The death of the artisan: The industrial divorce of beauty from use

“ With the organisation of industry on the grand scale, and the enormous application of machinery in the interests of competitive production for profit, when both art and industry are forced to make their appeal to the unreal and impersonal average, rather than to the real and personal you and me, it is not wonderful that beauty should have become divorced from use, and that attempts to concede its demands, and the desire for it, should too often mean the ill-considered bedizenment of meaningless and unrelated ornament. ”

“ The position which we have to face then is this: the lack of beauty in modern life (of decoration in the best sense of the word) , which in the earlier part of the century was unnoticed, is now recognised by a part of the public as an evil to be remedied if possible; but by far the larger part of civilised mankind does not feel that lack in the least, so that no general sense of beauty is extant which would force us into the creation of a feeling for art which in its turn would force us into taking up the dropped links of tradition, and once more producing genuine organic art. ”

“ Owen Wheeler's volume on old furniture.
The intense love of the Welsh woodcarver for intricacy is hardly less than that of the sturdy Swiss craftsmen environed by mountains. Perhaps the long winters and the solitary life influence the development of individual character in the applied arts. The Welsh love-spoons of wood, linked together and exhibiting delicate pierced work and minute carving of no mean order, are among other attractive specimens of native art. Ironwork of fine quality is also to be found in Wales. ”

“ Empathy is, even more than mere perception, a question of our activities and therefore of our habits; and the aesthetic sensitiveness of a time and country (say the Florentine fourteenth century) with a habit of round arch and horizontals like that of Pisan architecture, could never take with enthusiasm to the pointed ogeeval ellipse, the oblique directions and unstable equilibrium, the drama of touch and go strain and resistance, of French Gothic ”

“ Few signs of commerce are visible, except where the advent of branch stations of enterprising "Cash" firms has resulted in the squaring up of odd projections and consequent overthrow of certain ancient buildings. There is one act of vandalism which the town has never ceased to regret and which should serve as a warning for the future. This is the demolition of the house of Walter Coney, merchant, an unequalled specimen of fifteenth-century domestic architecture, which formerly stood at the corner of the Saturday Market Place and High Street. ”

“ CHAPTER XIX THE VANISHING OF ENGLISH SCENERY AND NATURAL BEAUTY
Not the least distressing of the losses which we have to mourn is the damage that has been done to the beauty of our English landscapes and the destruction of many scenes of sylvan loveliness. The population of our large towns continues to increase owing to the insensate folly that causes the rural exodus. People imagine that the streets of towns are paved with gold, and forsake the green fields for a crowded slum, and after many vicissitudes and much hardship wish themselves back again in their once despised village home. ”

“ The evils of heartless and unloving production, under the grind of an unnecessary greed, are patent enough to lead us to reflect that we have after all in these matters a choice. We need not spend our money on that which is not bread. We can go for our furniture to the individual craftsman and not the commercial firm. The penalty for so doing is no longer prohibitive.
In closing our remarks we cannot do better than repeat our initial axiom—the art of furnishing lies with the room as much as with the furniture. The old ways are still the only ways. ”

“ The special limitations of the material should be a pleasure to you, not a hindrance: a designer, therefore, should always thoroughly understand the processes of the special manufacture he is dealing with, or the result will be a mere tour de force. On the other hand, it is the pleasure in understanding the capabilities of a special material, and using them for suggesting (not imitating) natural beauty and incident, that gives the raison d'être of decorative art. ”

“ Whipping-posts and stocks are too light a punishment for such vandalism.
The story of our vanished and vanishing churches, and of their vanished and vanishing contents, is indeed a sorry one. Many efforts are made in these days to educate the public taste, to instil into the minds of their custodians a due appreciation of their beauties and of the principles of English art and architecture, and to save and protect the treasures that remain. That these may be crowned with success is the earnest hope and endeavour of every right-minded Englishman. ”

“ Now, there are many men who, though able to carve wood exquisitely, have never given themselves the trouble, or perhaps have scarcely had the opportunity, to learn how to read an ordinary drawing. The practice obtains in many carving shops for one or two leading men to rough out (viz. shape out roughly) all the work so far as that is practicable, and the others take it up after them and finish it. ”

“ Panelling, rough inlaying in the solid, carving and painting, and casing with repoussé or pierced metal, or covering with leather incised into designs, and making out patterns with nail-heads, were all methods of decoration used by the maker of boxes: other examples, and those not the least stately, had no other ornament than the purfling at the edges formed by ingeniously elaborate dovetails fitting together like a puzzle and showing a pattern like an inlay.
When people work naturally, it is as wearisome and unnecessary often to repeat the same design as to continually paint the same picture. ”

