness that comes from striving after over- 
 elegance. 
 
 3. All the surface must show the hand of the 
 potter, and not be finished with a baser tool. 
 
 4. Smoothness and high finish of surface, though 
 a quality not to be despised, is to be sought after as 
 a means for gaining some special elegance of orna- 
 ment, and not as an end for its own sake. 
 
 5. The commoner the material the rougher the 
 ornament, but by no means the scantier ; on the 
 contrary, a pot of fine materials may be more slightly 
 ornamented, both because all the parts of the orna- 
 mentation will be minuter, and also because it will 
 in general be considered more carefully. 
 
 6. As in the making of the pot, so in its sur- 
 face ornament, the hand of the workman must be 
 always visible in it ; it must glorify the necessary 
 tools and necessary pigment: swift and decided 
 
 
190 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 execution is necessary to it ; whatever delicacy 
 there may be in it must be won in the teeth of the 
 difficulties that will result from this ; and because 
 of these difficulties the delicacy will be more ex- 
 quisite and delightful than in easier arts where, so 
 to say, the execution can wait for more laborious 
 patience. 
 
 These, I say, seem to me the principles that 
 guided the potter's art in the days when it was 
 progressive : it began to cease to be so in civilised 
 countries somewhat late in that period of blight 
 which was introduced by the so-called Benais- 
 sance. Excuse a word or two more of well-known 
 history in explanation. 
 
 Our own pottery of Northern Europe, made 
 doubtless without any reference to classical models, 
 was very rude, as I have said ; it was fashioned 
 of natural clay, glazed when necessary trans- 
 parently with salt or lead, and the ornament 
 on it was done with another light-coloured clay, 
 sometimes coloured further with metallic oxides 
 under the glaze. During the fourteenth and fif- 
 teenth centuries the more finished work, which 
 had its origin, as before mentioned, in Egypt 
 and the Euphrates valley, was introduced into 
 Southern Europe through Moorish or rather Arab 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 191 
 
 Spain, and other points of contact between Europe 
 and the East. This ware, known now as Majolica, 
 was of an earthen body covered with opaque white 
 glaze, ornamented with colours formed of oxides, 
 some of which were by a curious process reduced 
 into a metallic state, giving thereby strange and 
 beautiful lustrous colours. 
 
 This art quickly spread through Italy, and for a 
 short time was practised there with very great 
 success, but was not much taken up by the nations 
 of Northern Europe, who for the most part went on 
 making the old lead or salt glazed earthenware ; the 
 latter, known as Gres de Cologne, still exists as a 
 rough manufacture in the border lands of France 
 and Germany, though I should think it is not 
 destined to live much longer otherwise than as a 
 galvanised modern antique. 
 
 When Italy was still turning out fine works in 
 the Majolica wares much of the glory of the Ee- 
 naissance was yet shining; but the last flicker of 
 that glory had died out by the time that another 
 form of Eastern art invaded our European pottery. 
 Doubtless the folly of the time would have found 
 another instrument for destroying whatever of 
 genuine art was left among our potters if it had not 
 had the work of China ready to hand, but it came to 
 
192 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 pass that this was the instrument that finally made 
 nonsense of the whole craft among us. True it is 
 that a very great proportion of the Chinese work 
 imported consisted of genuine works of art of their 
 kind, though mostly much inferior to the work of 
 Persia, Damascus, or Granada; but the fact is it 
 was not the art in it that captivated our forefathers, 
 but its grosser and more material qualities the 
 whiteness of the paste, the hardness of the glaze, 
 the neatness of the painting, and the consequent 
 delicacy, or luxuriousness rather, of the ware, were 
 the qualities that the eighteenth century potters 
 strove so hard to imitate. They were indeed valuable 
 qualities in the hands of a Chinaman, deft as he 
 was of execution, fertile of design, fanciful though 
 not imaginative ; in short, a born maker of pretty 
 toys; but such daintinesses were of little avail to 
 a good workman of our race, eager, impatient, 
 imaginative, with something of melancholy or 
 inoroseness even in his sport, his very jokes two- 
 edged and fierce, he had other work to do, if his 
 employers but knew it, than the making of toys. 
 
 Well, but in the time we have before us the 
 workman was but thought of as a convenient 
 machine, and this machine, driven by the hap- 
 hazard whims of the time, produced at Meissen, at 
 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 193 
 
 Sevres, at Chelsea, at Derby, and in Staffordshire, a 
 most woeful set of works of art, of which perhaps 
 those of Sevres were the most repulsively hideous, 
 those of Meissen (at their worst) the most bar- 
 barous, and those made in England the stupidest, 
 though it may be the least ugly. 
 
 Now this is very briefly the history of the art of 
 pottery down to our own times, when styleless 
 anarchy prevails ; a state of things not so hopeless 
 as in the last century, because it shows a certain 
 uneasiness as to whether we are right or wrong, 
 which may be a sign of life. Meanwhile, as to 
 matters of art, the craft which turns out such tons 
 of commercial wares, every piece of which ought to 
 be a work of art, produces almost literally nothing. 
 On this dismal side of things I will not dwell, but 
 will ask you to consider with me what can be done 
 to remedy it ; a question which I know exercises 
 much many excellent and public-spirited men who 
 are at the head of pottery works. 
 
 Well, in the first place, it is clear that the 
 initiative cannot be wholly taken by these men; 
 we, all of us I mean who care about the arts, must 
 help them by asking for the right thing, and making 
 them quite clear what it is we ask for. To my 
 mind it should be something like this, which is but 
 
 
194 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 another way of putting those principles of the art 
 which I spoke of before : 
 
 1st, No vessel should be fashioned by being 
 pressed into a mould that can be made by throwing 
 on the wheel, or otherwise by hand. 
 
 2d, All vessels should be finished on the wheel, 
 not turned in a lathe, as is now the custom. 
 How can you expect to have good workmen when 
 they know that whatever surface their hands may 
 put on the work will be taken off by a machine ? 
 
 3d, It follows, as a corollary to the last point, 
 that we must not demand excessive neatness in 
 pottery, and this more especially in cheap wares. 
 Workmanlike finish is necessary, but finish to be 
 workmanlike must always be in proportion to the 
 kind of work. What we get in pottery at present 
 is mechanical finish, not workmanlike, and is as 
 easy to do as the other is hard : one is a matter 
 of a manager's system, the other comes of constant 
 thought and trouble on the part of the men, who by 
 that time are artists, as we call them. 
 
