Themes
Design against picture
Crane's lecture rests on the difference between the designer and the pictorial artist. The picture is 'isolated and unrelated'; its frame is 'the last relic of the old connection between painting and architecture.' The designer makes a pattern, choosing and rejecting, and his work stands to nature as 'the imaginative language of the poetic drama' stands to ordinary speech. The blackboard oak-trees and daisies make the point visible.
Machines as servants
Crane's Socialism is 'very sensible and very quietly put.' He blames 'commercial greed' and the god of cheapness for the loss of old ornament, but he is no enemy of machinery as such: 'machines are bad only when they are our masters. The printing press is a machine that Art values because it obeys her.' Nor does he want the past copied in a servile spirit: 'For a new age we require a new form.'
The case for Japan
Wilde's only quarrel is with Crane's view, shared with Morris, of the Japanese as naturalists. He answers with a list of their decorative gifts: 'the exquisite finesse of their touch', their colour, their 'keen instinct of where to place a thing', and their knowledge of 'how to make a space decorative without decorating it', a point he says Crane missed. He proposes that someone lecture the Arts and Crafts on Japanese art next year.