MK
\ l OS

THE CLAIMS OF DECORATIVE ART
THE CLAIMS
OF
DECORATIVE ART
BY
WALTER CRANE

LONDON
LAWRENCE AND BULLEN
16 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
mdcccxcii
PREFACE
the papers included in this volume some of the shorter ones
had their origin in fireside discussions in the studios of
brother artists; others have been addressed to larger and various
audiences; but all have been written under the influence of that
new-old view of art, which has revived during the last quarter of
our century, which regards it not only in relation to use and
material, and seeks for its vital root in the handicrafts, but also
in its connection with common life and social conditions.
Believing that art, looked at rather from the creative side of
design, is as essentially a mental and emotional language as poetry
and music, while it seeks expression through a variety of processes
and materials, and under natural limitations, which limitations, in
so far as they are frankly acknowledged, give to art in all its
forms a peculiar beauty and charm: believing further that an
art which appeals to the eye must be influenced for good or ill by
external and social environment, just as a tree takes its character
vi
Preface
from certain qualities of soil and climate, it follows that I think
it is hardly possible to attach too much importance to these
external and social conditions, affecting as they do both art and
its producer.
While maintaining the first importance of the arts and crafts
of design as contributing to the formation of a fine sense of
beauty—a sense which grows by what it feeds on, I have dwelt
upon the necessity of harmonious relation in all the arts, and
a return to their primal unity in architecture. In this fraternal
unity none is before or after the other, none is greater or less than
the other.
If I may have succeeded in making out a case for the arts
now called Decorative and Applied (though "there is but one
art"); if I have made good their claim to consideration in an
age given largely to place pictorial and graphic power first; if
even any of the following papers induce my readers to follow the
clue for themselves, and especially to think out further the
relation of . art to labour and to social life, whether they reach
the same conclusions or not, my book will serve its purpose.
Some few of the papers have been printed in various journals,
and I have to thank the editor of the Art Journal for permission
to reprint "The Claims of Decorative Art."
WALTER CRANE.
Edgewater, Illinois,
January 1892.
CONTENTS
The Claims of Decorative Art ..... i
/ The Architecture of Art ...... 7
Figurative Art . . ... . . . 20
Sculpture: from a Decorator's Point of View . . .31
Painting at the Present Day: from a Decorator's Point of View 3 5
On the Structure and Evolution of Decorative Pattern . . 39
* Art and Labour ....... 50
Art and Handicraft ....... 62
j& The Prospects of Art under Socialism . . . .74
^ On the Teaching of Art . . . . . .83
Design in Relation to Use and Material . . . .90
- The Importance of the Applied Arts, and their Relation to
Common Life . . . . . . .106
Art and Commercialism . . . . . .123
v. Art and Social Democracy . . . . . .140
Imitation and Expression in Art . . . . .157
Art and Industry . . . . . . . 172
s
$ a n * 3 5 8 * *
_ au* ber $afdje unb gibt tyn mir. 3$ retfje ben Umfdjlag
auf unb lefe:
t^d) bin fo entfefclidj, entfefclidj bettubt uber ba$, n>a*
$u fdjnebfh ©ofort, n>enn id? nadj ber ©tabt fomme,
n>erbe id? ^inauf ju S)ir geljen, fatte e* moglid) ift 2Bal'
bemar foil e$ fur mid) unterfudjen."
2Bie ein ©rid) ge^f e* mir butty* Jperj -: nid)t ein
etn$ige$ Heine* 2Borf bason, n>a$ jte fiir mid> fv$lt: —
unb nerso* fktfe id) ben 93rief in bie *iafdje unb blicfe
ttyn an.
f>3a/' f^flt er bann, „id) modjte gem etn>a* mit bit
fpredjen, fall* bu nidjt $u nersite bift."
„9Rein, nein, ba$ bin id) nid)t — bitte fd?6n, fe^ bid)!"
(£r fe$t fid) auf einen ©tu^l am genfter. 3$ ne£me
*Pla$ auf bem eifernen .Ropffhitf be* niebrigen 53ette$ -
nerso*, bafj id) in jeber giber jittere.
f/3a/' fa9* er Wtt& r&ufpert fid) - „&uerfl mod)tt id)
bid) gem nad) ein paar @ad)en fragen, bte fiir mid? efwas
merfnnirbig auefafjen."
„Sttun . . .?"
„3$$e$£alb £aft bu mir niemate gefagt, ba% bu ©t;pf)i*
li* fcattefl?"
„9tein, benn id) folgte bem State be$ 2frjte$, ber $u
mir fagte, ate id) fte mir jugejogen Ijatte —: ,©predjen
©ie mit niemanbem bason, benn ba* fonnte 3£nen ebenfo
tuele Unanne£mlid)feiten einbringen, nue bte ^ranf^eit
felbjt.'"
f/HUv totfyatt fcafl bu ba* nid)t mit in bie ,£riftiania
95o^eme' ^inemgenommen? nad) bftnen literarifaen <Prin*
jipien - fcm? . .
„9tein, benn ate id) mir bie ©ty>&ilte jujog, fttylte id)
The Claims of Decorative Art
what is called decorative art belonged distinctly to a lower cate-
gory, that its demands upon the mind, both of the artist and the
spectator, were much less, and, in short, the whole thing was
of lower aim, and required less skill and power to produce than
what is called pictorial art. If, however, we are justified in draw-
ing any conclusions from the history and practice of art, they seem
to invert this view altogether.
I have no wish to set the sisters one against the other, or make
odious comparisons, and indeed there is no need to do so, as, in
my belief, both kinds of art in their higher development join
hands. Their true relative position, indeed, may be expressed by
the two limbs of a pair of compasses, inseparable and mutually
dependent and helpful. It is certain that painting and sculpture,
as commonly understood, cannot be in a good state, cannot reach
any perfection, where the multitudinous arts that surround and
culminate in them—that frame them in, in short—are not also in
vigorous health and life. As well expect flowers to bloom without
roots and stems, light, heat, and air, as to think that beautiful
pictures or statues, or the sense that produces and admires them,
can exist where there is no beauty in everyday things, no sources
of harmonious thought about us, or delight of the eye in pleasant
colour or form in things of daily use and surrounding I would
go further, and say that where decorative or applied art is in a
wholesome condition good pictorial or dramatic art will follow
on as natural effect in the chain of evolution from certain ascer-
tainable causes.
This is sufficiently obvious to actual workers in art; but
"Truth," as has been said, " never can be confirmed enough," and
The Claims of Decorative Art
3
I am afraid that it has by no means reached this stage with a
great majority of the people, not to speak of academicians and
archbishops, and that it yet needs demonstration to many that
beauty, both in life and art, is not something accidental and
fanciful, the luxury and pursuit of a few dreamers and misguided
beings; that it is an organic thing, having its own laws, however
various, its own logical causes and consequences; that it, like
everything else, is a result of that continual fierce and strenuous
struggle for existence throughout nature; a living thing, and
therefore ever-varying in its forms, having its own ever-recurring
seasons — growth, perfection, decline, and renaissance — as we
follow it down the long stream of time, and mark its many habita-
tions from age to age.
We may well treasure the broken caskets, the priceless shells
and fragments of art, cast by the ruthless flood of years on the
desert shores; but let us not, in our anxiety and admiration for
the beauty that is of the past, forget that beauty is a living force
with us, a living presence, and that, like her prototype, for those
who have eyes, she rises from our northern seas every summer
morning, without the trouble of going to Cyprus. But she must
be fed, clothed, and housed, and for these necessities we, as
decorative artists, must be held mainly responsible. We are
the trustees, as it were, of the common property of beauty, and
we are the administrators of it, to use a well-worn phrase, from
the cottage to the palace. Whether as architects, sculptors,
painters, and designers, each after our kind, by the forms, the
colours, and the patterns we put out, we are insensibly forming
the tastes, by association, of present and future generations.
4 The Claims of Decorative Art
And, to return to the question touched at the outset, herein
is the mark and goal of decorative art, properly speaking; that
whereas other considerations may weigh largely in painting a
picture, such as desire to get force or expression, though, per-
sonally, I should say they should never outweigh considerations
of beauty; yet in decorative art, or, as it is not very logically
called, applied art, these considerations are supreme. Decorum,
balance, harmony, these are the graces who must advise us,
though a whole crowd of secondary considerations clamours to
be heard.
The current notion of decoration is summed up in the expres-
sion "flatness of treatment," and to the notion that this is the
whole of the law and the prophets of decorative art may be dimly
traced, perhaps, the conception of it in the mind of the archbishop,
and in those of many superior persons. Hence, too, the flat-ironed
primulas and the genus of enfeebled flora and fauna generally,
which so often, alas, do duty as decoration. As if decorative art
was a voracious but dyspeptic being, and required everything in
heaven and earth to be thoroughly well boiled down before it
could be properly assimilated.
Flatness of treatment, of course, is well enough; it is the most
single and obvious answer to one of the many problems a decora-
tive artist has to consider. It is a part of his business, no doubt,
to assert the wall, but his work does not begin and end there.
But even if this was the last word of decorative art, it is by no
means so simple a matter as it sounds. A world of judgment
must come in, as at every step in all art properly so called. It
needs our best faculties, whether we treat things in the flat or the
The Claims of Decorative Art
5
round; but as well might one be satisfied with the definition of
painting as "the imitation of solid bodies on a plane surface,"
as with "flatness of treatment" as adequate characterisation of
decoration.
The real test in decoration is adaptability, either to position or
material. The exigencies of both often open the gates of inven-
tion; but assuredly no decoration has a right to the name which
does not satisfy these conditions.
These are, after all, but the bones and the scaffolding, and
though it is highly necessary to have them in their right places,
the real triumphs of decoration come afterwards. And truly,
the world, to the decorative artist, is all before him, where to
choose. Nay, like every true artist, he has to make his own
world, and people it with his thoughts. And in respect of
thought decorative or monumental art, in its higher forms, is
capable of expressing, by its command of figurative and em-
blematic resources, more than is possible to purely pictorial art.
There is, in fact, nothing beyond its range, by reason of its
being more suggestive than imitative; and in this direction it
becomes again, as at its beginning, but in a higher sense, a
language—a picture-writing.
And what language can be more definite and enduring, whether
we read it from the artist's or the historian's, the antiquarian's or
the philosopher's point of view? How faint an idea should we
get of the nations of antiquity if all their art Had perished! And
it is all strictly decorative art, from the incised bones of the cave
men to the frieze of the Parthenon. Therefore, say some, paint
your own time, its manners and its customs, its coats and its
6
The Claims of Decorative Art
trousers. By all means, if you see your way to it; but it would be a
mistake to suppose that this was the only way of painting it. The
mind has its habits and costumes as well as the body—a far more
extensive wardrobe, indeed, which promises still to increase. Art
does not live for the antiquary alone. He is never likely to be in
want of material, even if Derby Days and Railway Stations were
never put on canvas.
I know no better definition of beauty than that it is "the most
varied unity, the most united variety."
Well, certainly there is no lack in our day of variety—I mean
in the sense of style and material. To the worker in art it is a
truly formidable prospect, and to enter the lists he needs to be
well mounted and armed, in view of the forces arrayed against
him. Modern life with all its hideous luxury and squalor; its
huge, ever-spreading, unwieldy, unlovely cities; the bare skeleton
and bald framework of new aims and inventions breaking through
the rich tattered garment of ancient life and customs. How to
reconcile these things, how to assert the supremacy of Beauty,
to raise her standard everywhere, how to bring sweetness out of
strength, would seem to need the strength and courage of an
artistic Samson. At the same time it is as well to remember that
too much preparation may be as much an encumbrance as a
defence, and that great effects are sometimes produced by very
simple means; that giants have been floored by a well-directed
stone in a sling, and the Philistines routed in consequence. I say
it is as well to bear this in mind when we take our artistic life in
our hand and go forth—to meet the monsters of our time clad
in plate-glass, cast-iron, and fortified in desirable residences.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART
/ VHE Architecture of Art is a somewhat comprehensive title,
and it might not unreasonably be expected of me, before
proceeding with the structure and treatment of the subject in
perspective, to give some sort of scale, sketch, ground plan, or
elevation, so that the general drift of my argument may be
understood. I do not propose to deal exactly with the various
forms and styles of architecture as they are, and have been
manifested in plastic or graphic art; or the predilections of
different designers and painters for certain forms over others as
accessory to their compositions, interesting as such a compara-
tive study might be. I am taking the term architecture in its
widest sense, considering it not only as an art in its effect upon
other arts, but as the fundamental, comprehensive, and sustaining
framework both of life and thought; the historic and living
background which influences and moulds all our ideas, the set
scene upon which is enacted the ever-shifting drama of art.
In comparing the art of the present day, architectural or
8
The Claims of Decorative Art
otherwise, with the art of the past, especially of any well-defined
epoch, whether mediaeval or classical, we cannot fail to be struck
with one great distinction underlying all superficial differences.
Whereas the art of past ages seems to have germinated, to have
been continually evolved in new forms, to be alive, and spon-
taneous, as it were, growing like a thing of nature, and expanding
with man's ideas of nature and life; in our day this sense of
spontaneity, this natural growth, is scarcely felt. Conscious and
laborious effort takes the place of spontaneous invention, and
originality is crushed by the weight of authority, is confounded
and abashed by the mass of examples. No form of architect-
ure or art seems to spring naturally and unaffectedly out of
the actual necessities and demands of daily life.
It has been said that the great exhibition of 1851 is to be
held answerable for a great deal; for the vulgarising and com-
mercialising of art, and for the final break-up of old traditions
in the crafts of design; but so far as this took place, it was
only the effect of causes lying far deeper in the great economic
changes, affecting the conditions of the production of all works
whatsoever, which had been going on during the three previous
centuries. That exhibition, as succeeding ones have done,
merely summed up the results of these changes, and showed
their effects, for good or evil, declaring to all whom it might
concern that the apotheosis of commercialism meant the degra-
dation of art.
This will seem a hard saying to such as are accustomed to
believe that the accumulation of riches and the welfare of art
go hand in hand. But let us look around us. Of course the
The Architecture of Art 9
spirit of commercialism does produce startling results upon art, if
not in it; and it is a wolf quite capable of seeing the advantage
of sheep's clothing. There is, for example, plenty of building
and house painting. Capitalism is nothing if not practical. The
national instinct based on the national shibboleth that "every
man's house is his castle," combining with the enormous growth
of cities, has produced those miles and miles of brick cages which
have more or less ruined the architectural character and proportion
of every large town in the kingdom. What, then, are these?
These are Englishmen's castles—on a small scale, it is true, and
run together. There are not hills enough for the castles required,
and what hills there are belong to somebody else. What is easier
than to build them side by side? They will support each other,
and economise bricks and mortar; and why trouble to make a
fresh design for each castle? The little lords' wants are much the
same as the big ones', only on a smaller scale, like his purse. He
must, of course, have his outer line of defences. His portcullis,
a drawbridge,—well, at any rate, iron railing and portico,—that he
may speak with his enemy the tax-gatherer at the gate; his dining-
room, drawing-room, bedroom, and bath-rooms, and gas and
water laid on. Why should he not be happy and comfortable?
and it is all so cheap too! Yet the speculative man and the man
of profits—the kindly builders who multiply these miniature
strongholds for the average Briton—we do not account exactly
as public benefactors. Jack is rarely able to build his own house
nowadays, so Jerry builds it for him; but the well-known drama
of rat and cat, dog and cow with the crumpled horn, is still
enacted, with perhaps some changes in the cast, and new scenery
io The Claims of Decorative Art
and dresses. Here are the bee-cells ready made for the future
occupants of the national hive, fit for the average man,—never
mind if they do not always fit him; we cannot take account of
round or square bodies; if the majority are hexagonal, the rest
must put up with the inconvenience and a little squeezing: great
is Average! Meanwhile, how fares it with art in the house that
Jerry built? Do the streets produced on these principles, and at
such a terrible rate, lend themselves either to pictorial or decora-
tive treatment? Do they suggest any ideas, even, except of the
dust-man? Well, but the man of profits is ready again. The
Briton can get his art cheap too—wholesale or retail. He can
have cheap dadoes and coloured glass thrown in here and there.
If these are not enough, he can fill his house with early (or latest)
English furniture, "surmounted by something Japanese," as the
comic poet saith. Should his aspirations remain still unsatisfied,
he can take the illustrated magazines to tell him about every art
under the sun, and how it is done. In fact, if the literature of
the subject could make artists and craftsmen, every street should
be bristling with them. Every Christmas scatters oil paintings by
our first masters, fresh from the printing-press, over the British
Empire. A shilling or so will secure a whole gallery. Was ever
anything like it in any age of art? Truly, no. Still we are not
happy—we are not happy about our art. We English especially.
We allow Frenchmen and Belgians to teach us painting, and our
American cousins how to do nearly everything else.
Now, I am not going to say it is all the fault of the Royal
Academy. That institution, as regards its chief feature, the annual
Exhibition, is only another engine of the man of profits, which,
The Architecture of Art n
frankly recognising the commercialism of the age, endeavours, by
special appointment and self-election, to adapt the business of
picture-painting to it, without troubling much about architecture
and sculpture, and leaving the other arts to shift for themselves.
It is but due to say, however, that they endeavour to counteract
the influence of the new masters in the summer by the works of
the old masters in the winter, on the principle, perhaps, of the
mediaeval system of doing penance.
In the course of evolution we are passing through a period of
disintegration. Art cannot escape the tendencies and influences of
its time, which, indeed, it is of its very nature to illustrate. The
artist has become more and more specialised, and the unity of the
arts has been broken up. He is no longer the master craftsman
among his workmen and apprentices, prepared to do all things in
the province of design, from the pattern on the hem of a garment
to the painting of an altar-piece. He is rather the juggler in the
master's place, who with a particular sleight of hand can command
a particular phase of sea or sky; or he has the trick of the flatter-
ing glass in portraiture. Perchance he seeks to draw " iron tears"
down the cheeks of (not Pluto) but the philanthropic Plutus, and
golden ones from his pocket by his peculiar domestic pathos; or
in stage-lights strikes the contrast of wealth and misery, chilling
his blood by melo-dramatic horrors; or by seeking to glorify him
in his happy hunting grounds surrounded by images of his sacred
animals. As to painting, perhaps it has always been more or less
at the bidding of the dominant orders of its day, but more natu-
rally so since she left her roof-tree and parted company with
architecture and sculpture, and all the fair and fascinating troop
12
The Claims of Decorative Art
controlled by a common influence and a common devotion, that
throng in the splendid retinue of design.
Through the columns of the colossal architecture of time we
look back down the long vista of ages and epochs, and read their
spirit in the unmistakable language of art, coloured as it is by the
human systems and beliefs of which it is the monument; whether
as in the wall-paintings and reliefs of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and
Persia, art is devoted to the glorification of military or sacerdotal
despotism; or the systematised symbolism of an ancient nature wor-
ship, humanised and made beautiful by the Greek, informed by
freedom and life; decaying amid the corruption of ancient Rome,
or graced with a new splendour from the East, rising in the
solemn magnificence of Byzantine art; and so through the vivid
imagination of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the new mysticism,
yet through the Church linked to the hopes as well as the fears
of humanity. Then with the new thoughts and hopes of the
Renaissance it rekindles its lamp at the shattered shrine of classical
sculpture and learning, until choked with artifice and pedantry in
succeeding centuries, it is forced back to nature and life again on
the threshold of our own time. But again it is in danger from a
new tyranny in that unscrupulous commercialism, which is not
less dangerous because less tangible, and not less despotic because
it is masked under the form of political liberty. Steam machinery,
like a many-headed, many-handed dragon, rules industry literally
with a rod of iron, and fain would it make art prisoner too, for
its profit, but that its touch is death. Intended for the service of
man and for the saving of human labour, it has under our
economic system enslaved humanity instead, and become an engine
The Architecture of Art
13
for the production of profits, an express train in the race for
wealth, only checked by the brake of what is called over-produc-
tion. Who can tell what will be the end of the journey?
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 character-
istics in art, as in costume and the surroundings of common life
throughout the world. The system of absolute individual owner-
ship 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
The Claims of Decorative Art
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 alto-
gether 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 vari-
coloured 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 dung-
hills 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 bedizen-
ment of fashion, not a revolving kaleidoscope of dead styles, but
The Architecture of Art 15
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 con-
sentaneousness of thought and feeling throughout society. "As
it was" (to quote J. S. Mill) "in the days of Homer, of Phideas,
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 build-
16 The Claims of Decorative Art
ings 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 con-
sidered 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 mediaeval 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
The Architecture of Art
17
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
18 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 others craft and its limitations. Artists, there-
fore, 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
The Architecture of Art
19
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 inven-
tion to use, it is very noticeable how artistic adroitness of adapta-
tion 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
^I^T 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
Figurative Art 21
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
archaeological knowledge and draughtsmanship upon the present-
ment 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 alle-
gory 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
22 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 appli-
ances in stage machinery and lighting have given a new develop-
ment 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
Figurative Art
23
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 satis-
fying 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.
24 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 em-
bodied 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 develop-
ments, 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
Figurative Art 25
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 contri-
bute 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
26 The Claims of Decorative Art
r
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 iEsop
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
Figurative Art
27
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, dis-
played in mystery show and masque and pageant, or emblazoned
upon the illuminated parchment, rose to new life with the Renais-
sance, 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 counter-
part in the designs of such artists as Albert Diirer and Holbein,
and the best inventions of the emblem books, which are so char-
acteristic 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.
The art of the designs in these books varies, of course, very
greatly, according to the current artistic capacity and taste; some-
times rich and inventive, or quaint and graceful, but often little
more than a kind of pictorial heraldry, where the moral intention
overmasters the artistic power, and becomes merely a label or
ensign to point the moral of the emblem writer.
There exists a ceiling at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk, in the
library there, which is curiously like an emblem book worked out
in an ornamental scheme. It is in low relief, in plaster or some
kind of gesso or stucco, and is said to have been done by Italian
28 The Claims of Decorative Art
workmen. It is panelled out in a way characteristic of the time
of the house, which bears the date 1619. In the panels are curious
figure designs—allegorical representations of the senses, the virtues,
and the vices—which remarkably correspond in conception and
treatment with their next of kin in some of these old emblem
books. The general effect is very rich and agreeable, and though
now white, it was probably coloured in the manner of the elaborate
ceilings of the middle Italian Renaissance taste, as we find them,
for instance, in the Doria Palace at Genoa, in the work of Gio-
vanni da Udine.
Mr. Morris tells us that all the leading types of pattern design
sprang originally from ancestral forms which were definitely sym-
bolic; so that art, which we now call purely ornamental, once was
made expressive of mental ideas,—like Persian and Arabic texts
in Eastern carpets and tiles, where language and ornament are
often one and the same thing. The descent of our Alphabet
itself has been traced in a direct line back to the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphic signs; and these again were formed into a species of
alphabetical system from an earlier form of picture or emblem
writing. Even after they had been systematised into the equivalent
of an alphabet, pure symbols are used for the expression of
abstract notions, such as thirst, for instance, where a calf is figured
above the zigzag lines which signify water.
The hart drinking from a stream is a well-known early Chris-
tian symbol; we see it in mosaic in the churches at Ravenna,
with the vine and the peacock. These last, too, seem to have
been a favourite device to carve upon marble sarcophagi, and
it may well be contrasted with later Christian taste, in its choice
Figurative Art 29
and treatment of symbols in the modern graveyard; and what a
strange medley of emblems meet us there!
Not less mixed is the symbolism of commerce, as exemplified
in the variations of the modern trade-mark. iEsop and the Bible
are again drawn upon, as well as Pagan mythology ; but here again
perhaps the less said about art the better. It is only interesting
as showing the value in the purely practical sense a figurative
device may have, something which is distinctive and easily identi-
fiable. It is in some sense a survival of picture-writing or hiero-
glyphic3 without its old Egyptian ornamental sense and distinction
of style.
