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HISTORY OF THE
ARTS AND GRAFTS
5^1VI0¥EMENTl!!

YALE UNIVERSITY
ART LIBRARY

CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS
MOVEMENT

COPYRIGHT 1902~THE BOmE

1 GUILD OF THE INDUSTRY

HAPTERS IN
THE HISTORY
OF THE ^
ARTS AND CRAFTS
MOVEMENT-
By Oscar Lovell TnggsWD

^ Tujblishpd J?y
TheBohemia G'Uitd^the
fndustrial Art League
CHICAGO TvIDCCCCn

COPYRIGHT, lOOO
BY
THE BOHEMIA GUILD OF THE INDUSTRIAL
ART LEAGUE

Dedicated to

qf Industrial Art.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
I. Carlyle's Relationship to the New In
dustrialism ... I
II. Ruskin's Contribution to the Doctrine
OF Work - ii
Twentieth-Century Economy 25
The Omitted Elements in Political Economy 28
III. Morris and his Plea for an Industrial
Commonwealth 59
Statement of Principles of the Hammersmith
Socialist Society - 129
IV. Ashbee and the Reconstructed Workshop 142
V. Rookwood: An Ideal Workshop 157
VI. The Development of Industrial Con
sciousness 162

Appendix I. A Proposal for a Guild and
School of Handicraft 189
Appendix II. The Industrial Art League 195

CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY
OF THE
ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT.

The primary motive of the arts and crafts
movement is, as the name implies, the association
of art and labor. Initially an English movement,
it has been slowly emerging from the general in
dustrial field for about forty years, though its
differentiation into a distinct phase of industrialism
belongs to the last ten years. I count i860 as the
approximate year of its beginning, when William
Morris built his famous Red House on the out
skirts of London, and served his apprenticeship
to the industrial arts by designing and executing
the decoration and furniture of his home. On its
theoretical side the movement is, of course, much
older than forty years, its development as an idea
being measured by the lives of Carlyle, Ruskin,
and Morris.
/. Carlyle's Relationship to the New
Industrialism.
Carlyle's relationship to the new industrialism,
as I will call it, is remote, and in his own mind

2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
quite unconscious. But Carlyle was never any
thing more than a voice crying out in an age of
transition ; an age whose tendencies he did not
understand, and could not, therefore, in any way
direct ; an age about which he knew but one cer
tainty, namely, that its conditions were subject to
change. He wrote as early as 1 83 1 : " The doom
of the Old has been pronounced and irrevocable ;
the Old has passed away; but alas, the New ap
pears not in its stead ; the Time is still in pangs of
travail with the New." And later, when the New
had appeared with some definiteness, he wrote of
the age in satire : " You perceive, my friends, we
have actually got into the 'New Era' there has
been such prophesyings of; here we are, arrived
at last ; and it is by no means the land flowing
with milk and honey we were led to expect."
However, there was one thing that Carlyle per
ceived clearly: that the new era was industrial,
that the organization of labor was the universal
vital problem of the world ; and that the imme
diate function of labor, by whatever means of
steam and machinery, was to subdue the earth
and make it man's. Having named the ideal
heroes of the past — the hero as prophet, poet,
soldier, statesman — and knowing that these would
not serve the present, he summoned at length a

Carlyle's Relationship. 3
new ideal, the industrial hero, whose work was
" to civilize out of its utter savagery the world of
Industry." He called for an industrial Cromwell
or Frederick, of strong hand and iron will and
strict conscience, who should lay his might upon
the chaos, and rule it into order and harmony.
" Look around you," he said to the leaders of
industry he had evoked, "your world-hosts are
all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the
eve of fiery wreck and madness ! Ye shall reduce
them to order, begin reducing them. All human
interest, combining human endeavors, and social
growths in this world, have, at a certain stage of
their development, required organization ; and
Work, the grandest of human interests, does now
require it." In his view such leaders would con
stitute a new aristocracy — an aristocracy denoted
by something other than fine manners and accom
panied by something else than fine arts, an
aristocracy rude, doubtless, and inartistic in the
old sense of art, but from the new point of view
finely cultured and artists in deed. " Art," he
once said, referring to the fine arts, " is very fine
and ornamental, but only to persons sitting at
their ease." To the arts of the leisure classes
Carlyle never refers except with scorn. He had
short patience with the art of a nobility, who were

4 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
only concerned about their game preserves, and
wrote in his bitterest mood of satire a description
of the modern opera and its devotees. Yet his
world was not devoid of beauty : far from it.
" Manchester, with its cotton fuzz, its smoke and
dust, its tumult and contentious squalor, is hide
ous to thee ? I think not so : a precious substance,
beautifial as magic dreams, and yet no dream, but
a reality, lies hidden in that noisome wrappage —
a wrappage struggling to cast itself off, and leave
the beauty free and visible there ! Hast thou
heard, with sound ears, the awakening of a Man
chester, on Monday morning, at half-past five by
the clock ; the rushing off of its thousand mills,
like the boom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand
spools and spindles all set humming there — it is
perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara,
or more so. Cotton-spinning is the clothing of
the naked in its result ; the triumph of man over
matter in its means. Soot and despair are not
the essence of it : they are divisible from it. The
great Goethe, looking at cotton Switzerland, de
clared it to be of all things that he had seen in
this world the most poetical."
Carlyle then had certain notions respecting the
meaning of the industrial world. These mean
ings bring us very close to his central doctrine

Carlyle's Relationship. 5
of Duty, in which word all of constructive
thought he had to ofi^er is summed up. Duty, as
a vague term of obligation, finds its application
in three secondary doctrines: those of Work,
Silence, and Sincerity.
Work is the first and chief duty of man. In
its simplest form, the doctrine of work stands on
Carlyle's pages thus: "It is the first of all prob
lems for a man to find out what kind of work he
is able to do in this universe"; or in negative
statement: "One monster there is in this world,
the idle man." "For work," he explains, "is
the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries
that ever beset mankind — honest work which
you intend getting done." In shorter phrase:
"Labor is Life." Again he would assert: "Work
is alone noble." In a deeper sense work appears
to be the mission of man on the earth. "A day
is ever struggling forward," he wrote in his essay
on Chartism, "a day will arrive in some approximate
degree when he who has no work to do, by what
ever name he may be named, will not find it good
to show himself in our quarter of the Solar System;
but may go and look elsewhere — if there be any
Idle Planet discoverable. Let the honest work
ing-man rejoice that such law, the first of Nature,
has been made good on him; and hope that by

6 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
and by all else will be made good. It is the
beginning of all." And so in "Past and Present"
he said: "Whatsoever of morality and of intel
ligence; what of patience, perseverence, faithful
ness of method, insight, ingenuity, energy: in a
word, whatsoever of Strength the man had in him
will lie written in the Work he does." "He that
can work," he explains further, " is a born king
of something; is in communion with Nature, is
master of a thing or things, is a priest and king
of Nature so far." Thus understood, work is its
own reward, and becomes perverted the moment
it demands a wage, and falls under bondage to
Mammon. "The wages of every noble Work,"
Carlyle said, "do yet lie in Heaven, or else No
where. Not in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's
Labor bank, or any of the most improved estab
lishment of banking and money-changing, needest
thou, heroic soul, present thy account of earn
ings." The brave man has to give his life away,
and for his all "God's entire creation" is given in
return. So Carlyle quotes with approval the words
of the old monks : Laborare est Orare.
Closely connected with the doctrine of work is
his principle of silence. " Silence, withal, is the
eternal duty of a man." In silence thoughts shape
themselves and emerge in action. "Silence is the

Carlyle' s Relationship. j
element in which great things fashion themselves
together, that at length they may emerge, full-
formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life,
which they are henceforth to rule." On this
ground Carlyle had much to say on the topic of
education. The schools about him had been en
gaged for generations with abstractions, artificial
ities, manners, and the usage of words. But
from Wilhelm Meister he derived the notion of
"mute-education" — an education, that is, of the
deed, and not of the word; or, as he describes it,
"a training in practicality at every turn." "The
grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision
to discern, with free force to do; the grand School
master is Practice." In his paper on "Corn- Law
Rhymes " he explained more elaborately his edu
cation of silence: "He that has done nothing
has known nothing. Vain is it to sit scheming
and plausibly discoursing; up and be doing! If
thy knowledge be real, put it forth from thee;
grapple with real Nature; try thy theories there,
and see how they hold out. Do one thing; for
the first time in thy life do a thing; a new light
will rise to thee on the doing of all things what
soever. Truly, a boundless significance lies in
work, whereby the humblest craftsman comes to
attain much which is of indispensable use, but

8 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
which he who is of no craft, were he never so high,
runs the risk of missing." The contrast between
theory and practice is drawn still further in " Past
and Present": "How one loves to see the burly
figure of him, this thick-skinned, seemingly
opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man of
Practice, pitted against some light, adroit Man of
Theory, all equipt with clear logic, and able any
where to give you Why for Wherefore! The adroit
Man of Theory, so light of movement, clear of
utterance, with his bow full-bent and quiver full
of arrow-arguments — surely he will strike down
the game, transfix everywhere the heart of the
matter, triumph everywhere as he proves that he
shall and must do ? To your astonishment, it
turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed, thick-
soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utterance,
silence mainly, with here and there a low grunt
or growl, has In him what transcends all logic
utterance: a Congrulty with the Unuttered. The
Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or
outer skin, is his or is not his ; but the Doable,
which reaches down to the World's center, you
find him there." There Is much that is transcen
dental In all this — a philosophy gone quite gen
erally out of fashion, but it Is a transcendentalism

Carlyle' s Relationship. g
that pertains to the deed rather than the word,
and so links itself with some of the most vital
tendencies in modern life. Literary education Is
fast passing from the schools. Labor, we agree,
must become " a seeing, rational giant, with a soul
in the body of him, and take his place on the
throne of things."
In sincerity, the third of these principles, Car
lyle's economic doctrine Is embodied. The test
of manhood is its truth ; how to attain truth in
all things and be true at all places and times Is the
great human problem, the great industrial problem
no less. "Cheap and nasty" — with these words
Carlyle characterized most of the manufactured
goods of his day, tainted as they were with the
spirit of Mammon. Against the ideal of cheap
ness he placed that of fitness. " No good man did,
or ever should, encourage cheapness at the ruin
ous expense of unfitness, which Is always Infidelity,
and Is dishonorable to a man. If I want an arti
cle, let it be genuine, at whatever price ; If the
price Is too high for me, I will go without it,
unequipped with it for the present — I shall not
have equipped myself with hypocrisy, at any rate.
This, If you will reflect, is primarily the rule of
all purchasing and all producing men. They are

I o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
not permitted to encourage, patronize, or in any
form countenance the working, weaving, or acting
of Hypocrisy in this world."
In the mere statement of these three principles,
without any very definite suggestions as to their
application, Carlyle, it Is true, did not stimulate
much actual doing. The practical man of his day
cried out to him : " Descend from speculation
and the safe pulpit down into the rough market
place, and say what can be done." But Carlyle
answered : " It is first of all necessary to gird up
thyself for actual doing — once rightly girded up
many things present themselves as doable." Car
lyle's function was to arouse to action, at least to
stimulate thought on social questions. His own
life — as he observed of Schiller — was emphatically
a literary one ; he was primarilv a recorder, a biog
rapher, and historian. As a man of letters he had the
supreme faculty of vision, and was able to discern
the inmost facts of a scene, an event, or of a life ;
and, more than all, he had the gift of the word, the
genius for vivid description. It is the pathos of
the literary life to write volumes upon work and
to remain inactive, to write other volumes upon
silence and never be silent one's self. It is doubt
ful If the literary man can even be sincere, for
not having experienced life he must be haunted by

Ruskin's Contribution. 1 1
doubts and self-questionings. Carlyle's literary
faculty was his undoing as a sociologist ; for he
was wont to prophesy without data in experience.
And lacking clairvoyancy, unable to see any other
outcome for a society rapidly democratizing save
anarchy and chaos, he was prevented from utter
ing the creative word that might have Inaugurated
a new epoch. Mistaken In nearly all points relat
ing to political democracy, he was always right in
discussing questions iof Industry, and his dream of
" some chivalry of labor " is even now being real
ized — the complete democratizing of labor, which
Carlyle actually feared, being reserved for a dis
tant future.
//. Ruskin's Contribution to the Doctrine of
Work.
Carlyle's mission as a futurist was to arouse
thought on current social questions. It is doubt
ful if any genuine word, even though It be but a
word, can ever be lost. And Carlyle's word fell
upon the ear of a young man, then idling in Italy
and Switzerland, and employing an astonishing
literary skill in describing objects of nature and
art — but presently to become something quite
other than a literary dilettante, something more
even than Carlyle; namely, a socialist in both word

1 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
and deed. The story of John Ruskin's pilgrim
age, his passage from naturalism to artistic Inter
ests, and thence to soclahsm, is one of the most
significant life histories of the nineteenth century.
The impress left upon the mind, after a review of
all of Ruskin's writings In the order of publication.
Is of an amazingly vital, versatile, generally con
sistent, and — to quote Carlyle on Goethe — "pano
ramic" intelligence. There Is practically no sub
ject of human Interest that he did not discuss, and
there is no discussion that Is not In some degree
illuminative. His works constitute a kind of syn
thetic philosophy, with almost the scope, though
not with the manner, of Spencer and Fiske. He
reminds one also of those great mediaeval scholars
who took all knowledge for their province, and
preferred to synthesize knowledge rather than
specialize In narrow fields. We forget that Dante
was a scholar and desired to be known for his
learning, and not for his poetry, and it seems im
possible for the world to understand that Ruskin
was not primarily an artist or an art critic, but a
sociologist, who simply examined the phenomena
of art, the most intimate and essentially human
of all modes of expression, that he might the
better determine the economy of life. Art was
the chief, but by no means the only, field

Ruskin's Contribution. 1 3
wherefrom he gathered data for the understanding
of life. The social motive was undoubtedly the
central and controlling impulse in all he did ; yet
so great was his mental energy, the simple neces
sity of self-expression, that his work might fairly
be said to have been without special motive, pro
duced as spontaneously and naturally as flowers
and fruit in the physical world. An abundant
life-energy is turned now upon this subject and
now upon that, wreaking itself also upon style —
the mere manner of saying things, in which he
always took supreme delight. Rhetorically he
was the master of many styles : the direct, instruc
tive, persuasive. Invective, suggestive, and flam
boyant. Showing the influence of Hooker and
Johnson and Carlyle upon him, he could on
occasion outpreach Hooker, overcrowd John
son, and outscold Carlyle. But manner does
not measure him : he led as laborious a life an any
the busy nineteenth century can show. In a
humorous letter addressed to Mrs. Carlyle, a
transcript of his occupations is made for a portion
of 1855, one of his climacteric years; the letter
proceeds : " I have written, since May, good
six hundred pages, had these rewritten, cut up,
corrected, and got fairly ready for the press. . .
Also I have prepared above thirty drawings for

1 4 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
engravers this year, retouching the engravings
(generally the most part of the business), and
etched some on steel myself In the course of
the six hundred pages I have had to make various
remarks on German metaphysics, on poetry,
political economy, cookery, music, geology, dress,
agriculture, horticulture, and navigation ; all of
which subjects I have had to 'read up' accord
ingly, and this takes time. Morever I have had
my class of workmen out sketching every week in
the fields during the summer; and have been
studying Spanish proverbs with my father's part
ner, who came over from Spain to see the great
Exhibition. I have also designed and drawn a
window for the museum at Oxford ; and have
every now and then had to look over a parcel of
five or six new designs for fronts and backs to
the said museum. During my above-mentioned
studies of horticulture I became dissatisfied with
the LInnasan, Jussieuan, and everybody-elseian
arrangement of plants, and have accordingly ar
ranged a system of my own ; and unbound my
botanic book and rebound It in brighter green,
with all the pages throughother and backside
foremost — so as to cut off the old paging numer
als ; and am now printing my new arrangement
in a legible manner, on interleaved foolscap. I

Ruskin's Contribution. 15
consider this arrangement one of my great achieve
ments of the year. My studies of political
economy have Induced me to think also that
nobody knows anything about that, and I am
engaged in an investigation, on Independent prin
ciples, of the nature of money, rent and taxes,
in an abstract form, which sometimes keeps me
awake all night. My studies of German meta
physics have also Induced me to think that the
Germans don't know anything about them; and to
engage In a serious inquiry into the meaning of
Bunsen's great sentence in the beginning of the
second volume of HIppolytus, about the Finite
realization of Infinity; which has given me some
trouble. The course of my studies of navigation
necessitated my going to Deal to look at the Deal
boats ; and those of geology to rearrange all my
minerals (and wash a good many, which, I am
sorry to say, I found wanting it). I have also
several pupils, far and near, In the art of illumina
tion, an American young lady to direct In the
study of landscape painting, and a Yorkshire
young lady to direct in the purchase of Turners
— and various little bye things besides."
By the side of this letter may be placed another
written twenty years later, telling. In a mood of
jest and earnest, of designs for which he had been

1 6 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
collecting materials for fifty years. "Of these
materials I have now enough by me for a most
interesting (In my opinion) history of fifteenth-
century Florentine art. In six octavo volumes; an
analysis of the Attic art of the fifth century B. C,
in three volumes; an exhaustive history of northern
thirteenth-century art, in ten volumes ; a life of
Sir Walter Scott, with analysis of modern epic
art. In seven volumes ; a life of Xenophon, with
analysis of the general principles of education, in
ten volumes ; a commentary on Hesiod, with final
analysis of the principles of political economy, in
nine volumes; and a general description of the
geology and botany of the Alps, in twenty-four
volumes." From these recitals a notion of the prodigality
of Ruskin's genius Is gained; we notice the range
of his attainments, his many-sidedness, his origi
nality, his dogmatic and self-confident assertive-
ness, the Impatience of his spirit, the oscillation of
his temper, and particularly the happy union of
thinking and doing, the harmony of the theoret
ical and practical faculties. And what is quite as
important as any, we learn from the letter of 1855
of his intimacy with the Carlyles, and are prepared
for the dedication of "Munera Pulveris" in 1863
to " Thomas Carlyle, who has urged me to all

COPYRIGHT 1902-THE BOHEMIA GUILD OF THE INDUSTRIAL ART LEAGUE

Ruskin's Contribution. 17
chief labor," also for Ruskin's praise of Carlyle in
" The Crown of Wild Olive " as " the greatest of
historians since Tacitus," for the many references
to his "master" elsewhere in his writings, and for
the occasional Imitation of his manner, as the
scolding essay on the state of England in the
"Ariadne Florentina" volume; prepared also for
Carlyle's enthusiastic reception of Ruskin's later
social treatises, and for his writing of Ruskin in
1869: "The one soul now in the world who
seems to feel as I do in the highest matters."
Knowing Ruskin's relationship with Carlyle, we
can understand more clearly the sociological bear
ings of his teachings. Then, furthermore, without
going farther than the letter of 1855, we may
assume it likely that Ruskin's published volumes
will not contain any compact and systematized
body of Instruction, but rather the easy discourse
of a large but irregular intelligence, somewhat
willful, perhaps, yet struck through with genius.
However much given to divagation, the general
unity of Ruskin's life history Is not difficult to
trace. " My life," he declared himself, " has
chanced to be one of gradual progress in the things
which I began In childish choice." This unity is
found in the thread of his social thought. From
the age of seven to his twenty-second year he

1 8 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
devoted much of his energy quite seriously to
poetry. Poetry gave outlet to his adolescent en
thusiasms, and verse-making trained him to the
use of words. His first love was for mountains
and seas, and It is Indicative that the nom de plume
he attached to his early writings was "Kata
Phusin" — according to nature. But from these
Interests he early passed to a study of painting
and architecture, so that the first volume of
"Modern Painters" revealed an equal devotion
to nature and to art. There was at first no token
In his writings of a social motive, though a protest
in "Modern Painters" against the railroad as
signifying violence, restlessness, and avarice, might
have occasioned suspicion, and still more the
essential seriousness with which he wrote. "Art
Is no recreation," he declared; "it cannot be
learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we
have nothing better to do. It Is no handiwork for
drawing-room tables, no relief for the ennui of
boudoirs ; It must be understood and undertaken
seriously or not at all. To advance it men's lives
must be given, and to receive It, their hearts."
This surely Is unusual language for a mere assthete
and stylist, and should have made the English
public pause. We see clearly now that In all his
early writings on nature and art it was the relation

Ruskin's Contribution. 19
of these to man for which he cared. Professor
Norton points to the distinguishing features of
the first volume of "Modern Painters" In these
words: (i) "The display of intimate acquaint
ance with the aspects of nature and of unique
faculties of observation and interpretation of
them"; (2) "Keen analysis ofthe principles and
methods of art " ; (3) "The strong and devoted
moral sentiment manifest throughout It, which
read the laws of nature and of art by the light of
virtue." Now, it was the possession of this third
element, the moral, that differentiated Ruskin
from other art teachers and marked him thus early
for the mission of social reform. He declared
himself that the beginning of his political economy
is to be found In the assertion in " Modern
Painters " that beautiful things are useful to men
because they are beautiful, and for the sake of
their beauty only, and not to sell, or pawn, or In
any way turn into money. We are fortunate also
to have Ruskin's own statement ofthe purpose of
his art studies, following upon " Modern Paint
ers." He told an audience at Bradford: "The
book I called 'The Seven Lamps' was to show
that certain right states of temper and moral feel
ing were the magic powers by which all good
architecture, without exception, had been pro-

20 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
duced. 'The Stones of Venice' had, from begin
ning to end, no other aim than to show that the
Gothic architecture of Venice had arisen out of,
and Indicated in all Its features, a state of pure
national faith and of domestic virtue, and that its
Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in
all its features Indicated, a state of concealed
national Infidelity and of domestic corruption."
The recognition ofthe relations between art and
national character signifies the social bearing of
these volumes. Concerning the " Stones of
Venice," W. G. CoUingwood makes the following
comment: "The kernel of the work was the
chapter on the nature of the Gothic, in which he
showed, more distinctly than in 'The Seven
Lamps,' and connected with a wider range of
thought, suggested by pre-Raphaelltism, the great
doctrine that art cannot be produced except by
artists ; that architecture, in so far as It is an art,
does not mean the mechanical execution, by unin
telligent workmen, of vapid working-drawings
from an architect's office; that, just as Socrates
postponed the day of justice until philosophers
should be kings, and kings philosophers, so Ruskin
postponed the reign of art until workmen should be
artists, and artists workmen. . . . Out of that Idea
the whole of his doctrine could be evolved, with

Ruskin's Contribution. 21
all its safe-guardlngs and widening vistas. For if
the workman must be made an artist, he must
have the experience, the feelings, of an artist, as
well as the skill; and that involves every circum
stance of education and opportunity which may
make for his truest well-being. And when Mr.
Ruskin came to examine Into the subject prac
tically, he found that mere drawing-schools and
charitable efforts could not make an artist out of
a mechanic or country bumpkin; for wider ques
tions were complicated with this of art — nothing
short of the fundamental principles of human In
tercourse and social economy. Now for the first
time, after much sinking of trial-shafts, he had
reached the true ore of thought, In the deep-lying
strata; and the working ofthe mine was begun."
The volume entitled "A Joy Forever," being
the substance of lectures delivered in 1857 on the
political economy of art — the title is significant —
marks definitely the parting of the ways, and his
intention thereafter to speak out openly on social
themes. Upon this topic he had an Indisputable
right to be heard, since he knew more about art
than any political economist, and more about
economy than any artist. After 1857, practically
everything he wrote, whether upon nature, as the
"Ethics of the Dust," in 1865, or upon art, as

22 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
"Val d'Arno," in 1873, was conceived from the
social point of view. He would never admit that
any sentence upon a social topic written after 1 860
was erroneous in principle, and insisted In the face
of the pubhc that was ever praising his style, that
his volume called " Unto This Last," the purpose
of which was to give a logical definition of wealth
as a basis of economic science, contained the "best,
the truest, rightest-worded, and most service
able things " he had written. Even during the
time he was professor of art at Oxford he was
publishing the monthly series of studies called
" Fors Clavlgera," and forming the Company of
St. George.
In the last volume of " Fors Clavlgera," Rus
kin announced definitely the teachings of his five
greatest books: "'Modern Painters' taught the
claim of all lower nature In the hearts of men ; of
the rock and wave and herb, as a part of their
necessary spirit life ; In all that I now bid you
do, to dress the earth and keep It, I am fulfill
ing what I then began. ' The Stones of Venice '
taught the laws of constructive art, and the de
pendence of all human work or edifice, for Its
beauty, on the happy life ofthe workman. 'Unto
This Last' taught the laws of life itself, and its
dependence on the Sun of Justice; the Inaugural

Ruskin's Contribution. 23
Oxford Lectures, the necessity that It should be
led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor
recognized by the upper no less than the lower
classes of England; and lastly, 'Fors Clavlgera'
has declared the relation of these to each other,
and the only possible conditions of peace and
honor, for low and high, rich and poor together,
in the holding of that first Estate, under the only
Despot, God, from which, whoso falls, angel or
man. Is kept, not mythically nor disputably, but
here in visible horror of chains under darkness to
the judgment of the great day; and In keeping
which service In perfect freedom, and Inheritance
of all that a loving Creator can give to His crea
tures, and an Immortal Father to His children."
The essential seriousness of Ruskin's thought
being recognized, I do not propose in this paper
to wound his vanity by calling him a fine writer,
which would mean that nobody need mind what
he said ; Indeed, I am almost sure that he was not
always a fine writer, and am disposed to agree with
him in saying that four lines of description by
Tennyson are worth as much as many of his
pages, that a sentence of Carlyle's contains more
than some of his essays, and that Browning suc
ceeded In putting Into a few poems all that he
had striven to say in as many volumes on the

