Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/289

Rh Decorative art has developed through the constant attempt to please the eye by more and more beautiful forms, and in obedience to the law of the survival of the most beautiful or of the fittest to please; for pure, well-constructed forms are persistent, while those that are abnormal, bizarre, or not adapted to the eye, die out. We still, today, use straight lines and frets, and a multitude of beautiful forms, many of which, doubtless, have come down to us from an immense antiquity. They are normally beautiful and we shall always need them. These, I may add, are also the forms which we shall find most widely distributed.

The connection between the manufacture of pottery and the evolution of ornament is exceedingly close; and some of the most beautiful ornamental borders, etc., have originated on pottery, the soft, easily-scratched clay furnishing an excellent surface for drawing upon. In savage America the manufacture of pottery falls everywhere to the lot of women, since, as it is a branch of cooking, she, having the charge of domestic affairs, naturally makes the vessels in which to prepare food. But the-Indian woman not only makes the pottery, she also ornaments it. Elsewhere, as among certain tribes in Africa, and also among the Papuans and the Feejees, woman is the ceramic artist. Llewellyn Jewett thinks that the Celtic burial-urns were made and ornamented by women. But, the world over, woman, among savage tribes, not only makes ornamented pottery, but she spins and weaves, and makes and decorates clothes. She is, in fact, the primitive decorative artist. Even in civilized life she still loves to cover with beautiful, purely aesthetic forms every thing her hand touches, and it is through her influence, more than through that of man, that decorative art flourishes to-day. I do not know whether her greater susceptibility to the influence of decorative art-forms springs from her greater delicacy of physical organization, or whether, what is perhaps more probable, it is owing to the wants of an entirely different life from that which man leads.

Ornament is something so necessary to civilized life, so universally necessary, that, like music and the other fine arts, it merits serious and intelligent study. A song is evanescent, but a good ornament "is a joy forever." To-day, in our craving, we cover every thing about us with a motley mixture of classic and detestably rude forms, and half even of the educated really do not know how to distinguish a good ornament from a bad one. Ornamental art will never take its proper rank, and be fully appreciated, until it is, in the first place, systematically studied, and, in the second place, intelligently and widely taught.