ARTANDTHEBEAUTYOFTHE EARTH. BY WILLIAM MORRIS. ^ 1 .< •* / Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/artbeautyofearthOOmorr / ART AND THE BEAUTYOF THE EARTH. BY WILLIAM MORRIS. I j v 4 I THE GETTY CEMl* ART AND THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH. A LECTURE DELIVERED BYWILLIAM MORRIS AT BURSLEM TOWN HALL ON OCTOBER i 3 , 1881. WE are here in the midst of a population busied about a craft which may be called the most anci- ent in the world, a craft which I look upon with the greatest interest, as I well may, since, except perhaps the noble craft of house-building, it is se- cond to none other. And in the midst of this in- dustrious population, engaged in making goods of such importance to our households, I am speak- ing to a School of Art, one of the bodies that were founded all overthe country at atime when it was felt there was something wrong as between the two elements that go to make anything which can be correctly described as a work of industrial art, namely the utilitarian and the artistic elements. I hope nothing I may say to-night will make you think that I under-value the importance of these places of instruction ; on the contrary, I believe them to be necessary to us, unless we areprepared to give up all attempt to unite these two elements of use and beauty. Now, though no man can be more impressed with the importance of the art of pottery than I am, and though I have not, I hope, neglected the study of it from the artistic or historico-artistic side, I do not think myself bound to follow up the subject of your especial art; not so much because b x Lecture IL I know no more of the technical side of it than I Art and the have thought enough to enable me to understand Beauty of it from the above^said historico/artistic side; but the Earth* rather because I feel it almost impossible to dis/ sociate one of the ornamental arts from the others, as things go nowadays* Neither do I think I should interest you much, still less instruct you, if I were to recapitulate the general rules that ought to guide a designer for the industrial arts; at the very first foundation of these schools theim structors in them formulated those rules clearly & satisfactorily,and I think they have since been ac^ cepted generally, at least in theory* What I do really feel myself bound to do is to speak to you of certain things that are never absent from my thoughts, certain considerations on the condition and prospects of the arts in general, the neglect of which conditions would drive us in time into a strange state of things indeed; a state of things under which no potter would put any decoration on his pots, and indeed, if a man of strict logical mind, would never know of what shape to make a pot, unless the actual use it was to be put to drove him in one direction or another* What I have to say on these matters will not, I fear, be very new to you, and perhaps it may more or less offend you; but I will beg you to believe that I feel deep/' ly the honour you have done me in asking me to address you* I cannot doubt you have asked me to do so that you might hear what I may chance to 2 think on the subject of the arts, and it seems to Lecture IL me, therefore, that I should ill repay you for that Art and the honour, and be treating you unworthily, if I were Beauty of to stand here and tell you at great length what I the Earth, do not think. So I will ask your leave and license to speak plainly, as I promise I will not speak vould not have you think I underrate the difficulty of the art of plain speaking, an art as dif- ficult, perhaps, as that of pottery, and not nearly so much of it done in the world ; so what I will ask you to forgive me if I wound your feelings in any way will not be my downright meaning, my au/ dacious and rash thought, but rather my clumsy way of expressingit; and in truth I expecttohave your forgiveness, since in my heart I believe that a plain word spoken because it must be said, free from malice or self-seeking, can be no lasting of- fence to any one, whereas, what end is there to the wrong and damage that come of half-hearted speech, of words spoken in vagueness, hypocrisy, and cowardice ? You who in these parts make such hard, smooth, well /compacted, and enduring pottery under/ stand well that you must give it other qualities be/ sides those which make it fit for ordinary use. You must profess to make it beautiful as well as use/ ful, and if you did not you would certainly lose your market. That has been the view the world has taken of your art, & of all the industrial arts 3 Lecture IL since the beginning of history, and, as I said, is Art and the held to this day, whether from the force of habit Beauty of or otherwise* the Earth* Nevertheless, so different is the position of art in our daily lives from what it used to be that it seems to me, (and I am not alone in my thought), that the world is hesitating as to whether it shall take art home to it or cast it out* I feel that I am bound to explain what may seem a very startling as it is assuredly a very serious statement* I will do so in as few words as I can* I do not know whether a sense of the great change which has befallen the arts in modern times has come home to most, or indeed to many, of you ; a change which has only culminated in quite recent times within the lives of many of you present* It may seem to you that there has been no break in the chain of art, at all events since it began to struggle out of the confusion & barbarism of the early middle ages ; you may think that there has been gradual change in