Part 10

But monumental art demands the sympathy of a people bound together by common feelings, interested in the drama of history, and proud of their own struggles and sacrifices for freedom; accustomed to dwell with ennobling thoughts and aspirations, and accustomed to give them free and forcible expression; sensible both of the joy and the tragedy of life, delighting in phantasy and invention, and, above all, in beauty of form and colour. Yet there is nothing in these things but what naturally belongs to humanity.

Can such art be found where the best energies are engrossed in the feverish and unequal race for a more or less precarious existence on the one hand, and on the other made artificial by excess of wealth?--where the aspect of life, whether public or private, is neither simple nor dignified, and where cities become unlovely and inorganic accumulations of bricks and mortar?--where, with an appearance of zeal for art, education, and refinement, and the elevation of the masses, we allow mile after mile of mean or pretentious dwellings to carry the desolation of our unwieldy human warrens farther and farther into the green country, as the capitalist and the jerry-builder join house to house and brickfield to brickfield?

So we are thrown back on economic conditions, which, it is impossible to doubt, are finally responsible for these things, as, indeed, they have always been responsible for the form in which the art of a period is cast. How hopeless it is, for instance, to expect varied and beautiful street architecture with the present system of house tenure and the contract system in building! Here and there a dwelling, with some claims to beauty and distinction--or, at least, individuality--perchance arises from the sordid crowd; but these are the homes of men of wealth and exceptional taste, who build for their own delight, and have secured their ground. Here and there a board-school building relieves the monotony, and seems to point to the possibilities of better things. But the mass of modern London consists of the erections of the speculative builder--miles of absolutely uninteresting house fronts, composed chiefly of the repetition of one pattern, and that of the meanest and most uninventive kind, crowded together--the ready-made packing-cases for civilised humanity which enters in and dwells there. Could these things be were it not for the powers of commercialism, based upon the individual possession of land and capital, with the one object of money gain in their disposal?

But all things are in the grasp of commercialism. Let a band of artists and craftsmen associate together, and, working quietly, make to themselves and all whom it may concern things of beauty and utility for the use and adornment of simple homes. Straightway there is a growing desire for these things as a relief from the dreary monotony of ugliness, or the pretentious luxury of second empire taste. Thereupon commercialism, perceiving a demand, brings out what it calls art-furniture, art-colours, and so forth--the addition of the magic word being supposed to make all the difference--sucks the brains of designers, steals their designs, and devotes them to objects for which they were never intended; deluging the market with strange travesties and tortured misapplications of ill-digested ornament, which overruns everything like an irrepressible weed, until, coming down to its lower forms in the cheap furniture shop, one is tempted to think that, in the matter of taste, our last state is worse than the first.

Thus are all the channels of production fouled. Does not commercialism hold the keys of the kingdom of both art and industry? Everything has to pass through the sieve of profit before it reaches the public; and to keep the huge and wasteful machinery of competitive production and distribution going, even at an ordinary jog-trot, it appears to be necessary in every department of trade to make a vain show of so-called “novelties” every season, whether they are really new and better than the old or not.

But the counts of the indictment against commercialism are not yet filled up. The subject is, indeed, too vast and far-reaching to be adequately treated in the limits of a single paper. Hitherto I have kept very near home, but if we look abroad over the world we shall see the same causes at work, the same deterioration going on. Look at the effects of our rule on the native arts of India, The same process of extinction of the art of the people, of the village crafts, is taking place there as has resulted from the action of commercialism at home. (On this point I cannot refer any one who is desirous to pursue the subject to a more competent authority than Sir George Birdwood.) But all over the East, wherever European influence is in the ascendant, the result is disastrous to the arts, and thus the very sources of ornamental design, beauty of colour, and invention are being sullied and despoiled by the sharp practices and villainous dyes of Western commerce. Even in Japan, where the artistic sense seems instinctive among the people, so that everything touched by them bears its impress, since the results of ages of art labour and exquisite craftsmanship have suddenly been placed within the insatiable grasp of commercialism, there are signs that these riches are becoming exhausted, and the rarer and finer kinds grow scarcer every day. We can no longer expect to be given of the best, and wares are being consciously prepared for the European market. This is but the “retort courteous” for the compliments of Manchester in china-clay and size. We actually hear of proposals to establish schools of design on the British model, the more effectually, I suppose, to drive out those quick, spontaneous, characteristic native methods of art-expression, than which nothing, perhaps, has more refreshed and stimulated the jaded sensibilities of European design. Thus even by contact with a vicious civilisation the natural quickness and intelligence of a race may bring about its own destruction.

