HAND-CRAFT.
For some generations there has been cultivated in Sweden, and amongst Scandinavian and kindred peoples, a course of training in personal ingenuity, unknown in most other countries. It does not seem to have ever been persevered in after the manner of trading industry, but as a means of promoting throughout the community a taste and skill for the performance of highly-finished productions in mechanical art, proceeding from the simple to the complex, and resulting in a widely-diffused facility for all kinds of constructive occupations.
Such course or system of training is called Sloyd, and written Slöjd. For the majority of English people such a word cannot have a meaning, and cannot appeal with adequate force to popular appreciation. The nearest equivalent in English to the Swedish word Slöjd would seem to be Hand-Craft, or mechanical training for the hand, undertaken voluntarily for the satisfaction of acquiring manual skill in general, as distinguished from a handicraft of limited application, pursued of necessity from day to day, rather by routine than by skill.
Hand-Craft is therefore adopted as synonymous in England with the word Slöjd in Sweden.
As cultivated in Sweden, it involves all kinds of manual training, and is applicable to highly finished productions in leather, metal, and various other substances, but it suffices, for educational purposes, to limit teaching and exercise to objects made of wood.
It must always be borne in mind that Hand-Craft is mainly educational, and is valuable, not for what it produces, but for the training which the production involves; just as the letters of the alphabet, and their accurate use, are the essential preliminaries to literary attainments. It imparts and cultivates mechanical dexterity, just as learning to read and write spontaneously developes mental capacity. Therefore, whoever masters a course of Hand-Craft acquires an aptitude for all kinds of material processes. Such an aptitude, while useful and gratifying to the individual, is of the greatest consequence amongst people so deeply interested as the English are in manufacturing pursuits.
Hand-Craft also has strong claims to be cultivated as a recreation, and experience proves that it may be so regarded, with every prospect of becoming popular as such.
Touching this matter of recreation, and those who have not the faculty for viewing the subject in that light, reference may be made to familiar facts with reference to chess. Perhaps there is nothing that, to the uninitiated, appears more stupid, insipid, and purposeless than the progress of that game. Yet there are thousands, who have so regarded it, who, after being well initiated, have become interested and absorbed by it, to an extent exceeding the possibilities of their original belief.
So it is with Hand-Craft, with this difference, that Hand-Craft, while supplying an incentive to wholesome perseverance, developing into a fascinating recreation, is suggestive at every turn of life-long utility, with reference to an infinite variety of probable subsequent experience. It promotes a delightful consciousness of the merits of neat, natty tastefulness and judgment with reference to every material thing, and trains the mind and the eye, as well as the hand, to perceive and appreciate excellence of design and finish, proportion, beauty, and adaptability of the most familiar appliances.
Training of this kind has, in recent years, been much stimulated by the establishment of an Institute or Seminary for its teaching and cultivation at Nääs in Sweden, where very generous accommodation and facilities are provided for the instruction of teachers from all parts of Sweden and the rest of the world. The subsequent mission of each of those teachers is to diffuse the taste and knowledge he has thus acquired amongst his own people on his return to them, or amongst other people where he may find encouragement to settle for that purpose.