IN my last chapter I compared tradition in art to a golden chain, and the striking individualities which arise from time to time as the jewels upon such a chain. The history of art and the evolution of design may be regarded either from the point of view of the jewels or from the point of view of the ordinary links; and if we wish to take a just and comprehensive view I think we must not only consider the luminous points, but the system—the links—by which they are connected and related. Looking out into the clear night we see a vast mass of brilliant stars of all degrees of magnitude apparently flung into space without order or relation, but the studies of astronomers have revealed that they are the central suns of systems around which revolve planets invisible to us; but these star-suns themselves become lost, and merged in the countless myriads that form the silvery cloud we call the milky way. So it is in the history of art and the evolution of design. At first we are attracted by the brilliant personalities, surrounded by satellites, that seem to sum up in their work whole epochs, and remain typical and central points in the wide spaces of time; but further research reveals their relation to other personalities not so distinct, on whom the full light of popular favour has not flashed, and presently we get beyond personalities altogether, and in the work of remote antiquity see only the results of the labours of generations, purely typical forms of art, the monumental record of races, of nations, of dynasties, the work, not of individual men, but of collective man.

Of such we may find examples in the art of ancient Egypt, of Assyria, of Persia, and in the archaic and primitive art of all kinds, from the fragments of pottery from the plain of Troy to the carved paddles of the Polynesian islanders.

The art and craft of building—architecture, the fundamental art, can only be traced back to its primitive forms in different countries as practised among different races and peoples. The origin of its distinctive styles, and its principal constructive features, were determined long ago under the influence of climate and local materials, by the collective thought and co-operative labour of mankind schooled by necessity and experience.

Yes, it is a history of constant adaptation to conditions and united labour and invention from our primitive ancestor, who improved upon the natural shelter of the tree by interlacing its pendent branches with other branches and stakes fixed in the ground; who burned the ends of their timbers, so that as piles they could be driven more easily into the mud to support the platforms of the wattled lake dwellings, when there were no steel axes. From the early colonists of our race, the Aryan wagoners, who perhaps took the idea of the primitive gable and roof timbers from the tilt of the wagon, or the supports of the tent-coverings; from the ingenuity of the Mongolian settlers by the riverside, making the framing of their houses and supporting their roofs by the bamboo, utilizing the hollow canes for the jointing and bracketing of the supports, and terminating the ends ornamentally by inserting grotesquely carved heads. The chain of invention is unbroken up to modern scientific engineering and calculated principles of building construction, which but sums up and systematizes the collective experience of ages.

We see, too, the collective hand of tradition and the adherence to accustomed forms in the adoption or imitation of features of timber construction in stone construction and ornament by the ancients; as, for instance, in the form of the Persian capital from Persepolis, and in the dentil ornament of classical architecture mentioned in the preceding chapters.

Out of necessity springs construction; out of construction springs ornament. We cannot find the individual in either, both being the result of slow and gradual evolution, requiring long periods of time and continuity of custom, life, and habit, and the continuous associated labour of communities, wherein the individual is of less importance than the maintenance of the social organism. At first the preservation of the gens, the tribe, the protection and service of the village community, the handing on of tradition and folk-lore, until, with conquest and extension and consolidation into a nation, settled industries, and religious faith and ritual, the desire arises to clothe the mythical and spiritual ideas of a people in permanent monumental form and colour.

A cathedral represents the collective art, work, and thought of centuries. The names of its builders, its masons, its carvers, its glaziers, are lost; the heads and hands that carried out the work, whose invention and feeling, whose very life have been wrought into the stone and the wood and the glass, have left no other record. An abbot's or a bishop's name may be given as having planned or raised the money for this choir or that porch at different times, but the artists and craftsmen who did the work generally remain unknown. They worked in their craft in harmony with the workers in kindred crafts, and as brother members of their guild, and instead of building up merely personal reputations really evolved collectively the distinctive architectural style and decorative types of their age.

This is one reason why a Gothic cathedral is so impressive. We see the growth of an organic style, starting, perhaps, with the round arch and massive Norman pier, and passing through the transition to the lancet arch of the early pointed to the moulded arch and the clustered shaft and foliated capital, with the ribbed, vaulted roof covering the long nave with a network of recurring constructive lines, and meeting overhead in carved bosses, or spreading into Tudor fans. Or we may mark the gradual evolution of the window from the round headed, deep-set loop-hole of the Byzantine and Norman period into the long lancet-pointed panel of geometric glass; and see then how by degrees the light, first divided into two by a shaft, suggested the clustering of many lights together, as in great western or eastern windows, dividing them by mullions breaking into geometric tracery in the pointed heads; and thus raising a beautiful pierced screen of stone to hold the coloured glass and reveal its splendour against the full light of the sky.

