Ploughshare and Pruning-hook/Lecture 8
USE AND ORNAMENT
(or the Art of Living)
(1915)
I suppose you would all be very much surprised if I said that not use but ornament was the object of life.
I refrain from doing so because so definite a statement makes an assumption of knowledge which it may always be outside man's power to possess. The object of life may for ever remain as obscure to us as its cause. It seems, indeed, likely enough that the one ignorance hinges necessarily on the other, and that without knowing the cause of life neither can we know its object.
The writers of the Scottish Church Catechism, it is true, thought that they knew why man was created. The social products of their cocksure theology cause me to doubt it. I would prefer to worship more ignorantly a more lovable deity than the one which is there presented to my gaze.
But though we may never know why we are here, we may know, by taking a little thought and studying the manifestations of the life around us, what aspects of it make us glad that we are here. And gladness is as good a guide as any that I know to the true values of life.
Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has overlaid all the mere uses of existence—things which without those embellishments might not delight us at all—or only as a dry crust of bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one dying of thirst.
I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who claims to have been made "in God's image." Nothing that my senses respond to with delight stays limited within the utilitarian aspect on which its moral claims to acceptance are too frequently based—or remains a benefit merely material in its scope.
When we breathe happily, when we eat happily, and when we love happily, we do not think of the utilitarian ends with which those bodily instincts are related. The utilitarian motive connects, but only subconsciously, with that sense of well-being and delight which then fills us; and the conscious life within us is happy without stooping to reason.
Underlying our receptivity of these things is, no doubt, the fact that our bodies have a use for them. But were we to consider the material uses alone, our enjoyment would be less; and if (by following that process) we absorbed them in a less joyous spirit, our physical benefit, so science now tells us, would be less also.
For some reason or another, which is occasionally hard to define, you find pleasure in a thing over and above its use; and I want to persuade you that the finer instinct, the genius of the human race, tends always in that direction—not to rest content with the mere use of a thing, but to lay upon it that additional touch of adornment—whether by well-selected material, or craftsman's skill, or social amenity, which shall make it a thing delightful to our senses or to our intelligence.
Take, for instance, so simple a thing as a wine-glass, or a water-glass. Materially, it is subject to a very considerable drawback; it is brittle, and if broken is practically unmendable. From the point of view of utility, strength, cheapness, cleanliness, it has no advantage over hardware or china. But in its relation to beverages beautiful in colour and of a clear transparency, glass has a delightfulness which greatly enhances the pleasure of its use. There is a subtle relation between the sparkle of the glass, and the sparkle produced in the brain by the sight and the taste of good wine (or—let me add, for the benefit of temperance members of my audience—of good ginger-ale). I think one could also trace a similar delight to the relations subsisting between glass in its transparency and a draught of pure water.
That relationship set up between two or more senses (in this case between the senses of sight, taste and touch) brings into being a new value which I ask you to bear in mind, as I shall have a good deal to say about it later—the value of association. The more you examine into the matter, the more you will find that association is a very important element for evoking man's faculties of enjoyment; it secures by the inter-relation of the senses a sort of compound interest for the appeal over which it presides. And it is association, with this compound appeal, which again and again decides (over and above all questions of use) what material is the best, or the most delightful, to be employed for a given purpose. You choose a material because it makes a decorative covering to mere utility. That beauty of choice in material alone is the beginning of ornament.
When I began, I spoke for a moment as though use and ornament were opposite or separate principles; but what I shall hope soon to show is that they are so interlocked and combined that there is no keeping them apart when once the spirit of man has opened to perceive the true sacramental service which springs from their union, and the social discordance that inevitably follows upon their divorce. But as man's ordinary definition of the word "use" is sadly material and debased, and as his approval and sanction of the joys of life have too often been limited by a similar materialism of thought, one is obliged, for the time being, to accept the ordinary limiting distinction, so that the finer and less realised uses of beauty and delight may be shown more clearly as the true end to which all lesser uses should converge.
Life itself is a usage of material, the bringing together of atoms into form; and we know, from what science teaches of evolution, that this usage has constantly been in the direction of forms of life which, for certain reasons, we describe as "higher." Emerging through those forms have come manifestations or qualities, which quite obviously give delight to the holders of them; and we are able to gather in watching them, as they live, move, and have their being, that for them life seems good. It is no part of their acceptance of what has come that they are here not to enjoy themselves.
