Chapter I: Part 1

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART

_ONLY ONE HUNDRED AND TEN COPIES OF THIS FINE PAPER
EDITION HAVE BEEN PRINTED._

_THIS IS No._ 49 ....

THE CLAIMS

OF

DECORATIVE ART

BY

WALTER CRANE

LONDON
LAWRENCE AND BULLEN
16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
MDCCCXCII

PREFACE

Of the papers included in this volume some of the shorter ones had their origin in fireside discussions in the studios of brother artists; others have been addressed to larger and various audiences; but all have been written under the influence of that new-old view of art, which has revived during the last quarter of our century, which regards it not only in relation to use and material, and seeks for its vital root in the handicrafts, but also in its connection with common life and social conditions.

Believing that art, looked at rather from the creative side of design, is as essentially a mental and emotional language as poetry and music, while it seeks expression through a variety of processes and materials, and under natural limitations, which limitations, in so far as they are frankly acknowledged, give to art in all its forms a peculiar beauty and charm: believing further that an art which appeals to the eye must be influenced for good or ill by external and social environment, just as a tree takes its character from certain qualities of soil and climate, it follows that I think it is hardly possible to attach too much importance to these external and social conditions, affecting as they do both art and its producer.

While maintaining the first importance of the arts and crafts of design as contributing to the formation of a fine sense of beauty--a sense which grows by what it feeds on, I have dwelt upon the necessity of harmonious relation in all the arts, and a return to their primal unity in architecture. In this fraternal unity none is before or after the other, none is greater or less than the other.

If I may have succeeded in making out a case for the arts now called Decorative and Applied (though “there is but one art”); if I have made good their claim to consideration in an age given largely to place pictorial and graphic power first; if even any of the following papers induce my readers to follow the clue for themselves, and especially to think out further the relation of art to labour and to social life, whether they reach the same conclusions or not, my book will serve its purpose.

Some few of the papers have been printed in various journals, and I have to thank the editor of the _Art Journal_ for permission to reprint “The Claims of Decorative Art.”

WALTER CRANE.

EDGEWATER, ILLINOIS,
_January 1892_.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART 1

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART 7

FIGURATIVE ART 20

SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 31

PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW 35

ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN 39

ART AND LABOUR 50

ART AND HANDICRAFT 62

THE PROSPECTS OF ART UNDER SOCIALISM 74

ON THE TEACHING OF ART 83

DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL 90

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE APPLIED ARTS, AND THEIR RELATION TO
COMMON LIFE 106

ART AND COMMERCIALISM 123

ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY 140

IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART 157

ART AND INDUSTRY 172

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART

An archbishop at an Academy dinner, doubtless with an amiable desire to administer consolation to those less favoured ones whose works did not adorn the walls around him, is reported to have said, in effect: “Never mind. It is not given to every one to be a Raphael, a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo (the exhibition being, by implication, of course full of them); but let them not therefore despair, let them turn their attention to Decorative Art, for there was a large field in which they might yet distinguish themselves.”

Now, although I do not suppose that even an archbishop could be found now to say anything of this kind, so rapidly have we advanced, yet it struck me at the time as the expression of a very curious view of art. It was not the unfortunate selection of names, all of which stood for artists pre-eminently decorative; it was not the placid assumption that the Academy represented both the best judgment upon, and the best work in, art which the country produced; it was not this so much as the assumption that what is called decorative art belonged distinctly to a lower category, that its demands upon the mind, both of the artist and the spectator, were much less, and, in short, the whole thing was of lower aim, and required less skill and power to produce than what is called pictorial art. If, however, we are justified in drawing any conclusions from the history and practice of art, they seem to invert this view altogether.

I have no wish to set the sisters one against the other, or make odious comparisons, and indeed there is no need to do so, as, in my belief, both kinds of art in their higher development join hands. Their true relative position, indeed, may be expressed by the two limbs of a pair of compasses, inseparable and mutually dependent and helpful. It is certain that painting and sculpture, as commonly understood, cannot be in a good state, cannot reach any perfection, where the multitudinous arts that surround and culminate in them--that frame them in, in short--are not also in vigorous health and life. As well expect flowers to bloom without roots and stems, light, heat, and air, as to think that beautiful pictures or statues, or the sense that produces and admires them, can exist where there is no beauty in everyday things, no sources of harmonious thought about us, or delight of the eye in pleasant colour or form in things of daily use and surrounding. I would go further, and say that where decorative or applied art is in a wholesome condition good pictorial or dramatic art will follow on as natural effect in the chain of evolution from certain ascertainable causes.

This is sufficiently obvious to actual workers in art; but “Truth,” as has been said, “never can be confirmed enough,” and I am afraid that it has by no means reached this stage with a great majority of the people, not to speak of academicians and archbishops, and that it yet needs demonstration to many that beauty, both in life and art, is not something accidental and fanciful, the luxury and pursuit of a few dreamers and misguided beings; that it is an organic thing, having its own laws, however various, its own logical causes and consequences; that it, like everything else, is a result of that continual fierce and strenuous struggle for existence throughout nature; a living thing, and therefore ever-varying in its forms, having its own ever-recurring seasons--growth, perfection, decline, and renaissance--as we follow it down the long stream of time, and mark its many habitations from age to age.

