T. J. Cobden-Sanderson

“ But if in the great times of art, great works were the aims of great art rather than beauty, why to-day should not great works still be the aim of great art rather than beauty? Is to-day wanting in great works waiting to be done in the great way, which is the way of art? or is it that to-day all great works are machinery only, and so an evil, incapable of artistic treatment? ”

“ HANDWRITING and hand decoration of letter & page are at the root of the Book Beautiful, are at the root of Typography & of woodcut or engraved Decoration, & every printer, & indeed every one having to do with the making of books should ground himself in the practice or knowledge of the Art of Beautiful [2] Writing or Calligraphy, and let both hand and soul luxuriate and rejoice for a while in the art of Illumination. Such practice would keep Type alive under the influence of an ever living & fluent prototype. ”

“ But there is above and beyond every Actuality an Ideal upon which it can and should be modelled. It is this Ideal which it is the function of the Artist—which it is the function of this Society—to discover and to express, in great things as in small, in small as in great: and the Ideal, expressed, is then as a great Light to those who sit in darkness; it is a light towards which the soul of Actuality turns ”

“ And the whole duty of beautiful typography is not to substitute for the beauty or interest of the thing thought and intended to be conveyed by the symbol, a beauty or interest of its own, but, on the one hand, to win access for that communication by the clearness & beauty of the vehicle, and on the other hand, to take advantage of every pause or stage in that communication to interpose some characteristic & restful beauty in its own art. ”

“ Ever since that time this vision has been growing, taking on new matter for greater change still, and now it is worldwide indeed, and the time has come to cast its inspirations into form, to embody them in works of Art.
What of the past is past is no matter of regret, but somewhat of the past is imperishable because it is of all time: such is the instinct to build. The building of the past is built and is in decay. The building of the future has yet to be built. ”

“ I apprehend that when the illuminator, passing on from the decoration of significant or initial letters, took to the making of pictures in this fashion within the folds of them, he was pressing his art too far. He was in danger, as the event showed, of subordinating his Text to himself, of sacrificing the thing signified to the mode of its signification, for in the end the written communication became as it were nothing, or but the framework or apology to support a succession of beautiful pictures, beautiful indeed, but beautiful at the expense of the Text which they had set out to magnify. ”

“ Then the public fountains in the great thoroughfares, at the great crossings & in the great squares; noble works of art, at once to typify and to actualize a city's purity and to satiate a city's thirst, and for a city's joy and remembrance, in pleasant shower, to cast into the air the liquid drops which first fell for it, and fall, on the distant heights of snow. And finally in each house, in each room, the separate jet, the very taps this time ablaze with beauty for happy beauty's sake, and happier use! ”

“ Such a world, such a wealth of animate forces, such a vision, the creation in part of the unknown force, God, in part of man, who is ourselves, such is the vision upon which, pending the arrival of the shadow which is Death, we should fix the eyes of Art, permeating all, embracing all, producing all, even as would do, were he us, the supreme force, God. ”

“ On the other hand each contributory craft may usurp the functions of the rest & of the whole and growing beautiful beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause. I propose in this brief essay, putting aside for the moment the material, paper or vellum, the binding & decoration, & the literary content of the Book Beautiful, to say a few words on the artistic treatment of the vehicle of expression—Calligraphy, Printing, & Illustration—and on the Book Beautiful as a whole. ”

“ Nor does the great artist, as does the great opportunity, sojourn in our midst. Such art and artists as there are, and are there any? are but engaged in the conscious cultivation of art for art's sake, or of beauty for beauty's sake, pending the great transformation which, meanwhile, is no affair of theirs.
Of such art and of such cultivation, nothing need be expected: and such art and such cultivation are certainly not in my judgement, nor are they, so far as I know, in the judgement of the artists whose revolt founded the Society, the aims of the movement now passing under its name. ”

“ Thus in our own case the illuminator destroyed by over relative development the purely written text, & the moral is that every artist, in contributing to the Book Beautiful, must keep himself well in hand and strictly subordinate both his art and his ambition to the end in view. He must remember that in such a case his art is a means only & not itself an end. ”

“ At the end of the fifteenth century the printing press was at work, and Europe left for a time the outer world, the world of the senses and material building, and entered into the inner world, the world of imaginative reason, of ideas—communicable henceforward, for a time, by the printed page only, whereon only it could build up and contemplate the vision of its extended universe. ”

“ FINALLY, if the Book Beautiful may be beautiful by virtue of its writing or printing or illustration, it may also be beautiful, be even more beautiful, by the union of all to the production of one composite whole, the consummate Book Beautiful. ”

“ For a small body of artists to band themselves together, simply to produce and to exhibit objects of art for an age which is not indeed essentially inartistic, but which, by the accident of the failure of the imagination to grasp and mould its dominant realities, has not had revealed to itself the splendour of its opportunities, or of the meaning of Beauty in association with Industry and Science—for a small body of Artists to band themselves together for such a purpose is indeed something ”

