THE ARCHITECTURE OF ART
THE Architecture of Art is a somewhat comprehensive title, and it might not unreasonably be expected of me, before proceeding with the structure and treatment of the subject in perspective, to give some sort of scale, sketch, ground plan, or elevation, so that the general drift of my argument may be understood. I do not propose to deal exactly with the various forms and styles of architecture as they are, and have been manifested in plastic or graphic art; or the predilections of different designers and painters for certain forms over others as accessory to their compositions, interesting as such a comparative study might be. I am taking the term architecture in its widest sense, considering it not only as an art in its effect upon other arts, but as the fundamental, comprehensive, and sustaining framework both of life and thought; the historic and living background which influences and moulds all our ideas, the set scene upon which is enacted the ever-shifting drama of art.
In comparing the art of the present day, architectural or otherwise, with the art of the past, especially of any well-defined epoch, whether mediæval or classical, we cannot fail to be struck with one great distinction underlying all superficial differences. Whereas the art of past ages seems to have germinated, to have been continually evolved in new forms, to be alive, and spontaneous, as it were, growing like a thing of nature, and expanding with man’s ideas of nature and life; in our day this sense of spontaneity, this natural growth, is scarcely felt. Conscious and laborious effort takes the place of spontaneous invention, and originality is crushed by the weight of authority, is confounded and abashed by the mass of examples. No form of architecture or art seems to spring naturally and unaffectedly out of the actual necessities and demands of daily life.
It has been said that the great exhibition of 1851 is to be held answerable for a great deal; for the vulgarising and commercialising of art, and for the final break-up of old traditions in the crafts of design; but so far as this took place, it was only the effect of causes lying far deeper in the great economic changes, affecting the conditions of the production of all works whatsoever, which had been going on during the three previous centuries. That exhibition, as succeeding ones have done, merely summed up the results of these changes, and showed their effects, for good or evil, declaring to all whom it might concern that the apotheosis of commercialism meant the degradation of art.
This will seem a hard saying to such as are accustomed to believe that the accumulation of riches and the welfare of art go hand in hand. But let us look around us. Of course the spirit of commercialism does produce startling results upon art, if not in it; and it is a wolf quite capable of seeing the advantage of sheep’s clothing. There is, for example, plenty of building and house painting. Capitalism is nothing if not practical. The national instinct based on the national shibboleth that “every man’s house is his castle,” combining with the enormous growth of cities, has produced those miles and miles of brick cages which have more or less ruined the architectural character and proportion of every large town in the kingdom. What, then, are these? These are Englishmen’s castles—on a small scale, it is true, and run together. There are not hills enough for the castles required, and what hills there are belong to somebody else. What is easier than to build them side by side? They will support each other, and economise bricks and mortar; and why trouble to make a fresh design for each castle? The little lords’ wants are much the same as the big ones’, only on a smaller scale, like his purse. He must, of course, have his outer line of defences. His portcullis, a drawbridge,—well, at any rate, iron railing and portico,—that he may speak with his enemy the tax-gatherer at the gate; his dining-room, drawing-room, bedroom, and bath-rooms, and gas and water laid on. Why should he not be happy and comfortable? and it is all so cheap too! Yet the speculative man and the man of profits—the kindly builders who multiply these miniature strongholds for the average Briton—we do not account exactly as public benefactors. Jack is rarely able to build his own house nowadays, so Jerry builds it for him; but the well-known drama of rat and cat, dog and cow with the crumpled horn, is still enacted, with perhaps some changes in the cast, and new scenery and dresses. Here are the bee-cells ready made for the future occupants of the national hive, fit for the average man,—never mind if they do not always fit him; we cannot take account of round or square bodies; if the majority are hexagonal, the rest must put up with the inconvenience and a little squeezing: great is Average! Meanwhile, how fares it with art in the house that Jerry built? Do the streets produced on these principles, and at such a terrible rate, lend themselves either to pictorial or decorative treatment? Do they suggest any ideas, even, except of the dust-man? Well, but the man of profits is ready again. The Briton can get his art cheap too—wholesale or retail. He can have cheap dadoes and coloured glass thrown in here and there. If these are not enough, he can fill his house with early (or latest) English furniture, “surmounted by something Japanese,” as the comic poet saith. Should his aspirations remain still unsatisfied, he can take the illustrated magazines to tell him about every art under the sun, and how it is done. In fact, if the literature of the subject could make artists and craftsmen, every street should be bristling with them. Every Christmas scatters oil paintings by our first masters, fresh from the printing-press, over the British Empire. A shilling or so will secure a whole gallery. Was ever anything like it in any age of art? Truly, no. Still we are not happy—we are not happy about our art. We English especially. We allow Frenchmen and Belgians to teach us painting, and our American cousins how to do nearly everything else.
