In my lecture tonight I do not wish to give you any abstract definition of beauty; you can get along very well without philosophy if you surround yourselves with beautiful things; but I wish to tell you of what we have done and are doing in England to search out those men and women who have knowledge and power of design, of the schools of art provided for them, and the noble use we are making of art in the improvement of the handicraft of our country. I believe that every city produces every year a certain amount of artistic knowledge and artistic intellect, and it is our purpose to develop that intellect and use it for the creation of beautiful things.
Few people will deny that they are doing injury to themselves and their children by living outside the beauty of life, which we call art, for art is no mere accident of existence which men may take or leave, but a very necessity of human life, if we are to live as nature intended us to live, that is, unless we are content to be something less than men.
Now, one of the first questions you will ask me is, ‘what art should we devote ourselves to in this country?’ It seems to me that what you want most here is not that higher order of imaginative art of the poet and the painter, because they will take care of themselves, nothing will make or mar them, but there is an art that you can make or mar, and that is decorative art, the art that will hallow the vessels of everyday use, exerting its influence in the simplest and humblest of homes. If you develop art culture by beautifying the things around you, you may be certain that other arts will follow in the course of time. The art I speak of will be a democratic art made by the hands of the people and for the benefit of the people, for the real basis of all art is to be found in the application of the beautiful in things common to all and in the cultivation and development of this among the artisans of the day.
And what is the meaning of the term ‘decorative art?’ In the first place, it means the value the workman places on his work, it is the pleasure that he must take in making a beautiful thing. To progress in the decorative arts, to make chaste and elegant patterns of carpet or wall paper, even the little wreath of leaf or vine traced around the margin of cups we drink out of, requires more than mere machine work: it requires delicacy of hand, cultivated taste, and nobility of character. For the mark of all good art is not that the thing is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the tender, appealing vitality of the workman’s heart and head.
No one takes any pleasure in doing bad or fraudulent work; the craving for the artistic finds a place in every heart, and the fair decorations with which we love to surround ourselves, and which we call art, bear a deeper, holier meaning that the mere money value of the workmanship, a meaning that places them far above the usual price, since in them we recognize those heart-throbs of joy, and keen thrills of intellectual pleasure known only to the maker of beautiful things. And so wherever good work and good decoration is found, it is a certain sign that the workman has laboured not only with his hands, but with his heart and his head also.
But one cannot get good work done unless the handicraftsman is furnished with rational and beautiful designs; if you have commonplace design, you must have commonplace work, and if you have commonplace work, you must have commonplace workmen; but really good design will produce thoroughly good workmen whose work is beautiful at the moment and for all time. Give the workman noble designs, dignify and ennoble his work, and through this, his life. I suppose that the poet will sing or the artist will paint regardless whether the world praises or blames; he has his own world and is independent of his fellow men, but the ordinary handicraftsman is almost entirely dependent upon your pleasure and opinion and upon the influences which surround him for his knowledge of form and colour. And so it is of the utmost importance that he be supplied with the noble productions of original minds so that he may acquire that artistic temperament without which there is no creation of art, there is no understanding of art, there is not even an understanding of life.
How necessary, then, when the artist and the poet have supplied the handicraftsman with beautiful designs, thoughts, and ideas, that in working them out he should be honoured with a loving encouragement and satisfied with fair surroundings. For the great difficulty that stands in the way of your artistic development is not a lack of interest in art, nor a lack of love for art, but that you do not honour the handicraftsman sufficiently, and do not recognize him as you should; all art must begin with the handicraftsman, and you must reinstate him into his rightful position. Until you do art will be confined to the few, for if art is not a luxury for the rich and idle, then it should be made beautiful for us to appear in the beautification of our houses. Nor will you honour the handicraftsman sufficiently until you can see that there is no nobler profession for your son to learn than the creation of the beautiful; we must be prepared to give to these crafts the best of our young men and young women, and when you have noble designs, you will attract these men and women of real refinement and knowledge to work for you.
You ask me to name the most practical advance in art in the last five years in England? It is this: of the young men with me at Oxford, men of position, taste, and high mental culture, one is now designing furniture, a second is working metal, a third is trying to revive the lost art of tapestry-making, and so on. Indeed, such progress has been made in England during the last five years in all branches of the decorative arts that I expect to see her take her place once again as the foremost of all nations in the cultivation and development of art and the encouragement of those who love to perpetuate in their handiwork the beauties about them.
