For I wish specially to impress this upon you, that designing cannot be taught at all in a school:  continued practice will help a man who is naturally a designer, continual notice of nature and of art:  no doubt those who have some faculty for designing are still numerous, and they want from a school certain technical teaching, just as they want tools:  in these days also, when the best school, the school of successful practice going on around you, is at such a low ebb, they do undoubtedly want instruction in the history of the arts:  these two things schools of design can give:  but the royal road of a set of rules deduced from a sham science of design, that is itself not a science but another set of rules, will lead nowhere;—­or, let us rather say, to beginning again.

As to the kind of drawing that should be taught to men engaged in ornamental work, there is only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure:  both because the lines of a man’s body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong.  I do think that such teaching as this, given to all people who care for it, would help the revival of the arts very much:  the habit of discriminating between right and wrong, the sense of pleasure in drawing a good line, would really, I think, be education in the due sense of the word for all such people as had the germs of invention in them; yet as aforesaid, in this age of the world it would be mere affectation to pretend to shut one’s eyes to the art of past ages:  that also we must study.  If other circumstances, social and economical, do not stand in our way, that is to say, if the world is not too busy to allow us to have Decorative Arts at all, these two are the direct means by which we shall get them; that is, general cultivation of the powers of the mind, general cultivation of the powers of the eye and hand.

Perhaps that seems to you very commonplace advice and a very roundabout road; nevertheless ’tis a certain one, if by any road you desire to come to the new art, which is my subject to-night:  if you do not, and if those germs of invention, which, as I said just now, are no doubt still common enough among men, are left neglected and undeveloped, the laws of Nature will assert themselves in this as in other matters, and the faculty of design itself will gradually fade from the race of man.  Sirs, shall we approach nearer to perfection by casting away so large a part of that intelligence which makes us men?