RUSKIN AND MORRIS
painter or an architect, he founded a firm for designing and making
furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, carpets, stained glass, etc., and got his
Pre-Raphaelite friends to join him. Not until the artist becomes a
craftsman again, this was his belief, and the craftsman an artist, can
art be saved from annihilation by the machine. Morris was a
violent machine-hater. He attributed to mechanisation and sub-
division of labour all the evils of the age. And from his point of
view he was right. The solution he found was aesthetically sound,
though socially not in the long run adequate. To build up a new
style on design was sound, to try to build it up in opposition to the
technical potentialities of the century was just as much escapism as
the Classicist's disguising of a town hall as a Greek temple. The forms
which Morris & Co. chose for their products were inspired by the
late Middle Ages, as was Morris's poetry. But Morris did not imi-
tate. He recognised Historicism as the danger it was. What he did
was to steep himself in the atmosphere and the aesthetic principles
of the Middle Ages, and then create something new with a similar
flavour and on similar principles. This is why Morris fabrics and
wallpapers will live long after all applied art of the generation
before his will have lost its significance.
Morris's social-aesthetic theory as it was embodied in the many
lectures and addresses he delivered from 1877 onwards will keep its
life in history too. By trying to revive the old faith in service, by
indicting the contemporary architect's and artist's arrogant indiffer-
ence to design for everyday needs, by discrediting any art created by
individual genius for a small group of connoisseurs, and by forcing
home with untiring zest the principle that art matters only "if all can
share it", he laid the foundation of the Modern Movement.
"What Morris did for the philosophy of art and for design,
Richardson in the United States and Webb and Norman Shaw in
Britain did concurrently for the aesthetics of architecture. Henry
Hobson Richardson (1838-86) unquestionably still belongs to the
era of period revivals. He studied in Paris and returned to New
England deeply impressed by the power of the French Romanesque
style. He continued to make use of it for churches, public and office
buildings (Auditorium, Chicago)—but no longer just for imitative
or associational reasons. He saw that these plain massive stone sur-
faces and mighty round arches could convey emotional contents
more suited to our own age than any other familiar to him* And he
and his followers designed country houses in the eighties freer and
EJL—15 207