By
Members of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society
With a Preface
By William Morris
London
RIVINGTON, PERCIVAL, & CO.
1893{v}
The papers that follow this need no explanation, since they are directedtowards special sides of the Arts and Crafts. Mr. Crane has put forwardthe aims of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society as an ExhibitionSociety, therefore I need not enlarge upon that phase of this book. ButI will write a few words on the way in which it seems to me we ought toface the present position of that revival in decorative art of which ourSociety is one of the tokens.
And, in the first place, the very fact{vi} that there is a "revival" showsthat the arts aforesaid have been sick unto death. In all such changesthe first of the new does not appear till there is little or no lifeleft in the old, and yet the old, even when it is all but dead, goes onliving in corruption, and refuses to get itself put quietly out of theway and decently buried. So that while the revival advances and doessome good work, the period of corruption goes on from worse to worse,till it arrives at the point when it can no longer be borne, anddisappears. To give a concrete example: in these last days there aremany buildings erected which (in spite of our eclecticism, our lack of atraditional style) are at least well designed and give pleasure to theeye; nevertheless, so hopelessly hideous and vulgar is general buildingthat persons of taste find themselves regretting the brown brick boxwith its{vii} feeble and trumpery attempts at ornament, which characterisesthe style of building current at the end of the last and beginning ofthis century, because there is some style about it, and even some meritof design, if only negative.
The position which we have to face then is this: the lack of beauty inmodern life (of decoration in the best sense of the word), which in theearlier part of the century was unnoticed, is now recognised by a partof the public as an evil to be remedied if possible; but by far thelarger part of civilised mankind does not feel that lack in the least,so that no general sense of beauty is extant which would force us intothe creation of a feeling for art which in its turn would force usinto taking up the dropped links of tradition, and once more producinggenuine organic art. Such art as we have is not the work of the mass of{viii}craftsmen unconscious of any definite style, but producing beautyinstinctively; conscious rather of the desire to turn out a creditablepiece of work than of any aim towards positive beauty. That is theessential motive power towards art in past ages; but our art is the workof a small minority composed of educated persons, fully conscious oftheir aim of producing beauty, and distinguished from the great body ofworkmen by the possession of that aim.
I do not, indeed, ignore the fact that there is a school of artistsbelonging to this decade who set forth that beauty is not an essentialpart of art; which they consider rather as an instrument for thestatement of fact, or an exhibition of the artist's intellectualobservation and skill of hand. Such a school would seem at first sightto have an interest of its own as a genuine traditional development{ix} ofthe art