Kitabı oku: «The home: its work and influence», sayfa 7
VIII
DOMESTIC ART
One of the undying efforts of our lives, of the lives of half the world, is "to make home beautiful." We love beauty, we love home, we naturally wish to combine the two. The rich spare no expense, the æsthetic no care and pains, in this continuous attempt; and the "home" papers, or "home departments" in other papers, teem with instruction on the subject for the eager, but untutored many.
In varying fields of work there is a strong current of improvement, in household construction, furnishing, and decoration; and new employments continually appear wherein the more cultured few apply their talents to the selection and arrangement of "artistic interiors" ready-made for the purchaser. Whole magazines are devoted to this end, articles unnumbered, books not a few, and courses of lectures. People who know beauty and love it are trying to teach it to those who do not, trying to introduce it where it is so painfully needed – in the home.
Why does it not originate there? Why did the people who cared most for beauty and art, the Greeks, care so little for the home? And why do the people who care most for the home – our Anglo-Saxons – care so little for beauty and art? And, in such art-knowledge and art-growth as we have, why is it least manifested at home? What is there in home-life, as we know it, which proves inimical to the development of true beauty? If there is some condition in home life which is inimical to art, is that condition essential and permanent, or may it be removed without loss to what is essential and permanent?
Here are questions serious and practical; practical because beauty is an element of highest use as well as joy. Our love of it lies deep, and rests on truest instinct; the child feels it passionately; the savage feels it, we all feel it, but few understand it; and whether we understand it or not we long for it in vain. We often make our churches beautiful, our libraries and museums, but our domestic efforts are not crowned with the same relative success.
The reasons for this innate lack of beauty in the home are not far to seek. The laws of applied beauty reach deep, spread wide, and are inexorable: Truth; first, last, and always – no falsehood, imitation, or pretence: Simplicity; no devious meandering, but the direct clear purpose and result: Unity, Harmony, that unerring law of relation which keeps the past true to the whole – never too much here or there – all balanced and at rest: Restraint; no riotous excess, no rush from inadequacy to profusion.
If the student of art rightly apprehends these laws, his whole life is richer and sounder as well as his art. If the art he studies is one under definite laws of construction, he has to learn them, too; as in architecture, where the laws of mechanics operate with those of æsthetics, and there is no beauty if the mechanical laws are defied.
Architecture is the most prominent form of domestic art. Why is not domestic architecture as good as public architecture? If the home is a temple, why should not our hills be dotted with fair shrines worthy of worship?
We may talk as we will of "the domestic shrine," but the architect does not find the kitchen stove an inspiring altar. If it did inspire him, if he began to develop the idea of a kitchen – a temple to Hygeia and Epicurus, a great central altar for the libations and sacrifices, with all appropriate accessories for the contributory labour of the place – he could not make a pocket-edition of this temple, and stick it on to every house in forced connection with the other domestic necessities.
The eating-room then confronts him, a totally different motif. We do not wish to eat in the kitchen. We do not wish to see, smell, hear, or think of the kitchen while we eat. So the domestic architect is under the necessity of separating as far as possible these discordant purposes, while obliged still to confine them to the same walls and roof.
Then come the bedrooms. We do not wish to sleep in the kitchen – or in the dining-room. Nothing is further from our ideals than to confound the sheets with the tablecloths, the bed with the stove, the dressing table with the sink. So again the architect, whose kitchen-tendency was so rudely checked by the dining-room tendency, is brought up standing by the bedroom tendency, its demand for absolute detachment and remoteness, and the necessity for keeping its structural limits within those same walls and roof.
Then follows the reception-room tendency – we do not wish to receive our visitors in the kitchen – or the bedroom – or exclusively in the dining-room. So the parlour theme is developed as far as may be, connected with the dining-room, and disconnected as far as possible from all the other life-themes going on under that roof.
When we add to these the limits of space, especially in our cities, the limits of money, so almost universal, and the limits of personal taste, we may have clearly before us the reasons why domestic architecture does not thrill the soul with its beauty.