it, growth, improvement (not always perhaps readily recognized at first, that latter), but that all this has taken place witlv out violence or breakdown, & that the growth & improvement are still going on* And this seems a very reasonable view to take of it, & is analogous beyond doubt to what has hap/' pened on other sides of human progress; nay, it is on this ground that your pleasure in art is founded, & your hopes for its future* That foun^ 4 dation forhope has failed someofus; onwhatour Lecture IL hopes are founded to-day I maybe able to tell you Art and the partly this evening, but I will now give you a Beauty of glimpse of the abyss into which our earlier hope the Earth* tumbled* Let us look back a little to the early middle ages, the days of barbarism and confusion* As you fol- low the pages of the keen-eyed, cool-headed Gib- bon, you may well think that the genius of the great historian has been wasted over the mean squabbles, the bald self-seeking, the ignoble su- perstition, the pomp and the cruelty of the kings and scoundrels who are the chief persons named in the story ; yet also you cannot fail to know, when you come to think of it, that the story has notbeen fully told; nay scarce told at all, only a chance hint given, here and there* The palace and the camp were but a small part of their world surely; and outside them you may be sure that faith & hero- ism and love were at work, or what birth could there have been from those days ? For the visible tokens of that birth you must seek in the art that grew up and flourished amid that barbarism and confusion, and you know who wrought it* The tyrants, and pedants, & bullies of the time paid dog's wages for it, & bribed their gods with it, but they were too busy over other things to make it; the nameless people wrought it; for no names of its makers are left, not one* Their work only is left, & all that came of it, & all that is to come of it* 5 Lecture IL WTiat came of it first was the complete freedom Art and the of art in the midst of a society that had at least be- Beauty of gun to free itself from religious & political fetters* the Earth ♦ Art was no longer now, as in Egypt of olden time, keptrigidly within certain prescribed bounds that no fancy might play with, no imagination over - pass, lest the majesty of the beautiful symbols might be clouded and the memory of the awful mysteries they symbolized become dim in the hearts of men* Nor was it any longer as in the Greece of Pericles, wherein no thought might be expressed that could not be expressed in perfect form* Art was free* Whatever a man thought of, that he might bring to light by the labour of his hands, to be praised and wondered at by his feb lows* Whatever man had thought in him of any kind, & skill in him of any kind to express it, he was deemed good enough to be used for his own pleasure & the pleasure of his fellows; in this art nothing & nobody was wasted; all people east of the Atlantic felt this art; from Bokhara to Gab way, from Iceland to Madras, all the world glit- tered with its brightness and quivered with its vb gour* It cast down the partitions of race & religion also* Christianand Mussulman were made joyful by it ; Kelt, T euton, & Latin raised it up together ; Persian, Tartar, and Arab gave and took its gifts from one another* Consideringhow old the world is it was not too long-lived at its best* In the days when Norwegian, Dane, and Icelander stalked through the streets of Micklegarth, and hedged Lecture IL with their axes the throne of Kirialax the Greek Art and the king, it was alive & vigorous* When blind Dan/ Beauty of dolo was led from the Venetian galleys on to the the Earth* conquered wall of Constantinople, it was near to its best & purest days* When Constantine Palaeo' logus came back an old and care/worn man from apeacefuller home in the Morea to his doom in the great city, and the last Caesar got the muddle of his life solved, not ingloriously, by Turkish swords on the breached and battered walls of that same Constantinople, there were signs of sickness beginning to show in the art that sprang from there to cover east and west alike with its glory. Andallthattimeitwastheartof freemen* What/ ever slavery still existed in the world (more than enough, as always) art had no share in it; & still itwas only here & there that any great namesrose above the host of those that wrought it* These names (& itwas mainly in Italy only) came to the front when thosebranches of itthatwere the work of collective rather than individual genius, archi/ tecture especially, had quite reached their highest perfection* Men began to look round for some/ thing more startlingly new than the slow, gradual change of architecture & the attendant lesser arts could give them*Thi s change they found in the glo/ rious work of the painters, & they received it with an out/spoken excitement and joy that seems 7 Lecture 1 1 ♦ strange indeed to us in these days when art is held Art and the so cheap* Beauty of All went better than well for a time; though in the Earth* Italy architecture began to lose something of the perfection it had gained, yet it was scarcely to be noticed amidst the glory of the light that was in^ creasing in painting and sculpture* In France and England meantime the change, as it was slower in growing to a head, so it had begun earlier, as witness the sculpture in the great French Chur.' ches, and the exquisite drawing of the illumina^ tions of English books ; while the Flemings, nev/ er very great in the art of building, towards the end of this period had found their true vocation as painters