Oscar Wilde
Delivered in part while on a lecture tour in the United States, 1882.
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 presence 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: for the true colours of architecture
are those of natural stone, and I would fain see them taken advantage of to the full.
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 worn 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, 'to 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.
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 much good. But that swift legion of fiery-footed engines
that bore to the burning ruins of Chicago the loving help and
generous treasure of the world was as noble and as beautiful as any
golden troop of angels that ever fed the hungry and clothed the naked
in the antique times. As beautiful, yes; all machinery may be
beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We
cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of
strength and the line of beauty being one.
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 rock and river that I have seen yet
in America - all this is not enough. A school of design we must have
too in each city. It should be a stately and noble building, full of
the best examples of the best art of the world. Furthermore, do not
put your designers in a barren whitewashed room and bid them work in
that depressing and colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the
American schools of design, but give them beautiful surroundings.
Because you want to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste
in your workman, he must have always by him and before him specimens
of the best decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him:
'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 true
designer is not he who makes the design and then colours it, but he
who designs in colour, creates in colour, thinks in colour too. Show
him how the most gorgeous stained-glass windows of Europe are filled
with white glass, and the most gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned
colours--the primary colours in both places being set in the white
glass, and the tone colours line brilliant jewels set in dusky gold.
And then as regards design, show him how the real designer will take
first any given limited space, little disk of silver, it may be, like
a Greek coin, or wide expanse of fretted ceiling or lordly wall as
Tintoret chose at Venice (it does not matter which), and to this
limited space--the first condition of decoration being the limitation
of the size of the material used-- he will give the effect of its
being filled with beautiful decoration, filled with it as a golden
cup will be filled with wine, so complete that you should not be able
to take away anything from it or add anything to it. For from a good
piece of design you can take away nothing, nor can you add anything
to it, each little bit of design being as absolutely necessary and as
vitally important to the whole effect as a note or chord of music is
for a sonata of Beethoven.
But I said the effect of its being so filled. because this, again,
is of the essence of good design. With a simple spray of leaves and a
bird in flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression that he
has completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or lacquer
cabinet at which he is working, merely because he knows the exact
spot in which to place them. All good design depends on the texture
of the utensil used and the use you wish to put it to. One of the
first things I saw in an American school of design was a young lady
painting a romantic moonlight landscape on a large round dish, and
another young lady covering a set of dinner plates with a series of
sunsets of the most remarkable colours. Let your ladies paint
moonlight landscapes and sunsets, but do not let them paint them on
dinner plates or dishes. Let them take canvas or paper for such work,
but not clay or china. They are merely painting the wrong subjects on
the wrong material, that is all. They have not been taught that every
material and texture has certain qualities of its own. The design
suitable for one is quite wrong for the other, just as the design
which you should work on a flat table-cover ought to be quite
different from the design you would work on a curtain, for the one
will always be straight, the other broken into folds; and the use too
one puts the object to should guide one in the choice of design. One
does not want to eat one's terrapins off a romantic moonlight nor
one's clams off a harrowing sunset. Glory of sun and moon, let them
be wrought for us by our landscape artist and be on the walls of the
rooms we sit in to remind us of the undying beauty of the sunsets
that fade and die, but do not let us eat our soup off them and send
them down to the kitchen twice a day to be washed and scrubbed by the
handmaid.
All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten.
Your school of design here will teach your girls and your boys, your
handi-craftsmen 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 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 strong, sane, healthy physique among
your men and women. Sickly or idle or melancholy people do not do
much in art. And lastly, you require a sense of individualism about
each man and woman, for this is the essence of art a desire on the
part of man to express himself in the noblest way possible. And this
is the reason that the grandest art of the world always came from a
republic: Athens, Venice, and Florence--there were no kings there and
so their art was as noble and simple as sincere. But if you want to
know what kind of art the folly of kings will impose on a country
look at the decorative art of France under the great monarque,
under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy gilt furniture writhing under a
sense of its own horror and ugliness, with a nymph smirking at every
angle and a dragon mouthing on every claw. Unreal and monstrous art
this, and fit only for such periwigged pomposities as the nobility of
France at that time, but not at all fit for you or me. We do not want
the rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create more
beautiful things; for ever man is poor who cannot create. Nor shall
the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by a slave
and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to adorn or to
conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be the noble and
beautiful expression of a people's noble and beautiful life. Art
shall be again the most glorious of all the chords through which the
spirit of a great nation finds its noblest utterance.
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, 'Very 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 from the boat or bending
to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was weary of cities I
would ask him to come to your fields and meadows to watch the reaper
with his sickle and the cattle-driver with lifted lasso. For if a man
cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such simple daily
things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man leaning with
his scythe, he will not find them anywhere at all. Gods and goddesses
the Greek carved because he loved them; saint and king the Goth
because he believed in them. But you, you do not care much for Greek
gods and goddesses, and you are perfectly and entirely right; and you
do not think much of kings either, and you are quite right. But what
you do love are your own men and women, your own flowers and fields,
your own hills and mountains, and these are what your art should
represent to you.
Now as to the scope and nature of these Decorative 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; but a great part of the history of the world, and a most instrument to the study of
that history.
A very great industry indeed, comprising the trades 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 files. 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, that 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 we are talking of ornament 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 an 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. 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, 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 every-day 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 vigor 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 that 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 dissension, 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 connection 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 more 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 a labour, that their lives
have been one long tragedy of hope and fear, their 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
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 very slight outline 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 merely that
we are inferior in them to all who have gone before us, but also that they are in a state of
anarchy and disorganization, that 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.
How the world may answer my question, who can say? A man in his sort 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 a point in appearance 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 mater with all its tangle, 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 country or more covered over with hideous hovels, big, middle-sized, and
little, which should one day be called London.
Sirs, I say 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: 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, 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 whom 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 cared very much for what they 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 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.
It is not impossible, on the contrary it is certain to come about, if you are at heart desirous
to quicken the arts; if the world will, for the sake of beauty and decency, sacrifice some of
the things it is so busy over (many of which I think are not very worthy of its trouble) art
will begin to grow again; as for those difficulties above mentioned, some of them I know will in
any case melt away before the steady change of the relative conditions of men; the rest, reason
and resolute attention to the laws of nature, which are also the laws of art, will dispose of
little by little: once more the way will not be far to seek, if the will be with us.
Yet, granted the will, and though the way lies ready to us, we must not be discouraged if the
journey seem barren enough at first, nay, not even if things seem to grow worse for a while:
for it is natural enough that the very evil which has forced on the beginning of reform should
look uglier while, on the one hand, life and wisdom are building up the new, and on the other,
folly and deadness are hugging the old to them.
In this, as in all other matters, lapse of time will be needed before things seem to straighten,
and the courage and patience that does not despise small things lying ready to be done; and care
and watchfulness, lest we begin to build the wall ere the footings are well in, and always
through all things much humility that is not easily cast down by failure, that seeks to be
taught, and is ready to learn.
For your teachers, they must be Nature and History: as for the first that you must learn of it
is so obvious that I need not dwell upon that now: hereafter, when I have to speak more of matters
of detail, I may have to speak of the manner in which you must learn of Nature. As to the second,
I do not think that any man but one of the highest genius could do anything in these days without
much study of ancient art, and even he would be much hindered if he lacked it. If you think that
this contradicts what I said about the death of that ancient art, and the necessity I implied
for an art that should be characteristic of the present day, I can only say that, in these times
of plenteous knowledge and meagre performance, if we do not study the ancient work directly and
learn to understand it, we shall find ourselves influenced by the feeble work all round us, and
shall be copying the better work through the copyists and without understanding it, which will
by no means bring about intelligent art. Let us therefore study it wisely, be taught by it,
kindled by it; all the while determining not to imitate or repeat it, to have either no art at
all, or an art which we have made our own.
Yet I am almost brought to a stand-still when bidding you to study nature and the history of
art, by remembering that this is London, and what it is like: how can I ask working-men passing
up and down these hideous streets day by day to care about beauty? If it were politics, we must
care about that; or science, you could wrap yourselves up in the study of facts, no doubt,
without much caring what goes on about you - but beauty! do you not see what terrible difficulties
beset art, owing to a long neglect of art - and neglect of reason, too, in this matter? It is
such a heavy question by what effort, by what dead-lift, you can thrust this difficulty from you,
that I must perforce set it aside for the present, and must at least hope that the study of
history and its monuments will help you somewhat herein. If you can really fill your minds with
memories of great works of art, and great times of art, you will, I think, be able to a certain
extent to look through the aforesaid ugly surroundings, and will be moved to discontent of what
is careless and brutal now, and will, I hope, at last be so much discontented with what is bad,
that you will determine to bear no longer that short-sighted, reckless brutality of squalor that
so disgraces our intricate civilization.
