Hopes and Fears for Art

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This etext was produced by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
from the 1919 Longmans, Green and Co. edition.

HOPES AND FEARS FOR ART

by William Morris

Contents:

The Lesser Arts
The Art of the People
The Beauty of Life
Making the Best of It
The Prospects of Architecture in Civilisation

THE LESSER ARTS {1}

Hereafter I hope in another lecture to have the pleasure of laying
before you an historical survey of the lesser, or as they are called
the Decorative Arts, and I must confess it would have been
pleasanter to me to have begun my talk with you by entering at once
upon the subject of the history of this great industry; but, as I
have something to say in a third lecture about various matters
connected with the practice of Decoration among ourselves in these
days, I feel that I should be in a false position before you, and
one that might lead to confusion, or overmuch explanation, if I did
not let you know what I think on the nature and scope of these arts,
on their condition at the present time, and their outlook in times
to come. In doing this it is like enough that I shall say things
with which you will very much disagree; I must ask you therefore
from the outset to believe that whatever I may blame or whatever I
may praise, I neither, when I think of what history has been, am
inclined to lament the past, to despise the present, or despair of
the future; that I believe all the change and stir about us is a
sign of the world's life, and that it will lead--by ways, indeed, of
which we have no guess--to the bettering of all mankind.

Now as to the scope and nature of these Arts I have to say, that
though when I come more into the details of my subject I shall not
meddle much with the great art of Architecture, and less still with
the great arts commonly called Sculpture and Painting, yet I cannot
in my own mind quite sever them from those lesser so-called
Decorative Arts, which I have to speak about: it is only in latter
times, and under the most intricate conditions of life, that they
have fallen apart from one another; and I hold that, when they are
so parted, it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones
become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting
the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the
greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great
minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by
each other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and
become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious
toys for a few rich and idle men.

However, I have not undertaken to talk to you of Architecture,
Sculpture, and Painting, in the narrower sense of those words,
since, most unhappily as I think, these master-arts, these arts more
specially of the intellect, are at the present day divorced from
decoration in its narrower sense. Our subject is that great body of
art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to
beautify the familiar matters of everyday life: a wide subject, a
great industry; both a great part of the history of the world, and a
most helpful instrument to the study of that history.

A very great industry indeed, comprising the crafts of house-
building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths' work, pottery and
glass-making, weaving, and many others: a body of art most
important to the public in general, but still more so to us
handicraftsmen; since there is scarce anything that they use, and
that we fashion, but it has always been thought to be unfinished
till it has had some touch or other of decoration about it. True it
is that in many or most cases we have got so used to this ornament,
that we look upon it as if it had grown of itself, and note it no
more than the mosses on the dry sticks with which we light our
fires. So much the worse! for there IS the decoration, or some
pretence of it, and it has, or ought to have, a use and a meaning.
For, and this is at the root of the whole matter, everything made by
man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly;
beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it
is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be
indifferent: we, for our parts, are busy or sluggish, eager or
unhappy, and our eyes are apt to get dulled to this eventfulness of
form in those things which we are always looking at. Now it is one
of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with
nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter:
for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns interwoven,
those strange forms invented, which men have so long delighted in:
forms and intricacies that do not necessarily imitate nature, but in
which the hand of the craftsman is guided to work in the way that
she does, till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as natural, nay
as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain
flint.

To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce USE, that
is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the
things they must perforce MAKE, that is the other use of it.

Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without
these arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour
mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.

As for that last use of these arts, the giving us pleasure in our
work, I scarcely know how to speak strongly enough of it; and yet if
I did not know the value of repeating a truth again and again, I
should have to excuse myself to you for saying any more about this,
when I remember how a great man now living has spoken of it: I mean
my friend Professor John Ruskin: if you read the chapter in the 2nd
vol. of his Stones of Venice entitled, 'On the Nature of Gothic, and
the Office of the Workman therein,' you will read at once the truest
and the most eloquent words that can possibly be said on the
subject. What I have to say upon it can scarcely be more than an
echo of his words, yet I repeat there is some use in reiterating a
truth, lest it be forgotten; so I will say this much further: we
all know what people have said about the curse of labour, and what
heavy and grievous nonsense are the more part of their words
thereupon; whereas indeed the real curses of craftsmen have been the
curse of stupidity, and the curse of injustice from within and from
without: no, I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think
it either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands
before one doing nothing--to live like a gentleman, as fools call
it.