of a sweet and serious external natural^ ism, illuminated by colour unsurpassed for purity and brightness* So had the art of the middle ages climbed gradu/ ally to the top of the hill, doubtless not without carrying the seeds of the disease that was to end it,threateningsof great change which no doubt no one heeded at the time* Nor was there much to wonder at in their blindness, since still for centum ries to come their art was full of life & splendour, & when at last its death drew near men could see in it nothingbut the hopeof a new life* Formany years, a hundred years at least, before the change really showed itself, the expression of the greater thoughts that art can deal with was being made more difficult to men not specially learned* Witlv out demanding the absolute perfection that was Lecture IL the rule in the days of Greece, people began to look Art and the for an intricacy of treatment that the (jreeks had Beauty of never dreamed of; men began to see hopes of the Earth* realizing scenes of history & poetry in a far more complete way than the best of their forerunners hadattempted* Yetforlongtheseverancebetween artist and artizan (as our nicknames go) was not obvious, though doubtless things were leading up to it; it is, perhaps, noticeable chiefly in the differ/ ence between the work of nation and nation ra/ ther than among the indivi dual workmen* I mean, for instance, that in the thirteenth century Eng/ land was going step by step with Italy as far as mere excellence is concerned, while in the middle of the fifteenth England was rude, and Italy cul/ tured; and even while the change was preparing, by one accident or another came a great access of discoveries of the art and literature of the ancient world, &, as it were, fate ran to meet the half/ex/ pressed longings of men* Then, indeed, all hesitation was over, and sud/ denly, as it now seems to us, amidst a blaze of glory, the hoped/for new birth took place* Once, as I have said, the makers of beautiful things passed away nameless; but under the Renais/ sance there are more names of excellent craftsmen left to us than a good memory can well remember, & among those names are the greatest the world has ever known, or perhaps ever will know* No c 9 Lecture IL wonder men's exultation rose high; no wonder Art and the that their pride blinded them & that they did not Beauty of know where they were; yet most pitiable and sad the Earth, the story is. It was one of those strange times when men seem to themselves to have pierced through all the space which lies between longing and attainment. They, it seems, and no others, have at last reached the spot where lie heaped to/ gether all the treasures of the world, vainly sought aforetime. They, it seems, have everything, & no one of those thatwent beforethemhad anything, nay, not even their fathers whose bones lie yet un/ rotted under the turf. The men of the Renaissance looked at the thou/ sand years behind them as a deedless blank, & at all that lay before them as a perpetual triumphal march. We, taught so much by other people's failures, can see their position otherwise than that. We can see that while up to that time, since art first began, it had always looked forward, now it was looking backward; that whereas once men were taught to look through the art at that which the art represented, they were now taught to deem the art an end in itself, & that it mattered nothing whetherthe storyit told was believed or not. Once its aim was to see, now its aim was to be seen only. Once it was done to be understood, & to be help/ ful to all men : now the vulgar were beyond the pale, & the insults which the Greek slave/holders and the Roman tax/sweaters of old cast upon the to people, upon all men but a chosen few, were Lecture IL brought forth & tricked up again in fantastic guise Art and the to adorn the day of boundless hope* Beauty of Not all this, indeed, came at once, but come it did, the Earth* nor very slowly either, when men once began to look back* At the beginningof the sixteenth cem tury the new birth was in its hey/day* Before the seventeenth had quite begun, what had become of its over/weening hopes ? In Venice alone of all Italy was any art bein g done that was of any worth* The conquered North had gained nothing from Italy save an imitation of its worst extravagance, and all that saved the art of England from no^ thingness was a tradition of the earlier days still lingering among a people rustic and narrow^ minded indeed, but serious, truthful, & of simple habits* I have just spoken somewhat of how this came a^ bout* But what was at the bottom of it, and what I wish you chiefly to note and remember is this, thatthe menof the Renaissance lentall their ener/ gies, consciously or unconsciously, to the severance of art from the daily lives of men, and that they brought it to pass, if not utterly in their own days, yet speedily and certainly* I must remind you, though I, and better men than I, have said it over & over again, that once every man that made any/ thing made it a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, whereas now, only a very few thin gs have even the most distant claim to be considered works u Lecture IL of art* I beg you to consider that most carefully Art and the and seriously, & to try to think what it means* Beauty of But first, lest any of you doubt it, let me ask you the Earth* what forms the great mass of the objects that fill our museums, setting aside positive pictures and sculpture? Is it not just the common household goods of past time? True it is that some people may