Part 5

was a delicate matter, and it was easy to wander off into the regions on either hand. For in spite of the immense activity and industry, the independent artists in design and handicraft were but few, and although many inventive brains and skilled hands might be disguised as "---- and Company," they had to be discovered; the bushel had to be taken away and the light put upon the candlestick of publicity, and this appeared to be a trial to some. It might be thought to be of small importance, this matter of assigning artistic authorship or credit for any part of the work, where it was due; and it may be quite true that when men have reached the point when artistic tradition and social condition both favour a fraternal co-operation in production, they can afford to sink the individual claim to distinction in the collective pride of saying, "This is _our_ work." But we have not reached that stage yet, and it seems only common fairness, if individual and artistic responsibility is attached to a work, the credit should go with these, and be assigned in the proper quarter. In these days of commercial competition, and sculptor's "ghosts," it is perhaps hardly surprising that the assertion of such a principle might produce a little consternation, and also in cases of a great multiplicity of cooks it might easily be understood to be embarrassing to distribute properly the individual responsibility for spoiling the broth, and therefore not wonderful that it should in some instances have been shirked altogether.

As another indication of the way the wind was blowing, an Association was formed this same year (1888) for the Advancement of Art in Association with Industry--a somewhat large order. Almost everything and everybody had had their congresses and why not Art? So an Art Congress was arranged to take place at Liverpool in December of that year. It was properly divided into sections for the separate discussion of painting, architecture, sculpture, and decorative or applied art, as the phrase goes. It may be mentioned here that the Society of Arts had before this formed a special committee to arrange for lectures and discussions on "The Applied Arts," and had also offered prizes to art-workmen for excellence in various departments of handicraft, and had held a small exhibition of such works in their rooms in the Adelphi. Well, the Congress at Liverpool duly met, and every one having a particular axe to grind brought it to the common grindstone of public discussion. It was a fairly representative parliament. The royal academician sat down with the socialist; the scientific colour theorist fed with the practical decorator; the industrial villager faced the manufacturer; the art critic and the painter mingled their tears, and all were led to the pasture by a gentle Fine Art professor. Some home truths were spoken and there were many interesting papers and discussions, but whether we were really nearer solving the problem how to bring about the marriage of Art and Industry is doubtful, though the Association had another campaign at Edinburgh the following year and one since at Birmingham. Association and discussion among people of common interests is of course good, but Art is a subject by its very nature difficult to deal with in words, although perhaps more is said about it in these days than almost any other subject--and here am I still adding to the sum!

A hair perhaps divides the false and true.

We have no word-symbols for defining those delicate shades of difference so important to the artist, and to be perpetually qualifying is fatiguing. It is useful to consider art in its relation to life; to consider how it is affected by economic conditions, to study its history and influence, and the lives of its workers. One can even proceed a certain distance with general principles, but finally we must get down to the solid ground of practice to solve its real problems.

All these movements may be but fluttering leaves in the wind, but at least they serve to show its direction. The colours of spring sometimes resemble those of autumn; but the former are distinguished by a certain daintiness and delicacy: a soft bloom of silver and russet comes over the woods before the cloud-like green drapes them for the coming summer. When we see delicate and harmonious dyes and patterns in the fabrics of the windows of commerce, when we see dainty gowns in the street, expressing the fair forms of their wearers with the grace of flowers; when we see a certain sense of relation and harmony of tint in the most ordinary arrangements of paint and paper in the interiors of our houses: when our chairs and couches not unfrequently show lines of good breeding; when we find books on the table which have been considered by their printers and designers as works of art as well as of literature, and thus give a double pleasure, since they satisfy more than one of the senses--well, we begin to think that something has happened to us; some new spirit has breathed upon the land, that such refinements should be possible to the moderate citizen, remembering that such things but a few years ago could not be had for love or money. We might still be happy were it not for the whirlwind of trade, and the whirligig of fashion which occasionally seem to coquette with art, as a child plays with a toy, but soon turn away to continue their mad chase after a supposititious "novelty." Happily they leave some quiet corners unswept, as they have always done, or we could never have known what the homes of our ancestors were like. But how many still does England hold of those delightful places full of the pathos of old time, where each dumb thing of wood or iron, or copper, each fragment of faded tapestry seems to have the speech of romance.

