that would have touched his heart. The world never needed
sanctuaries more than it does to-day. In old days it was
comparatively easy for a man to run away and hide himself for a time
in the desert or the monastery, but the spread of civilization has
rendered that impossible. Mr. Cunninghame-Graham has spoken of St.
Francis feeding the birds, but to-day St. Francis would be
snapshotted, birds and all, to form an exclusive picture the next
morning. There are three classes which need sanctuary more than
others: birds, wild flowers and Prime Ministers. Prime Ministers
want some place where they will not be snapshotted, where they can be
private, and where they can perch for a moment on a fence and look at
the landscape without being "shooed" off. Thanks to Lord Lee, I have
my sanctuary at Chequers, and therefore I feel it incumbent upon me
to be here to-day to open this sanctuary for my fellow-sufferers who
find London at times a little crowded and a little lacking in that
privacy they require for their best development.
There is another reason why we are beginning to feel the necessity
for something of this kind. Those of us who love the country and
country things feel in our bones the urbanisation of our land and the
need that something should be done to preserve our birds and our
flowers. It behoves us all to act because of that love which exists
in English people wherever they may be found, the love and craving
for beauty which they can rarely see, rarely know, and rarely realise
in their own lives. We ought to do everything we can to foster that
spirit, and it is in the belief that this day we are helping to draw
people's attention to bird life that I rejoice to be allowed to
unveil this memorial.
ART
DINNER OF THE ARTISTS' GENERAL BENEVOLENT
INSTITUTION
6_th May_, 1925
On an occasion such as this I recall my boyhood days, when some of my
excitements consisted in coming to London from Worcestershire to
visit my uncle, Sir Edward Poynter, who then lived in Wood Lane. It
was a little old-fashioned country house with a garden, where now
there is the power-station of an electric light company, and
opposite, where the White City stands, were open fields. The
friendship which I enjoyed with my uncle was one which lasted from
the earliest days I can remember to the day of his death. I made my
first acquaintance with Italy as a young man in his company.
It is strange and curious to look back on those days, and to remember
that atmosphere of art and culture, of wit and humour, and to
recognise what one owes to it. One learns, in having the privilege
in youth of mixing with men like that, and their friends, the
inestimable value of such an association for after life, even for one
who has taken a far different career, and who, owing to a strange
concatenation of circumstances, finds himself to-day Prime Minister.
I learnt there, all unconsciously, the value of work. The men I am
thinking of were workmen, first and foremost. They were men who
worked at what they loved and who felt that it was due to the art
they loved to give it every power that God had given them. If, at
any time, they went for holidays they painted all the time, because
they liked it. That is the secret of good work, and the secret,
incidentally, of happiness. They would never tolerate scamped work.
Burne-Jones, a keener critic of himself than any of his outside
critics were, knew perfectly well where his own defects lay, and he
worked for years in middle life to master that draughtsmanship that
he had not learnt as a young man, because his decision to become an
artist was only taken after he had left Oxford. All men who love
their craft, and who believe in it and live for it, are their own
best critics. I learnt from this man, in addition to the value of
work, a complete indifference to all criticism, except that which
combines the two essential gifts of sincerity and truth. I also
learnt from the quality of those men and their friends, and from the
conversations I unconsciously heard, to form my own standards of
value in after life, rather than to attribute brilliancy, as I am so
often asked to do in London, to something that I know is in itself
essentially second-rate. I say these things to explain why I am
present on this occasion. I know that if any relations of mine, to
whom I have referred, had happened to die before they had achieved
fame and reputation, their widows and orphans would have been
dependent upon the funds of this institution (the Artists' General
Benevolent Institution) for their livelihood. Therefore, I feel that
I owe it to the memory of those I loved, who have played so large a
part in my own spiritual and mental development, to help in however
small a degree by saying something in aid of this great charity.
Art, in popular estimation, is going up in the world and politicians
are going down; but the time was, and not so long ago, when if a man
died who had been an artist, unless he had the good fortune to be a
baronet and a millionaire, the newspapers always said, "The deceased,
much against his family's wishes, became an artist." At that time it
was thought a very desirable thing to be a statesman. I am not sure
that to-day in the obituary notices you may not read that the
deceased, much against his family's wishes, had embraced politics as
a career.
I would like to emphasise the absolute necessity of the artist giving
his whole time to concentration on his work, just as in political
life a man has to devote his whole mind and strength to the almost
superhuman task which is imposed upon him, and to confine his
attention strictly to his work, lest the quality of that work should
suffer.
The present are difficult times for those who try to live by the
profession of art of any kind. They are difficult because times are
bad. There is not a great deal of money about in this country, and
we are not a people who naturally spend money on the encouragement of
art if we can spend it on anything else. Those who have the most
money, millionaires, not unnaturally are in the hands of the dealers.
One of the great difficulties always seems to me, as an outsider
knowing nothing of these matters, to be that there has been worked up
an entirely fictitious value in the pictures of the dead. I hope
this may arise from a high motive; from a feeling that having let
many artists and poets in the past starve in their lifetime, we
should allow them to provide a living for anyone who can make it out
of them. When a very rich man wants to invest money in pictures, he
wants to invest it in something that will not lose its value, and as
long as the dealer keeps up the value of the old masters he knows it
is safe. But if he wants to buy a modern work of art he has to
exercise his own judgment, and if his judgment is wrong he loses his
money. So the artist to-day, however good he may be, has everything
militating against him. There may be prizes from a worldly point of
view for the few, but in these days there must be, financially, only
too many failures; though whether they fail or succeed they have a
real pleasure in the actual performance of their work. Taking
artists as a whole, whether they have been what the world calls
successful, or not, they are a very happy confraternity. The artist
and the poet can, and often do, solace themselves with the thought
that if the people of this generation do not appreciate their work,
they may yet be painting or writing for generations to come, and the
thought of recognition by posterity, provided that the wolf is kept
from the door, is in itself a great comfort and strength.
ARTISTS AND POLITICIANS
AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY
2_nd May_, 1925
I should like, if I may, on behalf of my colleagues who are here
to-night, to congratulate you, Mr. President, on your election to the
great office which you hold, and to express our sympathy with the
Academy in the loss they have sustained in the death of Mr. John
Sargent--a great man, as well as a great artist. His memory will be
cherished through his paintings, and his art will be a prized
possession of posterity. And, Sir, I should like to congratulate you
on this singular achievement in getting together an assembly of such
distinction in London on a Saturday night. I remember trying to
secure an eminent Englishman as a much-desired trustee of the
National Gallery. He was a master of English and a scholar, and so
he was able to express himself as I could not when he declined that
great honour. He wrote to me: "No; they have a damnable habit of
holding their meetings on a Saturday."
Now I understand these are friendly gatherings at which confidences
may be given and exchanged, and I should like to tell you something
of the difficulties of a Prime Minister's life. A Prime Minister has
to form a Cabinet. I reflected when I was making mine that I should
have to appear to-night at Burlington House, and I thought the
greatest compliment I could pay the Academy would be to include, if
possible, a painter in the Cabinet. I thought I would choose someone
who could paint with a broad brush, and I regret extremely that he,
at the last moment, had to cancel his engagement here to-night. I
need hardly say I refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. When I
had secured my artist, the question was where to put him. I at once
decided that the right place for him was where he would have problems
to study of currency and exchange, and where he would be dealing with
mathematics. Many of my critics were hostile, but they were not
astonished. If they had known their Plato they would have known at
once why I asked him to go to the Exchequer. Many here will remember
what Plato said to the Delians. When the oracle set a problem, Plato
said: "It must be supposed not that the god specially wished this
problem solved, but that he would have the Greeks desist from war and
wickedness and cultivate the Muses, so that, their passions being
assuaged by philosophy and mathematics, they might live in innocent
and mutually helpful intercourse with one another." It is an
extraordinary thing how the solution of many of our difficulties was
really found many years ago.
Now I said there were many points of resemblance between your careers
and ours. Neither artists nor politicians can by any figure of
speech be said to belong to organised labour. Labour, yes;
organised, no. What power have we to strike? If every artist in
this country laid down his brush to-night, would a ripple pass over
the country? If I laid down my brush to-night, are there not fifty
men who would be ready to take it up? But then, on the other hand,
you cannot be nationalised, and neither can we. It is sometimes to
your advantage, and sometimes the advantage rests with us. Now take
criticism. We both either suffer or enjoy criticism. There I think
the advantage is with us. We, if we think fit, can answer back.
These canvases on the wall have to take it in contemptuous silence.
Your instruments by which you work so well are dumb--pencils and
paints. Ours are neither dumb nor inert. I often think that we
rather resemble Alice in Wonderland, who tried to play croquet with a
flamingo instead of a mallet.
Then, again, with both of us, to achieve success it is necessary to
mix our colours, so as to produce a harmonious whole. But your
colours have an advantage over those which are mixed on our palette.
In the language of the trade, your colours are fast; ours are not so
necessarily. You mix your colours to form a harmonious result, but
it may be after four or five years some of the colours, which you
thought the most beautiful, have faded and have been unable to stand
the bright light of day, and those which you thought mixed well in
the general scheme have come up hard and crude and dominate the whole
picture. We politicians are, and must of necessity be,
impressionists--impressionists, because we want to catch the public
eye, and we hope that we can make our meaning clear. We also
trust--my colleagues and I--that people will not examine our
workmanship too closely, lest they find defects in it which are not
visible at a distance. But there is one thing in which you have a
great advantage. If when you complete a piece of work you do not
like it, you can put your boot through it. With us the boot is on
the other leg.
