Fabian Tract No. I77· 


'SOCIALISM AND THE 
ARTS .QF USE. 

By A. CLUTTON BROCK. 


Price One Penny. 

The Fabian Society, 25 Tothill Street, Westminster, 
London, S.W. January, 1915. 


A Survey of their Economic 
Conditions and Prospects. 


WOMEN WORKERS IN 
SEVEN PROFESSIONS. 


Edited for the Studies Committee of the Fabian 
Women's Group by 
EDITH J. MORLEY. 
Price 6/-net. 
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED. 
To be obtained at the Fabian Office. 


In Cloth, 2s. 6d. net. 

THE RURAL PROBLEM 


BEING 

THE REPORT OF THE FABIAN RURAL INQUIRY 

COMMITTEE, prepared by the Chairman, 

HENRY D. HARBEN. 

Contents.-The Decline of the Countryside. The Poverty of the 
Laborer. A Minimum Wage for Agriculture. The Solution of the 
Cottage Question. Towards Nationalization. Small Holdings,
Tenancy versus Ownership. Education. The Organization of Production. 
The Organization of Distribution. Game. Afforestation. 
Rates. Summary of Recommendations. Bibliography. Appendices. 

THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 25 TOTHILL ST., WESTMINSTER; 
or CONSTABLE & CO. 


SociALISM AND THE ARTS OF USE~ 

Government and the Arts of Use. 

THE question whether Socialism is likely to encourage or to discourage 
art is of practical importance to Socialists because manypeople believe that it would make an end of all art, and are therefore 
opposed to it. Their belief is based upon the fact that our 
present Government is seldom successful when it tries to encourage 
art. They point to our Government offices, our memorials to deceased 
monarchs, and the work of our art schools, as examples of 
Socialist art, and they ask whether that is better than the art produced 
in answer to a pri\'ate demand. 

Certainly it is not ; and the Government failure in the matter of 
architecture has aroused a very strong prejudice against Socialism 
among architects. They practise the most important of all the arts,. 
and they tell us, from their own experience, that the Government is. 
usually unfortunate in its choice of architects and that it preventsthem from doing their best after it has chosen them. This I do not 
deny-one has only to look at our Government buildings to see that 
it must be true-but these opponents of Socialism assume that in a 
Socialist State all art would be at the mercy of the conscious patronage 
of the Government. They do not ask themselves whether in a 
Socialist State there might not arise conditions as favorable to the 
natural growth of architecture and all the arts of use as our present 
conditions are unfavorable. They assume that those arts, in the 
modern world, can only be kept alive by the abnormal interest of a 
few individuals, and they think that Socialism would deprive those 
few of their power of patronage. 

Socialism will not Produce an Immediate Improvement. 

This assumption I believe to be wrong. Socialism might destroythe patronage of the abnormal few ; but it might also make an 
interest in art, and particularly in the arts of use, normal. And my 
aim now is to explain why I believe it would do this. . 

But first I will admit that, if we could suddenly start now w1th 
any complete system of Socialism in full working order, I do not for 
a moment believe we should have an immediate improvement in 
our pictures or Government offices or public statues or in the memorials 
to deceased monarchs. There would, no doubt, be more 
money spent upon public art and less upon private; but the public 
art for a time would be just what it is now, and the artists chosen 
would be those who have an ill-deserved eminence in our present 
society. It is the general taste that makes art good or bad. It 
does not produce artists of genius, but it uses them or wastes them. 


4 


Whistler said that art happens, by which he meant, I suppose, that 
people like himself happen : that no society, by taking thought, can 
cause them to be born. But it is not true that works of art, like 
Bourges Cathedral, happen, any more than Dreadnoughts happen. 
They are the results of a long, common, and well directed effort. 
That kind of effort does not exist now, and in the most favorable 
circumstances it could only begin slowly, and would continue for 
some time bef?re it could produce any great results. 

Art Manifests Itself First not in Ornament but in Design. 

