POOR MEN'S PALACES.
WE publish in another column an appeal by Mr. Witt, the Tice-Chairman of the National ArtCollections Fund, asking for the support of the readers . . of the Spectator for his Society. We have the greatest possible pleasure in endorsing every word he says. No Fund or Society or organization of a similar charade! deserves more entirely the support, and also the gratitude, of the public. The treasures with which the Fund has helped to endow the nation are important in themselves, and have been obtained with the minimum of expense as well as with taste and good sense. Any one can raise a raging, tearing propaganda for purchasing some well-known work of art. Scare headlines purchasing A Masterpiece of Art in Danger " or " Shall Titian's Best Leave the Country ? " may be great cash-collectors, but that is not the way of the National Art-Collections Fund. The Committee's system of doing business is very different. Though they have helped, and will help again, to prevent the nation from losing great opportunities and in saving great works of art for the nation, they are essentially non-sensational in their methods.
Some of the Fund Committee's best work has been done by what we may call the organization of our artistic resources.' They have not only discovered neglected glories of the canvas or of the sculptor's chisel, but have brought them into our public galleries. They have often been able to show art collectors, or persons who have by accident become the guardians of beautiful things, how they can make the best use of their treasures. There are many possessors of beautiful things who do not realize that they have got just what the nation wants to complete its collection, to throw light on some special example, to provide the missing link in a great and noble chain, yet who, when the matter is explained to them, prove willing either to give, to sell on easy terms, or to lend. They would much prefer some transaction of this kind to a public auction or to getting the ultimate penny for an heirloom. If a man feels obliged to sell Gainsborough's picture of his Feat-great-grandmother, he would much rather say ' She is now in the National Gallery, where I and mine often go to look at her," than to have to own : " I sold her at Christie's, and, alas 1. I don't know where she is, or whether my sons will ever have the advantage, as I had, of seeing what their ancestress looked like when she saw company in Berkeley Square."
But it is not merely by adding to the numbers of our treasures that the National Art-Collections Fund desires to serve, and can serve, the community. Most of us have arrived, not without regret, at the conclusion that we are all going to be exceedingly poor. We shall have to live in smaller houses, and worse, many of us will have to give up buying beautiful things just when the arts of the designer and of the decorator have reached an extraordinary perfection. We most of us are well aware that the sight of beautiful pictures, fine furniture, and the work of skilful weavers, dyers, carvers, and smiths did us a great deal of good. They gave us What American journalists and orators, with their often appalling aptitude, call " uplift," and we dread lest in their absence we should revert to a sordid way of life, and lest, deprived of many of the things which had a civilizing effect on us, our hard-won " civility " should be lost. No State can Buller a greater loss than that of its civilization. Ours is now, in a sense, beleaguered by our poverty. At the moment, as Mr. Squire pointed out in his Introduction to the London Mercury, no one serves the State and the world better than he who keeps alive the flame of art, no matter on which of the Muse's altars it burns. In our houses in the sphere of the things of household use we have found a practical remedy for our inability to buy. We have turned to better account the things we already have. We cannot afford a fire in the dining-room ? Very well, we will make the sitting-room fire do double duty, and have our meals there. We want a new table ? There are some odd balusters and some old mahogany bookshelves in the lumber-room ; have them out and see what can be done. Now it is quite as necessary, in order to lead a civilized life, to have objects of beauty as it is to have objects of ease, and we may in the end have to let many of the treasures of which Mr. Witt speaks in his letter go oversee.