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

When the utilitarian would destroy such relics for the sake of "modern improvements" we do not realize what priceless things we lose. We can only realize it when we live for a time in country or city without antiquity of any sort. Here in England there are still many places where one might have the suggestion that we moderns were like children playing with new toys in front of a rich tapestried background full of great deeds and romances. In America the idea could not occur, and the absence of such suggestion is no doubt much felt by the more cultured and thoughtful, especially after visiting Europe. It may partly account, too, for the more fantastic character in the architecture of some of their recent country dwellings, which are full of nooks and corners and odd gables and stairways, as if their designer wished to make up by his invention for the absence of old time sentiment.

Some of us appear to be trying to turn England into another America--for ever scheming railways where they are not wanted, cutting down trees, and clearing away old dwelling places, and insulting even the green fields with advertisements. Anything that interferes with extra percentages is as dust in the balance to such.

In the destruction of beauty of any kind, however, is involved the destruction of the faculty of its perception and appreciation. The artistic capacity and sense of beauty must be fed by the contemplation of beauty or both will in time perish. We cannot really satisfy one of the senses unless we satisfy them all. It is often said, "you must sacrifice this or that to comfort and convenience;" but it is quite possible to have every so-called comfort and convenience, and yet to be anything but happy or comfortable--especially if the comfort of the eye is forgotten. Unless the utilitarian succeeds in eliminating the sense of beauty and art altogether, the natural man will still revolt against the tyranny of mechanical and artificial conditions. Such revolts make epochs, and when the human mind is deeply stirred it is sure sooner or later to find expression in some revival, or new form of art.

A great intellectual revolution has taken place in the last half century: a great social and industrial revolution is preparing, or even now progressing. Whether art will again be able to sum up and express adequately in monumental form the new life and its aspirations, as it expressed the heart of ancient life in Greece and mediaeval Europe, must depend upon its power of appeal, and this again must depend upon the sensitiveness to form and colour on the part of the people. In England the domestic sentiment is so strong that enthusiasm for large public works is rare, and opportunities for sculptor or painter to express anything like the generic thought of their time, or to touch the pride or hopes of the nation rarer still.[4] The art that is capable of illustrating this spirit is what is called decorative art: but the art which can cover large mural spaces with a peoples' history and legend in noble and typical forms, the art which can lift our souls with large thoughts, or enchant them with a sense of mystery and romance, can also be a familiar friend at our firesides, and touch each common thing of every day use with beauty, weaving its golden threads into the joys and sorrows of common life, and making happy both young and old.

[Footnote 4: It is true we have our frescoes of English history at the Houses of Parliament, but they cannot be said, with the exception of the work of Mr. G. F. Watts, to have been conceived in an epic spirit, but are rather anecdotic or incidental. Though the new pictures for the House of Lords by some of our ablest men of the younger school, such as Mr. Payne and Mr. Cadogan Cowper, show much finer mural and decorative feeling.]

THE SOCIALIST IDEAL AS A NEW INSPIRATION IN ART

THE SOCIALIST IDEAL AS A NEW INSPIRATION IN ART

Art as the commentator or the recorder of human life, reflecting not only its physical aspects but its mental attitude, must necessarily be influenced by every change which modifies the course and character of that life. It is the sensitive plate in the camera of the mind of the age which receives every image, every shadow which passes before the lens of its vision, and, over and above the fleeting shows of the hour, registers the prevailing sentiment of its period.

In proof of this we have only to look around us and see how intimately the life and spirit of our own times are represented in the art of the day, more especially pictorial art.

In any of our large annual popular mixed picture shows we may see the effects of the modern commercial principle of individual competition. Pictures of the utmost diversity of subject and treatment are crowded together, clamorous for attention, often injured by the juxtaposition of unsympathetic neighbours, the principal quality telling in such a conflict being force. Certain dominant, or privileged, individuals hold front places, but even the marked individual style of some leading painters is apt to be discounted by numerous more or less successful imitations.

Painters are said to be extreme individualists as a rule, and while, no doubt, the economic conditions of the day tend to encourage this, and to make painting more and more a matter of personal expression or impression, yet, I think, the individuality of modern artists is more apparent than real, and that it would not be difficult to classify them in types, or to trace the main influences in their work to some well-known artistic source either in the present or the past, or both. This, however, would be in no way to their discredit, but it shows how art, even in its most individualistic forms, is essentially a social product, and that each artist benefits enormously by the work of his contemporaries and his predecessors.

Our mixed picture exhibition also discloses another prominent characteristic of our time--the domination of money, and the influence of the possessing classes and material wealth. This appears in the preponderance of portraits and the comparative absence of imaginative works.

We may see the monarch and the political, financial, or commercial magnate in all their glory; generals and admirals, slayers and destroyers, in scarlet and blue and gold; the fashionable dame in purple and fine linen; the motorist in his career; national pride or imperialism is appealed to by pictures of battle and triumph over inferior races; and sports and pastimes, especially those involving the pursuit and death of birds and animals.