Thus, in the fierce and unscrupulous struggle for wealth, one after another, virgin markets are opened, and new peoples exploited by commercial enterprise, which, like a huge steam plane, is passing over the world striving to reduce all art, and with it humanity, to one dull level of commonplace mediocrity, leaving us but of vital and beautiful varieties the relics and shavings. Greedy eyes are now turning to Central Africa. The next act in the commercial drama will probably take place there. Already the rampant explorer, posing as the benefactor of humanity, has gone far and wide, and the representatives of the blessings of civilisation, with the Bible in one hand and the revolver in the other, call on the aborigines to stand and deliver. Wheresoever commercialism sets foot, the curse of gold seems to follow. As regards its effect upon art, it is like the old Greek story of Atalanta’s Race, but with a sinister climax. Milanion, the hunter (representing commercialism), enters for the race, and, carrying the fatal apples of gold, casts them one by one in the path of the fair fleet-footed, whom no competitor could hitherto outstrip. She yields, alas! to the seductive spoils--to the greed of gold--and henceforward her fate is sealed.

But commercialism, which seems now so triumphant, carries the seeds of destruction in its own bosom. The penalty of fast living must sooner or later be paid, by nations and systems as by individuals. Dissolution must inevitably set in. Already there are signs of the beginning of the end. Already men’s thoughts and hopes are turned to that which shall succeed. “The old order changeth, giving place to new.” Meanwhile the only hope, alike for art as for humanity, lies in socialism.

ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

To men engaged in strenuous political strife, amid the stress and strain of the fierce war of commercial competition; when the forces of labour are organising themselves and forming in battle array against the fenced strongholds of capitalism; when the air is full of strikes and rumours of strikes; and when in the vicissitudes of such war many of our fellow-citizens can scarcely keep body and soul together, it may seem to some a vain thing to speak of art.

But it all depends upon what we understand by art. Is it the senseless frippery and vulgar bedizenment of plethoric wealth and whirligig fashion, the paint and the patcher to make smooth and fair the outside of society, and to hide the wrinkles and hollows which would tell the truth too plainly? Is it the hireling of pride and ostentation living to please the passing whim or craze--a harlequin in the masquerade, ever ready with catch-penny tricks, driven to the necessity of pleasing, if but for the moment, in order to live? Is it the rarity of the market--the thing measured by fabulous price and sold by its weight in gold, though perhaps its producer may have had a bitter struggle to sell it at any price? Are these what we mean by art? or is it that kind and sympathetic enchantment which takes us out of ourselves; the genius of beauty and harmony which makes fair everything it touches, which knows no class or caste, which speaks a universal language; the friend of freedom and brotherhood, bringing order out of confusion, sweetness out of strength; not a matter of private property, but a common possession; whose price and virtue is not to be counted in, or commanded by, dollars, but lies simply in human and hopeful conditions of the life of a people?--entering into everything we touch and use, in the spade and plough, with their carefully-adapted curves and constructive lines fitting them for their proper work, and through all the simple, homely, and necessary implements of daily life and useful work, as well as in the organic beauty of its more conscious and emphatic decorative adornment, as in the carving or moulding or pattern work of our living-rooms, from the plate or the glass on the table to the picture on the wall.

Such simple and primitive things, often unregarded, have their influence, conscious or unconscious, on the lives of us all, if we have been fortunate in our surroundings, and where hearth and home exist at all, with all those tender and human feelings which gather about them more or less: perhaps even in these days of huge caravansaries with their here-to-day and gone-to-morrow inhabitants, on one side; and on the other, a night’s lodging under a cart or a railway arch, or on the golden pavement of the wealthiest city in the world, with a newspaper for a blanket. A newspaper! It might be an illustrated one too. Cheap art! Cheap indeed--almost as cheap as life itself!

Why, any art which is the outcome in any way of the conditions of such a life as that of which these are some of the outward and visible signs, is surely dear enough! The advocates of cheap art, of art for the homes of the people, are apt to forget that the price of cheap art, like the price of all cheap labour, means the cheapening of human lives. When we talk of bringing art to the homes of the people, it would be well first to see that they had got homes, or homes that they could call their own with any less doubtful security than a week’s rent, or with any time to live in them after ten, twelve, or sixteen or eighteen hours of toil.

I agree with a friend, who, at a congress for the furtherance of art, expressed the opinion that the best decoration he knew of for a hungry home was a flitch of bacon. If the cupboard, like Mother Hubbard’s, is bare, you cannot expect its owners will take much interest in the decoration of its panels.

There is a gaunt and hungry Cerberus which must be satisfied, and before Psyche, the soul of art, can enter, the body must be fed.

