William Morris

Art and Labour

I must first tell you what I mean by the words Art and Labour; and first, by art I mean something
wider than is usually meant by the word, something which I fear it is not very easy to explain to
some of you born and bred in this great manufacturing city, and living under conditions which I
will say would have made art impossible to be if men had always lived so.
Well you must understand that by art, I do not mean only pictures and sculpture, nor only these
and architecture, that is beautiful building properly ornamented; these are only a portion of art,
which comprises, as I understand the word a great deal more; beauty produced by the labour of
man both mental and bodily, the expression of the interest man takes in the life of man upon the
earth with all its surroundings, in other words the human pleasure of life is what I mean by art.
This clearly is a serious subject to consider, and should by no means be treated as though no one
but a professional artist could understand it or deal with it: we are all interested in it whether we
know it or not: because unless we have this peculiarly human pleasure of life we cannot be
happy as men: and men cannot be happy as beasts, which would be the next best thing to being
happy as men: they can only have such happiness as incomplete men can have; incomplete that is
to say degraded men; which happiness arising as it does from mere ignorance and habit is at best
ignoble and scarce to be desired.
So much by what I mean by the word art; now as to the word Labour without which art could not
exist: understand then that the labour I am thinking of is the labour that produces things, the
labour of the classes called the working-classes; I am not thinking of what one might call
accidental labour, that for example of the soldier, the thief, or the stockjobber, but I say of the
maker of things: I would say of goods but I am sorry to say I cannot say that just at present since
the question whether or not goods are always the result of this labour of the workman is just what
I have to deal with.
Now you must know the questions I have to ask and try to answer tonight are these: what are the
relations of the Labour of man on the earth the labour which produces all the means of human
life to Art which is the pleasure of man living on the earth? or rather I must expand that question
and say what have been, what are, and what should be the relations of Art to Labour?
Now further in order to let you know at once in what spirit I am speaking to you, and, to avoid
anything like mystification I may as well say from the first that I in common with a good many
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others of the educated class am quite discontented with the condition of the Arts under the
present system of labour, and that this discontent is what brings me before you tonight. But I
differ from some of those who are as discontented with the present state of the arts in one
important point: namely that they think that the matter is past hope and beyond remedy, whereas
I believe that there is a remedy for that state of the arts which so arouses my discontent, and that
the remedy lies in improving the condition of those who produce or ought to produce art, or the
pleasure of life, that is to say of the people, as those who actually work with their hands are most
properly and accurately called: let me repeat this statement of my hope, the remedy for that
sickness of the arts which I in common with many others feel so deeply must be the giving of a
new life to the people.
Now in answering the question what were the relations of art to labour, I must of necessity turn
back to past times, and even times a very long while passed; and you must believe that I do so
with the distinct purpose of showing you where lies the hope for the future, and not in mere
empty regret for the days which can never come again. Let us then as briefly as we can glance at
the history of art and labour in very early days. Yet we will not go back further than a time when
art was in a very flourishing and highly developed state, the days of the classical civilization of
Greece. From that time until now the labour of the people has been exercised under three
conditions; chattel slavery, serfdom, and wage-earning. The two first conditions have passed
away from civilized communities, the third wage-earning remains still in force.
In the days when the art of ancient Greece was flourishing, all society was founded on chattel
slavery: agriculture and the industrial arts were carried on by men who were bought and sold like
beasts of burden, and as a consequence all handicrafts were looked down on with contempt, and
what of art went with them was kept in the strictest subjection to the intellectual arts, which were
the work of the free citizens in other words of a privileged oligarchy: in most times this would
have been a fatal obstacle to the healthy development of art taken as a whole: but in those days
the world of civilization was young: the Greek race was beautiful, vigorous, and highly gifted;
and had an intense thirst for the knowledge of facts; furthermore the climate was genial, and did
not call on men to provide elaborate shelter for themselves, or tempt them into effeminacy or
luxury, ever the worst of all the foes of art; lastly though as I have said there was a world of
slaves below that oligarchy of the free citizens, those citizens were free from the petty individual
and family selfishness which in modern times habit has made a second nature to most of us; their
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lives and hopes were to them but a part of the life and hope of the city or community to which
they belonged, and they reverenced it with a true religious devotion.
From this beauty, simplicity of life, and greatness and unity of aim sprang up that glorious art of
Greece whose influence all civilization feels yet, and will feel for ever; and yet I must ask you to
remember that though under these circumstances it was the rule rather than the exception for the
free citizen to love and understand the higher forms of intellectual art, there was scarce any art of
the people: the slavish handicrafts of the time produced things which were certainly not ugly,
nay, which may in a sense be considered beautiful; but there was no delight of life in them, they
were treated as works of the lower arts wrought by the lower classes, in those days called slaves.
Meantime to the cultivated Greek citizen there seemed nothing wrong or burdensome in chattel
slavery, and all that it gave birth to: to him it was part of the natural order of things and the
greatest minds of the day could see no possibility of its ever ceasing.
I can imagine what a free citizen of the time of Pericles, a cultivated Athenian gentleman would
have said, if the question had been pressed on him of the right or wrong of keeping his fellowman in subjection to the supposed necessities of a few: he would have formed an answer readily
enough to extinguish any tendency towards revolutionary ideas, and to strengthen his conviction
that the order of things under which he lived was eternal: I think he might have said: "In the first
place it is impossible to do away with chattel slavery which is obviously founded on the moral
nature of man: but apart from that, a society founded on the equality of freedom would be poor
in all the elements of change and interest which make life worth living: such a change would
injure art and destroy individuality of character by taking away due stimulus to exertion; at best
in a State where all were free, there would be nothing but a dull level of mediocrity."
So might our citizen have argued, not without the agreement of many cultivated men of the
present day, who, I observe, do think, and not unnaturally, that the cultivated gentleman of
Greece or England is such a precious and finished fruit of civilization, that he is worth any
amount of suffering, injustice, or brutality in the mass of mankind below him.
But also I must say that our Greek gentleman might sustain his argument in favour of chattel
slavery in a manner rather embarrassing to us of these days of progress and wide-spread political
rights. For he might say: "Are you so sure that you will better the condition of the slave by
freeing him? at present it is [in] the interest of the owner to feed him and keep him in health: nay
if the owner be a benevolent or good-tempered man he will even do his best towards making his
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slaves happy for his own pleasure: but I can conceive of your state of free labour as leaving the
greater part of your citizens free indeed - free to starve: I can imagine a state of things in which
the sour faces of underfed and over-worked wretches, would have no chance of making their
masters, the rich, uncomfortable since the rich would do their best to forget their very existence
and at least would steadily deny the fact of their misery." "Nay believe me," our gentleman
would say, "you had better trust for the amelioration of Society to the humanizing influence of
the philosophical simplicity of the noble and free citizen of our glorious state, which, as you well
know, in spite of all the tales of the poets, is the real God which we worship, and which we may
hope may prove to be immortal."
Thus might our Greek gentleman have argued, mixing up things true and false, reasonable and
unreasonable, into a sedative to his conscience: thus might he have gone to work to elevate the
rules of successful tyranny into irrevocable laws of nature.
But what followed? This; the worship of the city found its due expression at last in the growth
and domination of Rome, the mightiest of cities, whose iron hand crushed out the bickerings of
ambitious clans and individuals, and cast over the world of civilization the chains of enforced
federation under the rule of the tax gatherer: at last this system took the form of an inflexible
central authority idealized into a religion and symbolized in the person of the emperor, the
master of the world enthroned in an Italian city; such was the outcome of the worship of the city,
that first took form in so-called free Greece.
Under this Roman tyranny chattel slavery still made good its claim to be considered the effect of
eternally natural laws for some time to come; although the condition of the slaves, now largely
working for the profit of the great Roman landowners was more dangerous to the state than it
had been under Greek civilization.
But time passed, and the so-called eternal order of things changed again: the hideous greed of the
capitalist landowners of Rome, whose slaves were in a worse condition than even the agricultural
labourers of Great Britain are today, discounted the fertility of Italy: the hugh, half-starved
population of the city of Rome itself depended on supplies of foreign corn for their bare
subsistence, and the enervating influence of rich men, had sapped all public virtue even to the
extent of destroying military qualities so that foreign war made the foreign supply of food
precarious; Rome was at last in an obviously dangerous condition; and at last the change came
again; this time a tremendous one, and involving a change in the conditions of labour.
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The huge crowd of starving slaves in whose minds a `revolutionary Eastern Creed' was fast
planting ideas quite foreign to classical civilization were by no means bound by the religion of
city-worship, which had once put such irresistible might into the hands of the Roman legionaries:
on all sides they recruited the bands of brigands and pirates whose exploits became so familiar to
the civilization of later imperial Rome: and they were always present as an element of disorder
ready to the hand of the foreign invader. Thus hunger, the child of class greed, did its work
within the empire, while without it hunger in another form pressed on the tribes of so-called
barbarians that surrounded the empire and so allied itself as a destroyer to the corruption of its
internal society: the tribes of the north and the east fell upon Rome, and found no serious
resistance since as aforesaid the gross individualism of a corrupt society had eaten out all public
spirit.
Thus attacked on all sides by slaves, Christians, and barbarians, classical civilization fell, and to
the eyes of all people then, and of most historians since mere confusion took its place, from
which as people used to think grew up in a haphazard way the collection of independent states
which form modern Europe.
But the new order of things was really forming under this confusion; the manner of its formation
has become very obscure, and in fact little emerges from that obscurity save the relics of the art
which was produced at the time, and which bears with it evidence of a change in the condition of
labour which can be read by the light of the wider knowledge which we have of the art and
labour of later days. I must ask you to allow me to say a few words about that art, which perhaps
may be difficult for some of you to follow who are not familiar with the art of past ages; but
which I will at least clear from all mere technicalities.
When Rome became mistress of the civilized world, she adopted as far as she could the arts of
conquered Greece: but those arts had by that time already fallen from their best days, nor was the
adoption of them by a people far from sympathetic with them likely to inspire new life into them:
the tendency therefore of the purely intellectual arts, those taken by Rome from Greece, was ever
downward: but influences, whose origin is most obscure, were at work in Italy which produced
forms of art on the less intellectual side which had little or nothing to do with Greece: from these
sprang the architecture of the civilized world: now in the earlier part of the decline of Rome that
architecture shared the general sickness of the arts and changed indeed, but ever into something
worse than before; its changes seemed at any rate to be towards death and not life: it still
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however retained a certain majesty of form if any new spirit could have breathed life into its
form.
Now that new spirit came to it in the midst of the confusion and disgrace I have been speaking
of, and its origins partakes of the obscurity that veils most things worthy of consideration in the
period that followed the degradation of Rome; the period during which Constantinople took the
semblance of the domination which Rome once really had.
But the spirit which was to breathe new life into the dead classical forms and [which] produced
the new art which almost suddenly blossoms in the days of the Byzantine emperors, and bears
with it something which the old classical art never had; that something is the very breath of life
to it: and that something is nothing less than the first signs of freedom: this art neither expresses
the exclusive, rigid, rational intellect of Greek art, nor the exclusive, academical pedantry of
Roman art, but it has another quality which makes us forgive it all its rudeness, timidity, and
unreason, that quality is its wide sympathy: it has become popular art, the art of the people.
Now I feel sure that whatever obscurity may enwrap the origins of this Byzantine art, this mother
of Gothic art, this quality is really a token of the labour which produced it, having thrown off
some of its chains at least; and I believe that what follows in history bears me out in this view. It
seems to me that this new art was the token and effect of the rise of that condition of labour
which may be briefly described as serfdom struggling towards freedom by means of cooperation
for the protection of trade and handicraft.
Serfdom is the condition of labour in the Early Middle Ages, as chattel slavery was that of the
Classical period: the chattel-slave, who was absolutely the property of his master was fed by him
and kept by him in just such a condition of comfort as suited the convenience of the master.
Sometimes as in the days of the huge Roman farms or Latifundia, the master hoping for
exorbitant profit, fed the slaves so low that he was obliged to allow them to supplement their
short commons by the additional industry of brigandage; but generally the master would find it
better to keep his slaves in fair condition.
So much for the slave; now the serf on the other hand had to perform certain definite services for
his feudal lord, generally to give him so many days work in the year, and for the rest of his time
was free to work for himself and feed himself.

So doing he was living in harmony with the general arrangement of Society in the Middle Ages,
a time in which every man had legal, definite, personal duties to perform to his superior, and
could in turn claim certain degrees of help and protection from him.
This was the idea of the hierarchical Society of the Middle Ages; which was founded on a priori
views of divine government, and under which every man had his due place which, theoretically,
he could not alter or step out of: personal duties for all, personal rights for all according to their
divinely appointed station was the theory of Society in the Middle Ages, which took the place of
that of classical times in which indeed all the citizens were equally parts of the supreme city and
lived in her and for her, but were served by men turned into mere beasts of burden.
Now it seems to me quite natural that this Medieval or hierarchical system should have been
looked upon as eternal and inevitable with at least as much confidence as that which preceded it.
But revolution was in store for it no less than for the classical system. For as the half-starved
slave of the Roman latifundia was driven to strive to better himself by brigandage first and then
by service with the invaders; so the medieval serf was driven by the compulsion of labouring to
feed himself after his compulsory work was done, into trying to better his condition altogether:
he began at last to try to slip his neck out of his lord's collar and become a free man: and this
struggle resulted in combination for freedom among the workers.
Apart from the religious houses, which in a way afforded protection to labour, and even gave
working-men a chance of rising out of their caste on condition of their accepting the
ecclesiastical yoke; apart from these combinations of ecclesiastics, there arose in the Middle
Ages other bodies which grew to be powerful and far-reaching: these bodies are called the
guilds.
The tendency of the Germanic tribes towards cooperation and community of life, a survival
probably from former days, began to show itself quite early in the Middle Ages. In England even
before the Norman conquest this tendency began to draw the workmen and traders into definite
association: the guilds which were thus formed were at first of the nature of benefit societies:
from this they grew into what are called the Merchant Guilds, bodies, that is, formed for mutual
protection in trading; and lastly these developed the craft-guilds or associations for the protection
and regulation of handicrafts.
All these guilds aimed at freeing the individual from the domination and protection of the feudal
lord, and substituting for that domination the authority and mutual protection of the associated
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guild-brethren; or to put it in another way the object was to free labour from the power of
individual members of the feudal hierarchy, and to supplant their authority by that of
corporations, which should themselves be recognized as members of that hierarchy, out of which
indeed the medieval mind could not step.
Of course all this took a long time, and was by no means carried out without very rough work; as
the merchant guilds resisted tooth and nail, especially in Germany, the changes which gave the
craft-guilds their position. In the process of the struggle the merchant guilds became for the most
part in England at least the corporations of the towns, and the craft-guilds fully took their place
as to the organization of labour: by the beginning of the 14th century the change was complete,
and the craft guilds were the masters of all handicrafts: all workmen were forced to belong to the
guild of the craft they followed.
For a time, only too short a time, the constitution of these guilds was thoroughly democratic:
every worker apprenticed to a craft was sure if he could satisfy the due standard of excellence to
become a master; there were no mere journeymen.
This state of things however did not last long: for as the population of the towns grew because of
the freeing of the serf field-labourers, these latter began to crowd into the craft guilds, and the
masters who at first were simple, complete workmen helped by their apprentices or incomplete
workmen now began to be employers of labour. They were privileged members of the guild and
besides their privileged apprentices employed journeymen, who though forced to affiliation with
the guild did not become masters or privileged in it.
Now this, which was the first appearance of the so-called free-workman, or wage-earner in
modern Europe was at the time felt as a trouble: some attempt was made by the journeymen
themselves to form guilds of journeymen beneath the craft-guilds just as the latter had done
beneath the merchant-guilds: in this revolt against privilege they were unsuccessful, and the craft
guilds went on getting more and more aristocratic so to speak, although at first the power of their
privileged members over the journeymen was limited by laws made in favour of the latter.
The labour of the Middle Ages therefore was carried on amidst a struggle, partly an unconscious
one, for freedom from the arbitrary rule of aristocratic privileges: before looking at the results of
this struggle, let us briefly consider the relations of art to labour during this period of the fullydeveloped Middle Ages.

From all we can learn of the condition of labour in England during this time, and the materials
are ample, we are driven to the conclusion, that however rude the general conditions of life may
have been; the struggle for livelihood among the workers was far less hard than it is at present;
considering the prices of necessaries at the time the earnings both of labourers and skilled
artisans were far higher than they are now: I repeat that for the workers life was easier, though
general life was rougher than it is in our days: that is there was more approach to real equality of
condition in spite of the arbitrary distinctions of noble and gentle: churl and villein.
But further as the distribution of wealth in general was more equal than now so in particular was
that of art or the pleasure of life; all craftsmen had some share in it to begin with: this is
illustrated by the fact that the pay of those who superintended labour, such persons as we should
now call builders, architects, and the like, was very little higher than that of the workmen under
them: nor were those who were doing what we should now call more intellectual work, artists we
should now call them, paid more than ordinary craftsmen; the knowledge of art, and the practice
of producing it were assumed to be the rule among craftsmen, and really were so.
The system of exchange also was simple: there was little competition in the market, goods were
made equal to the demand which was easy to ascertain: there was no work for mere middlemen;
people worked in the main for livelihood and not for profit: so that the worker had but one
master, the public, and he had full control over his own material, tools, and time; in other words
he was an artist.
Now it was this condition of labour which produced the art of the Middle Ages, and nothing else
could have produced it: people have sometimes supposed that the motive power for it was
religious enthusiasm, or the spirit of chivalry, whatever that may be, but such theories are now
exploded: history has been illuminated since then by careful research: we have counted our
forefathers' pots and kettles and chairs and pictures, we know what their clothes and their houses
were [like]; we have read not only their books, but their family letters, their bills and their
contracts, in short we have followed them from the church, the battlefield, and the palace to their
houses and workshops and tilled fields, and we find that these men of the same blood as
ourselves, speaking the same tongue, connected with us by an apparently unbroken chain of
laws, traditions, and customs, were yet amazingly different from ourselves, far more so than any
religion, and spirit of chivalry, romance, or what not could have made them.

And I am sorry to say that one of the main differences between us is that whereas when goods
are made now they are always made ugly unless they are specially paid for as things containing
beauty, in which case they are not uncommonly uglier still, in the Middle Ages everything that
man made was beautiful, just as everything that nature makes is always beautiful; and I must
again impress upon you the fact that this was because they were made mainly for use, instead of
mainly to be bought and sold as is now the case. The beauty of the handicrafts of the Middle
Ages came from this, that the workman had control over his material, tools, and time.
I must now go back to the condition of the workman as we left it at the period when the guilds
were beginning to be corrupted by the beginnings of capitalism at the end of the 14th century: I
must say first that you must remember however that the distinction between the privileged
guildsmen and their journeymen was after all an arbitrary one; the master craftsmen all worked:
there were no such people as `manufacturers' them [or] `organizers of labour'; that is people paid
very heavily to do nothing but look on while other people work: nor was there any division of
labour in the workshop. Throughout the 15th century also the condition of labour remained much
the same as in the 14th indeed wages rose on the whole throughout that century.
But somewhat early in the 16th century things began to change seriously; the Middle Ages were
coming to an end: the body of men available for journeymen or `free workmen', working for the
profit of a master increased greatly and suddenly.
Commerce was spreading all over Europe which was shaking off the roughness and ignorance of
the Middle Ages: America had been discovered also, and Commerce was tending ever westward;
Europe was the master now and Asia and the East the servant. In these islands the bonds of
personal feudal service had been much shaken by the wholesale slaughter of gentlemen in the
Wars of the Roses, and the landlords impoverished by that long struggle saw before them a
chance of recovering their position by throwing themselves into the market of new-born
Commerce.
Then began in England the great change, the death of the Middle Ages and Feudalism: hitherto
men had produced for a livelihood, they now began to produce for profit; in England the raising
of raw material was the first step towards this profit-grinding, and it led as a matter of course to
depriving the yeomen and workmen of the land; it was more profitable to raise wool for the
foreign market than grain for home consumption, sheep were more profitable animals than men.

