Part 4
These are not only decorative units and linear patterns complete in themselves, but furnish the system, scaffolding, or skeleton on which a multitude of rich and varied designs are built; as the beautiful lines, curves, and contours of the human figure are built upon the strong and symmetric framework of the bones, and form together an organic whole. These forms, too,--these decorative units which are geometrically evolved from the square and the circle,--are also constructive in their origin. The simplest of all patterns arise naturally from certain necessities of construction. Even the linear (alternating) arrangement, produced by the ordinary method of laying bricks, is in some sort a pattern, as well as those more specialised methods in masonry such as opus reticulatum and herring-bone work, for instance. The lattice work of the joiner and engineer also; the patterns formed by the plaiting of grass or rushes in matting, which give us the chequer; the spirals in the twisting of the strands of a rope, and the radiating ribs of a fan,--these all may be looked upon as the sources of our decorative units, and have their prototypes in the natural world, where, above all, we find constructive strength united with beauty and fitness, governed by adaptability to circumstance.
The Fan, indeed, holds universal sway, not only in the hands of women, but in the worlds both of nature and design.[1] In structure and system the Fan seems to be one of the first principles of organic construction, and is illustrated everywhere--from a bird’s wing to a vaulted ceiling, and in decorative art spreads from the Greek Anthemion to the Japanese screen. The Japanese artist is never tired of demonstrating its fitness for every ornamental purpose. It is his dearest decorative unit, and he certainly proves himself a master in its use.[2]
Of the Fan, considered both as a controlling system and as a decorative unit, it would be easy to recall examples in almost every age and style--through Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods. From the rising to the setting of the sun of art, the fan constantly reappears, and seems very early to have been associated with ideal beauty, inasmuch as the fan in the shell form has long been accepted in art as the cradle of Venus. Its felt applicability to so many forms of decoration lies, no doubt, in the fact that, structurally considered, the fan unites the minimum of lightness with the maximum of strength, as well as in its capacity for variation, and adaptability to position and material.
It would be interesting to trace the different treatment of the same decorative unit by different races and in different countries, and to hunt them down to their primitive type. I have often thought it would be possible to classify patterns, like plants, into species and genera. The analogy between the two is perhaps nearer than is commonly supposed,[3] for each is subject to those general laws of existence which control the existence of all art no less.
Art, of course, is not to be confounded with either science or nature, but there is a scientific side to art. When we come to principles of Design one may well fear the valley of dry bones, where so many champions have, alas! left theirs. From the point of view of the designer, who seeks to confirm his practice and experience by general principles and definitions--which, after all, are but the boundaries and defences of territory already gained and peopled--it would be possible to make definitions of the elements of ornament “refutation tight” as far as words go. In this sense it always strikes me that Professor Ruskin’s “ingenious friend,” of whom he speaks in his _Elements of Drawing_--his correspondent who defined ornament as consisting of “Contrast, Series, and Symmetry”--very nearly hit the mark. The demonstration given, too, with the test ingredients offered by Ruskin was, as far as it went, triumphant; and although it might not have been strictly ornament, it was at least skeleton ornament, and it is something to acknowledge that ornament should have a skeleton.
If we said that ornament was the systemisation of form it would perhaps be more comprehensive; but define as we may, the important thing is the motive power--be the machinery theoretically perfect. All depends on the use the designer makes of his system and ingredients. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and even then it is not always safe to affirm it could not have been made any other way. The truth is that pattern making, whatever are the elements, and however necessary certain sequences are, and its successful composition, depend finally on the inventive fertility of the artist’s mind; and this, again, may indefinitely be depressed or stimulated by the conditions under which he lives.
I do not pretend in this short paper to give more than a sketch of what is really a very vast subject, but if I have succeeded in awakening an interest in it, and induced any of my readers to pursue it farther themselves, I shall be very pleased. To those who would like to do so, I can recommend two excellent little books by Mr. Lewis F. Day, himself a well-known and practical designer. They are the _Anatomy of Pattern_ and the _Planning of Ornament_, both published by Mr. Batsford of Holborn.
It seems to me that one of the difficulties of designers in the present day is rather the embarrassment which comes from the overwhelming mass of examples from every age and clime with which he is overwhelmed. It requires a very powerful artistic digestion to assimilate such a mass and such a variety of ornamental styles. The consequences, too, are evident enough around us, as what may be properly called the ornament of the period is an extraordinary jumble--a hybrid production resulting from a mixture in the mind of all these styles,--just as if one were to consult the dictionaries of all the tongues living and dead, and take a few words there and a few words here and call the results language or poetry.