Can we name the inventors of these changes, the evolvers of these beauties of our constructive art? Do we not feel that by their very nature they could not have been claimed by any individual mind alone or have reached perfection in a single lifetime? They are the natural result of a free and vital condition in art, moved by the unity of faith and feeling, wherein men work together as brothers in unity, each free in his own sphere, but never isolated, and never losing his sense of relation to the rest.

Thus we get the harmonious effect of a great orchestra, where, though every variety of instrument may be played, all are subordinated, or co-ordinated, to the musical scheme, and produce that impression of power and sweetness by cadences that may be now soft as the whispers of the summer winds over a field of wheat, and anon sweep like a tempest with the fury of thundering waves upon the utmost shores of sound.

The emotions produced by such forms of collective art lift the mind out of the personal region altogether; they are akin, indeed, to the feelings awakened in the presence of wild nature. We seem to hear the voice of Time himself out of the caverns of the past, the song of life, like that of a child in the sunlight, and the half-articulate, pathetic murmur of the voices of birds and beasts; the hush of the wood at noon-tide, the transfiguration of the afterglow, and the mystery of night.

In the primitive ornament of all peoples we find the same or similar typical forms constantly recurring, the germs of pattern design afterwards developed, complicated, and refined upon: the chequer, the zigzag, the fret, the circle, the spiral volute, the twisting scroll—can we ascribe their invention to any individual mind or hand? Can the mechanician tell us who were the inventors of the wheel, the lever, the mode of producing fire, the canoe, the paddle, the spade, the plough, the vessel of clay, the axe, the hammer, the needle, or even spinning and weaving? Yet they are inventions of incalculable importance to human life, which without them could not maintain itself, much less build upon them, as it were, the vast and complex structure of modern invention, of science, and of art.

A form in ornament once found, however, is repeated. The eye grows accustomed to it, takes delight in it, and expects its recurrence. It becomes established by use and wont, and is often associated with fundamental ideas of life and the universe itself. Thus we get traditional ornament, handed on from generation to generation, its origin and meaning perhaps lost—like the pictorial significance of the individual letters of our alphabet, which everybody uses, but which require a special kind of study and research to explain their real meaning and original forms.

Side by side with this liking for the accustomed, this demand for the expected, appears to have grown up another feeling, a love of change and variety equally natural and human.

In ornament variation may at first be unconscious, and might have arisen from the natural tendency of the hand to vary a form in repeating it (as our own experience will tell us), while it requires an effort to reproduce its exact counterpart. This tendency to vary the same form, in repeating it, by different individuals is illustrated by the little American children cultivating their facility of hand by drawing on the blackboard. This natural variation, having a rich and pleasant effect, is encouraged until conscious and studied invention and ingenuity of individual artists in the varying of designs take its place.

Tradition in design may no doubt be largely attributed to the influence of the workshop, or what we should now call technical necessities, the use of certain tools and materials giving a certain character of their own in the rendering of form, as one may see even in the case of such a matter as quality of outline (important enough in all design) if we compare the differences between a form drawn with the pencil, the pen, with the brush, or with charcoal. A certain typical treatment becomes naturally evolved in the course of practice which seems proper to each method, while the treatment is sure to be slightly varied in the hands of every individual. Of course a strong artistic personality may greatly modify tradition in any art, though such an one is seldom entirely free from its influence; and the greatest artists in past times have generally built upon it, and have become what they are rather because of an existing vital tradition admitting of individual variation.

This was largely the case, I think, with the great masters of the Italian Renascence, some of whom I spoke of in the previous chapter. The general standard of excellence was maintained by their contemporaries. A great individual artist arises and only by degrees distinguishes himself by his personal choice and treatment, his variation of practice or method, grafting on to the stem perhaps some new rare flower. He raises the standard higher, he imports new elements, he influences tradition, and the lamp is handed on.

Giotto's art would not have been what it was but for the Byzantine influence under which he was trained. Without losing certain fine qualities of the dignity and serenity of the earlier art, he infused fresh life and prepared the way for the greater freedom and naturalism of his successors. The various schools of painting are closely linked, and if the links were complete we should perhaps be more struck with the resemblances, the similarities, than the differences.

The great structure of style is raised stone by stone: the labour of generations of artists gradually advances the standard of excellence. Now and then a greater mind appears, and by some new thought or method, fresh sentiment or point of view, raises the standard higher, and so an epoch is marked in art.

Great cleavages from time to time occur which disturb the orderly progression and connection, like cataclysms in nature—earthquakes and upheavals which break the continuity of the geologic beds and throw them upon different levels; but the strong social and collective tendency in man is always to repair and reform, to re-unite scattered fragments and to form new traditions both in life and art.