Philosophy, too, in her most modern dress has recourse to
symbol. The high priest of Evolution adopted a device for the
cover of his book, showing a plant springing upwards from earth,
and putting forth leaf, bud, and finally flower; a caterpillar among
the leaves, a chrysalis, pendent from the bud, and a butterfly
hovering over the open blossom. Nothing could well be more
tersely, and at the same time comprehensively, expressive of per-
haps the greatest and most far-reaching theory of our time.
Nothing, then, appears to be beyond or beneath the range of
expression in figurative design; no touch or conception of life but
is made more emphatic and comprehensible by being cast into a
concrete image—a kind of visible and picturesque logic to satisfy
the eye as well as the mind. But while vigorous design, Atlas-
like, can sustain the world of thought upon its shoulders, no
breath of thought can quicken dead art into life again. It is the
true test of really vital design that it should carry without effort
its own intention, and never be over-weighted.
30
The Claims of Decorative Art
This vigorous mental vitality as manifested in art is always
characteristic of the great periods. Nor is it spent in one direction
only, but, like the life-blood, circulates freely through the whole
body of art; so that the chased pattern upon a piece of armour or
a watch-plate, the design of a dress fabric or the woodcut ornaments
of a printed book, no less than the frescoed or tapestried wall and
the highly-wrought easel picture, declare the same nervous energy
and endless untiring inventiveness in beautiful and fertile design.
SCULPTURE: FROM A DECORATOR'S POINT OF
VIEW
age in which the ornamental sense in art is so little
understood—an age which cares only for superficial pic-
turesqueness or photographic naturalism is certainly not favour-
able to any high development of sculpture, which in times past
has been the noblest and most expressive of the decorative arts.
We have to recognise the fact that sculpture, in common with all
art and all forms of life, lives by its capacity of adaptability to
circumstances. Perhaps she has a harder struggle for existence
than her sisters, and in the absence of zeal for great monumental
works it is perhaps not altogether surprising that she sometimes
is content to furnish toys for the drawing-room, and finds the
perpetuation of nonentities more lucrative than the pursuit of
heroic design.
That love of picturesqueness, of naturalism, too, which in our
day asserts itself in season and out of season, and, unfortunately,
often quite regardless of material or place, has left its mark on
32
The Claims of Decorative Art
sculpture, as in painting. Perhaps it would be truer to say that
it has revolutionised, or at least made a formidable insurrection in
both; so much so that sculpture and painting, in some instances,
appear to be striving to change places—painters sacrificing every-
thing for an altitude of relief which suggests departure from the
canvas altogether, and sculpture vying with painting in the
imitation of textures and scenic effects which cry out for the
palette.
For in sculpture, at least in marble, despite all the resources
of tangible relief and rotundity, it is curious that naturalism of
treatment should be far less suggestive of nature than the same
thing in painting. The most elaborate imitation of textures and
surfaces (such as we see among the modern Italians) has, in the
absence of local tint, an exaggerated and, consequently, unreal
look ; and if there is no strong element of design to counterbalance
the elaboration—which, indeed, is offered in its place—the failure
as a work of art is complete.
The importance of designing power in sculpture is obvious
enough when we consider that a sculptor, in designing a figure or
group in the round, has really to make, or ought to make, not
one design merely, but a whole series, in order that his work
shall be expressive from every point of view. This necessity,
which is one of the difficulties, is also one of the advantages of
sculpture, and develops its capabilities for expressive design to
the utmost. Thus, while the witchery of imitative skill may lead
painters astray, in sculpture we are forced back to what may be
called the more purely artistic qualities of design of style; terms
which imply much—which comprehend, perhaps, all the essentials
Sculpture: from a Decorator s Point of View 33
of good art. Without distinction in these the craze for imitative
naturalism, or whatever we like to call it, only ends, so far as I
am aware, in attempts more or less unsuccessful to turn sculpture
into portrait painting or tableaux vivants.
It is very much the difference between imitation and ex-
pression, or repetition and creation in art; and this means of
course all the difference in the world, both as regards the artist
and his public.
Imitation only requires industry, but design demands inventive
power. Design might be defined as the constructive sense con-
trolled by the sense of beauty. One may have plenty of energy,
plenty of frank naturalism in a work, but if we have not the
sense of beauty in art it profiteth nothing.
This is of course obvious enough as applied to art with a
distinctly decorative purpose, but it seems curious that while it is
taken for granted that you cannot do without grace or charm of
some sort in this direction, as regards what may be called pictorial
art, whether in painting or sculpture, given plenty of force and
fact, grace and charm seem often quite secondary considerations,
hardly missed if altogether absent.
To me, I confess, such distinctions seem artificial and in-
jurious to art. A statue, or a picture, or a pattern must be an
organic whole, whether it is itself a whole or a part. It must
agree with itself, or it will agree with nothing, whether it be a
frieze, a string-course, or a bust.
And after all it is this humanising and controlling sense—this
sense of beauty, balance, decorum—this sixth or artistic sense, in
short, manifested in so many different materials, methods, and
D
34
The Claims of Decorative Art
styles, varying with climate and character, but articulate in every
tongue—which is the really permanent quality. Without it you
may have science, archaeology, antiquarianism, imitation of nature
—many things very useful in their way, but not art.
PAINTING AT THE PRESENT DAY: FROM A
DECORATOR'S POINT OF VIEW
J WILL ask you to figure to yourselves an aspiring decorator,
filled with the latter-day enthusiasm for beautifying human
surroundings, and recognising a manifest, if superficial, improve-
ment in domestic architecture and adornment,—recognising the
excellent and sympathetic work that has been done by certain
individual workers, or associated workers, in various arts and
crafts, and still undaunted by the rapacity with which competitive
commerce and the modern industrial system seize upon and spoil
their ideas, and like
the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said,—
undaunted, I say, let us suppose our decorator filled with this fine
enthusiasm, so as to have almost persuaded himself that we are on
the brink of a second Renaissance; let us suppose him to turn for
a moment from his all-engrossing studies in stained glass, tapestry,
repoussee metal work, wood-carving, pottery, and the like, amid
36 The Claims of Decorative Art
which he may have become possibly oblivious of the progress of
painting; to turn from wall-hanging and wall-paper to what
might be supposed to be the crown and summit of its decoration,
the wall picture, or, to speak figuratively, from the courts of South
Kensington to the galleries of Burlington House—I mean in the
time of its May blossoming.
He enters the exhibition hoping to find his aspirations stimu-
lated, if not satisfied, by some show of what he has been accustomed
to consider the higher aims and influences in art—primarily the
search for beauty of line, colour, and execution, where indeed
they are practically unfettered, in the technical sense, except by
the four sides of a frame (which in itself might contribute as the
setting to the gem). Here, as our decorator would reasonably
suppose, these qualities would be considered the prime necessities,
the indispensable ingredients of the work, whatever sort of pathetic,
dramatic, or high poetic expression a picture might bear.
But what are the actual evidences that meet his eye? To
begin with, he is appalled by the effect of the galleries as a whole
—a number of odd-sized painted panels in gilt mouldings, jostled
together with scarcely any reference to scale or harmony, either of
subject or colour. Here, perhaps, a life-sized human head and
shoulders in startling relief appears almost bursting through some
silvery retiring landscape distance; there tragedy and farce side
by side, and on the same wall tradition on crutches next the most
naked naturalism, with "no language but a cry," or perhaps some
piece of sentimentality leaning, as it were, on the shoulder of the
coldest academic style.
Supposing our decorator to have at least partially recovered
Painting at the Present Day 37
from the first shock of this impressionistic picture, and to have
sufficient presence of mind to go more into detail, what does he
find? Much ability certainly, much energy, much industry, but
wasted for the most part upon objects and subjects either unreward-
ing or repulsive, and squandered in aimless, and therefore inartistic
imitation; much striving after instantaneous photographic effects
both in figures and landscapes—miscalled Realism; much aca-
demic learning and archaeology; much sentimental as well as melo-
dramatic feeling; plenty of domestic and quasi-historical incidents,
some symptoms of war fever breaking out in red coats; plenty of
sporting and animal life—live and dead stock; a superabundance
of the personal element as in individual portraits, although the
term portrait might often be more justly claimed by landscape
painters, portraits so called being as often as not treated as if they
were landscapes, and landscapes as portraits, in these days.
In these, and such as these, then, our decorator will haply dis-
cover the leading tendencies in modern painting. But he will
reflect it does not need that men should be specially painters to
exhibit such qualities as these. For any strong evidence of any
feeling for, or search after style, design, composition, beauty of
form, beauty of colour, or perfection of workmanship, not to speak
of poetic expression—for those qualities, in short, most peculiarly
and distinctively artistic—qualities at least inseparable from art
with any title to be called decorative—our decorator might look
long and far without finding much to cheer his drooping spirits.
He will depart from the exhibition a sadder, if not a wiser
man; but he will say to himself, "It was not always so." He
will go into our national collection, and there he will find abundant
38
The Claims of Decorative Art
evidence that painting was once what he fondly hoped it might
be again, at the head of the decorative arts. Then perhaps he
would go down to his house justified, possibly to dream, and,
especially if he had an impression of Diirers " Melancholia" in his
room, his dream might take some such shape as this (were it
possible to conceive in an emblematic spirit such a being) :. The
genius of modern painting would appear amidst the ruins and
relics of ancient art attired in the last Paris fashion, leaning upon
a photographic camera, with canvas and palette set, and looking in
her paint-box for an idea. Instead of Amorini should flit around
her the bats and owls of criticism, uttering discordant cries, and
one flying with a scroll on which should be inscribed, "There is
no beauty but where you would least expect to find it; there is no
truth but literalism."
ON THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF
DECORATIVE PATTERN
jy^AN might be distinguished from other animals by his
pronounced love of ornament alone, or at least by the
capacity for producing it. Evidences of the impulse to ornament
are found mixed up with his earliest traces on the earth, and some
of his most elaborate efforts have been upon his own person. In
North Borneo, for instance, I believe, to this day a very elaborate
system of tattooing is still practised by special artists, a great part
of the body being covered with elaborate patterns of fantastic
animals and other devices.
From the poetic or artistic side pattern might be defined as
the Notation of silent music. Certain decorative units are the
keynotes. Primitive patterns, like primitive music, consist of
very simple elements—of very few notes. Repetition is the chief
factor in the development of both—Repetition and Rhythm. If
music was discovered by blowing into a hollow reed, design
might have begun by experiments with a stick on the sand or
40 The Claims of Decorative Art
soft clay. "Here is a sound," says the musician, "let us
make music." "Here is a surface," says the designer, "let us
make a pattern."
The art of pattern-making might be defined as the constructive
sense applied to surfaces. The ornamental designer is not so
absolutely bound by structural laws as the architect; but the fact
that the structural laws which govern his art are more mental than
physical does not make them less binding or less real. Designing
is not mathematics or geometry, but there appears to be a certain
logic of line and colour in design which, given certain fundamental
forms and characters, demands certain necessary sequences.
The system on which a design is built bears much the same
relation to it as the skeleton does to the outward human form,
and a knowledge of the skeleton is considered indispensable to the
student of the figure. If a pattern, for instance, be rectangular in
its general plan, however enriched by detail, the law of its
fundamental construction must be acknowledged. Every line,
every form, demands a reason for its existence. The designer
commits himself to a curve; that curve cannot remain as
an isolated fact, or it would be meaningless. It leads natur-
ally to a counterbalancing curve, and then probably asks to
be repeated; for in dealing with curves and angles we are
really dealing with forms of a most expressive language, and
one which cannot be clearly articulated even, unless we have
something to say. The character of a pattern, then, is governed
by its plan; and although there is no limit to the diversity and
variety of a design, this organic necessity will make itself felt—
much as a backbone is a necessity to a vertebrate. Beyond this
On the Structure of Decorative Pattern 41
the character of a design must be determined by the physical
conditions of its execution and its ultimate purpose.
It is obvious that a design intended to extend horizontally, as,
for instance, a running border or frieze, is naturally governed by
different laws from one intended to repeat and spread itself verti-
cally as well as horizontally over a large field, such as a wall-
pattern. And a design fitted for a hanging will not adapt itself to a
floor or ceiling. A pattern, a design, should at once speak for itself.
Its plan should declare its purpose, and its treatment acknowledge
the limitations and necessities-^-the characteristics, in short, of the
material in which it is produced, and the method by which it is
worked. Such considerations as these, we all know, are necessary
to the successful existence of a pattern, and when they are success-
fully met we have only another instance of the survival of the
fittest. For it happens in practice that a pattern which precisely
fits such mechanical conditions has a longer life than one which,
though perhaps more beautiful, in some details does not adapt
itself to its position or to the necessities of reproduction so well.
This applies more particularly to patterns intended for repro-
duction by processes of handicraft or manufacture, but it holds
good also, though in a lesser degree perhaps, in all applied art,
and can never be left out of account by the designer. Perfect
fitness and beauty ought, of course, always to accompany each
other—as a matter of fact, other conditions being equal, they do,
as beauty is really organic; but mistakes are sometimes made by
introducing in design elements which properly belong to other
provinces of art,—for instance, when a carver or a weaver aims at
superficial imitation of .natural forms in his work rather than
42
The Claims of Decorative Art
their constructive value in design, or ornamental effect as pattern.
For pattern, in its simplest form, and regarded solely in its abstract
technical sense, apart from symbolism or imitation of natural form,
is nothing but a series of modifications in the structure and corre-
lation of line, such modifications being suggested or determined
by the necessities of adaptation to spaces, objects, and materials.
Taking line, then, as the basis of ornament, a simple horizontal
line forms, as it were, the primal decorative unit. Repeat it in
parallels, and we get at once the type of a whole series of the
simplest, but perhaps the most widely-used of patterns. It gives
us the banded courses of brick and marble, the reeded mouldings
and strings in architecture, the endless linear borders in ceramics;
whilst in textiles it seems, in the ever-recurring barred and striped
patterns, as if it were the Alpha and Omega of design, and that
like Hope—slightly to alter the well-known line—it
springs eternal on the human vest.
But probably the same reasons for its perpetuation are found
cogent both in building and weaving—that is to say, the funda-
mental structural necessities of both lend themselves naturally to
that system of varying the surface, and it seems universally
pleasing to the human race.
But we are not very far on the road of invention. Satisfactory
as bands, bars, and horizontal mouldings may be, cunningly pro-
portioned and nicely placed, man cannot live by parallels alone.
He needs other decorative units to make him happy. It is not
known who struck the first circle. The inventor of the compasses
—the prehistoric Giotto—remains in obscurity. Perhaps the
hollow reed is again the medium; and the circular mark which
On the Structure of Decorative Pattern 43
would be left by the impression of the cut end of a reed on the
soft earth might have given the circle to design. So, perhaps,
Pan is the father of the arts of design. However this may be,
with spheres all around, the idea must soon have germinated.
Man needed to look no farther than the sun and the sea to find
the genesis of pattern ; nay, he had its elements in his own frame,
which, as Vitruvius demonstrates, comprises, or is comprised in,
both square and circle; and these may be said to divide the
responsibility for the whole race of pattern systems between them
—to stand in the world of design as a kind of Coelus and Terra to
an endless offspring.
The types of pattern to which they give rise are suggestive,
too, of different characteristics of race, language, and civilisation.
Broadly speaking, the square with its derived chequers, zigzags,
and diapers might almost stand as a symbol of the ornament of
the northern nations, associated as these forms are with Scandi-
navian and Gothic pattern work; while, on the other hand, the
circle, with its derived scrolls and spirals, seems figurative of the
greater suppleness and sensitiveness to beauty of the Southern;
and it is to ancient Greece and to Italy that we must look for
their most perfect types.
Square and angular patterns strike at once by their emphasis
and rigid logic; while the circular and curvilinear types appeal
rather to sense of grace and rhythm. For richness and intricacy
we must go to where both perhaps came from—to the home of
the Arabesque—to the East—the fountain-head of patterns,
poured forth in a continual stream of imaginative energy and
inventive subtlety. While the Frank has spent himself in the
44 The Claims of Decorative Art
pursuit of the superficial facts of nature, and of the portrayal of
life and character, seeking energy rather than beauty, and fact
rather than ideal expression, the Asiatic has been content to
wrap himself in a mesh of delicate fancy; and if he regards nature
it is rather through a series of carefully-chosen symbolic forms
that subserve his subtle ornamental sensibility.
Returning to our primitive square and circle, we find that they
not only give us patterns and pattern systems by simply repro-
ducing themselves, but that, by subdivision and extension, they
give us certain offshoots' which form universal decorative units,
as well as fundamental geometric plans or governing systems of
the whole race of what may be called organic patterns.
The leading forms of these offshoots from the square and
circle are—from the square—the Chequer, the Fret, the Zigzag,
the Diaper.
From the circle—the Scroll, the Spiral, the Fan, the Scale,
the Oval.
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,
On the Structure of Decorative Pattern
45
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 prin-
ciples 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 orna-
mental 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
1 A splendid instance of its principle in combination with another—the scale—may be found in
the construction of the peacock's tail, or rather tail coverts, the magnificent effect of which when
spread is as much owing to its construction as to its colour.
2 As showing the constructive sense in Japanese design see, for instance, the small books of
designers' patterns and crests for demonstrations of the way in which designs not geometric in them-
selves, such as animals, may yet be governed or bounded by geometric forms, such as the circle, and
the immense variation of which similar pattern systems are capable.
46
The Claims of Decorative Art
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 mini-
mum 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,1 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 T>rawing—his
correspondent who defined ornament as consisting of "Contrast,
1 Patterns, like plants, illustrate, in their arrangement and structure, those broad principles which
divide the world of design—the symmetrical, the alternate, and the spiral systems.
On the Structure of Decorative Pattern 47
Series, and Symmetry "—very nearly hit the mark. The demon-
stration 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 theoreti-
cally 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
48
The Claims of Decorative Art
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 orna-
mental 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
On the Structure of Decorative Pattern 49
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.
E
ART AND LABOUR
T JOW define Art or Labour? We might dryly attempt to sum
up the artificial distinctions between them by saying that—
(i) 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 differ-
ences. It is true the labourer is engaged in moving, say, earth
Art and Labour
5i
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 funda-
mental 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 com-
munity, 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.1
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
1 Yet if art depends upon labour, labour also depends upon art. The architect must plan the
house before the labourer can get to work, and design of all kinds must exist in the head before it
can be executed by the hands. What we want is to bring heads and hands together again, and on the
same shoulders, and not keep them as classes apart.
52 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 acquaint-
ance 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
Art and Labour
53
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 acquaint-
ance 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
54 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 pre-
tensions 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 handi-
craft, 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 conven-
tionalise 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
Art and Labour
55
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 master-
ship—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.
The Claims of Decorative Art
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 pro-
ductive labour, of labour absolutely indispensable to the com-
munity, 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.
Art and Labour
57
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 produc-
tion. 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,
58 The Claims of Decorative Art
"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.1
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.
1 It is curious to note, by the way, that terms then used in speaking of pictures and painting, such
as "performing" and "piece," are now almost exclusively confined to another art—the drama.
Art and Labour
59
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
6o
The Claims of Decorative Art
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.
I will confess, therefore, that I look to the reconstruction of
society on a basis of equality of condition (quite a different thing
from dividing up) to remedy the ills we suffer from. The problem
of the future lies in a nutshell, but that nutshell is no less than
the organisation of labour—a hard one to crack perhaps, but it
will have to be done some day. The organisation of labour
carries the question of art with it—carries every question with it.
I can conceive it quite practicable for any community to declare
that not one of its members shall want for food, clothes, shelter,
or work; and while placing no restrictions on individual develop-
ment, so long as that development did not infringe the liberty of
others, it might fix at least a minimum standard of life. It is
conceivable on such a basis that the useful necessary work of the
community might be carried on by a system of co-operation, by
companies or orders, in which every able-bodied member of the
community taking part, the number of working hours would be
few and short, necessarily, since there would be no question of
making a profit for any one, and for the same reason no work
need be scamped or hurried, while ample leisure could be afforded
for cultivation and enjoyment. If, in the first place, the world
(each country) was regarded as a place for its people to live
happily in, should we be likely to blacken it with smoke, or ruth-
Art and Labour
61
lessly deface or destroy the beauty either of town or country when
the fierce competition of trade no longer hounded us on; when the
hope of profits ceased from troubling and speculation was at rest?
Then, perhaps (instead of scratching holes here and there),
we might do something towards really building up a noble and
beautiful human life—a life of useful and pleasurable, but not
enforced or excessive labour; of labour gladdened by its recurring
festivals, and closely allied with the invention and colour of art; a
life in which the individual might have free scope, and character its
full weight (unbiassed by "real" property, and without its undue
powers), yet with a paramount social sense of the unity of common
life; of the life of which we are each a part only, which was here
before we came, and which will go on long after we are gone;
that life which absorbs, while it protects and leaves free the in-
dividual man and woman, humanising them by the sense of mutual
love and dependence, while bracing them with the sense of public
spirit and duty,—such a life, which, collectively speaking, is
alone worthy to be called a free state.
ART AND HANDICRAFT
'VHE formation of guilds of workers in art, taken with other
indications of a very decided movement towards a revival
of handicraft and of design as associated with it, is one of the
most notable signs of the times.
In the midst of the full tide of mechanical invention and
unheard-of ingenuity in the adaptation of machinery, we come
back to the hand, as the best piece of machinery after all.
It is a strange commentary upon that industrial commercial
progress which has been the subject of so much congratulation.
In the full swing of our commercial century, which has witnessed
such a wonderful development of mechanical invention and appli-
cation of steam power to every kind of process of production,
involving the specialising of our workman, and his conversion
very often into an appendage of the machine, we have discovered
that we are losing our sense of beauty, our artistic feeling, and
capacity for imaginative design; that our daily work is losing, or
has lost, its interest and romance; that we are paying a heavy
Art and Handicraft
63
price for this lob-sided progress of ours in the loss of beauty
without and happiness within; and that that very cheapening of
commodities, which is often regarded as such a blessing, means
the cheapening of human life and labour; and we are apt to for-
get that the cheapest necessity of life may be dear enough if one
has not even the cheap symbol of exchange for it—the uttermost
farthing,—and the portion of the human family, of our fellow-
citizens in this condition appears to be continually on the
increase.
So that the glittering palace of commercial prosperity and
individual profit-at-other-people's-expense casts a terrible shadow
of ever-deepening blackness exactly proportional to the luxury,
the waste, and the splendour within.
In the blackness of this shadow is involved the blight and
desolation of many a fair tract of our green England, as well as
the blight and desolation of the lives of her sons and daughters in
the grime of overcrowded joyless cities.
And while at one end of the social scale we get the height of
degradation which comes of the delegation of all manual labour
to another class, with ultra-refinement and softness of living, and
an aimless and restless life; at the other end we get depths of
degradation which comes not of work but of hopeless toil,
or enforced idleness; precarious and penurious living, and all
the sordid and narrowing cares it entails,—like the mysterious
flakes that Shelley describes in his "Triumph of Life," falling
and falling upon the heads of the throng until the brightness of
youth is changed to a sour-visaged old age.
Here, in these two perhaps equally deplorable extremes, we
64 The Claims of Decorative Art
have the white and the black upon our palette for a picture
of modern life—a "Bridge of Life" I have not yet painted.
These are the two negations. Between them there is a band or
bridge of colour very various in hue, fading gradually into the
white, or absorbed gradually into the blackness. Here is the
artificial bridge of life we have built up with the rigid stones and
bricks of an inhuman and unequal economic system, cemented by
the lives and hopes of the mass of mankind, who are constrained
to bear that bridge from dawn to sunset in order that a privileged
few may^pass over dry-shod—not unpursued, it is true, by their
own Nemesis, if unvexed by the common cares that wear away
the lives of those unregarded supporters of the present structure
of society—the caryatides of toil turned to stone.
