October ig, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
17 
not design a carpet. His reply was to the effect that no 
English manufacturer had ever offered him more than 
ten pounds for any design of any kind. While, on the 
other hand, a German carpet-maker had come over to 
ask him to design a rug for liim and suggested a fee of 
two hundred guineas German trade is not won ex- 
clusively by cliscreditable tricks. Imagination some- 
times plays its part. 
The Artist at Fault 
If the British business man has relatively made little 
use of the treasures of skilled craftsmanship which he 
could have commanded, the fault has been shared by the 
artist himself. He has held preciously and suspiciously 
aloof. He has turned up his cultured nose at trade and 
the machine — curiously, because products of the machine 
affect the many, while fine handicraft is onjy available 
for the rich few, and your artist is quite commonlv a sort 
of Socialist. 
Perhaps this exhibition at Burlington House is to 
date a new era. The enchanted hundred years are past, 
the Princess awakes to take her rightful place in the school 
and the mark?t, where she is badly needed. 
And as to the show itself. Perhaps the most interesting 
feature is the practical demonstration of how decorative 
work can and should be done by students under the 
direction of a controlling master-hand, as the early 
painters worked. In the central Civic Hall, built up as a 
suggestion that there is no need for our town halls to be 
decorated exclusively by " sanitary engineers," the 
subordinate decorative work has been done by students 
under the direction of the President, Mr. Henry Wilson. 
Even in the mural paintings, as in the case of the 
fine Simms and Greiffenhagen panels, students have 
helped, and their work has been generously acknowledged 
by the painter-in-chicf. This is no accidental contri- 
vance. It is an attempt to show that in the workshop 
alone, in actual work by which the living is made, should 
art be taught— a view that is gaining ground in our more 
progressive art schools such as Birmingham, Leicester 
and Edinburgh, and in the excellent group of teachers 
at the L.C.C. Central Schools in Southampton Row. 
The academic art master, who teaches only, without 
producing, will soon be a thing of the past : as will the 
wholesale production of half-baked artists quite in- 
capable of earning a living. The trained students should 
be turned into capable trained craftsmen and distribute 
themselves through the decorative trades to the immense 
advantage both of the trades and of themselves. 
Not professional artists alone, but ordinary citizens 
should have some right of entry into an artistic craft. 
If we were sane we should demand it in the education of 
our sons and daughters. The elements of a craft 
rightly taught serve as the foundation for future skill, 
even if little time can be given. No man who cannot 
use his hands to some creative purpose is a full man— 
and there are men among us who cannot hammer in a 
nail ! Practice of a craft, even as an amateur, opens a 
wmdow mto fairyland— such a window as cannot be 
opened— well, by many pennyworths of whisky ! And 
really such windows are important. 
At Burlington House, the mural decorations claim 
first attention. Excellent work signed by Clausen, Simms, 
Greiffenhagen, Moira, Guthrie, Walter Bayes, F.E. Jack- 
son, Randolph Schwabe, hangs upon the walls. Then 
there are the debatable John and W. Rothenstein. Of 
the sculpture, the visitor should note the admirable 
rehefs of Gilbert Bayes and a really beautiful nude in 
white marble— a " John the Baptist "—by Ernest Coles. 
Of furniture, there is much that is instructive. The 
standard of workmanship is amazingly high. The designs 
are more sane and " easier to live with " than has been 
the case with much even of the modern furniture. It 
IS as well to remind ourselves that the finer pieces by 
Gimson, Romney-Cxreen and Heal will have their con- 
siderable value in the future. It is indeed astonishing 
that with the universal cult of eighteenth-century furni- 
ture, the modern cabinet makers should have had the 
courage to keep " to their creative work They deserve 
all honour and patronage. 
The jewellery and silversmith's work of Henry Wilson 
and Paul Cooper has a rare distinction, as has that of the 
versatile Stablers. The glass of the Whitefriars Works 
still holds Its place even against the Venetians. The 
calligraphers, Johnston, (Iraily Hewitt and their school, 
give abundant example for the treatment of Rolls of 
Honour and Regimental Records. When one remembers 
the countless " illuminated addresses " now cumbering 
the vaults of the Record Oftice which were let loose on 
Queen Victoria (for no other crime than attaining two 
iubilees), one can indeed thank the pioneers of the 
renaissance in calligraphy that we should not stand 
that kind of thing so readilv now. 
