7/22/2019 The Century Guild Hobby Horse, 1884-1894.pdf http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-century-guild-hobby-horse-1884-1894pdf 1/14 "The Century Guild Hobby Horse", 1884-1894 Author(s): Julie F. Codell Source: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 43-53 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20082072 . Accessed: 13/11/2013 13:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Periodicals Review.
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7/22/2019 The Century Guild Hobby Horse, 1884-1894.pdf
Author(s): Julie F. CodellSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 43-53Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for Victorian
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian Periodicals Review.
The Century Guild Hobby Horse, published between 1884 and 1893, was one
of the last (and in many ways the ultimate) versions of the literature and art
journal, a genre born with the Pre-Raphaelite Germ in 1850. Unlike its successors,The Yellow Book and The Savoy, The Hobby Horse was not solely committed to an
elite aestheticism. Its pages were filled with essays arguing for recognitionof the vital social role of art and artists. It was the only such journal
published as an organ of an arts and crafts guild. In addition, Hobby Horse
contained scholarly essays on such varied topics as woodcuts and paintings of
the Italian Renaissance, Romantic and Victorian poetry, the nature of crafts,and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English architecture. This scholarly
perspective foreshadowed the modern art historical essays of later journalssuch as
Burlington Magazine.
Hobby Horse cost two shillings sixpence, when its popular contemporarieslike The Cornhill or Macmillan1 s cost one
shilling. The exceptional quality of
Hobby Horse accounted for the relatively high cost of each issue. Its paper was
rag and its binding of the finest quality. Technological innovations in the
printing trade, particularly in the areas of photography and reproduction of
art and illustrations, were applied. Hobby Horse used the photogravure techniqueto reproduce everything from Italian Renaissance woodcuts to Pre-Raphaelite
painting.
Thomas Plowman, in 1895, defining the main features of the aesthetic
movement, cited Hobby Horse as the final expression of a set of attitudes toward
art and artists of the academic tradition, and of the desire for unity of the
arts, "the keynote of the aestheticism of the
future",first articulated
bythe
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and later central to the work of William Morris,Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater. Plowman favorably described aesthetes as
possessing an "intimate knowledge of art, in anarchaeological sense", and his
essay summarized the interconnections of aesthete activities--the rebellion
against academic art modified by the careful study of the past through archeological
methods, and the attempted unity and cooperation among artists, writers, and
craftsmen. This scholarly, archeological approach, often ignored in subsequentstudies of aestheticism, characterized Hobby Horse.
The most striking feature of the magazine was the range of its content
which demonstrated the changes from the magazine1s early Ruskinian concern with
ethical and social issues to its later support of an art for art's sake creed.
A glance at the contents of the magazine over the years reveals a wide range of
topics and interests: John Addington Symonds on Pater, Pietro Longhi, and Tiepolo;C. Kegan Paul on prose style; Herbert Home's voluminous, serialized essays on
James Gibbs, Christopher Wren, and Inigo Jones; Laurence Binyon on criticism;Arthur Galton on the Italian Renaissance and on Arnold; William Michael Rossettion Ford Madox Brown; Oscar Wilde on Keats; Frederic Shields on Dante Rossetti;
poems by Christina Rossetti, Galton, Home, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson,Wilfrid Blunt, and Katherine Tynan; essays on
sixteenth-century printers; essays
by Ruskin, Arnold, and Morris; reprints of Blake1s "Marriage of Heaven and Hell";art by Simeon Solomon, Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts, Sir Frederick Leighton, Holbein,Ford Madox Brown, Frederic Shields, and D. G. Rossetti; essays on education by
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Selwyn Image (later Slade Professor of Art at Oxford) and Home. The most common
subjects were Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters, Italian and English Renaissance
artists, architecture, printmaking, and literature. The most striking changesover the course of the magazine's publication were the increasing number of
scholarly essays and essays on criticism which reflected Home's growing concern
with the methods of analysis of art as well as with the subject of art itself.
In the direction of increasing scholarship and interest in art history, Home's
ambitious essays on Wren, Jones, and James Gibbs carefully articulated the role
of aesthetic change and development in history and in the context of the artist's
biography which Home often corrected through documentation.
