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Title: The claims of decorative art
Author: Walter Crane
Release date: October 29, 2025 [eBook #77149]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Lawrence and Bullen
Credits: Alan, The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART ***
THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART
_ONLY ONE HUNDRED AND TEN COPIES OF THIS FINE PAPER
EDITION HAVE BEEN PRINTED._
_THIS IS No._ 49 ....
THE CLAIMS
OF
DECORATIVE ART
BY
WALTER CRANE
[Illustration]
LONDON
LAWRENCE AND BULLEN
16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
MDCCCXCII
[Illustration]
PREFACE
Of the papers included in this volume some of the shorter ones had
their origin in fireside discussions in the studios of brother artists;
others have been addressed to larger and various audiences; but all
have been written under the influence of that new-old view of art,
which has revived during the last quarter of our century, which regards
it not only in relation to use and material, and seeks for its vital
root in the handicrafts, but also in its connection with common life
and social conditions.
Believing that art, looked at rather from the creative side of design,
is as essentially a mental and emotional language as poetry and music,
while it seeks expression through a variety of processes and materials,
and under natural limitations, which limitations, in so far as they are
frankly acknowledged, give to art in all its forms a peculiar beauty
and charm: believing further that an art which appeals to the eye must
be influenced for good or ill by external and social environment, just
as a tree takes its character from certain qualities of soil and
climate, it follows that I think it is hardly possible to attach too
much importance to these external and social conditions, affecting as
they do both art and its producer.
While maintaining the first importance of the arts and crafts of design
as contributing to the formation of a fine sense of beauty--a sense
which grows by what it feeds on, I have dwelt upon the necessity of
harmonious relation in all the arts, and a return to their primal unity
in architecture. In this fraternal unity none is before or after the
other, none is greater or less than the other.
If I may have succeeded in making out a case for the arts now called
Decorative and Applied (though “there is but one art”); if I have made
good their claim to consideration in an age given largely to place
pictorial and graphic power first; if even any of the following papers
induce my readers to follow the clue for themselves, and especially to
think out further the relation of art to labour and to social life,
whether they reach the same conclusions or not, my book will serve its
purpose.
Some few of the papers have been printed in various journals, and I
have to thank the editor of the _Art Journal_ for permission to reprint
“The Claims of Decorative Art.”
WALTER CRANE.
EDGEWATER, ILLINOIS,
_January 1892_.
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART 1
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART 7
FIGURATIVE ART 20
SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 31
PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 35
ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN 39
ART AND LABOUR 50
ART AND HANDICRAFT 62
THE PROSPECTS OF ART UNDER SOCIALISM 74
ON THE TEACHING OF ART 83
DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL 90
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE APPLIED ARTS, AND THEIR RELATION TO
COMMON LIFE 106
ART AND COMMERCIALISM 123
ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 140
IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART 157
ART AND INDUSTRY 172
[Illustration]
THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART
An archbishop at an Academy dinner, doubtless with an amiable desire
to administer consolation to those less favoured ones whose works did
not adorn the walls around him, is reported to have said, in effect:
“Never mind. It is not given to every one to be a Raphael, a Phidias,
or a Michael Angelo (the exhibition being, by implication, of course
full of them); but let them not therefore despair, let them turn their
attention to Decorative Art, for there was a large field in which they
might yet distinguish themselves.”
Now, although I do not suppose that even an archbishop could be found
now to say anything of this kind, so rapidly have we advanced, yet it
struck me at the time as the expression of a very curious view of art.
It was not the unfortunate selection of names, all of which stood for
artists pre-eminently decorative; it was not the placid assumption that
the Academy represented both the best judgment upon, and the best work
in, art which the country produced; it was not this so much as the
assumption that what is called decorative art belonged distinctly to
a lower category, that its demands upon the mind, both of the artist
and the spectator, were much less, and, in short, the whole thing was
of lower aim, and required less skill and power to produce than what
is called pictorial art. If, however, we are justified in drawing any
conclusions from the history and practice of art, they seem to invert
this view altogether.
I have no wish to set the sisters one against the other, or make odious
comparisons, and indeed there is no need to do so, as, in my belief,
both kinds of art in their higher development join hands. Their true
relative position, indeed, may be expressed by the two limbs of a pair
of compasses, inseparable and mutually dependent and helpful. It is
certain that painting and sculpture, as commonly understood, cannot be
in a good state, cannot reach any perfection, where the multitudinous
arts that surround and culminate in them--that frame them in, in
short--are not also in vigorous health and life. As well expect flowers
to bloom without roots and stems, light, heat, and air, as to think
that beautiful pictures or statues, or the sense that produces and
admires them, can exist where there is no beauty in everyday things,
no sources of harmonious thought about us, or delight of the eye in
pleasant colour or form in things of daily use and surrounding. I
would go further, and say that where decorative or applied art is in a
wholesome condition good pictorial or dramatic art will follow on as
natural effect in the chain of evolution from certain ascertainable
causes.
This is sufficiently obvious to actual workers in art; but “Truth,”
as has been said, “never can be confirmed enough,” and I am afraid
that it has by no means reached this stage with a great majority of
the people, not to speak of academicians and archbishops, and that it
yet needs demonstration to many that beauty, both in life and art, is
not something accidental and fanciful, the luxury and pursuit of a few
dreamers and misguided beings; that it is an organic thing, having its
own laws, however various, its own logical causes and consequences;
that it, like everything else, is a result of that continual fierce and
strenuous struggle for existence throughout nature; a living thing,
and therefore ever-varying in its forms, having its own ever-recurring
seasons--growth, perfection, decline, and renaissance--as we follow it
down the long stream of time, and mark its many habitations from age to
age.
We may well treasure the broken caskets, the priceless shells and
fragments of art, cast by the ruthless flood of years on the desert
shores; but let us not, in our anxiety and admiration for the beauty
that is of the past, forget that beauty is a living force with us,
a living presence, and that, like her prototype, for those who have
eyes, she rises from our northern seas every summer morning, without
the trouble of going to Cyprus. But she must be fed, clothed, and
housed, and for these necessities we, as decorative artists, must
be held mainly responsible. We are the trustees, as it were, of the
common property of beauty, and we are the administrators of it, to
use a well-worn phrase, from the cottage to the palace. Whether
as architects, sculptors, painters, and designers, each after our
kind, by the forms, the colours, and the patterns we put out, we are
insensibly forming the tastes, by association, of present and future
generations. And, to return to the question touched at the outset,
herein is the mark and goal of decorative art, properly speaking; that
whereas other considerations may weigh largely in painting a picture,
such as desire to get force or expression, though, personally, I
should say they should never outweigh considerations of beauty; yet in
decorative art, or, as it is not very logically called, applied art,
these considerations are supreme. Decorum, balance, harmony, these
are the graces who must advise us, though a whole crowd of secondary
considerations clamours to be heard.
The current notion of decoration is summed up in the expression
“flatness of treatment,” and to the notion that this is the whole
of the law and the prophets of decorative art may be dimly traced,
perhaps, the conception of it in the mind of the archbishop, and in
those of many superior persons. Hence, too, the flat-ironed primulas
and the genus of enfeebled flora and fauna generally, which so often,
alas, do duty as decoration. As if decorative art was a voracious but
dyspeptic being, and required everything in heaven and earth to be
thoroughly well boiled down before it could be properly assimilated.
Flatness of treatment, of course, is well enough; it is the most single
and obvious answer to one of the many problems a decorative artist
has to consider. It is a part of his business, no doubt, to assert
the wall, but his work does not begin and end there. But even if this
was the last word of decorative art, it is by no means so simple a
matter as it sounds. A world of judgment must come in, as at every step
in all art properly so called. It needs our best faculties, whether
we treat things in the flat or the round; but as well might one be
satisfied with the definition of painting as “the imitation of solid
bodies on a plane surface,” as with “flatness of treatment” as adequate
characterisation of decoration.
The real test in decoration is adaptability, either to position or
material. The exigencies of both often open the gates of invention; but
assuredly no decoration has a right to the name which does not satisfy
these conditions.
These are, after all, but the bones and the scaffolding, and though
it is highly necessary to have them in their right places, the real
triumphs of decoration come afterwards. And truly, the world, to the
decorative artist, is all before him, where to choose. Nay, like
every true artist, he has to make his own world, and people it with
his thoughts. And in respect of thought decorative or monumental art,
in its higher forms, is capable of expressing, by its command of
figurative and emblematic resources, more than is possible to purely
pictorial art. There is, in fact, nothing beyond its range, by reason
of its being more suggestive than imitative; and in this direction
it becomes again, as at its beginning, but in a higher sense, a
language--a picture-writing.
And what language can be more definite and enduring, whether we read
it from the artist’s or the historian’s, the antiquarian’s or the
philosopher’s point of view? How faint an idea should we get of the
nations of antiquity if all their art had perished! And it is all
strictly decorative art, from the incised bones of the cave men to the
frieze of the Parthenon. Therefore, say some, paint your own time, its
manners and its customs, its coats and its trousers. By all means, if
you see your way to it; but it would be a mistake to suppose that this
was the only way of painting it. The mind has its habits and costumes
as well as the body--a far more extensive wardrobe, indeed, which
promises still to increase. Art does not live for the antiquary alone.
He is never likely to be in want of material, even if Derby Days and
Railway Stations were never put on canvas.
I know no better definition of beauty than that it is “the most varied
unity, the most united variety.”
Well, certainly there is no lack in our day of variety--I mean in
the sense of style and material. To the worker in art it is a truly
formidable prospect, and to enter the lists he needs to be well mounted
and armed, in view of the forces arrayed against him. Modern life with
all its hideous luxury and squalor; its huge, ever-spreading, unwieldy,
unlovely cities; the bare skeleton and bald framework of new aims and
inventions breaking through the rich tattered garment of ancient life
and customs. How to reconcile these things, how to assert the supremacy
of Beauty, to raise her standard everywhere, how to bring sweetness out
of strength, would seem to need the strength and courage of an artistic
Samson. At the same time it is as well to remember that too much
preparation may be as much an encumbrance as a defence, and that great
effects are sometimes produced by very simple means; that giants have
been floored by a well-directed stone in a sling, and the Philistines
routed in consequence. I say it is as well to bear this in mind when we
take our artistic life in our hand and go forth--to meet the monsters
of our time clad in plate-glass, cast-iron, and fortified in desirable
residences.
[Illustration]
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART
The Architecture of Art is a somewhat comprehensive title, and it
might not unreasonably be expected of me, before proceeding with
the structure and treatment of the subject in perspective, to give
some sort of scale, sketch, ground plan, or elevation, so that the
general drift of my argument may be understood. I do not propose to
deal exactly with the various forms and styles of architecture as
they are, and have been manifested in plastic or graphic art; or the
predilections of different designers and painters for certain forms
over others as accessory to their compositions, interesting as such a
comparative study might be. I am taking the term architecture in its
widest sense, considering it not only as an art in its effect upon
other arts, but as the fundamental, comprehensive, and sustaining
framework both of life and thought; the historic and living background
which influences and moulds all our ideas, the set scene upon which is
enacted the ever-shifting drama of art.
In comparing the art of the present day, architectural or otherwise,
with the art of the past, especially of any well-defined epoch, whether
mediæval or classical, we cannot fail to be struck with one great
distinction underlying all superficial differences. Whereas the art of
past ages seems to have germinated, to have been continually evolved
in new forms, to be alive, and spontaneous, as it were, growing like
a thing of nature, and expanding with man’s ideas of nature and life;
in our day this sense of spontaneity, this natural growth, is scarcely
felt. Conscious and laborious effort takes the place of spontaneous
invention, and originality is crushed by the weight of authority, is
confounded and abashed by the mass of examples. No form of architecture
or art seems to spring naturally and unaffectedly out of the actual
necessities and demands of daily life.
It has been said that the great exhibition of 1851 is to be held
answerable for a great deal; for the vulgarising and commercialising
of art, and for the final break-up of old traditions in the crafts
of design; but so far as this took place, it was only the effect of
causes lying far deeper in the great economic changes, affecting
the conditions of the production of all works whatsoever, which had
been going on during the three previous centuries. That exhibition,
as succeeding ones have done, merely summed up the results of these
changes, and showed their effects, for good or evil, declaring to all
whom it might concern that the apotheosis of commercialism meant the
degradation of art.
This will seem a hard saying to such as are accustomed to believe that
the accumulation of riches and the welfare of art go hand in hand.
But let us look around us. Of course the spirit of commercialism
does produce startling results upon art, if not in it; and it is a
wolf quite capable of seeing the advantage of sheep’s clothing. There
is, for example, plenty of building and house painting. Capitalism is
nothing if not practical. The national instinct based on the national
shibboleth that “every man’s house is his castle,” combining with the
enormous growth of cities, has produced those miles and miles of brick
cages which have more or less ruined the architectural character and
proportion of every large town in the kingdom. What, then, are these?
These are Englishmen’s castles--on a small scale, it is true, and run
together. There are not hills enough for the castles required, and
what hills there are belong to somebody else. What is easier than to
build them side by side? They will support each other, and economise
bricks and mortar; and why trouble to make a fresh design for each
castle? The little lords’ wants are much the same as the big ones’,
only on a smaller scale, like his purse. He must, of course, have his
outer line of defences. His portcullis, a drawbridge,--well, at any
rate, iron railing and portico,--that he may speak with his enemy the
tax-gatherer at the gate; his dining-room, drawing-room, bedroom, and
bath-rooms, and gas and water laid on. Why should he not be happy and
comfortable? and it is all so cheap too! Yet the speculative man and
the man of profits--the kindly builders who multiply these miniature
strongholds for the average Briton--we do not account exactly as public
benefactors. Jack is rarely able to build his own house nowadays, so
Jerry builds it for him; but the well-known drama of rat and cat,
dog and cow with the crumpled horn, is still enacted, with perhaps
some changes in the cast, and new scenery and dresses. Here are the
bee-cells ready made for the future occupants of the national hive,
fit for the average man,--never mind if they do not always fit him;
we cannot take account of round or square bodies; if the majority are
hexagonal, the rest must put up with the inconvenience and a little
squeezing: great is Average! Meanwhile, how fares it with art in the
house that Jerry built? Do the streets produced on these principles,
and at such a terrible rate, lend themselves either to pictorial or
decorative treatment? Do they suggest any ideas, even, except of the
dust-man? Well, but the man of profits is ready again. The Briton can
get his art cheap too--wholesale or retail. He can have cheap dadoes
and coloured glass thrown in here and there. If these are not enough,
he can fill his house with early (or latest) English furniture,
“surmounted by something Japanese,” as the comic poet saith. Should
his aspirations remain still unsatisfied, he can take the illustrated
magazines to tell him about every art under the sun, and how it is
done. In fact, if the literature of the subject could make artists
and craftsmen, every street should be bristling with them. Every
Christmas scatters oil paintings by our first masters, fresh from the
printing-press, over the British Empire. A shilling or so will secure
a whole gallery. Was ever anything like it in any age of art? Truly,
no. Still we are not happy--we are not happy about our art. We English
especially. We allow Frenchmen and Belgians to teach us painting, and
our American cousins how to do nearly everything else.
Now, I am not going to say it is all the fault of the Royal
Academy. That institution, as regards its chief feature, the annual
Exhibition, is only another engine of the man of profits, which,
frankly recognising the commercialism of the age, endeavours, by
special appointment and self-election, to adapt the business of
picture-painting to it, without troubling much about architecture
and sculpture, and leaving the other arts to shift for themselves.
It is but due to say, however, that they endeavour to counteract the
influence of the new masters in the summer by the works of the old
masters in the winter, on the principle, perhaps, of the mediæval
system of doing penance.
In the course of evolution we are passing through a period of
disintegration. Art cannot escape the tendencies and influences of
its time, which, indeed, it is of its very nature to illustrate. The
artist has become more and more specialised, and the unity of the arts
has been broken up. He is no longer the master craftsman among his
workmen and apprentices, prepared to do all things in the province of
design, from the pattern on the hem of a garment to the painting of an
altar-piece. He is rather the juggler in the master’s place, who with
a particular sleight of hand can command a particular phase of sea
or sky; or he has the trick of the flattering glass in portraiture.
Perchance he seeks to draw “iron tears” down the cheeks of (not Pluto)
but the philanthropic Plutus, and golden ones from his pocket by his
peculiar domestic pathos; or in stage-lights strikes the contrast of
wealth and misery, chilling his blood by melo-dramatic horrors; or
by seeking to glorify him in his happy hunting grounds surrounded by
images of his sacred animals. As to painting, perhaps it has always
been more or less at the bidding of the dominant orders of its day, but
more naturally so since she left her roof-tree and parted company with
architecture and sculpture, and all the fair and fascinating troop
controlled by a common influence and a common devotion, that throng in
the splendid retinue of design.
Through the columns of the colossal architecture of time we look
back down the long vista of ages and epochs, and read their spirit
in the unmistakable language of art, coloured as it is by the human
systems and beliefs of which it is the monument; whether as in the
wall-paintings and reliefs of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and Persia, art
is devoted to the glorification of military or sacerdotal despotism;
or the systematised symbolism of an ancient nature worship, humanised
and made beautiful by the Greek, informed by freedom and life; decaying
amid the corruption of ancient Rome, or graced with a new splendour
from the East, rising in the solemn magnificence of Byzantine art;
and so through the vivid imagination of the Middle Ages, absorbed in
the new mysticism, yet through the Church linked to the hopes as well
as the fears of humanity. Then with the new thoughts and hopes of the
Renaissance it rekindles its lamp at the shattered shrine of classical
sculpture and learning, until choked with artifice and pedantry in
succeeding centuries, it is forced back to nature and life again on
the threshold of our own time. But again it is in danger from a new
tyranny in that unscrupulous commercialism, which is not less dangerous
because less tangible, and not less despotic because it is masked under
the form of political liberty. Steam machinery, like a many-headed,
many-handed dragon, rules industry literally with a rod of iron, and
fain would it make art prisoner too, for its profit, but that its touch
is death. Intended for the service of man and for the saving of human
labour, it has under our economic system enslaved humanity instead,
and become an engine for the production of profits, an express train
in the race for wealth, only checked by the brake of what is called
over-production. Who can tell what will be the end of the journey?
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the whole force of our
economic system is against spontaneous art, and it is in spite of
it that there is any life left in it yet. As William Morris has so
strikingly pointed out, the system of producing all things for profit,
which has succeeded the old one of producing for use; the necessity
of selling in the big world market, division of labour, and lastly,
machine labour, have rapidly destroyed the art of the people, and are
fast vulgarising and destroying all local characteristics in art, as
in costume and the surroundings of common life throughout the world.
The system of absolute individual ownership of land, which, with the
advance of commercialism, has displaced the older systems of tenure,
and defrauded the people of their common rights wholesale, naturally
leads to much destruction of natural beauty, and when not destroyed it
is made inaccessible. It is also answerable, with the causes already
named, for that other great disaster both to architecture and art
already alluded to, the abnormal growth of the big towns, which year by
year throws out its long and aimless feelers that feed upon the green
country. When we speak of an advance in education, we too often forget
that no education of the schools can compensate for life passed amid
hills and woods, and by the sea, itself an education in a lore never to
be forgotten.
Overshadowed by such conditions of life, what wonder is it that we
should get our art by accident, that it should be in great measure the
Art of Accident, which is really what modern realism or naturalism
comes to, in spite of elaborate systems of art training, and the
elaborate unlearning of them which follows? The sense of beauty may
be stunted, but Nature cannot be altogether suppressed under the most
perverse social conditions. It is sometimes urged in defence of the
artistic aspects of modern life that strange and wonderful momentary
effects are seen, in London smoke-fogs, for instance, or amid the
fiery eyes of railway signals, and our blackened Stygian rivers, where
the Charon of the coal-wharf plies his trade. I have even heard an
apostle of beauty defend those monuments of commercial effrontery and
theatrical competition, our advertisement hoardings, covered with
varicoloured posters, as in certain lights becoming transfigured so
as to rival the tints on a Japanese fan. But it is one thing to find
accidental beauties in the midst of monstrosities, jewels on dunghills
as it were, and quite another to defend the monstrosities for the
sake of accidental beauties. The glow, the light fades, and with it
the momentary exaltation of spirit; the north-east wind succeeds the
south-west, and there being no dignity of form or beauty of proportion
in our streets, they are apt to look more sordid and miserable
than before. Grace and spirit may be shown by a child dancing to a
barrel-organ in a smoky, squalid street, but one would rather see her
on a village green dancing to a shepherd’s pipe. We should aim at a
condition of things which would not keep beauty at a distance from
common life, or on the footing of an occasional visitor. No artist
should be satisfied with such a cold relationship.
Art is not the mere toy of wealth, or the superficial bedizenment of
fashion, not a revolving kaleidoscope of dead styles, but in its true
sense, in a vital and healthy condition, the spontaneous expression of
the life and aspirations of a free people.
Before all things, then, in order that art may express itself in this
free way, it is necessary that there should be something like a common
life. We have no common life, because we have no life in common. Art
is split up into cliques, as society into classes. Art should know
neither; we want a vernacular in art, a consentaneousness of thought
and feeling throughout society. “As it was” (to quote J. S. Mill) “in
the days of Homer, of Phidias, or even of Dante.” No mere verbal or
formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity, but that comprehensive
and harmonising unity with individual variety, which can only be
developed among a people politically and socially free.
The signs of our times point unmistakably to great changes working
in the direction I have indicated, which cannot fail to produce
corresponding results in art. Consider, for instance, the probable
effect on architecture of a collective, communistic mode of living.
Instead of our rows of brick boxes, or piles of them in barracks,
there would probably be a demand for quite another type of domestic
architecture; we might see something like a revival of the plan of
house which for so many ages proved so serviceable to humanity, from
Homer to Shakespeare. The great hall as the common living-room,
with private rooms for sleeping or solitude adjoining it; or some
development of the collegiate plan. Buildings of such a type certainly
lead to more dignity of result in architecture than the houses under
our present system of tenure and individual plan are ever likely to.
We all know, too, that the only chance for the mural painter is in
buildings of a more or less public character. If buildings of the type
I have mentioned became common, there would be plenty of work for him
and the decorative artist generally, and so we might reasonably expect
that painting and the sister arts would be restored to perhaps greater
than their former dignity, beauty, and invention.
The decline of art corresponds with its conversion into portable forms
of private property, or material or commercial speculation. Its aims
under such influences become entirely different. All really great works
of art are public works--monumental, collective, generic--expressing
the ideas of a race, a community, a united people; not the ideas of a
class. It is evident enough in our own time that art needs some higher
inspiration than that of the cash-box. She suffers from a lethargy that
cannot be cured by a prescription from the cheque-book; these are at
best but stimulants that force an unnatural excitement, a feverish and
brief activity at the expense of the whole system. Private ownership
may be able to command both skill and beauty, no doubt, but it is, as
a rule, beauty of a lesser kind and considered in a narrower spirit,
as it is addressed to the taste of an individual; while the fancies of
rich and great persons, when their day is past, often come to be looked
upon as curiosities. The art of a people, as expressed in their public
buildings and monuments, possesses a kind of immortality.
We know the splendid results in art which grew on the rock of Athens,
and the cities of mediæval Italy. Our own cathedrals, no less, will
bear witness to the vitality in all the crafts of design at that
period. Is it too much to suppose, seeing the intimate connection
between political, social, and artistic expression, and how both are
affected by economical laws, that in the free federated communes
which not improbably will in the future succeed the present jealous
nationalities, with a large increase of leisure and opportunity for
cultivation and enjoyment, the arts may develop even a higher vitality?
For art in its highest sense is but the faculty of expression.
The higher, the richer, the fuller the life, the happier and more
harmonious its conditions, the higher and more varied and beautiful
will be the forms of its expression in art. But it is deep down in the
life of the people that we must dig the foundations, and out of common
speech and common labour and handicraft must be shaped the stones of
this Architecture of Art. Without such foundation, and without the
cement of fellowship, without due recognition of the equality and unity
of all art-workers, and their mutual interdependence in building the
great structure, we shall raise no enduring monument to be a delight to
ourselves, and a memorial of us to those who come after.
Brilliant toys it may be we shall have. Surprises and stimulants,
joyless elaboration, and pedantic weight of learning, gorgeous exotics,
flowers and fruits, formed for the jaded appetites of a society in
its decline, but we must give up all hope of vital and harmonious art
enclosed in a casket of beautiful architecture.
Hence comes it that most of the efforts made to revive the arts and
crafts among the people, without reference to their economic condition,
are like so many attempts to grow the tree leaves downwards. As if an
architect should put up an elaborate scaffolding and begin with his
roof, before he has decided on his ground plan, dug the foundations, or
thought of drainage.
Real progress we must not expect to make until we have re-established
the unity of the arts--a very different thing from uniformity. My late
friend, Mr. J. D. Sedding, in whom we have lost a genial and sensitive
spirit as well as a refined designer, in a discourse he made a while
ago, in his generous enthusiasm was assigning the mural decorations of
an ideal modern cathedral to various well-known popular painters. I
believe even I myself was allowed a corner to amuse the children in.
I have as great an admiration for the talents of my contemporaries
as any one, but I cannot conceal from myself that it would be a very
experimental scheme. It would be, metaphorically speaking, something
like an attempt to anticipate the millennium, by trying to persuade the
lion to lie down with the lamb in the same cage. But in the fifteenth
century Mr. Sedding would have been safe enough; the architect worked
in harmony with the painter, the painter with the carver and metal
worker, because each probably had a considerable knowledge of the
other’s craft and its limitations. Artists, therefore, knew what they
had to do, and did it. There was nothing mysterious in this, taking
into account the way in which men worked in those days and learned
their crafts; but it is a little depressing to think, with all our
superiority in exact science and mechanism, how far we are from
anything like certainty in art.
Whether the interest of scientific discovery has had anything to do
with directing men’s faculty of invention into another channel--and
life does not allow time for the exercise of both--I do not pretend to
say; but when science and art touch each other with the tips of their
fingers, when science asks for the aid of applied art, as in mounting
electric lights, for instance, or in order to fit any invention to use,
it is very noticeable how artistic adroitness of adaptation lags behind
the scientific invention. Perhaps there is no time for art to reconcile
herself to the new discovery, or it is too soon superseded by another,
and nobody cares.
No doubt the demands upon a designer in the present day, owing to such
causes alone, are very heavy; but I am inclined to think commercial
pressure and hurry is heavier upon him. Thought is all-powerful, but
there is no time to think; fancy and imagination might play about the
humblest accessory, but there is no time to play; and all work, or
rather uncertainty of work, and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But
depend upon it, in conditions fair to humanity, art wants but little
encouragement, only freedom and sympathy. The seed will grow fast
enough in a favourable soil and climate, and bring forth flowers and
fruits after its kind in due season.
[Illustration]
FIGURATIVE ART
At the present day, when, speaking generally, all forms of graphic art
seem to owe their existence to the primary object of imitation of the
more superficial, temporary, and accidental aspects of nature; there
would seem to be some danger of forgetting that art has properly any
other or loftier function. In painting, for instance, technical skill
has become so all-important that the end is too often lost sight of
in the means; a brilliant execution seems so sufficing that the hand
appears to say to the brain, “I have no need of thee.”
I am far from wishing to undervalue technical skill; we all know that
it means hard years of labour and incessant industry. To disparage it
would be like an attempt to throw discredit on the faculty of speech
or writing; but we should soon tire of language and literature without
thought or poetry, without analogy and illustration, or even if it gave
us nothing but the best “special correspondence.”
If we conceive all forms of plastic art to be so many different
methods of expression for the mind,--if we hold, in short, that art
is a language, not only for the expression of particular moods and
phases of nature, or portraitures of human character, but also for
the conveyance of the higher thoughts and poetic symbolism of the
mind,--then I think it is no longer possible to rest content merely
with the results of industry and facility of hand, still less so when
it is lavished upon the realisation of the commonplace, or squandered
in the vivid portraiture of squalid detail, which paints vulgarity in
all its glory, or spends all the resources of archæological knowledge
and draughtsmanship upon the presentment of some triviality in antique
dress, going a roundabout way in order to signify next to nothing with
the utmost nicety.
Art has become a toy only when it rests satisfied here; and when it
lives to please, it must please to live. The public is a big child,
without a child’s simple tastes, and cries continually, not for signs,
but wonders; “Young men,” as Falstaff says, “must live,” and so it is
all explained.
Admitting this, however, we should yet not be justified in assuming
that the taste for, or sense of, figurative design, or allegory in any
form, was extinct among us. Far from it.
Curiously enough we shall find it at what may be called the extremities
of art, or rather, at the head and at the feet. We shall find it still
in its original home, in the province of high poetic and decorative
painting; and we find it also, in a rough-and-ready form, in our
popular politico-satirical prints, where from week to week passing
events, political situations, and popular characters are figured in
every variety of pictorial parable, with varying degrees of ingenuity
and epigrammatic point; but the ingenuity is undoubted, and the
popularity of this form of figurative art equally so.
There is also another form in which what may be called figurative art
still holds its place in the popular mind--I mean on the stage, and in
the region of spectacular ballet and pantomime. The ballet has a very
ancient origin, no doubt, and it is of course entirely figurative, all
feeling being expressed by action alone, without the help of words.