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It was not difficult even at the time to see the danger of this step; in Henry VII's time legislation
tried to check it, but the impulse toward Commerce was too strong: force and fraud applied
without scruple soon did their work, and England from being a country of tillage interspersed
with common land for the pasturage of the people's livestock, became a great grazing country
raising sheep for the production of wool for a profit.
Two representative Englishmen have left in their writings full tokens of how bitterly this
spoliation of the people was felt: Sir Thomas More, one of the most high-minded and cultivated
gentleman of his period, a Catholic and a martyr to his honesty in that cause was one: Hugh
Latimer, a yeoman's son, the very type of rough English honesty, a protestant, and a martyr to his
honesty in that cause was another: both say much the same thing and in words which leave the
deepest impression on those who have read them, [and] give a terrible picture of the results of
Commercial greed in their days: it is no idle word to say that such men never die; and now once
more it seems as though the axe of More and the faggot of Latimer had still left their spirits with
us to produce fruit which they in their life-time, no not even More himself could ever dream
would come to pass.
Henceforth Commerce went merrily on her destructive way: the direct spoliation of the people
by driving them off the land was followed by their indirect spoliation in the form of the seizure
of the lands of the religious houses: the pretext being (if any was thought necessary) that they no
longer performed the public function for which they were held, and so were incapable of being
used for any public function, and therefore had better be stolen by private persons.
This fresh robbery of the people apart from the hideous brutality with which it was carried out
had on more than one side woeful enough immediate results; but as to our subject the thing to be
noted about it is that it added to the army of mere have-nothings already produced by the driving
off the people from the land.
So that in one way or other there had been created a vast body of people who had no property
except the power of labour in their own bodies, which in consequence they were obliged to sell
to anybody who would buy on the terms of keeping them alive to work. Thus was established the
class of free labourers, of whom our Athenian friend warned us, men who were (and are) free - to
starve.
Well this was the material ready for the use of the plague of profit-mongering politely called
Commerce, then newly let loose on the world: at first the material was rather embarrassing by its
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abundance, and was hanged out of the way by the thousand by Mr. Froude's pious hero Henry
VIII and other law makers of the time. However things shook down again at last, and the market
for labour, that is men's bodies and souls, adjusted itself: in Elizabeth's reign a poor law was
enacted to take the place of the almsgiving of the monasteries, and the new order of things was
established founded on Commerce, and tending ever more and more toward complete freedom of
competition in the markets of the world, among the various manufacturers, now so called and
their slaves the free workmen.
Thus had the struggles of labour to free itself from feudal arbitrariness succeeded: feudalism was
overthrown, and commercialism was taking the empty place in its old throne.
The worker had entered into his kingdom then? all was straightforward justice and a good life for
him from henceforth?
Strange to say not at all; the worker was the worker still, starved, despised, oppressed: a new
class had been formed, that was all: it had grown up out of those elements of freed serf, corporate
trader, privileged guild-craftsman, and yeoman and become a middle-class, which grew speedily
in wealth and power, being fed by the very misery created by the dawn of the age of profitgrinding, which also produced the middle-class itself.
Well certainly they were a stout and vigorous set of men, those early middle-class people, their
lives interesting enough, dear to the romance writer and the poet. Keen scholars, excellent poets,
not bad musicians, the bravest pirates and among the greatest liars whom the world has ever
seen: rough-handed and unscrupulous they pushed on against privilege with all the old traditions
behind them of men who were struggling under different circumstances and with different aims,
and probably were no wise conscious of that difference of aim: so they struggled and at last
towards the middle of the 17th century they began to aim at supremacy in the state and not
merely freedom for Commerce.
As to the condition of the free workers that had grown up under them it was poor enough, and
the very character of the labour they did was changing: here and there indeed the form of the old
individual work of the middle ages survived, though not for the benefit of the worker; but
generally division of labour had begun under the rule of the capitalist masters: the men were
collected into large workshops, their simple machines such as the loom, the lathe, and the potter's
wheel though not altered in principle were lightened and improved: the employment of labour for
profit necessarily stimulated the organization of the division of labour, which reached at last such
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a pitch that an intelligent man who once would have schemed and carried out a piece of work
from first to last, was now forced to concentrate his skill and strength on a very small portion of
that work; he was turned into a machine for the cheapening of market-wares.
As to the art which was produced in the early period of commercialism a very few words will
suffice: in places where goods were turned out in a kind of domestic manner popular art lingered
in a rude form, but was a mere survival of medievalism; elsewhere under the direct grip of profitmongering it kept on sinking, and subsisted almost wholly on attempts to perpetuate the products
of the great minds of the specially individualist artists of the beginning of the [16th] century:
division of labour extinguished even this poor remnant as it advanced step by step, and as more
and more those who produced anything with a claim to beauty were divided into workmen who
were not artists, and artists who were not workmen.
The 18th century saw the perfection of the division of labour system which was begun in the
17th and therewith for a time at least the end of all art worth considering: all goods now were
made primarily for the market, and all so-called ornamental art had become a mere incident of
these market wares, something which was to help force people to buy them, a thing which would
be bestowed or withheld according to the exigencies of profit: whereas once the beauty which
went with all men's handiwork was bestowed as ungrudgingly as nature bestows her beauty: the
workman could not choose but give it, his withholding it would have meant his depriving himself
of a pleasure. But now you see he had no voice in settling whether he should have any pleasure
in his work; he had become a `free-workman', and therefore it seems a machine at the beck and
call of the master who was grinding a profit out of him.
So much for popular art, that is of real art: there was a sort of gentleman's art left, done entirely
by `artists' so-called and showing sometimes in the best of the pictures painted at the period a
certain flippant cleverness as to invention and an amount of low manual dexterity in the
execution which made the said pictures quite good enough for their purpose, the amusement
namely of idle fine gentlemen and ladies.
As to this artists' art you may expect me to say something of its exploits and its prospects today;
but I won't say much: I can't help thinking that it does produce something worthier than was
turned out in the 18th century; but I know that if it does, it is because of the revolutionary spirit
working in the brains of men, who at least will not accept conventional lies in anything with
which they are busied: and whatever it is I fear it produces little effect on the mass of the people,
13

who at present, since popular art lies crushed under money bags, have no share in the pleasure of
life either in their work or their play.
Now if I shared the opinion of those who think that art is a thing which can be produced by the
conscious efforts of a few cultivated men apart from the work of the great mass of men, if I
thought it was a thing that could be shuffled on and off according to convenience like Sunday
religion and family morality, if this were my view of the matter I should not have another word
to say; but as I think pretty much the contrary of this I must trouble you with a few more words.
As far as history has gone we have come to the end of art properly speaking, but for labour there
was another change in store. The Division of labour system as perfected in the 18th century
produced an enormous amount of goods for the markets, but the markets kept on growing
beneath the adventurous spirit of profit-making, and mere machine workmen could not work fast
enough to satisfy their demands; it became necessary to supplement their labour by the invention
of machines, which did not fail to take place and labour once more entered into a new phase: for
all the greater industries the workshop with its groups of workmen was turned into the factory
which is one huge group, one machine in fact of which each individual workman is only an
inconsiderable part, and in which the skill of the individual even his subdivided skill as a
division-of-labour workman is supplanted by the social organization of the whole group.
This last great revolution in labour was effected in the most reckless manner, and consequently
entailed terrible sufferings on the workers. Before it though England had had her share in the
general increase of commerce, she was still in the main a quiet agricultural country; 50 years
passed and she became what she is now, or at least what she has been till quite lately, the
workshop of the world.
How do we stand now as regards the present and the future? is the question we have to ask
ourselves, and I plead with you to ask yourself the question in a wide and generous spirit, and not
to be contented with an answer which will put an aim before you scarce worth aiming at. There
are some who will tell you that we are going on very well now on our present lines, and that the
condition of the people has much improved during the last fifty years; and they imply by this that
the progress will be steady and uninterrupted on its present lines. Now remember that 50 years
will carry us back to the time when the utter confusion caused by the revolution of the great
machine industries had scarcely begun even to settle down: shall we then make it a matter of
exultation that we have improved a little on the very darkest period of the history of labour in
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England? Is the improvement, I say, from that welter of misery of which the Chartist revolt was a
token to be made a standard of our future hopes; and on the other hand can we venture to hope in
the face of all that is going on in all our great centres of labour today that this improvement will
be steady and permanent unless some real change from the root upwards is made in Society? I
say no with all the emphasis I can.
Do not let us fix our standard of endeavour by the misery which has been but rather by the
happiness that might be: do not let us suppose that labour has seen its last revolution: if it has I
do not quite know what to say in favour of civilization but I know something to say against it;
this namely that for the mass of mankind it has destroyed art, or the pleasure of life.
I have been trying to show you how owing to the rise of producing for profit the workman has
been robbed of one pleasure which as long as he is a workman is perhaps his most important one:
pleasure in his daily work: he is now only part of a machine, and has indeed little more than his
weariness at the end of his day's work to show him that he has worked at all in the day. Beauty,
the pleasure of life then has nothing to do with his work: has he not some compensatory pleasure
in his life outside his work? Where does it lie then? In his home? Why in these manufacturing
districts not even a rich man can have a decent dwelling, much less a poor one, since it has been
thought a little thing to turn the rivers into filth and put out the sun, and make the earth squalid
with the bricken encampments, I won't call them houses, in which those who make our wealth
live such lives as they can live: yet I have heard that even your hovels in the manufacturing
districts are better than our London ones, where a nation of the poor dwells beside a nation of the
rich, and both are supposed to call each other fellow countrymen.
Or does leisure compensate the workman for his dreary toil? not what I should call leisure,
though for a middle-class man I work pretty hard; not sufficient and unanxious leisure; such
leisure as he has, the workman has pretty much to steal; he knows that competition will punish
him and his wife and children for every hour's holiday he takes.
Or high wages? if indeed they could be any good to a man condemned to live all his days in a
toiling hell. No, his wages can't be high; as long as profit has to be made out of his labour they
must be kept down to the point which a long series of struggles has made him think just
necessary to live on; and mind you in spite of all past struggles he can't depend on keeping his
wages up even to their present level.

15

Shall he be recompensed by education then? Some people think he can be: I do not. I wish him
educated indeed in order that he may be discontented; more education than that he cannot have
as things go - why education means reasonable, pleasant work, and beautiful surroundings, and
unanxious leisure, these are essential parts of it.
Quite plainly therefore I say that the modern workman, the poor man can have no art that is none
of the beauty of life: his work will not produce it, and he has neither money to buy it with or
leisure and education, that is to say refinement to relish it.
I fear that there are some people who will say that all this doesn't matter at all: they think, the
man is well enough fed, housed, clothed, educated to make him a good workman - for making
profits for other people, and he is contented with his lot - as yet. After all I don't care what such
people think so long as I can get the workman himself to think that it does matter to him whether
he is robbed of the pleasure of life: it is to him therefore to the workman, that I turn and tell him
what I think he ought to claim for himself.
Well first he must claim to live in a pleasant house and a pleasant place; a claim which I daresay
many people would be inclined to allow for him - till they found out wh[at] he meant by it, and
how impossible it would be to satisfy it under the profit-grinding system: until for example we
consider what time, money, and trouble it would take to turn Glasgow into a pleasant place.
Second the workman must be well-educated: again all people at least pretend to agree with this
claim till they understand what I mean by it; namely that all should be educated according to
their capacity, and not according to the amount of money which their parents happen to possess:
less education [than] this means class education which is a monstrous oppression of the poor by
the rich.
Third the workman must have due leisure: which claim I know numberless benevolent men agree
to till they know what it involves; namely the prevention at any cost of overwork for profit;
which further implies that there must be no idlers, and that the duration of the day's work must be
legally limited.
You will see I daresay that what these three claims really mean is refinement of life for all; what
is called the life of a gentleman for all; a preposterous claim doubtless to make for a workman;
but one which they will get satisfied when they seriously claim it; and if they don't claim it and
get it, surely the hopes which this last period of the world began with the revolutionary hopes of

16

the last hundred years will fade out: and then conceive what the worker's life will be when he has
no longer any lurking hope of revolution.
So far I have been speaking of the conditions under which the workman should work, I must say
an express word or two on the work itself, though I have indeed implied it before.
There must be no useless work done, which follows as a matter of course on the claim to
limitation of the day's work; but of course few well-to-do people can agree with doing away with
useless work, as in one way or other almost all of the richer classes live upon it.
All useless work being abolished whatever of irksome work is left should be done by machines
used not as now to grind out profit, but to save labour really: this I know involves what to some
will seem the monstrous proposition that machines should be our servants and not our masters:
nevertheless I make it without blushing.
No useless work being done and all irksome labour saved as much as possible by machines
[being] made our servants instead of our masters, it would follow that whatever other work was
done would be accompanied by pleasure in the doing, and would receive praise when done if it
were worthy, and it is most true that all work done with pleasure and worthy of praise produces
art, that is to say an essential part of the pleasure of life.
Now I must remind you that I have said that the work of all handicrafts in the Middle Ages
produced beauty as a necessary part of the goods, so that some approximation to the ideal above
stated was realized then; I have also said that the workman produced this beauty because he was
in his work master of his material, tools, and time, in fact of his work: therefore you will not be
astonished to hear me say that in order to produce art once again the workman must once more
be master of his material, tools, and time: only I must explain that I do not mean that we should
turn back to the system of the middle ages, but that the workman should own these things that is
the means of labour collectively, and should regulate labour in their own interests; also you must
bear in mind that I have already said that all must work therefore the workmen means the whole
of society; there should be no society outside those who work to sustain society.
Now I know well enough that this means altering the basis of society, putting Socialism, that is
universal cooperation, in place of competition or universal war: but if that startles you I can only
say that I am quite sure that those claims for the well-being of the workers which I have made
are necessary to be carried out, and that it is simply impossible to carry them out in a condition
of universal war, which I repeat is in truth the condition under which we are living: our present
17

state of sham peace and real war is the outcome of many centuries of the war of classes, in which
the oppressed class was ever striving to raise itself at the expense of the oppressing class: always
in the process of this struggle at every stage of it the issue has been wider and wider: I have said
a few words about that stage of it which produced the present middle classes of civilization
whose struggle was crowned at last with success by the French Revolution and the years of
triumphant Commerce which have succeeded it: but the very triumph of the commercial middleclass has strengthened and solidified the working-class, has collected them into factories and
great towns, has forced them to act together to a certain extent by the trades unions, and has
given them a certain amount of political power: what they need now to enter on the last stage of
the modern revolution of labour is that they should understand their true position, which is in
short that they are the real necessary part of Society, and that the middle and upper classes which
now rule them are but hangers-on, who have been forced into usurpation of the governing power
of the community; they must understand that the division into classes which for so many hundred
years has been a curse and a burden to the earth is a system which is wearing out, and that the
sign of its approaching end is to be found in the fact that the division is sharper and simpler than
it has ever been; that it is no longer consecrated by religion and sentiment, but stands out in its
naked hideousness dependent on nothing more sacred than the possession of money. On the one
side are the rich: on the other the poor: and the rich possess not only more wealth than they
themselves can use, but also the power of allowing or forbidding the other class, the poor, to earn
themselves a livelihood; since they possess all the means whereby labour can be made fruitful
and the poor possess nothing but the power of labour inherent in their bodies: now I say that
when the working-classes once understand this, and that it [is] necessary for their happiness nay
for avoiding their degradation into the condition of brutes that they should assert their true
position of being themselves society, when they understand that they themselves can regulate
labour, and by being absolute masters of their material, tools, and time they can win for
themselves all that is possible to be won from nature without deduction or taxation paid to
classes that have no purpose or reason for existence; when this is understood, the workers will
find themselves compelled to combine together to change the basis of Society and to realize that
Socialism the rumour of whose approach is all about us.
What resistance may be offered to this combination by the present dominant classes who can
say? but I know that it must be futile: I address one last word to my middle-class hearers who are
18

really interested in the condition of the people, who are amazed and grieved at the corruption and
misery which civilization founded on a Society of classes has brought us to.
You are not bound by your class to the futile resistance which your class as long as it remains a
class must oppose to the advance of Socialism; with your leisure and opportunities it ought to be
easy to you to study this question which it is now obvious cannot be suppressed. When you have
gone into the matter, and have found, as you must do, that there are but two camps, that of the
people and that of their masters, and that you must take your choice between them, will you
hesitate then? To shut your eyes against reason then, and to join the camp of the masters is to
brand yourself as an oppressor and a thief: you did not mean to be either before you knew what
Socialism was; you meant to be just and benevolent; be no worse now when you know what
Socialism is, and what it asks of you and throw in your lot with the workers at every stage of the
struggle.
So doing you will be part of a great army which must triumph, and be hoping to bring about the
day when the words rich and poor, that have so long cursed the world, shall have no meaning,
when we shall all be friends and good fellows united in that communion of happy, reasonable,
honoured labour which alone can produce genuine art, or the Pleasure of Life.
Bibliographical Note
Title
Art and Labour
Deliveries
1. 1 April 1884: before the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society at the Philosophical
Hall, Leeds
2. 18 May 1884: to the Marylebone Branch of the DF at 95 Hampstead Road, Hampstead
3. 17 August 1884: before the Hammersmith Branch of the SDF at Kelmscott House,
Hammersmith
4. 14 September 1884: to the Sheffield Secular Society
5. 21 September 1884: at a meeting sponsored by the Ancoats Recreation Committee at the
New Islington Hall, Ancoats, Manchester
6. 16 November 1884: at a meeting sponsored by the Newcastle Branch of the SDF in the
Tyne Theatre, Newcastle

