nature are at work in the form of societies for the protection of
ancient buildings--for the preservation of the beauty of natural
scenery, for the abolition of smoke, for checking the abuse of
advertising, for the increase of parks and gardens and open spaces.
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 is 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 mainly 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, and unrestricted
commercial competition seems to lead direct to monopoly--a hitherto
unexpected climax. Modern life becomes an unequal race, or scramble
for money, place, power, or mere employment. The social (or rather,
unsocial) pressure which results, really causes those sordid aspects,
pretences, and brutal contrasts we deplore. Private ownership is
constantly opposed to public interest, and the narrow point of view
of immediate individual profit as the determining factor in all
transactions obscures larger issues and stultifies collective action
for the public good.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, 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 honoured guest in every city, in every house, bearing
the lamp of art, and bringing comfort and joy to all.
OF THE SOCIAL AND ETHICAL BEARINGS OF ART
The very existence of art in any form among a people is itself evidence
of some kind of social life; and, indeed, as regards pre-historic or
ancient life, is often the only record left of life at all.
From its earliest dawn in the pre-historic etchings of the
cave-dweller, to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptian; the sculptured
slabs of the Ninevite and the Persian; from the treasury of Athens,
and the spoils of Troy, to the refinement and monumental beauty of the
Parthenon marbles--everywhere art (at first identical with language,
or picture-writing) is eloquent of the mode of life; the ideas and
ideals which have held sway in the human mind, until they have become
precipitated, or crystallized, for us in antique architecture and
sculpture, and painting, and the sister arts of design. Until every
fragment of woven stuff, every bead and jewel, every fragment of broken
pottery still speaks to us out of the past with its “half-obliterated
tongue” of the life and thought which have gone away, of buried hopes
and fears, of the loves and strife, of the pride and power, which
have left but these frail relics to tell their tale.
[Illustration: Egyptian Hieroglyphics on a Wall Decoration
Abydos: Temple of Seti]
The keen, observant eye of the primitive hunter noted down unerringly
the outlines of the fierce animals he stalked and slew. The same
unerring perception of typical form reappears formalized, and more and
more abstracted, in the hieroglyphic, which, using the familiar animals
and objects of Eastern life as symbols, becomes finally cast, by use
and wont, in the course of evolution, into the rigid abstractions of
the alphabet. This, though in calligraphic and typographic art entering
another course of development, has become quite distinct from the
graphic and depicting power which appears to have been its origin;
but they are still closely and constantly associated together in our
books and newspapers, which form so large a part of, and so intimately
reflect, our social life, and which have carried picture-writing into
another and more complex stage.
The early Assyrian reliefs, too, in another way may often be considered
as a series of emphatic historic statements--a graven writing on the
wall. Their object, to record the conquests of kings or their prowess
as lion-hunters, their battles and sieges, their prisoners taken, their
weapons and munitions of war, the attributes of their symbolic deities.
Their value was perhaps as much their descriptive and recording power
as their decorative effect.
The archaic Greek passed through the same stage, only gradually
evolving that exquisite artistic sense, until the monumental beauty
and heroic ideality of the Phidian work is reached to pass away
again with the spirit and the life which gave it birth. The wave of
Greek civilization rises to the crest of its perfection, and breaks
and falls, yet spreads its influence, and leaves its impress upon
all lands; unextinguished by the power and pomp of the Roman which
succeeded, over which, indeed, in the artistic sense it triumphs,
springing to new life in Italy, until it is found wandering among the
ruins and trivialities of Pompeii, where the last stage of ancient life
has been preserved, as it were, in amber.
We may drop some natural tears over the death of paganism, feeling
that at all events, with all its corruptions, it has placed on record
for us in art that joy of life, and the frank acknowledgement of man’s
animal nature (which no religion or philosophy can afford to leave out
of account) and has reconciled them in forms of enduring refinement and
beauty. A great deal must be set down to persistence of sunshine, but
anyone glancing at what has been left us in various beautiful forms of
art from the classical times and countries must feel how much larger
an external part art must have played in that life; how constant and
intimate must have been its appeal--from the storied pediment and
frieze of the temple, to the gilded statues and bronze fountains in the
public streets and squares--walls whereon the painter’s fancy is let
loose--everywhere colour, and overhead the blue sky of Italy or Greece.
There was at any rate no room for monopoly in the pleasure of such
an external life. The _eye_ of the slave was, at least, as free as
that of his master, and the mere common possession of the spectacular
pleasure of life is something. We feel too that the ancient wealth of
beautiful art was the direct efflorescence of the life of the time.