At present the art of building and the art of all objects of use is 
commonly supposed to be an art of ornament. Architecture means 
to most of us a kind of ornamented building. Gothic is distinguished 
from Renaissance by its ornament, by traceried windows and cuspsand crockets and so on ; and we are always complaining that we 
have no style of our own in architecture or furniture or anything 
else. 

But the artistic instinct when it works in the making of objects 
of use does not first show itself in ornament, but in structure, and 
it may express itself triumphantly without any ornament. 

The artistic instinct, when it first begins to move in the makingof an object of use, is not consciously artistic at all. It shows itself 
mainly in a desire to make that object as well as it can be made, and 
of the closest possible adaptation to its function. But this desire 
must be in itself disinterested if it is to produce art. It pays, no 
doubt, at least in healthy societies, to make things as well as they 
can be made. But the artistic instinct will not grow out of a mere 
desire to make them well so that they may sell. For the next stagein the development of that instinct is a recognition of the beauty of 
a thing that is well adapted to its function ; from which follows an 
effort to insist upon that beauty for its own sake while at the same 
time preserving the perfect adaptation to function. It is upon this 
recognition and this effort that all architectural excellence depends,
and indeed all excellence of design. When art is growing and 
vigorous, it is because men see the natural functional beauty of the 
things which they make for use and because they try to increase 
that beauty, perhaps with ornament but certainly with pure design,
which does not disguise function but emphasizes it. But the beauty 
must be seen before it can be heightened with art. 

The Recognition of Functional Beauty. 

We are amazed at the beauty of the great French Gothic 
cathedrals, and we think of it as a romantic thing of the past that 
we can never attain to, But how did the builders of the Middle 
Ages attain to it ? Not in the least by their facility in designingahd carving ornament ; not by their tracery or stained glass or 
statues. Those things were only the overflow of their energy. A 
church might have them and yet be bad. It might lack them all, 
even the stained glass, and .yet be noble. What they· did was t<:i 

·be aware of the natural functional beauty of a plain building weU 


5 


built, and to see how that beauty might be heightened and 
emphasized step by step, until they attained to the cathedrals of 
Bourges and Chartres. All the time their building was engineering, 
and a great part of its beauty remained engineering or functional 
beauty, a beauty like that of a fine animal or a great tree. This 
functional beauty was at last almost perfectly fused with expressive 
art in the greatest French churches, but both beauties were always 
present up to the climax of Gothic. And in that great age of art 
which culminated in the thirteenth century, there is the same 
artistic impulse applied to most objects of use that have come down 
to us from that age. lt is altogether an architectural age, an age of 
design, one which recognized the functional beauty of its handiwork 
and tried to emphasize it. And so it has been in other ages famed 
for their prevailing artistic excellence. The Chinese pottery of the 
Sung dynasty, for instance, has often no ornament at all ; the 
beauty consists in the exquisite refinement of form, which is alwaysexpressive of function, and in the exquisite quality of glaze, which, 
like the form, had first a functional purpose. It was merely recognition 
of the beauties of a well-made pot and a desire to improve 
upon them which produced those miracles of art. 

Now the societies which produced this wonderful art were not 
Socialist according to our ideas ; but they had one condition necessary 
to the vigor of art which our present society almost entirelylacks, and which we can regain, I believe, only by means of 
Socialism. For it was possible with them for men to build buildingsand to make objects of use as well as they could build them or make 
them, and so it was possible for them to recognize the beauty of 
such things and to refine upon it generation after generation and 
man by man. The great churches, whether built for a monastery or 
for a city, were not built to pay. The Sung pottery was made to 
sell, but it was made by individual potters for customers who recognized 
its beauty like the potters themselves, and who therefore 
encouraged the potters to do their best and to refine and refine 
until they reached the unequalled height of excellence. I do not 
suppose that with Socialism our whole system of production would 
be altered at once, or that we should have pottery like the Sunginstead of our present crockery. But let us consider for a moment 
the manner in which most of our modern buildings are built and 
most of our more important objects of use are made. I am not now 
speaking of the objects which we think of as artistic, such as 
churches or public buildings, but rather of private buildings of all 
kinds, of lamp posts, pillar boxes, trams, railway bridges and 
viaducts and stations. Such things are more numerous and 
important in our lives, they are often larger and more conspicuous,_ 
than objects of use have been in any former civilization. 