Whenever it does, to any extent, the reason is as clear. The feudal castle was beautiful because it had one predominant idea – defence; and was a stone monument to that idea. Here you could have truth, and did have it. Defence was imperative, absolute; every other need was subsidiary; a fine type of castle could give room for unity, simplicity, harmony, and restraint; and stirs us yet to delighted admiration. But it was not a comfortable dwelling-house.
A cottage is also capable of giving the sense of beauty; especially an old thatch-roofed cottage; mossy, mouldy, leaky, damp. The cottage is an undifferentiated home; it is primarily a kitchen – with a bedroom or two added – or included! Small primitive houses, like the white, square, flat-roofed dwellings of Algiers, group beautifully, or, taken singly, give a good bit of white against blue fire, behind green foliage.
But as a theme in itself, a thing to study and make pictures of, the castle, the temple of war, is the most beautiful type of dwelling place – and the least inhabitable. In our really comfortable homes we have lost beauty, though we have gained in comfort. Would it be possible to have comfort and beauty too; beauty which would thrill and exalt us, delight and satisfy us, and which the art critic would dwell upon as he now does on temple, hall, and church?
Let us here take up the other domestic arts; surrendering architecture as apparently hopeless. We cannot expect our composers in wood and stone to take a number of absolutely contradictory themes and produce an effect of truth, unity, harmony, simplicity, and restraint; but may we not furnish and decorate our homes beautifully? Perhaps we might; but do we? What do we know, what do we care, for the elementary laws which make this thing beautiful, that thing ugly, and the same things vary as they are combined with others!
In the furnishing and decoration of a home we have room for more harmony than in the exterior, because each room may be treated separately according to its especial purpose, and we can accustom ourselves to the æsthetic jar of stepping from one to another, or even bring them all under some main scheme.
But here we are confronted by the enormous unrestricted weight of the limitation which is felt least by the architect – personal taste. We do not dictate much to our builders, most of us; but we do dictate as to the inside of the house and all that is in it. The dominating influence in home decoration is of course the woman. She is the final arbiter of the textures, colours, proportions, sizes, shapes, and relations of human production. How does she effect our output? What is her influence upon art – the applied art that is found, or should be found, in everything we make and use?
We may buy, if we can afford it, specimens of art, pictorial or sculptural art, or any other, and place them in our houses; but the mere accumulation of beautiful objects is not decoration; often quite the contrary. There are many beautiful vases in the shop where you bought yours; there is but one in the Japanese room – and there is beauty.
The magpie instinct of the collector has no part in a genuine sense of beauty. An ostentatious exhibit of one's valuable possessions does not show the sense of beauty. A beautiful chamber is neither show-room nor museum. That personal "taste" in itself is no guide to beauty needs but little proof. The "taste" of the Flathead Indian, of the tattooed Islander, of all the grades of physical deformity which mankind has admired, is sufficient to show that a personal preference is no ground for judgment in beauty.
Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it knows of true beauty.
The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they do not consciously select it.
Our women are far removed from the primitive simplicity that produces unconscious beauty; and they are also far removed from that broad culture and wide view of life which can intellectually grasp it. They have neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge of beauty; but they do have, in million-fold accumulation, a "personal taste." The life of the woman in the home is absolutely confined to personal details. Her field of study and of work is not calculated to develop large judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling; and feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced continually to contemplate and minister to the last details of the physical wants of humanity in ceaseless daily repetition. Whatever tendency to develop artistic feeling and judgment she might have in one line of her work, is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next; and her range of expression in each line is too small to allow of any satisfying growth.
The very rich woman who can purchase others' things and others' judgment, or the exceptional woman who does work and study in some one line, may show development in the sense of beauty; but it is not produced at home. The love of it is there, the desire for it, most cruelly aborted; and the result of that starved beauty-sense is what we see in our familiar rooms.
Being familiar, we bear with our surroundings; perhaps even love them; when we go into each other's homes we do not think their things to be beautiful; we think ours are because we are used to them; we have no appreciation of an object in its relation to the rest, or its lack of relation.
