of any completely ordered--state in its acutest form. He demands as an
essential to the proper use of his powers a freedom from restraint such
as no other workman expects. He must work when he feels inclined; he
cannot work to order. Hence his frequent quarrels with the burgher who
knows he has to work when he is disinclined, and cannot conceive why the
artist should not do likewise. The burgher watches the artist’s wayward
and apparently quite unmethodical activity, and envies his job. Now, in
any Socialistic State, if certain men are licensed to pursue the
artistic calling, they are likely to be regarded by the other workers
with some envy. There may be a competition for such soft jobs among
those who are naturally work-shy, since it will be evident that the
artist is not called to account in the same way as other workers.
If we suppose, as seems not unlikely, in view of the immense numbers who
become artists in our present social state, that there would be this
competition for the artistic work of the community, what methods would
be devised to select those required to fill the coveted posts? Frankly,
the history of art in the nineteenth century makes us shudder at the
results that would follow. One scarcely knows whether they would be
worse if Bumble or the Academy were judge. We only know that under any
such conditions _none_ of the artists whose work has ultimately counted
in the spiritual development of the race would have been allowed to
practise the coveted profession.
There is in truth, as Ruskin pointed out in his “Political Economy of
Art,” a gross and wanton waste under the present system. We have
thousands of artists who are only so by accident and by name, on the one
hand, and certainly many--one cannot tell how many--who have the special
gift but have never had the peculiar opportunities which are to-day
necessary to allow it to expand and function. But there is, what in an
odd way consoles us, a blind chance that the gift and the opportunity
may coincide; that Shelley and Browning may have a competence, and
Cézanne a farm-house he could retire to. Bureaucratic Socialism would,
it seems, take away even this blind chance that mankind may benefit by
its least appreciable, most elusive treasures, and would carefully
organise the complete suppression of original creative power; would
organise into a universal and all-embracing tyranny the already
overweening and disastrous power of endowed official art. For we must
face the fact that the average man has two qualities which would make
the proper selection of the artist almost impossible. He has, first of
all, a touching proclivity to awe-struck admiration of whatever is
presented to him as noble by a constituted authority; and, secondly, a
complete absence of any immediate reaction to a work of art until his
judgment has thus been hypnotised by the voice of authority. Then, and
not till then, he sees, or swears he sees, those adorable Emperor’s
clothes that he is always agape for.
I am speaking, of course, of present conditions, of a populace whose
emotional life has been drugged by the sugared poison of pseudo-art, a
populace saturated with snobbishness, and regarding art chiefly for its
value as a symbol of social distinctions. There have been times when
such a system of public patronage as we are discussing might not have
been altogether disastrous. Times when the guilds represented more or
less adequately the genuine artistic intelligence of the time; but the
creation, first of all, of aristocratic art, and finally of pseudo-art,
have brought it about that almost any officially organised system would
at the present moment stereotype all the worst features of modern art.
Now, in thus putting forward the extreme difficulties of any system of
publicly controlled art, we are emphasising perhaps too much the idea of
the artist as a creator of purely ideal and abstract works, as the
medium of inspiration and the source of revelation. It is the artist as
prophet and priest that we have been considering, the artist who is the
articulate soul of mankind. Now, in the present commercial State, at a
time when such handiwork as is not admirably fitted to some purely
utilitarian purpose has become inanely fatuous and grotesque, the artist
in this sense has undoubtedly become of supreme importance as a
protestant, as one who proclaims that art is a reasonable function, and
one that proceeds by a nice adjustment of means to ends. But if we
suppose a state in which all the ordinary objects of daily life--our
chairs and tables, our carpets and pottery--expressed something of this
reasonableness instead of a crazy and vapid fantasy, the artist as a
pure creator might become, not indeed of less importance--rather
more--but a less acute necessity to our general living than he is
to-day. Something of the sanity and purposefulness of his attitude might
conceivably become infused into the work of the ordinary craftsman,
something, too, of his creative energy and delight in work. We must,
therefore, turn for a moment from the abstractly creative artist to the
applied arts and those who practise them.
We are so far obliged to protect ourselves from the implications of
modern life that without a special effort it is hard to conceive the
enormous quantity of “art” that is annually produced and consumed. For
the special purpose of realising it I take the pains to write the
succeeding paragraphs in a railway refreshment-room, where I am actually
looking at those terribly familiar but fortunately fleeting images which
such places afford. And one must remember that public places of this
kind merely reflect the average citizen’s soul, as expressed in his
home.