19

7. 14 December 1884: before the Glasgow Sunday Society at St Andrew's Hall, Glasgow to
an audience of around 3,000
8. 3 March 1885: at a meeting sponsored by the Bristol Branch of the SL at the Bristol
Museum and Library
9. 2 May 1886: at a meeting sponsored by the Clerkenwell (Central) Branch of the SL at
Farringdon Road, London
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works
William Morris
ART AND INDUSTRY IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
In England, at least, if not on the Continent of Europe, there are some towns and cities which
have indeed a name that recalls associations with the past, but have no other trace left them of
the course of that history which has made them what they are. Besides these, there are many
more which have but a trace or two left; sometimes, indeed, this link with the past is so beautiful
and majestic in itself that it compels us when we come across it to forget for a few moments the
life of to-day with which we are so familiar that we do not mark its wonders or its meannesses,
its follies or its tragedies. It compels us to turn away from our life of habit which is all about us
on our right hand and our left, and which therefore we cannot see, and forces on us the
consideration of past times which we can picture to ourselves as a whole, rightly or wrongly,
because they are so far off. Sometimes, as we have been passing through the shabby streets of illburnt bricks, we have come on one of these links with the past and wondered. Before the eyes of
my mind is such a place now. You travel by railway, get to your dull hotel by night, get up in the
morning and breakfast in company with one or two men of the usual middle-class types, who
even as they drink their tea and eat their eggs and glance at the sheet of lies, inanity, and
ignorance, called a newspaper, by their sides, are obviously doing their business to come, in a
vision. You go out into the street and wander up it; all about the station, and stretching away to
the left, is a wilderness of small, dull houses built of a sickly-coloured yellow brick pretending to
look like stone, and not even able to blush a faint brown blush at the imposture, and roofed with
thin, cold, purple-coloured slates. They cry out at you at the first glance, workmen's houses; and
a kind of instinct of information whispers to you: railway workmen and engineers. Bright as the
spring morning is, a kind of sick feeling of hopeless disgust comes over you, and you go on
further, sure at any rate that you cannot fare worse. The street betters a little as you go on;
20

shabbyish shops indeed, and mean houses of the bourgeoisie of a dull market town, exhibiting in
their shop fronts a show of goods a trifle below the London standard, and looking "flash" at the
best; and above them dull houses, greyish and reddish, recalling some associations of the stagecoach days and Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, which would cheer you a little if you didn't see so
many gaps in their lines filled up with the sickly yellow-white brick and blue slate, and with a
sigh remember that even the romance surrounding Mr. Winkle is fast vanishing from the world.
You let your eyes fall to the pavement and stop and stare a little, revolving many things, at a
green-grocer's shop whose country produce probably comes mostly from Covent Garden, but
looks fresh and green as a relief from the jerry building. Then you take a step or two onward and
raise your eyes, and stand transfixed with wonder, and a wave of pleasure and exultation sweeps
away the memory of the squalidness of to-day and the shabby primness of yesterday; such a
feeling as takes hold of the city-dweller when, after a night journey, he wakes and sees through
his windows some range of great and noble mountains. And indeed this at the street's end is a
mountain also; but wrought by the hand and the brain of man, and bearing the impress of his will
and his aspirations; for there heaves itself up above the meanness of the street and its petty
commercialism a mass of grey stone traceried and carved and moulded into a great triple portico
beset with pinnacles and spires, so orderly in its intricacy, so elegant amidst its hugeness, that
even without any thought of its history or meaning it fills your whole soul with satisfaction. You
walk on a little and see before you at last an ancient gate that leads into the close of the great
church, but as if dreading that when you come nearer you may find some piece of modern
pettiness or incongruity which will mar it, you turn away down a cross street from which the
huge front is no longer visible, though its image is still in your mind's eye. The street leads you
in no long while to a slow-flowing river crossed by an ugly modern iron bridge, and you are
presently out in the fields, and going down a long causeway with a hint of Roman work in it. It
runs along the river through a dead flat of black, peaty-looking country where long rows of men
and women are working with an overlooker near them, giving us uncomfortable suggestions of
the land on the other side of the Atlantic as it was; and you half expect as you get near some of
these groups to find them black and woolly haired; but they are white as we call it, burned and
grimed to dirty brown though; fair-sized and strong-looking enough, both men and women; but
the women roughened and spoilt, with no remains of gracefulness, or softness of face or figure;
the men heavy and depressed-looking; all that are not young, bent and beaten, and twisted and
21

starved and weathered out of shape; in short, English field-labourers. You turn your face away
with a sigh toward the town again, and see towering over its mean houses and the sluggish river
and the endless reclaimed fen the flank of that huge building, whose front you saw just now,
plainer and severer than the front, but harmonious and majestic still. A long roof tops it and a
low, square tower rises from its midst. The day is getting on now, and the wind setting from the
north-west is driving the smoke from the railway-works round the long roof and besmirching it
somewhat; but still it looks out over the huddle of houses and the black fen with its bent rows of
potato-hoers, like some relic of another world. What does it mean? Over there the railway-works
with their monotonous hideousness of dwelling-houses for the artisans; here the gangs of the
field-labourers; twelve shillings a week for ever and ever, and the workhouse for all day of
judgment, of rewards and punishments; on each side and all around the nineteenth century, and
rising solemnly in the midst of it, that token of the "dark ages," their hope in the past, grown now
a warning for our future.
A thousand years ago our forefathers called the place Medehamstead, the abode of the meadows.
They used the Roman works and doubtless knew little who wrought them, as by the side of the
river Nene they drew together some stockaded collection of wooden and wattled houses. Then
came the monks and built a church, which they dedicated to St. Peter; a much smaller and ruder
building than that whose beauty has outlasted so many hundred years of waste and neglect and
folly, but which seemed grand to them; so grand, that what for its building, what for the richness
of its shrines, Medehamstead got to be called the Golden Burg. Doubtless that long stretching
water there knew more than the monks' barges and the coracles of the fenmen, and the oars of the
Norsemen have often beaten it white; but records of the sacking of the Golden Burg I have not
got till the time when a valiant man of the country, in desperate contest with Duke William, the
man of Blood and Iron of the day, led on the host of the Danes to those rich shrines, and between
them they stripped the Golden Burg down to its stone and timber. Hereward, that valiant man,
was conquered and died, and what was left of the old tribal freedom of East England sank lower
and lower into the Romanized feudality that crossed the Channel with the Frenchmen. But the
country grew richer, and the craftsmen defter, and some three generations after that sacking of
the Golden Burg, St. Peter's Church rose again, a great and noble pile, the most part of which we
have seen to-day.

22

Time passed again; the feudal system had grown to its full height, and the cloud as big as a man's
hand was rising up to overshadow it in the end. Doubtless this town played its part in this
change: had a great gild changing to a commune, federating the craft-gilds under it; and was no
longer called Medehamstead or the Golden Burg, but after its patron saint, Peterborough. And as
a visible token of those times, the gilds built for the monks in the thirteenth century that
wonderful piece of ordered beauty which you saw just now rising from out the grubby little
streets of the early nineteenth century. They added to the great Church here and there in the
fourteenth century, traceried windows to the aisles, two spirelets to the front, that low tower in
the midst. The fifteenth century added certain fringes and trimmings, so to say, to the building;
and so it was left to bear as best it could the successive waves of degradation, the blindness of
middle-class puritanism, the brutality of the eighteenth-century squirearchy, and the stark
idealless stupidity of the early nineteenth century; and there it stands now, with the foul sea of
modern civilization washing against it; a token, as I said, of the hopes that were, and which
civilization has destroyed. Might it but give a lesson to the hopes that are, and which shall some
day destroy civilization!
For what was the world so utterly different from ours of this day, the world that completed the
glories of the Golden Burg, which to-day is called Peterborough, and is chiefly known, I fear, as
the depot of the Great Northern Railway? This glorious building is a remnant of the feudal
system, which even yet is not so well understood amongst us as it should be; and especially,
people scarcely understand how great a gulf lies between the life of that day and the life of ours.
The hypocrisy of so-called constitutional development has blinded us to the greatness of the
change which has taken place; we use the words King, Parliament, Commerce, and so on, as if
their connotation was the same as in that past time. Let us very briefly see, for the sake of a
better understanding of the art and industry embodied in such works as Peterborough Cathedral,
what was the relation of the complete feudal system with its two tribes, the one the unproductive
masters, the other the productive servants, to the older incomplete feudality which it superseded;
or in other words, what the Middle Ages came to before the development of the seeds of decay in
them became obvious.
On the surface, the change from the serf and baron society of the earlier Middle Ages to the later
Gild and Parliament Middle Ages was brought about by the necessities of feudalism. The
necessities of the conquering or unproductive tribe gave opportunities to the progressive part of
23

the conquered or productive tribe to raise its head out of the mere serfdom which in earlier times
had been all it could look to. At bottom, this process of the rise of the towns under feudalism was
the result of economical causes. The poor remains of the old tribal liberties, the folk-motes, the
meetings round the shire-oak, the trial by compurgation, all these customs which imply the
equality of freemen, would have faded into mere symbols and traditions of the past if it had not
been for the irrepressible life and labour of the people, of those who really did the work of
society in the teeth of the arbitrary authority of the feudal hierarchy. For you must remember that
its very arbitrariness made the latter helpless before the progress of the productive part of that
society. The upper classes had not got hold of those material means of production which enable
them now to make needs in order to satisfy them for the sake of profit; the miracle of the worldmarket had not yet been exhibited. Commerce, in our sense of the word, did not exist: people
produced for their own consumption, and only exchanged the overplus of what they did not
consume. A man would then sell the results of his labour in order to buy wherewithal to live
upon or to live better; whereas at present he buys other people's labour in order to sell its results,
that he may buy yet more labour, and so on to the end of the chapter; the mediaeval man began
with production, the modern begins with money. That is, there was no capital in our sense of the
word; nay, it was a main care of the crafts, as we shall see later on, that there should be none.
The money lent at usury was not lent for the purposes of production, but as spending-money for
the proprietors of land: and their land was not capitalizable as it now is; they had to eat its
produce from day to day, and used to travel about the country doing this like bands of an
invading army, which was indeed what they were; but they could not, while the system lasted,
drive their now tenants, erewhile serfs, off their lands, or fleece them beyond what the custom of
the manor allowed, unless by sheer violence or illegal swindling; and also every free man had at
least the use of some portion of the soil on which he was born. All this means that there was no
profit to be made out of anything but the land; and profit out of that was confined to the lords of
the soil, the superior tribe, the invading army, as represented in earlier times by Duke William
and his hirelings. But even they could not accumulate their profit: the very serfdom that enabled
them to live as an unproductive class forbade them to act as land capitalists: the serfs had to
perform the customary services and nothing more, and thereby got a share of the produce over
and above the economic rent, which surplus would to-day certainly not go to the cultivators of
the soil. Now since all the class-robbery that there was was carried on by means of the land, and
24

that not by any means closely or carefully, in spite of distinct arbitrary laws directed against the
workers, which again were never fully carried out, it follows that it was easy for the productive
class to live. Poor men's money was good, says one historian; necessaries were very cheap, that
is, ordinary food (not the cagmag of to-day), ordinary clothing and housing; but luxuries were
dear. Spices from the East, foreign fruits, cloth of gold, gold and silver plate, silk, velvet, Arras
tapestries, Iceland gerfalcons, Turkish dogs, lions, and the like, doubtless cost far more than they
do to-day. For the rest, men's desires keep pace with their power over nature, and in those days
their desires were comparatively few; the upper class did not live so much more comfortably
then than the lower; so there were not the same grounds or room for discontent as there are
nowadays. A workman then might have liked to possess a canopy of cloth of gold or a big
cupboard of plate; whereas now the contrast is no longer between splendour and simplicity, but
between ease and anxiety, refinement and sordidness.
The ordinary life of the workman then was easy; what he suffered from was either the accidents
of nature, which the society of the day had not yet learned to conquer, or the violence of his
masters, the business of whose life was then open war, as it is now veiled war. Storm, plague,
famine and battle, were his foes then; scarcity and the difficulty of bringing goods from one
place to another were what pinched him, not as now, superabundance and the swiftness of
carriage. Yet, in some respects even here, the contrast was not so violent as it is nowadays
between rich and poor; for, if the artisan was apt to find himself in a besieged city, and had to
battle at all adventure for his decent life and easy work, there were vicissitudes enough in the life
of the lord also, and the great prince who sat in his hall like a god one day, surrounded by his
gentlemen and men-at-arms, might find himself presently as the result of some luckless battle
riding barefoot and bare-headed to the gallows-tree: distinguished politicians risked more then
than they do now. A change of government was apt to take heads off shoulders.
What was briefly the process that led to this condition of things, a condition certainly not
intended by the iron feudalism which aimed at embracing all life in its rigid grasp, and would
not, if it had not been forced to it, have suffered the serf to escape from serfdom, the artisan to
have any status except that of a serf, the gild to organize labour, or the town to become free? The
necessities of the feudal lord were the opportunities of the towns: the former not being able to
squeeze his serf-tenants beyond a certain point, and having no means of making his money grow,
had to keep paying for his main position by yielding up what he thought he could spare of it to
25

the producing classes. Of course, that is clear enough to see in reading mediaeval history; but
what gave the men of the towns the desire to sacrifice their hard earnings for the sake of position,
for the sake of obtaining a status alongside that of the baron and the bishop? The answer to my
mind is clear: the spirit of association which had never died out of the peoples of Europe, and
which in Northern Europe at least had been kept alive by the gilds which in turn it developed; the
strong organization that feudalism could not crush.
The tale of the origin and development of the gilds is as long as it is interesting, and it can only
be touched on here; for the history of the gilds is practically the history of the people in the
Middle Ages, and what follows must be familiar to most of my readers. And I must begin by
saying that it was not, as some would think (speaking always of Northern Europe), the towns that
made the gilds, but the gilds that made the towns. These latter, you must remember once more,
important as they grew to be before the Middle Ages ended, did not start with being organized
centres of life political and intellectual, with tracts of country whose business it was just to feed
and nourish them; in other words, they did not start with being mere second-rate imitations of the
Greek and Roman cities. They were simply places on the face of the country where the
population drawn together by convenience was thicker than in the ordinary country, a collection
of neighbours associating themselves together for the ordinary business of life, finding it
convenient in those disturbed times to palisade the houses and closes which they inhabited and
lived by. But even before this took place, and while the unit of habitation was not even a village,
but a homestead (or tun), our Teutonic and Scandinavian forefathers, while yet heathens, were
used to band themselves together for feasts and sacrifices and for mutual defence and relief
against accident and violence into what would now be called benefit societies, but which they
called gilds. The change of religion from heathenism to Christianity did not make any difference
to these associations; but as society grew firmer and more peaceful, as the commerce of our
forefathers became something more than the selling to one town what the traders had plundered
from another, these gilds developed in one direction into associations for the defence of the
carriers and sellers of goods (who you must remember in passing had little in common with our
merchants and commercial people); and on the other side began to grow into associations for the
regulation of the special crafts, amongst which the building and clothing crafts were naturally
pre-eminent. The development of these two sides of the gilds went on together, but at first the
progress of the trading gilds, being administrative or political, was more marked than that of the
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craft-gilds, and their status was recognized much more readily by the princes of the feudal
hierarchy; though I should say once for all that the direct development of the gilds did not
flourish except in those countries where the undercurrent of the customs of the free tribes was
too strong to be quite merged in the main stream of Romanized feudality. Popes, bishops,
emperors, and kings in their early days fulminated against them; for instance, an association in
Northern France for resistance to the Norse sea-robbers was condemned under ferocious
penalties. In England, at any rate, where the king was always carrying on a struggle with his
baronage, he was generally glad to acknowledge the claims of the towns or communes to a free
administration as a make-weight to the power of the great feudatories; and here as well as in
Flanders, Denmark, and North Germany, the merchant-gild was ready to form that administrative
power, and so slid insensibly into the government of the growing towns under the name of the
Great Gild, the Porte, the Lineage, and so on. These Great Gilds, the corporations of the towns,
were from the first aristocratic and exclusive, even to the extent of excluding manual workmen;
in the true spirit of Romanized feudalism, so diametrically opposed to that of the earlier tribal
communities, in the tales of which the great chiefs are shown smithying armour, building houses
and ships, and sowing their fields, just as the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey do. They were
also exclusive in another way, membership in them being in the main an hereditary privilege,
and they became at last very harsh and oppressive. But these bodies, divorced from labour and
being nothing but governors, or at most administrators, on the one hand, and on the other not
being an integral portion of the true feudal hierarchy, could not long hold their own against the
gilds of craft, who all this while were producing and organizing production. There was a
continuous and fierce struggle between the aristocratic and democratic elements in the towns,
and plenty of downright fighting, bitter and cruel enough after the fashion of the times; besides a
gradual progress of the crafts in getting hold of the power in the communes or municipalities.
This went on all through the thirteenth century, and in the early part of the fourteenth the artisans
had everywhere succeeded, and the affairs of the towns were administered by the federated craftgilds. This brings us to the culminating period of the Middle Ages, the period to which my
remarks on the condition of labourers apply most completely; though you must remember that
the spirit which finally won the victory for the craft-gilds had been at work from the first,
contending not only against the mere tyranny and violence incidental to those rough times, but

27

also against the hierarchical system, the essential spirit of feudality. The progress of the gilds,
which from the first were social, was the form which the class-struggle took in the Middle Ages.
I will now try to go a little more in detail into the conditions of art and industry in those days,
conditions which it is clear, even from the scattered hints given above, are very different from
those of to-day; so different indeed, that many people cannot conceive of them. The rules of the
crafts in the great towns of Flanders will give us as typical examples as can be got at; since the
mechanical arts, especially of weaving, were there farther advanced than anywhere else in
Northern Europe. Let us take then the cloth-weavers of Flanders, and see under what rules they
worked. No master to employ more than three journeymen in his workshop: no one under any
pretence to have more than one workshop: the wages fixed per day, and the number of hours
also: no work to be done on holidays. If piecework (which was allowed), the price per yard
fixed: but only so much and no more to be done in a day. No one allowed to buy wool privately,
but at open sales duly announced. No mixing of wools allowed; the man who uses English wool
(the best) not to have any others on his premises. English and other foreign cloth not allowed to
be sold. Workmen not belonging to the commune not admitted unless hands fell short. Most of
these rules and many others may be considered to have been made in the direct interest of the
workmen. Now for safeguards for the public: the workman must prove that he knows his craft
duly: he serves as an apprentice first, then as journeyman, after which he is a master if he can
manage capital enough to set up three looms besides his own, which, of course, he generally
could do. Width of web is settled; colour of list according to quality; no work to be done in a
frost, or in a bad light. All cloth must be "walked" or fulled a certain time, and to a certain width;
and so on, and so on. And finally every piece of cloth must stand the test of examination, and if it
fall short, goes back to the maker, who is fined; if it come up to the due standard it is marked as
satisfactory.
Now you will see that the accumulation of capital is impossible under such regulations as this,
and it was meant to be impossible. The theory of industry among these communes was
something like this. There is a certain demand for the goods which we can make, and a certain
settled population to make them: if the goods are not thoroughly satisfactory we shall lose our
market for them and be ruined: we must therefore keep up their quality to the utmost.
Furthermore, the work to be done must be shared amongst the whole of those who can do it, who

28

must be sure of work always as long as they are well behaved and industrious, and also must
have a fair livelihood and plenty of leisure; as why should they not?
We shall find plenty of people to-day to cry out on this as slavery; but to begin with, history tells
us that these workmen did not fight like slaves at any rate; and certainly a condition of slavery in
which the slaves were well fed, and clothed, and housed, and had abundance of holidays, has not
often been realized in the world's history. Yes, some will say, but their minds were enslaved.
Were they? Their thoughts moved in the narrow circle maybe; and yet I can't say that a man is of
slavish mind who is free to express his thoughts, such as they are; still less if he habitually
expresses them; least of all if he expresses them in a definite form which gives pleasure to other
people, what we call producing works of art; and these workmen of the communes did habitually
produce works of art.
I have told you that the chief contrast between the upper and lower classes of those days was that
the latter lacked the showy pomp and circumstance of life, and that the contrast rather lay there
than in refinement and non-refinement. It is possible that some readers might judge from our
own conditions that this lack involved the lack of art; but here, indeed, there was little cause for
discontent on the part of the lower classes in those days; it was splendour rather than art in which
they could feel any lack. It is, I know, so difficult to conceive of this nowadays that many people
don't try to do so, but simply deny this fact; which is, however, undeniable by any one who had
studied closely the art of the Middle Ages and its relation to the workers. I must say what I have
often said before, that in those times there was no such thing as a piece of handicraft being ugly;
that everything made had a due and befitting form; that most commonly, however ordinary its
use might be, it was elaborately ornamented; such ornament was always both beautiful and
inventive, and the mind of the workman was allowed full play and freedom in producing it; and
also that for such art there was no extra charge made; it was a matter of course that such and such
things should be ornamented, and the ornament was given and not sold. And this condition of the
ordinary handicrafts with reference to the arts was the foundation of all that nobility of beauty
which we were considering in a building like Peterborough Cathedral, and without that its beauty
would never have existed. As it was, it was no great task to rear a building that should fill men's
minds with awe and admiration when people fell to doing so of set purpose, in days when every
cup and plate and knife-handle was beautiful.

