Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/432

ÆT. 48] from this lowest depth of savagery: employment which would foster their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that can give them this—art."

Two other passages from the same address are memorable. The first expresses with great lucidity and sympathy the mixture of admiration and impatient despair with which he regarded the work of the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting as it culminated in the art of Burne-Jones.

"The work which is the result of the division of labour, whatever else it can do, cannot produce art: which must, as long as the present system lasts, be entirely confined to such works as are the work from beginning to end of one man—pictures, independent sculpture, and the like. As to these, on the one hand they cannot fill the gap which the loss of popular art has made, nor can they, especially the more imaginative of them, receive the sympathy which should be their due. As things go, it is impossible for any one who is not highly educated to understand the higher kind of pictures. The aspect of this as regards people in general is to my mind much more important than that which has to do with the unlucky artist: but he also has some claim upon our consideration; and I am sure that this lack of the general sympathy of simple people weighs very heavily on him, and makes his work feverish and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse."

The other passage is a piece of straightforward practical advice to designers. In the artist, and therefore in his art, a certain moral quality was before all things essential: the qualities fatal to art were not technical: