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Page 53
In making this appeal to you, I will not suppose that I am speaking
to any who refuse to admit that we who are part of civilisation are
responsible to posterity for what may befall the fairness of the
earth in our own days, for what we have done, in other words,
towards the progress of Architecture;--if any such exists among
cultivated people, I need not trouble myself about them; for they
would not listen to me, nor should I know what to say to them.
On the other hand, there may be some here who have a knowledge of
their responsibility in this matter, but to whom the duty that it
involves seems an easy one, since they are fairly satisfied with the
state of Architecture as it now is: I do not suppose that they fail
to note the strange contrast which exists between the beauty that
still clings to some habitations of men and the ugliness which is
the rule in others, but it seems to them natural and inevitable, and
therefore does not trouble them: and they fulfil their duties to
civilisation and the arts by sometimes going to see the beautiful
places, and gathering together a few matters to remind them of these
for the adornment of the ugly dwellings in which their homes are
enshrined: for the rest they have no doubt that it is natural and
not wrong that while all ancient towns, I mean towns whose houses
are largely ancient, should be beautiful and romantic, all modern
ones should be ugly and commonplace: it does not seem to them that
this contrast is of any import to civilisation, or that it expresses
anything save that one town IS ancient as to its buildings and the
other modern. If their thoughts carry them into looking any farther
into the contrasts between ancient art and modern, they are not
dissatisfied with the result: they may see things to reform here
and there, but they suppose, or, let me say, take for granted, that
art is alive and healthy, is on the right road, and that following
that road, it will go on living for ever, much as it is now.
It is not unfair to say that this languid complacency is the general
attitude of cultivated people towards the arts: of course if they
were ever to think seriously of them, they would be startled into
discomfort by the thought that civilisation as it now is brings
inevitable ugliness with it: surely if they thought this, they
would begin to think that this was not natural and right; they would
see that this was not what civilisation aimed at in its struggling
days: but they do not think seriously of the arts because they have
been hitherto defended by a law of nature which forbids men to see
evils which they are not ready to redress.
Hitherto: but there are not wanting signs that that defence may
fail them one day, and it has become the duty of all true artists,
and all men who love life though it be troublous better than death
though it be peaceful, to strive to pierce that defence and sting
the world, cultivated and uncultivated, into discontent and
struggle.
Therefore I will say that the contrast between past art and present,
the universal beauty of men's habitations as they WERE fashioned,
and the universal ugliness of them as they ARE fashioned, is of the
utmost import to civilisation, and that it expresses much; it
expresses no less than a blind brutality which will destroy art at
least, whatever else it may leave alive: art is not healthy, it
even scarcely lives; it is on the wrong road, and if it follow that
road will speedily meet its death on it.
Now perhaps you will say that by asserting that the general attitude
of cultivated people towards the arts is a languid complacency with
this unhealthy state of things, I am admitting that cultivated
people generally do not care about the arts, and that therefore this
threatened death of them will not frighten people much, even if the
threat be founded on truth: so that those are but beating the air
who strive to rouse people into discontent and struggle.
Well, I will run the risk of offending you by speaking plainly, and
saying, that to me it seems over true that cultivated people in
general do NOT care about the arts: nevertheless I will answer any
possible challenge as to the usefulness of trying to rouse them to
thought about the matter, by saying that they do not care about the
arts because they do not know what they mean, or what they lose in
lacking them: cultivated, that is rich, as they are, they are also
under that harrow of hard necessity which is driven onward so
remorselessly by the competitive commerce of the latter days; a
system which is drawing near now I hope to its perfection, and
therefore to its death and change: the many millions of
civilisation, as labour is now organised, can scarce think seriously
of anything but the means of earning their daily bread; they do not
know of art, it does not touch their lives at all: the few
thousands of cultivated people whom Fate, not always as kind to them
as she looks, has placed above the material necessity for this hard
struggle, are nevertheless bound by it in spirit: the reflex of the
grinding trouble of those who toil to live that they may live to
toil weighs upon them also, and forbids them to look upon art as a
matter of importance: they know it but as a toy, not as a serious
help to life: as they know it, it can no more lift the burden from
the conscience of the rich, than it can from the weariness of the
poor. They do not know what art means: as I have said, they think
that as labour is now organised art can go indefinitely as it is now
organised, practised by a few for a few, adding a little interest, a
little refinement to the lives of those who have come to look upon
intellectual interest and spiritual refinement as their birthright.
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