It is as true as if it had not been repeated, even to fatigue and boredom, that the arts of decoration have been in a bad way for a good part of the century past, at least among some European and Europeanized nations. I do not imagine that a Frenchman would admit that architecture and the arts of decoration had ever languished in his own society. Your cultivated Frenchman would say that some periods were better than others, but that there were no bad periods; he would say that, to be sure, the style of the First Napoleon’s Empire was not a very fortunate style,—too stiff, too absurdly pseudo-classic, unworthy of France, a poor enough successor of the dainty and playful art of Louis XV, or the somewhat more refined and restrained art of Louis XVI: but he would say that it was art still, and the period a not wholly inartistic period; and even of the dull times of the Napoleon of Peace, from 1830 to 1848, while he would confess to a great deal of languor and lack of public spirit of all sorts, except in the struggle which the Romantic artists, headed by Delacroix, waged with the Classicists, headed by Ingres; while he would admit that the abundant wood-cuts and lithographs, the painting and statues much less abundant even in proportion, and the buildings very few and unimportant, were not sufficient to make up a great artistical epoch, that is, for France; yet as for its being an epoch without art,—such a thing as that, he would say France had not known since she was France. And he would be right.
But if said of England it would be pretty nearly true, if it were said that the whole amount of art of the decorative kind that existed in England between 1810 and 1850, for instance, would fill but a small museum, and that its quality would fill but slight requirements, it would require a bold Anglophil to contradict. There came a dull pall, like that of her own black fogs, over social London, and the stucco-fronted languors of Baker Street and Portland Place are no worse than were the dull monotony of the interiors behind them. Veneered and polished mahogany furniture, very much too large and too heavy for the rooms; black haircloth, like the grave clothes of Art, for the covering of everything that could be sat upon; cold, brownish-red curtains, of shiny but not lustrous material; silver candlesticks of monstrous design,—these, and such as these, were the decorative objects which our fathers or our grandfathers admired, or felt that they must admire for want of better, during the unhappy years that I have cited. The delicate carvings that the furniture of a generation just previous had received, were forgotten. People put up with Chippendale chairs in their dining-rooms because they had belonged to their fathers and nothing special was offered to take their place; but there is no record that they cared for them. The richer and more fantastic carvings of Grinling Gibbons had never obtained any general recognition nor availed to modify the woodwork of the domestic interiors of England. The brocades and flowered silks which the eighteenth century had revelled in, and if in England not strong enough artistically to produce them itself, had brought into England from other lands;—these were replaced by the dismal things I have alluded to, and no vestige of them seems to have remained in the parlors of that unhappy time.
Richness of costume had disappeared with the wars of the French Revolution. Embroidered silk coats had given place gradually to claret-colored and blue broadcloth, and this gave place to black, and all variety in costume had disappeared completely; and now, from 1810 to 1850, fantastically varied and interesting house-furnishing and decoration had followed, as I suppose it inevitably must follow; costume, being, one fears, a necessary part of anything like a prosperous artistic epoch.
Out of this gloomy depression the Anglo-Saxon world, in England and in this country, is trying to emerge. It began its efforts with the perfectly natural conviction that by studying the artistic history of the past, something could be done to benefit the arts of the present. The Gothic revival, which you have heard of so much, and which was followed with real ardor and with unquestioning zeal by crowds of devotees for years, beginning with, perhaps, 1840, was an attempt along the most obvious lines,—along what seemed to be the line of least resistance, to change the metaphor. To develop anew an old art, which had flourished so greatly in the past,—how easy! and how certain! How certain were the enthusiasts of that time, that by earnestly poring over and closely analyzing and heartily loving the buildings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such buildings, and others like them, could be built in the nineteenth! How happy was the conviction of all these men that it was not more difficult than that! The secret of what had been done was to be found in the phenomena themselves. There, in this parish church, in this cathedral, lay the secret of their charm. Let us analyze first, they said, and let us put together again the ingredients that our analysis shall have discovered, and we will re-create the thing that we are in search of.
In like manner, in the minor arts, the people of 1850 felt, or some of them did, that they did not know how to weave curtains that it was worth any one’s while to hang up, except to shut out the light and shut in the warmth; that so far as beauty of texture, beauty of pattern, and beauty of color went, they were powerless to produce anything of any avail. But they saw that the Venetians of the sixteenth century and the Florentines of the seventeenth century and the French of the eighteenth century had produced splendid stuffs; and although there were no museums in those days that condescended to anything so humble, such stuffs were still to be bought of the bric-à-brac dealers, and very cheap, too, and still existed, rolled up in some old garrets. By studying them, surely the art of making others like them could be learned. And so around the whole circle of the arts of decoration, it was believed, and in thoroughly good faith, and with, as it seemed, perfectly good reason, that the study of what had been would suffice, with zeal and patience and good will, to the production of what should be.
Well, the experiment has failed. Archæology is the most delightful of pursuits, but it is not particularly conducive of good art. The German professor, who knows the most about Phidian sculpture, is as far as his youngest pupil from being able to produce anything Phidian, but, of course, this is not a fair example. The German professor does not profess to be a sculptor. Let us say then, that that sculptor now alive who knows the most, theoretically and historically about Greek art, is as far as his most ignorant contemporary and rival from having Greek methods of work. This is a safe proposition. I do not know who he is, nor can any one tell me. It is not a question of men, but of principles. The study of the monuments of art is one thing, their analysis, their criticism, their comparison, is one of the most attractive, the most fascinating, the most stimulating, the most absorbing of studies, one that I shall never cease commending in the most earnest way to all those persons to whom scholarship is dear and to whom it is a question of recommending a study which is worthy of their most earnest and hearty devotion, but it is not the study of practical art, that is another and a very different thing.
