Chapter II: Part 2

That love of picturesqueness, of naturalism, too, which in our day asserts itself in season and out of season, and, unfortunately, often quite regardless of material or place, has left its mark on sculpture, as in painting. Perhaps it would be truer to say that it has revolutionised, or at least made a formidable insurrection in both; so much so that sculpture and painting, in some instances, appear to be striving to change places--painters sacrificing everything for an altitude of relief which suggests departure from the canvas altogether, and sculpture vying with painting in the imitation of textures and scenic effects which cry out for the palette.

For in sculpture, at least in marble, despite all the resources of tangible relief and rotundity, it is curious that naturalism of treatment should be far less suggestive of nature than the same thing in painting. The most elaborate imitation of textures and surfaces (such as we see among the modern Italians) has, in the absence of local tint, an exaggerated and, consequently, unreal look; and if there is no strong element of design to counterbalance the elaboration--which, indeed, is offered in its place--the failure as a work of art is complete.

The importance of designing power in sculpture is obvious enough when we consider that a sculptor, in designing a figure or group in the round, has really to make, or ought to make, not one design merely, but a whole series, in order that his work shall be expressive from every point of view. This necessity, which is one of the difficulties, is also one of the advantages of sculpture, and develops its capabilities for expressive design to the utmost. Thus, while the witchery of imitative skill may lead painters astray, in sculpture we are forced back to what may be called the more purely artistic qualities of design of style; terms which imply much--which comprehend, perhaps, all the essentials of good art. Without distinction in these the craze for imitative naturalism, or whatever we like to call it, only ends, so far as I am aware, in attempts more or less unsuccessful to turn sculpture into portrait painting or _tableaux vivants_.

It is very much the difference between imitation and expression, or repetition and creation in art; and this means of course all the difference in the world, both as regards the artist and his public.

Imitation only requires industry, but design demands inventive power. Design might be defined as the constructive sense controlled by the sense of beauty. One may have plenty of energy, plenty of frank naturalism in a work, but if we have not the sense of beauty in art it profiteth nothing.

This is of course obvious enough as applied to art with a distinctly decorative purpose, but it seems curious that while it is taken for granted that you cannot do without grace or charm of some sort in this direction, as regards what may be called pictorial art, whether in painting or sculpture, given plenty of force and fact, grace and charm seem often quite secondary considerations, hardly missed if altogether absent.

To me, I confess, such distinctions seem artificial and injurious to art. A statue, or a picture, or a pattern must be an organic whole, whether it is itself a whole or a part. It must agree with itself, or it will agree with nothing, whether it be a frieze, a string-course, or a bust.

And after all it is this humanising and controlling sense--this sense of beauty, balance, decorum--this sixth or artistic sense, in short, manifested in so many different materials, methods, and styles, varying with climate and character, but articulate in every tongue--which is the really permanent quality. Without it you may have science, archæology, antiquarianism, imitation of nature--many things very useful in their way, but not art.

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

I will ask you to figure to yourselves an aspiring decorator, filled with the latter-day enthusiasm for beautifying human surroundings, and recognising a manifest, if superficial, improvement in domestic architecture and adornment,--recognising the excellent and sympathetic work that has been done by certain individual workers, or associated workers, in various arts and crafts, and still undaunted by the rapacity with which competitive commerce and the modern industrial system seize upon and spoil their ideas, and like

----the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,--

undaunted, I say, let us suppose our decorator filled with this fine enthusiasm, so as to have almost persuaded himself that we are on the brink of a second Renaissance; let us suppose him to turn for a moment from his all-engrossing studies in stained glass, tapestry, _repoussée_ metal work, wood-carving, pottery, and the like, amid which he may have become possibly oblivious of the progress of painting; to turn from wall-hanging and wall-paper to what might be supposed to be the crown and summit of its decoration, the wall picture, or, to speak figuratively, from the courts of South Kensington to the galleries of Burlington House--I mean in the time of its May blossoming.

He enters the exhibition hoping to find his aspirations stimulated, if not satisfied, by some show of what he has been accustomed to consider the higher aims and influences in art--primarily the search for beauty of line, colour, and execution, where indeed they are practically unfettered, in the technical sense, except by the four sides of a frame (which in itself might contribute as the setting to the gem). Here, as our decorator would reasonably suppose, these qualities would be considered the prime necessities, the indispensable ingredients of the work, whatever sort of pathetic, dramatic, or high poetic expression a picture might bear.

But what are the actual evidences that meet his eye? To begin with, he is appalled by the effect of the galleries as a whole--a number of odd-sized painted panels in gilt mouldings, jostled together with scarcely any reference to scale or harmony, either of subject or colour. Here, perhaps, a life-sized human head and shoulders in startling relief appears almost bursting through some silvery retiring landscape distance; there tragedy and farce side by side, and on the same wall tradition on crutches next the most naked naturalism, with “no language but a cry,” or perhaps some piece of sentimentality leaning, as it were, on the shoulder of the coldest academic style.

