36 Art in the Belfast Museum. 



comparatively untutored people have reached a point of excel- 

 lence in industrial art to which we cannot attain with all our 

 educational appliances and unlimited resources of production ? 



To answer that question fully would require more time than 

 we have at our disposal this evening. One important reason is 

 that we have become so accustomed to ugliness in all our 

 surroundings that we have lost the instinctive sense of art com- 

 mon to most unsophisticated peoples. We tolerate things in our 

 houses and buildings and in our streets which would have been 

 unendurable for a single moment to the ancient Greeks. Then 

 our artists have been taught to look to precedents, and to copy 

 the works of bygone styles so slavishly that they have almost 

 ceased to attempt originality. We are happily beginning to 

 see our error in that respect, and the five orders are no longer 

 held to embrace the whole of architecture, but there 

 is still much in our methods of art study that tends to the same 

 contracted ideas. Another and perhaps the greatest drawback 

 to our success in industrial art is to be found in our modern 

 method of mechanical production and the excessive division of 

 labour. Works of art cannot be produced by the gross. To be 

 worthy of our regard they must bear the impress of the in- 

 dividual mind. Even if we were to try to reproduce in quan- 

 tity some of the beautiful forms before us, we should find our 

 reproductions insipid and uninteresting ; there would be all the 

 difference between the two that there is between an original 

 painting and a chromo-lithograph. 



Mr. Trobridge then contrasted the methods adopted by our 

 modern manufacturers of textile and other wares with those 

 which result in the production of such things as we think 

 worthy to be placed in our museums, and proceeded : — 



In the first place, the modern manufacturer, so called — that 

 is, the proprietor of the works or factory — cares nothing for art. 

 What he wants is something that will sell. If the public 

 demand bad art, he is quite content they should have it ; if 

 high art is the rage, he will exert himself to produce it for us 

 as long as it pays. Of course I shall be met with the remark 



