The next craft I have to speak of is that of Weaving: not so much of an art as pottery and glass-making, because so much of it must be mechanical, engaged in the making of mere plain cloth; of which side of it all one need say is that we should have as little plain cloth made as we conveniently can, and for that reason should insist on having it made well and solidly, and of good materials; the other side of it, that which deals with figure - weaving, must be subdivided into figure-weaving which is carried out mechanically, and figure-weaving which is altogether a handicraft.

As to the first of these, its interest is limited by the fact that it is mechanical; since the manner of doing it has with some few exceptions varied little for many hundred years: such trivial alterations as the lifting the warp-threads by means of the Jacquard machine, or throwing the shuttle by steam-power, ought not to make much difference in the art of it, though I cannot say that they have not done so. On the other hand, though mechanical, it produces very beautiful things, which an artist cannot disregard, and man's ingenuity and love of beauty may be made obvious enough in it; neither do I call the figure weaver's craft a dull one, if he be set to do things which are worth doing: to watch the web growing day by day almost magically, in anticipation of the time when it is to be taken out and one can see it on the right side in all its well schemed beauty; to make something beautiful that will last, out of a few threads of silk and wool, seems to me not an unpleasant way of earning one's livelihood, so long only as one lives and works in a pleasant place, with work-day not too long, and a book or two to be got at.

However, since this is admittedly a mechanical craft, I have not much to say of it, since it is not my business this evening to speak of the designs for its fashioning: this much one may say, that as the designing of woven stuffs fell into degradation in the latter days, the designers got fidgeting after trivial novelties; change for the sake of change; they must needs strive to make their woven flowers look as if they were painted with a brush, or even sometimes as if they were drawn by the engraver's burin. This gave them plenty of trouble and exercised their ingenuity in the tormenting of their web with spots and stripes and ribs and the rest of it, but quite destroyed the seriousness of the work, and even its raison d'être . As of pottery-painting, so of figure weaving: do nothing in it but that which only weaving can do: and to this end make your design as elaborate as you please in silhouette, but carry it out simply; you are not drawing lines freely with your shuttle, you are building up a pattern with a fine rectilinear mosaic. If this is kept well in mind by the designer, and he does not try to force his material into no-thoroughfares, he may have abundant pleasure in the making of woven stuffs, and he is perhaps less likely to go wrong (ii he has a feeling for colour) in this err than in any other. I will say further that he should be careful to get due proportions between his warp and weft: not to starve the first, which is the body of the web so to say, for the sake of the second, which is its clothes: this is done now-a-days over much by ingenious designers who are trying to make their web look like non-mechanical stuffs, or who want to get a delusive show of solidity in a poor cloth, which is much to be avoided: a similar fault we are too likely to fall into is of a piece with what is done in all the lesser arts to-day; and which doubtless is much fostered by the ease given to our managers of works by the over-development of machinery: I am thinking of the weaving up of rubbish into apparently delicate and dainty wares. No man, with the true instinct of a workman, should have anything to do with this: it may not mean commercial dishonesty, though I suspect it sometimes does, but it must mean artistic dishonesty: poor materials in this craft, as in all others, should only be used in coarse work, where they are used without presence for what they are: this we must agree to at once, or sink all art in commerce (so-called) in these crafts.

So much for mechanical figure-weaving. Its raison d'être is that it gives scope to the application of imagination and beauty to any cloth, thick or thin, close or open, costly or cheap; in some way or other you may weave any of these into figures; but when we may limit ourselves to certain heavy, close, and very costly cloths we no longer need the help of anything that can fairly be called machine: little more is needed than a frame which will support heavy beams on which we may strain our warp: our work is purely hand-work--we may do what we will according to the fineness of our warp: these are the conditions of carpet and tapestry weaving: meaning by carpets the real thing, such as the East has furnished us with from time immemorial, and not the makeshift imitation woven by means of the Jacquard loom, or otherwise mechanically.

As to the art of carpet-weaving, then, one must say that historically it belongs to the East. I do not think it has been proved that any piled carpets were made in Europe during the Middle Ages proper, though some writers have thought that a fabric called in edicts of the fourteenth century "tapisserie sarracenois," was in fact piled carpet-work: however in the seventeenth century they certainly were being made to a certain extent even in these islands: amongst other examples I have seen some pieces of carpet-work in a Jacobean house in 0xfordshire, which an inventory of about 162O calls oddly enough "Irish stitch:" but wherever the history of the art may begin among ourselves, I fear it may almost be said to end with the seventeenth century; there are still a few places where hand-wrought carpets, are made, but scarcely anything original is done; coarsely copied imitations, of the Levantine carpets, and a sort of deduction from the degraded follies of the time of Louis XV., traditionally thought to be suitable for the dreary waste of an aristocratic country-horse, are nearly all that is turned out at present. Still I do not agree with an opinion, which I have heard expressed, that carpets can only be made in the East: such carpets as have been made there for the last hundred years or so, which are chiefly pieces of nearly formless colour, could not be made satisfactorily and spontaneously by Western art; but these carpets, delightful as they are, are themselves the product of a failing art: their prototypes are partly those simple but scientifically designed cloths, whose patterns are founded on the elaborate pavement mosaics of Byzantine art; and partly they are degradations, traceable by close study, from the elaborate floral art of Persia; the originals of the first kind may be seen accurately figured in many of the pictures of the palmy days of Italian and Flemish art, and, as I have said, they are designed on scientific principles which any good designer can apply to works of our own day without burdening his conscience with the charge of plagiarism. As to the other kind of the Persian floral designs, there are still a few of these in existence though, as I have never seen any of them figured in old pictures, I doubt if they found their way to Europe much in the Middle Ages. These, beautiful as they are in colour, are as far as possible from lacking form in design; they are fertile of imagination and lovely in drawing; and though imitation of them would carry with it its usual disastrous consequences, they show us the way to set about designing suchlike things, and that a carpet can be made which by no means depends for its success on the mere instinct for colour, which is the last gift of art to leave certain races. Withal, one thing seems certain, that if we don't set to work making our own carpets it will not be long before we shall find the East fail us: for that last gift, the gift of the sense of harmonious colour, is speedily dying out in the East before the conquests of European rises and money-bags.

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