Everywhere the artist’s and craftsman’s eye must have been stimulated,
the forms of man and woman moving without the restraint of formally cut
costume, but freely draped according to the taste of the individual or
the demands of the season, or circumstance. He could see the athlete
in the arena, the beauty on her terrace, the philosopher in his grove,
the colour and glitter of the market-place, the slave at his toil, the
warriors clanging out to battle, and all these in the broad and full
light of a southern sky. What wonder that his art took beautiful forms.
Even the grave was robbed of its gloom by the Greek artist, and death
was figured as a gentle and painless leave-taking between friends.
It is impossible to doubt that impressions of external beauty and
harmony have a softening and humanizing effect upon the mind. I believe
that we are unconsciously affected by such influences--that we are
unconsciously happier when we live in pleasantly proportioned rooms,
for instance, with harmoniously coloured and patterned walls and
furniture. The nerves are soothed through the gentle stimulus of the
eye dwelling on happy and refined forms and colours.
With the advent of Christianity, with the spiritual eye fixed upon
another world, the form, with the spirit, of art naturally changed,
and though the main current of the new teaching was to make man
indifferent to externals, after its first timid falterings in the dying
traditions of classical design, we know that Christian art became one
of the most powerful exponents of its creeds, and by the awe-inspiring
influence of the solemn and mystic splendour of the Byzantine and early
Gothic churches so impressed the imagination of men’s minds that,
other causes contributing, the Church became the great depository of
artistic skill and inspiration, and used its power of emotional appeal
to the utmost, by means of noble and impressive architectural form and
proportion, afterwards heightened by every decorative means at the
command of the Gothic craftsman in painted glass, carving, mosaic,
painting and work of gold and silver and precious stones.
A great church was inscribed within and without with Bible history, and
the lives of saints were enshrined for an ensample to all in the living
language of the painter or the carver.
The evil-doer was terrorized by presentments of the torments of a
very realistic hell, while the saint was lifted by ecstatic visions
of angelic choirs and flower-starred meads of Paradise. Art in the
Catholic Church was indeed a preacher and teacher of unparalleled
eloquence and moral force. The unlettered could read its open book, the
poor and the lame and the halt--and even the blind might be moved by
the “full-voiced choir” and “pealing organ.”
The splendour and beauty of a mediaeval cathedral must have had what
we should now call quite an incalculable educational effect upon the
people from the aesthetic and emotional side.
Besides this, the ordinary aspect of the towns must have been full of
romance and interest: the variety, and quaint richness of the citizens’
houses; the colour and fantastic invention in costume and heraldry;
the constant shows and processions, such as those organized by the
crafts’ guilds, full of quaint allegory and symbolic meaning. A street
might be solemn with the black and white gowns of monks and priests,
or gay with flaunting banners and the flashing armour of knights, or
the panoply of kings and queens. Great gilded wagons, bright with brave
heraldry--instead of our black, varnished, respectable carriages,
with a modest lozenge on their panels--though these have of late been
rather put out of countenance by the more daring and dangerous motor
car with its mysteriously veiled and masked occupants, a vehicle lately
described by a wit as “a cross between a brougham and a battleship.”
Well, between the ordinary wonders of its mixed and perpetual traffic,
we in London have now nothing left as a free popular spectacle but the
Lord Mayor’s Show, or the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. There is the
poster, it is true--that cheap and generally nasty “popular educator.”
Not always so cheap, either, since one hears of Royal Academicians
being secured for the service of pushing commerce at the price of
a thousand pounds or so--though the result is generally not a good
_poster_, but only an oil picture spoiled.
Human life, however disguised or uglified with unnatural and
inharmonious surroundings, must, of course, always remain intensely
interesting. If we all took to wearing sandwich boards to announce our
personal tastes or wants to save trouble, I suppose a certain amount
of drama would still be possible, and I have no doubt we should soon
have aesthetic persons declaring that it was as fine a costume as a
mediaeval herald’s or Joseph’s coat of many colours.
It does not seem as if we could take art and beauty naturally in
this country, since the puritan frost came over us. We have suffered
from stiffness in our aesthetic limbs ever since. A certain pedantry
and affectation which have attached themselves to some parts of the
question of art, seem to have created mistrust in the ordinary mind.
The ordinary mind has been too much inured to ugliness, perhaps--and
habit is dear to all of us. Conscious efforts to produce things of
beauty are not always convincing, and even a thing of beauty does not
look comfortable without harmonious environment. If Venus were to
suddenly rise from the Serpentine (or from New York Harbour) she might
be misunderstood.
