But besides this kind of furniture, there is the other kind of what I should call state-furniture, which I think is proper even for a citizen; I mean side-boards, cabinets, and the like, which we have quite as much for beauty's sake as for use; we need not spare ornament on these, but may make them as elegant and elaborate as we can with carving, inlaying, or painting; these are the blossoms of the art of furniture, as picture-tapestry is of the art of weaving: but these also should not be scattered about the house at haphazard, but should be used architecturally to dignify important chambers and important places in them.

And once more; whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls; for they are that which makes your house and home; and if you don't make some sacrifice in their favour, you will find your chambers have a kind of makeshift, lodging house look about them, however rich and handsome your movables may be.

The last of the Lesser Arts I have to speak of I come to with some trepidation; but it is so important to one half of the race of civilised mankind, the male half, that I will venture: indeed I speak of the art of dress with the more terror because civilisation has settled for us males that art shall have no place in our clothes, and that we must in this matter occupy the unamiable position of critics of our betters; rebel as I am, I bow to that decision, though I find it difficult to admit that a chimney pot hat or a tail-coat is the embodiment of wisdom in clothes-philosophy; and sometimes in my more sceptical moments I puzzle myself in thinking why, when I am indoors, I should wear two coats, one with a back and no front, and the other with a front and no back: however, I have not near enough courage even to suggest a rebellion against these stern sartorial laws; and after all one can slip into and out of the queer things with great ease, and that being the case, it is far more important to me what other people wear than what I wear: so that I ask leave to be an irresponsible critic for a few moments.

Now I have lived through at least two periods of feminine dress, without counting the present one, which I perceive with some terror is trembling on the verge of change: yes, with terror, because for a good many years past, in spite of a few extravagancies, the dress of ladies in England has been highly satisfactory, and very consolatory for the mishaps that have befallen the lesser arts otherwise.

Under these circumstances, both for the sake of the hope and the warning that may lie in it, I will venture to call to your memory what has befallen the art of dress in modern times.

The days of Louis XV. draw across our path a kind of enchanted wood of abominations into which we need not venture: out of those horrors costume escaped into a style that was really graceful and simple in the years that came just before the French Revolution. What this costume really was you can see as clearly as anywhere in the engravings designed by the quaint and fertile book illustrator, the Pole Chodowiescki, whose works were much imitated by our Stothard. Then came a period when dress was influenced by the affectation of imitating the art and manners of the classical times, which produced under the First Napoleon a costume characterised by somewhat of an exaggeration of slim gracefulness amongst other extravagancies; for which affectations a dire revenge was lying in wait, the result of which, after a doubtful time between the dates of the Battle of Waterloo and the accession of Queen Victoria, was a style which one may call that of grim modern respectability: into the middle of that period I was born, and well I remember its horrors. If you can get at an Illustrated London News of about the time of the Queen's visit to Louis Philippe, look at the costumes in it; they will give you cause for serious reflection: or for an earlier example (I think) take up your Oliver Twist, with George Cruikshank's illustrations, and contemplate on the effigy there figured of that insipid person Miss Rose Maylie.¹

Well, that was the first period I have seen; on this period gradually crept another, which, at its height at least, could not be accused of over-much love of respectability: this period was that of crinoline. The woodcuts of John Leech give you admirable illustrations of all the stages of this period. It conquered something from its predecessor in that on the whole it allowed women to arrange their hair naturally and gracefully; but in everything else mere blatant vulgarity was apparently what it aimed at. I have good hopes that one may say that the degradation of costume reached its lowest depth in this costume of the Second Empire.²

This is the second period of costume that I have seen, and its end brings us to the beginning of things as they are; when woman's dress is or may be on the whole graceful and sensible--please note that I say it may be--for the most hopeful sign of the present period is its freedom: in the two previous periods there was no freedom; in that of grim respectability a lady was positively under well understood penalties not allowed to dress gracefully, she could not do it; under the reign of crinoline if she had dressed simply and beautifully,--like a lady, in short, she would have been hooted in the streets; but now-a-days, and for years past, a lady may dress quite simply and beautifully and yet not be noticed as having anything peculiar or theatrical in her costume. Extravagancies of fashion have not been lacking to us, but no one has been compelled to adopt them; every one might dress herself in the way which her own good sense told her suited her best. Now this, ladies, is the first and greatest necessity of rational and beautiful costume, that you should keep your liberty of choice; so I beg you to battle stoutly for it, or we shall all tumble into exploded follies again.

