Chapter XVIII: Art and Life

In an earlier chapter I have pointed out that the art movements of the period took in the main two more or less diverse paths, paths which may be differentiated as the scientific and the traditional. The first aimed at reality of statement based upon close observation of life, the second depended upon the recapture of past tendencies in art and their definite association with the life of the day. The former was an exotic growth, having its antecedents in the work of the French Impressionists in painting, and the Realists and Symbolists in literature. The second was native, going back to the Middle Ages when art was definitely allied with utility. The former had for its outcome the development of the Fine Arts, and the latter that of what are known as the Applied Arts. In the preceding decade the Applied Art movement had the misfortune of becoming implicated in the æsthetic propaganda of Oscar Wilde, and although its underlying principles were as sound then as they are now, it suffered in repute when accumulated ridicule finally drove out the æsthetes. The movement sprang directly from the teaching of John Ruskin and it received considerable impetus from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is doubtful, however, whether the enthusiasm of a group of artists and enthusiasts for good craftsmanship would have developed into anything approaching the proportions of a national movement had it not been for the practical genius of William Morris. He gave a fresh turn to the teaching of Ruskin, demonstrating in things real what was at the time little more than a pious opinion in peril of being lost in the rhetoric of an impressive prose.

·DEDICATED·TO·THE·WORKERS·BY·WALTER·CRANE·]

For years a battle had been fought between the Impressionists and the Traditionalists, and the long series of wordy engagements had culminated in the Law Courts when Whistler brought his famous action against Ruskin. The result was a Pyrrhic victory for Whistler. This did little more than throw the contending parties into more definitely hostile camps without giving any hope of ultimate peace. William Morris, naturally on the side of Ruskin, did not make Ruskin’s mistake of under-estimating or decrying the realistic movement. Being a craftsman himself, and knowing good craftsmanship when he saw it, he realised that the Impressionists were sincere artists, equally with himself; though, from his point of view, wrong-headed; and, after granting so much, he was content with stating his differences. “Now it seems to me,” he said, in the preface to _Arts and Crafts Essays_ (1893), “that this impulse in men of certain minds and moods towards certain forms of art, this genuine eclecticism, is all that we can expect under modern civilisation; that we can expect no _general_ impulse towards the fine arts till civilisation has been transformed into some other condition of life, the details of which we cannot foresee. Let us then make the best of it, and admit that those who practise art must nowadays be conscious of that practice; conscious I mean that they are either adding a certain amount of artistic beauty and interest to a piece of goods which would, if produced in the ordinary way, have no beauty or artistic interest, or that they are producing something which has no other reason for existence than its beauty and artistic interest. But having made the admission let us accept the consequence of it, and understand that it is our business as artists, since we desire to produce works of art, to supply the lack of tradition by diligently cultivating in ourselves the sense of beauty (_pace_ the Impressionists), skill of hand and niceness of observation, without which only a _makeshift_ of art can be got; and also, so far as we can, to call the attention of the public to the fact that there are a few persons who are doing this, and even earning a livelihood by so doing, and that therefore, in spite of the destructive tradition of our immediate past, in spite of the great revolution in the production of wares, which this century only has seen on the road to completion, and which on the face of it, and perhaps essentially, is hostile to art, in spite of all difficulties which the evolution of the later days of society has thrown in the way of that side of human pleasure which is called art, there is still a minority with a good deal of life in it which is not content with what is called utilitarianism, which, being interpreted, means the reckless waste of life in the pursuit of the means of life.” Morris himself endeavoured to put his theories into practice in a variety of ways, and finally by the control of his own workshops at Merton Abbey and the sale of his goods at the historic shop in Oxford Street.