If, like David with the armour he had not proved, our designer could put these things away from him, and rely on the sling and the stone of constructive necessity and mother wit, one cannot help feeling the result would be better.
If we must have ornament let it be good as far as it goes, and grow naturally out of the constructural necessities and material of the work. The importance of good design and handicraft cannot be exaggerated, for upon their health depends the health of all art whatsoever; and the test of the conditions of the arts in any age must be sought in those crafts of design which minister to the daily life and common enjoyment of humanity.
A man may be able, with the proceeds of labour, to spend thousands of pounds upon a single picture, but it does not follow that art is making progress. There is no artistic inspiration in thousands of pounds--the sculptor cannot even make a golden image out of it. Wealth and luxury can never really foster art--they must eventually stifle it. The artist must keep in touch with nature and life; he must keep his eye fresh and his heart open if his work is to touch men and dwell in their memories. And it matters not whether he wield the chisel, the hammer, or the brush, or work at the forge, the carpenter’s bench, the stone-mason’s shed, on the scaffold or in the studio; if he feels his work, if he acquires the skill to make a thing of beauty, he is an artist in the true sense of the word.
ART AND LABOUR
How define Art or Labour? We might dryly attempt to sum up the artificial distinctions between them by saying that--(1) Art is the inventive use of tools and material. (2) Labour is the mechanical use of tools and material.
But on examination (regarding the whole field of handicraft) the two would be found to be so closely connected--so much art or skill in even the simplest operation of labour, so much labour involved in even the simplest form of art--each so involved in the other, that it would be very difficult to draw the line and to say where labour ends and art begins.
Leaving the abstract, let us consider the concrete--the personal. Let us look at what might be called the two extremes. Look at the labourer with his shovel, on the one hand, and the painter (who of late has monopolised the name of artist), on the other, with his palette and brushes.
The resemblances are perhaps not so striking as the differences. It is true the labourer is engaged in moving, say, earth or minerals from one place to another with his shovel. The painter is engaged in moving earth or minerals (in the form of colours) from one place to another--from his palette to his canvas with his brush. Both are contributing to the best of their ability to the wants of man. The labourer who may be supposed to be digging the foundations of a house is clearly contributing to his fundamental necessities; while the artist is presumably contributing to his sources of pleasure and refinement, though clearly his work will not be much in demand until the walls are built--until there is something to put his picture _on_.
And if we were to inquire further into the history of the maintenance and of the tools and materials of either workman, we should discover that both were alike dependent upon a vast chain of associated labour, which makes their work, nay, their very existence, possible.
As to the economic value of the work of each to the community, that again depends upon conditions. If there was a scarcity of houses the labourer’s labour would (or naturally ought to) be the most valuable; if there was a superfluity of houses, then the painter’s labour ought naturally to be the most valued. In gauging the value of the labour of each from the point of view of the barest utility, there can be no doubt that the painter would kick the beam.[4]
As to the _actual_ or market value, if we take as a criterion the monetary reward of each, it is quite the other way, at least, in what are called civilised countries; although both artist and labourer in their economic condition are alike in this, that _neither is certain of a livelihood_; and the position of both is affected _by competition and the general state of trade_--_not_, observe, _by the actual wants of the community_! Well, as to wages, as we know, there are all the degrees between them--between, say, 6d. an hour on the one hand, and 600 or 6000 pence and upwards an hour on the other; alternating, in each case, however, with _nothing_ an hour.
I think it will be agreed that this is not a very satisfactory or artistic state of things.
So much then by way of a rough sketch of the relative positions of artist and labourer; and other things being equal, I think it would be extremely difficult to prove that either is more useful to the community than the other. But as there is certainly labour in art (as with the best talents it requires great devotion and industry to become an artist and craftsman), so also there is a great deal of art in labour, even of the kind commonly called “unskilled.”
I know of no labour which can be properly described as the exertion of mere brute force. The slightest practical acquaintance with any kind of manual work is sufficient to convince one that there is always a better and a worse way of doing anything, and that it is not the amount of force, but the amount of _effective_ force, which counts in doing any work.
Try a hand at any ordinary piece of field work, for instance. Take up a scythe and see what you can do in the hayfield without previous practice, and then see if the results of your efforts do not convince you that there is a great deal of art in the management of such an apparently simple implement.
