London that the great changes have been made which have practically
transformed the town, sweeping away historic buildings and relics of
the past, and giving a general impression of rapid scene-shifting to
our streets.
The most costly and tempting wares are displayed in the shops in
clothing, food, and all the necessities of life, as well as fantastic
luxuries and superfluities in the greatest profusion--"things that
nobody wants made to give to people who have no use for them"--yet,
necessities or not, removed only by the thickness of the plate-glass
from the famished eyes of penury and want.
The shops, too, are not workshops. The goods appear in the windows
as if by magic. Their producers are hidden away in distant factories,
working like parts of a machine upon portions of wholes which perhaps
they never see complete.
Turning to the residential quarters, we see ostentation and luxury on
the one hand, and cheap imitation, pretentiousness, or meanness
and squalor on the other. We see the aforesaid brick boxes packed
together, which have ruined the aspect of most of our towns: we have
the pretentious suburban villa, with its visitors' and servants'
bells; we have the stucco-porticoed town "mansion," with its squeezy
hall and umbrella stand; or we have the "desirable" flat, nearer to
heaven, like the cell of a cliff-dweller, where the modern citizen
seeks seclusion in populous caravansaries which throw every street out
of scale where they rear their Babel-like heads.
I have not spoken of the gloom of older-fashioned residential
quarters, frigid in their respectability, which, whatever centres of
light and leading they may conceal, seem outwardly to turn the cold
shoulder to ordinary humanity, or peep distrustfully at a wicked world
through their fanlights.
Many of the features I have described are found also in most modern
cities in different degrees, and are still more evident in the
United States, where there is nothing ancient to stem the tide of
modern--shall we say progress? It is only fair to note, however,
that there is a movement in New York, in which leading architects and
artists are joining with municipal reformers, for the preservation of
beauty in the better ordering of street improvements, the laying out
of public places, and the general recognition of the social importance
of harmony and pleasant effect in cities, which has lately found
expression in schemes of town-planning and garden cities and suburbs
in this country.
Turning from the aspects of their houses to the humans who inhabit
them--take modern dress in our search for the beautiful! Well,
national if not distinctive costume--except of the working and
sporting sort, court dress, collegiate and municipal robes, and
uniforms--has practically disappeared, and, apart from working dress
in working hours, one type of ceremonial, or full dress is common
to the people at large, and that of the plainest kind--with whatever
differences and niceties of cut and taste in detail--I mean the type
for men, of course.
Among the undisputed rights of women the liberty to dress as she
pleases, even under recognized types for set occasions, and with
constant variety and change of style, is not a little important, and
it is a liberty that has very striking effects upon the aspects
of modern life we are considering. It is true, this liberty may be
checked by the decrees of eminent _modistes_, and limited by the
opinion of Mrs. Grundy, or the frank criticism of the boy in the
street; and it is even more than probable that the exigencies of trade
have something to do with it also.
It is, however, too important an element in the _ensemble_ of life to
be ignored or undervalued in any way, as women's dress affords one of
the few opportunities of indulging in the joy of colour that is left
to civilization.
Men suffer the tyranny of the tall silk hat as the outward and visible
sign of respectability--surely a far more obvious one nowadays
than Carlyle's "gig." "Gigmanity" has become top-hat-manity. The
"stove-pipe" is the crown of the modern king--financier--the business
man--_He_ "who must be obeyed." I understand it is still as much as a
city clerk's place is worth for him to appear in any other head-gear.
Ladies, too, encourage it, with the black-frock coat and the rest of
the funereally festive attire of modern correct mankind. I suppose the
garb is considered to act as an effective foil to the feast of colour
indulged in by the ladies, and that it may act as a sort of black
framing to fair pictures--black commas, semi-colons, or full-stops,
agreeably punctuating passages of delicate colour!
The worst of it is that the beauty of woman's dress, when it happens
to follow or revive a fashion with great possibilities of beauty, as
at present, seems to be a matter almost of accident, and entirely at
the mercy of the mode (or the trade?)--here to-day and gone to-morrow;
and, alas, lovely woman, our only hope for variety in colour and form
in modern life, in her determination to descend into the industrial
and professional arena and compete commercially with men, not
unfrequently shows a tendency to take a leaf out of her rival's
tailor's pattern-book, and to adopt or adapt more or less of the
features of modern man's prosaic, though possibly convenient and
durable, but certainly summary and unromantic attire.
Well, I think, on the whole, the pictures which modern life in London
or any great capital discloses may be striking in their
contrasts, vivid in their suggestions, dramatic or tragic in their
aspects--anything or everything, in fact, _except_ beautiful; except,
of course, in so far as accidental effects of light and atmosphere
are beautiful, mainly, perhaps, because they disguise or transfigure
actually unlovely form and substance.
