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Page 46
Now to sum up: This method of pattern-designing must be considered
the Western and civilised method; that used by craftsmen who were
always seeing pictures, and whose minds were full of definite ideas
of form. Colour was essential to their work, and they loved it, and
understood it, but always subordinated it to form.
There is next the method of relief by placing a dark figure on a
light ground. Sometimes this method is but the converse of the
last, and is not so useful, because it is capable of less variety
and play of colour and tone. Sometimes it must be looked on as a
transition from the last-mentioned method to the next of colour laid
by colour. Thus used there is something incomplete about it. One
finds oneself longing for more colours than one's shuttles or blocks
allow one. There is a need felt for the speciality of the next
method, where the dividing line is used, and it gradually gets drawn
into that method. Which, indeed, is the last I have to speak to you
of, and in which colour is laid by colour.
In this method it is necessary that the diverse colours should be
separated each by a line of another colour, and that not merely to
mark the form, but to complete the colour itself; which outlining,
while it serves the purpose of gradation, which in more naturalistic
work is got by shading, makes the design quite flat, and takes from
it any idea of there being more than one plane in it.
This way of treating pattern design is so much more difficult than
the others, as to be almost an art by itself, and to demand a study
apart. As the method of relief by laying light upon dark may be
called the Western way of treatment and the civilised, so this is
the Eastern, and, to a certain extent, the uncivilised.
But it has a wide range, from works where the form is of little
importance and only exists to make boundaries for colour, to those
in which the form is so studied, so elaborate, and so lovely, that
it is hardly true to say that the form is subordinate to the colour;
while, on the other hand, so much delight is taken in the colour, it
is so inventive and so unerringly harmonious, that it is scarcely
possible to think of the form without it--the two interpenetrate.
Such things as these, which, as far as I know, are only found in
Persian art at its best, do carry the art of mere pattern-designing
to its utmost perfection, and it seems somewhat hard to call such an
art uncivilised. But, you see, its whole soul was given up to
producing matters of subsidiary art, as people call it; its carpets
were of more importance than its pictures; nay, properly speaking,
they were its pictures. And it may be that such an art never has a
future of change before it, save the change of death, which has now
certainly come over that Eastern art; while the more impatient, more
aspiring, less sensuous art which belongs to Western civilisation
may bear many a change and not die utterly; nay, may feed on its
intellect alone for a season, and enduring the martyrdom of a grim
time of ugliness, may live on, rebuking at once the narrow-minded
pedant of science, and the luxurious tyrant of plutocracy, till
change bring back the spring again, and it blossoms once more into
pleasure. May it be so.
Meanwhile, we may say for certain that colour for colour's sake only
will never take real hold on the art of our civilisation, not even
in its subsidiary art. Imitation and affectation may deceive people
into thinking that such an instinct is quickening amongst us, but
the deception will not last. To have a meaning and to make others
feel and understand it, must ever be the aim and end of our Western
art.
Before I leave this subject of the colouring of patterns, I must
warn you against the abuse of the dotting, hatching. and lining of
backgrounds, and other mechanical contrivances for breaking them;
such practices are too often the resource to which want of invention
is driven, and unless used with great caution they vulgarise a
pattern completely. Compare, for instance, those Sicilian and other
silk cloths I have mentioned with the brocades (common everywhere)
turned out from the looms of Lyons, Venice, and Genoa, at the end of
the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The
first perfectly simple in manufacture, trusting wholly to beauty of
design, and the play of light on the naturally woven surface, while
the latter eke out their gaudy feebleness with spots and ribs and
long floats, and all kinds of meaningless tormenting of the web,
till there is nothing to be learned from them save a warning.
So much for the colour of pattern-designing. Now, for a space, let
us consider some other things that are necessary to it, and which I
am driven to call its moral qualities, and which are finally
reducible to two--order and meaning.
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