It is the drama of the body. Modern appliances in stage machinery and
lighting have given a new development to this species of show, which
has great capabilities, and although there is generally a want of
refinement, of controlling and directing taste on the whole, there
is often a vast amount of ingenuity and pretty invention in scenes
and details. In one of these spectacular ballets not long ago there
was a gigantic figure of Time painted at the back of the stage. His
hour-glass presently opened like a door, and out of it came one by one
the hours, represented by damsels, each showing (besides her legs)
distinct and appropriate emblematic feeling in her dress. Here, I
thought, was a notion conceived in the true spirit of figurative design.
Fashion and the demands of the market may elbow aside the claims of
figurative art in a picture exhibition, yet, one now and then has
its effect, as, so to speak, after the whirlwind of sensation, the
earthquake of literalism, and the fire of personal vanity, is heard
the still small voice of figurative thought. While we can point to
such examples of painting as Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death,” and Mr.
Burne-Jones’s “Fortune,” it cannot be said that either the power or the
feeling for the highest art has fallen to decay.
Between the region of party politics and the serene air of ideal
poetry there would seem to be a great gulf fixed, but the fact that
at both ends of the scale symbolism should be the natural outcome,
seems to show that strong feeling of either kind seeks for figurative
expression. The passions, the seasons, the senses, the virtues,
the vices; fate and time, love, fame, fortune, life, and death
itself,--these all belong to the world of allegory, and continually
reappear in new shapes, being by nature so protean that no fixed form
may hold them. Each age has its own view of them, and that view is
sure, sooner or later, to appear visibly in design.
It seems to be far too readily taken for granted that everything of
importance concerning such ideas in art has been said long ago, that
we must only expect more or less graceful shadows of what has been
done in the past to decorate our stained windows, friezes, our panels,
ceilings, and mosaics. Nay, there are people of the persuasion that
ornamental art should be content to be ornamental and no more; they are
content with figures elegantly employed in doing nothing, if, like the
peer in the comic opera, they do it remarkably well. Allegory seems to
depress them, and symbolism to put them out; life according to this
school is “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.”
I should not quarrel with this view if it led to high and satisfying
results, and I am far from saying that the exclusive study of line,
tone, arrangement, and method is not of great value. But so are
grammars and dictionaries. Rhythm, metre, and diction do not make
poetry, though they are essential to it; and my contention is that you
cannot separate style and matter in art, any more than in literature,
without serious loss.
But in a civilisation which is more distinguished by a morbid care for
decency than for a love of beauty, when the cry is _Sartor Resartus_,
and large profits are made by the sale of fig-leaves; in an age when no
one has made up his mind upon first principles, and there is a premium
on reserve; when men are chary of avowing in any shape their dearest
convictions, not from fear of bodily jeopardy, but out of consideration
for the feelings of others, or, perhaps, their own social position, any
pictorial expression of ultimate ideas, or vigorous thought embodied in
vital design, must of necessity be rare.
The ancient religions of the world were nothing but figurative
systems--personifications and symbols of the forces of nature, varying
in different countries as they were gradually evolved from some perhaps
common primitive type, or grew naturally out of the independent
imaginings of the human mind; certainly all have elements in common,
and varieties of the same conceptions appear again and again, through
endless modifications and developments, as the same plants vary in
different soils, and under different conditions. A foundation of
natural mythology was common to them all, and this mythology was
conceived and modified according to the genius of the race amid which
it grew. The Greek religion had the same origin, but the Greeks alone
of the ancient nations set free from traditional forms in their art
this nature worship; we may follow it from its primitive archaic types
till it is transfigured in heroic shape. Religion transformed by art
becomes poetry, and all things were made subservient to the dominant
sense of beauty. Of this Greek choice we have a beautiful figure or
emblem in the “Judgment of Paris,” which art never tires of repeating,
and which, like all the Greek stories, never seems to lose its
significance.
In the sublime fragments of the sculptured groups which decorate the
pediments of the Parthenon, even as we see them in our own Museum, the
eye is first charmed and won by the rhythmical sweep and play of line,
the masterly counterbalance of curve, the largeness of style in the
treatment of individual forms, and what must have been their triumphant
combination in an harmonious whole. We, perhaps, think last and least
of the poetic thought, or scheme of thought, which comprehends and
informs the entire design. Yet here is figurative art in its highest
form. Heroic shapes personify and express the physical and moral forces
of nature, and all are subservient to, and contribute to the climax (I
am thinking now of the eastern pediment), from the sun-god who rears
his arms out of the sea to urge his tossing horses, to the fates who
bring the hour of the glorious birth, to which, as the crowning fact
and summit of the design, all seems to attach as the highest aspiration
of the Athenian mind.
After the lapse of ages, through darkness, destruction, and neglect,
these fragments remain, not only unequalled as sculpture, but true
as figurative design, as expressing what Nature herself continually
teaches--namely, the triumph of mind over matter, of the dominion of
the higher organism over the lower, or, in modern philosophic phrase,
the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
It is strange to think how from the ancient mythological sources in the
dim past flow down the little streams that serve everyday life and
humble domestic use. Scattered in the drift, as it were, of a common
speech--itself a conglomerate of so many elements--like fossils, how
many well-worn fragments we meet of symbolism in proverb, or fable, or
allusion. They are common property, the decorations of everyday talk,
repeated again and again to emphasise and illustrate the most ordinary
conversation, like the little woodcut devices used by the early
printers over and over again to enliven their close pages of type.
It would be an interesting but almost endless task to collect and sift
such fragments, and trace each back to its origin. Many come from the
widest-read and most ancient books, such as Æsop and the Scriptures,
and centuries of human experience are perhaps condensed in some scrap
of proverbial wisdom or folklore. Indeed, as regards mankind at large
it would appear that the figurative element was the only enduring one.
History becomes lost in tradition and mythology. Lesser personalities
are rolled into the greater, and greater personalities are lost in
types. Events are generalised, and the image of the past experience of
the race upon the general mind becomes generic, like that of the visual
impressions of the individual, as Mr. Francis Galton has so strikingly
demonstrated.
It is this natural tendency of the human mind which gives figurative
art its importance; experience is the clay on which it works.
Imagination is the creative force, and sense of beauty the controlling
power. A mental efflorescence springs from life’s rough way, which in
words becomes a figure of speech or rises to poetry, and in design,
emblem and allegory.
The love of figurative art, which had been embodied in so many rich
and strange shapes all through the Middle Ages, bound up with the
mysticism and gorgeous ritual of the Roman religion, or entangled with
the quaint conceits of heraldry, displayed in mystery show and masque
and pageant, or emblazoned upon the illuminated parchment, rose to new
life with the Renaissance, and found with the art of printing new means
of expression in woodcut and copper-plate.
The allegorising power of poets like Spenser found its counterpart in
the designs of such artists as Albert Dürer and Holbein, and the best
inventions of the emblem books, which are so characteristic of the
period.
The taste for these emblem books seems to have lasted all through
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and into the eighteenth.
Collection after collection issued from the press in all the principal
centres of western Europe. The most complete and widely-known were, I
suppose, those of Andrea Alciati, which appear in so many different
editions since the first, printed at Milan in 1522.
The art of the designs in these books varies, of course, very greatly,
according to the current artistic capacity and taste; sometimes rich
and inventive, or quaint and graceful, but often little more than a
kind of pictorial heraldry, where the moral intention overmasters the
artistic power, and becomes merely a label or ensign to point to the
moral of the emblem writer.
There exists a ceiling at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, in the library
there, which is curiously like an emblem book worked out in an
ornamental scheme. It is in low relief, in plaster or some kind of
gesso or stucco, and is said to have been done by Italian workmen.
It is panelled out in a way characteristic of the time of the
house, which bears the date 1619. In the panels are curious figure
designs--allegorical representations of the senses, the virtues, and
the vices--which remarkably correspond in conception and treatment with
their next of kin in some of these old emblem books. The general effect
is very rich and agreeable, and though now white, it was probably
coloured in the manner of the elaborate ceilings of the middle Italian
Renaissance taste, as we find them, for instance, in the Doria Palace
at Genoa, in the work of Giovanni da Udine.
Mr. Morris tells us that all the leading types of pattern design sprang
originally from ancestral forms which were definitely symbolic; so that
art, which we now call purely ornamental, once was made expressive of
mental ideas,--like Persian and Arabic texts in Eastern carpets and
tiles, where language and ornament are often one and the same thing.
The descent of our Alphabet itself has been traced in a direct line
back to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs; and these again were
formed into a species of alphabetical system from an earlier form of
picture or emblem writing. Even after they had been systematised into
the equivalent of an alphabet, pure symbols are used for the expression
of abstract notions, such as thirst, for instance, where a calf is
figured above the zigzag lines which signify water.
The hart drinking from a stream is a well-known early Christian symbol;
we see it in mosaic in the churches at Ravenna, with the vine and the
peacock. These last, too, seem to have been a favourite device to
carve upon marble sarcophagi, and it may well be contrasted with later
Christian taste, in its choice and treatment of symbols in the modern
graveyard; and what a strange medley of emblems meet us there!
Not less mixed is the symbolism of commerce, as exemplified in the
variations of the modern trade-mark. Æsop and the Bible are again drawn
upon, as well as Pagan mythology; but here again perhaps the less said
about art the better. It is only interesting as showing the value in
the purely practical sense a figurative device may have, something
which is distinctive and easily identifiable. It is in some sense a
survival of picture-writing or hieroglyphic, without its old Egyptian
ornamental sense and distinction of style.
Philosophy, too, in her most modern dress has recourse to symbol.
The high priest of Evolution adopted a device for the cover of his
book, showing a plant springing upwards from earth, and putting forth
leaf, bud, and finally flower; a caterpillar among the leaves, a
chrysalis pendent from the bud, and a butterfly hovering over the
open blossom. Nothing could well be more tersely, and at the same
time comprehensively, expressive of perhaps the greatest and most
far-reaching theory of our time.
Nothing, then, appears to be beyond or beneath the range of expression
in figurative design; no touch or conception of life but is made more
emphatic and comprehensible by being cast into a concrete image--a
kind of visible and picturesque logic to satisfy the eye as well as
the mind. But while vigorous design, Atlas-like, can sustain the
world of thought upon its shoulders, no breath of thought can quicken
dead art into life again. It is the true test of really vital design
that it should carry without effort its own intention, and never be
over-weighted.
This vigorous mental vitality as manifested in art is always
characteristic of the great periods. Nor is it spent in one direction
only, but, like the life-blood, circulates freely through the whole
body of art; so that the chased pattern upon a piece of armour or a
watch-plate, the design of a dress fabric or the woodcut ornaments
of a printed book, no less than the frescoed or tapestried wall and
the highly-wrought easel picture, declare the same nervous energy and
endless untiring inventiveness in beautiful and fertile design.
[Illustration]
SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW
An age in which the ornamental sense in art is so little understood--an
age which cares only for superficial picturesqueness or photographic
naturalism is certainly not favourable to any high development of
sculpture, which in times past has been the noblest and most expressive
of the decorative arts. We have to recognise the fact that sculpture,
in common with all art and all forms of life, lives by its capacity
of adaptability to circumstances. Perhaps she has a harder struggle
for existence than her sisters, and in the absence of zeal for great
monumental works it is perhaps not altogether surprising that she
sometimes is content to furnish toys for the drawing-room, and finds
the perpetuation of nonentities more lucrative than the pursuit of
heroic design.
That love of picturesqueness, of naturalism, too, which in our day
asserts itself in season and out of season, and, unfortunately,
often quite regardless of material or place, has left its mark on
sculpture, as in painting. Perhaps it would be truer to say that it has
revolutionised, or at least made a formidable insurrection in both;
so much so that sculpture and painting, in some instances, appear to
be striving to change places--painters sacrificing everything for an
altitude of relief which suggests departure from the canvas altogether,
and sculpture vying with painting in the imitation of textures and
scenic effects which cry out for the palette.
For in sculpture, at least in marble, despite all the resources of
tangible relief and rotundity, it is curious that naturalism of
treatment should be far less suggestive of nature than the same thing
in painting. The most elaborate imitation of textures and surfaces
(such as we see among the modern Italians) has, in the absence of local
tint, an exaggerated and, consequently, unreal look; and if there is
no strong element of design to counterbalance the elaboration--which,
indeed, is offered in its place--the failure as a work of art is
complete.
The importance of designing power in sculpture is obvious enough when
we consider that a sculptor, in designing a figure or group in the
round, has really to make, or ought to make, not one design merely, but
a whole series, in order that his work shall be expressive from every
point of view. This necessity, which is one of the difficulties, is
also one of the advantages of sculpture, and develops its capabilities
for expressive design to the utmost. Thus, while the witchery of
imitative skill may lead painters astray, in sculpture we are forced
back to what may be called the more purely artistic qualities of design
of style; terms which imply much--which comprehend, perhaps, all the
essentials of good art. Without distinction in these the craze for
imitative naturalism, or whatever we like to call it, only ends, so far
as I am aware, in attempts more or less unsuccessful to turn sculpture
into portrait painting or _tableaux vivants_.
It is very much the difference between imitation and expression, or
repetition and creation in art; and this means of course all the
difference in the world, both as regards the artist and his public.
Imitation only requires industry, but design demands inventive power.
Design might be defined as the constructive sense controlled by the
sense of beauty. One may have plenty of energy, plenty of frank
naturalism in a work, but if we have not the sense of beauty in art it
profiteth nothing.
This is of course obvious enough as applied to art with a distinctly
decorative purpose, but it seems curious that while it is taken for
granted that you cannot do without grace or charm of some sort in this
direction, as regards what may be called pictorial art, whether in
painting or sculpture, given plenty of force and fact, grace and charm
seem often quite secondary considerations, hardly missed if altogether
absent.
To me, I confess, such distinctions seem artificial and injurious to
art. A statue, or a picture, or a pattern must be an organic whole,
whether it is itself a whole or a part. It must agree with itself, or
it will agree with nothing, whether it be a frieze, a string-course, or
a bust.
And after all it is this humanising and controlling sense--this
sense of beauty, balance, decorum--this sixth or artistic sense,
in short, manifested in so many different materials, methods, and
styles, varying with climate and character, but articulate in every
tongue--which is the really permanent quality. Without it you may have
science, archæology, antiquarianism, imitation of nature--many things
very useful in their way, but not art.
[Illustration]
PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW
I will ask you to figure to yourselves an aspiring decorator, filled
with the latter-day enthusiasm for beautifying human surroundings,
and recognising a manifest, if superficial, improvement in domestic
architecture and adornment,--recognising the excellent and sympathetic
work that has been done by certain individual workers, or associated
workers, in various arts and crafts, and still undaunted by the
rapacity with which competitive commerce and the modern industrial
system seize upon and spoil their ideas, and like
----the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,--
undaunted, I say, let us suppose our decorator filled with this fine
enthusiasm, so as to have almost persuaded himself that we are on the
brink of a second Renaissance; let us suppose him to turn for a moment
from his all-engrossing studies in stained glass, tapestry, _repoussée_
metal work, wood-carving, pottery, and the like, amid which he may
have become possibly oblivious of the progress of painting; to turn
from wall-hanging and wall-paper to what might be supposed to be the
crown and summit of its decoration, the wall picture, or, to speak
figuratively, from the courts of South Kensington to the galleries of
Burlington House--I mean in the time of its May blossoming.
He enters the exhibition hoping to find his aspirations stimulated, if
not satisfied, by some show of what he has been accustomed to consider
the higher aims and influences in art--primarily the search for beauty
of line, colour, and execution, where indeed they are practically
unfettered, in the technical sense, except by the four sides of a frame
(which in itself might contribute as the setting to the gem). Here,
as our decorator would reasonably suppose, these qualities would be
considered the prime necessities, the indispensable ingredients of the
work, whatever sort of pathetic, dramatic, or high poetic expression a
picture might bear.
But what are the actual evidences that meet his eye? To begin with,
he is appalled by the effect of the galleries as a whole--a number
of odd-sized painted panels in gilt mouldings, jostled together
with scarcely any reference to scale or harmony, either of subject
or colour. Here, perhaps, a life-sized human head and shoulders in
startling relief appears almost bursting through some silvery retiring
landscape distance; there tragedy and farce side by side, and on the
same wall tradition on crutches next the most naked naturalism, with
“no language but a cry,” or perhaps some piece of sentimentality
leaning, as it were, on the shoulder of the coldest academic style.
Supposing our decorator to have at least partially recovered from the
first shock of this impressionistic picture, and to have sufficient
presence of mind to go more into detail, what does he find? Much
ability certainly, much energy, much industry, but wasted for the
most part upon objects and subjects either unrewarding or repulsive,
and squandered in aimless, and therefore inartistic imitation; much
striving after instantaneous photographic effects both in figures and
landscapes--miscalled Realism; much academic learning and archæology;
much sentimental as well as melo-dramatic feeling; plenty of domestic
and quasi-historical incidents, some symptoms of war fever breaking out
in red coats; plenty of sporting and animal life--live and dead stock;
a superabundance of the personal element as in individual portraits,
although the term portrait might often be more justly claimed by
landscape painters, portraits so called being as often as not treated
as if they were landscapes, and landscapes as portraits, in these days.
In these, and such as these, then, our decorator will haply discover
the leading tendencies in modern painting. But he will reflect it
does not need that men should be specially painters to exhibit such
qualities as these. For any strong evidence of any feeling for, or
search after style, design, composition, beauty of form, beauty
of colour, or perfection of workmanship, not to speak of poetic
expression--for those qualities, in short, most peculiarly and
distinctively artistic--qualities at least inseparable from art with
any title to be called decorative--our decorator might look long and
far without finding much to cheer his drooping spirits.
He will depart from the exhibition a sadder, if not a wiser man; but
he will say to himself, “It was not always so.” He will go into our
national collection, and there he will find abundant evidence that
painting was once what he fondly hoped it might be again, at the head
of the decorative arts. Then perhaps he would go down to his house
justified, possibly to dream, and, especially if he had an impression
of Dürer’s “Melancholia” in his room, his dream might take some such
shape as this (were it possible to conceive in an emblematic spirit
such a being): The genius of modern painting would appear amidst the
ruins and relics of ancient art attired in the last Paris fashion,
leaning upon a photographic camera, with canvas and palette set, and
looking in her paint-box for an idea. Instead of Amorini should flit
around her the bats and owls of criticism, uttering discordant cries,
and one flying with a scroll on which should be inscribed, “There is no
beauty but where you would least expect to find it; there is no truth
but literalism.”
[Illustration]
ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN
Man might be distinguished from other animals by his pronounced love of
ornament alone, or at least by the capacity for producing it. Evidences
of the impulse to ornament are found mixed up with his earliest traces
on the earth, and some of his most elaborate efforts have been upon
his own person. In North Borneo, for instance, I believe, to this day
a very elaborate system of tattooing is still practised by special
artists, a great part of the body being covered with elaborate patterns
of fantastic animals and other devices.
From the poetic or artistic side pattern might be defined as the
Notation of silent music. Certain decorative units are the keynotes.
Primitive patterns, like primitive music, consist of very simple
elements--of very few notes. Repetition is the chief factor in the
development of both--Repetition and Rhythm. If music was discovered
by blowing into a hollow reed, design might have begun by experiments
with a stick on the sand or soft clay. “Here is a sound,” says the
musician, “let us make music.” “Here is a surface,” says the designer,
“let us make a pattern.”
The art of pattern-making might be defined as the constructive sense
applied to surfaces. The ornamental designer is not so absolutely bound
by structural laws as the architect; but the fact that the structural
laws which govern his art are more mental than physical does not
make them less binding or less real. Designing is not mathematics or
geometry, but there appears to be a certain logic of line and colour in
design which, given certain fundamental forms and characters, demands
certain necessary sequences.
The system on which a design is built bears much the same relation to
it as the skeleton does to the outward human form, and a knowledge
of the skeleton is considered indispensable to the student of the
figure. If a pattern, for instance, be rectangular in its general plan,
however enriched by detail, the law of its fundamental construction
must be acknowledged. Every line, every form, demands a reason for
its existence. The designer commits himself to a curve; that curve
cannot remain as an isolated fact, or it would be meaningless. It
leads naturally to a counterbalancing curve, and then probably asks
to be repeated; for in dealing with curves and angles we are really
dealing with forms of a most expressive language, and one which
cannot be clearly articulated even, unless we have something to
say. The character of a pattern, then, is governed by its plan; and
although there is no limit to the diversity and variety of a design,
this organic necessity will make itself felt--much as a backbone is
a necessity to a vertebrate. Beyond this the character of a design
must be determined by the physical conditions of its execution and its
ultimate purpose.
It is obvious that a design intended to extend horizontally, as,
for instance, a running border or frieze, is naturally governed by
different laws from one intended to repeat and spread itself vertically
as well as horizontally over a large field, such as a wall-pattern.
And a design fitted for a hanging will not adapt itself to a floor
or ceiling. A pattern, a design, should at once speak for itself.
Its plan should declare its purpose, and its treatment acknowledge
the limitations and necessities--the characteristics, in short, of
the material in which it is produced, and the method by which it is
worked. Such considerations as these, we all know, are necessary to
the successful existence of a pattern, and when they are successfully
met we have only another instance of the survival of the fittest.
For it happens in practice that a pattern which precisely fits such
mechanical conditions has a longer life than one which, though perhaps
more beautiful, in some details does not adapt itself to its position
or to the necessities of reproduction so well. This applies more
particularly to patterns intended for reproduction by processes of
handicraft or manufacture, but it holds good also, though in a lesser
degree perhaps, in all applied art, and can never be left out of
account by the designer. Perfect fitness and beauty ought, of course,
always to accompany each other--as a matter of fact, other conditions
being equal, they do, as beauty is really organic; but mistakes are
sometimes made by introducing in design elements which properly belong
to other provinces of art,--for instance, when a carver or a weaver
aims at superficial _imitation_ of natural forms in his work rather
than their constructive value in design, or ornamental effect as
pattern. For pattern, in its simplest form, and regarded solely in its
abstract technical sense, apart from symbolism or imitation of natural
form, is nothing but a series of modifications in the structure and
correlation of line, such modifications being suggested or determined
by the necessities of adaptation to spaces, objects, and materials.
Taking line, then, as the basis of ornament, a simple horizontal
line forms, as it were, the primal decorative unit. Repeat it in
parallels, and we get at once the type of a whole series of the
simplest, but perhaps the most widely-used of patterns. It gives us
the banded courses of brick and marble, the reeded mouldings and
strings in architecture, the endless linear borders in ceramics;
whilst in textiles it seems, in the ever-recurring barred and striped
patterns, as if it were the Alpha and Omega of design, and that like
Hope--slightly to alter the well-known line--it
----springs eternal on the human _vest_.
But probably the same reasons for its perpetuation are found cogent
both in building and weaving--that is to say, the fundamental
structural necessities of both lend themselves naturally to that system
of varying the surface, and it seems universally pleasing to the human
race.
But we are not very far on the road of invention. Satisfactory as
bands, bars, and horizontal mouldings may be, cunningly proportioned
and nicely placed, man cannot live by parallels alone. He needs
other decorative units to make him happy. It is not known who struck
the first circle. The inventor of the compasses--the prehistoric
Giotto--remains in obscurity. Perhaps the hollow reed is again the
medium; and the circular mark which would be left by the impression
of the cut end of a reed on the soft earth might have given the circle
to design. So, perhaps, Pan is the father of the arts of design.
However this may be, with spheres all around, the idea must soon have
germinated. Man needed to look no farther than the sun and the sea to
find the genesis of pattern; nay, he had its elements in his own frame,
which, as Vitruvius demonstrates, comprises, or is comprised in, both
square and circle; and these may be said to divide the responsibility
for the whole race of pattern systems between them--to stand in the
world of design as a kind of Cœlus and Terra to an endless offspring.
The types of pattern to which they give rise are suggestive, too,
of different characteristics of race, language, and civilisation.
Broadly speaking, the square with its derived chequers, zigzags, and
diapers might almost stand as a symbol of the ornament of the northern
nations, associated as these forms are with Scandinavian and Gothic
pattern work; while, on the other hand, the circle, with its derived
scrolls and spirals, seems figurative of the greater suppleness and
sensitiveness to beauty of the Southern; and it is to ancient Greece
and to Italy that we must look for their most perfect types.
Square and angular patterns strike at once by their emphasis and rigid
logic; while the circular and curvilinear types appeal rather to sense
of grace and rhythm. For richness and intricacy we must go to where
both perhaps came from--to the home of the Arabesque--to the East--the
fountain-head of patterns, poured forth in a continual stream of
imaginative energy and inventive subtlety. While the Frank has spent
himself in the pursuit of the superficial facts of nature, and of the
portrayal of life and character, seeking energy rather than beauty,
and fact rather than ideal expression, the Asiatic has been content
to wrap himself in a mesh of delicate fancy; and if he regards nature
it is rather through a series of carefully-chosen symbolic forms that
subserve his subtle ornamental sensibility.
Returning to our primitive square and circle, we find that they not
only give us patterns and pattern systems by simply reproducing
themselves, but that, by subdivision and extension, they give us
certain offshoots which form universal decorative units, as well as
fundamental geometric plans or governing systems of the whole race of
what may be called organic patterns.
The leading forms of these offshoots from the square and circle
are--from the square--the Chequer, the Fret, the Zigzag, the Diaper.
From the circle--the Scroll, the Spiral, the Fan, the Scale, the Oval.
These are not only decorative units and linear patterns complete in
themselves, but furnish the system, scaffolding, or skeleton on which a
multitude of rich and varied designs are built; as the beautiful lines,
curves, and contours of the human figure are built upon the strong and
symmetric framework of the bones, and form together an organic whole.
These forms, too,--these decorative units which are geometrically
evolved from the square and the circle,--are also constructive in their
origin. The simplest of all patterns arise naturally from certain
necessities of construction. Even the linear (alternating) arrangement,
produced by the ordinary method of laying bricks, is in some sort a
pattern, as well as those more specialised methods in masonry such as
opus reticulatum and herring-bone work, for instance. The lattice work
of the joiner and engineer also; the patterns formed by the plaiting
of grass or rushes in matting, which give us the chequer; the spirals
in the twisting of the strands of a rope, and the radiating ribs of a
fan,--these all may be looked upon as the sources of our decorative
units, and have their prototypes in the natural world, where, above
all, we find constructive strength united with beauty and fitness,
governed by adaptability to circumstance.
The Fan, indeed, holds universal sway, not only in the hands of
women, but in the worlds both of nature and design.[1] In structure
and system the Fan seems to be one of the first principles of organic
construction, and is illustrated everywhere--from a bird’s wing to
a vaulted ceiling, and in decorative art spreads from the Greek
Anthemion to the Japanese screen. The Japanese artist is never tired
of demonstrating its fitness for every ornamental purpose. It is his
dearest decorative unit, and he certainly proves himself a master in
its use.[2]
Of the Fan, considered both as a controlling system and as a decorative
unit, it would be easy to recall examples in almost every age and
style--through Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance
periods. From the rising to the setting of the sun of art, the fan
constantly reappears, and seems very early to have been associated
with ideal beauty, inasmuch as the fan in the shell form has long been
accepted in art as the cradle of Venus. Its felt applicability to so
many forms of decoration lies, no doubt, in the fact that, structurally
considered, the fan unites the minimum of lightness with the maximum of
strength, as well as in its capacity for variation, and adaptability to
position and material.
It would be interesting to trace the different treatment of the same
decorative unit by different races and in different countries, and
to hunt them down to their primitive type. I have often thought it
would be possible to classify patterns, like plants, into species and
genera. The analogy between the two is perhaps nearer than is commonly
supposed,[3] for each is subject to those general laws of existence
which control the existence of all art no less.
Art, of course, is not to be confounded with either science or nature,
but there is a scientific side to art. When we come to principles
of Design one may well fear the valley of dry bones, where so many
champions have, alas! left theirs. From the point of view of the
designer, who seeks to confirm his practice and experience by general
principles and definitions--which, after all, are but the boundaries
and defences of territory already gained and peopled--it would be
possible to make definitions of the elements of ornament “refutation
tight” as far as words go. In this sense it always strikes me that
Professor Ruskin’s “ingenious friend,” of whom he speaks in his
_Elements of Drawing_--his correspondent who defined ornament as
consisting of “Contrast, Series, and Symmetry”--very nearly hit the
mark. The demonstration given, too, with the test ingredients offered
by Ruskin was, as far as it went, triumphant; and although it might not
have been strictly ornament, it was at least skeleton ornament, and it
is something to acknowledge that ornament should have a skeleton.
If we said that ornament was the systemisation of form it would perhaps
be more comprehensive; but define as we may, the important thing is
the motive power--be the machinery theoretically perfect. All depends
on the use the designer makes of his system and ingredients. The proof
of the pudding is in the eating, and even then it is not always safe
to affirm it could not have been made any other way. The truth is
that pattern making, whatever are the elements, and however necessary
certain sequences are, and its successful composition, depend finally
on the inventive fertility of the artist’s mind; and this, again, may
indefinitely be depressed or stimulated by the conditions under which
he lives.
