O&K; Trojan L45-4500Z Wheel Loader

Parts Manual TB126

To download the complete and correct content, please visit:

https://manualpost.com/download/ok-trojan-l45-4500z-wheel-loader-parts-manual-
tb126

O&K; Trojan L45-4500Z Wheel Loader Parts Manual TB126Size: 6.73

MbLanguage: EnglishType: pdfPages: 302L45-4500Z_TB126
Download all on: manualpost.com.
 [Unrelated content]
Another random document on
Internet:
still the Pythia is not dead. In our own age she has sung for us, and
this land gave her new birth. Indeed, Mrs. Browning is the wisest of
the Sibyls, wiser even than that mighty figure whom Michael Angelo
has painted on the roof of the Sistine Chapel at Rome, poring over
the scroll of mystery, and trying to decipher the secrets of Fate; for
she realized that, while knowledge is power, suffering is part of
knowledge.
To her influence, almost as much as to the higher education of
women, I would be inclined to attribute the really remarkable
awakening of woman’s song that characterizes the latter half of our
century in England. No country has ever had so many poetesses at
once. Indeed, when one remembers that the Greeks had only nine
muses, one is sometimes apt to fancy that we have too many. And
yet the work done by women in the sphere of poetry is really of a
very high standard of excellence. In England we have always been
prone to underrate the value of tradition in literature. In our
eagerness to find a new voice and a fresh mode of music, we have
forgotten how beautiful Echo may be. We look first for individuality
and personality, and these are, indeed, the chief characteristics of
the masterpieces of our literature, either in prose or verse; but
deliberate culture and a study of the best models, if united to an
artistic temperament and a nature susceptible of exquisite
impressions, may produce much that is admirable, much that is
worthy of praise. It would be quite impossible to give a complete
catalogue of all the women who since Mrs. Browning’s day have tried
lute and lyre. Mrs. Pfeiffer, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mrs. Augusta
Webster, Graham Tomson, Miss Mary Robinson, Jean Ingelow, Miss
May Kendall, Miss Nesbit, Miss May Probyn, Mrs. Craik, Mrs. Meynell,
Miss Chapman, and many others have done really good work in
poetry, either in the grave Dorian mode of thoughtful and intellectual
verse, or in the light and graceful forms of old French song, or in the
romantic manner of antique ballad, or in that ‘moment’s monument,’
as Rossetti called it, the intense and concentrated sonnet.
Occasionally one is tempted to wish that the quick, artistic faculty
that women undoubtedly possess developed itself somewhat more in
prose and somewhat less in verse. Poetry is for our highest moods,
when we wish to be with the gods, and in our poetry nothing but the
very best should satisfy us; but prose is for our daily bread, and the
lack of good prose is one of the chief blots on our culture. French
prose, even in the hands of the most ordinary writers, is always
readable, but English prose is detestable. We have a few, a very
few, masters, such as they are. We have Carlyle, who should not be
imitated; and Mr. Pater, who, through the subtle perfection of his
form, is inimitable absolutely; and Mr. Froude, who is useful; and
Matthew Arnold, who is a model; and Mr. George Meredith, who is a
warning; and Mr. Lang, who is the divine amateur; and Mr.
Stevenson, who is the humane artist; and Mr. Ruskin, whose rhythm
and colour and fine rhetoric and marvellous music of words are
entirely unattainable. But the general prose that one reads in
magazines and in newspapers is terribly dull and cumbrous, heavy in
movement and uncouth or exaggerated in expression. Possibly
some day our women of letters will apply themselves more definitely
to prose.
Their light touch, and exquisite ear, and delicate sense of balance
and proportion would be of no small service to us. I can fancy
women bringing a new manner into our literature.
However, we have to deal here with women as poetesses, and it is
interesting to note that, though Mrs. Browning’s influence
undoubtedly contributed very largely to the development of this new
song-movement, if I may so term it, still there seems to have been
never a time during the last three hundred years when the women
of this kingdom did not cultivate, if not the art, at least the habit, of
writing poetry.
