Chapter IV: Part 4

Now here again pictorial proclivities have been very misleading. They have led us, in illustrating books for instance, to that inorganic way of loosely vignetting a subject--splashing a landscape upon or across a page without regard to its mechanical conditions, and ignoring its necessary relation to the type. Instances of this kind of treatment are to be found notably in our illustrated magazines of Continental or American origin, which have been setting the fashion in so-called page decoration of late years. But this inorganic, unrelated kind of designing has not confined itself to books. You may find it anywhere and everywhere almost,--dabbed upon fans, dragged across cupboard doors, and generally upset over the unconsidered trifles of everyday life.

I am afraid, too, that something is traceable to Japanese influence. But it does not at all follow that, because a Japanese artist, with his wonderful knowledge of nature and precision of touch, can throw a flowering branch, or bird, or a fish across a sheet of paper, or a panel, with such consummate skill as to delude us into the belief that he has decorated the space, therefore any one, with very inferior powers of draughtsmanship, can go and do likewise with equal _éclat_. It is somewhat like attempting tightrope dancing before one can walk properly on the ground.

The truth is that all the solid and determinative motives in design are traceable to the influence of architectural style. In the absence of a living style in architecture, the arts of design, which are really its offspring, languish, and lose at once their fitness, monumental dignity, and importance.

For style is strictly the sum of considerations like the foregoing--with individual feeling superadded. It is the quality which collects and concentrates, as it were, the virtue and essence of the past, and fuses it with the present. It consists in that highly selective impulse or instinct which gives an artist’s work its own peculiar and distinctive character, without isolating him or disconnecting him from the work that has gone before, or the work of his own day, so that a great design is in fact a link, or a luminous point or jewel, in a long golden chain, and necessarily dependent upon its continuity.

Style, of course, is a very different thing from what are known as “styles.” It is the difference between the quick and the dead. We can get decorations “in any style” nowadays to order. We can be Ancient Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman, or Pompeian, or Byzantine, or Celtic, or Italian, or German, Gothic or Renaissance, whichever we please, Louis Quatorze or Louis Seize--worse luck,--but none of them seems to please for long, perhaps because their designers and producers are only “pleasing to live,” as is the proverbial fate of those who “live to please.” Ours is the age for masquerading, because we have no particular _reality_ of our own--no style, in short. But we cannot be always masquerading, however amusing it may be once in a while, and whatever superior advantages we possess for getting at the best authorities. The motley and fantastic crowd palls at last, and we are glad to get back to everyday, if plain, habiliments, wherein we can at least feel at home.

It is this feeling “at home,” too--which is so important in design--which marks the difference between artist and archæologist. Ease and mastery of expression in any material is the aim of the designer, while keeping strictly within the limitations of that material.

In making a working drawing the designer should be mentally, if not actually, the craftsman also: the conditions and necessities of the material ever present to his mind; its very limitations suggesting new motives, and stimulating invention, as it never fails to do when the designer and the craftsman are one.

So, too, where there has been no conscious aim at decorative beauty, we find beauty of result, at least as regards the all-important quality of line, which goes to prove that organic lines, or lines of construction, at least where the construction is simple and evident to the eye, are usually beautiful lines, as in the sickle, the scythe, plough, ship, bridge, and wagon, for instance, and that this relation to material and use is a fundamental and necessary quality of all design.

Mistakes are usually made in the attempts to beautify by superadded ornament, unrelated to the object, use, and material, instead of treating it as a natural outgrowth, so that the absence of ornament is preferable to ornament not beautiful, or to ornament, however beautiful in itself, which does not decorate. And indeed, unless ornament is organic in this sense, we had much better be without it, and trust to the simple beauty of constructional lines alone.

Now this decline of organic design, it can hardly be doubted, is traceable in a great measure to the economic conditions and the development of machine industry in the interests of a commercial system of centralisation and a world-market which have characterised our century, and which have succeeded the system of division of labour developed in the last, as that succeeded, as Mr. Morris has often pointed out, the older system of local production for use; and this _because_ its effect has been to _separate the designer and the craftsman_, and to turn both more or less into machines. The effect of this is to throw the designer out of sympathy with the use and material of his design, to cut him off from the suggestive and inventive stimulus of the material, while, under the pressure of competition, forcing him to the constant production of so-called novelties, while it turns the craftsman or mechanic into an indifferent tool. The results are precisely what might have been expected, and what we have seen. In fact, the only wonder is they are not worse; but humanity has always been better than its systems.

As to the craftsman, the workman, he, perhaps, relegated to the performance of one monotonous function--a unit in a long sum of industrial production,--becomes but a part of a machine, his personality merged in the general description of “hands” (a designation, by the way, which does not encourage the development of brains), and, in short, all personal interest and identity with his work as a whole taken away, and leaving him with no prospect of winning public and personal appreciation--even if a “forty-thousandth part,” as Carlyle would have said, of a product could reasonably hope to win such things--since all credit for the finished result is practically claimed by the employer.

These things being so, I say it is not wonderful our “industrial art,” as we call it, _is_ what it is.

What then should we aim at? If this is the _real_ condition of affairs, what is the _ideal_? For unless we consider we are living under the best possible arrangements--social, political, and industrial--we must entertain an ideal of some sort, even if it be a stranger, like an angel unawares.

Well, then, if so far you are disposed to agree with me (firstly) as to the necessary conditions and considerations for the production of well-designed decorations and accessories of daily life, from the roof which shelters us to the cup we drink out of; (secondly) as to the relation of the designer and producer of these necessities--for I claim that beautiful things are a necessity of any reasonable and refined human life; and (thirdly) as to the condition of the producer of such things himself,--then we shall have reached the conclusion that for the production of beautiful and thoughtful work you must have conditions of life wherein beauty and thought have opportunity to germinate and grow naturally, and as a matter of course, out of the conditions of daily life and work, as naturally as the apple-tree blooms in the spring. But this means no less than that the conditions of health and refinement, of a vigorous and full if simple life, be open to _all_, both men and women, without distinction; and before such conditions can be realised it evidently implies that something like fundamental changes must take place in the constitution of society.

Then it comes to this, that all we have to make up our minds about are two things:--(1) Whether we consider art as an utterly unrelated, individual, and accidental matter; or (2) whether we consider it and its beautiful results as the highest outcome of life, and as necessarily dependent upon the character, ideals, and conditions of that life. If the latter, then it may be worth while to take such steps as may be within our power and mental vision to co-operate towards the realisation of such a life and such an ideal, which, strange and roundabout a method as it appears, will yet prove the shortest way to our goal, namely, a true revival of design in its relation to material and use.

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

Man in a natural and primitive condition does not begin to think of art until his physical wants are satisfied, since art is, in its true sense, after all only a spontaneous manifestation of mental life in form, colour, or line,--the outcome of surplus human energy. It is only under what is called modern civilisation that this natural order is artificially reversed, and men are forced, to attempt at least, to produce forms of art in order to satisfy their physical wants. Our troubles and failures in art may mostly be traced, directly or indirectly, to this condition of things--all the horrors and abominations perpetrated in the name of art, from the productions of the poor man whom necessity compels to chalk on the pavement, through the countless vanities and inanities of the fashionable store, to the refined cruelty of what is known as the “pot-boiler” in the “fine art” exhibition.

The primitive hunter in his cave, when his earliest efforts in applied art, in the form of flint weapons, had secured to him a sufficiency of fish and game and furred overcoats, began to record his impressions of the chase, and to scratch the forms of his favourite animals on their bones. If these representations of reindeer, mammoth, and bison be indeed the earliest examples of art, it would seem that the first impulse in art is imitative rather than what I should term expressive or decorative--the spirit of the picturesque sketcher recording his impressions of natural forms rather than the ordered, systematic, applied art of the inventive designer, who uses natural forms or colours much as a musician his notes to produce a rhythmical arrangement--a tune, a pattern. If this inference is correct, we may perhaps take comfort in the thought that out of our present pictorial zeal and cultivation of the picturesque sketcher we may be led to the study of the more ideal and intellectual side of art.

However the conscious invention of line, and its variation in pattern came about, whether by the burnt stick of the idler (according to Mr. Whistler), or on the soft clay of the primitive potter, it is tolerably obvious that certain primitive patterns are derived from certain necessities of construction, such as the chequer from the square plait of a rush matting, where not taken straight from Nature’s pattern book as in fish or serpent scale, and fan from leaf and shell. One of the most natural impulses in man is to make a mark or a cut upon something directly he has time on his hands. We can watch the development of this impulse in children. One line or mark suggests another, and strokes following one another in a certain order are found to have a pleasant and interesting effect. Strings of them round clay vessels were found to make them more exciting to the eye than the plain surface. The handles of dishes and hunting knives and horns, bows, hatchets, nay, even man’s own skin, all offered opportunities for the early ornamental impulse in carving and painting patterns. The implements in constant use, on which, indeed, rude as they were, life itself depended; the things most familiar, most valuable, constantly before the eyes or in the hands,--these were the first things to receive the touch of art, which was then “applied,” indeed, and applied only.

If we follow the manifestations of the artistic sense through the great historic periods we shall always find life and art, beauty and use, hand in hand,--the utmost artistic skill of invention and craftsmanship lavished upon cups and bowls, upon lamps and pitchers, upon dress and jewellery, upon arms and armour. We shall find the highest imagination, the most graceful fancy, and even wit, humour, and satire in the service of architecture, recording and reflecting the sentiment of the people: built into cathedral aisles and vaults, or glowing from the windows, frescoed upon the walls, or gleaming in the splendour of mosaic, or carved in endless fertility of resource on the stalls and misereres.

Under economic conditions of the production of all things for the service or delight of man for _use_ instead of, as now, for _profit_, the craftsman was an artist, and all objects under his hand naturally developed a characteristic beauty. Ornament was organic, completely adapted to its material, and expressive of its object; but with all our industrial organisation, subdivision of labour, and machine production, we have destroyed the art of the people, the art of common things and common life, and are even now awakening to the fact.