Now, I am not going to say it is all the fault of the Royal Academy. That institution, as regards its chief feature, the annual Exhibition, is only another engine of the man of profits, which, frankly recognising the commercialism of the age, endeavours, by special appointment and self-election, to adapt the business of picture-painting to it, without troubling much about architecture and sculpture, and leaving the other arts to shift for themselves. It is but due to say, however, that they endeavour to counteract the influence of the new masters in the summer by the works of the old masters in the winter, on the principle, perhaps, of the mediæval system of doing penance.
In the course of evolution we are passing through a period of disintegration. Art cannot escape the tendencies and influences of its time, which, indeed, it is of its very nature to illustrate. The artist has become more and more specialised, and the unity of the arts has been broken up. He is no longer the master craftsman among his workmen and apprentices, prepared to do all things in the province of design, from the pattern on the hem of a garment to the painting of an altar-piece. He is rather the juggler in the master’s place, who with a particular sleight of hand can command a particular phase of sea or sky; or he has the trick of the flattering glass in portraiture. Perchance he seeks to draw “iron tears” down the cheeks of (not Pluto) but the philanthropic Plutus, and golden ones from his pocket by his peculiar domestic pathos; or in stage-lights strikes the contrast of wealth and misery, chilling his blood by melo-dramatic horrors; or by seeking to glorify him in his happy hunting grounds surrounded by images of his sacred animals. As to painting, perhaps it has always been more or less at the bidding of the dominant orders of its day, but more naturally so since she left her roof-tree and parted company with architecture and sculpture, and all the fair and fascinating troop controlled by a common influence and a common devotion, that throng in the splendid retinue of design.
Through the columns of the colossal architecture of time we look back down the long vista of ages and epochs, and read their spirit in the unmistakable language of art, coloured as it is by the human systems and beliefs of which it is the monument; whether as in the wall-paintings and reliefs of ancient Assyria, Egypt, and Persia, art is devoted to the glorification of military or sacerdotal despotism; or the systematised symbolism of an ancient nature worship, humanised and made beautiful by the Greek, informed by freedom and life; decaying amid the corruption of ancient Rome, or graced with a new splendour from the East, rising in the solemn magnificence of Byzantine art; and so through the vivid imagination of the Middle Ages, absorbed in the new mysticism, yet through the Church linked to the hopes as well as the fears of humanity. Then with the new thoughts and hopes of the Renaissance it rekindles its lamp at the shattered shrine of classical sculpture and learning, until choked with artifice and pedantry in succeeding centuries, it is forced back to nature and life again on the threshold of our own time. But again it is in danger from a new tyranny in that unscrupulous commercialism, which is not less dangerous because less tangible, and not less despotic because it is masked under the form of political liberty. Steam machinery, like a many-headed, many-handed dragon, rules industry literally with a rod of iron, and fain would it make art prisoner too, for its profit, but that its touch is death. Intended for the service of man and for the saving of human labour, it has under our economic system enslaved humanity instead, and become an engine for the production of profits, an express train in the race for wealth, only checked by the brake of what is called over-production. Who can tell what will be the end of the journey?
