Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

Why, then, this dishonesty and hypocrisy in our workmanship, this exceeding hollowness of modern handicraft, of articles of furniture which tell a lie every moment of their existence, of so-called works of art that are unpunished crimes? It is because they are made by artisans who no longer love their work. The old furniture, so massive, strong and honest, was made by workmen who were familiar with the principles of beautiful design in an age when manual labour was considered noble and honourable.

  Your art will not improve until you seek out your workman and give him as far as possible the right surroundings; for remember that the real test and virtue of a workman is not his earnestness, nor his industry even, but his power of design only; and that design is no offspring of idle fancy; it is the result of accumulative observation and delightful habit. All the teaching in the world is of no avail in art unless you surround your workman with happy influences and with delightful things; it is impossible for him to have right ideas about colour unless he sees the lovely colours of nature unspoiled about him, impossible for him to supply beautiful incident and action in his work unless he sees beautiful incident and action in the world about him, for to cultivate sympathy, you must be among living things and thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among beautiful things and looking at them. And so your houses and streets should be living schools of art where your workman may see beautiful forms as he goes to his work in the morning and returns to his home at eventide.

  Go back to the eras of the highest decorative art and you will find it a time when the workman had beautiful surroundings; for the best periods of the decorative arts have been the ages of costume, when men and women wore noble attire and walked in beauty that could pass at once into marble and stone to be the admiration of all succeeding ages.

  Think of what was the scene which presented itself in his afternoon walk to a designer of the Gothic school of Pisa: Nino Pisano or any of his men: on each side of a bright river saw rise a line of brighter palaces, arched and pillared and inlaid with deep red porphyry and with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming light; the purple and silver and scarlet fringes flowing over the strong limbs and clashing mail like sea waves over rocks at sunset; opening each side of the river were gardens, courts, and cloisters, long successions of white pillars among reeds of vine, leaping of fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange; and still along the garden paths, and under and through the crimson of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest women that Italy ever saw: fairest, purest, and thoughtfullest, trained in all high knowledge as in all courteous art, in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love, able alike to cheer, to enchant, or save the souls of men.

  Above all this scenery of perfect human life rose dome and bell-tower burning with white alabaster and gold; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of mighty hills, hoary with olive; far in the north above a purple sea of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up their steadfast flames of marble summits into amber sky; and over all these, ever present, near or far, seen through the leaves of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno’s stream, or set with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and burning cheek of lady and knight, that untroubled and sacred heaven in which every cloud that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of its evening and morning streamed from the throne of God.

  What think you of that for a school of design? And then contrast that with the depressing monotonous appearance of any modern commercial city—the sombre dress of men and women, the meaningless and barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that desecrate not merely your eye and ear, but every rock and river and hill that I have seen yet in America. I do not say anything against commercial people, for it is not commerce that destroys art; Genoa was built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice, loveliest of them all, by her noble and honest merchants. I do not regard the commercial spirit of the present age as being opposed to the development of art, and I look to our merchants to support the changes we seek to make.

  Look at the ignoble character of modern dress. I do not know a greater heroism than that which opposes the conventionalities of dress; the sombre dress of the age is robbing life of its beauty and is ruinous to art. Not a deed of heroism done on either continent in this century is fitly portrayed on canvas, and yet the history of a country should live on canvas and in marble as well as in dreary volumes; the history of Italy, of Holland, and, for a time, that of our own England, was told in speaking marble and living paintings.

  Healthy art is that which realizes that beauty of the age in which we live, while art is unhealthy that is obliged to go back to old romantic ages for its themes. Well, the sombre and ignoble character of dress at present in fashion has brought art into a very unhealthy state by driving artists back to past ages for their subjects, although there is no more romantic age than our own. Instead of this servile imitation of romantic ages, we should strive to make our own age a romantic age, and art should reproduce for us the faces and forms we love and revere. But modern dress prevents the production of a picture or a statue in which may be embodied the element of that beauty and true nobility of form and feature pleasing to the eyes of those qualified to appreciate a work of art; it has almost annihilated sculpture, which has become all but extinct in England, and in looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one could almost wish that we had killed the noble art completely: to see the statues of our departed statesmen in marble frock-coats and bronze, double-breasted waistcoats adds a new horror to death.

