by William Morris
'And the men of labour spent their strength in daily struggling for
bread to maintain the vital strength they labour with: so living in
a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but
to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life,
and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.'--DANIEL
DEFOE.
I know that a large proportion of those here present are either
already practising the Fine Arts, or are being specially educated to
that end, and I feel that I may be expected to address myself
specially to these. But since it is not to be doubted that we are
ALL met together because of the interest we take in what concerns
these arts, I would rather address myself to you ALL as representing
the public in general. Indeed, those of you who are specially
studying Art could learn little of me that would be useful to
yourselves only. You are already learning under competent masters--
most competent, I am glad to know--by means of a system which should
teach you all you need, if you have been right in making the first
step of devoting yourselves to Art; I mean if you are aiming at the
right thing, and in some way or another understand what Art means,
which you may well do without being able to express it, and if you
are resolute to follow on the path which that inborn knowledge has
shown to you; if it is otherwise with you than this, no system and
no teachers will help you to produce real art of any kind, be it
never so humble. Those of you who are real artists know well enough
all the special advice I can give you, and in how few words it may
be said--follow nature, study antiquity, make your own art, and do
not steal it, grudge no expense of trouble, patience, or courage, in
the striving to accomplish the hard thing you have set yourselves to
do. You have had all that said to you twenty times, I doubt not;
and twenty times twenty have said it to yourselves, and now I have
said it again to you, and done neither you nor me good nor harm
thereby. So true it all is, so well known, and so hard to follow.
But to me, and I hope to you, Art is a very serious thing, and
cannot by any means be dissociated from the weighty matters that
occupy the thoughts of men; and there are principles underlying the
practice of it, on which all serious-minded men, may--nay, must--
have their own thoughts. It is on some of these that I ask your
leave to speak, and to address myself, not only to those who are
consciously interested in the arts, but to all those also who have
considered what the progress of civilisation promises and threatens
to those who shall come after us: what there is to hope and fear
for the future of the arts, which were born with the birth of
civilisation and will only die with its death--what on this side of
things, the present time of strife and doubt and change is preparing
for the better time, when the change shall have come, the strife be
lulled, and the doubt cleared: this is a question, I say, which is
indeed weighty, and may well interest all thinking men.
Nay, so universally important is it, that I fear lest you should
think I am taking too much upon myself to speak to you on so weighty
a matter, nor should I have dared to do so, if I did not feel that I
am to-night only the mouthpiece of better men than myself; whose
hopes and fears I share; and that being so, I am the more emboldened
to speak out, if I can, my full mind on the subject, because I am in
a city where, if anywhere, men are not contented to live wholly for
themselves and the present, but have fully accepted the duty of
keeping their eyes open to whatever new is stirring, so that they
may help and be helped by any truth that there may be in it. Nor
can I forget, that, since you have done me the great honour of
choosing me for the President of your Society of Arts for the past
year, and of asking me to speak to you to-night, I should be doing
less than my duty if I did not, according to my lights, speak out
straightforwardly whatever seemed to me might be in a small degree
useful to you. Indeed, I think I am among friends, who may forgive
me if I speak rashly, but scarcely if I speak falsely.
The aim of your Society and School of Arts is, as I understand it,
to further those arts by education widely spread. A very great
object is that, and well worthy of the reputation of this great
city; but since Birmingham has also, I rejoice to know, a great
reputation for not allowing things to go about shamming life when
the brains are knocked out of them, I think you should know and see
clearly what it is you have undertaken to further by these
institutions, and whether you really care about it, or only
languidly acquiesce in it--whether, in short, you know it to the
heart, and are indeed part and parcel of it, with your own will, or
against it; or else have heard say that it is a good thing if any
one care to meddle with it.
If you are surprised at my putting that question for your
consideration, I will tell you why I do so. There are some of us
who love Art most, and I may say most faithfully, who see for
certain that such love is rare nowadays. We cannot help seeing,
that besides a vast number of people, who (poor souls!) are sordid
and brutal of mind and habits, and have had no chance or choice in
the matter, there are many high-minded, thoughtful, and cultivated
men who inwardly think the arts to be a foolish accident of
civilisation--nay, worse perhaps, a nuisance, a disease, a hindrance
to human progress. Some of these, doubtless, are very busy about
other sides of thought. They are, as I should put it, so
ARTISTICALLY engrossed by the study of science, politics, or what
not, that they have necessarily narrowed their minds by their hard
and praiseworthy labours. But since such men are few, this does not
account for a prevalent habit of thought that looks upon Art as at
best trifling.
