Part 12

One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural History Museum) is the device by which a certain small possum has taught her young to accompany her from branch to branch. Along her back she seats her litter, then over their heads like the conducting-wire of a tram-line she extends her tail--and then (each like an electric connecting rod) up go the little tails, make a loop, adjust themselves to the maternal guide-rope, and hang on. And there, safe from upset, is the family-omnibus ready to start!

Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-growth of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all structural--having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents, excrescences--which to the craftsman’s purpose are nothing.

Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion; her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may live; thus she meets and out-matches the chances that are against her. The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously, and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material) fit to face life and its chances: if a house--walls and roof calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a textile--fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to outlast the brief occasion of their utterance--then in a form likely to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music--a system of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty and adornment.

And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man’s wish to leave memorable records--beyond the limits of his own generation--of what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work) breaking out into play. “See,” it says, “how I dance, and gambol, and triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle to live.”

Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives miserably--scrapes through as it were--the question in the face of so poverty-stricken a result, may still be--“Was the struggle worth it?” And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown that life is good in itself, that he can do well enough without the assurance of personal immortality held out to him by the theologians. Whether that be or be not his reward hereafter, he will still strive to express himself; but for that end mere use alone will not satisfy him.

We have seen, then, how man, in his social surroundings, begins to secure something over and above the mere necessities of life; and so, after providing himself with a certain competence of food, clothing and shelter, has means and energy left for the supply of luxuries, ornaments, delights--call them what you will. And according to the direction in which he flings out for the acquisition of these superfluities--so will his whole manhood develop, or his type of racial culture be moulded.

Far back in the beginnings of civilization one of the first forms taken by this surplus of power and energy over mere necessity was the acquisition of slaves and wives. Civilization then began to ornament itself with two modes of body-service--the menial attendance of the slave upon his master, and the polygamous sexual attendance of the woman upon her lord.

To-day we think that both those things were, from a moral point of view, bad ornament. But you cannot look into the history of any civilization conducted on those lines without seeing that they decorated it--and that, out of their acceptance, came colour, pomp, splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment--for a very keen self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous mysteries of the toilet.

At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that once flourishing school of ornament.

But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities--for polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of being carried on without those things--was, and is, happily lived by other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which those races think more enjoyable. But no race will consent to live without some sort of ornament of its own choosing; and when its choice of ornaments, or of social superfluities, over and above the needs of existence, is seriously threatened from without it declares that it is fighting not merely for liberty but for existence. Yet we know quite well that the people of invaded and conquered States continue in the main to exist--they continue even to wear ornaments; but these are apt to be imposed ornaments galling to the national pride. And so to-day, in the midst of a vast belligerency, we have committees and consultations going on, to see to it lest, at the end of the war, under German dominance, our women should have their future fashions imposed on them from Berlin instead of from Paris, a fearful doom for any lady of taste to contemplate.

The example may seem frivolous, but it is a parable of the truth; we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die fighting for them, we make others die for us.

Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage of civilization--that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and visible sign of the people’s pride of life and of their sense of power. The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.

But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic--in which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of service, and prided itself in military service alone--in that and in the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods, but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up into portions of an unimportant size and perished.

At a later day--and again with the city as centre to its life of self-realisation--we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences alternately jostled and combined.

And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex art--tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic arm, a new life-consciousness--the consciousness of the guilds, the workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own account--not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.

Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become imitative and debased.

I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings of Europe! Think of it!--of what that means in the realisation of life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called “merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in beauty.

I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred (so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment), there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living” was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot, so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their power.

So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty, delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to live delightfully.

If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable--not, I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”; else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.

Our life is built up--we know not to what ultimate end--on an infinite number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live; they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.

I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt and a loathing.

Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature itself--making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for self-realisation in ornament and delight--so long will these things be inevitable.

But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.

ART AND CITIZENSHIP

(1910)

The most hardened advocate of “Art for Art’s sake,” will hardly deny that Art, for all its “sacred egoism,” is a social force. The main question is where does your Art-training begin?

The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation; and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong feeling about Art.

And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same condemnation.

True education, as opposed to merely commercial education, is a training of mind and body to an appreciation of right values; values, not prices. The man who has an all-round appreciation of right values is a well-educated man; and he could not have a better basis either for the love or the practice of Art than this appreciation of what things are really worth.

But, in the present age, which prides itself on its inhuman system of specialisation as a means to economy, such a man is rather a rare phenomenon; for it is about as difficult to get out of present conditions a true appreciation of life values--a true Art-training--as it is to get a true artist. Where your national conditions shut down the critical faculties, and make their exercise difficult, there too, your creative artistic faculties are being shut down and made difficult also. They are far more interdependent than your average Art-teacher or Art-student is generally willing to admit. The idea that he has to concern himself with conditions outside his own particular department threatens him with extra trouble, and the burden of a conscience that the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” will not wholly satisfy; and so he is inclined to shut his eyes, and direct his energies to the securing of favourable departmental instead of right national conditions.

