T. J. Cobden-Sanderson

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The next thing to build will be the work of the world in the light of this supreme vision so seen and understood.
A time arrives in the development of the world's work when, in addition to the perfect workmanship and beauty of the world's wares, the embellishment of the world's work itself should become the object of ambition of those who carry the world's work on, an embellishment which may take one of two forms, but should take both: the embellishment by material means and the embellishment by ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In embellishment by material means the senses are satisfied and the imagination touched, and we have noble roads and houses, noble cities and harbours, noble wharves and warehouses, noble modes and means of communication, and noble modes and means of creativeness, and, crowning and giving significance to all, crowning and expressive ceremonial: in embellishment by ideas we have the illimitation which is the characteristic of the imagination, and enables us to see and to create wholes and relations which surpass the sweep of the senses, and are visible to the eye of reason only ”

“ Such a society was in due time formed, and, under the name of the 'Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society,' initiated the wider movement which, from itself as source, has spread all the world over, and created a new interest. The arts and crafts have been born again, and, in a new sense, occupy the attention of mankind. ”

“ Old things, long since done, were to be put into new relations, & upon a higher plane, and all new work was to be conceived of as convergent upon one end, the dignity and sweetness of life, and the workman—artist or craftsman—was to derive therefrom his measure of happiness & delight. ”

“ Begun in the simplest fashion, fashioned by the simplest means, created from the commonest materials, fictile Art grew with man's intellectual growth, and fictile Craft grew with his knowledge—the latter conquering in this our day, when the craftsman strangles the artist alike in this as in all other arts. To truly foster and forward an art,' concludes Mr. Robinson, 'the craftsman and the artist should, where possible, be united ”

“ Is not that a noble problem for the imaginative faculties of the artist, only less noble than the supply of the Holy Spirit from the pulpit or the altar, to the massed congregation at their feet, or than the summons from Tower or Belfry to unity of action or of prayer, of the separated members of a city or a Church? ”

“ Robinson, 'tell the story of his first art instincts, and of his yearnings to unite beauty with use. They tell, too, more of his history than is enshrined and preserved by any other art; for almost all we know of many a people and many a tongue is learned from the fictile record, the sole relic of past civilizations which the destroyer Time has left us. ”

“ Morris says, 'production by machinery is wholly an evil.'
But surely this is altogether questionable. Surely things there are, the production of which by machinery may be wholly right, things which, moreover, when so produced may be wholly right also, and in their rightness even works of art.
Great works of art are useful works, greatly done. ”

“ And looking for a moment down the long list of tongues in which Craft, under the guidance of Art, is striving to speak afresh, how can one fail to lament the time now past and to wish it back, when these tongues, now the language, and too often the quite artificial language, of a professional and specially trained class, were but the vernacular of one common language, widely and familiarly spoken, and craftmanship itself but 'joy in widest commonalty spread' ”

“ That work of art should be had in view in the struggles of the moment, should be had in view and be promoted by every citizen who would do more than live out his individual years in selfish & ignoble isolation; but it should especially be had in view by the people as a whole, be their ideal, their supreme work of art ”

“ The building of the future will be the building of the industries thereof, the building of its ways of looking at things determined by the vision which has taken the place of that old vision, under the inspiration of which were built the buildings of the past. ”

“ Such is one other great work of art, of machinery, still awaiting accomplishment, still awaiting the devotion to which all great art is due.
But art to-day has no eyes, no devotion, & so for art there is no great object, and for the great object no art. ”

“ The people of England, like the people of Rome, have been engaged for a thousand years or more in making a constitution, a great piece of machinery, for their own governance, and are still engaged in that task, and are likely to be engaged in it, perhaps for a thousand years or more to come. ”

“ Embroidery; and proceeds under each head to lay down principles, accordant with the particular method, for the production of the ornament required, and concludes his note with some general maxims applicable to all the methods alike, as thus, 'Never forget the material you are working with, and try always to use it for doing what it can do best: if you feel yourself hampered by the material in which you are working, instead of being helped by it, you have so far not learned your business, any more than a would-be poet has, who complains of the hardship of writing in measure and rhyme. ”