 4:th, As to the surface decoration on pottery, it is 
 clear it must never be printed ; for the rest, it would 
 take more than an hour to go even very briefly 
 into the matter of painting on pottery; but one rule 
 we have for a guide, and whatever we do if we 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 195 
 
 abide by it, we are quite sure to go wrong if we 
 reject it : and it is common to all the lesser arts. 
 Think of your material. Don't paint anything on 
 pottery save what can be painted only on pottery ; 
 if you do, it is clear that however good a draughts- 
 man you may be, you do not care about that special 
 art. You can't suppose that the Greek wall-paint- 
 ing was anything like their painting on pottery 
 there is plenty of evidence to show that it was not. 
 Or, take another example from . the Persian art ; it 
 is easy for those conversant with it to tell from an 
 outline tracing of a design whether it was done for 
 pottery-painting or for other work. 
 
 5th, Finally, when you have asked for these 
 qualities from the potters, and even in a very 
 friendly way Boycotted them a little till you get 
 them, you will of course be prepared to pay a 'great 
 deal more for your pottery than you do now, even 
 for the rough work you may have to take. I'm 
 sure that won't hurt you ; we shall only have less 
 and break less, and our incomes will still be the 
 same. 
 
 Now as to the kindred art of making glass vessels. 
 It is on much the same footing as the potter's 
 craft. Never till our own day has an ugly or 
 stupid glass vessel been made ; and no wonder, 
 
196 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 considering the capabilities of the art. In the 
 hands of a good workman the metal is positively 
 alive, and is, you may say, coaxing him to make 
 something pretty. Nothing but commercial enter- 
 prise capturing an unlucky man and setting him 
 down in the glass-maker's chair with his pattern 
 beside him (which I should think must generally 
 have been originally designed by a landscape 
 gardener) nothing but this kind of thing could turn 
 out ugly glasses. This stupidity will never be set 
 right till we give up demanding accurately-gauged 
 glasses made by the gross. I am fully in earnest 
 when I say that if I were setting about getting good 
 glasses made, I would get some good workmen 
 together, tell them the height and capacity of the 
 vessels I wanted, and perhaps some general idea as 
 to kind of shape, and then let them do their best. 
 Then I would sort them out as they came from the 
 annealing arches (what a pleasure that would be!) 
 and I would put a good price on the best ones, for 
 they would be worth it ; and I don't believe that 
 the worst would be bad. 
 
 In speaking of glass-work, it is a matter of course 
 that I am only thinking of that which is blown 
 and worked by hand ; moulded and cut glass may 
 have commercial, but can't have artistic value. 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 197 
 
 As to the material of the glass vessels, that is 
 a very important point. Modern managers have 
 worked very hard to get their glass colourless : it 
 does not seem to me that they have quite suc- 
 ceeded. I should say that their glass was cold and 
 bluish in colour ; but whether or not, their aim was 
 wrong. A slight tint is an advantage in the metal, 
 so are slight specks and streaks, for these things 
 make the form visible. The modern managers of 
 glassworks have taken enormous pains to get rid 
 of all colour in their glass ; to get it so that when 
 worked into a vessel it shall not show any slightest 
 speck or streak ; in fact, they have toiled to take 
 all character out of the metal, and have succeeded ; 
 and this in spite of the universal admiration for the 
 Venice glass of the seventeenth century, which is 
 both specked and streaky, and has visible colour in 
 it. This glass of Venice or Murano is most delicate 
 in its form, and was certainly meant quite as much 
 for ornament as use ; so you may be sure that if 
 the makers of it had seen any necessity for getting 
 more mechanical perfection in their metal they 
 would have tried for it and got it ; but like all true 
 artists they were contented when they had a 
 material that served the purpose of their special 
 craft, and would not weary themselves in seeking 
 
198 THE LESSEE ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 after what they did not want. And I feel sure 
 that if they had been making glass for ordinary 
 table use at a low price, and which ran more risks 
 of breakage, as they would have had to fashion their 
 vessels thicker and less daintily they would have 
 been contented with a rougher metal than that 
 which they used. Such a manufacture yet remains 
 to be set on foot, and I very much wish it could be 
 done ; only it must be a manufacture ; must be done 
 by hand, and not by machine, human or otherwise. 
 
 So much, and very briefly, of these two important 
 Lesser Arts, which it must be admitted are useful, 
 even to Diogenes, since the introduction of tea : 
 I have myself at a pinch tried a tin mug for tea, 
 and found it altogether inconvenient, and a horn I 
 found worse still ; so, since we must have pottery 
 and glass, and since it is only by an exertion of the 
 cultivated intellect that they can be made ugly, I 
 must needs wish that we might take a little less 
 trouble in that direction : at the same time I quite 
 understand that in this case both the goods would 
 cost the consumers more, even much more, and that 
 the capitalists who risk their money in keeping the 
 manufactories of the goods going would make less 
 money ; both which things to my mind would be 
 fruitful in benefits to the community. 
 
THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 199 
 
 The next craft I have to speak of is that of 
 Weaving : not so much of an art as pottery and 
 glass-making, because so much of it must be mecha- 
 nical, engaged in the making of mere plain cloth ; 
 of which side of it all one need say is that we 
 should have as little plain cloth made as we con- 
 veniently can, and for that reason should insist 
 on having it made well and solidly, and of good 
 materials ; the other side of it, that which deals 
 with figure - weaving, must be subdivided into 
 figure -weaving which is carried out mechanically, 
 and figure - weaving which is altogether a handi- 
 craft. 
 
 As to the first of these, its interest is limited by 
 the fact that it is mechanical ; since the manner of 
 doing it has with some few exceptions varied little 
 for many hundred years : such trivial alterations as 
 the lifting the warp-threads by means of the Jac- 
 quard machine, or throwing the shuttle by steam- 
 power, ought not to make much difference in the 
 art of it, though I cannot say that they have not 
 done so. On the other hand, though mechanical, 
 it produces very beautiful things, which an artist 
 cannot disregard, and man's ingenuity and love of 
 beauty may be made obvious enough in it ; neither 
 do I call the figure- weaver's craft a dull one, if he be 
 
200 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 set to do things which are worth doing : to watch 
 the web growing day by day almost magically, in 
 anticipation of the time when it is to be taken out 
 and one can see it on the right side in all its well 
 schemed beauty ; to make something beautiful that 
 will last, out of a few threads of silk and wool, 
 seems to me not an unpleasant way of earning one's 
 livelihood, so long only as one lives and works in a 
 pleasant place, with work-day not too long, and a 
 book or two to be got at. 
 
