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Page 17
At any rate let us count our gains, and set them against less
hopeful signs of the times. In England, then--and as far as I know,
in England only--painters of pictures have grown, I believe, more
numerous, and certainly more conscientious in their work, and in
some cases--and this more especially in England--have developed and
expressed a sense of beauty which the world has not seen for the
last three hundred years. This is certainly a very great gain,
which is not easy to over-estimate, both for those who make the
pictures and those who use them.
Furthermore, in England, and in England only, there has been a great
improvement in architecture and the arts that attend it--arts which
it was the special province of the afore-mentioned schools to revive
and foster. This, also, is a considerable gain to the users of the
works so made, but I fear a gain less important to most of those
concerned in making them.
Against these gains we must, I am very sorry to say, set the fact
not easy to be accounted for, that the rest of the civilised world
(so called) seems to have done little more than stand still in these
matters; and that among ourselves these improvements have concerned
comparatively few people, the mass of our population not being in
the least touched by them; so that the great bulk of our
architecture--the art which most depends on the taste of the people
at large--grows worse and worse every day. I must speak also of
another piece of discouragement before I go further. I daresay many
of you will remember how emphatically those who first had to do with
the movement of which the foundation of our art-schools was a part,
called the attention of our pattern-designers to the beautiful works
of the East. This was surely most well judged of them, for they
bade us look at an art at once beautiful, orderly, living in our own
day, and above all, popular. Now, it is a grievous result of the
sickness of civilisation that this art is fast disappearing before
the advance of western conquest and commerce--fast, and every day
faster. While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread
of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-
sightedness, actively destroying the very sources of that education-
-jewellery, metal-work, pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving,
carpet-making--all the famous and historical arts of the great
peninsula have been for long treated as matters of no importance, to
be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called
commerce; and matters are now speedily coming to an end there. I
daresay some of you saw the presents which the native Princes gave
to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his progress through
India. I did myself, I will not say with great disappointment, for
I guessed what they would be like, but with great grief, since there
was scarce here and there a piece of goods among these costly gifts,
things given as great treasures, which faintly upheld the ancient
fame of the cradle of the industrial arts. Nay, in some cases, it
would have been laughable, if it had not been so sad, to see the
piteous simplicity with which the conquered race had copied the
blank vulgarity of their lords. And this deterioration we are now,
as I have said, actively engaged in forwarding. I have read a
little book, {3} a handbook to the Indian Court of last year's Paris
Exhibition, which takes the occasion of noting the state of
manufactures in India one by one. 'Art manufactures,' you would
call them; but, indeed, all manufactures are, or were, 'art
manufactures' in India. Dr. Birdwood, the author of this book, is
of great experience in Indian life, a man of science, and a lover of
the arts. His story, by no means a new one to me, or others
interested in the East and its labour, is a sad one indeed. The
conquered races in their hopelessness are everywhere giving up the
genuine practice of their own arts, which we know ourselves, as we
have indeed loudly proclaimed, are founded on the truest and most
natural principles. The often-praised perfection of these arts is
the blossom of many ages of labour and change, but the conquered
races are casting it aside as a thing of no value, so that they may
conform themselves to the inferior art, or rather the lack of art,
of their conquerors. In some parts of the country the genuine arts
are quite destroyed; in many others nearly so; in all they have more
or less begun to sicken. So much so is this the case, that now for
some time the Government has been furthering this deterioration. As
for example, no doubt with the best intentions, and certainly in
full sympathy with the general English public, both at home and in
India, the Government is now manufacturing cheap Indian carpets in
the Indian gaols. I do not say that it is a bad thing to turn out
real work, or works of art, in gaols; on the contrary, I think it
good if it be properly managed. But in this case, the Government,
being, as I said, in full sympathy with the English public, has
determined that it will make its wares cheap, whether it make them
nasty or not. Cheap and nasty they are, I assure you; but, though
they are the worst of their kind, they would not be made thus, if
everything did not tend the same way. And it is the same everywhere
and with all Indian manufactures, till it has come to this--that
these poor people have all but lost the one distinction, the one
glory that conquest had left them. Their famous wares, so praised
by those who thirty years ago began to attempt the restoration of
popular art amongst ourselves, are no longer to be bought at
reasonable prices in the common market, but must be sought for and
treasured as precious relics for the museums we have founded for our
art education. In short, their art is dead, and the commerce of
modern civilisation has slain it.
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