PART I
_The Caliph’s Design_
_Section_ 1. _The Parable of the Caliph’s Design._ ” 2. _The Bull Sounds._ ” 3. _The Politician’s Apathy._ ” 4. _How the Fact of Style Obstructs._ ” 5. _Where the Painter would Benefit._ ” 6. _The Public Chosen._ ” 7. _Architecture._ ” 8. _Child Art and the Naif._ ” 9. _Machinery and Lions._ ” 10. _The Artist’s Luck._
_The Parable of the Caliph’s Design_
One day the Caliph rose gingerly and stealthily from his bed of gold and placed himself at a window of his palace. He then took a pen of turquoise, and for some hours traced hieroglyphs on a piece of paper. They consisted of patches and lines, and it was impossible to say what he was doing. Apparently exhausted by the effort, he sank back on his bed of gold and slept heavily for ten hours. Waking up in the small hours of the morning, he called for a messenger and despatched him in search of Mahmud and Hasan, respectively the most ingenious engineer and the most experienced architect in his dominions. He was in fine fettle when they arrived. He pointed with a certain facetiousness to his design lying outspread on a table. He then addressed them as follows:--“I am extremely dissatisfied with the shape of my city, so I have done a design of a new city, or rather of a typical street in a new city. It is a little vorticist effort that I threw off while I was dressing this morning.” He negligently curled the tip of his beard. “I want you to look at it and tell me what you think of my skill.”
Mahmud and Hasan bent over the design, and, noticing that their lord’s eye was dancing, they indulged in a few hurried guffaws, scraping their feet and pushing each other.
The Caliph then said, “Oh, Mahmud and Hasan, that is a very funny design. But it is my will that such a street should rise beneath the windows of my palace, work starting on it at ten o’clock to-morrow morning. It is your unpleasant duty to invent the shapes and conditions that would make it possible to realise my design. You have till ten to-morrow morning in which to produce the requisite plans and instructions for such a work. Should you fail to do so your heads will fall as soon as I have been informed of your failure, that is to say, between ten and eleven to-morrow. Good-night, oh Mahmud and Hasan.”
Those two tremendously able men burst into a cold sweat. Their eyes protruded from their intelligent faces. They clicked their tongues, shrugged their shoulders, and shuffled out with gestures of despair. After a half-hour of complete paralysis of their brilliant faculties, they pulled themselves together, and by ten o’clock next morning a series of the most beautiful plans that had yet been made in Baghdad (retaining with an exact fidelity the masses and directions of the potentate’s design) were ready for their master. And within a month a strange street transfigured the heart of that cultivated city.
_The Bull Sounds_
We are all agreed as to the deplorable nature of the form-content and colour-content around us. But there agreement ceases.
The divergence of opinion gathers round the following points: Is it not preferable to have every manifestation of the vulgar and stupid constantly, in an appetising, delicious form (something like the “highness” of game), at the disposal of our superiority and wit?
What would Flaubert have done had France not bred Bouvards and Pécuchets with rabbit-like fecundity? Can nature ever be thanked enough for Sir Sampson Legend, Mantalini, Boswell’s Johnson, Falstaff or any such types of Comedy, composed of the nastiest excrement and washiest imbecilities? No one would diminish by one ounce the meat of art that resides in folly or deformity; or see snobbery, gluttony or cruelty reduced by one single exemplaire, once his mind was fixed on the benefits that the æsthetic sense has received from their abundance in Nature!
A less self-indulgent satirist like Aristophanes, it is true, will attach a stink or some disgusting attribute to his absurd character, relying on the squeamishness of his audience, sending his characters about like skunks. But most authors are not so moral as to poison our pleasure with these gases. A stupid form is for the painter the same food as a stupid man for a writer like Gogol or Flaubert.
So it is very debatable whether without the stimulation of stupidity, or every bestial, ill-made, tasteless object that abounds in life to-day, the artist would be as well off and well nourished. Would he not be in the position of a satirist, like Flaubert, without a Bouvard, or of an artist like Boswell without his rich and very unusual dish? The irritation with the particular French folly that surrounded him, and that Flaubert ate every day as regularly as his breakfast; the consequent pessimism that became the favourite manure for his thoughts; we cannot see Flaubert without that, any more than we can conceive of Rousseau the Douanier without his squab little bourgeois, and blank, paunchy little villas.
The point rather lies in the _attitude_ that was Flaubert’s and that was the Douanier’s. Flaubert hated Bouvard, and considered the vulgarity and idiocy that he witnessed a very sad and improper affair. The Douanier, on the other hand, probably admired his Bouvards very much. It was with a naively respectful eye, it may be assumed, that he surveyed the bourgeois on Sunday, and noted his peculiarities like a child, directly, without judging.