With Us the Art of Design is Checked from the Start. 
Yet we never think of all these important objects of use as works 
of art or a& capable of becoming works of art. We never recognize(lny beauty in the~ to begin with, and of course we do not attempt: 


6 

to refine upon the beauty which we do not recognize. If anydesigner of such things saw beauty in them and tried to increase it 
in a new design, he would be asked at once if the new design were 
more expensiYe than the old and if it had any greater practicalvalue. And if it were more expensive and had no more practicalvalue, he would be warned, if he were not dismissed at once as a 
lunatic, not to wa te his time or hi employers' money. With us 
the art of de ign is checked at its very start by the general attitude 
towards all objects of use, since for us they are merely object of use, 
and so we ne,·er think of looking for any beauty in them whatever. 
According to our present notion, art i art and business is busine s; 
the first is unbusinesslike and the second inartistic, and that is the 
plain commonsense of the matter. 

Machinery is not Necessa rily Hostile to Art. 
Now that is quite a modern notion and most people believe that 
it prevails because we live in an age of machinery; that things made 
by machinery cannot be beautiful and that therefore it is useless to 
attempt to heighten their beauty. But on this point there is a greatconfusion of thought. There was a sudden decay of all the art of 
design which began about 1790 and was complete by about 1840. 
And this happened at the same time as the great increase in the 
use of machinery. Also in that period there was a production of 
machine-made ornament of all kinds which did help to destroythe production of hand-made ornament and to corrupt the designof all ornament, whether machine or hand-made. Now I will not 
lay it down as an absolute dogma that all machine-made ornament 
must be bad. But it is certainly a fact that most of it is bad and 
not ornament at all but mere excrescence. Yet to say that is not 
to say that all machine-made things are necessarily ugly or that 
they cannot have the same functional beauty as other objects of 
use. The fact is that the sense of functional beauty was weakeningjust when machinery began to prevail. It was not that machinerydestroyed art or made it impossible, but that we have made a wrongartistic u e of machinery and have failed to see its artistic po sibilities. 
Our great mechanical inventions were made just when, for other 
reasons, art was at its weakest. Therefore, so f<Jr as art has been 
concerned with them at all, they have been used merely to produceimitations of the art of the past. If art had been vigorous it would 
have mastered machinery instead of being mastered by it. As it is, 
machinery was used to imitate art, because, since ornament was anyhow 
ceasing to be expressive, it could be produced just as well bymachinery a by hand. With the decay of the sense of design people 
also lo t all sense of the meaning and purpose of ornament. Theydid not ee beauty in what they had made and therefore they tried 
to add beauty to it instead of drawing beauty out of it. They paintedthe lily, which is what no one would do who saw that the lily was 
beautiful to start with. 
The significant fact about the decay of the sense of de ign i that 
it came with the industrial age, not that it came with machinery. 


7 


It came, that is to say, with a new set of ideas, not with a new set of 
implements. And the idea that was fatal to art was not a refusal to 
recognize its abstract importance. The dominant capitalists were 
ready then, as now, to spend money on pictures and other works of 
art, but they drew a sharp distinction between works of art and 
objects of use. They might even be ready to add art to objects of 
use ; but they were not ready to draw art out of them. And the 
reason was, as Morris pointed out long ago, that they were makingobjects of use to sell, and merely to sell; and that they had no disinterested 
desire to make them as well as they could be made. 

The Ideas of the Industrial Age are Hostile to Art. 