What is wrong, then, with us or the arts, since what was once
accounted so glorious, is now deemed paltry?
The question is no light one; for, to put the matter in its clearest
light, I will say that the leaders of modern thought do for the most
part sincerely and single-mindedly hate and despise the arts; and
you know well that as the leaders are, so must the people be; and
that means that we who are met together here for the furthering of
Art by wide-spread education are either deceiving ourselves and
wasting our time, since we shall one day be of the same opinion as
the best men among us, or else we represent a small minority that is
right, as minorities sometimes are, while those upright men
aforesaid, and the great mass of civilised men, have been blinded by
untoward circumstances.
That we are of this mind--the minority that is right--is, I hope,
the case. I hope we know assuredly that the arts we have met
together to further are necessary to the life of man, if the
progress of civilisation is not to be as causeless as the turning of
a wheel that makes nothing.
How, then, shall we, the minority, carry out the duty which our
position thrusts upon us, of striving to grow into a majority?
If we could only explain to those thoughtful men, and the millions
of whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which
is to us as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about
which they know nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of
repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard
indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or
mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing
so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine
Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names of the pedants,
tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain which long-
dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people into
thinking that they were necessary lords of the world. Turn then to
the lands they governed, and read and forget a long string of the
causeless murders of Northern and Saracen pirates and robbers. That
is pretty much the sum of what so-called history has left us of the
tale of those days--the stupid languor and the evil deeds of kings
and scoundrels. Must we turn away then, and say that all was evil?
How then did men live from day to day? How then did Europe grow
into intelligence and freedom? It seems there were others than
those of whom history (so called) has left us the names and the
deeds. These, the raw material for the treasury and the slave-
market, we now call 'the people,' and we know that they were working
all that while. Yes, and that their work was not merely slaves'
work, the meal-trough before them and the whip behind them; for
though history (so called) has forgotten them, yet their work has
not been forgotten, but has made another history--the history of
Art. There is not an ancient city in the East or the West that does
not bear some token of their grief, and joy, and hope. From Ispahan
to Northumberland, there is no building built between the seventh
and seventeenth centuries that does not show the influence of the
labour of that oppressed and neglected herd of men. No one of them,
indeed, rose high above his fellows. There was no Plato, or
Shakespeare, or Michael Angelo amongst them. Yet scattered as it
was among many men, how strong their thought was, how long it
abided, how far it travelled!
And so it was ever through all those days when Art was so vigorous
and progressive. Who can say how little we should know of many
periods, but for their art? History (so called) has remembered the
kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the
people, because they created.
I think, then, that this knowledge we have of the life of past times
gives us some token of the way we should take in meeting those
honest and single-hearted men who above all things desire the
world's progress, but whose minds are, as it were, sick on this
point of the arts. Surely you may say to them: When all is gained
that you (and we) so long for, what shall we do then? That great
change which we are working for, each in his own way, will come like
other changes, as a thief in the night, and will be with us before
we know it; but let us imagine that its consummation has come
suddenly and dramatically, acknowledged and hailed by all right-
minded people; and what shall we do then, lest we begin once more to
heap up fresh corruption for the woeful labour of ages once again?
I say, as we turn away from the flagstaff where the new banner has
been just run up; as we depart, our ears yet ringing with the blare
of the heralds' trumpets that have proclaimed the new order of
things, what shall we turn to then, what MUST we turn to then?
To what else, save to our work, our daily labour?
With what, then, shall we adorn it when we have become wholly free
and reasonable? It is necessary toil, but shall it be toil only?
Shall all we can do with it be to shorten the hours of that toil to
the utmost, that the hours of leisure may be long beyond what men
used to hope for? and what then shall we do with the leisure, if we
say that all toil is irksome? Shall we sleep it all away?--Yes, and
never wake up again, I should hope, in that case.
What shall we do then? what shall our necessary hours of labour
bring forth?
That will be a question for all men in that day when many wrongs are
righted, and when there will be no classes of degradation on whom
the dirty work of the world can be shovelled; and if men's minds are
still sick and loathe the arts, they will not be able to answer that
question.