Well, this revival of handicraft, this claim of the workman to
have some share of the joy of the artist in his work, instead of,
like the blind tools and implements he uses, contributing to a
result in which he has no acknowledged part or recognition,—this
claim, I say, which is wrapped up in that revival of handicraft of
which we see the signs around us, is, in some sort, a protest
against the domination of our modern commercial and industrial
system of production for profit—the profit of some intervening
person other than the actual worker and maker—which has
gradually superseded the ancient one of production for use, which
has destroyed the old village industries, and is fast obliterating
local varieties and characteristics of all kinds as regards the out-
ward life of the people in all countries where our modern civilisa-
tion has obtained a footing.
Instead of things useful, each with their own constructive and
Art and Handicraft
65
organic beauty, or decoration arising out of these, being produced
at the will and pleasure of the artist or craftsman, with a view to
the actual requirements of particular people, things both of use
and so-called ornament are now, with few exceptions, with our
tremendous machinery, produced wholesale—as many as possible
to one pattern—whether hats, or boots, or clothes, or houses, or
food and furniture, or furniture for the mind's unseen house—
things intended to stimulate and delight it. Yet all these things,
even matters, one would think, of pure art like books and pictures,
instead of being the spontaneous outcome of a man's best thoughts
and skill, seem too often made by a species of guess-work, and
apparently on the assumption that, being made for no one, or no
place, in particular, they will do anywhere, or fit any one, or
every one, but sometimes end in suiting no one.
Now in order to facilitate this process of wholesale production
for profit (which ultimately depends for its success perhaps as
much upon the adroitness of the salesman as upon the actual wants
of the big public, at least beyond the bare necessities)—in order
to facilitate wholesale production, it becomes an object that all
labour that can be done by machine, after almost infinitesimal
subdivision has taken place, shall be done by machine, until such
workmen as are necessary to wait on the machine become parts of
it, and independent craftsmen cease to exist.
There may be a great future for machinery in the real saving
of labour—heavy and exhausting labour—the necessary heavy and
useful work—lifting weights, pumping, excavating, and carrying
us from place to place, and many other useful services—perhaps
when communities are masters of their own soil and the materials
66
The Claims of Decorative Art
of life; but at present it is only the cost of labour that is saved.
It may be a gain to the owner and to a few individuals, but so
long as machinery merely supplants men, and turns them adrift
to swell the army of the unemployed, what is gain to individuals
is a loss to the people at large.
If the production of the greatest saleable quantity for the
greatest purchasing number, without regard to quality or dura-
bility, be the object, of course there can be little question that
such a system as the present one is well adapted to attain it.
If mere reproduction of works on the same principle, even of
works of art, is our object, rather than to encourage the develop-
ment of the capacity for original invention, and the personal plea-
sure of fashioning, such a system is again well adapted to the end,
as, for instance, in the case of printed books, newspapers, engravings,
and all things where any form of press is employed. But for all
our advancement and steam power as applied to the printing
press, printing as an art has declined, however it may have
flourished as a trade, especially as regards the form of type and
its arrangement on the page, to say nothing of printers' ornaments
and illustrations from the point of view of their contributing to
the unity and decorative effect.
Yet this matter of book and newspaper illustration is con-
sidered by many, perhaps most, to be our strongest point. Well,
if we limit it strictly to the question of illustration pure and
simple, and leave out the question of adaptability to conditions
and decorative effect—the art and craft side, in fact—there can be
no doubt that, fostered perhaps by the enormous and wonderful
development of the photograph, there is an extraordinary display
Art and Handicraft 67
of clever work and graphic power of a kind scattered about among
our books, newspapers, and magazines.
In fact, some of our most original and clever work is found in
these things, and many of our most original painters first distin-
guished themselves as illustrators, and owe much of their character
and charm as painters to the fact of their having been first crafts-
men in black and white.
Yet in contemplating the amount of ability spent on works
the very existence of which depends often upon the passing
moment, it is impossible not to feel that there is an enormous
waste in this direction, both literary and artistic.
It has been said that we grind our potential Shakespeares very
small on the mill of the daily press; and in like manner, I
suppose, our Michael Angelos may be squandered in magazines
and Christmas numbers.
I believe it has been said that in our black and white illustra-
tive work we find our "art of the people." It may be the
modern substitute for it, but I should describe it more as the art
of a commercial democracy. It is produced by a special class
for special classes, rather than for or by the people, strictly
speaking; and, curiously enough, though addressed to a wide
public, its existence depends upon its swift conversion into
private property. You pay your money and you take your
choice.
As art, it is after all questionable compensation for that art of
the people which formerly existed in every village, every house-
hold, in close connection with every handicraft, however humble;
when every carpenter, mason, blacksmith, weaver, or plasterer
68
The Claims of Decorative Art
could give the touch of art to his work; when every gable, every
street, had character and beauty of its own, and every church was
the shrine of the most beautiful art of the time—common to all
who had eyes to see.
What, after all, becomes of this mass of illustrating and print-
ing, hastily conceived and hurriedly carried out—these flying
leaves, hot from the press, daily, hourly, weekly, monthly, falling
upon a comparatively apathetic public, needing stronger and
stronger sensational effects and newer novelties? Their days,
indeed, are as grass, for as soon as the breath of popular favour
and interest passeth over them they are gone, and the place thereof
knoweth them no more.
There being so little beauty and variety or romance in the
lives of most of us, and since the mind and the senses must be
fed in some way or another, we try to make books and pictures
fill the void. The demand increases, and an organised system of
supply springs up to meet it, so that our poetry and romance,
our sense of art and beauty, is ministered to in the way of
business, and made up in large or small parcels, to be had in
pounds' worths or penny-worths across the counter.
All this may be very admirable and convenient, but the most
beautiful art is the natural outcome and expression of a rich,
varied, heroic, and hopeful contemporary life, its character and
beauty depending upon that life, and the unity of its sentiment,
just as that of a tree or a flower depends upon the soil from which
it springs. By our modern methods we are gradually impoverish-
ing the soil while we are forcing the crops. We are obliterating
the beauty of common life, at least in towns, while we are
Art and Handicraft 69
endeavouring to increase and stimulate the production of works
of art.
That, surely, is a ruinous system—most uneconomical econo-
mics! We shall never make both ends meet.
It is well for those who have leisure and inclination to face
the question—whither our post-haste production for profit,
whether in art or craft, is carrying us? The world after all is
limited in extent, and the ordinary fundamental wants of man are
limited also. Sooner or later it may come within the bounds of
possibility to calculate almost to a nicety the demands of the
world-market. That market is already crowded with competitors,
and at the present rate the salesmen, or at least the goods, are
too many for the market—too much for the margin of profit ever
growing narrower. The result is a glut, a waste, a loss, and
incalculable suffering to the producers. Is it possible to contem-
plate the eternal existence of such a blindfold system? Is it not
within the bounds of probability that, when the people—the
workers—men and women, really come to their own again,
and really govern their own, a system of labour will be organ-
ised on a very different basis from that of the present, and on a
principle as near as possible to that expressed in the motto:
"From each according to his capacity, to each according to his
needs "?
It is, at least, on such a belief, and a belief founded on the
prospects of the inevitable ultimate break-down of the present
system of production and exchange by its own failure to fit the
conditions of life, that I base my best hopes both for art and
humanity.
7o
The Claims of Decorative Art
I have no wish to return to the fourteenth, or any other
century, even if wishes were horses and could carry us back.
The world moves slowly; the centuries do their work. I fully
recognise that our present conditions are the result of a long chain
of evolution, and we are still evolving. The peoples of the world
are being drawn closer together, and the interdependence of
nations brings such an ideal as I have indicated for the first time
in history into the region of possibility. All questions lead us on
to, and are absorbed in, one great question—the organisation of
labour. When that is solved in the interest of the community,
instead of for the profit of individuals, we may look forward to a
time when, released from the pressing burden of the anxiety for
the means of living, each one, while in his own community, taking
his share of the necessary work, having leisure and opportunity,
may devote his ability, such as lies in him, or as he may develop,
to the practice of art or craftsmanship; the results of which would
be, being followed for the pleasure of it, and in the pursuit of
beauty or for the expression of thought, Art would be entirely
unforced; growing naturally out of the use of the materials,
and adaptability to the constructive position, directed by creative
thought.
When the highest good becomes truly the good of the com-
munity and the service of man—the root and basis of all morality—
when instead of grudging and partial acknowledgment it becomes
the mainspring of action; and when, freed from narrowing and
debasing superstitions, man's place in nature is understood; when
living a life which afforded equal opportunities to all, which,
being more simple and natural, would favour the development
Art and Handicraft
7i
of the artistic sense, is it possible to doubt that we should see
great and beautiful public works and monuments, the result of
combined and sympathetic labours, expressing not only the joy of
individual artists and craftsmen in the beauty of their work, but
the collective spirit of the community, whose guiding principles
would be equality of condition and individual freedom, controlled
only by considerations of the common good and the fraternal
relationship of mankind?
Well, that is something, to my mind, worth looking forward
to. It may be a mere outline, but details can be filled in as we
complete the design. Whether its realisation be far or near, the
important thing for every one, it appears to me, is to have an ideal
of some kind. It is of the greatest practical value in life, con-
tinually stimulating us to fresh effort; producing wholesome
discontent with existing conditions, and filling the mind with
aspirations for something better, and the determination to work
for it, however infinitesimally each may help to attain it.
We know what it is in our work to have an aim—what a
difference it makes, if we are carving a piece of wood, or hammer-
ing a piece of metal, if we are seeking to express some particular
beauty of line or surface, which all the while dwells in our mind;
which we strive to satisfy, but which, whether we succeed or fail,
continually leads us to higher and better efforts. It is our aim
that makes all the difference in the conduct of art as of life.
It is this, too, which finally settles all questions of style or
method, of high art or low, over and above the material we work
in, which no artist or craftsman can afford to leave out of account.
There is a saying attributed to Goethe, I believe, that the true
72
The Claims of Decorative Art
power of an artist is shown when he works under limitations; and
most true it is,—applicable to all art, but especially in association
with handicraft, for the whole art of the craftsman lies in his
power of working under conditions; and he shows his skill in
applying design, and expressing it in different materials in such a
way as best to bring out the peculiar beauty and adaptability of
those materials, and the fitness of the design to them; by no
means endeavouring to imitate in one material what can only
properly be done in another, or joining in that aimless masquerade
in which the arts lose their identity and character together.
In the midst of decay and dissolution there are signs of new
life and movement—the awakening of spring among the dead
boughs of winter, the budding of the new shoots from among the
faded and fallen leaves. These efforts to revive the handicrafts, to
unite the scattered and estranged members of the family of the arts,
are full of good augury. Not that such movements alone can solve
the questions on which I have touched, except, perhaps, for in-
dividuals here and there; but the effort to return to better ways
in one direction is sure to lead us on to search out juster ways in
another; and in our realisation of the unity of art we may discover
the secret of the unity of life, if, indeed, the first is possible before
the last.
In the meantime the formation of guilds of workers in art
and handicraft must tend to foster the sense of fellowship,
sympathy, and co-operation, from the loss of which art and
artists have suffered so much. We shall discover by our trials
and exercises in various handicrafts what real pleasure and
interest can be associated with work; how impossible, indeed,
Art and Handicraft
73
is a healthy existence without interesting work of some kind;
and even what is called the drudgery of it—those preparatory
stages in work, with the ultimate end in view, become interesting,
and fall into their place as a proper part and necessary means to
the attainment of that end, and even, perhaps, not unwelcome
incidents in the day's work.
I feel sure we can afford to despise no manner of manual
labour, skilled or unskilled. The simplest operation requires some
kind of intelligence and adaptability. The stone-breaker on the
road will tell you that you have to find out "where to hit them,"
—not that any man ought to be condemned to stone-breaking all
his life, however. The human frame is the most adaptable thing
in nature (as well as in design); its beauty is owing to its adapta-
bility, and depends for its freedom of movement and command of
limb upon constant exercise. I see no beauty or desirability in
the contemplation of a society divided into two parts—brains and
hands—even were it possible, for neither can work well without
the other. We must overthrow that false, false notion that work
is degrading, and that it must be the object and mark of all superior
persons to shift the burden of all manual and useful labour on to
the shoulders of a class; that it is at all a creditable thing to be
"of no occupation/' or that impossible being "an independent
gentleman."
Here is where we have gone wrong, and there will have to be
some considerable changes in the ideals as well as in the realities
of existing society before things can be got straight again.
THE PROSPECTS OF ART UNDER SOCIALISM
pOR the sake of clearness I will commit myself to a definition:
firstly of art, which, so far as its meaning can be packed up
into the portmanteau of a sentence, might be described as a form
of vital force applied to the expression of Beauty. This will at
any rate sufficiently indicate the point of view from which I regard
it. As to socialism I know no better or more portable definition
than that of Mr. Belfort Bax, namely, that socialism is a new view
of life upon an economic basis.
Under the present system of commercial competition every
opportunity which seems to afford a chance of gaining a livelihood
or a hope of gain stimulates people to activity in all manner of
ways. But it is an unwholesome stimulus, especially in its effect
upon art and artists; and, as a result, the market is flooded with
every kind of catch-penny abomination — pictures or so-called
ornaments, and objects of art which could have brought no joy to
the maker of them, and can bring no real or lasting pleasure to
the user, for whom, perhaps, they but fit the whim of the moment,
The Prospects of Art under Socialism 75
or are only bought because of the persuasive eloquence of some
adroit salesman (under the aforesaid stimulus of gain); and for no
better reason than that such things are in fashion.
Now, naturally, there is this characteristic about genuine
spontaneous art, that its creation is a pleasurable exercise and ex-
citement. The artist is always anxious to give out what he has—
to offer his best to the sight of all men; and so far he is naturally
socialistic. Indeed, art itself is essentially a social product, inti-
mately associated with common life, and depending for its vitality
upon a co-operation of all workers, upon living traditions and quick
and universal sympathies. These are its sunlight and air.
Where the love of art is sincere, given the capacity, all a man
would ask would be security of livelihood, with a fair standard of
comfort and refinement, and materials to work with. For the rest
it would be simply a pleasurable thing to exercise his creative powers
for the benefit of the community and the praise he might win.
It would seem, too, that humanity under any system cannot do
without art in some form or another, and is always ready to wel-
come and reward the artist who has the skill to interpret nature,
or beautify and refine the life of every day. But no artist, in so
far as he is worthy of the name, works consciously for the
sake of reward, other than the sympathy and praise of his con-
temporaries. Modern commercialism does its best to turn him
into a man of business, but that was not his natural destiny.
Originally one with the constructive workman—the builder, the
smith, the carver, the weaver, the potter—he put the touch of art
on his work, the refining play of line and pattern, and he saw that
it was good, with the pleasure and delight of a craftsman. So use
;6
The Claims of Decorative Art
and beauty were one in the old simple days. But we have
changed all that. We have put use in one pigeon-hole and beauty
in another, and it is only by accident that they get mixed.
Now the severance of the artist and the workman—the crafts-
man—and the dismemberment, and absorption of the latter to a
large extent by machinery, have had results incalculably injurious to
art, whatever service they may have been in other ways. As to
machinery, it is but a question of adaptation of means to ends,
since machinery simply gives extra hands and feet to humanity;
useful enough to do heavy and useful drudgery, and works of neces-
sity in a hurry—feed, clothe, and warm, pump and lift weights,
for instance—to be the servant and labour-saver of man, in short,
but never his master and profit-grinder, as it has become, and cer-
tainly never intended to take pleasurable art-work out of his hands,
or speciously simulate the workmanship of those hands, and take,
with its variety, its interest and beauty away.
It is a curious thing that while every day we are extending
our railways and pushing our commerce, making travel easier, and
opening up unknown countries to what we are pleased to call the
advantages of civilisation,—while we are facilitating methods of
getting about on the one hand or the other, we are obliterating
those interesting varieties and local distinctions which make travel
chiefly interesting; so that while we increase our facilities of
travel we remove its inducements as fast as we can—at least from
the art point of view.
One of those things the disappearance whereof we deplore is
the art of the people—the peasant costume with its embroidery
and jewellery, always so full of character and colour, relics of long
The Prospects of Art under Socialism 77
antiquity and tradition, the odds and ends of which are carefully
scraped together and served up to the tourist long after they have
ceased to be realities in the life of the people. This native art,
found in all unexploited countries, is highly interesting, as showing
how naturally a people collectively express their sense of beauty in
colour and form, how naturally, with leisure and fairly easy con-
ditions of life, the art instinct asserts itself.
It is on the unquenchable spontaneity of this instinct that I
should rely to give new birth to new forms of art, even were all
types and conditions of the art of the past destroyed.
After a course of examination at South Kensington of vast
multitudes of designs in any and every style under the sun, I
could almost bear such a catastrophe with equanimity, since no
aspiring designer could then crib Persian or Chinese, mediaeval
or Greek patterns, spoil them in the translation, and serve them
up as original designs.
All the learning and archaeology in the world will not fill us
with an instinct for art, since art (to recur to our definition), being
a form of vital force, must spring from life itself. It depends on
realities, and draws its best inspiration from everyday existence.
It is bound to reflect the character of that life, and in so doing
gives the history of the people and the spirit of the age of which
it is the outcome. We have only to consider how much of our
knowledge of past ages and races we owe to the relics of ancient
art which have been preserved to us; and this brings us to the
consideration of another aspect of the importance of art to a
community, and one not likely to be overlooked under socialistic
conditions—I mean its educational value.
78 The Claims of Decorative Art
At present I think this is very much neglected. While we
crowd our galleries and exhibitions with masses and masses of
pictures every year, our public halls and the walls of our schools
are left blank for the most part. This seems to suggest that we
are thinking more of our shop-windows than of the windows of
our minds—especially those of the rising generation. But why
should not the capacity of children for receiving ideas through the
eye be taken advantage of? Why should "not the walls of our
schools be pictured with the drama of history? Why should they
not be made eloquent with the wonders of the earth by true and
emphatic drawings of the life and character of different countries
and peoples?
It has been said that the worst drawing conveys a more definite
idea of a thing than the best description. Bringing it down, there-
fore, even to the plainest utilitarian level, the importance of drawing
is obvious enough. A socialistic society would, however, not be
likely to gauge its value by so narrow a standard, and when the
object of education was recognised as the development of the
faculties of the individual, with a view to the service of the
community and reasonable enjoyment of life, as distinct from the
specialising them for a competitive commercial existence, art would
surely be recognised as a most important factor in that result and
accorded due place.
The greatest works of art have always been public works,
whether we think of the temples and statues of classical antiquity,
or the cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages. In the past
art has been devoted to the service of religion, whether pagan or
Christian. The wealth lavished on churches and pictures and
The Prospects of Art under Socialism - 79
tombs by princes and popes was spent for the most part, at least,
on works that all might see and admire; and the fact of this
larger appeal of art, and that it has the expression of the deeper
feelings and higher aspirations of humanity, increased its dignity,
interest, and beauty.
Nowadays artists, as a rule, work for rich men, and devote
their talents to beautifying strictly private interiors with every
kind of luxury and splendour: working for individual whims and
pleasures, however, cannot be as inspiring as working for the
community—for the time, for the people—and the feeling that the
artist may express its true mind and heart.
Unity of religious belief and sentiment now no longer exists,
and art no longer attempts to act as its interpreter. Painters are
content to be the familiar illustrators of ordinary life and passing
fashion, or the recorders of the superficial facts and phases of
nature, and care not for symbolic imagery or ideals. Architecture
and applied art, generally speaking, are devoted to the comfort or
glorification of well-to-do individuals, or to serve the ends and
purposes of trade.
In an epoch when personal comfort and private property seem
to be the main objects of existence, at the price of the absence of
both at the other end of the scale, this is not surprising, since art
is bound to reflect the character of its age.
Now socialism presents a new ideal to humanity. It is a
religion and a moral code as well as an economic system. Its true
realisation would mean again that unity of public sentiment, but
in a far higher degree, and the sympathy of a common humanity
freed from the domination of class and the grinding conditions of
8o
The Claims of Decorative Art
commercial competition. Such an atmosphere could not but be
favourable to art in the highest degree.
Not only would the common property in the beauty of nature
not be allowed to be disfigured for the purposes of private gain,
but with leisure and security of living it would not be a question,
as it is now so often, with the artist or craftsman, hindered, in pur-
suing his higher aims, and in seeking perfection in his craft, by
the cramping consideration that it will not pay.
And what is true of art work is, after all, true of all work.
A profit-grinding system must of necessity be against the produc-
tion of the best in all ways.
Greater simplicity and dignity of life, too, which would
naturally result from a juster distribution of wealth, would
have its effect on both art and architecture, and would find
expression in simpler and sincerer forms of construction and
ornament.
If we imagine a truly socialised community—a state of equal
condition (not necessarily of mental capacity or other quality)
wherein every able-bodied member served the community accord-
ing to their capacity, it might necessitate a portion of time (deter-
mined by the numbers of the community and their necessities)
being spent in some form of manual labour. This in itself would
be an advantage and physical benefit to each individual; nor so
long as enough leisure was secured would mental capacity be likely
to suffer, in its true sense, or the art instinct or capacity either—on
the contrary. There is nothing, after all, like close intimacy with
nature and fact to strengthen the character all round, and clear the
mental vision of morbid states; and as for art, like the wrestler, it
The Prospects of Art under Socialism 81
always gains new vigour every time it touches the ground—the
ground of nature and common life.
If your artist would depict the life about him—the drama of
men and women—he will be all the stronger if he has mixed
with the actors. If he would give man in all his labours and actions,
it is good that he should understand those actions and labours
—that he should be able himself to ride, swim, row, or drive
the plough, and wield the scythe or spade. He would be
a stronger man and a better artist: for it is as much what
we know and feel as what we see that comes into our work in art.
Would he be an artist in any of the handicrafts, let him first
be a smith or a carpenter, let him understand the material he would
work with, and its capacities; for it is from the workshop that all
good traditions in applied design must come.
I have spoken of probabilities and possibilities, and of necessity
both enter largely into the consideration of my subject as of any
thought of the future construction and condition of society.
Now, while I have the best hopes for art, I do not think it
probable that under socialism any one will get labour-values to the
extent of £70,000 for a picture, but it would nevertheless be
quite possible to get a Raphael.
The type of artist—supposing artists existed as a class or order
in a socialist community—most likely to be fostered would, I
think, be probably such as that represented by the master crafts-
men of the Middle Ages, such as Albert Diirer or Holbein, for
instance—men capable of design in all kinds of materials, who
could design a building, make the pattern of a jewel or a gown,
draw a title-page or paint a portrait. What may be called, in
G
82
The Claims of Decorative Art
short, the all-round artist would be likely to be more in demand
than the specialist more or less fostered under present conditions.
The essence of art is harmony and unity. We have seen how-
art depends upon life, and is affected by and reflects its character
and conditions. Before we can hope to get harmonious art
and thought, therefore, we must realise harmony and unity in
life.
For myself I am confident, in view of these considerations,
that what is good for humanity is good for art. Take care of
the pence of healthy life,—the current coin of individual freedom,
of political and social equality, of the fraternity of human service
and common interests,—and the gold pieces of art, thought, and
creative beauty will take care of themselves.
ON THE TEACHING OF ART
/"JpHE teaching of Art! Well, to begin with, you cannot teach
it. You can teach certain methods of drawing and painting,
carving, modelling, construction, and what not—you can teach
the words, but you cannot give the power of expression in the
language.
Of course a man's ideas on the subject of teaching necessarily
depend upon his general views of the purport and scope of art.
Is it (i) a mere imitative impulse, a record of the superficial facts
of nature in a particular medium? or is it (2) the most subtle and
expressive of languages, taking all manner of rich and varied
forms in all sorts of materials under the paramount impulse of the
search for beauty?
Naturally, our answer to the question, What should be taught,
and how to teach it, depends upon our answer to this question.
But the greater includes the less, and though one may be biassed
by the final definition, as above, it does not follow that the first-
named may not have their due place in a course of study.