But we are told that this is a practical age, and in the rush of business men have no time to think of delicate ornaments, that in the rush to catch a train a man cannot stop to examine the pattern of the carpet he is stepping over. We are told that if articles in everyday use are only honestly made, we are satisfied if they are not ornamental.
Indeed, honesty of work is essential to progress in a practical age, yet is this an honest age? This century has been marked by more dishonest workmanship and has produced more rubbish than any that preceded it. Every householder who furnishes a new residence discovers this in his carpets, which are badly designed, badly woven and dyed with cheap aniline dyes, and which become faded and shabby with one summer’s sun; furniture is machine-made, and much of it is not even honestly joined, but simply glued, and becomes split and twisted in less than five years’ time. The wonder is that we do not live out-of-doors. We must not be deceived by the attempt to draw the fine line of distinction between what is beautiful and what is useful. Utility is always on the side of the beautifully decorated article and the skill of the workman.
There is one article of furniture which has confronted me wherever I have gone on this continent, and that for absolutely horrid ugliness surpasses anything I have seen—the cast-iron American stove. If it had been left in its natural ugliness it might be endured as a necessary nuisance, like a dull relation or a rainy day, but manufacturers persist in decorating it with wreaths of black-leaded and grimy roses at the base and surmounting it with a dismal funereal urn—or, where they are more extravagant than usual, with two.
Thus it is that the dishonesty of the age has coined the most perfectly dreadful word at present forming our language—‘second-hand’—the meaning of which is that the moment you begin to use anything it begins to decrease in value until after six months it is worth nothing. I hope that the word will fall into such complete disuse that when philologists in the future try to discover what it means they shall not be able.
For it must always be remembered that what is well and carefully made by an honest workman after a rational design increases in beauty and value as the years go on, like the walls of Gothic cathedrals, which contain old marbles still as beautiful as when the chisels of the old workmen first rang upon them, carved woods as lovely and durable as when the plane first smoothed their sides, and they are now more firmly set in the earth and more beautiful than when first built. And the old furniture brought over from Europe or made by the Pilgrims two hundred years ago, and which I saw in New England, is just as strong and as beautiful today as it was on the day it came from the hands of its artificers. Simple of design, yet honestly made, it does not depreciate in value as does our modern furniture, and you have the satisfaction of knowing that your grandparents used that furniture before you, and your grandchildren will use it after you are gone. So always will good work thrive, and so should it. If this term ‘second-hand’ is to be understood as it now is, then have your handicrafts fallen indeed.
Why, then, this dishonesty and hypocrisy in our workmanship, this exceeding hollowness of modern handicraft, of articles of furniture which tell a lie every moment of their existence, of so-called works of art that are unpunished crimes? It is because they are made by artisans who no longer love their work. The old furniture, so massive, strong and honest, was made by workmen who were familiar with the principles of beautiful design in an age when manual labour was considered noble and honourable.
Your art will not improve until you seek out your workman and give him as far as possible the right surroundings; for remember that the real test and virtue of a workman is not his earnestness, nor his industry even, but his power of design only; and that design is no offspring of idle fancy; it is the result of accumulative observation and delightful habit. All the teaching in the world is of no avail in art unless you surround your workman with happy influences and with delightful things; it is impossible for him to have right ideas about colour unless he sees the lovely colours of nature unspoiled about him, impossible for him to supply beautiful incident and action in his work unless he sees beautiful incident and action in the world about him, for to cultivate sympathy, you must be among living things and thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among beautiful things and looking at them. And so your houses and streets should be living schools of art where your workman may see beautiful forms as he goes to his work in the morning and returns to his home at eventide.
Go back to the eras of the highest decorative art and you will find it a time when the workman had beautiful surroundings; for the best periods of the decorative arts have been the ages of costume, when men and women wore noble attire and walked in beauty that could pass at once into marble and stone to be the admiration of all succeeding ages.