Once men sat under grinding tyrannies, amidst violence and fear so
great, that nowadays we wonder how they lived through twenty-four
hours of it, till we remember that then, as now, their daily labour
was the main part of their lives, and that that daily labour was
sweetened by the daily creation of Art; and shall we who are
delivered from the evils they bore, live drearier days than they
did? Shall men, who have come forth from so many tyrannies, bind
themselves to yet another one, and become the slaves of nature,
piling day upon day of hopeless, useless toil? Must this go on
worsening till it comes to this at last--that the world shall have
come into its inheritance, and with all foes conquered and nought to
bind it, shall choose to sit down and labour for ever amidst grim
ugliness? How, then, were all our hopes cheated, what a gulf of
despair should we tumble into then?
In truth, it cannot be; yet if that sickness of repulsion to the
arts were to go on hopelessly, nought else would be, and the
extinction of the love of beauty and imagination would prove to be
the extinction of civilisation. But that sickness the world will
one day throw off, yet will, I believe, pass through many pains in
so doing, some of which will look very like the death-throes of Art,
and some, perhaps, will be grievous enough to the poor people of the
world; since hard necessity, I doubt, works many of the world's
changes, rather than the purblind striving to see, which we call the
foresight of man.
Meanwhile, remember that I asked just now, what was amiss in Art or
in ourselves that this sickness was upon us. Nothing is wrong or
can be with Art in the abstract--that must always be good for
mankind, or we are all wrong together: but with Art, as we of these
latter days have known it, there is much wrong; nay, what are we
here for to-night if that is not so? were not the schools of art
founded all over the country some thirty years ago because we had
found out that popular art was fading--or perhaps had faded out from
amongst us?
As to the progress made since then in this country--and in this
country only, if at all--it is hard for me to speak without being
either ungracious or insincere, and yet speak I must. I say, then,
that an apparent external progress in some ways is obvious, but I do
not know how far that is hopeful, for time must try it, and prove
whether it be a passing fashion or the first token of a real stir
among the great mass of civilised men. To speak quite frankly, and
as one friend to another, I must needs say that even as I say those
words they seem too good to be true. And yet--who knows?--so wont
are we to frame history for the future as well as for the past, so
often are our eyes blind both when we look backward and when we look
forward, because we have been gazing so intently at our own days,
our own lines. May all be better than I think it!
At any rate let us count our gains, and set them against less
hopeful signs of the times. In England, then--and as far as I know,
in England only--painters of pictures have grown, I believe, more
numerous, and certainly more conscientious in their work, and in
some cases--and this more especially in England--have developed and
expressed a sense of beauty which the world has not seen for the
last three hundred years. This is certainly a very great gain,
which is not easy to over-estimate, both for those who make the
pictures and those who use them.
Furthermore, in England, and in England only, there has been a great
improvement in architecture and the arts that attend it--arts which
it was the special province of the afore-mentioned schools to revive
and foster. This, also, is a considerable gain to the users of the
works so made, but I fear a gain less important to most of those
concerned in making them.
Against these gains we must, I am very sorry to say, set the fact
not easy to be accounted for, that the rest of the civilised world
(so called) seems to have done little more than stand still in these
matters; and that among ourselves these improvements have concerned
comparatively few people, the mass of our population not being in
the least touched by them; so that the great bulk of our
architecture--the art which most depends on the taste of the people
at large--grows worse and worse every day. I must speak also of
another piece of discouragement before I go further. I daresay many
of you will remember how emphatically those who first had to do with
the movement of which the foundation of our art-schools was a part,
called the attention of our pattern-designers to the beautiful works
of the East. This was surely most well judged of them, for they
bade us look at an art at once beautiful, orderly, living in our own
day, and above all, popular. Now, it is a grievous result of the
sickness of civilisation that this art is fast disappearing before
the advance of western conquest and commerce--fast, and every day
faster. While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread
of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-
sightedness, actively destroying the very sources of that education-
-jewellery, metal-work, pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving,
carpet-making--all the famous and historical arts of the great
peninsula have been for long treated as matters of no importance, to
be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called
commerce; and matters are now speedily coming to an end there. I
daresay some of you saw the presents which the native Princes gave
to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his progress through
India. I did myself, I will not say with great disappointment, for
I guessed what they would be like, but with great grief, since there
was scarce here and there a piece of goods among these costly gifts,
things given as great treasures, which faintly upheld the ancient
fame of the cradle of the industrial arts. Nay, in some cases, it