29

When I had the Golden Burg in my eye just now, it was by no means only on account of its
external beauty that I was so impressed by it, and wanted my readers to share my admiration, but
it was also on account of the history embodied in it. To me it and its like are tokens of the
aspirations of the workers five centuries ago; aspirations of which time alone seemed to promise
fulfilment, and which were definitely social in character. If the leading element of association in
the life of the mediaeval workman could have cleared itself of certain drawbacks, and have
developed logically along the road that seemed to be leading it onward, it seems to me it could
scarcely have stopped short of forming a true society founded on the equality of labour: the
Middle Ages, so to say, saw the promised land of Socialism from afar, like the Israelites, and like
them had to turn back again into the desert. For the workers of that time, like us, suffered heavily
from their masters: the upper classes who lived on their labour, finding themselves barred from
progress by their lack of relation to the productive part of society, and at the same time holding
all political power, turned towards aggrandizing themselves by perpetual war and shuffling of the
political positions, and so opened the door to the advance of bureaucracy, and the growth of that
thrice-accursed spirit of nationality which so hampers us even now in all attempts towards the
realization of a true society. Furthermore, the association of the time, instinct as it was with
hopes of something better, was exclusive. The commune of the Middle Ages, like the classical
city, was unhappily only too often at strife with its sisters, and so became a fitting instrument for
the greedy noble or bureaucratic king to play on. The gildsman's duties were bounded on the one
hand by the limits of his craft, and on the other by the boundaries of the liberties of his city or
town. The instinct of union was there, otherwise the course of the progress of association would
not have had the unity which it did have: but the means of intercourse were lacking, and men
were forced to defend the interests of small bodies against all corners, even those whom they
should have received as brothers.
But, after all, these were but tokens of the real causes that checked the development of the
Middle Ages towards Communism; that development can be traced from the survival of the
primitive Communism which yet lived in the early days of the Middle Ages. The birth of
tradition, strong in instinct, was weak in knowledge, and depended for its existence on its
checking the desire of mankind for knowledge and the conquest of material nature: its own
success in developing the resources of labour ruined it; it opened chances to men of growing rich
and powerful if they could succeed in breaking down the artificial restrictions imposed by the
30

gilds for the sake of the welfare of their members. The temptation was too much for the craving
ignorance of the times, that were yet not so ignorant as not to have an instinct of what boundless
stores of knowledge lay before the bold adventurer. As the need for the social and political
organization of Europe blotted out the religious feeling of the early Middle Ages which produced
the Crusades, so the need for knowledge and the power over material nature swept away the
communistic aspirations of the fourteenth century, and it was not long before people had
forgotten that they had ever existed.
The world had to learn another lesson; it had to gain power, and not be able to use it; to gain
riches, and starve upon them like Midas on his gold; to gain knowledge, and then have
newspapers for its teachers; in a word, to be so eager to gather the results of the deeds of the life
of man that it must forget the life of man itself. Whether the price of the lesson was worth the
lesson we can scarcely tell yet; but one comfort is that we are fast getting perfect in it; we shall,
at any rate, not have to begin at the beginning of it again. The hope of the renaissance of the time
when Europe first opened its mouth wide to fill its belly with the east wind of commercialism,
that hope is passing away, and the ancient hope of the workmen of Europe is coming to life
again. Times troublous and rough enough we shall have, doubtless, but not that dull time over
again during which labour lay hopeless and voiceless under the muddle of self-satisfied
competition.
It is not so hard now to picture to oneself those grey masses of stone, which our forefathers
raised in their hope, standing no longer lost and melancholy over the ghastly misery of the fields
and the squalor of the towns, but smiling rather on their newborn sisters the houses and halls of
the free citizens of the new Communes, and the garden-like fields about them where there will be
labour still, but the labour of the happy people who have shaken off the curse of labour and kept
its blessing only. Between the time when the hope of the workman disappeared in the fifteenth
century and our own times, there is a great gap indeed, but we know now that it will be filled up
before long, and that our own lives from day to day may help to fill it. That is no little thing and
is well worth living for, whatever else may fail us.
Bibliographical Note

Title
Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century
31

Delivery
This is the last of three lectures on the theme "England As It Was, As it Is and As it May Be",
delivered:
1. 15 May 1887 at a meeting sponsored by the Hammersmith Branch of the SL at Kelmscott
House, Hammersmith.
2. 2nd October 1887 at a meeting sponsored by the Ancoats Recreation Committee at New
Islington Hall, Ancoats, Manchester.
3. 25 March 1888 to an audience of 500 at a meeting sponsored by the Glasgow Branch of
the SL at Waterloo Hall, Glasgow.
4. 15 April 1888 at a meeting sponsored by the Hammersmith Branch of the SL at
Kelmscott House, Hammersmith.
Publication
1. Time, January 1890, pp.23-36.
2. Collected Works of William Morris, vol XXII, pp.375-390.
This version scanned and proofread from the Collected Works by Ted Crawford, August 2010
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works
William Morris
Art and its Producers
I fear what I have to tell you will be looked upon by you as an often-told tale; but it seems to me
that at the inception of an enterprise for the popularizing and furtherance of the arts of life, the
subject-matter of my paper is very necessary to be considered. I will begin by putting before you
a kind of text, from which I will speak, so that you may understand from the first the drift of my
paper; a plan which, I hope, will save both your time and mine.
Whereas the incentive to labour is usually assumed to be the necessity of earning a livelihood,
and whereas in our modern society this is really the only incentive amongst those of the workingclass who produces wares of which some form of art is supposed to form a part, it is impossible
that men working in this manner should produce genuine works of art. Therefore it is desirable
either that all pretence to art should be abandoned in the wares so made, and that art should be
restricted to matters which have no other function to perform except their existence as works of
art, such as pictures, sculpture, and the like; or else, that to the incentive of necessity to labour
should be added the incentives of pleasure and interest in the work itself.
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That is my text, and I am quite sure that you will find it necessary to consider its subject-matter
very carefully if you are to do anything save talk about art: for which latter purpose works of art
are not needed, since so many fine phrases have been invented in modern times which answer all
the purpose of realities.
To put it in another way, the question I ask you is threefold. First, shall we pretend to produce
architecture and the architectural arts without having the reality of them? Second, shall we give
them up in despair or carelessness of having the reality? Or, third, shall we set ourselves to have
the reality?
To adopt the first plan would show that we were too careless and hurried about life to trouble
ourselves whether we were fools (and very tragical fools) or not. The adoption of the second
would ticket us as very honest people, determined to be free from as many responsibilities as
possible, even at the expense of living a dull and vacant life. If we adopt the third sincerely, we
shall add very much to the trouble and responsibility of our lives, for a time at least, but also very
much to their happiness. Therefore I am in favour of our adopting this third course.
In point of fact, though I have put the second one before you for the sake, I fear, of an
appearance of logical fairness, I do not think we are free to adopt it consciously at present,
though we may be driven to adopt it in the end. To-day I think only the two courses are open to
us, of quietly accepting the pretence of an all-pervading art, which indeed pervades the
advertising sheets and nothing else; or else of struggling for an art which shall really pervade our
lives and make them happier. But since this, if we are in earnest about it, will involve a
reconstruction of society, let us first see what these architectural arts really are, and whether they
are worth all this trouble; because, if they are not, we had better go on as we are, and shut our
eyes to the fact that we are compelled to be such fools as to pretend that we want them when we
do not.
The architectural arts, therefore, if they are anything real, mean the addition to all necessary
articles of use of a certain portion of beauty and interest, which the user desires to have and the
maker to make. Till within a comparatively recent period there has been no question whether this
beauty and interest should form a part of wares; it always did do so without any definite order on
the part of the user, and not necessarily consciously on the part of the maker; and the sham art
which I have spoken of is simply the traditional survival of this reality; that is one reason why

33

you cannot clear yourselves of it in the simple and logical way that I put before you just now as
the second course to be adopted.
But the integrity and sincerity of this architectural art, which, mind you, the workman works up
with his wares not only because he must (for he is not conscious of compulsion in the matter) but
because he likes to, though he is often not conscious of his pleasure - this real architectural art
depends on the wares of which it forms a part being produced by craftsmanship, for the use of
persons who understand craftsmanship. The user, the consumer, must chose his wares to be so
and so, and the maker of them must agree with his choice. The fashion of them must not be
forced on either the user or the maker; the two must be of one mind, and be capable under easily
conceivable circumstances of exchanging their parts of user and maker. The carpenter makes a
chest for the goldsmith one day, the goldsmith a cup for the carpenter on another, and there is
sympathy in their work - that is, the carpenter makes for his goldsmith friend just such a chest as
he himself would have if he needed a chest; the goldsmith's cup is exactly what he would make
for himself if he needed one. Each is conscious during his work of making a thing to be used by
a man of like needs to himself. I ask you to note these statements carefully, for I shall have to put
a contrast to these conditions of work presently. Meantime observe that this question of
ornamental or architectural art does not mean, as perhaps most people think it does, whether or
not a certain amount of ornament or elegance shall be plastered on to a helpless, lifeless article of
daily use - a house, a cup, a spoon, or what not. The chest and the cup, the house, or what not,
may be as simple or as rude as you please, or as devoid of what is usually called ornament; but
done in the spirit I have told you of, they will inevitably be works of art. In work so done there is
and must be the interchange of interest in the occupations of life; the knowledge of human
necessities and the consciousness of human good-will is a part of all such work, and the world is
linked together by it. The peace of the arts springs from its roots, and flourishes even in the midst
of war and trouble and confusion.
Now this is the architectural art which I urge you to think it worth your while to struggle for in
all its reality. I firmly believe it is worth the struggle, however burdensome that may be. There
are some things which are worth any cost; but above them all I value consciousness of manly
life; and the arts form a part of this at least.
This, I say, is the theory of the conditions under which genuine architectural art can be produced;
but that theory is founded on a view of the historical development of the industrial arts, and is
34

not merely built up in the air. I must, therefore, now give a brief account of my historical
position, although it has been so often done before, that it must be familiar to many, if not most
of you. From the beginning of history down to the end of the Middle Ages there has been, as I
have said, no question as to whether due form of art should accompany all wares intended to last
for any time: this character of theirs did not in itself enhance their price or increase the conscious
labour upon them, it was part of their nature to be so, they grew so like a plant grows; during all
these ages wares had been made wholly by craftsmanship. It is true that in the ancient world the
greater part of the production of wares was the work of chattel slaves, and though the condition
of the artisan slaves was very different from that of the field-hands, yet their slavery has fixed its
mark clearly enough on the minor arts of the period, in their severe, or literally servile
subordination to the higher work done by artists. When chattel slavery passed away from Europe
with the classical world and the Middle Ages were fairly born out of the Medean caldron of the
confusion that followed: as soon as the formation of the gilds gave a rallying-point to the
workmen, free and serf, of the day, those workmen, the makers of wares, became free in their
work, whatever their political position was; and the architectural arts flourished to a degree
unknown before, and at least a foretaste was given to the world of what the pleasure of life might
be in a society of equals. At this time craftsmanship reached its highest point: the avowed object
of the craft-gilds, as may be gathered from the irrefragable evidence of their rules, was to
distribute whatever work was to hand equitably amongst a society of pure handicraftsmen (we
have translated the word now in order to give it a meaning exactly opposite to its original one) to
check the very beginnings of capitalism and competition inside the gild, and at the same time to
produce wares whose test should be the actual use, the real needs of the public of neighbours that
was engaged in work carried on in a similar spirit. This manner of work, of producing for use
and not for profit, bore its due fruit: as a matter of course, the wares made by the gildsmen of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have mostly perished; even the most enduring of them, the
buildings of their raising, have been either destroyed or degraded by the ignorance and
intolerance, the frivolity and the pedantry of succeeding ages; but what is left us, mostly by sheer
accident, is enough to teach us the lesson that no cultivation, no share in the science which has in
these days subdued nature, as long as it is exterior to the working life of the workman, can
supply the place of freedom of hand and thought during his working hours, and interest in the
welfare of his work itself; and further, that the collective genius of a people working in free but
35

harmonious co-operation is far more powerful for the production of architectural art than the
spasmodic efforts of the greatest individual genius; because with the former the expression of life
and pleasure is unforced and habitual, and directly connected with the traditions of the past, and
consequently is as unfailing as the work of Nature herself.
But this society of workmen, this crown of labour of the Middle Ages, was doomed to a short
life. Its tendency to equality was so completely extinguished by the development of the political
element in which it lived, that the existence of it has been scarcely suspected before the rise of
the school of historical criticism of our own days. Those who, perhaps unwittingly, are wont to
trouble themselves about what might have been, may consider the lesser causes that seem to have
led to this change, and speculate on what would have happened if the Black Death had not half
depopulated north-western Europe; if Philip van Artevelde and his bold Ghentmen had defeated
the French chivalry at Rosebeque, as their fathers did at Courtray; if the stout yeomen of Kent
and Essex, gathered on "the Fair-field at Mile-end," had had wits not quite so simple as to trust
the young scoundrel of a king, who had just had their leader murdered under tryst, but had
carried out the peasants' war to its due conclusion.
All this is pleasant fooling, but it is little else. The gild-governed industry must in any case have
come to an end as soon as the general longing for new knowledge, greater command over nature,
and greater hurry of life, had grown strong enough to force on the next development of
productive labour. The gilds were incapable of the necessary expansion then called for, and they
had to disappear, after having contributed largely to the death of the feudal hierarchy and given
birth to the middle-classes, which took its place as the dominant force in Europe. Capitalism
began to grow up within the gilds, the journeyman, the so-called free-labourer, began to appear
in them; and outside them, notably in this country, the land of the country began to be cultivated
for the profit of the capitalistic farmer instead of the livelihood of the peasant, and the system of
production was created which was needed for carrying on modern society - the society of
contract, instead of the society of status. It was essential to this system that the free-labourer
should be no longer free in his work; he must be furnished with a master having complete control
of that work, as a consequence of his owning the raw material and tools of labour; and with an
universal market for the sale of the wares with which he had nothing to do directly, and the very
existence of which he was unconscious of. He thus gradually ceased to be a craftsman, a man
who in order to accomplish his work must necessarily take an interest in it, since he is
36

responsible for making or marring the wares he has to do with, and whose market was made up
chiefly of neighbours, men whose needs he could understand. Instead of a craftsman he must
now become a "hand," responsible for nothing but carrying out the orders of his foreman. In his
leisure hours an intelligent citizen (perhaps), with a capacity for understanding politics, or a turn
for scientific knowledge, or what not, but in his working hours not even a machine, but an
average portion of that great and almost miraculous machine - the factory; a man, the interest of
whose life is divorced from the subject-matter of his labour, whose work has become
"employment," that is, merely the opportunity of earning a livelihood at the will of some one
else. Whatever interest still clings to the production of wares under this system has wholly left
the ordinary workman, and attaches only to the organizers of his labour; and that interest
commonly has little to do with the production of wares as things to be handled, looked at - used,
in short, but simply as counters in the great game of the world-market. I fancy that there are not a
few of the "manufacturers" in this great "manufacturing" district who would be horrified at the
idea of using the wares which they "manufacture," and if they could be witnesses of the
enthusiasm of the customers of the customers of their customers when those wares reached their
final destination of use they would perhaps smile at it somewhat cynically.
In this brief account I have purposely left out the gradations by which we have reached the
contrast between the craftsmen of the Middle Ages and the free workman of to-day: between the
productions of wares for direct use and their production as exchange-wares for the world-market.
I want to lay before you the contrast as clearly as possible; but that I may meet objections, I
ought to say that I am well aware that the process of transformation was gradual; that the new
free labourer did not at first have to change his manner of work much; that the system of division
of labour was brought to bear on him in the seventeenth century and was perfected in the
eighteenth, and that, as that system drew near to perfection, the invention of automatic
machinery changed the workman's relation to his work once more, and turned him, in the great
staple industries, into the tender of a machine instead of a machine (which I think was to him an
advantage); but, on the other hand, brought almost all the surviving handicrafts that had hitherto
escaped, under the sway of the system of division of labour, and thus for the time being
abolished craftsmanship among the wage-earning classes. Craftsmanship is now all but extinct,
except among the professional classes, who claim the position of gentlemen.

37

If we are in earnest in wishing to make the architectural or decorative arts a reality, we must face
these facts as they regard the workman in the first place. But in order to be clear as to what the
position of the workman, the producer of such wares, really is, we must also consider that of the
consumer of them. For it will perhaps be said, if you desire the production of these wares, there
is nothing necessary but to create a demand for them, and then they will come naturally, and
once more transform the workman into a craftsman. Now, granted that such demand is genuine,
and also wide enough, that is quite true; but then comes the question whether this genuine and
wide demand can be created; and if it can be, how it is to be done?
Now, as the present system of production has transformed the handicraftsman into a machine
without will, so it has turned the neighbour purchaser with good marketing faculties into a slave
of the world-market - a purse. The motto of the modern commercialist being, not the market for
the man, but man for the market: the market is the master, the man the slave, which to my mind,
is reversing the reasonable order of things. Let us see if that is not so. In the present day the great
problem which we have to face is the due employment of human labour; if we fail in employing
it in some fashion, it will eat us up to begin with, whatever it does afterwards; if we fail to
employ it duly we must at least expect to have nothing but a corrupt and degraded society; and
for my part I wish we could turn our thoughts to employing labour duly, instead of employing it
anyhow. But at any rate we are practically driven to recognize the fact that, except for a few
hundred thousands, who for anything we can do must starve or go to the workhouse, we must
look to the employment of labour-power, that is, men. Now, I have said just now, and repeat it
again with all the emphasis that I can, that the proper employers (or say customers) of the
working men are the working men: and if they had no other customers, I should have perfect
confidence that in the long run they would be employed in making nothing but useful things;
among which, of course, I would include works of art of various kinds: but as they have other
customers, I have not that confidence, for I see, no one can fail to see, that they are employed in
producing a great deal that is not useful, although it is marketable. They themselves are not as
good customers to themselves as they should be, because they are not wealthy enough; all the
wares which they consume must be of inferior quality for one thing, let alone their quantity;
therefore their custom must be supplemented by that of the well-to-do and the rich classes, and
these we will suppose are all of them wealthy enough to satisfy their needs for really desirable
things, and they do so: other things the reasonable among them would not demand, if they could
38

help themselves; but from what I can see round about me, I judge that they cannot help
themselves. It seems that the market for gambling in profits is too exacting, or the need for the
employment of labour is too pressing to allow them to purchase and consume only what they
need; they must, in addition, purchase and consume many things which they do not need; habits
of pomp and luxury must be formed amongst them, so that the market which would be starved by
the misery of the poor, may be kept busy with ministering to the luxury of the rich. And you
must understand that I mean here to assert that though all wares made must be consumed,
nevertheless that consumption does not prove their use: they may be used, or they may be
wasted, and if they are not needed, they cannot be used and must be wasted.
Here, then, in considering the possibility of the widespread and genuine demand for architectural
art, we are met at the outset by this difficulty, that the workmen, who must be the producers of
the art, are largely, I will say mostly, employed in wasting their labour in two ways; on the one
hand, in making inferior wares, which their inferior position forces them to demand, and for
which there ought to be no demand; and on the other, in making wares, not for the use, but for
the waste of the rich classes, for which, again, there ought to be no demand. And these two
haplessly false demands are forced on to both these classes, because they are forced into the
position which so forces them. The world-market, which should be our servant, is our master,
and ordains that so it must be. The wide and genuine demand, therefore, for the architectural arts
which we have seen can only be produced by the handicraftsman, cannot be created under the
present system of production, which, indeed, could not go on if the greater part of its wares were
the work of handicraft.
We are driven at last, then, to this conclusion; that pleasure and interest in the work itself are
necessary to the production of a work of art however humble; that this pleasure and interest can
only be present when the workman is free in his work, i.e., is conscious of producing a piece of
goods suitable to his own needs as a healthy man; that the present system of industrial production
does not allow of the existence of such free workmen consciously producing wares for
themselves and their neighbours, and forbids the general public to ask for wares made by such
men; that, therefore, since neither the producers nor the users of wares are free to make or ask for
wares according to their wills, we cannot under our present system of production have the reality
of the architectural arts which I have been urging you to strive for, but must put up with
pretending to have them; which seems to me a rather sorry proceeding.
39

