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Page 25
So much is now known of the periods of art that have left abundant
examples of their work behind them, that we can judge of the art of
all periods by comparing these with the remains of times of which
less has been left us; and we cannot fail to come to the conclusion
that down to very recent days everything that the hand of man
touched was more or less beautiful: so that in those days all
people who made anything shared in art, as well as all people who
used the things so made: that is, ALL people shared in art.
But some people may say: And was that to be wished for? would not
this universal spreading of art stop progress in other matters,
hinder the work of the world? Would it not make us unmanly? or if
not that, would it not be intrusive, and push out other things
necessary also for men to study?
Well, I have claimed a necessary place for art, a natural place, and
it would be in the very essence of it, that it would apply its own
rules of order and fitness to the general ways of life: it seems to
me, therefore, that people who are over-anxious of the outward
expression of beauty becoming too great a force among the other
forces of life, would, if they had had the making of the external
world, have been afraid of making an ear of wheat beautiful, lest it
should not have been good to eat.
But indeed there seems no chance of art becoming universal, unless
on the terms that it shall have little self-consciousness, and for
the most part be done with little effort; so that the rough work of
the world would be as little hindered by it, as the work of external
nature is by the beauty of all her forms and moods: this was the
case in the times that I have been speaking of: of art which was
made by conscious effort, the result of the individual striving
towards perfect expression of their thoughts by men very specially
gifted, there was perhaps no more than there is now, except in very
wonderful and short periods; though I believe that even for such men
the struggle to produce beauty was not so bitter as it now is. But
if there were not more great thinkers than there are now, there was
a countless multitude of happy workers whose work did express, and
could not choose but express, some original thought, and was
consequently both interesting and beautiful: now there is certainly
no chance of the more individual art becoming common, and either
wearying us by its over-abundance, or by noisy self-assertion
preventing highly cultivated men taking their due part in the other
work of the world; it is too difficult to do: it will be always but
the blossom of all the half-conscious work below it, the fulfilment
of the shortcomings of less complete minds: but it will waste much
of its power, and have much less influence on men's minds, unless it
be surrounded by abundance of that commoner work, in which all men
once shared, and which, I say, will, when art has really awakened,
be done so easily and constantly, that it will stand in no man's way
to hinder him from doing what he will, good or evil. And as, on the
one hand, I believe that art made by the people and for the people
as a joy both to the maker and the user would further progress in
other matters rather than hinder it, so also I firmly believe that
that higher art produced only by great brains and miraculously
gifted hands cannot exist without it: I believe that the present
state of things in which it does exist, while popular art is, let us
say, asleep or sick, is a transitional state, which must end at last
either in utter defeat or utter victory for the arts.
For whereas all works of craftsmanship were once beautiful,
unwittingly or not, they are now divided into two kinds, works of
art and non-works of art: now nothing made by man's hand can be
indifferent: it must be either beautiful and elevating, or ugly and
degrading; and those things that are without art are so
aggressively; they wound it by their existence, and they are now so
much in the majority that the works of art we are obliged to set
ourselves to seek for, whereas the other things are the ordinary
companions of our everyday life; so that if those who cultivate art
intellectually were inclined never so much to wrap themselves in
their special gifts and their high cultivation, and so live happily,
apart from other men, and despising them, they could not do so:
they are as it were living in an enemy's country; at every turn
there is something lying in wait to offend and vex their nicer sense
and educated eyes: they must share in the general discomfort--and I
am glad of it.
So the matter stands: from the first dawn of history till quite
modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its
purpose; all men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as
people call it, in those days; that and not robber-barons and
inaccessible kings with their hierarchy of serving-nobles and other
such rubbish: but art grew and grew, saw empires sicken and
sickened with them; grew hale again, and haler, and grew so great at
last, that she seemed in good truth to have conquered everything,
and laid the material world under foot. Then came a change at a
period of the greatest life and hope in many ways that Europe had
known till then: a time of so much and such varied hope that people
call it the time of the New Birth: as far as the arts are concerned
I deny it that title; rather it seems to me that the great men who
lived and glorified the practice of art in those days, were the
fruit of the old, not the seed of the new order of things: but a
stirring and hopeful time it was, and many things were newborn then
which have since brought forth fruit enough: and it is strange and
perplexing that from those days forward the lapse of time, which,
through plenteous confusion and failure, has on the whole been
steadily destroying privilege and exclusiveness in other matters,
has delivered up art to be the exclusive privilege of a few, and has
taken from the people their birthright; while both wronged and
wrongers have been wholly unconscious of what they were doing.
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