I must ask you to understand that by the word art, I mean something wider than is usually meant by it. I do not mean only pretty ornament though that is part of it; I don't mean only pictures and sculpture, though they are the highest manifestations of it; I don't mean only splendid or beautiful architecture, though that includes a great deal of all that most deserves to be called art: but I mean all these things, and a great many more, music, the drama, poetry, imaginative fiction, and above all and especially the kind of feeling which enables us to see beauty in the world and stimulates us to reproduce it, to increase it, to understand it, and to sympathise with those who specially deal with it. In short by art I mean the intellectual and therefore specially human pleasure of life, distinguished from the animal pleasure, and yet partaking of its nature in many ways, and which pleasure is produced by the labour of men, either manual or mental or both.
Now this pleasure I am clear the world cannot do without: nothing can take its place; if we lose that we lose civilization; nay all life that is worth living: for surely whatever degradation men may undergo they can never live the innocent life of beasts, or be happy in such pleasures only.
Furthermore of late years some of us who most love art (and I will name my friend and master J Ruskin as the most eminent among them) have awakened to a sense of a terrible lack in the life of to-day; they have felt as if this pleasure of life were slipping away from the world, as if something or other were robbing us of it.
Many of us still, all of us perhaps, some time ago, were blind as to the meaning or causes of this loss, plainly and bitterly as we could feel the loss itself; but as the years have grown and link by link the great chain of circumstances that is drawing forward the cause of the people has become plainer to us, we are beginning to understand what it all means: that decrepitude of art which once only filled us with dismay and hopelessness, shows with another face now, and we recognize in it one of the tokens of the coming change in the basis of society which we so ardently desire: all along we have dimly seen that what is called modern Commerce or the reckless war of the market has been the foe of art or the pleasure of life, and now at last we are beginning to see that the very sickness and confusion of that pleasure is a sign of commercial war wearing itself out, fretting itself away; that the foe itself will at last kill itself and give place to something better, nothing less than that which you and I call Socialism.
So with our eyes thus cleared we can face modern ugliness and unrest with hope, and accept it and our own discontent with it, as signs of encouragement, nay as signals for action.
Well, what we as lovers of art and defenders of the pleasures of life, have learned is really this: that art depends on the labour of the mass of men, and that the Commerce of modern times is destructive to art because it is the oppressor of labour; and by the Commerce of modern times, you understand I mean the system of exchange which lives on the exploitation of labour; that system of profit-grinding of which we all form a part either as the grinders or the ground; and the practical inference we have drawn from all this is that we will do our best to overthrow this system, with good hope in spite of its apparent strength and coherence.
Now as it was by the teaching of history that we have learned this lesson, I will ask your patience while I run briefly over the relations of art to labout in past times, that we may have some kind of idea how it was that the comparatively modern monster of profit-grinding gradually sucked art or the pleasure of life into its relentless mill, to be ground up fine with many other things some of which I hope will come out of this mill in a very different condition from that which the grinders hope for; to drop metaphor what I want to show you is how the enslavement of the mass of workers at the hands of the capital and labour system has necessarily involved the gradual sickness of the arts, and would but for the coming inevitable revolutions entirely destroy them in the course of time.
Introduction to 'Art and Labour' (untitled manuscript)
British Library Additional Manuscript 45334 pp. 47-9, as published in: William Morris, The Relations of Art to Labour, ed. Alan Bacon & Lionel C. Young, William Morris Society, London 2004
This text was used as the introduction to some deliveries of Art and Labour, including the version given at Preston
Graham Seaman, July 2020.
Art and Labour | The William Morris Internet Archive : Works