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Page 19
Let us look backward in history once more for a short while, and
then steadily forward till my words are done: I began by saying
that part of the common and necessary advice given to Art students
was to study antiquity; and no doubt many of you, like me, have done
so; have wandered, for instance, through the galleries of the
admirable museum of South Kensington, and, like me, have been filled
with wonder and gratitude at the beauty which has been born from the
brain of man. Now, consider, I pray you, what these wonderful works
are, and how they were made; and indeed, it is neither in
extravagance nor without due meaning that I use the word 'wonderful'
in speaking of them. Well, these things are just the common
household goods of those past days, and that is one reason why they
are so few and so carefully treasured. They were common things in
their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling--no
rarities then--and yet we have called them 'wonderful.'
And how were they made? Did a great artist draw the designs for
them--a man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily fed, carefully
housed, wrapped up in cotton wool, in short, when he was not at
work? By no means. Wonderful as these works are, they were made by
'common fellows,' as the phrase goes, in the common course of their
daily labour. Such were the men we honour in honouring those works.
And their labour--do you think it was irksome to them? Those of you
who are artists know very well that it was not; that it could not
be. Many a grin of pleasure, I'll be bound--and you will not
contradict me--went to the carrying through of those mazes of
mysterious beauty, to the invention of those strange beasts and
birds and flowers that we ourselves have chuckled over at South
Kensington. While they were at work, at least, these men were not
unhappy, and I suppose they worked most days, and the most part of
the day, as we do.
Or those treasures of architecture that we study so carefully
nowadays--what are they? how were they made? There are great
minsters among them, indeed, and palaces of kings and lords, but not
many; and, noble and awe-inspiring as these may be, they differ only
in size from the little grey church that still so often makes the
commonplace English landscape beautiful, and the little grey house
that still, in some parts of the country at least, makes an English
village a thing apart, to be seen and pondered on by all who love
romance and beauty. These form the mass of our architectural
treasures, the houses that everyday people lived in, the unregarded
churches in which they worshipped.
And, once more, who was it that designed and ornamented them? The
great architect, carefully kept for the purpose, and guarded from
the common troubles of common men? By no means. Sometimes,
perhaps, it was the monk, the ploughman's brother; oftenest his
other brother, the village carpenter, smith, mason, what not--'a
common fellow,' whose common everyday labour fashioned works that
are to-day the wonder and despair of many a hard-working
'cultivated' architect. And did he loathe his work? No, it is
impossible. I have seen, as we most of us have, work done by such
men in some out-of-the-way hamlet--where to-day even few strangers
ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own
doors; in such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so
careful, and so inventive, that nothing in its way could go further.
And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human
ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a
third party to the brain that conceived and the hand that fashioned
it. Nor are such works rare. The throne of the great Plantagenet,
or the great Valois, was no more daintily carved than the seat of
the village mass-john, or the chest of the yeoman's good-wife.
So, you see, there was much going on to make life endurable in those
times. Not every day, you may be sure, was a day of slaughter and
tumult, though the histories read almost as if it were so; but every
day the hammer chinked on the anvil, and the chisel played about the
oak beam, and never without some beauty and invention being born of
it, and consequently some human happiness.
That last word brings me to the very kernel and heart of what I have
come here to say to you, and I pray you to think of it most
seriously--not as to my words, but as to a thought which is stirring
in the world, and will one day grow into something.
That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man
of his pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his
labour without expressing that happiness; and especially is this so
when he is at work at anything in which he specially excels. A most
kind gift is this of nature, since all men, nay, it seems all things
too, must labour; so that not only does the dog take pleasure in
hunting, and the horse in running, and the bird in flying, but so
natural does the idea seem to us, that we imagine to ourselves that
the earth and the very elements rejoice in doing their appointed
work; and the poets have told us of the spring meadows smiling, of
the exultation of the fire, of the countless laughter of the sea.
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