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Page 23
For the rest I believe that, however seriously these words may be
gainsayed, I have been speaking to an audience in whom any words
spoken from a sense of duty and in hearty goodwill, as mine have
been, will quicken thought and sow some good seed. At any rate, it
is good for a man who thinks seriously to face his fellows, and
speak out whatever really burns in him, so that men may seem less
strange to one another, and misunderstanding, the fruitful cause of
aimless strife, may be avoided.
But if to any of you I have seemed to speak hopelessly, my words
have been lacking in art; and you must remember that hopelessness
would have locked my mouth, not opened it. I am, indeed, hopeful,
but can I give a date to the accomplishment of my hope, and say that
it will happen in my life or yours?
But I will say at least, Courage! for things wonderful, unhoped-for,
glorious, have happened even in this short while I have been alive.
Yes, surely these times are wonderful and fruitful of change, which,
as it wears and gathers new life even in its wearing, will one day
bring better things for the toiling days of men, who, with freer
hearts and clearer eyes, will once more gain the sense of outward
beauty, and rejoice in it.
Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as, indeed, in many ways they
are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine
gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and
beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows
trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against
to-morrow's daylight--that to-morrow, when the civilised world, no
longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a
glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness
to the maker and the user.
THE BEAUTY OF LIFE {5}
'--propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.'--Juvenal.
I stand before you this evening weighted with a disadvantage that I
did not feel last year;--I have little fresh to tell you; I can
somewhat enlarge on what I said then; here and there I may make bold
to give you a practical suggestion, or I may put what I have to say
in a way which will be clearer to some of you perhaps; but my
message is really the same as it was when I first had the pleasure
of meeting you.
It is true that if all were going smoothly with art, or at all
events so smoothly that there were but a few malcontents in the
world, you might listen with some pleasure, and perhaps advantage,
to the talk of an old hand in the craft concerning ways of work, the
snares that beset success, and the shortest road to it, to a tale of
workshop receipts and the like: that would be a pleasant talk
surely between friends and fellow-workmen; but it seems to me as if
it were not for us as yet; nay, maybe we may live long and find no
time fit for such restful talk as the cheerful histories of the
hopes and fears of our workshops: anyhow to-night I cannot do it,
but must once again call the faithful of art to a battle wider and
more distracting than that kindly struggle with nature, to which all
true craftsmen are born; which is both the building-up and the
wearing-away of their lives.
As I look round on this assemblage, and think of all that it
represents, I cannot choose but be moved to the soul by the troubles
of the life of civilised man, and the hope that thrusts itself
through them; I cannot refrain from giving you once again the
message with which, as it seems, some chance-hap has charged me:
that message is, in short, to call on you to face the latest danger
which civilisation is threatened with, a danger of her own breeding:
that men in struggling towards the complete attainment of all the
luxuries of life for the strongest portion of their race should
deprive their whole race of all the beauty of life: a danger that
the strongest and wisest of mankind, in striving to attain to a
complete mastery over nature, should destroy her simplest and
widest-spread gifts, and thereby enslave simple people to them, and
themselves to themselves, and so at last drag the world into a
second barbarism more ignoble, and a thousandfold more hopeless,
than the first.
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