and by the will of the people, deliberately, in the common interest,
declaring for common and collective possession of the means of life
and of wealth, as against individual property and monopoly. Since the
wealth of a country is only produced by common and collective effort,
and even the most individual of individualists is dependent for every
necessary, comfort, or luxury of life upon the labour of untold crowds
of workers, there is no inherent unreasonableness in such a view,
or in the advocacy of such a system, which might be proved to be as
beneficial, in the higher sense, for the rich as for the poor, as of
course it would abolish both. It is quite possible to cling to the
contrary opinion, but it should be fully understood that Socialism
does not mean "dividing up," and that a man is not necessarily not a
Socialist who does not sell all that he has to give to the poor. "A
poor widow is gathering nettles to stew for her dinner. A perfumed
seigneur lounging in the _[oe]il de b[oe]uf_ hath an alchemy whereby
he can extract from her every third nettle and call it rent." Thus
wrote Carlyle. Men like William Morris would make such alchemy
impracticable; but no man can change a social (or unsocial) system by
himself, however willing; nor can anyone, however gifted or farseeing,
get beyond the conditions of his time, or afford to ignore them in
the daily conduct of life, although at the same time his life and
expressed opinions may all the while count as factors in the evolution
by which a new form of society comes about.
Thus much seems due to the memory of a man like William Morris, who
was frequently taunted with not doing, as a Socialist, things that, as
a Socialist, he did not at all believe in; things, for which, too,
one knows perfectly well, his censors, if he had done them, would have
been the first to denounce him for a fool.
At all events, it is certain that William Morris spent some of the
best years of his life, he gave his time, his voice, his thought, his
pen, and much money to put Socialism before his countrymen. This can
never be gainsaid. Those who have been accustomed to regard him from
this point of view as a dangerous revolutionary might be referred to
the writings of John Ball, and Sir Thomas More, his predecessors in
England's history, who upheld the claims of labour and simple life,
against waste, want, and luxury. Indeed, it might be contended that it
was a conservative clinging to the really solid foundations of a
happy human life which made Morris a Socialist as much as artistic
conviction and study of modern economics. The enormous light which
has been recently thrown by historic research upon mediaeval life and
conditions of labour, upon the craft guilds, and the position of the
craftsman in the Middle Ages--light to which Morris himself in no
small degree contributed--must also be counted as a factor in the
formation of his opinions.
But whether accounted conservative or revolutionary in social
economics and political opinion, there can be no doubt of William
Morris's conservatism in another field, important enough in its
bearings upon modern life, national and historic sentiment, and
education--I mean the protection of Ancient Buildings. He was one of
the founders of the society having that object, and remained to the
last one of the most energetic members of the committee, and in
such important work his architectural knowledge was of course of the
greatest value. At a time when, owing to the action of a multitude of
causes, the historic buildings of the past are in constant danger,
not only from the ravages of time, weather, and neglect, but also,
and even to a greater extent, from the zeal of the "restorer," the
importance of the work which Morris did with his society--the work
which that society carries on--can hardly be overestimated.
The pressure of commercial competition and the struggle for life in
our cities--the mere necessity for more room for traffic--the dead
weight of vested interest, the market value of a site, the claims of
convenience, fashion, ecclesiastical or otherwise, or sometimes sheer
utilitarianism, entirely oblivious of the social value of historic
associations of architectural beauty--all are apt to be arrayed at
one time or another, or even, perhaps, all combined, against the
preservation of an ancient building if it happens to stand in their
way.
The variety, too, of the cases in which the difference of the artistic
conditions which govern the art and craft of building in the past and
in the present is another element which often prevents the defenders
and destroyers from meeting on the same plane. It is the old tragic
conflict between old and new, but enormously complicated, and with the
forces of destruction and innovation tremendously increased.
William Morris was a singularly sane and what is called a
"level-headed" man. He had the vehemence, on occasion, of a strong
nature and powerful physique. He cared greatly for his convictions.