24 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Renaissance. His manner, in short, does not
greatly Interest me, but his thinking does.
As an economist Ruskin inaugurated three de
partures from current teachings, the first relating
to general political economy, the second to the
theory of beauty, and the third to the doctrine
of work. His primary issue was with the political
economy of the time, and he claimed to have
made the first contribution to scientific economy,
because he alone considered life in Its Integrity
and wholeness ; that he alone among economists
was acquainted with the value of the products of
the highest Industrialism, commonly called the
fine arts, which had hitherto been Ignored by all
writers upon economy. The economy that con
cerned Itself with merely objective wealth, the
statistics of trade and production, Ruskin denom
inated mercantile economy— right in its place, but
partial and unscientific, since it dealt with only a
phase of wealth. A mercantile economy is an
economy of means — "the science of avarice"
Ruskin called it — whereas political economy is an
economy of essential life. The true question Is :
" How can society consciously order the lives of
its members so as to maintain the largest number
of noble and happy human beings?" Ruskin's
mission was on the one hand to correct a system

Ruskin's Contribution. 25
that had abstracted an " economic man " and set
him to producing things, and on the other hand
to expand the area of economy by Including
activities that do not lead directly to marketable
production. He is recognized by progressive
economists as having been the first English
thinker to socialize economy in a strictly scien
tific manner.
As I write this there comes to my hand an
editorial In the Chicago Tribune, entitled " Twen
tieth-Century Economy "; it is an admirable
summary of the modern situation, and will serve
to illustrate the better thinking of our own day :
T'ljuentieth-Century Economy,
" In its broadest statement, the problem of the
world's economy Is to develop and give scope to
individual originality, the benefits of whose exer
cise are registered in individual character as well
as in objective results.
"The English economist, Marshall, however,
declares that one-half of the power of human
initiative Is suppressed by the present social order,
and it is not difficult to accept the statement. The
happy instances where individuals manipulate cir
cumstances so as to bring out striking results are
rendered the more conspicuous by the number

26 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
of other individuals who entirely fail not only of
such achievement, but of anything comparable
thereto. And yet It Is known that these others
grade only somewhat below the first in capacity.
" Of all the stupendous waste exhibited In the
physical and moral world this is perhaps the most
tragic in character and consequences. Yet it is
enacted unobtrusively and with little dramatic
effect. It is typified by the circumscribed career
of the working-class boy, who at 14 years passes
from the Influence of the ' graded ' system of
education to ' tend a machine ' for ten hours a
day. The lot of the few who enjoy more elastic
and extended educational opportunities and a
more adequate field of action thereafter is more in
the public eye. Theirs, however. Is not the lot
of ' the great majority.' Among the latter there
Is no Inconsiderable proportion whose power of
Individual initiative Is but meagerly developed
and whose potential contribution to the world's
enterprise Is never realized.
"There can be no doubt that the dominant aim
of the century which has just closed has been
commercial rather that humanistic. It has been
the century of wealth-making. It has launched
an entire series of world's fairs. It has established
free public schools and abolished slavery, both of

Ruskin's Contribution. 27
which acts mean accelerated material development.
It has built great cities with their lack of art. It
has gone haltingly forward with its newly de
manded factory laws. It has neglected persons
as conscious objects. It has trusted for salvation
to the instinct of gain. It has — perhaps with
some twinges of conscience — assured all men that
the current waste of flesh and brain was Inevitable,
and that there could be no better way.
"The problem of this century Is to work out that
higher economy In which there shall not only be
a still better directed effort to effect material sav
ing, but in which the emphasis shall be shifted
from the material product to the human agent —
In which social advance rather than the Instinct of
profit-making or even of vast organization shall
more effectually dictate action. This does not
mean the retarding of material progress. Quite
the contrary. The better the man the better his
product. And a century whose conscious effort
shall be to make all existing progress converge
upon the development of its people and upon
insuring scope to their capacities will realize a
peculiar quality and profusion of productive ex
pression. "That the spirit of a higher social economy — a
spirit which is partially a revolt and partially an

28 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
instance of constructive self-assertion — Is moving
with great force in Europe and America is not to
be denied. It protests against waste In militar
ism. In industrial conflict, and especially in dwarfed
capacities. It finds the trust when kept within
just bounds a labor-saving device, but, without
abating its demands for efficiency in methods, its
chief thought is centered upon persons. It looks
for a twentieth-century economy which, as one of
its far-sighted aims, shall seek to set free that fund
of individual Initiative which to-day is so often
sacrificed." An editorial In Unity, of about the same date
as the preceding piece, and called " The Omitted
Elements in Political Economy," asks some per
tinent questions that sound familiar to the reader
of Ruskin's writings.
The Omitted Elements in Political Economy.
"Political economy still holds its place in the
curriculum of our universities, but that it has
some limitations, felt if not proven, even in academic
circles, is shown by the increasing use of such
terms as 'social economics' and 'sociology,' terms
which at least Include political economy if they do
not tend to supplant It. Political economy still
starts out with the assumption that wealth resolves

Ruskin's Contribution. 29
itself into three elements and three only, viz.,
wages, saving, interest or profit. But do these
represent all the elements In wealth, and are there
no economic elements in capital other than saving
and the higher skill of management ? Did the
man who had the foresight to run the railroad
into the undeveloped country create the weakh
of which he received so large a share ? Are there
not other elements of wealth which not only the
moralist but the economist must take note of, and
which are somehow legitimate factors in the con
siderations of the law of the land as well as the
law of God ? The railroad did not create but was
created by the general intelligence of the commu
nity, more than that by the general advancement
of science, the triumphs of invention, the progress
of the race, the bounty of nature which no man
created. Is the discovery of an unexpected force
or resource in nature sufficient title to private
ownership of that force or resource ? Can the
coal-beds of the world legitimately pass into the
hands of the most sagacious manipulator of sur
face titles ? Can the Standard Oil Company by
any manipulation of capital, legitimate or other
wise, claim first title to all the petroleum or natural
gas that their man-made deeds may seem to cover ?
Does the skill that succeeds In harnessing the

30 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Niagara give to the man or men thus harnessing,
private rights for all time to this the greatest of
nature's ' water powers' ? And then do the wages
fixed by the law of competition meet all the legal
and economic obligations of the more competent
to the less competent?
"Must economics. In order to be scientific, as
sume only egoistic elements as calculable, perma
nent, and conclusive? Is there no place for altruistic
forces in the political economy that Is scientific ?
Must the golden rule, the principle of noblesse
oblige, the law that increases moral responsibility
with the increase of power be always outside forces
seeking to ameliorate the otherwise grim and iron
elements of political economy ? Is there no reality
that answers for the unearned increment which the
science of political economy must take note of, and
will there never be any scientific recognition of
the principle that establishes the wage element in
production not by the laws of competition but by
the laws of a living wage, that fair proportion of
the profits that will not represent the grim mini
mum of life but a plus element to this minimum
that will make for the elevation of the workman,
the Increasing of his joy in life ? Is the success
of the successful man who gets to the top by virtue
of expert selfishness, the suppression of altruism

Ruskin's Contribution. 31
in his nature, a success which political economy
has no remedy for, which it must respect and has
nothing to do about except to turn the mean man
over into the hands of the evangelist after It has
sanctioned his methods, and say, ' He has made
his money legitimately; now let the minister of
religion teach him how to spend it'?
"We do not presume to answer any of these
questions, but we believe we have named some of
the disturbing elements In the discussion of the
class-room as well as in the adjustment of the in
dustrial problems of to-day. These are questions
to which we believe science and the scientific man
will somehow find an answer that will be satisfac
tory to the moralist as well as to the financier;
in short, political economy will eventually be
based on the golden and not the Iron rule."
Such thinking Ruskin anticipated by fifty years.
Let some of his pregnant sentences be noted and
their significance be reflected upon. " There Is
no wealth but life. Including all Its powers of love,
of joy, and of admiration." "The wealth of
nations, as of men, consists In substance not In
ciphers ; and the real good of all work, and of all
commerce, depends on the final intrinsic worth
of the things you make, or get by It." " That
country is the richest which nourishes the greatest

32 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
number of noble and happy human beings ; that
man is richest who, having perfected the functions
to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence,
both personal and by means of his possessions,
over the lives of others." "A noble thing cannot
be wealth except to a noble person." " The
essential work of the political economist is to de
termine what are in reality useful or life-giving
things and by what degree and kinds of labor
thev are attainable and distributable." Having
determined upon this idea of wealth all other defi
nitions of economy were tested by their truth to
human life or by their " vitality." The true end
of work consists In making "wealth " and not In
earning profits. " Value " Is the life-giving power
of anything. "Production" does not consist in
things laboriously made, but In things serviceably
consumable ; and the question for the nation is
not how much labor It employs, but how much
Hfe it produces. " Getting a Hving " Is getting
" admiration, hope, and love " — as Wordsworth
affirmed. " Labor " Is spending of life, the contest
of man with an opposite. " Cost " is the quantity
of labor required to produce anything. " Price "
is the quantity of labor which the possessor will
take in exchange for It. " Wages " should be de
termined by what Is necessary to sustain life at

Ruskin's Contribution. 33
its fullest and best, allowing for recreation and
rest. There are three tests of " work " : it must be
honest, useful, and cheerful. His general social
view is well summarized in a passage taken from
the Inaugural lecture at Oxford : "It has been
too long boasted as the pride of England that out
of a vast multitude of men, confessed to be In
evil case, it was possible for individuals, by strenu
ous effort and rare good fortune, occasionally to
emerge Into the light, and look back with self-
gratulatory scorn upon the occupations of the
parents, and the circumstances of their Infancy.
Ought we not rather to aim at an ideal of national
life, when, of the employments of Englishmen,
though each shall be distinct, none shall be un
happy or Ignoble; when mechanical operations,
acknowledged to be debasing in their tendency,
shall be deputed to less fortunate and more covet
ous races ; when advance from rank to rank,
though possible to all men, may be shunned
rather than desired by the best; and the chief
object in the mind of every citizen may not be
extrication from a condition admitted to be dis
graceful, but fulfilment of a duty which shall be
also a birthright."
It will not be necessary to follow Ruskin

34 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
through the details of his system or to debate the
advisability of the measures he proposed to effect
a better social order. It will be remembered he
advised the fullest regulation of society and
division into classes according to function — kings,
judges, administrative officers, bishops, soldiers,
teachers, and workers. He was as strongly op
posed to democracy as Carlyle and always used
the word "independence" with contempt, saying:
" The true strength of every human soul is to be
dependent on as many nobler as it can discern,
and to be depended upon, by as many inferior as
It can reach." Hence he desired to see all chil
dren taught obedience and all persons entering
Into life the power of unselfish admiration. Like
Carlyle he believed In leadership and kingship,
but kingship of "an inevitable and eternal kind,
crowned or not; the kingship, namely, which con
sists In a stronger moral state, and a truer thought
ful state, than that of others." He advocated
warfare, but a warfare that was hardly more than
pleasant jousting with shield and lance for the
development of hardihood. It must be confessed
that In respect to government Ruskin seems to
incline to the mediaeval view of governance rather
than to the modern, but perhaps, after all, there
would not be much disagreement as to his state-

Ruskin's Contribution. 35
ment In the last volume of " Modern Painters" :
" Government and co-operation are In all things
the laws of life ; anarchy and competition the
laws of death." The state he contemplated was
not a political or an industrial one, but more like
Plato's republic, a moral organism with justice as
its essential life.
Ruskin's divergence from the economical teach
ing of his day was not wider than his difference
from contemporary aesthetic. The term aesthetic
had been first used by Baumgarten In the
eighteenth century to designate the science of the
beautiful, meaning by the term that the beautiful
made its primary appeal to sensation, as distin
guished from the good and true, where perception
was interior. In making beauty "the perfection
of sensuous knowledge," the field of aesthetic was
demarked plainly from that of logic and ethic.
These distinctions prevailed In philosophy up to
the middle of the nineteenth century, with the
result of fashioning a school of art that laid stress
only upon sense effects, and, advocating " art for
art's sake," had so far withdrawn from life that
art had become merely a means of amusing and
entertaining the upper and leisure classes. Against
this aesthetic Ruskin set his face, affirming that
the impressions of beauty were not of sense, or

36 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
wholly of mind, but more essentially moral or
social. The test he applied to art was its degree
of social usefulness. He would never even use
the term " aesthetic" except to refute Its implica
tions. The art of any country is seen to be an
exact exponent of its ethical life: "You can have
noble art only from noble persons." When writ
ing the "Stones of Venice," he examined each
structure with reference to Its capacity for fulfilling
expressional purposes. In his more technical lec
tures on art at Oxford It was noticed that he
touched constantly upon the problems of life. His
exposition of the art of engraving, for instance,
was, as Mr. Norton observed, not more a treatise
on line In art than on line in conduct. His char
acterization of the art of engraving. In the course
of these lectures. Is quite typical of his attitude :
"It is athletic; It is resolute; It is obedient." In
"Aratra Pentllici," speaking of sculpture, he said :
"Its proper subject is the spiritual power seen in
the form of any living thing, and so represented
as to give evidence that the sculptor has loved the
good of It and hated the evil." The laws which
he deduced for sculpture are wholly untechnical :
(i) That the work is to be with tools of men.
(2) That it is to be in natural materials. (3) That
It is to exhibit the virtues of those materials, and

Ruskin's Contribution.

37

aim at no quality inconsistent with them.
(4) That Its temper is to be quiet and gentle, in
harmony with common needs, and in consent to
common intelligence. From such discussion the
definition is soon reached that art Is expression.
As art, then, is not an entity distinguished by
a quality called beauty, but a mode of expression,
allied to all other forms of expression, and so
marked by characteristics that may be termed
moral or social. It follows that the chief test
of art Is its incluslveness. Its lowly origin, its
universality, its serviceability, its degree of
satisfying genuine social needs. The general
proposition underlying "Modern Painters,"
"Stones of Venice," and his other art studies Is
this : " Great art is nothing else than the type
of strong and noble life." A sense for the noble
in life is something quite different from the " taste
for beauty" developed by the opposite aesthetic.
The false sense for art is known by Its refinement,
its fastidiousness, its preciosity; purity of taste
is tested by its universality. Hence Ruskin told
his students to beware of the spirit of choice, say
ing, " It is an insolent spirit, and commonly a
base and blind one, too." He told them also
that the main business of art was Its service in the
actual uses of daily life, and that the beginning

38 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
of art was In getting the country clean and the
people beautiful. He pointed then to the fact
that all good architecture rose out of domestic
work, that before great churches and palaces could
be built it was necessary to build good doors and
garret windows. The best architecture was simply
a glorified roof. His own statement runs: " The
dome of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or
Chartres, the vaults and arches of their aisles, the
canopy of the tomb, and the spire of the belfry
are art forms resulting from the mere require
ment that a certain space should be strongly cov
ered from heat and rain." In the " Crown of
Wild Olive " we meet the startling statement that
the builders of the great mediaeval cathedrals cor
rupted Gothic architecture — they corrupted It by
forgetting the people and devoting It to priestly
and aesthetic needs, until, losing Its vitality. It de
clined in expressiveness and ultimately ceased to
be. From these and other Instances, Ruskin
deplored the tendency of art to narrow Its appeal
and to become the object of the educated classes.
However attractive much ofthe art ofthe Renais
sance was to him, he yet saw that it had for foun
dation nothing but the pride of life — the pride of
the so-called superior classes. His strongest state
ment on this point occurs In " The Two Paths " :

Ruskin's Contribution. 39
" The great lesson of history Is, that all the fine
arts hitherto, having been supported by the selfish
power of the noblesse, and never having extended
their range to the comfort or the relief of the mass
of the people — the arts, I say, thus practiced, and
thus matured, have only accelerated the ruin of
the states they adorned ; and at the moment when,
in any kingdom, you point to the triumph of Its
greatest artists, you point also to the determined
hour of the kingdom's decline. The names of
great painters are like passing bells : In the name
of Velasquez, you hear sounded the fall of Spain;
in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the
name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there Is
profound justice in this ; for In proportion to the
nobleness of the power is the guilt of Its use for
purposes vain or vile ; and hitherto the greater
the art the more surely has it been used, and used
solely, for the decoration of pride or the provok
ing of sensuality. We may abandon the hope — or
if you like the words better- — we may disdain the
temptation ofthe pomp and grace of Italy in her
youth. For us there can be no more the throne
of marble, for us no more the vault of gold ; but
for us there Is the loftier and lovelier privilege of
bringing the power and charm of art within the
reach of the humble and the poor ; and as the

40 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
magnificence of past ages failed by Its narrowness
and Its pride, ours may prevail and continue by
its universality and Its lowliness." The beauty
which Is to be "a joy forever" must be a joy
for all.
The ground Is now cleared for understanding
Ruskin's teachings respecting industry. He had
proclaimed that art must spring from the people,
that Its test was Its lowliness and its universality.
He now reversed the proposition, and announced
the necessity of ennobling the people through
association with art — an association to be attained
by means of their labor. The separation that
had occurred between the artist and the artisan
had worked Injury to both kinds of products.
The artists had become effeminate because they
were not used to handle rough materials ; work
men had become debased because they could not
exercise their faculties In designing. The problem
was to universalize art and to ennoble labor. With
those sentimentalists who upheld the essential
dignity of labor Ruskin had little sympathy.
Whether labor was dignified or not depended
upon its character ; whether rough and exhaust
ing or with elements of recreation ; whether done
under conditions of slavery or freedom. Some
work is degrading by its physical conditions ;

Ruskin's Contribution. 41
other work is dangerous to health ; still other work
destroys moral character. Labor can be dignified
only as it has the character of dignity. In the
Seven Lamps it is written that "objects are noble
or ignoble In proportion to the amount of the
energy of that mind which has visibly been em
ployed upon them." But fullness of life involves a
large degree of freedom. The sight of a degraded
workman caused Ruskin the deepest gloom, while
that of a free workman aroused his highest enthu
siasm. He observed and commended In the free
workman the hand's muscular firmness and sub-
tilty, the brain's instantaneously selective and ordl-
nant energy, the will's unceasing governance, and
the whole being's joyful play and exertion — a joy
such as the eagle seems to take In the wave of his
wings. His defense of Gothic architecture as
against the Greek is based upon the nature of the
Gothic as involving the liberty of the workman
in Its design and execution, and he went so far as
to assert that, in order to raise up the workman
of the present day into a living soul, the whole
system of Greek architecture as now practiced —
the system, that is, of ordered and deindivldual-
ized work — must be annihilated. To produce a
free workman education and science should strive
— for surely these are made for man and not man

42 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
for them. The modern industrial problem is to
decrease the number of employments Involving
degradation, and to raise the character of others
by allowing the utmost possible freedom to the
workmen. Another fundamental proposition in Ruskin's
theory of Industry Is that all good work must be
free hand-work. Probably Ruskin would admit
to himself that his antagonism to the machine
was too extreme ; but to cry out against the ma
chine Is one way of Insisting upon the value of
human life. If the machine was always employed
in the service of man, to relieve him of drudgery
and of all work debasing In Its nature, if It always
did work for him, and produce the things he
needed, little could be said against it. But In the
service of mammon and greed, compelling men
to be its slave and lackey. It is anything but a
lovely spectacle, and to Ruskin's eyes It appeared
In the guise of a monster and not of a minister.
And there is this to be said, that as soon as the
principles of art are applied to Industry the ma
chine ceases to have much Importance, and we
can agree with the twenty-fifth aphorism of the
Seven Lamps, that "All good work must be free
hand-work." In fuller statement this aphorism
runs as follows : " I said, early in this essay, that

Ruskin's Contribution. 43
hand-work might always be known from machine-
work ; observing, however, at the same time, that
it was possible for men to turn their lives into ma
chines, and to reduce their labor to the machine
level ; but so long as men work as men, putting
their heart into what they do, and doing their
best, it matters not how bad workmen they may
be, there will be that in the handling which is
above all price ; It will be plainly seen that some
places have been delighted in more than others —
that there have been a pause and a care about
them ; and then there will come careless bits, and
fast bits ; and here the chisel will have struck
hard, and here lightly, and anon timidly ; and if
the man's mind as well as his heart went with the
work, all this will be In the right places, and each
part will set off the other ; and the effect of the
whole, as compared with the same design cut by
a machine or a lifeless hand, will be like that
of poetry well read and deeply felt to that of
the same verses jangled by rote. There are
many to whom the difference is imperceptible ;
but to those who love poetry it Is everything —
they had rather not hear It at all than hear It 111
read ; and to those who love architecture, the life
and accent of the hand are everything. They
had rather not have ornament at all than see it 111

44 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
cut — deadly cut, that is. I cannot too often
repeat It, It is not coarse cutting. It is not blunt
cutting, that Is necessarily bad; but it is cold cut
ting — the look of equal trouble everywhere — the
smooth, diffused tranquillity of heartless pains —
the regularity of a plough in a level field. The
chill Is more likely, indeed, to show itself In
finished work than In any other — men cool and
tire as they complete; and If completeness Is
thought to be vested In polish, and to be attain
able by help of sand-paper, we may as well give
the work to the engine lathe at once. But right
finish Is simply the full rendering of the intended
impression ; and high finish is the rendering of
a well-intended and vivid impression ; and it is
oftener got by rough than fine handling."
The social wrong wrought by division of labor
is another phase of Ruskin's arraignment of cur
rent industrialism. A profitable device from the
point of view of production, considered as mere
quantity, division of labor, especially in association
with machinery and forced by competition, does
injury to the producer and eventually to the con
sumer. It is a social wrong to the workman be
cause it tends to degrade him to a mechanism,
exercises but a single set of faculties, and disso
ciates him from the completed product, a knowl-

Ruskin's Contribution. 45
edge of which alone makes his labor rational. " It
is not the labor that is divided, but the men
— divided into mere segments and crumbs of
life." It Is a social wrong to the consumer be
cause production, though increased in quantity,
is lessened In quality, and the true utility of the
goods is correspondingly lowered. In other
words, the mercantile value of machinery and
division of labor does not coincide with their
social value, which Is the true economy. " It
comes to this," says J. A. Hobson, remarking
upon this point, " that only good work can pro
duce real utilities ; excessive division of labor, in
degrading the character of labor, degrades the
quality of commodities, and a progress estimated
quantitatively in increase of low-class material
forms of wealth is not true progress." The de
mand of art is for a whole man, a rational pro
cess, and a valuable result. Its expression Is
qualitative and not quantitative. And this ex
plains why artists and those associated in art pro
duction are the first to protest against an industrial
system that enforces bad workmanship.
Other aspects of his doctrine of work are pre
sented in an early essay on pre-RaphaelitIsm
and though this special passage was written with
reference to the artist, it applies to all workers :

46 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
"It may be proved, with much certainty, that
God intends no man to live in this world without
working; but it seems to me no less evident that
he intends every man to be happy in his work.
It Is written, ' In the sweat of thy brow,' but It
was never written ' in the breaking of thine heart,'
thou shalt eat bread ; and I find that, as on the
one hand, infinite misery is caused by Idle people,
who both fail in doing what was appointed for
them to do, and set In motion various springs of
mischief In matters in which they should have
had no concern, so on the other hand, no small
misery Is caused by overworked and unhappy
people, in the dark views which they necessarily
take up themselves, and force upon others, of
work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of
their being unhappy is in Itself a violation of
divine law, and sign of some kind of folly or sin
in their way of life. Now In order that people
may be happy in their work, these three things
are needed : they must be fit for it ; they must
not do too much of It ; and they must have a
sense of success In It — not a doubtful sense, such
as needs some testimony of other people for Its
confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowl
edge, that so much work has been done well, and
faithfully done, whatever the world may say or

Ruskin's Contribution. 47
think about it. So that in order that a man may
be happy. It is necessary that he should not only
be capable of his work, but a good judge of his
work." In other words a certain amount of
leisure, a certain amount of skill, and a certain
amount of intelligence, are requisite for the best
work. Given, then. Ideal conditions for work, what
profits should a man have for his labor? The
essential reward lies naturally In the happiness
which the work engenders. Labor that is whole
some exercise. Involving the skill and intelligence
and character of the individual, is not really labor
in the Ruskinian sense, for there Is in it no ex
pense of life. By the recognition of the human
values of labor the question of wages Is rendered
of secondary moment. The real demand of
workmen who have not been degraded or cor
rupted by the mammonism of the day is not for
higher wages but for better conditions of labor.
The assumption that a man Is a repository of
energy to be elicited by wages alone is unworthy
any observer of men. The wage system Is simply
one stage better than the slave system it super
seded, and wages high or low is still a token of
industrial bondage. The distinguishing sign of
slavery, Ruskin said, " is to have a price and to

48 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
be bought for It." The best work of artists,
poets, and scientists is never paid for, nor can the
value of toil in these fields be ever measured in
terms of money. " The largest quantity of work,"
our economist declares, "will not be done by this
curious engine (the Soul) for pay, or under pres
sure. It will be done only when the motive
force, that Is to say, the will or spirit of the
creatures is brought up to the greatest strength
by its own proper fuel, namely, by the affections."
Could workmen to-day direct their united energies
toward self-education, so that the nature by which
they are environed and the life with which they
are connected might mean more to them, and so
that the things they possess might be more highly
valued ; could employers understand that work is
done well only when It is done with a will and
that no man has a thoroughly sound will unless
he has character and Is contented, knowing he is
what he should be and is In his place — could this
higher ideal of labor be generally accepted and
acted upon, then would the battle between those
who have and those who have not be speedily
ended. The real labor problem is not that of
shorter hours or of higher wages, but It Is to
change the character of work so that work will be
Its own reward. It will be remembered that

Ruskin's Contribution. 49
Ruskin promised as the fruit of ideal labor a
crown of wild olive, symbolizing by this token
gray honor and sweet rest. " Free-heartedness,
and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and re
quited love, and the sight of the peace of others,
and the ministry of their pain ; these — and the
blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and
flowers of the earth beneath ; and mysteries and
presences. Innumerable, of living things — may yet
be your riches, untormenting and divine; service
able for the life that now Is ; nor, it may be, with
out promise of that which is to come."
Upon education Ruskin depended for the
social reforms he contemplated. As the school
he ideally constructed was so largely industrial In
character, the discussion of a few of his educational
principles will here be pertinent. His general
attitude may be understood by noting the follow-
lowing sentence: "You do not educate a man by
telling him what he knew not, but by making
him what he was not." From this we may know
that Ruskin had some large ideal of character,
agreeing In his main tenets with Froebel and the
new educationalists. His primary thought was that
knowledge must be accompanied by a habit of
useful action, else was It likely to become deceit
ful; and for the cultivation ofthe habit of action

50 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
he advocated the practice of manual labor. His
school was grounded fundamentally on what Is now
called manual training, having reduced the three
R's to an insignificant position, with an added basis
in nature-study. I quote his words In " Time and
Tide " : " It would be a part of my scheme of
physical education that every youth In the state
— from the king's son downwards — should learn
to do something finely and thoroughly with the
hand, so as to let him know what touch meant ;
and what stout craftsmanship meant; and to in
form him of many things besides, which no man
can learn but by some severely accurate discipline
In doing." Above this manual training each
class should be disciplined according to the
choice of occupation — the king for king's work,
the bishop for bishop's work, the farmer for
farmer's work — and he was careful to require that
the metal school should be presided over by gold
smiths and not by ironmasters. As to the de
velopment of such education In the larger field of
life his advice to the priests of the church — "the
gentlemen of the embroidered robe " — may be
taken as typical : " Do not burn any more
candles, but make some; do not paint anymore
windows, but mend a few where the wind comes
in. In winter time, with substantial clear glass and

Ruskin s Contribution. 51
putty. Do not vault any more high roofs, but
thatch some low ones ; and embroider rather on
backs which are turned to the cold, than on those
which are turned to congregations."
Ruskin's peculiar Importance In the history of
thought may now be determined by comparing
him with Carlyle, from whom he derived much,
yet from whom he diverged widely. Ruskin was
Impelled to undertake his social mission by read
ing Carlyle's " Hero Worship." Becoming per
sonally acquainted about the year 1850, the two
grew toward each other in those things which are
controlled by temperament. Both were men of
vigorous individuality. Both had sincerity as the
mainspring of their energy. Both of them, opti
mistic in their youth and early manhood, gradu
ally declined to the mood of pessimism. The bells-
of life jangled and went out of tune. By 1863
Ruskin's mood had fallen black and harsh, and
he scolded more and was more impatient. The
fine earnestness that always distinguished him had
lost its radiance, and pleasure seemed to have gone
out of his work, while the thing to be accom
plished loomed larger and more necessary than
ever. In their moods of doubt both thinkers pro
claimed the need of a nation's governance by its
superior members — the arlstol by divine sanction.