look upon them simply as curiosities, but you and I have been taught mostproperly to look upc on them as priceless treasures that can teach us all sorts of things, and yet, I repeat, they are for the most part common household goods, wrought by “common fellows,” as people say now, without any cultivation, men who thought the sun went round the earth, & that Jerusalem was exactly in the middle of the world* Again, take another museum that we have still left us, our country churches* Take note of them, I say, to see how art ran through every thing; for you must not let the name of “church” mislead you : in times of real art people built their churches in just the same style as their houses; “ecclesiastic cal art” is an invention of the last thirty years* Well, I myself am just fresh from an outcofcthec way part of the country near the end of the navic gable Thames, where, within a radius of five miles, are some halfcdozen tiny village churches, everyone of which is a beautiful work of art, with its own individuality* These are the works of the Thamescside country bumpkins, as you would call us, nothing grander than that* If the same sort of people were to design and build them now, (since within the last fifty years or so they have lost all the old traditions of building, though they clung to them longer than most people), they could not build anythingbetterthan the ordinary little plain Nonconformist chapels that one sees scattered about new neighbourhoods* That is what they correspond with, not an architect/de^ signed new Gothic church* The more you study archaeology the more certain you will become that I am right in this, and that what we have left usof earlier artwasmadebytheunhelpedpeople* Nei^ ther will you fail to see that it was made intelli/ gently and with pleasure* That last word brings me to a point so important that at the risk of getting wearisome I must add it to my old sentence and repeat the whole* Time was when everybody thatmade anything made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it* That is an assertion from which nothing can drive me; whatever I doubt, I have no doubt of that* And, sirs, if there is anythinginthe businessof mylifeworth doing, if I have any worthy aspiration, it is the hope that I may help to bring about the day when we shall be able to say, So it was once, so it is now* Do not misunderstand me; I am not a mere prai ser of past times* I know that in those days of which I speak life was often rough & evil enough, beset 13 Lecture II* Art and the Beauty of the Earth* Lecture IL by violence, superstition, ignorance, slavery; yet Art and the I cannot help thinking that sorely as poor folks Beauty of needed a solace, they did not altogether lack one, the Earth* &that solace was pleasure in their work* Ah, sirs, much as the world has won since then, I do not think it has won for all men such perfect happiness that we can afford to cast aside any solace that nature holds forth to us* Or must we for ever be casting out one devil by another? Shall we never make a push to get rid of the whole pack of them at once ? I do not mean to say that all the work we do now is done without any pleasure, but I mean to say that the pleasure is rather that of conquering a good spell of work, a courageous and good feeling cer/ tainly, or of bearing up well under the burden, & seldom, very seldom, comes to the pitch of com/ pelting the workman, out of the fulness of his heart, to impress on the work itself the tokens of his manly pleasure* Nor will our system of organizing the work allow of it* In almost all cases there is no sympathy be/ tween the designer and the man who carries out the design; not unseldom the designer also is driven to work in a mechanical, down-hearted kind of way, and I don't wonder at it* I know by ex/ perience that the making of design after design, mere diagrams, mind you, without oneself execut/ ing them, is a great strain upon the mind* It is necessary, unless all workmen of all grades are to 14 be permanently degraded into machines, that the Lecture 1 1 ♦ hand should rest the mind as well as the mind the Art and the hand* And Isay that this is the kind ofwork which Beauty of the world has lost, supplying its place with the the Earth* workwhich is the result ofthe division of labour* That work, whatever else it can do, cannot pro/ duce art, which must, as longas the present system lasts, be entirely confined to such works as are the work from beginning to end of one man: pictures, independent sculpture, and the like* As to these, on the one hand, they cannot fill the gap which the loss of popular art has made, nor can they, espe/ dally the more imaginative of them, receive the sympathy which should betheir due* I must speak plainly and say that as things go it is impossible for anyone who is not highly educated to under/ stand the higher kind of pictures* Nay, I believe most people receive very little impression indeed from any pictures but those which represent the scenes with which they are thoroughly familiar* The aspect of this as regards people in general is to my mind much more important than that which has to do with the unlucky artist; but he also has some claim upon our consideration; & I am sure that this lack of the general sympathy of simple people weighs very heavily on him, and makes his work feverish and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse* No, be sure if the people is sick its leaders also have need of healing* Art willnot growandflour/ *5 Lecture IL ish, nay, it will not long exist, unless it be shared Art and the by all people; and