I spoke a moment ago of a new set of ideas, but the ideas of the 
industrial age were really only the result of the complete triumphof one instinct. The instinct of gain became all-powerful, and it 
assumed, contrary to all experience, that it always had been and 
always must be all-powerful. That in fact it was the only true 
instinct concerned with the making of things, and that the artistic 
instinct was merely a bye-play of idleness. That was why all art was 
conceived to be ornament, since art itself was thought to be purelyornamental. But art, as I have said, is not ornament but design ; 
and design is the expression of an instinct, the suppression of which 
destroys all sense of design and with it all the health and vigour of 
art. 

Well, this instinct, to make things as well as they can possibly be 
made, was suppressed by that other triumphant instinct of gain ; 
and by the instinct of gain working, not in the actual people who 
made things, but in those who set them to make things; not in the 
designer or the workman, but in the capitalist. He could not exercise 
the artist's instinct if he would ; it was only possible for him to 
encourage it in others. And this he did not attempt to do because 
he conceived of himself merely as a producer of things to sell, competing 
with other producers. He might honestly try to produce a 
good article. He might be as moral as you please ; but the artistic 
instinct is not moral. It aims at excellence for its own satisfaction, 
not through a sense of duty to the public. The conscientious capitalist 
might try to give his best, but it is not an artistic best. He was 
never spurred on to make things more beautiful by a recognition of 
the beauty of what he had made. So, if in the way of trade he 
wished to produce a beautiful thing, he did not encourage his designers 
to refine upon their designs, but he imported an artist to 
ornament them. And that is why we have schools of ornamental 
art at South Kensington and elsewhere, and why we talk of 
applied art as if it were something added to things, like a flounce to 
a dress. And meanwhile no one ever expects an engineer or anykind of practical designer to have any artistic instinct at all. He is 
a man of business, and business is inartistic as art is unbusinesslike. 

The best example I can give of this view of art is a public not a 

private enterprise, but for that very reason it will enforce the moral 

I wish to draw. 


8 

The Lesson of the Tower Bridge. 


The Tower Bridge is a great work of engineering, and while it 
remained that and only that, it looked like the gates of the sea~ 
But no one recognized its beauty as a work of engineering, that is 
to say as a piece of design. On the contrary, since it was a publicwork, it was thought necessary to cover its indecent nakedness with ' 
art. So an architect was imported to do this ; and he made it look 
like two Gothic towers with a bridge between them. Not only are 
these towers ugly in themselves, but they make the bridge look 
ugly, partly because of its incongruity, partly because it seems too 
heavy for the towers, which, of course, do not really support it at all,. 
and have indeed no function whatever except to be artistic. 

Now in this case if the engineer had been conscious of the functional 
beauty of his design, and if he had tried to heighten that 
beauty and had made a more costly design in doing so, he would no 
doubt have been told to mind his own business and leave art to 
artists. It would never have entered into anyone's head that the: 
art of a bridge is the engineer's business just as much as the art of 
a statue is the sculptor's business. It would not even enter the 
engineer's head, for he has been taught by public opinion to suppress. 
his own natural artistic instinct just as the engineers of the greatGothic cathedrals were taught to develop it. By nature very likelyhe was just such a man as they were; and we may be sure that theywould admire his work as much as they would despise the architectural 
imitations of their own. 

The Tower Bridge was not built to pay, but it was built by a 
public body still subject to all the capitalist ideas about art and its 
incompatibility with business. Hence the absurd incompatibility of 
the art and the business of the bridge. We cannot expect those 
ideas to disappear all in a moment, or that a capitalist, when he acts 
as a member of a public body, will escape therefore from their influence. 
The revival of art, if it does come. will be a long and slow 
business, and it can only happen when the natural artistic instinct is 
no longer suppressed by the natural instinct of gain and by all the 
ideas which that instinct of gain, in its evil supremacy, has imposed 
upon us. 

Art is not Necessarily Doomed in Our Civilization. 

Our notion about art now is that it is always and everywhere fighting 
a losing battle, and that it can only be kept alive by the efforts. 
of the cultured few. And there is truth 'in that so long as the cultured 
few impose their own conception of art upon a puzzled and 
indifferent world. Art will only begin to fight a winning battle 
when the mass of men rediscover it for themselves without even 
knowing that what they have discovered is art ; when they find · 
that they can take a pleasure and pride in objects of use as natural 
and instinctive as the pleasure which they take in flowers or trees 
now. 