We may well treasure the broken caskets, the priceless shells and fragments of art, cast by the ruthless flood of years on the desert shores; but let us not, in our anxiety and admiration for the beauty that is of the past, forget that beauty is a living force with us, a living presence, and that, like her prototype, for those who have eyes, she rises from our northern seas every summer morning, without the trouble of going to Cyprus. But she must be fed, clothed, and housed, and for these necessities we, as decorative artists, must be held mainly responsible. We are the trustees, as it were, of the common property of beauty, and we are the administrators of it, to use a well-worn phrase, from the cottage to the palace. Whether as architects, sculptors, painters, and designers, each after our kind, by the forms, the colours, and the patterns we put out, we are insensibly forming the tastes, by association, of present and future generations. And, to return to the question touched at the outset, herein is the mark and goal of decorative art, properly speaking; that whereas other considerations may weigh largely in painting a picture, such as desire to get force or expression, though, personally, I should say they should never outweigh considerations of beauty; yet in decorative art, or, as it is not very logically called, applied art, these considerations are supreme. Decorum, balance, harmony, these are the graces who must advise us, though a whole crowd of secondary considerations clamours to be heard.

The current notion of decoration is summed up in the expression “flatness of treatment,” and to the notion that this is the whole of the law and the prophets of decorative art may be dimly traced, perhaps, the conception of it in the mind of the archbishop, and in those of many superior persons. Hence, too, the flat-ironed primulas and the genus of enfeebled flora and fauna generally, which so often, alas, do duty as decoration. As if decorative art was a voracious but dyspeptic being, and required everything in heaven and earth to be thoroughly well boiled down before it could be properly assimilated.

Flatness of treatment, of course, is well enough; it is the most single and obvious answer to one of the many problems a decorative artist has to consider. It is a part of his business, no doubt, to assert the wall, but his work does not begin and end there. But even if this was the last word of decorative art, it is by no means so simple a matter as it sounds. A world of judgment must come in, as at every step in all art properly so called. It needs our best faculties, whether we treat things in the flat or the round; but as well might one be satisfied with the definition of painting as “the imitation of solid bodies on a plane surface,” as with “flatness of treatment” as adequate characterisation of decoration.

The real test in decoration is adaptability, either to position or material. The exigencies of both often open the gates of invention; but assuredly no decoration has a right to the name which does not satisfy these conditions.

These are, after all, but the bones and the scaffolding, and though it is highly necessary to have them in their right places, the real triumphs of decoration come afterwards. And truly, the world, to the decorative artist, is all before him, where to choose. Nay, like every true artist, he has to make his own world, and people it with his thoughts. And in respect of thought decorative or monumental art, in its higher forms, is capable of expressing, by its command of figurative and emblematic resources, more than is possible to purely pictorial art. There is, in fact, nothing beyond its range, by reason of its being more suggestive than imitative; and in this direction it becomes again, as at its beginning, but in a higher sense, a language--a picture-writing.

And what language can be more definite and enduring, whether we read it from the artist’s or the historian’s, the antiquarian’s or the philosopher’s point of view? How faint an idea should we get of the nations of antiquity if all their art had perished! And it is all strictly decorative art, from the incised bones of the cave men to the frieze of the Parthenon. Therefore, say some, paint your own time, its manners and its customs, its coats and its trousers. By all means, if you see your way to it; but it would be a mistake to suppose that this was the only way of painting it. The mind has its habits and costumes as well as the body--a far more extensive wardrobe, indeed, which promises still to increase. Art does not live for the antiquary alone. He is never likely to be in want of material, even if Derby Days and Railway Stations were never put on canvas.

I know no better definition of beauty than that it is “the most varied unity, the most united variety.”

Well, certainly there is no lack in our day of variety--I mean in the sense of style and material. To the worker in art it is a truly formidable prospect, and to enter the lists he needs to be well mounted and armed, in view of the forces arrayed against him. Modern life with all its hideous luxury and squalor; its huge, ever-spreading, unwieldy, unlovely cities; the bare skeleton and bald framework of new aims and inventions breaking through the rich tattered garment of ancient life and customs. How to reconcile these things, how to assert the supremacy of Beauty, to raise her standard everywhere, how to bring sweetness out of strength, would seem to need the strength and courage of an artistic Samson. At the same time it is as well to remember that too much preparation may be as much an encumbrance as a defence, and that great effects are sometimes produced by very simple means; that giants have been floored by a well-directed stone in a sling, and the Philistines routed in consequence. I say it is as well to bear this in mind when we take our artistic life in our hand and go forth--to meet the monsters of our time clad in plate-glass, cast-iron, and fortified in desirable residences.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART

The Architecture of Art is a somewhat comprehensive title, and it might not unreasonably be expected of me, before proceeding with the structure and treatment of the subject in perspective, to give some sort of scale, sketch, ground plan, or elevation, so that the general drift of my argument may be understood. I do not propose to deal exactly with the various forms and styles of architecture as they are, and have been manifested in plastic or graphic art; or the predilections of different designers and painters for certain forms over others as accessory to their compositions, interesting as such a comparative study might be. I am taking the term architecture in its widest sense, considering it not only as an art in its effect upon other arts, but as the fundamental, comprehensive, and sustaining framework both of life and thought; the historic and living background which influences and moulds all our ideas, the set scene upon which is enacted the ever-shifting drama of art.

