and when the worker not only understands what the designer
meant, but feels with him. And it is the test of a practical designer
that he not only knows the conditions under which his design is to be
carried out, but is ready to submit to them.

The distinction here made between designer and embroiderer is not
casual, but afore-thought, notwithstanding the division of labour it
implies. Enthusiasm has a habit of outrunning reason. Because in some
branches of industry subdivision of labour has been carried to absurd
excess, it is the fashion to demand in all branches of it the autograph
work of one person, which is no less absurd. To try and link together
faculties which Nature has for the most part put asunder, is futile.

That designer and worker should be one and the same person is an ideal,
but one only very occasionally fulfilled. When that happens
(Illustrations 61 and 88) it is well. But the attempt to realise it
commonly works out in one of two ways: either a good design is spoilt in
the working for want of executive skill on the part of the designer, or
good workmanship is spent on poor design, as good, perhaps, as one has
any right to expect of a skilled needleworker.

The fact is, you can only make out all the world to be designers by
reducing design to what all the world can do. And that is not much.
There is a point of view from which it does not amount to design at all.

The study of design forms part of the education of an embroidress, not
so much that she may design what she works, but that she may know in the
first place what good design is, and, in the second, be equal to the
ever-recurring occasion when a design has to be modified or adapted. If,
in thus manipulating design not hers, she should discover a faculty of
invention, she will want no telling to exercise it. A designer wants no
encouragement to design--she designs.

There would be no occasion to insist upon this, were it not for the
prevalence at the present moment of the idea that a worker, in whatever
art or handicraft, is in artistic duty bound to design whatever she puts
hand to do. That is a theory as false as it is unkind; let no
embroidress be discouraged by it. Let her, unless she is inwardly
impelled to invent, remain content to do good needlework. That is her
art. Her business as an artist is to make beautiful things. Co-operation
in the making of them is no crime.

And what, then, about originality? Originality is a gift beyond