Who the first English poetess was I cannot say. I believe it was the
Abbess Juliana Berners, who lived in the fifteenth century; but I
have no doubt that Mr. Freeman would be able at a moment’s notice
to produce some wonderful Saxon or Norman poetess, whose works
cannot be read without a glossary, and even with its aid are
completely unintelligible. For my own part, I am content with the
Abbess Juliana, who wrote enthusiastically about hawking; and after
her I would mention Anne Askew, who in prison and on the eve of
her fiery martyrdom wrote a ballad that has, at any rate, a pathetic
and historical interest. Queen Elizabeth’s ‘most sweet and
sententious ditty’ on Mary Stuart is highly praised by Puttenham, a
contemporary critic, as an example of ‘Exargasia, or the Gorgeous in
Literature,’ which somehow seems a very suitable epithet for such a
great Queen’s poems. The term she applies to the unfortunate
Queen of Scots, ‘the daughter of debate,’ has, of course, long since
passed into literature. The Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney’s
sister, was much admired as a poetess in her day.
In 1613 the ‘learned, virtuous, and truly noble ladie,’ Elizabeth
Carew, published a Tragedie of Marian, the Faire Queene of Jewry,
and a few years later the ‘noble ladie Diana Primrose’ wrote A Chain
of Pearl, which is a panegyric on the ‘peerless graces’ of Gloriana.
Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of
Hawthornden; Lady Mary Wroth, to whom Ben Jonson dedicated The
Alchemist; and the Princess Elizabeth, the sister of Charles I., should
also be mentioned.
After the Restoration women applied themselves with still greater
ardour to the study of literature and the practice of poetry.
Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, was a true woman of letters, and
some of her verses are extremely pretty and graceful. Mrs. Aphra
Behn was the first Englishwoman who adopted literature as a regular
profession. Mrs. Katharine Philips, according to Mr. Gosse, invented
sentimentality. As she was praised by Dryden, and mourned by
Cowley, let us hope she may be forgiven. Keats came across her
poems at Oxford when he was writing Endymion, and found in one
of them ‘a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher kind’; but I fear
nobody reads the Matchless Orinda now. Of Lady Winchelsea’s
Nocturnal Reverie Wordsworth said that, with the exception of
Pope’s Windsor Forest, it was the only poem of the period
intervening between Paradise Lost and Thomson’s Seasons that
contained a single new image of external nature. Lady Rachel
Russell, who may be said to have inaugurated the letter-writing
literature of England; Eliza Haywood, who is immortalized by the
badness of her work, and has a niche in The Dunciad; and the
Marchioness of Wharton, whose poems Waller said he admired, are
very remarkable types, the finest of them being, of course, the first
named, who was a woman of heroic mould and of a most noble
dignity of nature.
Indeed, though the English poetesses up to the time of Mrs.
Browning cannot be said to have produced any work of absolute
genius, they are certainly interesting figures, fascinating subjects for
study. Amongst them we find Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who
had all the caprice of Cleopatra, and whose letters are delightful
reading; Mrs. Centlivre, who wrote one brilliant comedy; Lady Anne
Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was described by Sir Walter Scott
as ‘worth all the dialogues Corydon and Phillis have together spoken
from the days of Theocritus downwards,’ and is certainly a very
beautiful and touching poem; Esther Vanhomrigh and Hester
Johnson, the Vanessa and the Stella of Dean Swift’s life; Mrs. Thrale,
the friend of the great lexicographer; the worthy Mrs. Barbauld; the
excellent Miss Hannah More; the industrious Joanna Baillie; the
admirable Mrs. Chapone, whose Ode to Solitude always fills me with
the wildest passion for society, and who will at least be remembered
as the patroness of the establishment at which Becky Sharp was
educated; Miss Anna Seward, who was called ‘The Swan of
Lichfield’; poor L. E. L. whom Disraeli described in one of his clever
letters to his sister as ‘the personification of Brompton—pink satin
dress, white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and her hair à la
Sappho’; Mrs. Ratcliffe, who introduced the romantic novel, and has
consequently much to answer for; the beautiful Duchess of
Devonshire, of whom Gibbon said that she was ‘made for something
better than a Duchess’; the two wonderful sisters, Lady Dufferin and
Mrs. Norton; Mrs. Tighe, whose Psyche Keats read with pleasure;
Constantia Grierson, a marvellous blue-stocking in her time; Mrs.