The logo of the magazine created by Selwyn Image (see frontispiece) was
accompanied in its maiden appearance by a rather turgid discussion of its meaning
in an essay written by the magazine's first editor, Arthur Mackmurdo. Mackmurdo,
an architect and follower of Ruskin, soon gave up the magazine to devote himself
to social causes and other guild ventures. In Image's logo, several knights
astride a sea of horses and stylized roses are centralized within a larger land
scape symbolizing a new dawn complete with rays of sunlight, patterned birds
and vegetation, including
design is strictly two
magazine's anti-represen
Mackmurdo's essay "The
signed with his name and
Century Guild, recalling
proclaimed .a new dawn for
that the ultimate goal of
Hobby Horse was to pro
artists without adherence
creed but through a
The magazine's
rekindled ut picturaMackmurdo's
description
2. Home, endpiece
Hobby Horse IV (1889), 10
giant mushrooms. The entire
dimensional and reflects thetational views on art.
Guild's Flag Unfurling",
the initials MCG (Member,the PRB insignia), zealously
art. Mackmurdo promisedthe Century Guild and of
mote union and harmony among
to any absolute dogma or
"unity of sentiment".
idealism and its hope for a
poesisare best revealed in
of
Image's logoas,
... a pure creation but creation only in the sense Shelley uses the
word,--to express combination and representation.. . . For the brain
that conceived this picture-poem,or poem-picture, conceived firstly
the idea, or spirit of this flesh, and going into the world, sought
certain things for symbols of expression, and, combining them, presented
the idea?henceforth a new creature in the likeness of its creator. For
so God made man.
Mackmurdo's quasi-religious language described artists as pilgrims and art as a
spiritual revelation of the artist's inner life, not as a description of external
appearances. Consequently, he argued, the human figure was art's most important
subject as an embodiment of the highest human ideals.
Mackmurdo's essay also referred to craft as well as to high art. The
Century Guild, itself a craft guild, sought to recapture principles of design
universally applicable to all the arts including literature, architecture,
furniture, and interior decoration. This interest in decorative design was a
dominant preoccupation of Hobby Horse. It appeared literally in the end notes
(see illustration 2) and general format of the magazine and in the furniture and
wallpaper designed by the guild members themselves, especially Mackmurdo and
Home. The search for the universal principles of design led the "Hobby Horse
men" (as they were dubbed by Ernest Rhys) to the Renaissance, which Home
considered the most perfect period of art history. Principles thought to be
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Diana (see illustration 4) is another example of an image of Greek gods symbolizingArt. Since most Hobby Horse men saw the history of art as a series of revivals
of universal principles, the images of that first expression of those principles
by the Greeks represented the fine arts. Thus, these late Victorian goddesseswere self-referential, and entirely coherent with the art for art's sake creed
first mentioned by Image in an essay on the nature of art and the role of art
education. The art of Home, Watts, and Burne-Jones follows the Rossettian
branch of pre-Raphaelitism: revivalist, referring to past art rather than to
contemporary life, monumental, restrained in detail, treating the figure as an
emblematic part of a design rather than as a vehicle for emotional or moral
sentiment or narrative.
The transition which the Hobby Horse men felt was most characteristic of
their own age was the
pretations of history,
more scientific, empi
Despite the public?
is. #. , letters by
on obscure artists
a follower of Blake,
fifteenth-century
letters from the
centuries, a previous
of Blake's Book of
application of sci
documentary verifica
frequently complained
of such accuracy and
In an essay on the
Melchior, and Jaspar,
the author lamented
then deprived him of
however false it wasbetween the histori
scholarly essays, on
nostalgia for the
for faith expressed
symbolist art and
Hobby Horse reflected
mythic explanationssuch explanations were
appropriate.
H?rne, "Silvarum Potens"
Hobby Horse IV (1889)
change from poetic inter
art, and experience to
rical interpretations,
tion of numerous documents
Rossetti and Arnold; essays
such as Edward Calvert,
and Geoffroy Tory, aengraver and printer;
seventeenth and eighteenth
ly undiscovered manuscript
Los) , and the willing
entifie methods such as
tion, Hobby Horse writers
about the unpoetical effects
historical re-evaluations,
legend of Balthasar,
the three kings of Cologne,his own verification which
this beautiful legend,
was.?