The idea of bringing together art and craft possessed Morris throughout his life, but it is a curious fact in the history of the Arts and Crafts movement that he neither initiated the idea of the handicraft workshop, of which he became proprietor, nor the Arts and Crafts Society, of which he became chief figure. The former was suggested in the first instance by Ford Madox Brown, and the latter was a chance result of an abortive revolt on the part of a number of young artists, chiefly members of the new English Art Club, against the methods of the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy Exhibition. This rising occurred in 1886, and, upon its proving ineffective, the craftsmen and decorative artists who had thrown in their lot with the revolutionaries were led by Walter Crane into a new camp, which two years later became the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. This was the first organisation to give general publicity to the aims of a movement which had received the benediction of the craftsmen who founded the Art Workers’ Guild in 1884. William Morris was one of the earliest members of the Guild, and he eventually became a Guild Master. No one denies the supremacy of his influence in the handicrafts movement; just as he never denied, in fact was always ready to admit, the influence of Ruskin on his own work and ideas. In 1892 he wrote a preface to a popular reprint of the chapter from _The Stones of Venice_, called “The Nature of Gothic,” in the course of which he said that he believed that chapter to be one of the most important things written by Ruskin, and that in future days it would be considered “as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.” And in the same preface he upheld Ruskin’s teaching that art was the expression of man’s joy in his work, and laid it down as a fervent conviction that “the hallowing of labour by art” was the one aim for artists and craftsmen of the time. More than any other man of his day he lived for that purpose and devoted to it an energy and a variety of gifts without equal since the days of the Italian Renaissance.

In the Eighteen Nineties there were those, even as there are to-day, who persisted in looking upon this unique craftsman as a poet and _belles lettrist_, and upon his craftsmanship and his Socialism as the whims of an otherwise responsible genius. The writing of poetry was, of course, one of the many arts in which he was a master. Yet he never placed himself on a poetical pedestal, and he had no high opinion of those who made poetry the sole business of a lifetime. Poetry was only one of the many incidents in his extraordinarily varied career. He not only practised many crafts, but so wide was his vision, and so tremendous his store of energy, that he would practise several crafts, including the writing of poetry, literally at one and the same time. Those who worked with him remember how he could work at a design, a poem, an essay and a piece of tapestry, and produce good work in each during, say, the course of a single morning. First he might be working at his loom, and all the while he would be mumbling to himself, and humming aloud as if he were trying a tune over in his head and testing it by sound; then he would jump up from the loom, sit down at a table, and scribble very rapidly the verse of a poem; immediately afterwards he would add something to the manuscript of an essay that would probably be delivered as a lecture, returning anon to his loom to throw the shuttle for a while, before taking up an unfinished design for printed fabrics, stained glass or book decoration.

In the midst of this apparently scattered activity Morris not only finished a great amount of work, but he knew precisely what he was doing and had constantly before his mind the ideal towards which he aimed. “The aim of art,” he said, “is to increase the happiness of men by giving them beauty and interest in incident to amuse their leisure, and prevent their wearying even of rest, and by giving them hope and bodily pleasure in their work; or, shortly, to make man’s work happy and his rest fruitful.” He himself rested only when he went to bed. Somebody once criticised the discomfort of a chair he had designed, and the reply of William Morris was: “If you want to be comfortable, go to bed.” That explains the man. He loved his work; every expression of energy in the whole of that busy life was an expression of joy. He knew that what he was doing was art, but he made no more fuss about it than he fussed about his poetry; because he knew also that what he was doing was useful work.

William Morris had the imagination to see life in the form of design and the skill to express this sense of design in the materials of his art. That is the keynote of his genius and of his teaching. You can best understand his poetry, his romances, his stained glass and tapestries and chintzes, the books of the Kelmscott Press, as well as his Socialism, by an appeal to design--not an appeal merely to the technical relationship of lines and spaces and colours in patterns, or of rhymes and rhythms in a poem, but design as the relationship of idea and action, the relationship of art and purpose. William Morris always had at the back of his mind the dream of a Perfect State. Always busy in the visible world, he was still busier in the Utopia of his fancy. The beautiful things he made were imported to this world from that Utopia, and their very importation was an act of propaganda. They were the real _News from Nowhere_. And he did not bring them here to make lovers of the fine arts content with modern civilisation; he brought them here deliberately to lure the people of his day from their ugly surroundings into the better land of his dreams. Everything he created was a lure to Utopia, an invitation to follow him into a new world.

