‘And the men of labour spent their strength in daily struggling for
bread to maintain the vital strength they labour with: so living in a
daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to
live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a
wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.’—DANIEL DEFOE.
I KNOW that a large proportion of those here present are either already
practising the Fine Arts, or are being specially educated to that end,
and I feel that I may be expected to address myself specially to these.
But since it is not to be doubted that we are _all_ met together because
of the interest we take in what concerns these arts, I would rather
address myself to you _all_ as representing the public in general.
Indeed, those of you who are specially studying Art could learn little of
me that would be useful to yourselves only. You are already learning
under competent masters—most competent, I am glad to know—by means of a
system which should teach you all you need, if you have been right in
making the first step of devoting yourselves to Art; I mean if you are
aiming at the right thing, and in some way or another understand what Art
means, which you may well do without being able to express it, and if you
are resolute to follow on the path which that inborn knowledge has shown
to you; if it is otherwise with you than this, no system and no teachers
will help you to produce real art of any kind, be it never so humble.
Those of you who are real artists know well enough all the special advice
I can give you, and in how few words it may be said—follow nature, study
antiquity, make your own art, and do not steal it, grudge no expense of
trouble, patience, or courage, in the striving to accomplish the hard
thing you have set yourselves to do. You have had all that said to you
twenty times, I doubt not; and twenty times twenty have said it to
yourselves, and now I have said it again to you, and done neither you nor
me good nor harm thereby. So true it all is, so well known, and so hard
to follow.
But to me, and I hope to you, Art is a very serious thing, and cannot by
any means be dissociated from the weighty matters that occupy the
thoughts of men; and there are principles underlying the practice of it,
on which all serious-minded men, may—nay, must—have their own thoughts.
It is on some of these that I ask your leave to speak, and to address
myself, not only to those who are consciously interested in the arts, but
to all those also who have considered what the progress of civilisation
promises and threatens to those who shall come after us: what there is to
hope and fear for the future of the arts, which were born with the birth
of civilisation and will only die with its death—what on this side of
things, the present time of strife and doubt and change is preparing for
the better time, when the change shall have come, the strife be lulled,
and the doubt cleared: this is a question, I say, which is indeed
weighty, and may well interest all thinking men.
Nay, so universally important is it, that I fear lest you should think I
am taking too much upon myself to speak to you on so weighty a matter,
nor should I have dared to do so, if I did not feel that I am to-night
only the mouthpiece of better men than myself; whose hopes and fears I
share; and that being so, I am the more emboldened to speak out, if I
can, my full mind on the subject, because I am in a city where, if
anywhere, men are not contented to live wholly for themselves and the
present, but have fully accepted the duty of keeping their eyes open to
whatever new is stirring, so that they may help and be helped by any
truth that there may be in it. Nor can I forget, that, since you have
done me the great honour of choosing me for the President of your Society
of Arts for the past year, and of asking me to speak to you to-night, I
should be doing less than my duty if I did not, according to my lights,
speak out straightforwardly whatever seemed to me might be in a small
degree useful to you. Indeed, I think I am among friends, who may
forgive me if I speak rashly, but scarcely if I speak falsely.
The aim of your Society and School of Arts is, as I understand it, to
further those arts by education widely spread. A very great object is
that, and well worthy of the reputation of this great city; but since
Birmingham has also, I rejoice to know, a great reputation for not
allowing things to go about shamming life when the brains are knocked out
of them, I think you should know and see clearly what it is you have
undertaken to further by these institutions, and whether you really care
about it, or only languidly acquiesce in it—whether, in short, you know
it to the heart, and are indeed part and parcel of it, with your own
will, or against it; or else have heard say that it is a good thing if
any one care to meddle with it.
If you are surprised at my putting that question for your consideration,
I will tell you why I do so. There are some of us who love Art most, and
I may say most faithfully, who see for certain that such love is rare
nowadays. We cannot help seeing, that besides a vast number of people,
who (poor souls!) are sordid and brutal of mind and habits, and have had
no chance or choice in the matter, there are many high-minded,
thoughtful, and cultivated men who inwardly think the arts to be a
foolish accident of civilisation—nay, worse perhaps, a nuisance, a
disease, a hindrance to human progress. Some of these, doubtless, are
very busy about other sides of thought. They are, as I should put it, so
_artistically_ engrossed by the study of science, politics, or what not,
that they have necessarily narrowed their minds by their hard and
praiseworthy labours. But since such men are few, this does not account
for a prevalent habit of thought that looks upon Art as at best trifling.
