The Vineyard - a beginning - Part 2

'Peasant Tapestry from Haslemere',
The Artist, May 1901

In the first editorial of The Vineyard, Maude Egerton King goes on to say:

"What, then, is the purpose of The Vineyard?  To encourage and tend the good vine wherever we find it, and to plant it where it is not yet.  To uphold the simple traditions integral in the nature of man over against the powers of petrol and professionalism which are seeking to save him both the labour and the creative joy of living.

"For if Science is saving people from using their arms and legs, Professionalism, the inevitable product of industrial conditions, is snubbing and spoiling the innate power of song, dance, and the handicrafts of every kind.  In Art, Professionalism seeks a monopoly of beauty and fosters the notion that machinery has quite beneficently supplanted traditional handicraft; in Science and Literature it has placed intellect on a throne with the soul for its footstool and teaches us how education should be got by scientifically choking the vine with the weeds.  It follows naturally that we shall be properly suspicious of that modern mere cleverness of phrase and precious choice of word which, to simulate value, sand-paper all hand-hewn roughness, all evidence of the craftsman's vigour of mind, apologising for nature and mocking perfection.

"On the other hand, we mean to attract those who can write with reverent intimacy of peasants and the other labouring poor, with love of little children, animals and all dependent life; chroniclers of great movements and of humble household heroisms; reformers bent on helping the land bring forth her increase; craftsmen whose work is proof of how, when labour and art are one, they redeem our dreary days; and poets who can open unsuspected doors in our prison walls."

from Arbor Vitae, Blount, Godfrey, Fifield, 1910, 3rd edition