Part 2
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the whole force of our economic system is against spontaneous art, and it is in spite of it that there is any life left in it yet. As William Morris has so strikingly pointed out, the system of producing all things for profit, which has succeeded the old one of producing for use; the necessity of selling in the big world market, division of labour, and lastly, machine labour, have rapidly destroyed the art of the people, and are fast vulgarising and destroying all local characteristics in art, as in costume and the surroundings of common life throughout the world. The system of absolute individual ownership of land, which, with the advance of commercialism, has displaced the older systems of tenure, and defrauded the people of their common rights wholesale, naturally leads to much destruction of natural beauty, and when not destroyed it is made inaccessible. It is also answerable, with the causes already named, for that other great disaster both to architecture and art already alluded to, the abnormal growth of the big towns, which year by year throws out its long and aimless feelers that feed upon the green country. When we speak of an advance in education, we too often forget that no education of the schools can compensate for life passed amid hills and woods, and by the sea, itself an education in a lore never to be forgotten.
Overshadowed by such conditions of life, what wonder is it that we should get our art by accident, that it should be in great measure the Art of Accident, which is really what modern realism or naturalism comes to, in spite of elaborate systems of art training, and the elaborate unlearning of them which follows? The sense of beauty may be stunted, but Nature cannot be altogether suppressed under the most perverse social conditions. It is sometimes urged in defence of the artistic aspects of modern life that strange and wonderful momentary effects are seen, in London smoke-fogs, for instance, or amid the fiery eyes of railway signals, and our blackened Stygian rivers, where the Charon of the coal-wharf plies his trade. I have even heard an apostle of beauty defend those monuments of commercial effrontery and theatrical competition, our advertisement hoardings, covered with varicoloured posters, as in certain lights becoming transfigured so as to rival the tints on a Japanese fan. But it is one thing to find accidental beauties in the midst of monstrosities, jewels on dunghills as it were, and quite another to defend the monstrosities for the sake of accidental beauties. The glow, the light fades, and with it the momentary exaltation of spirit; the north-east wind succeeds the south-west, and there being no dignity of form or beauty of proportion in our streets, they are apt to look more sordid and miserable than before. Grace and spirit may be shown by a child dancing to a barrel-organ in a smoky, squalid street, but one would rather see her on a village green dancing to a shepherd’s pipe. We should aim at a condition of things which would not keep beauty at a distance from common life, or on the footing of an occasional visitor. No artist should be satisfied with such a cold relationship.
Art is not the mere toy of wealth, or the superficial bedizenment of fashion, not a revolving kaleidoscope of dead styles, but in its true sense, in a vital and healthy condition, the spontaneous expression of the life and aspirations of a free people.
Before all things, then, in order that art may express itself in this free way, it is necessary that there should be something like a common life. We have no common life, because we have no life in common. Art is split up into cliques, as society into classes. Art should know neither; we want a vernacular in art, a consentaneousness of thought and feeling throughout society. “As it was” (to quote J. S. Mill) “in the days of Homer, of Phidias, or even of Dante.” No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity, but that comprehensive and harmonising unity with individual variety, which can only be developed among a people politically and socially free.
The signs of our times point unmistakably to great changes working in the direction I have indicated, which cannot fail to produce corresponding results in art. Consider, for instance, the probable effect on architecture of a collective, communistic mode of living. Instead of our rows of brick boxes, or piles of them in barracks, there would probably be a demand for quite another type of domestic architecture; we might see something like a revival of the plan of house which for so many ages proved so serviceable to humanity, from Homer to Shakespeare. The great hall as the common living-room, with private rooms for sleeping or solitude adjoining it; or some development of the collegiate plan. Buildings of such a type certainly lead to more dignity of result in architecture than the houses under our present system of tenure and individual plan are ever likely to. We all know, too, that the only chance for the mural painter is in buildings of a more or less public character. If buildings of the type I have mentioned became common, there would be plenty of work for him and the decorative artist generally, and so we might reasonably expect that painting and the sister arts would be restored to perhaps greater than their former dignity, beauty, and invention.
