filled up. The subject is, indeed, too vast and far-reaching to be
adequately treated in the limits of a single paper. Hitherto I have
kept very near home, but if we look abroad over the world we shall see
the same causes at work, the same deterioration going on. Look at the
effects of our rule on the native arts of India, The same process of
extinction of the art of the people, of the village crafts, is taking
place there as has resulted from the action of commercialism at home.
(On this point I cannot refer any one who is desirous to pursue the
subject to a more competent authority than Sir George Birdwood.) But
all over the East, wherever European influence is in the ascendant,
the result is disastrous to the arts, and thus the very sources of
ornamental design, beauty of colour, and invention are being sullied
and despoiled by the sharp practices and villainous dyes of Western
commerce. Even in Japan, where the artistic sense seems instinctive
among the people, so that everything touched by them bears its impress,
since the results of ages of art labour and exquisite craftsmanship
have suddenly been placed within the insatiable grasp of commercialism,
there are signs that these riches are becoming exhausted, and the rarer
and finer kinds grow scarcer every day. We can no longer expect to be
given of the best, and wares are being consciously prepared for the
European market. This is but the “retort courteous” for the compliments
of Manchester in china-clay and size. We actually hear of proposals to
establish schools of design on the British model, the more effectually,
I suppose, to drive out those quick, spontaneous, characteristic native
methods of art-expression, than which nothing, perhaps, has more
refreshed and stimulated the jaded sensibilities of European design.
Thus even by contact with a vicious civilisation the natural quickness
and intelligence of a race may bring about its own destruction.
Thus, in the fierce and unscrupulous struggle for wealth, one after
another, virgin markets are opened, and new peoples exploited by
commercial enterprise, which, like a huge steam plane, is passing over
the world striving to reduce all art, and with it humanity, to one dull
level of commonplace mediocrity, leaving us but of vital and beautiful
varieties the relics and shavings. Greedy eyes are now turning to
Central Africa. The next act in the commercial drama will probably take
place there. Already the rampant explorer, posing as the benefactor
of humanity, has gone far and wide, and the representatives of the
blessings of civilisation, with the Bible in one hand and the revolver
in the other, call on the aborigines to stand and deliver. Wheresoever
commercialism sets foot, the curse of gold seems to follow. As regards
its effect upon art, it is like the old Greek story of Atalanta’s
Race, but with a sinister climax. Milanion, the hunter (representing
commercialism), enters for the race, and, carrying the fatal apples
of gold, casts them one by one in the path of the fair fleet-footed,
whom no competitor could hitherto outstrip. She yields, alas! to the
seductive spoils--to the greed of gold--and henceforward her fate is
sealed.
But commercialism, which seems now so triumphant, carries the seeds of
destruction in its own bosom. The penalty of fast living must sooner or
later be paid, by nations and systems as by individuals. Dissolution
must inevitably set in. Already there are signs of the beginning of the
end. Already men’s thoughts and hopes are turned to that which shall
succeed. “The old order changeth, giving place to new.” Meanwhile the
only hope, alike for art as for humanity, lies in socialism.
[Illustration]
ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
To men engaged in strenuous political strife, amid the stress and
strain of the fierce war of commercial competition; when the forces of
labour are organising themselves and forming in battle array against
the fenced strongholds of capitalism; when the air is full of strikes
and rumours of strikes; and when in the vicissitudes of such war many
of our fellow-citizens can scarcely keep body and soul together, it may
seem to some a vain thing to speak of art.
But it all depends upon what we understand by art. Is it the senseless
frippery and vulgar bedizenment of plethoric wealth and whirligig
fashion, the paint and the patcher to make smooth and fair the outside
of society, and to hide the wrinkles and hollows which would tell the
truth too plainly? Is it the hireling of pride and ostentation living
to please the passing whim or craze--a harlequin in the masquerade,
ever ready with catch-penny tricks, driven to the necessity of
pleasing, if but for the moment, in order to live? Is it the rarity
of the market--the thing measured by fabulous price and sold by its
weight in gold, though perhaps its producer may have had a bitter
struggle to sell it at any price? Are these what we mean by art? or
is it that kind and sympathetic enchantment which takes us out of
ourselves; the genius of beauty and harmony which makes fair everything
it touches, which knows no class or caste, which speaks a universal
language; the friend of freedom and brotherhood, bringing order out of
confusion, sweetness out of strength; not a matter of private property,
but a common possession; whose price and virtue is not to be counted
in, or commanded by, dollars, but lies simply in human and hopeful
conditions of the life of a people?--entering into everything we touch
and use, in the spade and plough, with their carefully-adapted curves
and constructive lines fitting them for their proper work, and through
all the simple, homely, and necessary implements of daily life and
useful work, as well as in the organic beauty of its more conscious and
emphatic decorative adornment, as in the carving or moulding or pattern
work of our living-rooms, from the plate or the glass on the table to
the picture on the wall.
Such simple and primitive things, often unregarded, have their
influence, conscious or unconscious, on the lives of us all, if we have
been fortunate in our surroundings, and where hearth and home exist at
all, with all those tender and human feelings which gather about them
more or less: perhaps even in these days of huge caravansaries with
their here-to-day and gone-to-morrow inhabitants, on one side; and on
the other, a night’s lodging under a cart or a railway arch, or on the
golden pavement of the wealthiest city in the world, with a newspaper
for a blanket. A newspaper! It might be an illustrated one too. Cheap
art! Cheap indeed--almost as cheap as life itself!
Why, any art which is the outcome in any way of the conditions of such
a life as that of which these are some of the outward and visible
signs, is surely dear enough! The advocates of cheap art, of art for
the homes of the people, are apt to forget that the price of cheap
art, like the price of all cheap labour, means the cheapening of human
lives. When we talk of bringing art to the homes of the people, it
would be well first to see that they had got homes, or homes that they
could call their own with any less doubtful security than a week’s
rent, or with any time to live in them after ten, twelve, or sixteen or
eighteen hours of toil.
I agree with a friend, who, at a congress for the furtherance of art,
expressed the opinion that the best decoration he knew of for a hungry
home was a flitch of bacon. If the cupboard, like Mother Hubbard’s,
is bare, you cannot expect its owners will take much interest in the
decoration of its panels.
There is a gaunt and hungry Cerberus which must be satisfied, and
before Psyche, the soul of art, can enter, the body must be fed.
The fundamental necessities come first. Feed the body and you nourish
the brain also. This seems a simple and obvious physical truth--a
truism, in fact; yet it has required a great deal of socialist
agitation to bring it home even to the limited degree in which it is
beginning to be recognised, as in the case of school children.
The best artists’ materials--the raw materials of art--will be found
in simple, natural, and healthy conditions of life; not brutalised
by excessive toil or degraded by the scramble for gain, but where
honest work is security for such a life, with leisure and freedom, and
accessibility to beauty of art and nature for all. So that the claims
of art are the claims of human life also, of which, indeed, it is but
the ultimate expression.
The splendours of ancient art (even of the Asiatic despotisms of Greece
and Rome) were lavished upon public buildings and public monuments, so
that it could be seen and enjoyed by all the citizens in common, even
the slaves. In the Middle Ages the churches, the great depositories of
art in all its forms, were always open for the use and enjoyment of
the people. The streets in those days were full of variety and colour,
so that at any rate life was full of incident and romance, in spite
of tyrannous lords and kings, and though innocent of exhibitions, and
penny dreadfuls, and shilling shockers, with which we are fain to fill
the void amid the dull husks of commonplace.
Coming to modern times, we see that art, like all other human products,
has been affected by the great changes in the economic system--changes
in the conditions of production and distribution, and of ownership of
land, centralisation and the world-market. It has become more and more
a matter of private property and absolute ownership, and we have so
dropped out of the habit of putting it to any great extent into our
public buildings and monuments that we have very few artists who know
how to do it, or who think it worth while to give any time or thought
to the subject.
Instead of sublime and noble public buildings, churches, and halls,
which all the arts unite to make splendid, we have as a rule very dull
or pretentious public offices, dull and respectable churches--essays
in architecture masquerading in various styles not native to us--and
melancholy images of military, naval, or political idols in smoked
bronze, like petrified orators for ever addressing an indifferent
public, holding, as if in mockery, the dumb show of a perpetual
open-air meeting under the presidency of Nelson in police-prohibited
Trafalgar Square!
