THE AIMS OF ART.

IN considering the Aims of Art, that is, why men toilsomely cherish and

practise Art, I find myself compelled to generalize from the only

specimen of humanity of which I know anything; to wit, myself. Now, when

I think of what it is that I desire, I find that I can give it no other

name than happiness. I want to be happy while I live; for as for death,

I find that, never having experienced it, I have no conception of what it

means, and so cannot even bring my mind to bear upon it. I know what it

is to live; I cannot even guess what it is to be dead. Well, then, I

want to be happy, and even sometimes, say generally, to be merry; and I

find it difficult to believe that that is not the universal desire: so

that, whatever tends towards that end I cherish with all my best

endeavour. Now, when I consider my life further, I find out, or seem to,

that it is under the influence of two dominating moods, which for lack of

better words I must call the mood of energy and the mood of idleness:

these two moods are now one, now the other, always crying out in me to be

satisfied. When the mood of energy is upon me, I must be doing

something, or I become mopish and unhappy; when the mood of idleness is

on me, I find it hard indeed if I cannot rest and let my mind wander over

the various pictures, pleasant or terrible, which my own experience or my

communing with the thoughts of other men, dead or alive, have fashioned

in it; and if circumstances will not allow me to cultivate this mood of

idleness, I find I must at the best pass through a period of pain till I

can manage to stimulate my mood of energy to take its place and make me

happy again. And if I have no means wherewith to rouse up that mood of

energy to do its duty in making me happy, and I have to toil while the

idle mood is upon me, then am I unhappy indeed, and almost wish myself

dead, though I do not know what that means.

Furthermore, I find that while in the mood of idleness memory amuses me,

in the mood of energy hope cheers me; which hope is sometimes big and

serious, and sometimes trivial, but that without it there is no happy

energy. Again, I find that while I can sometimes satisfy this mood by

merely exercising it in work that has no result beyond the passing

hour—in play, in short—yet that it presently wearies of that and gets

languid, the hope therein being too trivial, and sometimes even scarcely

real; and that on the whole, to satisfy my master the mood, I must either

be making something or making believe to make it.

Well, I believe that all men’s lives are compounded of these two moods in

various proportions, and that this explains why they have always, with

more or less of toil, cherished and practised art.

Why should they have touched it else, and so added to the labour which

they could not choose but do in order to live? It must have been done

for their pleasure, since it has only been in very elaborate

civilizations that a man could get other men to keep him alive merely to

produce works of art, whereas all men that have left any signs of their

existence behind them have practised art.

I suppose, indeed, that nobody will be inclined to deny that the end

proposed by a work of art is always to please the person whose senses are

to be made conscious of it. It was done _for_ some one who was to be

made happier by it; his idle or restful mood was to be amused by it, so

that the vacancy which is the besetting evil of that mood might give

place to pleased contemplation, dreaming, or what you will; and by this

means he would not so soon be driven into his workful or energetic mood:

he would have more enjoyment, and better.

The restraining of restlessness, therefore, is clearly one of the

essential aims of art, and few things could add to the pleasure of life

more than this. There are, to my knowledge, gifted people now alive who

have no other vice than this of restlessness, and seemingly no other

curse in their lives to make them unhappy: but that is enough; it is “the

little rift within the lute.” Restlessness makes them hapless men and

bad citizens.

But granting, as I suppose you all will do, that this is a most important

function for art to fulfil, the question next comes, at what price do we

obtain it? I have admitted that the practice of art has added to the

labour of mankind, though I believe in the long run it will not do so;

but in adding to the labour of man has it added, so far, to his pain?