In this disparitycal accuracy of its
the one hand, and the
past and obscure longingin its rather vapid
poetry, on the other hand,
a desire for poetic and
with the realization that
no longer sustainable or
The taste for veiled allusions to the art and life of the past influenced
later artists and designers, such as Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon whose
magazine The Dial carriedon
the interestin the
complementaryrelation between
art and literature. Ricketts' notion of the document ("Some exquisite detail in
a masterpiece, convincing to the spectator as a thing unknown, yet not of necessity
the symbol of a borrowed story") articulates in all its vagueness the region
between representation and symbolism also inhabited by Hobby Horse art. The word
document alluded to a masterpiece of the past and recalled that work's cultural
value as well as its visual appearance; yet the document also abstracted the
references to that work by alluding to it through a peripheral detail rather
than through a central image. The term further implied historical and factual
information, and in this, too, Ricketts echoed Hobby Horse writers' historical
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intentions and their application of historical methods to the analysis of
artistic forms and production.
The significance of Hobby Horse1 s contribution can be measured in the area
of design. Design {Hobby Horse writers often used the Italian disegno to indicate
the historical roots of design in the Italian Renaissance) was a term for the
abstract, formal arrangement of a work of art considered a universal feature and
equally important in all the visual arts, fine arts, or crafts. Design acted as
a leveller in the visual arts, eliminating the hierarchy of fine and appliedarts and establishing what appeared to be a universal principle binding the
arts together. For Hobby Horse men, principles of design, which they repeatedlyarticulated in various essays, were applied to literature, as well. Their
assumption that all arts could be tied to universal principles of design accounted
in part for their cool classicism, restrained form, and Greco-Roman subjects;
their taste in Italian Renaissance art; and their literary preferences for the
poetry of Blake, Rossetti, and the "decadents". Finally, it also accounted for
the editors' own activities in furniture design, and their interest in the graphic
arts, raising to the status of fine art, such arts as woodcuts, printing, and
book design. Almost every Hobby Horse writer believed in the combination of
tradition andcontemporaneity, though usually
instrong opposition
to the academic
mix which required copying Old Masters. In later volumes a kind of geometry of
artistic principles was articulated. The main hypotheses were (1) organicism,
in which the sequence of parts from primary (structure) to secondary (decorative)
is inevitable, as in living things, and (2) formalism through "severe simplicity
and economy of means".
With the emphasis on linear simplicity and economy of means, or functionalism,
Hobby Horse artists devalued decoration and ornamentation. A comparison of
objets drart of the Great Exhibition of 1851 with the simplicity of Morris'
designs, so often praised in Hobby Horse, or with Century Guild designs for
furniture and rooms in the Exhibition of 1887 reveals the antithesis between
Hobby Horse art and popular taste. Through abstract principles they hoped to
counter the imitative tendencies in art, particularly in Victorian architecture.
The principles of design which Hobby Horse endorsed had already been practicedto a considerable degree by Victorian architects, especially by R. Norman Shaw,
whose relatively unadorned houses and non-historicist decoration (neither Gothic
nor Greek) were models of simplicity and functionalism. Both Mackmurdo and Home
were influenced as architects by Victorian revivalism and by the possibility
that a total living environment could be unified through design. Like Shaw,
Home and Mackmurdo tried to find a particularly English architectural idiom
based on a combination of the work by great English architects of the past and
a thorough understanding of contemporary needs in living space and comfort.
In opposition to historicism, the principle of design denies time and
place. Since these principles are universal, their significance is in their
very abstraction from any particular historical use of them. In addition, these
principles offer a touchstone by which to judge the art of any period or nation.Home and Mackmurdo used design principles to distinguish criteria for judginga building's worth. Preservation could be justified on the basis either of
historical value or aesthetic value. Abstracted principles of design allowed
such a distinction to be made. For example, Mackmurdo's book on Wren's churches,
and Home's Hobby Horse essays on Wren, Jones, Gibbs, and architectural preser
vation all argue for aesthetic appreciation, physical preservation, and accurate
historical restoration according to considerations appropriate to the separate
categories of history and aesthetics. Home and Mackmurdo articulated a refined
defense of architectural preservation and restoration, issues which were discussed
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another characteristic of late Victorian aestheticism and reflected an oppositionto the emotionalism of popular Victorian genre paintings.
However, by comparison with art nouveau, the designs of Home and Mackmurdo
appear restrained; lines are thick and have volume and density.^
Curvilinear
lines never recoil back on themselves as they are inclined to do in art nouveau
designs. Rather, Hobby Horse taste in design consistently maintained clearvertical and horizontal axes. Symmetry was a compositional principle, and there
was a clear articulation between the dominant figure and subordinate vegetal
background, unlike the ambiguity of figure and ground in Art Nouveau, notoriously
in the case of Beardsley's work.