The way to make good sculpture is to let the youth thumb and punch and dabble in wet clay, and see what he can make of it; and the way to make a painter is to give the boy now a burnt stick, and at another time a pin and a back of a looking-glass, and see what he can delineate with such materials as these and with all other materials with which a line can be drawn. To look at the world, and what it contains, and to try and render what is suggested to him,—that is the training for the artist, and it has more to do with our beloved study of archæology than if they were not concerned with the same subject. This, I say, has been proven. Sad experience, the waste of forty years of work, disappointment and despair, have taught some of our artists what others did not need to learn,—that the way to succeed was not through study of the past. The artist has no primary need of archæological knowledge; the archæologist has no need of any fact that the artist can furnish him with.
Suggestions; yes! Each side can furnish the other with suggestions in abundance, and suggestions which each can immediately profit by. An able artist, if a fellow of modesty and frank speech, can hardly talk without giving the student of the theory of art hints which the latter should study over at home before he sleeps upon them; for the secret of much that is vital and essential in his study is to be found in these hints; and on the other hand, I imagine that an artist would be better off, and have more play of mind, and readier and fresher conceptions, if he would now and then listen to what the student of old art has to tell him about what is to be observed in this or that monument of the past. But beyond that there is no connection between them. I will run two ateliers side by side, one for archæologists, and one for practical students of architecture and they need never mix.
This will be more readily admitted, perhaps, in the case of the arts of expression than in the case of arts of decoration and let us define these terms. If you will allow me, I will quote from an address delivered a year ago before the New York Architectural League. Any work of art whose object is to explain and express the thing represented, or to convey the artist’s thought about the thing represented, is art of representation, or, if you please, art of expression, or if you please, expressional art. I offer these as nearly synonymous terms. But if, on the other hand, the work of art has for its object the adornment of a surface of any sort, as a weapon, a utensil, an article of costume, and if the natural objects represented or suggested are used only as suggestions to furnish pretty lines and pleasant tints, which lines and tints might have been after all represented apart from the object were man’s mind more creative than it is,—that is art of decoration.
Now, architecture, you see, is primarily an industrial affair, a method of covering men in from the rain, and admitting light into their protected interiors, and of warming those interiors, and in a few rare cases of ventilating them, and in providing a variety of apartments, communications, and the like for the varied requirements of a complicated existence; and it need not put on any artistic character at all. But as architecture becomes a fine art, it is perforce one of the arts of decoration. It has nothing to do with the arts of expression. Mr. Ruskin and all his life work to the contrary, notwithstanding, the business of building is not to tell tales about the world and its contents, not to set forth the truths of botany or of zoology, or of humanity, or of theology. If zoological or botanical or human objects are introduced, or representations of them, it is not for the sake of information that can be given about these interesting things, nor for the sake of expressing the artist’s mind about them, nor for the sake of saying anything whatever in regard to them. It is for the sake of making the building beautiful. When the Oxford Museum stood presenting to the street a flat-fronted wall, diversed with pointed arches, and carvers were set to work bands of rich sculpture around the windows; although Mr. Ruskin had a great deal to do with that edifice, and architects of his own choosing were in charge of it, and clever Irish workmen of his own approval were producing the interesting carvings of those archivolts and tympanums, in spite of all theories, the object aimed at and the object attained by that outlay of time and money and skill was the beautifying of the building, and this was achieved to an extent probably beyond what its planners proposed to themselves, for the effect of well-applied sculpture upon a building is beneficial to an extent that would never be believed by one who has not often watched the changes that can be wrought in this way. They who have said that the Gothic Cathedral is nothing but a work of associated sculpture are not far wrong, and to produce a lovely building, one would rather have the blankest malt-house or brewery in New York, and some good carvers set to work upon it, than to have the richest architectural achievement of our time, devoid as it is and must be of decorative sculpture. For to get decorative sculpture, you must have your sculptors; and they, you know, are wanting. Where are the men who will model capitals and panels in clay, with some sense of ornamental effect? We have the men who can make a copy in relief of an architect’s drawings: but then the architect, even if he have the sense of ornamental effect, in the first place can never draw out, full size and with care, all the work required in a rich building, and, in second place, can never design sculptured form aright by mere drawings on the flat. The architects of New York and Brooklyn are employing today, I suppose, 3,000 draughtsmen, of which number two or three hundred at least are engaged most of the time in making large scale and full-size drawings of architectural detail, in which sculpture plays a large part. Well, we need as many modellers, who, either in architects’ offices, or in stone-cutters’ yards and terra-cotta works, shall be putting into tangible form the dreams and thoughts of the designer’s brain. “As many,” do I say? Once it is found that architectural sculpture can be got promptly and cheaply, and conveniently, it is not 200 modellers only that this big community around the big bridge will need; but architects will engage three or four or a dozen at a time, as they now engage draughtsmen when big jobs come in.