Art and Socialism.
The matter which we are about to consider is not one about which I feel myself peculiarly competent to speak, but it is at least one which many people regard as of very great, if not of supreme importance, and one to which comparatively little really careful attention has been paid either by the opponents of Socialism or by its advocates. It is true that many upholders of the present capitalistic system talk in a vague sort of way about Socialism being destructive of Art, without ever making any attempt to support the statement by serious argument. It is also true that most Socialists speak (equally vaguely) about the "Wonderful Art of the Coming Age"; but they, too, seem to be somewhat diffident about emerging from the region of bald assertion. Of course a few of them (I rather fancy Bellamy was one of these) make imbecile suggestions in favour of some sort of State bureau for the discovery and encouragement of artists; but apart from these and from one or two men like Morris, who have really shed a great deal of light on the question, the majority of writers confine themselves almost entirely to the consideration of the economic, political and ethical aspects of Socialism. Even the Fabian Society, that Universal Provider of propagandist tracts, has not condescended to emit as much as one meagre little pamphlet on Art. So I shall not be bothered, and you will not be bored by a continual cascade of reference to an avalanche of authorities. Nevertheless it is a great pity, that some qualified person does not devote himself to a full inquiry into the relations between the prosperity of Art and the economic structure of society; as the publication of such an inquiry might be the means of bringing into our movement many men and women who, through an apathy towards what they regard as a purely bread-and-butter issue, have hitherto remained outside.
Perhaps the least unsatisfactory mode in which one may deal with this long matter in this short space will be to take the chief contentions on the subject which are used by our opponents, to analyse them, and, in so doing, to use them as pegs whereon to hang any general observations that one may feel moved to make. The recipe for the making of these objections would appear to be a simple one. It is this:—"Think of any conditions which you may consider (wrongly or rightly) indispensable to the proper development of Art, and, without further ado, blankly deny that these conditions could possibly exist in a Socialist State." It is interesting, too, to observe whence these objections come. One would imagine that if they had anything in them, the artists, as being the people most concerned, would cry them aloud on the housetops. But this is not the case. Of the great artists and literary men now living or recently dead, a large number have come out as avowed Socialists, and the rest have been apparently indifferent to the whole thing. I think that one may safely say that no artist of any repute has ever given it as his opinion that Socialism would be bad for Art. The only people who attack Socialism on artistic grounds are the very people who are least in sympathy with Art. One cannot put the position better than in the words of Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Socialist leader. "We have seen," he says in his book on Collectivism, "the most idle and inert of the capitalist classes reproach Socialism with weakening individual initiative; we have seen the most tyrannical of the employers oppose it in the name of human liberty; it is therefore quite in keeping that in their turn the most tasteless and unappreciative of the bourgeois should undertake the defence of Art against the 'ignorant masses' and the 'modern barbarians.'"
Now, what do these people say? Roughly, it is this: "In your Socialistic society all work will be regulated by the State; and (putting aside the fact that manual labourers always dislike to see other people apparently doing nothing) we fail to see how you are going to regulate intellectual work or how you are going to reward it." "Do you intend," cries an indignant French publicist, "to give artists an eight hours day; to command Victor Hugo to begin having his poetic inspiration at seven o'clock, and to switch it off at nine?"
We do not! But before we proceed to make a more elaborate answer to these questions it might be useful to see what have been the conditions of the patronage of Art in former times and in our own day.
Let us go back a few years; say, to the Stone Age. From the remotest prehistoric times the creative instinct has come to the surface in man. Our cave-dwelling ancestor used to pick up a large bone after he had finished his lunch, and scratch upon it with a flint two lines to represent a horse. No doubt, like the Deity, on the seventh day, he fondly flattered himself that his work was about as good as it could be. But the point is: Why did he do it; and what did he get for it?
Mr. Kipling, in a poem called, I think, "The Story of Ung," has pictured a palaeolithic artist getting maintained by his tribe merely for scratching heads on bones. Now one rather imagines that this notion of a savage making Art his only means of subsistence is historically untrue. One conceives rather that in primitive communities the men who do the tattooing and the painting, do also their share of the hunting and the fishing. It is difficult to believe that a primitive tribe would maintain an artist simply quâ artist. But whether this is so or not—and I am no palæologist—does not matter two straws. If these early men maintained the artists altogether, one may be safe in saying that a civilised communistic society would scarcely do less. If, on the other hand, the artists, when Art was in its infancy, took their part in the ordinary work as well as doing their own, we may take it that in a Socialistic State the artists could do a few hours ordinary labour a day, and neither they nor their Art, nor their neighbours would be any the worse for it. In fact, a little thought about the origin of Art will make one realise that all this cantish outcry about "Will Socialism starve the artist?" is nothing but a most preposterous red herring. For under moderately free and natural conditions men make poems, pictures, and the rest, because it is their nature so to do; and the chiefest part of their reward is bound to be the pleasure (akin to religious ecstasy) which they feel in the act of producing and in the contemplation of the finished product.
