CALLIGRAPHY
HANDWRITING and hand decoration of letter & page are at the root of the Book Beautiful, are at the root of Typography & of woodcut or engraved Decoration, & every printer, & indeed every one having to do with the making of books should ground himself in the practice or knowledge of the Art of Beautiful Writing or Calligraphy, and let both hand and soul luxuriate and rejoice for a while in the art of Illumination. Such practice would keep Type alive under the influence of an ever living & fluent prototype. It would supply a stock of exemplars & suggestions from which the Typographer might cautiously borrow, converting into his own rigid stock such of the new beautiful growths of Calligraphy as commended themselves to him for the purpose.
¶ In the making of the Written Book, moreover, in which various modes of presentment are combined, symbolical and pictorial, the adjustment of letter to letter, of word to word, of picture to text & of text to picture, and of the whole to the subject matter & to the page, admits of great nicety and perfection. The type is fluid, and the letters and words, picture, text, & page are conceived of as one and are all executed by one hand, or by several hands all working together without intermediation on one identical page and with a view to one identical effect. In the Printed Book this adjustment is more difficult. The type is rigid and implacable. The labour is divided and dispersed: the picture or illustration, for example, is too often done quite independently & at a distance, without thought of the printed page, & inserted, a stranger, amid an alien type. Yet in the making of the printed book, as in the making of the written book, this adjustment is essential, & should be specially borne in mind, and Calligraphy and immediate decoration by hand and the unity which should be inseparably associated therewith would serve as an admirable discipline to that end.
¶ Perhaps the most interesting things to note historically in this connexion are (1) that all Calligraphy in Italy, Spain, France, Germany & England would seem to be a development, with many subdivisions, of Roman Calligraphy, itself a development of Greek, and that the beautiful formation of the letters and their orderly placement in sequence upon the rectangular page are but modes of that general delight in the making of order and beauty which is the note of unity throughout all the arts: and (2) that in Calligraphy, as in all the arts, a beauty of decoration once started on its way, proceeds to throw off the conditions of its birth and where it was meant to be only a minister to make itself master. The stages in this usurpation in the case of Calligraphy are singularly well marked & apparent. At the outset, Calligraphy was uniform writing only, a succession of SQUARE CAPITALS all of equal value. Then came the enlargement of the sphere of action, so to speak, of letters in prominent positions, of initial letters & their decorative treatment: then, in consequence of this very enlargement, a further enlargement or emphasis which ended in ceasing to be adjective decoration & becoming a substantive beauty, as of a picture, framed by the adjacent illumination & writing, but superior to them as the flower to the leaf. Each of these stages has a beauty of its own, and each in its turn constitutes a Book in some sense a Beautiful Book. But in the passage from the image created in the mind by abstract symbolism to the image expressed on the page by verisimilitude, the book itself underwent a change & became in the process, not a vehicle for the conveyance of an image, but itself the image, to be appreciated not so much by the imagination, the inner eye, as directly by the outer eye, the sense of sight itself; just as on the stage the scenery created at first imaginatively by the spectators, in obedience to the influence of the actor, is now presented externally by the scene painter & costumier in simulated reality. I apprehend that when the illuminator, passing on from the decoration of significant or initial letters, took to the making of pictures in this fashion within the folds of them, he was pressing his art too far. He was in danger, as the event showed, of subordinating his Text to himself, of sacrificing the thing signified to the mode of its signification, for in the end the written communication became as it were nothing, or but the framework or apology to support a succession of beautiful pictures, beautiful indeed, but beautiful at the expense of the Text which they had set out to magnify.
¶ And we may in this connexion safely moralize & say that when many arts combine, or propose to combine, to the making of one thing, as the process continues, & the several arts develop, each will attempt to assert itself to the destruction of the one thing needful, to the making of which they at first all combined in a common subordination. Thus in our own case the illuminator destroyed by over relative development the purely written text, & the moral is that every artist, in contributing to the Book Beautiful, must keep himself well in hand and strictly subordinate both his art and his ambition to the end in view. He must remember that in such a case his art is a means only & not itself an end.
¶ It is worthy of remark that the Church fought against the idolatry of its Scribes, & sought to curtail the too exuberant beauty of their illuminators, & a similar attempt was made to keep down the idolatry of the Binder. The Church has perhaps lost all pretension even to influence in this respect. But artists should not need the guidance of anything outside themselves as artists. They should, as artists, realise that the world of art is a commonweal, and that the most beautiful art is a composite work, higher than the art of each, and that the art of each is contributory, only to be exercised in due subordination to the ideal which is the creation of all.