I do not pretend in this short paper to give more than a sketch of what
is really a very vast subject, but if I have succeeded in awakening
an interest in it, and induced any of my readers to pursue it farther
themselves, I shall be very pleased. To those who would like to do so,
I can recommend two excellent little books by Mr. Lewis F. Day, himself
a well-known and practical designer. They are the _Anatomy of Pattern_
and the _Planning of Ornament_, both published by Mr. Batsford of
Holborn.
It seems to me that one of the difficulties of designers in the present
day is rather the embarrassment which comes from the overwhelming mass
of examples from every age and clime with which he is overwhelmed. It
requires a very powerful artistic digestion to assimilate such a mass
and such a variety of ornamental styles. The consequences, too, are
evident enough around us, as what may be properly called the ornament
of the period is an extraordinary jumble--a hybrid production resulting
from a mixture in the mind of all these styles,--just as if one were to
consult the dictionaries of all the tongues living and dead, and take a
few words there and a few words here and call the results language or
poetry.
If, like David with the armour he had not proved, our designer could
put these things away from him, and rely on the sling and the stone
of constructive necessity and mother wit, one cannot help feeling the
result would be better.
If we must have ornament let it be good as far as it goes, and grow
naturally out of the constructural necessities and material of
the work. The importance of good design and handicraft cannot be
exaggerated, for upon their health depends the health of all art
whatsoever; and the test of the conditions of the arts in any age must
be sought in those crafts of design which minister to the daily life
and common enjoyment of humanity.
A man may be able, with the proceeds of labour, to spend thousands
of pounds upon a single picture, but it does not follow that art is
making progress. There is no artistic inspiration in thousands of
pounds--the sculptor cannot even make a golden image out of it. Wealth
and luxury can never really foster art--they must eventually stifle it.
The artist must keep in touch with nature and life; he must keep his
eye fresh and his heart open if his work is to touch men and dwell in
their memories. And it matters not whether he wield the chisel, the
hammer, or the brush, or work at the forge, the carpenter’s bench, the
stone-mason’s shed, on the scaffold or in the studio; if he feels his
work, if he acquires the skill to make a thing of beauty, he is an
artist in the true sense of the word.
[Illustration]
ART AND LABOUR
How define Art or Labour? We might dryly attempt to sum up the
artificial distinctions between them by saying that--(1) Art is the
inventive use of tools and material. (2) Labour is the mechanical use
of tools and material.
But on examination (regarding the whole field of handicraft) the two
would be found to be so closely connected--so much art or skill in even
the simplest operation of labour, so much labour involved in even the
simplest form of art--each so involved in the other, that it would be
very difficult to draw the line and to say where labour ends and art
begins.
Leaving the abstract, let us consider the concrete--the personal. Let
us look at what might be called the two extremes. Look at the labourer
with his shovel, on the one hand, and the painter (who of late has
monopolised the name of artist), on the other, with his palette and
brushes.
The resemblances are perhaps not so striking as the differences. It
is true the labourer is engaged in moving, say, earth or minerals
from one place to another with his shovel. The painter is engaged
in moving earth or minerals (in the form of colours) from one place
to another--from his palette to his canvas with his brush. Both are
contributing to the best of their ability to the wants of man. The
labourer who may be supposed to be digging the foundations of a house
is clearly contributing to his fundamental necessities; while the
artist is presumably contributing to his sources of pleasure and
refinement, though clearly his work will not be much in demand until
the walls are built--until there is something to put his picture _on_.
And if we were to inquire further into the history of the maintenance
and of the tools and materials of either workman, we should discover
that both were alike dependent upon a vast chain of associated labour,
which makes their work, nay, their very existence, possible.
As to the economic value of the work of each to the community, that
again depends upon conditions. If there was a scarcity of houses the
labourer’s labour would (or naturally ought to) be the most valuable;
if there was a superfluity of houses, then the painter’s labour ought
naturally to be the most valued. In gauging the value of the labour
of each from the point of view of the barest utility, there can be no
doubt that the painter would kick the beam.[4]
As to the _actual_ or market value, if we take as a criterion the
monetary reward of each, it is quite the other way, at least, in what
are called civilised countries; although both artist and labourer in
their economic condition are alike in this, that _neither is certain
of a livelihood_; and the position of both is affected _by competition
and the general state of trade_--_not_, observe, _by the actual wants
of the community_! Well, as to wages, as we know, there are all the
degrees between them--between, say, 6d. an hour on the one hand, and
600 or 6000 pence and upwards an hour on the other; alternating, in
each case, however, with _nothing_ an hour.
I think it will be agreed that this is not a very satisfactory or
artistic state of things.
So much then by way of a rough sketch of the relative positions of
artist and labourer; and other things being equal, I think it would
be extremely difficult to prove that either is more useful to the
community than the other. But as there is certainly labour in art (as
with the best talents it requires great devotion and industry to become
an artist and craftsman), so also there is a great deal of art in
labour, even of the kind commonly called “unskilled.”
I know of no labour which can be properly described as the exertion of
mere brute force. The slightest practical acquaintance with any kind of
manual work is sufficient to convince one that there is always a better
and a worse way of doing anything, and that it is not the amount of
force, but the amount of _effective_ force, which counts in doing any
work.
Try a hand at any ordinary piece of field work, for instance. Take
up a scythe and see what you can do in the hayfield without previous
practice, and then see if the results of your efforts do not convince
you that there is a great deal of art in the management of such an
apparently simple implement.
One has often been struck with the splendid action and admirable
precision with which two men will alternately hammer at an iron wedge,
when old pavement is being taken up in our streets. The hammer is
swung at the full sweep of the arms and brought down with the utmost
economy of concentrated force upon the head of the wedge. This is the
art of manual labour. When the dockers and gasmen strike it is not
found so simple a matter to fill their places (apart from the question
of “blacklegs”), and amateurs in manual labour are soon found to be
very different from the professional artists of labour. The lifter and
carrier of weights, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water have
a practical acquaintance with the nature of things (under constantly
varying secondary conditions)--of poise and pressure--which is far more
immediately valuable than any general _theoretic_ acquaintance with the
laws of nature.
In attempting any unwonted piece of work, say, in sawing a piece of
wood, the inexperienced always wastes force. In all labour it is the
_economy of force_ which makes force effective, and this must be the
result of experience. Even the rate at which manual labourers work is
fixed by general experience.
William Morris’s story of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, who set
his courtiers to work to help the vine-dressers, puts this fact in a
very picturesque way; and as a result of the experiment it was found
that for the first half-hour the courtiers worked forty-five minutes,
the second half-hour just thirty minutes, the third half-hour fifteen
minutes, and in the fourth half-hour declined to two minutes, while
the labourers maintained their steady rate.
There is a false estimate of the value and dignity of labour prevalent;
we need a new scale, a new gauge or test of the value and proportionate
usefulness of labour. If, apart from bodily strength, so much skill,
judgment, and experience is required in common everyday labours
that have not the slightest pretensions to art, consider how many
qualities are brought into play directly we touch any one of the finer
handicrafts.
Machinery, used solely in the interests of trade and rapid production,
has distorted our sense of the importance of labour as well as degraded
the labourer, and wellnigh destroyed the handicraft, and has set up
the quite false standard of mechanical precision, and what is known
as “trade finish,” which is fatal to any _artistic_, that is to say,
individual feeling.
It appears, indeed, as if art were only possible in so far as the
artist escapes the tendencies and influences of his time.
The very schools of art tend to mechanicalise and conventionalise
students to one pattern. The only way to teach or to learn any form
of art is by demonstration; the master should be able to do the work,
the pupil should be able to see it done. But the master-craftsman no
longer, as a rule, works in his shop with his apprentices, passing on,
with added skill and invention, those traditions of work and method,
which, continually added to by fresh experience and new impulses,
form the true soil out of which the vital force of design, in all its
manifold branches, ever springs.
But now, I suppose, it is very seldom a workman sees his work complete
from beginning to end. He must be content to furnish a part only,
perhaps an infinitesimal part, to the finished result. There can be no
possibility under such a system of the pleasure of the craftsman in
fashioning his work, to give it the individual twist and play of fancy,
the little touch of grace and ornamental feeling springing from the
organic necessities of the work which is characteristic of the times
when art and handicraft were united and living.
I cannot contemplate with satisfaction the spectacle of a world so
“civilised” that all the useful labours are made either terrible by
long hours, or emptied of all joy and interest by being reduced to
mechanism, so that every one, while spending mechanically the greater
part of their time on some work they take no interest in, and caring
only to end it, fix their heart upon something outside their lives and
work--following the game of “ins and outs” called politics, or giving
themselves up to the chances of the gambler, whose talk is of jockeys
and racehorses, or stocks and shares.
The ideal man was, a little while ago, the so-called “self-made”
man--the man who started from _somewhere_ with half-a-crown in his
pocket, and changed it cleverly (in course of time) for half a
million or so, living happily ever after on the labour of others--an
independent gentleman.
The miner or the navvy who digs himself out of his class and hoists
himself on the shoulders of others to a position of mastership--to a
position in which he is no longer obliged to do any work--has been held
up to the admiration of all other miners and navvies, who are enjoined
to go and do likewise.
But why should it be assumed that a man must rise out of his class in
order to raise himself? Why should a life of useful productive labour,
of labour absolutely indispensable to the community, be despised, and a
life of idleness be extolled and desired?
The principle of perpetually shifting the hardest and most disagreeable
work on to the shoulders of others, and then labelling those others as
inferiors, and paying them miserably, _must come to an end some day_.
The system under which a man who works hardest and longest is paid the
least, while at the other end of the scale the man who does nothing is
paid the most, is a scandal; and if this is the result of civilisation,
civilisation, if it is going to stop at that, must be pronounced a
failure.
No happy human life is surely possible without work--and by work I
distinctly mean some form of pleasurable handicraft. No healthy human
being would wish to be idle. Experience tells us how much happier we
are, mentally and physically, for doing some kind of work, especially
work, handiwork, in which we can take a pleasure; that is, which admits
of some kind of invention, judgment, discretion, selection, which gives
scope for individual preferences--art, in short.
And after all there is hardly any kind of manual work which (if not
excessive and burdensome by means of long hours) does not bring its
own satisfaction. To a healthy individual the mere putting out of his
physical and mental forces is a satisfaction. The contention with
difficulties, the triumph over obstacles, the solution of problems, the
strife with the materials and forces of nature (if not too arduous)
bring their own satisfactions and rewards.
I do not suppose any one who has never scrubbed a floor, or cleaned up
and set a room in order, can understand the satisfaction of the good
housewife who contemplates the result, putting the finishing touches
here and there, just as an artist before his picture, retiring with his
head on one side to judge of the effect.
It is noteworthy, too, that this sense of the worth of labour to the
individual seems to be in danger of being entirely lost sight of amid
the grinding overwork on the one hand, and the increasing luxury on the
other.
In a society which makes it an object in life for each one to evade
their share of useful productive labour, and by getting hold, by hook
or by crook, of the largest share of labour values, to live upon the
toil of their brothers and sisters, how can due respect be ever paid to
labour, in spite of the bidding of the politician for the working man’s
vote, and all the various baits dangled before his eyes?
I have a little book called _The Book of Trades, or Library of
the Useful Arts_, interesting as showing the state of the useful
handicrafts on the verge of this century of machine production. It is
in three parts, dated 1806 to 1811. Most of the plates are dated 1804.
Little pictures are given of most of the trades described, and we see,
for instance, in one part, with many other crafts, the trunkmaker, the
wheelwright, the iron-founder, the copperplate printer, the painter,
the statuary, side by side--no artificial distinction between art and
labour here; but while it says of the wheelwright that a journeyman
can earn “from a guinea to thirty shillings a week,” of the painter
it says, “the earning of an artist cannot be defined; he is paid
according to his talents, and to the celebrity which he has acquired.
Some persons will require a hundred guineas for a piece which another
of inferior merit, or little known to the public, would be glad to
perform for a twentieth part of that sum.” Our author is judicious.[5]
The _Book of Trades_ winds up with “The Merchant,” and after showing so
many handicraftsmen in full activity, the artist is rather hard put to
it to express the toil of the merchant, so he draws a fine gentleman
in a cocked hat, leaning on his walking stick, and elegantly presiding
over a docker who is rolling a barrel, and a clerk, in a rudimentary
top hat, who is entering something in a book. Here is an image of
art--or shall we say craft--and labour!
Well, I suppose the “merchant” of the present day is mostly a good many
removes farther from his merchandise than that, and often does not ever
see the thing he buys and sells, becoming ultimately sublimated into
the banker--the great financier who pulls the strings, and supplies the
sinews of war in the modern world. He is like the man who carries on
several games of chess without seeing the board. It is an unpicturesque
ideal which I do not admire. To be mere pieces and pawns in the game of
a cunning and unseen power is a very demoralising and dangerous game,
both for the pawns and the player, and the power of money seems less
scrupulous and more demoralising in its action than any other sinister
power which has held sway over humanity. While apparently fostering
art it really blights and destroys it, caring only for luxury; and
labour is degraded and despised under the commercial ideal of heaping
up riches, according to possession of which is a citizen respected!
I have been described as a person “deeply tainted with socialism.” I
do not know how such an impression originated, as I thought that I was
entirely gone that way long ago! But whether socialists or not, I think
we must all feel that man has become what he is by the development
of his social instincts, or the race would have become extinct, and
therefore it is reasonable to look forward to the attainment of a
higher and a juster and more human social life.
I believe that we cannot stand still, and I for one do not want to go
back. Intensely interesting as the study of past ages may be, and many
the lessons we may lay to heart from the past life and experience of
humanity, the possibilities of the future are still more fascinating.
I for one am not satisfied with our present commercial democracy,
which, indeed, I believe to be but a stage of evolution into something
more real and complete. The aspiration for liberty, equality, and
fraternity is a true aspiration, but it has yet to be realised. I
cannot for the life of me see how you can have political freedom
without _economic freedom_. If there is monopoly of land and the
means of subsistence, there must be slavery in some form, as well as
pauperism.
The world, however, cannot be changed by a ready-made, cut-and-dried
working model of a scheme for the regeneration of society. I am not
going to attempt the impertinence of offering one. Society must work
out its own salvation--no professional salvationist can save it that
trouble. We all have our aspirations, however, our preferences, our
ideas--dreams, if you will; and it is after all the sum and velocity
of these, incorporating the wants of the time, which ultimately form
opinion, which dissolve states, and reform them.
I will confess, therefore, that I look to the reconstruction of
society on a basis of equality of condition (quite a different thing
from dividing up) to remedy the ills we suffer from. The problem of
the future lies in a nutshell, but that nutshell is no less than _the
organisation of labour_--a hard one to crack perhaps, but it will have
to be done some day. The organisation of labour carries the question of
art with it--carries every question with it. I can conceive it quite
practicable for any community to declare that not one of its members
shall want for food, clothes, shelter, or work; and while placing no
restrictions on individual development, so long as that development did
not infringe the liberty of others, it might fix at least a minimum
standard of life. It is conceivable on such a basis that the useful
necessary work of the community might be carried on by a system of
co-operation, by companies or orders, in which every able-bodied member
of the community taking part, the number of working hours would be few
and short, necessarily, since there would be no question of making a
profit for any one, and for the same reason no work need be scamped
or hurried, while ample leisure could be afforded for cultivation and
enjoyment. If, in the _first_ place, the world (each country) was
regarded as a place for its people to live happily in, should we be
likely to blacken it with smoke, or ruthlessly deface or destroy the
beauty either of town or country when the fierce competition of trade
no longer hounded us on; when the hope of profits ceased from troubling
and speculation was at rest?
Then, perhaps (instead of scratching holes here and there), we might
do something towards really building up a noble and beautiful human
life--a life of useful and pleasurable, but not enforced or excessive
labour; of labour gladdened by its recurring festivals, and closely
allied with the invention and colour of art; a life in which the
individual might have free scope, and character its full weight
(unbiassed by “real” property, and without its undue powers), yet with
a paramount social sense of the unity of common life; of the life of
which we are each a part only, which was here before we came, and which
will go on long after we are gone; that life which absorbs, while it
protects and leaves free the individual man and woman, humanising them
by the sense of mutual love and dependence, while bracing them with
the sense of public spirit and duty,--such a life, which, collectively
speaking, is alone worthy to be called a free state.
[Illustration]
ART AND HANDICRAFT
The formation of guilds of workers in art, taken with other indications
of a very decided movement towards a revival of handicraft and of
design as associated with it, is one of the most notable signs of the
times.
In the midst of the full tide of mechanical invention and unheard-of
ingenuity in the adaptation of machinery, we come back to the _hand_,
as the best piece of machinery after all.
It is a strange commentary upon that industrial commercial progress
which has been the subject of so much congratulation. In the full
swing of our commercial century, which has witnessed such a wonderful
development of mechanical invention and application of steam power to
every kind of process of production, involving the specialising of
our workman, and his conversion very often into an appendage of the
machine, we have discovered that we are losing our sense of beauty, our
artistic feeling, and capacity for imaginative design; that our daily
work is losing, or has lost, its interest and romance; that we are
paying a heavy price for this lob-sided progress of ours in the loss
of beauty without and happiness within; and that that very cheapening
of commodities, which is often regarded as such a blessing, means the
cheapening of human life and labour; and we are apt to forget that
the cheapest necessity of life may be dear enough if one has not even
the cheap symbol of exchange for it--the uttermost farthing,--and the
portion of the human family, of our fellow-citizens in this condition
appears to be continually on the increase.
So that the glittering palace of commercial prosperity and individual
profit-at-other-people’s-expense casts a terrible shadow of
ever-deepening blackness exactly proportional to the luxury, the waste,
and the splendour within.
In the blackness of this shadow is involved the blight and desolation
of many a fair tract of our green England, as well as the blight and
desolation of the lives of her sons and daughters in the grime of
overcrowded joyless cities.
And while at one end of the social scale we get the height of
degradation which comes of the delegation of all manual labour to
another class, with ultra-refinement and softness of living, and
an aimless and restless life; at the other end we get depths of
degradation which comes not of work but of hopeless toil, or enforced
idleness; precarious and penurious living, and all the sordid and
narrowing cares it entails,--like the mysterious flakes that Shelley
describes in his “Triumph of Life,” falling and falling upon the
heads of the throng until the brightness of youth is changed to a
sour-visaged old age.
Here, in these two perhaps equally deplorable extremes, we have the
white and the black upon our palette for a picture of modern life--a
“Bridge of Life” I have not yet painted. These are the two negations.
Between them there is a band or bridge of colour very various in
hue, fading gradually into the white, or absorbed gradually into the
blackness. Here is the artificial bridge of life we have built up
with the rigid stones and bricks of an inhuman and unequal economic
system, cemented by the lives and hopes of the mass of mankind, who
are constrained to bear that bridge from dawn to sunset in order that
a privileged few may pass over dry-shod--not unpursued, it is true,
by their own Nemesis, if unvexed by the common cares that wear away
the lives of those unregarded supporters of the present structure of
society--the caryatides of toil turned to stone.
Well, this revival of handicraft, this claim of the workman to have
some share of the joy of the artist in his work, instead of, like the
blind tools and implements he uses, contributing to a result in which
he has no acknowledged part or recognition,--this claim, I say, which
is wrapped up in that revival of handicraft of which we see the signs
around us, is, in some sort, a protest against the domination of our
modern commercial and industrial system of production for profit--the
profit of some intervening person other than the actual worker and
maker--which has gradually superseded the ancient one of production
for use, which has destroyed the old village industries, and is fast
obliterating local varieties and characteristics of all kinds as
regards the outward life of the people in all countries where our
modern civilisation has obtained a footing.
Instead of things useful, each with their own constructive and organic
beauty, or decoration arising out of these, being produced at the will
and pleasure of the artist or craftsman, with a view to the actual
requirements of particular people, things both of use and so-called
ornament are now, with few exceptions, with our tremendous machinery,
produced wholesale--as many as possible to one pattern--whether hats,
or boots, or clothes, or houses, or food and furniture, or furniture
for the mind’s unseen house--things intended to stimulate and delight
it. Yet all these things, even matters, one would think, of pure art
like books and pictures, instead of being the spontaneous outcome of
a man’s best thoughts and skill, seem too often made by a species of
guess-work, and apparently on the assumption that, being made for no
one, or no place, in particular, they will do anywhere, or fit any one,
or every one, but sometimes end in suiting no one.
Now in order to facilitate this process of wholesale production for
profit (which ultimately depends for its success perhaps as much upon
the adroitness of the salesman as upon the actual wants of the big
public, at least beyond the bare necessities)--in order to facilitate
wholesale production, it becomes an object that all labour that _can
be_ done by machine, after almost infinitesimal subdivision has taken
place, _shall be_ done by machine, until such workmen as are necessary
to wait on the machine become parts of it, and independent craftsmen
cease to exist.
There may be a great future for machinery in the _real_ saving of
labour--heavy and exhausting labour--the necessary heavy and useful
work--lifting weights, pumping, excavating, and carrying us from place
to place, and many other useful services--perhaps when communities are
masters of their own soil and the materials of life; but at present it
is only the cost of labour that is saved. It may be a gain to the owner
and to a few individuals, but so long as machinery merely supplants
men, and turns them adrift to swell the army of the unemployed, what is
gain to individuals is a loss to the people at large.
If the production of the greatest saleable quantity for the greatest
purchasing number, without regard to quality or durability, be the
object, of course there can be little question that such a system as
the present one is well adapted to attain it.
If mere _reproduction_ of works on the same principle, even of works
of art, is our object, rather than to encourage the development of
the capacity for original invention, and the personal pleasure of
fashioning, such a system is again well adapted to the end, as, for
instance, in the case of printed books, newspapers, engravings, and all
things where any form of press is employed. But for all our advancement
and steam power as applied to the printing press, printing as an art
has declined, however it may have flourished as a trade, especially
as regards the form of type and its arrangement on the page, to say
nothing of printers’ ornaments and illustrations from the point of view
of their contributing to the unity and decorative effect.
Yet this matter of book and newspaper illustration is considered by
many, perhaps most, to be our strongest point. Well, if we limit it
strictly to the question of illustration pure and simple, and leave out
the question of adaptability to conditions and decorative effect--the
art and craft side, in fact--there can be no doubt that, fostered
perhaps by the enormous and wonderful development of the photograph,
there is an extraordinary display of clever work and graphic power of
a kind scattered about among our books, newspapers, and magazines.
In fact, some of our most original and clever work is found in these
things, and many of our most original painters first distinguished
themselves as illustrators, and owe much of their character and charm
as painters to the fact of their having been first craftsmen in black
and white.
Yet in contemplating the amount of ability spent on works the very
existence of which depends often upon the passing moment, it is
impossible not to feel that there is an enormous waste in this
direction, both literary and artistic.
It has been said that we grind our potential Shakespeares very small on
the mill of the daily press; and in like manner, I suppose, our Michael
Angelos may be squandered in magazines and Christmas numbers.
I believe it has been said that in our black and white illustrative
work we find our “art of the people.” It may be the modern substitute
for it, but I should describe it more as the art of a commercial
democracy. It is produced by a special class for special classes,
rather than for or by the people, strictly speaking; and, curiously
enough, though addressed to a wide public, its existence depends upon
its swift conversion into private property. You pay your money and you
take your choice.
As art, it is after all questionable compensation for that art of the
people which formerly existed in every village, every household, in
close connection with every handicraft, however humble; when every
carpenter, mason, blacksmith, weaver, or plasterer could give the
touch of art to his work; when every gable, every street, had character
and beauty of its own, and every church was the shrine of the most
beautiful art of the time--common to all who had eyes to see.
What, after all, becomes of this mass of illustrating and printing,
hastily conceived and hurriedly carried out--these flying leaves,
hot from the press, daily, hourly, weekly, monthly, falling upon
a comparatively apathetic public, needing stronger and stronger
sensational effects and newer novelties? Their days, indeed, are as
grass, for as soon as the breath of popular favour and interest passeth
over them they are gone, and the place thereof knoweth them no more.
There being so little beauty and variety or romance in the lives of
most of us, and since the mind and the senses must be fed in some way
or another, we try to make books and pictures fill the void. The demand
increases, and an organised system of supply springs up to meet it, so
that our poetry and romance, our sense of art and beauty, is ministered
to in the way of business, and made up in large or small parcels, to be
had in pounds’ worths or penny-worths across the counter.
All this may be very admirable and convenient, but the most beautiful
art is the natural outcome and expression of a rich, varied, heroic,
and hopeful contemporary life, its character and beauty depending upon
that life, and the unity of its sentiment, just as that of a tree or
a flower depends upon the soil from which it springs. By our modern
methods we are gradually impoverishing the soil while we are forcing
the crops. We are obliterating the beauty of common life, at least
in towns, while we are endeavouring to increase and stimulate the
production of works of art.
That, surely, is a ruinous system--most uneconomical economics! We
shall never make both ends meet.
It is well for those who have leisure and inclination to face the
question--whither our post-haste production for profit, whether in art
or craft, is carrying us? The world after all is limited in extent, and
the ordinary fundamental wants of man are limited also. Sooner or later
it may come within the bounds of possibility to calculate almost to a
nicety the demands of the world-market. That market is already crowded
with competitors, and at the present rate the salesmen, or at least the
goods, are too many for the market--too much for the margin of profit
ever growing narrower. The result is a glut, a waste, a loss, and
incalculable suffering to the producers. Is it possible to contemplate
the eternal existence of such a blindfold system? Is it not within
the bounds of probability that, when the people--the workers--men and
women, really come to their own again, and really govern their own,
a system of labour will be organised on a very different basis from
that of the present, and on a principle as near as possible to that
expressed in the motto: “_From_ each according to his capacity, _to_
each according to his needs”?
It is, at least, on such a belief, and a belief founded on the
prospects of the inevitable ultimate break-down of the present system
of production and exchange by its own failure to fit the conditions of
life, that I base my best hopes both for art and humanity.
I have no wish to return to the fourteenth, or any other century,
even if wishes were horses and could carry us back. The world moves
slowly; the centuries do their work. I fully recognise that our
present conditions are the result of a long chain of evolution, and we
are still evolving. The peoples of the world are being drawn closer
together, and the interdependence of nations brings such an ideal as
I have indicated for the first time in history into the region of
possibility. All questions lead us on to, and are absorbed in, one
great question--the organisation of labour. When that is solved in the
interest of the community, instead of for the profit of individuals,
we may look forward to a time when, released from the pressing burden
of the anxiety for the means of living, each one, while in his own
community, taking his share of the necessary work, having leisure and
opportunity, may devote his ability, such as lies in him, or as he may
develop, to the practice of art or craftsmanship; the results of which
would be, being followed for the pleasure of it, and in the pursuit
of beauty or for the expression of thought, Art would be entirely
unforced; growing naturally out of the use of the materials, and
adaptability to the constructive position, directed by creative thought.
When the highest good becomes truly the good of the community and
the service of man--the root and basis of all morality--when instead
of grudging and partial acknowledgment it becomes the mainspring of
action; and when, freed from narrowing and debasing superstitions,
man’s place in nature is understood; when living a life which afforded
equal opportunities to all, which, being more simple and natural, would
favour the development of the artistic sense, is it possible to doubt
that we should see great and beautiful public works and monuments, the
result of combined and sympathetic labours, expressing not only the
joy of individual artists and craftsmen in the beauty of their work,
but the collective spirit of the community, whose guiding principles
would be equality of condition and individual freedom, controlled only
by considerations of the common good and the fraternal relationship of
mankind?
Well, that is something, to my mind, worth looking forward to. It may
be a mere outline, but details can be filled in as we complete the
design. Whether its realisation be far or near, the important thing for
every one, it appears to me, is _to have an ideal_ of some kind. It is
of the greatest practical value in life, continually stimulating us to
fresh effort; producing wholesome discontent with existing conditions,
and filling the mind with aspirations for something better, and the
determination to work for it, however infinitesimally each may help to
attain it.
We know what it is in our work to have an aim--what a difference it
makes, if we are carving a piece of wood, or hammering a piece of
metal, if we are seeking to express some particular beauty of line or
surface, which all the while dwells in our mind; which we strive to
satisfy, but which, whether we succeed or fail, continually leads us to
higher and better efforts. It is our aim that makes all the difference
in the conduct of art as of life.
It is this, too, which finally settles all questions of style or
method, of high art or low, over and above the material we work in,
which no artist or craftsman can afford to leave out of account. There
is a saying attributed to Goethe, I believe, that the true power of
an artist is shown when he works under limitations; and most true
it is,--applicable to all art, but especially in association with
handicraft, for the whole art of the craftsman lies in his power of
working under conditions; and he shows his skill in applying design,
and expressing it in different materials in such a way as best to bring
out the peculiar beauty and adaptability of those materials, and the
fitness of the design to them; by no means endeavouring to imitate in
one material what can only properly be done in another, or joining
in that aimless masquerade in which the arts lose their identity and
character together.
In the midst of decay and dissolution there are signs of new life and
movement--the awakening of spring among the dead boughs of winter, the
budding of the new shoots from among the faded and fallen leaves. These
efforts to revive the handicrafts, to unite the scattered and estranged
members of the family of the arts, are full of good augury. Not that
such movements alone can solve the questions on which I have touched,
except, perhaps, for individuals here and there; but the effort to
return to better ways in one direction is sure to lead us on to search
out juster ways in another; and in our realisation of the unity of art
we may discover the secret of the unity of life, if, indeed, the first
is possible before the last.
