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Page 18
What is going on in India is also going on, more or less, all over
the East; but I have spoken of India chiefly because I cannot help
thinking that we ourselves are responsible for what is happening
there. Chance-hap has made us the lords of many millions out there;
surely, it behoves us to look to it, lest we give to the people whom
we have made helpless scorpions for fish and stones for bread.
But since neither on this side, nor on any other, can art be
amended, until the countries that lead civilisation are themselves
in a healthy state about it, let us return to the consideration of
its condition among ourselves. And again I say, that obvious as is
that surface improvement of the arts within the last few years, I
fear too much that there is something wrong about the root of the
plant to exult over the bursting of its February buds.
I have just shown you for one thing that lovers of Indian and
Eastern Art, including as they do the heads of our institutions for
art education, and I am sure many among what are called the
governing classes, are utterly powerless to stay its downward
course. The general tendency of civilisation is against them, and
is too strong for them.
Again, though many of us love architecture dearly, and believe that
it helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among
beautiful things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live
in houses which have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness
and inconvenience. The stream of civilisation is against us, and we
cannot battle against it.
Once more those devoted men who have upheld the standard of truth
and beauty amongst us, and whose pictures, painted amidst
difficulties that none but a painter can know, show qualities of
mind unsurpassed in any age--these great men have but a narrow
circle that can understand their works, and are utterly unknown to
the great mass of the people: civilisation is so much against them,
that they cannot move the people.
Therefore, looking at all this, I cannot think that all is well with
the root of the tree we are cultivating. Indeed, I believe that if
other things were but to stand still in the world, this improvement
before mentioned would lead to a kind of art which, in that
impossible case, would be in a way stable, would perhaps stand still
also. This would be an art cultivated professedly by a few, and for
a few, who would consider it necessary--a duty, if they could admit
duties--to despise the common herd, to hold themselves aloof from
all that the world has been struggling for from the first, to guard
carefully every approach to their palace of art. It would be a pity
to waste many words on the prospect of such a school of art as this,
which does in a way, theoretically at least, exist at present, and
has for its watchword a piece of slang that does not mean the
harmless thing it seems to mean--art for art's sake. Its fore-
doomed end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a thing
for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must
at last sit still and do nothing--to the grief of no one.
Well, certainly, if I thought you were come here to further such an
art as this I could not have stood up and called you FRIENDS; though
such a feeble folk as I have told you of one could scarce care to
call foes.
Yet, as I say, such men exist, and I have troubled you with speaking
of them, because I know that those honest and intelligent people,
who are eager for human progress, and yet lack part of the human
senses, and are anti-artistic, suppose that such men are artists,
and that this is what art means, and what it does for people, and
that such a narrow, cowardly life is what we, fellow-handicraftsmen,
aim at. I see this taken for granted continually, even by many who,
to say truth, ought to know better, and I long to put the slur from
off us; to make people understand that we, least of all men, wish to
widen the gulf between the classes, nay, worse still, to make new
classes of elevation, and new classes of degradation--new lords and
new slaves; that we, least of all men, want to cultivate the 'plant
called man' in different ways--here stingily, there wastefully: I
wish people to understand that the art we are striving for is a good
thing which all can share, which will elevate all; in good sooth, if
all people do not soon share it there will soon be none to share; if
all are not elevated by it, mankind will lose the elevation it has
gained. Nor is such an art as we long for a vain dream; such an art
once was in times that were worse than these, when there was less
courage, kindness, and truth in the world than there is now; such an
art there will be hereafter, when there will be more courage,
kindness, and truth than there is now in the world.
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