since, most unhappily as I think, these master-arts, these arts more
specially of the intellect, are at the present day divorced from
decoration in its narrower sense. Our subject is that great body of
art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to
beautify the familiar matters of everyday life: a wide subject, a
great industry; both a great part of the history of the world, and a
most helpful instrument to the study of that history.

A very great industry indeed, comprising the crafts of house-
building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths' work, pottery and
glass-making, weaving, and many others: a body of art most
important to the public in general, but still more so to us
handicraftsmen; since there is scarce anything that they use, and
that we fashion, but it has always been thought to be unfinished
till it has had some touch or other of decoration about it. True it
is that in many or most cases we have got so used to this ornament,
that we look upon it as if it had grown of itself, and note it no
more than the mosses on the dry sticks with which we light our
fires. So much the worse! for there IS the decoration, or some
pretence of it, and it has, or ought to have, a use and a meaning.
For, and this is at the root of the whole matter, everything made by
man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly;
beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it
is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be
indifferent: we, for our parts, are busy or sluggish, eager or
unhappy, and our eyes are apt to get dulled to this eventfulness of
form in those things which we are always looking at. Now it is one
of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with
nature, that it has to sharpen our dulled senses in this matter:
for this end are those wonders of intricate patterns interwoven,