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CALLIGRAPHY "PART-1"

BY MERVYN C. OLIVER

Looking back through the ages it can be seen that calligraphy has played   an important part in the development of civilization, and that it has mani­fested itself in many ways and through many agents. It can first be seen on papyrus in Egypt in the hieratic writing of the Papyrus Prisse dated about 2500 B.C. It is next observed in Greece where it had been practised since the third century B.C., and later turns up in Rome in the shape of Roman Uncials. Under the monastic system it took the form of fine writing on vellum which continued in varied style until the fifteenth century. During the next century beautiful italic hands were produced in the chan­celleries of Italy, which were also engraved on wood and metal, thus serving as examples of fine work for future generations.

The passing of Edward Johnston the calligrapher in 1944 and Graily Hewitt the illuminator in 1953, both pioneers in the art of writing and illuminating in England, has left a gap in the production of decorative MSS. that cannot easily be filled.

To Edward Johnston we owe the rediscovery of the master tool, the framed panel of writing as decoration, and freedom and sharpness in formal handwriting.

the tool. The tool that Edward Johnston rediscovered was the Roman reedpen which had been used as a substitute for an Egyptian brush. This was a very thin reed or cane chewed so that the frayed end became a small flat brush. This Egyptian brush had been in use since about the year 4500 B.C. and had been in constant use for writing the hieratic and demodic scripts until the third century B.C. when the Romans made contact. The reed then became a substitute for the brush and was cut with a chisel edge. It may therefore be concluded that the Romans were the first to cut a reed, which became the ancestor of the quill pen.

The outcome of the use of the chisel-cut reed was undoubtedly a script known as Rustic, which was carved in stone, painted on walls and written on papyrus; it became one of the common scripts of Rome probably before the year 1 a.d. and may have influenced the formation of the Roman capital.

The chisel-edged pen when pulled into a curve gave the stroke gradation; it also gave the oblique strokes variety of width, producing a capital letter form of great beauty.

It seems that when the capital letter had been carved so perfectly in the first cen­tury a.d., the writers of the time who set themselves to produce fine scripts did their best to follow the capital; they, finding it difficult to write the angular strokes, turned as many as convenient into curved ones, hence they obtained the Uncial Hand, which in time broke down to a half-uncial, which ultimately became the beautiful writing of mediaeval Europe. It was this fine writing that fired Edward Johnston as a young man to study formal hands; it was the rediscovery of the master tool that gave him the opportunity of forming modern writing.

framed panels. These framed MSS. were produced from a desire to use writing as a form of decoration; they conveyed information in a beautiful way. Poems, prayers, memorials, lists of names, short local histories, quotations, rules, etc., were beautifully written on vellum and framed often close up without a mount, the skin being kept from the glass by a strip of wood in the rabbet of the frame. These were shorn of meaningless border ornament and large initial letters which had been bequeathed to us by the Italians of the sixteenth century, and in their place these new scribes designed spirited writing in black colour and gold, producing a mass pattern of great beauty and interest. Heraldry was often introduced with a little quill line ornament to write it into the background, but, generally, a sense of decoration was attained by contrasting sizes of beautifully spaced lines of lettering in opposing colours.

This modern use of writing has been taken up by the followers of the pioneer with ever greater variety of subject and adaptation as these following pages will show.

The initial idea must have come from the display in museums of single leaves taken from mediaeval MS. books; but Edward Johnston, instead of copying book decoration, designed for the frame and produced an architectural balance within the space provided: and for the most part ignored the large initial which had played so large a part in book decoration in the past.

freedom. The formal imitation of late Gothic writing in the nineteenth century popularly known as "Old English" had become dull, mechanical and lifeless. It was based on the poorest form of Gothic and was often a bad imitation of printer's type drawn with a steel pointed nib and filled in. Edward Johnston completely super­seded this by showing how the broad nib would again give free decorative writing if the tool was well cut and the letter-form mastered. He had studied the written books of the third to the fifteenth centuries in order to select an example on which to base a modern hand. He was influenced in this choice by Sidney Cockerell, who as secre­tary to William Morris had knowledge of the collection of MSS. in the British Museum and introduced to him a tenth-century psalter which had probably been written at Winchester. This he modernized and wrote with great freedom and swift­ness, naming it the "Foundational Hand". Later he studied the Roman and Italian hands, and further experiments followed, all showing a vital knowledge of the way fine writing emerges from a natural use of a simple tool.

To Graily Hewitt we owe that great luminous quality, burnished gold; the quality that lifts gilded MSS. far above all other coloured decoration. This art, known and practised by the Byzantine scribes, revived by the monastic orders in the damp cells of Western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, again in this century attracts men and women to work at this absorbing and delightful craft.

