narrowing of his interest to the imitation of facts--tends, as we have
seen, to the limitation of his dramatic or poetic interest, or even
to its entire extinction. Our painter’s strength is spent upon the
realisation of persons often uninteresting, and incidents and themes
quite frivolous or even repulsive.
I am far from wishing back the old days of church influence and
patronage, when most pictures were religious and the demand for
Madonnas and saints almost unlimited; but when congratulations are
offered on the changed conditions--that art has broken loose from old
encumbering traditions and from sacerdotal fetters, it is too often
forgotten that, in spite of her boasted freedom, it is but an exchange
of bondage. When we see gifted artists chained down by their very
success to the constant production of the same sort of thing--generally
the presentment of some fact or phase of nature without ulterior
significance or import to humanity--where is our boasted width of range
and variety of interest?
Year after year our exhibition catalogues give us the same titles--the
same quotations even--I will not speak of the works corresponding
with those legends. I do not know that the money bag makes a better
escutcheon than the cross keys. I prefer the Phrygian cap and the red
flag to either, and truly our material gods, it would seem, give not so
much freedom as the old spiritual ones; for even in the oft-repeated
nativities and crucifixions of mediæval and early Renaissance painters,
what a world of invention and expression was often put into them! Such
subjects became, indeed, not only most fruitful themes for the display
of all the resources of the painter in the delineation of the life and
manners of his time, but their figurative significance gave them a
solemnity and depth of meaning for which it would be hard to find an
equivalent in modern art.
Storiation, which played so important a part in ancient art--what scope
has it in the modern cabinet picture? Were it not for the decorative
designers, the idea of story and series in pictorial design would
become extinct. Even in their hands it is too often too much on the old
lines, embodying the old ideas, and--from the necessities, perhaps,
of much or most important decorative work being for ecclesiastical
purposes--the ancient creeds.
If, owing to the absence of simplicity and dignity of life, but few
modern scenes lend themselves to decorative storiation--if the modern
body be too cumbered and disguised, what of the mind? Surely there are
thoughts and ideas distinctly modern, capable of figurative and poetic
embodiment, and charged with concern to humanity, if only he who runs
could be persuaded also to read.
If a painter here and there shows that he possesses any ideas a little
beyond the range of the illustrated newspaper, he is sure to be laughed
to scorn, and should he persist in his belief that painting is not
merely to be regarded as a commodity of the market, or as a toy for
grown-up and rather dull and _blasé_ children, let him abandon the hope
of making his bread by it.
A word as to the expression of action. A while ago Mr. Meybridge
lectured artists, through the Royal Academy, on the right way to
depict the action of a horse. He certainly succeeded in demonstrating,
by a very ingenious method, whereabouts a horse’s legs are found at
certain given consecutive moments--arrested by the photograph--but
no more striking proof could be given, especially when motion is
concerned, of the meaninglessness of an isolated fact than one of
these photographs. Taken singly, they express arrested action, which
is exactly what they _represent_ and nothing more. It is only when
the series is placed in consecutive order, and turned on a wheel, so
that they succeed each other on the retina, that the action is really
represented, and it is then of course complete; but that is _illusion_
rather than representation. Mr. Meybridge would have persuaded us that
artists have been fools since the world began in this matter. But in
representing a galloping horse, or any figure in action, in design,
the problem has always been to avoid the look of arrested action which
the exact record of the moment gives. The artist has to express, not
arrested, but continuous action. He must suggest, therefore, the moment
before and the moment after, and that often in one figure. The result
has been a certain convention, which conveys the idea of speed to the
mind more completely and convincingly than the exact imitation of the
action of any given moment could possibly do.
The truth is, that the external facts of motion are, like other
facts, expressionless in design, by themselves, and unless associated
with other facts and suggestions, and this has hitherto been frankly
acknowledged in art. I do not say that a new convention--new and more
perfect methods of expression of nature in art--may not be built on
the aggregation of more accurately recorded and observed facts, and
more profound knowledge. The plain inference is the other way. The
degree in which exact knowledge controls and determines methods of
representations in art is always a nice problem, and I do not pretend
to settle it.
My conclusion is, that the modern mind, in its eagerness for
literalism, has been led so far, after all, to but a superficial kind
of realism, and that which passes for realism is indeed too often only
a one-sided realism--reality only half realised. At the best it is but
the realisation of the passing sensation--the passing moment--the least
real thing in life and nature.
Nature, when we think we have seized her, verily turns and mocks us in
her turn. Alter the focus--go a little farther, or a little nearer, and
all is changed and falsified: so the artistic chase, like the artistic
problem, is endless. While idealist and realist are disputing, that
Pluto of art, the photographer, instantaneously seizes the fair maiden,
and carries her in a moment to his dark chamber, whence, though indeed
she reappears ravished of colour, it is in such verisimilitude as might
well be the despair of the painter, were not his vows addressed to a
yet fairer than Persephone.