What is wrong, then, with us or the arts, since what was once accounted
so glorious, is now deemed paltry?
The question is no light one; for, to put the matter in its clearest
light, I will say that the leaders of modern thought do for the most part
sincerely and single-mindedly hate and despise the arts; and you know
well that as the leaders are, so must the people be; and that means that
we who are met together here for the furthering of Art by wide-spread
education are either deceiving ourselves and wasting our time, since we
shall one day be of the same opinion as the best men among us, or else we
represent a small minority that is right, as minorities sometimes are,
while those upright men aforesaid, and the great mass of civilised men,
have been blinded by untoward circumstances.
That we are of this mind—the minority that is right—is, I hope, the case.
I hope we know assuredly that the arts we have met together to further
are necessary to the life of man, if the progress of civilisation is not
to be as causeless as the turning of a wheel that makes nothing.
How, then, shall we, the minority, carry out the duty which our position
thrusts upon us, of striving to grow into a majority?
If we could only explain to those thoughtful men, and the millions of
whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which is to us
as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about which they know
nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of repulsion, then the
seed of victory might be sown. This is hard indeed to do; yet if we
ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediæval history, it seems to me some
glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us. Take for example a
century of the Byzantine Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names
of the pedants, tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain
which long-dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people
into thinking that they were necessary lords of the world. Turn then to
the lands they governed, and read and forget a long string of the
causeless murders of Northern and Saracen pirates and robbers. That is
pretty much the sum of what so-called history has left us of the tale of
those days—the stupid languor and the evil deeds of kings and scoundrels.
Must we turn away then, and say that all was evil? How then did men live
from day to day? How then did Europe grow into intelligence and freedom?
It seems there were others than those of whom history (so called) has
left us the names and the deeds. These, the raw material for the
treasury and the slave-market, we now call ‘the people,’ and we know that
they were working all that while. Yes, and that their work was not
merely slaves’ work, the meal-trough before them and the whip behind
them; for though history (so called) has forgotten them, yet their work
has not been forgotten, but has made another history—the history of Art.
There is not an ancient city in the East or the West that does not bear
some token of their grief, and joy, and hope. From Ispahan to
Northumberland, there is no building built between the seventh and
seventeenth centuries that does not show the influence of the labour of
that oppressed and neglected herd of men. No one of them, indeed, rose
high above his fellows. There was no Plato, or Shakespeare, or Michael
Angelo amongst them. Yet scattered as it was among many men, how strong
their thought was, how long it abided, how far it travelled!
And so it was ever through all those days when Art was so vigorous and
progressive. Who can say how little we should know of many periods, but
for their art? History (so called) has remembered the kings and
warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because
they created.
I think, then, that this knowledge we have of the life of past times
gives us some token of the way we should take in meeting those honest and
single-hearted men who above all things desire the world’s progress, but
whose minds are, as it were, sick on this point of the arts. Surely you
may say to them: When all is gained that you (and we) so long for, what
shall we do then? That great change which we are working for, each in
his own way, will come like other changes, as a thief in the night, and
will be with us before we know it; but let us imagine that its
consummation has come suddenly and dramatically, acknowledged and hailed
by all right-minded people; and what shall we do then, lest we begin once
more to heap up fresh corruption for the woeful labour of ages once
again? I say, as we turn away from the flagstaff where the new banner
has been just run up; as we depart, our ears yet ringing with the blare
of the heralds’ trumpets that have proclaimed the new order of things,
what shall we turn to then, what _must_ we turn to then?
To what else, save to our work, our daily labour?
With what, then, shall we adorn it when we have become wholly free and
reasonable? It is necessary toil, but shall it be toil only? Shall all
we can do with it be to shorten the hours of that toil to the utmost,
that the hours of leisure may be long beyond what men used to hope for?
and what then shall we do with the leisure, if we say that all toil is
irksome? Shall we sleep it all away?—Yes, and never wake up again, I
should hope, in that case.
What shall we do then? what shall our necessary hours of labour bring
forth?
That will be a question for all men in that day when many wrongs are
righted, and when there will be no classes of degradation on whom the
dirty work of the world can be shovelled; and if men’s minds are still
sick and loathe the arts, they will not be able to answer that question.
