HEREAFTER I hope in another lecture to have the pleasure of laying before
you an historical survey of the lesser, or as they are called the
Decorative Arts, and I must confess it would have been pleasanter to me
to have begun my talk with you by entering at once upon the subject of
the history of this great industry; but, as I have something to say in a
third lecture about various matters connected with the practice of
Decoration among ourselves in these days, I feel that I should be in a
false position before you, and one that might lead to confusion, or
overmuch explanation, if I did not let you know what I think on the
nature and scope of these arts, on their condition at the present time,
and their outlook in times to come. In doing this it is like enough that
I shall say things with which you will very much disagree; I must ask you
therefore from the outset to believe that whatever I may blame or
whatever I may praise, I neither, when I think of what history has been,
am inclined to lament the past, to despise the present, or despair of the
future; that I believe all the change and stir about us is a sign of the
world’s life, and that it will lead—by ways, indeed, of which we have no
guess—to the bettering of all mankind.
Now as to the scope and nature of these Arts I have to say, that though
when I come more into the details of my subject I shall not meddle much
with the great art of Architecture, and less still with the great arts
commonly called Sculpture and Painting, yet I cannot in my own mind quite
sever them from those lesser so-called Decorative Arts, which I have to
speak about: it is only in latter times, and under the most intricate
conditions of life, that they have fallen apart from one another; and I
hold that, when they are so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether:
the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of
resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while
the greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great
minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each
other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and become nothing
but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich and
idle men.
However, I have not undertaken to talk to you of Architecture, Sculpture,
and Painting, in the narrower sense of those words, since, most unhappily
as I think, these master-arts, these arts more specially of the
intellect, are at the present day divorced from decoration in its
narrower sense. Our subject is that great body of art, by means of which
men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar
matters of everyday life: a wide subject, a great industry; both a great
part of the history of the world, and a most helpful instrument to the
study of that history.
A very great industry indeed, comprising the crafts of house-building,
painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths’ work, pottery and glass-making,
weaving, and many others: a body of art most important to the public in
general, but still more so to us handicraftsmen; since there is scarce
anything that they use, and that we fashion, but it has always been
thought to be unfinished till it has had some touch or other of
decoration about it. True it is that in many or most cases we have got
so used to this ornament, that we look upon it as if it had grown of
itself, and note it no more than the mosses on the dry sticks with which
we light our fires. So much the worse! for there _is_ the decoration, or
some pretence of it, and it has, or ought to have, a use and a meaning.
For, and this is at the root of the whole matter, everything made by
man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful
if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant
with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent: we, for our
parts, are busy or sluggish, eager or unhappy, and our eyes are apt to
get dulled to this eventfulness of form in those things which we are
always looking at. Now it is one of the chief uses of decoration, the
chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled
senses in this matter: for this end are those wonders of intricate
patterns interwoven, those strange forms invented, which men have so long
delighted in: forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate
nature, but in which the hand of the craftsman is guided to work in the
way that she does, till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural,
nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint.
To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce _use_, that is
one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things
they must perforce _make_, that is the other use of it.
Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without these
arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere
endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.
As for that last use of these arts, the giving us pleasure in our work, I
scarcely know how to speak strongly enough of it; and yet if I did not
know the value of repeating a truth again and again, I should have to
excuse myself to you for saying any more about this, when I remember how
a great man now living has spoken of it: I mean my friend Professor John
Ruskin: if you read the chapter in the 2nd vol. of his _Stones of Venice_
entitled, ‘On the Nature of Gothic, and the Office of the Workman
therein,’ you will read at once the truest and the most eloquent words
that can possibly be said on the subject. What I have to say upon it can
scarcely be more than an echo of his words, yet I repeat there is some
use in reiterating a truth, lest it be forgotten; so I will say this much
further: we all know what people have said about the curse of labour, and
what heavy and grievous nonsense are the more part of their words
thereupon; whereas indeed the real curses of craftsmen have been the
curse of stupidity, and the curse of injustice from within and from
without: no, I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think it
either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one’s hands before one
doing nothing—to live like a gentleman, as fools call it.
Nevertheless there _is_ dull work to be done, and a weary business it is
setting men about such work, and seeing them through it, and I would
rather do the work twice over with my own hands than have such a job: but
now only let the arts which we are talking of beautify our labour, and be
widely spread, intelligent, well understood both by the maker and the
user, let them grow in one word _popular_, and there will be pretty much
an end of dull work and its wearing slavery; and no man will any longer
have an excuse for talking about the curse of labour, no man will any
longer have an excuse for evading the blessing of labour. I believe
there is nothing that will aid the world’s progress so much as the
attainment of this; I protest there is nothing in the world that I desire
so much as this, wrapped up, as I am sure it is, with changes political
and social, that in one way or another we all desire.