Art and life were real to him, and his love of beauty was a passion.
His artistic and poetic vision was clear and intense--all the more
so, perhaps, for being exclusive on some points. The directness of
his nature, as of his speech, might have seemed singularly unmodern
to some who prefer to wrap their meaning with many envelopes. He might
occasionally have seemed brusque, and even rough; but so does the
north wind when it encounters obstacles. Men are judged by the
touchstones of personal sympathy or antipathy; but whether attracted
or repelled in such a presence, no one could come away without an
impression that he had met a man of strong character and personal
force, whether he realized any individual preconception of the poet,
the artist, and the craftsman, or not.
He was certainly all these, yet those who only knew him through his
works would have but a partial and incomplete idea of his many-sided
nature, his practicality, personal force, sense of humour,[3] and
all those side-lights which personal acquaintance throws upon the
character of a man like William Morris.
[Footnote 1: At the same time, it must be remembered, his
knowledge of mediaeval life, the craft guilds, and the
condition of the labourer in England in the fifteenth
century, helped him in his economic studies and his Socialist
propaganda.]
[Footnote 2: Here Morris lived when in London and his press
was set up close by at Sussex House, opposite to which is the
Doves Bindery of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson. Much of Morris's time
was spent at Kelmscott, near Lechlade, Gloucestershire, a
delightful old manor house close to the Thames stream. This
house was formerly held by D. G. Rossetti conjointly with
Morris. At Hammersmith the room outside the house, after the
carpet looms went to Merton, was used as the meeting room of
the Hammersmith Socialist Society.]
[Footnote 3: It is noteworthy that one who excluded humour
from his own work, whether literary, or artistic, had a keen
appreciation of it in the work of others. Few who only knew
Morris through his poems, romances, and designs would imagine
that among his most favourite books were "Huckleberry Finn,"
by Mark Twain, and "Uncle Remus." I have often heard him
recall passages of the first-named book with immense enjoyment
of the fun. He was, besides, always an admirer of Dickens.]
THE ENGLISH REVIVAL IN DECORATIVE ART
[Illustration]
THE ENGLISH REVIVAL IN DECORATIVE ART
The sense of beauty, like the enchanted princess in the wood, seems
liable, both in communities and individuals, to periods of hypnotism.
These periods of slumber or suspended animation, are not, however,
free from distorted dreams, having a certain tyrannical compulsion
which causes those under their influence blindly to accept arbitrary
ideas and cast-iron customs as if they were parts of the irreversible
order of nature--until the hour of the awakening comes and the
household gods of wood and stone, so ignorantly worshipped, are cast
from their pedestals.
Such a period of apathetic slumber and of awakening in the arts we
have been passing through in England during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, and since, side by side with analogous movements
in the political and social world.
As regards domestic architecture, the streets of London will
illustrate the successive waves of taste or fashion which the past and
present century have seen, from the quasi-classical, represented in
the Peloponnesus of Regent's Park, to the eclectic Queen Anne-ism
of the aesthetic village at Turnham Green; or the more recent
developments which have followed newer ideas of town-planning, the
modern hotel such as the Savoy or the Piccadilly, or the New Aero Club
in Pall Mall, the modern store, such as Selfridge's. Contrast such
examples of what one might call our new Imperial Renascence style
with the types of simple cottage dwellings in the Garden City at
Letchworth, or in the Hampstead garden suburb, and elsewhere; or these
again with the larger country mansions some of our best architects
are raising in the land. These extremes, with all the various
modifications of the outward aspect of the English home--degrees
indicating the arc of architectural fashion, as it were--imply a
series of corresponding transformations of interiors with all their
modern complexities of furniture and decorations.