In comparing the art of the present day, architectural or otherwise, with the art of the past, especially of any well-defined epoch, whether mediæval or classical, we cannot fail to be struck with one great distinction underlying all superficial differences. Whereas the art of past ages seems to have germinated, to have been continually evolved in new forms, to be alive, and spontaneous, as it were, growing like a thing of nature, and expanding with man’s ideas of nature and life; in our day this sense of spontaneity, this natural growth, is scarcely felt. Conscious and laborious effort takes the place of spontaneous invention, and originality is crushed by the weight of authority, is confounded and abashed by the mass of examples. No form of architecture or art seems to spring naturally and unaffectedly out of the actual necessities and demands of daily life.

It has been said that the great exhibition of 1851 is to be held answerable for a great deal; for the vulgarising and commercialising of art, and for the final break-up of old traditions in the crafts of design; but so far as this took place, it was only the effect of causes lying far deeper in the great economic changes, affecting the conditions of the production of all works whatsoever, which had been going on during the three previous centuries. That exhibition, as succeeding ones have done, merely summed up the results of these changes, and showed their effects, for good or evil, declaring to all whom it might concern that the apotheosis of commercialism meant the degradation of art.

This will seem a hard saying to such as are accustomed to believe that the accumulation of riches and the welfare of art go hand in hand. But let us look around us. Of course the spirit of commercialism does produce startling results upon art, if not in it; and it is a wolf quite capable of seeing the advantage of sheep’s clothing. There is, for example, plenty of building and house painting. Capitalism is nothing if not practical. The national instinct based on the national shibboleth that “every man’s house is his castle,” combining with the enormous growth of cities, has produced those miles and miles of brick cages which have more or less ruined the architectural character and proportion of every large town in the kingdom. What, then, are these? These are Englishmen’s castles--on a small scale, it is true, and run together. There are not hills enough for the castles required, and what hills there are belong to somebody else. What is easier than to build them side by side? They will support each other, and economise bricks and mortar; and why trouble to make a fresh design for each castle? The little lords’ wants are much the same as the big ones’, only on a smaller scale, like his purse. He must, of course, have his outer line of defences. His portcullis, a drawbridge,--well, at any rate, iron railing and portico,--that he may speak with his enemy the tax-gatherer at the gate; his dining-room, drawing-room, bedroom, and bath-rooms, and gas and water laid on. Why should he not be happy and comfortable? and it is all so cheap too! Yet the speculative man and the man of profits--the kindly builders who multiply these miniature strongholds for the average Briton--we do not account exactly as public benefactors. Jack is rarely able to build his own house nowadays, so Jerry builds it for him; but the well-known drama of rat and cat, dog and cow with the crumpled horn, is still enacted, with perhaps some changes in the cast, and new scenery and dresses. Here are the bee-cells ready made for the future occupants of the national hive, fit for the average man,--never mind if they do not always fit him; we cannot take account of round or square bodies; if the majority are hexagonal, the rest must put up with the inconvenience and a little squeezing: great is Average! Meanwhile, how fares it with art in the house that Jerry built? Do the streets produced on these principles, and at such a terrible rate, lend themselves either to pictorial or decorative treatment? Do they suggest any ideas, even, except of the dust-man? Well, but the man of profits is ready again. The Briton can get his art cheap too--wholesale or retail. He can have cheap dadoes and coloured glass thrown in here and there. If these are not enough, he can fill his house with early (or latest) English furniture, “surmounted by something Japanese,” as the comic poet saith. Should his aspirations remain still unsatisfied, he can take the illustrated magazines to tell him about every art under the sun, and how it is done. In fact, if the literature of the subject could make artists and craftsmen, every street should be bristling with them. Every Christmas scatters oil paintings by our first masters, fresh from the printing-press, over the British Empire. A shilling or so will secure a whole gallery. Was ever anything like it in any age of art? Truly, no. Still we are not happy--we are not happy about our art. We English especially. We allow Frenchmen and Belgians to teach us painting, and our American cousins how to do nearly everything else.

