I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt and a loathing.
Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature itself—making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for self-realisation in ornament and delight—so long will these things be inevitable.
But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.
ART AND CITIZENSHIP
(1910)
The most hardened advocate of “Art for Art’s sake,” will hardly deny that Art, for all its “sacred egoism,” is a social force. The main question is where does your Art-training begin?
The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation; and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong feeling about Art.
And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same condemnation.