From The Decay of Lying
Charles Dickens was depressing enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse
our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration
We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and
spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we
should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and
have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.
From Art and the Handicraftsman
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.
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 GRAND 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.
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 pretence and with some beauty.