52 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
who should be leaders and rulers In a state of
natural feudalism. Their social order was essen
tially a theocracy, with a hierarchy of saints and
apostles, and extending down to classes and sub
jects and slaves. Both men were thus antagonistic
to the democratic spirit, which tended to place
every man in rule of himself, and so to overcome
the sense of reverence and obedience to authority
in the hearts of the masses. Across the waters to
America they looked with contemptuous eyes,
the one seeing too much roast goose and apple
sauce, the other too few castles and ruins. But
Ruskin surpassed Carlyle in constructive ability.
Where the one simply called for leaders to rule
the chaos of the world, the other proposed a defi
nite plan for the social order and appointed the
leaders to their places. With Ruskin, destructive
criticism was linked with the Instinct of repair. A
great scientist, perhaps a great artist and poet, was
lost to the world in Ruskin. As It was, he was a
careful student of rocks and plants and clouds, an
engraver, drawing-master, and painter of no mean
ability, and a writer of sincere if not great poetry.
During the few years he was professor of art at
Oxford he was establishing a drawing-school,
making collections of paintings and drawings, issu
ing helpful catalogs for the use of the public.

Ruskin's Contribution. 53
writing plain letters to workingmen on social ques
tions, encouraging his students to repair roads and
to give other social service, and helping to form a
new social organization, which he called the Soci
ety of St. George. Then finally he passed beyond
Carlyle, and indeed beyond every other writer of
his day. In his knowledge of art. He knew the
method, the meaning, and the Impelling motive
of the higher industrialism. He sought to correct
the political economy of his time by including in
its data all that art had fiirnished. The very titles
of his books — " Modern Painters," " Stones of
Venice," " Lamps of Architecture " — denote the
wide field over which he worked. Then in all
practical matters he tried to connect art with labor,
thinking by this association to vitalize art and to
elevate labor. It Is in Ruskin that the modern
arts and crafts movement had its original source.
To him we are Indebted for the startling aphorism,
" Life without industry Is guilt, industry without
art is brutality."
The reformatory experiments of an Industrial
nature, undertaken directly by Ruskin or stimu
lated by his teachings, form perhaps the most in
teresting phase of our subject. As Is well known,
the great bulk of Ruskin's Inherited fortune and
of his earnings was expended In philanthropic and

54 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
educational schemes of one sort or another in the
almost vain attempt to better the social condition
of England. Brought up in isolation and edu
cated as a "gentleman commoner" he found him
self poorly equipped for his mission as Industrial
reformer, but desirous of coming Into closer con
tact with workingmen, he Interested himself as
early as 1854 in various educational Institutions
designed for workmen, and persuaded by F. D.
Maurice, gave at the Worklngman's College his
first lectures on drawing and decorative art. His
general lectures at this institution and elsewhere
at this period anticipated the methods of univer
sity extension, a cause which he heartily encour
aged at Its Inception. The university-settlement
Idea was first discussed at his house, and it is not
unlikely that his conception of the functions of
"bishops" determined the activities ofthe mem
bers of the settlement houses. Having some
property In London from which he was drawing
rent, he sought to become the best possible land
lord, and enlisted the help of Miss OctavIa Hill
and others In improving the habltableness of tene
ments. He practically Inaugurated the move
ment of " five per cent philanthropy," recently
become prominent. In 1854, on the occasion
of the opening of the Crystal Palace in Lon-

Ruskin's Contribution.

55

don, all of glass and Iron, like a gigantic green
house, Ruskin wrote a pamphlet pleading for
the preservation of the great buildings of the
past, then neglected and falling to ruins, and out
of this suggestion came the Society for the Pres
ervation of Ancient Buildings, in the work of
which William Morris figured so conspicuously.
As a writer, manufacturer, and distributer of
books, he tried to apply the principles of com
mercial Integrity and honor he had advocated ; he
would not advertise ; he employed no middle
men ; he gave no discounts ; he engaged In no
competitive struggle for a market ; he looked out
for the welfare of the workmen employed in manu
facture ; he used the best paper he could procure,
and took extraordinary care with the printing; he
began the sale of his books from a little Kentish
village, at one price, and without credit. Of like
nature was his experiment with a London tea-
shop : putting a salaried servant In charge, he
built up a successful business In tea, without ad
vertisement or any trick of the trade, and was
enabled later to turn the shop over to Miss Hill
as a part of his good-tenement scheme. He was
not above street-cleaning or road-making, as was
shown by his forming a company to keep a cer
tain length of London street " clean as the deck

56 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
of a ship " for a given season, and by his joining
in with Oxford undergraduates In mending the
HInksey road. The most considerable of his
practical schemes for reform was the St. George's
Company, which began to take definite shape
about 1875. '^^^ general purpose of this com
pany or guild was to socialize both capital and
labor, and incidentally to demonstrate two eco
nomic propositions — one that agriculture formed
the only genuine basis of national life, and the
other that happiness was derived from honest and
contented co-operative labor. It was his object to
collect from persons of means a fund of money
sufficient to buy land, at first for a small colony
of Rusklnltes, who should form an Ideal nucleus
of perfectly just persons, and from whom the Idea
of justice should radiate, until the whole social
body was shaped to its image. As the idea of a
perfect social order matured in Ruskin's mind he
turned his thoughts more and more to the possi
bility of showing to the world, in the St. George's
Guild, a copy of his vision of the new feudalism.
With Insufficient means for the experiment, and
with no marked public approval, there was no
opportunity in Ruskin's lifetime for the dream to
be realized. Like many another social dream.

Ruskin's Contribution. 57
the St. George's Guild remains a paper Utopia —
though its conception Is by no means unpotential
for the future. As the agricultural proposition
could not be proved, the guild funds were devoted
to the establishment of the Ruskin Museum at
Sheffield ; and as this museum embodies certain
of the master's Ideas on education, this much
of his original plan may be said to be realized.
The finer examples of man's and nature's cre
ated forms are here placed in view with reference
to their ethnic, scientific, and artistic significance,
and the museum Is so conducted that the objects
displayed minister at once to delight and Instruc
tion. With this museum as a nucleus, with the
many societies organized in England and America
for the study of Ruskin's writings, the general
ideal, if not all the specific ones, of the St. George's
Guild may yet be materialized. Already the
modern revival of various home industries, par
ticularly In spinning and weaving, is due directly
to Ruskin's teachings. It was one of his opinions
that workers should engage in some useful craft
under wholesome and humane conditions, and an
other that the people, the consuming class, should
have the opportunity of using sound and service
able goods Instead of being compelled to buy what

58 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Carlyle called " cheap and nasty " ones. He
thought that home Industry might still exist by
the side of the machine-driven factory. Two op
portunities of reviving the spinning and weaving
industries presented themselves in Ruskin's life
time — one on the Isle of Man, where the industry
was languishing, and another among the West
moreland cottages, where the art had long since
passed away. The successful revival of these
local industries was the initial phase of a general
economic movement that has to-day for social
support the Home Arts and Industries Associa
tion, which has succeeded In establishing many of
the handicrafts upon a permanent economic basis.
This movement is not to be understood as a fa
natical protest against machinery, and not as a
return to the abandoned domestic system of mediae
val days, but rather as a modern conscious effort
to advance a step beyond the factory stage of In
dustry, and to inaugurate a new industrialism
wherein the Interests of both the producing and
consuming classes are guarded — the one class de
manding the opportunity of Individual expression,
and the other the satisfaction of its higher wants.
So it is to-day that In nearly every Instance of or
ganized effort to create better industrial condi
tions the Informing mind of Ruskin Is somewhere

Morris and His Plea.

59

apparent. In whatever direction one advances It
is discovered that this pioneer mind has gone on
before — and as the world advances but slowly It
will be long before he can be passed by.
///. Morris and His Plea for an Industrial
Commonwealth.
By the middle of the century Carlyle and Rus
kin had created a certain disclpleship, and were
receiving the unbounded admiration of young
men of fervent and poetic temperament, who were
drawn at first, probably, by the splendid rhetoric
of " Past and Present " and " Modern Painters "
without examining very closely their social Impli
cations. Chief among the admirers of Ruskin
was William Morris, his junior by fifteen years.
Morris was just entering Oxford as Ruskin was
publishing the " Stones of Venice," the book that
first kindled In Morris his social beliefs, to which
he always referred as the first statement of the
doctrine that art is the expression of man's pleasure
In labor, and whose chapter "On the Nature of
the Gothic" he reprinted forty years after Its first
publication as one of the first products of the
Kelmscott Press, to stand In testimony of the
abiding influence of the master-thinker. The
development of the two men was, indeed, strangely

6o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
parallel, with certain differences of direction shortly
to be noted. Ruskin was born, in 1 8 1 9, of Scotch
ancestry, Morris, In 1834, of Welsh parentage,
both possessing thus a strain of the emotional and
mystic Celt. Their fathers were successful busi
ness men of London — the one a wine merchant,
the other a discount broker and general speculator
— and both left their sons such considerable for
tune as to relieve them from the necessity of com
peting for a livelihood. The boys were brought
up in surroundings that fostered a love of nature,
devotion to poetry and art, and a regard for piety
— both being Intended by their parents for the
church. Ruskin matriculated at Christ Church,
Oxford, as a "gentleman commoner," in 1837.
Morris at Exeter College, in 1853, entered essen
tially the same Oxford that Ruskin had left eleven
years before, an Oxford from which the " last en
chantments of the Middle Ages " had not yet van
ished, which was even then in the midst of a
mediaeval revival, supported by Newman and the
pre-Raphaellte brotherhood, although signs of
change were beginning to be noticed by the younger
generation. Neither exhibited at Oxford any
special attachment to scholarship, though their
reading extended much beyond the requirement
of the schools, and both won distinction for their

Morris and His Plea. 6i
poetic achievement — Ruskin by winning the New-
dlgate prize with his " Salsette and Elephanta,"
and Morris by winning the applause of his friends
in a less conspicuous way with his " Willow and
the Red Cliff." Ruskin abandoned verse to
write " Modern Painters " in more successful
prose. For thirty years verse was the one form
employed by Morris for pure Hterature. But the
prose of the one and the verse of the other are
equally distinctive. The year that Morris went
up to Oxford Ruskin was delivering at Edinburgh
his lectures on Architecture and Painting, which on
publication, introduced his Oxford adherents to
Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelltes. "Modern
Painters " and " Stones of Venice " were already
well known to them, and Canon Dixon tells in his
reminiscences of Oxford how Morris would read
Ruskin aloud: " He had a mighty, singing voice,
and chanted rather than read those weltering
oceans of eloquence as they have never been given
before or since, it is most certain." Though per
haps attracted by the eloquence Morris perceived
also something of the social bearings of " Stones
of Venice," and speaking of Its chapter " On the
Nature of the Gothic " long after, he testified that
when he first read It, " It seemed to point out a new
road on which the world should travel." It Is

62 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Hkely that Ruskin initiated In the minds of the
Oxford group their thought of brotherhood and
their attempt to Inaugurate " a crusade and holy
warfare against the age." It was in the interest
of some idea of " the higher Hfe" that the Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine was Issued by the
Brotherhood in 1856, though its Hterary and
artistic features exceeded the social. Gradually,
however, the Brotherhood tended toward a social
doctrine, though Morris did not engage militantly
in socialism till long after. It Is significant that
Morris took his first step in socialism In seconding
Ruskin's proposition for the preservation of
ancient buildings against the so-called restorer.
And in all respects of social and political economy
Morris was but the pupil of Ruskin, for he origi
nated almost nothing In point of theory, the social
ism with which he Identified himself being but the
socialism of Ruskin's "Unto This Last," as proved,
of course, by his own practical experience. Of
narrower range than Ruskin, but more intensive
in his own direction, he gave his life to the deter
mination of the relation between art and labor,
and made himself, therefore, the chief exponent of
the idea of the arts and crafts. Ruskin theorized ;
Morris demonstrated: henceforth the problem of
other workers Is that of extension and Inclusion.

Morris and His Plea. 63
"Poet, artist, manufacturer, and socialist" —
these terms describe the life-work of Morris in
in Its three-fold aspect of artist, craftsman, and
social reformer. With his strictly literary writings
I am not now concerned, save to observe their
abstraction, their devotion to pure beauty, their
lack of contemporaneity, and their note of weari
ness. His poetic fame rests secure, and is not
dependent upon what he wrought in other fields ;
yet if we had only the data of his poetry, our
measure of Morris would fall far short of his real
greatness, and we should know only his less posi
tive side. Some would call his socialism a divaga
tion In the wilderness. But I think It may be
proved that without a definite socialism his crafts
manship would have been wanting its motive, and
without material craft his art would have been
attenuated to the merest symbolism of dream.
Exclusive and aristocratic by nature, his great
work of democratizing art would not have been
undertaken except as a new Ideal seized and bound
him to its service. In the order of his develop
ment poetry preceded and then coincided with his
craft, his craft preceded and then coincided with
his socialism.
The history of handicraft shows no life more
eventful than Morris's, or more filled with notable

64 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
achievements. As a boy his hands were always
active, net-making being a favorite diversion. It
was foreseen that he would take up the pencil and
the engraver's tool at the earliest opportunity of
Instruction, although he was matriculated at Ox
ford for holy orders. His college chum, Burne-
Jones — also intended for the church, but even
then practicing the art by which he was to become
famous — taught him drawing and engraving, and
the two artists were soon considering the advisa
bility of giving up the church and devoting their
lives to art — the one aspiring to be a painter, the
other an architect. To architecture forthwith Mor
ris turned his attention, and while he never worked
professionally as an architect, his studies at this
time were of immense service in clarifying his
thought and concentrating his energies. " Then
and always," remarks Mr. Mackail, " the word
architecture bore an immense, and one might
almost say a transcendental, meaning. Connected
at a thousand points with all the other specific arts
which ministered to It out of a thousand sources.
It was itself the tangible expression of all the
order, the comeliness, the sweetness, nay, even
the mystery and the law, which sustain man's
world and make human life what it is. To him
the house beautiful represented the visible form

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Morris and His Plea. 65
of life Itself Not only as a craftsman and manu
facturer, a worker in dyed stuffs and textiles and
glass, a pattern designer and decorator, but
throughout the whole range of life, he was from
first to last the architect, the mastercraftsman,
whose range of work was so phenomenal, and his
sudden transitions from one to another form of
productive energy so swift and perplexing because,
himself secure In the center, he struck outwards
to any point of the circumference with equal direct
ness, with equal precision, unperplexed by artificial
divisions of art, and untrammeled by any limiting
rules of professional custom." The paper he con
tributed to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
on Amiens Cathedral, one of the noblest tributes
ever paid to the great building, rivaling the best
writings of Ruskin on architecture, is a witness to
the place the subject was holding In his thought
and affections. While In the office of Mr. G. E.
Street, and pursuing his studies in architecture, he
began the practice of more than one handicraft —
clay-modeling, wood and stone carving, manu
script illumination, window-designing and embroi
dery, and these occupations were soon to fill his
days even to the exclusion of painting, which Ros
setti had taught him, and of poetry, which was
his native expression. His hands were. Indeed,

66 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
those of a fine workman — broad, short, muscular,
and finely disciplined, and probably his truest per
sonality was realized In motor activity. The
beginning of Morris's work as a decorator and
manufacturer was due to the trifling circumstance
that certain rooms In Red Lion Square, which he
had engaged for lodging in 1857, were unfurnished
and in need of repair. It Is worth while to look
at this Incident quite closely. Mr. Mackall's
account is sufficiently elaborate : " The arts of
cabinet-making and upholstery had at this time
reached the lowest point to which they had ever
sunk. Ugliness and vulgarity reigned In them
unchecked. While he lived in furnished rooms
it was easy to accept things as they were ; but
now, when furniture had actually to be bought, it
became at once clear that nothing could be had
that was beautiful, or indeed, that was not actually
hideous. Nor was it possible even to get so sim
ple a thing as a table or chair, still less any more
elaborate piece of furniture made at the fiirnish-
ing shops from a better design. It was this state
of things which drove Morris and Webb to take
up the designing and making of objects of com
mon use on their account ; and which led, a few
years later, to the formation of the firm of Morris
and Company. For the moment, however, all that

Morris and His Plea. 67
was possible was that Morris should make rough
drawings of the things he most wanted, and then
get a carpenter In the neighborhood to construct
them from those drawings in plain deal. Thus
the rooms in the Red Lion Square were gradually
provided with 'Intensely mediaeval fixrniture,' as
Rossetti described it, ' tables and chairs like incubl
and succubl.' First came a large, round table 'as
firm and as heavy as a rock'; then some large chairs,
equally firm, and not lightly to be moved, 'such
as Barbarossa might have sat in.' Afterwards a
large settle was designed, with a long seat below,
and above three cupboards with great swing doors.
'There were many scenes with the carpenters,' Sir
Edward Burne-Jones says; 'especially I remember
the night when the settle came home. We were
out when it reached the house, but when we came
in all the passages and the staircase were choked
with vast blocks of timber, and there was a scene.
I think the measurements had perhaps been given
a little wrongly, and that It was bigger altogether
than he had ever meant; but set up It was finally,
and our studio was one-third less in size. Ros
setti came. This was always a terrifying moment
to the very last. He laughed but approved.' Not
only so, but he at once made designs for oil paint
ings to be executed on the panels of the cupboard

68 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
doors, and the sides of the settle. The design for
the central panel. Love between the Sun and the
Moon, was only executed later; but the painting of
the two others was completed during this winter;
and these panels, afterwards removed from the
cupboard, are now known as the Meeting of
Dante and Beatrice in Florence, and their Meet
ing in Paradise. On the backs of two of the
large, heavy chairs he also painted subjects from
Morris's own poems ; these panels, one repre
senting Guendolen in the witch-tower, and the
Prince below kissing her long, golden hair, and
the other the arming of a knight, from the Christ
mas Mystery of ' Sir Galahad,' are also extant.
The theory that furniture should exist to provide
spaces for pictorial decoration was carried in these
chairs to an extreme limit. But the next piece of
furniture required for the rooms was a wardrobe ;
and this, covered by Burne-Jones, in the spring of
1857, with paintings from 'The Prioress's Tale'
In Chaucer, remained to the last the principal
ornament of Morris's drawing-room in London,
and is familiar to all his later as well as his older
friends." This year 1857 was indeed a climacteric year
with Morris. Practicing painting under Rossettl's
direction, experimenting in mural decoration on

Morris and His Plea. 69
the walls of the Oxford Union Society, feeling
his way In various arts and handicrafts, preparing
also " The Defence of Guinevere " for publication,
here was evidence of a splendid general culture,
which, when specialized, was destined to accomplish
grand results. In 1859 and i860 Morris and
Philip Webb, just out of the architect's office,
built the famous Red House In an orchard and
meadow plot near London, carrying out in prac
tice for the first time their theories of domestic
building and decoration. These first steps are so
important that Mackall's account of the house
may be quoted in full : " It was planned as an
L-shaped building, two-storied, with a high-
pitched roof of red tile. The beautiful oak stair
case filled a bold projection In the angle, and cor
ridors ran from It along both the inner walls, so
that the rooms on both limbs of the house faced
outward onto the garden. The two other sides of
this half-quadrangle were masked by rose-trellises,
inclosing a square Inner court, in the middle of
which rose the most striking architectural feature
of the building, a well-house of brickwork and
oak timber, with a steep, conical, tiled roof Ex
ternally the house was plain almost to severity,
and depended for its effect on its solidity and fine
proportion. The decorative features it possessed

70 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
were constructional, not of the nature of applied
ornament : the frankly emphasized relieving arches
over the windows, the deep cornice molding, the
louvre in the high, open roof over the staircase,
and the two spacious recessed porches. Inside, Its
most remarkable feature was the large drawing-
room, which filled the external angle of the L on
the upper floor. It looked by its main end
window northwards toward the road and the
open country, and a projecting oriel on the west
ern side overlooked the long bowling-green, which
ran, encircled with apple-trees, close under the
length of that wing. The decoration ofthe room,
and of the staircase by which it was reached, was
to be the work of several years for Morris and his
friends; and he boldly announced that he meant
to make It the most beautiful room In England.
But through the whole house, inside and out, the
same standard was, so far as possible, to be kept
up. It was at this point that the problem of decora
tion began. The bricklaying and carpentering
could be executed directly from the architect's de
signs. But when the shell ofthe house was com
pleted, and stood clean and bare among the apple-
trees, everything — or nearly everything — that was
to furnish or decorate it had to be likewise de-

Morris and His Plea. 7 1
signed and made. Only in a few isolated cases,
such as Persian carpets and blue china or delft for
vessels of household use, was there anything then
to be bought ready-made that Morris could be
content with In his own house. Not a chair, or
table, or bed; not a cloth or paper-hanging for
the walls ; nor tiles to line fireplaces or passages ;
nor a curtain or a candlestick. These had to be
reinvented, one might almost say, to escape the
flat ugliness of the current article. The great
painted settle from Red Lion Square was taken
and set up in the drawing-room, the top of It be
ing railed in so as to form a small music gallery.
Much of the furniture was designed by Webb and
executed under his eye : the great oak dining-
table, other tables, chairs, cupboards, massive cop
per candlesticks, fire-dogs, and table glass of
extreme beauty. The plastered walls and ceilings
were treated with simple designs In tempera, and
for the hall and main living-rooms a richer and
more elaborate scheme of decoration was designed
and gradually began to be executed. The garden
was planned with the same care and originality as
the house ; in both alike the study of older models
never sank Into mere antiquarianism or imitation
of obsolete forms. Morris's knowledge of archi
tecture was so entirely a part of himself that he

72 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
never seemed to think about it as anything pe
culiar. But in his knowledge of gardening he
did — and did with reason — pride himself It is
very doubtfial whether he was ever seen with a
spade In his hands ; in later years at Kelmscott his
manual work In the garden was almost limited to
clipping yew hedges. But of flowers and vege
tables and fruit-trees he knew all the ways and
capabilities. Red House garden, with its long
grass walks, Its midsummer lilies and autumn sun
flowers. Its wattled rose-trellises inclosing richly
flowered square garden plots, was then as unique
as the house It surrounded. The building had
been planned with such care that hardly a tree in
the orchard had to be cut down ; apples fell in at
the windows as they stood open on hot autumn
nights." Into this house the Morrises moved during the
summer of i860, and after two years of residence
the house was practically completed.
" The garden, skilfully laid out amid the old
orchard, had developed Its full beauty, and the
adornment of the house kept growing into greater
and greater elaboration. A scheme had been de
signed for the mural decoration of the hall, stair
case, and drawing-room, upon various parts of
which work went on intermittently for several

Morris and His Plea. 73
years. The walls of the spacious and finely pro
portioned staircase were to be completely covered
with paintings in tempera of scenes from the War
of Troy, to be designed and executed by Burne-
Jones. Below them on a large wall space in the
hall was to be a great ship carrying the Greek
heroes. It was designed, as the rest of the Troy
series were also to have been, In a frankly mediae
val spirit ; a warship indeed of the fourteenth cen
tury, with the shields of the kings hung over the
bulwarks. Round the drawing-room, at a height
of about five feet from the floor, was to be a con
tinuous belt of pictures, the subjects of which were
scenes from the fifteenth-century English romance
of ' Sir Degrevaunt.' Three of them were exe
cuted by Burne-Jones, and remain onthe walls now.
Below them the wall was to have been covered with
magnificent embroidered hangings. The princi
pal bedroom was hung with Indigo-dyed blue serge
with a pattern of flowers worked on it In bright-
colored wools. For the dining-room embroidered
hangings of a much more elaborate and splendid
nature were designed and partly executed, in a
scheme of design like those of his later tapestries
when he revived the art of tapestry-weaving, of
twelve figures with trees between and above them,
and a belt of flowers running below their feet.