But the wheat of artistic thought and invention is a good deal
encumbered with chaff--the chaff of commerce and of fashion--and it
needs some pains to find the real vital germs. To trace the genesis of
our English revival we must go back to the days of the pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, and although none of that famous group were decorative
designers in the strict sense--unless we except D. G. Rossetti--yet by
their resolute and enthusiastic return to the direct symbolism, frank
naturalism, and poetic or romantic sentiment of mediaeval art,
with the power of modern analysis superadded, and the more profound
intellectual study of both nature and art, which the severity of their
practice demanded, and last, but not least, their intense love
of detail, turned the attention to other branches of design than
painting. The very marked character of their pictures, standing
out with almost startling effect from among the works of the older
Academic School, demanded at least a special architecture in the
frames of their pictures, and this led to the practice of painters
designing their own frames, at least those who were concerned for
unity and decorative effect. Mr. Holman Hunt, for instance, I believe
always designed his own frames, as well as some of the ornamental
accessories of his pictures--such as the pot for the basil in his
"Isabella." D. G. Rossetti the poet-painter, and perhaps the central
and inspiring luminary of the remarkable group, evidently cared
greatly for decorative effect, and bestowed the utmost pains upon
tributary detail, designing the frames to his pictures, the cover
and lining for his own poems, and various title-pages. Many of
his pictures, too, are remarkable for their beauty and richness of
accessory details which give a distinct decorative charm to his work,
closely associated as they are with its motive and poetic purpose.
The researches of Henry Shaw, and his fine works upon art of the
middle ages, first published in the "Forties" by Pickering, and
printed by the Chiswick Press, no doubt had their share in directing
the attention of artists to the beauty and intention bestowed upon
every accessory of daily life in mediaeval times.
Above all influences from the literary side, however, must be placed
the work of John Ruskin, an enormously vitalizing and still living
force, powerful to awaken thought, and by its kindling enthusiasm
to stir the dormant sense of beauty in the minds that come under the
spell of his eloquence, which always turns the eyes to some new or
unregarded or forgotten beauty in nature or in art. The secret of his
powers as a writer on art lies no doubt in the fact that he approached
the whole question from the fundamental architectural side, and saw
clearly the close connection of artistic development with social
life. The whole drift of his teaching is towards sincerity and
Gothic freedom in the arts, and is a strong protest against Academic
convention and classical coldness.
Among architects, men like Pugin and William Burges, enthusiasts
in the Gothic revival, gave a great deal of care and thought to
decorative detail and the design of furniture and accessories. The
latter, in the quaint house which he built for himself in Melbury
Road, showed a true Gothic spirit of inventiveness and whimsicality
applied to things of everyday use as well as the mural decorator's
instinct for symbolism. Since their day Mr. Norman Shaw may almost be
said to have carried all before him, and has quite created a type of
later Victorian architecture, and his advice is still sought in the
design of various buildings and street improvements of modern London.
His work, beautiful, well proportioned, and decorative as it often is,
however, has not the peculiar character and reserve of the work of Mr.
Philip Webb, and the latter is a decorative designer, especially of
animals, of remarkable originality and power. His work in architecture
and other designs is generally seen in association with that of
William Morris in decoration.