In the meantime the formation of guilds of workers in art and
handicraft must tend to foster the sense of fellowship, sympathy, and
co-operation, from the loss of which art and artists have suffered
so much. We shall discover by our trials and exercises in various
handicrafts what real pleasure and interest can be associated with
work; how impossible, indeed, is a healthy existence without
interesting work of some kind; and even what is called the drudgery of
it--those preparatory stages in work, with the ultimate end in view,
become interesting, and fall into their place as a proper part and
necessary means to the attainment of that end, and even, perhaps, not
unwelcome incidents in the day’s work.
I feel sure we can afford to despise no manner of manual labour,
skilled or unskilled. The simplest operation requires some kind of
intelligence and adaptability. The stone-breaker on the road will
tell you that you have to find out “where to hit them,”--not that any
man ought to be condemned to stone-breaking all his life, however.
The human frame is the most adaptable thing in nature (as well as in
design); its beauty is owing to its adaptability, and depends for its
freedom of movement and command of limb upon constant exercise. I see
no beauty or desirability in the contemplation of a society divided
into two parts--brains and hands--even were it possible, for neither
can work well without the other. We must overthrow that false, false
notion that work is degrading, and that it must be the object and
mark of all superior persons to shift the burden of all manual and
useful labour on to the shoulders of a class; that it is at all a
creditable thing to be “of no occupation,” or that impossible being “an
independent gentleman.”
Here is where we have gone wrong, and there will have to be some
considerable changes in the ideals as well as in the realities of
existing society before things can be got straight again.
[Illustration]
THE PROSPECTS OF ART UNDER SOCIALISM
For the sake of clearness I will commit myself to a definition:
firstly of art, which, so far as its meaning can be packed up into
the portmanteau of a sentence, might be described as _a form of vital
force applied to the expression of Beauty_. This will at any rate
sufficiently indicate the point of view from which I regard it. As to
socialism I know no better or more portable definition than that of
Mr. Belfort Bax, namely, that socialism is _a new view of life upon an
economic basis_.
Under the present system of commercial competition every opportunity
which seems to afford a chance of gaining a livelihood or a hope of
gain stimulates people to activity in all manner of ways. But it is an
unwholesome stimulus, especially in its effect upon art and artists;
and, as a result, the market is flooded with every kind of catch-penny
abomination--pictures or so-called ornaments, and objects of art which
could have brought no joy to the maker of them, and can bring no real
or lasting pleasure to the user, for whom, perhaps, they but fit the
whim of the moment, or are only bought because of the persuasive
eloquence of some adroit salesman (under the aforesaid stimulus of
gain); and for no better reason than that such things are in fashion.
Now, naturally, there is this characteristic about genuine spontaneous
art, that its creation is a pleasurable exercise and excitement. The
artist is always anxious to give out what he has--to offer his best to
the sight of all men; and so far he is naturally socialistic. Indeed,
art itself is essentially a social product, intimately associated with
common life, and depending for its vitality upon a co-operation of all
workers, upon living traditions and quick and universal sympathies.
These are its sunlight and air.
Where the love of art is sincere, given the capacity, all a man would
ask would be security of livelihood, with a fair standard of comfort
and refinement, and materials to work with. For the rest it would be
simply a pleasurable thing to exercise his creative powers for the
benefit of the community and the praise he might win.
It would seem, too, that humanity under any system cannot do without
art in some form or another, and is always ready to welcome and reward
the artist who has the skill to interpret nature, or beautify and
refine the life of every day. But no artist, in so far as he is worthy
of the name, works consciously for the sake of reward, other than the
sympathy and praise of his contemporaries. Modern commercialism does
its best to turn him into a man of business, but that was not his
natural destiny. Originally one with the constructive workman--the
builder, the smith, the carver, the weaver, the potter--he put the
touch of art on his work, the refining play of line and pattern, and he
saw that it was good, with the pleasure and delight of a craftsman. So
use and beauty were one in the old simple days. But we have changed
all that. We have put use in one pigeon-hole and beauty in another, and
it is only by accident that they get mixed.
Now the severance of the artist and the workman--the craftsman--and
the dismemberment, and absorption of the latter to a large extent by
machinery, have had results incalculably injurious to art, whatever
service they may have been in other ways. As to machinery, it is but a
question of adaptation of means to ends, since machinery simply gives
extra hands and feet to humanity; useful enough to do heavy and useful
drudgery, and works of necessity in a hurry--feed, clothe, and warm,
pump and lift weights, for instance--to be the servant and labour-saver
of man, in short, but never his master and profit-grinder, as it has
become, and certainly never intended to take pleasurable art-work out
of his hands, or speciously simulate the workmanship of those hands,
and take, with its variety, its interest and beauty away.
It is a curious thing that while every day we are extending our
railways and pushing our commerce, making travel easier, and opening
up unknown countries to what we are pleased to call the advantages
of civilisation,--while we are facilitating methods of getting about
on the one hand or the other, we are obliterating those interesting
varieties and local distinctions which make travel chiefly interesting;
so that while we increase our facilities of travel we remove its
inducements as fast as we can--at least from the art point of view.
One of those things the disappearance whereof we deplore is the art
of the people--the peasant costume with its embroidery and jewellery,
always so full of character and colour, relics of long antiquity
and tradition, the odds and ends of which are carefully scraped
together and served up to the tourist long after they have ceased to
be realities in the life of the people. This native art, found in all
unexploited countries, is highly interesting, as showing how naturally
a people collectively express their sense of beauty in colour and form,
how naturally, with leisure and fairly easy conditions of life, the art
instinct asserts itself.
It is on the unquenchable spontaneity of this instinct that I should
rely to give new birth to new forms of art, even were all types and
conditions of the art of the past destroyed.
After a course of examination at South Kensington of vast multitudes of
designs in any and every style under the sun, I could almost bear such
a catastrophe with equanimity, since no aspiring designer could then
crib Persian or Chinese, mediæval or Greek patterns, spoil them in the
translation, and serve them up as original designs.
All the learning and archæology in the world will not fill us with an
instinct for art, since art (to recur to our definition), being a form
of vital force, must spring from life itself. It depends on realities,
and draws its best inspiration from everyday existence. It is bound to
reflect the character of that life, and in so doing gives the history
of the people and the spirit of the age of which it is the outcome.
We have only to consider how much of our knowledge of past ages and
races we owe to the relics of ancient art which have been preserved to
us; and this brings us to the consideration of another aspect of the
importance of art to a community, and one not likely to be overlooked
under socialistic conditions--I mean its educational value.
At present I think this is very much neglected. While we crowd our
galleries and exhibitions with masses and masses of pictures every
year, our public halls and the walls of our schools are left blank for
the most part. This seems to suggest that we are thinking more of our
shop-windows than of the windows of our minds--especially those of the
rising generation. But why should not the capacity of children for
receiving ideas through the eye be taken advantage of? Why should not
the walls of our schools be pictured with the drama of history? Why
should they not be made eloquent with the wonders of the earth by true
and emphatic drawings of the life and character of different countries
and peoples?
It has been said that the worst drawing conveys a more definite idea of
a thing than the best description. Bringing it down, therefore, even to
the plainest utilitarian level, the importance of drawing is obvious
enough. A socialistic society would, however, not be likely to gauge
its value by so narrow a standard, and when the object of education
was recognised as the development of the faculties of the individual,
with a view to the service of the community and reasonable enjoyment
of life, as distinct from the specialising them for a competitive
commercial existence, art would surely be recognised as a most
important factor in that result and accorded due place.
The greatest works of art have always been public works, whether
we think of the temples and statues of classical antiquity, or the
cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages. In the past art has been
devoted to the service of religion, whether pagan or Christian. The
wealth lavished on churches and pictures and tombs by princes and
popes was spent for the most part, at least, on works that all might
see and admire; and the fact of this larger appeal of art, and that it
has the expression of the deeper feelings and higher aspirations of
humanity, increased its dignity, interest, and beauty.
Nowadays artists, as a rule, work for rich men, and devote their
talents to beautifying strictly private interiors with every kind of
luxury and splendour: working for individual whims and pleasures,
however, cannot be as inspiring as working for the community--for the
time, for the people--and the feeling that the artist may express its
true mind and heart.
Unity of religious belief and sentiment now no longer exists, and art
no longer attempts to act as its interpreter. Painters are content to
be the familiar illustrators of ordinary life and passing fashion,
or the recorders of the superficial facts and phases of nature, and
care not for symbolic imagery or ideals. Architecture and applied art,
generally speaking, are devoted to the comfort or glorification of
well-to-do individuals, or to serve the ends and purposes of trade.
In an epoch when personal comfort and private property seem to be the
main objects of existence, at the price of the absence of both at the
other end of the scale, this is not surprising, since art is bound to
reflect the character of its age.
Now socialism presents a new ideal to humanity. It is a religion and a
moral code as well as an economic system. Its true realisation would
mean again that unity of public sentiment, but in a far higher degree,
and the sympathy of a common humanity freed from the domination of
class and the grinding conditions of commercial competition. Such an
atmosphere could not but be favourable to art in the highest degree.
Not only would the common property in the beauty of nature not be
allowed to be disfigured for the purposes of private gain, but with
leisure and security of living it would not be a question, as it is
now so often, with the artist or craftsman, hindered, in pursuing his
higher aims, and in seeking perfection in his craft, by the cramping
consideration that it will not pay.
And what is true of art work is, after all, true of all work. A
profit-grinding system must of necessity be against the production of
the best in all ways.
Greater simplicity and dignity of life, too, which would naturally
result from a juster distribution of wealth, would have its effect on
both art and architecture, and would find expression in simpler and
sincerer forms of construction and ornament.
If we imagine a truly socialised community--a state of equal condition
(not necessarily of mental capacity or other quality) wherein every
able-bodied member served the community according to their capacity,
it might necessitate a portion of time (determined by the numbers of
the community and their necessities) being spent in some form of manual
labour. This in itself would be an advantage and physical benefit to
each individual; nor so long as enough leisure was secured would mental
capacity be likely to suffer, in its true sense, or the art instinct
or capacity either--on the contrary. There is nothing, after all, like
close intimacy with nature and fact to strengthen the character all
round, and clear the mental vision of morbid states; and as for art,
like the wrestler, it always gains new vigour every time it touches
the ground--the ground of nature and common life.
If your artist would depict the life about him--the drama of men and
women--he will be all the stronger if he has mixed with the actors. If
he would give man in all his labours and actions, it is good that he
should understand those actions and labours--that he should be able
himself to ride, swim, row, or drive the plough, and wield the scythe
or spade. He would be a stronger man and a better artist: for it is as
much what we _know_ and _feel_ as what we _see_ that comes into our
work in art. Would he be an artist in any of the handicrafts, let him
first be a smith or a carpenter, let him understand the material he
would work with, and its capacities; for it is from the workshop that
all good traditions in applied design must come.
I have spoken of probabilities and possibilities, and of necessity both
enter largely into the consideration of my subject as of any thought of
the future construction and condition of society.
Now, while I have the best hopes for art, I do not think it probable
that under socialism any one will get labour-values to the extent of
£70,000 for a picture, but it would nevertheless be quite possible to
get a Raphael.
The type of artist--supposing artists existed as a class or order in
a socialist community--most likely to be fostered would, I think, be
probably such as that represented by the master craftsmen of the Middle
Ages, such as Albert Dürer or Holbein, for instance--men capable of
design in all kinds of materials, who could design a building, make the
pattern of a jewel or a gown, draw a title-page or paint a portrait.
What may be called, in short, the all-round artist would be likely
to be more in demand than the specialist more or less fostered under
present conditions.
The essence of art is harmony and unity. We have seen how art
depends upon life, and is affected by and reflects its character and
conditions. Before we can hope to get harmonious art and thought,
therefore, we must realise harmony and unity in life.
For myself I am confident, in view of these considerations, that what
is good for humanity is good for art. Take care of the pence of healthy
life,--the current coin of individual freedom, of political and social
equality, of the fraternity of human service and common interests,--and
the gold pieces of art, thought, and creative beauty will take care of
themselves.
[Illustration]
ON THE TEACHING OF ART
The teaching of Art! Well, to begin with, you cannot teach it. You can
teach certain methods of drawing and painting, carving, modelling,
construction, and what not--you can teach the words, but you cannot
give the power of expression in the language.
Of course a man’s ideas on the subject of teaching necessarily depend
upon his general views of the purport and scope of art. Is it (1) a
mere imitative impulse, a record of the superficial facts of nature in
a particular medium? or is it (2) the most subtle and expressive of
languages, taking all manner of rich and varied forms in all sorts of
materials under the paramount impulse of the search for beauty?
Naturally, our answer to the question, What should be taught, and
how to teach it, depends upon our answer to this question. But the
greater includes the less, and though one may be biassed by the final
definition, as above, it does not follow that the first-named may not
have their due place in a course of study.
The question, then, really is, What is the most helpful course of study
towards the attainment of that desirable facility and cultivation of
the feeling and judgment in the use of those elements and materials
towards their ultimate expression of beauty?
And here we have to stop again on our road and ask, What is this
quality of beauty, and whence does it come? Without exactly attempting
a final or philosophical account of it, we may call it an outcome and
efflorescence of human life and energy under happy conditions. It is
found in varying degree, and the development of the sensibility to
impressions of beauty follows much the same course and stages as those
of the senses and the intellect themselves--of the development of man,
in short, as a social and reflective animal. As one cannot see colour
without light, neither can we expect sensibility to beauty to grow up
naturally amid sordid and dull surroundings.
To begin with, then, before we can have this impulse and sensibility
towards beauty, it is necessary to create an atmosphere of beauty,--a
condition of life where it comes naturally with the colours of dawn
and sunset; where it has not to struggle as for very life, as it were,
for every breath it draws, or ask itself the why and wherefore of its
existence.
Nor is beauty an independent and unrelated quality, but is the result,
as we find it in its various manifestations in art, of long ages of
growth and co-operative tradition and sympathy.
Seeking beautiful art, organic and related in all its branches, we turn
naturally to places and periods of history which are the culminating
points in such a growth--to Athens in the Phidian age, to England
or France in the mediæval age, to Florence or Venice in the early
Renaissance, for instance, rather than to modern London or Paris. Or
even limiting ourselves to our own day, we have got to expect far more
from the man who has worked from his youth up in an atmosphere of
art, even if it is only that of the modern painting studio, than from
one of our artisans, trained to some one special function, perhaps,
in a process of manufacture, and whose daily vision is bounded by
chimney-pots and back-yards.
A pinch of the salt of art and culture, at measured intervals,
will never counteract the adverse influence of the daily, hourly
surroundings on the eye and the mind. It is useless if one hour of life
says “yes,” if all the others say “no” continually.
Our first requirement, then, is a sympathetic, or at least suggestive
atmosphere--which means practically a reasonable human life, with fair
play for the ideas and senses through the drama of the eye. It ought
to be within the reach of all of us, whereas as a matter of fact it is
hardly possible for any under the present economic system.
Granting our first condition would go a long way towards solving the
next problem--what to teach, for we should then find that art was not
separable from life.
Children are never at a loss what to learn or what to teach themselves
when they see any manner of interesting work going on. They gather
at the door of the village blacksmith, or at the easel of the
wayside painter. Demonstration is the one thing needed, primarily.
Demonstration, demonstration, always demonstration. This is perhaps at
the bottom of the recent strong determination to French methods on the
part of our younger painters. You can learn this part of the painting
business because you can see it done. You could learn any craft if
you saw it done. But it does not follow that there is no painting but
impressionism--with M. Monet as its prophet.
Not that I would undervalue any sincere and genuine impulse; only
the cultivation of this kind of painting exclusively--that is, the
presentment of aspect--specialises a man and differentiates the painter
more and more from other artists; and the concentration of public
interest on this form of art draws away talent from the other most
important branches.
It might be said almost that the modern cabinet or competitive gallery
picture, unrelated to anything but itself (and not always that), has
destroyed painting as an art of design.
I would therefore rather begin with the constructive side of art. Let
a student begin by some knowledge of architectural construction and
form. Let him thoroughly understand--both historic and artistic--the
connection between art and architecture. Let him become thoroughly
imbued with a sense of the essential unity of art, and not, as is now
so often the case, be taught to practise some particular technical
trick, or be led to suppose that the whole object of his studies is
to draw or paint any or every object from the pictorial point of view
exclusively. Let the two sides of art be clearly and emphatically put
before him--that of Aspect and Adaptation. Let him see that it is one
thing to be able to make an accurate presentment of a figure, or any
object in its proper light and shade and relief, in relation to its
background and surroundings, and quite another to give expression to
outline, or to make them into organic pieces of decoration to fit a
given space. Then, again, he should perceive how the various media
and materials of workmanship naturally determine the character and
treatment of his design, while leaving large individual range.
A course of study from this point of view would tend to bring home to
the student the wholesome dictum of Goethe, “Art is art, precisely
because it is not nature,” even if his very first study failed to
convince him of its truth.
The formative capacity and constructive sense may exist in a high
degree, without any corresponding power of drawing in the pictorial
sense; and considerable proficiency in simpler forms of various
handicrafts, such as modelling, wood-carving, and _repoussée_ work, is
possible of attainment by quite young people, whereas the perception of
certain subtleties in pictorial methods of representation, such as the
perspectives, planes, and values, delicacy of modelling, and the highly
selective sense which deals with them, is a matter of matured mental
capacity, as well as technical experience and practical skill. So that
there are natural reasons for a primary training in some forms of
handicraft, which, while affording the same scope for artistic feeling,
present simpler problems in design and workmanship, and give a tangible
foundation from which to start.
In thus giving, in a course of study in art, the first place to
architecture and the allied decorative arts, we are only following
the historic order of their progress and development. When the arts
of the Middle Ages culminated in the work of the great painters of
the Renaissance, their work showed how much more than makers of easel
pictures they were--architects, decorators, jewellers, calligraphers,
embroiderers; so that a picture, apart from its central interest and
purpose, was often an illustrated history of contemporary design in
such things.
Now, my conclusion is that whereas a purely pictorial training or such
a training as is now given with that view, while it often fails to be
of much service in enabling a student to paint a picture, quite unfits
him for other fields of art quite as important, and leaves him before
the simplest problem of design helpless and ignorant; while a training
in applied design, or merely in drawing and colouring with that view,
and all the forethought and ingenuity it calls forth, would be a
good practical education in itself, would be a good preparation for
pictorial studies, should the student ultimately devote himself to them.
I should therefore endeavour to teach relatively--to teach everything
in relation not only to itself, but to surroundings--designating in
relation to its materials and objects--the drawing of form in relation
to other forms.
The ordinary ways of teaching drawing, say from the human figure--the
Alpha and Omega of all study in art--do not show themselves
sufficiently alive to the help that may be gained by comparative
anatomy. Study the figure not only in itself, but in relation
to the forms of other animals, and draw the analogous parts and
structures--bones, joints, muscles--side by side, not only from the
comparative anatomist’s point of view, but the artist’s. Study them in
life and in action also.
We have recently been told that artists have been fools since the world
began in relation to depicting the action of animals; but it was by
a gentleman who did not appear to have distinguished between moments
of arrested action and the action which is the sum of those moments.
Instantaneous photographs of animals in action tell you whereabouts
their legs are at a given moment, but it is only when they are put in
a consecutive series and turned on a wheel before the eye that they
represent action. This is illusion, not art. Now the artist has to
represent or to suggest action without actual movement of any kind, and
he has generally succeeded, not by arresting the action of the moment,
but by giving the sum of consecutive moments, much as the wheel does,
but without the illusory trick. His business is to represent, not to
imitate.
Art, after all, is not science. Until we all go about with photographic
lenses with dry plates in them instead of eyes, we shall, I fear, still
be interested in what artists have to say to us about nature and their
own minds, whether instantaneous impressions or not.
This is only one of the many questions which rise up at every step,
and I know of no system of teaching which adequately deals with them.
No doubt our systems of teaching, or attempting to teach, art want
overhauling like other systems; and when we are overhauling the system
of life itself, it is not wonderful.
I do not, of course, believe in any cast-iron system of education from
any point of view. It must be varied according to the individual. It
must be made personal and interesting, or it is of little good; and no
system, however good, will manufacture artists in anything, any more
than the most brilliant talents will do away with the necessity of
passionate devotion to work, careful thought, close observation, and
constant practice, which produces that rapid and intimate sympathy of
eye and hand, and makes them the responsive and fluent interpreters of
that selective and imaginative impulse which results in art.
[Illustration]
DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL
The fundamental importance of design, and its claims to consideration,
will hardly be disputed, particularly at a time when the advancement of
art in its application or relation to industry is so much sought for.
There is not a single thing we use but involves this primal necessity
of design in some degree, which has not demanded some exercise of human
thought, some measure of ingenuity, some kind of plan, to fit it for
its purpose, or to commend itself to our sense of beauty. And here it
may be said, although art in this sense is generally termed “applied
art,” strictly speaking, all forms of art, properly understood, come
under this head, and that there is no such thing as _un_applied
art--or, if there is, we may say then it is not art at all.
The gist of the whole matter lies in this application. Design in
all its forms is governed by the relative spirit. In making a
design, even of the simplest kind, important considerations and
questions immediately arise--questions of _scale_, of _treatment_,
of _material_, of _position_, of _use_, which finally decide its
character; and in the solution of such questions lie at once the
business and the success of the designer and craftsman.
Now the first of these considerations is SCALE. This is determined
by the size of the object or surface we deal with, its use, and its
relation to its surroundings: as the relation of the axe-head to
its handle, the unit of a pattern, the height and proportions of a
chair--what, in short, we may call architectural considerations.
Fitness of scale is of course primarily determined in relation to the
scale and proportions of man himself, who is naturally the standard
and measure by which all work for the use and pleasure of humanity is
finally checked. You would not, for instance, carve colossal heads on
chair backs; or, on the other hand, try to make a chimney-pot look like
a miniature cathedral spire! These, of course, are extreme instances.
There is a certain natural logic and common sense of proportion
which keeps us tolerably straight in these matters, while it allows
a sufficiently indefinite margin for individual taste and variety of
character.
There exist obvious reasons, as well as natural feeling, in favour of
decoration intended to be near the eye, or upon objects to be handled
or used, being small in scale and finely worked; and though, in that
perpetual readjustment and inventive adaptation in the control of the
designer there is always scope for variety, behind all he is conscious
of the pressure of relative considerations--of natural law, in fact.
Then we come to the great question of TREATMENT, in which lies folded,
as it were, like the flower in the bud, the very virtue and essence of
art.
To begin with, the designer, in the application of his art to material
and use, has to put away from him the allurements of imitative
naturalism, except in so far as they can be made to contribute and be
subordinated to the effect and purpose of his work as a whole. He soon
perceives the natural cleavage between nature and art--between the
accidental picturesqueness of confused detail, broken surface-lights,
and shadows, and definite, selected, related, and expressive forms and
lines. He may be likened to a child with a handful of wooden letters
out of which he has to construct words and sentences. Nature and the
history of art is the vast encyclopædia of fact and form and phase out
of which the poet and the artist have to choose the materials for their
work.
A painter pure and simple is, of course, much less restricted, much
less weighted with relative considerations, than the designer, and
is at liberty, governed only by the necessary internal relation of
his work, to avail himself of effects beyond the scope of the maker
of tapestries or mosaics, the painter of glass, or the carver. Yet,
curiously enough, in our industrial century the influence of the
easel-picture painter has been paramount. He has ridden (I will not
say in triumph) over our household furniture, he has trampled on
our hearthrugs and carpets, he has left his impress on our napery
and antimacassars; his influence, in fact, can be traced from our
faience to our fish-slice; and this perhaps because, owing chiefly
to industrial and economic conditions, the term art and artist came
to be limited to pictorial work and its producer,--since the modern
easel-picture painter was until lately the only form of craftsman
working independently, and with anything like complete control of his
own work.
We are recovering, however, I think. We are realising the difference
between pictorial and decorative art, between _imitative_ and
_constructive_ design. It will do us no harm, as a corrective to our
pictorial excesses, to draw the line very sharply between the two,--to
put, metaphorically, the decorative sheep on the one hand, and the
pictorial goats on the other. For we must remember there are two sides
to art, with distinct aims. They may be characterised as “_aspect_” and
“_adaptation_”: the one seeking rather to imitate planes and surfaces,
accidental lighting, phases and effects; the other constructive,
depending on its beauty, on qualities of line and form and tint,
unaffected by accidental conditions, seeking typical rather than
individual forms, and ornamental rather than realistic results.
The first necessity in designing is Definition. Hence LINE is
all-important. Let the designer, therefore, in the adaptation of his
art, lean upon the staff of _line_,--line determinative, line emphatic,
line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting. It
cannot lead him wrong; it will never deceive him. He will always know
where he is weak, and where he is indecisive, where he has hesitated,
and where he has been confident. It will be the solid framing of his
structure--the bones and marrow of his composition.
In line alone, having regard to all its different degrees of tenuity,
the designer possesses a means of expression of considerable force and
sympathetic range. It lends itself to the most sensitive and delicate
definition in a fine pen, pencil, or silver-point drawing, and it is
capable of the utmost strength and architectural solidity, as in the
emphatic outlines necessary to express the pattern and bring out the
qualities of the material in large mosaic decorations and stained
glass; where, too, other considerations come in, as the tesseræ (Fig.
2) of the one, and the lead lines (Fig. 1) and colour scheme in the
other.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
And here we come to another essential element in designing: we cannot
touch what may be called the exigencies of particular materials, or
begin to define our cartoon or pattern in line without perceiving the
necessity of proceeding upon some kind of system in the treatment of
form and detail.
In purely pictorial work, of course, this is not felt to the same
degree, though the necessity _is_ present even there, since we cannot
work with Nature’s own materials. We cannot dip our brush in liquid
sunshine on the one hand, or have the blackness of night upon our
palette on the other. We have not her greens or her reds, and gold and
blue, in our boxes; we cannot command the full colours of the sunset
or the dawn; so that with the most uncompromising realist the result
is after all a compromise, a question of translation, adjustment to
a scale, and more or less figurative expression. The same as regards
minuteness of detail. Do we paint for the eye at such and such a
distance, the photographic lens, or the microscope? A little nearer or
a little farther, and all the conditions are changed. The fact is, as I
have said, _all_ art is conditioned; it is only a question of degree,
and it is the successful demonstration and determination of these
degrees which mark the difference between one kind of art and another,
between one artist and another.
There is of course no absolute determination of rules for all cases.
There is nothing absolute in art. _Art is not science._ The way is
perpetually open for new experiments, for new expositions, and new
adaptations and applications, which makes the pursuit of art in all its
forms so peculiarly fascinating, and ever fresh and inspiring.
But to return to the question of System. Now supposing we wanted to
make a pattern of a rose for a wall-paper. We might pick one from our
garden (if we had one, as indeed every designer ought to have) and
sketch it exactly as we found it--a portrait, as near as we could make
it, of an individual rose with all its accidental characteristics.
Well, we might make an interesting study, certainly, but when we came
to apply it we should perceive that it made, however good as a study,
a very poor pattern, and its virtue and interest as a drawing would be
at once destroyed directly our pictorial rose was repeated--which we
should be driven to do. We should practically get the repetition of a
more or less shapeless blot, a _formal_ and _regular repetition_ of
an _informal and naturalistic drawing_--a contradiction in terms, in
fact. Yet it is a thing that has been attempted over and over again. A
sentimental public perhaps likes roses, in season and out of season,
and considers perhaps that a rose in any material would, if not smell,
at least look as sweet. It may be so, but if it be not sweet and clear
in line and disposition, and organic as a pattern, its sweetness
is wasted on the desert air of false art and taste and failure in
decoration.
Therefore it is that the designer, having regard to the conditions
of ornamental effect and relation to use and material, proceeds in a
very different way. He finds that a certain formalism is an essential
condition of his work, seeing that his aim is to adorn a space
pleasantly, to construct a pattern that will bear repetition, or rather
demand it, as another essential condition of its existence. He finds
therefore that typical and abstract forms are of more value for the
purpose than accidental ones; that suggestion is better in decoration
than naturalistic or pictorial imitation. He would naturally, in taking
a rose as his theme, recur to the primitive and fundamental type--to
the simple flower as we see it on the parent stem of the wild rose of
our hedges (Fig. 3). With such a type as this he could safely make a
diaper or simple sprigged arrangement which would be satisfactory as
far as it went (Fig. 4).
Nor, let it be observed, is the designer, in following such principles,
departing from nature necessarily. Nay, in his way he may be expressing
as much natural truth even as the pictorial artist: as we have seen
that truth of aspect is one thing, and truth of construction and
detail another; while in following the necessities of adaptation to use
and material the designer is only carrying out in the region of art the
great principle of Nature herself, which rules through all forms of
life,--that necessity of adaptation to conditions, which, as we have
learned, has led to the endless variety of development in both plant
and animal form that we see on every side.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.]
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
The necessity of plan in designing next makes itself felt, and is of
course very important, and capable of almost any degree of extension
and complexity, although designs for extension on walls or hangings
generally fall into recognisable classes with different variations.
