Part 12

But the race is not always to the swift brush, or the battle to strong colours, and painting is not the only eloquent language of expression in art, although its effects are more obvious and palpable. We have but to think of the means of expression at the command of the architect (unrestricted, that is, by Boards of Works and Building Acts)--even without the aid of sculpture or painting--in the simple but sublime language of proportion, mass, space, and outline. It is true, imitation is not unknown even in architecture, and we live under the shadow of the great historic styles; but in architecture anything like actual imitation of the materials and surfaces in other materials is now universally despised and condemned. It remains, so far as it is an art, a purely expressive one. How emphatically, and with what subtlety, architecture is capable of expressing ideas and principles of construction! and in so doing expresses not only these but the laws of evolution, and the changed temper of peoples, and social conditions in the long result of time, gathering under the shelter of its wings the whole family of arts and crafts which are its offspring.

Sculpture, too, eloquent in its severe limitations, and by reason of them, speaks in the language of pure form. It is true, it has its own equivalents for colour in contrasts of surface and richness of detail, but the attempts to introduce pure imitation, as with the Milanese school of modern Italy, have certainly not elevated the art. Any imitative success has been gained at the price of higher beauty and meaning--of the higher qualities of form, and repose and dignity of expression. I have noticed, too, that in sculpture, where imitation has been the primary object, the effect is curiously false, as in the case of a portrait statue in marble in costume, where the lace and different dress materials are sometimes imitated with surprising dexterity, but only to give an impression not of life but rather of a whitewashed effigy. Clearly, a step farther is called for if imitation is the sole object. We must revise the art of effigy and paint up to the life. Nor, where faithful portraiture is demanded, can there be any reasonable objection.

Interesting as coloured monumental effigies may be, and however undoubted the fact that it was the practice of the ancients to tint their sculpture, it cannot blind us to the more delicate and elevated expression of pure form, which no sculptor, I suppose, would forego as the justest and most eloquent medium for the embodiment of a heroic or poetic theme--or even solely as a means for the expression of the carver’s sense of the decorative effect of light and shadow in relief work.

There can be no doubt, too, that colour obscures and disguises form. I do not mean to say that it has not an emotional expressiveness all its own, but it is a different kind. We feel the beauty and expressiveness of a drawing by Mantegna or Albert Dürer, and do not ask for colour, or for more heightened and graphic expression than their pen lines convey. This seems to show how little the highest artistic and intellectual expressiveness is dependent on close or literal imitation of nature. To mock nature is one thing, to read and to express her, quite another. I doubt if, even with the photograph and the modern literalist, we could get on without line to make clear the nature of many things disguised in the illusory actuality of light and shadow: facts of construction, for instance, facts of growth, facts of texture and character, can all be made more emphatic and expressed clearer in a line drawing; and, apart from individual skill in its use, this is, perhaps, largely owing to its capacity of abstraction--which sounds like a paradox! A drawing in line is the result of a convention--a treaty between the mind and nature, signed by the free hand of the designer, and sealed by the understanding and imagination. Nothing shows so completely the quality and resources of a master as his perception and treatment of the value of line: nothing more eloquently and distinctly speaks of the vigorous or enervated condition of art in any period than its line drawings. Line is the nerve-fibre of art, knitting and controlling the whole body, but flaccid and meaningless in its day of decline. Compare, for instance, the woodcuts of the early sixteenth century with those of the later or of the next century, and the difference corresponds with the vigour and decline of the Renaissance impulse in design.

The indifference to the value of line as a means of expression in our day is an ominous sign of the state of the arts--despite the so-called revival of etching. Our students are taught to stipple and work up their drawings in chalk, and charcoal seems to be the favourite medium with the modern painter when he is _obliged_ to draw: but both are far inferior in delicacy and precision, and therefore in real potentiality of expression, to the pen-point, or even the firm lead or hair pencil. Effect, however, is more readily produced in chalk or charcoal. If you are not forcible you can at least be black, and you can command an abundance of the convenient obscurity of shadow to hide the want of invention and the absence of purity and precision of line.

In the rush, too, for directness and the unbiassed imitation of nature, another expressive resource of line has been thrown overboard, and this is what is usually included in the term composition. No doubt this has destroyed the commonplace, second-hand stock-in-trade species of pictorial composition, but it has also discouraged higher aims. But few painters nowadays, I imagine, except those more or less interested in decorative design, trouble themselves about schemes of line and counterbalancing curves, or think much of their picture in the skeleton.

