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 romantic moonlight landscape 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 moonlight landscapes 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 romantic moonlight 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.