Art then springs from man's primal instincts. Moreover, these instincts are present in every individual to a greater or lesser extent of development. Our capitalistic system has tended to give people the impression that the instinct for Art is present in the few, and totally absent in the many. One cause of this has been the increased specialisation in the production of works of Art, by which most men can find no good medium for the expression of the yearnings that are within them; and another cause is the fact that the majority of our unfortunate fellows find that it takes them all their time to earn enough hard cash to keep body and soul together, and cannot afford to waste a minute in what has come to be regarded (falsely, I think) as a mere luxury and not a necessity of life.
But every human being has in him the longing to ⟨create or⟩ to imitate (for they come to the same thing); although ⟨the actual⟩ technical faculty may vary indefinitely in different individuals. Why does the negro give the missionary a ton of rubber or other such commodity for a handful of coloured beads? Simply because the benighted black heathen has a crude craving for beauty, which is satisfied by the beads, and a certain decorative instinct to which he will give play in hanging the beads around his own or somebody else's neck. Why (en passant) does the missionary part with the beads for the rubber? Because his right and proper instincts have been crushed by a profit-mongering system of society which has led him to cherish the laughable and quite erroneous idea that india-rubber is worth more than coloured beads. I have no sympathy with those who accuse the missionary, in this instance, of swindling the native. He is not. He is swindling himself—selling his soul for a mess of caoutchouc. The black man gets the joy that form and colour can give—the European gets money, which turns to dust and ashes in his hand.
The same universal delight in form and colour, the same desire to design and to construct, that one finds in savages, one finds also in children. A very small child will play with pieces of coloured wool by the hour. In spite of the elaborate and expensive toys that are made nowadays for the offspring of the rich, it is unanimously agreed upon by educationalists that the little ones do not take half the delight in them that they do in those simpler ones, which give them the chance of bringing their artistic ingenuity into play. No girl or boy was ever born who could not amuse herself or himself with some paper and a box of crayons for drawing, or a little pile of bricks for building. And, with regard to a slightly more advanced age, is there a man here who does not remember the worthy and desirable things that he used to do with his first penknife?
It is the same all the world over. The civilised child who draws his headmaster's face, and the New Zealand aborigine who tattoos his own nose, are both giving expression to this one great impulse which they have in common with every member of the race.
Man, therefore, is essentially an imitative and a decorative animal. What effect have political, economic and social conditions with regard to the stimulation or repression of his instincts in these respects? Do we find that every system under which he has lived has encouraged his artistic aspirations to an equal extent? A glance at the designs for the new Carnegie Library at Eatanswill-on-the-Quicksands would in itself supply a sufficient answer to that question. But we can come to Capitalism directly, and for the moment confine ourselves to a consideration of previous social structures. Has there ever been a civilised community in which every member has been able to satisfy his desire for Art?
If one asked this question of the man-on-the-magazine-staff, he would doubtless reply: "Oh, yes. Look at Athens, my dear sir. Every citizen an artist and a critic." But the gentlemen (and ladies) who voice these ecstatic sentiments forget that in Athens there were at least seven slaves to every free man. In order that the free citizen might devote himself to general culture, seven of his fellowmen were turned into "dumb drudges." The same thing was to be seen in Rome—unlimited leisure at the top of the social scale, unlimited toil and hardship at the bottom, whether the labourer was slave or nominally free man. The two great requisites for the free development of the artistic instinct—a not too-crushing burden of mechanical labour, and a fair amount of leisure time—were absent as far as the mass of the people were concerned. Art was the concern of the few, and the few were agreed that this was as it should be. Culture, as in our own day, was deliberate, and not spontaneous; and the Romans, like ourselves, laid far too much stress upon the particular in a man's art and too little on the general. With them, as with us, the vast majority of the population was cheated out of its rightful inheritance.
