1142 
 
 G65 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FINE ARTS LffiRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 NR. , ,42.C65 
 
 The Arts and crafts movemem 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924020593269 
 
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT 
 BY T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON 
 
 HAMMERSMITH PUBLISHING SOCIETY 
 
 RIVER HOUSE HAMMERSMITH 
 
 MDCCCCV 
 
THE Movement, passing under the name of 
 ' Arts and Crafts,' admits of many defini- 
 tions. It may be associated with the movement 
 of ideas, characteristic of the close of the last 
 century,andbedefiiied to be an_effort to bring it 
 under the jnfl.ueace of art as the supreme mode 
 in which human, atdlivity of all kinds expresses 
 itself at its Jiighjest and best; in which case the 
 so-called ' Arts and Crafts Exhibitions ' would 
 be but a symbolic preseatmeat of a whole by 
 a part, itself incapable of presentment : or it may 
 be associated wjth the revival, by a few artists^ 
 of hand-craft as opposed to machine-craft, and 
 be defined to bethe insistence on the worth of 
 man's hand, a unique tool in danger of bein^ 
 lost in the substitution for it of highly; organ- 
 ized and intricate machinery, or of emotional 
 as distinguished from merely skilled and tech- 
 nical labour: or again, it may be defined to be 
 both the one and the other, and to have a wider 
 scope than either; as for example, it may be de- 
 fined to constitute a movement to bring all the 
 ad;ivities of the human spirit under the influence 
 of one idea, the idea that life is creation, and 
 should be creative in modes of art, &: tliaf this 
 creation should extend to all the ideasof science 
 and of social organization, to all the ideas and 
 habits begotten of a grandiose and consciously 
 3 
 
conceived procession of humanity, out of no- 
 thing and nowhere, into everything and every- 
 where, as well as to the merely instrumental 
 occupations thereof at any particular moment. 
 
 No definition, however, is orthodox or to 
 be propounded with authority: each has its 
 apostles: and besides the definitions attempted 
 above, there are still others, some of them, in- 
 deed, concerning themselves only with the fa- 
 cilities to be afforded to the craftsman for the 
 exhibition, advertisement, and sale of his wares. 
 
 Nor do I propose, myself, to propound one at 
 this stage of my description of the movement. 
 I merely adumbrate the shifting goal, as it may 
 have presented itself to the minds of the men 
 engaged in the movement, that you may know 
 at the outset, in vision, those far-off heights, 
 which they, or some of them, essayed not only 
 themselves to climb, but to make all mankiffd 
 also to climb. 
 
 It is to the movement itself that I will first 
 ask your attention. 
 
 Art is one, though manifold, and when the 
 Royal Academy of Arts, in spite of many pro- 
 tests, continued to restridt its Academic Exhi- 
 bitions to Painting, Sculpture, and Abstradl 
 Architedlure, a body of protesters came to- 
 gether, not any longer to protest only, but this 
 
 4 
 
time to constitute a society of exhibitioners 
 who should widen the academic conception of 
 art, and open its exhibitions to all forms of art, 
 provided only that the form was of art, born of 
 the imagination, and destined to touch the im- 
 agination. 
 
 Such a society was in due time formed, and, 
 under the name of the ' Arts and Crafts Exhi-| 
 bition Society,' initiated the wider movement 
 which, from itself as source, has spread all the 
 world over, and created a new interest. The arts* 
 and crafts have been born again, and, in a new 
 sense, occupy the attention of mankind. 
 
 The first exhibition was held in the New 
 Gallery, in London, in the autumn of 1888. It 
 is not necessary to dwell on the exhibits which 
 stand enumerated in the catalogue now before 
 me. It is sufficient to say that whereas each ex- 
 hibit, standing alone, might have been seen 
 without any sense of a new ' movement ' being 
 on foot, the accumulation, under one roof and 
 idea, of so many different and differently con- 
 ceived things of beauty, made a marked impres- 
 siononthe public imagination, & unmistakably 
 heralded the advent of a new force into society, 
 at once creative and classificatory. Old things, 
 long since done, were to be put into new rela- 
 tions, & upon a higher plane, and all new work 
 
 5 
 
was to be conceived of as convergent upon one 
 end, the dignity and sweetness of life, and the 
 workman — artist or craftsman — was to derive 
 therefrom his measure of happiness & delight. 
 And that work, which for the world had lost all 
 association with human initiative & solicitude, 
 was to be made to resume that intimate rela- 
 tion, and the workman himself to be recalled 
 into the assembly of those who are consciously 
 striving to the acknowledged end. The work- 
 •men contributing to the creation of a work were 
 to be thenceforward named its author, and to 
 have their names inscribed upon the great roll 
 of the world's ever visible record. 
 
 Such appeared to be the new movement of 
 which the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts 
 Exhibition Society was the first overt adt. 
 
 Besides the enumeration and description of 
 exhibits, the catalogue contained a preface by 
 the President, Walter Crane ; anoticeof led;ures 
 to be given in connexion with the exhibition; 
 and a number of ' Notes ' upon various arts & 
 crafts written by men who, as stated in the pre- 
 face, were associated with the subjedis of which 
 they treated, not in the literary sense only, but 
 as adtual designers and workmen. 
 
 The objed of the ledures was stated to be 
 / twofold: (i) To set out the aims of the Society; 
 
 6 
 
and (2) by demonstration & otherwise, to diredt 
 attention to the processes employed in the arts 
 and crafts, and so to lay a foundation for a just 
 appreciation, both of the processes themselves, 
 and of their importance as methods of expres- 
 sion in design. 
 
