In Babylonian, Assyrian, and Chaldean art we constantly find animal forms in patterns. The lion and the hare, birds and insects, are the commonest; and there are some instances of human figures reduced to a pattern in these sculptured representations of textiles. (Plate [2].)
There are curiously woven little human figures finished with the needle on the sleeve of an Egyptian dress in the British Museum, from Saccarah (Pl. [18]), and, of course, when such a design is small, it ceases to be very objectionable. On the whole, however, naturalistic designs for embroideries are more safely confined to floral decorations, excepting always flat tapestries for walls, which, representing pictures, may be as naturalistic as their purpose and style will admit.
Animal forms are often reduced to patterns by repetition in Indian and Persian embroidery.[105] The drawing is naturalistic, but the colouring is fanciful. We may see any day, on Persian rugs, scarlet lions pursuing and capturing blue or yellow hares. The flatness and want of all shadows tends to the conventional. Lions, bulls, cats, beetles, and serpents abound especially in Egyptian design; insects, reptiles, and fish in Asiatic patterns, where animals are sometimes made to walk in pairs, with their heads and tails twisted into a pattern.
Though landscapes are so rarely worked that the subject is, perhaps, hardly worthy of notice, yet such mistaken specimens of ingenuity have occurred. An altar frontal was exhibited at Zurich, in 1883, containing some really exquisitely worked landscapes, which were quite out of place, both as art and as decoration, for an ecclesiastical purpose. This was of the beginning of the last century.[106]
While we appreciate and should take advantage of our national tendency to naturalistic design, we must beware of looking on fixed rules as bonds which cramp our liberty, and of thinking that nature should be our only guide to an otherwise unassisted and unfettered inspiration. Without the wholesome checks of experience and educated taste, and the knowledge which teaches us what to avoid, as well as what to imitate, founded on the successes and failures of others, we fall into weak imitations of natural objects.
Mr. Redgrave points out how unpleasant and jarring to our sense of what is appropriate, and therefore how offensive to good taste and common sense, it is to tread on a carpet of water-lilies swimming in blue pools, or on fruits and flowers heaped up and casting shadows probably towards the light.[107] Woollen lions and tigers, as large as life, basking before the fire in a wreath of roses, are alarming rather than agreeable, and are of the nature of a practical joke in art. It is the search for novelty in naturalism that leads to such astonishing compositions; and these, being successively rejected in the heart of our civilization and culture, are drifted away to vulgarize our colonies, or to be sold cheap to furnish Continental hotels, and make the English traveller blush for his home manufactures.
SYMBOLICAL AND CONVENTIONAL.
Though it is true that the highest art, pictorial and sculptural, is always struggling towards naturalism, the art of decoration is, by its nature, constantly tending to conventionalism. Patterns, if not absolutely geometrical or naturalistic, must be classed under this principle. Let us examine what is meant by a conventional pattern.
It may be said that the conventional includes every form—the symbolic, the naturalistic, or even the hieroglyphic—that is selected and consecrated to convey a certain idea. The lily of Florence, which is something between a lily and an iris, but unlike either, is a conventional form; likewise the lily of France, which it is said was once a conventional frog. The rose of England, the shamrock, and the thistle have always been more naturalistic than is usual in such heraldic designs; but the parti-coloured rose of York and Lancaster was decidedly conventional, and heraldic.
Conventional patterns now are those which, having been originally naturalistic in style, but perhaps emblematic as to their motive, have been repeated till the meaning and form have been lost; or else, as in the case of the lotus, the emblem is forgotten, and nothing remains but the recognized conventional form.