Part 3

So we go upwards from the scientific formula and the laws of geometry, past the legal document to the newspaper article, and everyday prose, until we come to the more matter-of-fact forms of philosophy, thence on to parable, fiction and fairy tale, & from these to sculpture, architecture, painting, and poetry, calling in at every stage more and more of the aid of art, until we arrive at last at that most perfect art, and most complete expression, _music_. And observe, all the way through the series we have moved less and less within the regions of definitely statable facts, and more and more in the regions of those truths which can be felt & known, but not definitely expressed.

Great truths, which are for all time and all peoples, must be expressed in an art at any rate as high in dignity as parable in one of its many forms. The greatest teachers have recognised this. All great truths must be presented in a form in which those who are capable of realising them can find them, while others miss, & each can take away what he can comprehend. This is only another way of saying again, great truths can only be expressed through the medium of art, for it is an essential property of all true art that it shall suggest and imply more than it actually says.

I have said art is the only true educator between man and man, and a knowledge and appreciation of those things which through art alone we can learn, is the only true education. But I would not for one moment be thought to lose sight of the fact that _Nature_ can and does teach us more than any work of man. She has influences over us tending to the highest education; with these I was not concerning myself in the above, for I was speaking of man’s influence upon his fellow man. I am to try and give some idea of wherein lies the life and vitality of some of the humbler branches of art. I say humbler, for I will have none of the shallow hypocrisy of those who, not being able to paint a great realistic picture, pretend that their little conventional decorations are a higher and nobler branch of art, and who, because the great picture may be still greater by being _also_ decorative, and can only attain to its greatest when it _is also_ decorative, argue that all decorative art is greater than pictorial.

It is my aim to show that to these applied arts also belongs much of that power to express those higher things which are felt and known only through art.

We all know that the mere form of a chair, the contour of a mould, the shape of a bracket, a scheme of colour, have power to affect us, in a degree, in just the same way music does, and, with awe let us realise it, even as Nature herself does. And I would have every craftsman and every practiser of the arts as deeply impressed with the dignity this places upon him, and the responsibilities it brings with it, as he can possibly be. I would have him feel this truth, that in his degree he is instrumental in either forwarding or retarding his fellow men in their highest and truest education; that in just so far as his art is true or false, real and vital, or feeble and insincere, he is advancing or hindering this great work; that true art is the grandest work of which humanity is capable, and that through it alone can man advance to higher things than those of which he is now capable.

We can none of us know, and certainly none of us are in any danger of over-estimating, the good influence of a beautiful building upon all those who pass and repass it daily; and the smallest and most insignificant article in our daily use has, in its own degree, like power to help or hinder our development.

Wherein truth in art consists, none but the artist can know, and he cannot tell to another what he knows of it himself; he has learned it, first from an inborn instinct and gift, and second, by that education which true art only can promote, and others can only come to a knowledge of it in the same way.

The whole spirit and trend, all the outside circumstances, influences, and conditions of modern life, are against the artist and true art. The present individualistic and competitive basis of society makes a _living_ art almost an impossibility, but I do not propose we should concern ourselves now with questions which are not within the designer’s power, but only with those things which he can and must see that he personally rightly understands and practises.

No good work in any field of art was ever yet done in a hurry; it maybe done quickly, with the utmost energy, this will probably only give it vitality, but all outside pressure means death to art.

All true art work must always be done under the very keenest stress of mental effort; it cannot be slovenly, careless, or interestless in its smallest detail, but must be wrought with every faculty alert with an absorption and concentration amounting to abandon, and it must be done, _can_ only be done for the love of it. Other motives there may be, and in greater or less degree there _will_ be, but this must be first and paramount, or true art is impossible.

A very fruitful cause of failure is the effort to be original. In the loathsome distortions of fashion we see daily the result of this attempt to originate new forms, simply for the sake of novelty, without the slightest reference to any feeling for beauty or fitness. Originality has no value other than a purely commercial one, unless the original thing has advantages over the commonplace. Most of the things which we have about us show unmistakably that their designers went to work in the wrong spirit from the very first. We see at a glance that the position taken up was this. The designer has said to himself “This is generally done so and so, in such and such a manner; now how can I modify this to make it in some degree original: where can I introduce a little novelty?”

