A history of style—I mean of style in general, not of one particular style—has, so far as I am aware, never been written. That I can understand. It would be a gigantic task, even exceeding the power of an encyclopædist. It would have to show from what spiritual peculiarities of the artist; from what necessities and intuitions of the time; from what requirements of the material, and from what compulsion on the part of the technique, the style develops, and it would have to measure the whole range of individual and national psychology, of customs, of material and of technology. The individual, however, whose powers do not suffice for an exhaustive and systematic exposition of the genesis and mutation of styles, can constantly register partial observations, and throw light on sections of this wide province.

Every human activity is excited by a need. We fabricate weapons, implements, shelter, and clothing, because we need them. In the earliest stages of human artistic skill, purpose and material alone control the productions of the human hand; style, so far as we can speak of such a thing, is purely constructive. It makes us recognise the influence of a small number of bio-mechanical and psychological laws—laws that have hardly varied during all the thousands of years in the history of human morals. These laws are those of the least effort and of selfishness. By virtue of the law of least effort we choose the most promising material, i.e., at which we have most conveniently to hand, which can be worked in the easiest way, or is most durable, and for that reason, more especially saves us the too frequent repetition of the effort. We choose the form to which the material employed adapts itself most readily. The problem which the constructive element in style has to solve is this: given a determined task which should be performed by an artistic expedient, how will this object be most readily, and yet most perfectly, attained with the material available?

The law of selfishness alters the natural course of the law of least effort, and often operates quite in opposition to it. The possessor of an object wishes to be remarked; he will distinguish himself from others, be admired and envied by them, whereby he will gain influence over their minds. He will therefore demand that for the object not the most easily procured material, but the rarest, and that which can be furnished only with the utmost difficulty, be employed, that the form require not the least, but greatest possible amount of labour. He will likewise wish the workmen to sacrifice the elegance of economy, not to represent what is alone real and necessary with the smallest expenditure of material, but, on the contrary, to lavish material, and make it quite visible and quite striking; to add to the Useful and Essential, also the Superfluous, so as to suggest the notion of wealth. The idea of elegance will alter its meaning. It will no longer signify the greatest suitability and perfect appropriateness, but, in the first place, costliness of material, difficulty of work, wastefulness—in a word, luxury.

The law of selfishness bursts the narrow frame of construction, and adds to style its second element, decoration. This, too, is still under the law of least expenditure of force; this, too, is still primarily subordinate to construction, i.e., utility, but it strives to render itself independent of the constructive element, and to become its own object. The history of each particular style shows this conflict between the constructive and decorative elements. At first construction rules alone; next, decoration, called forth by the amour propre of the fabricator or possessor, joins it, but very timidly and very modestly. It obsequiously gets out of the way of construction, and contents itself with corners where the constructive element has nothing to do. But gradually it gets bolder, steps from its holes and corners, confronts construction, compels it to give way and take less comfortable by-paths, and finally subjects the constructive element entirely to its will and caprice, so that, in the decadent period of a style, a useful object becomes wholly unserviceable for its original purpose, and is only an excuse for decoration, which self-gloriously gives itself airs.

There is another contrast between construction and decoration. The constructive is the social element in the product of human labour; the decorative the individual one. I do not think that this dictum needs an elaborate explanation; it seems clear enough to me. In construction expression is given to a need which is, at a given time and in a given place, shared by many or all; it answers not only a condition, but a demand of the community. Decoration is—at any rate originally—the outcome of individual taste and individual imaginative power. Construction is a thing necessitated, and therefore banal; decoration is superfluous, and therefore charming. The former appeals to the understanding; the latter is fantastic and sentimental. The human consciousness is, however, so arranged that—for its gain? for its loss? (I have treated this question so often and so thoroughly in other places that I may here leave it undiscussed)—it derives its feelings of pleasure and aversion incomparably more from its sensuous than from its intellectual life. Wherefore, for practical purpose in style, only those who are most highly developed intellectually have appreciation; on the other hand, for what is pleasing, all whose nervous system is susceptible to pleasurable feelings.