The essential qualities of beauty being harmony, proportion, balance,
simplicity, charm of form and colour, can we expect to find much of
it in conditions which make life a mere scramble for existence for the
greater part of mankind? Bellamy, in his "Looking Backward," gives a
striking and succinct image of modern social and economic conditions
in his illustration or allegory of the coach and horses. The coach is
Capitalism. It carries a minority, but even these struggle for a seat,
and to maintain their position, frequently falling off, when they
either go under altogether, or must help to pull the coach with the
majority toiling in the traces of commercial competition.
However these conditions may, among individuals, be softened by human
kindness, or some of their aspects modified by artistic effort, they
do not change the cruelty or injustice of the system, or its brutal
and ugly aspects in the main.
But if modern civilization is only tolerable in proportion to the
number and facility of the means of escape from it, perhaps we may
find at least the beauty of the country and of wild nature unimpaired?
Do we? We may escape the town by train or motor--running the risk in
either case of a smash--but we cannot escape commercial enterprise.
The very trees and houses sprout with business cards, and the
landscape along some of our principal railway lines seems owned by
the vendors of drugs. Turning away our eyes from such annoyances,
commercial enterprise, again, has us in all sorts of alluring
announcements of all sorts and sizes in innumerable newspapers and
magazines, which, like paper kites, can only maintain their position
by extensive tails. The tail--that is, the advertisement sheets--keeps
the kite flying--and the serial tale keeps the advertisers going,
perhaps, also. Anyhow, the gentle reader is obliged to take his news
and views, social or political, sandwiched or flavoured with very
various and unsought and unwanted condiments, pictorial or otherwise.
Thus, public attention is diverted and--nobody minds! But it is in
these insidious ways that that repose or detachment of mind favourable
to the sense of beauty is destroyed, and thus, to put it in another
way, we are in danger of losing our lives, or the best that life can
give, in getting our living--or, well, perhaps it might be true to say
in some cases, a substantial percentage on our investments.
In obedience, too, to the requirements of the great god Trade, whole
districts of our fair country are blighted and blackened, and whole
populations are made dependent upon mechanical, monotonous, and often
dangerous toil to support the international commercial race for the
precarious world-market.
Under the same desperate compulsion of commercial competition,
agriculture declines, and the country side is deserted. The old
country life, with its festivals and picturesque customs, has
disappeared. Old houses, churches, and cottages have tumbled into
ruin, or have suffered worse destruction by a process of smartening
up called "restoration." The people have crowded into the overcrowded
towns, increasing the competition for employment, the chances of which
are lessened by the very industry of the workers themselves, and so
our great cities blindly become huger, more dangerous, and generally
unlovely, losing, too, by degrees their relics of historic interest
and romance they once possessed.
Even in the art-world, and among the very cultivators of beauty we
detect the canker of commercialism. The compulsion of the market rules
supply and demand, and the dealer becomes more and more dominant. The
idea of the shop dominates picture shows, and painters become almost
as specialized as men of science, while genius, or even ordinary
talent, requires as much puffing as a patent medicine. Everyone
must have his trade label, and woe to the artist who experiments,
or discovers capacities in himself for other things than his label
covers.
Every new and sincere movement in art has been in direct protest and
conflict with the prevailing conditions, and has measured its progress
by its degree of success in counteracting them, and, in some sense,
producing new conditions. The remarkable revival of the handicrafts,
or arts and crafts movement, of late years may be quoted as an
instance; but it is a world within a world; a minority producing for
a minority; although the movement has done valuable work even as a
protest, and has raised the banner of handwork and its beauty in an
age of machine industry.
Other notable movements of a protesting, protective, or mitigating
nature are at work in the form of societies for the protection of
ancient buildings, for the preservation of historic spots and the
beauty of natural scenery, for the abolition or abatement of the smoke
nuisance, for checking the abuses of public advertisement, for the
increase of parks and open spaces, and for spreading the love of art
among the people.
Indeed, it would seem as if the welfare of humanity and the prospects
of a tolerable life under modern conditions were handed over to such
societies, since it does not seem to be anybody's business to attend
to what should be everybody's business, and we have not even a
minister to look after such interests. The very existence of such
societies, however, is a proof of the danger and destruction to which
beauty is exposed under modern conditions.