Now, I am not going to say it is all the fault of the Royal Academy. That institution, as regards its chief feature, the annual Exhibition, is only another engine of the man of profits, which, frankly recognising the commercialism of the age, endeavours, by special appointment and self-election, to adapt the business of picture-painting to it, without troubling much about architecture and sculpture, and leaving the other arts to shift for themselves. It is but due to say, however, that they endeavour to counteract the influence of the new masters in the summer by the works of the old masters in the winter, on the principle, perhaps, of the mediæval system of doing penance.

In the course of evolution we are passing through a period of disintegration. Art cannot escape the tendencies and influences of its time, which, indeed, it is of its very nature to illustrate. The artist has become more and more specialised, and the unity of the arts has been broken up. He is no longer the master craftsman among his workmen and apprentices, prepared to do all things in the province of design, from the pattern on the hem of a garment to the painting of an altar-piece. He is rather the juggler in the master’s place, who with a particular sleight of hand can command a particular phase of sea or sky; or he has the trick of the flattering glass in portraiture. Perchance he seeks to draw “iron tears” down the cheeks of (not Pluto) but the philanthropic Plutus, and golden ones from his pocket by his peculiar domestic pathos; or in stage-lights strikes the contrast of wealth and misery, chilling his blood by melo-dramatic horrors; or by seeking to glorify him in his happy hunting grounds surrounded by images of his sacred animals. As to painting, perhaps it has always been more or less at the bidding of the dominant orders of its day, but more naturally so since she left her roof-tree and parted company with architecture and sculpture, and all the fair and fascinating troop controlled by a common influence and a common devotion, that throng in the splendid retinue of design.

Through the columns of the colossal architecture of time we look back down the long vista of ages and epochs, and read their spirit in the unmistakable language of art, coloured as it is by the human systems and beliefs of which it is the monument; whether as in the wall-paintings and reliefs of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and Persia, art is devoted to the glorification of military or sacerdotal despotism; or the systematised symbolism of an ancient nature worship, humanised and made beautiful by the Greek, informed by freedom and life; decaying amid the corruption of ancient Rome, or graced with a new splendour from the East, rising in the solemn magnificence of Byzantine art; and so through the vivid imagination of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the new mysticism, yet through the Church linked to the hopes as well as the fears of humanity. Then with the new thoughts and hopes of the Renaissance it rekindles its lamp at the shattered shrine of classical sculpture and learning, until choked with artifice and pedantry in succeeding centuries, it is forced back to nature and life again on the threshold of our own time. But again it is in danger from a new tyranny in that unscrupulous commercialism, which is not less dangerous because less tangible, and not less despotic because it is masked under the form of political liberty. Steam machinery, like a many-headed, many-handed dragon, rules industry literally with a rod of iron, and fain would it make art prisoner too, for its profit, but that its touch is death. Intended for the service of man and for the saving of human labour, it has under our economic system enslaved humanity instead, and become an engine for the production of profits, an express train in the race for wealth, only checked by the brake of what is called over-production. Who can tell what will be the end of the journey?

Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the whole force of our economic system is against spontaneous art, and it is in spite of it that there is any life left in it yet. As William Morris has so strikingly pointed out, the system of producing all things for profit, which has succeeded the old one of producing for use; the necessity of selling in the big world market, division of labour, and lastly, machine labour, have rapidly destroyed the art of the people, and are fast vulgarising and destroying all local characteristics in art, as in costume and the surroundings of common life throughout the world. The system of absolute individual ownership of land, which, with the advance of commercialism, has displaced the older systems of tenure, and defrauded the people of their common rights wholesale, naturally leads to much destruction of natural beauty, and when not destroyed it is made inaccessible. It is also answerable, with the causes already named, for that other great disaster both to architecture and art already alluded to, the abnormal growth of the big towns, which year by year throws out its long and aimless feelers that feed upon the green country. When we speak of an advance in education, we too often forget that no education of the schools can compensate for life passed amid hills and woods, and by the sea, itself an education in a lore never to be forgotten.

Overshadowed by such conditions of life, what wonder is it that we should get our art by accident, that it should be in great measure the Art of Accident, which is really what modern realism or naturalism comes to, in spite of elaborate systems of art training, and the elaborate unlearning of them which follows? The sense of beauty may be stunted, but Nature cannot be altogether suppressed under the most perverse social conditions. It is sometimes urged in defence of the artistic aspects of modern life that strange and wonderful momentary effects are seen, in London smoke-fogs, for instance, or amid the fiery eyes of railway signals, and our blackened Stygian rivers, where the Charon of the coal-wharf plies his trade. I have even heard an apostle of beauty defend those monuments of commercial effrontery and theatrical competition, our advertisement hoardings, covered with varicoloured posters, as in certain lights becoming transfigured so as to rival the tints on a Japanese fan. But it is one thing to find accidental beauties in the midst of monstrosities, jewels on dunghills as it were, and quite another to defend the monstrosities for the sake of accidental beauties. The glow, the light fades, and with it the momentary exaltation of spirit; the north-east wind succeeds the south-west, and there being no dignity of form or beauty of proportion in our streets, they are apt to look more sordid and miserable than before. Grace and spirit may be shown by a child dancing to a barrel-organ in a smoky, squalid street, but one would rather see her on a village green dancing to a shepherd’s pipe. We should aim at a condition of things which would not keep beauty at a distance from common life, or on the footing of an occasional visitor. No artist should be satisfied with such a cold relationship.