A third innovation attributable to Hobby Horse was the interest in, and
creation of, beautiful books as art objects. The book was an important medium
for several reasons. Physically it enabled visual images and literature to exist
together in parallel or complementary relationships. Rarely did the art simply
illustrate the literature, and in this non-illustrative symbiosis Hobby Horse
was the antithesis of popular magazines such as Strand, Once a Week, and so on.
Secondly, the book was a way of reaching an erudite audience and at the same
time avoiding the popular channels of communication, particularly the annual art
exhibition. Mackmurdo felt that such exhibitions sullied art by bringing it
into proximity with the world of Mammon, the commercial world he called a "rotten
row". As a result of the book format, the book itself became, like medieval
illuminated manuscripts, a total art form, combining art and literature without
resorting to illustration or naturalism, preserving the symbolic features of
both art and literature (Hobby Horse almost exclusively printed essays and
poetry). Choices in margin widths and lettering were considered aesthetic
matters. The quality of book production of Hobby Horse set a precedent for
Morris' Kelmscott Press, and, later, for designers like Ricketts and Shannon
in whose work the restrained curves, symmetrical balance, and domination of
naturalism by pattern comes close to Hobby Horse design.
Hobby Horse was "the first periodical to create a serious interest in the
craft of book production and treat the printing of each page as a considered
unity".5
Behind the total book concept lay the idea of the Renaissance scholar
artist-craftsman. Mackmurdo initially had hoped to counter increasing
specialization by uniting the arts and encouraging artists to work in several
genres of disciplines. Hobby Horse men derived many of their principles from
the Renaissance they envisioned and mythologized. Mackmurdo claimed that the
Renaissance provided a precedent for the unity of the arts and of art and
industry. He believed that the modern world was out of step in separatingart from technology and science, and that the unity of the arts with crafts and
with science was a necessary preconditon of a renascence of English culture in
the nineteenth century. He and Home believed the Renaissance embodied the
ideals they held dear: the gift of design, the Platonic conceptualism motivating
great art, free choice of subject matter, humanizing subject matter outside the
dictates of the church, repugnance to external rules, and multi-talented artist
scholars .
Arthur Galton's stirring poem described Hobby Horse men as knights akin to
those in Spenser's Faerie Queene fighting commercialism and the lack of community
spirit among artists:
Our Queen is bound: men traffic her for gold
Base traders hold her royal realms in fee.
Some recreant Knights their brotherhood deny,
Others to Mammon their bright arms have sold.
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In their aesthetic beliefs Hobby Horse writers rejected Ruskin's influence.
The reaction against Ruskin in the 1870s and 1880s reflected an aversion to
didacticism in art and to nature as the subject of art. Ruskin's emphasis on
the importance of visual analysis, natural subject matter, and didactic contentwere antithetical to
Hobby Horse interests in the human figure, idealism, and
synthesis through two-dimensionality and design. Image's argument that the
imagination's role was "to render us sensitive to the experience of some of the
most exquisite pleasures of which our nature is capable"*?was akin to Pater's
famous dictum in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, about burning with a "gemlikeflame". Experience, according to Image, however, was strained through "the
region of ideas" (not the senses ? la Pater) which "are the ultimate basis of
widely-reaching and permanent human activities".
Hobby Horse men went about saving art's reputation and separated it from
ethics and institutionalized religion. Through the "region of ideas", Image
argued for the separation of art from morality, while fending off Evangelicalattacks on art as merely sensuous. Image especially desired to persuade his
readers that the popular appeal of art was justified on the basis not of morality
(he called art as moral as math) , but rather on the basis of its capacity to
bring happiness, a view identical to Morris' argument in "The Aims of Art".
For Image, "art for art's sake" referred to a self-contained pleasure and
happiness derived by "creating another world of interests and loveliness",
analogous to nature's and to civilization's worlds. Image separated art both
from nature and from moral and religious dogma.
Hobby Horse men similarly subscribed to Pater's views on stylistic change.In The Renaissance, Pater described the cycles by which an art of strangeness
and innovation (e.g. , Botticelli, Dante) gradually became assimilated and
accepted until that art, in turn, became a classical model for later generations.Pater's concept of strangeness was employed by Home in his essays on seventeenth
and eighteenth-century English architecture. For Home, an art of strangenesswas exemplified by Blake's poetry, whose "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" Home
published from the original Cambridge manuscript, and by Botticelli's art.