What can we do, then, in order to shake off this disgrace; in order that we may be free to say
either that we want the ornaments of life, and no makeshifts of them shall content us; or that we
do not want them, and will not have them?
If my premises are accepted the practical position is clear; we must try to change the system of
the production of wares. To meet possible objections once more, I do not mean by this that we
should aim at abolishing all machinery: I would do some things by machinery which are now
done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery: in short, we should
be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or that tangible
steel and brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of
commercial tyranny, which oppresses the lives of all of us. Now, this enterprise of rebelling
against commercialism I hold to be a thoroughly worthy one: remember what my text was, and
how I said that our aim should be to add to the incentive of necessity for working, the incentive
of pleasure and interest in the work itself. I am not pleading for the production of a little more
beauty in the world, much as I love it, and as much as I would sacrifice for its sake; it is the lives
of human beings that I am pleading for; or if you will, with the Roman poet, the reasons for
living. In this assembly there are perhaps only a few who can realize the meaning of the daily
drudgery, hopeless of any result except the continuance of a life of drudgery, which is the lot of
all but a few in our civilization; for indeed it is only possible to be realized by experience or
strong imagination; but do your best to realize it, and then further to realize the result of turning
those daily hours of hopeless toil into days of pleasant work, the happy exercise of manly
energies, illuminated by the certainty of usefulness and the hope of applause from the friends and
neighbours for whom it is exercised. Surely when you have thought of this seriously you will
once more have to admit that the attainment of such a change is worth almost any sacrifice. I say
again, as I have often said, that if the world cannot hope to be happy in its work it must
relinquish the hope of happiness altogether.
Again, the aim of those who look on the popular arts seriously is, that we should be masters of
our work, and be able to say what we will have and what we will do; and the price which we
must pay for the attainment of that aim is, to speak quite plainly, the recasting of society. For that
mechanical and tyrannous system of production which I have condemned is so intimately
interwoven with the society of which we all form a part, that it sometimes shows as its cause, and
sometimes as its effect, and is in any case a necessity to it; you cannot abolish the slums of our
40

great cities; you cannot have happy villagers living in pretty houses among the trees, doing
pretty-looking work in their own houses or in the pleasant village workshop between seed-time
and harvest, unless you remove the causes that have made the brutal slum-dweller and the
starveling field-labourer. All essential conditions of society, the growth of ages as they are, must
bring about certain consequences which cannot be dealt with by mere palliation. The essentials
of ancient society involved the chattel slave, those of medieval society the serf, those of modern
society the irresponsible wage-worker under a master; and the latter cannot by efforts from
without be set to do work which does not belong to his condition of dependency on a master; the
craftsman is responsible for his work, and a dependent cannot be responsible for anything save
the fulfilment of the task set him by his master.
But lest you may think I show no course for you to take except striving, as I do, towards the
conscious reconstruction of society on a basis of equality, I will say a word or two on work
which may lie ready to our hands as artists rather than as citizens. There is a small body of men
who are independent in their work, who are called by the name I have just used - artists: as a
separate group they are the result of the commercial system which could not use independent
workmen, and their divorce from the ordinary production of wares is the obvious external cause
of the sickness of the architectural arts. Anyhow, they exist as independent workmen, the loose
screw in their position being that they do not work for the whole public, but for a very small
portion of it, which rewards them for that exclusiveness by giving them the position of
gentlemen. Now it seems to me that the only thing we can do, if we will not help in the
reconstruction of society, is to deal with this group of gentlemen workmen. The non-gentlemen
workmen are beyond our reach unless we look on the matter from the wider point of view, but
we can try to get the artists to take an interest in those arts of life whose production at present is
wholly in the hands of the irresponsible machines of the commercial system, and to understand
that they, the artists, however great they may be, ought to be taking part in this production; while
the workmen who are now machines ought to be artists, however humble. On the other hand we
may try to dig up whatever of responsibility and independence lies half smothered under the
compact clay of the factory system, to find out if there are not some persons in the employ of the
commercial organizers who are artists, to give them opportunities if possible of working more
directly for the public, and to win for them that applause and sympathy of their brother artists
which every good workman naturally desires. The idea that this may and can be done is by no
41

means mine alone; in putting it forward I represent not merely a vague hope that it may be
attempted, but an actual enterprise in good working order. I have the honour to belong to a small
and unpretentious society, of which Mr. Crane is President, which, under the name of the Arts
and Crafts Society, has just carried out a successful exhibition of what are called "the applied
arts" in London, with the definite intention of furthering the purpose I have just stated. To some
of us such work may seem very petty and unheroic, especially if they have been lately brought
face to face with the reckless hideousness and squalor of a great manufacturing district; or have
been so long living in the shabby hell of the great commercial centre of the world that it has
entered into their life and they are now "used to it," that is, degraded to its miserable standard:
but it is something to do at least, for it means keeping alive the spark of life in these architectural
arts for a better day; which arts might otherwise be wholly extinguished by commercial
production, a disaster which not many years ago seemed most likely to happen. But I think this
lesser work will be so far from hindering us, that it will rather draw us on to engaging in the
wider and deeper matter, and doing our best towards the realization of that Society of Equals,
which, as I have already said, will form the only conditions under which true craftsmanship can
be the rule of production; that form of work which involves the pleasurable exercise of our own
energies, and the sympathy with the capacities and aspirations of our neighbours, that is, of
humanity generally.
Bibliographical Note
Title
Art and its Producers
Delivery
1. 5th December 1888 at the first annual conference of the National Association for the
Advancement of Art at the Rotunda, Liverpool
Publication
1. Art and Its Producers, and The Arts and Crafts of To-day: Two Addresses Delivered
Before the National Association for the Advancement of Art, Longmans & Co., London,
1901
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works
William Morris
Gothic Architecture
42

By the word Architecture is, I suppose, commonly understood the art of ornamental building,
and in this sense I shall often have to use it here. Yet I would not like you to think of its
productions merely as well constructed and well proportioned buildings, each one of which is
handed over by the architect to other artists to finish, after his designs have been carried out (as
we say) by a number of mechanical workers, who are not artists. A true architectural work rather
is a building duly provided with all necessary furniture, decorated with all due ornament,
according to the use, quality, and dignity of the building, from mere mouldings or abstract lines,
to the great epical works of sculpture and painting, which, except as decorations of the nobler
form of such buildings, cannot be produced at all. So looked on, a work of architecture is a
harmonious co-operative work of art, inclusive of all the serious arts, all those which are not
engaged in the production of mere toys, or of ephemeral prettinesses.
Now, these works of art are man's expression of the value of life, and also the production of them
makes his life of value: and since they can only be produced by the general good-will and help of
the public, their continuous production, or the existence of the true Art of Architecture, betokens
a society which, whatever elements of change it may bear within it, may be called stable, since it
is founded on the happy exercise of the energies of the most useful part of its population.
What the absence of this Art of Architecture may betoken in the long run it is not easy for us to
say: because that lack belongs only to these later times of the world's history, which as yet we
cannot fairly see, because they are too near to us; but clearly in the present it indicates a
transference of the interest of civilised men from the development of the human and intellectual
energies of the race to the development of its mechanical energies. If this tendency is to go along
the logical road of development, it must be said that it will destroy the arts of design and all that
is analogous to them in literature; but the logical outcome of obvious tendencies is often
thwarted by the historical development; that is, by what I can call by no better name than the
collective will of mankind; and unless my hopes deceive me, I should say that this process has
already begun, that there is a revolt on foot against the utilitarianism which threatens to destroy
the Arts; and that it is deeper rooted than a mere passing fashion. For myself I do not indeed
believe that this revolt can effect much, so long as the present state of society lasts; but as I am
sure that great changes which will bring about a new state of society are rapidly advancing upon
us, I think it is a matter of much importance that these two revolts should join hands, or at least
should learn to understand one another. If the New society when it comes (itself the result of the
43

ceaseless evolution of countless years of tradition) should find the world cut off from all tradition
of art, all aspiration towards the beauty which man has proved that he can create, much time will
be lost in running hither and thither after the new thread of art; many lives will be barren of a
manly pleasure which the world can ill afford to lose even for a short time. I ask you, therefore,
to accept what follows as a contribution toward the revolt against utilitarianism, toward the
attempt at catching-up the slender thread of tradition before it be too late.
Now, that Harmonious Architectural unit, inclusive of the arts in general, is no mere dream. I
have said that it is only in these later times that it has become extinct: until the rise of modern
society, no Civilisation, no Barbarism has been without it in some form; but it reached its fullest
development in the Middle Ages, an epoch really more remote from our modern habits of life
and thought than the older civilisations were, though an important part of its life was carried on
in our own country by men of our own blood. Nevertheless, remote as those times are from ours,
if we are ever to have architecture at all, we must take up the thread of tradition there and
nowhere else, because that Gothic Architecture is the most completely organic form of the Art
which the world has seen; the break in the thread of tradition could only occur there: all the
former developments tended thitherward, and to ignore this fact and attempt to catch up the
thread before that point was reached, would be a mere piece of artificiality, betokening, not new
birth, but a corruption into mere whim of the ancient traditions.
In order to illustrate this position of mine, I must ask you to allow me to run very briefly over the
historical sequence of events which led to Gothic Architecture and its fall, and to pardon me for
stating familiar and elementary facts which are necessary for my purpose. I must admit also that
in doing this I must mostly take my illustrations from works that appear on the face of them to
belong to the category of ornamental building, rather than that of those complete and inclusive
works of which I have spoken. But this incompleteness is only on the surface; to those who study
them they appear as belonging to the class of complete architectural works; they are lacking in
completeness only through the consequences of the lapse of time and the folly of men, who did
not know what they were, who, pretending to use them, marred their real use as works of art; or
in a similar spirit abused them by making them serve their turn as instruments to express their
passing passion and spite of the hour.
We may divide the history of the Art of Architecture into two periods, the Ancient and the
Medieval: the Ancient again may be divided into two styles, the barbarian (in the Greek sense)
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and the classical. We have, then, three great styles to consider: The Barbarian, the Classical, and
the Medieval. The two former, however, were partly synchronous, and at least overlapped
somewhat. When the curtain of the stage of definite history first draws up, we find the small
exclusive circle of the highest civilisation, which was dominated by Hellenic thought and
science, fitted with a very distinctive and orderly architectural style. That style appears to us to
be, within its limits, one of extreme refinement, and perhaps seemed so to those who originally
practised it. Moreover, it is ornamented with figure-sculpture far advanced towards perfection
even at an early period of its existence, and swiftly growing in technical excellence; yet for all
that, it is, after all, a part of the general style of architecture of the Barbarian world, and only
outgoes it in the excellence of its figure-sculpture and its refinement. The bones of it, its merely
architectural part, are little changed from the Barbarian or primal building, which is a mere piling
or jointing together of material, giving one no sense of growth in the building itself and no sense
of the possibility of growth in the style.
The one Greek form of building with which we are really familiar, the columnar temple, though
always built with blocks of stone, is clearly a deduction from the wooden god's-house or shrine,
which was a necessary part of the equipment of the not very remote ancestors of the Periclean
Greeks; nor had this god's-house changed so much as the city had changed from the Tribe, or the
Worship of the City (the true religion of the Greeks) from the Worship of the Ancestors of the
Tribe. In fact, rigid conservatism of form is an essential part of Greek architecture as we know it.
From this conservatism of form there resulted a jostling between the building and its higher
ornament. In early days, indeed, when some healthy barbarism yet clung to the sculpture, the
discrepancy is not felt; but as increasing civilisation demands from the sculptors more naturalism
and less restraint, it becomes more and more obvious, and more and more painful; till at last it
becomes clear that sculpture has ceased to be a part of architecture and has become an
extraneous art bound to the building by habit or superstition. The form of the ornamental
building of the Greeks, then, was very limited, had no capacity in it for development, and tended
to divorce from its higher or epical ornament. What is to be said about the spirit of it which ruled
that form? This I think; that the narrow superstition of the form of the Greek temple was not a
matter of accident, but was the due expression of the exclusiveness and aristocratic arrogance of
the ancient Greek mind, a natural result of which was a demand for pedantic perfection in all the
parts and details of a building; so that the inferior parts of the ornament are so slavishly
45

subordinated to the superior, that no invention or individuality is possible in them, whence comes
a kind of bareness and blankness, a rejection in short of all romance, which does not indeed
destroy their interest as relics of past history, but which puts the style of them aside as any
possible foundation for the style of the future architecture of the world. It must be remembered
also that this attempt at absolute perfection soon proved a snare to Greek architecture; for its
could not be kept up long. It was easy indeed to ensure the perfect execution of a fret or a dentil;
not so easy to ensure the perfection of the higher ornament: so that as Greek energy began to fall
back from its high-water mark, the demand for absolute perfection became rather a demand for
absolute plausibility, which speedily dragged the architectural arts into mere Academicism.
But long before classical art reached the last depths of that degradation, it had brought to birth
another style of architecture, the Roman style, which to start with was differentiated from the
Greek by having the habitual use of the arch forced upon it. To my mind, organic Architecture,
Architecture which must necessarily grow, dates from the habitual use of the arch, which, taking
into consideration its combined utility and beauty, must be pronounced to be the greatest
invention of the human race. Until the time when man not only had invented the arch, but had
gathered boldness to use it habitually, architecture was necessarily so limited, that strong growth
was impossible to it. It was quite natural that a people should crystallize the first convenient form
of building they might happen upon, or, like the Greeks, accept a traditional form without
aspiration towards anything more complex or interesting. Till the arch came into use, building
men were the slaves of conditions of climate, materials, kind of labour available, and so forth.
But once furnished with the arch, man has conquered Nature in the matter of building; he can
defy the rigours of all climates under which men can live with fair comfort: splendid materials
are not necessary to him; he can attain a good result from shabby and scrappy materials. When
he wants size and span he does not need a horde of war-captured slaves to work for him; the free
citizens (if there be any such) can do all that is needed without grinding their lives out before
their time. The arch can do all that architecture needs, and in turn from the time when the arch
comes into habitual use, the main artistic business of architecture is the decoration of the arch;
the only satisfactory style is that which never disguises its office, but adorns and glorifies it. This
the Roman architecture, the first style that used the arch, did not do. It used the arch frankly and
simply indeed, in one part of its work, but did not adorn it; this part of the Roman building must,
however, be called engineering rather than architecture, though its massive and simple dignity is
46

a wonderful contrast to the horrible and restless nightmare of modern engineering. In the other
side of its work, the ornamental side, Roman building used the arch and adorned it, but disguised
its office, and pretended that the structure of its buildings was still that of the lintel, and that the
arch bore no weight worth speaking of. For the Romans had no ornamental building of their own
(perhaps we should say no art of their own) and therefore fitted their ideas of the ideas of the
Greek sculpture-architect on to their own massive building; and as the Greek plastered his
energetic and capable civilised sculpture on to the magnified shrine of his forefathers, so the
Roman plastered sculpture, shrine, and all, on to the magnified shrine of his forefathers, so the
Roman plastered sculpture, shrine, and all, on to his magnificent engineer's work. In fact, this
kind of front-building or veneering was the main resource of Roman ornament; the construction
and ornament did not interpenetrate; and to us at this date it seems doubtful if he gained by
hiding with marble veneer the solid and beautiful construction of his wall of brick or concrete;
since others have used marble far better than he did, but none have built a wall or turned an arch
better. As to the Roman ornament, it is not in itself worth much sacrifice of interest in the
construction: the Greek ornament was cruelly limited and conventional; but everything about it
was in its place, and there was a reason for everything, even though that reason were founded on
superstition. But the Roman ornament has no more freedom than the Greek, while it has lost the
logic of the latter: it is rich and handsome, and that is all the reason it can give for its existence;
nor does its execution and its design interpenetrate. One cannot conceive of the Greek ornament
existing apart from the precision of its execution; but well as the Roman ornament is executed in
all important works, one almost wishes it were less well executed, so that some mystery might be
added to its florid handsomeness. Once again, it is a piece of necessary history, and to criticize it
from the point of view of [the] work of to-day would be like finding fault with a geological
epoch: and who can help feeling touched by its remnants which show crumbling and battered
amidst the incongruous mass of modern houses, amidst the disorder, vulgarity and squalor of
some modern town? If I have ventured to call your attention to what it was as architecture, it is
because of the abuse of it which took place in later times and has even lasted into our own antiarchitectural days; and because it is necessary to point out that it has not got the qualities
essential to making it a foundation for any possible new-birth of the arts. In its own time it was
for centuries the only thing that redeemed the academical period of classical art from mere
nothingness, and though it may almost be said to have perished before the change came, yet in
47