 And here I may intercalate an extradl from 
 a book which appeared at that time, as it throws 
 a light upon, indeed constituted, one of the 
 main impulses to which was due the inception 
 of the lectures. I refer to ' Scientific Religion, 
 or Higher Possibilities of Life and Practice 
 through the Operation of Natural Causes,' by 
 Laurence Oliphant; and the passage to which 
 I ask your attention is the following : 
 
 ' He can no longer be esteemed an excellent 
 workman who can only work excellently! for 
 his work, to prove that it is living, must be 
 generative, and it will not be generative unless 
 the workman has his mind trained to a clear 
 conception of his own methods and their con- 
 nexion with the laws of Nature: and unless 
 he can impart that understanding by word of 
 mouth : unless, in fine, the sum of his experi- 
 ence, while he is constantly increasing it, is as 
 constantly forced by him into mental shape ' 
 — or, as I might add, into imaginative shape 
 and association. 
 
When I read this I seemed to see all crafts 
 and manufadtures and commerce crystal clear 
 and capable of statement, so that, even as they 
 stood outlined and embodied to the corporeal 
 eye, so they should shine in all their processes 
 and relations clear as in sunlight to the eye of 
 intelligence : and it was in such wise that when 
 the time came I proposed to the Committee of 
 the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society that 
 Ledtures should form a part of the purpose of 
 the Society, and should accompany and be de- 
 livered in the building of the Exhibition (i) to 
 convert the implicit mental processes involved 
 in the exercise of a craft into explicit articulate 
 utterance capable of making such mental pro- 
 cesses intelligible at once to the worker himself 
 and to the spectator interested to know, and 
 (2) to widen the horizons of the workers and to 
 set their work in due relation to the other crafts 
 and processes with which it was associated, 
 and to the forces of Nature upon which they 
 and it depended. 
 . Ledtures, as announced in the Catalogue, 
 were given in connexion with the first exhibi- 
 1 tion by William Morris on Tapestry, by George 
 \ Simmonds on Modelling and Sculpture, by 
 \ Emery Walker on Letterpress Printing, by 
 1 myself on Bookbinding, and by Walter Crane 
 on Design. 8 
 
Perhaps, in view of the results which have 
 flowed from it, and at this distance of time, I 
 may for a moment dwell particularly on the 
 ledlure on Letterpress Printing. It was at my 
 urgent request that Mr. Walker overcame his 
 reludtance to speak in public, and I therefore 
 claim for myself the honour of being the real 
 author of The Kelmscott Press ! for it was in 
 consequence of this ledturegivenbyMr. Emery 
 Walker at my request, and the lantern slides 
 of beautiful old founts of type and MS. by 
 which it was illustrated, that William Morris 
 was induced to turn again his attention to print- 
 ing, and this time, as a printer, to produce, in 
 friendly collaboration with Mr. Walker, that 
 splendid series of printed books which has in- 
 spired printing with a new life, and enriched 
 the libraries of the world with books as nobly 
 conceived and executed as any that distin- 
 guish the great age of Printing itself. 
 
 The ' Notes,' to which reference has already 
 been made, occupied a little more than a third 
 of the Catalogue, and treated of: 
 
 Textiles, if 
 
 Decorative Painting and Design, 
 
 Wall papers, 
 
 Fidtiles, 
 
 Metal work, 
 
 9 B 
 
Stone and Wood carving, 
 
 Furniture, 
 
 Stained and Table glass. 
 
 Printing, and 
 
 Bookbinding: 
 and as they contain the dodlrines of the new 
 movement so far as it was applicable to the 
 crafts of which they treated, it may be worth 
 while to turn over a few pages and to see what 
 those dodlrines are. 
 
 Mr. Morris, who writes on Textiles, opens 
 at once on his subjedt. ' There are,' he says, 
 ' several ways of ornamenting a woven cloth.' 
 He then enumerates the ways as follows: (i) 
 Real Tapestry; (2) Carpet weaving; (3) Me- 
 chanical weaving; (4) Printing or Painting; 
 and (5) Embroidery; and proceeds under each 
 head to lay down principles, accordant with 
 the particular method, for the produdlion of 
 the ornament required, and concludes his note 
 with some general maxims applicable to all the 
 methods alike, as thus, ' Never forget the ma- 
 terial you are working with, and try always to 
 use it for doing what it can do best: if you feel 
 yourself hampered by the material in which 
 you are working, instead of being helped by 
 it, you have so far not learned your business, 
 any more than a would-be poet has, who com- 
 ic 
 
plains of the hardship of writing in measure 
 and rhyme. The special limitations of the ma- | 
 terial should be a pleasure to you, not a hind- 
 rance: a designer, therefore, should always 
 thoroughly understand the processes of the 
 special manufad:ure he is dealing with, or the 
 result will be a mere tour-de-force. On the 
 other hand it is the pleasure in understanding | 
 the capabilities of a special material, and using 1 1 
 them for suggesting (not imitating) natural \ | 
 beauty and incident, that gives the raison \ \ 
 d'itre of decorative art.' ' 
 
 In a note on wall papers Mr. Crane goes into 
 useful detail as to the conditions of successful 
 pattern making for their decoration. As, how- 
 ever, our purpose is only with the more general 
 lines and dired;ion of the movement, we need 
 not follow him into this detail, and I will leave 
 it with the remark that this and kindred notes 
 by him and others show sufficiently that the 
 writers did not confine themselves to general 
 principles difficult of application without in- 
 termediary illustration, but addressed them- 
 selves vigorously to the actual practice of the 
 craft treated of, and sought to quicken it into 
 life at once by Principle and Precept, by Ex- 
 ample, and by Trade Recipe. 
 
 Continuing our exploration of the Notes, we 
 
 II 
 
next come upon an interesting one by the late 
 — alas! too many of the early workers in the 
 movement have ceased to be with us, and I 
 feel here tempted to break off, and, in sympathy 
 with that sublime chapter of Ecclesiasticus 
 which I have recently been printing, to com- 
 memorate 'our fathers that begat us,' the great 
 Dead. 
 
 Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms. 
 Men renowned for their power. 
 Giving counsel by their understanding. 
 And declaring prophecies. 
 
 Burne-Jones, William Morris, Madox Brown 
 — ' these be of them that have left a name be- 
 hind them to declare their praises.' And some 
 there be that have no memorial save the mem- 
 ory of them enshrined in the hearts of them 
 that knew them. But adequately to commemor- 
 ate were too great an enterprise, and I return 
 to my immediate topic; and yet, as I turn, one 
 of great name, greater than all whom I have 
 named, impels me to pause and to praise him, 
 him who begat the begetters, him who was 'as 
 the morning star in the midst of a cloud, as 
 the moon at the full,' Ruskin! To him we all 
 owe whatever of impulse is in us toward that 
 goal whose outline it is my business to de- 
 
 12 
 
scribe to you to-night. To Ruskin, then, all 
 honour, all praise, to Ruskin, the great Dead 
 who in life, living, begat us! 
 
 To resume. 
 
 The Note on Fidtiles, by the late G. T. Rob- 
 inson, carries us to the dawn of art and craft, 
 for, as says Mr. Robinson, ' Man's first needs 
 in domestic life, his first utensils, his first ef- 
 forts at civilization, came from the mother earth, 
 whose son he believed himself to be, and his 
 ashes or his bones returned to earth, enshrined 
 in the fidlile vases he created from their com- 
 mon clay. And these fidliles,' continues Mr. 
 Robinson, 'tell the story of his first art in- 
 stindts, and of his yearnings to unite beauty 
 with use. They tell, too, more of his history 
 than is enshrined and preserved by any other 
 art ; for almost all we know of many a people 
 and many a tongue is learned from the fidtile 
 record, the sole relic of past civilizations which 
 the destroyer Time has left us. Begun in the 
 simplest fashion, fashioned by the simplest 
 means, created from the commonest materials, 
 fi(ftile Art grew with man's intelledlual growth, 
 and fidile Craft grew with his knowledge — the 
 latter conquering in this our day, when the 
 craftsman strangles the artist alike in this as 
 in all other arts. To truly foster and forward 
 
 13 
 
an art,' concludes Mr. Robinson, ' the crafts- 
 man and the artist should, where possible, be 
 united ; or, at least, should work in common, 
 as was the case when, in each civilization, the 
 Potter's Art flourished most, and when the 
 scientific base was of less account than was the 
 art employed upon it.' 
 
 It is not necessary for our purpose to go 
 through the succeeding Notes, or to say more 
 than that, assuming the principles which under- 
 lie all great art, they deal in their several ways 
 with a number of crafts which the creative in- 
 genuity of man, working, as described by Mr. 
 Robinson, for the satisfaction & for the adorn- 
 ment of the satisfadtion of his wants, imagin- 
 ative and real, has in different circumstances 
 and at different times invented, and seek, amid 
 the confusion which has arisen in the abuse of 
 these crafts by pseudo-craftsmen and artists, 
 who have approached them from the outside, 
 to restore to them their sanity, alike in process 
 and in choice of material, in aim, and in the 
 expression of beauty and of purpose. 
 
 The master-principle, however, to be deduced 
 from the Notes maybe here restated in the words 
 of Mr. Morris, for it is a principle applicable 
 to the whole range of imaginative creation: 
 ' Never forget the material you are working 
 
 14 
 
with, and try always to use it for doing what 
 jit can do best.' 
 
 To the catalogues of the two following ex- 
 hibitions more Notes were added, and finally, 
 in 1893, all the Notes were put together and 
 published in one volume, entitled ' Arts and 
 Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and 
 Crafts Exhibition Society," with a Prefatory 
 Note by William Morris. This volume was 
 reprinted in 1899. 
 
 In the Prefatory Note Mr. Morris sets out 
 the purpose of the Society as understood by 
 him — too narrowly, I think. ' It is,' he says, 
 ' to help the conscious cultivation of art and to 
 interest the public in it, by calling special at- 
 tention to that,' in his judgement, ' really most 
 important side of art, the decoration of utilities 
 by furnishing them with genuine artistic finish 
 in place of trade finish.' To this I shall return 
 by and by. 
 
 After the Prefatory Note comes the Table of 
 Contents of the volume. And looking for a 
 moment down the long list of tongues in which 
 Craft, under the guidance of Art, is striving to 
 speak afresh, how can one fail to lament the 
 time now past and to wish it back, when these 
 tongues, now the language, and too often the 
 quite artificial language, of a professional and 
 
 15 
 
 
specially trained class, were but the vernacular 
 of one common language, widely and familiarly 
 spoken, and craftmanship itself but 'joy in 
 widest commonalty spread ' ; joy in working in 
 all the various ways of imaginative invention, 
 upon all sorts and kinds of material, material 
 brought from afar, sought with danger or grown 
 in pastoral peace; joy in making and devising 
 things of use and of beauty, homely things, 
 princely things, things of beauty for beauty's 
 adornment, noble things for a city's ; all amid 
 Nature's own, yet unsullied, immense creative- 
 ness, all for the admiration and use of vigorous 
 emergent and vanishing generations, whose 
 common bond in life was the thing so made, 
 its beauty and its use. 
 
 We may now leave the explanatory preludes, 
 the Notes, and turn to the Ledlures, to which 
 reference has already been made. They were 
 given, I think, at each Exhibition, except the 
 j last, and in the Exhibition itself, and were 
 I meant, besides the objedts officially announced 
 in the catalogues, to widen the scope of the 
 Exhibitions, otherwise restricted to things of 
 minor importance only, and to extend the at- 
 tention of the public to things not present in 
 the Exhibition, though to be imagined and 
 thought of in association with it. And here we 
 
 i6 
 
may exped to find, and shall find, as I shall 
 show, a more extended view of the aims of the 
 Society as set out by itself. 
 