Nor is the reverse of the medal unrepresented, for we may see side by side with brilliant ballroom scenes and banquets in marble halls, as a picturesque contrast or foil perhaps, various aspects of poverty and rags, sometimes sincere, sometimes sentimental, and occasionally flashes of insight reveal the pathos of the toiler's lot in the field, the factory, or on the treacherous ocean.

The genuine modern love of wild nature and landscape, and the roaming spirit of travel is generally catered for by our painters; in these directions, perhaps, may be detected the suppressed sigh of super-civilized man for primitive freedom and natural conditions of life, or,

The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.

With such mixed elements we may find some false sentiment, and also sensationalism, not infrequently connected with Christian sentimentality, and amid a fair allowance of military exploits, and flag-waving imperialism, there may be a few well-staged masquerades of past history, some grim and stark realism, perhaps, or gloomy pictorial pessimism, and for the rest, decorative or amatory posings, painted anecdotes and domesticities, flowers, babies, and bric-à-brac.

Thus, in pictorial form, with more or less completeness, the mixed drama of our age is presented, its very discords even, and the absence of any prevailing idea or unity of sentiment (except bourgeois) and artistic aim is characteristic, as the pictures jostle one another in a competitive crowd, each struggling for a share of attention.

Painters of the Latin and the Teutonic races are more dramatic, and also more daring in their conceptions, and often appear to strip the mask (or the fig-leaf) from objects and subjects which the more timid or prudish Anglo-Saxon would discreetly veil. Grim pictures of the industrial war not unfrequently appear in Italian and French salons, and in that of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts I have seen large and lurid canvases depicting strikers on the march with a background of factory chimneys looming through the smoke. Apart from their economic and historical significance, however, such subjects may fall in with a certain mood of gloom and pessimism which, in violent reaction from superficial grace and beauty, and classical tradition, manifests itself in some quarters. Now and again a new sensation is made by some eccentric genius, as it were, dragging a weird aesthetic red herring across the fashionable artistic scent, and diverting attention to side tracks in artistic development, often mixed with morbidity, or, as a change from the pursuit of superficial and ephemeral types of beauty, debased and revolting types and loathly subjects are drawn under the pictorial limelight and analysed.

So, in the pictorial world, the economic system under which we live makes itself felt by encouraging each artist to fight for his own hand, and to become a specialist of one sort or another, unless he can live by exploiting some other artist's discovery and method.

Few, probably, among artists are fully conscious of this compulsion, or, at least, of its cause, and but few trouble themselves about the economic system, but mostly, though not without social sympathies, take the risks, as individuals, of swimming or sinking, with the off chance of fortune and fame, as in the necessary order (or disorder) of things.

Yet the economic position of the modern artist can hardly be considered as at all satisfactory, dependent as he is mainly upon the caprice of the rich, or the control of the dealer, and upon the surplus value and unearned increment it may be in the power of individuals to spend upon art.

Painting, however, though the most individual, popular, vivid, and intimate of the arts, is not the _only_ art, and the arts, like humanity, do not flourish under Imperial rule. They are a brotherhood or a sisterhood (they are traditionally represented as the latter) though, in neither case are they necessarily celibate; on the contrary, for it is by the union of art with a human character and personality that living offspring are produced.

From the point of view of the necessities of the community (and amongst these necessities I would certainly count beauty of environment) the constructive arts come first in order.

Man needs shelter and security, and therefore architecture and the craft of building take the first place, since without roof and walls it would be difficult to enjoy the other arts which minister to our comfort, refinement, and pleasure (nor would it be hardly possible for many of them to exist) unless we could satisfy our aesthetic predilections by textiles and a tent, or by painting or chiselling the walls of a cave.

Now architecture or the art of building is essentially a co-operative art. The planning and general scheme of the design of a building may indeed emanate from one mind, but its realization needs an army of skilled artificers and artists--stonemasons, carvers, carpenters, smiths, tilers and plasterers, and a host of labourers working harmoniously together. And yet, in order to make the building really expressive--a work of art, in short--something more than training and manual skill, something above learned tradition, and beyond even organized co-operative labour is wanted.

What, then, is this something--this unknown quantity or quality?

What makes the great difference between ancient and modern architecture, we might ask, for it is in the answer to this question that we find the answer to our first?

Unity of sentiment--the inspiration of a great ideal, this it was which enabled the artists and craftsmen of past great periods in art to work in harmony on great public monuments, but without losing their character or individuality, as the different parts of the work might be full of invention and variety, and yet conduce to a harmonious whole, as in a Gothic cathedral.