Hemans; pretty, charming ‘Perdita,’ who flirted alternately with
poetry and the Prince Regent, played divinely in the Winter’s Tale,
was brutally attacked by Gifford, and has left us a pathetic little
poem on a Snowdrop; and Emily Brontë, whose poems are instinct
with tragic power, and seem often on the verge of being great.
Old fashions in literature are not so pleasant as old fashions in
dress. I like the costume of the age of powder better than the
poetry of the age of Pope. But if one adopts the historical
standpoint—and this is, indeed, the only standpoint from which we
can ever form a fair estimate of work that is not absolutely of the
highest order—we cannot fail to see that many of the English
poetesses who preceded Mrs. Browning were women of no ordinary
talent, and that if the majority of them looked upon poetry simply as
a department of belles lettres, so in most cases did their
contemporaries. Since Mrs. Browning’s day our woods have become
full of singing birds, and if I venture to ask them to apply themselves
more to prose and less to song, it is not that I like poetical prose,
but that I love the prose of poets.
 VENUS OR VICTORY
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1888.)

There are certain problems in archæology that seem to possess a

real romantic interest, and foremost among these is the question of
the so-called Venus of Melos. Who is she, this marble mutilated
goddess whom Gautier loved, to whom Heine bent his knee? What
sculptor wrought her, and for what shrine? Whose hands walled her
up in that rude niche where the Melian peasant found her? What
symbol of her divinity did she carry? Was it apple of gold or shield
of bronze? Where is her city and what was her name among gods
and men? The last writer on this fascinating subject is Mr. Stillman,
who in a most interesting book recently published in America, claims
that the work of art in question is no sea-born and foam-born
Aphrodite, but the very Victory Without Wings that once stood in the
little chapel outside the gates of the Acropolis at Athens. So long
ago as 1826, that is to say six years after the discovery of the
statue, the Venus hypothesis was violently attacked by Millingen,
and from that time to this the battle of the archæologists has never
ceased. Mr. Stillman, who fights, of course, under Millingen’s banner,
points out that the statue is not of the Venus type at all, being far
too heroic in character to correspond to the Greek conception of
Aphrodite at any period of their artistic development, but that it
agrees distinctly with certain well-known statues of Victory, such as
the celebrated ‘Victory of Brescia.’ The latter is in bronze, is later,
and has the wings, but the type is unmistakable, and though not a
reproduction it is certainly a recollection of the Melian statue. The
representation of Victory on the coin of Agathocles is also obviously
of the Melian type, and in the museum of Naples is a terra-cotta
Victory in almost the identical action and drapery. As for Dumont
d’Urville’s statement that, when the statue was discovered, one hand
held an apple and the other a fold of the drapery, the latter is
obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the subject is so
contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the statement made
by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none of whom
seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and
hand now in the Louvre were really found in the same niche as the
statue at all. At any rate, these fragments seem to be of extremely
inferior workmanship, and they are so imperfect that they are quite
worthless as data for measure or opinion. So far, Mr. Stillman is on
old ground. His real artistic discovery is this. In working about the
Acropolis of Athens, some years ago, he photographed among other
sculptures the mutilated Victories in the Temple of Nikè Apteros, the
‘Wingless Victory,’ the little Ionic temple in which stood that statue of
Victory of which it was said that ‘the Athenians made her without
wings that she might never leave Athens.’ Looking over the
photographs afterwards, when the impression of the comparatively
diminutive size had passed, he was struck with the close
resemblance of the type to that of the Melian statue. Now, this
resemblance is so striking that it cannot be questioned by any one
who has an eye for form. There are the same large heroic
proportions, the same ampleness of physical development, and the
same treatment of drapery, and there is also that perfect spiritual
kinship which, to any true antiquarian, is one of the most valuable
modes of evidence. Now it is generally admitted on both sides that
the Melian statue is probably Attic in its origin, and belongs certainly
to the period between Phidias and Praxiteles, that is to say, to the
age of Scopas, if it be not actually the work of Scopas himself; and
as it is to Scopas that these bas-reliefs have been always attributed,
the similarity of style can, on Mr. Stillman’s hypothesis, be easily
accounted for.
