des the principles and
laws of the art: the motives and their hereditary outcome; the art
creating the principles; the laws controlling the art.

Design means intention, motive, and should as such be applied to the
smallest as to the greatest efforts of art. That which results from
it, either as picture or pattern, is a record of the thoughts which
produced it, and by its style fixes the date, of its production.

I will first consider the principles of design, and afterwards, in
another chapter, inquire into the origin of patterns; investigating
their motives, and using them as examples, and also as warnings.

The individual genius of the artist works first in design, though his
work is for the use of the craftsman or artisan, his collaborator; for
the two, head and hands, must work together, or else will render each
other inoperative or ineffective.

The artisan, by right of his title, claims a part in the art itself;
the craftsman, by his name, points out that he, too, has to work out
the craft, the mystery, the inner meaning, of the design or intention.

The designer himself is subject to the prejudices called the taste of
his day. He is necessarily under the influence which that taste has
imposed upon him, and from which no spontaneous efforts of genius can
entirely emancipate him. Whether he is conceiving a temple for the
worship of a national faith, or the edging for the robe of a fair
votaress, or the pattern on the border of a cup of gold or brass, he
cannot avoid the force of tradition and of custom, which comes from
afar, weighted with the power of long descent, and which crushes
individuality, unless it is of the most robust nature.

Of very early design we have most curious and mysterious glimpses. The
cave man was an artist. The few scratches on a bone, cleverly showing
the forms of a dog or a stag, a whale or a seal, nay, the figure of a
man, have enabled us to ascertain and to classify the Palaeolithic cave
man; from whom his less civilized successor, the Neolithic man, may be
distinguished by his absence of all animal design.[73]

These fragmentary scraps of information, pieced together only in these
later years, teach us the value of very small facts which time and
care are now accumulating, and which, being the remains of lives and
nations passed away, still serve as the soil in which history can be
fertilized.

We have no means of judging whether the cave man was an artist on a
greater or mor