I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the
case of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking
about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever
the poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted,
piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be
monochrome; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a
matter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of
color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him
now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest; now black
like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a
field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understand
the irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about “that
bluer blue, that greener green.” There is no blue much bluer than
Reckitt’s Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin’s; no more
emphatic yellow than that of Colman’s Mustard. If, despite this chaos
of color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not
exactly intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does not
lie in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies in
the fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection, on the
wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors he
lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with
Reckitt’s Blue except that it is not Reckitt’s. Blue does not belong to
Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to
the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very
large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the
iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury;
a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special
irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to
such very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent
pleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who
should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the
taste of mustard altogether.
Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings
with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded
their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than
a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold.
The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more
hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient
artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the
lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that
colors really were significant and precious things, like jewels and
talismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was always
authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was
silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these
colors were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hot
and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching
color which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to
give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It
is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort
of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a
green field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away gold
leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or
crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood.
That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they
have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy
business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentieth
century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the
twelfth.
The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the
merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time
of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with
a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real
distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be
purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple
lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against
white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real difference
is this: that the brown earth-color of the monk’s coat was instinctively
chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the
clerk’s hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say
that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as
the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a
triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not
intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy;
far from it. White ermine was meant to express moral purity; white
waistcoats were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold
watch chains do not. The point is not that we have lost the material
hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best
advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint box and
are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children who have
mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the paper of
instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.
Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and
especially with our modern education. It is the same with ethical
education, economic education, every sort of education. The growing
London child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers who
will teach him that geography means painting the map red; that economics
means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the peculiarly
un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning these
examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar
crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mention
them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the
situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;
but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative
no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current
defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against
the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them;
because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the
House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave like
one.
*****