Ideals in Art: Papers Theoretical, Practical, Critical

by Walter Crane

Human life, however disguised or uglified with unnatural and inharmonious surroundings, must, of course, always remain intensely interesting. If we all took to wearing sandwich boards to announce our personal tastes or wants to save trouble, I suppose a certain amount of drama would still be possible, and I have no doubt we should soon have aesthetic persons declaring that it was as fine a costume as a mediaeval herald’s or Joseph’s coat of many colours.

It does not seem as if we could take art and beauty naturally in this country, since the puritan frost came over us. We have suffered from stiffness in our aesthetic limbs ever since. A certain pedantry and affectation which have attached themselves to some parts of the question of art, seem to have created mistrust in the ordinary mind. The ordinary mind has been too much inured to ugliness, perhaps—and habit is dear to all of us. Conscious efforts to produce things of beauty are not always convincing, and even a thing of beauty does not look comfortable without harmonious environment. If Venus were to suddenly rise from the Serpentine (or from New York Harbour) she might be misunderstood.

If we are ever to have beauty in our common life again, beauty must spring naturally from its ordinary conditions, just as beautiful art always is inseparable from its material. Now, it is often said that art has always been the minister to wealth and power, that it has been the private possession of the rich, and its dwelling-place the precincts of courts and the shelter of great houses. If, however, the results of art (so far as the art which appeals to the eye can ever be monopolized) have often become forms of private property, this is only so in a limited degree, and is only partially true; and in regard to the later detached or pictorial forms of art, or in the case of antique bric-à-brac.

Art, in its nobler monumental forms, by the necessity of its existence, has appealed to the whole people of a city or state from a Greek temple to a Gothic cathedral with all the arts of design in retinue.

If, in later days, artists were pressed into the service of kings, great nobles, merchant princes or millionaires, and art became largely tributary to their pomp and magnificence, it was at least at the expense of the whole people. And as, by degrees, partly owing to commercial and mechanical evolution, and partly to the inducement of greater personal credit, social distinction and sympathy (which, after all, are parts of commercial evolution or rather, perhaps, some of its effects) the artistic faculty was drawn more and more into purely pictorial channels, and partook more and more of the nature of portable and private property, its actual possession became a matter, more or less, for the rich. Even in this stage, however, it has made possible splendid public and national collections—as our own National Gallery, for instance, where the very choicest works of the greatest painters of all time are the actual possession of each and all of us.

Where there has been monopoly of art, and large masses of the people (the workers whose “surplus value” really pays for it) have been excluded from, or deprived of, its enjoyment and socializing influence, is it wonderful that monopoly in art should follow monopoly of land and the means of subsistence? or that those who refuse to recognize, or to respect, common rights in land, and common participation in the pleasures and refinements of life, should refuse to recognize common rights in art also?

The growing enlightenment and demand for justice on the part of the workers, and their growing power and capacity for combination under democratic institutions, will insist upon the abolition of such monopolies; and the spread of the feeling of fellowship and the inter-dependence of all workers will create a sounder public sentiment and morality in the matter of the uses of wealth and the social value of art.

I hope that we shall not be content as a people to remain satisfied with so little of the refining influence of art and beauty in our daily lives. We are beginning to realize the immense loss and deprivation their absence causes, and where they are not felt at all, where their warm rays, like the sun’s, never penetrate, there is coarseness, brutality, and degradation. It is a noticeable fact, that harshness and roughness of manner and want of sympathy are usually found with an absence of sensibility to art in individuals. The aesthetic sense, indeed, is like a sixth sense added to the other five, or rather evolved from them. Yet we have, until recently, been in the habit of shutting up our national museums and picture galleries on Sundays as if they were haunts of vice, instead of refining, intellectual and moral influences, and sources of unselfish pleasure. We allow the walls of our school rooms, for the most part, to be gaunt and bare, and give no greater stimulus to the children’s and young people’s imaginative reason than is to be gleaned from varnished, unillustrated maps and tame lithographs of wild animals.

But it is hardly surprising that the minds and imaginative faculties should be starved, when we know that the bodies so frequently are, as under our compulsory system of education it has been discovered poor children frequently go foodless to school.

Yet if common life was thought worth enriching by suggestions of heroism, poetry, and romance; if education was considered more as a means of developing the whole nature, than merely as a preparation for a narrow competitive commercial existence, might we not, from the storehouses of history and folk-lore, picture our school and college walls with great and typical figures of heroes, and founders and fighters for our liberties and the commonwealth, and make them glow with colour and suggestion? and I believe we should see its after results in a more refined and more spirited, more sympathetic, more united and self-respecting people.