Shakespeare, it is true, must have relished the absurd or deformed more consciously; and Dickens made a cult of it. But with Shakespeare it was against a vast background of other matter, and as comic relief, or used in farces, and so labelled. It has never amounted to what has practically become, in our day, a _rejection_ of anything as dull or useless unless it lends itself to our appetite for the comic or the “queer.”
But Wilde’s antithetic glitter, when used in journalism, may become the most wearisome thing on earth. We long, confronted by such a monotony of inversion as we get in Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, for a plain “dull” statement. In the same way, if the villainous stupidity that has always been around every man since the world began (only he has belaboured it with one hand while caressing it with the other) became something like the religion of the educated--such education, that is, as enabled you to enjoy it--and its pursuit and enjoyment the one topic and habit of life, should we not sigh for the old variety; the hero, the villain, the lovely lady and the Comic Relief? Should we not also, if embedded in some bric-à-brac of stuffed birds and wax flowers, and the languors of the “æsthetic period” of the article I cite later in this pamphlet, look towards Karnak, a plain French provincial town, or almost anywhere--with eyes of longing?
Surely all this sensibility of the “queer,” the “amusing,” the divinely ugly, the exquisitely vulgar, will date, and date very quickly.
There would to-day, in the “modern” section of the art-world, be as great an outcry if some philistine proposed that the lovely embellishments of our streets, coloured signs, posters, beautiful police-stations and bewitching tiled Tube stations should be pulled down, as there would have been formerly, and is still by the “beauty-loving public,” when some “picturesque old bit” or decaying cottage is removed.
But, with men trying their hardest to eliminate ugliness, injustice, imbecility and so forth from the world, has there ever been any absence of these commodities for the sweet, or bitter, tooth of the artist? Is there ever likely to be? It is true that the artist can gorge himself to-day probably as never before. But is that the best thing for his talent?
If twenty Christs charged abreast anywhere in the world, you would still get in a remarkably short time, and within a half-hour’s walk of their super-calvary, some such monument as the First Pyramid, the result of such a block of egotism as had never been seen before, to show you the weakness of the humane corrective. But I do not believe you would ever get a pyramid builder without Christian hysteria.
Even in order to appreciate the “banal” you must not have too much of it. And you must _pretend_ you do not like it even if you are incapable of liking anything else. The reactionary Prussian theorists of war--good, beneficent war--tyranny, and so forth were less useful than the Pacifist, and less intelligent.
The arrangement seems to be that you spend half your time destroying the cheap, the foolish, the repellent; and the other half enjoying what is left over after your efforts! This evidently being how we are intended to live, there is no excuse for slackness in the carrying out of your unpleasant duty: that is to desire equity, mansuetude, in human relations, fight against violence, and work for formal beauty, significance and so forth, in the arrangement and aspect of life.
But to conclude. The great line, the creative line; the fine, exultant mass; the gaiety that snaps and clacks like a fine gut string; the sweep of great tragedy; the immense, the simple satisfaction of the surest, the completest art, you could not get if you succeeded in eliminating passion; nor if you crowned imbecility, or made an idol of the weak.
Whereas you can always get enough silliness, meaningless form, vulgar flavour to satisfy the most gargantuan or the most exquisite appetite.
_The Politician’s Apathy_
What is this ugliness, banality, and squalor to which we have been referring? It is simply what meets your eye as it travels up practically any street in London to-day, or wanders around any Hotel lounge or Restaurant, or delects itself along the wall of the official galleries at Burlington House. Next, what influences go to the making of this horrible form-content and colour-content that we can either offer up a prayer of thankfulness for, take no notice of, or occupy ourselves with modifying, in our spare time? Exactly what set of circumstances, what lassitude or energy of mind working through millions of channels and multitudes of people, make the designs on match boxes (or the jokes on the back of some), the ornamental metal-work on the lamp-posts, gates, knife-handles, sepulchral enclosures, serviette-rings, most posters, ornamented Menu cards, the scenery in our Musical spectacles, chapter-headings and tail-pieces, brooches, bangles, embossments on watches, clocks, carving-knives, cruets, pendants in Asprey’s, in Dobson’s, in Hancock’s windows in Bond Street; in fact, every stitch and scrap of art-work that indefatigably spreads its blight all over a modern city, invading every nook, befouling the loveliest necks, waists, ears, and bosoms; defiling even the doormat--climbing up, even, and making absurd and vapid the chimney pot, which you would have thought was inaccessible and out of sight enough for Art not to reach; for the cheap modern thousand-headed devil of design not to find it worth while to spoil?
We are all perfectly agreed, are we not, that practically any house, railing, monument, wall, structure, thoroughfare, or lamp-post in this city should be instantly pulled down, were it not for the “amusement” and stimulus that the painter gets out of it?
