HOPES AND FEARS FOR ART (1882) by William Morris (key highlighted statements)

The following bullet points are key sections pulled out from William Morris's Hopes and fears for art (Chapter 2- THE ART OF THE PEOPLE).These to me signify what I think is important out of Morris's text.

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- Follow nature, study antiquity, make your own art, and do not steal it, grudge no expense of trouble, patience, or courage, in the striving to accomplish the hard thing you have set yourselves to do.

- What there is to hope and fear for the future of the arts, which were born with the birth of civilisation and will only die with its death--what on this side of things, the present time of strife and doubt and change is preparing for the better time, when the change shall have come, the strife be lulled, and the doubt cleared.

-Further those arts by education widely spread.

-What is wrong, then, with us or the arts, since what was once accounted so glorious, is now deemed paltry?

-I hope we know assuredly that the arts we have met together to further are necessary to the life of man, if the progress of civilisation is not to be as causeless as the turning of a wheel that makes nothing.

-How, then, shall we, the minority, carry out the duty which our position thrusts upon us, of striving to grow into a majority?

-so it was ever through all those days when Art was so vigorous and progressive. Who can say how little we should know of many periods, but for their art? History (so called) has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art has remembered the people, because they created.

-If men's minds are still sick and loathe the arts, they will not be able to answer that question.

-That that daily labour was sweetened by the daily creation of Art

-In truth, it cannot be; yet if that sickness of repulsion to the arts were to go on hopelessly, nought else would be, and the extinction of the love of beauty and imagination would prove to be the extinction of civilisation.

-Nothing is wrong or can be with Art in the abstract--that must always be good for mankind, or we are all wrong together

-were not the schools of art founded all over the country some thirty years ago because we had found out that popular art was fading--or perhaps had faded out from amongst us?

-I say, then, that an apparent external progress in some ways is obvious, but I do not know how far that is hopeful, for time must try it, and prove whether it be a passing fashion or the first token of a real stir among the great mass of civilised men.

-In England, and in England only, there has been a great improvement in architecture and the arts that attend it--arts which it was the special province of the afore-mentioned schools to revive and foster.

-I am very sorry to say, set the fact not easy to be accounted for, that the rest of the civilised world (so called) seems to have done little more than stand still in these matters; and that among ourselves these improvements have concerned comparatively few people, the mass of our population not being in the least touched by them; so that the great bulk of our architecture--the art which most depends on the taste of the people at large--grows worse and worse every day.

-While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short- sightedness, actively destroying the very sources of that education

-To be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called commerce

-The conquered races in their hopelessness are everywhere giving up the genuine practice of their own arts, which we know ourselves, as we have indeed loudly proclaimed, are founded on the truest and most natural principles. The often-praised perfection of these arts is the blossom of many ages of labour and change, but the conquered races are casting it aside as a thing of no value, so that they may conform themselves to the inferior art, or rather the lack of art, of their conquerors.

-Their famous wares, so praised by those who thirty years ago began to attempt the restoration of popular art amongst ourselves, are no longer to be bought at reasonable prices in the common market, but must be sought for and treasured as precious relics for the museums we have founded for our art education. In short, their art is dead, and the commerce of modern civilisation has slain it.

-Obvious as is that surface improvement of the arts within the last few years, I fear too much that there is something wrong about the root of the plant to exult over the bursting of its February buds.

-Again, though many of us love architecture dearly, and believe that it helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live in houses which have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness and inconvenience. The stream of civilisation is against us, and we cannot battle against it.

-These great men have but a narrow circle that can understand their works, and are utterly unknown to the great mass of the people: civilisation is so much against them, that they cannot move the people.

-I cannot think that all is well with the root of the tree we are cultivating

-To make people understand that we, least of all men, wish to widen the gulf between the classes, nay, worse still, to make new classes of elevation

-I wish people to understand that the art we are striving for is a good thing which all can share, which will elevate all; in good sooth, if all people do not soon share it there will soon be none to share; if all are not elevated by it, mankind will lose the elevation it has gained. Nor is such an art as we long for a vain dream; such an art once was in times that were worse than these, when there was less courage, kindness, and truth in the world than there is now; such an art there will be hereafter, when there will be more courage, kindness, and truth than there is now in the world.