Under the sway of commercial ideas, instead of taking pride in and
enjoying in common what belongs to everybody, the object seems to be to
get hold of something that no one else has--some rarity, curiosity, at
a fabulous price, or a next-to-nothing bargain, and to make art a thing
purely of money or exchangeable value--considering it in the light of a
good investment, in fact.
It may be said we have our national museums--storehouses stuffed full
of the precious relics and fragments of the times when art was a living
and growing thing. Valleys now of dry bones, except to a few students.
National, certainly, but the nation as a rule has no time to go and
see them in this industrial age, since they are not open on the one
day--Sunday--on which the people could go. There are the churches, it
is true, but the nation does not go to church--not, at least, to the
same one, and the churches are no longer as a rule the depositories of
the best art the age can produce. Some, indeed, will have none of it,
and as to the old ones, we seem to be doing our best to improve them
off the face of the earth altogether.
Again, under the mechanical and wholesale system of production for
profit, a specialising of labour and art has taken place, and this
has led to the practical extinction of the handicraftsman, and his
severance from the artist.
Art may be produced _for_ the people (or to sell to them), but it is
no longer produced _by_ the people. Every one has a mill of his own
to grind at--working against time at a mostly monotonous occupation
to meet an artificial demand, or engaged in stimulating that demand,
or compulsorily idle in its absence, under a commercial industrial
organisation so sensitive as to be affected by every fluctuation of the
market, and wherein every body of workers depends upon every other, yet
wherein each commercial unit works in competition with its hand against
the hand of every other. So that the natural social bond is ever at war
with the artificial and unsocial system--pending that true organisation
of labour in which lies the only solution of collective human life.
Since then life for the mass of mankind, by the working of various
causes--I will not say by consent--has become for the most part a
dull mechanical round of toil, alternating with enforced idleness,--a
kind of methodical and orderly lunacy with a few lucid intervals
which we call holidays or enjoyment, amusement, diversion, art, and
poetry--since humanity must have some kind of diversion, we have
created a special class to divert us. As the mediæval lord kept his
professional jester to ensure a supply of sparkling and ingenious
conversation, so we keep, or allow to starve, our artists, poets,
musicians, and actors. Very few of them can afford to do exactly as
they like--to be free to give us their very best. That would be too
expensive as things go; besides there are the laws of supply and
demand (as Lord Salisbury has reminded us). So that we have no higher
ideal even for an artist or a poet than that of a shopman behind the
counter, supplying wares of various or particular kinds to please his
customers; who again perhaps are not demanding what they individually
prefer, but what they think they ought to prefer, or what they believe
other people--supposed to be authorities--would tell them they ought
to prefer. It can hardly be wondered at then that our art should be so
often artificial.
But should we be justified in assuming that these influences on art are
the result of democracy?
It all depends upon what we understand by democracy, and what sort of
a democracy. Our present habits and characteristics are derived from
all sorts of sources and influences. Our present society is a huge
conglomerate formation with fossils scattered in it,--the relics of
living forms of past ages.
We chiefly differ from former societies by having a different class in
the ascendant with lower ideals, or rather no particular ideal at all,
unless 50 per cent or the subordination of most considerations to cash
and comfort can be counted as such.
Commercialism, in short, rules us with a rod of--brass. While nominally
and politically _free_, men were really never more dependent; and how
can men be free so long as their bread depends on the will or the whim
of another, and when they have no claim to a foot of land or a roof
over their heads, except on condition of a heavy tax upon their own
labour? And even in regard to the security of the continuance of labour
itself, and therefore of life, they are no more secure.
And yet we are told this is democracy, and that one man is as good as
another--yes, we might add, and a great deal better _off_, too.
What! is our social ladder planted then with its feet in the hell of
misery and poverty, its top rising to the false heaven of inane luxury
and hypocrisy, and the type of man held up to admiration and imitation
who works his way up, over others’ shoulders, from Lazarus to become
Dives?
