ART AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
TO 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 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 fitting 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 emphatic 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. 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 conditions of such a life as that of which these are some of the outward 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, 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 have 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 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 production 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 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 monotonous occupation to meet an artificial demand, or engaged in stimulating 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 mediæval 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 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 considerations 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 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, unscrupulous 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 democratic 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 benefits 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 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 conspicuous 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 master, 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 evidently 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, 1st, 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 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 continuance 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 foundations 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 victories, 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 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—deliberately 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 usefulness; 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 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 convictions 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 characteristics, 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 fundamental 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 progress 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 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 organisation. 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 Mayor’s 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 improving 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.
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 impertinently 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 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 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, stimulated 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, calumnies, oppressive laws, tyrannies, superstitions, ignorance, through good report and evil report, has led man out of the primal darkness, 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.