Think of what was the scene which presented itself in his afternoon walk to a designer of the Gothic school of Pisa: Nino Pisano or any of his men: on each side of a bright river saw rise a line of brighter palaces, arched and pillared and inlaid with deep red porphyry and with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light; the purple and silver and scarlet fringes flowing over the strong limbs and clashing mail like sea waves over rocks at sunset; opening each side of the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters, long successions of white pillars among reeds of vine, leaping of fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange; and still along the garden paths, and under and through the crimson of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women that Italy ever saw: fairest, purest, and thoughtfullest, trained in all high knowledge as in all courteous art, in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love, able alike to cheer, to enchant, or save the souls of men.
Above all this scenery of perfect human life rose dome and bell-tower burning with white alabaster and gold; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of mighty hills, hoary with olive; far in the north above a purple sea of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up their steadfast flames of marble summits into amber sky; and over all these, ever present, near or far, seen through the leaves of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno’s stream, or set with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and burning cheek of lady and knight, that untroubled and sacred heaven in which every cloud that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its evening and morning streamed from the throne of God.
What think you of that for a school of design? And then contrast that with the depressing monotonous appearance of any modern commercial city—the sombre dress of men and women, the meaningless and barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that desecrate not merely your eye and ear, but every rock and river and hill that I have seen yet in America. I do not say anything against commercial people, for it is not commerce that destroys art; Genoa was built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice, loveliest of them all, by her noble and honest merchants. I do not regard the commercial spirit of the present age as being opposed to the development of art, and I look to our merchants to support the changes we seek to make.
Look at the ignoble character of modern dress. I do not know a greater heroism than that which opposes the conventionalities of dress; the sombre dress of the age is robbing life of its beauty and is ruinous to art. Not a deed of heroism done on either continent in this century is fitly portrayed on canvas, and yet the history of a country should live on canvas and in marble as well as in dreary volumes; the history of Italy, of Holland, and, for a time, that of our own England, was told in speaking marble and living paintings.
Healthy art is that which realizes that beauty of the age in which we live, while art is unhealthy that is obliged to go back to old romantic ages for its themes. Well, the sombre and ignoble character of dress at present in fashion has brought art into a very unhealthy state by driving artists back to past ages for their subjects, although there is no more romantic age than our own. Instead of this servile imitation of romantic ages, we should strive to make our own age a romantic age, and art should reproduce for us the faces and forms we love and revere. But modern dress prevents the production of a picture or a statue in which may be embodied the element of that beauty and true nobility of form and feature pleasing to the eyes of those qualified to appreciate a work of art; it has almost annihilated sculpture, which has become all but extinct in England, and in looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one could almost wish that we had killed the noble art completely: to see the statues of our departed statesmen in marble frock-coats and bronze, double-breasted waistcoats adds a new horror to death.
It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion; the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that, in great cathedrals, such as that of Chartres, or in the decorations of any building in Europe erected between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, is to be seen wrought in stone the whole history of the olden time, the representation of what the people most loved and took pleasure in. We look at the capitals of the pillars and the tracery of the arches and see the picture of the century before us, joining hands with it across the waste of years; you have simply to use your eyes and you can read more in an hour than you can in a week out of a book. Contrast these with our public buildings: a workman is given a design stolen from a Greek temple and does it because he is paid for doing it—the worst reason for doing anything; no modern stonecutter could leave the stamp of this age upon his work as the ancient workmen did.
The problem is how to restore to the modern workman these right conditions, without which it is impossible to work freely or to work well. If we want to do real service to art we must alter the external forms of dress; the dress of the future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound with joyous colour. True art in dress will make our attire an instructor, an educator.
Give then, as I said, to your American workmen of today the bright and noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and simple architecture for your city, 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 from a beautiful external world.
But this is not enough. You must give your workman a school of art wherein he can learn rational design. There are many schools of art in America, but they should place themselves in a more immediate relation with trade, commerce, and manufacture and devote more time than they do now to making the common things of life beautiful. Then art in America would not lag behind the old world, but be quickened into loftier powers.
And you must attach to each school a museum—I do not mean the dreadful modern museum where you find a stuffed and very dusty giraffe face to face with a case or two of fossils—but where the workman can see clay, marble, wood, or glass specimens of the best decorative art to be found in Europe and Asia so that he may come to know what is simple and true and beautiful.