Then next, your only chance of keeping that liberty is, to resist the imposition on costume of unnatural monstrosities. Garments should veil the human form, and neither caricature it, nor obliterate its lines: the body should be draped, and neither sewn up in a sack, nor stuck in the middle of a box: drapery, properly managed, is not a dead thing, but a living one, expressive of the endless beauty of motion; and if this be lost, half the pleasure of the eyes in common life is lost. You must specially bear this in mind, because the fashionable milliner has chiefly one end in view, how to hide and degrade the human body in the most expensive manner. She (or he) would see no beauty in the Venus of Milo; she (or he) looks upon you as scaffolds on which to hang a bundle of cheap rags, which can be sold dear under the name of a dress Now, ladies, if you do not resist this to the bitter end, costume is ruined again, and all we males are rendered inexpressibly unhappy. So I beg of you fervently do not allow yourselves to be upholstered like armchairs, but drape yourselves like women.

Lastly, and this is really part of the same counsel, resist change for the sake of change; this is the very bane of all the arts. I say resist this stupidity, and the care of dress duly subordinated to other duties, is a serious duty to you; but if you do not resist it, the care of dress becomes a frivolous waste of time. It follows, from the admission of this advice, that you should insist on having materials for your dresses that are excellent of their kind, and beautiful of their kind, and that when you have a dress of even moderately costly materials, you won't be in a hurry to see the end of it. This is a thing too which will help us weavers, body and soul, and in a due and natural way: not like the too good natured way of my Lady Bective, who wants you to wear stiff alpaca, so that the Bradford capitalists may not have to change their machinery. I can't agree to that; if they will weave ugly cloth, let them take the consequences.

But one good thing breeds another, and most assuredly a steadiness in fashion, when a good fashion has been attained to, and a love of beautiful things for their own sakes and not because they are novelties, is both human, reasonable, and civilised, and will help the maker of wares, both master and man, and give them also time to think of beautiful things, and thus to raise their lives to a higher level.

Thus I have named a certain number of the lesser arts, which I must ask you to take as representing the whole mass of them: now all these arts, since they at all events make a show of life, one may suppose civilisation considers desirable, if not necessary; but if they are to go on existing and to occupy in one way or other the lives of millions of men, it seems to me that their life should be real, that the necessity for them should be felt by those that allow them to be carried on; for surely wasted -labour is a heavy burden for the world to bear.

I have said that, on the other hand, I am ready to accept the conclusion that these arts are vain and should not be carried on at all; that we should do nothing that we can help doing beyond what is barely necessary to keep ourselves alive, that we may contemplate the mystery of life, and be ready to accept the mystery of death. Yes, that might be agreed to, if the world would; but, you see, it will not. man's life is too complex, too unmanageable at the hands of any unit of the race for such a conclusion to be come to, except by a very few, better--or it may be worse--than their fellows; and even they will be driven to it by noting the contrast between their aspirations and the busy and inconsistent lives of other men. I mean, if most men lived reasonably, and with justice to their fellows, no men would be drawn towards asceticism.

No, the lesser arts of life must be practiced, that is clear. It only remains therefore for us to determine whether they shall but minister to our material needs, receiving no stimulus and no help from the cravings of our souls, or whether they shall really form part of our lives material and spiritual, and be so helpful and natural, that even the sternest philosopher may look upon them kindly and feel helped by them.