84 The Claims of Decorative Art
The question, then, really is, What is the most helpful course
of study towards the attainment of that desirable facility and culti-
vation of the feeling and judgment in the use of those elements
and materials towards their ultimate expression of beauty?
And here we have to stop again on our road and ask, What
is this quality of beauty, and whence does it come? Without
exactly attempting a final or philosophical account of it, we may
call it an outcome and efflorescence of human life and energy
under happy conditions. It is found in varying degree, and the
development of the sensibility to impressions of beauty follows
much the same course and stages as those of the senses and the
intellect themselves—of the development of man, in short, as a
social and reflective animal. As one cannot see colour without
light, neither can we expect sensibility to beauty to grow up
naturally amid sordid and dull surroundings.
To begin with, then, before we can have this impulse and
sensibility towards beauty, it is necessary to create an atmosphere
of beauty,—a condition of life where it comes naturally with the
colours of dawn and sunset; where it has not to struggle as for
very life, as it were, for every breath it draws, or ask itself the
why and wherefore of its existence.
Nor is beauty an independent and unrelated quality, but is
the result, as we find it in its various manifestations in art, of
long ages of growth and co-operative tradition and sympathy.
Seeking beautiful art, organic and related in all its branches,
we turn naturally to places and periods of history which are the
culminating points in such a growth—to Athens in the Phidian
age, to England or France in the mediaeval age, to Florence or
On the Teaching of Art
85
Venice in the early Renaissance, for instance, rather than to
modern London or Paris. Or even limiting ourselves to our own
day, we have got to expect far more from the man who has worked
from his youth up in an atmosphere of art, even if it is only that
of the modern painting studio, than from one of our artisans,
trained to some one special function, perhaps, in a process of
manufacture, and whose daily vision is bounded by chimney-pots
and back-yards.
A pinch of the salt of art and culture, at measured intervals,
will never counteract the adverse influence of the daily, hourly
surroundings on the eye and the mind. It is useless if one hour
of life says "yes," if all the others say "no" continually.
Our first requirement, then, is a sympathetic, or at least
suggestive atmosphere—which means practically a reasonable
human life, with fair play for the ideas and senses through the
drama of the eye. It ought to be within the reach of all of us,
whereas as a matter of fact it is hardly possible for any under
the present economic system.
Granting our first condition would go a long way towards
solving the next problem—what to teach, for we should then find
that art was not separable from life.
Children are never at a loss what to learn or what to
teach themselves when they see any manner of interesting
work going on. They gather at the door of the village
blacksmith, or at the easel of the wayside painter. Demon-
stration is the one thing needed, primarily. Demonstration,
demonstration, always demonstration. This is perhaps at the
bottom of the recent strong determination to French methods on
86
The Claims of Decorative Art
the part of our younger painters. You can learn this part of the
painting business because you can see it done. You could learn
any craft if you saw it done. But it does not follow that there is
no painting but impressionism—with M. Monet as its prophet.
Not that I would undervalue any sincere and genuine im-
pulse; only the cultivation of this kind of painting exclusively—
that is, the presentment of aspect—specialises a man and differ-
entiates the painter more and more from other artists; and the
concentration of public interest on this form of art draws away
talent from the other most important branches.
It might be said almost that the modern cabinet or com-
petitive gallery picture, unrelated to anything but itself (and not
always that), has destroyed painting as an art of design.
I would therefore rather begin with the constructive side of
art. Let a student begin by some knowledge of architectural
construction and form. Let him thoroughly understand—both
historic and artistic—the connection between art and architecture.
Let him become thoroughly imbued with a sense of the essential
unity of art, and not, as is now so often the case, be taught to
practise some particular technical trick, or be led to suppose that
the whole object of his studies is to draw or paint any or every
object from the pictorial point of view exclusively. Let the two
sides of art be clearly and emphatically put before him—that of
Aspect and Adaptation. Let him see that it is one thing to be
able to make an accurate presentment of a figure, or any object in
its proper light and shade and relief, in relation to its background
and surroundings, and quite another to give expression to outline,
or to make them into organic pieces of decoration to fit a given
On the Teaching of Art
87
space. Then, again, he should perceive how the various media
and materials of workmanship naturally determine the character
and treatment of his design, while leaving large individual range.
A course of study from this point of view would tend to
bring home to the student the wholesome dictum of Goethe,
"Art is art, precisely because it is not nature," even if his very
first study failed to convince him of its truth.
The formative capacity and constructive sense may exist in a
high degree, without any corresponding power of drawing in the pic-
torial sense; and considerable proficiency in simpler forms of various
handicrafts, such as modelling, wood-carving, and repoussee work,
is possible of attainment by quite young people, whereas the per-
ception of certain subtleties in pictorial methods of representation,
such as the perspectives, planes, and values, delicacy of modelling,
and the highly selective sense which deals with them, is a matter
of matured mental capacity, as well as technical experience and
practical skill. So that there are natural reasons for a primary
training in some forms of handicraft, which, while affording the
same scope for artistic feeling, present simpler problems in design
and workmanship, and give a tangible foundation from which to
start.
In thus giving, in a course of study in art, the first place to
architecture and the allied decorative arts, we are only following
the historic order of their progress and development. When the
arts of the Middle Ages culminated in the work of the great
painters of the Renaissance, their work showed how much more
than makers of easel pictures they were—architects, decorators,
jewellers, calligraphers, embroiderers; so that a picture, apart from
88 . The Claims of Decorative Art
its central interest and purpose, was often an illustrated history of
contemporary design in such things.
Now, my conclusion is that whereas a purely pictorial training
or such a training as is now given with that view, while it often
fails to be of much service in enabling a student to paint a picture,
quite unfits him for other fields of art quite as important, and
leaves him before the simplest problem of design helpless and
ignorant; while a training in applied design, or merely in draw-
ing and colouring with that view, and all the forethought and in-
genuity it calls forth, would be a good practical education in itself,
would be a good preparation for pictorial studies, should the
student ultimately devote himself to them.
I should therefore endeavour to teach relatively—to teach
everything in relation not only to itself, but to surroundings—
designating in relation to its materials and objects—the drawing of
form in relation to other forms.
The ordinary ways of teaching drawing, say from the human
figure—the Alpha and Omega of all study in art—do not show
themselves sufficiently alive to the help that may be gained
by comparative anatomy. Study the figure not only in itself, but
in relation to the forms of other animals, and draw the analogous
parts and structures—bones, joints, musclies—side by side, not
only from the comparative anatomist's point of view, but the
artist's. Study them in life and in action also.
We have recently been told that artists have been fools since
the world began in relation to depicting the action of animals; but
it was by a gentleman who did not appear to have distinguished
between moments of arrested action and the action which is the
On the Teaching of Art
89
sum of those moments. Instantaneous photographs of animals
in action tell you whereabouts their legs are at a given moment,
but it is only when they are put in a consecutive series and turned
on a wheel before the eye that they represent action. This is
illusion, not art. Now the artist has to represent or to suggest
action without actual movement of any kind, and he has generally
succeeded, not by arresting the action of the moment, but by giving
the sum of consecutive moments, much as the wheel does, but with-
out the illusory trick. His business is to represent, not to imitate.
Art, after all, is not science. Until we all go about with photo-
graphic lenses with dry plates in them instead of eyes, we shall, I
fear, still be interested in what artists have to say to us about nature
and their own minds, whether instantaneous impressions or not.
This is only one of the many questions which rise up at every
step, and I know of no system of teaching which adequately deals
with them. No doubt our systems of teaching, or attempting to
teach, art want overhauling like other systems; and when we are
overhauling the system of life itself, it is not wonderful.
I do not, of course, believe in any cast-iron system of educa-
tion from any point of view. It must be varied according to the
individual. It must be made personal and interesting, or it is
of little good; and no system, however good, will manufacture
artists in anything, any more than the most brilliant talents will do
away with the necessity of passionate devotion to work, careful
thought, close observation, and constant practice, which produces
that rapid and intimate sympathy of eye and hand, and makes
them the responsive and fluent interpreters of that selective and
imaginative impulse which results in art.
A
DESIGN IN RELATION TO USE AND MATERIAL
J VHE fundamental importance of design, and its claims to con-
sideration, will hardly be disputed, particularly at a time
when the advancement of art in its application or relation to
industry is so much sought for. There is not a single thing we
use but involves this primal necessity of design in some degree,
which has not demanded some exercise of human thought, some
measure of ingenuity, some kind of plan, to fit it for its pur-
pose, or to commend itself to our sense of beauty. And here it
may be said, although art in this sense is generally termed
"applied art," strictly speaking, all forms of art, properly under-
stood, come under this head, and that there is no such thing
as ##applied art—or, if there is, we may say then it is not art
at all.
The gist of the whole matter lies in this application. Design
in all its forms is governed by the relative spirit. In making a
design, even of the simplest kind, important considerations and
questions immediately arise—questions of scale, of treatment, of
Design in relation to Use and Material 91
material, of 'position, of use, which finally decide its character; and
in the solution of such questions lie at once the business and the
success of the designer and craftsman.
Now the first of these considerations is Scale. This is
determined by the size of the object or surface we deal with,
its use, and its relation to its surroundings: as the relation of the
axe-head to its handle, the unit of a pattern, the height and
proportions of a chair—what, in short, we may call architec-
tural considerations. Fitness of scale is of course primarily
determined in relation to the scale and proportions of man him-
self, who is naturally the standard and measure by which all
work for the use and pleasure of humanity is finally checked.
You would not, for instance, carve colossal heads on chair
backs; or, on the other hand, try to make a chimney-pot
look like a miniature cathedral spire! These, of course, are
extreme instances.
There is a certain natural logic and common sense of pro-
portion which keeps us tolerably straight in these matters, while
it allows a sufficiently indefinite margin for individual taste and
variety of character.
There exist obvious reasons, as well as natural feeling, in
favour of decoration intended to be near the eye, or upon objects
to be handled or used, being small in scale and finely worked;
and though, in that perpetual readjustment and inventive adapta-
tion in the control of the designer there is always scope for
variety, behind all he is conscious of the pressure of relative
considerations—of natural law, in fact.
Then we come to the great question of Treatment, in which
92 The Claims of Decorative Art
lies folded, as it were, like the flower in the bud, the very virtue
and essence of art.
To begin with, the designer, in the application of his art to
material and use, has to put away from him the allurements of
imitative naturalism, except in so far as they can be made to
contribute and be subordinated to the effect and purpose of his
work as a whole. He soon perceives the natural cleavage between
nature and art—between the accidental picturesqueness of confused
detail, broken surface-lights, and shadows, and definite, selected,
related, and expressive forms and lines. He may be likened to a
child with a handful of wooden letters out of which he has to
construct words and sentences. Nature and the history of art
is the vast encyclopaedia of fact and form and phase out
of which the poet and the artist have to choose the materials for
their work.
A painter pure and simple is, of course, much less restricted,
much less weighted with relative considerations, than the designer,
and is at liberty, governed only by the necessary internal relation
of his work, to avail himself of effects beyond the scope of the
maker of tapestries or mosaics, the painter of glass, or the carver.
Yet, curiously enough, in our industrial century the influence of
the easel-picture painter has been paramount. He has ridden (I
will not say in triumph) over our household furniture, he has
trampled on our hearthrugs and carpets, he has left his impress
on our napery and antimacassars; his influence, in fact, can be
traced from our faience to our fish-slice; and this perhaps because,
owing chiefly to industrial and economic conditions, the term art
and artist came to be limited to pictorial work and its producer,—
Design in relation to Use and Material 93
since the modern easel-picture painter was until lately the only
form of craftsman working independently, and with anything like
complete control of his own work.
We are recovering, however, I think. We are realising the
difference between pictorial and decorative art, between imitative
and constructive design. It will do us no harm, as a corrective
to our pictorial excesses, to draw the line very sharply , between the
two,—to put, metaphorically, the decorative sheep on the one hand,
and the pictorial goats on the other. For we must remember
there are two sides to art, with distinct aims. They may be
characterised as "aspect" and "adaptation": the one seeking
rather to imitate planes and surfaces, accidental lighting, phases ^
and effects; the other constructive, depending on its beauty, on
qualities of line and form and tint, unaffected by accidental con-
ditions, seeking typical rather than individual forms, and orna-
mental rather than realistic results.
The first necessity in designing is Definition. Hence Li n e is all-
important. Let the designer, therefore, in the adaptation of his
art, lean upon the staff of line,—line determinative, line emphatic,
line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting. It
cannot lead him wrong; it will never deceive him. He will
always know where he is weak, and where he is indecisive, where
he has hesitated, and where he has been confident. It will be the
solid framing of his structure—the bones and marrow of his
composition.
In line alone, having regard to all its different degrees of
tenuity, the designer possesses a means of expression of consider-
able force and sympathetic range. It lends itself to the most
94
The Claims of Decorative Art
sensitive and delicate definition in a fine pen, pencil, or silver-point
drawing, and it is capable of the utmost strength and architectural
solidity, as in the emphatic outlines necessary to express the pattern
and bring out the qualities of the material in large mosaic decora-
tions and stained glass; where, too, other considerations come in,
as the tesserae (Fig. 2) of the one, and the lead lines (Fig. 1) and
colour scheme in the other.

Fig. i. Fig. 2.
And here we come to another essential element in designing:
we cannot touch what may be called the exigencies of particular
materials, or begin to define our cartoon or pattern in line without
perceiving the necessity of proceeding upon some kind of system
in the treatment of form and detail.
In purely pictorial work, of course, this is not felt to the same
degree, though the necessity is present even there, since we cannot
work with Nature's own materials. We cannot dip our brush in
liquid sunshine on the one hand, or have the blackness of night
upon our palette on the other. We have not her greens or her
reds, and gold and blue, in our boxes; we cannot command the
Design in relation to Use and Material 95
full colours of the sunset or the dawn; so that with the most
uncompromising realist the result is after all a compromise, a
question of translation, adjustment to a scale, and more or less
figurative expression. The same as regards minuteness of detail.
Do we paint for the eye at such and such a distance, the photo-
graphic lens, or the microscope? A little nearer or a little farther,
and all the conditions are changed. The fact is, as I have said,
all art is conditioned; it is only a question of degree, and it is
the successful demonstration and determination of these degrees
which mark the difference between one kind of art and another,
between one artist and another.
There is of course no absolute determination of rules for all
cases. There is nothing absolute in art. Art is not science.
The way is perpetually open for new experiments, for new exposi-
tions, and new adaptations and applications, which makes the
pursuit of art in all its forms so peculiarly fascinating, and ever
fresh and inspiring.
But to return to the question of System. Now supposing we
wanted to make a pattern of a rose for a wall-paper. We might
pick one from our garden (if we had one, as indeed every designer
ought to have) and sketch it exactly as we found it—a portrait, as
near as we could make it, of an individual rose with all its acci-
dental characteristics. Well, we might make an interesting study,
certainly, but when we came to apply it we should perceive that it
made, however good as a study, a very poor pattern, and its virtue
and interest as a drawing would be at once destroyed directly our
pictorial rose was repeated—which we should be driven to do. We
should practically get the repetition of a more or less shapeless
96 The Claims of Decorative Art
blot, a formal and regular repetition of an informal and natural-
istic drawing—a contradiction in terms, in fact. Yet it is a
thing that has been attempted over and over again. A senti-
mental public perhaps likes roses, in season and out of season,
and considers perhaps that a rose in any material would, if not
smell, at least look as sweet. It may be so, but if it be not sweet
and clear in line and disposition, and organic as a pattern, its
sweetness is wasted on the desert air of false art and taste and
failure in decoration.
Therefore it is that the designer, having regard to the con-
ditions of ornamental effect and relation to use and material,
proceeds in a very different way. He finds that a certain formal-
ism is an essential condition of his work, seeing that his aim is to
adorn a space pleasantly, to construct a pattern that will bear
repetition, or rather demand it, as another essential condition of its
existence. He finds therefore that typical and abstract forms
are of more value for the purpose than accidental ones; that
suggestion is better in decoration than naturalistic or pictorial
imitation. He would naturally, in taking a rose as his theme,
recur to the primitive and fundamental type—to the simple
flower as we see it on the parent stem of the wild rose of our
hedges (Fig. 3). With such a type as this he could safely
make a diaper or simple sprigged arrangement which would
be satisfactory as far as it went (Fig. 4).
Nor, let it be observed, is the designer, in following such prin-
ciples, departing from nature necessarily. Nay, in his way he
may be expressing as much natural truth even as the pictorial
artist: as we have seen that truth of aspect is one thing, and truth
Design in relation to Use and Material 97
of construction and detail another; while in following the necessi-
ties of adaptation to use and material the designer is only carrying
out in the region of art the great principle of Nature herself, which

Fig. 3. Fig. 4.
rules through all forms of life,—that necessity of adaptation to con-
ditions, which, as we have learned, has led to the endless variety of
development in both plant and animal form that we see on every
side.
The necessity of plan in designing next makes itself felt, and
is of course very important, and capable of almost any degree
of extension and complexity, although designs for extension on
walls or hangings generally fall into recognisable classes with
different variations. Starting with our diaper, square or diagonal,
which may be considered the simplest, we may build our pattern
upon a great variety of foundations (Fig. 5). But we shall find it
necessary to build upon some plan, as a plan is as essential to a
pattern as the skeleton to the human figure, though you may
eventually conceal it as much as the skeleton is concealed by the
human form, or more, by superadded enrichment, detail, and
H
98
The Claims of Decorative Art

Fig. 5-
intricacy. How far to go in this way the nature of the material
and its uses will generally decide.
As to colour treatment, again, the best decorative "effect
does not demand the use of heavy
shading or relief. The colours
should be pure and fair, and the
true local colours of all things
should be sought, unaffected by
accidental lights and shadows, as
if we saw everything in an evenly
diffused or flat light.
In modelling, or any treatment
where the means of expression and
ornamental effect is by relief, of course the question is different,
though here again the gist of the matter lies in treatment, and
there is all the difference in the world between one treatment and
another.
Now of course the strictest observance of such principles in
designing as I have indicated will not necessarily ensure an interest-
ing pattern, though they would suffice to produce a workable one.
Other considerations come in as we advance. Plan involves the
consideration of the proportion and relation of our masses, and
beauty of silhouette. Draw a figure with a big head, and it at
once looks ridiculous (this seems so taken for granted by the many,
that comic draughtsmen have subsisted upon it for years), while
with a head of the natural proportion it may have grace and
dignity. The same principle holds good in ornamental design-
ing, and a beautiful result very largely depends upon a due
Design in relation to Use and Material

Fig. 6.
recognition of the importance of proportions. It does not follow
that these proportions are those of nature, as in a naturalistic
picture. In a decorative design, to serve our ornamental purpose,
one may depart widely from them, as in the relative size of trees
and figures and flowers and animals,
etc., where there is no approach to
naturalistic representation, as in de-
signs for textiles and other things.
The important thing to preserve
is the relation of masses, the organic
and necessary connection arising out
of the constructive necessities. In
pattern work three -proportions are
generally felt desirable. You can-
not jump at a bound from large to small, therefore an intermediate
scale is useful, as in the illustration (Fig. 6). The masses of the
tree and the pot are combined by
the forms of the birds, and further,
by the thin stems and leaves behind.
Silhouette, again, is a very im-
portant consideration in designing.
It is a very good practice to block
out one's design in silhouette in the
first instance, as this will afford the
best test of the relations and pro-
portions of its masses possible, and
of its variety. One does not seek to arrange a figure exactly
symmetrically (as at A, Fig. 7), except under very formal condi-

Fig. 7.
ioo The Claims of Decorative Art
tions. That at B is felt to be a more agreeable treatment. The
more variety in contour, the more beauty we get.
The best practice in effective and ornamental use of silhouette is
to be found in designing patterns for stencilling, where everything
depends upon it. You block out a pattern in flat colour—light
on dark, or dark on light—in such
a way that it is capable of being cut
out of a sheet of card or zinc with-
out breaking, so that by painting
over the perforated part, which is
the pattern, it is transferred to any
ground you desire. Fig. 8 shows
two sketches of stencil patterns;
the halves to repeat.
Another important consideration
in designing is the adequate filling of the space for which your
design is intended.
Now here again pictorial proclivities have been very mis-
leading. They have led us, in illustrating books for instance,
to that inorganic way of loosely vignetting a subject—splashing
a landscape upon or across a page without regard to its mechanical
conditions, and ignoring its necessary relation to the type. In-
stances of this kind of treatment are to be found notably in
our illustrated magazines of Continental or American origin,
which have been setting the fashion in so-called page decoration
of late years. But this inorganic, unrelated kind of designing
has not confined itself to books. You may find it anywhere
and everywhere almost,— dabbed upon fans, dragged across

Fig. 8.
Design in relation to Use and Material 101
cupboard doors, and generally upset over the unconsidered trifles
of everyday life.
I am afraid, too, that something is traceable to Japanese in-
fluence. But it does not at all follow that, because a Japanese artist,
with his wonderful knowledge of nature and precision of touch,
can throw a flowering branch, or bird, or a fish across a sheet of
paper, or a panel, with such consummate skill as to delude us into
the belief that he has decorated the space, therefore any one,
with very inferior powers of draughtsmanship, can go and do
likewise with equal eclat. It is somewhat like attempting tight-
rope dancing before one can walk properly on the ground.
The truth is that all the solid and determinative motives in
design are traceable to the influence of architectural style. In the
absence of a living style in architecture, the arts of design, which
are really its offspring, languish, and lose at once their fitness,
monumental dignity, and importance.
For style is strictly the sum of considerations like the fore-
going—with individual feeling superadded. It is the quality
which collects and concentrates, as it were, the virtue and essence
of the past, and fuses it with the present. It consists in that
highly selective impulse or instinct which gives an artist's work
its own peculiar and distinctive character, without isolating him or
disconnecting him from the work that has gone before, or the
work of his own day, so that a great design is in fact a link, or
a luminous point or jewel, in a long golden chain, and necessarily
dependent upon its continuity.
Style, of course, is a very different thing from what are known
as "styles." It is the difference between the quick and the dead.
102
The Claims of Decorative Art
We can get decorations "in any style" nowadays to order.
We can be Ancient Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman, or Pompeian,
or Byzantine, or Celtic, or Italian, or German, Gothic or Renais-
sance, whichever we please, Louis Quatorze or Louis Seize—worse
luck,—but none of them seems to please for long, perhaps
because their designers and producers are only "pleasing to live,"
as is the proverbial fate of those who "live to please." Ours is
the age for masquerading, because we have no particular reality
of our own—no style, in short. But we cannot be always mas-
querading, however amusing it may be once in a while, and what-
ever superior advantages we possess for getting at the best
authorities. The motley and fantastic crowd palls at last, and we
are glad to get back to everyday, if plain, habiliments, wherein we
can at least feel at home.
It is this feeling "at home," too—which is so important in
design—which marks the difference between artist and archaeologist.
Ease and mastery of expression in any material is the aim of the
designer, while keeping strictly within the limitations of that
material.
In making a working drawing the designer should be mentally,
if not actually, the craftsman also: the conditions and necessities
of the material ever present to his mind; its very limitations sug-
gesting new motives, and stimulating invention, as it never fails to
do when the designer and the craftsman are one.
So, too, where there has been no conscious aim at decorative
beauty, we find beauty of result, at least as regards the all-
important quality of line, which goes to prove that organic lines,
or lines of construction, at least where the construction is simple
Design in relation to Use and Material 103
and evident to the eye, are usually beautiful lines, as in the
sickle, the scythe, plough, ship, bridge, and wagon, for instance,
and that this relation to material and use is a fundamental and
necessary quality of all design.
Mistakes are usually made in the attempts to beautify by
superadded ornament, unrelated to the object, use, and material,
instead of treating it as a natural outgrowth, so that the absence of
ornament is preferable to ornament not beautiful, or to ornament,
however beautiful in itself, which does not decorate. And indeed,
unless ornament is organic in this sense, we had much better be
without it, and trust to the simple beauty of constructional lines
alone.
Now this decline of organic design, it can hardly be doubted,
is traceable in a great measure to the economic conditions and the
development of machine industry in the interests of a commercial
system of centralisation and a world-market which have character-
ised our century, and which have succeeded the system of division
of labour developed in the last, as that succeeded, as Mr. Morris
has often pointed out, the older system of local production for use;
and this because its effect has been to separate the designer and the
craftsman^ and to turn both more or less into machines. The
effect of this is to throw the designer out of sympathy with the
use and material of his design, to cut him off from the suggestive
and inventive stimulus of the material, while, under the pressure
of competition, forcing him to the constant production of so-
called novelties, while it turns the craftsman or mechanic into an
indifferent tool. The results are precisely what might have
been expected, and what we have seen. In fact, the only wonder
104
The Claims of Decorative Art
is they are not worse; but humanity has always been better than
its systems.
As to the craftsman, the workman, he, perhaps, relegated to
the performance of one monotonous function—a unit in a long
sum of industrial production,—becomes but a part of a machine,
his personality merged in the general description of " hands" (a
designation, by the way, which does not encourage the development
of brains), and, in short, all personal interest and identity with
his work as a whole taken away, and leaving him with no prospect
of winning public and personal appreciation—even if a "forty-
thousandth part," as Carlyle would have said, of a product could
reasonably hope to win such things—since all credit for the
finished result is practically claimed by the employer.
These things being so, I say it is not wonderful our "in-
dustrial art," as we call it, is what it is.
What then should we aim at? If this is the real condition of
affairs, what is the ideal} For unless we consider we are living
under the best possible arrangements—social, political, and in-
dustrial—we must entertain an ideal of some sort, even if it be a
stranger, like an angel unawares.
Well, then, if so far you are disposed to agree with me
(firstly) as to the necessary conditions and considerations for the
production of well-designed decorations and accessories of daily
life, from the roof which shelters us to the cup we drink out
of; (secondly) as to the relation of the designer and producer of
these necessities—for I claim that beautiful things are a necessity of
any reasonable and refined human life; and (thirdly) as to the con-
dition of the producer of such things himself,—then we shall have
Design in relation to Use and Material 105
reached the conclusion that for the production of beautiful and
thoughtful work you must have conditions of life wherein beauty
and thought have opportunity to germinate and grow naturally,
and as a matter of course, out of the conditions of daily life and
work, as naturally as the apple-tree blooms in the spring. But
this means no less than that the conditions of health and refine-
ment, of a vigorous and full if simple life, be open to all, both
men and women, without distinction; and before such conditions
can be realised it evidently implies that something like funda-
mental changes must take place in the constitution of society.
Then it comes to this, that all we have to make up our minds
about are two things :—(1) Whether we consider art as an utterly
unrelated, individual, and accidental matter; or (2) whether we
consider it and its beautiful results as the highest outcome of life,
and as necessarily dependent upon the character, ideals, and con-
ditions of that life. If the latter, then it may be worth while to
take such steps as may be within our power and mental vision to
co-operate towards the realisation of such a life and such an ideal,
which, strange and roundabout a method as it appears, will yet
prove the shortest way to our goal, namely, a true revival of
design in its relation to material and use.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE APPLIED ARTS, AND
THEIR RELATION TO COMMON LIFE
JYJAN in a natural and primitive condition does not begin to
think of art until his physical wants are satisfied, since art
is, in its true sense, after all only a spontaneous manifestation of
mental life in form, colour, or line,—the outcome of surplus human
energy. It is only under what is called modern civilisation that
this natural order is artificially reversed, and men are forced, to
attempt at least, to produce forms of art in order to satisfy their
physical wants. Our troubles and failures in art may mostly be
traced, directly or indirectly, to this condition of things—all the
horrors and abominations perpetrated in the name of art, from the
productions of the poor man whom necessity compels to chalk on
the pavement, through the countless vanities and inanities of the
fashionable store, to the refined cruelty of what is known as the
"pot-boiler" in the "fine art" exhibition.
The primitive hunter in his cave, when his earliest efforts in
applied art, in the form of flint weapons, had secured to him a
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 107
sufficiency of fish and game and furred overcoats, began to record
his impressions of the chase, and to scratch the forms of his
favourite animals on their bones. If these representations of rein-
deer, mammoth, and bison be indeed the earliest examples of art,
it would seem that the first impulse in art is imitative rather than
what I should term expressive or decorative—the spirit of the
picturesque sketcher recording his impressions of natural forms
rather than the ordered, systematic, applied art of the inventive
designer, who uses natural forms or colours much as a musician
his notes to produce a rhythmical arrangement—a tune, a pattern.
If this inference is correct, we may perhaps take comfort in the
thought that out of our present pictorial zeal and cultivation of
the picturesque sketcher we may be led to the study of the more
ideal and intellectual side of art.
However the conscious invention of line, and its variation
in pattern came about, whether by the burnt stick of the idler
(according to Mr. Whistler), or on the soft clay of the primitive
potter, it is tolerably obvious that certain primitive patterns are
derived from certain necessities of construction, such as the
chequer from the square plait of a rush matting, where not taken
straight from Nature's pattern book as in fish or serpent scale, and
fan from leaf and shell. One of the most natural impulses in man
is to make a mark or a cut upon something directly he has time
on his hands. We can watch the development of this impulse in
children. One line or mark suggests another, and strokes follow-
ing one another in a certain order are found to have a pleasant
and interesting effect. Strings of them round clay vessels were
found to make them more exciting to the eye than the plain
108 The Claims of Decorative Art
surface. The handles of dishes and hunting knives and horns,
bows, hatchets, nay, even man's own skin, all offered opportunities
for the early ornamental impulse in carving and painting patterns.
The implements in constant use, on which, indeed, rude as they
were, life itself depended; the things most familiar, most valuable,
constantly before the eyes or in the hands,—these were the first
things to receive the touch of art, which was then "applied/'
indeed, and applied only.
If we follow the manifestations of the artistic sense through
the great historic periods we shall always find life and art, beauty
and use, hand in hand,—the utmost artistic skill of invention
and craftsmanship lavished upon cups and bowls, upon lamps and
pitchers, upon dress and jewellery, upon arms and armour. We
shall find the highest imagination, the most graceful fancy, and
even wit, humour, and satire in the service of architecture,
recording and reflecting the sentiment of the people: built into
cathedral aisles and vaults, or glowing from the windows, frescoed
upon the walls, or gleaming in the splendour of mosaic, or carved
in endless fertility of resource on the stalls and misereres.
Under economic conditions of the production of all things for
the service or delight of man for use instead of, as now, for
'profit, the craftsman was an artist, and all objects under his hand
naturally developed a characteristic beauty. Ornament was or-
ganic, completely adapted to its material, and expressive of its
object; but with all our industrial organisation, subdivision of
labour, and machine production, we have destroyed the art of the
people, the art of common things and common life, and are even
now awakening to the fact.
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 109
Under a commercial system of production and exchange all
art has been rigidly divided into classes, like the society it reflects.
Since we have to sell it across the counter, as it were, we must
take the weights and scales to it—we must apply to an article of
commerce the tests and standards of commerce. Thus we have
divided beauty and use, and made them up in separate parcels;
or, perhaps, having reduced both to powder, we try a conscious
blend of the two to suit average tastes. We have the arts all
ticketed and pigeon-holed on the shelves behind us. We have
"industrial," "decorative," or "applied" art, as we now call it,
and "fine" art—fine art and "the arts not fine," as my friend
Mr. Lewis Day has it. Thus by degrees the vast general
public, who must get their ideas of art, like other things, ready-
made, have been taught to understand by the word "art" chiefly
that form of portable and often speculative property—cabinet
pictures in oil. Nor is this altogether wonderful, considering how,
under our system of wholesale machine production, the appliances
of common life have lost their individuality, interest, and mean-
ing, together with their beauty. We are not sensible of any
particular individual effort of thought or invention in an object
which is only one of thousands turned out exactly like it. Plates,
cups and bowls, chairs and tables; the moulding and panelling of
our wood-work, and the metal-work of our sacred hearth itself,
are taken as matters of course, like other productions of com-
merce. They were not specially made for you and me; they
must be made to suit Smith and Jones equally well, or equally
ill; and we shall probably be charmed to see them in each other's
houses. We know that furniture and fittings are only made to
no The Claims of Decorative Art
sell at a profit while the fashion lasts. Trade demands its
"novelties" every season, and it would never pay to let a man
sit contentedly in the chair that was solidly built for his grand-
father. Much better let him fall between two stools (as it were),
in his uncertainty of choice in regard to which of the confidently
named upholsterers' styles he will seat himself in.
Then as to the application of art to the walls of his dwelling
itself is the average man in a much better case? You cannot
expect him to put up costly and permanent decorations for the
benefit of his landlord, either outside or inside. He is a wander-
ing hermit-crab, only too glad to find an empty shell that will
reasonably fit him, at a not too exorbitant rent; and as for decora-
tion—well, at least there are paint and paperhangings.
Of course they that are rich can hire a great architect and
dwell in a perfect grammar of ornament. They can import the
linings of Italian temples and tombs, and the spoils of Eastern
mosques, to breakfast, dine, or play billiards in. The only fear
is that Tottenham Court Road will soon bethink itself of cheap
imitations of such antique wreckage; that Westbourne Park and
Camden Town may be even with Mayfair and South Kensington!
Cannot the moderate citizen already command his household gods
in any style at the shortest notice? Great is commercial enter-
prise! Nothing is too high or too low for it. Where your
fancy is, there will the man of profits be also.
The distinct awakening of interest and practice in the applied
arts, which is a mark of our time, I should be the last to belittle
or attempt to ignore; but at the same time, with all it has done
and is doing for our education, with all the remarkable skill and
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 111
reproductive antiquarian energy it has called forth, I feel that we
are landed in a strange predicament. For while on the one hand
new sensibility to beauty in common things, and new desire for
them, are awakened, on the other they are in danger of being
choked by that very facility of industrial production which floods
the market with counterfeit, set in motion by all the machinery of
that commercial enterprise which is the boast of the age, but
which all the time, by the very necessity of its progress, is fast
obliterating the remains of ancient art and beauty from the face of
the earth. So that it will be written of us that we were a people
who gathered with one hand while we scattered with the other.
Economic conditions prevent our artisans from being artists.
They have become practically, and speaking generally, slaves of
machines. The designer is another being from the craftsman.
It is only by a study of the conditions of the material in which a
design is to be carried out that we can get even workable designs;
and even at the best the designer who has no practical acquaint-
ance with any of the handicrafts necessarily loses that stimulus to
invention—that suggestive adaptability which the actual manipu-
lation of the material and first-hand acquaintance with its own
peculiar limitations and advantages always give.
One who develops a faculty for design has rarely a chance of
being other than a designer. He has no time to make experi-
ments, to strike out new paths. He must stick to the line by
which he has become known in order to get a living. Nothing
narrows a man so much as working continually in the same
groove. The utmost that can be said for specialising a single
capacity is that you get an extraordinary mechanical or technical
ii2 The Claims of Decorative Art
facility at the cost of all other qualities. It may not be possible
to be supreme in more than one art, but the arts illustrate each
other, and a knowledge of other arts and their capacities and
limitations is sure to react upon an artist's practice in the one
which most absorbs him.
It is true we hear of artists here and there who, though in the
eye of the world inseparably associated with some particular form
of, say, pictorial ability, nevertheless cultivate some secret amour
in the form of a handicraft.
Professor Herkomer invited us the other day to see his
wonderful application of the arts — his demonstration of their
practical unity on his own premises at Bushey; and a most
striking, interesting, and instructive exhibition it was. Perhaps
few who know him only by his pictures would suspect him of
being an accomplished artist and craftsman in many other arts,
notably in wrought iron. From the personal point of view he
offers a solution of the problem of how to associate art with
everyday life. He is devoting his energy and artistic skill and
invention to making domestic art, including architecture, monu-
mental. The works at Bushey, if Professor Herkomer will allow
me to say so, exemplify not only the power of individual direction
and organisation, but also the power of co-operation and unity of
aim in the arts founded upon, solidified, and supported by family
traditions of skill, invention, and workmanship in the crafts, and
how effectively all may be united in a common purpose. An-
other noteworthy fact was the remarkable way in which scientific
and mechanical invention can be made to serve artistic purposes, as
in Professor Herkomer's application of the dental point to the
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 113
carving and chasing of metal; and in the drilling machines we
saw preparing work for the wood-carver, In so far as such a use
of machinery does not necessarily condemn any man to be the
slave of it, to be a machine-minder all his life, it would seem to
be the natural and reasonable use of machinery in the preparation
of work—to save the drudgery and waste of energy in its pre-
paratory stages, and so reserve the delicate hand-work until the
stage at which it becomes really effective.
There was another thing that struck me about Professor
Herkomer's work, and that was the feeling and poetic sentiment
he had enshrined in some of his beautiful carved cabinets. We
all know the sentiment and charm of association which naturally
gather in time about some piece of domestic furniture. Now art
applied to furniture has the same, or rather a higher, power than
time, for it can, by beauty of design and workmanship, invest a
seat or a cabinet or a fireplace with a poetry of its own, far more
subtle, penetrating, and suggestive than perhaps any form of art,
because indissolubly associated with daily life and its drama.
But when we hand over the production of these things to the
trader, how can we expect anything of the sort? How can any
sentiment or poetic thought collect about an arm-chair, for
instance, that will not bear the weight of time, and has never
received the touch of art?
I daresay furniture may be found to serve our turn, good
enough for our shifting life of hurry, and strong enough to last
out its own fashion. I only say that if we care for genuine art in
these things, we cannot get them under the ordinary conditions of
trade.
H4
The Claims of Decorative Art
Yet there is not a thing we use, not the commonest appliance
in our houses, that does not show some effort at least to have been
spent upon it to make itself presentable to humanity. Unfortu-
nately, nowadays, when native instinct and individual feeling
have been so much swamped by forced mechanical industrial
production, and the search for mere mechanical smoothness and
superficial polish, instead of the finish which only comes of
thought and loving care; these efforts to be ornamental are too
consciously afterthoughts, while the eye is on the market and its
blind chances and uninspiring averages. The added ornament to
a thing of utility, instead of being a manifestation of the crafts-
man's feeling who made it, and his sense of pleasure in his work,
is too often some miserable shred torn from the reminiscences of
some dead language of decoration; all its grace and spirit gone,
and even if moderately adapted in type and form to its purpose,
is not calculated to bring a light to any eye, or joy to any heart,
since it is but the product of joyless toil and competitive pro-
duction—the mechanical smirk on the face of the thing of
commerce that it is, intended to beguile the simple-minded and
unwary into the momentary belief that it is a desirable and
beautiful thing, when, in another sense than the poet's, it stands ready to smite once, and smites no more.
This unhappy cheapening and vulgarising of ornament, so far
from fostering a taste for art, only degrades and distorts the
natural feeling for beauty, which with reasonable scope and
pleasant surroundings would develop itself as it has always done.
Let not commerce pride itself in cant phrase on its claim that it
places "art within the reach of all," for how could that have be-
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 115
come necessary until art had first been put out of reach? What
could compensate for whole tracts of country desolated, and for
the crowding of the people in our cities under conditions which
put ideas of human dignity and beauty practically out of the
question for the million?
Among secondary reasons for the decay of inventive and
spontaneous design in the applied arts, I believe the hard-and-fast
line which has been drawn between the artist and the craftsman is
answerable, and the separation of the designer and the workman.
The designer is perhaps kept chained to some enterprising
firm. Novelties are demanded of him—something "entirely new
and original" every season, but not too much so. It is not sur-
prising that the best talents should get jaded under such influ-
ences; that fancy should become forced or fantastic, and motive
weak and tame, or perhaps lost altogether in a search after super-
ficial naturalism, in defiance of fitness to material or use. Such
a nemesis is too apt to overtake the specialised designer, who
designs on paper only, without the stimulus of close acquaint-
ance with, and practice in, some handicraft. The mere change
of occupation is refreshing and invigorating, and stimulates the
invention.
In so far as I have been successful as a designer, it has been, I
believe, largely owing to my making myself acquainted with the
conditions of the material in which a design was to be carried out;
by striving to realise in thought, at least, the particular limitations
and conditions under which it was intended to be worked; and I
have always found that those very limitations, those very con-
ditions, are sources of strength and suggestion to the invention.
u6 The Claims of Decorative Art
For I am old-fashioned enough to believe that every material has
its own proper language—regarded as a medium for expression in
design—and it is the business of the designer to find this out.
The naturalistic or imitative impulse in art which is char-
acteristic of our time, with the enormous and surprising develop-
ment of the photograph, has had very visible effects upon art of
all kinds. It is quite distinct from the expressive or inventive
impulse, and though they may be a ground of reconciliation, the
former is of far less consequence to art in its applied or related
form than the latter.
What may be called the dominant art always seems to impress
its own peculiar characteristics upon every other. Whereas in
former periods—ancient, classical, mediaeval, Renaissance—archi-
tecture may be said to have ruled over, or to have embraced all
the arts, which in their earlier history were really essential parts
of it; and even when, by degrees, the family parted company and
went out individually to seek their fortunes, more or less inde-
pendently of each other, evidences of their architectural descent
still clung to them—as in the architectural construction and
character of portable furniture and fittings, and of their orna-
mental details.
Sculpture and painting to this day are obliged to retain the
rudiment which betrays their architectural parentage; in the one
case by the plinth which supports the bust or the statue, and in
the other by the moulding of the frame, with which the least
architectural or decorative picture cannot dispense.
But pictorial art has now usurped the first place in the popular
mind. It has influenced architecture; directly, in so far as it has
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 117
led to the erection of a new type of building—the picture gallery—
a place built with the sole aim of displaying pictures not painted
originally with any idea of concert, or to be seen side by side.
Surely a remarkably inartistic way of regarding art! Indirectly,
the effect of pictorial art and pictorial ways of looking at things
is seen in what has been called "the architecture of the sketch-
book"—the somewhat restless and fantastic designs in a mixed
style, chiefly in domestic work, full of little bits, nooks, and
corners, which are characteristic of the last decade. For all that, a
pleasant change and relief from the dull monotony of the quasi-
classic style which, preceded it. Sculpture, too, has not escaped
the pictorial influence, as is shown, for instance, in the naturalistic
school of modern Italy, which closely imitates in marble textures,
surfaces, and momentary grimaces as closely as possible, but with
more skill than taste. Abundant examples of such misapplied
imitative skill are to be found in other arts, such as wood-carving,
pottery painting, metal work, and textiles; although it is only fair
to say that, of late years, in these arts there has been a distinct
return to truer principles of design, with the revival of a feeling
for the capacity of the material which embodies it, and a recog-
nition, over and above mere reproduction of old work, of the
distinction between art and nature, which is so often lost sight of.
We are, however, never sure amid the vagaries of fashion that
we shall not suffer a relapse,—that we are not threatened with an
irruption of tea-roses, in high relief, on our curtains and chintzes,
and landscapes (not carboniferous) on our coal-boxes.
On the whole, however, the applied arts have shown a laud-
able independence and defiance of the pictorial mood. The dog
u8 The Claims of Decorative Art
no longer appears (after Landseer) on the hearthrug, but is often,
in metal, relegated to his proper place on the hearth itself. So
far so good. Albeit the desire for some of the happy results in
art which belong to ages of greater simplicity of life has produced
in some cases strange results, and some combinations of ancient
kitchen and modern drawing-room one has seen are not altogether
happy. We get an impression of the affectation of primitive
simplicity and homeliness with modern luxury and artificiality,
from which, at any rate, we can draw a moral on the connection
between art and life.
The movement, initiated by Mr. William Morris and the
gifted artists associated with him, to which we owe so much,
began in a genuine return to honesty of purpose, and to sincere
design, and sound workmanship, founded upon a study of good
models in the past; but it was the outward and visible sign of an
intellectual movement which has its eyes upon the future, and,
like all revivifying and stimulating impulses in art, it is the off-
spring of hope and enthusiasm.
Let us look to it that this English Renaissance of ours is not
extinguished,—that it does not fall utterly into the iron grasp of
commercialism. We may figure art as the fair Andromeda chained
to the rock of modern economic conditions, in danger from the all-
devouring, desolating monster of gain, until the deliverer shall come.
This is in sober truth the situation. Under our system of
centralised industrial production, local art and industry are every-
where being dispossessed, and local characteristics and varieties
are being fast obliterated. The machinery of trade forces pre-
vailing patterns everywhere, and the mass of the world cannot
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 119
pick and choose, or turn the stream of invention for their
particular delight. It must accept the latest novelty of commerce,
and content itself for all shortcomings with her assurance that it is
"just out" and will certainly be "the fashion." Thus it comes
about that our cups and bowls, our tables and carpets, rather
speak of the enterprise of a firm than historic traditions of. a
people, or the skill of a race of artists and craftsmen. The zeal
to make things "pay" hath eaten us up, in the artistic sense. It
is all very well to talk of informing with art the common acces-
sories of life, to cultivate the handicrafts with enthusiasm, to
distinguish ourselves by beauty of design and technical excellence
among the nations of the earth, and after all, for a man to find
that in proportion to the extra care, delicacy, and invention—in
proportion as the craftsman works in the spirit of the artist, and
is true to himself, without regard to trouble or time—the more
difficult will he find it to make his living.
While such enormous differences in reward and chance of
appreciation exist, as they do at present, in art, it is not encourag-
ing to the artist in wood, stone, or metal to find that, however
sincerely he may work, he must work in comparative obscurity,
and with a very modest scale of remuneration. As long as the
chance of both individual distinction and substantial reward is so
conspicuously in favour of the pictorial artist, in spite of the best
schools of design, and all the machinery for diverting the stream
of artistic feeling, skill, and invention into their proper channels,
I am afraid the tendency will be for every student who fancies
he develops artistic ability to press into the already overcrowded
ranks of picture-painters.
120
The Claims of Decorative Art
When we hear, for instance, of five shillings being offered as a
price for carved panels in a cabinet, it is not stimulating to those
who look to winning a competency in the practice of so highly-
skilled and artistic a craft as wood-carving.
We may lay such facts at the door of competition or apathetic
indifference to applied art, as it pleases us; but I venture to think
that if the crafts and arts were recognised in public exhibitions of
art, which are now practically devoted to one form of painting, it
would do something. It would at least offer a chance for in-
dividual distinction in some other form of art. The work of the
designer and craftsman could be seen, and by degrees people would
begin to realise that beauty of design and workmanship counted
for something besides in painting, and that the main business of an
artist was not to emulate the photograph, or to take the wind (or
the effect) out of the canvas of his neighbour in the pictorial
struggle for existence (through unnatural selection), known as a
"Fine Art Exhibition."
The arts are really inseparably associated and interdependent.
None is greater or less than another, and all are in some sense
applied. We are all consciously or unconsciously affected by our
surroundings. We may become sensitive to beautiful shapes and
colours, or lines, and afflicted by those ugly and coarse, or grow
callous and insensible to them, which is perhaps the commonest
result. It is therefore hardly possible to attach too much import-
ance to art in its applied forms, seeing its intimate association with
and bearing on life itself through all sources of refined pleasure.
In those periods of the past which we regard as great epochs in
art, the arts and crafts are in harmony and close relationship with
Applied Arts and their relation to Common Life 121
each other. The culminating glory and mastery of Renaissance
painting could hardly have existed without being founded upon
the firm basis of the handicrafts, set as it were like a gem in a not
less beautiful framework of invention in all branches of design;
and we know that more than one great Florentine painter came
out of a goldsmith's workshop. Such pictures as that of " The
Adoration of the Magi/' by Mabuse (shown at Burlington House
a winter or two ago), or Crivelli's "Annunciation" in our National
Gallery, seem to sum up the contemporary beauty of the handi-
crafts, and give them back to us again. A beautiful book was
lately brought out, of Italian ornament, taken from the patterns
and on dresses and hangings in pictures in the National Gallery;
and taking the fifteenth-century painters generally we might get a
perfect cyclopaedia of applied design from the beautiful details
which enrich their pictures. It was not archaeology then, but the
love of beauty and richness, the delight in the splendour of life,
which led them to paint such things, and also, probably, because
they were craftsmen themselves as well as painters.