 However, since this is admittedly a mechanical 
 craft, I have not much to say of it, since it is not 
 my business this evening to speak of the designs 
 for its fashioning : this much one may say, that as 
 the designing of woven stuffs fell into degradation in 
 the latter days, the designers got fidgeting after trivial 
 novelties; change for the sake of change; they must 
 needs strive to make their woven flowers look as if 
 they were painted with a brush, or even sometimes 
 as if they were drawn by the engraver's burin. 
 This gave them plenty of trouble and exercised their 
 ingenuity in the tormenting of their web with spots 
 and stripes and ribs and the rest of it, but quite 
 destroyed the seriousness of the work, and even its 
 raison d'etre. As of pottery-painting, so of figure- 
 weaving : do nothing in it but that which only 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 201 
 
 weaving can do : and to this end make your design 
 as elaborate as you please in silhouette, but carry 
 it out simply ; you are not drawing lines freely 
 with your shuttle, you are building up a pattern 
 with a fine rectilinear mosaic. If this is kept well 
 in mind by the designer, and he does not try to 
 force his material into no -thoroughfares, he may 
 have abundant pleasure in the making of woven 
 stuffs, and he is perhaps less likely to go wrong (if 
 he has a feeling for colour) in this art than in any 
 other. I will say further that he should be careful 
 to get due proportions between his warp and weft : 
 not to starve the first, which is the body of the web 
 so to say, for the sake of the second, which is its 
 clothes : this is done now-a-days over much by 
 ingenious designers who are trying to make their web 
 look like non-mechanical stuffs, or who want to get 
 a delusive show of solidity in a poor cloth, which is 
 much to be avoided : a similar fault we are too 
 likely to fall into is of a piece with what is done 
 in all the lesser arts to-day ; and which doubtless 
 is much fostered by the ease given to our managers 
 of works by the over -development of machinery : 
 I am thinking of the weaving up of rubbish into 
 apparently delicate and dainty wares. No man, with 
 the true instinct of a workman, should have any- 
 
202 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 thing to do with this : it may not mean commercial 
 dishonesty, though I suspect it sometimes does, but 
 it must mean artistic dishonesty : poor materials in 
 this craft, as in all others, should only be used in 
 coarse work, where they are used without pretence for 
 what they are : this we must agree to at once, or 
 sink all art in commerce (so-called) in these crafts. 
 
 So much for mechanical figure- weaving. Its raison- 
 d'dtre is that it gives scope to the application of 
 imagination and beauty to any cloth, thick or thin, 
 close or open, costly or cheap ; in some way or other 
 you may weave any of these into figures ; but when 
 we may limit ourselves to certain heavy, close, and 
 very costly cloths we no longer need the help of 
 anything that can fairly be called machine : little 
 more is needed than a frame which will support 
 heavy beams on which we may strain our warp : 
 our work is purely hand- work we may do what we 
 will according to the fineness of our warp : these are 
 the conditions of carpet and tapestry weaving : 
 meaning by carpets the real thing, such as the East 
 has furnished us with from time immemorial, and 
 not the makeshift imitation woven by means of the 
 Jacquard loom, or otherwise mechanically. 
 
 As to the art of carpet-weaving, then, one must 
 say that historically it belongs to the East. I do 
 
MORKIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 203 
 
 not think it has been proved that any piled carpets 
 were made in Europe during the Middle Ages proper, 
 though some writers have thought that a fabric 
 called in edicts of the fourteenth century " tapisserie 
 sarracenois," was in fact piled carpet- work : however 
 in the seventeenth century they certainly were being 
 made to a certain extent even in these islands : 
 amongst other examples I have seen some pieces of 
 carpet-work in a Jacobean house in Oxfordshire, 
 which an inventory of about 1620 calls oddly 
 enough " Irish stitch : " but wherever the history of 
 the art may begin among ourselves, I fear it may 
 almost be said to end with the seventeenth century ; 
 there are still a few places where hand- wrought car- 
 pets are made, but scarcely anything original is done ; 
 coarsely copied imitations of the Levantine carpets, 
 and a sort of deduction from the degraded follies of 
 the time of Louis XV., traditionally thought to be 
 suitable for the dreary waste of an aristocratic 
 country-house, are nearly all that is turned out at 
 present. Still I do not agree with an opinion, which 
 I have heard expressed, that carpets can only be 
 made in the East : such carpets as have been made 
 there for the last hundred years or so, which are 
 chiefly pieces of nearly formless colour, could not 
 be made satisfactorily and spontaneously by Western 
 
204 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 art ; but these carpets, delightful as they are, are 
 themselves the product of a failing art : their proto- 
 types are partly those simple but scientifically 
 designed cloths, whose patterns are founded on the 
 elaborate pavement mosaics of Byzantine art ; and 
 partly they are degradations, traceable by close 
 study, from the elaborate floral art of Persia; the 
 originals of the first kind may be seen accurately 
 figured in many of the pictures of the palmy days of 
 Italian and Flemish art, and, as I have said, they are 
 designed on scientific principles which any good 
 designer can apply to works of our own day without 
 burdening his conscience with the charge of plagi- 
 arism. As to the other kind of the Persian floral 
 designs, there are still a few of these in existence, 
 though, as I have never seen any of them figured 
 in old pictures, I doubt if they found their way to 
 Europe much in the Middle Ages. These, beautiful 
 as they are in colour, are as far as possible from 
 lacking form in design ; they are fertile of imagina- 
 tion and lovely in drawing ; and though imitation 
 of them would carry with it its usual disastrous 
 consequences, they show us the way to set about 
 designing suchlike things, and that a carpet can 
 be made which by no means depends for its success 
 on the mere instinct for colour, which is the last 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 205 
 
 gift of art to leave certain races. Withal, one thing 
 seems certain, that if we don't set to work making 
 our own carpets it will not be long before we shall 
 find the East fail us : for that last gift, the gift of 
 the sense of harmonious colour, is speedily dying out 
 in the East before the conquests of European rifles 
 and money-bags. 
 
