Hopes and Fears for Art | Page 7

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