§ 35

These words and a great many more I heard said, not in a church, but in the Town Hall by a great artist, and they led me to search. In my dream I had seen how the principles he dwelt upon were already at work in the homes of the people in municipal government, which was seeking Justice and Fraternity. So I extended my travels and observations.

The walls of the churches are growing busy with beauty. The fear of idol worship is no more. Men know now, being better instructed, that it was not the wooden effigy but the soul it put into a shape, that was worshipped. It was a symbol, sometimes an ugly one, but still a symbol of Divine Power. The crafts are symbols of industry, of faithfulness to an ideal that only the best work counts for good, hence underlying their technical merit is a great truth that the people are understanding, and of which they are conscious, so they have pride in the ethic as well as æsthetic quality of what they are doing; but in no spirit of priggism or sermonising is this, just simply it is a pleasurable sensation added to the fulfilment of duty. For what a man does unwillingly will be bad, what he does pleasurably will be good and impressive.

Many of the pictures are strange, some would call them childish. Perhaps they are childlike because they express intensity without rhetoric. To affect to be what one is not is humbug. Every “primitive” did his best. He tried hard to make his pictures look like nature. His hand was not so cultivated as his imagination. The image he formed in his mind was more complete than his power to portray it. Looking at works of art by “a primitive,” if we have the discriminating sensibility, we see what he saw and follow his mental effort, which compensates for technical shortcomings. To affect childishness is to prove imbecility. What we like in the new world pictures is their real naïvete. That the authors of them are untaught is obvious, but there is that in them which compensates. They are done by men who believe in what they are doing and are feeling it with intensity. An academic critic can find plenty to criticise, but nothing to laugh at. The simplicity evinced comes from the fact that their authors ARE primitive. I heard said they are mostly by peasants, who, like the noblest of French artists, J. François Millet, saw simply. Even when the subjects are biblical or so-called “religious,” the artist has used modern costume, which, seeing in an abstract, not photographic, manner, he has invested with poetical interest. A return to agricultural life is everywhere evident. It is producing, or reinstating, a healthy mental temperament which industrialism was well-nigh killing. This natural aptitude to create in art and to do so sincerely is not only prominent among the people, whose chief labour is agricultural, it is shown in the design of “industrials” also, who, not wholly emancipated by the artificiality of their labour earning hours, “let themselves go” in their leisure time and show by what they produce that even their straightforward simplicity has not been killed by the monotony of their wage-earning hours. They are not machines in their off hours, but human beings who have something to say for themselves which may be uncultured, but is a spontaneous expression of something they like to think of and enjoy making.