 As to the other manufacture of unmechanically 
 woven cloth, the art of tapestry -weaving, it was, 
 while it flourished, not only an art of Europe, but even 
 of Northern Europe. Still more than carpet-weav- 
 ing, it must be spoken of in the past tense. If you 
 are curious on the subject of its technique you may 
 see that going on as in its earlier, or let us say real, 
 life at the Gobelins at Paris ; but it is a melancholy 
 sight : the workmen are as handy at it as only 
 Frenchmen can be at such work, and their skill is 
 traditional too, I have heard ; for they are the 
 sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of tapestry- 
 weavers. Well, their ingenuity is put to the greatest 
 pains for the least results : it would be a mild 
 word to say that what they make is worthless ; it is 
 more than that ; it has a corrupting and deadening 
 influence upon all the Lesser Arts of France, since 
 it is always put forward as the very standard and 
 crown of all that those arts can do at the best : a 
 
206 THE LESSEE ARTS OF LIFE. MOKKIS. 
 
 more idiotic waste of human labour and skill it is 
 impossible to conceive. There is another branch of 
 the same stupidity, differing slightly in technique, 
 at Beauvais ; and the little town of Aubusson in 
 mid-France has a decaying commercial industry of 
 the like rubbish. I am sorry to have to say that an 
 attempt to set the art going, which has been made, 
 doubtless with the best intentions, under royal 
 patronage at Windsor, within the last few years, has 
 most unluckily gone on the lines of the work at the 
 Gobelins, and if it does not change its system utterly, 
 is doomed to artistic failure, whatever its commercial 
 success may be. 
 
 Well, this is all I have to say about the poor 
 remains of the art of tapestry -weaving: and yet 
 what a noble art it was once ! To turn our chamber 
 walls into the green woods of " the leafy month of 
 June," populous of bird and beast ; or a summer 
 garden with man and maid playing round the foun- 
 tains, or a solemn procession of the mythical warriors 
 and heroes of old ; that surely was worth the trouble 
 of doing, and the money that had to be paid for it : 
 that was no languid acquiescence in an upholsterer's 
 fashion. 
 
 How well I remember as a boy my first acquaint- 
 ance with a room hung with faded greenery at 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 207 
 
 Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in 
 Epping Forest (I wonder what has become of it 
 now ?), and the impression of romance that it made 
 upon me ! a feeling that always comes back on me 
 when I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Anti- 
 quary, and come to the description of the Green 
 Koom at Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist 
 has with such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the 
 fresh and glittering verses of the summer poet 
 Chaucer : yes, that was more than upholstery, believe 
 me. 
 
 Nor must you forget that when the art was at its 
 best, while on the one side it was almost a domestic 
 art, and all sorts of naive fancies were embodied in it, 
 it took the place in Northern Europe of the fresco 
 painting of Italy ; among the existing easel pictures 
 of the Flemish school of the fifteenth century there 
 are no designs which are equal in conception and 
 breadth of treatment to those which were worked 
 out in tapestry, and I believe that some of the very 
 best Northern artists spent the greater part of their 
 time in designing for this art. Eoger van der 
 Weyden of the Cologne school is named as having 
 done much in this way : under the gallery of the 
 great hall at Hampton Court hangs a piece which I 
 suppose is by him, and which at any rate is, taking 
 
208 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 it altogether, the finest piece I have seen. There is 
 quite a school of tapestry in the place, by the way : 
 the withdrawing room or solar at the end of the hall 
 is hung with tapestries, but little inferior to the first 
 mentioned and perhaps a little later, but unluckily, 
 unlike it, much obscured by the dirt of centuries 
 (not faded, only dirty), while the main walls of the 
 great hall itself are hung with work of a later date, 
 say about 1580. You may test your taste by com- 
 paring these later works (very fine of their kind) 
 with the earlier, and seeing which you like best. I 
 will not try to influence you on this matter, but 
 will only say that the borders of this later tapestry 
 are admirably skilful pieces of execution. 
 
 Perhaps you will think I have said too much 
 about an art that has practically perished ; but as 
 there is nothing whatever to prevent us from re- 
 viving it if we please, since the technique of it is 
 easy to the last degree, so also it seems to me that 
 in the better days of art the exaltation of certain 
 parts of a craft into the region of the higher arts 
 was both a necessary consequence of the excellence 
 of the craft as a whole, and in return kept up that 
 excellence to its due pitch by example ; the magni- 
 ficent woven pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries were the natural result of the pleasure and 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 209 
 
 skill that were exercised in the art of weaving in 
 every village and homestead, at the same time that 
 they were an encouragement to the humbler brother 
 of the craft to persevere in doing his best. 
 
 I have now to speak of a craft which I daresay 
 some of you will think a lesser art indeed, but which 
 nevertheless we cannot help considering if we are 
 to trouble ourselves at all about the art of weaving. 
 This is the dyer's craft : of which I must say that 
 no craft has been so oppressed by the philistinism of 
 false commerce, or by the ignorance of the public as 
 to their real wants ; which oppression is of very late 
 date, and belongs almost wholly to our own days. 
 
 I should very much like to be able to tell you 
 the whole story of this ancient craft, but time fails 
 me to give you more than the very barest outline 
 of it. 
 
 The ancient Egyptians knew well the niceties of 
 the art. I myself have dyed wool red by the self- 
 same process that the Mosaical dyers used ; and 
 from the remotest times the whole art was thoroughly 
 understood in India. If to-day I want for my own 
 use some of the red dye above alluded to, I must 
 send to Argolis or Acharnania for it ; and Pliny 
 would have been quite at home in the dye-house of 
 Tintoretto's father (or master) ; no change at all 
 
 p 
 
210 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 befell the art either in the East or the North till 
 after the discovery of America ; this gave the dyers 
 one new material in itself good, and one that was 
 doubtful or bad. The good one was the new insect 
 dye, cochineal, which at first was used only for dye- 
 ing crimson (or bluish red), and for this use cast 
 into the shade the older red insect dye above alluded 
 to, called by the classical peoples coccus, and by the 
 Arabs Al kermes. The bad new material was log- 
 wood, so fugitive a dye as to be quite worthless as 
 a colour by itself (as it was at first used), and to my 
 mind of very little use otherwise. No other new 
 dye-stuff of importance was found in America, 
 although the discoverers came across such abund- 
 ance of red-dyeing wood growing there that a huge 
 country of South America has thence taken its name 
 of Brazil. 
 
 The next change happened about 1630, when a 
 German discovered accidentally how to dye scarlet 
 with cochineal on a tin basis, thereby putting the 
 old dye, kermes, almost wholly out of commerce. 
 Next, in the last years of the eighteenth century, a 
 worthless blue was invented (which I don't name, to 
 avoid confusion in this brief sketch). About the 
 same time a rather valuable yellow dye (quercitron 
 bark) was introduced from America. Next, in 1810, 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 211 
 
 chemical science, which by this time had got fairly 
 on its legs, began to busy itself about the dyer's 
 craft, and discovered how to dye with Prussian blue, 
 a colour which, as a pigment, had been discovered 
 about eighty years before ; this discovery was rather 
 harmful than otherwise to my mind, but was cer- 
 tainly an important one, since before that time there 
 was but one dyeing drug that could give a blue 
 colour capable of standing a week of diffused day- 
 light even, indigo to wit, whether it was produced 
 from tropical or sub -tropical plants, or from our 
 Northern plant, woad. 
 