 It is matter of regret that, save one series 
 presently to be mentioned, and a ledture by 
 William Morris, no record has been kept of 
 them. They were delivered, and are now per- 
 haps forgotten. And yet how stimulating, how 
 interesting the circumstances of some of them ! 
 ^Wiilisuo[i-Mo¥fis, on a raised platform, sur- 
 rounded by products of the loom, at work upon 
 a model loom specially constructed from his 
 design — now in the Vidtoria and Albert Mu- 
 seum — to show how the wools were inwrought, 
 andthe visions of his brain fixed in colour and 
 in fprmj; Walter Crane, backed by a great black 
 board, wiped clean, alas ! when one would have 
 had it remain for ever still adorned by the spon- 
 taneous creations of his inexhaustible brain ; 
 George Simmonds, demonstrating to us the 
 uses of the thumb, and how under its pressure 
 things of clay rose into life; Lewis Day, de- 
 signing as he spoke, and bringing before our 
 inner eye, as well as the outer, t he pat terns of 
 Asia and of Europe in stage after stage of de- 
 velopment; Selwyn Image, by his studied elo- 
 cution, takingUs back to the church which he 
 had left, but with sweet reasonableness depidl- 
 - 17 -— - c -—- — 
 
i ngJ)d(3re4ts~si»dowy^feaek^©«iiti . the .hf ight 
 new^Xe£iasalem~to ward which his enfranchised 
 imagination burned; Lethaby, entrancing us 
 with the cities which crowned the hills of 
 Europe^ ox sat in white on the still seashore, 
 prmirrored in the waters of Italy; all v_anished, 
 save the memory of them ! And here, dwelling 
 in memory on the past, may I not recall the 
 fervour, the entJb.jisiasJ3i.Q£.those fo;st years^the 
 ready invention^ the design, bomi?Xlhe..jmo- 
 ment and the, Qccasiorij, for catalogu^.Dil£S.aad 
 room; and one design that caused so much, 
 long-forgotten commotion — the design by the 
 President, to be hung over the out-door en- 
 trance to the gallery, of artist and craftsman, 
 hand in hand! But how recall them to those 
 who knew them not? Impossible! I mention 
 them only in piety to that holy time, when we 
 circled about the founts, and played, of that 
 great movement which is now the world's ! 
 
 As I write these words I am reminded of that 
 definition to which I said I would return. 'The 
 ai rn^ol JheArts aadCrafts Exhibition Society ' 
 —I repeat the definition — ' is to help the con- 
 scious cultivation of art, and' the atteinpt to 
 interest the public in it, by calling special at- 
 tention to that really most important side of 
 art, the decoration of utilities, by furnishing 
 
 — ■■"™"7 ^'"' "18 
 
them with genuine artistic finish in place of 
 J;ia(le;iniish:' — — ^ -. ,....-^, , -., 
 
 Surely this is a strange misapprehension & 
 restridlion of the aims of the Society ! Were 
 that the only aim, then the movement was not 
 what I imagined it to be, and still imagine, nor / 
 would it be worthy of your attention to-day, not / 
 to speak of the world's ! ) 
 
 In the same preface in which this definition 
 occurs there is a passage which I passed over 
 at the time, but which at this stage of our his- 
 tory it is important that I should notice. 'We 
 can,' says the writer, 'expedl no general impulse 
 towards the fine arts till civilization has been 
 transformed into some other condition, the de- 
 tails of which we cannot see.' 
 
 And it was therefore — because we could ex- 
 pedt no general impulse towards the fine arts, 
 imlil-this^stacle was removed, that we were 
 (In the meahtime^and this was to be our ' move- 
 ment;*Io'lierpthe conscious cultivation of art, 
 which the writer at the same time says is no 
 art at all, and the attempt to interest the public 
 in it! 
 
 Here I am at issue with the writer, and would 
 submit that this general impulse must precede 
 and tfse/f bring about the transformation: and 
 further that this general impulse is precisely 
 
 19 
 
II 
 
 and already the impulse constituting that great 
 movement dubbed 'Arts and _CmftsJ.ja4J^ 
 its aim is not merely to help the conscious cul- 
 tivation of art pending the transformation, but 
 itself to bring the transformation about. 
 
 In fadl, I submit that in the intention of the 
 founders, or in the intention of some of them, 
 ArtXsj-or shauld be^-axL^a^mJM^j'if^slM/^on 
 of noble^life, and nptmerfily, aiLexgcutanide- 
 pendent upoaand prfisupposingjt^existe 
 
 As some evidence of this intention, I may 
 adduce the following conclusion from an un- 
 published Report of the Committee to the Mem- 
 bers of the Society. ' In conclusion, the Com- 
 mittee would venture for a moment to take 
 theirstandupon the higher plane of the Society, 
 and to say a word or two upon the cause which 
 in the opinion of the Committee constitutes the 
 claim of the Society to attention and support. 
 For a small body of artists to band themselves 
 together, simply to produce and to exhibit ob- 
 jedts of art for an^agejsdiidi-is _.noJ;Jadeed 
 essentially inartistic, butwhich, by the accident 
 of the failure of the imagination to ^rasp and 
 mould its dominant realities, has not had re- 
 vealed to itself the splendour of its opportuni- 
 ties, or of the meaning of Beauty in association 
 with Industry and Science^^fo'r a small body 
 
