nowledge of those branches in which the English schools
have shown, and are likely to show, peculiar excellence.

Now, in asking your sanction both for the nature of the general plans I
wish to adopt, and for what I conceive to be necessary limitations of
them, I wish you to be fully aware of my reasons for both: and I will
therefore risk the burdening of your patience while I state the
directions of effort in which I think English artists are liable to
failure, and those also in which past experience has shown they are
secure of success.

13. I referred, but now, to the effort we are making to improve the
designs of our manufactures. Within certain limits I believe this
improvement may indeed take effect: 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 danger or its change. 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 so 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