Supposing our decorator to have at least partially recovered from the first shock of this impressionistic picture, and to have sufficient presence of mind to go more into detail, what does he find? Much ability certainly, much energy, much industry, but wasted for the most part upon objects and subjects either unrewarding or repulsive, and squandered in aimless, and therefore inartistic imitation; much striving after instantaneous photographic effects both in figures and landscapes--miscalled Realism; much academic learning and archæology; much sentimental as well as melo-dramatic feeling; plenty of domestic and quasi-historical incidents, some symptoms of war fever breaking out in red coats; plenty of sporting and animal life--live and dead stock; a superabundance of the personal element as in individual portraits, although the term portrait might often be more justly claimed by landscape painters, portraits so called being as often as not treated as if they were landscapes, and landscapes as portraits, in these days.

In these, and such as these, then, our decorator will haply discover the leading tendencies in modern painting. But he will reflect it does not need that men should be specially painters to exhibit such qualities as these. For any strong evidence of any feeling for, or search after style, design, composition, beauty of form, beauty of colour, or perfection of workmanship, not to speak of poetic expression--for those qualities, in short, most peculiarly and distinctively artistic--qualities at least inseparable from art with any title to be called decorative--our decorator might look long and far without finding much to cheer his drooping spirits.

He will depart from the exhibition a sadder, if not a wiser man; but he will say to himself, “It was not always so.” He will go into our national collection, and there he will find abundant evidence that painting was once what he fondly hoped it might be again, at the head of the decorative arts. Then perhaps he would go down to his house justified, possibly to dream, and, especially if he had an impression of Dürer’s “Melancholia” in his room, his dream might take some such shape as this (were it possible to conceive in an emblematic spirit such a being): The genius of modern painting would appear amidst the ruins and relics of ancient art attired in the last Paris fashion, leaning upon a photographic camera, with canvas and palette set, and looking in her paint-box for an idea. Instead of Amorini should flit around her the bats and owls of criticism, uttering discordant cries, and one flying with a scroll on which should be inscribed, “There is no beauty but where you would least expect to find it; there is no truth but literalism.”

ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF DECORATIVE PATTERN

Man might be distinguished from other animals by his pronounced love of ornament alone, or at least by the capacity for producing it. Evidences of the impulse to ornament are found mixed up with his earliest traces on the earth, and some of his most elaborate efforts have been upon his own person. In North Borneo, for instance, I believe, to this day a very elaborate system of tattooing is still practised by special artists, a great part of the body being covered with elaborate patterns of fantastic animals and other devices.

From the poetic or artistic side pattern might be defined as the Notation of silent music. Certain decorative units are the keynotes. Primitive patterns, like primitive music, consist of very simple elements--of very few notes. Repetition is the chief factor in the development of both--Repetition and Rhythm. If music was discovered by blowing into a hollow reed, design might have begun by experiments with a stick on the sand or soft clay. “Here is a sound,” says the musician, “let us make music.” “Here is a surface,” says the designer, “let us make a pattern.”

The art of pattern-making might be defined as the constructive sense applied to surfaces. The ornamental designer is not so absolutely bound by structural laws as the architect; but the fact that the structural laws which govern his art are more mental than physical does not make them less binding or less real. Designing is not mathematics or geometry, but there appears to be a certain logic of line and colour in design which, given certain fundamental forms and characters, demands certain necessary sequences.

The system on which a design is built bears much the same relation to it as the skeleton does to the outward human form, and a knowledge of the skeleton is considered indispensable to the student of the figure. If a pattern, for instance, be rectangular in its general plan, however enriched by detail, the law of its fundamental construction must be acknowledged. Every line, every form, demands a reason for its existence. The designer commits himself to a curve; that curve cannot remain as an isolated fact, or it would be meaningless. It leads naturally to a counterbalancing curve, and then probably asks to be repeated; for in dealing with curves and angles we are really dealing with forms of a most expressive language, and one which cannot be clearly articulated even, unless we have something to say. The character of a pattern, then, is governed by its plan; and although there is no limit to the diversity and variety of a design, this organic necessity will make itself felt--much as a backbone is a necessity to a vertebrate. Beyond this the character of a design must be determined by the physical conditions of its execution and its ultimate purpose.