Nevertheless there IS dull work to be done, and a weary business it
is setting men about such work, and seeing them through it, and I
would rather do the work twice over with my own hands than have such
a job: but now only let the arts which we are talking of beautify
our labour, and be widely spread, intelligent, well understood both
by the maker and the user, let them grow in one word POPULAR, and
there will be pretty much an end of dull work and its wearing
slavery; and no man will any longer have an excuse for talking about
the curse of labour, no man will any longer have an excuse for
evading the blessing of labour. I believe there is nothing that
will aid the world's progress so much as the attainment of this; I
protest there is nothing in the world that I desire so much as this,
wrapped up, as I am sure it is, with changes political and social,
that in one way or another we all desire.

Now if the objection be made, that these arts have been the
handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs
say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used, as many
other excellent things have been. But it is also true that, among
some nations, their most vigorous and freest times have been the
very blossoming times of art: while at the same time, I must allow
that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples,
who have seemed to have no hope of freedom: yet I do not think that
we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such
peoples, art, at least, was free; when it has not been, when it has
really been gripped by superstition, or by luxury, it has
straightway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget
that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such
buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history-
books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St. Sophia at
Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III., Justinian the Emperor.
Did they? or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have
left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

Now as these arts call people's attention and interest to the
matters of everyday life in the present, so also, and that I think
is no little matter, they call our attention at every step to that
history, of which, I said before, they are so great a part; for no
nation, no state of society, however rude, has been wholly without
them: nay, there are peoples not a few, of whom we know scarce
anything, save that they thought such and such forms beautiful. So
strong is the bond between history and decoration, that in the
practice of the latter we cannot, if we would, wholly shake off the
influence of past times over what we do at present. I do not think
it is too much to say that no man, however original he may be, can
sit down to-day and draw the ornament of a cloth, or the form of an
ordinary vessel or piece of furniture, that will be other than a
development or a degradation of forms used hundreds of years ago;
and these, too, very often, forms that once had a serious meaning,
though they are now become little more than a habit of the hand;
forms that were once perhaps the mysterious symbols of worships and
beliefs now little remembered or wholly forgotten. Those who have
diligently followed the delightful study of these arts are able as
if through windows to look upon the life of the past:- the very
first beginnings of thought among nations whom we cannot even name;
the terrible empires of the ancient East; the free vigour and glory
of Greece; the heavy weight, the firm grasp of Rome; the fall of her
temporal Empire which spread so wide about the world all that good
and evil which men can never forget, and never cease to feel; the
clashing of East and West, South and North, about her rich and
fruitful daughter Byzantium; the rise, the dissensions, and the
waning of Islam; the wanderings of Scandinavia; the Crusades; the
foundation of the States of modern Europe; the struggles of free
thought with ancient dying system--with all these events and their
meaning is the history of popular art interwoven; with all this, I
say, the careful student of decoration as an historical industry
must be familiar. When I think of this, and the usefulness of all
this knowledge, at a time when history has become so earnest a study
amongst us as to have given us, as it were, a new sense: at a time
when we so long to know the reality of all that has happened, and
are to be put off no longer with the dull records of the battles and
intrigues of kings and scoundrels,--I say when I think of all this,
I hardly know how to say that this interweaving of the Decorative
Arts with the history of the past is of less importance than their
dealings with the life of the present: for should not these
memories also be a part of our daily life?

And now let me recapitulate a little before I go further, before we
begin to look into the condition of the arts at the present day.
These arts, I have said, are part of a great system invented for the
expression of a man's delight in beauty: all peoples and times have
used them; they have been the joy of free nations, and the solace of
oppressed nations; religion has used and elevated them, has abused
and degraded them; they are connected with all history, and are
clear teachers of it; and, best of all, they are the sweeteners of
human labour, both to the handicraftsman, whose life is spent in
working in them, and to people in general who are influenced by the
sight of them at every turn of the day's work: they make our toil
happy, our rest fruitful.

And now if all I have said seems to you but mere open-mouthed praise
of these arts, I must say that it is not for nothing that what I
have hitherto put before you has taken that form.

It is because I must now ask you this question: All these good
things--will you have them? will you cast them from you?

Are you surprised at my question--you, most of whom, like myself,
are engaged in the actual practice of the arts that are, or ought to
be, popular?

In explanation, I must somewhat repeat what I have already said.
Time was when the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well
acknowledged by the world, when imagination and fancy mingled with
all things made by man; and in those days all handicraftsmen were
ARTISTS, as we should now call them. But the thought of man became
more intricate, more difficult to express; art grew a heavier thing
to deal with, and its labour was more divided among great men,
lesser men, and little men; till that art, which was once scarce
more than a rest of body and soul, as the hand cast the shuttle or
swung the hammer, became to some men so serious labour, that their
working lives have been one long tragedy of hope and fear, joy and
trouble. This was the growth of art: like all growth, it was good
and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into
decay; like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into
something new.

