Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/227

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Art and Citizenship
207

callousness of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair length of life impossible—call upon labour to do those things, and you are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.

Industrial conditions which encourage the building of houses that are only intended to last a lease; which permit the destruction of our canal system because that means of transit has proved a dangerous rival to the railway, system; which impose a quick change in fashions on which depend various kinds of ephemeral and parasitic industries; which encourage a vast production of ephemeral journalism and magazine illustration which after a single reading is thrown aside and wasted—all these things, which have become nationalised in our midst, are a national anti-Art training. We English have, as the result of these things, no national school of architecture; we have no national costume (though I myself can remember the time when in our Midland counties not only the farm labourer, but the small yeoman farmer himself went to church as well as to labour in the beautiful smock-frock worn by their forefathers) and we have killed out from our midst one of the most beautiful national schools of popular art that ever existed, the school of the illus-