Such a place is the South Kensington Museum in London, whereon we build greater hopes for the future than on any other one thing, for it is a rational museum, a museum of decorative art. There I go every Saturday night, when the Museum is opened later than usual, to see the workmen whom we so much want to reach, and whom it is often so difficult to reach, the weaver, the glass-blower, the woodcarver, the embroiderer, and others with their notebooks open, and I feel certain that the week after such a visit their work is better for their observance. And it is here that the man of refinement and culture comes face to face with the workman who ministers to his joy; he comes to know more of the nobility of the workman, and the workman, feeling the appreciation, goes away with a heightened sense of the nobility of his calling.
Again, your artists must decorate what is more simple and useful. In your art schools I found no attempt to decorate such things as the common vessels for water. There is no excuse for the ugly water jugs or pitchers of today, for you might readily have more delicate and beautiful forms for them. A museum could be filled with the different kinds used in hot countries: in the olden times in Eastern countries when water was precious and when the daughters of men in the highest rank could go to the well to draw water, there was beauty and variety of form and design in nothing so much as in common water vessels. Yet we continue to submit to the depressing jugs with the handle all on one side.
There is one thing much worse than no art, and that is bad art. A wrong principle is often employed, and an inappropriateness of design in many of the schools of decorative art, arising from a want of instruction in the difference between imaginative and decorative art. I have seen young ladies painting moonlights upon dinner plates and sunsets on soup plates. I don’t think it adds anything to the pleasure of canvas-back duck to take it out of such glories. Such scenes should be kept to be hung on the walls, for we should leave to the painter the art of giving undying beauty to the beauty that dies away and fades; besides, we do not want a soup plate whose bottom seems to vanish into the misty hollow of a distant hill; one neither feels safe nor comfortable under such conditions.
You must encourage and support art in your own city instead of sending to New York or to other places, paying heavily for such things by way of freight; you should make by your own workmen beautiful art for the enjoyment of your citizens: weave your own carpets, design your own furniture, make your own pottery and other things from approved designs instead of submitting to be charged heavily for goods which do not suit you and which do not really represent your feeling and good taste, for you have here the primary elements of a great artistic movement.
Believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people imagine: for the noblest art one requires a clear, healthy atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and from factory chimney. You must have a strong and healthy physique among your men and women; sickly or idle or melancholy people don’t do much in art, believe me; and lastly you require a sense of individualism about each man and woman, because that, the very keynote of life, is also the essence of art—a desire on the part of man to express the noblest side of his nature in the noblest way, to show the world how many things he can reverence, love and understand.
For, the motives of art lie about you in all directions as they were around about the ancients. If the modern sculptor were to ask me where he should go for a model, I would tell him that he might, if he would, find in everyday life subjects in the nobility of labour entirely worthy of his attention—the depicting of men in their daily work; there is not a worker in mine or ditch, in the shop or at the furnace, who is not at some moment of his work in graceful attitude. Such scenes of beauty lie at the scientific basis of aesthetics, which is not mere dainty ornament and luxury, but the expression of strength, utility, and health. Who ever saw an ungraceful smith at his anvil or an ungraceful carpenter at his bench? The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever. Work is man’s great prerogative and the real essential of art; it is only the loafer and the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the artist as he is to himself.
Or 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 curb, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from the boat, or bending to the oar, and to carve them. The Greek sculptor asked for no higher subject for art than could be found on the running ground or in the gymnasium, and I recommend that plaster casts of the best Greek statuary be placed in all gymnasiums as models to correct that foolish impression that mental culture and athletics are always divorced.
There is and has been in Europe one school of painters and sculptors whose favourite subjects in their work are kings and queens, and another whose talent and genius are employed in the reproduction of faces and forms on canvas and in marble of saints and kindred subjects in reality and ideality. Now, the Greeks sculptured gods and goddesses because they loved them, and the Middle Ages, saints and kings because they believed in them. But the saint is now hardly prominent enough a feature to become a motive for high art, and the day of kings and queens is gone; and so art should now sculpture the men who cover the world with a network of iron and the sea with ships. Thus a universal deference to the dignity of the kingdom of industry would do much to reconcile the workman with his lot, and end the strife and bridge the now-widening chasm between capital and labour.