If we are ever to have beauty in our common life again, beauty must
spring naturally from its ordinary conditions, just as beautiful art
always is inseparable from its material. Now, it is often said that
art has always been the minister to wealth and power, that it has
been the private possession of the rich, and its dwelling-place the
precincts of courts and the shelter of great houses. If, however, the
results of art (so far as the art which appeals to the eye can ever be
monopolized) have often become forms of private property, this is only
so in a limited degree, and is only partially true; and in regard to
the later detached or pictorial forms of art, or in the case of antique
bric-à-brac.
Art, in its nobler monumental forms, by the necessity of its existence,
has appealed to the whole people of a city or state from a Greek temple
to a Gothic cathedral with all the arts of design in retinue.
If, in later days, artists were pressed into the service of kings,
great nobles, merchant princes or millionaires, and art became largely
tributary to their pomp and magnificence, it was at least at the
_expense_ of the whole people. And as, by degrees, partly owing to
commercial and mechanical evolution, and partly to the inducement of
greater personal credit, social distinction and sympathy (which, after
all, are parts of commercial evolution or rather, perhaps, some of
its effects) the artistic faculty was drawn more and more into purely
pictorial channels, and partook more and more of the nature of portable
and private property, its actual possession became a matter, more or
less, for the rich. Even in this stage, however, it has made possible
splendid public and national collections--as our own National Gallery,
for instance, where the very choicest works of the greatest painters of
all time are the actual possession of each and all of us.
Where there has been monopoly of art, and large masses of the people
(the workers whose “surplus value” really pays for it) have been
excluded from, or deprived of, its enjoyment and socializing influence,
is it wonderful that monopoly in art should follow monopoly of land
and the means of subsistence? or that those who refuse to recognize,
or to respect, common rights in land, and common participation in the
pleasures and refinements of life, should refuse to recognize common
rights in art also?
The growing enlightenment and demand for justice on the part of
the workers, and their growing power and capacity for combination
under democratic institutions, will insist upon the abolition of
such monopolies; and the spread of the feeling of fellowship and the
inter-dependence of all workers will create a sounder public sentiment
and morality in the matter of the uses of wealth and the social value
of art.
I hope that we shall not be content as a people to remain satisfied
with so little of the refining influence of art and beauty in our daily
lives. We are beginning to realize the immense loss and deprivation
their absence causes, and where they are not felt at all, where their
warm rays, like the sun’s, never penetrate, there is coarseness,
brutality, and degradation. It is a noticeable fact, that harshness
and roughness of manner and want of sympathy are usually found with
an absence of sensibility to art in individuals. The aesthetic sense,
indeed, is like a sixth sense added to the other five, or rather
evolved from them. Yet we have, until recently, been in the habit of
shutting up our national museums and picture galleries on Sundays as if
they were haunts of vice, instead of refining, intellectual and moral
influences, and sources of unselfish pleasure. We allow the walls of
our school rooms, for the most part, to be gaunt and bare, and give
no greater stimulus to the children’s and young people’s imaginative
reason than is to be gleaned from varnished, unillustrated maps and
tame lithographs of wild animals.
But it is hardly surprising that the minds and imaginative faculties
should be starved, when we know that the _bodies_ so frequently are, as
under our compulsory system of education it has been discovered poor
children frequently go foodless to school.
Yet if common life was thought worth enriching by suggestions of
heroism, poetry, and romance; if education was considered more as a
means of developing _the whole nature_, than merely as a preparation
for a narrow competitive commercial existence, might we not, from the
storehouses of history and folk-lore, picture our school and college
walls with great and typical figures of heroes, and founders and
fighters for our liberties and the commonwealth, and make them glow
with colour and suggestion? and I believe we should see its after
results in a more refined and more spirited, more sympathetic, more
united and self-respecting people.
Whether such changes can come before certain greater economic changes,
comprehended by socialism, is another matter (I do not believe they can
in their fulness), and I have no wish to put the aesthetic cart before
the economic horse, although conviction sometimes comes from attempting
the impossible--or the right thing at the wrong stage.
The social character of the appeal to the eye is brought home to us
by the involuntary impulse which, with a fine work of art before
us, or some lovely natural scene, provokes such common exclamations
as “Look at that!” “Oh! do look there!” “Did you ever see anything
so beautiful!” and the like. This seems to show that people are not
content, as a rule, to enjoy the pleasures of vision _alone_. They
cannot look at a beautiful work without wanting others to see it also,
and participate in the same emotional excitement and appreciative
delight.
Appreciation and sympathy are also, of course, enormously stimulating
to artists. They are like the answering ring to the coin of his thought
when he casts it forth to the world, which tells him it is of true gold.
