Shaker, Fraktur, Merton and Blake

A comparison of Shaker, fraktur and Blake is a comparison of art and text. Blake's images, his decoration, languished in much the same way as fraktur, divorced from the text when his work was neither reproduced nor understood. Even though Weiser says "Fraktur existed for the sake of the texts," and "a few selected images to convey the message," nobody read those texts, much less took them seriously. Weiser says it was because of a "preoccupation with death and religious themes" (xxviii), but such themes abound everywhere in English poetry, so why should it diminish the German? Separated from the text, fraktur decorations resemble Blake's art divorced from his writing. The visual image was accepted before the written.

If we could prove there was something esoteric about it it would get a following, but how can there be a vision in fraktur when it had multiple authors? But that is the point, it displays a collective intelligence. The vision is communal but not as esoteric among its practitioners as Blake among the scholars who spin a theory of imagination out of his evangel Jerusalem. Until Erdman or Frye, critics were affronted at the idea of coherent system in Blake. Their cousins among Pennsylvania critics are equally affronted at a hidden meaning of fraktur texts. Stoudt started to find it out, but his pietists, peasants and Catholic saints got little support in a hidden world in hymns. It affronted scholars also when he claimed a personal transcendentalism for thousands of Pennsylvanians a century before its appearance in New England. Pennsylvania could have been credited had come after, but coming before was not allowed. What is a personal transcendentalist? You have the idea and live it instead of talk about it. It sounds like the Hopi elders. [Coming here, a consideration of German Literary Influences in the American Transcendentalists.]

So what is the relation of Pennsylvanians to decoration greater or less than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns? Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors?
To linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips that migrate from paper to linen to wood?
Letters filled with swirls and stipples that whirl under signatures in descending spirals?
These have as much to do with the absence of things as their presence, the plainness of a board and a lapel, cap or hat capable of inner spiritual form from which the outer surface proceeds, greater decoration as the less.

Stoudt's mystics find allies in the Shakers. Thomas Merton's Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers (2003) has a view of The Inner Experience where Merton's phrase "images of Paradise" translates that art of making. It is all about believing and doing. Among Shakers "the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it" (Shakers, 85) says Merton. This believing has been a stumbling block to visions of every kind among the critical classes, from the prescient Milton taking dictation from the Holy Spirit each night to compose Paradise Lost, to the Shakers, who "believed their furniture was designed by angels--and Blake believed his ideas for poems and engraving came from heavenly spirits" (85). It is a great irony that Blake says his poem entitled Milton was so dictated. A little of this frustrates the rationalist.

Merton illumines fraktur too against "the blindness of 'single vision' which sees only the outward material surface of reality, not its inner spiritual form and the still more spiritual 'force' from which the form proceeds" (74). Shaker "work of the craftsman's hands had to be an embodiment of 'form.' The form had to be an expression of spiritual force. The force sprang directly from the mystery of God through Christ in the Believing artist" (79). If the believing artist was given these forms in hand and mind by a spiritual force, God in Christ, that art would not find illumination outside these beliefs. Merton says Shaker art has "something to do with what Blake called 'the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber'" (74), that "a work-a-day bench, cupboard, or table might also and at the same time be furniture in and for heaven" (74). For Merton it is also obvious that "Shaker inspiration was communal...due not to the individual craftsman but to the community spirit and consciousness of the Believers" (76).

So Anabaptists are like the Shakers in the communal production of their forms. Merton says Shaker forms were "a better, clearer, more comprehensible expression of their faith than their written theology" (76), which is what Stoudt says of Pennsylvania art, whose theology was a mythology seeing the outer surface through the inner form, the "spiritual force from which the form proceeds" (Merton, 74).

Merton, Shakers, Blake and fraktur of the Pennsylvania Dutch celebrate images of the natural fruition of paradise, a renewal of plant and animal that finds human life amid these images as a way into the flowering heart. Frakturs covered with lilies in the shape of a tulip, images of a tulip blooming from a heart, roosters, flower-stars or any field or haystack transformed by the renewing mind, spider, fly, rooster, child, cow, farmer, sky, grass endowed with plain dressed and unplain people ornate in their inner lives. "Their only advertisement was the work itself" (Merton, 79) in the field, orchard and plant. Spiritual conditions made out of the natural set Pennsylvanians apart. This celebration of life was many ways opposed to much of the surrounding English culture whose domination of peoples and empires had commercial motives.

Recapturing this Lily Age might be like trying to live out the prophecies of Blake of mental archetypes, meditating giant forms. But the Lily has as much to do with the artifact as the Elohim have to do with the hex. Nada. Both are round. You can't get to the Lily by turning it counterfeit. The Lily Age is not about nostalgia for a thing that once existed, stone pullers, horseback riders. You have to live it. Paradise is not an external state. It is interior, matching something unseen, mirrored in the seen, connected to an organic field which is an image of the Kingdom of God, the ground out of which the Lily grows. Artifacts may be said to leave a trail of crumbs to show the external that it belongs.

