isjr;:'( i;' iBi OF Tfm UNIVE 4^iF()V''^3 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/artcommonwealdelOOarchrich ART AND THE COMMONWEAL Copies of the first Conway Memorial Lecture^ The Task of Rationalism, hy John Russell ^ M.A,^ and also of the second, Peace and War in the Balance, hy Henry W, Nevinson, may still he obtained, uniform with this Lecture — each in hoards^ 6d, net (hy post y\d,); in cloth, gd. net (by post iid.J, CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE ART AND THE COMMONWEAL DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE ON FEBRUARY 23, 1912 BY WILLIAM ARCHER (Isra§l Zangwill in the Chair) London : WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.G. 1912 A 7 CHAIRMAN'S INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS I HAVE been honoured by the invitation to preside on this memorial occasion, and to preface the address of the very distinguished speaker of the evening, Mr. William Archer. Knowing, however, from sad personal ex- perience, how a speaker of the evening may suffer from having his ground covered and his audience exhausted by his Chairman, I shall try to remain outside Mr. Archer's terri- tory, or at least to avoid colliding with him. And I know I shall be safe for my first few minutes if I devote myself to Mr. Archer's qualifications for addressing you. " Art and the Commonweal " is a subject on which he speaks as one that has authority, and not as the scribes of Fleet Street. For he is a thinker as well as a critic — I am sorry the distinction should be necessary. He has 5 M698151 6 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS published valuable books on America, on spelling reform, and on the colour-problem, as well as on actors and dramatists and the psychology of acting. He has travelled — in space as well as in spirit. He has translated Ibsen, and pioneered his work in England. He has done, and is still doing, admirable work as a causeur and literary critic, and has ceased to function as a dramatic critic. And yet it is as a dramatic critic that he remains stamped on the popular mind. This can only be because, while in other fields he has had his fellows, in dramatic criticism he is unique. As a rule, one wonders why critics of any kind are allowed to ply without a licence, considering what damage to property, and even to life, may be wrought in their reckless and ignorant progress. For some strange reason, it is open to any blind man who can get printed to review pictures, or to any deaf man to criticise music ; while for those devoid of aesthetic feeling and impartially ignorant of life and literature dramatic criticism offers a secure career. The law of libel avails not against their censure, nor even against their praise. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS Under this reign of terror and orgie of licence, it is a merciful windfall for authors when a man like William Archer turns critic. For the critic is always self-appointed. His only credentials are his criticisms. And by these credentials William Archer was at once perceived to be both honest and competent. No wonder he cannot shake off his fame as a rara avis. For many years he stood out as our only sane and scholarly dramatic critic ; and even when Mr. Walkley joined the ranks of those who ply without a licence Mr. Archer's fame was not eclipsed. For the provinces of the two writers remained differentiated. Mr. Walkley does not pretend so much to be a critic as an artist in impressions, entitled, like all artists, to give pleasure even at the cost of judicial sobriety. While Mr. Archer surrenders himself to the work of art, Mr. Walkley subjugates the work of art to him- self. For my own part, I prefer Mr. Archer's conception of criticism. He does not seek to give amusement, but an exact verdict ; and his brilliancy, when it comes, is the brilliance of sanity, not the brilliance of vanity. You INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS may be sure that, if you take up his work on the colour question, you will find a serious study of the negro problem, not some witty demonstration that black is white. There is one other line of thought along which I may hope to travel without colliding with Mr, Archer, and that is my own personal relations to the great man we are com- memorating. For I should like to tell you that Mr. Conway's weekly addresses, printed, if I remember, as penny pamphlets, formed a main spiritual nutriment of my very early teens. I did not buy them myself, I blush to confess: I borrowed them from a young pupil- teacher, employed, like myself, in a highly orthodox atmosphere ; and these readings had all the charm of the forbidden. They were a superior sort of penny dreadful. Moncure Conway was my Emerson — my first modern thinker. I fancy I did not for years connect these pamphlets with an actual speaker or service. But at last, somehow or other, I became aware of his bodily being and his location in space, and one thrilling day I stole into this chapel to hear him. Alas! INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS the chapel was full, and I could only find a place very much at the back and very much at the side, where I could hear very little. I trust the occupant of my seat is not faring so badly to-night. And I have another confession to make. Before speaking here to-night I felt I ought to revive those far-away memories of the Master, and so I obtained — again by borrow- ing, for it was out of print — that splendid sixpenny volume of his Lessons for the Day. But it was with fear and trembling that I opened the book. For who does not know how fatal it is to re-read the masterpieces of one's boyhood ? Lessons for the Day Before Yesterday, I was thinking apprehensively. To my amazement, the thought was still so fresh and unpopular that the book might have been called Lessons for the Day After To- morrow. Indeed, my only apprehension now was lest I should be accused of plagiarising from it the ideas of the hero of my latest play, published only yesterday — ideas which, so far from being musty and antiquated, still belong to "The Next Religion," still shock Mr. INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS Charles Brookfield, and are prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain. And having thus got on the Stage, perhaps I may be permitted to remain there, safe from collisions with Mr. Archer, during the rest of the quarter of an hour allotted to me. For, I gather, he does not propose to touch on the drama, whether it be from his desire to shake off his persistent association with it, or because it is the one form of Art which has no relation to the Commonweal, except that of the prisoner to the magistrate. For painting there is, after all, the National Gallery, supplemented by a ministerial banquet at the Royal Academy ; architecture is associated with the State through Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament, not to mention Holloway Gaol ; sculpture has its national monuments, even if monuments of bad taste ; even music has a Court status through the national anthem. But the drama is officially recognised only as a public danger, a danger that needs careful preventive measures and a preventive service. It is, perhaps, an unconscious tribute to the power of the theatre to mould the nation's INTRODUCTOR V ADDRESS 1 1 thought. And, indeed, I would not put a fine stage performance second to a church service in its potentiality of quickening and purifying. Nay, without irreverence, I should express that trance of exalted feeling in which a whole audience, from the shopman in the gallery to the duchess in the stalls, hangs upon some noble dramatic issue as nothing less than a holy communion. So high and deep is the reach of the theatre that the inspired car- penter's son, who to initiate the next reli- gion proceeded so largely by parable, might well in these days have dramatised his stories. This, then, is the mighty art which England leaves entirely to commercial enterprise. The actor calls his theatre a shop — and, indeed, there is hardly one which does not look it. I have been ashamed, in travelling, to compare the outward appearance of some provincial French or German theatre with our most distinguished temples of the drama. Even in Sicily, supposed to be a semi-savage country, the theatre of Palermo proclaims by the spaciousness of its situation and the dignity INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS of its design the majesty of the muse it serves ; while along its pediment runs the motto : *' As the sunshine colours flowers, so art colours life.'* Looking at this theatre, I felt as Mr. Henry James felt when, after an evening of art and song at Capri in the society of humble Neapolitans, he suddenly remembered that his own country, the United States, had just opened three hundred liquor saloons at Manilla. And while many a theatre on the Con- tinent is backed by a state or municipal subsidy, with us the drama is an art which is run as a business — and by bad business men at that. For our managers are too uncommercial — that is the real trouble. They live, as Mr. Charles Frohman recently con- fessed, in their little world of the green-room, and forget to keep their finger on the pulse of life and the changing nature of the market. Hence, an age of growing education, of political upheaval, and of enormous intel- lectual and spiritual interests, is without a single theatre to body forth its form and pressure ; and at the present moment not INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 13 a single specimen of the poetical or classic drama is to be seen on any stage in London. No wonder that Mr. Hawtrey, who has just revived the Censor's Dear Old Charlie^ has prophesied that the high tragedian will soon be an extinct species. Such is the situation in the greatest city of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, a city of six million souls. It is a situation that has no parallel in any civilised centre, a situation which puts London below the level of Buenos Ayres. Nor is the situation improved by such mam- moth monstrosities as The Miracle^ which combines the minimum of art with the maximum of expense. In this old-fashioned spectacle, which might be admitted to have its beautiful moments and to be superior to football for the masses, were it not brazenly boomed as the next art, a whole army with its horses and cannons has to march past you to convey the idea that the heroine has become a camp-follower. It is aesthetics in its second childhood. The true art would be by showing the one camp-follower to suggest a whole army. Nor is there anything artistic in 14 INTROD UCTOR V ADDRESS making your characters pass through the midst of your audience. The pictures of Velasquez and Titian would not be enhanced if we could see them running into their frames. The vogue of the cinematograph, with its necessarily childish range of ideas, does not improve the prospects of the higher drama. In this desperate situation — wherein our occa- sional performances of Shakespeare do but give us the appearance of a savage, clothed exclusively in a top-hat — in this desperate situation, I say, we must look to the common- weal to safeguard this precious form of art. ** Where there is no vision the people perish," and in a day of decaying religion it is peculiarly necessary that men should gather to be uplifted in the high communion of poetry, and purged, as Aristotle taught, in the white fires of pity and terror. There is talk of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. But bricks-and-mortar are not what we want ; there is no lack in our theatres of bricks-and-mortar, though, as I have said, they might be more artistically disposed. INTRODUCTOR V ADDRESS 15 Nor do we need perpetual Shakespeare. What we do need is a living repertory in which Shakespeare shall indeed have his part, but as an inspiration, not an idol to which all living drama must be sacrificed. Despite the deadly indifference of the theatre proper, so much good drama is now being published, both in prose and verse, that the more favourable atmosphere of a National Theatre would probably foster one of the richest periods in our literature. Should such a Theatre ever arise, I hope we shall, as in France, put a man of letters at its head. And if you want a man of letters with a passion for the theatre, a man who finds in the footlights the fascination that Wordsworth found in the crags and the waters, a man who has the drama of every country at his fingers'-ends, you need not look beyond the man whom I now call upon to address you. ART AND THE COMMONWEAL Ladies and Gentlemen, My purpose to-night is to lay before you certain doubts and questionings as to the probable relation of art to the future of humanity. Not that I am going to prophesy — do not be afraid of that. I shall not attempt to forecast what viill be, but rather to speculate upon what ought to be : with the practical aim of enquiring whether we cannot, here and now, in some measure readjust our conceptions of art to a reasonable ideal of its social function. Remember that in every thought we think, or at any rate in every habit of thought we form, we are contributing, in however infinitesimal a degree, to the shaping of the future. Ages to come are 17 i8 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL germinating in our brains to-night. It is no idle pastime to body forth an ideal. On the contrary, we should have an ideal world to- morrow if a sufficient number of people could be got to imagine it. The one great obstacle to progress is the sluggishness of the human imagination. I hope you will feel with me that "Art and the Commonweal " is no inapt subject for a Conway Memorial Lecture. Moncure Conway, if I read him aright, was a man to whom nothing human was alien. Spiritual progress and enlightenment was, indeed, the main interest of his life ; but he could not be in- different to such a potent help — or hindrance — to spiritual progress as we must all recog- nise in art. I find him in very early days — during his ministry in Cincinnati — proclaim- ing from the pulpit that he held it a duty to encourage what was good in dramatic art, by seeking it out and supporting it in the ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 19 theatre. If that spirit had widely prevailed then — or if it prevailed in any effective degree at the present moment — how different would I be the theatre of the English-speaking world ! Nor did his alert interest in art decline as his spiritual outlook widened. Always we find him eager in the quest of beauty. In a sermon on "The Gospel of Art," delivered in 1883, he said : — The ministry of Art is the highest, because, when true, it awakens in man the emotions which lift him to the highest possibilities of his existence. I have remarked the admission of Schopenhauer, the prophet of Pessimism. In the general misery of the world and of existence, he finds one exception : the emotion ex- cited by a work of art. Human life, with its round of cares, is like the wheel in Hades on which Ixion was bound ; but when man gazes on a work of pure art, when he listens to sweet music, the wheel of Ixion pauses. Schopenhauer maintains that this fact cannot alter the general conditions of misery. Very few have either the culture or the opportunity for dwelling amid works of art. That may be true for the present, but it does not prevent our hope and endeavour for a coming time when art shall be brought near to the life of all men, in its highest forms. 20 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL I could not desire a better text for my discourse. None of us here, I suppose, imagines that our present social order is in any sense stable. We all feel that a critical development of one sort or another is at hand, and that the world of A.D. 200owill be even more unlike the world of 1900 than that was unlike the world of a century earlier. And it seems pretty safe to predict that the development must be either towards democracy or away from it. Either there will be a considerable equalisation of opportunity, and a juster distribution of the products of labour through the machinery of self-regulating social organisms ; or the servi- tude which now exists under the forms of freedom will be recognised and systematised, and we shall have an oligarchy of supermen ruling, by the ultimate sanction of military force, over a populace of serfs, who might easily be, in all physical respects, better cared ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 21 for and better off than some seven-tenths of the free and independent electors of to-day. I propose to assume, at all events, that human society at large will develop in one or other of these directions ; and, the wish being father to the thought, I ask you to grant, for the moment, that the democratic line of develop- ment is the more