eeding Notes,
or to say more than that, assuming the principles which underlie all
great art, they deal in their several ways with a number of crafts
which the creative ingenuity of man, working, as described by Mr.
Robinson, for the satisfaction & for the adornment of the satisfaction
of his wants, imaginative and real, has in different circumstances and
at different times invented, and seek, amid the confusion which has
arisen in the abuse of these crafts by pseudo-craftsmen and artists,
who have approached them from the outside, to restore to them their
sanity, alike in process and in choice of material, in aim, and in the
expression of beauty and of purpose.

The master-principle, however, to be deduced from the Notes may be here
restated in the words of Mr. Morris, for it is a principle applicable
to the whole range of imaginative creation: 'Never forget the material
you are working with, and try always to use it for doing what it can do
best.'

To the catalogues of the two following exhibitions more Notes were
added, and finally, in 1893, all the Notes were put together and
published in one volume, entitled 'Art and Crafts Essays by Members of
the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society,' with a Prefatory Note by
William Morris. This volume was reprinted in 1899.

In the Prefatory Note Mr. Morris sets out the purpose of the Society as
understood by him--too narrowly, I think. 'It is,' he says, 'to help
the conscious cultivation of art and to interest the public in it, by
calling special attention to that,' in his judgement, 'really most
important side of art, the decoration of utilities by furnishing them
with genuine artistic finish in place of trade finish.' To this I shall
return by and by.

After the Prefatory Note comes the Table of Contents of the volume. And
looking for a moment down the long list of tongues in which Craft,
under the guidance of Art, is striving to speak afresh, how can one
fail to lament the time now past and to wish it back, when these
tongues, now the language, and too often the quite artificial language,
of a professional and specially trained class, were but the vernacular
of one common language, widely and familiarly spoken, and craftmanship
itself but 'joy in widest commonalty spread'; joy in working in all the
various ways of imaginative invention, upon all sorts and kinds of
material, material brought from afar, sought with danger or grown in
pastoral peace; joy in making and devis