No good result was ever yet arrived at by any one who took up this position. No: the way to go to work is, to get clearly into your mind the functions, duties, requirements and limitations of the thing to be designed, then choose the material or materials which will enable it best to fulfil its functions, duties, and requirements, and keep within its limitations. Afterwards, with a full knowledge and candid recognition of the properties and characteristics of your materials and the best way of using them, set to work to evolve the form which will, in the simplest and most direct & at the same time most beautiful and decorative manner, fulfil the requirements, and the result will bear the impress of your own personality, it will have your own feeling, and will probably also have something of true originality.

You may if you like, with all this clearly in your mind, pass in review the customary forms employed to fulfil the conditions, retaining such characteristics as you see are valuable either because they advance the objects, or add to the comeliness, but this must come second not first.

I would like you to notice in passing that this right and true method of going to work in design is entirely inapplicable to all things having no functions to fulfil, by such a throng of which we are now surrounded.

The whole trend of modern civilisation would make the outlook for the artist one of blank hopelessness, were it not that there are signs of a reaction, due to the efforts of great men who have fought hard that art may not die.

We call the present the “Machine Age.” Now the influence of machinery on art is one of the most degrading we have to contend with, for every advance made by machinery must mean a corresponding retreat on the part of art.

When I have expressed the keen sense of pleasure given me by the beautiful variety of surface, the light and shade, the crisp, clean adze cuts, the vital human interest, of some old beam, the commercial mind has said to me “If the workman who wrought it had possessed the tools with which to get it up to a _better surface_, he would not have left it as it is.” This is probably true, but it does not affect the question of the relative beauty of the two beams, the absolutely square, smooth, machine planed one, and the irregular rough hewn one so full of character and interest. The artistic value of each is a question quite apart from such considerations. To-day, if we require a beam in our building, we take every bit of natural character out of it, and bring it, by mechanical processes, to as dead and flat, as lifeless and monotonous a state as possible, then we stupidly try to replace some of the natural and characteristic beauty we have been at so much trouble to get rid of, by some form of applied ornament, moulding, or what not, which probably has only this one result, that it obscures the one trace of natural beauty which has been able to survive the previous processes, that is the grain and figure of the wood. Afterwards we stand and look at it, with a sort of feeling that there is something wrong, and wonder why it was so much more beautiful before.

This is only one illustration, it would be easy to give hundreds. For beauty of texture and surface are nothing to the machine producer or the commercial spirit of to-day.

When I say I want a piece of copper just hammered out to the size and shape I require without that grinding and polishing by which all trace of the hammer & human hand is lost in mere smoothness and mechanical finish, the workman tells me it will be injurious to his credit, people will see nothing in it but bad workmanship and inability to finish. He would prefer to efface the sympathetic surface and natural beauties of the beaten metal as completely as possible, then he would put it in a press and stamp some meaningless pattern on it, but the result would be entirely uninteresting to him, and he would have no satisfaction in it, unless sheer commercialism had utterly killed every grain of everything higher than itself in his nature.

Think of the beauty of leaded glass compared with the lifeless hard mechanical perfection of polished plate. This beauty has nothing to do with its old-fashioned look, with romantic associations, or quaintness of effect; it is simply an inherent property of all leaded glazing, due to the wonderful and never ending charm of the play of light and shade on the different panes, each one catching the light slightly differently from any other, some glistening brightly, others dead and sombre, and the rest occupying every tone between the two. One sheet of glass with the leading laid upon it would be more ugly and meaningless than the plate glass. Many would-be artistic people think that it is an essential characteristic of the artistic that it should be in some degree eccentric or unusual. This is as great a delusion as any one could well labour under. That it is the case at the present time cannot be denied; but it is because we have sunk to such depths of degradation, that the artistic has become the eccentric and unusual, not that to be different from the ordinary is the property of the artistic. There was a time when the exact reverse was the case, when simple natural beauty was the rule in all things and ugliness the exception, and the unusual and eccentric was then the inartistic.

