we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die
fighting for them, we make others die for us.
Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage
of civilization--that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the
centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and
visible sign of the people’s pride of life and of their sense of power.
The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they
expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things
to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a
profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of
civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not
have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.
But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty
and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but
because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic--in
which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek
civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all
human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race
and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of
service, and prided itself in military service alone--in that and in
the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods,
but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of
humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up
into portions of an unimportant size and perished.
At a later day--and again with the city as centre to its life of
self-realisation--we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance,
a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences
alternately jostled and combined.
And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex
art--tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And
you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic
arm, a new life-consciousness--the consciousness of the guilds, the
workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert
itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own
account--not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and
glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and
halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments
to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.
Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery
and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn
round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the
true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back
into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then
did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become
imitative and debased.
I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our
England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the
great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches
the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said
that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings
of Europe! Think of it!--of what that means in the realisation of
life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest
after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called
“merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national
characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed
adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in
beauty.
I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a
very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use
if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that
statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in
which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain
on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred
(so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment),
there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living”
was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided
themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the
corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot,
so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own
too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve
them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their
power.
So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty,
delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that
one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our
goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do
not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to
live delightfully.
If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and
wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable--not,
I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he
must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”;
else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.
Our life is built up--we know not to what ultimate end--on an infinite
number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live;
they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine
the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could
not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their
utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.
I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life
where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of
shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt
and a loathing.
Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from
conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of
subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our
ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and
commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature
itself--making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for
self-realisation in ornament and delight--so long will these things be
inevitable.
But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human
nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I
mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here
and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.
ART AND CITIZENSHIP
(1910)
The most hardened advocate of “Art for Art’s sake,” will hardly deny
that Art, for all its “sacred egoism,” is a social force. The main
question is where does your Art-training begin?
The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries
do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation;
and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong
feeling about Art.
And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong
line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your
pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their
natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages
and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same
condemnation.
True education, as opposed to merely commercial education, is a
training of mind and body to an appreciation of right values; values,
not prices. The man who has an all-round appreciation of right values
is a well-educated man; and he could not have a better basis either for
the love or the practice of Art than this appreciation of what things
are really worth.
But, in the present age, which prides itself on its inhuman system
of specialisation as a means to economy, such a man is rather a
rare phenomenon; for it is about as difficult to get out of present
conditions a true appreciation of life values--a true Art-training--as
it is to get a true artist. Where your national conditions shut down
the critical faculties, and make their exercise difficult, there too,
your creative artistic faculties are being shut down and made difficult
also. They are far more interdependent than your average Art-teacher
or Art-student is generally willing to admit. The idea that he has to
concern himself with conditions outside his own particular department
threatens him with extra trouble, and the burden of a conscience
that the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” will not wholly satisfy;
and so he is inclined to shut his eyes, and direct his energies to
the securing of favourable departmental instead of right national
conditions.
But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training
must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery
of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition
of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among
other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live
a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he
derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily
disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions
between artistic supply and social demand have become vitiated, if
the conditions of the market, or of society, are unfavourable to the
reception of products of true worth, then the artist must to some
extent be an active party in the struggle for getting things set right.
That does not mean that, if he has a gift for the designing of
stage-scenery, he should necessarily be involved in a struggle to
secure a good drainage system (though even that should have an interest
for him) but it does mean very much that he should be tremendously
interested in the education of his own and the public mind to the point
of receiving good drama rather than bad, in order that his art may have
worthy material to work upon; and as good drama largely arises from a
lively conscience and the quickening in the community of new ideas, he
will wish his public a keen and open mind on all social questions.