Once men sat under grinding tyrannies, amidst violence and fear so great,
that nowadays we wonder how they lived through twenty-four hours of it,
till we remember that then, as now, their daily labour was the main part
of their lives, and that that daily labour was sweetened by the daily
creation of Art; and shall we who are delivered from the evils they bore,
live drearier days than they did? Shall men, who have come forth from so
many tyrannies, bind themselves to yet another one, and become the slaves
of nature, piling day upon day of hopeless, useless toil? Must this go
on worsening till it comes to this at last—that the world shall have come
into its inheritance, and with all foes conquered and nought to bind it,
shall choose to sit down and labour for ever amidst grim ugliness? How,
then, were all our hopes cheated, what a gulf of despair should we tumble
into then?
In truth, it cannot be; yet if that sickness of repulsion to the arts
were to go on hopelessly, nought else would be, and the extinction of the
love of beauty and imagination would prove to be the extinction of
civilisation. But that sickness the world will one day throw off, yet
will, I believe, pass through many pains in so doing, some of which will
look very like the death-throes of Art, and some, perhaps, will be
grievous enough to the poor people of the world; since hard necessity, I
doubt, works many of the world’s changes, rather than the purblind
striving to see, which we call the foresight of man.
Meanwhile, remember that I asked just now, what was amiss in Art or in
ourselves that this sickness was upon us. Nothing is wrong or can be
with Art in the abstract—that must always be good for mankind, or we are
all wrong together: but with Art, as we of these latter days have known
it, there is much wrong; nay, what are we here for to-night if that is
not so? were not the schools of art founded all over the country some
thirty years ago because we had found out that popular art was fading—or
perhaps had faded out from amongst us?
As to the progress made since then in this country—and in this country
only, if at all—it is hard for me to speak without being either
ungracious or insincere, and yet speak I must. I say, then, that an
apparent external progress in some ways is obvious, but I do not know how
far that is hopeful, for time must try it, and prove whether it be a
passing fashion or the first token of a real stir among the great mass of
civilised men. To speak quite frankly, and as one friend to another, I
must needs say that even as I say those words they seem too good to be
true. And yet—who knows?—so wont are we to frame history for the future
as well as for the past, so often are our eyes blind both when we look
backward and when we look forward, because we have been gazing so
intently at our own days, our own lines. May all be better than I think
it!
At any rate let us count our gains, and set them against less hopeful
signs of the times. In England, then—and as far as I know, in England
only—painters of pictures have grown, I believe, more numerous, and
certainly more conscientious in their work, and in some cases—and this
more especially in England—have developed and expressed a sense of beauty
which the world has not seen for the last three hundred years. This is
certainly a very great gain, which is not easy to over-estimate, both for
those who make the pictures and those who use them.
Furthermore, in England, and in England only, there has been a great
improvement in architecture and the arts that attend it—arts which it was
the special province of the afore-mentioned schools to revive and foster.
This, also, is a considerable gain to the users of the works so made, but
I fear a gain less important to most of those concerned in making them.
Against these gains we must, I am very sorry to say, set the fact not
easy to be accounted for, that the rest of the civilised world (so
called) seems to have done little more than stand still in these matters;
and that among ourselves these improvements have concerned comparatively
few people, the mass of our population not being in the least touched by
them; so that the great bulk of our architecture—the art which most
depends on the taste of the people at large—grows worse and worse every
day. I must speak also of another piece of discouragement before I go
further. I daresay many of you will remember how emphatically those who
first had to do with the movement of which the foundation of our
art-schools was a part, called the attention of our pattern-designers to
the beautiful works of the East. This was surely most well judged of
them, for they bade us look at an art at once beautiful, orderly, living
in our own day, and above all, popular. Now, it is a grievous result of
the sickness of civilisation that this art is fast disappearing before
the advance of western conquest and commerce—fast, and every day faster.
