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90. SIMPLE COUCHING ON LINEN.

It is not so much for geometric ornament as for simple pattern that I here make my plea, for that reticent work of which so much was at one time done in this country—mere back-stitching, for example, or what looks like it, in yellow silk upon white linen; or the modest diaper, archaic, if you like, but inevitably characteristic, in which the naïveté of the sampler seems always to linger; or again, the admirably simple work in Illustration [89]. This last does not show so delicately in the photographic reproduction as it should, because, being in grey and yellow on white linen, the relative value of the two shades of colour is lost in the process. In the original the broader yellow bands are much more in tone with the ground, and do not assert themselves so much. Such as it is, only an artist could have designed that border-work, and any neat-handed woman could have embroidered it.

Think again of the delicate work in white on white, too familiar to need illustration, which makes no loud claim to be art, but is content to be beautiful! Is that to be a thing altogether of the past now that we have Art Needlework? Art needlework! It has helped put an end to the patience of the modern worker, and to inspire her too often with ambitions quite beyond her powers of fulfilment.

What one misses in the work of the present day is that reticent and unpretending stitchery, which, thinking to be no more than a labour of loving patience, is really a work of art, better deserving the title than a flaunting floral quilt which goes by the name of "art needlework"—designed apparently to worry the eye by day and to give bad dreams by night to whoever may have the misfortune to sleep under it. Is anyone nowadays modest enough to do work such as the couching in outline in Illustration [90]? Yet what distinction there is about it!

EMBROIDERY DESIGN.

Perfect art results only when designer and worker are entirely in sympathy, when the designer knows quite what the worker can do with her materials, and when the worker not only understands what the designer meant, but feels with him. And it is the test of a practical designer that he not only knows the conditions under which his design is to be carried out, but is ready to submit to them.

The distinction here made between designer and embroiderer is not casual, but afore-thought, notwithstanding the division of labour it implies. Enthusiasm has a habit of outrunning reason. Because in some branches of industry subdivision of labour has been carried to absurd excess, it is the fashion to demand in all branches of it the autograph work of one person, which is no less absurd. To try and link together faculties which Nature has for the most part put asunder, is futile.