A very similar state of things may be observed in the other great civilisations of the past. In Egypt, in Mexico, in Assyria, in Babylonia, and in the East there has always been a helpless proletariat ground down by a master-class, and the artistic instincts of the majority have been stunted in infancy and stifled in later life. But there has been one period where these instincts have had, to a great extent, free play; and that period was the Middle Age in Western Europe. The reign of omnipotent capital had not yet come, and the worker was, within limits, his own master. He had certain dues to pay to those above him; but when these dues were paid, he was free to do what he liked with his own time. Trade was almost entirely local, and production was necessarily limited by the demands of the locality. Over-production would have been utterly purposeless. A man who turned out more articles than were wanted by his neighbours would never be able to get the surplus off his hands. The result was that, finding that he had more time at his disposal than was actually taken up with the manufacture of the required number of articles, he spent his spare hours, not in turning out more and more goods, that nobody could want, but in perfecting and ornamenting those which were already made.
It has been estimated that if a man were free from all extraneous burdens he could earn a bare living for himself and his family by about two hours work a day—one says "bare," because one leaves out of account modern machinery which, of course, in a well-ordered community would raise the general standard of living enormously without extending the hours of labour. In the Middle Ages the demands of kings, lords and what-nots undoubtedly raised this necessary number of hours to, say, five or six. But even then there was a margin of time which could not be employed in actual use-production. The consequence was that your mediæval craftsman exercised his ingenuity upon everything that passed through his hands. In William Morris's phrase: "He decorated everything, from a porridge-pot to a cathedral." His surplus time was of no value to anyone else, so he could afford to spend it in pleasing himself.
Thus it is that the Middle Ages were the only times in which there has been a great Popular Art. Popular literary work did not keep pace with popular handicraft. But that was not because the masses of the people had not the requisite faculties, but because the tools were not to hand. Printing had not yet been invented, and, above all, the knowledge of reading and writing was confined to a few. But where the people had a fair chance they took the fullest advantage of it. Think of the exquisite illuminated manuscripts, for example, that were turned out literally by the thousand from the monasteries—and the monks were almost entirely drawn from the lower orders. Go to any museum and compare one of these manuscripts with one of our machine-made products of the present day—say, the "Daily Mirror"—and, then, in the words of the poetaster:
“Seek thou the lone, sequestered vale,
And ponder o'er the gruesome tale."
But, above all, the mediæval workman spent his soul upon stone. The tools required for carving and building were not confined to the monks, but were within the reach of every man. Give Robin or Giles a chisel and a stone, and he starts (other things being equal) on level terms with any other man in any other age. And here our ancestors showed how men, when left to please themselves, can far outstrip any work that is done under cold compulsion, with respect both to variety and to power. People look at a Gothic church and come away sighing and complaining that the race of builders has vanished from the face of the earth. But they forget that the conditions of employment have changed. In these days the architect is hampered by a desire for cheapness, and the subordinate workman's individuality counts for nothing. In those bygone centuries the architect was allowed very much of a free hand, provided he turned out a beautiful structure. Money was a very small consideration, and time no consideration at all. Above all, matters of detail were left to the individual mason. Consequently, in every nook and corner of these buildings, we find odd bits of wonderful work, beautiful or grotesque, each expressive of some idea in some one man's mind. Then there was a rich variety: now there is a meagre uniformity.
Thus much for the Middle Ages and the artistic instincts of the people generally; it remains to be added that the more gifted individuals, the geniuses, were better looked after than ever before or since. There was a certain tradition of art patronage amongst the nobles; but an enormous amount of it was done by the monasteries and the various corporations of the towns, pious and otherwise. Wherever you had any noticeable number of men gathered together, they welcomed and gladly employed any man who showed signs of genius. In fact, the gifted child of working-class parents has never been so carefully helped as he was in that age. It is a striking thing that almost all the great mediæval artists came from the lower classes—a sufficient testimony both to the fact that taste was widespread and that there was a corresponding general eagerness to encourage genius. When all men are economically free, or even partially so, culture is bound to be far more general than it ever can be in a population mainly composed of wage-slaves or chattel-slaves; and when culture is general, genius will never be neglected.
We come to Capitalism. Instead of looking back, we will look around. Once more we will see how Art fares in these two great respects: How far is the general artistic instinct of the people given free play, and how far is the individual genius encouraged to exercise his powers to the fullest? As we said before, the two things are bound to stand or fall together, but we may take them separately, nevertheless.
