The old idea of a self-supporting country producing the necessities of life for its own use seems only appreciated by Socialists.
These thoughts bring one to that aspect of art I spoke of at the outset, as the servant or slave of commerce and industry.
Until the revival of design and handicraft in this country during the last twenty-five or thirty years, decorative design, despite a few distinguished artists, such as Alfred Stevens, might certainly be described as the slave of commerce, and even now the revivers of design and handicraft are not altogether free from the danger of being devoured by commercial methods.
However, a protest has been made, the hand and the brain have asserted themselves; a new standard in the decorative arts has been set up, and since the time of William Morris and his group of pioneers, many English artists and craftsmen have shown that they have successfully revived and can do beautiful work in many forgotten crafts.
In founding the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society we desired to give opportunities of personal distinction for artistic work in design and craftsmanship, to put designers and craftsmen in the same position as other artists, such as painters and sculptors, before the public in this respect by giving the names of all responsible executants of a work. Here, again, trade interests and competitive commerce have been against us, although commerce has not been slow to imitate or adapt some of the ideas in taste and design discovered in our exhibitions.
However, the movement has spread all over the country, Arts and Crafts Societies and Exhibitions flourish everywhere, and the art schools of the country have been largely reorganized and craft classes established in connection with design. After many years' work some of us think that so remarkable a movement might attain something like national recognition, and its progress or permanence not be left to depend upon the efforts of a few hard-working artists, with ever-diminishing opportunities for exhibition, in the absence of a suitable building. Painting and sculpture, and in a lesser degree architecture, are officially recognized and housed rent free at Burlington House. Why should the decorative arts have nowhere to lay their heads?
After all, it is these arts, intimately connected as they are with a people's daily life and well-being, that may be said to be really of more immediate consequence than what are called the Fine Arts. Though, personally, I do not admit the justice of the distinction usually accepted between Fine and Decorative or Industrial Art.
Art is a language—of many dialects it may be, but its greatness must not be measured by inches, or the power or beauty of its thoughts and conceptions determined by the material or method of their expression. The spirit of art, imagination, romance, and the sense of beauty may inspire the smaller accessories of life as they may the larger. It is not a question of size or quantity, it is a question of quality.
As regards the art schools of the country, both state-aided and municipal, whatever their shortcomings, it is only fair to say that they have been from their establishment the only means, outside the efforts of individual artists, of maintaining a standard of artistic taste and accomplishment in decorative art, as distinct from the influences of trade and fashion.
It has often been made a reproach that they have not been in closer touch and association with the industries of the country, but schools of art and technology cannot be turned into factories with the sole object of supplying the immediate demands of ephemeral fashion—often trivial and vulgar. This would only end in the raising of a crop of narrow specialists, incapable of producing more than one sort of thing, to be exploited by commerce, and unemployed when the boom was over. The business of a school of art is to train capable designers and craftsmen, competent both to practise and to teach. The progress, both in taste and accomplishment, shown by the works exhibited every year in the national competition under the auspices, first of the old Science and Art Department and now of the Board of Education at South Kensington, is most remarkable and striking, especially to one who can look back twenty or thirty years. Yet we are still without a proper building in which to show these works, which are generally housed in temporary sheds in an out-of-the-way corner, and consequently attract little public attention.