Well, at any rate, London is good for this, that it is well off for museums, - which I heartily
wish were to be got at seven days in the week instead of six; and certainly any of us who may
have any natural turn for art must get more help from frequenting them than one can well say.
It is true, however, that people need some preliminary instruction before they can get all the
good possible to be got from the prodigious treasures of art possessed by the country in that
form: there also one sees things in a piece-meal way: nor can I deny that there is something
melancholy about a museum, such a tale of violence, destruction, and carelessness, as its treasured
scraps tell us.
But moreover you may sometimes have an opportunity of studying ancient art in a narrower but a
more intimate, a more kindly form, the monuments of our land: Sometimes only, since we live in
the middle of this world of brick and mortar, and there is little else left us amidst it, except
the ghost of the glorious church at Westminster and the Hall beside it: but when we can get
beyond that smoky world, there out in the country we may see they works of our fathers yet alive
amidst the very nature they were wrought into, and of which they are so completely a part: for
there indeed if anywhere, in the English country, in the days when people cared about such things,
was there a full sympathy between the works of man, and the land they were made for: - the land is
a little land, Sirs, too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space
for swelling into hugeness: there are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great
solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied,
gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily-changing
uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with
the walls of sheep-walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant
of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison, nor palace, but a decent home.
All which I neither praise nor blame, but say that so it is: some people praise this homeliness
overmuch, as if the land were the very axle-tree of the world; so do not I, nor any unblinded by
pride in themselves and all that belongs to them: others there are who scorn it and the tameness
of it: not I any the more: though it would indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world,
no wonders, no terrors, no unspeakable beauties: yet when we think what a small part of the world's
history, past, present, and to come, is this land we live in, and how much smaller still in the
history of the arts, and yet how our forefathers clung to it, and with what care and pains they
adorned it, this unromantic, uneventful-looking land of England, surely by this too our hearts
may be touched and our hope quickened.
For as was the land, such was the art of it while folk yet troubled themselves about such things;
it strove little to impress people either by pomp or ingenuity: not unseldom it fell into
commonplace, rarely it rose into majesty; yet was it never oppressive, never a slave's nightmare
or an insolent boast: and at its best it had an inventiveness, an individuality, that grander
styles have never overpassed: its best too, and that was in its very heart, was given as freely
to the yeoman's house, and the humble village church, as to the lord's palace or the mighty
cathedral: never coarse, though often rude enough, sweet, natural and unaffected, an art of
peasants rather than of merchant-princes or courtiers, it must be a hard heart, I think, that
does not love it: whether a man has been born among it like ourselves, or has come wonderingly
on its simplicity from all the grandeur over-seas. A peasant art, I say, and it clung fast to the
life of the people, and still lived among the cottagers and yeomen in many parts of the country
while the big houses were being built `French and fine': Still lived also in many a quaint pattern
of loom and printing-block, and embroiderer's needle, while over-seas stupid pomp had extinguished
all nature and freedom, and art was become, in France especially, the mere expression of that
successful and exultant rascality which in the flesh no long time afterwards went down into the
pit for ever.
Such was the English art, whose history is in a sense at your doors, grown scarce indeed, and
growing scarcer indeed, and growing scarcer year by year, not only through greedy destruction,
of which there is certainly less than there used to be, but also through the attacks of another
foe, called now-a-days `restoration.'
I must not make a long story about this, but also I cannot quite pass it over, since I have
pressed on you the study of these ancient monuments. Thus the matter stands; these old buildings
have been altered and added to century after century, often beautifully, always historically;
their very value, a great part of it, lay in that: they have suffered too almost always from
neglect, often from violence (that latter also a piece of history often far from uninteresting),
but ordinary obvious mending would almost always have kept them standing, pieces of nature and
of history.