So also many would-be artistic people think that things derive an artistic value simply from being old or old-fashioned. This again is entirely untrue except of such things as undergo a modification and change for the better in themselves at the hands of old Father Time. But this too is an error easily accounted for, as at the present time, as regards the common things of daily life, the standard of design is so debased that it would be almost impossible to bring out of the past (at any rate of centuries before the last), forms for these which would not surpass in beauty those now current among us. If art in our homes were living and progressive the old and old-fashioned would be the ugly and inartistic.

A perfectly frank recognition of construction and an honest compliance with its demands is an absolute essential of all good designs; any attempt to disguise or thwart, or failure to acknowledge, the necessary characteristics and features of construction, must result in artistic disaster and is indeed a very fruitful cause of it. So also is that kindred error, the adoption of a less perfect construction to get the form wanted. It is not necessary I should dwell upon this now, for it is recognised by all art teachers, though by very few of those who practise the applied arts, and illustrations of the truth of it meet us in abundance on every hand and will occur to all.

Neither is it necessary (and for the same reasons) that I should say much about imitations & shams; wood made to simulate stone or marble; iron cast in forms suited only to wood; wood worked into forms suited only to stone, or in imitation of stone, as in tracery and groining. The evil of all this is too well known, and I have had to pass over it for the sake of what is less recognised and not so often brought before us. To put the right thing in the right place; to give it its most appropriate form, and above all things the form which will best enable it to fulfil its functions and uses, and withal the simplest, most direct, and the most perfect in construction; this is the first duty of every designer, and in doing this he will generally find he gets the maximum of beauty.

The conscious effort to be original will always produce abortions and painful results; the only originality worth anything is arrived at in trying to do something _better_ not something new; and the true artist shows himself in giving beauty of form, of colour, and design to the necessary and useful, and adding that higher usefulness belonging to a work of art. But may we not have ornament, pure ornament which has no other definite use? Certainly we may, but let us at the very outset apply this test to it. It does not, we say, fulfil any useful purpose on the physical plane, does it fulfil any purpose on that higher plane of which I have spoken? Is its educational influence good? If so we will welcome it. If not let it go. And I fear, when this test is applied, it will be found that there is but little of the enormous profusion of the (so-called) ornament spread over everything about us, which would not have to go.

Most of us would do well to change it all for one or two good pictures, a bit of really beautiful metal work, carving, or embroidery, done by an artist with his own hand, and possessing something of that dignity of true art I have tried to show.

BARRY PARKER.

OUR EDUCATION IN ART.

My subject is “Our Education in Art,” & I approach it with a sense of trepidation, feeling that the task I have set myself is one of very great difficulty, and being, as I am, so fully alive to the tremendous issues involved in our holding right or wrong views upon art education.

The place in our lives which Art must fill is so exalted that it is with reverence I would consider the way in which we should teach or be taught to express ourselves in art, or learn to read the meaning of others expressed through that medium. Those who have come to realize that only by the employment of Art can the highest truths which we are capable of receiving be conveyed from one man to another, must feel that the method of preparing ourselves to wield so great a power, or render ourselves receptive of such an influence, should be most earnestly considered. I have taken “Our Education in Art” as my title, instead of “The Education of an Artist” or any other title which would have fixed more definitely the limitations within which I should confine myself, because I want what I am about to say to have a much wider application than it would if simply taken as addressed to those who propose to practise an art. For, to train all to an appreciation of what is good, true, and beautiful, in Art, is hardly less important than to train artists capable of expressing what is good, true, and beautiful.

All have not vouchsafed to them the power to express themselves in an art, but all are in some degree influenced by the artistic qualities of the things by which they are surrounded, and I wish to suggest a way of learning to _appreciate_ what is good and true and beautiful in art, even more than a way of learning to _create_ such art. That there shall be those who can _appreciate_ good art is necessary to its life. That we should have those who can create it is not enough; this is the work of the few; the work of the many is to make an atmosphere in which it can live. I would impress as gravely as possible upon those who aspire to the practice of an art, not only the dignity belonging to what they would undertake, but the tremendous responsibility attaching to it.

