Read "Hopes & Fears for Art" by William Morris online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I HAVE to-night to talk to you about certain things which my experience / in my own craft has led me to notice, and which have bred in my mind / something like a set of rules or maxims, which guide my practice. Every / one who has followed a craft for long has such rules in his mind, and / cannot help following them himself, and insisting on them practically in / dealing with his pupils or workmen if he is in any degree a master; and / when these rules, or if you will, impulses, are filling the minds and / guiding the hands of many craftsmen at one time, they are busy forming a / distinct school, and the art they represent is sure to be at least alive, / however rude, timid, or lacking it may be; and the more imperious these / rules are, the wider these impulses are spread, the more vigorously alive / will be the art they produce; whereas in times when they are felt but / lightly and rarely, when one man's maxims seem absurd or trivial to his / brother craftsman, art is either sick or slumbering, or so thinly / scattered amongst the great mass of men as to influence the general life / of the world little or nothing.
_A Paper read before tile Trades' Guild of Learning and the Birmingham Society of Artists_.