All over the country, in all of  the hotels I stop  at, they give me cups like this to drink  my coffee or  chocolate from.  See how thick and clumsy it is.  It is at at least half an inch thick and so barbaric in form that one would think it was made in a barbarous savage age and intended to be used to hie at the head of an enemy as a weapon of defense.  It disgusts me to drink from it.  
Such rude things make men rude who use them. We ought to have things of beauty in everything about our house. Let children when quite young be accustomed to see and handle delicate things and they will become refined.  I was impressed,  while out west in going among the Chinese to see these navvies who worked hard all day on the railroad, shoveling dirt, go home at night and drink their tea out of cups of fine porcelain as thin  and delicate as the petals of a white rose, so delicate, indeed, that our ladies even are afraid to handle them for fear of breaking them.  This what we should have for ourselves here.  
I would place things of beauty, things of delicacy in the houses of all our mechanics as well  as of  the  wealthy.

"Mr Wilde, do you think that this present so called-- 'aesthetic craze' "-- ?

"Oh do not call it a craze.  It is no craze.  You Americans have such a way of treating serious things as a joke.  And yet you are not a joyous people.  
In society there is all brilliancy and apparent joyousness, but on the railway trains I do not see happy men and women.  Everybody has a troubled anxious look, and everybody is pushing forward in some business project.  But the people do not appreciate art and so they call it a craze.  But it will live and spread its influences and be continuing in its good and it is no craze."

Art and true beauty can never die.  There may be a wave of barbarism sweep over Europe by an Asiatic invasion but true art will not be lost.

                           

ohio  1882