Art is not the mere toy of wealth, or the superficial bedizenment of fashion, not a revolving kaleidoscope of dead styles, but in its true sense, in a vital and healthy condition, the spontaneous expression of the life and aspirations of a free people.

Before all things, then, in order that art may express itself in this free way, it is necessary that there should be something like a common life. We have no common life, because we have no life in common. Art is split up into cliques, as society into classes. Art should know neither; we want a vernacular in art, a consentaneousness of thought and feeling throughout society. “As it was” (to quote J. S. Mill) “in the days of Homer, of Phidias, or even of Dante.” No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity, but that comprehensive and harmonising unity with individual variety, which can only be developed among a people politically and socially free.

The signs of our times point unmistakably to great changes working in the direction I have indicated, which cannot fail to produce corresponding results in art. Consider, for instance, the probable effect on architecture of a collective, communistic mode of living. Instead of our rows of brick boxes, or piles of them in barracks, there would probably be a demand for quite another type of domestic architecture; we might see something like a revival of the plan of house which for so many ages proved so serviceable to humanity, from Homer to Shakespeare. The great hall as the common living-room, with private rooms for sleeping or solitude adjoining it; or some development of the collegiate plan. Buildings of such a type certainly lead to more dignity of result in architecture than the houses under our present system of tenure and individual plan are ever likely to. We all know, too, that the only chance for the mural painter is in buildings of a more or less public character. If buildings of the type I have mentioned became common, there would be plenty of work for him and the decorative artist generally, and so we might reasonably expect that painting and the sister arts would be restored to perhaps greater than their former dignity, beauty, and invention.

The decline of art corresponds with its conversion into portable forms of private property, or material or commercial speculation. Its aims under such influences become entirely different. All really great works of art are public works--monumental, collective, generic--expressing the ideas of a race, a community, a united people; not the ideas of a class. It is evident enough in our own time that art needs some higher inspiration than that of the cash-box. She suffers from a lethargy that cannot be cured by a prescription from the cheque-book; these are at best but stimulants that force an unnatural excitement, a feverish and brief activity at the expense of the whole system. Private ownership may be able to command both skill and beauty, no doubt, but it is, as a rule, beauty of a lesser kind and considered in a narrower spirit, as it is addressed to the taste of an individual; while the fancies of rich and great persons, when their day is past, often come to be looked upon as curiosities. The art of a people, as expressed in their public buildings and monuments, possesses a kind of immortality.

We know the splendid results in art which grew on the rock of Athens, and the cities of mediæval Italy. Our own cathedrals, no less, will bear witness to the vitality in all the crafts of design at that period. Is it too much to suppose, seeing the intimate connection between political, social, and artistic expression, and how both are affected by economical laws, that in the free federated communes which not improbably will in the future succeed the present jealous nationalities, with a large increase of leisure and opportunity for cultivation and enjoyment, the arts may develop even a higher vitality?

For art in its highest sense is but the faculty of expression. The higher, the richer, the fuller the life, the happier and more harmonious its conditions, the higher and more varied and beautiful will be the forms of its expression in art. But it is deep down in the life of the people that we must dig the foundations, and out of common speech and common labour and handicraft must be shaped the stones of this Architecture of Art. Without such foundation, and without the cement of fellowship, without due recognition of the equality and unity of all art-workers, and their mutual interdependence in building the great structure, we shall raise no enduring monument to be a delight to ourselves, and a memorial of us to those who come after.

Brilliant toys it may be we shall have. Surprises and stimulants, joyless elaboration, and pedantic weight of learning, gorgeous exotics, flowers and fruits, formed for the jaded appetites of a society in its decline, but we must give up all hope of vital and harmonious art enclosed in a casket of beautiful architecture.

Hence comes it that most of the efforts made to revive the arts and crafts among the people, without reference to their economic condition, are like so many attempts to grow the tree leaves downwards. As if an architect should put up an elaborate scaffolding and begin with his roof, before he has decided on his ground plan, dug the foundations, or thought of drainage.

Real progress we must not expect to make until we have re-established the unity of the arts--a very different thing from uniformity. My late friend, Mr. J. D. Sedding, in whom we have lost a genial and sensitive spirit as well as a refined designer, in a discourse he made a while ago, in his generous enthusiasm was assigning the mural decorations of an ideal modern cathedral to various well-known popular painters. I believe even I myself was allowed a corner to amuse the children in. I have as great an admiration for the talents of my contemporaries as any one, but I cannot conceal from myself that it would be a very experimental scheme. It would be, metaphorically speaking, something like an attempt to anticipate the millennium, by trying to persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb in the same cage. But in the fifteenth century Mr. Sedding would have been safe enough; the architect worked in harmony with the painter, the painter with the carver and metal worker, because each probably had a considerable knowledge of the other’s craft and its limitations. Artists, therefore, knew what they had to do, and did it. There was nothing mysterious in this, taking into account the way in which men worked in those days and learned their crafts; but it is a little depressing to think, with all our superiority in exact science and mechanism, how far we are from anything like certainty in art.