Now if the objection be made, that these arts have been the handmaids of
luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs say that it is true
in a sense; they have been so used, as many other excellent things have
been. But it is also true that, among some nations, their most vigorous
and freest times have been the very blossoming times of art: while at the
same time, I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among
oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom: yet I do
not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among
such peoples, art, at least, was free; when it has not been, when it has
really been gripped by superstition, or by luxury, it has straightway
begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget that when men say
popes, kings, and emperors built such and such buildings, it is a mere
way of speaking. You look in your history-books to see who built
Westminster Abbey, who built St. Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell
you Henry III., Justinian the Emperor. Did they? or, rather, men like
you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing
but their work?
Now as these arts call people’s attention and interest to the matters of
everyday life in the present, so also, and that I think is no little
matter, they call our attention at every step to that history, of which,
I said before, they are so great a part; for no nation, no state of
society, however rude, has been wholly without them: nay, there are
peoples not a few, of whom we know scarce anything, save that they
thought such and such forms beautiful. So strong is the bond between
history and decoration, that in the practice of the latter we cannot, if
we would, wholly shake off the influence of past times over what we do at
present. I do not think it is too much to say that no man, however
original he may be, can sit down to-day and draw the ornament of a cloth,
or the form of an ordinary vessel or piece of furniture, that will be
other than a development or a degradation of forms used hundreds of years
ago; and these, too, very often, forms that once had a serious meaning,
though they are now become little more than a habit of the hand; forms
that were once perhaps the mysterious symbols of worships and beliefs now
little remembered or wholly forgotten. Those who have diligently
followed the delightful study of these arts are able as if through
windows to look upon the life of the past:—the very first beginnings of
thought among nations whom we cannot even name; the terrible empires of
the ancient East; the free vigour and glory of Greece; the heavy weight,
the firm grasp of Rome; the fall of her temporal Empire which spread so
wide about the world all that good and evil which men can never forget,
and never cease to feel; the clashing of East and West, South and North,
about her rich and fruitful daughter Byzantium; the rise, the
dissensions, and the waning of Islam; the wanderings of Scandinavia; the
Crusades; the foundation of the States of modern Europe; the struggles of
free thought with ancient dying system—with all these events and their
meaning is the history of popular art interwoven; with all this, I say,
the careful student of decoration as an historical industry must be
familiar. When I think of this, and the usefulness of all this
knowledge, at a time when history has become so earnest a study amongst
us as to have given us, as it were, a new sense: at a time when we so
long to know the reality of all that has happened, and are to be put off
no longer with the dull records of the battles and intrigues of kings and
scoundrels,—I say when I think of all this, I hardly know how to say that
this interweaving of the Decorative Arts with the history of the past is
of less importance than their dealings with the life of the present: for
should not these memories also be a part of our daily life?
And now let me recapitulate a little before I go further, before we begin
to look into the condition of the arts at the present day. These arts, I
have said, are part of a great system invented for the expression of a
man’s delight in beauty: all peoples and times have used them; they have
been the joy of free nations, and the solace of oppressed nations;
religion has used and elevated them, has abused and degraded them; they
are connected with all history, and are clear teachers of it; and, best
of all, they are the sweeteners of human labour, both to the
handicraftsman, whose life is spent in working in them, and to people in
general who are influenced by the sight of them at every turn of the
day’s work: they make our toil happy, our rest fruitful.
And now if all I have said seems to you but mere open-mouthed praise of
these arts, I must say that it is not for nothing that what I have
hitherto put before you has taken that form.
It is because I must now ask you this question: All these good
things—will you have them? will you cast them from you?
Are you surprised at my question—you, most of whom, like myself, are
engaged in the actual practice of the arts that are, or ought to be,
popular?
In explanation, I must somewhat repeat what I have already said. Time
was when the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by
the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with all things made by
man; and in those days all handicraftsmen were _artists_, as we should
now call them. But the thought of man became more intricate, more
difficult to express; art grew a heavier thing to deal with, and its
labour was more divided among great men, lesser men, and little men; till
that art, which was once scarce more than a rest of body and soul, as the
hand cast the shuttle or swung the hammer, became to some men so serious
labour, that their working lives have been one long tragedy of hope and
fear, joy and trouble. This was the growth of art: like all growth, it
was good and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into
decay; like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into
something new.