While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread of education in
art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-sightedness, actively
destroying the very sources of that education—jewellery, metal-work,
pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving, carpet-making—all the famous
and historical arts of the great peninsula have been for long treated as
matters of no importance, to be thrust aside for the advantage of any
paltry scrap of so-called commerce; and matters are now speedily coming
to an end there. I daresay some of you saw the presents which the native
Princes gave to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his progress
through India. I did myself, I will not say with great disappointment,
for I guessed what they would be like, but with great grief, since there
was scarce here and there a piece of goods among these costly gifts,
things given as great treasures, which faintly upheld the ancient fame of
the cradle of the industrial arts. Nay, in some cases, it would have
been laughable, if it had not been so sad, to see the piteous simplicity
with which the conquered race had copied the blank vulgarity of their
lords. And this deterioration we are now, as I have said, actively
engaged in forwarding. I have read a little book, {50} a handbook to the
Indian Court of last year’s Paris Exhibition, which takes the occasion of
noting the state of manufactures in India one by one. ‘Art
manufactures,’ you would call them; but, indeed, all manufactures are, or
were, ‘art manufactures’ in India. Dr. Birdwood, the author of this
book, is of great experience in Indian life, a man of science, and a
lover of the arts. His story, by no means a new one to me, or others
interested in the East and its labour, is a sad one indeed. The
conquered races in their hopelessness are everywhere giving up the
genuine practice of their own arts, which we know ourselves, as we have
indeed loudly proclaimed, are founded on the truest and most natural
principles. The often-praised perfection of these arts is the blossom of
many ages of labour and change, but the conquered races are casting it
aside as a thing of no value, so that they may conform themselves to the
inferior art, or rather the lack of art, of their conquerors. In some
parts of the country the genuine arts are quite destroyed; in many others
nearly so; in all they have more or less begun to sicken. So much so is
this the case, that now for some time the Government has been furthering
this deterioration. As for example, no doubt with the best intentions,
and certainly in full sympathy with the general English public, both at
home and in India, the Government is now manufacturing cheap Indian
carpets in the Indian gaols. I do not say that it is a bad thing to turn
out real work, or works of art, in gaols; on the contrary, I think it
good if it be properly managed. But in this case, the Government, being,
as I said, in full sympathy with the English public, has determined that
it will make its wares cheap, whether it make them nasty or not. Cheap
and nasty they are, I assure you; but, though they are the worst of their
kind, they would not be made thus, if everything did not tend the same
way. And it is the same everywhere and with all Indian manufactures,
till it has come to this—that these poor people have all but lost the one
distinction, the one glory that conquest had left them. Their famous
wares, so praised by those who thirty years ago began to attempt the
restoration of popular art amongst ourselves, are no longer to be bought
at reasonable prices in the common market, but must be sought for and
treasured as precious relics for the museums we have founded for our art
education. In short, their art is dead, and the commerce of modern
civilisation has slain it.
What is going on in India is also going on, more or less, all over the
East; but I have spoken of India chiefly because I cannot help thinking
that we ourselves are responsible for what is happening there.
Chance-hap has made us the lords of many millions out there; surely, it
behoves us to look to it, lest we give to the people whom we have made
helpless scorpions for fish and stones for bread.
But since neither on this side, nor on any other, can art be amended,
until the countries that lead civilisation are themselves in a healthy
state about it, let us return to the consideration of its condition among
ourselves. And again I say, that obvious as is that surface improvement
of the arts within the last few years, I fear too much that there is
something wrong about the root of the plant to exult over the bursting of
its February buds.
I have just shown you for one thing that lovers of Indian and Eastern
Art, including as they do the heads of our institutions for art
education, and I am sure many among what are called the governing
classes, are utterly powerless to stay its downward course. The general
tendency of civilisation is against them, and is too strong for them.
Again, though many of us love architecture dearly, and believe that it
helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful
things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live in houses which
have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness and inconvenience.
The stream of civilisation is against us, and we cannot battle against
it.
Once more those devoted men who have upheld the standard of truth and
beauty amongst us, and whose pictures, painted amidst difficulties that
none but a painter can know, show qualities of mind unsurpassed in any
age—these great men have but a narrow circle that can understand their
works, and are utterly unknown to the great mass of the people:
civilisation is so much against them, that they cannot move the people.
Therefore, looking at all this, I cannot think that all is well with the
root of the tree we are cultivating. Indeed, I believe that if other
things were but to stand still in the world, this improvement before
mentioned would lead to a kind of art which, in that impossible case,
would be in a way stable, would perhaps stand still also. This would be
an art cultivated professedly by a few, and for a few, who would consider
it necessary—a duty, if they could admit duties—to despise the common
herd, to hold themselves aloof from all that the world has been
struggling for from the first, to guard carefully every approach to their
palace of art. It would be a pity to waste many words on the prospect of
such a school of art as this, which does in a way, theoretically at
least, exist at present, and has for its watchword a piece of slang that
does not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean—art for art’s sake.
