The fragments of which this lecture is composed are taken entirely from
the original manuscripts which have but recently been discovered. It is
not certain that they all belong to the same lecture, nor that all were
written at the same period. Some portions were written in Philadelphia
in 1882.
PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful
and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness:
all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on
the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always
on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is
always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed
on it. No workman will beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you
possibly get good handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful
designs. You should be quite sure of that. If you have poor and
worthless designs in any craft or trade you will get poor and worthless
workmen only, but the minute you have noble and beautiful designs, then
you get men of power and intellect and feeling to work for you. By
having good designs you have workmen who work not merely with their hands
but with their hearts and heads too; otherwise you will get merely the
fool or the loafer to work for you.
That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few people
would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act as if it were
of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves and those that are
to come after them. For that beauty which is meant by art is no mere
accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive
necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say
unless we are content to be less than men.
Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your life
and cities here is opposed to art. Who built the beautiful cities of the
world but commercial men and commercial men only? Genoa built by its
traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice, most lovely of all, by its
noble and honest merchants.
I do not wish you, remember, ‘to build a new Pisa,’ nor to bring ‘the
life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.’ ‘The
circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are those’ of
modern American life, ‘because the designs you have now to ask for from
your workmen are such as will make modern’ American ‘life beautiful.’
The art we want is the art based on all the inventions of modern
civilisation, and to suit all the needs of nineteenth-century life.
Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I tell you we
reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work, when it
relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it seeks to do
that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands and hearts of men.
Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless
and ugly. And let us not mistake the means of civilisation for the end
of civilisation; steam-engine, telephone and the like, are all wonderful,
but remember that their value depends entirely on the noble uses we make
of them, on the noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things
themselves.
It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the Antipodes
through a telephone; its advantage depends entirely on the value of what
the two men have to say to one another. If one merely shrieks slander
through a tube and the other whispers folly into a wire, do not think
that anybody is very much benefited by the invention.
The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the rate of
forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any memory of that
lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier at Rome, or that he
got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or civilisation much good.
But that swift legion of fiery-footed engines that bore to the burning
ruins of Chicago the loving help and generous treasure of the world was
as noble and as beautiful as any golden troop of angels that ever fed the
hungry and clothed the naked in the antique times. As beautiful, yes;
all machinery may be beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek
to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful,
also, the line of strength and the line of beauty being one.
Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright and noble
surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and simple
architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for your men and
women; those are the conditions of a real artistic movement. For the
artist is not concerned primarily with any theory of life but with life
itself, with the joy and loveliness that should come daily on eye and ear
for a beautiful external world.
But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour gaudy.
For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the colours that seem
about to pass into one another’s realm—colour without tone being like
music without harmony, mere discord. Barren architecture, the vulgar and
glaring advertisements that desecrate not merely your cities but every
rock and river that I have seen yet in America—all this is not enough. A
school of design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately
and noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the
world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren whitewashed
room and bid them work in that depressing and colourless atmosphere as I
have seen many of the American schools of design, but give them beautiful
surroundings. Because you want to produce a permanent canon and standard
of taste in your workman, he must have always by him and before him
specimens of the best decorative art of the world, so that you can say to
him: ‘This is good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many
years ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.’ Work
in this spirit and you will be sure to be right. Do not copy it, but
work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom of
imagination. You must teach him colour and design, how all beautiful
colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the essence of
vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful work of nature like the
rose, or any beautiful work of art like an Eastern carpet—being merely
the exquisite gradation of colour, one tone answering another like the
answering chords of a symphony. Teach him how the true designer is not
he who makes the design and then colours it, but he who designs in
colour, creates in colour, thinks in colour too. Show him how the most
gorgeous stained-glass windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and
the most gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours—the primary colours
in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours like
brilliant jewels set in dusky gold. And then as regards design, show him
how the real designer will take first any given limited space, little
disk of silver, it may be, like a Greek coin, or wide expanse of fretted
ceiling or lordly wall as Tintoret chose at Venice (it does not matter
which), and to this limited space—the first condition of decoration being
the limitation of the size of the material used—he will give the effect
of its being filled with beautiful decoration, filled with it as a golden
cup will be filled with wine, so complete that you should not be able to
take away anything from it or add anything to it. For from a good piece
of design you can take away nothing, nor can you add anything to it, each
little bit of design being as absolutely necessary and as vitally
important to the whole effect as a note or chord of music is for a sonata
of Beethoven.
