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Page 59
How shall we set about giving people without traditions of art eyes
with which to see works of art? It will doubtless take many years
of striving and success, before we can think of answering that
question fully: and if we strive to do our duty herein, long before
it is answered fully there will be some kind of a popular art
abiding among us: but meantime, and setting aside the answer which
every artist must make to his own share of the question, there is
one duty obvious to us all; it is that we should set ourselves, each
one of us, to doing our best to guard the natural beauty of the
earth: we ought to look upon it as a crime, an injury to our
fellows, only excusable because of ignorance, to mar the natural
beauty, which is the property of all men; and scarce less than a
crime to look on and do nothing while others are marring it, if we
can no longer plead this ignorance.
Now this duty, as it is the most obvious to us, and the first and
readiest way of giving people back their eyes, so happily it is the
easiest to set about; up to a certain point you will have all people
of good will to the public good on your side: nay, small as the
beginning is, something has actually been begun in this direction,
and we may well say, considering how hopeless things looked twenty
years ago, that it is marvellous in our eyes! Yet if we ever get
out of the troubles that we are now wallowing in, it will seem
perhaps more marvellous still to those that come after us that the
dwellers in the richest city in the world were at one time rather
proud that the members of a small, humble, and rather obscure,
though I will say it, a beneficent society, should have felt it
their duty to shut their eyes to the apparent hopelessness of
attacking with their feeble means the stupendous evils they had
become alive to, so that they might be able to make some small
beginnings towards awakening the general public to a due sense of
those evils.
I say, that though I ask your earnest support for such associations
as the Kyrle and the Commons Preservation Societies, and though I
feel sure that they have begun at the right end, since neither gods
nor governments will help those who don't help themselves; though we
are bound to wait for nobody's help than our own in dealing with the
devouring hideousness and squalor of our great towns, and especially
of London, for which the whole country is responsible; yet it would
be idle not to acknowledge that the difficulties in our way are far
too huge and wide-spreading to be grappled by private or semi-
private efforts only.
All we can do in this way we must look on not as palliatives of an
unendurable state of things, but as tokens of what we desire; which
is in short the giving back to our country of the natural beauty of
the earth, which we are so ashamed of having taken away from it:
and our chief duty herein will be to quicken this shame and the pain
that comes from it in the hearts of our fellows: this I say is one
of the chief duties of all those who have any right to the title of
cultivated men: and I believe that if we are faithful to it, we may
help to further a great impulse towards beauty among us, which will
be so irresistible that it will fashion for itself a national
machinery which will sweep away all difficulties between us and a
decent life, though they may have increased a thousand-fold
meantime, as is only too like to be the case.
Surely that light will arise, though neither we nor our children's
children see it, though civilisation may have to go down into dark
places enough meantime: surely one day making will be thought more
honourable, more worthy the majesty of a great nation than
destruction.
It is strange indeed, it is woeful, it is scarcely comprehensible,
if we come to think of it as men, and not as machines, that, after
all the progress of civilisation, it should be so easy for a little
official talk, a few lines on a sheet of paper, to set a terrible
engine to work, which without any trouble on our part will slay us
ten thousand men, and ruin who can say how many thousand of
families; and it lies light enough on the conscience of ALL of us;
while, if it is a question of striking a blow at grievous and
crushing evils which lie at our own doors, evils which every
thoughtful man feels and laments, and for which we alone are
responsible, not only is there no national machinery for dealing
with them, though they grow ranker and ranker every year, but any
hint that such a thing may be possible is received with laughter or
with terror, or with severe and heavy blame. The rights of
property, the necessities of morality, the interests of religion--
these are the sacramental words of cowardice that silence us!
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