It is obvious that a design intended to extend horizontally, as, for instance, a running border or frieze, is naturally governed by different laws from one intended to repeat and spread itself vertically as well as horizontally over a large field, such as a wall-pattern. And a design fitted for a hanging will not adapt itself to a floor or ceiling. A pattern, a design, should at once speak for itself. Its plan should declare its purpose, and its treatment acknowledge the limitations and necessities--the characteristics, in short, of the material in which it is produced, and the method by which it is worked. Such considerations as these, we all know, are necessary to the successful existence of a pattern, and when they are successfully met we have only another instance of the survival of the fittest. For it happens in practice that a pattern which precisely fits such mechanical conditions has a longer life than one which, though perhaps more beautiful, in some details does not adapt itself to its position or to the necessities of reproduction so well. This applies more particularly to patterns intended for reproduction by processes of handicraft or manufacture, but it holds good also, though in a lesser degree perhaps, in all applied art, and can never be left out of account by the designer. Perfect fitness and beauty ought, of course, always to accompany each other--as a matter of fact, other conditions being equal, they do, as beauty is really organic; but mistakes are sometimes made by introducing in design elements which properly belong to other provinces of art,--for instance, when a carver or a weaver aims at superficial _imitation_ of natural forms in his work rather than their constructive value in design, or ornamental effect as pattern. For pattern, in its simplest form, and regarded solely in its abstract technical sense, apart from symbolism or imitation of natural form, is nothing but a series of modifications in the structure and correlation of line, such modifications being suggested or determined by the necessities of adaptation to spaces, objects, and materials.

Taking line, then, as the basis of ornament, a simple horizontal line forms, as it were, the primal decorative unit. Repeat it in parallels, and we get at once the type of a whole series of the simplest, but perhaps the most widely-used of patterns. It gives us the banded courses of brick and marble, the reeded mouldings and strings in architecture, the endless linear borders in ceramics; whilst in textiles it seems, in the ever-recurring barred and striped patterns, as if it were the Alpha and Omega of design, and that like Hope--slightly to alter the well-known line--it

----springs eternal on the human _vest_.

But probably the same reasons for its perpetuation are found cogent both in building and weaving--that is to say, the fundamental structural necessities of both lend themselves naturally to that system of varying the surface, and it seems universally pleasing to the human race.

But we are not very far on the road of invention. Satisfactory as bands, bars, and horizontal mouldings may be, cunningly proportioned and nicely placed, man cannot live by parallels alone. He needs other decorative units to make him happy. It is not known who struck the first circle. The inventor of the compasses--the prehistoric Giotto--remains in obscurity. Perhaps the hollow reed is again the medium; and the circular mark which would be left by the impression of the cut end of a reed on the soft earth might have given the circle to design. So, perhaps, Pan is the father of the arts of design. However this may be, with spheres all around, the idea must soon have germinated. Man needed to look no farther than the sun and the sea to find the genesis of pattern; nay, he had its elements in his own frame, which, as Vitruvius demonstrates, comprises, or is comprised in, both square and circle; and these may be said to divide the responsibility for the whole race of pattern systems between them--to stand in the world of design as a kind of Cœlus and Terra to an endless offspring.

The types of pattern to which they give rise are suggestive, too, of different characteristics of race, language, and civilisation. Broadly speaking, the square with its derived chequers, zigzags, and diapers might almost stand as a symbol of the ornament of the northern nations, associated as these forms are with Scandinavian and Gothic pattern work; while, on the other hand, the circle, with its derived scrolls and spirals, seems figurative of the greater suppleness and sensitiveness to beauty of the Southern; and it is to ancient Greece and to Italy that we must look for their most perfect types.

Square and angular patterns strike at once by their emphasis and rigid logic; while the circular and curvilinear types appeal rather to sense of grace and rhythm. For richness and intricacy we must go to where both perhaps came from--to the home of the Arabesque--to the East--the fountain-head of patterns, poured forth in a continual stream of imaginative energy and inventive subtlety. While the Frank has spent himself in the pursuit of the superficial facts of nature, and of the portrayal of life and character, seeking energy rather than beauty, and fact rather than ideal expression, the Asiatic has been content to wrap himself in a mesh of delicate fancy; and if he regards nature it is rather through a series of carefully-chosen symbolic forms that subserve his subtle ornamental sensibility.

Returning to our primitive square and circle, we find that they not only give us patterns and pattern systems by simply reproducing themselves, but that, by subdivision and extension, they give us certain offshoots which form universal decorative units, as well as fundamental geometric plans or governing systems of the whole race of what may be called organic patterns.

The leading forms of these offshoots from the square and circle are--from the square--the Chequer, the Fret, the Zigzag, the Diaper.

From the circle--the Scroll, the Spiral, the Fan, the Scale, the Oval.

These are not only decorative units and linear patterns complete in themselves, but furnish the system, scaffolding, or skeleton on which a multitude of rich and varied designs are built; as the beautiful lines, curves, and contours of the human figure are built upon the strong and symmetric framework of the bones, and form together an organic whole. These forms, too,--these decorative units which are geometrically evolved from the square and the circle,--are also constructive in their origin. The simplest of all patterns arise naturally from certain necessities of construction. Even the linear (alternating) arrangement, produced by the ordinary method of laying bricks, is in some sort a pattern, as well as those more specialised methods in masonry such as opus reticulatum and herring-bone work, for instance. The lattice work of the joiner and engineer also; the patterns formed by the plaiting of grass or rushes in matting, which give us the chequer; the spirals in the twisting of the strands of a rope, and the radiating ribs of a fan,--these all may be looked upon as the sources of our decorative units, and have their prototypes in the natural world, where, above all, we find constructive strength united with beauty and fitness, governed by adaptability to circumstance.