A hand carpet-loom and a. hand weaving-loom are in 
operation in one of the rooms. The show of hand-woven 
fabrics and fine needlework is excellent. There are a few 
toys, notably a really wonderful hobby-horse by G. 
Simmonds and an elephant, hardly le'ss good. 
Of the pottery, the Omega workshops .send some fine 
specimens. But one certainly resents the futurist table 
■ — all that a table should not be — from the same quarter. 
There are, of course, a few bad things. The worst I 
detected was a flower vase from the Elton Works, with a 
belly pierced with fantastic tracery, and an inner vessel 
to hold the water for the flowers ! Shade of Morris ! 
The small exhibit of the Design and Industries Associa- 
tion shows some pieces made under trade conditions, 
ranging from fine porcelain to kitchen ware, and actually 
obtainable in shops. Is anything in the exhibition better 
than the large brown teapot in this collection, or the 
cider bottle, or the many bowls (costing but a few 
pence each) for kitchen use ? While some cotton fabrics 
(at an incredibly small price the yard) printed in Man- 
chester for the West African market, are a revelation ot 
what these cultured savages demand, as compared with 
what is thought to be good enough for citizens of a great 
Empire by the buyers and commercial travellers, in 
whose hands our destinies in this matter are apparently 
placed. 
But Sleeping Beauty is awakened— as I have said. 
Politics and human interest blend in fhe Shadmv Riders, 
by Isabel Patterson (John I.ane, 6s.), in a way that grips the 
interest of the reader in the first pages and retains it to the 
end. The story concerns Alberta, and a new township in 
which Ross Whittemore is interested to such an extent that 
he places his nephew there for the superintendence of his 
afi'airs. The nephew becomes interested in a woman, and 
Whittemore, a blase man of middle age, marries a girl out 
of pity and then falls in love with her — so that there are two 
love stories running side by side throughout the book, and 
of the two that of the elder man and his wife provides the 
most interest. Canadian life is cleverly sketched, and the 
story as a whole is one of broad human sympathies and great 
understanding. It is a notable book, and one that will rank 
high among the novels of the year. 
The Coconut Planter, by Doris Egerton Jones, (Cassell and 
Co. 6s.) is the story of a girl who married at the age of 
twenty, and was then deserted by her husband. Three years 
later, having heard that the husband had been killed up coun- 
try in Papua, she went there coconut planting, and fell in 
love with Nevile, the dead husband's cousin. Then it trans- 
pired that her husband was a prisoner in the hands of savages 
up the Fly River, and Nevile, the cousin, rescued him, mak- 
ing a pretty little problem for the girl to solve. The manner 
of its solving, and the fates of the girl and the two men, are 
affected by the outbreak of war — for the rest of the story 
one must read the book. It is well worth reading, being a 
simple and unaffected story of life in Papua and the islands 
thereabout ; its simplicity is its main strength, and the 
author is to be congratulated on the production of a charm- 
ing and sympathetic piece of work, from which the pro- 
verbial dull page is missing. 
The Allen Rayne type of story seems to have found a host 
of imitators among Welsh authors, recent evidence of this 
being afforded by The Call of the Soul (Simpkin Marshall. 6s.) 
a novel in which Miss Marion Prys- Williams works out the 
usual plot with a poor but honest young Welshman who 
went to seek his fortune, a rich young lady who, even in his 
early days, was not averse to him, and a London theatre 
misnamed the " Frivolity " (about the fifteen hundreth 
" Frivolity " in fiction, by the way) at which another young 
man, very rich, gets an engagement as a super in order to be 
near the leading lady, whom he rescues from fire in the 
approved way. Here, in fact, is the whole bag of tricks with 
which the melodramatist works — and yet there is a charm 
about the story that will, it is to be hoped, ensure for it a 
good number of readers. 