A complete reform (were it not for the needs of the painter who _must_ have his bit of banality, bless his little heart!) of every notion or lack of notion on the significance of the appearance of the world should be instituted. A gusto, a consciousness should imbue the placing and the shaping of every brick. A central spectacle, as a street like Regent Street is, should be worked out in the smallest detail. It should not grow like a weed, without forethought, meaning, or any agency but the drifting and accident of commerce. A great thoroughfare like Regent Street develops and sluggishly gets on its ill-articulated legs, and blankly looks at us with its silly face. There are Bouvards and Pécuchets in brick and stone, or just dull cheerless photographs. There is no beautiful or significant relief, even, in this third-rate comic spectacle.
Do politicians understand so little the influence of the Scene of Life, or the effect of Nature, that they can be so indifferent to the capital of a wealthy and powerful community? Would not a more imaginative Cecil Rhodes have seen that the only way an Empire such as he imagined could impress itself on the consciousness of a people would be in some such way as all ambitious nations have taken to make the individual citizen aware of his privileges and his burden? Whether in the weight of a Rhetoric of buildings, or in the subtler ways of beauty signifying the delights and rewards of success won by toil and adventure; in a thousand ways the imagination of the multitude could be captured and fixed. But beyond the obvious policy of _not_ having a mean and indolent surrounding for the capital of what sets out to be an “Empire,” simply for human life at all, or what sets out to be human life--_to increase gusto and belief in that life_--it is of the first importance that the senses should be directed into such channels, appealed to in such ways, that this state of mind of relish, fullness and exultation should obtain.
It is life at which you must aim. Life, full life, is lived through the fancy, the senses, consciousness. These things must be stimulated and not depressed. The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.
This is worse, again, for the crowd than the luckier individual. The life of the crowd, of the common or garden man, is exterior. He can only live through others, outside himself. He, in a sense, _is_ the houses, the railings, the bunting or absence of bunting. His beauty and justification is in a superficial exterior life. His health is there. He dwindles and grows restless, sick and troublesome when not given these opportunities to live and enjoy in the simple, communal crowd manner. He has just sense enough to know that he is living or not living. Give him a fine, well-fed type of life, a bit dashing and swanky, suitably clothed, with a glamour of adventure about it, to look at, and he is gladdened, if his own stomach is not too empty. Give him fine processions, and holidays, military display. Yes, but there is something you are going to omit. By the deepest paradox he knows that the plaster objects stuck up in Oxford Street outside Selfridges for Peace Day are not a symbol of anything but commerce; in which he equally, though not so successfully, is engaged himself. There is nothing there that he could not do himself, and they do not reach his imagination. Similarly, it is not such a tremendous critical flight as you would imagine for him to connect in some subtle way in his mind these banal plaster statues with the more careful but even more effusively mean Albert Memorial, or any other monument that meets his eye. Yet these he knows are the monuments that typify the society of which he is a unit. This putrid dullness, hopeless deadly stare of almost imbecile stupidity, that he is confronted with in the art offerings from those above, as in their persons, can hardly be expected to stimulate him, either to buoyancy, obedience, or anything but boredom.
So if there are a hundred reasons why Painters should oppose any modification of the appearance of our works, which is _Perfect_ in the quaintness of its stupidity, there is no reason why the politician should feel obliged to protect it.
_How the Fact of Style Obstructs_
The parable of the Caliph’s design describes the state of mind which must be that of every healthy and active artist living in the midst of the blasphemous stupidity, too much so even for health, that surrounds us to-day. But alas! although like the Caliph, a vorticist, I have not the power of life and death over the Mahmuds and Hasans of this city. Otherwise I should have no compunction in having every London architect’s head severed from his body at ten o’clock to-morrow morning, unless he made some effort to apply a finer standard of art in his own art-practise. I would flood those indolent commercial offices, where architects pursue their trade, with abstract designs. I am sure the result would be to cram the world with form and intention, where to-day, as far as it is beholden to the architect, it has no discernible significance or æsthetic purpose of any sort.
There is no reason at all why there should not be a certain number of interesting architects. I can also see no reason why this pamphlet should not bring them forth. I should be very proud of that, and watch their labours with great interest. This, I think, is such a modest optimism that I am sure you will allow it. I should like to see the entire city rebuilt on a more conscious pattern. But this would automatically happen should an architect of genius turn up who would invent an architecture for our time and climate that was also a creative and fertilising art-form. The first great modern building that arose in this city would soon carry everything before it; and hand in hand with the engineer, and his new problems, by force of circumstances so exactly modern ones, would make a new form-content for our everyday vision. So all we want is one single architect with brains, and we will regard him with optimism.