There always have been people who would at once say yes to that question;

so that there have been and are two sets of people who dislike and

contemn art as an embarrassing folly. Besides the pious ascetics, who

look upon it as a worldly entanglement which prevents men from keeping

their minds fixed on the chances of their individual happiness or misery

in the next world; who, in short, hate art, because they think that it

adds to man’s earthly happiness—besides these, there are also people who,

looking on the struggle of life from the most reasonable point that they

know of, contemn the arts because they think that they add to man’s

slavery by increasing the sum of his painful labour: if this were the

case, it would still, to my mind, be a question whether it might not be

worth the while to endure the extra pain of labour for the sake of the

extra pleasure added to rest; assuming, for the present, equality of

condition among men. But it seems to me that it is not the case that the

practice of art adds to painful labour; nay more, I believe that, if it

did, art would never have arisen at all, would certainly not be

discernible, as it is, among peoples in whom only the germs of

civilization exist. In other words, I believe that art cannot be the

result of external compulsion; the labour which goes to produce it is

voluntary, and partly undertaken for the sake of the labour itself,

partly for the sake of the hope of producing something which, when done,

shall give pleasure to the user of it. Or, again, this extra labour,

when it is extra, is undertaken with the aim of satisfying that mood of

energy by employing it to produce something worth doing, and which,

therefore, will keep before the worker a lively hope while he is working;

and also by giving it work to do in which there is absolute immediate

pleasure. Perhaps it is difficult to explain to the non-artistic

capacity that this definite sensuous pleasure is always present in the

handiwork of the deft workman when he is working successfully, and that

it increases in proportion to the freedom and individuality of the work.

Also you must understand that this production of art, and consequent

pleasure in work, is not confined to the production of matters which are

works of art only, like pictures, statues, and so forth, but has been and

should be a part of all labour in some form or other: so only will the

claims of the mood of energy be satisfied.

Therefore the Aim of Art is to increase the happiness of men, by giving

them beauty and interest of incident to amuse their leisure, and prevent

them wearying even of rest, and by giving them hope and bodily pleasure

in their work; or, shortly, to make man’s work happy and his rest

fruitful. Consequently, genuine art is an unmixed blessing to the race

of man.

But as the word “genuine” is a large qualification, I must ask leave to

attempt to draw some practical conclusions from this assertion of the

Aims of Art, which will, I suppose, or indeed hope, lead us into some

controversy on the subject; because it is futile indeed to expect any one

to speak about art, except in the most superficial way, without

encountering those social problems which all serious men are thinking of;

since art is and must be, either in its abundance or its barrenness, in

its sincerity or its hollowness, the expression of the society amongst

which it exists.

First, then, it is clear to me that, at the present time, those who look

widest at things and deepest into them are quite dissatisfied with the

present state of the arts, as they are also with the present condition of

society. This I say in the teeth of the supposed revivification of art

which has taken place of late years: in fact, that very excitement about

the arts amongst a part of the cultivated people of to-day does but show

on how firm a basis the dissatisfaction above mentioned rests. Forty

years ago there was much less talk about art, much less practice of it,

than there is now; and that is specially true of the architectural arts,

which I shall mostly have to speak about now. People have consciously

striven to raise the dead in art since that time, and with some

superficial success. Nevertheless, in spite of this conscious effort, I

must tell you that England, to a person who can feel and understand

beauty, was a less grievous place to live in then than it is now; and we

who feel what art means know well, though we do not often dare to say so,

that forty years hence it will be a more grievous place to us than it is

now if we still follow up the road we are on. Less than forty years

ago—about thirty—I first saw the city of Rouen, then still in its outward

aspect a piece of the Middle Ages: no words can tell you how its mingled

beauty, history, and romance took hold on me; I can only say that,

looking back on my past life, I find it was the greatest pleasure I have

ever had: and now it is a pleasure which no one can ever have again: it

is lost to the world for ever. At that time I was an undergraduate of

Oxford. Though not so astounding, so romantic, or at first sight so

mediæval as the Norman city, Oxford in those days still kept a great deal

of its earlier loveliness: and the memory of its grey streets as they

then were has been an abiding influence and pleasure in my life, and

would be greater still if I could only forget what they are now—a matter

of far more importance than the so-called learning of the place could

have been to me in any case, but which, as it was, no one tried to teach

me, and I did not try to learn. Since then the guardians of this beauty

and romance so fertile of education, though professedly engaged in “the

higher education” (as the futile system of compromises which they follow

is nick-named), have ignored it utterly, have made its preservation give

way to the pressure of commercial exigencies, and are determined

apparently to destroy it altogether. There is another pleasure for the

world gone down the wind; here, again, the beauty and romance have been

uselessly, causelessly, most foolishly thrown away.

