No better illustration of this could be found than the sections of the
Paris Exhibition which came under the heading of _Decorative Art_.
Decoration. But decoration of what? In reality of nothing. All the
objects--from the jewellery and enamels to the furniture and
hangings--which this decorative art is supposed to decorate, are the
merest excuse and sham. Not one of them is the least useful, or at all
events useful once it is decorated. And nobody wants it to be useful.
What _is_ wanted is a pretext, for _doing art_ on the side of the
artist, for buying costly things on the side of the public. And behind
this pretext there is absolutely no genuine demand for any definite
object serving any definite use; none of that insistence (which we see
in the past) that the shape, material, and colour should be the very
best for practical purposes; and of that other insistence,
marvellously blended with the requirements of utility, that the shape,
material and colour should also be as beautiful as possible. The
invaluable suggestions of real practical purpose, the organic dignity
of integrated habit and necessity, the safety of tradition, the
spiritual weightiness of genuine message, all these elements of
creative power are lacking. And in default of them we see a great
amount of artistic talent, artificially fed and excited by the
teaching and the example of every possible past or present art,
exhausting itself in attempts to invent, to express, to be something,
anything, so long as it is new. Hence forms gratuitous, without
organic quality or logical cogency, pulled about, altered and
re-altered, carried to senseless finish and then wilfully blurred.
Hence that sickly imitation, in a brand-new piece of work, of the
effects of time, weather, and of every manner of accident or
deterioration: the pottery and enamels reproducing the mere patina of
age or the trickles of bad firing; the relief work in marble or metal
which looks as if it had been rolled for centuries in the sea, or
corroded by acids under ground. And the total effect, increased by all
these methods of wilful blunting and blurring, is an art without
stamina, tired, impotent, short-lived, while produced by an excessive
expense of talent and effort of invention.
For here we have the mischief: all the artistic force is spent by the
art in merely keeping alive; and there is no reserve energy for living
with serenity and depth of feeling. The artist wears himself out, to a
great extent, in wondering what he shall do (there being no practical
reason for doing one thing more than another, or indeed anything at
all), instead of applying his power, with steady, habitual certainty
of purpose and efficiency of execution, to doing it in the very best
way. Hence, despite this outlay of inventive force, or rather in
direct consequence thereof, there is none of that completeness and
measure and congruity, that restrained exuberance of fancy, that more
than adequate carrying out, that all-round harmony, which are possible
only when the artist is altering to his individual taste some shape
already furnished by tradition or subduing to his pleasure some
problem insisted on by practical necessity.
Meanwhile, all round these galleries crammed with useless objects
barely pretending to any utility, round these pavilions of the
Decorative Arts, the Exhibition exhibits (most instructive of all its
shows) samples of the most marvellous indifference not merely to
beauty, peace and dignity, but to the most rudimentary æsthetic and
moral comfort. For all the really useful things which men take
seriously because they increase wealth and power, because they save
time and overcome distance; all these "useful" things have the naïve
and colossal ugliness of rudimentary animals, or of abortions, of
everything hurried untimely into existence: machines, sheds, bridges,
trams, motor-cars: not one line corrected, not one angle smoothed, for
the sake of the eye, of the nerves of the spectator. And all of it,
both decorative futility and cynically hideous practicality (let alone
the various exotic raree shows from distant countries or more distant
centuries) expect to be enjoyed after a jostle at the doors and a
scurry along the crowded corridors, and to the accompaniment of every
rattling and shrieking and jarring sound. For mankind in our days
intends to revel in the most complicated and far-fetched kinds of
beauty while cultivating convenient callousness to the most elementary
and atrocious sorts of ugliness. The art itself reveals it; for even
in its superfine isolation and existence for its own sake only, art
cannot escape its secondary mission of expressing and recording the
spirit of its times. These elaborate æsthetic baubles of the
"Decorative Arts" are full of quite incredibly gross barbarism. And,
even as the iron chest, studded with nails, or the walnut press,
unadorned save by the intrinsic beauty and dignity of their
proportions, and the tender irregularities of their hammered surface,
the subtle bevelling of their panels; even as these humble objects in
some dark corner of an Italian castle or on the mud floor of a Breton
cottage, symbolise in my mind the most intense artistic sensitiveness
and reverence of the Past; so, here at this Exhibition, my impressions
of contemporary over-refinement and callousness are symbolised in a
certain cupboard, visibly incapable of holding either linen or
garments or crockery or books, of costly and delicately polished wood,
but shaped like a packing-case, and displaying with marvellous
impartiality two exquisitely cast and chased doorguard plates of
far-fetched, many-tinted alloys of silver, and--a set of hinges, a
lock and a key, such as the village ironmonger supplies in blue paper
parcels of a dozen. A mere coincidence, an accident, you may object;
an unlucky oversight which cannot be fairly alleged against the art of
our times. Pardon me: there may be coincidences and accidents in other
matters, but there are none in art; because the essence of art is to
sacrifice even the finest irrelevancies, to subordinate the most
refractory details, to subdue coincidence and accident into seeming
purpose and harmony. And whatever our practical activity, in its
identification of time and money, may allow itself in the way of
"scamping" and of "shoddy"--art can never plead an oversight, because
art, in so far as it _is_ art, represents those organic and organised
preferences in the domain of form, those imperative and stringent
demands for harmony, which see everything, feel everything, and know
no law or motive save their own complete satisfaction.
Art for art's sake! We see it nowhere revealed so clearly as in the
Exhibition, where it masks as "Decorative Art." Art answering no claim
of practical life and obeying no law of contemplative preference, art
without root, without organism, without logical reason or moral
decorum, art for mere buying and selling, art which expresses only
self-assertion on the part of the seller, and self-satisfaction on the
part of the buyer. A walk through this Exhibition is an object-lesson
in a great many things besides æsthetics; it forces one to ask a good
many of Tolstoi's angriest questions; but it enables one also, if duly
familiar with the art of past times, to answer them in a manner
different from Tolstoi's.
One carries away the fact, which implies so many others, that not one
of these objects is otherwise than expensive; expensive, necessarily
and intentionally, from the rarity both of the kind of skill and of
the kind of material; these things are reserved by their price as well
as their uselessness, for a small number of idle persons. They have no
connection with life, either by penetrating, by serviceableness, deep
into that of the individual; or by spreading, by cheapness, over a
wide surface of the life of the nations.