The concentration, too, of the attention of the modern painter--the narrowing of his interest to the imitation of facts--tends, as we have seen, to the limitation of his dramatic or poetic interest, or even to its entire extinction. Our painter’s strength is spent upon the realisation of persons often uninteresting, and incidents and themes quite frivolous or even repulsive.

I am far from wishing back the old days of church influence and patronage, when most pictures were religious and the demand for Madonnas and saints almost unlimited; but when congratulations are offered on the changed conditions--that art has broken loose from old encumbering traditions and from sacerdotal fetters, it is too often forgotten that, in spite of her boasted freedom, it is but an exchange of bondage. When we see gifted artists chained down by their very success to the constant production of the same sort of thing--generally the presentment of some fact or phase of nature without ulterior significance or import to humanity--where is our boasted width of range and variety of interest?

Year after year our exhibition catalogues give us the same titles--the same quotations even--I will not speak of the works corresponding with those legends. I do not know that the money bag makes a better escutcheon than the cross keys. I prefer the Phrygian cap and the red flag to either, and truly our material gods, it would seem, give not so much freedom as the old spiritual ones; for even in the oft-repeated nativities and crucifixions of mediæval and early Renaissance painters, what a world of invention and expression was often put into them! Such subjects became, indeed, not only most fruitful themes for the display of all the resources of the painter in the delineation of the life and manners of his time, but their figurative significance gave them a solemnity and depth of meaning for which it would be hard to find an equivalent in modern art.

Storiation, which played so important a part in ancient art--what scope has it in the modern cabinet picture? Were it not for the decorative designers, the idea of story and series in pictorial design would become extinct. Even in their hands it is too often too much on the old lines, embodying the old ideas, and--from the necessities, perhaps, of much or most important decorative work being for ecclesiastical purposes--the ancient creeds.

If, owing to the absence of simplicity and dignity of life, but few modern scenes lend themselves to decorative storiation--if the modern body be too cumbered and disguised, what of the mind? Surely there are thoughts and ideas distinctly modern, capable of figurative and poetic embodiment, and charged with concern to humanity, if only he who runs could be persuaded also to read.

If a painter here and there shows that he possesses any ideas a little beyond the range of the illustrated newspaper, he is sure to be laughed to scorn, and should he persist in his belief that painting is not merely to be regarded as a commodity of the market, or as a toy for grown-up and rather dull and _blasé_ children, let him abandon the hope of making his bread by it.

A word as to the expression of action. A while ago Mr. Meybridge lectured artists, through the Royal Academy, on the right way to depict the action of a horse. He certainly succeeded in demonstrating, by a very ingenious method, whereabouts a horse’s legs are found at certain given consecutive moments--arrested by the photograph--but no more striking proof could be given, especially when motion is concerned, of the meaninglessness of an isolated fact than one of these photographs. Taken singly, they express arrested action, which is exactly what they _represent_ and nothing more. It is only when the series is placed in consecutive order, and turned on a wheel, so that they succeed each other on the retina, that the action is really represented, and it is then of course complete; but that is _illusion_ rather than representation. Mr. Meybridge would have persuaded us that artists have been fools since the world began in this matter. But in representing a galloping horse, or any figure in action, in design, the problem has always been to avoid the look of arrested action which the exact record of the moment gives. The artist has to express, not arrested, but continuous action. He must suggest, therefore, the moment before and the moment after, and that often in one figure. The result has been a certain convention, which conveys the idea of speed to the mind more completely and convincingly than the exact imitation of the action of any given moment could possibly do.

The truth is, that the external facts of motion are, like other facts, expressionless in design, by themselves, and unless associated with other facts and suggestions, and this has hitherto been frankly acknowledged in art. I do not say that a new convention--new and more perfect methods of expression of nature in art--may not be built on the aggregation of more accurately recorded and observed facts, and more profound knowledge. The plain inference is the other way. The degree in which exact knowledge controls and determines methods of representations in art is always a nice problem, and I do not pretend to settle it.

My conclusion is, that the modern mind, in its eagerness for literalism, has been led so far, after all, to but a superficial kind of realism, and that which passes for realism is indeed too often only a one-sided realism--reality only half realised. At the best it is but the realisation of the passing sensation--the passing moment--the least real thing in life and nature.

Nature, when we think we have seized her, verily turns and mocks us in her turn. Alter the focus--go a little farther, or a little nearer, and all is changed and falsified: so the artistic chase, like the artistic problem, is endless. While idealist and realist are disputing, that Pluto of art, the photographer, instantaneously seizes the fair maiden, and carries her in a moment to his dark chamber, whence, though indeed she reappears ravished of colour, it is in such verisimilitude as might well be the despair of the painter, were not his vows addressed to a yet fairer than Persephone.

