The Art of Building a Home: A collection of lectures and illustrations

by Barry Parker; Sir Raymond Unwin

A very little thought will show how absolutely true in literature is what I have said, as to the position art must hold as the only means of expressing the greatest truths, and will show too, that just as our theme advances in dignity, will it increasingly need the aid of art to give it expression. The meanest things of life are most easily expressed. We can give our financial position with clearness in figures. We can express the composition of a gas with absolute accuracy in a formula. We can give almost any mere scientific fact in words. We can even state the properties of a triangle with some definiteness. But beyond this we cannot go without calling Art to our aid; and the higher we attempt to soar the more dependent upon her do we become.

Our laws and legal documents are a constant comment upon and illustration of the utter failure inevitably resulting from any attempt to express with absolute accuracy, without the aid of art, any of those things which involve questions of morality, love, truth, justice, or any of the higher qualities of our nature; for they have always been and must always be the most obscure, involved, and incomprehensible attempts at expression in any language.

So we go upwards from the scientific formula and the laws of geometry, past the legal document to the newspaper article, and everyday prose, until we come to the more matter-of-fact forms of philosophy, thence on to parable, fiction and fairy tale, & from these to sculpture, architecture, painting, and poetry, calling in at every stage more and more of the aid of art, until we arrive at last at that most perfect art, and most complete expression, music. And observe, all the way through the series we have moved less and less within the regions of definitely statable facts, and more and more in the regions of those truths which can be felt & known, but not definitely expressed.

Great truths, which are for all time and all peoples, must be expressed in an art at any rate as high in dignity as parable in one of its many forms. The greatest teachers have recognised this. All great truths must be presented in a form in which those who are capable of realising them can find them, while others miss, & each can take away what he can comprehend. This is only another way of saying again, great truths can only be expressed through the medium of art, for it is an essential property of all true art that it shall suggest and imply more than it actually says.

I have said art is the only true educator between man and man, and a knowledge and appreciation of those things which through art alone we can learn, is the only true education. But I would not for one moment be thought to lose sight of the fact that Nature can and does teach us more than any work of man. She has influences over us tending to the highest education; with these I was not concerning myself in the above, for I was speaking of man’s influence upon his fellow man. I am to try and give some idea of wherein lies the life and vitality of some of the humbler branches of art. I say humbler, for I will have none of the shallow hypocrisy of those who, not being able to paint a great realistic picture, pretend that their little conventional decorations are a higher and nobler branch of art, and who, because the great picture may be still greater by being also decorative, and can only attain to its greatest when it is also decorative, argue that all decorative art is greater than pictorial.

It is my aim to show that to these applied arts also belongs much of that power to express those higher things which are felt and known only through art.

We all know that the mere form of a chair, the contour of a mould, the shape of a bracket, a scheme of colour, have power to affect us, in a degree, in just the same way music does, and, with awe let us realise it, even as Nature herself does. And I would have every craftsman and every practiser of the arts as deeply impressed with the dignity this places upon him, and the responsibilities it brings with it, as he can possibly be. I would have him feel this truth, that in his degree he is instrumental in either forwarding or retarding his fellow men in their highest and truest education; that in just so far as his art is true or false, real and vital, or feeble and insincere, he is advancing or hindering this great work; that true art is the grandest work of which humanity is capable, and that through it alone can man advance to higher things than those of which he is now capable.

We can none of us know, and certainly none of us are in any danger of over-estimating, the good influence of a beautiful building upon all those who pass and repass it daily; and the smallest and most insignificant article in our daily use has, in its own degree, like power to help or hinder our development.

Wherein truth in art consists, none but the artist can know, and he cannot tell to another what he knows of it himself; he has learned it, first from an inborn instinct and gift, and second, by that education which true art only can promote, and others can only come to a knowledge of it in the same way.

The whole spirit and trend, all the outside circumstances, influences, and conditions of modern life, are against the artist and true art. The present individualistic and competitive basis of society makes a living art almost an impossibility, but I do not propose we should concern ourselves now with questions which are not within the designer’s power, but only with those things which he can and must see that he personally rightly understands and practises.