Similarly a man who designs for textile fabrics should be very much
concerned indeed in getting cleanly conditions and pure air in the
towns and dwelling-houses where his designs have to live and look
beautiful, or grow ugly and rot. And there you get set before you in
small, the opposition between the interests of Art and the supposed
interests of trade. It is--or it is supposed to be--in the interest of
trade that things should wear out or get broken, and be replaced by
other things. It is in the interest of Art that they should not wear
out, that they should last; that everything worthy which is given to
man’s hand to do should have secured to it the greatest possible length
of life. And the reason is that the artist, if he be a true artist,
realises the value of things, the life value; that he is on the side of
creation and not of destruction, of preservation and not of waste. He
has within his nature an instinct that the greatest possible longevity
is the right condition for all manual labour; that when a man sets his
hand to a thing he should have it as his main aim to give good value,
to make it so that it will endure. And in this connection I would like
to substitute for the words “art training” the word “education.” It
is in the interests of education that things should be made to last,
and that only things should be made of any lasting material that
deserve lasting. Nothing should be produced the value of which will
become negligible before it is honestly worn out. And so it is in the
interest of education, as of Art, that we should eliminate as much as
possible the passing and the ephemeral, the demand of mood and fashion,
the thing cheaply chosen, cheaply acquired, and cheaply let go; and
substitute the thing that we shall have a long use for, and should like
to keep permanently--the thing acquired with thought and care, and
thoughtfully and carefully preserved because it has in itself a value.
But you won’t get any broad exercise of that kind of choice between
evil and good until you get a sense of right values--going far away
from what apparently touches art--in the mind, and the public and
private life of the community. And so, as I started by saying, true Art
is bound up with true education and social conditions. Good citizenship
is one of the conditions for setting national Art upon a proper basis.
A lively sense of your duty to your neighbour cannot fail to have an
effect upon your taste in art.
Now I want to bring this view of things home to you. So I will ask
everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own
living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which
are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic
necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation,
and rest. And to begin with, how do you show your sense of duty to
the architect, who has (if you are fortunate) designed for you rooms
of pleasant and restful proportions? How many of the objects in those
rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are
in themselves in any way beautiful--things, that is to say, which (if
not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness
of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their
production? Have those things been put there quite irrespective of
their price and the display they make of their owner’s “comfortable
circumstances”? Are they subordinated to a really intelligent sense
of what a living-room should be? Or are they merely a crowd, a
litter, things flung into the room pell-mell by a house-mistress
bent on securing for her parlour-maid a silly hour’s dusting every
day of objects--not of virtue--and for herself the recognition by
her neighbours that she has money enough to throw away in making her
living-room a silly imitation of a shop for bric-a-brac. Can you, even
those of you who do not live in streets where you have to safeguard
your privacy--can you look out of the window without being tickled in
the face by lace curtains, blind-tassels, or potted palm-leaves? Can
you sit down to the writing-table without entangling the legs of your
chair in a woolly mat and your feet in the waste-paper basket, or get
at the drawer of the cabinet without moving two or three arm-chairs,
or play the piano without causing the crocks which stand upon it to
jangle? Is the rest and recreation you get in that room anything else
but a sense of self-complacency based upon pride of possession? I ask
you to think what your furnishing of your rooms means, and remember
that to every person who comes into those rooms--and more especially
perhaps to the maids whom you set to dust them--you are helping to give
either an Art-training or an anti-Art-training, a training in true uses
and values, or in misuses and mere waste and wantonness.
Of course I know that to some extent you are victims. You have dear
friends who will give you presents, and you can’t hurt their feelings
by not putting up another shelf, or erecting another glass-shade,
where neither are wanted, or driving another peg into the wall to hang
a picture where no picture can be properly seen. And probably the
reason you cannot is because you have shown yourself so thoughtless
and haphazard in all your ideas about decoration and house-furnishing
that even in that house, which you falsely assert to be your castle,
you stand defenceless before this invasion of ornamental microbes!
Obviously the house is not yours if others can break in and spoil its
borders with their own false taste. But I can assure you that those
inroads do not happen to people whose rooms show a scrupulous sense of
selection. You inspire then (even in the thoughtless) a certain dread
and respect. Though they regard you as uncanny and call you a crank,
you are beginning their Art-training for them.
I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends
descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household
monstrosities which he was expected thereafter to live down to. It was
a cataclysm which he could not avert; but he found a remedy. He became
a passive resister to the Education rate, and year by year he placed
at the disposal of the distraining authorities a selection of his
wedding-presents till his house was purged of them. I have said that
you cannot separate Art-training from general education; and here, at
all events, you find the two happily combined--a war on bad art and on
a bad educational system joined economically in one.