I have noticed sometimes that advice is given to the artists of this
country to make a clean sweep of the Academy. It is always a
revolutionary people who think a clean sweep must result in something
which will give keen satisfaction. While, in the last four years,
the Academy has remained without great change, we have made a clean
sweep of three Governments, and we have a fourth in--and yet people
are not satisfied. So may there not be something said even for
keeping an Academy or keeping a Government?
There is one thing that we do have in common. No man in politics can
ever hope to achieve his desire--he can never accomplish the veriest
fragment of what he would will to do. In the same way, in the breast
of every artist who is an artist--and it is not everyone who uses a
brush who is an artist--there is a secret known only to himself and
spoken of to none--that ideal which he is ever seeking and ever
following up, and never in this world captures. It is that which
drives men on to their best and finest work. I doubt if any real
artist has ever satisfied himself. Occasionally, there comes what
Kipling has called the "magic," whether it be in poetry, in prose, or
in art, before which the voice of criticism is dumb--the art that
speaks straight to the soul of the world. Few of us can hope to
achieve that, and I think perhaps if I were to choose any words with
which to conclude, I would choose those that may be taken either for
your work or for ours--the words that Browning put into the mouth of
Andrea del Sarto:
I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame
Or their praise either.
_ON EDUCATION_
SELF-EDUCATION
AT BIRKBECK COLLEGE
20_th March_, 1924
The faith that can remove mountains was the faith of the pioneers of
Birkbeck College, and some of them lived to see the College as we
know it to-day--a solid, stable and permanent institution. It is a
great and triumphant story of which you may well be proud. But I
think that it would be useful to remember that if you wished to
understand history and sympathise with the founder and pioneers of
the College, you must not make the fatal mistake of reading our
history to-day, or of a hundred years ago, in the light of the
present time; you must try to throw yourselves back a century, and
consider a few of the ways in which the training you have had may
help you in your after life.
A hundred years ago popular education, so far as any one thought of
it, was regarded as a dangerous explosive. Those times have passed.
A hundred years ago London was a comparatively small city compared
with the one we know. There were no police. The parish constables
were not allowed to go beyond the confines of their own parishes, and
the night watchman kept the peace of the city. Old London Bridge was
still in existence. Waterloo Bridge had only just been built. Gas
had only just been introduced into the streets when the first
students came to the College. Contrast the position of the Press
to-day with what it was in those days. At that time there was a
bye-law under which no man who contributed to the Press was eligible
to be called to the Bar, and the Lord Chancellor of the day caused
great consternation and indignation amongst his friends by asking the
editor of the _Times_ to dine with him. To-day, which of us would
not feel proud if we were asked to dine with a newspaper proprietor?
Again, to touch upon another aspect of life, the Elizabethan Poor Law
was still the law of the land. Of the million and a quarter people
in London at that time one in every eight was in receipt of Poor Law
relief.
But hardly ever in the history of our country, or of any other
country, was there a more wonderful and brilliant period in the
literature of England than in and around the years when the College
was founded. It shows that, although in many ways the country was
what the people of to-day would call backward and unprogressive, yet
a literary movement was going on which would be a glory to any
country for all time. I need only name Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth,
Byron (who died in 1824, within two years of Keats and Shelley),
Carlyle, Tennyson, John Henry Newman (one of the greatest masters of
English prose), Thackeray, Browning and Dickens. There was a galaxy
of talent of the highest order in a literature that stands second to
none in the world, and it was a great thing that the College took its
origin from such a time. No country can compare with our own in the
literature of that period, and yet at that time there was Goethe in
Germany, while Dumas had just gone to Paris and was to present in the
succeeding year his first play. That amazing efflorescence in
literature was accompanied, as sometimes it is, by an efflorescence
in art and music.
I have always firmly held that there is no race with more ability
latent than our own, or with a higher aptitude for mechanical genius.
When the College was founded, Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, all
sons of working men, were inventing the machines which brought in the
cotton industry. I mention these names to show the stuff of which
our people are made, and how that stuff is worth training and
educating. It would be a very interesting subject, for anyone who
cared to explore it, to see how many of the mechanical inventions
which are light-heartedly attributed to Americans are really the
product of British brains, whether they were British brains which
have gone to work in that country, or the brains of children of
British parents who have gone there. But, having regard to the
foundation of this College and the men who went to it in its early
days, it is a wonderful thing to reflect that practically the
Industrial Revolution, for good or evil, was the work very largely of
six or seven men who sprang from the ranks of the people, with no
advantages such as you have had; and that they were men who changed
the face of the country and the habits of the lives of the people.