In an age which has seen the development of an organized industrial system of extraordinary and minute division of labour under the factory system, and has now entered an epoch of further specialization of labour with the invention and use of complicated machinery driven by steam and electric power, in association with which labour becomes not only specialized but almost automatic, we perhaps hardly need reminding of the collective influence, since for the effective supply of the big world-market all products are the result of collective human labour.

Such an organization of machine production as every effective factory displays, of collective labour, though not organized for the collective benefit, but rather wastefully contending with other factories for private profit-making in a fierce and unscrupulous warfare of commercial competition—such organizations can hardly be favourable to the production of fine and beautiful art. The art, the wonder, the invention, if anywhere, must really be sought in the means rather than the ends. The machines which produce our wares are marvels of ingenuity, of mechanical adaptation, of economy of force, but the finished product is often most depressing. One may see in print works, for instance, those wonderful colour printing machines capable of printing seven, and even twelve, colours from the rollers in succession upon the cloth as it passes through, often turning out extremely tame and commonplace patterns on cheap material, which look much more interesting as engraved upon the polished copper roller than they ever do on the cloth.

Well, it may be said, the remedy is with us—with the designers. We have only to use our invention in producing good and attractive designs, adapted to the process and material, and the factory and the machine will do the rest.

It is conceivable, certainly, that where the object is solely to produce something at once beautiful and serviceable, by a chain of associated and intelligent labour, with the most ingenious machines at the command of the designers, wonderful things might be done; but it is a question whether, if a design be ever so good, we should not grow tired of it if we saw it produced in enormous quantities. Yet that, after all, is the object of our factories, of our improved machinery, to produce in enormous quantities—not primarily to supply the world's needs either, but in order to sell at a profit. Art, however, is only concerned with quality—to make everything as good of its kind as possible, to seek variety, beauty, appropriateness.

We have yet to see whether industrial production, organized on the modern system, is equal to the old handicraftsman with his simple methods, as far as artistic results are concerned.

So far the Indian, with his hand-block printing his pattern on his strip of muslin or cotton, or dipping his tied cloth into the dye, produces more artistic results than all our wonderful machinery. Mechanical perfection is one thing, and artistic feeling quite another, and the more as an end a people seeks after the first the less it is likely to care for or understand the other.

The chain of production, too, may be mechanically complete, as in our best factories it may be said to be as far as organization goes, yet we may be still far from the finer sympathetic chain of artistic association by means of which the best work is produced. In this we must include the stimulus of external beauty and harmonious surroundings, as well as individual freedom.

Such a condition of things might have been found in any craft's-guild, and seen in full working order in any workshop of the Middle Ages.

Such an interior as is pictured by Etienne Delaune, a celebrated goldsmith of Paris, as late as the sixteenth century, of his own atelier, engraved by himself, shows us a group of artist craftsmen working together with all the tools and implements of their art around them. Of the three seated at the bench one is engraving or chasing; another at work upon a watch, drilling apparently; while the third is doing some fine repoussÉ work. The young man at the furnace is probably enamelling, and a boy at the wheel appears to be wire-drawing. A great variety of tools are placed in exemplary order upon the walls—pincers, pliers, files, shears, hammers, punches, a small anvil, crucibles, and a pair of bellows for the furnace.

There are still some crafts which are worked in this simple artistic co-operative way, and have undergone but little changes of method since the Middle Ages. Indeed, one might say all the finer artistic handicrafts; and it is noteworthy that the tools used are of the same type—the sculptor's mallet and chisel, the painter's palette and brushes, for instance, have remained practically unchanged in form from time immemorial.

Those who have seen glass blowing and the formation of glass vessels must have been struck by the skill and celerity displayed by the craftsmen at the furnace mouth, under very trying conditions, and also by the necessity of effective help at certain movements, when the molten glass is made to revolve upon the bar by one man, while the shape is given to it by another. The master craftsman generally seems to have two assistants, but the amount of co-operation necessary in forming the vessels depends much upon their size, small pieces being completed by one alone.

There are glass works still working, such as those at Whitefriars, which have been there since the sixteenth century. The circle of furnace mouths, the ruddy glow falling upon the faces and figures of the workers, form a striking scene. By a skill of manipulation that might well appear magical seen for the first time, the craftsmen produce vessels of any variety of shape, constantly returning the work as it progresses to the fire. Though the work seems to lend itself to the varying invention of the designer, they can reproduce the section sketched in chalk on a black panel at the side of the furnace in a completed form to exact measurement.

The art of the printer of books, to which so much interest has of late been drawn, and which has been revived as an art by Mr. William Morris at his Kelmscott Press, affords another instance of the necessity of intelligent and artistic co-operation.

