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