86 



NATURE 



[September 19, 1912 



There has been far too great a disregard of aesthetic 

 considerations in the everyday work of the engineer — 

 we usually take a too exclusively utilitarian view of 

 our calling. We should not be prepared to accept, as 

 referring to the arts we practise at their best, the 

 distinction drawn by a philosophical writer between 

 "the mechanical arts which can be efficiently exercised 

 by mere trained habit, rote, or calculation," and "the 

 fine arts which have to be exercised by a higher order 

 of powers." ' And I think it can be shown that a 

 greater regard for artistic merit in our designs would 

 not necessarily lead to extravagance, but, in many 

 cases, would conduce to economy and efficiency. It 

 is at least true — and much less than the whole truth — 

 that greater artistic merit than is commonly found 

 in our works could be attained with no sacrifice of 

 structural fitness, or of suitability for the purposes 

 they are designed to serve. 



There was a time when engineers made desperate 

 attempts to secure artistic effects by the embellish- 

 ment (?) of their productions with features which they 

 believed to be ornamental. Fortunately the standard 

 of taste has risen above and beyond this practice in 

 the case of most members of our profession and most 

 of our clients. We are all familiar with illustrations 

 of philosophical instruments, and other mechanical 

 contrivances, of the early times, that vied in lavish- 

 ness of adornment — though not in artistic merit — 

 with those wonderful astronomical appliances that 

 were carried — as trophies of war! — from Pekin to 

 Sans Souci. Many of us can remember a time when 

 the practice had not altogether disappeared, even in 

 the design of steam engines, lathes, and other pro- 

 ducts of the mechanical engineer's workshop. I well 

 remember in my apprenticeship days the building of 

 a beam engine that was a triumph of ingenuity in the 

 misapplication of decorative features. In place of the 

 mildly ornamented pillars and entablature of Watt's 

 design, there was provided, for the support of the 

 journals of the beam, a pair of A frames constructed 

 in the form of elaborately moulded Gothic arches 

 flanked by lesser arches on each side, while the beam 

 itself, and many other parts, were plentifully provided 

 with even, less appropriate embellishments borrowed 

 from the art of the stonemason. It is some consola- 

 tion to remember that the clients for whom the engine 

 was built were not of this country, and that the design 

 itself was not a product of the workshop that was 

 favoured with the contract to produce this amazing 

 piece of cast-iron architecture. We have all seen 

 wrought-iron bridges the inattractive features of 

 whicfi were concealed by cast-iron masks — in the form 

 of panelling, or of sham pillars and arches with no 

 visible means of support — that not only have no con- 

 nection with the structural scheme, but suggest types 

 of construction that could not, by any possibility, 

 meet the requirements. Structures of this kind re- 

 mind one of the pudding which the White Knight 

 (with good reason when we remember the character- 

 istics of his genius) considered the cleverest of his 

 many inventions. It began, he explained, with blot- 

 ting-paper, and when Alice ventured to express the 

 opinion that that would not be very nice, he assured 

 her that though it might not be very nice alone she 

 had no idea what a difference it made mixing it with 

 other things — such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. 



There are, and must always be, wide differences 

 of opinion regarding what is good or bad in matters 

 of taste, but we may go so far in generalisation as to 

 say that we can admire the association of elements 

 we know to be incongruous only in compositions that 

 are intended to be humorous. " All human excellence 

 has its basis in reason and propriety ; and the mind, 



■■ Enr. Rrit., eleventh edition, article "Art." 



NO. 2238, VOL. 90] 



to be interested to any efficient purpose, must neither 

 be distracted nor confused." ' But to be able to judge 

 of the propriety or reasonableness of any composition 

 we must have some knowledge of the essential quali- 

 ties and relationships of its component parts, and 

 excellence cannot depend upon an appeal to ignorance. 

 We can quite imagine that the White Knight's 

 pudding would appeal as an admirable and most in- 

 genious concoction to one who lacked a knowledge of 

 the dietetic value of blotting-paper and was willing 

 to take for granted the excellence of gunpowder as a 

 spice and of sealing-wax as a flavouring. No artist 

 would be bold enough to include a polar bear or a 

 walrus in the composition of a picture of the African 

 desert, nor be prepared to consider as a legitimate exer- 

 cise of the artistic imagination the depicting an Arab 

 and his camel wending their weary way across the 

 Arctic snows. He would recognise the incongruity, 

 and might even realise that it is only a lack of 

 imagination or of true inventive power that could lead 

 anyone to resort to such measures for the securing of 

 a desired colour scheme. These are lengths to which 

 even artists will not go in the arrangement of 

 elements in a composition. But an artist will secure 

 a colour scheme at which he aims by the introduction 

 into his landscape of a rainbow in an impossible posi- 

 tion, or of impossible form or dimensions, or with 

 colours arranged according to his own fancy, though 

 in this there is a much more essential unreasonable- 

 ness. A polar bear might be transported to the desert, 

 and an Arab might conceivably find his way to the 

 regions of snow and ice, but a rainbow cannot wander 

 fiom the place assigned to it by nature, nor can it 

 have other than the ordained form or dimensions 

 or sequence of colours. No artist would paint a figure 

 holding a candle and make the light fall on the side 

 of the face remote from the source, but he will, and 

 usually does, paint the moon illuminated on the side 

 remote from the sun. Why? Simply because he has 

 not before his mind the essential absurdity of the 

 scheme, if indeed he knows why the moon shines. 

 Artists who deal with nature in any of its aspects 

 may be commended to "mark, learn, and inwardly 

 digest " Whistler's definition of their calling : " Nature 

 contains the elements in colour and form of all pic- 

 tures . . . but the artist is born to pick and choose, 

 and group with science, these elements, that the result 

 may be beautiful." Whether or not we are to under- 

 stand that Whistler intended to include an accurate 

 knowledge of physical facts and phenomena in what 

 he calls science, he cannot have meant anything less 

 than sense. 



So in regard to the arts of construction, we may 

 say that mechanical science provides the elements of 

 all structures, and the craftsman — be he caHed 

 engineer or architect — is born to pick and choose, 

 and group with science, these elements, that the result 

 may be useful — and not devoid of grace. 



The only valid excuse for such departures from the 

 fit and rational in painting or in structural design as 

 those which I have instanced is ignorance on the part 

 of the designer of the nature of the elements he 

 employs, or a lack of skill to devise a possible or 

 reasonable arrangement of details that will secure the 

 general effect he desires. 



It may almost savour of sacrilege to quote, in this 

 connection, from the writings of that "Wild, wilful, 

 fancy's child " the story of whose eight short vears of 

 life and literary work Dr. John Brown has given in 

 his charming " Pet Marjorie " — a record of perhaps 

 the shortest human life that has formed the subject 

 of a biography. But the lines are too pertinent to 

 my purpose to be withheld, and the frankness of the 



-1 Mr. Duppa's *' Life of Michelangelo." 