The bottled discord of the woman's daily occupations if quite sufficient to account for the explosions of discord on her walls and floors. She continually has to do utterly inharmonious things, she lives in incessant effort to perform all at once and in the same place the most irreconcilable processes.
She has to adjust, disadjust, and readjust her mental focus a thousand times a day; not only to things, but to actions; not only to actions, but to persons; and so, to live at all, she must develop a kind of mind that does not object to discord. Unity, harmony, simplicity, truth, restraint – these are not applicable in a patchwork life, however hallowed by high devotion and tender love. This is why domestic art is so low – so indistinguishable.
When our great Centennial Exhibition was given us, a wave of beauty spread into thousands of homes, but it did not originate there. The White City by the lake was an inspiration to myriad lives, and wrought a lovely change in her architecture and many other arts; but the Black City by the Lake is there yet, waiting for another extra-domestic uplifting.
The currents of home-life are so many, so diverse, so contradictory, that they are only maintained by using the woman as a sort of universal solvent; and this position of holding many diverse elements in solution is not compatible with the orderly crystallisation of any of them, or with much peace of mind to the unhappy solvent.
The most conspicuous field for the display of the beauty sense – or the lack of it – in our home life, is in textile fabrics and their application to the body. The House is the foundation of textile art. People who live out of doors wear hides, if they wear anything. In the shelter and peace of the house, developed by ever-widening commerce, grew these wonderful textile arts, the evolution of a new plane for beauty. We find in nature nothing approaching it, save in the limited and passing form of spreading leaf and petal. To make a continuous substance soft as flowers, warm as furs, brilliant as the sunset – this was a great step in art.
Woven beauty is a home product, and in the house we are most free to use and admire it. The "street dress," even the most unsophisticated, is under some restrictions; but the house dress may be anything we please. There is nothing in the mechanical limitations of house life to pervert or check this form of loveliness. We are free to make and to use the most exquisite materials, to wear the most pleasing of textures and shapes.
Why, then, do we find in this line of development such hideously inartistic things? Because the discords of domestic industries and functions prevent a sense of harmony even here. Because the woman, confined to a primitive, a savage plane of occupation, continues to manifest an equally savage plane of æsthetic taste.
One of the most marked features of early savage decoration is in its distortion and mutilation of the body to meet arbitrary standards of supposed beauty. An idea of beauty, true or false, is apprehended, its line of special evolution rapidly followed, and there is no knowledge of physiology or grasp of larger harmonies of bodily grace to check the ensuing mutilation.
The Zulus decorate their cattle by cutting the dewlap into fringe, and splitting and twisting the growing horns into fantastic shapes. Some savage women tie the gastrocnemius muscle tightly above and below, till the "calf of the leg" looks like a Dutch cheese on a broomstick. Some tie strings about the breasts till they dangle half detached; some file the teeth or pluck out the eyebrows.
In the home, among women, still appear these manifestations of a crude beauty-sense, unchecked by larger knowledge. Our best existent examples are in the Chinese foot-binding custom, and ours of waist-binding. The initial idea of the corset is in a way artistic. We perceive that the feminine form has certain curves and proportions, tending thus and so; and following the tendency we proceed to exaggerate those curves and proportions and fix them arbitrarily. This is the same law by which we conventionalise a flower for decorative purposes, turning the lily of the field into the fleur-de-lis of the tapestry. The Egyptians did it, to an extreme degree, in their pictorial art, reducing the human body to certain fixed proportions and attitudes.
The application of these principles to living bodies is peculiar to the savage, and its persistence among our women is perhaps the strongest proof of the primitive nature of the home. As women enter the larger life of the world these limitations are easily outgrown; the working-woman cannot make a conventionalised ornament of her body, and the business woman does not care to; the really educated woman knows better, and the woman artist would be bitterly ashamed of such an offence against nature; only the home-bound woman peacefully maintains it.