74 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Yet another hanging, executed by Morris with his
own hands, was of green trees with gayly colored
birds among them, and a running scroll em
blazoned with his motto in English, " If I can."
The same motto in French reappeared In the
painted glass with which a number of windows of
the house were gradually filled, and on the tiles
which lined the deep porches. In the hall a
second great cupboard began to be painted with
scenes from the Nlebelungenlled. There were
no paper hangings In the house. The rooms that
had not painted walls were hung with flower-
embroidered cloth worked from his designs by
Mrs. Morris and other needlewomen. Even the
ceilings were decorated with bold, simple patterns
In distemper, the design being pricked Into the
plaster so as to admit of the celling being re-white
washed and the decoration renewed. ' Top thrives
though bandy,' writes Burne-Jones, In February,
1862, 'and is slowly making Red House the
beautlfullest place on earth.' "
Out of the building and furnishing of this house
Morris's work as a manufacturer sprang. He
had felt the joy of workmanship, he had been
made aware of his wonderful faculty of designing,
and he now understood the need by the public of
artistic furnishing. Early in the year 1861 the

Morris and His Plea. y ^
firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company
— made up of seven members — was formed, with
the purpose of designing and manufacturing fine
art fabrics. The circular sent out to the public
announcing the work of the company is one of
the most Important documents in the history of the
modern revival of handicraft. It reads In part as
follows :
" The growth of decorative art In this country,
owing to the efforts of English architects, has now
reached a point at which it seems desirable that
artists of reputation should devote their time to
it. Although, no doubt, particular instances of
success may be cited, still It must be generally felt
that attempts of this kind hitherto have been crude
and fragmentary. Up to this time the want of
that artistic supervision which can alone bring
about harmony between the parts of a successfiil
work has been increased by the necessarily excess
ive outlay, consequent on taking one Individual
artist from his pictorial labors.
" The artists whose names appear above hope
by association to do away with this difficulty.
Having among their number men of varied quali
fications, they will be able to undertake any species
of decoration, mural or otherwise, from pictures,
properly so-called, down to the consideration of

76 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
the smallest work susceptible of art beauty. It is
anticipated that by such co-operation, the largest
amount of what is essentially the artist's work,
along with his constant supervision, will be secured
at the smallest possible expense, while the work
done must necessarily be of a much more com
plete order than If any single artist were Inciden
tally employed in the usual manner.
"These artists having for many years been deeply
attached to the study of the decorative arts of all
times and countries, have felt more than most
people the want of some one place where they
could either obtain or get produced work of a
genuine and beautiful character. They have there
fore now established themselves as a firm for the
production, by themselves and under their super
vision, of:
" I. Mural decoration, either in pictures or In
pattern work, or merely in the arrangement of
colors, as applied to dwelling-houses, churches,
or public buildings.
"II. Carving generally as applied to architecture.
"III. Stained glass, especially with reference to
its harmony with mural decoration.
" IV. Metal work In all its branches. Including
jewelry. "V. Furniture, either depending for its beauty

Morris and His Plea. 77
on its own design, on the application of materials
hitherto overlooked, or on Its conjunction with
figure and pattern painting. Under this head is
included embroidery of all kinds, stamped leather,
and ornamental work in other such materials, be
sides every article necessary for domestic use.
" It Is only requisite to state further that work of
all the above classes will be estimated for, and ex
ecuted In a business-like manner ; and it is believed
that good decoration, involving rather the luxury
of taste than the luxury of costliness, will be found
to be much less expensive than is generally sup
posed." Into the work of this manufactory Morris en
tered with his accustomed energy and sagacity.
He was the practical manager of the firm's busi
ness and did more work himself than all the other
" artists " together. He was equipped for every
craft, even to the stitching of embroidery, and as
the "firm's poet " wrote verses for tile decoration.
The business rapidly developed, the demand for
stained glass windows and embroidered textiles,
owing to the revival of ritualism and Catholicism,
being considerable. One of Faulkner's letters,
written In 1862, gives a pleasant picture of the
inner company of workers, and Indicates also some
thing of the progress of the business the first year:

78 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
" Since Christmas," he wrote, "I have certainly
been busy enough, what between the business of
engineering, and our business In Red Lion Square.
Moreover, Rossetti, with remarkable confidence,
gave me a wood block to engrave, which I, with
marvelous boldness, not to say impudence, under
took to do, and by jingo ! I have done It, and It Is
published, and flattering friends say it is not so
bad a beginning. Our business in the stained
glass and general decoration line flourishes so suc-
cessfixlly that I have decided to give up engineer
ing and take part in it ; so henceforth, or rather
after a week or two, Topsy will give himself more
to the artistic part of the work while I shall be the
business manager. I don't know whether you
have heard of our firm before from me or any one
else. If not, I may just as well tell you that it
is composed of Brown, Rossetti, Jones, Webb,
Marshall, Morris, Faulkner ; that it commenced
with a capital that might be considered an infinites
imal of the second order, that it has meetings
once or twice a fortnight which have rather the
character of a meeting of the ' Jolly Masons ' or
the jolly something elses than of a meeting to dis
cuss business. Beginning at 8 or 9 p. m. they
open with the relation of anecdotes which have
been culled by members of the firm since the last

Morris and His Plea. 79
meeting. This store being exhausted, Topsy and
Brown will perhaps discuss the relative merits of
the art of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
then perhaps after a few more anecdotes business
matters will come up about 10 or 11 o'clock and
be furiously discussed till 12, i, or 2.
" Our firm has arrived at the dignity of exhibi
tion at the great exhibition, where we have al
ready sent some stained glass, and shall shortly
send some furniture, which will doubtless cause
the majority of spectators to admire. The getting
ready of our things first has caused more tribula
tion and swearing to Topsy than three exhibitions
will be worth."
So rapidly indeed did their affairs Increase that
In 1865 the work ofthe firm was carried to larger
quarters in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. Morris
gave up the Red House and came to live in
London, the premises at Queen Square being his
headquarters for seventeen years thereafter. In
1875 the firm was dissolved, and reconstituted,
with Morris as manager and Burne-Jones and
Webb as assistants. Morris Invested all his
means in the business, and depended upon it for
his Income. With greater opportunities, and in
spired with success, he pursued his labors with
unremitting diligence. His restless fingers were

8o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
fairly Itching for work. After 1870 his history
may fairly be divided Into periods, according to
his interest In new crafts. In 1870 he took up the
art of illumination, and executed several painted
books, including the "Rubalyat of Omar," the
"Odes of Horace," and his own "Cupid and
Psyche." The Rubalyat Is thus described by
Mackail : " This manuscript may take rank, by
its elaborate beauty, as one of his chief master
pieces. It was finished on the i6th of October,
1872, after being a year and a half In hand. On
Its tiny scale — twenty-three pages, measuring six
inches by three and a half — it is a volume of im
mense labor and exquisite workmanship. On
eighteen ofthe pages the illumination Is confined
to a central space less than three inches by two,
with a title In gold above each. In that central
space, alongside and between verses, is a running
ornament of flowers and fruits. On the other five
pages the margins are completely filled with flori
ated designs among them, which are minute but
beautifully drawn and colored figures, the lower
half of the last page being also filled by a design
of two figures holding a scroll. The treatment or
the fruit and flower work Is an admirable adapta
tion of an almost pre-Raphaelite naturalism to the
methods and limits of ornamental design."

Morris and His Plea. 8 1
Work In dyeing and weaving soon put a stop to
illuminating. Working over the dye-vat in the
cellar at Queen Square, and at Leek on a larger
scale with Mr. George Wardle, he restored old
and long-lost methods of dyeing. A few excerpts
of his notes give an idea of his occupations In
1875 : " ¦"• shall be glad enough to get back to the
dye-house at Leek to-morrow. I daresay you
will notice how bad my writing is; my hand Is so
shaky with doing journeyman's work the last few
days, delightful work, hard for the body and easy
for the mind. For a great heap of skein-wool has
come for me, and more is coming ; and yesterday
evening we set our blue-vat the last thing before
coming here. I should have liked you to see the
charm work on it; we dyed a lock of wool bright
blue in It, and left the liquor a clear primrose
color, so all will be ready for dyeing to-morrow In
it; though, by the way. If you are a dyer, you
must call it her. Meantime I trust I am taking
in dyeing at every pore — otherwise than by the
skin of my hands, which Is certain. I have found
out and practiced the art of weld-dyeing, the
anclentest of yellow dyes, and the fastest. We
have set a blue-vat for cotton, which I hope will
turn out all right to-morrow morning ; it is nine
feet deep, and holds one thousand gallons; It

82 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
would be a week's talk to tell you all the anxieties
and possibilities connected with this indigo subject,
but you must at least Imagine that all this Is going
on very nearly the same conditions as those of the
shepherd boy that made a watch all by himself."
Having got his dyes right, looms were set up
in the top story of the workshop, and weaving In
silk and wool went on with great energy. On
moving to Hammersmith, In 1 878, a tapestry-room
was built into his bedroom, that he might work at
the first dawn, and the new house was hung with
his own tapestries. By 1880 the carpet and rug
weaving had progressed so successfully that a pub
lic exhibition was held at the salesroom in Oxford
street, the circular announcing that this was " an
attempt to make England Independent ofthe East
for carpets which may claim to be considered
works of art."
"We beheve," the announcement read, "that
the time has come for some one to make that
attempt, unless the civilized world is prepared
to do without the art of carpet-making at its
best ; for it is a lamentable fact that, just when
we of the West are beginning to understand
and admire the art of the East, that art is fading
away, nor in any branch has the deterioration been
more marked than In carpet-making.

Morris and His Plea. 8 3
" All beauty of color has now (and for long) dis
appeared from the manufactures of the Levant —
the once harmonious and lovely Turkey carpets.
The traditions of excellence of the Indian carpets
are only kept up by a few tasteful and energetic
providers in England with infinite trouble and at
a great expense, while the mass of the goods are
already Inferior in many respects to what can be
turned out mechanically from the looms of Glas
gow or Kidderminster.
" As for Persia, the mother of this beautiful art,
nothing could mark the contrast between the past
and the present clearer than the carpets, doubt
less picked for excellence of manufacture, given to
the South Kensington Museum by his majesty
the Shah, compared with the rough work of the
tribes done within the last hundred years, which
the directors of the museum have judiciously hung
near them.
"In short, the art of carpet-making, in common
with the other special arts of the East, is either
dead or dying fast; and it Is clear to every one
that, whatever Is In store for those countries where
it once flourished, they will, in time to come,
receive all influence from, rather than give any
to, the West.
" It seems to us, therefore, that for the future.

84 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
we people of the West must make our own hand
made carpets, if we are to have any worth the
labor and money such things cost ; and that these,
while they should equal the Eastern ones as nearly
as may be In materials and durability, should by
no means Imitate them In design, but show them
selves obviously to be the outcome of modern
and Western ideas, guided by those principles that
underlie all architectural art In common."
This document is especially Important as indi
cating that Morris was not controlled by an un
reasoning medlaevalism, but that he sought out
the lost threads of the various crafts, and wher
ever an art had reached its highest development,
there Morris directed his studies. It happened
that many of the crafts were at their best estate in
certain countries of Europe In the early Middle
Ages, but if Turkey, or Persia, or India, could
furnish a better practical example of any craft,
Morris's " medlaevalism " did not prevent him
from sitting at the feet of these teachers also. It
is clear, too, that he was not a mere copyist of
ancient or foreign excellencies, but that his pur
pose was to discover the principles of a craft by
a study of its best examples, and to work there
from in the modern spirit.
In 1881 occurred the removal of the manufac-

Morris and His Plea. 85
tory to Merton Abbey, a village near the Thames,
some seven miles from Charing Cross. The ad
vantages at this location were far superior to any
they had enjoyed. The capacious sheds of dis
used print-works, with some modification, gave
room for designing, weaving, and cloth-printing.
A living stream furnished water for dyeing. There
was space for gardens. The grounds were free
from noise and dust and distraction. There were
birds' songs and the fiill sunshine. Under these
conditions the work of the firm rapidly developed,
the most important new line undertaken being
the printing of " chintzes." Their new circulars
advertised twelve different kinds of work : painted
glass windows, arras tapestry, carpets, embroidery,
tiles, furniture, general house decoration, printed
cotton goods, paper hangings, figured woven stuffs,
furniture velvets and cloths, and upholstery.
Aside from the continual expansion of the work
already undertaken there is little more to record
on the side of Morris's practical craftsmanship.
He had Initiated a genuine revival of art industry,
and was now Instrumental in forming a school of
designers and makers. And he was still to per
fect himself in the art of printing.
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which
was started in London In 1888, may be taken as

86 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
the type of result springing from the economic
teaching of Ruskin and the example of Morris.
Artists working In the decorative and applied fields
had been pressing for recognition at the doors of
the Royal Academy, but when their claims were re
fused they organized for separate exhibition. Such
an exhibition had been suggested by Ruskin as early
as 1 87 8, and was now carried into effect by the new
group of craftsmen, the most prominent of whom
were Walter Crane, C. R. Ashbee, T. J. Cobden-
Sanderson, and the Morrises, but numbering alto
gether over a hundred. The association was first
known as The Combined Arts, but later, at the
suggestion of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, adopted the
name of Arts and Crafts, as signifying more specifi
cally the union of art and industry, for which the
society stood. The exhibitions of the society have
increased yearly in value and importance, and they
have now become the most conspicuous evidence
of the modern revival of handicraft. The vol
umes of essays upon the crafts which the society
has published contain the most advanced technical
instruction In the applied arts to be found in Eng
lish. The papers by Morris represent his final
thought upon the crafts he practiced, and contain
his last protest against the "reckless waste of
life in the pursuit of the means of life," which the

Morris and His Plea. 87
current system of economy had countenanced.
Walter Crane, acting as spokesman of the society,
expresses his belief that the true root and basis of
all art lies in the handicrafts. " If there is no room
or chance of recognition," he argues, " for really
artistic power and feeling In design and craftsman
ship — if art is not recognized In the humblest
object and material, and felt to be as valuable In
its own way as the more highly rewarded pictorial
skill — the arts cannot be in a sound condition ;
and if artists cease to be found among the crafts,
there Is great danger that they will vanish from
the arts also, and become manufacturers and sales
men Instead."
The last art which Morris essayed to master
was that of printing. His Interest in printing
dates back to 1867, when he attempted to Issue
"The Earthly Paradise" In costly form and failed
from the difficulty of getting satisfactory printing
and illustration. Now that he was writing again,
and his zest for socialism being on the wane, he
wanted to issue " The House of the Wolfings "
and " The Roots of the Mountain " in attractive
typography and took up once more the study of
type and book-making In all Its modes. For a
time his work In connection with the Kelmscott
Press, which was established in 1891, took him

88 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
away from all other crafts. The letter he wanted,
he tells us, was " pure in form ; severe, without
needless excrescences ; solid, without the thicken
ing and thinning of the line which Is the essential
fault of the ordinary modern type, and which
makes it difficult to read ; and not compressed
laterally, as all later type has grown to be, owing
to commercial exigencies." He found the per
fected Roman type in the printing of Nicholas
Jenson, one ofthe Venetian printers of the fifteenth
century, and upon this type he based his own. In
all he constructed three new types. He drew
practically all the letters, stops, initials, borders,
and ornaments which were used in his book-mak
ing. The Press continued for seven years, and In
that time fifty-two works In sixty-six volumes
were Issued. In every respect — as printer, binder,
and publisher — Morris advanced the art and craft
ofthe book. Certainly his great Chaucer, finished
just before his death, after more than three years
of labor, is one of the most notable books of the
world. "At the beginning of 1895," Mackail says,
" Morris was carrying on all his multifarious occu
pations with unimpaired activity. Two presses
were at work upon the Chaucer, and a third on
smaller books. He was designing new paper

Morris and His Plea. 8 9
hangings; he was going on daily with the writing
of new romances ; he was completing, in col
laboration with Mr. Magnusson, the translation
of the "Heimskrlngla," which they had begun
some three and twenty years before, and seeing
it through the press for the Saga library ; and he
was busily increasing the collection of Illuminated
manuscripts, chiefly of the thirteenth and four
teenth centuries, which toward the end of his life
became his chief treasures and gave him extraor
dinary delight."
The socialism that lay at the base of Morris's
handicraft may now be set forth. An implicit
socialism may be understood as always abiding at
the heart of his life. Exclusive and aristocratic
though he was in his early youth, there was ever
the larger sense for unity, and like Ruskin in simi
lar circumstances, he yearned for social contact.
The first manifestation of a community spirit was
at the formation by the young men of Morris's
group at Oxford of the Brotherhood, conceived
in the beginning as a semi-monastic order, devoted
to the higher life, but gradually changing to a
social crusade against the age, with Carlyle and
Ruskin as their accepted leaders. During the
year 1856 the Brotherhood pubhshed the Ox
ford and Cambridge Magazine, which was In-

90 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
tended to be the organ of the new thought.
Ruskin promised something for its columns, but
Morris was the chief contributor and its financial
support. The essays were of a literary and social
nature, but there was little grasp of the realities
of the social problem. When Morris left Ox
ford for the architect's office the magazine lan
guished, and was not issued a second year. The
Oxford Brotherhood came to its real fulfilment
in the business firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulk
ner and Company, which was In a rather vague
way socialistic in Its motive, certainly ideal
in its tendency. The work of the manufac
tory was carried on in protest against the cur
rent economic and business methods of the
day. In the first place, Morris made goods,
not because he wanted to make money, but be
cause he wanted to do the thing he was doing.
He would not waste life in getting the means
for living. He would take pleasure In his work,
and make goods that were serviceable to others.
Above all, he stood for the integrity of work, and
would not himself make a design he could not
execute, or with reference to materials he did not
know. In one of his lectures he drew the pic
ture of an ideal craftsman who should put his
Individual intelligence and enthusiasm into the

Morris and His Plea. 9 1
goods he fashions. " So far from his labor being
divided, which is the technical phrase for his al
ways doing one minute piece of work and never
being allowed to think of any other — so far from
that, he must know all about the ware he is
making and its relation to other wares ; he must
have a natural aptitude for his work so strong
that no education can force him away from his
special bent. He must be allowed to think of
what he Is doing, and to vary his work as the
circumstances of It vary and his own moods. He
must be forever striving to make the piece he is
at work at better than the last. He must refuse,
at anybody's bidding, to turn out, I won't say a
bad, but even an indifferent, piece of work, what
ever the public want, or think they want. He
must have a voice worth listening to In the whole
affair." Until a state of society existed such that
a workman could enjoy the privilege of artistic
work, there could be no permanency in the social
order. For himself, he wanted "money enough
to keep him from fear of want or degradation for
him and his; leisure enough from bread-earning
work to give him time to read and think and con
nect his own life with the life ofthe great world;
work enough and praise of it, and encouragement
enough to make him feel good friends with his

9 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
fellows; and his own due share of art, the chief
part of which will be a dwelling that does not lack
the beauty which Nature would freely allow It, If
our own perversity did not turn Nature out of
doors." Inevitably the work he was doing forced
him to think of the conditions of labor In the
capitalistic regime, yet for twenty years — or from
about i860 to 1880 — he saw no way of effecting
revolution save by example. He was content to
labor In his own field. In his own way, choosing
poetry as one means of expression and craftsman
ship as another. In politics he would be described
as a Liberal, but passive In his attitude. But In
1877 Morris was listening to the call to larger
social service. That year he was instrumental In
forming two social organizations, one the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, out of
his interest In which grew his active instruction in
art, and the other the Eastern Question Associa
tion, a devotion to which led to his militant
socialism. On the fifth of March, 1877, Morris wrote to
the Athensum the following letter :
"My eye just now caught the word 'restoration'
in the morning paper, and on looking closer, I saw
that this time it Is nothing less than the Minster of
Tewksbury that Is to be destroyed by Sir Gilbert

Morris and His Plea. 93
Scott. Is It altogether too late to do something
to save it — It and whatever else of beautiful and
historical is still left us on the sites of the ancient
buildings we were once so famous for? Would it
not be of some use once for all, and with the least
possible delay, to set on foot an association for the
purpose of watching over and protecting these
relics, which, scanty as they are now become, are
still wonderful treasures, all the more priceless In
this age of the world, when the newly invented
study of living history Is the chief joy of so many
of our lives ?
" Your paper has so steadily and courageously
opposed itself to these acts of barbarism which
the modern architect, parson, and squire call
' restoration,' that it would be waste of words
to enlarge here on the ruin that has been wrought
by their hands ; but for the saving of what is left,
I think I may write a word of encouragement, and
say that you by no means stand alone In the mat
ter, and that there are many thoughtful people
who would be glad to sacrifice time, money, and
comfort in defense of those ancient monuments ;
besides, though I admit that the architects are,
with very few exceptions, hopeless, because their
order, habit, and an ignorance yet grosser, bind
them ; still there must be many people whose

94 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
ignorance Is accidental rather than Inveterate,
whose good sense could surely be touched if It
were clearly put to them that they were destroying
what they, or, more surely still, their sons and
sons' sons, would one day fervently long for, and
which no wealth or energy could ever buy again
for them.
"What I wish for, therefore, is that an association
should be set on foot to keep a watch on old mon
uments, to protest against all ' restoration ' that
means more than keeping out wind and weather,
and by all means, literary and other, to awaken a
feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere
ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the
nation's growth and hope."
On the organization of the society Morris was
chosen secretary and so called upon to write Its
statement of principles.
"Within the last fifty years a new interest,
almost like another sense, has arisen in these
ancient monuments of art ; and they have become
the subject of one ofthe most interesting of studies,
and of an enthusiasm, religious, historical, artistic,
which is one of the undoubted gains of our time ;
yet we think that if the present treatment of them
be continued, our descendants will find them use
less for study and chilling for enthusiasm. We

Morris and His Plea. 9 5
think that those last fifty years of knowledge and
attention have done more for their destruction than
all the foregoing centuries of revolution, violence,
and contempt.
" For architecture, long decaying, died out, as a
popular art at least, just as the knowledge of
mediaeval art was born. So that the civilized
world of the nineteenth century has no styles of
its own amidst Its wide knowledge of the styles of
other centuries. From this lack and this gain
arose in men's minds the strange idea of the res
toration of ancient buildings ; and a strange and
most fatal idea, which by Its very name Implies
that it Is possible to strip from a building this,
that, and the other part of Its history — of its life,
that Is — and then to stay the hand at some arbitrary
point, and leave it still historical, living, and even
as it once was.
"In early times this kind of forgery was impos
sible, because knowledge failed the builders, or
perhaps because Instinct held them back. If re
pairs were needed, if ambition or piety pricked on
to change, that change was of necessity wrought
in the unmistakable fashion of the time ; a church
of the eleventh century might be added to or
altered in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth,
fifteenth, sixteenth, or even the seventeenth and

96 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
eighteenth centuries ; but every change, whatever
the history It destroyed, left history In the gap,
and was alive with the spirit of the deeds done
amidst its fashioning. The result of all this was
often a building in which many changes, though
harsh and visible enough, were by their very con
trast Interesting and Instructive, and could by no
possibility mislead. But those who make the
changes wrought in our day under the name of
restoration, while professing to bring back a build
ing to the best time of its history, have no guide
but each his own Individual whim to point
out to them what Is admirable and what con
temptible ; while the very nature of their task
compels them to destroy something, and to sup
ply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders
should or might have done. Moreover, In the
course of this double process of destruction and
addition, the whole surface of the building is
necessarily tampered with, so that the appearance
of antiquity is taken away from such old parts
of the fabric as are left, and there is no laying
to rest in the spectator the suspicion of what
may have been lost ; and in short, a feeble and
lifeless forgery is the final result of all the wasted
labor. "Of all the restorations yet undertaken the worst

Morris and His Plea. 97
have meant the reckless stripping a building of
some of its most Interesting material features ;
while the best have their exact analogy in the
restoration of an old picture, where the partly
perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has
been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand
of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of to-day.
If, for the rest, it may be asked us to specify what
kind or amount of art, style, or other Interest in
a building, make it worth protecting, we answer:
Anything which can be looked on as artistic, pic
turesque, historical, antique, or substantial; any
work, in short, over which educated people would
think It worth while to argue at all.
" It Is for all these buildings, therefore, of all
times and styles, that we plead, and call upon those
who have to deal with them, to put protection in the
place of restoration, to stave off decay by daily
care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof
by such means as are obviously meant for support
or covering, and show no pretense of other art,
and otherwise to resist all tampering with either
the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands ;
and if it has become inconvenient for Its present
use to raise another building rather than alter or
enlarge the old one ; In fine, to treat our ancient
buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created