Into decay; for as the arts sundered into the greater and the lesser,
contempt on one side, carelessness on the other arose, both begotten of
ignorance of that _philosophy_ of the Decorative Arts, a hint of which I
have tried just now to put before you. The artist came out from the
handicraftsmen, and left them without hope of elevation, while he himself
was left without the help of intelligent, industrious sympathy. Both
have suffered; the artist no less than the workman. It is with art as it
fares with a company of soldiers before a redoubt, when the captain runs
forward full of hope and energy, but looks not behind him to see if his
men are following, and they hang back, not knowing why they are brought
there to die. The captain’s life is spent for nothing, and his men are
sullen prisoners in the redoubt of Unhappiness and Brutality.
I must in plain words say of the Decorative Arts, of all the arts, that
it is not so much that we are inferior in them to all who have gone
before us, but rather that they are in a state of anarchy and
disorganisation, which makes a sweeping change necessary and certain.
So that again I ask my question, All that good fruit which the arts
should bear, will you have it? will you cast it from you? Shall that
sweeping change that must come, be the change of loss or of gain?
We who believe in the continuous life of the world, surely we are bound
to hope that the change will bring us gain and not loss, and to strive to
bring that gain about.
Yet how the world may answer my question, who can say? A man in his
short life can see but a little way ahead, and even in mine wonderful and
unexpected things have come to pass. I must needs say that therein lies
my hope rather than in all I see going on round about us. Without
disputing that if the imaginative arts perish, some new thing, at present
unguessed of, _may_ be put forward to supply their loss in men’s lives, I
cannot feel happy in that prospect, nor can I believe that mankind will
endure such a loss for ever: but in the meantime the present state of the
arts and their dealings with modern life and progress seem to me to
point, in appearance at least, to this immediate future; that the world,
which has for a long time busied itself about other matters than the
arts, and has carelessly let them sink lower and lower, till many not
uncultivated men, ignorant of what they once were, and hopeless of what
they might yet be, look upon them with mere contempt; that the world, I
say, thus busied and hurried, will one day wipe the slate, and be clean
rid in her impatience of the whole matter with all its tangle and
trouble.
And then—what then?
Even now amid the squalor of London it is hard to imagine what it will
be. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, with the crowd of lesser arts
that belong to them, these, together with Music and Poetry, will be dead
and forgotten, will no longer excite or amuse people in the least: for,
once more, we must not deceive ourselves; the death of one art means the
death of all; the only difference in their fate will be that the luckiest
will be eaten the last—the luckiest, or the unluckiest: in all that has
to do with beauty the invention and ingenuity of man will have come to a
dead stop; and all the while Nature will go on with her eternal
recurrence of lovely changes—spring, summer, autumn, and winter;
sunshine, rain, and snow; storm and fair weather; dawn, noon, and sunset;
day and night—ever bearing witness against man that he has deliberately
chosen ugliness instead of beauty, and to live where he is strongest
amidst squalor or blank emptiness.
You see, sirs, we cannot quite imagine it; any more, perhaps, than our
forefathers of ancient London, living in the pretty, carefully whitened
houses, with the famous church and its huge spire rising above them,—than
they, passing about the fair gardens running down to the broad river,
could have imagined a whole county or more covered over with hideous
hovels, big, middle-sized, and little, which should one day be called
London.
Sirs, I say that this dead blank of the arts that I more than dread is
difficult even now to imagine; yet I fear that I must say that if it does
not come about, it will be owing to some turn of events which we cannot
at present foresee: but I hold that if it does happen, it will only last
for a time, that it will be but a burning up of the gathered weeds, so
that the field may bear more abundantly. I hold that men would wake up
after a while, and look round and find the dulness unbearable, and begin
once more inventing, imitating, and imagining, as in earlier days.
That faith comforts me, and I can say calmly if the blank space must
happen, it must, and amidst its darkness the new seed must sprout. So it
has been before: first comes birth, and hope scarcely conscious of
itself; then the flower and fruit of mastery, with hope more than
conscious enough, passing into insolence, as decay follows ripeness; and
then—the new birth again.
Meantime it is the plain duty of all who look seriously on the arts to do
their best to save the world from what at the best will be a loss, the
result of ignorance and unwisdom; to prevent, in fact, that most
discouraging of all changes, the supplying the place of an extinct
brutality by a new one; nay, even if those who really care for the arts
are so weak and few that they can do nothing else, it may be their
business to keep alive some tradition, some memory of the past, so that
the new life when it comes may not waste itself more than enough in
fashioning wholly new forms for its new spirit.
To what side then shall those turn for help, who really understand the
gain of a great art in the world, and the loss of peace and good life
that must follow from the lack of it? I think that they must begin by
acknowledging that the ancient art, the art of unconscious intelligence,
as one should call it, which began without a date, at least so long ago
as those strange and masterly scratchings on mammoth-bones and the like
found but the other day in the drift—that this art of unconscious
intelligence is all but dead; that what little of it is left lingers
among half-civilised nations, and is growing coarser, feebler, less
intelligent year by year; nay, it is mostly at the mercy of some
commercial accident, such as the arrival of a few shiploads of European
dye-stuffs or a few dozen orders from European merchants: this they must
recognise, and must hope to see in time its place filled by a new art of
conscious intelligence, the birth of wiser, simpler, freer ways of life
than the world leads now, than the world has ever led.