 Now these novelties, the sum of which amounts 
 to very little, are all that make any difference 
 between the practice of dyeing under Eameses the 
 Great and under Queen Victoria, till about twenty 
 years ago ; about that time a series of the most 
 wonderful discoveries were made by the chemists ; 
 discoveries which did the utmost credit to their 
 skill, patience, and capacity for scientific research, 
 and which, from a so-called commercial point of 
 view, have been of the greatest importance; for 
 they have, as the phrase goes, revolutionised the art 
 of dyeing. The dye stuffs discovered by the inde- 
 fatigable genius of scientific chemists, which every 
 one has heard of under the name of aniline colours, 
 
212 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 and which are the product of coal-tar, are brighter 
 and stronger in colour than the old dyes, cheaper 
 (much cheaper) in price, and, which is of course of 
 the last importance to the dyer, infinitely easier to 
 use. No wonder, therefore, that they have almost 
 altogether supplanted the older dyes, except in a few 
 cases : surely the invention seems a splendid one ! 
 
 Well, it is only marred by one fact, that being 
 an invention for the benefit of an art whose very 
 existence depends upon its producing beauty, it is 
 on the road, and far advanced on it, towards destroy- 
 ing all beauty in the art. The fact is, that every 
 one of these colours is hideous in itself, whereas all 
 the old dyes are in themselves beautiful colours 
 only extreme perversity could make an ugly colour 
 out of them. Under these circumstances it must, I 
 suppose, be considered a negative virtue in the new 
 dyes, that they are as fugitive as the older ones are 
 stable; but even on that head I will ask you to 
 note one thing that condemns them finally, that 
 whereas the old dyes when fading, as all colours will 
 do more or less, simply gradually changed into paler 
 tints of the same colour, and were not unpleasant to 
 look on, the fading of the new dyes is a change into 
 all kinds of abominable and livid hues. I mention 
 this because otherwise it might be thought that a 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 213 
 
 man with an artistic eye for colour might so blend 
 the hideous hut bright aniline colours as to produce 
 at least something tolerable ; indeed, this is not 
 unfrequently attempted to-day, but with small 
 success, partly from the reason above mentioned, 
 partly because the hues so produced by " messing 
 about," as I should call it, have none of the quality 
 or character which the simpler drug gives naturally : 
 all artists will understand what I mean by this. 
 
 In short, this is what it comes to, that it would 
 be better for us, if we cannot revive the now almost 
 lost art of dyeing, to content ourselves with weaving 
 our cloths of the natural colour of the fibre, or to 
 buy them coloured by less civilised people than 
 ourselves. 
 
 Now, really even if you think the art of dyeing 
 as contemptible as Pliny did, you must admit that 
 this is a curious state of things, and worth while 
 considering, even by a philosopher. It is most true 
 that the chemists of our day have made discoveries 
 almost past belief for their wonder ; they have given 
 us a set of colours which has made a new thing of 
 the dyer's craft; commercial enterprise has eagerly 
 seized on the gift, and yet, unless all art is to dis- 
 appear from our woven stuffs, we must turn round 
 and utterly and simply reject it. We must relegate 
 
214 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 these new dyes to a museum of scientific curiosities, 
 and for our practice go back, if not to the days of 
 the Pharaohs, yet at least to those of Tintoret. 
 
 I say I invite you to consider this, because it is 
 a type of the oppression under which the lesser arts 
 are suffering at the present day. 
 
 The art of dyeing leads me naturally to the 
 humble but useful art of printing on cloth ; really 
 a very ancient art, since it is not essential to it that 
 the pattern should be printed ; it may be painted 
 by hand. Now, the painting of cloth with real 
 dyes was practised from the very earliest days in 
 India; and, since the Egyptians of Pliny's time 
 knew the art well, it is most probable that in that 
 little-changing land it was very old also. Indeed 
 many of the minute and elaborate patterns on the 
 dresses of Egyptian imagery impress me strongly as 
 representing what would naturally be the work of 
 dye-painted linen. 
 
 As to the craft among ourselves, it has, as a matter 
 of course, suffered grievously from the degradation 
 of dyeing, and this not only from the worsening of 
 the tints both in beauty and durability, but from a 
 more intricate cause. I have said that the older 
 dyes were much more difficult to use than the 
 modern ones. The processes for getting a many- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 215 
 
 coloured pattern on to a piece of cotton, even so 
 short a while back as when I was a boy, were many 
 and difficult. As a rule, this is done in fewer hours 
 now than it was in days then. You may think this 
 a desirable change, but, except on the score of cheap- 
 ness, I can't agree with you. The natural and 
 healthy difficulties of the old processes, all connected 
 as they were with the endeavour to make the colour 
 stable, drove any designer who had anything in him 
 to making his pattern peculiarly suitable to the 
 whole art, and gave a character to it that charac- 
 ter which you so easily recognise in Indian palam- 
 pores, or in the faded curtains of our grandmothers' 
 time, which still, in spite of many a summer's sun 
 and many and many a strenuous washing, retain at 
 least their reds and blues. In spite of the rudeness 
 or the extravagance of these things, we are always 
 attracted towards them, and the chief reason is, that 
 we feel at once that there is something about the 
 designs natural to the craft, that they can be done 
 only by the practice of it ; a quality which, I must 
 once more repeat, is a necessity for all the designs of 
 the lesser arts. But in the comparatively easy way 
 in which these cloths are printed to-day, there are no 
 special difficulties to stimulate the designer to inven- 
 tion ; he can get any design done on his cloth ; the 
 
216 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 printer will make no objections, so long as the pattern 
 is the right size for his roller, and has only the due 
 number of colours. The result of all this is orna- 
 ment on the cotton, which might just as well have 
 been printed or drawn on paper, and in spite of any 
 grace or cleverness in the design, it is found to look 
 poor and tame and wiry. That you will see clearly 
 enough when some one has had a fancy to imitate 
 some of the generous and fertile patterns that were 
 once specially designed for the older cloths : it all 
 comes to nothing it is dull, hard, unsympathetic. 
 
 No ; there is nothing for it but the trouble and 
 the simplicity of the earlier craft, if you are to have 
 any beauty in cloth -printing at all. And if not, 
 why should we trouble to have a pattern of any sort 
 on our cotton cloths ? I for one am dead against 
 it, unless the pattern is really beautiful ; it is so 
 very worthless if it is not. 
 