So much, then, for thoughtless superfluity as an impediment to a
recognition of true values. I want now to come to the importance of
permanence as a condition underlying the aim of all production if
it is to be wholesome in its social results. I have said that an
instinct for permanence is what differentiates artistic from supposed
trade interests. Take architecture. Do you imagine that architects or
builders are likely to design or build in the same style for a system
of short leaseholds as they might for freeholds? And is the building
which is calculated just to “save its face” until the lease expires
likely to be so good either in design or workmanship?
Read, in that connection, what Coventry Patmore says in his essay on
“Greatness in Architecture”:
“The house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was,” he says, “fully aware that the strength of a rafter
lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at
least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways,
would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him
better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the
reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous
substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an
old house that strikes us as “architectural,” though it may not contain
a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances
in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the
beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future
is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a
similar house of the time of Henry VII. or Elizabeth. A man,” he goes
on, “now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he
has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: ‘I will
build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have to spare
I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising
wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall
want them?’ The answer is: Because that very ‘waste’ is the truest and
most striking ornament; and though your and your family’s enjoyment of
a house thus magnanimously built may last but a tenth of its natural
age, there lies in that very fact an ‘ornament’ of the most noble and
touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and
every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant;
whereas the meanness of the other plan will be only the more apparent
with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.”
Again, are you likely to get so good an architectural design where you
cannot be fairly sure that the use for which the building is raised
is likely to be permanent? And do our modern trade conditions and
present enormous demand for thoughtless superfluities tend to make that
prospect more probable? If not, then instability of trade, or trade
directed to the satisfaction of frivolous and ephemeral demands is bad
for architecture, and hinders any worthy development in it of national
characteristics.
But there, mind you, in trade, lies to-day the very life of the nation;
for the life of our teeming millions depends on it. By our industrial
specialisation in the pursuit of wealth vast numbers of us have ceased
to be self-supporting in the necessaries of life. And the question for
artists is, are we basing our national life on conditions that cannot
secure permanence and stability in the things which we produce? Is it
a necessary condition of our industrial development that things should
have a shorter life and we a shorter use for them than in the old days?
To the artist the drawback of machine-made things is not necessarily
in the mechanism of their production (for in some cases your machine
relieves the human hand of a hard and wearing monotony), but there is
a very obvious drawback if it imposes upon the worker merely another
form of hard and wearing monotony, and at the same time shortens the
life of the thing produced. If handicraft does not offer to the worker
worthier conditions for hand and brain, and insure longer life in the
thing produced, it is no good pinning our faith to it. Eliminate it,
and let machinery take its place. You have not, then, in the transfer,
destroyed any right values, and you are not going counter to the
conditions which tend to produce national Art.
But, as an example of the particular value which does sometimes attach
to hand labour (irrespective of its artistic value), I have here a
small unused sample of chair-cover material of English make, produced
about eighty years ago, at a probable cost--so I am told by experts--of
under £2 the square yard. The chairs it was made to cover are now
in my possession. During the twenty-five years of my own personal
acquaintance with them they have had plenty of hard wear; but even at
the corners that material has not yet begun to wear out; and the colour
has only become softer and more mellow in quality.
Within the last ten years I endeavoured to get that covering matched in
a modern material, and I paid for the nearest match I could get about
one-fifth of the price I have quoted. That material has already gone
shabby; and where it is most worn and faded the colour, instead of
mellowing, has gone dead and dirty in quality. The older material will
probably outlast my time.
There, then, are the comparative values of the old and the new
material. You pay the higher price for the old, but in the end it is
more economical. And it has this double advantage (or what would be a
double advantage in a State where industrial conditions were sound),
that it inclines its possessor to adopt a more permanent style of
furnishing, by making age beautiful and change unnecessary; and so it
sets free a great amount of human labour for other purposes; not merely
the labour of the textile workers who have not to provide new covers,
but the labour of the upholsterers, who are not called upon to rip off
a series of old covers and fit on new ones, dragging old nails out and
driving fresh nails in, with the result that the framework of the chair
itself is presently worn out and a new one required in its place. All
that labour is saved.
That small example is important because it exemplifies those
possibilities of permanence attaching to certain forms of hand-labour
out of which can be developed a school of textile manufacture
indigenous in character--indigenous in that you give it time to become
embedded in its domestic setting, and to make for itself domestic
history. It enables you to develop an appreciation for subtleties
of colour, and to secure tones and harmonies which you cannot get
ready-made in a shop: it gives to a piece of furniture life-value.
But it is bad for trade!