98 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
by bygone manners, that modern art cannot med
dle with without destroying."
His most active propaganda for this society was
carried on In 1 880, when It was learned that sweep
ing restorations were In progress at St. Marks,
Venice. Morris wrote and spoke unceasingly In
protest against the proposed demolition, the cause
taking him to Oxford to appear there for the first
time in a public capacity. He felt real heart sor
row at the loss that seemed eminent — the loss " of
a work of art, a monument of history, and a piece
of nature." " That the outward aspect of the
world," he reflected sadly, " should grow uglier
day by day in spite of the aspirations of civiliza
tion, nay, partly because of its triumphs, is a
grievous puzzle to some of us who are lacking
in sympathy for those aspirations and triumphs,
artists and craftsmen as we are. So grievous it Is
that sometimes we are tempted to say, ' Let them
make a clean sweep of It all then ; let us forget it
all, and muddle on as best we may, unencum
bered with either history or hope ! ' But such
despair Is, we all know, a treason to the cause of
civilization and the arts, and we do our best to
overcome it, and to strengthen ourselves in the
belief that even a small minority will at last be
listened to, and its reasonable opinions be ac-

Morris and His Plea. 99
cepted." A little later, when he was getting Httle
comfort out of the "Anti-Scrape" endeavor, he
describes the cause as little better than hopeless :
"We have begun too late, and our foes are too
many; videlicet, almost all people, educated and
uneducated. No, as to the buildings themselves,
't is a lost cause ; in fact, the destruction is not far
from being complete already. What people say
to themselves is this : ' I don't like the thing being
done, but I can bear it, maybe — or certainly, when
I come to think of it, and to stir In It is such
obvious suffering ; so I won't stir.' Certainly to
take that trouble In any degree it Is needful that
a man should be touched with a real love of the
earth, a worship of It, no less ; and I think that
as things go, that Is seldom felt except by very
simple people, and by them, as would be likely,
dimly enough. You know the most refined and
cultured people, both those of the old religions
and those of the new, vague ones, have a sort of
Manlchean hatred of the world (I use the word
in its proper sense, the home of man). Such
people must be both the enemies of beauty and
the slaves of necessity, and true It Is that they
lead the world at present, and I believe will do,
till all that is old is gone, and history has become
a book from which the pictures have been torn.

loo The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Now if you ask me why I kick against the pricks
in this matter, all I can say is, first, because I can
not help it, and secondly, because I am encouraged
by a sort of faith that something will come of it,
some kind of culture of which we know nothing
as present."
Notwithstanding his discouragements, Morris
persisted In preaching this lesson of the beauty ot
the earth and of man to the end of his days, and
in his feelings toward the earth and man's historic
monuments we may find the ground of much ot
his soclahsm.
The object of the second organization Morris
was interested In at the beginning of his active
socialism was to prevent the war in the East.
Morris was again chosen to write the manifesto
for the society, and addressing " the workingmen
of England," used these words :
" Workingmen of England, one word of warn
ing yet : I doubt if you know the bitterness of
hatred against freedom and progress that lies at
the heart of the richer classes in this country ;
their newspapers veil It in a kind of decent lan
guage ; but do but hear them talking among
themselves, as I have often done, and I know not
whether scorn or anger would prevail In you at
their folly and insolence. These men cannot

Morris and His Plea. loi
speak of your order, of Its aims, of its leaders,
without a sneer or an insult ; these men, if they
had the power (may England perish rather !), would
thwart your just aspirations, would silence you,
would deliver you bound hand and foot forever
to irresponsible capital. Fellow citizens, look to
It, and if you have any wrongs to be redressed, if
you cherish your most worthy hope of raising
your whole order peacefully and soHdly, if you
thirst for leisure and knowledge. If you long to
lessen these Inequalities which have been our stum
bling block since the beginning of the world, then
cast aside sloth and cry out against an unjust war,
and urge us of the middle classes to do no less."
Before an Exeter Hall audience gathered to
protest against the government, Morris made his
first appearance as a writer of political verse, with
a ballad, entitled "Wake, London Lads," antici
pating there the later " Chants for Socialists."
In 1877 Morris became treasurer of the National
Liberal League, an organization made up of
workingmen in opposition to the Eastern policy
of the government, but when a later election placed
the Liberal party in power, and Morris saw that
hope rested In neither Tory nor Whig, he with
drew from party lines and worked for the actual
reconstruction of society.

I02 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
In December ofthe same year, 1877 — the year
that marks the beginning of Morris's widening
social Interests — he delivered his first lecture on
the decorative arts before the Trades Guild of
Learning, and published Immediately In pamphlet
form, the essay became his first prose contribution
to socialistic literature. This essay (afterward re
printed in the volume entitled " Hopes and Fears
for Art," under the head of " The Lesser Arts ")
contains some pregnant sentences relative to his
social hopes and motives. He was here speaking
to craftsmen, and he addressed them familiarly and
with deep feeling, lamenting the decay of art, but
hoping for its revival again under better social
conditions. The decay of the lesser arts, the arts,
that is, of use, had come about through the with
drawal of the fine artist from the field of handi
craft and his attachment to the leisure classes. As
the arts sundered into the greater and the lesser,
contempt was begotten on one side and ignorance
on the other. The artist left the craftsman with
out hope of elevation ; he himself was left without
the help of Intelligent sympathy. Both classes
have suffered, but the workman more than the
artist. Commerce also has fallen more heavily
upon the craftsman than upon the artist ; he has
been forced into the field of competition, a com-

Morris and His Plea. 103
petition not of excellence, but of cheapness, and
the things he makes are veritably "cheap and
nasty," and as they were without pleasure to the
maker, so they give no pleasure to the user.
" Decoration," Morris said, " is the expression of
man's pleasure In successfiil labor." Its office Is
two-fold : " To give people pleasure In the things
they must perforce use," and " to give people
pleasure In the things they must perforce make."
That his mind was turning to the deeper social
problem and becoming convinced that nothing
less than a revolution in the modes of life was
necessary. Is evidenced by an impassioned passage
in this address : " Sirs, I believe that art has such
sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness,
and reality; so much she sickens under selfishness
and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and
exclusive. I will go further and say that on such
terms I do not wish her to live. I do not want
art for a few, any more than education for a few,
or freedom for a few. No, rather than art should
live this poor, thin life among a few exceptional
men, despising those beneath them for an ignorance
for which they themselves are responsible, for a
brutality that they will not struggle with — rather
than this, I would that the world should Indeed
sweep away all art for a while, as I said before I

1 04 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
thought it possible she might do; rather than the
wheat should rot in the miser's granary, I would
that the earth had It, that it might yet have a
chance to quicken In the dark."
Another address, in 1 881, on "Art and the
Beauty ofthe Earth," is well said to be the "sum
of all his earlier and the germ of all his later doc
trines." With that complete historic knowledge
which characterizes all his writings, he distin
guished between the times that cultivated art and
those that neglected It. In the early Middle Ages,
in the midst of much confusion and barbarism, he
detected the trend of popular art : " Art was no
longer, as in Egypt of olden time, kept rigidly
within certain prescribed bounds that no fancy
might play with, no imagination overpass, lest the
majesty ofthe beautiful symbols might be clouded
and the memory of the awful mysteries they sym
bolized become dim in the hearts of men. Nor
was It any longer as in the Greece of Pericles,
wherein no thought might be expressed that could
not be expressed in perfect form. Art was free.
Whatever a man thought of, that he might bring
to light, by the labor of his hands, to be praised
and wondered at by his fellows. Whatever man
had thought in him of any kind, and skill in him
of any kind to express It, he was deemed good

Morris and His Plea. 105
enough to be used for his own pleasure and the
pleasure of his fellows; in this art nothing and
nobody was wasted." The decay of art began with
the artists of the Renaissance, who lent their ener
gies to the severance of art from the daily life of
men, and left art sterile and life pleasureless. " I
do not mean to say," Morris went on, " that all
the work we do now is done without any pleasure,
but I mean to say that the pleasure is rather that
of conquering a good spell of work — a courageous
and good feeling, certainly — or of bearing up well
under the burden, and seldom, very seldom, comes
to the pitch of compelling the workman, out of
the fullness of his heart, to Impress on the work
Itself the tokens of his manly pleasure. Nor will
our system of organizing the work allow of It. In
most cases there is no sympathy between the de
signer and the man who carries out the design ;
not unseldom the designer also is driven to work
In a mechanical, down-hearted kind of way, and I
don't wonder at it. I know by experience that
the making of design after design, mere diagrams,
mind you, without one's self executing them. Is a
great strain upon the mind. It is necessary, unless
all workmen of all grades are to be permanently
degraded into machines, that the hand should rest
the mind as well as the mind the hand. And I

I o6 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
say that this Is the kind of work which the world
has lost, supplying its place with the work which
is the result of the division of labor. That work,
whatever else it can do, cannot produce art, which
must, as long as the present system lasts, be en
tirely confined to such works as are the work from
beginning to end of one man."
To the same system belongs the machine. It
is possible that nearly everything needed by man
can be made by machinery. " I myself," Morris
said, "have boundless faith In their capacity. I
believe machines can do everything except make
works of art." There Is not, then, in the machine,
any dependency for solace ; the curse will still
cling to labor. Morris's advice to the potters he
was addressing Is eminently sane: "Set yourself
as much as possible against all machine work.
Don't let yourselves be made machines, or it is
all up with you as artists. Though I don't much
love the iron and brass machines, the flesh and
blood ones are more terrible and hopeless to me ;
no man is so clumsy or base a workman that he is
not fit for something better than that."
The second clause in Morris's indictment of his
times referred to the ugliness ofthe environment:
" Of all the things that are likely to give us back
popular art In England, the cleaning of England

Morris and His Plea. 1 07
Is the first and most necessary. Those who are
to make beautiful things must live in a beautiful
place. Some people may be inclined to say, and
I have heard the argument put forward, that the
very opposition between the serenity and purity
of art, and the turmoil and squalor of a great
modern city stimulates the invention of artists,
and produces special life In the art of to-day.
I cannot believe It. It seems to me that at the
best It but stimulates the feverish and dreamy
qualities that throw some artists out of the gen
eral sympathy. I abide by my statement that
those who are to make beautiful things must
live in beautiful places. There is no square mile
of the earth's surface that Is not beautlfial In its
own way If we men will only abstain from will
fully destroying that beauty ; and It is this reason
able share in the beauty of the earth that I claim
as the right of every man who will earn it by
due labor; a decent house with decent surround
ings for every honest and industrious family ; that
is the claim I make of you In the name of art."
By 1 88 1 Morris had fully conceived the na
ture of the " Cause." He felt the discords of his
time; he offered the solution of popular art,
and desired that all men should feel the beauty
of the earth. Examining now the volume entitled

1 08 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
"Hopes and Fears for Art," published in 1882,
in aid of the fund for the Society for the Pro
tection of Ancient Buildings, we will find the
half-dozen maxims that pertain to ideal conduct.
The titles of the essays are " The Lesser Arts,"
" The Art of the People," " The Beauty of Life,"
" Making the Best of It," "The Prospects of Ar
chitecture In Civilization." They were earnest
addresses, delivered probably with a note of sad
ness. His first Insistence was that art is a serious
thing, and not to be dissociated from the weighty
matters that occupy the thoughts of men. " That
the beauty of Hfe Is a thing of no moment," he said,
" I suppose few people would venture to assert,
and yet most civilized people act as if it were
of none, and in so doing are wronging both them
selves and those that are to come after them;
for that beauty, which is what Is meant by art,
using that word In Its widest sense, is, I contend,
no mere accident to human life, which people
can take or leave as they choose, but a positive
necessity of life. If we are to live as nature meant
us to; that Is, unless we are content to be less
than men."
His main maxim concerning labor is worded
thus : " No work which cannot be done with
out pleasure In the doing is worth doing." And

Morris and His Plea. 109
the truth of this was the experience of his own
life. Turning over the opposite maxim that
" No man would work unless he hoped by
working to earn leisure," he thought the hope
of leisure a poor bribe to labor. If labor was un
derstood to be a curse. " I tried to think what
would happen to me If I were forbidden my ordi
nary daily work ; and I knew I should die of de
spair and weariness, unless I could straightway
take to something else which I could make my
daily work ; and it was clear to me that I worked
not In the least in the world for the sake of earn
ing leisure by It, but partly driven by the fear
of starvation or disgrace, and partly, and even
a very great deal, because I love the work itself;
and as for my leisure, well I had to confess that
part of it I do indeed spend as a dog does —
in contemplation, let us say — and like it well
enough; but part of it also I spend in work,
which work gives me just as much pleasure as
my bread-earning work — neither more nor less
— and therefore could be no bribe or hope for
my work-a-day hours." And in another address
he cried out: "If I were to work ten hours
a day at work I despised and hated, I should
spend my leisure I hope in political agitation,
but I fear in drinking." Then again referring to

1 1 o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
the wonderful wares at the Kensington Museum,
he asked : " Do you think the labor of the mak
ers was irksome ? " And then answered : " While
these men were at work, at least, they were not
unhappy, and I suppose they worked most days,
and the most part of the day, as we do." Another
statement of his position is found In " The Art
ofthe People": "That thing which I under
stand by real art is the expression by man
of his pleasure in labor. I do not believe he
can be happy in his labor without expressing
that happiness; and especially Is this so when
he is at work at anything in which he specially
excels. A most kind gift is this of nature, since
all men, nay, it seems all things, too, must labor;
so that not only does the dog take pleasure in
hunting, and the horse in running, and the bird
in flying, but so natural does the Idea seem to
us, that we imagine to ourselves that the earth
and the very elements rejoice In doing their ap
pointed work; and the poets have told us of the
spring meadows smiling, of the exultation of the
fire, of the countless laughter of the sea." His
more analytic statement of the theme occurs in the
essay on "Architecture." He divides work into
three classes: Mechanical, Intelligent, and Imagi
native. The first kind Is done under compul-

Morris and His Plea.

Ill

sion, without thought, and without any Inherent
reward. The second kind Is work that can be
done better or worse, and which if well done
claims attention from the workman, and requires
the impress of his individuality; It is not too
toilsome, and is done with some degree of pleas
ure. The third kind rises above the second in
degree only; It Is altogether Individual, and is
all pleasure. Mechanical toil Is bred of the hurry
and thoughtlessness of a commercial civilization.
Intelligent work is the child of struggling, hope
ful, progressive civilization; Its office Is to add
fresh interest to simple lives, to soothe discon
tent with innocent pleasure — a pleasure fertile
of deeds gainful to mankind. Imaginative work
Is the very blossom of civilization triumphant
and hopeful; It would fain lead men to aspire
towards perfection; each hope that it fulfils gives
birth to yet another hope; It bears in its bosom
the worth and the meaning of life, and the counsel
to strive to understand everything, to fear nothing,
and to hate nothing; in a word. It Is the symbol
and sacrament of the Courage of the World. The
problem of the world Is then to change the lower
form of labor Into the higher, and in the light of
this problem the questions of commerce, machin
ery, and division of labor must be considered.

1 1 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
In this transformation of work and the eleva
tion of Hfe the effect must be universal. Morris
saw concretely what Matthew Arnold stated In
tellectually, that the expansion of humanity must
be a general expansion. " The Individual is re
quired," said Arnold, " under pain of being stunted
and enfeebled in his own development If he dis
obeys, to carry others along with him in his
march towards perfection, to be continually doing
all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of
the human stream sweeping thitherward." Trans
lated Into art terms, and stated negatively, Arnold's
proposition reads in Morris In this wise : " For
whereas all works of craftsmanship were once
beautiful, unwittingly or not, they are now di
vided into two kinds, works of art and non-works
of art. Now nothing made by man's hand can be
Indifferent ; It must be either beautiful and elevat
ing, or ugly and degrading ; and those things that
are without art are so aggressively ; they wound
it by their existence, and they are now so much
in the majority that the works of art we are
obliged to set ourselves to seek for, whereas the
other things are the ordinary companions of our
every-day Hfe ; so that if those who cultivate art
intellectually were inclined never so much to wrap
themselves in their special gifts and their high

Morris and His Plea. 113
cultivation, and so live happily, apart from other
men, and despising them, they could not do so ;
they are as it were living on an enemy's country;
at every turn there is something lying In wait to
offend and vex their nicer sense and educated
eyes ; they must share In the general discomfort
— and I am glad of it." Stated positively and
prophetically, the theory of universality reads
thus : " Of the art that is to come who may
prophesy? But this at least seems to follow from
comparing that past with the confusion In which
we are now struggling and the light that glim
mers through it, that that art will no longer be
an art of Instinct, of ignorance, which is hopeful
to learn and strives to see, since ignorance is now
no longer hopeful. In this and in many other
ways it may differ from the past art, but in one
thing it must needs be like it, it will not be an
esoteric mystery shared by a little band of
superior beings ; it will be no more hierarchical
than the art of past time was, but like It It will be
a gift of the people to the people, a thing which
everybody can understand, and every one sur
round with love; it will be a part of every life,
and a hindrance to none. For this is the essence
of art, and the thing that is eternal to It, whatever
else may be passing and accidental."

1 1 4 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
In the earlier lecture on "Art and the Beauty of
the Earth " this thought receives even fuller state
ment : "If you accept art, it must be part of
your daily lives, and the daily life of every man.
It will be with us wherever we go, in the ancient
city full of traditions of past time, in the newly
cleared farm in America or the colonies, where no
man has dwelt for traditions to gather round him ;
in the quiet country-side as in the busy town, no
place shall be without it. You will have it with
you In your sorrow as in your joy. In your work-
a-day hours as In your leisure. It shall be no
respecter of persons, but be shared by gentle and
simple, learned and unlearned, and be as a lan
guage that all can understand. It will not hinder
any work that Is necessary to the life of man at
the best, but It will destroy all degrading toil, all
enervating luxury, all foppish frivolity. It will
be the deadly foe of Ignorance, dishonesty, and
tyranny, and will foster good-will, fair dealing, and
confidence between man and man. It will teach
you to respect the highest intellect with a manly
reverence, but not to despise any man who does
not pretend to be what he Is not." And then, re
turning as ever to his fundamental thought, Mor
ris concluded the passage : "And that which shall
be the Instrument that it shall work with and the

Morris and His Plea. 115
food that shall nourish it shall be man's pleasure
in his daily labor, the kindest and best gift that
the world has ever had."
For an art which is to be made by the people
and for the people two virtues are necessary :
honesty and simplicity — honesty as opposed to
injustice, and simplicity as opposed to luxury. On
both of these topics Morris has many pregnant
passages. His golden rule of house-furnishing
was, " Have nothing in your houses which you
do not know to be useful or believe to be beauti
ful." He claimed that all art started from this
simplicity, and the greater the art the more notice
able was Its simplicity. But this virtue appealed
to him not merely because simple art was more
beautiful than sumptuous art but because It was
more social. Luxury Is an outgrowth of and is
accompanied by slavery ; it means the piling up
of possessions, the spoil of the earth, and for the
owner a chain of pompous circumstance which
checks and annoys him at every step. " I had
thought," Morris said, " that civilization meant the
attainment of peace and order and freedom, of
good-will between man and man, of the love
of truth, and the hatred of injustice, and by con
sequence the attainment of the good life which
these things breed, a life free from craven fear,

1 1 6 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
but full of incident ; that was what I thought it
meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cush
ions, and more carpets and gas, and more dainty
meat and drink — and therewithal more and sharper
differences between class and class."
Then he thought that if, besides attaining to
simplicity of Hfe, the world attained also to the
love of justice, all things would be ready for the
new springtime of the arts. " For those of us
that are employers of labor, how can we bear to
give any man less money than he can decently
live on, less leisure than his education and self-
respect demand ? Or those of us who are work
men, how can we bear to fail In the contract we
have undertaken, or to make it necessary for a
foreman to go up and down spying out our mean
tricks and evasions ? Or we, the housekeepers, can
we endure to lie about our wares, that we may
shuffle off our losses on to some one else's shoul
ders ? Or we, the public, how can we bear to pay
a price for a piece of goods which will help to
trouble one man, to ruin another, and starve a
third ? Or, still more, I think, how can we bear
to use, how can we enjoy something which has
been a pain and a grief for the maker to make?"
In deeper definition art Is the expression of
reverence for nature. Art is satisfying, and gives

Morris and His Plea. 117
pleasure to the artist because Its activity Is a part
ofthe larger creative activity ofthe universe. In
the truest sense a work of art Is a work also of
nature. Emerson truly said of the Gothic cathe
drals, " These temples grew as grows the grass."
Morris expresses the same sentiment with refer
ence to certain old-time English cottages that
seem to be a part of the familiar nature amid
which they stand ; to one in particular, stand
ing by the roadside on one of the western slopes
of the Cotswold : " And there stands the little
house that was new once, a laborer's cottage built
of the Cotswold limestone, and grown now, walls
and roof, a lovely warm gray, though it was
creamy white in Its earliest day ; no line of it
could ever have marred the Cotswold beauty ;
everything about it is solid and well wrought ; it
is skilfully planned and well proportioned ; there
is a little sharp and delicate carving about its arched
doorway, and every part of it is well cared for ;
'tis in fact, beautiful, a work of art and a piece of
nature — no less."
It is at this point, if anywhere, that Morris's
poetry. Is linked with his socialism ; for his poems
describe the delights of a perfect physical life upon
the earth. His own Impulses, whether as artist
or man, were drawn from nature. Perhaps Whit-

1 1 8 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
man's phrase, " the primal sanities of nature," best
denotes the spirit of his work. " Until," he said,
" our streets are decent and orderly, and our town
gardens break the bricks and mortar every here
and there, and are open to all people ; until our
meadows even near our towns become fair and
sweet, and are unspoiled by patches of hideous
ness ; until we have clear sky above our heads
and green grass beneath our feet ; until the great
drama of the seasons can touch our workmen with
other feelings than the misery of winter and the
weariness of summer ; till all this happens our
museums and art schools will be but the amuse
ments of the rich ; and they will soon cease to be
of any use to them also, unless they make up
their minds that they will do their best to give us
back the fairness of the earth."
Finally he states definitely In this volume what
the " Cause " is for which he strives : " That cause
is the democracy of art, the ennobling of daily and
common work, which will one day put hope and
pleasure In the place of fear and pain, as the forces
which move men to labor and keep the world
a-going." After the pubhcatlon of this volume Morris's
socialism became more and more political and
actively militant. On the sixth of March he gave

Morris and His Plea. 119
an address at Manchester on " Art, Wealth, and
Riches," in which he attacked, though cautiously,
the ground and structure of modern life. And
when the Manchester Guardian asked : " Does
not that raise another question than one of mere
art ?" Morris answered by letter :
"It was the purpose of my lecture to raise
another question than one of art. I specially
wished to point out that the question of popular
art was a social question, involving the happiness
and misery of the greater part of the community.
The absence of popular art from modern times Is
more disquieting and grievous to bear for this rea
son than for any other, that it betokens that fatal
division of men Into the cultivated and the degraded
classes which competitive commerce has bred and
fostered; popular art has no chance of a healthy
life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way
to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and pov
erty. Doubtless many things will go to filling it
up, and if art must be one of those things, let It
go. What business have we with art at all unless
all share it? I am not afraid but that art will rise
from the dead, whatever else lies there. For after
all, what is the true end and aim of all politics and
all commerce ? Is it not to bring about a state of
things in which all men may live at peace and free

I 20 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
from ever-burdensome anxiety, provided with
work which is pleasant to them and produces
results useful to their neighbors ?
"It may well be a burden to the conscience of
an honest man who lives a more manlike life to
think of the Innumerable lives which are spent in
toil unrelieved by hope and uncheered by praise ;
men who might as well, for all the good they are
doing to their neighbors by their work, be turning
a crank with nothing at the end of it ; but this Is
the fate of those who are working at the bidding
of blind, competitive commerce, which still persists
in looking at itself as an end, and not as a means.
"It has been this burden on my conscience, I do
In all sincerity believe, which has urged me on to
speak of popular art in Manchester and elsewhere.
I could never forget that In spite of all drawbacks
my work Is little else than pleasure to me; that
under no conceivable circumstances would I give
it up even If I could. Over and over again have
I asked myself why should not my lot be the
common lot. My work Is simple work enough ;
much of It, nor that the least pleasant, any man
of decent inteUigence could do, if he could but get
to care about the work and its results. Indeed I
have been ashamed when I have thought of the
contrast between my happy working hours and

Morris and His Plea. 1 2 1
the unpraised, unrewarded, monotonous drudgery
which most men are condemned to. Nothing
shall convince me that such labor as this is good
or necessary to civilization."
With his conscience touched, and hoping some
thing practical might be done to relieve the social
situation, Morris gave up his half-hearted political
radicalism and joined the Democratic Federation,
contributing time and money to Its organ. Justice.
He conceived that by state socialism something
of change could be effected, and for several years,
particularly during 1883 and 1884, he gave most
of his time and energy to socialistic propaganda.
And when his friends expostulated that the lec
tures he was delivering, and the leaders and
" Chants for Socialists " he was writing did not
compensate for the poetry he was neglecting, and
that his work as a socialist was less effective and
valuable than his designing and weaving, he an
swered, " I cannot help acting in this matter."
How seriously the times were pressing upon him
is indicated by a letter dated 1883 : "I have long
felt sure that commercialism must be attacked at
the root before we can be on the road for those
improvements In life which I so much desire. A
society which Is founded on the system of com
pelling all well-to-do people to live on making

1 2 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
the greatest possible profit out of the labor of
others must be wrong. For It means the per
petuating the division of society Into civUized and
uncivilized classes. I am far from being an an
archist, but even anarchy is better than this, which
Is In fact anarchy and despotism mixed. If there
is no hope of conquering this — let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die."
At this time Morris was firm in the belief that
the reorganization of society was practicable, and
that if it could be effected the misery of the world
would speedily come to an end. In writing the
manifesto for the Hammersmith branch of the
Democratic Federation, he referred again to the
war between capital and labor, and declared :
" Socialism will end this war by abolishing classes ;
this change will get rid of bad housing, under
feeding, overwork, and ignorance." He believed
this so thoroughly that when the Democratic Fed
eration was disrupted — owing to the bickerings of
members — Morris was prominent in organizing
at once the Socialist League and In conducting
Its paper. The Commonweal. The manifesto of
the new league, dismissing as useless all tempor
ary and partial changes, declared for a complete
revolution in the basis of society. Filled with
loathing at the "cannibalism" of society, Morris