Into decay; for as the arts sundered into the greater and the
lesser, contempt on one side, carelessness on the other arose, both
begotten of ignorance of that PHILOSOPHY of the Decorative Arts, a
hint of which I have tried just now to put before you. The artist
came out from the handicraftsmen, and left them without hope of
elevation, while he himself was left without the help of
intelligent, industrious sympathy. Both have suffered; the artist
no less than the workman. It is with art as it fares with a company
of soldiers before a redoubt, when the captain runs forward full of
hope and energy, but looks not behind him to see if his men are
following, and they hang back, not knowing why they are brought
there to die. The captain's life is spent for nothing, and his men
are sullen prisoners in the redoubt of Unhappiness and Brutality.

I must in plain words say of the Decorative Arts, of all the arts,
that it is not so much that we are inferior in them to all who have
gone before us, but rather that they are in a state of anarchy and
disorganisation, which makes a sweeping change necessary and
certain.

So that again I ask my question, All that good fruit which the arts
should bear, will you have it? will you cast it from you? Shall
that sweeping change that must come, be the change of loss or of
gain?

We who believe in the continuous life of the world, surely we are
bound to hope that the change will bring us gain and not loss, and
to strive to bring that gain about.

Yet how the world may answer my question, who can say? A man in his
short life can see but a little way ahead, and even in mine
wonderful and unexpected things have come to pass. I must needs say
that therein lies my hope rather than in all I see going on round
about us. Without disputing that if the imaginative arts perish,
some new thing, at present unguessed of, MAY be put forward to
supply their loss in men's lives, I cannot feel happy in that
prospect, nor can I believe that mankind will endure such a loss for
ever: but in the meantime the present state of the arts and their
dealings with modern life and progress seem to me to point, in
appearance at least, to this immediate future; that the world, which
has for a long time busied itself about other matters than the arts,
and has carelessly let them sink lower and lower, till many not
uncultivated men, ignorant of what they once were, and hopeless of
what they might yet be, look upon them with mere contempt; that the
world, I say, thus busied and hurried, will one day wipe the slate,
and be clean rid in her impatience of the whole matter with all its
tangle and trouble.

And then--what then?

Even now amid the squalor of London it is hard to imagine what it
will be. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, with the crowd of
lesser arts that belong to them, these, together with Music and
Poetry, will be dead and forgotten, will no longer excite or amuse
people in the least: for, once more, we must not deceive ourselves;
the death of one art means the death of all; the only difference in
their fate will be that the luckiest will be eaten the last--the
luckiest, or the unluckiest: in all that has to do with beauty the
invention and ingenuity of man will have come to a dead stop; and
all the while Nature will go on with her eternal recurrence of
lovely changes--spring, summer, autumn, and winter; sunshine, rain,
and snow; storm and fair weather; dawn, noon, and sunset; day and
night--ever bearing witness against man that he has deliberately
chosen ugliness instead of beauty, and to live where he is strongest
amidst squalor or blank emptiness.

You see, sirs, we cannot quite imagine it; any more, perhaps, than
our forefathers of ancient London, living in the pretty, carefully
whitened houses, with the famous church and its huge spire rising
above them,--than they, passing about the fair gardens running down
to the broad river, could have imagined a whole county or more
covered over with hideous hovels, big, middle-sized, and little,
which should one day be called London.

Sirs, I say that this dead blank of the arts that I more than dread
is difficult even now to imagine; yet I fear that I must say that if
it does not come about, it will be owing to some turn of events
which we cannot at present foresee: but I hold that if it does
happen, it will only last for a time, that it will be but a burning
up of the gathered weeds, so that the field may bear more
abundantly. I hold that men would wake up after a while, and look
round and find the dulness unbearable, and begin once more
inventing, imitating, and imagining, as in earlier days.

That faith comforts me, and I can say calmly if the blank space must
happen, it must, and amidst its darkness the new seed must sprout.
So it has been before: first comes birth, and hope scarcely
conscious of itself; then the flower and fruit of mastery, with hope
more than conscious enough, passing into insolence, as decay follows
ripeness; and then--the new birth again.