of Artists to band themselves together for such 
 a purpose is indeed something; but it is to leave 
 unfulfilled, unessayed, the main fundtion, in 
 this and every age, of all great Art and of all 
 great Artists. Such Art and such Artists would 
 and should, whilst still producing, as best they 
 may, if not " yimgi_oXJ,mil!jOXtal-B€-auty,'' at 
 least " things of their own," strive at the same 
 time to understand the true drift and possible 
 Ideal of the Age in which they live. It is the 
 function of an Artist to divine the Ideal of an 
 age, and to express it in manifold Form. The 
 Ideal of the present age has been negledted by 
 him. The adluality has been left as an actual- 
 ity, unredeemed by ideas, to those whose sole 
 business it is to carry on, and to constitute, the 
 actuality of the age. But there is above and 
 beyond every Actuality an Ideal upon which it 
 can and should be modelled. It is this Ideal 
 which it is the fundtion of the Artist — which 
 it is the fundtion of this Society — to discover 
 and to express, in great things as in small, in 
 small as in great: and the Ideal, expressed, is 
 then as a great Light to those who sit in dark- 
 ness; it is a light towards which the soul of 
 Aduality turns; it is that which, aspired to, 
 gives to an age dignity and immortality, and 
 converts the work of the hand and brain from 
 
 21 
 
work that is sordid and mean, to work that is 
 imaginative and noble.' 
 
 But the claim does not rest on unpublished 
 records alone. This I think will be apparent if 
 attention be given to the one series of Ledlures 
 which has survived their delivery, and been 
 published. I refer to ' Art and Life, and the 
 Building and Decoration of Cities,' a title which 
 of itself carries the scope of the Society beyond 
 all the possible Exhibits of an Exhibition. 
 
 The objedt of these Ledturesisthus explicitly 
 stated by the Ledturer on ' Art and Life,' which 
 introduces the series, and his statement is borne 
 witness to throughoutbyall the other speakers. 
 The statement to which I refer is as follows : 'I 
 now begin the first of a series of Ledtures hav- 
 ing for their objedt generally the extension of 
 the conception of Art, and more especially the 
 application of the idea of Beauty to the organiz- 
 ation and decoration of our greater cities.' And 
 of his own Ledture he says : ' I desire to ex- 
 tend the conception of Art, and to apply it to 
 life as a whole ; or, inversely, to make the whole 
 of life, in all its grandeur, as well as in all its 
 delightful detail, the objedl of the action of Art 
 and Craft.' 
 
 And in the course of it the Ledturer thus 
 defined what seemed to him the fundtion of art 
 
 22 
 
in this extended conception of its meaning. 
 ' Art implies a certain lofty environment, and 
 is itself an adjustment to that environment of 
 all that can be done by mankind within it. Art 
 as a great fun(5lion of human imagination is not 
 the creation of isolated objedls of beauty, though 
 isolated objedts of beauty may indeed be created 
 by art, and, in themselves, resume all that is 
 beautiful, orderly, restful, and stable in the 
 artist's conception of that environment. Still 
 less is it, what some may seem to imagine, the 
 objed;s of beauty themselves. Art is, or should 
 be, alive, alive and a universal stimulus. It is 
 that spirit of order and seemliness, of dignity 
 and sublimity, which, adting in unison with the 
 great procession of natural forces in their own 
 orderly evolution, tends to make out of a chaos 
 of egotistic passions, a great power of disin- 
 terested social adtion ; which tends to make out 
 of the seemingly meaningless satisfadlion of 
 our daily and annual needs, a beautiful exercise 
 of our innumerable gifts of fancy and invention, 
 an exercise which may be its own exceeding 
 great reward, and come to seem to be indeed 
 the end for which the needs were made.' 
 
 It was thus and thus that, in the inception 
 of the Society, we sought to ' divine ' the Ideal 
 of the Age, and to give effedl to it in the work 
 
 23 
 
which lay immediately to hand. But it was not 
 to such work only that the ideal was to be ex- 
 tended. ' Nor,' continues the Ledlurer, ' do I 
 stop at deeds to be done in such unison. I 
 demand in the name of art — and here is es- 
 pecially the note and distin<5tion of Modern Art 
 as I conceive it — I demand in the name of art, 
 that Science itself, that knowledge, shall enter 
 upon a new phase, and itself become, in the 
 mind of man, the imaginative Re-presentment 
 of theuniverse without, an analytical knowledge 
 of which has hitherto been its one sole and 
 supreme aim.' 
 
 Again, in another matter, bearing upon the 
 aims of the Society & of the movement, I must, 
 albeit relucftantly, dissent from the view taken 
 of it by my friend Mr. Morris. It will help, 
 perhaps, to clear up the situation. 
 
 In an article ' On the revival of Handicraft ' 
 published in the ' Fortnightly 'in i888,theyear 
 of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, an ar- 
 ticle interesting and stimulating as are all the 
 writings of Mr. Morris, there is, amid so much 
 that is admirable, a statement which would 
 sweep away the whole of modern life, & render 
 the achievement of its distindlive ideal an im- 
 possible dream — a consummation devoutly to 
 be wished I we can indeed imagine Mr. Morris 
 to exclaim. 24 
 
duAjon by machinery is wholly aa- evil' . - - 
 But surely this is altogether questionable. 
 Surely things there are, the produdtion of which 
 by machinery maybe wholly right, things which, 
 moreover, when so produced may be wholly 
 right also, and in their rightness even works 
 of art. 
 
 Great works of art are useful works, grea.tly 
 done. In the same article Mr. Morris, depre- 
 cating, as I would do, the exclusive produdlion 
 of Beauty for Beauty's sake, goes on to say, 
 as I would wish to say: ' In the great times of 
 art, conscious effort was used to produce great 
 works for the glory of, the city, the triumph of 
 the Church, the exaltation of the citizens, the 
 quickening of the devotion of the faithful : even 
 in the higher art, the record of history, the in- 
 strudtion of men alive or to live hereafter, was 
 the aim rather than beauty.' 
 
