However, it was quite right of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson to extol his own art, and though he seemed often to confuse expressive and impressive modes of beauty, he always spoke with great sincerity.

Next week Mr. Crane delivers the final lecture of this admirable ’Arts and Crafts’ series and, no doubt, he will have much to say on a subject to which he has devoted the whole of his fine artistic life.  For ourselves, we cannot help feeling that in bookbinding art expresses primarily not the feeling of the worker but simply itself, its own beauty, its own wonder.

THE CLOSE OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 30, 1888.)

Mr. Walter Crane, the President of the Society of Arts and Crafts, was greeted last night by such an enormous audience that at one time the honorary secretary became alarmed for the safety of the cartoons, and many people were unable to gain admission at all.  However, order was soon established, and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson stepped up on to the platform and in a few pleasantly sententious phrases introduced Mr. Crane as one who had always been ‘the advocate of great and unpopular causes,’ and the aim of whose art was ‘joy in widest commonalty spread.’  Mr. Crane began his lecture by pointing out that Art had two fields, aspect and adaptation, and that it was primarily with the latter that the designer was concerned, his object being not literal fact but ideal beauty.  With the unstudied and accidental effects of Nature the designer had nothing to do.  He sought for principles and proceeded by geometric plan and abstract line and colour.  Pictorial art is isolated and unrelated, and the frame is the last relic of the old connection between painting and architecture.  But the designer does not desire primarily to produce a picture.  He aims at making a pattern and proceeds by selection; he rejects the ‘hole in the wall’ idea, and will have nothing to do with the ‘false windows of a picture.’

Three things differentiate designs.  First, the spirit of the artist, that mode and manner by which Durer is separated from Flaxman, by which we recognise the soul of a man expressing itself in the form proper to it.  Next comes the constructive idea, the filling of spaces with lovely work.  Last is the material which, be it leather or clay, ivory or wood, often suggests and always controls the pattern.  As for naturalism, we must remember that we see not with our eyes alone but with our whole faculties.  Feeling and thought are part of sight.  Mr. Crane then drew on a blackboard the naturalistic oak-tree of the landscape painter and the decorative oak-tree of the designer.  He showed that each artist is looking for different things, and that the designer always makes appearance subordinate to decorative motive.  He showed also the field daisy as it is in Nature and the same flower treated for panel decoration.  The designer systematises and emphasises,