Social conditions are the outcome of economic conditions. In all ages
it has been the system under which property is held--the ownership of
the means of production and exchange--which has decided the forms of
social life. The expansion of capital and the power of the financier
are essentially modern developments, as also is unrestricted
commercial competition, though this seems to lead to monopoly--a
heretofore unexpected climax. Modern existence in such circumstances
becomes an unequal race or scramble for money, place, power, or mere
employment. The social (or rather _un_social) pressure which results
really causes those sordid aspects, pretences, aggressions, and brutal
contrasts we deplore. Private ownership is constantly opposed to
public interest. The habit of regarding everything from the narrow
point of view of money value and immediate profit as the determining
factors in all transactions obscures larger issues and stultifies
collective action for the public good.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of public opinion, perhaps I have
said enough to support the case of beauty against modern social and
economic conditions. I do not ask for damages--they are incalculable.
She stands before you, a pathetic figure, obscured in shreds and
patches, driven from pillar to post, disinherited, a casual, and
obliged to beg her bread, who should be a welcome and an honoured
guest in every city and country, and in every house, bearing the lamp
of art and bringing comfort and joy to all.
A SHORT SURVEY OF THE ART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
WITH SOME NOTES ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
[Illustration]
A SHORT SURVEY OF THE ART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, CHIEFLY IN
ENGLAND, WITH SOME NOTES ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
A hundred years is but an arbitrary division of time, and yet one
cannot help investing the centuries with a sort of personality as
they pass, each distinguished by certain characteristics, particular
movements, and habits of thought as well as of life and its aspects,
and above all by the spirit and forms of the art to which they have
given birth.
If we could summon a typical figure with proper accessories to
illustrate each epoch we should get a vivid if somewhat symbolical
idea of the varying phases of thought and art, and the passing
fashions in taste which the past has witnessed.
Few centuries, perhaps, would be more difficult to comprehend in a
single figure than the nineteenth, displaying as it does in the course
of its history so many diversities--revolutions we might say--in
artistic development.
In its early years, inheriting its taste and fashions from the
eighteenth century, when handicraft was still the principal means for
the production of things of both use and adornment, the nineteenth
century has witnessed a complete revolution in commercial and
industrial conditions, with the development of the factory system,
competition, and the demands of the world-market. It has seen
the great machine industries take the place of the former minute
subdivision of labour, and in the process of both subdivision of
labour and the development of machine industry all forms of production
have been affected.
The former local centres of supply have disappeared with
self-dependent homesteads and village industries, and with the decline
of handicraft traditions of design and construction have been in this
country well-nigh completely broken, except in some trades, such as
the cartwright's and the wheelwright's and the harness maker's. We
still see in our beautiful country wagons the chamfers and ogee forms
in the woodwork and the gay painting of mediaeval times, and our
noble shire horses are often brave with bright brass ornaments
which perpetuate traditional patterns, moulded or pierced; while the
descendants of Wayland Smith still ply their trade at the village
forge, though mainly limited to horseshoes.
But machine industry and the factory and production for profit
rather than for use, having nearly extinguished all sense of art and
individual taste in the useful arts which contribute to the comfort
and decoration of the home, in the later years of the century, seem to
have evoked, by the mere force of reaction and revulsion of feeling,
that remarkable revival of decorative design and handicraft which has
distinguished its closing years, under the influence of which many
beautiful crafts have been successfully recovered and practised with
success, while trade itself has not been slow to derive new ideas from
the Arts and Crafts movement.
The main principles inspiring the promoters of this movement have been
the unity of the arts allied with and controlled by architecture, and
the due acknowledgement of the artistic responsibility of the designer
and craftsman.
With regard to the architecture of the nineteenth century we may see
nearly every past fashion of its history revived in turn, until some
of our eclectic architects seem to have evolved something like a
characteristic domestic style, at least, characteristically mixed in
its constructive and decorative features, but certainly adapted to
modern requirements.
The classical forms in building, which attained a certain heaviness
and Dutch plainness under the Georges, underwent a transformation with
the revival of Greek and Roman taste in the Empire period. From that
time onward classical columns and pilasters and classical details
of varying proportions became embedded, as it were, in our domestic
architecture, and as a consequence the more-or-less-Doric portico
still dominates large residential districts of London. Their columned
ranks, however, have latterly been greatly broken in some quarters
by the cheerful red brick fronts and white sashes of the Queen Anne
revival, which have, in some instances, in response to the demand
for "residential flats," even got upon stilts and nod at us from the
many-gabled top stories of the modern caravansary.
Street architecture in later Victorian days became a masquerade in
building materials, since the design of the façade bears little or
no relation to the hidden structure of steel framing by which our
many-storied piles are held together, while, apparently, when there
are shops on the ground floor the whole mass has the effect of
playfully reposing upon the edges of great sheets of plate glass.
