Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/19

 The exquisite armour of the knights, their swords and lances of perfect temper, the splendid and often humorous decorations of the stone and wood-work in the cathedrals, churches and abbeys, the illuminations of the missals, the paintings of the time, the manner in which beautiful designs and tracery nestled even in places where it might be thought that the human eye could rarely or never reach, nay, even such fragments of ordinary domestic furniture and utensils as have been preserved, all show that the art of the middle Ages, like the art of Greece, was something loved and cherished and made perfect for its own sake, that beauty welled up unbidden from the spontaneous flow of the ideas of the time. But just at this period of the fullest individual perfection the necessities of competition, arising out of economical changes in the conditions of labour which have yet to be traced, gradually turned the workman from the mediæval artist-craftsman into the mere artisan of the capitalist system, and almost entirely destroyed the attractiveness of his labour; so that when about the end of the 17th century the work-shop system of labour which had pushed out the gild system was struggling to perfect its speciality, the division of labour namely, wherein the unit of labour is not a single workman but a group, it found the romance, the soul, both of the higher and the decorative arts, gone though the commonplace or body of them still existed.

How then was the artist-craftsman thus turned into a mere artisan? How did the competition arise in such shape that not free rivalry in the creation of beauty but fierce antagonism in the greed for gain became the rule of