Walter Crane

“ A great deal must be set down to persistence of sunshine, but anyone glancing at what has been left us in various beautiful forms of art from the classical times and countries must feel how much larger an external part art must have played in that life; how constant and intimate must have been its appeal—from the storied pediment and frieze of the temple, to the gilded statues and bronze fountains in the public streets and squares—walls whereon the painter’s fancy is let loose—everywhere colour, and overhead the blue sky of Italy or Greece. ”

“ Gradually, as spring turns to summer, the colours deepen, the greens of trees and grass grow fuller, the flowers grow brighter and more varied in hue, crimsons and reds and purples are seen, and gardens become feasts of colour; and as the cornfields ripen scarlet poppies mingle with the gold, and the leaves of the trees, having reached their darkest tint, as autumn nears, become tinged with yellow and brown, and, before they fall, turn into wonderful harmonies of russet and gold, in part recalling, though in lower tones, some of the colours of spring. ”

“ Yet, looking through the life, the movement, the swing and vitality of the figures, and the power and poetry by which the story is conveyed, we shall find a fine ornate design, sustaining an extremely rich and sumptuous pattern of colour. We have a spread of deep-toned blue sky barred with silvery white and gray clouds, great masses of brown and green foliage swaying against it, above a band of deep blue sea, and a field of rich golden brown earth. ”

“ A little beyond we came to the magnificent gate of the Taj, a noble structure of red sandstone and white marble, approached by steps. Passing through its deep shadow under the great arch the wonderful tomb in all its pearly whiteness, with its graceful dome and slender minarets, rising sparkling in the full sunlight above a green bower of trees against the deep blue of the sky, and reflected in the still water of the long tank, breaks upon the sight like a fairy vision. ”

“ Thine image up upon a rock to greet
All comers, shaking from their wandering feet
The dust of old world bondage, to forget
The tyrannies of fraud and force, nor fret,
Where men are equal, slavish chain unmeet,
Nor bitter bread of discontent to eat,
Here, where all races of the earth are met?
America, beneath thy banded flag
Of old it was thy boast that men were free
To think, to speak, to meet, to come and go.
What meaneth then the gibbet and the gag
Held up to Labour’s sons who would not see
Fair Freedom but a mask—a hollow show? ”

“ Certain things are assumed to be excellent, and then excellence is to be striven for in them and in them alone. But how often in life—in the history of art and humanity has it been that some great artist and inventor has taken some poor despised thing and made it excellent. Think of the wealth of beauty and invention which makes alive the smallest fragment of Gothic carving, and invests every cup and bowl, every bench end and knife-handle of the middle ages with beauty and romance. ”

“ The Princess was disguised as a cavalier, but had no other armour than her helmet. She was dreadfully cold as she drew near the rock, but seeing a turtle-dove lying on the snow, she took it up, warmed it, and restored it to life: and the dove reviving, gaily said, "I know you, in spite of your disguise; follow my advice: when you arrive at the rock, remain at the bottom and begin to sing the sweetest song you know; the green bird will listen to you; you must then pretend to go to sleep; when it sees me, it will come down to peck me, and at that moment you will be able to seize it." ”

“ In the work of Leonardo's great rival, Michael Angelo, the art of the Italian Renascence may be said to have reached its culminating point, and after him decline sets in. It is as if the wonderful structure of inventive artistic genius had been piled by the life labours of generations to an ambitious and dangerous height, and at last had given way under the strain, or perhaps, like the sun-flower, the same force which raises the splendid rayed head and enables it to outface the sun, at last forces it earthwards again. ”

“ All who care for art value it as a means of expression, and for the pleasure and beauty it infuses into all it touches, or as essential and inseparable from life itself. Seeing then the importance of art from any point of view, individual, social, commercial, intellectual, emotional, economic, it should be important to us in our systems of art-teaching not to lose sight of the end in arranging the means—not to allow our teaching to be dominated by either dilettantism or commercialism, neither to be feeble for want of technical skill, nor to sacrifice everything to technique. ”

“ We had a bird’s-eye view of the palace courts and the stable yards, where elephants were tethered in long rows, the busy natives moving about with horses and oxen. Beyond were seen the clustering, small white houses with flat roofs, broken by domes here and there, the green wooded country and the hills far away, while on the other side of the palace the lake with its pavilioned islands mirrored the sunset framed in the blue mountains.
At night we frequently heard the weird cries of the jackals which prowl around most places in India after dark, and when all is quiet in human habitations. ”

“ And through the green gloom glows the light
Of ST. JOHN'S-WORT—a nimbus of gold.
But the hours of the sun swift glide,
And the flowers with them are speeding.
Though LOVE-IN-A-MIST may hide,
When Time's in the garden weeding. ”