He remarked once in a lecture: “I must remind you, though I, and better men than I, have said it over and over again, that once every man that made anything made it a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, whereas now only a very few things have even the most distant claims to be considered works of art. I beg you to consider that most carefully and seriously, and to try to think what it means. But first, lest any of you doubt it, let me ask you what forms the great mass of the objects that fill our museums, setting aside positive lectures and sculpture? Is it not just the common household goods that pass time? True it is that some people may look upon them simply as curiosities, but you and I have been taught most properly to look upon them as priceless treasures that can teach us all sorts of things, and yet, I repeat, they are for the most part common household goods wrought by common fellows, as people say now, without any cultivation, men who thought the sun went round the earth and that Jerusalem was exactly in the middle of the world.” William Morris was not defending museums, he was advocating conditions that would make it possible for the common people of to-day to create after their own manner beautiful, useful things, just as the common people of other times created such things after their manner. Such treasures were for him incentives to good artistic conduct, which for him again was nothing less than good citizenship.

Good craftsmanship as understood by William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen, although they talked much of beauty, was in the main a demand for quality in material, execution and taste allied with the idea of a change in social life, as without that these three things would be impossible. The main tendency of the handicraft revival was therefore social when it was not actually Socialist. It was rarely individual and private after the manner of the old fine arts and the new. “The decline of art,” wrote Walter Crane, “corresponds with its conversion into portable forms of private property, or material or commercial speculation. Its aims under such conditions 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 was inevitable that the ideas of John Ruskin should have been exploited to the full in a movement which sought thus to bring about the communalisation of art. But these ideas were not the only influence. The prose works of Richard Wagner were printed during the decade, and his doctrine of a folk-art had a sure though less definite effect in many quarters, more especially among those who, with Mary Neal, revived the almost lost art of folk-dance and singing games which became so important a feature of the Esperance Girls’ Club and Social Settlement, founded by her with Emmeline Pethick Lawrence in 1895. At the same time the folk-art revival was being strengthened by the researches into folk-song of Broadwood, Baring-Gould, Frank Kidson and Cecil Sharp. The appearance also of Aylmer Maude’s translation of Tolstoy’s _What is Art?_ in 1899 aroused heated discussions and a wide interest among art reformers. All prominent craftsmen agreed with the Wagnerian conception of the artistic as distinct from the financial community, and they looked forward to the time when, in Wagner’s own words, “art ... would become the herald and standard of all future communal institutions.” And it was easy for those who held this faith to sympathise with Tolstoy’s onslaught upon decadence, and to accept the Tolstoyan pronouncement that, “Art is not, as the meta-physicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.” It will be seen, then, that the two paths of the modern art movement resolved themselves into two very definite and very different aims: the communal and the individual, the public and the private.

But whatever theories about art dominated the intelligence of the members of the Arts and Crafts movement, one thing is certain, their activities produced a notable effect upon taste in all matters relating to architecture and the decorative and useful arts, and permeated more particularly the taste of the middle classes in Great Britain, spreading from them to Europe and America. To a large extent propaganda was carried on by example rather than by precept, and this was made possible by the existence of so many craftsmen of ability and repute. William Morris himself might have made any movement by his capacity for mastering whatever art or craft appealed to him, and he was known throughout the world for his skill as a designer, weaver, dyer and printer. But all branches of craftsmanship had their masters. These included Walter Crane, designer, painter and illustrator; Emery Walker, printer; T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, and his pupil, Douglas Cockerell, bookbinders; William de Morgan, tilemaker; May Morris, embroiderer; Henry Wilson, W. A. S. Benson and Edmund Spencer, metal-workers; Stephen Webb, wood-carver; and, perhaps most important of all, the group of architects led by Norman Shaw, and including T. G. Jackson, Reginald Blomfield, W. R. Lethaby, G. F. Bodley, Basil Champneys, Bailey Scott and C. F. A. Voysey, who together revolutionised our ideas of domestic, and opened the way to a new era in public, architecture. Many of these art workers were recognised masters in the preceding decade, and one or two even before that, but it remained for the Nineties to give their work a wider and more general acceptance.

The outward effect of this search for excellence of quality and utility in art was, however, not so profound as it might have been. This is explained by the fact that the conditions under which Morris and his group worked were so far removed from the conditions of the average economic and industrial life of the time as to appear impractical for general adoption. They demonstrated, it is true, that it was possible to produce useful articles of fine quality and good taste even in an age of debased industry, and scamped and counterfeit workmanship; but their demonstration proved also that unless something like a revolution happened among wageearners none but those of ample worldly means could hope to become possessed of the results of such craftsmanship. The Arts and Crafts movement was thus checked in its most highly organised and enthusiastic period by the habit and necessity of cheapness. It was found possible to educate taste, for even modern commerce had not succeeded in killing the fundamental love of excellence in commodities, but as quickly as taste was improved by exhibitions of modern craftsmanship, commerce stepped in supplying those who could not afford the necessarily expensive results with cheap imitations. The ogre of shoddy stood across the path of quality, and many who were set upon the high trail of excellence by the Arts and Crafts movement ended as devotees of fumed oak furniture, and what began as a great movement was in danger of ending as an empty fashion with the word “artistic” for shibboleth.

