STREET IN EGER, BOHEMIA.
After such a journey we should doubtless be glad to get home again to our own varying and changeable climate, and when seated comfortably at the fireside think how much the characteristics of our native art may also owe to the influence of the constant and varied procession of sunshine and cloud, storm and calm, heat and cold, fickle spring, short summer, long uncertain winter, our mist and rain (which gives us our green woodlands and meadows), to our wild and dangerous coasts. Or we may well think whether these influences are not traceable in our art: love of domesticity and indoor comfort, characterized by warm and blended though subdued colour, small patterns, trimness and neatness; love of animals and flowers, of natural scenery and the sea. May it not be said these are characteristics which our pictorial art certainly displays? While our architecture (in spite of foreign importations) is obliged to consider the necessities of a varying climate, so that our houses are built as a rule more to live in than to look at; and the colours of our interiors, while they often re-echo the greens, browns, and russets of our landscape—as our patterns and fabrics recall the flower gardens and meadows—are chosen perhaps more to live with quietly than to excite controversy, or compel a reference to the grammar of ornament.
CHAPTER VI.—OF THE RACIAL INFLUENCE IN DESIGN
THOSE personal predilections and idiosyncrasies which we each possess, those differences of temper and qualities of perception which affect our sense of colour and form, which account for those variations of treatment in the rendering, in design or drawing, of the same objects by different persons—what are these and whence do they come? They belong to the very constitution of our minds and bodies; they are beyond our own control, and beyond almost our own consciousness, oftentimes. They belong to our progenitors and ancestors perhaps as much as to ourselves, and are lost in the broken records of past family histories; we can only say that certain forms and colours appear so and so to our eyes, that we delight in some more than others—because we are made that way. Such indications of character and preferences are generally traceable, where clues and records exist, to the race, or mixture of races from which we have sprung. We attribute, for instance, certain imaginative faculties to our Celtic origin; certain calculating and analytical capacities to Teutonic sources; while as a mixed race we call ourselves Anglo-Saxon, and as such are supposed to be especially distinguished by practicality, the racial type gradually, in the process of time, being formed by the collective action of such small individual characteristics—somewhat as great geological deposits, such as our chalk hills, have been formed by the gradual accumulation and aggregation of the minute shells of minuter marine creatures.
These typical racial characteristics in art—these preferences in colour, form, pattern, treatment, sentiment, and idea, have left their marks upon the history of art, which indeed becomes, finally, the only history of races—the only record left of peoples to tell us of their intimate life, their hopes and fears, their struggles and their aspirations, so that a scrap of wall-painting, a fragment of an incised slab, a piece of broken pottery, a weapon of bronze, or a jewel, become in course of time full of significance—eloquent books of the life of peoples and powers long ago covered by the drifting sands of time.
The desire to record and to perpetuate seems to have stimulated the primitive artistic instinct in all races; and, indeed, it may still be said to be a living factor and motive in art production.
Each race seeks an image of itself (as every individual desires a portrait), and strives to put in imperishable form the character of its own life, and the ideas or ideals dearest to it. Thus, the prehistoric hunter left images of the animals he hunted, and his hunting reminiscences, scratched upon bones and smooth slates and stones; much as the Assyrian kings, in a more elaborate way, having the resources of a powerful civilization at command, loved to have recorded on sculptured slabs, lining their palaces, their prowess in arms and the chase; more especially as hunters and slayers of lions, though in their case the lion hunting was done in a more luxurious modern way, the animals being driven into special inclosures, and let loose on purpose to be slain by the king and his men—a system of a piece with the generally tyrannical and cruel methods of despotic persons. Still, no doubt, there was considerably more risk and danger involved than in a modern battue in a pheasant cover—barring the chance of being shot by your neighbour's gun.
Certainly the general tenor of the story told in ancient Asiatic art is that of the conqueror's triumphs, of the strong overcoming the weak, the glorification of kings and warriors in battle, of beleaguered cities, and the carrying away of captives and spoils. No doubt, if this conquering spirit had been absent, if each branch of the great human family had remained within its primitive borders, their art would have presented sharper and more distinct contrasts, while remaining simple in character. It is the restless, exploring, conquering, acquisitive spirit which mixes and blends elements originally distinct—well, it may be it also acts as the stormy wind that scatters the winged seeds of design and, bearing them to new soils, produces new varieties.
It is difficult, of course, to disentangle the strictly racial characteristics in art entirely from those other strong influences which, in fact, may be said to have helped in their formation—the influence of climate, habit, and local materials, which we have previously touched upon. Yet the purely human element appears to come in, and the final form which art takes among a people must bear the stamp of individual choice as well as of collective sentiment and climatic influence.