 As I have been speaking about printing on cotton 
 cloths, I suppose I am bound to say something also 
 on the quite modern and very humble, but, as things 
 go, useful art of printing patterns on paper for wall- 
 hangings. But really there is not much to be said 
 about it, unless we were considering the arrangement 
 and formation of its patterns ; because it is so very 
 free from those difficulties the meeting and conquer- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 ing of which give character to the more intric 
 crafts. I think the real way to deal successfully; *^^% % 
 with designing for paper-hangings is to accept their 
 mechanical nature frankly, to avoid falling into the 
 trap of trying to make your paper look as if it were 
 painted by hand. Here is the place, if anywhere, 
 for dots and lines and hatchings : mechanical enrich- 
 ment is of the first necessity in it. After that you 
 may be as intricate and elaborate in your pattern as 
 you please ; nay, the more and the more mysteriously 
 you interweave your sprays and stems the better 
 for your purpose, as the whole thing has to be pasted 
 flat on a wall, and the cost of all this intricacy will but 
 come out of your own brain and hand. For the 
 rest, the fact that in this art we are so little helped 
 by beautiful and varying material imposes on us 
 the necessity for being specially thoughtful in our 
 designs; every one of them must have a distinct 
 idea in it ; some beautiful piece of nature must have 
 pressed itself on our notice so forcibly that we are 
 quite full of it, and can, by submitting ourselves to 
 the rules of art, express our pleasure to others, and 
 give them some of the keen delight that we ourselves 
 have felt. If we cannot do this in some measure 
 our paper design will not be worth much ; it will be 
 but a makeshift expedient for covering a wall with 
 
218 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 something or other ; and if we really care about art 
 we shall not put up with " something or other," but 
 shall choose honest whitewash instead, on which 
 sun and shadow play so pleasantly, if only our room 
 be well planned and well shaped, and look kindly 
 on us. 
 
 A great if indeed ; which lands me at once into 
 my next division of the lesser arts, which for want 
 of a better word I will call house-furnishing : I say 
 it lands me there, because if only our houses were 
 built as they should be, we should want such a 
 little furniture and be so happy in that scanti- 
 ness. Even as it is, we should at all events take 
 as our maxim the less the better : excess of furni- 
 ture destroys the repose of a lazy man, and is in 
 the way of an industrious one ; and besides, if we 
 really care for art we shall always feel inclined to 
 save on superfluities, that we may have wherewithal 
 to spend on works of art. 
 
 Simplicity is the one thing needful in furnishing, 
 of that I am certain ; I mean first as to quantity, 
 and secondly as to kind and manner of design ; the 
 arrangement of our houses ought surely to express 
 the kind of life we lead, or desire to lead ; and to 
 my mind if there is anything to be said in favour of 
 that to-day somewhat well -abused English Middle 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 219 
 
 Class, it is that, amidst all the narrowness that is 
 more or less justly charged against it, it has a kind 
 of orderly intelligence which is not without some 
 value ; such as it is, such its houses ought to be if 
 it takes any pains about them, as I think it should : 
 they should look like part of the life of decent 
 citizens prepared to give good commonplace reasons 
 for what they do : for us to set to work to imitate 
 the minor vices of the Borgias, or the degraded and 
 nightmare whims of the UasS and bankrupt French 
 aristocracy of Louis XV.'s time, seems to me merely 
 ridiculous. So I say our furniture should be good 
 citizen's furniture, solid and well made in work- 
 manship, and in design should have nothing about 
 it that is not easily defensible, no monstrosities or 
 extravagances, not even of beauty, lest we weary of 
 it : as to matters of construction, it should not have 
 to depend on the special skill of a very picked 
 workman, or the superexcellence of his glue, but be 
 made on the proper principles of the art of joinery : 
 also I think that, except for very movable things 
 like chairs, it should not be so very light as to be 
 nearly imponderable ; it should be made of timber 
 rather than walking-sticks. Moreover, I must needs 
 think of furniture as of two kinds : one part of it 
 being chairs, dining and working tables, and the 
 
220 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 like, the necessary work-a-day furniture in short, 
 which should be of course both well made and well 
 proportioned, but simple to the last degree ; nay, if 
 it were rough I should like it the better, not the 
 worse; with work-a-day furniture like this we 
 should among other blessings avoid the terror which 
 now too often goes with the tolerably regularly 
 recurring accidents of the week. 
 
 But besides this kind of furniture, there is the 
 other kind of what I should call state -furniture, 
 which I think is proper even for a citizen ; I mean 
 side-boards, cabinets, and the like, which we have 
 quite as much for beauty's sake as for use ; we need 
 not spare ornament on these, but may make them 
 as elegant and elaborate as we can with carving, 
 inlaying, or painting ; these are the blossoms of the 
 art of furniture, as picture-tapestry is of the art of 
 weaving : but these also should not be scattered 
 about the house at haphazard, but should be used 
 architecturally to dignify important chambers and 
 important places in them. 
 
 And once more ; whatever you have in your 
 rooms think first of the walls ; for they are that 
 which makes your house and home ; and if you don't 
 make some sacrifice in their favour, you will find 
 your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 221 
 
 house look about them, however rich and handsome 
 your movables may be. 
 
 The last of the Lesser Arts I have to speak of I 
 come to with some trepidation ; but it is so im-. 
 portant to one half of the race of civilised mankind, 
 the male half, that I will venture : indeed I speak of 
 the art of dress with the more terror because civili- 
 sation has settled for us males that art shall have no 
 place in our clothes, and that we must in this 
 matter occupy the unamiable position of critics of 
 our betters ; rebel as I am, I bow to that decision, 
 though I find it difficult to admit that a chimney- 
 pot hat or a tail-coat is the embodiment of wisdom 
 in clothes-philosophy; and sometimes in my more * 
 sceptical moments I puzzle myself in thinking why, 
 when I am indoors, I should wear two coats, one 
 with a back and no front, and the other with a 
 front and no back :' however, I have not near enough 
 courage even to suggest a rebellion against these 
 stern sartorial laws ; and after all one can slip into 
 and out of the queer things with great ease, and that 
 being the case, it is far more important to me what 
 other people wear than what I wear : so that I 
 ask leave to be an irresponsible critic for a few 
 moments. 
 
222 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 Now I have lived through at least two periods 
 of feminine dress, without counting the present one, 
 which I perceive with some terror is trembling on 
 the verge of change : yes, with terror, because for a 
 good many years past, in spite of a few extrava- 
 gancies, the dress of ladies in England has been 
 highly satisfactory, and very consolatory for the 
 mishaps that have befallen the lesser arts other- 
 wise. 
 