Now the question of form-content is obviously one of importance to every painter. Almost any painter, sculptor, or designer of an actual type to-day will agree with you that Cheapside, Piccadilly, Russell Square, Marylebone Road, are thoroughly dull and insignificant masses of brickwork, laid out according to no coherent plan, bestially vulgar in their details of ornament, and in every way fit for instant demolishment. Similarly, he will agree that any large and expensive West-End restaurant is an eyesore, and a meaningless sham.
Similarly, when you say to him that it is about time something were done to get rid of this graceless and stupid spectacle, he will agree, but will quickly change the subject. Every law of common-sense precludes any possibility of an appreciable modification of this detestable sight. He will either imagine that you are out for some Utopia, or he will think that your notions hardly agree with the fashionable fad-idea that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds--that whatever reality, accident, or your neighbour, that is, flings at your head, your head should resound to, if it is empty, as it ought to be.
Of course there are good arguments against you. I have made use of those arguments myself. We have just been envisaging them in the section of this pamphlet headed “The Bull Sounds.” But we will proceed to sift out more thoroughly the Painter’s argument; this time not only the painter or the amateur, but any painter.
Style, he will say, can transform anything into gold. Take a convenient example. Should Rembrandt in one of his pen-drawings have had a more interesting type of architecture before him for subject matter, in place of the country mills by the side of the Dutch canals, would this better form-content have made his drawings better drawings? You must answer to that: “No, it would not.” But a windmill is a rough and simple contrivance, and there is a sad difference between the rough beauty and fitness of such objects stuck up centuries ago in Holland, and similar rough and simple objects built to-day. One would do better to imagine a Rembrandt, working in the same way that he worked, doing similar drawings in an industrial country like England or Germany at the present time. Still you have to admit that as fine an artist as Rembrandt would, by the magic of his use of the medium he chose, by his line, by his tact of simplification and elimination, make a _New_ thing of anything, however poor the original. And so, in considering if it is worth while to change a single brick, even, or the most trifling ornament, however offensive, you would be compelled to admit that, as regards the production of the finest type of art you would be no better off. The best half-dozen artists of any country, as regards the actual beauty and significance of their work, do not depend on the objective world for their success or stimulus.
As to all the thousands of artists, not amongst the most able or imaginative, but possibly able to do something, it is another story. _They_ depend on Nature, on the objective world, for their stimulus or their taste. Set a rather poor artist down in a roadway, ask him to draw a street of houses in front of him. If the houses were of a good and significant build, he would be more likely to do a good and significant painting than if they were such clumsy, and stupid, lineless, massless, things as we invariably find ourselves in the midst of to-day. If he has no particular invention or vision of his own, he depends on Nature a good deal. Nature must do half the work.
But the fallacy in the contention about a good artist is this. That although he does not depend on Nature, he certainly depends on life, and is subject to its conditions. And this surely re-acts on his painting. If he starves, is disturbed in his work, or has to do some horrible type of present-day commercial painting or designing to make a living, then his independence of objective form and colour-content is of little use to him.
_Where the Painter would Benefit_
Apart from my conviction on this subject, a useful way of illuminating it will be to consider how I, or an artist like me, stands towards it on the practical ground. It reduces itself to this: I have nothing materially to gain by your adopting these theories. You are perplexed: painters are everywhere perplexed. I make you and them a present of this analysis of these perplexities. I see the shapes that you would see did the world for the moment contain more stimulation and effort in the related arts. I do not need to have a house built with significant forms, lines, masses, and details of ornament, and planted squarely before my eyes, to know that such significance exists, or to have my belief in its reality stimulated. But _you_ require that. I am, or any painter you can see is, obviously here to do that. I am at your disposal in this respect. But that is primarily a work for you and not for me. I can get on quite well, the artist always can, without this material realisation. Theoretically, even, a creative painter or designer should be able to exist quite satisfactorily without paper, stone or paints, or without lifting a finger to translate into forms and colours his specialised creative impulse. It should be the same with the painter, the architect, or the sculptor as it is with the composer of music. The Interpreter is really only in the same category as the bricklayer, or at best a foreman of works.
Still, I suffer somewhat all the same, from this lack of readiness, or really of aptitude, on your part, to employ me usefully. And every true artist I know, painter or sculptor, is in the same box. The trouble is this: It does not matter what objective Nature supplies. The inventive artist is his own purveyor. But the society of which he forms a part, can, by its backwardness, indolence, or obtuseness, cause him a series of inconveniences; and above all, can, at certain times and under certain conditions, affect his pocket adversely and cause him to waste an absurd amount of time. When no longer able to produce his best work, it would not be a waste of time for a painter or for a writer to lecture, for example, on the subject of his craft. The propaganda, explanatory pamphlets, and the rest, in which we, in this country, have to indulge, is so much time out of active life which would normally be spent as every artist wishes to spend his time, in work, in a state of complete oblivion as regards any possible public that his work may ever have. Yet were one’s ideas on painting not formulated, and given out in the shape of a lecture, a pamphlet, or a critical essay, an impossible condition would result for an artist desirous of experimenting.
