Fig. 21.
These examples, you will say, are from architectural details which have nothing to do with wood-carving. On the contrary, the same laws govern all manner of sculpturesque composition—scale or material making no difference whatever. A sculptured marble frieze or a carved ivory snuff-box may be equally censurable as being either so bare that they verge on baldness and want of interest, or so elaborate that they look like layers of fungus.
Do not imagine that I am urging any preference for a Byzantine treatment in your work; to do so would be as foolish as to ask you to don medieval costume while at work, or assume the speech and manners of the tenth century. It would be just as ridiculous on your part to affect a bias which was not natural to you. I am, however, strongly convinced that in the choice of natural forms and their arrangement into orderly masses (more particularly with regard to their appearance in silhouette against the ground), and also in the matter of an economical use of detail, we have much to learn from the carvers who preceded the fourteenth century. They thoroughly understood and appreciated the value of the light which fell upon their work, and in designing it arranged every detail with the object of reflecting as much of it as possible. To this end, their work was always calculated for its best effects to be seen at a fairly distant point of view; and to make sure that it would be both visible and coherent, seen from that point, they insisted upon some easily understood pattern which gave the key to the whole at a glance. To make a pattern of this kind is not such an easy matter as it looks. The forms of the background spaces are the complementary parts of the design, and are just as important as those of the solid portions; it takes them both to make a good design.
Now I believe you must have had enough of this subject for the present, more especially as you have not yet begun to feel the extraordinary difficulty of making up your mind as to what is and what is not fit for the carver's uses among the boundless examples of beauty spread out for our choice by Dame Nature.
Meantime, I do not want you to run away with the impression that when you have mastered the principles of economy in detail and an orderly disposition of background, that you have therefore learned all that is necessary in order to go on turning out design after design with the ease of a cook making pancakes according to a recipe. You will find by experience, I think, that all such principles are good for is to enforce clearness of utterance, so to speak, and to remind you that it is light you are dealing with, and upon which you must depend for all effects; also that the power of vision is limited. Acting upon them is quite another matter, and one, I am afraid, in which no one can help you much. You may be counseled as to the best and most practical mode of expressing your ideas, but those thoughts and inventions must come from yourself if they are to be worth having.
In my next lecture I shall have something to say with regard to originality of design, but now we must take up our tools again and begin work upon another exercise.