Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was
cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected.
Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and
they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back.
They think he is merely shirking difficulties. But the difficulty of
expression is so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties of
mere professionalism that any man who is afraid of difficulties will try
to be a professional rather than an artist.

In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride. And it is
this pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work of
man. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom it
will endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the more
they are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered with
monstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan with
them. Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us very
well done; never do we dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
but it were better if it were not done at all; and the artist is still
to us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in
the unnatural difficulty of his performance.

Waste or Creation?

The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as
it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society,
and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many
part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as
slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the
quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in
any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which
encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come
to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he
predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of
our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and
commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to
civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one
at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what
must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of
labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--

Think