View Archetype as Letterform: The Dream of Edward Johnston
by Brian Keeble
During the many hours I have spent in conversation with calligraphers and lettercutters over the years, I have always been struck by the way in which the practicalities of achieving the ‘perfect’ letterform and its appropriate spacing in a given context is at the root of their preoccupation and effort. No doubt this is as it should be. What scribe or lettercutter worth his salt would take up this exacting craft and not be haunted and challenged by the idea of perfection.
But what one rarely comes across, if at all, is a serious consideration of where the notion of perfection comes from. For it has also been my experience that calligraphers and lettercutters, whilst pursuing their craft as if some notion of perfection was at least tacitly motivating them, are all too ready to deny that the perfect letterform exists.
What I would like to attempt here, then, is an exploration of the idea that the perfect letterform must be a reality, since if it were not, then it would not have the power to inspire the hand, the eye and the mind of the craftsman as often as it obviously does. Perhaps it would be better to say that the perfect letterform has a reality, even if it is never manifest in a material substance, such as ink or stone. To use more scholastic terms, that it has being even if it does not exist. But to make this distinction between being and existence presupposes that reality is much more complex and multi-layered than our everyday consciousness reveals to us.
You may be familiar with the old adage that ‘to work is to pray’, which saying gives some indication of the fact that the crafts were traditionally practised as if they possessed a spiritual dimension and that they acted as a support for contemplation. I believe the writings of Edward Johnston indicate that he exercised his vocation as if this was still a possibility. Even though Johnston’s practical example has inspired inummerable scribes to take up calligraphy and lettering, so far as I know, no one has previously examined this aspect of his work. If it is time to re-examine the legacy of Johnston, then this rather more ‘hidden’ aspect ought to be fundamental to that re-examination.
If calligraphy is to be understood and practised as if it were more than a skillful game of shape-forming – albeit a very sophisticated game – then we might look to the example of Johnston to learn more of the depths of this ancient, universal skill. Johnston’s was an example that prompted one of his pupils to claim of his inspirational teaching that it came as if out of ‘eternity and infinity’. ()
That is a very pointed description by someone carefully choosing his words. Speaking of the ultimate objective of his craft Johnston himself said: ‘Life is the thing we all want and it is the desire for life that is behind all religion and all art…. Our aim should be…to make letters live…that men themselves may have more life’. () Again, we note the carefully chosen words. This does not sound like someone advocating the practice of ‘art for art’s sake’, or even ‘craft for craft’s sake’.
If you look at your copy of Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, that is if you have an earlier edition, you will find three quotations given prominence on a page facing the Author’s Preface. (I have a copy of the rd edition of this book in which this page was still included. At some later date it was quietly dropped.)
Now from all that we know of him we can certainly agree with Eric Gill’s assessment that Johnston was ‘deliberate of speech and equally deliberate of thought’. We know that Johnston was a deeply religious man, and it is therefore impossible to believe that he lived his life keeping his vocation as a calligrapher and his religious experience in separate compartments. So we must believe that these quotations were chosen with great deliberation by a man who claimed that the ‘one thing I care most about’ is ‘to search out and live the truth’ (). We must also remember that Johnston thought sufficiently of the following passage to writeit out at least twice in , one of these for presentation to no less a master craftsman than Alfred Fairbank. Of this Johnston said ‘in many ways the is yet my best’. () The last of the three quotations reads as follows:
…in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become a friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.’ (x)
This extraordinary passage, taken from Plato’s Symposium and given such prominence by Johnston, needs to be examined carefully. I say extraordinary because it is by no means representative of the habits of mind and thought that have shaped and which energise the modern world, referring as it does to the intelligible realm of archetypal Ideas. Indeed, it is precisely because Johnston placed at the head of his treatise a quotation that does not underwritemodern assumptions about the nature of reality and the mind that makes it necessary we look at the quotation in some detail.