It is not, I think, merely visionary to hope for such a change ; 
for men have taken such a pleasure and pride in objects of use, not 


9 

once or twice only at favored periods of history, but nearly always 
until the end of the eighteenth century; and all our present restlessness 
and discontent about art proves that we feel the want of this 
pleasure and would regain it if we could. But how could Socialism 
help us to regain it? Certainly not by any conscious State 
patronage of art such as we have at present, not by giving us more 
and more sumptuous memorials to deceased monarchs or largerGovernment offices designed by scholarly architects, but rather, I 
think, in a manner which I can best illustrate by examples. 

The Case of Waterloo Station. 

It is natural to men, as I have said, to recognize the functional 
beauty of things of use ; and our present failure to recognize it is 
unnatural, and produced not by any decay of the senses, but by a set 
of ideas and associations which prevent us from using our senses. 
Let us take, for instance, the case of the new Waterloo Station. 
That is a piece of engineering which has a very real functional 
beauty, far more, for instance, than the Hall of the Law Courts. 
But people see nothing beautiful in it because their eyes are blinded 
by their ideas about the station ; they think of it as a prosaic work 
of mere utility, built by a prosaic company for its own profit. And 
this is the view of it which the company themselves take and are 
forced to take. They never for one moment suppose that their 
station could be a work of art or could have any beauty, because it 
is for them merely a means of earning money. They may, for the 
sake of advertisement, be ready to spend money upon an architectural 
fa~ade to it, and they may employ an architect to apply some 
art to that fa~ade. But art means to them, as to most other people, 
ornament, pilasters and capitals and cornices and mouldings and 
such things ; and they regard it as an advertisement, as a means of 
drawing attention to their station. But art, being by its nature disinterested, 
will not live on these terms ; and architectural fa<;:ades of 
this kind are a mere collection of artistic features that once had life 
and meaning and now have none whatever. Some are better than· 
others, but there is no growth or development of art in them ; and 
we can look for none so long as the motive which causes money to 
be spent on art is merely advertisement or even a vague belief that 
art ought to be patronized. 

To the railway company their station is, inevitably, merely an 
object of use ; not only have they no motive for making it beautiful, 
but they do not even see that it has any beauty. If, for some 
reason, they were in a lavish mood and determined to spend money 
upon making it beautiful, they would probably give all the columns 
Corinthian capitals of wrought iron. Indeed there is an absurd hint 
at capitals on the top of these columns, and that is the only ugliness 
in the structure of the station. 

But if anyone were to suggest to the directors of the companythat their station had already a functional beauty and that theyought to have spent money on emphasizing this functional beauty,
that they ought to allow their engineer to indulge his natural 


IO 

artistic instinct, they would of course reply that their business was 
to earn dividends, not to spend money on art which no one would 
recognize. 

Art and the Engineer. 

All real art, from the point of view of a profit earning company,
is sheer waste ; and that is the point of view which has been forced 
upon all of us, so that we neither see real art in its shy beginningsand possibilities, nor do we expect any money ever to be spent on it. 

Waterloo Station, as I have said, has a beauty of its own already. 
But that beauty tantalizes one with hints and suggestions of a much 
greater and more conscious beauty that might have been obtained 
by emphasis of structural features, and could only have been 
obtained by the designer of the station with his sense of structure. 
And the art of station design could only grow and develop if one 
engineer improved upon the design of another, recognizing its 
beauty and seeing how that beauty might be further increased ; if, 
in fact, there was incessant experiment of the same kind as that 
which culminated in the great French cathedrals of the thirteenth 
century.

We have already incessant experiment in purely engineeringproblems, but the further artistic experiment cannot even begin.
The engineering beauty is there, the designer's instinct to refine 
upon it must be there, for man's nature has not been utterlychanged in a hundred years; and so, too, the ordinary man's sense 
of beauty must be there if he could but be aware of it. It is only a 
certain set of ideas and associations which prevent both designer and 
public from asserting their instinct and their sense, and these are 
the ideas and associations of capitalism. 

The Relation of Lender and Borrower. 

You cannot have a living and growing art unless you are ready 
to spend money upon it, not as an advertisement or as a luxury, for 
money so spent will give you merely ornament, but as somethingwhich is worth having for its own sake. And no capitalist enterprise 
will ever spend money upon art in that spirit, nor will the 
public ever demand that a capitalist enterprise shall do so. 

For the buildings or objects of use provided by a capitalist enterprise 
belong to the capitalists, and the public have no interest in 
them except in the use they make of them. To the public at 
present a railway station is a mere . convenience, and they ask 
nothing of it except that it shall be convenient. They take no 
pride in it, for they have no part or lot in it. They only use it as 
we use books from a circulating library, in which we have no prideof possession, and of which therefore we expect no beauty either of 
binding or of type.

Indeed our relation to all works of capitalist enterprise is exactlythe relation of subscribers to the books of a circulating library. We 
use them, but we have no further interest in them ; and that is the 
reason why we neither recognize any beauty which they mayalready possess, nor have any desire that that beauty shall be 


II 

increased. Under our present system we all, at least those of us 
who have any money, are subscribers rather than owners ; and the 
owners themselves are shareholders with no sense of possession, 
except of dividends. If I own some South Western Railway Stock, 
I do not feel that Waterloo Station belongs to me, or that I have 
any interest whatever in making it more beautiful. I enter it not 
as an owner, but as a subscriber, and I forget my ownership as soon 
as I begin to travel on the line. So there is no consciousness of 
ownership anywhere, and ownership itself is a kind of abstraction. 
No one can say, in any sense or with any meaning, that Waterloo 
Station is his station. It and a thousand other buildings and objects 
of use are merely things that people make use of, and we are all 
living more and more in a world of things with which we have an 
utterly inhuman and indifferent relation. 

Our Artistic Parsimony and How it Might be Removed. 

But this relation to things of use, again, is not natural to man. 
And that other relation, in which men took a pride in them, recognized 
their beauty, and tried to increase it, was in the past the rule 

. rather than the exception ; and in ages when there was great 
poverty, when there were plagues, famines, wars, and other disasters, 
men have not grudged the money necessary to glorify objects of use. 
That kind of parsimony, which we see everywhere, is peculiar to 
modern times. And it is the result of our peculiar relation between 
those who own objects of use and those who use them, a relation 
always of lender and borrower. If this could come to an end we 
might confidently expect that our parsimony and indifference would 
gradually cease. Of course, if our railways were nationalized, we 
should not all at once begin to feel towards our railway stations as 
men in the Middle Ages felt towards their cathedrals. Indeed at 
present we are just as parsimonious and indifferent towards things 
made by the State as towards those made by private enterprise. No 
one, for instance, seems to notice the beauty of the trams on the 
Embankment, or to consider how much more beautiful they might 
be made ; but that is because public enterprise is still so rare that 
the ideas associated with private enterprise still cling to it. When 
the County Council runs trams, we think of it as a private company, 
and we use the trams without any sense of possession in them, just 
as we use the 'busses of the London General Omnibus Company.
And a public body, too, when it engages in any kind of trade, is 
still, to itself, a private trader. That is to say, it has the attitude of 
the private trader towards his own stock in trade, the attitude dictated 
by competition and by the determination to make as much 
money as possible. But we may expect, I think, that the more 
public enterprise prevailed, the more would the influence of privateenterprise weaken. The facts would change and the state of mind 
with them. I do not mean that in this matter of trams, for instance, 
the County Council would suddenly say, '' Our trams must be made 
more beautiful," and would therefore engage an artist to designthem. That is not the way in which art grows. That is the way in 