The impulse towards Greek and Roman forms in furniture and decoration,
which had held sway with designers since the French Revolution,
appeared to be dead. The elegant lines and limbs of quasi-classical
couches and chairs on which our grandfathers and grandmothers
reclined--the former in high coat-collars and the latter in short
waists--had grown gouty and clumsy, in the hands of Victorian
upholsterers. The carved scrolls and garlands had lost even the
attenuated grace they once possessed and a certain feeling for
naturalism creeping in made matters worse, and utterly deranged the
ornamental design of the period. An illustrated catalogue of the
exhibition of 1851 will sufficiently indicate the monstrosities in
furniture and decoration which were supposed to be artistic. The last
stage of decomposition had been reached, and a period of, perhaps,
unexampled hideousness in furniture, dress, and decoration set in
which lasted the life of the second empire, and fitly perished with
it. Relics of this period I believe are still to be discovered in the
cold shade of remote drawing-rooms, and "apartments to let," which
take the form of big looking-glasses, and machine-lace curtains, and
where the furniture is afflicted with curvature of the spine, and
dreary lumps of bronze and ormolu repose on marble slabs at every
opportunity, where monstrosities of every kind are encouraged under
glass shades, while every species of design-debauchery is indulged
in upon carpets, curtains, chintzes and wall-papers, and where the
antimacassar is made to cover a multitude of sins. When such ideas of
decoration prevailed, having their origin or prototypes, in the vapid
splendours of imperial saloons, and had to be reduced to the scale of
the ordinary citizen's house and pocket, the thing became absurd as
well as hideous. Besides, the cheap curly legs of the _un_easy chairs
and couches came off, and the stuffed seats, with a specious show of
padded comfort, were delusions and snares. Long ago the old English
house-place with its big chimney-corner had given way to the bourgeois
arrangement of dining and drawing-room--even down to the smallest
slated hut with a Doric portico. The parlour had become a kind of
sanctuary veiled in machine-lace, where the lightness of the curtains
was compensated for by the massiveness of their poles, and where
Berlin wool-work and bead mats flourished exceedingly.
Enter to such an interior a plain unvarnished rush-bottomed chair from
Buckinghamshire, sound in wind and limb--"C'est impossible!" And yet
the rush-bottomed chair and the printed cotton of frank design and
colour from an unpretending and somewhat inaccessible house in Queen
Square may be said to have routed the false ideals, vulgar smartness
and stuffiness in domestic furniture and decoration--at least wherever
refinement and feeling have been exercised at all.
"Lost in the contemplation of palaces we have forgotten to look about
us for a chair," wrote Mr. Charles L. Eastlake in an article which
appeared in "The Cornhill Magazine" some time in the "sixties," or
early "seventies." The same writer (afterwards Keeper of the National
Gallery) brought out "Hints on Household Taste" shortly afterwards,
and he, too, was "on the side of the angels" of sense and fitness in
these things. The "chair" at any rate was now discovered, if only a
rush-bottomed one.
Nowadays it might perhaps be said that the chair gets more
contemplation and attention than the palace, as since then the
influence of our old English eighteenth-century furniture designers
has been restored, and Chippendale, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite
are again held in honour in our interiors, and to judge from the
innumerable specimens offered in their name by our furniture dealers
the industry of these famous designers must have been prodigious!
The first practical steps towards actually producing things combining
use and beauty and thus enabling people so minded to deck their homes
after the older and simpler English manner was taken by William
Morris and his associates, who founded the house in Queen Square
afore-mentioned. Appealing at first only to a limited circle of
friends mostly engaged in the arts, the new ideas began to get abroad,
the new designs were eagerly seized upon. Morris and Company had to
extend their operations, and soon no home with any claim to decorative
charm was felt to be complete without its vine and fig-tree so to
speak--from Queen Square; and before long a typical Morris room was
given to the British Public to dine in at the South Kensington (now
the Victoria and Albert) Museum.
The great advantage and charm of the Morrisian method is that it lends
itself to either simplicity or to splendour. You might be almost
plain enough to please Thoreau, with a rush-bottomed chair, piece of
matting, and oaken trestle-table; or you might have gold and lustre
(the choice ware of William de Morgan) gleaming from the sideboard,
and jewelled light in your windows, and walls hung with rich arras
tapestry.
Of course, a host of imitators appeared, and manufacturers and
upholsterers were quick to adapt the more superficial characteristics,
watering down the character a good deal for the average taste--that
is, the timid taste of the person who has not made up his mind, which
may be described as the "wonder-what-so-and-so-will-think-of-it"
state--but its effects upon the older ideas of house decoration were
definite. Plain painting displaced graining and marbling, frankly
but freely conventionalized patterns routed the imitative and nosegay
kinds. Leaded and stained glass filled the places which were wont to
be filled with the blank despair of ground glass. The white
marble mantelpiece turned pale before rich hangings and deep-toned
wall-papers, and was dismantled and sent to the churchyard.