But could not the nation make greater use of the unparalleled works of art and of the magnificent palaces called Museums which it already possesses ? Could not the " new poor," and indeed the rest of the nation, imitate the Athenians and live more in our public buildings and galleries ? Even the rich Athenian lived in an indifferent house and the poor Athenian often in a wretched one. It ought surely to be possible for a poor man who lives in London to enjoy to the full his possession—pictures, tapestries, beautiful china, marbles, and bric-a-brac, magnificently housed in palaces—without spending a penny. These things belong ns, and they should be so organized that we can really enjoy them. All that is wanted is to make people realize that our spacious galleries and noble Halls, adorned with the masterpieces of art, are to be lived. in as it were, and not merely visited." At present our national art collections are still arranged for the student and the expert rather than for the ordinary man who goes to his treasures without any ulterior motive ; goes, that is, for illumination and 'enjoyment, that " aesthetic ecstasy " for whose evocation the painters and the sculptors have, after all, alone toiled. Why could not our galleries be arranged like those of the millionaire connoisseur, with comfortable chairs to sit in, and even perhaps—though there might be difficulties in this—little tables where one could have tea in sight of a Perugino or a Turner ? Could not one be allowed. to smoke in any rooms not devoted to fabrics, book or pictures ? Already the idea of equipping the gallery for the ordinary man and not merely for the student has borne fruit at the National Gallery ; for example, in the provision of guides who will take you round the pictures and tell you what you want to know about them ; and in one gallery music is provided [see Mr. Witt's letter to the Times last summer]. Surely the Bishop who said that his idea of Heaven was to eat strawberries to the sound of a trumpet would have acknowledged that the idea of looking at a plaque by Della Robbia to the sound of an " arrangement for flute and harpsichord " would run his admirable imaginings hard. Why, too, should it not be possible to hire some of the lesser palaces for entertainments after the hour of their normal closing ? Public dinners have already sometimes been held at Stafford House, and why should not Mrs. Jones, who lives in a minute flat above Harrods, be " At Home 10 o'clock, music, at the Soane Museum " ? If we could indeed. thus be allowed to live, move, and have our being in our palaces, we need envy no millionaire. For what can he do more than stroll in his galleries, invite his friends to see his pictures, and listen to delicious music while he scrutinizes his Titians ?
One thing the curators of our galleries would have sedulously to avoid. That is the overcrowding of exhibits. How incomparably more delightful is the National Gallery at this moment, when only the very best pictures have been left in each room, and those have been hung in a single line at a comfortable eye-level. And here it is well to remember that this happy reform is largely due to the National Art-Collections Fund and its untiring ViceC ha'rman, Mr. Witt. He is the leader and inspirer of the principle of hanging now adopted. The best pictures can be killed by being squeezed between mediocrities. Therefore " Few pictures on wide walls." Hang as in a house and not as in a dealer's shop. Just enough surplus ought to be kept in each gallery to have a change of pictures in order that the habitues of the new clubs should not cease to see their treasures through excessive familiarity. It is not that we want to abolish the less illustrious pictures, china, sculpture, and tapestries ; but why could not some of these minor masterpieces be used, as they are in France, to decorate public buildings ? We have become a nation of bureaucrats, and, alas ! there is hardly one among us whose fate it has not often been to wait weary moments in the outward rooms of public offices. The present writer never goes to see an official without a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress wherewith to console himself as he stands miserably in the hall ; but he would much rather sit in a comfortable chair in a welllighted room looking at, let us say, a collection of Japanese prints, or a mediaeval carving from the Low Countries, or early German woodcuts. We all have to wait at stations too. Why could there not be a little " tentacle " of the South Kensington Museum at Swindon, or Carlisle, or Crewe / One could imagine a traveller in that happy day rejoicing in the fact that he would have an hour between trains at such-and-such a junction because he would be able to go to see Flagman drawings, or a very fine new Canaletto, or a fresh collection of Staffordshire figures. The same sort of thing ought is be done in the Law Courts, and perhaps too in the anterooms to public baths. In some moods nothing is more delightful than the good second-rate. And yet it is very difficult properly to enjoy, say, engravings from Greuze at the British Museum with the Syrian bulls and the frieze of the Parthenon waiting for one below. At Crewe, Greuze would be a godsend.
The galleries might also fulfil another function. If we are too poor to have beautiful houses adorned by the pictures of the best modern painters and to buy the work of the new makers of beautiful furniture, how are the painters and designers to live ? We seem on the edge of great things in the figurative arts. Are we to be deprived of the fulfilment of the present promise because, in order to live, our artists had to turn artisan V We risk going down to posterity, not as the " Ophelia of the ages,' but as an age whose creators were repressed by the chill of penury, and whose hands, which were obliged to hold the rifle and the spade, lost their cunning in wielding the brush. Could not one room be set apart in each of our poor man's palaces in which modern pictures, Johns, Sargents, Glyn Philpot:es, Nevinsons, and Brangwyns could be seen in the-sort of setting which is appropriate to them t Do not let it be said of us that—worse than the nation that died because it had no poet—we had both poets and painters, but, not seeing that it was through them alone that we lived, we " economized " by starving them till they did " useful " work, and thus our civilization perished. Once more, let us mobilize our museums and embody our collections, in order to meet and drive back the hordes of Anarchy and Barbarism. And who can better help to put us in a posture of defence than the National ArtCollections Fund ? Therefore let all readers of the Spectator answer Mr. Witt's Appeal by becoming members of that Society. They will get value for their money. Of that we can assure them.
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