The Fan, indeed, holds universal sway, not only in the hands of women, but in the worlds both of nature and design.[1] In structure and system the Fan seems to be one of the first principles of organic construction, and is illustrated everywhere--from a bird’s wing to a vaulted ceiling, and in decorative art spreads from the Greek Anthemion to the Japanese screen. The Japanese artist is never tired of demonstrating its fitness for every ornamental purpose. It is his dearest decorative unit, and he certainly proves himself a master in its use.[2]

Of the Fan, considered both as a controlling system and as a decorative unit, it would be easy to recall examples in almost every age and style--through Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods. From the rising to the setting of the sun of art, the fan constantly reappears, and seems very early to have been associated with ideal beauty, inasmuch as the fan in the shell form has long been accepted in art as the cradle of Venus. Its felt applicability to so many forms of decoration lies, no doubt, in the fact that, structurally considered, the fan unites the minimum of lightness with the maximum of strength, as well as in its capacity for variation, and adaptability to position and material.

It would be interesting to trace the different treatment of the same decorative unit by different races and in different countries, and to hunt them down to their primitive type. I have often thought it would be possible to classify patterns, like plants, into species and genera. The analogy between the two is perhaps nearer than is commonly supposed,[3] for each is subject to those general laws of existence which control the existence of all art no less.

Art, of course, is not to be confounded with either science or nature, but there is a scientific side to art. When we come to principles of Design one may well fear the valley of dry bones, where so many champions have, alas! left theirs. From the point of view of the designer, who seeks to confirm his practice and experience by general principles and definitions--which, after all, are but the boundaries and defences of territory already gained and peopled--it would be possible to make definitions of the elements of ornament “refutation tight” as far as words go. In this sense it always strikes me that Professor Ruskin’s “ingenious friend,” of whom he speaks in his _Elements of Drawing_--his correspondent who defined ornament as consisting of “Contrast, Series, and Symmetry”--very nearly hit the mark. The demonstration given, too, with the test ingredients offered by Ruskin was, as far as it went, triumphant; and although it might not have been strictly ornament, it was at least skeleton ornament, and it is something to acknowledge that ornament should have a skeleton.

If we said that ornament was the systemisation of form it would perhaps be more comprehensive; but define as we may, the important thing is the motive power--be the machinery theoretically perfect. All depends on the use the designer makes of his system and ingredients. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and even then it is not always safe to affirm it could not have been made any other way. The truth is that pattern making, whatever are the elements, and however necessary certain sequences are, and its successful composition, depend finally on the inventive fertility of the artist’s mind; and this, again, may indefinitely be depressed or stimulated by the conditions under which he lives.

I do not pretend in this short paper to give more than a sketch of what is really a very vast subject, but if I have succeeded in awakening an interest in it, and induced any of my readers to pursue it farther themselves, I shall be very pleased. To those who would like to do so, I can recommend two excellent little books by Mr. Lewis F. Day, himself a well-known and practical designer. They are the _Anatomy of Pattern_ and the _Planning of Ornament_, both published by Mr. Batsford of Holborn.

It seems to me that one of the difficulties of designers in the present day is rather the embarrassment which comes from the overwhelming mass of examples from every age and clime with which he is overwhelmed. It requires a very powerful artistic digestion to assimilate such a mass and such a variety of ornamental styles. The consequences, too, are evident enough around us, as what may be properly called the ornament of the period is an extraordinary jumble--a hybrid production resulting from a mixture in the mind of all these styles,--just as if one were to consult the dictionaries of all the tongues living and dead, and take a few words there and a few words here and call the results language or poetry.

If, like David with the armour he had not proved, our designer could put these things away from him, and rely on the sling and the stone of constructive necessity and mother wit, one cannot help feeling the result would be better.

If we must have ornament let it be good as far as it goes, and grow naturally out of the constructural necessities and material of the work. The importance of good design and handicraft cannot be exaggerated, for upon their health depends the health of all art whatsoever; and the test of the conditions of the arts in any age must be sought in those crafts of design which minister to the daily life and common enjoyment of humanity.

A man may be able, with the proceeds of labour, to spend thousands of pounds upon a single picture, but it does not follow that art is making progress. There is no artistic inspiration in thousands of pounds--the sculptor cannot even make a golden image out of it. Wealth and luxury can never really foster art--they must eventually stifle it. The artist must keep in touch with nature and life; he must keep his eye fresh and his heart open if his work is to touch men and dwell in their memories. And it matters not whether he wield the chisel, the hammer, or the brush, or work at the forge, the carpenter’s bench, the stone-mason’s shed, on the scaffold or in the studio; if he feels his work, if he acquires the skill to make a thing of beauty, he is an artist in the true sense of the word.

ART AND LABOUR

How define Art or Labour? We might dryly attempt to sum up the artificial distinctions between them by saying that--(1) Art is the inventive use of tools and material. (2) Labour is the mechanical use of tools and material.

