Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical, Practical, Critical

by Walter Crane

The early Assyrian reliefs, too, in another way may often be considered as a series of emphatic historic statements—a graven writing on the wall. Their object, to record the conquests of kings or their prowess as lion-hunters, their battles and sieges, their prisoners taken, their weapons and munitions of war, the attributes of their symbolic deities. Their value was perhaps as much their descriptive and recording power as their decorative effect.

The archaic Greek passed through the same stage, only gradually evolving that exquisite artistic sense, until the monumental beauty and heroic ideality of the Phidian work is reached to pass away again with the spirit and the life which gave it birth. The wave of Greek civilization rises to the crest of its perfection, and breaks and falls, yet spreads its influence, and leaves its impress upon all lands; unextinguished by the power and pomp of the Roman which succeeded, over which, indeed, in the artistic sense it triumphs, springing to new life in Italy, until it is found wandering among the ruins and trivialities of Pompeii, where the last stage of ancient life has been preserved, as it were, in amber.

We may drop some natural tears over the death of paganism, feeling that at all events, with all its corruptions, it has placed on record for us in art that joy of life, and the frank acknowledgement of man’s animal nature (which no religion or philosophy can afford to leave out of account) and has reconciled them in forms of enduring refinement and beauty. A great deal must be set down to persistence of sunshine, but anyone glancing at what has been left us in various beautiful forms of art from the classical times and countries must feel how much larger an external part art must have played in that life; how constant and intimate must have been its appeal—from the storied pediment and frieze of the temple, to the gilded statues and bronze fountains in the public streets and squares—walls whereon the painter’s fancy is let loose—everywhere colour, and overhead the blue sky of Italy or Greece. There was at any rate no room for monopoly in the pleasure of such an external life. The eye of the slave was, at least, as free as that of his master, and the mere common possession of the spectacular pleasure of life is something. We feel too that the ancient wealth of beautiful art was the direct efflorescence of the life of the time. Everywhere the artist’s and craftsman’s eye must have been stimulated, the forms of man and woman moving without the restraint of formally cut costume, but freely draped according to the taste of the individual or the demands of the season, or circumstance. He could see the athlete in the arena, the beauty on her terrace, the philosopher in his grove, the colour and glitter of the market-place, the slave at his toil, the warriors clanging out to battle, and all these in the broad and full light of a southern sky. What wonder that his art took beautiful forms. Even the grave was robbed of its gloom by the Greek artist, and death was figured as a gentle and painless leave-taking between friends.

It is impossible to doubt that impressions of external beauty and harmony have a softening and humanizing effect upon the mind. I believe that we are unconsciously affected by such influences—that we are unconsciously happier when we live in pleasantly proportioned rooms, for instance, with harmoniously coloured and patterned walls and furniture. The nerves are soothed through the gentle stimulus of the eye dwelling on happy and refined forms and colours.

With the advent of Christianity, with the spiritual eye fixed upon another world, the form, with the spirit, of art naturally changed, and though the main current of the new teaching was to make man indifferent to externals, after its first timid falterings in the dying traditions of classical design, we know that Christian art became one of the most powerful exponents of its creeds, and by the awe-inspiring influence of the solemn and mystic splendour of the Byzantine and early Gothic churches so impressed the imagination of men’s minds that, other causes contributing, the Church became the great depository of artistic skill and inspiration, and used its power of emotional appeal to the utmost, by means of noble and impressive architectural form and proportion, afterwards heightened by every decorative means at the command of the Gothic craftsman in painted glass, carving, mosaic, painting and work of gold and silver and precious stones.

A great church was inscribed within and without with Bible history, and the lives of saints were enshrined for an ensample to all in the living language of the painter or the carver.

The evil-doer was terrorized by presentments of the torments of a very realistic hell, while the saint was lifted by ecstatic visions of angelic choirs and flower-starred meads of Paradise. Art in the Catholic Church was indeed a preacher and teacher of unparalleled eloquence and moral force. The unlettered could read its open book, the poor and the lame and the halt—and even the blind might be moved by the “full-voiced choir” and “pealing organ.”

The splendour and beauty of a mediaeval cathedral must have had what we should now call quite an incalculable educational effect upon the people from the aesthetic and emotional side.

Besides this, the ordinary aspect of the towns must have been full of romance and interest: the variety, and quaint richness of the citizens’ houses; the colour and fantastic invention in costume and heraldry; the constant shows and processions, such as those organized by the crafts’ guilds, full of quaint allegory and symbolic meaning. A street might be solemn with the black and white gowns of monks and priests, or gay with flaunting banners and the flashing armour of knights, or the panoply of kings and queens. Great gilded wagons, bright with brave heraldry—instead of our black, varnished, respectable carriages, with a modest lozenge on their panels—though these have of late been rather put out of countenance by the more daring and dangerous motor car with its mysteriously veiled and masked occupants, a vehicle lately described by a wit as “a cross between a brougham and a battleship.”

Well, between the ordinary wonders of its mixed and perpetual traffic, we in London have now nothing left as a free popular spectacle but the Lord Mayor’s Show, or the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. There is the poster, it is true—that cheap and generally nasty “popular educator.” Not always so cheap, either, since one hears of Royal Academicians being secured for the service of pushing commerce at the price of a thousand pounds or so—though the result is generally not a good poster, but only an oil picture spoiled.