As regards the appearance of the statue in Melos, Mr. Stillman points
out that Melos belonged to Athens as late as she had any Greek
allegiance, and that it is probable that the statue was sent there for
concealment on the occasion of some siege or invasion. When this
took place, Mr. Stillman does not pretend to decide with any degree
of certainty, but it is evident that it must have been subsequent to
the establishment of the Roman hegemony, as the brickwork of the
niche in which the statue was found is clearly Roman in character,
and before the time of Pausanias and Pliny, as neither of these
antiquaries mentions the statue. Accepting, then, the statue as that
of the Victory Without Wings, Mr. Stillman agrees with Millingen in
supposing that in her left hand she held a bronze shield, the lower
rim of which rested on the left knee where some marks of the kind
are easily recognizable, while with her right hand she traced, or had
just finished tracing, the names of the great heroes of Athens.
Valentin’s objection, that if this were so the left thigh would incline
outwards so as to secure a balance, Mr. Stillman meets partly by the
analogy of the Victory of Brescia and partly by the evidence of
Nature herself; for he has had a model photographed in the same
position as the statue and holding a shield in the manner he
proposes in his restoration. The result is precisely the contrary to
that which Valentin assumes. Of course, Mr. Stillman’s solution of
the whole matter must not be regarded as an absolutely scientific
demonstration. It is simply an induction in which a kind of artistic
instinct, not communicable or equally valuable to all people, has had
the greatest part, but to this mode of interpretation archæologists as
a class have been far too indifferent; and it is certain that in the
present case it has given us a theory which is most fruitful and
suggestive.
The little temple of Nikè Apteros has had, as Mr. Stillman reminds us,
a destiny unique of its kind. Like the Parthenon, it was standing
little more than two hundred years ago, but during the Turkish
occupation it was razed, and its stones all built into the great bastion
which covered the front of the Acropolis and blocked up the
staircase to the Propylæa. It was dug out and restored, nearly every
stone in its place, by two German architects during the reign of
Otho, and it stands again just as Pausanias described it on the spot
where old Ægeus watched for the return of Theseus from Crete. In
the distance are Salamis and Ægina, and beyond the purple hills lies
Marathon. If the Melian statue be indeed the Victory Without Wings,
she had no unworthy shrine.
There are some other interesting essays in Mr. Stillman’s book on the
wonderful topographical knowledge of Ithaca displayed in the
Odyssey, and discussions of this kind are always interesting as long
as there is no attempt to represent Homer as the ordinary literary
man; but the article on the Melian statue is by far the most
important and the most delightful. Some people will, no doubt,
regret the possibility of the disappearance of the old name, and as
Venus not as Victory will still worship the stately goddess, but there
are others who will be glad to see in her the image and ideal of that
spiritual enthusiasm to which Athens owed her liberty, and by which
alone can liberty be won.
On the Track of Ulysses; together with an Excursion in Quest of the
So-called Venus of Melos. By W. J. Stillman. (Houghton, Mifflin and
Co., Boston.)
 M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)

The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike
writer—this is the best description we can give of M. Caro’s Life of
George Sand. The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter
charmingly about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an
accomplished phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he
had a great contempt for Democracy and its doings, but he was
always popular with the Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was
nothing in history or in literature that he could not explain away for
their edification; having never done anything remarkable he was
naturally elected a member of the Academy, and he always remained
loyal to the traditions of that thoroughly respectable and thoroughly
pretentious institution. In fact, he was just the sort of man who
should never have attempted to write a Life of George Sand or to
interpret George Sand’s genius. He was too feminine to appreciate
the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too much of a dilettante
to realize the masculine force of that strong and ardent mind. He
never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never brings us near to
her wonderful personality. He looks on her simply as a littérateur, as
a writer of pretty stories of country life and of charming, if
somewhat exaggerated, romances. But George Sand was much
more than this. Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and
Mauprat, François le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of
them is she adequately expressed, by none of them is she
adequately revealed. As Mr. Matthew Arnold said, many years ago,
‘We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes
through her work as a whole.’ With this spirit, however, M. Caro has
no sympathy. Madame Sand’s doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us,
her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are
Utopian, incoherent and absurd. The best thing for us to do is to
forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secrétaire
Intime. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with such airy
flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the
world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is
so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia
must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro
is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that
he tries to class George Sand’s novels with the old Chansons de
geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures;
whereas in using fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a
means of influencing the social ideals of her age, George Sand was
merely carrying out the traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of
Diderot and of Chateaubriand. The novel, says M. Caro, must be
allied either to poetry or to science. That it has found in philosophy
one of its strongest allies seems not to have occurred to him. In an
English critic such a view might possibly be excusable. Our greatest
novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray, cared little for the
philosophy of their age. But coming, as it does, from a French critic,
the statement seems to show a strange want of recognition of one
of the most important elements of French fiction. Nor, even in the
narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro be said
to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic. To take merely one
instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand’s delightful
treatment of art and the artist’s life. And yet how exquisitely does
she analyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to
life! In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le
Château des Désertes of acting; in Les Maîtres Mosaïstes of mosaic
work; in Le Château de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La
Daniella of the painting of landscape. What Mr. Ruskin and Mr.
