It is sometimes my pleasant duty to visit other cities, in the hope of
being able to encourage their art students; but here it is my
pleasanter privilege to come for encouragement myself. I do not know
when I have received so much as from the report read this evening by
Mr. Hammersley, bearing upon a subject which has caused me great
anxiety. For I have always felt in my own pursuit of art, and in my
endeavors to urge the pursuit of art on others, that while there are
many advantages now that never existed before, there are certain
grievous difficulties existing, just in the very cause that is giving
the stimulus to art--in the immense spread of the manufactures of every
country which is now attending vigorously to art. We find that
manufacture and art are now going on always together; that where there
is no manufacture there is no art. I know how much there is of
pretended art where there is no manufacture: there is much in Italy,
for instance; no country makes so bold pretence to the production of
new art as Italy at this moment; yet no country produces so little. If
you glance over the map of Europe, you will find that where the
manufactures are strongest, there art also is strongest. And yet I
always felt that there was an immense difficulty to be encountered by
the students who were in these centres of modern movement. They had to
avoid the notion that art and manufacture were in any respect one. Art
may be healthily associated with manufacture, and probably in future
will always be so; but the student must be strenuously warned against
supposing that they can ever be one and the same thing, that art can
ever be followed on the principles of manufacture. Each must be
followed separately; the one must influence the other, but each must be
kept distinctly separate from the other.
It would be well if all students would keep clearly in their mind the
real distinction between those words which we use so often,
"Manufacture," "Art," and "Fine Art." "MANUFACTURE" is, according to
the etymology and right use of the word, "the making of anything by
hands,"--directly or indirectly, with or without the help of
instruments or machines. Anything proceeding from the hand of man is
manufacture; but it must have proceeded from his hand only, acting
mechanically, and uninfluenced at the moment by direct intelligence.
Then, secondly, ART is the operation of the hand and the intelligence
of man together; there is an art of making machinery; there is an art
of building ships; an art of making carriages; and so on. All these,
properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are pursuits in which the hand
of man and his head go together, working at the same instant.
Then FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the _heart_
of man go together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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