Studio: international art (12.1898)

The Art of Wood-Carving

Original design should be one of the first things
demanded from the student in wood-carving, as in
every other art. Let him from the very beginning
of his career try to think for himself, and let him
learn the techniques of his craft by working out his
own ideas and inventions. It is only the craftsman
who, in the truest and highest sense of the word,
can really design ; it is only he who knows his
material thoroughly, and is able to judge of what it
is capable, on the one hand, and what is impossible
to it on the other. It is not everybody, of course,
to whom the faculty of creation has been given, but
there are very few to whom some feeling for beauty
has been altogether denied. Let the young crafts-
man, then, go to Nature, if he can do nothing else,
and in the free translation and adaptation of natural
forms which his material imposes upon him, he will
find himself forced to conventionalise sufficiently
to allow his work to be classed as truly decorative.
But he must beware of imitation, which is just as
wrong when the object imitated has been originally
designed by Uame Nature herself, as when it owes
its form to the mind and hand of some dead-
and-gone craftsman of the Middle Ages.

I have in the course of these rather haphazard
notes said enough to warn the student against too
implicit a belief in the supreme virtue of technical
skill, and have shown him that it is by no means
necessary for him to be a supreme craftsman
before he endeavours to design for himself. On
the other hand, there is the almost equally insistent
danger to be guarded against of his allowing him-
self to be fettered at the very start of his career by
convention and precedent. I would not have him
understand by this that he is to pay no attention to
what has been done by those great masters of the
past whom we all unite in admiring, or that he should
not study carefully and reverentially on every occa-
sion which falls to his lot the work of the old men.
It is from them, after all, that he must learn first
the alphabet, and then the words of his art. It is for
him, however, later on to combine those words into
sentences of his own—sentences which convey an
original idea and which bespeak his own individu-
ality—rather than to slavishly repeat phrase after
phrase in the dead languages of olden-time design.
Such language is meaningless to our ears and
conveys no message to our generation; yet there
are not wanting those—and unfortunately among
them many to whom it is given to be leaders and
educators—who insist that we cannot do better
than keep on repeating the lessons we have learned
by rote. Hanging up in my studio is a model of
the head of a pastoral staff which I placed in the
46

hand of a statue of St. Mungo which I was com-
missioned to execute for a building in the city of
Glasgow. Not long ago a distinguished antiquary
happened to visit me and this object caught his
eye. Now in place of the conventional crocket I
had broken the curves of the head of the staff by
some little clusters of conventionally treated leaves
which it seemed to me might be supposed to have
sprung from the simple sapling from which the
earliest shepherd's crook was most probably
fashioned. This caught my friend's eye. " But
where are the crockets ? " said he, to which I had
to reply that there were none, but that I thought
that my little clusters of leaves fulfilled the artistic
purpose of the crocket, and yet added a touch of
originality and individuality to my work. " Dear !
dear! dear!" was the only comment, "that is all
wrong, you know. I never saw a pastoral staff of
the best period of the thirteenth century without
crockets, and I cannot think how you can have let
yourself design one without any." I found it a
hopeless task to persuade my distinguished friend
that a nineteenth-century designer might be
allowed to think for himself as well as the crafts-
man of the thirteenth century, and we parted with
mutual esteem.* In the same way many a grey
head has been shaken in pained disapproval of
the conventionalised, if somewhat naturalistic,
capitals which I have worked into a mural tablet
recently designed by me. " These are all wrong,
you know !" they say, " I never saw a capital
without an abacus or with so great a space
above the fillet. It looks very well perhaps—it
looks very well indeed, but I do not think any of
the old men would have ventured to do that."
The fact being that if any one of the "old men,"
for whom they have so reverential an esteem, had
thought of doing it, and had wished to do it, he
surely would have done it, and then it would have
become a precedent for them to slavishly follow.
Therefore I would impress upon the student these
several things : He must not, in the first place, be
constrained to believe that until he has become an
expert craftsman he must be content to copy and
to refrain from designing for himself. Should he
do so, he will find that when the time comes that
the technical portion of his education is finished he
has starved and stunted his creative powers until

* It was another antiquarian friend, I think, who seemed
to feel personally aggrieved when he noticed that there had
been introduced into the head of the same staff" the somewhat
heterogeneous arms of Glasgow, a salmon, a tree, and a
bell, in place of the figure of the Virgin or of a Saint, which
alone would have satisfied his antiquarian soul.