for my part I don't wish that Beauty of it should* the Earth* Therefore it is that I stand before you to say that the world has in these days to choose whether she will have art or leave it, and that we also, each one of us, have to make up our minds which camp we will or can join, those that honestly accept art or those that honestly reject it* Once more letmetry to put into words whatthese two alternatives mean* If you accept it, it mustbe part of your daily lives, and the daily life of every man* It will be with us wherever we go, in the ancient city full of traditions of past time, in the newly^cleared farm in America or the colonies, where no man has dwelt for traditions to gather round him ; in the quiet countryside as in the busy town, no place shall be without it* You will have it with you in your sorrow as in your joy, in your workaday hours as in your leisure* It shall be no respecter of persons, but be shared by gentle and simple, learned & unlearned, & be as a language that all can understand* It will not hinder any work that is necessary to the life of man at the best, but it will destroy all degrading toil, all enervate ingluxury,all foppish frivolity* It will be the dead' ly foe of ignorance, dishonesty, and tyranny, and will foster good-will, fair dealing, and confidence between man & man* It will teach you to respect the highest intellect with a manly reverence, but 16 not to despise any man who does not pretend to be Lecture IL what he is not; and that which will be the instru^ Art and the ment that it shall work with & the food that shall Beauty of nourish it shall be man's pleasure in his daily la^ the Earth* bour, the kindest and best gift that the world has ever had* Again I say, I am surethatthisiswhatart means, no less ; that if we attempt to keep art alive on other terms, we are but bolstering up a sham, and that it would be far better for us to accept the other alternative, the frank rejection of art, as many peo^ pie, & they not the worst of us, have already done* To these and not to me you must go if you want to have any clear idea of what is hoped for the fu^ ture of the world when art is laid within her tomb* Yet I think I can in a measure judge from thepre/ sent tendency of matters what is likely to happen to those things which we handicraftsmen have to deal with* When men have given up the idea that the work of men's hands can ever be pleasurable to them, they must, as good men and true, do their utmost to reduce the work of the world to a minimum ; like us artists theymust do all they can to simplify the life of man, to reduce his wants as much as possible; & doubtless in theory they will be able to reduce them more than we shall, for it is clear that the waste of tissue caused by a search after beauty will be forbidden : all ornament will cease Lecture IL ever nature works there will be beauty* The gar/ Art and the ment shall be unadorned, though the moth that Beauty of frets it is painted with silver and pearl* London the Earth* shall be a desert of hideousness, though the bios/ som of the “London pride” be more daintily flecked than the minutest missal that ever monk painted* And when all is done there will yet be too much work, that is to say, too much pain in the world* Whatthen? Machines then* Truly we shall have a good stock to start with, but not near enough* Some men must press on to martyrdom, and toil to invent new ones, till at last pretty nearly every/ thing that is necessary to men will be made by machines* I don't see why it should not be done* I myself have boundless faith in their capacity* I believe machines can do everything, except make works of art* And yet again, what next? Supposing we shall be able to get martyrs enough (or say slaves) to make all the machines that will still be needed, & to work them, shall we still be able to get rid of all labour, of all that which we have found out is an unmitigated curse? And what will our consciences be like (since I started by supposing us all to be conscientious people), when we think we have done all that we can do, and must still be waited upon by groaning, discontented wretches? What shall we do, I say? Well, I must say that my imagination will stretch 18 no further than to suggest rebellion in general as a Lecture 1 1 ♦ remedy, the end of which rebellion, if successful, Art and the must needs be to set up some form of art again as Beauty of a necessary solace of mankind* the Earth* But to say the truth, this leads me to making an/ other suggestion, a practical one I consider it* Sup/ pose we start by rebelling at once; because when I spoke of the world havingto choose between ac/ cepting and rejecting art, I did not suppose that its choice could be final if it chose to reject it* No, the rebellion will have to come and will be vie/ torious, don't doubt that; only if we wait till the tyranny is firmly established our rebellion will have to be a Nihilistic one; every help would be gone save deadly anger and the hope that comes of despair; whereas if we begin now, the change and the counter/change will work together, and the new art will come upon us gradually, and we shall one day see it marching on steadily and vie/ toriously, though its battle has raised no clamour, we, or our sons, or our sons' sons* How shall our rebellion begin then? What is the remedy for the lack of due pleasure in their work which has befallen all craftsmen, and for the con/ sequent sickness of art and degradation of civilize ation ? I am afraid whatever answer I may make to that question will disappoint you* I myself suffer so sorely