Art for life's sake; an application of the principles of art to the ideals and conduct of individual and collective life

Front matter

l I I O

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ART

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. By Way of Introduction 9

II. Concerning Barriers 15

Chapter I By Way Of Introduction

“ UT, my dear Sir, Saint-Gaudens is not an r“^ artist; he’s a scnlptor.”

_LJ This was said to me by a man who was himself a sculptor. He had no intention of disparaging Saint-Gaudens, whom he recognized as the foremost sculptor that America has produced, one who holds his own among the best of his contemporaries in Europe. Clearly, therefore, he was using the term, artist, merely as the equivalent of painter. That was fifteen years ago, and the jolt which my mind received started the idea which has developed into the topic of this book.

Briefly, the topic is: What is Art, and who is an artist? Do the old conceptions of these terms need extending in order to adjust them to the new conditions and ideals of democratic Life? Can we discover a more organic and therefore more vital relation between Art and Life than has existed under the old conception of Art, a conception for which the conditions and ideals of aristocracy were responsible?

For the core of our subject is Life and Art; Life which we cannot evade; Art which we may reject at our peril and cost; but Art for Life’s sake, not only for Art’s sake; not for selfish indulgence, but for the widest possible benefit to all; and not any one of the many arts; but all of them as embraced in the supreme Art — the Art of Living.

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The aim today of the greatest thinkers and doers in the solving of our democratic problems, is to increase the efficiency and the happiness of Life. Judged by this standard does Art, as at present taught and accepted, represent a vital force? If it were necessary to forego for one whole year the services of the artist, as at present understood, or those of the engineer or the surgeon or the industrial organizer, would the world have any hesitation as to which it could better spare?

We shall find, as we proceed, that the reason why the world would not dispense with its surgeons, engineers and industrial organizers — citing these only as examples — is because they are live workers and thinkers; they are products of the democratic ideal and practice, to the further development of which they are so vitally contributing. On the other hand the specialized artist’s attitude toward Art and Life is apt to be one

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION n derived from a dead past. It is a superannuated survival of aristocratic conditions and ideals, which, so far as we are concerned, are past and gone, swallowed up for ever in the new ideal of democracy.

In the New Ideal be it noted. For I am not speaking of what has passed current in school textbooks and Fourth of July oratory as the ideal of democracy. That, as some of the clearest and highest thinkers in the country are telling us, was aristocratic in its origin and development. The Fathers, though in revolt, were aristocrats, and the ideals inherited from them have been developed under a governmental and social system which virtually involves a bourgeois aristocracy and a proletariat. I speak of the New Democracy, the ideals of which are filling the live minds of progressive thinkers and workers and through their efforts are beginning to be realized.

It will be a democracy founded not upon theories of the rights of man, or the rights of the governed or what not, but upon knowledge derived from the facts of Nature, — inanimate Nature and the Nature of man. It demands for its consummation the union of two vital operations : Science and Art. Science, which is the mastering of the facts and relations of Nature; and Art, which is the organizing of the knowledge and power acquired by Science, so as to further the efficiency of the worker and his happiness.

Accordingly, this book is to treat of Art as the principle of constructive organization, not only in the Fine Arts but in the everyday conduct of Life. It aims to show that the qualities which go to the making of what we have been in the habit of regarding exclusively as a work of Art are analogous to those which make for efficiency in Life. Briefly, they are the product of Selection and Organization; the latter, based upon elements of Fitness, Unity, Balance, Harmony and Rhythm, with a view to Efficiency. The last-named product in Life is the equivalent of what the artist in the Fine Arts calls Expression.

It aims to show that the industrial organizer, the surgeon, the physician, the engineer and, in general, all who are working toward the highest possibilities of efficiency, are artists. That to govern a city well, or to order a house beautifully, or to build up an industrial unit of harmoniously related workers, achieving a maximum of productiveness under conditions of welfare to the individual and the community — needs Art and artists. Nay, further, that the Life of the individual will be complete in its efficiency and happiness only in so far as it is regulated by the principles of artistic ethics ; that men and women can be and ought to be, in their own lives, artists.

On the other hand, in the work of the world, however much we may cooperate to make it a

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 13

work of Art, we are confronted by obstacles over which we have only partial control. Life is so complicated within ourselves and in our relations with others that we can only approximate to completeness of Fitness, Unity, Balance, Harmony and Rhythm.