These two cases are given simply because they have been fixed in my mind;

they are but types of what is going on everywhere throughout

civilization: the world is everywhere growing uglier and more

commonplace, in spite of the conscious and very strenuous efforts of a

small group of people towards the revival of art, which are so obviously

out of joint with the tendency of the age that, while the uncultivated

have not even heard of them, the mass of the cultivated look upon them as

a joke, and even that they are now beginning to get tired of.

Now, if it be true, as I have asserted, that genuine art is an unmixed

blessing to the world, this is a serious matter; for at first sight it

seems to show that there will soon be no art at all in the world, which

will thus lose an unmixed blessing; it can ill afford to do that, I

think.

For art, if it has to die, has worn itself out, and its aim will be a

thing forgotten; and its aim was to make work happy and rest fruitful.

Is all work to be unhappy, all rest unfruitful, then? Indeed, if art is

to perish, that will be the case, unless something is to take its

place—something at present unnamed, undreamed of.

I do not think that anything will take the place of art; not that I doubt

the ingenuity of man, which seems to be boundless in the direction of

making himself unhappy, but because I believe the springs of art in the

human mind to be deathless, and also because it seems to me easy to see

the causes of the present obliteration of the arts.

For we civilized people have not given them up consciously, or of our

free will; we have been _forced_ to give them up. Perhaps I can

illustrate that by the detail of the application of machinery to the

production of things in which artistic form of some sort is possible.

Why does a reasonable man use a machine? Surely to save his labour.

There are some things which a machine can do as well as a man’s hand,

_plus_ a tool, can do them. He need not, for instance, grind his corn in

a hand-quern; a little trickle of water, a wheel, and a few simple

contrivances will do it all perfectly well, and leave him free to smoke

his pipe and think, or to carve the handle of his knife. That, so far,

is unmixed gain in the use of a machine—always, mind you, supposing

equality of condition among men; no art is lost, leisure or time for more

pleasurable work is gained. Perhaps a perfectly reasonable and free man

would stop there in his dealings with machinery; but such reason and

freedom are too much to expect, so let us follow our machine-inventor a

step farther. He has to weave plain cloth, and finds doing so dullish on

the one hand, and on the other that a power-loom will weave the cloth

nearly as well as a hand-loom: so, in order to gain more leisure or time

for more pleasurable work, he uses a power-loom, and foregoes the small

advantage of the little extra art in the cloth. But so doing, as far as

the art is concerned, he has not got a pure gain; he has made a bargain

between art and labour, and got a makeshift as a consequence. I do not

say that he may not be right in so doing, but that he has lost as well as

gained. Now, this is as far as a man who values art and is reasonable

would go in the matter of machinery _as long as he was free_—that is, was

not _forced_ to work for another man’s profit; so long as he was living

in a society _that had accepted equality of condition_. Carry the

machine used for art a step farther, and he becomes an unreasonable man,

if he values art and is free. To avoid misunderstanding, I must say that

I am thinking of the modern machine, which is as it were alive, and to

which the man is auxiliary, and not of the old machine, the improved

tool, which is auxiliary to the man, and only works as long as his hand

is thinking; though I will remark, that even this elementary form of

machine has to be dropped when we come to the higher and more intricate

forms of art. Well, as to the machine proper used for art, when it gets

to the stage above dealing with a necessary production that has

accidentally some beauty about it, a reasonable man with a feeling for

art will only use it when he is forced to. If he thinks he would like

ornament, for instance, and knows that the machine cannot do it properly,

and does not care to spend the time to do it properly, why should he do

it at all? He will not diminish his leisure for the sake of making

something he does not want unless some man or band of men force him to

it; so he will either go without the ornament, or sacrifice some of his

leisure to have it genuine. That will be a sign that he wants it very

much, and that it will be worth his trouble: in which case, again, his

labour on it will not be mere trouble, but will interest and please him

by satisfying the needs of his mood of energy.

