The perception of the essentially social character of the arts that minister to daily life, and the dependence of Design and Handicraft upon effective and sympathetic co-operation among groups of workers have drawn craftsmen together, and has led in some sort to a revival of guilds. Some of these guilds, like the Art Workers' Guild (founded as long ago as 1884) are for discussion of a demonstration in the various artistic handicrafts, and for mutual information and help.
The influence of such guilds in the revival of many beautiful crafts on sound lines, and, above all, in imbuing artists of different crafts with a sense of the unity of art can hardly be overestimated.
Other guilds, groups of workers, and industrial associations have been formed in many parts of the country for the practice of the handicrafts, influenced by the teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris. Others, again, are hardly more than commercial enterprises, but all endeavour to meet in one way or another the increasing public interest in hand-work.
This English movement of the last twenty-five or thirty years or so is usually traced to the workshop of William Morris, who, with a group of distinguished artists, represented the advanced school in English art at that time, founded the firm which still bears his name some time in the sixties, mainly, at first, to supply artists and people of refined taste with simple furniture and domestic decoration that they could live with.
Morris, who became so conspicuous an instance later, of the influence of the Socialist Ideal, was not then a conscious Socialist, though he was from the first in constant protest against the false taste and pretentiousness of modern decorative art, which had sunk to a very commercial and common-place level under mid-nineteenth century industrial conditions, controlled by division of labour and the machine.
The fact that he was a poet and a man of letters as well as an artist gave additional force to his revolution in English taste, and increased his influence very much, while his own position as an employer, and man of business brought him face to face with the conditions of labour and modern industry. Although in his own work and the work he controlled he was highly successful, and by the vigour and beauty of his designs, under mediaeval influence, especially in woven stuffs and wall coverings, he quite turned the tide of taste, he abandoned hope that there could be any real or lasting improvement in the arts under the existing economic and social conditions, and he did not seem to share in the belief which has animated some of his friends and followers, that the Arts and Crafts movement itself would prove a means of revolutionizing methods of production and carrying on an effective propaganda for Socialism.
The next step forward was made by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society which was founded in 1888 by a group of artists which included architects, painters, sculptors, as well as designers and craftsmen of different kinds.
The society arose from the ruins of a sort of secessionist movement of painters against the Royal Academy and its narrow views of art and exclusiveness. Among its members were men of very different ideas, but with these were several fully convinced and conscious Socialists, strongly imbued with Morris's ideals, though Morris himself did not at first join us, the present writer being elected as first president and serving in that office for the first three years of the society's existence, when Morris was elected to the chair and served till his death in 1896.
Our main and ostensible purpose was to advance the state of the decorative arts by uniting design and handicraft, and by acknowledging the share and artistic responsibility of the individual workmen who co-operated in the production of a work of art, also to give opportunities to designers and craftsmen to exhibit their work and appeal directly to the public, and by holding selected exhibitions of design and handicraft from time to time to maintain a standard of taste and workmanship which hitherto there had been no means of doing.