James Glaisher

“ The whole plant, too, exhibits those most delicate gradations of the primitive hue which are not the least remarkable characteristic of all sea-weeds. And in what are our designers more deficient—especially those employed in the decoration of our houses—than in simple and delicate contrasts, or more especially in those almost insensible gradations of colours which are so admirable in their effect, and which are so invariably presented to us alike in the sombre olive and in the bright greens and reds of the sea-weeds? ”

“ We do not forget, however, that the art of mosaic, taking its rise beneath the sunny skies of Italy and Greece, and glittering even now on the walls and beneath the cloisters of the Byzantine churches of Italy and Sicily, and within the mosques and palaces of the East, accords rather with the genius of the South and the gorgeous taste of the East than with the less florid tone of more northern lands ”

“ And in Fancy’s realms my drooping thoughts pass on to those homeless wanderers over the face of the earth, for whom never more the scenes of their first homes will wear a charm—who, torn from all familiar ties, and tossed and buffeted on the sea of life, may perish unregarded in some far-distant land. The surging crests of the great ocean’s waves oft cast, to moulder on our shores, the weeds and plants of other climes. ”

“ Between the earliest attempts of Nature to form a cell in which life should exert its mysteries, up to the most elaborated and gigantic form which ever swam in the ancient waters or roamed in the wide savannahs, there is one unceasing, never-failing effort to multiply the beautiful, and to make it conformable to the useful. ”

“ Wherever the briny waters wash the coasts, in marshes even where the salt sea penetrates but seldom in the year, on rocks and stones, and piers and piles, winter or summer, from the land of gold to the Canaries, from the soil of the Hottentot and Caffre to the ice-bound country of the Lapp, from the floating meadows of the tropics to the snowy regions of the poles—there grow the crisp sea-weeds—there may be gathered in endless variety the chastest patterns of simplicity. All the associations of the sea are grand and glorious, and the goddess of beauty came from the foam of its waves. ”

“ The efforts of man to convey to the canvas the resemblance of humanity—to impress, by the agency of a few colours upon his tablet, a reflection of the mental operation as it is seen “breathing through the face” in love and sympathy, or disturbing the features with agony or sorrow—is but an exalted effort of that desire which moves the entire race to copy the phenomena of Nature as they present themselves to our senses. ”

“ In the sections of the sea-weeds, therefore, even as made for the scientific elucidation of their structure, we may expect to find, as we undoubtedly shall do, many hints and lessons.
The true form of the cell is perhaps the globe, but it is more commonly presented to us as the cylinder, the conditions and outlines of which are varied almost ad infinitum, as by the various effects of growth and pressure the cells are forced into hexagons, pentagons, and other mathematical shapes, or their lines of junction are disposed in undulating tracery of the most elegant and intricate patterns. ”

“ Deprived of these bright influences of climate, we find it in our own country no less beautiful in itself, but wanting in a due harmonious relation to the tone of colour it is brought in contact with. To remedy this—to naturalise the art, in fact—the artist should be content to trust rather to harmony of design than to chromatic effects; so that the eye, uncaught by a general sensation of brilliancy and glitter, may repose upon the quiet harmony of the design ”

“ Are there no laws of symmetry in natural objects, as there are of mechanics and of force? no sympathetic principles of harmony of colour with form, as of structure with locomotion or fixity? Even in these humble plants there are traces of that divine delicacy which may be observed and appreciated—an expression of that one word which cannot be spoken. ”

“ As we rise higher, geometry, though still valuable in the setting out and defining of leading lines and masses, gives place to higher forms, those based on animal or vegetable life. In a fourteenth-century diaper the part we admire is not the geometric basis of the design, but the delicate filling in of oak or maple, buttercup or ivy, though we unconsciously admire this the more on account of the enclosing straight lines—lines that we should at once miss if they were removed as superfluous. ”

“ The Yellow-horned Poppy (Glaucium luteum) will no doubt have attracted the attention of many from the peculiarity of its habitat, growing and flourishing as it does by the seashore, where little else appears to thrive, and by the delicate green of its foliage, the brilliant yellow of its blossom, and its spreading growth, covering large expanses of the shingly beach with a very striking and beautiful carpet. ”

“ It is not in the herbarium, not in drawings, not when dried and shrivelled, and black and contorted, that we can see the beauty of sea-weeds; such are no more than the bleared and withered mummies of Egyptian men to the fresh vigour of youth: it is while free and waving in the waters that we must search for the best elucidations of their habits and gracefulness. ”

“ The lichen on the rock, the wayside grass, the many-coloured fungi, are no less full of beauty than the forms that more ordinarily attract attention, and are no less worthy of study. “The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein;” and Nature has ever to the devout mind, from its own inherent beauty and its testimony to Him its creator and sustainer, been a study of the deepest interest. ”

“ And, beyond this, we shall learn, too, that where the simple beauties of Nature have been approached—seldom have they been realised—the art-production has become the glory of the age and the boast of the country to which it belongs. We sometimes find that human intellect, proud of its comparatively high achievements, quits that almost stern simplicity which distinguishes Nature, and aspires to produce effects by violent contrasts and glaring characteristics ”