The first thing that must go to the making of an artist is that he should have that within him which craves for expression, and which can only be expressed through the medium of an art. This first essential is given to many to whom the power to express it is not given, but without it the facility to express will be a power for harm not for good: it is the presence of great qualities, not the absence of bad, which makes a work of art.

The artist’s great responsibility lies in this: every time he creates anything capable of bearing the impress of the true art instinct, he brings into existence that which will have an influence upon all who see it, and will quicken or deaden in them this high instinct. The thought that, if he create not something better than would have been created by others, had he left it to them, he is doing harm in the world, not good, is one that should come home to him very solemnly. To the art worker belongs this privilege--that his art can be a great power for good; and this responsibility--that he must of necessity have done either harm or good by his work, and that unless he has done something which is beyond and above the conception of the general run (nay, of the great majority) of his fellow-creatures, something they feel to have a little more in it, and to be a little more than they can grasp, he is not merely harmless, he is a failure. For as in life generally, so in the artistic life, he who merely does what no one can attach blame to, and has not done better than others would have done in his stead, has lived to no purpose. Virtue is not a negative quality in art or in life; it does not consist in keeping the Ten Commandments. “All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?” This man 1900 years ago had grasped the truth of what I have said above better than most of us have to-day.

I will herein confine myself to speaking of those arts which depend upon our eyes for their means of appealing to us; and as I wish that these suggestions may be of real practical value, to all who desire to appreciate what is artistically good and true, I must leave out of our consideration, for the moment, all the greater qualities which belong to art; and confine myself to showing how we must first learn to _see_, and to what I may call the purely technical side of learning to _see_ and represent. For simplicity I will take the art of portraying Nature, as seen in her landscapes, as my example of how to learn both to see and to draw; for the process is the same in either case.

Now when first one attempts to paint a landscape, one is over-whelmed by the tremendous number of different things one sees in it and has to take into consideration at the same time. There is the form and drawing, the light and shade, the atmosphere and its effect upon the local tints or real colours of each individual object in the landscape, the overpowering profusion of detail, the reflected lights and reflected colours, the relative value of objects, the texture, and character of surfaces, the composition, what we call the accidental effects; and last but not least, the teaching and meaning, the particular message Nature has to convey in the whole scene. And only by long and patient study of each of these _separately_, can we acquire the power to grasp them all together in the way which is necessary when painting.

Were I to teach, I should make my pupils go through a long and patient study of each of these _separately_, devoting much thought to each in turn, quite apart from the use of pencil or brush; for it is impossible to _represent_ one without the others, but not impossible to _study_ one without the others. And that we should be able to first dissociate one from another in our minds, and then see the influence of one upon another, is absolutely necessary to a true portraiture of Nature in landscape. I would then begin with the simplest of the things in my category, and impart to my pupils a knowledge of form (probably best done by some simple process of modelling), and I would go on to the drawing of form without reference to light and shade. Next I would teach them to see form in masses of light and shade only, leaving out of consideration at the first (as far as possible) the influence of reflected light, but eventually giving much time and thought to enabling them to see the reflected light truly, and to measure its gradations and degrees accurately. From this they should go on to represent textures and character of surfaces, and not until all this had been done would I bring in the use of colour. This should begin by the accurate matching of local tints, before the representation of the colour effects produced by atmosphere with its varying degrees of moisture, of density and transparency or opacity, its power of diffusing light, and its effect on distance, was attempted. Next I would allow sketching with reference to composition, grouping, and much study of the relative values of one object to another in the landscape, affected as it is by all the foregoing, and difficult of explanation as it always is, even in view of and with a perfect knowledge of all the foregoing. Finally, being first able to see and feel, then we would go on to try to catch & portray the moods and messages of Nature, and the poetry of the whole.