An individual decorative invention becomes style by the imitation of others, which can be slavish or free. A single work, a single artist, will never be felt as a phenomenon of style. There is the same difference between originality and style as between the picture of a certain person and the composite or average photograph of Galton. The feature of family likeness that runs through the works of one period and one place, however, like that which all members of a blood-relationship exhibit, is explained most simply through descent from a common ancestor.

Decoration is either organic or transferred. The former is the outgrowth of construction, and gives it a new meaning, unites to the idea of its purpose a simile that can be correct or false, pleasant or silly; the latter is added externally, and only aims at the beautification of the surface, without adopting living and necessary relations to the structure and destination of the object. Surface decoration may be pretty and rich, but it is always something subordinate, and always speaks of poor imagination and slight inventive power. Organic decoration is alone the outcome of a creative gift for art.

The psychical mechanism, which produces organic decoration, is always the same; it is the co-operation of association of ideas and anthropomorphism. I know very well that this latter is only a particular instance of the former; but I cite the really identical, nevertheless, as two apparently different ideas, so as not to become vague through too wide generalisation.

For the sake of clearness I will quote a concrete example. In collections, one not infrequently meets with a mediæval plane having the figure of a crouching lion with jaws open and a wild expression. It is easy to reproduce the psychic process through which this form arose. The joiner who uses the plane, and follows his own work reflectively, sees how the mouth of the plane, when applied, strikes the iron into the surface of the wood, and tears the splinters from it. What is more obvious than to think at the same time of jaws pouncing on the wood to flay and mangle it? The technical German expressions, Hobelmaul and Hobelwangen (plane-mouth and plane-cheeks) for the aperture in which the Hobeleisen (plane-iron) is fixed, show that the association of ideas at once presented itself when the tool assumed the form familiar to us. The mediæval artist went further; he has logically developed the image of a rending and devouring mouth suggested by association of ideas. He has given it form; he has examined it with sufficient artistic intensity to embody materially the picture presented by the word, to raise it from the rhetorical to the plastic. But whilst the artist advanced from the mouth of the plane to a lion’s jaws, and from the latter to an entire lion crouching over the board as over a victim that he has attacked and torn down, and mangling it with raging delight, he has at the same time made use of anthropomorphism, has imputed to the plane will, passion, gruesome enjoyment, and turned the planing into the tool’s riotous satisfaction of bloodthirsty wild-beast instincts.

This plane in the shape of a crouching lion is the model of a good organic decoration. The construction is not injured; it does no damage to the under-surface of the plane, that it is the smooth-lying belly of the lion with drawn claws; it does not prejudice the working capacity of the iron, that it is let into a mouth of a slightly waving lip shape; it does not make it difficult to work, that the handle is shaped like a round lion’s head. A sense is communicated to the tool which it did not originally possess; it does not shave and smoothe, but lives, tears, devours, and finds its joy therein. Organic decoration is thus an infusing of soul into that which possessed no soul; and not only this, but also in a higher and nobler way, a submerging of oneself in the soul that the artist has inspired into that which was soulless. He must live in the being which his anthropomorphising association of ideas has excogitated. “What should I feel, how should I act, what movements should I make, what expression should I have, if I were this object, but thinking, willing, feeling—in short, living and conscious? How should I, for instance, as a plane which was really a beast of prey, dispose myself, if I had the board—my victim—under me, and began devouring it?” The organically decorative artist is, therefore, really the dramatiser of the inanimate, for he creates beings, bestows on them character, and makes them act according to the latter and the situation, and, if not speak, nevertheless imitate.

If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness which is very strikingly clear, imitation seizes it and repeats it with slight individual changes, which are, now and then, spirited and happy, but, for the most part, make the original picture dull, nay, through stupidity or misunderstanding may degrade it to nonsense. Such is exactly the case with the material picture as with the word-picture. At first it is the new and peculiar discovery of a poetic mind, then it is repeated well or ill so often that it ends with being a characterless commonplace. Every cultivated language is made up of such commonplaces, and, in like manner, style is made up of repetitions and tones, which are the plastic equivalent of rhetorical phrases.