Under a commercial system of production and exchange all art has been rigidly divided into classes, like the society it reflects. Since we have to sell it across the counter, as it were, we must take the weights and scales to it--we must apply to an article of commerce the tests and standards of commerce. Thus we have divided beauty and use, and made them up in separate parcels; or, perhaps, having reduced both to powder, we try a conscious blend of the two to suit average tastes. We have the arts all ticketed and pigeon-holed on the shelves behind us. We have “industrial,” “decorative,” or “applied” art, as we now call it, and “fine” art--fine art and “the arts not fine,” as my friend Mr. Lewis Day has it. Thus by degrees the vast general public, who must get their ideas of art, like other things, ready-made, have been taught to understand by the word “art” chiefly that form of portable and often speculative property--cabinet pictures in oil. Nor is this altogether wonderful, considering how, under our system of wholesale machine production, the appliances of common life have lost their individuality, interest, and meaning, together with their beauty. We are not sensible of any particular individual effort of thought or invention in an object which is only one of thousands turned out exactly like it. Plates, cups and bowls, chairs and tables; the moulding and panelling of our wood-work, and the metal-work of our sacred hearth itself, are taken as matters of course, like other productions of commerce. They were not specially made for you and me; they must be made to suit Smith and Jones equally well, or equally ill; and we shall probably be charmed to see them in each other’s houses. We know that furniture and fittings are only made to sell at a profit while the fashion lasts. Trade demands its “novelties” every season, and it would never pay to let a man sit contentedly in the chair that was solidly built for his grandfather. Much better let him fall between two stools (as it were), in his uncertainty of choice in regard to which of the confidently named upholsterers’ styles he will seat himself in.

Then as to the application of art to the walls of his dwelling itself is the average man in a much better case? You cannot expect him to put up costly and permanent decorations for the benefit of his landlord, either outside or inside. He is a wandering hermit-crab, only too glad to find an empty shell that will reasonably fit him, at a not too exorbitant rent; and as for decoration--well, at least there are paint and paperhangings.

Of course they that are rich can hire a great architect and dwell in a perfect grammar of ornament. They can import the linings of Italian temples and tombs, and the spoils of Eastern mosques, to breakfast, dine, or play billiards in. The only fear is that Tottenham Court Road will soon bethink itself of cheap imitations of such antique wreckage; that Westbourne Park and Camden Town may be even with Mayfair and South Kensington! Cannot the moderate citizen already command his household gods in any style at the shortest notice? Great is commercial enterprise! Nothing is too high or too low for it. Where your fancy is, there will the man of profits be also.

The distinct awakening of interest and practice in the applied arts, which is a mark of our time, I should be the last to belittle or attempt to ignore; but at the same time, with all it has done and is doing for our education, with all the remarkable skill and reproductive antiquarian energy it has called forth, I feel that we are landed in a strange predicament. For while on the one hand new sensibility to beauty in common things, and new desire for them, are awakened, on the other they are in danger of being choked by that very facility of industrial production which floods the market with counterfeit, set in motion by all the machinery of that commercial enterprise which is the boast of the age, but which all the time, by the very necessity of its progress, is fast obliterating the remains of ancient art and beauty from the face of the earth. So that it will be written of us that we were a people who gathered with one hand while we scattered with the other.

Economic conditions prevent our artisans from being artists. They have become practically, and speaking generally, slaves of machines. The designer is another being from the craftsman. It is only by a study of the conditions of the material in which a design is to be carried out that we can get even workable designs; and even at the best the designer who has no practical acquaintance with any of the handicrafts necessarily loses that stimulus to invention--that suggestive adaptability which the actual manipulation of the material and first-hand acquaintance with its own peculiar limitations and advantages always give.

One who develops a faculty for design has rarely a chance of being other than a designer. He has no time to make experiments, to strike out new paths. He must stick to the line by which he has become known in order to get a living. Nothing narrows a man so much as working continually in the same groove. The utmost that can be said for specialising a single capacity is that you get an extraordinary mechanical or technical facility at the cost of all other qualities. It may not be possible to be supreme in more than one art, but the arts illustrate each other, and a knowledge of other arts and their capacities and limitations is sure to react upon an artist’s practice in the one which most absorbs him.

It is true we hear of artists here and there who, though in the eye of the world inseparably associated with some particular form of, say, pictorial ability, nevertheless cultivate some secret amour in the form of a handicraft.

