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Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only. CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts All the editorial text with the corrections of the editor has been retained. Text has been checked, proof-read and parsed using NSGMLS. The electronic text represents the edited text. Direct speech is marked The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained. Names of persons (given names), and places are not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged. The The title of the text is held as the first The fragmenta of which this lecture is composed are taken
entirely from the original manuscripts which have but
recently been discovered. It is not certain that they all
belong to the same lecture, nor that all were written at the
same period. Some portions were written in Philadelphia in
1882. PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between
what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition
to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful
or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the
beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always on
the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful
decoration is always an expression of the use you put a
thing to and the value placed on it. No workman will
beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good
handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs.
You should be quite sure of that. If you have poor and
worthless designs in any craft or trade you will get poor
and worthless workmen only, but the minute you have noble
and beautiful designs, then you get men of power and
intellect and feeling to work for you. By having good
designs you have workmen who work not merely with their
hands but with their hearts and heads too; otherwise you
will get merely the fool or the loafer to work for you. That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose
few people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised
people act as if it were of none, and in so doing are
wronging both themselves and those that are to come after
them. For that beauty which is meant by art is no mere
accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a
positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant
us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than
men. Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis
of your life and cities here is opposed to art. Who built
the beautiful cities of the world but commercial men and
commercial men only? Genoa built by its traders, Florence by
its bankers, and Venice, most lovely of all, by its noble
and honest merchants. I do not wish you, remember, Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I
tell you we reverence it; we reverence it when it does its
proper work, when it relieves man from ignoble and soulless
labour, not when it seeks to do that which is valuable only
when wrought by the hands and hearts of men. Let us have no
machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless
and ugly. And let us not mistake the means of civilisation
for the end of civilisation; steam-engine, telephone and the
like, are all wonderful, but remember that their value
depends entirely on the noble uses we make of them, on the
noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things
themselves. It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the
Antipodes through a telephone; its advantage depends
entirely on the value of what the two men have to say to one
another. If one merely shrieks slander through a tube and
the other whispers folly into a wire, do not think that
anybody is very much benefited by the invention. The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy
at the rate of forty miles an hour and finally sends him
home without any memory of that lovely country but that he
was cheated by a courier at Rome, or that he got a bad
dinner at Verona, does not do him or civilisation Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright
and noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately
and simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple
dress for your men and women; those are the conditions of a
real artistic movement. For the artist is not concerned
primarily with any theory of life but with life itself, with
the joy and loveliness that should come daily on eye and ear
for a beautiful external world. But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright
colour gaudy. For all beautiful colours are graduated
colours, the colours that seem about to pass into one
another's realm— colour without tone being like music
without harmony, mere discord. Barren architecture, the
vulgar and glaring advertisements that desecrate not merely
your cities but every But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this,
again, is of the essence of good All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always
forgotten. Your school of design here will teach your girls
and your boys, your handicraftsmen of the future (for all
your schools of art should be local schools, the schools of
particular cities). We talk of the Italian school of
painting, but there is no Italian school; there were the
schools of each city. Every town in Italy, from Venice
itself, queen of the sea, to the little hill fortress of
Perugia, each had its own school of art, each different and
all beautiful. So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having,
but make by the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for
the joy of your own citizens, for you have here the primary
elements of a great artistic movement. For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler
than people imagine. For the noblest art one requires a
clear healthy atmosphere, not All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great
artistic movement for every great art. Let us think of one
of them; a sculptor, for instance. If a modern sculptor were to come and say, Ours has been the first movement which has brought the
handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by
separating the one from the other you do ruin to both; you
rob the one of all spiritual motive and all imaginative joy,
you isolate the other from all real technical perfection.
The two greatest schools of art in the world, the sculptor
at Athens and the school of painting at Venice, had their
origin entirely in a long succession of simple and earnest
handicraftsmen. Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese,
Italian or English; but their artistic spirit of design and
their artistic attitude to-day, their own world, you should
absorb but imitate never, copy never. Unless you can make as
beautiful a design in painted china or embroidered screen or
beaten brass out of your American turkey as the Japanese
does out of his grey silver-winged stork, you will never do
anything. Let the Greek carve his lions and the Goth his Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that
cover your valleys in the spring and your hills in the
autumn: let them be the flowers for your art. Not merely has
Nature given you the noblest motives for a new school of
decoration, but to you above all other countries has she
given the utensils to work in. You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more
varied than Paros, but do not build a great white square
house of marble and think that it is beautiful, or that you
are using marble nobly. If you build in marble you must
either carve it into joyous decoration, like the lives of
dancing children that adorn the marble castles of the Loire,
or fill it with beautiful sculpture, frieze and pediment, as
the Greeks did, or inlay it with other coloured marbles as
they did in Venice. Otherwise you had better build in simple
red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence and with
some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was ordinary
stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. For it is
indeed a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only
workmen of nobility of invention and delicacy of hand should
be allowed to touch it at all, carving it into noble statues
or into beautiful decoration, or inlaying it with other
coloured marbles: forto build a new Pisa,
nor to bring the life or the decorations of the
thirteenth century back again.
The circumstances
with which you must surround your workmen are those
of
modern American life, because the designs you have now to
ask for from your workmen are such as will make modern
American life beautiful.
The art we want is the art
based on all the inventions of modern civilisation, and to
suit all the needs of nineteenth-century life.This is good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought
it so many years ago, but it is eternally young because
eternally beautiful.
Work in this spirit and you will
be sure to be right. Do not copy it, but work with the same
love, the same reverence, the same freedom of imagination.