Works of art are like questions or problems put by their inventor to
the public at large. If they are understood at once then the artist
knows he is in touch with his questioner, and that he speaks in a
tongue that is comprehended: but this is not always the case.
The conditions of the practice of art itself have undergone changes
analogous to the evolutions of society, the sentiment of which it
always reflects. From its earlier collective stages and typical forms,
when all the arts of design were united in architecture with such
beautiful results, to its more individual and personal character in
modern days, more especially in painting, we can trace an entire change
of spirit. The focus of artistic feeling and expression is no longer
centralized on religious ideals, mysteries, or mythologies, but is
turned everywhere on the parti-coloured aspects of human life, and the
changes of the face of nature. Its methods are no longer traditional
but experimental, and its point of view personal, so that the position
of a modern painter is not so much that of a musician taking his
place in a great orchestra, and contributing his part to a great and
harmonious whole, but rather that of a soloist, who claims our entire
attention to his performance on a particular instrument--it may be only
a tin whistle, or it may be, of course, the violin in the hands of a
master.
This condition of things in art has had its effect on the individual
practitioner, and the tendency is to set up individual codes of
artistic morality, so that each can only be judged with reference to
his own standard, and according to the dictates of his own aesthetic
conscience or consciousness, and this perhaps may be quite the reverse
of that of his brethren.
In every direction, however, the practice of art teaches the value of
certain virtues as means towards the attainment of its higher aims and
ideals: conscientiousness in workmanship--doing all that is fitting
and needful to obtain certain results: the necessity of making certain
sacrifices of lesser beauty, for instance, or minor truths, to express
the higher beauty and the more significant truth; for it is no more
possible to “eat your cake and have it” in art, than it is in the
affairs of life generally.
Judgement and temperance have important parts to play in the making of
the world of art; and that faithfulness to an ideal, and perseverance
through all manner of technical and other difficulties and adverse
circumstances, which carry a man through, and oblige him to exercise a
certain self-restraint, to reach the goal he has set before himself.
So that the practice of art cannot be said to be without its ethical
side, any more than its manifestations can be denied their social
bearing and significance.
OF ORNAMENT AND ITS MEANING
The decorative sense as expressed in the rich and varied field of
surface ornament is now so much taken as a matter of course, and so
associated with certain historic styles, racial types and climatic
characteristics, that few care to look further into origins than such
well-defined and comprehensive sources seem to contain, and doubtless
did we know all about our historic styles (a knowledge of which every
art student is expected to have at his fingers’ ends) and could we
thoroughly analyze the racial types and climatic influences of the
world, we should know as much as could be known about ornament.
Ornament in its developed, or sophisticated and conscious, stage seems
to me to have a close analogy to music of certain types, in which the
sensuous delight in rhythm and melody, as well as the technical skill
and invention of the musician, constitute the principal charm.
I imagine, however, that the pleasure a designer may feel in following
out a germ of what I might call ornamental thought to its natural
or logical development, and the pleasure derived by the beholder
from some harmonious or rhythmical arrangement of form and line are
themselves developments from a primitive germ. It is the pleasure,
or search for pleasure, of the aesthetic sense, which, from the
first discovery of the fascination arising from a repeated form, or
a recurring line, has been ever eager to extract from such simple
elements fresh delight by greater complexity and new dispositions of
the old elements, until the ornamentalist, or the student of pattern,
finds himself in a vast forest of invention, complex and varied in
its floral growth almost as Nature herself--an enchanted garden
of decorative form, line, and colour--in which, nevertheless, the
struggle for survival, or perhaps ascendancy, takes place, continually
controlled by the stern schooling of necessity and utility--the
gardeners with their pruning knives.
Yet I imagine, long before this conscious pleasure there was
_wonder_--the wonder as of a child who gazes at the daily wonder of the
sun, and covers paper with attempts at making circular forms.
Among the earliest scratchings of primitive man we get sun-symbols, we
find meandering lines for water, acute points for fire, and zigzags for
lightning. These signs, too, seem at first used in a detached way, as
if to convey to the mind the idea of the thing as words or signs and
not with any ornamental intention.
The Egyptians, as we know, afterwards developed this kind of
sign-language in their system of hieroglyphics, and in the necessity,
perhaps, of making the forms represented extremely abstract and
suitable for incision, while conveying as much character as possible,
they also made them ornamental. The necessity, too, of compression,
ordered scale, and control of space or boundary would naturally help
the decorative effect. (See illustration, p. 89.)
But apart from this consciously ordered and systematic language of
hieroglyphic, we may see the sun symbols and the meanders and zigzags
forming in repetition simple borderings and types of ornament in the
early art of most peoples on pottery, textiles, or carved in stone.