probable. The question at present before us, then, is the relation of art to a truly democratic state. And by a demo- cratic state I mean one in which extremes of luxury and of indigence are alike impossible, in which the community, as such, must in the nature of things be the chief patron of the arts, and in which the will of the community can make itself effective no less in matters of taste than in political and economic concern- ments. If we were to adopt the opposite hypothesis, and assume that an oligarchic development was the more probable, no difficulty would 22 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL present itself for discussion. What troubles me a little is precisely this : that artistic faculty and artistic discernment — that special dis- crimination which we call taste — seem to become more and more the privilege of the few, while, from the point of view of that narrowing circle of illuminati, the lack of taste exhibited by the multitude becomes more and more flagrant and horrific. If we were developing towards oligarchy, this would be all in its due order. A few thousand supermen — the few of the few, the elect of the oligarchy — would pay lavishly for art treasures of the past, while they would be seized with periodical crazes for this fashion or that of contemporary painting, sculpture, music, and dancing, which they would gratify regardless of expense. Meanwhile they would dole out freely to the labouring masses the cinematograph shows, the knockabout farces, the glitteringly brain- less ballets, and the other quasi-artistic ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 23 pastimes in which their souls delighted. Art, in fact — Art with a big A — would become confessedly an article of luxury, a hot-house plant, with which the multitude would have nothing to do. The colour of their environ- ment would be provided by whitewash and yellow ochre, mitigated by Christmas-number crudities both of hue and sentiment, and perhaps by the flaring hideousnesses which pass for humorous illustrations in the Ameri- can Sunday papers. Many people, I take it, would accept such a prospect with perfect equanimity. Many people are quite willing to believe that art is essentially and necessarily the appanage of the few, and that we might as well hope for a general diffusion of genius as for a general diffusion of taste. Half the charm of taste, to these people, is the sense of superiority, of aristocratic exclusiveness, which it confers. Everyone whocan, without too much hypocrisy, 24 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL declare that he enjoys Post-Impressionist painting, and revels in the music of Strauss or De Bussy, feels that he thereby confers upon himself an unimpeachable patent of intellectual nobility. He enjoys looking down upon the Philistines of his own class — the people, for instance, who take the Royal Academy seriously — while, as for the profane vulgar who haunt the ** picture-palaces " and read the scrap-papers, they are positively invisible from the artistic summit on which he moves and has his being. He is, in short, a first-rater, and the rest are nowhere. Now, there are times when I confess myself not disinclined to this aesthetic arrogance. We are all, I suppose, more or less subject to it. At the recent Post-Impressionist exhibi- tion, amid a good deal of what I take to have been charlatanism and a little that strongly suggested sheer lunacy, I found much that interested me deeply and gave me real ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 25 pleasure. I am an old and hardened Wagnerian, and, though I am not familiar enough with Strauss to know exactly where I stand with regard to him, I can say with perfect sincerity that I would very much rather hear his Elektra than The Merry Widow or The Waltz Dream. As for the Royal Academy, when by any chance I go to it, I do most unaffectedly despise nineteen- twentieths of the pictures I see there. In short, I am by way of being an aesthetic aristocrat. Much of what is acknowledged by the lawgivers of taste to be the greatest art in the world does give me keen and spontaneous delight, and in all of it, or almost all, I can take real intellectual pleasure, even when the immediate joys of specifically aesthetic appreciation are denied to me. The attitude of what may be called super- culture towards art was vividly illustrated the other day in an address delivered by Mn 26 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL Bernard Shaw at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. He suggested that when the curator, Mr. Dibdin, bought a picture for the permanent collection, ** it should be voted on by the whole community, and if more than lo per cent, of the people said they liked it, that picture should be burnt." Personally, I should no doubt consent without a qualm to that auto-da-fe; but when Mr. Shaw goes on to say : " We have so neglected things that the public does not know what is really great in art," I am beset with doubts as to whether " the public " ever will or can know what is "really great" in the sense which Mr. Shaw would attach to the term. His taste I more or less share, but not the serenity of his faith in it. For it is just this uppishness, this super- fineness of taste, that in some degree troubles both my conscience and my intelligence. *' Is there not," my conscience whispers, *'some- ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 27 thing anti-social in the art-forms begotten of plutocratic over-refinement?" And then my intelligence comes in with a still more dis- turbing question : '* Can that art be really- great which is wholly meaningless, and even repulsive, to the normal, unsophisticated man ? " We must, I think, find some provisional answer to these queries if we are to shape a rational course towards the larger and humaner future which I have assumed to be the goal of our aspirations. I hope, and do not doubt, that there are many here who are, not only by conviction, but by instinct, true democrats. By a true democrat I mean one who, on the theological side, would rather be damned with all the world than saved with a sect ; and, on the political side, one who has no relish for any- national prosperity or greatness which is founded on precarious and degrading con- ditions of existence for the great mass of the 28 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL people. If, then, we are democrats in theo- logy and politics, shall we not also be democrats in art ? Shall we not rather strive for the diffusion of a cultivated sense of beauty, than plume ourselves on a peculiar and exclusive faculty of discrimination, which must, in the nature of things, be the product of a supersubtle culture, based upon enormous inequalities of wealth and leisure? The idea towards which, with your indul- gence, I am groping my way, is something like this : Do not common sense and common humanity suggest an endeavour to find some midway meeting-ground on which the artistic instincts of all classes could communicate, so to speak, in the worship of forms of beauty accessible and comprehensible to all? And, if any such effort is to be made, does it not involve a climbing down as well as a climbing up ? Must not we, who flatter ourselves that we stand on the pinnacles of culture, try to ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 29 widen and simplify our tastes, and to value a preference because it can be shared by every- one of normal and healthy preceptions, rather than because it obviously can not? Has there ever existed, I wonder, what our aesthetes would recognise as a truly artistic community? Of course the mind at once flies to Attica, and conjures up a marvellous vision of a people whose daily life was environed by incomparable splendours of architecture and sculpture, and who assem- bled from time to time in a giant theatre to watch the stately procession of triads of tragedies which were at once poetic master- pieces and solemn acts of national religion. This is, indeed, a glorious vision ; and I am not scholar enough to criticise it. But there are one or two considerations which even the ignorant may profitably bear in mind. In the first place, the Athenian State was founded 30 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL on slavery. Mr. Alfred Zimmern, in his admirable book on The Greek Commonwealth y has done his best to attenuate the significance of that fact ; and he does, indeed, show that domestic slavery in Athens was no such undesirable condition. His demonstration amounts to this : that you cannot treat slaves very cruelly unless you can work them in gangs and stand over them with a whip ; whereas domestic slaves cannot possibly be worked in gangs. But at the same time Mr. Zimmern himself shows that in the silver- mines of Laureion, whence came the wealth that built the Parthenon, slavery assumed its most inhuman and abhorrent aspect ; so that we are well within the mark in saying that the immortal beauty of Athens grew up under conditions which we would not, if we could, reproduce. Again, one cannot but wonder whether Athenian life, as a whole, was, after ART AND THE COMMONWEAL . 31 all, so beautiful? Does not distance — the distance of four-and-twenty centuries — lend enchantment to the view? We see the marble — we do not see the mud ; the temples and porticos have, in part, survived — the hovels are gon^,^ Was popular taste, in truth, so impeccable as we are apt to imagine it? Had not Athens its cinematograph-shows and its comic picture-postcards — I mean, of course, analogous vulgarities which shocked the super- sensitive, as these things shock, or at any rate bore, the cultured person of to-day? I am speaking purely from conjecture, but I cannot help thinking that a valuable and illuminating book might be written on " Inartistic Athens,'* or " Philistia in Hellas " — a presentment of the other side of the artistic shield. Let me men- tion only one little fact, for which I am again ^ The sewers have not survived, as they have in Crete and Rome, for the simple and sufficient reason that there were none. D 32 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL indebted to Mr. Zimmern. It appears that, while the Parthenon cost ;^840,ooo, the gold- and-ivory statue of Athena which it enshrined cost more than one-third as much again — namely, ;^i, 200,000. We cannot suppose that it was Pheidias's fee that came to this huge amount ; it must have been the materials of the statue. Whether it was devotion or patriotic ostentation that led to so unbridled an expenditure I do not know ; but in either case — one says it with bated breath — was there not just a touch of vulgarity in it? One can almost see the Albert Memorial claiming kinship, across the ages, with that chryselephantine wonder. If there be any Hellenist among my audience, I suggest, quite seriously, that he should look into the subject of Inartistic Athens, and either make a book of it, or assure himself that my conjecture is wrong, and that there were no coloured supplements, ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 33 no picture-postcards in Hellas — perhaps not even a Royal Academy/ But now comes the point to which I would specially call your attention — a point which it needs no scholarship to assert with tolerable confidence. It is this : if ever art was really popular in Athens, it was because it was really "popular.'' This is not the identical proposition it may appear. I mean that Greek art was popular in the sense that it demanded no esoteric culture, no acquired taste, for its appreciation, but was calculated to give immediate and spontaneous pleasure to all sorts and conditions of men. We do not always realise this. Greek architecture ' A scholar whom I have consulted tells me that, though there were "coarse amusements" and " stupid and inar- tistic people" in Athens, there seems to have been no equivalent for the latter-day novelist or painter who is overwhelmingly popular with the multitude, while he (or she) practically does not exist for the intelligent. There are, no doubt, certain forms of vulgarity which are the peculiar product and privilege of modern life. 34 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL and sculpture come to us in chilly fragments, torn from their climatic, their spiritual, their social context, reduced to their bare elements of outline and proportion. We see only the poor mutilated ghost of the glory that was Greece, and even of the grandeur that was Rome. To a Bank Holiday crowd, strolling listlessly through the drab galleries of the British Museum, the Elgin Marbles naturally mean little enough. But replace them under the eaves of the Parthenon, in their pristine element of light and shade, colour them (for, I presume, under correction, that they were coloured), view them in their just perspective as part of the decoration of a glorious and perfect building, whose subtleties of propor- tion were understood, no doubt, only by the few, but were felt by every normal eye ; place this building on a rocky eminence springing from a mountain-bastioned plain ; arch over it the purple dome of an uiEgean sky ; and you ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 35 have a splendour of form and colour and light and life to which no human vision could be insensitive, no human spirit irre- sponsive. If a cockney pleasure-party could be transported by magic to fifth-century Athens, it would find itself in no pallid and wearisome museum, but in a scene that would outdo in brilliancy (to say nothing of beauty) the gayest of Christmas supplements. I do not know whether there were art-critics in Athens who formulated and scheduled, as we do now, the merits of different masters and different schools of sculpture. We may assume — for there is a great deal of human nature in man — that there were connoisseurs who plumed themselves on the superiority of their taste. But whatever degrees of discern- ment may have existed, art cannot have been the exclusive possession of any clique, coterie, or class. It must have been part of the daily life of the people, as familiar as electric signs 36 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL or whiskey posters to the populace of to-day. We do not know very much about Greek painting, but there is every reason to believe that it was simple and straightforward. It was not above telling a story, nor did it disdain that illusive realism which is so attractive to the many, and (in our time) so despicable to the few. Of Greek music we know even less ; but what we do know seems to indicate that, far from being tedious to the multitude, like a classical concert of to-day, it was apt to be too exciting, to appeal too directly to the senses and the passions. Those of us who have spelt our way with lexicon and crib through one or two plays of Sophocles or Euripides may find it rather hard to conceive that they should ever have been really popular, should ever have held a whole city spellbound. But that is because, even when we have mastered the linguistic diffu^ulties, we have only the pale ghost of the ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 37 living work of art before us. We are trying to reconstruct a bird-of-paradise from its skele- ton, or a rich banquet from its bill of fare. In Athens, then, we have a case in which supreme art was, in the literal sense of the words, an integral part of the common wealth. We cannot conceive, indeed, that the Athenian populace saw all that there was to see in Pheidias or in -^schylus ; but if they did not always penetrate to the inmost soul of great sculpture or great poetry, its outward body was sufficiently palpable and appealing to play an effective part in the environment of their lives. Although, as aforesaid, there are probably deductions to be made — although we cannot suppose Athens to have been entirely exempt from aesthetic vulgarity — we may find in Greek architecture a proof that there is no reason in the nature of things why great art should not at the same time be the pride and joy of a whole community. 