line of strength and the line of beauty being one.
Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright and

noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and
simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for

your men and women; those are the conditions of a real artistic
movement. For the artist is not concernedprimarily with any

theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness
that should come daily on eye and ear for a beautiful external

world.
But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour

gaudy. For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the
colours that seem about to pass into one another's realm - colour

without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord.
Barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that

desecrate not merely your cities but every rock and river that I
have seen yet in America - all this is not enough. A school of

design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately and
noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the

world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren
whitewashed room and bid them work in that depressing and

colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the American schools
of design, but give them beautiful surroundings. Because you want

to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste in your workman,
he must have always by him and before him specimens of the best

decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him: 'This is
good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many years

ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.' Work
in this spirit and you will be sure to be right. Do not copy it,

but work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom
of imagination. You must teach him colour and design, how all

beautiful colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the
essence of vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful work

of nature like the rose, or any beautiful work of art like an
Eastern carpet - being merely the exquisite gradation of colour,

one tone answering another like the answering chords of a symphony.
Teach him how the true designer is not he who makes the design and

then colours it, but he who designs in colour, creates in colour,
thinks in colour too. Show him how the most gorgeous stained-glass

windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and the most
gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours - the primary colours

in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours
like brilliant jewels set in dusky gold. And then as regards

design, show him how the real designer will take first any given
limited space, little disk of silver, it may be, like a Greek coin,

or wide expanse of fretted ceiling or lordly wall as Tintoret chose
at Venice (it does not matter which), and to this limited space -

the first condition of decoration being the limitation of the size
of the material used - he will give the effect of its being filled

with beautiful decoration, filled with it as a golden cup will be
filled with wine, so complete that you should not be able to take

away anything from it or add anything to it. For from a good piece
of design you can take away nothing, nor can you add anything to

it, each little bit of design being as absolutely necessary and as
vitally important to the whole effect as a note or chord of music

is for a sonata of Beethoven.
But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this, again,

is of the essence of good design. With a simple spray of leaves
and a bird in flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression

that he has completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or
lacquer cabinet at which he is working, merely because he knows the

exact spot in which to place them. All good design depends on the
texture of the utensil used and the use you wish to put it to. One

of the first things I saw in an American school of design was a
young lady painting a romanticmoonlightlandscape on a large round

dish, and another young lady covering a set of dinner plates with a
series of sunsets of the most remarkable colours. Let your ladies

paint moonlightlandscapes and sunsets, but do not let them paint
them on dinner plates or dishes. Let them take canvas or paper for

such work, but not clay or china. They are merely painting the
wrong subjects on the wrong material, that is all. They have not

been taught that every material and texture has certain qualities
of its own. The design suitable for one is quite wrong for the

other, just as the design which you should work on a flat table-
cover ought to be quite different from the design you would work on

a curtain, for the one will always be straight, the other broken
into folds; and the use too one puts the object to should guide one

in the choice of design. One does not want to eat one's terrapins
off a romanticmoonlight nor one's clams off a harrowing sunset.

Glory of sun and moon, let them be wrought for us by our landscape
artist and be on the walls of the rooms we sit in to remind us of

the undying beauty of the sunsets that fade and die, but do not let
us eat our soup off them and send them down to the kitchen twice a

day to be washed and scrubbed by the handmaid.
All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten.

Your school of design here will teach your girls and your boys,
your handicraftsmen of the future (for all your schools of art

should be local schools, the schools of particular cities). We
talk of the Italian school of painting, but there is no Italian

school; there were the schools of each city. Every town in Italy,
from Venice itself, queen of the sea, to the little hill fortress

of Perugia, each had its own school of art, each different and all
beautiful.

So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having, but
make by the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for the joy of

your own citizens, for you have here the primary elements of a
great artisticmovement.

For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people
imagine. For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy

atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the
smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and

from factory chimney. You must have strong, sane, healthy physique
among your men and women. Sickly or idle or melancholy people do

not do much in art. And lastly, you require a sense of
individualism about each man and woman, for this is the essence of

art - a desire on the part of man to express himself in the noblest
way possible. And this is the reason that the grandest art of the

world always came from a republic: Athens, Venice, and Florence -
there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and simple

as sincere. But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of
kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France

under the GRAND MONARQUE, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy
gilt furniture writhing under a sense of its own horror and

ugliness, with a nymph smirking at every angle and a dragon
mouthing on every claw. Unreal and monstrous art this, and fit

only for such periwigged pomposities as the nobility of France at
that time, but not at all fit for you or me. We do not want the

rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create more
beautiful things; for ever man is poor who cannot create. Nor

shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by
a slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to

adorn or to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be
the noble and beautiful expression of a people's noble and

beautiful life. Art shall be again the most glorious of all the
chords through which the spirit of a great nation finds its noblest

utterance.
All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great artistic

movement for every great art. Let us think of one of them; a
sculptor, for instance.

If a modern sculptor were to come and say, 'Very well, but where
can one find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats

and chimney-pot hats?' I would tell him to go to the docks of a
great city and watch the men loading or unloading the stately

ships, working at wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I
have never watched a man do anything useful who has not been