When I say I want a piece of copper just hammered out to the size and shape I require without that grinding and polishing by which all trace of the hammer & human hand is lost in mere smoothness and mechanical finish, the workman tells me it will be injurious to his credit, people will see nothing in it but bad workmanship and inability to finish. He would prefer to efface the sympathetic surface and natural beauties of the beaten metal as completely as possible, then he would put it in a press and stamp some meaningless pattern on it, but the result would be entirely uninteresting to him, and he would have no satisfaction in it, unless sheer commercialism had utterly killed every grain of everything higher than itself in his nature.
Think of the beauty of leaded glass compared with the lifeless hard mechanical perfection of polished plate. This beauty has nothing to do with its old-fashioned look, with romantic associations, or quaintness of effect; it is simply an inherent property of all leaded glazing, due to the wonderful and never ending charm of the play of light and shade on the different panes, each one catching the light slightly differently from any other, some glistening brightly, others dead and sombre, and the rest occupying every tone between the two. One sheet of glass with the leading laid upon it would be more ugly and meaningless than the plate glass. Many would-be artistic people think that it is an essential characteristic of the artistic that it should be in some degree eccentric or unusual. This is as great a delusion as any one could well labour under. That it is the case at the present time cannot be denied; but it is because we have sunk to such depths of degradation, that the artistic has become the eccentric and unusual, not that to be different from the ordinary is the property of the artistic. There was a time when the exact reverse was the case, when simple natural beauty was the rule in all things and ugliness the exception, and the unusual and eccentric was then the inartistic.
So also many would-be artistic people think that things derive an artistic value simply from being old or old-fashioned. This again is entirely untrue except of such things as undergo a modification and change for the better in themselves at the hands of old Father Time. But this too is an error easily accounted for, as at the present time, as regards the common things of daily life, the standard of design is so debased that it would be almost impossible to bring out of the past (at any rate of centuries before the last), forms for these which would not surpass in beauty those now current among us. If art in our homes were living and progressive the old and old-fashioned would be the ugly and inartistic.
A perfectly frank recognition of construction and an honest compliance with its demands is an absolute essential of all good designs; any attempt to disguise or thwart, or failure to acknowledge, the necessary characteristics and features of construction, must result in artistic disaster and is indeed a very fruitful cause of it. So also is that kindred error, the adoption of a less perfect construction to get the form wanted. It is not necessary I should dwell upon this now, for it is recognised by all art teachers, though by very few of those who practise the applied arts, and illustrations of the truth of it meet us in abundance on every hand and will occur to all.
Neither is it necessary (and for the same reasons) that I should say much about imitations & shams; wood made to simulate stone or marble; iron cast in forms suited only to wood; wood worked into forms suited only to stone, or in imitation of stone, as in tracery and groining. The evil of all this is too well known, and I have had to pass over it for the sake of what is less recognised and not so often brought before us. To put the right thing in the right place; to give it its most appropriate form, and above all things the form which will best enable it to fulfil its functions and uses, and withal the simplest, most direct, and the most perfect in construction; this is the first duty of every designer, and in doing this he will generally find he gets the maximum of beauty.
The conscious effort to be original will always produce abortions and painful results; the only originality worth anything is arrived at in trying to do something better not something new; and the true artist shows himself in giving beauty of form, of colour, and design to the necessary and useful, and adding that higher usefulness belonging to a work of art. But may we not have ornament, pure ornament which has no other definite use? Certainly we may, but let us at the very outset apply this test to it. It does not, we say, fulfil any useful purpose on the physical plane, does it fulfil any purpose on that higher plane of which I have spoken? Is its educational influence good? If so we will welcome it. If not let it go. And I fear, when this test is applied, it will be found that there is but little of the enormous profusion of the (so-called) ornament spread over everything about us, which would not have to go.
Most of us would do well to change it all for one or two good pictures, a bit of really beautiful metal work, carving, or embroidery, done by an artist with his own hand, and possessing something of that dignity of true art I have tried to show.
BARRY PARKER.