perishing it gave some token of the coming change, which indeed was as slow as the decay of
imperial Rome herself. It was in the height of the tax-gathering period of the Roman Peace, in
the last days of Diocletian (died 313) in the palace of Spalato which he built himself to rest in
after he was satiated with rule, that the rebel, Change first showed in Roman art, and that the
builders admitted that their false lintel was false, and that the arch could do without it.
This was the first obscure beginning of Gothic or organic Architecture; henceforth till the
beginning of the modern epoch all is growth uninterrupted, however slow. Indeed, it is slow
enough at first: Organic Architecture took two centuries to free itself from the fetters which the
Academical ages had cast over it, and the Peace of Rome had vanished before it was free. But the
full change came at last, and the architecture was born which logically should have supplanted
the primitive lintel-architecture, of which the civilized style of Greece was the last development.
Architecture was become organic; henceforth no academical period was possible to it, nothing
but death could stop its growth.
The first expression of this freedom is called Byzantine Art, and there is nothing to object to in
the name. For centuries Byzantium was the centre of it, and its first great work in that city (the
Church of the Holy Wisdom, built by Justinian in the year 540) remains its greatest work. The
style leaps into sudden completeness in this most lovely building: for there are few works extant
of much importance of earlier days. As to its origin, of course buildings were raised all through
the sickness of classical art, and traditional forms and ways of work were still in use, and these
traditions, which by this time included the forms of Roman building, were now in the hands of
the Greeks. This Romano-Greek building in Greek hands met with traditions drawn from many
sources. In Syria, the borderland of so many races and customs, the East mingled with the West,
and Byzantine art was born. Its characteristics are simplicity of structure and outline of mass;
amazing delicacy of ornament combined with abhorrence of vagueness: it is bright and clear in
colour, pure in line, hating barrenness as much as vagueness; redundant, but not florid, the very
opposite of Roman architecture in spirit, though it took so many of its forms and revivified them.
Nothing more beautiful than its best works has ever been produced by man, but in spite of its
stately loveliness & quietude, it was the mother of fierce vigour in the days to come, for from its
first days in St Sophia, Gothic architecture has still one thousand years of life before it. East and
West it overran the world wherever men built with history behind them. In the East it mingled
with the traditions of the native populations, especially with Persia of the Sassanian period, and
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produced the whole body of what we, very erroneously, call Arab Art (for the Arabs never had
any art) from Ispahan to Granada, In the West its settled itself in the parts of Italy that Justinian
had conquered, notably Ravenna, and thence came to Venice. From Italy, or perhaps even from
Byzantium itself, it was carried into Germany and pre-Norman England, touching even Ireland
and Scandinavia. Rome adopted it, and sent it another road through the south of France, where it
fell under the influence of provincial Roman architecture, and produced a very strong orderly
and logical substyle, just what one imagines the ancient Romans might have built, if they had
been able to resist the conquered Greeks who took them captive. Thence it spread all over
France, the first development of the architecture of the most architectural of peoples, and in the
north of that country fell under the influence of the Scandinavian and Teutonic tribes, and
produced the last of the round-arched Gothic styles, (named by us Norman) which those
energetic warriors carried into Sicily, where it mingled with the Saracenic Byzantine and
produced lovely works. But we know it best in our own country; for Duke William's intrusive
monks used it everywhere, and it drove out the native English style derived from Byzantium
through Germany.
Here on the verge of a new change, a change of form important enough (though not a change of
essence), we may pause to consider once more what its essential qualities were. It was the first
style since the invention of the arch that did due honour to it, and instead of concealing it
decorated it in a logical manner. This was much; but the complete freedom that it had won,
which indeed was the source of its ingeniousness, was more. It had shaken off the fetters of
Greek superstition and aristocracy, and Roman pedantry, and though it must needs have had laws
to be a style at all, it followed them of free will, and yet unconsciously. The cant of the beauty of
simplicity (i.e., bareness and barrenness) did not afflict it; it was not ashamed of redundancy of
material, or super-abundance of ornament, any more than nature is. Slim elegance it could
produce, or sturdy solidity, as its moods went. Material was not its master, but its servant: marble
was not necessary to its beauty; stone would do, or brick, or timber. In default of carving it
would set together cubes of glass or whatsoever was shining and fair-hued, and cover every
portion of its interiors with a fairy coat of splendour; or would mould mere plaster into intricacy
of work scarce to be followed, but never wearying the eyes with its delicacy and expressiveness
of line. Smoothness it loves, the utmost finish that the hand can give; but if material or skill fail,
the rougher work shall so be wrought that it also shall please us with its inventive suggestion. For
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the iron rule of the classical period, the acknowledged slavery of every one but the great man,
was gone, and freedom had taken its place; but harmonious freedom. Subordination there is, but
subordination of effect, not uniformity of detail; true and necessary subordination, not pedantic.
The full measure of this freedom Gothic Architecture did not gain until it was in the hands of the
workmen of Europe, the gildsmen of the Free Cities, who on many a bloody field proved how
dearly they valued their corporate life by the generous valour with which they risked their
individual lives in its defence. But from the first, the tendency was towards this freedom of hand
and mind subordinated to the co-operative harmony which made the freedom possible. That is
the spirit of Gothic Architecture.
Let us go on a while with our history: up to this point the progress had always been from East to
West, i.e., the East carried the West with it; the West must now go to the East to fetch new gain
thence. A revival of religion was one of the moving causes of energy in the early Middle Ages in
Europe, and this religion (with its enthusiasm for visible tokens of the objects of worship)
impelled people to visit the East, which held the centre of that worship. Thence arose the warlike
pilgrimages of the crusades amongst races by no means prepared to turn their cheeks to the
smiter. True it is that the tendency of the extreme West to seek East did not begin with the days
just before the crusades. There was a thin stream of pilgrims setting eastward long before, and
the Scandinavians had found their way to Byzantium, not as pilgrims but as soldiers, and under
the name of the Voerings a bodyguard of their blood upheld the throne of the Greek Kaiser, and
many of them, returning home, bore with them ideas of art which were not lost on their scanty
but energetic populations. But the crusades brought gain from the East in a far more wholesale
manner; and I think it is clear that part of that gain was the idea of art that brought about the
change from round-arched to pointed Gothic. In those days (perhaps in ours also) it was the rule
for conquerors in any country to assume that there could be no other system of society save that
into which they had been born; and accordingly conquered Syria received a due feudal
government, with the King of Jerusalem for Suzerain, the one person allowed by the heralds to
bear metal on metal in his coat-armour. Nevertheless, the Westerners who settled in this new
realm, few in number as they were, readily received impressions from the art which they saw
around them, the Saracenic Byzantine Art, which was, after all, sympathetic with their own
minds: and these impressions produced the change. For it is not to be thought that there was any
direct borrowing of forms from the East in the gradual change from the round-arched to the
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pointed Gothic: there was nothing more obvious at work than the influence of a kindred style,
whose superior lightness and elegance gave a hint of the road which development might take.
Certainly this change in form, when it came, was a startling one: the pointed-arched Gothic,
when it had grown out of its brief and most beautiful transition, was a vigorous youth indeed. It
carried combined strength and elegance almost as far as it could be carried: indeed, sometimes
one might think it overdid the lightness of effect, as e.g., in the interior of Salisbury Cathedral. If
some abbot or monk of the eleventh century could have been brought back to his rebuilt church
of the thirteenth, he might almost have thought that some miracle had taken place: the huge
cylindrical or square piers transformed into clusters of slim, elegant shafts; the narrow roundheaded windows supplanted by tall wide lancets showing the germs of the elaborate traceries of
the next century, and elegantly glazed with pattern and subject; the bold vault spanning the wide
nave instead of the flat wooden ceiling of past days; the extreme richness of the mouldings with
which every member is treated; the elegance and order of the floral sculpture, the grace and good
drawing of the imagery: in short, a complete and logical style with no longer anything to
apologise for, claiming homage from the intellect, as well as the imagination of men; the
developed Gothic Architecture which has shaken off the trammels of Byzantium as well as of
Rome, but which has, nevertheless, reached its glorious position step by step with no break and
no conscious effort after novelty from the wall of Tiryns and the Treasury of Mycenae.
This point of development was attained amidst a period of social conflict, the facts and
tendencies of which, ignored by the historians of the eighteenth century, have been laid open to
our view by our modern school of evolutionary historians. In the twelfth century the actual
handicraftsmen found themselves at last face to face with the development of the earlier
associations of freemen which were the survivals from the tribal society of Europe: in the teeth
of these exclusive and aristocratic municipalities the handicraftsmen had associated themselves
into guilds of craft, and were claiming their freedom from legal and arbitrary oppression, and a
share in the government of the towns; by the end of the thirteenth century they had conquered the
position everywhere and within the next fifty or sixty years the governors of the free towns were
the delegates of the craft guilds, and all handicraft was included in their associations. This period
of their triumph, marked amidst other events by the Battle of Courtray, where the chivalry of
France turned their backs in flight before the Flemish weavers, was the period during which
Gothic Architecture reached its zenith. It must be admitted, I think, that during this epoch, as far
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as the art of beautiful building is concerned, France and England were the architectural countries
par excellence; but all over the intelligent world was spread this bright, glittering, joyous art,
which had now reached its acme of elegance and beauty; and moreover in its furniture, of which
I have spoken above, the excellence was shared in various measure betwixt the countries of
Europe. And let me note in passing that the necessarily ordinary conception of a Gothic interior
as being a colourless whitey-grey place dependent on nothing but the architectural forms, is
about as far from the fact as the corresponding idea of a Greek temple standing in all the chastity
of white marble. We must remember, on the contrary, that both buildings were clad, and that the
noblest part of their real raiment was their share of a great epic, a story appealing to the hearts
and minds of men. And in the Gothic building, especially in the half century we now have before
us, every part of it, walls, windows, floor, was all looked on as space for the representation of
incidents of the great story of mankind, as it had presented itself to the minds of men then living;
and this space was used with the greatest frankness of prodigality, and one may fairly say that
wherever a picture could be painted there it was painted.
For now Gothic Architecture had completed its furniture: Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch; the German
Hero ballad-epics, the French Romances, the English Forest-ballads, that epic of revolt, as it has
been called, the Icelandic Sagas, Froissart and the Chroniclers, represented its literature. Its
painting embraces a host of names (of Italy and Flanders chiefly) the two great realists Giotto
and Van Eyck at their head: but every village has its painter, its carvers, its actors even; every
man who produces works of handicraft is an artist. The few pieces of household goods left of its
wreckage are marvels of beauty; its woven cloths and embroideries are worthy of its loveliest
building, its pictures and ornamented books would be enough in themselves to make a great
period of art, so excellent they are in epic intention, in completeness of unerring decoration, and
in marvellous skill of hand. In short, those masterpieces of noble building, those specimens of
architecture, as we call them, the sight of which makes the holiday of our lives to-day, are the
standard of the whole art of those times, and tell the story of all the completeness of art in the
heyday of life, as well as that of the sad story which follows. For when anything human has
arrived at quasi-completion there remains for it decay and death, in order that the new thing may
be born from it; and this wonderful joyous art of the Middle Ages could by no means escape its
fate.

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In the middle of the fourteenth century Europe was scoured by that mysterious terror the Black
Death (a terror similar to which perhaps waylays the modern world) and, along with it, the no
less mysterious pests of Commercialism and Bureaucracy attacked us. This misfortune was the
turning point of the Middle Ages; once again a great change was at hand.
The birth and growth of the coming change was marked by art with all fidelity. Gothic
Architecture began to alter its character in the years that immediately followed on the Great Pest;
it began to lose its exaltation of style and to suffer a diminution in the generous wealth of beauty
which it gave us in its heyday. In some places, e.g., England, it grew more crabbed, and even
sometimes more common-place; in others, as in France, it lost order, virility, and purity of line.
But for a long time yet it was alive and vigorous, and showed even greater capacity than before
for adapting itself to the needs of a developing society: nor did the change of style affect all its
furniture injuriously; some of the subsidiary arts as e.g., Flemish tapestry and English woodcarving, rather gained than lost for many years.
At last, with the close of the fifteenth century, the Great Change became obvious; and we must
remember that it was no superficial change of form, but a change of spirit affecting every form
inevitably. This change we have somewhat boastfully, and as regards the arts quite untruthfully,
called the New Birth. But let us see what it means.
Society was preparing for a complete recasting of its elements: the Medieval Society of Status
was in process of transition into modern Society of Contract. New classes were being formed to
fit the new system of production which was at the bottom of this; political life began again with
the new birth of bureaucracy; and political, as distinguished from natural, nationalities were
being hammered together for the use of that bureaucracy, which was itself a necessity to the new
system. And withal a new religion was being fashioned to fit the new theory of life: in short, the
Age of Commercialism was being born.
Now some of us think that all this was a source of misery and degradation to the world at the
time, that it is still causing misery and degradation, and that as a system it is bound to give place
to a better one. Yet we admit that it had a beneficent function to perform; that amidst all the
ugliness and confusion which it brought with it, it was a necessary instrument for the
development of freedom of thought and the capacities of man; for the subjugation of nature to his
material needs. This Great Change, I say, was necessary and inevitable, and on this side, the side
of commerce and commercial science and politics, was a genuine new birth. On this side it did
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not look backward but forward: there had been nothing like it in past history; it was founded on
no pedantic model; necessity, not whim, was its crafts-master.
But, strange to say, to this living body of social, political, religious, scientific New Birth was
bound the dead corpse of a past art. On every side it bade men look forward to some change or
other, were it good or bad: on the side of art, with the sternest pedagogic utterance, it bade men
look backward across the days of the `Fathers and famous men that begat them,' and in scorn of
them, to an art that had been dead a thousand years before. Hitherto, from the very beginning the
past was past, all of it that was not alive in the present, unconsciously to the men of the present.
Henceforth the past was to be our present, and the blankness of its dead wall was to shut out the
future from us. There are many artists at present who do not sufficiently estimate the enormity,
the portentousness of this change, and how closely it is connected with the Victorian
Architecture of the brick box and the slate lid, which helps to make us the dullards that we are.
How on earth could people's ideas of beauty change so? you may say. Well, was it their ideas of
beauty that changed? Was it not rather that beauty, however unconsciously, was no longer an
object of attainment with the men of that epoch?
This used once to puzzle me in the presence of one of the so-called masterpieces of the New
Bible, the revived classical style, such a building as St Paul's in London, for example. I have
found it difficult to put myself in the frame of mind which could accept such a work as a
substitute for even the latest and worst Gothic building. Such taste seemed to me like the taste of
a man who should prefer his lady-love bald. But now I know that it was not a matter of choice on
the part of any one then alive who had an eye for beauty: if the change had been made on the
grounds of beauty it would be wholly inexplicable; but it was not so. In the early days of the
Renaissance there were artists possessed of the highest qualities; but those great men (whose
greatness, mind you, was only in work not carried out by co-operation, painting, and sculpture
for the most part) were really but the fruit of the blossoming-time, the Gothic period; as was
abundantly proved by the succeeding periods of the Renaissance, which produced nothing but
inanity and plausibility in all the arts. A few individual artists were great truly; but artists were
no longer the masters of art, because the people had ceased to be artists: its masters were
pedants. St Peter's in Rome, St Paul's in London, were not built to be beautiful, or to be beautiful
and convenient. They were not built to be homes of the citizens in their moments of exaltation,
their supreme grief or supreme hope, but to be proper, respectable, and therefore to show the due
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amount of cultivation and knowledge of the only peoples and times that in the minds of their
ignorant builders were not ignorant barbarians. They were built to be the homes of a decent
unenthusiastic ecclesiasticism, of those whom we sometimes call Dons now-a-days. Beauty and
romance were outside the aspirations of their builders. Nor could it have been otherwise in those
days; for, once again, architectural beauty is the result of the harmonious and intelligent cooperation of the whole body of people engaged in producing the work of the workman; and by
the time that the changeling New Birth was grown to be a vigorous imp, such workmen no
longer existed. By that time Europe had begun to transform the great army of artist-craftsmen,
who had produced the beauty of her cities, her churches, manor-houses and cottages, into an
enormous stock of human machines, who had little chance of earning a bare livelihood if they
lingered over their toil to think of what they were doing: who were not asked to think, paid to
think, or allowed to think. That invention we have, I should hope, about perfected by this time,
and it must soon give place to a new one. Which is happy; for as long as the invention is in use
you need not trouble yourselves about architecture, since you will not get it, as the common
expression of our life, that is a genuine thing.
But at present I am not going to say anything about direct remedies for the miseries of the New
Birth; I can only tell you what you ought to do if you can. I want you to see that from the brief
historic review of the progress of the Arts it results that to-day there is only one style of
Architecture on which it is possible to found a true living art, which is free to adapt itself to the
varying conditions of social life, climate, and so forth, and that that style is Gothic architecture.
The greater part of what we now call architecture is but an imitation of an imitation of an
imitation, the result of a tradition of dull respectability, or of foolish whims without root or
growth in them.
Let us look at an instance of pedantic retrospection employed in the service of art. A Greek
columnar temple when it was a real thing, was a kind of holy railing built round a shrine: these
things the people of that day wanted, and they naturally took the form of a Greek Temple under
the climate of Greece and given the mood of its people. But do we want those things? If so, I
should like to know what for. And if we pretend we do and so force a Greek Temple on a
modern city, we produce such a gross piece of ugly absurdity as you may see spanning the Lochs
at Edinburgh. In these islands we want a roof and walls with windows cut in them; and these
things a Greek Temple does not pretend to give us.
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Will a Roman building allow us to have these necessaries? Well, only on the terms that we are to
be ashamed of wall, roof and windows, and pretend that we haven't got either of them, but rather
a whimsical attempt at the imitation of a Greek Temple.
Will a neo-classical building allow us these necessities? Pretty much on the same terms as the
Roman one; except when it is rather more than half Gothic. It will force us to pretend that we
have neither roof, walls, nor windows, nothing but an imitation of the Roman travesty of a Greek
Temple.
Now a Gothic building has walls that it is not ashamed of; and in those walls you may cut
windows wherever you please; and, if you please may decorate them to show that you are not
ashamed of them; your windows, which you must have, become one of the great beauties of your
house, and you have no longer to make a lesion in logic in order not to sit in pitchy darkness in
your own house, as in the sham sham-Roman style: your window, I say, is no longer a
concession to human weakness, an ugly necessity (generally ugly enough in all conscience) but a
glory of the Art of Building. As for the roof in the sham style: unless the building is infected with
Gothic common sense, you must pretend that you are living in a hot country which needs nothing
but an awning, and that it never rains or snows in these islands. Whereas in a Gothic building the
roof both within and without (especially within, as is most meet) is the crown of its beauties, the
abiding place of its brain.
Again, consider the exterior of our buildings, that part of them that is common to all passers-by,
and that no man can turn into private property unless he builds amidst an inaccessible park. The
original of our neo-classic architecture was designed for marble in a bright dry climate, which
only weathers it to a golden tone. Do we really like a neo-classic building weather-beaten by the
roughness of hundreds of English winters from October to June? And on the other hand, can any
of us fail to be touched by the weathered surface of a Gothic building which has escaped the
restorers' hands? Do we not clearly know the latter to be a piece of nature, that more excellent
mood of nature that uses the hands and wills of men as instruments of creation?
Indeed time would fail me to go into the many sides of the contrast between the Architecture
which is a mere pedantic imitation of what was once alive, and that which after a development of
long centuries has still in it, as I think, capacities for fresh developments, since its life was cut
short by an arbitrary recurrence to a style which had long lost all elements of life and growth.
Once for all, then, when the modern world finds that the eclecticism of the present is barren and
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fruitless, and that its needs and will have a style of architecture which, I must tell you once more,
can only be as part of a change as wide and deep as that which destroyed Feudalism; when it has
come to that conclusion, the style of architecture will have to be historic in the true sense; it well
not be able to dispense with tradition; it cannot begin at least with doing something quite
different from anything that has been done before; yet whatever the form of it may be, the spirit
of it will be sympathy with the needs and aspirations of its own time, not simulation of needs and
aspirations passed away. Thus it will remember the history of the past, make history in the
present, and teach history in the future. As to the form of it, I see nothing for it but that the form,
as well as the spirit, must be Gothic; an organic style cannot spring out of an eclectic one, but
only from an organic one. In the future, therefore, our style of architecture must be Gothic
Architecture.
And meanwhile of the world demanding architecture, what are we to do? Meanwhile? After all,
is there any meanwhile? Are we not now demanding Gothic Architecture and crying for the fresh
New Birth? To me it seems so. It is true that the world is uglier now than it was fifty years ago;
but then people thought that ugliness a desirable thing, and looked at it with complacency as a
sign of civilisation, which no doubt it is. Now we are no longer complacent, but are grumbling in
a dim unorganised manner. We feel a loss, and unless we are very unreal and helpless we shall
presently begin to try to supply that loss. Art cannot be dead so long as we feel the lack of it, I
say: and though we shall probably try many roundabout ways for filling up the lack; yet we shall
at last be driven into the one right way of concluding that in spite of all risks, and all losses,
unhappy and slavish work must come to an end. In that day we shall take Gothic Architecture by
the hand, and know it for what it was and what it is.
Bibliographical Note
Title
Gothic Architecture
Delivery
1. 11th February 1889 at a meeting sponsored by the Haldane Trustees at the Corporation
Galleries, Glasgow
2. 9th April 1889 at a meeting sponsored by the Guild and School of Handicraft which was
held in the Lecture Room of Toynbee Hall for students of the University Settlements
scheme
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3. 7th November 1889 at a meeting sponsored by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at
the opening of their second exhibition at the New Gallery, Regent Street, London
4. 20th November 1889 at a meeting sponsored by the Hammersmith Branch of the SL at
Kelmscott House, Hammersmith
5. 12th April 1890 before the Artists' Club at the Club Rooms, Eberle Street, Liverpool
6. 2nd May 1890 at a meeting sponsored by the Fabians at the St James's Hall Restaurant
7. 28th November 1890 at a meeting held at Barnard's Inn
Publication
1. Gothic Architecture: A Lecture for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society,
Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works
William Morris
The Arts and Crafts of To-day
"Applied Art" is the title which the Society has chosen for that portion of the arts which I have to
speak to you about. What are we to understand by that title? I should answer that what the
Society means by applied art is the ornamental quality which men choose to add to articles of
utility. Theoretically this ornament can be done without, and art would then cease to be "applied"
- would exist as a kind of abstraction, I suppose. But though this ornament to articles of utility
may be done without, man up to the present time has never done without it, and perhaps never
will; at any rate he does not propose to do so at present, although, as we shall see presently, he
has got himself into somewhat of a mess in regard to his application of art. Is it worth while for a
moment or two considering why man has never thought of giving up work which adds to the
labour necessary to provide him with food and shelter, and to satisfy his craving for some
exercise of his intellect? I think it is, and that such consideration will help us in dealing with the
important question which one more I must attempt to answer, "What is our position towards the
applied arts in the present, and what have we to hope for them and from them in the future?"
Now I say without hesitation that the purpose of applying art to articles of utility is twofold: first,
to add beauty to the results of the work of man, which would otherwise be ugly; and secondly, to
add pleasure to the work itself, which would otherwise be painful and disgustful. If that be the
case, we must cease to wonder that man should always have striven to ornament the work of his

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own hands, which he must needs see all round about him daily and hourly; or that he should have
always striven to turn the pain of his labour into a pleasure wherever it seemed possible to him.
Now as to the first purpose: I have said that the produce of man's labour must be ugly if art be
not applied to it, and I use the word ugly as the strongest plain word in the English language. For
the works of man cannot show a mere negation of beauty; when there are not beautiful they are
actively ugly, and are thereby degrading to our manlike qualities; and at last so degrading that we
are not sensible of our degradation, and are therefore preparing ourselves for the next step
downward. The active injury of non-artistic human work I want especially to fix in your minds;
so I repeat again, if you dispense with applying art to articles of utility, you will not have
unnoticeable utilities, but utilities which will bear with them the same sort of harm as blankets
infected with the small-pox or the scarlet-fever, and every step in your material life and its
"progress" will tend towards the intellectual death of the human race.
Of course you will understand that in speaking of the works of man, I do not forget that there are
some of his most necessary labours to which he cannot apply art in the sense wherein we are
using it; but that only means that Nature has taken the beautifying of them out of his hands; and
in most of these cases the processes are beautiful in themselves if our stupidity did not add grief
and anxiety to them. I mean that the course of the fishing-boat over the waves, the plough-share
driving the furrow for next year's harvest, the June swathe, the shaving falling from the
carpenter's plane, all such things are in themselves beautiful, and the practice of them would be
delightful if man, even in these last days of civilization, had mot been so stupid as to declare
practically that such work (without which we should die in a few days) is the work of thralls and
starvelings, whereas the work of destruction, strife, and confusion, is the work of the pick of the
human race - gentlemen to wit.
But if these applied arts are necessary, as I believe they are, to prevent mankind from being a
mere ugly and degraded blotch on the surface of the earth, which without him would certainly be
beautiful, their other function of giving pleasure to labour is at least as necessary, and, if the two
functions can be separated, even more beneficent and indispensable. For if it be true, as I know it
is, that the function of art is to make labour pleasurable, what is the position in which we must
find ourselves without it? One of two miseries must happen to us: either the necessary work of
our lives must be carried on by a miserable set of helots for the benefit of a few lofty intellects;
or if, as we ought to do, we determine to spread fairly the burden of the curse of labour over the
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whole community, yet there the burden will be, spoiling for each one of us a large part of that
sacred gift of life, every fragment of which, if we were wise, we should treasure up and make the
most of (and allow other to do so) by using it for the pleasurable exercise of our energies, which
is the only true source of happiness.
Let me call your attention to an analogy between the function of the applied arts and a gift of
Nature without which the world would certainly be much unhappier, but which is so familiar to
us that we have no proper single word for it, and must use a phrase; to wit, the pleasure of
satisfying hunger. Appetite is the single word used for it, but is clearly vague and unspecific: let
us use it, however, now we have agreed as to what we mean by it.
By the way, need I apologize for introducing so gross a subject as eating and drinking? Some of
you perhaps will think I ought to, and are looking forward to the day when this function also will
be civilized into the taking of some intensely concentrated pill once a year, or indeed once in a
life-time, leaving us free for the rest of our time to the exercise of our intellect - if we chance to
have any in those days. From this height of cultivated aspiration I respectfully beg to differ, and
in all seriousness, and not in the least in the world as a joke, I say that the daily meeting of the
house-mates in rest and kindness for this function of eating, this restoration of the waste of life,
ought to be looked on as a kind of sacrament, and should be adorned by art to the best of our
powers: and pray pardon me if I say that the consciousness that there are so many people whose
lives are so sordid, miserable, and anxious, that they cannot duly celebrate this sacrament, should
be felt by those that can, as a burden to be shaken off by remedying the evil, and not by ignoring
it. Well now, I say, that as eating would be dull work without appetite, or the pleasure of eating,
so is the production of utilities dull work without art, or the pleasure of production; and that it is
Nature herself who leads us to desire this pleasure, this sweetening of our daily toil. I am
inclined to think that in the long-run mankind will find it indispensable; but if that turn out to be
a false prophecy, all I can say is that mankind will have to find out some new pleasure to take its
place, or life will become unendurable, and society impossible. Meantime it is reasonable and
right that men should strive to make the useful wares which they produce beautiful just as Nature
does; and that they should strive to make the making of them pleasant, just as Nature makes
pleasant the exercise of the necessary functions of sentient beings. To apply art to useful wares,
in short, is not frivolity, but a part of the serious business of life.

