Part 2

Now this fear of repetition is no imaginary evil, but a very real and living one. How often do we all attempt something fresh, knowing it not to be the best we can do, (best I mean more in kind than degree) simply from a weak dislike that people should say of us, that we have only one style. How often do we turn out a design for a certain purpose and position, knowing it to be not so good as one we have before made for a similar purpose and position, simply because we have not strength to repeat what we believe to be best, lest people should think that is _all_ we can do. In so doing we preclude all possibility of development.

Now observe, this never occurs during the progress of any living art in the past. The man who had carved one Early English capital did not, when next he had a capital to carve, say, “I know nothing more _beautiful_, but I must at any rate do something different, I must not put the same capital here again.” On the contrary, his aim was to carve a similar capital again, only he would try to do a better one; for probably he had noticed some little point in which he could improve on the last he did; some way in which he could mass his light and shade so as to give them a more pleasing form when seen at a distance; or some more lovely feeling it was possible to introduce into the reveal of a leaf or the curve of a stem.

You must forgive me if I dwell on this a little. For it is of vital importance that all of us who have any hope or wish to see a living art again existent among us, should realise the full significance of this. There are many other changes which must take place in our practice of the arts, and these very radical changes, before living art is again possible to us; but if I can bring home to anyone, directly or indirectly, the full significance of this, I shall have done _something_ towards this great end.

In excuse it may be and is said, “This aiming at change, variety, novelty, &c. is demanded of the designer by a capricious change-loving public, broadly speaking, incapable of any true judgment or appreciation of good and bad in art.” In reply to this, I think we cannot do better than recall what Mr. Ruskin says on this head. “You may like making money exceedingly; but if it come to a fair question, whether you are to make five hundred pounds less by this business, or to spoil your building, and you choose to spoil your building, there’s an end of you. So you may be as thirsty for fame as a cricket is for cream; but, if it come to a fair question, whether you are to please the mob, or do the thing as you know it ought to be done; and you can’t do both, and choose to please the mob,--its all over with you;--there’s no hope for you; nothing that you can do will ever be worth a man’s glance as he passes by.”

A further cause of failure in decorating and furnishing is virtually the same as we noticed when speaking of planning. When a small middle class house is wanted, what is usually done, we saw, is virtually to take a plan suitable for a larger house and reduce it every way, instead of designing a house suited to the new requirements. This same mistake is generally made in the decoration and furniture; instead of these being designed to suit the condition or circumstances in which they are to be placed, each designed for its position and purpose, and good and honest as far as it goes, what do we find? Cheapened imitations of the sort of thing common in the larger house, cheapened by being badly made, by veneer on pine instead of solid wood, by cast metals and ornament made to look like wrought, by machine carved wood, by marbled slate, &c. P. G. Hubert in his little book entitled “Liberty and a Living,” says: “One of my critics, for whom I have great personal deference, tells me that my theory of life tends to a relapse into barbarism, and in illustration of the truth of his position, he pointed one evening to a music stand near the piano with the remark: “With your ideas, that stand would never be made of mahogany and elaborately ornamented, but would be of pine, perhaps stained.”

“Well, suppose it was, I am inclined to think that the greater use of common material, stained pine and other cheap wood, in the houses of people of taste is a distinct indication of a needed reform. Take the little music stand in illustration. Its purpose is to hold a number of music books and loose sheets of music. It has three or four shelves, and is so made as to stand in a corner near the piano and take up but little room. It is made of mahogany, highly polished, & is ornamented, as most people would call it, with a sort of stucco-beading, which to me is distasteful. But it cost money, and therefore has its reasons for being in certain eyes. I have forgotten what it cost me--probably from fifteen to twenty dollars. Thanks to the growth of good taste, I can to-day pick out from half-a-dozen books I know of a little design for a music stand, or sketch it myself, and the nearest carpenter will make the thing in a day at a cost of two or three dollars for wood, labor, and staining. The result will be something which is pleasanter to my eye, and I will venture to say to the eyes of nine out of ten persons of educated taste. The other fifteen or sixteen dollars saved may be devoted to books, pictures, music--any of the things which really add something to life. The music stand of stained pine will do its work just as well as the one made of mahogany, inlaid with stucco beading--in fact it will do it better, for it will not need a periodic rubbing on the part of the parlour-maid to keep it bright and polished, and it can be moved about when occasion demands, as it weighs but little. It is as strong as the other, and it will last a hundred years.”