from the lack above/mentioned that I have little remedy in myself save that of fostering dis/ *9 Lecture IL content* I have no infallible nostrum to cure an Art and the evil whose growth is centuries old* Any remedies Beauty of I can think of are commonplace enough* In those the Earth* old days of popular art, the world, in spite of all the ills thatbeset life, was strugglingtowardcivili^ zation & liberty, & it is in that way which we must also struggle,unless you think that we are civilized enough already, as I must confess I do not* E duca^ tiononall sides is what we must look to* We may expect, ifwe do not learn much, to learn this at least, that we know but little, & that knowledge means aspiration or discontent, call it which you will* I do not doubtthat, as far as our schools of art go, education is bringing us to that point* I do not think any reasonable man can consider them a failure when the condition of the ornamental part of the individual arts is considered at the time of their foundation* Trueit is that thosewho estab^ lished them were partly influenced by a delusive expectation that they would presently be able to supply directly a demand which was felt for trained & skilful designers of goods; but, though this hope failed them, they have no doubt in/ fluenced both that side of art & others also ; among all that they have done not the least is that public recognition of the value of art in general which their very existence implies : or, to speak more cor/ rectly, their existence and the interest that is felt in them, is a token of .people's uneasiness at the present disorganized state of the arts* 20 Perhaps you who study here, & represent such a Lecture IL large body of people who must needs have some Art and the aspirations towards the progress of the arts, will Beauty of excuse a word or two from me a little less general the Earth* than the rest I have been saying* I think I have a right to look upon you as enrolled soldiers of that rebellion against blank ugliness that I have been preaching this evening* You, therefore, above all people are bound to be careful not to give cause to the enemy to blaspheme* Youarebound tobespe/ dally careful to do solid, genuine work, & eschew all pretence and flashiness* Be careful to eschew all vagueness* It is better to be caught out in going wrong when you have had a definite purpose, than to shuffle and slur so that people can't blame you because they don't know what you are at* Hold fast to distinct form in art* Don't think too much of style, but set yourself to get out of you what you think beautiful, & express it, as cautiously as you please, but, I repeat, quite distinctly and without vagueness* Always think your design out in your head before you begin to get it on the paper* Don't begin by slobbering & messing about in the hope that something may come out of it* You must see it before you can draw it, whether the design be of your own invention or nature's* Remember always, form before coL our, & outline, silhouette, before modelling; not because these latter are of less importance, but because they can't be rightif the first are wrong* 21 Lecture I L N ow, upon all these points you may be as severe Art and the with yourselves as you will, and are not likely to Beauty of be too severe* the Earth* Furthermore, those of you especially who are de/ signing for goods, try to get the most out of your material, but always in such a way as honours it most* Not only should it be obvious what your material is, but something should be done with it which is specially natural to it, something that could not be done with any other* This is the very raison d'etre of decorative art: to make stone look like ironwork, or wood like silk, or pottery like stone is the last resource of the decrepitude of art* Set yourselves as much as possible against all machine work (this to all men)* But if you have to design for machine work, at least let your de/ sign show clearly what it is* Make it mechanical with a vengeance, at the same time as simple as possible* Don't try, for instance, to make a printed plate look likeahand/paintedone: makeitsome/ thing which no one would try to do if he were painting by hand, if your market drives you into printed plates: I don't see the use of them myself* To sum up, don't let yourselves be made ma/ chines, or it is all up with you as artists* Though I don't much love the iron and brass machines, the flesh & blood ones are more terrible & hope/ less to me; no man is so clumsy or base a work/ man that he is not fit for something better than that* 22 Well, I have said that education is the first remedy Lecture IL forthe barbarism which has been bred bythe hur/ Art and the ry of civilization and competitive commerce* To Beauty of know that men lived & worked mightily before the Earth* you is an incentive for you to work faithfully now, that you may leave something to those who come after you* What next is to be thought of after education ? I musthere admit that if you acceptart and join the ranks of those who are to rise in rebellion against the Philistines, you will have a roughish time of it* “ Nothing fornothing and not much for adoL lar,” says a Yankee somewhere, and I am sorry to say it is the rule of nature also* Those of us who have money will have to give of it to the cause, & all of us will have to give time, and thought, and trouble to it; and I must nowconsider amatter of the utmost importance to art and to the lives of all of us, which we can, if we please, deal with at once, but which emphatically claims of us time, thought, and money* Ofall