As far as the ordinary worker is concerned, it is not too much to say that he is altogether debarred from making his products artistic, even where he is allowed to make them useful! Two main causes are at work here. In the first place, the worker is kept working so ruthlessly and at such very high pressure that he cannot possibly take any real pleasure in what he is doing. Moreover, his mind and body are so exhausted as a result of the long day's toil in the interests of the profit-makers that he is scarcely in a suitable frame of mind, after his work is over, to turn his attention to any occupation that requires concentrated effort of any kind. When one considers the long hours, the arduous nature of the work, and the evil conditions under which the manual proletarians have to live, one is struck dumb with wonder; not at the fact that so many working men seek a narcotic or a stimulant in the form of alcohol or a cheap music-hall (as our dear sentimentalists complain), but that so many of them have the astonishing endurance to go through with the day's work and still to take some interest in matters not immediately connected with the daily round. The marvel is, not that some of the workers are a trifle unrefined in their pursuits, but that the whole lot have not been brutalised beyond all hope of redemption. It merely serves to show how impossible it is to eradicate men's higher impulses, and the feeling for Art goes with the rest, lake away long hours, take away slums—take away, in fact, everything we've got, and put its exact opposite in its place, and amongst the things which will come again to the surface of the people's soul will be the old, irrepressible yearning after Art.
If these forces were not sufficient to benumb the workers' artistic instincts, Capitalism would at least make sure that those instincts should not be satisfied. If the flame still burns in the poisonous air, Capitalism pours cold water on it. If every single workman in the land were cultured, refined, an artist to his fingertips, he would be quite unable to put artistry into his work. In the first place, a very great deal of our manufacture is nowadays machinafacture, and a machine can scarcely put much soul, emotion, individuality (call it what you like) into its work. In the second place, where the craftsman actually handles the whole thing, he dare not attempt to strike out a line for himself.
Take a concrete example. Suppose one of those unfortunate men who will be compelled to assist in the building of the Eatanswill-on-the-Quicksands Free Library were to say to himself as he contemplated the growing monument: "Heavens! What an eyesore!" and suppose he were to conclude that he would put a little decorative work in which would at least improve a few square inches of the monstrosity, and acted accordingly. What would, in effect, be said to him?
The architect would say, "Clear out! That wasn't in my design." To a certain extent a justifiable remark in a day when we have a totally false conception of the real nature of architecture. But the essential and fundamental remark would be that of the contractor: "My man, I tendered so much for this job. The main thing for me to do is to get it done as cheaply as possible. I don't pay you to waste your time (and, consequently, my money) on anything that isn't in the contract."
I give this merely as an illustration of what I am trying to convey; of course, to suggest that a square foot of decoration on the building in question would look anything but ridiculous is the last thing I should urge. But the whole attitude of Capital towards the aesthetic aspect of things may be summed up in a few words: "Art be damned, if it isn't in the contract." Under a competitive commercial system, where cheapness is the Holy Grail, almost every single thing you can think of is bound to be a triumph of ugliness. For the beautifying of work means the expenditure of a certain amount of the workman's time, and if one firm tried this the others would undersell it with cheaper though uglier articles; and, with things as they are, few men can afford to reject the cheaper in favour of the dearer if they both equally well serve the primary material purpose for which they have been made.
That is where the masses stand as far as concerns any possibility of getting artistic enjoyment as part and parcel of their daily life. But how does Capitalism treat those rare ones who are born with exceptional gifts? How far is genius allowed to travel untrammelled along its own peculiar lines. And this, perhaps, is the crux of the whole matter, for it is in connection with the fate of the individual artist that the hottest attacks from this quarter are made.
Our opponents lay down three dicta: That the artist must be free from the burden of extraneous work, and that he would not be so under Socialism; that he must be given the necessary means to live a decent life, and that he would not get them under Socialism; that the taste of a whole population is bound to be bad, and that under a Socialistic régime the bad artists would be encouraged and the good ones go all unheeded.
The shortest way in which to combat these assaults would be to say right away to Capitalism: "Pluck the beam out of your own eye before thou pluckest out the mote which is in thy brother's—or, rather, thy son's." If the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of these several conditions is the test of a system's attitude towards Art, Capitalism stands trebly condemned out of its own mouth; for it fulfils none of them.
It may be an open question as to whether an artist should be absolutely free from any employment except his art. But at all events he never has been under Capitalism. If one excepts the painters—and most of those have had a very bad time in early life, while some have died in extreme poverty—one finds that the greater number of geniuses, English and foreign, have been forced not only to work for a living, but to do uncongenial and painful work for a living. Think of Chatterton and Haydon, the suicides; think of Burns, the excise-officer (small wonder that he took to drinking whisky when they put him to tapping it); think of Wordsworth, who might have starved had a friend not left him a small income; think of Goldsmith, doing the meanest literary hack work; of Wagner, writing cornet duets; of scores of others who have had to do any work which offered itself, or else live in absolute poverty.