And now for the last cause of failure of which I shall speak, and this is: the very marked feeling which everything has of not having been designed for its place: the look everything has of being ready to move at any moment. Most things to look right and happy in their places must be designed _for_ their places. The advantages attaching to a room furnished in this way, and largely by means of _fixtures_, I think the accompanying sketches will do something to illustrate.

There is a unity, completeness, comfort, and repose about such a room, which can never be got in a room in which the furniture &c. is not designed for its position and looking at home there, but is just temporarily stuck where it happens to stand, with a look of being on the alert, and ready to move on at a moment’s notice.

But it is time to sum up our position and note the general conclusions to which we are led. I have described some of the defects we most commonly see in planning, and the arrangement of the hall; the entire want of reposefulness, (that infallible criterion of good ornament), that troubles the man of taste in nearly all domestic decorative work; and the lack of fitness in the furniture that is generally crowded into the rooms of smaller middle class houses, which adds the final touch to the complete failure, from an artistic point of view, of the great majority of such rooms.

I further mentioned as causes generally contributing to this failure, over-decoration, the covering of all surfaces with a mass of incongruous patterns, quite fatal, even where the designs are in themselves good: the effortfulness of most ornament, by which every pattern seems to clamour for notice, in which connexion I stated as a guiding principle, that any ornament you notice before you look for it, is likely to be in bad taste. Further I noticed the laboured and unspontaneous character of so many of the designs themselves and the lack of good drawing in them, and hinted that this arose partly from the designer’s dread of repeating himself, and his eagerness to produce something fresh without considering whether it was better. Finally I drew attention to the way in which so many rooms are furnished with cheap imitations of better or more esteemed materials, decorated with cast, or otherwise mechanically produced imitations of hand-wrought ornament, and the general unfitness, and ready-to-move look, which results from there being no fixed furniture, but all having been designed without any thought of the room, and the room planned without any view to its furniture.

I have several times hinted that the entire lack of unity, which is the inevitable result of all this, must continue, so long as our rooms and our houses are never thought out as a whole, so long as one man plans the building, another arranges the decorations, and a third picks up the furniture of twenty designers, here and there and everywhere. It is essential to any good result, that one man should design the house as a whole. I do not mean necessarily that he should design everything in it, or draw with his own hand every detail; but he must exercise a controlling power, selecting where he does not design, and ensuring that the work of all may be done in a spirit of co-operation towards the complete whole which he planned.

You will all be wishing to ask me, I doubt not, how this is possible in our days of speculative building, short leases & shorter tenancies. I must at once admit that to a large part of this work such a system is inapplicable, though even here much could be done if each department made what improvements are possible irrespective of the others. The lack of power to control the decorations does not excuse a badly planned hall. But outside the purely speculative building there is yet a large amount of work to which the system is applicable, in greater or less degree, such degree mainly depending on our clients: and here we have the real difficulty. We are powerless to compel our clients, nay, to a large extent, the client has a right to have his own way.

I suppose a doctor is in a similar fix; he is called in to prescribe for a patient and finds his prescription is useless because the patient will continue to smoke; he does not, if he is worth anything, accept the situation; but he explains that smoking is, in this case, fatal, that it renders his skill unavailing; and, if all his advice is neglected, he will finally refuse to act.

Architecture is rightly called a profession only when the architect advises his client what is best, and brings the whole weight of his knowledge and experience to persuade him from anything foolish, or in bad taste. When he produces to order some plan of which he cannot approve, he is merely a merchant of plans.

While speaking of this duty of the architect, I would not be thought to make light of many conditions of modern life which will, so long as they continue, and to the extent to which they spread, hinder all attempts to produce beautiful and dignified homes. One such condition is the instability of social position; everyone is seeking to get a step further up the social ladder. The result is a demand for houses which look as though they belonged to the social grade next above that of the people who are to live in them. To such untrue aims art refuses any countenance; and it is well. But there is an already great and daily increasing number of those who are weary of this fruitless struggle, of a life spent in work entirely without interest or beauty, or the power of giving a vestige of real pleasure, that they may have the means to _acquire_ things without interest, beauty, or the power of giving any pleasure beyond the sordid satisfaction of letting Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So see they can afford to have them. These are anxious to find houses suited to their genuine wants, houses in which the work will be reduced to a minimum, and the beauty increased to a maximum, by the only true method of making all the useful and necessary things beautiful; not by the false method of keeping all useful & necessary things out of sight, trying to conceal their purpose or to appear unconscious of their existence, and substituting for them things recognised to be useless but regarded (so long as the fashion lasts at any rate) as beautiful.