It is probably true that the great number of men who sacrificed their
time and their leisure to work and study did so to help themselves to
get on in life. But that was not the fundamental reason: there lay
behind it the desire of knowledge for its own sake, the will to force
a way through those doors that lead to a kingdom of beauty,
literature and art.
I am a fair sample myself of the evening student. Many people tried
to educate me, but the reaction was not always successful. A great
part of my education took place after I had gone into business, on
railway journeys and at odd moments, and for some years, when I was
working all day, I would read nearly every night. This was the
education, I feel, that did me most good. I learned that all of us
have to work hard for our living. Some may do work they enjoy; some
may not. Then there comes a time when one feels that one is no use,
and that the work itself is difficult and sordid. It is at these
times that we may thank God for what we have learned in any school
which will enable us to get away from our surroundings into an inner
secret chamber. From this we may go with renewed strength to any
work that is toward.
There are many definitions of education. The first thing is to be
master of our own job; but to be educated we must know enough of the
other man's job to be able to understand the part he is playing in
life, and to play our own part in sympathy with him. We have also to
learn to play our part as members of the commonwealth, or, in other
words, to have humanity, by which I mean the knowledge of the things
that pertain to humanity, of the way to go about among our fellows,
ready to help and to sympathise with them. Do not go through life as
a perpetual blister.
If it be not heresy to say so, do not pay too much attention to
examinations. Do not be afflicted with pride of intellect. In my
view, pride of intellect is more vulgar that the pride of the
_nouveau riche_ in his wealth, for the simple reason that the
_nouveau riche_ has made his own money, whereas your intellect is the
gift of God. You may polish it up and get the best out of it, but
for the instrument you are less responsible than any man.
Just as I would advise no man to become a political leader--although
political leaders are necessary--so I would strongly advise no man to
become merely a specialist. Always have other interests which will
keep you in touch with your fellow-men and women. There is no real
republicanism except that of literature. If I find a human face
light up at some quotation which everyone ought to know, that man, be
he duke or dustman, is my brother. That is the bond of literature.
Study it, the glorious literature of the first country in the
world--your own.
POLITICAL EDUCATION
AT THE PHILIP STOTT COLLEGE
27_th September_, 1923
Amidst all the multifarious duties that fall to my lot, some pleasant
and some less pleasant, you have combined to give me to-day a really
happy afternoon's outing. I have the greatest admiration, Sir
Philip, for this great work upon which you have embarked. It is the
grain of mustard seed which will become a great tree that may
overshadow the earth, and I am proud to meet so many of those who are
fired with the same enthusiasm that you have and that I have for
education of the kind that you provide here. It is a great privilege
to be allowed to speak to you for a few minutes on that subject.
There are few movements in this country in my view that augur better
for the future, or that in themselves bear a higher and truer tribute
to the best that is in our nature than the great, voluntary efforts
that are being made in this country for adult education; and if there
be anyone here who may at times feel a passing regret for the closing
of the great houses of England, it must be an immense consolation to
see from the ashes of the past springing up a new and hopeful life
like this within their walls. That can do nothing but good for the
men who come here, and for the country of which they are a part.
I have a peculiar sympathy with adult education, because I have
followed it to the best of my ability all my life. I was very much
interested to find a peculiar instance recently of that interest
which all English people take in education, not always instructed,
but always present, because, when I became Prime Minister, a
well-known lady in society whose acquaintance I had not had the
pleasure of making, asked this question of a friend of mine: "Is the
new Prime Minister what you would call an educated man?" I doubt
very much whether she knew what was implied by the word "educated";
but it showed, at any rate, that she felt that education was a good
thing in itself, and a thing which it was desirable should be
possessed by anyone aspiring to the post of Prime Minister. That is
all to the good. But I expect all of you have learned, as I have,
that education is a process and a thing that is never finished. And
it is a wonderful thing that here, in this movement, we find one more
instance in our history of that triumph of voluntary effort from
which have sprung all the best movements and the best things in our
country from the beginning of its history. You take a movement like
that of the Boy Scouts; it did not originate with the War Office.
You take the Salvation Army; it did not come from Canterbury. The
Franciscans did not come from Rome; and in the same way this great
movement of education did not take its origin in Whitehall. It
sprang--where all these things have sprung from--it sprang from the
very heart of the people, and that is what gives it its strength, and
that is what is going to continue to give power to the movement.
I was very impressed by a few words that I read in a prospectus of
the College, that the aim of the curriculum here is "to furnish
instruction which will equip the trade unionist or the co-operator,
on the one hand, to take an active and effective interest in the
affairs of his or her society, and on the other, a Parliamentarian or
a business man to discharge with greater knowledge and insight such
duties of citizenship as may devolve upon him."