Such negative results did not imply complete failure. The Arts and Crafts movement never expected immediate victory, far less would it have been capable of the illusion that passing fashion and victory were one and the same thing. They were doing pioneer work, propaganda by demonstration, and even if all craftsmen were not convinced of the impossibility of making such work the rule rather than the exception in a commercial community, they learnt their lesson very soon, and readily admitted and advocated some other than the prevailing financial standard of production. Still, the work of the craftsmen named represents so high an achievement that we have to go back many years before we can find anything in this country to equal it, and although the Arts and Crafts as an organised movement is not so apparent to-day, the tradition of good craftsmanship has been recaptured and its upholders will not readily let it be lost again.

To have accomplished so much is no little achievement, but perhaps a more important contribution to the vitality of the period was the recognition and the interpretation of the organic relationship between the separate arts and architecture and between architecture and the building of towns. The immediate function of art as understood by the Arts and Crafts movement was stated by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson in a lecture at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1896 as the power of doing things in the spirit of an artist and in reference to the whole of life. “Art implies a certain lofty environment,” he said, “and is itself an adjustment to that environment, of all that can be done by mankind within it. Art as a great function of human imagination is not the creation of isolated objects of beauty, though isolated objects of beauty may indeed be created by Art, and in themselves resume all that is beautiful, orderly, restful and stable in the artist’s conception of that environment. Still less is it, what some may seem to imagine, the objects of beauty themselves. It is something--it is _much_--more. Art is, or should be, alive, alive and a universal stimulus. It is that spirit of order and seemliness, of dignity and sublimity, which, acting in unison with the great perception of natural forces in their own orderly evolution, tends to make out of the chaos of egotistic passions a great power of disinterested social action.” And in a lecture on “Beautiful Cities,” delivered at the same exhibition, W. R. Lethaby took the idea further and gave it a more practical turn: “Art is not the pride of the eye and the purse, it is a link with the child-spirit and the child-ages of the world. The Greek drama grew up out of the village dance; the Greek theatre was developed from the stone-paved circles where the dances took place. If we gather the children who now dance at the street corners into some better dancing-ground, might we not hope for a new music, a new drama, and a new architecture? Unless there is a ground of beauty, vain it is to expect the fruit of beauty. Failing the spirit of Art, it is futile to attempt to leaven this huge mass of ‘man styes’ by erecting specimens of architect’s architecture, and dumping down statues of people in cocked hats. We should begin on the humblest plane by sweeping the streets better, washing and whitewashing the houses, and taking care that such railings and lamp-posts as are required are good lamp-posts and railings, the work of the best artists attainable.” By linking up art with the city and with common things the Arts and Crafts movement completed the sequence of its ideas, and if it has not as yet succeeded in creating a new Jerusalem, it has indicated a way by pointing out the path for the Town Planning activities of a later date. Many craftsmen-visionaries saw afar off the Promised Land. William Morris set his own vision down in the magical prose of _News from Nowhere_ (1891), and there is little doubt that his vision and their craftsmanship helped the ideas of Ebenezer Howard as expressed in _Garden Cities of To-morrow_ to such practical manifestations as they have received at Letchworth and Golders Green.

The weakness of the Arts and Crafts movement was a weakness of circumstance rather than ability. Its members did pioneer work, and one of the first tasks was to step back into the past towards fine standards and sound traditions of workmanship before stepping forward into the future with their records and examples, or even, indeed, lauding them in the present. Thus their work, excellent though it is, looks and is archaic. The best craftsmanship of the Eighteen Nineties was outmoded at birth--“born out of its due time.” It was sound in workmanship, excellent in design; at its best, beautiful; but in the main it was ’prentice work, a lesson rather than an achievement. It bore the stigmata of unrest and yearning instead of the easy gladness of confident and inevitable expression which was at once true to its moment and fit for its purpose.