Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us very
well done; never do we dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
but it were better if it were not done at all; and the artist is still
to us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in
the unnatural difficulty of his performance.
Waste or Creation?
The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as
it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society,
and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many
part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as
slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the
quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in
any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which
encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come
to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he
predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of
our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and
commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to
civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one
at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what
must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of
labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--
Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I
feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is
undergone for the making of useless things.
Pages:
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118