The combination of historical and contemporary views about the nature of
art were uneasily wed, and their marriage could only be sustained for a short
time. In the final Hobby Horse issues, writers feebly argued that art was
essential to society, and taught us how to live and cope with arapidly changing
society and 'future shock' : "All great masters that have lived in a nation,
primarily have been, before all else, zealous citizens".?
The arts were,
supposedly, united by a shared prophetic and cooperative social message, as well
as by a functional formalism and the Renaissance exemplum. Yet it is clear that
the problematic concerns which animated Hobby Horse in its early years had
withered; by1900 formal issues dominated an art world in which artists were
specialists in aesthetic sensibility. Despite the influences of Ruskin and
Morris on attempts to improve crafts and design and to unify the arts, the most
striking difference between Hobby Horse essays and these predecessors is that
Hobby Horse was not Utopian in its pronouncements. After Mackmurdo's departure
the magazine's essays were directed at an audience of educated art specialists,
and not at workingmen or amateurs. The fatalistic tone of the poetry by Home,
Dowson, and Johnson reflected the general tone of the art in its fated images
of gods, goddesses, and Roman decadents. Despite Mackmurdo's and Image's pleas
for broadening art's social basis and for educational reform in the arts and
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crafts, most Hobby Horse writers expressed little or no hope of changing the
taste of their contemporaries. The aesthetic values and tone of the magazine
stand somewhere between the Utopian idealism of Morris and Ruskin and the
specialized art for art's sake coterie world of The Yellow Book and Savoy,.
Albeit, by the time Hobby Horse began, the notion that design was auniversal concept underlying the arts, the creed of art for art's sake, and the
belief that art was primarily a beautiful object above all else had already been
articulated by artists and critics.22 What Hobby Horse contributed to these
issues was an attempted synthesis of the design-oriented art for art's sake
aesthetic first with an outdated social purpose and idealism (through Mackmurdo
and Image) and later (through Home) with analytic, formalist, and historical
methods for understanding the principles of design and the historical application
of these principles in the history of art. Beyond foreshadowing art nouveau or
even Bauhaus aesthetics,2^ Hobby Horse foreshadowed the modern art historical
methods of documentation, visual analysis, comparison-contrast approach, and
the examination of the relationship of a work to its historical precedents or
sources and to the tastes of its own age. Hobby Horse articulated a rising
historical awareness applied to the study of art.
Despite the claims of Arthur Symons thatHobby Horse was a predecessor of
The Yellow Book, there are noticeable differences between the two publications.
The eroticism and avant-gardism of The Yellow Book emerged infrequently in The
Hobby Horse, and really only in the case of the publication of Dowson's poem,
"Cynara", a daring step of which Home was ever after proud. The Hobby Horse
retained and strengthened its ties to the past, especially the Italian and
English Renaissance, and, furthermore, held at bay French influences which The
Yellow Book embraced. Hobby Horse, furthermore, never intended to ?pater le
bourgeoisie. Its motives and intentions were more conservative and traditional:
to revive an interest in the arts, to define shared fundamental principles in
the arts, and to defend the arts against the dual charges of sensuality and
irrelevance. Unfortunately, as anti-metaphysical and anti-theoretical as theywere, neither Mackmurdo nor Home ever articulated a coherent theory of the
arts or of the interdependence between crafts, fine art, or poetry. The
editors never made the diverse aesthetic borrowings from two generations of
Pre-Raphaelites, from Blake, from crafts guilds, from the Italian Renaissance,
coherent, perhaps due, in part, to their failure to recognize the role of French
painting in the developing formalism at the end of the century, an omission
Roger Fry later corrected.
In many ways, because of its combined scholarly and aesthetic content,
Hobby Horse mirrored changing artistic roles and values and turned away from
Ruskinian social concerns toward specialist and formalist priorities in art.
Its writers tried to create an abstract set of principles for art, like the
principles of late nineteenth-century science, in which theories believed widely
applicable to phenomena dominated particular empirical catalogues of data.
Hobby Horse brought together many current and often conflicting aesthetic issues
in its pages. Part revivalist, part symbolist, part Ruskinian, part specialist,
the magazine records aesthetic changes of the 1880s, particularly the development
of a formalist aesthetic which emphasized design as a fundamental basis of all
arts and crafts and the articulation of an historical method fundamental to
modern art scholarship.
University of Montana
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