Time is too short, our life too densely crowded, to allow leisure for the extravagance of what is, after all, only a luxury of art—no longer a civilizer, as of old, but just an efflorescence of our culture.
Embroidery is now essentially “decoration,” and nothing more. It is intended to appeal to the sense of beauty of the eye, rather than to the imagination. The designer for needlework should be an artist, but he need not be a poet. You may omit this art altogether, and you need be none the less sumptuously clothed and lodged. Yet it is worthy of careful study as historical evidence, and that in the present and future, as in the past, it may be an art, and not merely a craft.
For the great web of history is composed of many threads of divers colours, and the warp and the woof are often exchanged, yet so connected and knotted together that the continuity is never broken. On this web, Time has drawn the picture of the past—sometimes faintly, sometimes with indelible tints and pronounced forms. By poetry; by architecture and its decorations; by dress, which represents and distinguishes nationalities; by customs, such as the different forms of burial; or even by such details as painting the eyes; also by the tradition and outcome of the laws of the tribes that flowed consecutively over Europe from the East; by the institutions which remained immutably fixed on their native soil, such as those of the Code of Manu, and those of Babylon, inscribed on bricks or clay; or by the words, their form and lettering, in which these are handed down to us;—out of all these the history of man is being reconstructed.
How valuable is every witness to the ancient records, which were fading into myths in the memories of men. How joyfully is each little fact hailed as a landmark, in the general fog of doubt!
Now embroidery may boast that it is a source of landmarks for all time.
Without presuming to fix a date for its first beginning, that which I wish to impress on the mind of the reader is the long continuity of the art of needlework.
The sense of antiquity induces reverence, and I claim for the needle an older and more illustrious age than can be accorded to the brush. While the great pendulum of Time has swung art in sculpture, painting, and architecture, from its cradle as in Mycenæ, to its throne in Athens in the days of Pericles, and then back again to the basest poverty of decaying Rome—needle work, continually refreshed from Eastern inspiration, never has fallen so low, though it had never aspired as high as its greater sister arts.
The stuffs and fabrics of various materials of the Egyptians, Chinese, Assyrians, and Chaldeans are named in the earliest records of the human race. How much these decorations depended on weaving, and how much on embroidery with the needle, may in each case be disputed. The products of the Babylonian looms are alluded to in the Book of Joshua. Their beauty tempted Achan to rescue them when Jericho fell;[5] and Ezekiel speaks of the embroideries of Canneh, Haran, and Eden, as well as of their cloths of purple and blue, and their chests of garments of divers colours[6].
All these fabrics are named as merchandise, and were carried to the sea-coast, and thence over the ancient world, by the Phœnicians, the great shipowners and dealers of the East.
Indian needlework and design is 4000 years old; and the long perspective of Egyptian art, while leading us still further back into unlimited periods, shows it changing so slowly, that we feel as if it had been all but stationary from the beginning.