Is it possible that civilisation can determine to brutalise the crafts of life by cutting them off from the intellectual part of us? Surely not in the long run; and yet I know that the progress of the race from barbarism to civilisation has hitherto had a tendency to make our lives more and more complex; to make us more dependent one upon the other, and to destroy individuality, which is the breath of life to art; but swiftly and without check as this -tendency has grown, I know I cannot be alone in doubting if it has been an unmixed good to us, or in believing that a change will come, perhaps after some great disaster has chilled us into pausing, and so given us time for reflection: anyhow, in some way or other, I believe the day is not so far distant when the best of men will set to work trying to simplify life on a new basis--when the organisation of labour will mean something else than the struggle of the strong to use each one to his best advantage the necessities and miseries of the weak.

Meanwhile I believe that it will speed the coming of that day if we do but look open-eyed at art and with all sincerity-; I want an end of believing that we believe in art-bogies; I want the democracy of the arts established: I want every one to think for himself about them, and not to take things for granted from hearsay; every man to do what he thinks right, not in anarchical fashion, but feeling that he is responsible to his fellows for what he feels, thinks, and has determined.

In these lesser arts every one should say: I have such or such an ornamental matter, not because I am told to like it, but because I like it myself, and I will have nothing that I don't like--nothing; and I can give you my reasons for rejecting this, and accepting that, and am ready to abide by them, and to take the consequences of my being right or wrong. Of course such independence must spring from knowledge, not from ignorance, and you may be sure that this kind of independence would be far from destroying the respect due to the higher intellects that busy themselves with the arts; on the contrary, it would make that respect the stronger, since those who had themselves got to think seriously about the arts would understand the better what difficulties beset the greatest men in their struggles to express what is in them. Anyhow, if this intelligent, sympathetic, and serious independence of thought about the arts does not become general among cultivated men (and all men ought to be cultivated) it is a matter of course that the practice of the arts must fall into the hands of a degraded and despised class, degraded and despised at least as far as its daily work goes; that is to say, the greater part of its waking hours.

Surely this is a serious danger to our political and social advancement, to our cultivation, to our civilisation, in short; surely we can none of us be content to accept the responsibility of creating such a- class - of pariahs, or to sit quiet under the burden of its existence, if it exist at present, as indeed it does.

Therefore I ask you to apply the remedy of refusing to be ignorant and nose-led about the arts; I ask you to learn what you want and to ask for it; in which case you will both get it and will breed intelligent and worthy citizens for the common weal; defenders of society, friends for yourselves.

Is not this worth doing? It will add to the troubles of life. Maybe; I will not say nay. Yet consider after all that the life of a man is more troublous than that of a swine, and the life of a freeman than the life of a slave; and take your choice accordingly.

Moreover, if I am right in these matters, your trouble will be shifted, not increased: we shall take pains indeed concerning things which we care about, hard and bitter pains maybe, yet with an end in view; but the confused, aimless, and for ever unrewarded pains which we now so plentifully take about things we do not care about, we shall sweep all that away, and so shall win calmer rest and more strenuous, less entangled work.

What other blessings are there in life save these two,-fearless rest and hopeful work? Troublous as life is, it has surely given to each one of us here some times and seasons when, surrounded by simple and beautiful things, we have really felt at rest; when the earth and all its plenteous growth, and the tokens of the varied life of men, and the very sky and waste of air above us, have seemed all to conspire together to make us calm and happy, not slothful but restful Still oftener belike it has given us those other times when at last after many a struggle with incongruous hindrances our own chosen work has lain before us disentangled from all encumbrances and unrealities, and we have felt that nothing could withhold us, not even ourselves, from doing the work we were born to do, and that we were men and worthy of life.

Such rest, and such work, I earnestly wish for myself and for you, and for all men: to have space and freedom to gain such rest and such work, is the end of politics; to learn how best to gain it is the end of education; to learn its inmost meaning is the end of religion.

¹ I do not mean any disrespect to Dickens, of whom I am a humble worshipper.

² Indeed I hope so; but since this Lecture was delivered, unhappy tokens are multiplying that fine ladies are determined to try whether ugliness may not be more attractive than beauty.

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