Themes
Artist and craftsman as equals
The heart of the lecture is Morris's picture of the weaver as a partner, not a copyist. 'The one was not too free, the other was not a slave.' The artist conceives, but the weaver 're-created and put into a new and delightful form' a design that needed the loom and its coloured threads before its beauty came 'to its real flower.' The idea runs through all of Wilde's notices of the Arts and Crafts series.
The discipline of limits
Morris praises the constraints of the craft. 'What is the use of setting an artist in a twelve-acre field and telling him to design a house?' A narrow surface forces the designer to concentrate and fill it 'with pure loveliness.' The same principle explains his taste in history: the Gothic weavers fill every corner, while Boucher's followers leave 'wide expanses of waste sky' and slip into perspective and artificial posing.
Art against commercialism
Morris ends by turning from the loom to society. Great work requires that we 'be worthy of it', and 'Commercialism, with its vile god cheapness, its callous indifference to the worker, its innate vulgarity of temper, is our enemy.' To gain anything good we must give up some luxury and think of 'the State, the commonweal.' Wilde reports the argument without mockery and notes that the audience applauded loudly.