would have been laughable, if it had not been so sad, to see the
piteous simplicity with which the conquered race had copied the
blank vulgarity of their lords. And this deterioration we are now,
as I have said, actively engaged in forwarding. I have read a
little book, {3} a handbook to the Indian Court of last year's Paris
Exhibition, which takes the occasion of noting the state of
manufactures in India one by one. 'Art manufactures,' you would
call them; but, indeed, all manufactures are, or were, 'art
manufactures' in India. Dr. Birdwood, the author of this book, is
of great experience in Indian life, a man of science, and a lover of
the arts. His story, by no means a new one to me, or others
interested in the East and its labour, is a sad one indeed. The
conquered races in their hopelessness are everywhere giving up the
genuine practice of their own arts, which we know ourselves, as we
have indeed loudly proclaimed, are founded on the truest and most
natural principles. The often-praised perfection of these arts is
the blossom of many ages of labour and change, but the conquered
races are casting it aside as a thing of no value, so that they may
conform themselves to the inferior art, or rather the lack of art,
of their conquerors. In some parts of the country the genuine arts
are quite destroyed; in many others nearly so; in all they have more
or less begun to sicken. So much so is this the case, that now for
some time the Government has been furthering this deterioration. As
for example, no doubt with the best intentions, and certainly in
full sympathy with the general English public, both at home and in
India, the Government is now manufacturing cheap Indian carpets in
the Indian gaols. I do not say that it is a bad thing to turn out
real work, or works of art, in gaols; on the contrary, I think it
good if it be properly managed. But in this case, the Government,
being, as I said, in full sympathy with the English public, has
determined that it will make its wares cheap, whether it make them
nasty or not. Cheap and nasty they are, I assure you; but, though
they are the worst of their kind, they would not be made thus, if
everything did not tend the same way. And it is the same everywhere
and with all Indian manufactures, till it has come to this--that
these poor people have all but lost the one distinction, the one
glory that conquest had left them. Their famous wares, so praised
by those who thirty years ago began to attempt the restoration of
popular art amongst ourselves, are no longer to be bought at
reasonable prices in the common market, but must be sought for and
treasured as precious relics for the museums we have founded for our
art education. In short, their art is dead, and the commerce of
modern civilisation has slain it.
What is going on in India is also going on, more or less, all over
the East; but I have spoken of India chiefly because I cannot help
thinking that we ourselves are responsible for what is happening
there. Chance-hap has made us the lords of many millions out there;
surely, it behoves us to look to it, lest we give to the people whom
we have made helpless scorpions for fish and stones for bread.
But since neither on this side, nor on any other, can art be
amended, until the countries that lead civilisation are themselves
in a healthy state about it, let us return to the consideration of
its condition among ourselves. And again I say, that obvious as is
that surface improvement of the arts within the last few years, I
fear too much that there is something wrong about the root of the
plant to exult over the bursting of its February buds.
I have just shown you for one thing that lovers of Indian and
Eastern Art, including as they do the heads of our institutions for
art education, and I am sure many among what are called the
governing classes, are utterly powerless to stay its downward
course. The general tendency of civilisation is against them, and
is too strong for them.
Again, though many of us love architecture dearly, and believe that
it helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among
beautiful things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live
in houses which have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness
and inconvenience. The stream of civilisation is against us, and we
cannot battle against it.
Once more those devoted men who have upheld the standard of truth
and beauty amongst us, and whose pictures, painted amidst
difficulties that none but a painter can know, show qualities of
mind unsurpassed in any age--these great men have but a narrow
circle that can understand their works, and are utterly unknown to
the great mass of the people: civilisation is so much against them,
that they cannot move the people.
Therefore, looking at all this, I cannot think that all is well with
the root of the tree we are cultivating. Indeed, I believe that if
other things were but to stand still in the world, this improvement
before mentioned would lead to a kind of art which, in that
impossible case, would be in a way stable, would perhaps stand still
also. This would be an art cultivated professedly by a few, and for
a few, who would consider it necessary--a duty, if they could admit
duties--to despise the common herd, to hold themselves aloof from
all that the world has been struggling for from the first, to guard
carefully every approach to their palace of art. It would be a pity
to waste many words on the prospect of such a school of art as this,
which does in a way, theoretically at least, exist at present, and
has for its watchword a piece of slang that does not mean the
harmless thing it seems to mean--art for art's sake. Its fore-
doomed end must be, that art at last will seem too delicate a thing
for even the hands of the initiated to touch; and the initiated must
at last sit still and do nothing--to the grief of no one.
