The author also shows very ably that, even where plant forms are selected by the original geometric artist, it is only owing to some peculiarly orderly or systematic arrangement of their parts, and that the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines,[21] to gratify his will to be master of natural disorder.
These objections of Riegl and Worringer are both necessary and important; for, as the former declares: "It is now high time that we should retreat from the position in which it is maintained that the roots of Art lie in purely technical prototypes."[22]
Even in the camp of the out-and-out evolutionists, however, there seems always to have been some uncertainty as to whether they were actually on the right scent. One has only to read Grosse, where he throws doubt on the technical origin of ornament, and acknowledges that he clings to it simply because he can see no other,[23] and the concluding word of Dr. Haddon's book, _Evolution in Art_,[24] in order to understand how very much a proper concept of the Art-instinct would have helped these writers to explain a larger field of facts than they were able to explain, and to do so with greater accuracy.
Nobody, of course, denies that the patterns on alligators' backs, the beaks of birds, and even the regular disposition of features in the human face, have been incorporated into designs; but what must be established, once and for all, is the fact that there is a whole ocean of difference between the theory which would ascribe such coincidences to the imitative faculty, and that which would show them to be merely the outcome of an original desire for rhythmic order, simplification, and organization, which may or may not avail itself of natural or technical forms suggestive of symmetrical arrangement that happen to be at hand.
It is an important controversy, and one to which I should have been glad to devote more attention. In summing up, however, I don't think I could do better than quote the opening lines of the Rev. J. F. Rowbotham's excellent _History of Music_, in which the same questions, although applied to a different branch of Art, are admirably stated and answered.