 But if in the great times of art, great works 
 were the aims of great art rather than beauty, 
 why to-day should not great works still be the 
 aim of great art rather than beauty? Is to-day 
 wanting in great works waiting to be done in 
 the great way, which is the way of art? or is it 
 that to-day all great works are machinery only, 
 and so an evil, incapable of artistic treatment? 
 
 25 D 
 
But, to take a simple instance, one short of 
 that complete Transformation of Life which 
 should be the main aim of art, to take a prac- 
 tical problem of modern life, the supply of water 
 to a great city, consider the grandiose character 
 of the problem, despite, or shall we say in con- 
 sequence of, the mighty mechanical agencies 
 now involved in its solution — the fetching of 
 the water from the far-off pure source, the hills 
 of rain & of snow, to the city of the plain and 
 the sun, its storage and distribution, by the 
 immense pulsations of machinery, day& night, 
 year after year. Is not that a noble problem 
 for the imaginative faculties of the artist, only 
 less noble than the supply of the Holy Spirit 
 from the pulpit or the altar, to the massed con- 
 gregation at their feet, or than the summons 
 from Tower or Belfry to unity of adlion or of 
 prayer, of the separated members of a city or 
 a Church ? But such a problem, since the great 
 days of Rome, is not thought of in connexion 
 with art, nor is the grandiose character of its 
 solution so much as dreamed of — the carriage 
 of the water to the city,onelong triumphantpro- 
 cession : and within the city what noble works ! 
 first in importance, the pumping station ; how 
 prosaic it sounds! yet to the imagination how 
 magnificent! that mighty heart, that to the 
 
 26 
 
uttermost ambit of the city drives the far-off 
 burthen of the hills ! Then the public fountains 
 in the great thoroughfares, at the great cross- 
 ings & in the great squares ; noble works of art, 
 at once to typify and to adualize a city's purity 
 and to satiate a city's thirst, and for a city's joy 
 and remembrance, in pleasant shower, to cast 
 into the air the liquid drops which first fell for 
 it, and fall, on the distant heights of snow. And 
 finally in each house, in each room, the separate 
 jet, the very taps this time ablaze with beauty 
 for happy beauty's sake, and happier use! 
 
 Again, to take a larger instance — still an in- 
 stance of machinery. The people of England, 
 like the people of Rome, have been engaged for 
 a thousand years or more in making a constitu- 
 tion, a great piece of machinery, for their own 
 governance, and are still engaged in that task, 
 and are likely to be engaged in it, perhaps for a 
 thousand years or more to come. 1 1 is agreat task, 
 a great problem, ever changing its conditions 
 with the changes which, with other causes, its 
 own changes bringabout : it is also, or should be, 
 a great work of art as well as of machinery, in 
 which, in future ages, will be seen the moral & 
 imaginative framework of this people of Eng- 
 land. That work of art should be had in view 
 in the struggles of the moment,' should be had 
 
 27 
 
in view and be promoted by every citizen who 
 would do more than live outhis individual years 
 in selfish & ignoble isolation; but it should es- 
 pecially be had in view by the people as a whole, 
 be their ideal, their supreme work of art ; and 
 theirs whom the people'swill has placed at their 
 head to mould and to guide their destinies, 
 theirs, so that when the world's history shall be 
 rounded off and resumed in planetary stillness, 
 and in the consciousness of the gods, England, 
 England's history, shall shine out starlike, 
 England, which shall have made, not itself its 
 goal, but an immortal purpose — ideal freedom 
 and the world's joy! 
 
 Such is one other great work of art, of ma- 
 chinery, still awaiting accomplishment, still 
 awaiting the devotion to which all great art is 
 due. 
 
 But art to-day has no eyes, no devotion, 8z 
 so for art there is no great objedl, and for the 
 great objedl no art. Nor does the great artist, 
 as does the great opportunity, sojourn in our 
 midst. Such art and artists as there are, and 
 are there any? are but engaged in the conscious 
 cultivation of art for art's sake, or of beauty for 
 beauty's sake, pending the great transforma- 
 tion which, meanwhile, is no affair of theirs. 
 
 Of such ar^t and of such cultivation, nothing 
 
 28 
 
need be expedted : and such art and such culti- 
 vation are certainly not in my judgement, nor 
 are they, so far as I know, in the judgement of 
 the artists whose revolt founded the Society, 
 the aims of the movement now passing under 
 its name. 
 
 What those aims are, I will now, from my 
 own point of view, endeavour to restate : for 
 of the subsequent exhibitions of the Society, 
 nothing more need be said. Subsequent exhi- 
 bitions, whether in England, on the Continent, 
 or in the United States of America, were, and 
 are, but repetitions, with variations only of de- 
 tail, of thefirst,andneednodescription; though 
 against exhibitions themselves I maybe allowed 
 before I pass away from them to urge one ob- 
 jection, an objedlion, not indeed condemnatory 
 of them, but an objection which should, I think, 
 be borne in mind in promoting them, and be 
 obviated as far as the circumstances of each ex- 
 hibition will permit. The objedtion which I 
 would urge is this. 
 _^Q_exhibition, a s^I^have akeadyjij^tedyi s 
 but a small part of the Arts & Crafts movement, 
 whjch is a, movement in the main of ideas and 
 not of objets d'ar/, &:'i'^ere is a danger in the 
 constant repetition of exhibitions, civic, nation- 
 al, and international, of public attention being 
 
 29 
 
/• 
 
 diverted from the movement of ideas, & ad;ion 
 thereupon, to the mere produdlion and exhi- 
 bition of exhibits. Moreover, of exhibits, very 
 few things, relatively to the whole of life's pos- 
 sessions and produdlions, can be brought to- 
 gether usefully, or at all, under one roof, and 
 of those which can very few can tell their own 
 tale, apologize for their shortcomings, or of 
 themselves ask to be forgiven for the sake of 
 their approximate merit. 1 1 was to guard agai n st 
 the danger of this possible diversion of interest 
 \ andforgetfulnessofthe movement's greater pur- 
 poses, and indiredly, by suggestionoTTEemeal, 
 to illuminate the possible deficiencies of the ex- 
 hibits, as well as to draw attention to their merits, 
 that the aid of lecftures was made an essential 
 part of at least the scheme of the Society: and 
 ledlures of the kind in question, ledlures, that 
 isto say, which shall deal at largewith the mean- 
 ing, as well as the contents, of an exhibition, 
 are, in my opinion, an essential adjundt of every 
 exhibition. 
 