As far back as 1896 William Morris and W. H. Cowlishaw were experimenting with staked plaster, white lead and gums to find the best way to get gold leaf to stick to parchment; and then to produce a burnish that would last and not crack in the course of time. Edward Johnston also made extensive experiments during the early years of his writing career, but never attained a lasting burnish to his work.

Graily Hewitt was very early in life attracted to the art of illuminating and so keen was he that no one could dissuade him from it. He became one of the first students of Edward Johnston at the new L.C.C. Central School and soon became a fair scribe. Very soon he was placed in charge of a second class and began his research into the question of gilding for MSS.

He based his early experiments on the historic notes of Cennino Cennini, which contained the ingredient "candy". He therefore tried various sugars, finally selecting "centrifugal or coffee sugar". This has proved to be a far better ingredient than "black treacle" which Edward Johnston had used.

This selection of sugar seems to have been a turning point and from that time has become a vital part of the size or gesso used by Graily Hewitt and his followers with such success. By about 1910 the materials used in making gilding size were settled, namely staked plaster of Paris, powdered white lead, centrifugal sugar and a fish glue, not forgetting a pinch of American Bole for its colour. It was then a matter of the exact number of parts of each to produce the best result; the requirements were:

1. The mixture must settle smoothly.
   
   
2. The gold leaf must adhere to the gesso after it has been breathed upon.
   
   
3. The finished work must bend without cracking and be very flat.
   
   
4. The burnish must be bright and lasting.

In a few years most of these aims were realized by Graily Hewitt and a few who assisted him, and this period saw the best work that was being done; but even those lived to see their work crack in course of time, and so experiment has gone on with different methods and materials to find lasting perfection.

A complete chapter on gilding (brought up to date) has been written among other details of the craft and is to be published by the Society of Scribes and Illuminators within the course of a few months.

Graily Hewitt also did his best to revive the handwritten book for such pur­poses as Communion Services, historical records, books of poetry and fine prose, memorials, etc.

The first Church Service book to be written was by Edward Johnston in 1902, a Communion Service for Holy Trinity Church, Hastings. Next came the War Record of South Africa by Graily Hewitt, the first of a large number of memorials by him and other followers of the two pioneers.

During the production of these works, modern calligraphy has established itself as a useful craft, especially where a single copy has been required. It was soon discovered by those needing memorials that to have a large volume set up and printed in type was not economic, so the writer was called in. Graily Hewitt's aim was therefore partly realized; but very few books have been commissioned except by rich patrons in the early days of the movement, and the memorials for regiments, county councils, churches and schools. The price of fine writing materials and the cost of binding have prohibited scribes from producing handwritten books for sale.

Books written on calligraphy and allied subjects have kept pace with the revival during the whole of the period, and much research has been undertaken both in regard to the origin and development of the alphabet and the development of the small letter through mediaeval writing.

Before the beginning of the century little had been written on the subject except The Story of the Alphabet by Edward Clodd and Maude Thompson's fine work on Greek ana Latin Paleography together with his volume on English Illuminated Manu­scripts, published in 1895 and out of print before 1906. But since the time that Edward Johnston published his book on Writing, Lettering and Illuminating a steady stream of works upon all aspects of the subject have been written; probably it was because of the interest aroused by the pioneers in the practical side of the craft that this flow of literature occurred, both here and in the United States.

The following are among the most important. The British Museum published a guide to the collection of manuscripts they had in 1906. About the same time John W. Bradley was publishing illustrated books on illuminating, its history and development. During 1907 the British Museum published Reproductions of Illuminated MSS., a series of fifty collotype plates. In 1920 W. A. Mason published in New York a work of considerable scholarship dealing with the subject of picture writing in the Americas together with the growth of letter-form in Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylon, Assyria, Crete, Greece and Rome, a book of great interest to all who wish to study the formation of alphabets.

With the development of photography and process reproduction the range of examples showing epigraphy and paleography has increased to a degree unthought of during the early days of the century. During 1932 B. L. Ullnan of the University of Chicago published Ancient Writing and Its Influence, which brings the history of the alphabet more up to date and includes some observations on the Sinai stones which may eventually help to solve the riddle of the alphabet. Professor E. A. Lowe of Oxford wrote in The Legacy of the Middle Ages a chapter on "Handwriting" which deals with its growth before the time of Charlemagne. This is an excellent essay which should be known by all serious students of calligraphy. James Wardrop of the Victoria and Albert Museum has also written on "Palatino and His Circle" in Signature, No. 14, 1952.