But on examination (regarding the whole field of handicraft) the two would be found to be so closely connected--so much art or skill in even the simplest operation of labour, so much labour involved in even the simplest form of art--each so involved in the other, that it would be very difficult to draw the line and to say where labour ends and art begins.

Leaving the abstract, let us consider the concrete--the personal. Let us look at what might be called the two extremes. Look at the labourer with his shovel, on the one hand, and the painter (who of late has monopolised the name of artist), on the other, with his palette and brushes.

The resemblances are perhaps not so striking as the differences. It is true the labourer is engaged in moving, say, earth or minerals from one place to another with his shovel. The painter is engaged in moving earth or minerals (in the form of colours) from one place to another--from his palette to his canvas with his brush. Both are contributing to the best of their ability to the wants of man. The labourer who may be supposed to be digging the foundations of a house is clearly contributing to his fundamental necessities; while the artist is presumably contributing to his sources of pleasure and refinement, though clearly his work will not be much in demand until the walls are built--until there is something to put his picture _on_.

And if we were to inquire further into the history of the maintenance and of the tools and materials of either workman, we should discover that both were alike dependent upon a vast chain of associated labour, which makes their work, nay, their very existence, possible.

As to the economic value of the work of each to the community, that again depends upon conditions. If there was a scarcity of houses the labourer’s labour would (or naturally ought to) be the most valuable; if there was a superfluity of houses, then the painter’s labour ought naturally to be the most valued. In gauging the value of the labour of each from the point of view of the barest utility, there can be no doubt that the painter would kick the beam.[4]

As to the _actual_ or market value, if we take as a criterion the monetary reward of each, it is quite the other way, at least, in what are called civilised countries; although both artist and labourer in their economic condition are alike in this, that _neither is certain of a livelihood_; and the position of both is affected _by competition and the general state of trade_--_not_, observe, _by the actual wants of the community_! Well, as to wages, as we know, there are all the degrees between them--between, say, 6d. an hour on the one hand, and 600 or 6000 pence and upwards an hour on the other; alternating, in each case, however, with _nothing_ an hour.

I think it will be agreed that this is not a very satisfactory or artistic state of things.

So much then by way of a rough sketch of the relative positions of artist and labourer; and other things being equal, I think it would be extremely difficult to prove that either is more useful to the community than the other. But as there is certainly labour in art (as with the best talents it requires great devotion and industry to become an artist and craftsman), so also there is a great deal of art in labour, even of the kind commonly called “unskilled.”

I know of no labour which can be properly described as the exertion of mere brute force. The slightest practical acquaintance with any kind of manual work is sufficient to convince one that there is always a better and a worse way of doing anything, and that it is not the amount of force, but the amount of _effective_ force, which counts in doing any work.

Try a hand at any ordinary piece of field work, for instance. Take up a scythe and see what you can do in the hayfield without previous practice, and then see if the results of your efforts do not convince you that there is a great deal of art in the management of such an apparently simple implement.

One has often been struck with the splendid action and admirable precision with which two men will alternately hammer at an iron wedge, when old pavement is being taken up in our streets. The hammer is swung at the full sweep of the arms and brought down with the utmost economy of concentrated force upon the head of the wedge. This is the art of manual labour. When the dockers and gasmen strike it is not found so simple a matter to fill their places (apart from the question of “blacklegs”), and amateurs in manual labour are soon found to be very different from the professional artists of labour. The lifter and carrier of weights, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water have a practical acquaintance with the nature of things (under constantly varying secondary conditions)--of poise and pressure--which is far more immediately valuable than any general _theoretic_ acquaintance with the laws of nature.

In attempting any unwonted piece of work, say, in sawing a piece of wood, the inexperienced always wastes force. In all labour it is the _economy of force_ which makes force effective, and this must be the result of experience. Even the rate at which manual labourers work is fixed by general experience.

William Morris’s story of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, who set his courtiers to work to help the vine-dressers, puts this fact in a very picturesque way; and as a result of the experiment it was found that for the first half-hour the courtiers worked forty-five minutes, the second half-hour just thirty minutes, the third half-hour fifteen minutes, and in the fourth half-hour declined to two minutes, while the labourers maintained their steady rate.

There is a false estimate of the value and dignity of labour prevalent; we need a new scale, a new gauge or test of the value and proportionate usefulness of labour. If, apart from bodily strength, so much skill, judgment, and experience is required in common everyday labours that have not the slightest pretensions to art, consider how many qualities are brought into play directly we touch any one of the finer handicrafts.

Machinery, used solely in the interests of trade and rapid production, has distorted our sense of the importance of labour as well as degraded the labourer, and wellnigh destroyed the handicraft, and has set up the quite false standard of mechanical precision, and what is known as “trade finish,” which is fatal to any _artistic_, that is to say, individual feeling.

It appears, indeed, as if art were only possible in so far as the artist escapes the tendencies and influences of his time.