But of late years a great uprising of ecclesiastical zeal, coinciding with a great increase
of study, and consequently of knowledge of mediaeval architecture, has driven people into
spending on these buildings, not merely with the purpose of repairing them, of keeping them
safe, clean, and wind and water-tight, but also of `restoring' them to some ideal state of
perfection; sweeping away if possible all signs of what has befallen them at least since the
Reformation, and often since dates much earlier: this has sometimes been done with much disregard
of art and entirely from ecclesiastical zeal, but oftener it has been well meant enough as
regards art: yet you will not have listened to what I have said to-night if you do not see that
from my point of view this restoration must be as impossible to bring about as the attempt at it
is destructive to the buildings so dealt with: I scarcely like to think what a great part of
them have been made nearly useless to students of art and history: unless you knew a great deal
about architecture you perhaps would scarce understand what terrible damage has been done by
that dangerous `little knowledge' in this matter, but this I think is easy to be understood,
that to deal recklessly with valuable (and national) monuments which, when once gone, can never
be replaced by any splendour of modern art, is doing a very sorry service to the State.
You will see by all that I have said on this study of ancient art that I mean by education
herein something much wider than the teaching of a definite art in schools of design, and that
it must be something that we must do more or less for ourselves: I mean by it a systematic
concentration of our thoughts on the matter, a studying of it in all ways, careful and laborious
practice of it, and a determination to do nothing but what is known to be good in workmanship
and design.
Of course, however, both as an instrument of that study we have been speaking of, as well as
of the practice of the arts, all handicraftsmen should be taught to draw very carefully; as
indeed all people should be taught drawing who are not physically incapable of learning it:
but the art of drawing so taught would not be the art of designing, but only a means toward this
end, general capability in dealing with the arts.
For I wish specially to impress this upon you, that designing cannot be taught at all in a
school: continued practice will help a man who is naturally a designer, continual notice of
nature and of art: no doubt those who have some faculty for designing are still numerous, and
they want from a school certain technical teaching, just as they want tools: in these days also,
when the best school, the school of successful practice going on around you, is at such a low
ebb, they do undoubtedly want instruction in the history of the arts: these two things schools
of design can give: but the royal road of a set of rules, will lead nowhere; - or, let us rather
say, to beginning again.
As to the kind of drawing that should be taught to men engaged in ornamental work, there is
only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure:
both because the lines of a man's body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you
can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong. I do think that such teaching as this,
given to all people who care for it, would help the revival of the arts very much: the habit of
discriminating between right and wrong, the sense of pleasure in drawing a good line, would
really, I think, be education in the due sense of the word for all such people as had the germs
of invention in them; yet as aforesaid, in this age of the world it would be mere affectation
to pretend to shut one's eyes to the art of past ages: that also we must study. In other
circumstances, social and economical do not stand in our way, that is to say, if the world is
not too busy to allow us to have Decorative Arts at all, these two are the direct means by which
we shall get them; that is, general cultivation of the powers of the mind, general cultivation
of the powers of the eye and hand.
Perhaps that seems to you very commonplace advice and a very roundabout road; nevertheless 'tis
a certain one, if by any road you desire to come to the new art, which is my subject to-night:
if you do not, and if those germs of invention, which, as I said just now, are no doubt still
common enough among men, are left neglected and undeveloped, the laws of Nature will assert
themselves in this as in other matters, and the faculty of design itself will gradually fade
from the race of man. Sirs, shall we approach nearer to perfection by casting away so large a
part of that intelligence that makes us men?
And now before I make an end, I want to call your attention to certain things, that, owing to
our neglect of the arts for other business, bar that good road to us and are such a hindrance,
that, till they are dealt with, it is hard even to make a beginning of our endeavour. And if my
talk should seem to grow too serious for our subject, as indeed I think it cannot do, I beg you
to remember what I said earlier, of how the arts all hang together. Now there is one art of which
the old architect of Edward the Third's time was thinking - he who founded New College, Oxford,
I mean - when he took this for his motto: `Manners maketh man:' he meant by manners the art of
morals, the art of living worthily, and like a man. I must needs claim this art also as dealing
with my subject.