“ In some quarters it appears to have been supposed that our Exhibitions are intended to appeal, by the exhibition of cheap and saleable articles, to what are rudely termed "the masses"; we appeal to all certainly, but it should be remembered that cheapness in art and handicraft is well-nigh impossible, save in some forms of more or less mechanical reproduction. In fact, cheapness as a rule, in the sense of low-priced production, can only be obtained at the cost of cheapness—that is, the cheapening of human life and labour ”

“ Such art as we have is not the work of the mass of craftsmen unconscious of any definite style, but producing beauty instinctively; conscious rather of the desire to turn out a creditable piece of work than of any aim towards positive beauty. That is the essential motive power towards art in past ages; but our art is the work of a small minority composed of educated persons, fully conscious of their aim of producing beauty, and distinguished from the great body of workmen by the possession of that aim. ”

“ As the stem and branches to the leaves, flowers, and fruit of a tree, so is design to painting. In decoration one cannot exist without the other, as the beauty of a figure depends upon the well-built and well-proportioned skeleton and its mechanism. You cannot separate a house from its plan and foundations. So it is in decoration; often thought of lightly as something trivial and superficial, a merely aimless combination of curves and colours, or a mere réchauffé of the dead languages of art, but really demanding the best thought and capacity of a man ”

“ As we proceed down the coast we find that the sea is still gaining on the land. The old church at Walton-on-the-Naze was swept away, and is replaced by a new one. A flourishing town existed at Reculver, which dates back to the Romans. It was a prosperous place, and had a noble church, which in the sixteenth century was a mile from the sea. Steadily have the waves advanced, until a century ago the church fell into the sea, save two towers which have been preserved by means of elaborate sea-walls as a landmark for sailors.
The fickle sea has deserted some towns and destroyed their prosperity ”

“ If a restoration is carried out without any real comprehension of the laws of architecture, the result can only be a production of common and dreary artificiality, recognizable perhaps as belonging to one of the architectural styles, but wanting the stamp of true art, and, therefore, incapable of awakening the enthusiasm of the spectator. ”

“ The duty of a man who wishes to avoid egotism in this region is to try and recognize faithful conception and firm execution everywhere; to realize that half, and more than half, of the beauty of everything is the beauty of age, remoteness, and association. There is no temptation so strong for the aesthetic nature, as to deride and contemn the beauty of the art that we have just outgrown. ”

“ Every thing may have a great number of very different Aspects; and some of these Aspects may invite contemplation, as that landscape invited the third man to contemplate it; while other aspects (say the same place after a proper course of tramways and funiculars and semi-detached residences, or before the needful volcanic and glacial action) may be such as are dismissed or slurred as fast as possible. Indeed, with the exception of a very few cubes not in themselves especially attractive, I cannot remember any things which do not present quite as many displeasing aspects as pleasing ones. ”

“ Such different thinkings away from the shapes are often traceable to previous orientation of the thoughts or to special states of body and feelings. But explicable or not in the particular case, these varieties of one's own aesthetic responsiveness will persuade the Reader who has verified their existence, that contemplative satisfaction in shapes and its specific emotion cannot be given by the greatest artist or the finest tradition, unless the beholder meets their efforts more than half way. ”

“ Not willing, because our nervous condition may be unable for the strain of shape perception; and our emotional bias (what we call our interest) may be favourable to some incompatible kind of activity. Until quite recently (and despite Fechner's famous introductory experiments) aesthetics have been little more than a branch of metaphysical speculation, and it is only nowadays that the bare fact of aesthetic responsiveness is beginning to be studied. ”

“ I cannot repeat too often that the differentiating characteristic of art is that it gives its works a value for contemplation independent of their value for fact-transmission, their value as nerve-and-emotion-excitant and of their value for immediate, for practical, utility. This aesthetic value, depending upon the unchanging processes of perception and empathy, asserts itself in answer to every act of contemplative attention, and is as enduring and intrinsic as the other values are apt to be momentary and relative. ”

“ And we can also understand that the problem unconsciously dealt with by all art (though by no means consciously by every artist) is to execute the order of suggesting interesting facts about things in a manner such as to satisfy at the same time the aesthetic demand for shapes which shall be satisfactory to contemplate. ”

“ To take the aesthetic region next, the duty of the philosopher is to realize at the outset that the perception of beauty is essentially an individual thing, and that the canons of what are called good taste are of all things the most shifting. In this region the danger of dogmatism is very great, because the more that a man indulges the rapturous perception of the beauty that appeals to himself, the more likely he is to believe that there is no beauty outside of his own perceptions. ”