-I began by saying that part of the common and necessary advice given to Art students was to study antiquity.

-They were common things in their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling--no rarities then--and yet we have called them 'wonderful.'

-Wonderful as these works are, they were made by 'common fellows,' as the phrase goes, in the common course of their daily labour.

-do you think it was irksome to them?

-These men were not unhappy

-These form the mass of our architectural treasures, the houses that everyday people lived in, the unregarded churches in which they worshipped.

-And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a third party to the brain that conceived and the hand that fashioned it.

-So, you see, there was much going on to make life endurable in those times. Not every day, you may be sure, was a day of slaughter and tumult, though the histories read almost as if it were so; but every day the hammer chinked on the anvil, and the chisel played about the oak beam, and never without some beauty and invention being born of it, and consequently some human happiness.

-That thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his labour without expressing that happiness; and especially is this so when he is at work at anything in which he specially excels.

-If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect. Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of it in the end.

-Making labour happy for all, to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour--nay

- This hapless token is, that the work done by the civilised world is mostly dishonest work.

-Machines for the violent destruction of life--that is to say, materials for two kinds of war

-It is quite true, and very sad to say, that if any one nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he get it well done.

-Be sure that there is, that the blindness and hurry of civilisation, as it now is, have to answer a heavy charge as to that enormous amount of pleasureless work--work that tries every muscle of the body and every atom of the brain, and which is done without pleasure and without aim--work which everybody who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest way that dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.

-That the dishonesty in the daily arts of life, complaints of which are in all men's mouths, and which I can answer for it does exist, is the natural and inevitable result of the world in the hurry of the war of the counting-house, and the war of the battlefield, having forgotten--of all men, I say, each for the other, having forgotten, that pleasure in our daily labour, which nature cries out for as its due.

-As to the bricklayer, the mason, and the like--these would be artists, and doing not only necessary, but beautiful, and therefore happy work, if art were anything like what it should be. No, it is not such labour as this which we need to do away with, but the toil which makes the thousand and one things which nobody wants, which are used merely as the counters for the competitive buying and selling, falsely called commerce, which I have spoken of before--I know in my heart, and not merely by my reason, that this toil cries out to be done away with.

-I repeat; lest discontent, unrest, and despair should at last swallow up all society--If we, then, with our eyes cleared, could but make some sacrifice of things which do us no good, since we unjustly and uneasily possess them, then indeed I believe we should sow the seeds of a happiness which the world has not yet known

-and with that seed would be sown also the seed of real art, the expression of man's happiness in his labour,--an art made by the people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.

-And, to-day, when the opinions which we think right, and which one day will be generally thought so, have to struggle sorely to make themselves noticed at all, it is early days for us to try to see our exact and clearly mapped road.

-general education that makes men think, will one day make them think rightly upon art.

-ART WHICH IS TO BE MADE BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE, AS A HAPPINESS TO THE MAKER AND THE USER

-let me tell you that though simplicity in art may be costly as well as uncostly, at least it is not wasteful, and nothing is more destructive to art than the want of it.

-Or, still more, I think, how can we bear to use, how can we enjoy something which has been a pain and a grief for the maker to make?

-At any rate, it is good for a man who thinks seriously to face his fellows, and speak out whatever really burns in him, so that men may seem less strange to one another, and misunderstanding, the fruitful cause of aimless strife, may be avoided.

-Meanwhile, if these hours be dark, as, indeed, in many ways they are, at least do not let us sit deedless, like fools and fine gentlemen, thinking the common toil not good enough for us, and beaten by the muddle; but rather let us work like good fellows trying by some dim candle-light to set our workshop ready against to-morrow's daylight--that to-morrow, when the civilised world, no longer greedy, strifeful, and destructive, shall have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user.

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There will be a following blog post that will highlight the key points I feel that are missing from Morris's text.

Reference: Morris, W. (1882). Hopes and fears for art. London: Ellis & White.