38 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL In late republican and imperial Rome, art was already an exclusive possession of the plutocracy. Horace hates the profane vulgar, and bids them hold aloof from his aesthetic preserves. It would need no profound learn- ing, I fancy, to draw a pretty exact parallel between artistic conditions in the Rome of Tiberius and in the London of George V. Roughly speaking, we have in both a wealthy and superficially-cultured upper class patron- ising, with more or less affected enthusiasm, various exotic forms of art, which are really a mere adjunct to ostentation and luxury ; while the many-headed multitude is quite un- affectedly devoted to the crudest forms of spectacle, and to violent sports in which they take no personal share, but merely look on and yell in epileptic partizanship. Rome, in fact, can give us no guidance, but simply restates our problem in an exaggerated form. Coming, now, to the Middle Ages and the ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 39 Renaissance, we ask again whether art has ever been the glory and the delight of a whole community, as opposed to a caste or class? The orthodox answer, I suppose, would be in the affirmative. We should be told to look at the great cathedrals that sprang up between the tenth and the fifteenth century. We should be reminded of the Florentine populace carrying Cimabue's Madonna in triumphal procession down the street which to this day is ** Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face." But, if we consider a little more closely, we shall find something to deduct from the con- ception of Gothic architecture as an efflor- escence of the artistic soul of this or that community. Unquestionably there must have been in those days a great race of sculptor- architects, both clerical and lay. Unquestion- ably religion did inspire extraordinary flights 40 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL of imagination and wonderful feats of crafts- manship. But what part had the common people in all this? It is true that the clergy, both monastic and secular, were mainly recruited from the common people, as were the lay craftsmen, who co-operated with the clerical master-builders. But these, after all, were a minority of a minority. Our enquiry is not concerned with artistic talent, but rather with artistic enjoyment. Do the great cathe- drals of Northern Europe express a genuine impulse of the popular mind? And did they, in design or in decoration, give aesthetic pleasure to the mass of the people? I very much doubt it. They ministered to devotion and to superstition ; but that is a totally different matter. When a Russian peasant crosses himself before his ikon, we do not attribute the act to aesthetic susceptibility ; nor, I believe, should we find anything truly aesthetic in the attitude of the average medieval townsman or ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 41 countryman to the great ecclesiastical build- ings which he saw growing up around him. Then, as now, aesthetic discernment was the monopoly of the few. The popular aesthetic sense expressed itself in forms which we now recognise as grotesque, and which we should certainly call vulgar were they not partly trans- figured for us by the amber atmosphere of the past. So, too, with the art of the Italian renais- sance : in its earlier phases it ministered to devotion, and only incidentally to anything that can fairly be called taste ; in its later phases it ministered, like the art of to-day, to the taste which is a by-product of wealth and luxury, an exclusive possession of the few. The princes of the church vied with the princes and merchant-princes of the world in patronage of the arts ; for in those days theocracy and plutocracy went hand-in-hand. I do not say that there may not have been 42 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL moments in the history of Pisa, of Florence, of Siena, and other cities, when delicate artistic perception was pretty widely diffused, and taste became, as it were, a branch of local patriotism. But, taking one country and one century with another, the rule has been pretty constant that art has been the handmaid, not to say the paramour, of wealth, whether ecclesiastical or worldly, and that, when it has made any appeal at all to the populace, it has entered into so close an alliance with super- stition as to render purely aesthetic recep- tivity almost impossible. The most glorious buildings in the world, to my thinking, are some of the Spanish cathedrals ; but for the ordinary Spaniard, man or woman, their noble proportions, their grandeur and their grace, can scarcely be said to exist ; they are simply the dwelling-places of this or that blackened and battered image, muy milagrosa — very miraculous — to whom tribute is sent ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 43 from every corner of the Spanish-speaking world. If there has ever been, in modern times, a truly artistic commonwealth, I should be dis- posed to look for it in sixteenth- and seven- teenth-century Holland. But here there are two things to be noted. Firstly, art was still the handmaid of wealth, though of widely diffused and burgherly as opposed to aristo- cratic wealth. Secondly, in Holland, as in Attica, art was thoroughly " popular.'* Though its refinements were appreciated only by people of special culture, its surface aspects were attractive and entertaining to everyone. On the canvasses of Franz Hals and Rembrandt people saw their friends and neighbours, and the local notabilities, with the same interest with which they now see society snap-shots, or portraits of popular actors and unpopular politicians, in the illus- trated papers. Such masters as De Hoogh 44 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL and Terburg, Van Ostade and Teniers, had no fear of anecdote-painting, or of appeals to domestic sentiment and convivial humour. Most of the gems of Vermeer of Delft would make attractive coloured supplements to a modern Christmas number. The pictures in a Dutch gallery are like a cinematograph-show of all aspects of common life, only that genius replaces the camera, and instead of marvels of motion we have miracles of colour. But Dutch art, I repeat, though popular in its appeal, was a by-product of Dutch com- merce, and was fostered and mainly enjoyed by the wealthier classes, who, by the way, were so far from being infallible in taste that Rembrandt's " Night Watch,'' now reckoned among the half-dozen great paintings of the world, was disapproved of, and hurt his reputation. Apart from certain forms of decoration applied to garments and household ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 45 utensils in various countries, I know not where to look for any art of visual form of which we can say that it is popular at once in its origin and its appeal. It is somewhat different with poetry and music. In the folk- song and in some forms of ballad literature, it is the heart of the people that speaks to the heart of the people, often in exquisite and very moving accents. But it is the problem of pictorial and plastic art that I have here chiefly in view. What is the upshot, then, of this all too rapid survey? We find, I think, that art has seldom, if ever, been a possession and a delight to the man in the street — to say nothing of the man in the slum. Artistic ability is a wholly different matter from artistic appreciation. The power to see and to draw, or to model, probably exists in a certain percentage of individuals of all classes 46 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL and at all times, since first the cave-man scratched a reindeer on the breast-bone of a mammoth. Whether, in any particular case, it is recognised, developed, and trained, depends on chance and on the artistic environment ; but it is certainly in no sense peculiar to the upper layers of society. From this fact, as well as from many others, we may infer that the possibility of artistic perception is latent in all classes, if only their inward and outward circumstances permit of its development. But that indispensable condition has very seldom been realised on any large scale ; and never, assuredly, has any nation or city been, in the mass, capable of those subtle perceptions and discriminations which we nowadays hold to be the very essence of artistic culture. We may be perfectly certain that to the Athenian (even the cultivated Athenian) of the age of Pericles, and to the Florentine (even the cultivated Florentine) of the days of Cosimo ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 47 and Lorenzo de' Medici, the Post-Impres- sionist Exhibition would have been a by-word and a jest, as it was to the Philistine of yesterday. If art was ever popular, it was popular in the fullest sense of the word ; that is to say, it was not only significant to the penetrating eye of the specialist, but super- ficially attractive to the normal, natural man. Well, now, is there any possibility that art should ever become the possession and the heritage of the whole people, instead of a privilege of wealth, an embellishment of luxury, a pretext for intellectual arrogance? Can visible and audible beauty ever become an inseparable element in the