This polished mahogany life of ours, with stucco trimmings and jerry joints presented for view to our visitors and acquaintances in the front room, is not, I believe, what many of us really want; we are tired also of the dismal and cramped, but at anyrate real, back office, back room, and kitchen life; & many are looking for houses in which they shall not spend their labour for that which is not bread, but shall be able to live a life of less artificiality than our present complex 19th century existence, a truer, healthier life altogether.

I have just said, that the true method of making a room beautiful is to make all the necessary and useful things in it beautiful; so much is this true that it becomes almost impossible to design a really beautiful room that is to have no useful work done in it or natural life lived in it. An architect called upon to design a room in which nothing more earnest is to be done than to gossip over afternoon tea has, indeed, a sad job.

For a room must always derive its dignity or meanness from, and reflect somewhat, the character and kind of occupation which is carried on in it. For instance, the studio of an artist, the study of a man of letters, the workshop of a carpenter, or the kitchen of a farmhouse, each in its position and degree, derives a dignity and interest from the work done in it. And the things in the room bear some relation to that work, and will be the furniture and surroundings natural to it; as the bench and tools in the carpenter’s shop; the easels and canvasses in the studio; the books and papers in the study; and the bright pans and crockery in the kitchen. All these lend a sense of active, useful, human life to the room, which redeems it from vulgarity, though it be the simplest possible; and no amount of decoration or ornamentation can give dignity or homeliness to a room which is used as a show room, or in which no regular useful life is lived. For in the work room all things _have a place_, by reason of their usefulness, which gives a sense of fitness and repose entirely wanting in a room where a place has obviously _had to be found_ for everything, as in a drawing room.

How far things _beautiful_ alone, are to be allowed place in our rooms I am not prepared to say. Thoreau, you will remember, threw away his fossil, the only ornament in his room, because it required dusting. While not suggesting that we should follow his example to such an extreme, I yet think that in retaining his spade and his axe he retained more of true decoration. And I believe in the main that the more adapted to its use anything is, the more graceful will it be in shape. The bent handle of the axe, more comfortable to hold, is also more beautiful than the straight, and in the degree the curve and form of the handle is adapted to its uses as an axe, by just so much the more beautiful it becomes.

The charm of the farmhouse kitchen, with everything in its place because of its usefulness, can of course be increased to an unlimited extent by making all the useful articles also beautiful in form, and harmonious in color. This is the line on which alone, I contend, a really beautiful room is to be got; and I would discourage all attempts at adornment by finding places for useless things.

I am glad to think that, owing to the great increase of education and employment among ladies, there will be less and less call for the old-fashioned drawing room; ladies will want a room to work in, not to dawdle in.

Pardon me if I seem to have dwelt over long on some of these difficulties in the way of designing really beautiful rooms. I have done so in the belief that they do not, as at first may appear, lie outside our province. For I believe, as professional men, we have just such power of influencing our clients by helping them towards a more natural life as the doctor has in such matters as diet; and particularly is this power evident in the domestic branch of the profession, with which we are dealing.

In building a man’s shell for him we certainly can influence very largely the life he will live within it; and while it is our duty to make that shell fit the life as well as possible, it is surely also our privilege to make it conduce to the realisation of the best of which he is capable.

In so far as we do this, we shall rise above the mere planner of houses and take our places in the work of planning and moulding the future life of the people.

BARRY PARKER.

THE DIGNITY OF ALL TRUE ART.

The kinship between all the various branches of art is so very close, that instead of speaking of them as different arts, it would really be more accurate to describe them as only different media for expression of the same truth. Our object in trying to express ourselves in some one form of art, is to bring home to those to whom this _form_ most appeals, truths which we see are passed over by them unheeded and uncomprehended when expressed in another. Many of the principles and truths I hope to bring before you are so much more easily set forth in other arts than that of language, that the attempt to use this form would seem unnecessary and undesirable were it not for the truth of what I have just said, that each of the arts appeals & clearly expresses its meanings and teachings only to a part of those to whom it is addressed. All feel something of the meanings expressed through art, no matter what _form_ of expression may have been chosen, but every one will be more directly appealed to and will more clearly understand the message expressed in one art than they would that, or some other message, expressed in another.