These were some of the most marked effects of the adoption of the new,
or a return to older and sounder ideas in domestic decoration.
The quiet influence of the superb collections at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, and the opportunities of study, open to all, of the
most beautiful specimens of mediaeval, renascence, and oriental design
and craftsmanship of all kinds must not be forgotten--an influence
which cannot be rated as of too much importance and value, and which
has been probably of more far-reaching influence in its effect on
designers and craftsman than the more direct efforts of the Art
Department to reach them through its school system. By means of this,
as is well known, it was sought to improve the taste and culture of
artisans by putting within their reach courses of study and exercises
in drawing and design, the results of which, it was hoped, carried
back into the practice of their various trades and handicrafts, would
make them better craftsmen because better draughtsmen. Now, if we were
to ask why on the whole the system has not been so fruitful of result
in this direction we should find ourselves plunged at once into the
deep waters of economic conditions, of the relations of employer and
employed, of hours, of wages, of commercial competition, trade unions,
and, in fact, should bring the whole Labour question about our ears.
Of course the whole scheme of the schools of design was based upon the
idea of improvement _downwards_, and like many modern improvements,
or reforms, its contrivers sought to make the tree of art flourish and
put forth new leaves without attending to the nourishment of the roots
or touching the soil. But the drawing-board and the workshop-bench
are after all two very different things, and it is by no means certain
that proficiency at one would necessarily produce a corresponding
improvement at the other, except indeed, it be on the principle that
if a man acquires one language it will be easier for him to learn
others. But at this point another consideration comes in. You get your
student seated at his drawing-board, you set him to represent at the
point of his pencil or chalk certain objects, casts, for instance, and
encourage him to portray their appearance with all relief of light
and shade, dwelling solely on the necessity of his attaining a certain
degree of purely pictorial skill, which in itself is really of no
practical use to a designer of ornament intended to be worked out in
some other material such as a textile, wood, or metal. In fact, the
development of pictorial skill has a strong tendency to lead the
student to devote himself entirely to pictorial work, and hitherto
there have been plenty of other inducements, such as the chance of
larger monetary reward and social position. If he is not ultimately
drawn into the already overcrowded ranks of the picture producers, he
is too likely to carry back into his own particular craft a certain
love of pictorial treatment and effect which may really be injurious
to his sense of fitness in adapting design and material. This indeed
is what evidently has happened as the result of much so-called
art-education, and we are only now slowly awakening to the conception
that art is not necessarily the painting of pictures, but that the
most refined artistic feeling may be put into every work of man's
hand, and that each after its kind gives more delight and becomes more
and more beautiful in proportion as it follows the laws of its own
existence--when a design is in perfect harmony with its material, and
one does not feel one would want it reproduced in any other way.
It is next to impossible to get this unity of design and material
unless the craftsman fashions the thing he designs, or unless the
designer thoroughly understands the conditions and allows them to
determine the character of his design, which he can hardly do
unless he is in close and constant touch with the craftsman. Now
the industrial conditions under which the great mass of things are
produced, which have gradually been developed in the interests of
trade rather than of art have tended to separate the designer
and craftsman more and more and to subdivide their functions. Our
enterprising manufacturers are quick enough to adopt or adapt an idea,
and some will pay liberally for it, but they do not always realize
that it does not follow because _one_ good thing is produced in a
limited quantity that therefore it must be much better if a cheap
imitation of it can be produced by the thousand--but then we no longer
produce for _use_ but for _profit_. Demand and supply--"thou shalt
have no other gods but these," says the trader in effect; although the
demand in these days may be as artificial as the supply.
The Nemesis of trade pursues the invention of the artist, as the
steamers on the river on boat-race day pursue, almost as if they would
run down, the slender craft of the oarsmen straining every nerve for
victory. It is a suggestive spectacle. Someone's brain and hand must
set to work--must give the initiative before the steam-engine can be
set going. But how many brains and hands, nay lives, has it devoured
since our industrial epoch began?