The work was done by a little boy twelve years old.  This is a wooden bowl decorated by a little girl of thirteen.  The design is lovely and the colouring delicate and pretty.  Here you see a piece of beautiful wood carving accomplished by a little boy of nine.  In such work as this, children learn sincerity in art.  They learn to abhor the liar in art—­the man who paints wood to look like iron, or iron to look like stone.  It is a practical school of morals.  No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art.  It dignifies every flower of the field.  And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.  What we want is something spiritual added to life.  Nothing is so ignoble that Art cannot sanctify it.

ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN

The fragments of which this lecture is composed are taken entirely from the original manuscripts which have but recently been discovered.  It is not certain that they all belong to the same lecture, nor that all were written at the same period.  Some portions were written in Philadelphia in 1882.

People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful.  There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness:  all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it.  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.  Who built the beautiful cities of the world but commercial men and commercial men only?  Genoa built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice, most lovely of all, by its noble and honest merchants.