The use of terra-cotta, or cut-brick enrichments have been a
welcome relief from the doleful gentility of the white brick, or
the depressing gray stucco which has cast a peculiar gloom over some
respectable neighbourhoods.
In church architecture the Gothic revivalists have carried all before
them. At one period of the nineteenth century, indeed, when the
restoring zeal was at its height and nothing was acceptable but
something "early English," there was considerable reason to fear that
the architects would leave nothing behind them!
But we have had really distinguished work from men like Butterfield
(the architect of All Saints, Margaret Street), William Burges, and J.
D. Sedding, while domestic architecture both in town and country has
been developed on new lines by Mr. Norman Shaw, Mr. Philip Webb, and
their able followers of the younger generation.
In sculpture we may trace an analogous line of development, from the
severe, graceful, but somewhat cold classical style of Flaxman and the
more dramatic Canova, or the sentiment of Thorvaldsen, freezing into
the later classicism of Gibson on the one hand, or breaking out
into the realisms and trivialities of the modern Italian School. In
England, inspired by the study of nature and cultivation of style
chiefly under the influence of the works of Phidias and the Florentine
masters of the fifteenth century, a school of considerable distinction
and force has arisen. We had one, at least, really great master
in Alfred Stevens standing almost alone as a modern expositor of
renascence traditions. He has been succeeded by men of taste and
refinement like the late Onslow Ford, or the accomplishment, beauty
of design, and vigour of expression of the late Harry Bates, not to
mention living exponents of sculpture quite as distinguished. Among
the younger school the continental influence of Meunier and of Rodin
may be noted.
To continue our rapid and necessarily imperfect survey, in the field
of painting, again, the course of development through changes of
feeling and aim is even more emphatically marked, as might be expected
from that most sensitive and impressionable of the arts.
The domination of the older Academic traditions in artistic education
and practice was only broken fitfully in the first quarter of the
century by such meteoric influences as that of William Blake, who with
his vivid and inspired vision of a world of spiritual, imaginative,
and symbolic beauty was in open revolt against the classical coldness
and the conscious prettinesses and pretences of his time in art, as
well as against the prosaic calculating spirit of a commercial epoch.
Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough as well as Hogarth left
their mark on the methods in English painting and raised a standard
of workmanship in the eighteenth century which has not since been
approached in the same direction, though many charming artists in the
figure and landscape, such as George Morland, succeeded them; while
later we have the anecdotic and incident pictures of David Wilkie
which established a characteristic British type.
The remarkable work of J. M. W. Turner is perhaps more characteristic
of the first half of the nineteenth century than that of any other
English painter. Trained in the restricted and reserved methods of
the early landscape school learned from Italy and France, with
extraordinary industry and facility as a draughtsman, and a keen sense
of composition, his development under different influences, from the
classical landscape school of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin to
the romantic feeling of Titian and Salvator Rosa, or the quiet pathos
and precision of touch of the Dutch masters, and above all of the
close and constant observation of nature in all her varying moods, and
in nearly all European countries, may be seen in the unrivalled record
of work he has left, and in the splendid collection in the National
Gallery.
Turner seems to express the general movement of the half-century's
life and moods of thought more completely than any other artist.
Classical, romantic, mythological, naturalistic, impressionistic, in
turn; from the serene atmosphere, lucent skies, and deep umbrage of
classical landscapes, with their nymphs and shepherds, we may follow
the course of his mind to the "Rain, Steam, and Speed" of the Great
Western Railway.
It is a wide reach, but Turner's art illuminates the smoke and
the stir and stress of the industrial and revolutionary nineteenth
century, like a rainbow spanning a stormy sky.
And what of its last fifty years? They have seen the rise, formation
and decline of the pre-Raphaelite School. That strong and earnest
movement emanating from a small group of enthusiastic young painters,
seeking sincerity of expression with thoroughness of workmanship and
profound study of nature. The names of Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, D.
G. Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown and Frederick Sandys will always be
associated with this important epoch in English painting. Their works
have exercised a potent influence far beyond their own immediate
circle, and have affected many different developments, forming the
root and stem as it were of many different branches.
To this source (whether as reactive or related influences) we may
trace back the two chief and vital distinctive directions into which
modern painting may be broadly divided--impressionism on the one hand
and the pursuit of decorative beauty tinged with poetic feeling
and romance on the other, this latter being allied with a further
important movement concerned with the revival of design and the
artistic handicrafts, known as the Arts and Crafts movement.
With this the names of William Morris and Burne-Jones will always be
associated, and they both link hands with the original group of the
pre-Raphaelites.