Needlework in Art

THERE is a singular fascination in the history of the tools of men. In a certain sense they are the starting-point in which our knowledge of the past begins ; and as one looks at some great museum that earth-mounds and shell-heaps have given up to the spade of the archæologist, — such a one, for instance, as that in the cabinets of Bologna, — the imagination is touched almost pathetically by those relics of the infancy of the race, that bear sometimes so humorous a resemblance to the instruments of war and industry that our jackknives used to fashion. To follow the development of the plough or the loom, the arrow or the ship, is to read the great book of civilization in the simplest and perhaps the most useful way; for these and the other real elements of universal life are its true alphabet. They outlive the nations they establish and bind together, and the advance in their adaptation and application is a better gauge of progress than the rise and fall of empires. They are very like the forces of nature in moulding the destiny of mankind, and more powerful than human laws ; they have determined, one might say, the physique of castes in India, and, if modern speculation is to be believed, they may be thought to have affected, through inheritance, the arrangement of the brain-cells in the skilled artisans of Italy and Flanders. The history of a tool, in fact, if told in full, involves the successive stages of politics, art, and culture; to know it is to know what man has done.

Such reflections may seem to be too vast in range to stand, like the innumberable angels of the scholastic doctor, on the point of a needle ; but the lady who has written this richly made volume ¹ would not think so. The needle is one of the oldest of tools, and from the time when it was shaped from a bone, and used to fasten the skins of beasts with sinews, down to the present age of the Kensington school, it has much to tell of its deeds. Of its mere utilitarian value, the great industry of clothing the race, little is said by the author ; she considers the needle only in its works of art. One wonders whether its early use for ornamentation may not have been due to its being preëminently the woman’s tool. Certain it is that seams hardly began to be before they were adorned. From the moment when the sense of beauty was first pleased with the needle’s work, however rude, it became the minister of art, and through all the ages it continued in an alliance with the ideal part of man’s nature. It has been thought — and no one can say nay to the theory — that the needle was in reality the source of art ; that paintings on the brick of Nineveh and Babylon and in Egypt, that bas-reliefs on the temples of Greece, and all artistic work in wood, or clay, or stone, or metal, were in the first instance nothing more than imitations, in more durable materials, of the woven and wrought hangings of the most ancient temples, such as were used in the tabernacles of the Orientals. To the latest times of paganism these precious stuffs, of which the peplos of Athene is the highest type, were retained in worship of the gods, and also in the festivals of monarchs, as at Alexander’s marriage feast in the marvelous tent of his Asian spoils; and do they not at the present hour robe the altars and priesthood of the larger part of Christendom, though secular fêtes have lost such splendid shows of tapestries in our age of cotton prints and broadcloth ?

But whether or not needlework may justly claim to have been the parent of the arts, it has been of the family, and in its long course it has reflected the spirit of man in many phases and pictured his life, as the other prouder arts have done. It is astonishing, therefore, only to one who does not reflect, to find the author of this volume somewhat embarrassed by the richness of the materials, the variety and historic sweep of her subject; and amid it all it is interesting to observe how simple and universal are the laws of art, so that, as truly as all of gravitation was said to be in the fall of the apple, all of art seems to be in the management of the stitch. Just as in books of philosophy nowadays we come upon the eternal formulas of Spencer, on homogeneity, differentiation, and heterogeneity, and the rest, so in this work we find the sententiœ of Ruskin, that the material must determine the design, and the like. The result is that the volume gives a curiously mixed impression of orderliness when theory is under discussion, and of bewilderment when facts are being registered. In dealing with the laws of the art the author is entirely at home, and her decisions clear and cogent ; perhaps in the field of history a limitation of the view, particularly in the department of archæology, might have given a definiteness and compactness of which the unlearned reader may possibly feel the lack.

The multitude of things referred to, however, is one of the charms of the book, and suggests, as nothing else could, the infinite number of ways in which the simple tools of man’s craft have affected his civilized life, to which we have already alluded. One reason for the breadth of subject is that nearly all works of the needle in ancient times have perished ; a few examples on leather or linen have survived in a more or less dilapidated state, but for the most part the handiwork of antiquity in this art must be studied from the monuments, from sculptured or painted representations, or from those literary descriptions, such as Homer’s, which are the best record we possess of the character of the embroidered stuffs which filled the wardrobes and palaces of Asiatic cities, and were borne to other lands by the commerce of the Phœnicians. One must go to archæology for the history of the ancient art, perforce ; and if one pushes the research farther, and asks what was the origin and meaning of the old patterns, such as the wave or wickerwork, and traces backward the conventional forms to the symbolism of the lotus of Egypt, the daisy of Assyria, and the immemorial tree of life with the yoked animals, and furthermore must include a type so distant from these as is the serpentine of the Lindisfarne Gospels, it is easy to see what an omnium gatherum of doubtful and prehistoric facts must result. The subject of crosses alone, from the schwastika, or crossed sticks of the worship of fire (if that be its derivation), to the meandering combinations of mediæval times, is large enough to require a volume to itself. The division of these patterns, not many in number, into their classes opens another wide field, and in their passage from naturalism into symbolism, and thence into conventionalized forms, one may stop to study one of the movements common to all art from birth to extinction; while at the end the mathematical patterns with the Saracenic arabesque still remain to be treated. The way in which all these were transmitted from country to country and from age to age, the great highways of commerce by which they passed, the market-points at which they met, such as Sicily in the mediæval times, must also be considered. The mere materials used, wool, flax, silk, and cotton, to mention no others, have each an interesting history, which cannot be wholly disregarded; and the schools of design which the needlework of each period reflected, from the Egyptian to the Italian, are to be touched on in a way that shall recall the motives, characteristics, and temper of the whole history of art. Thus, before one gets to so important a department as lacework, his eye begins to get wearied with the survey in which so many matters have called for attention, and he may be excused if a sigh for system, a more rigid system, at times escapes him.

That portion of the volume in which the examples are described with some detail, and in many cases are profusely illustrated, does not lie open to any similar objection. The mind rests on these, and lets go of the general history of the centuries and the problems of archæology. These examples naturally are mainly mediæval or Renaissance, and the greater portion are ecclesiastical. They are beautiful to look at and delightful to read about. The chapter upon the school of English embroidery is an excellent study of a special subject, and stands by itself, like a book within a book. The author has here a thorough knowledge of the period and the work, and is not hampered by the necessity of leaning on the monographs of learned scholars, as in the more general parts of her narrative. She is mistress of this particular branch of the English art, and of the theory of how it should now be practiced under the conditions of its modern revival. Her account of the Kensington school, though brief, is interesting, and her advice to her fellow-workers in the attempt to bring needlework back to the artistic purpose it served before the days of sewing-machines is of the best. To have written such a book on one of the minor arts is to have filled an empty place in the great English library with practical effect. The illustrations, by their number, excellence, and range, make it admirable for reference, and justify its title; for it is not the history of the art of needlework which is written, but rather the great works of the needle are viewed with reference to the general artistic expression of the race. The efforts of Lady Marian Alford and her coadjutors, both in England and this country, to restore to the needle its office in domestic and church decoration have the sympathy of those who respect beauty and the adornment of the common life; and all such will give her volume — a very difficult work to write — their good wishes.