Browning have done for England she did for France. She invented
an art literature. It is unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M.
Caro’s minor failings, for the whole effect of the book, so far as it
attempts to portray for us the scope and character of George Sand’s
genius, is entirely spoiled by the false attitude assumed from the
beginning, and though the dictum may seem to many harsh and
exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute incapacity for
appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no qualification for writing
a treatise on the subject.
As for Madame Sand’s private life, which is so intimately connected
with her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before
she could write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it. He
passes it over with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for
fear of wounding the susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose
passions M. Paul Bourget analyses with such subtlety, he transforms
her mother, who was a typical French grisette, into ‘a very amiable
and spirituelle milliner’! It must be admitted that Joseph Surface
himself could hardly show greater tact and delicacy, though we
ourselves must plead guilty to preferring Madame Sand’s own
description of her as an ‘enfant du vieux pavé de Paris.’
George Sand. By the late Elmé Marie Caro. Translated by Gustave
Masson, B.A., Assistant Master, Harrow School. ‘Great French
Writers’ Series. (Routledge and Sons.)
 A FASCINATING BOOK
(Woman’s World, November 1888.)

Mr. Alan Cole’s carefully-edited translation of M. Lefébure’s history of

Embroidery and Lace is one of the most fascinating books that has
appeared on this delightful subject. M. Lefébure is one of the
administrators of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Paris, besides
being a lace manufacturer; and his work has not merely an
important historical value, but as a handbook of technical instruction
it will be found of the greatest service by all needle-women. Indeed,
as the translator himself points out, M. Lefébure’s book suggests the
question whether it is not rather by the needle and the bobbin, than
by the brush, the graver or the chisel, that the influence of woman
should assert itself in the arts. In Europe, at any rate, woman is
sovereign in the domain of art-needlework, and few men would care
to dispute with her the right of using those delicate implements so
intimately associated with the dexterity of her nimble and slender
fingers; nor is there any reason why the productions of embroidery
should not, as Mr. Alan Cole suggests, be placed on the same level
with those of painting, engraving and sculpture, though there must
always be a great difference between those purely decorative arts
that glorify their own material and the more imaginative arts in
which the material is, as it were, annihilated, and absorbed into the
creation of a new form. In the beautifying of modern houses it
certainly must be admitted—indeed, it should be more generally
recognized than it is—that rich embroidery on hangings and curtains,
portières, couches and the like, produces a far more decorative and
far more artistic effect than can be gained from our somewhat
wearisome English practice of covering the walls with pictures and
engravings; and the almost complete disappearance of embroidery
from dress has robbed modern costume of one of the chief elements
of grace and fancy.
That, however, a great improvement has taken place in English
embroidery during the last ten or fifteen years cannot, I think, be
denied. It is shown, not merely in the work of individual artists,
such as Mrs. Holiday, Miss May Morris and others, but also in the
admirable productions of the South Kensington School of Embroidery
(the best—indeed, the only real good—school that South Kensington
has produced). It is pleasant to note on turning over the leaves of
M. Lefébure’s book, that in this we are merely carrying out certain
old traditions of Early English art. In the seventh century, St.