Starting with our diaper, square or diagonal, which may be considered
the simplest, we may build our pattern upon a great variety of
foundations (Fig. 5). But we shall find it necessary to build upon
_some_ plan, as a plan is as essential to a pattern as the skeleton
to the human figure, though you may eventually conceal it as much as
the skeleton is concealed by the human form, or more, by superadded
enrichment, detail, and intricacy. How far to go in this way the
nature of the material and its uses will generally decide.
As to colour treatment, again, the best decorative effect does not
demand the use of heavy shading or relief. The colours should be pure
and fair, and the true local colours of all things should be sought,
unaffected by accidental lights and shadows, as if we saw everything in
an evenly diffused or flat light.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
In modelling, or any treatment where the means of expression and
ornamental effect is by relief, of course the question is different,
though here again the gist of the matter lies in treatment, and there
is all the difference in the world between one treatment and another.
Now of course the strictest observance of such principles in designing
as I have indicated will not necessarily ensure an interesting
pattern, though they would suffice to produce a workable one. Other
considerations come in as we advance. Plan involves the consideration
of the proportion and relation of our masses, and beauty of silhouette.
Draw a figure with a big head, and it at once looks ridiculous (this
seems so taken for granted by the many, that comic draughtsmen have
subsisted upon it for years), while with a head of the natural
proportion it may have grace and dignity. The same principle holds good
in ornamental designing, and a beautiful result very largely depends
upon a due recognition of the importance of proportions. It does not
follow that these proportions are those of nature, as in a naturalistic
picture. In a decorative design, to serve our ornamental purpose, one
may depart widely from them, as in the relative size of trees and
figures and flowers and animals, etc., where there is no approach to
naturalistic representation, as in designs for textiles and other
things.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
The important thing to preserve is the relation of masses, the organic
and necessary connection arising out of the constructive necessities.
In pattern work _three proportions_ are generally felt desirable. You
cannot jump at a bound from large to small, therefore an intermediate
scale is useful, as in the illustration (Fig. 6). The masses of the
tree and the pot are combined by the forms of the birds, and further,
by the thin stems and leaves behind.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
Silhouette, again, is a very important consideration in designing. It
is a very good practice to block out one’s design in silhouette in the
first instance, as this will afford the best test of the relations
and proportions of its masses possible, and of its variety. One does
not seek to arrange a figure exactly symmetrically (as at A, Fig. 7),
except under very formal conditions. That at B is felt to be a more
agreeable treatment. The more variety in contour, the more beauty we
get.
The best practice in effective and ornamental use of silhouette is
to be found in designing patterns for stencilling, where everything
depends upon it. You block out a pattern in flat colour--light on dark,
or dark on light--in such a way that it is capable of being cut out of
a sheet of card or zinc without breaking, so that by painting over the
perforated part, which is the pattern, it is transferred to any ground
you desire. Fig. 8 shows two sketches of stencil patterns; the halves
to repeat.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
Another important consideration in designing is the adequate filling of
the space for which your design is intended.
Now here again pictorial proclivities have been very misleading. They
have led us, in illustrating books for instance, to that inorganic way
of loosely vignetting a subject--splashing a landscape upon or across
a page without regard to its mechanical conditions, and ignoring its
necessary relation to the type. Instances of this kind of treatment
are to be found notably in our illustrated magazines of Continental
or American origin, which have been setting the fashion in so-called
page decoration of late years. But this inorganic, unrelated kind of
designing has not confined itself to books. You may find it anywhere
and everywhere almost,--dabbed upon fans, dragged across cupboard
doors, and generally upset over the unconsidered trifles of everyday
life.
I am afraid, too, that something is traceable to Japanese influence.
But it does not at all follow that, because a Japanese artist, with
his wonderful knowledge of nature and precision of touch, can throw
a flowering branch, or bird, or a fish across a sheet of paper, or
a panel, with such consummate skill as to delude us into the belief
that he has decorated the space, therefore any one, with very inferior
powers of draughtsmanship, can go and do likewise with equal _éclat_.
It is somewhat like attempting tightrope dancing before one can walk
properly on the ground.
The truth is that all the solid and determinative motives in design are
traceable to the influence of architectural style. In the absence of
a living style in architecture, the arts of design, which are really
its offspring, languish, and lose at once their fitness, monumental
dignity, and importance.
For style is strictly the sum of considerations like the
foregoing--with individual feeling superadded. It is the quality
which collects and concentrates, as it were, the virtue and essence
of the past, and fuses it with the present. It consists in that
highly selective impulse or instinct which gives an artist’s work
its own peculiar and distinctive character, without isolating him or
disconnecting him from the work that has gone before, or the work of
his own day, so that a great design is in fact a link, or a luminous
point or jewel, in a long golden chain, and necessarily dependent upon
its continuity.
Style, of course, is a very different thing from what are known as
“styles.” It is the difference between the quick and the dead. We can
get decorations “in any style” nowadays to order. We can be Ancient
Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman, or Pompeian, or Byzantine, or Celtic,
or Italian, or German, Gothic or Renaissance, whichever we please,
Louis Quatorze or Louis Seize--worse luck,--but none of them seems
to please for long, perhaps because their designers and producers
are only “pleasing to live,” as is the proverbial fate of those who
“live to please.” Ours is the age for masquerading, because we have
no particular _reality_ of our own--no style, in short. But we cannot
be always masquerading, however amusing it may be once in a while,
and whatever superior advantages we possess for getting at the best
authorities. The motley and fantastic crowd palls at last, and we are
glad to get back to everyday, if plain, habiliments, wherein we can at
least feel at home.
It is this feeling “at home,” too--which is so important in
design--which marks the difference between artist and archæologist.
Ease and mastery of expression in any material is the aim of the
designer, while keeping strictly within the limitations of that
material.
In making a working drawing the designer should be mentally, if not
actually, the craftsman also: the conditions and necessities of the
material ever present to his mind; its very limitations suggesting new
motives, and stimulating invention, as it never fails to do when the
designer and the craftsman are one.
So, too, where there has been no conscious aim at decorative beauty, we
find beauty of result, at least as regards the all-important quality of
line, which goes to prove that organic lines, or lines of construction,
at least where the construction is simple and evident to the eye, are
usually beautiful lines, as in the sickle, the scythe, plough, ship,
bridge, and wagon, for instance, and that this relation to material and
use is a fundamental and necessary quality of all design.
Mistakes are usually made in the attempts to beautify by superadded
ornament, unrelated to the object, use, and material, instead of
treating it as a natural outgrowth, so that the absence of ornament is
preferable to ornament not beautiful, or to ornament, however beautiful
in itself, which does not decorate. And indeed, unless ornament is
organic in this sense, we had much better be without it, and trust to
the simple beauty of constructional lines alone.
Now this decline of organic design, it can hardly be doubted, is
traceable in a great measure to the economic conditions and the
development of machine industry in the interests of a commercial
system of centralisation and a world-market which have characterised
our century, and which have succeeded the system of division of
labour developed in the last, as that succeeded, as Mr. Morris has
often pointed out, the older system of local production for use; and
this _because_ its effect has been to _separate the designer and the
craftsman_, and to turn both more or less into machines. The effect of
this is to throw the designer out of sympathy with the use and material
of his design, to cut him off from the suggestive and inventive
stimulus of the material, while, under the pressure of competition,
forcing him to the constant production of so-called novelties, while it
turns the craftsman or mechanic into an indifferent tool. The results
are precisely what might have been expected, and what we have seen. In
fact, the only wonder is they are not worse; but humanity has always
been better than its systems.
As to the craftsman, the workman, he, perhaps, relegated to the
performance of one monotonous function--a unit in a long sum of
industrial production,--becomes but a part of a machine, his
personality merged in the general description of “hands” (a
designation, by the way, which does not encourage the development of
brains), and, in short, all personal interest and identity with his
work as a whole taken away, and leaving him with no prospect of winning
public and personal appreciation--even if a “forty-thousandth part,” as
Carlyle would have said, of a product could reasonably hope to win such
things--since all credit for the finished result is practically claimed
by the employer.
These things being so, I say it is not wonderful our “industrial art,”
as we call it, _is_ what it is.
What then should we aim at? If this is the _real_ condition of affairs,
what is the _ideal_? For unless we consider we are living under the
best possible arrangements--social, political, and industrial--we must
entertain an ideal of some sort, even if it be a stranger, like an
angel unawares.
Well, then, if so far you are disposed to agree with me (firstly) as
to the necessary conditions and considerations for the production of
well-designed decorations and accessories of daily life, from the
roof which shelters us to the cup we drink out of; (secondly) as to
the relation of the designer and producer of these necessities--for
I claim that beautiful things are a necessity of any reasonable and
refined human life; and (thirdly) as to the condition of the producer
of such things himself,--then we shall have reached the conclusion
that for the production of beautiful and thoughtful work you must
have conditions of life wherein beauty and thought have opportunity
to germinate and grow naturally, and as a matter of course, out of
the conditions of daily life and work, as naturally as the apple-tree
blooms in the spring. But this means no less than that the conditions
of health and refinement, of a vigorous and full if simple life, be
open to _all_, both men and women, without distinction; and before such
conditions can be realised it evidently implies that something like
fundamental changes must take place in the constitution of society.
Then it comes to this, that all we have to make up our minds about
are two things:--(1) Whether we consider art as an utterly unrelated,
individual, and accidental matter; or (2) whether we consider it
and its beautiful results as the highest outcome of life, and as
necessarily dependent upon the character, ideals, and conditions of
that life. If the latter, then it may be worth while to take such steps
as may be within our power and mental vision to co-operate towards
the realisation of such a life and such an ideal, which, strange and
roundabout a method as it appears, will yet prove the shortest way to
our goal, namely, a true revival of design in its relation to material
and use.
[Illustration]
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE APPLIED ARTS, AND THEIR RELATION TO COMMON LIFE
Man in a natural and primitive condition does not begin to think of
art until his physical wants are satisfied, since art is, in its true
sense, after all only a spontaneous manifestation of mental life in
form, colour, or line,--the outcome of surplus human energy. It is
only under what is called modern civilisation that this natural order
is artificially reversed, and men are forced, to attempt at least,
to produce forms of art in order to satisfy their physical wants.
Our troubles and failures in art may mostly be traced, directly
or indirectly, to this condition of things--all the horrors and
abominations perpetrated in the name of art, from the productions of
the poor man whom necessity compels to chalk on the pavement, through
the countless vanities and inanities of the fashionable store, to the
refined cruelty of what is known as the “pot-boiler” in the “fine art”
exhibition.
The primitive hunter in his cave, when his earliest efforts in applied
art, in the form of flint weapons, had secured to him a sufficiency
of fish and game and furred overcoats, began to record his impressions
of the chase, and to scratch the forms of his favourite animals on
their bones. If these representations of reindeer, mammoth, and
bison be indeed the earliest examples of art, it would seem that the
first impulse in art is imitative rather than what I should term
expressive or decorative--the spirit of the picturesque sketcher
recording his impressions of natural forms rather than the ordered,
systematic, applied art of the inventive designer, who uses natural
forms or colours much as a musician his notes to produce a rhythmical
arrangement--a tune, a pattern. If this inference is correct, we may
perhaps take comfort in the thought that out of our present pictorial
zeal and cultivation of the picturesque sketcher we may be led to the
study of the more ideal and intellectual side of art.
However the conscious invention of line, and its variation in pattern
came about, whether by the burnt stick of the idler (according to Mr.
Whistler), or on the soft clay of the primitive potter, it is tolerably
obvious that certain primitive patterns are derived from certain
necessities of construction, such as the chequer from the square plait
of a rush matting, where not taken straight from Nature’s pattern book
as in fish or serpent scale, and fan from leaf and shell. One of the
most natural impulses in man is to make a mark or a cut upon something
directly he has time on his hands. We can watch the development of this
impulse in children. One line or mark suggests another, and strokes
following one another in a certain order are found to have a pleasant
and interesting effect. Strings of them round clay vessels were found
to make them more exciting to the eye than the plain surface. The
handles of dishes and hunting knives and horns, bows, hatchets, nay,
even man’s own skin, all offered opportunities for the early ornamental
impulse in carving and painting patterns. The implements in constant
use, on which, indeed, rude as they were, life itself depended; the
things most familiar, most valuable, constantly before the eyes or in
the hands,--these were the first things to receive the touch of art,
which was then “applied,” indeed, and applied only.
If we follow the manifestations of the artistic sense through the great
historic periods we shall always find life and art, beauty and use,
hand in hand,--the utmost artistic skill of invention and craftsmanship
lavished upon cups and bowls, upon lamps and pitchers, upon dress and
jewellery, upon arms and armour. We shall find the highest imagination,
the most graceful fancy, and even wit, humour, and satire in the
service of architecture, recording and reflecting the sentiment of
the people: built into cathedral aisles and vaults, or glowing from
the windows, frescoed upon the walls, or gleaming in the splendour of
mosaic, or carved in endless fertility of resource on the stalls and
misereres.
Under economic conditions of the production of all things for the
service or delight of man for _use_ instead of, as now, for _profit_,
the craftsman was an artist, and all objects under his hand naturally
developed a characteristic beauty. Ornament was organic, completely
adapted to its material, and expressive of its object; but with all our
industrial organisation, subdivision of labour, and machine production,
we have destroyed the art of the people, the art of common things and
common life, and are even now awakening to the fact.
Under a commercial system of production and exchange all art has been
rigidly divided into classes, like the society it reflects. Since
we have to sell it across the counter, as it were, we must take the
weights and scales to it--we must apply to an article of commerce
the tests and standards of commerce. Thus we have divided beauty
and use, and made them up in separate parcels; or, perhaps, having
reduced both to powder, we try a conscious blend of the two to suit
average tastes. We have the arts all ticketed and pigeon-holed on the
shelves behind us. We have “industrial,” “decorative,” or “applied”
art, as we now call it, and “fine” art--fine art and “the arts not
fine,” as my friend Mr. Lewis Day has it. Thus by degrees the vast
general public, who must get their ideas of art, like other things,
ready-made, have been taught to understand by the word “art” chiefly
that form of portable and often speculative property--cabinet pictures
in oil. Nor is this altogether wonderful, considering how, under our
system of wholesale machine production, the appliances of common life
have lost their individuality, interest, and meaning, together with
their beauty. We are not sensible of any particular individual effort
of thought or invention in an object which is only one of thousands
turned out exactly like it. Plates, cups and bowls, chairs and tables;
the moulding and panelling of our wood-work, and the metal-work of
our sacred hearth itself, are taken as matters of course, like other
productions of commerce. They were not specially made for you and me;
they must be made to suit Smith and Jones equally well, or equally ill;
and we shall probably be charmed to see them in each other’s houses.
We know that furniture and fittings are only made to sell at a profit
while the fashion lasts. Trade demands its “novelties” every season,
and it would never pay to let a man sit contentedly in the chair
that was solidly built for his grandfather. Much better let him fall
between two stools (as it were), in his uncertainty of choice in regard
to which of the confidently named upholsterers’ styles he will seat
himself in.
Then as to the application of art to the walls of his dwelling itself
is the average man in a much better case? You cannot expect him to put
up costly and permanent decorations for the benefit of his landlord,
either outside or inside. He is a wandering hermit-crab, only too glad
to find an empty shell that will reasonably fit him, at a not too
exorbitant rent; and as for decoration--well, at least there are paint
and paperhangings.
Of course they that are rich can hire a great architect and dwell in
a perfect grammar of ornament. They can import the linings of Italian
temples and tombs, and the spoils of Eastern mosques, to breakfast,
dine, or play billiards in. The only fear is that Tottenham Court Road
will soon bethink itself of cheap imitations of such antique wreckage;
that Westbourne Park and Camden Town may be even with Mayfair and
South Kensington! Cannot the moderate citizen already command his
household gods in any style at the shortest notice? Great is commercial
enterprise! Nothing is too high or too low for it. Where your fancy is,
there will the man of profits be also.
The distinct awakening of interest and practice in the applied
arts, which is a mark of our time, I should be the last to belittle
or attempt to ignore; but at the same time, with all it has done
and is doing for our education, with all the remarkable skill and
reproductive antiquarian energy it has called forth, I feel that we
are landed in a strange predicament. For while on the one hand new
sensibility to beauty in common things, and new desire for them, are
awakened, on the other they are in danger of being choked by that
very facility of industrial production which floods the market with
counterfeit, set in motion by all the machinery of that commercial
enterprise which is the boast of the age, but which all the time, by
the very necessity of its progress, is fast obliterating the remains of
ancient art and beauty from the face of the earth. So that it will be
written of us that we were a people who gathered with one hand while we
scattered with the other.
Economic conditions prevent our artisans from being artists. They
have become practically, and speaking generally, slaves of machines.
The designer is another being from the craftsman. It is only by a
study of the conditions of the material in which a design is to be
carried out that we can get even workable designs; and even at the
best the designer who has no practical acquaintance with any of
the handicrafts necessarily loses that stimulus to invention--that
suggestive adaptability which the actual manipulation of the material
and first-hand acquaintance with its own peculiar limitations and
advantages always give.
One who develops a faculty for design has rarely a chance of being
other than a designer. He has no time to make experiments, to strike
out new paths. He must stick to the line by which he has become
known in order to get a living. Nothing narrows a man so much as
working continually in the same groove. The utmost that can be said
for specialising a single capacity is that you get an extraordinary
mechanical or technical facility at the cost of all other qualities.
It may not be possible to be supreme in more than one art, but the
arts illustrate each other, and a knowledge of other arts and their
capacities and limitations is sure to react upon an artist’s practice
in the one which most absorbs him.
It is true we hear of artists here and there who, though in the eye of
the world inseparably associated with some particular form of, say,
pictorial ability, nevertheless cultivate some secret amour in the form
of a handicraft.
Professor Herkomer invited us the other day to see his wonderful
application of the arts--his demonstration of their practical unity
on his own premises at Bushey; and a most striking, interesting,
and instructive exhibition it was. Perhaps few who know him only
by his pictures would suspect him of being an accomplished artist
and craftsman in many other arts, notably in wrought iron. From
the personal point of view he offers a solution of the problem of
how to associate art with everyday life. He is devoting his energy
and artistic skill and invention to making domestic art, including
architecture, monumental. The works at Bushey, if Professor Herkomer
will allow me to say so, exemplify not only the power of individual
direction and organisation, but also the power of co-operation and
unity of aim in the arts founded upon, solidified, and supported
by family traditions of skill, invention, and workmanship in the
crafts, and how effectively all may be united in a common purpose.
Another noteworthy fact was the remarkable way in which scientific and
mechanical invention can be made to serve artistic purposes, as in
Professor Herkomer’s application of the dental point to the carving
and chasing of metal; and in the drilling machines we saw preparing
work for the wood-carver. In so far as such a use of machinery
does not necessarily condemn any man to be the slave of it, to be
a machine-minder all his life, it would seem to be the natural and
reasonable use of machinery in the preparation of work--to save the
drudgery and waste of energy in its preparatory stages, and so reserve
the delicate hand-work until the stage at which it becomes really
effective.
There was another thing that struck me about Professor Herkomer’s work,
and that was the feeling and poetic sentiment he had enshrined in
some of his beautiful carved cabinets. We all know the sentiment and
charm of association which naturally gather in time about some piece
of domestic furniture. Now art applied to furniture has the same, or
rather a higher, power than time, for it can, by beauty of design and
workmanship, invest a seat or a cabinet or a fireplace with a poetry
of its own, far more subtle, penetrating, and suggestive than perhaps
any form of art, because indissolubly associated with daily life and
its drama. But when we hand over the production of these things to the
trader, how can we expect anything of the sort? How can any sentiment
or poetic thought collect about an arm-chair, for instance, that will
not bear the weight of time, and has never received the touch of art?
I daresay furniture may be found to serve our turn, good enough for our
shifting life of hurry, and strong enough to last out its own fashion.
I only say that if we care for genuine art in these things, we cannot
get them under the ordinary conditions of trade.
Yet there is not a thing we use, not the commonest appliance in our
houses, that does not show some effort at least to have been spent upon
it to make itself presentable to humanity. Unfortunately, nowadays,
when native instinct and individual feeling have been so much swamped
by forced mechanical industrial production, and the search for mere
mechanical smoothness and superficial polish, instead of the finish
which only comes of thought and loving care; these efforts to be
ornamental are too consciously afterthoughts, while the eye is on
the market and its blind chances and uninspiring averages. The added
ornament to a thing of utility, instead of being a manifestation of the
craftsman’s feeling who made it, and his sense of pleasure in his work,
is too often some miserable shred torn from the reminiscences of some
dead language of decoration; all its grace and spirit gone, and even if
moderately adapted in type and form to its purpose, is not calculated
to bring a light to any eye, or joy to any heart, since it is but the
product of joyless toil and competitive production--the mechanical
smirk on the face of the thing of commerce that it is, intended to
beguile the simple-minded and unwary into the momentary belief that it
is a desirable and beautiful thing, when, in another sense than the
poet’s, it
----stands ready to smite once, and smites no more.
This unhappy cheapening and vulgarising of ornament, so far from
fostering a taste for art, only degrades and distorts the natural
feeling for beauty, which with reasonable scope and pleasant
surroundings would develop itself as it has always done. Let not
commerce pride itself in cant phrase on its claim that it places “art
within the reach of all,” for how could that have become necessary
until art had first been put out of reach? What could compensate for
whole tracts of country desolated, and for the crowding of the people
in our cities under conditions which put ideas of human dignity and
beauty practically out of the question for the million?
Among secondary reasons for the decay of inventive and spontaneous
design in the applied arts, I believe the hard-and-fast line which has
been drawn between the artist and the craftsman is answerable, and the
separation of the designer and the workman.
The designer is perhaps kept chained to some enterprising firm.
Novelties are demanded of him--something “entirely new and original”
every season, but not too much so. It is not surprising that the best
talents should get jaded under such influences; that fancy should
become forced or fantastic, and motive weak and tame, or perhaps lost
altogether in a search after superficial naturalism, in defiance of
fitness to material or use. Such a nemesis is too apt to overtake the
specialised designer, who designs on paper only, without the stimulus
of close acquaintance with, and practice in, some handicraft. The mere
change of occupation is refreshing and invigorating, and stimulates the
invention.
In so far as I have been successful as a designer, it has been,
I believe, largely owing to my making myself acquainted with the
conditions of the material in which a design was to be carried out; by
striving to realise in thought, at least, the particular limitations
and conditions under which it was intended to be worked; and I have
always found that those very limitations, those very conditions,
are sources of strength and suggestion to the invention. For I am
old-fashioned enough to believe that every material has its own proper
language--regarded as a medium for expression in design--and it is the
business of the designer to find this out.
The naturalistic or imitative impulse in art which is characteristic
of our time, with the enormous and surprising development of the
photograph, has had very visible effects upon art of all kinds. It is
quite distinct from the expressive or inventive impulse, and though
they may be a ground of reconciliation, the former is of far less
consequence to art in its applied or related form than the latter.
What may be called the dominant art always seems to impress its
own peculiar characteristics upon every other. Whereas in former
periods--ancient, classical, mediæval, Renaissance--architecture may
be said to have ruled over, or to have embraced all the arts, which
in their earlier history were really essential parts of it; and even
when, by degrees, the family parted company and went out individually
to seek their fortunes, more or less independently of each other,
evidences of their architectural descent still clung to them--as in
the architectural construction and character of portable furniture and
fittings, and of their ornamental details.
Sculpture and painting to this day are obliged to retain the rudiment
which betrays their architectural parentage; in the one case by the
plinth which supports the bust or the statue, and in the other by the
moulding of the frame, with which the least architectural or decorative
picture cannot dispense.
But pictorial art has now usurped the first place in the popular mind.
It has influenced architecture; directly, in so far as it has led to
the erection of a new type of building--the picture gallery-a place
built with the sole aim of displaying pictures not painted originally
with any idea of concert, or to be seen side by side. Surely a
remarkably inartistic way of regarding art! Indirectly, the effect of
pictorial art and pictorial ways of looking at things is seen in what
has been called “the architecture of the sketch-book”--the somewhat
restless and fantastic designs in a mixed style, chiefly in domestic
work, full of little bits, nooks, and corners, which are characteristic
of the last decade. For all that, a pleasant change and relief from
the dull monotony of the quasi-classic style which preceded it.
Sculpture, too, has not escaped the pictorial influence, as is shown,
for instance, in the naturalistic school of modern Italy, which closely
imitates in marble textures, surfaces, and momentary grimaces as
closely as possible, but with more skill than taste. Abundant examples
of such misapplied imitative skill are to be found in other arts, such
as wood-carving, pottery painting, metal work, and textiles; although
it is only fair to say that, of late years, in these arts there has
been a distinct return to truer principles of design, with the revival
of a feeling for the capacity of the material which embodies it, and
a recognition, over and above mere reproduction of old work, of the
distinction between art and nature, which is so often lost sight of.
We are, however, never sure amid the vagaries of fashion that we shall
not suffer a relapse,--that we are not threatened with an irruption of
tea-roses, in high relief, on our curtains and chintzes, and landscapes
(not carboniferous) on our coal-boxes.
On the whole, however, the applied arts have shown a laudable
independence and defiance of the pictorial mood. The dog no longer
appears (after Landseer) on the hearthrug, but is often, in metal,
relegated to his proper place on the hearth itself. So far so
good. Albeit the desire for some of the happy results in art which
belong to ages of greater simplicity of life has produced in some
cases strange results, and some combinations of ancient kitchen and
modern drawing-room one has seen are not altogether happy. We get an
impression of the affectation of primitive simplicity and homeliness
with modern luxury and artificiality, from which, at any rate, we can
draw a moral on the connection between art and life.
The movement, initiated by Mr. William Morris and the gifted artists
associated with him, to which we owe so much, began in a genuine return
to honesty of purpose, and to sincere design and sound workmanship,
founded upon a study of good models in the past; but it was the outward
and visible sign of an intellectual movement which has its eyes upon
the future, and, like all revivifying and stimulating impulses in art,
it is the offspring of hope and enthusiasm.
Let us look to it that this English Renaissance of ours is not
extinguished,--that it does not fall utterly into the iron grasp of
commercialism. We may figure art as the fair Andromeda chained to the
rock of modern economic conditions, in danger from the all-devouring,
desolating monster of gain, until the deliverer shall come.
This is in sober truth the situation. Under our system of centralised
industrial production, local art and industry are everywhere being
dispossessed, and local characteristics and varieties are being
fast obliterated. The machinery of trade forces prevailing patterns
everywhere, and the mass of the world cannot pick and choose, or
turn the stream of invention for their particular delight. It must
accept the latest novelty of commerce, and content itself for all
shortcomings with her assurance that it is “just out” and will
certainly be “the fashion.” Thus it comes about that our cups and
bowls, our tables and carpets, rather speak of the enterprise of a
firm than historic traditions of a people, or the skill of a race of
artists and craftsmen. The zeal to make things “pay” hath eaten us up,
in the artistic sense. It is all very well to talk of informing with
art the common accessories of life, to cultivate the handicrafts with
enthusiasm, to distinguish ourselves by beauty of design and technical
excellence among the nations of the earth, and after all, for a man to
find that in proportion to the extra care, delicacy, and invention--in
proportion as the craftsman works in the spirit of the artist, and is
true to himself, without regard to trouble or time--the more difficult
will he find it to make his living.
While such enormous differences in reward and chance of appreciation
exist, as they do at present, in art, it is not encouraging to the
artist in wood, stone, or metal to find that, however sincerely he
may work, he must work in comparative obscurity, and with a very
modest scale of remuneration. As long as the chance of both individual
distinction and substantial reward is so conspicuously in favour of
the pictorial artist, in spite of the best schools of design, and all
the machinery for diverting the stream of artistic feeling, skill, and
invention into their proper channels, I am afraid the tendency will be
for every student who fancies he develops artistic ability to press
into the already overcrowded ranks of picture-painters.
When we hear, for instance, of five shillings being offered as a price
for carved panels in a cabinet, it is not stimulating to those who
look to winning a competency in the practice of so highly skilled and
artistic a craft as wood-carving.
We may lay such facts at the door of competition or apathetic
indifference to applied art, as it pleases us; but I venture to think
that if the crafts and arts were recognised in public exhibitions of
art, which are now practically devoted to one form of painting, it
would do something. It would at least offer a chance for individual
distinction in some other form of art. The work of the designer and
craftsman could be seen, and by degrees people would begin to realise
that beauty of design and workmanship counted for something besides in
painting, and that the main business of an artist was not to emulate
the photograph, or to take the wind (or the effect) out of the canvas
of his neighbour in the pictorial struggle for existence (through
unnatural selection), known as a “Fine Art Exhibition.”
The arts are really inseparably associated and interdependent. None is
greater or less than another, and all are in some sense applied. We
are all consciously or unconsciously affected by our surroundings. We
may become sensitive to beautiful shapes and colours, or lines, and
afflicted by those ugly and coarse, or grow callous and insensible to
them, which is perhaps the commonest result. It is therefore hardly
possible to attach too much importance to art in its applied forms,
seeing its intimate association with and bearing on life itself through
all sources of refined pleasure.