the things thatis like^ ly to give us back popular art in England, the cleaning of England is the first and the most ne^ cessary* Those who are to make beautiful things must live in a beautiful place* Some people may be inclined to say, and I have heard the argument put forward, thatthevery opposition between the serenity & purity of art and the turmoil & squalor of a great modern city stimulates the invention of artists, and produces special life in the art ofto^ 2 3 Lecture II* day* I cannot believe it* It seems to me that at the Art and the best it but stimulates the feverish & dreamy qual- Beauty of ities that throw some artists out of the general the Earth* sympathy* Butapartfrom that, thesearemen who are stuffed with memories of more romantic days and pleasanter lands, and it is on these memories they live, to my mind not altogether happily for their art ; and you see it is only a very few men who could have even these doubtful advantages* I abide by my statement that those who are to makebeautiful things must live in beautifulplaces, but you must understand I do not mean to claim for all craftsmen a share of those gardens of the world, or ofthose sublime & awe-inspiring mourn tains and wastes that men make pilgrimages to see; that is to say, not a personal share* Most of usmustbe content with the tales of the poets and painters about these places, and learn to love the narrow spot that surrounds our daily life for what of beauty and sympathy there is in it* For surely there is no square mile of earth's in- habitable surface that is not beautiful in its own way, if we men will only abstain from wilfully destroying that beauty; and it is this reasonable share in the beauty of the earth that I claim as the right of every man who will earn itby due labour; a decent house with decent surroundings for every honest and industrious family; that is the claim which I make of you in the name of art* I sit such an exorbitant claim to make of civilization ? of a ^4 civilizationthatis too apt to boast in after-dinner Lecture IL speeches ; too apt to thrust her blessings on far- Art and the off peoples at the cannon's mouth before she Beauty of has improved the quality of thoseblessings so far the Earth* that they are worth having at any price, even the smallest* Well, I am afraid that claim is exorbitant* Both you as representatives of the manufacturing dis- tricts, and I as representing the metropolis, seem hitherto to have assumed that, at any rate; nor is there one family in a thousand that has established its claim to the right aforesaid* Itisapity though; for if the claim is to be considered inadmissible, then is it most certain that we have been simply filling windbags and weaving sand-ropes by all the trouble we have taken in founding schools of art, National Galleries, South Kensington Mu- seums, and all the rest of it* I have said education is good, is necessary, to all people; neither can you if you would withhold it; and yet to educate people with no hope, what do you expect to come of that? Perhaps you might learn what to expect in Russia* Look you, as I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith, close to the river, I often hear go past the window some of that ruffianism of which a good deal has been said in the papers of late, and has been said before at recurring periods* As I hear the yells and shrieks & all the degrada- tion cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare & e 25 Lecture 1 1 ♦ Milton, as I see the brutal reckless faces & figures Art and the go past me, it rouses the recklessness & brutality Beauty of in me also, & fierce wrath takes possession of me, the Earth* till I remember, as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art,& not on the other side, in the empty street, the drinks steeped liquor^shops, the foul and degraded lodgx ings* What words can say what all that means? Do not think, I beg of you, that I am speaking rhetorically in saying that when I think of all this, I feel that the one great thing I desire is that this great country should shake off from her all foreign and colonial entanglements, & turn that mighty force of her respectable people, the greatest power the world has ever seen, to giving the children of these poor folk the pleasures & the hopes of men* Is that really impossible ? is there no hope of it? If so, I can only say that civilization is a delusion and a lie; there is no such thing and no hope of such a thing* But since I wish to live,& even to be happy, I can^ not believe it impossible* I know by my own feeL mgs & desires what these men want, what would have saved them from this lowest depth of sav^ agery : employment which would foster their self' respect and win the praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable Lecture IL rest* There is only one thing that can give them Art and the this, and that is art* Beauty of I have no doubt that you think this statement a the Earth* ridiculous exaggeration,but it is my firm convict tion nevertheless, & I can only ask you to remem/ ber that in my mind it means the properly organs ized labour of all men who make anything; that must at least be a mighty instrument in the raising of men's self/respect, in the adding of dig/ nity to their lives* Once more, “Nothing for no/ thing and very little for a dollar*" You can no more have art without paying for it than you can have anything else, & if you care about art, as you must when you come to know it, you will not shrink from the necessary sacrifice* After all, we are the descendants and countrymen of those who have well