Ethelreda, first abbess of the monastery of Ely, made an offering to
St. Cuthbert of a sacred ornament she had worked with gold and
precious stones, and the cope and maniple of St. Cuthbert, which
are preserved at Durham, are considered to be specimens of opus
Anglicanum. In the year 800, the Bishop of Durham allotted the
income of a farm of two hundred acres for life to an embroideress
named Eanswitha, in consideration of her keeping in repair the
vestments of the clergy in his diocese. The battle standard of King
Alfred was embroidered by Danish Princesses; and the Anglo-Saxon
Gudric gave Alcuid a piece of land, on condition that she instructed
his daughter in needle-work. Queen Mathilda bequeathed to the
Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen a tunic embroidered at Winchester
by the wife of one Alderet; and when William presented himself to
the English nobles, after the Battle of Hastings, he wore a mantle
covered with Anglo-Saxon embroideries, which is probably, M.
Lefébure suggests, the same as that mentioned in the inventory of
the Bayeux Cathedral, where, after the entry relating to the broderie
à telle (representing the conquest of England), two mantles are
described—one of King William, ‘all of gold, powdered with crosses
and blossoms of gold, and edged along the lower border with an
orphrey of figures.’ The most splendid example of the opus
Anglicanum now in existence is, of course, the Syon cope at the
South Kensington Museum; but English work seems to have been
celebrated all over the Continent. Pope Innocent iv. so admired the
splendid vestments worn by the English clergy in 1246, that he
ordered similar articles from Cistercian monasteries in England. St.
Dunstan, the artistic English monk, was known as a designer for
embroideries; and the stole of St. Thomas à Becket is still preserved
in the cathedral at Sens, and shows us the interlaced scroll-forms
used by Anglo-Saxon MS. illuminators.
How far this modern artistic revival of rich and delicate embroidery
will bear fruit depends, of course, almost entirely on the energy and
study that women are ready to devote to it; but I think that it must
be admitted that all our decorative arts in Europe at present have, at
least, this element of strength—that they are in immediate
relationship with the decorative arts of Asia. Wherever we find in
European history a revival of decorative art, it has, I fancy, nearly
always been due to Oriental influence and contact with Oriental
nations. Our own keenly intellectual art has more than once been
ready to sacrifice real decorative beauty either to imitative
presentation or to ideal motive. It has taken upon itself the burden
of expression, and has sought to interpret the secrets of thought
and passion. In its marvellous truth of presentation it has found its
strength, and yet its weakness is there also. It is never with
impunity that an art seeks to mirror life. If Truth has her revenge
upon those who do not follow her, she is often pitiless to her
worshippers. In Byzantium the two arts met—Greek art, with its
intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with humanity;
Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism, its frank rejection of
imitation, its wonderful secrets of craft and colour, its splendid
textures, its rare metals and jewels, its marvellous and priceless
traditions. They had, indeed, met before, but in Byzantium they
were married; and the sacred tree of the Persians, the palm of
Zoroaster, was embroidered on the hem of the garments of the
Western world. Even the Iconoclasts, the Philistines of theological
history, who, in one of those strange outbursts of rage against
Beauty that seem to occur only amongst European nations, rose up
against the wonder and magnificence of the new art, served merely
to distribute its secrets more widely; and in the Liber Pontificalis,
written in 687 by Athanasius, the librarian, we read of an influx into
Rome of gorgeous embroideries, the work of men who had arrived
from Constantinople and from Greece. The triumph of the
Mussulman gave the decorative art of Europe a new departure—that
very principle of their religion that forbade the actual representation
of any object in nature being of the greatest artistic service to them,
though it was not, of course, strictly carried out. The Saracens
introduced into Sicily the art of weaving silken and golden fabrics;
and from Sicily the manufacture of fine stuffs spread to the North of