That paradise accompanies the child is the point of paradise art, to decorate the new with hope. Pennyslvania German art is an art of paradise reckoned from the child archetype. Fraktur Vorschrift were given to school children as a reward for good performance. The teacher would make a flower as a bookmark or a watercolor according to ever more elaborate systems of ornament. Verses of the Bible turn the letters of words into flowers. The message was, "here is a picture of paradise." Such symbols emerged from a life view that implied a millennium ready to lie down with the lion and lamb. Their notion of paradise fostered a fantastic idealism of decoration on linen, furniture, pottery, barns. They planted equally fantastic gardens if they moved to the city, covered their windowsills with violets. "We have heard how Christopher Dock prodded his pupils with such drawings. If he did not originate the practice, he is evidence that it was in use at an early date, for Dock wrote in 1750. These tiny scraps of paper with birds, tulips, other flowers and occasionally other subjects survive by the dozens" (Weiser, xx). In the greater tradition it had wider applications. Most of this communal body was unsigned, but it was repeated again and again in images that migrated from paper to linen (show towels) to wood (decorated chests).

There are individual characteristics of fraktur artists. Dock uses block designs, initial capital letters filled with swirls and stipples, as Hershey puts it (59f ). He includes an alphabet and numbers in German and in English, with some scripture translated to English, a bilingualism that mostly ended with him. Sometimes he runs a banner through the illuminated title or above it. His students imitate these features, establishing a style which grows more ornate in later examples. Borders marked by whirls also under gird the initial letter in descending spirals, a common feature of Pennsylvania signatures.

Fraktur occurs in baptismal certificates called Taufschien, mostly printed, but the most notable are freehand letters of reward and instruction, vorschrift, given to children. Until Hershey's Teaching (2003) there were few good reproductions. Blake's watercolors were hidden from public eye until the Princeton editions and the Blake Archive, though inferior reproductions existed. The essentially different genres of Taufschien and vorschrift, with the division of art from text, mirror the divided demographics of the Pennsylvania German between the 90% "churched" Lutheran and Reformed Taufschien and the 10% Mennonite and Anabaptist vorschrift. The "churched" assumed proprietary status over the whole by their majority, but were often outweighed by the social/political acts of Mennonites. A sibling rivalry still impacts discussion.

Language Flowers
Fraktur is a species of language flower, but according to Weiser, "...one basic fact must be underscored in studying these documents--the illumination was auxiliary to the text" ("Piety and Protocol in Folk Art," 1). Such divorces are premature because the illuminations emerge from the text. Consider Plate 60 of Hershey's This Teaching, "Ihr Kinder Wolt ihr Lieben," ("O Children Who Are Loving"). This particular design is attributed to schoolmaster Jacob Gottschall (1793), but the text, "O Children" is a hymn of Christopher Dock's, himself a schoolteacher. It was presented as a reward to a student, Anna Kampffer in 1793, but the actual letter strokes mimic the design of the flowers in the composition, making the teaching a kind of Calligrammes, a hand drawn vispo, flower of the hand and mind. Letters, alphabets, numerals, colors and shapes woven to attract the child, now the adult, contemplate the text with the art.

A vine, a "stem" of tulips germinates from a globe/seed in the right corner. This spreads up and to the left. Another bloom of this "plant," slightly unconnected and larger, blooms down from the top left as though rooted in air, coextensive, but separate from the vine. The second larger bloom mimics the colors and shapes of the capitals of the title, Ihr Kinder in rose, blue and gold stripes, as though the letters were flowers or the flowers letters.The upstroke of the blue I combines with the down stroke of the rose h, making three letters out of two, an elision designed. The larger blooms have smaller dark stems, unrooted, air borne. A current of air lifts the "letter petal" leaves, from right to left which "blooms" in two large four-chambered blossoms, penetrated by segments of the unattached vine through each center of the four chambers (circles) of the flower, covered by a cross hatched red and gold diamond, Hershey's "checkerboard."

so ubt was freude worth...

Erquicken Hertz und muth

[The practice of joy...
quickens hearts and minds.]

Several phonetic cognates sound like English.The immediate short lines and rhymes are felt in translation. The vine that springs from the seed at the lower right flows across the top of the page, which seed, translated, says, "Be with us, on all our ways / Dear God with thy blessing," which blessing, rises in the vine. The title words Ihr Kinder, underlined in gold, resemble the block style of Dock's fraktur. These intersect the center of the page and divide the text below from its flower above, as if a flower of the text rises from the word garden. Language flowers teach children to identify petal letters. The writing of the text below in thirteen long cursive lines, is identified in stanzas only by numerals 1 to 5, set in a hand so small the students must have known the hymn by heart.

A child art, the colors, floral designs intend to attract the eye. At least among Mennonites fraktur was child art, designed for children, sometimes executed by children with its colors and floral designs intended for the child's eye. Before we defame it as not high art we should remember our literary master William Blake and fear his reproving. The first study of it was by H. C. Mercer, "The Survival of the Medieval Art of Illuminative Writing Among Pennsylvania Germans." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 36 (1898): No. 156, 423-432.