Professor Herkomer invited us the other day to see his wonderful application of the arts--his demonstration of their practical unity on his own premises at Bushey; and a most striking, interesting, and instructive exhibition it was. Perhaps few who know him only by his pictures would suspect him of being an accomplished artist and craftsman in many other arts, notably in wrought iron. From the personal point of view he offers a solution of the problem of how to associate art with everyday life. He is devoting his energy and artistic skill and invention to making domestic art, including architecture, monumental. The works at Bushey, if Professor Herkomer will allow me to say so, exemplify not only the power of individual direction and organisation, but also the power of co-operation and unity of aim in the arts founded upon, solidified, and supported by family traditions of skill, invention, and workmanship in the crafts, and how effectively all may be united in a common purpose. Another noteworthy fact was the remarkable way in which scientific and mechanical invention can be made to serve artistic purposes, as in Professor Herkomer’s application of the dental point to the carving and chasing of metal; and in the drilling machines we saw preparing work for the wood-carver. In so far as such a use of machinery does not necessarily condemn any man to be the slave of it, to be a machine-minder all his life, it would seem to be the natural and reasonable use of machinery in the preparation of work--to save the drudgery and waste of energy in its preparatory stages, and so reserve the delicate hand-work until the stage at which it becomes really effective.

There was another thing that struck me about Professor Herkomer’s work, and that was the feeling and poetic sentiment he had enshrined in some of his beautiful carved cabinets. We all know the sentiment and charm of association which naturally gather in time about some piece of domestic furniture. Now art applied to furniture has the same, or rather a higher, power than time, for it can, by beauty of design and workmanship, invest a seat or a cabinet or a fireplace with a poetry of its own, far more subtle, penetrating, and suggestive than perhaps any form of art, because indissolubly associated with daily life and its drama. But when we hand over the production of these things to the trader, how can we expect anything of the sort? How can any sentiment or poetic thought collect about an arm-chair, for instance, that will not bear the weight of time, and has never received the touch of art?

I daresay furniture may be found to serve our turn, good enough for our shifting life of hurry, and strong enough to last out its own fashion. I only say that if we care for genuine art in these things, we cannot get them under the ordinary conditions of trade.

Yet there is not a thing we use, not the commonest appliance in our houses, that does not show some effort at least to have been spent upon it to make itself presentable to humanity. Unfortunately, nowadays, when native instinct and individual feeling have been so much swamped by forced mechanical industrial production, and the search for mere mechanical smoothness and superficial polish, instead of the finish which only comes of thought and loving care; these efforts to be ornamental are too consciously afterthoughts, while the eye is on the market and its blind chances and uninspiring averages. The added ornament to a thing of utility, instead of being a manifestation of the craftsman’s feeling who made it, and his sense of pleasure in his work, is too often some miserable shred torn from the reminiscences of some dead language of decoration; all its grace and spirit gone, and even if moderately adapted in type and form to its purpose, is not calculated to bring a light to any eye, or joy to any heart, since it is but the product of joyless toil and competitive production--the mechanical smirk on the face of the thing of commerce that it is, intended to beguile the simple-minded and unwary into the momentary belief that it is a desirable and beautiful thing, when, in another sense than the poet’s, it

----stands ready to smite once, and smites no more.

This unhappy cheapening and vulgarising of ornament, so far from fostering a taste for art, only degrades and distorts the natural feeling for beauty, which with reasonable scope and pleasant surroundings would develop itself as it has always done. Let not commerce pride itself in cant phrase on its claim that it places “art within the reach of all,” for how could that have become necessary until art had first been put out of reach? What could compensate for whole tracts of country desolated, and for the crowding of the people in our cities under conditions which put ideas of human dignity and beauty practically out of the question for the million?

Among secondary reasons for the decay of inventive and spontaneous design in the applied arts, I believe the hard-and-fast line which has been drawn between the artist and the craftsman is answerable, and the separation of the designer and the workman.

The designer is perhaps kept chained to some enterprising firm. Novelties are demanded of him--something “entirely new and original” every season, but not too much so. It is not surprising that the best talents should get jaded under such influences; that fancy should become forced or fantastic, and motive weak and tame, or perhaps lost altogether in a search after superficial naturalism, in defiance of fitness to material or use. Such a nemesis is too apt to overtake the specialised designer, who designs on paper only, without the stimulus of close acquaintance with, and practice in, some handicraft. The mere change of occupation is refreshing and invigorating, and stimulates the invention.

In so far as I have been successful as a designer, it has been, I believe, largely owing to my making myself acquainted with the conditions of the material in which a design was to be carried out; by striving to realise in thought, at least, the particular limitations and conditions under which it was intended to be worked; and I have always found that those very limitations, those very conditions, are sources of strength and suggestion to the invention. For I am old-fashioned enough to believe that every material has its own proper language--regarded as a medium for expression in design--and it is the business of the designer to find this out.

The naturalistic or imitative impulse in art which is characteristic of our time, with the enormous and surprising development of the photograph, has had very visible effects upon art of all kinds. It is quite distinct from the expressive or inventive impulse, and though they may be a ground of reconciliation, the former is of far less consequence to art in its applied or related form than the latter.

What may be called the dominant art always seems to impress its own peculiar characteristics upon every other. Whereas in former periods--ancient, classical, mediæval, Renaissance--architecture may be said to have ruled over, or to have embraced all the arts, which in their earlier history were really essential parts of it; and even when, by degrees, the family parted company and went out individually to seek their fortunes, more or less independently of each other, evidences of their architectural descent still clung to them--as in the architectural construction and character of portable furniture and fittings, and of their ornamental details.