I said, _to see_ this in time; I do not mean to say that our own eyes
will look upon it: it may be so far off, as indeed it seems to some, that
many would scarcely think it worth while thinking of: but there are some
of us who cannot turn our faces to the wall, or sit deedless because our
hope seems somewhat dim; and, indeed, I think that while the signs of the
last decay of the old art with all the evils that must follow in its
train are only too obvious about us, so on the other hand there are not
wanting signs of the new dawn beyond that possible night of the arts, of
which I have before spoken; this sign chiefly, that there are some few at
least who are heartily discontented with things as they are, and crave
for something better, or at least some promise of it—this best of signs:
for I suppose that if some half-dozen men at any time earnestly set their
hearts on something coming about which is not discordant with nature, it
will come to pass one day or other; because it is not by accident that an
idea comes into the heads of a few; rather they are pushed on, and forced
to speak or act by something stirring in the heart of the world which
would otherwise be left without expression.
By what means then shall those work who long for reform in the arts, and
who shall they seek to kindle into eager desire for possession of beauty,
and better still, for the development of the faculty that creates beauty?
People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and
flourish, you must make it the fashion: a phrase which I confess annoys
me; for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two
days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that
they care very much for what they really do not care in the least, so
that it may happen according to the proverb: _Bell-wether took the leap_,
_and we all went over_. Well, such advisers are right if they are
content with the thing lasting but a little while; say till you can make
a little money—if you don’t get pinched by the door shutting too quickly:
otherwise they are wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many
strings to their bow, and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that
fails, for it to be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not their
fault, they cannot help it, but they have no chance of spending time
enough over the arts to know anything practical of them, and they must of
necessity be in the hands of those who spend their time in pushing
fashion this way and that for their own advantage.
Sirs, there is no help to be got out of these latter, or those who let
themselves be led by them: the only real help for the decorative arts
must come from those who work in them; nor must they be led, they must
lead.
You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you must
be all artists, and good artists too, before the public at large can take
real interest in such things; and when you have become so, I promise you
that you shall lead the fashion; fashion shall follow your hands
obediently enough.
That is the only way in which we can get a supply of intelligent popular
art: a few artists of the kind so-called now, what can they do working in
the teeth of difficulties thrown in their way by what is called Commerce,
but which should be called greed of money? working helplessly among the
crowd of those who are ridiculously called manufacturers, _i.e._
handicraftsmen, though the more part of them never did a stroke of
hand-work in their lives, and are nothing better than capitalists and
salesmen. What can these grains of sand do, I say, amidst the enormous
mass of work turned out every year which professes in some way to be
decorative art, but the decoration of which no one heeds except the
salesmen who have to do with it, and are hard put to it to supply the
cravings of the public for something new, not for something pretty?
The remedy, I repeat, is plain if it can be applied; the handicraftsman,
left behind by the artist when the arts sundered, must come up with him,
must work side by side with him: apart from the difference between a
great master and a scholar, apart from the differences of the natural
bent of men’s minds, which would make one man an imitative, and another
an architectural or decorative artist, there should be no difference
between those employed on strictly ornamental work; and the body of
artists dealing with this should quicken with their art all makers of
things into artists also, in proportion to the necessities and uses of
the things they would make.
I know what stupendous difficulties, social and economical, there are in
the way of this; yet I think that they seem to be greater than they are:
and of one thing I am sure, that no real living decorative art is
possible if this is impossible.
It is not impossible, on the contrary it is certain to come about, if you
are at heart desirous to quicken the arts; if the world will, for the
sake of beauty and decency, sacrifice some of the things it is so busy
over (many of which I think are not very worthy of its trouble), art will
begin to grow again; as for those difficulties above mentioned, some of
them I know will in any case melt away before the steady change of the
relative conditions of men; the rest, reason and resolute attention to
the laws of nature, which are also the laws of art, will dispose of
little by little: once more, the way will not be far to seek, if the will
be with us.
Yet, granted the will, and though the way lies ready to us, we must not
be discouraged if the journey seem barren enough at first, nay, not even
if things seem to grow worse for a while: for it is natural enough that
the very evil which has forced on the beginning of reform should look
uglier, while on the one hand life and wisdom are building up the new,
and on the other folly and deadness are hugging the old to them.