The fundamental necessities come first. Feed the body and you nourish the brain also. This seems a simple and obvious physical truth--a truism, in fact; yet it has required a great deal of socialist agitation to bring it home even to the limited degree in which it is beginning to be recognised, as in the case of school children.

The best artists’ materials--the raw materials of art--will be found in simple, natural, and healthy conditions of life; not brutalised by excessive toil or degraded by the scramble for gain, but where honest work is security for such a life, with leisure and freedom, and accessibility to beauty of art and nature for all. So that the claims of art are the claims of human life also, of which, indeed, it is but the ultimate expression.

The splendours of ancient art (even of the Asiatic despotisms of Greece and Rome) were lavished upon public buildings and public monuments, so that it could be seen and enjoyed by all the citizens in common, even the slaves. In the Middle Ages the churches, the great depositories of art in all its forms, were always open for the use and enjoyment of the people. The streets in those days were full of variety and colour, so that at any rate life was full of incident and romance, in spite of tyrannous lords and kings, and though innocent of exhibitions, and penny dreadfuls, and shilling shockers, with which we are fain to fill the void amid the dull husks of commonplace.

Coming to modern times, we see that art, like all other human products, has been affected by the great changes in the economic system--changes in the conditions of production and distribution, and of ownership of land, centralisation and the world-market. It has become more and more a matter of private property and absolute ownership, and we have so dropped out of the habit of putting it to any great extent into our public buildings and monuments that we have very few artists who know how to do it, or who think it worth while to give any time or thought to the subject.

Instead of sublime and noble public buildings, churches, and halls, which all the arts unite to make splendid, we have as a rule very dull or pretentious public offices, dull and respectable churches--essays in architecture masquerading in various styles not native to us--and melancholy images of military, naval, or political idols in smoked bronze, like petrified orators for ever addressing an indifferent public, holding, as if in mockery, the dumb show of a perpetual open-air meeting under the presidency of Nelson in police-prohibited Trafalgar Square!

Under the sway of commercial ideas, instead of taking pride in and enjoying in common what belongs to everybody, the object seems to be to get hold of something that no one else has--some rarity, curiosity, at a fabulous price, or a next-to-nothing bargain, and to make art a thing purely of money or exchangeable value--considering it in the light of a good investment, in fact.

It may be said we have our national museums--storehouses stuffed full of the precious relics and fragments of the times when art was a living and growing thing. Valleys now of dry bones, except to a few students. National, certainly, but the nation as a rule has no time to go and see them in this industrial age, since they are not open on the one day--Sunday--on which the people could go. There are the churches, it is true, but the nation does not go to church--not, at least, to the same one, and the churches are no longer as a rule the depositories of the best art the age can produce. Some, indeed, will have none of it, and as to the old ones, we seem to be doing our best to improve them off the face of the earth altogether.

Again, under the mechanical and wholesale system of production for profit, a specialising of labour and art has taken place, and this has led to the practical extinction of the handicraftsman, and his severance from the artist.

Art may be produced _for_ the people (or to sell to them), but it is no longer produced _by_ the people. Every one has a mill of his own to grind at--working against time at a mostly monotonous occupation to meet an artificial demand, or engaged in stimulating that demand, or compulsorily idle in its absence, under a commercial industrial organisation so sensitive as to be affected by every fluctuation of the market, and wherein every body of workers depends upon every other, yet wherein each commercial unit works in competition with its hand against the hand of every other. So that the natural social bond is ever at war with the artificial and unsocial system--pending that true organisation of labour in which lies the only solution of collective human life.

Since then life for the mass of mankind, by the working of various causes--I will not say by consent--has become for the most part a dull mechanical round of toil, alternating with enforced idleness,--a kind of methodical and orderly lunacy with a few lucid intervals which we call holidays or enjoyment, amusement, diversion, art, and poetry--since humanity must have some kind of diversion, we have created a special class to divert us. As the mediæval lord kept his professional jester to ensure a supply of sparkling and ingenious conversation, so we keep, or allow to starve, our artists, poets, musicians, and actors. Very few of them can afford to do exactly as they like--to be free to give us their very best. That would be too expensive as things go; besides there are the laws of supply and demand (as Lord Salisbury has reminded us). So that we have no higher ideal even for an artist or a poet than that of a shopman behind the counter, supplying wares of various or particular kinds to please his customers; who again perhaps are not demanding what they individually prefer, but what they think they ought to prefer, or what they believe other people--supposed to be authorities--would tell them they ought to prefer. It can hardly be wondered at then that our art should be so often artificial.