Its fore-doomed end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a
thing for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated
must at last sit still and do nothing—to the grief of no one.
Well, certainly, if I thought you were come here to further such an art
as this I could not have stood up and called you _friends_; though such a
feeble folk as I have told you of one could scarce care to call foes.
Yet, as I say, such men exist, and I have troubled you with speaking of
them, because I know that those honest and intelligent people, who are
eager for human progress, and yet lack part of the human senses, and are
anti-artistic, suppose that such men are artists, and that this is what
art means, and what it does for people, and that such a narrow, cowardly
life is what we, fellow-handicraftsmen, aim at. I see this taken for
granted continually, even by many who, to say truth, ought to know
better, and I long to put the slur from off us; to make people understand
that we, least of all men, wish to widen the gulf between the classes,
nay, worse still, to make new classes of elevation, and new classes of
degradation—new lords and new slaves; that we, least of all men, want to
cultivate the ‘plant called man’ in different ways—here stingily, there
wastefully: I wish people to understand that the art we are striving for
is a good thing which all can share, which will elevate all; in good
sooth, if all people do not soon share it there will soon be none to
share; if all are not elevated by it, mankind will lose the elevation it
has gained. Nor is such an art as we long for a vain dream; such an art
once was in times that were worse than these, when there was less
courage, kindness, and truth in the world than there is now; such an art
there will be hereafter, when there will be more courage, kindness, and
truth than there is now in the world.
Let us look backward in history once more for a short while, and then
steadily forward till my words are done: I began by saying that part of
the common and necessary advice given to Art students was to study
antiquity; and no doubt many of you, like me, have done so; have
wandered, for instance, through the galleries of the admirable museum of
South Kensington, and, like me, have been filled with wonder and
gratitude at the beauty which has been born from the brain of man. Now,
consider, I pray you, what these wonderful works are, and how they were
made; and indeed, it is neither in extravagance nor without due meaning
that I use the word ‘wonderful’ in speaking of them. Well, these things
are just the common household goods of those past days, and that is one
reason why they are so few and so carefully treasured. They were common
things in their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling—no
rarities then—and yet we have called them ‘wonderful.’
And how were they made? Did a great artist draw the designs for them—a
man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily fed, carefully housed, wrapped
up in cotton wool, in short, when he was not at work? By no means.
Wonderful as these works are, they were made by ‘common fellows,’ as the
phrase goes, in the common course of their daily labour. Such were the
men we honour in honouring those works. And their labour—do you think it
was irksome to them? Those of you who are artists know very well that it
was not; that it could not be. Many a grin of pleasure, I’ll be
bound—and you will not contradict me—went to the carrying through of
those mazes of mysterious beauty, to the invention of those strange
beasts and birds and flowers that we ourselves have chuckled over at
South Kensington. While they were at work, at least, these men were not
unhappy, and I suppose they worked most days, and the most part of the
day, as we do.
Or those treasures of architecture that we study so carefully
nowadays—what are they? how were they made? There are great minsters
among them, indeed, and palaces of kings and lords, but not many; and,
noble and awe-inspiring as these may be, they differ only in size from
the little grey church that still so often makes the commonplace English
landscape beautiful, and the little grey house that still, in some parts
of the country at least, makes an English village a thing apart, to be
seen and pondered on by all who love romance and beauty. These form the
mass of our architectural treasures, the houses that everyday people
lived in, the unregarded churches in which they worshipped.
And, once more, who was it that designed and ornamented them? The great
architect, carefully kept for the purpose, and guarded from the common
troubles of common men? By no means. Sometimes, perhaps, it was the
monk, the ploughman’s brother; oftenest his other brother, the village
carpenter, smith, mason, what not—‘a common fellow,’ whose common
everyday labour fashioned works that are to-day the wonder and despair of
many a hard-working ‘cultivated’ architect. And did he loathe his work?
No, it is impossible. I have seen, as we most of us have, work done by
such men in some out-of-the-way hamlet—where to-day even few strangers
ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own doors; in
such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so careful, and so
inventive, that nothing in its way could go further. And I will assert,
without fear of contradiction, that no human ingenuity can produce work
such as this without pleasure being a third party to the brain that
conceived and the hand that fashioned it. Nor are such works rare. The
throne of the great Plantagenet, or the great Valois, was no more
daintily carved than the seat of the village mass-john, or the chest of
the yeoman’s good-wife.
