The Hindoo arranges colours for a fabric with the same certainty of intuition that a bird weaves his nest, or a spider its web. His blues and greens are as harmonious in their combinations as those of Nature herself; while the "educated" Englishman is now introducing every species of atrocity in form and colour wherever he goes, ruining the beautiful native manufactures by instructions from his superior "standpoint;" forcing the workers to commit every blunder which he does himself at home, in order to adapt their fabrics to the abominable taste of the middle classes in England. Even the missionaries, male and female, cannot hold their hands, and teach the children in schools and hareems crochet and cross-stitch of the worst designs and colours, instead of the exquisite native embroidery of the past. Arsenic greens, magenta and gas-tar dyes, are introduced by order of the merchants into carpets and cashmere shawls; vile colours and forms in pottery and bad lacquer-work are growing up, by command, in China and Japan. There seems to be no check or stay to the irruption of bad taste which is swamping the whole world by our influence. The Japanese have even been recommended to make a Museum of their own beautiful old productions quickly, or the very memory of their existence, and of the manner in which they were made, would be lost.
It is commonly supposed that the taste of the French is better than our own, and the pretty, the bizarre, the becoming, may indeed be said to belong to their domain; but high art is not their vocation. A certain harmony is obtained by quenching colour, as in the "Soupir étouffé," the "Bismarck malade," the "rose dégradée," the "Celadon" of the Sèvres china, all eighth and tenth degrees of dilution; but pure colour, like that of Persia and of the East generally, they never now dare to dip their hands into. The gorgeous effects of their own old painted glass, the "rose windows" of the churches at Rouen and in many other towns of Normandy, are far beyond their present reach.
The stained glass of all countries in Europe, indeed, belonging to the good times, is a feast of colour which none of the modern work can approach. There is a "Last Judgment," said to be from designs by Albert Dürer, which was taken in a sea-fight on its road to Spain, and put up in a little church at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, which dazzles us with its splendour; and the scraps which are still to be found all over England in village churches (many of which are now believed to be of home manufacture) are as beautiful as the great Flemish windows thirty feet high. At the present day the pigments used, we are told, are finer; the glass is infinitely better rolled, all the manufacturing processes have made wonderful progress, as we proudly declare; only the results of it are utterly and simply detestable—the colours of the great modern windows in Cologne Cathedral and Westminster Abbey set one's very teeth on edge—the temptation to use a stone (if it had come under one's hand) would be frightfully great in front of that at the east end of Ripon.
There lies before me an old Persian rug, all out of shape and twisted in the weaving, but full of subtle quantities in colour, perfect in the proportions of its vivid brilliancy, and a grand new Axminster carpet alongside, of faultless construction, with a design as hideous as its colours are harsh.
It is not only now with productions destined for the English market, but the degradation of art is beginning to spread all over the world—the standards of "instructed" European taste are vitiating the very well-springs of beautiful old work. The "mantilla" of Seville, and the "tovaglia" of the Roman peasant, are supplanted by frightful bonnets; the striking old costumes are disappearing alike in Brittany and in Algiers; in Athens and in Turkey they are giving way to the abominations of Parisian toilettes for the women, while the chimney-pot hat is taking the place of the turban and the kalpac for the men.
The picturesque quaintness of the narrow Egyptian streets dies away, as under a frost, under the hand of Western architects; the delicate pierced woodwork of their projecting balconies is changed for flat windows with red and green "jalousies;" and the Khedive builds minarets, it is true, but like enlarged Mordan pencil-cases. The harmony of the lines in an ancient Arabian fountain or mosque at Cairo, the interlacing patterns of fretwork in the Saracenic buildings at Grenada, are marvellous in their exquisite variety; yet the secret of their construction in their own land is nearly gone, the very tradition of the old work seems to have perished in the race—they cannot even imitate their own old creations. "Oh for a touch of a vanished hand!" we say over the ruined tombs of the Memlook Sultans in their desolate beauty, standing lonely in the desert near Cairo, or the wonderful mosques of the deserted city of Beejapore in the Bombay Presidency, whose photographs have lately been printed.
Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue, indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer than, ever words could frame.
The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles, curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples—solemn, heavy, magnificent, mysterious—with a sentiment of dignified repose, though little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion and grandeur.
The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe, so lovely—with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the architectural design when at its highest point of excellence.
The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble work.