So when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to _look_ at it. It is _you_ who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would benefit by this exhilarating spectacle. _I_ should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks, the queer wild men of cubes, the terrible futurists, or any other rubbish that the Yellow Press invents to amuse the nerves of its readers. (Do you suppose that the art-man who reports on the French Show in Tottenham Court Road and describes the “horror” of these pictures, really _thinks_ that they are in any way blood-curdling? No. He knows for every extra curdle he makes an extra quid.) It naturally does not please me, or any other painter who paints pictures that appear extravagant according to the pretty and facetious standard of this time, to be described as a wild man, or a bolshevik in paint. No pleasurable thrill accompanies these words when used about one’s own very normal proceedings, since they appear to the painter the _only_ normal proceedings in the midst of the detestable capers of the usual mild lunatic asylum we have to inhabit.
_The Public Chosen_
The Public I should like for this pamphlet is a rather different one than that to which painters usually consider it worth while to address themselves. In the first place, any individual belonging to the rank and file of the Royal Academy is fond of regarding himself as “a Craftsman”; as a specialist of the most prodigious, horny, paint-and-dust-grimed, mediæval sort. The more furibundly ignoble his paintings, the further he retires into the technical mysteries of his craft. And so lay opinion he scorns.
Then another pale exists, an even funnier one, beyond which stand those multitudes who have not been taught a delightful faintness, a cheap catch of the voice, and the few dozen snobbish tricks of thought and hand coined in each decade for the lucky young rich. A board school master, an excise clerk, a douanier, for that matter, are usually approached if at all with every nuance of amused condescension that a disgusting stereotyped education can breed.
How sick such men must be with the wearisome and endless trifling that they have come to associate with the word Artist!
I write in these notes for a socially wider and not necessarily specialist public.
_Architecture_
Architecture is the weakest of the arts, in so far as it is the most dependent on the collective sensibility of its period. It is so involved, on the other hand, in utility, and so much a portion of public life, that it is far more helpless than painting and literature in the face of public indifference. Sculpture shares with it some of this helplessness. There are many good sculptors wasted to-day as thoroughly as anyone can be, through the absence of such conditions as are needed to give them their chance of natural expression. Had Gaudier-Brzeska lived, he would be doing an odd door-knocker or two, and an occasional paper-weight, or portrait busts, for a living, with all the limiting circumstance that personal vanity sets to that form of art work. There only remains for the sculptor, as for the painter, the art exhibition, and the freak-selling or commercial-selling of the dealer’s shop. A man like Archipenko, for instance, quite capable of finer things, is reduced to stunt-sculpting of a dilettante sort, on a small scale, it may be assumed of a precarious nature on the material side.
Have you ever met an Architect? I do not mean a well-paid _pasticheur_, who restores a house or runs one up, in Tudor, Italian, or any other style. But a creative architect, or a man with some new power in his craft, and concerned with the æsthetic as well as the practical needs of the mass sensibility of his time? I have not. And what is more, should you wish to approach this neglected subject and learn more about it, you will find nothing but a dismal series of very stupid books for your information and reference. The best treatise I have so far come across is W. K. Lethaby’s handbook, “An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building.” It appears to me to be as sound a book as possible: and if everybody were of Mr. Lethaby’s opinions we should soon find that the aspect of this lifeless scene had changed for the better. And this voice for the right and active vision comes from the unlikeliest quarter. For Mr. Lethaby, I understand, is Chief Lecturer on Architecture in the South Kensington School.
Listen to this admitted academic authority on the subject:
“Modern armoured concrete is only a higher power of the Roman system of construction. If we could sweep away our fear that it is an inartistic material, and boldly build a railway station, a museum, or a cathedral, wide and simple, amply lighted, and call in our painters to finish the walls, we might be interested in building again almost at once. This building interest must be aroused.
“We cannot forget our historical knowledge, nor would we if we might. The important question is, Can it be organised and directed, or must we continue to be betrayed by it? The only agreement that seems possible is agreement on a scientific basis, on an endeavour after perfect structural efficiency. If we could agree on this we need not trouble about beauty, for that would take care of itself.
“Experience must be brought back once more as the centre of architecture, and architects must be trained as engineers are trained.
“The modern way of building must be flexible and vigorous, even smart and hard. We must give up designing the broken-down picturesque which is part of the ideal of make-believe. The enemy is not science, but vulgarity, a pretence to beauty at second hand.”