“ Gold in Byzantine art always seems to have been used with a sense of dignity and of solemnity. The gold tesseræ which form the field of the mosaic decoration in the subdued light in St. Mark’s at Venice impress one with an effect of quiet splendour. There is nothing gaudy or flaming. The light falls through the narrow windows of the dome, and moves softly over the concave gilded surface, reflected backwards and forwards in every variety of tone as the sunlight travels, and the great figures and emblems loom majestically and mysteriously upon the gold field. ”

“ To paint great masterpieces and make fame and fortune is an ambition given to few to realize. The masterpiece at all events must be a labour of love, whether fame or fortune follow or not, and in the history of art it has happened over and over again that masterpieces have not been instantly recognized, and the master usually has had to wait for recognition and reward—if that can be said in any real sense to lie outside the accomplishment of his work. Good art, like virtue, is its own reward. ”

“ We feel the beauty and simplicity of such effects in nature. We feel that the mind, through the eye resting upon these quiet planes and delicate lines, receives a sense of repose and poetic suggestion which is lost in the bright noontide, with all its wealth of glittering detail, sharp cut in light and shade. ”

“ My soul lay; watching for the eyes of morn;
As from a dying universe adrift,
A naked life—to what dim world new born? VIII
All former things had passed, the sea’s salt tears
From Youths’ frail ship had washed false hopes and fears,
And relics, treasured once, bestrewed the sand,
Wrapped in the clinging weed the seamaid wears. IX
The bodies of lost Faith and Love, outcast,
Spurned by the waves, and clinging to the mast,
Were flung upon the shore, mid drift and wreck,—
Time’s fragile shells, which frailer lives outlast. ”

“ In the midst of our self-congratulation on the enormous increase of our resources for the rapid and cheap production of books, and the power of the printing press, we should do well not to forget that if books of those benighted centuries of which I have been speaking were few, comparatively, they were fit, though few—they were things of beauty and joys for ever to their possessors. A prayer-book was not only a prayer-book, but a picture-book, a shrine, a little mirror of the world, a sanctuary in a garden of flowers. ”

“ But how many still does England hold of those delightful places full of the pathos of old time, where each dumb thing of wood or iron, or copper, each fragment of faded tapestry seems to have the speech of romance.
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
When the utilitarian would destroy such relics for the sake of "modern improvements" we do not realize what priceless things we lose. We can only realize it when we live for a time in country or city without antiquity of any sort. ”

“ As regards procedure in working out a design, one generally thinks of some leading feature, some central mass or form or curve—of a figure or a flower, say—and one thinks of its capacity in repeat; and, since one form or line should inevitably suggest or necessitate—as by a kind of logic—another, one adds other forms until the design is complete. For it must never be forgotten that design is a growth which has its own stages of evolution in the mind, answering to the evolution of the living forms of nature—first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. ”

“ This wonderful contrast of bright and dark, of glitter and solemnity, the splendour of sunlight and the solemnity of shade, can only be fully appreciated in southern or eastern countries. The pitch of light being higher the shade seems deeper, and yet it is a shade full of colour always. When the sun sinks, in the short afterglow everything seems fused in an atmosphere of luminous colour and half-tone, which transfigures and glorifies everything. ”

“ It runs east and west, and we saw a striking effect one evening—the glowing sunset behind the dark masses of the trees, the end of the vista lost in mysterious gloom; twinkling153 lights, here and there, about the white awnings of the stalls under the trees; white turbaned figures of natives moving noiselessly up and down, ox-carts and pony tongas, wandering sacred zebus, and all the mixed and varied character of an Indian bazaar form a wonderful and picturesque ensemble. ”

“ There good and ill, brothers and bitter foes,
Do strike the balance of man’s joys and woes;
And in the traffic of the world’s exchange
Oft ill as good, and good as evil goes: XCVII
Two knights that battle for Truth’s painted targe,
With flashing spears upon time’s river marge,
Where, like the rushing waters, rise their steeds,
And crash together in tremendous charge. XCVIII
Their broken harness lies upon time’s plain,
Their wars’ receding tide doth cast the slain,
As shifts the battle ground from age to age,
And earth its grim memorials retain. ”

“ Side by side with the evolution of letters and calligraphic art went on the evolution of the graphic power and the artistic sense, developing on the one hand towards close imitation of nature and dramatic incident, and on the other towards imaginative beauty, and systematic, organic ornament, more or less built upon a geometric basis, but ultimately bursting into a free foliation and flamboyant blossom, akin in inventive richness and variety to a growth of nature herself. ”

“ Yet if common life was thought worth enriching by suggestions of heroism, poetry, and romance; if education was considered more as a means of developing the whole nature, than merely as a preparation for a narrow competitive commercial existence, might we not, from the storehouses of history and folk-lore, picture our school and college walls with great and typical figures of heroes, and founders and fighters for our liberties and the commonwealth, and make them glow with colour and suggestion? ”

