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Page 6
Nevertheless there IS dull work to be done, and a weary business it
is setting men about such work, and seeing them through it, and I
would rather do the work twice over with my own hands than have such
a job: but now only let the arts which we are talking of beautify
our labour, and be widely spread, intelligent, well understood both
by the maker and the user, let them grow in one word POPULAR, and
there will be pretty much an end of dull work and its wearing
slavery; and no man will any longer have an excuse for talking about
the curse of labour, no man will any longer have an excuse for
evading the blessing of labour. I believe there is nothing that
will aid the world's progress so much as the attainment of this; I
protest there is nothing in the world that I desire so much as this,
wrapped up, as I am sure it is, with changes political and social,
that in one way or another we all desire.
Now if the objection be made, that these arts have been the
handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs
say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used, as many
other excellent things have been. But it is also true that, among
some nations, their most vigorous and freest times have been the
very blossoming times of art: while at the same time, I must allow
that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples,
who have seemed to have no hope of freedom: yet I do not think that
we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such
peoples, art, at least, was free; when it has not been, when it has
really been gripped by superstition, or by luxury, it has
straightway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget
that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such
buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history-
books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St. Sophia at
Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III., Justinian the Emperor.
Did they? or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have
left no names behind them, nothing but their work?
Now as these arts call people's attention and interest to the
matters of everyday life in the present, so also, and that I think
is no little matter, they call our attention at every step to that
history, of which, I said before, they are so great a part; for no
nation, no state of society, however rude, has been wholly without
them: nay, there are peoples not a few, of whom we know scarce
anything, save that they thought such and such forms beautiful. So
strong is the bond between history and decoration, that in the
practice of the latter we cannot, if we would, wholly shake off the
influence of past times over what we do at present. I do not think
it is too much to say that no man, however original he may be, can
sit down to-day and draw the ornament of a cloth, or the form of an
ordinary vessel or piece of furniture, that will be other than a
development or a degradation of forms used hundreds of years ago;
and these, too, very often, forms that once had a serious meaning,
though they are now become little more than a habit of the hand;
forms that were once perhaps the mysterious symbols of worships and
beliefs now little remembered or wholly forgotten. Those who have
diligently followed the delightful study of these arts are able as
if through windows to look upon the life of the past:- the very
first beginnings of thought among nations whom we cannot even name;
the terrible empires of the ancient East; the free vigour and glory
of Greece; the heavy weight, the firm grasp of Rome; the fall of her
temporal Empire which spread so wide about the world all that good
and evil which men can never forget, and never cease to feel; the
clashing of East and West, South and North, about her rich and
fruitful daughter Byzantium; the rise, the dissensions, and the
waning of Islam; the wanderings of Scandinavia; the Crusades; the
foundation of the States of modern Europe; the struggles of free
thought with ancient dying system--with all these events and their
meaning is the history of popular art interwoven; with all this, I
say, the careful student of decoration as an historical industry
must be familiar. When I think of this, and the usefulness of all
this knowledge, at a time when history has become so earnest a study
amongst us as to have given us, as it were, a new sense: at a time
when we so long to know the reality of all that has happened, and
are to be put off no longer with the dull records of the battles and
intrigues of kings and scoundrels,--I say when I think of all this,
I hardly know how to say that this interweaving of the Decorative
Arts with the history of the past is of less importance than their
dealings with the life of the present: for should not these
memories also be a part of our daily life?
And now let me recapitulate a little before I go further, before we
begin to look into the condition of the arts at the present day.
These arts, I have said, are part of a great system invented for the
expression of a man's delight in beauty: all peoples and times have
used them; they have been the joy of free nations, and the solace of
oppressed nations; religion has used and elevated them, has abused
and degraded them; they are connected with all history, and are
clear teachers of it; and, best of all, they are the sweeteners of
human labour, both to the handicraftsman, whose life is spent in
working in them, and to people in general who are influenced by the
sight of them at every turn of the day's work: they make our toil
happy, our rest fruitful.
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