What do you make of that? Does not Mr. Lethaby, Professor of Architecture in the South Kensington Schools, speak to you in a tone seldom heard in the art-schools? What English professor of painting would you find recommending his pupil to paint in a manner “smart and hard”?
Such books as C. H. Caffin’s contain nothing very useful. He refers to the Woolworth Buildings in New York in the following way:
“Up to the present, the noblest example of this new movement is the Woolworth Buildings, which is not only the tallest of the tall buildings, but a monument of arresting and persuasive dignity. Such a building supplies an uplift to the spirit.” Etc.
The Woolworth Buildings, one of the tallest in New York, consisting of 51 storeys, is a piece of rudimentary ecclesiastical nonsense, 25 of its storeys being a spire. It is in every way less interesting than the less ambitious skyscrapers, which are at least enormously tall boxes, and by their scale “uplift the spirit” that wishes to soar so high, far more than this monstrous, dull, Anglican church: that is not a church, however, and has not even that excuse for its stupid spire.
In this connection, we hear a great deal of rubbish talked about the sky-scraper. The sky-scraper, for the most part, is a tall box. So far it has been nothing but that; except where, as in the Schiller Theatre Building in Chicago, or the famous Woolworth Buildings, some dreadful intervention of art has converted it into an acre-high advertisement of the modern architect’s fatuity.
It has been a fashion lately to admire the sky-scraper in its purely engineering form, and other forms of quite plain engineering construction. But a box is always a box, however high. And when you think of the things that could have been done by a liaison of the artist’s fancy, once more, with all these works of engineering genius, you wonder that there is not one single example which one can quote of such a structure.
In the case of a dynamic shape like an aeroplane there is neither any reason nor any need for the association of engineering inventiveness with that of the artist. All such machines, except for the colouring of them and a possible deliberate camouflaging to modify their shape, not to deceive the eye of the enemy but to add significance or beauty to their aspect, develop in accordance with a law of efficient evolution as absolute as a tiger, a wasp, or a swallow. They are definitely, for the artist, in the category of animals.
When we come to the static cell-structures in which we pass our lives there is far more latitude and opportunity for the inventiveness of the artist.
To begin with, let us by all means reduce everything to the box. Let us banish absolutely the stylistic architectural rubbish. But even as to the shaping of the box or series of boxes let the artist be used.
For if you say that the design and ornament over the body of the building is the same as the clothes on a man’s back, there is still something to be said about the naked shape of the man or even for his skeleton. The nature of the body or of the skeleton will decide what the character of the clothes must be. So the artist should come in long before he usually does, or give a new consciousness to the shaping of the skeleton of the Engineer. This should be invariable, not occasional: that is when the first painters or sculptors have been used for this purpose, instead of the horrible stock architect.
Remy de Gourmont has the following notion on the subject of the decay of architecture in our time:
“Voilà le point capital de l’explication pourquoi on avait au moyen-age le sens de l’architecture: on ignorait la nature. Incapables de jouir de la terre telle qu’elle est, des fleuves, des montagnes, de la mer, des arbres, ils étaient obligés, pour exciter leur sensibilité, de se créer un monde factice, d’ériger des forêts de pierre.
“La nature s’ouvrit à l’homme parce que la France et le centre de l’Europe furent sillonnés de routes, parce que les campagnes devinrent sûres et d’un commode accès.”
And he goes on to fancy that perhaps when Nature has become too cheap, through its general accessibility, and men tire of it, that Art and Architecture will once more have its turn.
Since a narrow belt of land like the Nile valley is more crowded with buildings, or their remains, than any other territory, and since the character of those buildings, the source of all subsequent constructions, was evidently determined by the nature of the landscape of Egypt, the hills, palms, and so forth, with which, further, the builders were at least as familiar as any men could be with Nature, de Gourmont’s theory would appear to be nonsense. It displays the listless and dull eye that a usually keen journalist can turn to this Cinderella of a subject.
_Child Art and the Naif_
The Child and the Naif are two of the principal mainstays of dilettante criticism in this country. And this “phenomenon” with all the sentimentality of which its exploitation clearly is susceptible, is one of the trump cards in the Amateur’s game, and a fruitful source of confusion. It is one of the most obvious avenues, flooded with an effusive critical craft, by which the thoroughly undeserving can slip through into a position of artificial respect.
“The Young Visiters” is swelling into fabulous editions. Pamela Bianca, a child of nine, is fawned on by the hoary great. The Omega Workshops have had an exhibition of children’s drawings. The Naif, too, is a doll-like dummy that the trader on sentiment pushes in front of him in stalking the public. The Naif is an elastic phenomenon and of earlier date, as regards his boom, than the Child.
