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