Well, certainly, if I thought you were come here to further such an
art as this I could not have stood up and called you FRIENDS; though
such a feeble folk as I have told you of one could scarce care to
call foes.
Yet, as I say, such men exist, and I have troubled you with speaking
of them, because I know that those honest and intelligent people,
who are eager for human progress, and yet lack part of the human
senses, and are anti-artistic, suppose that such men are artists,
and that this is what art means, and what it does for people, and
that such a narrow, cowardly life is what we, fellow-handicraftsmen,
aim at. I see this taken for granted continually, even by many who,
to say truth, ought to know better, and I long to put the slur from
off us; to make people understand that we, least of all men, wish to
widen the gulf between the classes, nay, worse still, to make new
classes of elevation, and new classes of degradation--new lords and
new slaves; that we, least of all men, want to cultivate the 'plant
called man' in different ways--here stingily, there wastefully: I
wish people to understand that the art we are striving for is a good
thing which all can share, which will elevate all; in good sooth, if
all people do not soon share it there will soon be none to share; if
all are not elevated by it, mankind will lose the elevation it has
gained. Nor is such an art as we long for a vain dream; such an art
once was in times that were worse than these, when there was less
courage, kindness, and truth in the world than there is now; such an
art there will be hereafter, when there will be more courage,
kindness, and truth than there is now in the world.
Let us look backward in history once more for a short while, and
then steadily forward till my words are done: I began by saying
that part of the common and necessary advice given to Art students
was to study antiquity; and no doubt many of you, like me, have done
so; have wandered, for instance, through the galleries of the
admirable museum of South Kensington, and, like me, have been filled
with wonder and gratitude at the beauty which has been born from the
brain of man. Now, consider, I pray you, what these wonderful works
are, and how they were made; and indeed, it is neither in
extravagance nor without due meaning that I use the word 'wonderful'
in speaking of them. Well, these things are just the common
household goods of those past days, and that is one reason why they
are so few and so carefully treasured. They were common things in
their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling--no
rarities then--and yet we have called them 'wonderful.'
And how were they made? Did a great artist draw the designs for
them--a man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily fed, carefully
housed, wrapped up in cotton wool, in short, when he was not at
work? By no means. Wonderful as these works are, they were made by
'common fellows,' as the phrase goes, in the common course of their
daily labour. Such were the men we honour in honouring those works.
And their labour--do you think it was irksome to them? Those of you
who are artists know very well that it was not; that it could not
be. Many a grin of pleasure, I'll be bound--and you will not
contradict me--went to the carrying through of those mazes of
mysterious beauty, to the invention of those strange beasts and
birds and flowers that we ourselves have chuckled over at South
Kensington. While they were at work, at least, these men were not
unhappy, and I suppose they worked most days, and the most part of
the day, as we do.
Or those treasures of architecture that we study so carefully
nowadays--what are they? how were they made? There are great
minsters among them, indeed, and palaces of kings and lords, but not
many; and, noble and awe-inspiring as these may be, they differ only
in size from the little grey church that still so often makes the
commonplace English landscape beautiful, and the little grey house
that still, in some parts of the country at least, makes an English
village a thing apart, to be seen and pondered on by all who love
romance and beauty. These form the mass of our architectural
treasures, the houses that everyday people lived in, the unregarded
churches in which they worshipped.
And, once more, who was it that designed and ornamented them? The
great architect, carefully kept for the purpose, and guarded from
the common troubles of common men? By no means. Sometimes,
perhaps, it was the monk, the ploughman's brother; oftenest his
other brother, the village carpenter, smith, mason, what not--'a
common fellow,' whose common everyday labour fashioned works that
are to-day the wonder and despair of many a hard-working
'cultivated' architect. And did he loathe his work? No, it is
impossible. I have seen, as we most of us have, work done by such
men in some out-of-the-way hamlet--where to-day even few strangers
ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own
doors; in such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so
careful, and so inventive, that nothing in its way could go further.
And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human
ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a
third party to the brain that conceived and the hand that fashioned
it. Nor are such works rare. The throne of the great Plantagenet,
or the great Valois, was no more daintily carved than the seat of
the village mass-john, or the chest of the yeoman's good-wife.