The space my eye travels over is a small one, but I am appalled at the
amount of “art” that it harbours. The window towards which I look is
filled in its lower part by stained glass; within a highly elaborate
border, designed by some one who knew the conventions of
thirteenth-century glass, is a pattern of yellow and purple vine leaves
with bunches of grapes, and flitting about among these many small birds.
In front is a lace curtain with patterns taken from at least four
centuries and as many countries. On the walls, up to a height of four
feet, is a covering of lincrusta walton stamped with a complicated
pattern in two colours, with sham silver medallions. Above that a
moulding but an inch wide, and yet creeping throughout its whole with a
degenerate descendant of a Græco-Roman carved guilloche pattern; this
has evidently been cut out of the wood by machine or stamped out of some
composition--its nature is so perfectly concealed that it is hard to say
which. Above this is a wall-paper in which an effect of
eighteenth-century satin brocade is imitated by shaded staining of the
paper. Each of the little refreshment-tables has two cloths, one
arranged symmetrically with the table, the other a highly ornate printed
cotton arranged “artistically” in a diagonal position. In the centre of
each table is a large pot in which every beautiful quality in the
material and making of pots has been carefully obliterated by methods
each of which implies profound scientific knowledge and great inventive
talent. Within each pot is a plant with large dark-green leaves,
apparently made of india-rubber. This painful catalogue makes up only a
small part of the inventory of the “art” of the restaurant. If I were to
go on to tell of the legs of the tables, of the electric-light fittings,
of the chairs into the wooden seats of which some tremendous mechanical
force has deeply impressed a large distorted anthemion--if I were to
tell of all these things, my reader and I might both begin to realise
with painful acuteness something of the horrible toil involved in all
this display. Display is indeed the end and explanation of it all. Not
one of these things has been made because the maker enjoyed the making;
not one has been bought because its contemplation would give any one any
pleasure, but solely because each of these things is accepted as a
symbol of a particular social status. I say their contemplation can give
no one pleasure; they are there because their absence would be resented
by the average man who regards a large amount of futile display as in
some way inseparable from the conditions of that well-to-do life to
which he belongs or aspires to belong. If everything were merely clean
and serviceable he would proclaim the place bare and uncomfortable.
The doctor who lines his waiting-room with bad photogravures and worse
etchings is acting on exactly the same principle; in short, nearly all
our “art” is made, bought, and sold merely for its value as an
indication of social status.
Now consider the case of those men whose life-work it is to stimulate
this eczematous eruption of pattern on the surface of modern
manufactures. They are by far the most numerous “artists” in the
country. Each of them has not only learned to draw but has learned by
sheer application to put forms together with a similitude of that
coherence which creative impulse gives. Probably each of them has
somewhere within him something of that creative impulse which is the
inspiration and delight of every savage and primitive craftsman; but in
these manufacturer’s designers the pressure of commercial life has
crushed and atrophied that creative impulse completely. Their business
is to produce, not expressive design, but dead patterns. They are
compelled, therefore, to spend their lives behaving in an entirely
idiotic and senseless manner, and that with the certainty that no one
will ever get positive pleasure from the result; for one may hazard the
statement that until I made the effort just now, no one of the thousands
who use the refreshment-rooms ever really _looked_ at the designs.
This question of the creation and consumption of art tends to become
more and more pressing. I have shown just now what an immense mass of
art is consumed, but this is not the same art as that which the genuine
artist produces. The work of the truly creative artist is not merely
useless to the social man--it appears to be noxious and inassimilable.
Before art can be “consumed” the artistic idea must undergo a process of
disinfection. It must have extracted and removed from it all, or nearly
all, that makes it æsthetically valuable. What occurs when a great
artist creates a new idea is somewhat as follows: We know the process
well enough, since it has taken place in the last fifty years. An artist
attains to a new vision. He grasps this with such conviction that he is
able to express it in his work. Those few people in his immediate
surroundings who have the faculty of æsthetic perception become very
much excited by the new vision. The average man, on the other hand,
lacks this faculty and, moreover, instinctively protects the rounded
perfection of his universe of thought and feeling from the intrusion of
new experience; in consequence he becomes extremely irritated by the
sight of works which appear to him completely unintelligible. The
misunderstanding between this small minority and the public becomes
violent. Then some of the more intelligent writers on art recognise that
the new idea is really related to past æsthetic expressions which have
become recognised. Then a clever artist, without any individual vision
of his own, sees the possibility of using a modification of the new
idea, makes an ingenious compromise between it and the old, generally
accepted notions of art. The public, which has been irritated by its
incomprehension of the new idea, finding the compromise just
intelligible, and delighted to find itself cleverer than it thought,
acclaims the compromising intermediary as a genius. The process of
disinfection thus begun goes on with increasing energy and rapidity, and
before long the travesty of the new idea is completely assimilable by
the social organism. The public, after swallowing innumerable imitations
of the new idea, may even at last reluctantly accept the original
creator as a great man, but generally not until he has been dead for
some time and has become a vague and mythical figure.
