So, in years to come there will be nothing in any man’s house which has not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its user.  The children, like the children of Plato’s perfect city, will grow up ’in a simple atmosphere of all fair things’—­I quote from the passage in the Republic—­’a simple atmosphere of all fair things, where beauty, which is the spirit of art, will come on eye and ear like a fresh breath of wind that brings health from a clear upland, and insensibly and gradually draw the child’s soul into harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so that he will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly (for they always go together) long before he knows the reason why; and then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as a friend.’

That is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation, feeling that the secret not of philosophy merely but of all gracious existence might be externally hidden from any one whose youth had been passed in uncomely and vulgar surroundings, and that the beauty of form and colour even, as he says, in the meanest vessels of the house, will find its way into the inmost places of the soul and lead the boy naturally to look for that divine harmony of spiritual life of which art was to him the material symbol and warrant.

Prelude indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of beautiful things be for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes a burden and knowledge is one with sorrow:  for as every body has its shadow so every soul has its scepticism.  In such dread moments of discord and despair where should we, of this torn and troubled age, turn our steps if not to that secure house of beauty where there is always a little forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that citta divina, as the old Italian heresy called it, the divine city where one can stand, though only for a brief moment, apart from the division and terror of the world and the choice of the world too?

This is that consolation des arts which is the keynote of Gautier’s poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed—­as indeed what in our century is not?—­by Goethe.  You remember what he said to the German people:  ‘Only have the courage,’ he said, ’to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.’  The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions:  yes, that is the secret of the artistic life—­for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul.  But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true treasure:  else will she be as powerless to aid you as the mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical nature of Heine.