So, you see, there was much going on to make life endurable in those
times. Not every day, you may be sure, was a day of slaughter and
tumult, though the histories read almost as if it were so; but every
day the hammer chinked on the anvil, and the chisel played about the
oak beam, and never without some beauty and invention being born of
it, and consequently some human happiness.
That last word brings me to the very kernel and heart of what I have
come here to say to you, and I pray you to think of it most
seriously--not as to my words, but as to a thought which is stirring
in the world, and will one day grow into something.
That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man
of his pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his
labour without expressing that happiness; and especially is this so
when he is at work at anything in which he specially excels. A most
kind gift is this of nature, since all men, nay, it seems all things
too, must labour; so that not only does the dog take pleasure in
hunting, and the horse in running, and the bird in flying, but so
natural does the idea seem to us, that we imagine to ourselves that
the earth and the very elements rejoice in doing their appointed
work; and the poets have told us of the spring meadows smiling, of
the exultation of the fire, of the countless laughter of the sea.
Nor until these latter days has man ever rejected this universal
gift, but always, when he has not been too much perplexed, too much
bound by disease or beaten down by trouble, has striven to make his
work at least happy. Pain he has too often found in his pleasure,
and weariness in his rest, to trust to these. What matter if his
happiness lie with what must be always with him--his work?
And, once more, shall we, who have gained so much, forego this gain,
the earliest, most natural gain of mankind? If we have to a great
extent done so, as I verily fear we have, what strange fog-lights
must have misled us; or rather let me say, how hard pressed we must
have been in the battle with the evils we have overcome, to have
forgotten the greatest of all evils. I cannot call it less than
that. If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not
satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater
part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect.
Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of
it in the end.
If I could only persuade you of this, that the chief duty of the
civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all,
to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour--nay, if I
could only persuade some two or three of you here present--I should
have made a good night's work of it.
Do not, at any rate, shelter yourselves from any misgiving you may
have behind the fallacy that the art-lacking labour of to-day is
happy work: for the most of men it is not so. It would take long,
perhaps, to show you, and make you fully understand that the would-
be art which it produces is joyless. But there is another token of
its being most unhappy work, which you cannot fail to understand at
once--a grievous thing that token is--and I beg of you to believe
that I feel the full shame of it, as I stand here speaking of it;
but if we do not admit that we are sick, how can we be healed? This
hapless token is, that the work done by the civilised world is
mostly dishonest work. Look now: I admit that civilisation does
make certain things well, things which it knows, consciously or
unconsciously, are necessary to its present unhealthy condition.
These things, to speak shortly, are chiefly machines for carrying on
the competition in buying and selling, called falsely commerce; and
machines for the violent destruction of life--that is to say,
materials for two kinds of war; of which kinds the last is no doubt
the worst, not so much in itself perhaps, but because on this point
the conscience of the world is beginning to be somewhat pricked.
But, on the other hand, matters for the carrying on of a dignified
daily life, that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help, which
is the only real life of thinking men--these things the civilised
world makes ill, and even increasingly worse and worse.
If I am wrong in saying this, you know well I am only saying what is
widely thought, nay widely said too, for that matter. Let me give
an instance, familiar enough, of that wide-spread opinion. There is
a very clever book of pictures {4} now being sold at the railway
bookstalls, called 'The British Working Man, by one who does not
believe in him,'--a title and a book which make me both angry and
ashamed, because the two express much injustice, and not a little
truth in their quaint, and necessarily exaggerated way. It is quite
true, and very sad to say, that if any one nowadays wants a piece of
ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver,
smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he get it well
done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of
plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights; yet I cannot see
how the 'British Working Man' is to be made to bear the whole burden
of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it. I doubt if it be
possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are
driven, and in which there is no hope and no pleasure, without
trying to shirk it--at any rate, shirked it has always been under
such circumstances. On the other hand, I know that there are some
men so right-minded, that they will, in despite of irksomeness and
hopelessness, drive right through their work. Such men are the salt
of the earth. But must there not be something wrong with a state of
society which drives these into that bitter heroism, and the most
part into shirking, into the depths often of half-conscious self-
contempt and degradation? Be sure that there is, that the blindness
and hurry of civilisation, as it now is, have to answer a heavy
charge as to that enormous amount of pleasureless work--work that
tries every muscle of the body and every atom of the brain, and
which is done without pleasure and without aim--work which everybody
who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest way that
dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.