Italy, and became localized in Genoa, Florence, Venice, and other
towns. A still greater art-movement took place in Spain under the
Moors and Saracens, who brought over workmen from Persia to
make beautiful things for them. M. Lefébure tells us of Persian
embroidery penetrating as far as Andalusia; and Almeria, like
Palermo, had its Hôtel des Tiraz, which rivalled the Hôtel des Tiraz at
Bagdad, tiraz being the generic name for ornamental tissues and
costumes made with them. Spangles (those pretty little discs of
gold, silver, or polished steel, used in certain embroidery for dainty
glinting effects) were a Saracenic invention; and Arabic letters often
took the place of letters in the Roman characters for use in
inscriptions upon embroidered robes and Middle Age tapestries, their
decorative value being so much greater. The book of crafts by
Etienne Boileau, provost of the merchants in 1258–1268, contains a
curious enumeration of the different craft-guilds of Paris, among
which we find ‘the tapiciers, or makers of the tapis sarrasinois (or
Saracen cloths), who say that their craft is for the service only of
churches, or great men like kings and counts’; and, indeed, even in
our own day, nearly all our words descriptive of decorative textures
and decorative methods point to an Oriental origin. What the
inroads of the Mohammedans did for Sicily and Spain, the return of
the Crusaders did for the other countries of Europe. The nobles who
left for Palestine clad in armour, came back in the rich stuffs of the
East; and their costumes, pouches (aumônières sarrasinoises), and
caparisons excited the admiration of the needle-workers of the
West. Matthew Paris says that at the sacking of Antioch, in 1098,
gold, silver and priceless costumes were so equally distributed
among the Crusaders, that many who the night before were
famishing and imploring relief, suddenly found themselves
overwhelmed with wealth; and Robert de Clair tells us of the
wonderful fêtes that followed the capture of Constantinople. The
thirteenth century, as M. Lefébure points out, was conspicuous for
an increased demand in the West for embroidery. Many Crusaders
made offerings to churches of plunder from Palestine; and St. Louis,
on his return from the first Crusade, offered thanks at St. Denis to
God for mercies bestowed on him during his six years’ absence and
travel, and presented some richly embroidered stuffs to be used on
great occasions as coverings to the reliquaries containing the relics
of holy martyrs. European embroidery, having thus become
possessed of new materials and wonderful methods, developed on
its own intellectual and imitative lines, inclining, as it went on, to the
purely pictorial, and seeking to rival painting, and to produce
landscapes and figure-subjects with elaborate perspective and subtle
aerial effects. A fresh Oriental influence, however, came through the
Dutch and the Portuguese, and the famous Compagnie des Grandes
Indes; and M. Lefébure gives an illustration of a door-hanging now
in the Cluny Museum, where we find the French fleurs-de-lys
intermixed with Indian ornament. The hangings of Madame de
Maintenon’s room at Fontainebleau, which were embroidered at St.
Cyr, represent Chinese scenery upon a jonquil-yellow ground.
Clothes were sent out ready cut to the East to be embroidered, and
many of the delightful coats of the period of Louis xv. and Louis xvi.
owe their dainty decoration to the needles of Chinese artists. In our
own day the influence of the East is strongly marked. Persia has
sent us her carpets for patterns, and Cashmere her lovely shawls,
and India her dainty muslins finely worked with gold thread
palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles’ wings. We are
beginning now to dye by Oriental methods, and the silk robes of
China and Japan have taught us new wonders of colour-
combination, and new subtleties of delicate design. Whether we
have yet learned to make a wise use of what we have acquired is
less certain. If books produce an effect, this book of M. Lefébure
should certainly make us study with still deeper interest the whole
question of embroidery, and by those who already work with their
needles it will be found full of most fertile suggestion and most
admirable advice.
Even to read of the marvellous works of embroidery that were
fashioned in bygone ages is pleasant. Time has kept a few
fragments of Greek embroidery of the fourth century b.c. for us.