Thus we are driven to the conclusion that the whole force of our economic system is against spontaneous art, and it is in spite of it that there is any life left in it yet. As William Morris has so strikingly pointed out, the system of producing all things for profit, which has succeeded the old one of producing for use; the necessity of selling in the big world market, division of labour, and lastly, machine labour, have rapidly destroyed the art of the people, and are fast vulgarising and destroying all local characteristics in art, as in costume and the surroundings of common life throughout the world. The system of absolute individual ownership of land, which, with the advance of commercialism, has displaced the older systems of tenure, and defrauded the people of their common rights wholesale, naturally leads to much destruction of natural beauty, and when not destroyed it is made inaccessible. It is also answerable, with the causes already named, for that other great disaster both to architecture and art already alluded to, the abnormal growth of the big towns, which year by year throws out its long and aimless feelers that feed upon the green country. When we speak of an advance in education, we too often forget that no education of the schools can compensate for life passed amid hills and woods, and by the sea, itself an education in a lore never to be forgotten.
Overshadowed by such conditions of life, what wonder is it that we should get our art by accident, that it should be in great measure the Art of Accident, which is really what modern realism or naturalism comes to, in spite of elaborate systems of art training, and the elaborate unlearning of them which follows? The sense of beauty may be stunted, but Nature cannot be altogether suppressed under the most perverse social conditions. It is sometimes urged in defence of the artistic aspects of modern life that strange and wonderful momentary effects are seen, in London smoke-fogs, for instance, or amid the fiery eyes of railway signals, and our blackened Stygian rivers, where the Charon of the coal-wharf plies his trade. I have even heard an apostle of beauty defend those monuments of commercial effrontery and theatrical competition, our advertisement hoardings, covered with varicoloured posters, as in certain lights becoming transfigured so as to rival the tints on a Japanese fan. But it is one thing to find accidental beauties in the midst of monstrosities, jewels on dunghills as it were, and quite another to defend the monstrosities for the sake of accidental beauties. The glow, the light fades, and with it the momentary exaltation of spirit; the north-east wind succeeds the south-west, and there being no dignity of form or beauty of proportion in our streets, they are apt to look more sordid and miserable than before. Grace and spirit may be shown by a child dancing to a barrel-organ in a smoky, squalid street, but one would rather see her on a village green dancing to a shepherd’s pipe. We should aim at a condition of things which would not keep beauty at a distance from common life, or on the footing of an occasional visitor. No artist should be satisfied with such a cold relationship.
Art is not the mere toy of wealth, or the superficial bedizenment of fashion, not a revolving kaleidoscope of dead styles, but in its true sense, in a vital and healthy condition, the spontaneous expression of the life and aspirations of a free people.
Before all things, then, in order that art may express itself in this free way, it is necessary that there should be something like a common life. We have no common life, because we have no life in common. Art is split up into cliques, as society into classes. Art should know neither; we want a vernacular in art, a consentaneousness of thought and feeling throughout society. “As it was” (to quote J. S. Mill) “in the days of Homer, of Phidias, or even of Dante.” No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity, but that comprehensive and harmonising unity with individual variety, which can only be developed among a people politically and socially free.
The signs of our times point unmistakably to great changes working in the direction I have indicated, which cannot fail to produce corresponding results in art. Consider, for instance, the probable effect on architecture of a collective, communistic mode of living. Instead of our rows of brick boxes, or piles of them in barracks, there would probably be a demand for quite another type of domestic architecture; we might see something like a revival of the plan of house which for so many ages proved so serviceable to humanity, from Homer to Shakespeare. The great hall as the common living-room, with private rooms for sleeping or solitude adjoining it; or some development of the collegiate plan. Buildings of such a type certainly lead to more dignity of result in architecture than the houses under our present system of tenure and individual plan are ever likely to. We all know, too, that the only chance for the mural painter is in buildings of a more or less public character. If buildings of the type I have mentioned became common, there would be plenty of work for him and the decorative artist generally, and so we might reasonably expect that painting and the sister arts would be restored to perhaps greater than their former dignity, beauty, and invention.
