Editing Arts and Crafts movement (section)

===Critique of industry===
William Morris shared Ruskin's critique of industrial society and at one time or another attacked the modern factory, the use of machinery, the division of labor, capitalism and the loss of traditional craft methods. But his attitude to machinery was inconsistent. He said at one point that production by machinery was "altogether an evil",<ref name=pevsner/> but at others times, he was willing to commission work from manufacturers who were able to meet his standards with the aid of machines.<ref>Graeme Shankland, "William Morris – Designer", in Asa Briggs (ed.) ''William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs'', Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 {{ISBN|0-14-020521-7}}</ref> Morris said that in a "true society", where neither luxuries nor cheap trash were made, machinery could be improved and used to reduce the hours of labor.<ref>William Morris, "Useful Work versus Useless Toil", in Asa Briggs (ed.) ''William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs'', Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 {{ISBN|0-14-020521-7}}</ref> The cultural historian [[Fiona MacCarthy|Fiona McCarthy]] said of Morris that "unlike later zealots like [[Mahatma Gandhi|Gandhi]], William Morris had no practical objections to the use of machinery ''per se'' so long as the machines produced the quality he needed."{{sfn|MacCarthy|1994|p=351}}

Morris insisted that the artist should be a craftsman-designer working by hand<ref name=pevsner/> and advocated a society of free craftspeople, such as he believed had existed during the Middle Ages. "Because craftsmen took pleasure in their work", he wrote, "the Middle Ages was a period of greatness in the art of the common people. ... The treasures in our museums now are only the common utensils used in households of that age, when hundreds of medieval churches&nbsp;– each one a masterpiece&nbsp;– were built by unsophisticated peasants."<ref name=mingei/> Medieval art was the model for much of Arts and Crafts design, and medieval life, literature and building was idealized by the movement.

Morris's followers also had differing views about machinery and the factory system. For example, [[Charles Robert Ashbee|C.&nbsp;R. Ashbee]], a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, said in 1888, that, "We do not reject the machine, we welcome it. But we would desire to see it mastered."<ref name=pevsner/><ref>Ashbee, C.&nbsp;R., ''A Few Chapters on Workshop Construction and Citizenship'', London, 1894.</ref> After unsuccessfully pitting his Guild and School of Handicraft guild against modern methods of manufacture, he acknowledged that "Modern civilisation rests on machinery",<ref name=pevsner/> but he continued to criticise the deleterious effects of what he called "mechanism", saying that "the production of certain mechanical commodities is as bad for the national health as is the production of slave-grown cane or child-sweated wares."<ref>"C.&nbsp;R. Ashbee, ''Should We Stop Teaching Art?'', New York and London: Garland, 1978, p.12 (Facsimile of the 1911 edition)</ref> [[William Arthur Smith Benson]], on the other hand, had no qualms about adapting the Arts and Crafts style to metalwork produced under industrial conditions (see Crawford quotation above).

Morris and his followers believed the division of labour on which modern industry depended was undesirable, but the extent to which every design should be carried out by the designer was a matter for debate and disagreement. Not all Arts and Crafts artists carried out every stage in the making of goods themselves, and it was only in the twentieth century that that became essential to the definition of craftsmanship. Although Morris was famous for getting hands-on experience himself of many crafts (including weaving, dying, printing, calligraphy and embroidery), he did not regard the separation of designer and executant in his factory as problematic. Walter Crane, a close political associate of Morris's, took an unsympathetic view of the division of labour on both moral and artistic grounds, and strongly advocated that designing and making should come from the same hand. Lewis Foreman Day, a friend and contemporary of Crane's, as unstinting as Crane in his admiration of Morris, disagreed strongly with Crane. He thought that the separation of design and execution was not only inevitable in the modern world, but also that only that sort of specialisation allowed the best in design and the best in making.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://marshallcolman.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/designer-and-executant-argument-between.html| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20180304054850/https://marshallcolman.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/designer-and-executant-argument-between.html| url-status = dead| archive-date = 4 March 2018| title = Designer and Executant: An Argument Between Walter Crane and Lewis Foreman Day| date = 19 June 2017}}</ref>

Few of the founders of the [[Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society]] insisted that the designer should also be the maker, although they considered it important that the maker should be credited, which was the practice in the catalogues of their exhibitions. Peter Floud, writing in the 1950s, said that "The founders of the Society ... never executed their own designs, but invariably turned them over to commercial firms."<ref name=floud>Peter Floud, "The crafts then and now", ''The Studio'', 1953, p.127</ref> The idea that the designer should be the maker and the maker the designer derived "not from Morris or early Arts and Crafts teaching, but rather from the second-generation elaboration doctrine worked out in the first decade of [the twentieth] century by men such as [[W. R. Lethaby]]".<ref name=floud/>