In those periods of the past which we regard as great epochs in art,
the arts and crafts are in harmony and close relationship with each
other. The culminating glory and mastery of Renaissance painting
could hardly have existed without being founded upon the firm basis
of the handicrafts, set as it were like a gem in a not less beautiful
framework of invention in all branches of design; and we know that more
than one great Florentine painter came out of a goldsmith’s workshop.
Such pictures as that of “The Adoration of the Magi,” by Mabuse (shown
at Burlington House a winter or two ago), or Crivelli’s “Annunciation”
in our National Gallery, seem to sum up the contemporary beauty of
the handicrafts, and give them back to us again. A beautiful book
was lately brought out, of Italian ornament, taken from the patterns
and on dresses and hangings in pictures in the National Gallery; and
taking the fifteenth-century painters generally we might get a perfect
cyclopædia of applied design from the beautiful details which enrich
their pictures. It was not archæology then, but the love of beauty and
richness, the delight in the splendour of life, which led them to paint
such things, and also, probably, because they were craftsmen themselves
as well as painters.
I believe we are making a mistake in training students in art, from
first to last, solely with the pictorial view. The imitative powers
are cultivated to the utmost, while the inventive are neglected. The
superficial effects of nature are studied, while the expressiveness
and value of pure line, and its bearing on applied art, are very
much overlooked. Thus the designing, constructive power seems to be
considered secondary to the depicting power, or rather one phase of it;
the consequence is we get large numbers of clever painters and graphic
sketchers, but very few designers. Everything is looked at from the
pictorial point of view, and the term artist has been narrowed to mean
the pictorial or imitative painter.
I should like to see a reversal of the principle. I should like to
see a course of training in the handicrafts come first, as the most
important to the cultivation of a sense of beauty in common life, not
to speak of its importance to an industrial country, in an industrial
age.
[Illustration]
ART AND COMMERCIALISM
We have been lately told by a brilliant impressionist, no less in words
than in paint, that there never have been such things as artistic
periods; that art is solely individual, and lives and dies with the
artist. And among other interesting facts we learned that, after all,
one thing is as beautiful as another (to a painter) if you only get it
in the right light; that, in short, those striking features of modern
landscape--wharves and factory chimneys--look just as well as antique
towers and palaces when merged in the twilight--that is, when you can
no longer see what they really are, and the imagination is free to
invest them with the romance of a past age.
Now, whatever germs of truth such statements contain, they only throw
us back upon the question, “What is art?” If it is the art only of
the impressionist, the record in paint of the children of the mist,
of factory-smoke even, and London fog; if nature must only be seen
with the eyes half shut, and in the abomination of desolation--the
squalid outskirts and Stygian rivers of modern cities--then, indeed,
former ages were but poorly furnished in the matter of art. What
availeth the clear-cut noble sculpture of ancient Greece, and the work
of her vase painters? What availeth the endless decorative invention
of the Asiatic peoples, and of mediæval and early Renaissance times,
lavished upon all the accessories of life, not to speak of its
culminating glories in painting and sculpture? Could all this beauty
of design and workmanship, in its constant growth and development
through the centuries, have hung upon a thread--upon the lives of one
or two persons of genius, springing, like mushrooms, from universal
indifference, ignorance, and decay?
Such an opinion is, however, only a sign of the times. When every man
fights for his own hand, and every artist has to make his own public,
such an individualistic conception of art is not altogether surprising;
and, were it intended to apply to the art of the present day only,
would be very near the truth. But a little inquiry and consideration
would show that art has deeper roots. The delight in beauty, be it
human or of wild nature, be it of light, colour, form, or sound, is a
common possession and a necessity of life, as in the higher sense it
must always be, so long as the human has any claim to be the higher
animal. And it should be remembered that certain animals and birds
have been proved to be sensitive to certain colours and decorative
effects, which sensibility is indeed wrapped up with the very fact of
the germination and continuity of life itself; and this only convinces
us how far down and deeply rooted is this sense in nature which has
been so highly developed and specialised in man. Differing, it may be,
in degree, but not in kind; cultivated, or uncultivated; modified by
centuries of habit and association; influenced by modes of thought and
conditions of life--wheresoever humanity dwells, in northern snow or
southern sunshine, it flowers and seeds, and springs anew.
Art, in all its forms, is normally but the language of this
universal feeling which, shared more or less by all, consciously or
unconsciously, is fully comprehended, passionately expressed, and
communicated in tangible and eloquent shape by comparatively few. But I
should say that every one whose heart is stirred at the voice of music,
at the music of poetry; every one who feels the magic of beauty and is
touched by its pathos, who is moved by the strangeness of the shifting
drama of life; every one who vibrates, as it were, to the harmonies of
nature, is a potential or latent artist.
As far as we can judge from its history, it would seem that this power
of artistic expression, controlled as it is by countless influences of
soil, climate, and character; constantly intercrossing and blending;
springing from simple beginnings, and passing through various stages of
growth, development, and decline, with the life of nations--this power,
I say, seems to have reached its noblest and most beautiful results
under collective conditions--of the arts, at all events--when all
art was decorative, and all were allied with architecture, depending
technically upon a certain continuity of tradition, and intellectually
on a certain consentaneousness or universality of sentiment, ere it
reached a high perfection among a people, being always at its highest
in public monuments. It is obvious, since these conditions depend
upon a vast number of other conditions, since art is the flowering of
the tree of life in man’s moral nature, the form in which it is cast
must, finally, be the outcome of the social, political, and economic
conditions of society.
We have only to remember the temples and palaces of antiquity, whether
the colossal fragments of the crumbled civilisations of the East, the
sculptured triumphs of Greece and Rome, or the cathedrals and public
halls of the Middle Ages. Art in such buildings touches sublimity.
The effect, for instance, of such a building as that of St. Mark’s at
Venice is like embodied music--rich, mysterious, splendid, harmonious;
storied with the legends and emblems of a faith, and a conception of
the universe then corresponding with the knowledge and aspirations of
mankind, full of solemnity, pathos, and dignity. But one of our own
English cathedrals, where the ruthless hand of the modern restorer is
not too obvious--say our historic Abbey of Westminster--will impress
us in the same kind; and this impressiveness is not due merely to the
effect of antiquity, though it no doubt contributes. We feel it to be
the collective work of artists and craftsmen, as well as of ages, and
we feel it embodies the aspirations, the religious sentiment, even the
humour and satire, of its time, and, speaking through the architect,
the mason, the carver, the glass painter, is heard the voice of a whole
people.
But if one should go into a modern church in search of the ideas of the
time, I am afraid he would only find the ideas of the new curate.
The former dignity and impressiveness of art is usually accounted for
by the fact that it was in the past chiefly devoted to the service of
religion; but that was only because religious ideas had the strongest
hold upon the human mind--because with religion were wrapped up all
other ideas, and the sources of knowledge were in the hands of the
priesthood. Art is bound by its very nature to give expression to
ascendant ideas. But both art and religion have since been broken to
fragments, and these are often so small and so incongruously pieced
together, that they refuse to reflect any ideas at all; or so feebly
and falsely, that men, in distrust of both art and religion, have
turned to nature and science, which in the strongest minds fill the
place of both.
But this, after all, is only like saying that the loss of the eyesight
is compensated for by the increased stimulation of the other senses. It
is a serious loss all the same.
Let us try to find, however, what ideas, even in the fragmentary and
artificial condition to which it is now reduced, art gives us in our
day. The one great distinction and difference which marks it from the
art of ancient times consists in the absence of what is called popular
art--the art of the people, hand in hand with everyday handicraft,
inseparable from life and use--that spontaneous native art of the
potter, the weaver, the carver, the mason, which our economical,
commercial, industrial, competitive, capitalistic system has crushed
out of existence by division of labour, the factory system, and
production for profit; yes, our three-headed Cerberus has devoured the
art, together with the wellbeing and the independence of the people,
and stands unappeased at the smoke-gloomed industrial gate, over which
is written, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” But this basis of
popular art was the soil in which all art germinated, and from which
the goodly tree grew and branched out, to blossom in the more delicate
kinds of painting and sculpture which, since they have ministered
to the caprices of wealth, fashion, and luxury alone, branded in a
separate class as “fine arts,” have turned their backs upon their
humble relations, the handicrafts, with the result that their house is
left unto them desolate. Cut off, as it were, like flowers from their
natural stem, they presently languish and wither away, or linger on,
fantastic ghosts, shadows, and travesties of their former beauty.
But we are calmly told that “we must recognise, however, that modern
art has no tendency in this latter direction (that of beauty). Beauty
no longer suffices for us.”[6] This is clear and emphatic enough.
It comes from the French, too, who have assumed the position of
dictators of taste, at least in painting, to the world at large. It is
from a book on æsthetics, by Eugene Véron; I quote from the English
translation. The book is an attempt to find a scientific basis and
reasonable position for art under the conditions of modern society, and
while the author fails to recognise the causes of its deterioration in
the quality of beauty, he boldly acknowledges the difference between
past and present aims, and insists on freedom of development. Yet the
writer is possessed by a distinction which he himself sets up between
decorative, and what he calls expressive art, applying this latter
title to the pictorial art of the present day. As if all good art was
not expressive!
In my view, however, all forms of plastic or graphic art, properly so
called, must be dominated by the sense of beauty, as the condition
of their normal existence and the condition of their successful
appeal to the eye. The expression of beauty naturally controls all
other expressions. Otherwise, it seems to me, art is overstepping
the border line which divides it from other operations of the mind;
from scientific analysis, for instance, and from photography, where
the object is totally different, and everything is sacrificed to the
attainment of fact.
Yet this is just what is happening in modern painting--everything is
being sacrificed to the attainment of fact in some form or other, and
painting has almost ceased to be an art of design.
The modern French view is frankly expressed in a passage quoted by
Véron from Fromentin, who says: “The time has come for less thought,
and for less lofty aims. We must now look at things more closely, and
observe better. We must paint as well, though in a different fashion.
We must work for the general public, for the citizen, the man of
business, and the _parvenu_--everything is now for them.” And he goes
on to point out in effect that the painter must do the best he can
under these rather depressing circumstances, copy his model, and take
comfort in the belief that henceforward the greatest genius will be
the man of the least invention. Here, at all events, it is clearly
recognised that painting now exists for a class, which, possessing
the wealth, commands all things that may be commanded by wealth, and
as these things are many, a money standard is set up, which is in
danger of becoming the only standard and test, whether of virtue and
character, or artistic ability.
The results of such a state of things are visible on every side. We
have seen that in all ages it has been natural to art to express the
ascendant characteristics and ideas of its time, as well as to reflect
the material facts of life.
Art is the sensitive plate in the dark camera of history, which records
both the mental and physical features of humanity without prejudice,
when all other sources of light are shut out.
So in an age when commercialism is supreme, and bourgeois ideas are
triumphant, it is only natural that they should make themselves felt in
art.
Accordingly, we see the influence of profit-making principles in the
way in which painters become specialised for certain sorts of work,
and in the rise and progress of the middleman or picture-dealer. As
illustrating this, it is said of Verboeckhoven, the cattle painter,
that the dealers were in the habit of sending orders couched in terms
like the following: “Wanted, by Monday, three pictures of the usual
description--cow, with two sheep.” There is a story told of him, too,
which is very suggestive of the effect of commercial ideas on art. One
day an American entered the studio; he saw a picture which pleased him,
and bought it at the artist’s price--1200 francs. He could not take it
away with him immediately, and when he came for it some time after, the
painter had another, just like it, nearly finished. He was putting in
an extra lambkin, when the American returned. A happy thought struck
the latter; he would take the second picture too; it would form a
pendant to the other. But Verboeckhoven wanted 1300 francs for it. His
customer hesitated. “Well, well!” said he, “the same price, then;” and
dipping a rag in turpentine he wiped out the lamb.
That grand development of the shop, the modern picture exhibition,
is, again, another triumph of commercialism in art, which, faithfully
following the accepted theory of the trader that supply will produce
demand, succeeds in something like real over-production. Consider the
huge annual pictorial displays and their chief product--the child of
competition in art--the “pot-boiler.” Truly the temple of art is the
market, and its high priest the picture-dealer! “Take your choice” (or,
rather, the recommendation of the adroit salesman), “go to so-and-so
for your fish and your salt-water pieces--fresh every year, but all
alike. If your fancy is flesh or fowl, you must go farther. This other
gentleman will give you game pieces--he has a special license. Then
you can finish with flower and fruit,” and so forth. Yes, division
of labour has triumphed even in painting, and to excel a man must
specialise his talents; that is to say, adapt them to the continual
production of the same sort of thing. Thus, and thus only, can he hope
to make either reputation or a living.
Very good; but what becomes of art, unless the whole of art is
comprehended in portraiture? For, in spite of our classification,
our labels for landscape, portrait, genre, historical; under this
specialising, ticketing, commercial system, the tendency is for
painting to become really limited to forms of portraiture. I do not
mean merely the production of portraits, though that is a noticeable
feature, but I apply the term to characterise a certain literal
and prosaic habit of regarding all nature, and literal methods of
representation, whether of persons, scenes, or animal life; while
the conditions of the market, even apart from the tastes of the
ascendant class we have been considering, cut against even honest
and faithful portraiture, but encourage that conscious making-up,
dressing, and forcing of effect to catch the public eye, amid the
further falsification of pictorial values caused by the entire want of
classification and harmonious arrangement in the picture exhibition.
So that in the result, where every inducement is held out in this
fierce pictorial competition to painters to consciously work for forced
effect, and put out their possible neighbour, pretentiousness and
meretriciousness too often win the day.
When the decline in modern art is mentioned, it is usual for the
average man, imbued with the commercial ideas of the age, and with
the all-sufficient standard of money-value in his mind, to point
triumphantly to the enormous sums given for certain pictures in these
days, and to the wealth of certain successful artists. But those
enormous sums only show that pictures are a marketable commodity in
which the chances of large profits are involved, and the fluctuating
values in the market make them objects of speculative investments for
capitalists. Reputations fall and rise, often according to what appears
to be the mere caprice of fashion, though even fashion is controlled
by commercialism. And as to the wealth of successful painters, is
that always in proportion to the excellence of their work, or the
labour bestowed upon it, and is it always the accompaniment of the
highest skill and the loftiest aims? Overwhelmed with commissions, the
fashionable painter has the alternative before him of over-work or
inevitable deterioration. In many cases he becomes the victim of both.
Then, too, for one favourite of fame and fortune, how many unfortunate,
struggling, obscure? Thus at both ends of the scale the influence of
commercialism is only for evil.
Consider, too, the waste of energy and talent in this unequal struggle
for artistic life and recognition--this pictorial lottery, where so
many blanks are drawn. Think of the capacities now swallowed up in the
tasteless contention of exhibitions, which, properly organised and
directed, might co-operate to adorn our streets and public places,
our lecture halls and railway stations, left desolate now to another
and more hideous form of competition in the clamorous posters of
commercialism, which cover our waste walls and hoardings, and crowd
upon the weary eye in all their shameless self-assertion and sordid
language of the market, shouldering one another in the unspeakable
coarseness of colour-bedizenment and graceless superscription.
In spite of our refinement, our care for art, our æstheticism,
forsooth! and the lavishly-decorated private interiors of wealth, to
this complexion must we come out of doors!
And in the meantime we are so inured and hardened to such
disfigurements that we cease to feel their enormity. Nay, we must grow
to like them, for are not advertising and bill-sticking an inseparable
part of our system? There is no escape. So it is, and so it will be,
so long as we allow this selfish, demoralising, and unscrupulous demon
of commercialism to tyrannise over and exploit us, ever with its
continual cry of “Profit, profit, profit!” Every aspiration will be
shouted down as visionary and unpractical; every real attempt to better
our disorganised condition will be opposed by the dead weight of vested
interests.
It is on record that one of the few living artists, properly called
ideal--George Frederick Watts--offered to decorate the hall of the
Euston Station with frescoes without charge, if the Company would
bear the cost of the materials; and the offer was refused. How can
monumental art, which is but decorative art in its highest form, exist
in such apathetic conditions? To grow the flower you must not only have
the seed, but a favourable soil and climate. It will be written of our
age that we squandered the talents of our more original writers and
artists upon the newspaper and periodical press. We preferred to be
amused with a constant succession of brilliant trivialities and passing
sensations, to beholding our best thoughts embodied in enduring and
noble forms of art; and it did not seem to signify how many lives might
be frittered away--how much energy and talent ground to powder in the
process.
But monumental art demands the sympathy of a people bound together by
common feelings, interested in the drama of history, and proud of their
own struggles and sacrifices for freedom; accustomed to dwell with
ennobling thoughts and aspirations, and accustomed to give them free
and forcible expression; sensible both of the joy and the tragedy of
life, delighting in phantasy and invention, and, above all, in beauty
of form and colour. Yet there is nothing in these things but what
naturally belongs to humanity.
Can such art be found where the best energies are engrossed in the
feverish and unequal race for a more or less precarious existence
on the one hand, and on the other made artificial by excess of
wealth?--where the aspect of life, whether public or private, is
neither simple nor dignified, and where cities become unlovely
and inorganic accumulations of bricks and mortar?--where, with
an appearance of zeal for art, education, and refinement, and
the elevation of the masses, we allow mile after mile of mean or
pretentious dwellings to carry the desolation of our unwieldy human
warrens farther and farther into the green country, as the capitalist
and the jerry-builder join house to house and brickfield to brickfield?
So we are thrown back on economic conditions, which, it is impossible
to doubt, are finally responsible for these things, as, indeed,
they have always been responsible for the form in which the art
of a period is cast. How hopeless it is, for instance, to expect
varied and beautiful street architecture with the present system of
house tenure and the contract system in building! Here and there a
dwelling, with some claims to beauty and distinction--or, at least,
individuality--perchance arises from the sordid crowd; but these
are the homes of men of wealth and exceptional taste, who build for
their own delight, and have secured their ground. Here and there a
board-school building relieves the monotony, and seems to point to the
possibilities of better things. But the mass of modern London consists
of the erections of the speculative builder--miles of absolutely
uninteresting house fronts, composed chiefly of the repetition of one
pattern, and that of the meanest and most uninventive kind, crowded
together--the ready-made packing-cases for civilised humanity which
enters in and dwells there. Could these things be were it not for the
powers of commercialism, based upon the individual possession of land
and capital, with the one object of money gain in their disposal?
But all things are in the grasp of commercialism. Let a band of
artists and craftsmen associate together, and, working quietly, make
to themselves and all whom it may concern things of beauty and utility
for the use and adornment of simple homes. Straightway there is a
growing desire for these things as a relief from the dreary monotony
of ugliness, or the pretentious luxury of second empire taste.
Thereupon commercialism, perceiving a demand, brings out what it calls
art-furniture, art-colours, and so forth--the addition of the magic
word being supposed to make all the difference--sucks the brains of
designers, steals their designs, and devotes them to objects for which
they were never intended; deluging the market with strange travesties
and tortured misapplications of ill-digested ornament, which overruns
everything like an irrepressible weed, until, coming down to its lower
forms in the cheap furniture shop, one is tempted to think that, in the
matter of taste, our last state is worse than the first.
Thus are all the channels of production fouled. Does not commercialism
hold the keys of the kingdom of both art and industry? Everything has
to pass through the sieve of profit before it reaches the public; and
to keep the huge and wasteful machinery of competitive production
and distribution going, even at an ordinary jog-trot, it appears to
be necessary in every department of trade to make a vain show of
so-called “novelties” every season, whether they are really new and
better than the old or not.
But the counts of the indictment against commercialism are not yet
filled up. The subject is, indeed, too vast and far-reaching to be
adequately treated in the limits of a single paper. Hitherto I have
kept very near home, but if we look abroad over the world we shall see
the same causes at work, the same deterioration going on. Look at the
effects of our rule on the native arts of India, The same process of
extinction of the art of the people, of the village crafts, is taking
place there as has resulted from the action of commercialism at home.
(On this point I cannot refer any one who is desirous to pursue the
subject to a more competent authority than Sir George Birdwood.) But
all over the East, wherever European influence is in the ascendant,
the result is disastrous to the arts, and thus the very sources of
ornamental design, beauty of colour, and invention are being sullied
and despoiled by the sharp practices and villainous dyes of Western
commerce. Even in Japan, where the artistic sense seems instinctive
among the people, so that everything touched by them bears its impress,
since the results of ages of art labour and exquisite craftsmanship
have suddenly been placed within the insatiable grasp of commercialism,
there are signs that these riches are becoming exhausted, and the rarer
and finer kinds grow scarcer every day. We can no longer expect to be
given of the best, and wares are being consciously prepared for the
European market. This is but the “retort courteous” for the compliments
of Manchester in china-clay and size. We actually hear of proposals to
establish schools of design on the British model, the more effectually,
I suppose, to drive out those quick, spontaneous, characteristic native
methods of art-expression, than which nothing, perhaps, has more
refreshed and stimulated the jaded sensibilities of European design.
Thus even by contact with a vicious civilisation the natural quickness
and intelligence of a race may bring about its own destruction.
Thus, in the fierce and unscrupulous struggle for wealth, one after
another, virgin markets are opened, and new peoples exploited by
commercial enterprise, which, like a huge steam plane, is passing over
the world striving to reduce all art, and with it humanity, to one dull
level of commonplace mediocrity, leaving us but of vital and beautiful
varieties the relics and shavings. Greedy eyes are now turning to
Central Africa. The next act in the commercial drama will probably take
place there. Already the rampant explorer, posing as the benefactor
of humanity, has gone far and wide, and the representatives of the
blessings of civilisation, with the Bible in one hand and the revolver
in the other, call on the aborigines to stand and deliver. Wheresoever
commercialism sets foot, the curse of gold seems to follow. As regards
its effect upon art, it is like the old Greek story of Atalanta’s
Race, but with a sinister climax. Milanion, the hunter (representing
commercialism), enters for the race, and, carrying the fatal apples
of gold, casts them one by one in the path of the fair fleet-footed,
whom no competitor could hitherto outstrip. She yields, alas! to the
seductive spoils--to the greed of gold--and henceforward her fate is
sealed.
But commercialism, which seems now so triumphant, carries the seeds of
destruction in its own bosom. The penalty of fast living must sooner or
later be paid, by nations and systems as by individuals. Dissolution
must inevitably set in. Already there are signs of the beginning of the
end. Already men’s thoughts and hopes are turned to that which shall
succeed. “The old order changeth, giving place to new.” Meanwhile the
only hope, alike for art as for humanity, lies in socialism.
[Illustration]
ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
To men engaged in strenuous political strife, amid the stress and
strain of the fierce war of commercial competition; when the forces of
labour are organising themselves and forming in battle array against
the fenced strongholds of capitalism; when the air is full of strikes
and rumours of strikes; and when in the vicissitudes of such war many
of our fellow-citizens can scarcely keep body and soul together, it may
seem to some a vain thing to speak of art.
But it all depends upon what we understand by art. Is it the senseless
frippery and vulgar bedizenment of plethoric wealth and whirligig
fashion, the paint and the patcher to make smooth and fair the outside
of society, and to hide the wrinkles and hollows which would tell the
truth too plainly? Is it the hireling of pride and ostentation living
to please the passing whim or craze--a harlequin in the masquerade,
ever ready with catch-penny tricks, driven to the necessity of
pleasing, if but for the moment, in order to live? Is it the rarity
of the market--the thing measured by fabulous price and sold by its
weight in gold, though perhaps its producer may have had a bitter
struggle to sell it at any price? Are these what we mean by art? or
is it that kind and sympathetic enchantment which takes us out of
ourselves; the genius of beauty and harmony which makes fair everything
it touches, which knows no class or caste, which speaks a universal
language; the friend of freedom and brotherhood, bringing order out of
confusion, sweetness out of strength; not a matter of private property,
but a common possession; whose price and virtue is not to be counted
in, or commanded by, dollars, but lies simply in human and hopeful
conditions of the life of a people?--entering into everything we touch
and use, in the spade and plough, with their carefully-adapted curves
and constructive lines fitting them for their proper work, and through
all the simple, homely, and necessary implements of daily life and
useful work, as well as in the organic beauty of its more conscious and
emphatic decorative adornment, as in the carving or moulding or pattern
work of our living-rooms, from the plate or the glass on the table to
the picture on the wall.
Such simple and primitive things, often unregarded, have their
influence, conscious or unconscious, on the lives of us all, if we have
been fortunate in our surroundings, and where hearth and home exist at
all, with all those tender and human feelings which gather about them
more or less: perhaps even in these days of huge caravansaries with
their here-to-day and gone-to-morrow inhabitants, on one side; and on
the other, a night’s lodging under a cart or a railway arch, or on the
golden pavement of the wealthiest city in the world, with a newspaper
for a blanket. A newspaper! It might be an illustrated one too. Cheap
art! Cheap indeed--almost as cheap as life itself!
Why, any art which is the outcome in any way of the conditions of such
a life as that of which these are some of the outward and visible
signs, is surely dear enough! The advocates of cheap art, of art for
the homes of the people, are apt to forget that the price of cheap
art, like the price of all cheap labour, means the cheapening of human
lives. When we talk of bringing art to the homes of the people, it
would be well first to see that they had got homes, or homes that they
could call their own with any less doubtful security than a week’s
rent, or with any time to live in them after ten, twelve, or sixteen or
eighteen hours of toil.
I agree with a friend, who, at a congress for the furtherance of art,
expressed the opinion that the best decoration he knew of for a hungry
home was a flitch of bacon. If the cupboard, like Mother Hubbard’s,
is bare, you cannot expect its owners will take much interest in the
decoration of its panels.
There is a gaunt and hungry Cerberus which must be satisfied, and
before Psyche, the soul of art, can enter, the body must be fed.
The fundamental necessities come first. Feed the body and you nourish
the brain also. This seems a simple and obvious physical truth--a
truism, in fact; yet it has required a great deal of socialist
agitation to bring it home even to the limited degree in which it is
beginning to be recognised, as in the case of school children.
The best artists’ materials--the raw materials of art--will be found
in simple, natural, and healthy conditions of life; not brutalised
by excessive toil or degraded by the scramble for gain, but where
honest work is security for such a life, with leisure and freedom, and
accessibility to beauty of art and nature for all. So that the claims
of art are the claims of human life also, of which, indeed, it is but
the ultimate expression.
The splendours of ancient art (even of the Asiatic despotisms of Greece
and Rome) were lavished upon public buildings and public monuments, so
that it could be seen and enjoyed by all the citizens in common, even
the slaves. In the Middle Ages the churches, the great depositories of
art in all its forms, were always open for the use and enjoyment of
the people. The streets in those days were full of variety and colour,
so that at any rate life was full of incident and romance, in spite
of tyrannous lords and kings, and though innocent of exhibitions, and
penny dreadfuls, and shilling shockers, with which we are fain to fill
the void amid the dull husks of commonplace.
Coming to modern times, we see that art, like all other human products,
has been affected by the great changes in the economic system--changes
in the conditions of production and distribution, and of ownership of
land, centralisation and the world-market. It has become more and more
a matter of private property and absolute ownership, and we have so
dropped out of the habit of putting it to any great extent into our
public buildings and monuments that we have very few artists who know
how to do it, or who think it worth while to give any time or thought
to the subject.
Instead of sublime and noble public buildings, churches, and halls,
which all the arts unite to make splendid, we have as a rule very dull
or pretentious public offices, dull and respectable churches--essays
in architecture masquerading in various styles not native to us--and
melancholy images of military, naval, or political idols in smoked
bronze, like petrified orators for ever addressing an indifferent
public, holding, as if in mockery, the dumb show of a perpetual
open-air meeting under the presidency of Nelson in police-prohibited
Trafalgar Square!
Under the sway of commercial ideas, instead of taking pride in and
enjoying in common what belongs to everybody, the object seems to be to
get hold of something that no one else has--some rarity, curiosity, at
a fabulous price, or a next-to-nothing bargain, and to make art a thing
purely of money or exchangeable value--considering it in the light of a
good investment, in fact.
It may be said we have our national museums--storehouses stuffed full
of the precious relics and fragments of the times when art was a living
and growing thing. Valleys now of dry bones, except to a few students.
National, certainly, but the nation as a rule has no time to go and
see them in this industrial age, since they are not open on the one
day--Sunday--on which the people could go. There are the churches, it
is true, but the nation does not go to church--not, at least, to the
same one, and the churches are no longer as a rule the depositories of
the best art the age can produce. Some, indeed, will have none of it,
and as to the old ones, we seem to be doing our best to improve them
off the face of the earth altogether.
Again, under the mechanical and wholesale system of production for
profit, a specialising of labour and art has taken place, and this
has led to the practical extinction of the handicraftsman, and his
severance from the artist.
Art may be produced _for_ the people (or to sell to them), but it is
no longer produced _by_ the people. Every one has a mill of his own
to grind at--working against time at a mostly monotonous occupation
to meet an artificial demand, or engaged in stimulating that demand,
or compulsorily idle in its absence, under a commercial industrial
organisation so sensitive as to be affected by every fluctuation of the
market, and wherein every body of workers depends upon every other, yet
wherein each commercial unit works in competition with its hand against
the hand of every other. So that the natural social bond is ever at war
with the artificial and unsocial system--pending that true organisation
of labour in which lies the only solution of collective human life.
