Hopes and Fears for Art | Page 5

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