The very schools of art tend to mechanicalise and conventionalise students to one pattern. The only way to teach or to learn any form of art is by demonstration; the master should be able to do the work, the pupil should be able to see it done. But the master-craftsman no longer, as a rule, works in his shop with his apprentices, passing on, with added skill and invention, those traditions of work and method, which, continually added to by fresh experience and new impulses, form the true soil out of which the vital force of design, in all its manifold branches, ever springs.

But now, I suppose, it is very seldom a workman sees his work complete from beginning to end. He must be content to furnish a part only, perhaps an infinitesimal part, to the finished result. There can be no possibility under such a system of the pleasure of the craftsman in fashioning his work, to give it the individual twist and play of fancy, the little touch of grace and ornamental feeling springing from the organic necessities of the work which is characteristic of the times when art and handicraft were united and living.

I cannot contemplate with satisfaction the spectacle of a world so “civilised” that all the useful labours are made either terrible by long hours, or emptied of all joy and interest by being reduced to mechanism, so that every one, while spending mechanically the greater part of their time on some work they take no interest in, and caring only to end it, fix their heart upon something outside their lives and work--following the game of “ins and outs” called politics, or giving themselves up to the chances of the gambler, whose talk is of jockeys and racehorses, or stocks and shares.

The ideal man was, a little while ago, the so-called “self-made” man--the man who started from _somewhere_ with half-a-crown in his pocket, and changed it cleverly (in course of time) for half a million or so, living happily ever after on the labour of others--an independent gentleman.

The miner or the navvy who digs himself out of his class and hoists himself on the shoulders of others to a position of mastership--to a position in which he is no longer obliged to do any work--has been held up to the admiration of all other miners and navvies, who are enjoined to go and do likewise.

But why should it be assumed that a man must rise out of his class in order to raise himself? Why should a life of useful productive labour, of labour absolutely indispensable to the community, be despised, and a life of idleness be extolled and desired?

The principle of perpetually shifting the hardest and most disagreeable work on to the shoulders of others, and then labelling those others as inferiors, and paying them miserably, _must come to an end some day_. The system under which a man who works hardest and longest is paid the least, while at the other end of the scale the man who does nothing is paid the most, is a scandal; and if this is the result of civilisation, civilisation, if it is going to stop at that, must be pronounced a failure.

No happy human life is surely possible without work--and by work I distinctly mean some form of pleasurable handicraft. No healthy human being would wish to be idle. Experience tells us how much happier we are, mentally and physically, for doing some kind of work, especially work, handiwork, in which we can take a pleasure; that is, which admits of some kind of invention, judgment, discretion, selection, which gives scope for individual preferences--art, in short.

And after all there is hardly any kind of manual work which (if not excessive and burdensome by means of long hours) does not bring its own satisfaction. To a healthy individual the mere putting out of his physical and mental forces is a satisfaction. The contention with difficulties, the triumph over obstacles, the solution of problems, the strife with the materials and forces of nature (if not too arduous) bring their own satisfactions and rewards.

I do not suppose any one who has never scrubbed a floor, or cleaned up and set a room in order, can understand the satisfaction of the good housewife who contemplates the result, putting the finishing touches here and there, just as an artist before his picture, retiring with his head on one side to judge of the effect.

It is noteworthy, too, that this sense of the worth of labour to the individual seems to be in danger of being entirely lost sight of amid the grinding overwork on the one hand, and the increasing luxury on the other.

In a society which makes it an object in life for each one to evade their share of useful productive labour, and by getting hold, by hook or by crook, of the largest share of labour values, to live upon the toil of their brothers and sisters, how can due respect be ever paid to labour, in spite of the bidding of the politician for the working man’s vote, and all the various baits dangled before his eyes?

I have a little book called _The Book of Trades, or Library of the Useful Arts_, interesting as showing the state of the useful handicrafts on the verge of this century of machine production. It is in three parts, dated 1806 to 1811. Most of the plates are dated 1804. Little pictures are given of most of the trades described, and we see, for instance, in one part, with many other crafts, the trunkmaker, the wheelwright, the iron-founder, the copperplate printer, the painter, the statuary, side by side--no artificial distinction between art and labour here; but while it says of the wheelwright that a journeyman can earn “from a guinea to thirty shillings a week,” of the painter it says, “the earning of an artist cannot be defined; he is paid according to his talents, and to the celebrity which he has acquired. Some persons will require a hundred guineas for a piece which another of inferior merit, or little known to the public, would be glad to perform for a twentieth part of that sum.” Our author is judicious.[5]

The _Book of Trades_ winds up with “The Merchant,” and after showing so many handicraftsmen in full activity, the artist is rather hard put to it to express the toil of the merchant, so he draws a fine gentleman in a cocked hat, leaning on his walking stick, and elegantly presiding over a docker who is rolling a barrel, and a clerk, in a rudimentary top hat, who is entering something in a book. Here is an image of art--or shall we say craft--and labour!

