Florida Pier index
Domesticating Art
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (May 13, 1911) : 23
hathitrust : link
Domesticating Art
Galleries wherein are exhibited art objects of any kind whatsoever seem to bring out all that is most domestic in the nature of those people who make the round of the exhibit directly behind or before you. It is doubtful if any of us have ever visited such a place without overhearing one voice condemn as beyond redemption a museum piece, with: “I wouldn’t care to live with though.” One of Turner’s extremely spacious canvases in his early panoramic style is gazed at by two quiet little ladies, and left with this final, inevitable remark. It is the ultimatum delivered by the majority, and one is so put to it to know how they came, one and all, to regard as the last test of what is beautiful its adaptability for fitting into their more or less tasteless abodes. It proves that they are to a man entirely satisfied with their household ornaments; a depressing conclusion, as it has always seemed likely, and charitable to believe, that those inanimate objects which cluster around us do so, not by our will, but by our weak good nature in not refusing to inherit the blunders of our parents and the crass-nesses of our friends. It is equally deducible that whatever, after close inspection, remains stubbornly outside the bibelot class, has shown itself worthy of their condemnation; perhaps because, on its refusing to grant them admittance to a world not of their ken where it holds a high place on grounds they cannot at all make out, the only self-respecting course left open to them is the recrimination of denying that it would be welcome in the only worlds where they have any place at all — which are, of course, their homes.
It seems impossible to believe that they apply the same test to everything else with which they come in contact. Short work would be made of the people we meet if they were to be dismissed summarily on our not wishing to live with them; for whom, when it comes to that, do we want to live with? We live with people either by an accident over which we have had no control, and cannot remedy, or because it is the only way to assure not se[e]ing too much of ourselves, and more than a little of them. We do not like scenery because it would or would not prove amenable to being converted into a front lawn — even the stupidest of us have not reached that point; it is, in a word, only works of art that reveal us in this determinedly domestic phase, and works of art we must and will reduce to furniture. When they show themselves not reducible, we question their worth as works of art .
And after all we are, if nothing else, utilitarian, for what, if we cannot use cabinets as wardrobes and pictures as wall decorations is the earthly use, as far as we are concerned, of their existing at all? We cannot extravagantly admire them, and that is the only alternative to using them comfortably. If we admired them, then the entire question would be different, or else never raised at all. To admire is to make pilgrimages, to feel that what we admire most is rightfully difficult of access, to prefer it so, and not to dream of possession, unless we are very great people indeed, but, on the contrary, to doubt so much as hardly to consider for a moment our right to be singled out from the rest of mankind for a owning and housing of something we declare by the homage we pay it to be beyond ownership. Having dwelt on the opposite of that very general instinct to domesticate art, the domesticating tribe seem but to have had their drollness emphasized, rather than to have had it in the least explained away.
Fancy their not for a moment wondering if either they or their household gods would be rendered out of scale and forever reduced by the introduction of so considerable gem, but all trippingly and blithely deciding that the gem, not having those folksy, livable qualities it should have, need not retain their attention longer, and they can, on having discovered that about it, pass on to something else. The number of things we “wouldn’t care to live with though” perhaps accounts for the record time in which galleries can and have been done.
On Skipping in Books
When a book is difficult of reading, when it is, in fact, a book which nothing but a moral resolve or a stimulating companion would ever have led to one’s reading, the odd discovery is made that the question of understanding it depends entirely on having the reckless bravery to make an almost immoral dash through the stiffer bits. It is not to be thought for a moment that skipping is advised. If one skips, one is in some way pushed out of the book, and never can a satisfactory re-entrance be made. It is only stated that, if one has not the hardihood to work up to a certain speed, the knotty points cannot be at all grasped. When an author so immersed in his subject as almost to have sunk out of sight starts out with a premise or a hypothetical question, the tyro at books of such a solidity does not dare plod. To plod is to be obliged to understand each sentence or section of a sentence as it comes and to fit the next on it, keeping the narrow road of the author’s meaning, without missing a step of his orderly march. This requires a mind of parts. For celebration, which is half dogged intention and half hopeful intuition, an entirely different method is necessary.
Read fast, read at pace which might almost be called pellmell, do not stop for a doubt of what it is all about, go as fast as you can, and when you grasp, reeling, the final period, it is ten to one that you will have in some way reached your goal with an understanding of what you have come through. You could not say from what words you tore the idea in passing; in going back over the ground you are baffled by the network of deliberate phrasing, but all lawlessly, inexplicably, and admittedly even by those who know, your speed achieved the result of preventing your stumbling, and by a happy miracle your desire has outrun your stupidity.
24 July 2026