This, I say, is how a reasonable man would act if he were free from man’s

compulsion; not being free, he acts very differently. He has long passed

the stage at which machines are only used for doing work repulsive to an

average man, or for doing what could be as well done by a machine as a

man, and he instinctively expects a machine to be invented whenever any

product of industry becomes sought after. He is the slave to machinery;

the new machine _must_ be invented, and when invented he _must_—I will

not say use it, but be used by it, whether he likes it or not.

But why is he the slave to machinery? Because he is the slave to the

system for whose existence the invention of machinery was necessary.

And now I must drop, or rather have dropped, the assumption of the

equality of condition, and remind you that, though in a sense we are all

the slaves of machinery, yet that some men are so directly without any

metaphor at all, and that these are just those on whom the great body of

the arts depends—the workmen. It is necessary for the system which keeps

them in their position as an inferior class that they should either be

themselves machines or be the servants to machines, in no case having any

interest in the work which they turn out. To their employers they are,

so far as they are workmen, a part of the machinery of the workshop or

the factory; to themselves they are proletarians, human beings working to

live that they may live to work: their part of craftsmen, of makers of

things by their own free will, is played out.

At the risk of being accused of sentimentality, I will say that since

this is so, since the work which produces the things that should be

matters of art is but a burden and a slavery, I exult in this at least,

that it cannot produce art; that all it can do lies between stark

utilitarianism and idiotic sham.

Or indeed is that merely sentimental? Rather, I think, we who have

learned to see the connection between industrial slavery and the

degradation of the arts have learned also to hope for a future for those

arts; since the day will certainly come when men will shake off the yoke,

and refuse to accept the mere artificial compulsion of the gambling

market to waste their lives in ceaseless and hopeless toil; and when it

does come, their instincts for beauty and imagination set free along with

them, will produce such art as they need; and who can say that it will

not as far surpass the art of past ages as that does the poor relics of

it left us by the age of commerce?

A word or two on an objection which has often been made to me when I have

been talking on this subject. It may be said, and is often, You regret

the art of the Middle Ages (as indeed I do), but those who produced it

were not free; they were serfs, or gild-craftsmen surrounded by brazen

walls of trade restrictions; they had no political rights, and were

exploited by their masters, the noble caste, most grievously. Well, I

quite admit that the oppression and violence of the Middle Ages had its

effect on the art of those days, its shortcomings are traceable to them;

they repressed art in certain directions, I do not doubt that; and for

that reason I say, that when we shake off the present oppression as we

shook off the old, we may expect the art of the days of real freedom to

rise above that of those old violent days. But I do say that it was

possible then to have social, organic, hopeful progressive art; whereas

now such poor scraps of it as are left are the result of individual and

wasteful struggle, are retrospective and pessimistic. And this hopeful

art was possible amidst all the oppression of those days, because the

instruments of that oppression were grossly obvious, and were external to

the work of the craftsman. They were laws and customs obviously intended

to rob him, and open violence of the highway-robbery kind. In short,

industrial production was not the instrument used for robbing the “lower

classes;” it is now the main instrument used in that honourable

profession. The mediæval craftsman was free in his work, therefore he

made it as amusing to himself as he could; and it was his pleasure and

not his pain that made all things beautiful that were made, and lavished

treasures of human hope and thought on everything that man made, from a

cathedral to a porridge-pot. Come, let us put it in the way least

respectful to the mediæval craftsman, most polite to the modern “hand:”

the poor devil of the fourteenth century, his work was of so little value

that he was allowed to waste it by the hour in pleasing himself—and

others; but our highly-strung mechanic, his minutes are too rich with the

burden of perpetual profit for him to be allowed to waste one of them on

art; the present system will not allow him—cannot allow him—to produce

works of art.

