disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera
"Patience," and lately revived in some of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and
of late to some extent in various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore
the day of the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when
conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines only
imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor culture harks back
to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even respect, was indeed praise.
Refined men and women have remembered these early days, when their race
was in its prime, as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and
even weaving tapestries and muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival
Tyrian purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the
Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks, irons,
and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old
effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as well as
architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners; and all this
toil and moil was ad majorem gloriam hominis [To the greater glory of man] in a
new socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take his
rightful place above the man who merely knows. The day of the mere professor,
who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer, who creates, has
come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and each weak and mean
without the other; use and beauty, each alone vulgar; letters and labor, each
soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this
union will lift man to a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat,
inspired by the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott,
revering Wagner's revival of the old Deutschenthum that was to conquer
Christenthum, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle—this was its ideal; even as the
Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient traditions of their race and made their
Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made
our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for
the red man.
Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it something
of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us the
glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in maturity, the time
when the soul can best appreciate the value of its creations and its possibilities,
and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence
it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in all
manual education, which is just as capable of idealism as literary education. This
gives soul, interest, content, beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy