|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 38
Now, these are the exceptions. The rest is what really amounts to
the dwellings of all our people, which are built without any hope of
beauty or care for it--without any thought that there can be any
pleasure in the look of an ordinary dwelling-house, and also (in
consequence of this neglect of manliness) with scarce any heed to
real convenience. It will, I hope, one day be hard to believe that
such houses were built for a people not lacking in honesty, in
independence of life, in elevation of thought, and consideration for
others; not a whit of all that do they express, but rather
hypocrisy, flunkeyism, and careless selfishness. The fact is, they
are no longer part of our lives. We have given it up as a bad job.
We are heedless if our houses express nothing of us but the very
worst side of our character both national and personal.
This unmanly heedlessness, so injurious to civilisation, so unjust
to those that are to follow us, is the very thing we want to shake
people out of. We want to make them think about their homes, to
take the trouble to turn them into dwellings fit for people free in
mind and body--much might come of that I think.
Now, to my mind, the first step towards this end is, to follow the
fashion of our nation, so often, so VERY often, called practical,
and leaving for a little an ideal scarce conceivable, to try to get
people to bethink them of what we can best do with those makeshifts
which we cannot get rid of all at once.
I know that those lesser arts, by which alone this can be done, are
looked upon by many wise and witty people as not worth the notice of
a sensible man; but, since I am addressing a society of artists, I
believe I am speaking to people who have got beyond even that stage
of wisdom and wit, and that you think all the arts of importance.
Yet, indeed, I should think I had but little claim on your attention
if I deemed the question involved nothing save the gain of a little
more content and a little more pleasure for those who already have
abundance of content and pleasure; let me say it, that either I have
erred in the aim of my whole life, or that the welfare of these
lesser arts involves the question of the content and self-respect of
all craftsmen, whether you call them artists or artisans. So I say
again, my hope is that those who begin to consider carefully how to
make the best of the chambers in which they eat and sleep and study,
and hold converse with their friends, will breed in their minds a
wholesome and fruitful discontent with the sordidness that even when
they have done their best will surround their island of comfort, and
that as they try to appease this discontent they will find that
there is no way out of it but by insisting that all men's work shall
be fit for free men and not for machines: my extravagant hope is
that people will some day learn something of art, and so long for
more, and will find, as I have, that there is no getting it save by
the general acknowledgment of the right of every man to have fit
work to do in a beautiful home. Therein lies all that is
indestructible of the pleasure of life; no man need ask for more
than that, no man should be granted less; and if he falls short of
it, it is through waste and injustice that he is kept out of his
birthright.
And now I will try what I can do in my hints on this making the best
of it, first asking your pardon for this, that I shall have to give
a great deal of negative advice, and be always saying 'don't'--that,
as you know, being much the lot of those who profess reform.
Before we go inside our house, nay, before we look at its outside,
we may consider its garden, chiefly with reference to town
gardening; which, indeed, I, in common, I suppose, with most others
who have tried it, have found uphill work enough--all the more as in
our part of the world few indeed have any mercy upon the one thing
necessary for decent life in a town, its trees; till we have come to
this, that one trembles at the very sound of an axe as one sits at
one's work at home. However, uphill work or not, the town garden
must not be neglected if we are to be in earnest in making the best
of it.
Now I am bound to say town gardeners generally do rather the reverse
of that: our suburban gardeners in London, for instance, oftenest
wind about their little bit of gravel walk and grass plot in
ridiculous imitation of an ugly big garden of the landscape-
gardening style, and then with a strange perversity fill up the
spaces with the most formal plants they can get; whereas the merest
common sense should have taught them to lay out their morsel of
ground in the simplest way, to fence it as orderly as might be, one
part from the other (if it be big enough for that) and the whole
from the road, and then to fill up the flower-growing space with
things that are free and interesting in their growth, leaving nature
to do the desired complexity, which she will certainly not fail to
do if we do not desert her for the florist, who, I must say, has
made it harder work than it should be to get the best of flowers.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|