One has often been struck with the splendid action and admirable precision with which two men will alternately hammer at an iron wedge, when old pavement is being taken up in our streets. The hammer is swung at the full sweep of the arms and brought down with the utmost economy of concentrated force upon the head of the wedge. This is the art of manual labour. When the dockers and gasmen strike it is not found so simple a matter to fill their places (apart from the question of “blacklegs”), and amateurs in manual labour are soon found to be very different from the professional artists of labour. The lifter and carrier of weights, the hewer of wood, and the drawer of water have a practical acquaintance with the nature of things (under constantly varying secondary conditions)--of poise and pressure--which is far more immediately valuable than any general _theoretic_ acquaintance with the laws of nature.
In attempting any unwonted piece of work, say, in sawing a piece of wood, the inexperienced always wastes force. In all labour it is the _economy of force_ which makes force effective, and this must be the result of experience. Even the rate at which manual labourers work is fixed by general experience.
William Morris’s story of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, who set his courtiers to work to help the vine-dressers, puts this fact in a very picturesque way; and as a result of the experiment it was found that for the first half-hour the courtiers worked forty-five minutes, the second half-hour just thirty minutes, the third half-hour fifteen minutes, and in the fourth half-hour declined to two minutes, while the labourers maintained their steady rate.
There is a false estimate of the value and dignity of labour prevalent; we need a new scale, a new gauge or test of the value and proportionate usefulness of labour. If, apart from bodily strength, so much skill, judgment, and experience is required in common everyday labours that have not the slightest pretensions to art, consider how many qualities are brought into play directly we touch any one of the finer handicrafts.
Machinery, used solely in the interests of trade and rapid production, has distorted our sense of the importance of labour as well as degraded the labourer, and wellnigh destroyed the handicraft, and has set up the quite false standard of mechanical precision, and what is known as “trade finish,” which is fatal to any _artistic_, that is to say, individual feeling.
It appears, indeed, as if art were only possible in so far as the artist escapes the tendencies and influences of his time.
The very schools of art tend to mechanicalise and conventionalise students to one pattern. The only way to teach or to learn any form of art is by demonstration; the master should be able to do the work, the pupil should be able to see it done. But the master-craftsman no longer, as a rule, works in his shop with his apprentices, passing on, with added skill and invention, those traditions of work and method, which, continually added to by fresh experience and new impulses, form the true soil out of which the vital force of design, in all its manifold branches, ever springs.
But now, I suppose, it is very seldom a workman sees his work complete from beginning to end. He must be content to furnish a part only, perhaps an infinitesimal part, to the finished result. There can be no possibility under such a system of the pleasure of the craftsman in fashioning his work, to give it the individual twist and play of fancy, the little touch of grace and ornamental feeling springing from the organic necessities of the work which is characteristic of the times when art and handicraft were united and living.
I cannot contemplate with satisfaction the spectacle of a world so “civilised” that all the useful labours are made either terrible by long hours, or emptied of all joy and interest by being reduced to mechanism, so that every one, while spending mechanically the greater part of their time on some work they take no interest in, and caring only to end it, fix their heart upon something outside their lives and work--following the game of “ins and outs” called politics, or giving themselves up to the chances of the gambler, whose talk is of jockeys and racehorses, or stocks and shares.
The ideal man was, a little while ago, the so-called “self-made” man--the man who started from _somewhere_ with half-a-crown in his pocket, and changed it cleverly (in course of time) for half a million or so, living happily ever after on the labour of others--an independent gentleman.
The miner or the navvy who digs himself out of his class and hoists himself on the shoulders of others to a position of mastership--to a position in which he is no longer obliged to do any work--has been held up to the admiration of all other miners and navvies, who are enjoined to go and do likewise.
But why should it be assumed that a man must rise out of his class in order to raise himself? Why should a life of useful productive labour, of labour absolutely indispensable to the community, be despised, and a life of idleness be extolled and desired?
The principle of perpetually shifting the hardest and most disagreeable work on to the shoulders of others, and then labelling those others as inferiors, and paying them miserably, _must come to an end some day_. The system under which a man who works hardest and longest is paid the least, while at the other end of the scale the man who does nothing is paid the most, is a scandal; and if this is the result of civilisation, civilisation, if it is going to stop at that, must be pronounced a failure.
No happy human life is surely possible without work--and by work I distinctly mean some form of pleasurable handicraft. No healthy human being would wish to be idle. Experience tells us how much happier we are, mentally and physically, for doing some kind of work, especially work, handiwork, in which we can take a pleasure; that is, which admits of some kind of invention, judgment, discretion, selection, which gives scope for individual preferences--art, in short.