But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this, again, is of
the essence of good design. With a simple spray of leaves and a bird in
flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression that he has
completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or lacquer cabinet at
which he is working, merely because he knows the exact spot in which to
place them. All good design depends on the texture of the utensil used
and the use you wish to put it to. One of the first things I saw in an
American school of design was a young lady painting a romantic moonlight
landscape on a large round dish, and another young lady covering a set of
dinner plates with a series of sunsets of the most remarkable colours.
Let your ladies paint moonlight landscapes and sunsets, but do not let
them paint them on dinner plates or dishes. Let them take canvas or
paper for such work, but not clay or china. They are merely painting the
wrong subjects on the wrong material, that is all. They have not been
taught that every material and texture has certain qualities of its own.
The design suitable for one is quite wrong for the other, just as the
design which you should work on a flat table-cover ought to be quite
different from the design you would work on a curtain, for the one will
always be straight, the other broken into folds; and the use too one puts
the object to should guide one in the choice of design. One does not
want to eat one’s terrapins off a romantic moonlight nor one’s clams off
a harrowing sunset. Glory of sun and moon, let them be wrought for us by
our landscape artist and be on the walls of the rooms we sit in to remind
us of the undying beauty of the sunsets that fade and die, but do not let
us eat our soup off them and send them down to the kitchen twice a day to
be washed and scrubbed by the handmaid.
All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten. Your
school of design here will teach your girls and your boys, your
handicraftsmen of the future (for all your schools of art should be local
schools, the schools of particular cities). We talk of the Italian
school of painting, but there is no Italian school; there were the
schools of each city. Every town in Italy, from Venice itself, queen of
the sea, to the little hill fortress of Perugia, each had its own school
of art, each different and all beautiful.
So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having, but make by
the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for the joy of your own
citizens, for you have here the primary elements of a great artistic
movement.
For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people
imagine. For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy atmosphere,
not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the smoke and grime
and horridness which comes from open furnace and from factory chimney.
You must have strong, sane, healthy physique among your men and women.
Sickly or idle or melancholy people do not do much in art. And lastly,
you require a sense of individualism about each man and woman, for this
is the essence of art—a desire on the part of man to express himself in
the noblest way possible. And this is the reason that the grandest art
of the world always came from a republic: Athens, Venice, and
Florence—there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and
simple as sincere. But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of
kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France under
the _grand monarque_, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy gilt
furniture writhing under a sense of its own horror and ugliness, with a
nymph smirking at every angle and a dragon mouthing on every claw.
Unreal and monstrous art this, and fit only for such periwigged
pomposities as the nobility of France at that time, but not at all fit
for you or me. We do not want the rich to possess more beautiful things
but the poor to create more beautiful things; for ever man is poor who
cannot create. Nor shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple
robe woven by a slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous
king to adorn or to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be
the noble and beautiful expression of a people’s noble and beautiful
life. Art shall be again the most glorious of all the chords through
which the spirit of a great nation finds its noblest utterance.
All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great artistic movement
for every great art. Let us think of one of them; a sculptor, for
instance.
If a modern sculptor were to come and say, ‘Very well, but where can one
find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats and
chimney-pot hats?’ I would tell him to go to the docks of a great city
and watch the men loading or unloading the stately ships, working at
wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I have never watched a
man do anything useful who has not been graceful at some moment of his
labour: it is only the loafer and the idle saunterer who is as useless
and uninteresting to the artist as he is to himself. I would ask the
sculptor to go with me to any of your schools or universities, to the
running ground and gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race,
hurling quoit or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping,
stepping from the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when
he was weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows
to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle-driver with lifted
lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such
simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man
leaning with his scythe, he will not find them anywhere at all. Gods and
goddesses the Greek carved because he loved them; saint and king the Goth
because he believed in them. But you, you do not care much for Greek
gods and goddesses, and you are perfectly and entirely right; and you do
not think much of kings either, and you are quite right. But what you do
love are your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own
hills and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.
