House and Garden 
exception of the privileged class of the great 
artists and great inventors, were occupied in 
pushing buttons or feeding raw material, 
with deadly regularity and unvarying mon¬ 
otony, into wonderfully constructed machin¬ 
ery. It is inconceivable that individuals 
continually so occupied could have any in¬ 
terest in the product of such work, whether 
their own or that of others, and even the 
artist designers themselves would be so out 
of touch with their work that they could 
get little joy of it. 
Taking this situation, one which we are fast 
approaching (minus the great artists), and 
even granting the widest distribution of the 
machine-made product and the greatest pos¬ 
sible individual wealth and leisure for study 
and development, you must still grant that 
we have thrown away one of its best it not 
its best opportunity for creative work and 
development. But this is not all. Beauty 
and appropriateness of design are not 
so easily attained as some think. Re¬ 
move the stimulus of individuality in the 
person for whose use the object is to be 
made, and you have rendered the proper 
designing of the article almost hopeless. 
Let an architect, for instance, sit down and 
try to design a house for no one in par¬ 
ticular, for no site in particular, and he will 
find it impossible to do so without first 
constructing in his mind some sort of a 
client and some environment. If he doesn’t, 
the result will not be architecture at all, or 
it will be poor architecture at the best, for the 
architect must mould his house about the 
peculiarities of his client, if it is to be worth 
the doing or the possessing. 
Nor is this the only or the worst difficulty 
confronting the designer of objects to be 
made by the machine. A great part and the 
best part of a design must be brought forth 
in the making. One cannot design wrought 
iron, or carving, or furniture, or pottery, or 
any other object, upon paper alone, but on 
the anvil, with the gouge and mallet or the 
wheel, for these things, to have the true 
touch of the artist’s self that makes the work 
worth the making or the having, must be 
wrought, not merely designed. The ma¬ 
chine that is still a tool in no wise hampers 
the expression of the workman in his work, 
and is altogether good, but the product of 
such tools cannot be classed with machine- 
made things, and such tools help and do not 
hinder the individuality of a man’s work, 
and through that his growth. 
Of course it is not fair to charge the ma¬ 
chine with present industrial conditions, in 
which men, women and children are wearing 
out their lives in unwholesome surroundings, 
working long hours and living in squalor. 
But grant the existence of any degree of ma¬ 
terial comfort and leisure, and 1 still contend 
that unthinking, monotonous work tends to¬ 
wards the madhouse and not the Hall of 
Fame. Suppose we were all rich and had 
plenty ot leisure and had traveled around the 
world gazing in admiration and awe at the 
workmanship of better men. What joy could 
we find in life to compare with the joy of 
creative work? Would we not turn again 
to tools to build things for ourselves and 
friends, even though not so beautiful or per¬ 
fect perhaps as the machine-made thing de¬ 
signed by the great artist? It must be re¬ 
membered that at present our most treasured 
possesions have not been either designed or 
made by professional artists, but originally by 
peasants for their own use. Brasses by the 
Russian peasant, rugs, Damascus steel and 
enamels by the peasants of the East, carry¬ 
ing with them the message of striving souls 
to their fellows, and what might we not be 
doing with our greater liberty and knowledge 
if we were likewise striving to express our best 
in the joyous work of our hands unfettered by 
the superstitions of Schoolcraft and heredity. 
A new and better regime of craftmanship, 
uses the discoveries and inventions of its 
age and all other ages, and holds fast as 
the very soul of its faith the belief that the 
means is little but the man is much. Art re¬ 
mains no longer the plaything of the rich, or 
the cloistered and separated possession of a 
self-elected few, but becomes the very breath 
of life to all of us, transmuting our dross to 
better than gold, and making the children of 
art an all-embracing brotherhood to which 
there could be no outside. F'or the spirit of art 
embraces all, from the first crude gropings of 
the painted savage to the supremest triumph 
of world-wide service, for the end and aim 
of all art can be no more and no less than 
the making of you and me fit to love and 
to be loved. 