One is figured in M. Lefébure’s book—a chain-stitch embroidery of
yellow flax upon a mulberry-coloured worsted material, with graceful
spirals and palmetto-patterns: and another, a tapestried cloth
powdered with ducks, was reproduced in the Woman’s World some
months ago for an article by Mr. Alan Cole. [115] Now and then we
find in the tomb of some dead Egyptian a piece of delicate work. In
the treasury at Ratisbon is preserved a specimen of Byzantine
embroidery on which the Emperor Constantine is depicted riding on
a white palfrey, and receiving homage from the East and West. Metz
has a red silk cope wrought with great eagles, the gift of
Charlemagne, and Bayeux the needle-wrought epic of Queen
Matilda. But where is the great crocus-coloured robe, wrought for
Athena, on which the gods fought against the giants? Where is the
huge velarium that Nero stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot
drawn by steeds? How one would like to see the curious table-
napkins wrought for Heliogabalus, on which were displayed all the
dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; or the
mortuary-cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees;
or the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
Pontus, and were embroidered with ‘lions, panthers, bears, dogs,
forests, rocks, hunters—all, in fact, that painters can copy from
nature.’ Charles of Orleans had a coat, on the sleeves of which were
embroidered the verses of a song beginning ‘Madame, je suis tout
joyeux,’ the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in
gold thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed
with four pearls. [116] The room prepared in the palace at Rheims
for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy was decorated with ‘thirteen
hundred and twenty-one papegauts (parrots) made in broidery and
blazoned with the King’s arms, and five hundred and sixty-one
butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the Queen’s
arms—the whole worked in fine gold.’ Catherine de Medicis had a
mourning-bed made for her ‘of black velvet embroidered with pearls
and powdered with crescents and suns.’ Its curtains were of
damask, ‘with leafy wreaths and garlands figured upon a gold and
silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls,’
and it stood in a room hung with rows of the Queen’s devices in cut
black velvet on cloth of silver. Louis xiv. had gold-embroidered
caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. The state bed of
Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade
embroidered in turquoises and pearls, with verses from the Koran;
its supports were of silver-gilt, beautifully chased and profusely set
with enamelled and jewelled medallions. He had taken it from the
Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mahomet had
stood under it. The Duchess de la Ferté wore a dress of reddish-
brown velvet, the skirt of which, adjusted in graceful folds, was held
up by big butterflies made of Dresden china; the front was a tablier
of cloth of silver, upon which was embroidered an orchestra of
musicians arranged in a pyramidal group, consisting of a series of six
ranks of performers, with beautiful instruments wrought in raised
needle-work. ‘Into the night go one and all,’ as Mr. Henley sings in
his charming Ballade of Dead Actors.
Many of the facts related by M. Lefébure about the embroiderers’
guilds are also extremely interesting. Etienne Boileau, in his book of
crafts, to which I have already alluded, tells us that a member of the
guild was prohibited from using gold of less value than ‘eight sous
(about 6s.) the skein; he was bound to use the best silk, and never
to mix thread with silk, because that made the work false and bad.’
The test or trial piece prescribed for a worker who was the son of a
master-embroiderer was ‘a single figure, a sixth of the natural size,
to be shaded in gold’; whilst one not the son of a master was
required to produce ‘a complete incident with many figures.’ The
book of crafts also mentions ‘cutters-out and stencillers and
illuminators’ amongst those employed in the industry of embroidery.
In 1551 the Parisian Corporation of Embroiderers issued a notice
that ‘for the future, the colouring in representations of nude figures
and faces should be done in three or four gradations of carnation-
dyed silk, and not, as formerly, in white silks.’ During the fifteenth
century every household of any position retained the services of an
embroiderer by the year. The preparation of colours also, whether
for painting or for dyeing threads and textile fabrics, was a matter
which, M. Lefébure points out, received close attention from the
artists of the Middle Ages. Many undertook long journeys to obtain
the more famous recipes, which they filed, subsequently adding to
and correcting them as experience dictated. Nor were great artists
above making and supplying designs for embroidery. Raphael made
designs for Francis i., and Boucher for Louis xv.; and in the Ambras
collection at Vienna is a superb set of sacerdotal robes from designs
by the brothers Van Eyck and their pupils. Early in the sixteenth
century books of embroidery designs were produced, and their
success was so great that in a few years French, German, Italian,
Flemish, and English publishers spread broadcast books of design
made by their best engravers. In the same century, in order to give
the designers opportunity of studying directly from nature, Jean
Robin opened a garden with conservatories, in which he cultivated
strange varieties of plants then but little known in our latitudes. The
rich brocades and brocadelles of the time are characterized by the
introduction of large flowery patterns, with pomegranates and other
fruits with fine foliage.
The second part of M. Lefébure’s book is devoted to the history of
lace, and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the
earlier portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still
work in this delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable
suggestions in it, as well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful
designs. Compared to embroidery, lace seems comparatively
modern. M. Lefébure and Mr. Alan Cole tell us that there is no
reliable or documentary evidence to prove the existence of lace
before the fifteenth century. Of course in the East, light tissues,