  It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion; the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that, in great cathedrals, such as that of Chartres, or in the decorations of any building in Europe erected between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, is to be seen wrought in stone the whole history of the olden time, the representation of what the people most loved and took pleasure in. We look at the capitals of the pillars and the tracery of the arches and see the picture of the century before us, joining hands with it across the waste of years; you have simply to use your eyes and you can read more in an hour than you can in a week out of a book. Contrast these with our public buildings: a workman is given a design stolen from a Greek temple and does it because he is paid for doing it—the worst reason for doing anything; no modern stonecutter could leave the stamp of this age upon his work as the ancient workmen did.

  The problem is how to restore to the modern workman these right conditions, without which it is impossible to work freely or to work well. If we want to do real service to art we must alter the external forms of dress; the dress of the future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound with joyous colour. True art in dress will make our attire an instructor, an educator.

  Give then, as I said, to your American workmen of today the bright and noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and simple architecture for your city, bright and simple dress for your men and women—those are the conditions of a real artistic movement; for the artist is not concerned primarily with any theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness that should come daily on eye and ear from a beautiful external world.

  But this is not enough. You must give your workman a school of art wherein he can learn rational design. There are many schools of art in America, but they should place themselves in a more immediate relation with trade, commerce, and manufacture and devote more time than they do now to making the common things of life beautiful. Then art in America would not lag behind the old world, but be quickened into loftier powers.

  And you must attach to each school a museum—I do not mean the dreadful modern museum where yo
u find a stuffed and very dusty giraffe face to face with a case or two of fossils—but where the workman can see clay, marble, wood, or glass specimens of the best decorative art to be found in Europe and Asia so that he may come to know what is simple and true and beautiful.

  Such a place is the South Kensington Museum in London, whereon we build greater hopes for the future than on any other one thing, for it is a rational museum, a museum of decorative art. There I go every Saturday night, when the Museum is opened later than usual, to see the workmen whom we so much want to reach, and whom it is often so difficult to reach, the weaver, the glass-blower, the woodcarver, the embroiderer, and others with their notebooks open, and I feel certain that the week after such a visit their work is better for their observance. And it is here that the man of refinement and culture comes face to face with the workman who ministers to his joy; he comes to know more of the nobility of the workman, and the workman, feeling the appreciation, goes away with a heightened sense of the nobility of his calling.

  Again, your artists must decorate what is more simple and useful. In your art schools I found no attempt to decorate such things as the common vessels for water. There is no excuse for the ugly water jugs or pitchers of today, for you might readily have more delicate and beautiful forms for them. A museum could be filled with the different kinds used in hot countries: in the olden times in Eastern countries when water was precious and when the daughters of men in the highest rank could go to the well to draw water, there was beauty and variety of form and design in nothing so much as in common water vessels. Yet we continue to submit to the depressing jugs with the handle all on one side.

  There is one thing much worse than no art, and that is bad art. A wrong principle is often employed, and an inappropriateness of design in many of the schools of decorative art, arising from a want of instruction in the difference between imaginative and decorative art. I have seen young ladies painting moonlights upon dinner plates and sunsets on soup plates. I don’t think it adds anything to the pleasure of canvas-back duck to take it out of such glories. Such scenes should be kept to be hung on the walls, for we should leave to the painter the art of giving undying beauty to the beauty that dies away and fades; besides, we do not want a soup plate whose bottom seems to vanish into the misty hollow of a distant hill; one neither feels safe nor comfortable under such conditions.

  You must encourage and support art in your own city instead of sending to New York or to other places, paying heavily for such things by way of freight; you should make by your own workmen beautiful art for the enjoyment of your citizens: weave your own carpets, design your own furniture, make your own pottery and other things from approved designs instead of submitting to be charged heavily for goods which do not suit you and which do not really represent your feeling and good taste, for you have here the primary elements of a great artistic movement.

  Believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people imagine: for the noblest art one requires a clear, healthy atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and from factory chimney. You must have a strong and healthy physique among your men and women; sickly or idle or melancholy people don’t do much in art, believe me; and lastly you require a sense of individualism about each man and woman, because that, the very keynote of life, is also the essence of art—a desire on the part of man to express the noblest side of his nature in the noblest way, to show the world how many things he can reverence, love and understand.