“ We therefore appreciate the quaint fancy, the studied thought of the designer who in some old glass that we have noticed at Ockham Church, in Surrey, while making some of his quarry designs of columbine, rose, and other lovely forms, chose for one of them a little fungus surrounded by cup moss, and springing from the turf; frail creatures of a day, meet emblems—like the withering grass, the{viii} fading flower—of the short estate of man, the transience of all his glory. ”

“ In studying the application of natural vegetable forms to the various requirements of ornamental art—such, for instance, as the employment of bold, vigorous plants to stone or wood carving, and the more graceful and delicate growths to such fabrics as muslin and lace—we speedily find that in some cases we are unable to treat the whole of the plant we have selected for our purpose, owing to the limitations placed upon us by the requirements of the work, the exigencies of manufacture, or the nature of the materials in which our design is to be embodied. ”

“ Botany, in itself a science in the ordinary use of the term, may, however, render valuable service to art; and it is this phase of the subject which we more especially propose to develop, treating only of the more exclusively scientific points so far as we find them necessary for our present purpose; and in this we think we are fully justified, for though numbers of excellent works are accessible to the student who desires to study botany as a science, but few fully recognise its importance in a modified form to the art-student, and more especially to the designer. ”

“ In the introduction of vegetable growth into any ornamental composition, we must be careful to remember that what is wanted is not so much a direct imitation of nature, which after all can only be faulty at the best, as a due adaptation of the natural form to the purpose of our design—a recognition of the impossibility of a close copy of nature, together with a feeling of its undesirableness even if it could be accomplished. ”

“ Having glanced already at the species of lowest organization, let us take one other instance of the applicability of sea-weeds as objects of design. A dozen collected at random, in one’s walk from the edge of the beach to the rim of the tide, would more than suffice for many different applications and manufactures; and the very commonest are equally valuable, and often better than the rarest. ”

“ The herb-robert is one of the most abundantly distributed plants of the genus, being met with throughout the whole of Britain and in many other parts of the world, growing upon all kinds of soils, and flourishing equally well upon hedge-banks, waste ground, and old walls. Owing to the foliage turning a brilliant crimson in autumn, the plant becomes very striking and conspicuous as the year advances, a peculiarity which will greatly aid its identification by those of our readers who are not acquainted with it. ”

“ The true is always beautiful, and in whatever form it may address itself to the mind, it exerts over it an uncontrollable power for good. The impulses of Nature are ever in the direction of perfection, and we find, even in the exercise of the mysterious physical forces which bind the atoms of matter into a mass, that a constant tendency is exhibited towards an arrangement which shall observe the utmost symmetry. ”

“ But however complicated the combinations of the cellular and vascular tissues become as we ascend in the scale of creation, the development of forms and tints in every natural object is as dependent upon fixed laws as the beauty and colouring of a picture on the skill and innate genius of the artist. Few artists, however, if any, work by rule; in their studies they attain instinctively, as it were, a conceptive knowledge of the beautiful; they find Nature ever varying, and they find variety the source of beauty ”

“ Distributed through every phase of being, the creations of Nature present a chain, each link of which is symmetrical in form{210} and beautiful in its arrangement. If we commence our examination with these forms of the lowest organization, which appear to mark the dawn of vitality on this planet, and trace series after series through the distinguishing strata—each one marking a new epoch in the order of animal existence, and exhibiting new and constantly varied forms—we shall find that order and elegance mark the whole. ”

“ There is one application yet to mention, which we have reserved to this place as involving somewhat lengthy consideration—that of their adaptation to the manufacture of earthenware and porcelain. The ungainly and unmeaning spots that are so often put upon plates, and the distorted ornament which so frequently degrades cups and saucers and jugs for ordinary domestic use, we hope may, to a great extent, be displaced by these snow crystals, which, varied to infinity, would cause the eye and mind to receive that refreshment which arises from the true and beautiful ”

“ Architecture, too, has liberally borrowed from the perfections of the human form. In the symmetry of the Ionic columns, and in the graceful strength and grouped elegance of the Caryatides, we trace the best proportions of the perfect woman; and in the flowing beauty of their ornamentations we may discover a reproduction of some of those caprices which are the spontaneous growth of the female mind. ”

“ But whatever ideas may be entertained of the manner by which the creative energy has worked, the results and the power, the ends and the means, are alike astounding, whether the monad or the cell were elaborated into the animal or the plant, or both were produced by a thought to fulfil their purposes in the economy of life. ”

“ In such situations the plant grows with luxuriance, and from the large size and brilliant yellow of its star-like flowers, the vigorous growth of the rich green foliage, and the long succulent stems, it becomes a striking feature even in the mass of bold healthy vegetation so commonly found by the edges of a water-course: these, therefore, are the characters which, in embodying the plant in any design, we must endeavour to enforce. ”

“ We thus in these few words, Acer campestre, the maple, learn where the plant is to be found; one of its striking features, the hardness of the wood; and also, from its Saxon name, the fact of its being one of our indigenous shrubs. This has, from the beautiful forms of the leaves and fruit, been largely introduced in mediæval work. It occurs, for instance, very beautifully treated, as one of a series of small spandrels in the stalls of Lincoln Cathedral, and again in a spandrel in the choir of Winchester. ”