It cannot be denied that many get from music what they see not in poetry, while others learn from poetry what they miss in music, painting, sculpture, or architecture; that some can feel and know truth in architecture they find not in the drama, and many learn from the drama what no other art can teach them.

For though it is true that many of our greatest artists could have expressed themselves, as some have expressed themselves, with equal power through several media; many of our greatest poets might have made equally great painters, and our painters, poets; still few could possibly find time to acquire equal knowledge of several arts. And though most men, being masters of one art, will have abundant sympathy and love for the others, yet life will prove too short for them to come to feel and know the messages or truths of any other with equal clearness. But, having them in the depths of their natures, they will feel, though dimly perhaps, that they are all one, and that their vital truths belong to all alike, and are essentially the same in all, and are of the very life of all that is worthy, all that is beautiful, true, or noble.

Now all the greatest truths are so broad and universal in their very elements, that they are incapable of clear definition and _must_ depend on the subtleties of true art for expression. And in this lies the dignity of all true art, in that by it and through it only can the highest truths be taught, or true education reached.

Music is the most perfect means of saying what cannot be expressed in words. None of us can translate into words what has been revealed to us through music, it is a means of expression above and beyond words; painting, poetry, sculpture, architecture, even a mere colour scheme, can all tell us much which is beyond the power of any direct expression. The deeper the truth the more dependent it is upon one or other of these arts for its expression. None of us can say what music has brought home to us, none of us can tell what a beautiful building has said to us. If we try to give all these things in words, “beauty,” “truth,” or that hopelessly feeble phrase “elevating influence,” and kindred terms, are all that come to our aid with which to tell of them. Into these weak inadequate words we have to read all that which we have learned from other arts, & so give them a meaning they are incapable of conveying, unless we have felt it through influences above and beyond them. Music, the most perfect of the arts, is the most subtle, the most inexplicable. It seems to be, (if I may use the expression), the most direct gift of God to man, excepting of course that revelation of Himself which we call Nature, and which is above all arts or anything needing man’s instrumentality.

Why has music this power of calling forth all that is best in us, of making us feel the great things beyond expression? We cannot say.

We feel, and so we know and realise, that music never deceives, and is the only art which is never misunderstood. Her revelation is either taken or left, it is either comprehended or passed by unheeded, but it is never misconstrued. It may be understood and felt in a degree only. It may give more of its message to one than to another, but in so far as it is understood at all, it is _truly_ understood and never misleads, and herein lies its greatness.

Some there are who say they can express by language or other arts what the musician is speaking of in his music; this only shows that all in which music transcends other arts is beyond their conception. The messages music has for us are above and beyond such things as can be put into words, and to have it merely telling a story which could equally well, or perhaps even better, have been told in words, or even to have it imitating the sounds of the sea, the voices of the storm, the whisper of the trees, or the sorrow of the wind, is to miss much of its greatness.

The messages of music may have been at some times the same as those of Nature, in the sea, the stream, or the trees, but to make it merely a less comprehensible language, telling us what written or spoken language can tell us, is to take from it much of its nobility and to deprive it of some of its most sacred prerogatives.

So if we follow this through we see its truth in all the arts. Poetry, partaking of the character of music, can bring home to us things too subtle, too high, to be told to us in prose, but may be misunderstood as music cannot be. In its highest influences, in those elements which it has in common with music, it is, like music, either taken rightly or not comprehended at all, but in many of its lesser and more definable messages it may be misunderstood.

A very little thought will show how absolutely true in literature is what I have said, as to the position _art_ must hold as the only means of expressing the greatest truths, and will show too, that just as our theme advances in dignity, will it increasingly need the aid of art to give it expression. The meanest things of life are most easily expressed. We can give our financial position with clearness in figures. We can express the composition of a gas with absolute accuracy in a formula. We can give almost any mere scientific fact in words. We can even state the properties of a triangle with some definiteness. But beyond this we cannot go without calling Art to our aid; and the higher we attempt to soar the more dependent upon her do we become.

Our laws and legal documents are a constant comment upon and illustration of the utter failure inevitably resulting from any attempt to express with absolute accuracy, without the aid of art, any of those things which involve questions of morality, love, truth, justice, or any of the higher qualities of our nature; for they have always been and must always be the most obscure, involved, and incomprehensible attempts at expression in any language.