working helplessly among the crowd of those who are ridiculously
called manufacturers, i.e. handicraftsmen, though the more part of
them never did a stroke of hand-work in their lives, and are nothing
better than capitalists and salesmen. What can these grains of sand
do, I say, amidst the enormous mass of work turned out every year
which professes in some way to be decorative art, but the decoration
of which no one heeds except the salesmen who have to do with it,
and are hard put to it to supply the cravings of the public for
something new, not for something pretty?

The remedy, I repeat, is plain if it can be applied; the
handicraftsman, left behind by the artist when the arts sundered,
must come up with him, must work side by side with him: apart from
the difference between a great master and a scholar, apart from the
differences of the natural bent of men's minds, which would make one
man an imitative, and another an architectural or decorative artist,
there should be no difference between those employed on strictly
ornamental work; and the body of artists dealing with this should
quicken with their art all makers of things into artists also, in
proportion to the necessities and uses of the things they would
make.

I know what stupendous difficulties, social and economical, there
are in the way of this; yet I think that they seem to be greater
than they are: and of one thing I am sure, that no real living
decorative art is possible if this is impossible.

It is not impossible, on the contrary it is certain to come about,
if you are at heart desirous to quicken the arts; if the world will,
for the sake of beauty and decency, sacrifice some of the things it