 Under these circumstances, both for the sake of 
 the hope and the warning that may lie in it, I will 
 venture to call to your memory what has befallen 
 the art of dress in modern times. 
 
 The days of Louis XV. draw across our path a 
 kind of enchanted wood of abominations into which 
 we need not venture : out of those horrors costume 
 escaped into a style that was really graceful and 
 simple in the years that came just before the French 
 Eevolution. What this costume really was you can 
 see as clearly as anywhere in the engravings de- 
 signed by the quaint and fertile book illustrator, the 
 Pole Chodowiescki, whose works were much imitated 
 by our Stothard. Then came a period when dress 
 was influenced by the affectation of imitating the 
 art and manners of the classical times, which pro- 
 duced under the First Napoleon a costume charac- 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 223 
 
 terised by somewhat of an exaggeration of slim 
 gracefulness amongst other extravagancies ; for which 
 affectations a dire revenge was lying in wait, the 
 result of which, after a doubtful time between the 
 dates of the Battle of Waterloo and the accession of 
 Queen Victoria, was a style which one may call 
 that of grim modern respectability : into the middle 
 of that period I was born, and well I remember 
 its horrors. If you can get at an Illustrated London 
 News of about the time of the Queen's visit to Louis 
 Philippe, look at the costumes in it ; they will give 
 you cause for serious reflection : or for an earlier 
 example (I think) take up your Oliver Twist, with 
 George Cruikshank's illustrations, and contemplate 
 on the effigy there figured of that insipid person 
 Miss Eose Maylie. 1 
 
 Well, that was the first period I have seen ; on 
 this period gradually crept another, which, .at its 
 height at least, could not be accused of over-much 
 love of respectability : this period was that of crino- 
 line. The woodcuts of John Leech give you admir- 
 able illustrations of all the stages of this period. 
 It conquered something from its predecessor in that 
 on the whole it allowed women to arrange their 
 
 1 I do not mean any disrespect to Dickens, of whom I am a 
 humble worshipper. 
 
224 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 hair naturally and gracefully ; but in everything 
 else mere blatant vulgarity was apparently what it 
 aimed at. I have good hopes that one may say 
 that the degradation of costume reached its lowest 
 depth in this costume of the Second Empire. 1 
 
 This is the second period of costume that I have 
 seen, and its end brings us to the beginning of 
 things as they are ; when woman's dress is or may 
 be on the whole graceful and sensible please note 
 that I say it may le for the most hopeful sign of 
 the present period is its freedom : in the two pre- 
 vious periods there was no freedom ; in that of grim 
 respectability a lady was positively under well- 
 understood penalties not allowed to dress gracefully, 
 she could not do it ; under the reign of crinoline if 
 she had dressed simply and beautifully, like a lady, 
 in short, she would have been hooted in the streets ; 
 but now-a-days, and for years past, a lady may dress 
 quite simply and beautifully and yet not be noticed 
 as having anything peculiar or theatrical in her 
 costume. Extravagancies of fashion have not been 
 lacking to us, but no one has been compelled to 
 adopt them ; every one might dress herself in the 
 
 1 Indeed I hope so ; but since this Lecture was delivered, unhappy 
 tokens are multiplying that fine ladies are determined to try 
 whether ugliness may not be more attractive than beauty. 
 

 MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 225 
 
 way which her own good sense told her suited 
 best. Now this, ladies, is the first and gre 
 necessity of rational and beautiful costume, that 
 should keep your liberty of choice ; so I beg you 
 to battle stoutly for it, or we shall all tumble into 
 exploded follies again. 
 
 Then next, your only chance of keeping that 
 liberty is, to resist the imposition on costume of 
 unnatural monstrosities. Garments should veil the 
 human form, and neither caricature it, nor obliterate 
 its lines : the body should be draped, and neither 
 sewn up in a sack, nor stuck in the middle of a box : 
 drapery, properly managed, is not a dead thing, but 
 a living one, expressive of the endless beauty of 
 motion ; and if this be lost, half the pleasure of the 
 eyes in common life is lost. You must specially 
 bear this in mind, because the fashionable milliner 
 has chiefly one end in view, how to hide and degrade 
 the human body in the most expensive manner. 
 She (or he) would see no beauty in the Venus of 
 Milo ; she (or he) looks upon you as scaffolds on 
 which to hang a bundle of cheap rags, which can be 
 sold dear under the name of a dress. Now, ladies, 
 if you do not resist this to the bitter end, costume 
 is ruined again, and all we males are rendered 
 inexpressibly unhappy. So I beg of you fervently 
 
226 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 do not allow yourselves to be upholstered like arm- 
 chairs, but drape yourselves like women. 
 
 Lastly, and this is really part of the same counsel, 
 resist change for the sake of change ; this is the 
 very bane of all the arts. I say resist this stupidity, 
 and the care of dress duly subordinated to other 
 duties, is a serious duty to you ; but if you do not 
 resist it, the care of dress becomes a frivolous waste 
 of time. It follows, from the admission of this 
 advice, that you should insist on having materials 
 for your dresses that are excellent of their kind, and 
 beautiful of their kind, and that when you have a 
 dress of even moderately costly materials, you won't 
 be in a hurry to see the end of it. This is a thing 
 too which will help us weavers, body and soul, and 
 in a due and natural way : not like the too good- 
 natured way of my Lady Bective, who wants you to 
 wear stiff alpaca, so that the Bradford capitalists 
 may not have to change their machinery. I can't 
 agree to that; if they will weave ugly cloth, let 
 them take the consequences. 
 
 But one good thing breeds another, and most 
 assuredly a steadiness in fashion, when a good 
 fashion has been attained to, and a love of beautiful 
 things for their own sakes and not because they are 
 novelties, is both human, reasonable, and civilised, 
 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 227 
 
 and will help the maker of wares, both master and 
 man, and give them also time to think of beautiful 
 things, and thus to raise their lives to a higher 
 level. 
 
 Thus I have named a certain number of the 
 lesser arts, which I must ask you to take as repre- 
 senting the whole mass of them : now all these arts, 
 since they at all events make a show of life, one 
 may suppose civilisation considers desirable, if not 
 necessary ; but if they are to go on existing and to 
 occupy in one way or other the lives of millions of 
 men, it seems to me that their life should be real, 
 that the necessity for them should be felt by those 
 that allow them to be carried on ; for surely wasted 
 labour is a heavy burden for the world to bear. 
 