The psychic sources of style—in contradistinction to those or freely devised organic decoration, which style only repeats and vulgarises—originate in very mean domains of mind. They are thoughtlessness, or, to put it more clearly and briefly, stupidity and mental inertia in their special forms as imitativeness and detestation of novelty.

It is thoughtlessness when we imitate forms that are suited to a particular material in a quite different material, simply because we are used to the sight of them. The far-famed Greek temple architecture is largely a result of this thoughtlessness: it slavishly imitates in stone the wooden architecture, the place of which it has taken; it retains the beams with projecting beam-heads and cross-braces that have neither object nor meaning in stone. To the same category belong the tablets, with manifold curled up and twisted edges, which the Renaissance and the Rococo executed in stone and wood, although they have no sense or justification except in sheet metal: the contemporary Moscow silver-work, which imitate painfully enough damask linen with Russo-Byzantine coloured embroidery, or cakes and black-bread in precious metals or enamel: the marble veils, lace garments, and knitted stockings of the North-Italian sculptors of the decadence, etc.

It is mental inertia when we mechanically persist in repeating forms which either are unfitted for a given object, or have lost all meaning. For two thousand years artists of all sorts have made a decorative use of acanthus leaves in countries where no human eye has ever had an acanthus leaf before it. The Middle Ages decorated with a whole menagerie of beasts from Asia and Africa, which they knew only from fables, foreign textures, and pictures. From imitation to imitation the outlines, which no comparison with the actual model corrected and restored to accuracy, became more inexact and grotesque. Thus arose acanthus capitals which are more like rough logs than the elegantly curled plant, and heraldic lions and leopards, in which no feature any longer reminds us of the great cats. This is then called improving upon the natural form, and people even discover a particular beauty in it: a striking proof of the ability of mankind to make a virtue out of necessity. For the so-called stylisation is conscious and intentional only in late conservative imitation. It arises, however, quite involuntarily through unintelligent imitation of a pattern that is incorrectly felt and grasped, because one has never known its living model. So, too, the whole mythology of the Greeks still haunts our present-day decoration, which mythology was to the Greek artists a part of their living feeling and religious conviction, whilst to-day it has lost all thought and feeling. What can Neptune’s trident, Orpheus’ lyre, the Sirens and the Centaur, the Sphynx and the Gorgon, signify to a son of this century? But whilst these bits of inherited form wander from one imitator to another, until they become hopelessly unrecognisable, they gain a beauty of another sort which they did not originally possess: the venerable spell of antiquity surrounds them, and this charm, in its turn, touches certain susceptibilities of the soul, the inclination to mystic, twilight conceptions of what is remote in time and place, the pleasurable feeling of comfortable persistance in that to which we are accustomed, the connection of the familiar and always known with the remembrance of all strong impressions, both happy and unhappy, of childhood and youth. This mystico-archaic and subjectively sentimental element, which occurs in every style handed down traditionally, furnishes it with fanatical devotees whom its original decorative value could never win. That is, if I may say so, the religious side of the feeling for, and appreciation of, style.

From the oppressive mass of material, which I must, for the most part, leave untouched, I am afraid I must deal with only one more question:—Is there a new style? Is the so-called “Secessionism” a style which characterises our time, or, perhaps, a fugitive moment of our time? He who has attentively observed the later exhibitions on this point will be bound to say “No” decisively. Household furniture and room decoration of the “secessionist” order are tortured into appearing new and original; but they are neither the one nor the other, but a patient, methodical eclecticism which aims at the influence of what is foreign and peculiar. We distinguish accurately that rooms built and painted in the secession style are patched together of Chinese motives, with an addition of Loie Fuller’s serpentine twistings, and that secessionist furniture imitates, in good wood and metal, the slenderness, knottiness, and pliancy of bamboos. The secession contains a very minute percentage of independent invention and a great many reminiscences of Eastern Asia. The West European style, which should ostensibly be the expression of the latest high European tendencies, is, in reality, Chinese and Japanese style, exaggerated by absurdity of form and assumed or real delirium.