World origins and development of alphabets are also dealt with in great profusion by D. Diringer, a scholar in these matters. The French just before the war of 1939-1945 issued some newly discovered material in plates dealing with early specimens of the written small letter under the title of L’ Éicriture Latine by J. Mallon, which takes history back earlier than Maude Thompson's great work.

Finally among the smaller and more recent publications comes the "King Penguin" on the subject of writing by Alfred Fairbank, which makes a rapid survey from the fourth to the twentieth centuries; and some beautiful photographic reproductions of the detailed work of twelfth-century artists taken from the Winchester Bible by Walter Oakshott.

From about the year 1930 writing and lettering had made such progress that it had become a subject in the training of Art Teachers and was taught by the imme­diate followers of the two who had given their lives to its cause. Lettering of Today, first volume, published in 1937, showed the work of some of these who had taken up the craft and were in their turn passing it on to the new generation.

Under post-war conditions the subject suffered a setback; writing materials had suddenly become scarce and expensive. The supply of quills, which had been so good and plentiful from Russia and Canada, was completely cut off. They were large turkey and Hudson Bay goose. Indian ink which had been imported from New York in convenient one-ounce bottles was no longer in stock, and chinese "stick" from those who had made it for centuries had been reduced to small end pieces almost too small to hold and grind. England has never produced a thin black ink suitable for both small and large manuscript writing; those made here have either been off-black or too thickly charged with gum to produce a really thin fine quill stroke on vellum. Various trades had used hematite burnishers in the course of their work, such as the burnishing of gilded edges of books and the brightening of silver­ware that had been gilt. These burnishers had been found to be the best tools for the work of the manuscript gilder, and a number of scribes bought from trade suppliers or had them cut and polished in Germany. This supply has been cut off for ten years. Vellum could still be bought as it was a product of our own; but the quality was different. The finest raw hides came from Scandinavia and these were denied us by the Government; in consequence modern writing has greatly suffered.

The trend of calligraphy today is that it has fallen away from the idiosyncrasies of Graily Hewitt and mainly follows the general line laid down by Edward Johnston; there are, however, certain exceptions and differences creeping in which are in­evitable. This was expected and often encouraged by him when he talked of the future.

He had examined the work of past generations, learned what they had to teach and then based his alphabets and concepts of page design on the whole of the mediaeval movement, from early growth, middle glory and final decay.

A few modern scribes have done the same in some measure, the result of which can be seen in the following pages. The majority have learned and followed what they have been taught by the early followers of Edward Johnston and, as it is to be expected, have lost a certain amount in the process.

Some have clung to the middle period of his work while others have been interested in what he produced in the latter part of his life; some have interpreted, some have misunderstood: but for the most part writers have chosen the alphabets which rely on the swift-stroke of the pen rather than those which were based on early Roman MSS. such as uncials, or the insular half-uncials of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The result has been that the italic hands are favoured and that the Foundational Hand which Edward Johnston founded on a tenth-century psalter has sometimes been given an italic bias.

However they work, for fine calligraphy, all must study the tools and their fitness for size, the inks or paints for their consistency, and the surface of the vellum or paper in order to produce sharpness, which is one of the greatest values in calligraphy.

This art, having been re-established in our modern world, makes one ask whether it has any real use today beside being a reminder of a glorious past. To begin with, maps have been greatly enlivened by the use of the revived "hands" to­gether with calligraphic drawings making the whole design one by the use of a common tool. Pedigrees have been designed in a more interesting way especially the circular type for limited use. Again, the "Address" has been thoroughly shaken up, redesigned and decorated with improved drawing and design of heraldic achievements, while the vellum book of names has shown a real improvement on the discoloured brass so often found on church walls.

There is, however, a tendency to decorate manuscripts with drawings which are naturalistic in type, and to ignore the fact that all great illumination relies upon conventional and symbolic decoration which is more akin to the strokes of a pen than to the naturalistic work of illustrators. This tendency will be watched with interest by those who have seen the initial stages of the revival.

sheila waters. Loyal Address to H.M. The Queen from The Archi­tectural Association. Heading in raised and burnished gold; remain­der in greenish grey-blue. Original: 27 x 12½ inches

Dorothy hutton. Prayer for H.M. The Queen. Crown and initial in gold, remainder of lettering in blue, red and black. Original: 13½ x 17¼ inches

G. C. GRIFFITHS. Centre opening from Handel's Largo in G. written in dark grey, red, green and blue.

Original: 10 x 14 inches

Bo Lindberg. Address to the Swedish Board of Trade from the Council of Mines. Original:11½ x 9 inches

John Woodcock. A page from ''English Brasses". Main lettering in black with chapter heading and side note in green, gold initial, and figures on a pale yellow ground. Original: I5½x 11½ inches

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