Chapter II

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.