The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the
rate of forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any
memory of that lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier
at Rome, or that he got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or
civilisation much good. But that swift legion of fiery-footed
engines that bore to the burning ruins of Chicago the loving help
and generous treasure of the world was as noble and as beautiful as
any golden troop of angels that ever fed the hungry and clothed the
naked in the antique times. As beautiful, yes; all machinery may
be beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate
it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the
line of strength and the line of beauty being one.
Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright and
noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and
simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for
your men and women; those are the conditions of a real artistic
movement. For the artist is not concerned primarily with any
theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness
that should come daily on eye and ear for a beautiful external
world.
But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour
gaudy. For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the
colours that seem about to pass into one another's realm - colour
without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord.
Barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that
desecrate not merely your cities but every rock and river that I
have seen yet in America - all this is not enough. A school of
design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately and
noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the
world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren
whitewashed room and bid them work in that depressing and
colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the American schools
of design, but give them beautiful surroundings. Because you want
to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste in your workman,
he must have always by him and before him specimens of the best
decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him: 'This is
good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many years
ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.' Work
in this spirit and you will be sure to be right. Do not copy it,
but work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom
of imagination. You must teach him colour and design, how all
beautiful colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the
essence of vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful work
of nature like the rose, or any beautiful work of art like an
Eastern carpet - being merely the exquisite gradation of colour,
one tone answering another like the answering chords of a symphony.
Teach him how the true designer is not he who makes the design and
then colours it, but he who designs in colour, creates in colour,
thinks in colour too. Show him how the most gorgeous stained-glass
windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and the most
gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours - the primary colours
in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours
like brilliant jewels set in dusky gold.
