When I appeared before you on a previous occasion, I had seen nothing of American art save the Doric columns and Corinthian chimney-pots visible on your Broadway and Fifth Avenue.  Since then, I have been through your country to some fifty or sixty different cities, I think.  I find that what your people need is not so much high imaginative art but that which hallows the vessels of everyday use.  I suppose that the poet will sing and the artist will paint regardless whether the world praises or blames.  He has his own world and is independent of his fellow-men.  But the handicraftsman is dependent on your pleasure and opinion.  He needs your encouragement and he must have beautiful surroundings.  Your people love art but do not sufficiently honour the handicraftsman.  Of course, those millionaires who can pillage Europe for their pleasure need have no care to encourage such; but I speak for those whose desire for beautiful things is larger than their means.  I find that one great trouble all over is that your workmen are not given to noble designs.  You cannot be indifferent to this, because Art is not something which you can take or leave.  It is a necessity of human life.

And what is the meaning of this beautiful decoration which we call art?  In the first place, it means value to the workman and it means the pleasure which he must necessarily take in making a beautiful thing.  The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.  I cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational designs are necessary in all work.  I did not imagine, until I went into some of your simpler cities, that there was so much bad work done.  I found, where I went, bad wall-papers horribly designed, and coloured carpets, and that old offender the horse-hair sofa, whose stolid look of indifference is always so depressing.  I found meaningless chandeliers and machine-made furniture, generally of rosewood, which creaked dismally under the weight of the ubiquitous interviewer.  I came across the small iron stove which they always persist in decorating with machine-made ornaments, and which is as great a bore as a wet day or any other particularly dreadful institution.  When unusual extravagance was indulged in, it was garnished with two funeral urns.

It must always be remembered that what is well and carefully made by an honest workman, after a rational design, increases in beauty and value as the years go on.  The old furniture brought over by the Pilgrims, two hundred years ago, which I saw in New England, is just as good and as beautiful today as it was when it first came here.  Now, what you must do is to bring artists and handicraftsmen together.  Handicraftsmen cannot live, certainly cannot thrive, without such companionship.  Separate these two and you rob art of all spiritual motive.