ill
give the effect of its being filled with beautiful decoration, filled
with it as a golden cup will be filled with wine, so complete that you
should not be able to take away anything from it or add anything to it.
For from a good piece of design you can take away nothing, nor can you
add anything to it, each little bit of design being as absolutely
necessary and as vitally important to the whole effect as a note or chord
of music is for a sonata of Beethoven.

But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this, again, is of
the essence of good design. With a simple spray of leaves and a bird in
flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression that he has
completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or lacquer cabinet at
which he is working, merely because he knows the exact spot in which to
place them. All good design depends on the texture of the utensil used
and the use you wish to put it to. One of the first things I saw in an
American school of design was a young lady painting a romantic moonlight
landscape on a large round dish, and another young lady covering a set of
dinner plates with a series of sunsets of the most remarkable colours.
Let your ladies paint moonlight landscapes and sunsets, but do not let
them paint them on dinner plates or dishes. Let them take canvas or
paper for such work, but not clay or china. They are merely painting the
wrong subjects on the wrong material, that is all. They have not been
taught that every material and texture has certain qualities of its own.
The design suitable for one is quite wrong for the other, just as the
design which you should work on a flat table-cover ought to be quite
different from the design you would work on a curtain, for the one will
always be straight, the other broken into folds; and the use too one puts
the object to should guide one in the choice of design. One does not
want to eat one's terrapins off a romantic moonlight nor one's clams off
a harrowing sunset. Glory of sun and moon, let them be wrought for us by
our landscape artist and be on the walls of the rooms we sit in to remind
us of the undying beauty of the sunsets that fade and die, but do not let
us eat our soup off them and send them down to the kitchen twice a day to
be washed and scrubbed by the handmaid.

All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten. Your
school of design here will teach your girls and your boys, your
handicraftsmen of