The passage occurs in Plato’s dialogue at a section where Diotima is speaking to Socrates in the context of her teaching that Love is ‘a great spirit between divine and mortal’ (as Johnston annotates it in his footnotes to the inscription). Diotima is speaking about the possibility of men gazing on Beauty’s very self, unsullied and in the words of Johnston’s notes, ‘not dogged with the pollution of mortality and all the colours and varieties of human life. Diotima insists that, only when men discern heavenly beauty itself – face to face – through what makes it visible will they have hold of the true.
The quotation begins, ‘in that communion’ – that is to say, in the mind’s contemplation of beauty, and continues, ‘beholding beauty with the eye of the mind’. When he speaks of mind here, Plato means not, as might be assumed, the rational mind – that part of our common-sense consciousness that makes a reasoned judgement about things on the basis of empirical observation and logical calculation. And the ‘eye’ referred to is not the eye of sensible apprehension – for Plato, like Heraclitus before him, held that the senses are unreliable witnesses of what is unchangingly true. The ‘eye of the mind’ is an intuitive faculty of the soul, capable of grasping metaphysical and spiritual realities that are not subject to change, as is every reality conditioned in whatever way by time and space. ‘To bring forth’ means to grasp and hold with unwavering stability a truth of the mind beyond the world of the senses. It is to grasp ‘a reality’ as opposed to ‘an image’ (or representation) of beauty, as the passage continues. Plato is pointing out that external appearances, because they are the very fabric from which transient reality is woven, have something illusory or deceptive about them. He is making the distinction between things that possess true, permanent Being as opposed to things that are subject to change and which are only in the mind as mental abstractions. So, when he speaks of ‘bringing forth and nourishing’ he is referring to the archetypal truths that enter into one’s very being and become part of our identity, rather than truths of a more ephemeral nature that are temporarily registered in the imagination through the senses. When the contemplator is truly absorbed into these archetypal truths or Ideas, he or she becomes, as the quotation continues, ‘the friend of God and be immortal’. That is to say, assumes or takes on the identity of the archetypal, to identify oneself with the Divine within in the measure the contemplator is able to shed the grosser demands and predilictions of the empirical ego.
We might take it as an indication that Johnston was familiar early on with the idea that an approach to the Divine within entails the sacrifice of one’s ego, that in , at the age of , he wrote on a parchment, ‘The best way to see Divine Light is to put out your own candle’. ()
Now, all this may seem a far cry from the practice of calligraphy, but that it was important to Johnston we cannot doubt. What we must keep in the forefront of our minds is that this contemplation of, and entering into objective beauty, is the grasping of a reality that is never materially embodied. It is an intuitive, unanalysable experience that is known directly without the intervention of mediate, mental activity – that is without any sort of mental calculation that effectively puts a distance between or makes a distinction of the knower and the known. It may be difficult for the modern mind, with its rational and materialist training and bias, to see that such archetypal Ideas are more true and more real than the products of mental calculation on the one hand and physical realities on the other. But Johnston’s belief that this is so becomes evident from a careful reading of the relevant passages of his writings. That he was more a Platonist than a modernist also goes a long way to explain why he was increasingly at odds with the progressive, industrial world that surrounded him.
To help us get an idea of how this archetypal reality might apply to letterforms we can turn to a passage in Johnston’s Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering. He says: ‘the mere taking to pieces, or analysing, followed by ‘putting together’, is only a means of becoming acquainted with the mechanism of construction, and will not reproduce the original beauty of a thing’. (wxix) In other words, that part of the mind that calculates, measures and co-ordinates what the interaction of the hand, the eye and the mind must apply in the making of a letterform does not go deep enough in its self to touch upon the ‘original beauty’ of the perfect letterform that is none the less sought, whether implicitly of explicitly, in the craftsman’s pursuit of excellence. This impalpable, archetypal letter (as we might call it), experienced intuitively in the deep recesses of the ‘eye of the mind’, is what actually underpins the perfect unity of that physical and mental action required to shape palpably beautiful letters in whatever substance. When a manifestly beautiful letter is fully realised by the craftsman, then the archetype is, as it were, sounded so that what results is a letterform whose beauty reduces the observer to silence, unable to describe or quantify in what its perfection consists. I would suggest that whenever we look at a letter that appears insufficient in some way, even though all its elements are ‘correctly’ present, then in that experience of impoverishment we are sensing intuitively the absence of any reverberation of the archetypal ‘original beauty’ Johnston refers to.