Ours has been the first movement which has brought the handicraftsman and
the artist together, for remember that by separating the one from the
other you do ruin to both; you rob the one of all spiritual motive and
all imaginative joy, you isolate the other from all real technical
perfection. The two greatest schools of art in the world, the sculptor
at Athens and the school of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely
in a long succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen. It was the
Greek potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design
which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator of
chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always true to its
primary pictorial condition of noble colour. For we should remember that
all the arts are fine arts and all the arts decorative arts. The
greatest triumph of Italian painting was the decoration of a pope’s
chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in Venice. Michael Angelo wrought
the one, and Tintoret, the dyer’s son, the other. And the little ‘Dutch
landscape, which you put over your sideboard to-day, and between the
windows to-morrow, is’ no less a glorious ‘piece of work than the extents
of field and forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the
once melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,’ as Ruskin says.
Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or
English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic attitude
to-day, their own world, you should absorb but imitate never, copy never.
Unless you can make as beautiful a design in painted china or embroidered
screen or beaten brass out of your American turkey as the Japanese does
out of his grey silver-winged stork, you will never do anything. Let the
Greek carve his lions and the Goth his dragons: buffalo and wild deer are
the animals for you.
Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your valleys
in the spring and your hills in the autumn: let them be the flowers for
your art. Not merely has Nature given you the noblest motives for a new
school of decoration, but to you above all other countries has she given
the utensils to work in.
You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied than
Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble and think
that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly. If you build
in marble you must either carve it into joyous decoration, like the lives
of dancing children that adorn the marble castles of the Loire, or fill
it with beautiful sculpture, frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or
inlay it with other coloured marbles as they did in Venice. Otherwise
you had better build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no
pretence and with some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was
ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. For it is indeed
a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only workmen of nobility of
invention and delicacy of hand should be allowed to touch it at all,
carving it into noble statues or into beautiful decoration, or inlaying
it with other coloured marbles: for ‘the true colours of architecture are
those of natural stone, and I would fain see them taken advantage of to
the full. Every variety is here, from pale yellow to purple passing
through orange, red, and brown, entirely at your command; nearly every
kind of green and grey also is attainable, and with these and with pure
white what harmony might you not achieve. Of stained and variegated
stone the quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable. Were brighter
colours required, let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used in
mosaic, a kind of work as durable as the solid stone and incapable of
losing its lustre by time. And let the painter’s work be reserved for
the shadowed loggia and inner chamber.
‘This is the true and faithful way of building. Where this cannot be,
the device of external colouring may indeed be employed without
dishonour—but it must be with the warning reflection that a time will
come when such aids will pass away and when the building will be judged
in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin. Better the less
bright, more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato
and the mosaics of Saint Mark’s are more warmly filled and more brightly
touched by every return of morning and evening, while the hues of the
Gothic cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud, and the
temples, whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontory,
stand in their faded whiteness like snows which the sunset has left
cold.’—Ruskin, _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, II.
I do not know anything so perfectly commonplace in design as most modern
jewellery. How easy for you to change that and to produce goldsmiths’
work that would be a joy to all of us. The gold is ready for you in
unexhausted treasure, stored up in the mountain hollow or strewn on the
river sand, and was not given to you merely for barren speculation.
There should be some better record of it left in your history than the
merchant’s panic and the ruined home. We do not remember often enough
how constantly the history of a great nation will live in and by its art.
Only a few thin wreaths of beaten gold remain to tell us of the stately
empire of Etruria; and, while from the streets of Florence the noble
knight and haughty duke have long since passed away, the gates which the
simple goldsmith Ghiberti made for their pleasure still guard their
lovely house of baptism, worthy still of the praise of Michael Angelo who
called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.