It is here that the specialized artist has the advantage. Working in the world of his own imagination, controlling the materials with which he works, subject to no limitations save those of his own capacity, the painter, the poet, the writer of fiction, the dramatist, the composer and the artists in other mediums, can reach a more perfect Organization, a more complete Harmoniousness, a fuller Efficiency of Expression. If, therefore, they know and live up to the privilege of their high estate their works of Art should be symbols of what the rest of the earnest workers of the world, in their zeal for individual and collective betterment, are striving with necessary incompleteness to attain. Hence the proud distinction of the artist proper, if he understand himself aright and be rightly understood, is to hold aloft the ensign to humanity, pointing the way to nearer and nearer approaches toward perfection.

For this gospel of the New Democracy, based upon the Union of Art and Science, and to be realized by individual and collective Organization, involves a reconsideration of our old notions respecting the ideal and the practical. Hitherto they have been regarded as antagonistic. But the new faith and hope in Life discover their identity. The idealist of today, we shall find, must be practical; and the most practical man is he who has the vision of the idealist.

Rodin once remarked that “the greatest artist who ever lived was Jesus.” The famous sculptor’s meaning, as I understand it, may be expressed in this way. While other artists have built, carved or painted, sung or written their ideals into the forms of their Works of Art, Jesus embodied His ideal of humanity in the Form and Works of His own Life. And thereby He left an example, which the world has been too slow to follow, how humanity, both individually and collectively, may give form to its ideals in the grandest of all Works of Art — the Perfected Beauty of Life and Living.

The ultimate aim of this book, therefore, is to further the getting together of each and all, no matter what may be their specialized work, in an organized cooperation, animated by the ideal of individual and collective betterment.

• CHAPTER II CONCERNING BARRIERS 0 return to my friend, the sculptor: his narrow understanding of the term, “ artist,” was not confined to himself. It was then, and still is, far too common a habit to regard as an artist only one who makes pictures.

Young people who have spent a few months in a school of drawing and painting will tell you, if you inquire their profession, that they are artists. Their idea of an artist is of one who has acquired more or less facility in representing objects upon a piece of paper or canvas by means of pencil, crayon or brush. This is also very much the notion of an artist that is entertained by the general public. To the vast majority of people an artist is one who draws the originals of the advertisements in the street cars and newspapers; or who illustrates the magazines and comic supplements; or who represents incidents or scenes in easel pictures.

It is in this narrow sense that Art is being popularized in the market place. For nowadays every progressive department store has its “Art i6

Department" in which the bargain hunter can find at marked-down prices “real handmade pictures." They are usually chosen with a view to satisfying the popular taste for seeing something accurately represented and highly finished; that is to say, in plentiful detail, and rendered with photographic fidelity; the whole being wrought up to a smooth, shiny polish, until it rivals the surface of a varnished oak bureau. This to the average public is Art, which however, if I may judge from a remark I once overheard, is to be distinguished from “high Art." Two ladies were standing in front of the picture of a nude woman. Said one, “Just look at that, my dear."

“Yes," replied the other with the assured tone of one who knows, “that is high Art." It seems, then, that according to the popular idea Art is the representation in picture form of something with which we are familiar, while the representation of that with which we are not supposed to be familiar is “high Art."

Meanwhile, the painters as a body have done their share in spreading this limited idea of Art. To themselves they arrogate the title artist, but they seldom extend it to sculptors or architects; while they qualify the smaller arts of design by calling them art-crafts and the workers in them art-craftsmen. But a man cannot be an artist without being a craftsman, and, if he is a craftsman of the right sort, he is an artist.

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Painters, and sculptors also, have further prejudiced the appreciation of Art by the arbitrary barriers which they have erected around it. They have regarded Art as the private preserve of artists, a sort of pleasaunce, walled about against intrusion, with a sign over the gate: “No Trespassers.” For their pose is that nobody but themselves can understand Art, that is to say, painting and sculpture; unless it be the art-connoisseur and the art-patron. These they welcome to their sacred inclosure; meanwhile, it is true, opening the gate on certain formal occasions to the general public — Philistines, they are apt to call them — usually at so much a head for the privilege of viewing the exhibition. Then the public dribbles in and is confronted, in effect, with injunctions to “keep off the grass” and is baffled with jargon about “Art for Art’s sake.” It breathes a sigh of relief as it comes out, for it feels that it has done its duty; yet is puzzled as to what this Art has to do with Life. Nor is this astonishing, when one considers how many artists view Art as a thing apart from Life.

I do not forget that many painters are trying to popularize Art by securing commissions to decorate our public buildings. But whether the kind of decorations which they provide bear much relation to our Life or whether they are in themselves calculated to fire enthusiasm for Art, is a question to which I may return later.