Sirs, there is a great deal of sham work in the world, hurtful to the buyer, more hurtful to
the seller, if he only knew it, most hurtful to the maker: how good a foundation it would be
toward getting good Decorative Art, that is ornamental workmanship, if we craftsmen were to
resolve to turn out nothing but excellent workmanship in all things, instead of having, as we
too often have now, a very low average standard of work, which we often fail below.
I do not blame either one class or another in this matter, I blame all: to set aside our own
class of handicraftsmen, of whose shortcomings you and I know so much that we need talk no more
about it, I know that the public in general are set on having things cheap, being so ignorant
that they do not know when they get them nasty also, so ignorant that they neither know nor care
whether they give a man his due: I know that the manufacturers (so-called) are so set on carrying
out competition to its utmost, competition of cheapness, not of excellence, that they meet the
bargain-hunters half way, and cheerfully furnish them with nasty wares at the cheap rate they
are asked for, by means of what can be called by no prettier name than fraud. England has of
late been too much busied with the counting-house and not enough with the workshop: with the
result that the counting-house at the present moment is rather barren of orders.
I say all classes are to blame in this matter, but also I say that the remedy lies with the
handicraftsmen, who are not ignorant of these things like the public, and who have no call to be
greedy and isolated like the manufacturers or middlemen; the duty and honour of educating the
public lies with them, and they have in them the seeds of order and organization which make the
duty the easier.
When will they see to this and help to make men of us by insisting on this most weighty piece
of manners; so that we may adorn life with the pleasure of cheerfully buying goods at their due
price; with the pleasure of selling goods that we could be proud of both for fair price and fair
workmanship: with the pleasure of working soundly and without haste at making goods that we
could be proud of? - much the greatest pleasure of the three is that last, such a pleasure as,
I think, the world has none like it.
You must not say that this piece of manners lies out of my subject: it is essentially a part
of it and most important: for I am bidding you learn to be artists, if art is not to come to an
end amongst us: and what is an artist but a workman who is determined that, whatever else happens,
his work shall be excellent? or, to put it in another way: the decoration of workmanship, what
is it but the expression of man's pleasure in successful labour? But what pleasure can there be
in bad work, in unsuccessful labour, why should we decorate that? and how can we bear to be
always unsuccessful in our labour?
As greed of unfair gain, wanting to be paid for what we have not earned, cumbers our path with
this tangle of bad work, of sham work, so the heaped-up money which this greed has brought us
(for greed will have its way, sirs, like all other strong passions), this money, I say, gathered
into heaps little and bit, with all the false distinction which so unhappily it yet commands
amongst us, has raised up against the arts a barrier of the love of luxury and show, which is
of all obvious hindrances the worst to overpass: the highest and most cultivated classes are not
free from the vulgarity of it, the lower are not free from its pretence. I beg you to remember
both as a remedy against this, and as explaining exactly what I mean, that nothing can be a work
of art which is not useful; that is to say, which does not minister to the body when well under
command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state.
What tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish pretending to be works of art in some degree would
this maxim clear out of our London houses, if it were understood and acted upon! To my mind it
is only here and there (out of the kitchen) that you can find in a well-to-do house things that
are of any use at all: as a rule all the decoration (so called) that has got there is there for
the sake of show, not because anybody likes it. I repeat, this stupidity goes through all
classes of society: the silk curtains in my Lord's drawing-room are no more a matter of art to
him than the powder in his footman's hair; the kitchen in a country farmhouse is most commonly a
pleasant and homelike place, the parlour dreary and useless.
Simplicity of live, begetting simplicity of taste, that is, a love for sweet and lofty things,
is of all matters most necessary for the birth of the new and better art we crave for; simplicity
everywhere, in the palace as well as in the cottage.
Still more is this necessary, cleanliness and decency everywhere, in the cottage as well as
in the palace: the lack of that is a serious piece of manners for us to correct: that lack and
all the inequalities of life, and the heaped-up thoughtlessness and disorder of so many centuries
that cause it: and as yet it is only a very few men who have begun to think about a remedy for
it in its widest range: even in its narrower aspect, in the defacement of our big towns by all
that commerce brings with it, who heeds it? who tries to control their squalor and hideousness?
there is nothing but thoughtlessness and recklessness in the matter: the helplessness of people
who don't live long enough to do a thing themselves, and have not manliness and foresight enough
to begin to work, and pass it on to those that shall come after them.