Thus we see from the upward trend of creation a faculty for enjoyment steadily emerging, and existing side by side with fears, risks, and hardships which the struggle for existence entails—probably an even increased faculty for enjoyment, as those fears and risks become more consciously part of their lives. And I question whether we should think that the wild deer had chosen well, could it resign its apprehension of death at the drinking-*place for the sake of becoming a worm—the wriggling but scarcely conscious prey of the early bird.
Man (the most conscious prey of death) has also his compensations; but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see, who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young; or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his due.
In doing so, he does but pursue, to a rather injudicious extent, that instinct for the ornamentation and embellishment of the facts of life which I spoke of to begin with. For whether it be well-founded or not, a belief in immortality gives ornament to existence.
Of course, it may be bad ornament; and I think it becomes bad ornament the moment he bases it upon the idea that this life is evil and not good. If he says "Life is so good that I want it to go on for ever and ever," and thinks that he can make it better by asserting that it will go on for ever and ever, that is a playful statement which may have quite a stimulating effect on his career, and make him a much more charming and social and imaginative person than he would otherwise be. But if he wants a future life merely because he regards this life as a "vale of misery"—and wants that future life to contain evil as well as good—a Hell as well as a Heaven (in order that he may visualise retribution meted out on a satisfactory scale upon those whom he cannot satisfactorily visit with retribution to-day) then, I think, that it tends to become bad ornament, and is likely to make him less charming, less social, and less imaginatively inventive for the getting rid of evil conditions from present existence than he would be if he had not so over-loaded his brain with doctrinal adornments.
Still, it is ornament of a kind; and with ornament, good or bad (the moment he has got for himself leisure or any elbow-room at all in the struggle for existence) man cannot help embellishing the facts of life—the things that he really knows.
Now that instinct for embellishment is of course latent in Nature itself, or we should not find it in man; and it comes of Nature (the great super-mathematician) putting two and two together in a way which does not merely make four. When two and two are put together by Nature, they come to life in a new shape; and man is (up-to-date) the most appreciative receptacle of that fact which Nature has yet produced. Man builds up his whole appreciation of life by association— by studying a method of putting two and two together which comes to something very much more than a dead numerical result.
This, as I have said, is Nature's way of giving to our investments in life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body, soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily returns to him year by year—not detached portions of his original outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between man's energy and Nature's, something new arises. And yet, though new, it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his, partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association. All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage—of the way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.
This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very little of human about them.
The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two make—not two twos but four, which is, in fact, a fresh concept; and the mind that can embrace so much—the idea of four as a number with an identity of its own has already raised itself above the lowest level of savagery. In that mind something has begun out of which the social idea may presently be developed; for the man who has conceived the number four will presently be identifying his new concept with a variety of correspondencies under fresh aspects: he will discover that certain animals have four legs, whereas, until then, his view of them was rather that of the child who said that a horse had two legs in front two legs behind, and two at each side—a statement which shows, indeed, that the horse has been earnestly considered from as many points of view as are sometimes necessary to enable a Cabinet Minister to make up his mind, but, for all that, never as a whole; and in such a mind, though the identity of the horse may be established from whatever point of view he presents himself, the thought of the horse, as a being of harmoniously related parts, having order and species, has not yet been established. Until a man can count, and sum up the results of his counting in synthesis, Nature is composed merely of a series of units—and the mind cannot begin that grouping and defining process which leads to association and from that to the development of the social idea.
You will remember in Alice through the Looking Glass, when the two Queens set to work to test her educational proficiency—you will remember how the White Queen says (in order to discover whether Alice can do addition) "What's one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one?"
"I don't know," says Alice, "I lost count."
"She can't do addition," says the White Queen.
Well—she "lost count," and, therefore, that series of ones failed to have any fresh meaning or association for her.
In the same way the primitive savage loses count; beyond three, numbers are too many for him—they become merely a "lot." But war and the chase begin to teach him the relative value of numbers; and he finds out that if one lot goes out to fight a bigger lot, the smaller lot probably gets beaten; so that, before long, calculation of some sort becomes necessary for the preservation of existence. He finds out also (and this is where ornament begins to come in) that a certain amount of wilful miscalculation has a beauty and a value of its own. So, after going out to fight ten against ten, and defeating them, he comes back and says to his wives and the surrounding communities by whom he wishes to be held in awe—"My lot killed bigger lot—much, much bigger lot." And so, when he comes later on to set down his wilful miscalculations in records of scripture, he provides delightful problems for the Bishop Colensos of future ages—problems the undoing of which may shake to the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally inspired—not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its reasons for having plunged into war.
