Now, any going back to the conditions of the Middle Ages or to those of
the Renaissance is of course impossible; but if craftsmanship and art
are again to become normal functions in a helpful social order, the old
formulas, at least in principle, must hold. There will be no generally
fine craftsmanship until most people want well-made things and get
them from craftsmen who design; and the so-called fine arts will have
no general importance until there are many patrons with a common bond
of taste which is sympathetic to most artists. Is there anything which
promises so desirable a reconstruction?
On the side of craftsmanship, I fear nothing is to be expected. The
gallant counter-attacks of a John Ruskin and a William Morris against
modern industrialism show just how much and how little can be gained
from a militant reaction. A hundred passionate spinsters are printing
batiks or glazing pottery in as many æsthetic last ditches, but they
are mostly doing so at the expense of rich and generous eccentrics,
in short are merely subsidised artists disguised as craftsmen. We
are getting better designed things from the factory--the museums are
working usefully to this end--but this reform only enlists a handful
of professional designers, and does nothing to produce the old type
of creative craftsman. In short we probably must say good-bye to the
craftsman save as a picturesque survival, like the man who is skilful
with the rapier or the long bow. All we can hope for is that some
improvement in the general taste, which I think is reasonable to look
for,--since for a century it could hardly have been lower,--may cause a
discriminating demand for better designed factory goods. This of course
leaves the problem of the artist and the craftsman just where it was,
with the sole difference that the passing of the craftsman shuts off
the possibility of any return of the artist to his traditionally best
school, the shop of a good craftsman.
So if there is to be any useful rebuilding, I feel it must proceed
after the very modern precedent of the skyscraper, from the top
down. Much might conceivably be done to produce a more coherent and
intelligent patronage for the fine arts, much is already being done
by museums, art dealers, colleges and universities, and all manner of
art societies. Indeed the increased activity of museums, collectors,
and colleges in behalf of the acquisition and appreciation of fine
works of art has persuaded Mr. R. C. Duffus that we are well launched
on an American Renaissance, and to that effect he has published a very
interesting book. Far be it from me to minimise the importance of
activities in which I have been and am deeply engaged myself. One may
gladly admit that to multiply our art treasures--and for a generation
the multiplication has been astoundingly accelerated--is in itself an
unqualified benefit. But the mere accumulation of great works of art
and much talk about them does not imply understanding of them, and the
question the humanist must raise is always--Are these masterpieces
understood? And how are they understood? Mediæval Rome lay in full
artistic decadence when much of the glory of her old art was visible
on every hand. To understand any nobly conceived work of art, one must
have lived nobly in deed, in imagination, or in both. To own a great
work of art may be a mere counsel of personal vanity; to expound a
work of art, a mere assertion of self-importance. A whole school of
interpretation, which has its faculty, museum, and journal, tears the
work of art from its human context and studies its forms as if these
were ends in themselves. And this sort of teaching is popular. Along
such lines one may make a generation of resolute pedants. For the
humanist such teaching is not merely defective but positively harmful.
On the other side, there is much sound and modest teaching, and the
next generation of art patrons will be far better trained than that
which is passing.
Yet all such useful activities are simply marginal. Without a
predisposition in its visitors, the museum might just as well be
unvisited, since it then has no more dignity or value than the peep
show. It is a proper uneasiness before flattering statistics of
attendance that has rightly induced our museums to inaugurate direct
instruction in appreciation. It is a weakness and limitation of such
teaching that it too often merely foments a diffused interest in art
taken as an entity and not as related to human values generally. For
appreciation really requires a right and balanced attitude towards
life. It was really more important for Florence that her great
citizens, while bowing to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur
that was Rome, wanted a full and honourable life in Florence--it was
really more important, I say, that they cared discriminatingly for the
dignity of their ordinary activities and for the authority of their
faith, than that they cared _specifically_ for painting, sculpture, and
architecture.