ART AND INDUSTRY

We are here to further the advancement of art in its application to industry. Are we quite sure that we do not mean the advancement of industry by the application of art?

For the last two or three centuries we appear to have been applying all the power of organisation, the ingenuity, and the mechanical invention of man to the advancement of industry in the interests of competitive commerce; not with the advancement of art as the object, but rather that of profit-making, with the economic result that we cannot find work enough for our compulsorily idle hands to do; while in the din of the vast workshop of machine production, and the fierce battle of the world-market, art can hardly find a place for the sole of her foot.

Mechanical invention in the interests of trade has dominated us. Mechanical invention has outstripped the invention of the artist. Mechanical smoothness has taken the place of artistic thought and finish. And why? Because to our great deities of commercial enterprise and successful trade, the amount of the output is more regarded than the artistic quality of the material and work.

The very spirit and meaning of the word “artistic” implies something harmonious; something in relation to its surroundings; something arising out of the joy of life, and expressing the delight of the artist in his work, however arduous; something personal, the expression of one mind, or of many--congruous--expressly and lovingly addressed to particular persons, and adapted to particular places and things. Not a mere system of guess-work, beginning with the designer who makes a guess at the sort of thing that may possibly “take,” rather than what he personally likes and has a feeling for. The designer, again, being dependent on the manufacturer, guessing what the market or the trade will take; or he again depends on the conjectures of the trade as to what an unknown quantity in the public can be induced to take. The public, again, surrounded with every species of conundrum in the name of art, is driven to guess in _its_ turn not as to what it really likes, or what is good and fitted to its purpose, but what is the correct thing to buy, or what other people buy, or are likely to buy. So the whole structure of applied art, under our present system, speaking generally, is built upon the shifting sands of insincerity and speculation.

Let us inquire what natural affinity there is between art and industry. Properly considered, obviously, they should be inseparable; but the spirit that rules industry now is wrapped up in the one object of the salesman--to sell.

The spirit of industry is merely to produce. The spirit of the artist is not merely to produce, but to express--to both produce and to express something which is a joy to him in the making, and may be a joy to the user and beholder. In the search after perfection of method of expression, in the struggle to express his thought, to make his work, whatever it be--the lines of a design, a simple, repeating pattern, a moulding, a sculptured ornament, a figure, a group, a picture, a building--to make his work live, to answer to his thought, and so to touch the thoughts of others, the artist will frequently undo or destroy his own work--will cast aside the labour that has cost him perhaps hours of toil and thought, and try again, until his work answers more nearly to the ideal in his mind.

Considerations of the market are forced upon him, it is true, too often; but these have no necessary connection with art, and in so far as he ceases to be true to his ideal, and is seriously influenced, or driven, by circumstances to work consciously and exclusively for money, as an artist he must deteriorate.

Now, the man of commerce--the controller of industry--seeks only to make a _saleable_ article. He is influenced in his industrial production simply by this object. He takes the opinions of salesmen, of the trade, not of artists, as a rule, and so far as any artistic standard or aim enters into the produce of his manufactory, it is strictly checked by the average of what his rivals are doing, and by the discovery of what the big public can be persuaded to buy.

Slowly, perhaps, some personal force or centre of artistic sincerity creates a new impulse and new desires in a jaded public, sated with every craze and whim under the name of art; slowly the wave of fashion rises, swiftly it rolls. It affects the salesman first. His arts fail him. He cannot palm off these coarse and inharmonious colours, these hideous patterns, or this clumsy furniture, charm he ever so wisely. He sells at a “great sacrifice,” and returns to the industrial king, the manufacturer, who either evolves something “new and original” out of his inner consciousness on the premises for next season, or he seeks out the artist. He makes a compact with him. The man of ideas meets the man of industry and profits. The result is of course a compromise. The artist must turn out taking novelties in design for the market. That is, the market of guess-work. The market must be the first consideration; it is imperative to sell one’s season’s goods.

Commerce, like the old woman in the nursery tale, stands at the stile (of an overstocked market) with her obdurate pig (over-production) that refuses to move until the stick (of new demand) has been persuaded to bring its influence to bear, and one by one all the characters of the commercial drama act and re-act upon each other by the very necessities of their existence, middleman and public, capitalist and labourer. We shall find their prototypes in our nursery tale, up to the ox (personifying John Bull) driven to action from the fear of the butcher--the Nemesis of foreign competition.

The little allegory from the nursery fits the situation exactly. It has been revealed unto babes.