You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated truths but of calculated untruths.
But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use, which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic forms of expression the higher grades of civilization.
And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good.
Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; his weapons—first of the chase, and then of war. No sooner had he proved their use than he began to ornament them—to make them records, trophies, and so—objects of beauty. He cannot stop from doing so; his delight in the skill of his hands breaks out into ornament. It is the same with the arts of peace the work of the woman-primitive—she moulds a pot, or weaves a square of material, and into it—the moment she has accomplished the rudiments—goes pattern, beauty, something additional and memorable that is not for use material, but for use spiritual—pleasure, delight.
And that quite simple example, from a time when man was living the life, as we should now regard it, of a harried and hunted beast—with his emergence from surrounding perils scarcely yet assured to him—goes on consistently up and up the scale of human evolution; and the more strongly it gets to be established in social institutions, the more noble is likely to be the form of civilization which enshrines it. And the less it shows, the less is that form of civilization likely to be worthy of preservation, or its products of permanent value to the human race.
It is not the millionaire who leaves his mark on the world so that hereafter men are glad when they name him; it is the "maker" who has turned uses into delights; not the master of the money-market, but the Master of Arts. The nearest thing we have on earth to that immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms of ornament—of embellishment over and above mere use—which man's genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts—the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy through which men—many now nameless—made permanent the vision of delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become heirs. The self-realisation of that age—all the best of it that we inherit—comes to us through embodiment in forms transcending material use.
Run your mind's eye through the various peoples and nationalities of Europe—of the world—and you will find that their characteristic charm—that which is "racy" of their native soil, marking the distinction between race and race, lies in the expression they have given to life over and above use. If we had kept to use, race would have remained expressionless. Race expresses itself in ornament; and even among a poor peasant people (and far more among them than among the crowded and over-worked populations of our great cities where we pursue merely commercial wealth) comes out in a characteristic appreciation of the superabundance of material with which, at some point or another, life has lifted them above penury. In the great civilizations it extends itself over a rich blend of all these, drawn from far sources; and the more widely it extends over the material uses of life, the higher and the more permanent are the products of that form of civilization likely to be. What does it mean but this?—man is out to enjoy himself.
Having said that, need I add that I put a very high interpretation upon the word "joy"?
To that end—man's enjoyment of life—all art is profoundly useful. I put that forward in opposition to the specious doctrine of Oscar Wilde that "all art is entirely useless." But it is usefulness extended in a new direction; leaving the material uses, by which ordinary values are measured, it shifts to the spiritual; and by the spiritual I mean that which animates, vitalizes, socializes.
To that end it may often be—and is generally the case—that, in the material sense, art is a useless addition or refinement upon that which was first planned merely for the service of man's bodily needs. Yet where the need is of a worthy and genuine kind, art never ceases to rejoice at the use that is underlying it. This can be clearly seen in architecture, where the beauty of design, the proportion, the capacity of the edifice—though far transcending the physical need which called it into being—remain nevertheless in subtle relation thereto, and give to it a new expression—useless indeed to the body—but of this use to the mind, that it awakens, kindles, enlivens, sensitizes—making it to be in some sort creative, by perception of and response to the creative purpose which evoked that form. You cannot enter a cathedral without becoming aware that its embracing proportions mean something far more than the mere capacity to hold a crowd; its end and aim are to inspire in that crowd a certain mental attitude, a spiritual apprehension—to draw many minds into harmony, and so to make them one—a really tremendous fact when successfully achieved.
Now nothing can be so made—to awaken and enlarge the spirit—without some apparent wastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will absorb more stone, and the labour of more men's lives, before it is finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his composition is likely to say on beholding it: "Why was all this waste made?"
Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made, from a certain stand-*point against all forms of joy evolved by the art of living—possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful.
But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers (latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament. He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish it—to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful; and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked for utility alone.
Now if spirit thus acts on matter—achieving its own well-being only through a certain waste of material, or expenditure of labour upon the lower plane, yet communicating back to matter influences from that state of well-being to which it has thus attained—may it not be that waste of a certain kind (what I would call "selective waste" versus "haphazard waste") is the concomitant not only of spiritual but of material growth also? May it not be that evolution has followed upon a course of waste deliberately willed and insisted on—and that without such waste, life—even material life—had not evolved to its present stage?
