For instance, I would have the famous and wonderful pictures now foiling and dwarfing one another in our vulgar galleries, distributed over the Western world.  I wish their enfranchisement.  Each great picture should be given a room to itself, like the Sistine Madonna, not only a room but a temple like that of the Iverskaya at Moscow, not only a temple but a fair populous province.  The great pictures should be objects of pilgrimages, and their temples places of prayer.  In the galleries, as is obvious, the pictures are at their smallest, their glory pressed back into themselves or overlapped or smudged by the confusing glory of others.  Out in the wide world, enshrined in temples, these pictures would become living hearts, they would have arms dealing out blessings, they would outgrow again till their influence was as wide as the little kingdoms in which they were enshrined.  Pictures would again work miracles.  What is more, great pictures would again be painted.

This illustration is valuable allegorically.  Great pictures are very like great souls, very like great and beautiful ideas.  What is true for pictures is true for men.

The men who feel in themselves the instinct for the new life must take steps to make space for themselves and to make temples.  Where they find the beautiful, the real, they must take it to themselves and protect it from enemies, they must at once begin to build walls of defence.  So great is their responsibility and so delicate their charge that they must challenge no one, and invite no discussion and no hostility.  They must have and hold their own beautiful life as they would a fair young bride.

Where they have visions they must build temples, as the Russian mouzhiks build churches and put up crosses.  Of course I do not mean material temples, but temples not made by hands, temples of spirit, temples of remembrance.  Where they read in books sacred pages they must make these pages sacred, sacred for them.  Where they find men noble they must have reference to the noble part of them and deny the other.  They have to win back the beautiful churches and cathedrals.  Often it is said nowadays, “Such and such a church is wonderful and its service lifts one to heaven, but the clergyman and his sermon are impossible.”  But though a clergyman can condition his congregation it is much more true that the congregation can condition the clergyman.  It is written, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them.”  When they in the pews are those in white robes, then He in the pulpit is the Christ Himself.

In literature we have to differentiate what is purely a commercial product like the yellowback novel, what is educational like the classic, and what is of the new.  With the commercial we have of course no traffic; the classic is a place for those still learning what has already been said, a place for orientisation, for finding out where one stands.  In this category are the Shakespearean performances at the theatre.  In any case the classic is necessarily subordinate to the new literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature of ourselves.  It is the school which prepares for the stepping forth on the untrodden ways.