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Page 12
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.
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