We see a certain wastefulness attaching to many of the most beautiful biological manifestations in the world. Up to a certain point, the construction of flower, bird, beast, fish, shows a wonderful economy of structure, of means to end (it is the same also in the arts). But there comes a point at which Nature, "letting herself go," becomes fantastic, extravagant—may one not say "wilful"?—in the forms she selects for her final touches of adornment. And is it not nearly always when the matter in hand is most closely related to the "will to live"—or, in other words, in relation to the amative instincts—that the "art of living" breaks out, and that Nature quits all moderation of design and becomes frankly ornamental and extravagant? Just at the point where to be creative is the immediate motive, where, in the fulfilment of that motive, life is found to be a thing of delight, just there, Nature, being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental.
There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails—that they were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They certainly cannot have been a help; and yet—they still persist in them!
Taking, then, these natural embryonic beginnings as our starting point, I would be inclined to trace out the living value of art and ornament somewhat upon these lines: Exuberance—the emergence of beauty and adornment, in addition to the mere functional grace arising out of fitness for use—has always been going on through the whole process of creation among animate nature. We see it established in a thousand forms, not only in bird, beast and reptile, but in the vegetable world as well. The tendency of all life that has found a fair field for its development, is to play with its material—to show that it has something over and above the straight needs imposed on it by the struggle for existence, which it can spare for self-expression.
It has been lured on to these manifestations mainly by that "will to live" which underlies the attractions of sex. That exuberance is an essential feature of the evolutionary process at the point where self-realisation by self-reproduction is the game to play. Under that impulse the selective principle begins to assert itself, and straightway the outcome is ornament. Self-realisation (by self-reproduction under all sorts of images and symbols) is the true basis of ornament and of art: self-realisation!
The spirit of man, moving through these means, impresses itself reproductively on the spirits of others with a far better calculation of effect than can be secured through bodily inheritance. For in physical parentage there is always the chance of a throw-back to tainted origins; the sober and moral citizen cannot be sure of sober and moral children in whom the desire of his soul shall be satisfied. They may be drawn, by irresistible forces, to take after some giddy and disreputable old grandfather or grandmother instead of after him; for in his veins run the parental weaknesses of thousands of generations; and over the racial strain that passes through him to others he possesses no control whatever. But the man who has given ornament to life in any form of art—though he commits it to the risks and chances of life, the destructive accidents of peace and war—is in danger of no atavistic trick being played upon the product of his soul; he is assured of his effect, and so long as it endures it reflects and represents his personality more faithfully than the descendants of his blood.
Now for the satisfaction of that instinct, the perpetuation of name and identity is not necessary. The artist would not (if told that his self-realisation was destined to become merged anonymously in the existence of fresco, or canvas, or mosaic)—he would not therefore lay down his mallet or his brush, and say that in that case the survival of these things to a future age was no survival for him. The maker of beautiful inlay would not lose all wish to do inlay if the knowledge that he, individually, as the craftsman were destined to oblivion. Let the future involve him in anonymity as impenetrable as it liked, he would still go on expressing himself in ornament; self-realisation would still be the law of his being.
That is the psychology of the artist mind—of that part of humanity which produces things that come nearest, of all which earth has to show, to conditions of immortality, and so presumably are the most satisfying to man's wish for continued individual existence. The makers of beauty do not set any great store on the continuance of their names—the continuance of their self-realisation is what they care about.
But the possessors of these works of beauty do very often make a great point of having their own names perpetuated, even though the vehicle is another personality than their own. And so very frequently we have the names passed down to us of these parasites of immortality—the tyrants for whom palaces, or arches, or temples were built—but not the names of the artists who designed them, whose immortality they really are. And though the official guide may refresh our memory with snippets of history, and say this, that, or the other about the name to which the temple remains attached—the really important thing that lives, survives, and influences us is not the externally applied name, but the invested beauty which has no name, but is soul incarnate in stone to the glory of God—the self-realisation of a being who (but for that) has passed utterly from remembrance.
That, as I have said before, is the nearest thing to immortality that we know. And it comes to us, in a shape which, (so to be informed with immortality) cannot limit itself to the demands of use. When all the claims of use are satisfied, then the life of personality begins to show—the fullest and the most permanent form of self-realisation known to man on earth lies in ornament.