Is this democracy? Is it not rather the old enemy, unscrupulous
ambition, without its old excuse, under a new mask of thrift, business
habits, respectability--secure in the automatic working of the great
rent-collecting and interest-yielding machine, faring sumptuously every
day on the labour of others?
And if it is proposed to do something to keep up our democratic
character, and to endeavour to shorten the hours of labour of our
wage-slaves, to throw them a very trifling crust from the table of
life, even advanced Liberal politicians seem to think the world is
coming to an end. What! the political clock stopping at eight hours
a day! Well, I know that after about only six or seven hours of
even interesting and varied work at the easel or the desk one feels
rather tired; but fancy eight hours in a coal seam! or at a grinder’s
wheel!--eight hours of mechanically repeated momentary actions at the
will of a steam engine! The only objections to an eight hours bill
appear to me to be that it is not _six_ hours, and that there should
be any doubt as to whether, under the present system with “the iron
law of wages,” its benefits even then might not be illusory, _taken by
themselves_. But no one proposes to do that, I presume?
But if the lot of the wage-labourer be not an enviable one, is the
lot of his masters more enviable? We might well envy the physical
endurance, patience, and pluck of a miner, or a docker, or a gas
stoker, but can any man envy such qualities as have been exhibited on
the part of some locking-out masters and profit-grinding companies?
Not even willing to fight on fair terms--men dismissed for sticking to
their union, the workman’s only weapon against capitalism! But even
the life which is the result of the “cash and comfort” ideal is far
from desirable, from the purely material point of view. _Cash_ there
may be, but the _comfort_ is often illusory; stewed in hot-water-pipe
atmosphere as if one was an orchid; stiff and uncomfortable dressing;
and rooms in which the absence of taste is as conspicuous as the
superfluity of furniture. All manner of formal customs and observances,
hardly ever a chance to do something for yourself, and language often
used to conceal if not thoughts at least feelings.
Is it in this direction we must look for our democratic ideal of life?
Is there anything democratic about it, except that the butler is
dressed like his master, a certainly unpicturesque result of democracy.
But it appears to me if democracy can show such social characteristics,
it cannot be a democracy really. It must be a sham democracy--a
commercial democracy, in fact. There evidently must be distinctions
even in democracies, because we even hear of “Tory-democracy,” quite
the most peculiar notion. We are evidently dealing, as is usual in
commercial matters, with questions of quality, 1st, 2d, 3d, and so
on, like grocers’ sugar, or like the classes on a railway--another
democratic institution, I suppose.
Whatever our “class,” however, we are all chained to the triumphal car
of commercialism, which, in spite of the application of brakes and
occasional stoppages, rolls on its iron way round the world. Yet its
speed and progress depend upon the constant watchfulness and careful
labour of millions--upon stretched sinews and overstrained nerves;
and who may count the sacrifices in the lives crushed beneath its
remorseless wheels! For all that the progress of the car is absolutely
dependent upon the continuance of that labour. What if the labourers
were by common and universal consent to throw down their tools some day?
I have often wondered that some of our modern realistic painters do
not give us pictures of the actualities of modern industry. Weird
scenes from the “black country”--those desolate regions that bloom but
in furnace flames; scenes in the mines; at iron works; nail and chain
makers--tragic pictures many of them will be; truly historic; eloquent
witnesses of the foundations of England’s riches, and what they have
cost.
It has always been the custom of a people to perpetuate in art their
deeds of arms, to carve and paint their triumphs and victories, but
we do not seem particularly proud of the real battles, commercial and
industrial, upon which our modern importance has been built, and the
toil and waste of human life by which it is sustained.
Yet the man who makes a fortune in business generally thinks it well
to spend something in pictures. We do not, however, as a rule, see
such subjects in his gallery. Our attention is called to the finished
product of civilisation, and it is thought desirable to draw a veil
over some of the intermediate processes. But few have the hardihood to
invite the skeleton to the feast.
Among the curious developments of latter-day civilisation is the
rise of a school of painters who apparently spend their talents in
discovering, if they can, the beauty of ugliness--the attraction of
repulsion! For instance, I noticed at Paris this summer that there was
quite a run on pictures of operations in hospitals. Even over here we
have men who quite revel in London smoke and fog, and in the charm of
the most ill-favoured spots.