Here, in parenthesis, it is interesting to note that in a Report on Art Schools that W.R. Lethaby prepared for the L.C.C. in , a few months before meeting Johnston, he wrote: ‘Lettering of all kinds is almost without exception bad. Such students as endeavour to apply lettering harmoniously to their designs seem to endeavour to invent new and contorted forms out of their heads. Of all things the form of letters has been shaped by tradition and in most cases the effort to be original is an effort to be bad’. ()
Lethaby is surely noting that such bad letterforms arise from the use only of that superficial part of the rational mind (if that!) that takes to pieces, analyses and puts together the basic elements of letters on the basis of personal preference. And in saying that the forms of letters have been shaped by tradition – with the implication that such forms are ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ – it would surely be in bad logic to interpret Lethaby as meaning that such forms are arrived at simply on the basis of habits of past precedent. An ugly or bad letterform does not acquire beauty or legitimacy in the process of being copied and repeated, for however long. Beauty is of another order than the mere passage of time.
Johnston himself, early in his career defined ‘Beauty’,as ‘obedience made manifest to the Laws of Truth’ () – we note the use of capitals on the words Beauty, Laws and Truth. He did not significantly change his mind in later life, even though he went on to investigate those laws exactingly , testing them again and again against vigorous thought and assiduous practice. He never lost sight either of the earthly/heavenly axis along which, traditionally, the practice of any craft proceeds. Speaking of the old scribes at their work, he remarked that even more than their skill and the speed with which they wrote – as if writing an ordinary letter – and even though they were ‘engaged on serious work’ and were not concerned with ‘art’ as we think of it, ‘they had in their hearts a kind of dream of divine beauty that they were seeking …[and] …note how much that dream was fulfilled’(). Let us look a little closer at this ‘dream’.
All that we know of Johnston presents us with a picture of an entirely practical man. There was nothing ‘abstract’ or ‘airy-fairy’ about him, nothing ‘arty’. Indeed, we might doubt whether there was anything about him that was superficial. ‘Preoccupied’, certainly, as the notice he made for his study door proclaimed, aimed at repelling unwelcome visitors. His daughter Priscilla said of him: ‘for all his lassitude he was extremely forceful, indeed dominant. It was not an active forcefulness of vitality but a kind of latent forcefulness of character’.()
But his was no utilitarian practicality. Johnston’s vision of his craft begins at the beginning. Literally the beginning of all things – his testing of his ideas took him that far. Noel Rooke reports of him that ‘he related his subject to everything in heaven and earth’ because he saw it as essentially part of a whole. Even when it came to describing a single element of letter formation – that of contrast – he took the comprehensive view: ‘contrast is at the very root of formal penmanship. So is harmony. That is why our work, when well done, is so sparkling. It has that unique possession, the best of both sides; the idea of Heaven and Earth is there, harmony and contrast.’ ()
And Priscilla Johnston relates that her father once spoke to her of his taking a class, ‘of how he was able to give (the students) the feeling that it really was worth doing and a little of his vision, also, the spirit of it, over and above the technical side. He quoted Man shall not live by bread alone and spoke of the excitement of the vision’. () Can we not sense in this passage Johnston’s desire to communicate the idea that the perfection of work which is the aim of the true craftsman must involve more that the mastery of practical skills, if indeed the craftsman is to become ‘a friend of God’ as the quotation from Plato puts it?