 I have said that, on the other hand, I am ready 
 to accept the conclusion that these arts are vain and 
 should not be carried on at all; that we should do 
 nothing that we can help doing beyond what is 
 barely necessary to keep ourselves alive, that we 
 may contemplate the mystery of life, and be ready 
 to accept the mystery of death. Yes, that might be 
 agreed to, if the world would ; but, you see, it will 
 not : man's life is too complex, too unmanageable at 
 the hands of any unit of the race for such a con- 
 clusion to be come to, except by a very few, better 
 
228 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 
 
 it may be worse than their fellows ; and 
 even they will be driven to it by noting the 
 contrast between their aspirations and the busy and 
 inconsistent lives of other men. I mean, if most 
 men lived reasonably, and with justice to their 
 fellows, no men would be drawn towards asceticism. 
 
 No, the lesser arts of life must be practised, that 
 is clear. It only remains therefore for us to deter- 
 mine whether they shall but minister to our material 
 needs, receiving no stimulus and no help from the 
 cravings of our souls, or whether they shall really 
 form part of our lives material and spiritual, and 
 be so helpful and natural, that even the sternest 
 philosopher may look upon them kindly and feel 
 helped by them. 
 
 Is it possible that civilisation can determine to 
 brutalise the crafts of life by cutting them off from 
 the intellectual part of us ? Surely not in the long 
 run ; and yet I know that the progress of the race 
 from barbarism to civilisation has hitherto had a 
 tendency to make our lives more and more complex ; 
 to make us more dependent one upon the other, and 
 to destroy individuality, which is the breath of life 
 to art; but swiftly and without check as this 
 tendency has grown, I know I cannot be alone in 
 doubting if it has been an unmixed good to us, or 
 
MORRIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 229 
 
 in believing that a change will come, perhaps after 
 some great disaster has chilled us into pausing, and 
 so given us time for reflection : anyhow, in some 
 way or other, |t believe the day is not so far distant 
 when the best of men will set to work trying to 
 simplify life on a new basis when the organisa- 
 tion of labour will mean something else than the 
 struggle of the strong to use each one to his best 
 advantage the necessities and miseries of the weak. 
 
 Meanwhile I believe that it will speed the coming 
 of that day if we do but look open-eyed at art and 
 with all sincerity ; I want an end of believing that 
 we believe in art-bogies ; I want the democracy of 
 the arts established : I want every one to think for 
 himself about them, and not to take things for 
 granted from hearsay; every man to do what he 
 thinks right, not in anarchical fashion, but feeling 
 that he is responsible to his fellows for what he 
 feels, thinks, and has determined. 
 
 In these lesser arts every one should say : I have 
 such or such an ornamental matter, not because 
 I am told to like it, but because' I like it myself, 
 and I will have nothing that I don't like nothing ; 
 and I can give you my reasons for rejecting this, 
 and accepting that, and am ready to abide by them, 
 and to take the consequences of my being right or 
 
230 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 wrong. Of course such independence must spring 
 from knowledge, not from ignorance, and you may be 
 sure that this kind of independence would be far 
 from destroying the respect due to the higher 
 intellects that busy themselves with the arts ; on the 
 contrary, it would make that respect the stronger, 
 since those who had themselves got to think 
 seriously about the arts would understand the 
 better what difficulties beset the greatest men in 
 their struggles to express what is in them. Any- 
 how, if this intelligent, sympathetic, and serious 
 independence of thought about the arts does not 
 become general among cultivated men (and all men 
 ought to be cultivated) it is a matter of course that 
 the practice of the arts must fall into the hands of 
 a degraded and despised class, degraded and despised 
 at least as far as its daily work goes ; that is to say, 
 the greater part of its waking hours. 
 
 Surely this is a serious danger to our political and 
 social advancement, to our cultivation, to our civilisa- 
 tion, in short ; surely we can none of us be content 
 to accept the responsibility of creating such a class 
 of pariahs, or to sit quiet under the burden of its 
 existence, if it exist at present, as indeed it does. 
 
 Therefore I ask you to apply the remedy of 
 refusing to be ignorant and nose-led about the arts ; 
 
MOREIS. THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. 231 
 
 I ask you to learn what you want and to ask for it ; 
 in which case you will both get it and will breed 
 intelligent and worthy citizens for the common weal ; 
 defenders of society, friends for yourselves. 
 
 Is not this worth doing ? It will add to the 
 troubles of life. Maybe ; I will not say nay. Yet 
 consider after all that the life of a man is more 
 troublous than that of a swine, and the life of a free- 
 man than the life of a slave ; and take your choice 
 accordingly. 
 
 Moreover, if I am right in these matters, your 
 trouble will be shifted, not increased : we shall take 
 pains indeed concerning things which we care about, 
 hard and bitter pains maybe, yet with an end in 
 view ; but the confused, aimless, and for ever unre- 
 warded pains which we now so plentifully take 
 about things we do not care about, we shall sweep 
 all that away, and so shall win calmer rest and 
 more strenuous, less entangled work. 
 
 What other blessings are there in life save these 
 two, fearless rest and hopeful work ? Troublous as 
 life is, it has surely given to each one of us here 
 some times and seasons when, surrounded by simple 
 and beautiful things, we have really felt at rest; 
 when the earth and all its plenteous growth, and 
 the tokens of the varied life of men, and the very 
 
232 THE LESSER ARTS OF LIFE. MORRIS. 
 
 sky and waste of air above us, have seemed all to 
 conspire together to make us calm and happy, not 
 slothful but restful. Still oftener belike it has 
 given us those other times when at last after many 
 a struggle with incongruous hindrances our own 
 chosen work has lain before us disentangled from all 
 encumbrances and unrealities, and we have felt that 
 nothing could withhold us, not even ourselves, from 
 doing the work we were born to do, and that we 
 were men and worthy of life. 
 
 Such rest, and such work, I earnestly wish for 
 myself and for you, and for all men : to have space 
 and freedom to gain such rest and such work, is the 
 end of politics ; to learn how best to gain it is the 
 end of education ; to learn its inmost meaning is the 
 end of religion. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinbiirgh. 
 
CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 202 Main Library. 
 LOAN PERIOD T 
 HOME USE 
 
 All BOOKS MAY BE RECAUED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 * 
 
 "UNIVERSITY OF CAUWKNIA BERKELEY 
 
 FO RMNO.DD6,60 m ,l/83 BERKELEY, CA 947. 
 
 (B139s22)476' 
 
 University of California 
 Berkeley 
 
GENERAL LIBRARY U.C. BERKELEY 
 
 PG 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY 
 
."\ '^''^'"''''''"^^''''' 
 
 I ' \'\ f. t . A " ' -'' ',!' .