“ With the return of the sun and lengthening days and the new awakening of life in the spring, a delicate bloom overspreads the landscape, the dark wintry woodlands burst into blossoms and clouds of foliage, taking every tint, from the palest green to delicate amber and red; while the meadows show the rich moist green of new springing grass, embroidered with flowers, yellow, white, and blue; and the blue sky seems to repeat itself in the copses where the hyacinths grow. ”

“ The direct touch with the full brush—to cultivate this is of enormous advantage to all artists, whatever particular line of art they may follow, since it may be said to be of no less value in design than it is in painting pure and simple. We can all feel the charm of the broad brush washes and emphatic brush touches of a master of water-colour landscape such as De Wint. This is mastery of brush and colour in one direction—tone and effect. A Japanese drawing of a bird or a fish may show it equally in another—character and form. ”

“ Every new and sincere movement in art has been in direct protest and conflict with the prevailing conditions, and has measured its progress by its degree of success in counteracting them, and, in some sense, producing new conditions. The remarkable revival of the handicrafts, or arts and crafts movement, of late years may be quoted as an instance; but it is a world within a world; a minority producing for a minority; although the movement has done valuable work even as a protest, and has raised the banner of handwork and its beauty in an age of machine industry. ”

“ The mass of the people do not change, however, and seem to have no desire to, and they are the common people everywhere who give the characteristic life and colour. Though they only wear cotton or muslin, the beauty and variety of the tints are wonderful, and fill the bazaars with a stream of ever-changing hues in the most unexpected combinations and harmonies.
Driving through the bazaars at Ahmedabad, we came to a sort of open space from which several streets diverged, and here was being held a sort of open market of cloth—chiefly muslins and cottons of every variety of colour and pattern. ”

“ What is Life? Truth answers never;
Darkly flows the secret river,
But its springs are hid for ever.
What is Truth? Man’s long endeavour
Finds the web but not the weaver:
Sleeps the riddle none may sever.
As it was in Time’s beginning,
Then, as now, while Fate is spinning
Man her clue would still be winning.
My soul knew rest no more that day.
[26] I heard Time’s voice sink far away,
And long did muse till light was gone,
Still sitting in my porch alone.
Strange thoughts like flashes went and came,
And dreams of love, and hopes of fame,
With dim desires that inly burned ”

“ Gothic art, too, was a familiar art, intimate and sympathetic with human life in all its varieties.
In the beautiful illuminated Psalters, Missals, Books of Hours, and chronicles of the Middle Ages, the life of those days is presented in bright and vivid colours. We see the labourers at work in the fields, ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, treading the wine-press. We see the huntsman, the fisherman, and the shepherd; the scribe at his work, the saint at his prayers, the knight at arms. The splendour and pomp of jousts and tournaments, with all their bright colour and quaint heraldry ”

“ The aristocracy, in their morocco and gilded coats, seem too costly and precious to handle every day and be dimmed by London smoke and dust. Few could duplicate their favourite books, so in the end the quiet cloth cover with its plain lettering is welcome for work-a-day, while, do as we may, the motley crowd in paper will press in and flaunt their little hour, “yellow and black and pale and hectic red,” driven like leaves before the breath of passing interest, some, perhaps, at last finding rest, and resurrection, in the portfolios of the careful collector. ”

“ She stands before you, a pathetic figure, obscured in shreds and patches, driven from pillar to post, disinherited, a casual, and obliged to beg her bread, who should be a welcome and an honoured guest in every city and country, and in every house, bearing the lamp of art and bringing comfort and joy to all. ”

“ The ash tree Igdrasil, the sustainer of the Norse universe, reminds one of the eastern tree of life—the tree of life of the garden of Eden, and the fountain of the rivers of the Asiatic paradise which, with the figures of Adam and Eve, the typical father and mother of the whole human race, have so constantly figured in art of all kinds, both eastern and western, and continue to stand in the midst of the garden in endless designs and pictures, surrounded by the birds and beasts, as the type and emblem of the origin of the world in the Christian cosmos. ”

“ From its earliest dawn in the pre-historic etchings of the cave-dweller, to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian; the sculptured slabs of the Ninevite and the Persian; from the treasury of Athens, and the spoils of Troy, to the refinement and monumental beauty of the Parthenon marbles—everywhere art (at first identical with language, or picture-writing) is eloquent of the mode of life; the ideas and ideals which have held sway in the human mind, until they have become precipitated, or crystallized, for us in antique architecture and sculpture, and painting, and the sister arts of design. ”