Since then life for the mass of mankind, by the working of various
causes--I will not say by consent--has become for the most part a
dull mechanical round of toil, alternating with enforced idleness,--a
kind of methodical and orderly lunacy with a few lucid intervals
which we call holidays or enjoyment, amusement, diversion, art, and
poetry--since humanity must have some kind of diversion, we have
created a special class to divert us. As the mediæval lord kept his
professional jester to ensure a supply of sparkling and ingenious
conversation, so we keep, or allow to starve, our artists, poets,
musicians, and actors. Very few of them can afford to do exactly as
they like--to be free to give us their very best. That would be too
expensive as things go; besides there are the laws of supply and
demand (as Lord Salisbury has reminded us). So that we have no higher
ideal even for an artist or a poet than that of a shopman behind the
counter, supplying wares of various or particular kinds to please his
customers; who again perhaps are not demanding what they individually
prefer, but what they think they ought to prefer, or what they believe
other people--supposed to be authorities--would tell them they ought
to prefer. It can hardly be wondered at then that our art should be so
often artificial.
But should we be justified in assuming that these influences on art are
the result of democracy?
It all depends upon what we understand by democracy, and what sort of
a democracy. Our present habits and characteristics are derived from
all sorts of sources and influences. Our present society is a huge
conglomerate formation with fossils scattered in it,--the relics of
living forms of past ages.
We chiefly differ from former societies by having a different class in
the ascendant with lower ideals, or rather no particular ideal at all,
unless 50 per cent or the subordination of most considerations to cash
and comfort can be counted as such.
Commercialism, in short, rules us with a rod of--brass. While nominally
and politically _free_, men were really never more dependent; and how
can men be free so long as their bread depends on the will or the whim
of another, and when they have no claim to a foot of land or a roof
over their heads, except on condition of a heavy tax upon their own
labour? And even in regard to the security of the continuance of labour
itself, and therefore of life, they are no more secure.
And yet we are told this is democracy, and that one man is as good as
another--yes, we might add, and a great deal better _off_, too.
What! is our social ladder planted then with its feet in the hell of
misery and poverty, its top rising to the false heaven of inane luxury
and hypocrisy, and the type of man held up to admiration and imitation
who works his way up, over others’ shoulders, from Lazarus to become
Dives?
Is this democracy? Is it not rather the old enemy, unscrupulous
ambition, without its old excuse, under a new mask of thrift, business
habits, respectability--secure in the automatic working of the great
rent-collecting and interest-yielding machine, faring sumptuously every
day on the labour of others?
And if it is proposed to do something to keep up our democratic
character, and to endeavour to shorten the hours of labour of our
wage-slaves, to throw them a very trifling crust from the table of
life, even advanced Liberal politicians seem to think the world is
coming to an end. What! the political clock stopping at eight hours
a day! Well, I know that after about only six or seven hours of
even interesting and varied work at the easel or the desk one feels
rather tired; but fancy eight hours in a coal seam! or at a grinder’s
wheel!--eight hours of mechanically repeated momentary actions at the
will of a steam engine! The only objections to an eight hours bill
appear to me to be that it is not _six_ hours, and that there should
be any doubt as to whether, under the present system with “the iron
law of wages,” its benefits even then might not be illusory, _taken by
themselves_. But no one proposes to do that, I presume?
But if the lot of the wage-labourer be not an enviable one, is the
lot of his masters more enviable? We might well envy the physical
endurance, patience, and pluck of a miner, or a docker, or a gas
stoker, but can any man envy such qualities as have been exhibited on
the part of some locking-out masters and profit-grinding companies?
Not even willing to fight on fair terms--men dismissed for sticking to
their union, the workman’s only weapon against capitalism! But even
the life which is the result of the “cash and comfort” ideal is far
from desirable, from the purely material point of view. _Cash_ there
may be, but the _comfort_ is often illusory; stewed in hot-water-pipe
atmosphere as if one was an orchid; stiff and uncomfortable dressing;
and rooms in which the absence of taste is as conspicuous as the
superfluity of furniture. All manner of formal customs and observances,
hardly ever a chance to do something for yourself, and language often
used to conceal if not thoughts at least feelings.
Is it in this direction we must look for our democratic ideal of life?
Is there anything democratic about it, except that the butler is
dressed like his master, a certainly unpicturesque result of democracy.
But it appears to me if democracy can show such social characteristics,
it cannot be a democracy really. It must be a sham democracy--a
commercial democracy, in fact. There evidently must be distinctions
even in democracies, because we even hear of “Tory-democracy,” quite
the most peculiar notion. We are evidently dealing, as is usual in
commercial matters, with questions of quality, 1st, 2d, 3d, and so
on, like grocers’ sugar, or like the classes on a railway--another
democratic institution, I suppose.
Whatever our “class,” however, we are all chained to the triumphal car
of commercialism, which, in spite of the application of brakes and
occasional stoppages, rolls on its iron way round the world. Yet its
speed and progress depend upon the constant watchfulness and careful
labour of millions--upon stretched sinews and overstrained nerves;
and who may count the sacrifices in the lives crushed beneath its
remorseless wheels! For all that the progress of the car is absolutely
dependent upon the continuance of that labour. What if the labourers
were by common and universal consent to throw down their tools some day?
I have often wondered that some of our modern realistic painters do
not give us pictures of the actualities of modern industry. Weird
scenes from the “black country”--those desolate regions that bloom but
in furnace flames; scenes in the mines; at iron works; nail and chain
makers--tragic pictures many of them will be; truly historic; eloquent
witnesses of the foundations of England’s riches, and what they have
cost.
It has always been the custom of a people to perpetuate in art their
deeds of arms, to carve and paint their triumphs and victories, but
we do not seem particularly proud of the real battles, commercial and
industrial, upon which our modern importance has been built, and the
toil and waste of human life by which it is sustained.
Yet the man who makes a fortune in business generally thinks it well
to spend something in pictures. We do not, however, as a rule, see
such subjects in his gallery. Our attention is called to the finished
product of civilisation, and it is thought desirable to draw a veil
over some of the intermediate processes. But few have the hardihood to
invite the skeleton to the feast.
Among the curious developments of latter-day civilisation is the
rise of a school of painters who apparently spend their talents in
discovering, if they can, the beauty of ugliness--the attraction of
repulsion! For instance, I noticed at Paris this summer that there was
quite a run on pictures of operations in hospitals. Even over here we
have men who quite revel in London smoke and fog, and in the charm of
the most ill-favoured spots.
This is no doubt more attributable to competition and picture shows
than to democracy, but it is hugging your chains with a vengeance.
If our artists are so affected by the ugliness of modern life that
they--the supposed apostles of beauty--deliberately prefer an ugly
subject to show their skill in treating it, we may perhaps lose our
sense of beauty altogether in time. While we can, however, let us
insist on the difference.
Art of course has many sides and capacities--as many, perhaps, as
democracy. While from one point of view it may be regarded simply as
the language of observation and record, and as such, I freely admit,
it has an important sphere of usefulness; on the other, by means of
figurative embodiment and poetic suggestion it is capable of appealing
to and stimulating our highest faculties.
The figurative emblematic form of art has always had a strong hold
upon the human mind. We see it under the influence of religious
ritual and associated with civil life paramount in the art of past
ages; and though under the modern search for naturalism symbolism
has practically disappeared from the canvas of the painter, except
in some few instances among the more thoughtful and poetic, it still
maintains an active and popular life in political cartooning. Every
week’s public affairs and public characters are treated in a series of
pictorial parables, and appear in every variety of comparison, analogy,
and disguise, pointing a satire or a political purpose according to
the editorial or proprietorial views of the journal. It is noteworthy
that it is always in the expression of the strongest feelings and
convictions that the parable or symbolical form is used.
Politics and social questions in our time have largely taken the place
which religious faith formerly occupied in the popular mind. They are
the only questions in which you can interest the mass of mankind--the
only questions, perhaps, on which people get really excited.
Accordingly they delight to see the expression of their political or
social faith in emphatic, familiar, and yet allegorical form, with a
satiric sting in it if possible.
Nothing so forcibly expresses the common current of political opinion,
or rather sentiment (or even prejudice), of the dominant sections of
society as its political and satiric cartoons. They will be valuable
material for the future historian. It is curious, too, how long a
symbolic figure once accepted will last. Take the familiar one of John
Bull himself. Is he really any longer typical of the comfortable,
powerful classes--the financier, the banker--who really rule the
roast-beef of old England? Instead of a mixture of semi-agricultural,
sporting, and Quaker characteristics, a commercial and semi-oriental
cast would now perhaps be nearer the truth. But even he must be
prepared to give way to the rising power, the real John Bull--LABOUR. I
think more advantage might be taken of this widespread love of parable,
symbolic and emblematic art. Something, for instance, might be done
in it as an effective means of conveying those fundamental economic
truths which are so necessary to realise before we can hope to make
real progress.
Illustrations might be given, for instance, of Mr. Ruskin’s
parallel--the _Crag_ Baron and the _Bag_ Baron.
The first is the baron of feudal times, with his castle on the crag
behind him, and the lances of his armed retainers ready to swoop upon
all coming through his territory and levy his blackmail.
The second is the baron of modern commercialism, with his own
appropriate scenery behind him--his castles, gaunt factories, and
instead of the forest of lances, a forest of chimneys. He rules by the
power of the money-bag. His bag is beside him, duly labelled rent,
profit, interest--the three great sources of his riches and power. He
is only disturbed by reading of the progress of socialism.
Another effective design might be a symbolic representation of the
present relations of capital and labour, suggested by the Hindu idea of
the universe--namely, that the world is supported upon the back of an
elephant, and the elephant stands upon a tortoise.
Even so the world of wealth and leisure rests upon capital (the
elephant), which again is supported by labour (the tortoise), which
indeed may not stand or go except by the will of the elephant and its
rider.
The relation of capital to labour might be further symbolised by the
_two_ coins in the elephant’s trunk to _one_ in the mouth of the
tortoise. The tortoise naturally looks discontented and resentful,
and altogether the position of affairs is insecure--insecure because
unnatural and unjust.
An emblem of evolution might be given by means of the design of a
plant growing from the root up, putting forth leaves, buds, and finally
flowers, with the caterpillar, chrysalis, and final transformation
into butterfly, typifying the progress of human society--a spiral
progression, but culminating in higher organisation. And so from the
course of growth and development in nature the socialist takes hope for
the future of humanity, through changing conditions and transitions,
and causes ever at work evolving a more humane and just order.
While on the subject of popular symbolism, I noticed a while ago a
correspondence on the Lord Mayor’s show. Though we may not approve
of its present symbolism or its artistic taste always (and I have
always wondered that a tableau representing Wat Tyler, who struck a
blow for English freedom and the worker in the fourteenth century,
prostrate at the feet of Lord Mayor Walworth was allowed to proceed
through the streets of London), still the fact remains that it is the
one free, popular, open-air spectacle for the people of London, and a
historic relic of great interest; and since it brings people together
in good-humoured crowds it cannot be an anti-social function. Much
more might be made of it if its organisers were inspired by popular
sympathies. It might be at once made more beautiful, more instructive,
and more significant, and I should suggest that the money now spent
on the banquet might be devoted to improving the show as a popular
spectacle; spectacles and processions always will be popular. It is
not as if the community--except perhaps the business part--would gain
anything by the suppression of the show, whereas the poor would lose
what is evidently an excitement and a pleasure.
Few sights are more impressive than the vast processions of workmen
marching to the park with their bands and banners on one of those great
occasions of demonstration or protest, which become so important and
so necessary from time to time. Here, at least, is one of the artistic
aspects of democracy which is likely to increase with the growth of
true democratic institutions, and which affords in the design of
banners and emblems the highest scope for emblematic and decorative art.
Processions as a means of propaganda, too, would be no bad thing. A
series of groups illustrating the progress of political liberty and
social progress from the earliest times to the present, for instance,
or the relations of labour and capital (as in our elephant and
tortoise), would afford splendid dramatic and picturesque material, and
there are still a sufficiently large number of people who take in more
ideas through their eyes than by any other door of the brain luckily.
This fact is at least taken advantage of by the advertising tradesman,
not so much from a love of art, but with a view to gain his private
ends; and so we allow a perfect epidemic of posters and puffery to
pursue us everywhere with their vulgar effrontery and hideous forms
and colours, from the streets to the stations, from the platform into
the railway carriages, trams, buses, in wearisome iteration; or even
to cram themselves impertinently between the leaves of the magazine or
book we are reading. Well, we can but hope that posters are not the
last word in mural decoration, and that perhaps another generation
may think it worth while, instead of throwing away labour and skill
in pasting every temporary boarding with flagrant announcements
and sensational eye-sores, which must come out of the cost price of
the articles puffed, to endeavour to relieve the monotony of our
house-fronts with some attempt at beauty of design or colour for its
own sake.
I have been dwelling on some of the characteristics of our present
transitional state of society. “Now is the winter of our discontent,”
but the spring will surely come. The new leaves are ever ready to
spring from the shrivelled husk. New ideas, new forces, are at work
which are destined to change the face of the earth. We may look either
to the past or the future, but it is to the future we must look to
realise the true ideal democracy--not a commercial, but a social
democracy; the first business of which will be to take care of human
life itself, and its conditions; to see that the tree is nourished at
the roots before we ask for flower or fruit; to raise the standard of
life all round; to make the present extremes of poverty on the one
hand and luxury on the other impossible; to set up a new ideal of
life--simple, but by no means ascetic, which will provide work, as
well as full opportunity for leisure and cultivation of individual
abilities; which will aim at the organisation of such a system of
labour that the useful work of the community shall never press unduly
upon one class; and which will not find it tolerable that the price
of the comfort and enjoyment of one class should be the degradation
of another. No, let our aim be _the abolition of class_ and the
establishment of a truly human society of equals; enough for us if
a man is true to his manhood and a woman to her womanhood--and what
prouder title or higher praise is possible if we consider this true
meaning in all the relations of life?--with full scope for those
infinite varieties of talent and character which are sure to assert
themselves. Faithful service to the community according to the capacity
of each the only compulsion, in exchange for all the possibilities
which a full and human life may afford, stimulated by friendly
emulation in the true service of man.
Every one who contends for human freedom, for justice, and regulates
his actions as far as he is able on the principles of equality and
fraternity, which are practically the love of one’s neighbour,--every
one who does so, not in an ascetic spirit of sour self-denial, but
because he takes his highest happiness in so doing, is helping to
realise this ideal, is adding in his own way a stone to the great
edifice of human effort and human progress, the spirit of which
from remote ages, through persecutions, calumnies, oppressive laws,
tyrannies, superstitions, ignorance, through good report and evil
report, has led man out of the primal darkness, steadfastly bearing the
torch of hope till hope becomes a faith--faith in socialised humanity.
If we are working in this spirit we need not trouble about the fate of
art, for if we take care of life, art will take care of itself; it will
become the natural and spontaneous expression of such a life, both as
its familiar friend and helpmate, and its final crown and aspiration.
[Illustration]
IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART
To any one who has put his head beneath the magic cloth of the
photographer, and has seen, focussed on the glass screen, a beautiful
pre-Raphaelite miniature of nature, the thought must have occurred--if
the secret of retaining colours as well as forms in chiaroscuro by
photography could be discovered, what would become of modern painting?
But, it may be said, photography is already one of the chief props and
ministers of modern painting. As it is, the camera and the dry plate
often supplement, if they do not supersede, the sketch-book and the
laborious study, and the influence of photography and photographic
effect is apparently the paramount influence in contemporary work.
Would painting thus lean upon photography if she felt that she was but
being led to her own destruction? Very likely not; yet, of necessity,
the weaker leans upon the strong, and the object being the imitation of
superficial fact, photography is strong where painting is weak.
For the last quarter-century and more, the stream of tendency in art,
reflecting that in life and thought, has been setting strongly towards
naturalism; and this naturalism (or literalism, as I should prefer to
call it) is both the cause of the effect and the effect of the cause.
It both acts and re-acts, and certainly its action upon art is one of
the most striking signs of the times.
Amid the confusion of critical tongues, the artificial conditions
of the market, the absence of public taste, the false values of
exhibitions, and the hopeless commercialism upon which they are based,
what wonder is it that painters should eagerly seize upon such help as
photography can give, to force still further already forced effects.
But it is a fatal alliance, and photography must win in the long run in
such an unequal race.
Art, like the aged and world-worn sage Faust, ardent for life and
enjoyment, snatches eagerly at the promise of renewed youth--the vision
of realised nature--held out by the demon, and ignores the consequences.
It is time to ask whether the game is worth the candle? The answer of
course depends on our conception of the scope of art; what are its
ends and aims? If it is indeed the exclusive pursuit of naturalism or
literalism, there is nothing but the prospect of this unequal race with
photography, which, in the attainment of fact or of phase, and even in
beauty of tone and effect, puts any painting or drawing hopelessly at a
distance.
On this course it is clear that art is destined to be finally beaten
by science. It may be indeed that art is destined to be absorbed and
comprehended in science, for even the hitherto uncontested field
of ideal conception is threatened by the results of the composite
photograph, and Mr. Galton’s generic images.
Painting would certainly never have been brought to this pass if she
had not been parted from the early companion of her way, but she has
severed herself from craftsmanship, from ornamental design--nay,
generally speaking, from design and invention, too--and given herself
body and soul to literal imitation of nature dominated by commercial
sentiment and sensation.
Again it may be objected, is not the business of painting then to
imitate? I answer, only a part of the business, and only in so far as
imitation contributes to expression, whether of beauty, or thought, or
story, or phase of nature, in which it ceases to be merely imitation
and becomes an art--that of representation. Where would be either use
or enduring pleasure in art, if it did not express something besides
the mere accidents of superficial fact? As well might the poet deal in
nothing but description, or the musician limit himself to reproducing
the noises of the farmyard, as the painter be content to ignore
invention and design, story and poetic suggestion. In these things the
human mind comes into play, and it is these qualities that give life
and endurance to art. Nor is there any substitute for them. We cannot
get our designing done by machinery, or our thinking by photography.
The only known mechanism for these processes is that of the brain
itself.
Mere cunning of hand invariably tires, and this is why superficial
literal imitation by itself is always so dull. We are bored to death by
what is called realism, and can only keep up our interest by a constant
succession of novelties; like the audience in a theatre, who tire of
a mere scene, an arrangement of properties however real, according to
stage realism. On the stage, however, strongly as it reflects the
literal tendencies of the day, art may safely go much farther in that
direction, as the meaning and expression (to which thought, scenery,
and properties may contribute in a high degree) must finally depend
upon the dramatic action of the living persons, and these, at least and
from the pictorial point of view of the stage, from the very fact that
they are alive, can never be overpowered by accessories.
Of course, I admit, as regards painting, apart from any poetic
embodiment or abstract treatment, there is the expression of the facts
of light and colour, texture and tones, and these--although, with
the exception of colour, they can be rendered by photography with an
accuracy and completeness quite unapproachable--really would appear
to be at present the only qualities, the only facts, the expression
of which is worth the attention of the painter. If that is really the
case, painting--pending its final extinction by photography--must be
content to take an inferior intellectual position among the arts. “Art
is art, precisely because it is not nature,” said Goethe, but the
modern painter, so far as he is articulate, would render it, “Art is
art, precisely because it mocks nature.”
The career of an illustrious contemporary (as shown in a recent
collection at the Grosvenor Gallery) illustrates in a remarkable way
certain degrees of expressiveness and imitation in painting. It is
remarkable, too, as showing that, even when the object in painting is
to cast off all convention, and to represent nature without prejudice
or prepossession, how, even then, unconsciously, under the influence
of passionate feeling striving for expression, the painter develops,
as it were, a new convention of his own. The most striking quality
about the earlier pictures of Millais is not what was commonly supposed
to be the chief characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite school, namely,
their unflinching truth to nature, but rather the intellectual force
of their poetic and dramatic expression. Comparing the work of the
earlier period--say from 1849 to 1856--with the work of the later--say
of the last ten years--one may see as totally different aims as are
perhaps possible in the work of one man. The close textures, beautiful
detail, fine and finished execution, deep though not always harmonious
colours, and romantic feeling of the earlier time have in the later
work entirely disappeared, and nearly everything is sacrificed to the
more superficial facts of full relief, and accidents of lighting,
atmosphere, and surface. I do not lay so much stress on the fact that
the recent pictures are chiefly portraits in the technical sense
(although one certainly does rather resent that personages of mere
wealth and fashion should have usurped so much of the painter’s time,
and filled so many of his canvases, to the extinction, in great part,
of the romantic and dramatic element in his art), for Millais has
always been a portrait painter whatever his subject. His one particular
idiosyncrasy as an artist has, from the first, consisted in the force
and directness of his realisation of nature, which is of the essence of
portrayal, or portraiture. He never showed any tendency to idealism in
any shape, so far as I am aware, but has always been content to take
nature as he found her, without endeavouring, by careful and conscious
selection and comparison, to build up types of form, or elaborate
schemes of decorative composition and colour. He is not a seer of
visions or a dreamer of dreams. Life and circumstance are enough,
without reading between the lines. In this directness lie both his
strength and his weakness as an artist.
Again, to compare the last with the first, one is struck with a certain
flatness of the general effect of the early work, as in the Ophelia,
for instance. And to this, no doubt, the multiplicity of careful and
beautiful detail contributes, as well as the deep and frank tones of
colour afore-mentioned. The impressiveness of the results is dependent
upon those qualities--upon this treatment--bound up with them as
inseparably as the words of a poet are with his matter and style. When
relief, and superficial and accidental facts of light are sought after,
the whole feeling changes, and the method with the characteristics
expressed. We stand in the common light of day, and talk with the
members of Society. Gone is the glow of the romance--the passion and
the earnestness of youth, with the beautiful detail, and the even and
certain finish of the workmanship. We have to make the best of it, and
extract what satisfaction we may from the contemplation of a coarser
realism of more obvious facts, including a certain amount of British
brutality, a vulgar ostentation of wealth, and the attraction or
repulsion of matter-of-fact personalities--these things being expressed
by an execution which shows more directness than care, and more force
than finish or beauty.
We draw the lesson that with increased facility there is less care, and
a coarser literalism takes the place of earnest realism, and while the
attention is narrowed to individual and accidental characteristics,
there is a notable decline of thought, dramatic power, and decorative
effect; depth of colouring has departed with beauty of execution, which
are the natural vehicles of the expression of quite different aims.
We are led to the conclusion that the search after a more obvious,
literal, and surface imitation of natural fact is followed at the
sacrifice of the more refined and delightful qualities, and with the
limitation of these comes the limitation of the range of expression.
The more of nature,--at least of her more superficial facts,--the
less, apparently, of art--the less of the expression of the individual
thought of the artist.
If this be a true statement of the tendency of modern painting, let
us be satisfied with photography. If we value literal representation
solely, and the preservation of superficial facts and effects of
surface lighting, photography can give them better and more certainly
than any paint--can produce in a moment of time what years of labour
could never accomplish. And then, too, the photograph gives us the
facts, and, within their limited range, as much force of expression
as belongs to facts, without any false sentiment, which is too often
the case with the painter. If we can get our facts registered for us
with absolute certainty and fidelity, and without individual bias, let
us take them and be thankful: but let art give up the struggle for
territory over which she can no longer claim exclusive or absolute
jurisdiction. Let her rest in her own borders. There is a large
and ample domain in which there is no fear of invasion; a fair and
beautiful region, peopled with the
Forms more real than living men,
flowered and fruited with the rejuvenescence of the thought of all
time; where invention and expression are the familiar friends and
counsellors of art, and truth becomes identical with beauty in the
large control of design.
But this is the possession of merely Decorative Art--despised and
rejected of men; fit only to be lounged upon or trodden under foot:
a toy in the hand, not credited with brain or soul, or power of
expression, speaking in strange tongues and parables, or at the best a
harmless species of lunacy, fed but with the crumbs from the table of
the pictorial Dives.
But the race is not always to the swift brush, or the battle to
strong colours, and painting is not the only eloquent language of
expression in art, although its effects are more obvious and palpable.
We have but to think of the means of expression at the command of the
architect (unrestricted, that is, by Boards of Works and Building
Acts)--even without the aid of sculpture or painting--in the simple
but sublime language of proportion, mass, space, and outline. It is
true, imitation is not unknown even in architecture, and we live under
the shadow of the great historic styles; but in architecture anything
like actual imitation of the materials and surfaces in other materials
is now universally despised and condemned. It remains, so far as it
is an art, a purely expressive one. How emphatically, and with what
subtlety, architecture is capable of expressing ideas and principles of
construction! and in so doing expresses not only these but the laws of
evolution, and the changed temper of peoples, and social conditions in
the long result of time, gathering under the shelter of its wings the
whole family of arts and crafts which are its offspring.
Sculpture, too, eloquent in its severe limitations, and by reason of
them, speaks in the language of pure form. It is true, it has its own
equivalents for colour in contrasts of surface and richness of detail,
but the attempts to introduce pure imitation, as with the Milanese
school of modern Italy, have certainly not elevated the art. Any
imitative success has been gained at the price of higher beauty and
meaning--of the higher qualities of form, and repose and dignity of
expression. I have noticed, too, that in sculpture, where imitation has
been the primary object, the effect is curiously false, as in the case
of a portrait statue in marble in costume, where the lace and different
dress materials are sometimes imitated with surprising dexterity, but
only to give an impression not of life but rather of a whitewashed
effigy. Clearly, a step farther is called for if imitation is the sole
object. We must revise the art of effigy and paint up to the life. Nor,
where faithful portraiture is demanded, can there be any reasonable
objection.
Interesting as coloured monumental effigies may be, and however
undoubted the fact that it was the practice of the ancients to tint
their sculpture, it cannot blind us to the more delicate and elevated
expression of pure form, which no sculptor, I suppose, would forego as
the justest and most eloquent medium for the embodiment of a heroic
or poetic theme--or even solely as a means for the expression of the
carver’s sense of the decorative effect of light and shadow in relief
work.
There can be no doubt, too, that colour obscures and disguises form. I
do not mean to say that it has not an emotional expressiveness all its
own, but it is a different kind. We feel the beauty and expressiveness
of a drawing by Mantegna or Albert Dürer, and do not ask for colour, or
for more heightened and graphic expression than their pen lines convey.
This seems to show how little the highest artistic and intellectual
expressiveness is dependent on close or literal imitation of nature. To
mock nature is one thing, to read and to express her, quite another. I
doubt if, even with the photograph and the modern literalist, we could
get on without line to make clear the nature of many things disguised
in the illusory actuality of light and shadow: facts of construction,
for instance, facts of growth, facts of texture and character, can all
be made more emphatic and expressed clearer in a line drawing; and,
apart from individual skill in its use, this is, perhaps, largely owing
to its capacity of abstraction--which sounds like a paradox! A drawing
in line is the result of a convention--a treaty between the mind and
nature, signed by the free hand of the designer, and sealed by the
understanding and imagination. Nothing shows so completely the quality
and resources of a master as his perception and treatment of the value
of line: nothing more eloquently and distinctly speaks of the vigorous
or enervated condition of art in any period than its line drawings.
Line is the nerve-fibre of art, knitting and controlling the whole
body, but flaccid and meaningless in its day of decline. Compare, for
instance, the woodcuts of the early sixteenth century with those of the
later or of the next century, and the difference corresponds with the
vigour and decline of the Renaissance impulse in design.
The indifference to the value of line as a means of expression in our
day is an ominous sign of the state of the arts--despite the so-called
revival of etching. Our students are taught to stipple and work up
their drawings in chalk, and charcoal seems to be the favourite medium
with the modern painter when he is _obliged_ to draw: but both are far
inferior in delicacy and precision, and therefore in real potentiality
of expression, to the pen-point, or even the firm lead or hair pencil.
Effect, however, is more readily produced in chalk or charcoal. If you
are not forcible you can at least be black, and you can command an
abundance of the convenient obscurity of shadow to hide the want of
invention and the absence of purity and precision of line.
In the rush, too, for directness and the unbiassed imitation of nature,
another expressive resource of line has been thrown overboard, and this
is what is usually included in the term composition. No doubt this
has destroyed the commonplace, second-hand stock-in-trade species of
pictorial composition, but it has also discouraged higher aims. But
few painters nowadays, I imagine, except those more or less interested
in decorative design, trouble themselves about schemes of line and
counterbalancing curves, or think much of their picture in the skeleton.
The concentration, too, of the attention of the modern painter--the
narrowing of his interest to the imitation of facts--tends, as we have
seen, to the limitation of his dramatic or poetic interest, or even
to its entire extinction. Our painter’s strength is spent upon the
realisation of persons often uninteresting, and incidents and themes
quite frivolous or even repulsive.
I am far from wishing back the old days of church influence and
patronage, when most pictures were religious and the demand for
Madonnas and saints almost unlimited; but when congratulations are
offered on the changed conditions--that art has broken loose from old
encumbering traditions and from sacerdotal fetters, it is too often
forgotten that, in spite of her boasted freedom, it is but an exchange
of bondage. When we see gifted artists chained down by their very
success to the constant production of the same sort of thing--generally
the presentment of some fact or phase of nature without ulterior
significance or import to humanity--where is our boasted width of range
and variety of interest?
