In what manner it is absurd, merely foolishly impatient or foolishly
cavilling, to ask. Not certainly by a return to the past and its
methods, but by the coming of the future with new methods having the
same result: the maintenance and tolerable quality of human life, of
body and soul. Hence probably by a further development of democratic
institutions and machine industry, but democratic institutions neither
authoritative nor _laissez faire_; machinery of which the hand and
mind of men will be the guide, not the slave.
One or two guesses may perhaps be warranted. First, that the
distribution of wealth, or more properly of work and idleness, will
gradually be improved, and the exploitation of individuals in great
gangs cease; hence that the workman will be able once more to see and
shape what he is making, and that, on the other side, the possessor of
objects will have to use them, and therefore learn their appearance
and care for them; also that many men will possess enough, and
scarcely any men possess much more than enough, so that what there is
of houses, furniture, chattels, books or pictures in private
possession may be enjoyed at leisure and with unglutted appetite, and
for that reason be beautiful. We may also guess that willing
co-operation in peaceful employments, that spontaneous formation of
groups of opinion as well as of work, and the multiplication of small
centres of activity, may create a demand for places of public
education and amusement and of discussion and self-expression, and
revive those celebrations, religious and civil, in which the art of
Antiquity and of the Middle Ages found its culmination; the service of
large bodies and of the community absorbing the higher artistic gifts
in works necessarily accessible to the multitude; and the humbler
talents--all the good amateur quality at present wasted in ambitious
efforts--being applied in every direction to the satisfaction of
individual artistic desire.
If such a distribution of artistic activity should seem, to my
contemporaries, Utopian, I would point out that it has existed
throughout the past, and in states of society infinitely worse than
are ever likely to recur. For even slaves and serfs could make unto
themselves some kind of art befitting their conditions; and even the
most despotic aristocracies and priesthoods could adequately express
their power and pride only in works which even the slave and serf was
able to see. In the whole of the world's art history, it is this
present of ours which forms the exception; and as the changes of the
future will certainly be for greater social health and better social
organisation, it is not likely that this bad exception will be the
beginning of a new rule.