Have then your school of design, search out your workmen and, when you
find one who has delicacy of hand and that wonder of invention necessary
for goldsmiths’ work, do not leave him to toil in obscurity and dishonour
and have a great glaring shop and two great glaring shop-boys in it (not
to take your orders: they never do that; but to force you to buy
something you do not want at all). When you want a thing wrought in
gold, goblet or shield for the feast, necklace or wreath for the women,
tell him what you like most in decoration, flower or wreath, bird in
flight or hound in the chase, image of the woman you love or the friend
you honour. Watch him as he beats out the gold into those thin plates
delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or draws it into the long wires
like tangled sunbeams at dawn. Whoever that workman be, help him,
cherish him, and you will have such lovely work from his hand as will be
a joy to you for all time.
This is the spirit of our movement in England, and this is the spirit in
which we would wish you to work, making eternal by your art all that is
noble in your men and women, stately in your lakes and mountains,
beautiful in your own flowers and natural life. We want to see that you
have nothing in your houses that has not been a joy to the man who made
it, and is not a joy to those that use it. We want to see you create an
art made by the hands of the people to please the hearts of the people
too. Do you like this spirit or not? Do you think it simple and strong,
noble in its aim, and beautiful in its result? I know you do.
Folly and slander have their own way for a little time, but for a little
time only. You now know what we mean: you will be able to estimate what
is said of us—its value and its motive.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to
write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it
would be impossible to overestimate—not to the artist but to the public,
blinding them to all, but harming the artist not at all. Without them we
would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are
trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never
by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount
of his income and a poet by the colour of his neck-tie. I said there
should be a law, but there is really no necessity for a new law: nothing
could be easier than to bring the ordinary critic under the head of the
criminal classes. But let us leave such an inartistic subject and return
to beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art which would
represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be exactly the art which
you and I want to avoid—grotesque art, malice mocking you from every
gateway, slander sneering at you from every corner.
Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the workman.
You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your somewhat
imaginative newspapers as, if not a ‘Japanese young man,’ at least a
young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of the modern world
were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in life was the
difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china—a paradox from
which England has not yet recovered.
Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an
artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful
things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might
create.
One summer afternoon in Oxford—‘that sweet city with her dreaming
spires,’ lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning as
Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower, past
silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that long, grey
seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used to, I say,
because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway and a light
cast-iron bridge in its place, desecrating the loveliest city in
England)—well, we were coming down the street—a troop of young men, some
of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or
cricket-field—when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us. He
seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a
few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life,
saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and
strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket
ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well
one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat.
He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do
good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all
labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and
said we would do anything he wished. So he went out round Oxford and
found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a
great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other
without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked
us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people
to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and
to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank—a very difficult
thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of
an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us
from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it
afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road. And what
became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly—in the
middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for
the next term there was no leader, and the ‘diggers,’ as they called us,
fell asunder. And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst the
young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of a noble
ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic movement that might
change, as it has changed, the face of England. So I sought them
out—leader they would call me—but there was no leader: we were all
searchers only and we were bound to each other by noble friendship and by
noble art. There was none of us idle: poets most of us, so ambitious
were we: painters some of us, or workers in metal or modellers,
determined that we would try and create for ourselves beautiful work: for
the handicraftsman beautiful work, for those who love us poems and
pictures, for those who love us not epigrams and paradoxes and scorn.
Well, we have done something in England and we will do something more.
Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant young men, your
beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on a swamp for any
village in America, but I think you might each of you have some art to
practise.
* * * * *
We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our culture, a
basis for our higher accomplishments in the work of our hands—the
uselessness of most people’s hands seems to me one of the most
unpractical things. ‘No separation from labour can be without some loss
of power or truth to the seer,’ says Emerson again. The heroism which
would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must be that of a domestic
conqueror. The hero of the future is he who shall bravely and gracefully
subdue this Gorgon of fashion and of convention.
When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly try
and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common
nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous
age.
And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death cannot
harm. The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the wisdom of New
England’s Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of that Attic genius
dimmed: the lips of Longfellow are still musical for us though his dust
be turning into the flowers which he loved: and as it is with the greater
artists, poet and philosopher and song-bird, so let it be with you.