So, you see, there was much going on to make life endurable in those
times. Not every day, you may be sure, was a day of slaughter and
tumult, though the histories read almost as if it were so; but every day
the hammer chinked on the anvil, and the chisel played about the oak
beam, and never without some beauty and invention being born of it, and
consequently some human happiness.
That last word brings me to the very kernel and heart of what I have come
here to say to you, and I pray you to think of it most seriously—not as
to my words, but as to a thought which is stirring in the world, and will
one day grow into something.
That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his
pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his labour
without expressing that happiness; and especially is this so when he is
at work at anything in which he specially excels. A most kind gift is
this of nature, since all men, nay, it seems all things too, must labour;
so that not only does the dog take pleasure in hunting, and the horse in
running, and the bird in flying, but so natural does the idea seem to us,
that we imagine to ourselves that the earth and the very elements rejoice
in doing their appointed work; and the poets have told us of the spring
meadows smiling, of the exultation of the fire, of the countless laughter
of the sea.
Nor until these latter days has man ever rejected this universal gift,
but always, when he has not been too much perplexed, too much bound by
disease or beaten down by trouble, has striven to make his work at least
happy. Pain he has too often found in his pleasure, and weariness in his
rest, to trust to these. What matter if his happiness lie with what must
be always with him—his work?
And, once more, shall we, who have gained so much, forego this gain, the
earliest, most natural gain of mankind? If we have to a great extent
done so, as I verily fear we have, what strange fog-lights must have
misled us; or rather let me say, how hard pressed we must have been in
the battle with the evils we have overcome, to have forgotten the
greatest of all evils. I cannot call it less than that. If a man has
work to do which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and
rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass
unhappily and without self-respect. Consider, I beg of you, what that
means, and what ruin must come of it in the end.
If I could only persuade you of this, that the chief duty of the
civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all, to do
its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour—nay, if I could only
persuade some two or three of you here present—I should have made a good
night’s work of it.
Do not, at any rate, shelter yourselves from any misgiving you may have
behind the fallacy that the art-lacking labour of to-day is happy work:
for the most of men it is not so. It would take long, perhaps, to show
you, and make you fully understand that the would-be art which it
produces is joyless. But there is another token of its being most
unhappy work, which you cannot fail to understand at once—a grievous
thing that token is—and I beg of you to believe that I feel the full
shame of it, as I stand here speaking of it; but if we do not admit that
we are sick, how can we be healed? This hapless token is, that the work
done by the civilised world is mostly dishonest work. Look now: I admit
that civilisation does make certain things well, things which it knows,
consciously or unconsciously, are necessary to its present unhealthy
condition. These things, to speak shortly, are chiefly machines for
carrying on the competition in buying and selling, called falsely
commerce; and machines for the violent destruction of life—that is to
say, materials for two kinds of war; of which kinds the last is no doubt
the worst, not so much in itself perhaps, but because on this point the
conscience of the world is beginning to be somewhat pricked. But, on the
other hand, matters for the carrying on of a dignified daily life, that
life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help, which is the only real life
of thinking men—these things the civilised world makes ill, and even
increasingly worse and worse.
If I am wrong in saying this, you know well I am only saying what is
widely thought, nay widely said too, for that matter. Let me give an
instance, familiar enough, of that wide-spread opinion. There is a very
clever book of pictures {61} now being sold at the railway bookstalls,
called ‘The British Working Man, by one who does not believe in him,’—a
title and a book which make me both angry and ashamed, because the two
express much injustice, and not a little truth in their quaint, and
necessarily exaggerated way. It is quite true, and very sad to say, that
if any one nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by gardener,
carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky
rarity if he get it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every
side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men’s rights;
yet I cannot see how the ‘British Working Man’ is to be made to bear the
whole burden of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it. I doubt if
it be possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are
driven, and in which there is no hope and no pleasure, without trying to
shirk it—at any rate, shirked it has always been under such
circumstances. On the other hand, I know that there are some men so
right-minded, that they will, in despite of irksomeness and hopelessness,
drive right through their work. Such men are the salt of the earth. But
must there not be something wrong with a state of society which drives
these into that bitter heroism, and the most part into shirking, into the
depths often of half-conscious self-contempt and degradation? Be sure
that there is, that the blindness and hurry of civilisation, as it now
is, have to answer a heavy charge as to that enormous amount of
pleasureless work—work that tries every muscle of the body and every atom
of the brain, and which is done without pleasure and without aim—work
which everybody who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest
way that dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.
