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Page 50
A dining-room ought not to look as if one went into it as one goes
into a dentist's parlour--for an operation, and came out of it when
the operation was over--the tooth out, or the dinner in. A drawing-
room ought to look as if some kind of work could be done in it less
toilsome than being bored. A library certainly ought to have books
in it, not boots only, as in Thackeray's country snob's house, but
so ought each and every room in the house more or less; also, though
all rooms should look tidy, and even very tidy, they ought not to
look too tidy.
Furthermore, no room of the richest man should look grand enough to
make a simple man shrink in it, or luxurious enough to make a
thoughtful man feel ashamed in it; it will not do so if Art be at
home there, for she has no foes so deadly as insolence and waste.
Indeed, I fear that at present the decoration of rich men's houses
is mostly wrought out at the bidding of grandeur and luxury, and
that art has been mostly cowed or shamed out of them; nor when I
come to think of it will I lament it overmuch. Art was not born in
the palace; rather she fell sick there, and it will take more
bracing air than that of rich men's houses to heal her again. If
she is ever to be strong enough to help mankind once more, she must
gather strength in simple places; the refuge from wind and weather
to which the goodman comes home from field or hill-side; the well-
tidied space into which the craftsman draws from the litter of loom,
and smithy, and bench; the scholar's island in the sea of books; the
artist's clearing in the canvas-grove; it is from these places that
Art must come if she is ever again to be enthroned in that other
kind of building, which I think, under some name or other, whether
you call it church or hall of reason, or what not, will always be
needed; the building in which people meet to forget their own
transient personal and family troubles in aspirations for their
fellows and the days to come, and which to a certain extent make up
to town-dwellers for their loss of field, and river, and mountain.
Well, it seems to me that these two kinds of buildings are all we
have really to think of, together with whatsoever outhouses,
workshops, and the like may be necessary. Surely the rest may
quietly drop to pieces for aught we care--unless it should be
thought good in the interest of history to keep one standing in each
big town to show posterity what strange, ugly, uncomfortable houses
rich men dwelt in once upon a time.
Meantime now, when rich men won't have art, and poor men can't,
there is, nevertheless, some unthinking craving for it, some
restless feeling in men's minds of something lacking somewhere,
which has made many benevolent people seek for the possibility of
cheap art.
What do they mean by that? One art for the rich and another for the
poor? No, it won't do. Art is not so accommodating as the justice
or religion of society, and she won't have it.
What then? there has been cheap art at some times certainly, at the
expense of the starvation of the craftsmen. But people can't mean
that; and if they did, would, happily, no longer have the same
chance of getting it that they once had. Still they think art can
be got round some way or other--jockeyed, so to say. I rather think
in this fashion: that a highly gifted and carefully educated man
shall, like Mr. Pecksniff, squint at a sheet of paper, and that the
results of that squint shall set a vast number of well-fed,
contented operatives (they are ashamed to call them workmen) turning
crank handles for ten hours a-day, bidding them keep what gifts and
education they may have been born with for their--I was going to say
leisure hours, but I don't know how to, for if I were to work ten
hours a-day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure
I hope in political agitation, but I fear--in drinking. So let us
say that the aforesaid operatives will have to keep their inborn
gifts and education for their dreams. Well, from this system are to
come threefold blessings--food and clothing, poorish lodgings and a
little leisure to the operatives, enormous riches to the capitalists
that rent them, together with moderate riches to the squinter on the
paper; and lastly, very decidedly lastly, abundance of cheap art for
the operatives or crank turners to buy--in their dreams.
Well, there have been many other benevolent and economical schemes
for keeping your cake after you have eaten it, for skinning a flint,
and boiling a flea down for its tallow and glue, and this one of
cheap art may just go its way with the others.
Yet to my mind real art is cheap, even at the price that must be
paid for it. That price is, in short, the providing of a
handicraftsman who shall put his own individual intelligence and
enthusiasm into the goods he fashions. So far from his labour being
'divided,' which is the technical phrase for his always doing one
minute piece of work, and never being allowed to think of any other;
so far from that, he must know all about the ware he is making and
its relation to similar wares; he must have a natural aptitude for
his work so strong, that no education can force him away from his
special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is doing, and
to vary his work as the circumstances of it vary, and his own moods.
He must be for ever striving to make the piece he is at work at
better than the last. He must refuse at anybody's bidding to turn
out, I won't say a bad, but even an indifferent piece of work,
whatever the public want, or think they want. He must have a voice,
and a voice worth listening to in the whole affair.
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