IS ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE

Accordingly, the general public, for whom let me say this book is mainly written, thinks of Art as something to be collected in museums, displayed occasionally in Salons or National or Royal Academy exhibitions; or to be used as furnishings for the houses of those who like fine things and can afford to pay for them; or lastly, a commodity that serves the fads of rich collectors who run one another up to fancy prices in the auction rooms. Viewed from any of these standpoints, Art is not an integral part of Life but a kind of orchid-like parasite on Life. And as such the public regards it, and, being very busy with real problems, feels that it “hasn’t time to bother with Art.”

Meanwhile a great many people feel that Art ought to be related to Life and they are working hard to make it so, both for their own individual benefit and for the good of the community. For example, most of the Women’s Clubs in America have an “Art Section” or Class, composed of a handful of earnest women who are eager to “do something for Art.” Some have traveled and seen the World’s masterpieces of Art; more hope to do so. Meanwhile, by studying books and engaging a lecturer once a year for an hour they try to keep the fire of “Art” alive in themselves and to hand it on to others. In nine cases out of ten what they understand by “Art” is painting and they invite a lecturer to talk on pictures and show them some lantern slides. All the time,

CONCERNING BARRIERS however, they are living in communities where pictures, or at any rate the sort of pictures they are studying, do not exist. For I have in mind not only the great centers of population, where the Art Museum takes its place alongside the Public Library, but the countless smaller cities in which the problems of our modern civilization are being gradually solved; where the men and women are fired with high ideals of citizenship, and some of the finest products of the modern democratic spirit are to be found.

It is the number of such communities and their achievement and promise that have helped to develop the idea involved in this book.

I have had some fifteen years’ experience as a lecturer before these Women’s Clubs. When I am asked to give a lecture on “ Art,” it almost goes without saying that I am expected to treat some phase of the history of painting. Occasionally I may be invited to speak on sculpture or architecture; but, with the fewest possible exceptions, pictures are the theme. The chairman of the “Art Class” receives me, expressing the hope that there may be a good attendance. However, she is not sanguine for, as she explains, the “Art Class” is very small. As a matter of fact, it seems to be usually the smallest of all the groups into which the Club membership is divided. These will comprise Literature, Music, Drama, Sociology, Civics, Current Topics and so forth.

Each group has its special meetings, to which the members of other groups are invited. But for the most part the ladies who are interested in Literature are not interested in “Art”; and those who “do something for Art” leave Civics to be attended to by others; and so on. For the most part the Club does not attempt to coordinate its units in order to promote greater efficiency. It comes near to being a Club divided against itself.

After one of my talks a lady remarked: “Oh! if my husband could only have heard you. But he cares nothing about Art; the only pictures that interest him are the moving picture shows.” This lady overlooked the fact that these were the only sort of pictures to be seen in this particular city. The women, in fact, were reading and talking about things which most of them had not seen and perhaps never would see, while the men were dealing with such facts — business, moving pictures and what not — as actually existed in their midst. The women were “getting culture”; the men, “ doing things.”

Two points of view toward Life! Not united, but representing separate outlooks upon Life from the standpoint of a “ Great Divide.” The woman looking out to what she calls Ideals; the man, on his side, looking out upon what he calls the Practical. The two, standing back to back, each fronting a partial prospect; instead of standing shoulder to shoulder, fronting together the same wide

CONCERNING BARRIERS horizon in which both the Practical and the Ideal are united. Hence, as in the case of the Woman’s Club, for lack of coordination of purpose and community of spirit there is less than there might be of sympathy and efficiency. The home is in danger of being divided against itself; the club likewise, while the city, because its men and women are at odds as to motives, is apt to be disorganized, misgoverned; with more bungling and waste than necessary and less efficiency — a place not so fit as it might be for productive industry and for healthy, happy lives.

Chapter III The Aristocratic And The Demo- Cratic Ideal In Art And Life

NOTHER reason for the public’s indifference to Art is that artists and instructors in Art have been at so little pains to illustrate the relation of the Art of the past to the ideals and conditions of its several periods. They have treated Art as a specialized subject, detached from other departments of human energy; as if, like Topsy, it had “just grow’d” and were not, as in fact it has always been, an expression of the life-spirit of its time. For, as Richard Wagner said, all memorable art has been produced in response to a common and collective need on the part of the community; or at least of that portion of it which was in the ascendancy, or possessed of sufficient power to make its need recognized.

