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.