Wherever the former has been paramount, as in
Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe
by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative
work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic
conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned
for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our
work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern
tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty
whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We
are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we
have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets
of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane
worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have
become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter.
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