Well, I suppose the “merchant” of the present day is mostly a good many removes farther from his merchandise than that, and often does not ever see the thing he buys and sells, becoming ultimately sublimated into the banker--the great financier who pulls the strings, and supplies the sinews of war in the modern world. He is like the man who carries on several games of chess without seeing the board. It is an unpicturesque ideal which I do not admire. To be mere pieces and pawns in the game of a cunning and unseen power is a very demoralising and dangerous game, both for the pawns and the player, and the power of money seems less scrupulous and more demoralising in its action than any other sinister power which has held sway over humanity. While apparently fostering art it really blights and destroys it, caring only for luxury; and labour is degraded and despised under the commercial ideal of heaping up riches, according to possession of which is a citizen respected!

I have been described as a person “deeply tainted with socialism.” I do not know how such an impression originated, as I thought that I was entirely gone that way long ago! But whether socialists or not, I think we must all feel that man has become what he is by the development of his social instincts, or the race would have become extinct, and therefore it is reasonable to look forward to the attainment of a higher and a juster and more human social life.

I believe that we cannot stand still, and I for one do not want to go back. Intensely interesting as the study of past ages may be, and many the lessons we may lay to heart from the past life and experience of humanity, the possibilities of the future are still more fascinating.

I for one am not satisfied with our present commercial democracy, which, indeed, I believe to be but a stage of evolution into something more real and complete. The aspiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity is a true aspiration, but it has yet to be realised. I cannot for the life of me see how you can have political freedom without _economic freedom_. If there is monopoly of land and the means of subsistence, there must be slavery in some form, as well as pauperism.

The world, however, cannot be changed by a ready-made, cut-and-dried working model of a scheme for the regeneration of society. I am not going to attempt the impertinence of offering one. Society must work out its own salvation--no professional salvationist can save it that trouble. We all have our aspirations, however, our preferences, our ideas--dreams, if you will; and it is after all the sum and velocity of these, incorporating the wants of the time, which ultimately form opinion, which dissolve states, and reform them.

I will confess, therefore, that I look to the reconstruction of society on a basis of equality of condition (quite a different thing from dividing up) to remedy the ills we suffer from. The problem of the future lies in a nutshell, but that nutshell is no less than _the organisation of labour_--a hard one to crack perhaps, but it will have to be done some day. The organisation of labour carries the question of art with it--carries every question with it. I can conceive it quite practicable for any community to declare that not one of its members shall want for food, clothes, shelter, or work; and while placing no restrictions on individual development, so long as that development did not infringe the liberty of others, it might fix at least a minimum standard of life. It is conceivable on such a basis that the useful necessary work of the community might be carried on by a system of co-operation, by companies or orders, in which every able-bodied member of the community taking part, the number of working hours would be few and short, necessarily, since there would be no question of making a profit for any one, and for the same reason no work need be scamped or hurried, while ample leisure could be afforded for cultivation and enjoyment. If, in the _first_ place, the world (each country) was regarded as a place for its people to live happily in, should we be likely to blacken it with smoke, or ruthlessly deface or destroy the beauty either of town or country when the fierce competition of trade no longer hounded us on; when the hope of profits ceased from troubling and speculation was at rest?

Then, perhaps (instead of scratching holes here and there), we might do something towards really building up a noble and beautiful human life--a life of useful and pleasurable, but not enforced or excessive labour; of labour gladdened by its recurring festivals, and closely allied with the invention and colour of art; a life in which the individual might have free scope, and character its full weight (unbiassed by “real” property, and without its undue powers), yet with a paramount social sense of the unity of common life; of the life of which we are each a part only, which was here before we came, and which will go on long after we are gone; that life which absorbs, while it protects and leaves free the individual man and woman, humanising them by the sense of mutual love and dependence, while bracing them with the sense of public spirit and duty,--such a life, which, collectively speaking, is alone worthy to be called a free state.

ART AND HANDICRAFT

The formation of guilds of workers in art, taken with other indications of a very decided movement towards a revival of handicraft and of design as associated with it, is one of the most notable signs of the times.

In the midst of the full tide of mechanical invention and unheard-of ingenuity in the adaptation of machinery, we come back to the _hand_, as the best piece of machinery after all.

It is a strange commentary upon that industrial commercial progress which has been the subject of so much congratulation. In the full swing of our commercial century, which has witnessed such a wonderful development of mechanical invention and application of steam power to every kind of process of production, involving the specialising of our workman, and his conversion very often into an appendage of the machine, we have discovered that we are losing our sense of beauty, our artistic feeling, and capacity for imaginative design; that our daily work is losing, or has lost, its interest and romance; that we are paying a heavy price for this lob-sided progress of ours in the loss of beauty without and happiness within; and that that very cheapening of commodities, which is often regarded as such a blessing, means the cheapening of human life and labour; and we are apt to forget that the cheapest necessity of life may be dear enough if one has not even the cheap symbol of exchange for it--the uttermost farthing,--and the portion of the human family, of our fellow-citizens in this condition appears to be continually on the increase.

So that the glittering palace of commercial prosperity and individual profit-at-other-people’s-expense casts a terrible shadow of ever-deepening blackness exactly proportional to the luxury, the waste, and the splendour within.

