No workman will
beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good
handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs. You
should be quite sure of that. If you have poor and worthless
designs in any craft or trade you will get poor and worthless
workmen only, but the minute you have noble and beautiful designs,
then you get men of power and intellect and feeling to work for
you. By having good designs you have workmen who work not merely
with their hands but with their hearts and heads too; otherwise you
will get merely the fool or the loafer to work for you.
That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few
people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act
as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves
and those that are to come after them. For that beauty which is
meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can
take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live
as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be
less than men.
Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your
life and cities here is opposed to art.
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