The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-27 00:00:00

right action, depending as it does, not on to-clay
or tomorrow, but en the long future, is remote.
In the same proportion it is wise to call in aid all
the secondary resources we can command. Among
these instruments, and among the best of them, is
to be reckoned the foundation of institutes like
this, for they not only supply
the willing with
means
toe the principle
dnwn the on
tradition which
agethoefygoaod
the night are
founded. age
They y h
carry
times through the slumber and •
ght of bad
times, ready to point the path to excellence when
the dawn returns again. I heartily
trust the
institute may be one worthy of ite founder and of
its object. But now let us draw nearer to the
immediate character and office of him whom I may
call our hero. His most signal and characteristic
merit lay in the fineness and fullness of his per-
ception of the true law of what we term industrial
art; or, in other words, of the application of the
higher art to industry, the law which teaches us
to aim first at giving to every object the greatest
possible degree of fitness and convenience for
its purpose, and next at making it the vehicle for
the highest degree of beauty which compatibility
for that fitness and convenience it will bear ; it
does not substitute the secondary for the primary
end, but recognises as part of its business the study
to harmonise the two. To have a strong grasp of
this principle, and to work it out to its result in
the details of a vast and varied manufacture is
praise high enough for any man. But it was
higher and more peculiar in the case of Wedgwood
than any other man. For that truth of art which
he saw so clearly, and which lies at the root of
excellence, was one of which England has not
usually had a perception at all corresponding
with her other rare endowments. She has long
taken lead among the nations of Europe for the
cheapness of her manufactures. Not so for
their beauty ; and if the day shall ever come
when she shall be as eminent for taste as she is now
for economy of production, my belief is that result
will probably be due to no other single man in so
great a degree as to Wedgwood. This part of the
subject, however, deserves a fuller consideration.
There are three regions given to man for the exer-
cise of his faculties in the production of objects and
the performance of acts conducive to civilisation and
to the ordinary use of life. Of these, one is the
homely sphere of simple utility. lit hat is done is
done for some purpose of absolute necessity, or im-
mediate use; what is produced is produced with an
almost implicit regard to its value and exchange—
to the market, the place, and day. A dustman can-
not be expected to move with the grace of a fairy,
nor can his cart be constructed on the flowing lines
of a Greek chariot of war: Not but that, even in
this unpromising domain, beauty also has her place,
Then there is the lofty sphere of pure thought, and
its numerous organs; the sphere of poetry and the
highest arts. Here, again the place of utility is
narrowed, and the production of the beautifulin one
or other of its Innumerable forms is the supreme if
not the only object. I believe it to be undeniable
that in both of these spheres, widely separated as
they are, the faculties of Englishmen, and the dis-
tinctions of England have been of the very first
order. In the power of economical production she
is at the head of all the nations of the earth. If in
the fine arts—painting for example—she must be
content with a second place, yet in poetry, which
ranks even higher than painting, she may fairly
challenge all the naticns of Christendom, and none
but Italy can as yet enter into serious competition
with the land of Shakspeare. (Cheers.) I for one
should admit that, while thus pre-eminent in the
pursuit of pure beauty on one side, and of unmixed
utility on the other, she has been far less fortunate
in that intermediate region where art is brought
into contact with industry, and where the pair may
wed together. This is a region alike vast and
diversified. Upwards it embraces architecture—an
art which, while it affords the noblest scope for grace
and grandeur, is, or rather ought to be strictly tied
dowu to the purposes of convenience. Down-
wards it extends to a very large proportion of the
products of human industry; but, while all the
objects of trade and manufacture admit of funda-
mental differences in point of fatness and unfitness,
probably the major part of them admit of funda-
mental differences also in point of beauty or ugli-
ness. Utility is not to be sacrificed for beauty, but
they are generally compatible and often positively
helpful to each other, and it may ')e safely asserted
that the periods when the study of beauty have
been neglected have usually been marked not by a
more successful pursuit of utility, but by a general
decline in the energies of man. In Greece, the foun-
tain head of our instruction on these matters, the
season of her highest historic splendour was also
summer of her classic poetry and art; and in con-
templating her architecture we scarcely know
whether most to admire the acme of beauty, or the
perfect obedience to the laws of mechanic contriv-
ance. The arts of Italy were the offspring of her
freedom—(cheers)—and with its death they lan-
guished and decayed. In the particular department
of industrial art, France perhaps, of all modern
nations, has achieves the greatest distinction, and
and there is nocountry which has displayed, through
a long course of ages, a more varied activity, or
acquired a greater number of titles to renown. It
would be easy to show that the reputation which
England has long enjoyed with the trading world
has been for cheap and not beautiful productions.
In some great branches of manufacture we were
until late dependent upon patterrs from abroad. In
others our work presented nothing but a dreary
waste of capricious ugliness. Some of us remember
with what avidity, some thirty or forty years back,
the ladies of England smuggled every article of
dress and ornament from France. That practice has
now ceased, partly perhaps because there are no
longer any duties to evade—(laughter)—but also
because the preference has, in some degree, been
modified, because of the great progress made in the
taste which this country applies to industry. I

have understood that for some of the textile
fabrics patterns are not imported only, but
also exported and exchanged. Let us not treat
this as a matter of blame to our forefathers and
commendation to ourselves. It has not been suffi-
ciently considered what immense disadvantages
were brought on the country as respects the appli-
cation of fine art to industry by the great revolu-
tionary war. Not only was the engroasing cha-
racter of a deadly struggle unfavourable to all such
purpose, but our communion with the civilised
world was placed under restraint, and we were in
great measure excluded from a resort to those cities
and countries which possessed the greatest abund-
ance of examples bequeathed by former excellence.
Nor could it be expected that Kings and Govern-
ments, absorbed in a conflict of life and death, and
dependent for the means of sustaining it on enor-
mous and constant loans, would spare either
thought or money from war and its imperious de-
mends for these, the most pacific among all the
purposes of peace. At any rate, I take it to be
nearly certain that the period of the war was a pe-
riod of general and progressive depression and even
degradation, in almost every branch of industrial
art, that the fabrics of your own manufacture, for
example, were in point of beauty, much inferioi to
what they had been at a former time—that the
older factories had in some cases died out, in others,
such a Worcester, for instance, they declined—and
that whereas Wedgwood is said to have exported
five-sixths of what ho made, we had not only lost
any hold such as he had gained upon the foreign
market, but we owed the loss in part, at least, to our
marked decline in excellence and taste. I submit,
however, that, considering all that England has
done in the sphere of pure beauty on the one side,
and in the sphere of cheap and useful manufacture
that i
°n the
the other, it not only is needless, but would be
where to suppose that she lies under any radi-
cal or honourablerrei,ate
sipnheearpottewi incapacity r
ef for excelling
tw o
join alsoha n
sn.
-Wedgwood
gained the distinctions which
have made biro, in the language of Mr. Smiles,
"the illustrioui Wnot thick that Wedgwood edgwood:'(Cheers.) I do
should be regarded as
a strange phenomenon,
no
more native to us and
ours than a meteoric stone
happy accident without ezara from heaven, a
turn. Rare, indeed, t1:11! and without re-
" appearance of
such men in, the history of indastr
y, single
per-
t-mpg it may 1::-ivc Ivan amnnz, ourselvs; forothat.