common weal? Will a man or woman with no artistic sense ever come to be regarded as strikingly and rather painfully abnormal, like a stammerer or an albino? We have seen that art has hitherto been, as a rule, a product and symptom of social or spiritual disease — of E 48 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL inordinate wealth, of gloomy or childish superstition, at the very least of an unwhole- some and exclusive ultra-aristocratic culture. As the body politic approaches health — which we have assumed to consist in effective demo- cracy — will art decline with the diseases from which it has hitherto drawn so much of its sustenance? Or will a new and ennobled art be one of the symptoms of convalescence? It is very rash to dogmatise as to the conditions of artistic sensitiveness. At first sight one is apt to think that it depends largely on climate, and to imagine that the grey skies, the fogs, the general colourlessness of life in these islands during a considerable portion of the year, has much to do with the rudimentary sense of beauty displayed by the majority of the population. But is taste any commoner in Italy itself? In that glorious climate, and surrounded with every form of natural beauty in lavish profusion, does the ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 49 Italian peasant or workman exhibit much more taste than his British brother ? He uses colour more daringly, no doubt, but without the smallest discretion or sense of harmony. There is nothing in the world more puerile or more garish than the "art" of an Italian village church. I greatly prefer the chaste simplicity of a Methodist meeting-house. Nor is it only the peasant and labourer who seem to have no artistic feeling. Town councils and suchlike bodies are little, if at all, better inspired than our own civic senates in their dealings with art. You remember the mother in Punch who says to her daughter, " Go and see what baby is doing, and tell him he mustn't.'' When the modern Italian gets a brush or chisel into his hands, one could almost wish that it were possible to apply an equally sweeping prohibition. There are, of course, conspicuous and admirable'; excep- tions ; but certainly the blue sky of Italy has 50 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL begotten no general refinement of taste in the race which it now overarches. But if beauty of environment does not beget taste, we may at least take it for granted, I think, that constant hideousness of environ- ment will quickly kill any germ of artistic perception in the human soul. The sense of beauty grows by what it feeds on, and when it is habitually forced to go without food it is quickly atrophied. Hence, I take it, the futility of the efforts made by well-meaning people some time ago (I do not know whether they still continue) to bring culture — and mainly pre-Raphaelite culture — into the slums. I do not mean that in individual cases these efforts may not have given pleasure and done good ; what I do mean is that it is idle to dream of the diffusion of a sense of beauty through regions in which all the externals of life are sordidly ugly. A little patch of beauty stuck like a postage- ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 51 Stamp upon a vast expanse of squalor is a sheer irrelevance. It would be possible, and not so very costly, to have casts of the Venus of Milo and other " Greek things of the best period " stuck up in glass cases at every street- corner in Whitechapel, like the Madonnas in an Italian village ; but would Whitechapel be any the less ugly, or its populace one whit the happier? Assuredly not. These shivering gods-in-exile would merely accentuate the gloom and grime of their surroundings. *' What are we Olympians doing in Tar- tarus ?" they would seem to say. A crucifix would be a fitter street-corner emblem. " This is what comes of other-worldliness ''—it would tell us — **this is what comes of fixing your hopes on a beautiful heaven, instead of working for a justly-ordered, healthy, and beautiful earth." Certainly the first step towards any diffusion of taste must be a diffusion of cleanliness and 52 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL comfort, or, in one word, of decency, in the external conditions of life. It is none of my business to speculate upon the methods or the probable rate of progress in this direction. It is improbable, not to say impossible, that anyone here present should live to see the time when the average British lower-class home should be fitted to serve as a nursery of taste. But we are apt to forget, I think — and here we reach the practical purport, if I may so call it, of this discourse — we are apt to forget that it is possible to create, outside the home, an environment which might pro- foundly influence even the swarming millions of the slums. Neither municipal endeavour nor private generosity seems to me to realise what might be done in the way of relieving the congestion of the tenement-home — to say nothing of the congestion of the public-house — by making warmth, comfort, and beauty on a large scale accessible to the poor. I feel ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 53 sure that in this respect we neglect our oppor- tunities, and I shall devote the few minutes that remain to me to suggesting some of the measures that might be taken in the direction of associating physical comfortwith the gradual cultivation of the artistic sense. First let me take one or two cases in which local authorities might contribute to the deve- lopment of a sense of beauty in the people whose welfare is entrusted to them. As we come into London from the suburbs, we pass, every here and there, buildings which rise considerably above the labyrinth of mean streets around them, and are not less con- spicuous for their ugliness than for their size. They are built of the dingiest yellow and grey brick ; they have large windows put in with- out the slightest regard to symmetry or pro- portion ; in fact, they stolidly ignore the very idea of beauty. What are they? Of course 54 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL they are schools. They are the daily resort of tens of thousands of children in the most impressionable years of their lives. Why should these gaunt, forbidding edifices so sedulously conceal from the rising generation the existence of such a thing as beauty in the world ? We hear much of object-lessons in these days; but when a child has — very ridiculously — been taught that b-e-a-u-t-y spells ''beauty/' where is the object to which to refer him? Even Mr. Squeers, when a boy had spelt "w-i-n-d-e-r — winder/* impressed the idea on his memory by sending him to clean it ; but in the case of beauty no such teaching by example is possible to the East- end or suburban schoolmaster. There may, indeed, be a few plaster casts or drawings or photographs somewhere around, but their beauty is in all probability too remote and too abstract to appeal to the youthful mind.' * I am told that I exaggerate both the outward hideous- ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 55 I suggest that every school should be an oasis of beauty in the dismalness of modern city life. Its architecture, if it cannot be noble, should at least be seemly (I believe that the insinuating, pervasive influence of architec- ture is very great, even in the uncultured and unconscious mind) ; and, though the class- rooms mjght be as austere as you please, there should be in every school a hall or assembly- room, carefully adapted, both in design and decoration, to appeal to the childish eye as a place of notable beauty. All this, I shall be told, would cost money, and there are the ratepayers and the Education Office to be considered. I don't know that it need cost so much money. Given a little thought and inspiration, beauty is often found to be no ness of school-buildings and the internal neglect of beauty. There is, I understand, a strenuous movement afoot for the remedy of these evils. This is a good hearing ; but I believe the picture I have drawn is still sufficiently near the truth for all practical purposes. S6 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL more expensive than ugliness. But my point is that, even if it cost a little extra money, beauty of school-environment would be well worth paying for, and that art can never be an effective element in the commonweal until this truth is recognised and