This is no doubt more attributable to competition and picture shows
than to democracy, but it is hugging your chains with a vengeance.
If our artists are so affected by the ugliness of modern life that
they--the supposed apostles of beauty--deliberately prefer an ugly
subject to show their skill in treating it, we may perhaps lose our
sense of beauty altogether in time. While we can, however, let us
insist on the difference.
Art of course has many sides and capacities--as many, perhaps, as
democracy. While from one point of view it may be regarded simply as
the language of observation and record, and as such, I freely admit,
it has an important sphere of usefulness; on the other, by means of
figurative embodiment and poetic suggestion it is capable of appealing
to and stimulating our highest faculties.
The figurative emblematic form of art has always had a strong hold
upon the human mind. We see it under the influence of religious
ritual and associated with civil life paramount in the art of past
ages; and though under the modern search for naturalism symbolism
has practically disappeared from the canvas of the painter, except
in some few instances among the more thoughtful and poetic, it still
maintains an active and popular life in political cartooning. Every
week’s public affairs and public characters are treated in a series of
pictorial parables, and appear in every variety of comparison, analogy,
and disguise, pointing a satire or a political purpose according to
the editorial or proprietorial views of the journal. It is noteworthy
that it is always in the expression of the strongest feelings and
convictions that the parable or symbolical form is used.
Politics and social questions in our time have largely taken the place
which religious faith formerly occupied in the popular mind. They are
the only questions in which you can interest the mass of mankind--the
only questions, perhaps, on which people get really excited.
Accordingly they delight to see the expression of their political or
social faith in emphatic, familiar, and yet allegorical form, with a
satiric sting in it if possible.
Nothing so forcibly expresses the common current of political opinion,
or rather sentiment (or even prejudice), of the dominant sections of
society as its political and satiric cartoons. They will be valuable
material for the future historian. It is curious, too, how long a
symbolic figure once accepted will last. Take the familiar one of John
Bull himself. Is he really any longer typical of the comfortable,
powerful classes--the financier, the banker--who really rule the
roast-beef of old England? Instead of a mixture of semi-agricultural,
sporting, and Quaker characteristics, a commercial and semi-oriental
cast would now perhaps be nearer the truth. But even he must be
prepared to give way to the rising power, the real John Bull--LABOUR. I
think more advantage might be taken of this widespread love of parable,
symbolic and emblematic art. Something, for instance, might be done
in it as an effective means of conveying those fundamental economic
truths which are so necessary to realise before we can hope to make
real progress.
Illustrations might be given, for instance, of Mr. Ruskin’s
parallel--the _Crag_ Baron and the _Bag_ Baron.
The first is the baron of feudal times, with his castle on the crag
behind him, and the lances of his armed retainers ready to swoop upon
all coming through his territory and levy his blackmail.
The second is the baron of modern commercialism, with his own
appropriate scenery behind him--his castles, gaunt factories, and
instead of the forest of lances, a forest of chimneys. He rules by the
power of the money-bag. His bag is beside him, duly labelled rent,
profit, interest--the three great sources of his riches and power. He
is only disturbed by reading of the progress of socialism.
Another effective design might be a symbolic representation of the
present relations of capital and labour, suggested by the Hindu idea of
the universe--namely, that the world is supported upon the back of an
elephant, and the elephant stands upon a tortoise.
Even so the world of wealth and leisure rests upon capital (the
elephant), which again is supported by labour (the tortoise), which
indeed may not stand or go except by the will of the elephant and its
rider.
The relation of capital to labour might be further symbolised by the
_two_ coins in the elephant’s trunk to _one_ in the mouth of the
tortoise. The tortoise naturally looks discontented and resentful,
and altogether the position of affairs is insecure--insecure because
unnatural and unjust.
An emblem of evolution might be given by means of the design of a
plant growing from the root up, putting forth leaves, buds, and finally
flowers, with the caterpillar, chrysalis, and final transformation
into butterfly, typifying the progress of human society--a spiral
progression, but culminating in higher organisation. And so from the
course of growth and development in nature the socialist takes hope for
the future of humanity, through changing conditions and transitions,
and causes ever at work evolving a more humane and just order.