And after all there is hardly any kind of manual work which (if not excessive and burdensome by means of long hours) does not bring its own satisfaction. To a healthy individual the mere putting out of his physical and mental forces is a satisfaction. The contention with difficulties, the triumph over obstacles, the solution of problems, the strife with the materials and forces of nature (if not too arduous) bring their own satisfactions and rewards.
I do not suppose any one who has never scrubbed a floor, or cleaned up and set a room in order, can understand the satisfaction of the good housewife who contemplates the result, putting the finishing touches here and there, just as an artist before his picture, retiring with his head on one side to judge of the effect.
It is noteworthy, too, that this sense of the worth of labour to the individual seems to be in danger of being entirely lost sight of amid the grinding overwork on the one hand, and the increasing luxury on the other.
In a society which makes it an object in life for each one to evade their share of useful productive labour, and by getting hold, by hook or by crook, of the largest share of labour values, to live upon the toil of their brothers and sisters, how can due respect be ever paid to labour, in spite of the bidding of the politician for the working man’s vote, and all the various baits dangled before his eyes?
I have a little book called _The Book of Trades, or Library of the Useful Arts_, interesting as showing the state of the useful handicrafts on the verge of this century of machine production. It is in three parts, dated 1806 to 1811. Most of the plates are dated 1804. Little pictures are given of most of the trades described, and we see, for instance, in one part, with many other crafts, the trunkmaker, the wheelwright, the iron-founder, the copperplate printer, the painter, the statuary, side by side--no artificial distinction between art and labour here; but while it says of the wheelwright that a journeyman can earn “from a guinea to thirty shillings a week,” of the painter it says, “the earning of an artist cannot be defined; he is paid according to his talents, and to the celebrity which he has acquired. Some persons will require a hundred guineas for a piece which another of inferior merit, or little known to the public, would be glad to perform for a twentieth part of that sum.” Our author is judicious.[5]
The _Book of Trades_ winds up with “The Merchant,” and after showing so many handicraftsmen in full activity, the artist is rather hard put to it to express the toil of the merchant, so he draws a fine gentleman in a cocked hat, leaning on his walking stick, and elegantly presiding over a docker who is rolling a barrel, and a clerk, in a rudimentary top hat, who is entering something in a book. Here is an image of art--or shall we say craft--and labour!
Well, I suppose the “merchant” of the present day is mostly a good many removes farther from his merchandise than that, and often does not ever see the thing he buys and sells, becoming ultimately sublimated into the banker--the great financier who pulls the strings, and supplies the sinews of war in the modern world. He is like the man who carries on several games of chess without seeing the board. It is an unpicturesque ideal which I do not admire. To be mere pieces and pawns in the game of a cunning and unseen power is a very demoralising and dangerous game, both for the pawns and the player, and the power of money seems less scrupulous and more demoralising in its action than any other sinister power which has held sway over humanity. While apparently fostering art it really blights and destroys it, caring only for luxury; and labour is degraded and despised under the commercial ideal of heaping up riches, according to possession of which is a citizen respected!
I have been described as a person “deeply tainted with socialism.” I do not know how such an impression originated, as I thought that I was entirely gone that way long ago! But whether socialists or not, I think we must all feel that man has become what he is by the development of his social instincts, or the race would have become extinct, and therefore it is reasonable to look forward to the attainment of a higher and a juster and more human social life.
I believe that we cannot stand still, and I for one do not want to go back. Intensely interesting as the study of past ages may be, and many the lessons we may lay to heart from the past life and experience of humanity, the possibilities of the future are still more fascinating.
I for one am not satisfied with our present commercial democracy, which, indeed, I believe to be but a stage of evolution into something more real and complete. The aspiration for liberty, equality, and fraternity is a true aspiration, but it has yet to be realised. I cannot for the life of me see how you can have political freedom without _economic freedom_. If there is monopoly of land and the means of subsistence, there must be slavery in some form, as well as pauperism.
The world, however, cannot be changed by a ready-made, cut-and-dried working model of a scheme for the regeneration of society. I am not going to attempt the impertinence of offering one. Society must work out its own salvation--no professional salvationist can save it that trouble. We all have our aspirations, however, our preferences, our ideas--dreams, if you will; and it is after all the sum and velocity of these, incorporating the wants of the time, which ultimately form opinion, which dissolve states, and reform them.