William Morris. Arthur Clutton-BrockЧитать онлайн книгу.

      And there was the same principle of choice in all the applied arts. Towards the end of the Italian Renaissance these arts had been used by the great to express their power, pride and wealth. And since these were realities, the arts themselves had often a real splendour and vigour. One can see that a Renaissance Palace was built for a great prince who, at least, knew how to enjoy himself magnificently. In the palace, in its furniture and in its gardens, there is the expression of a certain state of being with which those who enjoyed it were content. They had lost the high passion for a celestial glory that expressed itself in the great churches of the Middle Ages and were determined to make for themselves private Heavens here and now; and they did succeed in making them so far as they could be made out of material things. This tradition of Renaissance splendour still dominated all the arts in 1860; but they expressed then splendour and a pride that no longer existed. There were, of course, rich people, but they did not know, like the Princes of the Renaissance, how to enjoy their riches; and the art that was provided for them was nothing but an advertisement of their wealth. They liked furniture upon which much time and labour had evidently been spent, because it was costly; but they never asked themselves whether the time and labour had been spent in making the furniture ugly, for they did not wish to enjoy the furniture but only their awareness that they were able to pay for it. For those who were not rich art was employed to give the illusion that they were rich. Machinery had made it possible to produce cheap imitations of costly ornament, uglier even than the originals. No one can ever have enjoyed these with their natural senses; what they enjoyed, or tried to enjoy, was merely the illusion of riches produced by them. The sense of beauty, in itself quite a simple instinctive thing, had not entirely disappeared, as one might suppose; it had been degraded into a sense of propriety, so that people called those things beautiful which seemed to them proper to their social station. As for art, except in pictures, few were conscious of its existence. Most people thought of it as an obsolete activity which modern civilisation had outgrown. They could not see that, being thus purposeless and ignored, it still persisted, not consciously expressing anything that was worth expression, but merely betraying all the meanness and failures and impotent unrest of the industrial age. And even the most intelligent allowed this purposeless tell-tale art to be imposed upon them, just as good men, in evil times, submit to a morality of cowardice and cruel habits.

      But Morris saw what this bad art meant just as if he were a being from another planet. It was not merely that he disliked it with his senses; he had a moral dislike for it as an expression of evil things, and to him its ugliness was of the same kind as the ugliness of manners servile and pretentious. He, after Ruskin, was the first to have a scientific understanding of his own likes and dislikes in art. Philosophers have talked about the arts for ages, but they have isolated them from other activities. Ruskin and Morris looked rather for their connection with other activities, and with the whole mind of the society that produces them. They saw that people whose values are wrong will betray the fact in their art, that a society which worships riches will express its idolatry even in its table legs and chandeliers. But Morris, being a man of action, was determined not to express an idolatry that he hated in his table-legs or in any detail of his house. He meant that house to express the kind of life that he wished to lead, a life orderly, busy, free from pretence, free too from aimless rebellions, and devoted to a high purpose.

      When Lord Grimthorpe called him a poetic upholsterer he meant to express his contempt for a man who could take upholstery so seriously. Morris himself liked the phrase and thought it just. He thought upholstering and all the furniture of a house ought to be as expressive as poetry; and he began with his own home. If he had ended there, his enterprise would have had little importance, and at the time, no doubt, he did not see where it would lead him. But it was the beginning of a revolt still only in its initiation, and the end of which no man can foresee.

      39. Tulip and Rose, 1876. Woven woollen triple cloth, 297 × 171 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

      40. Wey, c. 1883. Furnishing fabric. Indigo-discharged, block-printed cotton, 85 × 110.5 × 4.5 cm (framed). Private collection.

      The house that Philip Webb built for Morris aimed at no beauties, exquisite or palatial, beyond the power of the builders of that time. It was unlike other houses of the period chiefly in its plainness and in the quality of its material. It was built of red brick and roofed with red tiles, L shaped, and two stories high. It stood among apple and cherry trees, and was so placed that hardly a tree had to be cut down. Indeed, Mackail tells us, apples fell in at the windows as they stood open on hot August nights. The garden was planned as carefully as the house, being an outdoor continuation of it rather than a wilderness or a flower-show. A rose-trellis made a quadrangle with the two sides of the building; and in the midst of this was a well house of brick and oak with a round tiled roof like a low spire. Morris knew about gardening as about other domestic arts; and for him it was always a domestic art, not a horticultural game.

      When the house was built Morris set to work to furnish it himself, and the difficulty of getting things made according to his own designs or the designs of his friends was the immediate cause of the foundation of the firm of Morris & Co. It is not certain who first proposed the enterprise, though it had long been in Morris’s mind, but Rossetti, Madox Brown the painter, Burne-Jones and Webb were all parties to it. To them were added Faulkner, Morris’s old College friend, and Peter Paul Marshall, a friend of Madox Brown, and a sanitary engineer. He never did much for the firm, but Faulkner worked hard for it, both as a man of business, and, to the best of his ability, as a craftsman.

      The circular of the firm, which is headed Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., insists upon the need of co-operation in all decorative art and upon the continual supervision of the artist. This, indeed, was what distinguished the firm from ordinary commercial enterprises. They may employ an artist to make designs, but they seldom employ him to supervise the execution of them. The result is that the designer usually produces what will suit the workman instead of the workman working to satisfy the artist. When execution and design are thus estranged, execution inevitably tends to deteriorate. For it is the spur of design, especially when the designer is himself the workman, that makes the workman do better than his former best. New tasks are set to him, as they are set to executants in music; and the artist at his elbow, or the artist in himself, urges him to perform them. But when the designer never sees the workman, and has no control over his work, his designs are often so unsuited to the material that the workmen get the habit of doing what they will with them. And in a purely commercial business the employer is content if the result sells well. He, being a man of business and probably knowing little about art, demands from artists designs which he thinks are likely to sell. He prefers an artist who follows the fashion to one who follows his own bent. We cannot blame him but only the public, which expects such a system to supply them with works of art.

      Morris’s aim was as far as possible to put an end to this estrangement between design and execution. He was determined that his

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