But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions between artistic supply and social demand have become vitiated, if the conditions of the market, or of society, are unfavourable to the reception of products of true worth, then the artist must to some extent be an active party in the struggle for getting things set right.

That does not mean that, if he has a gift for the designing of stage-scenery, he should necessarily be involved in a struggle to secure a good drainage system (though even that should have an interest for him) but it does mean very much that he should be tremendously interested in the education of his own and the public mind to the point of receiving good drama rather than bad, in order that his art may have worthy material to work upon; and as good drama largely arises from a lively conscience and the quickening in the community of new ideas, he will wish his public a keen and open mind on all social questions.

Similarly a man who designs for textile fabrics should be very much concerned indeed in getting cleanly conditions and pure air in the towns and dwelling-houses where his designs have to live and look beautiful, or grow ugly and rot. And there you get set before you in small, the opposition between the interests of Art and the supposed interests of trade. It is--or it is supposed to be--in the interest of trade that things should wear out or get broken, and be replaced by other things. It is in the interest of Art that they should not wear out, that they should last; that everything worthy which is given to man’s hand to do should have secured to it the greatest possible length of life. And the reason is that the artist, if he be a true artist, realises the value of things, the life value; that he is on the side of creation and not of destruction, of preservation and not of waste. He has within his nature an instinct that the greatest possible longevity is the right condition for all manual labour; that when a man sets his hand to a thing he should have it as his main aim to give good value, to make it so that it will endure. And in this connection I would like to substitute for the words “art training” the word “education.” It is in the interests of education that things should be made to last, and that only things should be made of any lasting material that deserve lasting. Nothing should be produced the value of which will become negligible before it is honestly worn out. And so it is in the interest of education, as of Art, that we should eliminate as much as possible the passing and the ephemeral, the demand of mood and fashion, the thing cheaply chosen, cheaply acquired, and cheaply let go; and substitute the thing that we shall have a long use for, and should like to keep permanently--the thing acquired with thought and care, and thoughtfully and carefully preserved because it has in itself a value.

But you won’t get any broad exercise of that kind of choice between evil and good until you get a sense of right values--going far away from what apparently touches art--in the mind, and the public and private life of the community. And so, as I started by saying, true Art is bound up with true education and social conditions. Good citizenship is one of the conditions for setting national Art upon a proper basis. A lively sense of your duty to your neighbour cannot fail to have an effect upon your taste in art.

Now I want to bring this view of things home to you. So I will ask everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation, and rest. And to begin with, how do you show your sense of duty to the architect, who has (if you are fortunate) designed for you rooms of pleasant and restful proportions? How many of the objects in those rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are in themselves in any way beautiful--things, that is to say, which (if not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their production? Have those things been put there quite irrespective of their price and the display they make of their owner’s “comfortable circumstances”? Are they subordinated to a really intelligent sense of what a living-room should be? Or are they merely a crowd, a litter, things flung into the room pell-mell by a house-mistress bent on securing for her parlour-maid a silly hour’s dusting every day of objects--not of virtue--and for herself the recognition by her neighbours that she has money enough to throw away in making her living-room a silly imitation of a shop for bric-a-brac. Can you, even those of you who do not live in streets where you have to safeguard your privacy--can you look out of the window without being tickled in the face by lace curtains, blind-tassels, or potted palm-leaves? Can you sit down to the writing-table without entangling the legs of your chair in a woolly mat and your feet in the waste-paper basket, or get at the drawer of the cabinet without moving two or three arm-chairs, or play the piano without causing the crocks which stand upon it to jangle? Is the rest and recreation you get in that room anything else but a sense of self-complacency based upon pride of possession? I ask you to think what your furnishing of your rooms means, and remember that to every person who comes into those rooms--and more especially perhaps to the maids whom you set to dust them--you are helping to give either an Art-training or an anti-Art-training, a training in true uses and values, or in misuses and mere waste and wantonness.

Of course I know that to some extent you are victims. You have dear friends who will give you presents, and you can’t hurt their feelings by not putting up another shelf, or erecting another glass-shade, where neither are wanted, or driving another peg into the wall to hang a picture where no picture can be properly seen. And probably the reason you cannot is because you have shown yourself so thoughtless and haphazard in all your ideas about decoration and house-furnishing that even in that house, which you falsely assert to be your castle, you stand defenceless before this invasion of ornamental microbes! Obviously the house is not yours if others can break in and spoil its borders with their own false taste. But I can assure you that those inroads do not happen to people whose rooms show a scrupulous sense of selection. You inspire then (even in the thoughtless) a certain dread and respect. Though they regard you as uncanny and call you a crank, you are beginning their Art-training for them.