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Now let us see in somewhat more detail what applied art deals with. I take it that it is only as a
matter of convenience that we separate painting and sculpture from applied art: for in effect the
synonym for applied art is architecture, and I should say that painting is of little use, and
sculpture of less, except where their works form a part of architecture. A person with any
architectural sense really always looks at any picture or any piece of sculpture from this point of
view; even with the most abstract picture he is sure to think, How shall I frame it, and where
shall I put it? As for sculpture, it becomes a mere toy, a tour de force, when it is not definitely a
part of a building, executed for a certain height from the eye, and to be seen in a certain light.
And if this be the case with works of art which can to a certain extent be abstracted from their
surroundings, it is, of course, the case a fortiori with more subsidiary matters. In short, the
complete work of applied art, the true unit of the art, is a building with all its due ornament and
furniture; and I must say from experience that it is impossible to ornament duly an ugly or base
building. And on the other hand I am forced to say that the glorious art of good building is in
itself so satisfying, that I have seen many a building that needed little ornament, wherein all that
seemed needed for its complete enjoyment was some signs of sympathetic and happy use by
human beings: a stout table, a few old-fashioned chairs, a pot of flowers will ornament the
parlour of an old English yeoman's house far better than a wagon-load of Rubens will ornament a
gallery in Blenheim Park.
Only remember that this forbearance, this restrain in beauty, is not by any means necessarily
artless: where you come upon an old house that looks thus satisfactory, while no conscious
modern artist has been at work there, the result is caused by unconscious unbroken tradition: in
default of that, in will march that pestilential ugliness I told you of before, and with its loathsome
pretence and hideous vulgarity will spoil the beauty of a Gothic house in Somersetshire, or the
romance of a peel-tower on the edge of a Scotch loch; and to get back any of the beauty and
romance (you will never get it all back) you will need a conscious artist of to-day, whose chief
work, however, will be putting out the intrusive rubbish and using the white-washing brush
freely.
Well, I repeat that the unit of the art I have to deal with is the dwelling of some group of people,
well-built, beautiful, suitable to its purpose, and duly ornamented and furnished so as to express
the kind of life which the inmates live. Or it may be some noble and splendid building, built to
last for ages, and it also duly ornamented so as to express the life and aspirations of the citizens:
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in itself a great piece of history of the efforts of the citizens to raise a house worthy of their noble
lives, and its mere decoration an epic wrought for the pleasure and education, not of the present
generation only, but of many generations to come. This is the true work of art - I was going to
say of genuine civilization, but the word has been so misused that I will not use it - the true work
of art, the true masterpiece, of reasonable and manly men conscious of the bond of true society
that makes everything each man does of importance to every one else.
This is, I say, the unit of the art, this house, this church, this town-hall, built and ornamented by
the harmonious efforts of a free people: by no possibility could one man do it, however gifted he
might be: even supposing the director or architect of it were a great painter and a great sculptor,
an unfailing designer of metal work, of mosaic, of woven stuffs and the rest - though he may
design all these things, he cannot execute them, and something of his genius must be in the other
members of the great body that raises the complete work: millions on millions of strokes of
hammer and chisel, of the gouge, of the brush, of the shuttle, are embodied in that work of art,
and in every one of them is either intelligence to help the master, or stupidity to foil him
hopelessly. The very masons laying day by day their due tale of rubble and ashlar may help him
to fill the souls of all beholders with satisfaction, or may make his paper design a folly or a
nullity. They and all the workmen engaged in the work will bring that disaster about in spite of
the master's mighty genius, unless they are instinct with intelligent tradition; unless they have
that tradition, whatever pretence of art there is in it will be worthless. But if they are working
backed by intelligent tradition, their work is the expression of their harmonious co-operation and
the pleasure which they took in it: no intelligence, even of the lowest kind, has been crushed in
it, but rather subordinated and used, so that no one from the master designer downwards could
say, This is my work, but every one could say truly, This is our work. Try to conceive, if you
can, the mass of pleasure which the production of such a work of art would give to all concerned
in making it, though years and years it may be (for such work cannot be hurried); and when
made there it is for a perennial pleasure to the citizens, to look at, to use, to care for, from day to
day and year to year.
Is this a mere dream of an idealist? No, not at all; such works of art were once produced, when
these islands had but a scanty population, leading a rough and to many (though not to me) a
miserable life, with a "plentiful lack" of many, nay most, of the so-called comforts of
civilization; in some such way have the famous buildings of the world been raised; but the full
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expression of this spirit of common and harmonious work is given only during the comparatively
short period of the developed Middle Ages, the time of the completed combination of the
workmen in the gilds of craft.
And now if you will allow me I will ask a question or two, and answer them myself.
1. Do we wish to have such works of art? I must answer that we here assembled certainly do,
though I will not answer for the general public.
2. Why do we wish for them? Because (if you have followed me so far) their production would
give pleasure to those that used them and those that made them: since if such works were done,
all work would be beautiful and fitting for its purpose, and as a result most labour would cease to
be burdensome.
3. Cam we have them now as things go? Can the present British Empire, will all its power and all
its intelligence, produce what the scanty, half-barbarous, superstitious, ignorant population of
these islands produced with no apparent effort several centuries ago? No; as things go we cannot
have them; no conceivable combination of talent and enthusiasm could produce them as things
are.
Why? Well, you see, in the first place, we have been engaged for at least one century in loading
the earth with huge masses of "utilitarian" buildings, which we cannot get rid of in a hurry; we
must be housed, and there are our houses for us; and I have said you cannot ornament ugly
houses. This is a bad hearing for us.
But supposing we pulled these utilitarian houses down, should we build them up again much
better? I fear not, in spite of the considerable improvement in taste which has taken place of late
years, and of which this Congress is, I hope, an indication amongst others.
If the ugly utilitarian buildings abovesaid were pulled down, and we set about building others in
their place, the new ones would assuredly be of two kinds: one kind would be still utilitarian in
fact, though they might affect various degrees and kinds of ornamental style; and they would be
at least as bad as those which they replaced, and in some respects would be worse than a good
many of the older ones; would be flimsier in building, more tawdry, and more vulgar than those
of the earlier utilitarian style. The other kind would be designed by skilful architects, men
endowed with a sense of beauty, and educated in the history of past art, and they would doubtless
be far better in form than the utilitarian abortions we have been speaking of; but they would lack

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the spirit of the older buildings of which I have spoken above. Let that pass for the moment. I
will recur to it presently.
For one thing I am sure would immediately strike us in our city rebuilt at the end of the
nineteenth century. The great mass of building would be of the utilitarian kind, and only here and
there would you find an example of the refined and careful work of the educated architects - the
Eclectic style, if you will allow me so to call it. That is all our rebuilding would come to; we
should be pretty much where we are now, except that we should have lost some solid
straightforwardly ugly buildings, and gained a few elegantly eccentric ones, "not understanded of
the people."
How is this? Well, the answer to that question will answer the "why" of a few sentences back.
The mass of our houses would be utilitarian and ugly even if we set about the work of housing
ourselves anew, because tradition has at last brought us into the plight of being builders of base
and degrading buildings, and when we want to build otherwise we must try to imitate work done
by men whose traditions led them to build beautifully; which I must say is not a very hopeful
job.
I just said now that those few refined buildings which might be raised in a rebuilding of our
houses, or which, to drop hypothesis, are built pretty often now, would lack, or do lack, the spirit
of the medieval buildings I spoke of. Surely this is obvious: so far from being works of
harmonious combination as effortless as any artistic work can be, they are, even when most
successful, the result of a contrast conflict with all the traditions of the time. As a rule the only
person connected with a work of architecture who has any idea of what is wanted in it is the
architect himself; and at every turn he has to correct and oppose the habits of the mason, the
joiner, the cabinet-maker, the carver, etc., and to try to get them to imitate painfully the habits of
the fourteenth-century workmen, and to lay aside their own habits, formed not only from their
own personal daily practice, but from the inherited turn of mind and practice of body of more
than two centuries at least. Under all these difficulties it would be nothing short of a miracle if
those refined buildings did not proclaim their eclecticism to all beholders. Indeed, as it is, the
ignorant stare at them wondering; fools of the Podsnap breed laugh at them; harsh critics pass
unkind judgments on them. Don't let us be any of these: when all is said they do much credit to
those who have designed them and carried them out in the teeth of such prodigious difficulties;
they are often beautiful in their own eclectic manner: they are always meant to be so: shall we
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find fault with their designers for trying to make them different from the mass of Victorian
architecture? If there was to be any attempt to make them beautiful, that difference, that
eccentricity, was necessary. Let us praise their eccentricity and not deride it, we whose genuine
tendency is to raise buildings which are a blot on the beautiful earth, an insult to the common
sense of cultivated nineteenth-century humanity. Allow me a parenthesis here. When I look on a
group of clean well-fed middle-class men of that queer mixed race that we have been in the habit
of calling the Anglo-Saxon (whether they belong to the land on this side of the Atlantic or the
other); when I see these noble creatures, tall, wide-shouldered, and well-knit, with their bright
eyes and well moulded features, these men full of courage, capacity, and energy, I have been
astounded in considering the houses they have thought good enough for them, and the pettiness
of the occupations which they have thought worthy of the exercise of their energies. To see a
man of those inches, for example, bothering himself over the exact width of a stripe in some
piece of printed cloth (which has nothing to do with its artistic needs) for fear it might not just hit
the requirements of some remote market, tyrannized over by the whims of a languid creole or a
fantastic negro, has given me a feeling of shame for my civilized middle-class fellow-man, who
is regardless of the quality of the wares which he sells, but intensely anxious about the profits to
be derived from them.
This parenthesis, to the subject of which I shall presently have to recur, leads me to note here that
I have been speaking chiefly about architecture, because I look upon it, first as the foundation of
all the arts, and next as an all-embracing art. All the furniture and ornament which goes to make
up the complete unit of art, a properly ornamented dwelling, is in some degree or other beset
with the difficulties which hamper nowadays the satisfactory accomplishment of good and
beautiful building. The decorative painter, the mosaicist, the window-artist, the cabinet-maker,
the paper-hanging-maker, the potter, the weaver, all these have to fight with the traditional
tendency of the epoch in their attempt to produce beauty rather than marketable finery, to put
artistic finish on their work rather than trade finish. I may, I hope, without being accused of
egotism, say that my life for the last thirty years has given me ample opportunity for knowing the
weariness and bitterness of that struggle.
For, to recur to my parenthesis, if the captain of industry (as it is the fashion to call a business
man) thinks not of the wares with which he has to provide the world-market, but of profit to be
made from them, so the instrument which he employs as an adjunct to his machinery, the artisan,
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does not think of the wares which he (and the machine) produces as wares, but simply as
livelihood for himself. The tradition of the work which he has to deal with has brought him to
this, that instead of satisfying his own personal conception of what the wares he is concerned in
making should be, he has to satisfy his master's view of the marketable quality of the said wares.
And you must understand that this is a necessity of the way in which the workman works; to
work thus means livelihood for him; to work otherwise means starvation. I beg you to note that
this means that the realities of the wares are sacrificed to commercial shams of them, if that be
not too strong a word. The manufacturer (as we call him) cannot turn out quite nothing and offer
it for sale, at least in the case of articles of utility; what he does do is to turn out a makeshift of
the article demanded by the public, and by means of the "sword of cheapness," as it has been
called, he not only can force the said makeshift on the public, but can (and does) prevent them
from getting the real thing; the real thing presently ceases to be made after the makeshift has
been once foisted on to the market.
Now we won't concern ourselves about other makeshifts, however noxious to the pleasure of life
they may be: let those excuse them that profit by them. But if you like to drink glucose beer
instead of malt beer, and to eat oleo-margarine instead of butter; if these things content you, at
least ask yourselves what in the name of patience you want with a makeshift of art!
Indeed I began by saying that it was natural and reasonable for man to ornament his mere useful
wares and not to be content with mere utilitarianism; but of course I assumed that the ornament
was real, that it did not miss its mark, and become no ornament. For that is what makeshift art
means, and that is indeed a waste of labour.
Try to understand what I mean: you want a ewer and basin, say: you go into a shop and buy one;
you probably will not buy a merely white one; you will scarcely see a merely white set. Well,
you look at several, and one interests you about as much as another - that is, not at all; and at last
in mere weariness you say, "Well, that will do"; and you have your crockery with a scrawl of
fern leaves and convolvulus over it which is its "ornament." The said ornament gives you no
pleasure, still less any idea; it only gives you an impression (a mighty dull one) of bedroom. The
ewer also has some perverse stupidity about its handle which also says bedroom, and adds
respectability: and in short you endure the said ornament, except perhaps when you are bilious
and uncomfortable in health. You think, if you think at all, that the said ornament has wholly
missed its mark. And yet that isn't so; that ornament, that special form which the ineptitude of the
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fern scrawl and the idiocy of the handle has taken, has sold so many dozen or gross more of that
toilet set than of others, and that is what it is put there for; not to amuse you, you know it is not
art, but you don't know that it is trade finish, exceedingly useful - to everybody except its user
and its actual maker.
But does it serve no purpose except to the manufacturer, shipper, agent, shopkeeper, etc.? Ugly,
inept, stupid, as it is, I cannot quite say that. For if, as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage
which vice pays to virtue, so this degraded piece of trade finish is the homage which commerce
pays to art. It is a token that art was once applied to ornamenting utilities, for the pleasure of
their makers and their users.
Now we have seen that this applied art is worth cultivating, and indeed that we are here to
cultivate it; but it is clear that, under the conditions above spoken of, its cultivation will be at
least difficult. For the present conditions of life in which the application of art to utilities is made
imply that a very serious change has taken place since those works of co-operative art were
produced in the Middle Ages, which few people I think sufficiently estimate.
Briefly speaking, this change amounts to this, that Tradition has transferred itself from art to
commerce - that commerce which has now embraced the old occupation of war, as well as the
production of wares. But the end proposed by commerce is the creation of a market-demand, and
the satisfaction of it when created for the sake of the production of individual profits: whereas
the end proposed by art applied to utilities, that is, the production of the days before commerce,
was the satisfaction of the genuine spontaneous needs of the public, and the earning of individual
livelihood by the producers. I beg you to consider these two ideas of production, and you will
then see how wide apart they are from one another. To the commercial producer the actual wares
are nothing; their adventures in the market are everything. To the artist the wares are everything;
his market he need not trouble himself about; for he is asked by other artists to do what he does
do, what his capacity urges him to do.
The ethics of the commercial person (squaring themselves of course to his necessities) bid him
give as little as he can to the public, and take as much as he possibly can from them: the ethics of
the artist bid him put as much of himself as he can in every piece of goods he makes. The
commercial person, therefore, is in the position, that he is dealing with a public of enemies; the
artist, on the contrary, with a public of friends and neighbours.