I believe we are making a mistake in training students in art,
from first to last, solely with the pictorial view. The imitative
powers are cultivated to the utmost, while the inventive are
neglected. The superficial effects of nature are studied, while the
expressiveness and value of pure line, and its bearing on applied
art, are very much overlooked. Thus the designing, constructive
power seems to be considered secondary to the depicting power,
or rather one phase of it; the consequence is we get large numbers
of clever painters and graphic sketchers, but very few designers.
Everything is looked at from the pictorial point of view, and the
122
The Claims of Decorative Art
term artist has been narrowed to mean the pictorial or imitative
painter.
I should like to see a reversal of the principle. I should like
to see a course of training in the handicrafts come first, as the
most important to the cultivation of a sense of beauty in common
life, not to speak of its importance to an industrial country, in an
industrial age.
ART AND COMMERCIALISM
E have been lately told by a brilliant impressionist, no less
in words than in paint, that there never have been such
things as artistic periods; that art is solely individual, and lives
and dies with the artist. And among other interesting facts we
learned that, after all, one thing is as beautiful as another (to a
painter) if you only get it in the right light; that, in short, those
striking features of modern landscape—wharves and factory
chimneys—look just as well as antique towers and palaces when
merged in the twilight—that is, when you can no longer see what
they really are, and the imagination is free to invest them with
the romance of a past age.
Now, whatever germs of truth such statements contain, they only
throw us back upon the question, "What is art?" If it is the
art only of the impressionist, the record in paint of the children of
the mist, of factory-smoke even, and London fog; if nature must
only be seen with the eyes half shut, and in the abomination of
desolation—the squalid outskirts and Stygian rivers of modern

124
The Claims of Decorative Art
cities—then, indeed, former ages were but poorly furnished in the
matter of art. What availeth the clear-cut noble sculpture of
ancient Greece, and the work of her vase painters? What availeth
the endless decorative invention of the Asiatic peoples, and of
mediaeval and early Renaissance times, lavished upon all the
accessories of life, not to speak of its culminating glories in
painting and sculpture? Could all this beauty of design and
workmanship, in its constant growth and development through
the centuries, have hung upon a thread—upon the lives of one
or two persons of genius, springing, like mushrooms, from
universal indifference, ignorance, and decay?
Such an opinion is, however, only a sign of the times. When
every man fights for his own hand, and every artist has to make
his own public, such an individualistic conception of art is not
altogether surprising; and, were it intended to apply to the art
of the present day only, would be very near the truth. But a
little inquiry and consideration would show that art has deeper
roots. The delight in beauty, be it human or of wild nature, be
it of light, colour, form, or sound, is a common possession and a
necessity of life, as in the higher sense it must always be, so long
as the human has any claim to be the higher animal. And it
should be remembered that certain animals and birds have been
proved to be sensitive to certain colours and decorative effects,
which sensibility is indeed wrapped up with the very fact of the
germination and continuity of life itself; and this only convinces
us how far down and deeply rooted is this sense in nature which
has been so highly developed and specialised in man. Differing,
it may be, in degree, but not in kind; cultivated, or uncultivated;
Art and Commercialism
125
modified by centuries of habit and association; influenced by
modes of thought and conditions of life—wheresoever humanity
dwells, in northern snow or southern sunshine, it flowers and
seeds, and springs anew.
Art, in all its forms, is normally but the language of this
universal feeling which, shared more or less by all, consciously or
unconsciously, is fully comprehended, passionately expressed, and
communicated in tangible and eloquent shape by comparatively
few. But I should say that every one whose heart is stirred at
the voice of music, at the music of poetry; every one who feels
the magic of beauty and is touched by its pathos, who is moved
by the strangeness of the shifting drama of life; every one who
vibrates, as it were, to the harmonies of nature, is a potential or
latent artist.
As far as we can judge from its history, it would seem that
this power of artistic expression, controlled as it is by countless
influences of soil, climate, and character; constantly intercrossing
and blending; springing from simple beginnings, and passing
through various stages of growth, development, and decline,
with the life of nations—this power, I say, seems to have reached
its noblest and most beautiful results under collective conditions—
of the arts, at all events—when all art was decorative, and all were
allied with architecture, depending technically upon a certain con-
tinuity of tradition, and intellectually on a certain consentaneous-
ness or universality of sentiment, ere it reached a high perfection
among a people, being always at its highest in public monuments.
It is obvious, since these conditions depend upon a vast number of
other conditions, since art is the flowering of the tree of life in
126 The Claims of Decorative Art
man's moral nature, the form in which it is cast must, finally, be
the outcome of the social, political, and economic conditions of
society.
We have only to remember the temples and palaces of
antiquity, whether the colossal fragments of the crumbled civilisa-
tions of the East, the sculptured triumphs of Greece and Rome,
or the cathedrals and public halls of the Middle Ages. Art in
such buildings touches sublimity. The effect, for instance, of
such a building as that of St. Mark's at Venice is like embodied
music—rich, mysterious, splendid, harmonious; storied with the
legends and emblems of a faith, and a conception of the universe
then corresponding with the knowledge and aspirations of man-
kind, full of solemnity, pathos, and dignity. But one of our
own English cathedrals, where the ruthless hand of the modern
restorer is not too obvious—say our historic Abbey of West-
minster—will impress us in the same kind; and this impress-
iveness is not due merely to the effect of antiquity, though
it no doubt contributes. We feel it to be the collective work
of artists and craftsmen, as well as of ages, and we feel it
embodies the aspirations, the religious sentiment, even the humour
and satire, of its time, and, speaking through the architect, the
mason, the carver, the glass painter, is heard the voice of a whole
people.
But if one should go into a modern church in search of the
ideas of the time, I am afraid he would only find the ideas of the
new curate.
The former dignity and impressiveness of art is usually ac-
counted for by the fact that it was in the past chiefly devoted to
Art and Commercialism
127
the service of religion; but that was only because religious ideas
had the strongest hold upon the human mind—because with
religion were wrapped up all other ideas, and the sources of
knowledge were in the hands of the priesthood. Art is bound
by its very nature to give expression to ascendant ideas. But
both art and religion have since been broken to fragments, and
these are often so small and so incongruously pieced together,
that they refuse to reflect any ideas at all; or so feebly and
falsely, that men, in distrust of both art and religion, have turned
to nature and science, which in the strongest minds fill the place
of both.
But this, after all, is only like saying that the loss of the eye-
sight is compensated for by the increased stimulation of the other
senses. It is a serious loss all the same.
Let us try to find, however, what ideas, even in the frag-
mentary and artificial condition to which it is now reduced, art
gives us in our day. The one great distinction and difference
which marks it from the art of ancient times consists in the
absence of what is called popular art—the art of the people, hand
in hand with everyday handicraft, inseparable from life and use—
that spontaneous native art of the potter, the weaver, the carver,
the mason, which our economical, commercial, industrial, com-
petitive, capitalistic system has crushed out of existence by
division of labour, the factory system, and production for profit;
yes, our three-headed Cerberus has devoured the art, together
with the wellbeing and the independence of the people, and
stands unappeased at the smoke-gloomed industrial gate, over
which is written, "All hope abandon ye who enter here." But
128
The Claims of Decorative Art
this basis of popular art was the soil in which all art germinated,
and from which the goodly tree grew and branched out, to
blossom in the more delicate kinds of painting and sculpture
which, since they have ministered to the caprices of wealth,
fashion, and luxury alone, branded in a separate class as "fine
arts," have turned their backs upon their humble relations, the
handicrafts, with the result that their house is left unto them
desolate. Cut off, as it were, like flowers from their natural
stem, they presently languish and wither away, or linger
on, fantastic ghosts, shadows, and travesties of their former
beauty.
But we are calmly told that "we must recognise, however,
that modern art has no tendency in this latter direction (that of
beauty). Beauty no longer suffices for us."1 This is clear and
emphatic enough. It comes from the French, too, who have
assumed the position of dictators of taste, at least in painting,
to the world at large. It is from a book on aesthetics, by Eugene
Veron; I quote from the English translation. The book is an
attempt to find a scientific basis and reasonable position for art
under the conditions of modern society, and while the author fails
to recognise the causes of its deterioration in the quality of beauty,
he boldly acknowledges the difference between past and present
aims, and insists on freedom of development. Yet the writer is
possessed by a distinction which he himself sets up between
decorative, and what he calls expressive art, applying this latter
1 The same author says in another place'; "No! perfect art does not necessarily concern itself
with beauty of form, unless the object has been specially designed for art use. We must expel the
idea" (Msthetics, p. 125).
Art and Commercialism
129
title to the pictorial art of the present day. As if all good art
was not expressive!
In my view, however, all forms of plastic or graphic art,
properly so called, must be dominated by the sense of beauty,
as the condition of their normal existence and the condition of
their successful appeal to the eye. The expression of beauty
naturally controls all other expressions. Otherwise, it seems to
me, art is overstepping the border line which divides it from other
operations of the mind; from scientific analysis, for instance, and
from photography, where the object is totally different, and every-
thing is sacrificed to the attainment of fact.
Yet this is just what is happening in modern painting—
everything is being sacrificed to the attainment of fact in some
form or other, and painting has almost ceased to be an art of
design.
The modern French view is frankly expressed in a passage
quoted by Veron from Fromentin, who says: "The time has
come for less thought, and for less lofty aims. We must now
look at things more closely, and observe better. We must paint
as well, though in a different fashion. We must work for the
general public, for the citizen, the man of business, and the
parvenu—everything is now for them." And he goes on to
point out in effect that the painter must do the best he can
under these rather depressing circumstances, copy his model, and
take comfort in the belief that henceforward the greatest genius
will be the man of the least invention. Here, at all events, it
is clearly recognised that painting now exists for a class, which,
possessing the wealth, commands all things that may be com-
K
130 The Claims of Decorative Art
manded by wealth, and as these things are many, a money
standard is set up, which is in danger of becoming the only
standard and test, whether of virtue and character, or artistic
ability.
The results of such a state of things are visible on every side.
We have seen that in all ages it has been natural to art to express
the ascendant characteristics and ideas of its time, as well as to
reflect the material facts of life.
Art is the sensitive plate in the dark camera of history, which
records both the mental and physical features of humanity without
prejudice, when all other sources of light are shut out.
So in an age when commercialism is supreme, and bourgeois
ideas are triumphant, it is only natural that they should make
themselves felt in art.
Accordingly, we see the influence of profit-making principles
in the way in which painters become specialised for certain sorts
of work, and in the rise and progress of the middleman or picture-
dealer. As illustrating this, it is said of Verboeckhoven, the
cattle painter, that the dealers were in the habit of sending orders
couched in terms like the following: "Wanted, by Monday,
three pictures of the usual description-—cow, with two sheep."
There is a story told of him, too, which is very suggestive of the
effect of commercial ideas on art. One day an American entered
the studio; he saw a picture which pleased him, and bought it at
the artist's price—1200 francs. He could not take it away with
him immediately, and when he came for it some time after, the
painter had another, just like it, nearly finished. He was putting
in an extra lambkin, when the American returned. A happy
Art and Commercialism 131
thought struck the latter; he would take the second picture too;
it would form a pendant to the other. But Verboeckhoven wanted
1300 francs for it. His customer hesitated. "Well, well!"
said he, "the same price, then ;" and dipping a rag in turpentine
he wiped out the lamb.
That grand development of the shop, the modern picture
exhibition, is, again, another triumph of commercialism in art,
which, faithfully following the accepted theory of the trader that
supply will produce demand, succeeds in something like real over-
production. Consider the huge annual pictorial displays and their
chief product—the child of competition in art—the "pot-boiler/'
Truly the temple of art is the market, and its high priest the
picture-dealer!" Take your choice" (or, rather, the recommen-
dation of the adroit salesman), "go to so-and-so for your fish
and your salt-water pieces—fresh every year, but all alike. If
your fancy is flesh or fowl, you must go farther. This other
gentleman will give you game pieces—he has a special license.
Then you can finish with flower and fruit," and so forth. Yes,
division of labour has triumphed even in painting, and to excel
a man must specialise his talents; that is to say, adapt them to
the continual production of the same sort of thing. Thus, and
thus only, can he hope to make either reputation or a living.
Very good; but what becomes of art, unless the whole of art
is comprehended in portraiture? For, in spite of our classifica-
tion, our labels for landscape, portrait, genre, historical; under
this specialising, ticketing, commercial system, the tendency is
for painting to become really limited to forms of portraiture.
I do not mean merely the production of portraits, though that
132
The Claims of Decorative Art
is a noticeable feature, but I apply the term to characterise a
certain literal and prosaic habit of regarding all nature, and
literal methods of representation, whether of persons, scenes, or
animal life; while the conditions of the market, even apart
from the tastes of the ascendant class we have been considering,
cut against even honest and faithful portraiture, but encourage
that conscious making-up, dressing, and forcing of effect to
catch the public eye, amid the further falsification of pictorial
values caused by the entire want of classification and harmonious
arrangement in the picture exhibition. So that in the result,
where every inducement is held out in this fierce pictorial com-
petition to painters to consciously work for forced effect, and put
out their possible neighbour, pretentiousness and meretriciousness
too often win the day.
When the decline in modern art is mentioned, it is usual for
the average man, imbued with the commercial ideas of the age,
and with the all-sufficient standard of money-value in his mind,
to point triumphantly to the enormous sums given for certain
pictures in these days, and to the wealth of certain successful
artists. But those enormous sums only show that pictures are
a marketable commodity in which the chances of large profits are
involved, and the fluctuating values in the market make them
objects of speculative investments for capitalists. Reputations
fall and rise, often according to what appears to be the mere
caprice of fashion, though even fashion is controlled by commer-
cialism. And as to the wealth of successful painters, is that
always in proportion to the excellence of their work, or the labour
bestowed upon it, and is it always the accompaniment of the
Art and Commercialism
i33
highest skill and the loftiest aims? Overwhelmed with com-
missions, the fashionable painter has the alternative before him
of over-work or inevitable deterioration. In many cases he
becomes the victim of both. Then, too, for one favourite of
fame and fortune, how many unfortunate, struggling, obscure?
Thus at both ends of the scale the influence of commercialism
is only for evil.
Consider, too, the waste of energy and talent in this unequal
struggle for artistic life and recognition—this pictorial lottery,
where so many blanks are drawn. Think of the capacities now
swallowed up in the tasteless contention of exhibitions, which,
properly organised and directed, might co-operate to adorn our
streets and public places, our lecture halls and railway stations,
left desolate now to another and more hideous form of competi-
tion in the clamorous posters of commercialism, which cover our
waste walls and hoardings, and crowd upon the weary eye in all
their shameless self-assertion and sordid language of the market,
shouldering one another in the unspeakable coarseness of colour-
bedizenment and graceless superscription.
In spite of our refinement, our care for art, our aestheticism,
forsooth! and the lavishly-decorated private interiors of wealth,
to this complexion must we come out of doors!
And in the meantime we are so inured and hardened to such
disfigurements that we cease to feel their enormity. Nay, we
must grow to like them, for are not advertising and bill-sticking
an inseparable part of our system? There is no escape. So it
is, and so it will be, so long as we allow this selfish, demoralising,
and unscrupulous demon of commercialism to tyrannise over and
134 The Claims of Decorative Art
exploit us, ever with its continual cry of " Profit, profit, profit!"
Every aspiration will be shouted down as visionary and unprac-
tical; every real attempt to better our disorganised condition will
be opposed by the dead weight of vested interests.
It is on record that one of the few living artists, properly
called ideal—George Frederick Watts—offered to decorate the
hall of the Euston Station with frescoes without charge, if
the Company would bear the cost of the materials; and the
offer was refused. How can monumental art, which is but
decorative art in its highest form, exist in such apathetic con-
ditions? To grow the flower you must not only have the seed,
but a favourable soil and climate. It will be written of our age
that we squandered the talents of our more original writers and
artists upon the newspaper and periodical press. We preferred
to be amused with a constant succession of brilliant trivialities
and passing sensations, to beholding our best thoughts embodied
in enduring and noble forms of art; and it did not seem to
signify how many lives might be frittered away—how much
energy and talent ground to powder in the process.
But monumental art demands the sympathy of a people bound
together by common feelings, interested in the drama of his-
tory, and proud of their own struggles and sacrifices for freedom;
accustomed to dwell with ennobling thoughts and aspirations,
and accustomed to give them free and forcible expression; sen-
sible both of the joy and the tragedy of life, delighting in phantasy
and invention, and, above all, in beauty of form and colour. Yet
there is nothing in these things but what naturally belongs to
humanity.
Art and Commercialism
i3S
Can such art be found where the best energies are engrossed
in the feverish and unequal race for a more or less precarious
existence on the one hand, and on the other made artificial by
excess of wealth?—where the aspect of life, whether public or
private, is neither simple nor dignified, and where cities become
unlovely and inorganic accumulations of bricks and mortar?—
where, with an appearance of zeal for art, education, and refine-
ment, and the elevation of the masses, we allow mile after mile
of mean or pretentious dwellings to carry the desolation of our
unwieldy human warrens farther and farther into the green
country, as the capitalist and the jerry-builder join house to
house and brickfield to brickfield?
So we are thrown back on economic conditions, which, it is
impossible to doubt, are finally responsible for these things, as,
indeed, they have always been responsible for the form in which
the art of a period is cast. How hopeless it is, for instance, to
expect varied and beautiful street architecture with the present
system of house tenure and the contract system in building!
Here and there a dwelling, with some claims to beauty and
distinction—or, at least, individuality—perchance arises from
the sordid crowd; but these are the homes of men of wealth
and exceptional taste, who build for their own delight, and have
secured their ground. Here and there a board-school building
relieves the monotony, and seems to point to the possibilities of
better things. But the mass of modern London consists of the
erections of the speculative builder—miles of absolutely uninter-
esting house fronts, composed chiefly of the repetition of one
pattern, and that of the meanest and most uninventive kind,
136
The Claims of Decorative Art
crowded together—the ready-made packing-cases for civilised
humanity which enters in and dwells there. Could these things
be were it not for the powers of commercialism, based upon the
individual possession of land and capital, with the one object of
money gain in their disposal?
But all things are in the grasp of commercialism. Let a band
of artists and craftsmen associate together, and, working quietly,
make to themselves and all whom it may concern things of
beauty and utility for the use and adornment of simple homes.
Straightway there is a growing desire for these things as a relief
from the dreary monotony of ugliness, or the pretentious luxury
of second empire taste. Thereupon commercialism, perceiving
a demand, brings out what it calls art-furniture, art-colours, and
so forth—the addition of the magic word being supposed to make
all the difference—sucks the brains of designers, steals their
designs, and devotes them to objects for which they were never
intended; deluging the market with strange travesties and
tortured misapplications of ill-digested ornament, which over-
runs everything like an irrepressible weed, until, coming down
to its lower forms in the cheap furniture shop, one is tempted
to think that, in the matter of taste, our last state is worse than
the first.
Thus are all the channels of production fouled. Does not
commercialism hold the keys of the kingdom of both art and
industry? Everything has to pass through the sieve of profit
before it reaches the public; and to keep the huge and wasteful
machinery of competitive production and distribution going, even
at an ordinary jog-trot, it appears to be necessary in every depart-
Art and Commercialism
i37
ment of trade to make a vain show of so-called "novelties" every
season, whether they are really new and better than the old or
not.
But the counts of the indictment against commercialism are
not yet filled up. The subject is, indeed, too vast and far-reach-
ing to be adequately treated in the limits of a single paper.
Hitherto I have kept very near home, but if we look abroad
over the world we shall see the same causes at work, the same
deterioration going on. Look at the effects of our rule on the
native arts of India. The same process of extinction of the art
of the people, of the village crafts, is taking place there as has
resulted from the action of commercialism at home. (On this
point I cannot refer any one who is desirous to pursue the
subject to a more competent authority than Sir George Bird-
wood.) But all over the East, wherever European influence is
in the ascendant, the result is disastrous to the arts, and thus the
very sources of ornamental design, beauty of colour, and inven-
tion are being sullied and despoiled by the sharp practices and
villainous dyes of Western commerce. Even in Japan, where
the artistic sense seems instinctive among the people, so that
everything touched by them bears its impress, since the results
of ages of art labour and exquisite craftsmanship have suddenly
been placed within the insatiable grasp of commercialism, there
are signs that these riches are becoming exhausted, and the rarer
and finer kinds grow scarcer every day. We can no longer
expect to be given of the best, and wares are being consciously
prepared for the European market. This is but the "retort
courteous" for the compliments of Manchester in china-clay
138 The Claims of Decorative Art
and size. We actually hear of proposals to establish schools of
design on the British model, the more effectually, I suppose,
to drive out those quick, spontaneous, characteristic native
methods of art-expression, than which nothing, perhaps, has more
refreshed and stimulated the jaded sensibilities of European
design. Thus even by contact with a vicious civilisation the
natural quickness and intelligence of a race may bring about its
own destruction.
Thus, in the fierce and unscrupulous struggle for wealth, one
after another, virgin markets are opened, and new peoples ex-
ploited by commercial enterprise, which, like a huge steam plane,
is passing over the world striving to reduce all art, and with it
humanity, to one dull level of commonplace mediocrity, leaving
us but of vital and beautiful varieties the relics and shavings.
Greedy eyes are now turning to Central Africa. The next act
in the commercial drama will probably take place there. Already
the rampant explorer, posing as the benefactor of humanity, has
gone far and wide, and the representatives of the blessings of
civilisation, with the Bible in one hand and the revolver in the
other, call on the aborigines to stand and deliver. Wheresoever
commercialism sets foot, the curse of gold seems to follow.
As regards its effect upon art, it is like the old Greek story of
Atalanta's Race, but with a sinister climax. Milanion, the hunter
(representing commercialism), enters for the race, and, carrying
the fatal apples of gold, casts them one by one in the path of
the fair fleet-footed, whom no competitor could hitherto outstrip.
She yields, alas! to the seductive spoils—to the greed of gold—
and henceforward her fate is sealed.
Art and Commercialism
i39
But commercialism, which seems now so triumphant, carries
the seeds of destruction in its own bosom. The penalty of fast
living must sooner or later be paid, by nations and systems as
by individuals. Dissolution must inevitably set in. Already
there are signs of the beginning of the end. Already men's
thoughts and hopes are turned to that which shall succeed.
"The old order changeth, giving place to new." Meanwhile
the only hope, alike for art as for humanity, lies in socialism.
ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
'vO men engaged in strenuous political strife, amid the stress
and strain of the fierce war of commercial competition;
when the forces of labour are organising themselves and forming
in battle array against the fenced strongholds of capitalism;
when the air is full of strikes and rumours of strikes; and when
in the vicissitudes of such war many of our fellow-citizens can
scarcely keep body and soul together, it may seem to some a
vain thing to speak of art.
But it all depends upon what we understand by art. Is it the
senseless frippery and vulgar bedizenment of plethoric wealth and
whirligig fashion, the paint and the patcher to make smooth and
fair the outside of society, and to hide the wrinkles and hollows
which would tell the truth too plainly? Is it the hireling of
pride and ostentation living to please the passing whim or craze—
a harlequin in the masquerade, ever ready with catch-penny tricks,
driven to the necessity of pleasing, if but for the moment, in order
to live? Is it the rarity of the market—the thing measured by
Art and Social Democracy 141
fabulous price and sold by its weight in gold, though perhaps
its producer may have had a bitter struggle to sell it at any
price? Are these what we mean by art? or is it that kind and
sympathetic enchantment which takes us out of ourselves; the
genius of beauty and harmony which makes fair everything it
touches, which knows no class or caste, which speaks a universal
language; the friend of freedom and brotherhood, bringing order
out of confusion, sweetness out of strength; not a matter of private
property, but a common possession; whose price and virtue is not
to be counted in, or commanded by, dollars, but lies simply in
human and hopeful conditions of the life of a people ?—entering
into everything we touch and use, in the spade and plough,
with their carefully-adapted curves and constructive lines fit-
ting them for their proper work, and through all the simple,
homely, and necessary implements of daily life and useful work,
as well as in the organic beauty of its more conscious and em-
phatic decorative adornment, as in the carving or moulding or
pattern work of our living-rooms, from the plate or the glass on
the table to the picture on the wall.
