That adjustment between artist and layman which seems so difficult
to-day, until the seventeenth century and the beginning of modern times
came of itself and in some such fashion as this--it hardly matters
whether the scene be Italy, Spain, France, England, China, Japan,
India, or Persia: in every case the basis was fine craftsmanship.
Pretty much all objects of common use were delicately conceived and
carefully made. The amateur of to-day gladly pays great prices for the
ordinary grave figurines and temple vessels of China, for the horse
trappings of the Scythians, for the common household gear and even the
workman’s tools of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, for the
comfit boxes and carved fobs of feudal Japan, for the peasant furniture
of Brittany and Scandinavia. This general high level of craftsmanship
depended chiefly on the fact that even the humblest craftsman was also
a designer. To the joy of fit execution was joined that of successful
invention.
A very few craftsmen became what we now call artists,--that is made
finer inventions on a more impressive scale, designed a cathedral or a
palace instead of a simple house, decorated an entire chapel instead
of a bride chest or tournament shield, made a bronze statue instead
of a chiselled ink stand. But the line between the craftsman and the
artist was not a sharp one. At Florence a Donatello belonged to the
Stonecutters Guild and officially was merely a very highly esteemed
stonecutter. And every future artist entered upon his career as a
simple apprentice in a craft. The tragedy and frustration so common in
the artists’ career to-day were absent. The apprentice with only a fine
craftsman’s endowment lived out his life contentedly as a craftsman.
But he was free, had he the ability, to become an artist and to achieve
the companionship of princes.
The step from craftsman to artist lay really in the artist’s
intelligent assimilation of greater subject matter or in his fuller
expression of subject matter common to artist and craftsman alike.
Such subject matter was furnished him by his ecclesiastical and
temporal betters; he did not invent it. There was no hardship in this
imposition, for the values of his betters were also his own. There was
a like-mindedness and real co-operation between artist and patron. A
romantic and sentimentally individualistic criticism has challenged
this case. No person who knows either history or human nature, however,
will hold that Giotto was hampered because he had to paint the legends
of Saint Francis and those of the Virgin; that Raphael was great in
spite of the fact that he had to find symbols for syncretic theology;
that Hogarth is belittled by the fact that he so genially followed
the literary, satirical current of his age. A humanistic criticism
will hold, on the contrary, that an essential factor in the greatness
of these artists was that, their themes coming almost ready made,
they were spared the waste and perturbation of so-called original
invention and were free to face in tranquillity their real problem of
transformation and execution.
To recapitulate: the craftsman, until at most a couple of centuries
ago, depended on a universal taste for the well-made thing, while the
artist depended on the taste of a minority, the taste of an aristocracy
with which he himself felt in harmony. The few remaining fine craftsmen
of to-day find no general taste for the well-made thing upon which they
may depend, while the myriad artists of to-day face no aristocracy
whatever, no accepted body of taste whatever, but rather a congeries
of pseudo-aristocracies each with its shifting preferences, which
hardly deserve the name of tastes at all.
How the isolation of the artist with the virtual extinction of the
craftsman has come about is a commonplace of history which need be
recalled here only in its broad lines. The factory within a century
has done away with the craftsman designer. Still earlier the crumbling
of the old aristocracy of birth and religion at once put an end to
community of taste at the top, and gave exaggerated scope to the
already strongly rising ideal of originality and individuality as
highest æsthetic values. A stable and spiritually profitable patronage
ceased and was succeeded by a capricious and heavy handed patronage
from a new wealth undisciplined either by tradition or by fine and
broad personal experience. The artist’s immemorial task of realising
himself in society became almost impossibly difficult. If he were
weak and clever, his resort was to sycophancy; if he were strong and
wise, there was little for him but patience, resignation, and a tragic
hopefulness; if he were strong and unwise, he became a rebel. And the
rebel, in a manner perfectly familiar to the neurologist, built up his
compensations, by which he extolled that isolation which was really
his sore misfortune as his superiority and his advantage, until after
three generations it has become a common conviction among artists that
their proper task is self-expression in a void, that there should be no
desire to communicate and, obviously, no need to be understood.
And just at the moment when the position of the artist was becoming
barely tenable, the number of artists increased inordinately. The
craftsman who didn’t want to go into a factory but wanted to use his
head and hands delicately, had to become an artist, while wholesale
methods of education in the practice of art made the way to becoming an
artist easy to any young person with a modicum of money and diligence.
As if that were not enough, the false glamour thrown about the artist
life by romantic poets and novelists brought new hordes of the unfit to
join the bewildered survivors from the old régime.