annot 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.

I do not wish you, remember, 'to build a new Pisa,' nor to bring 'the
life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.' 'The
circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are those' of
modern American life, 'because the designs you have now to ask for from
you