I am as sure of one thing as that I am living and breathing, and it is
this: that the dishonesty in the daily arts of life, complaints of which
are in all men’s mouths, and which I can answer for it does exist, is the
natural and inevitable result of the world in the hurry of the war of the
counting-house, and the war of the battlefield, having forgotten—of all
men, I say, each for the other, having forgotten, that pleasure in our
daily labour, which nature cries out for as its due.
Therefore, I say again, it is necessary to the further progress of
civilisation that men should turn their thoughts to some means of
limiting, and in the end of doing away with, degrading labour.
I do not think my words hitherto spoken have given you any occasion to
think that I mean by this either hard or rough labour; I do not pity men
much for their hardships, especially if they be accidental; not
necessarily attached to one class or one condition, I mean. Nor do I
think (I were crazy or dreaming else) that the work of the world can be
carried on without rough labour; but I have seen enough of that to know
that it need not be by any means degrading. To plough the earth, to cast
the net, to fold the flock—these, and such as these, which are rough
occupations enough, and which carry with them many hardships, are good
enough for the best of us, certain conditions of leisure, freedom, and
due wages being granted. As to the bricklayer, the mason, and the
like—these would be artists, and doing not only necessary, but beautiful,
and therefore happy work, if art were anything like what it should be.
No, it is not such labour as this which we need to do away with, but the
toil which makes the thousand and one things which nobody wants, which
are used merely as the counters for the competitive buying and selling,
falsely called commerce, which I have spoken of before—I know in my
heart, and not merely by my reason, that this toil cries out to be done
away with. But, besides that, the labour which now makes things good and
necessary in themselves, merely as counters for the commercial war
aforesaid, needs regulating and reforming. Nor can this reform be
brought about save by art; and if we were only come to our right minds,
and could see the necessity for making labour sweet to all men, as it is
now to very few—the necessity, I repeat; lest discontent, unrest, and
despair should at last swallow up all society—If we, then, with our eyes
cleared, could but make some sacrifice of things which do us no good,
since we unjustly and uneasily possess them, then indeed I believe we
should sow the seeds of a happiness which the world has not yet known, of
a rest and content which would make it what I cannot help thinking it was
meant to be: and with that seed would be sown also the seed of real art,
the expression of man’s happiness in his labour,—an art made by the
people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.
That is the only real art there is, the only art which will be an
instrument to the progress of the world, and not a hindrance. Nor can I
seriously doubt that in your hearts you know that it is so, all of you,
at any rate, who have in you an instinct for art. I believe that you
agree with me in this, though you may differ from much else that I have
said. I think assuredly that this is the art whose welfare we have met
together to further, and the necessary instruction in which we have
undertaken to spread as widely as may be.
Thus I have told you something of what I think is to be hoped and feared
for the future of art; and if you ask me what I expect as a practical
outcome of the admission of these opinions, I must say at once that I
know, even if we were all of one mind, and that what I think the right
mind on this subject, we should still have much work and many hindrances
before us; we should still have need of all the prudence, foresight, and
industry of the best among us; and, even so, our path would sometimes
seem blind enough. And, to-day, when the opinions which we think right,
and which one day will be generally thought so, have to struggle sorely
to make themselves noticed at all, it is early days for us to try to see
our exact and clearly mapped road. I suppose you will think it too
commonplace of me to say that the general education that makes men think,
will one day make them think rightly upon art. Commonplace as it is, I
really believe it, and am indeed encouraged by it, when I remember how
obviously this age is one of transition from the old to the new, and what
a strange confusion, from out of which we shall one day come, our
ignorance and half-ignorance is like to make of the exhausted rubbish of
the old and the crude rubbish of the new, both of which lie so ready to
our hands.
But, if I must say, furthermore, any words that seem like words of
practical advice, I think my task is hard, and I fear I shall offend some
of you whatever I say; for this is indeed an affair of morality, rather
than of what people call art.
However, I cannot forget that, in my mind, it is not possible to
dissociate art from morality, politics, and religion. Truth in these
great matters of principle is of one, and it is only in formal treatises
that it can be split up diversely. I must also ask you to remember how I
have already said, that though my mouth alone speaks, it speaks, however
feebly and disjointedly, the thoughts of many men better than myself.