* * * * *

So that there has arisen this strange phenomenon, that there is now a

class of ladies and gentlemen, very refined indeed, though not perhaps as

well informed as is generally supposed, and of this refined class there

are many who do really love beauty and incident—i.e., art, and would make

sacrifices to get it; and these are led by artists of great manual skill

and high intellect, forming altogether a large body of demand for the

article. And yet the supply does not come. Yes, and moreover, this

great body of enthusiastic demanders are no mere poor and helpless

people, ignorant fisher-peasants, half-mad monks, scatter-brained

sansculottes—none of those, in short, the expression of whose needs has

shaken the world so often before, and will do yet again. No, they are of

the ruling classes, the masters of men, who can live without labour, and

have abundant leisure to scheme out the fulfilment of their desires; and

yet I say they cannot have the art which they so much long for, though

they hunt it about the world so hard, sentimentalizing the sordid lives

of the miserable peasants of Italy and the starving proletarians of her

towns, now that all the picturesqueness has departed from the poor devils

of our own country-side, and of our own slums. Indeed, there is little

of reality left them anywhere, and that little is fast fading away before

the needs of the manufacturer and his ragged regiment of workers, and

before the enthusiasm of the archæological restorer of the dead past.

Soon there will be nothing left except the lying dreams of history, the

miserable wreckage of our museums and picture-galleries, and the

carefully guarded interiors of our æsthetic drawing-rooms, unreal and

foolish, fitting witnesses of the life of corruption that goes on there,

so pinched and meagre and cowardly, with its concealment and ignoring,

rather than restraint of, natural longings; which does not forbid the

greedy indulgence in them if it can but be decently hidden.

The art then is gone, and can no more be “restored” on its old lines than

a mediæval building can be. The rich and refined cannot have it though

they would, and though we will believe many of them would. And why?

Because those who could give it to the rich are not allowed by the rich

to do so. In one word, slavery lies between us and art.

I have said as much as that the aim of art was to destroy the curse of

labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards

energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its

exercise.

Now, therefore, I say, that since we cannot have art by striving after

its mere superficial manifestation, since we can have nothing but its

sham by so doing, there yet remains for us to see how it would be if we

let the shadow take care of itself and try, if we can, to lay hold of the

substance. For my part I believe, that if we try to realize the aims of

art without much troubling ourselves what the aspect of the art itself

shall be, we shall find we shall have what we want at last: whether it is

to be called art or not, it will at least be _life_; and, after all, that

is what we want. It may lead us into new splendours and beauties of

visible art; to architecture with manifolded magnificence free from the

curious incompleteness and failings of that which the older times have

produced—to painting, uniting to the beauty which mediæval art attained

the realism which modern art aims at; to sculpture, uniting the beauty of

the Greek and the expression of the Renaissance with some third quality

yet undiscovered, so as to give us the images of men and women splendidly

alive, yet not disqualified from making, as all true sculpture should,

architectural ornament. All this it may do; or, on the other hand, it

may lead us into the desert, and art may seem to be dead amidst us; or

feebly and uncertainly to be struggling in a world which has utterly

forgotten its old glories.

For my part, with art as it now is, I cannot bring myself to think that

it much matters which of these dooms awaits it, so long as each bears

with it some hope of what is to come; since here, as in other matters,

there is no hope save in Revolution. The old art is no longer fertile,

no longer yields us anything save elegantly poetical regrets; being

barren, it has but to die, and the matter of moment now is, as to how it

shall die, whether _with_ hope or _without_ it.