In short some aristocratic vision of the good life has always been the
foundation on which great national art has been reared in the past.
It behooves us then to ask what is in America our accepted vision of
the good life? For upon it must rest our art. What do we all agree to
(saving always negligible minorities of “knockers”)? I fear it would
come to these few articles of faith:--to make a lot of money by fair
means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die
with one’s boots on. This is a credo which has within its limitations
positive merits, and it is by no means lightly to be decried, but it
palpably offers little spiritual nourishment to the “art-artist,”
to quote a recent mayor of New York. A certain kind of art it feeds
admirably. And it naturally gets the art it feeds--the immaculate bank
clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like apparition in the porcelain
tub, the beach party in the classy car--the art of the advertisement
generally. And this ideal also finds its authentic expression in the
cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the moving picture, and the
potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over the radio. These are our
representative arts, as sculpture was the representative art of Greece,
or painting of Florence.
The prospect is more pleasing when we turn to architecture, really the
only art that is perennial. Here there is at least a great progress, a
far higher level of taste than that of a generation ago, a competent
and audacious coping with unprecedented problems. Yet here as elsewhere
the cult of haste works harm. No architect of a skyscraper is given
time to think his building out. Perfection in the arts rests largely on
trifles lovingly meditated, and what successful architect has time for
meditation? We have in abundance such arts as we deserve, and we shall
have better arts only as we deserve them through better ideals of life
generally.
Painting and sculpture are kept alive by a sort of artificial
respiration. It is to be hoped that the increasing public use of
both in decoration may restore to these traditionally leading arts
a fuller measure of vitality. As it is, these arts have joined
fine craftsmanship as an elegant survival, like fencing or court
tennis. Since painting and sculpture are the arts I most love, it
would be pleasant indeed to come forward with a programme for their
rehabilitation. But I have no such programme. I feel rather that we
should at once accept the situation and emphasise it. The only remedy,
and a partial one at that, is, I think, this: since painting and
sculpture have become exotic, relatively unwanted, and subsidised
arts, let us rebuild on their rarity value. If instead of making
it ridiculously easy to learn painting and sculpture, we made it
difficult, we should probably have better painting and sculpture. This
could be done by withdrawing charitable support from the art schools,
keeping open such as reasonably pay their way, and by suspending the
artificially encouraged salesmanship of painting and sculpture. There
would remain the human problem of what to do with the thousands of
young men and women who legitimately wish to work delicately with their
hands; but in a civilisation that is supplied from the factory, that
problem seems insoluble. And withal there may be a satisfactory outlet
in amateurism--this has happened notably in the art of the theatre at
the very moment when the moving picture seemed to announce the end
of the spoken play. In general I am not discouraging the support of
survivals. Indeed I see in such support a singularly sympathetic act of
patronage. But one should know what he is about. I have, for example,
a predilection for the quill pen, but I should be very unwise to endow
an institution for writing with the quill. And we are very unwise in
America when, not really wanting their works, we artificially multiply
painters and sculptors.
Whatever reform comes from within the arts, will probably not come
from carefully fostered survivals nor yet from conscious revivals,
but rather from the response of the wanted arts to a finer demand.
The comic strip and the moving picture seem barometric to me, as does
illustration for advertising. Whenever I see a marked improvement in
these popular arts, I shall expect to find greater improvement in the
traditional fine arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture. And
while I am only a casual observer of these barometric arts, what I
have observed of design for advertising and of the moving picture
does not cause me either to hope unduly nor yet to despair utterly.
Certainly both have improved much within my experience. There remains
the dilemma: can the democratic arts really acquire distinction, that
solicitude for perfecting trifles which we have already remarked, or
must they stop at a certain level simply because they are democratic
arts? It would be hazardous to answer this question, but historically
no democratic art, with the possible exception of engraving, has as yet
transcended fine craftsmanship and successfully invaded the realm of
great ideas. That realm has without exception been occupied by the arts
that were frankly aristocratic.