ANNE OF AUSTRIA BY VAN DYCK
About 1635, cluny lace made with bobbins
There are, besides, the familiar and often beautiful Applications, in which either needle or bobbin-made flowers are stitched, or appliquéd on machine-made tulle, or, rarely, on a tulle made by hand. And various mixed laces, fantasies and embroidered tulles, as well as a whole company of cheaper tissues called lace, but which can not honestly claim the name, are trying always to crowd the true lace from the market.
Naturally, the technique of any given kind of lace has undergone various transformations through the centuries. The Valenciennes mesh, for instance, first had round spaces, while square ones became more popular later. During a certain period the introduction of jours, or open-work effects, added an airy lightness to many laces.
I had the pleasure recently of being with a friend of mine, the sister of the Belgian Consul-General at New York, Madame Kefer-Mali, who has devoted twenty years to the study of lace, when she first examined a lace collection lately presented to the Cinquantenaire Museum. With magnifying glass I followed from case to case, as she placed each specimen in its country and century, according to its design, its mesh, the manner of directing the threads, the relief of the flowers, the various stitches or the kind of thread employed. As I listened to her, it was easy to appreciate why lace may become an all-absorbing interest. Madame Kefer-Mali’s love for the lace itself is now subordinate to her passionate desire to secure justice for the lace-worker. As she takes a filmy length in her hand, her first thought is of the talent and patience of the girl or woman who made it, of the eye-straining, meticulous labor it represents, and of the pittance still paid her for her gift to the world of art. Madame Kefer-Mali has already won something for the dentellière and she will continue to fight for more.
Tho there are lace sections in widely scattered parts of Belgium, none (except Turnhout) is so important as those of the two Flanders. Western and Eastern Flanders form an almost continuous and unrivalled lace region, which breaks up irregularly into districts, each celebrated for a particular kind, or for several kinds of lace. However, it would be impossible to draw an accurate map illustrating the Belgian lace situation, either from the point of view of the varieties made and their quality, or of the workers. It seems, indeed, at times that lace was invented to defeat the statistician, for he no sooner reaches a conclusion than it proves inexact; a factory rises near a certain river and the lace women desert their cushions to accept its better wages; in a village long devoted to Needle Point, young girls discover that the bobbin-made Clunys pay better, or they marry and make no lace at all until their children are partly grown; poor crops and resulting misery may send others who have not for some time been listed as workers back to their cushions. For, since despite the many schools and work-rooms, the great majority of women still work at home, lace-making is peculiarly sensitive to every change in family and community life. We may say, however, that despite constantly shifting conditions, Western Flanders forms a great bobbin-lace area, unquestionably the most important in the world to-day, while Eastern Flanders has been for centuries and still is, famous for its needle points.
Unfortunately, too, because of the miserable lace-wage (in Belgium, before the war, it averaged about a franc a day) this industry has been regarded always as a supplementary occupation, on which the family could not rely for its main support, and which was not capable of organization and amelioration as other industries are. The slavery conditions have undoubtedly been due chiefly to lack of good schools and constructive lace training, and to the system by which a facteur, or first buyer, collects the laces, to re-sell them to a fabricant, or dealer, who in turn may sell them to a larger fabricant—a system permitting any number of intermediaries—and also to the fact that the women, scattered as they are throughout the agricultural regions, have never protected themselves by forming syndicates. The first step toward emancipation has been taken; the new teaching is under way. The fatal system of the many intermediaries remains to be dealt with—to be swept away. And it is hoped that feeling the new power education will give them, the dentellières will at last find ways either through unions or by other means, of protecting themselves.
For the rest, fixt data are difficult to obtain. The lace industry can not be captured and subjected to cold analysis and tabulation. It must be studied differently from other industries that can be localized. As in learning to know the garden flowers of a country, one must go from doorstep to doorstep, so if one wishes to understand lace, one should become familiar with its milieu, the family and community life from which it springs. In a sense, then, these little journeys to lace districts which are the subjects of my chapters, may suggest more about what lace really is than a more technical and formidable volume.