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Page 28
Well, people will not take the trouble or spend the money necessary
to beginning this sort of reforms, because they do not feel the
evils they live amongst, because they have degraded themselves into
something less than men; they are unmanly because they have ceased
to have their due share of art.
For again I say that therein rich people have defrauded themselves
as well as the poor: you will see a refined and highly educated man
nowadays, who has been to Italy and Egypt, and where not, who can
talk learnedly enough (and fantastically enough sometimes) about
art, and who has at his fingers' ends abundant lore concerning the
art and literature of past days, sitting down without signs of
discomfort in a house, that with all its surroundings is just
brutally vulgar and hideous: all his education has not done more
for him than that.
The truth is, that in art, and in other things besides, the laboured
education of a few will not raise even those few above the reach of
the evils that beset the ignorance of the great mass of the
population: the brutality of which such a huge stock has been
accumulated lower down, will often show without much peeling through
the selfish refinement of those who have let it accumulate. The
lack of art, or rather the murder of art, that curses our streets
from the sordidness of the surroundings of the lower classes, has
its exact counterpart in the dulness and vulgarity of those of the
middle classes, and the double-distilled dulness, and scarcely less
vulgarity of those of the upper classes.
I say this is as it should be; it is just and fair as far as it
goes; and moreover the rich with their leisure are the more like to
move if they feel the pinch themselves.
But how shall they and we, and all of us, move? What is the remedy?
What remedy can there be for the blunders of civilisation but
further civilisation? You do not by any accident think that we have
gone as far in that direction as it is possible to go, do you?--even
in England, I mean?
When some changes have come to pass, that perhaps will be speedier
than most people think, doubtless education will both grow in
quality and in quantity; so that it may be, that as the nineteenth
century is to be called the Century of Commerce, the twentieth may
be called the Century of Education. But that education does not end
when people leave school is now a mere commonplace; and how then can
you really educate men who lead the life of machines, who only think
for the few hours during which they are not at work, who in short
spend almost their whole lives in doing work which is not proper for
developing them body and mind in some worthy way? You cannot
educate, you cannot civilise men, unless you can give them a share
in art.
Yes, and it is hard indeed as things go to give most men that share;
for they do not miss it, or ask for it, and it is impossible as
things are that they should either miss or ask for it. Nevertheless
everything has a beginning, and many great things have had very
small ones; and since, as I have said, these ideas are already
abroad in more than one form, we must not be too much discouraged at
the seemingly boundless weight we have to lift.
After all, we are only bound to play our own parts, and do our own
share of the lifting, and as in no case that share can be great, so
also in all cases it is called for, it is necessary. Therefore let
us work and faint not; remembering that though it be natural, and
therefore excusable, amidst doubtful times to feel doubts of success
oppress us at whiles, yet not to crush those doubts, and work as if
we had them not, is simple cowardice, which is unforgivable. No man
has any right to say that all has been done for nothing, that all
the faithful unwearying strife of those that have gone before us
shall lead us nowhither; that mankind will but go round and round in
a circle for ever: no man has a right to say that, and then get up
morning after morning to eat his victuals and sleep a-nights, all
the while making other people toil to keep his worthless life a-
going.
Be sure that some way or other will be found out of the tangle, even
when things seem most tangled, and be no less sure that some use
will then have come of our work, if it has been faithful, and
therefore unsparingly careful and thoughtful.
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