Since man is created in the Divine Image (as Johnston believed), it follows that in the exercise of his vocation the craftsman, by analogy, shares in the actions of the making of the world by its Creator. Johnston thought of the process of creation as involving three stages: ‘embodying , animating and inspiring’. The three stages must be understood and actualised in the context of man’s origin and place in the fabric of the Creation; ‘in a book for craftsmen’, Johnston wrote, ‘the primary order is Genesis :: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’. () Also, in connection with man’s being created in the Divine Image Johnston asks us to consider Genesis :, of how God formed every beast and bird and how Adam named every living creature. That is to say, the word by which each thing is named establishes the unique and permanent reality of that thing. In the naming by Adam of each thing inheres the archetypal essence or Idea of that thing as it exists in the mind of God: as it exists in the Word, that is, the logos – the eternal reason of things. The scribe, in making in manifest form, true and beautiful words, recapitulates the Adamic action of giving each thing God’s signature. Thus, named things and meaning co-inhere. And in this co-inherence is the very ligature that binds man to Truth itself. Johnston, with life-long insistence that the scribe pay attention to the meanings of the words he writes, is reported as having worn out his Dictionary.
How Adam’s giving God’s signature to each thing is, in Johnston’s mind, an analogy of the scribe’s action is clearly seen in the following passage:
All his [the craftsman’s]works express Idea [note the Platonic capital, denoting a pre-existing, immaterial potentiality]..by substance brought to [material] life – like Adam made of Earth. Each of his [man’s] work – like every son of Adam – bears a human touch and is seen to be unique. All things are unique, but the craftsman’s works show this –each one [each manuscriptof ours] is an autograph. ()
As each man bears the signature of God in his deiformity so each work from the hand of the scribe bears the signature of its creator. Thus, each work is, infallibly and authentically, a thing brought materially to life from a pre-existing idea in the mind. This analogical wisdom is surely what resonates in Johnston’s assertion that the proper task of the scribe is ‘to make letters live…that men themselves may have more life’ ().
Finally, in a letter quoted by Priscilla Johnston, Johnston himself spoke of the final creative act as one in which God saw of the Creation that it was Good –‘in fact, a thing is not completely created until it has been appreciated…I believe it’. () Here Johnston is at his most profound, for he is drawing upon the idea that the final justification for the Creation of the world by God is in the realisation of the necessity that it is completed by being known.
It is the responsibility of the craftsman’s share in the Divine Creation to see that his work is good, that it is true, for it is the Truth, ‘both immanent and transcendent’ () that prevails. And of Truth, Johnston wrote: ‘its other names are goodness and beauty, the way and the Life, the Light (of the world), the Word, and many more.’ Which brings us to the question of beauty.
We can only correctly understand Johnston’s view of Beauty if we keep it in the context he himself placed it in: Beauty is approached and found indirectly in the search for Truth, through the discipline of a proper utility of human needs. Priscilla Johnston reports her father as holding: ‘Beauty is an ultimate Grace which will be conferred upon the craftsman’s work if it be well done. If Truth…has been served, the result will be Beauty’. ()
Can any one look at the best of Johnston’s works and not see that it is beautiful? However that may be, it perhaps takes a more trained eye to see that the beauty of his forms arises out of their construction. It remained axiomatic for Johnston that ‘unless the design arises out of the actual construction of a thing it is reduced to the level of extraneous ornamentation. Design is inherent rather than applied…’.()
In connection with this principle we might incidentally note that Johnston’s reluctance to have his work reproduced was precisely because of the resulting inauthenticity in this respect. As he pointed out, ‘nothing is reproduced, something different is produced’. ()
As with design, so with the ‘original Beauty’ of a thing. It is not a surface application but comes out of workmanship honestly and straightforwardly undertaken. What, then, does such workmanshop entail?’
Like Gill, Johnston anchors his answer to all questions that have to do with the validity of the craftsman’s activity by going back to the nature of the agent doing the work. What is man? Man is a creature, a body – ‘the flesh is a sine qua non for the spirit of man’ () – who looks to God for the answers to the primary questions: What, How and Why. Why should one, why ought one, why must one, make a thing? And by a ‘thing’ Johnston meant both ‘what we make and what we do’.() Moreover ‘things are His [God’s] will’. () In asking these questions man is searching for Truth and by asking he is tacitly proposing that an answer can be found. Other names for Truth are Goodness and Beauty. And Truth ‘is that against which we sin’. () (This thought – that the workman can sin in his actions – may go some way to account for Johnston’s lassitude.)