The decline of art corresponds with its conversion into portable forms of private property, or material or commercial speculation. Its aims under such influences become entirely different. All really great works of art are public works--monumental, collective, generic--expressing the ideas of a race, a community, a united people; not the ideas of a class. It is evident enough in our own time that art needs some higher inspiration than that of the cash-box. She suffers from a lethargy that cannot be cured by a prescription from the cheque-book; these are at best but stimulants that force an unnatural excitement, a feverish and brief activity at the expense of the whole system. Private ownership may be able to command both skill and beauty, no doubt, but it is, as a rule, beauty of a lesser kind and considered in a narrower spirit, as it is addressed to the taste of an individual; while the fancies of rich and great persons, when their day is past, often come to be looked upon as curiosities. The art of a people, as expressed in their public buildings and monuments, possesses a kind of immortality.
We know the splendid results in art which grew on the rock of Athens, and the cities of mediæval Italy. Our own cathedrals, no less, will bear witness to the vitality in all the crafts of design at that period. Is it too much to suppose, seeing the intimate connection between political, social, and artistic expression, and how both are affected by economical laws, that in the free federated communes which not improbably will in the future succeed the present jealous nationalities, with a large increase of leisure and opportunity for cultivation and enjoyment, the arts may develop even a higher vitality?
For art in its highest sense is but the faculty of expression. The higher, the richer, the fuller the life, the happier and more harmonious its conditions, the higher and more varied and beautiful will be the forms of its expression in art. But it is deep down in the life of the people that we must dig the foundations, and out of common speech and common labour and handicraft must be shaped the stones of this Architecture of Art. Without such foundation, and without the cement of fellowship, without due recognition of the equality and unity of all art-workers, and their mutual interdependence in building the great structure, we shall raise no enduring monument to be a delight to ourselves, and a memorial of us to those who come after.
Brilliant toys it may be we shall have. Surprises and stimulants, joyless elaboration, and pedantic weight of learning, gorgeous exotics, flowers and fruits, formed for the jaded appetites of a society in its decline, but we must give up all hope of vital and harmonious art enclosed in a casket of beautiful architecture.
Hence comes it that most of the efforts made to revive the arts and crafts among the people, without reference to their economic condition, are like so many attempts to grow the tree leaves downwards. As if an architect should put up an elaborate scaffolding and begin with his roof, before he has decided on his ground plan, dug the foundations, or thought of drainage.
Real progress we must not expect to make until we have re-established the unity of the arts--a very different thing from uniformity. My late friend, Mr. J. D. Sedding, in whom we have lost a genial and sensitive spirit as well as a refined designer, in a discourse he made a while ago, in his generous enthusiasm was assigning the mural decorations of an ideal modern cathedral to various well-known popular painters. I believe even I myself was allowed a corner to amuse the children in. I have as great an admiration for the talents of my contemporaries as any one, but I cannot conceal from myself that it would be a very experimental scheme. It would be, metaphorically speaking, something like an attempt to anticipate the millennium, by trying to persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb in the same cage. But in the fifteenth century Mr. Sedding would have been safe enough; the architect worked in harmony with the painter, the painter with the carver and metal worker, because each probably had a considerable knowledge of the other’s craft and its limitations. Artists, therefore, knew what they had to do, and did it. There was nothing mysterious in this, taking into account the way in which men worked in those days and learned their crafts; but it is a little depressing to think, with all our superiority in exact science and mechanism, how far we are from anything like certainty in art.
Whether the interest of scientific discovery has had anything to do with directing men’s faculty of invention into another channel--and life does not allow time for the exercise of both--I do not pretend to say; but when science and art touch each other with the tips of their fingers, when science asks for the aid of applied art, as in mounting electric lights, for instance, or in order to fit any invention to use, it is very noticeable how artistic adroitness of adaptation lags behind the scientific invention. Perhaps there is no time for art to reconcile herself to the new discovery, or it is too soon superseded by another, and nobody cares.
No doubt the demands upon a designer in the present day, owing to such causes alone, are very heavy; but I am inclined to think commercial pressure and hurry is heavier upon him. Thought is all-powerful, but there is no time to think; fancy and imagination might play about the humblest accessory, but there is no time to play; and all work, or rather uncertainty of work, and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But depend upon it, in conditions fair to humanity, art wants but little encouragement, only freedom and sympathy. The seed will grow fast enough in a favourable soil and climate, and bring forth flowers and fruits after its kind in due season.
FIGURATIVE ART
At the present day, when, speaking generally, all forms of graphic art seem to owe their existence to the primary object of imitation of the more superficial, temporary, and accidental aspects of nature; there would seem to be some danger of forgetting that art has properly any other or loftier function. In painting, for instance, technical skill has become so all-important that the end is too often lost sight of in the means; a brilliant execution seems so sufficing that the hand appears to say to the brain, “I have no need of thee.”
