The influence in Arabic ornament of the Mohammedan faith, too, in forbidding the representation of living forms, turned the ingenuity and invention of the Arabic and Eastern designer in a purely ornamental direction, and as a result we get extremely elaborate patterns, either purely geometric, or filling the interstices of a geometric framework in inlays and carved and pierced work. These patterns from the pulpit of a mosque at Cairo, now in the South Kensington Museum, work of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, show how fine and delicate Arabic ornament became. We may note the star-shape formed by the intersection of the lines. The star is an emblem of the Deity (Allah).
The plateaus and slopes of the Himalayas, which are the northern mountainous boundary of India, were supposed to be the cradle of that great wandering, colonizing, adaptive, speculative, and organizing race, the Aryans, from which we Western people, according to one theory, have sprung, dispersing over the world, and settling in different countries and climates. The race has greatly differentiated in speech, customs, and forms of art; and yet through them all it is rather differences in similarities, or similarities in differences, that we trace.
Latin, Teutonic, Celtic, suggest great divergences both in spirit and form, yet perhaps the correspondences are more frequent than the divergences. When we see how greatly members of the same family differ from one another in tastes and habits, can we wonder that members of the greater human family should be so different in tastes and habits, under different skies and conditions of life?
ARABIAN FOURTEENTH CENTURY CARVED AND INLAID PULPIT, CAIRO (SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM. DRAWN BY W. CLEOBURY).
When we turn further east the difference seems greater, the gaps larger. The Mongolian race seems further apart and suggests a remoter antiquity. Their geographical remoteness and their persistent adhesion to their ancient customs seem to have fixed more or less of a gulf between them and the western peoples, and there is a corresponding contrast in the forms of their art. It is familiar, and yet remains strange; it has been constantly imported amongst us, and has more than once influenced European fashions in decorative design, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the Dutch, and in the last century in England in Chippendale furniture and porcelain, while China has given its name to the finer ware of the modern potter, of which it taught him the secret. To this day the willow pattern in blue upon plates and dishes, with its Chinese legend, scenery, and personages, remains a popular pattern, wonderfully little changed by its English translator. All the typical characteristics are found in its details, the typical Chinese house raised upon its first story of stone—with its bamboo trellises and quaintly curved tiled roof. The Chinese dragon remains a distinct breed, influencing here and there the form of the mythical beasts in design of other races, such as the Persian and Indian, but remaining as characteristically Chinese itself as the Pagoda.
ARABIAN FOURTEENTH CENTURY CARVED AND INLAID PULPIT, CAIRO (SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM. DRAWN BY W. CLEOBURY).
The love of trellis-like backgrounds and diagonal diapers for floral designs is a very marked feature with the Chinese designer, and it suggests the native fantastic and ingenious bamboo constructions used in the framing and panelling of their dwellings and temples, dominated by that distinct love of quaintness and queerness which seems a part of the artistic sense in the yellow race, and is as marked as their love of bright colour and emphatic pattern.
Their formidable neighbours, relations, and rivals, the Japanese, exhibit in the art up to a certain stage much the same qualities and influences, their art indicating a gradual transformation in style from the primitive mythical and religious and symbolical towards the more domestic, familiar, and naturalistic. But before coming into contact with European forms of art they began to develop a naturalistic feeling in their art which in the present century has become the dominant note, and, joined with a certain inventive quaintness and ornamental reserve, has had so tremendous an influence upon the art of Europe, more especially modern French art.