Page:Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome - William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax (1909).djvu/29

 Rh can do anything that does not tend towards the support of this slavery unless they act as conscious rebels against it. Men living under such conditions cannot produce social art or architecture (with all that grasp of the decorative cycle of the arts which that word means), or even desire to do so; they have lost all understanding of what it is; the mass of the people have nothing to do with Art architectural except so far as they are compelled to produce the sham of it mechanically as a trade finish to wares, so as to give them a higher marketable value. Space fails us here to contrast this condition of things with that of the epochs that produced Art, or to show the consequences of the difference. Suffice it to say once more that, except for the very few works produced by men of exceptional genius, which works the general public does not relish or understand in the least, Art is for the most part dormant.

In this brief review of the various phases of modern life,—its family relations, morality, religion, politics, and art,—the reader who has not yet studied socialism may see nothing but pessimism.