You must teach him colour and design, how all beautiful
colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the
essence of vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful
work of nature like the rose, or any beautiful work of art
like an Eastern carpet—being merely the exquisite
gradation of colour, one tone answering another like the
answering chords of a symphony. Teach him how the trueVery well,
but where can one find subjects for sculpture out of men
who wear frock-coats and chimney-pot hats?
I would
tell him to go to the docks of a great city and watch the
men loading or unloading the stately ships, working at wheel
or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I have never
watched a man do anything useful who has not been graceful
at some moment of his labour: it is only the loafer and the
idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the
artist as he is to himself. I would ask the sculptor to go
with me to any of your schools or universities, to the
running ground and gymnasium, to watch the young men start
for a race, hurling quoit or club, kneeling to tie their
shoes before leaping, stepping fromDutch landscape, which you put over
your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow,
is
no less a glorious piece of work than the
extents of field and forest with which Benozzo has made
green and beautiful the once melancholy arcade of the
Campo Santo at Pisa,
as Ruskin says.the true colours of
architecture are those of natural stone, and I would fain
see them taken advantage of to the full. Every variety is
here, from pale yellow to purple passing through orange,
red, and brown, entirely at your command; nearly every
kind of green and grey also is attainable, and with these
and with pure white what harmony might you not achieve. Of
stained and variegated stone the quantity is unlimited,
the kinds innumerable. Were brighter colours required, let
glass, and gold protected by glass, be used in mosaic, a
kind of work as durable as the solid stone and incapable
of losing its lustre by time. And let the painter's work
be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner
chamber.
This is the true and faithful way of building. Where
this cannot be, the device of external colouring may
indeed be employed without dishonour—but it must be
with the warning reflection that a time will come when
such aids will pass away and when the building will be
judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the
dolphin. Better the less bright, more enduring fabric. The
transparent alabasters of San Miniato and the mosaics of
Saint Mark's are more warmly filled and more brightly
touched by every return of morning and evening, while the
hues of the Gothic cathedrals have died like the iris out
of the cloud, and the temples, whose azure and purple
—Ruskin,
I do not know anything so perfectly commonplace in design as most modern jewellery. How easy for you to change that and to produce goldsmiths' work that would be a joy to all of us. The gold is ready for you in unexhausted treasure, stored up in the mountain hollow or strewn on the river sand, and was not given to you merely for barren speculation. There should be some better record of it left in your history than the merchant's panic and the ruined home. We do not remember often enough how constantly the history of a great nation will live in and by its art. Only a few thin wreaths of beaten gold remain to tell us of the stately empire of Etruria; and, while from the streets of Florence the noble knight and haughty duke have long since passed away, the gates which the simple goldsmith Ghiberti made for their pleasure still guard their lovely house of baptism, worthy still of the praise of Michael Angelo who called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.
Have then your school of design, search out your workmen
and, when you find one who has delicacy of hand and that
wonder of invention necessary for goldsmiths' work, do not
leave him
This is the spirit of our movement in England, and this is
the spirit in which we would wish you to work, making
eternal by your art all that is noble in your men and women,
stately in your lakes and mountains, beautiful in your own
flowers and natural life. We want to see that you have
nothing in your houses that has not been a joy to the man
who made it, and is not a joy to those that use it. We want
to see you create an art made by the hands of the people to
please the hearts of the people too. Do you like this spirit
or not? Do you think it simple
Folly and slander have their own way for a little time, but for a little time only. You now know what we mean: you will be able to estimate what is said of us—its value and its motive.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be
allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their
foolish and random writing it would be impossible to
overestimate—not to the artist but to the public,
blinding them to all, but harming the artist not at all.
Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at
present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public
to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but
by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of
his income and a poet by the colour of his neck-tie. I said
there should be a law, but there is really no necessity for
a new law: nothing could be easier than to bring the
ordinary critic under the head of the criminal classes. But
let us leave such an inartistic subject and return to
beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art which
would represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be
exactly the art which you and I want to
avoid—grotesque art, malice mocking you from
Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and
the workman. You have heard of me, I fear, through the
medium of your somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a
Japanese young man,
at least a young man to whom the
rush and clamour and reality of the modern world were
distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in life was the
difficulty of living up to the level of his blue
china—a paradox from which England has not yet
recovered.
Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create.
One summer afternoon in Oxford—that sweet city
with her dreaming spires,
lovely as Venice in its
splendour, noble in its learning as Rome, down the long High
Street that winds from tower to tower, past silent cloister
and stately gateway, till it reaches that long, grey
seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used to,
I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a
tramway and a light cast-iron bridge in its place,
desecrating the loveliest city in England)—well, we
were comingdiggers,
as they called
us, fell asunder. And I felt that if there was enough spirit
amongst the young men to go out to such work as road-making
for the sake of a noble ideal of life, I could from them
create an artistic movement that might change, as it has
changed, the face of England. So I sought them
out—leader they would call me—but there was no
leader: we were all searchers only and we were bound to each
other by noble friendship and by noble art. There was none
of us idle: poets most of us, so ambitious were we: painters
some of us, or workers in metal or modellers, determined
that we would try and create for ourselves beautiful work:
for the handicraftsman beautiful work, for those who love us
poems and pictures, for those who love us not epigrams and
paradoxes and scorn.
Well, we have done something in England and we will do something more. Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant young men, your beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on a swamp for any village in America, but I think you might each of you have some art to practise.
We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our
culture, a basis for our higher accomplishments in the work
of our hands—the uselessness of most people's hands
seems to me one of the most unpractical things. No
separation from labour can be without some loss of power
or truth to the seer,
says Emerson again. The heroism
which would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must be
that of a domestic conqueror. The hero of the future is he
who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of
fashion and of convention.
When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly try and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which
Death cannot harm. The little