Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Hopes and Fears for Art by William Morris
page 49 of 181 (27%)
extent done so, as I verily fear we have, what strange fog-lights
must have misled us; or rather let me say, how hard pressed we must
have been in the battle with the evils we have overcome, to have
forgotten the greatest of all evils. I cannot call it less than
that. If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not
satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater
part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect.
Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of
it in the end.

If I could only persuade you of this, that the chief duty of the
civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all,
to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour--nay, if I
could only persuade some two or three of you here present--I should
have made a good night's work of it.

Do not, at any rate, shelter yourselves from any misgiving you may
have behind the fallacy that the art-lacking labour of to-day is
happy work: for the most of men it is not so. It would take long,
perhaps, to show you, and make you fully understand that the would-
be art which it produces is joyless. But there is another token of
its being most unhappy work, which you cannot fail to understand at
once--a grievous thing that token is--and I beg of you to believe
that I feel the full shame of it, as I stand here speaking of it;
but if we do not admit that we are sick, how can we be healed? This
hapless token is, that the work done by the civilised world is
mostly dishonest work. Look now: I admit that civilisation does
make certain things well, things which it knows, consciously or
unconsciously, are necessary to its present unhealthy condition.
These things, to speak shortly, are chiefly machines for carrying on
DigitalOcean Referral Badge