 With this objection stated, I now proceed to 
 wind up my observations and to come to a con- 
 clusion. But before doing so I must a,sk your 
 attention in one other matter in which' I find it 
 necessary to differ from Mr. Morris. . . / 
 
 But pray note that it is a matter of interpre- 
 
 30 
 
tation only in which here, as elsewhere, I pre- 
 sume to differ from that great spirit, now passed 
 away. Only in the matter of interpretation, for 
 I do not — how could I ? — call in question, here 
 or anywhere, the greatness of the aims of Wil- 
 liam Morris himself. I claim only (i) that the 
 movement which I am attempting to describe 
 had a higher aim than in his own despite he 
 assigned to it in the passage I have quoted : (2) 
 that/machinery may be redeemed by imagina- 
 tion, and made to enter even into his restored 
 world, adding to the potency of good, and to 
 its power ovpr evil, which itself, in my view, it 
 is not : and/'(3) finally, & this is the last point of 
 difference to which I shall have to call your at- 
 tention, thaythe age upon which mankind en- 
 tered, at the' close of the fifteenth century, was 
 one of decay of an old world indeed, but at the 
 same time, and this was its characteristic, was 
 an age in which a new and a greater world came 
 to the birth, as in this age it is coming to ma- 
 turity, and that it is with this new world, and 
 not with the old world, that the movement & 
 ourselves have now to do. , ' •'^ 
 
 To resume, and to revert to what I was about 
 to say. 
 
 In that magnificent brief ledlure on Gothic 
 Archited;ure, which was first spoken as a lec- 
 
 31 
 
ture at the New Gallery for the Arts and Crafts 
 Exhibition Society in the year 1889, and after- 
 wards printed by the Kelmscott Press during 
 and in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in the 
 New Gallery, 1893, Mr. Morris traced, with 
 lightning-like swiftness and clearness, the pro- 
 gress of Gothic Architecture from its first in- 
 ception by the Romans in the invention of the 
 Arch to its consummation in the exquisitely 
 poised and traceried buildings of the close of 
 the fifteenth century. 
 
 ris says, 'the great change'j;amej^^& Mr. Moms 
 means that we and Architedturs,^Air.prijacipal 
 stru(5tural "expression, entered upon a_pejiod 
 of decay. But I would rather— and here is my 
 point ofdifference — I would rather put it,^ that 
 the great change came in that the inner vision 
 was substituted for the outer ; or, better still, 
 that one inner vision was substituted for another 
 inner vision and that the outward expression 
 of the latter was arrested. Its buildings had 
 been built and the passion for them exhausted, 
 for the world which had inspired them had 
 vanished, & another had been born or created 
 in its place: partly another world of fadt, the 
 newly discovered continent of America, and the 
 whole round world itself; partly another world 
 
 32 
 
of ideas, the ancient world and its literature, 
 Greece and Rome. At the end of the fifteenth 
 century the printing press was at work, and 
 Europe left for a time the outer world, the 
 world of the senses and material building, and 
 entered into the inner world, the world of 
 imaginative reason, of ideas — communicable 
 henceforward, for a time, by the printed page 
 only, whereon only it could build up and con- 
 template the vision of its extended universe. 
 . Ever since that time this vision has been 
 growing, taking on new matter for greater 
 change still, and now it is worldwide indeed, 
 and the time has come to cast its inspirations 
 into form, to embody them in works of Art. 
 
 What of the past is past is no matter of re- 
 gret, but somewhat of the past is imperishable 
 becauseit is of all time: such is the instindt to 
 build. The building of the past is built and is 
 in decay. The building of the future has yet to 
 be built. Of what will it be ? 
 
 The answer to this question will be the an- 
 swer to the question : What, then, is the move- 
 ment which I am attempting to describe? 
 
 The building of the future will be the build- 
 ing of the industries thereof, the building of 
 its ways of looking at things determined by 
 the vision which has taken the place of that 
 
 33 E 
 
old vision, under the inspiration of which were 
 built the buildings of the past. 
 
 And the first thing to build will be the vision 
 itself, the supreme vision— for 'where there is 
 no vision the people perish.' 
 
 The important, the essential thing in the 
 Architedture of the early and middle ages, as 
 of all ages, is not the Architedture itself, but 
 the exaltation of sentiment and knowledge, and 
 , skill of hand and brain, which produced it, and 
 the vision of life which was also the creation 
 of the sentiment, and in turn its inspiration. 
 The vision, indeed, here as elsewhere & always, 
 is the important, the essential thing. What 
 then is there in the life of to-day comparable 
 in exaltation to the vision of that day, what 
 vision competent to produce to-day an Archi- 
 tedture of life and occupation, with resultant 
 material and imaginative expression, compar- 
 able to the Architedture of life and occupation 
 and resultant material and imaginative expres- 
 sion, which the vision of that day was com- 
 petent to produce and did produce ? 
 \ There is one set, static universe, or vision, 
 I the Norm of Life, in which all force is at rest, 
 j at rest in equilibrium, in equilibrium of motion, 
 and there are in the many minds of men in- 
 numerable versions thereof, isolated, unre- 
 
 34 
 
lated or related, sequent, one: set in motion 
 by passion, crime, terror, frenzy, even of hate, 
 love, madness, ambition, or by the soft touch 
 of the dreamer of dreams, the musician, painter, 
 poet. But be these visions what they may be, 
 they are but visions, which die again into the 
 norm, the static universe, which is the tomb, 
 as it is the womb, of all motion, at once the 
 birth-place and the cinerary urn of all change, 
 the all in all. It is with this all of change and 
 rest, that the soul of man, athwart all distrac- 
 tion, aspires to be at one, at one for the fruit 
 of its energy in creation, at one for the control 
 of its energy in rest, in rest interlocked, repose 
 absolute. 
 
