chooses and rejects, and decorative work bears the same relation to naturalistic presentation that the imaginative language of the poetic drama bears to the language of real life.  The decorative capabilities of the square and the circle were then shown on the board, and much was said about symmetry, alternation and radiation, which last principle Mr. Crane described as ’the Home Rule of design, the perfection of local self-government,’ and which, he pointed out, was essentially organic, manifesting itself in the bird’s wing as well as in the Tudor vaulting of Gothic architecture.  Mr. Crane then passed to the human figure, ’that expressive unit of design,’ which contains all the principles of decoration, and exhibited a design of a nude figure with an axe couched in an architectural spandrel, a figure which he was careful to explain was, in spite of the axe, not that of Mr. Gladstone.  The designer then leaving chiaroscuro, shading and other ‘superficial facts of life’ to take care of themselves, and keeping the idea of space limitation always before him, then proceeds to emphasise the beauty of his material, be it metal with its ‘agreeable bossiness,’ as Ruskin calls it, or leaded glass with its fine dark lines, or mosaic with its jewelled tesserae, or the loom with its crossed threads, or wood with its pleasant crispness.  Much bad art comes from one art trying to borrow from another.  We have sculptors who try to be pictorial, painters who aim at stage effects, weavers who seek for pictorial motives, carvers who make Life and not Art their aim, cotton printers ’who tie up bunches of artificial flowers with streamers of artificial ribbons’ and fling them on the unfortunate textile.

Then came the little bit of Socialism, very sensible and very quietly put.  ’How can we have fine art when the worker is condemned to monotonous and mechanical labour in the midst of dull or hideous surroundings, when cities and nature are sacrificed to commercial greed, when cheapness is the god of Life?’ In old days the craftsman was a designer; he had his ’prentice days of quiet study; and even the painter began by grinding colours.  Some little old ornament still lingers, here and there, on the brass rosettes of cart-horses, in the common milk-cans of Antwerp, in the water-vessels of Italy.  But even this is disappearing.  ‘The tourist passes by’ and creates a demand that commerce satisfies in an unsatisfactory manner.  We have not yet arrived at a healthy state of things.  There is still the Tottenham Court Road and a threatened revival of Louis Seize furniture, and the ’popular pictorial print struggles through the meshes of the antimacassar.’  Art depends on Life.  We cannot get it from machines.  And yet machines are bad only when they are our masters.  The printing press is a machine that Art values because it obeys her.  True art must have the vital energy of life itself, must take its colours from life’s good or evil, must follow angels of light or angels of darkness.  The art of the past is not to be copied in a servile spirit.  For a new age we require a new form.