It is literally true to say that the imitations of works of art are more
assimilable by the public than originals, and therefore always tend to
fetch a higher price in the market at the moment of their production.
The fact is that the average man uses art entirely for its symbolic
value. Art is in fact the symbolic currency of the world. The possession
of rare and much coveted works of art is regarded as a sign of national
greatness. The growth and development of the Kaiser Friedrich museum was
due to the active support of the late Emperor, a man whose distaste for
genuine art is notorious, but whose sense of the symbolic was highly
developed. Large and expensively ornamented buildings become symbols of
municipal greatness. The amount of useless ornaments on façades of their
offices is a valuable symbol of the financial exuberance of big
commercial undertakings; and, finally, the social status of the
individual is expressed to the admiring or envious outer world by the
streamlines of an aristocratic motor-car, or the superfluity of lace
curtains in the front windows of a genteel suburban villa.
The social man, then, lives in a world of symbols, and though he presses
other things into his service, such, for instance, as kings, footmen,
dogs, women, he finds in art his richest reservoir of symbolic currency.
But in a world of symbolists the creative artist and the creative man of
science appear in strange isolation as the only people who are not
symbolists. They alone are up against certain relations which do not
stand for something else, but appear to have ultimate value, to be real.
Art as a symbolic currency is an important means of the instinctive life
of man, but art as created by the artist is in violent revolt against
the instinctive life, is an expression of the reflective and fully
conscious life. It is natural enough, then, that before it can be used
by the instinctive life it must be deprived by travesty of its too
violent assertion of its own reality. Travesty is necessary at first to
make it assimilable, but in the end long familiarity may rob even
original works of art of their insistence, so that, finally, even the
great masterpieces may become the most cherished symbols of the lords of
the instinctive life, may, as in fact they frequently do, become the
property of millionaires.
A great deal of misunderstanding and ill-feeling between the artist and
the public comes from a failure to realise the necessity of this process
of assimilation of the work of art to the needs of the instinctive
life.
I suspect that a very similar process takes place with regard to truth.
In order that truth may not outrage too violently the passions and
egoisms of the instinctive life it, too, must undergo a process of
deformation.
Society, for example, accepts as much of the ascertainable truth as it
can stand at a given period in the form of the doctrine of its organised
religion.
Now what effect would the development of the Great State which this book
anticipates have upon all this? First, I suppose that the fact that
every one had to work might produce a new reverence, especially in the
governing body, for work, a new sense of disgust and horror at wasteful
and purposeless work. Mr. Money has written of waste of work; here in
unwanted pseudo-art is another colossal waste. Add to this ideal of
economy in work the presumption that the workers in every craft would be
more thoroughly organised and would have a more decisive voice in the
nature and quality of their productions. Under the present system of
commercialism the one object, and the complete justification, of
producing any article is, that it can be made either by its intrinsic
value, or by the fictitious value put upon it by advertisement, to sell
with a sufficient profit to the manufacturer. In any socialistic state,
I imagine--and to a large extent the Great State will be socialistic at
least--there would not be this same automatic justification for
manufacture; people would not be induced artificially to buy what they
did not want, and in this way a more genuine scale of values would be
developed. Moreover, the workman would be in a better position to say
how things should be made. After years of a purely commercial standard,
there is left even now, in the average workman, a certain bias in favour
of sound and reasonable workmanship as opposed to the ingenious
manufacture of fatuous and fraudulent objects; and, if we suppose the
immediate pressure of sheer necessity to be removed, it is probable that
the craftsman, acting through his guild organisations, would determine
to some extent the methods of manufacture. Guilds might, indeed, regain
something of the political influence that gave us the Gothic cathedrals
of the Middle Ages. It is quite probable that this guild influence would
act as a check on some innovations in manufacture which, though bringing
in a profit, are really disastrous to the community at large. Of such a
nature are all the so-called improvements whereby decoration, the whole
value of which consists in its expressive power, is multiplied
indefinitely by machinery. When once the question of the desirability of
any and every production came to be discussed, as it would be in the
Great State, it would inevitably follow that some reasonable and
scientific classifications would be undertaken with regard to machinery.