which it is patronized and perverted by connoisseurs. What I do 
mean is that the County Council and the public itself would gradually 
begin to take a pride in their tramways. They would no longerthink of them merely as money making machines and conveniences. 
Gradually the tram designer would begin to express his own natural 
artistic instinct in his design, and he would not be instantly checked 
by the cry of expense. Then the public would notice his new trams 
and like their design. They would not say that they were more 
artistic ; they would simply find that they took the pleasure which 
we all take in a design that expresses function and emphasizes it. 
Then other designers would notice those improvements and improve 
upon them, and the public would notice these further improvementsand take a pride in them, the people of one town saying to the peopleof another: ''Yes, your Hull trams are well enough, but have you 
seen our new trams at Halifax? They beat everything." Then the 
Hull designer would go and look at the Halifax trams, and would be 
spurred to improve upon them in his next design. And so a new 
kind of competition would arise in trams and in a thousand other 
objects of use, or rather that old kind of competition which helped 
to produce the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, a competition not of 
cheapness, but of excellence. 

Poetry and Prose in Art. 

We think of trams and railway stations as very prosaic things,
having nothing in common with those cathedrals ; and I do not 
suppose that any great general emotion could express itself in a 
station as the religious emotion was expressed at Chartres or Bourges.
But we, with our loss of art in all things of common use, have 
acquired a vicious notion that all art must be pure expression, and 
expression of the highest and most passionate emotions. For us 
there is nothing between the meanness of a workhouse that looks as 
if it had been designed by Scrooge, and the irrelevant splendor of a 
new monster hotel. Both of those have the same defect manifested 
in different ways ; in neither is there any recognition of the beautyof functional design, but one of them tries to make up for it by the 
use of ornament that is like the flowers of speech of a bad prosaic 
writer. The good writer of prose knows that it has its beauties too, 
and that they are spoilt by incongruous poetic ornament. He may 
not call himself an artist, yet there is art and the beauty of art in his 
prosaic excellence, in the structure of a sentence which says exactly 
what it means; and he too recognizing this beauty unconsciouslyperhaps, is always trying to heighten it. So, whenever art flourishes, 
there is a recognition of the beauty of all design and an effort to 
increase it, even though the object designed has no association with 
the higher emotions. There is in fact a prose of art as well as a 
poetry, and whenever its poetry is sublime its prose is also beautiful. 
But we have forgotten that there is a prose of art at all. To us art 
is all poetry which we plaster irrelevantly on the most prosaic objects 
as if we were ashamed of them. And indeed we are ashamed of 
them just because they a.re prosaic to us, just because we never 


13 

Tecognise or try to heighten their natural beauty of design. In an 

age of healthy art, objects of use may be the prose of art, but they 

are not prosaic in one sense, for they are made as beautiful as the 

emphasis of their function can make them. And design can fiouish 
·nowhere unless it flourishes in the prose as well as in the poetry of 
'art. It is not a faculty that a few specially trained artists can suddenly 
apply to a church or a palace or a Victoria memorial. It is a 
faculty that must be exercised by all designers and the value of 
which must be recognized by the public, whether it be applied to 
churches or palaces, or to railway stations, or to trams or pillarboxes. 

What we call design now is all remembered from the art of the 

past ; but art, when it is alive, lives not on the admiration of past 

art but on discovery. To the artist reality suggests something finer 

than itself, and yet itself. To the great builders of the Middle Ages 

a cathedral did not suggest a great avenue of stone, but a finer, 

more completely organized cathedral-which they proceeded to 

build. So a railway station should suggest, not some vaguely

romantic hall of vapors and hurrying crowds, but a finer, more 

highly organized railway station, which we too should proceed to 

build. 

There must be a prose of life, but if it becomes merely prosaic 
-to us, merely routine, that is because of our failure to make anything 
of it. We cannot be always in a high and passionate state of emotion, 
like the bright seraphim in burning row; and art for us is not 
all a touching of celestial harps with golden wires. Rather it is, or 
might be, in the mass of its achievements, a symptom of our triumph 
over routine in the prose of life. And the peculiar weakness of our 
present society is that it fails utterly to triumph over this routine, 
and betrays that failure in all objects of use. For us nearly everyobject of use is a platitude, and that means that a great part of life 
itself is a platitude ; that in all our commercial and industrial relations 
with each other we are dominated by a belief, at once platitudinous 
and untrue, that we must take as much and give as little as 
we can. Where that belief prevails, there can be no art of design ; 
for the art of design comes into being through the designer's impulse 
to give P10re than he need give; and that impulse is checked at 
once where he works for employers who tell him to give as little as 
he can. 

