formance of acts, conducive to civilisation, and to the ordinary uses of life. Of these, one is the homely sphere of simple utility. What is done, is done for some purpose of absolute necessity, or of immediate and passing use. What is produced, is produced with an almost exclusive regard to its value in exchange, to the market of the place and day. A dustman, for example, cannot be expected to move with the grace of a fairy; nor can his cart be constructed on the flowing lines of a Greek chariot of war. Not but that, even in this unpromising domain, Beauty also has her place. But it is limited, and may for the present purpose be left out of view. 16. Then there is, secondly, the lofty sphere of pure thought and its ministering organs, the sphere of Poetry and the highest Arts. Here, again, the place of what we term utility is narrow; and the production of the Beautiful, in one or other of its innumerable forms, is the supreme, if not the only, object. Now, I believe it to be undeniable, that in both of these spheres, widely separated as they are, the faculties of Englishmen, and the distinctions of England, have been of the very first order. In the power of economical production, she is at the head of all the nations of the earth. If in the Fine Arts, in Painting, for example, she must be content with a second place, yet in Poetry, which ranks even higher than Painting,—I hope I am not misled by national feeling when I say it, she may fairly challenge all the countries of Christendom, and no one of them, but Italy, can as yet enter into serious competition with the land of Shakespeare. 17. But, for one, I should admit that, while thus preeminent in the pursuit of pure beauty on the one side, and of unmixed utility on the other, she has been far less for tunate, indeed, for the most part she has been decidedly behind-hand, in that intermediate region, where Art is brought into contact with Industry, and where the pair may wed together. This is a region alike vast and diversified. Upwards, it embraces Architecture, an art which, while it affords the noblest scope for grace and grandeur, is also, or rather ought to be, strictly tied down to the purposes of convenience, and has for its chief end to satisfy one of the most imperative and elementary wants of man. Downwards, it extends to a very large proportion of the products of human industry. Some things, indeed, such as scientific instruments for example, are so determined by their purposes to some particular shape, surface, and materials, that even a Wedgwood might find in them little space for the application of his principles. But, while all the objects of trade and manufacture admit of fundamental differences in point of fitness and unfitness, probably the major part of them admit of fundamental differences also in point of Beauty or of Ugliness. 18. Utility is not to be sacrificed for Beauty, but they are generally compatible, often positively helpful to each other; and it may be safely asserted, that the periods, when the study of Beauty has been neglected, have usually been. marked not by a more successful pursuit of utility, but by a general decline in the energies of man. In Greece, the fountainhead of all instruction on these matters, the season of her highest historic splendour was also the summer of her classic poetry and art; and in contemplating her architecture, we scarcely know whether most to admire the acme of Beauty, or the perfect obedience to the laws of mechanical contrivance. The Arts of Italy were the offspring of her freedom, and with its death they languished and decayed. And let us again advert for a moment to the case of France. In the particular department of industrial art, France, perhaps, of all modern nations, has achieved the greatest distinction: and at the same time there is no country which has displayed, through a long course of ages, a more varied activity, or acquired a greater number of the most conspicuous titles to renown. 19. It would be easy to show that the reputation, which England has long enjoyed with the trading world, has been a reputation for cheap, and not for beautiful, production. In some great branches of manufacture, we were, until lately, dependent upon patterns imported from abroad in others, our works presented to the eye nothing but a dreary waste of capricious ugliness. Some of us remember with what avidity, thirty or forty years back, the ladies of England, by themselves and by their friends, smuggled, when they had a chance, every article of dress and ornament from France. That practice has now ceased. No doubt the cessation is to be accounted for by the simple and unquestionable fact that there are no longer any duties to evade: but also the preference itself has in some degree been modified, and that modification is referable to the great progress that has been made in the taste and discernment, which this country applies to industry. I have understood that, for some of the textile fabrics, patterns are now not imported only, but also exported to France in exchange. 20. Nor let us treat this as if it were a matter only of blame to our immediate forefathers, and of commendation to ourselves. It has not, I think, been sufficiently considered, what immense disadvantages were brought upon the country, as respects the application of Fine Art to Industry, by the great Revolutionary War. Not only. was the engrossing character of a deadly struggle un favourable to all such purposes, but our communion with the civilised world was placed under very serious restraint; and we were in great measure excluded from resort to those cities and countries, which possessed in the greatest abundance the examples bequeathed by former excellence. Nor could it be expected, that Kings and Governments, absorbed in a conflict of life and death, and dependent for the means of sustaining it on enormous and constant loans, could spare either thought or money from war and its imperious demands, for these, the most pacific among all the purposes of peace. At any rate, I take it to be nearly certain, that the period of the war was a period of general, and of progressive, depression, and even degradation, in almost every branch of industrial art. Nor is this the less true in substance, because Beauty may have had witnesses here and there, prophesying, as it were, in sackcloth on her behalf. I apprehend that, for example, the fabrics of your own manufacture were, in point of taste and grace, much inferior to what they had been at a former time; that the older factories had in some cases died out, in others, such as Worcester, for instance, they had declined and that, whereas Wedgwood is said to have exported five-sixths of what he made, we not only had lost, forty or fifty years ago, any hold such as he had obtained upon the foreign market, but we owed the loss, in part at least, and in great part, to our marked declension in excellence and taste. 21. I submit, however, that, considering all which England has done in the sphere of pure Beauty on the one side, and in the sphere of cheap and useful manufacture on the other, it not only is needless, but would be irrational, to suppose that she lies under any radical or incurable incapacity for excelling also in that intermediate sphere, where the two join hands, and where Wedgwood gained the distinctions which have made him, in the language of Mr. Smiles, the "illustrious" Wedgwood. I do not think that Wedgwood should be regarded as a strange phenomenon, no more native to us and ours than a meteoric stone from heaven; as a happy accident, without example, and without return. Rare indeed is the appearance of such men in the history of industry: single perhaps it may have been among ourselves, for whatever the merits of others, such in particular as Mr. Minton, yet I for one should scruple to place any of them in the same class with Wedgwood; no one is like him, no one, it may almost be said, is even second to him; 66 but the line on which he moved is a line, on which every one, engaged in manufacture of whatever branch, may move after him, and like him. 22. And, as it is the wisdom of man universally to watch against his besetting errors, and to strengthen himself in his weakest points, so it is the study and following of Wedgwood, and of Wedgwood's principles, which may confidently be recommended to our producers as the specific cure for the specific weakness of the ordinary products of English industry.* Of imagination, fancy, taste, of the * A friend has pointed out to me, since this Address was delivered, the following comparison between Goethe and Wedgwood, by a countryman of the former. As a countryman of Wedgwood, I should hardly have dared it but I accept it, as most apt and just, from the competent and dispassionate witness who tenders it. Novalis (Fragmente, Aesthetik und Literatur) thus writes: "Goethe ist ganz praktischer Dichter. Er ist in seinen Werken, was der Engländer in seinen Waaren ist höchst einfach, nett, bequem und dauerhaft. Er hat in der deutschen Literatur das gethan, was Wedgwood in der englischen Kunstwelt gethan hat." |