390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF DECORATION. 



By Prof. G. AITCHISON.* 



WE have, in our cities, three things that are adverse to the 

 embellishment of our lives : First, we live, as a rule, in hired 

 houses. No one will ornament his house with that which is beau- 

 tiful, permanent, and costly, if some one that he neither knows 

 nor cares for will, after a few years, enjoy it, and that without 

 paying one farthing as compensation for the outlay. Secondly, 

 our clothes are not only ugly, but ignoble in form. Sculpture or 

 statuary, when used to portray man in the costume worn in Eng- 

 land, is impossible ; the ablest sculptor can but turn out a scare- 

 crow if he is bound to reproduce the actual clothes. Thirdly, in 

 our buildings the atmosphere and its accompaniments almost for- 

 bid external color in monumental materials. Those materials 

 that are unaffected by wet, frost, and the vitriol of the atmos- 

 phere, are soon covered with a pall of soot and dust. If we could 

 once get Englishmen to love something beautiful, the fine arts 

 might then enter on a new career. Our machinery and me- 

 chanical appliances could furnish almost the poorest houses 

 with copies of first-rate works of art if the demand once arose. 

 It is, however, much more important that the outsides of build- 

 ings should be enriched with color and lovely form than their 

 insides. I may say that they are wanting in their first duty 

 to the public if they are not beautiful, for they have not only 

 taken some sky and air from us, and possibly flowers, trees, or 

 herbage, but they help to poison the air by their smoke, dust, 

 and exhalations. 



In using decoration we are strictly following Nature, who not 

 only makes the most of her works of beautiful form and of 

 beautiful color, but enriches them with a variety of texture, of 

 patterns, and of colors that would in man's work be most strictly 

 decoration. No doubt some of this is protective, but much also, 

 as far as we can judge, is purely ornamental. 



The schemes for decoration are purely architectural, not only 

 when they apply to buildings but also in the case of separate 

 articles that are movable, and that are not wholly covered with 

 one scheme of ornament, and for this reason, that architecture 

 deals with harmonic proportions, and with the contrast of primi- 

 tive forms. 



What may be called formal ornament is the application of 

 certain observed facts in Nature that please. Up to a certain 

 point the repetition of some simple form is pleasing : lines are said 



* Abridged from Ins lectures before the Society of Arts. 