I am as sure of one thing as that I am living and breathing, and it
is this: that the dishonesty in the daily arts of life, complaints
of which are in all men's mouths, and which I can answer for it does
exist, is the natural and inevitable result of the world in the
hurry of the war of the counting-house, and the war of the
battlefield, having forgotten--of all men, I say, each for the
other, having forgotten, that pleasure in our daily labour, which
nature cries out for as its due.
Therefore, I say again, it is necessary to the further progress of
civilisation that men should turn their thoughts to some means of
limiting, and in the end of doing away with, degrading labour.
I do not think my words hitherto spoken have given you any occasion
to think that I mean by this either hard or rough labour; I do not
pity men much for their hardships, especially if they be accidental;
not necessarily attached to one class or one condition, I mean. Nor
do I think (I were crazy or dreaming else) that the work of the
world can be carried on without rough labour; but I have seen enough
of that to know that it need not be by any means degrading. To
plough the earth, to cast the net, to fold the flock--these, and
such as these, which are rough occupations enough, and which carry
with them many hardships, are good enough for the best of us,
certain conditions of leisure, freedom, and due wages being granted.
As to the bricklayer, the mason, and the like--these would be
artists, and doing not only necessary, but beautiful, and therefore
happy work, if art were anything like what it should be. No, it is
not such labour as this which we need to do away with, but the toil
which makes the thousand and one things which nobody wants, which
are used merely as the counters for the competitive buying and
selling, falsely called commerce, which I have spoken of before--I
know in my heart, and not merely by my reason, that this toil cries
out to be done away with. But, besides that, the labour which now
makes things good and necessary in themselves, merely as counters
for the commercial war aforesaid, needs regulating and reforming.
Nor can this reform be brought about save by art; and if we were
only come to our right minds, and could see the necessity for making
labour sweet to all men, as it is now to very few--the necessity, I
repeat; lest discontent, unrest, and despair should at last swallow
up all society--If we, then, with our eyes cleared, could but make
some sacrifice of things which do us no good, since we unjustly and
uneasily possess them, then indeed I believe we should sow the seeds
of a happiness which the world has not yet known, of a rest and
content which would make it what I cannot help thinking it was meant
to be: and with that seed would be sown also the seed of real art,
the expression of man's happiness in his labour,--an art made by the
people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the
user.
That is the only real art there is, the only art which will be an
instrument to the progress of the world, and not a hindrance. Nor
can I seriously doubt that in your hearts you know that it is so,
all of you, at any rate, who have in you an instinct for art. I
believe that you agree with me in this, though you may differ from
much else that I have said. I think assuredly that this is the art
whose welfare we have met together to further, and the necessary
instruction in which we have undertaken to spread as widely as may
be.
Thus I have told you something of what I think is to be hoped and
feared for the future of art; and if you ask me what I expect as a
practical outcome of the admission of these opinions, I must say at
once that I know, even if we were all of one mind, and that what I
think the right mind on this subject, we should still have much work
and many hindrances before us; we should still have need of all the
prudence, foresight, and industry of the best among us; and, even
so, our path would sometimes seem blind enough. And, to-day, when
the opinions which we think right, and which one day will be
generally thought so, have to struggle sorely to make themselves
noticed at all, it is early days for us to try to see our exact and
clearly mapped road. I suppose you will think it too commonplace of
me to say that the general education that makes men think, will one
day make them think rightly upon art. Commonplace as it is, I
really believe it, and am indeed encouraged by it, when I remember
how obviously this age is one of transition from the old to the new,
and what a strange confusion, from out of which we shall one day
come, our ignorance and half-ignorance is like to make of the
exhausted rubbish of the old and the crude rubbish of the new, both
of which lie so ready to our hands.
But, if I must say, furthermore, any words that seem like words of
practical advice, I think my task is hard, and I fear I shall offend
some of you whatever I say; for this is indeed an affair of
morality, rather than of what people call art.
However, I cannot forget that, in my mind, it is not possible to
dissociate art from morality, politics, and religion. Truth in
these great matters of principle is of one, and it is only in formal
treatises that it can be split up diversely. I must also ask you to
remember how I have already said, that though my mouth alone speaks,
it speaks, however feebly and disjointedly, the thoughts of many men
better than myself. And further, though when things are tending to
the best, we shall still, as aforesaid, need our best men to lead us
quite right; yet even now surely, when it is far from that, the
least of us can do some yeoman's service to the cause, and live and
die not without honour.