But should we be justified in assuming that these influences on art are the result of democracy?

It all depends upon what we understand by democracy, and what sort of a democracy. Our present habits and characteristics are derived from all sorts of sources and influences. Our present society is a huge conglomerate formation with fossils scattered in it,--the relics of living forms of past ages.

We chiefly differ from former societies by having a different class in the ascendant with lower ideals, or rather no particular ideal at all, unless 50 per cent or the subordination of most considerations to cash and comfort can be counted as such.

Commercialism, in short, rules us with a rod of--brass. While nominally and politically _free_, men were really never more dependent; and how can men be free so long as their bread depends on the will or the whim of another, and when they have no claim to a foot of land or a roof over their heads, except on condition of a heavy tax upon their own labour? And even in regard to the security of the continuance of labour itself, and therefore of life, they are no more secure.

And yet we are told this is democracy, and that one man is as good as another--yes, we might add, and a great deal better _off_, too.

What! is our social ladder planted then with its feet in the hell of misery and poverty, its top rising to the false heaven of inane luxury and hypocrisy, and the type of man held up to admiration and imitation who works his way up, over others’ shoulders, from Lazarus to become Dives?

Is this democracy? Is it not rather the old enemy, unscrupulous ambition, without its old excuse, under a new mask of thrift, business habits, respectability--secure in the automatic working of the great rent-collecting and interest-yielding machine, faring sumptuously every day on the labour of others?

And if it is proposed to do something to keep up our democratic character, and to endeavour to shorten the hours of labour of our wage-slaves, to throw them a very trifling crust from the table of life, even advanced Liberal politicians seem to think the world is coming to an end. What! the political clock stopping at eight hours a day! Well, I know that after about only six or seven hours of even interesting and varied work at the easel or the desk one feels rather tired; but fancy eight hours in a coal seam! or at a grinder’s wheel!--eight hours of mechanically repeated momentary actions at the will of a steam engine! The only objections to an eight hours bill appear to me to be that it is not _six_ hours, and that there should be any doubt as to whether, under the present system with “the iron law of wages,” its benefits even then might not be illusory, _taken by themselves_. But no one proposes to do that, I presume?

But if the lot of the wage-labourer be not an enviable one, is the lot of his masters more enviable? We might well envy the physical endurance, patience, and pluck of a miner, or a docker, or a gas stoker, but can any man envy such qualities as have been exhibited on the part of some locking-out masters and profit-grinding companies? Not even willing to fight on fair terms--men dismissed for sticking to their union, the workman’s only weapon against capitalism! But even the life which is the result of the “cash and comfort” ideal is far from desirable, from the purely material point of view. _Cash_ there may be, but the _comfort_ is often illusory; stewed in hot-water-pipe atmosphere as if one was an orchid; stiff and uncomfortable dressing; and rooms in which the absence of taste is as conspicuous as the superfluity of furniture. All manner of formal customs and observances, hardly ever a chance to do something for yourself, and language often used to conceal if not thoughts at least feelings.

Is it in this direction we must look for our democratic ideal of life? Is there anything democratic about it, except that the butler is dressed like his master, a certainly unpicturesque result of democracy.

But it appears to me if democracy can show such social characteristics, it cannot be a democracy really. It must be a sham democracy--a commercial democracy, in fact. There evidently must be distinctions even in democracies, because we even hear of “Tory-democracy,” quite the most peculiar notion. We are evidently dealing, as is usual in commercial matters, with questions of quality, 1st, 2d, 3d, and so on, like grocers’ sugar, or like the classes on a railway--another democratic institution, I suppose.

Whatever our “class,” however, we are all chained to the triumphal car of commercialism, which, in spite of the application of brakes and occasional stoppages, rolls on its iron way round the world. Yet its speed and progress depend upon the constant watchfulness and careful labour of millions--upon stretched sinews and overstrained nerves; and who may count the sacrifices in the lives crushed beneath its remorseless wheels! For all that the progress of the car is absolutely dependent upon the continuance of that labour. What if the labourers were by common and universal consent to throw down their tools some day?

I have often wondered that some of our modern realistic painters do not give us pictures of the actualities of modern industry. Weird scenes from the “black country”--those desolate regions that bloom but in furnace flames; scenes in the mines; at iron works; nail and chain makers--tragic pictures many of them will be; truly historic; eloquent witnesses of the foundations of England’s riches, and what they have cost.

It has always been the custom of a people to perpetuate in art their deeds of arms, to carve and paint their triumphs and victories, but we do not seem particularly proud of the real battles, commercial and industrial, upon which our modern importance has been built, and the toil and waste of human life by which it is sustained.