[Illustration]
ART AND INDUSTRY
We are here to further the advancement of art in its application to
industry. Are we quite sure that we do not mean the advancement of
industry by the application of art?
For the last two or three centuries we appear to have been applying all
the power of organisation, the ingenuity, and the mechanical invention
of man to the advancement of industry in the interests of competitive
commerce; not with the advancement of art as the object, but rather
that of profit-making, with the economic result that we cannot find
work enough for our compulsorily idle hands to do; while in the din of
the vast workshop of machine production, and the fierce battle of the
world-market, art can hardly find a place for the sole of her foot.
Mechanical invention in the interests of trade has dominated us.
Mechanical invention has outstripped the invention of the artist.
Mechanical smoothness has taken the place of artistic thought and
finish. And why? Because to our great deities of commercial enterprise
and successful trade, the amount of the output is more regarded than
the artistic quality of the material and work.
The very spirit and meaning of the word “artistic” implies something
harmonious; something in relation to its surroundings; something
arising out of the joy of life, and expressing the delight of the
artist in his work, however arduous; something personal, the expression
of one mind, or of many--congruous--expressly and lovingly addressed
to particular persons, and adapted to particular places and things.
Not a mere system of guess-work, beginning with the designer who makes
a guess at the sort of thing that may possibly “take,” rather than
what he personally likes and has a feeling for. The designer, again,
being dependent on the manufacturer, guessing what the market or the
trade will take; or he again depends on the conjectures of the trade
as to what an unknown quantity in the public can be induced to take.
The public, again, surrounded with every species of conundrum in
the name of art, is driven to guess in _its_ turn not as to what it
really likes, or what is good and fitted to its purpose, but what is
the correct thing to buy, or what other people buy, or are likely to
buy. So the whole structure of applied art, under our present system,
speaking generally, is built upon the shifting sands of insincerity and
speculation.
Let us inquire what natural affinity there is between art and industry.
Properly considered, obviously, they should be inseparable; but the
spirit that rules industry now is wrapped up in the one object of the
salesman--to sell.
The spirit of industry is merely to produce. The spirit of the artist
is not merely to produce, but to express--to both produce and to
express something which is a joy to him in the making, and may be
a joy to the user and beholder. In the search after perfection of
method of expression, in the struggle to express his thought, to make
his work, whatever it be--the lines of a design, a simple, repeating
pattern, a moulding, a sculptured ornament, a figure, a group, a
picture, a building--to make his work live, to answer to his thought,
and so to touch the thoughts of others, the artist will frequently
undo or destroy his own work--will cast aside the labour that has cost
him perhaps hours of toil and thought, and try again, until his work
answers more nearly to the ideal in his mind.
Considerations of the market are forced upon him, it is true, too
often; but these have no necessary connection with art, and in so far
as he ceases to be true to his ideal, and is seriously influenced, or
driven, by circumstances to work consciously and exclusively for money,
as an artist he must deteriorate.
Now, the man of commerce--the controller of industry--seeks only
to make a _saleable_ article. He is influenced in his industrial
production simply by this object. He takes the opinions of salesmen,
of the trade, not of artists, as a rule, and so far as any artistic
standard or aim enters into the produce of his manufactory, it is
strictly checked by the average of what his rivals are doing, and by
the discovery of what the big public can be persuaded to buy.
Slowly, perhaps, some personal force or centre of artistic sincerity
creates a new impulse and new desires in a jaded public, sated with
every craze and whim under the name of art; slowly the wave of fashion
rises, swiftly it rolls. It affects the salesman first. His arts fail
him. He cannot palm off these coarse and inharmonious colours, these
hideous patterns, or this clumsy furniture, charm he ever so wisely. He
sells at a “great sacrifice,” and returns to the industrial king, the
manufacturer, who either evolves something “new and original” out of
his inner consciousness on the premises for next season, or he seeks
out the artist. He makes a compact with him. The man of ideas meets
the man of industry and profits. The result is of course a compromise.
The artist must turn out taking novelties in design for the market.
That is, the market of guess-work. The market must be the first
consideration; it is imperative to sell one’s season’s goods.
Commerce, like the old woman in the nursery tale, stands at the stile
(of an overstocked market) with her obdurate pig (over-production) that
refuses to move until the stick (of new demand) has been persuaded
to bring its influence to bear, and one by one all the characters
of the commercial drama act and re-act upon each other by the very
necessities of their existence, middleman and public, capitalist and
labourer. We shall find their prototypes in our nursery tale, up to
the ox (personifying John Bull) driven to action from the fear of the
butcher--the Nemesis of foreign competition.
