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Page 15
Nay, so universally important is it, that I fear lest you should
think I am taking too much upon myself to speak to you on so weighty
a matter, nor should I have dared to do so, if I did not feel that I
am to-night only the mouthpiece of better men than myself; whose
hopes and fears I share; and that being so, I am the more emboldened
to speak out, if I can, my full mind on the subject, because I am in
a city where, if anywhere, men are not contented to live wholly for
themselves and the present, but have fully accepted the duty of
keeping their eyes open to whatever new is stirring, so that they
may help and be helped by any truth that there may be in it. Nor
can I forget, that, since you have done me the great honour of
choosing me for the President of your Society of Arts for the past
year, and of asking me to speak to you to-night, I should be doing
less than my duty if I did not, according to my lights, speak out
straightforwardly whatever seemed to me might be in a small degree
useful to you. Indeed, I think I am among friends, who may forgive
me if I speak rashly, but scarcely if I speak falsely.
The aim of your Society and School of Arts is, as I understand it,
to further those arts by education widely spread. A very great
object is that, and well worthy of the reputation of this great
city; but since Birmingham has also, I rejoice to know, a great
reputation for not allowing things to go about shamming life when
the brains are knocked out of them, I think you should know and see
clearly what it is you have undertaken to further by these
institutions, and whether you really care about it, or only
languidly acquiesce in it--whether, in short, you know it to the
heart, and are indeed part and parcel of it, with your own will, or
against it; or else have heard say that it is a good thing if any
one care to meddle with it.
If you are surprised at my putting that question for your
consideration, I will tell you why I do so. There are some of us
who love Art most, and I may say most faithfully, who see for
certain that such love is rare nowadays. We cannot help seeing,
that besides a vast number of people, who (poor souls!) are sordid
and brutal of mind and habits, and have had no chance or choice in
the matter, there are many high-minded, thoughtful, and cultivated
men who inwardly think the arts to be a foolish accident of
civilisation--nay, worse perhaps, a nuisance, a disease, a hindrance
to human progress. Some of these, doubtless, are very busy about
other sides of thought. They are, as I should put it, so
ARTISTICALLY engrossed by the study of science, politics, or what
not, that they have necessarily narrowed their minds by their hard
and praiseworthy labours. But since such men are few, this does not
account for a prevalent habit of thought that looks upon Art as at
best trifling.
What is wrong, then, with us or the arts, since what was once
accounted so glorious, is now deemed paltry?
The question is no light one; for, to put the matter in its clearest
light, I will say that the leaders of modern thought do for the most
part sincerely and single-mindedly hate and despise the arts; and
you know well that as the leaders are, so must the people be; and
that means that we who are met together here for the furthering of
Art by wide-spread education are either deceiving ourselves and
wasting our time, since we shall one day be of the same opinion as
the best men among us, or else we represent a small minority that is
right, as minorities sometimes are, while those upright men
aforesaid, and the great mass of civilised men, have been blinded by
untoward circumstances.
That we are of this mind--the minority that is right--is, I hope,
the case. I hope we know assuredly that the arts we have met
together to further are necessary to the life of man, if the
progress of civilisation is not to be as causeless as the turning of
a wheel that makes nothing.
How, then, shall we, the minority, carry out the duty which our
position thrusts upon us, of striving to grow into a majority?
If we could only explain to those thoughtful men, and the millions
of whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which
is to us as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about
which they know nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of
repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard
indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or
mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing
so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine
Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names of the pedants,
tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain which long-
dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people into
thinking that they were necessary lords of the world. Turn then to
the lands they governed, and read and forget a long string of the
causeless murders of Northern and Saracen pirates and robbers. That
is pretty much the sum of what so-called history has left us of the
tale of those days--the stupid languor and the evil deeds of kings
and scoundrels. Must we turn away then, and say that all was evil?
How then did men live from day to day? How then did Europe grow
into intelligence and freedom? It seems there were others than
those of whom history (so called) has left us the names and the
deeds. These, the raw material for the treasury and the slave-
market, we now call 'the people,' and we know that they were working
all that while. Yes, and that their work was not merely slaves'
work, the meal-trough before them and the whip behind them; for
though history (so called) has forgotten them, yet their work has
not been forgotten, but has made another history--the history of
Art. There is not an ancient city in the East or the West that does
not bear some token of their grief, and joy, and hope. From Ispahan
to Northumberland, there is no building built between the seventh
and seventeenth centuries that does not show the influence of the
labour of that oppressed and neglected herd of men. No one of them,
indeed, rose high above his fellows. There was no Plato, or
Shakespeare, or Michael Angelo amongst them. Yet scattered as it
was among many men, how strong their thought was, how long it
abided, how far it travelled!
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