So the whole mill of industrial commercial production is fed and set in motion, and grinds on year after year. The wheels of its machinery, like those of fortune herself, lifting some into prosperity, upon the condition of the ruin of others, and the working order of the whole depending on the existence of the vast majority of our brothers and sisters in the condition of not being more than one week’s remove from destitution.

This is the social and industrial structure we have raised, in which we live and move and have our being. Art and industry, like figures carved in stone, may adorn its portal, and our hopes and fears, our regrets for the past, our thoughts for the future, play like cloud shadows upon its grim façade, which will yet master our efforts at humanising and beautifying, until its tenants some day insist on improvements, perhaps even involving a change of plan and structure.

Meanwhile our fluctuating harlequin of fashion and trade comes and goes. This year we are going to be “artistic”--everything is to be “artistic”--art colours, art furniture, art in the attic, art in the coalhole. Next year, away with your degraded colours! Let us be grandly barbaric in mauve and magenta! Is this the delightful spontaneous caprice of unstable humanity, seeking novelty in the simplicity of its heart? Or is it wholly unconnected with the inscrutable movements and exigencies of those commercial and industrial potentates whereof I have spoken?

Anyway, art and industry remain a somewhat ill-assorted couple, and furnish an additional modern instance to those who rudely ask, “Is marriage a failure?”

Of course, to the artist accustomed to believe in personal work--to value the individual touch and characteristic method--the whole idea of the application of steam-power, and the mechanical reproduction of any form of art wholesale, is an entire mistake; or, at least, it can only be countenanced under certain conditions and in certain well-defined directions under controlling taste, such, for instance, as the domain of the printer, whether of books, cottons, wall-papers, and the like, or in the work of the loom. I have constantly been struck, in passing through one of our industrial exhibitions--those huge trophies of the world’s trade, that we have raised from time to time, and which are counted among the triumphs of the century--I have often been struck with the marvellous mechanical invention, and the extent and range of the application of steam machinery. One is impressed with a vivid idea of the lightning speed with which the competitive race is run, and the scale on which the world’s market is stocked. But if one inquires how this mechanical march has affected the progress of art, the answer generally appears in some such shape as this. We may, perhaps, see some wonderful piece of ingenuity and mechanism--a carpet loom, for instance, such as I saw at the American Exhibition in London. The machine itself appeared to be a marvel of adaptation; but it would seem as if all the invention had been exhausted upon the means of production, and when one came to the product itself--the carpet in the loom--the result as an artistic matter, a matter of design and colour, was simply deplorable. So that one generally turns from these triumphs of the century with a conviction that we have lost sight of the end in our search for mechanical perfection in the means.

The world, having increased so much under the sway of our industrial kings (we will grant them that), having congregated in vast centres for the convenience of commerce and industry, necessarily has large and immediate wants. Millions of interdependent human beings demand to be fed and clothed, warmed and sheltered, with swift and efficient means of communication and carriage from place to place. Wholesale industrial production does it, with the aid of steam and electricity; and does it so thoroughly (as regards quantity and the purchasing power of the community) as to overshoot the mark and glut the market, which means that a number of citizens are obliged to go without the comforts and necessities they have assisted in producing, seeing that the system of production is not economically organised in the interest of the community, but rather for the profit of individuals.

The world does not stop in its demands at food and clothes and shelter, however. Man does not live by bread alone. He needs mental bread, spiritual exaltation, amusement, excitement, and would clothe his thoughts in artistic and architectural garments. Here, however, wholesale industrial machine production is distinctly at fault, even if in the quality of its food stuffs and bare necessities it has been blameless. In making art a commodity, or in the endeavour to make it so, its distinctive virtue and value has been left out of account. In associating it with purely mechanical and subdivided toil, in handing it over to the blind fingers of insensate machinery, or in setting before it a purely commercial object, both its spiritual and sensuous delight vanishes, and the refining and educating influence of both its practice and its ultimate appeal is lost. The human interest being reduced to a minimum, or made to depend solely on impulse of the pictorial sketcher or designer in no sort of relation to the man, or the process by which his work is to be reproduced, is apt to lose itself in the desire for mere novelty or trick, to become the art of the newspaper, which rests its claims to attention on its impartial, partial, or partisan record of passing events and news--nothing if not new. Thus, both the beauty and the dignity of art are endangered, while the reduction of handicraft to mechanism takes their personal interest and individuality away.

The idea of producing art wholesale by steam-power is certainly an extraordinary one. It is very much like printing a misquoted line from a poet, repeating it page after page, and calling the result a book.