Sculpture and painting to this day are obliged to retain the rudiment which betrays their architectural parentage; in the one case by the plinth which supports the bust or the statue, and in the other by the moulding of the frame, with which the least architectural or decorative picture cannot dispense.

But pictorial art has now usurped the first place in the popular mind. It has influenced architecture; directly, in so far as it has led to the erection of a new type of building--the picture gallery-a place built with the sole aim of displaying pictures not painted originally with any idea of concert, or to be seen side by side. Surely a remarkably inartistic way of regarding art! Indirectly, the effect of pictorial art and pictorial ways of looking at things is seen in what has been called “the architecture of the sketch-book”--the somewhat restless and fantastic designs in a mixed style, chiefly in domestic work, full of little bits, nooks, and corners, which are characteristic of the last decade. For all that, a pleasant change and relief from the dull monotony of the quasi-classic style which preceded it. Sculpture, too, has not escaped the pictorial influence, as is shown, for instance, in the naturalistic school of modern Italy, which closely imitates in marble textures, surfaces, and momentary grimaces as closely as possible, but with more skill than taste. Abundant examples of such misapplied imitative skill are to be found in other arts, such as wood-carving, pottery painting, metal work, and textiles; although it is only fair to say that, of late years, in these arts there has been a distinct return to truer principles of design, with the revival of a feeling for the capacity of the material which embodies it, and a recognition, over and above mere reproduction of old work, of the distinction between art and nature, which is so often lost sight of. We are, however, never sure amid the vagaries of fashion that we shall not suffer a relapse,--that we are not threatened with an irruption of tea-roses, in high relief, on our curtains and chintzes, and landscapes (not carboniferous) on our coal-boxes.

On the whole, however, the applied arts have shown a laudable independence and defiance of the pictorial mood. The dog no longer appears (after Landseer) on the hearthrug, but is often, in metal, relegated to his proper place on the hearth itself. So far so good. Albeit the desire for some of the happy results in art which belong to ages of greater simplicity of life has produced in some cases strange results, and some combinations of ancient kitchen and modern drawing-room one has seen are not altogether happy. We get an impression of the affectation of primitive simplicity and homeliness with modern luxury and artificiality, from which, at any rate, we can draw a moral on the connection between art and life.

The movement, initiated by Mr. William Morris and the gifted artists associated with him, to which we owe so much, began in a genuine return to honesty of purpose, and to sincere design and sound workmanship, founded upon a study of good models in the past; but it was the outward and visible sign of an intellectual movement which has its eyes upon the future, and, like all revivifying and stimulating impulses in art, it is the offspring of hope and enthusiasm.

Let us look to it that this English Renaissance of ours is not extinguished,--that it does not fall utterly into the iron grasp of commercialism. We may figure art as the fair Andromeda chained to the rock of modern economic conditions, in danger from the all-devouring, desolating monster of gain, until the deliverer shall come.

This is in sober truth the situation. Under our system of centralised industrial production, local art and industry are everywhere being dispossessed, and local characteristics and varieties are being fast obliterated. The machinery of trade forces prevailing patterns everywhere, and the mass of the world cannot pick and choose, or turn the stream of invention for their particular delight. It must accept the latest novelty of commerce, and content itself for all shortcomings with her assurance that it is “just out” and will certainly be “the fashion.” Thus it comes about that our cups and bowls, our tables and carpets, rather speak of the enterprise of a firm than historic traditions of a people, or the skill of a race of artists and craftsmen. The zeal to make things “pay” hath eaten us up, in the artistic sense. It is all very well to talk of informing with art the common accessories of life, to cultivate the handicrafts with enthusiasm, to distinguish ourselves by beauty of design and technical excellence among the nations of the earth, and after all, for a man to find that in proportion to the extra care, delicacy, and invention--in proportion as the craftsman works in the spirit of the artist, and is true to himself, without regard to trouble or time--the more difficult will he find it to make his living.

While such enormous differences in reward and chance of appreciation exist, as they do at present, in art, it is not encouraging to the artist in wood, stone, or metal to find that, however sincerely he may work, he must work in comparative obscurity, and with a very modest scale of remuneration. As long as the chance of both individual distinction and substantial reward is so conspicuously in favour of the pictorial artist, in spite of the best schools of design, and all the machinery for diverting the stream of artistic feeling, skill, and invention into their proper channels, I am afraid the tendency will be for every student who fancies he develops artistic ability to press into the already overcrowded ranks of picture-painters.

When we hear, for instance, of five shillings being offered as a price for carved panels in a cabinet, it is not stimulating to those who look to winning a competency in the practice of so highly skilled and artistic a craft as wood-carving.

