MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WE ought to benefit by experiences which, without causing acute 'discouragement or self-distrust, diminish spiritual pride. Living as we do in a haze of apprehension, it is a bad habit to expose ourselves gratui- tously to ordeals creative of unnecessary humiliation. But it is quite a valuable practice, from time to time, to confront ourselves with circumstances that remind us of the mutability of our own opinions and the inconstancy of our own judgement. I therefore recommend a visit to the Exhibition of Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts now being held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. We enter the building in a mood of amused anticipation; we leave it in a mood of modesty, con- scious that we are not certain of our own standards of taste. It is a commonplace that objects that have aroused in one generation emotions akin to aesthetic emotions appear to the succeeding generation inappropriate and even funny. What is so salutary is to be forced to realise that, even in one's own life-time, one has experienced what Dr. Johnson called " the wild vicissitudes of taste." In my youth, before I went up to Oxford, I spent some months in the city of Weimar, and was filled with pleasurable excitement by the loveliness of the new style then and there being inaugurated by Vandervelde and his fellow practitioners. The art shops in the Schiller- strasse were full of small plaster statues tinted to resemble green bronze; every lamp-stand, every ash-tray, was con- torted with the fronds and stalks of water-lilies; and the houses being erected in the residential quarters were enriched under their gables with huge female faces, with hair neatly parted in the middle and the loose locks streaming down in a cataract until they reached the front door. To me at the time, these inventions seemed superb and daring. I even admired the beastly pots then produced in Paris by Lalique and the bronze railings of the Metro stations, still surviving in the outlying districts of Menilmontant or Belleville. Today it seems incredible that anyone could ever have admired such monstrosities.
Taste, according to Croce, is a " judicial activity " and at its best it amounts to genius. To me it seems as volatile and undependable as the fashion in clothes. Men and women of serious artistic interests and knowledge would, when I was very young, stick plates and fans upon their walls, arrange forests of pampas grass behind their horrid little screens, and clutter up their tables with photographs accompanied by Sicilian peasant carts, or Meissen figurines, or porpoises in Copen- hagen ware. Then followed the epoch of what Mr. Betjeman, with some acerbity, has dubbed "ghastly good taste." The silk Louis XV screens were replaced by huge high Coromandel; T'ang horses replaced the monkey orchestras upon the chimney piece; the lamp shades were no longer flounced with pink or violet silk but were constructed of stiff black cardboard diversi- fied by Chinese or Persian decorations. The Axminster carpets were succeeded by calm pile in cream or grey or black. Everybody was convinced that the dark ages had been banished and that the new age of taste and enlightenment had dawned. For some fifteen years this mode persisted; thereafter there came a revival of early Victorianism, and the more advanced or less superstitious would even disport themselves with peacock fans. All that has remained from these wild vicissitudes is the belief that there is such a thing as con- venience and inconvenience, comfort and discomfort, the dustable and the undustable. The rest is as transient as the bustle or the Piccadilly collar. *, Is that all we have learnt about taste ? The present exhibi- tion at the Victoria and Albert, arranged under the direction of Mr. Peter Floud, possesses all the sense, seriousness and scholarship that we have come to associate with that progres- sive museum. The catalogue is so well composed, the exhibits themselves so conveniently arranged, that we are at once deprived of all feelings of amused conceit and pass from stand to stand in a mood of reflective enquiry. Why is it, we ask ourselves, that these objects should appear to us so inap- propriate and ungainly ? The artists who designed these tables, pots and wall-papers were men of skill and sincerity; the people who purchased these products were neither vulgar, ostentatious or crude. It is foolish to dismiss these decora- tions as no more than the product of an age when taste had suffered an eclipse, or to deride what gave pleasure to our grandmothers as evidence of their confused philistinism. Nor is it satisfactory to contend that what seems to us an epoch of shocking taste was no more than a transitional phase, when decorators catered, not for the refinement of the former aristo- cracy, but for the bourgeois public resulting from the Industrial Revolution. These objects were as welcome in Mayfair as they were at Surbiton. It was rather that both producers and con- sumers became intoxicated by the new technical capacity, of which the 1851 Exhibition was the dominant expression, and that they lost for a while the feeling for appropriate material. If, as Croce contended, " the ugly is unsuccessful expression," then much of their apparent failure must be due to the fact that the artists of the period were not certain what they wished to express.
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With this in mind we can compare the exhibits from " Summerly's Art Manufacturers," dating generally from 1847, with the metalwork of Alfred Stevens, dating from 1851-1861. The former still retain some sense of tradition and uniformity; the latter appears to our minds as a wild vicissitude. Of special interest is the stove designed by Alfred Stevens in bronze and brass with glazed earthenware panels, and exhi- bited in London in 1862. Why is it that this object, for all the competence of its execution, appears to us as a most " unsuc- cessful expression " ? Simply because a stove is by its very nature an ungainly convenience, and as such ill-adapted to intricate decoration. Why is it, again, that the hunting-knives designed by George Wostenholm for the 1851 Exhibition appear to us almost comic in their inappropriateness ? Simply because hunting-knives, if used at all, are not now used for purposes of decoration and that to encase them in a sheath of purple plush indicates insensitiveness to their function. Again and again do we derive the impression that these Victorian and Edwardian designers had no clear idea of what they wanted to do. Thus when we pass from these tentative experi- ments to the section devoted to William Morris we feel a sudden change from uncertainty to certainty. Morris knew exactly what he wanted to do; within his own formula, the expression is entirely successful. William Burges, again, who in the 'seventies decorated 'his own house in Melbury Road as " a model residence of the 15th century," had a clear conception of his intention. The bed and washstand that he designed for his own guest-chamber sparkle with mirrors, gilt, illuminated vellum and small silver fish. His decanter, with its amethysts and coins, his claret bottle,. with its jade and coral, suggest, not craftsmanship only, but creative exhilara- tion. They communicate pleasure in a way that can never be communicated by Alfred Stevens' stove.
* * There are four salutary lessons to be derived from this excellent exhibition. The first is that personal taste is a sub- jective and variable emotion, and as such of small importance. The second is that to decorate objects that are purely functional is to risk " unsuccessful 'expression." The third is that, if these minor arts are to cause satisfaction, the designer must make it evident that he knew what he wished to do. And the fourth is that to dismiSs with ridicule things that gave pleasure to a vanished generation is to display insensitiveness rather than a refined intelligence.
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