Such simple and primitive things, often unregarded, have their
influence, conscious or unconscious, on the lives of us all, if we
have been fortunate in our surroundings, and where hearth and
home exist at all, with all those tender and human feelings which
gather about them more or less: perhaps even in these days of
huge caravansaries with their here-to-day and gone-to-morrow
inhabitants, on one side; and on the other, a night's lodging
under a cart or a railway arch, or on the golden pavement of the
wealthiest city in the world, with a newspaper for a blanket.
142
The Claims of Decorative Art
A newspaper! It might be an illustrated one too. Cheap art!
Cheap indeed—almost as cheap as life itself!
Why, any art which is the outcome in any way of the con-
ditions of such a life as that of which these are some of the out-
ward and visible signs, is surely dear enough! The advocates
of cheap art, of art for the homes of the people, are apt to forget
that the price of cheap art, like the price of all cheap labour,
means the cheapening of human lives. When we talk of bringing
art to the homes of the people, it would be well first to see that
they had got homes, or homes that they could call their own with
any less doubtful security than a week's rent, or with any time to
live in them after ten, twelve, or sixteen or eighteen hours of toil.
I agree with a friend, who, at a congress for the furtherance
of art, expressed the opinion that the best decoration he knew
of for a hungry home was a flitch of bacon. If the cupboard,
like Mother Hubbard's, is bare, you cannot expect its owners
will take much interest in the decoration of its panels.
There is a gaunt and hungry Cerberus which must be satisfied,
and before Psyche, the soul of art, can enter, the body must be fed.
The fundamental necessities come first. Feed the body and
you nourish the brain also. This seems a simple and obvious
physical truth—a truism, in fact; yet it has required a great deal
of socialist agitation to bring it home even to the limited degree
in which it is beginning to be recognised, as in the case of school
children.
The best artists' materials—the raw materials of art—will be
found in simple, natural, and healthy conditions of life; not
brutalised by excessive toil or degraded by the scramble for gain,
Art and Social Democracy
i43
but where honest work is security for such a life, with leisure and
freedom, and accessibility to beauty of art and nature for all. So
that the claims of art are the claims of human life also, of which,
indeed, it is but the ultimate expression.
The splendours of ancient art (even of the Asiatic despotisms
of Greece and Rome) were lavished upon public buildings and
public monuments, so that it could be seen and enjoyed by all
the citizens in common, even the slaves. In the Middle Ages
the churches, the great depositories of art in all its forms, were
always open for the use and enjoyment of the people. The
streets in those days were full of variety and colour, so that at
any rate life was full of incident and romance, in spite of tyrannous
lords and kings, and though innocent of exhibitions, and penny
dreadfuls, and shilling shockers, with which we are fain to fill the
void amid the dull husks of commonplace.
Coming to modern times, we see that art, like all other human
products, has been affected by the great changes in the economic
system—changes in the conditions of production and distribution,
and of ownership of land, centralisation and the world-market.
It has become more and more a matter of private property and
absolute ownership, and we haye so dropped out of the habit of
putting it to any great extent into our public buildings and
monuments that we have very few artists who know how to do
it, or who think it worth while to give any time or thought to
the subject.
Instead of sublime and noble public buildings, churches, and
halls, which all the arts unite to make splendid, we have as a
rule very dull or pretentious public offices, dull and respectable
144 The Claims of Decorative Art
churches—essays in architecture masquerading in various styles not
native to us—and melancholy images of military, naval, or political
idols in smoked bronze, like petrified orators for ever addressing
an indifferent public, holding, as if in mockery, the dumb show of
a perpetual open-air meeting under the presidency of Nelson in
police-prohibited Trafalgar Square!
Under the sway of commercial ideas, instead of taking pride
in and enjoying in common what belongs to everybody, the object
seems to be to get hold of something that no one else has—some
rarity, curiosity, at a fabulous price, or a next-to-nothing bargain,
and to make art a thing purely of money or exchangeable value
—considering it in the light of a good investment, in fact.
It may be said we have our national museums—storehouses
stuffed full of the precious relics and fragments of the times when
art was a living and growing thing. Valleys now of dry bones,
except to a few students. National, certainly, but the nation as a
rule has no time to go and see them in this industrial age, since
they are not open on the one day—Sunday—on which the people
could go. There are the churches, it is true, but the nation does
not go to church—not, at least, to the same one, and the churches
are no longer as a rule the depositories of the best art the age
can produce. Some, indeed, will have none of it, and as to the
old ones, we seem to be doing our best to improve them off the
face of the earth altogether.
Again, under the mechanical and wholesale system of produc-
tion for profit, a specialising of labour and art has taken place,
and this has led to the practical extinction of the handicraftsman,
and his severance from the artist.
Art and Social Democracy
i4S
Art may be produced for the people (or to sell to them), but
it is no longer produced by the people. Every one has a mill of
his own to grind at—working against time at a mostly monoton-
ous occupation to meet an artificial demand, or engaged in stimu-
lating that demand, or compulsorily idle in its absence, under a
commercial industrial organisation so sensitive as to be affected
by every fluctuation of the market, and wherein every body of
workers depends upon every other, yet wherein each commercial
unit works in competition with its hand against the hand of every
other. So that the natural social bond is ever at war with the
artificial and unsocial system—pending that true organisation of
labour in which lies the only solution of collective human life.
Since then life for the mass of mankind, by the working of
various causes—I will not say by consent—has become for the most
part a dull mechanical round of toil, alternating with enforced
idleness,— a kind of methodical and orderly lunacy with a few
lucid intervals which we call holidays or enjoyment, amusement,
diversion, art, and poetry—since humanity must have some kind
of diversion, we have created a special class to divert us. As the
mediaeval lord kept his professional jester to ensure a supply of
sparkling and ingenious conversation, so we keep, or allow to
starve, our artists, poets, musicians, and actors. Very few of
them can afford to do exactly as they like—to be free to give us
their very best. That would be too expensive as things go;
besides there are the laws of supply and demand (as Lord
Salisbury has reminded us). So that we have no higher ideal
even for an artist or a poet than that of a shopman behind
the counter, supplying wares of various or particular kinds to
L
r
f
146 Tfa Claims of Decorative Art
please his customers; who again perhaps are not demanding what
they individually prefer, but what they think they ought to prefer,
or what they believe other people—supposed to be authorities—
would tell them they ought to prefer. It can hardly be wondered
at then that our art should be so often artificial.
But should we be justified in assuming that these influences on
art are the result of democracy?
It all depends upon what we understand by democracy, and
what sort of a democracy. Our present habits and characteristics
are derived from all sorts of sources and influences. Our present
society is a huge conglomerate formation with fossils scattered in
it,—the relics of living forms of past ages.
We chiefly differ from former societies by having a different
class in the ascendant with lower ideals, or rather no particular
ideal at all, unless 50 per cent or the subordination of most con-
siderations to cash and comfort can be counted as such.
Commercialism, in short, rules us with a rod of—brass. While
nominally and politically free, men were really never more
dependent; and how can men be free so long as their bread
depends on the will or the whim of another, and when they have
no claim to a foot of land or a roof over their heads, except on
condition of a heavy tax upon their own labour? And even in
regard to the security of the continuance of labour itself, and
therefore of life, they are no more secure.
And yet we are told this is democracy, and that one man is
as good as another—yes, we might add, and a great deal better
off, too.
What! is our social ladder planted then with its feet in the
Art and Social Democracy
H7
hell of misery and poverty, its top rising to the false heaven of
inane luxury and hypocrisy, and the type of man held up to
admiration and imitation who works his way up, over others'
shoulders, from Lazarus to become Dives?
Is this democracy? Is it not rather the old enemy, un-
scrupulous ambition, without its old excuse, under a new mask
of thrift, business habits, respectability—secure in the automatic
working of the great rent-collecting and interest-yielding machine,
faring sumptuously every day on the labour of others?
And if it is proposed to do something to keep up our demo-
cratic character, and to endeavour to shorten the hours of labour
of our wage-slaves, to throw them a very trifling crust from the
table of life, even advanced Liberal politicians seem to think the
world is coming to an end. What! the political clock stopping
at eight hours a day! Well, I know that after about only six or
seven hours of even interesting and varied work at the easel or the
desk one feels rather tired; but fancy eight hours in a coal seam!
or at a grinder's wheel!—eight hours of mechanically repeated
momentary actions at the will of a steam engine! The only
objections to an eight hours bill appear to me to be that it is
not six hours, and that there should be any doubt as to whether,
under the present system with "the iron law of wages," its bene-
fits even then might not be illusory, taken by themselves. But no
one proposes to do that, I presume?
But if the lot of the wage-labourer be not an enviable one, is
the lot of his masters more enviable? We might well envy the
physical endurance, patience, and pluck of a miner, or a docker,
or a gas stoker, but can any man envy such qualities as have
148
The Claims of Decorative Art
been exhibited on the part of some locking-out masters and profit-
grinding companies? Not even willing to fight on fair terms—
men dismissed for sticking to their union, the workman's only-
weapon against capitalism! But even the life which is the
result of the "cash and comfort" ideal is far from desirable,
from the purely material point of view. Cash there may be,
but the comfort is often illusory; stewed in hot-water-pipe
atmosphere as if one was an orchid; stiff and uncomfortable
dressing; and rooms in which the absence of taste is as con-
spicuous as the superfluity of furniture. All manner of formal
customs and observances, hardly ever a chance to do something
for yourself, and language often used to conceal if not thoughts
at least feelings.
Is it in this direction we must look for our democratic ideal
of life? Is there anything democratic about it, except that the
butler is dressed like his paster, a certainly unpicturesque result
of democracy.
But it appears to me if democracy can show such social
characteristics, it cannot be a democracy really. It must be a
sham democracy—a commercial democracy, in fact. There evi-
dently must be distinctions even in democracies, because we even
hear of " Tory-democracy," quite the most peculiar notion. We
are evidently dealing, as is usual in commercial matters, with
questions of quality, ist, 2d, 3d, and so on, like grocers' sugar, or
like the classes on a railway—another democratic institution, I
suppose.
Whatever our "class," however, we are all chained to the
triumphal car of commercialism, which, in spite of the application
Art and Social Democracy 149
of brakes and occasional stoppages, rolls on its iron way round
the world. Yet its speed and progress depend upon the constant
watchfulness and careful labour of millions—upon stretched
sinews and overstrained nerves; and who may count the sacrifices
in the lives crushed beneath its remorseless wheels! For all that
the progress of the car is absolutely dependent upon the continu-
ance of that labour. What if the labourers were by common and
universal consent to throw down their tools some day?
I have often wondered that some of our modern realistic
painters do not give us pictures of the actualities of modern
industry. Weird scenes from the " black country"—those desolate
regions that bloom but in furnace flames; scenes in the mines;
at iron works; nail and chain makers—tragic pictures many of
them will be; truly historic; eloquent witnesses of the founda-
tions of England's riches, and what they have cost.
It has always been the custom of a people to perpetuate in art
their deeds of arms, to carve and paint their triumphs and vic-
tories, but we do not seem particularly proud of the real battles,
commercial and industrial, upon which our modern importance
has been built, and the toil and waste of human life by which it
is sustained.
Yet the man who makes a fortune in business generally thinks
it well to spend something in pictures. We do not, however, as
a rule, see such subjects in his gallery. Our attention is called to
the finished product of civilisation, and it is thought desirable to
draw a veil over some of the intermediate processes. But few
have the hardihood to invite the skeleton to the feast.
Among the curious developments of latter-day civilisation is
The Claims of Decorative Art
the rise of a school of painters who apparently spend their talents
in discovering, if they can, the beauty of ugliness—the attraction
of repulsion! For instance, I noticed at Paris this summer that
there was quite a run on pictures of operations in hospitals. Even
over here we have men who quite revel in London smoke and
fog, and in the charm of the most ill-favoured spots.
This is no doubt more attributable to competition and picture
shows than to democracy, but it is hugging your chains with a
vengeance. If our artists are so affected by the ugliness of
modern life that they—the supposed apostles of beauty—delib-
erately prefer an ugly subject to show their skill in treating it,
we may perhaps lose our sense of beauty altogether in time.
While we can, however, let us insist on the difference.
Art of course has many sides and capacities — as many,
perhaps, as democracy. While from one point of view it may
be regarded simply as the language of observation and record,
and as such, I freely admit, it has an important sphere of use-
fulness; on the other, by means of figurative embodiment and
poetic suggestion it is capable of appealing to and stimulating our
highest faculties.
The figurative emblematic form of art has always had a strong
hold upon the human mind. We see it under the influence of
religious ritual and associated with civil life paramount in the
art of past ages; and though under the modern search for
naturalism symbolism has practically disappeared from the canvas
of the painter, except in some few instances among the more
thoughtful and poetic, it still maintains an active and popular
life in political cartooning. Every week's public affairs and
Art and Social Democracy
public characters are treated in a series of pictorial parables, and
appear in every variety of comparison, analogy, and disguise,
pointing a satire or a political purpose according to the editorial
or proprietorial views of the journal. It is noteworthy that it
is always in the expression of the strongest feelings and convic-
tions that the parable or symbolical form is used.
Politics and social questions in our time have largely taken the
place which religious faith formerly occupied in the popular mind.
They are the only questions in which you can interest the mass of
mankind—the only questions, perhaps, on which people get really
excited. Accordingly they delight to see the expression of their
political or social faith in emphatic, familiar, and yet allegorical
form, with a satiric sting in it if possible.
Nothing so forcibly expresses the common current of political
opinion, or rather sentiment (or even prejudice), of the dominant
sections of society as its political and satiric cartoons. They
will be valuable material for the future historian. It is curious,
too, how long a symbolic figure once accepted will last. Take
the familiar one of John Bull himself. Is he really any longer
typical of the comfortable, powerful classes—the financier, the
banker—who really rule the roast-beef of old England? Instead
of a mixture of semi-agricultural, sporting, and Quaker character-
istics, a commercial and semi-oriental cast would now perhaps be
nearer the truth. But even he must be prepared to give way to
the rising power, the real John Bull—Labour. I think more
advantage might be taken of this widespread love of parable,
symbolic and emblematic art. Something, for instance, might
be done in it as an effective means of conveying those funda-
152
The Claims of Decorative Art
mental economic truths which are so necessary to realise before
we can hope to make real progress.
Illustrations might be given, for instance, of Mr. Ruskin's
parallel—the Crag Baron and the Bag Baron.
The first is the baron of feudal times, with his castle on the crag
behind him, and the lances of his armed retainers ready to swoop
upon all coming through his territory and levy his blackmail.
The second is the baron of modern commercialism, with his
own appropriate scenery behind him—his castles, gaunt factories,
and instead of the forest of lances, a forest of chimneys. He
rules by the power of the money-bag. His bag is beside him,
duly labelled rent, profit, interest—the three great sources of his
riches and power. He is only disturbed by reading of the pro-
gress of socialism.
Another effective design might be a symbolic representation of
the present relations of capital and labour, suggested by the Hindu
idea of the universe—namely, that the world is supported upon the
back of an elephant, and the elephant stands upon a tortoise.
Even so the world of wealth and leisure rests upon capital
(the elephant), which again is supported by labour (the tortoise),
which indeed may not stand or go except by the will of the
elephant and its rider.
The relation of capital to labour might be further symbolised
by the two coins in the elephant's trunk to one in the mouth of the
tortoise. The tortoise naturally looks discontented and resentful,
and altogether the position of affairs is insecure—insecure because
unnatural and unjust.
An emblem of evolution might be given by means of the
Art and Social Democracy
i53
design of a plant growing from the root up, putting forth leaves,
buds, and finally flowers, with the caterpillar, chrysalis, and final
transformation into butterfly, typifying the progress of human
society—a spiral progression, but culminating in higher organisa-
tion. And so from the course of growth and development in
nature the socialist takes hope for the future of humanity,
through changing conditions and transitions, and causes ever at
work evolving a more humane and just order.
While on the subject of popular symbolism, I noticed a while
ago a correspondence on the Lord Mayors show. Though we
may not approve of its present symbolism or its artistic taste
always (and I have always wondered that a tableau representing
Wat Tyler, who struck a blow for English freedom and the
worker in the fourteenth century, prostrate at the feet of Lord
Mayor Walworth was allowed to proceed through the streets of
London), still the fact remains that it is the one free, popular,
open-air spectacle for the people of London, and a historic relic
of great interest; and since it brings people together in good-
humoured crowds it cannot be an anti-social function. Much
more might be made of it if its organisers were inspired by
popular sympathies. It might be at once made more beautiful,
more instructive, and more significant, and I should suggest that
the money now spent on the banquet might be devoted to improv-
ing the show as a popular spectacle; spectacles and processions
always will be popular. It is not as if the community—except
perhaps the business part—would gain anything by the suppression
of the show, whereas the poor would lose what is evidently an
excitement and a pleasure.
154 The Claims of Decorative Art
-
Few sights are more impressive than the vast processions of
workmen marching to the park with their bands and banners on
one of those great occasions of demonstration or protest, which
become so important and so necessary from time to time. Here,
at least, is one of the artistic aspects of democracy which is likely
to increase with the growth of true democratic institutions, and
which affords in the design of banners and emblems the highest
scope for emblematic and decorative art.
Processions as a means of propaganda, too, would be no bad
thing. A series of groups illustrating the progress of political
liberty and social progress from the earliest times to the present,
for instance, or the relations of labour and capital (as in our
elephant and tortoise), would afford splendid dramatic and
picturesque material, and there are still a sufficiently large number
of people who take in more ideas through their eyes than by any
other door of the brain luckily.
This fact is at least taken advantage of by the advertising
tradesman, not so much from a love of art, but with a view to
gain his private ends; and so we allow a perfect epidemic of
posters and puffery to pursue us everywhere with their vulgar
effrontery and hideous forms and colours, from the streets to the
stations, from the platform into the railway carriages, trams,
buses, in wearisome iteration; or even to cram themselves im-
pertinently between the leaves of the magazine or book we are
reading. Well, we can but hope that posters are not the last word
in mural decoration, and that perhaps another generation may
think it worth while, instead of throwing away labour and skill in
pasting every temporary boarding with flagrant announcements
Art and Social Democracy
and sensational eye-sores, which must come out of the cost price
of the articles puffed, to endeavour to relieve the monotony of
our house-fronts with some attempt at beauty of design or colour
for its own sake.
I have been dwelling on some of the characteristics of our
present transitional state of society. "Now is the winter of our
discontent," but the spring will surely come. The new leaves
are ever ready to spring from the shrivelled husk. New ideas,
new forces, are at work which are destined to change the face of
the earth. We may look either to the past or the future, but it
is to the future we must look to realise the true ideal democracy—
not a commercial, but a social democracy; the first business of
which will be to take care of human life itself, and its conditions;
to see that the tree is nourished at the roots before we ask for
flower or fruit; to raise the standard of life all round; to make
the present extremes of poverty on the one hand and luxury on
the other impossible; to set up a new ideal of life—simple, but
by no means ascetic, which will provide work, as well as full
opportunity for leisure and cultivation of individual abilities;
which will aim at the organisation of such a system of labour that
the useful work of the community shall never press unduly upon
one class; and which will not find it tolerable that the price of
the comfort and enjoyment of one class should be the degradation
of another. No, let our aim be the abolition of class and the
establishment of a truly human society of equals; enough for us
if a man is true to his manhood and a woman to her womanhood—
and what prouder title or higher praise is possible if we consider
this true meaning in all the relations of life ?—with full scope for
The Claims of Decorative Art
those infinite varieties of talent and character which are sure to
assert themselves. Faithful service to the community according
to the capacity of each the only compulsion, in exchange for all
the possibilities which a full and human life may afford, stimu-
lated by friendly emulation in the true service of man.
Every one who contends for human freedom, for justice, and
regulates his actions as far as he is able on the principles of
equality and fraternity, which are practically the love of one's
neighbour,—every one who does so, not in an ascetic spirit of
sour self-denial, but because he takes his highest happiness in so
doing, is helping to realise this ideal, is adding in his own way
a stone to the great edifice of human effort and human progress,
the spirit of which from remote ages, through persecutions, cal-
umnies, oppressive laws, tyrannies, superstitions, ignorance, through
good report and evil report, has led man out of the primal dark-
ness, steadfastly bearing the torch of hope till hope becomes a
faith—faith in socialised humanity.
If we are working in this spirit we need not trouble about the
fate of art, for if we take care of life, art will take care of itself;
it will become the natural and spontaneous expression of such a
life, both as its familiar friend and helpmate, and its final crown
and aspiration.
IMITATION AND EXPRESSION IN ART
/T^O any one who has put his head beneath the magic cloth of
the photographer, and has seen, focussed on the glass
screen, a beautiful pre-Raphaelite miniature of nature, the
thought must have occurred—if the secret of retaining colours
as well as forms in chiaroscuro by photography could be dis-
covered, what would become of modern painting?
But, it may be said, photography is already one of the chief
props and ministers of modern painting. As it is, the camera
and the dry plate often supplement, if they do not supersede, the
sketch-book and the laborious study, and the influence of photo-
graphy and photographic effect is apparently the paramount in-
fluence in contemporary work. Would painting thus lean upon
photography if she felt that she was but being led to her own
destruction? Very likely not; yet, of necessity, the weaker
leans upon the strong, and the object being the imitation of
superficial fact, photography is strong where painting is weak.
For the last quarter-century and more, the stream of tendency
158
The Claims of Decorative Art
in art, reflecting that in life and thought, has been setting
strongly towards naturalism; and this naturalism (or literalism,
as I should prefer to call it) is both the cause of the effect and
the effect of the cause. It both acts and re-acts, and certainly
its action upon art is one of the most striking signs of the times.
Amid the confusion of critical tongues, the artificial con-
ditions of the market, the absence of public taste, the false values
of exhibitions, and the hopeless commercialism upon which they
are based, what wonder is it that painters should eagerly seize
upon such help as photography can give, to force still further
already forced effects. But it is a fatal alliance, and photography
must win in the long run in such an unequal race.
Art, like the aged and world-worn sage Faust, ardent for life
and enjoyment, snatches eagerly at the promise of renewed youth
—the vision of realised nature—held out by the demon, and
ignores the consequences.
It is time to ask whether the game is worth the candle?
The answer of course depends on our conception of the scope of
art; what are its ends and aims? If it is indeed the exclusive
pursuit of naturalism or literalism, there is nothing but the
prospect of this unequal race with photography, which, in the
attainment of fact or of phase, and even in beauty of tone and
effect, puts any painting or drawing hopelessly at a distance.
On this course it is clear that art is destined to be finally
beaten by science. It may be indeed that art is destined to be
absorbed and comprehended in science, for even the hitherto
uncontested field of ideal conception is threatened by the results
of the composite photograph, and Mr. Galton's generic images.
Imitation and Expression in Art
iS9
Painting would certainly never have been brought to this
pass if she had not been parted from the early companion of her
way, but she has severed herself from craftsmanship, from orna-
mental design—nay, generally speaking, from design and inven-
tion, too—and given herself body and soul to literal imitation of
nature dominated by commercial sentiment and sensation.
Again it may be objected, is not the business of painting then
to imitate? I answer, only a part of the business, and only in
so far as imitation contributes to expression, whether of beauty,
or thought, or story, or phase of nature, in which it ceases to be
merely imitation and becomes an art—that of representation.