What is it, for instance, that has destroyed the Rouen, the Oxford of

_my_ elegant poetic regret? Has it perished for the benefit of the

people, either slowly yielding to the growth of intelligent change and

new happiness? or has it been, as it were, thunderstricken by the tragedy

which mostly accompanies some great new birth? Not so. Neither

phalangstere nor dynamite has swept its beauty away, its destroyers have

not been either the philanthropist or the Socialist, the co-operator or

the anarchist. It has been sold, and at a cheap price indeed: muddled

away by the greed and incompetence of fools who do not know what life and

pleasure mean, who will neither take them themselves nor let others have

them. That is why the death of that beauty wounds us so: no man of sense

or feeling would dare to regret such losses if they had been paid for by

new life and happiness for the people. But there is the people still as

it was before, still facing for its part the monster who destroyed all

that beauty, and whose name is Commercial Profit.

I repeat, that every scrap of genuine art will fall by the same hands if

the matter only goes on long enough, although a sham art may be left in

its place, which may very well be carried on by _dilettanti_ fine

gentlemen and ladies without any help from below; and, to speak plainly,

I fear that this gibbering ghost of the real thing would satisfy a great

many of those who now think themselves lovers of art; though it is not

difficult to see a long vista of its degradation till it shall become at

last a mere laughing-stock; that is to say, if the thing were to go on: I

mean, if art were to be for ever the amusement of those whom we now call

ladies and gentlemen.

But for my part I do not think it will go on long enough to reach such

depths as that; and yet I should be hypocritical if I were to say that I

thought that the change in the basis of society, which would enfranchise

labour and make men practically equal in condition, would lead us by a

short road to the splendid new birth of art which I have mentioned,

though I feel quite certain that it would not leave what we now call art

untouched, since the aims of that revolution do include the aims of

art—viz., abolishing the curse of labour.

I suppose that this is what is likely to happen; that machinery will go

on developing, with the purpose of saving men labour, till the mass of

the people attain real leisure enough to be able to appreciate the

pleasure of life; till, in fact, they have attained such mastery over

Nature that they no longer fear starvation as a penalty for not working

more than enough. When they get to that point they will doubtless turn

themselves and begin to find out what it is that they really want to do.

They would soon find out that the less work they did (the less work

unaccompanied by art, I mean), the more desirable a dwelling-place the

earth would be; they would accordingly do less and less work, till the

mood of energy, of which I began by speaking, urged them on afresh: but

by that time Nature, relieved by the relaxation of man’s work, would be

recovering her ancient beauty, and be teaching men the old story of art.

And as the Artificial Famine, caused by men working for the profit of a

master, and which we now look upon as a matter of course, would have long

disappeared, they would be free to do as they chose, and they would set

aside their machines in all cases where the work seemed pleasant or

desirable for handiwork; till in all crafts where production of beauty

was required, the most direct communication between a man’s hand and his

brain would be sought for. And there would be many occupations also, as

the processes of agriculture, in which the voluntary exercise of energy

would be thought so delightful, that people would not dream of handing

over its pleasure to the jaws of a machine.

In short, men will find out that the men of our days were wrong in first

multiplying their needs, and then trying, each man of them, to evade all

participation in the means and processes whereby those needs are

satisfied; that this kind of division of labour is really only a new and

wilful form of arrogant and slothful ignorance, far more injurious to the

happiness and contentment of life than the ignorance of the processes of

Nature, of what we sometimes call _science_, which men of the earlier

days unwittingly lived in.

They will discover, or rediscover rather, that the true secret of

happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of

daily life, in elevating them by art instead of handing the performance

of them over to unregarded drudges, and ignoring them; and that in cases

where it was impossible either so to elevate them and make them

interesting, or to lighten them by the use of machinery, so as to make

the labour of them trifling, that should be taken as a token that the

supposed advantages gained by them were not worth the trouble and had

better be given up. All this to my mind would be the outcome of men

throwing off the burden of Artificial Famine, supposing, as I cannot help

supposing, that the impulses which have from the first glimmerings of

history urged men on to the practice of Art were still at work in them.

