MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
FUNCTIONAL beauty, I have heard it said, is the major aesthetic discovery of the twentieth century. I am suspicious of such generalisations. In the first place I am not sure what is meant by the term " functional beauty." We are told that it implies the congruity of shape acquired by any instrument or building when it is perfectly adapted to the function it has to perform. Thus the most beautiful spoon would be the, one that possessed the greatest spoonfulness ; and the finest power station that which best combined the static with the dynamic, as is done by our own Egyptian temple at Battersea. These standards, if they become too dominant, would persuade me that objects such as hammers, in that they perform their functions admirably, were more aesthetically satisfying than daffodils, which have no obvious function at all. In the second place I doubt ',whether functional beauty is in fact a discovery of the last fifty years. I have seen in darkest Africa wooden spoons or bowls of even greater functional propriety than those we observe in the shop windows of London, New York or Paris. The Greeks undoubtedly possessed a sense of functional beauty and their approach to many of the arts and virtues was essentially a teleological approach, in that they, perhaps too insistently, posed the question, " Does this object or person rightly serve the end for which it or he was created? " Yet although I question the extreme assertion that the happiest invention of this stimulat- ing age is the invention of functional significance, I do agree that as decades have passed people have come to acquire, not so much a sense of functional beauty, as an enhanced sense of the appropriate. We no longer derive delight from objects that pretend to be something that they are not. The Edwardians enjoyed making waste-paper baskets out of regimental drums or elephants' feet ; they derived pleasure rather than pain from hanging gongs on the tusks of dead boar, or sticking maps upon their lampshades, or using old bindings as cigarette-boxes. They were entranced by the incongruous ; as a reaction against all their silliness, the succeeding generation preferred things to mean what they said. Congruity became the standard. * * * * In no branch of human ingenuity has this slow progression from the fanciful td the functional been better manifested than in the development, during the last fifty years, of the art and practice of photography. Ever since M. Nicephore Niepce in 1822 produced the first sample of what was then called " helio- graphy," the art of photography has developed, after many deviations, towards the functional exprpssion of its own special capacities. We are always told to admire Victorian photographs and to laud the beauty of Fox Talbot's grouping or Mrs. Cameron's portraiture. I find these early essays in photography interesting, but very ugly indeed. Even worse was the phase of photography, lasting from 1900 till 1930, when the photographers and their societies and associations sought to render their pictures what were called " art-photographs," to approximate them as closely as possible to the Salon or Royal Academy paintings of the time. Thus we used to have elaborate photo- graphs of fishing boats leaving Ramsgate Harbour, or highland cattle sloping sulkily, or gulls tumbling round the wake of a ship, or berries in early autumn—all aiming at the imitation, not of nature, but of popular pictures by inferiol contemporary artists. Instead of concentrating upon the things that the camera was best able to do, these uninspired photographers devoted their energies and talents to rendering their productions as unlike photclgraphs as possible. We have now abandoned that fantasy ; we now realise that the purpose of the camera is to accomplish what it can do better than any other medium or machine. This is all to the good.
* * * * Especially is this true of photographs produced today for books • and albums. In Victorian days, the actual apparatus required, the time entailed, the damage occasioned, discouraged all but the most ardent spirits from engaging in this complicated hobby. Only a woman of Mrs. Cameron's overpowering rush and ruthlessness could have induced Lord Tennyson to dress himself as a monk and sit still for several minutes while she boggled about under her black velvet blanket or smashed successive plates in her stained rheumatic fingers. All that is now over. A young man today can hold a snoopy little camera in the palm of his right hand and snap Thebaw's queen or a shoal of mackerel without obtruding for one second upon their attention. Very soon do these amateurs become adept at manipu- lating their recording instruments. As a result, we have lovely travel photographs taken amid the thyme of Delphi or among the palms of the Antilles. Thus we have had recently Mr. John Deakin's illustrations to Mr. Christopher Kininmonth's notebook on his Roman journey, photographs which convey to those who have never seen them every fissure and granulation of Trastevere stone. This, assuredly, is what photography was teleologically intended to do for us—to provide us as far as possible with a reflection of unfamiliar lights and textures, and to do this with a detailed accuracy such as would be scorned by the artist of today. I quite understand why the perfection of photography should have induced artists to become increasingly more abstract and inhuman: I am glad, indeed, that it is also encouraging photographers to become more concrete.
I have been admiring this week a book of photographs of Versailles, taken by Viktor Fiirst and Louis d'Arcy, produced by Messrs. Waldheim-Eberle, of Vienna, and distributed in this country by Phoenix House for the price of forty-five shillings. This album, we are told, is the first of an extended series of similar portfolios which will depict in equal detail the beauties of Bruges, Oxford and other masterpieces of the Greco-Roman inheritance. We have travelled a long way since photographers exercised their ingenuity in reproducing the mists of autumn and dead leaves falling past the lamp-posts. This Versailles album concentrates upon the effect upon architecture and sculp- ture of full sun-light ; it serves to remind us that such depressing grave yards as are today the " Fontaine du Petit Quinconce " or the " Bassin des Lezards " were, when first designed, intended to suggest, not grandeur only, but also a certain lightness and gaiety. The commentary that accompanies these splendid illustrations is less satisfying ; one dislikes being told, as if one were a fool, that it is at Versailles " that the true spirit of hellenism is most keenly felt." How ugly must Versailles have been when it first rose from the drawing-boards of Le Vau and Le Notre ! The immense expanse of terrace and sky-space, the sham perspectives and too elaborate fountains, must have been even more atrocious at a date when the yews and the hornbeam were only three feet high. An immensity of gravel. dotted with over-sized statues, and gasping in the scent of tube-roses under a pitiless sky.
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Only at night-time, or in the decay of autumn, does Versailles, to our minds, acquire the melancholy beauty that Henri de Regnier has celebrated in a series of elaborate poems. The taciturn grandeur, the monotonous quiet, of those alleys can duly come to us when the gates are closed against the tourists and the postcard-sellers, and when the water dribbles gently into moss-grown basins. Le dauphin, le triton et !'obese grenouille," sings Henri de R6gnier ; Neptune has a broken trident and there is a • dead leaf in the tortured mouth of Enceladus ; " autumn is tired," he tells us, " of the scent of box hedges and the murmur of fountains." This fine album reminds us that there must be something more to Versailles than the beauty of ostentation in decay.
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