  For, the motives of art lie about you in all directions as they were around about the ancients. If the modern sculptor were to ask me where he should go for a model, I would tell him that he might, if he would, find in everyday life subjects in the nobility of labour entirely worthy of his attention—the depicting of men in their daily work; there is not a worker in mine or ditch, in the shop or at the furnace, who is not at some moment of his work in graceful attitude. Such scenes of beauty lie at the scientific basis of aesthetics, which is not mere dainty ornament and luxury, but the expression of strength, utility, and health. Who ever saw an ungraceful smith at his anvil or an ungraceful carpenter at his bench? The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever. Work is man’s great prerogative and the real essential of art; it is only the loafer and the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the artist as he is to himself.

  Or I would ask the sculptor to go with me to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit or curb, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from the boat, or bending to the oar, and to carve them. The Greek sculptor asked for no higher subject for art than could be found on the running ground or in the gymnasium, and I recommend that plaster casts of the best Greek statuary be placed in all gymnasiums as models to correct that foolish impression that mental culture and athletics are always divorced.

  There is and has been in Europe one school of painters and sculptors whose favourite subjects in their work are kings and queens, and another whose talent and genius are employed in the reproduction of faces and forms on canvas and in marble of saints and kindred subjects in reality and ideality. Now, the Greeks sculptured gods and goddesses because they loved them, and the Middle Ages, saints and kings because they believed in them. But the saint is now hardly prominent enough a feature to become a motive for high art, and the day of kings and queens is gone; and so art should now sculpture the men who cover the world with a network of iron and the sea with ships. Thus a universal deference to the dignity of the kingdom of industry would do much to reconcile the workman with his lot, and end the strife and bridge the now-widening chasm between capital and labour.

  And so, as I said, find your subjects in everyday life: your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills and mountains; these are what your art should represent to you, for every nation can represent with prudence or with success only those things in which it delights, what you have with you and before you daily, dearest to your sight and to your heart, by the magic of your hand or the music of your lips you can gloriously express to others. All these commend themselves to the thoughtful student and artist.

  Not merely has nature given you the noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above all other countries has she given the materials to work in. The noble Titan forests out of which you build your houses should be an incentive to woodcarving, because the beautiful in art can be built only of wood well-carved. I wish to say little about your wooden houses, which are painted in the most oppressive colours I have ever seen, but it does seem to me that the adoption of the prevailing colour, white, with which you cover them, making the white walls appear as a sheet of white flame in the noonday sun, is a gross mistake when the barrenness of the houses is overcome so easily by woodcarving, which is the simplest of the decorative arts and the one in which the artist is least likely to go astray. In Switzerland, the little barefooted shepherd boy that blows a horn all day on the hills after some stray goats will return home and there carve in wood over his father’s door the figures of the birds and flowers he has seen, and beautifies the house with his art. What a Swiss boy can do well, an American boy can do twice as well, if he is properly taught to do it.

  There is nothing to my mind more coarse in conception, nothing more vulgar in execution, than modern jewellery. How easy for you to change all that, and to produce goldsmith’s work that would be a joy to all of us. In Europe we have not the quantity of gold and of silver that lies around you in your mountain hollows or strewn along your river beds, and our jewellers have not the opportunities of those of America as artificers of these metals; yet when I was in Leadville, the richest city for silver in the world, and heard of the most incredible quantity of silver taken from its m
ountains, I thought how sad it was that the silver should be made into flat, ugly dollars, useful perhaps to the artist—for dollars are very good in their way—but which should not be the end and aim of life. There should be some better record of it left in your history than the merchant’s panic and the ruined home. We discover, remember, often enough, how constantly the history of a great nation will live in and by its art; only a few thin wreaths of beaten gold are all that remain to tell us of the stately empire of Etruria; and while from the streets of Florence the noble knight and haughty duke have long since passed away, the gates which the simple goldsmith, Ghiberti, made for their pleasure still guard their lovely house of baptism, worthy still of the praise of Michelangelo, who called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.

  Be sure of one thing: we shall get no good work done unless we come face to face with the designer and dispense with all middlemen. We should not be content to have the salesman stand between us, who knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it. We shall know the workmen and they us, and they will understand the requirements of our state. When this is accomplished we shall then understand the nobility of all rational workmanship, and in this way we shall surround ourselves with beautiful things; for the good we get from art is not what we derive directly, but what improvement is made in us by being accustomed to the sight of all comely and gracious things.

  And art will do more than make our lives joyous and beautiful; it will become part of the new history of the world and a part of the brotherhood of man; for art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere between all countries might, if it could not overshadow the world with the silvery wings of peace, at least make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or minister as they do in Europe, for national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.