We may lay such facts at the door of competition or apathetic indifference to applied art, as it pleases us; but I venture to think that if the crafts and arts were recognised in public exhibitions of art, which are now practically devoted to one form of painting, it would do something. It would at least offer a chance for individual distinction in some other form of art. The work of the designer and craftsman could be seen, and by degrees people would begin to realise that beauty of design and workmanship counted for something besides in painting, and that the main business of an artist was not to emulate the photograph, or to take the wind (or the effect) out of the canvas of his neighbour in the pictorial struggle for existence (through unnatural selection), known as a “Fine Art Exhibition.”

The arts are really inseparably associated and interdependent. None is greater or less than another, and all are in some sense applied. We are all consciously or unconsciously affected by our surroundings. We may become sensitive to beautiful shapes and colours, or lines, and afflicted by those ugly and coarse, or grow callous and insensible to them, which is perhaps the commonest result. It is therefore hardly possible to attach too much importance to art in its applied forms, seeing its intimate association with and bearing on life itself through all sources of refined pleasure.

In those periods of the past which we regard as great epochs in art, the arts and crafts are in harmony and close relationship with each other. The culminating glory and mastery of Renaissance painting could hardly have existed without being founded upon the firm basis of the handicrafts, set as it were like a gem in a not less beautiful framework of invention in all branches of design; and we know that more than one great Florentine painter came out of a goldsmith’s workshop. Such pictures as that of “The Adoration of the Magi,” by Mabuse (shown at Burlington House a winter or two ago), or Crivelli’s “Annunciation” in our National Gallery, seem to sum up the contemporary beauty of the handicrafts, and give them back to us again. A beautiful book was lately brought out, of Italian ornament, taken from the patterns and on dresses and hangings in pictures in the National Gallery; and taking the fifteenth-century painters generally we might get a perfect cyclopædia of applied design from the beautiful details which enrich their pictures. It was not archæology then, but the love of beauty and richness, the delight in the splendour of life, which led them to paint such things, and also, probably, because they were craftsmen themselves as well as painters.

I believe we are making a mistake in training students in art, from first to last, solely with the pictorial view. The imitative powers are cultivated to the utmost, while the inventive are neglected. The superficial effects of nature are studied, while the expressiveness and value of pure line, and its bearing on applied art, are very much overlooked. Thus the designing, constructive power seems to be considered secondary to the depicting power, or rather one phase of it; the consequence is we get large numbers of clever painters and graphic sketchers, but very few designers. Everything is looked at from the pictorial point of view, and the term artist has been narrowed to mean the pictorial or imitative painter.

I should like to see a reversal of the principle. I should like to see a course of training in the handicrafts come first, as the most important to the cultivation of a sense of beauty in common life, not to speak of its importance to an industrial country, in an industrial age.

ART AND COMMERCIALISM

We have been lately told by a brilliant impressionist, no less in words than in paint, that there never have been such things as artistic periods; that art is solely individual, and lives and dies with the artist. And among other interesting facts we learned that, after all, one thing is as beautiful as another (to a painter) if you only get it in the right light; that, in short, those striking features of modern landscape--wharves and factory chimneys--look just as well as antique towers and palaces when merged in the twilight--that is, when you can no longer see what they really are, and the imagination is free to invest them with the romance of a past age.

Now, whatever germs of truth such statements contain, they only throw us back upon the question, “What is art?” If it is the art only of the impressionist, the record in paint of the children of the mist, of factory-smoke even, and London fog; if nature must only be seen with the eyes half shut, and in the abomination of desolation--the squalid outskirts and Stygian rivers of modern cities--then, indeed, former ages were but poorly furnished in the matter of art. What availeth the clear-cut noble sculpture of ancient Greece, and the work of her vase painters? What availeth the endless decorative invention of the Asiatic peoples, and of mediæval and early Renaissance times, lavished upon all the accessories of life, not to speak of its culminating glories in painting and sculpture? Could all this beauty of design and workmanship, in its constant growth and development through the centuries, have hung upon a thread--upon the lives of one or two persons of genius, springing, like mushrooms, from universal indifference, ignorance, and decay?

Such an opinion is, however, only a sign of the times. When every man fights for his own hand, and every artist has to make his own public, such an individualistic conception of art is not altogether surprising; and, were it intended to apply to the art of the present day only, would be very near the truth. But a little inquiry and consideration would show that art has deeper roots. The delight in beauty, be it human or of wild nature, be it of light, colour, form, or sound, is a common possession and a necessity of life, as in the higher sense it must always be, so long as the human has any claim to be the higher animal. And it should be remembered that certain animals and birds have been proved to be sensitive to certain colours and decorative effects, which sensibility is indeed wrapped up with the very fact of the germination and continuity of life itself; and this only convinces us how far down and deeply rooted is this sense in nature which has been so highly developed and specialised in man. Differing, it may be, in degree, but not in kind; cultivated, or uncultivated; modified by centuries of habit and association; influenced by modes of thought and conditions of life--wheresoever humanity dwells, in northern snow or southern sunshine, it flowers and seeds, and springs anew.