Thus and thus only _can_ come about the new birth of Art, and I think it

_will_ come about thus. You may say it is a long process, and so it is;

but I can conceive of a longer. I have given you the Socialist or

Optimist view of the matter. Now for the Pessimist view.

I can conceive that the revolt against Artificial Famine or Capitalism,

which is now on foot, may be vanquished. The result will be that the

working class—the slaves of society—will become more and more degraded;

that they will not strive against overwhelming force, but, stimulated by

that love of life which Nature, always anxious about the perpetuation of

the race, has implanted in us, will learn to bear everything—starvation,

overwork, dirt, ignorance, brutality. All these things they will bear,

as, alas! they bear them too well even now; all this rather than risk

sweet life and bitter livelihood, and all sparks of hope and manliness

will die out of them.

Nor will their masters be much better off: the earth’s surface will be

hideous everywhere, save in the uninhabitable desert; Art will utterly

perish, as in the manual arts so in literature, which will become, as it

is indeed speedily becoming, a mere string of orderly and calculated

ineptitudes and passionless ingenuities; Science will grow more and more

one-sided, more incomplete, more wordy and useless, till at last she will

pile herself up into such a mass of superstition, that beside it the

theologies of old time will seem mere reason and enlightenment. All will

get lower and lower, till the heroic struggles of the past to realize

hope from year to year, from century to century, will be utterly

forgotten, and man will be an indescribable being—hopeless, desireless,

lifeless.

And will there be deliverance from this even? Maybe: man may, after some

terrible cataclysm, learn to strive towards a healthy animalism, may grow

from a tolerable animal into a savage, from a savage into a barbarian,

and so on; and some thousands of years hence he may be beginning once

more those arts which we have now lost, and be carving interlacements

like the New Zealanders, or scratching forms of animals on their cleaned

blade-bones, like the pre-historic men of the drift.

But in any case, according to the pessimist view, which looks upon revolt

against Artificial Famine as impossible to succeed, we shall wearily

trudge the circle again, until some accident, some unforeseen consequence

of arrangement, makes an end of us altogether.

That pessimism I do not believe in, nor, on the other hand, do I suppose

that it is altogether a matter of our wills as to whether we shall

further human progress or human degradation; yet, since there are those

who are impelled towards the Socialist or Optimistic side of things, I

must conclude that there is some hope of its prevailing, that the

strenuous efforts of many individuals imply a force which is thrusting

them on. So that I believe that the “Aims of Art” will be realized,

though I know that they cannot be, so long as we groan under the tyranny

of Artificial Famine. Once again I warn you against supposing, you who

may specially love art, that you will do any good by attempting to

revivify art by dealing with its dead exterior. I say it is the _aims of

art_ that you must seek rather than the _art itself_; and in that search

we may find ourselves in a world blank and bare, as the result of our

caring at least this much for art, that we will not endure the shams of

it.

Anyhow, I ask you to think with me that the worst which can happen to us

is to endure tamely the evils that we see; that no trouble or turmoil is

so bad as that; that the necessary destruction which reconstruction bears

with it must be taken calmly; that everywhere—in State, in Church, in the

household—we must be resolute to endure no tyranny, accept no lie, quail

before no fear, although they may come before us disguised as piety,

duty, or affection, as useful opportunity and good-nature, as prudence or

kindness. The world’s roughness, falseness, and injustice will bring

about their natural consequences, and we and our lives are part of those

consequences; but since we inherit also the consequences of old

resistance to those curses, let us each look to it to have our fair share

of that inheritance also, which, if nothing else come of it, will at

least bring to us courage and hope; that is, eager life while we live,

which is above all things the Aim of Art.