Where would be either use or enduring pleasure in art, if it did
not express something besides the mere accidents of superficial
fact? As well might the poet deal in nothing but description,
or the musician limit himself to reproducing the noises of the
farmyard, as the painter be content to ignore invention and
design, story and poetic suggestion. In these things the human
mind comes into play, and it is these qualities that give life and
endurance to art. Nor is there any substitute for them. We
cannot get our designing done by machinery, or our thinking by
photography. The only known mechanism for these processes
is that of the brain itself.
Mere cunning of hand invariably tires, and this is why super-
ficial literal imitation by itself is always so dull. We are bored
to death by what is called realism, and can only keep up our
interest by a constant succession of novelties; like the audience in
a theatre, who tire of a mere scene, an arrangement of properties
however real, according to stage realism. On the stage, however,
160 The Claims of Decorative Art
strongly as it reflects the literal tendencies of the day, art may
safely go much farther in that direction, as the meaning and
expression (to which thought, scenery, and properties may con-
tribute in a high degree) must finally depend upon the dramatic
action of the living persons, and these, at least and from the
pictorial point of view of the stage, from the very fact that they
are alive, can never be overpowered by accessories.
Of course, I admit, as regards painting, apart from any poetic
embodiment or abstract treatment, there is the expression of the
facts of light and colour, texture and tones, and these—although,
with the exception of colour, they can be rendered by photo-
graphy with an accuracy and completeness quite unapproachable
—really would appear to be at present the only qualities, the
only facts, the expression of which is worth the attention of the
painter. If that is really the case, painting—pending its final
extinction by photography—must be content to take an inferior
intellectual position among the arts. "Art is art, precisely
because it is not nature," said Goethe, but the modern painter,
so far as he is articulate, would render it, "Art is art, precisely
because it mocks nature."
The career of an illustrious contemporary (as shown in a
recent collection at the Grosvenor Gallery) illustrates in a re-
markable way certain degrees of expressiveness and imitation in
painting. It is remarkable, too, as showing that, even when the
object in painting is to cast off all convention, and to represent
nature without prejudice or prepossession, how, even then, un-
consciously, under the influence of passionate feeling striving for
expression, the painter develops, as it were, a new convention of
Imitation and Expression in Art 161
his own. The most striking quality about the earlier pictures of
Millais is not what was commonly supposed to be the chief
characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite school, namely, their unflinch-
ing truth to nature, but rather the intellectual force of their
poetic and dramatic expression. Comparing the work of the
earlier period—say from 1849 t0 1856—with the work of the
later—say of the last ten years—one may see as totally different
aims as are perhaps possible in the work of one man. The close
textures, beautiful detail, fine and finished execution, deep though
not always harmonious colours, and romantic feeling of the
earlier time have in the later work entirely disappeared, and
nearly everything is sacrificed to the more superficial facts of full
relief, and accidents of lighting, atmosphere, and surface. I do
not lay so much stress on the fact that the recent pictures are
chiefly portraits in the technical sense (although one certainly
does rather resent that personages of mere wealth and fashion
should have usurped so much of the painter's time, and filled so
many of his canvases, to the extinction, in great part, of the
romantic and dramatic element in his art), for Millais has always
been a portrait painter whatever his subject. His one particular
idiosyncrasy as an artist has, from the first, consisted in the force
and directness of his realisation of nature, which is of the essence
of portrayal, or portraiture. He never showed any tendency to
idealism in any shape, so far as I am aware, but has always been
content to take nature as he found her, without endeavouring, by
careful and conscious selection and comparison, to build up types
of form, or elaborate schemes of decorative composition and
colour. He is not a seer of visions or a dreamer of dreams.
M
The Claims of Decorative Art
Life and circumstance are enough, without reading between the
lines. In this directness lie both his strength and his weakness
as an artist.
Again, to compare the last with the first, one is struck with a
certain flatness of the general effect of the early work, as in the
Ophelia, for instance. And to this, no doubt, the multiplicity of
careful and beautiful detail contributes, as well as the deep and
frank tones of colour afore-mentioned. The impressiveness of the
results is dependent upon those qualities—upon this treatment—
bound up with them as inseparably as the words of a poet are
with his matter and style. When relief, and superficial and
accidental facts of light are sought after, the whole feeling
changes, and the method with the characteristics expressed. We
stand in the common light of day, and talk with the members
of Society. Gone is the glow of the romance—the passion and
the earnestness of youth, with the beautiful detail, and the even
and certain finish of the workmanship. We have to make the
best of it, and extract what satisfaction we may from the con-
templation of a coarser realism of more obvious facts, including
a certain amount of British brutality, a vulgar ostentation of
wealth, and the attraction or repulsion of matter-of-fact per-
sonalities—these things being expressed by an execution which
shows more directness than care, and more force than finish or
beauty.
We draw the lesson that with increased facility there is less
care, and a coarser literalism takes the place of earnest realism,
and while the attention is narrowed to individual and accidental
characteristics, there is a notable decline of thought, dramatic
Imitation and Expression in Art 163
power, and decorative effect; depth of colouring has departed
with beauty of execution, which are the natural vehicles of the
expression of quite different aims.
We are led to the conclusion that the search after a more
obvious, literal, and surface imitation of natural fact is followed
at the sacrifice of the more refined and delightful qualities, and
with the limitation of these comes the limitation of the range of
expression. The more of nature,—at least of her more superficial
facts,—the less, apparently, of art—the less of the expression of
the individual thought of the artist.
If this be a true statement of the tendency of modern paint-
ing, let us be satisfied with photography. If we value literal
representation solely, and the preservation of superficial facts and
effects of surface lighting, photography can give them better and
more certainly than any paint—can produce in a moment of time
what years of labour could never accomplish. And then, too, the
photograph gives us the facts, and, within their limited range, as
much force of expression as belongs to facts, without any false
sentiment, which is too often the case with the painter. If we
can get our facts registered for us with absolute certainty and
fidelity, and without individual bias, let us take them and be
thankful: but let art give up the struggle for territory over
which she can no longer claim exclusive or absolute jurisdiction.
Let her rest in her own borders. There is a large and ample
domain in which there is no fear of invasion; a fair and beautiful
region, peopled with the
Forms more real than living men,
flowered and fruited with the rejuvenescence of the thought of all
164 The Claims of Decorative Art
time; where invention and expression are the familiar friends and
councillors of art, and truth becomes identical with beauty in the
large control of design.
But this is the possession of merely Decorative Art—despised
and rejected of men; fit only to be lounged upon or trodden
under foot: a toy in the hand, not credited with brain or soul,
or power of expression, speaking in strange tongues and parables,
or at the best a harmless species of lunacy, fed but with the
crumbs from the table of the pictorial Dives.
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 univers-
ally 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.
Imitation and Expression in Art 165
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 reason-
able objection.
Interesting as coloured monumental effigies may be, and how-
ever 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 expres-
siveness all its own, but it is a different kind. We feel the
The Claims of Decorative Art
beauty and expressiveness of a drawing by Mantegna or Albert
Diirer, 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 Renais-
sance 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
Imitation and Expression in Art 167
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 inven-
tion 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 over-
board, and this is what is usually included in the term composi-
tion. 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 painters 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 congratula-
i68
The Claims of Decorative Art
tions 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
mediaeval and early Renaissance painters, what a world of inven-
tion 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
Imitation and 'Expression in Art . 169
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 blase
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.
170 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 con-
veys the idea of speed to the mind more completely and con-
vincingly 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 know-
ledge 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
Imitation and Expression in Art 171
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
^^/'E are here to further the advancement of art in its appli-
cation 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 com-
pulsorily idle hands to do; while in the din of the vast work-
shop 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
Art and Industry
173
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 surround-
ings; 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 in-
separable; 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
174
The Claims of Decorative Art
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
Art and Industry 175
first. His arts fail him. He cannot palm off these coarse and
inharmonious colours, these hideous patterns, or this clumsy furni-
ture, 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 conscious-
ness 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 com-
promise. 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 proto-
types 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
176 The Claims of Decorative Art
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 facade, 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
Art and Industry 177
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 gener-
ally 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,
N
i78
The Claims of Decorative Art
necessarily has large and immediate wants. Millions of inter-
dependent 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 gar-
ments. 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 com-
modity, 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
Art and Industry
179
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 atten-
tion 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 cer-
tainly 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.
As I have already said, our mechanical invention, directed to
the cheapening of the processes of industrial production, and the
acceleration in speed of that production, has outstripped our
artistic invention. In our efforts to increase the means of pro-
duction we have lost sight of the end. In purely artistic produc-
tion the old methods, the old tools, mostly remain, as they have
done for centuries, unaffected by mechanical invention, for the
simple reason that nothing can supersede the hand. The tools
of the sculptor, the carver, the painter, are but extra fingers
supplementary to the original four and the indispensable thumb,
to which the artist continually recurs, and with which his work is
begun and ended. That personal touch and impress of character
we value so highly in what we call the Fine Arts, with the dis-
appearance of the handicraftsman and the severance of designer
and workman, has practically ceased to exist; except in those
instances of individual revival and pursuit of a craft on its
original lines, which, among the cultured and the leisured, or
i8o The Claims of Decorative Art
on the part of painters or sculptors as a diversion, have increased
so much of late years.
The modern conditions of manufacture appear to have
destroyed the old traditions of the handicrafts. Our commerce
has vulgarised and confused the public taste. Yet where any
form of art is concerned—anything in the nature of a pattern or
design in the material of surface decoration in any form, appeal-
ing to the eye, in the goods produced—manufacture is absolutely
dependent on design of some sort. It may be begged, borrowed,
paid for, or stolen, but still the design must be there to start
with. Yet design, so far as it is under the influence of the exist-
ing conditions, has become tamer and tamer, and more and more
meaningless and superficial; and it is obvious that the ill effects
of a bad design are increased a thousandfold, or exactly in pro-
portion to the increase in the mechanical power and speed of its
production by the resources of machinery.
When the power of reproduction is so enormous, it becomes,
obviously, more than ever necessary to reproduce nothing in
design but what is sound and good in its own way. If not,
far better confine ourselves to the manufacture of plain materials:
good cloth, well woven and dyed, without pattern; serviceable
furniture, without carving or painting, unless it can be sincere
and thoughtful; useful pottery, as good in contour as the wheel
and the skill of the thrower can make it, unspoiled by the ravings
of the china painter distracted by centuries of false taste, or con-
fused by dictionaries of ornament, or the impressionism of the
modern Japanese or Parisian.
There are, of course, certain great industries which are
Art and Industry 181
absolutely dependent on the surface designer and pattern maker,
such as cotton-printing, carpet-weaving, paper-staining, for in-
stance—manufactures which would not exist at all without a
constant supply of designs. There is no doubt that this is fully
recognised by the manufacturers or their managers; and the
utmost pains, consistent with a due regard for the possibilities
of profit, are taken by the leading firms to secure at least com-
petent working drawings, if not tasteful designs. It may be
conceded, too, that, as regards design, these industries have been
the first to show the influence of those ideas which have produced
a kind of revolution among designers of late years, with the result
that a movement which appears to be purely English in origin
has made its mark in these directions, and has largely counter-
acted the stream of tendency which at one time set so strongly
towards Paris as the head centre of taste in all matters of art, the
disastrous effects of which still affect us in many ways.
The real secret of Continental influence in design upon us is
no doubt to be found in the fact that the severance of the arts
and handicrafts has never been anything like so complete in other
Eu'ropean countries as in industrial England. Our great indus-
trial rival America shows the same want of originating power in
artistic design, the same tendency in a more marked degree to
avail herself of Parisian modes in art. However degraded the
taste of the designer, or debased in type the design, the French-
man" or the Italian designer remained thoroughly in touch with
the craftsman, and understood the technical conditions of the
work thoroughly, so that his working drawings would be perfectly
adapted to the method of manufacture. We have here, at any
182
The Claims of Decorative Art
rate, one reason why our manufacturers have given preference to
French designs, and have been so much in the habit of crossing
the water for new supplies. Yet we must recognise that so closely
connected are now all countries, commercial and industrial, that
the slightest change in one will surely affect the other. If foreign
artists and workmen are in demand, our own suffer, or if our
native talent is preferred, then our Continental brothers are worse
off. This, of course, is the result of competition. Level up all
round with technical education. Competition would come in
again. You would get a technically educated proletariat, but no
more secure of a livelihood than they are at present. Supposing
England temporarily regained her commercial ascendency, the
suffering would only be transferred from one country to another;
and can we morally justify it to ourselves that people of one
nationality have more right to live than those of another? These
are awkward questions. But to return.
The term "artist" in this country has come to mean the
pictorial artist only. Our art education has been dominated by
the ideas and methods of the pictorial artist, and nearly everything
has been sacrificed to the naturalistic, imitative, pictorial principles
of representation, which, of whatever value they may be to the
painter of easel pictures, or the popular illustration of newspapers,
have but remote bearing on applied design. Fortune, fame, and
favour have been open to the painter of pictures almost exclu-
sively, and our art school training has been sedulously directed
to the manufacture of painters as distinct from designers and
craftsmen.
It is remarkable that during this century the artistic and
Art and Industry
183
industrial characteristics of which I have been endeavouring to
describe, we should have been under the shadow of a Royal
Academy of Arts—a chartered and privileged body, presumably
established to foster the arts of the country, but which, while it
nominally includes architecture, sculpture, and engraving, and
recognises their existence to a certain limited extent, as an
institution really exists for the painter, and as far as the weight
of its influence goes, almost exclusively encourages one form of
art production, that of easel and marketable pictures—not only
indirectly by the training of its schools, but by the far wider and
more popular influence of its annual exhibitions, and those it
controls throughout the country; but so far as the applied arts
and decorative designs are concerned, or are dependent upon
academic recognition, they might scarcely exist at all.
Not that I think academies or academic influences are at
all desirable or beneficial in their effects upon art or artists.
Academic influence tends to crystallise both men and ideas.
An academy, of course, can never originate, it can only recog-
nise; and is apt to be exceedingly slow at that. Every new,
vigorous, and characteristic movement in art has grown up out-
side, and in opposition to its teaching and influence; and as each
independent school becomes prominent and influential, its leaders,
unable as a rule to resist the substantial worldly advantages which
academic distinction and titles bestow, become absorbed, and help
to increase the weight of academic power, and become part of
that crystallising influence against which every original mind has
to struggle. It is not surprising; I merely note the fact that it
is so. I have no personal feeling in the matter. The Academy
184 The Claims of Decorative Art
includes many distinguished artists—men whose acquaintanceship
I am proud to claim, but I fail to see that being Academicians
makes them better artists; it does not prevent me feeling that
the Academy exists for painters rather than painting, as to which
I venture to think it has only succeeded practically in encourag-
ing one form of that art, and that not the highest. It offers
prestige and position to individual artists who have already won
a position, and produces a keen competition among the candidates
for its honour, but once inside its charmed circle a man seems, as
a rule, inclined to rest on his laurels, or to eat the lotus. At the
same time I desire freely to acknowledge at least the verbal recog-
nition that has been extended to the arts and crafts of design, and
the claim of those who work in them to the title of artists, to
which my accomplished friend Sir Frederick Leighton gave
expression in his eloquent address at the opening of the Art
Congress at Liverpool.
It may seem I have been saying hard things of the Royal
Academy. Well, here is a splendid opportunity of proving the
reality of its new grand enthusiasm for the arts and crafts. Why
not lend the noble galleries at Burlington House to the Society I
represent, in the Exhibition of Arts and Crafts? I throw out
this as a suggestion.
There is another institution which was established for the
express purpose of dealing with the arts of design—I mean the
National Art Training Schools of the country in connection with
the Science and Art Department at South Kensington; with which
I may say I have a kind of connection as one of the examiners in
design.
Art and Industry
185
The primary and excellent object of these schools was to
afford a general artistic training to a craftsman, to the end that
he might cultivate his artistic capacities in draughtsmanship and
design, and apply them to the improvement of his own particular
craft, under the stimulus of prizes for proficiency in various
studies by means of a national competition every year.
But here, again, owing to the domination of the pictorial ideas
and pictorial aims and methods in art, and their paramount in-
fluence in teaching, it has been found that students who develop
pictorial skill and draughtsmanship, so far from endeavouring, or
being able, to carry such skill back into their own craft or in-
dustry, aspire—as indeed under the circumstances is not surprising
—to be painters of easel pictures, and follow the popular art with
all its possibilities of personal distinction and fortune.
I say it is not surprising, for, even if the kind of training
obtainable in these schools was in all cases, as it is in some, of
such a nature that it could be made of real practical value in
its bearing on particular handicrafts and industries, what strong
inducements are there for a student working in any industry
to remain in that industry, applying his school acquirements to it,
when he has no prospect of gaining either personal credit or
distinction for his work as an individual, or even substantial
reward beyond a certain point within the margin of profit in that
trade, a limit which, in proportion as the number of skilled
workers increased, would necessarily tend to diminish by the
competition among themselves?
I think this shows that existing economic conditions are dead
against the aim of the schools. There are, of course, many
186 The Claims of Decorative Art
schools of high proficiency as such, and as examples of good
working models, under the South Kensington system. I am not,
however, personally able to feel much more enthusiasm for schools
of art, as such, however efficient according to the official standards,
than I am for academies, because I believe that the only training
worth having in the arts must be in the workshop, as of old;
since I hold that the true root and basis of all art lies in the
handicrafts, and that artistic impulse and invention weakens as
it loses its close connection and intimate relationship with them.
The weakness, too, of art schools is that, though an energetic
master with ideas may, by dint of untiring zeal, build up his
school to a certain high standard of proficiency, with the im-
mediate object of passing as many students in the various grades
as he can, under the system of payment by results, the students
are apt under such a system to depend upon the qualities of their
teacher—the distinction of the school as such collapses without
him, and the personal individual element, owing to the student
being rather subordinated to particular courses and. methods of
study, and the cultivation generally of a particular style, is not
worth, or does not seem to leave, such permanent or desirable
results as might be expected.
Of course it is true that the great increase in the ranks of
picture painters of late years has had the usual effect under
competition of lowering prices and diminishing sales; and also
of making the struggle for distinction harder, since the standard
of mediocrity is raised. In fact, the market is overstocked, and
though, unlike the labourer who supports him, the painter can
generally employ himself, his work remains unsold. With his
Art and Industry
187
purely pictorial training, he, as a rule, has no idea of applying
his art in any way to any form of industry. There are plenty
of clever sketchers from nature, who, when they come to making
a design for any special purpose or for execution in some par-
ticular material, are quite at sea; and even if they were ever so
able, I am afraid that the market for art and industry combined
is as yet but limited.
The craftsman himself, as we have seen, has been wellnigh
extinguished by the development of that machine industry, which,
while it has isolated the pictorial artists as a class, has also brought
them to their present state. So that there are abundant reasons
why art, as applied to industry, should not be in a flourishing and
vigorous condition.
It is not surprising, bearing these thoughts in mind, that
design has come to be regarded as a sort of Cinderella of art;
her fine sisters, bedecked in paint and public favour, go to the
ball and leave her to mind the hearth or the workshop. But she
is not without her fairy godmother—Inventive Adaptation—who
comes to her aid; and though it is hoped she will never lose her
domestic qualities and substantial household virtues, she may yet
win her share of applause, and, wearing the shoe of good luck, be
recognised as the true bride of the prince Imagination.
At the preliminary meeting for the formation of the National
Association for the Advancement of Art, I took occasion to say
that, "We must turn our artists into craftsmen, and our crafts-
men into artists." That is the problem before us in this matter
of art and industry.
I do not pretend to have found a cut-and-dried solution, but
i88
The Claims of Decorative Art
there is one first necessary step to be taken, it seems to me, as a
matter of common honesty, if we are really sincere in our desire
to unite art and industry, and it is this: that the workman
should have the credit of the work of his own head and hands,
whether designer or craftsman. We must no longer be content
with the vague, however convenient, designation of authorship,
or rather proprietorship—So-and-So & Co.—now commonly
affixed to works of art or industry in our exhibitions; but
we should require the actual names of the contrivers and crafts-
men whose actual labour, thought, and experience produced what
we see.
Make a man responsible, and give him the credit of his own
skill in his work: his self-respect at once increases, and he is
stimulated to do his best; he will take pride and pleasure in his
work; it becomes personal and therefore interesting.
I am associated with a movement in London—in which I have
had the advantage of the co-operation and sympathy of many able
and distinguished men in the arts—the immediate outcome of which
has been an Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts with the object of
ascertaining to some degree not only our artistic condition in the
applied arts, and the amount of genuine public interest in them,
as distinct from picture-painting, but also of giving the names of
the responsible designers and executants of the works exhibited, as
far as possible. We do not pretend, in the face of various diffi-
culties inseparable from an initial movement, that our exhibition
was all that we should have liked to make it, but the success
which has attended it has been quite beyond our expectations, and
the amount of public interest and support we have received and
Art and Industry 189
the general recognition of the justness of the principle have been
most encouraging—so much so that we held a second exhibition
on the same lines in the autumn of 1889.
There is no reason why the movement should not be taken
up independently and locally in other towns, on the same prin-
ciples, managed by local committees, and supported by local
sympathisers. Such exhibitions might afford valuable tests of
the state of the arts and crafts generally, and, in particular, of the
condition of design in the special industries of the district; while
the association of the name of the actual designer and workman
with their work would tend to bring out in emulation individual
skill and invention under the stimulus of public recognition.
Another suggestion—in which I have been anticipated—I
venture to make is that in every manufacturing town a permanent
collection should be formed of the best procurable examples of
design and artistic workmanship in different materials, especially
with reference to the particular industries of the place or district.
Designs and working drawings, together with the finished pro-
duct, might be arranged side by side, and so constantly to be
seen and studied and compared by designers and workmen. Such
collections might comprise both old and new work; and speci-
mens might be acquired from time to time from the annual or
occasional arts and crafts exhibitions, such as those suggested.
The formation of guilds of artists and craftsmen for the study
and discussion and illustration of the arts and crafts, and all
questions concerning their interests, and those of workers in them,
would also be found a very useful and interesting way of keep-
ing designers and craftsmen in touch with one another, and
190 The Claims of Decorative Art
preserving that unity and solidarity in art which is so essential
to its vitality.
This idea has already been adopted in Liverpool, and the
"Liverpool Art Workers' Guild" also held an exhibition of
applied art a year or two ago, which I understand was very
successful, though I had not the pleasure of seeing it.
These, then, are some of the immediately practical ways of
working towards a healthier condition of things in the arts.
Discussion and counsel must come before action. Hereafter
we may be able to meet and gauge our progress. In the mean-
time I think it is most important to recognise certain facts—to
know exactly how and where we stand in this matter of art and
industry; which, moreover, cannot be separated from the great
economic question of which, indeed, it is but a part.
Do not let us deceive ourselves, or expect to gather the grapes
of artistic or industrial prosperity from economic thorns, or
aesthetic figs from commercial thistles.
It is idle to expect artistic sense and refinement to spring
from dull and sordid surroundings, or a keen sense of beauty
amid the conditions of monotonous and mechanical toil. Unless
your artist and craftsman has personal freedom, leisure and culti-
vation, and continued access to the beauty of both art and nature,
you will get neither vigorous design nor good craftsmanship.
Let us look the Sphinx fairly in the face, and take the length
of her claws and wings before we offer our solution of the riddle.
It may be that the problem will solve itself in the course of time,
as part of that great and constant movement of evolution in
which we ourselves and our lives and interests are involved;
Art and Industry 191
which no man can do much either to impede or to accelerate,
though the action of the least of us counts in the total sum—
since it is the slow but sure result of causes at work through the
long progress of centuries, bound up with the laws of nature, and
the course of human destiny itself.
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh
Replaced with Commercial Microform 1987

DO NOT REMOVE
OR
MUTILATE CARD