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Again, it is clear that the commercial person must chiefly confine his energies to the war which
he is waging; the wares that he deals in must be made by instruments - as far as possible by
means of instruments without desires or passions, by automatic machines, as we call them.
Where that is not possible, and he has to used highly-drilled human beings instead of machines,
it is essential to his success that they should imitate the passionless quality of machines as long
as they are at work; whatever of human feeling may be irrepressible will be looked upon by the
commercial person as he looks upon grit or friction in his non-human machines, as a nuisance to
be abated. Need I say that from these human machines it is futile to look for art? Whatever
feelings they may have for art they must keep for their leisure - that is, for the very few hours in
the week when they are trying to rest after labour and are not asleep; or for the hapless days
when they are out of employment and are in desperate anxiety about their livelihood.
Of these men, I say, you cannot hope that they can live by applying art to utilities: they can only
apply the sham of it for commercial purposes; and I may say in parenthesis, that from experience
I can guess what a prodigious amount of talent is thus wasted. For the rest you may consider, and
workmen may consider, this statement of mine to be somewhat brutal: I can only reply both to
you and to them, that it is a truth which it is necessary to face. It is one side of the disabilities of
the working class, and I invite them to consider it seriously.
Therefore (as I said last year at Liverpool), I must turn from the great body of men who are
producing utilities, and who are debarred from applying art to them, to a much smaller group,
indeed a very small one. I must turn to a group of men who are not working under masters who
employ them to produce for the world-market, but who are free to do as they please with their
work, and are working for a market which they can see and understand, whatever the limitations
may be under which they work: that is, the artists.
They are a small and a weak body, on the surface of things obviously in opposition to the general
tendency of the age; debarred, therefore, as I have said, from true co-operative art; and as a
consequence of this isolation heavily weighted in the race of success. For co-operative tradition
places an artist at the very beginning of his career in a position wherein he has escaped the toil of
learning a huge multitude of little matters, difficult, nay impossible to learn otherwise: the field
which he has to dig is not a part of a primeval prairie, but ground made fertile and put in good
heart by the past labour of countless generations. It is the apprenticeship of the ages, in short,
whereby an artist is born into the workshop of the world.
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We artists of to-day are not so happy as to share fully in this apprenticeship: we have to spend
the best part of our lives in trying to get hold of some "style" which shall be natural to us, and too
often fail in doing so; or perhaps oftener still, having acquired our "style," that is, our method of
expression, become so enamoured of the means, that we forget the end, and find that we have
nothing to express except our self-satisfaction in the possession of our very imperfect instrument;
so that you will find clever and gifted men at the present day who are prepared to sustain as a
theory, that art has no function but the display of clever executive qualities, and that one subject
is as good as another. No wonder that this theory should lead them into the practice of producing
pictures which we might pronounce to be clever, if we could understand what they meant, but
whose meaning we can only guess at, and suppose that they are intended to convey the
impression on a very short-sighted person of divers ugly incidents seen through the medium of a
London fog.
Well I admit that this is a digression, as my subject is Applied Art, and such art cannot be
applied to anything; and I am afraid, indeed, that it must be considered a mere market article.
Thus we artists of to-day are cut off from co-operative tradition, but I must not say that we are
cut off from all tradition. And though it is undeniable that we are out of sympathy with the main
current of the age, its commercialism, yet we are (even sometimes unconsciously) in sympathy
with that appreciation of history which is a genuine growth of the times, and a compensation to
some of us for the vulgarity and brutality which beset our lives; and it is through this sense of
history that we are united to the tradition of past times.
Past times: are we reactionists, then, anchored in the dead past? Indeed I should hope not; nor
can I altogether tell you how much of the past is really dead. I see about me now evidence of
ideas recurring which have long been superseded. The world runs after some object of desire,
strives strenuously for it, gains it, and apparently casts it aside; like a kitten playing with a ball,
you say. No, not quite. The gain is gained, and something else has to be pursued, often
something which once seemed to be gained and was left alone for a while. Yet the world has not
gone back; for that old object of desire was only gained in the past as far as the circumstances of
the day would allow it to be gained then. As a consequence the gain was imperfect; the times are
now changed, and allow us to carry on that old gain a step forward to perfection: the world has
not really gone back on its footsteps, though to some it has seemed to do so. Did the world go
back, for instance, when the remnant of the ancient civilizations was overwhelmed by the
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barbarism which was the foundation of modern Europe? We can all see that it did not. Did it go
back when the logical and orderly system of the Middle Ages had to give place to the confusion
of incipient commercialism in the sixteenth century? Again, ugly and disastrous as the change
seems on the surface, I yet think it was not a retrogression into prehistoric anarchy, but a step
upward along the spiral, which, and not the straight line, is, as my friend Bax puts it, the true line
of progress.
So that if in the future that shall immediately follow on this present we may have to recur to
ideas that to-day seem to belong to the past only, that will not be really a retracing of our steps,
but rather a carrying on of progress from a point where we abandoned it a while ago. On that side
of things, the side of art, we have not progressed; we have disappointed the hopes of the period
just before the time of abandonment: have those hopes really perished, or have they merely lain
dormant, abiding the time when we, or our sons, or our sons' sons, should quicken them once
more?
I must conclude that the latter is the case, that the hope of leading a life ennobled by the
pleasurable exercise of our energies is not dead, though it has been for a while forgotten. I do not
accuse the epoch in which we live of uselessness: doubtless it was necessary that civilized man
should turn himself to mastering nature and winning material advantages undreamed of in former
times; but there are signs in the air which show that men are not so wholly given to this side of
the battle of life as they used to be. People are beginning to murmur and say: "So we have won
the battle with nature; where then is the reward of victory? We have striven and striven, but shall
we never enjoy? Man that was once weak is now most mighty. But his increase of happiness,
where is that? who shall show it to us, who shall measure it? Have we done more than change
one form of unhappiness for another, one form of unrest for another? We see the instruments
which civilization has fashioned; what is she going to do with them? Mare more and more and
yet more? To what avail? If she would but use them, then indeed were something done.
Meantime what is civilization doing? Day by day the world grows uglier, and where in the
passing day is the compensating gain? Half-conquered nature forced us to toil, and yet for more
reward than the sustenance of a life of toil; now nature is conquered, but still we force ourselves
to toil for that bare unlovely wage: riches we have won without stint, but wealth is as far from us
as ever, or it may be farther. Come then, since we are so mighty, let us try if we can not do the
one thing worth doing; make the world, of which we are part, somewhat happier."
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This is the spirit of much that I hear said about me, not by poor or oppressed men only, but by
those who have a good measure of the gains of civilization. I do not know if the same kind of
feeling was about in the earlier times of the world; but I know that it means real discontent, a
hope, partly unconscious, of better days: and I will be bold to say that the spirit of this latter part
of our century is that of fruitful discontent, or rebellion; that is to say, of hope. And of that
rebellion we artists are a part; and though we are but few, and few as we are, mere amateurs
compared with the steady competency of the artists of bygone times, yet we are of some use in
the movement towards the attainment of wealth, that is toward the making of our instruments
useful.
For we, at least, have remembered what most people have forgotten amongst the ugly unfruitful
toil of the age of makeshifts, that it is possible to be happy, that labour may be a pleasure; nay,
that the essence of pleasure abides in labour if it be duly directed; that is if it be directed towards
the performance of those functions which wise and healthy people desire to see performed; in
other words, if mutual help be its moving principle.
Well, since it is our business, as artists, to show the world that the pleasurable exercise of our
energies is the end of life and the cause of happiness, and thus to show it which road the
discontent of modern life must take in order to reach a fruitful home, it seems to me that we
ought to feel our responsibilities keenly. It is true that we cannot but share in the poverty of this
age of makeshifts, and for long I fear we can be little but amateurs. Yet, at least each in his own
person, we may struggle against makeshifts in art. For instance, to press a little home on
ourselves, if drawing is our weak point, let us try to improve ourselves on that side, and not
proclaim that drawing is nothing and tone is everything. Or if we are bad colourists, let us set to
work and learn, at least, to colour inoffensively (which I assure you can be learned), instead of
jeering at those who give us beautiful colour habitually and easily. Or of we are ignorant of
history, and without any sense of romance, don't let us try to exalt those deficiencies into
excellences by maintaining the divinity of the ugly and the stupid. Let us leave all such unworthy
shabbinesses to the Philistines and pessimists, who naturally want to drag everybody down to
their level.
In short, we artists are in this position, that we are the representatives of craftsmanship which has
become extinct in the production of market wares. Let is therefore do our very best to become as
good craftsmen as possible; and if we cannot be good craftsmen in one line, let us go down to the
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next, and find our level in the arts, and be good in that; if we are artists at all, we shall be sure to
find out what we can do well, even if we cannot do it easily. Let us educate ourselves to be good
workmen at all events, which will give us real sympathy with all that is worth doing in art, make
us free of that great corporation of creative power, the work of all ages, and prepare us for that
which is surely coming, the new co-operative art of life, in which there will be no slaves, no
vessels to dishonour, though there will necessarily be subordination of capacities, in which the
consciousness of each one that he belongs to a corporate body, working harmoniously, each for
all, and all for each, will bring about real and happy equality.
Bibliographical Note
Title
The Arts and Crafts of Today
Delivery
1. 30th October 1889 as the presidential address to the Applied Art Section of the National
Association for the Advancement of Art at a meeting held in Queen Street Hall,
Edinburgh
Publication
1. Art and Its Producers, and The Arts and Crafts of To-day: Two Addresses Delivered
Before the National Association for the Advancement of Art, Longmans & Co., London,
1901
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works
William Morris
The Socialist Ideal: Art
Some people will perhaps not be prepared to hear that Socialism has any ideal of art, for in the
first place it is so obviously founded on the necessity for dealing with the bare economy of life
that many, and even some Socialists, can see nothing save that economic basis; and moreover,
many who might be disposed to admit the necessity of economic change in the direction of
Socialism believe quite sincerely that art is fostered by the inequalities of condition which it is
the first business of Socialism to do away with, and indeed that it cannot exist without them.
Nevertheless, in the teeth of these opinions I assert first that Socialism is an all-embracing theory
of life, and that as it has an ethic and a religion of its own, so also it has an aesthetic: so that to
every one who wishes to study Socialism duly it is necessary to look on it from the aesthetic
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point of view. And, secondly, I assert that inequality of condition, whatever may have been the
case in former ages of the world, has now become incompatible with the existence of a healthy
art.
But before I go further I must explain that I use the word art in a wider sense than is commonly
used amongst us to-day; for convenience sake, indeed, I will exclude all appeals to the intellect
and emotions that are not addressed to the eyesight, though properly speaking, music and all
literature that deals with style should be considered as portions of art; but I can exclude from
consideration as a possible vehicle of art no production of man which can be looked at. And here
at once becomes obvious the sundering of the ways between the Socialist and the commercial
view of art. To the Socialist a house, a knife, a cup, a steam engine, or what not, anything, I
repeat, that is made by man and has form, must either be a work of art or destructive to art. The
Commercialist, on the other hand, divides "manufactured articles" into those which are
prepensely works of art, and are offered for sale in the market as such, and those which have no
pretence and could have no pretence to artistic qualities. The one side asserts indifference, the
other denies it. The Commercialist sees that in the great mass of civilized human labour there is
no pretence to art, and thinks that this is natural, inevitable, and on the whole desirable. The
Socialist, on the contrary, sees in this obvious lack of art a disease peculiar to modern
civilization and hurtful to humanity; and furthermore believes it to be a disease which can be
remedied.
This disease and injury to humanity, also, he thinks is no trifling matter, but a grievous deduction
from the happiness of man; for he knows that the all-pervading art of which I have been
speaking, and to the possibility of which the Commercialist is blind, is the expression of pleasure
in the labour of production; and that, since all persons who are not mere burdens on the
community must produce, in some form or another, it follows that under our present system
most honest men must lead unhappy lives, since their work, which is the most important part of
their lives, is devoid of pleasure.
Or, to put it very bluntly and shortly, under the present state of society happiness is only possible
to artists and thieves.
It will at once be seen from this statement how necessary it is for Socialists to consider the due
relation of art to society; for it is their aim to realize a reasonable, logical, and stable society; and
of the two groups above-named it must be said that the artists (using the word in its present
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narrow meaning) are few, and are too busy over their special work (small blame to them) to pay
much heed to public matters; and that the thieves (of all classes) forma disturbing element in
society.
Now, the Socialist not only sees this disease in the body politic, but also thinks that he knows the
cause of it, and consequently can conceive of a remedy; and that all the more because the disease
is in the main peculiar, as above-said, to modern civilization. Art was once the common
possession of the whole people; it was the rule in the Middle Ages that the produce of handicraft
was beautiful. Doubtless, there were eyesores in the palmy days of medieval art, but these were
caused by destruction of wares, not as now by the making of them: it was the act of war and
devastation that grieved the eye of the artist then; the sacked town, the burned village, the
deserted fields. Ruin bore on its face the tokens of its essential hideousness; to-day, it is
prosperity that is externally ugly.
The story of the Lancashire manufacturer who, coming back from Italy, that sad museum of the
nations, rejoiced to see the smoke, with which he was poisoning the beauty of the earth, pouring
out of his chimneys, gives us a genuine type of the active rich man of the Commercial Period,
degraded into incapacity of even wishing for decent surroundings. In those past days the wounds
of war were grievous indeed, but peace would bring back pleasure to men, and the hope of peace
was at least conceivable; but now, peace can no longer help us and has no hope for us; the
prosperity of the country, by whatever "leaps and bounds" it may advance, will but make
everything more and more ugly about us; it will become more a definitely established axiom that
the longing for beauty, the interest in history, the intelligence of the whole nation, shall be of no
power to stop one rich man from injuring the whole nation to the full extent of his riches, that is,
of his privilege of taxing other people; it will be proved to demonstration, at least to all lovers of
beauty and a decent life, that private property is public robbery.
Nor, however much we say suffer from this if we happen to be artists, should we Socialists at
least complain of it. For, in fact, the "peace" of Commercialism is not peace, but bitter war, and
the ghastly waste of Lancashire and the ever-spreading squalor of London are at least objectlessons to teach us that this is so, that there is war in the land which quells all our efforts to live
wholesomely and happily. The necessity of the time, I say, is to feed the commercial war which
we are all of us waging in some way or another; if, while we are doing this, we can manage,

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some of us, to adorn our lives with some little pleasure of the eyes, it is well, but it is
no necessity, it is a luxury, the lack of which we must endure.
Thus, in this matter also does the artificial famine of inequality, felt in so many other ways,
impoverish us despite of our riches; and we sit starving amidst our gold, the Midas of the ages.
Let me state bluntly a few facts about the present condition of the arts before I try to lay before
my readers the definite Socialist ideal which I have been asked to state. It is necessary to do this
because no ideal for the future can be conceived of unless we proceed by way of contrast; it is
the desire to escape from the present failure which forces us into what are called "ideals"; in fact,
they are mostly attempts by persons of strong hope to embody their discontent with the present.
It will scarcely be denied, I suppose, that at present art is only enjoyed, or indeed thought of, by
comparatively a few persons, broadly speaking, by the rich and the parasites that minister to
them directly. The poor can only afford to have what art is given to them incharity; which is of
the inferior quality inherent in all such gifts - not worth picking up except by starving people.
Now, having eliminated the poor (that is, almost the whole mass of those that make anything that
has form, which, as before-said, must either be helpful to life or destructive of it) as not sharing
in art from any side, let us see how the rich, who do share in it to a certain extent, get on with it.
But poorly, I think, although they are rich. By abstracting themselves from the general life of
man that surrounds them, they can get some pleasure from a few works of art; whether they be
part of the wreckage of times past, or produced by the individual labour, intelligence, and
patience of a few men of genius of to-day fighting desperately against all the tendencies of the
age. But they can do no more than surround themselves with a little circle of hot-house
atmosphere of art hopelessly at odds with the common air of day. A rich man may have a house
full of pictures, and beautiful books, and furniture and so forth; but as soon as he steps out into
the streets he is again in the midst of ugliness to which he must blunt his senses, or be miserable
if he really cares about art. Even when he is in the country, amidst the beauty of trees and fields,
he cannot prevent some neighbouring landowner making the landscape hideous with utilitarian
agriculture; nay, it is almost certain that his own steward or agent will force him into doing the
like on his own lands; he cannot even rescue his parish church from the hands of the restoring
parson. He can go where he likes and do what he likes outside the realm of art, but there he is
helpless. Why is this? Simply because the great mass of effective art, that which pervades all

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life, must be the result of the harmonious co-operation of neighbours. And a rich man has no
neighbours - nothing but rivals and parasites.
Now the outcome of this is that though the educated classes (as we call them) have theoretically
some share in art, or might have, as a matter of fact they have very little. Outside the circle of the
artists themselves there are very few even of the educated classes who care about art. Art is kept
alive by a small group of artists working in a spirit quite antagonistic to the spirit of the time; and
they also suffer from the lack of co-operation which is an essential lack in the art of our epoch.
They are limited, therefore, to the production of a few individualistic works, which are looked
upon by almost everybody as curiosities to be examined, and not as pieces of beauty to be
enjoyed. Nor have they any position or power of helping the public in general matters of taste (to
use a somewhat ugly word). For example, in laying out all the parks and pleasure grounds which
have lately been acquired for the public, as far as I know, no artist has been consulted; whereas
they ought to have been laid out by a committee of artists; and I will venture to say that even a
badly chosen committee (and it might easily be well chosen) would have saved the public from
most of the disasters which have resulted from handing them over to the tender mercies of the
landscape gardener.
This, then, is the position of art in this epoch. It is helpless and crippled amidst the sea of
utilitarian brutality. It cannot perform the most necessary functions: it cannot build a decent
house, or ornament a book, or lay out a garden, or prevent the ladies of the time from dressing in
a way that caricatures the body and degrades it. On the one hand it is cut off from the traditions
of the past, on the other from the life of the present. It is the art of a clique and not of the people.
The people are too poor to have any share of it.
As an artist I know this, because I can see it. As a Socialist I know that it can never be bettered as
long as we are living in that special condition of inequality which is produced bythe direct and
intimate exploitation of the makers of wares, the workmen, at the hands of those who are not
producers in any, even the widest, acceptation of the word.
The first point, therefore, in the Socialist ideal of art is that it should be common to the whole
people; and this can only be the case if it comes to be recognized that art should be an integral
part of all manufactured wares that have definite form and are intended for any endurance. In
other words, instead of looking upon art as a luxury incidental to a certain privileged position,
the Socialist claims art as a necessity of human life which society has no right to withhold from
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any one of the citizens; and he claims also that in order that this claim may be established people
shall have every opportunity of taking to the work which each is best fitted for; not only that
there may be the least possible waste of human effort, but also that that effort may be exercised
pleasurably. For I must here repeat what I have often had to say, that the pleasurable exercise of
our energies is at once the source of all art and the cause of all happiness: that is to say, it is the
end of life. So that once again the society which does not give a due opportunity to all its
members to exercise their energies pleasurably has forgotten the end of life, is not fulfilling its
functions, and therefore is a mere tyranny to be resisted at all points.
Furthermore, in the making of wares there should be some of the spirit of the handicraftsman,
whether the goods be made by hand, or by a machine that helps the hand, or by one that
supersedes it. Now the essential part of the spirit of the handicraftsman is the instinct for looking
at the wares in themselves and their essential use as the object of his work. Their secondary uses,
the exigencies of the market, are nothing to him; it does not matter to him whether the goods he
makes are for the use of a slave or a king, his business is to make them as excellent as may be; if
he does otherwise he is making wares for rogues to sell to fools, and he is himself a rogue by
reason of his complicity. All this means that he is making the goods for himself; for his own
pleasure in making them and using them. But to do this he requires reciprocity, or else he will be
ill-found, except in the goods that he himself makes. His neighbours must make goods in the
same spirit that he does; and each, being a good workman after his kind, will be ready to
recognize excellence in the others, or to note defects; because the primary purpose of the goods,
their use in fact, will never be lost sight of. Thus the market of neighbours, the interchange of
mutual good services, will be established, and will take the place of the present gamblingmarket, and its bond-slave the modern factory system. But the working in this fashion, with the
unforced and instinctive reciprocity of service, clearly implies the existence of something more
than a mere gregarious collection of workmen. It implies a consciousness of the existence of a
society of neighbours, that is of equals; of men who do indeed expect to be made use of by
others, but only so far as the services they give are pleasing to themselves; so far as they are
services the performance of which is necessary to their own well-being and happiness.
Now, as on the one hand I know that no worthy popular art can grow out of any other soil than
this of freedom and mutual respect, so on the other I feel sure both that this opportunity will be
given to art and also that it will avail itself of it, and that, once again, nothing which is made by
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man will be ugly, but will have its due form, and its due ornament, will tell the tale of its making
and the tale of its use, even where it tells no other tale. And this because when people once more
take pleasure in their work, when the pleasure rises to a certain point, the expression of it will
become irresistible, and that expression of pleasure is art, whatever form it may take. As to that
form, do not let us trouble ourselves about it; remembering that after all the earliest art which we
have record of is still art to us; thatHomer is no more out of date than Browning; that the most
scientifically-minded of people (I had almost said the most utilitarian), the ancient Greeks, are
still thought to have produced good artists; that the most superstitious epoch of the world, the
early Middle Ages, produced the freest art; though there is reason enough for that if I had time to
go into it.
For in fact, considering the relation of the modern world to art, our business is now, and for long
will be, not so much attempting to produce definite art, as rather clearing the ground to give art
its opportunity. We have been such slaves to the modern practice of the unlimited manufacture of
makeshifts for real wares, that we run a serious risk of destroying the very material of art; of
making it necessary that men, in order to have any artistic perception, should be born blind, and
should get their ideas of beauty from the hearsay of books. This degradation is surely the first
thing which we should deal with; and certainly Socialists must deal with it at the first
opportunity; they at least must see, however much others may shut their eyes: for they cannot
help reflecting that to condemn a vast population to live in South Lancashire while art and
education are being furthered in decent places, is like feasting within earshot of a patient on the
rack.
Anyhow, the first step toward the fresh new-birth of art must interfere with the privilege of
private persons to destroy the beauty of the earth for their private advantage, and thereby to rob
the community. The day when some company of enemies of the community are forbidden, for
example, to turn the fields of Kent into another collection of cinder heaps in order that they may
extract wealth, unearned by them, from a mass of half-paid labourers; the day when some
hitherto all powerful "pig-skin stuffed with money" is told that he shall not pull down some
ancient building in order that he may force his fellow citizens to pay him additional rack-rent for
land which is not his (save as the newly acquired watch of the highwayman is) - that day will be
the beginning of the fresh new-birth of art in modern times.

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But that day will also be one of the memorable days of Socialism; for this very privilege, which
is but the privilege of the robber by force of arms, is just the thing which it is the aim and end of
our present organization to uphold; and all the formidable executive at the back of it, army,
police, law courts, presided over by the judge as representing the executive, is directed towards
this one end - to take care that the richest shall rule, and shall have full licence to injure the
commonwealth to the full extent of his riches.
New Review, January 1891.
The William Morris Internet Archive : Works

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