In this, as in all other matters, lapse of time will be needed before
things seem to straighten, and the courage and patience that does not
despise small things lying ready to be done; and care and watchfulness,
lest we begin to build the wall ere the footings are well in; and always
through all things much humility that is not easily cast down by failure,
that seeks to be taught, and is ready to learn.
For your teachers, they must be Nature and History: as for the first,
that you must learn of it is so obvious that I need not dwell upon that
now: hereafter, when I have to speak more of matters of detail, I may
have to speak of the manner in which you must learn of Nature. As to the
second, I do not think that any man but one of the highest genius, could
do anything in these days without much study of ancient art, and even he
would be much hindered if he lacked it. If you think that this
contradicts what I said about the death of that ancient art, and the
necessity I implied for an art that should be characteristic of the
present day, I can only say that, in these times of plenteous knowledge
and meagre performance, if we do not study the ancient work directly and
learn to understand it, we shall find ourselves influenced by the feeble
work all round us, and shall be copying the better work through the
copyists and _without_ understanding it, which will by no means bring
about intelligent art. Let us therefore study it wisely, be taught by
it, kindled by it; all the while determining not to imitate or repeat it;
to have either no art at all, or an art which we have made our own.
Yet I am almost brought to a stand-still when bidding you to study nature
and the history of art, by remembering that this is London, and what it
is like: how can I ask working-men passing up and down these hideous
streets day by day to care about beauty? If it were politics, we must
care about that; or science, you could wrap yourselves up in the study of
facts, no doubt, without much caring what goes on about you—but beauty!
do you not see what terrible difficulties beset art, owing to a long
neglect of art—and neglect of reason, too, in this matter? It is such a
heavy question by what effort, by what dead-lift, you can thrust this
difficulty from you, that I must perforce set it aside for the present,
and must at least hope that the study of history and its monuments will
help you somewhat herein. If you can really fill your minds with
memories of great works of art, and great times of art, you will, I
think, be able to a certain extent to look through the aforesaid ugly
surroundings, and will be moved to discontent of what is careless and
brutal now, and will, I hope, at last be so much discontented with what
is bad, that you will determine to bear no longer that short-sighted,
reckless brutality of squalor that so disgraces our intricate
civilisation.
Well, at any rate, London is good for this, that it is well off for
museums,—which I heartily wish were to be got at seven days in the week
instead of six, or at least on the only day on which an ordinarily busy
man, one of the taxpayers who support them, can as a rule see them
quietly,—and certainly any of us who may have any natural turn for art
must get more help from frequenting them than one can well say. It is
true, however, that people need some preliminary instruction before they
can get all the good possible to be got from the prodigious treasures of
art possessed by the country in that form: there also one sees things in
a piecemeal way: nor can I deny that there is something melancholy about
a museum, such a tale of violence, destruction, and carelessness, as its
treasured scraps tell us.
But moreover you may sometimes have an opportunity of studying ancient
art in a narrower but a more intimate, a more kindly form, the monuments
of our own land. Sometimes only, since we live in the middle of this
world of brick and mortar, and there is little else left us amidst it,
except the ghost of the great church at Westminster, ruined as its
exterior is by the stupidity of the restoring architect, and insulted as
its glorious interior is by the pompous undertakers’ lies, by the
vainglory and ignorance of the last two centuries and a half—little
besides that and the matchless Hall near it: but when we can get beyond
that smoky world, there, out in the country we may still see the works of
our fathers yet alive amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and
of which they are so completely a part: for there indeed if anywhere, in
the English country, in the days when people cared about such things, was
there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were
made for:—the land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow
seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: there
are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes
of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured,
mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers,
little plains; swelling, speedily-changing uplands, all beset with
handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with
the walls of sheep-walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but
serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it
is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.
All which I neither praise nor blame, but say that so it is: some people
praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very axle-tree
of the world; so do not I, nor any unblinded by pride in themselves and
all that belongs to them: others there are who scorn it and the tameness
of it: not I any the more: though it would indeed be hard if there were
nothing else in the world, no wonders, no terrors, no unspeakable
beauties: yet when we think what a small part of the world’s history,
past, present, and to come, is this land we live in, and how much smaller
still in the history of the arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to
it, and with what care and pains they adorned it, this unromantic,
uneventful-looking land of England, surely by this too our hearts may be
touched, and our hope quickened.