As we survey the past, we find that such power has been usually in the hands of a minority of the community; of a privileged class, who were able to impose their theory and practice of life on the more or less unquestioning submission of the masses of the people. Was it not Bismarck who cynically suggested the addition to the Sermon on the

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Mount of another Beatitude, “Beati possidentes”? “ Blessed are they who are in possession”; for “to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.” The history of society is mainly composed of chapters which either recognize the rights of Privilege, based on birth, divine ordinance, or on power gained by the sword or by superior physical, mental or material resources; or, on the other hand, records the struggle of the Unprivileged to wrest from the Privileged at least a portion of their rights. The pendulum swings between the two Ideals of aristocracy and democracy.

The dawn of history and the myths which obscure it show the aristocratic ideal in the ascendant. The Bible begins significantly with the “fall” of man, because he had dared to exercise his will in opposition to the decrees of the deity. The latter was a “jealous god,” wishing mankind to be happy, but in the way that he prescribed and so as not to encroach upon his prerogative of the knowledge of Good and Evil. The Woman, however, seeing that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make men wise, took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave unto her husband with her and he did eat. Woman’s intuition, as we might explain the incident today, divined the right that was hers and the Man’s and the right of their

Children yet unborn, and, while Man paltered, timorous of doing an act for which there was no precedent, she reached out and grasped the means to acquire the right.

Even today the Man is haggling over precedents and rights. For many thousand years he had asserted the rights of privilege, founded upon precedent. Then he grew hot in revolt and enunciated theories of the rights of man as Man. But later his conscience overtook him and today, in the light of what he calls the scientific attitude, he is apt to maintain that all rights are a fiction. They can at best only be assumed to exist by courtesy or general consent. The fact is he cannot prove them by his reason and accordingly assumes that rights are non-existent. Meanwhile, modern philosophers, such as William James and Henri Bergson, have been teaching that reason is not man’s sole guide; that instinct and intuition, too long treated by philosophers as of small account, have a very definite and important standing in the tribunals of thought. That intuition, in its anticipation of reason, which later so frequently confirms the intuition, is a most precious capacity of the human mind. It is the handmaiden and the nursing mother of reason and is distinctively the Woman’s process of reaching after what she divines to be necessary and good. She divined, according to the old story, the necessity and goodness of knowledge and made it a human right.

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But the old “moral” was otherwise. Woman was represented as having been tempted by the serpent, which to the Hebrew imagination symbolized everything inimical to mankind; and she in turn tempted Adam and he fell. In consequence, through Woman’s sin, labor and sorrow entered into the world. Thus early, in fact, did Man realize that Woman, unless she were kept in subjection, might prove an obstacle to privilege.

For by the time that Hebrew poets had invented this story of the Fall of Man and the Curse of Labor, the functions of a jealous god had been usurped by the patriarch. He imposed his will upon his dependents, wives and concubines, and found in the story a divine sanction for his privilege; one that explained, justified, and would maintain the subjection of the masses to labor and of the Woman to Man. Since then the patriarch’s privilege has been superseded at one time or another by that of kings, emperors, popes, churches, trades-guilds, aristocracies of birth, of money and intellect. All have conspired to exploit the unprivileged and by flattery or force to keep the Woman as an appendage to the Man.

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It is not necessary for our present study to attempt to trace the age-long conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged. Our main topic is Art in relation to Life, and, in order to show how close has been the relation in the past, it will suffice to review briefly three epochs: the era of Cathedral Building, the Italian Renaissance and the Renaissance in Holland in the seventeenth century. The first and the last were northern movements in the direction of democracy; the Italian was a revival of Mediterranean culture and stood for aristocracy. It is my purpose to suggest in each case what was the Life-spirit of the time and how it was, respectively, represented in Art.

We are prone to think of the Medieval period, which intervened between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance, as the Dark Ages. This term of contempt has come down from the Italians, whose enthusiasm over the revival of Classic literature and the harvest of architecture, sculpture and painting which flourished in the glow of the New Learning made them see nothing but darkness in the past. Because there had been an interval of chaos in the earlier period, before the German Empire and the French Kingdom had respectively assumed some degree of homogeneity and the Roman Catholic Church had established its civilizing power in the West, they chose to belittle the great era of cathedral building. Since the Goths had devastated Italy, the revivers of Mediterranean culture dubbed the cathedral architecture ‘ ‘ Gothic. 9 ’ The epithet was an insult, and a complete misnomer, the use of which now chiefly lingers in the English language.

