The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Arts and Crafts Movement, by
Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson

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Title: The Arts and Crafts Movement

Author: Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson

Release Date: August 4, 2010 [EBook #33350]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

BY T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON

HAMMERSMITH PUBLISHING SOCIETY
RIVER HOUSE HAMMERSMITH
MDCCCCV

The Movement, passing under the name of 'Arts and Crafts,' admits of
many definitions. It may be associated with the movement of ideas,
characteristic of the close of the last century, and be defined to be
an effort to bring it under the influence of art as the supreme mode in
which human activity of all kinds expresses itself at its highest and
best; in which case the so-called 'Arts and Crafts Exhibitions' would
be but a symbolic presentment of a whole by a part, itself incapable of
presentment: or it may be associated with the revival, by a few
artists, of hand-craft as opposed to machine-craft, and be defined to
be the insistence on the worth of man's hand, a unique tool in danger
of being lost in the substitution for it of highly organized and
intricate machinery, or of emotional as distinguished from merely
skilled and technical labour: or again, it may be defined to be both
the one and the other, and to have a wider scope than either; as for
example, it may be defined to constitute a movement to bring all the
activities of the human spirit under the influence of one idea, the
idea that life is creation, and should be creative in modes of art, &
that this creation should extend to all the ideas of science and of
social organization, to all the ideas and habits begotten of a
grandiose and consciously conceived procession of humanity, out of
nothing and nowhere, into everything and everywhere, as well as to the
merely instrumental occupations thereof at any particular moment.

No definition, h