As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,
articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are
commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy
of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their
greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail
execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible
imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted
marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin
and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this
ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up
and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for
a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work
and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the
characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when
the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.
It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of
aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said
here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but
chiefly as a characterization of the tendency of this teaching in its
effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods.
The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself
out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book
manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of
his life; but what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an
eminent degree, holds true with but slightly abated force when applied
to latter-day artistic book-making generally--as to type, paper,
illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to
excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's industry
rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities
of the time when the work of book-making was a doubtful struggle with
refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances.
These products, since they require hand labor, are more expensive; they
are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view
to serviceability alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of
the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and
effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to
"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are
less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than the "modern."
Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most
effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned,
will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to
publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle type, on laid paper, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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