The decline of art corresponds with its conversion into portable forms of private property, or material or commercial speculation. Its aims under such influences become entirely different. All really great works of art are public works—monumental, collective, generic—expressing the ideas of a race, a community, a united people; not the ideas of a class. It is evident enough in our own time that art needs some higher inspiration than that of the cash-box. She suffers from a lethargy that cannot be cured by a prescription from the cheque-book; these are at best but stimulants that force an unnatural excitement, a feverish and brief activity at the expense of the whole system. Private ownership may be able to command both skill and beauty, no doubt, but it is, as a rule, beauty of a lesser kind and considered in a narrower spirit, as it is addressed to the taste of an individual; while the fancies of rich and great persons, when their day is past, often come to be looked upon as curiosities. The art of a people, as expressed in their public buildings and monuments, possesses a kind of immortality.
We know the splendid results in art which grew on the rock of Athens, and the cities of mediæval Italy. Our own cathedrals, no less, will bear witness to the vitality in all the crafts of design at that period. Is it too much to suppose, seeing the intimate connection between political, social, and artistic expression, and how both are affected by economical laws, that in the free federated communes which not improbably will in the future succeed the present jealous nationalities, with a large increase of leisure and opportunity for cultivation and enjoyment, the arts may develop even a higher vitality?
For art in its highest sense is but the faculty of expression. The higher, the richer, the fuller the life, the happier and more harmonious its conditions, the higher and more varied and beautiful will be the forms of its expression in art. But it is deep down in the life of the people that we must dig the foundations, and out of common speech and common labour and handicraft must be shaped the stones of this Architecture of Art. Without such foundation, and without the cement of fellowship, without due recognition of the equality and unity of all art-workers, and their mutual interdependence in building the great structure, we shall raise no enduring monument to be a delight to ourselves, and a memorial of us to those who come after.
Brilliant toys it may be we shall have. Surprises and stimulants, joyless elaboration, and pedantic weight of learning, gorgeous exotics, flowers and fruits, formed for the jaded appetites of a society in its decline, but we must give up all hope of vital and harmonious art enclosed in a casket of beautiful architecture.
Hence comes it that most of the efforts made to revive the arts and crafts among the people, without reference to their economic condition, are like so many attempts to grow the tree leaves downwards. As if an architect should put up an elaborate scaffolding and begin with his roof, before he has decided on his ground plan, dug the foundations, or thought of drainage.
Real progress we must not expect to make until we have re-established the unity of the arts—a very different thing from uniformity. My late friend, Mr. J. D. Sedding, in whom we have lost a genial and sensitive spirit as well as a refined designer, in a discourse he made a while ago, in his generous enthusiasm was assigning the mural decorations of an ideal modern cathedral to various well-known popular painters. I believe even I myself was allowed a corner to amuse the children in. I have as great an admiration for the talents of my contemporaries as any one, but I cannot conceal from myself that it would be a very experimental scheme. It would be, metaphorically speaking, something like an attempt to anticipate the millennium, by trying to persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb in the same cage. But in the fifteenth century Mr. Sedding would have been safe enough; the architect worked in harmony with the painter, the painter with the carver and metal worker, because each probably had a considerable knowledge of the other’s craft and its limitations. Artists, therefore, knew what they had to do, and did it. There was nothing mysterious in this, taking into account the way in which men worked in those days and learned their crafts; but it is a little depressing to think, with all our superiority in exact science and mechanism, how far we are from anything like certainty in art.
Whether the interest of scientific discovery has had anything to do with directing men’s faculty of invention into another channel—and life does not allow time for the exercise of both—I do not pretend to say; but when science and art touch each other with the tips of their fingers, when science asks for the aid of applied art, as in mounting electric lights, for instance, or in order to fit any invention to use, it is very noticeable how artistic adroitness of adaptation lags behind the scientific invention. Perhaps there is no time for art to reconcile herself to the new discovery, or it is too soon superseded by another, and nobody cares.
No doubt the demands upon a designer in the present day, owing to such causes alone, are very heavy; but I am inclined to think commercial pressure and hurry is heavier upon him. Thought is all-powerful, but there is no time to think; fancy and imagination might play about the humblest accessory, but there is no time to play; and all work, or rather uncertainty of work, and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But depend upon it, in conditions fair to humanity, art wants but little encouragement, only freedom and sympathy. The seed will grow fast enough in a favourable soil and climate, and bring forth flowers and fruits after its kind in due season.