Art, in all its forms, is normally but the language of this universal feeling which, shared more or less by all, consciously or unconsciously, is fully comprehended, passionately expressed, and communicated in tangible and eloquent shape by comparatively few. But I should say that every one whose heart is stirred at the voice of music, at the music of poetry; every one who feels the magic of beauty and is touched by its pathos, who is moved by the strangeness of the shifting drama of life; every one who vibrates, as it were, to the harmonies of nature, is a potential or latent artist.

As far as we can judge from its history, it would seem that this power of artistic expression, controlled as it is by countless influences of soil, climate, and character; constantly intercrossing and blending; springing from simple beginnings, and passing through various stages of growth, development, and decline, with the life of nations--this power, I say, seems to have reached its noblest and most beautiful results under collective conditions--of the arts, at all events--when all art was decorative, and all were allied with architecture, depending technically upon a certain continuity of tradition, and intellectually on a certain consentaneousness or universality of sentiment, ere it reached a high perfection among a people, being always at its highest in public monuments. It is obvious, since these conditions depend upon a vast number of other conditions, since art is the flowering of the tree of life in man’s moral nature, the form in which it is cast must, finally, be the outcome of the social, political, and economic conditions of society.

We have only to remember the temples and palaces of antiquity, whether the colossal fragments of the crumbled civilisations of the East, the sculptured triumphs of Greece and Rome, or the cathedrals and public halls of the Middle Ages. Art in such buildings touches sublimity. The effect, for instance, of such a building as that of St. Mark’s at Venice is like embodied music--rich, mysterious, splendid, harmonious; storied with the legends and emblems of a faith, and a conception of the universe then corresponding with the knowledge and aspirations of mankind, full of solemnity, pathos, and dignity. But one of our own English cathedrals, where the ruthless hand of the modern restorer is not too obvious--say our historic Abbey of Westminster--will impress us in the same kind; and this impressiveness is not due merely to the effect of antiquity, though it no doubt contributes. We feel it to be the collective work of artists and craftsmen, as well as of ages, and we feel it embodies the aspirations, the religious sentiment, even the humour and satire, of its time, and, speaking through the architect, the mason, the carver, the glass painter, is heard the voice of a whole people.

But if one should go into a modern church in search of the ideas of the time, I am afraid he would only find the ideas of the new curate.

The former dignity and impressiveness of art is usually accounted for by the fact that it was in the past chiefly devoted to the service of religion; but that was only because religious ideas had the strongest hold upon the human mind--because with religion were wrapped up all other ideas, and the sources of knowledge were in the hands of the priesthood. Art is bound by its very nature to give expression to ascendant ideas. But both art and religion have since been broken to fragments, and these are often so small and so incongruously pieced together, that they refuse to reflect any ideas at all; or so feebly and falsely, that men, in distrust of both art and religion, have turned to nature and science, which in the strongest minds fill the place of both.

But this, after all, is only like saying that the loss of the eyesight is compensated for by the increased stimulation of the other senses. It is a serious loss all the same.

Let us try to find, however, what ideas, even in the fragmentary and artificial condition to which it is now reduced, art gives us in our day. The one great distinction and difference which marks it from the art of ancient times consists in the absence of what is called popular art--the art of the people, hand in hand with everyday handicraft, inseparable from life and use--that spontaneous native art of the potter, the weaver, the carver, the mason, which our economical, commercial, industrial, competitive, capitalistic system has crushed out of existence by division of labour, the factory system, and production for profit; yes, our three-headed Cerberus has devoured the art, together with the wellbeing and the independence of the people, and stands unappeased at the smoke-gloomed industrial gate, over which is written, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” But this basis of popular art was the soil in which all art germinated, and from which the goodly tree grew and branched out, to blossom in the more delicate kinds of painting and sculpture which, since they have ministered to the caprices of wealth, fashion, and luxury alone, branded in a separate class as “fine arts,” have turned their backs upon their humble relations, the handicrafts, with the result that their house is left unto them desolate. Cut off, as it were, like flowers from their natural stem, they presently languish and wither away, or linger on, fantastic ghosts, shadows, and travesties of their former beauty.

But we are calmly told that “we must recognise, however, that modern art has no tendency in this latter direction (that of beauty). Beauty no longer suffices for us.”[6] This is clear and emphatic enough. It comes from the French, too, who have assumed the position of dictators of taste, at least in painting, to the world at large. It is from a book on æsthetics, by Eugene Véron; I quote from the English translation. The book is an attempt to find a scientific basis and reasonable position for art under the conditions of modern society, and while the author fails to recognise the causes of its deterioration in the quality of beauty, he boldly acknowledges the difference between past and present aims, and insists on freedom of development. Yet the writer is possessed by a distinction which he himself sets up between decorative, and what he calls expressive art, applying this latter title to the pictorial art of the present day. As if all good art was not expressive!

In my view, however, all forms of plastic or graphic art, properly so called, must be dominated by the sense of beauty, as the condition of their normal existence and the condition of their successful appeal to the eye. The expression of beauty naturally controls all other expressions. Otherwise, it seems to me, art is overstepping the border line which divides it from other operations of the mind; from scientific analysis, for instance, and from photography, where the object is totally different, and everything is sacrificed to the attainment of fact.