I am far from wishing to undervalue technical skill; we all know that it means hard years of labour and incessant industry. To disparage it would be like an attempt to throw discredit on the faculty of speech or writing; but we should soon tire of language and literature without thought or poetry, without analogy and illustration, or even if it gave us nothing but the best “special correspondence.”
If we conceive all forms of plastic art to be so many different methods of expression for the mind,--if we hold, in short, that art is a language, not only for the expression of particular moods and phases of nature, or portraitures of human character, but also for the conveyance of the higher thoughts and poetic symbolism of the mind,--then I think it is no longer possible to rest content merely with the results of industry and facility of hand, still less so when it is lavished upon the realisation of the commonplace, or squandered in the vivid portraiture of squalid detail, which paints vulgarity in all its glory, or spends all the resources of archæological knowledge and draughtsmanship upon the presentment of some triviality in antique dress, going a roundabout way in order to signify next to nothing with the utmost nicety.
Art has become a toy only when it rests satisfied here; and when it lives to please, it must please to live. The public is a big child, without a child’s simple tastes, and cries continually, not for signs, but wonders; “Young men,” as Falstaff says, “must live,” and so it is all explained.
Admitting this, however, we should yet not be justified in assuming that the taste for, or sense of, figurative design, or allegory in any form, was extinct among us. Far from it.
Curiously enough we shall find it at what may be called the extremities of art, or rather, at the head and at the feet. We shall find it still in its original home, in the province of high poetic and decorative painting; and we find it also, in a rough-and-ready form, in our popular politico-satirical prints, where from week to week passing events, political situations, and popular characters are figured in every variety of pictorial parable, with varying degrees of ingenuity and epigrammatic point; but the ingenuity is undoubted, and the popularity of this form of figurative art equally so.
There is also another form in which what may be called figurative art still holds its place in the popular mind--I mean on the stage, and in the region of spectacular ballet and pantomime. The ballet has a very ancient origin, no doubt, and it is of course entirely figurative, all feeling being expressed by action alone, without the help of words. It is the drama of the body. Modern appliances in stage machinery and lighting have given a new development to this species of show, which has great capabilities, and although there is generally a want of refinement, of controlling and directing taste on the whole, there is often a vast amount of ingenuity and pretty invention in scenes and details. In one of these spectacular ballets not long ago there was a gigantic figure of Time painted at the back of the stage. His hour-glass presently opened like a door, and out of it came one by one the hours, represented by damsels, each showing (besides her legs) distinct and appropriate emblematic feeling in her dress. Here, I thought, was a notion conceived in the true spirit of figurative design.
Fashion and the demands of the market may elbow aside the claims of figurative art in a picture exhibition, yet, one now and then has its effect, as, so to speak, after the whirlwind of sensation, the earthquake of literalism, and the fire of personal vanity, is heard the still small voice of figurative thought. While we can point to such examples of painting as Mr. Watts’s “Love and Death,” and Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Fortune,” it cannot be said that either the power or the feeling for the highest art has fallen to decay.
Between the region of party politics and the serene air of ideal poetry there would seem to be a great gulf fixed, but the fact that at both ends of the scale symbolism should be the natural outcome, seems to show that strong feeling of either kind seeks for figurative expression. The passions, the seasons, the senses, the virtues, the vices; fate and time, love, fame, fortune, life, and death itself,--these all belong to the world of allegory, and continually reappear in new shapes, being by nature so protean that no fixed form may hold them. Each age has its own view of them, and that view is sure, sooner or later, to appear visibly in design.
It seems to be far too readily taken for granted that everything of importance concerning such ideas in art has been said long ago, that we must only expect more or less graceful shadows of what has been done in the past to decorate our stained windows, friezes, our panels, ceilings, and mosaics. Nay, there are people of the persuasion that ornamental art should be content to be ornamental and no more; they are content with figures elegantly employed in doing nothing, if, like the peer in the comic opera, they do it remarkably well. Allegory seems to depress them, and symbolism to put them out; life according to this school is “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.”
I should not quarrel with this view if it led to high and satisfying results, and I am far from saying that the exclusive study of line, tone, arrangement, and method is not of great value. But so are grammars and dictionaries. Rhythm, metre, and diction do not make poetry, though they are essential to it; and my contention is that you cannot separate style and matter in art, any more than in literature, without serious loss.