Whether the interest of scientific discovery has had anything to do with directing men’s faculty of invention into another channel--and life does not allow time for the exercise of both--I do not pretend to say; but when science and art touch each other with the tips of their fingers, when science asks for the aid of applied art, as in mounting electric lights, for instance, or in order to fit any invention to use, it is very noticeable how artistic adroitness of adaptation lags behind the scientific invention. Perhaps there is no time for art to reconcile herself to the new discovery, or it is too soon superseded by another, and nobody cares.

No doubt the demands upon a designer in the present day, owing to such causes alone, are very heavy; but I am inclined to think commercial pressure and hurry is heavier upon him. Thought is all-powerful, but there is no time to think; fancy and imagination might play about the humblest accessory, but there is no time to play; and all work, or rather uncertainty of work, and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But depend upon it, in conditions fair to humanity, art wants but little encouragement, only freedom and sympathy. The seed will grow fast enough in a favourable soil and climate, and bring forth flowers and fruits after its kind in due season.

FIGURATIVE ART

At the present day, when, speaking generally, all forms of graphic art seem to owe their existence to the primary object of imitation of the more superficial, temporary, and accidental aspects of nature; there would seem to be some danger of forgetting that art has properly any other or loftier function. In painting, for instance, technical skill has become so all-important that the end is too often lost sight of in the means; a brilliant execution seems so sufficing that the hand appears to say to the brain, “I have no need of thee.”

I am far from wishing to undervalue technical skill; we all know that it means hard years of labour and incessant industry. To disparage it would be like an attempt to throw discredit on the faculty of speech or writing; but we should soon tire of language and literature without thought or poetry, without analogy and illustration, or even if it gave us nothing but the best “special correspondence.”

If we conceive all forms of plastic art to be so many different methods of expression for the mind,--if we hold, in short, that art is a language, not only for the expression of particular moods and phases of nature, or portraitures of human character, but also for the conveyance of the higher thoughts and poetic symbolism of the mind,--then I think it is no longer possible to rest content merely with the results of industry and facility of hand, still less so when it is lavished upon the realisation of the commonplace, or squandered in the vivid portraiture of squalid detail, which paints vulgarity in all its glory, or spends all the resources of archæological knowledge and draughtsmanship upon the presentment of some triviality in antique dress, going a roundabout way in order to signify next to nothing with the utmost nicety.

Art has become a toy only when it rests satisfied here; and when it lives to please, it must please to live. The public is a big child, without a child’s simple tastes, and cries continually, not for signs, but wonders; “Young men,” as Falstaff says, “must live,” and so it is all explained.

Admitting this, however, we should yet not be justified in assuming that the taste for, or sense of, figurative design, or allegory in any form, was extinct among us. Far from it.

Curiously enough we shall find it at what may be called the extremities of art, or rather, at the head and at the feet. We shall find it still in its original home, in the province of high poetic and decorative painting; and we find it also, in a rough-and-ready form, in our popular politico-satirical prints, where from week to week passing events, political situations, and popular characters are figured in every variety of pictorial parable, with varying degrees of ingenuity and epigrammatic point; but the ingenuity is undoubted, and the popularity of this form of figurative art equally so.

There is also another form in which what may be called figurative art still holds its place in the popular mind--I mean on the stage, and in the region of spectacular ballet and pantomime. The ballet has a very ancient origin, no doubt, and it is of course entirely figurative, all feeling being expressed by action alone, without the help of words. It is the drama of the body. Modern appliances in stage machinery and lighting have given a new development to this species of show, which has great capabilities, and although there is generally a want of refinement, of controlling and directing taste on the whole, there is often a vast amount of ingenuity and pretty invention in scenes and details. In one of these spectacular ballets not long ago there was a gigantic figure of Time painted at the back of the stage. His hour-glass presently opened like a door, and out of it came one by one the hours, represented by damsels, each showing (besides her legs) distinct and appropriate emblematic feeling in her dress. Here, I thought, was a notion conceived in the true spirit of figurative design.

Fashion and the demands of the market may elbow aside the claims of figurative art in a picture exhibition, yet, one now and then has its effect, as, so to speak, after the whirlwind of sensation, the earthquake of literalism, and the fire of personal vanity, is heard the still small voice of figurative thought. While we can point to such examples of painting as Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death,” and Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Fortune,” it cannot be said that either the power or the feeling for the highest art has fallen to decay.