Mr. Halsey Ricardo, in an interesting address recently given to the Architectural Association of London, aptly described the architecture of Ancient Egypt as "priest's architecture"; that of Ancient Assyria as "the architecture of kings"; the architecture of Greece he considered as "sculptor's architecture," and that of the revived classicism of the Renascence as "the architecture of scholars." Well, these have all had their day. The turn of the people must come, and in the architecture of the future, under the inspiration of the great Socialist Ideal we may realize what may be described as the architecture of humanity.

And, looking to the probable requirements of a co-operative commonwealth, this hope seems to be well founded in view of the likelihood of the construction of collective dwellings (already projected in the garden city) of noble public halls and schools.

The unifying effect of a great Ideal, a Hope, a Faith, is obviously wanting generally in modern architecture, wherein the influence most paramount is too often the limits of the builders' contract.

The golden image (which yet is never, like Nebuchadnezzar's, actually "set up") is the real god bowed down to, whosesoever the image and superscription over the porchway, and so modern art is everywhere tied to the purse strings.

But the money-bag makes a poor device for an escutcheon, and is still less effective as an inspirer in art. The standard of the man in possession is "market value," and art under capitalism has become mostly a kind of personal and often portable property, and as much a matter for speculative investment as stocks and shares.

As money cannot write history or ancestry, every portable bit of antiquity is now in danger of being bought up by dealers for the use of millionaires, and we shall soon have no visible history but in our museums.

But, above the din of the market and the confusion of political tongues, a clarion call is heard, and through the darkness breaks a new dawn.

The Socialist Ideal comes, scattering the clouds of pessimism and decadence which have lain heavily on the spirit of modern art.

Artists have already been touched by the stress and stir of the struggle of Labour and the pathos of the life of the toiler, who, as a patient Atlas, sustains the earthy heaven of wealth and luxury. In contact with the earth again, and in sympathy with the life of the people, many painters have found inspiration.

One of the greatest of modern sculptors--Meunier, the Belgian (alas! now no more) was himself a Socialist, and devoted himself to the study and realization of types of heroic labour--the labour that takes its life in its hand in every ordinary day's work--at the furnace mouth or in the coal mine. A group of his figures and reliefs forms a noble epic in bronze of the modern toiler.

François Millet may be said to have painted the epic of the French agricultural labourer, though not, apparently, from any conscious or revolutionary point of view, but rather as a sympathetic observer recording its pathos.

Much in the same spirit Joseph Israels in Holland, and Liebermann in Germany, have painted aspects of the worker's life.

Many of our island painters from a similar standpoint have painted the English workers--such as George Clausen, H. H. La Thangue, Frank Brangwyn, Stanhope Forbes, H. S. Tuke, Prof. Frederick Brown, the late Charles Furse, and the late F. Madox Brown--and shown us the toilers of the sea and land, and the nameless heroes of the life-boat, and the tragedies of the fishing village.

The aspects of labour under modern conditions, indeed, have a deep significance, more, perhaps, than the artist or the labourer, unconscious of Socialism, is probably aware of.

To the artist it is always invigorating to get down to the roots of life, and draw fresh inspiration from the simple life of simple people meeting nature face to face every day of their lives.

The representation of types and aspects of modern labour, however, may or may not always be an indication of the effect of Socialist sympathies or the inspiration of the Socialist Ideal, and in any case it only exhibits one phase of such sympathy. But the Socialist ideal has undoubtedly had a great influence in another direction, namely, in what are generally known as the "Arts and Crafts"; and it is not a little remarkable that the modern revival in Design and Handicraft may claim manufacturing and individualistic England as its birthplace.

This fact has been freely and generously acknowledged by our Continental brethren.

The perception of the essentially social character of the arts that minister to daily life, and the dependence of Design and Handicraft upon effective and sympathetic co-operation among groups of workers have drawn craftsmen together, and has led in some sort to a revival of guilds. Some of these guilds, like the Art Workers' Guild (founded as long ago as 1884) are for discussion of a demonstration in the various artistic handicrafts, and for mutual information and help.

The influence of such guilds in the revival of many beautiful crafts on sound lines, and, above all, in imbuing artists of different crafts with a sense of the unity of art can hardly be overestimated.

Other guilds, groups of workers, and industrial associations have been formed in many parts of the country for the practice of the handicrafts, influenced by the teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris. Others, again, are hardly more than commercial enterprises, but all endeavour to meet in one way or another the increasing public interest in hand-work.