To the scientific student, man or woman, the sturdy reappearance of this very early custom is intensely interesting; he sees in the "newest fashion" of holding and binding the body a peculiar survival of the very oldest fashion in personal decoration known to us. The latest corset advertisement ranks ethnologically with the earliest Egyptian hieroglyph, the Aztec inscriptions, and races far behind them.
The woman's love of beauty finds its freest expression along lines of personal decorations, and there, as in the decoration of the house, we see the same crippling influence.
She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk, soft muslin and sheer lawn; she loves the delicate fantasy of lace, the alluring richness of fur; she loves the colour and sparkle of gems, the splendour of burnished metal, and, in her savage crudity of taste, she slaps together any and every combination of these things and wears them happily.
A typical extreme of this ingenuous lack of artistic principles is the recent, and still present, enormity of trimming lace with fur. This combines the acme of all highly wrought refinement of texture and exquisite delicacy of design, a fabric that suggests the subtleties of artistic expression with a gossamer tenuity of grace; this, and dressed hide with the hair still on, the very first cover for man's nakedness, the symbol of savage luxury and grandeur, of raw barbaric wealth, which suggests warmth, ample satisfying warmth and crude splendour in its thick profusion! We cut up the warmth and amplitude into threads and scraps which can only suggest the gleanings of a tan-yard rag-picker, and use these shabby fragments to trim lace! Trim what is in itself the sublimated essence of trimming, with the leavings of the earliest of raw materials! Only the soul which spends its life in a group of chambers connected merely by mechanical force; in a group of industries connected merely by iron tradition, could bear a combination like that – to say nothing of enjoying it. Domestic art is almost a contradiction in terms.
The development of art, like the development of industry, requires the specialisation, the life-long devotion, impossible to the arbitrary combinations of home life. Where you find great beauty you find a great civic sense, most clearly in that high-water mark of human progress in this direction, ancient Greece. Within the limits of their cities, the Greeks were more fully "civilised" than any people before or since. They thought, felt, and acted in this large social contact; and so developed a sufficient breadth of view, a wide, sweet sanity of mind, which allowed of this free growth of the art-sense. Great art is always public, and appears only in periods of high social development. The one great art of the dark ages – religious architecture – flourished in that universal atmosphere of "Christendom," the one social plane on which all met.
The Greeks were unified in many ways; and their highly socialised minds gave room for a more general development of art, as well as many other social faculties.
Household decoration was not conspicuous, nor elaborate attire; and while their women were necessarily beautiful as the daughters of such men, it was the men whose beauty was most admired and immortalised. The women stayed at home, as now, but the home did not absorb men, too, as it does now. When art caters to private tastes, to domestic tastes, to the wholly private and domestic tastes of women, art goes down.
The Home was the birthplace of Art, as of so many other human faculties, but is no sufficing area for it. So long as the lives of our women are spent at home, their tastes limited by it, their abilities, ambitions, and desires limited by it, so long will the domestic influence lower art.
"So much the worse for art!" will stoutly cry the defenders of the home; and they would be right if we could have but one. We can have both.
A larger womanhood, a civilised womanhood, specialised, broad-minded, working and caring for the public good as well as the private, will give us not only better homes, but homes more beautiful. The child will be cradled in an atmosphere of harmonious loveliness, and its influence will be felt in all life. This is no trifle of an artificially cultivated æsthetic taste; it is one of nature's deepest laws. "Art" may vary and suffer in different stages of our growth, but the laws of beauty remain the same; and a race reared under those laws will be the nobler.
These more developed women will outgrow the magpie taste that hoards all manner of gay baubles; the monkey-taste that imitates whatever it sees; the savage taste that distorts the human body; they will recognise in that body one infinitely noble expression of beauty, and refuse to dishonour it with ugliness.
They will learn to care for proportion as well as plumpness, for health as well as complexion, for strength and activity as essentials to living loveliness, and to see that no dress can be beautiful which in any way contradicts the body it should but serve and glorify. We do not know, because we have not seen, the difference to our lives which will be made by this large sense of beauty in the woman – in the home; but we may be assured that, while she stays continually there, we shall have but our present stage of domestic art.
