But Art cannot be of the most truly vital and evolutionary kind unless it is born of national inspiration and has its roots in the social and spiritual life of a people—growing in response to their conscious need and desire for it. We adulate the great Italian artists instead of paying our homage to the Italian people for producing them—as they undoubtedly did, by desiring them; for art was not only a joy to their kings and prelates but a spiritual need to themselves. In such an atmosphere great men were bound to arise to give form to the ideals and emotions of the nation. Other countries have in equal degree made this demand at certain periods of their history; to mention the more obvious—Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, France, Japan. And in answer—great men have arisen to express what were really national ideals in concrete form. The demands of a king and his court may produce a Velasquez; the desire of a city may produce a Watteau or a Sargent; but only the desire of a nation can produce a great school in art.
Religion once held the artist as her most valuable ally and was, invariably, the source of his inspiration in all the greatest masterpieces he gave the world in all branches: whether in architecture, sculpture, painting, or in the lesser arts of carving, illuminating, embroidery, jewellery. For art has ever reached its high-water mark in the expression of religious ideals or in ministering to the needs of a religious civilization: the temples of Egypt, Greece and Ancient India; the paintings of the great schools of Italy, China, Flanders and Japan; the sculptures of the Parthenon and the Renaissance; and even the ju-jus of Africa and Australasia (about the virtues of which Chelsea mimics the adulations of Paris) were one and all oblations to the gods. But Religion in a frenzy of madness drove the artist from her sanctuaries and has not yet admitted the disastrous results of her crime. And all over the world—in the East as well as in the West—the artist has now retaliated and has gone elsewhere for his inspiration (and, incidentally, has turned, for the most part, for his appreciation to the race who are still forbidden by the sacred tenets of their faith to make to themselves “any graven image”). And art is now only the demand of the few.
At this particular point in history—a fact that should give us to think—the peoples of all the world are very far from clamouring to see their ideals given form through art. That many of them have ideals and can formulate their desires this generation has had ample proof; as for instance it had of the English—in the war. But the English have given innumerable proofs, too, that the desire of the mass of this people does not tend towards the arts—for however many great painters the English have produced the fact remains that our only national art—except perhaps the school of Reynolds and a tradition of landscape painting—is, still, literature; as it always has been. It is nothing to us that a national memorial is not conceived on nearly such large or costly lines as are our drapery stores. This causes us no concern whatever; we get what we want—economy of public money; and what we deserve—unworthy memorials. To the present-day public the function of the artist is of small importance—his work is there to amuse us, to flatter our vanity, to decorate our hideous houses (with which we are well content) and, when he is dead, to afford us the mild excitement of a little speculative buying. With such a point of view we can produce no great school in art. Nothing can change us except we change ourselves. Gallant attempts to change us have been made by individuals: Ruskin, in proclaiming one of the world’s great painters, sought to instil some fire of art into our flaccid hearts—and what happened? We pretended to desire great things; we became sentimental about the “beauties of nature” and our insincere desires produced a school of hucksters—who profaned the work of their master and sullied the beauties of nature.
Where a country has no national art the message of its great men, when they come, has to be completed just so far as they can take it in their own lifetime; for it is carried no further by those who follow them; whereas, when art is national, all its forms “interact. From the building of a great temple to the outline of a bowl which the potter turns upon his wheel, all effort is transfused with a single style,” and the message of a great man may take centuries to achieve its completion and fullness in a progressive unfoldment in evolution.
So many of the greatest drawings of the old masters were done in chalk that it is sometimes difficult to find examples executed in pen or pencil that will bring their work within the scope of this book; but in the Family of Thomas More we have an example of Holbein’s pen drawing which could not be better for our purpose. It is obviously the carefully thought out design for a painting of considerable size and, like all Holbein’s portraits, is a most intimate and searching study of psychology. Composition drawings (and this one is a good example) are among the most valuable to us of all works of art. Valuable because the composition sketches of a great man are generally pure inspiration throughout. In them he has worked too rapidly to be conscious of his method—he has been as unconscious as a writer is of his hand-writing. Napoleon said:
“Inspiration is the instantaneous solution of a long meditated problem”; what more perfect description could one have of a composition sketch, for the artist does, as a rule, meditate a problem for a long time but the moment he finds the solution he sets down his idea with the greatest zest seizing the first thing to hand—generally a pen or a pencil. Moreover, in the first rapid sketch that records his inspiration his mental vision is clear; the interruptions—inevitable in the slow process of painting a picture—having not yet occurred.
This book abounds with examples of sketches done in this way. They may have been done thus, only as a means to an end, but that end is often more nearly reached in the “instantaneous solution” than in the finished picture that follows—though we may prize this for many other qualities.
Rembrandt