But in a civilisation which is more distinguished by a morbid care for decency than for a love of beauty, when the cry is _Sartor Resartus_, and large profits are made by the sale of fig-leaves; in an age when no one has made up his mind upon first principles, and there is a premium on reserve; when men are chary of avowing in any shape their dearest convictions, not from fear of bodily jeopardy, but out of consideration for the feelings of others, or, perhaps, their own social position, any pictorial expression of ultimate ideas, or vigorous thought embodied in vital design, must of necessity be rare.
The ancient religions of the world were nothing but figurative systems--personifications and symbols of the forces of nature, varying in different countries as they were gradually evolved from some perhaps common primitive type, or grew naturally out of the independent imaginings of the human mind; certainly all have elements in common, and varieties of the same conceptions appear again and again, through endless modifications and developments, as the same plants vary in different soils, and under different conditions. A foundation of natural mythology was common to them all, and this mythology was conceived and modified according to the genius of the race amid which it grew. The Greek religion had the same origin, but the Greeks alone of the ancient nations set free from traditional forms in their art this nature worship; we may follow it from its primitive archaic types till it is transfigured in heroic shape. Religion transformed by art becomes poetry, and all things were made subservient to the dominant sense of beauty. Of this Greek choice we have a beautiful figure or emblem in the “Judgment of Paris,” which art never tires of repeating, and which, like all the Greek stories, never seems to lose its significance.
In the sublime fragments of the sculptured groups which decorate the pediments of the Parthenon, even as we see them in our own Museum, the eye is first charmed and won by the rhythmical sweep and play of line, the masterly counterbalance of curve, the largeness of style in the treatment of individual forms, and what must have been their triumphant combination in an harmonious whole. We, perhaps, think last and least of the poetic thought, or scheme of thought, which comprehends and informs the entire design. Yet here is figurative art in its highest form. Heroic shapes personify and express the physical and moral forces of nature, and all are subservient to, and contribute to the climax (I am thinking now of the eastern pediment), from the sun-god who rears his arms out of the sea to urge his tossing horses, to the fates who bring the hour of the glorious birth, to which, as the crowning fact and summit of the design, all seems to attach as the highest aspiration of the Athenian mind.
After the lapse of ages, through darkness, destruction, and neglect, these fragments remain, not only unequalled as sculpture, but true as figurative design, as expressing what Nature herself continually teaches--namely, the triumph of mind over matter, of the dominion of the higher organism over the lower, or, in modern philosophic phrase, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
It is strange to think how from the ancient mythological sources in the dim past flow down the little streams that serve everyday life and humble domestic use. Scattered in the drift, as it were, of a common speech--itself a conglomerate of so many elements--like fossils, how many well-worn fragments we meet of symbolism in proverb, or fable, or allusion. They are common property, the decorations of everyday talk, repeated again and again to emphasise and illustrate the most ordinary conversation, like the little woodcut devices used by the early printers over and over again to enliven their close pages of type.
It would be an interesting but almost endless task to collect and sift such fragments, and trace each back to its origin. Many come from the widest-read and most ancient books, such as Æsop and the Scriptures, and centuries of human experience are perhaps condensed in some scrap of proverbial wisdom or folklore. Indeed, as regards mankind at large it would appear that the figurative element was the only enduring one. History becomes lost in tradition and mythology. Lesser personalities are rolled into the greater, and greater personalities are lost in types. Events are generalised, and the image of the past experience of the race upon the general mind becomes generic, like that of the visual impressions of the individual, as Mr. Francis Galton has so strikingly demonstrated.
It is this natural tendency of the human mind which gives figurative art its importance; experience is the clay on which it works. Imagination is the creative force, and sense of beauty the controlling power. A mental efflorescence springs from life’s rough way, which in words becomes a figure of speech or rises to poetry, and in design, emblem and allegory.
The love of figurative art, which had been embodied in so many rich and strange shapes all through the Middle Ages, bound up with the mysticism and gorgeous ritual of the Roman religion, or entangled with the quaint conceits of heraldry, displayed in mystery show and masque and pageant, or emblazoned upon the illuminated parchment, rose to new life with the Renaissance, and found with the art of printing new means of expression in woodcut and copper-plate.
The allegorising power of poets like Spenser found its counterpart in the designs of such artists as Albert Dürer and Holbein, and the best inventions of the emblem books, which are so characteristic of the period.
The taste for these emblem books seems to have lasted all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and into the eighteenth. Collection after collection issued from the press in all the principal centres of western Europe. The most complete and widely-known were, I suppose, those of Andrea Alciati, which appear in so many different editions since the first, printed at Milan in 1522.