So I will say that I believe there are two virtues much needed in
modern life, if it is ever to become sweet; and I am quite sure that
they are absolutely necessary in the sowing the seed of an ART WHICH
IS TO BE MADE BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE, AS A HAPPINESS TO
THE MAKER AND THE USER. These virtues are honesty, and simplicity
of life. To make my meaning clearer I will name the opposing vice
of the second of these--luxury to wit. Also I mean by honesty, the
careful and eager giving his due to every man, the determination not
to gain by any man's loss, which in my experience is not a common
virtue.
But note how the practice of either of these virtues will make the
other easier to us. For if our wants are few, we shall have but
little chance of being driven by our wants into injustice; and if we
are fixed in the principle of giving every man his due, how can our
self-respect bear that we should give too much to ourselves?
And in art, and in that preparation for it without which no art that
is stable or worthy can be, the raising, namely, of those classes
which have heretofore been degraded, the practice of these virtues
would make a new world of it. For if you are rich, your simplicity
of life will both go towards smoothing over the dreadful contrast
between waste and want, which is the great horror of civilised
countries, and will also give an example and standard of dignified
life to those classes which you desire to raise, who, as it is
indeed, being like enough to rich people, are given both to envy and
to imitate the idleness and waste that the possession of much money
produces.
Nay, and apart from the morality of the matter, which I am forced to
speak to you of; let me tell you that though simplicity in art may
be costly as well as uncostly, at least it is not wasteful, and
nothing is more destructive to art than the want of it. I have
never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the
better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all
that it held. Indeed, our sacrifice on the side of luxury will, it
seems to me, be little or nothing: for, as far as I can make out,
what people usually mean by it, is either a gathering of possessions
which are sheer vexations to the owner, or a chain of pompous
circumstance, which checks and annoys the rich man at every step.
Yes, luxury cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other, and
its abolition will be blessed, like the abolition of other
slaveries, by the freeing both of the slaves and of their masters.
Lastly, if, besides attaining to simplicity of life, we attain also
to the love of justice, then will all things be ready for the new
springtime of the arts. For those of us that are employers of
labour, how can we bear to give any man less money than he can
decently live on, less leisure than his education and self-respect
demand? or those of us who are workmen, how can we bear to fail in
the contract we have undertaken, or to make it necessary for a
foreman to go up and down spying out our mean tricks and evasions?
or we the shopkeepers--can we endure to lie about our wares, that we
may shuffle off our losses on to some one else's shoulders? or we
the public--how can we bear to pay a price for a piece of goods
which will help to trouble one man, to ruin another, and starve a
third? Or, still more, I think, how can we bear to use, how can we
enjoy something which has been a pain and a grief for the maker to
make?
And now, I think, I have said what I came to say. I confess that
there is nothing new in it, but you know the experience of the world
is that a thing must be said over and over again before any great
number of men can be got to listen to it. Let my words to-night,
therefore, pass for one of the necessary times that the thought in
them must be spoken out.
For the rest I believe that, however seriously these words may be
gainsayed, I have been speaking to an audience in whom any words
spoken from a sense of duty and in hearty goodwill, as mine have
been, will quicken thought and sow some good seed. At any rate, it
is good for a man who thinks seriously to face his fellows, and
speak out whatever really burns in him, so that men may seem less
strange to one another, and misunderstanding, the fruitful cause of
aimless strife, may be avoided.
But if to any of you I have seemed to speak hopelessly, my words
have been lacking in art; and you must remember that hopelessness
would have locked my mouth, not opened it. I am, indeed, hopeful,
but can I give a date to the accomplishment of my hope, and say that
it will happen in my life or yours?
But I will say at least, Courage! for things wonderful, unhoped-for,
glorious, have happened even in this short while I have been alive.
Yes, surely these times are wonderful and fruitful of change, which,
as it wears and gathers new life even in its wearing, will one day
bring better things for the toiling days of men, who, with freer
hearts and clearer eyes, will once more gain the sense of outward
beauty, and rejoice in it.
Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as, indeed, in many ways they
are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine
gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and
beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows
trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against
to-morrow's daylight--that to-morrow, when the civilised world, no
longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a
glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness
to the maker and the user.
This article is from the classic text Hopes and Fears for Art, by William Morris. It is in the public domain.
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