Capitalism has never allowed the artist to live for his art—at least not until he has become almost too old to enjoy his leisure. The only way by which the gifted writer or painter has been able to secure case and independence in early life has been by prostituting his gifts to the caprice of his masters. If he can persuade himself to stifle his real aspirations and to adapt himself to the taste of Mr. Moneybags he can make the latter disgorge a little of his superfluous spoils. That is what is happening when we see talented painters wasting their time in painting vast portraits of rich nonentities or their wives for the Academy show. Your magnate hears that X.Y.Z. is a good painter, but he would see him a long way further before he would commission him to paint anything but a portrait of himself. Ostentation and taste can never exist side by side.
As the painter can make money by flattering the Capitalist's vanity through reflecting his ugly features, so the literary man can make money by reflecting his ugly thought—political or otherwise. If Kipling had confined himself to bringing out the best that was in him, he would have got fame—eventually—but he would never have become a plutocrat or a public oracle. He was ingenious enough to lay himself out in flattering the rampant Imperialism that was rife amongst the middle-classes when he appeared upon the scene. I have no doubt that if, at the present time, a man similarly gifted should arise to sing the wrongs of the income-tax payer he could feather his nest well in a few weeks.
It is a commonplace that the true test of Art is the test of time. And what is the test of time but the verdict of the people as a whole. One cannot think of a single great writer whose first work has been received with anything but coldness or abuse from the critics. Time has justified them all. The few have over and over again shown themselves utterly without judgment, but as these works have gradually filtered through to the people they have been acclaimed as masterpieces. That there is an unlimited demand for good work when it is within reach is witnessed by the rush that is made for cheap editions, when copyrights of great writers expire.
The whole way along, Capitalism has stifled Art and tortured the artist. For Art there has been a cramped and narrowed existence; for the artist starvation during his best years, and fame when he was too old to enjoy it. There never was a system which was so noxious to Art as this of Capitalism. All the accusations that it hurls at Socialism will rebound with redoubled vigour against its own lying head. The most inconceivably unrefined Socialistic State could not do worse than degrade Art and starve the artist. What will the ordinary Socialist State of our dreams do?
Firstly, with regard to your geniuses. Well, the bureau idea is a rotten one. We have the rudiments of it now in the various scholarships to Schools of Painting and Schools of Music, although they have not yet tried it in respect to Literature. You may discover and encourage technical talent like this—but the chances are that genius will go unnoticed, if nothing more. In such schemes you are bound to have examiners and selectors of a sort, and anything novel (as all works of genius are bound to appear until you get used to them) may give them the impression that it is only bad or eccentric. Genius takes some little time to be appreciated, and then a whole people is always a safer judge than an individual who is asked to give an immediate opinion. But, frankly, is there any reason why you should thus keep the artists as a breed apart, a sort of Levites? A poet eats, sleeps, and drinks, and (if he is a sensible man) plays billiards. There ⟨seems⟩ to me to be no valid reason why he should not spend three or four hours a day in some socially necessary labour, mental or physical—always giving him a choice of occupation, of course. Our error at present is not in forcing artists to take up other work in order to earn their living, but in giving them so much of this other work, or such distasteful work, that their energies are sapped and their thought deadened.
And as, for the community at large, it seems as clear as daylight to me that better material conditions and a freer life will bring out again all those instincts which in many men are suppressed under Capitalism. Art will give pleasure to work and beauty to the world. And beauty breeds like every other living thing—except the upper classes. The more beautiful the world becomes, the more men's efforts will be centred on making it beautiful. On what lines these efforts will run it were a little rash to attempt to forecast. Men will attempt to abolish ugliness wherever possible; ugliness in social conditions of all sorts, in their dwellings, in their clothes, in their habits, in every single article they use. One can scarcely agree with Ruskin that the destruction of all machinery is desirable. But still, it is highly probable that in a communist society men, as regards certain articles of every-day use, would rather go without machinery, and do a little more work, in order to get the beauty that only handicraft can give. Many ugly things, too, that we see around us to-day would disappear of their own accord, because they are only in existence to satisfy an artificial need created by the capitalists in order to find an investment for a portion of their surplus capital. But, indeed, one cannot draw the line between the man who removes ugliness of any description and the man who is consciously serving Art. If we feed a hungry child, we arc in a certain sense helping the cause of Art. If we pull down a filthy cottage and erect something habitable in its place, we are doing so no less. The ancient identities between Beauty and Good, and between Ugliness and Evil are as true now as ever they were. Every man who is working for human happiness is, whether he knows it or not, following in the footsteps of the great artists of the past and clearing the road for the great artists of the future.