The Slade School produces regularly a certain number of Naifs. They are frequently the most sophisticated individuals imaginable. Beyond the fact that they wrestle with a slight incompetence, in addition to possessing a pretty feeling for the sentimentalities of rustic prints, although they never by any means capture the native charm of those, they are no more naive than Mr. Horatio Bottomley. None that I know are half as good manufactured naiveté as George Formby. They are very cunningly simple, and their graces and queernesses pall as swiftly as the tiresome mannerisms of a too clever child, exploiting its childishness.
There are two types of Naif: the Child-Naif, and the Primitive Naif. It is difficult to decide which is the more boring of the two.
The Child-Naif usually starts from a happy combination of an ingrained technical incompetence and of a “nice feeling” for the things of art. He is distressed that this “nice feeling” should be wasted owing to his lack of power, and hits on the happy idea, or gradually drifts into the habit (a sort of progressive _collage_) of bringing his lack of painter’s prowess and his nice feeling for art together, and producing the very marketable commodity, Naiveté!
Or he may be a bit more definitely naive than this. The woodenness of his figures or trees, his rickety line, may really have a pathetic charm for him. He genuinely pities his little wooden figures for being so wooden and silly looking (a manner of pitying himself). He is sorry for himself through them! And this sensation becomes a necessity with him; he goes on doing them. If he has been touched enough; or, more likely, if his is a nasty theatrical self-love, other people are touched, and he in turn touches a little regular income in consequence!
Or the more general pathos may be absent. The weak pathetic line, and silly meaningless forms, the unreal colour, are the object of a certain emotion: something that I can only describe as a technical pity; a professional pathos. The best is made of an unfortunate limitation. This Naif may even become perfectly bumptious and self-satisfied in course of time, everything turning out, in the practical sphere, for the best: by the same process that produces the infantile swank of the deformed.
The Primitive Naif may evolve rather in the same way as the Child-Naif, or he may not. It may be a refuge of incompetence. Or it may be a romantic mode, teutonic in character. Then the Child-Naif and the Primitive Naif sometimes come together in the same artist.
There is no such thing as the _born Primitive_. There is the _Primitive_ in point of view of historical date, the product of a period. And there is the _Primitive voulu_, who is simply a pasticheur and stylist, and invariably a sentimentalist, when not a rogue. When he is not specially an _Italian_ or _Flemish Primitive_, but just a _Primitive_ (whatever period he flits into _always_ a Primitive), he is on the same errand and has the same physiognomy as the Period-taster, or any other form of dilettante or of pasticheur. The Primitive voulu acrobatically adapts himself to a mentality of a different stage of social development: the pasticheur merely, en touriste, visits different times and places, without necessarily so much a readjustment of his mind as of his hand.
As to the Child proper. Of course the success of “The Young Visiters” is partly due to its domestic appeal, partly due to its character of a sentimental curiosity. The distillation of Middle-class snobbery, also, presented in this pure and objectionable form, is sure to “attract a wide public.”
Pamela Bianca, whose drawings are to be found in a publication called the _Owl_, in _Vogue_, and so forth, is like Daisy Ashford at least in one point: that _she is not a child_. She may be nine years old, and “The Young Visiters” may have been written by a child of two. But they both have every sad relaxed quality of the average adult mind. They are as extinct as that. Pamela Bianca’s “libido” has naively devoured the Douanier’s Fête National. But that is the nearest she has come to naiveté. Otherwise she imitates Beardsley or Botticelli, or some fellow-child, with as sophisticated a competence as any South Kensington student. She is very exactly the æsthetic peer of the professional painters who run the _Owl_.
The growth of the mind and of the body is so often not parallel, some people’s “mature” lives so long, others almost non-existent, that it is difficult to know where you are dealing with the art product of the child, or the child-like art of the adult.
Presumably a powerful nature develops at once, disregarding the schedules of human growth and the laws of probation. William Blake was a case of a being who took little notice of the dawdling ritual of growth. On the other hand, many individuals, highly developed in adult life, have shown no precocity at all.
Genius no doubt has its system of working in a man, all the facts of the case--the best time to strike--the mental resources--the character of the gift to be hatched--in its possession.
As regards the Naif, Rousseau the Douanier is the only great naif as far as I know. In his case Nature made on the one hand his Douanier’s calling a water-tight case against sophistication; and then put something divinely graceful and simple--that we associate with “childhood” and that that abstraction sometimes has--at his disposal for the term of his life.
Nothing seemingly could corrupt or diminish it; and it brought with it, like a very practical fairy, or a sardine tin with its little key, an instrument with which to extract all the genius from within this Douanier of forty or fifty years old.
To return to the Child proper. The only case in which the drawing of a child is of value, is when it possesses the same outstripping or unusual quality that the work of a very few adult artists possesses. The adult in question may have accomplished nothing himself as a child. But the drawing of the child would seem perhaps to be his work at a more immature stage. It is not a question of Child or Adult. It is a question simply of the _better being_. Both belong to an exceptional type of being.
