The Arts and Crafts Movement

by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson

But art to-day has no eyes, no devotion, & so for art there is no great object, and for the great object no art. Nor does the great artist, as does the great opportunity, sojourn in our midst. Such art and artists as there are, and are there any? are but engaged in the conscious cultivation of art for art's sake, or of beauty for beauty's sake, pending the great transformation which, meanwhile, is no affair of theirs.

Of such art and of such cultivation, nothing need be expected: and such art and such cultivation are certainly not in my judgement, nor are they, so far as I know, in the judgement of the artists whose revolt founded the Society, the aims of the movement now passing under its name.

What those aims are, I will now, from my own point of view, endeavour to restate: for of the subsequent exhibitions of the Society, nothing more need be said. Subsequent exhibitions, whether in England, on the Continent, or in the United States of America, were, and are, but repetitions, with variations only of detail, of the first, and need no description; though against exhibitions themselves I may be allowed before I pass away from them to urge one objection, an objection, not indeed condemnatory of them, but an objection which should, I think, be borne in mind in promoting them, and be obviated as far as the circumstances of each exhibition will permit. The objection which I would urge is this.

An exhibition, as I have already insisted, is but a small part of the Arts & Crafts movement, which is a movement in the main of ideas and not of objets d'art, & there is a danger in the constant repetition of exhibitions, civic, national, and international, of public attention being diverted from the movement of ideas, & action thereupon, to the mere production and exhibition of exhibits. Moreover, of exhibits, very few things, relatively to the whole of life's possessions and productions, can be brought together usefully, or at all, under one roof, and of those which can very few can tell their own tale, apologize for their shortcomings, or of themselves ask to be forgiven for the sake of their approximate merit. It was to guard against the danger of this possible diversion of interest and forgetfulness of the movement's greater purposes, and indirectly, by suggestion of the ideal, to illuminate the possible deficiencies of the exhibits, as well as to draw attention to their merits, that the aid of lectures was made an essential part of at least the scheme of the Society: and lectures of the kind in question, lectures, that is to say, which shall deal at large with the meaning, as well as the contents, of an exhibition, are, in my opinion, an essential adjunct of every exhibition.

With this objection stated, I now proceed to wind up my observations and to come to a conclusion. But before doing so I must ask your attention in one other matter in which I find it necessary to differ from Mr. Morris.

But pray note that it is a matter of interpretation only in which here, as elsewhere, I presume to differ from that great spirit, now passed away. Only in the matter of interpretation, for I do not—how could I?—call in question, here or anywhere, the greatness of the aims of William Morris himself. I claim only (1) that the movement which I am attempting to describe had a higher aim than in his own despite he assigned to it in the passage I have quoted: (2) that machinery may be redeemed by imagination, and made to enter even into his restored world, adding to the potency of good, and to its power over evil, which itself, in my view, it is not: and (3) finally, & this is the last point of difference to which I shall have to call your attention, that the age upon which mankind entered, at the close of the fifteenth century, was one of decay of an old world indeed, but at the same time, and this was its characteristic, was an age in which a new and a greater world came to the birth, as in this age it is coming to maturity, and that it is with this new world, and not with the old world, that the movement & ourselves have now to do.

To resume, and to revert to what I was about to say.

In that magnificent brief lecture on Gothic Architecture, which was first spoken as a lecture at the New Gallery for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in the year 1889, and afterwards printed by the Kelmscott Press during and in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in the New Gallery, 1893, Mr. Morris traced, with lightning-like swiftness and clearness, the progress of Gothic Architecture from its first inception by the Romans in the invention of the Arch to its consummation in the exquisitely poised and traceried buildings of the close of the fifteenth century.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Mr. Morris says, 'the great change' came, & Mr. Morris means that we and Architecture, our principal structural expression, entered upon a period of decay. But I would rather—and here is my point of difference—I would rather put it, that the great change came in that the inner vision was substituted for the outer; or, better still, that one inner vision was substituted for another inner vision and that the outward expression of the latter was arrested. Its buildings had been built and the passion for them exhausted, for the world which had inspired them had vanished, & another had been born or created in its place: partly another world of fact, the newly discovered continent of America, and the whole round world itself; partly another world of ideas, the ancient world and its literature, Greece and Rome. At the end of the fifteenth century the printing press was at work, and Europe left for a time the outer world, the world of the senses and material building, and entered into the inner world, the world of imaginative reason, of ideas—communicable henceforward, for a time, by the printed page only, whereon only it could build up and contemplate the vision of its extended universe.

Ever since that time this vision has been growing, taking on new matter for greater change still, and now it is worldwide indeed, and the time has come to cast its inspirations into form, to embody them in works of Art.