Even Semper, however, as Riegl points out, did not go so far as his disciples, and though he believed that art-forms had been evolved—a fact any one would be ready to admit—he did not press the point that technical industry had always been their root.
When we find such delicate and beautifully rhythmic patterns as those which Dr. A. C. Haddon gives us in his interesting work on Evolution in Art, and are told that they originated in the frigate birds, or in woodlarks, which infest the neighbourhood from which these patterns hail;[12] when we are shown a Chinese ornament which resembles nothing so much as the Egyptian honeysuckle and lotus ornament,[13] and we are told that it is derived from the Chinese bat, and when we are persuaded that an ordinary fish-hook can lead to a delightful bell-like[14] design; then our knowledge of what Art is protests against this desecration of its sanctity—more particularly after we have been informed that any beauty that the original "Skeuomorph"[15] may ultimately possess is mostly due to rapid and faulty copying by inexpert draughtsmen, or to a simplifying process which repeated drawings of the same thing must at length involve.
This is nonsense, and of a most pernicious sort. No mechanical copying or involuntary simplification will necessarily lead to designs of great beauty. One has only to set a class of children to make dozens of copies of an object—each more removed than the last from the original —in order to discover that if any beauty arises at all, it is actually given or imparted to the original by one particular child, who happens to be an artist, and that the rest of the class will be quite innocent of anything in the way of embellishments, or beauty of any kind.
It would be absurd to argue that the beak of a frigate bird had not been noticed by particular natives in those parts of the world where the creature abounds; but the creative act of making an ornamental design based upon a pot-hook unit, such as the frigate bird's beak is, bears no causal relation whatsoever to the original fact in the artist's environment, and to write books in order to show that it does, is as futile as to try and show that pneumonia or bronchitis or pleurisy was the actual cause of Poe's charming poem, "Annabel Lee."
Riegl, Lipps, and Dr. Worringer very rightly oppose this view of Semper and others. In his book, Stilfragen, Riegl successfully disposes of the theory that repetitive patterns have invariably been the outcome of technical processes such as weaving and plaiting, and points out that, very often, a vegetable or animal form is given to an original ornamental figure, only after it has been developed to such an extent that it actually suggests that vegetable or animal form.[16]
Dr. Worringer goes to great pains in order to show that there is an Art-will which is quite distinct from mimicry of any kind, and that this Art-will, beginning in the graphic arts with rhythmic and repetitive geometrical designs, such as zigzags, cross-hatchings and spirals, has nothing whatsoever to do with natural objects or objects of utility, such as baskets and woven work, which these designs happen to resemble.[17]
He points out that there is not only a difference of degree, but actually a marked difference of kind, between the intensely realistic drawing of the Madeleine finds and of some Australian cave painting and rock sculptures,[18] which are the work of the rudest savages, and the rhythmic decoration of other races; and that whereas the former are simply the result of a truly imitative instinct which the savage does well to cultivate for his own self-preservation—since the ability to imitate also implies sharpened detective senses[19]—the latter is the result of a genuine desire for order and simple and organized arrangement, and an attempt in a small way to overcome confusion. "It is man's only possible way of emancipating himself from the accidental and chaotic character of reality."[20]
The author also shows very ably that, even where plant forms are selected by the original geometric artist, it is only owing to some peculiarly orderly or systematic arrangement of their parts, and that the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines,[21] to gratify his will to be master of natural disorder.
These objections of Riegl and Worringer are both necessary and important; for, as the former declares: "It is now high time that we should retreat from the position in which it is maintained that the roots of Art lie in purely technical prototypes."[22]
Even in the camp of the out-and-out evolutionists, however, there seems always to have been some uncertainty as to whether they were actually on the right scent. One has only to read Grosse, where he throws doubt on the technical origin of ornament, and acknowledges that he clings to it simply because he can see no other,[23] and the concluding word of Dr. Haddon's book, Evolution in Art,[24] in order to understand how very much a proper concept of the Art-instinct would have helped these writers to explain a larger field of facts than they were able to explain, and to do so with greater accuracy.