The great mass of people now have a belief that ornament
is necessarily beauty, that, without it, nothing can be beautiful. But
ornament is often only added ugliness, like a wen on a man's face. It is
always added ugliness when it is machine-made, and when it is put on to
hide cheapness of material and faults of design and workmanship.
Unfortunately, it does hide these things from us; we accept ornament as
a substitute for that beauty which can only come of good design,
material, and workmanship; and we do not recognize these things when we
see them, except in objects like motor-cars, which we prefer plain
because we do unconsciously enjoy their real beauty.
So, in the matter of ornament, we need to make a self-denying
ordinance; not because ornament is necessarily bad--it is the natural
expression of the artist's superfluous energy and delight--but because
we ourselves cannot be trusted with ornament, as a drunkard cannot be
trusted with strong drink. We must learn to see things plain before we
can see them at all, or enjoy them for their own real qualities and not
for what we think we see in them. A man whose taste is for bad poetry
can only improve it by reading good, plain prose. He must become
rational before he can enjoy the real beauties of literature. And so we
need to become rational before we can enjoy art, whether in pictures or
in objects of use. The unreason of our painting has the same cause as
the unreason of our objects of use; and the cause is in us, not in the
artist.
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