Spare - A Book Of Satyrs - 1907.pdf

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INTRODUCTION
The field of black and white art has been generously extended since that golden period in
the "eighties" when Walker and Pinwell and Millais wrought their quiet designs, although
their olden delicacy of interpretation (for us almost wholly in the hands of Clemance
Housman) can still claim charms which our more facile method can never attain. For
every such accomplished craft is the companion of an aristocracy of art, even if it is
compelled to prayer and fasting before serving fittingly the high expression which is
exhaustive of every resource; but it shares, on the other hand, with commoner orders of
art its own eloquence and dignity. Thus all advantages we now possess of rapid, literal,
and cheap reproduction open the way to an easier acceptance of art which is habited with
more grace than profundity, more fancy than imagination, and inclines us to postpone
indefinitely what is only acquired at more pain and cost.
Perhaps these reasons sufficiently explain the absence, among so much that hints at
greater artistic personality, of the remote, and the strange, and the unadaptable. There
would seem, indeed, to exist a guiding science supplanting natural selection where the
popular interest is concerned : as though some ingenious financier had made an abiding
tabulation or arithmetic of invariable demands, in hope to subdue the purposes of his race
every ebullience feeble enough to lay its own destiny aside, and trim its shape to the
recognised guage. Outside such an order all the free forces of art move-some hovering in
uncertain intention, momentarily liable to that mundane gravitation which invites their
indecision; others, like Spare, naturally and definitely in possession of themselves, are
hardly compelled even within that reckoning to which isolated evidences of their mode
tempt the scientific.
The "Earth" Book of Spare was an elemental and chaotic thing, full of significant art, and
of still more significant conception. So mighty a theme may only remain littered with
fragments, each, like the Sphinx, an unread riddle, existing in the mind amid a turmoil of
unaccustomed thought. But the present series of designs occupies the more circumscribed
area of local allegory on a physical plane, the artist aiming not only to stir the optical
centres by agreeable contours and adjacencies, when he adjusts with powerful
deliberation the actual to a purpose which extends in his mind beyond executive
considerations. For that is a narrow scope to which some would compel art, as though a
predisposition to beauty were the sole equipment desirable for the expression of life.
Popular art, in the sense that this book can never be popular, arises, indeed, from an
extraordinary pessimism : it is an unwholesome flattery of the environment and
circumstance from out whose grip the man at length emerges equipped for faith by
knowledge. And Spare, with the unflinching assurance of the optimist as to the ultimate,
treads with reforming energy where the effeminate and parsonic would whimper or weep
helplessly. His is no gently-advancing theory, but his satires (or satyrs, as he loves to call
them) arrive as full-fledged and assertive dogma. The designs have their claim upon the
imagination also, not from a visionary cast given by obscure shapes or heavy
mystification, but by reason of clearly incisive and circumstantial detail, informed

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