conditions for a great artistic movement
for every great art. Let us think of one of them; a sculptor, for
instance.

If a modern sculptor were to come and say, 'Very well, but where can one
find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats and chimney-
pot hats?' I would tell him to go to the docks of a great city and watch
the men loading or unloading the stately ships, working at wheel or
windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I have never watched a man do
anything useful who has not been graceful at some moment of his labour;
it is only the loafer and the idle saunterer who is as useless and
uninteresting to the artist as he is to himself. I would ask the
sculptor to go with me to any of your schools or universities, to the
running ground and gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race,
hurling quoit or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping,
stepping from the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when
he was weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows
to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle driver with lifted
lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his art in such
simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the well or a man
leaning with his scythe, he will not find them anywhere at all. Gods and
goddesses the Greek carved because he loved them; saint and king the Goth
because he believed in them. But you, you do not care much for Greek
gods and goddesses, and you are perfectly and entirely right; and you do
not think much of kings either, and you are quite right. But what you do
love are your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own
hills and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.

Ours has been the first movement which has brought the handicraftsman and
the artist together, for remember that by separating the one from the
other you do ruin to both; you rob the one of all spiritual motive and
all imaginative joy, you isolate the other from all real technical
perfection. The two greatest schools of art in the world, the sculptor
at Athens and the school of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely
in a long succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen. It was the
Greek potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design
which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator of
chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always