Machinery and Functional Beauty. 

The fact that we make many things with machinery has nothing 
to do with our failure to recognize their beauty. If things made bymachinery could have no functional beauty, machinery would of 
course be fatal to art, and we should have to make up our minds 
whether we would give up art or machinery. But, as I have tried to 
show, many machine-made things have great beauty, and our failure 
to recognize it is the result merely of associations which prevent us 
from taking the pleasure we ought to take in such things. An 
artistic person will, for instance, admire some fantastic, ancient fowl



ing piece. It is old and highly ornamented, and therefore he thinks 
of it as a work of art. But he will not admire a modern sporting 
gun by a good maker because he thinks of it as an article of commerce. 
And yet the modern gun has a beauty of design, a functional 
beauty, far beyond that of the old one. It has an almost miraculous 
elegance, which is heightened, not spoilt, by the preciswn of the 
mechanical finish. In this case an extreme beauty has been achieved 
because the wealthy sportsman does take a pride in his weapon. He 
does not call it beautiful any more than the people of the Middle 
Ages called their cathedrals works of art. But without knowing it 
he recognizes the beauty of fine design and workmanship and is 
ready to pay for it. So it is also with motor cars, which become 
more beautiful in design every year. But it is not so with the mass 
of objects of use which are made for the larger public and it cannot 
be so as long as the public has no sense of possession of those objectsand no control over them, and so long as the designers of them are 
prevented from expressing their natural sense of design.

We have lost control by an accident, through a conjunction of 
circumstances that has never happened before in the world's history;
and, since Socialism is an effort to regain this control, it is also an 
effort to produce those conditions which will be favorable to the arts 
of use. In respect to art it is not a very conscious effort ; but the 
conscious efforts to encourage art have not been very successful. 
What art wants is not the patronage of superior persons but a fair 
chance with the ordinary man ; and that Socialism would give it, if 
it gave to the ordinary man a fair chance of enjoying those thingswhich his ancestors enjoyed. 


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The War; Women; and Unemployment; 
by the Fabian Women's Group Executive 

This pamphlet contains a striking presentment of women's 
economic position as revealed by the war, illustrated by new and 
hitherto unpublished statistics comparing the wages of men and 
women manual workers, prepared for the Fabian " 'omen 's GrOiJjJ 
by :\Ir. Sidney Webb. Some startling results of the investig-ations 
of Dr. Bowley are also cited, together " ·ith those of the 
Group's own inquiry into the proportion of women workers "·ho 
are breadwinners for others besides themscln:s. The authors urge 
that unemployment amongst the seven millions of \\·omcn and 
girls ,,·orking for their living in the l !nited Kingdom demands consideration 
independently from that amongst men, as its conditions 
differ-a fact thrown into strong relief by the "'·ar. The neg-lect 
of such separate consideration by the Central and Local Authorities 
is the cause of much preventable distress. A number of 
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\\·omen workers. The war, it is contended, has brought British 

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and millions more as unpaid organisers of consumption at home, 
and though millions own indC'pendent means or earnings, yet 
"·omen in England have less voice 111 carrying on national 
economic life than in other countries. The causes that hm·r: 
brought this about, and the deplorable results, concern all classes, 

and the remedy lies in a drastic change of mental attitude. 

The pamphlet appeals alike to those ,,-ho " ·ish to understand 
and practically cope with the grave eYils of unemployment 
amongst " ·omen) To all who recognise the important relation 
bet\\·een the co-or-era tive movement and "·omen's "-elfare, and to 
every man and woman inter~stcd in the social re-construction 

which must follow the war. 

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