Year after year our exhibition catalogues give us the same titles--the
same quotations even--I will not speak of the works corresponding
with those legends. I do not know that the money bag makes a better
escutcheon than the cross keys. I prefer the Phrygian cap and the red
flag to either, and truly our material gods, it would seem, give not so
much freedom as the old spiritual ones; for even in the oft-repeated
nativities and crucifixions of mediæval and early Renaissance painters,
what a world of invention and expression was often put into them! Such
subjects became, indeed, not only most fruitful themes for the display
of all the resources of the painter in the delineation of the life and
manners of his time, but their figurative significance gave them a
solemnity and depth of meaning for which it would be hard to find an
equivalent in modern art.
Storiation, which played so important a part in ancient art--what scope
has it in the modern cabinet picture? Were it not for the decorative
designers, the idea of story and series in pictorial design would
become extinct. Even in their hands it is too often too much on the old
lines, embodying the old ideas, and--from the necessities, perhaps,
of much or most important decorative work being for ecclesiastical
purposes--the ancient creeds.
If, owing to the absence of simplicity and dignity of life, but few
modern scenes lend themselves to decorative storiation--if the modern
body be too cumbered and disguised, what of the mind? Surely there are
thoughts and ideas distinctly modern, capable of figurative and poetic
embodiment, and charged with concern to humanity, if only he who runs
could be persuaded also to read.
If a painter here and there shows that he possesses any ideas a little
beyond the range of the illustrated newspaper, he is sure to be laughed
to scorn, and should he persist in his belief that painting is not
merely to be regarded as a commodity of the market, or as a toy for
grown-up and rather dull and _blasé_ children, let him abandon the hope
of making his bread by it.
A word as to the expression of action. A while ago Mr. Meybridge
lectured artists, through the Royal Academy, on the right way to
depict the action of a horse. He certainly succeeded in demonstrating,
by a very ingenious method, whereabouts a horse’s legs are found at
certain given consecutive moments--arrested by the photograph--but
no more striking proof could be given, especially when motion is
concerned, of the meaninglessness of an isolated fact than one of
these photographs. Taken singly, they express arrested action, which
is exactly what they _represent_ and nothing more. It is only when
the series is placed in consecutive order, and turned on a wheel, so
that they succeed each other on the retina, that the action is really
represented, and it is then of course complete; but that is _illusion_
rather than representation. Mr. Meybridge would have persuaded us that
artists have been fools since the world began in this matter. But in
representing a galloping horse, or any figure in action, in design,
the problem has always been to avoid the look of arrested action which
the exact record of the moment gives. The artist has to express, not
arrested, but continuous action. He must suggest, therefore, the moment
before and the moment after, and that often in one figure. The result
has been a certain convention, which conveys the idea of speed to the
mind more completely and convincingly than the exact imitation of the
action of any given moment could possibly do.
The truth is, that the external facts of motion are, like other
facts, expressionless in design, by themselves, and unless associated
with other facts and suggestions, and this has hitherto been frankly
acknowledged in art. I do not say that a new convention--new and more
perfect methods of expression of nature in art--may not be built on
the aggregation of more accurately recorded and observed facts, and
more profound knowledge. The plain inference is the other way. The
degree in which exact knowledge controls and determines methods of
representations in art is always a nice problem, and I do not pretend
to settle it.
My conclusion is, that the modern mind, in its eagerness for
literalism, has been led so far, after all, to but a superficial kind
of realism, and that which passes for realism is indeed too often only
a one-sided realism--reality only half realised. At the best it is but
the realisation of the passing sensation--the passing moment--the least
real thing in life and nature.
Nature, when we think we have seized her, verily turns and mocks us in
her turn. Alter the focus--go a little farther, or a little nearer, and
all is changed and falsified: so the artistic chase, like the artistic
problem, is endless. While idealist and realist are disputing, that
Pluto of art, the photographer, instantaneously seizes the fair maiden,
and carries her in a moment to his dark chamber, whence, though indeed
she reappears ravished of colour, it is in such verisimilitude as might
well be the despair of the painter, were not his vows addressed to a
yet fairer than Persephone.
[Illustration]
ART AND INDUSTRY
We are here to further the advancement of art in its application to
industry. Are we quite sure that we do not mean the advancement of
industry by the application of art?
For the last two or three centuries we appear to have been applying all
the power of organisation, the ingenuity, and the mechanical invention
of man to the advancement of industry in the interests of competitive
commerce; not with the advancement of art as the object, but rather
that of profit-making, with the economic result that we cannot find
work enough for our compulsorily idle hands to do; while in the din of
the vast workshop of machine production, and the fierce battle of the
world-market, art can hardly find a place for the sole of her foot.
Mechanical invention in the interests of trade has dominated us.
Mechanical invention has outstripped the invention of the artist.
Mechanical smoothness has taken the place of artistic thought and
finish. And why? Because to our great deities of commercial enterprise
and successful trade, the amount of the output is more regarded than
the artistic quality of the material and work.
The very spirit and meaning of the word “artistic” implies something
harmonious; something in relation to its surroundings; something
arising out of the joy of life, and expressing the delight of the
artist in his work, however arduous; something personal, the expression
of one mind, or of many--congruous--expressly and lovingly addressed
to particular persons, and adapted to particular places and things.
Not a mere system of guess-work, beginning with the designer who makes
a guess at the sort of thing that may possibly “take,” rather than
what he personally likes and has a feeling for. The designer, again,
being dependent on the manufacturer, guessing what the market or the
trade will take; or he again depends on the conjectures of the trade
as to what an unknown quantity in the public can be induced to take.
The public, again, surrounded with every species of conundrum in
the name of art, is driven to guess in _its_ turn not as to what it
really likes, or what is good and fitted to its purpose, but what is
the correct thing to buy, or what other people buy, or are likely to
buy. So the whole structure of applied art, under our present system,
speaking generally, is built upon the shifting sands of insincerity and
speculation.
Let us inquire what natural affinity there is between art and industry.
Properly considered, obviously, they should be inseparable; but the
spirit that rules industry now is wrapped up in the one object of the
salesman--to sell.
The spirit of industry is merely to produce. The spirit of the artist
is not merely to produce, but to express--to both produce and to
express something which is a joy to him in the making, and may be
a joy to the user and beholder. In the search after perfection of
method of expression, in the struggle to express his thought, to make
his work, whatever it be--the lines of a design, a simple, repeating
pattern, a moulding, a sculptured ornament, a figure, a group, a
picture, a building--to make his work live, to answer to his thought,
and so to touch the thoughts of others, the artist will frequently
undo or destroy his own work--will cast aside the labour that has cost
him perhaps hours of toil and thought, and try again, until his work
answers more nearly to the ideal in his mind.
Considerations of the market are forced upon him, it is true, too
often; but these have no necessary connection with art, and in so far
as he ceases to be true to his ideal, and is seriously influenced, or
driven, by circumstances to work consciously and exclusively for money,
as an artist he must deteriorate.
Now, the man of commerce--the controller of industry--seeks only
to make a _saleable_ article. He is influenced in his industrial
production simply by this object. He takes the opinions of salesmen,
of the trade, not of artists, as a rule, and so far as any artistic
standard or aim enters into the produce of his manufactory, it is
strictly checked by the average of what his rivals are doing, and by
the discovery of what the big public can be persuaded to buy.
Slowly, perhaps, some personal force or centre of artistic sincerity
creates a new impulse and new desires in a jaded public, sated with
every craze and whim under the name of art; slowly the wave of fashion
rises, swiftly it rolls. It affects the salesman first. His arts fail
him. He cannot palm off these coarse and inharmonious colours, these
hideous patterns, or this clumsy furniture, charm he ever so wisely. He
sells at a “great sacrifice,” and returns to the industrial king, the
manufacturer, who either evolves something “new and original” out of
his inner consciousness on the premises for next season, or he seeks
out the artist. He makes a compact with him. The man of ideas meets
the man of industry and profits. The result is of course a compromise.
The artist must turn out taking novelties in design for the market.
That is, the market of guess-work. The market must be the first
consideration; it is imperative to sell one’s season’s goods.
Commerce, like the old woman in the nursery tale, stands at the stile
(of an overstocked market) with her obdurate pig (over-production) that
refuses to move until the stick (of new demand) has been persuaded
to bring its influence to bear, and one by one all the characters
of the commercial drama act and re-act upon each other by the very
necessities of their existence, middleman and public, capitalist and
labourer. We shall find their prototypes in our nursery tale, up to
the ox (personifying John Bull) driven to action from the fear of the
butcher--the Nemesis of foreign competition.
The little allegory from the nursery fits the situation exactly. It has
been revealed unto babes.
So the whole mill of industrial commercial production is fed and set
in motion, and grinds on year after year. The wheels of its machinery,
like those of fortune herself, lifting some into prosperity, upon the
condition of the ruin of others, and the working order of the whole
depending on the existence of the vast majority of our brothers and
sisters in the condition of not being more than one week’s remove from
destitution.
This is the social and industrial structure we have raised, in which we
live and move and have our being. Art and industry, like figures carved
in stone, may adorn its portal, and our hopes and fears, our regrets
for the past, our thoughts for the future, play like cloud shadows upon
its grim façade, which will yet master our efforts at humanising and
beautifying, until its tenants some day insist on improvements, perhaps
even involving a change of plan and structure.
Meanwhile our fluctuating harlequin of fashion and trade comes and
goes. This year we are going to be “artistic”--everything is to be
“artistic”--art colours, art furniture, art in the attic, art in the
coalhole. Next year, away with your degraded colours! Let us be grandly
barbaric in mauve and magenta! Is this the delightful spontaneous
caprice of unstable humanity, seeking novelty in the simplicity of its
heart? Or is it wholly unconnected with the inscrutable movements and
exigencies of those commercial and industrial potentates whereof I have
spoken?
Anyway, art and industry remain a somewhat ill-assorted couple, and
furnish an additional modern instance to those who rudely ask, “Is
marriage a failure?”
Of course, to the artist accustomed to believe in personal work--to
value the individual touch and characteristic method--the whole idea of
the application of steam-power, and the mechanical reproduction of any
form of art wholesale, is an entire mistake; or, at least, it can only
be countenanced under certain conditions and in certain well-defined
directions under controlling taste, such, for instance, as the domain
of the printer, whether of books, cottons, wall-papers, and the like,
or in the work of the loom. I have constantly been struck, in passing
through one of our industrial exhibitions--those huge trophies of the
world’s trade, that we have raised from time to time, and which are
counted among the triumphs of the century--I have often been struck
with the marvellous mechanical invention, and the extent and range of
the application of steam machinery. One is impressed with a vivid idea
of the lightning speed with which the competitive race is run, and the
scale on which the world’s market is stocked. But if one inquires how
this mechanical march has affected the progress of art, the answer
generally appears in some such shape as this. We may, perhaps, see
some wonderful piece of ingenuity and mechanism--a carpet loom, for
instance, such as I saw at the American Exhibition in London. The
machine itself appeared to be a marvel of adaptation; but it would
seem as if all the invention had been exhausted upon the means of
production, and when one came to the product itself--the carpet in the
loom--the result as an artistic matter, a matter of design and colour,
was simply deplorable. So that one generally turns from these triumphs
of the century with a conviction that we have lost sight of the end in
our search for mechanical perfection in the means.
The world, having increased so much under the sway of our industrial
kings (we will grant them that), having congregated in vast centres for
the convenience of commerce and industry, necessarily has large and
immediate wants. Millions of interdependent human beings demand to be
fed and clothed, warmed and sheltered, with swift and efficient means
of communication and carriage from place to place. Wholesale industrial
production does it, with the aid of steam and electricity; and does
it so thoroughly (as regards quantity and the purchasing power of the
community) as to overshoot the mark and glut the market, which means
that a number of citizens are obliged to go without the comforts and
necessities they have assisted in producing, seeing that the system
of production is not economically organised in the interest of the
community, but rather for the profit of individuals.
The world does not stop in its demands at food and clothes and
shelter, however. Man does not live by bread alone. He needs mental
bread, spiritual exaltation, amusement, excitement, and would clothe
his thoughts in artistic and architectural garments. Here, however,
wholesale industrial machine production is distinctly at fault, even
if in the quality of its food stuffs and bare necessities it has been
blameless. In making art a commodity, or in the endeavour to make it
so, its distinctive virtue and value has been left out of account. In
associating it with purely mechanical and subdivided toil, in handing
it over to the blind fingers of insensate machinery, or in setting
before it a purely commercial object, both its spiritual and sensuous
delight vanishes, and the refining and educating influence of both its
practice and its ultimate appeal is lost. The human interest being
reduced to a minimum, or made to depend solely on impulse of the
pictorial sketcher or designer in no sort of relation to the man,
or the process by which his work is to be reproduced, is apt to lose
itself in the desire for mere novelty or trick, to become the art of
the newspaper, which rests its claims to attention on its impartial,
partial, or partisan record of passing events and news--nothing if not
new. Thus, both the beauty and the dignity of art are endangered, while
the reduction of handicraft to mechanism takes their personal interest
and individuality away.
The idea of producing art wholesale by steam-power is certainly an
extraordinary one. It is very much like printing a misquoted line from
a poet, repeating it page after page, and calling the result a book.
As I have already said, our mechanical invention, directed to the
cheapening of the processes of industrial production, and the
acceleration in speed of that production, has outstripped our artistic
invention. In our efforts to increase the means of production we
have lost sight of the end. In purely artistic production the old
methods, the old tools, mostly remain, as they have done for centuries,
unaffected by mechanical invention, for the simple reason that nothing
can supersede the hand. The tools of the sculptor, the carver, the
painter, are but extra fingers supplementary to the original four and
the indispensable thumb, to which the artist continually recurs, and
with which his work is begun and ended. That personal touch and impress
of character we value so highly in what we call the Fine Arts, with the
disappearance of the handicraftsman and the severance of designer and
workman, has practically ceased to exist; except in those instances of
individual revival and pursuit of a craft on its original lines, which,
among the cultured and the leisured, or on the part of painters or
sculptors as a diversion, have increased so much of late years.
The modern conditions of manufacture appear to have destroyed the old
traditions of the handicrafts. Our commerce has vulgarised and confused
the public taste. Yet where any form of art is concerned--anything in
the nature of a pattern or design in the material of surface decoration
in any form, appealing to the eye, in the goods produced--manufacture
is absolutely dependent on design of some sort. It may be begged,
borrowed, paid for, or stolen, but still the design must be there to
start with. Yet design, so far as it is under the influence of the
existing conditions, has become tamer and tamer, and more and more
meaningless and superficial; and it is obvious that the ill effects of
a bad design are increased a thousandfold, or exactly in proportion to
the increase in the mechanical power and speed of its production by the
resources of machinery.
When the power of reproduction is so enormous, it becomes, obviously,
more than ever necessary to reproduce nothing in design but what is
sound and good in its own way. If not, far better confine ourselves to
the manufacture of plain materials: good cloth, well woven and dyed,
without pattern; serviceable furniture, without carving or painting,
unless it can be sincere and thoughtful; useful pottery, as good
in contour as the wheel and the skill of the thrower can make it,
unspoiled by the ravings of the china painter distracted by centuries
of false taste, or confused by dictionaries of ornament, or the
impressionism of the modern Japanese or Parisian.
There are, of course, certain great industries which are
absolutely dependent on the surface designer and pattern maker,
such as cotton-printing, carpet-weaving, paper-staining, for
instance--manufactures which would not exist at all without a constant
supply of designs. There is no doubt that this is fully recognised by
the manufacturers or their managers; and the utmost pains, consistent
with a due regard for the possibilities of profit, are taken by the
leading firms to secure at least competent working drawings, if not
tasteful designs. It may be conceded, too, that, as regards design,
these industries have been the first to show the influence of those
ideas which have produced a kind of revolution among designers of late
years, with the result that a movement which appears to be purely
English in origin has made its mark in these directions, and has
largely counteracted the stream of tendency which at one time set so
strongly towards Paris as the head centre of taste in all matters of
art, the disastrous effects of which still affect us in many ways.
The real secret of Continental influence in design upon us is no doubt
to be found in the fact that the severance of the arts and handicrafts
has never been anything like so complete in other European countries
as in industrial England. Our great industrial rival America shows the
same want of originating power in artistic design, the same tendency in
a more marked degree to avail herself of Parisian modes in art. However
degraded the taste of the designer, or debased in type the design, the
Frenchman or the Italian designer remained thoroughly in touch with
the craftsman, and understood the technical conditions of the work
thoroughly, so that his working drawings would be perfectly adapted to
the method of manufacture. We have here, at any rate, one reason why
our manufacturers have given preference to French designs, and have
been so much in the habit of crossing the water for new supplies. Yet
we must recognise that so closely connected are now all countries,
commercial and industrial, that the slightest change in one will surely
affect the other. If foreign artists and workmen are in demand, our
own suffer, or if our native talent is preferred, then our Continental
brothers are worse off. This, of course, is the result of competition.
Level up all round with technical education. Competition would come in
again. You would get a technically educated proletariat, but no more
secure of a livelihood than they are at present. Supposing England
temporarily regained her commercial ascendency, the suffering would
only be transferred from one country to another; and can we morally
justify it to ourselves that people of one nationality have more right
to live than those of another? These are awkward questions. But to
return.
The term “artist” in this country has come to mean the pictorial artist
only. Our art education has been dominated by the ideas and methods
of the pictorial artist, and nearly everything has been sacrificed to
the naturalistic, imitative, pictorial principles of representation,
which, of whatever value they may be to the painter of easel pictures,
or the popular illustration of newspapers, have but remote bearing on
applied design. Fortune, fame, and favour have been open to the painter
of pictures almost exclusively, and our art school training has been
sedulously directed to the manufacture of painters as distinct from
designers and craftsmen.
It is remarkable that during this century the artistic and industrial
characteristics of which I have been endeavouring to describe, we
should have been under the shadow of a Royal Academy of Arts--a
chartered and privileged body, presumably established to foster
the arts of the country, but which, while it nominally includes
architecture, sculpture, and engraving, and recognises their existence
to a certain limited extent, as an institution really exists for
the painter, and as far as the weight of its influence goes, almost
exclusively encourages one form of art production, that of easel
and marketable pictures--not only indirectly by the training of its
schools, but by the far wider and more popular influence of its annual
exhibitions, and those it controls throughout the country; but so
far as the applied arts and decorative designs are concerned, or are
dependent upon academic recognition, they might scarcely exist at all.
Not that I think academies or academic influences are at all desirable
or beneficial in their effects upon art or artists. Academic influence
tends to crystallise both men and ideas. An academy, of course, can
never originate, it can only recognise; and is apt to be exceedingly
slow at that. Every new, vigorous, and characteristic movement in art
has grown up outside, and in opposition to its teaching and influence;
and as each independent school becomes prominent and influential, its
leaders, unable as a rule to resist the substantial worldly advantages
which academic distinction and titles bestow, become absorbed, and
help to increase the weight of academic power, and become part of
that crystallising influence against which every original mind has to
struggle. It is not surprising; I merely note the fact that it is so.
I have no personal feeling in the matter. The Academy includes many
distinguished artists--men whose acquaintanceship I am proud to claim,
but I fail to see that being Academicians makes them better artists;
it does not prevent me feeling that the Academy exists for painters
rather than painting, as to which I venture to think it has only
succeeded practically in encouraging one form of that art, and that not
the highest. It offers prestige and position to individual artists who
have already won a position, and produces a keen competition among the
candidates for its honour, but once inside its charmed circle a man
seems, as a rule, inclined to rest on his laurels, or to eat the lotus.
At the same time I desire freely to acknowledge at least the verbal
recognition that has been extended to the arts and crafts of design,
and the claim of those who work in them to the title of artists, to
which my accomplished friend Sir Frederick Leighton gave expression in
his eloquent address at the opening of the Art Congress at Liverpool.
It may seem I have been saying hard things of the Royal Academy. Well,
here is a splendid opportunity of proving the reality of its new grand
enthusiasm for the arts and crafts. Why not lend the noble galleries at
Burlington House to the Society I represent, in the Exhibition of Arts
and Crafts? I throw out this as a suggestion.
There is another institution which was established for the express
purpose of dealing with the arts of design--I mean the National Art
Training Schools of the country in connection with the Science and Art
Department at South Kensington; with which I may say I have a kind of
connection as one of the examiners in design.
The primary and excellent object of these schools was to afford a
general artistic training to a craftsman, to the end that he might
cultivate his artistic capacities in draughtsmanship and design, and
apply them to the improvement of his own particular craft, under the
stimulus of prizes for proficiency in various studies by means of a
national competition every year.
But here, again, owing to the domination of the pictorial ideas and
pictorial aims and methods in art, and their paramount influence in
teaching, it has been found that students who develop pictorial skill
and draughtsmanship, so far from endeavouring, or being able, to carry
such skill back into their own craft or industry, aspire--as indeed
under the circumstances is not surprising--to be painters of easel
pictures, and follow the popular art with all its possibilities of
personal distinction and fortune.
I say it is not surprising, for, even if the kind of training
obtainable in these schools was in all cases, as it is in some, of such
a nature that it could be made of real practical value in its bearing
on particular handicrafts and industries, what strong inducements are
there for a student working in any industry to remain in that industry,
applying his school acquirements to it, when he has no prospect of
gaining either personal credit or distinction for his work as an
individual, or even substantial reward beyond a certain point within
the margin of profit in that trade, a limit which, in proportion as the
number of skilled workers increased, would necessarily tend to diminish
by the competition among themselves?
I think this shows that existing economic conditions are dead against
the aim of the schools. There are, of course, many schools of high
proficiency as such, and as examples of good working models, under the
South Kensington system. I am not, however, personally able to feel
much more enthusiasm for schools of art, as such, however efficient
according to the official standards, than I am for academies, because I
believe that the only training worth having in the arts must be in the
workshop, as of old; since I hold that the true root and basis of all
art lies in the handicrafts, and that artistic impulse and invention
weakens as it loses its close connection and intimate relationship with
them.
The weakness, too, of art schools is that, though an energetic master
with ideas may, by dint of untiring zeal, build up his school to a
certain high standard of proficiency, with the immediate object of
passing as many students in the various grades as he can, under the
system of payment by results, the students are apt under such a system
to depend upon the qualities of their teacher--the distinction of the
school as such collapses without him, and the personal individual
element, owing to the student being rather subordinated to particular
courses and methods of study, and the cultivation generally of a
particular style, is not worth, or does not seem to leave, such
permanent or desirable results as might be expected.
Of course it is true that the great increase in the ranks of picture
painters of late years has had the usual effect under competition of
lowering prices and diminishing sales; and also of making the struggle
for distinction harder, since the standard of mediocrity is raised.
In fact, the market is overstocked, and though, unlike the labourer
who supports him, the painter can generally employ himself, his work
remains unsold. With his purely pictorial training, he, as a rule,
has no idea of applying his art in any way to any form of industry.
There are plenty of clever sketchers from nature, who, when they come
to making a design for any special purpose or for execution in some
particular material, are quite at sea; and even if they were ever so
able, I am afraid that the market for art and industry combined is as
yet but limited.
The craftsman himself, as we have seen, has been wellnigh extinguished
by the development of that machine industry, which, while it has
isolated the pictorial artists as a class, has also brought them to
their present state. So that there are abundant reasons why art, as
applied to industry, should not be in a flourishing and vigorous
condition.
It is not surprising, bearing these thoughts in mind, that design has
come to be regarded as a sort of Cinderella of art; her fine sisters,
bedecked in paint and public favour, go to the ball and leave her to
mind the hearth or the workshop. But she is not without her fairy
godmother--Inventive Adaptation--who comes to her aid; and though it
is hoped she will never lose her domestic qualities and substantial
household virtues, she may yet win her share of applause, and, wearing
the shoe of good luck, be recognised as the true bride of the prince
Imagination.
At the preliminary meeting for the formation of the National
Association for the Advancement of Art, I took occasion to say that,
“We must turn our artists into craftsmen, and our craftsmen into
artists,” That is the problem before us in this matter of art and
industry.
I do not pretend to have found a cut-and-dried solution, but there is
one first necessary step to be taken, it seems to me, as a matter of
common honesty, if we are really sincere in our desire to unite art
and industry, and it is this: that the workman should have the credit
of the work of his own head and hands, whether designer or craftsman.
We must no longer be content with the vague, however convenient,
designation of authorship, or rather proprietorship--So-and-So
& Co.--now commonly affixed to works of art or industry in our
exhibitions; but we should require the actual names of the contrivers
and craftsmen whose actual labour, thought, and experience produced
what we see.
Make a man responsible, and give him the credit of his own skill in
his work: his self-respect at once increases, and he is stimulated to
do his best; he will take pride and pleasure in his work; it becomes
personal and therefore interesting.
I am associated with a movement in London--in which I have had
the advantage of the co-operation and sympathy of many able and
distinguished men in the arts--the immediate outcome of which has been
an Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts with the object of ascertaining
to some degree not only our artistic condition in the applied arts,
and the amount of genuine public interest in them, as distinct from
picture-painting, but also of giving the names of the responsible
designers and executants of the works exhibited, as far as possible. We
do not pretend, in the face of various difficulties inseparable from an
initial movement, that our exhibition was all that we should have liked
to make it, but the success which has attended it has been quite beyond
our expectations, and the amount of public interest and support we have
received and the general recognition of the justness of the principle
have been most encouraging--so much so that we held a second exhibition
on the same lines in the autumn of 1889.
There is no reason why the movement should not be taken up
independently and locally in other towns, on the same principles,
managed by local committees, and supported by local sympathisers. Such
exhibitions might afford valuable tests of the state of the arts and
crafts generally, and, in particular, of the condition of design in the
special industries of the district; while the association of the name
of the actual designer and workman with their work would tend to bring
out in emulation individual skill and invention under the stimulus of
public recognition.
Another suggestion--in which I have been anticipated--I venture to
make is that in every manufacturing town a permanent collection should
be formed of the best procurable examples of design and artistic
workmanship in different materials, especially with reference to the
particular industries of the place or district. Designs and working
drawings, together with the finished product, might be arranged side
by side, and so constantly to be seen and studied and compared by
designers and workmen. Such collections might comprise both old and new
work; and specimens might be acquired from time to time from the annual
or occasional arts and crafts exhibitions, such as those suggested.
The formation of guilds of artists and craftsmen for the study and
discussion and illustration of the arts and crafts, and all questions
concerning their interests, and those of workers in them, would also
be found a very useful and interesting way of keeping designers and
craftsmen in touch with one another, and preserving that unity and
solidarity in art which is so essential to its vitality.
This idea has already been adopted in Liverpool, and the “Liverpool
Art Workers’ Guild” also held an exhibition of applied art a year or
two ago, which I understand was very successful, though I had not the
pleasure of seeing it.
These, then, are some of the immediately practical ways of working
towards a healthier condition of things in the arts.
Discussion and counsel must come before action. Hereafter we may be
able to meet and gauge our progress. In the meantime I think it is most
important to recognise certain facts--to know exactly how and where we
stand in this matter of art and industry; which, moreover, cannot be
separated from the great economic question of which, indeed, it is but
a part.
Do not let us deceive ourselves, or expect to gather the grapes of
artistic or industrial prosperity from economic thorns, or æsthetic
figs from commercial thistles.
It is idle to expect artistic sense and refinement to spring from dull
and sordid surroundings, or a keen sense of beauty amid the conditions
of monotonous and mechanical toil. Unless your artist and craftsman has
personal freedom, leisure and cultivation, and continued access to the
beauty of both art and nature, you will get neither vigorous design nor
good craftsmanship.
Let us look the Sphinx fairly in the face, and take the length of her
claws and wings before we offer our solution of the riddle. It may be
that the problem will solve itself in the course of time, as part of
that great and constant movement of evolution in which we ourselves and
our lives and interests are involved; which no man can do much either
to impede or to accelerate, though the action of the least of us counts
in the total sum--since it is the slow but sure result of causes at
work through the long progress of centuries, bound up with the laws of
nature, and the course of human destiny itself.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A splendid instance of its principle in combination with
another--the scale--may be found in the construction of the peacock’s
tail, or rather tail coverts, the magnificent effect of which when
spread is as much owing to its construction as to its colour.
[2] As showing the constructive sense in Japanese design see, for
instance, the small books of designers’ patterns and crests for
demonstrations of the way in which designs not geometric in themselves,
such as animals, may yet be governed or bounded by geometric forms,
such as the circle, and the immense variation of which similar pattern
systems are capable.
[3] Patterns, like plants, illustrate, in their arrangement and
structure, those broad principles which divide the world of design--the
symmetrical, the alternate, and the spiral systems.
[4] Yet if art depends upon labour, labour also depends upon art. The
architect must plan the house before the labourer can get to work, and
design of all kinds must exist in the head before it can be executed by
the hands. What we want is to bring heads and hands together again, and
on the same shoulders, and not keep them as classes apart.
[5] It is curious to note, by the way, that terms then used in speaking
of pictures and painting, such as “performing” and “piece,” are now
almost exclusively confined to another art——the drama.
[6] The same author says in another place: “No! perfect art does not
necessarily concern itself with beauty of form, unless the object
has been specially designed for art use. We must expel the idea”
(_Æsthetics_, p. 125).
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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