Yet this is just what is happening in modern painting--everything is being sacrificed to the attainment of fact in some form or other, and painting has almost ceased to be an art of design.

The modern French view is frankly expressed in a passage quoted by Véron from Fromentin, who says: “The time has come for less thought, and for less lofty aims. We must now look at things more closely, and observe better. We must paint as well, though in a different fashion. We must work for the general public, for the citizen, the man of business, and the _parvenu_--everything is now for them.” And he goes on to point out in effect that the painter must do the best he can under these rather depressing circumstances, copy his model, and take comfort in the belief that henceforward the greatest genius will be the man of the least invention. Here, at all events, it is clearly recognised that painting now exists for a class, which, possessing the wealth, commands all things that may be commanded by wealth, and as these things are many, a money standard is set up, which is in danger of becoming the only standard and test, whether of virtue and character, or artistic ability.

The results of such a state of things are visible on every side. We have seen that in all ages it has been natural to art to express the ascendant characteristics and ideas of its time, as well as to reflect the material facts of life.

Art is the sensitive plate in the dark camera of history, which records both the mental and physical features of humanity without prejudice, when all other sources of light are shut out.

So in an age when commercialism is supreme, and bourgeois ideas are triumphant, it is only natural that they should make themselves felt in art.

Accordingly, we see the influence of profit-making principles in the way in which painters become specialised for certain sorts of work, and in the rise and progress of the middleman or picture-dealer. As illustrating this, it is said of Verboeckhoven, the cattle painter, that the dealers were in the habit of sending orders couched in terms like the following: “Wanted, by Monday, three pictures of the usual description--cow, with two sheep.” There is a story told of him, too, which is very suggestive of the effect of commercial ideas on art. One day an American entered the studio; he saw a picture which pleased him, and bought it at the artist’s price--1200 francs. He could not take it away with him immediately, and when he came for it some time after, the painter had another, just like it, nearly finished. He was putting in an extra lambkin, when the American returned. A happy thought struck the latter; he would take the second picture too; it would form a pendant to the other. But Verboeckhoven wanted 1300 francs for it. His customer hesitated. “Well, well!” said he, “the same price, then;” and dipping a rag in turpentine he wiped out the lamb.

That grand development of the shop, the modern picture exhibition, is, again, another triumph of commercialism in art, which, faithfully following the accepted theory of the trader that supply will produce demand, succeeds in something like real over-production. Consider the huge annual pictorial displays and their chief product--the child of competition in art--the “pot-boiler.” Truly the temple of art is the market, and its high priest the picture-dealer! “Take your choice” (or, rather, the recommendation of the adroit salesman), “go to so-and-so for your fish and your salt-water pieces--fresh every year, but all alike. If your fancy is flesh or fowl, you must go farther. This other gentleman will give you game pieces--he has a special license. Then you can finish with flower and fruit,” and so forth. Yes, division of labour has triumphed even in painting, and to excel a man must specialise his talents; that is to say, adapt them to the continual production of the same sort of thing. Thus, and thus only, can he hope to make either reputation or a living.

Very good; but what becomes of art, unless the whole of art is comprehended in portraiture? For, in spite of our classification, our labels for landscape, portrait, genre, historical; under this specialising, ticketing, commercial system, the tendency is for painting to become really limited to forms of portraiture. I do not mean merely the production of portraits, though that is a noticeable feature, but I apply the term to characterise a certain literal and prosaic habit of regarding all nature, and literal methods of representation, whether of persons, scenes, or animal life; while the conditions of the market, even apart from the tastes of the ascendant class we have been considering, cut against even honest and faithful portraiture, but encourage that conscious making-up, dressing, and forcing of effect to catch the public eye, amid the further falsification of pictorial values caused by the entire want of classification and harmonious arrangement in the picture exhibition. So that in the result, where every inducement is held out in this fierce pictorial competition to painters to consciously work for forced effect, and put out their possible neighbour, pretentiousness and meretriciousness too often win the day.

When the decline in modern art is mentioned, it is usual for the average man, imbued with the commercial ideas of the age, and with the all-sufficient standard of money-value in his mind, to point triumphantly to the enormous sums given for certain pictures in these days, and to the wealth of certain successful artists. But those enormous sums only show that pictures are a marketable commodity in which the chances of large profits are involved, and the fluctuating values in the market make them objects of speculative investments for capitalists. Reputations fall and rise, often according to what appears to be the mere caprice of fashion, though even fashion is controlled by commercialism. And as to the wealth of successful painters, is that always in proportion to the excellence of their work, or the labour bestowed upon it, and is it always the accompaniment of the highest skill and the loftiest aims? Overwhelmed with commissions, the fashionable painter has the alternative before him of over-work or inevitable deterioration. In many cases he becomes the victim of both. Then, too, for one favourite of fame and fortune, how many unfortunate, struggling, obscure? Thus at both ends of the scale the influence of commercialism is only for evil.