“ The Printer must at the same time be a Calligrapher, or in touch with him, & there must be in association with the Printing Press a Scriptorium where beautiful writing may be practised and the art of letter-designing kept alive. ”

“ Art as a great function of human imagination is not the creation of isolated objects of beauty, though isolated objects of beauty may indeed be created by art, and, in themselves, resume all that is beautiful, orderly, restful, and stable in the artist's conception of that environment. ”

“ Art is one, though manifold, and when the Royal Academy of Arts, in spite of many protests, continued to restrict its Academic Exhibitions to Painting, Sculpture, and Abstract Architecture, a body of protesters came together, not any longer to protest only, but this time to constitute a society of exhibitioners who should widen the academic conception of art, and open its exhibitions to all forms of art, provided only that the form was of art, born of the imagination, and destined to touch the imagination. ”

“ The type is rigid and implacable. The labour is divided and dispersed: the picture or illustration, for example, is too often done quite independently & at a distance, without thought of the printed page, & inserted, a stranger, amid an alien type. Yet in the making of the printed book, as in the making of the written book, this adjustment is essential, & should be specially borne in mind, and Calligraphy and immediate decoration [3] by hand and the unity which should be inseparably associated therewith would serve as an admirable discipline to that end. ”

“ There is one set, static universe, or vision, the Norm of Life, in which all force is at rest, at rest in equilibrium, in equilibrium of motion, and there are in the many minds of men innumerable versions thereof, isolated, unrelated or related, sequent, one: set in motion by passion, crime, terror, frenzy, even of hate, love, madness, ambition, or by the soft touch of the dreamer of dreams, the musician, painter, poet. ”

“ As this tradition died out in the distance, the craft of the Printer declined. It is the function of the Calligrapher to revive & restore the craft of the Printer to its original purity of intention & accomplishment. ”

“ But, to take a simple instance, one short of that complete Transformation of Life which should be the main aim of art, to take a practical problem of modern life, the supply of water to a great city, consider the grandiose character of the problem, despite, or shall we say in consequence of, the mighty mechanical agencies now involved in its solution—the fetching of the water from the far-off pure source, the hills of rain & of snow, to the city of the plain and the sun, its storage and distribution, by the immense pulsations of machinery, day & night, year after year. ”

“ But be these visions what they may be, they are but visions, which die again into the norm, the static universe, which is the tomb, as it is the womb, of all motion, at once the birth-place and the cinerary urn of all change, the all in all. It is with this all of change and rest, that the soul of man, athwart all distraction, aspires to be at one, at one for the fruit of its energy in creation, at one for the control of its energy in rest, in rest interlocked, repose absolute. ”

“ Still less is it, what some may seem to imagine, the objects of beauty themselves. Art is, or should be, alive, alive and a universal stimulus. It is that spirit of order and seemliness, of dignity and sublimity, which, acting in unison with the great procession of natural forces in their own orderly evolution, tends to make out of a chaos of egotistic passions, a great power of disinterested social action ”

“ The first exhibition was held in the New Gallery, in London, in the autumn of 1888. It is not necessary to dwell on the exhibits which stand enumerated in the catalogue now before me. It is sufficient to say that whereas each exhibit, standing alone, might have been seen without any sense of a new 'movement' being on foot, the accumulation, under one roof and idea, of so many different and differently conceived things of beauty, made a marked impression on the public imagination, & unmistakably heralded the advent of a new force into society, at once creative and classificatory. ”

“ And I should say that man is at the top of his thought when in exalted, ecstatic contemplation thereof, and at the top of his doing when in action in accordance therewith, be the action what it may be. And I should say that the supreme consciousness emergent from the supreme vision was the consciousness of Being—the wonder, I AM—and of its inexplicable, insuperable mystery. ”

“ I see the busy hives of industry, glittering like fanes of light by the river's side or bridging them—all part and parcel of the ocean, the land, and the air, obedient like them to the cadency of thought, as day and night, the seasons and the years, beat out their sequences and bear life onward into the future, or leave it, silent, in the irrecoverable past. ”

“ Robinson, for the satisfaction & for the adornment of the satisfaction of his wants, imaginative and real, has in different circumstances and at different times invented, and seek, amid the confusion which has arisen in the abuse of these crafts by pseudo-craftsmen and artists, who have approached them from the outside, to restore to them their sanity, alike in process and in choice of material, in aim, and in the expression of beauty and of purpose. ”

“ I merely adumbrate the shifting goal, as it may have presented itself to the minds of the men engaged in the movement, that you may know at the outset, in vision, those far-off heights, which they, or some of them, essayed not only themselves to climb, but to make all mankind also to climb. ”

“ An exhibition, as I have already insisted, is but a small part of the Arts & Crafts movement, which is a movement in the main of ideas and not of objets d'art, & there is a danger in the constant repetition of exhibitions, civic, national, and international, of public attention being diverted from the movement of ideas, & action thereupon, to the mere production and exhibition of exhibits. ”