so that we may no more humour momentary
fashions by ugly results of chance instead of design; and may produce
both good tissues, of harmonious colours, and good forms and substance
of pottery and glass. But we shall never excel in decorative design.
Such design is usually produced by people of great natural powers of
mind, who have no variety of subjects to employ themselves on, no
oppressive anxieties, and are in circumstances either of natural
scenery or of daily life, which cause pleasurable excitement. _We_
cannot design because we have too much to think of, and we think of it
too anxiously. It has long been observed how little real anxiety exists
in the minds of the partly savage races which excel in decorative art;
and we must not suppose that the temper of the middle ages was a
troubled one, because every day brought its dangers or its changes. The
very eventfulness of the life rendered it careless, as generally is
still the case with soldiers and sailors. Now, when there are great
powers of thought, and little to think of, all the waste energy and
fancy are thrown into the manual work, and you have as much intellect
as would direct the affairs of a large mercantile concern for a day,
spent all at once, quite unconsciously, in drawing an ingenious spiral.

Also, powers of doing fine ornamental work are only to be reached by a
perpetual discipline of the hand as well as of the fancy; discipline as
attentive and painful as that which a juggler has to put himself
through, to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession.
The execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force,
and much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is
indeed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. Now, when powers
of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity,
descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at
last, what is not so much a trained artist as a new species of animal,
with whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of contending. And thus
all our imitations of other peoples' work are futile. We must learn
first to make honest English wares, and afterward to decorate them as
may please the then approving Graces.

Secondly--and this is an incapacity of a graver kind, yet having its
own good in it also--we shall never be successful in the highest fields
of ideal or theological art.

For there is one strange, but quite essential, character i