In the blackness of this shadow is involved the blight and desolation of many a fair tract of our green England, as well as the blight and desolation of the lives of her sons and daughters in the grime of overcrowded joyless cities.

And while at one end of the social scale we get the height of degradation which comes of the delegation of all manual labour to another class, with ultra-refinement and softness of living, and an aimless and restless life; at the other end we get depths of degradation which comes not of work but of hopeless toil, or enforced idleness; precarious and penurious living, and all the sordid and narrowing cares it entails,--like the mysterious flakes that Shelley describes in his “Triumph of Life,” falling and falling upon the heads of the throng until the brightness of youth is changed to a sour-visaged old age.

Here, in these two perhaps equally deplorable extremes, we have the white and the black upon our palette for a picture of modern life--a “Bridge of Life” I have not yet painted. These are the two negations. Between them there is a band or bridge of colour very various in hue, fading gradually into the white, or absorbed gradually into the blackness. Here is the artificial bridge of life we have built up with the rigid stones and bricks of an inhuman and unequal economic system, cemented by the lives and hopes of the mass of mankind, who are constrained to bear that bridge from dawn to sunset in order that a privileged few may pass over dry-shod--not unpursued, it is true, by their own Nemesis, if unvexed by the common cares that wear away the lives of those unregarded supporters of the present structure of society--the caryatides of toil turned to stone.

Well, this revival of handicraft, this claim of the workman to have some share of the joy of the artist in his work, instead of, like the blind tools and implements he uses, contributing to a result in which he has no acknowledged part or recognition,--this claim, I say, which is wrapped up in that revival of handicraft of which we see the signs around us, is, in some sort, a protest against the domination of our modern commercial and industrial system of production for profit--the profit of some intervening person other than the actual worker and maker--which has gradually superseded the ancient one of production for use, which has destroyed the old village industries, and is fast obliterating local varieties and characteristics of all kinds as regards the outward life of the people in all countries where our modern civilisation has obtained a footing.

Instead of things useful, each with their own constructive and organic beauty, or decoration arising out of these, being produced at the will and pleasure of the artist or craftsman, with a view to the actual requirements of particular people, things both of use and so-called ornament are now, with few exceptions, with our tremendous machinery, produced wholesale--as many as possible to one pattern--whether hats, or boots, or clothes, or houses, or food and furniture, or furniture for the mind’s unseen house--things intended to stimulate and delight it. Yet all these things, even matters, one would think, of pure art like books and pictures, instead of being the spontaneous outcome of a man’s best thoughts and skill, seem too often made by a species of guess-work, and apparently on the assumption that, being made for no one, or no place, in particular, they will do anywhere, or fit any one, or every one, but sometimes end in suiting no one.

Now in order to facilitate this process of wholesale production for profit (which ultimately depends for its success perhaps as much upon the adroitness of the salesman as upon the actual wants of the big public, at least beyond the bare necessities)--in order to facilitate wholesale production, it becomes an object that all labour that _can be_ done by machine, after almost infinitesimal subdivision has taken place, _shall be_ done by machine, until such workmen as are necessary to wait on the machine become parts of it, and independent craftsmen cease to exist.

There may be a great future for machinery in the _real_ saving of labour--heavy and exhausting labour--the necessary heavy and useful work--lifting weights, pumping, excavating, and carrying us from place to place, and many other useful services--perhaps when communities are masters of their own soil and the materials of life; but at present it is only the cost of labour that is saved. It may be a gain to the owner and to a few individuals, but so long as machinery merely supplants men, and turns them adrift to swell the army of the unemployed, what is gain to individuals is a loss to the people at large.

If the production of the greatest saleable quantity for the greatest purchasing number, without regard to quality or durability, be the object, of course there can be little question that such a system as the present one is well adapted to attain it.

If mere _reproduction_ of works on the same principle, even of works of art, is our object, rather than to encourage the development of the capacity for original invention, and the personal pleasure of fashioning, such a system is again well adapted to the end, as, for instance, in the case of printed books, newspapers, engravings, and all things where any form of press is employed. But for all our advancement and steam power as applied to the printing press, printing as an art has declined, however it may have flourished as a trade, especially as regards the form of type and its arrangement on the page, to say nothing of printers’ ornaments and illustrations from the point of view of their contributing to the unity and decorative effect.

Yet this matter of book and newspaper illustration is considered by many, perhaps most, to be our strongest point. Well, if we limit it strictly to the question of illustration pure and simple, and leave out the question of adaptability to conditions and decorative effect--the art and craft side, in fact--there can be no doubt that, fostered perhaps by the enormous and wonderful development of the photograph, there is an extraordinary display of clever work and graphic power of a kind scattered about among our books, newspapers, and magazines.

In fact, some of our most original and clever work is found in these things, and many of our most original painters first distinguished themselves as illustrators, and owe much of their character and charm as painters to the fact of their having been first craftsmen in black and white.