Note 154 — Chapter VII · CONCLUSION

This diffused æsthetic sense is correlated with a diffused artistic instinct, based on craftsmanship, which the Greeks were afraid to recognise because they looked down with contempt on the handicrafts as vulgar. William Morris was a pioneer in asserting this association. As a distinguished English writer, Mr. Charles Marriott, the novelist and critic, clearly puts the modern doctrine: “The first step is to absorb, or re-absorb, the ‘Artist’ into the craftsman.... Once agree that the same æsthetic considerations which apply to painting a picture apply, though in a different degree, to painting a door, and you have emancipated labour without any prejudice to the highest meaning of art.... A good surface of paint on a door is as truly an emotional or æsthetic consideration as ‘significant form,’ indeed it is ‘significant form.’” (Nation and Athenæum, 1st July, 1922.) Professor Santayana has spoken in the same sense: “In a thoroughly humanised society everything—clothes, speech, manners, government—is a work of art.” (The Dial, June, 1922, p. 563.) It is, indeed, the general tendency to-day and is traceable in Croce’s later writings.