There is also a fresh and delicate charm of very young life that some children, not many, have the power of infusing into their drawings. And there remains the melancholy fact that no infant’s pictures could be duller than the average adult’s. And therefore there is every bit as much justification for exhibiting any twenty children’s scribbles as there is for exhibiting those of any twenty professional painting adults.
_Machinery and Lions_
The Futurists had in their idée fixe a great pull over the sentimental and sluggish eclecticism, deadness and preciosity of the artists working in Paris.
But they accept objective nature wholesale, or the objective world of mechanical industry. Their pæan to machinery is really a worship of a Panhard racing-car, or a workshop where guns or Teddy bears are made, and not a deliberate and reasoned enthusiasm for the possibilities that lie in this new spectacle of machinery; of the _use_ it can be put to in art. Machinery should be regarded as a new resource, as though it were a new mineral or oil, to be used and put to different uses than those for which it was originally intended. A machinery for making the parts of a 6in. Mk. 19 gun should be regarded apart from its function. Absorbed into the æsthetic consciousness it would no longer _make_ so much as a pop-gun: its function thenceforward would change, and through its agency emotions would be manufactured, related, it is true, to its primitive efficiency, shinyness, swiftness or slowness, elegance or power, but its meaning transformed. It is of exactly the same importance, and in exactly the same category, as a wave on a screen by Korin, an Odalisque of Ingres, a beetle of a sculptor of the XVIII. dynasty. Ingres lived in the midst of a great appetite for the pseudo-classic: the Egyptian sculptor lived in the presence of a great veneration for the beetle. Korin’s contemporaries possessed a high susceptibility and sentiment for the objects of the natural world. Korin’s formal wave-lines is the same impulse as Balla’s Linee Andamentali: the Beetle and the Odalisque are both sleek and solid objects! Ingres probably did not believe in the Odalisque as an Odalisque, although realising the admirable uses to which she could be put. The Egyptian probably found the beetle objectionable until transformed into stone. And there should be no obligation to supply veneration, or to behave like a religious fanatic about a sausage machine or a locomotive: other people can supply that, indeed should do so about something or other. If the world _would only build temples to Machinery_ in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honoured, pursue their trade without further trouble. Else what is the use of taking all the useful Gods and Goddesses away, and leaving the artist with no rôle in the social machine, except that of an entertainer, or a business man?
Imagine Koyetzu, Signorelli, or the sculptor who carved the head of Akhenaton or of the wife of the Sheik-el-Beled, alive painting and carving, to-day. They would have been in the profoundest sense the same artists. But just as a painter may use one medium one day and another the next; so far more than simply traces of the fact that they had seen the machines that play such a part in our existence would be found in their inventions. Just as the sculptors of Nineveh put the lions that were such immediate objects in their life, to good use in their reliefs; or the painters of the Sung period the birds and landscapes found by them in their wilfully secluded lives; so it was inevitable to-day that artists should get into their inventions (figures, landscapes, or abstractions) something of the lineaments and character of machinery. An artist could excel, no doubt, who never suggested in his pictures acquaintance with anything more ferreous than a mushroom. But you would not be liable, I suppose, to pick a quarrel with the artists of Asshur because they used the lions at their door?
This ground has to be gone over, and thus much reasserted, for the purposes of the new adjustments I propose.
_The Artist’s Luck_
The best artists of the Sung period lived a secluded life, very luckily for them. It was considered the thing to inhabit the fairly distant country and live in intercourse with the objects of Nature. When this fashion passed, and a painter had to live within hailing distance of the court, the pictures produced showed an immediate decline in quality. That is _one_ lesson.
The scenes in the Assyrian bas-reliefs from Nineveh were produced by an artist who led an unlucky kind of life. He was hurried about by the king in his razzias and hunts: no sooner had the party (a marauding or a hunting one) returned to the city than the harassed sculptors had to rush to their workrooms and produce by the next morning a complete series of bas-reliefs describing in what was apparently considered a flattering way the exploits of their diabolical idiot of a master. For no sooner had he slept off the fatigue caused by the last of an incessant series of displacements than he insisted on seeing what he had looked like to his band of performing sculptors during the last week or two. Their heads probably fell like apples in an autumn wind; though there is seemingly no record of his ever having had sculptors enough to build up their skulls into a pyramid. How they succeeded in doing such good lions it is difficult to say. Perhaps the ones who did the good lions were left in peace sometimes. But on the whole, a sculptor fated to work for Asshur’s deputy would no doubt have regarded the Sung hermit as the luckiest old yellow crab that ever painted.
It has occurred to me that we might be worse off than we are. But I can see no reason why we should not be better off: hence, partly, this pamphlet.