Of course, when I say "ornament," I use the word in a very wide sense. What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists. Every department of mental activity has its ornament—the culminating expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and knowledge and sex would have no beauty that the soul of man should desire them. Those additions or glosses were quite unnecessary to existence—up to a point; for millions of years the world did without them, and Evolution managed to scramble along without faith, without hope, without love. But Evolution itself brought them into being; and then for millions of years they existed in germ, without self-consciousness; but steadily, as they germinated, they produced beauty and a sense of design in their environment. Co-ordination, dovetailing (peaceful word!), the harmonising and gentle effect of one life upon another, as opposed to the savage and predatory, began to have effect. And in response came ornament; faith, hope and love showed their rudimentary beginnings even in the lower animals.
One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural History Museum) is the device by which a certain small possum has taught her young to accompany her from branch to branch. Along her back she seats her litter, then over their heads like the conducting-wire of a tram-line she extends her tail—and then (each like an electric connecting rod) up go the little tails, make a loop, adjust themselves to the maternal guide-rope, and hang on. And there, safe from upset, is the family-omnibus ready to start!
Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-*growth of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all structural—having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents, excrescences—which to the craftsman's purpose are nothing.
Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion; her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may live; thus she meets and out-.*matches the chances that are against her. The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-*man took hold of the one selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously, and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material) fit to face life and its chances: if a house—walls and roof calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a textile—fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to outlast the brief occasion of their utterance—then in a form likely to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music—a system of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty and adornment.
And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man's wish to leave memorable records—beyond the limits of his own generation—of what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work) breaking out into play. "See," it says, "how I dance, and gambol, and triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle to live."
Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives miserably—scrapes through as it were—the question in the face of so poverty-stricken a result, may still be—"Was the struggle worth it?" And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown that life is good in itself, that he can do well enough without the assurance of personal immortality held out to him by the theologians. Whether that be or be not his reward hereafter, he will still strive to express himself; but for that end mere use alone will not satisfy him.
We have seen, then, how man, in his social surroundings, begins to secure something over and above the mere necessities of life; and so, after providing himself with a certain competence of food, clothing and shelter, has means and energy left for the supply of luxuries, ornaments, delights—call them what you will. And according to the direction in which he flings out for the acquisition of these superfluities—so will his whole manhood develop, or his type of racial culture be moulded.
Far back in the beginnings of civilization one of the first forms taken by this surplus of power and energy over mere necessity was the acquisition of slaves and wives. Civilization then began to ornament itself with two modes of body-service—the menial attendance of the slave upon his master, and the polygamous sexual attendance of the woman upon her lord.
To-day we think that both those things were, from a moral point of view, bad ornament. But you cannot look into the history of any civilization conducted on those lines without seeing that they decorated it—and that, out of their acceptance, came colour, pomp, splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment—for a very keen self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous mysteries of the toilet.
At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that once flourishing school of ornament.
But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities—for polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of being carried on without those things—was, and is, happily lived by other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which those races think more enjoyable. But no race will consent to live without some sort of ornament of its own choosing; and when its choice of ornaments, or of social superfluities, over and above the needs of existence, is seriously threatened from without it declares that it is fighting not merely for liberty but for existence. Yet we know quite well that the people of invaded and conquered States continue in the main to exist—they continue even to wear ornaments; but these are apt to be imposed ornaments galling to the national pride. And so to-day, in the midst of a vast belligerency, we have committees and consultations going on, to see to it lest, at the end of the war, under German dominance, our women should have their future fashions imposed on them from Berlin instead of from Paris, a fearful doom for any lady of taste to contemplate.
The example may seem frivolous, but it is a parable of the truth; we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die fighting for them, we make others die for us.
Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage of civilization—that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and visible sign of the people's pride of life and of their sense of power. The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.
But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic—in which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of service, and prided itself in military service alone—in that and in the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods, but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up into portions of an unimportant size and perished.
At a later day—and again with the city as centre to its life of self-realisation—we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences alternately jostled and combined.
And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex art—tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic arm, a new life-consciousness—the consciousness of the guilds, the workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own account—not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.
Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then did labour's power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become imitative and debased.
I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our England of the Middle Ages) the "joy of the harvest" expressed in the great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings of Europe! Think of it!—of what that means in the realisation of life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man's rest after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called "merry" and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in beauty.
I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred (so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment), there were always dark and cruel habitations where the "art of living" was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot, so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their power.
So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty, delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to live delightfully.
If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable—not, I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he must see Him not here and there only, but in the "land of the living"; else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.
Our life is built up—we know not to what ultimate end—on an infinite number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live; they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.
I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt and a loathing.
Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature itself—making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for self-realisation in ornament and delight—so long will these things be inevitable.
But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.