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beautiful, would relieve us from nine-tenths of our terrible 
jim-crackery. 
Some years since I was much struck by the saying of an old 
friend, a fishmonger, and an honest man to boot, who said the 
secret of his trade was to know when to throw away. That 
secret might be learned by most of us. I can at any rate speak 
for myself. In furnishing a couple of rooms in an Ancoats 
workman’s cottage some years ago, our endeavour was to keep 
out the unnecessary ; the result is two charming little rooms, 
and at very little expense, with few regrets, and no enforced 
endurance of fid-faddery. Of course I know what the difficulties 
are. Generations of bad taste have produced a marketful of 
horrors, and good simple things are not easy to get. even if we 
wanted them. The demand for gimeracks has its definitely evil 
side, and the Japanese, for example, those wonderful workmen 
are sending us and the Americans shiploads of rubbish, fit only 
_ for the lowest taste in any market. Having mentioned these 
marvellous workmen, let me commend your attention to another 
confusion which is common. In the majority of examples of 
Japanese work you find expressed a remarkable realism, the 
painting of a bird or a flower, for instance, or some laboured 
process of inlay or surface finish ; but even the best result is not 
what a Western person would, in his coolest moments, class as 
the highest art. It is marvellous technical workmanship at its 
best, so perfect, so skilful as handiwork as to fill one with 
amazement, wonder, and delight. But no great or even minor 
example of the best fine art has been accomplished by any 
nation that treats the human figure so meanly as do even the 
best of the Japanese artists. Superb workmanship is not 
necessarily fine art, although all great artists have been excellent 
craftsmen, and while we give the best astern workman every 
praise for his skill and taste, he has failed to produce an artist 
according to our inherited standards in painting and sculpture. 
In the decorative arts, so called, these workmen are often supreme. 
All this seems to be by the way, but it is important, and I fail 
to see how the moribund painted mirror, tambourine, macramé, 
or to use the latest vulgarism, the Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay standard, 
can enable anyone who lives with it to appreciate a piece of real 
art, either in crockery, furniture, painting, music, or sculpture. 
The eye has been misled, the judgment distorted, so that the 
real thing, not the bad thing, looks outré, or, is not understood, 
just as the Comic Cuts or Tit-Bits reader would vote Tennyson 
dull, or Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott a couple 
of bores. Now nothing lasts but art, and you can apply this 
maxim to the things bought, under the influence of the fashion 
of the day, whether they be the ruined mirrors spoken of or the 
erinolines of the last generation, both in their degree being 