Morris and His Plea. 123
wrote at this time : " One must turn to hope, and
only in one direction do I see it — on the road to
revolution ; everything else is gone now." Yet
after 1886 Morris gradually withdrew from the
more violent members of his party, and announced
that the revolution must come by education :
" Education towards revolution seems to me to
express In three words what our policy should
be." Consequently he took less and less interest
in the active propaganda of the day, and turned
again to literature, publishing, in 1886, "The
Dream of John Ball," socialistic in Its motive, to
be sure, but tempered by reflection and imagina
tion. In 1890 he contributed to successive
numbers of The Commonweal his socialistic
romance, "News from Nowhere," written in
opposition to Bellamy's " Looking Backward."
Morris here proposes a simple, pastoral life,
motived by co-operation in labor. Incentive to
which is pleasure in life itself, as against Bellamy's
complex state socialism, centralization, and ma
chinery. Finally, In 1 890, the affairs of the Social
istic League having gone from bad to worse,
Morris resigned from the organization, making
in The Commonweal, however, before withdrawal,
a final appeal to his associates, summing up the
results of his seven years of public service :

I 24 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
" It Is now seven years since socialism came to
life again in this country. To some the time will
seem long, so many hopes and disappointments as
have been crowded into them. Yet in the history
of a serious movement seven years Is a short time
enough ; and few movements surely have made so
much progress during this time in one way or an
other as socialism has done. For what was It
which we set out to accomplish ? To change the
system of society on which the tremendous fabric
of civilization is founded, and which has been
built up by centuries of conflict with older and
dying systems, and crowned by the victory of
modern civilization over the material surround
ings of life. Could seven years make any visible
Impression on such a tremendous undertaking as
this? " Consider, too, the quality of those who began
and carried on this business of reversing the
basis of modern society ! A few workingmen,
less successful even in the wretched life of labor
than their fellows ; a sprinkling of the intellectual
proletariat, whose keen pushing of socialism must
have seemed pretty certain to extinguish their
limited chances of prosperity ; one or two out
siders in the game political ; a few refugees from
the bureaucratic tyranny of foreign Governments ;

Morris and His Plea. 125
and here and there an unpractical, half-cracked
artist or author.
" Yet such as they were, they are enough to do
something. Through them, though not by
them, the seven years of the new movement
toward freedom have, contrary to all that might
have been expected, impressed the idea of
socialism deeply on the epoch.
" It cannot be said that great, unexpected talent
for administration and conduct of affairs has been
developed amongst us, nor any vast amount of
foresight either. We have been what we seemed
to be (to our friends I hope) — and that was no
great things. We have between us made about
as many mistakes as any other party in a similar
space of time. Quarrels more than enough we
have had ; and sometimes also weak assent for
fear of quarrels to what we did not agree with.
There has been self-seeking amongst us, and vain
glory, and sloth, and rashness ; though there has
been at least courage and devotion also. When
I first joined the movement I hoped that some
worklngman leader, or rather leaders, would turn
up, who would push aside all middle-class help,
and become great historical figures. I might still
hope for that, if it seemed likely to happen, or
indeed I long for it enough ; but to speak plainly

1 26 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
it does not seem so at present. Yet I repeat, In
spite of all drawbacks the impression has been
made, and why ? The reason has been given in
words said before, but which I must needs say
again ; because that seemingly inexpugnable fab
ric of modern society Is verging towards its fall ;
it has done its work, and is going to change into
something else."
Noting then the change In their minds from
dwelling upon ideals and seeking their realization
practically Morris continues :
" There are two tendencies in this matter of
methods ; on the one hand Is our old acquain
tance palliation, elevated now into vastly greater
importance than it used to be, because of the
growing discontent, and the obvious advance of
socialism ; on the other is the method of partial,
necessarily futile, inconsequent revolt, or riot
rather, against the authorities, who are our abso
lute masters, and can easily put it down.
" With both of these methods I disagree ; and
that the more because the palliatives have to be
clamored for, and the riots carried out, by men
who do not know what socialism Is, and have no
Idea what their next step Is to be. If contrary to all
calculation they should happen to be successful.
Therefore, at the best, our masters would be our

Morris and His Plea. 127
masters still, because there would be nothing to
take their place. We are not ready for such a
change as that!
"I have mentioned the two lines on which what
I should call the methods of Impatience profess
to work. Before I write a very few words on
the line of method on which some of us can
work, I will give my views about the present
state of the movement as briefly as I can.
" The whole set opinion amongst those that
are more or less touched by socialism, who are
not definite socialists, is towards the new trades'
unionism and palliation. Men believe that they
can wrest from the capitalists some portion of
their privileged profits, and the masters, to judge
by the recent threats of combination on their
side, believe also that this can be done. That
it could only partially be done, and that the
men could not rest there If it were done, we
socialists know very well, but others do not. I
neither believe In state socialism as desirable in
itself, nor, indeed, as a complete scheme do I
think It possible. Nevertheless, some approach
to it is sure to be tried, and to my mind this will
precede any complete enlightenment on the new
order of things. The success of Mr. Bellamy's
Utopian book, deadly dull as it Is, Is a straw to

128 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
show which way the wind blows. The general
attention paid to our clever friends, the Fabian
lecturers and pamphleteers. Is not altogether
due to their literary ability ; people have really
got their heads turned more or less in their direc
tion. " Now it seems to me that at such a time, when
people are not only discontented, but have really
conceived a hope of bettering the condition of
labor, while at the same time the means towards
their end are doubtful ; or, rather, when they take
the very beginning of the means as an end in it
self — that this time, when people are excited about
socialism, and when many who know nothing
about it think themselves socialists. Is the time of
all others to put forward the simple principles of
socialism, regardless of the policy of the passing
hour. " My readers will understand that in saying this
I am speaking for those who are complete social
ists — or let us call them communists. I say for
us to make socialists Is the business at present,
and at present I do not think we can have any
other useful business. Those who are not really
socialists — who are trades unionists, disturbance-
breeders, or what-not — will do what they are im
pelled to do ; but we need not and cannot heartily

Morris and His Plea. 129
work with them, when we know that their meth
ods are beside the right way.
" Our business, I repeat. Is the making of social
ists., i. e., convincing people that socialism Is good
for them and is possible. When we have enough
people of that way of thinking, they will find out
what action Is necessary for putting their prin
ciples in practice. Therefore, I say, make social
ists. We socialists can be nothing else that is
useful." Soon after withdrawing from the league, Morris
organized the Hammersmith Socialist Society,
with the object of " making socialists " and spread
ing the principles of socialism. The meetings
were held weekly at Morris's house on the Upper
Mall, and by lectures, street-meetings, and publi
cations the work of the society was carried on. Its
"Statement of Principles " reads as follows :
Statement of Principles of the Hammersmith Socialist
Society.
By Socialism, the Hammersmith Socialist So
ciety understands the realization of a condition of
true society, all-embracing and all-sufficing.
It believes that this great change must be
effected by the conscious exertions of those who
have learned to know what socialism is.
This change, it believes, must be an essential

1 30 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
change In the basis of society. The present basis
Is privilege for the few, and consequent servitude
for the many; the future basis will be equality of
condition for all, which we firmly believe to be the
essence of true society.
As soon as any community begins to make
differences in the condition and livelihood of Its
members, according to some imagined standard of
estimation of their qualities, it finds Itself driven
to use a mere arbitrary system for the appor
tioning of responsibilities and rewards, which must
of necessity Injure some for the aggrandizement of
others. But when a society habitually injures any
group of its members. It has become a tyranny;
it has ceased to be a true society, and has lost
its reason for existence.
As Socialists, we say that society is embodied
for two purposes, the increase of wealth by means
of the combination and co-operation of the vary
ing powers and capacities of men, and the equit
able distribution of the wealth so produced ; and
as each man's capacities can be used for the benefit
of the community, and as the needs of all men are
at least similar, we claim the right for every per
son born into society to a full share of the sum
of benefits produced by it ; whosoever is kept out
of this share, whether by force or fraud, is not a
member of society, but has been thrust out of it,
and owes no allegiance to it.
But the society of the present day, that of the
capitalist and wage-earner, of rich and poor, by no

Morris and His Plea. 131
means admits this claim ; on the contrary, the es
sence of it Is the denial of this right and the asser
tion of an arbitrary inequality. It is an exclusive
society, a combination of privileged persons united
for the purpose of excluding the majority of the
population from participation in the wealth which
they, the workers, make. The system whereby
this privilege is sustained is the exclusive owner
ship by the privileged classes ofthe means of pro
duction, that is to say, the land and the tools and
appliances necessary to combined labor, namely,
the factories, machinery, railways, and other means
of transit. The working classes are not allowed
to use these means of production except on the
terms of their giving up everything to the possess
ing classes save the bare necessities of life. These
so-called higher classes, therefore, are enabled to
live upon the labor of the workers, who are thus
deprived of all the advantages gained by an ad
vanced state of civilization. The productivity of
labor has increased enormously within the last four
hundred years, but the working classes have not
shared In the gains of that Increase in power ; all
that they have done is to create a large and pros
perous middle class, which consists in part of
their direct employers, i. e., their masters, and in
part of those who minister to the pleasure and
luxury of those masters.
The workers, therefore, we repeat, are not a
part of capitalist society, since they do not share
in the wealth produced for it ; they are but Its ma-

I 3 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
chinery, and are not protected or sustained by It;
for them it has ceased to be a society, and has
become a tyranny ; and it is a tyranny whose sub
jects are not an Inferior race of feeble and inca
pable persons, but the useful part of the population.
Such a society (so called) dominating popula
tions, the usefiil part of which is outlawed, cannot
be stable; it holds within itself the elements of its
own dissolution ; and it can only go on existing
by the repression by force and fraud of all serious
and truthful thought and all aspirations for better
ment. It is conceivable, though we believe Im
probable, that It may still further degrade the
working-classes till it has crushed all resistance
out of them, and made them slaves more hope
less and more hapless than the world has yet seen.
But the whole evolution of society, and all the
signs of the times bid us hope for a better fate
than this for our epoch. It is becoming clearer
day by day that the thought and the hopes of the
working-classes (who are being gradually educated
into a knowledge of their unworthy position), and
the force lying latent in them for a new order
of things cannot be repressed; that the tyranny
of privilege Is weakening, and that we are within
sight of its overthrow.
It is beyond a doubt that if the workers unite
to claim their heritage, the due membership of so
ciety, the tyranny of privilege must fall before
them, and that true society will rise out of its
ruins.

Morris and His Plea. 133
For here we must say that it Is not the disso
lution of society for which we strive, but Its rein
tegration. The Idea put forward by some who
attack present society, of the complete Indepen
dence of every individual, that Is, of freedom with
out society, is not merely Impossible of realization,
but when looked Into, turns out to be incon
ceivable. As Socialists, It is a true society which we de
sire. Of that true society the workers contain
the genuine elements, although they are outcasts
from the false society of the day, the tyranny
of privilege; and it is their business to show the
privileged that It Is so by constituting themselves
even now, under the present tyranny, into a society
of labor, definitely opposed to the society of privi
lege. Such a society would be able to ameliorate
the lot of the workers by wringing concessions
from the masters, while it was sapping the strong
hold of privilege, the individual ownership of the
means of production, and developing capacity for
administration in its members; so that when the
present system is overthrown they might be able
to carry on the business of the community with
out waste or disaster.
To fiirther this militant society of labor we be
lieve to be the business of all Socialists; but we
would say a word about the part in this business
which we believe should be the special work of the
Hammersmith Socialist Society and others, who
are neither State Socialists nor Anarchists.

134 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
We believe then that it should be our special
aim to make Socialists by putting before people,
and especially the working-classes, the elementary
truths of Socialism ; since we feel sure, in the first
place, that in spite of the stir in the ranks of labor
there are comparatively few who understand what
Socialism Is, or have had opportunities of arguing
on the subject with those who have at least begun
to understand it; and In the second place we are
no less sure that before any definite Socialist action
can be attempted It must be backed up by a great
body of Intelligent opinion — the opinion of a great
mass of people who are already Socialists — people
who know what they want, and are prepared to ac
cept the responsibilities of self-government, which
must form a part of their claims.
It may be, nay, probably will be, necessary that
various crude experiments In the direction of State
Socialism should be tried; but we say if this be
so let them be advocated by those who believe
that they see in them a solution of the social
question, rather than by those who, not so believ
ing, merely wish to use the advocacy of them as
a political expedient for strengthening their po
sition as exponents of Socialism.
On the other hand, we deprecate spasmodic and
desperate acts of violence, which will only increase
the miseries of the poor and the difficulties of So
cialists by alarming the timid, and giving oppor
tunities for repression to the capitalist executive,
and which must of necessity be carried on by men

Morris and His Plea.

35

who know nothing of their position, except that
they are suffering, and who. In consequence, will
yield easily to those who may relieve their suffer
ings temporarily. At the same time, we know
that it may be necessary to incur the penalties
attaching to passive resistance, which Is the true
weapon of the weak and unarmed, and which
embarrasses a tyranny far more than acts of hope
less violence can do, turning the apparent vic
tories of the strong and unjust Into real defeats
for them.
Furthermore, as Socialists, we would remind
our brethren generally that, though we cannot
but sympathize with all struggles of the workers
against their masters, however partial they may
be, however much they may fall short of com
plete and effective combination, yet we cannot
fail to see that of themselves these partial struggles
will lead nowhere; and that this must always be
the case as long as the workers are the wage-
slaves of the employers.
We, therefore, earnestly urge the workers to
lose no time in constituting a general combina
tion of labor, whose object will be the abolition
of privilege by means of obtaining for labor the
complete control of the means of production,
which must be the first step in the realization
of Socialism. With this object steadily in view
such a combination will gain ever fresh advan
tages for the workers; every one of which, be It
remembered, must necessarily be gained at the

1 36 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
expense of the capitalists. It will drive them
from position after position, until at last they will
find themselves burdened with a responsibUity
which carries with it no privilege, and will call
upon the workers to take that responsibUity on
themselves, and themselves carry on the work
of the world.
It is the business of all Socialists to do their
best to bring it about, that in that day the masters
will be addressing men who are willing and able to
accept that responsibUity, because they know that
they, who were once outcasts from society, have
now become society Itself.
In this hope, we appeal to all workers to learn
to understand their true position; to understand
that they have no hope of bettering their con
dition save by general combination; but that,
by means of that general combination, they may
become irresistible; that their demands must then
be yielded to. But unless they know what to
demand they will not be really strong; nay,
without that knowledge, complete combination
is impossible.
You that are not Socialists, therefore learn, and
in learning teach us, that when we know we may
be able to act, and so realize the new order
of things, the beginnings of which we can al
ready see, though we cannot picture to ourselves
its happiness.
December, 1 890.

Morris and His Plea. i^y
During the remaining years of his life Morris
was active In many directions — writing, working,
lecturing, equally Interested in life and in the arts
of life. His last public utterance on a social topic
appeared in the Daily Chronicle, November 9,
1893, with reference to the Miner's Question:
" The first step," he declared, " towards the new
birth of art must be a definite rise in the condi
tion of the workers ; their livelihood must, to say
the least of it, be less niggardly and less precari
ous, and their hours of labor shorter ; and this
improvement must be a general one, and con
firmed against the chances of the market by
legislation." And once more, in 1894, address
ing some art students at Birmingham, he reviewed
his familiar thoughts, affirming that for a new art
Impulse the world must depend upon a love of
nature and admiration for the great architecture
and art of the past, the faithful memorials of
man's history, and offering as his last advice this
thought : " Make yourself sure that you have In
you the essentials of an artist before you study
art as a handicraft by which to earn your bread.
But, again. If you are able to do this, and become
a genuine handicraftsman, I congratulate you on
your position, whatever else may happen to you,
for you then belong to the only group of people

I 38 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
in civilization which Is reaUy happy — persons
whose necessary daily work Is inseparable from
their greatest pleasure." His last words on the
subject of socialism were written to an Amer
ican correspondent who had asked if he had
changed his mind on socialism. He replied, In
January, 1896 : "I have not changed my mind on
socialism. My view on the point of relation
between art and socialism is as follows : Society
(so called) at present is organized entirely for the
benefit of a privileged class; the working-class being
only considered in the arrangement as so much
machinery. This involves perpetual and enor
mous waste, and the organization for the pro
duction of genuine utilities is only a secondary
consideration. This waste lands the whole civil
ized world in a position oi artificial poverty, which
again debars men of all classes from satisfying
their rational desires. Rich men are In slavery
to philistinism, poor men to penury. We can
none of us have what we want, except (partially
only) by making prodigious sacrifices, which very
few men can ever do. Before, therefore, we can so
much as hope for any art, we must be free from
this artificial poverty. When we are thus free,
in my opinion, the natural Instincts of mankind
toward beauty and incident will take their due

Morris and His Plea. 139
place ; we shall want art, and since we shall be
really wealthy, we shall be able to have what
we want."
To the ending of the day of commercial selfish
ness, and to the dawning of the day of peace and
good will, Morris ever looked forward, with the
same feeling as when, in Sigurd, he pictured the
twilight of the old gods and the rising of the sun
of Balder, the Beautiful.
The Sixth Exhibition, in 1899, ofthe London
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was made
notable by a memorial exhibition of works by
William Morris. One room of the new gallery
was devoted to a collection of his more Intimate
and personal work, comprising over one hundred
and fifty of his original drawings for fabrics,
stained glass,'! wall-paper, and printing, and the
products of the Kelmscott Press. To the cata
log of this exhibition Mr. Walter Crane con
tributed a note in memory ofthe former president
of the society, which, as one of the most adequate
estimates made of the great designer, may be
quoted In full:
" Three years have passed since, on the eve of
the opening of our Fifth Exhibition, on October
3d, 1896, WiUiam Morris, our late president, died.
"It seems fitting, therefore, in inaugurating the

140 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Sixth Exhibition of the Society, to offer a word to
the memory of the great designer and craftsman,
poet and social reformer, who has been so potent
an Influence in the movement of revival in the
handicrafts which has characterized the later years
of our century.
"Looking at the evidence of his extraordinary
energy and power of concentration spent upon the
details of so many different crafts, one is struck
no less by the vigor and strength of his work In
each as by the care and taste displayed.
"William Morris's unerring Instinct for deco
rative beauty in surface ornament allowed him to
be exuberant and profuse, rich and intricate, or,
as in the earlier work, frank and simple. One sees
an English taste and reserve united with a luxuriant
and almost Oriental fancy. Yet through them all
one feels the spirit of the romantic and narrative
poet refining and informing every detail, as one
may see the sunlight illuminating the leafy meshes
of a wild wood.
"In the same way, as we wander through the
poet's own garden in 'The Earthly Paradise,' we
feel the spirit of the artist and craftsman dwelling
lovingly upon the beauty of carved pillars and in
laid floors, the wonders of the loom, the vessels of
brass, and of silver and gold, which become parts

Morris and His Plea. 141
of that rich mosaic of romance which he himself
wove In his verse and prose tales, so glowing with
color and pattern as scarcely to need the illumi
nator's gold and blue and scarlet, which again, in
the literal sense, no one knew better how to use
than William Morris.
" Strictly reserved and formalized as his drawing
and designs were, in adaptation to printing and
weaving, his treatment of natural forms shows the
close observer and student of structural line and
form, as well as the artist's delight In them.
" An ardent enthusiast for the character and
beauty of mediaeval art, deeply penetrated with its
spirit, while possessing a profound knowledge of Its
letter, he wrote and designed freely In what some
thought the disguise of a past age, but It was as
an artist, not as an archaeologist, and he was
strengthened In all his work by his knowledge and
love of architecture, by which all the arts are
united. " So that, although we may trace the sources of
his inspiration and the various influences under
which he lived, the total impression of the work
of William Morris, regarded as a whole, is that
of the full and free expression of a powerful per-
sonaHty; and it was by the force of that person
ality that he was able to Inspire and direct others

142 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
with so much success and to leave behind him a
living tradition.
"Again, In his social work. It was his passion for
beauty, and love of a simple and wholesome life,
however refined, which drove him to revolt against
the gloomy conventions, the pretenses, the mean
ness and shabbiness of so much in the aspects of
modern existence.
"Although, with his usual thoroughness and
power of concentration, he pursued the matter to
its roots in the economic system, his artistic in
stincts, as well as his reason and humanity, made
him a socialist; and beyond the din of controversy,
he took care to record his own conception of an
ideal state, in his Utopian romance, ' News from
Nowhere.' "
IV. Ashbee and the Reconstructed Workshop.
The Essex House in London, " A Guild and
School of Handicraft," is another mile-stone on
the road to Industrial freedom — on the testi
mony both of its work and of Its purpose as re
corded In the writings of C. R. Ashbee, the
founder and director of the Essex Guild. Mr.
Ashbee's special plea is for a reconstructed work
shop, a workshop so constituted that it may func
tion at once as the state, the school, and the factory.

The Reconstructed Workshop. 143
Membership In it should constitute citizenship,
apprenticeship In It should afford education, pro
duction In It should provide materials for use and
exchange. In the final essay in Mr. Ashbee's volume en
titled " Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction
and Citizenship" the idealist's gospel of work
and the ideal of citizenship In a workshop are
finely presented. In the matter of production —
what, Mr. Ashbee asks. Is it all for? "This
mere trifle of mine, of what use or beauty may It
be, will It give any one delight ? Maybe not,
maybe it is useless and unlovely, and will give no
man pleasure. What then ? Why just this, we
are brought face to face with the ethics of pro
duction ; the artist producer stands forth. This
trifle of mine Is a mere symbol, the thing Itself Is
empty, vain; its goodness consists in the spirit put
into it, and the doing it ; its creation by us reflects
a greater doing, symbolizes a creation elsewhere.
In which we are sublimely and unconsciously tak
ing part. We talk of a piece of machine-made
work as soulless — what a deal we mean when we
say that ! So let us continue to make our trifles,
remembering always that they are symbols only.
This, If you will, is the Idealist's Gospel of
Work, and the strength of our continuance Is

1 44 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
the measure of our Idealism. Artist and pro
ducer then, have the same ethics, and just as it is
the individual touches of the artist that make the
great work of Art, so it is the little human details
Impressed upon production that give It Interest
or character. This, in our vast mechanical sys
tem of industry and individualism, we have
missed sight of. Individualism has lost us in
dividuality. Individuality has gone out of in
dustry, but it must be brought back again. The
system has destroyed the things created, and in
destroying the productions we destroy the pro
ducers. Lower the standard of the work and
you lower the standard of the man."
But given individualism how shall sovereign
individuals be united in a community ? The
" Workshop " gives the solution to this question
also. " The reconstructed workshop must have an
intimate human relationship for its basis ; here
will be the faith of the little citizen of the future.
So personal is this question, that it seems out of
place in any consideration of the action of men
together for any public purpose. But it is just
because it Is so personal that it Is so important.
As present, where men are bound together in
production, their bond Is one of chance, or of

The Reconstructed Workshop. 145
common enmity to an employer, and they become
friends because they are shopmates. In the re
constructed workshop this will have to be inverted,
and they will become shopmates rather because
they are friends. Here, once again, is the unit ;
we come back to that. It is the unit, the individ
ual, that we have got to touch.
" Somewhat In this way might we state our
behef: " That moment when the hand of my friend
was pressed in mine has expanded over my life,
and become it. The reason why I choose you —
what Is It ? Let us call It a twofold reason. First,
because of the you in you; second, because of the
you in me — the first In your own character and
choosing ; the second, the magnetic force of
which I am the vessel ; the first In your own
making; the second intrusted to me by God. It
is not new in itself; this, the feeling that drew
Jesus to John, or Shakespeare to the youth of
the sonnets, or that inspired the friendships of
Greece, has been with us before, and In the new
citizenship we shall need it again. The Whit-
manic love of comrades Is its modern expression,
democracy — as socially, not politically, conceived
— its basis. The thought as to how much of the
solidarity of labor and the modern trade-union

1 46 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
movement may be due to an unconscious faith
In this principle of comradeship is no idle one.
The freer, more direct, and more genuine rela
tionship between men, which is ImpHed by it,
must be the ultimate basis of the reconstructed
workshop. 'When I touch the human body,'
said Novalls, 'I touch heaven!'
" This relationship — human bond — as distin
guished from the cash or other nexus, we have to
study, to analyze, to find, if possible, the philo
sophic basis of, and we may learn In teaching it. We
have to train ourselves and those we teach to lay
high stakes on new personalities, to strive for infal
libility of decision, and instant decision when a
new personality comes. I look into your eyes,
stranger ; God grant me the power of instantly
telling whether or not you are sent for me. A few
times wrong, and we grow sensitive to right choos
ing; each right choice makes the next more certain.
This magnetism of the human bond, too. Is gen
erative; you light me, and the fire grows within
me ; I spread it, and it grows again, till at last
the whole air in which we move is charged with
It. It runs Into us, and through us, again and
again ; as we receive more we emit more, till our
whole surroundings grow brilliant with light —

