concern ourselves about what I may call the great master arts of painting and of sculpture, as with the more domestic and decorative arts, to which I desire to refer to-night. For great artists and great sculptors cannot be produced, even like Senior Classics and Senior Wranglers by great schools or great universities. They can only be produced very largely at Nature's own pleasure, at her own time, and in her own way, her own very often quaint, seemingly capricious, and unsuspected way. But though they cannot be produced at schools, yet I think that the history of the art world will show us that they will arise from among the children of an educated race, cultivated in music and in literature, and of a race where there has been developed an innate instinct for beauty, derived from arts practised from father to son, and extended from valley to valley, and from workshop to workshop.

I referred a few minutes ago to the divorce which the introduction of machinery and the great industrial revolution of the last century and a half have brought into the art and industry of this country. I think that that divorce has had a bad effect upon both the artists of our day and upon the workmen, the craftsmen of our day. When the artist, say the architect, has great designs, noble views of his own with regard to the rearing of a great building, he makes this design in his studio, he probably submits it to some governing body or committee, and when approved or accepted places it in the hands of men whom he has never known, with whom he has never come into contact, and with whom he has, as a rule, very little social sympathy. I believe I am right when I say that in the great ages of production, in the ages, for instance, of the building of the stately abbeys and the great cathedrals and churches of Western Europe, the architects had in all manner of ways a much nearer touch with the actual

workmen. As a matter of fact, I believe that the artificers, the workers of our great abbeys and churches, were housed very often in the abbey church, or in the very house of the architect. Very often the bishop himself was the architect, and I have no doubt that Wykeham and Gower, as well as many others, were not merely architects living in a studio, but that they were in close and constant and loving touch with the actual workmen who carved the stone and placed the wood, and found pleasure in carrying out in the minutest detail the ideas of their great master.

That is not so in our day. The artist too often takes little interest either in the problems or in the life or in the wants of the actual workman or craftsman, and the craftsman is not taught or encouraged to take actual personal pleasure in carrying out the ideals and the plans of his master or his architect. I venture to think that the only way in which that gulf can be to some extent bridged is by so modifying our present system of industry as to make it possible for the workman to take and to feel a personal human interest in the actual details of his work from day to day. As things are at present, owing very largely no doubt to the enormous development of machinery, owing perhaps also to the enormous extension of our great factory system, it is difficult, and in many cases perhaps impossible, for workmen to use hand and brain and affection in the way to which I have referred. But I am convinced that it is our duty, so far as in us lies, to make it easy for the workmen as well as for those for whom homes and schools and chapels are built, to feel and to realise that it is possible to give thought and brain, the highest qualities of art, to the construction even of the simplest form of building, whether that building be a house, or a school, or a chapel, or a hall of council. And

although we in Wales cannot hope to produce at command great sculptors, or great painters, or great architects, yet I am convinced that we can very largely through our public and national system of education do much to kindle and rekindle and nourish the instinct for art in its application to industry, for beauty of design and truth in workmanship, in the mind and the life of the people, and more especially by nourishing the domestic and decorative arts, which are the handmaidens of the mother art of architecture.

You may ask me what is meant by decorative art. I would reply in the words of perhaps the greatest witness to the need for domestic art, and to the results, and to the beauty, and to the value of it to the national life, namely, William Morris. He said that the twofold office of domestic art is to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, and to give people pleasure in the things that they must perforce make. Now, let us apply that definition or description of the office of decorative art to two simple things, to the building of a home and to our regard for a book. I only take these as the two that are nearest to us, as the two that are necessary to us, and as the two that during life give us the greatest possible pleasure and joy; and I must admit, as I look round parts of Wales and parts of England, that we have, under various pretexts, very much to learn from the generations that have gone by, with regard to them. In our prosperity, our love of change, our tendency to follow the fashion of the day, we have under various pretexts cleared off from Wales most of the memorials of what native art there was in Wales. The number, for instance, of the homesteads, whether manor houses or farm houses or cottages, of Wales, which are old, is already comparatively small. The vast majority of the

old churches of Wales have been restored out of all recognition. You can go to various glens and country sides in Wales where some of the very loveliest churches in this country used to be, and instead of those beautiful buildings that attract and extort the admiration even of the most aggressive politician, what will you find? Not these ancient buildings, except one here and there, but spick and span churches, that you would not really spend half an hour in crossing over fields to see. I have felt the deepest and bitterest regret in going to certain parts of Wales, where there used to be these magnificent old churches, and finding hardly a stone or trace of the old church, but some modern and utterly characterless building.

Bnt there are enough manor houses and farm houses and cottages in Wales still to show us that there was almost instinctively in their builders a natural taste for what was fitting and pleasurable and beautiful. Before entering these old houses, one thing, I think, strikes most observers. Our forefathers in Wales did not plant their houses just in the first place they came to. Many of our villages now, and of our newer houses, are just planted around railway stations, with very little thought of the fittingness of the situation. But if you observe the old homes of Wales, whether manor houses or farm houses, or cottages, you will find that the builder has been very careful in his choice of the site. Not that, as a rule, he chose to build a house where he had the best view of scenery, because peasants do not always realise the beauty of landscape, but he generally chose it in a spot sheltered from the prevailing wind. The house was built where there was a sense of comfort and of restfulness, and instead of leaving the house bare to the four winds, and to the tempests and rains of Wales, the builder generally sur

rounded it by a belt of sycamore, or ash, or oak, or pine trees. I often wish that the builders of our day, the great landowners of Wales, as the case may be, or you rich London people who go down to Wales and build your houses on our hillsides, would emulate the care taken by our forefathers in the choice of site and aspect for their dwellings.

Before we go inside the old Welsh home, there are one or two other points which are always of great interest to me, in fact three points, the porch, the window, and the chimney. It is very seldom that I see in modern houses in Wales the same charm, either in chimney, window, or porch, as in the old Welsh houses. These are not matters to be made light of. I think that the square, squat chimney on a house, is one of the ugliest monstrosities that the eye can rest upon, and I feel a certain joy when I think of some of the old houses, especially some old Tudor and Stuart houses in Wales, where the chimneys themselves are things of beauty, not those square, squat piles of stone, but fine long, almost sinuous chimneys, that are a joy to contemplate. The windows of many of the old houses are not perhaps very regular; they are not placed, as in a good many modern houses, just like a postage stamp on a letter, but there is a certain fittingness about them. There is generally either about the shape of the window, or about the casement, or the way of disposing of the glass and the lead or wood, something to attract and to please the fancy. In the porch or door one is glad always to notice in the older houses not alone the solid, honest way in which the door and its framework have been put up, but the fact that the timber itself has been thoroughly well chosen and well seasoned, which is not true of most of the modern houses; and that, instead of having handles and knockers chosen out of those made