“ Robed in the kindling splendour of the sun,
Renascent from the sea of crystal air, CXXVI
That limpid broke on her rejoicing shore,
Where life’s reviving stream welled evermore
From Nature’s fount, through teeming veins that bred
Man’s countless kin from one redundant core. CXXVII
I saw the dragons slain of lust and greed,
Of gold and power, that waste to serve their need
Poor human lives; and till earth’s fruitful fields
With fire and sword, and bloody vengeance breed. ”

“ At present the world seems too busy about other matters—dissecting and analysing, experimenting, buying and selling, manufacturing and speculating, to care collectively for beauty, perhaps, and truth is at present too many-sided and composite to be easily reconciled with beauty. All is tumult and conflict, and through the smoke and dust of the commercial competitive battle in which we spend our lives we are not quite sure when the sun is shining, and when we are sure, are perhaps too busy making the proverbial hay to notice the beauty of it. ”

“ There is, indeed, in the embroiderer's art immense range of both treatment and subject. It may be light and delicate, and restricted to one or two colours, or vie in fulness, richness, and depth of colour and splendour of effect with tapestry itself. It may adorn a child's quilt, or decorate an altar; it may touch the hem of a garment, or inform the cover of a book; nothing seems to be above or below it; and throughout its manifold adaptations it offers an attractive field to the designer and the worker who is not afraid of patient but not unrewarding labour. ”

“ We fly over narrow streets, and complex webs and net-works of railway lines, telegraph and telephone wires, myriad smoking chimney-pots, steaming, throbbing works of all kinds, sky-signs and the wonders of the parti-coloured poster-hoardings, which pursue one into the station itself, flaring on the reluctant and jaded sight with ever-increasing importunity and iteration, until one recalls the philosopher who remarked: “Strange that the world needs so much pressing to accept such apparently obvious—and sometimes startlingly obvious—advantages.” ”

“ What makes the great difference between ancient and modern architecture, we might ask, for it is in the answer to this question that we find the answer to our first?
Unity of sentiment—the inspiration of a great ideal, this it was which enabled the artists and craftsmen of past great periods in art to work in harmony on great public monuments, but without losing their character or individuality, as the different parts of the work might be full of invention and variety, and yet conduce to a harmonious whole, as in a Gothic cathedral. ”

“ The arras that doth clothe the house of Time,
Stained with the hues of all man’s bliss and crime:—
The chequered pageant of the changing earth
Still through its folds doth ever sink and climb:
[114]
XCII
Along the street of days and nights where rolls
The world’s car onwards and its throng of souls,
Like captives in a conqueror’s triumph chained—
Compelled by fortune’s wheel that none controls. XCIII
The glittering triumph of youth’s golden dreams,
And ardent manhood in the zenith, beams
Of love, and fame, and power that guides the car,
And slow-pulsed eld still warmed in their last gleams. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Above all influences from the literary side, however, must be placed the work of John Ruskin, an enormously vitalizing and still living force, powerful to awaken thought, and by its kindling enthusiasm to stir the dormant sense of beauty in the minds that come under the spell of his eloquence, which always turns the eyes to some new or unregarded or forgotten beauty in nature or in art. ”

“ Germany might follow, great in bold and brave heraldry, or with a Gothic accent in richly-scrolled mantling, and a redundant display of Renascence ornament.
France, as a more volatile Pallas Athene, might, perhaps, bear the wavering lamp of executive and imitative skill, and dramatic instinct in design. 221
Spain would look coquettishly under a fan, wrapped in faded embroidery, bearing the Alhambra, like a pendent jewel: while for England, what artistic emblems are left? Well, we have been described as inveterate colonists, even in art. ”

“ When we stand amazed in this labyrinth—this enchanted and beautiful wood of human invention which the history of art displays, we might be content to gaze at the loveliness of particular forms there, and simply enjoy, like children, the beauty 2 of the trees and flowers; gathering here and there at random, and casting them aside again when we were tired, without a thought as to their true significance. ”

“ These are a few, a very few, individualities out of the drama of Italian art, briefly sketched, but distinct as they are, they are not detached like isolated statues upon pedestals from the characteristics of their age. They are great because they embody those characteristics; they are like rich jewels strung upon a golden chain—the golden chain of inventive tradition which unites them—which, while leaving each artist free in his own sphere, brings his work into relation and harmony with that of his contemporaries, his predecessors, and his successors. ”

“ The ripe fruit in the orchards gives a deeper note of richer and brighter colour, when the procession of flowers has reached the threshold of winter, bare and cold, though not colourless—its colours being more metallic—the silver of frost and mists, and the ruddy gold of the winter sun gilding the black trees, whereon mosses and lichens take the place of leaves and flowers, and sombre 163 yews and hollies and firs, instead of the bright greens of spring, until the whole is veiled in ice and snow. ”