The Reconstructed Workshop. 147
that Incomprehensible blue light In the vision of
Heinrich von Ofterdlngen."
From this ideal of citizenship — individuality
on the basis of comradeship — the problem of
education takes on meaning. Throughout his
writings Mr. Ashbee insists upon connecting the
teaching function with the workshop function.
Teaching outside the workshop is too artificial,
too remote from life, too abstract. " Our ideal Is
to create a school whose life shall depend upon
what is the only living thing — the life of work
manship ; a school whose future shall be bound
up with the future of those who labor in it; a
school, therefore, that shall be self-dependent and
supported from within, not from without — the
school of a movement." It is first necessary to
co-ordinate the abstract and the concrete, to graft
the humanistic onto the Industrial. It is seen that
every craft has Its social, historical, literary, artistic,
technical, and scientific aspect. Starting from the
manipulation, say of metals in the workshop, the
lines of interest run out in every direction and
involve scientific and humanistic studies in their
most vital bearings. Then art Instruction must
be transferred from the studio to the workshop.
The studio Is, In its nature, subjective and non-

148 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
social. It fosters selfishness and a kind of refined
sensuality. The workshop in its nature is objec
tive and social. It cultivates the higher socialism.
In the workshop those magnetic affinities that
engender creative impulses spring up between men.
Based on comradeship production is humanized.
In the workshop questions of organization and
division of labor are solved on democratic grounds.
The workshop, constructed on such grounds,
renders schools of design and polytechnic insti
tutions unnecessary. It Is idle to teach design
abstractly as an end in Itself. " Design," says
Mr. Ashbee, " is that element in any art and craft
by which the whole hangs together, first con
structively and then aesthetically." Design, there
fore, must have reference to something — a building,
a table, jewel, lamp, or book. A craftsman learns
design by applying thought to materials. In
polytechnic Institutes Instruction is again given
outside the workshop by teachers who know little
or nothing of practical craftsmanship. Instead
of maintaining an industrial system whereby a few
men become holders of great wealth, a part of
which, forced by public opinion, returns to the
public In the form of endowed technical schools,
the query arises why cannot technical instruction
be conducted within the system, and by the work-

The Reconstructed Workshop. 149
ers themselves ? Some such conclusion as Mr.
Ashbee reaches Is forced upon us. "We must
convert Mr. Pushington's great house Into a sort
of Industrial partnership whose future Is Invested
in Its producers, not its entrepreneurs, and we
must utilize the sum which public opinion extorts
from his munificence, not for the purpose of
swelling big polytechnics, but of teaching in the
workshop." " Suppose," says Mr. Ashbee fur
ther, " Mr. Pushlngton were to keep his ^20,000.
Suppose he were to spend the interest of it upon
the educational development. In artistic matters, of
the employes of Sky Sign & Co. Suppose he
were to build a small hall, with benches, books,
and appliances, useful and Illustrative ofthe trade
of Sky Sign & Co. Suppose he were then to say
to Mr. Pennyworth: Now complete your knowl
edge by a more careful application to the tools
and concrete facts of design ; and to Mr. Trudge,
now come and improve not your technical skill,
but master some of the theory of your trade, and
learn how the whole hangs together. In addition,
suppose he taught In his school the small Penny
worths and the small Trudges the use of the tool
and the use of the pencU alike, and got them in
their boyhood to feel this relation of art to Indus
try; got them to see the charm of a well-lit, well-

150 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
hung haUof art and Industry; got them to feel their
own little relation to Sky Sign & Co., perhaps
even insuring them a footing, after their pupilage
In the school, in the historical house Itself There,
it seems to me, would be a veritable polytechnic,
and a genuine application of art to industry."
The workshop as factory, which shall be also a
training school for citizenship and for occupations.
Is as yet but a vision offered to the future for
realization. The present factory, with Its mon
archic organization. Its commanders and bosses,
its special designers, its divided workers, and as
a whole, its commercial motives, will give way In
time to the guild or small co-operative society,
which shall be integral as to Its work, human as
to its motives, artistic as to its ends. By integral
labor Is meant that the workman must give his
entire energy, physical, moral, and intellectual, to
his work, and that all his faculties must touch his
work at all points. By human motives is meant
that the producers, and not the things produced,
are to be valued and conserved. By artistic ends
is meant that work must constantly tend towards
imaginative production. "Art" Is the "higher
production," differing from " craft," which Is tech
nical production, and from "industry," which is
mechanical production, only in the degree of per-

The Reconstructed Workshop. 151
sonal creativeness involved in the process. Thus
considered, art is the " crown and fulfilment of
noble citizenship," and the ultimate function of
the workshop.
Among the aphorisms offered by Mr. Ashbee
to guide our thinking on workshop reconstruction
appear the following:
" The crown and fulfilment of national life is
a wise understanding and enjoyment of beauty."
" The only hope for the development of the
sense of beauty is among the artificially cultured
class of artists and the artisan ; the one conscious,
the other unconscious."
" Under modern conditions of art, picture-
painting Is forced Into an artificial prominence,
and the constructional and decorative arts, the
real backbone, have as yet no right recognition
among us."
" The problems of machine production wUl have
to be solved within the workshop. A sharp dis
tinction will have to be drawn between what Is pro
duced by machinery and the direct work of man's
hands, and the standard of artistic excellence must
depend ultimately upon the pleasure given, not
to the consumer but to the producer."
"At the present day, the social problem has
prior claim to the artistic."

152 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
The Guild and School of Handicraft, where
these ideas have been demonstrated, was founded
by Mr. Ashbee, in 1880, as the result of a small
Ruskin class conducted at Toynbee Hall. " The
reading of Ruskin," Mr. Ashbee notes, " led to an
experiment of a practical nature, and out of ' Fors
Clavlgera ' and the ' Crown of Wild Olive ' sprang
a small class for the study of design. The class
grew to thirty — some men, some boys — and
then It was felt that design needed application
to give the teaching fulfilment. A piece of prac
tical work, which Involved painting, modeling,
plaster-casting, gilding, and the study of heraldic
forms, gave a stimulus to the corporate action
of the thirty students, and the outcome of their
united work as dilettanti was the desire that per
manence might be given to it by making It work
for life and bread. From this sprang the idea
of the present Guild and School. Very undefined
at first the notion was that a school should be
carried on in connection with a workshop; that
the men In this workshop should be the teachers
in the school, and that the pupils in the school
should be drafted Into the workshop as It grew
In strength and certainty. Wisdom pronounced
the experiment, from a business point of view.

The Reconstructed Workshop. 153
as entirely quixotic, and precedent for it there
was none.
" The little Guild of three members to begin
with, and the larger School of some fifty mem
bers was, however, started in its present form ;
the top floor of a warehouse in Commercial Street
was taken for two years to serve as workshop and
school-room combined; it was polychromatlzed
by the pupils, and the Guild and School celebrated
its Inauguration on June 23, 1888. A kindly pub
lic gave the funds for supporting the School for
two trial years; while the Guild, launching as
an Independent venture, announced its Intention
of taking up three lines of practical work : wood
work, metal-work, and decorative painting, and
intimated the ambitious hope that It would one
day take over the School, for which purpose,
when formulating its constitution. It laid by a first
charge on its profits. The little workship in Com
mercial Street saw many vicissitudes and unex
pected developments. Strange new things had
to be learnt, new conditions and new experi
ences. The introduction among its members
of some of the leading trades -unionist work
men — an Indispensable element In the solving
of an industrial problem — gave to the GuUd

154 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
that peculiar character which has been the prin
cipal reason of its success so far. The marriage
between the stolid, uncompromising, co-operative
force of trades-unionism, and the spirit that makes
for a high standard of excellence In English Art
and Handicraft, has so far proved a fortunate
one; and a younger generation is already begin
ning to tell of a life and tradition of its own.
We look back now with wonder to the circulars
issued in the days of the beginnings, and ask how
far the original intention has been warped, and
changed, and twisted; but the central Ideas have
been always maintained, that the movement shall
be a workman's movement, that It shall be one
for the nobility and advance of English Art and
Handicraft, that it shall be developed not on the
basis of mastership, in the ordinary sense, but
co-operatively as an Industrial partnership, and
that the arts and crafts, united in the Guild,
shall be the children of the mother art of archi
tecture. This is the basis upon which all has
been built up."
The original notice as to the objects of the
Guild and School was as follows : " The Guild
and School of Handicraft has for its object the ap
plication of Art and Industry. It is a Co-operative
Society of Workmen, working out original de-

The Reconstructed Workshop. 155
signs, either of their own or such as may be sub
mitted to them from without. In connection
with, and dependent on it. Is a School of about
one hundred working men and boys. Its effort
is to apply the Guild System of Mediaeval Italy
to modern industrial needs, and to the move
ment for Technical Education."
The Essex House, located on the edge of
Whitechapel, Is now, after many years of experi
ment, a flourishing industrial institution, with the
original principle of co-operation still in force,
and the guild idea fully worked out, though the
Instructional feature Is held in abeyance. To a
question asked If the Guild of Handicraft was
not merely a business enterprise, Mr. Ashbee
gave an answer which Is characteristic of those
who have to do with the new Industrialism. He
said : " This is not the case. There are many of
us In the Guild — I for one — who, if It were a
mere business enterprise, would have no further
interest in it. Mere business we could pursue
more profitably elsewhere, and unencumbered with
altruism. It Is just because of the nature of Its
constitution, and in what It seeks to produce, that
the Guild is a protest against modern business
methods, against the trade point of view, against
the commercial spirit." Then when asked if this

156 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
did not mean the mixing of sentiment with busi
ness, he answered in the affirmative, and retorted:
" The great businesses of England, could their
histories be written, would often be found to have
had In them some other than merely the pecuniary
objective. They are voiceless for the most part
because they have been built up by men that do
not talk. But every now and then we catch a
glimpse of the unexpected workings of these sen
timental considerations. In one of the letters of
the great house of Wedgwood, which old Josiah,
the potter, founded in the middle of the last cen
tury, appears the following, written to Bently on
whom he is urging the partnership : 'You have
taste, the best foundation for our Intended con
cern, and which must be our primum mobile, for
without that, all would stand still, or better it did
so.' And the great house still exists In the Mid
lands, for all the decay and taste that later and
more commercial times may have brought with
them. The point to be noted is that It was a
sentimental consideration that inspired its found
ing, and that the founders knew how to apply the
sentiment. And so I fancy with many of the
great businesses, they would probable be found
to have in them some quality of Idealism however
slight, some sense of a need towards the raising

An Ideal Workshop. 157
of the standard of life, some inspiration of a better
taste, a more useful purpose, however misdirected,
some further object than the mere increase of the
margin of profit, unconscious no doubt, but none
the less present, the '¦primum mobile' in the words
of that old business man and Idealist, which, if
misapplied, would stand condemned as sentiment
in business, but which, if rightly applied, becomes
its justification, its first principle."
From these and other sayings It will appear
that Ashbee continues the traditions of Ruskin
and Morris In attempting to humanize business
and Industry.
V. Rookwood: An Ideal Workshop.
" The social question," said Mr. Ashbee, in his
fifth aphorism, " has prior claim to the artistic."
The world slowly adjusts itself to the truth of
this statement. The question of art is altogether
a question of social reform. Art must grow out
of the life. If the life is not so ordered that art will
appear as Its crown and fulfilment It is Idle to fos
ter and upbuild it. To give it independent devel
opment is to preserve the empty form and overlook
the Informing and vitalizing spirit. Those who
prate most of art are not the true promoters so
much as the thinkers, the social reformers, who

158 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
are trying to reach a status of true liberty, to de
stroy slavery of every kind, to humanize indus
try, and to introduce other motives into production
than the commercial and mechanical ones. Hence
the Arts and Crafts movement, with its principle
of co-operative Individualism, is brought Into har
mony with some of the deepest thought tendencies
of the times ; with such books as George's " Pro
gress and Poverty," Kropotkin's " Farm, Field,
and Factory," Tolstoy's "The Slavery of Our
Times," Edward Carpenter's "Angels' Wings,"
and " Towards Democracy," Whitman's " Leaves
of Grass," Crosby's " Plain Talk in Psalm and
Parable," and the writings of Bolton Hall. For
when the present system is outworn, and a more
just and equal order Is established, the order for
which these writers are laboring. Industry will be
the crown of life, and art the crown of Industry.
Art on any other terms than the contentment of
a well-ordered and consistent life Is undesired and
undesirable. So long as the factory Is organized to the end
of making profits for some owner and director,
an Issue of production in art Is practically Impos
sible. The wage slavery of the factory forbids
art; the machine forbids It; competition forbids
It; the methods of designing and executing by

An Ideal Workshop. 159
division of labor are against It. The factories
that are so constituted that their products rise to
the plane of art may be counted on the fingers
of one hand. These few, conducting business
within the present system, but with higher mo
tives, may be referred to as Indicating also the
tendency toward workshop reconstruction. Chief
among the factories that undertake production
from the instinct for beauty — and which enjoy
also commercial success — may be counted the
Rookwood Pottery at Cincinnati. Instituted as
a private industrial experiment by Mrs. Maria
Longworth Storer In 1880, it has grown in twenty
years to a position of public importance and of
far-reaching influence. The aspects of Its organi
zation and work that bear upon our present theme
may be briefly considered. Three factors evi
dently conspire to make the Rookwood Pottery
what It is — the founder, the workmen, and the
public. The Rookwood Pottery has — so to speak — a
soul. A woman's intelligence and affection went
to its upbuilding. It Is established upon a person.
Upon this fact all other features of the factory de
pend. The motive that controUed the enterprise
from the beginning was the desire to produce a
perfect product. Below this must have been the

i6o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
intention to perform a social service In perfecting
a given product. But perfection is fugitive — how
secure it in a workshop involving many hands
and minds.
Though the management of the business Is
centered in a board of directors, the fullest possible
freedom Is given to the workmen ; they are en
couraged to experiment, to express their own
individuality, and to Increase their culture by
study and travel. The spirit of the factory is
that of co-operation and good fellowship. Mr.
Taylor, the genial director, calls himself " the
arbiter," expecting Initiation from his associates.
From the first the problems have been solved as
they have arisen from the Inside. The factory
consequently has its traditions, and its products
represent organic growth. Its art Is as indigenous
as that of the first potter. The principle of con
struction Is to adjust design sympathetically to
shape and material. No printing-patterns are per
mitted, and no copying or imitation is allowed.
Division of labor is practiced sufficient to Insure
technical skill but not to the extent of destroying
unity of design. This one fact, unity of design,
that for which Rookwood is especially noted, is itself
an evidence of the unity of the workers, their ab
sorption In a common purpose. Let discord enter

An Ideal Workshop. 1 6 1
or dissatisfaction be felt, or let the pride of any
worker assert itself, or the authority of the director
be unduly exercised, and the effect is recorded at
once In the product. The problem of uniting a
workshop of large membership would seem to
be solved here by the cultivation of human sym
pathy — that delicate something that is the source
of all high endeavor.
But the pottery Is not merely a workshop ;
it is In a sense a school of handicraft, an indus
trial art museum, and a social center. The crafts
men, creating and Initiating on their own ground,
constantly improve in skill and character. By the
employment of apprentices the workshop could
be at once transformed Into a school. A portion
of the buUding Is now devoted to exhibition.
By means of lectures, and other entertainments
at the pottery, the public participates in some
degree In the enterprise, and by reaction shapes
the product. Here are all the elements needed
for the Ideal workshop — a self-directing shop,
an Incidental school of craft, and an associative
public. Standing high on the edge of Mt. Adams,
an attractive building in a fair environment — the
buUding an Interesting example of Early English
architecture, with roof of tile and walls of cement
decorated by scratchwork — it is even now a model

1 62 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
factory. Its motive, its management, its prin
ciples of work, its fine artistic production — all
distinguish It from contemporary factories. With
only slight changes, by the development of forces
already Implicit, such a workshop as the re
formers have dreamed of could be here and
now created.
VI. The Development of Industrial
Consciousness.
The Arts and Crafts movement Is the indus
trial phase of the modern evolution of Individu
ality. For several centuries the conditions of life
have tended to produce a general uniformity
of civilization within the bounds of large social
groups. Nations have been unified under the
impulse of a more or less artificial patriotism,
induced largely by the stress of wars which have
been undertaken as a means of self-preservation,
protection, or expansion. Industrial war, con
ducted by means of competition within nations,
and by means of " protection " between nations,
has tended also to solidify more or less arbitrary
groups of industrial agents. From the point
of view of unity, the United States of America,
regarded both politically and industrially. Is cer
tainly a sublime spectacle. And when one con-

Industrial Consciousness. 163
ceives the possibUity of uniting North and South
America, and the Americas with a united Europe,
and of federating eventually the entire world,
the vision Is more than sublime. The time
must come when the earth will be partitioned
and equilibrium established. The necessity for
uniformity will then cease, nationalism will be
come functlonless, and conditions will conduce
to the survival of variations. At the present
time the very fierceness of the struggle for uni
formity compels hypocrisy and false swearing,
and these lead to protest and reaction. Even
while the tendency toward unity Is strongest the
discontent with uniformity is greatest also, and
the more vigorous personalities are withdrawing
from political policies, and religious orthodoxies
and educational and Industrial systems, and are
thinking and acting individually; and strangely
enough the more Individualistic men become the
more universal and genuinely united they find
themselves to be. Philosophic anarchy is. In short,
the virtual belief of some of the most conspicuous
leaders ofthe present day. The tendency toward
uniformity may continue for yet a century, but
even now the thought that will destroy it Is
taking shape. Examine whatever field you wIU,
the signs of transition are made manifest.

1 64 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
The new definitions of art are formulated by
Morris and Tolstoy. Let the terms be noted
and their import fairly considered. " By art I
understand," said Morris, "the pleasure of life."
Such a definition at once universalizes art and
individualizes it. For pleasure Is, or may become,
universal, but when universal it is least uniform.
Let all men share in art; let all, that is, do what
gives them pleasure, or do that which gives pleas
ure to others, and the individuality of the maker
and user Is forthwith outdrawn and exercised.
The uniform machine - made products of the
present day — uniform because impersonal and
for the "average" — are made without pleasure
and produce no pleasure ; they spring from pain,
and If not actively painful to the user, yield but
little satisfaction. The workers are pained be
cause they must subdue themselves to the system,
must hold in abeyance their own affections and
thoughts and imaginings, must become an im
personal machine serving another impersonal ma
chine. The theologians have never imagined
a more painful hell than the actual factories
economists have constructed, wherein a man is
hopelessly engaged in the performance of one
never-ending and abhorrent task. In distribu
tion also the goods thus made are dissevered

Industrial Consciousness. 165
from personality. Of necessity the consolidated
factory, making uniform wares by wholesale, labors
for no one Individual, but for an abstract average
individual — a person who has of course no real
being. When the consumer finds In the goods
he has purchased no real fitness, no response
to his needs, no appeal to memory or associ
ations, no real adjustment between the body and
its garments, he can experience no genuine pleas
ure or rational satisfaction — in most cases the
shoes actually pinch his feet, and the clothes con
strain some part of the body. The fault Is not
with the materials, or with the form — considered
abstractly — and not in workmanship or the style ;
still there Is no pleasure to the user. Unless
goods that are costly, perfect In their work
manship, tasteful In their design, serve an indi
vidual need, they are Inappropriate, and in reality
ugly and painful. If on the other hand the article
evidences the maker's pleasure, his affection for
his work, his play of memory and inteUigence
and faith, or If it Is constructed with reference
to another's need, and represents some claim
of the soul for outer garment; if. In fine, the
work be Individualized, It becomes to that de
gree a work of art, a part of the pleasure of men's
lives, the source of happiness. When once the

1 66 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
habit of pleasurable labor is established, then
it will be possible for all to take a pleasur
able Interest in the details of life, to feel our
selves a part of nature, and thoughtfully and
without distraction note the course of our lives
amidst the events that make up the whole of hu
manity. Then art will be synonymous with life,
and the very activity of life will be an artistic
activity. As life Is now, under the compulsion
of uniformity, it is anxious, inhuman. Inartistic,
empty. It will thus be seen that Morris's defini
tion of art is social In Its bearing. It implies
the modern necessity of building up the orna
mental part of life. Its pleasures of every nature,
on the basis of work undertaken cheerfully, with
the consciousness of helping ourselves and our
fellows. In his volume "What Is Art ? " Tolstoy offers
a definition that accords closely with that of Mor
ris, though perhaps with a wider view of what
constitutes social well-being. Tolstoy's treatment
of the theme is consciously revolutionary. He
abandons the current theories of beauty, the theo
ries that make beauty something " fine," abstract,
exclusive, perceiving that so long as the world
upholds such theories art will tend more and
more to separate itself from life, and lead a poor.

Industrial Consciousness. 167
thin existence with the privileged and esoteric
cults. As a matter of social justice It is neces
sary to re-establish art among the people, and
restore to toil its natural solace. The definition
of art founded upon the current metaphysics of
beauty is a class definition, and Is Intended to
preserve the upper classes in their special privi
leges of culture and " taste." After centuries of
exclusiveness art has become perverted, is devoid
of natural and spontaneous feeling, and Is gen
erally incomprehensible, and In truth "decadent."
To bring art back to the people, and make it
universal In its appeal, we are required to start an
entirely new definition, and to understand art not
as a possession for a select minority, but as a
means toward human perfection and the brotherly
union of mankind. The Inaccuracy of previous
definitions arises from the fact that In them art is
considered as an end in Itself, or as a means of
pleasure to a specially equipped class of persons;
whereas the true view is to consider art as one of
the conditions of human life, a means of intercourse
between man and man. "The activity of art,"
Tolstoy says, " is based on the fact that a man,
receiving through his sense of hearing or sight
another man's expression of feeling. Is capable of
experiencing the emotion which moved the man

1 6 8 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
who expressed it." From this fact the definition
of art is deduced: "Art is a human activity con
sisting in this, that one man consciously, by means
of certain external signs, hands on to others feel
ings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings, and also experience
them." It follows from this that the purpose of
art is to create the sense of kinship: "Art Is a
means of union among men, joining them together
in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life
and progress towards well-being of individuals and
of humanity." The activity of art is, therefore, a
general activity, as widely diffused and as common
as speech itself. Art and speech are indeed the
two organs of human progress ; by speech we
convey thoughts, by art we interchange feelings.
Of course with perverted Ideas of art, and on the
supposition that the art of the upper classes is the
whole of art, it has come about that only a small
fraction of the people of Christendom make any
use of art or even understand it. And this fact
of exclusiveness in art points to a social condition
wherein the masses of the people are in virtual
slavery to the privileged classes.
The question of art becomes then at once a
social question, and Tolstoy, like Morris, requires
a complete revolution of the social system, and an

Industrial Consciousness. 169
entire change In the ideals of life. Consequently
the art of the future will not be a development
of the art of the present; It will not increase by
educating the masses to the standards ofthe classes,
but will rise on wholly new foundations, and require
entirely new modes of perception. The one Indu
bitable indication of real art is its Infectiousness,
and the degree of Infection is the sole measure of
excellence. The degree of Infection depends upon
the greater or less Individuality of the feelings
transmitted, on the greater or less clearness with
which the feeling is transmitted, and on the greater
or less force with which the artist himself feels the
emotions he transmits. The more individual the
feeling, the more strongly does It act on the receiver.
The clearer the expression, the more readily Is it
received by another. And the more sincere the
artist, the more his art springs out of an inner
need for expression, the greater is the sympathy
of the receiver excited for its reception. The
feeling, moreover, must be a common feeling,
which all can share, which must be therefore pro
foundly human, and relate to the growing religious
perception of our time that the well-being of man
kind lies in the growth of brotherhood among all
men, in their living in harmony with one another.
Freed from professionalism and criticism and the

1 70 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
obligation to display technique and to produce
startling and bizarre effects, freed, too, from com
mercialism and unseemly strife, the artist of the
new day will live the common life of man, and
his work will be accessible to all. But in that
time art will be produced by all members of a
community, and will be either a factor in their
daily labor, as Morris desired, or if produced
apart from a vocation, will be In answer to an
irresistible Impulse to create.
Morris's definition of art in terms of pleasure,
and Tolstoy's in terms of Infection, have practi
cally the same ground, and reach essentially the
same conclusion : an art that is common to all, yet
one that admits the freest play of individuality.
Two definitions of education have recently been
enunciated by prominent educators, that repre
sent the advance In educational theory corre
sponding to the stage reached by Morris and
Tolstoy, In their definitions of art, and display like
these the subtle forces in modern life working
for democracy. " Education," said Francis W.
Parker, "Is expression." " Education," says John
Dewey, "Is life." These definitions or descrip
tions of education point to the rejection by mod
ern thinkers of those theories that, like the older
definitions of art, grew up from the social order

Industrial Consciousness. lyi
of feudalism, and maintained the cultural classes
in their positions of privilege. Feudalistic educa
tion had learning for its motive and discipline
for its method. The priestly and noble classes
alone possessed the key of knowledge, the capa
city of translating the symbols of learning, and
imposed upon the world the tyranny of culture.
Secure in their special privileges, these classes
enforced on their underlings the forms of obedi
ence drawn on the model of the military, and by
this means suppressed the disposition on the part
of any one to assert his own nature and live his
own life. In whatever school to-day the stress
of education is placed upon learning and Intel
lectual culture, in the manner and by the discipUne
prescribed by authority, in that place the forces of
an earlier system are surviving. But wherever
the emphasis is withdrawn from teachers and
books and examinations, and placed upon the
child, regarded as a living personality with a char
acter to develop, his ends to seek, and his social
relations to realize, there are the evidences of the
new spirit in education.
Of necessity the new educators, like Morris
and Tolstoy In their spheres, are in the broad
sense of the term socialists, and their hands reach
out not merely to educate the child in terms of

172 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
self-activity, but to shape society so that the newly
formed individuality may not be thwarted and
destroyed by environment. If the man In his
industrial activities Is not permitted to exercise
his individuality. It is folly to educate the child in
freedom. If education be expression, the child's
self-activity cannot stop at the boundary of school
yards. If education is life, then the general life
must be so shaped as to be in itself educative. In
short, the new education, precisely in the way of
the new art, makes culture coincide with life, and
as the new art promises to destroy the profession
alism and commercialism of the special artist, so
the new education will eventually dispense with
school-systems, all external machinery, even with
teachers as they are now known, and will erect
school-houses on an entirely new model — I think
probably a building modeled on the Idea of a
workshop, wherein the life activity of the young
will be developed at the freest yet with the most
intimate relationship with all other social factors.
The subject of manual training will serve as a
text for further discussion of this thought. Man
ual training has come into the schools but recently,
but Its meaning Is rapidly growing in the public
mind. Manual training is, as educators know,
but another name for self-activity. It Is a method

Industrial Consciousness. ly^
of education, and its spirit pertains to every class
room. Though when that is done, the " class,"
with all its traditional methods and meanings,
presently dissolves, and the room itself Is trans
formed Into something new and strange. It Is
this very class-room, with its teacher In authority,
its pupils In intellectual vassalage, its text-books
(another form of authority), its recitations and ex
aminations, its discipline, traditions, and methods,
that manual training — entering secretly and in
disguise by way of a workshop- — has come to
destroy. It has come also to create — to create
self-control, self-activity, sovereign individuality.
Through Its agency education becomes expression,
and tends more and more to become life.
A greater revolution cannot be conceived than
that taking place to-day in the schools. The
movement in education Is one phase of a general
emancipatory movement which has for Its purpose
the complete democratizing of the modern world.
Morris and Tolstoy foretold the democratization
of art, which means the association of art and
life. The new education promises the association
of education and life. In reality art and educa
tion are modes of the same activity, and they
properly coincide in the larger synthesis we call
Hfe.

