For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people imagine.  For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and from factory chimney.  You must have strong, sane, healthy physique among your men and women.  Sickly or idle or melancholy people do not do much in art.  And lastly, you require a sense of individualism about each man and woman, for this is the essence of art—­a desire on the part of man to express himself in the noblest way possible.  And this is the reason that the grandest art of the world always came from a republic, Athens, Venice, and Florence—­there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and simple as sincere.  But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France under the grand monarch, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy gilt furniture writhing under a sense of its own horror and ugliness, with a nymph smirking at every angle and a dragon mouthing on every claw.  Unreal and monstrous art this, and fit only for such periwigged pomposities as the nobility of France at that time, but not at all fit for you or me.  We do not want the rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create more beautiful things; for every man is poor who cannot create.  Nor shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to adorn or to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be the noble and beautiful expression of a people’s noble and beautiful life.  Art shall be again the most glorious of all the chords through which the spirit of a great nation finds its noblest utterance.

All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great artistic movement for every great art.  Let us think of one of them; a sculptor, for instance.

If a modern sculptor were to come and say, ’Very well, but where can one find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats and chimney-pot hats?’ I would tell him to go to the docks of a great city and watch the men loading or unloading the stately ships, working at wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway.  I have never watched a man do anything useful who has not been graceful at some moment of his labour; it is only the loafer and the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the artist as he is to himself.  I would ask the sculptor to go with me to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle driver with lifted