The little allegory from the nursery fits the situation exactly. It has
been revealed unto babes.
So the whole mill of industrial commercial production is fed and set
in motion, and grinds on year after year. The wheels of its machinery,
like those of fortune herself, lifting some into prosperity, upon the
condition of the ruin of others, and the working order of the whole
depending on the existence of the vast majority of our brothers and
sisters in the condition of not being more than one week’s remove from
destitution.
This is the social and industrial structure we have raised, in which we
live and move and have our being. Art and industry, like figures carved
in stone, may adorn its portal, and our hopes and fears, our regrets
for the past, our thoughts for the future, play like cloud shadows upon
its grim façade, which will yet master our efforts at humanising and
beautifying, until its tenants some day insist on improvements, perhaps
even involving a change of plan and structure.
Meanwhile our fluctuating harlequin of fashion and trade comes and
goes. This year we are going to be “artistic”--everything is to be
“artistic”--art colours, art furniture, art in the attic, art in the
coalhole. Next year, away with your degraded colours! Let us be grandly
barbaric in mauve and magenta! Is this the delightful spontaneous
caprice of unstable humanity, seeking novelty in the simplicity of its
heart? Or is it wholly unconnected with the inscrutable movements and
exigencies of those commercial and industrial potentates whereof I have
spoken?
Anyway, art and industry remain a somewhat ill-assorted couple, and
furnish an additional modern instance to those who rudely ask, “Is
marriage a failure?”
Of course, to the artist accustomed to believe in personal work--to
value the individual touch and characteristic method--the whole idea of
the application of steam-power, and the mechanical reproduction of any
form of art wholesale, is an entire mistake; or, at least, it can only
be countenanced under certain conditions and in certain well-defined
directions under controlling taste, such, for instance, as the domain
of the printer, whether of books, cottons, wall-papers, and the like,
or in the work of the loom. I have constantly been struck, in passing
through one of our industrial exhibitions--those huge trophies of the
world’s trade, that we have raised from time to time, and which are
counted among the triumphs of the century--I have often been struck
with the marvellous mechanical invention, and the extent and range of
the application of steam machinery. One is impressed with a vivid idea
of the lightning speed with which the competitive race is run, and the
scale on which the world’s market is stocked. But if one inquires how
this mechanical march has affected the progress of art, the answer
generally appears in some such shape as this. We may, perhaps, see
some wonderful piece of ingenuity and mechanism--a carpet loom, for
instance, such as I saw at the American Exhibition in London. The
machine itself appeared to be a marvel of adaptation; but it would
seem as if all the invention had been exhausted upon the means of
production, and when one came to the product itself--the carpet in the
loom--the result as an artistic matter, a matter of design and colour,
was simply deplorable. So that one generally turns from these triumphs
of the century with a conviction that we have lost sight of the end in
our search for mechanical perfection in the means.
The world, having increased so much under the sway of our industrial
kings (we will grant them that), having congregated in vast centres for
the convenience of commerce and industry, necessarily has large and
immediate wants. Millions of interdependent human beings demand to be
fed and clothed, warmed and sheltered, with swift and efficient means
of communication and carriage from place to place. Wholesale industrial
production does it, with the aid of steam and electricity; and does
it so thoroughly (as regards quantity and the purchasing power of the
community) as to overshoot the mark and glut the market, which means
that a number of citizens are obliged to go without the comforts and
necessities they have assisted in producing, seeing that the system
of production is not economically organised in the interest of the
community, but rather for the profit of individuals.
The world does not stop in its demands at food and clothes and
shelter, however. Man does not live by bread alone. He needs mental
bread, spiritual exaltation, amusement, excitement, and would clothe
his thoughts in artistic and architectural garments. Here, however,
wholesale industrial machine production is distinctly at fault, even
if in the quality of its food stuffs and bare necessities it has been
blameless. In making art a commodity, or in the endeavour to make it
so, its distinctive virtue and value has been left out of account. In
associating it with purely mechanical and subdivided toil, in handing
it over to the blind fingers of insensate machinery, or in setting
before it a purely commercial object, both its spiritual and sensuous
delight vanishes, and the refining and educating influence of both its
practice and its ultimate appeal is lost. The human interest being
reduced to a minimum, or made to depend solely on impulse of the
pictorial sketcher or designer in no sort of relation to the man,
or the process by which his work is to be reproduced, is apt to lose
itself in the desire for mere novelty or trick, to become the art of
the newspaper, which rests its claims to attention on its impartial,
partial, or partisan record of passing events and news--nothing if not
new. Thus, both the beauty and the dignity of art are endangered, while
the reduction of handicraft to mechanism takes their personal interest
and individuality away.
The idea of producing art wholesale by steam-power is certainly an
extraordinary one. It is very much like printing a misquoted line from
a poet, repeating it page after page, and calling the result a book.
