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_.
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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.