known how to give the lesser for the greater* WTiat you have to sacrifice is chiefly money, that is, force, and dirt; a serious sacrifice I know; but perhaps, as I have said, we have made greater in England aforetime; nay, I am far from sure that dirt will not in the long run cost us more in hard cash even than art will* So which shall we have, art or dirt? What is to be done, then, if we make the better choice? The land we live in is not very big either in actual acreage or in scale of fashion, but 1 think it is notour natural love for it only that makes us thinkit as fit as anylandforthe peaceful dwellings 2 7 Lecture IL of serious men* Our fathers have shown us that, Art and the if it could otherwise be doubted* I say, without fear Beauty of of contradiction, that no dwelling of men has ever the Earth* been sweeter or pleasanter than an ancient Eng/ lishhouse; but our fathers treated our lovely land well, and we have treated it ill* Time was when it was beautiful from end to end, and now you have to pick your way carefully to avoid coming across blotches of hideousness which are a disgrace, I will not say to civilization, but to human nature* I have seen no statistics ofthe size of these blotches in relation to the unspoiled, or partially spoiled, country, but in some places they run together so as to cover a whole county, or even several coun/ ties, while they increase at a fearful rate, fearful in good earnest and literally* Now, while this goes on unchecked, nay, unlamented, it is really idle to talk about art* While we are doing this or letting it be done, we are really covertly rejecting art, and it would be honester and better for us if we did so openly* If we accept art we must atone for what wehavedoneand pay thecostof it* We mustturn this land from the grimy back yard of a workshop into a garden* If that seems difficult, or rather im/ possible, to some of you, I cannot help it; I only know that it is necessary* As to its being impossible, I do not believe it* The men of this generation even have accomplished matters thatbutaverylittlewhile ago would have been thought impossible* They conquered their 28 difficulties because their faces were set in that di^ Lecture IL rection ; & what was done once can be done again* Art and the Why even the money and the science that we ex^ Beauty of pend in devices for killingand maiming our ene^ the Earth* mies present and future would make a good nest' egg towards the promotion of decency of life if we could make up our minds to that tremendous sacrifice* However, I am far from saying that mere money can do much or indeed anything: it isourwill that must doit* Nor need I attempttotry to showhow that will should express itself in action* True I have, in common with some others, ideas as to what steps would best help us on our way, but those ideas would not be accepted by you, & I feel sure that when you are thoroughly intent on the goal you will find the means to reach it,& it is ofim finitesimal importance whatthose means maybe* When you have accepted the maxim that the ex^ ternal aspect of the country belongs to the whole public, & that whoever wilfully injures that pro^ perty is a public enemy, the cause will be on its way to victory* Meantime it is encouraging to me to think there is one thingthat makes itpossible forme to stand here, in a district that makes as much smoke as pottery, and to say what I have been sayingon the subject of dirt, and that is that quite lately there has been visible expression given to a feeling on this subject, which has doubtless been long grow^ 2 9 Lecture IL Art and the Beauty of the Earth* mg* If I am a crazy dreamer, as may well be, yet there are many members and supporters of such societies as the Kyrle and the Commons Pre/ servation Societies, who have not time to dream, and whose craziness, if that befel them, would be speedily felt throughout the country* I pray your pardon for having tried your patience so long* A very few words more, and I have done* Those words are words of hope* Indeed, if I have said anything that seemed to you hopeless, it has been, I think, owing to that bitterness which will sometimes overtake an impatient man when he feels how little his own hands can do towards help/ ing the cause that he has at heart* I know that cause will conquer in the end, for it is an article of faith with me, that the world cannot drop back into savagery, & that art must be its fellow on the for/ ward march* I know well it is not for me to pre/ scribe the road which that progress must take* I know that many things that seem to me to/day clinging hindrances, nay, poisons to that progress, may be furtherers of it, medicines to it, though they befated to bring terrible things to pass before the visible good comes of them* Butthat very faith impels me to speak according to my knowledge, feeble as it may be and rash as the words may sound; for every man who has a cause at heart is bound to act as if it depended on him alone, how/ ever well he may know his own un worthiness; & thus is action brought to birth from mere opinion* 3 ° Lecture IL Art and the Beauty of the Earth* Printed at the Chiswick Press with the Golden type designed by William Morris for the Kelnv scott Press, and finished on the 6th day of December, 1898* Published by Longmans & Co*, 39, Paternoster Row, London* And in all I have been saying I have had steadily in mind that you have asked me to speak to you as a friend, & that I could do no less thanbe quite open and fearless before my friends and fellow^ craftsmen* 3 * r~ r~\ GETTY CENTER LIBRARY 3 3125 00775 3482