Meantime it is the plain duty of all who look seriously on the arts
to do their best to save the world from what at the best will be a
loss, the result of ignorance and unwisdom; to prevent, in fact,
that most discouraging of all changes, the supplying the place of an
extinct brutality by a new one; nay, even if those who really care
for the arts are so weak and few that they can do nothing else, it
may be their business to keep alive some tradition, some memory of
the past, so that the new life when it comes may not waste itself
more than enough in fashioning wholly new forms for its new spirit.

To what side then shall those turn for help, who really understand
the gain of a great art in the world, and the loss of peace and good
life that must follow from the lack of it? I think that they must
begin by acknowledging that the ancient art, the art of unconscious
intelligence, as one should call it, which began without a date, at
least so long ago as those strange and masterly scratchings on
mammoth-bones and the like found but the other day in the drift--
that this art of unconscious intelligence is all but dead; that what
little of it is left lingers among half-civilised nations, and is
growing coarser, feebler, less intelligent year by year; nay, it is
mostly at the mercy of some commercial accident, such as the arrival
of a few shiploads of European dye-stuffs or a few dozen orders from
European merchants: this they must recognise, and must hope to see
in time its place filled by a new art of conscious intelligence, the
birth of wiser, simpler, freer ways of life than the world leads
now, than the world has ever led.

I said, TO SEE this in time; I do not mean to say that our own eyes
will look upon it: it may be so far off, as indeed it seems to
some, that many would scarcely think it worth while thinking of:
but there are some of us who cannot turn our faces to the wall, or
sit deedless because our hope seems somewhat dim; and, indeed, I
think that while the signs of the last decay of the old art with all
the evils that must follow in its train are only too obvious about
us, so on the other hand there are not wanting signs of the new dawn
beyond that possible night of the arts, of which I have before
spoken; this sign chiefly, that there are some few at least who are
heartily discontented with things as they are, and crave for
something better, or at least some promise of it--this best of
signs: for I suppose that if some half-dozen men at any time
earnestly set their hearts on something coming about which is not
discordant with nature, it will come to pass one day or other;
because it is not by accident that an idea comes into the heads of a
few; rather they are pushed on, and forced to speak or act by
something stirring in the heart of the world which would otherwise
be left without expression.

By what means then shall those work who long for reform in the arts,
and who shall they seek to kindle into eager desire for possession
of beauty, and better still, for the development of the faculty that
creates beauty?

People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed
and flourish, you must make it the fashion: a phrase which I
confess annoys me; for they mean by it that I should spend one day
over my work to two days in trying to convince rich, and supposed
influential people, that they care very much for what they really do
not care in the least, so that it may happen according to the
proverb: Bell-wether took the leap, and we all went over. Well,
such advisers are right if they are content with the thing lasting
but a little while; say till you can make a little money--if you
don't get pinched by the door shutting too quickly: otherwise they
are wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many strings to
their bow, and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that
fails, for it to be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not
their fault, they cannot help it, but they have no chance of
spending time enough over the arts to know anything practical of
them, and they must of necessity be in the hands of those who spend
their time in pushing fashion this way and that for their own
advantage.

Sirs, there is no help to be got out of these latter, or those who
let themselves be led by them: the only real help for the
decorative arts must come from those who work in them; nor must they
be led, they must lead.

You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you
must be all artists, and good artists too, before the public at
large can take real interest in such things; and when you have
become so, I promise you that you shall lead the fashion; fashion
shall follow your hands obediently enough.

That is the only way in which we can get a supply of intelligent
popular art: a few artists of the kind so-called now, what can they
do working in the teeth of difficulties thrown in their way by what
is called Commerce, but which should be called greed of money?
working helplessly among the crowd of those who are ridiculously
called manufacturers, i.e. handicraftsmen, though the more part of
them never did a stroke of hand-work in their lives, and are nothing
better than capitalists and salesmen. What can these grains of sand
do, I say, amidst the enormous mass of work turned out every year
which professes in some way to be decorative art, but the decoration
of which no one heeds except the salesmen who have to do with it,
and are hard put to it to supply the cravings of the public for
something new, not for something pretty?

The remedy, I repeat, is plain if it can be applied; the
handicraftsman, left behind by the artist when the arts sundered,
must come up with him, must work side by side with him: apart from
the difference between a great master and a scholar, apart from the
differences of the natural bent of men's minds, which would make one
man an imitative, and another an architectural or decorative artist,
there should be no difference between those employed on strictly
ornamental work; and the body of artists dealing with this should
quicken with their art all makers of things into artists also, in
proportion to the necessities and uses of the things they would
make.

I know what stupendous difficulties, social and economical, there
are in the way of this; yet I think that they seem to be greater
than they are: and of one thing I am sure, that no real living
decorative art is possible if this is impossible.

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