That is to say, it would be considered in what processes and to what
degree machinery ought to replace handiwork, both from the point of view
of the community as a whole and from that of the producer. So far as I
know, this has never been undertaken even with regard to mere economy,
no one having calculated with precision how far the longer life of
certain hand-made articles does not more than compensate for increased
cost of production. And I suppose that in the Great State other things
besides mere economy would come into the calculation. The Great State
will live, not hoard.
It is probable that in many directions we should extend mechanical
operations immensely, that such things as the actual construction of
buildings, the mere laying and placing of the walls might become
increasingly mechanical. Such methods, if confined to purely structural
elements, are capable of beauty of a special kind, since they can
express the ordered ideas of proportion, balance, and interval as
conceived by the creative mind of the architect. But in process of time
one might hope to see a sharp line of division between work of this kind
and such purely expressive and non-utilitarian design as we call
ornament; and it would be felt clearly that into this field no
mechanical device should intrude, that, while ornament might be
dispensed with, it could never be imitated, since its only reason for
being is that it conveys the vital expressive power of a human mind
acting constantly and directly upon matter.
Finally, I suppose that in the Great State we might hope to see such a
considerable levelling of social conditions that the false values put
upon art by its symbolising of social status would be largely destroyed
and, the pressure of mere opinion being relieved, people would develop
some more immediate reaction to the work of art than they can at present
achieve.
Supposing, then, that under the Great State it was found impossible, at
all events at first, to stimulate and organise the abstract creative
power of the pure artist, the balance might after all be in favour of
the new order if the whole practice of applied art could once more
become rational and purposeful. In a world where the objects of daily
use and ornament were made with practical common sense, the æsthetic
sense would need far less to seek consolation and repose in works of
pure art.
Nevertheless, in the long run mankind will not allow this function,
which is necessary to its spiritual life, to lapse entirely. I imagine,
however, that it would be much safer to penalise rather than to
stimulate such activity, and that simply in order to sift out those with
a genuine passion from those who are merely attracted by the apparent
ease of the pursuit. I imagine that the artist would naturally turn to
one of the applied arts as his means of livelihood; and we should get
the artist coming out of the _bottega_, as he did in fifteenth-century
Florence. There are, moreover, innumerable crafts, even besides those
that are definitely artistic, which, if pursued for short hours (Sir Leo
Money has shown how short these hours might be), would leave a man free
to pursue other callings in his leisure.
The majority of poets to-day are artists in this position. It is
comparatively rare for any one to make of poetry his actual means of
livelihood. Our poets are, first of all, clerks, critics, civil
servants, or postmen. I very much doubt if it would be a serious loss to
the community if the pure graphic artist were in the same position. That
is to say, that all our pictures would be made by amateurs. It is quite
possible to suppose that this would be not a loss, but a great gain. The
painter’s means of livelihood would probably be some craft in which his
artistic powers would be constantly occupied, though at a lower tension
and in a humbler way. The Great State aims at human freedom;
essentially, it is an organisation for leisure--out of which art grows;
it is only a purely bureaucratic Socialism that would attempt to control
the æsthetic lives of men.
So I conceive that those in whom the instinct for abstract creative art
was strongest would find ample opportunities for its exercise, and that
the temptation to simulate this particular activity would be easily
resisted by those who had no powerful inner compulsion.
In the Great State, moreover, and in any sane Socialism, there would be
opportunity for a large amount of purely private buying and selling. Mr.
Wells’s Modern Utopia, for example, hypothecates a vast superstructure
of private trading. A painter might sell his pictures to those who were
engaged in more lucrative employment, though one supposes that with the
much more equal distribution of wealth the sums available for this would
be incomparably smaller than at present; a picture would not be a
speculation, but a pleasure, and no one would become an artist in the
hope of making a fortune.
Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified of its present
unreality by a prolonged contact with the crafts, society would gain a
new confidence in its collective artistic judgment, and might even
boldly assume the responsibility which at present it knows it is unable
to face. It might choose its poets and painters and philosophers and
deep investigators, and make of such men and women a new kind of kings.
ART AND SCIENCE[8]
The author of an illuminating article, “The Place of Science,” in _The
Athenæum_ for April 11th, distinguishes between two aspects of
intellectual activity in scientific work. Of these two aspects one
derives its motive power from curiosity, and this deals with particular
facts. It is only when, through curiosity, man has accumulated a mass of
particular observations that the second intellectual activity manifests
itself, and in this the motive is the satisfaction which the mind gets
from the contemplation of inevitable relations. To secure this end the
utmost possible generalisation is necessary.