Between the region of party politics and the serene air of ideal poetry there would seem to be a great gulf fixed, but the fact that at both ends of the scale symbolism should be the natural outcome, seems to show that strong feeling of either kind seeks for figurative expression. The passions, the seasons, the senses, the virtues, the vices; fate and time, love, fame, fortune, life, and death itself,--these all belong to the world of allegory, and continually reappear in new shapes, being by nature so protean that no fixed form may hold them. Each age has its own view of them, and that view is sure, sooner or later, to appear visibly in design.

It seems to be far too readily taken for granted that everything of importance concerning such ideas in art has been said long ago, that we must only expect more or less graceful shadows of what has been done in the past to decorate our stained windows, friezes, our panels, ceilings, and mosaics. Nay, there are people of the persuasion that ornamental art should be content to be ornamental and no more; they are content with figures elegantly employed in doing nothing, if, like the peer in the comic opera, they do it remarkably well. Allegory seems to depress them, and symbolism to put them out; life according to this school is “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.”

I should not quarrel with this view if it led to high and satisfying results, and I am far from saying that the exclusive study of line, tone, arrangement, and method is not of great value. But so are grammars and dictionaries. Rhythm, metre, and diction do not make poetry, though they are essential to it; and my contention is that you cannot separate style and matter in art, any more than in literature, without serious loss.

But in a civilisation which is more distinguished by a morbid care for decency than for a love of beauty, when the cry is _Sartor Resartus_, and large profits are made by the sale of fig-leaves; in an age when no one has made up his mind upon first principles, and there is a premium on reserve; when men are chary of avowing in any shape their dearest convictions, not from fear of bodily jeopardy, but out of consideration for the feelings of others, or, perhaps, their own social position, any pictorial expression of ultimate ideas, or vigorous thought embodied in vital design, must of necessity be rare.

The ancient religions of the world were nothing but figurative systems--personifications and symbols of the forces of nature, varying in different countries as they were gradually evolved from some perhaps common primitive type, or grew naturally out of the independent imaginings of the human mind; certainly all have elements in common, and varieties of the same conceptions appear again and again, through endless modifications and developments, as the same plants vary in different soils, and under different conditions. A foundation of natural mythology was common to them all, and this mythology was conceived and modified according to the genius of the race amid which it grew. The Greek religion had the same origin, but the Greeks alone of the ancient nations set free from traditional forms in their art this nature worship; we may follow it from its primitive archaic types till it is transfigured in heroic shape. Religion transformed by art becomes poetry, and all things were made subservient to the dominant sense of beauty. Of this Greek choice we have a beautiful figure or emblem in the “Judgment of Paris,” which art never tires of repeating, and which, like all the Greek stories, never seems to lose its significance.

In the sublime fragments of the sculptured groups which decorate the pediments of the Parthenon, even as we see them in our own Museum, the eye is first charmed and won by the rhythmical sweep and play of line, the masterly counterbalance of curve, the largeness of style in the treatment of individual forms, and what must have been their triumphant combination in an harmonious whole. We, perhaps, think last and least of the poetic thought, or scheme of thought, which comprehends and informs the entire design. Yet here is figurative art in its highest form. Heroic shapes personify and express the physical and moral forces of nature, and all are subservient to, and contribute to the climax (I am thinking now of the eastern pediment), from the sun-god who rears his arms out of the sea to urge his tossing horses, to the fates who bring the hour of the glorious birth, to which, as the crowning fact and summit of the design, all seems to attach as the highest aspiration of the Athenian mind.

After the lapse of ages, through darkness, destruction, and neglect, these fragments remain, not only unequalled as sculpture, but true as figurative design, as expressing what Nature herself continually teaches--namely, the triumph of mind over matter, of the dominion of the higher organism over the lower, or, in modern philosophic phrase, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.

It is strange to think how from the ancient mythological sources in the dim past flow down the little streams that serve everyday life and humble domestic use. Scattered in the drift, as it were, of a common speech--itself a conglomerate of so many elements--like fossils, how many well-worn fragments we meet of symbolism in proverb, or fable, or allusion. They are common property, the decorations of everyday talk, repeated again and again to emphasise and illustrate the most ordinary conversation, like the little woodcut devices used by the early printers over and over again to enliven their close pages of type.

It would be an interesting but almost endless task to collect and sift such fragments, and trace each back to its origin. Many come from the widest-read and most ancient books, such as Æsop and the Scriptures, and centuries of human experience are perhaps condensed in some scrap of proverbial wisdom or folklore. Indeed, as regards mankind at large it would appear that the figurative element was the only enduring one. History becomes lost in tradition and mythology. Lesser personalities are rolled into the greater, and greater personalities are lost in types. Events are generalised, and the image of the past experience of the race upon the general mind becomes generic, like that of the visual impressions of the individual, as Mr. Francis Galton has so strikingly demonstrated.

It is this natural tendency of the human mind which gives figurative art its importance; experience is the clay on which it works. Imagination is the creative force, and sense of beauty the controlling power. A mental efflorescence springs from life’s rough way, which in words becomes a figure of speech or rises to poetry, and in design, emblem and allegory.

