22. Anent Art Production - Page 2

graces, or it bristles with arabesques and unmeaning phantasies. Every
wall is painted; every grotto decorated. Sham landscapes, sham loggias,
sham parapets are everywhere. The sham windows themselves are provided,
not only with sham blinds and sham curtains, but even with sham
coquettes making sham eyes or waving sham handkerchiefs at passers-by
below them. Open-air fresco painting is still a living art, an art
practised by hundreds and thousands of craftsmen, an art as alive as
cookery or weaving. The Italian decorates everything; his pottery, his
house, his church, his walls, his palaces. And the only difference he
feels between the various cases is, that in some of them a higher type
of art is demanded by wealth and skill than in the others. No wonder,
therefore, he blossomed out at last into Michael Angelo's frescoes in
the Sistine Chapel!

To us English, on the contrary, high art is something exotic, separate,
alone, _sui generis_. We never think of the plaster star in the middle
of our ceiling as belonging even to the same range of ideas as, say, the
frescoes in the Houses of Parliament.

A nation in such a condition as that is never truly artistic. The artist
with us, even now, is an exceptional product. Art for a long time in
England had nothing at all to do with the life of the people. It was a
luxury for the rich, a curious thing for ladies' and gentlemen's
consumption, as purely artificial as the stuccoed Italian villa in which
they insisted on shivering in our chilly climate. And the pictures it
produced were wholly alien to the popular wants and the popular
feelings; they were part of an imported French, Italian, and Flemish
tradition. English art has only slowly outgrown this stage, just in
proportion as truly artistic handicrafts have sprung up here and there,
and developed themselves among us. Go into the Cantagalli or the Ginori
potteries at Florence, and you will see mere boys and girls, untrained
children of the people, positively disporting themselves, with childish
glee, in painting plates and vases. You will see them, not slavishly
copying a given design of the master's, but letting their fancy run riot
in lithe curves and lines, in griffons and dragons and floral
twists-and-twirls of playful extravagance. They revel in ornament. Now,
it is out of the loins of people like these that great artists spring by
nature--not State-taught, artificial, made-up artists, but the real
spontaneous product, the Lippi and Botticelli, the hereditary craftsmen,
the born painters. And in England nowadays it is a significant fact that
a large proportion of the truest artists--the innovators, the men who
are working out a new style of English art for themselves, in accordance
with the underlying