For as was the land, such was the art of it while folk yet troubled
themselves about such things; it strove little to impress people either
by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into commonplace, rarely it
rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a slave’s nightmare
nor an insolent boast: and at its best it had an inventiveness, an
individuality that grander styles have never overpassed: its best too,
and that was in its very heart, was given as freely to the yeoman’s
house, and the humble village church, as to the lord’s palace or the
mighty cathedral: never coarse, though often rude enough, sweet, natural
and unaffected, an art of peasants rather than of merchant-princes or
courtiers, it must be a hard heart, I think, that does not love it:
whether a man has been born among it like ourselves, or has come
wonderingly on its simplicity from all the grandeur over-seas. A peasant
art, I say, and it clung fast to the life of the people, and still lived
among the cottagers and yeomen in many parts of the country while the big
houses were being built ‘French and fine’: still lived also in many a
quaint pattern of loom and printing-block, and embroiderer’s needle,
while over-seas stupid pomp had extinguished all nature and freedom, and
art was become, in France especially, the mere expression of that
successful and exultant rascality, which in the flesh no long time
afterwards went down into the pit for ever.
Such was the English art, whose history is in a sense at your doors,
grown scarce indeed, and growing scarcer year by year, not only through
greedy destruction, of which there is certainly less than there used to
be, but also through the attacks of another foe, called nowadays
‘restoration.’
I must not make a long story about this, but also I cannot quite pass it
over, since I have pressed on you the study of these ancient monuments.
Thus the matter stands: these old buildings have been altered and added
to century after century, often beautifully, always historically; their
very value, a great part of it, lay in that: they have suffered almost
always from neglect also, often from violence (that latter a piece of
history often far from uninteresting), but ordinary obvious mending would
almost always have kept them standing, pieces of nature and of history.
But of late years a great uprising of ecclesiastical zeal, coinciding
with a great increase of study, and consequently of knowledge of mediæval
architecture, has driven people into spending their money on these
buildings, not merely with the purpose of repairing them, of keeping them
safe, clean, and wind and water-tight, but also of ‘restoring’ them to
some ideal state of perfection; sweeping away if possible all signs of
what has befallen them at least since the Reformation, and often since
dates much earlier: this has sometimes been done with much disregard of
art and entirely from ecclesiastical zeal, but oftener it has been well
meant enough as regards art: yet you will not have listened to what I
have said to-night if you do not see that from my point of view this
restoration must be as impossible to bring about, as the attempt at it is
destructive to the buildings so dealt with: I scarcely like to think what
a great part of them have been made nearly useless to students of art and
history: unless you knew a great deal about architecture you perhaps
would scarce understand what terrible damage has been done by that
dangerous ‘little knowledge’ in this matter: but at least it is easy to
be understood, that to deal recklessly with valuable (and national)
monuments which, when once gone, can never be replaced by any splendour
of modern art, is doing a very sorry service to the State.
You will see by all that I have said on this study of ancient art that I
mean by education herein something much wider than the teaching of a
definite art in schools of design, and that it must be something that we
must do more or less for ourselves: I mean by it a systematic
concentration of our thoughts on the matter, a studying of it in all
ways, careful and laborious practice of it, and a determination to do
nothing but what is known to be good in workmanship and design.
Of course, however, both as an instrument of that study we have been
speaking of, as well as of the practice of the arts, all handicraftsmen
should be taught to draw very carefully; as indeed all people should be
taught drawing who are not physically incapable of learning it: but the
art of drawing so taught would not be the art of designing, but only a
means towards _this_ end, _general capability in dealing with the arts_.
For I wish specially to impress this upon you, that _designing_ cannot be
taught at all in a school: continued practice will help a man who is
naturally a designer, continual notice of nature and of art: no doubt
those who have some faculty for designing are still numerous, and they
want from a school certain technical teaching, just as they want tools:
in these days also, when the best school, the school of successful
practice going on around you, is at such a low ebb, they do undoubtedly
want instruction in the history of the arts: these two things schools of
design can give: but the royal road of a set of rules deduced from a sham
science of design, that is itself not a science but another set of rules,
will lead nowhere;—or, let us rather say, to beginning again.
As to the kind of drawing that should be taught to men engaged in
ornamental work, there is only _one best_ way of teaching drawing, and
that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure: both because the
lines of a man’s body are much more subtle than anything else, and
because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong.
I do think that such teaching as this, given to all people who care for
it, would help the revival of the arts very much: the habit of
discriminating between right and wrong, the sense of pleasure in drawing
a good line, would really, I think, be education in the due sense of the
word for all such people as had the germs of invention in them; yet as
aforesaid, in this age of the world it would be mere affectation to
pretend to shut one’s eyes to the art of past ages: that also we must
study. If other circumstances, social and economical, do not stand in
our way, that is to say, if the world is not too busy to allow us to have
Decorative Arts at all, these two are the _direct_ means by which we
shall get them; that is, general cultivation of the powers of the mind,
general cultivation of the powers of the eye and hand.
Perhaps that seems to you very commonplace advice and a very roundabout
road; nevertheless ’tis a certain one, if by any road you desire to come
to the new art, which is my subject to-night: if you do not, and if those
germs of invention, which, as I said just now, are no doubt still common
enough among men, are left neglected and undeveloped, the laws of Nature
will assert themselves in this as in other matters, and the faculty of
design itself will gradually fade from the race of man. Sirs, shall we
approach nearer to perfection by casting away so large a part of that
intelligence which makes us _men_?
And now before I make an end, I want to call your attention to certain
things, that, owing to our neglect of the arts for other business, bar
that good road to us and are such an hindrance, that, till they are dealt
with, it is hard even to make a beginning of our endeavour. And if my
talk should seem to grow too serious for our subject, as indeed I think
it cannot do, I beg you to remember what I said earlier, of how the arts
all hang together. Now there is one art of which the old architect of
Edward the Third’s time was thinking—he who founded New College at
Oxford, I mean—when he took this for his motto: ‘Manners maketh man:’ he
meant by manners the art of morals, the art of living worthily, and like
a man. I must needs claim this art also as dealing with my subject.
There is a great deal of sham work in the world, hurtful to the buyer,
more hurtful to the seller, if he only knew it, most hurtful to the
maker: how good a foundation it would be towards getting good Decorative
Art, that is ornamental workmanship, if we craftsmen were to resolve to
turn out nothing but excellent workmanship in all things, instead of
having, as we too often have now, a very low average standard of work,
which we often fall below.
I do not blame either one class or another in this matter, I blame all:
to set aside our own class of handicraftsmen, of whose shortcomings you
and I know so much that we need talk no more about it, I know that the
public in general are set on having things cheap, being so ignorant that
they do not know when they get them nasty also; so ignorant that they
neither know nor care whether they give a man his due: I know that the
manufacturers (so called) are so set on carrying out competition to its
utmost, competition of cheapness, not of excellence, that they meet the
bargain-hunters half way, and cheerfully furnish them with nasty wares at
the cheap rate they are asked for, by means of what can be called by no
prettier name than fraud. England has of late been too much busied with
the counting-house and not enough with the workshop: with the result that
the counting-house at the present moment is rather barren of orders.
I say all classes are to blame in this matter, but also I say that the
remedy lies with the handicraftsmen, who are not ignorant of these things
like the public, and who have no call to be greedy and isolated like the
manufacturers or middlemen; the duty and honour of educating the public
lies with them, and they have in them the seeds of order and organisation
which make that duty the easier.
When will they see to this and help to make men of us all by insisting on
this most weighty piece of manners; so that we may adorn life with the
pleasure of cheerfully _buying_ goods at their due price; with the
pleasure of _selling_ goods that we could be proud of both for fair price
and fair workmanship: with the pleasure of working soundly and without
haste at _making_ goods that we could be proud of?—much the greatest
pleasure of the three is that last, such a pleasure as, I think, the
world has none like it.
You must not say that this piece of manners lies out of my subject: it is
essentially a part of it and most important: for I am bidding you learn
to be artists, if art is not to come to an end amongst us: and what is an
artist but a workman who is determined that, whatever else happens, his
work shall be excellent? or, to put it in another way: the decoration of
workmanship, what is it but the expression of man’s pleasure in
successful labour? But what pleasure can there be in _bad_ work, in
unsuccessful labour; why should we decorate _that_? and how can we bear
to be always unsuccessful in our labour?
As greed of unfair gain, wanting to be paid for what we have not earned,
cumbers our path with this tangle of bad work, of sham work, so the
heaped-up money which this greed has brought us (for greed will have its
way, like all other strong passions), this money, I say, gathered into
heaps little and big, with all the false distinction which so unhappily
it yet commands amongst us, has raised up against the arts a barrier of
the love of luxury and show, which is of all obvious hindrances the worst
to overpass: the highest and most cultivated classes are not free from
the vulgarity of it, the lower are not free from its pretence. I beg you
to remember both as a remedy against this, and as explaining exactly what
I mean, that nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to
say, which does not minister to the body when well under command of the
mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy
state. What tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish pretending to be works
of art in some degree would this maxim clear out of our London houses, if
it were understood and acted upon! To my mind it is only here and there
(out of the kitchen) that you can find in a well-to-do house things that
are of any use at all: as a rule all the decoration (so called) that has
got there is there for the sake of show, not because anybody likes it. I
repeat, this stupidity goes through all classes of society: the silk
curtains in my Lord’s drawing-room are no more a matter of art to him
than the powder in his footman’s hair; the kitchen in a country farmhouse
is most commonly a pleasant and homelike place, the parlour dreary and
useless.
Simplicity of life, begetting simplicity of taste, that is, a love for
sweet and lofty things, is of all matters most necessary for the birth of
the new and better art we crave for; simplicity everywhere, in the palace
as well as in the cottage.