The love of figurative art, which had been embodied in so many rich and strange shapes all through the Middle Ages, bound up with the mysticism and gorgeous ritual of the Roman religion, or entangled with the quaint conceits of heraldry, displayed in mystery show and masque and pageant, or emblazoned upon the illuminated parchment, rose to new life with the Renaissance, and found with the art of printing new means of expression in woodcut and copper-plate.

The allegorising power of poets like Spenser found its counterpart in the designs of such artists as Albert Dürer and Holbein, and the best inventions of the emblem books, which are so characteristic of the period.

The taste for these emblem books seems to have lasted all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and into the eighteenth. Collection after collection issued from the press in all the principal centres of western Europe. The most complete and widely-known were, I suppose, those of Andrea Alciati, which appear in so many different editions since the first, printed at Milan in 1522.

The art of the designs in these books varies, of course, very greatly, according to the current artistic capacity and taste; sometimes rich and inventive, or quaint and graceful, but often little more than a kind of pictorial heraldry, where the moral intention overmasters the artistic power, and becomes merely a label or ensign to point to the moral of the emblem writer.

There exists a ceiling at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, in the library there, which is curiously like an emblem book worked out in an ornamental scheme. It is in low relief, in plaster or some kind of gesso or stucco, and is said to have been done by Italian workmen. It is panelled out in a way characteristic of the time of the house, which bears the date 1619. In the panels are curious figure designs--allegorical representations of the senses, the virtues, and the vices--which remarkably correspond in conception and treatment with their next of kin in some of these old emblem books. The general effect is very rich and agreeable, and though now white, it was probably coloured in the manner of the elaborate ceilings of the middle Italian Renaissance taste, as we find them, for instance, in the Doria Palace at Genoa, in the work of Giovanni da Udine.

Mr. Morris tells us that all the leading types of pattern design sprang originally from ancestral forms which were definitely symbolic; so that art, which we now call purely ornamental, once was made expressive of mental ideas,--like Persian and Arabic texts in Eastern carpets and tiles, where language and ornament are often one and the same thing. The descent of our Alphabet itself has been traced in a direct line back to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic signs; and these again were formed into a species of alphabetical system from an earlier form of picture or emblem writing. Even after they had been systematised into the equivalent of an alphabet, pure symbols are used for the expression of abstract notions, such as thirst, for instance, where a calf is figured above the zigzag lines which signify water.

The hart drinking from a stream is a well-known early Christian symbol; we see it in mosaic in the churches at Ravenna, with the vine and the peacock. These last, too, seem to have been a favourite device to carve upon marble sarcophagi, and it may well be contrasted with later Christian taste, in its choice and treatment of symbols in the modern graveyard; and what a strange medley of emblems meet us there!

Not less mixed is the symbolism of commerce, as exemplified in the variations of the modern trade-mark. Æsop and the Bible are again drawn upon, as well as Pagan mythology; but here again perhaps the less said about art the better. It is only interesting as showing the value in the purely practical sense a figurative device may have, something which is distinctive and easily identifiable. It is in some sense a survival of picture-writing or hieroglyphic, without its old Egyptian ornamental sense and distinction of style.

Philosophy, too, in her most modern dress has recourse to symbol. The high priest of Evolution adopted a device for the cover of his book, showing a plant springing upwards from earth, and putting forth leaf, bud, and finally flower; a caterpillar among the leaves, a chrysalis pendent from the bud, and a butterfly hovering over the open blossom. Nothing could well be more tersely, and at the same time comprehensively, expressive of perhaps the greatest and most far-reaching theory of our time.

Nothing, then, appears to be beyond or beneath the range of expression in figurative design; no touch or conception of life but is made more emphatic and comprehensible by being cast into a concrete image--a kind of visible and picturesque logic to satisfy the eye as well as the mind. But while vigorous design, Atlas-like, can sustain the world of thought upon its shoulders, no breath of thought can quicken dead art into life again. It is the true test of really vital design that it should carry without effort its own intention, and never be over-weighted.

This vigorous mental vitality as manifested in art is always characteristic of the great periods. Nor is it spent in one direction only, but, like the life-blood, circulates freely through the whole body of art; so that the chased pattern upon a piece of armour or a watch-plate, the design of a dress fabric or the woodcut ornaments of a printed book, no less than the frescoed or tapestried wall and the highly-wrought easel picture, declare the same nervous energy and endless untiring inventiveness in beautiful and fertile design.

SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR’S POINT OF VIEW

An age in which the ornamental sense in art is so little understood--an age which cares only for superficial picturesqueness or photographic naturalism is certainly not favourable to any high development of sculpture, which in times past has been the noblest and most expressive of the decorative arts. We have to recognise the fact that sculpture, in common with all art and all forms of life, lives by its capacity of adaptability to circumstances. Perhaps she has a harder struggle for existence than her sisters, and in the absence of zeal for great monumental works it is perhaps not altogether surprising that she sometimes is content to furnish toys for the drawing-room, and finds the perpetuation of nonentities more lucrative than the pursuit of heroic design.