In making a thing, the scribe ‘works in substances …with special tools and special methods. He also thinks in substances and in things, and in methods…, which direct the tools and form the thing out of the substance’. The ‘prime purpose of writing is to be read’. ‘His direct objective is to writewell’ so that the work produced is useful. In his primary duty to the author ‘the words are of the first importance’ and with this in mind the scribe aims at a presentation that is beautiful. Such beauty for formal penmanship is achieved by ‘Sharpness, Unity and Freedom’. In this, his direct purpose, ‘the scribe keeps the idea of usefulness constantly before him’.
‘Usefulness in this context, consists in legibility, fitness for purpose and perfect presentation. The scribe follows after usefulness since, in the final analysis, the ultimate objective of usefulness is beauty. (–)
So, given that the scribe has mastered all the necessary practical skills, this alone will not suffice to achieve the ‘original beauty’ that must be sought by indirect means. ‘Original beauty’ comes intuitively through concentration upon and contemplation of the archetypal Ideas that letterforms embody. The fact that Johnston wrote little on the subject of beauty is itself an indication of the fact that, by its very nature, it is a subject all but unteachable in any direct sense. The pursuit of beauty in isolation from its necessary alignment with truth and legitimate human needs has always been recognised by the wisest minds as being liable to lead men astray, into folly and self-indulgence. Nevertheless, something of what is involved in achieving the original beauty of living letters can be glimpsed in words Johnston addressed to an audience in Dresden in . The passage occurs in the context touched upon earlier regarding the scribe’s aim to ‘make letters live’. The relevant words are: ‘I think I can claim that, poor as they are, the letters on the blackboard are alive: that is not due to myself – I am only a superior kind of motor or engine – it is due to the pen (which brings life to letters)’. () It is ‘not due to myself’ – this attributing his achievement in giving life to letters to a higher agency, gives a hint, I believe, of what is meant, in the passage from Plato’s Symposium, by ‘nourishing true virtue to become a friend of God’.
So, to come back to Johnston’s ‘dream’ and to end with a question. Priscilla Johnston, in her memoir of her father, quotes him as saying: ‘I see no successor who will put his life and heart into the work I love. There are plenty of good scribes to whom it is an occupation and a profession but apparently not a preoccupation and a dream’, () our emphasis. His daughter was inclined to dismiss this remark, but given its pointed wording can we be so sure? Does not another interpretation offer itself? To any one with a deep religious conviction such as Johnston possessed the scribe’s vocation must be more than an entertaining and diversionary activity of mere shape-making, however sophisticated. The whole man must be engaged. Could it be that Johnston found no one willing to attempt, through the craft of the pen, that degree of contemplation, beyond the empirical ego, that engages those ‘realities’ – and not their semblances – that enable the craftsman to ‘bring forth and nourish true virtue’; that coincidence of being and knowing that is a gazing upon the heavenly beauty face to face in so far as ‘mortal man may’?
■ .The reference throughout to a perfect letterform is more a matter of convenience that a dogmatic assertion. This same perfection is operative in a whole collection of letters that, cumulatively, have an organic unity, each single letter being in some way modified in accommodation of the whole context of its presence
■ .The abbreviations used throughout are an initial followed by the page number of the following books by Johnston: =Lessons in Formal Writing edited by Heather Child and Justin Howes (London), ; =Formal Penmanship and other papers, edited by Heather Child (London), ; =Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering (London), , but reprinted many times; =Priscilla Johnston, Edward Johnston (London), second edition .
■ . It might be noted that Robert Speaight, in his biography of Eric Gill, records Johnston reading Plato aloud to Gill in his workshop when they were close neighbours in Hammersmith.