To begin with, there is the paper; a good tough handmade paper, like drawing paper, is wanted for rich and bright impressions of type or woodcuts. This must be made from the best linen rags, and each sheet is manipulated by the hands, by means of a wired frame of wood dipped into the pulp and cunningly shaken so that it (the pulp) shall spread over the wires evenly to form, when dry, the sheet of paper.

Then the type-founding must be looked after. Lettering of good form must be designed, and so designed that each letter must be separate and yet capable of forming words without undue gaps, and also legible pages of agreeable type, good in the mass and good in the single letters and words. The type-founder and designer must therefore be a man of taste and cultivation, he must have a knowledge of alphabets, of early printing and of historic MSS. and calligraphy, and he must be a capable designer, able to appreciate the niceties of line, the value of a curve, of balance and mass, proportion and appropriate scale.

Mr. Morris had several typical ancient types photographed upon a large scale so as to more easily compare their design and structure, and founded his own designs for his Kelmscott founts more or less upon them, giving them, whether Roman or Gothic, a distinctive character of their own. This is about as near as one can get in our conscious, selective way to old methods, in which individuals from time to time introduced small variations, while adhering to the general style and form, so that the collective traditional influence and historic continuity is preserved with the cumulative advantages of individual invention.

Of the placing of the type-page upon the paper, regarding the double page of the open book as the true unit, I have before spoken, and a great deal of art comes into the setting of the type, so as to disperse it without leaving "rivers" or gaps—much as a designer of a repeating pattern would seek to avoid running into awkward accidental lines. Constructive principle would here come in, and should be serviceable to the printer in enabling him to preserve a pleasant and harmonious ornamental effect in his page.

The designer of printers' ornaments and book illustrations, too, if he wishes to make his work an essential and harmonious part of the book is, while free in his own sphere, bound to remember the conditions under which his work will be produced and seen; and, so far from regarding these conditions as restraints, should rather regard them as sources of suggestion in the treatment of his designs, making his initial letters and decorative borders and headings natural links to unite the formal ornamental element of the type-page with the informal inclosed panel of figure design which, in its treatment of line or black and white mass, may be but an extension of the same principles found in any individual letter of the type-mass. The mechanical reason for this is, of course, that it simplifies the process of printing, type and woodcut being subject to the same pressure.

With good paper and ink, with good, well-cut type and woodcut ornaments and illustrations, the success of the book now depends upon the actual printer, as defective printing, poor impressions, the blocks not up to full strength, the impressions blurred, would spoil the effect of the best work. Bright, clean impressions are wanted, and much care and skill are required to secure such, as well as time to allow the sheets to dry well before being made up into book form.

Finally the binder takes up the tale of collective skill necessary to the production of that one of the most beautiful of beautiful things—a beautiful book.

Here, of course, an immense amount of art may be called in over and above neat and careful craftsmanship in the preliminary but most necessary stages of "forwarding," as Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has told us. Beautiful binding, indeed, may display some of the most refined qualities of decorative art in disposition of line and pattern, while it affords in gold tooling another instance of strict limitation of method lending itself to free invention and fancy.

The artist is under the necessity of building up his lines and constructing his forms by the repetition of the impress of certain tools, the most resourceful designer being shown by the decorative use he is able to make of few and simple forms. An examination of the designs by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, given here, will show that they are built up of very few units. A flower, a leaf, a stem, and straight lines of borders with the lettering, which is also an important ornamental unit. Everything depends upon the taste and skill with which they are used.

From the single example of the chain of associated labour necessary to the production of a book, we may see then how much depends upon intelligent and harmonious co-operation in collective work. Where each process is so important, where the skill and taste of each worker is so necessary to the complete result, one can hardly say that one is more important than another—certainly not less essential. We see, too, how inter-dependent the work of each is. Each stone in the structure must be well and truly laid, or sound progress and satisfactory completion are impossible. Art in all its manifold developments always teaches us this. Fault or failure at one stage may ruin the whole work.

Are the foundations less important than the wall; is the wall less important than the window; is the roof less essential to the house than the carving of its porch, or the painting of its interior?

If we realize the close and necessary links that unite all workers, that are essential to the production of things useful or beautiful, or both, should not we do well to strive to make the association closer and more complete than it is, and thus hand on the lamp of good tradition in design and workmanship, however far we must look forward to the enlargement of our horizon and the harmonizing of human life, and its freedom from the sinister powers and false ideals that now oppress and deceive it? And if we accept the truth that art is unity, and that what the unit is the mass may become, should we not strive, each in his sphere, whatever our main work may be, to do it worthily and well? remembering that it is better to do a small thing well than a big thing badly, and that it is the spirit in which our work is done, not the place it may accidentally occupy, or the class to which it may belong, or the reward it may receive in the ordinary estimation, that makes it great or little.