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Page 7
And now if all I have said seems to you but mere open-mouthed praise
of these arts, I must say that it is not for nothing that what I
have hitherto put before you has taken that form.
It is because I must now ask you this question: All these good
things--will you have them? will you cast them from you?
Are you surprised at my question--you, most of whom, like myself,
are engaged in the actual practice of the arts that are, or ought to
be, popular?
In explanation, I must somewhat repeat what I have already said.
Time was when the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well
acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with
all things made by man; and in those days all handicraftsmen were
ARTISTS, as we should now call them. But the thought of man became
more intricate, more difficult to express; art grew a heavier thing
to deal with, and its labour was more divided among great men,
lesser men, and little men; till that art, which was once scarce
more than a rest of body and soul, as the hand cast the shuttle or
swung the hammer, became to some men so serious labour, that their
working lives have been one long tragedy of hope and fear, joy and
trouble. This was the growth of art: like all growth, it was good
and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into
decay; like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into
something new.
Into decay; for as the arts sundered into the greater and the
lesser, contempt on one side, carelessness on the other arose, both
begotten of ignorance of that PHILOSOPHY of the Decorative Arts, a
hint of which I have tried just now to put before you. The artist
came out from the handicraftsmen, and left them without hope of
elevation, while he himself was left without the help of
intelligent, industrious sympathy. Both have suffered; the artist
no less than the workman. It is with art as it fares with a company
of soldiers before a redoubt, when the captain runs forward full of
hope and energy, but looks not behind him to see if his men are
following, and they hang back, not knowing why they are brought
there to die. The captain's life is spent for nothing, and his men
are sullen prisoners in the redoubt of Unhappiness and Brutality.
I must in plain words say of the Decorative Arts, of all the arts,
that it is not so much that we are inferior in them to all who have
gone before us, but rather that they are in a state of anarchy and
disorganisation, which makes a sweeping change necessary and
certain.
So that again I ask my question, All that good fruit which the arts
should bear, will you have it? will you cast it from you? Shall
that sweeping change that must come, be the change of loss or of
gain?
We who believe in the continuous life of the world, surely we are
bound to hope that the change will bring us gain and not loss, and
to strive to bring that gain about.
Yet how the world may answer my question, who can say? A man in his
short life can see but a little way ahead, and even in mine
wonderful and unexpected things have come to pass. I must needs say
that therein lies my hope rather than in all I see going on round
about us. Without disputing that if the imaginative arts perish,
some new thing, at present unguessed of, MAY be put forward to
supply their loss in men's lives, I cannot feel happy in that
prospect, nor can I believe that mankind will endure such a loss for
ever: but in the meantime the present state of the arts and their
dealings with modern life and progress seem to me to point, in
appearance at least, to this immediate future; that the world, which
has for a long time busied itself about other matters than the arts,
and has carelessly let them sink lower and lower, till many not
uncultivated men, ignorant of what they once were, and hopeless of
what they might yet be, look upon them with mere contempt; that the
world, I say, thus busied and hurried, will one day wipe the slate,
and be clean rid in her impatience of the whole matter with all its
tangle and trouble.
And then--what then?
Even now amid the squalor of London it is hard to imagine what it
will be. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, with the crowd of
lesser arts that belong to them, these, together with Music and
Poetry, will be dead and forgotten, will no longer excite or amuse
people in the least: for, once more, we must not deceive ourselves;
the death of one art means the death of all; the only difference in
their fate will be that the luckiest will be eaten the last--the
luckiest, or the unluckiest: in all that has to do with beauty the
invention and ingenuity of man will have come to a dead stop; and
all the while Nature will go on with her eternal recurrence of
lovely changes--spring, summer, autumn, and winter; sunshine, rain,
and snow; storm and fair weather; dawn, noon, and sunset; day and
night--ever bearing witness against man that he has deliberately
chosen ugliness instead of beauty, and to live where he is strongest
amidst squalor or blank emptiness.
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