 And if I were asked, as I have asked, what 
 that supreme vision, that Norm of Life, in 
 plain words was, I should say that it was the 
 vision of the universe as revealed to-day in 
 history & science, including in science all that 
 is not man, though revealed by man working 
 to that end through the ages, and in history all 
 that is man, all his doings, all his imaginings, 
 all his aspirations, all whatsoever that is his, but 
 all seen in the light of science, positively — the 
 vision of the universe, framed in the infinite. 
 And I should say that man is at the top of his 
 thought when in exalted, ecstatic contempla- 
 
 35 
 
tion thereof, and at the top of his doing when 
 in adlion in accordance therewith, be the adion 
 what it may be. And I should say that the 
 supreme consciousness emergent from the su- 
 preme vision was the consciousness of Being 
 — the wonder, I AM — and of its inexplicable, 
 insuperable mystery. 
 
 The next thing to build will be the work of 
 the world in the light of this supreme vision 
 so seen and understood. 
 
 A time arrives in the development of the 
 world's work when, in addition to the perfect 
 workmanship and beauty of the world's wares, 
 the embellishment of the world's work itself 
 should become the objedl of ambition of those 
 who carry the world's work on, an embellish- 
 ment which may take one of two forms, but 
 I should take both : the embellishment by mate- 
 rial means and the embellishment by ideas. In 
 '. embellishment by material means the senses 
 : are satisfied and the imagination touched, and 
 we have noble roads and houses, noble cities 
 and harbours, noble wharves and warehouses, 
 noble modes and meansof communication, and 
 noble modes and means of creativeness, and, 
 crowning and giving significance to all, crown- 
 ing and expressive ceremonial : in embellish- 
 ment by ideas we have the illimitation which 
 
 36 
 
is the charaderistic of the imagination, and 
 enables us to see and to create wholes and rela- 
 tions which surpass the sweep of the senses, 
 and are visible to the eye of reason only; it is 
 thus that we have the vision, and see all man's 
 work in its entirety and as part of the universal 
 process of creation. 
 
 Thinking, then, dispassionately of the world, 
 not for my country's sake or another's, but for 
 man's, I am haunted by the vision of this its 
 industrial life, as the matter of man's art to- 
 day. And there come to me the murmur of the 
 beat of far-off waves on an unknown shore, 
 the rustle and the struggle of winds through 
 unknown forests and over wide spaces of in- 
 habitable land : I see the masts of shipping far 
 asunder, solitary, on the wide seas, or clustered 
 into peopled harbours : I see the busy hives of 
 industry, glittering like fanes of light by the 
 river's side or bridging them — all part and 
 parcel of the ocean, the land, and the air, obedi- 
 ent like them to the cadency of thought, as day 
 and night, the seasons and the years, beat out 
 their sequences and bear life onward into the 
 future, or leave it, silent, in the irrecoverable 
 past. 
 
 Such a world, such a wealth of animate 
 forces, such a vision, the creation in part of the 
 
 37 
 
unknown force, God, in part of man, who is 
 ourselves, such is the vision upon which, pend- 
 ing the arrival of the shaddw which is Death, 
 we should fix the eyes of Art, permeating all, 
 embracing all, producing all, even as would 
 do, were he us, the supreme force, God. 
 
 As of the world of man's work, so of all the 
 visions within the vision — build with the in- 
 stindts of fitness and beauty, build & await the 
 Shadow: to-day again, for a time, comes the 
 light, again and yet again. In the infinitude of 
 sequences the soul rests, and whilst it rests, 
 resting, it disappears, even as in life, into sleep, 
 into Death. Build and await the Shadow. 
 
 Such as I dream it is the Vision of Life, such 
 the Vision of man's world within it, such the 
 Vision of Art, such, or something like it, the 
 Vision of the Arts and Crafts Movement, its 
 inception, its history, and its aims. 
 
 ' And here I will make an end. And if I have 
 done well and as is fitting the story, it is that 
 which I have desired: but if slenderly and 
 meanly it is yet that which I could attain 
 unto.' 
 
 It may be, indeed, that I have all the while 
 been describing some other movement, & not 
 that of the Arts and Crafts at all ; some move- 
 ment that has been taking place in my own 
 
 38 
 
mind, as I have had the possibilities of man's 
 being and doing brought home to my imagina- 
 tion ' in thoughts from the visions of the night, 
 when deep sleep falleth on men': for in the 
 Introdudion to the Ledures on ' Art & Life,' 
 to which reference has been made in support 
 of the Vision, it is stated that the Ledures are 
 not to be taken, nor is any of them to be taken, 
 as the official expression of the aims of the 
 Society 1 
 
 But be the official expression of the aims of 
 the Society what it may be, it is the VISION, 
 some VISION, which imports your good, — 
 which I urgently commend to your attention. 
 WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE 
 PEOPLE PERISH. 
 
 39 
 
Printed at the Chiswick Press: Charles Whit- 
 tingham ,& Co.; Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, 
 London, And sold by the Hammersmith Pub- 
 lishing Society, River House, Hammersmith.