As I have already said, our mechanical invention, directed to the
cheapening of the processes of industrial production, and the
acceleration in speed of that production, has outstripped our artistic
invention. In our efforts to increase the means of production we
have lost sight of the end. In purely artistic production the old
methods, the old tools, mostly remain, as they have done for centuries,
unaffected by mechanical invention, for the simple reason that nothing
can supersede the hand. The tools of the sculptor, the carver, the
painter, are but extra fingers supplementary to the original four and
the indispensable thumb, to which the artist continually recurs, and
with which his work is begun and ended. That personal touch and impress
of character we value so highly in what we call the Fine Arts, with the
disappearance of the handicraftsman and the severance of designer and
workman, has practically ceased to exist; except in those instances of
individual revival and pursuit of a craft on its original lines, which,
among the cultured and the leisured, or on the part of painters or
sculptors as a diversion, have increased so much of late years.
The modern conditions of manufacture appear to have destroyed the old
traditions of the handicrafts. Our commerce has vulgarised and confused
the public taste. Yet where any form of art is concerned--anything in
the nature of a pattern or design in the material of surface decoration
in any form, appealing to the eye, in the goods produced--manufacture
is absolutely dependent on design of some sort. It may be begged,
borrowed, paid for, or stolen, but still the design must be there to
start with. Yet design, so far as it is under the influence of the
existing conditions, has become tamer and tamer, and more and more
meaningless and superficial; and it is obvious that the ill effects of
a bad design are increased a thousandfold, or exactly in proportion to
the increase in the mechanical power and speed of its production by the
resources of machinery.
When the power of reproduction is so enormous, it becomes, obviously,
more than ever necessary to reproduce nothing in design but what is
sound and good in its own way. If not, far better confine ourselves to
the manufacture of plain materials: good cloth, well woven and dyed,
without pattern; serviceable furniture, without carving or painting,
unless it can be sincere and thoughtful; useful pottery, as good
in contour as the wheel and the skill of the thrower can make it,
unspoiled by the ravings of the china painter distracted by centuries
of false taste, or confused by dictionaries of ornament, or the
impressionism of the modern Japanese or Parisian.
There are, of course, certain great industries which are
absolutely dependent on the surface designer and pattern maker,
such as cotton-printing, carpet-weaving, paper-staining, for
instance--manufactures which would not exist at all without a constant
supply of designs. There is no doubt that this is fully recognised by
the manufacturers or their managers; and the utmost pains, consistent
with a due regard for the possibilities of profit, are taken by the
leading firms to secure at least competent working drawings, if not
tasteful designs. It may be conceded, too, that, as regards design,
these industries have been the first to show the influence of those
ideas which have produced a kind of revolution among designers of late
years, with the result that a movement which appears to be purely
English in origin has made its mark in these directions, and has
largely counteracted the stream of tendency which at one time set so
strongly towards Paris as the head centre of taste in all matters of
art, the disastrous effects of which still affect us in many ways.
The real secret of Continental influence in design upon us is no doubt
to be found in the fact that the severance of the arts and handicrafts
has never been anything like so complete in other European countries
as in industrial England. Our great industrial rival America shows the
same want of originating power in artistic design, the same tendency in
a more marked degree to avail herself of Parisian modes in art. However
degraded the taste of the designer, or debased in type the design, the
Frenchman or the Italian designer remained thoroughly in touch with
the craftsman, and understood the technical conditions of the work
thoroughly, so that his working drawings would be perfectly adapted to
the method of manufacture. We have here, at any rate, one reason why
our manufacturers have given preference to French designs, and have
been so much in the habit of crossing the water for new supplies. Yet
we must recognise that so closely connected are now all countries,
commercial and industrial, that the slightest change in one will surely
affect the other. If foreign artists and workmen are in demand, our
own suffer, or if our native talent is preferred, then our Continental
brothers are worse off. This, of course, is the result of competition.
Level up all round with technical education. Competition would come in
again. You would get a technically educated proletariat, but no more
secure of a livelihood than they are at present. Supposing England
temporarily regained her commercial ascendency, the suffering would
only be transferred from one country to another; and can we morally
justify it to ourselves that people of one nationality have more right
to live than those of another? These are awkward questions. But to
return.
The term “artist” in this country has come to mean the pictorial artist
only. Our art education has been dominated by the ideas and methods
of the pictorial artist, and nearly everything has been sacrificed to
the naturalistic, imitative, pictorial principles of representation,
which, of whatever value they may be to the painter of easel pictures,
or the popular illustration of newspapers, have but remote bearing on
applied design. Fortune, fame, and favour have been open to the painter
of pictures almost exclusively, and our art school training has been
sedulously directed to the manufacture of painters as distinct from
designers and craftsmen.