1 74 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
Considering the converging lines of all these
tendencies, I see no reason why the workshop
will not become at once the school and the fac
tory. But this would mean an Industrial revo
lution. It would mean that the workshop would
aim to minister to the well-being of the workers,
and not merely to make wares for sale. It would
mean that men and women would take pleasure
in their work, that their work was in line with
their Ideals. It would mean that by their work
they would be attached to the past of life, and
be brought into contact with their fellows. But
a humanized workshop has yet to be evolved.
Before industrialism can join with art and edu
cation It must pass through a long evolution, be
disciplined by suffering, and tried by success. It
Is the part of the twentieth century to reconstruct
the workshop, and to train for citizenship in an
industrial Commonwealth.
Industrialism is now at the point of creating
and enforcing its feudal discipline. The French
Revolution marked the end of political feudalism
and the rise of Industrial feudalism — the attain
ment, that Is, of practical political equality and
the first stage of industrial organization. Prac
tically all the Incidents of Western peoples since
the Revolution have had Industrial bearing though

Industrial Consciousness. ly^
generally described in terms of politics. The three
great American wars, though apparently one was
fought for political independence, the second for
political union, and the third for political expan
sion, were in reality Industrial incidents, represent
ing different phases of the establishment of the
industrial regime in the new world. Either through
blindness or policy, the men who formulated the
American governmental papers have written them
in political verbiage, obscuring the real facts of in
dustrial evolution. Meanwhile the farms have been
cleared, mines have been opened, canals and raU
roads have been constructed, engines and ma
chines have been invented, capital has accumulated,
laborers have formed their unions, and the great
Industries are in process of organization. In the
organization of industry the model of pohtical mon
archy has necessarily been followed. Monarchy cir
cumscribed the egotistic claims of Individuals, put
an end to private wars, economized the political
energy of peoples, and afforded the necessary
training ground for the evolution among the
people ofthe consciousness of government. With
out the assumption of a throne by a king, and the
acceptance of these symbols of kingship by a people,
the absorption of the functions of government by
the people could never have taken place. Feder-

1 76 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
allsm was the first step in transition from mon
archy to democracy. The next stage is that of
" anarchism," which, poHtically speaking, means
control of one's self in all matters relating to the
self and to one's fellows. By federal government
the king was rendered impotent; by the exercise
of self-control state and national governments
are rendered unnecessary. In America the stage
of anarchism has been reached by multitudes
of citizens; and legislatures, In so far as they
are merely law-making bodies, have less and less
meaning and function, surviving as the English
throne survives, as the symbol of the past. The
real government in America Is not at Washington
or in any State Capital, but in the minds of the
men and women who dwell within the bounds
of the continent. The evolution of political gov
ernments Is practically finished. Certainly every
person capable of self-rule is granted that privi
lege. There may still be questions arising respect
ing suffrage; the rights of peoples, like the Boers,
to political Independence ; the rights of Island
peoples, like the Philippines, \o autonomy ; the
rights of peoples, like the Chinese, to their ancient
customs; but nevertheless the vital interests ofthe
world are not in these questions. The Boers lose
their independence, the Philippines pass under

Industrial Consciousness. \yy
American wardship, the Chinese suffer the inter
vention of Western powers : a century ago no
one of these Incidents could have happened.
Public opinion almost universally would have
been strong in opposition. That the people who
revere Washington pursued Aguinaldo is a sign
of the passing of political consciousness. In some
way these oppressed peoples are the victims of his
tory ; as those who are called " social degenerates"
from the point of view of a higher civilization are
victims, so to speak, of that civilization ; or as the
South American Republics, in assuming repub
licanism before receiving the discipline necessary
to republics, are a sacrifice, as it were, of Fate.
The new civilization that Is usurping the place
of the legal and political order is Industrial. An
industrial civilization is not a government of laws
but a co-partnership of men. " Industry," said
Frederic Harrison, "Is essentially republican; Its
life is the free co-operation of intelligent masses
of men." It foUows the industrial relationship,
is personal and not legal, even while society is
divided into the classes of the capitalists and the
laborers, the exploiters and the exploited, the
organizers and the organized. In the present
relationship aU the features of feudaUsm are found.
And as the world is only at the beginning of Its

178 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
industrial evolution It is likely that the process
will run parallel at all points with the develop
ment of government. The old domestic system
of industry, which the factory system superseded,
was simply undifferentiated and unorganized indus
try. Corresponding to the political era of petty war
fare was the period of competition. Competition
has been the agent for the selection of the strong
and the elimination of the weak. It has created
" Captains of Industry " on one side, and an army
of workmen reduced to order, and compelled to
service, on the other. Industrial monarchy Is now
forming. The word " king " is constantly used
to describe the great magnates. It will be the
work of the twentieth century to establish the
Industrial king In a commanding position ; his
function will be, of course, not to make laws for
his subjects, but to provide materials and set
the task for labor. The king is necessary for
the development of industrial consciousness.
A college president was quoted not long since
as saying that In twenty years an emperor might
be ruling in Washington. If the function of such
an emperor be pohtical, and he sits at Washington,
he can do no harm. Political machinery is too
cumbersome, too antiquated, for industrial uses.
State socialism, within the boundaries, and accord-

Industrial Consciousness. 179
ing to the fiction of a state. Is forever Impossible.
Industry recognizes no false boundaries. The
king will stand at strategic points, where ma
terials are most accessible and laborers most nu
merous. The " trust " is the type of organization
that will prevail during the period of monarchy.
Already trusts are incorporated with charters,
permitting the conduct of an almost universal
business. The universal trust, of which we have
read in humorous fiction, is a present possibility.
One day the trust of trusts will be formed ; its
president will be at the center of a splendid organ
ization ; without friction or opposition of any
kind he will control the wheels of Industry. With
the perfection of this organization, and the de
velopment In the minds of all of an industrial
consciousness, the end of the monarchical stage
will have been reached ; then will begin the ab
sorption by the workers of the function of the
king, and some form of republicanism will be
inaugurated. "An industrial world," said Fred
eric Harrison, " Is a republican world. And the
republican world is one in which the state be
longs to all, exists for all, and lives by the help
and good-wUl of all." But the final and per
manent stage Is democracy — the stage of Indus
trial freedom and equality. Then once more the

i8o The Arts and Crafts Movement.
individual will rise to his full stature, and the
principles which are now dimly perceived and
vaguely practiced by artists and craftsmen will
be fully operative.
One of the first signs of the development of In
dustrial consciousness was the change In the world's
attitude toward work. In an aristocracy work is
condemned ; education is directed to securing
a personal culture, purely passive In its nature,
which will enable an idle nobility to live con
tentedly in courtly fashion, in romantic war,
in sports, or happily in a palace of art. In Indus
trialism Idleness Is condemned and work is ex
tolled, and the instinct for workmanship overcomes
the leisurlstic habit. In an aristocracy the learned
professions simulate the graces of the nobility ;
in industrialism the professions lose their im
portance, the best minds finding their freest ex
ercise in originating and controlling Industrial
enterprises, or In engaging in some higher form
of craft. At the beginning of the twentieth cen
tury the legitimacy and the necessity of work
are fully recognized. A passage from a recent ad
dress by Bishop Spalding, on " Work and Leisure,"
may illustrate this phase of the theoretical accept
ance of labor :
"Life Is energy," said the Bishop; "we feel

Industrial Consciousness. 1 8 1
ourselves only In doing, and when we inquire
what a man's value Is, we ask what is his per
formance. The deed is the proof of faith, the
test of character, and the standard of worth. To do
nothing is to be nobody, and to have done Is to
have been. True work fixes attention, develops
ability, and enriches life ; It strengthens the mind,
forms the will, and inures to patience and endur
ance. It Is what we do and suffer to overcome
nature's indifference and hostility to man's well-
being and progress ; it Is the means whereby what
is not ourselves is taken hold of and made to do
us service. True work, then, Is furtherance of life,
and it cannot be rightly understood unless it Is
looked at in this light."
Of great significance in this connection is the
appearance of the magazine entitled The World's
Work. Commenting upon American life, the
editor in the first issue reached this generalization :
"In American life, as the century ends, the
keynote is the note of joyful achievement; and
Its faith is an evangelical faith in a democracy that
broadens as fast as social growth Invites. The
republic has been extended, held together, again
extended, and It is still the harbor of refuge and
the beacon of civilization. Its influence has broad
ened the thought of the Old World, and is now

1 8 2 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
felt in the oldest world. It is liberalizing kings
toward their uncrowning, and softening class dis
tinctions, and it is making all artificial authority
obsolete. Its century of action and of social ex
periment has turned all formal philosophies into
curiosities of literature. It has now yielded ma
terial for a new period of constructive thought."
And in defense of the dignity and idealism of
his field the editor made annoucement:
" The higher organization of Industry has for
half a century engaged the kind of minds that
once founded colonies, built cathedrals, led armies,
and practiced statecraft; and to an increasing num
ber, work has become less and less a means of
bread-winning and more and more a form of noble
exercise. The artist always took joy in his work;
it Is the glory of our time that the man of affairs
can find a similar pleasure in his achievements.
"It is with the activities of the newly organized
world, its problems, and even its romance, that
this magazine will earnestly concern itself, trying
to convey the cheerful spirit of men who do
things." The world is nearly ready to accept the truth
of these propositions. But it seems not to be
generally understood that If the kind of mind
that once founded colonies, built cathedrals, and

Industrial Consciousness. 183
practiced statecraft, enter the Industrial field the
conditions of that field are destined to change
according to the standards of the new minds. If
industry is to become a form of noble exercise,
then the essential nobility of life must appear in
that industry. All work is not elevating or con
ducive to pleasure. Again I quote from Bishop
Spalding :
"To know the worth of work we must con
sider, first of all, what is Its effect upon the worker.
If it warp, cripple, and degrade him, it is not true
work, though he should thereby amass vast wealth
or gain great reputation. The work is best which
best helps to make men and women wise and vir
tuous, and that which breeds vice is worst, is little
better than Idleness, which is evil because it breeds
vice. The Bishop then spoke of present economic
and commercial systems as subversive of civiliza
tion. "They sacrifice men to money," he said,
"wisdom and virtue to cheap production and the
amassing of capital." After speaking of the
effects of competition on weaker concerns and
wage-workers, he continued: "On the other
hand, the capitalists, the captains in the armies
of laborers, are, under the present system, driven
like the workmen themselves. The necessity of

184 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
ceaseless vigilance and effort keeps them under
continual strain. Like those they employ, they
become parts of a machine, and therefore, partial
and mechanical men. The sense of inner free
dom dies within them, the source of the purest
joy runs dry, and they are made Incapable of
thinking great thoughts or walking in the light
of high Ideals. They are the victims of their
own success, and having great possessions, are
poor in themselves. The work, then, which we
are doing, and the conditions under which we are
doing it, whether we be rich or poor, are unfavor
able to the best kind of life."
Bishop Spalding then spoke of the wise use
of leisure, saying the theater might be a school
of refinement, but It was not, and that the club
and dinner habits were wrong. Fewer hours of
toil would not benefit if the leisure were spent
in saloons.
But with the absorption of the higher type of
mind In industrial pursuits such conditions are
destined to pass away. Industry will be mor
alized and intellectualized. Already those who
have acquired great wealth by means of the pres
ent system are seeking to know their duty in
regard to that wealth. Humanize the system
still further, and not only the wealth will be mor-

Industrial Consciousness. 185
allzed, but the entire system as well. But the
more hopeful sign of change is taking place In
the workshops outside the system. In these In
dependent workshops the elevation of work is
steadily taking place. If a great poet like Wil
liam Morris can find a more secure satisfaction In
his workshop than in his library, if a large-minded
lawyer like J. Cobden-Sanderson can find a fuller
exercise of his faculties in book-binding than in law-
practice, there must be some exceptional resources
in work as yet quite unsuspected by the majority of
mankind. Infuse these larger minds into indus
trialism, and It will follow that the system will be
purged of many of Its evils, and that work will
change Its character till it yields the highest
pleasure. Two modes of economy are combining to release
for the higher individual work vast numbers of
industrial agents : the machine and the " trust."
The machine is a device for transforming poten
tial or unapplied energy of the universe into
practical energy with the least possible interven
tion of the human hand. The perfect machine
is the automatic machine. Science and invention
promise the construction of machines for certain
purposes so simple and efficient that the human
hand may be whoUy withdrawn from their manip-

1 86 The Arts and Crafts Movement.
ulation. The organization of Industry and the
organization of the organization effect a similar
economy of persons. The great organizer, build
ing with men as the machinist with iron, brings
into being a self-directing, self-supporting system.
Mr. Carnegie is quoted as saying that if all his
money and materials were taken away from him,
he could regain them all If his organization were
left intact. With the further removal of friction
by the co-ordinating of systems by the trust, the
work of the world is conducted with the least pos
sible expense of energy.
Put these facts together and we have, first, the
general tendency on the part 'of all to be active In
some sphere, but this Is met by the opposite ten
dency to eliminate persons from the organized
systems of production. It Is not likely that either
of these tendencies will change ; men and women
will continue to love to work, and the machine
and the trust will but increase their economy.
There is but the one outlet Into the field of Indi
vidual work, the field that affords the greatest
opportunity for free labor, where work Is under
taken as a satisfaction to personality and as a
pleasure. The emancipation of labor Is accomplished by
changing the character of labor. No one desires

Industrial Consciousness. 187
to be free from work, but to be free and self-di
rective in his work. The machine in doing the
drudgery of the world is undoubtedly an instru
ment for the furthering of Industrial liberty.
Voluntary co-operative individualism Is the goal
toward which the whole industrial world Is now
tending.

Appendix I.
A Proposal for a Guild and School of Handicraft.
An address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Industrial Art League at
the Auditorium Hotel, Chicago, November 23, 1901.
James Russell Lowell once said that the ideal school
would be a place where nothing useful should be taught.
The transcendental view of education has long been
abandoned by educators, but the practical view that the
ideal school would be a place where nothing useless
should be taught has not yet come into full acceptance.
The tendency, however, to discard the useless and to
develop the useful is quite marked in recent years, and
it is not impossible that the school I have in mind to
describe, which is essentially a workshop and not simply
a place of instruction, will be the ultimate result of the
modern trend toward the practical. The rapid develop
ment of the manual training school is evidence of the
vitality of this movement.
The industrial factor co-operating also to this end is
known as the Arts and Crafts movement. As the name
given to the new industrialism implies, its supporters
propose the association of art and labor — in which
association, of course, art is to give up something of its
special and " fine " character and become practical, and

190 Appendix I.
labor is to rise above its drudgery and become pleasur
able. By emancipating and individualizing labor it tends
to become artistic. By subduing art and rendering it
useful it tends to become real and vital. By applying
the principles of both art and labor to either an artist
or workman the ideal craftsman is formed — a craftsman
that is a new kind of artist and a new kind of work
man. Such a craftsman satisfies all the life conditions
that economists like Ruskin and Morris demand, and he
is indeed the product of their teaching.
And now the query rises whether, by combining the
new educational tendency and the new industrial ten
dency, a new sort of institution may not be established,
which shall serve the ends of the industrial common
wealth now forming in this country, better than any
existing institution. Might it not be possible to turn
the school into an factual factory, and transform the
factory into a genuine school? Even now some manual
training schools approximate the factory in appearance,
and some factories, with slight modification, could easily
be made into ideal communities, entirely self-subsisting,
in which an individual, while " earning his living," might
also be educated by the self-same work.
Work, when rightly understood, furnishes every neces
sary means for the development of the highest human
life. As practiced at present, work is more frequently
the curse it is popularly supposed to be than the blessing
the moralists affirm. If once it can be made pleasur
able — pleasurable because free, and free because its

Guild and School of Handicraft. 191
prosecution is in the direction of a man's individual
life — this question of the ages is solved.
As yet our civilization seems cumbersome, and costly,
and ill-regulated. A philanthropic proprietor of a factory
devotes a portion of his surplus wealth to building and
endowing a school. Now a little more philanthropy on
the part of the proprietor would save the double expense
of maintaining both a factory and a school. If he were
to realize in the factory itself the full opportunities of
labor, if his men worked with pleasure upon the objects
they desired, inasmuch as their work afforded them the
fullest possible satisfaction, the factory would then be a
school — a ground, that is, for individual growth and
development. That the factory will some day be transformed in the
manner I suggest I do not doubt. For only a few years
has the Gospel of Wealth been preached, and the prin
ciple of trusteeship put into practice by the world's
money -holders. And already streams of wealth are
returning to the people in universities and art institutes
and libraries. When, now, the man of millions, con
vinced also of the Gospel of Labor, recognizes the
opportunities of his factory as he does now of his wealth,
the next step in the socialization of industry will be
taken, and the world will be advanced by that degree.
But meanwhile may not a beginning of such socializa
tion be made, in the construction of an ideal workshop
and the testing of its advantages .''
I wish to propose, then, the establishment of a Guild

192 Appendix I.
and School of Handicraft. For the purpose of this out
line the practical difficulties in the way of building such
an institution may be ignored. I conceive a workshop,
or series of workshops and studios under a single roof,
owned and conducted by the craftsmen themselves — so
owned that the entire returns from the sale of products
accrue to the workers, and so conducted that each crafts
man works individually as a unit, and yet co-operatively
as forming a part of a community or guild. In order
to get the best creative results from a workman it is
essential that he work individually — that is, that while
making goods for sale he exercise his own talent for
designing and organizing materials according to the con
ception and order that are regnant in his own mind.
But in order that the advantages of centralization and
general organization may be claimed, it would be neces
sary for the members of the group to work co-operatively,
according to some principle of government determined
by the guild. Co-operative individualism is the neces
sary working theory of a free workshop.
This one fact almost of itself determines the kind of
work to be undertaken, and the character of the products
that would constitute the commercial output of the guild.
The field would be that indicated by the term Industrial
Arts, or the more popular term, the Arts and Crafts.
The function of the machine is clearly to do most of
the mechanical work of the world, and all its drudgery.
The ideal machine is automatic ; the better and more
perfect the machine, the more able is it to dispense with

Guild and School of Handicraft. 193
an operator. For the present at least the machine is
calculated to do the lower kind of work, and to render
serviceable to the world the less skilful and less intelli
gent workmen. The higher the work, the more of
intelligent design necessary for a product, the greater is
the need for skilled craftsmen to initiate and execute a
given design.
Here, then, is the opportunity of the artist and crafts
man. In the field of the industrial arts the artist-
craftsman will find the fullest scope for his intelligence
and personality. To his surprise Morris discovered that
the crafts offered him more scope for expression than
literature, and Cobden-Sanderson found in bookbinding
that which the lawyer's brief denied him.
The guild may be large or small according to the
circumstances. An experimental guild might be made
up of fifteen master-workmen and their necessary assist
ants ; an architect, decorator, sculptor, wood-worker,
metal-worker, potter, glass-worker, printer, illustrator,
bookbinder, etcher, weaver, embroiderer, leather-worker,
and photographer. A chemist and physicist would be
needed to assist in solving the special industrial problems
connected with the crafts. One such institution, in a
central city, equipped with the best modern appliances,
conducted by skilled artisans, intent upon " making
things," to be sure, and yet working primarily for the
pleasure found in the making — such an institution
might fairly effect a revolution in our conceptions and
methods of work, and incidentally benefit the world

1 94 Appendix I.
by increasing good taste and raising the standard of
living. But I have called the workshop also a school. A
school, indeed, would such a workshop be, not only for
the master-craftsmen engaged in actual production, but
also for their assistants and apprentices, and for the
limited number of special students the shop could ac
commodate ; a school, too, of more genuine character
than the present schools where learning is gained
abstractly and with no definite relation to life. I con
ceive of such a working guild as being the unit of the
social organization that pertains to an industrial com
monwealth. I can foretell that such a workshop would
grow into a kind of industrial " settlement," social in
its motive, co-operative in its method, complete and
self-supporting in its results. The system is capable of
indefinite ramification and expansion, and may indeed
include trades and industries other than artistic. In
fact, this proposal meets that of Mr. Gilman in his
recent volume " Back to the Soil," only I should say,
rather. Back to the Workshop. In general outline, such
is the Arts and Crafts Institute that the new — newer
than the new — education and industrialism demand.

Appendix II.
The Industrial Art League.
(Reprinted from The House Beautiful, February, 1902.)
Industrial art is a name given to a form of art that
is grounded in life and industry, and is distinguished,
therefore, from the " fine " arts, which are leisuristic
in their appeal, represent special status, and require
genius for their development. The term " arts and
crafts " has also come into general use as indicating
the same association of art and labor. When these
two elements — art and labor — come into associa
tion, each loses something of its special character, but
art gains in so far as it is vitalized by use, and labor
gains in that it is refined by beauty and energized by
pleasure. The Industrial Art League was organized in Chicago
in 1899, and was subsequently incorporated as a non-
pecuniary corporation, with the object of promoting
the industrial arts. The convictions which prompted
the organization were that art in a democracy is nat
urally industrial, and that the democratization of art
means the return of art to the people, and the estab
lishment of life upon the basis of art. The ultimate
ground of such an art is pleasure — the pleasure which
19s

196 Appendix II.
springs from free and skilful labor. After various formu
lations the " object " of the league came to be stated in
the articles of incorporation in the following terms :
The league aims: i. To provide workshops and
tools for the use of guilds of artists and craftsmen,
and means for the exhibition and sale of their pro
ducts; 2. To give instruction in the industrial arts;
3. To establish industrial art libraries and museums;
4. By publications and other appropriate means to pro
mote the arts and crafts.
It will be noticed that these four propositions involve
four functions: that of work, instruction, exhibition,
and publication; and that these functions require at
least three separate institutions : workshops in which
manufacture and instruction may be carried on in asso
ciation, exhibition and sales rooms where products from
the workshops may be sold or permanently exhibited,
and special means of spreading and enforcing the doc
trine of work so as to build up a united community
of workers and patrons.
The Industrial Art League is now well established,
with a considerable membership, and a popular and
efficient board of trustees, and the first steps in carry
ing out the original plans have been taken. The officers
for the present year are Frank O. Lowden, president;
Emil G. Hirsch, vice-president; Newton A. Partridge,
treasurer; Oscar L. Triggs, secretary; and E. P. Rosen
thal, manager. The executive committee includes, besides
the president and secretary, Herbert S. Stone, chairman.

The Industrial Art League. igy
Alfred H. Granger, William R. Harper, Marguerite
W. Springer, and Charles F. Browne.
The league, while not conducting any workshop
directly, is giving assistance to several groups of work
ers, and is associated with a number of co-operating
shops. Among these are the Schreiber shop in Long-
wood, and the " Quisisana " shop at La Porte. It is the
intention of the league to build as soon as possible
a central workshop for the accommodation of all the
crafts — a place where work may be conducted with
commercial, artistic, and educational motives — which
shall also serve as a sort of industrial laboratory where
new materials and processes may be experimented with,
and special invention encouraged. So far as practicable,
the eld guild system will be established in workshops.
An exhibition and salesroom is located in Chicago,
at present at 264 Michigan Avenue. Here in a suite
of four rooms are put on sale selected products from
the shops already mentioned, and the work also of indi
viduals. The Atlan Ceramic Club has a very attractive
permanent exhibit. A recent accession is the Herbert
A. Coffeen collection of Indian goods, consisting of blank
ets, baskets, pottery, moccasins, etc., all of genuine native
manufacture, and illustrating one phase of handicraft.
The league does not purchase goods, but simply ex
hibits, receiving a small percentage of sales to cover
expenses. Circulars and pamphlets, special articles on indus
trial themes contributed to magazines, and more com-

198 Appendix II.
prehensive studies in volume form represent the activity
of the league in respect to publication. A course of lec
tures on industrial and social topics is conducted yearly;
this year a course of fourteen lectures is given at
the Fine Arts Building in association with the Illinois
Chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution.
The league is also collecting books for an Industrial
Art Library. This library will be built up on three
lines: It will include : i. Books of general sociological
and industrial import; 2. Books treating technically
of the arts and crafts; 3. Books illustrating the his
tory of printing and book-making.

PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY
AND SONS COMPANY AT THE
LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL.

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