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Page 27
I need not perhaps dwell much on what of change has been since: you
know well that one of the master-arts, the art of painting, has been
revolutionised. I have a genuine difficulty in speaking to you of
men who are my own personal friends, nay my masters: still, since I
cannot quite say nothing of them I must say the plain truth, which
is this; never in the whole history of art did any set of men come
nearer to the feat of making something out of nothing than that
little knot of painters who have raised English art from what it
was, when as a boy I used to go to the Royal Academy Exhibition, to
what it is now.
It would be ungracious indeed for me who have been so much taught by
him, that I cannot help feeling continually as I speak that I am
echoing his words, to leave out the name of John Ruskin from an
account of what has happened since the tide, as we hope, began to
turn in the direction of art. True it is, that his unequalled style
of English and his wonderful eloquence would, whatever its subject-
matter, have gained him some sort of a hearing in a time that has
not lost its relish for literature; but surely the influence that he
has exercised over cultivated people must be the result of that
style and that eloquence expressing what was already stirring in
men's minds; he could not have written what he has done unless
people were in some sort ready for it; any more than those painters
could have begun their crusade against the dulness and incompetency
that was the rule in their art thirty years ago unless they had some
hope that they would one day move people to understand them.
Well, we find that the gains since the turning-point of the tide are
these: that there are some few artists who have, as it were, caught
up the golden chain dropped two hundred years ago, and that there
are a few highly cultivated people who can understand them; and that
beyond these there is a vague feeling abroad among people of the
same degree, of discontent at the ignoble ugliness that surrounds
them.
That seems to me to mark the advance that we have made since the
last of popular art came to an end amongst us, and I do not say,
considering where we then were, that it is not a great advance, for
it comes to this, that though the battle is still to win, there are
those who are ready for the battle.
Indeed it would be a strange shame for this age if it were not so:
for as every age of the world has its own troubles to confuse it,
and its own follies to cumber it, so has each its own work to do,
pointed out to it by unfailing signs of the times; and it is unmanly
and stupid for the children of any age to say: We will not set our
hands to the work; we did not make the troubles, we will not weary
ourselves seeking a remedy for them: so heaping up for their sons a
heavier load than they can lift without such struggles as will wound
and cripple them sorely. Not thus our fathers served us, who,
working late and early, left us at last that seething mass of people
so terribly alive and energetic, that we call modern Europe; not
thus those served us, who have made for us these present days, so
fruitful of change and wondering expectation.
The century that is now beginning to draw to an end, if people were
to take to nicknaming centuries, would be called the Century of
Commerce; and I do not think I undervalue the work that it has done:
it has broken down many a prejudice and taught many a lesson that
the world has been hitherto slow to learn: it has made it possible
for many a man to live free, who would in other times have been a
slave, body or soul, or both: if it has not quite spread peace and
justice through the world, as at the end of its first half we fondly
hoped it would, it has at least stirred up in many fresh cravings
for peace and justice: its work has been good and plenteous, but
much of it was roughly done, as needs was; recklessness has commonly
gone with its energy, blindness too often with its haste: so that
perhaps it may be work enough for the next century to repair the
blunders of that recklessness, to clear away the rubbish which that
hurried work has piled up; nay even we in the second half of its
last quarter may do something towards setting its house in order.
You, of this great and famous town, for instance, which has had so
much to do with the Century of Commerce, your gains are obvious to
all men, but the price you have paid for them is obvious to many--
surely to yourselves most of all: I do not say that they are not
worth the price; I know that England and the world could very ill
afford to exchange the Birmingham of to-day for the Birmingham of
the year 1700: but surely if what you have gained be more than a
mockery, you cannot stop at those gains, or even go on always piling
up similar ones. Nothing can make me believe that the present
condition of your Black Country yonder is an unchangeable necessity
of your life and position: such miseries as this were begun and
carried on in pure thoughtlessness, and a hundredth part of the
energy that was spent in creating them would get rid of them: I do
think if we were not all of us too prone to acquiesce in the base
byword 'after me the deluge,' it would soon be something more than
an idle dream to hope that your pleasant midland hills and fields
might begin to become pleasant again in some way or other, even
without depopulating them; or that those once lovely valleys of
Yorkshire in the 'heavy woollen district,' with their sweeping hill-
sides and noble rivers, should not need the stroke of ruin to make
them once more delightful abodes of men, instead of the dog-holes
that the Century of Commerce has made them.
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