And so, as I said, find your subjects in everyday life: your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills and mountains; these are what your art should represent to you, for every nation can represent with prudence or with success only those things in which it delights, what you have with you and before you daily, dearest to your sight and to your heart, by the magic of your hand or the music of your lips you can gloriously express to others. All these commend themselves to the thoughtful student and artist.
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 materials to work in. The noble Titan forests out of which you build your houses should be an incentive to woodcarving, because the beautiful in art can be built only of wood well-carved. I wish to say little about your wooden houses, which are painted in the most oppressive colours I have ever seen, but it does seem to me that the adoption of the prevailing colour, white, with which you cover them, making the white walls appear as a sheet of white flame in the noonday sun, is a gross mistake when the barrenness of the houses is overcome so easily by woodcarving, which is the simplest of the decorative arts and the one in which the artist is least likely to go astray. In Switzerland, the little barefooted shepherd boy that blows a horn all day on the hills after some stray goats will return home and there carve in wood over his father’s door the figures of the birds and flowers he has seen, and beautifies the house with his art. What a Swiss boy can do well, an American boy can do twice as well, if he is properly taught to do it.
There is nothing to my mind more coarse in conception, nothing more vulgar in execution, than modern jewellery. How easy for you to change all that, and to produce goldsmith’s work that would be a joy to all of us. In Europe we have not the quantity of gold and of silver that lies around you in your mountain hollows or strewn along your river beds, and our jewellers have not the opportunities of those of America as artificers of these metals; yet when I was in Leadville, the richest city for silver in the world, and heard of the most incredible quantity of silver taken from its mountains, I thought how sad it was that the silver should be made into flat, ugly dollars, useful perhaps to the artist—for dollars are very good in their way—but which should not be the end and aim of life. There should be some better record of it left in your history than the merchant’s panic and the ruined home. We discover, 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 are all that 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 Michelangelo, who called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.
Be sure of one thing: we shall get no good work done unless we come face to face with the designer and dispense with all middlemen. We should not be content to have the salesman stand between us, who knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it. We shall know the workmen and they us, and they will understand the requirements of our state. When this is accomplished we shall then understand the nobility of all rational workmanship, and in this way we shall surround ourselves with beautiful things; for the good we get from art is not what we derive directly, but what improvement is made in us by being accustomed to the sight of all comely and gracious things.
And art will do more than make our lives joyous and beautiful; it will become part of the new history of the world and a part of the brotherhood of man; for art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries might, if it could not overshadow the world with the silvery wings of peace, at least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or minister as they do in Europe, for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.
Thinking this, what place can I ascribe to art in our education? Consider how susceptible children are to the influence of beauty, for they are easily impressed and are pretty much what their surroundings make them. How can you expect them, then, to tell the truth if everything about them is telling lies, like the paper in the hall declaring itself marble? Why, I have seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime; you should not have such incentives to sin lying about your drawing-rooms.
And hence the enormous importance given to all the decorative arts in our English renaissance; we want children to grow up in England in the simple atmosphere of all fair things so that they will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly, long before they know the reason why. If you go into a house where everything is coarse and you find the common cups chipped and the saucers cracked, it will often be because the children have an utter contempt for them, but if everything is dainty and delicate, you teach them practically what beauty is, and gentleness and refinement of manner are unconsciously acquired.
But you will say, these things get broken. When I was in San Francisco, I used to visit the Chinese theatres for their rich dresses, and the Chinese restaurants on account of the beautiful tea they made there. I saw rough Chinese navvies, who did work that the ordinary Californian rightly might be disgusted with and refuse to do, sitting there drinking their tea out of tiny porcelain cups, which might be mistaken for the petals of a white rose, and handling them with care, fully appreciating the influence of their beauty; whereas in all the grand hotels of the land, where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my chocolate in the morning and my coffee in the evening in common delft cups about an inch-and-a-half thick. I think I have deserved something nicer. If these men could use cups with that tenderness, your children will learn by the influence of beauty and example to act in a like manner. The great need in America is for good decoration; art is not given to the people by costly foreign paintings in private galleries; people can learn more by a well-shaped vessel for ordinary use.
