Summary
Wilde recalls his earlier lecture on the English Renaissance and reports that, after touring some fifty or sixty American cities, he finds the country needs art 'which hallows the vessels of everyday use.' The handicraftsman, unlike the poet, depends on public encouragement. Good art is made with the workman's head and heart, and he lists the bad work he has met: dismal wall-papers, the horse-hair sofa, creaking rosewood furniture, and iron stoves garnished with funeral urns. Well-made things grow in value, like the Pilgrims' furniture, so artists and handicraftsmen must be brought together and the workman surrounded by beauty.
On dress, Wilde regrets the loss of nobility that has left statues of men in frock-coats, praises Greek drapery, the costume of the time of Charles I and the dresses once handed down from mother to daughter, and names the Western miners, in wide hats, cloaks and high boots, as the only well-dressed men he has seen in America.
America needs a school of rational art, with a museum of good decoration like the South Kensington Museum rather than a dusty giraffe. American rooms have too many white walls and no scheme of colour; Whistler's Symphony in White, his Peacock Room and a breakfast room in blue and yellow show what colour can do. Ordinary jugs are ugly and dinner-plates should not carry sunsets. Marble is squandered, wood carving is absent, jewellery is vulgar, and the silver of Leadville ends as ugly dollars.
Children, Wilde says, learn gentleness by growing up among delicate things: in San Francisco he watched a Chinese labourer drink tea from a cup as fine as a petal, while grand hotels served him coffee in cups an inch and a quarter thick. He wants a workshop in every school and shows brass disks, a painted bowl and wood carving made by children at a school in Philadelphia. Such work teaches sincerity and hatred of sham materials, and he closes: nothing is so ignoble that art cannot sanctify it.