For it was out of Romanesque ecclesiastical

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architecture, which itself was a development of the Roman basilica, that the styles of the great cathedrals of northern France, England, the Rhine Provinces and the Netherlands were evolved in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Meanwhile, although their origin was Mediterranean, their achievement was a product of the northern genius.

When men found that the completion of the thousand years of Christianity did not bring the anticipated end of the world, a new lust of life mingled with their gratitude to God. Thus commenced the era of cathedral building, a movement of the people, headed by the Church. For amid the rivalry of the Privileged, the Church shrewdly and nobly arrayed itself on the side of the Commonalty, especially in the cities whose growing wealth enabled them to extort from monarchs and nobility, in return for the taxes which they paid, certain rights of self-government. The movement, in fact, was a popular one, enlisting the pride and cooperation of the community. The cathedrals became the embodiment of the people’s faith and aspirations; primarily temples of worship, but also community-centers of learning and culture; university settlements, one may say, built by the collective efforts of the Church and the Laity. Dramatic performances were held in them; incidents of Sacred Writ, at first produced under clerical supervision, later by the laity and accompanied by secular and even farcical interludes. Further, in some instances obtained the curious custom of opening the sacred edifice once a year to romping sports; a recognition, apparently, of the joint ownership of the Laity in what they had helped to create.

These cathedrals of the north are the direct antithesis of Classic architecture. The latter, as represented most impressively in the Greek temples, embodies the reposeful dignity of the horizontal line, and is characterized by formulated refinement in the repetition of the details. But the distinguishing characteristics of the northern cathedral are the fines of upward growth and the variety in unity which their exuberant elaboration of details involves. They are the product of a union of the cooperative and individualistic methods. The master-builder — bishop, abbot or master-mason, planned the general design. Its development was intrusted to the mason guild, while individual members of the latter wrought their own skill and imagination into the details. The carved decoration has not the logic and uniformity of Classic ornament. It has rather the spontaneity and artlessness of natural growth; including forms of ugliness as well as beauty; embodying in animal and human shapes, now lifelike, now grotesque, the racial lust of fife and the human experience of the conflict in fife of good and evil.

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No darkened or dimly lighted shrine, like the Classic temple, the cathedral was inclosed with windows that were fretted with tracery and jeweled with colored glass, through which the light of heaven poured in a wealth of multitudinous dyes upon the mosaic pavements, painted ornament, scrollwork of brass and iron, velvets and brocades of altar hangings and the vestments of the priests. Every art of skilled craftsmanship was expended on the fittings of the interior, while nave and aisles and transepts soared to sublime heights and stretched in vistas that terminated in the mystery of intersecting lines. Meanwhile, the vastness of the exterior was at once supported and relieved of heaviness by flying buttresses, embellished with sculpture and enriched with carved finials, the whole rising in majesty of grace and power until it reached its supreme growth in tower or spire.

For growth is characteristic of its style; growth upward and expansive; growth like that of human life, representing oneness composed of infinite units of variation. And the Life which these cathedrals embody is peculiarly northern in its genius; aspiring in spirit, audacious and adventurous in practice; ever seeking out new problems and bringing to their solution the tireless patience of organization and dauntless liberty of invention.

The northern cathedrals, indeed, were the expression in Art of the spirit of a race, which even in those privilege-ridden times teemed with the desire of Liberty and Progress.

Incidentally, this is a fact that too long has been ignored. For, whatever may be the particular strain which each of us carries in his blood we are very largely of one race and that is the northern, as contrasted with the races of the Mediterranean. Yet it is from the latter that for some three centuries our northern race has derived its culture. Meanwhile, in the conduct of Life our race has ever been animated with the spirit of adventure and the love of liberty. The result, therefore, of borrowing an alien culture is that we have never really fitted it to our practice and ideal of living. This has been one of the fundamental causes of the great divide between Art and Life which has characterized our civilization.

Chapter IV Tee Italian Renaissance : An Ideal Of Aristocracy

IN complete contrast to the growth of the northern cathedrals, the splendor of the Italian Renaissance shone upon the ruins of national liberty and progress. The old-time communal freedom of the cities had been usurped by hereditary or upstart nobility; Florence, for example, being dominated by the Medici, whose armorial bearings of three balls testify to their origin as money-lenders. The various dukes and their principalities engaged in constant internecine warfare and the country as a whole was the battleground for the rivalries of the kings of Spain and France and of the emperors of Germany, while the papacy fought and intrigued with all for the maintenance of its temporal authority. Privilege, in its most aggravated form and attended by its worst results of human waste, was rampant. The common people counted for nothing but hewers of wood, drawers of water or pawns in the game of their betters.