Most of you will agree that there is an education independent of books that is of far greater service in life. The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who look upon human beings as obstructions, and they have tried to educate boys’ minds before they had any. Most of us remember the dreary hours we have spent at our books, and then what we have learned in the woods by watching the work of the artisan in his shop as we passed the door.
In the false education of our present system, minds too young to grapple with the subjects in the right sense are burdened with those bloody slaughters and barbarous brawls of the French and English wars and that calendar of infamy, European history. How much better would it be in these early years to teach children in the useful branches of art, to use their hands in the rational service of mankind. Bring a boy up in the atmosphere of art, give him a mind before trying to teach him, develop his soul before trying to save it.
In every school I would have a workshop, and I would have an hour a day set apart when boys could learn something practically of art: turning a potter’s wheel, beating a leaf of gold, carving wood, working metal, or other such things as could give him an insight into the various decorative arts. This would be a golden hour to the children, and they would enjoy that hour most, learn more of the lessons of life and of the morality of art than in years of book study. And you would soon raise up a race of handicraftsmen who would transform the face of your country.
It is a great mistake of the age not to honour working men and their pursuits as they should be honoured. These men have been educated to use their hands and are useful members of society, a class ever productive of good to all, while in contrast may be found the great army of useless idlers whose costly education tends only to cultivate their memories for a time and is now, in the broad sea of practical life, nearly, if not quite completely, useless to them. For instance, I have seen an example of the uselessness of modern education among well-educated young men in Colorado, among others that of Eton students, men of fine physique and high mental cultivation, but whose knowledge of the names of all the kings of the Saxon Heptarchy, and all the incidents of the second Punic War, was of no use to them in Leadville and Denver.
How much better it would have been if those young men had been taught to use their hands, to make furniture and other things useful to those miners. The best people of all classes should be given to the pursuits of artistic industry, and everyone should be taught to use his hands; the human hand is the most beautiful and delicate piece of mechanism in the world, although many people seem to have no other use for their hands than to squeeze them into gloves that are far too small for them.
The most practical school of morals in the world, the best educator, is true art: it never lies, never misleads, and never corrupts, for all good art, all high art, is founded on honesty, sincerity, and truth. Under its influence children learn to abhor the liar and cheat in art—the man who paints wood to represent marble, or iron to look like stone—and to him retribution comes immediately, and he never succeeds. And if you teach a boy art, the beauty of form and colour will find its way into his heart, and he will love nature more; for there is no better way to learn to love nature than to understand art—it dignifies every flower of the field. He will have more pleasure and joy in nature when he sees how no flower by the wayside is too lowly, no little blade of grass too common, but some great designer has seen it and loved it and made noble use of it in decoration.
And art culture will do more to train children to be kind to animals and all living things than all our harrowing moral tales, for when he sees how lovely the little leaping squirrel is on the beaten brass or the bird arrested in flight on carven marble, he will not throw the customary stone. The boy will learn too to wonder and worship at God’s works more, for all art is perfect praise of God, the duplication of His handiwork. He will look on art and on nature as the craftsman looks on the carving round the arch of a Gothic cathedral, with all its marvels of the animal and vegetable world being a Te Deum in God’s honour, quite as beautiful and far more lasting than that chanted Te Deum sung within its sacred walls, which dies in music at evensong; for art is the one thing that death cannot harm.
The victories of art can give more than heroes yield or the sword demands, for what we want is something spiritual added to life. And if you wish for art you must revolt against the luxury of riches and the tyranny of materialism, for you may lay up treasures by your railways, or open your ports to the galleys of the world, but you will find the independence of art is the perfect expression of freedom. The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and add lustre to pride. Let it be for you to create an art that is made with the hands of the people, for the joy of the people, too, an art that will be an expression of your delight in life. There is nothing in common life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your touch; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.
And when artisans are among you, don’t dishonour them or leave them in necessity; I hardly think people know how much a word of sympathy means to young artists, who often are sustained and inspired by a word; search out your young artists, cheer them in their race through the asphodel meadows of youth, and bring once more into their faces the proud bright scarlet with your encouragement; and in return there will be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or briar that does not live forever in carven arch or window of marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment. For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not alone the chosen music of liberty only; other messages are there in the wonder of windswept height and the majesty of silent deep, messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty.