Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (223 page)

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.