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210 the Art Workers' Guild; and it was the existence of the Art Workers' Guild, Mr. Benson thinks, which made the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society possible. Of less import, but not without a large result both for good and harm on the new movement, were the various associations which had sprung up in recent years under the names of Home Arts, or Cottage Arts Societies, or Village Industries. These associations had been formed chiefly by the energy or caprice of individuals. Some of them were direct attempts at following the teaching of Ruskin. Others represented a mixture of charity and patronage, and their only effect was to multiply the productions of amateur incompetency. In a few cases, according to the view taken by skilled judges, good work had been produced by them, and in a few more, a slow but steady progress towards good work was visible; but on the whole they were of little value either as productive or as educational agencies.

The newly-formed association was at first known by the name of the Combined Arts. The name of the Arts and Crafts was the invention, at a somewhat later stage, of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson. He was also in the main responsible for another of the new departures made in the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, that of publishing the names of the designer and executant as the joint-authors of any given piece of work which was exhibited.

That such a thing should be thought of at all marked a great advance from the ideas of a generation earlier. The large firms of decorators and furnishers looked on the notion with suspicion or contempt; and several of them refused point blank to have anything to do with a scheme under which the work of art should have any name attached to it