Is this, then, what you want? You are going straight at it at present;
and I have only to ask under what limitations I am to conceive or
describe your final success? Or shall there be no limitations? There
are none to your powers; every day puts new machinery at your disposal,
and increases, with your capital, the vastness of your undertakings.
The changes in the state of this country are now so rapid, that it
would be wholly absurd to endeavour to lay down laws of art education
for it under its present aspect and circumstances; and therefore I must
necessarily ask, how much of it do you seriously intend within the next
fifty years to be coal-pit, brickfield, or quarry? For the sake of
distinctness of conclusion, I will suppose your success absolute: that
from shore to shore the whole of the island is to be set as thick with
chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool: and there shall
be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown
upon the housetops, reaped and threshed by steam: that you do not leave
even room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your mills, on
viaducts; or under their floors, in tunnels: that, the smoke having
rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the
light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without
its shaft and its engine; and therefore, no spot of English ground
left, on which it shall be possible to stand, without a definite and
calculable chance of being blown off it, at any moment, into small
pieces.
Under these circumstances, (if this is to be the future of England,) no
designing or any other development of beautiful art will be possible.
Do not vex your minds, nor waste your money with any thought or effort
in the matter. Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have
beautiful things about them, and leisure to look at them; and unless
you provide some elements of beauty for your workmen to be surrounded
by, you will find that no elements of beauty can be invented by them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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