with sorrow as well as with frankness-that not the most patriotic of us can claim for Wales the possession of a native school of art, such as is possessed by other small countries which have obtained and enjoyed the priceless gift of self-government. I remember well in 1889 spending a few days in the Centenary Exhibition at Paris. I have forgotten most of what I saw there. I have a vague recollection of the crowd, the physiognomy and characteristics of those who came from the various provinces of France, and of the enormous wealth exhibited, the wealth of industry, of art, of commerce, and of the various activities of the great country of France. But the one thing which stands out in my memory, which I think will stand out so long as I live, is the fact that, not alone had the great countries, France, Germany, Great Britain, their separate rooms for the exhibition of the products of their art, but that Denmark, Finland, Servia, Greece, and countries very much the same as Wales in population and in ordinary material wealth, had, each one of them, even distant Finland, separate rooms in that great Exhibition, in order to show, as show they did, the splendid products of the native art of their respective countries. I wondered then, as I often wonder now, whenever I think of these nationalities, whether it is possible that in the times to come our own country may, as an outcome of enfranchised nationhood, claim a place in the galleries which from time to time will show the collective activities of the nations of the world.

But, even without this, one is glad and proud that there have been from time to time witnesses to the latent power for art in the Welsh people. It is true that many of these have shown this latent power well over the border of Wales and in other lands, but I think they have almost all shown it with a personal pride in their early training and recol

lections and associations connected with their life in Wales. Take, for instance, the fact, which must bring some pride to the heart of every Welshman, that the real father of the British school of landscape was Richard Wilson, who was brought up in comparatively humble surroundings in the little village of Penegoes. One of the most prolific and ablest of the sculptors who have brought glory to the British name in sculpture, was John Gibson of Conway. Inigo Jones in architecture, and Owen Jones in laying down the principles of ornament, have shown that from time to time there will arise witnesses to the latent power which lies in the race and people of Wales.

In our own day we have witnesses to this same power. Were it not for his presence here to-night, I would venture to say a word or two as to the feeling of joy with which we look upon the career and the bright promise of a still greater career of our countryman, Mr. Goscombe John; and, at any rate, one can (in the absence of Sir Edward Burne-Jones) express the pride which every Welshman and Welsh-woman must feel that it has been left to one of Welsh blood, who is proud of his Welsh blood and lineage, to bring forth new powers and reveal new secrets in art, in the person of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Who, it has been fittingly asked, can measure the wealth of the thought and reading and fine literary discrimination which is signified by the command possessed by Burne-Jones over the entire range of Northern and Celtic and Greek mythology, or the tenderness and largeness of sympathy which have enabled him to harmonise these with the loveliest truths of the Christian faith?

Before I touch upon my actual subject, I ought to refer to one other point. That is the change which has come. over Wales in one respect during the last thirty or forty years in the fact that artists-not, I am sorry to say, as a

rule Welsh artists, but artists from outside-have from time to time lived and settled down in Wales, in order to interpret the scenery and the life of Wales. My feeling of regard for them is tinged with sadness at the thought that the interpretation of the beauty of the landscape and of the life of Wales should be left to artists from outside, and that their products should be for a public outside Wales. Their pictures do not pass through the mind or the heart of Wales. This must be so, until we have a municipal gallery or galleries, or a national gallery or galleries, where the works of these artists, who have seen the loveliness of Wales, can be exhibited for the wise enjoyment of the Welsh people. As it is we have neither galleries nor artists of our own, nor any means, except the wealth and good fortune and taste of an individual Welshman here and there, of securing for our people either temporarily or permanently, the artistic interpretation of the landscape and life of Wales.

But, perhaps, national or municipal galleries are not the main thing necessary for the cultivation among the Welsh people themselves of a sense and capacity for art. I think it quite possible that both in England and in Wales we may have the production of hundreds and thousands of paintings or pictures, and at the same time a deterioration of the public taste in art. Art and artists on the one hand, and ordinary life and industry on the other hand, have during the last century and a half been more and more divorced, and I am convinced, from what I can read and learn and observe, that we can never expect a real pervasive feeling and taste for art until this divorce. between the artist and his studio, on the one hand, and the workman and his workshop, on the other hand, can be done away with, and the gulf between them be bridged over. If that be so, I feel that we should at present not so much

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DOMESTIC AND DECORATIVE ART IN WALES.

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