Still more is this necessary, cleanliness and decency everywhere, in the
cottage as well as in the palace: the lack of that is a serious piece of
_manners_ for us to correct: that lack and all the inequalities of life,
and the heaped-up thoughtlessness and disorder of so many centuries that
cause it: and as yet it is only a very few men who have begun to think
about a remedy for it in its widest range: even in its narrower aspect,
in the defacements of our big towns by all that commerce brings with it,
who heeds it? who tries to control their squalor and hideousness? there
is nothing but thoughtlessness and recklessness in the matter: the
helplessness of people who don’t live long enough to do a thing
themselves, and have not manliness and foresight enough to begin the
work, and pass it on to those that shall come after them.
Is money to be gathered? cut down the pleasant trees among the houses,
pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square
yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison
the air with smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see to it or
mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful
of the workshop, will do for us herein.
And Science—we have loved her well, and followed her diligently, what
will she do? I fear she is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the
counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she is too busy, and will for
the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have
thought easy for her; say for example teaching Manchester how to consume
its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye
without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth her
attention as the production of the heaviest of heavy black silks, or the
biggest of useless guns. Anyhow, however it be done, unless people care
about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how
can they care about Art? I know it will cost much both of time and money
to better these things even a little; but I do not see how these can be
better spent than in making life cheerful and honourable for others and
for ourselves; and the gain of good life to the country at large that
would result from men seriously setting about the bettering of the
decency of our big towns would be priceless, even if nothing specially
good befell the arts in consequence: I do not know that it would; but I
should begin to think matters hopeful if men turned their attention to
such things, and I repeat that, unless they do so, we can scarcely even
begin with any hope our endeavours for the bettering of the arts.
Unless something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the
eyes and rest for the mind in the aspect of their own and their
neighbours’ houses, until the contrast is less disgraceful between the
fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that
the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly
cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful places, whose education
enables them, in the contemplation of the past glories of the world, to
shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men move
in. Sirs, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom,
open-heartedness and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and
luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and exclusive. I will go
further than this and say that on such terms I do not wish her to live.
I protest that it would be a shame to an honest artist to enjoy what he
had huddled up to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to
sit and eat dainty food amongst starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort.
I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or
freedom for a few.
No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few
exceptional men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance for which
they themselves are responsible, for a brutality that they will not
struggle with,—rather than this, I would that the world should indeed
sweep away all art for awhile, as I said before I thought it possible she
might do; rather than the wheat should rot in the miser’s granary, I
would that the earth had it, that it might yet have a chance to quicken
in the dark.
I have a sort of faith, though, that this clearing way of all art will
not happen, that men will get wiser, as well as more learned; that many
of the intricacies of life, on which we now pride ourselves more than
enough, partly because they are new, partly because they have come with
the gain of better things, will be cast aside as having played their
part, and being useful no longer. I hope that we shall have leisure from
war,—war commercial, as well as war of the bullet and the bayonet;
leisure from the knowledge that darkens counsel; leisure above all from
the greed of money, and the craving for that overwhelming distinction
that money now brings: I believe that as we have even now partly achieved
LIBERTY, so we shall one day achieve EQUALITY, which, and which only,
means FRATERNITY, and so have leisure from poverty and all its griping,
sordid cares.
Then having leisure from all these things, amidst renewed simplicity of
life we shall have leisure to think about our work, that faithful daily
companion, which no man any longer will venture to call the Curse of
labour: for surely then we shall be happy in it, each in his place, no
man grudging at another; no one bidden to be any man’s _servant_, every
one scorning to be any man’s _master_: men will then assuredly be happy
in their work, and that happiness will assuredly bring forth decorative,
noble, _popular_ art.
That art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as
the mountain-sides: it will be a pleasure and a rest, and not a weight
upon the spirits to come from the open country into a town; every man’s
house will be fair and decent, soothing to his mind and helpful to his
work: all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in
harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful: yet all will be
simple and inspiriting, not childish nor enervating; for as nothing of
beauty and splendour that man’s mind and hand may compass shall be
wanting from our public buildings, so in no private dwelling will there
be any signs of waste, pomp, or insolence, and every man will have his
share of the _best_.
It is a dream, you may say, of what has never been and never will be;
true, it has never been, and therefore, since the world is alive and
moving yet, my hope is the greater that it one day will be: true, it is a
dream; but dreams have before now come about of things so good and
necessary to us, that we scarcely think of them more than of the
daylight, though once people had to live without them, without even the
hope of them.
Anyhow, dream as it is, I pray you to pardon my setting it before you,
for it lies at the bottom of all my work in the Decorative Arts, nor will
it ever be out of my thoughts: and I am here with you to-night to ask you
to help me in realising this dream, this _hope_.