expressed in action. There is another way in which municipalities and other public bodies could foster a sense of beauty at even less cost. It is the glorious privilege of music to be independent of any local habitation. It is free as a bird to circle through the air ; it can penetrate where no bird could follow ; and its beauty remains immaculate even in the most hideous of environments. All enlightened municipalities, I take it, now maintain bands, which play at stated times in parks, gardens, and other public places ; but I do not find that any care is taken to accustom the public ear to melodic grace, tenderness, nobility, distinction. No doubt fairly good music, in the shape of ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 57 operatic selections and so forth, is often to be heard ; but it is freely mixed with the poorest and vulgarest rubbish. Now, what- ever may be the case in the other arts, it is certain that in music there are a thousand things of pure and perfect beauty which are, potentially, quite as popular — as " catchy '' if you will — as the meanest music-hall jingles. Why should we not form a great repertory of these things, treated in the simplest and most straightforward fashion, and then take every means of sending them pulsing, like gorgeous tropic birds, through the grey jungle of the slums? The musician will, no doubt, sneer at the idea of cultivating musical taste by the mere dissemination of what he will con- temptuously call "tunes/' But I am not thinking of cultivating specifically musical taste, in the sense in which the musician understands it. All I say is that in thousands of melodies by the great composers, or by those 58 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL nameless melodists who made the folk-songs of the world, we have things of absolute beauty which might easily become a part of the every-day environment of the poorest in the land. We cannot walk the back streets without seeing, in the crowds which gather around every jangling tin-pot of a piano- organ, how the populace yearns for "tunes'*; and I am convinced that they are every bit as accessible to good tunes as to bad. Why should municipal bands play only in parks and gardens, to people of more or less leisure? Why should they leave the mean streets and the slums to the organ-grinder and the Salvationist drum-thumper? Why should they not march every day through this or that working-class district, filling the air with things of simple, radiant, ineffable beauty, so that the huxter at his stall and the sweated seamstress in her garret should look up and be glad, and the street boys ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 59 should whistle Mozart, or at least Verdi, instead of ** Yip-i-addy-i-ay *' or *'The Honeysuckle and the Bee''? For music is not like the objects of visual art, which seem discordant and out of place in squalid sur- roundings. It is of such immaterial essence, it speaks to us from a fourth dimension so infinitely aloof, that it defies all soilure of circumstance. It is the great incommen- surable. It does not seem irrelevant among ugliness, but appears rather to reduce ugliness to absurdity, and annihilate it with what Emerson calls "its beautiful disdain." These, then, are two ways in which that hideousness of environment which makes people blind to art might be in some degree mitigated by the action of public authorities. There are other ways which as yet, I imagine^ are beyond the powers of any public body,, but are not, surely, impossible to well-directed private munificence. Here is one, for example. 6o ART AND THE COMMONWEAL We have all heard of '' People's Palaces '* and other institutions of that nature, founded for the instruction and recreation of the working classes ; but whenever I have chanced to visit such a building, I have found it gloomy, grimy, and unattractive, in the highest degree. Here and there you may find a hall of toler- able proportions ; but its materials are always poor, and its decorations cheap, tawdry, and generally dirty. So far as my observation goes, in fact, such institutions never attain to any reasonable standard of comfort and amenity — much less of beauty. Now I do not see why, in all great centres of population, there should not be People's Palaces really worthy of the name : stately and beautiful club-houses, open on nominal terms, to all well-conducted persons, where, for two or three hours of an evening, they should be enabled to live the life of civilised human beings, in warmth, in light, in comfort, in seemliness ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 6i and dignity. The palaces should not be luxurious in upholstery, carpets, and so forth ; but they should be rich and, above all, genuine in their materials, and beautiful in their design and in their appointments. I shall be reminded of one initial difficulty : I shall be told that the reason People's Palaces are grimy is that they are frequented by grimy people, and that a Pall Mall club-house would soon sink to a like condition if its denizens wore the boots and the clothes of Whitechapel or Wapping. This is a real, but surely not an insuperable, difficulty. The whole basement of every People's Palace should be devoted to baths and dressing-rooms ; and some simple form of raiment should be devised, to be worn in the club-rooms, and not elsewhere. " What!" you exclaim, ''do you propose to put Demos into evening dress !" Why not? By ''evening dress" I do not, of course, mean the silly, starchy, black-and-white uniform I am at 62 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL present wearing, but some light and comfort- able garb suitable for indoor use in well- warmed rooms and halls. Personally, I am a great barbarian as to evening dress. I do not see that we of the sedentary middle classes, who always wear reasonably clean clothes, are bound to waste time in " dressing for dinner.'' But it is quite otherwise with people who do hard physical work in the sun, in the rain, or in crowded factories and workshops. To them a bath and a change of clothes must be the most real of luxuries ; and I do not see why it should not be brought within the reach of everyone. A system of lockers might be con- trived, so that the club dress would not have to be constantly carried to and fro. And such a change of garb would have its symbolic as well as its material value. People would put off more than the mere dust and sweat of the day: they would gradually put off rough- ness of manner and commonness of mind* ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 63 Cleanliness is an indispensable preliminary to culture. It is true that the Greeks **of the best period" got on with no soap and with very little water; but they lived much more in the open air than is possible in our climate ; and, on the whole, their noses cannot have been as sensitive as their eyes and ears. Let us rather take example from the Romans in the matter of bathing. Well, in the People's Palaces I am imagining, art of all kinds would find an appropriate background and setting. The permanent decorations would be beautiful ; and there would be temporary exhibitions of all sorts, so arranged that they should not involve a fatiguing drag around from picture to picture, from showcase to showcase, but should form part of the ordinary environ- ment of social life. There would be good music, as a matter of course : not too severe^ but somewhat less elementary than the street F 64 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL music of which I have been speaking. There would be reading rooms, writing rooms, and rooms for games. There would, on occa- sion, be lectures on artistic subjects. But direct and formal instruction would be spar- ingly administered, and only to those who actively desired it. The primary object of such an institution would be the creation of an atmosphere composed of three elements : first, physical comfort ; second, seemliness ; third, beauty. The mere habit of living from time to time in such an atmosphere would be more potent for good than any direct teaching. It would humanize manners, it would refine perceptions. The People's Palace, or People's Clubhouse, would leaven the whole life of its district, by affording an ever-present means of temporary escape from the dingy discom- forts of the workaday world. " It would awaken discontent," you may say, "by making people keenly conscious of these discomforts. ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 65 who now accept them as part of the natural order of things." A wholesome discontent, an aspiration towards better conditions of life, it would, no doubt, beget ; but it would not awaken that querulous discontent which lowers vitality and diminishes the sum of happiness. That is the effect of brief glimpses of better things, conceded for an instant and then with- drawn — peeps through the keyhole of paradise. It would not be the effect of a boon conferred in perpetuity, an ever-accessible solace, an abiding element of sweetness and light added to the routine of existence. All this may seem to you very visionary, and in a sense it is ; because millionaires — even those who feel the necessity of paying ransom for their unearned increment — are seldom men of imagination or creative originality. I daresay my People's Palaces will remain castles in the air until economic reorganisation enables the democracy to build 66 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL them for itself. But, after all, they are only an extension of existing institutions which I have seen with my own eyes — such as the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburg, the great new Public Library of New York, and the Washington Library of Congress. These are buildings of great architectural splendour, applied to directly educational ends. The People's Palace of my dream is a somewhat similar structure, devoted to purposes of social intercourse, and indirect, pervasive refinement of the artistic sense. And now to meet one criticism before I close. It will be said that throughout, and especially in considering methods of popular culture, I have used the word " beauty " with the utmost freedom, and without any analysis or definition, assuming apparently that "art" and "beauty" are interchangeable terms. This is not so, I shall be told ; at any rate, it is not so in the plain and ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 67 obvious sense presupposed in my argument. In the eyes of enlightened criticism, there are no such qualities as beauty and ugliness — there are only good art and bad art. Does not art find its best material in things which the Philistine calls ugly? It either extracts from them or adds to them the only beauty which it recognises : the beauty of — I was going to say technical mastery ; but as the latest doctrine abjures technique, and urges a return to divine puerility, I really do not know in what to place the essence of *' good art " as latter-day criticism understands it. Now I do not want— if I can help it — to take up a purely Philistine attitude in this matter. It is quite true that one of the great functions of art is to reveal beauty where the common and unobservant eye sees nothing of the kind, and to create beauty by the imaginative employment of its resources of selection, emphasis, tone, harmony, and so forth. I do 68 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL not presume to attack any school of art criticism, though I may have my own opinion as to the final and exclusive validity of some of the orthodoxies, or fashionable heterodoxies, of the hour. What I do urge upon all who are interested in art is that there must be something wrong, or at any rate something undesirable, in a conception of art which makes it necessarily and essentially a posses- sion of the very few, and forever inaccessible to the generality of mankind. We are tending more and more towards the theory that art exists for the artist alone, and that no one else can possibly understand or appreciate it. The studio point of view is the only point of view, and the critic who cannot or will not adopt it is a hopeless outsider. And art, withal, is as sectarian as religion. The adepts of each new dogma are convinced that they alone are in a state of grace, and that all other so-called artists are following the broad path that ART AND THE COMMONWEAL 69 leadeth to the Royal Academy, or some even lower depth of perdition. Am I wrong in thinking that there is something manifestly amiss in this extreme exclusivism? It is quite probable that each of these sects has its eye on some facet of the truth — perhaps some hitherto neglected facet. But the whole truth is not, and cannot be, revealed to any one man or one school. If we may personify Art as our fathers personified the World-Artist, shall we not say with the poet ? — Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be ; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. So I come back to my initial position : if art is to be a vital element in the larger life to which we aspire, not only must the people climb up, but the artist must, in a certain sense, climb down. He must admit the validity of other points of view besides that 70 ART AND THE COMMONWEAL of the studio. He must not wrap himself up in arrogant self-sufficiency, but must honestly endeavour to interpret the beauty of the world — including, no doubt, the beauty of ugliness — in terms understandable to the man of normal, unsophisticated perceptions. Art, in short, must become a social — not, as it has too often been, an anti-social — factor in the life of the commonweal. I do not believe that the healthy human being of the future, nurtured in physical and spiritual equipoise, will care any more for artistic salvation with a clique than for theological salvation with a sect. APPENDICES APPENDIX A BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES CONCERNING MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY 1832. Born in Virginia. 1850. Free Schools in Virginia, 185 1. Enters Methodist Ministry. 1854. Enters Unitarian Ministry. 1858. Marries. 1863. Comes to England. 1864. Preaches at South Place Chapel. 1865. Appointed permanent Minister. 1869. Abandonment of prayer, followed by gradual abandonment of Theism. 1870. The Earthward Pilgrimage, 1874. The Sacred Anthology. 1877. Idols and Ideals. 1883. Lessons for the Day (2 vols.). (Revised edition, 1907.) 1884. Temporarily retires from South Place. 73 74 APPENDICES 1892. Returns to South Place. Life of Thomas Paine, 1897. Death of Mrs. Conway. Final retirement from South Place. 1904. Autobiography (2 vols.). 1906. My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, 1907. Dies in Paris. 1909. Moncure D, Cotiway : Addresses and Re- prints, (A Memorial Volume containing a complete Bibliography.) 1910. First Memorial Lecture. 191 1. Second Memorial Lecture. APPENDIX B THE CONWAY MEMORL\L LECTURESHIP At a general meeting of the South Place Ethical Society, held on October 22, 1908, it was resolved, after full discussion, that an effort should be made to establish a series of lectures, to be printed and widely circulated, as a permanent Memorial to Dr. Conway. APPENDICES 75 Moncure Conway's untiring zeal for the emanci- pation of the human mind from the thraldom of obsolete or waning beliefs, his pleadings for sympathy with the oppressed and for a wider and profounder conception of human fraternity than the world has yet reached, claim, it is urged, an offering of gratitude more permanent than the eloquent obituary or reverential service of mourning. The range of the lectures (of which the third is published herewith) must be regulated by the financial support accorded to the scheme ; but it is hoped that sufficient funds will be forthcoming for the endowment of periodical lectures by dis- tinguished public men, to further the cause of social, political, and religious freedom, with which Dr. Conway's name must ever be associated. The Committee, although not yet in possession of the necessary capital for the permanent endow- ment of the Lectureship, thought it better to inaugurate the work rather than to wait for further contributions. The funds in hand, together with those which may reasonably be expected in the immediate future, will ensure the delivery of an annual lecture for some years at least. The Committee earnestly appeal either for 76 APPENDICES donations or subscriptions from year to year until the Memorial is permanently established. Con- tributions may be forwarded to the Hon. Treasurer. On behalf of the Executive Committee : — W. C. CouPLAND, M.A., Chairman, C. Fletcher Smith and Alfred Delve, Hon, Secretaries, F. M. CocKBURN, ^^w. Treasurer J " Peradeniya," Ashburton Road, Croydon. WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS, JOHNSON S COURT, FLEET STREET, B.C. YB 80IBI mm ) I M i! 11 !(.'i!!. !!! !i lili! •i'iif