Run your mind’s eye through the various peoples and nationalities of Europe—of the world—and you will find that their characteristic charm—that which is “racy” of their native soil, marking the distinction between race and race, lies in the expression they have given to life over and above use. If we had kept to use, race would have remained expressionless. Race expresses itself in ornament; and even among a poor peasant people (and far more among them than among the crowded and over-worked populations of our great cities where we pursue merely commercial wealth) comes out in a characteristic appreciation of the superabundance of material with which, at some point or another, life has lifted them above penury. In the great civilizations it extends itself over a rich blend of all these, drawn from far sources; and the more widely it extends over the material uses of life, the higher and the more permanent are the products of that form of civilization likely to be. What does it mean but this?—man is out to enjoy himself.
Having said that, need I add that I put a very high interpretation upon the word “joy”?
To that end—man’s enjoyment of life—all art is profoundly useful. I put that forward in opposition to the specious doctrine of Oscar Wilde that “all art is entirely useless.” But it is usefulness extended in a new direction; leaving the material uses, by which ordinary values are measured, it shifts to the spiritual; and by the spiritual I mean that which animates, vitalizes, socializes.
To that end it may often be—and is generally the case—that, in the material sense, art is a useless addition or refinement upon that which was first planned merely for the service of man’s bodily needs. Yet where the need is of a worthy and genuine kind, art never ceases to rejoice at the use that is underlying it. This can be clearly seen in architecture, where the beauty of design, the proportion, the capacity of the edifice—though far transcending the physical need which called it into being—remain nevertheless in subtle relation thereto, and give to it a new expression—useless indeed to the body—but of this use to the mind, that it awakens, kindles, enlivens, sensitizes—making it to be in some sort creative, by perception of and response to the creative purpose which evoked that form. You cannot enter a cathedral without becoming aware that its embracing proportions mean something far more than the mere capacity to hold a crowd; its end and aim are to inspire in that crowd a certain mental attitude, a spiritual apprehension—to draw many minds into harmony, and so to make them one—a really tremendous fact when successfully achieved.
Now nothing can be so made—to awaken and enlarge the spirit—without some apparent wastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will absorb more stone, and the labour of more men’s lives, before it is finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his composition is likely to say on beholding it: “Why was all this waste made?”
Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made, from a certain standpoint against all forms of joy evolved by the art of living—possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful.
But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers (latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament. He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish it—to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful; and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked for utility alone.
Now if spirit thus acts on matter—achieving its own well-being only through a certain waste of material, or expenditure of labour upon the lower plane, yet communicating back to matter influences from that state of well-being to which it has thus attained—may it not be that waste of a certain kind (what I would call “selective waste” versus “haphazard waste”) is the concomitant not only of spiritual but of material growth also? May it not be that evolution has followed upon a course of waste deliberately willed and insisted on—and that without such waste, life—even material life—had not evolved to its present stage?
We see a certain wastefulness attaching to many of the most beautiful biological manifestations in the world. Up to a certain point, the construction of flower, bird, beast, fish, shows a wonderful economy of structure, of means to end (it is the same also in the arts). But there comes a point at which Nature, “letting herself go,” becomes fantastic, extravagant—may one not say “wilful”?—in the forms she selects for her final touches of adornment. And is it not nearly always when the matter in hand is most closely related to the “will to live”—or, in other words, in relation to the amative instincts—that the “art of living” breaks out, and that Nature quits all moderation of design and becomes frankly ornamental and extravagant? Just at the point where to be creative is the immediate motive, where, in the fulfilment of that motive, life is found to be a thing of delight, just there, Nature, being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental.
There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails—that they were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They certainly cannot have been a help; and yet—they still persist in them!