Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage of civilization—that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and visible sign of the people’s pride of life and of their sense of power. The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.
But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic—in which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of service, and prided itself in military service alone—in that and in the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods, but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up into portions of an unimportant size and perished.
At a later day—and again with the city as centre to its life of self-realisation—we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences alternately jostled and combined.
And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex art—tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic arm, a new life-consciousness—the consciousness of the guilds, the workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own account—not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.
Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become imitative and debased.
I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings of Europe! Think of it!—of what that means in the realisation of life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called “merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in beauty.
I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred (so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment), there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living” was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot, so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their power.
So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty, delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to live delightfully.
If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable—not, I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”; else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.
Our life is built up—we know not to what ultimate end—on an infinite number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live; they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.