And further, though when things are tending to the best, we shall still,
as aforesaid, need our best men to lead us quite right; yet even now
surely, when it is far from that, the least of us can do some yeoman’s
service to the cause, and live and die not without honour.
So I will say that I believe there are two virtues much needed in modern
life, if it is ever to become sweet; and I am quite sure that they are
absolutely necessary in the sowing the seed of an _art which is to be
made by the people and for the people_, _as a happiness to the maker and
the user_. These virtues are honesty, and simplicity of life. To make
my meaning clearer I will name the opposing vice of the second of
these—luxury to wit. Also I mean by honesty, the careful and eager
giving his due to every man, the determination not to gain by any man’s
loss, which in my experience is not a common virtue.
But note how the practice of either of these virtues will make the other
easier to us. For if our wants are few, we shall have but little chance
of being driven by our wants into injustice; and if we are fixed in the
principle of giving every man his due, how can our self-respect bear that
we should give too much to ourselves?
And in art, and in that preparation for it without which no art that is
stable or worthy can be, the raising, namely, of those classes which have
heretofore been degraded, the practice of these virtues would make a new
world of it. For if you are rich, your simplicity of life will both go
towards smoothing over the dreadful contrast between waste and want,
which is the great horror of civilised countries, and will also give an
example and standard of dignified life to those classes which you desire
to raise, who, as it is indeed, being like enough to rich people, are
given both to envy and to imitate the idleness and waste that the
possession of much money produces.
Nay, and apart from the morality of the matter, which I am forced to
speak to you of; let me tell you that though simplicity in art may be
costly as well as uncostly, at least it is not wasteful, and nothing is
more destructive to art than the want of it. I have never been in any
rich man’s house which would not have looked the better for having a
bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held. Indeed,
our sacrifice on the side of luxury will, it seems to me, be little or
nothing: for, as far as I can make out, what people usually mean by it,
is either a gathering of possessions which are sheer vexations to the
owner, or a chain of pompous circumstance, which checks and annoys the
rich man at every step. Yes, luxury cannot exist without slavery of some
kind or other, and its abolition will be blessed, like the abolition of
other slaveries, by the freeing both of the slaves and of their masters.
Lastly, if, besides attaining to simplicity of life, we attain also to
the love of justice, then will all things be ready for the new springtime
of the arts. For those of us that are employers of labour, how can we
bear to give any man less money than he can decently live on, less
leisure than his education and self-respect demand? or those of us who
are workmen, how can we bear to fail in the contract we have undertaken,
or to make it necessary for a foreman to go up and down spying out our
mean tricks and evasions? or we the shopkeepers—can we endure to lie
about our wares, that we may shuffle off our losses on to some one else’s
shoulders? or we the public—how can we bear to pay a price for a piece of
goods which will help to trouble one man, to ruin another, and starve a
third? Or, still more, I think, how can we bear to use, how can we enjoy
something which has been a pain and a grief for the maker to make?
And now, I think, I have said what I came to say. I confess that there
is nothing new in it, but you know the experience of the world is that a
thing must be said over and over again before any great number of men can
be got to listen to it. Let my words to-night, therefore, pass for one
of the necessary times that the thought in them must be spoken out.
For the rest I believe that, however seriously these words may be
gainsayed, I have been speaking to an audience in whom any words spoken
from a sense of duty and in hearty goodwill, as mine have been, will
quicken thought and sow some good seed. At any rate, it is good for a
man who thinks seriously to face his fellows, and speak out whatever
really burns in him, so that men may seem less strange to one another,
and misunderstanding, the fruitful cause of aimless strife, may be
avoided.
But if to any of you I have seemed to speak hopelessly, my words have
been lacking in art; and you must remember that hopelessness would have
locked my mouth, not opened it. I am, indeed, hopeful, but can I give a
date to the accomplishment of my hope, and say that it will happen in my
life or yours?
But I will say at least, Courage! for things wonderful, unhoped-for,
glorious, have happened even in this short while I have been alive.
Yes, surely these times are wonderful and fruitful of change, which, as
it wears and gathers new life even in its wearing, will one day bring
better things for the toiling days of men, who, with freer hearts and
clearer eyes, will once more gain the sense of outward beauty, and
rejoice in it.
Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as, indeed, in many ways they are, at
least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking
the common toil not good enough for us, and beaten by the muddle; but
rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to
set our workshop ready against to-morrow’s daylight—that to-morrow, when
the civilised world, no longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall
have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as
a happiness to the maker and the user.