Is money to be gathered? cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and
venerable buildings for the money that a few square yard of London dirt will fetch, blacken
rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it's nobody's business to see
to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop,
will do for us herein.
And Science - we have loved her well, and followed her diligently, what will she do? I fear she
is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she
is too busy, and will for the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have thought
easy for her, say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to
get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much
worth her attention as the production of the heaviest of heavy black silks, or the biggest of
useless guns. Anyhow, however it be done, unless people care about carrying on their business without
making the world hideous, how can they care about art? I know it will cost much both of time and
money to better these things even a little; but I do not see how these can be better spent than
in making life cheerful and honourable for others and for ourselves; and the gain of good life
to the country at large that would result from men seriously setting about the bettering of the
decency of our big towns would be priceless, even if nothing specially good befell the arts in
consequence: I do not know that it would; but I should begin to think matters hopeful if men
turned their attention to such things, and I repeat, that unless they do so, we can scarcely
even begin with any hope our endeavours for the bettering in the Arts.
Until something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest for the
mind in the aspect of their own and their neighbours' houses, until the contrast is less
disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that
the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men, who
can go often to beautiful places, whose education enables them, in the contemplation of the past
glories of the world, to shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men
move in. Sirs, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness,
and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live thus
isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this, and say that on such terms I do not wish
her to live. I protest that it would be a sham to an honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled
up to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to sit and eat dainty food amongst
starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort.
I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
No, rather than art should live this poor thin life among a few exceptional men, despising
those beneath them for an ignorance for which they themselves are responsible, for a brutality
that they will not struggle with, - rather than this, I would that the world should indeed sweep
away all art for a while, as I said before I thought it possible she might do: rather than the
wheat should rot in the miser's granary, I would that the earth had it, that it might yet have
a chance to quicken in the dark.
I have a sort of faith, though, that this clearing away of all art will not happen, that men
will get wiser, as well as more learned; that many of the intricacies of life, on which we now
pride ourselves more than enough, partly because they are new, partly because they have come
with the gain of better things, will be cast aside as having played their part, and being useful
no longer. I hope that we shall have leisure from war, - war commercial, as well as war of the
bullet and the bayonet; leisure from the knowledge that darkens counsel; leisure above all from
the greed of money, and the craving for that overwhelming distinction that money now brings: I
believe that, as we have even now partly achieved LIBERTY, so we shall achieve EQUALITY, and
best of all, FRATERNITY, and so have leisure from poverty and all its griping, sordid cares.
Then, having leisure from all these things, amidst renewed simplicity of life we shall have
leisure to think about our work, that faithful daily companion, which no man any longer will
venture to call the Curse of labour: for surely then we shall be happy in it, each in his place,
no man grudging at another; no one bidden to be any man's servant, everyone scorning to be any
man's master: men will then assuredly be happy in their work, and that happiness will assuredly
bring forth decorative, noble, popular art.
That art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountain-sides:
it will be a pleasure and a rest, and not a weight upon the spirits to come from the open
country into a town; every man's house will be fair and decent, soothing to his mind and helpful
to his work: all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in harmony with nature,
will be reasonable and beautiful: yet all will be simple and inspiriting, not childish or enervating;
for as nothing of beauty and splendour that man's mind and hand may compass shall be wanted from
our public buildings, so in no private dwelling will there be any signs of waste, pomp, or
insolence, and every man will have his share of the best.
It is a dream, you may say, of what has never been and never will be: true, it has been, and
therefore, since the world is alive and moving yet, my hope is the greater that it one day will
be: true, it is a dream; but dreams have before now come about of things so good and necessary
to us, that we scarcely think of them more than of the daylight: though once people had to live
without them, without even the hope of them.
It is a dream, you may say, of what has never been and never will be: true, it has been, and
therefore, since the world is alive and moving yet, my hope is the greater that it one day will
be: true, it is a dream; but dreams have before now come about of things so good and necessary
to us, that we scarcely think of them more than of the daylight: though once people had to live
without them, without even the hope of them.
Reprinted from Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde,
London: Methuen and Co., 1908.
